S1E4: Winning Universal Paid Leave Ft. Hannah Weilbacher
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Last year, after years of struggle, organizing, and campaigning, the DC Council passed the landmark Universal Paid Leave Act of 2016, putting the district on the progressive edge of workplace social insurance policy in the US. However, since we can’t have nice things in DC, the Council is currently renegotiating the legislation as the business lobby fights to water down the program before it’s implemented. In short, there’s still a lot to protect and fight for on this issue. To help us explore the paid leave issue in the district — the legislation as it’s passed, the coalition that came together to fight for it, and what’s coming next — we spoke with Hannah Weilbacher, previously a community organizer with Jews United for Justice who worked on the DC Paid Family Leave Campaign. Hannah also runs an awesome weekly e-newsletter called The B-Sides that focuses on the intersection of politics and pop music. If you like what you see and hear on the blog, you can sign up to get the newsletter in your inbox each week. Our interview is broken up by “Crying” from local band Oh He Dead. If you like how they sound, you can check them out on Facebook, Twitter, and SoundCloud.
Call To Action
This is our clearest call to action yet: go to the DC Paid Family Leave Campaign website and volunteer. Seriously, they make it so easy for you to contribute however you can — showing up at events, making phone calls, shooting out tweets, or even just talking to your friends about the issue. You can also show your support by signing this petition or sign up directly to make weekly phone calls to targeted council members demanding full funding for program startup costs in the 2018 budget being debated now throughout the month of May. It took a popular movement to get to this point. Now we need to keep the pressure on so that the Council and the Mayor know that we’re watching, and we won’t accept anything less than full implementation of this paid family leave program.
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