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paid sick leave
State Victories Against Inequality to Celebrate Despite Bleak Election Day
Any near-term policy progress will have to start at the city and state levels and work its way up to the federal level. Three progressive tax victories from last night are an encouraging sign.
Nov 06, 2024
If you’ve ever questioned whether our country has an inequality problem, this election should provide all the evidence you need. As billionaires used their financial firepower to throw support their preferred candidates’ way, Americans who’ve been left behind took out their frustrations at the ballot box.
How do we get started on this next chapter in the fight to reverse extreme inequality? With Senate Republicans still short of a filibuster-proof supermajority, next year’s debate over the expiration of the Trump tax cuts could still present one opportunity.
But it’s also likely that any near-term policy progress will have to start at the city and state levels and work its way up to the federal level. Three progressive tax victories from last night are an encouraging sign.
In addition to these fair tax victories, I’m heartened by the passage of pro-worker reforms in several “red” states last night—in sharp contrast to the positions of their Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress.
Washington state’s Initiative 2109 was the most important tax-related ballot measure of the year. Hedge fund executive Brian Heywood bankrolled this campaign, hoping to repeal the state’s innovative capital gains tax on high earners.
With 62% of votes counted, the rollback proposal went down in a 63-37% landslide.
“This victory shows that advocacy in support of creating a more equitable tax code works,” Melinda Young-Flynn, communications director at the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, told Inequality.org.
“So many groups and individuals—including business owners, labor unions, teachers, racial justice advocates, parents, lawmakers, and many more—have worked together for more than a decade to help the public at large in our state make the connection between commonsense progressive taxes and the very real needs of our communities.”
Introduced in 2022, Washington state’s path-breaking policy imposes a 7% excise tax on capital gains from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets that exceed $250,000 per year (excluding real estate sales). Who makes that much from their financial investments? Fewer than 1% of the state’s richest resident.
Prior to the introduction of this tax in 2022, Washington’s wealthy had flourished under a state constitution that prohibits income tax. The capital gains tax does an end-run around that ban and the state supreme court has ruled it constitutional.
In its first two years, the capital gains levy has raised $1.3 billion for investments in childcare and early learning, public schools, and school construction.
“The people of Washington have sent a clear message,” says Young-Flynn. “The well-being of kids takes precedence over tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. All those of us who care about economic justice know it’s well past time to stop giving the ultra-wealthy a special deal in the tax code at the expense of everyone else.”
Washington state voters also beat back an effort to allow employees to opt out of a new payroll tax for long-term care insurance if they waive the benefit of that state-operated program. If this measure had passed, it likely would’ve rendered the insurance program financially unviable. Fortunately, voters rejected the proposal by a 55-45% margin.
In Illinois, voters expressed support for an extra 3% tax on income of over $1 million, with revenue going to property tax relief. With 89% of votes counted, Illinois voters approved the ballot measure by an 89-11% margin. While this measure is nonbinding, organizers hope this victory will stoke efforts to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2026 to authorize the new tax on the rich.
In addition to these fair tax victories, I’m heartened by the passage of pro-worker reforms in several “red” states last night—in sharp contrast to the positions of their Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress. Voters in Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska approved guaranteed paid leave and Missouri and Alaska also passed state minimum wage hikes.
A friend just wrote to me with this message: “A tree outside my window is nearly bare. Perhaps it is an image of our national life this morning. We have a choice: to focus on the bare branches or to appreciate the colorful leaves.”
These state victories against the scourge of inequality are some of the colorful leaves I’m appreciating today.
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To Address Inequalities, the US Needs a Federal Mandate for Paid Sick Leave
While private sector gains are welcome news for millions of working families, access to paid sick leave remains vastly unequal.
Sep 20, 2024
Absent federal action, states and localities have expanded workers’ ability to earn paid sick leave to care for themselves and their families. The results of these efforts over the past dozen years are clear: There have been significant gains in access to paid sick time among private-sector workers. The latest data released Thursday morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that these trends continued into 2024: 79% of private-sector workers have the ability to earn paid sick leave, an increase from 63% in 2012.
While these gains are welcome news for millions of working families, access to paid sick leave remains vastly unequal. As shown in the graph below, higher-wage workers have greater access to paid sick days than lower-wage workers. Among the 25% of private-sector workers with the highest wages, 94% have access to paid sick days. By contrast, among the 25% of workers with the lowest wages, only 58% have access to paid sick days. Prior releases have shown that the bottom 10% fare even worse, with only 39% having access to paid sick days in 2023 (though their access has improved, likely from state action).
