“I wouldn’t be alive without paid leave”

From a baby’s first breath, to an aging parent’s last words - these are the moments every single one of us should be there for.

But without a federal paid leave policy, only 27% of workers have access to paid family leave - which means millions of Americans miss these moments with their families.

We’re in an election year. We have a real opportunity to get loud about our support for a federal paid leave policy - and vote for the candidates who prioritize what matters to us.

Today’s guest is Orli Cotel, a parental leave expert and advocate, who is fighting for change for working parents and caregivers.

Orli has spent nearly the last decade focused on paid parental leave and maternal rights advocacy as a founding member of the national Paid Leave for the U.S. Campaign and now as a senior advisor at Moms First.

In this episode, we cover how she helped win paid leave for 8.5 million employees at companies like Starbucks and Walmart, the state of paid leave in the U.S. today, and why this election is so critical for parents and caregivers.

She also shares her personal story about why she wouldn’t be alive today without parental leave and why this advocacy work is so important to her.

Allison: Orli, thank you so much for being with me today on The False Tradeoff.

Orli: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here talking with you.

Allison: I know you decently well, we've talked a lot before, but one thing that we have not actually discussed is something that I heard you say in the past, which is that I wouldn't be alive without paid leave. What did you mean by that?

Orli: Yeah, so, well, you know, I think that there's so many reasons why paid leave is important to people. Sometimes we forget just the deeply, deeply personal nature of it. And for me, when I say I wouldn't be alive without paid leave, it's actually a story that goes back to my grandmother. So my mom was born in 1949, severely premature.

She was what they now call a micro preemie. She was three and a half months early and she weighed less than two pounds. Yeah, and so in that time it was pretty rare for a baby to survive, born that early or at least the babies that did survive had pretty serious medical challenges that sometimes went on for the rest of their lives. But when my mom was born at the time and she was in the hospital,

My grandfather would go every single day and he would take the streetcar. My grandmother was recovering at home and my grandfather would take the streetcar from their house downtown to the hospital. He would bring with him this tiny, tiny bottle of breast milk that my grandmother would hand express. I they didn't even have breast pumps in those days.

And at the time in 1949, people weren't even really promoting breast milk, but my grandfather and my grandmother really had this sense that it might help their tiny, tiny infant baby. And so he would go every day on the streetcar, bring this, and then he would sit in the hospital at my one and a half pound baby mother's bedside, and he would feed it to her out of an eyedropper every day.

Allison: Oh my gosh.

Orli: And it was a miracle because she didn't just survive, she thrived. She ended up leaving that hospital after the first three months of her life and didn't have any serious medical conditions that resulted from being a preemie. And so the reason I relate that to paid leave is that, you know, paid leave didn't exist in 1949 and it especially did not exist for men. There was no such thing as paternity leave.

Allison: Wow.

Orli: And at the time, my grandfather happened to be self -employed. He worked for himself. So he had control over his own schedule. And he was able to say, you know, he was in his early 20s, and he was able to say, I need to be there. And we all know that when you're by someone's side in the hospital and you can advocate for them, that really increases their outcomes, their chance of survival.

And so I think about that and that care and devotion that my grandparents gave to her to be able to be by her side in the NICU. And the fact that if my mother hadn't had that as an infant, she might not be here and I wouldn't be here today. So that's what I mean when I talk about paid leave, my life, saving my life, being one of the reasons I'm here today. But I also think it's really important to put that into the context of what it means in this country now for other people because

I had a conversation with a neonatal intensive care unit nurse a couple of years ago, she's someone whose job is to be there with the most vulnerable infants when they're born. And she told me a story of a patient who came in, gave birth to a premature baby on a Thursday., and had to go back to her job as a server at Waffle House that Sunday. Sunday.

So, you know, a couple days after giving birth, still bleeding from childbirth, she had to go back and be on her feet as a server in a low wage job and leave her baby alone to fight for its life in the NICU. And this nurse told me that this mother would come in every day after her shift and she would sit by her baby's bed in the hospital and she would cry.

