The First Congressman to Take Parental Leave Is Ready to Fight for It

Even before the pandemic, American attitudes on paid leave were shifting. A poll from February conducted in the 67 most competitive congressional districts found that 67 percent of Republicans and 87 percent of Democrats support paid leave. Among white-collar companies in many industries, there’s been a race to expand policies as a way of enticing employees to stay. The workforce is now full of the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of the women who first started juggling careers and parenting, and men whose understanding of detached fatherhood isn’t anything like Ward Cleaver’s or Don Draper’s. Even Jesse Watters, the Fox News host who got famous doing stunt interviews on the street, making fun of liberal talking points for Bill O’Reilly’s show, made a brief appearance on air this month to tell his colleagues, “I used to mock people for taking paternity; I used to think it was a big ruse. But now, you know, I wish I could take six weeks.”

Allred can rattle off stats about how the lack of a national paid-leave law matters the most for workers who aren’t at white-collar companies. He can talk about developmental studies that show how children and parents both benefit from time spent together, or that a number of studies show that employees with leave tend to come back to their job more productive. He can talk about how paid leave is a family-values issue. He can talk about his personal story, how his mother sent him to school with chicken pox because she didn’t have any other option when she had to go to work, and how growing up not knowing his father made him determined to be a true presence in the lives of his own children. But Allred hasn’t yet dug into the details of what paid-leave legislation should look like. He is, after all, still on leave himself, he reminded me. But he said he’s eager to speak with the congressional liaison at the White House as soon as he’s back.

“We need a different face on the issue than just the liberal wish-list item. The way this would happen and the way it can be palatable for a broad spectrum of members is a different approach, and one that’s not just based in the wider conversation of compensation and hours and all that, but specifically in families and in business productivity,” Allred said. This being the moment for making paid leave real, he argued, might have to do not just with the pandemic, but with this president. “Biden is a great messenger,” Allred said. “He took the train home every day after his wife died, and he was there for his boys, and he was a single parent for quite a while.”

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For Ivanka Trump, who almost completely evaporated from public view as her father’s presidency ended, the paid-leave push presents an opportunity. Paid leave was central to the image she aspired to project as a Fifth Avenue liberal embedded in a nativist White House—a champion of women’s empowerment working for a president who went on about “suburban housewives.” She talked about paid leave back when she was still voting for Democrats. She kept talking about it through the 2016 campaign, and over her four years working in the West Wing. She gradually pulled along enough Republicans that Congress approved 12 weeks of paid leave for federal workers in 2019 (though not for members of Congress, like Allred, and their staffs). The former president proudly signed the bill, the most significant expansion of parental leave since Bill Clinton signed an unpaid-leave law in 1993. Republicans talked about being “family first” and prided themselves on conservative values, Ivanka argued, and that meant taking care of children and families. “Ivanka has been an advocate for paid family leave for many years and brought the issue to the front of policy discussions for the Republican Party,” Julie Radford, her former chief of staff and the point person for these efforts, told me. “Due to her efforts over the last four years, we’ve seen this issue become a bipartisan one, and she continues to want to see every working American have access to paid family leave.”