Day 246- Labor Day

Dear Mr. President,

Thanks for declaring Monday Labor Day. I know you didn't make up the Holiday, and the Presidential Proclamation is almost entirely ceremonial. But thank you. You might think that, as a member of America's workforce, I appreciate the holiday you've proclaimed for us. I guess the part of me that values symbolism and whimsy does, sort of. The rest of me just remembers that this is pushing back payday an extra 24 hours since the payroll department and the bank all have a day off. Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge my cubicle-bound brethren their 3-day weekend; just because I am a part-time employee and not qualified for a paid holiday doesn't mean every one else shouldn't have a special weekend. My real problem with Labor Day is that it reminds me how truly sad the current state of the American worker actually is.

A study conducted in 2007 found that the US is the only country out of the top 21 richest that does not require by law paid vacation time for workers.

As a result, 1 in 4 U.S. workers do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays. The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays in the U.S. is particularly acute for lower-wage and part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses.

I'm not an expert or anything, but if we all had paid time off, wouldn't we have more time to stay healthy, recover from illness or injury, connect with our families, raise our children, travel, shop, learn, and be creative? I think most people need more of most of those things in their lives and our society would definitely benefit from more of these activities. Also, if workers were mandated paid time off, more workers would be needed to do the same amount of work and wouldn't that lower unemployment?

I do understand that if the Federal Government can't secure health insurance for every American worker, paid time off might be a fantastic stretch of the imagination. While I have had jobs with paid vacations, this was a benefit only applicable to select "full-time" employees, even when many designated "part-time" worked as many or more hours. Starbucks is the notable exception to this and I think their entire benefit package for part-time workers is truly one of the most commendable examples from an American company of its size. I think that Starbucks grasps something that more companies might benefit from understanding: employees are often the best customers. Keeping employees healthy and sane and comfortable benefits the employer, and it benefits society as a whole.

Maybe it's just my resentment at not getting a three day weekend. Maybe asking for paid time off is unforgivably socialist of me in a time when you're getting called much worse for doing far less. I am grateful for the victories secured by workers of this country and they are worth remembering. But, in a time when the desperation and fear of so many workers just barely scraping by is exploited to increase the profit margins and bonuses of the rich executives, when so many of us lack health insurance or even paid sick time and are constantly told to just feel lucky we have jobs at all, maybe asking us to celebrate on Monday is asking too much.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey

Day 218- Spain, Haiti and China

From College Humor:




Dear Mr. President,

Apparently the First Lady's trip to Spain is upsetting some people, and it is no surprise that Rush Limbaugh is one of them. He is, predictably, spewing his usual racist nonsense about something as silly as a First Lady going on vacation. This from the man who paid a million dollars to have Elton John sing at his latest wedding. I'm glad that Limbaugh chimed in, because his contributions to public discourse usually remind thinking people just how ridiculous some of the accusations by the right actually are.

What do you think about Wyclef Jean running for President of Haiti? I suppose I don't know enough about Haitian politics to have an informed opinion, but my initial reaction is that a nation so devastated by natural disaster and economic calamity should probably have a more experienced leader. On the topic of Haiti, tonight I heard some news of a woman I attended high school with, Katie Zook. She was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building after the earthquake hit. She's recovered now, and going back to Haiti soon, to continue working as a teacher. Seeing the courage it must require of her to return to a place still so damaged after survivng such a tragedy has got to give a person hope for the future.

I've also heard two rather disturbing stories out of China. The first is about China's policy of locking the poor up in their own neighborhoods during the night. The second is about the 600,000 Chinese workers who die from overwork in manufacturing every year.
Both stories illustrate, to me, the dangers of a society where wealthy corporate interests are placed above the value of a person (even, or especially, a poor person.) What is most disturbing is how much the purchasing habits of the American people contribute to this system. Our demand for cheap goods has created this tragedy, and we continue to support it almost unconsciously. Recently, you offered three words to frame our best hope for economic recovery; made in America. Don't Americans have a moral imperative, as well as an economic interest, in making sure the good they buy are, whenever possible, produced by fairly paid workers in safe conditions? I don't think that most Americans want to support a system that contributes to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, or the extreme poverty of many workers. There has to be a way to wake people up to the human cost of our cheap imported goods.

