At Women’s Rights NY, we have awarded our Annual “Women of the Year” recognition to the following four exemplary feminists –

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the 24th and current President of Liberia won a decisive victory in the reelection of 2011. She has the distinction of being the first and currently the only elected female head of state in Africa.

She received the African Gender Award in 2011, and was the co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Ellen Sirleaf has in the past represented Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Pan-African anticolonial agency that supported, trained and provided weapons and military bases to colonized nations fighting for independence. It was thanks to OAU that South Africa during Apartheid was expelled from World Health Organization.

When Sirleaf was elected in 2005, she had promised to rule just one term, but she decided to contest again last year and continues to rule Liberia as its most illustrious of presidents. As the president, she has had enormous success in fronts of national debt relief. She has criticized international military interventions in Libya, and has led historical investigations into national civil conflicts in Liberia with an intent to identify the people associated with former warring factions.

However, not everything is rosy with Sirleaf’s growth and progress. She has been viewed as pro-western in many instances. Her opponents claim that the Nobel Prize was awarded to her a couple of months before the election so as to ensure her re-election. Her first foreign visit was meant to restore friendship with Côte d’Ivoire, a traditionally pro-capitalist member of the former OAU. Under pressure, she also agreed to withdraw her stance regarding Libya and joined the chorus in calling for Gaddafi’s head.

Notwithstanding controversies, being an African woman leader, she has been acknowledged by Newsweek magazine as one of the top ten best leaders of the world. Time magazine paid her tribute as one of the top ten female leaders.

Lidia Gueiler Tejada

Lidia Gueiler Tejada

Lidia Gueiler Tejada died on May 9, 2011. She was Bolivia’s first female president and only the second female president in the entire western hemisphere (if at all Argentina’s Isabel Pero’s widow-card is accounted for).

Unlike any other female political leader in the Americas, Lidia Gueiler was fiercely revolutionary in her politics. She joined the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) in 1948, the most important political party in the 20th Century Bolivia.

Lidia Gueiler’s contributions to feminist causes in Latin America are unparalleled. Three years after she joined the Revolutionary Left Movement, she became the most formidable social rights activist in Latin America when she led 26 women on an eight-day hunger strike to win the release of their sons and husbands, who were being held as communist political prisoners.

After the MNR was toppled from power in 1964, Gueiler spent many years in exile. She was elected president of the lower legislature in Bolivia upon her return. After a series of military interventions and nationwide labor strikes, Gueiler was appointed president of Bolivia by the Bolivian congress in 1979.

A lifetime campaigner of women’s rights and progressive causes, she publicly supported the socialist leader Evo Morales in 2005 election.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy turned 50 in 2011. But more than this incidental turn of event for her, there was a more conscious decision taken by the Booker Prize winning progressive writer. She declared herself to be “a Maoist sympathizer”. In an interview to The Guardian, she endorsed any means possible to bring about revolutionary changes.

Guerrillas use violence directed against the state forces and at times innocent civilians sustain injuries and deaths. When Roy was asked to clarify if she condemned such violence, she was forthright: “I don’t condemn it any more. If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

Betty Ford

Betty Ford

Betty Ford died on July 8, 2011. She was more than a First Lady. Through her contributions to women’s rights movements, she set precedents as a First Lady unafraid of taking on politically sensitive issues.

Betty Ford raised awareness about breast cancer following her mastectomy in 1974. She also drew from her personal experiences to politicize issues when she raised awareness of addiction following her battle with alcoholism.

As a pioneering feminist of her time, she actively supported Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), equal pay, and women’s right to abortion. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Betty Ford to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. She opened the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas where she helped create the National Plan of Action.

When in 1978, the deadline for ratification of the ERA was extended from 1979 to 1982 it resulted in a march of a hundred thousand people on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Several leading feminists including Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Chittick, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem joined Betty Ford in registering protest.

