Monthly Archives: May 2017

Senate Bill 153, which was approved for full Senate debate on a 4-2 vote, would increase the states minimum wage from the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 to $8 an hour starting Jan. 1, 2018, and $8.50 beginning Jan. 1, 2019.

Senate Bill 155 carried 3-1, with committee chairman Neil Riser opposing. It would enact the Louisiana Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would add language to existing law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.

Carter said the minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, though the cost of goods has continued to rise some by as much as 35 percent.

In a statement, Gov. John Bel Edwards expressed his support for the measure: If we say that family values are critical to our way of life here in Louisiana, its time to start valuing the hardworking families who contribute a great deal to our communities.

State Sen. Wesley Bishop, D-New Orleans, said he wished more legislators had the cojones to pass the minimum wage bill, which he said takes a wrong turn every session it is brought up. The vast majority of individuals who live here know that this is the right thing to do, Bishop said, citing a Louisiana Budget Project survey that found 70 percent of Louisianans support a higher state minimum wage. (Louisiana is one of five states that has no minimum wage law, instead following federal guidelines.)

The fight for $15 an hour in New Orleans

A march and protest in New Orleans demanding a $15 minimum wage joins a growing chorus among U.S. workers.

By Alex Woodward

The Latest

We have a crisis in Louisiana a crisis of systemic poverty, said former Rep. Melissa Flournoy, who chairs Louisiana Progress Action and spoke in support of the bill.

While Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, lamented that moving from $7.25 to $8 really just isnt enough, Sen. Barrow Peacock, R-Bossier City, fumed at a bill supporter who attacked Walmart for not providing its employees a living wage. I cant believe you would single out a corporate company that is very generous, Peacock said, arguing Walmart is the biggest contributor to the Louisiana Food Bank. Peacock voted against a favorable send to the Senate floor.

Louisiana Association of Business and Industry head Jim Patterson argued the minimum wage is an entry-level starting wage and is not intended to be a living wage.

Similarly, Dawn Starns of the National Federation of Independent Businesses said it is never a good time to increase the cost of doing business, which she said is what the minimum wage increase implies.

In his closing, Carter chided opponents who said his legislation might cripple the American system of free-market capitalism. Our American system was to build our country on free labor, Carter said. We dont call it slavery anymore, but we might as well.

Senate Bill 155 was a much quicker debate, with Dylan Waguespack from Louisiana Trans Advocates testifying on behalf of the proposed act. Waguespack, who is transgender and works in the Capitol, said he had to decide whether he should come out to the lawmakers he saw on a regular basis.

Nobody should have to leave in fear of being fired because of who they love or who they are, said Sarah Jane Guidry, director of the Forum for Equality.

Speaking in opposition, Will Hall argued Carters bill did not fit existing law because the U.S. Supreme Court determined sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic.

N.O. Council passes 'living wage' law

City contract workers to get $10.55 per hour

By Alex Woodward

I-10: News on the move

The rest is here:

Bills on minimum wage, LGBT non-discrimination move to full state Senate for consideration - bestofneworleans.com

When the issue is slavery, we shouldn't adjust our standards so low that we let a piece go unchallenged for being a memoir

Published 5:44 PM, May 18, 2017

Updated 7:43 PM, May 18, 2017

GRIPPING STORY. Philippine-born journalist Alex Tizon's posthumous story on her family's slave appears on the cover of the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic. Photo from The Atlantic

Alex Tizon, the Pulitzer-award winning journalist born in the Philippines, wrote a story about Eudocia Pulido, a woman he called "Lola," their family's slave for 56 years. It's "the story Alex was born to write," says his widow Melissa.

Tizon died at age 57 last March in their home in Oregon.

"My Family's Slave" is the cover story of the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic, touted by observers as the return of the magazine to its roots of being abolitionists of slavery.

I, however, find it difficult to share praises.

Tizon ends the story with a description of Lola's family as they receive her ashes. Tizon had traveled to Lola's hometown in Tarlac to return the dead Pulido, decades after holding her hostage in America.

Lola's relatives sobbed, of course, but just like a typical Filipino family, they prepared a feast.

"Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories," Tizon writes.

It concludes his well-written account of his Lola's life, the woman who served their family without being paid and the woman his parents subjected to verbal and emotional torment.

Slave

Lola was Tizon's grandfather's gift to his mother, who had just then turned 12. According to Tizon, his grandfather offered Lola "food and shelter" in exchange for "committing to care" for his mother if only to escape an unhappy life where she was set for an arranged marriage.

Lola became their maid since then, which continued until they moved to America where she would eventually become an illegal immigrant as the rest of the family became citizens.

The family never paid her, nor gave her any allowance. Tizon's parents were also cruel to her, described in detail in the article.

"Mom would come home and upbraid Lola for not cleaning the house well enough or for forgetting to bring in the mail. 'Didnt I tell you I want the letters here when I come home?' she would say in Tagalog, her voice venomous. 'Its not hard naman! An idiot could remember.' Then my father would arrive and take his turn. When Dad raised his voice, everyone in the house shrank. Sometimes my parents would team up until Lola broke down crying, almost as though that was their goal," Tizon writes.

His parents did not allow her to fly home to the Philippines when her parents died. His mother had refused to pay for dental checkup when she squirmed with toothache.

"She used to get angry whenever Lola felt ill. She didnt want to deal with the disruption and the expense, and would accuse Lola of faking or failing to take care of herself," Tizon writes of his mother.

And so, that the story ends with a light feast angers me. For me, the real story is what was left out, what follows that feast in Lola's home in Tarlac.

What does Lola's family think of her fate, or of the Tizon family? Why had they stayed quiet? Could they have fought for Lola? My guess is maybe not.

I grew up in that province, I grew up immersed in the kind of poverty that makes it bearable for a mother to give up a child, a sibling to give up a sibling because it's the only way they have a chance.

I grew up immersed in the kind of culture that glorifies being in America. I wonder whether Lola's sister thought it better that she was living the American dream at least, never mind that she doesn't send money home. I wonder whether Lola had told them she was not being paid. I wonder what she had told them at all.

I am angry that the story ends in Lola's relatives feeling light and ready to eat. The story should have ended openly.

Off the top of my head, I ask: What are the laws, whether Philippine or American, on human trafficking that had been violated in the unpaid employment of Lola? Would Lola's relatives be able to claim compensation from the living relatives of the Tizon family?

Editorial choices

According to Jeffrey Goldberg, Tizon's editor in The Atlantic, Tizon had sent the story to the magazine before his death. He never found out of the magazine's decision to put him on cover.

We will never be able to tell whether Tizon would have edited his writing, stuck to it, or how he would react to the contoversies that his story has stirred.

So we are left with only this piece to analyze. And in the piece, there is a sense of justification. Tizon devoted a huge chunk to describing the good things he had done for Lola when his parents were already gone.

Tizon flew her back to the Philippines. By then his own family had started paying her handsomely $200 a week, he says. Then he followed her to the Philippines and asked "You want to go home?" Lola said yes.

Tizon then follows that with stories of a happy Lola, the happy family vacations, the room with word-puzzle booklets.

It doesn't talk about how Lola must have felt to realize she had been robbed of her home, forced to go back to America because it's now the only place she knows.

Instead, Tizon talks about the garden she returns to in America, the "roses and tulips and every kind of orchid" and that she "spent whole afternoons tending it."

Why did she love gardening? In that chunk of the story, Tizon writes about always reminding Lola she was no longer a slave. But why did Lola become a compulsive cleaner, even when Tizon had made it clear she was no longer required to clean? Maybe Tizon had asked, but he doesn't tell us.

Tizon's widow also reveals on Facebook that the black and white portrait of Lola was taken several years ago. It had been a longtime plan to turn Lola into this story why wasn't she interviewed, why wasn't her voice given more prominence?

Some people say it is for Tizon to write this story in any way he wanted, that this was his memoir, his tale to tell. If so, then let his editorial choices speak of his intentions.

