COLUMNS/INEQUALITY
Menstruation and the right to work pain-free

Guaman Worship
Wednesday, June 1, 2022

The recently approved reform in Spain that enables temporary disability due to disabling menstrual periods meant that the effects of menstruation on women's lives starred for the first time in gatherings and debates in the media, breaking the taboo of the issue, not only in Spain but in different parts of the world. The installation of this conversation in Latin America brings up the lack of legal guarantees that women experience in the workplace, which make the application of regulations like this unfeasible.

On May 17, the Government of Spain took a historic step in terms of equality and non-discrimination. Thanks to the impulseof the Ministry of Equality headed by Unidas Podemos, Spain will have the most advanced legislation regulating the right to sexual and reproductive health in Europe. To this end, the Government gave the green light to the regulatory processing of a reform that will expand the right of women to decide on their own body, strengthen sex education, recognize surrogacy as a form of violence against women and regulate menstrual health in labor terms.

One of the most discussed issues regarding this reform has been the regulation of a temporary disability derived from disabling rules, opening a debate in political and even union spheres regarding whether the proposed regulation can end up aggravating discrimination in labor contracting. Like this

For days we have heard how the set of pains that women and menstruating people suffer were listed and that include abdominal cramps, nausea, fatigue, feeling faint, headaches, back pain and general malaise or migraines. With all this once a month and 480 times throughout our lives we go to work with disabling pain, generating a "presenteeism" (work in non-optimal conditions) that far exceeds absenteeism and that has a considerable impact on occupational health and productivity of companies.

Although it is a situation that half of the world's population can go through, menstrual health is maintained in almost all countries of the world in an area covered by stigma, shame and stereotypes. Neither labour law nor social security rules have specifically addressed these situations. On the contrary, occupational health policies were usually developed through supposedly "neutral" standards (based on the experience of male workers and ignoring the different reality of women's health) or health and safety policies at work that considered women from a protectionist perspective, as a weak group and focused on the protection of pregnancy and maternity. Menstruation, as a situation to be considered per se, has been little present in legal debates.

In fact, some of the previous regulatory experiences have yielded poor results. Specifically, Japan passed a law on menstruation at work in 1947; South Korea grants women one day of menstruation leave and Taiwan three days; in Indonesia two. In addition, similar policies have been adopted in some provinces of China. Several reports point out the difficulties of implementing these related norms and their relationship with discriminatory practices or even violations of women's rights, all of which is probably related to flawed regulation and business malpractice. Some authors, in view of the poor or poor results, described these practices as "benevolent sexism".

The debate in other countries, such as France, the United Kingdom or Australia, has opened up in line with the experiences in various companies that have implemented work organization models compatible with the protection of menstrual health (including also the periods of menopause) and that report constant success rates both from the point of view of increasing productivity and improving the well-being of people who take advantage of these permissions. For its part, the Italian parliament debated in April 2016 a proposed law entitled "Establishment of permits for women suffering from dysmenorrhea".

The proposal, which was not approved, contemplated the right not to go to work a maximum of three days a month to women who suffer from dysmenorrhea that prevents the performance of ordinary functions of daily work, a condition that had to be verified in an annual medical certificate. This "menstrual leave" would be covered by the state with a benefit equal to the salary. In addition, some collective agreements, in Spain or Argentina, regulate permits recoverable by workers, with little success.

The Spanish proposal is undoubtedly the most complete and focuses on the protection of menstrual health in the field of employment contract, as a right within occupational health. To this end, the right to a special temporary disability is recognized for women with painful menstruations that incapacitate them to work, without a maximum of days as indicated in the mandatory medical report, in charge of the social security, paid from the first day of leave and without prior contribution requirements. There will therefore be no economic burden on the entrepreneur.

Given the regulation of this sick leave due to menstruation, it has been stated that focusing on how menstruation affects the ability to work of a good number of women during certain days of the month would mean recognizing a weakness and could imply a business reaction, a kind of backlash (through which we have already traveled) that could deepen the preference for male hiring.

To rule out or minimize this possibility, it is necessary to remember that measures such as this cannot be isolated legal devices but must be combined with a good policy of equality in terms of rights linked to care, and particularly to maternity and paternity, based on co-responsibility; a strong anti-discrimination regulatory structure, which punishes sexist behaviour at work; a powerful pedagogical work that shows among the business community that equality in companies is a right (and it is also positive for productivity) and the commitment of social dialogue for its proper development. That menstrual health enters companies requires that the State promote these devices and that the business community internalizes the need to protect it.

The proposal of regulations such as the Spanish one is per se a huge step forward in the legal, symbolic and cultural that allows to make visible and verbalize a reality and a need historically overshadowed. It opens a path that can be an example for Latin America, accompanying the steps forward in thedecriminalization of abortion and the processes towards the recognition of equality and the prohibition of discrimination in labor relations. Obviously, the obstacles to overcome are considerable in many respects. In our region, co-responsibility is scarce (women's unpaid work or care time is much longer than the time spent by men) and this weighs on female recruitment andperpetuates inequalities.

In addition, it is well known that, in Latin America, people who work without the legal guarantees linked to the employment contract (the so-called informal work) represent more than half of the labor force, which makes it difficult to apply measures such as the one mentioned. In addition, the permanence of the stigma and taboo regarding menstruation, which in popular slang is still identified with a disease, is equally clear.

Fortunately, thepower of the feminist movement in the region is allowing the normative advances that make us walk towards the achievement of a more just society, where no one has to go to work suffering from disabling pain and where menstruation is part of everyday life, free of stereotypes, stigmas and discrimination.


* Adoración Guamán is a political scientist and jurist. Professor at the University of Valencia. Coordinator of the CLACSO WG 'Lex Mercatoria, Human Rights and Democracy'. Founding member of CLAJUD (Latin American Council of Justice and Democracy).

*www.latinoamerica21.com, a plural media committed to the dissemination of critical opinion and truthful information about Latin America. Follow us on @Latinoamerica21

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Summit in L.A. Showcases Biden’s Central America Problem


Central America, in Brief: Days before the summit in Los Angeles, the U.S. is short on friends in the Northern Triangle. Giammattei, once Biden's ally of last resort, said he will not attend amid an open feud over the reelection of the corrupt attorney general. Honduran Xiomara Castro said she wouldn’t attend without Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Only the provocateur Bukele remains silent.


El Faro English
Wednesday, 1 de june de 2022

On inauguration day the Biden administration looked at Central America’s troubled leadership and saw in Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei its best, if not only, chance for preserving influence in the north of the isthmus to curb political corruption. One year later Guatemala was the first Central American country to announce it will decline the U.S. invitation to the Summit of the Americas held from June 6 to 8 in Los Angeles.

Tensions have been brewing for months. Last week the Heritage Foundation and Washington Examiner published that Giammattei privately accused Ambassador William Popp in April of meeting with Indigenous leaders to “topple” his government. Giammattei also told the authors that he has “decided to ask” the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to leave the country for promoting “indigenism,” which to Giammattei, the authors interpret, is a Guatemalan version of “critical race theory.”

It’s true that the United States has insisted, as Kamala Harris did in her June 2021 trip, on voicing concerns over the marginalization of Indigenous peoples in Guatemala, some 45 percent of the population. But at the heart of the tensions is the U.S. criticism of Giammattei’s decision to reappoint a key ally, Attorney General Consuelo Porras, on May 16 to a second term through 2026, despite sanctions for shielding the president from criminal investigations into multimillion-dollar bribery schemes.




"Do not come," Vice President Kamala Harris told prospective Central American migrants contemplating traveling without papers to the United States. Harris traveled to Guatemala in June 2021 to discuss migration, foreign investment, and other bilateral priorities with the administration of Alejandro Giammattei. Photo: Víctor Peña/El Faro

Giammattei called Porras’ reelection an expression of “national sovereignty.” Her bid received key support from CACIF, Guatemala’s powerful business association, and from the Foundation against Terrorism, an advocacy group with deep ties to the military and a lead architect of legal attacks against independent prosecutors and judges.

The Biden administration, who calls corruption a critical national security issue, saw the selection of the new attorney general as a small window of opportunity in a backsliding democracy. A source close to the White House told El Faro English that they set as a diplomatic objective the appointment of anyone but Porras. Thirteen embassies offered technical assistance to Congress in the nomination process, eliciting accusations from Giammattei of “foreign interference.”

The events caused rumblings in Washington. On Apr. 29 Senate Republicans Marco Rubio and Mike Lee requested a report from the State Dept. on “inappropriate influence” by the U.S. Embassy and USAID in the selection process, an example of Giammattei’s successful lobbying to portray U.S. anti-corruption activism as partisan meddling. The Heritage Foundation titled its analysis, “The Biden administration placates American foes while pummeling American friends.”

