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'End This Absurdity': Sanders, Gillibrand, and DeLauro Unveil Bills to Guarantee Paid Leave
"It is a total disgrace that millions of workers are having to choose between their job and caring for their family, their newborn child, or themselves when they are sick and in need of care," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
May 17, 2023
Mothers along with leaders from nursing and railway unions joined U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro as well as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning to introduce two bills that would guarantee paid leave nationwide.
DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sanders (I-Vt.) are leading the Healthy Families Act (HFA), which would enable everyone working for businesses with 15 or more employees to earn up to seven paid sick days per year to "recover from their own illnesses, access preventive care, provide care to a sick family member, or attend school meetings related to a child's health condition or disability."
A fact sheet from Sanders' office highlights that "34 million American workers in the U.S. lack paid sick time entirely, including 25% of the private sector workforce and 9% of the public sector workforce," and such policies are "particularly inaccessible" for low-wage workers.
"It is time to end this absurdity," declared Sanders, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). "It is time for the United States to join nearly every other major country in the world and finally guarantee paid sick leave."
"In the richest country in the history of the world, it is a total disgrace that millions of workers are having to choose between their job and caring for their family, their newborn child, or themselves when they are sick and in need of care," he asserted. "It is time Congress passed this legislation to ensure workers receive the basic dignity and benefits that they deserve."
\u201cLIVE: It is long overdue for the United States to join virtually every other major country on Earth in guaranteeing paid leave to all its workers. https://t.co/f83l4hYm7J\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1684332123
DeLauro and Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also unveiled an updated version of the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, which would ensure that all workers in the United States have access to paid leave for serious medical events. The legislation would provide up to 12 weeks of partial income annually and ensure those with the lowest pay earn up to 85% of their normal wages.
The FAMILY Act would also ensure workers who have been at their job for over 90 days have the right to be reinstated after their leave, allow states to continue administering existing programs, and establish a new Office of Paid Family and Medical Leave. As DeLauro noted, she and Gillibrand have been fighting for versions of their bill for the past decade.
"Thirty years ago, we broke ground by enshrining the Family and Medical Leave Act into law, providing unpaid family and medical leave for working Americans," she said. "Let's break ground again by making it paid. Since 2013, I have been proud to be joined by Sen. Gillibrand in introducing the FAMILY Act, which would establish the nation's first universal, comprehensive paid family and medical leave program. This year, the fight continues, as we reintroduce a strengthened FAMILY Act to meet families where they are now and ensure no one has to make the impossible choice between their job and the health of themselves or their loved ones."
The proposals are backed by dozens of advocacy organizations and unions, with several groups and activists demanding swift passage of both bills—though the odds are unlikely, with slim Democratic control of the Senate and the House's GOP majority.
\u201cHere with the most beautiful crowd for #PaidLeaveForAll\u2014nurses, railroad workers, parents, Teamsters, advocates, Congressional leadership. @SharitaGruberg of @NPWF kicks off.\u201d— Paid Leave for All (@Paid Leave for All) 1684332673
"I had my first child, I was a public school teacher, and I had to drain all my sick time to try to maintain some income during my unpaid maternity leave," said Rachel Shelton, a MomsRising member from Asheville, North Carolina, in a statement.
"That was a huge challenge, because babies get sick!" Shelton explained. "When I had my second, I made the tough decision to leave my job because the situation was unsustainable. It shouldn't be this hard to balance caregiving and work. We need Congress to pass the FAMILY Act and Healthy Families Act, now. It's past time we guarantee all working people the paid leave and paid sick days we need to care for our families and for ourselves."
National Nurses United also supports both bills. The organization's president, Jean Ross, said that "nurses want what is best for patients, and that's why our union supports paid sick and family leave for all workers. Nurses see the negative health consequences on patients when they are unable to take leave due to their own illness, or the need to care for family."
"Nobody should have to choose between their own health or the health of their loved ones, and their livelihood," Ross stressed. "Further, nursing is a majority female profession, and paid sick and family leave is essential to ensuring that nursing becomes a sustainable profession."
\u201cIt's a great day for a rally for not one but TWO pieces of legislation that support families and #paidleave: FAMILY Act & Healthy Families Act!\n\nSpecial thanks to @PaidLeaveforAll and our allies.\u201d— Family Values @ Work Action (@Family Values @ Work Action) 1684335871
The introductions—which also featured remarks from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.)—come after a year of railway workers, backed by key congressional allies including Sanders, gaining national attention for their fight for paid leave in the face of dangerous working conditions and industry greed.
