Navigating Hawai‘i’s Family-Leave Maze

About six months into her pregnancy, Leilani Kailiawa learned from her doctor that something was seriously wrong.

The baby was tiny, and the blood in her placenta wasn’t flowing properly, an untreatable condition that put the pregnancy at risk. As the final trimester progressed, she was advised to leave Hawai‘i Island for Honolulu and its specialized medical facilities and doctors.

Kailiawa was 40, married and had two older children. She had already dropped to half-time hours at her job managing a Taco Bell in Kona, a company she had worked for since high school. Fewer hours helped reduce the stress of work and her three-hour round-trip commute. Now, all of her work hours would have to be cut, with a return date unknown.

“It was important for us as a family that I stayed close to him, even if it meant struggling.”

— Leilani Kailiawa, mother of a child with disabilities

She applied for benefits through her employer’s temporary disability insurance, known as TDI, which the state requires businesses to purchase. The disability insurance covers pregnancy complications and the postpartum period, providing 58% of a mother’s average income, with a current cap of $798 a week. Benefits generally cover five to six weeks, or eight weeks for cesarean-section deliveries.

She also applied for Med-Quest, the state’s Medicaid program for low-income residents. The public plan covered her care at the Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children, as well as a place to stay. She flew to Honolulu, where her days became a stressful blur of doctor’s appointments and concerns about the baby.

Finally, on March 7, 2016, Jeremiah was born, at just 2 ½ pounds. He was whisked into the neonatal intensive care unit, where the staff soon discovered that he had a dangerous condition, volvulus, a twisting and knotting of the gastrointestinal tract. He needed immediate surgery, the first of several.

Jeremiah remained in intensive care units for seven months, with his mother by his bedside. “It was important for us as a family that I stayed close to him, even if it meant struggling,” says Kailiawa.

Paid Family Leave Would Have Helped

Financially, the family was strained. She had no income. Her TDI benefits ran out in April, about a month after Jeremiah’s birth. And expenses were mounting, including flights every two weeks that her husband made to Honolulu, sometimes bringing the older children. The tickets were charged to their credit card.

“That’s where we could have used paid family leave,” says Kailiawa. “Because it’s only so much with TDI.”

The family visits were reprieves from the long days spent at the hospital and the nights alone in her hotel room, with no one to talk to, worried about Jeremiah and how the family would manage in the years to come. Potentially, a lifetime of intensive parenting lay ahead.

By October, once Kailiawa and her husband had learned to change his nasogastric feeding tube, Jeremiah was released from the hospital. Back on Hawai‘i Island, Kailiawa’s life narrowed to caring for a medically fragile baby, and eventually a young boy with a pediatric feeding disorder, hearing loss and other conditions.

“For a period of three years, I just secluded myself from everyone,” she says. “I was trying to find my place as a mom of a child who I know will have challenges.”

Jeremiah is 8 now, with a “lot of spunk and a great spirit,” says Kailiawa. He attends elementary school in Kailiawa’s hometown of Hilo, where the family moved two years ago. But his parents are still rebuilding their lives after the chaos of pregnancy, infancy and early childhood.

While her husband works full time, they’re chipping away at accumulated debt, the result of Kailiawa’s lost income and inability to return to a regular job because of heavy caretaking responsibilities at home. Kailiawa has tried several work-from-home arrangements, including her latest venture, as an insurance agent.

Over the years, Kailiawa, who says she’s normally “very reserved,” has found her voice as an advocate for children with disabilities and their parents. Today, she’s a member of the ‘Ohana Leadership Council, organized by the Hawai‘i Children’s Action Network, which champions more robust paid family leave for caretakers of all kinds.

“As Good as It Gets”

Kailiawa’s story lies on the raw edges of the parenting experience, but it’s not unique. Many parents find themselves in extremis, with health challenges, lost income, crumbling relationships and relentless child-care demands that prevent them from working regular full-time jobs.

Even uncomplicated births can throw a family into new levels of turmoil. For Amy, who asked that a pseudonym be used for confidentiality since she’s back at her job, starting a family was comparably smooth. But, with not enough time off from work and not enough money to cover leave, it opened her eyes to the precarity of the career-family balancing act.

