Paid sick days: A public-health imperative

By Julia James 

Yes, You Can Get Fired After Taking Maternity Leave

By Sharon LernerPosted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2010, at 10:03 AM ET

Sandy Stephens got pregnant when she was working in housekeeping for a company known as Global NAPs Inc. in Massachusetts. Her supervisor at the small telecommunications firm had told her that she could take unpaid maternity leave longer than eight weeks if she gave birth by cesarean section. Stephens did wind up having a C-section, and so she stayed home for 11 weeks. Yet, when she returned to her job, she found she had been fired.

It’s the kind of “misunderstanding” that takes place all the time. The postpartum deal is struck, the baby comes, and then—whoops!—human resources has no record of the agreement. The story often ends up with a confused, angry, and suddenly unemployed new mother quietly accepting her fate. In this case, though, Stephens decided to sue; and last week the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed her a decision that is a depressing, if not surprising, reminder of the sorry state of parental-leave policy in this country. Read More….

A case for paid sick days for N.H. workers

Paid sick days — it sounds like a good idea for employees, but it’s also good for businesses. Healthy workers are essential to a strong economy and to business success. When workers are provided with paid sick time, they demonstrate increased job satisfaction, commitment and morale. Their employers reap the benefits of high performance and productivity.

New Hampshire lawmakers are now considering HB 662, which would make it mandatory for businesses with 15 or more employees to offer three paid sick days. This is an amendment to the original bill which asked for five days in companies with 10 or more employees. Both full and part-time employees would have the opportunity to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. The bill also states that paid sick time can be used to care for sick family members.

The N.H. Women’s Lobby and Alliance partnered with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) to estimate the costs and benefits of the proposed law, using government-collected data, peer-reviewed research literature and a thoroughly vetted methodology. While this research is based on the original bill, the benefits stated are applicable to the amended bill as well. According to IWPR’s research, nearly half of New Hampshire workers will benefit from paid sick days. Currently, 215,800 New Hampshire private-sector workers lack paid sick days, or 42 percent of the work force. Additionally, 128,400 New Hampshire workers (24 percent of the private-sector work force) have no paid leave or vacation and will receive new paid sick days under the bill.

The benefits of paid sick days for New Hampshire workers will substantially outweigh costs. New Hampshire employers will pay $46 million annually for wages, payroll taxes and payroll-based employment benefits, and administrative expenses. But benefits for employers will total $76 million annually, largely from reduced costs of turnover — workers who have paid sick days are less likely to look for a different job. The average weekly cost of the policy for covered workers will be $6.92 per worker, or about 20 cents per hour worked. Savings will be $11.39 per worker, for a net savings of $4.47 per worker per week.

Improved public health for New Hampshire employees will save millions of dollars in other ways as well. Paid sick days reduce the spread of serious contagious diseases such as the flu and norovirus. Workers will save $1.5 million annually on flu-related costs and short-term nursing home stays for relatives. Obtaining timely medical care will improve care and treatment, reduce emergency room visits and reduce costs for providers and patients.

Workers who come in sick to their jobs cost our national economy $180 billion annually in lost productivity. And, sick workers are more likely to have an accident on the job, incurring additional costs for the employer. New Hampshire employers statewide will save $30 million annually as a result of HB 662.

The demographics of the U.S. workplace have witnessed a dramatic change over recent decades. We live in a time where 70 percent of households have all adults in the labor force. It is important to adopt family responsive policies such as paid sick days before the work-family conflicts experienced by an escalating number of Granite Staters reach crisis level. When it comes to business, it’s all about the bottom line, and research shows that paid sick days for New Hampshire’s employees will provide a great return on investment.

Nikki Murphy is executive director of the N.H. Women’s Lobby and Alliance.

