Skip to footer

Mother's Day: Top 10 states for working moms

3. New Jersey (B+)

Wayne Parry/AP/File
In this March file photo, Ron Gilleo, left, flies a kite on an Ocean City, N.J., beach. New Jersey has a paid family-leave program that provides wage compensation to new parents who take time off work.

  • By Schuyler Velasco Correspondent

Private and public-sector workers in New Jersey are entitled to six weeks of paid family leave, which can be used by either parent or by a domestic partner.  New Jersey is one of only two states with a payroll-funded family-leave program, which offers partial wage replacement to new parents and those caring for seriously ill family members. Enacted in 2008, New Jersey’s program offers two-thirds of a recipient’s income for six weeks.

The program also essentially functions as disability leave for women recovering from childbirth. TDI and paid family leave have to be taken sequentially, not at the same time. Workers are eligible for 26 weeks of TDI leave.

New Jersey law also provides 12 weeks of job-protected family leave, to care for a child or family member, within one year. However, the job protection under New Jersey’s FMLA does not apply to an employee’s own medical leave, so a new mother has no official job protection.  Family leave benefits are available to civil union partners as well as those who are legally wed.

The Garden State, though, is one of the few states on this list that doesn’t have workplace nursing rights for either state or private employees.

 

8 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.