Amy is the main earner in her family as her husband builds his landscaping business. After a decade in the nonprofit sector, she had returned to UH Mānoa to earn a master’s degree, with sights on getting a better-paid job in the private sector. She landed one right out of graduate school, and already pregnant.

Her short tenure with the company meant she wasn’t protected by the Family and Medical Leave Act. The federal law guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave and job protection for people working in organizations with at least 50 employees, but only if they had worked 1,250 hours during the 12 months before their leave starts.

She also wasn’t protected by the weaker Hawai‘i Family Leave Law, which applies to larger companies with 100 or more employees but requires less time on the job. Employees need six consecutive months at the company, including part-time work, to qualify for four weeks of unpaid leave – the bare minimum time it takes to heal from childbirth.

Because of her circumstances, Amy had entered a less predictable world, where much is dependent on the policies, traditions or even whims of her company, which doesn’t offer paid leave for employees. She got lucky with a sympathetic boss and was given 12 weeks of unpaid leave.

She had another stroke of luck by qualifying for temporary disability insurance, but just barely. To be eligible for TDI benefits, employees must have worked at least 14 weeks in Hawai‘i, be currently employed and have earned at least $400 in the year before they take their first day of “disability.”

However, some jobs don’t count as employment, including Amy’s UH graduate-assistant job, leaving her to merely hope that she would meet the 14-week eligibility cutoff. “If my son had been born before my due date, I wouldn’t have made it,” she says.

Since her income is fairly high, she expected to get the weekly maximum amount of $798 for six weeks. But the check that arrived was missing an entire week of benefits. The insurance company, Pacific Guardian, wrote in an email exchange that this “elimination period,” or when the policy will start paying benefits, was “determined by the employer and the type of policy they have.”

That left her family with about $3,600 for her three-month maternity leave, supplemented with savings and her husband’s income from contract jobs. The TDI funds covered one month’s mortgage on their Central O‘ahu home and utilities, but not much more.

As the end of her three-month leave approached in July, Amy was still up much of the night nursing the baby and sleeping in the mornings when he napped. She was deeply exhausted, fantasizing about long stretches of sleep. She asked for and was granted another month of unpaid leave to prepare for the transition.

“I was thinking by three months things would be easier,” she says. “Maybe four months will be easier but, honestly, I don’t know if he’ll be sleeping more.”

Her husband helps with cooking and care, and will take on more caretaking duties once Amy starts back at work, much of it done remotely. She’s not sure how the arrangement will work out and says the family is in “survival mode.”

“I don’t want to choose between working and having a baby, but with so little leave, it does feel like a choice,” she says. “If I wanted to stay home longer, I would basically need to quit my job, which is not an option since I have (health) insurance for the family.”

Amy has lived in Hawai‘i for many years and would like to stay. But she also wants a second child, and is already toying with the idea of moving back to California, where she and her husband have family and the state paid-leave program is more generous.

“Having access to those benefits is a big impetus to want to move back,” she says.

“My situation here is as good as it gets. On the one hand, I’m very grateful for that. But on the other hand, I feel like it’s not enough,” she says. “Any paid leave beyond the five weeks of partial pay would be such a big relief.”

“If I wanted to stay home longer, I would basically need to quit my job, which is not an option.”

— Amy, first-time mother who is heading back to work

TDI: “A Horrible, Confusing Patchwork”

Here’s a fact that is often repeated but can still deliver a jolt: The United States is the only developed country in the world without a national paid family-leave program. The U.S. joins Papua New Guinea and five small Pacific Island nations – the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Tonga and the Marshall Islands – as the only outliers among the 193 members of the United Nations, according to the World Policy Analysis Center.

Globally, the average length of paid maternity leave is 29 weeks, usually at partial pay and with payment caps. U.S. law, in contrast, offers unpaid leave, lasting just 12 weeks, and only covers about 56% of workers since small employers, part-time workers and new hires are excluded.

To fill the holes in the system, nine states and Washington, D.C., have implemented paid-leave programs, and four others have passed paid-leave legislation. Hawai‘i occupies an in-between space, with temporary disability insurance serving as an awkward substitute for more generous and inclusive plans.

