Monday Reads: Liberty and Justice for All

Good Morning!

I attended a forum with my city councilwoman, congressman and democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday. It’s evident that part of the Democratic Party election strategy for these midterm elections is to turn out women, but I did find much of the forum very compelling and inspiring despite knowing the underlying motive.

Each of these forums showcase women that speak to issues that have framed their lives–be it pay inequality, the lack of child care or the lack of benefits like paid medical and parenting leave and medical insurance.  Enabling women to better participate in the economy is part of the policy  initiatives to revive the struggling American Middle Class.  The other pillars are to use Buy America Bonds to modernize infrastructure and reduce student loan interest rates to that paid by banks.

Single and minority women overwhelmingly vote Democratic.  So do people with graduate degrees and nearly every minority. Chuck Todd, who is succeeding at keeping MTP at the bottom of the ratings, refers to this phenomenon as the Chick-Fil-A Nation vs. Starbucks Nation.  But really, how do so many folks that are struggling to make ends meet fall into the category of Starbucks customers? 

“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd on Sunday described the 2014 midterm elections as a battle between “Starbucks nation” and “Chick-Fil-A country.”

He split the U.S. into the Democratic urban areas that drink Starbucks and the Republican rural areas that eat Chick-Fil-A.

According to Todd, there are a few Senate seats up for grabs in Chick-Fil-A-loving states like Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia, giving Republicans the advantage. And he said that the major battlegrounds are Colorado and Iowa.

He said that Democrats will need to deploy major get-out-the-vote efforts in urban centers. Perhaps at Starbucks?

Much of the Democratic party base are those folks that are unlikely to get time off to vote. They are struggling with being underpaid and basically aren’t given paid time off for anything.  And, there’s a whole lot of assholes on the internet that will tell them they are horrible people.  But, guess what?  Studies show that it’s internet trolls that are the horrible people.  They test as sadists, sociopaths, and narcissists.

In this month’s issue of Personality and Individual Differences, a study was published that confirms what we all suspected: internet trolls are horrible people.Let’s start by getting our definitions straight. An internet troll is someone who comes into a discussion and posts comments designed to upset or disrupt the conversation. Often, it seems like there is no real purpose behind their comments except to upset everyone else involved. Trolls will lie, exaggerate, and offend to get a response.

What kind of person would do this?

Canadian researchers decided to find out. They conducted two internet studies with over 1,200 people. They gave personality tests to each subject along with a survey about their internet commenting behavior. They were looking for evidence that linked trolling with the Dark Tetrad of personality:narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadistic personality.

[Edit to add: these are technical terms with formalized surveys to measure them. You can find lots more information about their formal definitions online]

They found that Dark Tetrad scores were highest among people who said trolling was their favorite internet activity.

The greatest thing that I found attending this forum was the number of young women who were truly committed feminists.  Here’s a great speech given by the actress best known as the nerdy wizard girl of the Harry Potter Series.  She’s a committed young feminist too.

Earlier this summer, fresh from college graduation, Emma Watson, was named a U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador. Though the ripples of her involvement over the past six months can be seen online (crashing the U.N. website, using Twitter to denounce a sexist politician in Turkey or respond to the gender politics of the recent celebrity nude photo hack), Watson’s power in person is an entirely different matter.

The actress gave an impassioned speech on feminism and gender at the U.N. Headquarters in New York this weekend to launch the “HeForShe” campaignwhich aims to galvanize one billion men and boys as advocates for ending the inequalities that women and girls face globally.

Watson’s speech, which was met with a thunderous standing ovation, not only called for action from male allies, but clarified a persistent misconception about feminism in general. She said:

I decided that I was a feminist. This seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word. Women are choosing not to identify as feminists. Apparently, [women’s expression is] seen as too strong, too aggressive, anti-men, unattractive.

Why has the word become such an unpopular one? I think it is right I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decisions that affect my life. I think it is right that socially, I am afforded the same respect as men.

Watson is pushing back against recent campaigns like Women Against Feminism. As Watson puts it elsewhere in her speech, these campaigns portray the feminist cause as “man-hating.” By involving both genders in the “HeForShe” campaign, Watson hopes to abolish the “us vs. them” mentality.

Watson is potentially in an even better position than many of her peers to do so. Her role as Hermione Granger, the universally-adored heroine of the Harry Potter series, gives her an automatic in with male and female Millenials. This is a rare case where an actor being conflated with their role might be a good thing. In this way, her wide-spread influence on young minds (still forming their opinions on gender roles and advocacy) is even stronger than other high-profile defenders of the f-word like Beyoncé.

But, the world has changed and not always for the better.  Not only are there tales of women who get sick with no health care and no paid medical leave.  There is the ever decreasing disrespect shown to teachers and the way universities are saving their money to pay their highest administrators by using professors as adjuncts. It’s not only home health care workers, fast food workers, and retail workers that can’t live on the wages paid.

You’ve probably heard the old stereotypes about professors in their ivory tower lecturing about Kafka while clad in a tweed jacket. But for many professors today, the reality is quite different: being so poorly paid and treated, that they’re more likely to be found bargain-hunting at day-old bread stores. This is academia in 2014.

“The most shocking thing is that many of us don’t even earn the federal minimum wage,” said Miranda Merklein, an adjunct professor from Santa Fe who started teaching in 2008. “Our students didn’t know that professors with PhDs aren’t even earning as much as an entry-level fast food worker. We’re not calling for the $15 minimum wage. We don’t even make minimum wage. And we have no benefits and no job security.”

