St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 47

MAY 27 1990 SUNDAY, MAY 27, 1990 SI.LUUIS rUbl-UISfAIUM Free Food Leave Distributed To Thousands -errs Bill Gives Leaves To Mothers By Virginia Young Pott-Dispatch Jeffenon City Bureau JEFFERSON CITY A bill on Gov. John Ashcroft's desk would guarantee new mothers in Missouri eight weeks of unpaid leave from their jobs. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Jay Nixon, D-Hillsboro, says the measure, passed by the Legislature on May 18, contains compromises to make it less objectionable to business interests. For example: Employers would be required to provide leaves only for new mothers, not fathers.

Mothers of adopted children younger than 3 would qualify. Businesses would not be required to provide leaves for "key employees" defined as "any female employee in the highest-paid 10 percent of the employees or among the five highest-paid individuals and whose absence would substantially harm the firm economically." The guaranteed leave was reduced to eight weeks from 12, as proposed in an earlier version of the bill. To be eligible employees would have to have worked for the employer at least 35 hours a week for six months. Hourly workers at food service establishments would not be covered, nor would workers at businesses with fewer than 50 employees. "I think the bill's workable, reasonable and fair," said Nixon.

"I don't think we should punish people for going to work in many cases, having to work" while raising infants. whether the government should dictate employee benefits, as it would with a family leave law. "I hate to see government get involved in so many things," she said. "But, on the other hand, I know business won't do it by itself. I would really like to give more time to my child." Mary B.

is, in fact, luckier than many employees. Many women have jobs that offer no maternity leave, or only two weeks. Extended maternity leave, paid or unpaid, is rare. "A recent survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that only 37 percent of working women work for companies that had parental leave, paid or unpaid, beyond the period of sick leave," said Donna Lenhoff, legal director of the Women's Legal Defense Fund in Washington. Local day-care providers say it is not uncommon to get calls from new parents looking for day care for children as young as 2 weeks.

Care For Elderly Parents The other primary beneficiaries of the federal family leave bills would be people, like Cathy Ryan, who need to spend time with sick parents. Ryan's case is one that the Women's Defense Fund has used to illustrate the need for family leave laws. She could not be reached for comment. According to the Defense Fund, Ryan is an only child who sought four days' leave to be with her parents when her father underwent surgery for cancer. Her supervisor refused, saying she was entitled to take off only the day of her father's surgery.

Ryan took nine days off and was disciplined for "abandoning patients." Soon afterwards, she took two more days off to help her mother move and care for her father. When she returned, she was fired. By Tom Uhlenbrock Of the Post-Dispatch Staff POTOSI, Mo. Free food was distributed Saturday to thousands of people from Washington, St. Francois and Jefferson counties by Operation Blessing, a charitable group funded by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network.

"We know that two-thirds of Washington County is unemployed," said Ann Uhrig of St. Louis, a spokeswoman for the group. "It has the highest unemployment in the state." Uhrig said some 50 businesses, church groups and other organizations donated some of the food, and the rest was purchased by the broadcasting network. She estimated up to 2,000 people had showed up at the field on Route 8 just outside of Potosi Saturday to pick up food and listen to country and gospel bands performing in a large tent. Food also was to be handed out all day Sunday.

"We thought we might attract 500 people over a couple of days," she said. "But it just keeps getting bigger and bigger." At about 3 p.m. Saturday, the field was filled with pickup trucks and other vehicles, and lines of people were waiting for volunteers to hand out the food. Racks of free clothing also were available. Only people from the three counties were eligible to receive the free food.

"We're asking people to show picture IDs and have a need for food we're taking people's word on it," she. said. employees with more seniority, she said. "Nafeesha actually lived a year (longer), and I stayed home with her the whole time," Scales said. "We went on welfare, and I begged and borrowed whatever else I could, and we lived like that until she died, on New Year's Eve 1989." Scales was fortunate; she found a job two weeks after her daughter's death.

