As a second Trump administration approaches, we’re running out of time to confirm as many federal judges as possible to provide a check on his presidential power and curb his stated policy priorities.
There are 42 federal judicial vacancies and 13 nominations before the Senate right now—as our civil rights hang in the balance, take action now!
Today, too many working families are set up to fail. Millions of parents across the country work in jobs whose low wages, unfair scheduling practices, and minimal benefits make it difficult to meet both work and caregiving responsibilities. The challenging working conditions of many low-wage jobs often leave parents struggling, without time to spend with their children and resources to afford the high-quality early care and education their children need to succeed in school and beyond.
A new action agenda from NWLC recommends policies, practices, and strategies that have the potential to improve lives across multiple generations—and provides examples that have been advanced and implemented by advocates, policy experts, researchers, private sector representatives, and low-wage workers themselves.
The recommendations in Set Up for Success: Supporting Parents in Low-Wage Jobs and Their Children are intended to further five critical goals:
Each of these goals is essential to supporting low-wage working parents in their efforts to provide for their families and promote their children’s growth and development.
Reaching these goals will require federal, state, and local policies and investments —and progress is already being made on these fronts. For example, federal legislation to raise the federal minimum wage is pending in Congress, and California and New York recently passed legislation to raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour statewide, in response to workers’ Fight for $15 campaign. In San Francisco, workers in many retail, restaurant, and hospitality jobs are guaranteed at least two weeks’ notice of their work schedules, with additional pay for last-minute schedule changes, under the Retail Workers’ Bill of Rights passed in 2014, and, if passed by Congress, the federal Schedules That Work Act would create similar protections for workers across the country. In addition, the Child Care Access to Resources for Early-learning (Child CARE) Act pending in Congress would expand investments to help low-income families afford high-quality child care. Further progress, in the form of increased funding for the major federal child care program, the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), to provide child care assistance to more families, raise child care provider payment rates and compensation, and strengthen the supply and quality of child care will also be essential—especially in light of new requirements imposed by the 2014 CCDBG reauthorization that have the potential to improve child care access and quality, but that will require additional resources to implement.
In addition to these efforts, advocates, researchers, businesses, and worker justice groups across the country have advanced and implemented other promising strategies. For example:
By building on and broadening these and other efforts described in Set Up for Success, stakeholders can work together across sectors and disciplines to set families up to succeed.
