Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has kicked up all sorts of controversy with her argument that career women can be their own worst enemy and should “lean in” more to their jobs and their ambitions. But the biggest, largely unspoken problem is not that she is elitist, or placing blame in the wrong place. [...]
Moms shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and the health of their families. But too often, companies that are fixated on their bottom lines force women to make this choice. I know. It happened to me. I became pregnant with my second child while I was working at a T-Mobile call center in Nashville, [...]
I have paid sick days but, sadly, know firsthand that we’re all at risk if we don’t ensure that everyone has this basic benefit. My mother, a Holocaust survivor, developed Parkinson’s disease and had a major stroke. She was hospitalized and then sent to a nursing home. The doctors told my father that there was [...]
It’s the stories that I keep coming back to. The story of a cook who was hit by a bus and hit with an eviction notice when he couldn’t pay his rent. The story of a mother who missed two weeks of work with illness and, five months later, still wasn’t back on her feet [...]
Susan, a single mother in Missouri, has a 10-year-old son who has pneumonia. She wants to stay home and care for him, but she cannot because her boss refuses to let her take the day off and she is terrified that, if she misses work, she will lose her job. She has no choice but [...]
Mickey Mouse now has a side gig as a corporate lobbyist?! Apparently. Because right now in Florida, in the final days of the state legislative session, the Orlando Sentinel reports that Disney is working to make it impossible for local Florida cities and counties to pass earned sick time laws. [1] In fact, as reported in [...]
The Healthy Families Act, a federal bill that would allow workers to earn seven paid sick days a year, was just introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Rosa DeLauro. Portland, Ore., was the most recent city to pass an ordinance granting workers earned paid sick leave. Will New York follow suit? The push for [...]
As President of the New York City Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO), I represent over 1.3 million workers across many industries and professions in the private sector, public sector and building and construction trades. Many of these workers have the benefit of collective bargaining agreements that stipulate for time off with pay during illness. However, there [...]
Sick days matter to me as a mom. I am a single mother so I have always been the parent who gets those dreaded calls — the daycare number pops up on your phone and your heart sinks into your stomach. “Your son is sick, you need to get him now.” My son is 8 [...]
As one of 11 kids in a migrant farm worker family, I toiled in the fields of California’s Central Valley under the bleakest of conditions in the 1950s and ‘60s, before Cesar Chavez’s movement offered us any relief. Getting sick or injured or showing symptoms of pesticide poisoning were not options. If they happened, you [...]
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