Jan. 22, 2020
PL+US advocate Jessica Dimmock wrote an open letter to Hollywood’s Directors Guild calling for parental benefits for all directors, particularly women.
Among the achievements and accolades that the photojournalist and director Jessica Dimmock has amassed are three World Press Photo prizes, an Emmy nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and membership in the exclusive international photo agency VII.
In September 2017, Dimmock reached another milestone, when she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Roxanne. But after taking time to recover and care for her infant, Dimmock fell short of the yearly wages required to keep her health benefits with the Directors Guild of America. In April 2018, she lost her coverage.
READ MORE >>
Jan 22, 2020
Led by PL+US advocate Jessica Dimmock, major Hollywood directors team up to change policies for parents in Hollywood.
Greta Gerwig, Amy Poehler, Ava DuVernay, Reese Witherspoon and a host of other Hollywood names have co-signed a letter urging the Directors Guild of America to make accommodations for new and expectant parents.
The letter, written by documentary filmmaker Jessica Dimmock, asks that the guild extend the qualifying period in which members must meet a minimum earnings threshold in order to qualify for health insurance. Such a policy, if implemented, would not provide paid leave per se, but would enable new parents to take time off from work without fear of losing their health insurance coverage.
READ MORE >>
Jan 13, 2020
PL+US surveyed all the presidential candidates on their paid leave proposals and scored their plans.
The question of how to support Americans who are juggling caring for their families with the demands of paid work is getting more airtime in this presidential contest than any in history.
The politics of these issues, however, can be surprising. Candidates who have taken more moderate stances on other topics like Medicare for All, such as Pete Buttigieg, have come out with bold proposals on affordable child care and paid family leave. The proposals made by the more left-leaning candidates, meanwhile, are in some cases less ambitious.
READ MORE >>
Oct 11, 2019
PL+US Founder and Executive Director Katie Bethell answers FAQs about paid leave.
The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not mandate employers give paid time off to new mothers and fathers or other workers who need to step away to care for themselves or loved ones. When you compare the U.S. to Bulgaria, which gives 59 weeks of maternity leave at 90 percent salary, plus an additional year to be split between parents, or Norway (49 weeks), India (26 weeks), Chile (18 weeks), Iraq (14 weeks), our country looks downright pathetic.
So why is the U.S. so far behind the rest of the world, and what are members of Congress, presidential contenders, companies, and individuals doing about it? To find out, Marie Claire asked Katie Bethell, founder and executive director of PL+US (Paid Leave for the United States)—a national campaign to win paid family leave by 2022—to answer some of the most pressing FAQs about paid family leave.
READ MORE >>
Sept 20, 2019
PL+US Action Fund’s Daria Dawson explains why paid leave isn’t only about new parents, but crucial for those with chronic illnesses.
On February 5, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the legislation that allows employees unpaid leave for medical or family events. Only 13-years-old at the time, I had no idea what FMLA meant or why it seemed important. Furthermore, I had no idea of the endless significance of the legislation in my own life until three years later.
In 1996, when I was in the eleventh grade, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation of the digestive tract, which can lead to abdominal pain, severe diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss and malnutrition.
READ MORE >>
Aug 12, 2019
PL+US and the Georgetown Center for Poverty & Inequality released a report on the paid leave policies that everybody in the US needs.
Hear me out. I'm not suggesting that new mothers don't need time off. In fact, I'm arguing just the opposite. They need more time off and it should be paid, ideally at 100% pay. But in 2019, parental leave should not only be available or expected for birthing mothers, it should be available for all caregivers.
It's been 26 years since the initial passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act—the purpose of which was "to balance the demands of the workplace with the needs of families, to promote the stability and economic security of families, and to promote national interests in preserving family integrity" It was a noble pursuit on behalf of Congress but one that required states and corporations to shoulder the financial responsibility of providing paid leave.
READ MORE >>
April 19, 2018
PL+US Founder and Executive Director Katie Bethell picked for Fortune’s annual list of leaders stepping up to meet today’s challenges.
Though it seems unlikely, Tim Cook and Indira Jaising have something in common besides membership in Fortune’s 2018 ranking of the World’s Greatest Leaders. Cook (No. 14) is the wealthy CEO of Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company on earth; Jaising (No. 20) is an Indian lawyer who cofounded an NGO called Lawyers Collective, which promotes human rights issues. Yet they share this trait: Both have multiplied their organizations’ effectiveness by harnessing the power of unbundling. Following their example is a new imperative for the best leaders.
READ MORE >>
April 20, 2018
How PL+US united with Wal-Mart employees to win change at the corporation.
