Civic Leadership

My Public Diary: Secrets of a Strategist (February 2023)

Storming Caesar’s Palace, parenting, and the art of crafting city policy

Dear Mayor Woodfin,

I am scared.

The women who serve the City of Birmingham are scared.

The women we represent are scared.

I am calling on you to join me in doing everything we can to protect and support women.

These were the first sentences of a personal letter written by one of my colleagues to her boss, the Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama.

The letter, written on June 26, 2022, was spurred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Her letter included more than expressions of feelings and fears.

It also included some understanding of what it means to live in Alabama — a state with a demonstrated history of controlling people’s bodies.

Especially the bodies of women and black folk.

She continued.

I am 33-years-old. These are real and present threats to my personal choices — to my personhood, my womanhood. I realize the City of Birmingham is limited in our legal recourse to address these issues head-on. But, we can do our very best to make the City of Birmingham the most supportive workplace in our city for mothers and women in mothering roles.

With that, she made several recommendations, including new paid leave policies for mothers and fathers.

Background

Until recently, the City of Birmingham has adhered to basic federal FMLA (Federal Medical Leave Act) rules which require employers to allow employees to take up to twelve (12) weeks off of work for medical purposes. That rule guarantees your current (or equivalent) position will be held for you while on leave.

Employers are not required to pay employees for any part of those twelve weeks.

In fact, most women use their sick days for the birthing process. That assumes she didn’t already use up her sick days dealing with doctor’s appointments and, heaven forbid, complications with the pregnancy or postpartum depression.

This is the reality for most working women in America. It’s why many of them return to work within six (6) weeks after birth or adoption.

Because she cannot afford not to.

And, working fathers don’t even have a chance. Culturally and economically, he is expected to get back to work in short order — usually within two weeks.

So, when the Mayor stood before the City during his State of the City Address on January 17, 2023, it was a really big deal for employees to hear him announce a paid parental leave policy that supports all parents and pays them their full salary or wages for up to twelve (12) weeks.

The policy went into effect the day he announced it.

With this action, Birmingham becomes the first and only public agency in the state of Alabama to offer this robust benefit to its employees — signaling a serious and substantial commitment to recruiting and retaining young talent. And, one of the highest expressions of our city’s core strategy of putting people first.

But, this classic case of actions speaking louder than words was not a cakewalk.

Read on for a deeper look at how the policy was developed.

Our Paid Parental Leave Journey

The letter received by a city employee was not our first internal discussion about paid parental leave.

Paid leave was raised early in the administration along with other issues, including a significantly underfunded pension, and runaway healthcare costs, among other existential crises facing the early years of the Woodfin administration.

To put it plainly, it was important to consider paid leave for new parents, but that consideration paled in comparison to the issues of the day.

But, in October 2022, the Mayor was on an airplane headed to Amsterdam with the same team member that wrote him the letter. This provided space for them to talk and explore the paid leave policy, among other issues.

Shortly after they returned, the Mayor directed his chief of staff to launch an exploratory team for a new paid parental leave policy.

The team was led by our human resources team with support from our letter-writing employee, legal, finance, and other team members. The team included parents, non-parents, (mostly) women and (some) men; senior leaders as well as junior staff persons and wage workers.

Questions came up.

First, the initial recommendation included separate policies for mothers and fathers. Did it make sense to combine them? Probably so.

• What kind of employees will this impact most?
• And, what are the impacts on their lives?
• How might this impact city services, given our ongoing labor shortage with a significant number of retirements still to come?
• How much will this cost the taxpayers who may also have their services impacted by extended parental leave absences?
• How does this position the city as an employer of choice?

These questions and many more were walked down one by one with actuaries, legal experts, national benchmark research, and consistent engagement with the Mayor and his senior leadership team. The team also conducted focus groups with employees to gain their front-end insights.

There were a few, otherwise subjective dynamics to work through.

For instance, the average age of city employees is over 50 years old in many of our departments. Does this new policy create an actual or perceived inequity among certain employee age populations? What about those older employees who are spending as much time taking care of aging parents? They are givers of another kind, right?

And, what does parental leave look like for men?

Men might be more likely than women to have more than one child in a year, especially since the proposed policy will include adoption. Does he/they get multiple rounds of parental leave?

What about women who get pregnant but lose their child during the birthing process? Don’t parents who suffer the trauma of a stillborn child deserve support as well?

The team addressed those issues but did not agree on everything the entire way through.

Two sticky points

There were two issues that garnered the most discussion: eligibility and staggering.

First, should the policy be available immediately for new employees? Aside from being a policy that exemplifies our deepest values of equity, especially for women, it is also an incredible recruiting benefit for young talent.

Some team members thought we should make the benefit available on the first day of employment. Others felt the policy should have parity with FMLA rules which requires employment for one year before the 12 weeks of job protection kicks in.

Both sides had strong arguments. In the end, we chose to require employment for at least one year before the paid parental leave benefit.

The second issue related to the unique impact of this policy on a few key departments.

The highest concentration of city employees who are partnered or married city to one another is in our first responder population: police, fire, and public works.

These are city departments with the greatest shortage of employees due to retirements, with the greatest challenges recruiting new employees, and already have the greatest risk of employees being temporarily taken out of service because of on-the-job injuries.

So, extending leave for these employee groups — up to six weeks more — is not insignificant. The team debated if both city-employed parents could take their leave at the same time or if they needed to stagger their 12 weeks. This means that married or cohabitated couples could not enjoy the paid leave benefit at the same time; together. It was a well-rounded debate.

Resolution

The team worked through all of this and ultimately submitted a cohesive recommendation to the Mayor with just these two sticky points that only he could reconcile.

The Mayor convened all team members for one final discussion.

The recommendation to require service to the city for at least one year was agreed upon fairly quickly.

“Is there anything else?” he asked.

I did not have much to stay in the discussion. After all, I was not deeply engaged in the team discussions, so some of what I heard was new.

As a fairly new parent, I had to ask.

Me: “Why are we forcing co-habitated parents to stagger their 12 weeks. Why can’t they take their leave at the same time?”

HR: “The greatest concentration of city employees is in our public safety departments. This new policy will already reduce their workforce, but it literally doubles the impact on the departments if we do it at the same time. “

Mayor: “Ed, I understand your concern. Team, we need to adopt this parental leave policy. But, we need to be balanced and ensure we don’t hurt ourselves while doing this. Let’s stagger it for a year and see what happens. We can re-evaluate it from there. Everyone, is that fair?”

Us: “Yes sir!”

Touched. Agreed.

With that, human resources locked the final version of the executive order. Executive Orders from the Mayor (or any executive branch leader at the local, state, or federal level) do not require ratification by a legislative body.

This is a pure exercise of executive authority (like pardon power) and why we should all care who sits in these seats.

The next day the Mayor announced the policy.

This is how this policy came to be.

A timely and raw truth raised by one employee challenged the Mayor to walk out his deepest values. With time, space, and team available — not facing the headwinds of existential crises — we buckled down and got it done.

One Leadership Insight About Driving An Agenda

You may be asking. Can’t we do things we want to do while doing things we have to do? Absolutely, but not all the time. Not in local government when trash trucks break down, bad weather scuttles schedules, and life or death matters happen on a daily basis. The capacity to go upstream and innovate is scarce — leaders have to truly reach for it.

Because no matter what, the trash must be picked up and some percentage of your leadership energy will always be dedicated to ensuring that happens, among other critical services.

One day you may sit in these seats. Know this: You’ve got to choose. You’ve got to prioritize. Having a pre-mediated agenda will guide that prioritization in seasons of crisis as well as seasons of peace.

Other City Initiatives

“We know that 69% of the youth ages 13 to 22 who were murdered last year had prior family court contact. Eighty-three percent of the perpetrators under the age of 22 charged with murder or attempted murder last year had prior family court contact,” Mayor Randall L. Woodfin said. “RESTORE will provide impactful intervention for this population at risk with support and services not just for the youth but their family, too.”

Paid Parental Leave. Find the Mayor’s letter to employees here and a brief maternal rights advocacy story here.

Pay Raise for City Employees. Read more about the Mayor’s 10% year-over-year pay raise for city employees.

State of the City. Watch the full State of the City address here.

Embrace Mothers. Our guaranteed income pilot team recently hosted a public Mom’s Night Out event at Sidewalk Film Festival for single moms. On Saturday, February 25, the team will host a public screening of a classic film titled, “Storming Caesar’s Palace.” Learn more about our Embrace Mothers guaranteed income pilot here and the film here. It is worth the watch!

RESTORE. The Mayor has announced about $7M in funding for a variety of crime prevention, conflict resolution, and violence interruption measures (with more to come.) This is the lowest dollar, highest impact program yet. Read more here and check out a good summary news coverage item here.

Parents wrestle with their own issues. Parents wrestle with their children. And, parents wrestle with a society that, at times, seems hell-bent on harming their children.

That’s why we must continue to be courageous, like Ruby Duncan. To tell our own truths to the powers that be. Whether they be our bosses or the public we serve, sometimes the truths we tell are not received as well as they deserve.

That’s when it is time to storm the palace.

Honestly,

Ed.

I am a poet, essayist, and civic strategist. I currently serve as senior advisor and chief strategist for the City of Birmingham Mayor’s Office.

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Read my previous public diary posts.

• October 2022: Partying with a Male Stripper, My Public Calendar, and Civic Engagement in Birmingham
• July 2022:The World Games, Narrative Change, and Possibility Government
• May 2022: Discovering God, Winning Big, Over Communicating, and Game of Thrones
• April 2022: Food Strategies, Public Surveys, Single Parents and Creflo Dollar
• March 2022: A sneak peek into my role, my calendar, and my projects