 Welcome back to day two of the Millennials Rising Summit. Thanks for coming. We have a panel here for you on Millennials, Work and Family. My name is Connor Williams. I'll be the moderator today. I'm a senior researcher in New America's Early Education Initiative, which means that I spent a lot of time thinking about what government programs, public programs, the private sector, collaboration between the two can do to make things better for kids, how we can improve their academic outcomes, how we can support their development, how we can change their life trajectories for the better. And I think about this all the time. It's what I'm paid to think about. This may seem obvious to you, but it's become increasingly obvious to me that you can't do that, right, without thinking a lot about how to support families as well, especially working families. So as I've been doing that work, I also have this other hat, a more important hat, and I'm a 31-year-old father of two, two toddlers. So I got to where I was thinking about outcomes for kids for a living daily basis, but on an hourly basis, thinking about how to make work and family and our broader life cycle, my wife and I, makes sense. So that's why I'm here and sitting in the moderator chair. I have an awful lot of thoughts about this. Let me just not hide the ball and tell you what my broad thesis is about millennials. And again, I say this as a millennial, though I'm like one of the old geezers in the cohort, right? I get 31, I remember the Berlin Wall falling, I remember the 88 election, and most millennials are, they were in my fourth grade when September 11th happened. I'm mindful of the fact that I can only sort of speak for millennials, but let me tell you about my thesis about millennials, work and family. And I think the day to bear this out, as you've probably been seeing now over during the summit, it's that the old life cycle patterns about school, work, marriage, and children are simply, they're not as effective as they used to be. And I've mentioned to say almost entirely ineffective for a huge portion of the millennial generation to say, that is to say that knowing when and how and where to go through each of those phases of life is really difficult right now. And that's in particular in the sense of the big three trappings of middle-class life, right? Which are being able to save effectively for college for kids, a dignified retirement, and a mortgage in a decent school district. And so I say that from the data perspective, but now I'm going to indulge you because you're welcome to the Beltway, right? I don't want to talk about me. I'm a relatively privileged guy. I'm a white guy with a PhD and two master's degrees. But I came from a lower middle-class background in Michigan. I went to college on heavily need-based financial aid. My family, my wife and I are still paying us our undergraduate student loans. And like I said, we more or less followed what was a pretty traditional life cycle pattern. In the 20s, I had two kids by the time we were 30. Went to school, went to work. I have an unbroken employment record stretching back 20 years. I've been working since I was 11. In addition to all the privilege, I've had really no bad luck, no major bad luck. Never had to leave a job for health reasons, never had some sort of catastrophic accident that derailed me professionally. Despite that, despite all the privilege I've got going for me, despite all the things generally breaking in the not screwing up my life way in terms of luck, we still don't really know here at 31 with two kids how to make this traditional life cycle that we've chosen, early marriage, early kids, how to make that work for those long-term savings priorities. I think we've got two out of three nailed down, but I don't really know yet. I don't see a path from where we are financially now to getting with that third together. And so I bring that up not to elicit sympathy from you because, again, let's be honest, my problems are not major league problems. Again, white guy with a PhD and lots of privilege. But to point out that if someone like me, with all of that, those advantages are struggling, that ought to be another canary in the coal mine for the broader struggles that millennials are facing around working family. If a guy like me isn't quite sure how to make the middle-class equation work around work family and the life cycle, then we have some serious problems. So I'm the least interesting person on this stage though. I could talk about this forever. We have a great panel here. I want to just tell you first quickly about the format we're going to use, and then second, I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves. So we're going to spend another 10 minutes or so on introductions on each of the panelists talking about how their work intersects with what we're talking about on the panel. And then we're going to do 15, 20 minutes of questions for me, conversation up here. It's going to be as free flowing as I can keep it. And then the last half hour, so hopefully, is questions from you. So that means we're counting on you for questions, because if I say any questions and nobody's hand goes up, then I get to keep talking. And I'm counting on you to make sure that doesn't happen. So without further ado, let me just briefly introduce each panelist, and then they're going to each talk in order going down the line. So we have Jessica Gross here from Slate. We have Donald Levin from Care.com. And then we have Kerry Gleason for the Center for Popular Democracy. So Jessica, please. Hi, everyone. So I am a writer for Slate, and I cover a lot of issues about work-life balance and childcare. And when I think about millennials and the future of care, I think when you talk