by Tula Connell, May 24, 2007

In 1997, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D) from Connecticut introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would provide more effective remedies to workers who are not being paid equal wages for doing equal work. (Although the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, women continue to earn just 74 cents for every dollar earned by men.)

The bill got its first hearing last month, when Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) scheduled hearings on April 24, Equal Pay Day.

Only 10 years? If Democrats hadn’t swept Congress last fall, the bill still wouldn’t have had a hearing, much less a chance to be voted on.

Speaking today at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C., DeLauro discussed the serious challenges working families face in trying to make ends meet while struggling with child care, elder care and more—and noted repeatedly that the fundamental threat of income insecurity underlies all these critical issues.

Parents are stretched thin trying to make sure their kids get the care they deserve. Despite that fact that the economy grew 4.4 percent last year, very little of it reaching working families.

DeLauro was keynote speaker for EPI’s Agenda for Shared Prosperity series, which this month featured Getting Real About Families, a discussion that included Heidi Hartmann, president and founder of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) and Janet Gornick, political science professor at Baruch College.

DeLauro outlined the series of measures now in Congress that address working family issues, including the Healthy Families Act, which would require employers with 15 or more full-time workers to provide seven days of paid sick leave annually—what DeLauro called “a floor on good corporate citizenship.” Another bill would raise the monthly amount of food stamps—currently averaging $1 per meal, a nutritional disaster for adults and especially children, as demonstrated this month when several members of the U.S. House of Representatives lived on foods stamps for a week to “urge or shame Congress into doing the right thing,” as Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) told the press.

Current laws also need to be improved, Hartmann told the audience, including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable federal income tax credit for low-income working individuals and families. Currently, if minimum wage or low-wage workers miss time on the job to care for a sick child, personal illness and so on, they likely will not get paid for the time off. As a result, their wages go down—and so does the support they receive from EITC, a flaw in the law that essentially penalizes workers because their employers refused to provide paid leave.

Emphasizing the role of pay equity in balancing work and family, Hartmann cited a joint study by the AFL-CIO and the IWPR, which demonstrated that reducing the pay gap between men and women would decrease poverty by half. Hartmann, who presented her paper, An Economy that Puts Families First: Expanding the Social Contract to Include Family Care, reiterated the need for the United States to catch up with other nations in meeting the needs of workers and getting children off to a good start. The report, which she co-wrote with Ariane Hegewisch and Vicky Lovell, recommends a comprehensive family policy program with three main features:

Greater flexibility on the job so that workers can better mesh family care needs with their work responsibilities.

Paid leave for care giving so as to ensure income continuity for workers.

Subsidized child care and elder care.

In proposing increasing flexibility—adjusting working time to better meet workers’ needs—Hartmann says the U.S. can influence employer behavior in several ways, including financial incentives (tax breaks) or penalties for compliance failure, as well as other enforcement mechanisms such as Equal Employment Opportunity.

Although the United States is often perceived as being committed to a relatively unregulated labor market, government intervention in employers’ actions is not uncommon and a perfectly legitimate avenue for pursuing public policy goals, especially where market signals simply do not incentivize employers as a group to provide for society’s needs.

Without such government involvement, progress clearly won’t be made. As all three speakers noted, the comparisons between the United States and other nations in family policy issues is stark. Among them: Although 145 nations have some form of paid sick leave, the United States does not, leaving 94 million people, mostly low-wage workers, unpaid if they need to stay home. Some 85 percent of restaurant workers have no paid sick leave.

Gornick’s paper analyzed the differences among the United States, Japan and Europe in work-time policies, including the number of hours worked—working hours in the United States are the highest of any industrialized nation—and why regulation of working hours would go a long way toward addressing families’ work-life struggles.

Limiting the standard full-time week to below 40 hours would grant parents more time for children on a daily basis. Limiting men’s time in the labor market, in particular, would raise the likelihood of more gender-equitable time allocations between partners. Implementing reductions economy-wide would increase parents’ opportunities to seek employment that is “full time” but at less than 40 hours, across a broad range of firms, occupations, and industries.

In addition, Gornick sees the need for paid time-off policies to assure workers a substantial number of paid days off each year; pay and benefit parity for part-time workers and the right of workers to formally request a shift to reduced-hour or flexibly-scheduled work, subject to employer agreement.

As they do in several European countries, employers would have the right to refuse “on business grounds,” but their refusals would be subject to government review. To accommodate the needs of small employers, these general rights to work-hour changes could be restricted to workers in enterprises of a minimum size, but the minimum should be set relatively low.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the papers of Hartmann and Gornick, which are packed with solid recommendations for moving our nation forward. As DeLauro stressed, the opportunities for passage of legislation to improve the challenges of balancing work and family are much greater now than ever in recent years. But only when members of Congress hear from constituents on these issues, will they see the urgency for action. And for those who never get it, the 2008 elections are just over a year away.

Previous Agenda for Shared Prosperity events have focused on jobs and trade, the role of unions in strengthening America’s middle class, immigration and the federal budget. The Agenda, a network of economists and policymakers, seeks to address the growing gap between America’s promise and its problems and will distribute the reports issued through the series to 2008 congressional and presidential contenders.

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