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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ -♪ Mother's Day. -♪ It's the day we honor moms, as opposed to every other day when we look at our phones and go, -"Yeah, not now." -♪ -♪ Mother's Day is not just an opportunity to do something for your mom. It's an opportunity for businesses to be the thing that you do for them.

Speaker 2

00:22

JC Penney believes mom deserves to get everything she wants. The JC Penney Mother's Day sale.

Speaker 3

00:28

Baskin-Robbins Mother's Day cake. Pick 1 up today.

Speaker 2

00:31

For Mother's Day, personalize your M&Ms on MyMMS.com. Welcome to Hooters. Right this way.

Speaker 2

00:37

Mom's rock. Bring yours to Hooters on Mother's Day and she'll eat free.

Speaker 1

00:40

-♪ ♪ -♪ Perfect. What better way to honor the woman who gave you life than taking her to Hooters. Mom, I just want to thank you for making me the man I am today.

Speaker 1

00:52

A man who takes his mother to a Hooters on Mother's Day. By the way, I don't have to pay for you, so order me some wings. Even America's national pastime wants to publicly acknowledge mothers.

Speaker 3

01:06

Hey Mets fans, come spend Mother's Day at Citi Field on Sunday, May 11th. Every mom in attendance is going to receive this Mets t-shirt.

Speaker 4

01:12

On Sunday, May 11th, make sure your mom receives this Dodgers Mother's Day clutch. Celebrate Mother's Day with the home team. The first 10,000 women get a raised flower pot.

Speaker 1

01:22

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ It's the perfect gift for the mom who enjoys the 3 Bs. Baseball, botany, and being disappointed with her Mother's Day gift. In America, there is nothing we wouldn't do for moms, apart from 1 major thing.

Speaker 5

01:38

According to the United Nations, we and Papua New Guinea are the only countries in the world that do not provide any paid time off for new mothers.

Speaker 1

01:49

Just us and Papua New Guinea. That is unlikely a pairing as Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon. Separately, great.

Speaker 1

01:56

But if it's just the 2 of them with no 1 else, It makes you feel like 1 of them has taken her eye off the ball. -...Reese. In the U.S. Here in the U.S.

Speaker 1

02:08

Federal law grants workers just 12 weeks of unpaid leave. And there are some stark limits on that.

Speaker 6

02:15

You have to work for a company with 50 or more employees, you have to have been there for over a year, you have to be a full-time salaried employee, so if you're a freelance or contract or something like that, it doesn't apply to you.

Speaker 1

02:27

And what that means is that 40% of workers are not covered by the federal law. So if a worker with no paid leave goes into labor at work, she better hope it's on her lunch hour and that her coworkers don't mind if the break room gets a bit messy. And this is not to say that women don't take leave.

Speaker 1

02:44

They just have to get very creative about doing it.

Speaker 6

02:47

What we have right now, women do take maternity leave. It is oftentimes unpaid, and it is through a patchwork system where they use up their vacation time, they use up their sick days. 1 woman I talked to put her maternity leave essentially on her credit cards.

Speaker 1

03:01

Now, sure, that sounds bad, but on the plus side, think of all the points she earned towards vacation she can't now take because she has a f*****g baby. This is not how it's supposed to work. Mothers shouldn't have to stitch together time to recover from childbirth, the same way that we plan four-day weekends in Atlantic City.

Speaker 1

03:20

Or, I'll take a vacation day Thursday, call out sick Friday, hit the slot Saturday, win big Sunday, and I'll never go back, baby! Woo! And look, And look, there are women who want to get back to work as soon as they can, and that's obviously fine. But for many women, the current situation forces them to return well before they want to, like this new mother.

Speaker 2

03:42

Right now, I'm using the family medical leave, for my time. It's not paid, and it'll guarantee me my position back only for 12 weeks. I see myself probably maybe like a month.

Speaker 2

04:02

I don't see myself taking longer than that. I don't know how I could take longer than that. So, probably like a month.

Speaker 1

04:17

That is a woman who deserves real gratitude in the form of a Tampa Bay-raised flowerpot. Just to help her and the baby. And that's if your pregnancy goes according to plan.

Speaker 1

04:28

If a baby's born prematurely, parents can be forced to make some truly heart-wrenching choices, like Selena Allen, whose baby was 6 weeks premature and who knew that she could only afford to take 4 weeks off in total.

Speaker 7

04:40

We decided the best thing we could do is to spend the 1 month with Connor when he's home with us. I gave birth on Wednesday, and on Monday, I went back to work. It was like a piece of me got left in that hospital.

Speaker 7

04:58

And now I had to pretend that I'm okay.

Speaker 1

05:01

Okay, that's terrible. Although, I will say, you have definitely got everyone's bullshit, what I did over the weekend story beat. Oh, 0, really, Carol?

Speaker 1

05:11

Skydiving? That's interesting. I dropped a baby from my innards, and I was forced to leave it right there in the hospital for financial reasons, but go ahead, tell me what you had for brunch the next day. You had waffles?

Speaker 1

05:22

You're incredible, Carol. That's a great f-king story. And... And look, I don't mean to suggest that this is an issue that only mothers should have to think about.

Speaker 1

05:34

Family leave should be thought of as an option for both parents, which will take some cultural adjustment. Look at Major League Baseball, which offers all of 3 days off to players who become fathers. But when 1 of them, the Mets' Daniel Murphy, actually took it, this happened.

Speaker 5

05:49

This week, sports radio skewered him for missing the first 2 games of the season for his son's birth.

Speaker 8

05:55

You get your ass back to your team when you play baseball. That's my take on it. What did you do anyway?