about millennials, you just really have to talk about them in two different categories, which is educated millennials and millennials who are not educated and don't have those privileges. Because when you look at their experiences of care and their difficulties with caregiving, it's really two different ballgames. So I'll tell you two sort of anecdotal stories that I think illustrate the different problems everybody's facing. So I am the mom of a two-year-old, and we had a hangout with some people in our building. And those couples, most of the other couples had kids and they were in the exact same scenario, which was that both wives worked in finance and ended up, were now stay-at-home moms, and neither really wanted to be, but their options were work 12-hour days and never see their kids or not work at all. Because there was no part-time, there was no flex-time, there was no consulting. In their specific fields, those just were not options. And so I think it's a huge loss to have women like them not contributing, not just for themselves, it's not an individual loss, but it's a societal loss when you have that brain drain. Because the, and it's, again, you know, this is the statistics bear this out. When that brain drain happens, it's mostly women who are stepping back. You know, their husbands are still working those still, you know, long hours, but whether it's a combination of individual and cultural choice, that women are the ones who end up having to step back. So that's sort of the educated picture. And then the, some women and men, lower down the socioeconomic cohort because many of them have what's called just-in-time scheduling, which is, you know, they don't know when they're going to be working week-to-week, so that's women often in food service and in many caregiving, like nursing home, certified nursing assistants. It's impossible for them to arrange child care in any kind of way. And often they will not have paid sick days or any kind of paid leave. And so them getting sick, their kid getting sick, that can mean the difference between, you know, their family eating and their family not eating. They lose, and they're losing jobs and that is just dreadful. I mean, they're not managing to care for their kids at all. And so I see those as sort of two separate problems. I think we were talking a little bit before and we're all a little afraid that this panel is just going to be a huge bummer for everyone. So I will say that for women and men lower down the socioeconomic cohort, I do think that there are fixes that if we can get together and have them change on a societal level, like, again, paid sick leave, which should not be as hard a sell as it is in this country. I mean, every other country has paid sick leave and things like, you know, paid parental leave, even just six weeks, which is what the Family Act, which is the paid parental leave that they're trying to pass on the federal level, just things like that passing will help everyone, but especially men and women down the socioeconomic cohort. I think there's tons of policy minds that are better than mine trying to figure out fixes for the two working parent problems that I described among men and women of the higher socioeconomic cohort and I do a series called Child Care Over There, firstly, which is interviewing men and women in other countries about how their childcare works. And even in the social democracies that we all look to as, you know, child care scenarios like Norway and Sweden, when I interview these men and women, it's not perfect for them. It's still often a struggle, especially when there's a sick kid or any sort of event out of the ordinary. Somebody has to stay home. Someone has to pick up the slack and it can, you know, be detrimental to their careers and so obviously it is a lot nicer to be a mom in Norway than it is here, but it's still, there's no, like Connor was saying, there's no perfect fix to this life cycle problem that we haven't quite figured out. So, that's it. Great. So, Donna Levin from Care.com. We are a marketplace that brings together families who are looking for caregivers with providers in their local area and we have providers across the lifespan. So, childcare, senior care, special needs care. We have roughly somewhere, over 11 million members in 16 countries and we're very focused on how do we professionalize this caregiving industry because what we foresee is a care crisis as more and more families have to work. So, with, you know, 60% of two parent households needing to have dual incomes with most single moms, I think those numbers are slightly off in the last data that I received that said only 40% work. I think that number is probably higher. And when we pull back and take a look at our member base, one of the conversations we were having before we came out here was sort of this expansive definition of the millennial and that maybe there are two segments of millennial, you know, Connor considers himself sort of the older end of the millennial and then there's sort of the younger end of the millennial up to sort of age 18. When we take a look at our member base, we see with our care seekers probably skewing towards the older end of the millennial base being about 45% of our members. And then when we take a look at our providers, it skews across both segments. Some millennials make up over 50% of our member base. The interesting thing, if we take a look at our providers on millennials, a lot of them highly educated. They have their undergraduate degrees. They could not find work. They're taking some time off. They're working as a nanny while they're thinking about going to grad school or their graduate students who are also providing care to make ends meet. Looking forward to sharing some