Dear friends,
Mayday came into use as an international distress call in the early 20th century; the word sounds like m'aidez, which means “help me” in French.
Yesterday, I took a rainy walk in DC with my first friend. She walked me by her old apartment building and reminded me of the summer workshop I took in 1992, when I was housed in a gross hotel near Dupont Circle. I called her and she encouraged me to abandon the lousy accommodations and get on the metro to stay with her. It was one of the minor rescues in a lifetime of rescuing me.
Somehow, I hadn’t thought of that summer workshop in a long time. It was an introduction to Ralph Nader’s new civics curriculum, Civics for Democracy. The workshop was a turning point in my professional life, as I became a passionate — and prepared — civics teacher.
At the time, few people wanted to teach NYS’s Participation in Government course, because it was project-based, new, and it encouraged loud-mouth tendencies in adolescents. I loved it.
It is distressing — if not surprising — to learn that in Texas, a 2021 law includes
The restrictions created are so daunting that they effectively suppress the teaching of participatory democracy.
Practically overnight, a growing movement to engage Texas students in real-world civics lessons evaporated. Teachers canceled time-honored assignments, districts reversed expansion plans with a celebrated civics education provider and a bill promoting student civics projects that received bipartisan support in 2019 was suddenly dead in the water.
Generation Citizen, which had contracts with many school districts in Texas, has a shrunken footprint, now, and works with just three districts in the state.
Contact folks you know in Texas, share the article, and encourage them to tell their representatives that the law must be changed.
The police report stated that Barnett had intimidated elected officials. He sat on the floor with two other students chanting “Trans Lives Matter,” outside the school board meeting at which members voted for anti-trans bathroom laws and book bans.
To Barnett’s credit, he refused to offer a guilty plea to a charge of “failure to disperse,” since he had done nothing wrong. Barnett spent one somewhat harrowing night in jail and is appealing the charges (he was also charged with trespassing).
Here’s a not-very-fun fact: I conducted a search and a live chat to find out how to contact the judge in Barnett’s case, and came up empty-handed. It’s almost as if they don’t want people to contact elected officials in Arkansas, either.
I got Barnett’s story from Judd Legum’s Popular Information. I could not help but hear Roy Wood, Jr. decrying the loss of local journalism, which amplified a civil rights protest in which his mother participated as a student.
Watch Roy Wood, Jr.’s full set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Mondays seems to bring feelings of distress, in part because it is the beginning of the work week, and for so many workers, the conditions of their labor are stressful, if not downright distressing.
Emergency Medical Technicians — whose work is enormously stressful and requires considerable skill — earn under $19/hour, and are among the city’s lowest paid workers. Unsurprisingly, there are staffing shortages.
A proposed boost to the minimum wage for city employees to $18, up from the current $15, would mean that many of these front-line emergency workers would end up near the very bottom of the city pay scale unless they get a long-sought-after raise.
Home care workers are working with vulnerable populations around the clock, during which they provide routine care and must be trained to handle emergencies. They too are among the lowest earners, with wages at $17 per hour. And there are shortages among care workers too.
In spite of the wage bump for lifeguards, the city is on track for continued shortages. The Parks Department website indicates that
"There are no lifeguard qualifying test dates available for registration at this time."
Why can’t we find the resources to support essential workers? Here, of all places.
The Fund for the City of New York released a report that shows that half of the households in New York City’s can’t afford rent, adequate food, basic health care and transportation. The cost of living is simply too high for most people to stay afloat.
Call on Congress to end the child care crisis by passing the Child Care for Working Families Act. This quick action is from Moms Rising.
Ezra Klein recently interviewed Matthew Desmond, the author of Poverty By America. Desmond takes an unflinching look at the relationships between antipoverty programs and the persistence of poverty, and between corporate profits and the struggling masses.
He traces much of our poverty problem back to worker exploitation.
[S]o many worker wages today are low and they’re falling. And this is really key. This is an answer to the puzzle of how we could spend more and stay in the same place.
When the Great Society and the war on poverty were launched in the 1960s, wages were climbing. Unions were strong. But as unions lost power, wages started to fall. American jobs got a lot worse, and for non-college-educated men, real wages today are lower now than they were 50 years ago.
So I would like to see us address not just the symptoms but treat the disease, really go after exploitation in the labor market, which means not only subsidies like the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit], . . .but also getting deeper, making sure workers have power, improving collective bargaining strategies, these kinds of things so we can make sure wages increase as spending increases. And that’s the way to really bring folks out of poverty.
Ooh. We have so much work to do.
While there are already existing federal, state and local laws that protect immigrant workers regardless of status, many immigrants aren’t aware of this, according to Council Member Shahana Hanif, who sponsors Intro. 569. The legislation would compile all those protections into a single document to be distributed to employees annually. Employers would also be required to “conspicuously” display the bill of rights in the workplace – or in the case of delivery workers and other app based workers, on the mobile app.
Call on your council members to support Intro 569.
Toward the end of Klein’s excellent interview of Matthew Desmond, he explained what we all lose by living in a society divided into haves and have-nots:
[T]here’s some spiritual violence we do to our lives when we live apart from each other, when we’re segregated from each other, and when we kind of clutch on to money is our only security in America that we have kind of a stingy, frightened affluence.
I wish that the progressive coalition that called for higher taxes on wealthy New Yorkers had prevailed in Albany. Instead, stingy, frightened affluence continues to hold us in its clutches.
Tell Congress that we need fair pay for care workers. This quick action comes from Caring Across Generations.
It is May Day, of course, which is celebrated in much of the world with demonstrations and rallies in support of workers. Bring your loud-mouth tendencies.
Come out to Foley Square after work and give voice to the distress and the hope of workers who are trying to make it in New York.
with love,
L