Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

"Violence against women has yet to receive the priority attention and resources needed at all levels to tackle it with the seriousness and visibility necessary."

UN Secretary-General’s in-depth study on violence against women (2006) (A/61/122/Add.1)

Before we reach another consensus on violence against women, let us examine the existing differences. For, whereas it is far easier (because it is pacifying) to share the knowledge that violence against women continues to exist, it is rather discomforting (because it is agitating) to throw lights on why it is so.

Like every year, academic and administrative reports of all kinds will be generated to commemorate March 8. After all, since we have a non-profit United Nations and we have corporate profiteers, we will eventually need to reach a consensus on issues such as violence against women. And amidst the thousands of articles and hundreds of televised tear-jerkers we will encounter in the coming month, the information overload would have done the damage, if we do not stay alert about few conditions that need addressing:

1. Suspect the Messengers: The kinds of messages about women may be misgivings. Indeed, most channels that provide news about women’s progress and violence are owned and controlled by men. Whereas it is undoubtedly true that many men are truly understanding of their gender positions and many women are too willing to play the assigned roles, it is still wise to suspect the men in the month of IWD message boards.

2. Women’s Rights are Universal Rights: Some will talk about women’s rights as a domain that applies to women only. Indeed, women’s rights are women’s prerogative only as a practice, but everyone’s concern as a scope. Just like they fool us by writing different history books for African-Americans, and the Americans as though American history does not include the minorities, it is highly suspect that women’s rights are not matter of concern for men.

3. Workplace for women vs Women for workplace: Most arguments about women’s rights focus on necessities to prepare the women for the workplace. Its like Amartya Sen saying that the question should not be if democracy is good for a country, but it should be directed towards making the country good for a democracy. Well, frankly speaking, he could be wrong. Just as JFK was while demanding that people give to the country without asking what the country can do for them. That’s the populist tone. The reality is women don’t need to be prepared for workplace. Workplaces need to be geared to serve women.

4. International Woman has a meaning: It means, women identify with each other across different boundaries. This identification has an undertone: that is, they accept the differences across cultures. To be truly international means understanding that there are differences across nations, and hence across women from different nations. There is no place for homogenization of women as one entity. So yes, White women are different from Black women are different from Asian women are different from Latina women are different from Muslim women are different from Hindu women are different from Swahili-speaking women who are different from Greek women. Women have different social locations among themselves, and hence understanding them holds the key. Let no one lead us into an essentialist notion of women’s problem. Different women face oppressions of different nature. The similarity is the most striking: that women are oppressed simply because they are women.

5. Are women human?: MacKinnon’s question is still valid. No amount of cultural excuses (from first world pornography to third world dowry) makes all women full human today. Ruling classes of the world still consider women as accessories to either their power ladder, or to their social justice tokenism. Their domestic adornment or cheap working class market value. Their television anchoring revenue system or their make-up kit industry. Just as Aishwarya Rai cannot be allowed to cry in public because Revlon will probably run into losses, Tamara MaidenName cannot challenge her greedy boss for uneven wages because he will merely retaliate.

International Women’s Day must not be allowed to promote card and gifts companies to indulge in exhibitionism of annual love to the mothers and sisters and wives and friends. It is rather a day to remind all of us in the world that a separate battle is on. This one is a battle of all. A battle that is waged by the true majority of the world, the women. A battle, that addresses the core inconsistencies of capitalism.

Just how difficult it is to be a mom in a postfeminist era? Or are the mothers going to redefine the movement now? New York Times probes into the new shift.

By KARA JESELLA

A BABY was passed around like the hors d’oeuvres — in this case, bruschetta, a fruit plate — among the 10 mothers who crowded into Ann Clark’s Sacramento home on a Tuesday night this month. No matter if the baby was crying; this was a child-friendly crowd.

The mothers all held jobs outside the home (pastry chef, singer in a band, lawyer, hairstylist, nanny) and many had flexible schedules to make it easier to care for their children. Like hundreds of others who have gathered over the last nine months, they huddled around a television to view “The Motherhood Manifesto,” a documentary about the obstacles still facing working mothers, including many of those in the room.

“I’m home with a 2-year-old, so there may be an interruption,” said Ms. Clark, 35, a social worker with two children and a three-day-a-week office job, as she recounted the viewing party the next day and talked about how she related to the mothers in the movie. Like them, she said, her financial situation felt precarious. She wasn’t sure she could count on keeping her part-time position next fall.

