CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS

THE SHRIVER REPORT: A WOMAN’S NATION CHANGES EVERYTHING

FAMILY FRIENDLY: THE GOVERNMENT'S ROLE IN SUPPORTING TODAY'S FAMILIES

WELCOME: HEATHER BOUSHEY, SENIOR ECONOMIST, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS

MODERATOR: ELLEN BRAVO, COORDINATOR, FAMILY VALUES AT WORK CONSORTIUM

SPEAKERS: ANN O’LEARY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BERKELEY CENTER ON HEALTH, ECONOMIC, AND FAMILY SECURITY AND SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS

MARIA ECHAVESTE, FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS; LECTURER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY LAW SCHOOL

DAVID GRAY, DIRECTOR, WORKFORCE AND FAMILY PROGRAM, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2009 10:00 A.M. WASHINGTON, D.C.

Transcript by Federal News Service Washington, D.C.

HEATHER BOUSHEY: Okay, well, thank you so much. It was so wonderful to have Secretary Solis here this morning, such an honor and a privilege for us here at the Center for American Progress to have her. And, you know, it’s kind of stunning here this morning to see so many friends and colleagues here in the audience today. And thank you all for coming and for helping us to mark the release of this report and to talk about these issues, moving forward.

I also – as I sort of start my comments here this morning, I’m Heather Boushey. I’m one of the coeditors of “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.” And over here, on the sort of the left side of the audience, are many of the authors that are part of this report and I wanted to give a special thank you to Ann O’Leary, my coeditor on the project without whom I could have never done this.

I didn’t know Ann at the beginning of this project and now I feel that she is my dearest friend. And after a project as intense as this one is, that should pretty much say everything. So thank you. We’ll be hearing from her on the next panel. But I also wanted to thank all of our authors who have just done such a fantastic job here today.

My job is to give you a bit of a detailed overview of the themes in our report and some of the pieces in it. And we’ve structured the day today to really mirror the chapters in the report. So I’ll talking both about how we’re going to work through our day, but also on the report and I hope all of you got a copy of it on your way in and have been able to see some of the coverage that we’ve gotten so far on this report.

So the key message – the key thing that we talk about in this report is that what is happening now is that as millions of women have entered the workforce over the past few decades and are now fully half of workers on U.S. payrolls. This is a dramatic shift that changes everything. We were very purposeful in the title that a woman’s nation changes everything.

We think that the fundamental change of how women have spent their days has had far- reaching implications, not just for women, but for all of the institutions around us and especially for men and for their families. Quite simply, having women as half of workers changes everything around us.

Yet, we as a nation have not yet come to terms with what this means. And again, as I look out at the audience today, I see so many of you who’ve dedicated your lives to working on getting the kinds of policies that we need to enable every worker to be a good caretaker and a good worker. But yet, we haven’t – you know, the institutions around us haven’t yet fully changed. We haven’t seen the kind of change that we need to see.

The – many of the policies that we have rely on an outdated model of how families actually are. This first speaker that’s in our report and that is in Ann’s – Ann and Karen Kornbluh’s chapter shows that, you know, it used to be the case that the traditional male breadwinner, female homemaker family was the modal family type.

But that is no longer the case today. And now, we have an increase in a variety of families that we have out there. Alongside this change, we also now know that women are increasingly the breadwinners for their families. In four in five families with children, a women is the primary breadwinner, that either – that is either she is a single, working mom, or she’s a married mom who brings home as much or more than her husband.

An additional quarter of moms are co-breadwinners. That is that they’re a married mom who’s bringing home at least a quarter of her family’s income. This is a dramatic shift from just a couple of generations ago, when most mothers were not breadwinners. Now, within married- couple families, the typical working wife brings home 42.4 percent of her family’s earnings. So she’s bringing over four out of every $10 that’s coming into a dual-earner family.

Even so, even as women are now half of workers on U.S. payrolls and even as they’re breadwinners, equality in the workplace has not yet been achieved and I cannot stress enough how this is more important now than ever. The deep recession that we continue to be in has amplified and accelerated this trend of women becoming breadwinners.

In millions of families across America right now, there is a woman who is bringing home the bacon because men have lost seven out of every 10 jobs that have been lost in this recession so far. Yet, those women remain underpaid and less likely to get health insurance from their employer than their – many of their husbands who have lost their jobs.

But even though the recession has accelerated these trends, this is not a short-term blip. It is not the case that millions of women are going to go back home. This is not – this is not a short-term problem. This is a permanent change in our economy and we need to push the institutions around us to adapt to it.

Now, both Sarah Wartell and Secretary Solis stressed this theme but I cannot stress enough that although we’ve called our report A Woman’s Nation, this is just a woman’s story. This is a story about everyone. It is a report about how women working changes the lives of the people around them and how men have been affected just as much as women have. It’s about the ripple effects of women working on the world around us.

Now, Maria Shriver, who was our fearless leader in this project – she couldn’t join us today because as Sarah said, she’s doing live television coverage, which I’m sure we can see on the screens out there on NBC. And so we’re very sad that she couldn’t join us but I do want to focus for a few minutes on some of the key things that she brought to this report.

And a lot of it has to do with these conversations with men. One of the things that she did, you know, she was a journalist before she was the first lady of California. And she took her keen journalist sense and went around the country and held conversations with everyday Americans about what it meant that women were working.

What does it mean that women are half of workers on U.S. payrolls? And one of the themes that she culled from those conversations is that – and she wanted to know, of course, what this meant for men. One of the key themes that she culled was that families are now negotiating this balance between men and women, between work and family and that these are issues that are affecting everyone.

And these negotiations are happening at kitchen tables around the country, in boardrooms around the country and in classrooms. Everywhere, people are negotiating this new gender balance. In her words, she often talks about how the battle of the sexes is over and this new era of negotiation has begun.

Many of the quotes from these conversations that she held around the country are in the report, highlighted alongside essays that her and her team culled from a fantastic array of authors, again, many of whom are here in the audience today, short personal stories that talk about what it means – what a woman’s nation means to them.

We are very grateful for our collaboration with Maria and her team, Leslie Miller and Karen Skelton to help us work on this project today and their fantastic leadership. So the panel after mine today is going to be talking about government and about how government needs to respond to the issues – to the reality that most families have a woman who’s either a breadwinner or a co-breadwinner.

And the focus of that panel is a chapter written by my coeditor, Ann O’Leary and Karen Kornbluh, who couldn’t be with us today because she’s off in Paris, having I’m sure, a fantastic time. Not that we’re having fun here, but you know. But the focus of their chapter in the report is that up until now, government has focused for the most part on allowing women to enter the workforce and compete with men on the same rules that were there before women entered, a workplace where policies on hours, pay, benefits and leave time were designed around a male breadwinner who presumably had no family care-giving responsibilities.

But of course, we all know that too many women and especially too many low-wage women simply cannot compete in the way that a traditional male breadwinner could, primarily because they don’t have a stay-at-home wife at home to take care of all of life’s little and big emergencies and to provide the care for their families. So I want to just preempt them just a little bit because I want everyone to hear this twice.

Their key conclusions where they want to push us to make policy changes are to update our basic labor standards, to include a focus on family-friendly employee benefits, what Maria Shriver is now calling a smart family policy, which is a term that I like and I hope that we can co-opt; second, to reform our anti-discrimination laws so that employers cannot disproportionately exclude women from workplace benefits; third, to modernize our social insurance system.

