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Tag: family leave

  • These School Employees Are Crucial — But They Don’t Qualify For Family Leave

    These School Employees Are Crucial — But They Don’t Qualify For Family Leave

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    Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) had her first child while serving in the House of Representatives in 2014. Four years later, she became the first sitting senator to give birth while in office.

    “It was not until I became a mom and was traveling back and forth to Illinois twice a week and trying to pump breast milk for my baby that I realized there were no lactation rooms I could use in the airport,” Duckworth told HuffPost. “I was told, ‘Well, you can plug your breast pump in next to where those guys are charging their phones.’”

    The U.S. tends to lag behind other developed countries when it comes to progressive, family-friendly policies. One law that Duckworth says desperately needs some bolstering is the Family and Medical Leave Act, which turns 30 years old this year.

    The FMLA assures workers can take protected leave from their jobs for up to 12 weeks to care for a new child or a loved one who’s sick. Historic as it was at the time, the law came with some significant holes: Only unpaid time off is guaranteed, and millions of workers fall outside of the law’s protections because they work for small employers or don’t work enough hours.

    Duckworth plans to reintroduce a bill in the Senate on Thursday that would add about 3 million additional workers to the FMLA’s coverage: education support professionals. These are school employees who are not teachers and typically work nine or 10 months a year, like cafeteria workers, custodians, bus drivers, administrative staff and paraeducators who assist teachers in the classroom.

    While teachers have protections under the FMLA, many education support professionals are excluded because their schedules are part time and they don’t work 1,250 hours per year. Unless a local school district has negotiated a leave policy for these workers, they might be unable to take time off and still know they will have a job to come back to.

    “These are your lunch ladies, these are your janitors, these are your bus drivers, and they don’t qualify because it’s hard for them to reach the minimum number of hours,” Duckworth said. “Everybody deserves to have access to the FMLA, and these education support professionals are absolutely integral to students and schools across America.”

    Duckworth’s bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), would create a separate hours threshold for these workers. They would be able to qualify for unpaid leave so long as they worked 60% of the hours typically expected for their job over the course of a month. That way a cafeteria worker who might only work 15 hours a week would still have a job to come back to if they needed to stop working for a few weeks.

    The main teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — are two of the biggest backers of Duckworth’s bill.

    Many school bus drivers don’t work enough hours to qualify for job-protected unpaid leave under the FMLA.

    The Washington Post via Getty Images

    Joshua Webster, a school employee and leader of his union local in Madison, Wisconsin, said workers shouldn’t have to quit their jobs because they have to care for someone. He said an assistant cook in his school district recently lost his fiancee and is now looking after their two children. Because he didn’t qualify for family leave, the union helped negotiate a special arrangement with the district due to the tragic circumstances.

    Webster said the worker is now on leave and has a job to come back to, but only because the school district was willing to compromise.

    “It speaks volumes to what’s going on,” said Webster, whose union is part of the AFT. “He did not have the hours. He would have ended up quitting. His spot never would have been held.”

    The National Partnership for Women and Families, a group that advocates for robust leave policies, estimates that more than 40% of U.S. workers do not qualify for unpaid leave under the FMLA. Of those who do take leave under the law, roughly half step away from work due to their own health issues, according to Labor Department data. The leave is typically short: More than three-quarters of workers take two months or less.

    “These are your lunch ladies, these are your janitors, these are your bus drivers, and they don’t qualify.”

    – Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.)

    Duckworth said expanding protections to school support workers is not only morally right but makes for smart public policy, considering school staffing shortages. School districts have struggled to hang on to bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other employees as COVID-19 took a toll on the workforce and the labor market tightened.

    In a federal survey released last year, 60% of U.S. principals said they were having a hard time filling non-teaching positions at their schools.

    “You see where folks were not able to take time or have access to FMLA to take care of a loved one during the pandemic,” Duckworth said. “Consequently, many of these workers have quit to go find other jobs where they could qualify for it, or they made the tough decision of stopping work. And we don’t want to lose that workforce.”

    Duckworth’s bill did not make it out of committee last time. Neither did a companion bill introduced by Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) in the House.

    Democrats haven’t had much success pursuing more aggressive reforms to the FMLA, either. While controlled by Democrats, the House passed a bill to create a paid leave program funded through a corporate minimum tax and administered through the Social Security Administration. That bill died in the Senate, however. Now that Republicans control the House, it’s unlikely any such legislation will go anywhere for the time being.

