My sister Americans:

The state of our union is strong.  Electing women to fully 51% of public offices has ushered in a new era in our great experiment in democracy. Legislators now put the common good ahead of their personal power and individual gain.  We, men and women together, make better policy decisions and make them faster than in any prior administration.  As a result, the cost of government has decreased dramatically and we have more funds available to put to good use in making our country smarter, healthier, more competitive, and happier than ever before.

In the past year, the U.S. Congress has passed legislation to make all of our lives easier, more meaningful and more fulfilling.  First, every U.S. worker is guaranteed seven days per year of paid sick leave. If you wake up with the flu, you can stay home and still pay the bills.  If your child comes home with strep throat, you can take her to the doctor and not risk your job.  You can count on getting your annual physical and lab tests, your dental checkups and your children’s vaccines without running the risk of losing your income, or putting off necessary medical care.

Second, paid family leave has become the law of the land. Your members of Congress know that people are born, people die, people get sick and recover, or get injured and get well.  The people who show up every day in our factories and our offices are the self-same people who are having babies, adopting children, caring for their chronically ill parents, their injured spouses, or disabled family members.  We have created a caring economy.  We can attend to the business of America while giving those who need it the care they require because we know that, throughout our lives, there is a time to work, and a time to care, a time to be born, and a time to die.  One day we are the caregiver, the next day we are the family member who needs help.  By accepting this reality and crafting public laws in harmony with it, we share in both the effort and the benefit, in covering for the absent worker, rocking the new baby, or holding the hand of a dying loved one.  We can’t do it all alone.  But from now on, we can do it all together.  Every American will have access to six months of family leave, and receive two-thirds of their wages until they can return to work.

If mothers or fathers wish to spend more time with a young child, they can count on earning Social Security credits for the period they spend with children younger than five for a maximum of six years across their lifetime. Until now, this critical period of personal investment eroded financial security after retirement.  Attributing half the median annual income to a stay-at-home parent will ensure that retirement benefits are not totally inadequate for those who contributed their care work rather than their compensated work to our collective well-being.  At long last, we have instilled family values into policies which actually value the family.

As if that weren’t enough to induce whiplash across this great country of ours, starting now, employed women will make as much money as employed men. Gender will no longer be an excuse for income inequality.  Fair pay puts more money into the economy pushing up job growth, and effectively ending our recession.  Fairness increases opportunity for women and for everyone.  Also, banks and financial institutions, until now directed primarily by men, are prohibited from taking excessive risks with other people’s money.  Therefore, invested savings will no longer be the private casino of a few.  Thoughtful and prudent administration by the most talented men and women will finally end the seesaw effect of market volatility.  When you save for retirement or your child’s education, the money you are counting on will be there.

Finally, workplace flexibility, alternative schedules and tele-work will become the rule rather than the exception. All parents who wish may enroll their pre-school children into accessible, affordable, high-quality childcare, whether it’s for standard business hours, a few days a week, or during a night shift or weekend.  Families will have both the support and the freedom they need to devise a routine that works for them, and to modify it as children get older or circumstances change.   Parents can pursue professional goals while being the mothers and fathers they want to be.  You will always be able to find clean and private places to breastfeed a baby, and other clean and private places to change a diaper.

And from this day forward, the number of women’s restrooms will be doubled in all public buildings, so that no woman ever, ever, has to stand in line again.

Thank you, citizens, for electing men and women in equal measure with a passion for public service and long range vision. Their commitment to our mutual well-being has made this possible.  We can look forward with confidence to generation upon generation of the greatest prosperity and the greatest opportunity possible.

God bless you and God bless the United States of America.  Good night.

Click here to read more posts from Your (Wo)manInWashington blog.

And we need your ears too! Tweet with us @MomsRising in conversation on Twitter starting at 9:00 PM EST tonight.

If you don’t tweet, please join the conversation right here on the blog! Leave your comments under this blogpost during and after the speech. Let us know what you heard and what you think of the speech. We’ll be reading every comment–we want to know what you care about, what you think about the President’s remarks and what our national priorities should be for families in 2012.

