19 | August | 2017 | Be a Seed for Change

A Better Balance

ABB Joins First-Ever New York State Council on Women & Girls

On August 2, Governor Cuomo announced the creation of the first-ever New York State Council on Women and Girls. ABB Co-President Dina Bakst is honored to serve on the Council’s Steering Committee, which is comprised of women leaders in academia, advocacy, business, and media. In addition to the Steering Committee, the Council is made up of the leaders of all New York State agencies, who are charged with ensuring every policy and program takes into account the experiences of women and girls. The Council will meet quarterly and focus on nine impact areas: education, economic opportunity, workforce equity, leadership, health care, child care, safety, STEM, and intersectionality. In January, the Trump administration disbanded the White House Council on Women and Girls. The New York State Council sends a strong message that women’s rights will not be overlooked in New York.

Know Your Rights: ABB’s Summer of Outreach & Education

This summer, ABB has been actively conducting outreach and education on a variety of topics impacting working families. August is National Breastfeeding Awareness Month, and our staff has been spreading the word about nursing mothers’ rights in New York. ABB attorneys are conducting a series of trainings throughout New York City to educate pregnant women, new mothers, and birth professionals about breastfeeding rights.

We’ve also been ramping up our outreach efforts around paid family leave, as covered workers in New York State will be able to take paid family leave starting on January 1, 2018. These efforts have included trainings at the LGBT Center in Manhattan, focusing on how the paid family leave law specifically applies to LGBTQ families, and at the Manhattan VA Medical Center on key workplace rights for veterans and their caregivers including benefits that will be available to military caregivers under the paid family leave law. In addition to our efforts in New York, ABB also led a national webinar on recent developments around paid family and medical leave, featuring on-the-ground leaders from Washington State and Washington, D.C.

Finally, this month, Preston Van Vliet (shared staff person with Family Values @ Work) presented a workshop at the Family Week conference in Provincetown, Massachusetts about the need among LGBTQ parents for paid leave policies that are inclusive of every family, as well as an all-day workshop with Forward Together at the Western States Center’s Activists Mobilizing for Power conference in Portland, Oregon about the importance of inclusive family definitions for cross-movement, long-term advocacy.

Federal Watch

We’ve been paying close attention to the Trump administration’s and Congress’s attempts to roll back women’s rights, workers’ rights, and LGBTQ rights, threatening our core values of fairness and economic security for all families. Most recently we highlighted the administration’s restrictive definition of “close familial relationship” for the purposes of enforcing a travel ban on refugees and other people from six Muslim-majority countries; the devastating consequences repealing the Affordable Care Act would have had for women’s and maternal health; the Department of Justice’s disavowal of anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual employees; and Donald Trump’s announced ban on transgender service members in the U.S. military. And we’ve been fighting back. We recently signed on to a letter opposing Congress’s attempt to limit collection of data from employers that helps to identify discriminatory pay practices. We will continue to keep the public informed about the latest challenges and developments in D.C. through our Federal Watchblog series.

Progress for Working Families in Massachusetts and Washington State

On July 27, Governor Baker signed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) into law, making Massachusetts the 22nd state to ensure that pregnant workers do not have to choose between a paycheck and a healthy pregnancy. ABB worked closely with local advocates and lawmakers to make the PWFA a reality. Congratulations to our partners at MotherWoman, the coalition leading the PWFA effort in Massachusetts, and to all others who worked on this campaign!

We are continuing to work with advocates in Massachusetts to further progress for working families. Raise Up Massachusetts, the coalition we supported as they fought for and won paid sick days for the Bay State, recently filed for a 2018 ballot initiative to enact paid family and medical leave. We are proud to be part of this innovative effort to ensure that all working families can access the paid leave they need.

Washington State also achieved a significant victory for working families this summer. In July, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the state’s new paid family and medical leave law. Washington is the sixth U.S jurisdiction to enact such a law and the third to do so in the last two years. Workers will be able to take leave under the law starting in 2020.