Imagine getting suspended from your job for seven days because you had to leave work for a half hour and pick up your child when no one could watch her. This is just one example of a major obstacle working women face. 

Major progressive organizations came together to kick off the Fair Shot campaign last week, which is a women’s initiative focused on elevating public policy solutions, and to demand action on the real challenges that women face today, including jobs and economic security, health care rights and opportunities for leadership and advancement.

Congress is headed toward yet another manufactured budget crisis after House Republicans today passed legislation that AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director William Samuel says will provoke another government shutdown by making “ransom demands” that are “unacceptable” and “unrealistic."

Women will not receive the same median annual pay as men until 2058, if current earnings patterns continue without change, announced the Institute for Women's Policy Research this week. 

The House voted Thursday night to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program that helps feed hungry, low-income and often jobless people and families. As many as 6 million could be thrown off the rolls of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The bill was aggressively promoted and adamantly backed by tea party Republicans, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). The vote was 217–210, with all Democrats and 15 Republicans voting “no.”

While there’s a move—led by Republican lawmakers but with support from some Democrats—to cut Social Security benefits through a so-called “chained" CPI and raise the retirement age, a bill introduced in the House this week goes in the other direction: it strengthens Social Security benefits.

Although the Washington, D.C., Council did not override Mayor Vincent C. Gray's veto of the Large Retailer Accountability Act (LRAA), which would have required the district’s big-box retailers to pay workers a living wage of $12.50 an hour, the conversation about raising the minimum wage in D.C. is gaining momentum. 

House Republicans are set to take the food off the table for millions of low-income people, with huge cuts to the food stamp program, under a bill they are pushing toward a vote this week, likely Thursday or Friday. 

The $40 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are part of the farm bill reauthorization and would result, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in 1.7 million people forced off the rolls in the coming year and another 2.1 million dropped in 2014. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) puts the figure at 4 million to 6 million.  

Nearly 2 million home care workers—the vast majority of whom are women—take care of the elderly and people with disabilities, often working 12-hour days and 60 to 70 hours a week. Now, for the first time since 1975, most of these workers will have the wage and overtime protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) under a new rule issued today by the Obama administration’s Department of Labor.   

Since they were exempted from the FLSA nearly four decades ago, home care workers seldom have been paid overtime and their net income is often less than the minimum wage, considering time spent in travel between the homes where they work in a single day and its cost. Unlike workers covered by federal labor laws, they have not been paid for all the hours they are on the clock.

The minimum wage has recently been in the news because of the fast-food workers’ strike for $15 an hour. Critics claim that would cause unemployment. There is a tipping point, but we don't really know where that is. The principal reason minimum wage increases have not led to disemployment effects is that the minimum has been so far below a market clearing wage. In the case of the fast-food industry increases, so long as they are below the tipping point, they are likely to lead to increases in employment because the fast-food industry is a labor monopsony. That is, they are the principal employers of minimum wage workers.

In the first of a new series of videos profiling minimum and low-wage workers, Raise the Wage New Jersey profiles Tayzia, a security guard for Edison. She is a single mother who explains why her wages, which are slightly above minimum wage, aren't enough to help her survive and raise her daughter.