Oregon’s paid leave program now in effect

Only about a dozen states have passed a paid leave program that guarantees workers can take time off for personal or family medical reasons. As of Sunday, Oregon’s program has now begun. Companies and workers are starting to contribute the money to pay for the program. Workers will be able to apply for benefits in September of this year. Employees can take three different kinds of leave: medical leave, family leave or safe leave. Medical covers the individual; family leave is for caring for children or loved ones; and safe leave provides for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, harassment or stalking to take paid time off. Karen Humelbaugh is the director of Paid Leave Oregon in the state’s employment department and joins us to explain the details of the program.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Happy New Year. Oregon’s new paid leave program took effect on January 1st. It guarantees that nearly all workers in the state will be able to take paid time off for personal or family medical reasons. Oregon is only one of about a dozen states with such a law. Companies and employees are now contributing money to pay for the program. Workers will be able to apply for benefits starting in September. Karen Humelbaugh joins us to talk about this new law. She is the director of Paid Leave Oregon in the state’s Employment Department. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Karen Humelbaugh: Thanks so much. I’m glad to be here.

Miller: This law was passed in 2019. Why is it just now going into effect?

Humelbaugh: Yes, you’re right. 2019 is when the legislature passed the law and of course, building an entire benefit system that also has contributions from employers and workers takes quite a bit of a lift and effort and time. So it’s going into effect now so that we had time to build all of the rules and the systems and then be able to begin, actually a couple of days ago, with this going live.

Miller: There is a real patchwork of laws already that provides the rights to all kinds of leave paid and unpaid with different qualifying purposes, different durations, different benefit levels, different kinds of employers. It is, as I know, a real patchwork. What’s new about this latest law, this new program. What sets it apart?

Humelbaugh: I think the biggest thing that actually sets this apart is the fact that it is paid time off. Most of the laws that you’re referencing are things like family, Medical Leave Act or the Oregon Family Leave Act. Those protect your job when you need to take time off, but they don’t necessarily provide pay while you’re off. So people are often having to make a choice between taking unpaid time off knowing their job might be there or just continuing to work when they have a situation where they may need leave.

Miller: Who is actually covered under this new law?

Humelbaugh: Most workers in Oregon will be covered. There are a few exceptions. There are some folks who can opt into the program. People who are self-employed or independent contractors or tribal governments can opt in. But most of us who receive, essentially what I’ll say is like a W-2 paycheck, have regular pay, we are in Paid Leave Oregon.

Miller: And am I right that people who are employed by the federal government, they’re not included in this?

Humelbaugh: That is correct. The federal government has their own paid leave system.

Miller: Okay, so basically if you have an employer at this point, and you live in Oregon, you can have paid leave of some kind?

Humelbaugh: At this point, we’ve begun to collect the contributions for paid leave will be able to apply for the benefits starting in September.

Miller: Let’s go through the different qualifying reasons that you could actually get this paid leave? I think maybe the most seemingly obvious is personal medical leave. What’s included in that category?

Humelbaugh: We have three categories of which one is medical leave. And that’s really for a serious health condition. So thinking about things like a surgery or if you have cancer treatment or you are hospitalized for some reason, so some serious health condition. It’s not for your day to day “need to take a day off for a cold” or something. It’s for a serious health condition to be covered.

Miller: What circumstances are covered under family leave?

Humelbaugh: Yeah, family leave is pretty broad. It’s primarily a place where you can bond with a new child after a birth, adoption or foster care placement. But also it’s if you need to take care of a family member who has a serious illness or injury. So what I just described for our own serious health conditions, if I had someone else in my household who I needed to care for, it would also fall under family leave.

Miller: We asked folks on social media and what they thought about the new program.

Valerie wrote,

‘It would have made a huge difference for me earlier this year, when I had to take several months away from my job to care for my mother who was in the last stages of cancer and absolutely no other care was available to her.’

So we’ve covered personal medical leave and family leave. Then there’s also a third category of safe leave, which might be the most unfamiliar one to listeners. Can you describe what this is?

Humelbaugh: Safe leave is for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, harassment, or stalking. And it really is something that’s new. There are only a couple of other states with paid leave programs that have safe leave as part of the eligible leave options. This one is really significant because if you are concerned about your safety, the last thing we need somebody to be thinking about is whether or not they should go to their job and get paid or whether they can take time to take care of their health and safety for their family. So safe leave is a really critical component of our paid leave program here in Oregon.

Miller: What would someone have to do to prove that they’re eligible for safe leave?

Humelbaugh: Safe leave is a little bit different in that there are sometimes people in these circumstances might have a police report or something like that. They may have documentation through a hospital or through an advocacy group. And so those would all be kinds of things that you could utilize to show your eligibility for safe leave.

Miller: How long will this program pay for people to take any of these different kinds of leave?

