Women won the 2020 election for Joe Biden, while shouldering the worst economic and public health crisis in generations. We’ve led the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as almost 80 percent of frontline health care workers. We’ve kept families safe and fed as two out of three caregivers in the United States. We’ve become teachers and home health aides, therapists and childcare professionals, all without leaving our homes — and with record levels of unemployment.
We need the Build Back Better Act, with the paid family and medical leave provisions intact, to protect women’s welfare and wellbeing, the most transformative piece of legislation for women since the 19th Amendment.
Women’s groups have supported the Build Back Better Act in rallies, articles, and letters to Congress. My organization, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, called on Congress and used this bill to convince Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander women that we finally have a champion in the White House.
Attempts to scrub the bill of paid leave, a policy supported by more than 80 percent of Americans and practiced by every other industrialized nation, faced the full wrath of the women’s community. Thanks to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, paid leave has been given a lifeline and it must not be cut.
Cutting it out of the bill hurts all working parents— but it maims women of color, including AANHPI women, the deepest.
Women of color are disproportionately both low-wage workers and breadwinners. Millions of Asian American mothers live in multigenerational households, shouldering the dual responsibility of providing for our children and our elderly parents, and are more often than not, the primary earners for our families.
Women of color have experienced skyrocketing unemployment during the pandemic. AANHPI women have suffered the highest rate of long-term unemployment of any racial or gender group.
With this Build Back Better Act, Congress cannot leave working parents behind. As the people who keep America running, we’re demanding that lawmakers give us the support and resources we need.
It’s easy to imagine the objections to this proposal: “We don’t have the votes,” “We don’t have enough time left in-session,” “We don’t have enough support from our constituents.”
To these, women say: We don’t have time to wait. We elected our senators and representatives to advocate for us — to make it possible for us to support ourselves and our families with dignity. It’s time for Congress to do their jobs, just like we do ours.
America has never fully lived up to the promises of freedom, justice, and equality on which it was founded. Not for women. Not for people of color. Not for the workers who protect us when all other systems fail. Congress, don’t fail us now.
Sung Yeon Choimorrow is the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), the nation’s only multi-issue, progressive, community organizing and policy advocacy organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and girls. You can follow her @schoimorrow.
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