Sheila Bapat is an attorney and writer covering economic and gender justice. Her work has appeared in Jacobin, Salon, Reuters, Slate, Alternet, Truthout, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law, PolicyMatters, and the Center for Women Policy Studies' series, "Reproductive Laws for the 21st Century." Her article about the US domestic workers' movement is forthcoming in The Believer magazine. Sheila holds a JD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.
According to earnings statistics, women get far less bang for their buck out of higher education. Recent proposals to reduce student debt could benefit women over the course of their lives—but they may not go far enough.
The Brazilian Immigrant Center has launched a first-of-its-kind mediation program that seeks to resolve disputes between domestic workers and their employers. So far, it seems to be working.
Though substantively similar, the two states’ laws arrived at and passed their state legislatures in vastly different ways.
U.S. activists were instrumental to the passage of international domestic workers’ treaty—which the U.S. is unlikely to ratify in the near future.
As of 2011, 1 in 12 private-sector workers was employed in the restaurant industry. But women, especially women of color, face a variety of struggles in this growing field.
What did it really take for a Reagan-appointed federal judge to make one of the most critical reproductive justice rulings of the year, possibly the decade?
Across the country, employers are choosing to cut worker hours in order to save money and dodge requirements in the Affordable Care Act. And some workers are fighting back.
California has plans to experiment with a retirement program that could cost the state nothing in taxes but could greatly help many of individuals who rely heavily on Social Security. Unfortunately, it may not cover the growing ranks of freelance workers.
“I thought the sick day ordinance could become an excuse for my servers or other employees to call in sick at the last minute and leave shifts unstaffed,” said a San Francisco restaurant owner. “Turns out, that hasn’t been a problem at all.”
Organizing in Georgia and Illinois shows that the domestic workers’ movement is not exclusive to predictable blue states.
