Unions Boosting Maternity Leave Use

Union-represented female workers are more likely to use maternity leave benefits, in large part because unions are better at communicating benefits available to workers.

Unionized mothers are at least 17 percent more likely to use paid maternity leave than comparable nonunion workers, new research from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management shows. The findings are based on an analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Longitudinal Survey of Youth over the last 15 years.

Unions help working mothers in many ways, Tae-Youn Park, assistant professor of management at Vanderbilt, told Bloomberg Law. Unions make leave policies ...