New Resources for Paid Sick Days

We have recently added a couple new resources on our website, for Paid Sick Days:

Quick Facts: 2010 NORC Paid Sick Days Survey:
http://nhwomen.org/pdf/Quick_Facts_on_NORC-PWF_Poll.pdf

Public Strongly Supports Paid Sick Days:
http://nhwomen.org/pdf/The_Public_Strongly_Supports_Paid_Sick_Days.pdf

You can browse all our resources by going to our Resources / Media page on our website.

You can get notified when we add new resources, events, or news by following us on Facebook or Twitter!

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It’s Time To Pass The Paycheck Fairness Act

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Ellen Simon

April 20, 2010 was Equal Pay Day. It was established in 1996 to illuminate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. The date symbolizes how far into 2010 women must work to earn what men earned in 2009.

This year, with the support of President Obama, Equal Pay Day should also bring attention to pending legislation intended to address lingering issues of pay disparity in the American workforce. Here are some facts about pay equity from the National Organization for Women:

• In 2007, women’s median annual paychecks reflected only 78 cents for every $1.00 earned by men. Specifically for women of color, the gap is even wider: In comparison to a man’s dollar, African American women earn only 69 cents and Latinas just 59 cents.
• In 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was passed, full-time working women were paid 59 cents on average for every dollar paid to men. This means it took 44 years for the wage gap to close just 19 cents — a rate of less than half a penny a year.
• The narrowing of this gap has slowed down over the last six years, with women gaining a mere two cents since 2001.
• Women’s median pay was less than men’s in each and every one of the 20 industries and 25 occupation groups surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007. Even men working in female-dominated occupations earn more than women working in those same occupations.
• According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, if equal pay for women were instituted immediately, across the board, it would result in an annual $319 billion gain nationally for women and their families (in 2008 dollars).
• When The WAGE Project looked exclusively at full-time workers, they estimated that women with a high school diploma lose as much as $700,000 over a lifetime of work, women with a college degree lose $1.2 million and professional school graduates may lose up to $2 million because of pay disparity.
• As a result, these inequities follow women into their retirement years, reducing their Social Security benefits, pensions, savings and other financial resources.
• A study by the American Association of University Women examined how the wage gap affects college graduates. Wage disparities kick in shortly after college graduation, when women and men should, absent discrimination, be on a level playing field.
• One year after graduating college, women are paid on average only 80 percent of their male counterparts’ wages, and during the next 10 years, women’s wages fall even further behind, dropping to only 69 percent of men’s earnings ten years after college.

I have represented women in discrimination cases for many years. From my vantage point it’s clear that while the pay equity issues are not as blatant as they once were, wage discrimination is still a prevalent concern for women of all socio-economic groups.

It’s also true that the Equal Pay Act of 1963, while well intentioned, has not come close to fulfilling its goal due to a whole host of reasons.

The good news is that there is a bill pending in Congress aimed at correcting unlawful wage disparities and which offers a legislative fix for some of the problems with the Equal Pay Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R.12 and S.182) was introduced January 2009 by then-Senator Hillary Clinton and Rep. Rosa DeLauro to strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The bill expands damages under the Equal Pay Act and amends its very broad fourth affirmative defense which will be a real help to victims of pay discrimination.

The Paycheck Fairness Act also prohibits retaliation against inquiring about or disclosing wage information and proposes voluntary EEOC guidelines to show employers how to evaluate jobs with the goal of eliminating unfair disparities. The bill was passed by the House in January of 2009 and is pending in the Senate. It’s lead sponsor is Sen. Christopher Dodd. There were hearings about the bill in March of this year with lots of illuminating testimony, including the remarks of Stuart Ishimaru, acting Chariman of the EEOC.

The bottom line is if you care about equal rights for women and want to make a difference, please call or write your Senator and urge passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. We know that the President supports it — we just need to get it on his desk.

Paid Sick Leave in the United States

From John Steven Niznik, former About.com Guide

At this writing, there are no U.S. laws that require employers to provide a paid sick leave benefit. Worse, employers don’t have to provide a sick leave benefit even without pay, except as noted below.

