Federal Advocacy Initiative
The best laboratories for legislative and governmental progress have always been states and localities. The Federal Advocacy Initiative leans heavily on NELP’s experience in helping to forge change at the local and state level and is strategically designed to foster and take advantage of synergies between grass roots and federal policy reform efforts. Building on our active collaborations with scores of state and local partner organizations, the Initiative focuses on bringing local successes to the federal policy debate, while ensuring that the agenda is built with strategies that work. Simultaneously, NELP aims to promote federal initiatives that will empower and encourage even more activity and innovation at the state and local levels.
Such work has never been more important. The ongoing loss of good jobs, shrinking wages, declining benefits, ominous signs of an impending recession—the second in only seven years— and years of federal inaction on jobs policy, has led to an uneasy awareness of something profoundly wrong with the economy and the rules governing the labor market.
NELP's contribution of legal and policy design expertise to federal policy makers, as well as empirical research that makes the case for reform, has already proven successful. NELP’s core issues have a much higher profile in Washington, as Congress is considering new proposals for policy change on issues like federal extended unemployment benefits, independent contractor misclassification, trade adjustment assistance, modernization of state unemployment programs, and criminal background checks.
NELP owes its success in these areas in large part to the efforts of our partners at the state and local level, whose ingenuity and enthusiasm have helped drive the local reforms on which NELP has been privileged to work. In 2009, NELP will explore more ways to more deeply engage our state and local partners in federal advocacy, continue our progress on the issues identified above, and develop new promising reform endeavors, such as raising and strengthening the federal minimum wage and revitalizing enforcement at the U.S. Department of Labor.
To learn more about NELP’s Federal Advocacy Initiative, please contact Judy Conti at jconti@nelp.org or 202-533-2573. For more information about the specific substantive issues involved in our federal efforts, please visit NELP’s issues pages and check our newsroom for the latest developments.