(The List: Edited by Saswat Pattanayak)

A Republican-led House Committee sent a letter to Planned Parenthood requesting twelve years of financial disclosures to determine if the organization is misusing federal funds, in particular for abortion services. The ranking Democrat on the Committee, Henry Waxman, called the investigation, “part of a Republican vendetta against an organization that provides family planning and other medical care to low-income women and men.” With the economy headed for the Republican Great Depression II, as civil unrest rises about the high crimes perpetrated by Wall Street, as well as two unfunded, undeclared and endless wars, the GOP believe that taxpayers dollars are best used to destroy Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive health and rights.

Don’t these bastards have wives, daughters, mothers and sisters? To paraphrase Philip Roth, can people be so abysmally sociopathic and live?

Do you believe it?

Can they actually be equipped with all the machinery, a brain, a spinal cord, and the four apertures for the ears and eyes, and still go through life without a single clue about the feelings and yearnings of anyone other than themselves?

By Jack Tuckner, Esq

Voter ID laws hurt female voter interests, as well as the interests of the rest of us, and though the first time you hear Republicans explain that they’re only in favor of compulsory photo identification at the polls in order to stop voter fraud, it sounds reasonable, until you realize that’s just a transparent pretext for their real agenda, suppressing voter turnout in general to help their chances of winning. There’s absolutely zero evidence that voter fraud of the type that could be deterred by photo ID is a significant problem in the United States. A five-year effort by the Bush Justice Department “turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections,” according to reporting by the NY Times. They found no evidence of double voting or other types of fraud that an ID requirement would prevent. It’s all about suppressing the will of “we the people” (remember us?) by ensuring that vast numbers of ordinary citizens are disallowed from voting, whether by hook or by crook. Here’s how Paul Weyrich, the co founder of the Heritage Foundation­, Moral Majority, and other right-wing Republican groups explains the conservati­ve opinion on voting:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Republican politicians and the corporations and wealthy special interests groups and individual who pull their strings, want as keep as few African-Americans, women, Latinos, the young, the elderly, the poor, the vulnerable, and the sick from voting as they possibly can, as every vote counts equally, and it is rightly assumed that most of us who aren’t wealthy white men will vote for a candidate who cares about the general welfare of our country and the real persons who comprise the beating heart of our great country, not the corporate “persons” who pay to get rich Republicans to do its selfish bidding.

Voter ID laws place an unnecessary hardship on women, as those who are newly married or recently divorced may have name changes issues (unfortunately, U.S. women still change their names in 90 percent of marriages) and their passport or birth certificate may be in their former names, meaning that may be required to obtain a certified court document showing the divorce decree or marriage certificate. These documents vary in cost from state to state but can cost upwards of $25 plus any time off work needed to obtain them. For each additional burden placed on a voter the likelihood of voting diminishes.

You may need a driver’s license to drive a car or get on a plane, but those activities are privileges not rights. Voting for a candidate that represents our true interests should be an unfettered right; in fact it should be required in a true democracy. Nine decades after women won the right to vote, that right is under attack by big business and its enablers in government.

(Related Story from the Women’s Media Center)

By Jack Tuckner, Esq

In the New York Times today, Jennifer Preston writes about how some companies are subjecting job candidates to social media background check. This article is more bad news for employees in today’s job market. As it’s a clear seller’s market for corporations sitting on $2 trillion in cash and who’ve now been declared “persons” by our corporation-happy US Supreme Court, and with more than 30 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed, how many job seekers can withstand the rigors of a “voluntary” background check into every aspect of their personal lives? This search is not actually voluntary, of course, because if you decline to allow it, you won’t be considered for the job, period.

If you’ve been out of work for any length of time, and missed a credit card payment or two, how will you withstand the credit check? And unless it’s a financial planning position, what does a missed credit card payment or two say about your ability to perform the essential functions of the job sought? Nothing. Where the internet’s concerned, applicants are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t, as a complete absence of presence on the ‘net may make an employer suspicious of your long term anonymity and voicelessness, or, your prolific blog postings, Facebook and LinkedIn entries and photos may become fodder for deep examination and judgment by every employer seeking to analyze your “compatibility” for the job based on illegal factors. It’s a brave new world of utter transparency, and the power of the few and the mighty is engulfing the dwindling influence of the many and the meek.

