One Senator’s Decades-Long Fight for Universal Childcare
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4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2021
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
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 childcare.
Guest: U.S. Senator Patty Murray of Washington state.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello? Can you hear me? |
| 0:05.2 | I can hear you. How are you doing? |
| 0:09.0 | I called up Senator Patty Murray, Democrat from Washington State, to talk about her career-long obsession with child care. |
| 0:17.5 | Sorry for a little bit of a delay. I am hiding in a closet from my children right now, which |
| 0:22.5 | the irony is not lost on me. I'm sorry, I'm not laughing. Okay. Yeah. We were both multitasking |
| 0:32.5 | in this conversation. The senator was between votes. That's why she's on her cell phone. |
| 0:38.3 | I love that you're laughing. That is real. |
| 0:40.3 | Bam there. Ben there. Yeah. |
| 0:44.3 | If the senator sounds a little giddy here, it's because she can almost taste a legislative victory. |
| 0:51.3 | She's been plotting since before she was elected. |
| 0:53.3 | With the president, |
| 0:55.0 | putting the weight of his office behind policies that would make daycare and preschool more |
| 0:58.4 | accessible, that would provide paid family leave, she senses an opportunity. When I first came |
| 1:04.7 | into the Senate in 1993, January 1993, the first bill we did on the floor was unpaid family leave. And it took almost a |
| 1:14.4 | month to get it through. Senator Ted Kennedy was working hard to get Republican votes for it. |
| 1:20.3 | And all I could think of is this is unpaid, but it's a step forward. Certainly we will |
| 1:24.9 | very soon do paid leave, so it's real for more people. Here we are |
| 1:29.5 | almost 30 years later, and today I had a hearing on unpaid family leave. And it's like, |
| 1:35.3 | when will these guys ever get it that these are real issues and either we fix them or we're |
| 1:40.7 | going to be just in trouble for another 30 years. |
| 1:48.7 | Arguably, over the last three decades, the closest to the U.S. has come to expanding support for working families was when Donald Trump guaranteed paid family leave for federal workers |
| 1:54.4 | back in 2019. And then the pandemic happened. |
... |
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