Media Center | News

Plan to open up CalPERS reflects worry about inadequate saving for retirement

04.25.2008 | Sacramento Bee | Investing for retirement is the financial equivalent of eating your vegetables: It's good for you, but sometimes downright distasteful. Now a proposal making its way through the California Legislature has people talking about whether the state can make putting aside retirement money more palatable. | Read

National paid family leave legislation introduced

04.22.2008 | Representatives Pete Stark (D-CA), George Miller (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) today introduced landmark legislation to provide workers with 12 weeks of paid leave in order to care for a new child, a sick family member, recover from an illness, or because of an exigency arising from the deployment of a member of the armed services. The “Family Leave Insurance Act of 2008” will provide families with the support and flexibility they need and businesses with improved productivity and employee morale. | Read

Tough Wage Enforcement Law Approved in Iowa Senate; Anti-Immigrant Measures Rejected

04.17.2008 | Progressive States Network | The Iowa Senate on Tuesday approved SF 2416, a bill to sharply increase fines on employers violating Iowa state wage laws, crack down on the practice of misclassifying employees as "independent contractors" to evade those laws, and protect workers reporting violations from retaliation. The Iowa Senate approach contrasts sharply with the punitive approach against immigrants embodied in a competing proposal approved by the Iowa House this week which would create new state ID requirements for new hires and "employee theft" provisions that would criminalize many immigrant workers. | Read

N.J. to allow paid family leave; Boosters push for similar law in New York

04.12.2008 | Times Herald-Record | New Jersey is about to become the third state in the nation to require paid family leave, prompting approval from advocacy groups and anger from some business organizations. A similar measure has been hovering in the halls of the New York State Legislature, and advocates are pushing for its passage. | Read

New Report: Washington’s Wealthiest ‘Rake It In’

04.09.2008 | Washington News Service | It's no surprise, but now it's documented in black and white: The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. It's happening in Washington as well as the rest of the country. A new report on "income inequality" says wages of the lowest-income families in the state have lost ground since the late 1990s, while the richest in Washington have made about 12 percent more money. | Read | Listen

Retirement confidence plummets

04.09.2008 | Employee Benefits Research Institute | Reflecting the growing concern over health care costs and economic issues, American workers’ confidence in being able to afford a comfortable retirement decreased over the past year by a rate unmatched in the 18 years of the Retirement Confidence Survey® (RCS), according to results released today. | Read

New Jersey Approves Family Leave Law

04.08.2008 | Philadelphia Inquirer | New Jersey's paid family leave measure received final legislative approval today in the state Senate. The bill, which already cleared the Assembly, was approved in a 21-15 vote. "I know this type of leave time is necessary because I've been there myself," said Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney, (D., Gloucester), referring to the birth of his 14-year-old daughter, Lauren, who remained in intensive care for 75 days after she was born. "In my case, I had an understanding employer, but I can't say the same for all of New Jersey's workers." The bill heads to Gov. Corzine's desk; the governor has announced his support for the measure. | Read

Washington stumbles toward landmark paid family leave

04.04.2008 | Crosscut.com | It's a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of a story: A year ago, Washington became only the second state in the nation to legislate paid family leave. This year, legislators failed to provide the program with a permanent funding source, but their budget did give it an administrative home and start-up funding of $6.2 million. Now it's likely New Jersey will pass Washington by, becoming the second state (after California) to implement paid family leave — and a more generous program than Washington's at that. | Read

New Jersey Assembly Approves Paid Leave to Care for Baby or Ailing Kin

03.14.2008 | New York Times | New Jersey moved closer to becoming the third state in the country to give employees the right to paid family leave. Legislation going to that state's Senate next week will offer people six weeks of paid leave to care for a newborn or sick family member at two-thirds of their salary, up to $524 a week. The measure would be financed by employee payroll deductions that would cost every worker in New Jersey a maximum of 64 cents a week, or $33 a year. | Read

WA Childcare Advocates Seek Advice from Finland, England

03.10.2008 | Washington News Service | Juggling preschoolers and paychecks isn't as hard for families in some countries as it is for Americans. So, a group from Washington went to Finland and England recently, to see what they could learn about those countries' cultures and priorities. They found that taxes are high there, but tax dollars are used to cover costs of early learning and college, family leave, and healthcare -- expenses that most Americans pay on their own. | Read

Washington Childcare Centers Explore Right to Organize

03.05.2008 | Washington News Service | It's a new twist on unionizing. Instead of workers negotiating with employers, child care centers and their workers want collective bargaining rights with the state. A bill aiming to allow that is on the Senate floor this week. Washington pays a subsidy to help poor families get child care, but care providers say it's not enough to cover their costs or retain qualified employees. | Listen

New Jersey Senate Votes for Leave to Care for Kin

03.04.2008 | New York Times | After an unusually emotional debate bursting with political indignation and personal anguish, the State Senate narrowly approved legislation Monday that would make New Jersey the third state in the nation to give employees the right to take paid leave to care for a newborn or a sick relative. | Read

