This past Sunday, John Oliver thrilled liberals again with his HBO show Last Week Tonight when he decided to politicize Mother’s Day as another way to bring up the “war on women.” There’s a reason he doesn’t say he’s a “journalist.” He’s a televised activist. He "slams Mother's Day hypocrisy," oozed the Daily Beast.
This was his topic sentence: “You can’t go on and on about how much you support mothers and then fail to support legislation that makes life easier for them.” Obviously, if you cut a mother’s taxes, that would not be on Oliver’s little liberal list. It’s all about mandates:
OLIVER: “Here in the U.S., federal law grants workers just 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and there are some stark limits on that…In order to apply for the 12 weeks of unpaid leave U.S. federal law gives workers, you must work for a company with at least 50 employees, have been employed at the company for over a year, and be a full-time employee…What that means is that 40 percent of workers are not covered under the federal law…”
Oliver then talked about how some women bend over backwards trying to take achieve paid leave by using sick time, vacation time, etc. (Hey – pregnancy and maternity leave are actually considered a “short term disability” – so that’s another way…)
Oliver sounds very much like Hillary Clinton, self-proclaimed “feminist” crusader against the “war on women,” and Democratic presidential candidate, also made sure to capitalize on Mother’s Day. The Clinton camp aired a two-minute video about Clinton’s mother and the role Clinton plays in the lives of her daughter Chelsea and granddaughter Charlotte. In the video, Clinton says that after Chelsea gave birth, this happened:
HILLARY: “One of the nurses said to me 'Thank you for fighting for paid family leave.' At a time that should be so exciting and joyful, I see so many women who are just distraught. They have to immediately go back to work. They don’t know how they’re gonna manage. It is outrageous that America is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t guarantee paid leave… We know, that when women are strong, families are strong.”
Wow. Hillary Clinton as a daughter, mother and grandmother. She’s trying really hard to soften up that image of hers.
It's always a little amazing that to hear one of America's staunchest advocates for a woman's right to an abortion at any moment of pregnancy unspool lines like "Everyone deserves a chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. That's the dream we share!"
And how is anyone supposed to believe that rhetoric coming from someone who didn’t even pay her own female staff equal pay as her male staff?
Sure, many cite that European countries have more family friendly policies, but maybe Clinton and Oliver should’ve done a little research. (That’s okay. I did it for them.)
A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, so highly regarded that even The New York Times cited their study for a story last August, found new mothers living in European countries were less likely to reenter the workforce, more likely to go to part-time work, and less likely to achieve powerful positions the longer they stay on leave.
Periods of long leave are extremely expensive for companies. Of course they would be hesitant on hiring someone who may take up to a year off of paid leave.
Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University stated in the Times, “It gives them good reason to think twice about hiring someone who might take the leave…No one is saying they dislike women who are capable of having children. But they might dislike additional labor costs.”
Christopher J. Ruhm, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Virginia, has studied work-life policies in the U.S. and Europe and found similar results. He concluded that “short to moderate leaves are beneficial for the economy and employment and have little effect on women’s wages, but leaves of more than nine months can have a negative effect.”
And another thing. If Clinton and Oliver are so gung-ho on women’s equality and unpaid leave, why aren’t they advocating for fathers to be more demanding of flexible schedules to help share the responsibility of parental leave, instead of “leaving” it all up to the mother? After all, research shows that men who are more involved at home allow women to achieve more at home and in the office.
If Oliver and Clinton bothered to do their homework and educate themselves instead of spouting off with the liberal wish lists, they would have found that the family leave in European countries isn’t better OR any better than that of the United States. It’s just the opposite.
