Tipping promotes inequality, and fosters discrimination and sexual harassment. The roots of tipping in the US can be traced back to the freeing of enslaved people, when change-resistant employers could avoid paying newly freed people an actual wage by making them work for tips. People who work for tips are twice as likely to live in poverty, and can be paid far below minimum wage. People of color are tipped at lower rates than their white colleagues. Workers who rely on tips to make a living experience twice as much sexual harassment. Is this what we meant when we used to say, “Here — for your trouble”?
This blog post was written after a visit to the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, in Geneva, Switzerland in December of 2015. The goal was to collect some of the most easily-digestible information on this massive global crisis, along with resources to make it easy to take action from here in the US.
I chose Medium as the platform, due to its media integration features and built-in audience for timely and topical blogs.
It was easy to tell myself I wasn’t doing work that supported the NRA. Until a man walked into a club in Orlando and killed 49 people, injuring over 50 others. Once again, dozens of innocent people were dead. Our nation mourned. Vigils were held. Arguments raged. Who is culpable for letting this happen again?
I was. And I didn’t act alone.
I had a great time chatting with Larry Drake on WSCA’s Seacoast Currents show this morning. We talked about how I got started with political activism and advocacy, and what I learned from Planned Parenthood’s national volunteer summit, The Power of Pink (#PinkOutTheVote).
Thank you to All Above All for highlighting my op-ed on repealing the Hyde Amendment in their “Acts of Boldness” campaign! It’s such an honor to featured alongside so many of my heroes in the fight for reproductive justice and gender equality.
As an uninsured young adult working three jobs, Planned Parenthood was my only option for access to birth control and well-woman exams. Since they were there for me to provide much-needed sex education, information on and access to birth control and compassionate, professional health care, I’ve become outspoken about reproductive justice and the fact that I #StandWithPP.
According to UNCHR’s 2015 Mid-Year Trends Report, “the global refugee total, which a year ago was 19.5 million, had as of mid-2015 passed the 20 million threshold (20.2 million) for the first time since 1992. Asylum applications meanwhile were up 78 per cent (993,600) over the same period in 2014. And the numbers of internally displaced people jumped by around 2 million to an estimated 34 million.
Indications from the first half of the year suggest 2015 is on track to see worldwide forced displacement exceeding 60 million for the first time. In a global context, that means that one person in every 122 has been forced to flee their home.” (Source: UNHCR)
How do you even wrap your brain around such a crisis?