Washington gets top marks for government performance

03.02.2008 | Pew Center on the States | Grading the States 2008 is the only 50-state assessment of its kind that evaluates and grades each state based on a range of areas, from budget and finance to roads and bridges. Overall state performance in 2008 ranged from A- (Utah, Virginia, and Washington) to D+ (New Hampshire). | Press Release | Full Report

With teacher turnover high, Vancouver schools shift recruiting effort to attract idealists

03.02.2008 | The Columbian | Washington state school districts are struggling to retain the teachers for whom retirement is still decades away. State schools Superintendent Terry Bergeson wrote in her five-year strategic plan that Washington’s attrition rate for new teachers is higher than the national average. “Lower paying districts have particular difficulty attracting and retaining teachers,” Bergeson wrote. The result, she said, is that “lower-income and minority students often don’t have equal access to the best-prepared instructors.” | Read

Tacoma School Board agrees to fund free full-day kindergarten

02.29.2008 | The News Tribune | If you want smarter high school graduates, you’d better start feeding students bigger doses of reading, writing, math and even coloring right from the start, Tacoma school officials believe. So starting this fall, free all-day kindergarten will be on the menu at every public school in the city. | Read

More day cares may unionize: Bill would allow workers to organize at state-backed centers

02.28.2008 | Everett Herald | Susan Torngren knows there's much more to looking after kids than feeding them and changing diapers. After 25 years as a child-care provider, she said, it still remains one of the most neglected professions. That's why she supports a bill moving through the Legislature that would enable licensed child-care centers that take state money to care for low-income children to join unions and bargain with the state for more money. | Read

Social Security Lifts 1.3 Million Children Out of Poverty

02.26.2008 | National Academy of Social Insurance | While Social Security is best known as a retirement program, it is also irreplaceable life and disability insurance for young families, according to a new report released today by the non-partisan National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI). | Read (press release | Read (full report)

Area’s middle class is losing ground

02.21.2008 | Seattle Times | More people are flying high or falling into poverty while the middle class is shrinking, says a county report released Wednesday. Wages, adjusted for inflation, rose 1 percent per year from 2001 through 2006, but that gain "has not been evenly distributed among King County households," according to the 2007 Annual Growth Report, which compiles a variety of data from various agencies. The notion that fewer people qualify as middle-class is not new, but the numbers present a stark picture. | Read

Dos and Don’ts of Coping with State Budget Crises

02.20.2008 | California Progress Report | The budget news is grim in some states. Twenty states face a combined budget shortfall of at least $35 billion for 2009, according to analysis by the Center on Budget Policy & Priorities. Another 8 states will likely have budget problems next year or the year after. The impulse by some state leaders is to slash state spending, but that could be disastrous for the economy if multiple states lay off state workers and cut-off help to those in need just as private spending is falling. | Read

Paid family leave bill to be addressed in state budget

02.20.2008 | Associated Press | A blueprint for running the state's paid family leave program has been shelved by its proponents, who say they'll handle the details in the upcoming state budget. Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent, said she and a fellow Democrat, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson of Seattle, decided to pull the bill because they feared Republicans would use up valuable floor time Tuesday debating the merits of the overall program, which became law last year. | Read

Minimum Wage Increase: Much Ado About Nothing for Most Small Business Owners According to SurePayroll Survey

02.17.2008 | SurePayroll | Small business owners are not losing much sleep about an increase in the national minimum wage, according to a recent survey by national payroll service provider SurePayroll. According to the SurePayroll survey, the majority of small businesses (51 percent) don't even know what the minimum wage is in their state. | Read

No equal-opportunity recession

02.10.2008 | Seattle Times | Atop the list of recessionary losers is government revenue as tax collections fall. Worse, this risks the competitive position of states and cities when the economy recovers, because funding for education, research and infrastructure stagnates or declines. | Read

State senators debate approved family leave bill

02.07.2008 | Columbia Basin Herald | An amended version of Senate Bill 6280, which details the family leave bill's implementation, was approved by the Labor, Commerce, and Research and Development Committee on Monday for consideration by another committee. | Read

Changes in Family Leave Act Proposed

01.25.2008 | Seattle Times/AP | The Labor Department announced proposed changes to regulations governing the Family and Medical Leave Act. The changes, if approved, would be first in more than a decade to regulations that give workers unpaid leave to deal with family or medical emergencies. | Read Seattle Times/AP | Read New York Times

Oregon's leave law is no cure-all

Legislation helps parents stay home when a kid is sick, but many still feel pressed to work

01.22.2008 | The Oregonian | Under the Oregon Family Leave Act, working parents who are eligible may stay home - unpaid - with a child who does not have a serious illness or injury without jeopardizing their job. Still, 13 years after the act's authors tried to address the common illnesses of childhood, the pressures on parents remain high. | Read | PDF