Dec 02, 2021
A group of New York leaders and organizations are urging for paid leave to be included in recent legislation passed in the U.S. House. On December 2, a group of 785 leaders and organizations released a letter sent to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, urging the Senator to include paid leave in the final Build Back Better legislative package.
In the letter, the group discussed the value of paid leave benefits in New York. The group claimed that “paid leave is an effective and necessary tool for public health and for our economic security and growth.”
They stated that before the COVID-19 pandemic, workers and their families lost $22.5 billion in wages each year on average due to a lack of paid leave. Adding that aid leave policies can support work and labor force strength and improve worker retention.
Dec 02, 2021
New York officials, businesses, advocacy groups, and celebrities are pressuring Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to ensure a new paid leave entitlement remains part of the nearly $2 trillion social spending and tax package that passed the House.
More than 750 people and organizations signed a letter dated Thursday—accompanied by a full-page ad in the New York Times—urging the senior senator from New York to keep the paid family and medical leave proposal in the Democrats’ legislation (H.R. 5376), which also includes a sweeping mix of climate change, tax, health-care, and education measures.
Dec 02, 2021
In a full-page ad in Thursday’s New York Times, more than 750 New York politicians, leaders and community organizations signed a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to ensure that paid family and medical leave remains part of the Build Back Better Act.
“We thank you for your leadership to fight for working families in New York and across the country; the passage of paid leave this year would cement that legacy,” the letter reads. “Simply put, on your watch, paid leave must not be left on the cutting room floor. We believe that every working person in New York and beyond deserves time to care for themselves and their loved ones regardless of where they live or work.”
THE TIMES OF ISRAEL: Jewish activists and others urge Chuck Schumer to ensure paid leave legislation
Dec 02, 2021
Nearly 800 political leaders, Jewish community activists and other prominent New Yorkers send a letter to US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urging him to ensure that paid leave remains in the final Build Back Better legislative package that passed the US House earlier this month as negotiations over the legislation continue in the Senate.
“Simply put, on your watch, paid leave must not be left on the cutting room floor. We believe that every working person in New York and beyond deserves time to care for themselves and their loved ones regardless of where they live or work,” the letter reads.
Dec 02, 2021
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is facing pressure from a coalition in his state to preserve paid family leave in the Democrats’ massive social spending and climate package, an endeavor that appears unlikely due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)
The coalition of more than 750 New York lawmakers, organizations and industry leaders penned an open letter to Schumer on Thursday urging him to “put your strongest-possible support behind” paid family and medical leave to be included in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act. The House passed the legislation last month.
Dec 01, 2021
Advocates are mounting a final push to ensure that Senate Democrats don’t strip the national paid leave program out of the party’s $2 trillion climate and social spending bill.
Their efforts are aimed squarely at Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), the lone Democratic holdout who has insisted that paid leave should be passed in a bipartisan way, and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who controls whether paid leave will be included in the Senate bill that will go to the floor this month.
Dec 01, 2021
A proposal for federal paid family leave is at risk of ending up on the chopping block as Washington lawmakers work to finalize new social spending legislation.
Cutting the plan out of the Build Back Better package could cripple Democrats’ chances in key Senate races next year, advocates warn.
Eight states will have battleground contests between Republicans and Democrats in 2022, according to recent research from Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm, and Paid Leave for All Action, an advocacy organization. That includes Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Dec 01, 2021
When paid family leave was briefly dropped from congressional Democrats’ massive social spending and climate bill earlier this fall, the outcry was swift.
Women and caregivers suddenly were calling lawmakers and advocates, and they were sharing their own stories on social media in huge numbers, said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All, a national advocacy group, during a virtual event with reporters on Tuesday.
“I think people assumed this was a given, that why would you drop paid leave in a pandemic?” Huckelbridge said. “And when that happened, there was outrage.”
Nov 30, 2021
A top adviser to the Duchess of Sussex MEGHAN MARKLE has been privately helping the behind-the-scenes effort to pass universal paid leave legislation — with one of the groups she consults for engaging in talks with the White House.
GENEVIEVE ROTH, who runs Invisible Hand, a “social impact and culture change agency," is a senior strategic adviser for the Archewell Foundation, Markle and Prince HARRY’s charitable organization. Roth has also been working with PL+US, a nonprofit advocacy group campaigning for universal paid leave to be included in the social spending package, aka Build Back Better, that Democrats are hoping to pass through budget reconciliation this month.
