Screw paid parental leave. Republican presidential candidate (yes, still) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich thinks new mothers and fathers should rely on their employers to “try to be creative” instead of being required to offer paid leave. And if the extent of their employers’ creativity is “come to work or you’re fired,” as it is for so many Americans, oh well.
“The one thing we need to do for working women is to give them the flexibility to be able to work at home online,” Kasich told the man who asked the question. “The reason why that’s important is, when women take maternity leave or time to be with the children, then what happens is they fall behind on the experience level, which means that the pay becomes a differential.
It’s not clear how you run a cash register or take care of patients while sitting at your computer at home, but Kasich must have a way, right? Because otherwise he wouldn’t be claiming that working online was “the one thing we need to do for working women.” Also, how easy must he think it is to care for a newborn if you could apparently do it while also getting in a full day’s work online?
Kasich is also flat-out wrong on the effects of maternity leave, as Bryce Covert points out:
Kasich is right that the fact that women are more likely than men to interrupt their careers to care for family is part of it, explaining about 10 percent of the overall gap. But paid leave actually helps mitigate that problem. A woman who gets 30 or more days of paid family leave isover 50 percent more likely to see her wages increase than a woman who got no paid time off. Women who take unpaid leave, meanwhile, are more likely to wind up in a different job and often end up with lower pay than their previous one.
Flat-out wrong and not a little offensive:
“And we need to accommodate women who want to be at home, having a healthy baby and in fact being involved, however many years they want to take care of the family.”
So women who work aren’t involved and don’t have healthy babies? That would come as a surprise to an awful lot of women (and the healthy children they’ve raised with love and, yes, involvement) and as a particularly heinous guilt trip to women who can’t afford to stay home with their babies for even a few weeks because they lack the paid family leave that Kasich opposes. Not to mention, how exactly does it work that a couple months of paid maternity leave is terrible for women’s careers and so we should oppose policies requiring that couple months of paid maternity leave, but staying home for “however many years” is something that should be accommodated and supported?
Kasich is not only an enemy of the facts and an opponent of a policy that a majority of Americans support, he’s also just f’ing incoherent.
