Editorials

...Following the Great Crash of '89, the repeal of the Twenty-seventh Amendment limiting the number of terms he could serve, and his Democratic successor's indecisive leadership in the Ecuadoran hostage crisis, the president had reclaimed the Oval Office in 1992 with the inspired theme, "It's High Noon in America...

...Caveat emptor, but caveat vendor as well...

...He said he was pardoning all those accused of misconduct in his previous administrations, and planned to present each with an inscribed Bible...

...As for the future, he was anticipating the resumption of the space program next year in 2001, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first election to the presidency in 2005, and, with God's help and theirs, celebrating the nation's most important bicentennial in 2014: the two-hundredth anniversary of the burning of the city of Washington...

...He extended anew a warm invitation to Mikhail Gorbachev for a summit meeting...

...Sixty percent of children born in 1984 can expect to live in a single-parent family before reaching the age of eighteen...

...But the Court also backed a Missouri law which has no job reinstatement provision in its maternity leave policy...

...The bill would simply extend benefits to all workers who fit the conditions stipulated for a leave, pre-empting the allegation that one group is "preferred...

...He looked not a hair older than during his first such address to Congress in 1982...

...The first case the Court considered involved a California law requiring an employer to grant up to four months unpaid "pregnancy disability" leave, if medically warranted, and job reinstatement if possible...

...This camel is just too big...

...nine out of ten of these children will live in female-headed families...

...One such plan, The Family and Medical Leave Act, sponsored by Rep...

...women of childbearing age will be working outside the home...

...Starlet Wars is the camel's nose, the foot in the door...

...Furthermore, the proposal contains a built-in strategy to meet the objection to "preferential treatment" raised by its opponents and by women's groups who fear a backlash of discrimination against hiring women who receive preferential treatment...

...The figures speak for themselves: # Today, women comprise 55 percent of the U.S...

...The issues may seem legally technical...

...cost less for us to deploy than for the enemy to overcome...

...Second, the initiative would breach the ABM treaty, thus shattering one of the few remaining arms-control achievements of the past as well as most hopes for arms control in the future...

...He said that at the recent Iceland meeting, arms control had been within a single word of being achieved...

...and Rep...

...she is also ineligible to collect unemployment compensation — just as ineligible as any other Missouri worker who leaves a job "voluntarily," i.e., for reasons not attributable to either the employer or the job...

...To think that prematurely deploying a jerrybuilt system will render the momentum toward a full-blown SDI "irreversible" is wildly unrealistic...

...Such a maneuver simply won't work, and sympathizers with strategic defense systems really ought to be the first to advise against it...

...And while the president warned he would veto any increase in the minimum wage, he was proposing a new national standard for redeeming bottles...

...His most controversial new ideas were busing and a proposed standard federal redemption policy...

...Obviously, a minimal standard leave policy for the nation as a whole could have kept both these cases off the Supreme Court docket...

...compromise on the lines of, well, the MX...

...Although the two had met recently for a pre-summit at Reykjavik IV, the prospect of a Washington summit was still one of the president's fondest hopes...

...That same year, 65 percent of the nation's married women between the ages of twenty and thirty-four were employed...

...parents in Sweden may choose to work six-hourdays until a child is eight years old...

...As the president cantered out of the House chamber, everyone rose in near spontaneous applause...

...He said that his administration was planning to more than double expenditures for the war on drugs, recommending that Congress approve $50,000 for the coming fiscal year...

...Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett reports that 90 percent of French three-year-olds attend government-sponsored pre-schools...

...It would have to be built on a clear understanding and a solid consensus, or it wouldn't be built...

...on the installment plan...

...Such legislation would acknowledge the central place of families in our society and restore the notion that families deserve priority in social programs...

...For years, European mothers have been enjoying an average of five months maternity leave at full pay...

...The president ended his thirty-two minute, flawless address by looking to the past and to the future...

...The president had argued vigorously that SOI was "the path for both sides to a safer future,'' that SOI would remove the '' web of dependency" both superpowers were experiencing since their deployments of SDI...

...Some supporters of the bill, who favor it as a first step in what must become a larger, more comprehensive program of family supports, argue that the bill doesn't go nearly far enough...

...Unfortunately, as on other occasions, the aging Mr...