But Scales remembers with bitterness the daily struggle she once waged to reconcile the demands of her jobs with those of Nafeesa's illness. "There ought to be a parental leave law, or whatever it takes to help the next person who comes along," she said. "I went through pure hell." Jan Tomaseski, a pediatric social worker at St. Louis Children's Hospital, counsels scores of parents like Scales each year about how to balance their need to preserve their jobs with their child's need to have them at bedside. But often, many children fight their illnesses alone.

"The nurses and volunteers try to give them extra attention," Tomaseski said. "But it's not the same as having their parent there." Tomaseski says she frequently writes to employers of the parents of sick children to "ask for some consideration." "It doesn't always make a difference," she said. Little Time For Bonding Mary B. wasn't thrilled about turning her new baby over to a day-care worker when he wasn't even 6 weeks old and she was still getting up twice a night for feedings. But her employer insisted that she return to work, she said.

"It's hard to leave a 6-week-old in day care," Mary B. said. "I worry all the time about whether he's getting enough attention." She is a managerial employee for a local governmental agency and asked that neither she nor her employer be identified. Mary B. said that some other employees at her agency were able to negotiate longer maternity leaves but that the length of time allowed seemed to depend on the flexibility of individual supervisors and the importance of the new parent's job.

Under some circumstances, employees are allowed to request a 90-day unpaid leave; the need to bond with a newborn child is not one of the specified circumstances. Basically conservative politically, Mary B. said she had doubts about- From page one St. Louis, the bill's sponsor, says it would benefit many of the 4 million American workers who are denied family or medical leave every year. A similar bill, to be taken up in the Senate by mid-June, would require employers to provide up to 10 weeks of unpaid leave in similar cases (13 weeks for the employee's own illness).

Both bills have exemptions for small employers. President George Bush opposes both bills and has threatened to veto any family leave law. Spokesmen for the president say that he believes parental leave benefits should be negoti-ated between employers and employees. No Understanding Scales' daughter, Nafeesa, got sick in October 1986 when she was 8 years old and in the third grade. The diagnosis: neuroblastoma, a deadly cancer, which produced tumors in both her stomach and left lung.

Chemotherapy sent the cancer into remission for almost a year, but for much of the last two years of her life, Nafeesa was in and out of St. Louis Children's Hospital. She was bedridden most of the time when she was home. "When Nafeesa was really sick. I would sleep in the hospital and go to work from there," said Scales, who was a drawer of blood at a local private hospital.

"I always made it to work, because my boss always told me: your job comes first. They weren't understanding at all about the pressures placed on you by a sick child. And there were times when she would be at home sick, and call me on the phone, crying, and I'd just have to leave work and go home to her. My boss didn't like that at all." The hospital would have given her an unpaid leave for three months to care for Nafeesa but would not guarantee that she could return to the same or even a similar job, Scales said. In addition, upon return, she would have had to start over on the hospital's pay scale, a major sacrifice after 15 years on the job.

About 16 months into her daughter's illness. Scales was fired for carelessness. She eventually got a similar job at another local hospital. But when doctors told her In December 1988 that her daughter needed her by her bedside because she had only a short time to live, Scales had to quit her job. An unpaid leave was available only to Sen.

Jay Nixon Cites compromise "This is a very minimal standard," he said. The bill drew opposition from business groups during the session. One business leader, Curt Long of Associated Industries of Missouri, said Friday that his organization had not evaluated the final version of the bill. "We just hate to have the state of Missouri come along mandating benefits," Long said. "It's a strong possibility" that the group will ask the governor to veto the bill.

Ashcroft declined Friday to say how he is leaning on the bill. Lenhoff, of the women Defense Fund, calls the eldercare provisions in the family leave legislation "the most revolutionary, because there are very few employers now who explicitly give leave for eldercare. People generally lose their jobs when they take off to care for their parents." Yet caring for elderly parents is a responsibility that almost all workers face, sooner or later, Lenhoff noted. "The impetus for this legislation is demographics," Lenhoff said. "Seventy two percent of women with preschool-age children are in the workforce today, and many of them also have the primary responsibility for caring for their aging parents.

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