San Francisco will require six weeks of full parental leave

San Francisco is ushering in a new era for parents, as the city on Tuesday became the first to pass a law mandating six weeks of fully paid parental leave. The law covers mothers, fathers, adoptive parents and same-sex couples.

The landmark measure comes as an upgrade to an existing California law that gave six weeks of parental leave at 55 percent of pay, which was covered by a state disability fund. Employers with 50 or more workers will now be required to cover the remaining 45 percent under the law, which goes into effect in January 2017. The following year, the requirement will extend to companies with 20 or more employees.

progressive by san fran

Wow, this is great news! The great thing is that even fathers, adoptive parents and same sex couples can avail the leave. And that's 100% paid salary as well, very much helpful to new parents as having a baby can be quite expensive.

I still think Sweden has the best deal, 56 weeks of maternity leave at 80% of the worker's salary. But yeah, they do have very high taxes from 29% to 60%. So it's a big disappointment if their government wouldn't offer them something like this. Haha!

Another one is Croatia, which allows up to 34 weeks of leave with 100% of the salary paid. Then Denmark also offers one year of paid maternity leave at a rate of 100% salary that is paid.

Currently, in our country, a bill is in the works in the senate to make the maternity leave 100 days with pay. Right now, it's only 60 days paid maternity leave. I hope it also becomes a year of leave with salary in the future. Lol.