On the night of Porras’ reelection, the State Department revoked the visa of her husband, as the family member of an official involved in “significant corruption.” Giammattei responded the next day by announcing that he will not attend the summit. “This country may be small, but as long as I’m president, this country and its sovereignty will be respected,” he said in an event at the Mexican Embassy.

String of Absences

It would be the second time that Guatemala does not attend a Biden diplomatic gathering. In the runup to the Democracy Summit in December, the U.S. cited concerns about democratic institutions in uninviting Giammattei, along with Nayib Bukele and Juan Orlando Hernández, the last of whom is months later in an American jail. Daniel Ortega was never on the list, nor will he attend the summit in Los Angeles.

But the case that would most underscore a diplomatic failure in the isthmus would be if Xiomara Castro stays home. Since becoming president of Honduras in January, she has shown her interest in a closer relationship with the United States, which has said it will support her new government in any way possible. Kamala Harris attended her inauguration and the two have exchanged diplomatic phone calls in recent months.


U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Honduran President Xiomara Castro during their bilateral meeting in the Presidential Palace in Tegucigalpa on Jan. 27, 2022. Photo: Erin Schaff/POOL/AFP

The mutual courtship has not yet convinced Castro to fly to Los Angeles. She joined Mexico and Bolivia in requesting that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua be on the guest list. On a Wednesday press call, Biden national security advisor Juan González tried to minimize the issue, saying that they “haven’t been so focused on who is and isn’t invited” but rather on the outcomes of the reunion. He then recognized that the White House is still weighing —five days before the summit— the three countries’ attendance.

It’s still unclear whether Nayib Bukele will be part of the summit —possibly setting the stage for further confrontation— or look the other way altogether. He has only said, after meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in early May, that “it’s important to discuss hemispheric issues in a holistic way.”

Hanging over the gathering is the State Department’s promise to expand this month the ‘Engel List’ sanctions expected to touch Bukele’s inner circle, as well as Guatemalan officials involved in the reelection of Consuelo Porras.

By all indicators Costa Rica will attend, but the U.S. Democrat administration has yet to forge its relationship with the new conservative outsider president Rodrigo Chaves, who declared a national emergency in mid-May, a week after taking office, to fend off Russian hackers holding government servers for ransom.

That leaves Panama as one of the few partners to the United States in the summit’s long —and expected to be largely empty— table. The central bilateral issues in the country are Chinese influence, drug trafficking, and global, not Central American, migration over the Darien Gap.

It’s ironic that Biden’s closest ally in Central America happens to be the farthest from the U.S. border. People in the region even joke that the country, two centuries ago part of Gran Colombia, is not really Central America.

Thanks for your time. If you’ve gained from our work, consider funding independent journalism in Central America, in its most critical hour, at support.elfaro.net.

Once Upon Another Fraught Time …

The power of Yiddish children’s literature

By David Stromberg | June 2, 2022

Adapted from the cover of In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times

Democracy is not the only thing that dies in darkness. Together with democracy—which enshrines into a governing system the capacity to disagree and compromise—other parts of civil life are threatened, including deceptively basic values like honesty and respect. It doesn’t take much to pronounce these words, but it takes a lot to internalize them, and a whole lot more to express them in action. For this to happen, these values need to turn into principles, a process that often requires learning as well as practice. This is why culture—through which we develop convictions and sustain them in our interactions—is so important to civic life. Culture provides us the means to be entertained, to pass our leisure time. But it is also a way of maintaining and developing our values through creativity and play. This is what dies in darkness: our human drive to be creative.

Americans have experienced a resurgence of anti-Semitism in a way we thought had passed from the nation’s history. But just as wars have not passed out of our culture, so anti-Semitism has been dormant yet present, less expressed, but fueling hate nevertheless. Aside from dealing with the practical elements of its reappearance, including the need for dialogue, education, and security, we also need to revive a cultural memory of times when Jews endured such difficulties on a regular basis, and depended on their culture for resilience.

In 2016, I was living in New York City, and on the day after the presidential election, I walked into the Center for Jewish History, just as I had done every day for several months—I was collecting Yiddish children’s tales with the aim of translating them into English. In the reading room of the CJH, where pleasant smiles and hellos had always welcomed me and other readers, no one uttered the words good morning. There seemed to be a collective feeling of confusion and concern, as if we were experiencing this historical moment with the weight of Jewish history on our shoulders—sensing, perhaps, that when hate and anger rise, Jews, along with other minorities, are soon after targeted.

I had zero motivation to do anything that morning, but I tried to focus on my task. The stories I was collecting were written in the early 1920s, after the horrors of the pogroms and the First World War. The Polish-Soviet War was raging, but the nightmare of the Second World War and the Holocaust, of course, were still beyond most people’s imaginations. The stories were intended for an audience that was itself caught in the grips of radical changes, one that was witnessing the modernization of society while still adhering to traditional values. The Jews who were wrote these stories—many of whom dreamed of socialism, communism, or Zionism—tried to instill in the children the values of their times while also being honest about the difficult pasts they had themselves witnessed or experienced. Privilege was not something that these authors possessed. Traditional life for them had meant deep poverty, whether they came from rural or urban settings. Their only privilege, perhaps, was that they’d committed themselves to a life of literature.

I sat there thinking to myself: What good had any of this done? In what way did these stories help? History had proven these values and principles powerless in the face of aggression and violence. Most of the kids who read these stories were annihilated two decades later. In America, where others had gone as immigrants, their success—both in terms of economic mobility and cultural adaptation—had left them helpless when their families and friends were being deported to death camps. What good had these stories done? I felt like history was going to render these attempts at instilling value pointless yet again.

It was an ominous morning. But one thing gave me a sense of hope: this effort was being undertaken for children. Regardless of my mood, my actions told a different story. Investing energy into transforming these lost tales into something that could be relevant for readers today meant that I believed in a future where children still cared about stories that embodied values. A future that needed books to help turn values into principles—and, hopefully and eventually, into action. This wasn’t about wiping the dust off old folktales. It was about bringing the freshness of the past into today’s world, seeing that our own concerns were not ours alone, that they were shared by recent generations. Everything from antiwar sentiments to tolerance, environmentalism and vegetarianism, could be found in these tales, along with a yearning for equality and acceptance. The sensitivities, and not only the stories or images, increasingly seemed to reflect an anxiety over how the changing world was going to affect its children—and how these children were going to get through their own struggles. The stories came from a world where Jewish life was infused with Yiddish culture. This is not the Yiddish that is now depicted in popular culture—a kind of a nostalgic yearning for a lost authenticity. This is Yiddish as a culture of resilience. Even when they tell of magical realms or treasures buried in the snow, the stories are gritty reflections of real experiences—empowering their readers by increasing their awareness about the world and themselves. These were stories by people who shared concerns about precisely the kinds of eventualities that unfolded in the years to come. They were looking to the future, and so, in this future, their voices still have something relevant to say.

One of those voices was Jacob Reisfeder, a writer of fiction, plays, and poetry, and a member of the editorial board of Unzer Express, a daily Warsaw Yiddish newspaper in the interwar years. Little is known of him other than that he traveled to Argentina in the early 1920s and later returned to Poland. He was married, and eyewitness accounts suggest that he took part in literary events held in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he appears to have died. Reisfeder wrote a number of children’s tales that were published in small booklets. One of them was the following story, “The Children Who Lived in the Cellar,” which Ri J. Turner translated for the collection that became In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times. The story had been set aside due to the publisher’s concerns about the story’s imagery—that it might be too harsh for children today. (Read on and judge for yourself.) But such images help children grasp the power of resilience and the idea that suffering is a common experience. The images also help them see that there are people in the world who live in difficult circumstances—and that these people, too, know how to use their imaginations to cope with their circumstances. As a testament of solidarity with all those who maintain creativity even in times of darkness, the story has been included in the paperback version of the book—in a world battling darkness, our children’s resilience depends on the wells of creativity that can be found deep within the heart and soul.

THE CHILDREN WHO LIVED IN THE CELLAR

BY JACOB REISFEDER • TRANSLATED BY RI J. TURNER

It was a wintry night. The damp cellar apartment was cold and dark.

Three children clustered around the cold stove, a brother and two sisters. They clung to one another, their feet wrapped in old rags and their hearts pounding with fear.

“Mama is taking so long to get home!” the youngest cried out with tears in her eyes, startled at the sound of her own hoarse voice. She was not yet six years old.

“She locked us in, and she’s not coming back!” wept her seven-year-old brother.

