The Healthy Families Act (HFA) would ensure that all eligible workers have a minimum of seven days of paid time off annually to take care of their own health needs and those of members of their families.

Over the past two and a half decades in Ohio, more women have entered the labor force, and families have increased their work hours. Yet, job quality has often declined: wages for most workers have been stagnant, health insurance provision by employers has decreased, and Ohio remains nearly 264,000 jobs below its peak employment.

More than half of all workers in the private sector and in state and local government (54 percent, or 66 million workers) are not provided with any paid sick leave after a full year of service, according to a new analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Expansion of paid sick leave and integration of family caregiving activities into authorized uses of paid sick leave are crucial work and health supports for workers, their families, employers, and our communities at large.

The Florida unemployment insurance (UI) system is not meeting its basic goal of providing a modest measure of income support to temporarily unemployed workers.

The Florida unemployment insurance (UI) system is not meeting its basic goal of providing a modest measure of income support to temporarily unemployed workers. This is due in significant part to the UI system’s failure to keep pace with fundamental changes in the labor market, including the growth of low-wage and part-time work and the vastly expanding role of women in the labor market.

The gender wage gap is much narrower now than it was at the start of the revolutionary decade of the 1960s, when long-standing barriers to women’s educational achievement and employment success began to be dismantled and the first of a series of critical equal employment opportunity standards were enacted by Congress.

The 40-hour-a-week, year-round work requirement Congress is considering imposing on TANF recipients is substantially higher than the current level of mothers’ employment activity.

This report summarizes a meeting co-hosted by the Institute of Women's Policy Research and the Institute of Industrial Relations of the University of California Berkeley in March 2002.

Presently, the federal welfare law requires that 50 percent of single-parent families and 90 percent of two-parent families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) be engaged in a work activity.