Allison: Ugh. Gosh It's just astounding that that is still happening in the United States today. I mean, it almost makes more sense if that were happening in 1949. That's not your story. The story is like, this is happening today all over the U .S. So I know you know more about this topic than virtually anyone else in this country. You spent six years at PL+US. Then it, I don't know what word you use. shut down, stopped, transferred. Explain more about that six years, what the goal was and how that energy and effort is continuing on today.

Orli: Yeah, so when we founded Paid Leave for the US, which was founded by an extraordinary woman named Katie Bethel, and I was part of the founding team in the very early days. And the goal was to really create a national campaign for paid family leave that would put all of the focus and emphasis on winning this critical issue so that everyone could be there for their family in the moments that matter most.

And I think it's really important when we talk about paid leave to also say, I know we have a lot of folks who listen to your podcast who are, you know, especially interested in parental leave, but paid leave goes far beyond parental leave. You know, we were advocating for comprehensive paid family and medical leave. And so that meant leave to be there to welcome a newborn baby, but also to be there for an aging parent or, you know, to care for a spouse with cancer.

There are a lot of reasons that people need to be there for their families beyond just bringing a new baby into the world. And so we really need to make sure that people can be there for their baby's first breaths or their parents' last words. Those moments are so important. Those are the cornerstones of our lives, and nobody should have to miss those. So our work at Pavely for the US is really to kickstart that national conversation at the time. There were other groups that were working on paid family and medical leave.

But one of the opportunities that we saw was that we really felt like public policy is downstream of corporate practice. And so if you want to transform what's happening in the halls of Congress, first you need to transform what's happening in workplaces around the country. And so we saw a real opportunity to help say, look, at the time,

Paid leave was still mostly an elite benefit. It was something that helped people in professional class jobs. It helped people in the C -suite. It wasn't there for low wage working people. And we saw an opportunity to say, you can't talk about shattering glass ceilings if you're not also going to talk about raising the floor.

And what does it mean for low wage, hard working people around this country who have to go back to work just days after giving birth? And this is actually, by the way, it's still in this country, about one in four new mothers is back at work two weeks after a childbirth.

And people come to me all the time and they say, you I can't believe that everyone has to go back to work after 12 weeks when in other countries they have, you know, they have so much time. And it is true that some people do get 12 weeks, but I think that's a bias for people who are in higher paying jobs to think that it's 12 weeks. Cause really for low wage people, it's not. So at paid leave for the US or plus what we did is we helped to win paid leave at Walmart, Starbucks, CVS, Target.

Allison: Yeah.

Orli: all of these large retail employers to help really shift that conversation to say no, this is not a perk. This is something that's necessary for everyone in this country. And not just for women too, we advocated for paternity leave as well.

Allison: And so you, love that strategy of going to some of the largest corporations in the U S first to show, you know, this is valuable because like so many things in life, the second that companies start doing this and then we get a critical mass, that's when we grab more of the attention of policy makers of like a lot of companies today now already offer this. Like in my world, everyone that I talk to on LinkedIn, our clients, mean, everyone gets paid leave from their company. Not from the government, depending on which state they're in. Then all of a sudden it starts this conversation and it starts to be like, well, if I don't get paid leave, but all my neighbors get paid leave, that's putting pressure on that company then to also adopt that. And it becomes sort of this like, I don't know, this big momentum around this.

Ultimately your goal though with PL+US and today at Moms First is to get, I guess maybe fill in the blank. What is the ultimate goal with paid leave for both of those organizations or are they different the way that you think about them?

Orli: We need to win national paid leave for everyone in this country to be able to be there for their families in the moments that matter. And right now what we have is this patchwork of solutions that definitely support some people, but has a huge amount of people that are left out and that's disproportionately workers of color, low wage working people are still widely left out.

So if you look at what we have today, yes, there are a lot of employers that provide paid leave. There are 14 states that now have a statewide paid leave insurance program where people can file a claim and get paid by the state for their paid leave. When we started at paid leave for the US, it was three states. And so I've been happy to see a lot of this momentum. But going state by state is going to take way too long. And frankly, there are millions of people out there who can't afford to wait.

