THE CASE FOR GENEROUS PAID CARER LEAVE
Leave to help working parents look after their children has rightly existed in many parts of the world for years, as has leave after childbirth or adoption. A few countries go further. In Japan, which has one of the world’s oldest populations, staff have a legal right to take time off to care, plus extra days of leave for doing the caring.
It took until this year for the UK parliament to pass the Carers Leave Act, which allows one week’s unpaid leave a year for workers caring for a relative or dependant. One week wouldn’t be enough for the carers I know, but the new law should still make a big difference.
“It will make this type of care much more visible,” says Emily Holzhausen, policy director at the Carers UK charity. That visibility should make it easier to request and arrange carer leave.
It will be even better if more employers follow the lead of companies such as Centrica, the UK energy group. For more than a decade it has offered 10 days of paid carer leave and in 2019 it allowed another 10 days if taken with matched annual leave — so if two days off were needed, one would be carer leave and the other annual leave.
Insanely costly and open to abuse? Centrica says not. Its staff took an average of just 3.4 days of matched leave a year pre-pandemic.
And it calculates the policy saved it £1.8 million (US$2.2 million) a year by avoiding unplanned absences and underperformance, and another £1.3 million from retaining people who might have otherwise left.
Not every employer is as large as Centrica but the business case they make for more generous carer leave is compelling. The human case, meanwhile, is overwhelming and growing.