additional data with you on sort of the differences that we're seeing with caregiving as it relates to millennials and their parents. So, I don't know. Is that better? Okay. So, I am the director of the Fair Work Week Initiative and so we're working hard to figure out solutions to the challenges that we're all facing in our working time. Something to think about, right, is that the last time we actually passed public policies that addressed the challenges we're facing around working time was 75 years ago. And I think we can all agree that today's Work Week is radically different than what it is 75 years ago and even, you know, 15 years ago if we think about the rise of just-in-time scheduling. There is a movement right now to actually think about what are the solutions that we need for today's Work Week. That's the part of the work I do at the Fair Work Week Initiative. One of the things I also want to kind of, as context before we start to dig in on what are the solutions, I think that you had already laid out some of the trends. But that actually, the majority of Americans today are getting paid by the hour. Three in five Americans are getting paid by the hour. The majority isn't salaried workers. And it might not be interesting to survey us in the room how that lays out, right, because whether or not you're getting paid by the hour or by salaried does follow along whether or not, you know, what kind of education you have. So increasingly we're seeing what happens to academic jobs or freelance. What's happening to the reporters, you know, across journalism, even in professional jobs or the lawyers, right, professional jobs are even increasingly paid by the hour. And then if we look at what are the industries that are growing, well, most of the job growth is in the lower paid jobs. It's retail and restaurants. And the quality of those jobs is even declining even more rapidly. They're part-time, no benefits, and less and less of a career path. And I know many people who, you know, get a college education and then go back to their retailer restaurant job while they look for their career job, and that time in those jobs is going longer and longer. And so the idea that these jobs are stopping points, I think we need to kind of reconsider that. The other question is, right, so if we think about what is the job growth, well, a lot of it is part-time work. The majority of the job growth last year was part-time jobs. 40% of millennials are under-employed, right? And so the world between being employed and having that job security and having no income, more and more of us are in this gray area. And it's scrambling, right? And we're all, even for the ones that are employed, if you're in some of these sectors that are more fluid, that are trying to micro-adjust according to the working time, not giving you a permanent contract, you're one step away from being a part of that 40% of under-employed. And then if we think about working time, right, we're all working by the hour. It's a good job today. It's a transaction paid by the hour, increasingly mediated by online tools like Care.com. Some people say blame the technology for work just-in-time scheduling, and I think that the technology can be a part of the solution and the tools. The question is, do we have the power to mediate with that technology? What are the protections we need to reimagine how this technology could be creating the future of work that we need? And the most point before I'll stop is just that when we think about work as becoming a transaction paid by the hour and we think about our overall economic picture, the productivity is output per hour. I'm not an economist, so correct me if I'm interpreting and understanding this differently. But my understanding is that productivity is growing, hours are shrinking, and hours are becoming more uncertain. And so for us as people who are working and thinking about our labor as giving us certainty and being able to project our future, we're producing more, right? We're productive, we're multitasking, but it's not resulting into more economic stability for us. So again, we're trying our best to not make this an overwhelmingly pessimistic or depressing panel, however. I think there's really no doubt that the picture right now for millennials broadly construed and certainly within specific demographics is not an encouraging one for work and family. And so I want to ask Jessica, I want to ask you, part of drilling into these demographics, because again, we know that not all millennials have the same problems, right? And I think it's sort of obnoxious to talk that way even, right? But I want to start with you on gender a little, because you touched on that, right? If we're talking about the demographics of how millennials are challenged by having a dignified life with their family and working, how does gender play into that? Well, I mean, the biggest way gender plays into that is I think the latest statistics are that 40% of children are born to single mothers. And so the brunt of the care falls on their shoulders. And the way that our welfare laws are structured, they are all pushed back into the workforce as soon as possible. And that is just untenable. I mean, it results in situations, and I think this woman is probably older than a millennial, but there's a big story. Earlier this year, a woman named Deborah Harrell worked at McDonald's, had a single mom, had to, someone had to watch her kid. It was the summer, so her kid wasn't in school. So she let her kid go to the park by herself. Girl was nine, you know, that's, you know, old enough, I think, anyway, that's debatable. So she, someone found out that the girl was going to the park by herself, and the mother got arrested. The girl was sent to social services. I