Oklahoma Lawmaker Joins Bipartisan Group Working On Paid Family Leave Law

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including a member of the Oklahoma delegation, will be working to come up with legislation providing for some level of paid family leave in the United States, one of just a handful of countries in the world that currently has no national paid leave law.

President Biden and Democratic leadership pushed to include paid leave in the Build Back Better legislation, but it was viewed as too expensive by Republicans and some moderate Democrats and was not included in the significantly pared down version of the bill, which became known as the Inflation Reduction Act.

But the issue is not going away and Oklahoma congresswoman Stephanie Bice (R-OK5) understands why: “I have been back in the district and visiting businesses pretty regularly,” said Rep. Bice in a recent interview, “and I keep hearing the challenges of workforce, filling these open positions, finding people to come back to work.”

Bice said it’s clear that a lot of the parents who left the workforce during the COVID pandemic have not come back to work, at least in part because of the difficulty of working while trying to raise a family.

"As a mom myself," said Bice, "I recognize that we need to have families home, at least, in the few weeks and months after the birth."

Rep. Bice and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) will be heading up the group put together by the Bipartisan Policy Center for the specific reason of trying to finally get a paid family leave bill across the finish line.

"We are one of the few developed countries that doesn’t have some sort of standardized paid family leave across the nation," said Bice, "and we should -- we need to be supporting families. And so I’m really excited to get to work next Congress with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and try to find some solutions to that."

Republican enthusiasm for paid family leave is relatively new and due, in part, observers believe, to the GOP’s realization that the Supreme Court decision on abortion, which Republicans mostly cheered, inevitably means even more parents having to make the difficult choice between career and family.

Congresswoman Bice said another factor is that more Republican women -- now a record 42 for the 118th Congress -- are being sent to Washington and bring with them a different perspective.

“Working moms, we recognize the challenges of raising a family,” Bice stated.

The challenges for Bice and her group may be significant, as they work through the difficult details of legislation they hope to be able to get through both chambers: how much paid leave? how is it paid for? who qualifies?

"It’s a tough conversation because you want to make sure that you’re being business-friendly, but also providing for families," said Bice, "and so this group has come together and we’ll spend really the next year probably looking at what are the options to be able to make this a reality."