We have a social insurance system that was developed in the 1930s when most families had a stay-at-home caretaker. It’s not relevant. In many ways, it needs to be updated for today’s families to both incorporate paid family leave as well as to account for time spent out of the labor force.

And finally, they encourage government to increase support for families for child care, early education and especially elder care so that parents and families can cope with their dual responsibilities. Now, on the panel this morning on government, Ann O’Leary’s going to be joined by Ellen Bravo, David Gray and Maria Echaveste.

And Maria also had a chapter in our report, which talks about the important role of immigrant workers and especially immigrant women workers in our economy, doing the kinds – who especially disproportionate through the kinds of care work that makes it possible for other families to work and we need to recognize and value that work.

Now, many of the recommendations that are in the government chapter and we’re going to talk about the next panel are underscored in the poll. Now, Sarah sort of gave you a little bit of a preview. It was a poll that we did – CAP, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, with Time Magazine that was done in early September.

It was a nationwide poll and it focused on how men and women are responding to the fact that women are now fully half of U.S. payrolls. And over the course of the day, we’re going to pop on these screens around the room questions from the polls so that you all can think about what – how you would respond.

And at the end of the day, John Halpin, who is one of the authors who analyzed the poll is going to come up and tell you the answers and talk about the key findings. And not to steal his thunder, but there’s a couple of things that I do want to point out. First, is that in the poll, we find that men and women overwhelmingly agree that working women is good for society.

And this is consistent, of course, with the work by Michael Kimmel in his chapter in our report, who finds that most men have moved along the path of quiet acceptance of women working, even if they haven’t yet joined us, as I look out there.

Actually, there are a ton of men here today, which is fantastic, but we need more and Michael Kimmel talks about in his chapter how men have not fully stepped up to the plate to join us in the political battle for fighting to make sure that every worker can also be a caregiver. And that both men and women need the kinds of policies that make it possible for them to fulfill their role as fathers, which many report that they want to do, moving forward.

So on this panel, Michael is going to be joined by Marcia Greenberger and Stephanie Coontz, who also authored a short chapter in our report about marriage, called The New Gender Balance. And she provides evidence that the most stable, high-quality marriages today are the ones where men and women share both paid work and domestic work, which is a shift from generations past.

And on that panel as well, they’re joined by Courtney Martin, who wrote a concluding essay for the report and it will provide us with insights on both the political aspects but how her generation sees these issues.

Now, over lunch, we’re going to do something innovative. CAP has this fantastic events team that I am so grateful for. And one of the things that they’ve set up today – there’s going to be a series of tables for other authors from our report to tell you about their key findings. And I want to just introduce their key findings for you this morning.

First, Jessica Arons and Dorothy Roberts, who couldn’t be with us today, explore the implications of women working on women’s health, as well as on women’s access to health insurance, finding that women’s breadwinning has not always led to greater access to health benefits and too often, women’s health is compromised as they try to combine work and family responsibilities.

Mary Ann Mason, who wrote our chapter on education – she focuses primarily on post- secondary education and finds that even though women have made significant strides in higher education, there is still clear evidence that women face barriers and women have not sort of made the leaps that we would like to see, especially in science and technology.

Kimberly Morgan and Sally Steenland explore the ongoing role of religion and spirituality in women’s lives and how traditional faith communities and new organizational forms of spirituality have responded to women working. They find that some congregations have been actively engaged, but many haven’t. Many have yet to sort of adapt to the fact that families need different kinds of help from their faith institutions.

And Susan Douglas shows us how the media that we’re surrounded with everyday has in some ways overshot the actual reality of women – the way that women work and live in our society today. Mainstream media outlets often suggest that women have made it, portraying women as highly successful executives. Yet in real life, we haven’t caught up as much as is often portrayed. And Susan suggests that we need to challenge these misleading portraits with facts, vigor and yes indeed, humor and particularly, we need more women in the media.

After lunch, Congressman DeLauro will be joining us and then after that, we have a session on business and what this report means for business. We have Brad Harrington and his coauthor, Jamie Ladge, who wrote this fantastic chapter on how businesses have adapted or haven’t adapted to so many women working and that the vast majority of employers need to let go of outdated models such as thinking that there’s only one place that work gets done and one way to structure a workday.

And we end our day with acting EEOC Chairman Stuart Ishimaru, who’s one of the leading voices in establishing the caregiver guidelines that the EEOC released about a year-and- a-half ago.

So just to conclude, our report lays the groundwork. We hope – it is our fervent hope that it lays the groundwork for how our society can better support the new American worker and the new American family. We hope that it’ll start a conversation and we hope that will change – this conversation will change us from thinking about these issues purely as women’s issues, but start thinking them as – about as family issues and as economic issues.

And that if we – yesterday, John Podesta and Maria Shriver were on “Meet the Press” with Valerie Jarrett and it was fantastic to hear everyone on that panel, including David Gregory, talk about these as family issues, that these are issues that affect every one of us. They’re not just women’s issues. They shouldn’t be sidelined, but they are fundamental to how our economy is moving forward.

Now, before I step down from the podium, I want to give a shout-out to someone – to a couple of folks who’ve been so important to helping us with this report, just so you can – just because we have to. And that is Ed Paisley, who I can see there in the back of the room, who was our fantastic editor on this report and I know helped so many of the authors here in the front. (Applause.)

And I know it sounds cliché but of course in a big project like this, it’s the folks that you never see but that we know did all of the work to make these things happen and we want to – I want to just thank you all and thank you Ed, especially. So I think I probably – I’m not sure exactly if I’ve run out of time for questions or not. Okay, I do have a few moments for questions. Let’s have you.

Q: Thank you. Hi, I’m Joan Michaelson (ph). I am interested in the – addressing the regional differences. We here in the Mid-Atlantic region, particularly the East Coast in general, have one view. I’ve spent time living in other parts of the country and the coasts have a different point of view than the middle of the country on, I would venture to guess, all of these issues and I’m assuming that your report addresses the regional differences – if you could address that at least a little bit now, that’d be great.

MS. BOUSHEY: We don’t spend a great deal of time focusing on differences by state or by region in the report. There are some places where regional differences do play important roles, especially in terms of institutions and thinking about faith. That’s a chapter where I think you get a lot of a sense of the different ways that people think about faith and faith institutions around the country. For the most part, we focused on the national picture and how this change is affecting people throughout the country, rather than getting into that kind of detail.

Q: My name is Jo Freeman. I wrote for Senior Women Web and I’m also a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Do you have anything in this report on the role of unions in bringing women into jobs?

MS. BOUSHEY: Yes and the kinds of jobs. There are a number of places where we have – we focus our attention that. A few that come to mind are – there’s a great chart in Ann O’Leary and Karen Kornbluh’s chapter on government showing that – showing that it is women who are in unions that really – that that makes a difference between having paid maternity leave and not and that was key after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed that many of those workplaces were the ones where you saw that playing a key role.

We have essays by – oh now, see, it’s a quiz here. I can’t remember the author’s names – oh golly, but we do have essays by folks from the union movement in the chapter and in my chapter, we focus – I focus a lot on differences in terms of occupational segregation and the importance of unions in closing the gender pay gap or not closing the gender pay gap for men and women. So there are a variety of places throughout the report where we do touch on that. And apologies to whoever’s name I forgot. Arlene Holt Baker, thank you so much.

Q: Good morning, Heather.

MS. BOUSHEY: Good morning, Valerie.

