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Here’s what 3 Newark residents had to say about the city’s lead crisis

by PhilDrechsler Posted on November 14, 2018

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Four years after lead was discovered in Flint’s drinking water, a similar public health crisis is playing out in New Jersey’s most populous city, Newark.

Residents of Newark say over the past year and a half, top city and state officials assured them that their water supply was safe. But as early as 2016, state-run tests that showed elevated lead levels at local schools.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, together with the Newark Education Workers’ Caucus, filed a lawsuit against the city in June, accusing it of violating federal safe drinking water laws. The suit alleges Newark both failed to treat its water properly to prevent lead from leaching off old service pipes into residents’ drinking water and failed to notify residents about the elevated lead levels.

For most of 2018, Newark’s website read: “NEWARK’S WATER IS ABSOLUTELY SAFE TO DRINK,” according to the New York Times. Since the lawsuit was filed, the city has sprung into action, giving away 40,000 water filters across the city of 285,000 people and telling parents their children should not drink the water.

The situation has drawn parallels to the Flint water crisis. “The actual facts of what happened in Flint may not be the exact same, but the overall arc of what happened is,” Mae Wu, an attorney and water expert at the NRDC, told Grist.

The revelation of this potentially widening public health crisis has angered many Newark residents. Here are three community members’ experiences, as told to Grist reporter Paola Rosa-Aquino. Their statements have been edited for length and clarity.

Though the city of Newark is distributing water filters, like these, for residents to mitigate lead levels in their homes, residents say there are not enough for those who need them. Image courtesy of Shakima Thomas

Debra Salters, community activist

I live in a building in the East Ward. We didn’t get water filters. The people who had something to say about it — the activists — we were turned away. We’re actually meeting with our building’s owners next week to find out what the situation is and if they can get the water tested.

Even now, not everyone who lives here knows about the lead in the water. More and more people are finding out, from family members out of state and other cities. Not only are we drinking the water, we’re bathing in it. We’re brushing our teeth in it. We’re washing our hair with it. It’s affecting our entire life here and no one seems to care, until the lawsuit, until they were made to care.

None of the top officials have really done anything to make the public aware of the public health crisis. They denied there was a problem when we, the citizens, were digging up information and bringing it to them to make sure. First, we found out about the lead in schools, and they tried to tell us the water was OK to drink at home. If you’re saying the water is not good in the schools, then how is it fine in our homes, if it’s all coming from the same source? We were shooed away like gnats at a barbecue.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (left) looks on as Senior Aide Andrea Mason (center) speaks to residents at a town hall concerning the city’s lead problem.Image courtesy of Shakima Thomas

Yvette Jordan, teacher and member of Newark Education Workers Caucus

My concern as well as other educators who I have spoken with, of course, is our students as well as small children and those most vulnerable, including elderly and women who are pregnant. We felt we represented a cross-section of our city and especially of those who would be impacted. A couple of us who were homeowners or parents of small children — we felt emotional about this. We could really speak to it with some credibility. My own home’s water was found to be 42.2 parts per billion which is over the federal threshold for lead.

Our teachers’ group was approached by the Natural Resource Defense Council and they asked if we could join them in a lawsuit against the City of Newark. We asked, “Why?” They said, “Well, your water actually rivals Flint, Michigan.” We were alarmed. We said we’d join them.

I mentioned it in my classroom with my students. Some students have heard something and others don’t know what I’m talking about. I feel it’s a failure of public trust in coming forward and saying exactly what is happening.

I think a lot of times people who are affiliated with those who are in power try to downplay what is going on. They try to say to those who are speaking out about it are being irresponsible, that we shouldn’t say anything because it will scare the public. Well, guess what? They should be scared.

Shakima Thomas’s son, 4, bathes in water in Newark, New Jersey.Image courtesy of Shakima Thomas

Shakima Thomas, social worker

I pay for water and it’s really confusing for me that I have to pay for toxic water. What I’m paying is not adding up to the service that I’m getting. I don’t appreciate it, especially as a hard working person. Even as a mom, I have to protect my son, who’s a four-year-old. He’s okay and doesn’t have any elevated levels of lead in his bloodstream, but this still is a public health disaster.

It’s people’s lives. Who wants to have lead in your bloodstream? Who wants that? None of us. We were just exposed to this toxic water. It’s horrible. I think it should be a federal class action lawsuit against this city. That’s what I would think. And I think that we should be reimbursed from the time that administration knew about the lead in the water up until now. From 2016 to now, I feel as though my fees for water should be waived, because I was buying poison, and it wasn’t even consensual. I’m not just going to go out there willingly purchasing poison. I’m just not gonna do that. So, that’s what makes this even more of a scandal.

The mayor keeps saying that this isn’t like Flint. It is the same as Flint in the way that they tried to cover it up. It’s the same thing. We were victimized by this administration. They gamble with our health. They put politics first before justice.

