— for the family of Trayvon Martin
This poem wants to write itself backwards.
Wishes it were born memory instead, skipping
time like a record needle stuck on the line
of your last second. You sit up. Brush not blood,
but dirt from your chest. You sit up. You’re in bed.
Bad dream. Back to sleep. You sit up. Rise and shine.
Good morning. This is the poem of a people united
in the uniform of your last day. Pockets full
of candy, hooded sweatshirt, sweet tea. This poem
wants to stand its ground, silence force
with simple words, pray you alive, anyone’s
son — tall boy, eye-smile, walk on home.
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Tara Skurtu is a Teaching Fellow at Boston University, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow and recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.
For more than 30 years each, Cheryl Smith-Vincent and Cheryl Ortega have shared a passion for teaching public school in Southern California. Smith-Vincent teaches third grade at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park; before retiring, Ortega taught kindergarten at Logan Street Elementary School in Echo Park. Both women have been jolted by experiences with a little-known statewide policy that requires traditional public schools to share their facilities with charter schools. Ortega says she has seen charter-school children warned against greeting non-charter students who attend the same campus. Smith-Vincent reports that she and her students were pushed out of their classroom prior to a round of important student tests – just to accommodate a charter school that needed the space.
“It was extremely disruptive,” Smith-Vincent says of the incident.
The practice of housing a traditional public school and a charter school on the same campus is known as “co-location.” Charters are publicly funded yet independently operated,
» Read more about: Why Charter Schools Are Tearing Public Campuses Apart »
The New York Times recently reported on how small business owners in certain cities are dealing with paid sick days laws. The takeaway? These new requirements have caused very little pain. The article highlights Bill Stone, the owner of Café Atlas in San Francisco’s Mission District, who was initially leery of paid sick days for his employees back in 2007 when San Francisco became the first city in the nation to implement a paid sick leave law. In 2007 Bill felt that the new paid sick law would only make it more expensive to run his business.
But Stone recognizes that his fears about paid sick days were unfounded. Robb Mandelbaum of the Times writes:
Six years later, Mr. Stone admits to having been a little alarmist about paid sick leave. “As a small restaurant business, it’s really hard to make money,
» Read more about: Paid Sick Days: Good Sense and Good Karma »
The so-called Global Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, announced July 10 by Walmart, Gap and the Bipartisan Policy Center, was developed without consultation with workers or their representatives and is yet another “voluntary” scheme with no meaningful enforcement mechanisms. Companies that sign onto the alliance but fail to meet a commitment face no adverse consequences beyond expulsion from the scheme. Instead, workers will continue to pay.
In stark contrast, more than 75 corporations from 15 countries, including the United States, have signed the binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety negotiated with Bangladeshi and international unions. The Accord has rules to make real improvements in the safety of garment workers. Workers, unions and worker rights organizations negotiated this agreement with employers and integrated worker safety efforts by governments and the International Labor Organization (ILO). The AFL-CIO and Change to Win, along with global unions IndustriAll and UNI and numerous organizations representing Bangladeshi workers,
» Read more about: Walmart’s Worthless “Alliance” for Bangladesh Factories »
Is the full-time American job going the way of the dodo? The signs aren’t exactly heartening.
Consider the jobs report released Friday [July 5]. The United States added 195,000 new jobs in June, it said, including 322,000 new part-time jobs — a number that comprises only part-timers who want full-time work but can’t find it. Assuming my grade-school arithmetic skills haven’t completely eroded, that suggests that the number of full-time jobs actually declined.
Critics of Obamacare have a ready explanation: The 30-hour-a-week cutoff of the now-postponed employer mandate — which requires many employers to either provide health-care coverage for employees who work at least that much or to pay a penalty — was compelling employers to reduce workers’ hours. That mandate, the Wall Street Journal editorialized, gave businesses “an incentive to hire more part-time workers.”
If the employer mandate really were the problem,
» Read more about: The Full-Time Worker: A Vanishing American »
Ever since the emergence of talking pictures, schools have been a major subject of both Hollywood movies and documentary films. One consistent theme of Hollywood portrayals of schools – from Blackboard Jungle (1955), Up the Down Staircase (1967) and Stand and Deliver (1988) to Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), October Sky (1999) and Freedom Writers (2007) – has been the idealistic teacher fighting to serve his and her students against overwhelming odds, including uncaring administrators, cynical colleagues, a stultifying required curriculum that crushes the spirit of teachers and students alike, dilapidated conditions, budget cuts, unruly and hostile students, or students suffering from the symptoms of poverty or neglect. The underlying message is that while occasionally a rare teacher can light a spark in a few students, our public schools are failing most of the students they are supposed to serve. Most documentaries about education –
» Read more about: A Harsh Schooling: The War Against Public Education »
Before January 2009, the filibuster was used only for measures and nominations on which the minority party in the Senate had their strongest objections. Since then, Senate Republicans have filibustered almost everything, betting that voters will blame Democrats for the dysfunction in Congress as much as they blame the GOP.
So far the bet is paying off because the press has failed to call out the GOP – which is now preventing votes on the President’s choices for three D.C. Circuit Court nominees, the Labor Department and the EPA, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and the National Labor Relations Board. (The GOP has blocked all labor board nominees, some to whom the President gave recess appointments, but he’s now asking approval for all.)
The GOP has already violated hundreds of years of Senate precedent by filibustering the nomination of a Cabinet secretary, Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense,
» Read more about: Clinton Official: New GOP Hates Government and Governing »
Jenna S.
Alton, Illinois
I am a tipped worker at a restaurant, so according to Illinois law I only have to be paid 60 percent of the minimum wage, or $4.95 an hour. I am a single mother with a five-month-old son. I am worried because with the economy going so badly, people aren’t eating out as much or tipping as much. If things get worse and I can’t rely on my tips, then I am going to need to use things like food stamps. I am not able to save any money because I am living paycheck to paycheck, so if something unexpected happened I wouldn’t know what to do. We need this new law to raise the minimum wage because it would change the law for tipped workers so that they would get 100 percent of the minimum wage. We shouldn’t have to depend on something as unreliable as tips to survive.
» Read more about: Paycheck to Paycheck: Minimum Wage Stories »
Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Thursday the “Governor’s Economic Development Initiative,” which radically overhauls California’s troubled Enterprise Zone program. The signing took place in San Diego at the headquarters of Takeda California, a pharmaceutical company. State legislature backers of the new program, which consists of Assembly Bill 93 and Senate Bill 90, say it will stimulate economic activity and create good jobs for Californians via a three-pronged approach.
The first prong is a sales tax exemption on research and development equipment purchases for biotechnology and manufacturing firms. The second is a series of credits given to businesses that hire in regions with high unemployment and poverty rates. Finally, the initiative allows for California business to gain tax credits based on the quality and quantity of jobs they create.
The governor said he has supported this legislation in order “to help grow our economy and create good manufacturing jobs,” with a focus on building “the strength of intellectual capacity.”
» Read more about: Governor Signs Overhaul of Enterprise Zone Program »