Cross-posted from the Family Values @ Work Blog. Listen up, working moms and dads: Rep. Eric Cantor has a deal for you – more time to spend with your family! What’s not to like? Except for one hitch: You get to spend more time with your family only after you’ve been forced to spend more [...]
This article originally appeared in Family Values @ Work. Home rule – guaranteed under the Florida state constitution — is a cherished conservative principle. It ensures the right of the people to determine and implement a public purpose at the grassroots level. So when is home rule not okay with conservative politicians connected to the [...]
I’m reading Junot Diaz’s new book and my head is swimming with images of Ana Iris, a Dominican mother of three who hasn’t seen her children in seven years. In order to feed them, she’s come to New York and works two jobs, one laundering bloody hospital sheets and the other filleting fish. Even though [...]
My favorite Mother’s day gifts from my sons were their original stories, songs and poems. But what I needed when they were infants and toddlers was something children can’t deliver: affordable time off when they were born and when they were sick. So for all those candidates and elected officials interested in the women’s vote [...]
More than a century ago, thousands of women walked out of garment shops – then one of the largest occupations for women – to march for better pay and working conditions. Their bravery inspired the annual celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8. Today garments are more likely to be sewn in Mexico than [...]
New York may be known for sex in the city, but Nancy Rankin at the Community Service Society of NY (CSSNY) has written a compelling report on a seamier topic: the unacceptably high percentages of New Yorkers without paid sick days, and the consequences for workers, their families, and for the economy. “Still Sick in [...]
Name a country where large numbers of women legally earn less than minimum wage and have to drag themselves to work sick or risk losing their job. To all the places that come to mind, add the United States of America. The workers in question are employed in one of the largest and fastest growing [...]
What’s most frightening about the movie Contagion is that it’s NOT science fiction. Flu epidemics are real, and they can spread quickly – especially in the United States, where 44 million people without paid sick days are forced to choose between their financial security and their health when they get sick. During the recent H1N1 [...]
Every night a second grade teacher washes the top cover of her reading couch because some child has had to come to class with the flu rather than staying home alone. A principal describes the number of high school students who miss school to stay home with a younger sibling because a parent can’t afford [...]
As the sheriff’s truck followed our van several blocks through Phoenix, I kept thinking what the sight of that vehicle would mean for Silvia or Esperanza or Alejandra or the other women we’d met: Visions of being yanked out of the van and ordered to produce papers. Picturing kids arriving to an empty house. Wondering [...]
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