Remember, as they indicate in the article, personal information that you can’t ask about in an interview are the same things you can’t research online, and that includes a wide range of information covering a person’s age, gender, religion, disability, national origin, race, color, ethnicity, pregnancy, and marital status and sexual orientation in many states such as NY. How can you keep an employer from discriminating against you based on these protected statuses, when they may be readily apparent from your online profile, photos and postings? And one has to prove that these illegal reasons formed the basis of the company’s rejection of your application, a feat that may be impossible without clear evidence. This is another reason why the future looks bleak for the American worker, so long as corporations and their enablers hold all the power, money and influence in our culture and government.

Unless we all mobilize and fight for more union representation and enhanced labor and worker rights, unless we fight for progressive representatives who’ll do the business of “we the people,” as they’re Constitutionally required to do, not the business of millionaires, billionares and corporations as they now do because of the corrupting influence of unrestrained money in politics, our freedom to follow our heart’s path in life will be severely restricted by the oligarchs at the helm of America’s economic ship.

One hundred years ago today, on March 25, 1911, the disastrous Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire killed 146 workers, mainly women, due to unsafe sweatshop conditions. This industrial calamity stands out in history as New York City’s worst occupational disaster before 9/11, and the harrowing details of the disaster were the catalyst for radical reforms in the labor and employment sphere, many of which we take for granted today as basic worker’s rights. Occurring at a time when the union and labor movements were growing and demanding serious changes to the unrestrained capitalism that facilitated dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, the horror of Triangle Shirt Waist Fire captured the public’s attention. The massive outpouring of sympathy and solidarity of workers following the tragedy forced the nation’s leaders to recognize, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “The old laws, and the old customs… are no longer sufficient.”

The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the top-most floors of the Asch building, just one block east of Washington Square Park, in New York City. The factory produced women’s blouses (“shirtwaists”) and employed approximately 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. The Triangle employees worked nine hours a day on weekdays, plus another seven hours on Saturdays. Charles Kernaghan, the executive director of the National Labor Committee, estimates that when adjusted for inflation, the Triangle Shirt Waist employees were making the equivalent of $3.18 an hour.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

The factory fire began on the 8th floor at the end of the workday on March 25, 1911, from a cigarette butt dropped into a bin holding scraps of fabric. The fire quickly spread, fed by flammable fabrics and working materials, accelerating through each floor by the cramped layout of the factory. There was neither an audible alarm system nor a means to contact employees on each floor of the building to warn them of the fire. There were no fire prevention or extinguishing equipment on the site. Although each floor had a few exits, many of the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked during work hours. One fire escape soon collapsed under the overload of terrified employees and the heat of the flames. Dozens of employees escaped the fire by climbing up to the roof, if it was accessible from their floor, and others were able to jam themselves into elevators while they were still in operation. Some of the victims pried the elevator doors open and jumped down the empty shaft. The weight of their bodies and the heat destruction of the rails eventually rendered the elevators inoperable.

Available technology such as sprinkler systems, fire walls and adequate fire escapes could have prevented the fire or at the very least, limited its scope. But, as such safety measures were not required by law, they were not installed in the factory. Inadequate fire department equipment, including ladders that only reached the 6th floor, devastatingly short of the eighth, ninth and tenth floors where the fire occurred, and flimsy life nets that were torn by the height and impact of falling bodies, contributed to a staggering loss of life.

Within a half-hour, 146 workers died: 129 women and 17 men. Nearly half of the victims were still in their teens, with the youngest being two fourteen-year-old girls. More than a third of the victims, approximately 62 people, tragically jumped or fell to the street pavement from the eight, ninth and tenth floors of the building, trying to escape the flames. The large crowd of horrified bystanders gathered on the street, included Louis Waldman, later a New York State Assemblyman. He described the scene years later, saying, “When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eight, ninth and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames… The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, an in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.”

Company owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were indicted on charges of first and second-degree manslaughter, having survived the fire by fleeing to the buildings roof when the fire began. An all male jury acquitted the two owners, the defense having argued that the prosecution failed to prove that the owners knew the exit doors were locked at the time of the fire. A subsequent suit enabled plaintiffs to win compensation in the amount of $75 per deceased victim. In 1913, Blanck was arrested for locking the door to his factory during working hours, and fined a mere $20.

