Fighting for Justice and Fairness for Working Families

Dear Friends,

When Katie, a cashier in Pennsylvania, suffered a miscarriage and experienced heavy bleeding, she tried to use doctors’ notes and hospitalization records to excuse her missed shifts, but her manager wouldn’t accept them. Instead, Katie was disciplined and forced to return to work, still in pain, and fearful of losing her job.

Stories like Katie’s are all too common, but A Better Balance is fighting for people like her every day.

During these difficult times, our efforts to use the power of the law to protect and defend the rights of workers, women, and LGBTQ families is essential.

Your support is more urgent than ever—please consider making a gift this year to A Better Balance.

With a federal government that has pulled back from its critical role enforcing our nation’s civil rights laws, we have doubled down to provide free legal support to vulnerable workers through direct representation and litigation to bring about wider change.

And in the absence of federal progress, we are working even harder to secure new protections for workers at the state and local levels.

Donate Now

Despite these challenges, with your support, A Better Balance has led the way and helped achieve major victories in 2017:

With this year’s victory in Rhode Island, we have helped to pass 40 paid sick time laws, including eight statewide laws, around the country.
Nashville, Tennessee implemented a path-breaking paid family leave policy—a model for municipalities across the nation.
And four new states (Vermont, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Washington) passed laws to ensure that pregnant workers are afforded accommodations to stay healthy and on the job.
We are implementing the strongest paid family leave law in the nation to ensure that millions of New Yorkers are able to access paid family leave when this groundbreaking law goes into effect.
In New York City, we helped lead the fight for equal pay and strong laws protecting retail and fast food workers from abusive scheduling practices. And most recently, we championed the expansion of the city’s paid sick time law to cover victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, or trafficking.
We assisted more than 450 workers and their families through our free legal helpline in 2017 and launched a national legal effort to combat Walmart’s punitive “absence control” policy featured in The New York Times. We also filed a nationwide class action discrimination lawsuit on behalf of thousands of pregnant Walmart workers.

None of these victories would be possible without your support.

With your support, we will not only preserve the progress we’ve made, but can move forward. We know the opposition will be trying every tactic in the book in 2018—support us now as we stand ready to fight back!

Best regards,

Dina & Sherry

P.S. You can read more about the impact your support made possible this year here.

We are Working Washington

BossFeed Briefing for December 11, 2017. Last Sunday, demonstrators held a satirical Buddhist-themed protest against proposals by the Taiwanese government to erode labor protections. Last Thursday, the Seattle Times published an extensive report on sexual harassment allegations against anti-worker State Representative Matt Manweller (R – Ellensburg), who said he would remain in office, but in the future might decline to hold meetings with women. Today is Day 7 of Working Washington’s 12 Days of Giving online auction, which now includes lunch with Lt. Governor Cyrus Habib. Yesterday was International Human Rights Day, and Friday is the 226th anniversary of the US Bill of Rights becoming law.

The bill

Three things to know this week:

Nannies and house cleaners launched the Seattle Domestic Workers Alliance on Thursday, sharing their stories and calling for change. With the support of key city councilmembers and a representative of the mayor’s office, domestic workers unveiled a proposal for a bill of rights to improve working conditions, raise standards in the industry, and build power for workers.

The US Department of Labor is considering a new rule which would allow employers to pocket tips for themselves. Court decisions and administrative rules around tip pooling can get complicated, but the current proposal could very well be the worst possible approach for workers.

A bankruptcy court judge has approved a plan by Toys R Us to pay top executives $16 million in bonuses if some goals are met, in addition to $8 million in retention bonuses previously awarded to the same top executives, despite the company having lost more than $300 million in just six months. Front line workers are not in line for any bonuses, regardless of company performance, level of service, hours of work, or anything else.

Two things to ask:

And what if workers worked together? Based on their numbers and appetites, it appears that the spiders of the world could eat every human on earth in just a year, if they would just work together. There are believed to be an average of more than 100 spiders per square yard of the planet.

Will he notch another win? A federal judge has ruled that the lawsuit by Attorney General Bob Ferguson against Geo Group, the private prison company, may proceed. Ferguson has charged that Geo Group’s for-profit immigrant detention facility in Tacoma violates state law by paying prisoners less than minimum wage for their work.

And one thing that’s worth a closer look:

star More and more of our lives as workers & consumers are affected by crowdsourced ratings which are then aggregated online, but as anyone working in the gig economy can tell you, there’s often little correspondence between how many stars you get and anything that happened in the real world. Even knowing all that though, Oobah Butler’s story in Vice is still startling: he submitted his London shed as a restaurant to TripAdvisor, posted some curious pictures, and said the place was by appointment only. With disturbing speed and no verification by any actual customers, the restaurant ascended the ranks and became officially listed as the top-ranked joint in London — even though it didn’t even exist & had never served a meal. By the end of the experiment, hundreds of people had called in desperate to make reservations at this apparently uber-exclusive venue; companies had sent free promos in hopes of a marketing boost; and a nearby municipality even offered tax incentives if the “restaurant” would move there.