Access to employer-provided paid leave and eldercare provision for older workers

ABSTRACT

Paid leave for family and medical reasons is an important workplace benefit for older workers with eldercare responsibilities by offering time off from work to deal with the need for caregiving, but little is known about its effects on eldercare provision. I study the association between employer-provided paid leave and eldercare provision among workers aged 45 or over, using the 2011 and 2017–18 American Time Use Survey and its Leave Modules. Among various types of leave, paid leave for eldercare was the only type of leave associated with an increase in any care provision by six percentage points. The positive relationship was stronger for care provided less than daily than care provided daily. The significant, but small, increase in care provision associated with paid leave for eldercare suggests the role of paid leave in facilitating care for older adults among middle- and old-aged workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Paid leave
• employer benefit
• eldercare
• older worker
• working caregiver

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Intensive caregiving is defined as a daughter’s care provision to a mother with an ADL need for 1,000 hours or more in a two-year period. If the wage replacement during leave is doubled, intensive caregiving increases by 3.40 percent. The effect size is larger in the simulation where a mother cannot be left alone. On the other hand, caregiver allowance simulation (at the same payment level of paid leave) shows the largest increase in intensive caregiving but a decrease in employment.

2 Because I define eldercare provision as any care provided to an older adult aged 65 or over, my sample might include friends or neighbors who may not be covered by paid leave policies.

3 Previous studies use different age thresholds to define older workers with caregiving responsibilities: AP-NORC (2017) uses age 40 and older, Skira (2015) uses age 42–70, and Dugan et al. (2016) use age 55 and older.

4 One’s disability status could be negatively associated with time spent on eldercare, particularly for men (Shandra & Penner, 2017). In my analysis, the results were similar when those with disabilities were included.

5 Time spent on caregiving could differ by the care recipient’s location as caregivers who co-reside with the care recipients experience higher demand for care provision than their counterparts who do not (Clancy et al., 2020).

6 Less than half of those who provided eldercare in the last three months reported zero time in care. The inconsistency of reference periods of the measures could have affected my estimates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soohyun Kim

Soohyun Kim, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University.