Paid Family Leave Good for Business and the Economy
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When workers have paid family leave, especially after childbirth, they’re more likely to stay in the workforce and significantly less likely to require public assistance, according to a new report from the National Partnership for Women & Families. In fact, they’re even more likely to receive salary increases.
That’s good for everybody, the authors say, including both taxpayers and businesses, which reap a more stable workforce when paid family leave is offered.
Today, nearly three-fourths of children live in homes where the adults who care for them work outside the home. Workers in jobs that have paid holidays and vacation time often cobble together those benefits in order to take care of a newborn or other family members. But low-wage workers whose employers don’t offer any paid leave, say the study’s authors, are at risk for falling out of the workforce and onto public assistance rolls when family members require their care.
The study, ”Pay Matters: The Positive Economic Impacts of Paid Family Leave for Families, Businesses and the Public,” conducted by the Center for Women and Work (CWW) at Rutgers University, reports that: Read the rest of this entry »
Painters Give Women’s Safe Haven Building Needed Makeover
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AFL-CIO Community Services Director Will Fischer sends us this report.
Members from the Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) District Council 2, friends and family came together in South St. Louis in recent days to give the “Women in Transition” organization a much needed makeover.
Union painters, tapers, glaziers, friends and family of District Council 2 put the two apartment buildings in their sights to be re-painted. After being graciously supplied with donations by PaintSmith Companies, CR Painting and More and Sherwin-Williams of Crestwood, they decorated the eight apartments in just one day! Read the rest of this entry »
Women Will Wait Until 2056 to See Pay Equity, Unless We Act Now
Emmelle Israel, AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, sends us this.
At the current rate, pay equity between men and women won’t occur for another 45 years, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).
Add in the past 48 years since the Equal Pay Act was first signed into law and you have an almost 100-year long struggle for basic wage parity—even longer if you reach back into history and take into account all the women who stood up for themselves when they noticed their male counterparts were paid more for similar work.
The enduring wage disparity between female and male workers prompted a series of forums on Capitol Hill regarding the gender wage gap, sponsored by Women’s Policy, Inc.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler was a featured speaker, along with Susan Meisinger of HRExecutive Online at yesterday’s forum, moderated by Women’s Policy Inc. President Cindy Hall and Rep. Gwen Moore.
Shuler shared with attendees a story about her first job working at a restaurant as a waitress, making only five cents above minimum wage. All the waitresses were women and all the cooks were men. Although the men were already paid more than the women, the waitresses had to pool their tips together and divide the money with the cooks as well. It was her “first
experience with wage, gender and workplace frustration.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ohio Panelists Detail Impact of Kasich’s Issue 2/S.B. 5 on Working Women
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Mike Gillis, Ohio AFL-CIO communications director, writes about a panel in Ohio earlier today in which participants agreed that women will be hard-hit by the state’s newly passed bill (S.B. 5) that takes collective bargaining rights away from public employees—and why voters need to go to the polls Nov. 8 to vote NO on Issue 2, to kill the bill.
Experts on women’s workplace issues and women from Ohio’s workforce detailed their concern for Kasich’s agenda this morning at a panel in Cleveland on the state’s S.B. 5/Issue 2. The panel, moderated by journalist, author and Pepper Pike City Councilwoman Jill Miller Zimon, offered a variety of perspectives on why doing away with collective bargaining would be disproportionally detrimental to women. Panelists also discussed how, with unemployment increasing in Ohio and more layoffs and cuts expected from Gov. John Kasich’s budget, Issue 2/S.B. 5 would only make the growing jobs crisis in the state worse and has only divided and distracted Ohioans from real policies that will help grow jobs.
Women, Black Workers Hard Hit by Attacks on Public Employees
The improved jobs figures out last Friday obscured the ongoing decline in public-sector jobs. As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics noted when releasing the March unemployment data:
Employment in local government continued to trend down over the month. Local government has lost 416,000 jobs since an employment peak in September 2008.
The loss of such jobs is important because the nation’s well-being depends not only on job numbers increasing, but on the creation of quality jobs—those that pay decent wages and enable people to attain or maintain a middle-class life. According to National Employment Law Project (NELP), the new jobs being created aren’t as good as the ones that have been lost. NELP found that jobs in lower wage industries, such as retail and food preparation, made up 23 percent of the jobs that were lost in the recent recession. Yet they made up 49 percent of the jobs the economy has gained in the past year. As the BBC Business puts it:
In other words, it appears that while people may finally be returning to work, they have to work for less pay.
President Calls on Americans to Honor Triangle Fire Anniversary
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire March 25, President Obama issued a proclamation in honor of this day and is calling on ”all Americans to participate in ceremonies and activities in memory of those who have been killed due to unsafe working conditions.” The president recognized the nation’s continued need for job saftey and collective bargaining a century after the disaster that killed 146 young, mostly immigrant women.
Despite the enormous progress made since the Triangle factory fire, we are still fighting to provide adequate working conditions for all women and men on the job, ensure no person within our borders is exploited for their labor, and uphold collective bargaining as a tool to give workers a seat at the tables of power. Working Americans are the backbone of our communities and power the engine of our economy. As we mark the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, let us resolve to renew the urgency that tragedy inspired and recommit to our shared responsibility to provide a safe environment for all American workers.
Saying that the fire “was a galvanizing moment” that called on American leaders “to reexamine their approch to workplace conditions and the purpose of unions,” Obama said the tragedy ”strengthened the potency of organized labor, which gave voice to previously powerless workers.”
A century later, we reflect not only on the tragic loss of these young lives, but also on the movement they inspired.
Big Bankers Howl—and Other Tidbits
Finally, some good news on the jobs front. The Council of Economic Advisers announced that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has now created or saved between 1.5 million and 2 million jobs. The economic recovery package also added several percentage points to the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Other tidbits:
• President Obama yesterday announced his intention to propose a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee that would require the largest and most highly levered Wall Street firms to pay back taxpayers for the extraordinary assistance provided so that the TARP program does not add to the deficit. Even before the announcement, Big Bankers were squealing like stuck pigs. From Think Progress:
Edward Yingling, president and chief executive, American Bankers Association: “To impose yet another burden on the industry would obviously decrease their ability to lend.”
Bronfenbrenner: Employee Free Choice Is Key for Women
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Cornell University’s Kate Bronfenbrenner, a leading scholars in labor studies, discusses the Employee Free Choice Act and the future of the union movement in the latest issue of The American Prospect.
In a great interview, Bronfenbrenner, whose research has detailed the pattern of corporate interference and intimidation that prevents workers from freely choosing a union, says the Employee Free Choice Act is critical to giving workers bargaining power and restoring balance in an economy that has been undermined by corporate greed. Says Bronfenbrenner:
The public has seen that deregulation and letting employers do whatever they want has hurt a lot of people. Corporate capital does not work in the interest of the public good. Letting them act without any restraint puts us where we are today. The National Labor Relations Act as it is now enforced is a poor piece of legislation. The Employee Free Choice Act is nothing more than making the law do what it was supposed to have been doing all along.
