Ensuring Good Jobs and Access to Services

In the Headlines

27 April 2012

Report Sheds Light on Challenges to Balancing Work and Family

“The New Breadwinners,” a study released this week by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a grantee of our Ensuring Good Jobs and Access to Services initiative, shows that more women are supporting their families economically than ever before. And yet in the United States, the typical woman still earns an average of only 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and both men and women run up against the weakest family leave laws in the industrialized world. The United States has done “far less than other well-off countries to accommodate the difficult work-family dilemmas that most moms and dads deal with in the new economy,” E.J. Dionne writes in a Washington Post column highlighting the CAP study. Through our work on quality employment, the foundation supports efforts to address the challenges working families face, with emphasis on expanding leave policies and raising the minimum wage.

Opinion piece published in The Washington Post

Two-paycheck couples, working because they must

April 18, 2012 By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Instead of fighting a phony mommy war over what Hilary Rosen said about Ann Romney, we should face the fact that most families these days cannot afford to have one parent stay home with the kids. This is not about “lifestyle” or “values.” This is an economic struggle highlighting yet again the social costs arising from decades of stagnating or declining wages and growing income inequality.

There is a profound class bias in our discussion of what mothers should or should not do. The public debate seems premised on the idea that all two-parent families have a choice as to whether one or both work. That’s still true for the better-off. But this choice is denied to most American families. They have had to send two people into the workforce whether they wanted to or not.

Thus the importance of a study released this week by the Center for American Progress that deserves wide attention. The report demonstrates conclusively that the ruckus over Ann Romney’s decisions is 30 years out of date. Its core conclusion: “Most children today are growing up in families without a full-time, stay-at-home caregiver.”

Read the complete article »