Before Frances Perkins 1 accepted President Roosevelt’s offer to become Secretary of Labor she presented her to-do list: the eight-hour day, the minimum wage and overtime pay, unemployment insurance, Social Security, health insurance, and many more ideas that, at the time, were considered radical and impossible to achieve.

The expectations for the Obama Department of Labor in 2009 were no less ambitious. We faced the worst economic collapse since the one that propelled FDR and Frances Perkins into office. Republicans in Congress were committed to fighting President Obama at every turn. Did we win everything we wanted for workers’ rights and labor law reform? Hardly. But, I believe the Obama administration made a historic difference in the lives of workers, families, and communities and pushed as far as political constraints allowed. We established minimum wages and overtime for millions of home care workers, won prevailing wages on government projects, rebuilt strategic enforcement of wage and hour and health and safety laws, challenged the financial industry with new retirement security initiatives, enacted higher labor standards and collective bargaining rights, advanced paid leave, protected immigrant workers, expanded employment opportunities for workers with disabilities, enacted groundbreaking LGBT and especially trans rights at work, saved union jobs in the the domestic auto industry, and much more. At a time with less political opening and opportunity, we won real victories, learned lessons and laid the foundation for even more transformative changes in the Biden-Harris administration.

Whether you were part of those years or engaged in Executive Actions with a new administration, this Toolkit is for you. It is designed to demystify and democratize lessons we learned in those years, and to aid those who want to work at the intersection of “inside” and “outside.” Misconceptions abound about what really impacts decision making and outcomes in the Executive Branch. Every political appointee probably has their list of the “asks” that well-meaning folks made that were simply impossible to do. Every advocate has their experience of scratching their head, wondering: “What are they thinking? Why is this taking so long?” While there is a growing consensus that more collaboration between civil society and government is necessary to rebuild a healthy democracy, aligning movements and governing, it is much harder to do than to say.

To gain a better understanding of the current state of U.S. labor law, American Rights at Work examined the experience of one, fairly typical local union that successfully assists workers who wish to organize. We chose Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199 Florida because it is a midsize union concentrated in one industry (nursing homes); it runs many campaigns using the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections process; and, it attempts to negotiate many first contracts. Nursing home workers’ low wages, limited benefits, safety problems, and lack of respect are representative of issues facing workers throughout the burgeoning service sector. Thus, the case of SEIU 1199 Florida serves as a microcosm of worker organizing under the NLRB today.

While America’s working families deserve flexible supports that meet their Modern Family needs, we offer them a Leave it to Beaver family policy stuck in the last century. Despite rapid and persistent social change – such as dual-income Gen X couples “sandwiched” between caring for children and parents and the emerging millennial workforce rejecting traditional male breadwinner models – we stand still while family policy in the rest of the world passes us by. Nowhere is this dynamic more striking than on the issue of paid leave.