think it's ultimately been resolved. I think the girl is back with her mother, but the fact that that is what had to happen is appalling. And so I think that's sort of one major way it plays in. But then the other way is, again, you know, I mean, I think the book Lean In is obviously something that always comes up in these discussions, and I think it's a great service to encourage women to, you know, go for whatever they want. But I think that neglects the fact that women who are married and who are ambitious are still running into the same problems that they were running into 20 years ago. I mean, I read, in my research, I end up stumbling on articles, you know, from the New York Times or Time Magazine that were written in, you know, 1987, and they could have been written yesterday. I just don't think that there's been any real progress in terms of, in dual income couples, women sort of bearing the brunt of the childcare. And so, yeah, again, we're being such a bummer. Yeah, that is how gender plays into it in sort of two ways. We're going to be, as a father who's a primary caretaker for two years with my kids, one of the things that I've been challenged by is, there's lots of good data showing right now that mothers and fathers alike, men and women alike in the United States are spending more time generally on both caregiving and bread winning, right? That there's less and less free time. And putting in more as they become parents, whether or not the equity is quite there is another question, right? Whether or not fathers are, on average, doing as much as mothers when you add all the hours up is a hotly debated and, I think, generally speaking, we, the dads, are not holding up our end of the bargain. But it's true that equity is even harder when you're talking about working to the point of exhaustion, right? Once everybody's wiped out, trying to get something to do a little bit more to get to equity is a really tough place. Well, I would also say that, I think people are afraid to talk about because it doesn't want to sound gender-essentialist, but I think it needs to be said that women, especially with very small children, can be really physically exhausted in a way that makes it hard for them to really be incredibly ambitious when their children are small. So it's, you know, you just gave birth, you're maybe still breastfeeding, and you don't get the proper leave or the proper time to pump or whatever you need. And so if it becomes a decision where, you know, someone needs to sort of step back from their career, I think it can often be a decision that's made not out of any sort of desire that the mother wants to, you know, spend more time with the kids than the father does, but it can often be a decision that's made out of just sheer exhaustion. And I think that's sort of something that, you know, it's always said, like, oh, women, you know, they just want to spend more time with their children, but that's a factor that sort of doesn't get discussed enough. Can I touch upon that? Please, please. I think there are two factors at play there. So hands down, any household with newborns, parents are exhausted, particularly if also there's a mom at play. I do think for a number of women who do go back to the workplace and let's, you know, focus on sort of those professionals in a salaried position, there's a thing that happens to mom and there's a thing that happens to dad. So if mom is Jane, when Jane goes back to the workplace after giving birth to a child, there is an inherent assumption that Jane is more involved in caregiving. So if there's a stretch opportunity, the leadership usually thinks, you know what? Jane's just getting back. Let's ease her into it. Don't give her the stretch opportunity. If dad, let's call him, Joe goes back to work. For Joe, the perception is, way to go Joe. You're a parent now. He is in, he is committed. Give him the stretch opportunity because he's going to go knock it out of the park. So when it's time to take a look at sort of who gets promoted, Jane does not get promoted because there's a perception that Jane, you know what, she's stressed, she's working on this, but Joe does get promoted. So I just wanted to touch upon sort of those two factors at play. Well, it's all, I mean, but it's all like, I think everybody needs to be treated as an individual and that's part of this problem. You know, it's like it's, some women are going to need longer to physically recover and some women are going to, you know, have the baby in the next day be like, so when do I get back to work? Like, feel amazing. And our perceptions and our, I mean, and at this point in our laws to sort of accept both those things. And I think, you know, I'm also a young mom, or new mom, I'm not young as compared to others, but you know, if we think about these questions around like a voice in our schedules, right? So it's the idea of like, if you want to be able to ensure that you can accommodate your work schedule according to what you need, all of our circumstances are totally different, right? There was really new, there was new data that came out. It was the National Longitude Survey of Youth. So it was a survey of millennials and what's interesting about it, it's the first ever national survey that studied work schedules, right? The rise of unstable schedules, unpredictable schedules, and the country is actually now looking to this data to think about what's happening across, at labor markets, across the board, because it was the first time we had representative data. So it's interesting, right, to think about all the millennials in the room and what your experiences are around your working time or actually informing public policy on the federal, local, state level. Because there's an absence of data, our tools aren't, we're not actually measuring the stuff that is impacting our lives, right? But in this data it found that, and there's like fact sheets of materials out there if you're interested to get paper, 50%, regardless if you worked full time or hourly, 50% of people said they had no input into their schedule, right? Yet, unpredictabilities on the rise. The majority of people, it was, I think, what was it? 75% said that they had, I didn't get to print my own paper. 