The Rebuild America Act: Expanding Opportunity and Economic Security for Women, Ensuring Millionaires and Corporations Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes

The Rebuild America Act, introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, would promote broadly shared prosperity—and finance crucial investments in a fair and fiscally responsible way. 

The Rebuild America Act includes a number of provisions that are especially important to women struggling to reach and remain in the middle class, including:

• Protecting and creating jobs for women and men.  The Rebuild America Act includes funding to help states and localities hire teachers and other workers providing public services; this is especially crucial for women, who, as of February 2012, had lost nearly 70 percent of the 584,000 public sector jobs cut since the recovery began in June 2009. The Act also would invest in boosting employment in manufacturing and infrastructure, and would expand access to quality job training.

• Raising the minimum wage and the tipped minimum wage. Women represent nearly two-thirds of both minimum wage workers and workers in tipped occupations, for whom the minimum cash wage is just $2.13 an hour.  A woman working full time, year round at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 earns just $14,500 – more than $3,000 below the poverty line for a family of three.  By raising the minimum wage to $9.80 per hour, the Rebuild America Act would boost a minimum wage worker’s annual earnings by $5,100 per year, enough to pull a family of three out of poverty.  In addition, the Act would index the minimum wage for inflation and raise the tipped wage to 70 percent of the federal minimum wage.

• Increasing access to affordable, high-quality child care.  Many parents struggle to pay for the child care they need to get and keep a job while their children receive the high-quality early learning they need to succeed in school.  The Act would provide significant new funding to help states improve the quality of child care, including initiatives to ensure the safety of child care facilities and enhance the knowledge and skills of the child care workforce.  It also would provide assistance to help families pay for high-quality child care programs and increase the supply of these programs in low-income communities.  In addition, it would provide resources to renovate early education and care facilities and provide additional jobs for teachers in state and local early childhood programs.

• Guaranteeing paid sick leave.  Millions of workers, including a large majority of those in low-wage jobs, are not entitled to a single paid sick day.  The Rebuild America Act would enable workers to earn up to seven job-protected paid sick days a year to use if they get sick, need to address domestic violence, or provide care for a sick child or aged parent.

• Strengthening Social Security.  Achieving retirement security is particularly challenging for women, who typically have lower lifetime earnings than men and have to stretch their smaller resources over a longer lifespan.   Women rely more on income from Social Security than men do, so the Act’s improvements in Social Security benefits are especially important to them.  The Act also would strengthen Social Security’s financing for decades to come by phasing out the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.

The Rebuild America Act would support these crucial investments and help restore balance to the tax code by ensuring that millionaires pay their fair share of taxes, closing the “carried interest” tax loophole for private investment fund managers, placing a small tax on trading in financial securities that would raise revenue and deter speculation, ending tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs and profits overseas, and implementing other fair and fiscally responsible tax measures.  By promoting a more equitable tax system and raising needed revenues from those with the greatest ability to pay, the Rebuild America Act would help chart a course towards a full recovery and expanded economic opportunity for all. 

Click  here for a more extensive summary of the child care and early learning provisions in the Act, and here for an analysis of the importance of the Act’s minimum wage increase for women.