Our Successes

EOI's work with the Washington Family Leave Coalition paid off in May 2007, when Washington became the second state in the nation with paid family leave for all new parents. The new program will provide up to 5 weeks of time off with a benefit of $250 for all parents taking leave from work to care for a newborn or newly adopted child.

This groundbreaking legislation helps ensure no one has to choose between being a good parent and a good employee. Family leave insurance lowers infant mortality, encourages breastfeeding (bolstering babies’ immune systems), and allows women time to recover from childbirth. It also improves productivity by reducing turnover and helping children become better learners – both essential to economic growth.

Health Care

The Economic Opportunity Institute was responsible for the policy research and design of Initiative 773, as well as for catalyzing the coalition that pushed for its passage in November 2001. Sixty-five percent of Washington voters in 38 of 39 counties voted to pass I-773 which expanded Washington's Basic Health Plan through an increase in the cigarette tax.

The expansion enabled sliding-scale subsidized coverage of an additional 50,000 adults whose incomes were equal to or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. (For a family of four this was $34,000 in gross income.) Visit the Health Care archive page.

Early Childhood Educator Career and Wage Ladder

EOI's policy model helps increase the accessibility, affordability, and quality of early learning programs. It is the basis for the Washington State Early Childhood Education Career and Wage Ladder, which links teacher wages to their experience, responsibility, and education. First piloted in 2000, the program has now been implemented in approximately 70 early learning centers across the state, benefiting more hundreds of children and their teachers.

Minimum Wage

Washington State has one of the highest minimum wages in the country, the result of a successful Initiative to the People based on policy developed by EOI in 1998. EOI aggressively defined the policy debate on the initiative, providing the economic analysis that identified the positive economic effects of the minimum wage increase and uncovering the analytical distortions upon which the opposition's scare tactics were based. The policy, approved in every single county in the state through an Initiative to the People, not only increased the minimum wage but also included an annual cost-of-living adjustment.

Social Security

EOI is catalyzing the public dialogue on Social Security at the state level, helping work turn the dialogue away from privatization schemes and toward recognition of Social Security as fundamental shared social insurance. Our annual Social Security brief explains this crucial bedrock of economic security in layman's terms and proposes policy to protect, expand and enhance Social Security.

Worker Advancement

EOI worked collaboratively with community agencies and private sector employers to create  Community Jobs, an innovative public-private, job-creation partnership for "hard-to-employ" individuals on welfare.

A dynamic, creative and successful program, Community Jobs promoted skill-building and livable wage employment in local communities. Unique in the nation, it provided welfare recipients with training, intensive case management, and a regular paycheck for their work in the public and nonprofit sectors.

The program became a national model for paid work for hard-to-serve welfare recipients. As a result of the collaboration, over two-thirds of the people entering the program eventually moved into the unsubsidized workforce, increasing both their wages and living standards. Visit the Worker Advancement archive page.