This unequal access to paid sick days is particularly troubling since low-wage workers are least able to absorb lost wages when they or their family members are sick. Workers may have trouble paying for housing, food, health care, and other necessities (see Table 1 of this report).
While federal inaction on paid sick days continues to erode families’ economic security and needlessly spread illness, cities and states are stepping up for working people and serving as models for jurisdictions throughout the country. Minnesota is the latest example of states granting workers the ability to earn paid sick time in 2024. Measures to provide paid sick time are also on the ballots this November in Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska.
Given variation in state laws, it’s no surprise that there are significant differences in access to paid sick time across the country, as shown below.
The share with access to paid sick days ranges from only 64% in the East South Central states (Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee) and 65% in the West South Central (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas) up to 95% in the Pacific states (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska). Notably, many state governments in the East South Central and West South Central Census divisions have passed preemption laws prohibiting local municipalities from passing paid leave and sick day policies.
There is also huge variation in access to paid sick days across the private sector. Full-time workers are much more likely to have paid sick days than part-time workers (87% versus 55%). Unionized workers have greater access to paid sick days than nonunion workers (84% versus 79%).
Fortunately, there is a relatively simple way to address some of these inequities: The federal government can pass legislation to mandate paid sick leave for all workers. Paid sick leave not only helps reduce transmission of disease, it also provides economic security for workers who might otherwise lose income if they have to take time off from work.
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There Can Be No American Dream Without Paid Sick Leave and Low-Cost Child Care
America gives a lot of lip service to the American Dream, but we haven’t led the world in meeting human needs since the Reagan Revolution.
Sep 18, 2023
American families with children — and the American Dream they’re trying to live — are about to face a serious crisis.
Counterintuitively, the pandemic brought a child-care boon to working families with kids. This was in large part due to the extraordinary efforts of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, who got billions for expanded childcare funds to families in distress.
Although these were technically emergency funds, they were similar to normal, routine programs offered by virtually every other developed country in the world.
But when the pandemic was declared officially over, Republicans dug their feet in and said that there was no way America would ever do for its families what Europe, Canada, and the democracies of Asia do for theirs.
So the funds are expiring this month and one-in-three American children’s families will lose the money to cover childcare costs, causing an estimated 3.2 million kids to lose care and lead to the shut-down of an estimated 70,000 child-care programs.
This is crazy, but it makes perfect sense to Republicans who believe if kids weren’t born to wealthy parents they should have no claim to life’s best opportunities.
There’s a backstory here that’s worth understanding.
Most of America’s labor and child care policies were established or find their foundation in FDR’s New Deal and the work of his Labor Secretary, Francis Perkins. At the time, women had few rights and little economic or political power.
Their opportunities in the workplace were strictly circumscribed (I still remember, in the 1970s, The Lansing State Journal requiring me to place a “Help Wanted: Secretary” classified ad in the “Women Wanted” section), pay was correspondingly low, and benefits were non-existent.
A historian for the US Department of Labor tells a story that was repeated often back in the early 1930s before the passage of New Deal labor protections:
“While President Franklin Roosevelt was in Bedford, Mass., campaigning for reelection, a young girl tried to pass him an envelope. But a policeman threw her back into the crowd. Roosevelt told an aide, ‘Get the note from the girl.
“Her note read, ‘I wish you could do something to help us girls....We have been working in a sewing factory,... and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week... Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week.’
“To a reporter's question, the President replied, ‘Something has to be done about the elimination of child labor, and long hours and starvation wages [for women].’”
The battle over working conditions and pay was particularly bitter in the South. As an Indiana congressman declared during a 1937 debate on legislation to establish a minimum wage:
“There are in the State of Georgia, canning factories working ... women 10 hours a day for $4.50 a week. Can the canning factories of Indiana, Connecticut, and New York continue to exist and meet such competitive labor costs?”
The result — after considerable public pressure by FDR and Perkins — was the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which established the minimum wage, created boundaries on the ability of employers to exploit workers, and outlawed child labor but also — because of the hostile-to-women-in-the-workplace business climate of the day — ended up cutting the working opportunities for women.
At that time, most families subsisted on a single paycheck, and the “homemaker mom” was the norm across America. Outside of the upper middle class and the morbidly rich, childcare that would allow leisure or work time for a working class or poor mom was, outside of a grandparent or close relative, nonexistent.
Travel was also far more expensive and inconvenient than it is today, so families tended to live closer to grandparents, who, when mom did work, could often fill that childcare gap. I saw this in my own family: my stay-at-home mom cared for several of my brothers’ kids over the decades when my sisters-in-law went to work in the 1980s.
