Issue Position: Balancing Work & Family

Issue Position

Working families too often face a difficult choice between investing in their career or their children. Alexi believes that the right federal polices can help families balance these competing demands and do the most important job that there is in any society: to raise and nurture the next generation. His work-family agenda focuses on increasing workplace flexibility to help build stronger families, increase American competitiveness, and promote economic growth.

The national Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides unpaid time off for parents to care for their newborn or adopted children or to support caregivers who are caring for elderly relatives or immediate family members. But this time only extends to parents at certain companies, making the United States one of only a few countries that provides no legal guarantee of maternity leave to all new parents.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that 3.5 million workers cannot afford to take advantage of unpaid family leave for the birth or adoption of a child. The Paid Parental Leave Act provides federally-employed parents four weeks of paid leave to spend at home with a new child. Alexi supports this first step toward universal paid leave so that families must no longer choose between a child and a paycheck.

Alexi would like to see all states institute a paid family leave program. In the U.S. Senate, he will support efforts that help states to test and implement new programs that meet basic national standards. One such model is California's program, which provides paid family leave for all employees who pay into California's state disability insurance program.

While FMLA has shown to improve employee productivity and retention, it only applies to firms with more than 50 workers, an exclusion that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers and working women because they are more likely to work for small employers. Alexi would like to see that threshold lowered to firms with 20 employees or more.

Unmarried domestic partners in committed, long-term relationships should enjoy the same rights and responsibilities under the law. Alexi would push to include domestic partners under FMLA so that they can care for their new children or for loved ones in times of need. The first step should be passage of the Domestic Violence Leave Act, which expands the FMLA to include domestic partners.

Provide access to early childhood care

Alexi believes that a quality education serves as the foundation of the American economy and that we must invest in our children at a very young age. That is why he supports an increased investment in Head Start, Early Head Start, and other early childhood education programs.

The level of child care funding was frozen by the Bush administration, effectively causing 300,000 children to lose child care assistance by 2010. To halt this trend, Alexi supports efforts to increase child care funding through the Child Care and Development Fund. The $2 billion in Recovery Act funds were a good start, but Alexi supports restoring full funding in the federal budget to inflation-adjusted levels.

Under the Child Care Development Block Grant, only parents who place their children in child care are eligible to receive federal assistance. Alexi would like to see equal assistance paid to low-income parents who choose to stay home with their young children rather than place them in care.

Make education more affordable

Many parents are forced to work overtime or into retirement to afford to send their children to college. Alexi will work to make higher education more affordable by supporting an expansion of Pell Grants and proposing new financial incentives and tax credits to make sure any young person who works hard can afford to attend school. Alexi supports indexing the maximum Pell grant to the inflation rate plus 1 percent, and protecting it from future cuts, by exempting the maximum Pell grant level from the appropriations process.

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