In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Labor

Hello Again, Feministe

She’s baaaaaaaack…

Jill asked me to help fill in for her while she’s traveling, and though I’m in no way a good replacement for Jill I agreed, even though I’m in sort of a strange head space around Feminist Blogging.

I haven’t been a regular blogger in a while–I was just in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive and someone asked me if I was a “blogger” with that odd note in his voice, the one I that I can never tell if it’s condescension or camaraderie. And I said, really, not so much anymore.

I mean, I maintain a Tumblr but I maintain a line in the sand rule about that blog–it is for me. I don’t owe anyone a post or a response or anything at all. I can ignore it for four days or post nothing but pictures of Robyn or Lauryn Hill. I’ll write long rambling posts that include references to period sex or one-liner abortion jokes.

I still consider myself a feminist, obviously–though lately I’m thinking more about bell hooks’ formulation “I advocate feminism” as a more active line to hold myself to. I’ve been doing maybe more straight-up feminist activism and plotting more work around the issues of abortion and women’s sexuality than ever before lately, and yet I’ve put some distance between myself and the feminist blogosphere.

Maybe because it so often seems to be having arguments we’ve had before. Or because I work too much and I’m busy writing things for people who pay me (I’m a journalist with a full-time job and entirely too much freelance work).

That sounds mean; I don’t mean it to be.

So I’m back here again, and though the server ate half my first post (Chally swears it hates her, not me, but I don’t believe it. Technology’s been out to get me this week.) I’ll be giving blogging a shot again, to see if I can remember what I liked about it so much for a while. To do some thinking out loud, in public, and see if we can’t get somewhere.

I’m not sure quite what I’ll write about yet–maybe about Frances Fox Piven and why Glenn Beck is scared of her; maybe about Wisconsin and Indiana and Ohio and why a resurgent union movement matters; maybe more about Robyn (there can never be enough Robyn).

I hope you have fun, whatever happens. Thanks for having me.

On, Wisconsin

This is a guest post by Meredith Clark. Meredith writes about politics, lives in Brooklyn, and thinks everyone should visit Madison in the summertime. She has a blog and is covering events in Wisconsin on Twitter at @MeredithLClark.

70,000 protesters gathered in downtown Madison, WI on Saturday for the biggest demonstration yet against Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to crush the state’s public employee unions. Madison is a city of only 300,000 people, and it’s the middle of a brutal Midwest winter, yet every day brings the kinds of crowds rarely seen outside of football games. As a Wisconsinite, it has been inspiring to watch things unfold over the last six days, but the fight is not finished. We have to keep watching. This is only the beginning.

Why is this happening in Wisconsin and not someplace flashier, more glamorous, less pasty? Mother Jones has an excellent primer, but there is much, much more to the story. Wisconsin has long been at the forefront of labor issues. It was the first state to allow collective bargaining for public employees, in 1959 (the very right that Gov. Walker wants to destroy), it’s the birthplace of AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and it’s the home of the only collectively-owned professional football team in the U.S. Workers in Wisconsin led movements for the 40 hour work week, 8 hour days, and unemployment insurance. We teach labor history in our schools, we love it so much.

We also make really good cheese.

Sadly, organized labor is in the fight of its life thanks to one of Wisconsin’s other long-standing traditions: we love pioneers and risk-takers. Sometimes this works out wonderfully. We proudly claim Russ Feingold(the only Senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act), Tammy Baldwin(the first openly gay person elected to Congress), Gwen Moore(the state’s first African-American Representative), Gaylord Nelson(father of Earth Day), and Robert LaFollette (father of modern US progressivism in general). As a proud member of the far, far left, I don’t think they’re extremists, but I can’t pretend they’re mainstream. Less proudly, we gave the world Joe McCarthy(we’re really, really sorry about that), and now Scott Walker. The state is fairly evenly divided politically, but Walker got elected in 2010 thanks to millions of dollars of corporate money and a terrifying platform: Don’t just hate the government, destroy it.

It was easy to see this coming. While he was Milwaukee County Executive, people died. Yes, people actually died. He was so bad at his job that the Milwaukee newspaper reportedly endorsed him for Governor just so he would stop screwing things up. Of course, since he also proposed eliminating the County’s government altogether, Walker’s stunning incompetence starts to look a little like Tea Party supervillainy.

Only seven weeks into his term, Scott Walker is poised to strip public sector employees of their right to collectively bargain for fair pay, better benefits, and safe working conditions (All employees except the ones whose unions endorsed him in the election, that is). As Dana Goldstein pointed out, this is going to hurt a lot of women, and this is a dangerous precedent to set at a time of such economic upheaval. Over the past thirty years, income inequality has increased precipitously as union membership has plummeted. Without unions, there is no middle class. The people of Wisconsin know this, and protests are set to continue into next week because they refuse to let the legacy of their ancestors die. This will happen all over the country; it’s already happening in Ohio. This is part of a Republican war on workers.

