So refreshing to read of a government that takes this stuff seriously!

[the_future_modernes]

Liberia tackles sexual violence head on

MONROVIA, Liberia (WOMENSENEWS)--Korlu, a young mother of two, lives on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital here.

A high school dropout, Korlu, who declined to give her last name for safety reasons, says when she was a teen, she became pregnant.

"My parents put me out of their house because they couldn't bear the shame of me getting pregnant," she says.
She says when she was 17 she moved in with the baby's father and he began to beat her. Korlu says she accepted the beatings until she heard women talking on the radio one day about how sexual and gender-based violence was not acceptable.

"It was tough," Korlu says. "They were speaking directly about me."

The women on the radio were from the Liberia Women Media Action Committee, which promotes women's rights through the media. She says the radio program encouraged her to report domestic violence to the police.

"Before my husband would beat me and I would accept it," she says. "But nowadays, I report my husband to the police when he beats on me or tries to beat me because I know it is domestic violence. He doesn't beat me anymore," she says with a smile.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female president, has been proactive about fighting sexual and gender-based violence. The Liberian government and the United Nations jointly committed to reducing gender-based violence by 30 percent by the end of 2011.

The Ministry of Gender and Development also has a special unit dedicated to tackling sexual and gender-based violence, the Gender-Based Violence Task Force, which aims to coordinate violence prevention and response.MORE

This is what happens when unions are destroyed...

[the_future_modernes]

via ontd_political

All work and No pay: The Great Speedup

Webster's defines speedup as "an employer's demand for accelerated output without increased pay," and it used to be a household word. Bosses would speed up the line to fill a big order, to goose profits, or to punish a restive workforce. Workers recognized it, unions (remember those?) watched for and negotiated over it—and, if necessary, walked out over it.

But now we no longer even acknowledge it—not in blue-collar work, not in white-collar or pink-collar work, not in economics texts, and certainly not in the media (except when journalists gripe about the staff-compacted-job-expanded newsroom). Now the word we use is "productivity," a term insidious in both its usage and creep. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don't you want to be a productive member of society? Pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that US productivity (a.k.a. economic output per hour worked)consistently leads the world. Yes, year after year, Americans wring even more value out of each minute on the job than we did the year before. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Except what's good for American business isn't necessarily good for Americans. We're not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory.

MORE

The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret Uh...this article will make you feel sick. You should probably not be eating, at least.

First Hormel gutted the union. Then it sped up the line. And when the pig-brain machine made workers sick, they got canned

SINCE 1989, the line speed at QPP had been steadily increasing—from 750 heads per hour when the plant opened to 1,350 per hour in 2006, though the workforce barely increased. To speed production, the company installed a conveyor system and humming automatic knives throughout the plant, reducing skilled tasks to single motions. Workers say nearly everyone suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome or some repetitive stress injury, but by October 2007, there were signs of something else. Workers from QPP's kill floor were coming to Carole Bower, the plant's occupational health nurse, with increasingly familiar complaints: numbness and tingling in their extremities, chronic fatigue, searing skin pain. Bower started noticing workers so tender that they struggled with the stairs to the top-floor locker rooms, high above the roar of the factory line.


Six workers were referred to Richard Schindler, a doctor at the Austin Medical Center who'd first seen Matthew Garcia. Garcia had returned a second time to the brain machine, worked four-hour days, then six hours—but his symptoms soon returned. He began falling on the plant floor, his legs numb and motionless under him. Schindler found that Garcia and another brain-machine operator were the most advanced cases. Besides Garcia and the six workers referred by Bower, Schindler had seen another five men and women with similar symptoms—all workers at QPP. Schindler believed they were suffering from something like the rare disorder Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP)—death of the peripheral nerves caused by damage to the fatty neural covering known as the myelin sheath. He emailed a group of neurologists at the Mayo Clinic for advice. MORE

USA! USA! USA! USA!

Capitalism for the wins!!!Not.