(Copenhagen) Sweden on Monday launched a revolutionary new law that allows grandparents to get paid parental leave to care for their grandchildren during the first three months of life.
Published yesterday at 5:59 p.m.
Jan M. Olsen
Associated Press
The development comes after Sweden’s 349-seat Riksdag parliament approved the government’s proposal to transfer parental allowance last December. It comes 50 years after the Scandinavian country became the first in the world to offer paid parental leave for fathers, not just mothers.
Under the law, parents can transfer part of their generous parental leave allowance to the child’s grandparents. A pair of parents can transfer up to 45 days, while a single parent can transfer 90 days, according to the government agency that administers the social insurance system.
This Scandinavian country of 10 million people, known for its taxpayer-funded welfare system, has built over generations a society where citizens are cared for from cradle to grave.
In Sweden, it is allowed to take a complete leave of absence from work when a child is born. Parental allowance is paid for 480 days, or about 16 months, per child. Of these, 390 days’ compensation is calculated based on the person’s total income, while for the remaining 90 days, people receive a fixed amount of 180 kroner (about $23 CAD) per day.
There are also other benefits for parents in Sweden: they can work reduced hours until their child is eight years old, while government employees can benefit from these reduced hours until their child is 12 years old.
Conditions
Alexandra Wallin of the Swedish Social Insurance Agency told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the new law “will provide greater opportunities”.
However, the rules for grandparents, she explained, are the same as for regular parental allowance and require that one person be insured for parental allowance, which is the case for most Swedes.
There are conditions for receiving parental allowance: a pensioner can also take parental leave, in which case the compensation is based on the person’s pension. A person cannot look for work or study during the period in which they receive parental allowance.
In 1974, Sweden replaced gender-specific maternity leave with parental leave for both parents. At the time, so-called parental insurance allowed parents to take six months off work for each child – with each parent entitled to half the days.
However, after this decision, only 0.5% of paid parental leave was taken by fathers, according to the Social Insurance Agency. Today, fathers in Sweden take about 30% of paid parental leave, according to the agency.
The United States, a dunce in parental leave
In contrast, the United States is one of the few countries—and the only industrialized country—that does not have a national paid maternity leave policy. The Family and Medical Leave Act provides eligible American workers with up to 12 weeks of job-protected leave per year, but this time is unpaid.
“We have no right to paid parental leave at the federal or state level,” said Vicki Shabo, who researches and advocates for paid family and medical leave programs in the United States at the Washington-based think tank New America.
Paid family leave programs have been created in 13 states and the District of Columbia, though the parental leave offered in those places is typically about three months, a fraction of Sweden’s benefits. As of March of last year, only about a quarter of civilian workers in the United States received paid family leave, according to the U.S. Agency for Labor Statistics.
Even in states that offer paid leave to bond with a new child, that time is not transferable to grandparents unless they are acting as the child’s parent, said Jared Make, vice president of the nonprofit advocacy organization A Better Balance.
“Families often extend beyond the nuclear family,” Make said. “Examples like Sweden show how far behind the United States is. We have a lot of work to do to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world.”
