Congress Grapples With Spate of Family-Aid Bills : Workplace: Wide-ranging measures are being offered, despite awareness of the President’s lukewarm support because of costs.

Families with two working parents have been a growing feature of the American scene for the last few decades, and politicians are finally beginning to address their concerns with a spate of new family-aid bills in Congress.

Skeptics attribute the flurry of proposals mainly to presidential election-year politics. Family advocates, however, say the need for middle- and low-income family-aid measures is so obvious--and so strongly supported by the American public--that real help is finally arriving. How much help may be limited by the cost of this legislation, especially during a lingering recession.

“Congress has fallen behind the needs of American families,” says Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Children’s Commission. But “the American people today are more open than they ever have been to family support legislation.”

Rockefeller recently introduced a comprehensive Family Income Security package that pulls together various legislative ideas that he and several others have been pushing for years. It features refundable tax credits, some health care provisions for the uninsured, an improved food stamp program for low-income families and stricter enforcement of child-support laws.

In recent months similar, less-ambitious measures have been proposed in Congress and by President Bush, who generally has been lukewarm to family-support legislation, citing its cost.

The Bush Administration’s latest budget, for example, proposes that families earning less than $157,000 receive a $500 tax cut for each child. A Senate bill, the Downey-Gore measure, has broad support among Democrats. It would provide tax credits only for middle- and low-income families, eliminating existing eligibility for upper-income families.

Ironically, efforts to assist dual wage-earner families are gaining ground as the growth of such families seems to be waning.

After climbing steadily for two decades, the number of women entering the work force has been leveling off since 1987, recent studies show. This result runs counter to Census Bureau predictions that the percentage of working women will continue to rise through the 1990s.

About 47% of U.S. workers today are women, and many of these women are bearing children in a new baby boom. In 1989, 4.2 million babies were born in the United States, the most since the last baby-boom year of 1961, when there were 4.3 million newborns. The increase is only partly attributable to the soaring number of out-of-wedlock births; births to married women have also been rising since 1988, reversing a trend of two decades.

“We’re seeing a rise (in births) due to older career women who delayed child bearing” and to younger women in the 20-24 age group who are having children, says Diane Macunovich, an economics professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.

Many states are ahead of the federal government in providing support for working families. Twelve states have laws mandating that women be able to return to their jobs after maternity leaves or absences related to the birth of disabled children. They are California, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Vermont.

Eight states have enacted family and medical leave legislation that covers state employees only: Delaware, Florida, Illinois, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia.

The length of the leaves vary widely from state to state. Hawaii allows only four weeks of leave for companies employing 100 or more people, while Minnesota provides six weeks of leave for companies with 21 or more workers.

California’s family-support legislation, passed last year, is among the most generous of the state laws, requiring up to four months of unpaid leave for employees of companies with more than 50 workers.

In California and elsewhere, however, the push for more comprehensive family-support measures has been interrupted by the recession.

“We’re scrambling around trying to meet the needs of families,” says Sherry Novick, a consultant on family issues to Gov. Pete Wilson. “We’ve had to go off the holistic approach toward helping all families” because of state budget problems.

Instead, the state is limited to following “a patchwork approach for the neediest families,” she says.

Despite the recent flurry of activity, family-support advocates say Congress has dragged its heels on this issue for two decades before it passed an extensive child care bill two years ago. The bill will provide $725 million in day-care support for low-income families this year; that figure will rise to $925 million in 1993 and beyond.

With this bill, the federal government for the first time became an active partner with states in the day-care business. It provides grants to states to expand and improve child care facilities for families with children age 13 or under and household incomes at or below 75% of the state median.

But in an election year, family advocates are hopeful that politicians will pay heed to opinion polls that show strong support for aid to families.

In 1990, for example, more than 70% of Americans surveyed in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll supported the Family and Medical Leave Bill, which had been kicking around Congress for five years. The bill’s provisions included up to three months of unpaid leave for the birth or adoption of a child, or to care for a seriously ill family member, and a guaranteed job when they returned to work.

Congress passed the bill in 1991, but President Bush vetoed it. Congress approved the act again by a substantial margin, but failed to muster the two-thirds majority needed to override a Presidential veto. The bill’s sponsors, mostly Democrats, are deciding whether to amend it or resubmit it closer to the November election when pressure for aid to families could be more intense.

One of the main arguments against the bill, however, is the weak economy. The General Accounting Office has estimated that the bill will cost employers $330 million annually, or about $7.10 per worker. Small-business groups, such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses. oppose the measure, saying it’s too expensive.

But family advocates say further delays will mean more troubled families and marred lives, insisting that that costs the country more in the long run.