Despite pandemic woes, California bill to accommodate working parents fails

As Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) struggled with COVID-19 final week and cared for her two younger kids, she lamented the failure of her effort to require employers to supply better lodging for working mother and father.

She had pulled JoJo, 5, and Ellie, 22 months, out of summer season camp and nanny care due to the virus, and she or he too had simply examined optimistic.

Wicks famous she comes from a “large place of privilege” as a state lawmaker, capable of keep dwelling that day. However “it’s totally different if you’re working three jobs within the service sector,” she stated.

“Earlier than I had children I had no thought how onerous it’s to juggle it unexpectedly,” she stated from her dwelling in Oakland. “You want flexibility.”

Wicks authored Meeting Invoice 2182, laws that may have expanded job protections to workers tending to “household duties” and banned employers from firing staff due to abrupt parenting wants.

The invoice would have created antidiscrimination provisions for caregivers and required bosses to accommodate staff with regards to unexpected circumstances like faculty and daycare closures as long as it didn’t create “an undue burden” on the office.

However the invoice, supported by a coalition of labor and social justice organizations, didn’t make it previous the Meeting Appropriations Committee, a key gatekeeper panel that decides whether or not laws with a price ticket will advance.

The California Chamber of Commerce labeled the invoice a “job killer” and alleged it might result in uncapped day without work and expose employers to litigation.

Dozens of employer organizations opposed the invoice, warning that “household duties” was too broad of a protected classification and would permit workers to problem “any hostile employment motion” within the title of parenthood.

“In actuality, an worker is more likely to name in that morning saying they can’t present up for work, and the enterprise shall be compelled to accommodate or face litigation,” Ashley Hoffman, a coverage advocate for the California Chamber of Commerce stated in a legislative listening to, urging lawmakers to vote in opposition to the invoice. “By enacting this invoice we’re placing one other imprecise mandate on small companies.”

The same invoice by Wicks additionally failed within the Legislature final yr, however she says she plans to maintain making an attempt. Different states, together with Connecticut, Delaware and Maine have handed related legal guidelines.

Wicks grew to become a logo of working moms in 2020 when she introduced her new child to the state Meeting ground after her request was denied to vote remotely throughout maternity depart amid the pandemic.

Lots of of fogeys throughout the nation reached out to Wicks saying the second resonated with them as they struggled to stability work and residential life amid mass faculty closures.

“My hope on the time was there could be an important awakening for the necessity for caregivers to have extra flexibility. I assumed that we might have a special understanding now of parental duties, given what we’ve simply gone via,” Wicks stated.

It’s additionally a ladies’s rights challenge, Wicks stated. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 80% of the 1 million-plus staff who left the workforce in 2020 amid faculty and daycare disruptions have been ladies, who disproportionately bear caregiving duties.

As California steps up as a bastion for ladies’s rights amid assaults on abortion entry, it’s necessary for state leaders to acknowledge that extra progress will be made even right here, stated Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), chair of the state Legislative Ladies’s Caucus.

Whereas payments prioritized by the caucus relating to reproductive rights have made it via the Legislature, Garcia pointed to different gender-equity payments centered on points corresponding to wage disparities which have failed this yr.

“We’ve had progress and I need to acknowledge that, however that doesn’t deny the truth that we nonetheless have many extra steps to go,” Garcia stated. “As progressive as we’re, we’ve much more to do.”