I’m a fourth generation Wisconsinite, and alum of UW-Madison, and the daughter of two public employees, so this is personal. The outcome of this standoff will affect people that I love. Friends and family have been sending me pictures from the protests all week, and the stories I’ve heard are so thrilling it’s hard to believe they’re true, but they are. More than a dozen school districts closed – including the state’s two biggest – while teachers flooded downtown surrounded by the children they teach. University students camping inside the Capitol for days. Police officers handing out brats (a delicious sausage, if you’re not familiar) to protesters. Union members setting up grills to feed their fellow protesters. High school students Firefighters marching in solidarity (their union, along with the police and state troopers, are the ones exempted from the bill) while playing the bagpipes.

The popular uprising has been amazing to see, but without the actions of 14 State Senators on Thursday, all of it would be over. Thursday was when the 14 Democratic State Senators fled the state to prevent a vote on the bill. As of today, they have no plans to return until Gov. Walker removes the collective bargaining ban from his budget bill. This was a heroic last-ditch attempt to stop legislation that was introduced just over a week ago, and all 14 of them must remain outside of Wisconsin or all of this falls apart. There are 19 Republicans in the State Senate, and 20 Senators are needed in order to hold a vote. If even one of the 14 sets foot in Wisconsin, state troopers can compel that Senator to return to Madison for the vote.

State troopers, state workers who will not suffer under this plan, state workers whose union endorsed Scott Walker, will force a democratically-elected State Senator to be present for a vote to undermine workers’ rights.

If that sounds like the antithesis of democracy, you’re right, but Wisconsin’s Republicans disagree. At this point, when Republican lawmakers accuse the Senate Minority Leader of shutting down democracy, they’re not talking about democracy. They’re using the same trick that Fox News pundits use when they face consequences for hateful rhetoric. “Democracy” means showing up and watching as the rights of their constituents are taken away, just as “Free Speech” means that someone can say whatever they want without facing criticism.

The people in the streets in Wisconsin know that real democracy sometimes means shutting down schools, missing work, standing in the freezing cold, and even packing up and getting the hell out of town, and doing it day after day after day. Scott Walker isn’t going to stop trying to gut public benefits while enriching business interests. He’s not going to stop trying to destroy the unions. The unions have already said they will pay more for their benefits if Walker drops the collective bargaining ban. He’s already said he will not compromise. The people in the streets, the people who have the most to lose in this struggle, know they can’t afford to compromise either.

Jayaben Desai, 1933-2010

Jayaben Desai has died at 77 years of age. From The Hindu:

The diminutive India-born Ms. Desai, who moved to Britain from Tanzania in 1969, came to be known as a “lioness” for her role in leading the two-year long strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, north London, in the 1970s to demand union recognition for its largely Asian and female workforce.

She famously told a manager: “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.’’

Jack Dromey has written an obituary at The Guardian.

The Motherhood Discounting

This is the second in a series examining a post written by Chamber of Commerce Senior Communications Director Brad Peck, and the subsequent apologies for it by himself and Chamber COO David Chavern.

Peck decided to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the recognition of women’s right to vote by writing that the well-documented gender pay gap is mostly due to “individual choice,” then suggesting that women who want equal pay have a “fetish for money,” and recommending that women focus their energies on “choosing the right partner at home.” The apologies were cold comfort, considering the Chamber’s lobbying history. Part 1, here.

Numerous workplace studies, including those conducted by government agencies, have demonstrated that given equal levels of education and experience, women get paid less than men.

Mothers have it worse. Not only are they paid less than men, mothers are usually paid less than women without children, while fathers are usually paid more than childless men. (If you were wondering, no, the premium paid to fathers wouldn’t make up for the lower wages of mothers even in families with both a mother and father in paid employment.) Since about 80 percent of women become mothers this represents a quite large and consistent shift of wealth away from working women compared to their male peers.

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Pre-Post Poll: Thoughts On Marxist Feminism?

At the community center where I live and work (yeah, long story), I have a lot of freedom to dream up ways of using the space. Starting new programs, things like that. And so, early this year, when a friend of mine asked if she could host a Marxist Feminist study group here, I was psyched about the idea.

We’d been meeting for a couple months before my co-workers (all of whom are liberal; a couple of whom are nuns) finally, collectively, were like,

“So Katie. What is…….Marxist Feminism?”

Good question!

What do you think, fabulous readers? What are your understandings, associations, and experiences of it? I’m curious to hear from you before getting into my own present thoughts.

Thanks for sharing, and please do keep in mind our dhamma comment guidelines!

