It’s a vast, systemic issue. Women’s legal rights – at the moment of hiring, when they receive their paycheck, when they get pregnant, after they give birth – are consistently trampled, and many of them feel powerless to fight back. A recent WSJ/NBC poll found that an overwhelming 84 per cent of American women perceive bias in the workplace.

They can’t, like Sandberg and the privileged few at the top of the corporate heap, demand pregnancy parking or walk out the door at 5:30 pm every night. They can’t “lean in” to a workplace that offers no flexibility, refuses to pay them as much as their male peers, and reminds them at every turn that getting pregnant and having a baby is a huge liability.

Their experience is more like the woman who received a FedEx envelope from her employer shortly after she announced she was pregnant and learned she was being dismissed because, the letter explained, she would no longer “be able to fulfill [her] obligations.”

Or like the hospital employee, a new mother, who was reduced to pumping breastmilk in a bathroom stall after she was told: “If a patient with a colostomy bag can train his bowels to sh*t at regular hours, then you can train your boobs to pump after-hours.”

Or like the nursing home activity director who was forced out when she was 28 weeks pregnant because she had a history of miscarriages and requested help with the more physically strenuous parts of her job.

At our organization, A Better Balance, we offer free legal services to women who feel their workplace rights are being disregarded and hear stories like this all time. Even though it is illegal to fire someone because she is pregnant, we routinely see women forced out when they need a minor accommodation to stay healthy and on the job—and many courts are letting employers get away with it.  When there is an obvious legal violation, many women don’t take action because they don’t know they can or because litigation is expensive, time consuming, and very public.

Pregnancy discrimination is a growing problem nationwide, leading to job losses and economic instability for women and families when they need financial security the most.  Women who are pregnant or have children are less likely to be recommended for hire and promotion and, in most cases, are offered lower salaries than their male counterparts.  And rigid, inflexible workplaces, coupled with a lack of supportive leave policies, make it impossible for many workers, particularly those with the fewest resources, to cope with child care or family needs.

Can women do more to help themselves? Absolutely they can. At A Better Balance, we routinely advise women on overcoming adversity in the workplace – whether it is pay discrimination or resistance to a pregnancy or the needs of a new baby.  We seek to empower women to advocate for themselves and hold on to the financial security that comes with their jobs.

But let’s be clear. Combating discrimination is not something women can accomplish alone. Even Sandberg, to her credit, has acknowledged that her argument does not apply to all women.  Employers and government leaders must “lean in” too.  Employers should demonstrate a real commitment to gender equity and root out policies that allow bias against women to persist. Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has taken an important step by expanding parental leave for her employees. Others should follow her example.

Most importantly, we need concrete action from our legislators to level the playing field and ensure equal opportunity.   Today, Congress reintroduced the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act– critical legislation that would help prevent blatant discrimination against pregnant workers and enable them to stay healthy and on the job.   And more states need to follow the example of Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, whose ten-point Women’s Equality Agenda lays out a groundbreaking plan to break down legal barriers holding women back. Key provisions include stronger laws to ensure equal pay for equal work, more explicit protections for pregnant workers and clear sanctions for employers who turn down candidates for work or promotion purely because they are mothers.

We need similar measures in Ohio and Texas and Alabama and Alaska and the rest of the country. In 2013, in a country that prides itself on equal opportunity for all, it is a scandal that so many working women are still treated like second-class citizens.  On the heels of Mother’s Day, we should honor them with the respect they deserve.

I became pregnant with my second child while I was working at a T-Mobile call center in Nashville, Tenn. It was a very, very rough pregnancy. I was taking medication to keep me from going into labor. I was going to the doctor twice a week, seeing both a regular obstetrician and a high-risk obstetrician. I had to drink a lot of water and go to the bathroom pretty frequently, which is what normal pregnant women do.

But my company warned me getting up to use the toilet would cut into what people in the call center industry call “adherence” – a metric that measures the degree to which employees stick to their schedules. Being on the phone was my job, so if I wasn’t, I risked being written up and possibly fired. Essentially the message was, “You can go, but understand that if you don’t meet that metric at the end of the day, week and month, we have the opportunity to fill your seat.” They didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use the toilet. But the reality was that this is a metric on how your job is measured and if you don’t meet it, then you do not have your job.

So I held off eating and drinking. I just couldn’t afford to lose my job or my health insurance during such a high-risk pregnancy.

It was insane.

