Just a few months after my wife and I had unpacked our last boxes from Washington, D.C., and settled into our new house in Washington County, I squatted down early one morning to dump kibble into my cat’s bowl. When I stood up, I slammed the crown of my head directly into the granite countertop on our kitchen island. My wife found me there moments later, on the floor, the kibble scoop beside me, holding my head and writhing in pain, barely able to speak.
I had a concussion, and have since battled what my doctor calls “concussion syndrome” — where problems with speech, cognitive processing, decision making, emotional regulation — simply don’t go away within a few days or weeks. According to the Brain Injury Alliance of Utah, I’m one of an estimated 56,000 Utahans living with a traumatic brain injury. Within days of the concussion it became clear I’d be needing weeks off of work to rest and recover my faculties.
But the stressors of everyday life don’t simply stand by while a person heals. My wife and I still had bills to pay, including a mortgage we’d taken on sooner than expected due to the pandemic. My employer, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America, offers generous paid time off, and luckily I’d accrued enough to take paid time off through Christmas. Had this same accident happened to a friend, family member or neighbor of mine in Utah, it’s doubtful they would have been so lucky.
According to analysis from the National Partnership for Women and Families, more than half of Utah workers (63%) don’t even qualify for the 12 weeks of unpaid leave available under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that just 21% of privately employed Americans are offered paid leave through their employers, leaving the majority of workers, and 93% of low-income workers, without paid leave when they need it.
So what does that mean for the majority of working Utahans, when they have a new baby, battle a life-threatening illness, or, like me, experience unforeseeable medical trauma that takes weeks or months to recover from? In most cases it means a jarring loss of income, as well as increased health risks and worse recovery outcomes. Brain injury survivors are among these financially insecure families — with most losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of lifetime earnings after their accidents.
These often-devastating impacts on workers and their families prompted former President Donald Trump to endorse leave multiple times during his term. The Biden administration has included a paid leave plan in the American Families Act. Some congressional Democrats have endorsed a leave proposal called the FAMILY Act since 2013, which would work like the FMLA, but provide employees a good portion of their regular pay, accumulated through a small payroll tax. Sen. Mike Lee has offered his own proposal for a leave policy for new parents that would run through Social Security.
But as my experience shows, new parents aren’t the only people who need paid leave. The FAMILY Act, which covers family and medical leave as well as parental leave, would reduce the number of Utah families who experience financial insecurity because of their need for leave by an estimated 79 percent. With an aging population and long-term COVID-19 effects mounting, the time is now for Utahans to weigh in on what our future paid leave program will look like, how we’ll pay for it, and who can use it.
To me and my wife, our move to Utah represented opportunity — the chance to experience greater natural beauty, closer connection to family and, given the much lower cost of living and of real estate, a promise of financial security that was out of our reach in D.C.
But without the time to enjoy the beauty, and the quiet and the care my family offered, or if that time had been spent panicking over the future of my family and how we would pay our bills, my period of healing might well have been a period of incredible ailing. My wife and I would be among the hundreds of thousands of working Utahans buried in debt, possibly so deep we might never emerge again, and all because of one bad morning.
We couldn’t afford such an outcome. Neither can Utah.
Haley Swenson
Haley Swenson is a writer and researcher, and the deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, a nonpartisan think and action tank based in Washington, D.C. She and her wife live in Ivins, Utah.
