Most Americans Believe Employers Should Be Required To Give Workers Paid Vacation: Poll

WASHINGTON -- Americans overwhelmingly support the idea of requiring large U.S. employers to provide their workers with at least some paid vacation time, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.

In a poll conducted ahead of Labor Day, 75 percent of respondents said they believe in placing such a mandate upon the business community. A mere 17 percent said they oppose it. The support crossed party lines to include 87 percent of self-identified Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans.

The United States is an outlier among the world's advanced economies in having no law to guarantee workers paid time off from work.

In a 2013 analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research looking at the U.S. and 16 European nations, America was the only country without some form of a vacation mandate on its books. European countries tend to guarantee workers four weeks' worth of vacation per year, and some countries offer as much as five or six. Canada mandates at least two weeks.

Most U.S. employers voluntarily offer paid vacation time to their workers, but many still opt not to. That's particularly the case in lower-wage industries like food service and retail, where workers are also less likely to receive paid sick leave. The same analysis by CEPR estimated that 23 percent of U.S. workers don't get any paid vacation.

Of the respondents to the HuffPost/YouGov poll who were currently employed, nearly one in three said they receive no paid vacation time through their jobs. Only 46 percent of all respondents said they had taken a vacation in the past year. (As a separate poll recently found, many of the American workers fortunate enough to receive paid vacation time choose not to take advantage of it for various reasons.)

There appears to be little appetite among Republicans or Democrats in Congress to place a vacation mandate upon businesses. In recent sessions, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) has introduced a bill that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to guarantee most workers vacation time, but the legislation has gone nowhere.

Under Grayson's proposal, companies with at least 100 employees would be required to provide a week's vacation to full-time workers as well as part-time workers who have been employed for a year and log at least 25 hours a week. After three years, those companies would be required to offer two weeks of vacation to workers, while companies with at least 50 employees would be required to offer one week.

Grayson's bill likely has no chance of passing the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, where Republicans are loath to place any mandates upon the business community. And while many lawmakers are willing to back paid sick leave, not a single one of Grayson's Democratic colleagues has signed on as a co-sponsor to his vacation bill.

"We're really hurting ourselves, and specifically we're hurting the most vulnerable among us," Grayson told HuffPost last year, noting that low-wage workers are disproportionately without vacation time. "If every other advanced country can do this, so can we."

A HuffPost/YouGov poll from last year found nearly as much support among the general public for a paid sick leave mandate for employers. Seventy-four percent of respondents to that poll said that companies should be required to provide sick days to workers, while only 18 percent said they shouldn't. In recent years many U.S. cities have passed legislation that guarantees workers a certain amount of accrued paid sick leave, often over the strong opposition of business lobbies.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted Aug. 26-28 among 1,000 U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here.

Some Insurers Ignore Obamacare, Refuse To Cover Birth Control

Provided by Kaiser Health News.

How much leeway do employers and insurers have in deciding whether they’ll cover contraceptives without charge and in determining which methods make the cut?

Not much, as it turns out, but that hasn’t stopped some from trying.

Kaiser Health News readers still write in regularly describing battles they’re waging to get the birth control coverage they’re entitled to.

In one of those messages recently, a woman said her insurer denied free coverage for the NuvaRing. This small plastic device, which is inserted into the vagina, works for three weeks at a time by releasing hormones similar to those used by birth control pills. She said her insurer told her she would be responsible for her contraceptive expenses unless she chooses an oral generic birth control pill. The NuvaRing costs between $15 and $80 a month, according to Planned Parenthood.

Under the health law, health plans have to cover the full range of FDA-approved birth control methods without any cost sharing by women, unless the plan falls into a limited number of categories that are excluded, either because it’s grandfathered under the law or it’s for is a religious employer or house of worship. Following the recent Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case, some private employers that have religious objections to providing birth control coverage as a free preventive benefit will also be excused from the requirement.

In addition, the federal government has given plans some flexibility by allowing them to use "reasonable medical management techniques" to keep their costs under control. So if there is both a generic and a brand-name version of a birth-control pill available, for example, a plan could decide to cover only the generic version without cost to the patient.

As for the NuvaRing, even though they may use the same hormones, the pill and the ring are different methods of birth control. As an official from the federal Department of Health and Human Services said in an email, "The pill, the ring and the patch are different types of hormonal methods … It is not permissible to cover only the pill, but not the ring or the patch."

Guidance from the federal government clearly states that the full range of FDA-approved methods of birth control must be covered as a preventive benefit without cost sharing. That includes birth control pills, the ring or patch, intrauterine devices and sterilization, among others.

But despite federal guidance, “we’ve seen this happen, plenty,” says Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and education organization. “Clearly insurance companies think things are ambiguous enough that they can get away with it.”

If you are denied coverage, your defense is to appeal the decision, and get your state insurance department involved.

“The state has the right and responsibility to enforce this law,” says Sonfield.

Women Are Killing It On Kickstarter

Female entrepreneurs looking for funding may want to just skip pitching to the elite boys club of venture capital and go straight to the Internet instead.

Companies led by women are more likely than to reach their fundraising goals on crowdfunding site Kickstarter than companies led by men, according to a study of 1,250 projects by researchers at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania. That is true even though men make up the majority of people giving money on the site. The study hints at how women can benefit when the playing field is more even than it is in male-dominated venture capital.

“The system has been unfairly stacked,” said Ethan Mollick, a management professor at Penn’s Wharton School of Business and co-author of the paper. The men handing out the vast majority of VC cash tend to stick to their networks of buddies, who are also mostly male, Mollick pointed out. "It’s all very tight-knit, so anything you can do to blow those networks up helps a lot.”

The study looked at projects in five categories: Fashion, publishing, film, tech and games. Surprisingly, female-led businesses outperformed male-led ventures by a wider margin in tech -- which is dominated by male founders and male backers -- than in fashion, an industry typically dominated by women.

Whos Getting Funded | Create Infographics

That difference was largely due to women pointedly backing female entrepreneurs to help give them a boost in the industry, the researchers found.

“It’s not really enough to have more women venture capitalists," Mollick said, "you need women venture capitalists who are trying to help other women.”

These Kickstarter results are essentially the opposite of what happens in the rest of the fundraising world. When female business owners seek funding from traditional sources like banks or venture capitalists, they're typically less likely to get it than men, Mollick said.

The gender imbalance is particularly bad in tech. Female-led companies get as little as 7 percent of VC funds, according to a 2004 study from the Kauffman Foundation. Experts speculate that’s because women make up such a small share of higher-ups at VC firms. Many women seeking funding from the largely male world of venture capital have reported being subject to inappropriate questions at best and harassment at worst.