Book Review: Working For Justice

Working for Justice: The L.a. Model of Organizing and Advocacy edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro
(Cornell University Press)

I first found out about this book when I got an email from one of my activist friends, which she had sent out to all her activist friends, about the release party. I couldn’t make it that night, but the book seemed like the perfect thing to review for a political feminist website, so I ordered a copy as soon as I could. (You may think that, as a book reviewer, I get free copies of books. Very often this is true – in fact, some publishers like to send me two, even three copies of a new title, just to show they’re serious – but most of the university presses are too high and mighty for the likes of us.) Working For Justice argues that Los Angeles has its own distinct style of union and worker center organizing – that the transformation of the labor market through globalization and deregulation has led organizers to find creative new strategies for achieving fair working conditions. As a union member and labor activist (who worked on one of the very campaigns discussed in the book), I opened it hoping for – nay, expecting – a cornucopia of ideas and tactics that I could take to the organizers of my own campaigns.

I should probably mention that I fall prey to wishful thinking pretty easily.

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New York Expected to Extend Protections to Domestic Workers

This is great news. The bill that New York is considering also protects workers who are undocumented, and requires a series of basic workplace protections:

The State Senate this week passed a bill that would require paid holidays, sick days and vacation days for domestic workers, along with overtime wages. It would require 14 days’ notice, or termination pay, before firing a domestic worker.

The Assembly passed a similar measure last year, and lawmakers expect that the two versions will be reconciled and that Gov. David A. Paterson will sign what they say would be the nation’s first such protections for domestic workers. It would affect an estimated 200,000 workers in the metropolitan area: citizens, legal immigrants and those here illegally as well.

This is long overdue, and it’s a shame that New York is the first state to pass legislation like this (assuming it’s signed, which it looks like it will be). There is some question as to whether it will actually help undocumented workers, who may be hesitant to report violations, but it is a step in the right direction. And other types of workers in New York — deliverymen, grocery store employees — have successfully challenged workplace violations, even where some of the individuals were not here legally.

The bill will also give workers more negotiating power, and will help people who hire domestic workers to parse out what is fair and what isn’t.

But for nannies and parents alike, the legislation, if enacted, could well create a kind of baseline for negotiations over pay, hours and benefits. Now, the dealings typically leave both sides unsure of what is fair, and in the end, employers sometimes feeling guilty and employees feeling shortchanged.

“We are really looking toward healing the divide between employee and employee,” said Sara Fields, program director at the advocacy group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.

New York Domestic Workers Fight to Pass Bill of Rights

Via Equal Writes, the BBC has recently reported on the struggle of domestic workers in New York state to pass a bill of rights for those in their line of work. In this context, the term domestic workers refers to nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers, of which there are over 200,000 in NY alone. Domestic workers are overwhelmingly women — they are also very disproportionately low-income, women of color, and immigrants. And under U.S. law, they have very few legal rights and are subjected to all kinds of heinous abuse by unscrupulous employers.

For 17 years, Barbara Young from Barbados has worked as a nanny in New York, arriving at 0700 to care for the children of high-flying parents, often working through the night to care for newborn babies.

Because domestic workers are specifically excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of the 1930s, nannies operate in the shadows, their pay and conditions determined by their employers.

Ms Young has had to endure a lot over the years.

She told me how one employer paid her the bare minimum for her daily nannying work, and then expected her to sleep in a room with an infant, and feed that baby overnight, all for no extra pay.

“Because you work in the home, people don’t see you as an employee. It’s seen as women’s work, not proper work,” says Ms Young.

…

Ms Young believes the bill would make a huge difference to her.

“It would require notice of termination, paid sick leave, paid holidays, the right to a day off, and it would recognise domestic work as real work.”

The bill would also give nannies the right to organise collectively.

Because domestic workers are frequently economically vulnerable, vulnerable to deportation, and/or likely to face racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and other prejudices, it’s usually not so easy as “just quit.” Abusive employers, of course, know this and use it to their advantage. And legal action is rarely an option.

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Happy César Chávez Day

For those who don’t know, today is César Chávez Day. Chávez was a migrant worker from a young age and co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with the ever-awesome Dolores Huerta. (The NFWA would later merge with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form the United Farm Workers of America.) In addition to being a champion of labor rights, he was also an advocate for civil rights and immigration rights, and he was a proponent of non-violence.

César Chávez Day is celebrated primarily in California, but I still think it’s damn awesome that he even has a day in his honor. It’s not so often that Latinos are honored with their own holidays. Of course, I’m slightly bitter that Dolores Huerta doesn’t have her own day, but whatevs, I love her beyond belief so perhaps I’m a bit biased there.

At any rate, Chávez was hugely important to the labor movement. There’s a nice bio on him on UFW’s website that’s worth checking out. And because I’m a lover of quotations, here are my favorites:

Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?

You are never strong enough that you don’t need help.

How will you celebrate César Chávez today?