{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.casey.senate.gov/newsroom/article/the-woes-of-working-women", "The Woes of Working Women", "2014-12-05", "2014", "2014-12", "Democrat", "House", "PA", "Bob Casey", "C001070", "www.casey.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "By:\u00a0\r\n                    Gail Collins\r\n                \r\n            \r\n            \r\n                \r\n                \r\n                \r\n            Friday, December 5, 2014\r\n            \n\t\n\r\n            \r\n              \r\n                \r\n                  \r\n                \r\n              \r\n            \r\n            Today, let\u2019s take a look at the Little Bill That Couldn\u2019t.\r\nSay hello to the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act. It\u2019s sort of shy, but if you look over there behind the ottoman, you may see it peeking out.\r\nThe bill would require employers to make \u201creasonable accommodations\u201d for workers who become pregnant. You may be stunned to hear that this does not always happen now in the American workplace. Consider Heather Myers, a floor worker in the infant department at a Walmart in Kansas whose obstetrician told her to drink liquids. She was then fired for bringing a water bottle to work.\r\nThis week, the Supreme Court heard the case of Peggy Young, a United Parcel Service driver who was put on an unpaid disability leave after her doctor told her she should avoid lifting bundles that weighed more than 20 pounds. That was not much of a problem, since Peggy mainly spent her days delivering envelopes. And we know that UPS had the capacity to make reasonable accommodations because it has changed its policy and now makes ... reasonable accommodations.\r\nYoung\u2019s case is getting support from both sides of the great, gaping abortion divide. On the day of her hearing, everybody was united behind working women who wanted to have children.\r\n\u201cI think we\u2019re always looking for common ground, and when we can agree \u2014 it\u2019s magic,\u201d said Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.\r\n(Hear that, little bill? Come on out. Everybody\u2019s on your side. We\u2019ll take a selfie!)\r\nThis high-minded rapprochement, alas, has not made its way into the halls of Congress. Thirty-three senators have signed onto the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act, and 142 members of the House. They\u2019re all Democrats.\r\n\u201cThis bill has a lot of support, but it\u2019s not yet bipartisan. That\u2019s the problem,\u201d said Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, the lead sponsor in the Senate.\r\nFor sure, given that the next session of Congress is going to be entirely run by Republicans.\r\nThe lead House sponsor, Jerrold Nadler of New York, says he\u2019s hoping some of the anti-abortion groups who have signed onto Peggy Young\u2019s case will start pressing their congressional allies to come around on a bill that would solve the Peggy Young problem. But, so far, there doesn\u2019t seem to be much progress.\r\nThe Susan B. Anthony List hasn\u2019t taken a position on the matter. \u201cWe have one bill and that\u2019s our priority and that\u2019s kind of the way it works,\u201d said Dannenfelser. This would be the ban on abortions beyond the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy.\r\nNadler, listing what progress there has been, mentioned getting the bill included as \u201cpart of the Democratic women\u2019s agenda \u2014 although it wasn\u2019t mentioned all the time. To my annoyance.\u201d\r\nO.K., not looking good for the Pregnant Workers. Damned bill\u2019s crawled under the couch.\r\nEmily Martin, vice president of the National Women\u2019s Law Center, has been lobbying for the bill, and she says she\u2019s had meetings with Republican lawmakers that were \u201cvery positive,\u201d in a no-action kind of way. \u201cIt\u2019s been hard to get somebody to take the leap to be the first Republican,\u201d she said.\r\nThis is the way politics goes. Nobody\u2019s making you do it, so you don\u2019t. Anyway, businesses probably wouldn\u2019t like it. (The U.S. Women\u2019s Chamber of Commerce is listed as a supporter. This is not to be confused with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which hasn\u2019t taken a position. \u201cYou\u2019ll find that on the majority of issues, we\u2019re on the opposite side of the table,\u201d said Margot Dorfman, who leads the women\u2019s group.)\r\nWhat we have here is a bill that\u2019s been kicking around for more than a year, during which time a multitude of Democrats have signed on without making any superhuman efforts to win over their Republican colleagues. The Republicans, who have been complaining mightily about being branded anti-women during the election season, have been making quiet murmurs of agreement but don\u2019t want to go out of their way to promote something the Democrats started.\r\nAnd here we are, in a country where more than two-thirds of mothers work, most of them full time. We have interesting debates about whether young mothers should opt out of the workplace, ignoring that most of them have no option whatsoever on the opting question.\r\nOur institutions cheerfully refuse to restructure themselves to reflect the fact that most families do not contain a non-working parent. Congress has been debating early education programs for more than 40 years and it has hardly made a dent. A great many of our employers don\u2019t bother to make jobs more family-friendly; they don\u2019t even bother to make modest arrangements to accommodate their pregnant workers. Everybody thinks this is extremely unfortunate, but almost nobody does anything about it because there is not a lot of political or financial reward for siding with working mothers.\r\nO.K., rant is over. Sorry, I think I scared the little bill.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.casey.senate.gov/newsroom/article/the-woes-of-working-women"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9352911729365587, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}