Everett, Wash.
Published: Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Suburban moms rise up to back paid family leave

John Burbank / Syndicated Columnist

 Last Thursday legislators and lobbyists in Olympia were greeted with a unique form of political performance art. Walking from one building to another, they all passed by a display of "onesies." For those of us who may have forgotten, these are infant undershirts that snap at the crotch for easy diaper changing.

Now why would anyone want to decorate and hang up 250 "onesies" in the state capitol? The "onesie" exhibitors brought attention to the need for family leave insurance in our state. They are part of a new organization called MomsRising. These moms from the suburbs have had good lives and opportunities. They were raised with a rightful sense of middle class entitlement to economic security and opportunity.

They haven't been particularly active politically. But they vote.

Now they find themselves raising their children with a growing sense of economic insecurity. Time off from work to care for a new child is harder and harder to balance between family leave without pay, a mortgage that needs to be paid, and increasing health insurance premiums. In our "ownership society" insecurity has gotten crammed into every nook and cranny of our lives. If we don't own "it" and are foundering financially, then that must be our own fault.

This modern Social Darwinism is based on the ideology that we are totally independent of each other, and that our status as wealthy or middle class or poor is due only to our own effort, and nothing else.

By this measure, the wealthy are good, productive and moral; the middle class is only somewhat good, marginally productive and certainly not moral; and the poor are bad, lazy and immoral. Tell that to someone working a double shift at 7-Eleven, trying to raise a family and care for a sick parent. Or a suburban mom balancing a new baby with a production deadline.

The MomsRising generation grew up under the tutelage of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush to assume that corporations were good, government was bad, and you are on your own. Of course, corporations can be both incredibly productive and incredibly damaging to the economy and society; government provides many of the essentials of democracy, such as K-12 education, Social Security and the justice system; and being on your own can sound fine (even if it is a fiction) until you lose your job, you overextend on your house mortgage, or your wife is diagnosed with aggressive cancer and you have to quit your job to care for her in her last days of life.

What are you going to do then? That's the question that MomsRising was trying to get the Legislature and the governor to answer last week. They were supporting legislation that will give workers who have to take time off to care for a newborn or newly adopted child or a seriously ill family member the right to take that leave and gain some minimum compensation for five weeks.

It is not a novel concept, just plain common sense. If we truly believe we are a society of family values, then we need to enable workers to balance work and family. We can't assume it is OK to force a parent to go back to work when her newborn child is two weeks old, just so she can keep her job. We can't assume it is OK to abandon our parents to lonely deaths, just because we can't get time off to spend with them.

Already employers are cutting back on pensions, sick leave and health care. For the past seven years, the incredible increase in productivity has not made a bulge in the typical worker's wallet.

Instead, that wallet is getting squeezed as health care costs get shifted from employers to workers and variable rate mortgages suddenly jump up.

The question MomsRising has put to the Legislature and the governor is: Do you want to sustain and reinforce a system of economic insecurity in the wealthiest country in the world, or are you willing to grant workers and their families a modicum of economic security as they try to balance their responsibilities as workers, family members and citizens? For 2 cents an hour (that is the insurance premium for this program), what choice would you make? The answer is easier than changing a "onesie."

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.
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