Welcome to another edition of the weekly roundup. In addition to our weekly roundup, we’re also hoping to highlight relevant cases being brought against employers regarding violations of the Family First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). You can see that here. Now, onto this week’s roundup. This week we’re highlighting several important developments regarding a return to work and the continued federal failure to properly address workplace safety, as well as more news on the childcare front, and a thoughtful consideration about how the global pandemic could get people thinking about family values in a new light.
Eugene Scalia Grilled Over PUA and OSHA in Senate Hearings
This week, Department of Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia went before the Senate Finance Committee to discuss the prospects of extending pandemic relief beyond its July cutoff. As other writers, such as David Dayden at the American Prospect have noted, the DoL and Congress should have put automatic stabilizers on recovery rather than a hard deadline of July, 31. But we have to live with what we have now that we’re approaching the date, Congress is unsure of whether to extend relief, with Republic senators particularly keen on ending it. Another important highlight of the meeting was Scalia’s admission that the DoL has received 5,000 OSHA complaints and has only issued one citation, underscoring the DoL’s failure to create uniform guidelines for workplace safety.
Without Childcare, There Can Be No Recovery
We might sound like a broken record, but it is a cornerstone of our practice to place emphasis on how important caregiving is and how much more is needed to protect the rights of pregnant women and new parents. And even more so as working parents start to get calls to return to work. Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, Sarah D. Wire reminds us all that “child care is still the missing ingredient for a fast recovery.” According to Wire, only hospitality industries saw a bigger hit than the child care industry, and she reports that federal employer surveys demonstrate again and again that after fears about coronavirus, lack of child care is a top reason for people not returning to work. In addition to this, it is practically a given at this point that child care slots will be deeply slashed and prices will increase sharply in order to accommodate social distancing requirements and the razor-thin margins of privatized healthcare.
Ditching the Rhetoric of “Family Values”
Finally today, we want to share a piece from Julie Kohler, Fellow in Residence at the National Women's Law Center. Kohler writes in the Boston Review that the coronavirus pandemic offers a unique opportunity to get rid of the ideological bludgeon of the two-parent, nuclear “family values” which she argues has been used for the last 40 years as a deceptive way to smuggle into our lives the total privatization of family care provision and the shaming of single and working parents. She writes:
“As various forms of public economic support for families have been systematically eroded (e.g., cuts to public higher education, the scaling back of Pell grants) and replaced by private financing mechanisms (e.g., the expansion of private student loans), family economic ties through marriage and parenthood have been strengthened. The net result is that family structure has become, along with race and gender, one of the prime sources of inequality in the United States.”
While married couples in the US enjoy thousands of legal rights and privileges, single mothers are not only vilified, but are “more likely to be poor in the United States than they are in twenty-six of twenty-nine comparable, rich democracies.” This is not because of personal failings but because our policies have failed working people. Kohler argues that as more parents, even well-off ones and especially women, face the modern imperatives of holding down a full-time job and a return of full-time child care due to coronavirus, there is hope that they will look beyond their own personal stories to realize how important universal programs for working parents and their children are.
