So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 21) How paid family leave programs in the U.S. stack up

Hello! I stayed up way too late last night reading Volume 2 of God Hates Astronauts (I gushed about Volume 1 in SW, WC vol 2, issue 10), so if there's any word salad in today's newsletter, it's because I blithely ignored everything I've ever written about sleep deprivation. (vol 1, issue 1; vol 1, issue 46; vol 2, issue 2; vol 2, issue 4)

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California's paid family leave program celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, New Jersey's paid family leae program is five years old, and Rhode Island's celebrated its first-year anniversary this year. So how do the three stack up? The National Partnership for Women and Families compared the first years of paid family leave programs for the three states to see what the remaining 47 states might learn if and/or when they decide to roll out their own paid family leave programs. The most interesting findings come from Rhode Island: A higher percentage of men availed themselves of the program than in the other two states, and a greater percentage of the program's participants used it for family leave, not new-baby leave.

So what? What a difference a decade makes! The rising rates of male participation in paid family leave track nicely with rising interest from fathers in actually being around their children (vol 1, issue 4), and the percentage of fathers who reported work-family conflict surged from 35% to 60% in the years from 1978 to 2008. This suggests a major shift in people's attitudes about familial roles -- and with those shifts in attitude will come shifts in what people want from their workplaces.

Who cares? Employers should. Until there's a national paid family leave policy in place -- and remember, we're one of only three countries in the world without one -- working adults are going to be looking to their employers or their state governments to fill in the gaps. The places that don't offer leave are going to lose talented workers, either because they find jobs at places with better benefits or because they leave once the family demands become untenable with a job. Even if a business's attitude toward workers is "Leave all you want! We'll make more!" there's an economic argument for paid family leave: It's better for the business's bottom line and it saves governments money on all levels (vol 1, issue 24).

Other stakeholders in this emerging trend: public policy types. Expect paid leave to become an electoral talking point in the 2016 elections, so everyone, start your position paper-writing engines now.

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Those who do not pay attention to retail history are doomed to repeat it. Last summer, Zara stepped in it by selling a set of striped child's pajamas with what looked to be a yellow star on the front (vol 1, issue 7) -- an ensemble not unlike those worn by Jewish concentration camp inmates during World War II -- and today, Urban Outfitters discovered that selling a throw with stripes and bright pink triangles is going to remind people of the concentration camp uniforms worn by gay inmates during World War II.

So what? This is not Urban Outfitters' first brush with antisemitic allegations: In 2012, the retailer briefly stocked a yellow shirt with a star on the breast pocket, and that drew fire from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of Philadelphia, and way back in 2004, Urban Outfitters stocked a dollar sign-bedecked t-shirt reading "Everybody loves a Jewish girl."

Urban Outfitters has also managed to stock items that cheerfully reference the Kent State shootings, appropriate Navajo patterns, and called a t-shirt's color combination "Obama/black."

Who cares? Investors, who traded stocks at a higher volume today than normal and pushed up the trading price to a three-month high. This little stunt garnered Urban Outfitter oodles of free press, and while the offending tapestry isn't available for sale online, that's probably not going to stop people from poking around the retiler's website and maybe impulse buying the not-at-all-controversial American Flag tapestry.

The retailer's brand profile is young, edgy and "controversial" in a mass market sort of way. This kind of press only increases the brand's cachet with its target audience of very young adults.

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"Across the world, a child's survival is a lot like drawing a lottery ticket. Factors based purely on chance — where a child is born, how much money his or her family has and what their ethnic background is — can determine if a child lives past age 5."

This lede stopped me short yesterday. The gist of the story is that sometimes, the simplest changes to common practices surrounding birth and the first minutes of a child's life can mean the difference between life and death. For Muslims, it meant modifying the practice of ritual bathing for a newborn; in Malawi, the widespread adoption of "kangaroo care," or snuggling an infant next to his mother's chest, has reduced infant mortality by 44% over 25 years.

So what? Falling global child mortality was one of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a set of eight different public health goals, and it's actually happening: In 2013 approximately 6.3 million children under the age of five died around the world, down 35% from 2000. On a macro level, say economists, setting the goal via the MDG helped guide public policy, which contributed to the decline.

On a much more local level, says Dr. Istiaq Mannan (@ishtiaqmannan) is to help people in the community believe they can change situations that were previously thought to be both heartbreaking and unchangeable.

Who cares? Public health professionals, for sure. It's also something U.S. voters should take a look at: The U.S. has the most first-day deaths of any country, thanks to a combination of poverty, stress, racism, adolescent mothers and pre-term births, which may not be counted by some infant mortality metrics.


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Your pop culture moment of the day: The best listicles are the ones that have one-n items you want to debate with some (the author, the person you're sitting next to) and one-n items that are like shooting fish in a barrel. Flavorwire's "25 Love Songs That Need To Be Retired" certainly qualifies on the fish-in-barrel front, hauling out hoary hair-band ballads for inclusion while letting John Mayer completely off the hook.

What love songs would you retire if you could reprogram the robot overlords who program FM radio? Vent your spleen via Twitter or email.

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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Are there typos? I apologize in advance.

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