Workers’ bereavement benefits often fall short

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

The day after Kate Massey’s grandmother died last September, the only thing on her mind, other than grief, was how she was going to take time off for the funeral and the wake.

Massey, who’s the director of business development for Kel & Partners, a marketing firm in Westborough, Mass., had already taken all her vacation for the year and never bothered to look at the company’s bereavement leave policy.

“I called my boss that morning after my grandmother passed to ask about time off, and she was shocked I even asked,” Massey recalls about the CEO Kel Kelly’s reaction to her question. “She told me to ‘take all the time you need.’”

She ended up taking a week off for the funeral, and Kelly — who also attended the funeral — even insisted she take an extra day off to pull herself together. She got paid for all her time off.

While Massey’s boss accommodated her needs during such a loss, few employees have that kind of luxury.

Some workers don’t even have access to any type of paid leave when a death occurs. According to a 2007 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 69 percent of workers in the private sector get paid funeral leave. Among companies with 100 employees or more, the number rises to 81 percent, while only 57 percent of small businesses with work forces of under 100 provide funeral leave.

When they do get it, two to three days of paid bereavement leave is the norm for most U.S. businesses and there are no signs that will be changing any time soon. “That’s the rule of thumb,” says Peter Ronza, compensation and benefits manager with the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., and an expert with the Society for Human Resource Management.

But is it enough?

“Three days is a tragedy,” says Russell Friedman, author of “The Grief Recovery Handbook” and executive director of the Grief Recover Institute. “Some companies are extraordinary and have big hearts when it comes to giving time off after a death, but many are stuck in the dark ages.”

Workers need at least a week, he says, to deal with all the logistics surrounding a death and burial, especially given many of us don’t live near our loved ones these days. Not to mention, he adds, that people need time to grieve the loss because they won’t be as productive right after the death of someone close.

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