NYC employees to receive 6 weeks of paid parental leave

New York City’s billion-dollar spending increase on programs attacking homelessness will reduce the number of street people and families in shelters, but it won’t happen overnight, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

As members of the city’s new homeless outreach team fanned out Monday in a campaign to persuade people to leave the streets, three homeless New Yorkers filed paperwork to sue over an unrelated effort to remove them, saying police wrongly tossed identifying documents and family photos into a dump truck.

The $15 million cost will be paid for by cutting some long-serving workers’ vacation time by two days, from 27 to 25 a year. “This is a common-sense policy that will make for healthier and more financially stable working families, making it good for employees and employers”.

Roughly 20,000 city workers will be eligible for the city’s new paid parental leave policy.

The unions representing the city’s almost 300,000 unionized workers would need to negotiate for a similar benefit for their membership. Unions seeking the benefit could look to that arrangement for a framework of how they might pay for it.

Hector Figueroa, president of 32BJ SEIU, also praised the announcement.

A commission is recommending raises for New York City’s mayor, city councilmembers and some other elected officials.

“No one should miss the sweet miracle of those early weeks because they are forced to choose between paying their bills and taking care of their baby”, Ms. McCray, who also serves as honorary chair of the city’s Commission on Gender Equity, said.

NY joins a growing wave of localities – and employers – offering paid time off to parents, even as the USA remains the only developed country with no national paid leave for mothers.

Extending the policy to non-city employees would require federal or state action.

We have been trying for years to interest various city administrations in expanding parental leave, and finally have a willing partner on an issue that is very important to us.

The ouster had nothing to do with Home-STAT, she said.