The fight continues: Will paid family and medical leave become law this year?

Sixth time’s the charm?

That’s what advocates of a paid parental and medical leave program hope. Originally introduced as legislation in the Roundhouse in 2019, lawmakers are once again trying to get the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act to land on the governor’s desk — this time, for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s last 60-day session.

The legislation would provide 12 weeks of paid parental leave and nine weeks of paid medical, safe or military exigency leave, which could eventually increase to 12 weeks.

The money to pay for the leave would come from a newly created state fund, paid for by new taxes on employees and employers. Businesses with less than five employees wouldn’t have to pay into the fund.

The bill is largely starting off this year where it left off in 2024, when it failed to pass the House by two votes. Three Democratic representatives who voted against the bill aren’t in the Roundhouse this year, all having lost their primary election races: Willie Madrid of Chaparral, Ambrose Castellano of Serafina and Harry Garcia of Grants.

Political makeup changes in the Roundhouse could help get the legislation across the finish line, said Tracy McDaniel, policy director at Southwest Women’s Law Center, which has repeatedly helped craft the bill.

“We’re continuing this fight, and we’re going to keep fighting until it’s passed,” McDaniel said.

The major concerns from Republicans — who have already said they don’t support the bill as it stands — more moderate Democrats and some business leaders largely revolve around the tax the program would set on businesses and an inability for employers to replace workers taking paid leave.

Indeed, Rep. Marian Matthews, D-Albuquerque, who introduced a much narrower alternative to the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act last year, still has the same concerns with the bill she had last year. Her alternative legislation garnered support from business leaders who didn’t support the original proposal, but the legislation was tabled in its first committee.

“Given the number of times the bill has been introduced in the past and the opposition to it, hopefully we’re at a point where there’s some recognition that we need to find a meeting of the minds,” Matthews told the Journal.

She added that legislators who voted in favor of the bill in the past may not necessarily do the same this year.

The legislation has never actually landed on the governor’s desk for an opportunity to become law, and McDaniel said she hasn’t heard much from the Governor’s Office on the bill. Still, she said she hopes it can get done under Lujan Grisham’s administration.

Lujan Grisham will have another Legislature under her purview as governor, but the 2026 session, spanning 30 days and primarily focused on budgetary matters, could prove to be a lame duck session.

The governor didn’t bring up the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act in her State of the State Address on Tuesday.

Systemic issues

Melissa Scott is the owner and director of Pando Little School in Albuquerque, a child care provider with 32 students and 11 employees. The facility offers both preschool and before- and after-school care and is funded by the state.

It wasn’t until the pandemic that Scott realized “the child care industry and early childhood as a whole just wasn’t able to provide for its staff.” She said child care workers weren’t — and still aren’t — receiving enough time off, resulting in burnouts and attrition.

Pando Little School offers state-required sick leave, which is 64 hours per year, and vacation time accrues at a rate of 1 hour for every 31 hours worked. Additionally, it has six weeks of paid parental leave and six weeks of unpaid parental leave.

Even then, she has staff who are working when “they really need to be home.” Her employees are paid around $18-20 an hour, and she said that, “just barely a living wage,” makes it difficult to take unpaid time off.

“They really need to be able to stop and take care of themselves and fully recover. And it’s heartbreaking that they feel financially required to be there,” Scott said.

She has one employee who has a hernia, but still comes in every day, “smiling with kids, holding them on her lap, changing their diapers, cleaning up their vomit, laughing with them, holding them with a hernia.”

The employee is waiting on a doctor’s appointment to deal with the hernia and will be back to work as soon as possible after that, “when, really, what this woman needs is the opportunity to slow down,” Scott said.

While Scott supports the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act, she acknowledges the “very legitimate concerns” people have with the program. Many of her fellow child care owners don’t support the program, she said, and she can see where they’re coming from in an essential service industry that’s understaffed.

“If this passes, small businesses and child care in particular are going to be rattled,” she said. “It’s going to be incredibly difficult.”

That’s an industry Matthews said she’s particularly concerned for.

“You would think that if both sides would like to be able to provide some maternity leave and to help when people have to help a sick relative … we ought to be able to figure out how to make that happen and and to do it without unintended consequences,” she said.

Matthews might introduce another, more narrow version of the bill this year. But that depends on “whether or not we can make some progress through the negotiation process.”

McDaniel said advocates don’t anticipate another alternative bill will be introduced but hopes if it is, “that we can collaborate with other legislators and continue to negotiate something that will work well for everybody.”

Influential business leaders in New Mexico have also disagreed with the bill. Terri Cole, president and CEO of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, said the Chamber “continues to oppose passage of an onerous paid family medical leave proposal.”

The Chamber particularly disagrees with the tax it would impose on businesses and anticipates the program would increase the cost of labor in New Mexico and make it harder for employers to find replacement workers, leading “to workplace disruptions across the economy year after year,” Cole said.

She said the bill “isn’t business friendly because of its extreme business mandates.”

But McDaniel said the bill “looks a lot different than it did when we started this fight” in 2019. She added that there’s a lot of misinformation about the program still and negative outcomes as a result of it, which advocates “continue to combat.”

“This version of the bill really reflects lots of hard work, lots of negotiation and working with the business community and other stakeholders to ensure that this really will work well for everyone involved,” she said.

Scott said the challenges with the bill highlight a broader systemic issue in child care. If the legislation passed, she said the state would need to increase how it funds child care facilities and allow for more flexibility in hiring and training workers.

“It’s short-term pain that’s worth it for the long-term shift that we’ll see in how we treat employees,” she said.