85% said that they had fluctuations in their hours. And if you were working part-time, if you're one of those under-employed people, that number skyrocketed even higher. For part-time workers, they said 87% that said that, no, 85% said that their schedules, they experienced some fluctuations and the majority of those workers had no input to their schedule. And those fluctuations were by 87% weekly from month to month. So what this means, right? It's not just that your income is massively fluctuating. It's that your time is massively fluctuating. What does this mean for care? What does this mean for being able to budget, do other things, be a productive human being in this world? And I think that, so what's interesting, though, to think about it, right? A lot of people do in the public policy world are saying, well, you know, Jeanette Navarro at Starbucks and of Anne-Marie Slaughter that she faced. There are just two different problems. We need to think about two separate solutions. What's interesting as we're thinking about what are the public policy solutions is actually if you think about the core of the problem, right, of what Jeanette Navarro experienced in Anne-Marie Slaughter struggles with, actually it could be the same solution when you come to public policy lovers. And I think that's kind of exciting. When we think about a world in which we're talking about what all working people are facing, many of these solutions actually are the same. Really? Yeah. That's fascinating. This is actually the next question I was going to ask you was sort of a socialist question, right? If so much of our job growth is coming in part-time low-wage work, should we be focusing on better care options that make it possible to work these really, you know, really inadequate jobs and focusing on the problem of creating really inadequate jobs? So it sounds like what you're suggesting is that it turns out, right, the policy lovers here could be beneficial across, not just for those jobs. Yeah. So one of the solutions is we shouldn't be required to work any hours in which we're not scheduled. So you get a schedule, right? So the first part of the solution is you actually get a schedule. The start-time in the beginning, the start-time in the end-time, right? That's radical. Most of us don't have that protection, right? And then you'd have the right to say not that you can't be working beyond those working hours, but you'd have the right to say, I can't. And be protected from retaliation when you say that you can't. And if a employer really wants to be able to have people work last minute, which many of them do, well, then you can also offer well, give me an extra hour of pay. Give me some extra added incentive if you want, if this kind of flexible time is so valuable to the employer, then there's no reason why they can't pay for it, right? We have overtime protections time and a half. Why can't we have predictability pay or flex time pay, right? And so that's some of the solutions we're thinking about. There are solutions around having a voice into your schedule, right? That we could require employers to just solicit input from their workers on their schedule and have a good faith attempt at accommodating that input. You know, these are some of the solutions, right? Can we offer core hours, right? We think about minimum wage. Can we have minimum hours? Sure. Donna, I want to see if you've got thoughts on this, too, because I know you mentioned that one of the things that's happening with care now is that there are a lot of, I'm going to say a lot of new parents right now are looking for care in ways and in sort of fluid ways that they weren't before. What do you think about this? Absolutely. So we also know from the data that less than a third of millennials actually plan our working traditional hours. It could be because of the demand. I think it's also because we are so connected as a society. And so they are looking for flexibility. They are doing shifts. They are doing off hours. So a lot of the traditional forms of care of, you know, you can do a drop-off at a child care center from this time. They don't apply and they don't necessarily work. So I do, that's the rise of services like care.com and others that try and provide different types of options. I think the other difference that millennials are also facing, I'm sure are shocked by the USDA study that said, you know, it's going to cost $245,000 to raise a child today. It doesn't include college. What our own data also says that, you know, the average family, 18% of their income is going towards care. That care is their largest expense. So they're looking for flexible solutions. They're looking for creative solutions. This notion of a nanny is no longer viewed as something, as a luxury, that's something that wealthy people do. If you have two young children and you're considering a daycare solution that's going to run you, you know, $300 to $400 a week, it might be cheaper to actually hire a nanny to help care for your children. So we're seeing some of those changing trends that more people are looking for in-home care solutions because they can't afford the other more traditional. And the other one that we're seeing is a big push and I'm sure it's covered in the booklet I was reviewing