That's the conclusion of today's editorial by the Olympian, after surveying the apparent failure of paid family leave advocates to persuade this year's legislature to fund the benefits it put into place last year.
Earlier in the week the paper first reported on the apparent concession that a funding bill for the paid leave benefit is off the table this session. Today, the editors remark:
. . . a new program like paid leave is meaningless unless lawmakers decide how to pay for it. And now it appears that legislators have punted on that question two years in a row. . .
Supporters can spin that any way they want, but the reality is lack of a permanent funding source for family leave is a huge defeat.
Once again, the state is left with a valuable family leave program and no way to pay for it. And that just proves the old adage: Talk is cheap.
The paper is right that the program is meaningless without a sensible, long-term funding source. It's the funding that puts the "paid" in paid family leave. There are already four different pre-existing leave laws on the books that would cover leave to care for a newborn or adopted child and many employers already pay for some or all of that time off.
It's no boon to the employer community to have this issue left dangling, indefinitely unresolved. With a deadline for paying benefits of October 1, 2009 in statute, but no way to pay for it, all of a sudden supposed deep pockets like business taxpayers or non-legislative trust funds like workers' compensation start looking very attractive. But new taxes on business or diverting funds from other benefit programs is a deeply inappropriate way to address an issue like this. It's an employee benefit. Those who use it should pay for it.
On the leave front, apart from how to pay for it, all last year's bill did was drop the threshold for taking FMLA-style leave for birth or adoption down from 50 employee or more shops to those with 25 or more employee. But that could have been done with a simple sentence in a pre-existing law, without all of the fuss, bureaucracy, expense, and uncertainty.
But, of course, from the proponent's perspective, without all of the pomp and circumstance of becoming the second state in the nation after California to blaze ahead with a paid family leave mandate. On that score, the Olympian was also right when it editorialized last year just after Governor Gregoire signed the bill that its symbolic but unfunded provisions were "all sizzle, no steak."