Anyway, Mr. President, I wanted to make a cleaner connection between all of this, but I don't know that I can. It's something about our priorities, about celebrity worship and service to others and putting our own immediate gratification away for the greater good. Maybe these stories aren't connected anywhere outside of my own mind, but I hope that people wake up and realize that obsessing over how many Secret Service agents are working to keep the First Lady safe is not fair or productive to complain about. There are so many terrible things happening in this world, and we ought to stop worrying about appearances and ephemera. I hope that the Rush Limbaughs of the world don't frustrate you into forgetting about the Katie Zooks. I think, at heart, most Americans are good people like Katie who are concerned about preventing or easing the suffering of others. We don't always go about it the right way, and we don't always make the important connections between our own decisions and their consequences, but I think that slowly we will change for the better.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey

Day 183- All at once

****Update for those of you who don't read my facebook or Chev's: Chev is totally fine and safe, the Peace Corps volunteers are only being evacuated from the Northern regions of Burkina Faso, and so they will be reassigned to southern villages that are safer. Yay for good news!

Dear Mr. President,

I have a soft spot for certain "celebrity" chefs. Jamie Oliver. Molly Wizenberg and, perhaps ironically, given his position on all things vegetarian, Anthony Bourdain. While at work, I glanced through a few passages from Bourdain's latest book, Medium Raw, in which he expresses his inexplicable mix of dislike and respect for Alice Waters. Bourdain, who himself insists upon fresh, organic food for his own family, has several problems with the way Waters has advocated these practices for all Americans. His first problem is with the reality of modern farming, which he, perhaps correctly, insists could not be simultaneously organic, sustainable, and affordable. His next contention, that few Americans want to do the hard work that kind of farming requires and must therefor rely upon immigrant labor or machines to do it for them, reminded me of two articles I'd stumbled upon lately. The first was a Freakonomics piece by James McWilliams on fair trade coffee and economic reality, and the second was an interview with a United Farm Workers of America VP Erik Nicholson discussing agricultural practices, in which Nicholson asserts that the convergence of sustainable small farms, labor and immigration issues make any real progress politically problematic.

Reading these pieces and contemplating the many ways that reality frustrates idealism, I realized that this issue is more than just labor and immigration and sustainability; it's healthcare and our energy future and our environmental policy. What we eat, how we produce our food, will involve and impact every major (and especially contentious) domestic policy issue we face. I was once again reminded of how overwhelmed I felt in Costco the other day, sure that all of my good intentions were for nothing. I don't see how we can possibly remake our entire agricultural system in the image of Waters' utopian ideal, but neither do I have quite so cynical a perspective as Bourdain. We may not have a surplus of Americans willing to return to agricultural labor, at least not the way it is now or has been done in the past, but it isn't as though all Americans are strangers to hard labor. I, for one, (and I doubt very much that I'm alone in this) would much rather have tended fields or picked fruit than toiled away as a food service employee for all the years I spent in unskilled positions. The problem is simultaneous change. We need more people to grow food that is safer and more nutritious, for themselves and for their communities, and to do that we need more people to work in agriculture, and to do that we need to have better wages and working conditions, which means the use of pesticides and factory farming practices would have to change. Immigration, food prices, import and export practices, the environment; everything would be affected. Everything would have to change at once for any of it to work, and I've lived too long to believe that we're capable of that.

So will organic, sustainably grown food continue to be a luxury for the rich, or favorably located, or fervently committed, forever subject to the economic realities that link scaling up these practices with the degradation of the very principles they were founded upon? I want to believe that we can reform ourselves, but I don't know that I, or you, or even Alice Waters, has the solution. In the last few days, I've seen major discussions on healthcare, immigration, energy and environmental policies from the White House, and so I know that your administration still has faith that we can make the necessary changes in all of these areas. For myself, I don't imagine that the solution lies in regressing to the practices that once sustained us; our society has become far too urban, far too disconnected from the land our food comes from to ever fully revert back to the kind of farming I associate with John Steinbeck's novels. I think our best hope is yet to be discovered, but that it will require us all to involve ourselves, however unappealing some may find it, in the sources of our food and to demand better conditions for the people who provide it for us.

Anyway, on Monday I'll be putting myself to the test and see how well my rhetoric stands up against reality. More on that, to come.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey