John Oliver pointed his laser-sharp wit at Mother's Day—what we say as a nation versus what we do as a nation.
John Oliver: Mother's Day is not just an opportunity to do something with your mom, it's an opportunity for businesses to be the thing that you do for them.
[series of commercials saying how moms deserve everything they want, while selling you ice cream, clothing, M & Ms, Hooters free dinner. Seriously, Hooters offers a Mother's day free meal special. On Mother's Day. In Hooters. Then Oliver points out that America's past-time, Baseball, also has many Mother's Day specials—free t shirts, plant pots ]
Oliver: In America there is nothing we wouldn't do for moms, apart from one major thing:
News Report: According to the United Nations we and Papua New Guinea are the only countries in the world that do not provide any paid time off for new mothers.
Oliver: Just us and Papua New Guinea. That's as unlikely a pairing as Sophia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon. Separately great, but if it's just the two of them with no one else it makes you feel like one of them has taken her eye off the ball. Reese. In the U.S., here in the U.S. federal law grants workers just 12 weeks of unpaid leave and they're some stark limits on that.
C-Span: You have to work for a company with 50 or more employees, you have to have been there for over a year, you have to be a full-time salaried employee.
Oliver: And what that means is 40% of workers are not covered by the federal law. So if a worker with no paid leave goes into labor at work, she better hope it's on her lunch hour and that her coworkers don't mind if the break room gets messy.
Oliver: And this is not to say that women don't take leave, it's just they have to get very creative about doing it.
News: What we have now is that women do take maternity leave. It is often times unpaid and it is through a patchwork system where they use up their vacation time, they use up their sick days, one woman I talked to put her maternity leave essentially on her credit cards.
Oliver: Now sure that sounds bad but on the plus side think of all the points she earned towards vacation she can't now take because she has a fucking baby.
This is not how it's supposed to work. Mothers shouldn't have to stitch together time to recover from childbirth.
Oliver's show can continue on where other news stories have to cut to commercial. He continues to go in on the variables that can make going back to work that much tougher than one could imagine. It gets more heart-wrenching (but yes, still funny). He then takes apart legislators who have fear mongered away family paid leave over the years (which can be teeth-grinding, but still funny).
The whole video is below the fold.