The state’s TDI law, enacted 55 years ago, requires all employers to provide partial “wage replacement” insurance coverage for “nonwork-related injury or sickness, including pregnancy.” Some policies cover employees for up to 26 weeks.

The Hawai‘i Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, which governs the TDI program set up by the state Legislature, explained in an email that pregnancy-related medical conditions such as preeclampsia could be covered by TDI, with a physician’s verification. Childbirth and the postpartum recovery phase also require medical approval.

The email continues: “If the individual is not capable of working due to a medical issue after the birth, the period would be a disability. If the health-care provider determines there is a period or periods before and/or after birth when the individual is not able to work due to a medical reason, the individual may be able to receive TDI benefits.”

In stark contrast, California’s paid family-leave website uses welcoming language to encourage people to apply for eight weeks off at up to 70% of their pay, and with a weekly maximum amount that’s more than double Hawai‘i’s cap. California was the first to introduce a paid-leave program, but other states now offer more – 12 weeks of paid leave – including Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Washington.

Hawai‘i’s temporary disability insurance law, to its credit, covers most working people, says Arynn Nagahiro, a labor and employment attorney with the law firm of Torkildson Katz. For example, those working part-time – even spread across multiple employers, with breaks between jobs – would probably qualify for TDI benefits. But someone who had just returned from an extended break from the workforce, or someone just entering for the first time, would not, she says.

Yet quirks in the system abound. A mishmash of jobs, such as Amy’s graduate-student job at UH Mānoa, are excluded from TDI benefits. Others deemed ineligible for TDI include domestic workers in private homes, student nurses, real estate and insurance agents, sole proprietors, people who work in the fishing industry and those who work for family members.

Deborah Zysman, executive director of the Hawai‘i Children’s Action Network, says TDI is “a horrible, confusing patchwork,” with gaps in coverage and different rules for different employers. The Hawai‘i State Teachers Association, for example, offers its own temporary disability insurance to union members, independent of state-approved TDI plans.

“Some people in Hawai‘i get something, but many do not,” says Zysman. She says her organization often hears from people whose employers haven’t purchased TDI, as required by law, “and the employees find out when they need it.” The state Department of Labor counters that, saying most employers are compliant.

But the sheer complexity of the system can lead to unexpected claim denials. Taylor C., who asked that her last name be withheld, got a denial letter in 2022, several months after her second child was born.

Before the birth, she worked for a mainland loan company, but the volume of business had dropped as interest rates surged.

In the weeks before her delivery, her hours were cut to zero and she applied for unemployment benefits. She says she was still on the company’s health-care plan, and expected to get more work hours in the future.

The company handling her TDI claim, Tristar Risk Management, denied her request. Taylor C. says she immediately appealed the decision with the Hawai‘i Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, which upheld Tristar’s decision.

She had not met the “current employment” requirement, and had not “performed regular service for the employer within the two weeks before the start of (the) disability period,” according to the department’s denial letter. She was also cited for collecting unemployment benefits.

“It felt very sneaky. … Who knew you would need to technically have (worked) hours in the two weeks before the birth?”

— Taylor C, mother of three who was denied TDI

Taylor C. was shocked. She says she would have used vacation time in her final weeks of pregnancy if she or her employer had realized that the temporary work slowdown would make her ineligible for TDI benefits.

“It felt very sneaky because I was an employee, my medical (insurance) was still there,” she says. “Who knew you would need to technically have hours in the two weeks before the birth? No one having a baby wants to deal with this stuff. It was so demoralizing.”

Taylor C. says she was lucky to get four weeks of paid maternity leave from her employer, but the loss of TDI benefits hurt financially, and the entire experience felt cold and perfunctory.

The TDI process even surprised Liana Hilweh, a CPA and “paperwork person” who, until recently, was managing director of HiAccounting, the accounting arm of The Hawaii Group.

Once the company’s HR officer notified the insurance carrier about her pregnancy, Hilweh says there’s a “transfer of responsibility. … The employer is almost no longer involved and has no control, and you have to be the one to get your benefit.” That includes getting a doctor to fill out parts of the claim.