Speaker 8

06:02

You're not breastfeeding the kid. I was at C-section before the season starts. I need to be at opening day.

Speaker 1

06:08

Oh! Good luck selling that to your wife. Listen, babe, I know I play 162 games in a season, but I can't miss a single 1, so let's cut that thing out of your belly so I can wear my baggy pajamas and swing a cone of wood to make a ball go far. -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ So, so why do we have this system in the United States?

Speaker 1

06:27

Well, for a start, employers tend to fear any sort of mandate, but when it comes to family leave, any fears do tend to be overblown. Look at the way that lawmakers discussed our current 12 weeks of unpaid leave system back when it was proposed in 1993.

Speaker 9

06:42

I want to make sure that all of you who will vote for this have no illusions. This bill will cost jobs.

Speaker 5

06:50

Today, America's businesses are already saddled with too many suffocating regulatory burdens.

Speaker 6

06:56

Now is not the time to shove restrictive federal mandates down the throats of American businesses and American families.

Speaker 10

07:03

This bill is unfair, anti-business, anti-growth, invasive, deathly expensive.

Speaker 1

07:10

I say this to the House, if we allow new mothers to take time off work, businesses shall crumble, our cities shall burn, and hungry wolves shall roam our streets. I'm not anti-mom, I'm anti-wolf! That's all I'm saying!

Speaker 1

07:25

No to wolves! No to the wolves! Think about the wolves! Now, that bill obviously passed, and a 2012 survey found few work sites reported negative effects of complying with the law.

Speaker 1

07:40

So we thought the bill would kill us, but instead, we just got used to having it around, like an irregular mole or a new stepdad. I... I don't know why I was so afraid of you, Gene. You were fine.

Speaker 1

07:53

Now, some people might argue, but that was unpaid leave. Paid leave is too onerous. But is it? Because back in 2002, California passed a plan providing 6 weeks of partially paid leave funded through a small payroll tax.

Speaker 1

08:08

Essentially, it was an insurance plan that would cost employers little to nothing. But all the same fear-mongering took place, and in the end, this happened.

Speaker 5

08:17

More than 90 percent of the companies there reported either positive or at worst, neutral effects.

Speaker 4

08:24

Businesses seem to just make it work and the polling data we have when we survey them, most of them say it's just not a big deal.

Speaker 1

08:32

Yeah, it seems paid maternity is a bit like having hockey on in the background of the bar. It's not hurting anyone, and a couple of people are actually really into it. So, look, in California, it worked.

Speaker 1

08:45

And yet, only 2 other states have followed their lead. And that may be because any legislation that specifically seeks to support women often faces vocal opposition. In fact, Minnesota recently debated a bill which expanded unpaid maternity leave and provided other workplace protections for women, which seemed like a slam dunk. After all, lawmakers love their mothers in Minnesota.

Speaker 1

09:08

Just look at these videos they made.

Speaker 4

09:10

Hi, Mom. Happy Mother's Day.

Speaker 9

09:13

Whether it's 1 day or all year round, frankly, we should be thanking our moms.

Speaker 4

09:16

Happy Mother's Day to all mothers in Minnesota. And thank you.

Speaker 10

09:20

And do I talk about my mom or the mother of my children? I love them both.

Speaker 4

09:25

She always said there's 2 sides to every story. You need to know them both before you can be wise enough to know what to do.

Speaker 1

09:32

Okay, just pump the brakes a bit, because moms are like feet. The more you talk about them in public, the more everyone assumes you want to have sex with them. So, just don't.

Speaker 1

09:42

Still, it's... It is... It is... Don't think too much about that.

Speaker 1

09:46

It is, it is interesting that Representative Dan Hall's mother taught him that there's 2 sides to every story. Because you might like to know that he and every other lawmaker you just saw voted against that bill. And you can't have it both ways. You can't go on and on about how much you love mothers, and then fail to support legislation that makes life easier for them.

Speaker 1

10:07

In fact, until we... Until we, as a country, do something to address this, this should be the only message that we're allowed to send on Mother's Day.

Speaker 10

10:18

Mothers. We owe everything to them. They gave birth to us. They nurtured us.

Speaker 10

10:24

They made us who we are. And this Mother's Day, we have just 1 thing to say to all the mothers out there. Get the f*** back to work. Seriously, get back to work now.

Speaker 10

10:36

Because unless you can personally afford to take the time off you want, we're gonna need you to get your exhausted ass back to work and show us that can-do attitude that moms are famous for. We'd do anything for our moms, up to, but not including, paying them to stay home for a while after pushing a human being out of their body. But we do want to say thank you. And what better way to thank us for thanking you than maybe turning up on time once in a while?

Speaker 10

11:03

We appreciate you, moms. That's why we're happy to allow you to bring that weird donut cushion to work, just so long as you promise not to tell us what it's for. And if you need to find a place to pump breast milk, well, No problem. Either use the break room, or even better, why not get some fresh air?

Speaker 10

11:20

You'll be more comfortable out there. It'll be like a picnic. And moms, you love picnics. The important thing is that you come back to work when you're ready, or when you're not ready, or even when your placenta is still technically inside you.

Speaker 10

11:36

Oopsie, clean up on aisle 7. Look at you, Supermom, taking care of everyone. Because remember, Not only can you balance work and family, you have to. And that's why this Mother's Day, we know you'll be grateful, moms, because you understand that even though 183 other countries do more for you, we do as much as we feel we can right now.

Speaker 10

12:00

What we're saying is, you deserve the very best moms. You're just not gonna get it Happy Mother's Day

Speaker 8

12:15

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