Twitter boss Elon Musk has reportedly slashed the company’s paid parental leave offering from 20 weeks to just two, according to New York Times tech reporter Kate Conger.
In the same week that we at Glamour, in partnership with Paid Leave for All, launched our campaign to #passpaidleave in the US, Musk has reportedly done away with Twitter’s competitive parental leave policy. This leaves the company well out of step with major tech corporations across the country, and strikes a huge blow at the entire workforce but particularly women, many of whom may be forced back to work bleeding and exhausted, in order to pay their bills and not fall into debt.
According to internal documents seen by Conger, the policy is “being changed to whatever is required by law in the region where employees work, along with a ‘top up’ of two weeks of leave.”
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In America, where there is no national policy for paid family leave, the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees your job for 12 weeks of leave unpaid, forcing millions of Americans every year to choose between their families and a paycheck.
It is unclear whether Musk’s new policy takes into account state paid leave offerings. Twelve states in the US offer some form of paid family and medical leave. In California many workers are eligible for up to eight weeks state paid leave, and in New York, up to 12.
But many incensed ex-Twitter employees have taken to the social media platform to highlight that, with many workers based in states that don’t offer state-based paid leave, they will now get only the two weeks paid from the company.
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This policy change comes in the same week Glamour and Paid Leave for All launched our national campaign to raise awareness of the catastrophic lack of a national paid family and medical leave program in this country, where one in four women are forced back to work within two weeks of giving birth.
Our campaign—featuring the Get Your Sh*t Together, Baby book series we created in partnership with Mother advertising agency—is a satirical look at what happens when parents are forced back to work within two weeks of giving birth, and urges people across the country to sign a petition for Congress to pass paid leave into law.
Former Twitter employees are equally outraged by two-week-old babies being left to fend for themselves, thanks to the company’s new policy.
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In the same year that President Biden and Vice President Harris called to pass paid leave into law, we say it’s time to expand parental leave policies in the workplace, not row back on them. Musk, are you listening?