Carolyn Davis insists she’s a terrible public speaker. “Oh, my goodness, it’s like being on the chopping block!” says Davis, an associate at Walmart’s New Bern, N.C., store. It took hours of practice, encouragement from coworkers, and “determination,” she says, to get her ready to address 15,000 people at the University of Arkansas’s Bud Walton Arena last June.
The occasion was Walmart’s annual investors’ meeting, which traditionally draws a huge crowd to the retailer’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters. Few in the audience had blue-collar jobs like Davis’s; she spends her workdays tracking inventory and stocking shelves. Still, as a shareholder, Davis, who goes by Cat, had a right to speak. She’s also a mother of two, and she had come to deliver a petition—signed by more than 100,000 associates—to urge Walmart to give workers like her the same family-leave benefits that executives get.
READ MORE >>
March 1, 2018
Katie Bethell, PL+US Founder and Executive Director, on changing workplace policies to better support parents.
Walmart will soon offer better parental leave than most U.S. companies. The new policy for biological parents, announced in January, will go into effect on March 1, according to a company spokesperson. The company already has rolled out a more generous policy for adoptive parents.
This matters because America remains one of just three countries without paid maternity leave, and Walmart is America’s biggest employer. With 1.5 million U.S. employees, its workforce is bigger than the populations of roughly a dozen U.S. states. While the policy only applies to full-time workers, that is still hundreds of thousands of people.
READ MORE >>
Jan 23, 2018
An op-ed by PL+US Founder and Executive Director Katie Bethell on how parental leave can address the leadership gap for women.
While the gruesome details vary – massages in hotel rooms, the button under the desk, men literally just showing their penises in the office – every #MeToo story has something in common: powerful men working in industries with very few women in top leadership positions.
As the #MeToo conversation begins to turn towards solutions, we need to implement policies that address the barriers to women leading. While women and men launch careers in equal numbers, starting at around 30 their upward trajectories to leadership start to seriously and increasingly diverge, with women falling behind and men moving ahead. There are, of course, many confluent factors – bias, rampant harassment, lack of mentorship – that contribute to this widening gap, but one stands out: caregiving.
READ MORE >>
Jan 23, 2018
How PL+US helped advocate Sarah Johal transform her workplace policy at Lyft.
With little fanfare, Lyft recently significantly expanded the amount of time its workers will be able to take paid family and medical leave, one of a small but growing number of U.S. companies stepping up to meet the needs of the modern workforce. Though a majority of children are now being raised in families where all parents work, only a handful—14 percent—have paid family leave.
At Lyft, it all started with one woman, and one meeting.
READ MORE >>
May 18, 2017
A report from PL+US found that among some of the largest employers in the U.S., paid leave benefits are largely reserved for salaried employees.
“The people who most need paid family leave are the least likely to have it.”
That’s according to a report released Wednesday by nonprofit Paid Leave for the United States (PLUS), which found that among some of the largest employers in the U.S., paid leave benefits are largely reserved for salaried employees. And that’s not just the case for those working for the big-name brands: A November Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that just 6% of low-wage workers in the U.S. have access to paid family leave.
READ MORE >>
May 17, 2017
A report from PL+US shows that the vast majority of low-wage workers still have no access to paid leave at all.
The 2016 campaign was full of firsts: the first time a woman earned a major party’s nomination for president, for example, and the first time paid leave became a major campaign issue. Hillary Clinton’s push for things like paid leave and affordable child care was a natural extension of issues she’d worked on her whole career, while Donald Trump’s interest in the topic stemmed from his daughter, Ivanka. Regardless, visibility was progress — especially in light of a new report from Paid Leave for the United States, which shows that the vast majority of low-wage workers still have no access to paid leave at all.
READ MORE >>
Nov 16, 2016
A 2016 report from PL+US finds many employers lagging in paid leave benefits.
While a number of major companies have made significant strides in providing paid family leave this year, and the benefits of these policies are widely reported, a majority of the U.S.’s top employers still lag far behind.
According to a new study by Paid Leave for the United States (PL+US), a national nonprofit advocating for paid family leave, two-thirds of the country’s 60 biggest employers (so ranked by the number of U.S. employees) have either no paid leave policy, or refused to disclose their paid leave policy.
READ MORE >>
Sept. 15, 2016
An op-ed by PL+US Founder and Executive Director Katie Bethell on the Trump Administration’s paid leave proposal.
Donald Trump’s announcement of a paid maternity leave policy this week–and Ivanka Trump’s refusal to go into details in an interview with Cosmopolitan yesterday – brought the issue into the national political spotlight. It also marks the first time a Republican presidential nominee has addressed the growing public demand for paid family leave policy–even as Trump’s proposal is drawing tough and important questions about what American families really need.
READ MORE >>
