The New York Times Magazine has a feature about how a service dog transformed the life of a boy with severe fetal alcohol syndrome. Chancer the golden retriever started life as an ordinary pet, that is, before his adoptive family got tired of him. Chancer got a fresh start as a service animal for a 13-year-old boy named Iyal who suffers from debilitating rages and tantrums.

Chancer is trained to disrupt tantrums by distracting Iyal before his rages get out of control.

Since Chancer came into his life, Iyal has made remarkable cognitive and emotional progress:

The science behind Iyal’s cognitive leaps is still in its infancy. Alan M. Beck, the director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, is among those intrigued by it. “There is a real bond between children and animals,” he told me. “The younger the child, the greater the suspension of disbelief about what an animal understands or doesn’t understand.” According to Beck, more than 70 percent of children confide in their dogs, and 48 percent of adults do. “The absolutely nonjudgmental responses from animals are especially important to children,” he says. “If your child with F.A.S.D. starts to misbehave, your face may show disapproval, but the dog doesn’t show disapproval. The performance anxiety this child may feel all the time is absent when he’s with his dog. Suddenly he’s relaxed, he’s with a peer who doesn’t criticize him.”

The hypothesis is that the sudden drop in Iyal’s anxiety level — the sudden decrease in his hypervigilance, the lowering of his cortisol level and the disarming of the fight-flight physiology — frees up cognitive energy that he can use for thought and speech. “A child with a disability feels freer not to suppress his ideas and behaviors when he’s with his dog,” Beck says. “There’s a level of trust and confidentiality he has with no one else. And it’s a good choice: the dog is his true confidant and friend.”

 

[Photo credit: Rick Leche, Creative Commons.]

Academy Award-nominated documentary film director Josh Fox was arrested Wednesday as he tried to film a congressional hearing on a new EPA draft report linking hydrofraking chemicals to groundwater contamination of Wyoming. Fox was gathering footage for a follow-up to his acclaimed 2010 fraking documentary, Gasland. 

Fox spoke to Democracy Now! about what happened in the Rayburn building yesterday. He said House Republicans had him arrested after he refused to stop filming at a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology. In theory, the hearing was open to the media, but only to credentialed members of the press. Fox was filming for HBO, but he didn’t have the right credential. An ABC camera crew was also turned away, ostensibly because they hadn’t arranged in advance to film the hearing.

The ranking Democrat on the committee urged chairman Andy Harris (R-MD) to postpone the hearing for a week so that Fox could attend. Harris refused.

Why were the Republicans so keen to keep the press out of the hearing? “Well, virtually every Republican candidate right now is out for elimination of the EPA, which shows the deep, deep influence of oil and gas on Congress and on the Republican Party,” Fox told host Amy Goodman. Pro-fraking Republicans are trying to sideline the the strict well-funded EPA in order to give more power to permissive state-level regulators, Fox explained.

[Photo: Filmmaker Josh Fox. By Public Herald, Creative Commons.]

Vicky Talag (not pictured) is a 52-year-old home care who spends at least 10 hours looking after her 82-year-old client on a typical work day. Recently, Women’s eNews correspondent Amy Lieberman shadowed Talag at work: 

“I’m supposed to work 10 hours a day, but I often wind up doing more than that,” Talag says. “But I need to act like I am taking care of my mother.”

Talag has so far received no overtime pay or raise in this position, after almost three years. She hesitates to bring up these issues with her employer, who has suffered a series of health setbacks.

“If she is happy with me it is up to her to increase my pay. I want to ask her, but it isn’t always the right time,” Talag says. “When I brought her home from the hospital, I couldn’t let her stay alone, so I stayed with her here. But I am stretching myself.”

One week at the end of December, Talag worked a 24-hour shift. The next day, she felt exhausted and broke down crying. Then she took the next day off. She rarely uses her sick or vacation days, but when she does, an independent geriatric care manager arranges a replacement.

Talag doesn’t earn overtime, in fact, she doesn’t get paid at all for the hours she works in excess of what her contract calls for. Yet she stays and works for free because she wants to do a good job and maintain good relations with her client.

She believes, incorrectly, that she would qualify for unemployment insurance if she lost her job because she pays her self-employment taxes.

New York passed a domestic workers Bill of Rights in 2010, legislation that has enabled domestic workers to recoup over half a million dollars in wages through the Labor Board, but Talag doesn’t know about the new law. She hasn’t had a raise since she took the job in 2009, but she says she doesn’t feel comfortable broaching the subject with her client because the old woman has experienced a number of health setbacks recently.

The work of home care aides is vital to their patients and to society at large. New York’s 200,000 domestic workers look after the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled, freeing their family members to earn a living outside the home. Home care aides enable their clients to live with independence and dignity in their own homes instead of costly institutions.

[Photo: Home care aide, illustration only, myfuture.com, Creative Commons.]

Charles Duhigg and David Barboza of the New York Times documented brutal working conditions at Apple factories in China:

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

Apple claims that it holds all its suppliers to high standards, but privately, insiders conceded to the Times that the company sometimes lets suppliers off the hook for violations because it’s costly and time consuming to replace them. As one labor expert explained, Foxconn is basically the only company in the world that can meet Apple’s needs, so “[t]here’s a lot of rationalization.”

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” one former Apple executive told the Times. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

The company developed a code of conduct in 2005 and it has since audited nearly 400 suppliers and suppliers of suppliers. Much of what we know about abuses comes from Apple’s own investigations.

Officially, violators have 90 days to fix the problem, but critics note that the same problems keep cropping up year after year, which suggests accomodation rather than enforcement. It’s interesting that violators get 90 whole days to fix an industrial health and safety violation in a sector prized for its lightening-fast flexibility. If a factory can redesign a screw in three hours to the customer’s exact specifications, why can’t it fix a workplace hazard just as quickly? Maybe because the customer doesn’t care about the hazard as long as the screws keep rolling in.

At some level, everyone knows that no manufacturing system can meet Apple’s incessant and ever-escalating demands for production, flexibility, and low prices without hurting people. “You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” a current Apple executive confided to the Times. “And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

Duhigg’s in-depth investigation of Apple’s manufacturing system ran on Monday. The piece, which set out to explain why iPads aren’t made in the United States, electrified readers and spurred vigorous debate online. Could America win those jobs back? Given the miserable working conditions that Apple assembly workers endure, would we even want to? As long as we’re considering a complete economic makeover to revive high tech manufacturing, are there other models, like extensive automation, that would be more acceptable to Americans?

[Photo credit: waferbaby, Creative Commons.]