The good news is, in April 2005 Senator Edward Kennedy introduced the Healthy Families Act, through Senate Bill S.932. If the Act as initially introduced becomes Federal law, it will require employers in all states who employ 15 or more employees to provide at least minimal, sick leave benefits. Better yet, employers will have to offer paid sick leave, as follows.

• 7 days of paid sick leave annually for employees working 30 or more hours per week or
• A pro rata number of days or hours of paid sick leave annually for employees working less than:
  • 30 hours per week on a year-round basis or
  • 1,500 hours throughout the year involved

Paid Sick Leave for Family Care

Even better, the Healthy Families Act as initially introduced has provisions for employees to take paid sick leave to care for family members, in addition to themselves.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires employers to grant qualified employees up to 12 weeks of sick leave to care for themselves or family members. But it does not require employers to grant paid sick leave. It also doesn’t require employers to offer a traditional sick leave benefit, as does the Healthy Families Act.

Paid Sick Leave Bill Purpose

The purpose of paid sick leave under the Healthy Families Act is paraphrased below.

• Ensure that all working Americans can address their own health needs and the health needs of their families
• Diminish health care costs by enabling workers to seek early and routine medical care for themselves and family members
• Minimize potential employment discrimination on the basis of sex, by ensuring paid sick leave is available on a gender-neutral basis

You can research the Healthy Families Act at THOMAS, an official government Website that provides Federal legislative information from the Library of Congress.

For women in America, equality is still an illusion

Every day, we hear about the horrors women endure in other countries: rape in Darfur, genital mutilation in Egypt, sex trafficking in Eastern Europe. We shake our heads, forward e-mails and send money.

We have no problem condemning atrocities done to women abroad, yet too many of us in the United States ignore the oppression on our doorstep. We’re suffering under the mass delusion that women in America have achieved equality.

And why not — it’s a feel-good illusion. We cry with Oprah and laugh with Tina Fey; we work and take care of our children; we watch Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice proudly and sigh with relief, believing we’ve come so far. But we’re basking in a “girl power” moment that doesn’t exist — it’s a mirage of equality that we’ve been duped into believing is the real thing.

Because despite the indisputable gains over the years, women are still being raped, trafficked, violated and discriminated against — not just in the rest of the world, but here in the United States. And though feminists continue to fight gender injustices, most people seem to think that outside of a few lingering battles, the work of the women’s movement is done.

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves. For all our “empowered” rhetoric, women in this country aren’t doing nearly as well as we’d like to think.

After all, women are being shot dead in the streets here, too. It was only last year that George Sodini opened fire in a gym outside Pittsburgh, killing three women and injuring nine others. Investigators learned from Sodini’s blog that he specifically targeted women. In 2006, a gunman went into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania; he sent the boys outside and opened fire on almost a dozen girls, killing five. That same year in Colorado, a man sexually assaulted six female students he had taken hostage at a high school before killing one of them.

And it’s not just strangers who are killing women; more than 1,000 women were killed by their partners in 2005, and of all the women murdered in the United States, about a third are killed by a husband or boyfriend. A leading cause of death for pregnant women? Murder by a partner.

In Iraq, women serving in the military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.

Even the government underestimates the crisis American women are in. Last year the Justice Department reported that there were 182,000 sexual assaults committed against women in 2008, which would mean that the rate had decreased by 70 percent since 1993. But a study by the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center showed that the Justice Department’s methodology was flawed. Instead of behaviorally based questions, such as “Has anyone ever forced you to have sex?”, women were asked if they had been subject to “rape, attempted or other type of sexual attack.” Victims often don’t label their experience as “rape,” especially when someone they know attacked them. The center says the actual number of U.S. women raped in 2008 was more than 1 million.

The distressing statistics don’t stop with violence: Women hold 17 percent of the seats in Congress; abortion is legal, but more than 85 percent of counties in the United States have no provider; women work outside the home, but they make about 76 cents to a man’s dollar and make up the majority of Americans living in poverty.

