Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

Minimum Wage Bill Advances in New York

Posted by Julie Vogtman, Senior Counsel | Posted on: May 16, 2012 at 05:11 pm

Good news from New York on the minimum wage: the state Assembly passed a bill yesterday that would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 per hour next year and index it to keep pace with inflation. The bill would also raise the minimum cash wage for food service workers (a particularly large segment of tipped workers) from $5.00 to $5.86 per hour and index it for inflation.

This is particularly good news for women, who make up close to two thirds of minimum wage workers in New York. A mom with two kids working full time at $7.25 per hour makes just $14,500 per year, leaving her family thousands of dollars below the poverty line. Raising the minimum wage to $8.50 per hour would provide a meaningful boost of $2,500 each year. And raising the tipped minimum wage for food service workers – like restaurant servers, who are mostly women – to $5.86 per hour would increase their earnings by more than $1,700 per year. Moreover, because women are the majority of minimum wage workers in New York, increasing the minimum wage could help to close the gap between men’s and women’s typical earnings in the state. 

But the bill still needs to pass the Senate before it can get to Governor Andrew Cuomo (who has said he supports a minimum wage increase “in principle”). And unfortunately, a number of senators have expressed opposition to the minimum wage bill, trotting out false and tired arguments that an increase would “kill jobs.”

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Tags: Minimum Wage, New York, Equal Pay, Minimum Wage, Poverty & Income Support | Add new comment

NWLC in the News: May 9 – 15

Posted by Danielle Jackson, Online Outreach Associate | Posted on: May 16, 2012 at 02:37 pm

Check out these mentions of NWLC in the news over the past week!

May 9

Girls flag football grabs attention as growing sport, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

May 10

An Economy that Gives Mothers a Choice, Tri-States Public Radio

May 11

I’m pregnant. Can my health plan refuse maternity coverage?, Consumer Reports
The True Economic Value of Women, Fast Company

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They Forgot Who They're Talking To

Posted by Judy Waxman, Vice President for Health and Reproductive Rights | Posted on: May 16, 2012 at 10:09 am

This week is National Women's Health Week — a time for women to remind ourselves to put our health first. Some politicians are determined to put women's health first, too — first on the chopping block.

Opponents of the health care law are dead-set on finding ways to undermine it. And, if they win, our health will be undermined, too. Watch our new video! Then, share it with your friends, family, and co-workers and ask them to join the fight to protect the law.

 

 

For generations, women have overcome obstacles, exceeded expectations and fought for equality.

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Tags: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Health Care, Health Care Reform, Health Insurance, Health Care Reform, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | Add new comment

Who Needs Facts? We Do, Whatever the House GOP Leadership Thinks.

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: May 15, 2012 at 12:34 pm

Did you know…

These facts aren’t trivia; they have important implications for public debate and public policy. And they all come from the American Community Survey (ACS) a dataset that almost all House Republicans and a handful of House Democrats voted to eliminate last week.  

The ACS is invaluable to researchers, businesses, non-profits and the government. The ACS is the only source of annual data on the social, economic, and demographic characteristics of our country down to the neighborhood level.

The arguments to eliminate the ACS are tenuous at best. Some policy makers, like Congressman Daniel Webster (R-FL), have stated that the survey is a violation of privacy. This is simply ludicrous – the Census Bureau takes extreme caution to make sure that all survey results are confidential. No one’s responses are identifiable – from looking at the public data, it is impossible to tell who answered a survey question a specific way.

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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, House of Representatives, Equal Pay, Poverty & the Safety Net, Tax & Budget | 1 comment

First Confirmations After Deal Expires: Now What?

Posted by Amy K. Matsui, Senior Counsel | Posted on: May 15, 2012 at 11:22 am

Last Monday, the last three nominations covered by the deal agreed to by Senate leadership back in March were voted on. The question on court-watchers’ minds was: How will the Senate approach scheduling confirmation votes during the rest of 2012? 

Yesterday, we got the first inklings of an answer. The Senate voted on two district court nominees, George Russell to the District Court of Maryland, and John Tharp, Jr., to the Northern District of Illinois. Both judges were confirmed by overwhelming votes – Judge Tharp by the vote of 86-1 and Judge Russell by voice vote.

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Tags: Judicial Nominees, Judicial Nominations, Judges & the Courts | Add new comment

A Check Could be in the Mail for You

Posted by Anna Benyo, Senior Health Policy Analyst | Posted on: May 14, 2012 at 10:37 am

It’s Women’s Health Week. Time to Celebrate! Along with all of the other goodies we’ve been talking about endlessly for the last two years, the health care law is giving us another reason to celebrate: cold hard cash.

That’s right, cash money. Or more like a check. Let me explain.

The health care law signed by President Obama in 2010 to overhaul our health care system included a provision to require insurance companies to spend more of our premiums on our care, not on administrative costs or profits. It is called the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) and it is a federal requirement that insurance companies must spend 80-85% of premiums on health care. When I talk about this with women across the country, one of the first things they say is something along the lines of, “It’s about time!” (That that seems a pretty normal requirement and one that should have been in place a long time ago.) Before the health care law, many insurance companies spent excessive amounts of our premium dollars on administrative costs and profits, including executive salaries, overhead, and marketing—and not on our health care.

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Tags: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Health Care, Health Insurance, Health Insurance, Health Care Reform, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | Add new comment

The Greatest Mother’s Day Gift

Posted by Andrea Maruniak, Media Manager | Posted on: May 13, 2012 at 02:56 pm

If I could give my mom any Mother’s Day gift, I’d reassure her that the health care law is safe. Because, like millions of Americans, my mom has a "pre-existing condition" that her insurance won't cover. And last month, she was forced to pay $14,000 out-of-pocket for cataract surgery. She’d hoped to wait until 2014, when the health care law is fully implemented and pre-existing condition exclusions are banned, but her vision was declining too quickly to keep putting it off.

Unfortunately for the millions of Americans who desperately need the health care law, those who oppose the law for political reasons have brutally slandered it—on the news, in Congress, even in the highest court in the land. And they’ve talked so loudly and adamantly that the law’s significance—what we truly stand to lose—has largely been lost in the debate.

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Tags: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Health Care, Health Insurance, Mother's Day, Health Care Reform, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | Add new comment

Read All the Blog Posts from NWLC’s Mother’s Day Series!

Posted by Danielle Jackson, Online Outreach Associate | Posted on: May 13, 2012 at 01:39 pm

Happy Mother’s Day! Here at NWLC, we wanted to celebrate by bringing you some new blog posts to highlight some ways our work helps American mothers and families nationwide. We’ve got 10 great posts for you – check them all out below.

This Mother’s Day, Let’s Raise the Minimum Wage, by Julie Vogtman

As you probably know, Mother’s Day is coming up on Sunday. Here at the National Women’s Law Center, we care a lot about mothers – not only our own (although you’re totally awesome, Mom!), but also the millions of women across the country who are trying to raise kids, care for their own aging parents, climb the career ladder, save for retirement, and protect their health – often all at the same time, and often with the odds stacked against them. My work in the Family Economic Security program focuses on advancing policies that help low-income women and their families make ends meet, and if you’ve seen any of my blog posts lately, you’ll know one policy change that could really help working moms is an increase in the minimum wage. Read More >>

 

Investments in Child Care Help Moms, by Karen Schulman

As mothers across the country celebrate Mother’s Day with their children this Sunday, many will be enjoying their time together with their daughters and sons. But many mothers who have young children and work outside the home will be looking ahead to the work week with trepidation, worrying about their child care arrangements.

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Tags: Mother's Day | Add new comment
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