“Hush! As soon as Mama sells out of apples, she’ll come straight home,” their elder sister soothed them, herself only eight years old. She too could barely keep from crying, she was so cold and hungry.

“I’m hungry!” the little boy wept louder.

“We haven’t eaten all day!” echoed the littlest sister.

“Oh, hush, hush! As soon as Mama gets home, she’ll prepare supper,” Rivkeleh coaxed, swallowing her own tears.

“It’s so cold!” Her younger brother and sister trembled feverishly, their hands black and blue from the winter chill. From time to time they breathed on their hands in an attempt to thaw them out.

“As soon as Mama brings wood, we’ll kindle the oven, and it’ll be so warm in here!” Rivkeleh drew the two younger children closer.

All three fell silent. They huddled together, listening fearfully to the wind’s menacing howls outside the window.

“Oh, look—flowers!” cried the little boy suddenly, pointing at the frosty windowpanes. “And up there, trees. Look, look—isn’t that a forest?”

“Oh, yes, a forest!” agreed Rivkeleh, the eldest sister.

“A forest, a forest,” the youngest sister, Miriam, said dreamily. “Moysheleh, have you ever seen a forest?”

“No,” replied Moysheleh sadly, and kept peering at the windowpane, which the frost had decorated thickly with white flowers.

“How about flowers?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, but then he quickly reconsidered. “Wait! I have seen flowers! On the street once, an entire basketful. Oh, how beautiful they were! A peasant woman was carrying them on her shoulder. I begged her for one tiny blossom, but she wouldn’t give it to me.”

“I’ve never ever seen any flowers,” Mireleh said sadly, lowering her eyes to the floor. “Where do flowers grow?”

“In gardens and in fields,” answered Rivkeleh. “There are different kinds of flowers—white and red, blue and yellow.”

“Ha, ha, ha! All the colors!” laughed Mireleh, her eyes sparkling. “And how do they grow, all those different flowers?”

“Mama told me that you have to plant them in the earth, and then they grow in the sun and rain. Flowers, like children, love the sun best of all. And that’s all I know. Children who can read books know a lot about it. But I can’t read and I don’t have any books.”

“I’ve never seen anything at all: no forests, no gardens,” Mireleh commented abstractedly.

“We never get to see anything here—in the courtyard or on the street,” mourned Moysheleh.

“Mama never takes us anywhere,” Mireleh complained.

“Where would she find the time? Silly goose … when she comes home, she’s always coughing,” scolded Rivkeleh.

“When the summer comes, we’ll make our own garden outside the window,” Moysheleh ventured.

“I’ll plant the seeds,” said Rivkeleh. “You’ll see, I know how to do it.”

“Yes, yes!” Mireleh practically jumped for joy. “What will we grow in the garden?”

“Grass,” said Moysheleh, “beautiful grass whose fragrance will spread throughout the house. Also peas and beans …”

“No, no!” interrupted Mireleh. “Let’s grow only flowers.”

“Yes, flowers are better—white and red, all kinds of colors.”

And the poor children were off on a fantasy, their eyes lighting up with excitement, their hunger and cold all but forgotten. So engrossed were they that they barely heard the creak of the door opening. Suddenly a beautiful smiling woman stepped gently over the threshold, fresh white roses woven into her loose golden hair. Her gown was made of nothing but flowers, flowers of every shade, each more beautiful than the last. In her hand she held a sweet little woven basket full of the loveliest violets, narcissi, lilies, and forget-me-nots.

The children leapt up, their eyes wide with wonder and fright. They started to cry out, but the beautiful Flower Lady, whose mere presence had already caused sweet fragrances to spread throughout the cellar apartment, approached them with soft steps, and with a white glowing hand she tenderly stroked their frozen faces.

“Don’t be frightened, children. I’ve come to decorate your apartment with flowers. For I know that you love flowers! I heard how your hearts fluttered when you spoke of the green grass and the blossoms you’ve never seen, living here in your little apartment on this tiny street. Well, children, now you won’t lack for flowers. Take a look at the beautiful blossoms I have for you here in my basket.”

And as soon as she set the sweet woven basket down on top of the black sooty oven, it instantly transformed into a beautiful marble pedestal.

The children stood and stared in awe at the marble pedestal and the fresh quivering flowers.

“How beautiful! How beautiful!” Mireleh whispered, shaken.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” the Flower Lady smiled, again caressing the children’s faces warmly.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” nodded all three children, not taking their eyes off the basket of flowers.

“Would you like even more flowers?” asked the Flower Lady.

“Yes, dear lady, give us more, more …” the children replied. They spoke in a pleading tone, yet their voices rang out more confidently now that they had begun to feel comfortable in the lady’s presence.

The kindly beautiful woman let loose her flower-dress, waving its skirts over the marble pedestal. It was as if she had opened up a door. Twelve gleaming pedestals sprang forth, lining up as if alive, in three rows down the length of the apartment. Then the Flower Lady waved her skirts toward the basket of flowers, which still stood on top of the first pedestal, and it multiplied into 12 baskets, one to top each pedestal.

“Ha, ha, ha! So many flowers! So many flowers!” rejoiced the poor children. They ran from one basket to another, their eyes shining with pleasure at the fresh, fluttering blossoms.

“Is there anything else that you want, children?” asked the Flower Lady with a gentle smile, gathering the three children in her arms. A cascade of her sweet flowery fragrances floated over them.

“A garden, a garden!” All three children blurted out their shared desire.

“All right, dear children,” the Flower Lady said, tenderly stroking the children’s heads. “Soon you shall have a beautiful garden.”

And the moment she waved her flower-skirts in the air, the crowded cellar apartment was instantly transformed into a large, gorgeous garden with a clear silvery stream running through its center. There were countless trees with all kinds of leaves—red, green, golden, and many other colors—and lovely paths, paved with precious stones and surrounded by beds full of the most beautiful flowers in the world. The beds were round, as if the flowers were playing circle games, and everything was bathed in the golden rays of the sun. The garden was crowded with blossoms of all colors, quivering cheerfully on their green stems. They’d bend over momentarily in the breeze, and then poke their little heads back out into the light, as if they were playing hide-and-seek. And in the air above, pure white butterflies fluttered and golden bees buzzed, and in the branches of the trees all sorts of songbirds sang sweetly.

And the three children ran around across the length and breadth of the garden. They wore lovely summer outfits and light slippers. Their eyes gleamed, their cheeks glowed, and the blossoms laughed in greeting.

“Ha, ha, ha!”—the cheerful satisfied laughter of the blossoms rang out throughout the garden – “they’ve come, the sisters and brother who yearned for us so … ha, ha, ha! Come closer, children, so we can play together … ha, ha, ha!”

And the children ran around drunkenly from one flowerbed to another, laughing along with the blossoms and kissing their tender petals. And the beautiful Flower Lady stood to the side and looked on with pride, calling out first to the flowers and then to the children:

“That’s right, just like that … keep playing together, pure little souls!”

And suddenly she began to sing in a sweet voice:

In the lovely garden,
In Flower Land
Three children laugh and play
With blossoms hand in hand,
With blossoms hand in hand.

Children and flowers,
Blossom with allure
Children and flowers,
Little souls so pure.

Souls so full of light—
True birds of a feather,
Children and flowers,
Playing all together.

And the Flower Lady joined hands with the children, and they danced in a circle around the flowerbeds and sang the song together. And all the flowers nodded their heads emphatically to the music, dancing too, and the golden bees buzzed along, and the butterflies fluttered, and the songbirds sang an accompaniment from the tree branches, and waves of song filled the entire garden:


In the lovely garden,
In Flower Land
Three children laugh and play
With blossoms hand in hand,
With blossoms hand in hand.

Children and flowers
Blossom with allure
Children and flowers
Little souls so pure.

Souls so full of light—
True birds of a feather,
Children and flowers
Playing all together.

* * *



When the children’s mother came in from the street, agitated and chilled to the bone, she found the children lying asleep on the floor next to the cold stove, clinging to one another.

“My poor little swallows!” she murmured, tears coming to her eyes. “The cold and hunger must have put them to sleep.”

She didn’t know, the devoted mother, what sort of beautiful sweet image her poor children had seen in their dreams, and what kind of person they’d received as a guest in the dank cellar apartment.

***

David Stromberg’s introduction is adapted from the paperback edition, recently published, of In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Tomes, in which Jacob Reisfeder’s story also appears.

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar whose recent work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction, EastWest Literary Forum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His latest book is A Short Inquiry into the End of the World, and his edited collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer's essays will be published in May. He was born in Israel, grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in Jerusalem.

