Dear friends,
Our work for justice is guided by the idea that we are inextricably bound to one another. As Fannie Lou Hamer said,
It’s Thursday, our day to review and catch up with actions, so take some of your second chances! If you’re having an exceptionally busy week, pause long enough to fund the people on the ground who are leading the fight.
Contribute to the NY Working Families Party, which is “leading the fight for social, racial, and economic justice in New York state.”
Voting rights legislation is urgent because the judicial system is not going to save us.
The Justice Department’s complaint in United States v. Texas is a fine, workmanlike legal document that makes a strong case that Texas drew its maps in order to maximize white power within the state and minimize the impact of Black and Latino voters. It’s the sort of lawsuit that would have a good shot at prevailing — if the Supreme Court hadn’t spent the past decade dismantling nearly all of the Voting Rights Act.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the formula for DOJ’s oversight power was outdated. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will provide a necessary update.
Tell your Senators to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This ready-made action comes from The Six PAC.
Add your voice: tell Senator Schumer that we need voting rights before Christmas! I’ve provided a sample message.
Sign the petition to Senators Manchin and Sinema: reject the filibuster to save democracy.
We can’t sit back and watch voting rights disappear.
Sign up to phone bank with Common Cause to get the Freedom to Vote Act passed.
In the US, it’s there in communities living with fracking rigs in their backyards and breathing dangerous air pollution every day. It’s there in neighborhoods split by oil and gas pipelines or entire towns whose water is contaminated with lead. It’s clear: things can and must change in these places where community health is sacrificed in the name of profit.
Call on the US Army Corps of Engineers to protect frontline communities on the Gulf Coast.
The problem of lead poisoning is tremendously widespread in the US.
“Most American children are exposed to lead, a substance that is not safe at any level,” said co-author Dr Harvey Kaufman, a senior medical director at Quest Diagnostics, which led the study. According to the CDC, “[e]ven low levels of lead in blood have been shown to negatively affect a child’s intelligence, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement.”
Unsurprisingly, children who live in poor Black and brown communities are at the highest risk for lead poisoning.
Programs to detect and treat lead poisoning are still largely ineffective. Rhode Island has one of the strongest programs, requiring two lead screenings for every child before their third birthday. Testing enables states to assess how serious their lead problem is, which is the first step to addressing it.
Citizen Action notes that “New York State holds the unforgivable title of being the state with the highest number of lead-poisoned children in the country.”
Call on the Governor and state legislators to take action to prevent lead poisoning. This is a ready-made action from Citizen Action.
A while back, I went down a little rabbit hole with crypto-mining, which is turning into a growth industry in New York State. State Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, whom I recently met at a Working Families Party meeting, introduced a bill that would pause the energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining.
The bill failed in the Assembly, but upstate activists have not given up on the idea.
“We need the governor to step in. If she wants to be a champion on climate, she needs to adopt a moratorium on this type of energy-intensive cryptocurrency, or we’ll never achieve our climate goals.”
Ask Governor Hochul to issue an executive moratorium on fossil-fuel-powered cryptomining. I made it really easy!
Uptown, graduate assistants at Columbia University began picketing to build support for their demands for a living wage. A small number of faculty have joined their untenured colleagues. Susan Witte, a professor in the School of Social Work pointed out
As a tenured faculty member, I think that protected employees have a responsibility to speak out on behalf of other employees.
This principle applies to all of us.
A new federal indictment has been unsealed charging twenty-four people in South Georgia for human trafficking. The operation primarily involved farm labor, but included many other types of exploitation. More than one hundred people originally from Mexico and Central American were freed when the investigation finally yielded indictments.
The crimes chronicled in the indictment were alleged to have occurred in the South Georgia counties of Atkinson, Bacon, Coffee, Tattnall, Toombs and Ware, where local farmers paid the defendants to provide contract laborers.
The crime ring that orchestrated the human trafficking operation reaped over $200 million from the illegal scheme. Conspirators are facing charges including mail fraud and mail fraud conspiracy, forced labor and forced labor conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and witness tampering.
Solimar Mercado-Spencer, an attorney at the Farmworker Rights Division of the Georgia Legal Services Program, noted that this is not the only operation of this kind and that exploitation on this scale is part of a long pattern of abuses.
Because it’s happening in rural areas, nobody sees the victims, Mercado-Spencer said.
“All you see is, you know, your onions at Kroger. You can go buy them. You don’t know where they came from. But this is happening and nobody notices it. And these are essential workers that have been keeping us fed through the pandemic.”
Learn more about slavery in our supply chain.
The investigation is a product of shifting priorities for immigration enforcement under the Department of Homeland Security.
Instead of targeting unauthorized workers through mass raids on workplaces – as was the norm in past administrations – authorities are now taking aim at “exploitative employers” and business that violate labor laws.
The solution, however is to change immigration laws so that workers will not be bound to employers, as they are under the H-2A guest worker program.
Even without the plainly illegal abuses by those indicted in South Georgia — wage theft, confiscation of passports, and violent abuse — workers in the H-2A program are excluded from federal worker protections like overtime pay. Trump ordered a wage freeze for agricultural workers the same month he was voted out of office; a federal court in California eventually blocked the freeze.
I am not aware of organized efforts to change the H-2A program, but there are immigration reforms, including a path to citizenship for some, in the Build Back Better legislation before Congress. Make the Road NY sent two buses of activists to DC this week to call attention to the urgent need for immigration reform.
Sign the petition demanding the passage of a pathway to citizenship in Build Back Better. This is a ready-made action from the New York Immigration Coalition.
As always, I invite you to suggest an action or a resource so that we can better address injustices. If you have ideas for actions against human trafficking and labor exploitation, please get in touch.
with love,
L