On a recent Friday evening, walking with my children along Main Street during Midnight Merriment in Concord, I was delighted to see the holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life playing in a store-front window.
My kids had never seen the movie, so I explained to them: “It’s a movie about how the holidays remind us how lucky we are to live in a place where people really care about and look out for each other.”
Across New Hampshire, our communities embody the timeless virtues of Bedford Falls (the town in the film): close-knit, resourceful and compassionate. But every place, both on-screen and in real life, has people in it who aren’t looking out for the folks around them. It’s A Wonderful Life has the banker Mr. Potter, who is out to destroy the local building & loan company. New Hampshire has Gov. Chris Sununu, who approaches the needs of children and families with a Mr. Potter-like callousness.
Executive Order 2019-08 on infants in the workplace for the executive branch (issued on Dec. 9) is packaged as a family-friendly equivalent of paid family leave. In fact, it’s a lump of coal in our stockings: It applies only to executive branch employees, not all families, and having to bring your kids to work with you is the opposite of having comprehensive family leave guaranteed by state law.
This executive order permits parents and eligible guardians who work for participating state agencies to bring infants (ages 6 weeks to 6 months) with them to work – as long as certain criteria are met. These criteria include that the worker has drawn up an “individualized plan” for the infant and that the parent “ensure that the presence of the infant does not create habitual disturbances in the workplace.”
According to the order, bringing your infant to work “provides parents an option to remain in the workforce, improves employee retention, optimizes parent-infant bonding and breastfeeding, and improves the health of parent and baby.”
Comprehensive paid family leave promotes infant, family and workforce well-being. Bringing your baby to work is the opposite of leave: It’s layering care-giving work upon paid work. While this option can be helpful back-up for families that get into a child care jam (as all families do sometimes!), it’s no substitute for ensuring secure family and medical leave across the Granite State – which Gov. Sununu has declined to do.
Let’s backtrack a few months to spring showers rather than winter snowstorms.
In March of this past year, the New Hampshire Legislature passed a paid family and medical leave bill. It was a modest bill with a lot of public support. It would have given parents up to 12 weeks at home with their new children, as well as this same time at home for serious illness in the family.
In May, Sununu vetoed the bill. It was one of the 57 laws passed by the Legislature that he vetoed, many of which had wide bipartisan support. The governor crassly celebrated his veto by auctioning off his copy of the vetoed bill at a Republican political fundraiser in July.
Paid family and medical leave is about family values, women’s rights and the welfare of children. It’s about recognizing the importance of families to each other and the family’s role as the central organizing structure of American life. It’s about giving people the ability to care for their loved ones during times of extraordinary challenge within a family without the stress of losing their jobs.
It’s also about the reality that women bear the overwhelming brunt of child care and to assume the equal status their professional talents demand, the workplace needs to change and give women the space to begin motherhood and pay attention to their children while not losing their opportunity to flourish professionally.
And it’s about children, who flourish when they develop attachment to their loved ones.
We are one of the richest states in the country. Our Legislature wanted to do this for our people. The people wanted it to happen. And our governor stood in our way with a callous disregard for our needs.
The son of a millionaire who was gifted a ski resort, Sununu is showing himself to be light years away from understanding what the lives of the rest of us look like as we make daily choices and trade-offs between work and home.
I’m a working mom of two young kids, and I think New Hampshire can and should be doing much more to support our working families. That doesn’t look like asking new moms, new dads and new parents to do their job duties at the same time as their parenting ones. Of course, many of us already do that every day – taking our kids with us to run our small business, writing emails from the side of a Little League game and countless other activities – but this kind of balancing is a compromise, not a solution.
I’m running for Executive Council in District 2 to stand up and speak up for the rights, health and safety of children, women, families and communities wherever I see the state falling short.
This holiday season, at the top of my wish list, is that the new year will bring new leadership in the corner office of the executive branch that will create a more wonderful life for the working families of New Hampshire.
(Leah Plunkett, a law professor, lives in Concord and is a candidate for Executive Council in District 2.)