Paid Family Leave (California)

California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) insurance program, which is also known as the Family Temporary Disability Insurance (FTDI) program, is a law enacted in 2002 that extends unemployment disability compensation to cover individuals who take time off work to care for a seriously ill family member or bond with a new minor child. Benefits equal approximately 55% of earnings and have a maximum per week, for a total of up to six weeks.

The Paid Family Leave program is administered by the State Disability Insurance (SDI) program of the Employment Development Department. Benefits commenced on July 1, 2004. The PFL insurance program is fully funded by employees' contributions, similar to the SDI program.

The statute states that PFL must be taken concurrently with leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the California Family Rights Act (CFRA), both of which provide for twelve weeks of unpaid leave in a twelve-month period. In other words, the FMLA and CFRA offer job protection for up to twelve weeks of family leave whereas PFL offers compensation for up to six weeks.

In 2002, after an extended campaign by the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and the Work and Family Coalition led by the Labor Project for Working Families, California was the first state to pass a law requiring the Paid Family Leave program. As of mid-2008, the only other states that had passed laws to offer paid family leave benefits were Washington and New Jersey.

In 2009, five years after California's paid family leave law first went into effect, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, a Democrat from the same state, introduced H.R. 2339, the Family Income Responding to Significant Transitions (FIRST) Act, which would provide federal grants to states with existing paid family leave laws to implement and administer their paid family leave programs, and would encourage other states to develop their own paid family leave programs.

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