My supervisor said if I had a medical necessity to use the toilet, I should go get a note from my doctor. And my doctor thought I was crazy. She told me, “I’m sure one person going to the toilet wouldn’t mean the collapse of an entire T-Mobile customer service center!” Yet, management reasoned that if I had to log off the phone, it meant one more T-Mobile customer would be stuck in the cue. That meant longer and longer waits for customers to get their issues handled. Or if I was off the phone, I wouldn’t be making sales. And that all was inexcusable.

After a long consultation with H.R. to make sure it would be air tight, I got the doctor’s note, so I was free to go to the bathroom whenever I needed. But T-Mobile was absolutely not going to pay me for going to the toilet. So every time I needed to go, I had to clock out and lot out of the system. Then I had to write it down and turn it into resource planning – just to make sure it I wasn’t gone an unreasonable amount of time! I felt very micromanaged.

At the same time, I was under so much pressure to keep my sales up. I would sprint – as much as a heavily pregnant woman can — between my desk and the bathroom to make sure I squeezed every second I could out of my work day. Everything I did was scrutinized. I felt picked on. Someone was always watching over my shoulder, monitoring my performance.

I was constantly checking to make sure my coaches and resource planning were making changes to my adherence based on the breaks I was reporting, so my adherence wouldn’t fall and I wouldn’t be in trouble. But sometimes they forgot to make the changes and my metrics suffered. I had to be constantly vigilant.

Everything about it was irritating. I was chasing my tail just to go the bathroom!

I was using intermittent FMLA and my vacation time to use the bathroom and go to doctors’ appointments.

Finally one of my doctors told me that she was putting me on full FMLA. It was all too much. I still wasn’t eating, drinking and using the toilet like I was supposed it. I was getting sick. My blood pressure was sky high. I was stressed about the possibility of losing my job and my health insurance. I was stressed about not being able to take care of myself and my baby. And being stressed out was only going to make my pregnancy harder.

I finally went on FMLA seven weeks before I had my son. It felt like it was my only option. It was my job or my family. When I stopped working, we worried about our strained finances and how we were going to pay our family’s bills. But I had to do what was best for me and my baby.

I now have a very healthy son. But I wanted to tell my story because this is why paid medical and sick leave is so important. No one should have to go through what I did.

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 nothing further they could do for her that couldn’t be done at home, and as a result, my 85-year old-father took my mother home to care for her. As she needed a feeding tube and was in a semi-coma, he needed some additional assistance. We recruited a home health care aide who came for four hours a day to help him provide care for my mother. The aide, a lovely and caring person who took good care of my mother, unfortunately, struggled to have enough money to live on. Even though she lived a considerable distance from my parent’s home, she walked to work to save the $2.25 subway fare.

In January of this year our aide called in sick with the flu. However, she still came into work the next day — clearly still sick, but unable to simply stay home and recover if she were also to lose a day’s pay. My father felt sorry for the aide and didn’t want to send her home knowing how badly she needed the money. Though earlier in the season my parents had flu shots and the aide wore gloves and a mask, both of my parents contracted the flu. Our doctor was called immediately and administered Tamiflu.

My mother died three days later.

My family is heartbroken and devastated. My father now not only grieves for my mom’s death, but bears unwarranted guilt in being placed in a horrible no-win situation. He doesn’t deserve this — he took unbelievable care of my mom (often sacrificing his own health).

Our aide feels terrible as well. If she had access to paid sick days when she had the flu she never would have come to our home and my mother would still be alive.

Having over 40 million workers in the United States without such benefit affects all of us, even those of us that receive paid sick days. We need a law that makes sure anyone who is sick can stay at home to recover from their illness and to prevent that illness from being conveyed to others. We need a national standard regarding paid sick days so that no family will have to go through what mine has.

When Andrea’s seven-year-old daughter gets pinkeye, the Arizona mother is told to bring the sick child to work with her – at a school, no less. Andrea has to leave her daughter in a small room all day, checking on her regularly and worrying about the infection spreading to school staff and students.

Susan and Andrea are far from alone. They are just two of the nearly 40 million people in this country who cannot earn a single paid sick day. Millions more cannot use them to care for a sick child. For these mothers and fathers, having to choose between job and family is the norm. And it is simply unacceptable.

Fortunately, we have seen recent glimmers of hope that suggest a growing awareness of the plight of workers like Susan and Andrea, and the urgent need for public policies to help.

For the past several years, cities and states have been advancing paid sick days proposals. San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have had paid sick days laws in place since 2007 and 2008, respectively. In 2011, Connecticut became the first state to guarantee workers this basic right. And Seattle recently passed a paid sick days law, which took effect in 2012.