After her daughter was born in 2020, she used all of her paid time off, took unpaid leave and got her capped TDI benefits, which she had initially thought would be higher. When her son was born two years later, she received $3,494 for five weeks plus two days of TDI.

Despite getting 12 weeks of maternity leave, which neither federal nor state family-leave law require since the company has less than 50 employees, she says it felt like a good time to step away and try something else. She left her job to help her husband grow his remodeling and building business and to care for the family.

The Hawaii Group recently hired Hilweh to coach her successor through the maternity-leave process, which includes dispelling assumptions that TDI covers the entire 12 weeks of leave or comes close to matching the mother’s salary.

“If you’re the mom and you’re the breadwinner, you need to plan,” says Hilweh. “You need to understand how your family unit will work, but you can’t foresee all the things that might go differently. You might have a traumatic birth or postpartum depression, and need more time off.”

She says something goes amiss for every mother. For her, it was a health scare during her first maternity leave that ended in a botched biopsy, a milk fistula that got infected, and a painful open wound – while still breastfeeding – that took three full months to heal.

How Paid Family Leave Works

In the past legislative session, Zysman from the Hawai‘i Children’s Action Network says she felt encouraged by real interest percolating around a paid family-leave program. While the five bills introduced this past year all died, she says momentum is building as more people understand how a paid plan would work and what it would do.

Zysman and a coalition of supporters that includes AARP Hawai‘i, Catholic Charities Hawai‘i, Parents And Children Together and 23 other organizations envision a state insurance fund that employees would pay into via small payroll deductions, much like unemployment insurance. Because everyone contributes, individual costs would be low – less than 1% of employees’ pay would be deducted to cover the insurance. Claims, with medical approvals, would be submitted to the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

In return, employees would get a finite but substantial chunk of paid time off for a broad range of parental, medical and caretaking scenarios, such as mothers and fathers caring for infants, adoptive parents bonding with a new child, parents caring for very sick children, adult children helping aging parents recover from surgery, a spouse traveling with a partner for cancer treatments or the employee himself who is recovering from an accident.

The plan would absorb Hawai‘i’s temporary disability insurance, for which 22 private insurance carriers are currently authorized to write policies. It would open eligibility to sole proprietors, gig workers and other people who hold jobs that aren’t currently considered employment under TDI rules.

Conceptually, paid family leave shifts the focus from a disability framework – a person is injured or incapacitated and incapable of working – to one of care and recovery: providing people with support through periods of critical caregiving for their family members or themselves.

While the paid family-leave plan would follow models created by other states, details such as the amount of time off, the percentage of wages people will get, and whether costs would be shared by employers and employees are still in discussion.

The state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations is part of that discussion. It’s being asked to run any program created, which would require more funding and a larger staff. The department’s primary role now is to mediate TDI cases in which insurance benefits have been denied. A department spokesperson says that works out to about 6% of the approximately 800 claims filed yearly, including those unrelated to pregnancy and childbirth.

In a written statement, Jade Butay, who assumed leadership of the department last year, says he can’t act until the Legislature decides how the program would be designed. He says he wants to ensure the design doesn’t “conflict with some of our preexisting programs, including TDI and Prepaid Health Care.” The latter requires employers to offer health-care coverage when workers get sick or injured, unrelated to their jobs.

But Zysman says the challenges are surmountable and that other states have developed the software and procedures to run effective programs. And a mountain of Hawai‘i-based data was collected for a 2017 report (called the Hawaii Family Leave Insurance Grant Analysis Report), followed by a legislative analysis, that made persuasive arguments for the viability of a more robust paid-leave plan, and the desire for it among residents. For example: 

• 62% of Hawai‘i survey respondents said they wanted to take time off in the past to care for a baby or ailing family member; of those who wanted time off, only 80% of new parents and 65% of family caregivers did so.
• 89% of respondents said they would use a paid leave benefit, if offered.
• 60% had a “very favorable” view of paid leave and 34% a “somewhat favorable” view

“Everybody Eventually Has a Caregiving Story”

Lisa Kimura, a community health consultant at Kaiser Permanente, helped spearhead Hawai‘i’s first paid family-leave initiative in 2013 when she was executive director of the nonprofit Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies. The 2017 family-leave report, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, came out of that work.

