Paid Parental Leave for FAA Employees Advances

NATCA continues to aggressively seek a technical correction to fix the loophole that inadvertently excluded FAA employees and five other federal employee workforces from the 12-week paid parental leave proposal enacted last December as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020 (FY 20 NDAA; P.L. 116-92). In July, NATCA successfully secured the technical correction in the House version of the FY 2021 NDAA bill after months of extensive advocacy from Government Affairs staff. Since then, the House and Senate have both passed their versions of the NDAA bill and now the legislation is headed to “conference,” where differences between the two bills will be sorted out. A final version of the legislation must be agreed upon in the House and Senate before being signed into law by the President.

Now that the technical correction is included in the House-passed version of the bill, NATCA’s Government Affairs staff is shifting its advocacy to the Conference Committee, which will be made up of House and Senate lawmakers who will finalize this legislation. It is unclear when this year’s NDAA legislation will be finalized and enacted into law, so Government Affairs is looking at all legislation as other possible avenues to secure this fix.

As a reminder, NATCA signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the FAA in May to provide 12 weeks of paid parental leave for qualifying events occurring on or after Oct. 1, 2020. This benefit covers all members employed by the FAA. In the meantime, the work being done by Government Affairs staff is to ensure that this benefit is codified in law for both current and future FAA workforces.