Perhaps the latter part of the story where he describes Lola's happy last years is his way of asking for forgiveness. Forgiveness from himself, or from Lola, or from Lola's relatives who now have to confront what I could only imagine is a turbulence of emotions having to read what became of Lola's life in the Land of the Free.

Casting judgment

Every apocalypse is personal, a friend likes to say. "Don't be so righteous," some readers exclaim on social media.

Perhaps it wouldn't be fair to cast so much judgment on Tizon and his family. We do not know their circumstances. However, when he decided to write the piece, he had given us the readers the right to his story. It is no longer just his.

And as parts of the story, it is just right, even necessary, that we ask questions.

"Why did you wait that long to help?"

"Did you not earn enough to pay Lola yourself?"

"How far did you go other than teaching her to drive a car to try to help her?"

"Did you say sorry to Lola's relatives when you met them?"

"What story did you tell authorities when you applied for her amnesty?"

"When you 'searched for your Asian self' when writing your book, what did you realize about your roots that are in conflict with how your family treated Lola?"

Had Tizon not been part of this family and was tipped to this story, I would like to believe that as a journalist, he would have also wanted to ask these questions. It's just what journalists do. And it's what the readers need.

Which is why I believe that Tizon should have gotten somebody else to write his story. When The Atlantic allowed him to write it, they allowed for a singular view on an issue so complex. An outsider would have asked the hard questions, it would have afforded us a more objective view into the Tizon family and Tizon himself his inner struggles and how he resolved it as time passed.

An outsider would have exacted some accountability.

Most importantly, an outsider would have talked to some of Lola's relatives. Are you not interested to find out how they really feel outside of Tizon's description of them in that feast in Tarlac?

Because at this point, with Lola dead, their voices are the voices of justice, not Tizon's. And justice is what stories are for.

"Take this piece as it is, which is a memoir, and not an investigative piece," says someone else.

When the issue is slavery, which resonates around the world especially to Filipinos who send millions of our own for domestic jobs abroad, we shouldn't ever adjust our standards so low that we let a piece go unchallenged "because it's a memoir."

There is also a cultural justification when Tizon refers to our pre-colonial history of owning slaves.

Then he adds: "Traditions persisted under different guises, even after the U.S. took control of the islands in 1898. Today even the poor can have utusans or katulongs (helpers) or kasambahays (domestics), as long as there are people even poorer. The pool is deep."

A fellow journalist defends Tizon as a "person who represents the marginalized, the immigrant, the victim of a feudal society."

We conveniently forget that Tizon is the son of a lawyer and a doctor and afforded education from no less than Stanford. Just on that he's already a cut above the rest of Filipino immigrants in America.

It doesn't take away his struggles and hard work, but to afford him the narrative privileges of being minority just because he was born to the ethnic minority is also cultural misappropriation.

And in any case, whether he's Asian, or white, or black, he was complicit to slavery, and that in itself is wrong, no matter the race.

I struggled to write this because it feels betraying my own: Tizon is a Filipino, a journalist and an immigrant. I should be empathetic.

But I'm choosing to take a hard look at the mirror and recognize that this is my problem too, that this is our problem too.

Have we treated our house helps in the most humane way we can? Are we paying them the minimum wage? Are we giving them statutory benefits? Are we allowing them 8 hours off daily, two days off weekly? All of which, by the way, are provided for in the Kasambahay Law.

This is the conversation now, the conversation that The Atlantic evaded when they decided they were going to go for a beautiful memoir, instead of a hard-hitting piece.

"I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench, and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where shed been born," is Tizon's final sentence.

Lola is home, so it's now up to us to continue the conversation. To stop would be to betray her memory, and maybe even Tizon's.

Because the story sure should not end with a light-hearted feast, because if Lola had been your lola, would you have been able to eat in peace? Rappler.com

See more here:

The Atlantic's 'My Family's Slave' should not end with a feast - Rappler (blog)

Thousands of girls from all over Ethiopia are trafficked to Addis Ababa to work in domestic service, some ending up in conditions comparable to slavery

By Tom Gardner

ADDIS ABABA, May 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - It was the promise of education in Addis Ababa that led 11- year-old Eleni to take the fateful decision to leave home.