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Here’s what 3 Newark residents had to say about the city’s lead crisis

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Tyson Foods Wants the Supreme Court to Let It Keep Stealing Workers’ Wages

by DavidSpann Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Workers have filed dozens of lawsuits against Tyson Foods alleging millions of dollars in “wage theft” for its failure to keep wage and hour records and to properly pay workers for overtime as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA). On Tuesday, Tyson came before the US Supreme Court and argued that the justices should make those lawsuits go away. Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo is truly a David-versus-Goliath lawsuit, with about 3,000 low-income, often immigrant workers going up against the world’s second-largest meat processor, which has more than $30 billion in annual sales.

Tyson has asked the nation’s highest court to throw out a lawsuit that resulted in a $6 million jury verdict against the company in Iowa for cheating its workers out of earned overtime. Tyson doesn’t just want the case thrown out, though. The verdict at issue amounts to peanuts for the multinational corporation—a little more than two hours’ worth of Tyson’s annual profits. The company also wants the court to issue a broad ruling that would effectively immunize it against future class actions for wage and hour theft, and make it much harder for workers everywhere to join together to bring such claims. If it wins this case, Tyson could have it both ways: It could effectively continue to violate the FSLA and escape liability for it in court.

Tyson is one of three significant legal assaults on class actions before the court this term, waged by big businesses seeking to make it more difficult for workers and consumers to join together to sue them for misconduct. Weighing in on Tyson’s side in the case are other corporate giants, including Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

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Tyson Foods Wants the Supreme Court to Let It Keep Stealing Workers’ Wages

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This Is the Degrading Bullshit Nail Salon Workers Put Up With Every Single Day

by MariamO55vkb Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Scoring a cheap manicure or pedicure, particularly in New York, is incredibly easy. After all, nail salons abound on seemingly every other city block and thus keep prices low in order to compete. It all comes at a steep price, however. The New York Times has published an in-depth investigation looking into the disturbing culture of exploitation, racism, and low-wages salon workers endure throughout the New York region. Here are the most shocking bits:

Some workers are paid as little as $1.50 an hour. In Manhattan, where the average price for a manicure is $10.50, salons compensate for such low prices by severely underpaying workers and oftentimes hitting employees with surprise charges just to work there. On slow days, some worker aren’t even paid at all.

Among the hidden customs are how new manicurists get started. Most must hand over cash — usually $100 to $200, but sometimes much more — as a training fee. Weeks or months of work in a kind of unpaid apprenticeship follows.

Ms. Ren spent almost three months painting on pedicures and slathering feet with paraffin wax before one afternoon in the late summer when her boss drew her into a waxing room and told her she would finally be paid.

Race often determines how well a worker is paid.

Korean workers routinely earn twice as much as their peers, valued above others by the Korean owners who dominate the industry and who are often shockingly plain-spoken in their disparagement of workers of other backgrounds. Chinese workers occupy the next rung in the hierarchy; Hispanics and other non-Asians are at the bottom.

…

Many Korean owners are frank about their prejudices. “Spanish employees” are not as smart as Koreans, or as sanitary, said Mal Sung Noh, 68, who is known as Mary, at the front desk of Rose Nails, a salon she owns on the Upper East Side.

Workers are frequently subjected to physical abuse.

…the minichain of Long Island salons whose workers said they were not only underpaid but also kicked as they sat on pedicure stools, and verbally abused.

Salons rarely go punished because language barriers prove too difficult.

When investigators try to interview them, manicurists are frequently reluctant to cooperate, more so than in any other industry, according a Labor Department official involved who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not permitted to talk with reporters. “It’s really the only industry we see that in,” the person said, explaining that it most likely indicated just how widespread exploitation is in nail salons. “They are totally running scared in this industry.”

In all, the story paints a deeply disturbing portrait of income inequality literally an arm’s length away. To read the investigation in its entirety, head to the Times.

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This Is the Degrading Bullshit Nail Salon Workers Put Up With Every Single Day

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama, Shoot Workers in the Foot

by GretchenBamford Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama announced yesterday that, yes, he would veto a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. This is hardly news, since he’s already said this before, but it was nonetheless reported as yet another shot across the bow of congressional Republicans. The GOP wants to be reasonable and bipartisan—honest!—but it’s tough when Obama keeps deliberately baiting them like this.

So what’s the GOP doing as a show of good faith? Trying to blow a hole in Obamacare, of course. But that’s not all! They’ve actually picked a specific plan that’s something of a trifecta. Here’s what it does:

Cripples a part of Obamacare.
Costs the federal government money.
Increases corporate profits.

Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning? The proposal in question would change the definition of full-time worker from 30 hours to 40 hours. As a result, employers would be required to offer health insurance only to employees working 40 hours or more, not those working 30 hours or more. It’s hard to truly capture the cynicism motivating this proposal, but Matt Yglesias does a pretty good job this morning. I’ll turn over the mike to him:

It turns out that the authors of the ACA weren’t idiots….Sherry Glied and Claudia Solis-Rosman have shown that while working slightly more than 40 hours is common, working slightly more than 30 hours is rare. In other words, few workers are at risk of having hours slashed from 31 per week to 29, but many could be cut back from 41 to 39.

