Join me below the fold for hunger strikers, pregnancy discrimination, and more.
A fair day's wage
- Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has once again been an asshole and a corporate running dog, vetoing a paid sick leave measure that is just one vote short of being able to override his veto. If you live in Philadelphia, here are some phone numbers for you to call.
- When a new management company took over the Hilton Mission Valley hotel, UNITE HERE was able to get the company to keep all of the hotel's union workers. Only the next move from Evolution Hospitality was to insist that all the workers go through E-Verify—and nine are now in danger of being fired from the jobs they've held for more than a year. The union is planning a five-day hunger strike and other events in solidarity with the workers.
- Women of steel:
- Republicans are all about keeping women pregnant. Making sure they can keep their jobs while pregnant, not so much. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act isn't exactly speeding through Congress, even though discrimination against pregnant women is common:
Amy Crosby, 30, was 23 weeks pregnant when her doctor told her she needed to quit all heavy lifting until she delivered. The pregnancy was exacerbating her carpal tunnel syndrome. "I couldn't sleep at night because my arm and my hand were numb," she told BuzzFeed. But, she said, her employers at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where she worked as a cleaner, told her she couldn't work with a lifting restriction. She'd have to go on unpaid leave, and said she's now slated to be fired — the month before her baby is born.
Crosby isn't alone. Under current law, employers who refuse to make accommodations for pregnant women that they would make for workers with disabilities are guilty of discrimination. But according to Emily Martin of the National Women's Law Center, which is filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Crosby's behalf, employers still commonly fire pregnant women rather than providing such accommodations.
- Major retailers have a major database of workers believed to have stolen merchandise, which is used to avoid hiring those workers across not just stores but chains. Problem is, the accuracy of the database is problematic, workers may have been put in it based on coerced and false confessions, and there's little way to get out of it if you shouldn't be in it.
- You don't actually have to look to anything complicated or political to find out why the number of Americans on disability has grown.
- Guest workers as bellwether.
Education
- Really, Jonathan Chait?
- Covering the Atlanta schools cheating scandal, Charles Pierce suggests a basic principle:
We really should all agree now that the American corporate class essentially is made up these days, high and low, entirely of grifting pieces of dickweed who don't have the moral sense possessed by spirochete, and that anything they touch will inevitably become in some way a thieves paradise, and that any education "reform" proposed, developed, and/or modeled for the nation by the members of its corporate class invariably will take on the ethical norms, not of the old American classroom, but of the new American boardroom.
- South Carolina is considering a bill that would hold back nearly 3,000 third graders because their reading scores don't measure up. Third graders!