Guide Offers Lessons from Nation’s First Paid Family Leave Program
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As more states consider offering paid family leave, state legislators would do well to check out a new guide released last week that offers a primer on the nation’s first paid family leave program, implemented six years ago in California. Published by the Labor Project for Working Families and the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic & Family Security, the guide includes the dos and don’ts other states should consider as they pursue similar proposals.
Since 2004, the California program has provided more than 1 million Californians paid leave from their jobs to tend to critical life events, such as bonding with a newborn or newly adopted child, or caring for a seriously ill family member.
Netsy Firestein, director of the Labor Project for Working Families and the guide’s co-author, says:
Today’s workers have to juggle work and family like never before, and California has shown there’s a significant and easy way for states to help facilitate that. With a largely successful six-year track record, California offers key lessons for what other states can do.
Domestic Workers Seeking Rights Need Unions
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Jenya Cassidy of the Labor Project for Working Families reports on the importance of unions joining the campaign for domestic workers’ rights.
Many workers have a hard time balancing work and family, but the workers who take care of other people’s families have the hardest time of all. There are more than 2.5 million domestic workers in the United States who work as nannies and maids. They care for other families’ homes and children while they are separated from their own children, often by a continent. They work long hours without overtime pay and, more often than not, without health benefits.
In the most recent edition of Labor Family News, Andrea Cristina Mercado of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (Active and United Women, MUA) and Ai-Jen Poo of Domestic Workers United (DWU) tell the story of Maria, a Central American woman who came to New York as a domestic worker to support her family.
Work Songs, Bargaining for Work and Family and More from Cool Tools
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Our latest edition of Cool Tools includes a look at successful Blue-Green coalitions, working songs from labor’s long musical history and educational resources to help you put vital family life issues on the bargaining table. The AFL-CIO’s Cool Tools assembles the latest hot picks for union activists and allies. (If you can’t locate the items at The Union Shop Online,TM try Powell’s Books, the nation’s largest union bookstore, or get a list of union stores at The Union Shop Online.TM)
Union and environmental activists are finding new power and success in the growing Blue-Green movement. University of Florida sociologist Brian Mayer’s new book, Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities, finds that
attempts to build blue-green coalitions are likely to succeed when [workplace and environmental] health is the starting point for finding a common ground.
