Ms. Nice Guy tells stories.

 

Story: At war with women 

 

If you think the male powers-that-be never conspire to make life harder for women in politics, you need look no further than Senator Tammy Duckworth for proof. 

 

Illinois’ junior Senator is used to fighting tough battles. The former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel served as a helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, where she lost both legs and suffered damage to one arm when her chopper was shot down. She’s the first Asian American woman elected to Congress from Illinois, the first Thai native to serve in either house, and the first disabled woman elected to Congress. 

 

But fighting to do her job while breastfeeding was a battle she didn’t expect. 

 

Duckworth is the first U.S. Senator in history to give birth while in office. Her second daughter, Maile Pearl, was born on April 9, 2018. But before she headed to the hospital, the Senate’s (male) GOP leadership informed her that she would be barred from voting on or sponsoring any legislation if she took even a day of maternity leave. (Unlike men who’ve been ferried from hospital beds to the Senate in wheelchairs to cast an important vote.) And even if she didn’t take a day of leave, they told her, she’d be forbidden from bringing her nursing infant to the Senate floor to cast a vote. 

 

Hey, you chose to have a baby, lady. If you miss a vote, that’s your tough luck. 

 

With the Senate divided 51-49, every vote counts. And with control in the GOP’s hands, denying a Democrat any reasonable accommodation was the political game they chose to play. (In the end, though, they lost: before Duckworth returned with her 10-day-old daughter, the Senate – evidently embarrassed by news reports – relented, and changed its rules. Senators may now bring children younger than one with them to the floor for votes. Ever accommodating, Maile Pearl honored the Senate women’s dress code that day, sporting a baby blazer over her duckling onesie.) 

 

American women deal with family-unfriendly workplace policies every day. It’s one reason that one-fourth of all new mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth – far sooner than is recommended by doctors. 

 

But with more women running for the House and Senate than ever before in American history, it’s beyond ironic that male Senators flatly refused to tweak the rules to enable one of their colleagues to care for her new child while also representing her constituents. 

 

It’s all about power. And trying to keep women from wielding it. 

 

 

Ms. Nice Guy shares facts. 

 

Rolling back progress. 

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But as state governments seem increasingly eager to work toward pay equality for women, it’s a different story on the national front. 

 

Rescinding the Obama era equal pay rule in August 2017 was just Donald Trump’s opening act in trying to turn back the clock on workplace fairness for women and minorities. 

 

He also revoked President Obama’s Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, an executive order that barred companies from federal contracts if they had a history of violating wage, labor or workplace safety laws. The regulation, criticized by its opponents as “blacklisting,” had already been upheld in the courts. And, because Trump used the Congressional Review Act to fast track his action, he precluded any subsequent federal action to reinstate the rule. 

 

In early January 2018, Trump’s Labor Department revived 17 opinion letters to employers – first issued during the closing days of George W. Bush’s second term – to alter how the department had been enforcing compliance with wage and overtime requirements during the Obama presidency. 

 

Labor Department officials also announced a change in how they evaluate whether interns and students qualify as employees – a move that National Employment Law Project director Christine Owens described to Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin as just “another example of how this administration is siding with big business to make it harder to get paid for working overtime and to make it easier for companies to reap the benefits of young workers’ labor without paying a cent for it.” 

 

Other critics of Trump’s actions told Eilperin that reinstating the opinion letters will “allow employers to skirt paying overtime and complying with other aspects of the far-reaching labor law.” 

 

Those changes were soon followed by a new rule proposed by the Labor Department that would make it legal for employers to pocket employees’ tips if they’re paying them at least minimum wage. If the rule is ever finalized, the Economic Policy Institute predicts that workers would lose $5.8 billion in tips every year – nearly 80 percent of it taken from women, who hold the vast majority of tip-income jobs. 

 

Labor officials claim the proposed rule is just a way for employers to share tips with “back of the house” cooks, dishwashers and bussers (who already earn at least minimum wage, which meant employers would likely trim their base pay if they did give some tip income to them). But the rule wouldn’t require employers to share tips with anyone – leaving them free to simply pocket customer tips as extra income for the business. 

 

With research confirming that illegal tip theft by employers already impacts 12 percent of tipped workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, it’s safe to assume that such a rule would embolden employers to take tips legally. 

 

As one who waited tables to support herself through undergraduate school, I can assure you: waitpersons do not take on the exhausting, leg-wearying work of serving food to customers to earn minimum wage. They do the work because of the tip income they might pull in for delivering great service. If this rule were ever enacted, you’d see waiters deserting the businesses that take advantage of it the moment they land work at a restaurant where the boss understands that tips belong to the people who earned them. 

