Tag Archives: women’s work
Supreme Court ruling allows plan for religious limits to Obamacare contraceptive coverage
From today’s NBC News Online:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to give the nation’s employers more leeway in refusing to provide free birth control for their workers under the Affordable Care Act.
The ruling is a victory for the administration’s plan to greatly expand the kinds of employers who can cite religious or moral objections in declining to include contraceptives in their health care plans. Up to 126,000 women nationwide would lose birth control coverage under President Donald Trump’s plan, the government estimated. Planned Parenthood said nearly nine in 10 women seek contraceptive care of some kind during their lifetimes.
The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, gives the government authority to create the religious and moral objections, said Justice Clarence Thomas for the court’s 7-2 majority. The Department of Health and Human Services “has virtually unbridled discretion to decide what counts as preventive care and screenings,” and that same authority “leaves its discretion equally unchecked in other areas, including the ability to identify and create exemptions from its own guidelines,” he said.
In dissent, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said the court in the past has struck a balance in religious freedom cases, so that the beliefs of some do not overwhelm the rights of others.
“Today for the first time, the court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree” and “leaves women workers to fend for themselves” in seeking contraceptive services, they said.
Women’s groups condemned the ruling. The National Women’s Law Center said more than 61 million women get birth control coverage through Obamacare.
“The Supreme Court’s decision will leave their ability to receive this critical coverage at the whim of their employers and universities,” the group said. “This decision will disproportionately harm low-wage workers, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others who already face barriers to care.”
Read the complete article here.
Women’s Gains in the Work Force Conceal a Problem
From today’s New York Times:
American women have just achieved a significant milestone: They hold more payroll jobs than men. But this isn’t entirely good news for workers, whether they’re men or women.
The difference is small, but it reflects the fact that women have been doing better in the labor market compared with men. One big reason is that the occupations that are shrinking tend to be male-dominated, like manufacturing, while those that are growing remain female-dominated, like health care and education. That puts men at a disadvantage in today’s economy — but it also ensures that the female-dominated jobs remain devalued and underpaid.
“Female-dominated jobs in the working class are just not comparable to men’s jobs,” said Janette Dill,a sociologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “So yes, it’s great to see women participating at such a high level in the labor market, but it also really means continuing challenges for working-class families, because these jobs just don’t replace manufacturing jobs in terms of job quality and wages.”
Women now hold 50.04 percent of payroll jobs (which excludes people who work on farms or in households or are self-employed), according to the Labor Department’s jobs report this month. (Men are still a larger share of the labor force than women, a number that is calculated differently — it includes people who don’t have jobs but are looking for work; farm and household workers; and self-employed people.)
Reasons for the decline in work for less educated men are many. They include the rise of automation; the waning power of unions; rising incarceration rates; the factories that move overseas; and hurdles to switching jobs like having to move away or return to school. But gender norms are a major and often overlooked factor. However much politicians talk about manufacturing jobs, the United States economy has become service-dominated — and jobs helping people have typically been done by women, while jobs making things have been associated with men.
Read the complete article here.
Opinion: Should women’s soccer players be paid as much as men?
From today’s Washington Post:
The tipping point may have been the sixth goal. Or the seventh. Or the 13th, which turned out to be the last goal scored in the U.S. women’s national team’s handy defeat of Thailand in their first World Cup game.
Whichever goal it was that fans thought should have been the last for ecstatic celebration by the likes of Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan on Tuesday, the debate over the players’ sliding, kicking and group hugging drew attention to another issue: the 38 cents on the dollar that the women are paid compared to the men’s team.
On International Women’s Day in March, all 28 members of the women’s team filed a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, alleging they do the same job as the men’s team in exchange for lower wages and inferior working conditions. The men’s national team has never won a world title and did not qualify for last year’s World Cup.
The women have been fighting for fair pay for years. Five of them filed a wage-discrimination complaint in 2016 with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces civil-rights laws in the workplace. Some of them then made the rounds on major television networks to plead their case.
Read the complete article here.
Six countries give women the same work rights as men, US not one of them
From today’s Washington Post:
A decade ago, no country in the world treated men and women equally under the law, according to a gender equality index from the World Bank. Today, only six countries do — and the United States isn’t one of them.
A new index released this week by the World Bank analyzes how each country’s laws affect women at every stage in their working lives — from applying for a job to having a child to receiving a pension — and the extent to which legal gender equality has progressed over time.
The study shows that over the past 10 years, the majority of the world moved closer to gender equality under the law, raising the global average score from 70.06 to 74.71 today.
By the index’s measures, six countries now have laws that protect men and women equally: Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg and Sweden.
The United States, meanwhile, is far from the leading pack. Its 2018 score came in at 83.75, a score that has stayed flat for the past 10 years. The U.S. tied with Malawi, Kenya and The Bahamas. More than 60 other countries had better scores.
The study, titled “Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform,” calculated each country’s score using 35 different indicators, focusing on laws that affect women’s ability to live and work freely. Each of the data points were divided into eight categories: Going places, starting a job, getting paid, getting married, having children, running a business, managing assets and getting a pension.
Read the complete article here.
Google workers worldwide walk off job to protest its treatment of women
From today’s Los Angeles Times:
Carrying signs with messages such as “Don’t be evil,” Google employees around the world are walking off the job Thursday in a protest against what they said is the tech company’s mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations against executives.
Employees staged walkouts at offices from Tokyo to Singapore to London to Chicago. Hundreds protested outside Google’s office in New York, and others were expected to do so in California later in the day.