The American Scholar: Once Upon Another Fraught Time … 

U.S. in talks with Spain, Canada about taking more refugees -sources

By Matt Spetalnick and Ted Hesson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Biden administration is in talks with Spain and Canada about taking more Western Hemisphere refugees for resettlement, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, signaling possible commitments that could be announced at next week's Summit of the Americas.

Separate proposals are under consideration by the Spanish and Canadian governments but no decisions have been made, the sources said, as President Joe Biden's aides prepared to seek greater regional cooperation on tackling irregular migration when he hosts fellow leaders in Los Angeles.

The Axios news site was the first to report possible migration commitments from Spain and Canada, citing internal planning documents.

Two of the sources told Reuters the numbers under consideration for possible resettlement in Spain and Canada were modest, given that the United States was facing a record number of migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexican border.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed talks with Canada on taking in more migrants, and a second U.S. source said the Biden administration wanted to use the hemispheric summit to pressure other countries to do the same.

Spain, if it agrees to take action, would be accepting refugees beyond its long-standing program for bringing in temporary workers from Central America.

Canada, which has a long tradition as a safe-haven country, is weighing whether to take in larger numbers of regional refugees and also to increase the number of Haitian workers it allows in, the source in Washington said.

The White House referred questions to the Spanish and Canadian governments. Canada's immigration department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. There was no immediate word from Spanish authorities.

It was unclear whether those whom Spain might agree to resettle would be from among asylum seekers who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border or whether they would be required to apply at U.S. embassies and consulates in the region or via international refugee agencies, one person familiar with the matter said.


(Reporting By Matt Spetalnick and Ted Hesson in Washington, additional reporting by Thomas Denny in Toronto; Editing by Bradley Perrett)

The Human Element: The Other Half of Warfare

Bryan Terrazas

June 2, 2022

"Hence most of the matters dealt with in this book are composed in equal parts of physical and of moral causes and effects. One might say that the physical seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade."
—Carl von Clausewitz[1]

On Thursday, February 24th 2022, one of the United States’ near-peer adversaries crossed the Ukrainian border with a significant portion of its substantial military power. At the outset Ukrainian forces suffered from material combat power disparities with their Russian invaders, but the Ukrainian people themselves seemed to enjoy high morale overall.[2] Despite Russian technical and numerical military superiority, Russian forces did not quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders and achieve a decisive victory.[3] Nearly two months into the conflict, not only have the high-spirited Ukrainian people proven unwilling to accept defeat as a consequence of material destruction, they are rallying international support for their cause.[4] Conversely, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby remarked that low Russian morale may in fact affect the outcome.[5] As the gap between Ukrainian and Russian morale continues to yawn, the ultimate outcome of the conflict is still very much in question. Although the Russia-Ukraine conflict may not ultimately be decided solely by the gap between Russian and Ukrainian morale, it has so far been an intangible yet critical aspect that will have effects on its enduring outcome.


The body of a Russian serviceman outside Kharkiv on February 26, 2022. (AFP/Getty)

Will and morale now represent critical aspects of warfare that the U.S. military has neglected in favor of material factors. The deleterious consequences of that neglect have prodded leaders across the U.S. joint force to acknowledge that an emphasis on the physical destruction of enemy capabilities as the primary goal for military operations translates to operational and tactical success and not necessarily enduring strategic successes.[6] Even before the Russia-Ukraine conflict, U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan provide ample justification for these concerns. The outcomes of these conflicts challenge the current U.S. military assumption that more physical destruction can achieve enduring success, and the implication that non-Western perspectives to warfare do not accommodate this type of war’s outcome long-term. In response, there is newly placed importance on the potential for affecting the most fundamental motivations for adversaries—the will and morale to develop, reconstitute, and fight.[7] This emphasis on intangible human factors such as will and morale embodies a glaring current omission in Western thinking on the conduct and outcome of war, and represents the human or psychological element that has historically been considered the other half of warfare.

 
THE IMPORTANCE OF PEOPLE

The strategic environment is now defined by human-oriented considerations as much as it is defined by increasing complexity and interconnection. The world is progressively more online and connected, and this migration on to social media is increasing at a much faster rate than the population itself.[8] Much of the world is now watching the Russia-Ukraine war play out in real time on their smartphones, bypassing traditional media corporations and providing a direct linkage to those intimately involved in the fighting.[9] Although much of this change is attributable to advances in technology-enabled information capabilities, it also highlights the importance of the human-centric aspect of global affairs empowered by the ability to connect instantaneously across the globe. These connections further highlight the importance of perceptions, emotions, beliefs, and ultimately the willingness to become involved in conflict or to accept its outcomes.

The joint staff has recognized the importance of people and that military power must be re-imagined to accommodate these changes in order “to alter behavior of relevant actors to support the achievement of enduring strategic outcomes.”[10] This statement does not mean simply an acknowledgment of information or non-lethal operations. Given the increased importance of human connections, it is an expansion of the relevant actors beyond the immediate participants that accommodates those who may be geographically distant and otherwise only indirectly involved. It serves as an emphasis on influencing the will of the people involved as the ultimate objective in competition and conflict over simply the physical destruction of enemy means to resist. However, this acknowledgement has not yet translated into practical application.

U.S. ARMY TREATMENT OF WILL AND MORALE

The U.S. military has not fully exploited this long-acknowledged assertion operationally, especially in the U.S. Army. Even as the seminal U.S. Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-0 recognizes that a military operation is a human endeavor, it characterizes breaking the enemy will only as a result of ground combat.[11] Beyond advising to limit harm and adhering to international laws of war, the doctrine is devoid of how to conduct operations in a manner that accounts for enemy, friendly, or civilian will. The somewhat more tactically focused Field Manual (FM) 3-0 again only acknowledges will as the focus of the “Dominate” phase, which itself is characterized as “overmatching enemy capabilities at the right time and place.”[12] There is no guidance on how to conduct operations to affect will and morale, such as timing an offense to exploit morale considerations.

U.S. military doctrine principally seeks the destruction of an adversary’s will through the destruction of that adversary’s material means to resist and fight. Moreover, the destruction of an adversary’s will is often viewed as a derivative of morale during combat operations. For example, enemy morale is discussed briefly as particularly low during an enemy withdrawal, but the U.S. Army’s principle guidance on offense and defense FM 3-90-1 treats morale as an incidental effect of regular combat operations without any real consideration of how to influence it directly or as the actual objective.[13] This effectively ignores that some operations may instead boost enemy willingness to resist rather than diminish it, and that the destruction of the morale may require a change in the time, place, or type of operation itself. Friendly morale similarly receives only passing attention as the commander’s responsibility, and its primary tools are through religious services, human resources, and sustainment.[14] Like the treatment of enemy morale, there is no guidance on how to conduct combat operations to maintain or even enhance friendly morale.

The U.S. military’s default approach to enduring success in war thus neither speaks to how to influence friendly morale during actual combat operations nor how to counter any enemy attempts at influencing it. It is further still from any considerations on affecting the will of enemy non-combatants and civilians that provide support for the conflict. This approach, in effect, treats high friendly morale in combat as nearly a foregone conclusion and degraded enemy morale only as a consequence of continued material destruction. Only contemporary Military Information Support Operations doctrine focuses on deliberately affecting enemy morale in combat and only narrowly by using information means. Principles and methods of information operations are accepted but largely within support of traditionally planned military operations that prioritize physical destruction of enemy capabilities.[15]

THE THREAT

This dearth of meaningful institutional commitment to the influence of will and morale ironically contrasts with U.S. warnings of foreign state hybrid threats and subversion activities designed to undermine the will and morale of the U.S. and its allies.[16] China, for example, has closely observed U.S. military actions in the previous decades and has concluded that intangible factors are increasingly significant for modern warfare.[17] China’s emphasis on intangibles is especially evident in the division of a Chinese technology-based information domain and an equally important cognitive domain.[18] The Chinese seek victory by forcing the enemy to lose “the will and ability to resist” and “paralysis” through a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic means, as a part of its systems destruction warfare concept. Realizing the vulnerability within these domains to destroy the enemy’s morale and will to fight, the systems destruction warfare concept emphasizes the capabilities of psychological warfare to exploit opportunities.[19] The Chinese have also introduced a concept of Strategic Psychological Warfare that proposes to win wars through means independent from fighting by preemptively overpowering an enemy psychologically.[20]

