U.S. Sen. Angus King serves a hot dog to a patron of the Trinity Jubilee Center in Lewiston during a tour of the Twin Cities on Wednesday morning that included visiting several nonprofits and announcing his support for a new family leave bill in Congress. Next to him is volunteer Nathalie Biagcheun Florence.
AUBURN — The manager of the Topsham Lamey Wellehan was supposed to join owner Jim Wellehan and U.S. Sen. Angus King on Wednesday as King announced he’s co-sponsoring the new federal Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act.
But Alysha Bouffard’s young baby was sick, so she took the day off. Paid.
“That’s the type of thing we should all be able to do,” said Wellehan, who used his employee to illustrate the point of the new legislation: Life happens and sometimes people need time off.
King, an independent, said the act would create a new insurance program using the Social Security system as a model and overseen by the Social Security Administration. It would collect two-tenths of 1 percent of pay each week from employees and employers — he estimated it at $1.50 a week — for a new fund.
Workers with enough work history would draw from that fund — two-thirds of their salary, up to a cap, up to 12 weeks — when time off is needed for things like caring for a parent, recovering from an injury or after the birth of a child.
“The problem is that we have a changing workforce that involves a lot of people that are having to make agonizing decisions between earning the money to support their own family and taking time off to support their family, whether it’s children that are ill, an aging parent, whether it’s the birth of a child. And that is a decision people shouldn’t really have to make,” King said. “None of us know when some kind of family emergency is going to strike.”
Eliza Townsend, executive director of the Maine Women’s Lobby, said existing law allows for up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but that only applies to the roughly 60 percent of the workforce employed by larger companies.
She estimated American workers lose $20.6 billion a year in missed time for family and medical leaves.
“Nearly one in four new mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth and, of those, 12 percent return to work within one week,” said Townsend. “That’s heartbreaking, it’s wrong and there’s something we can do about it.”
King has also supported the creation of a tax credit for companies that offer paid leave. Whether either will get traction in the highly partisan U.S. House and Senate is unclear, but King said he felt like the time was right.
“You know who’s the key to this? Ivanka Trump. This is one of her issues,” he said. “This is something she’s expressed an interest in, so it’s something we might be able to get done on a bipartisan basis.”
While he was in the Twin Cities on Wednesday, King also visited the Trinity Jubilee Center, the Auburn Police Activities League Center, Safe Voices and New Beginnings to talk about the work being done at each.
kskelton@sunjournal.com
U.S. Sen. Angus King takes a selfie with Trinity Jubilee Center volunteer Holden Mohamed in Lewiston on Wednesday during a tour of the Twin Cities. King helped serve lunch to the patrons.
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