Daddy plea

University of the West Indies lecturer Dr Herbert Gayle is insisting that paternity leave for public-sector workers not be compromised by unwieldy middle-class markers.

It should be purely based on an employee fathering a newborn, he said. Full stop!

“It should not be on any other principle that we hatch in church or in our middle-class homes,” the social anthropologist asserted in a Gleaner interview on Tuesday.

His assertion came hours after Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke announced planned changes to the 2004 public-sector staff orders which are expected to reflect an increase in paid maternity leave from 40 days to three calendar months.

Paternity leave is expected to be introduced for the first time in the public service, for a specific time and on specific terms to be finalised, Clarke said.

Family leave for adoptive parents who are bringing a new child into the home is also on the Government's agenda.

The minister said changes to the appropriate circular will be sent out to members of the public service by September 30 to make them effective.

They form part of the six-month public-sector compensation restructuring.

“Once we're speaking about a person getting maternity leave, it should be purely on the basis of them becoming a mother,” said Gayle.

He said mothers generally need six months with a newborn and noted that in several developed countries, the Government pays for half of that.

He said that the extension to 90 days would meet international standards.

Concomitantly, the lecturer, who has long advocated for paternity leave, wants a two-month break for fathers.

“One month is a start, but we hope that the country would move to modern times and give six to eight weeks,” he said.

The time, Gayle argued, would allow fathers to adequately support mothers who are vulnerable during the period.

There are concerns, however, that men may abuse the benefit by fathering multiple newborns during the same period.

But Gayle downplayed the concern, arguing that the average birth rate of men is declining.

This is reflective of the overall dip in the national fertility rate from 2.8 children per woman in 1997 to 2.4 in 2018, according to the just-released Economic and Social Survey Jamaica 2021, published by the state-run Planning Institute of Jamaica.

“If the female birth rate is declining, then who are the men having kids with women overseas?” he quipped. “[The village ram] is not the norm in Jamaica; those are outliers.”

In the same breath, he batted for unwedded fathers to be included in the policy because less than one-third of households are married.

The criteria for the paternity-leave policy are not yet clear, but the educator said using marriage as a qualifier would distort the eligibility towards a fraction of society, mostly within the formal middle class.

“Eligible men should include those married, cohabiting and also visiting [partners],” said Gayle.

Meanwhile, Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA) President O'Neil Grant said that the Government acceded to its demands in announcing the changes to family leave.

“When the JCSA responded initially to the consultants' report, we did say to the Ministry of Finance that we want these things to be considered under the review. The ministry was non-committal at the time, so we take [this] as a happy announcement,” Grant said in a Gleaner interview on Tuesday.

At the same time, he admitted that he was not aware that it would come under the compensation restructuring.

“This, for us, is an indication that the Government acceded to our concerns and our requests for matters to be dealt with under the review and so it being dealt with now actually indicates the position we have taken as to how we want certain matters to be dealt with,” he said.

editorial@gleanerjm.com