Photo by Emily Welsch.

“My grandmother was a domestic worker,” said actor Harold Perrineau (Lost), co-host of the #BeTheHelp Children’s Art Party presented by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) in Los Angeles this Saturday. “Today, we love the nanny who works with our family. We’re thrilled to support efforts to bring fairness to this important workforce.” Perrineau then smiled as his daughter raced by with a noisemaker in the kid-friendly playroom at the Treehouse Social Club.

Perrineau and his wife Brittany hosted the event along with fellow Hollywood parents Gina Torres (Suits) and Ann Lopez. In addition to the many excited children like Wynter, they were joined by Torres’ husband, Laurence Fishburne, Elisabeth Rohm (Law & Order), Kathleen Robertson (Boss), producer Chris Cowles, NDWA co-founder Ai-jen Poo, Aquilina Soriano of the Pilipino Workers Center, and Sarah Benor and me representing Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Association, a national network of families who employ domestic workers.

After jamming to a live band and enjoying glitter tattoos, children at the party painted large fabric panels with images and words that expressed their love for the nannies in their lives. These panels will be sewn together to create a banner that will be carried at the Children’s March for the CA Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (AB 889) in Sacramento on January 24th. This historic legislation, if passed, will end historical exclusions of domestic workers from most U.S. labor laws.

Ai-jen Poo talks with Harold Perrineau and Elisabeth Rohm.

The event is part of NDWA’s new #BeTheHelp campaign, launched in December to inspire viewers of the film The Help to take simple action to improve the lives and working conditions of domestic workers. NDWA has invited the entertainment community to help bring the real-life concerns of domestic workers into the pop-culture conversation, and Hollywood is answering their call.

Just last week, Octavia Spencer, one of the stars of The Help, used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to recognize today’s domestic workers; and in December, Participant Media partnered with the NDWA to release a series of videos featuring domestic workers discussing their work. The videos have been viewed and shared by over 80,000 people so far.

On Saturday, Perrineau, Torres and their friends joined this growing family of supporters who understand that the love, dedication and expertise domestic workers bring to families is invaluable. #BeTheHelp is an opportunity for parents and children to celebrate and honor these relationships.

To learn more about #BeTheHelp, visit www.domesticworkers.org. To learn more about how families and employers of domestic workers are involved, visit www.domesticemployers.org.

Originally posted on Huffington Post.

So reads a very small headline in the December 7th Washington Post.  The brief item states that a 38-year-old Texan mother of two was “unable to qualify for food stamps for months.”   She walked into the state welfare office, initiating a seven hour standoff with authorities, during which she shot her 12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son.  The she killed herself.

A spokesperson for the welfare office said the mother “didn’t submit enough information.”

Perhaps they feel like they have enough information now?

‘Til next time,

Your (Wo)Man in Washington

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A bona-fide mega-wealthy rich guy is Nick Hanauer. He’s got millions and millions and says he wants politicians and pundits bent on protecting his millions and millions to cease and desist calling him a Job Creator. He’s had great ideas. He’s taken big risks. He’s made smart business bets. And God bless him for it. But he says, “I’ve never been a job creator.”

He says if any jobs were created by his ideas and risks and bets, it’s because there were customers for what he was selling. Without customers, there’s no one to buy your product or service. And if customers don’t have jobs and decent pay to go along with those jobs, they can’t buy what you’re selling.

Customers with a paycheck create jobs. And when customers lose their jobs and their paychecks, giving all the tax breaks and tax credits and tax loopholes in the world to the mega-wealthy won’t create a consumer.

In fact, giving the mega-wealthy more may actually mean you’ve given them some loophole that pays them to create jobs… in China.

It may mean tax rules and loopholes lead Big Business to see it in their best interest to lay people off and ask those who remain to do the work of two, or cut the pay or their benefits of frightened employees who know that there’s a waiting line of unemployed who are giving up hope that they will find something. Anything. Including your job.

In short, the mega-wealthy are going to protect their bottom lines, and even as we speak, they are fighting for more and more ways to maximize their profits, jobs be damned. If profits increase by moving jobs to another country where they can pay people starvation wages while damaging someone else’s environment with impunity, why wouldn’t they do it?