Q: My name is Valerie Young and I’m with the National Association of Mothers Centers. I understand, very easily, that the main focus of this is women moving into the labor force and generating income. But also, as I’m sure, you’re familiar with one thing that women do is generate human capital as well and they still do that in disproportionate amount to the work in that regard that men do.

That really has very economic ramifications, though it’s not the low-hanging fruit about women generating income. Can you talk just a little bit and tell me if there’s anything in this report about those dual economic roles that women play now, not just earning income but raising the human capital and their intense involvement in the child-rearing and how that plays out economically as well?

MS. BOUSHEY: That’s a great question. So the theme is the movement of women into the workplace. So we do focus a lot on that. But of course, we recognize the very important value that women – the work that women do, do in the home and men are increasingly doing in the home to raise the generation, to care for the elderly and to care for sick family members. We talk a lot about – we talk a lot about how we need to make sure that families can be both good worker – every worker can be a good worker and a good caretaker.

So we talk a lot, especially about workplace flexibility policies and the need for that so that it’s not just finding care substitutes. It’s not just finding somebody else to watch your children or to care for your ailing grandparent, but that you – that workers have the flexibility to make sure that they can be there when they need to for their families.

We were very heartened yesterday when Maria Shriver and John Podesta were on Meet the Press that that was a key theme of what folks were talking about, the need for flexibility, the need for us to think about and something like a right to request kind of law that would give workers the right to ask their employer for flexibility without retribution so that families can be there.

So that’s the way we thought – so we don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the full-time stay-at-home parents, but we do spend a lot of time talking about how it is that those parents and families that need – that have care-giving responsibilities can be in the workplace and yet still be able to do that important work that they need to do at home. So – and behind you, Lauren.

Q: Hi, Ann Marie Wisener (ph). I work a not-for-profit government consulting agency in McLean, Virginia. I understand this is a wonderful window of opportunity to insert these policies, these work-life balance policies into a new fair labor standards position in the United States and I certainly advocate also for that.

However, in former, previous conferences and meetings I’ve been at, the issue of the fact that we’re in a recession – now is not the time to do that, we have to get people back to work, the flexibility argument is not something we can fight for right now. I’m sure you’ve heard all of these arguments. I wonder if you can just speak to that, that some researchers and scholars feel that it’s not the right time and others of course, feel that it is exactly the right time.

MS. BOUSHEY: That’s a great question and as an economist, one that I love. It’s a great question to be pushed on. Yet, we are in the deepest, darkest recession of our lives. We haven’t seen anything like this in generations and we’re seeing massive employment and moreover, we’re also seeing very sharp declines in hours worked. So the average hours of work per week is at lows that we’ve never seen before since we started tabulating data on this in 1964.

So is this a good time to implement these kinds of policies? Well, I have a couple of responses. I mean first, many firms are furloughing workers; they’re cutting back on hours. They’re trying to figure out how to keep their employees, keep them on their payrolls and yet not have to pay for all of their hours of work because they can’t afford to in this recession. That is a perfect opportunity to do the kinds of education outreach around good flexibility policies.

Many employers simply don’t know how to do this right and one of the key things that we’d like to see the Department of Labor and the administration do more of is provide more information to employers to help them implement those kinds of cutbacks in a way – implement flexibility. It may be that there are workers in their workplace that would like to pare their hours but they won’t know unless they know how to ask.

So it’s an excellent opportunity to be talking about flexibility. It’s also a good time to be talking about the other things that we need. You know, for families – families still have these care responsibilities and because so many men have lost their jobs, there are millions of women who are still working and dealing with their responsibilities as caregivers. They still need that time off to care for a child or to care for an ailing parent.

And so when you – we need to make sure that those workers can keep their jobs, that that worker is not disproportionately being fired or laid off because they have a sick kid and they didn’t come into work on time. That – pushing the responsibility onto those kinds of families is actually bad for the economy overall because it means those that have the most care and the most dependence are going to be the ones who are sort of most dependent on the state if they’re the ones who are being sort of pushed out of employment.

So it is a good time to focus on it. It’s a good time to talk about all of these issues. Of course, we need to recognize that millions of employers have laid off – you know, millions of workers have been laid off and that there’s a lot of unemployed people, but we do need to make sure that those workers with care responsibilities are not discriminated against and they get access to the time off that they need.

I’ve been told – so thank you all so much for your attention. I believe I need to introduce the next introducer – that is my job here today. So you’ll be seeing a lot of me introducing introducers. So I would like to – I’ll wait until they get in the room, okay. So the next panel is going to be our panel on government. And moderating our panel, who I’d like to introduce, is the fantastic, lovely in purple here, Ellen Bravo, a dear friend and colleague.

Ellen is a long-time activist for working women. She’s currently a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and she’s the former national director of 9to5, the national organization dedicated to putting working women’s issues on the public agenda.

She’s the author of one of my favorite books, “Taking on the Big Boys,” a game- changing book that explains why feminism is good for families, businesses, the nation, and provides activist strategies for systemic change.

Ellen is one of my – I mean, I have many favorite advocates out there but Ellen is definitely one of my favorite advocates out there, and she’s the executive director of an amazing organization, which I – (chuckles) – called Valuing Families at Work, that works with advocates nationwide, and they work on issues around paid leave and especially paid sick days, and we are so grateful for your work, Ellen. Thank you. (Applause.)

ELLEN BRAVO: Thank you so much. So I’m really thrilled to talk about the role of government. I wish you will, for a minute, shut your eyes. Not so long ago, there’d have been ashtrays and cigarette smoke in this room and everywhere that you meet and work. Not so long ago in some of those rooms, there’d have been asbestos in the walls. If you were a passenger in a car with a baby or a toddler this morning, chances are, you would have been holding that baby on your lap.

And maybe your father in another state had a heart attack and you asked for permission to go help take care of him and were told, sorry, we can’t do that, but if he dies, you can have three days off instead of one for bereavement because it’s more than 100 miles away.

And maybe you were the only woman on the job, and after 19 years, found out that you were paid less than all the men, and you said, that’s not right; I’m going to complain about that. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court and five out of nine of the justices said, sorry, too late. You should have complained the first time you got a discriminatory check; you can’t do it now.

That brings us to – what people did is they got together and petitioned government and said, we have to change this; we need new rules. The first function of government is to be – if your eyes are shut, you can open them now – (laughter) – a protector, to give oversight and to establish standards and rules for how we should do things.

The second role of government is to enforce those rules, to say, look, if you don’t do what we’ve told you you have to do, there will be consequences. But the third role of government is to offer a carrot. In this case, an organic, locally grown carrot from Wisconsin – (laughter) – to say, we’re going to use our federal dollars and give extra points if you set the pace for good policies to help workers and their families.

A fourth function of government is to gather data and create reports, like this one that I helped participate in on the impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act; that shows the sky didn’t fall; it helped millions of workers and their families; it did not hurt profits or productivity; and employers found it not hard to administer.

Which brings us to a fifth function government, and that is to be a model employer; to demonstrate best practices and to work with private businesses and state governments and local governments to set up demonstration projects, to showcase what can be, to bring the workplace in line with the realities in our society.

Our panel today is going to talk about these different functions of government. I’m going to start with Ann O’Leary, who, as you know, was the fabulous co-editor of this report; she’s the director of the Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at Berkeley; she was the legislative director for Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady. Please join me in welcoming Ann O’Leary. (Applause.)

ANN O’LEARY: I love Ellen Bravo. (Laughter.) She is so fun. (Chuckles.) There are so many great women like Ellen who I’ve had the great privilege of working with, and it just puts a smile on my face – Judy Lichtman’s another one, and I have to say, for many years, these women have fought the fight and we are standing on their shoulders and it’s just so wonderful to be here.

