Differential eligibility for paid leave benefits in OECD countries: the impact of tenure requirements for young workers

ABSTRACT

Research has shown health and economic benefits to having access to paid family and medical leave, yet eligibility requirements restrict coverage. The impact and variation of these requirements across countries have not been studied. This study addresses this gap using original data on legislated tenure requirements and worker tenure as reported in national household surveys from countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to estimate the percentage of workers who would not be eligible for paid leave benefits because of tenure requirements. As the need for different types of leave varies over the life course, ineligibility rates are estimated by age. Findings show that across all types of leave, younger workers (age 20–29 years) were substantially less likely to be eligible than older workers, and that rates of ineligibility declined consistently with each five-year increase in age. This study highlights the important health and economic implications of policy design decisions that can exclude vulnerable sectors of the population.

RESUMEN

Estudios han demostrado beneficios económicos y de salud de tener acceso a licencia familiar y médica remunerada; sin embargo, los requisitos de elegibilidad restringen la cobertura. El impacto y la variación de estos requisitos entre países no han sido estudiados. Este estudio aborda esta brecha utilizando datos originales sobre requisitos de antigüedad laboral establecidos por ley, y el historial de antigüedad laboral de trabajadores reportado en encuestas de hogares en los países de la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE) para estimar el porcentaje de trabajadores que no calificarían por falta de antigüedad laboral. Puesto que la necesidad de diferentes tipos de licencia varía a lo largo del curso de vida, las tasas de inelegibilidad se estiman por edad. Los resultados muestran que, para todos los tipos de licencia, los trabajadores más jóvenes (de 20 a 29 años) fueron sustancialmente menos propensos a calificar que los trabajadores mayores, y que las tasas de inelegibilidad disminuyeron con cada aumento de edad de cinco años. Este estudio destaca las importantes implicaciones económicas y de salud de decisiones tomadas en torno al diseño de políticas públicas que pueden excluir a sectores vulnerables de la población.

KEYWORDS:

• Paid leave benefits
• tenure requirements
• young workers
• comparative analysis
• OECD
• eligibility

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Beneficios de licencia remunerada
• requisitos de antigüedad laboral
• trabajadores jóvenes
• análisis comparativo
• OCDE
• elegibilidad

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nicolas de Guzman Chorny, MA, is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Previously, he worked as a Senior Policy Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. His work focuses on health, social policy, and reducing inequalities.

Amy Raub, MS, is a Principal Research Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her work focuses on the development of quantitative measures of laws and policies in all 193 UN countries and how these measures can be used to advance monitoring and accountability.

Alison Earle, PhD, is Senior Work-Family Policy Research Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the availability and inclusiveness of paid family and medical leave policies in the OECD and globally, and their impact on health, gender and economic inequalities.

Jody Heymann, MD, PhD, is Distinguished Professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Geffen School of Medicine, and the Founding Director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center. Her work addresses how social policy can advance equality across populations. She has written extensively on inequalities in access to paid leave in the OECD and globally.

Notes

1 These findings must be interpreted with caution, however, as results are limited to workers that reported being on paid leave at the time of the survey, which does not account for variations in length of leave, and the fact that paternal leave tends to be far shorter than maternal leave.

2 Numbers over 100 take into account countries where there is both high take-up and policies that allow parents to take leave over multiple years and/or in several blocks such as Sweden where the number of women receiving paid parental leave benefits in 2016 was 380 per 100 live births. Excluding Sweden, the averages are 104 women and 29 men per 100 births.

3 Sources included the U.S. Social Security Administration’s ‘Social Security throughout the World’ annual reports, European Commission’s ‘Mutual Information System on Social Protection’, Council of Europe’s ‘Mutual Information System on Social Protection of the Council of Europe’, and the International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research (Koslowski et al., 2019).

4 Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.

5 In analyzing legislated length-of-tenure requirements for paid family and medical leave benefits, we differentiated tenure requirements from contribution requirements. Tenure was defined as the amount of continuous time spent by a worker with his/her employer; contribution referred to the amount of time, continuous or not, that a worker made periodic payments to a social security fund (whether directly, through taxation, or through his/her employer).

6 Similarly, in the few cases where the tenure requirement was shorter than 1 month, the percentage of ineligible workers was not estimated; the closest category would have been ‘less than 1 month’ of tenure, and it was not possible to determine the share of workers above or below the legislated tenure requirement in weeks.

7 N.B. Turkey and Ireland introduced paid leave for fathers in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

8 Though this article focuses on rates of ineligibility for full paid leave benefits based on tenure requirements, it is worth noting that a few OECD countries provide some benefits to workers who do not meet the full requirements. In all cases, however, these benefits are less generous – whether in terms of length, payment, or both.