For decades, advocates for paid family and medical leave have tried and failed to gain momentum to pass comprehensive, statewide policies in North Carolina (NC). NC is one of the twenty-eight states in America with neither mandatory nor voluntary paid leave. This means the state has no law that either mandates employers provide paid leave or that facilitates employers’ ability to purchase paid leave insurance on the private market. North Carolina is also an at-will employment state meaning employers can fire their staff for any reason, or no reason at all. Strikingly, a 1959 North Carolina statute prohibits all public employees from forming unions or engaging in collective bargaining. The conditions for progress are challenging, particularly because a deeply conservative faction of the Republican Party has maintained controls of both chambers of the North Carolina State legislature for the past fourteen years, as well as held a 5-2 conservative majority on State Supreme Court since 2022.

In 2023, Democrat legislators, along with their organizer allies, introduced a suite of bills intended to improve conditions for NC workers. This included statewide mandatory paid leave law as well as an increase in minimum wage to $15 by 2025. Mom’s Rising, a national advocacy group with a robust NC presence, worked with the North Carolina Justice Center (NCJC) to co-convene a campaign called the NC Families CARE Coalition. The group worked tirelessly to persuade lawmakers that the lack of paid leave disproportionately effects women in the workforce. Their campaign drew on testimony from women across the state. Despite tireless advocacy from a diverse coalition, the suite of bills did not pass.

Given the intractability of opposition at the state level, advocates and activists decided to try a novel approach. NCJC suspected that local public employees, folks working for their county or city government, might act as a bellwether for their municipalities. If the local public employer offers paid family and medical leave, it might mean private employers in the region would also provide paid leave benefits to remain competitive. In this theory of change, public employers set the standard for private employers at the municipality level.

From October to December of 2024, I interviewed dozens of HR workers across the state on behalf of the NCJC Paid Leave for All Campaign, to learn about the status of paid family and medical leave policies, as well as living wage floors in their municipalities. I reached out to the seventy-five largest towns and counties in the state, using population data found here. Staff from thirty-five cities and counties responded to my outreach. I was able to find paid leave policy data for another 27 cities and counties via their publicly available benefits policies.

My findings, publicly accessible here, revealed that among the cities and counties with the largest populations in NC, a little over half the local government employers offer some form of paid leave. Most municipalities with paid leave benefits instituted those benefits after 2022. In addition to showing promising trends towards the widespread voluntary adoption of paid leave policies, my interviews with HR professionals across North Carolina revealed a range of insights useful to those invested in (re)valuing care.

The HR staff I spoke with described city and county government workers forced to make caregiving decisions that did not reflect their values, desires or goals. Many staff spoke about multiyear efforts to implement paid leave involving compensation studies, conversations with peer government employers, and comprehensive staff surveys. It was moving to hear HR managers describe the depth of gratitude expressed by employees following the implementation of paid leave policies. Sara Larson, the Wayne County HR Director said, “I have worked here for five years – this is the first year that I’ve had employees come into my office to personally thank me for a policy. It has happened three times in four months.” Across the state, workers expressed deep gratitude for paid leave facilitating their ability to care of themselves and their families, often mentioning anecdotes about sick relatives and newborn children.

Yet despite the widespread praise of paid leave, even in municipalities that had not yet implemented the policy, my interviewees never mentioned basic dignity or fairness for workers. There was no discussion or recognition that the lack of paid leave in America is fundamentally inhumane. The HR staff I spoke with focused on metrics such as worker satisfaction and improved retention. They described the cost required to train new employees and praised paid leave policies as cost saving measures. While the NC Families CARE Coalition emphasized dignity for workers, and support for working moms, my conversations with HR professionals instead a focus on the market-based benefits of paid leave. I was surprised to hear HR staff, who clearly care deeply about their employees, describe paid leave in purely material rather than aspirational terms.

My conversations showed that the introduction of paid leave policies had striking implications for the gendered distribution of household labor. According to multiple HR professionals, male staff in their public safety departments (firefighters and police officers) rarely took unpaid leave in the form of FMLA, but did take paid leave once it was made available. Anita Bradrock, the HR Director of Chapel Hill, stated, “I love, love how many of our fathers take parental leave.  Before we had the paid leave, a lot of the dads wouldn’t even take the FMLA they were entitled to–but now that its employer paid leave at 100% pay, they take the leave and enjoy being home with their child and their partner!” Studies around parental leave benefit usage by gender could contribute to research on caregiving norms, and how caregiving and caregivers value shifts when care is compensated via paid leave.

In the small sample of the 62 municipalities I surveyed, very small locales (municipalities with less than 10,00 residents) as well as large urban areas, tended to have the most robust benefits. This finding was surprising and seemed to reflect the prevalence of local champions for paid leave in small towns. Perhaps these small towns espouse stronger community bonds, and therefore stronger incentives to advocate collectively for a universal benefit like paid leave.

In March of 2025, nearly two months into the second Trump administration, the role of public employers has changed dramatically. As the Administration has begun to gut federal employment, private sector employs have already started to mirror the administration’s approach. Major private employers have cut DEI programs, changed their language around climate commitments, and shifted how they frame gender parity goals. Unfortunately, NCJC’s logic may work in reverse, as public employers begin to offer workers less protection and fewer benefits, private employers are likely to follow.

My research revealed that a market-based approach, in which advocates for paid leave demonstrate to employers that they will lose business, experience retention challenges, and bear the cost of new hires if they do not implement paid leave, is an effective form of advocacy. However, I believe a market-based approach is insufficient to capture the importance of paid leave. North Carolina workers are not alone, as of 2023, only 27% of workers in America are employed at a workplace that provides access to paid leave. The last time Congress passed a law providing leave protection to American workers in the case of medical emergencies or childcare needs was thirty-two years ago in the form of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993. The United States is a global outlier among highly industrialized countries in lacking basic legal protections for workers. Market based approaches to changing labor policies can work, but to recapture the fundamental injustice facing workers in America advocates and activists should also continue to make arguments about basic human dignity that frame paid family and medical leave as the foundation upon which to build a thriving, just society.

Nora Salitan is a candidate in the MPP and JD programs at Duke University.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Image courtesy of Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

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