“These are issues I’m aware of and feel strongly about,” she said of the movie’s focus on subjects like universal child care, maternity and paternity leave, and workplace discrimination against mothers. That is why she joined MomsRising.org, the mother’s advocacy organization that made the documentary. “It’s a great opportunity to connect with friends — mothers — and together have a chance to change things,” she said.

For years, mothers have been taking to the Internet to blog or post messages about the travails of motherhood, commiserating, fuming or laughing about their shared lives. But in the last year there has been a marked increase in those who are going beyond simply expressing their feelings. In a throwback to their mothers’ — or was it their grandmothers’? — time, they are organizing about family and work issues.

A generation of mothers who are largely perceived as postfeminist in every way, from sex to economic discrimination, has begun a consciousness-raising that is almost old-fashioned were it not for the technology involved. Raised to believe that girls could accomplish anything, these women have reached parenthood, only to find they faced many of the same pay, equity and work-family balance issues that were being fought over decades before. From that awakening, they say, has come the inkling of a new movement.

Continue reading "Moms Rising: A new feminist shift" »

Is feminist art going to be institutionalized or just going to gain wider acceptance? NY Times has a story following MOMA's new initiatives.

By HOLLAND COTTER

“Well, this is quite a turnout for an ‘ism,’ ” said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. “Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women.”

Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s seminal proto-feminist work.)

Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women’s art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

Continue reading "Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage" »

New York City is still languishing in poverty, and the infant mortality continues to be a matter of concern. And yet, this is one of the least spoken truth.
Helen Klein for Courier-Life decides to break a story about Brooklyn’s darkest shame, its dying babies.

A human tragedy continues to unfold in central Brooklyn.

The communities at the heart of the borough persist as an epicenter of infant mortality, due in large part to the fact that access to quality, timely health care is limited, both for mothers-to-be and their young infants.

Sadly, this situation endures despite the fact that there have been some gains made in certain areas, thanks to intensive grass-roots efforts at working with mothers-to-be in neighborhoods traditionally under-served in the arena of health.

Indeed, the risk of death is more than three times as high for a black baby in his or her first year of life as it is for that baby’s white counterpart, and more than twice as high for a Puerto Rican infant as for a Caucasian infant, according to Ngosi Moses, the executive director of the Brooklyn Perinatal Network (BPN).

The impact of this on Brooklyn residents is anything but theoretic. The borough is second to the Bronx in the rate of infant mortality (with an average of 6.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 7.1 in the Bronx), according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

In addition, Moses stressed, six of the 10 community districts in the city with the highest infant mortality rates are in Brooklyn, with five in central Brooklyn. “Some parts have had improvements, but not what we would like to see,” noted Moses.

Even more frightening, while New York City infant mortality rates have decreased overall (to 6.1 per 1,000 live births in 2004, a six percent reduction from 2003), the rate for black infants has risen, particularly in certain neighborhoods, Moses said.

“One of our big concerns is that national trends in black infant mortality went up, and it also went up in New York City,” she explained. “We have seen disparities increase from two-fold to three-fold.”

Increasing Disparity

Using DOHMH statistics from 2004, Moses pointed out that the disparity in infant mortality rate between blacks and whites, “Has been increasing over the past four years as blacks’ infant mortality rate increased by 16 percent while the white infant mortality rate declined by almost the same amount (15 percent) over the same period.”

Continue reading "Brooklyn's darkest shame: Its dying babies" »

Supreme Court has agreed to hear Coca-Cola's appeal in a race discrimination case. 0

The Supreme Court Friday agreed to consider a discrimination case in which a Coca-Cola bottling company fired a black employee, one of seven cases the court added to its docket. Coca-Cola asked the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit, which involves allegations that a supervisor of employee Stephen Peters was motivated by racial bias and influenced a human resources manager to fire the worker.

Such circumstances are sometimes referred to as "cat's paw" or "rubber stamp" liability. Coca-Cola fired Peters for insubordination after he refused a request to work on a weekend during his scheduled days off.

A federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit brought on Peters' behalf by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The appeals court said a federal judge placed too much emphasis on the fact that Peters' immediate supervisor made no express recommendation to fire him.

In asking the court to hear the case, the company asked the justices to consider when an employer may be held liable for intentional discrimination when the person who fired an employee harbored no discriminatory bias. Peters worked at the Coca-Cola facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The case is BCI Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles v. EEOC, 06-341.