Mike Baldwin, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, said Wednesday that "the BRS would like to thank those members of Congress who support paid sick leave. Rail workers were deemed essential during the pandemic. They came to work sick because they didn't want to miss a day's pay, or worse be disciplined for their absence."
"This legislation is important to rail workers," he said of the HFA. "It is an essential need, and it isn't just a frivolous want."
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Strong Plurality of Voters Blame Norfolk Southern for Toxic Train Crash
"Voters across party lines are in favor of increased safety measures," according to think tank Data for Progress.
Feb 24, 2023
Almost half of U.S. voters surveyed by progressive think tank Data for Progress blame rail company Norfolk Southern for the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio which forced 1,500 residents to evacuate, contaminated soil and water, and has been blamed for causing a number of symptoms even as officials claim air and water monitoring hasn't shown dangerous levels of pollution.
Forty-nine percent of the 1,243 people surveyed by Data for Progress from February 17-22 said they believed Norfolk Southern was responsible for the crash, including 50% of Democrats, 52% of Independents, and 47% of Republicans.
Nineteen percent said they didn't know who to blame, while 10% blamed the U.S. Department of Transportation.
\u201cNEW POLL: After the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, voters blame train operator Norfolk Southern for the crash and strongly support requiring railroad companies to improve working conditions and upgrade their braking systems.\n\nhttps://t.co/JeTnZ1ugxl\u201d— Data for Progress (@Data for Progress) 1677251896
The poll was taken as the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its preliminary assessment of the derailment of the train, which was carrying hazardous materials including vinyl chloride. As Common Dreams reported Thursday, the report found the crash was likely caused by a wheel bearing failure due to overheating.
Eddie Hall, national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), pointed out after the report was released that rail companies have aggressively pushed to loosen safety regulations, spending "nearly a half billion dollars lobbying Congress" in the past two decades as they attempt to reduce train crews to just one person and pushed back as the Obama administration sought to require more modern braking systems on trains carrying hazardous materials.
Rail workers have also blamed major rail companies' use of Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which requires train to run on strict schedules and cuts back on equipment and train crews, for the crash and others like it.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said Thursday the board is now examining Norfolk Southern's use of "wayside defect detectors," which did not alert the train crew quickly enough to the overheated wheel bearing, and said the board could issue safety recommendations to regulators or the rail company.
ProPublicareported on Wednesday that Norfolk Southern has at times instructed train crews "to ignore alerts from train track sensors designed to flag potential mechanical problems"—a policy union leaders say is "emblematic" of PSR. The NTSB did not suggest that was the case with the derailment in East Palestine.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents to the Data for Progress survey said they believe there are not enough safety regulations in place for railroad companies that transport hazardous material.
"Voters across party lines are in favor of increased safety measures, including 89% of voters who support setting higher standards for maintenance on railroads and strengthening safety regulations on railroad cars carrying explosive substances," reported the group. "Eighty-six percent of voters support placing limits on the length and weight of freight trains carrying hazardous materials."
The poll results were released as Rail Workers United (RWU), an inter-union caucus of rail workers, demanded that regulators and lawmakers take action to stop companies like Norfolk Southern from prioritizing speed and profits over safety.
"Every day we go to work, we have serious concerns about preventing accidents like the one that occurred in Ohio," RWU general secretary Jason Doering said. "As locomotive engineers, conductors, signal maintainers, car inspectors, track workers, dispatchers, machinists, and electricians, we experience the reality that our jobs are becoming increasingly dangerous due to insufficient staffing, inadequate maintenance, and a lack of oversight and inspection."
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In Railroad Workers' Fight, Democrats Must Show Whose Side They're Really On
Some lessons from the (almost) Great Railroad Strike of 2022.
Feb 19, 2023
Bernie Sandersclutched both sides of the sturdy wooden podium at the UAW Local 578 hall in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as he prepared to address a packed house of 400 union workers, students, campaign staff, and curiosity seekers. Looking like a cross between a history professor and a professional wrestler from a bygone era, the Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont leaned in, then rocked back and forth. He was pacing himself before launching into another stem-winder lecture on income inequality and the state's fiercely contested U.S. Senate race, whose Republican incumbent, Ron Johnson, lives in Oshkosh.