Before I give my remarks, I have to thank Heather Boushey. She is one of the smartest women I know, and just a dear friend after this project, and I thank her so much. I also want to thank Karen Kornbluh, my co-author, who is now the ambassador to the OECD doing this great work in Paris – (laughter) – lucky for her – and was a delight to work with despite packing boxes and moving her whole family across the country.

And I think it’s really important to thank the people who make us stand here today. I couldn’t be here if not for the fact that the last four days, my mother-in-law, Yeng-tsing (ph) Liu, took care of my daughter and made sure that she was in bed and tucked in. And today, my husband took the day off because our daughter is sick. So thank you to Goodwin and to my mother-in-law.

Let me start by reading a quote, and then talking a little bit, and then I really want to open it up to conversation. Let me start with this quote, “Women are going to work and they deserve to do so. Yet, we keep the old male rules – nine-to-five, 40 hours a week and if there’s overtime, you do it or you don’t keep your job. Neither men nor women can combine working with parenting under these rules. We need new ways of working.”

This is not a quote from our report. It’s a quote from a New York Times story from 1978, more than 30 years ago, covering students that were studying the changing dynamics of work and family life. Well, we’ve come a long way from 1978, but not far enough. Despite the progress of women’s mass entry into the workforce, technology that makes it easier and often more efficient to work out of the office and major changes in societal attitudes.

As we certainly showed by the poll that we conducted with Time Magazine and Rockefeller, we have made too little progress despite all of this. And that’s why we’re here today. Let me add to the painting of the picture that Ellen did so nicely this morning to talk a little bit about some things that are perfectly legal today.

Let me start by saying an employer has every right to change a worker’s schedule from week-to-week, from day-to-day. What does this mean? It means that one day you may work nine-to-five, the next day, 12-to-eight, the next day, a different set of hours, making it almost impossible either to set up consistent child care or to coordinate with your spouse or your extended family to ensure that you have regular child care duties.

Or it may be that at the end of the day, you’re about to leave to pick up your child and your boss comes to you and says you need to stay an extra two hours. This isn’t a request; it’s a demand. You’re going to lose your job if you don’t stay an extra two hours. So what’s the government doing? Very little is the answer. The government needs to do more to encourage employers to flexible and predictable work schedules.

I’m glad that Secretary Solis and Valerie Jarrett have made that commitment that we do need to do more, that we need to put a spotlight on those employers that are doing a good job because frankly, it’s really hard. Our schools are still open during traditional hours, which means that after-school and at summertime, we need more child care and extended learning opportunities, more child care.

One of the other things that is perfectly legal today is that if you’re a pregnant woman who doesn’t qualify for FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act, which is half workforce does not qualify, that means that if you get – that if you’re pregnant and you need to take a couple days off to give birth, your employer doesn’t offer sick leave, doesn’t offer disability leave, you can be fired. That’s not illegal. We have the Pregnancy Discrimination Act but that just means that you get the same benefits as other workers. It doesn’t mean you get leave.

So this continues to be a problem. It also is a problem that if you’re a pregnant woman and you need – and you cannot lift heavy boxes, but you’re required to do by your job, your employer doesn’t have to accommodate you. Your employer can say good-bye. So these cause major problems. Our anti-discrimination laws have been incredibly helpful in helping women gain entry to the workforce, but only on the same terms as other workers. And those are often rules that were created for men who had, often wives at home taking care of children.

We need to really re-look at those laws. In addition, a woman who needs to take leave to support her family or a man cannot do so because we do not have paid family leave in our country. We’re one of very few industrialized countries without paid family leave. What does this mean? It means that not only does our government not offer it as part of our social insurance, but we don’t even provide incentives to employers to offer it.

So while our government subsidizes pensions and health care to make sure that employers offer those benefits, we do not do so for paid family leave or paid sick days. In addition, you can work for many years earning your pay, but take some time off to do care- giving, whether it’s for your child or for your elderly relative.

Or then you may want to go part-time. If you do so, oftentimes, our Social Security system will really cause problems for you, which is you will not make as much money in retirement as if you had been in a traditional family. So this is something that needs to be updated.

And finally, we know too well that having a young child is expensive. It’s a delight, but it’s expensive. We find that in child care becomes the second-highest family expense after housing for families with young children. Well, what do we do? Our government doesn’t do enough. We provide some subsidies to low-income families, but not even enough to ensure that those who are on the waitlist get off the waitlist for help with child care.

We do almost nothing on providing support for elder care. This has to change. In the 1970s, some of you in this room worked on the Universal Child Care bill and got Congress to pass it, only to have President Nixon veto it. We haven’t done an effort since that time that was as comprehensive and we should.

So one of the things that I find frustrating is that too often, presidents hold conferences or convene commissions but they don’t do the heavy legislative lifting and make the budget commitments necessary to transform our basic plans, labor standards, our social insurance system and provision of aid to child and elder care.

One of my dear friends, Julie Lichtman, who I noted earlier, often says we need families to stop thinking that these issues are just their own private hell, but to understand that we’re all struggling and we need our government and our businesses to step up and help workers, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s good for business. It’s good for our families and it’s good for our economy.

Heather went over the findings in our chapter so I’m not going to go in depth because I want to start the conversation. But we need to update our basic labor standards, fix our anti- discrimination laws, ensure that we have an updated social insurance system and make sure that we have child care and elder care.

And we need to make sure that this isn’t just women talking about these issues and making sure that we have access but that it’s comprehensive for men and women who want this together. So Ellen has already told us how we’re going to do that through the great actions of government and I look forward to that conversation. Thank you.

MS. BRAVO: Thank you so much. This is David Gray, who’s the head of the Working Family Department at New America Foundation and he has done a lot of work thinking about what could bipartisan solutions be to this? So I wonder if you’d like to respond a little bit to what you’ve heard us say. What are some things that you’ve been working on that you think we could get bipartisanship support for?

DAVID GRAY: Sure. Well, I think the focus on looking big at the need for a real conversation on structural change is, I think, surprisingly a bipartisan interest. And so rather than looking at some of the smaller pieces of change that have been made – voted for the last two decades, which have really been stalled in some partisan rancoring between business and labor, that it’s really an opportunity for a broad conversation about total systemic change.

So I’ve tried to encourage the administration to look at this moment and not lose it by just trying to focus on some of the policies that we’ve – Congress has worked on in the past but rather, try to take some sort of systemic change which includes business. So if we believe, as I think we all do, that there’s really been this massive shift in the way – not just women but men in families work, the structure of work in many work places, in fact most, have not kept up.

It’s time for a real, broader systemic change and a lot of the issues around child care and around the tax code, the incentives that you talked about, issues around social insurance, I think that Heather’s raised, I think, have – actually some surprising bipartisan opportunities. But the general flexibility theme is really the one that has the most salience, I think.

But there is a strong interest across gender, across party and across business and labor that there is a need for flexibility and if there’s one thing that makes the most difference, that has probably the best chance of success, it would be that.

MS. BRAVO: Great. Thank you so much, David. I know Maria Echaveste from when she was at Wage and Hour. I remember when the Family Medical Leave Act was first implemented and people would call with a complaint, Maria would just pick up the phone and call the employer and say is it true that you’re not doing “X”? Fix that and they would.