 
HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE TWO HALVES OF WARFARE

The substantial absence of human considerations in U.S. doctrine is, all things considered, relatively new and represents a departure from the view in numerous traditions. An enduring theme throughout writings on the theory of warfare is the duality of the physical with the psychological. Ancient works such as Homer’s The Odyssey highlighted intelligence and cunning, or métis, while Sun Tzu wrote of the importance of morale for controlling maneuvers, the effectiveness of surprise, and even that the ultimate goal was winning without a fight.[21] Napoleon, a master of the decisive battle, emphasized the importance of the psychological aspect of war with his dictum that “in war morale forces are to physical as three to one.”[22] Revolutionary France’s ability to harness the collective will of the nation through levée en masse, reduced desertion, and rendered its fighting spirit reliant on psychological factors for its advantage rather than new technical or material means.[23] Not surprisingly, students of the Napoleonic Wars, such as Carl von Clausewitz, exalted the psychological over the physical for securing an enduring outcome.[24]

 


“La Liberté Guidant le Peuple (Liberty Leading the People)” by Eugène Delacroix (Wikimedia)


There have been previous attempts at operationalizing the concept of a psychologically-driven way of war. Psychological warfare as a theory provides one of the earliest that attempted to capture the intangible factors in warfare. However, the value of these factors was quickly lost as the term psychological warfare became plagued with misconceptions and derided as an imprecise description of the concepts it was meant to describe.[25] Rather than a mere support mechanism to traditional military operations, J.F.C. Fuller originally envisioned psychological warfare in the early half of the 20th century as a future way to wage wars beyond the physical domain.[26] Paul M.A. Linebarger later refined Fuller’s idea at the onset of the Cold War. Linebarger characterized it instead as “warfare psychologically waged,” wherein psychological objectives provided the driving force for operations in all domains, not isolated to the information domain, and as a way to wage a war that was not focused primarily on destroying the physical means of the enemy.[27] This concept represented the other half of war long-discussed, and most recently forgotten in the West.

CONCLUSION

Even a brief survey of the theories of war show that the U.S. has largely forgotten the other half of warfare—the psychological complement to the physical—even as its significance in conflict increases. Against several centuries of claims to the contrary, U.S. doctrine has errantly privileged the physical over rational and emotional factors. This is not to suggest that the physical is not important or plays no role in modern or future warfare. Rather, the proper practice of strategy is to start with the human or psychological components, like will and morale, as avenues to affect the physical. This represents a near-inverse of the current paradigm wherein the physical is used to get to the psychological, and one that may benefit enemies that may be all-to-willing to draw upon the psychological to wage a prolonged conflict.

The U.S. is unprepared for a future of human-centric warfare. Its military doctrine acknowledges morale and other psychological factors but does not provide guidance on how to shape it. This represents a disconnect between war as a material affair and war as a human affair. Such a misconception of warfare leaves the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to adversaries and enemies seeking to exploit this lacuna. The U.S. therefore critically constrains itself despite its material strengths if it fails to embrace a psychologically grounded view of war.

Header Image: “Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow “ by Adolph Northen (Wikimedia)


NOTES:

in[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and eds. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 184–85.

[2] Alexander S. Vindman, “Morale Remains High. Ukraine Is Fighting for Freedom and Democracy and, Most Importantly, for Their Homes. Https://T.co/Zzxxumofdz,” Twitter, February 24, 2022, https://twitter.com/avindman/status/1496932285773488131.

[3] Angela Dewan, “Ukraine and Russia's Militaries Are David and Goliath. Here's How They Compare,” CNN, Cable News Network, February 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-military-comparison-intl/index.html.

[4] Megan Specia, “'Like a Weapon': Ukrainians Use Social Media to Stir Resistance,” The New York Times, March 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/world/europe/ukraine-war-social-media.html.

[5] John F. Kirby, “Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby Holds a Press Briefing, March 22, 2022,” March 22, 2022, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2975214/pentagon-press-secretary-john-f-kirby-holds-a-press-briefing-march-22-2022/.

[6] U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Staff, Joint Concept for Human Aspects of Military Operations (JC-HAMO) (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2016), 1.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Simon Kemp, “Digital 2022: Global Overview Report,” (January 26, 2022), https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022-global-overview-report.

[9] Kyle Chayka, “Watching the World’s ‘First TikTok War’” The New Yorker (March 3, 2022), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war.

[10] U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Staff, Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment (JCOIE) (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2018), iii-9.

[11] US Department of the Army, Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2019), 1-4 to 1-5.

[12] US Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2017), 1-13.

[13] U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-90-1, Offense and Defense Volume 1, Change 2 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, April 2015), 5-6, 5-10, 6-32, 9-1, B-12.

[14] U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-90-2, Reconnaissance, Security, And Tactical Enabling Tasks Volume 2 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, March 2013), 6-6.; U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 1-0, Human Resources Support (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, August 2021), 1-6, 1-8, 4-24.; U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 4-0, Sustainment (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, July 2019), 1-10.

[15] U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-53, Military Information Support Operations, Change 1 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, June 2013), 1-4, 5-5.; U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Staff, Joint Publication (JP) 3-13, Information Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), I-1.; U.S. Joint Staff, JP 3-13.2, Military Information Support Operations, Change 1 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, December 2011), xvi-xxi.

[16] U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Staff, Joint Operating Environment (JOE) 2035: The Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, July 2016), 7, 44.

[17] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books, 1999), 1–5.

[18] Cindy Hurst, “A Chinese Concept of “Cognitive Confrontation” In Future Warfare,” OE Watch 11, issue 9 (September 2021): 5.

[19] Jeffrey Engstrom, Systems Confrontation and Systems Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018), 71-72, 76-77, 116.

[20] Timothy Thomas, The Chinese Way of War: How Has It Changed? (McLean, VA: MITRE Corporation, June 2020), 3, 15-19, accessed November 5, 2021, https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/docpreview-s/00-00-16-68-30/20200611-China-Way-of-War-_2800_Timothy-Thomas_2900_.pdf.

[21] Sun Tzu, The Wart of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 63-101.

[22] Arthur Upham Pope, “The Importance of Morale,” The Journal of Educational Sociology 15, no. 4 (December 1941): 195, https://doi.org/10.2307/2262466.

[23] Steven T. Ross, “Napoleon and Maneuver Warfare,” In The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History, 1959–1987, edited by Harry R. Borowski, 309–24 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, U.S. Air Force, 1988), 1-11.

[24] 127, 184-186; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, indexed ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 92-93, 184-185; Baron Henri de Jomini, The Art of War, trans. G.H. Mendell and W.P. Craighill (Project Gutenberg, last updated September 28, 2004), 60-65, 122, 178-179, 321-323. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13549/13549-h/13549-h.htm.

[25] William E. Daugherty and Morris Janowitz, A Psychological Warfare Casebook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958), 1-3, 18.

[26] U.S. Department of the Army, Pamphlet No. 525-7-1, The Art and Science of Psychological Operations: Case Studies of Military Application, Volume One (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, April 1976), 19.

[27] Paul M.A. Linebarger, “Psychological Warfare,” Naval War College Information Service for Officers 3, no. 7 (1951): 19-24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44792590.

Bryan Terrazas is an Army officer and future planner. He holds masters degrees from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and is currently a student at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies. This article is adapted from his recently submitted monograph that explores psychological components to warfare through the lens of psychological warfare theory. This article reflects his own views and not necessarily those of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense.



The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

Peter Dutton is banking on importing US classroom culture wars to Australia

In one of his first interviews as Liberal leader, Dutton said he wants to make the "extremism" of teachers a major political issue.


CAM WILSON
JUN 02, 2022

IN ONE OF HIS FIRST INTERVIEWS AS LIBERAL LEADER, PETER DUTTON SAID HE'S GOT HIS EYES ON THE "EXTREMISM OF TEACHERS" (IMAGE: SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA)


New Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton has signalled he wants to take on teacher “extremism”, in the debate over the development of Australia’s new national school curriculum, hinting at a United States-style education culture war.

On a Tuesday broadcast of Sky News’ Bolt Report, the freshly elected opposition leader signposted the party’s intention to make what’s being taught in Australia’s schools a hotly contested political issue.



“If [the teaching was] limited to just environmental issues or just to climate change, it would be bad enough. But the extremism of some of the teachers and the language that they use, the approach that they take, it’s across a broad range of policy areas,” he said.

Dutton foreshadowed reigniting a fight with the Labor Party over the draft national curriculum: “I think the national curriculum, the values argument, is going to be one of the big debates over this Parliament. I think you will see a big difference between the policies that we take to the next election compared with what Labor will.”

Last year, then education minister Alan Tudge led a campaign against the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority’s draft curriculum that would be taught to students from preschool to Year 10 nationally.

Before being sidelined over his affair and alleged abusive relationship with a former staffer, which he denies, Tudge took issue with how the document depicted Australia’s racial and religious history. He even went as far as claiming that it would teach students to hate Australia and not want to defend it in war.

