When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States in early 2020, it didn’t just bring about a public health emergency. It also exposed a longstanding weakness in the U.S. labor market—that many workers lack access to emergency paid sick leave.

In April 2020, U.S. unemployment surged to its highest level in more than 75 years, leaving millions of families vulnerable to lost income as they faced a nationwide economic shutdown. Without paid leave, workers who were not laid off faced a stark choice: Show up sick or stay home and lose income on which they depended.

To help Americans manage the shock of the pandemic, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in March 2020. It created the first federal paid leave mandate, albeit only temporary and not for everyone. Importantly, the program targeted the workers most vulnerable to gaps in paid leave coverage: employees at smaller firms and in jobs that could not be done from home.

But did it work?

In a recently published article supported by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, we dig into this question about emergency paid sick leave. Our study is the first to leverage individual employment data to study whether the Families First Coronavirus Response Act successfully expanded access to paid leave when families needed it most.

Our findings point to a clear conclusion: FFCRA paid leave benefits protected workers against the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic—especially parents of young children—and helped fill a longstanding gap in U.S. social infrastructure at a time when it was needed most. Notably, these lessons extend beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent recession, offering a blueprint for how federal policy can prepare for the next crisis and support working families in the meantime.

Unequal and Inadequate Paid Leave Is the Norm Across the United States

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we estimate that just 1 in 5 private-sector workers in the United States had any access to paid family and medical leave and 1 in 4 did not have access to paid sick leave. Those without access to paid leave disproportionately worked in smaller firms and in lower-paying jobs—making them already more exposed to the effects of economic or public health crises due to the nature of their occupations and their employers’ vulnerability to economic downturns.

Read the full article about emergency paid sick leave by Tanya Byker, Elena Patel, and Kristin Smith at Equitable Growth.