She is now, like Ann, a fellow here at CAP and she teaches at the University of California-Berkeley. She’s paid a lot of attention to people who, because they work, many others are allowed to work. And yet, these are the invisible workforce who are often left out of the kind of protection that we need. So Maria, would you to us a little bit about that and what could change?

MARIA ECHAVESTE: Well, one of – my essay in the book and I want to thank all of – Ann and Heather and all the great folks, Maria Shriver for really doing this report, was to focus on immigrant workers in particular because I felt that one of the things that hadn’t really been discussed and needed to be discussed if women are half of the workforce and mothers are two- thirds of either breadwinners or co-breadwinners, who’s the minding the children?

Who’s taking care of the parent? Who’s cleaning the house? And the reality is, is that there are hundreds of thousands, millions of workers who are in – caring for families, caring for children. And my question was they often have no protections under labor laws, are often paid very low wages. Certainly, a significant number do not have health insurance and the list goes on and on. And they also happen to be predominantly women and often mothers themselves. So who’s taking care of their children?

But one of the questions that I posed in my essay was is that the nurturing – the care, the work that was traditionally done by the traditional wife and mother been so undervalued that when other people took over that work, we just don’t value it or is it because it’s being performed immigrants, some of them legal, some of them not. Why is it that we entrust our children, our parents, our homes to people and not respect.

And it’s not just caregivers. I have a particular interest in farm workers. They put the food on our tables and we don’t care as a society about their living conditions, their working conditions. So I feel that what I tried to do in the essay and what I hope this conversation is, oftentimes, it’s sort of middle class, upper-middle class women and families who are discussing the challenges and the gives and takes and the negotiations between who’s picking up the child – or I like to say when I’m traveling around the country, the fact that I’m still calling to arrange the play dates because my husband, brilliant though he is, somehow doesn’t manage to be able to do that – (laughter) – and he’s in Berkeley.

The reality is, is that there are issues that are even more profound than arranging that play date and those negotiations. It’s the fact that there are people who are helping us have these dual careers and I want to be sure that we don’t leave them out of this conversation.

MS. BRAVO: Thanks so much. I’m actually going to start there if that’s okay with this conversation because you know, when Evelyn Cook – we all know who Lilly Ledbetter is but unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know who Evelyn Cook was. She was 74 years old, African- American home help aide, one of those left out of labor law protections.

When her case went to the Supreme Court, it wasn’t a 5-4 decision, it was a 9-0 decision because the issue wasn’t justice or fairness, it was, did the Department of Labor have the authority to exclude these groups of workers from the labor law protection? And the answer was yes. So that means they also have the authority to include them.

So I wonder, Maria, if you could talk about two things. One, right now, under the law – if there is a wage – a minimum wage or overtime violation or an FMLA violation, are workers protected even if they’re outside this perimeter. And secondly, what could the Department of Labor do to redefine this definition?

MS. ECHAVESTE: (Off mike, inaudible) – I’m hearing complaints. Okay. Whether it’s – is it 15 employees? Thank you – (chuckles). And many, many people work for small business. So unless you work for a business that has 50 or more employees, you’re not going to be covered by family medical leave. So if you’re a home health care worker, you have probably – you’re the only employee.

So that’s a significant problem and so I think we need to look at the kind of – sort of a worker’s rights that have nothing to do with the size of the establishment. I know that’s very hard, but it’s something we need to think about. The second is, on the Wage and Hour, you are supposed to be paid minimum wage, but there are exemptions for sort of when the overtime rules kick in for home health and nanny and child caring.

And I remember having the discussion about this issue when I was at the Department of Labor and recognized that this gets very tricky because we want to increase wages. They are workers. They help the economy, but if as we’ve seen of it in the last 30 years that income from many, many income groups have actually stagnated or gone down, when you talk about increasing wages for these types of work, then you are, as you said, child care tends to be very expensive, so as elder care.

It forces us to confront, as a society, what are our – what’s a living wage? What’s an appropriate age? How do we lift the wage rate so that in fact, you have – you can sustain your family, not create – the economy create havoc and I think that’s a very hard conversation to have and most people don’t – most policymakers don’t want to have it because it is, I think, very difficult.

MS. BRAVO: That leads to us a question about the role of government because obviously, if we leave it as parents pay more and they can’t afford to, or child care workers live on what they make, which they can’t afford to, we’ll never win. So the question is, can there be a third let to that stool? You were talking about that. What would it look like if child care were a priority?

MS. ECHAVESTE: (Off mike, inaudible) – struggles with this very issue is that child care workers are, you know, making a minimum wage, if that. Some are, of course, not and they’re breaking the labor standards and I think there’s – you know, there are certain – our government has, in some sense, done a good job.

Let me just applaud the Obama administration for what they’ve done in the economic stimulus package, as many people know, they put a tremendous amount of money – almost $5 billion into increasing child care because one of the things that we have seen is that there’s even been an erosion in the child care subsidies that we do have.

So we’re trying our very best to ensure that our low-income families have access to child care because they can’t afford to purchase child care in a way that middle and upper-income families can. So that’s a start. It’s a start both because it ensures that there’s jobs for the child care workers and there’s access for parents. But unfortunately, it’s just not enough.

I think one of the things that we really need to look to is how do we continue that federal support and then how do we ensure that our state and local governments are doing the same and that our businesses are stepping up? You know, one of the things I think is most challenging is that our states have had massive budget cuts.

So some of the stimulus has gone to just ensure that we don’t lose child care workers, don’t lose child care opportunities, but there’s a lot more leadership that needs to be done. And it can’t all be government. Businesses have – we do have tax incentives to have businesses provide child care and the frank matter is that not enough businesses take advantage of those types of incentives. Let’s encourage them to do more.

MS. BRAVO: Terrific. I want to turn to the question of flexibility and I want to just amend one thing that Ann said about leave. We do have a leave policy in this country for all workers. It goes like this – if you leave, don’t come back, for unfortunately, for too many.

And so the question I want to maybe start with you, David, is we have – when you talk about flexibility, there are so many elements and I think it’s exciting that there is this broad support, but here’s – For people I work with, this is the real question for them, the government, the health officials tell them if you get the flu or your kid gets the flu, stay home.

And their employer says if you do, you will at the minimum, lose your pay and you will points that will lead to termination. And for some of them, there isn’t even the point – little gap there – you’re just gone. That’s a kind of flexibility that is so basic, it’s not about stress. It’s about survival. How can we not say we need a floor that says nobody can be told you’re going to be fired for doing the right thing?

MR. GRAY: Well, the swine flu that we’re all trying to negotiate is sort of uncharted territory. You know, there’s so many people I know who you know, that are a little under the weather and they would have gone to work sick, but now, there’s a real calculus going on about – it’s really raised the level of awareness. So a lot of people are staying home.

And it does highlight, really, two things for me. One is, you know, businesses do struggle with this, as workers do, employers do. I mean, they have an incentive to retain their best workers. They have an incentive to not decimate the rest of their workforce by having somebody there who is sick and therefore, they have an incentive to provide some sort of flexibility for their workers.

And it also puts a real highlight on the need for some sort of telework or the use of technology. There’s your telework centers or an ability for people to be productive in some way at home because many people will be at home care-giving, but they’re going to be perfectly healthy themselves and able to work. In my mind, it, you know, the health issues of the next few months highlight the need for what is really a bipartisan issue anyway, which is the need for flexibility in terms of telework.

MS. BRAVO: Yes, Maria?