on the plane as well. They're looking towards their employers. So the same way that we are looking towards a policy solution and some of the policy solutions are really trying to prod employers to do different things from the likes of your Googles to your Facebook, they are looking for benefits for their employees to provide them with different flexible caregiving options from subsidies to in-home care. We think a lot about the sandwich generation of being people. I'm not a millennial. I am probably the traditional family or sandwich generation but what we're seeing is that people think of this sandwich generation as someone like myself, so I have two kids, a five-year-old and a twelve-year-old and I also have my mother living with me. It's not because she needs end-of-life care it's because she's on that caregiving continuum. What we're seeing is that it's also touching millennials. So for that older segment of the millennial base who have their young families and are really just starting to get going even if their parents are still in the workforce. They're also involved if there's a diagnosis with one of their parents if there's some scary testing that's going on. That's also impacting their ability at home and in the office. So employers are also being asked to help figure out is there some other benefit outside a traditional EAP that can help me also address some of these other challenges. I'm going to let Jessica weigh in in a moment but I just want to tell you that we're going to go to Q&A in a moment so get those questions ready. Yeah, I mean I think elder care is sort of a looming problem for us as a country. I mean when you're talking about policy problems I think childcare is obviously a huge one but demographically I'm sort of terrified when I think about all the baby boomers retiring and how that is going to be something else that strains millennials and sort of prevents them from as Connor was saying before gaining that financial foothold and paying back their college loans buying homes. I think in many areas we're just kicking the can down the road of responsibility and it just all seems to unfortunately seem like it's going to fall on millennial shoulders so that's also a concern that I think about a lot and in terms of caregiving traditionally a lot of families relied on grandparents or aunts and uncles whatever to help but increasingly again because of the way that the economy is gone those grandparents are still working so again a lot of people that I've interviewed for this child care series especially in other countries that had sort of more traditional trajectories all of their parents are still working and so especially when you have a crisis inflection point where your kid is sick you're sick there's schools cancelled because there's a weather event but you still have work they don't have that built-in backup even if they do have child care of a family member coming to help because everybody's working longer and more hours which you know is what you are speaking to as well so Millenials Sinking no I'm being a little glib but look I'd love to hear what you have to think about or have to say about this quick ground rules please state your name and any affiliation you might have that's brought you here second is please ask a question and properly if it gets a 30-40 seconds and there's no question coming I'm going to cut you off so questions please right up here hi I'm Greg O'Shawe St. Louis Fad somebody mentioned that 40% of kids are now born to single moms of course if you're not educated it's twice that and the growth has been mostly among parents without an education and of course folks like Belle Saw Hill Robert Putnam, Brad Wilcox have been talking about this their concern is not necessarily a moral one that we have the rise of kids being born without two parents it's the concern for the kid and I was just wondering if the panel could say a little bit more about what kind of supports can employers and policy makers offer especially to single moms without education both for their benefit can I please I think that there's a lot of solutions out there so I actually don't, I think this is this moment this summer actually we saw the introduce of groundbreaking legislation the schedules that worked act in congress San Francisco is advancing many of these policy solutions next year we're going to see multiple cities and states introduce new policy protections around caregiving around work hours we're actually at this very exciting moment where employers are workers are speaking out, putting pressure on their employers and employers are responding because you can't justify that a mom shouldn't be able to stay employed and should have to wake her kid up at 3 in the morning or piece together care through friends and family I mean we've seen I think the supports out there are outdated when we think about childcare subsidies I was speaking with one Starbucks mom Chester Pennsylvania Allison Santana and she had childcare subsidies she was able to access childcare subsidies as a single mom and because of her unpredictable Starbucks schedule over which she had zero control the childcare subsidy system actually pushed her off childcare subsidies and so when you have minimum income requirements and our social safety net whether it's FMLA or childcare subsidies or you know the full range of them really do yet our incomes are fluctuating and we have no control over that it's really tough Nurse Jackie actually just I'm catching up on my nurse Jackie she actually had that right she needed to in order to in her childcare custody battle she needed to get a more predictable stable schedule as a condition and the truth is that it's really tough and so I do think there are some there is some consideration