Why is it important?
The Latinx community, especially Latinas, should be paid equitably, with access to healthcare, paid family leave, paid sick days, affordable childcare, and healthy work environments. All workers – undocumented, domestic and farmworkers, and migrant workers - contribute to the well being of our country and must have the right to organize and fight for a living minimum wage. We urge Congress to pass federal paid family and medical leave for all working people.
Our Impact
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for paid leave has been experienced first-hand by many Americans, and especially Latinas. Our community historically holds the idea that we don’t deserve what we don’t work for, this idea must be dismantled so that Latinx employees gain the leave that they so desperately deserve. The number of Latinas in the US raised to 29.6 million in 2018, 9% of the total population, and Latinas are entrepreneurs and have created 2.3 million new businesses across the country which represent 18% of all women-owned businesses between 2014 and 2019. No one is more affected by the lack of guaranteed paid leave in America than Latinas, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Latinxs are the fastest growing segment of the US workforce, they are also the least likely to have access to paid sick days.
In 2020, under our Economic justice work, we joined efforts with 30 partner organizations to educate and bring more resources about paid leave to people in our community. In Florida and Arizona, we became a co-anchor organization for the Family Values @ Work network. For this campaign, we collected a total of 601 advocates, led phone bank programs during GOTV for the Nov. 3rd elections, shared information with 20,000 eligible voters, sent 10,000 text messages, produced three know your rights webinars that reached over 4,500 people, and launched a story collection database to highlight more stories of families and workers that can benefit from paid leave.
For 2021, we are leading a multi layered campaign to win and discuss the benefits paid leave would bring to our community. A guaranteed policy of paid leave would support all families and working people across the nation.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
Our campaign is unique and action-oriented with access to tools and resources that take our advocates, volunteers, and community at large beyond the lecture and traditional training to directly drive the change we want to see in our community.