MS. ECHAVESTE: I think we have to confront the tensions that exist and in writing the family medical leave regulations and running Wage and Hour for 4 years, there are some observations. One is that most employers just want to know what they’re supposed to do. They really don’t want to get in trouble. The second is employers value some workers more than others.

And when we were writing the FMLA regs, what we had to deal with – with the fact is you’re going to be accommodating to a valued and trusted employee but when the employee who has consistently pushed the limits and your patience actually has a qualified FMLA reason to be out, you’re going to be less likely to be sympathetic.

And so one of the challenges in government is how do you write regs, how do you pass laws that actually deal, really provide guidance for the majority of the workforce and not just try to – and this is a tension we fought about a lot – try to write the reg to ensure that that one individual who’s going to push the limit would be protected. And I always argued, that’s going to end up in litigation, trust me. Let’s worry about the 80-plus percent of folks who really just want to know what they – and their employees – who just want to know what their rights are. So how we – you know, flexibility’s important.

And the other thing is, flexibility in the high-tech, or can you do your work through the computer, well, there are lots of jobs in which you actually have to be present. And you can’t open the store remotely! So how do we balance that?

MS. O’LEARY: Can I just add to that, Maria? I think one of the things that is so challenging is that we do have to recognize that professional workers have a tremendous amount more flexibility in our society than our low-wage workers. The same can be said of paid, certainly, maternity leave; we have a ways to go on paid parental leave, particularly for fathers and paid family leave. But in a large part, our workers – all of us – have had wonderful opportunities, I’m quite sure, when we’ve had children or elder care needs.

And so I do think we really need to stress and focus on that we need to ensure that we are not just talking about workplace flexibility to help the four of us on this panel do a better job of making this work, but, really, both highlight the workplaces that are doing a good job for their low-wage workers.

We point out in our business chapter – I believe Brad (ph) and Jamie (ph) point out that we have – CVS and Marriott that have done a good job of trying to make sure that there are predictable schedules; that people – we’re not saying that you can’t be there to open the store, we’re saying, I want to know that I have to be there to open the store so that I can arrange my child care. So that’s the type of conversation.

The other thing that I really want to stress is that I – you know, as you look back on this, you applaud the many, many reports that have happened and the many, many highlights of good businesses that have been going on since the 1970s; yes, let’s do more of that, but let’s not stop at just spotlighting the ones who are doing a good job. We really need to provide incentives.

I was very delighted that both Maria Shriver and John Podesta talked about the possibility of doing something like right to request flexibility, which is a policy in the U.K. and other countries where it gives the employee the right to say to their employer, I need to have a conversation with you, and I don’t want to be fired for having that conversation about what I need to have a predictable or a flexible schedule.

MS. BRAVO: Did you want to add something, David? You look –

MR. GRAY: Oh, no, it’s just great stuff. I mean, the focus on some of the corporations which have the least amount of opportunities to provide some sort of telework flexibility – in manufacturing and others where you physically really do have to be present – I don’t think that excludes the fact that there are really a lot more corporations which really could be doing a lot more in this area, whether it’s incentives or – you know, like, the government, through its reinvestment policy, could really provide a broader technological broadband base to allow telework for some of those companies which could be doing much more in that area.

Some of those companies that have a need for people to be physically onsite are in industries that are harder hit in the recession than the average. And so it provides a challenging current environment for them to be overly regulated given their job loss challenges and the transitions in those industries.

And it’s going to be interesting to see, you know, the conversation – right to request is – the conversation part – and when I talk to businesses, a lot of employers will say that if employees simply ask, I’m very happy to provide some flexibility, and usually they’ll say when they do ask, we have a conversation that usually goes pretty well.

So there is kernel within the right to request discussion that I think is very – has a bipartisan piece. The hammer of that is when those discussions don’t go well, what kind of mechanism you provide in terms of the employee at that point becomes a real sticking point because you’re going to get – you’re going to lose that bipartisan conversation quickly when discussion turns to that hammer.

MS. BRAVO: So I just want to add, I appreciated what David, what you said about it makes sense – you know, employers know this is the way to keep your best people and you don’t want to make other people sick.

Here’s the problem: For many reasons, employers don’t always do what makes sense. The people who make the decisions don’t always live the lives of their employees, and the world they live in doesn’t – they may have wives at home still and they may not know that the world has changed, or they may not function as if it does.

I remember when the FMLA passed, one of the things our commission found is that two- thirds of all the employers who were covered – and mind you, that was a minority of all employers – two-thirds of all the employers who were covered, had to change at least one of their policies. And you know what that meant? They weren’t covering men before, or they weren’t covering adoption, or they weren’t covering time off for caring your parents, or for caring for your sick children.

So I think I was part of – with the regional wage-an-hour person – of doing trainings with employers, and they bring up “that problem employee.” This is what I would always say, if you have a problem employee, you have every right to set goals and expectations and coach and have consequences, but for heaven’s sakes, don’t wait ‘till her mother has a stroke to tell her that she’s a problem employee because that will be against the law.

So I think there are ways of, you know – other kinds of –

MS. ECHAVESTE: I’m going to amplify this point about employers – and all of us across the country – who sometimes do things that don’t make sense. And yet, the role of government in terms of setting the floor and then providing the framework for these discussions.

I remember the battles we had about comp time – how many people remember changing the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow employees to substitute time off for overtime, right? It was a huge battle in which – I remember a meeting in the White House, and the problem was that there was sort of folks who worked 20 hours a day in their job saying, people should be able to have comp time.

And I just remembered – there were only two people in that room I believe who’d ever punched a time clock – me and another person. And you have to be able to step in other peoples’ shoes that – yeah, it all sounds great to be able to substitute comp time, but how many of us really will be able to stand up to our boss and say, I actually need the overtime; I don’t want the time off.

And yet, I still think there’s a kernel to that that ought to be explored because it could – perhaps not right now in this current economy, but when the economy gets really, really strong – people might be willing to trade off some overtime for time off and flexibility.

MS. BRAVO: I think the most important thing is the word, I appreciate, that Ann used – of predictability. It’s not predictable if overtime is something you can’t choose. If it’s not voluntary, we can’t even begin the conversation. And there actually are way for people who want more time off – employers right now could say to them, I’ll give you that unpaid time off; if you have enough money from your overtime pay, I’ll just accommodate your schedule.

So it isn’t – I think the comp time was a phony/funny ? (1:30:50) – way of looking at a problem we could solve right now. The real issue is how do we get at predictability of schedules; making sure people have enough hours and not, you know, mandatory staying time that disregards the lives that they have and so on.

I wanted to mention that a number of organizations – the Family Values @ Work Consortium and national partnership and dozens of other organizations have signed onto a Valuing Families at Work agenda that we think helps show what kind of legislative changes the secretary was implying we do need to help expand – bring systems up-to-date, make them work smart – to accommodate the realities of the workforce today.

MS. O’LEARY: It’s such great work and we thank you so much for doing that. One of the things that you said, I just want to stress – you said, legislative changes. There’s a lot we can do without making legislative changes, and I think Secretary Solis and her staff are really focusing on some of that work.

Now, one of the things that I’ve been working on through the Center for American Progress and through UC-Berkeley, where I work, is this idea that, through federal contracting, we can make good policies. Many of you might not know that federal contracting actually affects about one-quarter of the work force. So if we can really incentivize our federal contracting employers to do a much better job and do be those model employers, I think we could get a long way in this conversation, and really have a ripple effect throughout the private sector.

