Federal employes will be given at least six weeks of paid leave to care for new children under plans unveiled by the White House to kick-start legislative efforts to close the gap in family benefits offered by the US and other wealthy countries.

Democrats have been pushing for better maternity and sick leave rights for over a decade in Congress with little success, but plans by Barack Obama to back the passage of a Healthy Families Act with the executive action for government workers and $2.2bn of new funding for state efforts would be the first time the president has acted on the issue.

The long-stalled legislation would also allow workers in the private sector to earn up to seven days a year of paid sick time and although it is still opposed by most Republicans, Obama’s intervention ahead of the State of Union address next week suggests Democrats hope to make the policy an issue for emerging 2016 presidential candidates.

In a briefing for reporters, White House officials said its plan to grant six weeks of paid leave to workers at federal agencies would be “an advance” on their future leave entitlements aimed specifically at new parents rather than an additional grant, which would be difficult to provide without legislation.

Announcing the plan separately in a blog on LinkedIn, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said the US remained “the only developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave”.

“At a time when all parents are working in more than 60% of households with children, and 63% of women with children under the age of five participate in the labour force, one fact is resoundingly clear: the fundamental structure of our workplaces has simply not kept pace with the changing American family,” added Jarrett, who is also chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls.



The White House estimates 43 million private sector workers currently do have any paid sick leave and a survey of 185 countries by the International Labour Organisation suggests the US and Papua New Guinea are the only ones not to offer paid maternity leave.

But US business groups argue that small businesses in particular should be allowed to determine the benefits they offer to workers. “Our members are opposed to it because of real costs — and in a philosophical sense, they’re opposed to it because they don’t want the government telling them what to do,” a spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Businesses recently told The Hill magazine.

A breakthrough, however, will probably depend on whether the issue is embraced by a new generation of Republican leaders.

The Democratic congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, sponsor of the current legislation backed by Obama, has introduced a version of the Healthy Families Act in every Congress since 2004 with little effect even when Democrats controlled both chambers.



But the White House points to three states – California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island – that have launched programmes offering paid family and medical leave that it claims have not had any negative impact on employers and are helping shift the national debate.

“Two years after passage of a law requiring workers to earn paid sick days in Connecticut, more than three-quarters of employers responding to a survey indicated that they supported the new law, and employers reported that there were little or no negative effects of the new law on their bottom line,” added a fact sheet issued by the White House.