Paid family leave can’t just be about babies and children:
More than 40 million people, or 18 percent of the adult population, are providing unpaid eldercare today. Americans’ struggle to balance those responsibilities with work is on a collision course with an aging population that will make even more demands on our time.
As the Baby Boomer generation gets older, the number of family caregivers is going to increase dramatically. The share of Americans age 85 or older is set to triple by 2040. And while some families are able to hire aides to assist with elderly parents’ needs, relatives are still often needed to fill in the gaps. Seven out of 10 older Americans prefer to receive care from family members.
The estimated economic value of the unpaid hours family caregivers spent on their responsibilities was about $470 billion in 2013 alone. As more and more elderly Americans will need care, their contributions will become even more valuable.
This new report from PL+US highlights the enormous amount of unpaid labor Americans are doing to care for aging or chronically ill family members—caregivers are spending an average of 24 hours a week—and how unprepared our laws and our jobs are to handle that. Caregivers are losing income and straining themselves to the breaking point, with few large companies offering paid leave for this kind of family caregiving. It’s just one more way the U.S. falls short of humane worker protections.
● JetBlue flight attendants file for a union election.
● Fordham University contingent faculty have voted for a union.
● Trump is about to make tip-pooling legal again. Here's what that means for restaurant workers.
● Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is again seeking to indulge his hard-on for drug-testing food stamp applicants.
● Chicago activists march against the class war in the Republican tax plan.
● The ideology of cheap stuff.
● Quarter-million-dollar baby.
● How Harvard's hypocrisy could hurt your union:
To keep its graduate students from unionizing, Harvard is pushing the government to weaken important protections for workers across the United States.
That’s not how the university puts it, of course.
But as law students who came to Harvard to study labor, we are alarmed by the implications of the anti-organizing tactics the school is using against its students. The institution is poised to hobble unions far beyond our Cambridge campus.
● A year ago, Donald Trump was bragging about saving 1,000 jobs at Carrier. Now ...
In retrospect, Trump’s “Mission Accomplished” moment looks as premature as George W. Bush’s appearance on that aircraft carrier. What appeared to be a genuine, if deeply flawed, shift in direction for Republican Party politics has been entirely abandoned. On the anniversary of the Carrier deal, Trump’s party was scrambling to put together a $6 trillion tax cut for the rich paid for by $4.5 trillion in tax increases for everyone else. And all of Trump’s promises to stop outsourcing have had no effect. Instead, according to a new report by Good Jobs Nation, 93,449 jobs have been certified by the Department of Labor as lost to trade competition or corporate outsourcing—higher than the average rate of loss for the preceding five years.
● Oh, look. Legislation attacking public workers in Florida.
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● Election results were great for Democrats—but a warning to the party's corporate education reform wing.