Just another word for “No time off from work.”

“Astonishingly, despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70 percent of American children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work demands…As a result, when the United States’ work-family policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last.”

To accompany Stephanie Coontz’s editorial on the stagnation of pro-family policy, a NYT map shows how far behind we are with regard to paid maternity leave, among other basic worker benefits now considered standard everywhere else in the developed world. “Out of nearly 200 countries studied…180 now offer guaranteed paid leave to new mothers, and 81 offer paid leave to fathers. They found that 175 mandate paid annual leave for workers, and 162 limit the maximum length of the workweek. The United States offers none of these protections.” See also this 2011 post on “The Great Speedup.”