While Chris Christie continues to do nothing other than attack Corzine for everything under the sun and STILL hasn't laid out what his plans are for dealing with any aspect of the job he is running for, Corzine has once again shown real tangible results from an initative that will help working families:The state's family leave Insurance program, the second in the nation, began providing workers up to six weeks of benefits starting July 1. To date, more than 5,000 family leave claims have been determined to be eligible. Of those, 4,368, or 81 percent, are for bonding with a newborn or newly adopted child and 1,040, or 19%, are claims for care of a seriously ill family member. Corzine signed the legislation in May.
That is 5,000 more NJ families who are able to spend time with a newborn or a seriously ill family member without the additional stress of lost wages or even a lost job for being out for too long. Just to provide context here, an article last year about paid family leave noted the following stunning and embarrassing statistics: Even in favorable economic times, the United States ranks behind other developed countries in regard to many family-friendly workplace policies. According to McGill University's Institute for Health and Social Policy:
- The U.S. is one of only four countries out of 173 in a recent survey that doesn't guarantee some form of paid maternity leave; the others are Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.
- Sixty-six countries, but not the U.S., ensure that fathers either receive paid paternity leave or have a right to paid parental leave.
- At least 145 countries provide paid sick days, with 136 providing a week or more annually, while the U.S. has no federal law providing for paid sick days.
Yet, the "compassionate" douchebags conservatives claim that paid family leave is horrible because it is "socialistcommunistfascistblahblahblahantibusiness" and only promotes people being lazy. Don't believe that? Check out this from the mental midgets at the Save Jersey Blog, or the praise lavished on former candidate Steve Lonegan when he wanted to repeal this law in NJ or the prize for most "scary words" used by NJ Tax Revolution, because people should just be slave drones to the wonderful corporate machine that chew them up and spits them out and they should be happy to just have a job - let alone be treated as humans.
Or, you know, as workers who don't have to worry about losing their job or house or falling behind on their other bills while they care for a seriously ill family member or a newborn - which of course, they should have to pay for out of pocket too because we wouldn't want to take money out of the pockets of Big Insurance and their executives.
But I digress.
While I haven't found any quotes directly from Christie on this particular law (shocker), there is a pattern of him siding with big business against NJ families on issues such as this (for example, there is no mention of families at all in the healthcare section of his website). There is this quote from a recent NY Times article: Republicans still have a top of the ticket that will not protect women's rights in Trenton," a Corzine spokeswoman, Elisabeth Smith, said in an e-mail message that also mentioned Mr. Christie's opposition to the state's paid family leave law.
And there is this thinly veiled attack on the paid family leave legislation: Corzine let stand Gov. Jim McGreevey's executive order requiring union-level wages on state projects. And he has backed other union causes, including paid family leave, which is funded by paycheck deductions, and a law that lets unions represent workers once they have a simple majority of the workers signed up.
Lonegan and Christie oppose all those measures.
"In difficult economic times like this, we don't need to be adding more costs to business," said Christie. "I think my job is to get New Jersey working again."
Once again showing that Christie sides with business and has no clue whatsoever about the pain and struggle that most families and New Jerseyans are facing every single day. |