The tragedy received massive press coverage and the disturbing photographs of the victims and testimonies of eye witnesses contributed to overwhelming public sympathy for the victims, with as many as 400,000 people attending the funeral procession up Fifth Avenue on April 1, 1911. The public outrage over the acquittal of the Triangle Company owners, contributed to a pro-worker sentiment that caused a wave of workplace reforms, union advances and a crucial shift in the public policy on worker safety, which sought to eliminate many of the hazardous working conditions associated with American industrialization. The fire only intensified the growth of the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, which two years before the Triangle Fire had organized a general strike of young female makers of women’s blouses. The “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” had included women who were employed by the Triangle Waist Company, and evidences the entrance of women into political discourse and the struggle for better working conditions and worker’s rights.

Union organizing only intensified after the event, reaching an epic peak in 1919, when one out of every five workers in the U.S. went on strike. Rose Schniederman, an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, spoke passionately to a meeting of women shortly after the Triangle Fire demanding that worker’s safety be addressed, stating, “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship… Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

In an era that was in uproar with new ideas and movements, the question of how to end workers’ strikes and address the serious abuses of industrialization and economic inequality dominated the discourse. The Triangle Fire galvanized public opinion and forced the nation’s leaders to begin advocating a progressive agenda of pro-labor and pro-worker safety laws, delivering more humane labor laws and many of the fire and building codes that protect workers today. For example, new legislation required that there be a certain amount of space per worker, employee breaks, and the right to a safe, clean and sanitary working environment.

The Triangle also spurred an important alliance of New York Democrats with unions and progressive reformers that would persist through the New Deal and help make New York State one of the most progressive states in terms of labor reform. New York State created a Factory Investigating Committee to “investigate factory conditions in this and other cities, and to report remedial measures of legislation to prevent hazard or loss of life among employees through fire, unsanitary conditions, and occupational diseases.” The State Committee’s detailed report in 1915 helped to create and modernize the state’s labor and fire laws, many then copied in other states. For example, requirements for sprinklers and regular fire drills became standard practice for every workplace. In the next 3 years, New York State enacted nearly 40 labor laws, and in 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which improved worker’s rights throughout the county and strengthened the gains of the burgeoning union movement. These laws were the first of many created to protect worker’s safety, providing a foundation for later laws in the twentieth century, such as the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, that significantly changed the reality of the American workplace.

While the improvements and reforms in workplace following the Triangle Fire provide some reparation for the tragedy, the triumphs are limited in both scope and permanence. As the factory industry reorganized over the years, influenced by labor reforms and union pressures, many factory businesses, especially clothing manufacturers, began leaving unionized centers like New York City for rural locations and eventually for foreign shores. With today marking the centennial for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, we tend to assume that the conditions that led to such a catastrophe couldn’t possibly exist today. However, in some of our country’s industrial and manufacturing sectors, dangerous working conditions have re-emerged, fraught with minimum wage violations and child labor, as factories began to rely heavily on immigrant labor. There has been a trend since the 1970s towards greater deregulation in factory and manufacturing industries, with unionized jobs that were once stable and well paid, becoming low paid jobs with poor benefits and a high employee turn over rate. Many people in the United States see parallels between the Triangle Fire victims and the plight of undocumented workers who labor in factories, farms and construction sites.

Furthermore, one reason for the drop in occupational deaths in the United States has been because the manufacturing sector is shrinking, having mostly left the United States for foreign countries where it is cheaper to produce goods, especially in places with less stringent labor laws and workplace safety practices. On May 10, 1993 at the Kader Toy Factor near Bangkok, Thailand, 188 people were killed and over 500 seriously injured in what is now considered the worst industrial factory fire in history. The factory produces toys for international export designed for major toy companies such as Disney and Mattel. The factory was poorly designed and built, with flammable materials not disposed of properly, crowded working conditions, inadequate exits, locked external doors, and un-insulated steel girders which caused the entire factory to collapse during the fire. It is evident that the trend of many foreign factories is for the employers to flout workplace safety and worker’s rights (if there are any at all) in order to keep manufacturing and international export cheap, with the tacit consent of foreign governments who prefer economic growth and prosperity to the safety of workers.

