What Hillary Said About Paid Leave, Child Care, Inequality — Yesterday& 20 Years Ago

I truly believe that as President, Hillary would do her darn-est to improve the lives of all families.


What Hillary Said About Paid Leave, Child Care, Inequality — Yesterday & 20 Yrs Ago http://www.nationalmemo.com/what-hillary-said-about-paid-leave-child-care-inequality-yesterday-and-20-years-ago/ #uniteblue



Joe Conason


What Hillary Said About Paid Leave, Child Care, Inequality — Yesterday And 20 Years Ago


June 15, 2015 4:32 pm / 11 Comments / Editor's Blog,



Following Hillary Clinton’s first major campaign speech on Saturday, purveyors of conventional wisdom have assured us again that she is tacking toward the left to deflect her challengers and mollify her party’s liberal base. Such assertions usually hint that Clinton is not progressive herself, but merely swayed that way by polls and consultants.

On the evening before her big event in Four Freedoms Park, New York’s memorial to its favorite son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I picked up a copy of her 1996 bestseller, It Takes A Village. (While many journalists once thumbed through it, few seem to remember its contents.) Published during an era when the nation showed few signs of turning leftward, Clinton’s first book offered pithy arguments for the same priorities she is emphasizing now. Consider the views she expressed on family leave — and, in particular, the limitations of the law signed by her husband in 1993:

As I have mentioned, the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees unpaid leave to employees in firms with more than fifty workers. That is a good beginning. Many parents, however, cannot afford to forgo pay for even a few weeks, and very few employers in America offer paid maternity and paternity leave….

Other countries have figured out that honoring the family by giving it adequate time for caregiving is not only right for the family and smart for society but good for employers, who reap the benefits of workers’ increased loyalty and peace of mind. The Germans, for example, guarantee working mothers fourteen weeks’ maternity leave (six weeks before and eight weeks after delivery) at full salary…