Photo: Callaghan O’Hare/REUTERS In 1984, a group of female attorneys huddled over a typewriter in an office of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, now the National Partnership for Women & Families. They punched out a document that would eventually become the Family and Medical Leave Act, which today guarantees eligible workers 12 weeks of unpaid time off. To get the idea out into the world, they rolled out copies through a mimeograph machine.
Barring a total legislative meltdown, advocates believe some form of paid leave is going to be included in the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, even if the price tag comes down during negotiations. Given the growing consensus around paid leave, it may seem almost unremarkable, perhaps inevitable, that its time has come.
This was always the plan: to use states to make the case in Congress. “We never had the view that we were going to have 50 state programs,” Bravo said. “Always the goal was to pave the way toward a federal program.” Advocates have also used state-level wins to turn some Democratic lawmakers into champions, particularly those in key leadership positions. One of them is Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
It’s now one of his top priorities. At a rally in August, he told the assembled audience, “Our pledge to you is when Congress gets done this fall, family leave, paid family leave, will not be on the cutting-room floor.” Since the 1980s, families have increasingly relied on two incomes to get by, so paid leave came to be viewed not as a communist plot but something essential to modern life. Poll after poll shows support well over 70 percent, even among Republican voters.
Advocates and Democratic supporters speak in unison about what a paid leave program must include in order to get their support. They insist it can’t be whittled down to maternity or parental leave, which would be “insufficient,” Gillibrand said. It also has to include serious illnesses and disabilities of one’s own or a family member’s. The definition of family has to be expansive, and all workers must be eligible, whether gig workers or public-sector employees.
PaidLeaveforAll brycecovert Hope so, will believe it when I see it.
brycecovert This bill is going to die as people are waking up to the reality of harm it will cause as far as taxes go and strain on the debt it will cause as the dems want things not necessary in it that want get passed a yr from now when they lose the house.
brycecovert Keep in mind there's nothing for hourly workers. Not even health care or a retirement fund as an option to pay into.
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