Mayor Price Champions New Parental Leave Policy for the City of Fort Worth
- August 11, 2020
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Fort Worth, Texas (August 11, 2020) – After on-going efforts to make Fort Worth known as the Best Place for Kids® and The Best Place for Working Parents®*, Mayor Betsy Price champions the City of Fort Worth’s efforts to implement a new parental leave policy available to all City of Fort Worth employees effective October 1, 2020. The effort was approved by the City Manager and City Council after a 10-month long listening process conducted by City’s management and Human Resources teams, who surveyed city employees and researched comparative human resources policies among municipalities across the country. Before today, the City of Fort Worth had no parental leave policy, including no formal maternity leave policy. Annually, there are approximately 100 births among employees and employee spouses who access City’s health insurance plan.
“As the city with the 2nd highest percentage of families with children in the nation, introducing this policy is not only the right thing to do, but the smart fiscal decision for the City long-term,” says Mayor Betsy Price. “In order to have strong businesses, we need healthy employees and healthy families. It’s important that we modernize our HR policies to reflect the needs of working parents, because if they aren’t supported with benefits that recognize their commitment to work and their family – there will be other companies that will provide that critical support.”
This new benefit now positions Fort Worth among other cities who have modernized their parental leave policy in recognition of the overall return on investment it makes for organizations when it comes to increasing productivity, attraction and retention of talent and overall job satisfaction among working parents.
The parental leave policy offers six weeks of paid leave for maternity or paternity leave and can also be applied to adoptions or “placements” of children in homes. The policy is paid in full and not based on tenure of the employee.
Fort Worth’s City Manager, David Cooke, states, “This benefit will positively impact the hundreds of families that didn’t have these supports in place and help us stay on the forefront of attracting quality, competitive candidates to meet the critical demands of running a city.”
The City’s Human Resources Department worked with PFM Consulting on the leave study, utilizing data and information from an employee focus group on the current leave structure. After analyzing the leave data, preforming a cost analysis, and modeling the effects of the various leave policy options PFM Consulting highlighted the recommendations that were sustainable for the City using a ten-year forecasting model. View the comparative survey presentation of various leave policies of other local and national, public and private organizations here.
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About Fort Worth, Texas
With more than 909,000 residents and almost 350 square miles, Fort Worth, Texas is the 13th largest city in the United States and the fifth largest city in Texas. A major center for industry, technology, distribution, aerospace, and transportation, Fort Worth offers the very best of Texas — an atmosphere of partnership and progress, coupled with a sky-high quality of life and burgeoning business opportunities. Fort Worth is home to American Airlines, Alcon, Bell Helicopter and BNSF Railway, among other corporate headquarters. The city is known for its western heritage, world-renowned museums, hospitality and its diverse neighborhoods. Fort Worth has received multiple accolades, including No. 1 Downtown (Livability), top five commercial real estate markets (Urban Land Institute) and second-best city in the nation for job seekers (Forbes).
*About The Best Place for Working Parents®
As part of Fort Worth’s effort to lead the charge in showing what businesses can do to be more effective and competitive in an ever-changing business environment, the Best Place for Working Parents® effort applauds this significant step by the City of Fort Worth, one of Fort Worth’s largest employers, to support working parents. In a study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, paid parental, or family leave can benefit employers resulting in, “either maintained or increased employee productivity (89%), profitability/performance (91%), turnover (96%) and employee morale (99%).
With the implementation of this parental leave policy, the City of Fort Worth joins the ranks as a Best Place for Working Parents® business alongside dozens of Fort Worth businesses who hold this designation based on the family-friendly policies and practices they offer to support working parents that are also business-friendly. To learn more about this effort working to make the fastest-growing large city in the nation known as the Best Place for Kids® and the Best Place for Working Parents®, click here or visit LinkedIn.
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