Via Washington Policy Watch:

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and I’ve been thinking long and hard about how to honor my mom for all the sacrifices she has made for me and my siblings over the last four decades.

My ever-busy mom worked throughout her child-rearing years. And while she has enjoyed her career, I know it was quite a challenge to manage work demands while raising kids. Lots of moms are in the same boat – always trying to squeeze a 25^th hour into the day. In Washington, nearly two-thirds of moms with kids at home are in the labor force, juggling family and work responsibilities day in and day out.

But when crisis strikes, even the best jugglers may drop a ball or two. When I was 10, I suffered a serious injury that required hospitalization and months of recovery. Fortunately, my parents were able to piece together their vacation and sick leave to ensure someone was always with me during those first critical weeks.

But even my parents’ solution – a patchwork of paid time off – often isn’t available to many workers, especially those working low-wage jobs. For low-wage earners, a family crisis might mean forgoing a paycheck or even losing their job. Access to paid family and medical leave would spare them the difficult choice of sacrificing financial stability for the well-being of a family member.

So this Mother’s Day, I’m honoring working moms (and dads!) by supporting family and medical leave insurance (FMLI). FMLI ensures workers are able to receive some compensation while caring for family member, or recovering from their own illness or injury. But the importance of FMLI extends beyond financial stability. FMLI benefits:

• Children – FMLI increases the duration of breastfeeding, and improves children’s health, social and educational outcomes.
• Seniors – FMLI makes it easier for adult children to care for their aging parents, instead of relying on an expensive nursing home.
• Women – The gender wage gap widens with age, especially during child-rearing years, creating lifelong economic insecurity for women. FMLI helps expand work opportunities and level the playing field.
• Workers – As Washington’s workforce ages, more spouses – and workers themselves – are at risk of developing serious health problems. FMLI allows people to get the care they need then return to work.

Policy brief: Evaluating FMLI for Washington State

Researchers have also found that FMLI benefits businesses by increasing worker retention and boosting morale and worker productivity. Further, FMLI frees up public funds by helping families avoid public assistance, promoting family care for seniors, and giving all kids a strong and healthy start in life.

For more information about family and medical leave insurance, please see EOI’s latest brief Evaluating Family and Medical Leave Insurance for Washington State.

This free community forum on Tuesday May 8^th from 6 to 8pm, will highlight the impacts of the recession and state budget cuts on women in Washington.

It will focus on how the unprecedented cuts to our state budget are disproportionally harming women’s employment, economic security, health, and safety. Marilyn Watkins, EOI Policy Director will join other panelists in discussing policies that should be pursued at the state level as our economy recovers, and how we can ensure the recovery is equitable for women. Attendees will be invited to join the discussion during the Q&A session.

Click here to RSVP for the forum (it’s a free event, but space is limited).

The forum will be moderated by Erica Barnett from Publicola and panelists include:

• Lori Pfingst, Senior Policy Analyst, Washington State Budget & Policy Center
• Marilyn Watkins, Policy Director, Economic Opportunity Institute
• Dana Laurent, Political Director of Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest
• Diane Narasaki, Executive Director of Asian Counseling and Referral Service
• David Ward, Legal and Legislative Counsel at Legal Voice

RSVP: http://whatwomenwantwashington.eventbrite.com/

The percentage of American mothers who breastfeed their babies has risen over the past decade, but it remains far below the rate public health officials would like to see. Newly published research provides one possible reason why.

It turns out all that healthy, nutritious milk comes at a surprisingly high cost.

A study of 1,313 American women who gave birth between 1980 and 1993 finds those who breastfed for six months or more suffered “more severe and more prolonged earnings losses” than mothers who breastfed for a shorter amount of time, or not at all.

“Our results suggest that breastfeeding, at least for six months or longer, is not free in an economic sense,” write sociologists Phyllis Rippeyoung and Mary Noonan. Their findings are published in the American Sociological Review.

According to the most recent government statistics, 74.6 percent of mothers report they breastfed their babies. But only 44.3 percent were still breastfeeding at six months, and 23.8 percent at one year, the minimum cutoff age recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In an attempt to find out why, Rippeyoung and Noonan studied data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, an annual survey of a large group of Americans born between 1957 and 1964. They specifically looked at how childbirth and subsequent breast feeding impacted a woman’s earnings over the following years.

“We found that after childbirth, short-duration breastfeeders (those who stopped before the baby was 6 months old) and formula-feeders experienced similar earnings penalties,” the researchers write. “By contrast, women who breastfed for long durations experienced a much steeper decline in earned income over the first five years of their children’s lives.”

The cause of this gap is clear enough: “Long-duration breastfeeders are more likely to be non-employed in the years following childbirth, and they work fewer hours when they are employed.”

Learn why – and what can be done – in Miller-McCune »

[Cross-posted from Washington Policy Watch]

Ellen Bravo

Paid sick days are good for our economy, according to numerous studies by seasoned economists.  That’s why Americans in cities and states across the country from all parts of the political spectrum support this policy.

The same policy is under fierce attack by big corporate lobbyists, whose job it is to protect the top 1% of society – folks who, of course, already have paid sick days.  In their attempts to scare small business owners and the public, the corporate lobbyists have created a whole new math system to justify their position.

The abra-ca-dabra arithmetic practiced by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, (NFIB,) one of the Big Six corporate lobbies, is simply about pulling numbers out of a hat and daring to call it economics.

The NFIB is currently peddling a so-called “study” in Massachusetts, proclaiming that proposed legislation allowing workers to earn paid sick days in that state would cost huge amounts and be a disaster for small business. Legitimate research estimates the legislation would save businesses in that state upwards of $348 million and save hospital emergency rooms another $22.7 million, including $13.4 million in taxpayer-funded public health savings.

As economists have pointed out about a similar tome produced in Philadelphia, the NFIB document rests on incorrect facts and flawed assumptions. Here are a few examples:

• False Assumption #1: The NFIB assumes each employee who gains paid sick days will use every day provided to them. The document’s own footnote acknowledges that the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Center for Disease Control estimate much smaller numbers of usage – 3 days (BLS) or 3.8 (CDC). Also, in a random sample of employees in San Francisco, which has had similar requirements in place since 2007, employees used a median of 3 days per year. Researchers say workers tend to view the time as an insurance policy, saving the days they earn for when they may need them most.

• False Assumption #2:  The NFIB includes in additional wages the cost of health insurance – but those costs are fixed and do not vary with work hours.  They will be unaffected by new PSD coverage.

• Convenient Oversight: Perhaps most outrageous is the refusal of the NFIB to look at the other side of the equation – how much employers save from increased productivity, lower absenteeism when co-workers don’t catch the sick employee’s germs, reduced turnover when workers aren’t fired for following a doctor’s orders. A 2009 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research projects s a $348 million annual benefit to Massachusetts employers if the earned paid sick days law were instituted.

Who does the NFIB really work for? While the group claims to represent Mom and Pop shops, it has never lobbied on behalf of bills small businesses really need – such as halting the expansion of big-box competitors that drive out Main Street businesses, or curbing the many tax policies that local activists say give national retailers an unfair advantage over independent small companies.

In fact, the NFIB is underwritten by far-right groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. According to the Wall Street Journal, American Crossroads gave the NFIB a hefty $3.7 million before the 2010 election – money Rove’s group considered “well spent.”

If the NFIB cared about the economy and small businesses, they’d have to acknowledge that job retention policies like paid sick days help reduce unemployment and strengthen the economy.  They’d recognize that jobs are lost when worker do NOT have paid sick days, as shown by a report from the National Opinion Research Center, which finds that 23% of workers are fired or threatened with being fired for taking time to care for personal or family illness.

And they’d admit that in San Francisco, which last year was named one of the best cities in the world to do business by PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than two in three businesses support the local law and six in seven report no negative impact on profitability.

You can call the latest output from the NFIB many things – distortions, misinformation, hocus pocus.

What you can’t call it is a study.

In these tough economic times, no one should have to lose income — or worse, lose their job — because they get sick, but this is just what happens all the time. Paid sick days is a commonsense measure that will help get our economy moving again by making sure hardworking men and women can hold onto their jobs, support their families and have money to spend to sustain local businesses.

Business owners across Massachusetts support paid sick days because it’s a good policy for their workers, their customers and their bottom lines. The NFIB is another corporate lobby that continues to show it is out of touch with business and the economy.

~by Ellen Bravo, cross-posted from the Family Values at Work Coalition

Will Washington’s 2013-14 Legislature support paid sick days and paid family and medical leave insurance? All the seats in Washington’s House of Representatives and half of the seats in the Senate will be on the ballot this November.

Washington’s regular 2012 legislative session ended without action on the Paid Sick Days bill. The special session that convened in mid-March is focused on the state budget.

Will Washington’s 2013-14 Legislature support paid sick days and paid family and medical leave insurance? All the seats in Washington’s House of Representatives and half of the seats in the Senate will be on the ballot this November.

Be sure the candidates running in your district know that you and your family members care about these issues! Here are questions you can ask at candidate forums:

• Paid Sick Days: The City of Seattle as well as several other cities and the state of Connecticut have established minimum standards for paid sick leave, to protect public health, family economic security, and worker productivity and business health.In Seattle, businesses with between 5 and 49 full-time-equivalent employees (FTEs) will be entitled to up to 40 hours of sick leave  per year; those with 50 to 249 FTEs have up to 56 hours, and larger businesses will be required to provide up to 72 hours per year.

  Would you support adopting a similar standard for all workers in the state?

• Family and Medical Leave Insurance: In 2007, the Washington State Legislature passed Family Leave Insurance that provided for individuals to take up to five weeks of paid leave to care for a new born or adopted child. However, the legislature did not set up a mechanism for funding the program and has postponed implementation until 2015.Other states, including California and New Jersey, have successfully established programs that provide 6 weeks of partial wage replacement to care for a new child or sick family member, as well as more extended leave for the worker’s own serious health condition, funded through modest payroll taxes.

  Would you support expanding and funding Washington’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program as other states have done?