For many, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy resonates in our nation’s undocumented workers and the plight of workers abroad. If one of the legacies of the Triangle Fire has been the need for laws requiring workplace safety and stronger unions, scores of workers are still left unprotected. Without the effective ability to organize to demand better working conditions, compounded with our tacit acceptance as consumers of sweatshop products from abroad, for many workers around the globe, not much has changed since 1911.

What is most noteworthy is the fact that in the three most respected professional fields – law, medicine and business – women are treated most abysmally. Despite the stringent manners of admissions into professional schools that awards degrees in these coveted areas of expertise, and the accompanying social status that identifies virtues of honesty and integrity with these specializations, it so appears – from the latest US Department of Labour statistics – that the most esteemed professional fields are also the most exploitative ones as well. At least so far as gender inequality is concerned.

In legal occupations, American women earn 56 cents per dollar that the men earn. Legal professions include the jobs of lawyers, judges, magistrates, other judicial workers, paralegals, legal assistants, and miscellaneous legal support workers. Likewise, in the medical profession, among the physicians and surgeons, women earn 64 cents per dollar the men earn. Third highest hall of shame is reserved for business management executives. Female financial managers earn 66 cents per dollar their male counterparts earn and women human resources managers earn 69 cents per dollar.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women still lag far behind men in almost all the industries. The inequality exists most clearly for instance among physicians and surgeons (women $1,228, men $1,914), loan counsellors (women $754, men $1,118), purchasing managers (women earn $1,029 weekly, men earn $1,383), claims adjusters, investigators (women $845, men $1,128), computer programmers (women $1,182, men $1,267), lawyers (women $1,449, men $1,934), postsecondary teachers (women $1,030, men $1,342), retail salespersons (women $443, men $624), real estate brokers (women $745, men $939), inspectors, testers (women $513, men $754), financial services sales agents (women $798, men $1,237), etc.

Among several hundreds of jobs that were surveyed, women were found to be earning slightly more than the men only in the fields of bartending and baking.

As we begin the Women’s History Month, the above serve as timely reminders as to how the history needs to be revisited and radical feminist movements be reintroduced.

Most of us are still blissfully, ignorantly unaware, as our free press is mostly anything but free, corporate-owned and under contract, that the US Supreme Court changed the world as we know it at the beginning of this year. In Citizens United, the five majority, right-wing, corporatist crazies voted to grant corporations personhood, free-speech rights and the unrestricted opportunity to inject billions of dollars into the body politic, throwing their overbearing financial weight behind politicians who will support corporate greed over the needs of we the people and the commons we all share. The decision was a huge victory for Wall Street banks, big oil, the “health” insurance industry and other transnational corporations and the billionaires who run them, and a huge defeat for the rest of us, as well as the for the planet itself. A true travesty.

What does corporate money and influence buy? Everything, of course. Just last week, the heavily business lobbied Senate Republicans unanimously voted against a measure that would have finally help address pay discrimination against women in the workplace. The Paycheck Fairness Act passed the House of Representatives nearly two years ago, but it can’t seem to gain traction with those Senate boys (don’t they like and respect their own wives, daughters and mothers?) despite the consistent polls showing that over 84% of Americans support equal pay for women, our elected GOPers won’t even let the bill come up for a discussion, let alone a debate. They all sided, yet again, with the Chamber of Commerce, because if they paid women the same as they paid men, there would be less money remaining for seven figure CEO bonuses. This despite the fact that women with identical education, experience and qualifications make only 77 cents on the dollar of what men make. Over the course of a 40-year career, it’s estimated that women lose out on upwards of a million dollars in total wages due to this discrimination, and the Senate and Chamber of Commerce want it to continue that way.

