July 25, 2012

PAID SICK DAYS: food handlers shouldn't have to work while contagious

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169036/women-paid-sick-days#

Women for Paid Sick Days
Katrina vanden Heuvel on July 24, 2012 - 12:42 PM ET

Some policy questions are difficult. Here are a few easy ones: Should people who handle food for a living have to work while contagious? Should sick kids be stuck at school because their parents are stuck at work? Should coming down with something cost you your job?

Most Americans say: No, no and no. Politicians are catching up with them, but not fast enough.

As I noted last winter, 2011 was the biggest year yet for paid sick leave, a common sense reform requiring employers to provide a minimum number of sick days, so low-wage workers can stay home sick without losing their pay or their jobs. After years of savvy, tenacious organizing, last year Seattle joined San Francisco and DC to become the nation’s third paid sick leave city, and Connecticut’s became the nation’s first statewide law (Milwaukee passed a bill in 2009 but Scott Walker has overridden it).

Paid sick leave is the kind of pro-family policy that we should be able to take for granted in a civilized democracy. By averting senseless firings, it reduces unemployment. By letting sick people stay home, it advances public health. In San Francisco, which in 2006 became the first city to mandate paid leave, even critics have changed their tune. In 2010, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which had decried the bill as a job killer, told Bloomberg Businessweek that it had turned out to be “the best public policy for the least cost. Do you want your server coughing over your food?”







more on the Paid Sick Days campaign (including tools and resources) here: http://paidsickdays.nationalpartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=psd_index

July 19, 2012

The last time "you people" was deployed in a presidential campaign: contempt and class and race

Nothing illustrates condescension quite like addressing folks as "you people." I believe when this phrase is used by those in power, they betray their own sociopathy. It's not difficult to measure your speech. Normal people who will never breathe the rarified air of a Romney fundraiser are able to do so everyday. Like when we tell our boss that "sure, it's no problem" working late for the umpteenth time this week. Or when there's a heated political discussion in the break room about what a stroke of genius the Laffer Curve was.

We hold our tongue b/c we know that we don't have the power not to.

These elite assholes flaunt their power when they speak down to us as "you people." What they're really saying is that we're too meaningless to matter, and they sure don't have to modify their speech to address with respect. To them, we are merely to be manipulated until they don't even have to refer to us at all...that is, when they have ALL THE POWER (and we are completely objectified for their profit and amusement).

Let's not forget that Ann Romney dropping the "you people" bomb was by way of telling us how little we deserve to know about their business dealings. She wants "us people" to know that their money entitles them to walk all over us. She wants "us people" to know that their money EMPOWERS them to treat us like their servants. And she want "us people" to vote for them.

Well, that's rich.

When Ross Perot addressed the NAACP as "you people," he was revealing exactly what he thought of blacks in America. His language belied a particular form of Southern racism, that "you (black) people" know your place.

Ann Romney's use of this language has a similar goal. She wants "you (non-elite) people" to know your place. She wants "you (non-richy rich) people" to know that her people will crush us people under their pointy Pravda heels the first chance they get. She holds "us people" in contempt...we're out line...and if we don't watch it, someone will be sorry. As CEO of this country Mittens will see to that.

I'm outraged by this comment of hers, but I'm terrified that "those people" hold most of the power in this country. They might not have the White House at the moment, but they run nearly all the businesses, and their toadies who're lower on the corporate totem poles across this country have too much power to make our lives miserable in the form of unfair labor practices, wage suppression, and cronyism.

It's not enough for me to win this election -- we have to run THESE PEOPLE out of our lives for good.






http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/12/us/the-1992-campaign-racial-politics-perot-speech-gets-cool-reception-at-naacp.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm