America on its way to paid maternity leave?

Supposedly, the US Department of Labor is seriously looking into the lack of paid maternity leave in this country.  It's about damn time.  Their first step was awarding $500,000.00 to Massachusetts, Montana, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia to fund feasibility studies on paid leave.

I suppose that's a start.  I wonder how many years this will take to actually implement and how much paid leave new mothers (and possibly fathers) will actually get?

I'm incredibly skeptical about such a big change in any national program, but I suppose all we can do is just wait and see for now.

Read more about the push for paid leave here.

Just for fun let's look at other countries' paid leave policies again.  Keep in mind though, that a "paid" maternity leave in Afghanistan or Somalia for example probably isn't much, but the point is that these countries have long recognized the importance of offering paid leave. 

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/05/24/489973/paid-maternity-leave-us/



Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/laraparker/this-is-what-paid-maternity-leave-looks-like-around-the-worl

Did you get any paid maternity leave when you had a baby?

I work in the private sector and was lucky to have 6 weeks paid but it paled in comparison to say Finland's 167 week paid leave policy!