“School Lunches? Eat Fucking Tree Bark… Reaganomics, Ladies and Gentlemen, Reaganomics.” Richard Belzer, Catch a Rising Star, circa 1984

The U.S Department of Agriculture also recently reported that 17.4 million American households had trouble finding enough food to eat last year. That’s 1 out of every 8 homes–someone went hungry at some point throughout the year. Children in single parent households were most affected by this food shortage–all in all–14% of the households in our country experienced hunger. And these numbers could have been much higher–the Department of Agriculture reports that although the number of hungry families shot up much higher in 2007 when the recession began, it has held steady since, thanks in large part to federal programs like the supplemental nutritional assistance program and free and reduced school lunches. Moreover, economists have proven that federal food assistance programs actually have a stimulative effect on the program. Every dollar given out in food stamps produces a $1.73 in economic activity as it circulates from the hungry person to the retail stores to the wholesaler to the farmer. And yet Republicans still insist that a 3% tax cut for millionaires and billionaires, so that they can then put more money in foreign banks, is a better stimulus for America, and they are willing to cut food assistance programs to pay for it. As Thom Hartmann characterized this maddening fact; “There you have it, the Republican Party literally taking food off the table of hungry Americans, so fat cat banksters can get a million dollar tax giveaway bonus, borrowed from China and handed to those billionaires, courtesy of you and me by the Republican Party.”

In conversation with Dana Rapoport, Jack Tuckner discusses criteria for the right candidate: “Gender is probably not the most important factor…. But if we get a woman who is progressive, liberal and smart, it is terrific.”

World’s largest retailer is about to face the largest class action suit in American history. Status quo of Walmart Stores Inc., thus far maintained through several expensive public relations campaigns and television advertorials, has been challenged by this lawsuit representing interests of more than 1 million women. In a case that will unveil the extent to which corporate America has institutionalized systemic sexism, Walmart and its likes will most likely demand a review, an appeal or shameless dismissal.

Women Challenge Wal-Mart

Indeed, Walmart has no shame. Its official statement is irresponsible and unrealistically far from the ground: “We do not believe the claims….Walmart is an excellent place for women to work and fosters female leadership among our associates and in the larger business world.”

In its defense, Walmart has clearly taken shelter within the ideology of market capitalism pervading the “larger business world” – a genre of trade policies that has resulted in enormous costs to human dignity, labor and unity. Capitalistic “free” market economy in America has consistently been anti-worker, especially, anti-women. Despite countless judicial interventions and feministic endeavors to ensure equality at workplaces, corporate America continues to treat women workers as invisible and their labor unworthy of rewards. As a result, women in 2010 still earn about 79 cents for every dollar men earn. For women of color, it is way less.

As the most prolific representative of global capitalism, Walmart has an extraordinary share in maintaining existing gender inequalities. Walmart has $405 billion in annual sales, 2 million employees, more than 8,400 stores. Between the Waltons (Christy, Jim, Alice, Robson), personal assets of the owners of Walmart run over $80 billion – the richest private wealth accumulation ever in the world.

From time to time, corporations like Walmart (and Sam’s Club which it owns) have hired more women and workers from various minorities groups. But this is usually done in order to enhance profits through cheaper labor standards. Ironically, thus emancipated class – women and other minorities – prove to be the instruments for higher profits of the unregulated corporations.

After hiring cheaper alternatives in the form of women and members of minorities in their native country of operations, corporations like Walmart then globalize their exploitative expansions for even cheaper labor alternatives to maximize profits. So in Mexico, Walmart becomes Walmex, in the UK, it is Asda, in Japan, it becomes Seiyu and in India it is Best Price. Walmart successfully hires cheaper labors also in China, Argentina, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Canada, among others.

A crucial way of challenging anti-worker policies of Walmart and its likes, is for the workers to join labor unions. And this is one area where the Walton families have excelled in choking human liberties. Walmart has consistently maintained anti-union stances, exposed employees to health hazards, locked in night-shift workers and paid employees below minimum wage. With the forced absence of workers unions, Walmart has ensured that workers get paid below poverty line minimum wage to maintain families and yet have no right to challenge it in an organized manner. And most famously, Wal-mart has opposed the pro-worker Employee Free Choice Act.

The working class of the world needs for this lawsuit to prevail, not merely to send a signal to a corporation that undervalues its employees, but also to encourage all workers to join in solidarity to radically challenge and upstage profiteering monopolists everywhere.

