Families First act only for the lucky
Relief law excludes many parents, putting some out of a job
In early April, Michelle Burnett, a single mother of two girls, asked her employer for time off to pick up a Google Chromebook from her youngest daughter’s school.
She was scrambling to set her children up to do their schoolwork in the living room of her Vallejo home while she worked as an administrative assistant and accounting clerk at a retirement home in Oakland. She kept an eye on them through a wallmounted camera in the home.
When her daughters were in school, the 42yearold Oakland native had help: She dropped 9yearold Namarhianna and 12yearold Alayjah off at a beforeschool day care at 6:30 a.m., then picked them up from an afterschool program at 6:30 p.m. Even then, things were tough: In February, Alayjah was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
“You can’t tell, but she gets excitable,” Burnett said. “She’s an awesome chick.”
Things got even tougher when day cares and schools closed due to the coronavirus.
So it was a blow when her employer denied her April 6 request for two hours off to pick up the Google Chromebook for Namarhianna, telling her she had no
vacation time left.
Burnett was familiar with state and federal family leave policies, because in January and February she missed work to get Alayjah tested for learning disabilities. This time, she researched the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act, which provides, among other worker protections, up to 12 weeks of emergency child care leave for those “whose school or child care provider is closed or unavailable for reasons related to COVID19.”
She believed it would provide her family with some relief, so the next morning, she emailed her boss and insisted she needed to take the time because she had no one else to pick up the computer. She asked her employer to explain their coronavirus protocol for employees needing time off.
She was shocked by what happened next.
Her employer told her she couldn’t take the time off. The Families First act, they told her, allowed them to deny her request.
Then they told her goodbye. She said she was told that the company was treating her email as a resignation letter.
She said the company asked her to sign a form stating she resigned. She refused.
“I couldn’t say anything,” Burnett recalled in a recent interview. “I hadn’t even (missed work) yet and you’re terminating me.”
The Families First act is ludicrously flawed because the U.S. Department of Labor’s rules allow exemptions that have left millions of workers like Burnett unprotected. For example, employers of health care providers or emergency responders can elect to exclude their employees from leave eligibility. That’s what Burnett’s employer did.
That’s right — employers can refuse to grant the essential workers lauded as heroes time off to take care of themselves or their children. Burnett is out of a job for living up to the relief act’s name: She put her family first.
Any politician who has ever preached that family values are the bedrock of American society should be rushing to rectify this. But that’s not happening. Sadly, it’s common for the most vulnerable to have the least protection. God bless America. Katherine Wutchiett, a staff attorney for Legal Aid at Work, which provides free legal advice about workplace rights, told me there’s been an uptick in calls for help. Since March 16, the day six Bay Area counties announced stayhome orders, Wutchiett said there have been more than 1,000 calls from workers seeking advice. In a regular year, the nonprofit legal services organization gets about 3,000 total.
“Our office has heard from people working in the health care industry who have been denied safety protections at work or haven’t been permitted time off,” Wutchiett said.
Legal Aid at Work was part of a broad coalition of over 120 California labor, family advocacy, legal, civil rights and other groups that wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers in late March asking for expanded paid family leave and sick leave, among other requests.
“These are the same stories that people have been dealing with,” Wutchiett said. “It’s just that suddenly everybody is dealing with it at the same time. It’s a big gap that policymakers didn’t have their eye on before this, but now it’s certainly coming to light.”
In a scathing report on the relief act, the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, estimates in a bestcase scenario that only 47% of privatesector workers are guaranteed emergency paid leave by the Families First act. If every employer took the exemption, only 17% of workers would be covered. The New York attorney general filed a lawsuit against the Department of Labor, alleging that the department’s set of rules “unlawfully narrows workers’ eligibility for emergency family leave and paid sick leave” that’s guaranteed by the act.
For years, state Sen. HannahBeth Jackson, DSanta Barbara, has been pushing to expand job protections for parents who need to take time off to care for their children.
“No one should ever be forced to choose between keeping their jobs and their livelihood and caring for a sick family member or themselves if they’re ill or helping a child because now we see the schools are closed,” Jackson said.
On March 11, the day the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Sarah Jane Glynn was testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee on the need for more paid sick days.
“I don’t care what your job is. Every single person should be able to hold down employment and also take care of their children,” Glynn, the senior fellow for the Center for American Progress who authored the report on the relief act, told me. “That should be a basic piece of our society. It’s sickening that people don’t have the ability to do that.”
When she received her last paycheck, Burnett got paid 22.56 hours of vacation time — time she had been told she didn’t have available to use to pick up her daughter’s Chromebook. She has enough money saved to pay the $1,300 rent on her threebedroom house for two months.
“I was fortunate enough, before all of it happened, to have paid my bills,” she said. “But now I’m pretty much like everybody else waiting to see what unemployment’s going to do for me.”