Bill Clinton: “We asked Lucy Sanchez to come here to talk about the Family and Medical Leave Act and its effect on her life, because I…”

“We asked Lucy Sanchez to come here to talk about the Family and Medical Leave Act and its effect on her life, because I think it's important to point out that while both men and women are equally eligible for the Family and Medical Leave Act, women are far more likely to take advantage of it. And they should not lose a year of eligibility, in terms of retirement vesting, when they do. Keep in mind, if men and women all had retirement systems in addition to Social Security and they were more or less equal, then our task of dealing with handling the baby boomers in the retirement system would be much, much easier. And so anything we can do now to equalize the impact of retirement earnings among similarly situated people 20 years from now will change and make less difficult the changes we are going to have to make anyway in the Social Security system. I think it's very important for everybody to kind of keep that in mind. So when I announced earlier today, a few moments ago, that we wanted people not to lose credit in retirement vesting when they access the Family and Medical Leave Act, I think it's important. We have an illustration of why it's important to have this law on the books and why it is inconsistent with being pro-work or pro-family to disallow retirement vesting just because people are taking advantage of the law. Lucy? [Lucy Sanchez described how the Family and Medical Leave Act ensured her job stability throughout the previous year, when she had to take 90 days off to care for her husband and when her 85-year-old mother was hospitalized. Ms. Sanchez said she was concerned that her time off would affect her employee pension plan, and she expressed support for the President's proposal to count such time off toward retirement plan vesting and eligibility requirements.]”