“This policy alone is something that is so fundamentally transformational to the health of our society,” Kimura says. “Everybody eventually has a caregiving story. And once people start to realize that this is something for everyone – this is for you, whether you’re zero or 100 years old – then it becomes meaningful and impactful.”

Zysman, who now leads the initiative, oversees about 20 employees at the Hawai‘i Children’s Action Network. She says a state insurance fund would be cheaper for businesses, and points to her own nonprofit as an example. When an employee took time off last year, the nonprofit paid the entirety of her salary, as well as the contracted help hired to fill the gap. A state-run paid-leave program would have been much less costly, she says.

While small businesses are often leery of paid-leave programs, one study found perceptions change once a program is started. Two years after paid leave was introduced in New York state, a survey of small business owners, who were previously skeptical, reported higher levels of employee commitment and fewer challenges dealing with extended absences than respondents in neighboring Pennsylvania, which doesn’t have a paid-leave program.

Kimura says that employers “should adapt to employees’ needs, rather than having some steel box that they must reside within. That’s not how you create happy, loyal employees and not how you build your business,” she says. “When people feel cared for as employees, they turn around and care for your organization. I found that to be true in spades.”

She speaks from experience as a former nonprofit leader and also as an employee who once left a job in the hotel industry when administrators tried to block her work-from-home plans during her third trimester. Her doctor had prescribed bed rest.

But her employer wanted her offthe payroll and using TDI benefits before she gave birth, which she says would have been financially disastrous. In the end, her supervisor prevailed and she was able to work from home at full pay, but she left the company not long after her baby was born for a more family-friendly environment.

A Father at Sea

A huge body of research shows several months of paid time off can significantly improve a mother’s overall well-being, which leads to healthier babies. In addition, a 2024 study found that paid time off resulted in fewer infants being hospitalized for respiratory infections.

Research also shows that when men stay home too, they not only bond with their children, but their partners are less anxious and depressed. Yet men are sometimes subjected to workplace cultures that downplay the role of fathers and the value of paternity leave.

Christen Zulli lives near Hilo on the Hāmākua Coast with her two children, ages 7 and 5. Her husband is usually somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, where he works 90-day contracts as a marine engineer with Hawai‘i’s shipping companies. He’s often far from satellite communications, cut off from his family, missing holidays and birthdays.

Zulli says she never expected to be parenting solo, and that she and her husband made a pact to jointly co-parent their kids. But the desperate year after her younger child was born upturned their lives and sent her husband to sea for their financial survival.

“The paid family-leave philosophy targets the heart of what it means to be family and community-centered.”

— Christen Zulli, mother of two whose husband is at sea

Her second pregnancy was harder than the first, says Zulli. At the time, she was caring for her firstborn and coping with frequent migraines. Then medical complications arose, including a subchorionic hemorrhage and placental abruption that put her pregnancy at risk.

She needed help with her toddler, who was past the 10-pound lifting limit that her doctor advised. But child-care facilities in her area weren’t taking children that young, so she hired three college students to work part-time in rotation. The financial stress and the fear of losing her unborn daughter triggered severe anxiety, which later ballooned into severe postpartum depression.

Her husband, meanwhile, was working at a robotics company in Waimea. After their second child was born, he took the company’s two weeks of paid leave and then returned to work. Zulli says she was calling him frequently, as her thoughts were spiraling into disturbing places. Her husband was given a performance-improvement plan for “not living up to expectations and taking too many phone calls from me,” she says.

Her husband then talked with the human resources department about taking a longer period of unpaid leave through the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, though he didn’t think it was financially possible for the family. His boss followed up on his inquiry, wanting to know if he would be taking unpaid leave. He said he didn’t know yet, and a week later he was let go from the company.

Zulli says the company’s culture “looked down upon health issues and mental health issues.” Employees were given the message that they “shouldn’t have emotions, and that they should dismiss their wife’s emotions, and that they should dismiss anything that isn’t work-related.”

