By Ellen Bravo

Business lobbyists weren’t able to stop passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The bill is so popular, they can’t launch an open effort to attack it. Instead, they’re pinning their hopes on the Department of Labor gutting it by drastic changes in the regulations.

The FMLA represented a huge step forward for working families. It codified the principle that having a family shouldn’t cost you your job. Since it was passed in 1993, an estimated 50 million workers have been able to care for a loved one or recover from illness without being fired. At the same time, nearly nine in 10 employers report that the FMLA has had a positive effect or neutral effect on productivity and profits.

In reality, though, the law has to be described as meager compared to what’s offered in the rest of the world—including many third world countries. It leaves more than two in five workers unprotected, provides no pay while workers are on leave and does not cover leave for such routine family needs as caring for a child with a cold, taking an elderly parent for preventive screening or attending school meetings. Fully half the workforce—and three-quarters of low-wage workers—lack paid sick days.

We need to expand, not contract, the provisions of this bill and add to it with measures like the Healthy Families Act, introduced in Congress in 2004, which would guarantee a minimum of seven paid sick days. Yet today, tens of millions of workers and their families stand to lose out because of actions being pushed by Big Business lobbyists—the same people who blocked family leave for eight years.

These lobbyists are pressuring the Labor Department to redefine serious illness in much more stingy terms. They want to undo the current regulation that allows workers with such chronic conditions as asthma or diabetes to take off when they need to, without having to certify every instance of their ailment. A worker with an emergency appendectomy who misses a few days of work, someone who needs to care for a child with a life-threatening bout of asthma, someone whose parent has a stroke and needs help getting settled—all could be fired if these people have their way.

Yes, fired. Because one of the greatest benefits of the FMLA has been the guarantee that you could return to your job.

Imagine the flu epidemic lands on your doorstep. You take the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stay home for a week so you don’t contaminate your co-workers. Yet, if the special interest lobbyists succeed, your job could be in jeopardy.

The business lobbyists also are trying to hamstring the use of intermittent leave. Right now, you can take just the number of hours you need for treatments, minimizing the loss of pay to yourself and the strain on employers and co-workers. Yet FMLA opponents want to compel you to use at least half a day or a day at a time, whether or not you need to be out that long. The result? Fewer workers will be able to take the time they need, and the absence of those who do will be more disruptive.

This move to dismantle the provisions of family medical leave is one of the most anti-family proposals ever put forward. It flies in the face of all the research conducted by the bipartisan Commission on Leave and many other experts. It ignores public opinion, which overwhelmingly supports the FMLA. That’s why the opposition frames their move as “restoring the law to the legislature’s original intent” rather than the significant take back they aim for.

The proposed reversal of key elements of the law will be devastating especially to low-paid workers, who generally lack sick or personal days. Weakening family leave would make it harder for these workers to stay employed and move out of poverty.

To strengthen working families, we need to go forward, not backward. At a time when more families than ever are caring for young children or elderly parents or both, we need to allow leave to more people for more reasons. And we need to make it affordable.

Get your local union to send a letter to the Labor Department. Share stories of your members who have benefited from the FMLA. State your firm opposition to any efforts to undercut its provisions.

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