Episode Notes
Patty Murray began her career in the Senate pushing for a landmark piece of legislation: the Family and Medical Leave Act. Now, nearly 30 years later, she’s putting her weight behind a plan to grant universal access to affordable child care.
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Indián Jackson, 35, worked at Pardee Memorial Hospital for five years. When she first started the job, she thought she’d made it.
“I really enjoyed the job title,” she told the Citizen Times. “It s a well-known hospital in this area. As far as people in Hendersonville, you tell them that you re working for this hospital they re like, ‘Oh, wow.’”
Pardee Memorial Hospital is part of the University of North Carolina medical system. It is the second largest employer in Henderson County, according to its website.
For Jackson, the hospital’s illustrious reputation began to fade soon after she started working there. According to a lawsuit she filed in Henderson County Superior Court last November, beginning in 2016 she was subjected to a hostile, racist work environment. It led her to develop PTSD and forced her to resign in October 2020.
Democratic Washington Sen. Patty Murray has been one of Congress’ strongest supporters of working families ever since she entered the chamber in 1993. That same year saw the Family and Medical Leave Act signed into law, which was a big step forward for employers’ leave policies but nowhere near enough, as the leave guaranteed was unpaid. In the three decades since that legislation’s passage, there haven’t been any significant updates to child care infrastructure. But something shifted when the pandemic hit. “I was hearing from businesses, from Chambers of Commerce, who are trying to keep some semblance of order, who couldn’t get their employees to come to work simply because of child care,” Murray says. With everybody now “facing the same crisis,” a new opportunity has emerged for fixing this country’s child care systems President Joe Biden is putting the weight of his office behind policies that would make day care and preschool more accessible and provide paid f
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