Stay Up To Date

In a two-day testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, Fed Chair Jerome Powell let it be known that improved federal child care programs would have a positive impact on women remaining in the workforce.

As the vaccine rollout is speeding up, questions about employers’ legal rights to require the vaccine are becoming more frequent.

The members of the Center for WorkLife Law have been working 24/7 since the pandemic began trying to provide advice to parents on how to manage with this brave new world of remote learning, shuttered schools, and social distancing which means restricted access to child care assistance.

The last time family leave provisions were expanded in the US was mere weeks after Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. The Family and Medical Leave Act provided unpaid leave for certain employees for family and medical reasons. And then, nothing. For 28 years. Now the FAMILY Act is pending in Congress.

If Congress’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan becomes law, one important addition to its language will be the expansion of the child tax credit, thanks to Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

In fact, many of the discrimination cases we take on follow very similar outlines. An employee, even a very senior one, is intimidated, berated, and subjected to mistreatment at the hands of a manager or executive, and has trouble sorting through the proper legal response to the situation.

A recent report from the Paid Leave for the US (PL+US), one of the leading campaigns to deliver federal-level paid family and medical leave has important findings about issues near to our hearts and our practice.

A significant gender discrimination lawsuit brought by the former COO against her former employer, Pintrerest, at the end of last year may have hiring and diversity ramifications far beyond the doors of the Silicon Valley organization.

According to the latest analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic and lockdowns continue to have an outsize effect on women’s employment in the U.S. with fewer than half (44.6%) of the jobs women lost between February and December returning. Another way of looking at it is that roughly 12 million jobs simply disappeared. Or, as Representative Katie Porter tweeted, “Women. Accounted. For. All. The. Losses.”

On the heels of some important wins for paid leave in the 2020 election, paid maternity leave has found a new supporter. One who you might not have expected: conservative co-host of The View Megan McCain. The challenge is, as Monica Hesse notes, “how we can speed up this process so that it doesn’t require every leave-denier to personally birth a child before they also get on board.”

One of the most devastating forms in which structural race discrimination appears is in the worlds of medicine and health care where people of color, especially Black people are provided with inferior forms of care, which are often deadly.

A new lawsuit, filed by an employee of the motivational speaker Tony Robbins, alleges that Robins’s company, Robbins Research International, along with Robbins and his wife Bonnie, discriminated against the employee who requested reasonable accommodations be met for her recovery from coronavirus.