My previous post was concerned with the screwing employees are gonna get if a couple of new bills become law. Under the guise of helping families, the Senate and House versions of the bills will most likely kill the 40-hour workweek which has served us pretty well since it was enacted in 1938.
What I didn’t mention in that rant was that the bills were introduced and sponsored by Republicans. The Senate bill is sponsored by 6 Republicans, while the House bill is sponsored by 82 Republicans and 3 Democrats (William Lipinski of Illinois, Jim McDermott of Washington and Charles Stenholm of Texas — Shame on all of them.)
It’s not usually this clear-cut, but, while the Republicans are introducing bills to screw the worker, the Democrats are introducing a bill help families by expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act. The new bill would extend the Act’s provisions to Federal workers and to workplaces with at least 25 (opposed to the current 50) employees. It would also address one of the most problematic aspects of the current law: “3.5 million people who qualified for family and medical leave in the year 2000 were not able to take it. Seventy-eight percent of that group did not take leave because they could not afford to do so.”
The new, expanded law would create funding for a pilot program to assist states in designing “…ways to offer six weeks of partial or full paid leave, which would count toward the FMLA-allowed 12 weeks of leave….” The funding for the leave could come from state short-term disability programs, or unemployment insurance, or some other mechanism.
Finally, in a section of the bill called the “Time for Schools Act of 2003“, this legislation would entitle an eligible employee “to a total of 24 hours of leave during any 12-month period to participate in an academic activity of a school of a son or daughter of the employee, such as a parent-teacher conference or an interview for a school, or to participate in literacy training under a family literacy program.”
This is unpaid leave, but unlike the Republican-sponsored bills, it doesn’t require the employee to make up the time by working more than 40 hours. Sometimes, the time is more valuable than the money. Write your Senator encouraging him or her to pass this bill.