One can make the case that the American worker is as much a victim of mega-wealth as the beneficiary. Any second-grader could do the math. The rich have been getting richer, and as tax breaks for big business and big wealth have exploded beyond reason, jobs here have been shrinking, not growing.

High employment and millions without a good paycheck are the problems to be solved here. Not how to filter more riches into the pockets of the “haves”.

Five million good people; people who were working hard; people who want to work hard again, have not been able to find a job. Their unemployment benefits are about to run out.

President Obama has proposed an extension of their federal unemployment benefits – benefits that are providing no more than modest food on the table and a roof over a family’s head. But he can’t get the votes he needs from the folks who would take a bullet for the Job Creators.

Here’s something that may seem counter-intuitive to the “Rich People Are Job Creators” security detail.

People on unemployment benefits are not rich people. But every penny they get in these vital benefits is spent on something that creates a job for someone else here at home. The grocery store clerk. The electric company meter reader. The gas station cashier. People on unemployment insurance aren’t taking European vacations.

They’re living check to check while they hit the pavement, ready to take any honest job that comes along. And every dime they spend on what they need to get by until the next job interview is spent in their communities, keeping their friends and neighbors working.

Five million men and women are in danger of losing these modest benefits unless Congress acts on the president’s proposal.

Some (ironically the “Rich People Are Job Creators” guys) want trade offs, demanding cuts in public projects and services to “balance” the dollars it will take to extend the unemployment benefits.

from Mother Jones

Cuts that would lay off special education teachers, construction workers, health care workers, public safety workers, park rangers, cancer researchers, librarians – their cuts would result in the loss of government and contract workers, perhaps in the millions.

This is crazy. We would throw millions of men and women out of good, middle-class jobs to extend the unemployment benefits of millions of men and women looking for good, middle-class jobs?

Alternate proposals to ask the mega-wealthy to even approximate a shared sacrifice in a modest tax increase are met with screams that we must put our patriotic muscle behind protecting our national Job Creators.

Indeed, mega-wealth has been protected by policy design, part of that design being to scream only carefully crafted words like Job Creators to replace less poetic verbiage like Rich Guys Who Don’t Pay Their Fair Share. To be against the protection of mega-wealth is to be against America. For thirty years, politicians have been more than patriotic.

For thirty years, the current rules have benefited the top 1%, of Rich Guys. The current rules have made it possible for the top 1% of incomes to go up 275%. Middle-class incomes went up 40% in that time period. Poor incomes went up 18%.

I say the Job Creators are the 99% who clip discount coupons from the Sunday newspaper so they can get 4 cans for $1. Job Creators are the middle-class and the poor and the folks scrapping by on unemployment checks who buy shoes for their kids and oatmeal and a bus pass. They’re customers.

And this country would be in a whole different position if we had understood that the middle-class and making sure they have what they need to stay in the middle-class – a decent paycheck, a good public school for their kids, retirement security – is what made this country an economic power in the first place. What’s happening is a travesty, and I’m trying not to become violent.

I believe in the peaceful, political process, and I’ll do it.

I will call my member of Congress to support the President’s plan to extend unemployment benefits and funding for more jobs. I will talk to my friends and neighbors to call their members of Congress. But I wish I could do more.

I wish I could slap every single one of those pundits, pontificators and politicians who’s forgotten that the primary Job Creators in this or any other country are millions and millions of ordinary, middle-class hard-working people with good jobs.

Lily Eskelsen is the Vice President of the National Education Association, publisher of the education blog Lily’s Blackboard as well as a contributing blogger to MomsRising.org. Prior to her prominent position at NEA, she had a successful decades-long career as a teacher. Among her many achievements, she was named Utah’s Teacher of the Year in 1989.

Moms and dads are working hard to make this a joyous holiday season and year. Every cent counts when it comes to the basics, like putting food on the table and buying winter clothes and shoes for growing kids.

Unfortunately, our budgets are possibly about to get even tighter.  Ouch!