MS. BRAVO: I was reaching for my carrot, but I’ll –

MS. ECHAVESTE: Yeah, and there’s actually another role, and it’s been alluded to in several places in the report, but there are business opportunities. One of the things that is known is that still – how many businesses, pediatricians, dentists offer evening hours, weekend hours? I mean, there’s a lot of opportunity there that I think, really, we just have to think about the fact that people are working with different schedules, and are constrained by their own schedules, that I think that if businesses saw that as an opportunity, it could also help – and it’s not legislative; it’s not even model – it’s just, I’ve got a service and I’m going to make it more flexible.

MR. GRAY: If I could just highlight that, I think that’s just really well-said; that the business case or the business opportunities, the business incentives, market incentives, are strong and they shouldn’t be lost in the focus or the rush for government to do it all.

Public policy has a very important role to play but the conversation now – there’s enough of a generational change; there’s enough of a change in terms of women’s leadership in business. And in terms of a bi-partisan conversation, I think, that it’s possible that, to take a step back and really look at the moment and say, things have structurally changed, how do we solve the structural change problem, is very different conversation than, how do we pass this specific piece of legislation?

If you start with some of the legislative discussions, you might lose part of the opportunity. If one starts with a discussion that says, we really have had a change, a fundamental structural change in the way we work and the way families need support – how do we provide that support and what is the right role of the different aspects of our society, whether it’s government, business, union, families? I think that becomes a very helpful and surprisingly – I’m surprisingly optimistic about where that conversation leads.

MS. O’LEARY: Maria Shriver has done such a brilliant job at really encouraging all of these institutions, including faith-based institutions, business, government, to really do that; and not just rely on government. I think it’s so critical.

Do we have time for audience questions?

MS. BRAVO: We do have time, and I was just going to open it up to the audience to see what you’d like to ask. Yes?

Q: Carole Joffe, from Ms. Magazine. Thank you all for your wonderful work. I’d like to go back to the child care issue, which, obviously, is a very big theme in your report, all through our conversations today.

And my specific question is this, that I think, understandably, most of us policymakers, advocates, et cetera focus on the lack of child care; that there’s simply not enough of it. For those of us who’ve studied child care – or used it – (chuckles) – you know, one of the major problems is just very poor quality in many cases.

We saw this very dramatically after welfare reform when child care expanded dramatically, but a lot of it was simply terrible. Some of our colleagues at UC-Berkeley did wonderful reports showing that. So my question to all of you is, is there anything in your report or in your advocacy/political world that can address the question of the quality of child care?

MS. O’LEARY: Absolutely. One of the exiting things that many of you may not know is happening because it’s been – because health care’s been dominating our public discourse – is that – which is great – early, the Obama administration has put a big push in Congress for – the leadership of George Miller and others have been pushing something called the Early Learning Challenge Fund. It’s already passed the House as part of the Higher Education Act.

And what it would do is to provide money to states to really look at comprehensively changing our early childhood policies so that we did have a focus on quality and that we had a more seamless education program for early childhood so that we’re looking at – right now, we have infant programs; we have toddler programs; we have pre-school programs. But we don’t look at the transitions and the importance of early learning and development and healthy child indicators from zero to five. So I am just delighted that the Obama administration is doing this, and I think that’s the exact type of leadership that we need to be focused on.

MS. BRAVO: And it’s a really good example of where government can partner – in this case, with state governments – to set demonstration projects and show some models that work that then can go on and become national models. Yes? That woman right there in the blue scarf.

Q: Thank you. Anne-Marie Widner. Yes, government has a lot of employees, but I was watching TV last night and there was a show on Wal-Mart – I don’t know if anyone saw this documentary – and it said Wal-Mart has 1.4 million employees; the largest employer in the United States, is what this show said.

I encourage government being the role model, but I’d like to raise the issue of using Ellen’s metaphor of the carrot or the stick – incentives versus mandates. You had a great quote that said, this has been – we’ve been talking about this for 40 years, these issues. At what point do you say, okay, incentives, great, you know, keep throwing out the model employers, wonderful, but when do you start talking about mandating these issues in government? Thanks.

MS. ECHAVESTE: I think that’s an analysis that’s both mandating, but I would start, as the secretary said earlier this morning, is also enforce what’s there. and then let’s be very clear; I know this is a nonpartisan group and we want to speak about opportunities for bipartisanship, but also, let’s be clear that we did have a period of time in this country between 2000 and 2008 – (chuckles) – in which the Department of Labor was not – I look at my old division wage and hour, and it is half of what it was before.

It had a GAO report that came out this summer that totally criticized the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of what once was the policeman, if you will, for labor law enforcement, basic enforcement. So I think that – in much the same way, we should talk about all the different ways, the structural things we need to do, but part of it is also what laws do we have, and how can we better enforce, and how can we then see what is missing? So I just think we need to start there.

MS. BRAVO: Thank you so much. Yes, right here?

Q: My name’s – (inaudible). I affiliate with many civic organizations who are trying to put the picture together. Although it’s good to have women come to the labor force, we want to improve the women’s status, but the problem is we have to use existing conditions and existing law to improve the well-being of our families and general public.

You know, way back, maybe decades ago, maybe only one person who was earners. The problem is, they have happiness for bringing our families together to have some enjoyment and some happiness, but now, it’s everybody, they have to struggle to work, to get some bread back home. The problem is, it’s not enough to bring the people together; they don’t even talk to their children.

So they doesn’t have a bedtime to tuck them in bed if they have a chance, or lets us bring out to work and then we’ll have a chance to talk. I wonder if – (unintelligible) – in our women’s studies can really look into the problems: How are we going to reduce the taxpayer’s burden and reduce the chance to go to the highway, to have congestion of the problems, because they don’t need to go to the work if they can just stay in the home.

Just now before, women stay home, but now it’s the husbands stay home. So it’s not solving the problem. We have to do – using existing law and penalize those who ask the people to work more because – (unintelligible) – abuse and – (unintelligible) – that we have to trim it, and then really, people suffer everywhere from domestic to global. That kind of expectation profit about people is wrong.

MS. BRAVO: Yes, I think the point about – that David raised before about telework and the point about curbing mandatory overtime and finding more ways for people to have flexible ways to work, and I would add ending the situation where part-time workers are penalized. You may work part time but you work full time every hour on the job, and you should get the same rate of pay, and at least pro-rated benefits. Some of those changes, I think, would help people have more time with their families, which we know from polls and from everything in our lives people want. Yes, go ahead.

Q: Carrie Pickett (ph), Washington Times. Look, we’re seeing more women in the past 15, 20 years – they’re getting married later if not getting married at all; they’re not having children. And very often, while some of their own female colleagues are, perhaps, getting married and they are getting pregnant, very often they’re also leaving some of the workload to those single women in the offices.

So that being said, how is it that the single women in the offices who don’t have children aren’t going to get the shaft with some of these new proposals that you’re putting forward in these books?

MS. O’LEARY: You know, I think everybody – women, men, married, unmarried – have these problems. It doesn’t matter if you have children. Most people have parents; they have a sibling; they have an aunt or an uncle who has cared for them at some point in their lives. Very few of us are without any family. And I think it’s important to recognize that we’re not talking only about child care policies. Maria Shriver talks a lot about the struggle that many people have – she’s worked a lot on Alzheimer’s – and what a struggle it is when you have a parent who has Alzheimer’s, or has issues like that.

So I think it’s really, really important that while these issues are very important to parents, they’re not only about parents; they’re really about all workers and the family responsibilities that we all have. So that is a real issue.

