I think paid leave is just plain immoral. It is up to the parent to evaluate how much they care for their child vs foregone salaries. Paid leave is just a distortion: it makes employees and employers dance around a topic that is not in the employers business.

How can you correctly price how much the time with your kid is worth if you get gifted money for inflating it?

The worst part of this debate is that its a constant pull between two players that understand the same policy in different ways: employees think they are getting free money, but in reality the employer distributes the cost from one employee to the others. (ie. if you have a budget for 10 employees, and you make employees 10% more expensive, now you get 9 employees).

So employees ask for something thinking its in their benefit, and employers are thinking "as long as the competition gets hurt as much as we do, we don't care".

And to add insult to injury, its the richest of the richest that get the longest paid leave benefits, longest pto, etc etc, mostly to reduce tax burden.