They represent half the population, folks.
by digby
Kathy Geier has a nice piece in the Baffler today about the new and exciting Democratic economic initiatives to support women:
The main women’s economic policies the White House supports are the following: an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the passage of the anti-discriminatory Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, (exceedingly modest) increases in funding for child care and job training programs, expanding a few of those ever-popular tax credits for working families, and the usual terrifying-sounding public-private “projects” and “initiatives.”
And by the way, there’s also “Making Progress Toward Solutions for Paid Leave.” You’ll notice that the latter doesn’t include actually enacting a national paid leave policy. As White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett explained earlier in the week, a paid leave program would require raising taxes. For Obama and other anti-paid-leave Democrats like Hillary Clinton, such an action would be unthinkable, apparently.
Other national Democrats are bolder. Late last year, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced a paid family and medical leave bill in Congress. But on the whole, the Democrats’ economic agenda for women is disappointingly tepid. There are many economic policies the Dems could be advocating, but are not—including pay equity legislation, an executive order to improve low-wage federal contractor jobs, and yes, a comprehensive child care system.
Unfortunately, given the anti-feminist, anti-labor extremism of today’s Republicans, it’s unlikely that even the mildest items on the Democrats’ work-and-family agenda will be enacted any time soon. That the Democrats are loudly talking up work-and-family issues after over twenty years of neglect is a hopeful sign. If they talk the talk, then maybe eventually they’ll walk the walk.
And I would suggest they walk a bolder walk. Yes, you can go with baby steps and hope that you get through some incremental change that adds up to something bigger over the long term. That would be the traditional way of legislative progress. But I don’t think that’s how it works anymore. You have to propose policies that are way outside the mainstream discourse and hope that when the right flings it back in your face it lands a little to the left of where it started.
Still, this is a good political issue and a necessary political cause. So good for them.
.