...But any full-blown strategic defense system would necessarily be the work of many years—stretching across different presidential administrations and various shifts in the political and economic climate...

...A scaled-down instant Starlet Wars promising to provide a quick-and-dirty solution to protecting missile sites might be seen as the hook that would lure wavering politicians into buying Star Wars Sr...

...But even if such a campaign were waged and won, it would be only one small victory in the protracted struggle necessary to save the American family...

...While we certainly do not want to forfeit the vitality of the U.S...

...competitiveness 70: Commonweal was being wasted in transporting workers the long distances to their employment...

...Patricia Schroeder (D-Col...

...The result is that today wages, especially those earned by most women, simply do not support a family, even one shrunken in size to only one or two children...

...Opponents of the bill argue that such liberal benefits would be prohibitively expensive since, though leave is unpaid, temporary help would be required to replace absent workers...

...We began this century with the idea of a family wage — that the head of the household, then nearly always a male, should be able to earn a salary that would cover the cost of living for himself, his wife, and his children...

...Therefore, the bill would not apply at all to part-time workers...

...Clearly then, some minimal standard of maternity leave with compulsory job reinstatement would furnish a bare-bones safety net for the majority of the nation's working families...

...Proponents counter that rehiring experienced workers would more than pay for the temporarily incurred costs of hiring substitutes...

...As of now, we haven't heard enough to know...

...Thus the "feminization of poverty," and more recently the scandalous rate of increase of children in poverty...

...It is more likely to be the boomerang that will damage first the prospects for arms reduction, then whatever merits strategic defense itself may turn out to possess...

...William Clay (D-Mo...

...Somewhere along the line a program lacking genuine clarity and consensus will encounter enough opposition either to stop it altogether or turn it into a ramshackle It was the year 2000 and the president's fifteenth State of the Union Message...

...economy, we might learn something from our European neighbors about reordering our priorities...

...Would Starlet Wars be a good idea...

...But two things count heavily against this newest initiative...

...Not Star Wars but what we might call Starlet Wars, a couple of anti-missile missile systems that he would like to see fully deployed in the early 1990s...

...working women in Italy receive two years' credit toward seniority with every childbirth...

...In both cases, the Court voted to uphold state laws, although the laws in each case differ substantially...

...The rights of workers to return to their jobs after such leaves would be ensured, and health benefits, pensions, and seniority rights would also be continued...

...First, it has not been successfully measured against the basic threefold criteria that Paul Nitze and others have set forth for strategic defense: systems must be survivable against enemy attacks...

...If these data are correct, the majority of this generation of American children will spend at least some portion (if not the entirety) of their childhoods supported solely by their working mothers, if their mothers are lucky enough, healthy enough, and skilled enough to be employed...

...And the leave mandated in the bill is unpaid, giving low-income wage-earners or "the working poor," a benefit that may not be worth the loss of income it entails...

...The Schroeder-Clay bill now in Congress would apply to companies with at least 15 employees...

...It's meant to evade debate rather than encourage it, to get a bit of Star Wars deployed and a hole punched in the ABM treaty while Ronald Reagan is still in office and before the full scope of his SDI vision can be thoroughly sized up...

...Another element, seized upon by opponents and proponents alike, is the notion of ' 'preferential treatment.'' In both cases, the Court agreed that while it is unlawful to discriminate against women in employment because of pregnancy, it is not unlawful to deny them "preferential treatment...

...13 February 1987: 71...

...His policies had created an excess of 20 million new jobs in the last five years, 3 million of them full-time...

...According to Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing the majority opinion in the California case, it can...

...This was indeed the promise of America: there would never be a lame-duck president again...

...will be reintroduced to Congress this year, after having been stalled in the Senate during the last congressional term...

...The cost for these babies in the strategic defense family would be $100 billion or up...

...The policy of Constructive Engagement had borne patient fruit: members of South Africa's three-chamber parliament would now be allowed to use the same beaches, although not yet on the same day...

...According to some critics, that's just the point...

...What appears to be the strongest objection by opponents of the bill, however, cannot yet be measured: that an American labor market with family leave benefits would send businesses racing ever faster toward employing third-world workers who enjoy no such protections...

