I've long complained about farmworkers being left out of the worker protections the rest of us enjoy under the law, but H.R. 6230/S. 3131, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, would begin to fix that, by repealing those parts of the Fair Labor Standards Act that exempt farmworkers from minimum wage and maximum work laws. When your Tea Party uncle squeals BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH SMALL BIZNINZZIZ!!!!!, remind him that Secs. 2(a) and 2(c)(1)(B) and 2(c)(2)(B) all give farms with fewer than 25 workers three more years to get their act together; when he squeals BUT WHATZ ABOUT TEH FAMILY FARMZ!!!!!, merely point him to Sec. 2(b)(1), which allows arrangements between actual family farm owners and their immediate family members to continue. All we need now is a bill that'll let farmworkers unionize, and we'll have justice! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair wage and hour standards for farm workers by passing the Fairness for Farm Workers Act.
Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell the Virginia Department of Corrections to release Kevin "Rashid" Johnson from solitary confinement and to stop moving him to other prisons out of state. Why? Because Mr. Johnson has spent much of his last 30 years in prison exposing abuses by prison administrators and staff -- which means he's also spent much of his time getting threatened, beaten up, and put in solitary for no good reason, not to mention getting moved to prisons in three other states between 2012 and 2018. All without actually charging him with anything! Seriously, if we want prisoners to do better for themselves and for their communities, then we shouldn't terrorize them when they actually do better for themselves and for their communities. But the Virginia Department of Corrections seems determined to teach Mr. Johnson (and everyone else!) that the only thing that matters is the state's self-interest. And that's not what a sane and moral society does.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to scuttle its proposal to radically reduce the amount of good science it can use to make policy decisions, then Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that. You know the drill: the EPA says it only wants to use "publicly-available" scientific research to make decisions about pollution in our air and water, but if you saw the words "publicly-available" and said well, that doesn't necessarily mean best, good for you. In this case, "publicly-available" kinda means the opposite of good -- plenty of good scientific research isn't "publicly-available" because it has good Americans' private health into and medical records in it. What would the end result be, then? More pollution, more health care issues, and a lot more money flying into fossil fuel CEO pockets so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Why must it be this way?
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