For an entire year, her husband searched for a professional job on Hawai‘i Island, as they tapped funds from their retirement plan and borrowed money. He finally gave up and began bidding on shipping jobs, which often depart from Honolulu on short notice. Zulli is now trying to resuscitate her life-coaching business while often parenting alone and dealing with stress-related autoimmune conditions.

“The future that I had seen prior to my husband being fired is not the same future that I see now,” she says, adding that longer, more generous paternity leave would have helped her family, as well as others.

“The paid family-leave philosophy targets the heart of what it means to be family- and community-centered because it’s not just about having children,” says Zulli. “It’s about everyone in the ‘ohana getting the support they deserve at the time they need it most, and that it will not result in their family losing their jobs, having to move, going bankrupt or financially injuring them for years, which essentially is what happened to my family.”

Centering the Family

Ashley Lukens wants the entire family-leave system to be rebuilt, with parents and the developmental needs of children at the center. The director of the Hawai‘i Center for Food Safety and founder of a local consultancy says the postpartum period after her now 9-month-old son was born – 15 years after her daughter – was emotionally, psychologically and physically intense. And it was a reminder of the inadequacy of family leave, even in the best situations.

Her employer, based in Washington, D.C., gave her eight weeks of paid leave, along with accrued paid time off and additional unpaid leave. Her husband’s employer, global consulting firm Ernst & Young, gave him 12 weeks of paid leave. She and her husband both work from home, and they’ve hired a full-time nanny at $3,800 a month.

“Every day that I’m with my son, I feel this profound gratitude that I have the flexibility that I do, and also profound dismay that we expect the vast majority of families to return to work after four weeks,” Lukens says. “It is literal insanity.”

She said she recently wanted to get an 8-week-old puppy but was told that many veterinarians and breeders don’t recommend separating puppies from their mothers until they’re 12 weeks old. “And yet in the United States, we expect women to go back to work after four weeks,” Lukens says.

She describes herself as a “work-identified woman,” but she’s also acutely aware of the mother-baby connection and the “deep interconnectivity that helps us understand a baby’s needs before they’re verbal. And we can’t have that if we’re separated from our babies all the time. We can’t have that attunement if we’re forced to go back to work after four weeks.”

“(I feel) profound dismay that we expect the vast majority of families to return to work after four weeks. It is literal insanity.”

— Ashley Lukens,  mother of two and a lifelong activist

She says laws and government policies have failed to provide the paid time off that parents and children need, and many private employers in the Islands, including some of the largest, offer nothing beyond vacation and sick time.

“It’s incumbent upon Hawai‘i and employers that if they don’t want the best and the brightest to leave and go to the continent, they need to start providing competitive leave.” She says her own company, with less than $1 million in revenue, gave an employee eight weeks of paid leave because “it’s the right thing to do.”

She’s encouraged by Gen Zers and Millennials, her own generation, who are “fighting for the reclamation of our dignity in the workplace. You do see a recentering on different values,” says Lukens. “I think we do value rest and we value vacation. We value the ability to work from home and to center ourselves around a different story. And paid family leave is absolutely part of that.”

Paid Leave Is Rare in Hawai‘i

Before she moved to Hawai‘i eight years ago, Katelyn Shelly worked on Wall Street, where long hours are valorized. But the culture has a contradictory element: Financial companies generally provide lots of paid family leave, for both parents. Shelly, for example, got 16 weeks of paid maternity leave from J.P. Morgan after her second child was born nearly a decade ago.

She says she was surprised to discover that Hawai‘i is so far behind. In fact, 73% of workers in Hawai‘i don’t get any paid leave through their jobs, according to the National Partnership for Women and Children, which calculated the percentage from recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

After Shelly was hired as COO of Chun Kerr, a small law firm in Honolulu, she helped advocate for paid leave. The partners readily agreed, she says, and in October 2022, the firm rolled out eight weeks of fully paid family leave; for longer leaves, mothers can turn to temporary disability insurance to fill any gaps in pay.

So far, three mothers and two fathers at the firm have taken fully paid parental leave, and they’ve all returned to their jobs. For the men, in particular, Shelly says she tries to assure them that it’s not just a written policy but a benefit they’re expected to use.