    But there have been some glimmers of hope for more modest legislation aimed at working parents. In the omnibus bill passed late last year, Republicans joined with Democrats to include two significant provisions: one that guarantees basic workplace accommodations for pregnant employees, and another that expands workplace protections for women who are breastfeeding. In a sign of how much support they had, the two measures passed, 73-24 and 92-5, respectively.

    Duckworth said the pandemic may have helped change some lawmakers’ perspectives on these issues.

    “People are finally understanding the decisions people are having to make,” she said. “It became much more visible, people having to choose between going to work sick and keeping a paycheck, or in many of these cases just dropping out of the workforce.”

    According to Duckworth, making sure a school bus driver can take leave without losing their job shouldn’t be such a heavy lift.

    “It’s the bare minimum we should be providing,” she said.

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  • What Joe Biden Has (And Hasn’t) Accomplished

    What Joe Biden Has (And Hasn’t) Accomplished

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    Voters will render a midterm verdict on President Joe Biden as they decide whether to keep Democrats in control of Congress. Forgive them if their views about the president’s record so far are a bit complicated.

    In less than two years, Biden has chaotically ended the war in Afghanistan while struggling to bring the nation fully out of a two-and-a-half-year pandemic. Domestically, he’s pursued nothing less than a transformation of the American social safety net, with an agenda comprising a dizzying number of progressive policy goals. Biden has accomplished quite a lot of them—perhaps more than most political observers expected with such narrow Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill. Some of his legislative moves, on infrastructure and clean-energy manufacturing, for example, have even been bipartisan victories. But Biden has also failed to achieve many of his most progressive priorities, which have fallen victim to a combination of lockstep GOP opposition and crucial defections in his own party.

    Biden’s approval ratings have languished far below 50 percent for more than a year; the end of his presidential honeymoon coincided with the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the prolonged pandemic. Most conservatives, of course, never gave him a chance. Many blame his high-spending policies for exacerbating inflation. The view from Democrats and independent voters is more complex: Will they conclude that Biden’s legislative successes—a record infusion of funds to fight climate change, a major infrastructure bill, action to lower prescription-drug prices, modest gun reform—outweigh his failure to enact promises such as paid family leave, universal pre-K, far-reaching voting-rights legislation, and a ban on assault weapons? In the past few months, Biden has bolstered his progressive record without the help of Congress, unilaterally forgiving student-loan debt for millions and pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession.

    The signing of just three enormous bills—the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, and this summer’s climate-and-health spending bill—made Biden’s first two years among the most productive of any president in the past half century. The initial pandemic bill, also known as the American Rescue Plan, was about the size of Barack Obama’s two biggest legislative achievements—his initial economic stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act—combined. The legislation sent $1,400 checks to Americans across the country, nearly doubled the child tax credit, shored up state budget accounts, and funded testing, treatment, and vaccines to fight the pandemic. The politically named Inflation Reduction Act is actually the largest climate bill in U.S. history and allows Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs for the first time.

    Beyond those headline bills, Biden more quietly amassed a bevy of smaller legislative wins, often with bipartisan support. A modest gun-safety bill expanded background checks (although not universally), made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking, and provided federal funding for so-called red-flag laws. Congress also passed the CHIPS Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, a long-stalled postal-reform bill, substantial military aid for Ukraine, and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act—all with fairly broad support from both parties. Biden’s executive actions on student-loan forgiveness and pardons for marijuana possession answered a pair of progressive demands.

    Perhaps Biden’s biggest legislative disappointment in his first two years was the Senate’s failure to overcome a Republican filibuster of a major voting-rights-and-election-reform bill at the start of the year. (Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona memorably refused to support an exemption to the Senate’s rules to pass the bill.) The shrinking of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda sacrificed another large chunk of the president’s initially transformative progressive vision. Democrats jettisoned plans for a $15 federal minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, free community college, a huge affordable housing initiative, an expansion of Medicare, and an extension of the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit. They also bowed to Sinema’s opposition to reversing tax-rate cuts enacted by former President Donald Trump.

    Some of Biden’s plans never stood a chance. The Senate did not make a serious effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform or more aggressive gun-control measures, such as universal background checks or a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Nor did Congress act on restoring the public insurance option left out of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

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    Russell Berman

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