The campaign of Tudge and other conservative groups against the draft curriculum coincided with the “critical race theory backlash” in American schools, led by Republicans. Since then, this scrutiny has only intensified (and morphed), and offers insight into why Peter Dutton is so eager to make this into an issue.

There’s a long history of fighting over what is taught in schools in the US, from anti-evolution laws in the 1920s to today’s battles. Since Trump’s loss in 2020, the Republican Party has found success in appealing to parents over how matters of race, sex and gender are being taught — confecting moral panic around being indoctrinated or even “groomed” by teachers.

The recent come-from-behind victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin in last November’s Virginia governor’s race laid out a new blueprint for conservatives winning in liberal-leaning areas. In a state that voted 54-44 for Joe Biden a year before, Youngkin was able to straddle being pro-Trump while also attracting back some voters repelled by Trump by making local education a key issue in the campaign.

Youngkin specifically argued against critical race theory being taught in schools while also appealing against COVID-19 restrictions that kept children at home or wearing masks in the classroom. This, combined with Joe Biden’s dropping popularity, contributed to Youngkin’s campaign picking up enough voters from the suburbs to win.

Going into 2022, state Republicans have doubled down on the critical race theory strategy while also incorporating anti-LGBTQI+ elements. Florida’s governor and 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner Ron DeSantis proudly passed “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in state classrooms.

There are reasons to believe a renewed focus on classroom culture wars using the national curriculum as a trojan horse could be a smart strategy for the Liberal Party. Education remains an important issue for voters: an ANU-run poll found more than half of voters said improving the education system was a top priority ahead of the 2022 election, beating out issues like reducing crime or dealing with the pandemic. It’s also a traditional Labor strong suit. The party has an 8% lead in which of the two major parties is trusted more to handle the issue.

If the US is anything to go by, embracing this fight could be a way for a Dutton-led opposition to neutralise or even gain ground on an issue that’s been a weakness for them. Dutton started off his term by promising to pay attention to the “forgotten Australians” in the suburbs — the same people who Youngkin picked up. The scare campaign against the Safe Schools Coalition program from 2016-2018 shows there’s fertile political ground for this kind of issue. (Dutton has form on this).

As we saw from Katherine Deves’ kamikaze campaign, international culture wars can’t be directly imported, they need to be translated. One difference is that education policy in the US is mediated through locally elected school boards that develop the curriculum. Australia’s curriculum is national and education policy is state-based — and it’s this difference that could make Australia ripe for a national education culture war.

At least, that’s what Peter Dutton has hinted he is hoping for: “I intend to take this challenge to the Labor Party on this and not just at a federal level but also at a state level. I think there’s a lot of work to do there, and it will be a main area of focus.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cam Wilson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR @CAMERONWILSON
Cam Wilson is Crikey's associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.

 

Michigan Medicine demands nurses accept pay package that is half the rate of inflation

Kevin Reed

WSWS.ORG

With the June 30 contract expiration just four weeks away, Michigan Medicine management has made it clear it intends to force through attacks on the pay and staffing levels of the 6,000 nurses who work for the University of Michigan-affiliated hospital system.

The hospital administration said it had hoped to have a tentative agreement by May 20, but that date came and went without a resolution of the major issues facing nurses. Instead, on May 16, Michigan Medicine presented a package of contract terms which would result in a reduction in real income for nurses and does not address the chronic understaffing throughout the Ann Arbor-based health system.

Michigan Medicine nurses discharging patient (Michigan Medicine)

In a May 20 bargaining update from the University of Michigan Professional Nurses Council (UMPNC), which is affiliated with Michigan Nurses Association (MNA), the nurses union said that management’s wage proposal for Nurse Practitioners (NPs) contained an offer of salaries that are $10,000 to $25,000 less than Physician Assistants (PAs). 

The union said, “In their own statements, Michigan Medicine acknowledges that NPs and PAs do comparable work and yet brought a shameful offer that has egregiously disproportionate rates of pay.” According to a study of national trends by the University of St. Augustine, the wages of NPs and PAs are within $1,000 of each other across the country, yet Michigan Medicine “management has chosen to disrespect the profession of Nurse Practitioners with this insulting offer.” 

Management proposed annual wage increases for RNs of 5 percent, 4 percent, 4 percent and 3 percent across four years, along with a one-time $1,000 “lump sum” to be paid in 2023. If the current inflation rate of 8.3 percent were to hold over the next four years, these raises would lead to an effective pay reduction of between 4 and 5 percent annually.

On May 20, Nancy May, Chief Nurse Executive at the University of Michigan Health System—who has an annual salary of $454,480—published a communication asserting that management has proposed no changes to nurses in the Central Staffing Resources (CSR) unit. However, on May 12, a proposal was submitted during bargaining containing language that would remove the guarantee that an appropriate number of CSR nurses would be maintained based on “variable needs.”

If this change were to be accepted by nurses, it would mean further staffing shortages and exacerbate the already dire situation throughout the health care system. The May 20 communication also made it clear that management is offering no solution to the staffing crisis. Committing themselves to nothing, management claimed, “We spent time this week continuing to explore ways that Michigan Medicine can ensure we have staff available to meet patient care needs, while also enabling our nurses to have a work/life balance.”

In other words, while negotiations have been taking place daily for three weeks, there is still no proposal or plan to resolve the number one workplace issue facing nurses at Michigan Medicine.

Additionally, even in the face of what the union itself states is an “insulting” and “shameful” offer, the strategy and posture of the MNA-UMPNC has been to block the mass mobilization of hospital staff and to advance an impotent policy of appealing to management and the University of Michigan Board of Regents to be more humane.

The drive for ever-greater profit, however, is an absolute barrier to the rational allocation of financial and human resources, which is required to provide adequate staffing levels and quality care to patients.

Michigan Medicine is one of the largest health care systems in the state. This major US academic medical center has $1 billion in cash reserves and is earning profit margins of as much as 6.5 percent on revenue of more than $5 billion each year. While the hospital administration is demanding that nurses accept a paltry pay increase that will take two years to catch up to the current inflation rate, the top 25 executives at Michigan Medicine earn a combined income of $16,781,466, or an average of $671,258 each.

Rather than mobilize the strength of tens of thousands of Michigan Medicine employees, who all face the same issues as nurses whether they are doctors or support staff, the MNA-UMPNC is calling on union members to participate in a toothless petition drive to the Board of Regents. It is an absurdity to believe that petitioning the board, which includes prominent Detroit business figures, such as Denise Ilitch, daughter of the multibillionaire Little Ceasar’s founder Mike Ilitch, will have any impact on the issues facing nurses.

Proof of this fact was demonstrated at the Board of Regents meeting held on May 19, where nurses and families of patients gave stark descriptions of the conditions in the Michigan Medical facilities, including being forced to work 16-hour shifts and then return without adequate sleep for another shift 8 hours later. 

One nurse in a surgical intensive care unit who spoke at the meeting said, “Michigan Medicine is not doing enough to retain or hire both nurses or support staff, and those who have been there have been overburdened. Some of us have been there the entire time. I’ve been in the room when people have died from COVID. … A lot of nurses are going to work at other places because it’s more lucrative. My unit alone has had 24 percent of its highly trained and experienced staff leave over the last fiscal year. The executive staff response to the staffing issue has been both patronizing and to blame it on absenteeism.”

MNA-UMPNC President Rene Curtis spoke at the meeting and said, “Put yourself in the shoes of nurses. … Please acknowledge our sacrifices with more than words. We need safe working conditions, safe for our nurses and safe for our patients to whom we are devoted. Your nurses and your patients deserve no less.”

But the executives who run Michigan Medicine are not and never will be in the shoes of nurses. Instead, they look at them not a professional caregivers who require adequate pay and resources but as sources of profit. The less nurses get, the more profit they generate.

The MNA-UMPNC president’s pathetic appeal fell on deaf ears. Instead, the chair of the Michigan Medicine subcommittee spoke for the board of regents, muttering some patronizing phrases thanking the nurses “for all of your amazing hard work,” before declaring that the Board of Regents was “not involved at the negotiating table” and adjourned the meeting.

The meeting was followed immediately by an even harder line from Michigan Medicine. Despite this, the union is instructing nurses to go back to the Board of Regents for more of the same at the next meeting on June 16, only two weeks before the contract expires. As the phrase goes, “The definition of insanity ...”

