Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

Gabriel Thompson Wins January Sidney for Profile of Latino Immigrant Course Workers

Approximately two-thirds of the workers who maintain golf courses in the United States are Latino immigrants. Some are documented and others are undocumented. The work is gruelling, but invisible by design: They rise before dawn to trim the grass, level the sand traps, and chisel weeds out of the turf. They earn about $10 an hour. Gabriel Thompson wins the January Sidney Award for “The Caretakers,” which tells the stories of the men who make golf possible as a sport and an industry. Golf Digest took the unusual step of commissioning the piece because they wanted their readers to understand the huge contributions of Latino workers to the golf industry. Read my interview with Thompson in The Backstory

A New Civil Rights Issue: Women's Freedom Online

Social media presence and online branding are said to be critical to success in journalism today. Important questions are debated online and professional reputations are established in this arena. So, where does that leave female journalists whose work generates huge volumionus threats and abuse over twitter and other social media? Amanda Hess’s thought-provoking Pacific Standard essay on the online harrassment of female journalists should be read by everyone who cares about the future of journalism.

The web was supposed to disrupt established media power structures and give traditionally under-represented groups more ability to shape public opinion. To some extent, this promise has come true. However, women and other vulnerable groups (including young writers and writers of color) are disproportionately targeted for threats and abuse over social media. The very tools that enabled a broader reach also enable abusers to shame and harrass with terrifying precision. 

 

Dispatches from the Permatemp Economy

Temporary work used to mean exactly that, but today’s economy, “temps” have become a disposable second-class of permanent workers who can do the same work as employees for years at a time, but with lower wages, and no job security. Sarah Jaffe reports on the tempification of the American workforce for In These Times. Bosses have used temporary labor as a tool to divide their workers and forestall unionization, but Jaffe reports on encouraging signs of temp/perm solidarity at a Nissan plant in the deep south. 

 

[Photo credit: Haughygrandeur, Creative Commons.]

#Sidney's Picks: Student Loan Sharks; Brain Death; Sex Work in China

  • North Korea’s weird but Kim Jong Un probably didn’t feed his uncle to 120 ravening hounds. 

 

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

The Emperor Has Clothes, But They're From Sweatshops

The Obama administration has called on clothing buyers to use their purchasing power to improve working conditions in the global apparel industry, but the contractors who supply uniforms for the federal workforce are still sourcing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of clothing from sweatshops, Ian Urbina reports:

Labor Department officials say that federal agencies have “zero tolerance” for using overseas plants that break local laws, but American government suppliers in countries including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam show a pattern of legal violations and harsh working conditions, according to audits and interviews at factories. Among them: padlocked fire exits, buildings at risk of collapse, falsified wage records and repeated hand punctures from sewing needles when workers were pushed to hurry up.

The U.S. Marine Corps buys shirts from a Bangladeshi factory where children make up a third of the workforce. 

 

[Photo credit: for illustration, NYC Marines.]

Women Wrote 9 out of 10 of Dissent's Top Stories of 2013

Nine out of ten of Dissent’s most popular stories of 2013 were written by women. Lots of great writing and reporting here. Congratulations to all who made the list. 

[Photo credit: Hades2K, Creative Commons.]

#Sidney's Picks: Temp Workers, Workers' Comp, and "Life Hacking"

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Former Prosecutor Gets Himself Arrested to Investigate the Justice System

Why does a white guy in a suit have to do to get arrested around here? Former prosecutor Bobby Constantino was determined to find out. When multiple police officers declined to arrest him for openly carrying graffiti tools–a misdemeanor that young men of color get stopped for routinely–Constantino tagged City Hall in full view of the police and they still wouldn’t arrest him. He had to turn himself in. 

[Photo credit: larrylorca, Creative Commons.]

EPA Official Pretended to Be a CIA Agent to Avoid Work

I’m not even sure what to say about this revelation from Michael Isikoff of NBC: A senior federal bureaucrat pretended to be working under cover for the CIA in order to avoid work.

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his “historic” lies are “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.

Beale’s ruse was finally discovered after he very publicly “retired,” but continued to collect his salary. 

#Sidney's Picks: Lobotomies; Big Tobacco; Justin Timberlake's Union Tour

The Best of the Week’s News

  • A judge gave a drunk-driving teen a reduced sentence for killing four people because he supposedly suffered from “affluenza,” meaning that he was too privileged to know right from wrong.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

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