Keira Knightly Blasts ‘Archaic’ Maternity Laws
Keira Knightley is, admittedly, incredibly lucky. Not only does she have a career that pays her “really, really well,” but she can afford “really good childcare” too, a privilege that she tells Harper’s Bazaar is unique — but probably shouldn’t be.
Furthermore, she acknowledges that if her socioeconomic status were different, she would have been forced to take four years out of her career, a situation that she says would have had a dramatic (no pun intended) effect on her career. The actress, who gave birth to daughter Edie in 2015, also recalled her shock after learning of Britain’s “archaic” family leave policies, most notably the lack of paternity leave. “It’s shocking. Because you need that option,” she said. “You need to be a family unit, not just have the guy there for two weeks and then go back to work and the mother left desperately trying to figure it out.”
Yet while Britain’s paid leave policies have earned the country low-ratings compared to its European peers, the country offers the longest maternity leave of all of Europe at 52 weeks. The mandate for maternity leave under European Union (EU) law is 14 weeks. Fathers in the United Kingdom are also guaranteed 9 weeks of leave after the arrival of a child. Though Britain recently voted to leave the European Union, EU law regulates that all parents are guaranteed 16 weeks of paid leave to care for their children.
And so if Knightley finds the family leave policies of her home country grim, no doubt she would be appalled by the reality facing families across the pond. The United States is not only one of just two countries in the entire world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave — the other country is Papua New Guinea — but in the U.S., the only mandate over guaranteed family leave comes in the form of the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which only ensures that 12 weeks of unpaid leave are afforded to employees…but only those who work for companies with at least 50 employees who have worked at least one year for their employers. According to the Department of Labor, approximately 40 percent of all employees in the U.S. fail to qualify for FMLA and only 12 percent of all American private sector workers have access to paid family leave through their employer.
Another huge problem facing Americans who both work and have families is the lack of physical access to quality child care. The Center for American Progress (CAP) recently analyzed the zip codes of eight states with reported “child care deserts,” or areas with at least 30 children under the age of 5 and either no child care centers or so few centers that there are more than three times as many children under the age of 5 as there are spaces in these centers. CAP found that 48 percent of the almost 7,000 ZIP codes analyzed in these eight states can be classified as child care deserts.
As Knightley mentions, another major issue when talking about family policies is the cost of childcare. An October 2015 report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that child care costs end up being the bulk of most family’s expenses — in 33 states plus the District of Columbia, infant care costs exceed that of in-state college tuition — and that child care is especially unaffordable for low-wage workers. As EPI notes, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ official affordability threshold is 10 percent of less of a family’s income, a measure far exceeded but many families, especially those at the lowest income levels.
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