FV@W Celebrates New Grant Funding Paid Leave Research

FV@W Executive Director Josephine Kalipeni to Work With UCLA Scholar Dr. Jody Heymann

(WASHINGTON, DC)––Family Values @ Work, in partnership with the WORLD Policy Analysis Center (WORLD) at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, was announced as a $125,000 WorkRise research grant recipient for 2022. FV@W executive director, Josephine Kalipeni, will partner with Dr. Jody Heymann, director of WORLD, to examine the economic sustainability and mobility resulting from paid leave policies.

“This is an exciting and timely honor,” said Kalipeni. “The pandemic continues to ravage our workforce, eating away at this nation’s already-fragile social safety net and destabilizing families. Through our partnership and with this funding, Dr. Heymann and I will get to identify how paid leave impacts the economic security of workers and their families in tangible, measurable ways. And we’ll get a glimpse at the implications on generations to come when those policies are not in place. I am most looking forward to applying what we learn to improve the outcomes for low-wage-earning, BIPOC, and queer workers, their families, and their communities––those most often negatively impacted by this nation’s historic and systematic racist workforce infrastructure.”

In July of 2021, WORLD released the first study to systematically analyze how common sick and medical leave eligibility criteria in the US affect access and to examine leave policies globally to understand whether these criteria are necessary. The study showed incontrovertible proof that women, low-wage workers, workers of color, and LGBTQIA workers become trapped in the revolving door of economic instability due to a lack of national standards around paid leave.

Kalipeni and Dr. Heymann’s proposed research project will take WORLD’s pivotal research on disparities created by policy design elements even further, delving into state-level data and tying paid leave to economic outcomes disaggregated across race, class, ability, and other identity markers. The resulting data could create compelling economic arguments that investments in paid leave alleviate poverty, decrease welfare enrollment, and support labor-force attachment for women of color and women who earn low wages, among other economic benefits for historically underserved communities.

“Family Values @ Work, together with partners across the country, has long led and continues to lead efforts to ensure every person in every state can take care of their own health, the health of their children, parents, partners, and spouses,” Dr. Jody Heymann said. “At WORLD, we are so grateful to have this opportunity to work together to redress the fact that the US is one of the few countries left without national paid sick and family leave, and to eliminate this long-lasting source of inequality.”

WorkRise is a research-to-action network on jobs, workers, and mobility, hosted by the Urban Institute.The research will be conducted throughout 2022. Kalipeni and Dr. Heymann make up one of 13 teams that received grants. Each of the funded teams will build new knowledge to drive action towards accelerating economic mobility and advancing equity in the US labor market, particularly for workers in low-wage occupations. Although inequities in our labor market predate COVID-19, the pandemic’s toll on low-wage workers has created a new urgency to close equity gaps and expand labor-market opportunities for all workers.

WorkRise’s May 2021 request for proposals was competitive, receiving 175 letters of inquiry. Twenty-two project teams were selected to receive funding, based on the strength of their project proposal or the salience of their research question to advancing knowledge on workers’ economic mobility in the US labor market. 

Read the official announcement and learn about the other grantees here.  

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