Five fast facts about the FAMILY Act and paid leave

  Recently, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) reintroduced the FAMILY Act for the 118th Congress. This bill, which has been reintroduced in every Congress since 2013, would guarantee workers the right to paid, job-protected time off for serious health and caregiving needs.

  This column lists five fast facts on the FAMILY Act.

What it tastes like to eat what you want for the first time

  All my childhood grocery shopping memories center on being poor: Walking 10 minutes from our two-bedroom home in the Malden Housing Authority’s projects to the local Stop & Shop and filling the cart with juice, eggs, and bologna. There was the joy of adding the small amount of treats we could afford — at the time, that meant fresh bakery chocolate muffins, apple turnovers, and Gushers fruit snacks — and the embarrassment of putting some of the food back at the register when it rang up over our limit.

Rhetoric vs. Reality: Paid family and medical leave

  Access to comprehensive paid family and medical leave strengthens all American families because everyone potentially needs to take off from work at some point to recover from an illness, care for a family member, or welcome a new child. But the United States is the world’s only advanced economy that does not guarantee some form of paid leave for workers. The result is that only 12 percent of private-sector workers in the United States have paid family and medical leave. In most American families, all the parents in the home are employed, meaning there is no full-time stay-at-home caregiver, and the majority of American families rely on a female breadwinner or co-breadwinner. Paid family and medical leave policies are already working across the United States, as cities, states, and individual employers embrace them. But without a national solution, millions of workers and their families are left out.

Strengthening child welfare systems by resisting LGBT discrimination

  On May 19, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, a federal measure designed to maximize the number of qualified parents available to the hundreds of thousands of children who currently live in the American foster care system. The law would prevent child welfare organizations that receive federal funds from discriminating against potential parents on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status.