Tag Archives: Republican

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Families & Flexibilit​y, The Supreme Court, Babygate, & Paid Sick Days Victories!
Families & Flexibility

From left to right, Kelly Sakai, Janet Gornick, Dina Bakst, Barbara Wankoff, Marcee Harris Schwartz
Families & Flexibility Forum 
On Monday we co-hosted a forum on Families & Flexibility with NYC Comptroller Scott M. Stringer. We are excited to see this conversation garnering attention and eager to work with city officials to develop solutions in the coming months. Read more

Peggy Young v. UPS
Earlier this month A Better Balance and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) jointly filed a friend of the court (amicus) brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a woman who was forced off her job while pregnant, losing income and her health benefits in the process. Peggy Young worked for UPS in Maryland when she became pregnant and submitted a doctor’s note with a lifting restriction. She was told that she could not have light duty because of a company-wide policy, so she would have to resort to unpaid leave. This was despite the fact that UPS provided light duty to many other workers. Our brief uses real stories to explain to the high court how policies like UPS’s are clearly illegal under the plain text of the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) and contrary to Congressional intent. Click here to read more and click here to read the brief.
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Babygate, the Sequel.   
This month the Feminist Press re-published our guidebook for expecting and new parents about their workplace rights.
Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the Workplace, has a new cover, updated content and has been generating buzz, from the New Republic and The Maria Shriver Project this summer to the Brian Leher Show on WNYC in September.  Coming up next?  Babygate, the website. Stay tuned!
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ABB Senior Staff Attorney Jared Make (far right) with other advocates after the Paterson law was passed.
Paid Sick Time Victories 
The momentum for paid sick time is undeniable. In the past three months, we have helped to win seven new paid sick time laws across the country! In July, San Diego and Eugene (Oregon) both passed paid sick time laws. In September, California became the second state to legally guarantee paid sick time for its workers! This statewide victory will extend paid sick time to more than six million workers in California who currently receive no paid sick days for personal or family health reasons. Also in September we helped to pass four new paid sick time laws In New Jersey: the cities of Paterson, East Orange, Passaic, and Irvington recently joined Newark and Jersey City in ensuring that workers can earn paid sick time.
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ABB Southern Office Director Elizabeth Gedmark (far right) with members of Respect the Bump and other advocates at Chicago Know Your Rights training.
Know Your Rights
ABB is continuing to educate pregnant women and caregivers around the country about their legal rights. For example, our Southern Office recently provided educational Know Your Rights materials in Nashville, TN at an event called the “Best Baby Shower”. Hundreds of pregnant women and their partners were in attendance. ABB is also working with our partners at Respect The Bump (a group of pregnant and formerly pregnant workers at Walmart who have banded together to create change at the superstore) to educate workers about their rights under Walmart’s new policy on Accomodations in Employment.
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Protect our families from chemical disasters


{UCSACTION ALERT
Tell the Environmental Protection Agency to Improve Chemical Plant Safety

 

Right now, 134 million Americans live in danger zones around facilities that use or store hazardous chemicals. And with around 30,000 documented incidents reported annually—from West Virginia to California—we remain devastatingly ill-prepared to protect the public from chemical disasters.

In fact, last year, 15 people died and three schools were destroyed as a result of a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas. After this tragic and avoidable accident, President Barack Obama took an important step to prevent disasters like this from happening again, calling on federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to strengthen chemical plant safety regulations.

Tell Administrator Gina McCarthy that the EPA must improve chemical plant safety and ensure communities get the scientific information they need to make informed decisions about their health, safety, and environment.

For the first time in decades, we have a chance to make real strides in improving chemical safety and security. The EPA needs to hear your support to improve chemical plant safety and prevent future disasters. Tell Administrator McCarthy that the EPA must improve access to information about toxic chemicals, require the use of safer chemical processes, and protect vulnerable communities.

Let’s make sure the EPA enacts the necessary standards to keep our families safe from chemical disasters.