of high priority categories that the federal bill that Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced and Representative George Miller introduced basically said everyone has the right to request and not be retaliated for requesting that requesting a schedule accommodation but that if you're in high priority category if you're a student if you have a second job or other caregiving responsibilities that actually the employer has to accommodate that request and there was a whole bunch of exceptions for the employer so they didn't provide an undue hardship but that there is actually if we want to address problems of occupational segregation for women if we want to think about what black and Latino workers workers of color immigrant communities are facing where you have more responsibilities less support less wealth to tap into you actually we need these solutions if we want to be serious about addressing these kinds of inequalities and I would add just starting at the very beginning an example of paid leave and so many cases that single mom let's say she's a nanny she wouldn't be paid for the time that she went off to go have her own child in cases where there can be remote working you know we have a very large workforce mostly moms who work from home where employers can offer the opportunity for single moms to work remotely I believe we should and I do agree that the current definition of subsidies is outdated that we should move more to more of an allotment model on those subsidies so that they can find a type of care that actually works for them even if that is you know paying a grandparent as a caregiver or hiring someone else that can help them out other questions we've got a few right here in fact why don't we gather both of these questions do we have about 10 minutes left so I want to make sure we hear as many voices as we can oh am I coming in from the back hi I'm Sarah Lewis from the AFL CIO I'm hearing a lot of great sentiments in this panel on previous panels the one thing that concerns me is I've heard the word workers twice in this entire time and it's only in relation to people of color and not in relation to anyone else I've also heard a lot about caregivers but only once about their rights as workers one thing I have only heard from Sarah Adele is the word union 80 some years ago we were given the right to organize and to enforce our own rights and interests at the workplace but this hasn't been spoken about the entire time and I know most of you who are on this panel are sympathetic to workers rights workers right to have a voice and to control or try to control their own situation their wages, their hours and other circumstances of work I want to point that out and I also would invite you to talk about how these issues of care and flex work of healthcare and other benefits are not being addressed now and what actually happens when you have a union on the workplace and I know my friend at CPD is going to be good at this one so I'll be quiet now and let you talk Thank you Jessica, Dan? Well I can tell you I can't speak to how unions can help because I'm not an expert in that but the reason I don't bring up unions is because I'm not confident in their future in this country and that saddens me deeply but if you've looked at any trends in any state it's all been to break unions it's all been to bust unions and so I think looking to unions as a future solution is not realistic in this particular moment I'm sad to say that but I just don't think that imagining a scenario in which there's a solution to this great problem is not going to happen I mean you look at Kentucky where Volkswagen auto workers were given the chance to form a union and they said they didn't what's the they didn't form the union though I just think that it's not because exactly, it's not positive for the formation of unions either whatever happened the union didn't happen it's not, we're not moving towards that and so I mean the reason that I don't talk about it as a solution is because I just, it's not where the trends seem to be lying so in Tennessee I was actually there in Tennessee at the time I was driving down and we saw billboard after billboard about how voting yes for the union would be a job killer right and so it's a politicized process today to organize a union and so while the employer was actually remaining neutral as a supportive worker, was neutral to workers choosing the union the elected officials in that landscape were not and there was a massive earned media campaign that did not create a neutral environment for those workers to to have that election and actually the UAW is working with Volkswagen to explore alternatives right and I think the question is what is, I've been a union organizer right I've helped workers in retail and hotel industry organized workers in New York City it's a good middle class job if you are a unionized hotel worker they earn over $30 an hour, have guaranteed health insurance, have protections, have a union that will fight for them it's a, you know if you should be trying to get into the hotel industry in New York City and join their union and retail there is also a massive difference right and a lot of these policy solutions right the Macy's Union and New York City was able to really negotiate on the integration of these workforce technologies and was actually able to give workers like more voice and more say through bargaining and the technology and so I don't I think that we need to think about new strategies to create on-ramps for workers to organize and I think that it's, that actually the more whites that workers have, the more power they have, the more protection they have to be able to think about collectively addressing the problems that they face at work