“The fathers find themselves in a position where they want to take advantage of the leave, but they’re worried about the career implications and the perception that it presents,” she says.

Chun Kerr is an outlier with its paid leave policy. Only 17 of the 78 companies on Hawaii Business Magazine’s Best Places to Work 2024 list said they offered fully paid leave. Of those, only a few responded to a request for more detailed information. Some said they didn’t want to highlight their policy’s disparities, which are based on a person’s position or seniority, and one submission didn’t exceed the minimum requirements of federal law.

Those companies that did respond, including Chun Kerr, are profiled in a separate sidebar, along with Bank of Hawai‘i, which was named to Newsweek’s most recent list of “America’s Greatest Workplaces for Parents and Families.” (See the sidebar below for a survey that lets others submit paid-leave information.)

In a tight labor market like the current one, “employees can be more picky and selective about the companies they go with,” says Serena Puaokalani, a senior HR consultant at ProService Hawaii. “Sometimes benefits are more important than the base pay, especially if you’ve got ailing family members or you’re responsible for young kids. They’re going to be looking at what your paid-leave benefits are.”

And prospective employees can get detailed information on sites such as LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor, so they’re savvier than they were a decade ago, she says.

Statistics show that the cost of replacing an employee can range from 20% to 150% of that person’s annual salary, depending on the employee’s role, industry and location, says Puaokalani. “It is not uncommon for women to leave their work because they don’t feel like they have ample time to recover or bonding time with their newborns,” she says.

“Companies that offer paid leave, such as parental leave, enable employees to balance family responsibilities without jeopardizing their jobs. This benefits both employees and employers by enhancing recruitment and retention efforts.”

Shelly from Chun Kerr says the firm’s paid family-leave benefit also serves a broader mission of keeping young professionals in Hawai‘i.

“If you want to start a family and you’re already having a hard time making ends meet, and then your company is saying, ‘If you want to be home with your infant, you’re going to have to sacrifice your income,’ that’s asking people to leave,” says Shelly. “We want to do our part to help the local economy and keep local talent here.”

Know Your Rights

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)

The federal FMLA guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for parents, including adoptive and foster parents, and people caring for themselves or family members with serious health conditions. For parents, leave must be taken within a year of birth; for people with serious health conditions, leave may be renewed each year.

The law applies to employers with 50 or more employees. Employees must have worked 1,250 hours with the employer during the 12 months before they start leave. Because of these restrictions, FMLA only covers about half of U.S. workers.

Hawai‘i Family Leave Law (HFLL)

The state HFLL says employees “may be eligible” for 4 weeks of unpaid family leave each calendar year for the birth or adoption of a child, or to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition.

The law applies to employers with 100 or more employees. Employees must have worked at least 6 consecutive months, either full time, part time or as temporary workers; unlike the federal FMLA, no minimum number of hours is required.

Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI)

Hawai‘i employers are required to provide TDI benefits for their employees. Benefits for mothers generally cover about 6 weeks for vaginal births and 8 weeks for C-sections, but the first week after birth may be excluded. Payments are 58% of the claimant’s average wages; many employers don’t allow vacation/sick time to be taken at the same time as TDI benefits.

To receive benefits, employees must have worked at least 20 hours per week for at least 14 weeks in Hawai‘i; and earned at least $400 (total) in the 52 weeks preceding the first day of disability; and be in “current employment.” Be warned: Not every job is eligible. See section 392-5 of the Hawai‘i Revised Statutes for exclusions.

Hawai‘i Administrative Rules

Hawai‘i administrative rules prohibit employers from terminating a female employee because she needs to take leave for a disability due to and resulting from pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions. The administrative rules further require employers to allow female employees to take leave for a “reasonable period of time” as determined by the employee’s physician, taking into consideration the employee’s physical condition and the job requirements.

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA)

Federal PWFA regulations went into effect on June 18, 2024. They apply to private- and public-sector employers with 15 or more employees.

Employers must provide “reasonable accommodations” to employees with “known limitations” related to pregnancy and childbirth if those accommodations don’t cause “undue hardship.” Examples of accommodations are providing a stool to sit on, more rest breaks or a later starting time.