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Building a Progressive Majority in the States:
Balancing Work and Family

Helping parents balance the demands of work and family should underline progressive pro-family policies. With the rhetoric of "family values", the rightwing has convinced large swathes of voters that gay marriage and associated social issues are endangering the family, even as those same corporate conservatives studiously downplay the real stresses on families, especially a workplace that is unforgiving of parents trying to balance the demands of work and home. A core challenge for progressives is to reclaim their image as defenders of the family against the pressures of modern life and work. Providing parents with time to stay home with new children or with sick loved ones, supporting decent child care and early education, and providing support for contraception to assist family planning all express a core progressive vision of valuing families and offering real support to them.

The reality for most families is that it usually takes two paychecks to pay the bills, with a majority of women and men with children under five -- and an even larger percentage with older children -- working outside the home. Despite these pressures on families, the government does remarkably little either to help parents who want to stay home with their children, even when the children are first born, or to help them afford quality child care where both parents need to work. And most workplaces extend little flexibility to parents to deal with the day-to-day challenges of raising kids. They typically punish parents, usually mothers, who take extended leave to care for their children, with fewer promotions and lower paychecks over their careers. And for all that the rightwing talks about preventing abortion, those same conservative politicians often oppose making contraception readily available and fail to extend mothers the extra support they need even if they want to have a child.

States and local governments are taking the lead in promoting policies to make work more family-friendly. Since the federal Family and Medical Leave Act passed over a decade ago, almost all innovative policy to assist families has been coming from the states.

• California became the first state to enact a law providing paid family leave for employees needing to care for a new child or ill family member and the city of San Francisco this November became the first jurisdiction to guarantee all employees paid sick days off to care for family members.
• Oklahoma guarantees pre-K for all its children - becoming a leader in this trend in the states with the highest percentage of 4-year olds in school of any state in the country.
• Twenty-three states have enacted contraceptive equity laws to assure that contraception is covered by insurance companies.

Politically, these issues divide rightwing politicians from their culturally conservative base. When California enacted its paid family leave law, surveys found 85% approval-with even 77 percent of those who identified themselves as political conservatives in support. Polls in Washington State and Connecticut found that 74% and 83% of state voters respectively in support-with an even higher percentage of workers with children under 18 supporting the policy. Even an issue like access to contraception divides the religious right leadership from all but the narrowest base of voters: a June 2006 Wall Street Journal poll found that 81% of Americans saw access to contraception as important in preventing abortions, 73% said contraception should be available regardless of a person's ability to pay, and 58% said the "morning after pill" should be readily available at any pharmacy.

What is remarkable about family leave, early education and contraception issues are the broad-based coalitions that support these policies, from medical professionals to worker advocates to PTAs to advocates for the elderly. So by progressives highlighting these issues, rightwing politicians throwing around "family values" rhetoric can be forced to either assist families in passing such legislation or expose their anti-family rightwing loyalties.

Key Balancing Work and Family Policies

Family Leave: States have increasingly moved beyond the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to help parents who need to take extended time off to care for children or ill family members, including policies that:

• Strengthen Unpaid Leave Laws: Some states extend family leave rules to smaller workplaces, allow more weeks of leave, and guarantee that leave can be taken in multiple increments.
• Provide Paid Leave: To make family leave affordable for families, states provide paid leave for public employees, expand paid disability leave for new mothers, or create a full paid leave program for new parents and for those caring for ill family members.
• Promote At-Home Infant Care: As part of welfare reform, some states have programs that allow low-income working parents to directly provide care for their newborn or adopted children as an alternative to paid child care.

Time to Care: States are taking action to help employees gain the flexibility to take care of family needs with policies such as:

• Days Off for Self and Family Needs: A basic reform is protecting time to attend kids' school activities. Where sick days are provided, employees should be allowed to use them to care for a sick child, spouse or parent. More comprehensively, employees should be guaranteed a minimum number of Paid Sick Days each year for sickness and to attend to family needs.
• Promoting More Flexible Work Options: Banning or limiting mandatory overtime (while protecting overtime pay for those who need it) and promoting options for part-time work are critical policies for increasing the ability of employees to better care for their families' needs.
• Prohibiting Discrimination Based on Family Responsibilities: Non-discrimination statutes, enacted in only a few states, help protect those with family responsibilities from discrimination.

Childcare, Pre-K and Afterschool Programs: Both to strengthen investments in childhood education and to ease the burden on working parents, states are increasingly expanding child care, pre-K and after-school education options that:

• Better Child Care Options: For infants and smaller children, state policies should increase funding for child care and encourage employers to provide workplace-based child care.
• Expand Pre-K: With studies showing the economic and social returns from early childhood education, states are increasingly expanding pre-K programs for three- and four-year olds with the goal increasingly being to make programs universally available to all parents.
• Expand Afterschool Programs: Providing after-school programs expands learning opportunities and strengthens youth supervision in our communities.
• Create Quality Care and Career Ladders: At all levels of care, policymakers should strengthen professional development and improve working conditions for caretakers to maximize the quality and social returns from childhood investments.

Making Contraception Available: Progressives can help parents plan for children when they are best able to support them and help prevent the need for abortion by making conception more available through:

• Contraceptive Equity: To assure that women are not burdened with inequitable out-of-pocket expenses, insurers should pay for contraception on the same terms as other prescription drugs.
• Funding Contraception: States are expanding coverage of contraception and other family planning services through Medicaid programs or through direct funding of community clinics.
• Emergency Contraception Availability: Many states now allow pharmacists to prescribe emergency contraception, require them to provide it to any woman with a prescription, and require emergency rooms to inform sexual assault victims of its availability.