Appeals to the conscience of corporate management will go nowhere. Nurses at Michigan Medicine, like workers throughout the entire health care system, are locked in an irreconcilable struggle to defend their interests and the interests of their patients, against the owners and executives who place profits and wealth accumulation about everything else in society. That is why nurses should follow the lead of their brothers and sisters across the country and form rank-and-file committees of nurses and other hospital employees that will take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the union. This committee can then elaborate a plan of action and draw up demands that meet the needs of nurses and staff instead of the financial interests of Michigan Medicine and the other corporations in the health care industry.

YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY BABY

GLAAD, Leaders of Journalism and Global Business, and The Ariadne Getty Foundation Spotlight Global LGBTQ Acceptance in Davos during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

 June 2, 2022

GLAAD was on-the-ground in Davos as the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting took place to raise awareness for current LGBTQ issues including a rise in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, nearly 250 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in the U.S. this year, and the continuous criminalization of LGBTQ people in nearly 70 countries globally.

The World Economic Forum’s ‘Driving LGBTQI+ Resilience through Equity’

The World Economic Forum presented a panel in Congress Centre entitled ‘Driving LGBTQI+ Resilience through Equity.’ GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis moderated the panel which featured: Asha Kharga, Executive Vice President, Brand & Customer Experience, Mahindra Group, Chairperson of the Gender Diversity Council at Mahindra; Amit Paley, CEO of The Trevor Project; Christiana Riley, Member of the Managing Board, Chief Executive Officer, Americas, Deutsche Bank; and Sander Van’t Noordende, Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Executive Board at Randstad.



Sarah Kate Ellis opened the panel discussing criminalization of LGBTQ people, anti-LGBTQ legislation in the U.S., and violence that the community faces globally.

She noted: “The IMF contends that an economy is ‘more fragile and less resilient when it is not inclusive.’ This idea will become increasingly apparent because younger people are more open about being LGBTQI. In the U.S., the Gallup poll this year showed that over 20% of Gen Z are LGBT, that is up over 5 points from just last year. Creating more equitable and inclusive societies isn’t just the right thing to do; as the evidence shows, it’s an important part of an economic strategy focused on resilience and recovery.”

During the panel, Randstad's Sander Van't Noordende discussed the power of coming out in the workplace: "Bring your story to work, don't leave it by the door. Tell your story because that's what people need to hear. They need to hear different stories to open their eyes to people that are different than they are.”

Mahindra Group's Asha Kharga shared how to create safe environments for out employees: “It's about representation in terms of hiring but what's most important is the day to day experience of these folks in our organizations. How comfortable will they feel coming into work? What’s the psychological safety that we offer them in the context of work?”

And Deutsche Bank's Christiana Riley continued: “It's more than just being a safe space, it's about showing leadership in the space and making sure employees see you expressing that leadership.” -

The panel also discussed the growing number of anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S. with The Trevor Project's Amit Paley noting: "There are bills being passed targeting the most vulnerable people in our world… We need people in positions of power to say this is wrong and we won't stand for it. We need the words to happen and then we need action to follow."

The Ariadne Getty Foundation and GLAAD’s ‘Leading on LGBTQ Acceptance’

The Ariadne Getty Foundation and GLAAD, with support from Randstad, also hosted a side event entitled ‘Leading on LGBTQ Acceptance: The Future of Work and Navigating an Activist Led Generation’ and centered on discussing ways companies can take action as allies today.

Richard Quest, CNN Business Editor-at-large and Anchor or “Quest Means Business,” moderated the panel featuring Sarah Kate Ellis; Christy Pambianchi, EVP and Chief People Officer, Intel Corporation; Shamina Singh, EVP of Sustainability, Mastercard, and Founder & President, Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth; and Sander Van’t Noordende, CEO, Randstad.

Van’t Noordende is one of only four openly LGBTQ CEOs of a Fortune 500 company.



Richard Quest opened the panel noting, “In previous years I have always urged this panel to look outside the United States…This year is different isn’t it. There is a real threat. There is a change in the environment that needs to be addressed in the United States.”

The rest of the panel discussed how companies can play roles in LGBTQ advocacy with Intel Corporation's Christy Pambianci noting: “A lot of the progress we’ve reached to date has been due to the incredible partnerships between the corporate world, NGOs, and public movement and sentiment. We have to continue down that path.”

Mastercard's Shamina Singh discussed the importance of hiring diverse talent: “Innovation without diverse talent is not innovation.”

During the event, The Partnership for Global LGBTQ Equality (PGLE), an initiative of BSR, the World Economic Forum, and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, provided an update on its work from Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR. PGLE has been helping corporates operationalize the UN’s Standards of Conduct for Business in Tackling Discrimination Against LGBTQI People.

The AGF and GLAAD event also featured a fireside chat between Ina Fried, Chief Technology Correspondent at Axios, and Joy Dunn, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and the Head of Operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Dunn also oversees manufacturing projects in the U.S. and noted: “I don’t see how you can build a building in the 21st century and not include gender neutral bathrooms.”



Fried spoke about #Letters4TransKids, an affirming campaign she created to send messages of support to trans young people. She explained: “I also couldn't sit by and see young people’s lives made even harder. The fight for trans equality isn't about wanting youth to be trans or nonbinary, or not. All we want for any young person is for them to have the space and support to safely be their fullest self, whoever that is.”

To participate, simply post a message to trans and nonbinary young people on social media using #Letters4TransKids.

During her opening remarks at the event, Ellis introduced a PSA that GLAAD released last month featuring Amber Briggle, the mom of a trans teen in Texas. GLAAD worked with Comcast NBCUniversal, Paramount, WarnerMedia, The Walt Disney Company, and The Ad Council to run versions of the PSA nationwide.

Also during her remarks, Ellis called on corporates to take real action, stating, “Do not post rainbows next month during Pride then look away the rest of the year.”

She continued: “Corporate responsibility is not just employee benefits and hiring– it extends to how a company spends its philanthropic and political dollars. It extends to if a company supports the Equality Act or takes public stands and lobbies against anti-LGBTQ legislation, because legislation impacts LGBTQ employees and consumers.

We’ve seen an unprecedented wave of attacks against our community. Our most vulnerable, our youth, have been hit the hardest – and we need vocal allies more than ever. The business community has had our backs in the past for marriage equality and decriminalization in India in 2018. For that, we thank you. Now is the time to join us again. Join our movement, don’t market to a moment during Pride. We need you, and our youth need you.”


The Female Quotient’s Corporate Advocacy & LGBTQ Inclusion

The Female Quotient’s Equality Lounge hosted panels on DEI and empowerment throughout the week. Inside the Equality Lounge was a wall with women leaders including Marsha P Johnson and Laverne Cox.

 

Sarah Kate Ellis appeared on the Female Quotient’s ‘Corporate Advocacy & LGBTQ Inclusion’ panel moderated by TIME Executive Editor Dan Macsai and featuring Damon Jones, Chief Communications Officer of P&G, to discuss intentional corporate advocacy. The two discussed the Visibility Project from GLAAD and P&G, which works to increase the quantity, quality, and diversity of LGBTQ representation in advertising and public brand communications.

Damon Jones said: "Advertisers have a unique opportunity to both help people see themselves and to truly see others. The most important driver is accurate portrayal — people want to be seen in the fullness of who they are. As we look to effectively communicate and connect with people, the first step is accurate portrayal.”

Visibility matters and LGBTQ visibility at global convenings like the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos is growing at a time when the leaders of business, politics, and civil society need to speak out and take action on LGBTQ issues.

Limits on early abortion drive more women to get them later

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

AP

An 18-year-old was undergoing treatment for an eating disorder when she learned she was pregnant, already in the second trimester. A mom of two found out at 20 weeks that her much-wanted baby had no kidneys or bladder. A young woman was raped and couldn’t fathom continuing a pregnancy.

Abortions later in pregnancy are relatively rare, even more so now with the availability of medications to terminate early pregnancies.

Across large parts of the United States, they are also increasingly difficult to obtain.

Now, if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, women will face even more hurdles in some parts of the country, and may have to travel to another state to get an abortion.

That means more women could end up having the procedure later than they wish, and the burden falls more heavily on some groups, such as teens, poor, Black, Latino and Native American women and those who live in states where access to any abortion is limited.

“It’s not because people don’t want to have them sooner,” said Dr. Diane Horvath, an OB-GYN in Baltimore, Maryland, who has performed abortions for 16 years. “It’s because barriers and new information cause them to have to push it back to later in pregnancy.”


The Associated Press interviewed three women who had abortions later in their pregnancy. While their backgrounds and reasons for terminating their pregnancies were varied, none expressed doubt about their decision — or said they were traumatized by it — and all said they were grateful that they were able to do it.