….While a shift from a 30-hour definition to a 40-hour definition would exacerbate the problem of hour cuts, it would help solve one very serious problem — the problem of rich businessmen who would like to see higher profits rather than lower profits. Lifting the hours threshold would automatically cause millions of workers to fall below the limit, saving their employers money in insurance premiums and fees to the government. And lifting the hours threshold would also make it easier for employers to monkey with workers’ schedules to get them redefined as part-time.

At a time when corporate profits as a share of the economy are abnormally high, boosting profits at the expense of workers’ health insurance coverage isn’t necessarily a great political slogan. But it’s still something that business owners and managers care passionately about, and business priorities tend to get a thorough airing on the Hill.

There’s always going to be some threshold that defines “full-time” workers. And no matter what that threshold is, some employers will game the system by reducing the hours of some employees from barely above to barely below the threshold. There’s just no way around that. But you can certainly try to minimize the problem by picking a threshold that’s hard to game. One way to do that is to set the threshold at a level that affects very few workers. Democrats did that when they passed Obamacare in 2009, and that was good for employees, good for Obamacare, and good for the budget since it meant fewer workers receiving federal subsidies.

But not so good for anyone who wanted to game the system and toss lots of vulnerable employees onto the federal dime. Apparently that’s the GOP’s core constituency, though. Are you surprised?

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama, Shoot Workers in the Foot

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Does Amazon Have to Pay Workers for Going Through Its Security Lines? The Supreme Court Is About to Decide

by KarmaG62lyzhfxl Posted on October 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the newest front in the war to pay low-wage workers even less:

The latest battle, which goes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, was launched by former warehouse workers for Amazon.com, who argue they should have been paid for the time they spent waiting in security lines after their shifts….Those security lines could take more than half an hour, the workers said, and that was time when they should have been getting paid.

….Amazon said it would not comment due to the pending litigation, but a spokesperson said the “data shows that employees walk through post shift security screening with little or no wait.”

Well now. If employees truly walk though security screenings with “little or no wait,” then it wouldn’t cost Amazon anything to pay them for that time. So why are they fighting this? Perhaps it’s because Amazon is lying. Sometimes the wait really is substantial, and Amazon doesn’t want to (a) pay more security guards to speed up the lines or (b) pay workers for the time spent in slowpoke lines.

So this really does seem like a simple case. If Amazon is telling the truth, they should have no objection to paying employees for time spent in line. If they’re lying, then they should be given an incentive to speed up the security process—and the best incentive I can think of is to pay employees for time spent in line. Either way, the answer is the same: pay employees for time spent in security lines.

Needless to say, the Supreme Court will figure out a way to spend a hundred pages making this more complicated so that they can justify a different ruling. After all, it wouldn’t do to allow workers to get above their stations, would it?

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United Auto Workers submits comment in support of the Renewable Fuel Standard

by Posted on January 28, 2014

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United Auto Workers submits comment in support of the Renewable Fuel Standard

Posted 28 January 2014 in

National

Joining thousands of consumers, farmers and environmental advocates, UAW has submitted its comment to the EPA, urging the agency to reconsider its planned cuts to renewable fuel in 2014. Speaking on behalf of its more than 300,000 members, the union warned that “this proposed rule could not only raise prices at the pump and deter investment in biofuels and biofuel infrastructure, but hurt rural economies and jeopardize valuable American manufacturing jobs.”

From their comment:

Once-struggling rural American communities have grown and become economically independent because of the success of the biofuel industry. However, under this proposed rule, it is predicted that gas prices could increase 5.7 cents a gallon, affecting all workers and their families. Corn prices are expected to drop $0.19 per bushel, below the cost of production, leading to idle ethanol production and significant job loss in the agricultural implement sector.

Our manufacturing sector is viable and strong, particularly in the biofuels and renewable fuels industry. A significant reduction in renewable volume obligations under this proposed rule could destabilize the renewable fuel industry and send the wrong message to investors. As an ardent proponent of the Administration’s light-duty fuel efficiency standards, we at the UAW support growth in the next generation biofuels. Continuing to build our biofuels industry will keep America globally competitive, create even more jobs, improve the environment, and boost economic demand.

We respectfully request that the EPA revise this proposal, ensuring that it is consistent with targets outlined in the 2007 law. Without a revised proposal, the EPA’s proposed rule would impose significant burdens and losses on rural American workers and the economies of their communities.

Click here to read the UAW’s full comment.

Today is the last day to submit comments to the EPA on the Renewable Fuel Standard. Stand with us to protect the only policy that’s helping us end our addiction to oil!

 

 

 

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United Auto Workers submits comment in support of the Renewable Fuel Standard

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