Walmart Parental Leave

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Walmart will soon offer better parental leave than most U.S. companies. The new policy for biological parents, announced in January, will go into effect on March 1, according to a company spokesperson. The company already has rolled out a more generous policy for adoptive parents.
This matters because America remains one of just three countries without paid maternity leave, and Walmart is America's biggest employer. With 1.5 million U.S. employees, its workforce is bigger than the populations of roughly a dozen U.S. states. While the policy only applies to full-time workers, that is still hundreds of thousands of people.
And since only 14% of civilian U.S. workers have access to any paid parental leave, employees at most American firms can …show more content…
And when they can thrive at home, they'll have better work engagement, performance, and productivity. In other words, this was a business decision. Walmart's view is that, from a human capital management perspective, expanded parental leave makes a whole lot of sense. This is borne out by the data: research has shown that paid leave increases not only the probability that new mothers will return to their jobs, but also increases they hours they work when they do so.
What's remarkable about Walmart's move is that it's not just workers in low-paying jobs who are likely to cast an envious eye over Walmart's paid parental leave. It's also people who work at more "elite" employers, like Princeton University, which offers employees just two fully paid weeks, and Wellesley College, which offers just four. It includes employees at General Motors and Ford, where new mothers get only 6-8 weeks at both, and new fathers get 2 weeks and bupkis, respectively. It includes workers at Cargill (two weeks) and Boeing (three) and CVS …show more content…
What's the ideal length, then? Some experts have put it at between six months and a year. That's the point at whichbabies are (often) sleeping through the night, smiling, remembering faces and interacting with their caregivers, and eating solid foods. But since almost no U.S. companies are that generous, employee advocates will have to decide what they can settle for. Collecting data on what competitor firms offer is tough: when PL+US surveyed the largest employers in America a couple of years ago, many refused to disclose their policies. Websites like Fairygodboss or Glassdoor can help, but are often incomplete since the information on those sites is crowdsourced. And the state of paid leave in the U.S. is so dismal, advocates may have a hard time making the case that "we should do this because everyone's doing it." Instead, would-be changemakers can try to make the case that their companies should be leaders on this issue rather than
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