For caregivers, Thanksgiving is no break at all

You’re probably winding down from work and getting ready for a few days at home with your family. But anybody with caregiving responsibility knows that the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks will not be relaxing. Since the United States does not have a federal policy that gives workers paid time off after giving birth, having a medical procedure, or to care for a loved one, many will cram this labor into their precious holiday time.

Many of us have a colleague who will come back to work exhausted after spending time with a dying parent, having taken advantage of the time off from work to figure out hospice and funeral arrangements. Or one who will be caring for a sibling or spouse who is recovering from surgery or managing a terminal illness. And then there are parents who will spend the week taking care of infants and toddlers while daycare is closed.

Many women, who bear the brunt of this caregiving, have found it impossible to balance work and taking care of loved ones. From January to August 2025, an estimated 455,000 women left the workforce, often because they had to care for children and aging parents. This isn’t just bad for those who are giving up their income; it’s bad for the U.S. economy, which is losing productive workers.

Starting today, Paid Leave for All, a nonprofit fighting for the government to pass paid family and medical leave for all working people, is drawing attention to the way the lack of paid leave hurts American workers. It’s encouraging people to post out-of-office messages that reflect how they’re using their holidays to care for family members since they’re not granted any other time to do so.

The organization will be displaying these real out-of-office messages in prominent places. There will be a scrolling mosaic of messages in the New York and Washington, D.C., airports throughout this week, which happens to be the busiest travel week of the year. These messages will also be posted on a billboard in Times Square. On social media, the organization is encouraging everyday people to post their out-of-office messages publicly. After the break, when Congress returns from their recess, Paid Leave for All will deliver these messages to lawmakers and argue for the importance of passing paid leave.

Out-of-office messages tend to be generic and polite. Some companies even mandate what employees post. Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave for All, says that in many ways, these messages obscure the real story of workers’ lives. “The messages are designed to sound like people are getting a break from work,” she says. “But in fact, there is a lot of labor going on during these periods out of the office.”

With this campaign, Paid Leave for All invites everybody to post out-of-office messages that more accurately reflect what they’re doing when away from their desk. They may say things like: “Thanks for your message! I’m OOO because my mom is having surgery. But like so many Americans, I don’t have any paid leave so I will be back on Monday.”

Or: “Thanks for your note! I’m OOO because my parents are getting older and I can’t manage their Rx and 500 unread emails at once. In-home care is $60K and I have limited PTO. Will get back to you ASAP!”

Most workers feel like they can’t publicly share how overwhelmed they are by their caregiving responsibilities, because it might suggest that they’re not competent. But Huckelbridge hopes that by encouraging people to openly discuss these issues through their out-of-office messages, it will reveal that there is actually a systemic problem in the U.S., which is the only developed country with no national paid family and medical leave policy.

“There’s a crisis in the workplace that people are not talking about,” she says. “We’ve had one of the steepest declines in women’s participation in the workplace, partly because these women are burnt out from working full-time jobs while bearing the brunt of caregiving.”

After the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Huckelbridge will deliver the messages to Congress. “It is unlikely that a Republican Congress will pass these laws,” she says. “But we’re playing the long game here. And it’s encouraging to see that more and more Republicans are recognizing how valuable paid leave is for workers and the economy.”

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