CLUW’s National Executive Board launched an FMLA campaign at its Reno meeting on March 25, 2006 with 5,000 postcards urging members of Congress and President Bush to “fight against any attempts to dismantle” the FMLA.

Big business tried to keep the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) from becoming law in 1993. Now the business lobby is trying to dismantle one of this era’s most family-friendly reforms.

More than 50 million workers have taken advantage of the FMLA by taking unpaid leave to care for themselves or their loved ones—with the guarantee that their job would be waiting for them when they return. CLUW is alerting all of its members that business groups are pushing hard to restrict the ability of workers to take time off and even to end the job guarantee. In the face of this campaign to weaken the law, we instead advocate expanding the FMLA to allow leave to more people for more reasons—and to mandate paid leave.

Although it took an act of Congress to create the FMLA, its provisions could be undone without any action on Capitol Hill. The Department of Labor has the authority to make revisions, following a public comment period. Since the Department has placed changes to the FMLA on its list of regulatory priorities, action could come at any time.

But CLUW believes the FMLA must not only be protected, it should be extended. CLUW’s National Executive Board launched an FMLA campaign at its Reno meeting on March 25 with 5,000 postcards (printed courtesy of IAM) urging members of Congress and President Bush to “fight against any attempts to dismantle” the FMLA. The message then points out that millions more working families could benefit from the Act in the future if it called for paid leave. NEB members distributed the postcards to CLUW members and unionists in their local communities.

The FMLA needs to be expanded because so many workers are left behind. Two in five employees are not covered at all under the Act, whose mandate is restricted to companies with 50 or more workers and workers employed at the company for at least a year.

FMLA supporters propose extending the law to allow workers to take leave for additional family needs—such as parent-teacher conferences, taking an elderly parent to the doctor or staying home with a child who has the flu. As Americans live longer, they are spending more years as caretakers of their children, their aging parents or both—increasing the need for time off to tend to their medical requirements.

In addition, too many workers don’t take advantage of the FMLA because they can’t afford to take unpaid leave. CLUW supports paying for family leave. For instance, consider the example of a parent who uses the law to take up to 12 weeks off without pay after the birth of a child. Many parents wind up leaving their newborns to go back to work early because of economic pressures. In contrast, a Harvard University study shows that 32 countries around the world mandate paid time off for new parents, and 19 countries offer two years or more of parental leave. Meanwhile, half of the U.S. workforce—and three-quarters of all low-wage workers—don’t even get paid sick days.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

CLUW members know that union membership helps ensure worker benefits and protections, whether or not they are part of federal law. But do you realize that you can bargain with your employer for better FMLA provisions—or for basic FMLA coverage if your employer is exempt?

Your first step might be to incorporate the FMLA into your collective bargaining agreement so that you can enforce the law’s protections through your established grievance procedure. Next, expand the provisions:

• to cover all employees in the bargaining unit, even if the FMLA doesn’t apply to them;
• to allow employees to use family leave to care for family members beyond a spouse, child or parent;
• to extend the Act to apply to other family needs and additional medical situations;
• to increase the amount of time off available; and, of course,
• to convert family leave or medical leave into paid leave.