Bad Deeds for 10-13-2010

 

In Rick Perry’s Texas, Schoolchildren Are Tracked Like Cattle – Two school districts in the Houston area have begun monitoring students’ whereabouts on campus by issuing them identification badges with radio frequency identification technology — the same technology used to track cattle. The Spring school district in Houston has distributed the ID badges to about 13,500 of its 36,000 students since December 2008. The Santa Fe school district, about 30 miles south of Houston, began using the badges this year.

Many students already are used to being electronically monitored. Some campuses have had surveillance cameras for years. “It feels like someone’s watching you at all times,” said Jacorey Jackson, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey.

Now, what was that I heard Rick Perry saying about liberty and freedom?

 

US is #1 in Longest Hours and Lowest Wages – At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not. [Excessively paid CEO can abuse any employee for any reason.]

In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.
According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”

Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.

There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States.

The U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave.
In every country included except Canada and Japan (and the U.S., which averages 13 days/per year), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days. In France and Finland, they get 30 – an entire month off, paid, every year.

Then there’s this depressing graph on average paid vacation time in industrialized countries:

The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.

Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.

 

Wall Street Pay Expected to Climb Again While Many Don’t Even Have jobs – While many people in the US are unemployed, pay on Wall Street is likely to rise another 4 percent to what $144 billion, according to an estimate by the Wall Street Journal published Tuesday. “Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms,” the paper’s reporters wrote, with the total payouts leaping to $144 billion, “a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009.” “Until focus of these institutions changes from revenue generation to long-term shareholder value, we will see these outrageous pay packages and compensation levels,” Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, told reporters.

 

Chamber Receives At Least $885,000 From Over 80 Foreign Companies In Disclosed Donations Alone – In addition to multinational members of the Chamber headquartered abroad (like BP, Shell Oil, and Siemens), a new ThinkProgress investigation has identified at least 84 other foreign companies that actively donate to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6). All of this money is collected in the same 501(c)(6) the Chamber is using to run partisan attack ads.

Regards,

Jim