These laws paved the way for a flurry of activity that led last month to the approval of a paid sick days law in Portland, Oregon, City Council passage of a similar measure in Philadelphia for the second time (although Mayor Nutter vetoed it again), and an agreement in New York City that will lead to close to one million workers getting the right to earn paid sick days by the time the law is fully implemented in 2015.

These victories result from the tireless efforts of workers, businesses, advocates and lawmakers across the country. But the sad reality is that they won’t make life better for Susan or Andrea or for millions of workers like them who do not live in a city or state that gives workers the right to earn paid sick days. Their states, Missouri and Arizona, do not have paid sick days laws and, until recently, federal lawmakers have failed to even consider a national paid sick days standard.

That changed last week when members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce discussed H.R. 1406 – anti-worker legislation disguised as an effort to give workers more flexibility. The bill would cause real harm to workers; it would mean a pay cut without any guarantee of the time off workers need. But in the course of discussing this misguided and dangerous proposal, lawmakers acknowledged experiences like those of Susan and Andrea – and that the country needs policy solutions. And they had an unprecedented discussion of the Healthy Families Act, the federal paid sick days proposal.

As small a step as that was, it was a first for this Congress.  And it comes on the heels of local victories and significant momentum around and support for paid sick days policies. Lawmakers at the federal level need to seize this moment and pass the Healthy Families Act.

The time is now for federal action on paid sick days. Mothers, fathers, family members and workers across the country deserve it.

In fact, as reported in the Orlando Sentinel, Disney helped write the bill! “Walt Disney World and Darden Restaurants, owner of the Red Lobster and Olive Garden chains, helped draft the legislation, the sponsors said.” [2]  What gives? Who wants to take their family on vacation to a place where workers have to choose between going to work sick (and risk infecting others) or losing a day’s pay – and possibly even their jobs – because they are unable to earn sick days?

These corporations opposing earned sick time measures aren’t looking out for the families that visit or work at their theme park or eat and work in their restaurants – they are protecting their own massive profits.

Tell Disney: We prefer your fictional cartoon villains. Stop trying to kill access to earned sick time!

http://action.momsrising.org/sign/Disney/

There is absolutely nothing magical about getting fired or losing a day’s pay because you got sick. So it’s no surprise that momentum for earned sick time is growing.  In just the last few months, City Councils in Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia have passed earned sick time bills and New York City is poised to do the same.  [3,4,5]

In Orange County, Florida, the county where Walt Disney World is based, voters will be able to consider earned sick time in an upcoming referendum.  In response to this growing grassroots effort to make access to earned sick time a workplace standard, the Orlando Sentinel reports that opponents like Disney are pushing bills that would prevent local governments from writing laws regarding employee benefits. [6] It would strip away measures already in place, including those banning wage theft and requiring a living wage, as well as block legislators or voters from moving on local earned sick days measures such as the pending referendum in Orange County.

Tell Disney: Stop trying to make families’ lives a nightmare. Working families need and want access to earned sick time!

http://action.momsrising.org/sign/Disney/

Corporations may have tons of resources at their disposal to try to squash common sense policies that protect our families and our economy, but we have something better: We have moms. Moms who are willing to send a message that the happiest place on earth is NOT a place where workers risk losing pay or their jobs if they or a family member get sick.

It’s pretty obvious why earned sick time is good for public health: It helps contain health care costs through prevention, early detection, and treatment of illness. With earned sick time, families would not be forced to send sick children to school where they would likely infect classmates and teachers. Workers with earned sick time would not spread illness to their coworkers and customers.

Somewhat less obvious, but equally true, is that earned sick time turns out to be good for businesses, too. Research shows that the costs of replacing workers, including advertising for, interviewing and training new employees, often far outweigh the cost of retaining employees by offering earned sick time. [7]

Additionally, ”presenteeism,” when workers come to work sick, costs the national economy about $160 billion  - that’s a billion with a “b” – a year in lost productivity versus absenteeism.  [8]

Tell Disney to stop standing in the way of earned sick time! 

http://action.momsrising.org/sign/Disney/

And take a moment to forward this to your friends and family so they can take action too!

Together we’re a magical force for women and families.

The push for paid sick days is gaining serious MOMentum across the country and it could not come at a more crucial time. Approximately 40% of workers in the private sector are unable to earn a single paid sick day, compromising their health and those around them. It’s time to pull out our bullhorns and say ENOUGH. Will you join us?

Today MomsRising has teamed up with the AFL-CIO to co-host a blog carnival on anything and everything related to paid sick days. We will also co-host a tweetchat today at #WellnessWed at 2ET. Please join us for both! Want every worker to have the right to paid sick leave? Peruse the blogs, leave a positive comment or two and share widely to your social media followers.

