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Workers Increasingly Donating Vacay to Expectant Mothers

More and more workplaces are allowing their employees to help pregnant coworkers with the most important gift they could hope for right after giving birth: time.

In lieu of baby shower gifts for their co-workers who will soon give birth, employees are donating their own vacation days so the mother-to-be will have more time to spend at home with her newborn, ABC News reports. The donated vacation is on top of the employer provided maternity leave, affording the new mom a lot more time off.

In some cases, as with Angela Hughes, the donated time from her co-workers was vital for her to be with her newborn. That's because the Kansas City, Missouri woman who works in the registrar's office at a private college had less than one year on the job, which meant she was not yet eligible for paid maternity leave.

Hughes' boss acted first by donating 80 hour of her own paid-time off, which is a practice the college allows. Other co-workers also gave up their own unused vacation time, eventually giving Hughes eight weeks of paid maternity leave.
Hughes' baby, Bella, was born premature and spent almost three months in the neonatal intensive care unit.

"It took a weight off my family's shoulder," Hughes says of the donated time. "Having a baby is a huge adjustment anyway but having a premature baby, my emotions were all over the place."

The U.S. stands alone as the only nation of 41 industrialized countries to not require paid maternity leave, according to 2016 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And only 15% of private workers in the U.S. had paid family leave, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found in December 2017.

There is some positive news in that the frequency of paid maternity leave has gone up from 26% in 2016 to 35% this year, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) finds in its 2018 Employee Benefits Survey.

The 2018 SHRM survey shows that 15% of U.S. employers permit their employees to donate their paid-time off. However, that survey is not a scientific study.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts in January signed legislation to enact a maternity leave donation program that permits new mothers working for the state to receive donated time from their co-workers after they exhaust their personal accrued sick time.

The governor's chief human resources officer, Jason Jackson, was key to that policy becoming a reality. Jackson worked with a pregnant employee in his office to devise a new work-life balance to help the worker.

"We were searching for solutions to that problem that would enable women and expectant mothers to be able to better balance their career in public service and continue their career in public service while also being able to provide care for their child in those first weeks after childbirth," Jackson says.

At the federal level, donated time from co-workers has become one of the most popular gifts for pregnant co-workers, The Washington Post reports. The donated time is in addition to the six weeks off the new mom gets from her federal employer.

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