That era — the Reagan/Bush Revolution 1980s — was the transitional time. As Reagan took a meataxe to unions and cut taxes on the morbidly rich while raising them repeatedly on the middle class, working class wages and take-home pay first froze and then began to collapse at the same time housing and Reagan-deregulated medical costs were exploding. Mom, in many cases, had no choice but to go to work if the family wanted to continue to live the American Dream.
In pushing women into the workplace to make up for dad’s loss of income and the shipping of good jobs overseas, Reagan and his neoliberal heirs had some help. The birth control pill was legalized in 1961 and was in widespread use by 1965. Abortion was legalized with the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision in 1973.
As women gained control of their own fertility and the women’s movement expanded workplace opportunities, the economic definition of the normal American family shifted from a single breadwinner to two (or more).
When you look at household income statistics you see that they’ve been steadily but incrementally growing ever since the 1970s; when you look at individual income, though, the story is quite different, as pay only increased slightly, then declined, particularly over the past two decades, in the years since Reagan put the US into his trickle-down supply-side model.
Many of these dynamics — particularly the empowerment of women in the job market post-1960s — are not unique to the US. Developed countries across the world have stepped up to backstop women in their entry into the workplace by providing, paying for, or subsidizing childcare from an early age. These policies are assisted by family leave provisions that cover months and sometimes years after childbirth.
As Claire Cain Miller noted in The New York Times:
“Typical 2-year-olds in Denmark attend child care during the day, where they are guaranteed a spot, and their parents pay no more than 25 percent of the cost. That guaranteed spot will remain until the children are in after-school care at age 10. If their parents choose to stay home or hire a nanny, the government helps pay for that, too.”
Miller notes that rich countries “contribute an average of $14,000 a year for a toddler’s care” while here in the US it’s around $500.
And it really is that stark. Norway, at the top of the OECD list of the world’s developed nations, spends an average $29,276 per child per year and Hungary, at the bottom, spends $7,222. The OECD average is $14,436. As noted, the US spends $500.
President Biden proposed legislation in 2022 that would cap American families’ childcare expenses at 7 percent of their income, but Republicans in Congress killed that part of what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act.
Another crisis for working families — particularly two-income working families without union protections — is illness. In addition to the costs of illness and the constant rip-offs by insurance companies demanding co-pays and pre-approval for tests and procedures, millions of American workers don’t have paid time off work when they fall sick.
While 76 percent of workers have access to some form of paid sick leave, those numbers are heavily skewed by high-income employees. Among the bottom 25% of workers (wage-wise) only about half have paid sick leave. For people in the bottom 10% of income it’s fewer than 30 percent.
In February of this year, President Biden called on Congress to fix that situation by passing legislation to mandate paid family and medical leave.
“No American should ever have to choose between a paycheck and taking care of a family member or taking care of themselves,” the President said, adding, “Workers must have access to paid leave when they face a medical or caregiving need that affects their ability to work. Yet, the United States is one of the few countries in the world that does not guarantee paid leave.”
Republicans immediately announced their opposition to the proposal and at the moment it’s frozen in Congress, blocked in the House by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and in the Senate by Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander.
Given the paucity of childcare options and the number of two-wage-earner families, family and sick leave is no luxury. Paid sick leave is even a public health issue: for example, do you want a waiter or cook sick with the flu or some other disease sneezing on or handling your food?
When people don’t have paid sick leave and they’re barely able to pay the rent with their wages, there’s a powerful incentive to work when sick, infecting both their co-workers and their company’s customers.
In some countries, like Germany, sick leave is paid by the government; Germany allocates 2.3 percent of GDP for this purpose. Other countries, like Luxembourg, require employers to cover the cost for a specific time (in Luxembourg it’s up to 3 months) and then the cost rolls over to the government. Most developed countries have specific subsidies or exceptions for small employers who would be hit hard by such expenses.
This is such a commonsense perspective that the United States is the only developed country in the world that neither offers paid sick leave nor paid family leave.
And it’s not just the rich countries of the world: fully 98 countries mandate one or both, and even at the bottom of the OECD wealth scale you find Slovenia with unlimited sick time and Lithuania offering 15 months of leave for childbirth or other family emergencies.
Repeatedly since the 1970s Democrats have proposed both paid sick and family leave, only to see their proposals shot down every time by Republicans. The result has been increased stress on our families and, when contagious diseases are circulating like during flu season, a public health crisis.
America gives a lot of lip service to the American Dream, but we haven’t led the world in meeting human needs since the Reagan Revolution.
It’s time to wake the hell up and start putting families above the interests of billionaires and corporate bosses who just want to squeeze every last penny out of their employees, consequences to them and their children be damned.
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