Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with theSkimm co-founders Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg for an exclusive interview for their weekly podcast ‘Skimm This’, which breaks down the most complicated stories of the week and gives you the context on why they matter.
VP Harris spoke from the White House about how women, particularly women of color, are being pushed out of the workforce at an alarming rate, a phenomenon that has been accelerated by the pandemic and is being referred to as the “Shecession”, and how the next COVID relief bill could provide women with some relief.
On what Vice President Harris and President Biden are doing to get women back to work beyond a stimulus check:
This is a national emergency, two and a half million women have left the workforce during this pandemic. When you have to make decisions about how you’re going to take care of your family, it’s the women who ended up being the ones who were going to stay at home to take care of the kids, because the kids aren’t going to school.
Here’s a basic point, when you lift up the economic status of women, you lift up the economic status of families and communities and all of society benefits. So that’s how the President and I look at what we need to do around women in the workforce – a matter of how everyone as a society will benefit, how the economy as a whole will be better when women are in the workforce, when they are paid equal, pay for equal work. And when they have the benefits that all working people should have such as again, paid sick leave and family leave.
When asked if the U.S. is ever going to have a permanent national family leave policy:
We better. Let me just say this: tragically, this pandemic…has been an accelerator. Meaning the things that were bad before are even worse now… paid sick leave, paid family leave. In a pandemic working people should be able to stay at home when they are sick and not have to worry about staying at home. It’s only humane and right to say working people should have some time to be able to take care of emergencies and not have to worry about paying their rent.
When asked about how the American rescue plan would help women of color in particular:
Two thirds of minimum wage workers are women of color… If you look at the people who are working in the hospitals who are the frontline workers – be it the grocery store worker or the person who is actually helping people get by everyday in terms of home health care. So we need to look at what those jobs are and we need to pay people for their value. And we also need to understand the disparities that are front and center for us around race and gender that have been by this pandemic. Because again, the inequities that existed before the pandemic around race and gender are even worse.
