November 18, 2021

Chamber of Mothers Spreads Awareness and Advocacy for Paid Family Leave

       

Chamber of Mothers is a newly formed group by moms and for moms. Chamber of Mothers is comprised of lawyers, advocates, and leaders advocating for the interests of moms, with their first goal to secure federal paid family leave.

Congress is in the midst of negotiating the Build Back Better Bill, legislation proposed by President Joe Biden to help America rebuild in the wake of COVID-19. The legislation is largely broken into three categories:

  • The American Rescue Plan (a COVID-19 relief package);
  • The American Jobs Plan (an infrastructure proposal intended to aid in the reduction of climate change), and;
  • The American Families Plan (a social policy focusing on welfare and social services funding).

Chamber of Mothers is currently focused on the American Families Plan, specifically the proposed federal funding for paid family leave. Right now, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is the only federal legislation related to family leave and fails to financially compensate mothers and family members who are eligible utilize the leave policy. President Biden originally proposed 12 weeks of paid leave, and Congress completely cut paid leave from the plan altogether. After much back and forth, Democrats reintroduced four weeks of paid family leave back into the proposal.

In the wake of this addition, the Chamber took to social media, spreading awareness on the need to keep federal paid family leave. They utilized #savepaidleave and #buildbackbleeding to build and track support of the movement. In the coalitions’ inaugural post, they created a symbol highlighted above “[t]he shape that the hands are making evokes the shape of the vagina, the entrance to the womb where life is formed. The hands are the union of two as one, and conjure the helping hands and village of support needed for new mothers and families.” This image spread throughout thousands and posts and a myriad of communities highlighting the need for federal support for mothers. The group is eager to grow and encourages those interested to enter their information on their website in addition to staying abreast of their social media pages.

Written by Law Clerk Katina Smith

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This Week in FFCRA Complaints: Dismissals While Seeking Paid Leave

September 11, 2020
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Disability Discrimination
It appears employers continue to terminate workers who are supposed to be protected under the FFCRA. This week, we’ve highlighted several cases where employees were waiting for test results or already diagnosed with Covid-19 and subsequently fired when seeking paid leave.

Employees Push Back at Tech Companies for Giving Parents too Much

September 11, 2020
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It might seem like vanilla stuff for some of the world’s almost capitalized companies in the world to provide extra support to employees during a global pandemic, but not so at companies like Facebook and Twitter, where a rift has formed between parents, non-parents and employers over the companies’ policy responses to daycare and school closures.

The Berke-Weiss Law Weekly Roundup: A nurse fights for safer workplaces

September 8, 2020
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There was some decent news this week in the employment outlook, depending on how you look at it. The positive is that roughly 1.37 million jobs were added this week and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.4 percent. The negative is that nearly 20 million Americans remain unemployed and of those 1.37 million jobs added over 230,000 hires are census workers, who will be out of a job shortly.

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