The young girl from a small town in Ethiopia's Amhara region, packed up and left for the capital in the company of her older neighbour, who said that her relatives there would welcome her into their home, pay her 200 Ethiopian birr ($8) a month to look after their young children, and send her to school.

"I thought I would enjoy Addis," said Eleni, tearfully. "The woman told me fancy things about it. I thought everything would be okay."

But it wasn't. Despite the promises, Eleni was never paid by her neighbour's relatives, and she was never sent to school. She slept on a mattress in the living room, was barely fed, and suffered abuse at the hands of her employers.

"I had to do everything," she said, including cleaning, cooking, and looking after the family's young children."

After two months living with the family, Eleni, who did not want to give her real name, fled - walking the streets of Addis Ababa until she was found and taken to the local police station.

Her story is far from unusual: she is one of thousands of girls from all over Ethiopia who are trafficked to Addis Ababa to work in domestic service, some ending up in conditions comparable to slavery.

More than 400,000 Ethiopians are estimated to be trapped in slavery, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index by human rights group Walk Free Foundation.

The industry is fed by one of the world's highest rates of human trafficking. Each year, upwards of 20,000 Ethiopian children, some as young as 10, are sold by their parents, according to Humanium, a children's charity.

It is a trade driven by poverty.

Despite a state-led industrial push that has transformed Ethiopia, known for famine, into one of Africa's fastest-growing economies, a third of its 99 million citizens still survive on less than $1.90 a day - the World Bank's measure of extreme poverty.

Addis Ababa's population is now thought to be close to 4 million, and growing at a rate of nearly 4 percent per year propelled by land shortages which force rural families to send their children to the capital to earn wages to send back home.

A World Bank study in 2010 found that 37 percent of Addis Ababa's residents were internal migrants, the vast majority of whom were drawn by the city's educational or employment opportunities. Wages in the cities are higher than in rural areas, sometimes as much as double.

But young children in particular often fall victim to exploitation.

"Deception is an important part of trafficking," said Lynn Kay, country director of Retrak Ethiopia, an organisation that rescues street children in Addis Ababa and reunites them with their families.

"Children are lured with the promise of a better education in Addis."

"NO FOOD"

Though Eleni dreamt of a good education in Addis Ababa, her family - a mother and stepfather, who works as a farmer, as well as four brothers and three sisters - wanted her to find employment.

Before being sent to the capital she spent two months working for another family in a town nearer her home in Amhara, where she was babysitter to a two-year-old boy.

But the work was hard and she missed her schoolso she ran away and returned to her family, only to be sent to Addis Ababa when it became clear that her parents could not afford to look after her.

"Things weren't as I expected when I arrived back," Eleni told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "There was no food and my mother was having another child."

Under Ethiopian law, it is illegal for a child below the age of 14 years to be engaged in wage labour. But laws against child labour, especially domestic service, are rarely enforced.

"The problem is that the whole economy of a city like Addis Ababa is dependent on being able to access domestic labour - so that parents can go off to work," said Kay.

Whereas most of the street boys that Retrak rescues are runaways who come to Addis Ababa voluntarily, girls are more often victims of human trafficking.

Despite a wide-ranging anti-trafficking law introduced by the Ethiopian government in 2015, the U.S. State Department's 2016 Trafficking in Persons report found that girls as young as eight were working in brothels around Addis Ababa's central market.

The report also noted that while the government was making efforts to curb cross-border trafficking, there was "little evidence of investigation or prosecution of sex trafficking or internal labor trafficking."

Part of the problem is that "traffickers are often respected members of the community," said Kay. Parents pay them to take their children to Addis Ababa and find them employment.

"It can be a very open, public thing." she said. "They are often known as 'brokers' and it is almost like it is an acceptable job."

Some, like Eleni's neighbour, are close to the family.

"But what happens is that these children are brought to Addis Ababa and then abandoned," said Kay. "They can come to Addis Ababa and just disappear."

(Editing by Ros Russell.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Read more:

FEATURE-Trafficked into slavery: The dark side of Addis Ababa's growth - Thomson Reuters Foundation