By Kiri Blakeley, FORBES
You can take time off for health or child care issues, but where’s the corporate understanding about work disruption due to relationship turmoil?

When news broke that Sandra Bullock’s husband, Jesse James, was allegedly having an affair with a tattooed biker model, Bullock pulled out of the London premiere of her Oscar-winning movie, The Blind Side. A premiere without a film’s star might as well not be a premiere, so the studio kiboshed the entire thing. As the cheating scandal widened, Bullock canceled several other overseas premieres and an appearance on the Kids Choice Awards.

Media appearances, press junkets and premieres are generally not optional for a celebrity–they are often contractually obligated or, at the very least, considered a necessary part of the job.

Bullock is fortunate that not only does her studio, Warner Brothers, seem to be supportive of her time off, but she is also a big enough star that she’s in no danger of being rendered unemployable in the future over her ditched duties. A less bankable actor would likely not have had the same option.

And what about us average wage slaves? While it is generally acceptable in the workplace to take time off due to health reasons, child care issues, or the well-being of a parent, there is often scant corporate understanding when it comes to work disruption as a result of divorce, breakup or even general relationship turmoil.

Walking into your boss’ office and saying you’d like to take a few days off because your mother is sick (something I did in the past year) is a little different from saying you need to come to terms with the idea that your husband is schtupping a series of bimbos. Should this kind of time off be more widely available and acceptable?

Mental health experts seem divided over the issue. Irina Firstein, a New York City therapist with 20 years’ experience, says that relationship trouble should not be given the same leeway in the workplace as health issues. “These events, while very traumatic, don’t require a long time off work,” she says. “In fact, I think it is most helpful to try and continue your usual activities. This takes away some of the focus and energy on obsessively dwelling on one’s pain.”

Taking the opposite tack is Sally Wright, Ph.D., a consultant for clients like the American Psychotherapy Association, who says, “Situations involving relationship breakup are every bit as mentally and emotionally taxing as those which are characterized as ‘acceptable’ reasons. In fact they are often more difficult to deal with.”

Yet there persists the corporate and societal bias that relationship issues are not “serious,” despite reams of research indicating that divorce is on par with death in terms of emotional devastation. The Family Medical Leave Act covers certain employees whose parents or children are ill, but those suffering emotional woes take their chances when going up against an employer.

Labor attorney Jack Tuckner, who specializes in women’s rights in the workplace, represented a 26-year-old New York City woman who was fired from her company after taking nearly a month off work after her live-in boyfriend abruptly dumped her. “[The company] called her ‘weak-minded,’” says Tuckner, who settled the woman’s case.

Tuckner advises those who may need to take time off due to personal issues be honest but vague with your employer (don’t divulge all the dirty details), give your boss a time-line of when you plan to return to work (two to three weeks off is about as much as one can reasonably expect), and to document your emotional state through a doctor or mental health professional. Even then, he warns, you still risk being marginalized at work after such a leave of absence.

But perhaps the tide is shifting. The human rights laws in some states and cities require that employers must accommodate reasonable requests due to mental anxiety, and those laws are beginning to be interpreted more broadly. “Mental suffering is getting closer to being a covered disability,” says Pryor Cashman labor attorney Josh Zuckerberg. But emotional distress isn’t protected in the clear-cut way that, say, blindness is.

However, there are decent compromises that employers can make to allow employees to regain emotional footing while not being forced into the role of emotional hand-holder. Heather Gatley, who oversees human resources for staffing firm AlphaStaff, says she has seen an increase in companies that offer personal time off (PTO)–to be taken for whatever reasons, no explanation necessary–in place of sick days or vacation time. Says Gately: “It’s unreasonable to expect that employees won’t need time off every once in awhile to attend to personal issues–whether renewing a driver’s license or nurturing a broken heart.”

Still, says Gately, even employers who offer PTO can require that those who want to take advantage of it give notice “as far in advance as is possible.” Unfortunately, one can never quite plan when you may discover your spouse or partner is a cheating low life.

Kiri Blakeley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her book, Can’t Think Straight: A Memoir of Mixed-Up Love, will be published in January 2011.