If Congress doesn’t extend the payroll tax “holiday” by the time it expires at the end of this year, most paychecks in America will shrink. [1] What tax “holiday?” This tax holiday was put in place in 2010 to stimulate the economy.  According to the New York Times, if the payroll tax holiday were extended, “the average working family would have close to $1,500 a year more to spend, according to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.”[2] And, on the other hand, if Congress refuses to act, then middle-class families are going to get hit with a tax increase at the worst possible time. [3]

Raising taxes should start with millionaires and billionaires, and with the many giant corporations that somehow manage to evade all taxes, but not with struggling families. [4] Yet, some Grinches in Congress are standing in the way of real economic recovery for working families and for our national economy.

*Tell your member of Congress to extend the payroll tax holiday so that working families can put food on the table and also give the economy the boost it needs!

http://action.momsrising.org/letter/extendpayrollholiday/

http://action.momsrising.org/letter/extendpayrollholiday/

[3] http://action.momsrising.org/go/1392?ak_proof=1&akid=3026.2.5f_n57&t=10

[4] The Washington Post

[5] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

[6] The Fiscal Times Goldman Sachs Report

[7] Moody’s Analytics

[8] Mother Jones

[9] New York Times – August 2011

[10] Washington Post

Prepare to be impressed with yourselves, girls.  The US Census Bureau just put out new numbers on maternity leave and employment which show we’ve spent the past 40 years investing wisely in ourselves.  First time mothers are more likely to have at least an undergrad degree by the time they give birth, now at an average age of 25.  In fact, if a woman delays her first birth until age 30, she’ll probably join the 43% of mothers with a college degree.  Teen pregnancy has dropped from 36% in 1970 to 21% in 2007.  Births to women over age 35 have gone up by a factor of eight.  Delaying pregnancy and gaining education are two of the best things women can do for themselves and their children, and we’re doing it.

Just about three quarters of new mothers are employed before they give birth.  More than half are working full-time.  Sixty-six percent work during their pregnancy, but among the over-30 first-time  mothers, 80% worked while pregnant.  Overall, women are working much longer into their pregnancies.  Once they deliver, about half receive some kind of paid leave, but how much pay and for how long is not recorded, as there is no requirement that they receive any paid maternity leave at all.  College-educated, older, and full-time employed mothers are the most likely to use some form of paid leave.  Having only a high school diploma, working part-time and being a younger mother are characteristics suggesting paid maternity leave is not an option.

If a woman was employed before giving birth, there’s a 59% chance she’ll be clocking back in by the time her baby is 3 months old.  Almost three quarters of new mothers are back 6 months after, and nearly 80% are back one year after the birth.  Obviously, those most dependent upon their own earnings  returned to work the most quickly, but those lacking a high school education are not likely to return to work even when the baby celebrates his or her first birthday.  Women with college degrees or higher, and who had some paid maternity leave, are likely back by the five month mark.  Most women who go back to work do so at the same employer, and 75% of them work the same number of hours they did before becoming mothers.

Taken all together, pregnant women are now more likely to be better educated, older, and employed when they give birth.  They go back to work in a matter of weeks or months after delivering, and they mostly stick to their pre-baby work hours.  Considering how a baby turns your life and your household upside down, that’s nothing short of extraordinary.  Notwithstanding the fact that the employment world was most definitely not designed with us in mind, and still stiffs us on wages, we continue to show up, work hard, deliver the goods, and push ourselves, all while keeping the lid on the pot at home.  All this, and without the supports the rest of the modern world sees fit to provide, like paid leave for both parents without regard to income level, decent childcare, part-time employment standards, alternative schedules, and the ability to ask for a flexible schedule without fear of being fired.  Not to mention pension credits for the years spent caregiving.  And yet, mothers are the ones who say they feel guilty.  Astonishing!  Where’s the public outrage?  Do you feel even just the slightest bit taken advantage of?

“Til next time,

Your (Wo)Man in Washington

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Children are welcomed as important members of the community with child safe zones, play areas, and in one case, even a stroller brigade.