People who will miss those critical moments with their families if we take too long So there's a lot of urgency around this when you look at the fact that there are still you know millions and millions of people in this country don't have access to pay leave and the other thing about it is you know, we talk about yes more and more employers are providing paid leave but so many people are still employed in the gig economy in this country people who are consultants, contractors, 1099 employees, not employees, but workers. That's something we really have to solve for as well. Because I remember reading a news article a few years ago about an Uber driver who was back at work driving her Uber five days after her C -section. That shouldn't have to happen.

Allison: Right.

Orli: In the United States of America in 2024, nobody should be bleeding at work while they're recovering from their C -section, right? We need to be able to take care of our families.

Allison: So you spent six years at Plus. You convinced all of these companies to roll out more generous paid leave policies. We went from three to 14 states now. Now you're at Moms First. How are you continuing that today within a separate organization?

Orli: So Moms First is an incredible organization founded by Reshma Saujani who started Girls Who Code. I know you've had her on the podcast as well. And we're fighting for childcare, paid leave and equal pay.

And it's a very similar approach in the sense that, you know, we do a lot of work with the private sector at Moms First. We understand that there's opportunity both to transform what paid leave looks like in the private sector and win it for a lot of people. And also to really set the stage for what it will look like to pass federal policy, which we're still fighting for and which will happen. I mean, we're not going to stop until we really can pass paid leave for everyone in the US. And look, I mean,

When you look at what employers have to deal with right now with the complexity of managing paid leave across 14 different states, I think employers don't want to see a state by state solution where there's 50 states with paid leave. They want a national solution where there will be federal paid leave for everyone.

Allison: Right.

Orli: So I think it's been a really exciting time to see how employers are moving into new trends to support more employees and to really be there, not just for parents who give birth, but for all kinds of parents, adoption, paternity leave, parents who welcome a baby through surrogacy or foster parents, and also, frankly, all the folks out there who are in the sandwich generation who are having to take care of their aging parents at the same time as their kids. These are things that employers are grappling with, and they're really helping to figure out new paths forward.

Allison: So do you spend any of your time thinking about the next states that you want or is it like, forget it? Like, this is going to take way too long. We're focusing all of our energy on a national policy.

Orli: Well, it's not really my role to figure out which states should be next. I think of it more like how can I support the states where there's already momentum because it's the folks on the ground in those states who are leading those campaigns. I know there's been a lot of momentum recently in Pennsylvania, in New Mexico came very, very close last year to passing paid family leave in New Mexico.

Allison: And why didn't it pass? Because I remember that. But what was it? What's the reason that it wouldn't get passed when most people do, I think, from a distance, when they don't know the details, support this?

Orli: Well, first of all, I mean, we can get into this more a little bit later, but this is why elections matter. And I think that there's a lot of folks out there who feel like, you know, the decisions that get made by our legislators feel very distant to them. And they don't necessarily see that actually the decisions that are getting made by legislators, by lawmakers, these impact our daily lives. These are issues that, you know, really impact our workplaces.

Allison: Yeah.

Orli: I think in New Mexico, I mean, I really would want to let the local folks speak more to why it didn't pass there. But I do think that in many cases, there's a profound lack of understanding among our lawmakers about what paid family leave really means, how it's actually good for business, how it can help employers. And also, they need to hear more from their constituents.

Allison: Yeah.

Orli: You know, there are so many issues that they need to work on and prioritize. They need to be hearing from parents and caregivers, you know, in their district saying, this is a top issue for me. This has impacted my life in these ways and I need you to prioritize it. So, you know, that's why it's important to get out there and vote, but it's also why it's important to stay engaged and make sure that you're contacting your decision makers to let them know that it's critical to you.

Allison: Also, one of the things that I've been thinking more about and and hope to post more about on LinkedIn is I'm a small business owner. And so because we have under 50 employees, we are very much benefiting from the state by state paid leave policies because I mean, we work in the paid leave space. I attract a lot of candidates who are in the process of expanding their family. And so we have a lot of people who go on paid leave, which can be really, really, really hard for a small business.

