The California legislature is now considering the Household Worker Equity Bill (AB2536). The purpose of this bill is to provide equitable employment benefits for household workers such as equal overtime protection, protection of health and safety, and accountability for employers hire household workers. Domestic workers are currently exempted from the overtime provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and they are also excluded from state Labor Codes.

According to the California Domestic Worker Project, over half the domestic workers who work overtime do not receive overtime pay. 16% had faced non-payment (such as a bad check), 22% had been paid less than agreed, 9% had been sexually harassed, and 20% had been insulted and threatened on the job. Live-in workers are highly exploited since employers tend to disregard boundaries between working and personal time, and workers often have no place to go if they want to leave. Most workers are Latina, immigrant women with families to support.

If you live in California, you can help further the cause of social justice by letting your elected representatives know you support fair treatment of domestic workers!

The ancient nomadic tribe of the Nabateans (who resided in the area of modern Jordan) understood a few things that apparently went right by the denizens of the modern world:

They live in the open air….It is their custom neither to plant grain, set out any fruit-bearing tree, use wine, nor construct any house….They follow this custom because they believe that those who possess these things are, in order to retain the use of them, easily compelled by the powerful to do their bidding….They are exceptionally fond of freedom…
Diodorus Siculus (c. 80-20 BCE)

This will be very much on my mind while I review all my bills tonight. People are enslaved in proportion to what they are obliged to shell out.

One obvious subject for a blog that focuses on rankism is the ongoing attempts of fundamentalists to subtract human rights from a whole category of people - those who profess to be (or are perceived to be) gay. However, I’m just going to redirect people to the Intrepid Liberal Journal, which got there first last week. The only thing I have to add is that identifying a stable social structure with the traditions of a particular theology is the epitome of religious rankism. The only people who push for theocracy are the ones who envision that they themselves will benefit from it. Beware the people who actively seek a pretext to rule over others.

When black children are bullied by other black children, do administrators disregard the violence as normal behavior?

A recent Supreme Court decision determined that a white manager could be sued for referring to black employees as boys. While the legal system is focusing on the racial slur, perhaps this is also an opportunity to consider whether it’s appropriate for managers to reduce any subordinate employee to the dependent and disregardable status of a child.

For decades the U.S. has struggled to find a balance between the sanctity of the family and protecting women from domestic abuse. Imagine the difficulties faced by immigrant women, who aren’t protected by the same laws as U.S. citizens. Immigrant women may also face language and cultural barriers that discourage them from seeking help. Furthermore, they can easily be threatened with deportation or a bureaucratic break up of their family.

While the corporate exploitation of immigrants has garnered much public attention, there seems to be very little concern about domestic abuse. Part of the problem is that these woman are ensconced in the “private sphere” of the family, and thus they have no voice that can be heard in civil society (beyond the occasional chivalrous journalist or charitable organization that offers to speak for them). They are trapped in their Nobody status until the police come to process the handling of a dead body. Only through death and red tape do they actually become a Somebody: documented in a file, registered in a database, and preserved as a statistic.

What is it about facial differences that provoke people to violence?

Earlier today Oakland minister Byron Williams wrote an article about racism and rankism for Huffington Post. The article describes how a manager of a Jacksonville, Florida, restaurant saw Reverend Williams as an opportunity to impose his will over another human being, and this led to the manager’s demand that Williams remove his hat.

Reverend Williams observed the manager’s maneuver might have had as much to do with rank as with race. The manager sized up Williams at a glance and relegated him to an inferior rank, someone to be ordered around rather than served as a valued customer. No matter how much effort we put into educating each other about racism, there will never be a way to judge how much race factors into mundane little power plays like this. However, if we critique the blatant rankism of the incident, perhaps we can curb some of the racism as well.

I wanted to leave a comment on the article, but unfortunately comments were locked by the time I got there. A couple of the early commenters, who seem to have been reacting to the article without really reading it, pointed out that it’s standard courtesy to remove your hat in the South. I find this to be a relic of rankism. The Bible uses covering the head as a sign of submission (particularly for women), so making demands about what people can or cannot wear on their heads hearkens back to the Biblical framework for subjugation to authority. This implication could hardly be lost on Reverend Williams. Moreover, insisting that people remove their hats indoors might stigmatize people who have good personal reasons for wearing their hat (such as wishing to avoid calling attention to cancer). In his article, Reverend Williams imparts one of those little human stories with big implications for the human condition. I’m glad he chose to share it.

In Montana, a group opposed the school system’s implementation of an anti-bullying policy because it would equally apply to kids who are perceived to be gay.

A major economics forum in Saudi Arabia kicked off this year’s conference with a focus on the prospects for women. The U.S. should be included in the broad observation that “women everywhere are not getting their equal share of wages, healthcare or education”.