Together we are an unbeatable force for healthy working families!

Carmen Berkley, Generational Alliance
People are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Caroline Dobuzinskis, Institute for Women’s Policy Research
IWPR Recommends Thorough Assessment of DC’s Paid Sick Leave Law

Cathy Youngblood, UNITE HERE
Do you want a sick housekeeper coughing all over your bed?

Charlie Rose, MomsRising.org
Paid Sick Days Matter to Me

Cindy Weasen, Devoted Daughter for Paid Sick Days
Paid Sick Days: A Matter of Life and Death

Debra L. Ness, National Partnership for Women and Families
The Time is Now for Federal Action on Paid Sick Days

dream hampton, MomsRising.org
Got the flu? Got sick time to use?

Elisa Batista, MomsRising.org
Lack of Paid Sick Days for Immigrant Caregivers Risky for Workers, U.S. Economy

Elizabeth A. Chau, RN, National Association of School Nurses
Children Pay the Price When Parents Don’t Have Paid Sick Days

Elizabeth Shuler, AFL-CIO
Paid Sick Leave: It’s Business-Friendly, Too

Ellen Bravo, Family Values @ Work
Local Florida Officials Say No Attacks on Local Control

Fred Redmond, United Steelworkers
Without Paid Sick Leave, Mickey Mouse, a Daycare Worker or a Fast Food Server May Give Your Kid the Flu

Gabriele Swe, Direct Care Alliance, Inc.
Why My Husband Wishes I’d Choose a Different Profession

Jodie Levin-Epstein, CLASP
Paid Sick Days Get Traction and Real MOMentum

Judy Clinco, Direct Care Alliance, Inc.
Why Giving My Direct Care Workers Paid Time Off Is a Good Investment

Kristi Rifkin, Former T-Mobile Employee
Why I Believe in Paid Sick Leave

Laura Reyes, AFSCME
Paid Sick Leave: A Reform that Makes Sense

Linda Meric, 9to5.org
Paid Sick Days Movement On the Move

Madeline Shepherd, National Council of Jewish Women
Confessions of a Recovered Waitress

Maria Elena Durazo, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor
No One Wins When Low-Wage, Immigrant Workers Have No Paid Sick Days

Marianne Bellesorte, Pathways PA
Brotherly Love? Check. Sisterly Devotion? Check. Earned Sick Days? Not So Fast.

Melissa Broome, Job Opportunities Task Force
Picking up the pieces after a bill dies

Rashad Robinson, ColorofChange.org
New Yorkers Deserve Paid Sick Time

Ruth Martin, MomsRising.org
Disney vs. Democracy

Tamara Green, Retail Action Project
Disciplined at work for caring for my sick child: Why retail work needs a makeover!

Tara Murphy, Working America
Against Earned Sick Days? Try Waiting Tables With Torn Tendons In Your Leg

Vincent Alvarez, New York City Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO)
Paid Sick Time Is a Basic Right

Around the Web:
MomsRising.org: Tell Disney to stop blocking paid sick time, David Damron for the Orlando Sentinel
Editorial: Clarification, Accountability and a New Direction, John Andrade for the PoPville D.C. Blog
A Sad Day and a Hopeful Lesson in Orange County, National Partnership for Women and Families for MomsRising.org
Dying for Work?, Ruth Martin for MomsRising.org

Fired up? Sign up for MomsRising’s e-mail alerts — they’re free!

Low-wage workers represent the majority of those not afforded paid sick time. In 2011, 66% of low-income parents of school-age children did not have access to paid sick time. The stress of caring for a sick child is great enough without having to decide between missing bill payments or potentially losing your job.

56% of workers who prepare and serve food do not have access to paid sick time, clearly representing not only a hazard to others in the workplace, but to the general public with whom those workers come into contact. Providing paid sick time to workers, particularly in the food service industry, would curtail the spread of illness and present an overall benefit for the greater workforce of our city.

Additionally, healthy workers are more productive workers: giving workers paid sick time has been demonstrably shown to improve worker productivity and reduce employee turnover, resulting in a cost-savings for employers. Advertising open positions and taking the time to interview and train replacement workers outweighs the costs of providing workers with paid sick time.

Paid sick time should not be a privilege for a chosen few, but a basic right pursued by private and public employers, and one that is provided to as many workers as possible.

My son is 8 now, so he is past the sick-every-five-seconds stage, but I remember those earlier years a little too well. It’s like kids are programmed to projectile you-know-what right when taking a day off would be a disaster.