What is so difficult about having work that pays a living wage, health care that is affordable and providing our children with quality early education.

The numbers are dismal in our State of California. We have received among the lowest grades in the country for meeting the basic needs of our children. According to the Children Now Report Card, California earned a D+ in health coverage, a C- in early learning and development, a D in K-12 education and a C+ in infant health.

We have some powerful advocates in State Government with a commitment to quality, affordable, accessible early education, and keep the issue top-of-mind in legislation and in budget battles. The voices of parents and teachers and advocates have been heard and heeded. Still, the future we want for our children, our communities and ourselves is still out of reach.

Parents have a chance to step out into a very public and nationally televised platform. Unlike hearings and working groups that take place during traditional working hours, parents can participate after work hours and on the weekend.

Children rely upon each of us to speak out on their behalf. At the rally in SF I saw a mother with her child holding a sign, “Too Small to Fail.” Let’s speak up.

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem has remarked that “[i]gnorance is the root of oppression.”  So it is important that Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit legal organization working for women and girls, acknowledges this twentieth anniversary of the testimony of Anita Hill before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about sexual harassment she experienced from then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Here’s recent history our children need to know:  In 1991, Hill was a 35-year old lawyer who had worked for Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  As a key witness at his nomination hearings, she accused Thomas of making sexual advances and offensive statements while he was her supervisor.  Thomas denied the accusations, and the controversy gripped the country.  While some accused Hill of lying to derail the nomination of a conservative justice, many of us old enough to have watched the hearings remember that we believed Anita Hill.  She was grace under fire.  She had nothing to gain.  Her claims were not only plausible; they mirrored the experience of thousands of women in the American workplace.

While Thomas was ultimately confirmed to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52-48, Anita Hill’s act of speaking out against sexual harassment has proven to be a watershed moment for many women across different generations.  Women across the country, angered by the treatment of Hill by many of the 10 male members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed their frustration at the polls in 1992.  In what became known as “The Year of the Woman,” four new women were elected to the U.S. Senate, more than in any previous decade.  Those elected included California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), the Senate’s first African-American woman.  Suddenly, legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which had difficulty gaining traction when it was first introduced in 1990, found overwhelming support in both the House and Senate and sailed to passage in 1994.

Anita Hill’s ability to galvanize the women’s movement was in full force at a conference co-sponsored by ERA at Hunter College in New York City last month — “Sex, Power and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later.”  The conference brought together Hill, those close to her during her Senate ordeal, moms, pioneers of the women’s movement, cutting-edge advocates, academics, and the newest generation of feminists.  Speakers included Yale Law Professor Judith Resnick and Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, movement icons Catharine MacKinnon and Gloria Steinem, advocates such as Joanne Smith from Girls for Gender Equity and domestic worker organizer Ai-Jen Poo, and compelling academics including Kimberle Crenshaw from UCLA Law School and Melissa Harris-Perry from Tulane University.  The conference was energized by the next generation of women advocates, from feminist teen bloggers who created the “FBomb” to young women tackling street harassment through an organization called “Hollaback!”  This cross-generational conference cast a spotlight on the vast contributions of Hill’s testimony to advancing women’s rights and drawing attention to sexual harassment in work, school and on the streets at a national level.

For some of us, the face of Anita Hill testifying before a panel of men about sexual harassment she endured by a Supreme Court nominee feels like yesterday.  While Hill’s courage in stepping forward with her story raised awareness about sexual harassment in the workplace, it certainly did not end it.

Unfortunately, 20 years later, there are many new faces of Anita Hill — women who are far less privileged than Hill was and for whom sexual assault is, quite simply, a term of employment.  Callers to ERA’s national, toll-free advice and counseling hotline complain of sexual harassment in work and schools more than any other form of mistreatment.  ERA represents women janitors and restaurant workers who have been sexually assaulted by their supervisors.  Each day, we counsel women farmworkers, retail workers, financial planners, firefighters, teachers, factory workers, doctors, scientists, tradeswomen, lawyers, hotel workers and students not yet in their teens who experience sexual harassment, day in and day out.