Going to your point that we don’t all have family responsibilities, at the same time, there has to be a shared sense of responsibility, and employers need to provide assistance so that the burden doesn’t fall on the smaller workforce when somebody is out. But there needs to be a recognition that all workers will have this happen to them at some point in our lives.

MS. BRAVO: Thank you so much. Someone back there – is it Rachel? Right here.

Q: Hi, Rachel Lyons from Business and Professional Women’s Foundation. One of the numbers I’m always struck by is equal in the labor force but still not equal in wage. And I’m wondering what you see the government’s role in addressing the persistent wage gap.

MS. ECHAVESTE: Well, it’s often a job – it has, what was it – 30 years ago was something like 56 cents to the dollar; now it’s 77 or 78. So you look at the glass half full but it’s still not completely full. I think that it underscores what many people, what many women know.

I think the significance of the Lilly Ledbetter case and what the Supreme Court did, but then what congress did, what President Obama did as his first piece of legislation that he signed, underscores that we do need that floor, that nondiscrimination. And then have people be informed of their rights in order to ensure that we start digging away at that gap.

MS. BRAVO: And I’ll just add, you know, half of the narrowing of the wage gap unfortunately comes from loss of pay for men. This is not exactly what we had in mind by quality. And so one of the things we need to do in addition to enforcing the laws we have and raising awareness about it is we need a new policy that will revalue women’s work.

As Maria pointed out, the people who take care of our kids make less than the people who take care of our cars, our lawns, our pets. And that’s because they do what women did for so long in the home that was for free and unvalued. So we need to revalue women’s work and remove gender and race as criteria in compensation. That will certainly help.

Ariane (ph) had her hand up back there and then someone over here.

Q: Ariane Hegewisch from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. I wonder whether you have had any views or thoughts on how one might support employers in financing leave.

We probably know that a lot of people aren’t covered by the FMLA, but of those who are, many can’t afford to take it or say that’s why they’re not taking it. And you find good employers who pay maternity leave or other leave but who – especially small employers – who might be unfortunate, have three women go on maternity leave and suddenly, their insurance rate triple or quadruple.

So I was wondering whether you had any thoughts – either through Social Security or through taxation or by creating pooled funds for insurance – that might help employers level the costs rising potentially from this.

MS. O’LEARY: First, I’d just like to recognize and thank you for being here. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, as we all know, has been such a leader on these issues, and for many years, has done commissions on the status of women reports. And we’re just so thankful for their work.

In terms of your question, one of the things that we’re excited about at the Center for American Progress is to really take the next step and to dig into these really hard policy questions about financing, about some of the issues that David raises, about how we ensure that we get these things done in a way that we can all come together on.

My colleague, Heather Boushey, has some terrific ideas on this; a paper called “Social Security Cares;” that’s on the Web site at CAP I encourage you to look at. But I want to say a plug for more to come; look for a great, detailed policy report coming in December.

MS. ECHAVESTE: I just want to suggest that – and it’s underneath all of this discussion, which is that we’re looking for policy answers but on many different levels. But I think there has to be – in the same way that the last 40 years hasn’t led quite to – there’s been this tremendous change but our institutions have not kept up. this country has such a focus on individualism – which is a source of creativity; it’s a source of energy and intellect and all those things – but at times, it stops, I think, many of us from actually looking for common solutions. Like, for example: If we thought regionally or if we thought, why not think of pooled funds for health care, for one, but for these things like maternity leave and sick leave for when you – the fact is, there’s no mandatory paid sick leave. People forget that; that it’s your employer – there’s no federal law that says you should have sick leave.

MS. BRAVO: But there could be!

MS. ECHAVESTE: There could be – (laughter) – I know people are working on it.

MS. O’LEARY: And the federal government did play a role back in the – encouraging employers to offer these type of benefits. So I think there’re roles for both. And, David, do you want to add to that?

MR. GRAY: Sure, sure. You know, I think this is a hard – this extended-time-off piece is a very difficult one. I mean, one of the metaphors for government you could have is sort of a stethoscope from a doctor; the Hippocratic Oath, though, of doing no harm, though, which is recognizing that there is a cost to a variety of the mandates. Particularly in this economy, you have to think through that.

So providing support for the financing of extended time off is a very challenging piece. When you’re using the tax code, it’s fraught with potential negative consequences. That’s why I actually like – this social insurance model of thinking about Social Security is a pretty creative, interesting opportunity because you have a system where the majority of workers have some sort of connection with; you’ve got some states who’ve already looked at the disability insurance model.

And so there’s some research to be had on what California and others have done, and there’s a broad interest in changing the Social Security system anyway because it’s not sustainable financing-wise.

So we’re going to be looking as a society at that area anyway. And so if we’re going to value the type of work and family that I think the people in this room are interested in, when one opens up that conversation, I hope this is part of it.

MS. BRAVO: Thank you so much. Yes, right here.

Q: Hi, Valerie Young with the National Association of Mothers’ Centers. All this talk of encouraging and modeling I find altogether absolutely baffling. So we have women as 50 percent of the labor force; we certainly don’t have them as 50 percent of the decision-makers or policymakers or the people who have access to the wealth of the nation or who decide what to do with the wealth of the nation. And we’re all paying the price for that right now and will be for some time to come.

No other industrialized nation has been able to cajole their business community into paid family medical leave. They’ve had to pass laws. I don’t understand what we think we’re going to accomplish by opening dialogues and encouraging good behavior.

As a practical matter, child labor laws didn’t happen because employers were persuaded that perhaps it wasn’t such a great thing to employ children. It made a great business case; you could pay them less. The 40-hour work week didn’t make sense to the business community; we had to get there through federal legislation.

I think there’s a real limit to what modeling and encouraging can do, and I think the government’s role in public policy is to cover that gap between what’s fair and what the business community will pay for. It is not fair to sideline and marginalize half of your educated labor pool and not have them participate equally because they’re the ones who have children and do the bulk of the care giving. (Applause.)

MS. O’LEARY: You know, certainly I have to say that I agree that there’s legislation that we need to pass. But in order for legislation to pass, there has to be public pressure for it to pass. And, frankly, right now, there’s not enough public pressure.

You know, Heather and I have been really eager to work on policy and to support the great work of Ellen and others in terms of legislation, but the fact of the matter is until we have not just all of us in the room demanding this but people across the country demanding it, it’s not going to get done. So I think looking at the role of how you get legislation passed is such a critical part of this.

Someone was remarking to me last night about “Meet the Press,” where Maria and Jon and Valerie Jarrett talked, trying to remember the last time a Washington Sunday talk show actually talked about these issues. It was probably 17 years ago back in 1993 when we passed the Family and Medical Leave Act.

So I agree that we have more work to do, but let’s not pooh-pooh the idea that we have a really tremendous role, all of us, to play together to make sure that this room is, you know, 300 times greater than it is right now in terms of our voices being amplified.

MS. BRAVO: And here’s the good news: All these things actually work together. The more we have this conversation and the more we showcase what works, the more we help make the case that everybody should have access to it.

And the wonderful thing is the coalitions in the states that are part of this effort, they’re very broad. They include school nurses and people who care about Alzheimer’s and asthma, and faith-based groups, and many, many others; many employers who say, don’t steal my identity and say the business community opposes; I’m part of that community and I do this and I think everybody should. So we’re building this kind of broad movement that will – and we’re trying to make more visible the work that is going on.

Thank you all of you so much for being here. Thank you to our great panelists; really appreciate this conversation. And thank you to CAP for hosting us. (Applause.)

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