Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Does Your Child Care Center Provide Paid Sick Days?

Published on September 28, 2009 in Karen Pesapane and Work & Family. 0 Comments
Karen Pesapane

Karen Pesapane

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps updating its guidelines to help child care and early childhood programs - - and all of us - - respond to influenza during the 2009-2010 flu season.

Guidelines for providers include separating children with signs of illness from healthy children until the ill child can be picked-up, and not allowing children back to school until 24 hours after their fever naturally subsides.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius unveiled a new PSA featuring Elmo practicing sneezing into his arm and went on record saying “If your child comes down with the flu, we hope you plan to keep them home and not share this with their playmates.”

It’s been said enough over the past few weeks that I think we all get it. Staying home when feeling sick is one of the best ways to prevent the spread of illness.

But for all the recent emphasis on keeping sick kids home, I wondered if my 2 year-old son’s child care teachers were sick, would they stay home? Could they stay home?

So I did the unthinkable and I asked the director of my son’s child care if teachers are able to stay home when they are sick without losing pay or worrying about job security. I was delighted to learn that the teachers at my son’s child care have a paid leave package that covers sick days, and that they also allow longer tenured employees (who earn more leave than newer employees) to transfer their leave hours to colleagues who may need them.

But I know the child care industry does not typically provide workers with paid sick days.

Case in point, my mother recently retired after 25 years of teaching child care in Connecticut. She told me recently how relieved she is that she retired when she did, because she never had any sick days. She shudders to think how any teachers in the same situation this flu season will not be able to follow the CDC’s advise and stay home when they are sick.

Unfortunately, the national emphasis on staying home when sick is neglecting to acknowledge the fact that millions of workers in this country don’t have a single paid sick day. If they stay home, they get no pay. This isn’t exactly a great time to be losing income, especially for working families.

We all need a reality check.

Ask your child care provider, or the barista at your favorite coffee joint, or the worker preparing your lunch order, or working members of your family: “Can you afford to stay home if you feel sick?”

If they say no, ask them to tell their leaders in Congress that we need a minimum standard of paid sick days in this country.

No Progress on the Wage Gap…Again!

Published on September 14, 2009 in Sharyn Tejani and Workplace Fairness. 0 Comments
Sharyn Tejani

Sharyn Tejani

It is official. Women are still getting short-changed when it comes to our wages. Last week, the government released information on pay and gender.

Even in 2009, we are not receiving equal pay for equal work.

A woman working full time is still paid only 77 cents to a man’s dollar in this country. So a woman has to work all of 2009 and into April 2010 to be paid as much as a man was paid in 2009 for equal work.

Alarmingly, we saw virtually no improvement this year. The wage gap is about the same as last year. The rate of progress is glacial; at the rate of improvement we were seeing before this stagnation, equal pay would come sometime in 2058 – and now the “progress” has slowed down!

The lack of any improvement in closing the wage gap is especially frightening given data showing how badly women need equal pay. The economic downturn has caused enormous job losses, especially among men—meaning that more and more families are solely dependent on the income women are bringing in. When women are not paid fairly, families suffer.

The new data also show that as poverty rates are increasing, women on their own—single women, divorced women, widows—are experiencing very high rates of poverty. Women of color in that group are even worse off. Again, the lack of equal pay has devastating effects for these women and for the families they support.

What keeps the pay gap going? Study after study that controls for factors that go into wages—education, experience, occupation—fails to explain it. The only conclusion possible is that equally qualified men and women are being paid different wages for the same work. In other words, discrimination persists.

And unequal pay begets more inequality. Salaries at a new job often reflect past salaries; retirement benefits are a percentage of salary, as are Social Security payments. So a woman who is being paid less now because of discrimination will probably be paid less at her next job and she will certainly be paid less when she retires.

Most employers have policies that prohibit workers from talking about their wages, which keeps women in the dark about these inequities. To fix these problems, we need the Senate do what the House has done—pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. This new law will make it harder for employers to defend unequal pay decisions, given victims of unequal pay more remedies, and help stop employers from retaliating against workers who share salary information.

Or we can just wait for April 2058.

President Obama has spoken. This is your moment!

Published on September 10, 2009 in Debra Ness and Health Care. 0 Comments
Debra Ness

Debra Ness

President Obama delivered a powerful and passionate speech on health insurance reform.

It was a resounding call to get it done right, and get it done right now.  

It is safe to say the silly season is officially over.

America’s families are counting on lawmakers to fix our broken health care system this year. And their need for reform is urgent and indisputable. 

The vast majority of Americans — including patients, providers, and caregivers — recognize that the status quo is unsustainable and unacceptable. 

Thousands of National Partnership supporters like you and millions of people nationwide have spoken out because they know we need meaningful reform that makes quality, affordable care a reality.

The cost of inaction to women and families across the country is too great.  

The President called for urgently-needed reforms to the insurance market so that people can count on their health care benefits when they need them the most, regardless of their age, gender, or a pre-existing condition. He also recognized the need to transform our current system into a pay-for-value rather than a pay-for-volume system in order to finally deliver comprehensive, coordinated and quality health care.

