Test. Test. Test. A checkpoin we increase the population in this world is through childbirth and that there is a need for a woman to be able to take time off and, god help her if she has a child who is sick. And so after the birth of the killed continuously having to care for that child, that could be the father, the mother, a samesex couple, all of the issues that goes with caring with a sick child, we as a sophisticated, major force of democracy in this world should not be one of the last to say that every person working and trying to provide for the family, regardless of their income, do not have access to paid family leave. I want to ask a question, how many workers across the country currently have access to paid family or medical leave benefits. 19 of workers have access to paid family leave. And how current is that . That is from march of this year. March of this year, the big, amazing fix all pay cut happened, did that did that have a major increase on providing this benefit to American Workers . No. And in fact more to the point of low wage workers. Over the past five years, weve seen participation increase overall. Amongst the lowest wage workers, its gone up by two points. Were seeing the divergence in access to benefits actually increasing exponentially. This idea that the tax cut or any other factors related to employment and the equipment is going to lift the lowest wage workers isnt born out by the data. The data that the congressman cited, 20 have access to benefits, that means 80 dont. Im concerned about the 94 of low wage workers and thats who we need to to be focusing on. Any of the solutions that are looted in austerity doesnt play out in terms of peoples access to the benefits that were looking for them to have. I want to close with this your time is the ladys time has expired. May i and the next witness is ms. Miller. Thank you, madam chairwoman and thank you all for being here today. I want to express my empathy to you. Theres nothing more frightening than when one of your children are sick and im glad that little joe is doing so much better. The topic before us today is multifaceted and extremely personal. Likely the issue of leave has impacted each of us, our spouse, our sons and daughters at some point in our lives. Through the enactment of tax cuts and job act, we have seen increasing benefits such as family leave. The president and his administration have worked to cut regulations to ensure a more prosperity economy. Its amazing to see the advancements that happen when we free businesses from overtaxation and burdensome regulation. I would ask unanimous consent to offer a study about californias paid family leave into the record. I think its important that it should be included. I want to object. But ill ask that we be able to see that. Absolutely. It has not been given to us. I certainly have no objection. Without objection. Without objection, so ordered. Thank you, maam. We have seen the unemployment decrease to 3. 5 . We see employers competing to find good workers. How has the Strong Economy under President Trump impacted the benefit packages that companies can now offer . Not only have we seen more people have availability to jobs and you cant have a good benefit package until you have a job, but weve seen a large increase in the number of companies that are offering paid family and medical leave benefits. More than 100 large employers have offered these benefits. These are the lowes, target, starbucks who have access to these benefits. In your testimony you mentioned that record low unemployment is providing opportunities for marginalized workers. Can you expand on that . Yes. This is why i want to reiterate that the Strong Economy is better. The evidence has shown when you impose high minimum wages you crowd out the employees who are the least marginalized and those who have the hardest time finding a job. Its the lower rung of the ladder that gets cut off. On the other hand, if you provide progrowth policy that is let employers have more benefits to offer, they have opportunities to draw more workers into the labor force and thats what weve seen. Weve seen people who were disabled, discouraged and now there are hundreds of thousands of them that have jobs that are supporting themselves and have the benefit of seeing that paycheck that they get as opposed to relying on a government benefit. Its an intangible value for them to have choices and flexibility over what theyre doing with their money. Thank you. You also discussed how wage growth has helped contribute reversing income trends. Can you elaborate how the current economy has done this . Yes. And i just wanted to actually point to my written testimony there because i think there is based on the recent jobs report, im quoting here from the council of economic advisers. Through the end of 2016, average wage growth for production in nonsupervisory workers lagged that of managers. Those without a College Degree lagged that of the College Graduates and africanamericans lagged that of white americans. Since President Trump took office, each of those trends have been reversed, contributing to lower income inequality and these are the types of progrowth free market policies that are bringing the bottom end up and those people who have been marginalized before, theyre benefitting the most from this and its not having the government come in and tell them that they will provide them with a benefit and take more of their money away so they dont have these choices. Its letting the economy grow and letting exchanges between workers and employers help boost everybody. I understand that the private sector approach is better than a one size fits all approach. How can we encourage innovation and leadership in the private sector in terms of paid family and medical leave. There are lots of things we can do without a government program. The act lets private Sector Workers have access to the same thing that state and local workers have right now and thats the choice between if you work overtime hours, would you take time and a half of paid leave or would you rather take that time and a half of pay. It doesnt force anything upon anyone. If you are a