"We're going to have to knock down a wall or two," Sanders remarked. "This is a good turnout."
Oshkosh, a city of 67,000 people, was built by a union workforce. Its sawmills were organized in the late nineteenth century, and the University of Wisconsin campus a few miles up the road was the state's first teachers college,founded in 1871. Labor's roots run deep here on the western shore of Lake Winnebago.
In recent years, Winnebago County has become a bellwether. When it goes narrowly blue or grazes the 50 percent mark, Democrats win statewide. Blue-collar Oshkosh anchors the county, and Democrats must ramp up turnout here to win tightly contested races.
Democratslost the U.S. Senate race in November's midterm elections butprevailed in the race for governor, and kept the Oshkosh-based state assembly seat in the Democratic fold, thereby staving off a Republican run for a supermajority in the lower house. In November, Governor Tony Everslost Winnebago County by just one percentage point.
For the first time in decades, Democrats are on track to burnish their street credentials as a truly economic populist party, a sharp turn from the ideologies and philosophies of the previous three Democratic administrations: neoliberalism (Barack Obama), neo-neoliberalism (Bill Clinton), and rudderless-ism (Jimmy Carter).
Shifts in the gubernatorial race have beensignificant since2010 in the outer-ring suburbs of Milwaukee, namely Waukesha and Ozaukee Counties. But movement in counties like Winnebago and Eau Claire—the latter of which saw a sixteen-point increase for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate between 2010 and 2022—which have college and working class populations, was not as well noticed. Democrats held their own in rural areas likeWood County, home to Verso Paper, which wasshuttered two years earlier and had supported more than 900 localjobs, along with countless logging jobs in the Northwoods.
One month after Democrats beat expectations in the 2022 midterm elections by holding on to the U.S. Senate and denying Republicans a working majority in the House, President Joe Biden broke from his populist, pro-labor moorings and spiked a good labor contract proposal by the railway workers' unions.
When rank-and-file members of four of the twelve unions rightlyrejected a proposal that did not grant them enough paid sick days, Bideninvoked the Railway Labor Act of 1926 andsent the rebuffed contract to Congress for ratification. It was the first time a President had applied that law since 1992, when then-U.S. Senator Joe Biden was one of just six Senators tooppose the measure.
Biden breached the trust of American workers and did untold damage to hisbrand as the "most pro-union President you've ever seen." Progressive Democrats understood both the symbolism and the substance of the President's actions. But thanks to quick work by Sanders and Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal, of Washington State, progressives put a separate measure up for a vote thatincluded seven days of paid sick leave, to add to the railway contract bill. However, the Senatefailed to reach cloture, and the measure died. (Yet another reason to ax the filibuster.)
The Railway Labor Act is an outdated labor law that was designed to placate workers at a time when they were achieving significant momentum. Its roots were in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when workers took one too many pay cuts on the chin and decided to fight back. One striking worker famouslystated, "I might as well die by the bullet as to starve to death by inches."
Laws were soon passed to set up arbitration panels to salve workers' grievances. But members of Congress struggled to pin down an effective mediation and arbitration system to resolve grievances. President Woodrow Wilson came close to fixing this when henationalized the rail industry in 1917. But shortly after World War I, Wilson returned power to the railroad owners, and the industry oligarchs have been screwing over workers ever since.
Then came the cure-all: the New Deal'sNational Labor Relations Act of 1935. It, too, was designed to quell labor unrest. President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not allow unregulated union activity to upend the New Deal. While the act'strue intent was to pump the brakes on union momentum, its initial effects were quite promising for the labor movement. Unions became recognized across the country and among all private-sector industries. By the end of the Great Depression, enrollment in unions had shot up almostthree-fold, from 7 to 20 percent of employed workers.
But as soon as labor started grabbing the upper hand, Congress responded with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Harry Truman's veto, which limited job actions, made union dues voluntary, and prohibited closed shops. The bipartisan vote spelled the beginning of the end of the modern-day labor movement. When it took effect in the aftermath of World War II,one out of three private-sector workers were in a union. Three years later, union density had fallen by 10 percent. It rebounded briefly, but by the end of the 1960s, its downward trajectory was clear.