READ MORE

Support Equal Pay

On average, women earn just 77 cents on the dollar earned by men. Just one year out of college, working women already earn less than their male colleagues earn, even when they work in the same field with the same degree. As women now make up half of the workforce and a larger percentage of breadwinners than ever before, wage discrimination hurts the majority of American families. And in these tough economic times, when more and more and more families are counting on a woman’s paycheck to make ends meet, pay equity is even more important. Urge your senators to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a much needed update of the 46-year-old Equal Pay Act, and find out how you can get involved with Equal Pay Day on April 20. http://capwiz.com/aauw/issues/alert/?alertid=12819746

Reproductive Coercion Among Young Women and Teens

Reproductive rights activists have posited that the rise in unwanted and unplanned pregnancies among teens and young women in recent years could be due to the failure to use adequate birth control or the effects of abstinence-only-until-marriage education. A new study indicates, however, that reproductive coercion may be an additional factor. This type of abuse of power is defined as male pressure on his partner to control her reproductive choices and decisions. Research conducted at the University of California at Davis has revealed that many young women experience this type of harassment and intimidation. In the study, 1,300 women between the ages of 16 and 29 were asked questions about birth-control sabotage, pregnancy coercion, and partner violence. The study found that one in five women said they had experienced pregnancy coercion and 15% had experienced birth-control sabotage. More than half had experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. The researchers concluded that the rate of unintended pregnancy was double among women who experienced reproductive coercion and partner violence. These research findings might explain why unintended pregnancies are so much more common among women and teens who have been abused. Younger women may have a harder time dealing with this phenomenon as they generally have less access to doctors’ appointments and emergency contraception, especially if they are minors. Additionally, less experience with intimate relationships may contribute to a difference between perceived and actual reproductive choices. Young women are also less likely to be earning enough money to support themselves, and may be more likely to depend on their male partnerswhich is ultimately the goal of abusers–not an actual, wanted child. “What we’re seeing is that, in the larger scheme of violence against women and girls, it is another way to maintain control,” says Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at University of California, Davis. “You have guys telling their partners ‘I can do this because I’m in control’ or ‘I want to know that I can have you forever.’” There is discussion about potentially including reproductive coercion under the umbrella of sexual abuse, which would require healthcare professionals to report each case to the authorities. But this may not be the best way to handle such situations. Miller advocates a solution wherein a woman’s doctor could provide a more covert means of contraception and counseling that could help her “explore the possibility of ending the relationship.” Whether or not reproductive coercion is determined to be an indicator of an abusive relationship, it is a significant violation of a woman’s right to choose and be comfortable in her own reproductive decisions. Covert birth control prescribed by a woman’s doctor is a necessary first step, but affected women must also be provided with the skills and support needed to avoid or leave unhealthy and malignant relationships. And there needs to be targeted outreach to young men who may commit reproductive coercion, through school programs, faith communities, or other sources. This problem will need both men and women to solve it.

US Gets Low Grade on Paid Parental Leave

Paid parental leave is considered a human right under international treaties, and is guaranteed by 177 countries. But in the United States, federal law requires only unpaid leave, and just a few states legally require paid parental leave. For the most part, it is up to employers to decide whether to offer this. Most US workers do not have paid parental leave benefits.

When you gave birth or adopted your kids, did you take leave without pay? How did this affect breastfeeding, your health, your baby’s health, or your family’s finances? How did this affect the timing of your return to work? How else did the lack of paid parental leave affect you and your family?

Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental human rights group, is hoping to interview parents about their experience with unpaid maternity and paternity leave, and the impact on their families. They will also interview businesses, officials, and experts. The interviews will be used for a report (using pseudonyms, not actual names of interviewees) and, depending on the findings, for making recommendations on US law and policy.

Please contact Human Rights Watch at walshj@hrw.org if you would like to share your story through a short interview. To learn more about Human Rights Watch, visit www.hrw.org.