But I know I have to offer paid leave both because I believe in it and because I want the best talent. And people quite frankly, just at a certain point may not come work for me if I don't offer paid leave. But we benefit so much as a business owner. I benefit so much by these states being able to support that so that I can hire people, I can backfill them. have, you know, it's...

It's like the financial support that we get from the states to be able to do that is really, really good for small businesses. And I think oftentimes the counter argument I hear against it is, well, it's so expensive to pay for this. I mean, yes, but is it like our employees pay into the system and they don't even notice it. It's such an insignificant amount of money. Small businesses, I don't think are paying into the system. I don't think we are, and the large businesses that are, it's just not a huge amount of money.

Orli: Yeah, it depends on the state. I mean, right now, one of the complexities is that it's different in every state. But I will say the math really does add up when you look at these public policy supports for paid leave. They are extremely helpful to small businesses in particular and it helps our entire economy as a whole. Because when you have paid family leave, you have more women participating in the workforce, which leads to a huge boost in the GDP.

So I could talk on and on about all of the moral reasons why we should have paid leave. And I can tell heartbreaking stories about it. But the truth is, it's fiscally irresponsible for executives to not be supporting paid leave. Because paid leave helps their employees. It helps create healthier communities for their consumers.

It helps create a whole ecosystem of families that can thrive, that all benefit from it. And it helps with the employer's own recruitment and retention. So it's really a no brainer when it comes to supporting these policies morally and economically. And I will say that on the mom's first website, one of the resources that we have there is we have what we call a cost benefit calculator.

It was designed a few years ago by the former HR director at Etsy so that you can look at not just the costs of paid leave, but the benefits. Because in every other area when you're being fiscally prudent, you would look at both the expenses and the return. You would look at the cost and the benefit. But for some reason with paid leave, lot of executives say, well, this is just going to cost me money. It doesn't.

Allison: Right.

Orli: Yes, upfront it does, but when you look at the recruitment and the retention and the boost to morale and all the ways that it helps your business run smoothly, it's a no -brainer.

Allison: Yeah, and I always just think like, can you imagine if somebody gives birth and then you're telling them, well, you need to come in on Monday? I mean, what are they going to do when they come in on Monday? Like, they're not going to be doing good work. is so much better, to your point, of the ROI is so much better if you give them the time to recover and they come back ready.

So, yes, I could also talk about that at length, but I do think that there is maybe a little bit of a misunderstanding on the political side of like, this is bad for business. Whereas as a small business owner, I love it. And I don't even think for the large businesses that it's bad for them either, because you're right, the math does work. It is such a good thing.

Orli: It's great, and I'll say one other thing. I mean, it can be a branding nightmare for a brand nightmare for a company when they have a story that can go viral about an employee coming back to work.

Allison: Ueah.

Orli: I know that there was an incident earlier this year that sparked a whole conversation around this idea of NICU leave, which is a new emerging benefit that a lot of employers don't yet offer.

And that some great employers like Morgan Stanley and Sony and Pinterest and Bobby and the Skim already do offer extra leave if your baby's in the NICU. But imagine the nightmare PR situation if you have an employee who's posting that they have to leave their infant...their premature baby fighting for its life in the NICU and go back to work because their boss wouldn't let them take the time off.

So it's much better for a company to be very consistent and not do what I call leaving it up to the boss lottery. Because you don't want to have your policies applied in inconsistent ways to different classes of employees or different folks who have different managers. You just want to be doing the right thing for everyone, getting the financial benefit, and reducing your own risk.

Allison: Right, yeah, I also think what you've called out earlier in this conversation is really important, which is that we have a little bit of a haves and have not situation in the United States today where the people who have the most resources, make the most money, have the most benefits, have the best health care. Those are the people that get paid leave from their employer. And so what a national policy would do, it wouldn't change that much about what those folks are already experiencing. It's going to change the entire life of every single person who today is not in that scenario.

