“My students don’t get toilet paper; billionaires get handouts,” New York City teacher and state Senate candidate Katherine Brezler writes:
Last year my class and I received the rare opportunity to attend the Lincoln Center ballet. I couldn’t wait to see the joy on my students’ faces as they took in the opulence. During intermission I took two student to the restroom. I stood outside waiting for them to come out. I couldn’t wait to hear about what they noticed; was it the marble counter tops, or the brass knuckling on the chairs?
The door flew open and the glowing faces of my students greeted me, “Ms. Brezler did you know their bathrooms have TWO toilet paper rolls!”
By the way, Lincoln Center features a theater named after one of the key people who stands to benefit from the Republican tax plan—the David H. Koch Theater. That’s a theater Koch no doubt got a major tax deduction for when he donated the money. Teachers, on the other hand, could lose the small tax deduction they currently get for buying classroom supplies with their own money, and that’s not even the biggest piece of damage the Republican tax plan could do to public schools or students.
● Next you are going to tell me Donald Trump doesn't really care about outsourcing.
● Editorial workers at Vox Media are moving to unionize.
● The tiny Dominican factory that disproves the need for sweatshops:
… there are real doubts that consumers’ desire for clothing made in less-abusive conditions could ever override their desire for low prices. Another issue is just how sprawling the global supply chain is—brands can have trouble accounting for every single factory and worker that has a hand in creating a garment. These are some of the things that brands have said can inhibit their ability to increase wages and weed out supply-chain abuses; they have also suggested that it’s up to local governments to establish a minimum wage that covers workers’ living expenses.
One factory in the Dominican Republic stands as a counter-argument to all of this. It’s called Alta Gracia, and it makes clothing, including T-shirts and sweatshirts, for university bookstores and sports teams around the U.S. Alta Gracia pays its workers a living wage in an industry that is notorious for skimping on worker salaries, and was opened about seven years ago by two executives at Knights Apparel, Donnie Hodge and Joe Bozich, with help from labor advocates at the nonprofit Worker Rights Consortium.
● Faking the grade:
The latest School Performance Scores for the state of Louisiana are in. And that makes now a pretty good time to finally come to terms with the fallacy of the miracle in New Orleans. [...]
It’s been 12 years since our schools were hijacked. And 12 years later, many of them are performing just as poorly as they were before they were stolen. To learn that charter operators set up goals they knew were unattainable just to get their charters approved and their hands on public money and facilities is indefensible Unless and until these pilfering reformers are ready to admit what they did and that it was wrong and then actually return public schools to real local control without charter organizations and unelected boards that come with them under the current model of return anything else they have to say sounds pretty much like sounding brass and tinkling cymbals—a whole bunch of noise.
● Want to stop sexual abuse in the workplace? Unionize.
Harassment occurs at all levels of the economy precisely because it's bound up with economic hierarchy. Women (and sometimes men) are targeted because they're dependent on someone else — be it a boss or customer — for an income, a job, a promotion, a career path, etc. Women in low-wage work also often face retaliation for trying to fight back: not merely the loss of a career, but the loss of a viable income of any form.
We need to confront the workplace hierarchy directly. That means unions and labor organizing. It means demands for more democratic workplaces, and established institutions and practices for dealing with sexual harassment. Many companies already have human resource departments, and labor movements can and should force the creation of more. But even these can wind up focusing more on the business' bottom line than the interests of owners. All of these demands must be backed by workers' ability to threaten protests, work stoppages, and strikes.
● What do you know. This week was one year since Donald Trump promised to save Carrier jobs.
● What a great argument for air traffic control privatization: