Those two issues repeatedly have become flash points during contract negotiations between educators and their school committees and have driven teachers to the picket lines.

State law requires most workers to be provided paid parental leave and minimum wage. So why do teachers have to fight for those rights? Here’s what to know.

Since 2021, Massachusetts has guaranteed most workers up to 26 weeks of paid time off, in addition to employer-provided sick days. The leave, funded through a payroll tax and issued by the state, covers about 60 to 80 percent of a person’s salary, although employees can top off their pay with company-provided sick and vacation time.

Massachusetts is one of only a dozen states with paid parental leave. (Federal law requires certain employers to offer 12 weeks of unpaid leave, with employees able to return to their jobs post-leave.)

The parental leave policy was part of a 2018 bill known as the “grand bargain” that also raised the minimum wage to $15 per hour and eliminated time-and-a-half pay on Sundays.

Teachers, and other municipal workers, were specifically excluded from the parental leave part of the bill, and they were already left out of the state’s minimum wage because lawmakers can’t obligate cities and towns to pay parental leave costs without providing them the funds to do so (and they need a super-majority in favor to raise the municipal minimum wage). Municipal employees are still covered by the federal minimum wage, but it is less than half of the state bar, at just $7.25.

Instead of requiring municipalities to pay their share of the payroll taxes and grant their employees paid family leave, the bill gave them the option to opt in. But according to Matt Kitsos, a spokesman for the state’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, not a single municipality has opted into the policy.

The state is barred from creating new costs for municipalities, a provision called the Local Mandate Law. The law was enacted as part of the 1981 tax law Proposition 2½, which limits municipalities’ ability to raise funds. The state is only permitted to impose additional costs on cities and towns if it provides them additional funds. That meant municipalities could not be forced to pay new payroll taxes to fund the benefit. (Communities can vote to accept additional costs — hence the parental leave opt-in.)

A separate piece of state law, written into the state constitution, governs municipal employee benefits and compensation directly. Under the provision, the state can set standards for cities and towns — like the minimum wage — only if the law passes with a two-thirds majority.

Other exempt workers include independent contractors and people working for churches and certain other religious organizations. Employees of the state government do receive paid family leave, as do charter school employees.

Many teachers have relatively generous sick time policies that roll over from year to year, but that accumulation puts younger teachers at a disadvantage and some policies exclude nonbirthing parents from using sick time for parental leave.

“It is just an enormous inequity that our educators, public school educators, who are two-thirds or more women, do not have access to a guaranteed good paid family leave policy,” Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said. “In almost every table where there’s bargaining with the MTA across 400 locals, the issue of paid family leave is a top, top priority.”

According to data from the association, dozens of its local unions have negotiated standalone paid parental leave policies with their districts for an average of about 17 guaranteed days.

Page said his union intends to file legislation to address the issue so educators receive “the equivalent” of the paid leave private-sector and state employees receive.

In recent strikes, union members have won as many as eight weeks of fully paid parental leave.

Page said the union will also file legislation to raise wages for paraprofessionals, although it may not take the form of expanding the state’s minimum wage.

Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.