Stop the abuse of women workers at McDonalds and Whole Foods: Fight for 15!
Filed under: Uncategorized
“Unlike nations which have rational labor policies like sick leave, paid parental leave, affordable childcare, vacation time, generous retirement and which protect the right to organize a union, the USA has chosen the opposite course. This has led to some of the worst inequality in the developed world, which because of our rampant gender and racial discrimination, falls heaviest on women, particularly women of color.”
International Women’s Day (IWD), March 8, was originally inspired by the historic 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000”, a garment workers strike of women in NYC, many of them immigrants. They demanded better pay, better working conditions and the right to join a union.
So it made sense that the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC), which leads the Fight for $15 campaign in the city, should celebrate International Women’s Day by standing up for the rights of women workers in 2014.
A Chicago McDonald’s worker named Carmen Navarrette had been told that she “should put a bullet through her head,” because she had requested permission to go home after become very ill at work. She is a diabetic and had just been released from the hospital.
As a result, dozens of WOCC members and supporters marched into a North Side McDonald’s on International Women’s Day to demand an end to this kind of discrimination and verbal abuse.
On the morning of March 8, a smaller group of WOCC members and allies picketed a North Side Chicago Whole Foods and demanded the reinstatement of Rhiannon Brochat. She was fired after she stayed home with her special needs child when Chicago schools were closed on the worst day of the Polar Vortex.
McDonald’s and Whole Foods may seem like very different companies, but their attitude toward women workers is remarkably similar.
Chicagoans join together to ice the ISAT standardized test
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
“Standardized testing encourages rigid scripted teach-to-the-test curricula devoid of educational exploration. The human element that makes great teaching and engaged learning is ruthlessly crushed like so much scrap metal in a junkyard compactor. No student was ever motivated to become an eager life-long learner by taking a mind numbing battery of tests. Now they are even being inflicted on Kindergarten and Pre-K children. Have we lost our minds?”
Across the wide 24th Boulevard in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood you could hear the chants: “Let us teach…Let us teach…Let us teach!”
It was the frigid late afternoon of February 28 and the sounds were coming from the steps of Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. Parents, teachers, students and community allies had gathered to support Saucedo’s boycott of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT).
Students dismissed from school gather before the rally
Earlier that week Saucedo teachers, with the urging of school parents, had voted unanimously not to give the test. The endless procession of standardized tests that take up valuable instruction time had pushed the Saucedo school community past the limit of its patience. Teachers didn’t want to go to work and follow a regimen they knew was harmful to children. And parents didn’t want that either. A natural alliance came into being.
The late Maria Saucedo was a highly respected bi-lingual educator working in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood who was active in groups like Casa Atzlan and Mujeres Latinas. As an honors student at Northeastern Illinois University, she helped found the Chicano Student Union. She was killed in a fire in 1981.
The Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy community is carrying on her life’s work of social and education justice.
Saucedo special education teacher Sarah Chambers opened the rally by announcing that Saucedo did not stand alone:
“ We’ve received e-mails, photos, calls from Montana, from California, from New York, from all over the country. We have people supporting us for taking a stand.”
The rally was part of the general revolt against testing abuse in Chicago and across the nation. Spirits at the Saucedo rally were buoyed when word spread that Drummond Montessori on the city’s North Side had joined the boycott. This was in addition to the 67 schools where parents were opting out of the test on an individual basis. Read more