Tim Jacobson of UAW Local 578 looks exactly like you would expect a union steward to look. He has a commanding presence, is tall, muscular, and has a frame built for a hard hat. He hunches over slightly, no doubt the result of decades on the Oshkosh Defense assembly line fastening bolts and panels onto military tactical trucks.
Elbowing his way through a scrum of fans after Sanders's speech, Jacobson presented the Senator with a T-shirt from the union local. Sanders gladly accepted it, held it up to an approving crowd, and slipped out the side door.
Jacobson was stoked that Sanders had made it to his union hall. For almost two years, he and his union brothers and sisters had been trying to grab the attention of national leaders. In June 2021, Oshkosh Corporation, the parent company of his employer, selected Spartanburg, South Carolina, rather than Wisconsin, to fill a multi-billion-dollar U.S. Postal Service (USPS) contract to build the next fleet of electric postal vehicles. The contract was won on the merits and track record of the work by Jacobson and his colleagues, not because of an empty warehouse in the Palmetto State, leading many critics toaccuse the company of pulling a bait-and-switch.
Aside from a briefclash in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform earlier in the year between Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and a USPS representative, Local 578's plight garnered scant national attention. While most would have given up, Jacobson soldiered on. His persistence and advocacy were the reason Sanders took a break from a nationwide campus tour to get out the youth vote—a vote that madethe difference in the midterm elections—to meet and rally with workers in Oshkosh.
What happened to Jacobson represents a bigger problem—not in organized labor, but in American and global industry. Chief executive officers are recruited not for their knowledge and understanding of how a certain industry works, but for other factors.According to Byron Hanson of the Curtin Graduate School of Business, "Industry experience is not as big a success factor as what people think it would be. My sense of success factors is more context-related or expertise-related."
While worker wages have stagnated in the past four decades, chief executive officer compensation has skyrocketed. From 1978 to 2021, it increased by 1,460 percent, according toan analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Concurrently, the average worker's compensation package has grown at literally 1 percent of that rate.
During a visit to a local paper mill in the Fox River Valley, I once asked a now former paper executive what was in a rail car below his office window. "I'm not sure," he responded. "In fact, I don't really know what we actually do, I'm just here to run the place."
While he undoubtedly knew the difference between a paper roll and a roll of toilet paper, the executive's limited insight into a fundamental part of his business was revealing. If he didn't know what the hell was going on, who did? One year later, the company fell into bankruptcy.
It's union workers like Jacobson who dedicate an entire career to a single industry at a single plant. Unsurprisingly, manufacturing workers have the highest tenure—five years—of all major private industries in the United States. And for organized shops, with theunion wage premium, workers stick around longer.
When workers at Appleton Coated in Combined Locks, Wisconsin, rallied tosave their mill after it had been sold at a receivership sale in late 2017, it was the union that convinced a judge to give them another shot. And it was the workers' expertise that executed a new business model that made the company profitable. (Just over two years later, the owner—a scrap dealer that had bought the mill for parts—made tens of millions of dollars in profit byreselling it in 2020.)
When it came time to bring 1,000 union jobs to Oshkosh, it was Jacobson and UAW Local 578 President Bob Lynk who flew to Washington, D.C., to make their case to USPS officials and to lobby their members of Congress. Meanwhile, Oshkosh Defense executives were feted by anti-union South Carolina business groups, including being given the South Carolina Manufacturing Commerce and Expo's "Smart Move Award" for 2022.
If the workers are the ones tending to the shop, shouldn't they figure more prominently in industry? And shouldn't they be treated a little better?
Democrats should make clear whose side they are really on in the new Congress. One way to do that is to adopt an economic bill of rights, not unlike the one FDRproposed in January 1944, or what labor activists like University of Wisconsin–Green Bay professor emeritus Harvey Kaye and writerJohn Nichols, a contributor to The Progressive, have been championing of late. And that is tolay out in no uncertain terms what the American worker can count on from the Democratic Party in order to achieve "the essentials of a good life, regardless of their income, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or country of origin."
In states like Wisconsin, where Democrats beat expectations and met crucial goals like re-electing Tony Evers as governor and denying the GOP a supermajority in the state legislature, credit is owed to folks like Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, for injecting real resources into crucial races. Equally important, however, are workers like Jacobson, who should be credited with reminding elected leaders and candidates who it was that built the Democratic Party—and the nation—in the first place.
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