Dear friends,
A few weeks ago, I participated in a harvest of watermelons and spinach as a gleaner (the folks who pick what’s left over).
If your knowledge of gleaning is limited to the painting by Jean-Francois Millet, then you might be imagining something more arduous than what I did. While the watermelon harvest was kind of like a treasure hunt, the farmers left us a whole lush row of spinach to harvest.
And yet. It was just a few hours, and it wasn’t especially hot, I didn’t (couldn’t!) lift the crates of watermelons — and I was still completely exhausted by the work.
Currently, farm workers must clock more than 60 hours per week before they see overtime pay. I’m sure that seems like economic common sense to someone, but it seems like utter madness to me.
The plan approved by the Farm Laborers Wage Board is to reduce the threshold to 56 hours/week by January 2024, and gradually to reach a 40-hour week by 2032.
In California, farm workers have been working through a punishing heat wave.
Pressure is growing on Governor Gavin Newsom to sign the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act, which would
help prevent intimidation during in-person elections from management, including fears of workers’ deportation if they attempt to unionize.
In August, the United Farm Workers, organized supporters of the bill to march over 300 miles to the state’s capital, to raise awareness.
As the good people at the National Day Laborers Organizing Network say,
If you accept the fruits of our labor, you must accept our humanity.
Tell Governor Gavin Newsom that farmworkers keep us fed and should have the right to form unions! This quick action is from More Perfect Union.
We need to change our relationships. Human dignity should not be under constant threat. But if you are an undocumented farm worker or a trans person seeking health care, or a migrant seeking asylum, your humanity is apparently in question.
A young person in Kansas with a seizure disorder was denied care at a hospital after they told the staff that
they are transgender and nonbinary, that their name is different from their legal name, and that they use gender-neutral pronouns.
The outcome was predictably bad: they stopped seeking care, their health declined, they lost their job, and eventually their home.
There’s a nondiscrimination provision in the Affordable Care Act which is intended to protect people from discrimination in health care settings. It’s in Section 1557, and it prohibits programs or facilities which accept federal funds from discriminating against patients
based on race, color, national origin, age, disability, or sex.
A proposed revision of the rule would expand protections by clarifying that
“on the basis of sex” includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics, including intersex traits.
Write in support of a federal rule that will make discrimination in health care and health insurance settings illegal. This 15-second move comes from the Center Action Network.
Because I used to attend Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) meetings, I became aware of disgraceful educational neglect in Yeshivas in NYS. The insularity of ultra-Orthodox communities has concealed and prolonged the problem.
Many Yeshivas offer little to no instruction in secular subjects, leaving their students unprepared for the world, with few opportunities for further schooling or employment.
Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Yaffed is hosting an online panel discussion to discuss the findings of the investigation. Register here for tomorrow’s event.
New arrivals have a right to shelter and are making use of the city’s overburdened shelter system. But an incident on Wednesday highlighted the crisis within the system.
An officer of the NYC Department of Homeless Services hit Meiver Martinez, 21, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, pinned him down, and Tased him at a shelter in Brooklyn. Another man from Venezuela at the shelter, who saw the assault, noted
“Many of us had to spend days in the jungle, on trains that are dangerous. To flee all of that and to be here in a situation where we’re being treated in this way, is very upsetting. Very surprising.”
The office who assaulted Martinez has been suspended.
Make the Road NY is assisting newly arrived asylum-seekers with MetroCards, phones, and cash assistance. We can contribute.
with love,
L