...BACK TO THE FUTURE STAR WARS FOR STARTERS Caspar Weinberger has a new proposal...

...The Act would provide unpaid family leave of up to four months for the birth, adoption, or serious illness of a child or a parent (male or female), and would allow seriously ill workers up to six months of unpaid medical leave...

...Gorbachev had balked during the final communique...

...He noted that once again he had left the hospital prior to the average days allotted to his specific DRG, and that if Congress would forgive him the personal anecdote, he had proven catastrophic illness legislation was a concept that had properly died with the long defunct 100th Congress...

...What was needed was a new nationwide busing program to join the cities and the townships...

...labor force, and their numbers are increasing...

...This would be a first step worth taking...

...By the turn of the century, the number of femaleheaded families will have increased at more than five times the rate of husband-wife families...

...Too much U.S...

...Gorbachev had refused to join the president in his new Strategic Offensive Initiative...

...They also earn higher wages in comparison with male co-workers than U.S...

...Progress toward a genuine family wage was made largely in the decades after World War II...

...At 7.5 cents a return, this historic 50 percent increase would offer unprecedented incentives to all America's working collectors, those "true heroes of our land who make up the most uncommon doers in history...

...but they prod us to think about not only the question at hand — extending maternity leave and protecting post-childbirth job security for the nation's working mothers — but also about the looming problem of reconciling work and family life under changed circumstances...

...and be stabilizing in their effects on the nuclear stand-off...

...These costs may, in fact, be too much for smalland medium-size businesses, however, and any feasible parental leave legislation may need to exempt companies with fewer than 100 or 200 employees...

...Ever since the gentrification of the inner cities in the 1980s, the majority of minority service workers had been displaced to the townships...

...The president then itemized other recent foreign policy achievements: 0 President Pinochet had promised to hold elections in 2009...

...Before turning to broader domestic matters, however, the president said he wanted to communicate briefly on foreign policy...

...What is more, women of childbearing age comprise the fastest growing segment of the total work force...

...13 February 1987: 67 # Seventy percent of women who work hold jobs out of necessity: they are single, divorced, widowed, or have husbands earning less than $14,000 a year...

...Any proposal for parental leave, whether paid or unpaid, 68: Commonweal will not touch the most needy among us...

...On the domestic side, the president noted that since welfare reform more Americans were working than ever before...

...But can preferential treatment ever be a requirement of genuine equality...

...And unpaid leave could ease the burden of middle-class workers, allowing time for parental bonding between mothers, fathers, and newborn or newly adopted children, as well as extending leave-taking to employees with illnesses requiring more than the annual allotment of sickdays...

...It assumes employment — full-time employment — before an employee is eligible for fringe benefits...

...Marshall explained that by establishing "a benefit floor beneath which pregnancy disability benefits may not drop," California's law "promotes equal employment opportunity" because it "allows women, as well as men, to have families without losing their jobs...

...Why insist that maternity leave is a family problem, not merely a women's issue...

...This time the offensive word was literally Offensive...

...But a national provision for paid leave with job reinstatement could help the working poor...

...women do with theirs, as well as a host of other family-centered benefits...

...To have a family without losing one's job is precisely what is at stake in this debate which includes, but is not limited to, a measure of equality for women at work...

...In Missouri, a woman who loses her job upon returning from maternity leave is not merely unemployed...

...That's why even the skeptical (include this journal) favor continuing research...

...Still, parental leave is hardly an innovation...

...hostages abroad would soon be able to vote by 13 February 1987: 69 means of absentee ballots...

...If these trends continue, by 1995, 80 percent of U.S...

...However, the Court upheld a basic states' rights position, which is only one element in the debate...

...Obviously, at this point, no one can know with complete certainty whether a defensive shield against nuclear weapons might be technically feasible and strategically stabilizing...

...In 1985,48 percent of working women had children under one year old...

...He thanked his listeners around the world to whom the United States was indebted, and his listeners at home for their concern over his most recent surgery...

...And the privatization of foreign policy had now been completed under Secretary of State H. Ross Perot...

...Standing before Congress without a prepared text, the president acknowledged the usual standing ovations...

...But then came changes in the American family (the rate of divorce, illegitimate births, and the number of female-headed households, to name only a few), accompanied by a slowdown in the wage system...