Sarah Solon

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Here's to Working Life for bluntly stating that marriage equality is a labor issue, because clearly when it comes to benefits, domestic partners face an unending uphill battle.

To keep tabs on the developments surrounding Adrianne Shropshire's post on Nichole Byrne Lau, the teacher recently fired from a charter school for inquiring about her fellow teachers rights for a fair pay scale and talking about the right to unionize, check out Edwize, who has compiled a definitive list of blogs covering the story.

Jordan on Confined Spaces blog reminds us that if you want to communicate an idea, a workplace safety idea for example, to teenagers, you need to reach them where they are. In a comparative piece displaying the differences between ways of getting workplace safety info to teenagers - OSHA's meek approach of passive information buried in its website vs. the better shock and awe tactics of its parallel organization up in Canada - Jordan argues that workplace rights only matter when workers know about them. It's clear that kids should know that they can refuse to do an unsafe job, given that "the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2004, more than 38,000 teen workers were injured on the job, and another 134 were fatally injured."

And speaking of Jordan, he has a new weekly column in FireDogLake. His latest delves into the lack of unions in charter schools, talking speicifcally about the plight of Nichole Byrne Lau and then arguing that the problem exists across the board: "Earlier this year, 7500 New Orleans teachers were fired, and all but four of the schools still exist in the city were transformed into charter schools which are exempt from union rules."

Emboldened keeps tabs on President Bush as he maneuvers over the immigration map. Ah, the power of political pressures and the unending delights of an election year.

In case living on the often ignored and under-served margins was getting a little too comfy, the Agonist reports on a new law that will require new applicants and current beneficiaries of Medicaid to present passports demonstrating their legal right to benefits. Citing the LA Times, this post claims that "As many of the 50 million people covered by Medicaid lack such documentation, and advocates and state officials feared that as many as 3 million could lose benefits." In a sobering statement of the truth, the blog claims that it's not immigrants who will be primarily affected by this new law, but that "Medicaid recipients so marginal to the system that they don't even have a birth certificate, are so marginal that no attention need be paid to any possibility of backlash from them."

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Posted at 6:53 AM, Jul 08, 2006 in Blog Stroll
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