Nov 30, 2021
Despite his public opposition to expansive, taxpayer-funded paid family and medical leave, proponents believe they can get West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin on board in a compromise deal for President Joe Biden’s costly “Build Back Better” agenda.
Key advocates for a scaled-back, four-week leave plan included in the House-passed bill suggested today that Manchin is open to supporting it, especially since it is one of a few elements of the bill that all partisan groups agree on. Publicly, he hasn't indicated any change, however.
Nov 24, 2021
In Congress, the Senate is weighing whether four weeks paid leave should stay in the Build Back Better Act that House Democrats passed last week. Meanwhile, Ohio House Democrats are renewing their advocacy for paid family leave at the Statehouse.
"Paid leave is too important to be luck of the draw," said Heather Whaling of Columbus.
Whaling said she first felt the impact of paid family leave as a new mom. In 2013, she gave birth to her son, Evan, five weeks early. Evan then spent the first two weeks of his life in the NICU.
"And during that time, I was able to stay singularly focused on getting him healthy so we could get him home," Whaling said.
That is because she is fortunate enough to own her own business.
Nov 22, 2021
Paid leave has been on the minds of advocates in Ohio for many years, and they’re seeing the possibility for better leave options as federal legislation heads from the U.S. House to the Senate.
At a meeting of the Ohio Children’s Legislative Caucus, members of the General Assembly heard from those who want to see not only federal movement in the “Build Back Better” spending bill on paid leave, but also from the state level, where several other states have started giving workers leave separate from the federal FMLA leave, which is unpaid.
Nov 19, 2021
It’s been a contentious battle to get paid family leave included in social spending legislation being debated on Capitol Hill.
To that end, Democrats notched a win on Friday when the House of Representatives passed a version of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation that includes the hotly contested proposal.
The U.S. is one of the few developed countries without a paid family leave policy.
Democratic lawmakers have sought to change that. Their proposal calls for four weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers, whether they are employees or independent contractors.
Nov 16, 2021
Congress is close to passing the Build Back Better plan, and policy groups are hopeful a provision to ensure more Ohioans can access paid leave will remain. The social-spending plan initially offered 12 weeks of paid leave for workers, which has since been scaled down to four weeks.
Elizabeth Brown, executive director of the Ohio Women's Public Policy Network, explained 72% of Ohio households with kids have two parents working, and one in four moms return to their jobs within 10 days after having a baby. She noted paid leave is not just about working mothers, but also working daughters. "Workers in our economy are not just responsible for providing care for their children but also their parents, their spouses, their siblings as our economy ages," Brown observed. "And women's wages support their household. In Ohio, 55% of mothers are key family breadwinners."
Nov 15, 2021
Longtime advocates of paid family and medical leave are scrambling to make sure that the long-sought Democratic priority remains in a massive social and environmental spending bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revived it. But the outcome will likely come down to the support of one man.
The one Senate Democrat who opposes including paid leave in the spending package is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate who has used his leverage in the evenly divided chamber to whittle away some of his party’s most ambitious and costly policy proposals.
Through cable TV ads, personal conversations on the Senate floor — even a banner at a West Virginia University football game — Democrats and advocates are pleading with Manchin to support the paid leave proposal in the broader $1.85 trillion legislation. The effort is expected to intensify over the coming days and weeks as the House prepares to pass the massive bill and send it to the Senate.
Nov 15, 2021
By most accounts, this seemed to be the year that a federal paid family leave policy would finally become a reality. The pandemic had been the most powerful indicator yet that American workers—only 23% of whom had access to paid leave—desperately needed the financial support. Many low-wage workers, who are disproportionately people of color, could not take sick days without sacrificing their paychecks. (In 2020, barely 8% of those workers had any paid family leave.) Even the business community had, at last, come around to the idea of national paid leave, in part because many companies had reaped the benefits of the temporary paid leave provisions passed in response to the pandemic.
And women had dropped out of the workforce at staggering rates, beset by job losses and the unequal burden of caregiving responsibilities. “We always talk about [paid leave] as an issue for all workers, not just women,” says Sherry Leiwant, the copresident of advocacy group A Better Balance. “But the fact of the matter is that the job of caring for family has fallen on women.”