parent, particularly a single parent, that time off is a lot more valuable in many cases than just having a higher paycheck. There are other things that we can do to encourage among employers. I was thinking of my brotherinlaw and my sisterinlaw and hes a School Teacher as well and in his situation they had a paid sick leave pool, they had a daughter who was born weighing a pound and they had to have extended time off and she was an hour away from where they were. He had access to that. I would love to see more employers, larger ones, to say the womans time is expired. Thank you. Thank you. I ask unanimous consent to yield one minute to representative lawrence who wants to thank her constituent whos on the panel. I want to say that it is very important that we understand the role of government and to thank all of you for coming out in each role that you play and adding light to this issue. I count on government for a number of things and to say that we dont need government to intervene on an issue thats going to be transformational for the quality of life for americans is something that i feel very strongly about. I have a dream as well for this great country. And i try to keep hope alive, but i know that i have to take action and do the work. And it is clear that only a comprehensive approach like the family act will protect our workers and i urge all of us to support it. Thank you. Thank you so much. And the chair now recognizes mrs. Tlaib. Thank you, chairwoman. I really do appreciate this hearing. This is very, very important issue for my district which is the third poorest Congressional District in the country. And i really do appreciate your leadership on this and for this to be one of your first ever Committee Hearings on house oversight. I do want to just clarify something that some of the members on the other side of the aisle have been pointing to. A recent study on longterm affects of californias paid term leave program found that first time mothers who used the policy has lower employment and wages ten years later. I would like to ask you about the specific study. I dont want people to mislead the public in regards to this. I look at studies, polling, everything, and sometimes it doesnt match up with whats happening on the ground. So where there any limitations to the scope of the study that you could shed some light to so we can have the facts before us and not make any misleading comments . Yes, absolutely. The study is interesting. Its an outlier. Many studies have shown an increase in earnings over time. I think whats interesting and limiting about this study is that it studied the very first cohort of women who took leave who had the additional six weeks of leave available in 2004 specifically and followed the earnings of that cohort over a fiveyear period and then a tenyear period. There might be something unique or special about that first cohort of women. There might be different affects. When the law first went into effect, the men was only 15 . Now were above close to 40 . So theres trends in gender equity that have changed. We dont know how that study would bear out if it was repeated in fact, there have been other studies conducted of california mothers that show that paid leave had a positive impact on the workforce. Yes, absolutely. And a particularly substantial effect on latino women and low wage women. It is not right to focus everything on this one particular study. The other thing that the study shows is we need to think about how we make policies accessible for men, how we encourage mens leave taking, how we get better childcare for parents and the wages and benefits and taunts for people who do choose to work less than full time. The other limitation of the study, didnt include selfemployment income. Some of these women moved into gig work and into less formal employment relationships so they could spend more time. But we dont know the effects of those wages. Thank you. I do appreciate that. One of the things i know is really critically important is trying to bring people in this room that are not here physically and many residents in my district cant afford to come here or to speak out because theyre working right now and one community of caregivers who are left out of the paid family leave conversation or families that have members with special needs. I want to share a story of one of my residents, the mother of three, and one of her boys, isaiah, was born with a liver disorder. After receiving a liver transplant, his mother started working as a server and she was very up front with her employer about having a child with special needs. One day after this employer refused to let her leave early to take care of her son, she was forced to Prioritize Health for her son and left her shift early which resulted in her getting fired. As it stands, her son takes eight medications daily and goes to the hospital once a week to check his liver blood levels. If the u. S. Had a paid leave policy, not only would it keep my resident to have a job, but she would have been to work without her livelihood being threatened on a regular basis. Can you elaborate on the difficulties that families with special Needs Children have but also this is something our country needs to look at, this is a form of discrimination. That mother may not be the one with disability, but that fact of the matter is, discrimination towards her which is due to because of the loved one and because of the fact that shes a caretaker, i feel like it needs to extend in protecting those caregivers, this is a form of discrimination and we know, and chairwoman, i consistently was asked as a young person applying for jobs whether or not i was going to have children which was illegal. But i do think, you know, people are going to push forward and say, well, you have a child with special needs, im not going to hire you. If you can talk a little bit about that, i really would appreciate it. Theres a couple of really good studies out there about the multiple impacts that affect parents and other caregivers to special Needs Children and other people with disabilities, the relationship between the income this those households and lack of access to leave. The