right the part of the problem is that there's all these things that are happening in today's workplace no matter whether you're a worker in a law firm or a worker in a fast food joint and there's just, it's all legal it's all fine right but just because it's legal doesn't mean that it's fair and so part of what we do need is more protections for all of us in the workplace and then we can begin to imagine what it means for us to actually have representation and democracy in the workplace so I don't think it's one or the other and I think it is a part of the solution for sure. So we and we think about professionalizing the caregiving industry and so the movement here on sort of trying to pass the domestic worker bill of rights and different states and there's been some success but it's moving really slowly I think maybe four states so far have passed with a fifth one on the docket and I think there are a few different challenges and the domestic worker bill of rights would get protections to workers who work in the home so your nanny, your house cleaner, anyone who is providing services inside of someone's home as much as we support it I think one of the big challenges is the same thing if you ask someone if they're a family caregiver most of us would not self-identify as a family caregiver and a lot of the nannies housekeepers who provide services through care.com and others would not immediately identify themselves as a domestic worker and to make the connection that this bit of legislation that just passed actually applies to them so I think there's a bit of heavy lifting that we also have to do on communicating the information and letting people why it's in their best interest to either get actively involved or to learn more about it. Sure. Now just a few minutes left and so I've flagged you two in the middle but I'd like to collect another question over here as well just lightning round for the last couple of questions please. Great. Hi. I'm with Unate for Reproductive and Gender Equity. Urge. I just want to ask over the past few years we've seen a lot of restrictions on increasing laws on restrictions to an individual's decision whether to have children not have children to parent the children we have right a lot of restrictions on access to abortion access to contraception and while we've seen some progress with marriage equality there's still a lot of restrictions in terms of LGBTQ couples being able to adopt and so I wanted to know if you could talk a little bit about that how it affects young people and what young people are doing in response. Excellent. One more question right here in the red sweater. Oh no, I'm sorry. Alright, so let's just take that question then. So restrictions to family planning millennials working family? Well, the sort of divide between pro-choice and pro-life is something that is unfortunately not budging in the way that attitudes towards gay marriage are. So I think there's sort of two separate issues and I think in terms of millennials' attitudes towards LGBTQ rights I think that is the legislation is only going to continue to move forward on that front. I mean if you look at all of the statistics millennials are vastly in favor of giving the full speed of rights and so I think once the older generations stop being in power we're going to see a lot of movement forward pretty even more quickly than what we're already seeing. In terms, I mean I am deeply troubled by anti-choice legislation that is continuing to be passed on the state level and you know I think there's a lot of organizing that's happening on the grassroots level in terms of pro-choice activists but I think they face a real a sort of bigger uphill battle because there's still a lot of pro-life sentiment and Kathapallit's book pro which just came out is really trying to recapture the language of anti-choice and I think movements like that will only help to the good but in terms of contraception and family planning obviously there's been a couple Supreme Court decisions recently that have been a huge blow and so I think it kind of remains to be seen where that's going. We have very little time left and anybody else like to weigh on that? So then let me just close by saying that I've been thinking, I hadn't really enjoyed our conversation I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of the old American progressives about a hundred years ago they repeatedly were accused of trying to go beyond America, leave America behind make it un-American with the policies they were proposing to regulate an industrializing economy and a changing society and they always claimed and I think this was consistent with what they thought they were doing what they were doing and it was new policies to actually resuscitate old American values, new ideas that could make the American promise, the American dream the American way of life real again in a new economic moment and I don't think there's a whole lot of I don't think it's especially controversial to say that we're dealing with something like that again right now and especially around work at family issues in the United States so how can we rebuild the American dream in a way that we have caregiving available, caregiving policies humane and dignified bread winning in the United States that's an open question and I don't think we've figured it out yet and it's also really another way of just asking how can we rebuild the American dream today so it's not really just a millennial problem obviously any of you who hope to retire soon and take Social Security and draw other old age benefits in the United States need millennials to keep paying taxes and advancing in their careers this is a national problem and I hope you'll stay tuned at New America we'll wrestle with it