 

Fortunately, heat from ordinary citizens forced the Department of Labor to back down, at least for now. Several members of the House followed up by proposing the Tip Income Protection Act on March 6, which would prevent employers, managers and supervisors from pocketing their workers’ tip income. Chances for its passage, however, are slim. 

 

There’s still one more interesting, highly relevant measure of the current president’s interest in advancing work and career opportunities for women: his own record. 

 

When the final member of Trump’s Cabinet was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 11, 2017, Business Insider’s Rebecca Harrington compared his team to President Obama’s first set of executive appointments. “While there were seven women and 10 minorities in Obama’s first 22-member Cabinet, Trump’s 24-member advisory body has four women and four minorities. That’s 32 percent female and 45 percent minorities for Obama, and 17 percent female and minorities for Trump.” 

 

Trump’s Cabinet, reported The New York Times, contains more white men than the Cabinets of each of the last six presidents. 

 

Trump’s not doing better on pay, either. An analysis by economist Mark Perry of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute found that the pay gap between male and female White House staffers more than tripled in the first year of the Trump administration. It stood at 11 percent in the final year of the Obama administration, but jumped to 37 percent in 2017.    

 

Trump then devised an odd way to “thank” federal workers for their public service – by first cutting their retirement compensation fund by $143.5 billion in early May 2018, and following it up two weeks later with a series of executive orders that make it easier to fire government workers and weaken the role that public employee unions can play in representing them. Federal agencies began implementing his orders in early July, but in late August, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson struck down key provisions of Trump’s executive orders. So the contest continues.

 

And when members of the U.S. Senate asked the Labor Department for data on the economic impact of sexual harassment, Trump’s Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta refused to supply it. Senators, led by New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, have now turned to the Government Accountability Office for the information. 

 

This concerted effort to impede our quest for equality is certainly not what American women were expecting to see when we voted in 2016.

 

 

And Ms. Nice Guy inspires women to fight back.

 

So what do we do? 

 

• Educate yourself about the Affordable Care Act, and on proposals for Medicare for All or universal healthcare. Become a knowledgeable, effective advocate for affordable healthcare for all Americans. 

• Support efforts in your state to sustain the ACA so it can continue to meet the healthcare needs of residents who lack access to employer-provided coverage and can’t afford an individual policy. 

• Speak out against Trump administration and GOP health policy rollbacks – including his expansion of the global gag rule; their attacks on Planned Parenthood and on maternity and women’s well-care coverage offered through the ACA; their elimination of the individual mandate; and their push for cheaper short-term policies that eliminate key coverages offered by ACA plans. 

• Support Planned Parenthood. 

• Support your state’s legislative efforts to fund family planning and health clinics. 

• Advocate for health and employment policies at the federal, state and local levels that honor women’s needs and rights, including the inclusion of birth control coverage in all health insurance policies. 

• Speak out against “religious exemptions” that allow employers to deny birth control coverage to their female workers. 

• Defend a woman’s right to choose against legislative attacks at the federal and state levels. 

• Expose the role of “crisis pregnancy centers” in your community, which pretend to provide women’s health services and abortion counseling but in fact are anti-abortion clinics run by evangelical Christians. Their actions were empowered by a June 27, 2018 Supreme Court ruling in NIFLA v. Becerra, which invalidated a California law requiring all health care facilities to be honest about their purpose and the services they provide. California legislators are now pondering a new legislative response.

• Advocate for childcare and family/parental leave policies that benefit allworkers – not just those earning enough to front the cost one year and wait for a tax refund the following April. 

• Advocate for employer-paid parental/family leave. 

• Fight federal and state efforts to gut Medicaid, whether via reduced funding or through work requirements that many Medicaid recipients are too young, too old, or too ill to meet. 

• Fight GOP and Trump administration efforts to convert Medicaid funding into state block grants. 

• Support the Consumer Health Insurance Protection Act proposed in March 2018 by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. It would provide increased financial assistance to people buying health insurance on their own, allow more people to qualify for that aid, and limit premium costs for participants to 8.5 percent of income. Her argument for the bill, intended as a stop-gap measure while she and others work to enact a national single-payer plan: “So long as private health insurance exists, we should require these companies to provide coverage that is at least as good and priced as reasonably as the coverage offered by our public health care programs.” The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Kirsten Gillebrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). 

 

Oh, and while we’re at it, remain vigilant in your defense of women’s right to choose. 

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