In my last job, calling in sick was one of the scariest things to do. An angry boss adds worlds of stress to the already stressful situation of having a sick kid at home. And then you come back to the time sheet. L… W… P…

Leave Without Pay. We were living paycheck to paycheck. I got paid every two weeks, one check for rent and the second for bills. One LWP on a time sheet and a tenth of my paycheck was gone. When you are earning just enough to scrape by, a tenth is not a margin you can swallow.

When you are poor, your budget is an exact science. Weeks with an unpaid sick day wrecked that balance. I would obsessively check my bank account to make sure I wasn’t going to overdraft my account if I bought cereal. I remember playing out every possible scenario in my head — “We’ll be okay if the electric posts today, as long as the car insurance doesn’t post ‘til the 15th.” “I can pay for the field trip if I don’t buy coffee.”

I earn paid sick days now and it makes a world of difference. I didn’t realize how much stress I carried, until that stress was gone. It’s normal to worry when your kid is sick, but those worries should be about the kid, not about your livelihood.

That is why I work with MomsRising now on the paid sick days campaign to make sure everyone has access to this important workplace protection. Paid sick days show that our work, both as employees and as parents, is valued. Getting sick is part of life and most of our families do not have a family member who is available at home to take care of sick kids. Most of us have to work — and we need the money that we earn working. We need workplace protections that reflect the reality of our lives.

Little has changed since then in our country, especially for private-sector workers.

When her doctor ordered bed rest for Heather, from Cedar Crest, New Mexico, “my boss hounded me to come back, but I was way too sick. I told him I would be back as soon as I could. When I did go back to work early, he fired me and told me he needed someone he could count on.”

Noel, from Bellingham, Washington, kept working in severe pain with walking pneumonia: “I needed the money to pay for things like rent and food. When my quality of work suffered substantially from having to work while so sick, I was fired from my job because, according to my then-supervisor, I did not create a happy environment for the customers.”

U.S. workers who don’t have paid sick days face miserable choices: Go to work sick and expose others on the job or send an ill son or daughter off to daycare or school. By staying home, particularly in this economy, they risk losing their pay or even their jobs.

The choice is especially daunting for immigrant workers. In their countries of origin, surrounded by family, there are often alternatives when they or their loved ones became sick or injured. Those alternatives rarely exist here, where too frequently immigrants find themselves isolated in an alien environment with little, if any, means of support.

Some 40 million American workers can’t leave work when they are sick. Forty percent of private sector workers have no paid leave or job protections when they become ill. And millions of additional workers don’t have sick time to attend to an ill loved one. Eight in 10 low-wage workers lose pay, face discipline or risk losing their jobs altogether if they get sick.

Many of these low-wage, mostly immigrant workers who are organizing through affiliated local unions with help from our Los Angeles County Federation of Labor toil at physically arduous and often dangerous jobs. They include hotel housekeepers and sanitation and recycling plant workers. For them, real-life, serous financial dilemmas accompany getting sick, which happens too frequently given the nature of their work.

Twenty-three percent of American adults report losing or being threatened with losing their jobs because they had to take off time to tend to a sick child or relative. Sixteen percent have been fired or have a family member who was fired, disciplined or threatened for taking sick time.

This country must create a fundamental policy assuring every worker the right to earn paid, job-protected sick days so they aren’t faced with having to decide between their health and their family’s economic survival. The national movement for such a standard is growing.

More than a dozen drives for paid sick days are underway in states across the nation. Progress has been made from Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But those and other pro-worker advances are now being undermined by state legislation aimed at preventing municipalities from enacting their own paid sick days ordinances and other worker protections. These state “preemption” measures began when in 2011, the Wisconsin Legislature passed and Gov. Scott Walker signed a law essentially axing Milwaukee’s 2008 paid sick days law, even though it was approved by nearly 70 percent of city voters. Pushing these preemption bills in states such as Mississippi, Florida, Arizona, Indiana and Michigan are anti-worker outfits such as the National Restaurant Association and the Koch brothers-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, which brought us cookie-cutter voter suppression and union-busting laws in a host of states.

Lawmakers proposing preemption bills argue workplace policies such as paid sick days should only be passed at the state level. But they either don’t propose such reforms or oppose them while millions of workers and their families suffer from lack of protection. Aren’t conservatives supposed to embrace the right of local people to control their own destiny as an expression of democratic principles? Or do they embrace democracy only if they agree with the policies and they don’t benefit working families?

No class of working people is in greater need of paid sick days than low-wage, immigrant workers. Ultimately, we need a national standard that benefits all workers in America such as that offered in the Healthy Families Act recently introduced in Congress.