Take Action

Sincerely,
Danielle Fox
Danielle Fox
Outreach Coordinator
Center for Science and Democracy
Union of Concerned Scientists

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It’s On Us: A Week of Action


The White House

Since its launch in September, the It’s On Us campaign has rapidly expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of students on college campuses across the country. It’s On Us is a cultural movement aimed at fundamentally shifting the way we think about sexual assault. In addition to a celebrity PSA with almost 4 million views, the campaign has generated more than 100,000 pledge signatures from people committing to be a part of the solution.

On Monday, It’s On Us launched its first Week of Action to engage thousands of students in the conversation about how to end campus sexual assault. Partner organizations and hundreds of school leaders joined together to hold over 200 events in 38 states across the country.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

The week kicked off with the release of a new PSA encouraging bystander intervention. Snapchat sent a special PSA to more than 250,000 student users via the app, and offered special It’s On Us picture filters to help spread awareness. Xbox also featured the PSA on the game console’s dashboard, and SB Nation not only released two original PSAs with athlete spokespeople, but also created custom content for each of their individual partner sites.

See more about the Snapchat PSA.

Student leaders across hundreds of college campuses held events ranging from pledge drives at athletic events to panel discussions with college administrators and experts in the field. At the University of Texas at Dallas, the student government, sororities and fraternities, and other student stakeholders came together to launch their Week of Action. The It’s On Us logo and branding were incorporated into their homecoming festivities, and student leaders were featured in “We Are UT Dallas,” a one-minute video highlighting UT Dallas’s participation in the campaign.

On Monday, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosted an “It’s On The Quad” pledge drive and photo booth. Throughout the week, they will distribute 500 It’s On Us t-shirts to students who take the pledge.

More than 50 colleges and universities have also created their own PSAs, including MIT, University of Arizona, Ohio State University, and even the staff and faculty at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Throughout the Week of Action, thousands of young people have stepped up and turned their pledge into action — and there will be more opportunities to engage with the It’s On Us campaign beyond this week. Over the coming months, we will work with our partners on college campuses and in communities to continue to engage students across the country.

It’s on us to realize we all have a role to play in preventing sexual assault, and we must challenge each other to do everything we can to make our college campuses safer.

Kyle Lierman
Office of Public Engagement
The White House

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Oye Como Va


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Paid Sick Time Ballot Initiative​s Win Big in Tuesday’s Election


A Better Balance the work and family legal center.
Paid Sick Time Ballot Initiatives Win Big in Tuesday’s Election
On Tuesday, paid sick time was on the ballot in 4 elections, and we won all of them! Massachusetts is now the 3rd state to guarantee paid sick time statewide, which is wonderful news for the nearly 1 million workers in the state who currently lack paid sick time. Two cities in NJ, Montclair and Trenton, passed paid sick time laws, bringing the total number of cities in NJ with such laws to 8 (all passed in the last year!). And in California, voters in Oakland passed an expansive paid sick time ballot measure. We’re especially thrilled with the huge margins of support for each ballot initiative: approximately 60% of the vote in Massachusetts, 85% in Montclair, 75% in Trenton, and 81% in Oakland.
A Better Balance has provided legal research, bill drafting, and other technical support to all of these campaigns and can’t wait to build on the incredible momentum from these wins. But we couldn’t do it without such incredible supporters and campaign partners! For background and to learn more about these 4 paid sick time ballot initiatives, check out our recent blog post.
The Pregnancy Penalty: How Motherhood Drives Inequality & Poverty in New York City
In Case You Missed It
October was also an exciting and busy month for ABB’s efforts on behalf of pregnant workers.   The New York Times’ Rachel Swarns featured our client, Angelica Valencia, in “The Working Life Column,” which garnered over 800 reader comments and an offer from Angelica’s employer to reinstate her.  Our latest report—The Pregnancy Penalty: How Motherhood Drives Inequality and Poverty in New York City—was featured, along with ABB Co-President Dina Bakst and ABB Community Advocate Award recipient, Armanda Legros, on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC.  And our new website resource for pregnant and parenting workers was highlighted in the New York Times and Washington Post.  We’re thrilled to see the media focusing on this issue and expect the coverage to continue next month as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the case of Peggy Young v. UPS. Stay tuned!