Missoula, Montana residents may have reclaimed their water from private corporations, but the city of Cascade Locks, Oregon still plans to let Nestlé haul away water for about one cent for every 40 gallons of water, and then sell that water for more than 100 times that amount. Nice work if you can get it! The Cascade Locks City Council would give up its rights to Oxbow Springs water for the promise of 50 created jobs and the promise that Nestlé will double the city's property tax revenue. I'd say it's nice that Nestlé will pay property taxes, if I thought fulfilling your obligation as a corporate citizen was all that impressive, or didn't know that the public will have to pay for all the infrastructure needed to move water in and out of town. Nestlé plays dumb, saying it needs the water merely to "respond() to consumer demand." Respond to consumer demand? What was the consumer demand for bottled water, exactly, before corporations started bottling it? More likely Nestlé means "our CEO's bank account's demand." Sum of Us helps you tell the Governor of Oregon to block Nestlé's plans and protect public water.
Meanwhile, corporations promote wellness among their employees, and sometimes give financial incentives to get their workers healthy. Toward that end they'll ask questions about their lifestyle and medical history -- but some bosses try to find out if their workers are pregnant before they're ready to announce it, and thus get an opportunity to discriminate against those pregnant employees. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (or EEOC) to clarify that a boss can't force women to share the news of their pregnancies before they're ready to do so. The EEOC is apparently proposing to regulate corporate wellness programs, but their proposals don't actually address pregnancy in this manner, and they should. For as Noam Chomsky instructed us all those years ago, corporations are fundamentally anti-family, because some family matters (like pregnancies, illnesses and accidents) aren't as predictable as corporate bottom-liners would like. CEO attitudes toward things like paid sick leave are changing, but pregnant workers still need protection.
And speaking of paid sick leave, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to co-sponsor H.R. 1489/S. 736, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would, as you may know, provide working families paid family medical leave for up to 12 weeks, at an amount not exceeding two-thirds of whatever they're making when they're working. And imagine that, in countries that provide fathers with paternity leave, women face less wage discrimination. It's not that big a surprise if you think about it, I suppose. Remember, also, that a 0.2% payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "2 percent," "liberal" media) would fund the FAMILY Act, and the only people who could oppose that are the NO NEW TAXEZ EVAH!!!!!! crowd. Who don't get all the say about everything, at least not in my America. And for the fool who reflexively complains "they'll just pass the cost onto their customers": if they did that (which they won't, for the simple reason that the 0.2% tax would be split among employee and employer), that would raise the cost of a $10 dinner at Wendy's to $10.02. Complaining about that would just about qualify you as a whiner.
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