bills that passed into law, including the Food Dating Bill, the Sex Education Bill, and the Pregnancy Insurance Bill. She also introduced the Unrenumerated Work Act in 1991, 1993, and 1994. This bill would have required the Bureau of Labor Statistics to set value on unwaged work such as housework, care work, agricultural work, volunteer work, and work in a family business, and include that value in the Gross National Product of the United States. This measure had been called for in the Forward Looking Strategies resolution passed at the World Conference on Women, 1985. Collins's bill was endorsed by the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues and by 1993 had 90 co-sponsors; however, it failed to pass. Collins was the subject of a United States House Committee on Ethics inquiry in 1995, under suspicion of 11 instances of misuse of funds. In 1996, after she lost the Democratic primary for re-election to Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, the inquiry was dropped. After five years out of politics, Collins returned to the Detroit City Council in 2001. She was re-elected in 2005 and retired in 2009. Juneteenth Barbara-Rose Collins can be credited with proposing a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday back in 1996. According to the ACLU of Michigan, "Michigan's own Congresswoman Barbara Rose Collins introduced a bill in 1996 that petitioned the U.S. government to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In her congressional remarks, she stated, "the dehumanizing and degrading conditions of slavery were unnecessarily prolonged for hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, because our American government failed to communicate the truth" (2017). Because of Barbara-Rose Collins and her efforts back in 1996, Juneteenth is now a federal holiday since 2021. Death Collins died from COVID-19 at a Detroit hospital on November 4, 2021, at age 82, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Michigan. According to her son, she had been vaccinated with the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine. According to one of her grandsons, Collins had health issues that contributed to her COVID-19 death despite her vaccination status. See also List of African-American United States representatives List of federal political scandals in the United States Women in the United States House of Representatives References External links 1939 births 2021 deaths African-American state legislators in Michigan African-American women in politics African-American members of the United States House of Representatives Democratic Party members of the Michigan House of Representatives Wayne State