Humelbaugh: In most cases, you could take up to 12 weeks in a year for leave. You could take that for one kind of leave, like to take care of a new child after birth or perhaps you have a surgery and you take five weeks. But you need five weeks later to take care of your spouse or something like that. And so it’s up to 12 weeks in most cases. In some pregnancy related conditions, you’ll have 14 weeks.

Miller: How large might the weekly benefit be?

Humelbaugh: The weekly benefit amount really depends on the amount of money that a person makes. So for people who make minimum wage, our lowest wage earners, they would actually be getting 100% wage replacement, which is essentially around $540 a week. For the rest of us, it’s a little bit of a formula, but it’s based on a percentage of your income over the past year to see how much your weekly benefit amount would be. But for those of us who are in higher wage brackets, it would not be 100%.

Miller: And there’s also variation in terms of how much people have to pay in, how much employees have to pay in. Can you give us a sense for the variety of those payments for higher wage workers compared to lower wage workers?

Humelbaugh: The percentage that we pay in is actually the same percentage but higher wage earners, obviously the percentage would make the contribution more. So we actually have a contribution rate that we set annually and it’s currently set at 1% of your gross payroll. We, as individual workers pay 60% of that contribution rate. If you work for a large employer, they’re going to pay 40% of that contribution rate. Small employers don’t have to pay into the trust.

Miller: We got a comment on Facebook from Taylor Taylor, who wrote that the program costs

‘just $3.50 a week, if you make minimum wage and $8.00 a week if you make around $66,000 a year. $3 so you can have the peace of mind to take time off and spend time with your newborn baby or give end of life care if your parent is in hospice. It’s worth it, on top of the added benefit that you can’t get fired for taking the time off in the first place.’

That’s Taylor Taylor on Facebook. Nicole DeGraff had the exact opposite take on Twitter writing

‘higher taxes for zero return.’

Is this program going to be solely funded by these employee and employer contributions as opposed to direct taxpayer money?

Humelbaugh: Yes, that’s correct. It is 100% based on the contributions that will become part of a state trust fund. And so there won’t be any other general funds going into it. It will be solely based on the contributions.

Miller: So, like actuarial tables and insurance funds, it’s up to folks at the state level to make the best guesses in terms of how much money you’ll need to get in contributions and how much Oregonians are going to be using in any given year. And you’ll just hopefully have to get that right for this to be solvent?

Humelbaugh: That is correct. Solvency is part of the requirements in our statutes. But one of the very first folks that the Employment Department hired actually for Paid Leave Oregon was an actuary, a person who’s been crunching those numbers for us. And we are fortunate enough to have some states who have gone before us. So we’ve learned a lot from them, in terms of what the take up rate is, in terms of being able to crunch all of the numbers. And right now everything looks good for us to be able to begin paying those contributions in September as planned.

Miller: My understanding is that if employers want to offer their own independent version of a paid leave program, they can, potentially. How would that work?

Humelbaugh: Employers can apply for what we call an Equivalent Plan. They would have to make sure that it is equal to or better than what we’re going to provide in the state paid leave program. And that includes not charging or collecting money from their employees that is more than what they would pay into the state trust. So they would actually, if they’re interested in doing that, go into our new modernized portal for businesses called Frances Online, and they would be able to upload the documentation and do all of that application. And then we would let them know if they qualified or not.

Miller: Have you seen a large amount of interest on the part of employers to go their own way? I imagine the only reason the company would do it is if they thought they had better actuaries and they could somehow save money by doing this themselves. Have companies decided to do that?

Humelbaugh: We do have some companies who have decided to do that. We’ve had some deadlines go by. We have a little over 300 businesses who have submitted those equivalent plans and I think it’s a business choice. Some of them are already giving paid leave programs like this to their employees, so they’re just carrying that over essentially. So it just depends on each employer’s circumstances.

Miller: In the early months of the pandemic, when there were historic levels of unemployed Oregonians all seeking unemployment benefits, the Employment Department really struggled in a variety of ways, including with trying to help people who didn’t speak English. What are you doing now to prevent that happening with this new system?

Humelbaugh: We’ve learned so much since the pandemic in terms of just volume and what we need to do. But we are really committed to offering this system in multiple languages. We’ve worked hard to hire staff who are multilingual and come from different backgrounds and cultures and from places all across our state. So those are the folks who are answering questions, who will be answering phone calls, who will be looking at applications. And we’ll continue to do that as we hire up. But we’re also making sure our systems and all of our letters and forms are available in multiple languages so that we can serve folks in all of the ways in which they might access the system.

Miller: Karen, thanks very much.

Humelbaugh: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Miller: Karen Humelbaugh is the director of Paid Leave Oregon. She’s with the Oregon Employment Department. She joined us to talk about the new paid leave program that took effect on January 1, guaranteeing that basically all workers in the state will be able to take paid time off for personal or family, medical or safety reasons. The money is now being collected and people can actually start taking advantage of paid leave, starting in September.

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