Posted on 10/22/2014 12:07:47 PM PDT by Rusty0604
Paid leave will improve the nation's labor participation rate, currently at record lows, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said on Monday.
"It is a sleeper issue that will sleep no more," Perez told a gathering at the National Press Club.
"Every first Friday of the month, the most frequently asked question I get, 'What can you do, Tom, to increase labor force participation?' Well, let's talk about paid leave and let's compare the United States with Canada," Perez said.
"The labor force participation rate of women ages 25 to 54 in the year 2000 in the U.S. and Canada was virtually identical. Today, Canada is ahead of us by roughly 8 percentage points, in large measure because they have generous paid leave laws and they provide affordable access to affordable child care.
In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that "most of the decline" in the labor force participation rate since 2007 is attributable to "long-term trends, especially the aging of the population," as well as the "slow recovery of the labor market that led workers to become discouraged and permanently drop out of the labor force."
In other words, the jobs simply weren't there, whether they offered paid leave or not.
The CBO report says nothing about the lack of paid leave being a drag on labor force participation.
In his speech, Perez also lobbied for a higher minimum wage, immigration reform, and labor unions.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Maybe that explains why there are so many thousands of federal workers on paid leave, they are just helping the economy!
That’s one reason the public unions get their workers so much paid time off; the agencies have to have plenty of workers to fill in for the absent ones. The union gets more money and everyone except the taxpayers are happy.
Crazy.
bttt
I looked for a satire indication too, but I think this is real. He’s “reasoning” that if someone is on paid leave, someone has to hire someone else to do the work. It never occurs to him that if paid leave is a cost of hiring within the USA, employers are going to create fewer jobs here.
Yeah, let’s make employers pay more people for doing nothing, that’ll solve everything. /s
That’s the way gov’t agencies operate, but they have taxpayers that are forced to pay for it. They don’t have to worry about profit.
What?! Paid leave is a solution to the opposite problem: when you have too many jobs and not enough people, you offer incentives to attract the best to your place of work.
So no chance that anything other than paid leave could cause that result? Undivided middle fallacy.
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