other thing that strikes me as we think about policies that would exclude those families, we talk we hear a lot about one size fits all policy, but it would only apply to new parents. To say that that caregivering is less beneficial or less worthy of investment just strikes me as the ultimate discrimination as you say. Thank you. Congresswoman presley is recognized. Thank you, madam chair, for holding this critical hearing. I also want to thank congresswoman delauro for his work on this issue. It is simply appalling that the United States continues to be one of other two industrialized nations in the World Without any form of paid family leave. It is shameful and this reality continues to place undue burdens on families already struggling to make ends meet. Household disproportionally led by women struggling to get by and lingering gender and racial pay gaps persist. Currently policy is out of touch that at some point every person, every working person, because hardship does not discriminate, will need to take time away from a job to fulfill care giving responsibilities or disruptive life event. While i was a caregiver to my mother in the final throws of her leukemia battle, battling cancer while also battling bill collectors and along with the trauma of such a devastating life event. It was as if seeing my mother facing her final days wasnt already hard enough. And so my experience is not unique. In fact there are more than 34 million caregivers who provided unpaid care to a parent or relative in the last 12 months alone. So thank you so much for sharing your story earlier today. Can you share what the daytoday for caring with your mother entailed. I can. Yes, you know, it was tough. It was tough to try to make the arrangements that we needed to make for her care, especially as she aged because this was over a tenyear period. It was tough finding doctors who she felt comfortable with. Being a part of the sandwich generation, having a child who would come with me every day to the nursing facility that she spent her final year in because she had gotten to a point where she needed care and i remember one time my daughter saying to me do we have to come every day to see granny . Well, that was pretty devastating. It was tough dealing with the financial aspect of this. My mother was a retired teacher so she had some savings and she had a monthly income from her retirement and from her Social Security that made that that lightened that load. But there was nothing easy about it and allconsuming. And i was on my own to find the resources that we needed each time her she had a crisis and we needed to go to the next level of care. Thank you. And its my understanding that you cared for your sister after she suffered a severe spinal cord injury as well. So how did you manage serving as a caregiver for both your mom and sister and how did this impact your financial situation and are you still recovering . Thats a lot of questions there. A lot to unpack. Im sorry. Lucky for me these illnesses didnt occur at the same time. My sisters accident or bleed occurred five years after my mothers death. So we had time to kind of hang out before she became really ill with her spinal cord injury which is what it was. And, again, when i think back, i dont know how i did it. I just found the resources that i needed to do it and i was in a place where i had the flexibility with work to do it. I had Vacation Time and i had sick leave and im one of those people whos always at work so i had accumulated a lot of leave that allowed me to pinch off the three hours i needed to go to the hospital before coming to work. And it was a patchwork of using leave and thinking it through. In terms of support i had the support of family and the support of a spouse at the time that helped to make it easier. And i was in a twoincome household that helped to make it easier. But i meant that i was up late looking at the numbers for trying to figure out how we were going to make it happen. And we almost used up all of my my mothers savings before she passed away. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The chair recognizes mr. Raskin. Thank you very much and congratulations to you. Thank you. On your first hearing and i know this will be an important landmark for you the way it was an important landmark for chairman cummings. I want to go back to this question about the tax cuts. Some of our colleagues have suggest that had the trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthiest corporations and people has provided paid leave benefits to workers and i know there was a limited temporary tax credit for employers who provide two weeks of paid leave that was built into the legislation, but is there any evidence that this trillion dollar tax cut has actually made a difference in peoples ability to get family medical leave . Not that im aware of and certainly not in my experience. I certainly as a Small Business owner dont feel the effects of that law, i would say. Okay. And is there anybody who has any structural evidence or data about this point whether this tax cut suddenly transformed things. What im getting is rather the reports that millions and millions of americans are still without family medical leave and its a crisis for people. In talking to Business Associations and Business Owners, survey data from ey which asked Business Owners whether they would take up this tax cut, theres no evidence that this tax cut has had any affect. And the only company that i know of that has said in the press that they extended their leave policy is rollsroyce. Let me stick with you for a second because i have three children who are the light of my life along with my wife and the apple of our eye. And i consider it obviously a profoundly meaningful thing to be into parenthood and im a cosponsor of the legislation to create family medical leave. But i do get questions from constituents and not just rightwing republicans. There are people who are concerned about the environment, saying should we be subsidizing the act of having children when we have concerns about Climate Change and the caring capacity of the earth. What is the argument that you make for the impo