Counterpoint: As a small-business owner, I assure you we want and need paid leave

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Recently, I read a story in this publication claiming business leaders don’t want paid leave (“Business leaders push to roll back paid family leave,” March 7). As a small-business owner, a mom and a member of Main Street Alliance, I think real leadership means providing for our employees when they need support. We need a statewide paid-leave plan in order to do that.

I own Content, an independent bookstore in Northfield that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. In our first decade in business, we’ve grown our staff from just a few part-timers to six full-time and nine part-time staff; we’ve given high school students their first jobs and retirees just the right part-time gigs. We’ve built strong relationships with local schools and other businesses, and we’ve shared our resources with countless local charities. Visitors to Northfield are charmed by the well-preserved character of our historic river town and our quirky local culture, and we are proud to be contributors to both.

But in 2016, when my son Thorsten was born, the bookstore was new, and I could only budget for a month off when he arrived. It was too expensive to cover all my hours with other people, so I spent many sleep-deprived days at the shop with a baby in my arms. Four years later, Content had grown, and I carefully planned to take 10 weeks off when Lyra was born. But she arrived in March 2020, along with the pandemic, and I ended up spending just a week recovering before working harder than ever to make sure my shop survived that crisis. Because paid leave hasn’t been available to me, I’ve made painful tradeoffs between investing in my business and caring for my babies — choices the statewide fund for paid family leave can spare other families.

Folks who claim to represent Minnesota businesses — like the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce — will try to tell you paid leave is bad for business. As a thriving small employer and retailer, I can tell you that it is just the opposite. My business needs this program to compete with the big guys on a level playing field. I provide good jobs with great benefits, and we have booksellers who have been with us for nearly a decade. But many of my younger employees are likely to leave us for larger employers when they want to start a family — unless we have a statewide paid leave system in place. The cost to my business of losing fully trained employees is far higher than our expected contribution to the state fund for paid leave. The cost to our community when small businesses struggle to hire and retain the best staff is even greater.

I’m happy to invest in paid leave because it will provide stability to my team when we need it, because it gives us a way — even with our small pool — to budget and plan. When someone needs to care for a new baby, or stay with a loved one in their final days, they can take the time they need — and our small business can continue to function and thrive.

The Chamber of Commerce, which has opposed this benefit from the very beginning, claims the system is not ready to launch, and that employers don’t understand the system well enough to start using it nine months from now. But this system is built on the concept of a statewide insurance pool, which is familiar to anyone who’s participated in the Minnesota Unemployment Fund (by my calculations, that includes most anyone who’s received or issued a paycheck in our fair state).

My employees, my bookkeeper and my CPA all understand the system that is in place and ready to launch in January 2026. We are ready to start using it. It’s time to move into the 21st century — where we can all agree that babies shouldn’t go to day care a few weeks after they’re born, and that nobody should have to choose between caring for their family and a paycheck. Minnesota families and small businesses are ready for paid family and medical leave now.

Jessica Peterson White is president and owner of the Content Bookstore in Northfield and a member of the Main Street Alliance.