Even as bickerings continue over minimum wage of workers in the United States and no headway is made in the direction of improving the lots of huge majority of working class population, the salaries of the chief executives in big companies have tended to grow at an exponential rate. In fact, studies suggest they have increased 600 percent over the last two decades!

In a recent article in New York Times, more lights are shed.

Compensation Experts Offer Ways to Help Curb Executive Salaries By ERIC DASH

Nothing, it seems, can put the brakes on runaway executive pay.

Shareholder advocates and lawmakers have harshly criticized huge compensation packages. Better disclosure has led only to bigger gains. Even when investors get the chance, they rarely vote against outsized pay.

Despite the growing attention over the last 25 years, the average chief executive’s compensation at big companies has increased more than 600 percent, to $8 million dollars a year after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, the ratio between the average pay for a top executive and a worker, which held steady in the 30 years before 1980, has more than quadrupled, to a multiple of 170, according to recent academic research.

“I don’t actually believe we have made any real progress — or very, very little,” said Robert A. G. Monks, a longtime corporate governance advocate. “If we cannot effectively monitor and control what the principal executives are paid, we are kidding ourselves if we can control anything else.”

So what can be done to tie pay more closely to performance, and cut back on excessive benefits and perks?

Executive compensation issues are tricky; the devil is often deep in the footnotes of proxy statements, employment agreements and stock option plans. It will take a concerted effort by both investors and boards to effect real change. Otherwise, lawmakers have threatened to get involved. “It’s not like Iraq, where everybody says it is bad, but nobody says what to do,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor who has been an outspoken critic of executive pay. “The problem is making the process and the people who play a key role in making the decisions want to make improvements.”

Here are eight steps that compensation experts say might help rein in executive pay:

HIRE INDEPENDENT ADVISERS Despite what appears to be an obvious conflict of interest, it is still common for a compensation consultant, hired by the company’s top managers for lucrative actuarial or benefits work, to also help the board evaluate those same executives’ pay.

New Securities and Exchange Commission rules will require companies to disclose the name of their pay adviser. But unlike the rules for auditors, they stop short of requiring them to parse out their other financial ties to the company.

“You certainly don’t want the outside adviser to the compensation committee to become beholden to the company,” James F. Reda, an independent compensation consultant, said.

Continue reading "The Gap Widens: CEOs have the cake and eat it too" »

Posted by Saswat Pattanayak | Permalink | Email This Post | Comments (0)

Posted In: Labor, News

Bookmark:                                                  

New York Times has an article on the difficulties of being a woman in the business of construction. Things sure seem to be changing, but not much better than they historically have been.

One Degree in Fine Arts, and One in Plumbing
By JOSEPH P. FRIED

WHEN Elaine Ward became an apprentice plumber in 1986, the only female plumber most Americans had ever seen was Josephine the Plumber, a character in 1960s and ’70s commercials for Comet cleanser.

But Ms. Ward’s choice of a vocation wasn’t the only thing that made her unusual. After all, how many plumbers of either sex have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree?

Today, Ms. Ward remains anomalous. She is still one of a small number of women who work as plumbers in New York City; one of an even smaller number of women who own plumbing businesses in the city; and, according to the Buildings Department, one of very few women licensed by the city as master plumbers.

That rank, held by about 1,400 plumbers, and achieved in part on the basis of a city-administered written and practical test, exceeds the journeywoman status that Ms. Ward worked under for a decade before starting her company in 2001. For a plumbing contracting business in the city to operate legally, at least 51 percent of it must be owned by one or more licensed master plumbers.

Continue reading "Women plumbers: More distress than progress" »

A National Labor Relations Board ruling may prevent more than 8 million workers from becoming union members.

The ruling clearly exempts the supervisors from memberships, and so it has brought into its scope all those workers who oversee another employee and are held accountable if that subordinate performs poorly. The majority also has ruled that workers could be deemed supervisors if they were assigned supervisory duties just 10 percent to 15 percent of their total work time.

Steven Greenhouse of New York Times today has treated the story at length:

Board Redefines Rules for Union Exemption In a decision condemned by unions but praised by business, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling yesterday that will exempt registered nurses — and many other workers — from union membership if they have certain kinds of supervisory duties.

Some labor experts predicted that the ruling could affect more than eight million workers who might also be deemed supervisors, including teachers who oversee aides. The board’s 3-to-2 decision involved nurses overseeing shifts at a Michigan hospital.

Continue reading "Union exemption to affect 8 million" »