And so, I don't know, I just think like I am very much living in that haves world where all of our clients are companies that have rolled out very generous paid leave policies and they're very supportive to their employees. But there are so many people that do not have access to that, whether it's because they work for themselves or they're a contractor or they work for a small company that doesn't have the ability to support that. And so I just think like calling out that equity issue is just so important too.

Orli: Absolutely. Alison, let me add something for your listeners too, because I think that a lot of folks that are listening to this podcast are in jobs where they do have paid leave and they don't always understand how this can fully play out and what it actually means in real life. And I'll give you one example of the kind of people that are left out, because as you said, it's a haves and have not situation. So over 90 % of low wage working people don't have a single day of paid leave, not one day.

I spoke a number of years ago, I was in touch with a man from New Hampshire and he was in a situation where he was a security guard and his wife went into labor and he called his boss to say, you know, my wife's in labor so I'm taking her to the hospital so I can't come into work today and his boss said to him, well, I'm sorry but I'm not giving you the day off so

You you have to choose, like be with your wife who's in labor in the hospital or come into work. And, you know, he chose his wife and he lost his job and he entered the most expensive phase of his life with a new baby as an unemployed dad.

And what happened to him was totally legal because in this country, there are millions and millions of people who aren't even covered by FMLA to take even one unpaid day off for that type of life event. So again, those are the kind of people that we need to fight for.

And I think especially for your listeners, if folks are in positions of privilege, know, racial privilege, class privilege, positional privilege within your organization, really, this is a way that you can use your voice and your privilege to help advocate not only for yourself and your, you know, the other folks, maybe in your, you know, immediate category at work, but advocate for a company wide policy that can really support everyone. And also, you know, weigh in on, on state and federal issues to say that we need paid leave in this country for every working person.

Allison: And that's a great point and one that I've seen happen more and more frequently with larger companies that have a large hourly workforce and salary workforce is that there have been so many people, including the HR leaders who have said, we want one policy for everyone. Everyone should have access to this. Whereas I think in the past that was less common. It was more common to see salary workers got different types of benefits or policies. And so even within one company, there are ways to advocate for people that aren't necessarily the highest earners of the company.

Let's talk about the election. So I got so many texts and messages when Kamala I think it was her first speech and she mentioned paid family leave in that speech. I think people were like, wow, does this mean that this is going to be one of the main things that she is talking about?

How does this election matter for paid family leave?

Orli: Well, first of all, I'll go back to what I said before. Elections matter. Elections matter for the most personal parts of your life. It's not something that's just distant and remote for us. When you look at the workplace rights that you have, when you look at how things are going for you in your career, there are decisions that our lawmakers make that impact our careers and our lives.

And I'll zoom out for one minute and talk, for example, about one of the most important pieces of legislation to pass in recent years about workplace rights, especially for women and birthing people, was a law called the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. And that passed just a couple of years ago. And it was very, you know, provided very basic protections, things like saying that a pregnant person should be allowed to have a chair to sit on at work or a bottle of water, right?

Or an hour off to go to a doctor's appointment. Things, protections that a lot of working people in this country still don't have, but are absolutely critical. Seems like a basic no -brainer that everyone would support. There were 24 US senators who voted against the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, who literally voted against letting a pregnant person have a bottle of water and a chair to sit on at work. That was shameful.

And if I were a constituent in one of those states, I would want to know about that. And I would want to make sure not to vote for them again, because there should be consequences for those kinds of actions. So when it comes to this election coming up, I would say that Harris -Walls is the most pro -paid family leave ticket we've ever seen in this country.

A lot of people don't know that Kamala Harris and Governor Walz both have been big advocates for paid family leave in their own careers. So when I was at the Paid Leave for the US campaign, Kamala was one of the first candidates who we endorsed because she was such a strong supporter of paid leave. And in particular, she had called at the time for six months of paid family leave. She was going a lot farther than other folks.

And I've also heard about her own experience, you know, being with her mother in hospice in the last days of her mother's life and her own experience as a family caregiver, which I'm sure has really influenced her support for why comprehensive paid family leave going beyond parental leave is so important for everyone. And Governor Walz helped to, he signed paid leave into law in his home state of Minnesota.

