More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Dying alone is not unique to a pandemic. In ordinary times, millions of people, including children, spend long hours in the hospital without a loved one present.
In these cases, the orders come not from medical personnel but from a boss: “If you take leave to be with this family member, you will lose your pay.” For many, the order goes further: “If you leave, don’t come back. You will lose your job and your health insurance.”
What is the cost of a father dying alone? Who knows the toll when chemo is what you do on your lunch hour? How do we measure the loss of a career to care for a loved one with a disability? What’s the price tag on a child’s terror while waiting in her hospital bed for a parent to finish work and drop exhausted into the chair beside her?
We need a national paid leave program that is effective and sustainable, that will reach those who need it the most and that will not threaten other key areas of support for working families. But the recently-proposed CRADLE Act fails to meet any of those criteria.
It has been encouraging to see politicians on both sides of the aisle signal their support for a national paid parental leave plan in the days since President Trump’s State of the Union address. With any legislation, however, the devil is in the details—and the plan proposed by the administration to date is devilish indeed.
We need national legislation supporting paid sick days.
We all had to be there. And we will all keep being there for ourselves and for each other.
Andrew Puzder’s public comments and his company’s lingering controversies show him to be someone geared to undermine the Labor Department’s mission.
The tweet from The Washington Post said it best: “D.C. could become best place to have a baby, be sick, or have parents.” We may not all bear or raise children, but we all have parents or partners or other loved ones who occasionally need care from us, and we are all susceptible to an illness […]
What do Lady Gaga, President Obama, and the head of Harvard University have in common? They’re all speaking out to stop sexual assault—and not a moment too soon. The headlines call attention to the problem on college campuses: “Survey: More than 1 in 5 female undergrads at top schools suffer sexual attacks.” It’s important to […]
August 26 marked the 95th anniversary of women’s suffrage, enshrined in the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Many describe this as the date women were “granted the right to vote.” Others prefer to say it’s when women “won the right to vote,” recognizing the decades of struggle it took to get that victory, full […]