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WANTED BABY, MISSING ORGANS

Christina Taylor already had two kids when she became pregnant with her third. Everything was going well at the start and she was looking forward to welcoming a new baby into the family.

When she was 20 weeks pregnant, Taylor went for an ultrasound and basic anatomy scan that is normally done at this stage. For most people, this is a time to find out the baby’s sex. For some, it’s also when fetal abnormalities are detected.

“I laid down and the ultrasound tech was doing her thing and she was getting really quiet and was taking a really long time,” she recalled. “She left the room at one point, ‘I need to talk to the doctor.’”

When the tech returned, Taylor could see from the look on her face that something was wrong. When the doctor arrived, he told the couple that there was no amniotic fluid. There were also no kidneys. The baby would likely not survive the pregnancy, or if by some miracle made it to full term, he would die shortly after birth.

“I told the doctor, look, I’m not sure … I don’t buy the age of viability thing, but for my own mental health and for the health of my family I want to terminate my pregnancy as soon as possible,” Taylor recalled.

She got a second doctor’s opinion and an MRI, which not only confirmed that there were no kidneys present, but also no bladder.

Fortunately, in Colorado, abortion is legal, as it was at the time, with no gestational limits. In the U.S., nearly all abortions take place in the first trimester of pregnancy. Just over 6% of abortions were performed at 14 to 20 weeks’ gestation, the second trimester, in 2019 according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. Less than 1% took place at 21 weeks or later, in the third, based on the most recent data available.

Taylor’s story shows what getting an abortion with access to good health care, health insurance and no legal obstacles can look like.

“I had the option to wait it out and see when he passed and then, you know, you’d have a stillbirth. But I knew I couldn’t do that. Like, I couldn’t put my kids through that,” Taylor said.

On the way home from the MRI she called her insurance company and found that they covered both types of abortion procedures, dilation and evacuation, D&E, and induction and dilation, or I&D. She chose the latter, which essentially would mean inducing labor and going through delivery. This way, she could have the procedure in a maternity ward, with a team of midwives.

“There was a small chance that he could have been born still alive and we would have been able to hold him and say goodbye when he passed,” Taylor said.

She labored for a day and a half. Given the circumstances, she recalled it as an overall positive experience, knowing “how much worse it could have been” had they still lived in Texas, where even in 2017 the procedure would not have been legal. The state’s current ban of all abortions after 6 weeks makes no exceptions – Taylor would have had to travel out of state to receive care, or possibly wait until her baby died in her womb, putting her at increased risk of infections and even death.

Only eight states allow abortions at any time during a pregnancy. Twenty states have no specific time limits but prohibit abortions at the time of “fetal viability,” which is generally considered to be around 23 or 24 weeks but depends on a host of other factors besides gestational age.

“I still grieve to this day for the loss of my son and my husband does too,” Taylor, who has been sharing her abortion story to bring attention to experiences such as hers, said. “But you know, we accept that that’s something that happens sometimes. And especially because of the context of knowing how lucky we were to just not have laws in the way of just doing what felt right.”

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‘I WAS FEELING SUICIDAL’

“Everyone thinks you present pregnancies the same way. You miss a period, you throw up, you take a test and at five weeks, you know you’re pregnant. And that is just not how life shakes out for a lot of people,” said Erika Christensen, founder of PatientForward, a nonprofit that helps people access later abortions.

Jenn Chalifoux, now 30 and studying law at the University of Colorado in Boulder, became pregnant in 2010, when she was 18 years old and receiving inpatient care for an eating disorder in New York. Her story touches on popular myths — that women always know they are pregnant and that women in liberal states with laws that only ban rare late abortions can easily get them.

Chalifoux returned home from college in the summer before her sophomore year to receive treatment for restrictive eating. A common symptom of such eating disorders is the loss of one’s period. A common – though by no means fail-safe – sign of being pregnant is also the loss of one’s period.

“I had a medical team of doctors and psychiatrists and stuff that I was working with. And at no point did any of us think that the fact that I hadn’t gotten my period was because of a pregnancy,” Chalifoux said.

As she was starting to recover from the eating disorder, though, her period still hadn’t returned. She was on birth control, but just to rule it out, she took a home pregnancy test, which was positive. After confirming the pregnancy through a blood test, she reached out to Planned Parenthood, where she was told that it was too late for a medical abortion and she would need a surgical procedure.

“I spent probably at least two weeks thinking about the financials, going through the money that I had,” Chalifoux said. “And a week makes a difference.”

The cost of an abortion increases significantly as time goes on, from a few hundred dollars to thousands in the second trimester and even tens of thousands later on. For many women, financial barriers to abortion serve to push the procedure later, because it can take time to come up with money. Medicaid, which provides health care coverage to low-income Americans, does not pay for abortions except in the case of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger.

“It’s really hard to get an abortion in this country,” Christensen said. “And the idea that people are able to seek care by a certain date is kind of based on the myths that we get all the information we need by a certain time and that we live in equitable environments with equal access to resources and health care. Neither of those are true.”

Realizing that she could not handle it alone, Chalifoux told her parents, who embraced her with support. By this point, weeks had passed since she learned she was pregnant and she started to experience physical symptoms of pregnancy. The experience of not having control over her body as it changed horrified her and she said she getting intrusive thoughts of performing an abortion on herself.

“I just remember feeling like I wanted to cut myself open or die. The experience of not having control over my body and feeling my body, feeling it change, noticing the changes and knowing that I was getting more pregnant every day was just … I mean, it was like horror,” she recalled.

After going for an initial appointment at a hospital to prepare for the procedure, another ultrasound revealed that she was further along than first thought. In all, Chalifoux said it took about a month from the time she learned she was pregnant until she was able to receive an abortion, a few days after she turned 19.

“It was such a long time ago that I’ve healed from a lot of it, but I’m able to recognize that where I used to think that my abortion was traumatic for me, I can realize now that it was the pregnancy that was traumatic. And that the abortion was actually very healing,” she said.

Today, Chalifoux is studying law, hoping to become a public defender or find work fighting against mass incarceration and speaks publicly about her abortion as part of her reproductive rights activism. Looking back, she says, she does not think she would have survived if she were forced to carry the pregnancy to term.

“I can remember having this fear that I would be forced to give birth,” she said. “And I can remember thinking that I would rather die.”

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RAPE AND A DOCTOR’S MISCALCULATION

It was July 2020. The young woman decided to check out her friend’s stand-up comedy show in a downtown Houston comedy club. She wouldn’t know anyone in the audience, but that didn’t matter. Working in the service industry and being a social, responsible person who had lived on her own since she turned 18, she wasn’t worried. She met what seemed like “a group of really cool people.” She had some drinks with them and had a good time, she recalled. Looking back, she doesn’t recall any women being part of the group. But she trusted herself.

“Everything kind of happened really fast,” said the woman, 31, whom the AP is not identifying because she is the victim of sexual assault. “I’m pretty sure, pretty sure someone slipped something in one of my drinks. I ended up waking up the next morning in a rundown motel room somewhere in southwest Houston.”

She had nothing on her except her clothes and shoes. Her phone, wallet and underwear were missing. It was about 10:30 a.m. and the motel’s management was banging on her door. Instead of offering help, she recalled, they yelled at her and kicked her out. The woman, who is Black, thinks they might have thought she was a prostitute. She walked along the side of the highway until she found a gas station where she could call a family member to pick her up.

Time went on, and she didn’t tell anyone what happened except one close friend. She started dating someone.

In late October, early November of that year, she, took a home pregnancy test. She was on birth control, but she figured maybe it had failed. She was pregnant.

After an initial appointment with a doctor who gave her an incorrect gestational age, she followed up at a women’s clinic, where she learned that she was actually further along. She did the math, and traced back the start of her pregnancy to the time she was raped back in July.

“And that was just something that I was not … I would not have been able to live with,” she said.

The young woman said it took her more than a week to absorb the shock of learning that she became pregnant from a sexual assault. More time passed as she searched for an abortion provider, encountering crisis pregnancy centers that tried to steer her away from terminating the pregnancy. One of the centers, she said, was calling her daily at one point. The woman said she felt harassed.

There was also the cost. According to medical bills the woman provided to the AP, the cost of her procedure increased by $2,500 between the time she was examined in Austin before her abortion and the time she arrived in New Mexico for the procedure. PatientForward helped cover her costs.

She was in her third trimester by the time she got on an airplane, alone, to fly to New Mexico and terminate her pregnancy at 27 weeks of gestation. She hasn’t told her family what happened, or any other friends, still coping with feelings of shame and guilt from both the rape and the abortion. She does not know who raped her.

“I have no idea who did it. No idea,” she said. “I never went back and pursued it.”

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Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story.