Allison: I'm a Minnesotan, so I'm right in the thick of that. Yeah. We were very happy when that passed.

Orli: Yeah. Yeah. So when I say that 14 states have statewide paid leave, Minnesota is one of those and he's been a champion. And in fact, he was on the Ezra Klein podcast recently. And when he was asked what should be the top priority for Democrats if they win this election, he said one of the first things they should do out of the gate is pass national paid family leave.

I also am sure that his time as a teacher impacted him in this area because teachers are among those who are least likely to have paid leave. So I'm really excited to see paid leave be a front and center issue in this election. And I think, again, one of the things we really need to do is keep up the pressure and the momentum so that paid leave can move forward after November.

Allison: Is getting a national paid leave policy about the election for president or are there other things that we all can be doing? Like what are the things that have to happen? Obviously you don't have a crystal ball, but if you had to say, if these one, two or three things happened, we would have a fighting chance at this. What would those three things be?

Orli: First of all, I think we need to be loud. We need to be loud about paid family leave. We need to be loud about childcare. We need to be loud about these issues that are impacting working parents. I think one of the real problems in this country is that people view these as individual problems. They think, you know, I'm having such a hard time as a working parent because I didn't figure out the right work -life balance. I didn't create the best spreadsheet.

Allison: Yeah.

Orli: You know, I made the wrong choices. And the truth is the system is stacked against working parents right now. Right. I mean, if you look even at how the school day operates, Reshma Sajjani, the founder of Moms First talks about this a lot. You know, a lot of working people have a schedule that's nine to five and the school day is nine to three. So from the minute that you wake up in the morning,

Allison: Mm -hmm. Right.

Orli: it's already stacked against working parents. So I think one of the most important things to acknowledge is we can't solve systemic problems with individual solutions.

So if you're a working parent, and I often talk with parents who tell me, I've been crying in my bathroom at night, trying to hide from my kids because I can't make it work and I can't juggle it and it's too overwhelming. And I think that's very relatable. We can all relate to that. But the problem is that we're crying alone in our bathrooms instead of getting loud in the faces of our lawmakers and our employers. And you can't solve a problem you can't see.

So as long as folks are not being loud about these challenges and showing how important it is to fix the systemic failures that are making it so hard to be a working parent in this country, that's what it's going to take for us to really win.

Allison: We're almost at the end, but I wanna make sure that I ask you this question of all of the work that you have done to advocate for working parents, what are you most proud of having accomplished?

Orli: Wow, that's a great question. I have to say, it was really a career highlight for me at paid leave for the US when we were able to win changes to the policies at Walmart and Starbucks. In particular, just feel like that really catalyzed a huge wave of adoption among other companies who saw that these industry leaders were doing it and wanted to follow suit. And we won paid leave for millions of people.

That campaign for me was really a career highlight. But I have to say, I'm also really proud, you know, we've done a lot of work both at the paid leave for the US campaign and then later at Moms First in training folks in their workplaces who wanted to be advocates and who wanted to help advocate internally for change.

It's just a moment of immense pride for me when I hear back from folks who, you know, they get in touch and they say, you know, we did your workshop or we used your resources. And then I went out and I advocated for a better policy for pay leave in my workplace and we won. And now, you know, thousands of people in my workplace are going to have access to be there for their new babies and for their families. And so that for me, every time I hear something like that, you know, it's hugely inspiring. And I'll say, you know, for your listeners, you know,

Every time there's change in a workplace, it's because some dedicated employee spoke up and tried to do that. Whether you're in the HR department or whether you're an employee in a totally different department who just wants to help make it a better workplace for parents, there are resources out there on the Moms First website that can help you and go out there and fight for it because you can win it.

Allison: Well, thank you so much for your time today. What I'm taking away from this is we all need to be louder. We all need to be very vocal about the change that we want to see, and we need to vote for the people that we believe are going to listen to us and do the things we're asking them to do. Thank you so much for your time today. I've learned a lot and thank you for all the work that you do each and every day.

Orli: Thank you, Allison. It's been great talking with you.

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