Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, offer paid family and medical leave, and enforce labor laws.
These are just some of the points outlined in an op-ed piece by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that address some gaping holes in the way working families are treated.
Using her own experience as a pregnant law graduate in a position where “no law firm was going to offer a job to a woman in my ‘condition,’ Warren drew up proposals on how to improve the rights, welfare, and conditions of the American worker.
Some of her suggestions were mentioned again for emphasis—Warren has long advocated for hiking the minimum wage to as high as $22 an hour, and she again repeated calls to protect the rights of unions. “Unions help workers secure higher wages for their members,” she wrote.
She also listed data that showed the lack of paid family or medical leave in all levels of work, listing that 40% of all private-sector workers and 70% of low-wage workers don’t get a single paid sick day. “That needs to change,” she said.
Warren called out the lack of enforcement in labor laws, where two-thirds of low-wage workers encounter wage violations. And while she called the Family and Medical Leave Act “landmark,” she reminded readers that the next step of delivering on the Act’s promises “won’t be easy.”
One issue the article didn’t address was speculation on who Warren would endorse in the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Her consistent railing against Wall Street lines up with Sanders’ message, and Warren has previously suggested that donors may have once influenced Clinton’s position.