The public is counting on Congress to pass a health insurance reform package this year that will finally give them stability and security when it comes to their health and the health of their loved ones. 

And, despite a vocal minority intent on playing politics with health care, we are closer than ever before to reform that lowers costs, guarantees coverage, and provides more choice for all Americans.

Now is the time to answer the President’s call by putting politics aside and working towards a goal we all share — healthy futures for America’s families. 

There is more momentum now than ever to make it happen.

I encourage you to take action today —and demand that Congress get it done right … and get it done right NOW!

Virginia is for … Moms-to-be: New On-Line Tool Helps Expecting Parents Choose Hospitals, Doctors

Published on September 9, 2009 in Health Care and Lee Partridge. 0 Comments
Lee Partridge

Lee Partridge

You’re pregnant, your first language is Vietnamese, and you’d like to find an obstetrician who speaks your language. You had your first baby by emergency C-section, in another state, but you want to try to deliver the second vaginally, and you’d like to find a doctor who seems to use C-sections sparingly. Or you want very much to breastfeed your baby, and you’d like to deliver at a hospital with lactation consultants available.

If you live in the state of Virginia, you’re in luck, because the Virginia Health Information (VHI) organization has just released a Web-based, interactive consumer guide to obstetrical care that has just the data you need.

VHI is a private, non-profit organization that was started in 1993 and works with Virginia health care providers, the state government, and the research community to develop health-related databases that support quality health care. The obstetrics guide is the product of several years of work with a special task force and aims to give consumers a balanced picture of what they can expect, what questions they should ask, and information they would find useful in making choices of providers. It allows you to compare hospitals and compare physicians in multiple ways. It also contains a very useful short discussion of clinical issues and a glossary of terms.

Whether you live in Virginia or just want to look at it (wistfully) as a model for your own community, you can find it here. Once there, in the comparison sections, you can search by hospital, by region, and by physician name. The hospital and physician segments also include risk-adjusted performance evaluations on their c-section rates, episiotomy rates, and cost of care. And don’t miss the hospital services data under Prenatal Services tab 5. That’s where you can find the really cool tips – like which hospitals offer music therapy, birthing balls, or maternal massages to assist you during labor!

Virginia Health Information’s new consumer guide to obstetrical services is a great example of transparency in health care information. It’s exactly the type of tool we need to empower consumers in their health care decision-making and improve health care delivery and quality all across the nation.

With H1N1 Spreading this Labor Day: We Need Paid Sick Days, Not Another iPhone App

Published on September 4, 2009 in Rachna Choudhry and Work & Family. 1 Comment
Rachna Choudhry

Rachna Choudhry

As schools reopen and cooler, drier temperatures return here to Washington, D.C., the nation waits for the second wave of the H1N1 flu to hit us.  Meanwhile, we are bombarded by information on the Internet, in the news and through our email inboxes.  Google, too, is in on the action, helping to track and map the H1N1 flu.  And now, there’s even an “iPhone app” for the H1N1 virus!  We know people are engaged when there’s an “app.”  This one will enable users to track, report and be notified of H1N1 outbreaks on the ground, in real time.  It will also allow researchers to collect data on new areas of flu activity. 

Yet, when we look beyond the hype, the actual prevention of the spread of the H1N1 virus is relatively uncomplicated.  Government officials are simply asking workers to stay home when they are sick, and to keep sick children home from school.  Of course, there’s other advice, including coughing into your inner elbows, washing your hands frequently and getting vaccinated.  But perhaps the most effective is to stay home when you’re sick. 

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommends that “people with influenza-like illness remain at home until at least 24 hours after they are free of fever…without the use of fever-reducing medications.”  Schools will need to rely on parents to keep children at home if they are feverish.

Staying home to prevent the spread of H1N1 doesn’t require an “iPhone app,” or even access to Google maps.  All a sick worker, or the parent of a sick child, needs is time off from work without the risk of losing their pay or their jobs.  What workers urgently need is a guarantee that if they do the right thing and stay home with the flu, they won’t be docked pay, disciplined by an employer or fired. 

A basic workplace standard of paid sick days would provide workers with such a guarantee.  And it would help protect the public’s health by removing a key reason that sick adults go to work, and parents send sick children to school: concern about their financial security. 

This policy establishing a standard of paid sick days has already been proposed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Chris Dodd.  The Healthy Families Act (HR 2460/ S 1152) would guarantee workers seven paid sick days a year to recover from illness like the flu and care for ill family members. 

Now, we need urgent action from our elected leaders in the White House and Congress to make the Healthy Families Act the law of the land.  We’ve heard a lot from officials about how to cough into our elbows, and that’s good.  Now, we want to hear how they will ensure that working families don’t risk their financial security to do what is right for their own health and the health of others in their workplaces, schools and communities.   A real commitment to quickly enact the Healthy Families Act would make this a Labor Day to remember.