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Today more than a hundred New Yorkers from a host of organizations will descend on Albany, calling on their elected officials to finally guarantee paid family leave to working people statewide. They’ll argue that for too many New Yorkers, bonding with a new baby or tending to a loved one who is seriously ill is impossible without missing a much-needed paycheck. And the numbers back them up.
Nearly 9 out of 10 working New Yorkers do not receive paid leave from their employers.
The call for paid family leave in New York is steadily growing. Just this morning, Governor Cuomo amended his paid family leave proposal to increase the payment for some of the state's lowest paid workers, and at this very moment, New Yorkers are gathering in Albany to call for a family leave insurance system that covers working people statewide.
“Super PACs likely encouraged more candidates to get into the 2016 GOP presidential race,” said Jay Goodliffe, a political science professor at Brigham Young University. “Even if their polls were not initially good, or there were other setbacks, the super PAC could help keep them afloat.”
Wal-Mart for increasing the starting salary of workers from $9 to $10 an hour, which would boost the wages of 500,000 employees, along with other boosts in specialized sections. While this step is a positive one, a new Demos brief argues that despite this new policy, Wal-Mart wages and schedules still aren't livable. Demos finds that the new $10 an hour wage "still does not provide enough income to support the basic needs of a single adult working Walmart's full-time schedule of 34 hours per week in any state in the country."
Seven years ago today, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became the first piece of legislation that newly-inaugurated President Obama signed into law. The law restored protections against pay discrimination that had been restricted by a recent Supreme Court decision, making it easier for working people to hold their employers accountable for discriminatory compensation.
But as Demos senior policy analyst Amy Traubpoints out in a blog post on Friday, "[b]eing paid less for doing the same job is just one aspect of the pay gap."
The 12 W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) "Anchor Institutions," applaud the Foundation's launch of the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) commission. The WKKF “America Healing Racial Equity Anchor Collaborative" is a unique partnership of 12 leading national organizations all dedicated to racial equity and racial healing. As coalition members in the TRHT process, we express our individual and collective support of moving to action and creating comprehensive initiatives on racial healing. Each Anchor institution responds to the launch, below.