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Mother's Day: Top 10 states for working moms

9. Maine (B-)

Robert F. Bukaty/AP/File
In this file photo, Sima Simic, of Portland, Maine, fishes for striped bass below Portland Head Light at Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Maine offers better access to family disability benefits than federal law, but the family leave period is shorter.

  • By Schuyler Velasco Correspondent

Maine offers better access to family-disability and medical-leave benefits than the federal government requires. But those laws only apply to workplaces with 15 or more employees, and workers must have held their job for at least 12 months. Maine also defines a family more broadly, expanding the list of family law beneficiaries to include domestic partners, the children of domestic partners, and siblings. A caveat, however: the duration of family leave in Maine is shorter than under the federally mandated FMLA.

Full-time state and private-sector workers get 40 hours per year of sick leave to care for an ill child (or spouse or parent), and working mothers are entitled to workplace nursing rights for up to three years after a child is born. 

In failing to offer paid, federally protected maternity leave, the US is a minority among developed (and many developing) countries. As of 2010, 177 countries offered some form of paid leave for new moms, including Afghanistan and Haiti. But some US states on this list do offer a short period of paid leave in the form of disability insurance.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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