Immigrant women workers are most vulnerable to sexual harassment.  “Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry,” a report recently issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, noted that 80% of the Mexican immigrant women surveyed said they had experienced sexual harassment while working in the fields. That compares to roughly half of all women in the U.S. workforce who say they have experienced at least one incident.  This country’s two and half million female domestic workers (many of whom are immigrant women) similarly face repeated and severe sexual harassment without recourse because they are excluded from most labor protections. Poverty, cultural constraints, language barriers, undocumented status, fear, shame, lack of information about their rights, and a dearth of resources to assist them have made it incredibly challenging for these women to come forward to speak up about the sexual harassment and sexual assault that they suffer on the job.

The twentieth anniversary of Hill’s testimony creates a moment of opportunity to seriously reflect on the predicament of the new faces of Anita Hill and implement a plan of action.  We must adopt a holistic preventative and remedial approach for women that prioritizes their safety at work and their need for a job and income security while factoring in vulnerabilities such as language and immigration status.  ERA is forging ahead with this approach.  In addition to pursuing litigation on behalf of women workers who have experienced sexual harassment and/or assault at work, ERA is developing live clinics and Know Your Rights trainings.  ERA is also forming exciting partnerships with organizations, such as San Francisco Women Against Rape and immigrant women’s rights groups, to address the myriad emotional, social and legal issues faced by women who report harassment, including undocumented women workers.  ERA needs your support for this focus of our Marginalized Women Worker Campaign. Click here to learn about how you can help.

Last week’s policy briefings included one on the state of early education and child care programs in the U.S.  The number of spots available across the country is nowhere near the number of children that need to be looked after while their parents are at work.  For many families, if care can be located, it is hugely expensive.  As a result, a vast number of children are left with unregulated or uncertified caregivers, making little more than minimum wage, with no access to paid sick leave or employer-sponsored health insurance.  Some families turn to uncompensated family members, such as grandparents or other relatives, who may or may not welcome filling that role.  If that person, or a paid caregiver, gets sick or has to take time to attend to personal matters, the fragile care arrangement can quickly fall apart, leaving parents stranded.  Typically, a breakdown in child care logistics falls squarely into the mother’s lap.

There are several reasons for this mess.  For one thing, the pervasive neglect of all matters pertaining primarily to women on the political level explains why the passing decades have seen no improvement. For another, unlike most other modern nations, the U.S. leaves preschool funding up to individual families.  Available resources are not equally distributed throughout society, so families will hire nannies or pony up a sum equal to a  year’s college tuition for center-based care.  Others will write a check to the care provider as big or bigger than their monthly mortgage or rental payment.  Some will qualify for subsidies through public funding, but only 1 out of 6 eligible children will actually get the care they need through these programs for low income families.  If you imagine that all public schools in America were entirely paid for by the parents of the children that attend them, you’ll see how we’ve set up our current early education/child care system.  It’s ridiculous to expect that private funds alone can sustainably support quality care for preschool age children.

Many Americans want to believe in hard work breeding success, competition resulting in economic vitality, and an unregulated market efficiently satisfying  the needs of consumers.  There’s significant evidence to the contrary, however.  The demand for healthcare goes unmet for about 50 million Americans.  Women’s superior education and equal work force penetration have yet to reward them with equal wages or workplace policies that align with their disproportionate caregiving responsibilities.  And the market has utterly failed to provide anywhere near the quantity of affordable, quality childcare that families demand.  So, parents (usually mothers) are sidelined from the workforce or working fewer hours in an attempt to provide care.  As a result, their economic security, and that of their household, is in peril.  The optimum opportunity to position a child for maximum development and school readiness is lost.  In the long run, society will pay far more for poorer health, poor educational outcomes, lower lifetime earnings, and greater social problems such as incarceration and early pregnancy.

You can watch a video of the New America Foundation briefing I attended right here.  Fast forward to 1 hour 19 minutes in to hear Your (Wo)Man in Washington challenge the panel with a provocative question on mothers’ rights.

‘Til next time,

Your (Wo)Man in Washington

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