When his father died from COVID-19 in 2020, James Gerraughty didn’t have to choose between working and grieving.
That’s because his employer provides three days of paid bereavement for the death of a parent. This gave Gerraughty enough time to drive from the Altoona area to Buffalo, New York, to collect his dad’s remains.
Gerraughty said his employer was flexible as he undertook closing his father’s estate and cleaning his house. The two-and-a-half year effort became a second job, Gerraughty told How We Care. But the government contracting consultant had “very good support,” he said of his boss and colleagues.
Not everyone is so lucky. Pennsylvania doesn’t have a universal bereavement leave policy. Employers offer it at their discretion, meaning many workers can experience the death of a loved one but not get time off.
Other states have filled this gap in labor law, to varying degrees. California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington all mandate some form of bereavement leave. Spotlight PA contacted the chambers of commerce in those states to ask how the laws affect the workforce and business. Most either declined to comment or did not respond.
Loren Furman, the head of Colorado’s chamber, said there wasn’t much pushback when the state amended its paid sick leave law in 2023 to mandate that employees be permitted to use this time for bereavement. “The smaller employers, I’m sure they had a little more of a struggle,” she said. “But the larger to mid-sized companies told us that they did this already.”
There’s a bipartisan effort in Pennsylvania to implement paid sick leave. However, the most recent state House and Senate versions of the proposed Family Care Act are silent on bereavement.
It takes time to process a death. So not being able to take off work can threaten a person’s mental health and livelihood, said Nisha Bowman, a social worker in Pittsburgh for Monarch Hospice.
Major losses have many downstream effects, including job performance. “Your boss is only looking at your productivity,” said Bowman. “And as that starts to slip … you're trying to fight to come up for air. It's too much to have to process at the same time.”
The Family and Medical Leave Act, a landmark federal employment law enacted in 1993, does not cover bereavement. It provides job protection to people who take an unpaid leave of up to 12 weeks for specific situations, such as caring for an ill spouse or the birth of a child.
But if that spouse or child were to die, then an employer could legally require the worker to clock in the very next day.
Washington state addresses this gap in a limited fashion by requiring that employees receive paid leave in the seven days following the death of a child who is under a year old. The law also covers families whose child dies within a year of an adoption or foster placement. New Jersey is considering a similar law.
The Family and Medical Leave Act does protect someone’s job if their grief causes a serious mental health condition that prevents them from working. But there are practical hurdles to getting that leave granted, especially if the employee doesn’t have a history of mental health issues, said Pittsburgh-based attorney Christine Elzer, who is a board member of the National Employment Lawyers Association.
“[It] would require the employee to get an appointment with a mental health provider, and have the mental health provider submit that certification paperwork on short notice,” said Elzer.
Diane Bergeron, an organizational psychologist and researcher at the nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership, said people shouldn’t be burdened to prove a mental health issue, and argued that standard pathologizes normal emotions that arise after a loss.
Grieving people can work, said Bergeron, noting that some even welcome it as a distraction. Others enjoy being around their colleagues. But grief isn’t linear or confined to one period, so bereavement policies should allow for nonconsecutive time off, Bergeron argued.
“It can hit you out of the blue,” Bergeron said of grief. “But then all of the sudden you’re OK, and you can do things.”
California’s bereavement law partially allows for that unpredictability. It requires that employers provide at least five days of nonconsecutive, unpaid leave.
But those days must be used within three months following the death, a stipulation that doesn’t account for how days outside that window — such as birthdays, holidays, and death anniversaries — can trigger grief.
Bowman of Monarch Hospice, for instance, miscarried twins on Valentine’s Day in 2019. They were due on her wedding anniversary. Ever since, Bowman said, she becomes irritated and sad around those dates. Drawing on her mental health background, she’s learned to be compassionate to herself when experiencing these complex emotions.
“Can you imagine being someone who's never felt a feeling in their life, like having to navigate big feelings all of a sudden?” she said. “You can't cope with that out of the blue.”
Illinois’s bereavement law also has a time limit. Workers are permitted 10 days of leave, which must be taken within 60 days of when they learn of their family member’s death. The law also covers stillbirth or miscarriage, an unsuccessful round of fertility treatment, or a failed adoption.
“Terrible things happen in people’s lives, and they should have the ability to take a moment,” Illinois state Rep. Anna Moeller told How We Care. The Democrat represents Chicago's western suburbs and sponsored the legislation in 2022.
American culture does not handle death and grief well, said Kent Tonkin, an associate professor at Saint Francis University who studies bereavement in the workplace.
He said grieving people are expected to separate from friends and society at times when they need the most support. That’s why there isn’t any sort of national law or even comprehensive guidance for employers, he argued.
“Companies really are kind of in a no man's land on their own, figuring out what's going to work well for their employees,” he said.
Like Bergeron and Bowman, Tonkin recommended that employers give workers as much flexibility as possible.
Whether a worker gets such consideration, however, largely depends on their supervisor and their seniority within a company, according to Tonkin’s research. In a 2022 study, he examined the case of a woman who had two miscarriages, received no bereavement leave, and was eventually fired. A different manager might have found ways to support that employee.
For Bergeron, such a lack of consistency illustrates why standards are needed. “I think it’s unfair that we put a basic decent human response on individuals to buck the system, rather than just expecting the organization to step up and be sensitive,” she said.
James Gerraughty agreed, and said he was fortunate to have compassionate supervisors who were understanding as he dealt with his father’s death.
He said he would support a state or federal law that mandates other workers receive that same consideration.
Working after a loss is difficult, he noted: “If [someone is] a little bummed out, if they’re a little sad, well there’s a reason for that.”
