Ellen Bravo's Remarks
Testimony of Ellen Bravo
Friday October 31, 2003
Dirksen Senate Office Building
Take Care Net Launch
9to5 is celebrating its 30th anniversary. When we began in 1973, there was no concept of family leave. Our members could be and often were fired for being pregnant. By and large the workplace was designed for male employees with wives at home full time.
The Family and Medical Leave Act was a big step forward, even for low-income women. I had the privilege of serving on the bipartisan Commission on Leave under the leadership of Sen. Chris Dodd. Our Commission was made up of equal numbers of proponents and opponents of FMLA. Yet the group issued a unanimous report in May 1996 documenting that FMLA was a significant benefit for workers and their families without burdening businesses.
We applaud that progress. The FMLA recognizes that being a good employee and a good family member can go hand in hand.
But many workers – especially low-wage workers – are left out. Our members still lose jobs when they’re pregnant and still face little flexibility for family care. Those who work for firms with fewer than 50 employees are not eligible for FMLA. Routine medical or school visits are not covered; neither is routine illness. And many of those permitted to take leave cannot afford to do so because the time is unpaid.
Our Commission study asked employees how they supported themselves while out on leave. Nearly 1 in 8 said by going on public assistance. For those with low family income, the figure was 1 in 5. And it hadn’t improved much when the DOL did a follow-up study in 2000.
There’s been a lot of talk about welfare to work. Unfortunately, there’s been far too little attention to how many women go to welfare from work – often because of lack of flexibility for family care.
Two years ago, 9to5 and Radcliffe Public Policy Center set out to examine how low-income working parents cross the boundaries of work, family and community. We talked with 350 parents, supervisors, teachers and child care providers in 3 cities. Our report, entitled "Keeping Jobs and Raising Families in Low-Income America," was released last year. We found an entrenched mismatch between the demands of caring for families and succeeding on the job.
All families face challenges as they strive to pursue their careers while nurturing their families. But for families in the bottom third of the economy, economic pressures and lack of caregiving resources intensify the ordinary challenges of keeping a job and raising a family to the level of a daily crisis.
One overlooked fact is how much job changeover low-income women experience, mostly because of family care reasons, and the harmful impact that has on kids.
These low-wage parents we talked to have a relatively high hourly wage and still have low annual incomes because many work less than full time and have a high incidence of “churning” or job changing.
Nichole's story: a Milwaukee mother of four. As part of W-2, she received training to become a certified nursing assistant and got a well-paying job at a nursing home. But her increased income put her in a common bind—she was no longer eligible for childcare assistance, yet unable to afford more than $600 a month for care for her four children. She arranged to leave them with an aunt, but when the aunt became ill, Nichole had to stay with her children and as a result, lost her job. She then took a part-time job, so she could care for her children herself after school; the tradeoff was accepting a poverty wage of less than $7.00 an hour.
We learned that current strategies for caring for children in low-income families are fragile, fluid, and patchwork, and the upheaval these arrangements create destroys many employment efforts.
Good care, even when subsidized, is still too costly for many families. Yet the quality and reliability of those systems have a profound impact on a parent’s ability to hold a job.
We also found that inadequate parental time and attention—a concern for all children—may be especially detrimental to children in low-income families.
More than two-thirds of the parents interviewed reported having at least one child with either a chronic health issue or a special learning need. These conditions typically require more frequent and lengthy medical visits and/or school conferences. Yet many parents reported their jobs offered few resources and little flexibility to accommodate family responsibilities.
One mother of a child with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) in Denver reported she gets at least three calls a week about her child. "My jobs last about as long as my supervisors can tolerate the interruptions," she said.
A Boston teacher described a direct connection between children’s’ educational achievement and their parents’ job situations. “The [children] don’t see much of their parents. A lot of these people could only get jobs at night… so kids come in without signed permission slips or homework [done].”
Work schedule flexibility and publicly-funded job and income supports reduce the conflicts between job demands and family life, benefiting both employees and employers. The problem is, most parents don't have this or real flexibility. 58% had no paid sick leave, 52% no paid vacation.
Nearly half of all parents in this research experienced some kind of job sanction, including termination, lost wages, denied promotions and written and verbal warnings, as a result of trying to meet family needs.
With a few exceptions, for these workers adjusting work schedules means leaving a job and finding another one.
What's Needed:
As a start, we call on those responsible for TANF reauthorization to redefine the goal of this program as ending poverty and enhancing the well-being of children and families, and to broaden the definition of "needy families" beyond those who have received welfare.
Policies recommended include:
Opponents of FMLA complain about what any expansion would cost. But it’s high time we factored in the cost of not providing affordable leave – the cost to taxpayers, to employers, and above all to workers and their families. The benefits of the public policies we call for go beyond cost savings in the ways they strengthen child and family well-being.
9to5 is proud to be part of the Take Care Net and to help translate our research and that of so many others into action for public policy change. We will be drafting a candidate survey to ask candidates where they stand on the public policies that are needed, and to help frame the debate for the 2004 elections.
