Here we fall short miserably. Fewer than one in 10 of those who care for other people’s children have any paid time off for the birth or adoption of their own. Nearly one in eight new moms in the United States cannot afford to take off more than a week of work after childbirth. One week!

The pain seen in this crisis when adult children can’t be with their parents in their final days is experienced in ordinary times by great numbers of workers who do not have paid leave. While four in five top earners have paid bereavement leave, only one in five of the lowest-wage workers do. How can we say that workers’ rank in a company should determine whether they have time to grieve the loss of a spouse or a child?

There has also never been a more fitting time to legislate the principle that if there is dignity in all work, there must be a dignified wage for all workers.

Conservatives like Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, echo progressive calls for the dignity of work and espouse the “need to be needed.” Yet he and others routinely oppose virtually every policy, like a strong minimum wage and universal health security, that would enable tens of millions of working parents who are quite needed by their children to actually meet those needs. They treat the notion of a living wage as radical even though it was a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who called for a “living wage” that was high enough “to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.”

Conservatives, and some traditional economic analyses, claim that a living wage would lead to job loss, but that has been repeatedly contradicted by empirical evidence — including a recent analysis of 138 state minimum-wage increases. But even this debate misses a larger reality. We have many policies that can be used in tandem to ensure an effective living wage while alleviating any fears of job loss.

The $20-an-hour or more that is most likely needed for working parents to raise their children with true economic dignity can be reached by combining a $15 minimum wage with policies that do not raise employer costs at all — like major expansions of the earned-income tax credit and child-care subsidies. We could further protect employment levels by pairing a major minimum-wage increase with expansions of green jobs, health service jobs and caregiving.