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Parents welcoming a newborn into their family can face financial stress if their employer doesn't offer paid parental leave. More than 30,000 state public employees have no such

benefit. But as our June Lefler reports, Kentucky politicians and policy researchers want to see that change. Research suggests parents and newborns fare better when mom or dad have paid

leave. The left leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy says state government would function better, too, with such a policy. We have 33,000 folks who work for the state, and we've

heard a lot in past legislative sessions about how hard it is to find and retain good quality workers in Kentucky. So one thing that we feel like would really go a long way toward helping

that, as well as provide a host of other benefits to new parents and their children, is making sure that there's at least six weeks of paid parental leave for any any new parent who

works for the state. Caleb Policy found other employers in Kentucky already offer paid parental leave. Kentucky employees, particularly, and some of the more white collar positions in state

government, they're directly competing for workers with other governmental entities. So that includes places like Lexington, Louisville and Frankfort. That includes places like the

University of Kentucky, Northern Kentucky University. That includes health care systems like Norton and UK health care, and then some other types of private sector places like Amazon and all

the places I just mentioned to offer some form of paid parental leave. Most workers can take weeks off to care for a newborn under federal protections, but that's unpaid. If state

employees don't have enough vacation or sick days to cover their absence, they might just leave their job. There's plenty of research to show that when there's not paid

parental leave after particularly a new mother has a child, they tend to stay home. Now, that's not that doesn't happen the majority of the time, but it happens enough that we

think that it creates a real burden for state government. We also know that it can cost up to 21% of your salary for that position to hire for that new worker. So in many ways, we think this

could be a cost savings to the state, particularly considering there's very little money that would need to be put up to be able to pay for it. That's why some fiscal

conservatives like the idea to. This is the type of benefit that even the playing field with some private sector jobs. And we do want to attract talented folks into these positions in state

government and if it can be done, which it appears will be done without impacting the pension system or having a very significant cost with it, there's just an opportunity for there to

be broad support for it. Last session, State Senator Amanda Maze Bledsoe proposed four weeks of paid leave for state employees. Right now she is pushing the Beshear administration to enact a

paid leave policy of its own before she takes the fight again to the General Assembly. For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler. The full case for paid parental leave report is online

that hey, why policy? Dot org.