Over three quarters of college professors are adjunct. Legally, adjunct positions are part-time, at-will employment. Universities pay adjunct professors by the course, anywhere between $1,000 to $5,000. So if a professor teaches three courses in both the fall and spring semesters at a rate of $3000 per course, they’ll make $18,000 dollars. The average full-time barista makes the same yearly wage. However, a full-time adjunct works more than 40 hours a week. They’re not paid for most of those hours.

“If it’s a three credit course, you’re paid for your time in the classroom only,” said Merklein. “So everything else you do is by donation. If you hold office hours, those you’re doing for free. Your grading you do for free. … Anything we do with the student where we sit down and explain what happened when the student was absent, that’s also free labor. Some would call it wage theft because these are things we have to do in order to keep our jobs. We have to do things we’re not getting paid for. It’s not optional.”

We have a long way to go before all of us achieve life, liberty, and happiness.  This is especially true since a huge portion of one of the two parties is more interested in ideological grandstanding and magical thinking than governance.

I’m learning a lot more about Home Health Care Workers as a result of two women that shared their stories yesterday.  It’s not only the fastest growing job in the country.  It’s also the worst paying.

Two occupations make up the home care aide profession: personal aides who provide clients with self-care and help them with everyday tasks, and home health aides who assist the disabled, chronically ill, or cognitively impaired and may administer medication or check clients’ vial signs. Put together, about 2 million Americans hold these jobs. (The PHI estimates that there are likely hundreds of thousands of uncounted aides employed by individuals and families.)

The wages these workers earn are painfully low: the median salary for a personal care aide is $19,910 annually, or $9.57 an hour; a home health aide earns $20,820 or $10.01 per hour. As America’s population ages, these professions are expected to grow by 49% and 48%, respectively, from 2012 to 2022, eclipsing the average growth for all occupations: 11%. They are the second- and third-fastest growing occupations in the nation—behind only industrial-organizational psychologist, a job that brings in median annual wages of $83,750. On the BLS’s list of 30 fastest-growing jobs, personal and home care aides are the worst paid.

It’s no surprise, then, that the home care industry is plagued by high turnover rates, which the Institute for the Future of Aging Services pegged at between 40% and 60% for a home health aide who has been on the job for less than a year.

Take all these factors into account and you’ve got the makings of a public health crisis, says Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy group. “In light of the Age Wave—the Silver Tsunami—the high rates of burnout, and poverty wages that no one wants to work for—it’s not good for the general public,” she says.

Home care workers, who are employed by third-party agencies or by clients directly, have long been exempt from minimum wage and overtime laws. That will finally come to an end in January, when a Department of Labor regulatory change will grant most home care workers wages of at least $7.25 per hour and overtime.

The ramifications of the new rule illustrate, as Poo puts it, “the pattern and practice of discrimination” against home care workers. At the time of the rule’s announcement, it promised to give home care workers in 29 states minimum wage and overtime protections for the first time, according to the National Employment Law Project. Many of these states have minimum wage and overtime laws for other workers, of course, but some of them have over the course of their history carved out exemptions for in-home care providers. That means that in some states home care workers will earn the federally mandated $7.25 an hour for the first time in January, but if their state has a higher minimum wage that excludes in-home workers, they won’t be eligible for the higher rate. Alaska, for instance, enforces a minimum wage of $7.75 but it also has an exemption for “domestic service” employees, so most home care workers in that state will be subject to the federal $7.25 rate come January, not the state’s higher wage.

At the federal level, home health care workers aren’t covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which only covers “facility” workers, according to PHI. And anti-discrimination laws, such as the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, generally only cover employers with multiple employees, says the Economics Policy Institute, meaning some in-house workers are excluded.

Home health workers employed by individual households aren’t eligible for workers’ compensation, family and medical leave, and can’t enroll in a 401(k), PHI says.

In the hierarchy of workers, home health care workers are at the bottom, below even low-paid fast-food workers,whose recent strikes and protests have drummed up public empathy. This is by no means a new development.

It seems that these jobs really, really need unions. One woman who spoke from the audience said she was terminated after she asked to be removed from her contractor’s constant emails about who to vote for in upcoming elections.  Evidently, they didn’t appreciate the fact she didn’t want to vote for the people who are making decisions that keep her from a living wage with benefits that ensure her well-being.

Here is another compelling story about a woman supporting her family at Burger King while attending university. She wrote an essay that went viral and has been turned into a book.

After the initial fuss, some journalists began muck-raking, trying to prove that you weren’t what you said you were. How did that feel?
I’m not going to recommend it as a lifestyle choice. I lost a ton of weight in three weeks. If you need a crash diet, go viral. Whatever it was I managed to capture had enough power truly to upset some people. A lot of them hoped I was a poor little rich girl, living in a McMansion. Emotionally, it would have been easier to deal with. But I’ve never claimed to be anything that I’m not. Guys, I called the thing “Why I make terrible decisions”.

So, I gave my welfare records to the Washington Post. Those things, and the teeth video, closed it down [in her essay, Tirado wrote that her teeth had rotted because she could not afford dental care, and that this made her unsuitable for working front-of-house in restaurants and offices; when this was disputed she posted a video online in which the ugly gaps in her teeth can clearly be seen].

The trouble is that a lot of people simply don’t understand the stratification in the lower classes. I wasn’t born in Appalachia with no running water. At Burger King I made $28,000 a year. Yes, you can survive on that money. But that’s not the point. It’s a 90-hour week. What is your life like while you’re surviving? Can you keep a family on it?

I have one more thing to ask you today besides begging you to vote for candidates that support the rights of all. It’s that time of year when we ask you to help us renew our domain name and gadgets that help us maintain the blog. Please click the donate button.  Our bills are coming due for early October and we need help!  Thanks so much!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?