In Dublin, organizers used megaphones to address the crowd of men and women to express their support for victims of sexual harassment. Other workers shied away from the media spotlight, with people gathering instead indoors, in packed conference rooms or lobbies, to show their solidarity with abuse victims.
Protesters in New York carried signs with such messages as “Not OK Google” and the company’s onetime motto, “Don’t be evil.” Many employees outside Google’s New York offices cited job security in refusing to talk.
In an unsigned statement from organizers, sent from a company account, protesters called for an end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination. They also want Google to commit to ending pay inequity and to create a publicly disclosed sexual harassment report and a clearer process for reporting complaints.
Read the complete article here.
Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy and Gender Discrimination
From today’s New York Times:
If you are a Verizon customer on the East Coast, odds are good that your cellphone or tablet arrived by way of a beige, windowless warehouse near Tennessee’s border with Mississippi.
Inside, hundreds of workers, many of them women, lift and drag boxes weighing up to 45 pounds, filled with iPhones and other gadgets. There is no air-conditioning on the floor of the warehouse, which is owned and operated by a contractor. Temperatures there can rise past 100 degrees. Workers often faint, according to interviews with 20 current and former employees.
One evening in January 2014, after eight hours of lifting, Erica Hayes ran to the bathroom. Blood drenched her jeans.
She was 23 and in the second trimester of her first pregnancy. She had spent much of the week hoisting the warehouse’s largest boxes from one conveyor belt to the next. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, she had been begging her supervisor to let her work with lighter boxes, she said in an interview. She said her boss repeatedly said no.
She fainted on her way out of the bathroom that day. The baby growing inside of her, the one she had secretly hoped was a girl, was gone.
“It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life,” Ms. Hayes said.
Three other women in the warehouse also had miscarriages in 2014, when it was owned by a contractor called New Breed Logistics. Later that year, a larger company, XPO Logistics, bought New Breed and the warehouse. The problems continued. Another woman miscarried there this summer. Then, in August, Ceeadria Walker did, too.
The women had all asked for light duty. Three said they brought in doctors’ notes recommending less taxing workloads and shorter shifts. They said supervisors disregarded the letters.
Pregnancy discrimination is widespread in corporate America. Some employers deny expecting mothers promotions or pay raises; others fire them before they can take maternity leave. But for women who work in physically demanding jobs, pregnancy discrimination often can come with even higher stakes.
The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of court and other public records involving workers who said they had suffered miscarriages, gone into premature labor or, in one case, had a stillborn baby after their employers rejected their pleas for assistance — a break from flipping heavy mattresses, lugging large boxes and pushing loaded carts.
Read the complete article here.
Overworking is overrated and unhealthy. Why so hard to respect work-life balance?
From today’s Washington Post:
Why does our society perpetuate the idea that people must be constantly working in order to be worthy of respect?
I get tired of the way our culture fetishizes overworking. People contribute to this by competing over who has worked the hardest, longest hours as though overworking makes you a better person. This attitude can lead to a feeling of shame for taking a day off for being sick, tired, or needing a mental health day. In our very public, social media sharing society it can feel like we need to constantly “prove” how hard we are working to the watching world.
Instead, we should encourage the people around us to work hard for their goals, but also encourage them to remember to take breaks, relax and enjoy life. Overdoing anything is never healthy, and we should aim to be better at balancing work and play in our culture.
Read the complete article here.
The Old Rules of the Workplace Aren’t Working. At Least Not for Women.
From today’s New York Times:
Despite clear gains by women in so many aspects of society over the decades, their progress in the workplace seems to have stalled. It is as easy to find a man named John walking the corridors of American power as it is to find a woman.
The number of female chief executives in Fortune 500 companies is 5 percent and has actually declined — by 25 percent — over the past year. In Britain, a study by the British Equality and Human Rights Commission found that a third of employers still think it’s O.K. to ask a woman during a job interview if she plans to have children. It’s not.
Women receive the majority of college degrees in the United States — and more advanced degrees — and yet they still must work four extra months to earn what their white male colleagues earned the year before, according to United States census data. When those numbers are segmented by race, it’s clear: Women of color must work even longer.
And then, of course, there is the rise of the #MeToo movement, which revealed as never before the sexual pressure many women face in the workplace. At least one study has found that 81 percent of women say they have experienced some form of sexual harassment.
Economists have long contended that there is a clear financial case for gender equality: Companies are more profitable, more collaborative and more inclusive when they hire women. True gender equality, research from McKinsey & Company has shown, would increase the gross national product in the United States by 26 percent.
What is it that seems to stand in the way of greater strides by women in the workplace?
Read the complete article here.
The Wrong Way to Do Paid Family Leave
From today’s New York Times:
Senator Marco Rubio just made a small bit of history: He became the first of his party to put forward a national paid family leave program. On Aug. 2, he introduced a bill that would allow any American to take paid time off to be with a new child.
It marks a surprising step forward: Paid family leave has become bipartisan. Unfortunately, smart policy design has not. Instead of creating a new, desperately needed benefit, Mr. Rubio’s bill would make parents cash in their retirement to take care of their children today.
All developed countries — except for the United States — guarantee at least some paid maternity leave, ranging from six weeks in Portugal to 43 weeks in Greece. Americans are only entitled to up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave.
Even securing unpaid time off was a bruising political battle. The former speaker of the House, John Boehner, called unpaid family leave “another example of yuppie empowerment,” and Representative Cass Ballenger reportedly smeared it as “socialism.” The unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act suffered two vetoes from President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, and was signed into law only after Bill Clinton, a Democrat, won the White House.
Read the complete article here.