It’s been 32 years since the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was signed into law, and some three-quarters of employers believe the program is “outdated and should be updated,” according to a recent survey from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
Efforts to modernize the FMLA with the passage of a paid leave program didn’t materialize in Congress last year, and it appears unlikely that lawmakers will prioritize such a policy in 2025. While SHRM has been lobbying for changes to the FMLA, its head of government affairs, Emily Dickens, contended that “you can’t always think the federal government can solve everything.”
Absent a sudden expansion of the FMLA, Dickens said SHRM is encouraging employers to consider offering benefits that will meet the needs of a wide range of caregivers. If paid leave isn’t possible, HR can consider offering benefits with a lower barrier to entry, such as mental or financial health resources, she suggested.
Budgets can limit benefits. Paid leave is often cited as a critical benefit for caregivers, but most employers don’t offer a benefit beyond what is required by the FMLA, according to SHRM. More than 60% of the employers in SHRM’s network are small and midsize companies whose budgets may limit how much paid leave they can offer, Dickens told HR Brew. Some 40% of organizations surveyed by SHRM in 2024 offered paid parental leave, while 33% offered paid leave to care for an immediate family member.
“We talk a lot in this country about what the Fortune 500 and the Fortune 1000s are doing, but the majority of us work for a company that is not on a Fortune list, and so we can’t assume that just because we’re meeting payroll every week that we have all these additional dollars to put towards every new problem,” Dickens said.
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Some benefits HR can consider for caregivers that represent a lower level of investment include mental health support and financial advising—the latter can be relevant for employees who are trying to figure out how to file taxes when they take on a dependent, or make sense of a parent’s pension fund, she said.
Dickens also emphasized the importance of offering benefits that are flexible enough to apply to a wide range of caregivers, noting that employees may be caring for a child, an elderly family member, or both at once—a phenomenon experienced by the so-called “sandwich generation.”
How caregiving needs impact the workforce. Caregiving also has implications for businesses’ bottom lines, the SHRM surveys suggest, as workers with these responsibilities reported reducing their working hours (28%), scaling back their workload (21%) or changing jobs for more flexibility (14%) in the past year.
While the federal government has been slow to adopt policies focused on addressing these issues, a number of states in recent years have enacted paid leave programs, as well as funded initiatives to help lower the cost of childcare.
Should lawmakers put a federal paid leave program on the table sometime in the future, Dickens said SHRM is concerned with potential costs for the small- and medium-sized businesses she referenced.
A bipartisan working group from the House of Representatives issued a paid leave policy framework last year that included a few different proposals to help lower costs for small employers affected by a federal paid leave mandate, including allowing them to join insurance pooling plans, and strengthening the employer-paid family and medical leave tax credit.
“That’s the number one thing before we go into the weeds; is there a mechanism to help offset the costs for our small- and mid-sized companies?” Dickens said.
