Recently, in DC, Republican incumbent Carol Schwartz has come under fire for her advocacy of and vote for the paid sick leave bill that made its way through Council. Although the bill was extraordinarily weak and pathetic, it’s still a step in the right direction. Her opponent in the Republican primary has been out bashing her for the endorsements she’s received from labor, while he’s also been intimating that Republicans and unions don’t mix (um, does he remember the 80’s and the unfortunate Teamsters’ endorsements? Or IAFF’s endorsement of DeWine in Ohio over Sherrod Brown?), clearly, he’s an idiot who can raise money and thereby threaten an entrenched Republican (I’m yawning here), good for him, even if he's an idiot.

Now, it appears that this little race, and more specifically the issue of paid sick leave, has some very interesting national implications that the AP (I know, the dreaded AP which seems to be cleaning up their act) actually reported today (not the local race, the implication of it on the nation):

Some 46 million U.S. workers lack paid sick days, but lawmakers in 12 states — including California, Connecticut, Minnesota and West Virginia — have proposed legislation in the past year that would require businesses to provide them.

Snip

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 43 percent of the private industry labor force worked in 2007 without paid sick time, a group primarily made up of low-paid employees at small businesses.

That means that the waitresses at your table, the cooks in your kitchens and the school bus drivers (who aren’t yet unionized through the Teamsters' efforts) are helping you to a nice heaping serving of whatever they are carrying from viruses to bacteria. They’re treating you to more and more sickness. I know, it’s sweet, isn’t it?

But fear not, if you live in DC, and don’t work in the food industry or health care industry, are on the job for at least a year, you might be able to qualify for prorated sick days depending on how many hours you work up to a maximum number of days. I know complicated, I prefer how San Francisco did it:

Paid sick days are already law in Washington, D.C., where employees earn days off based on the number of hours worked and the size of the business, and in San Francisco, which requires one hour sick leave for every 30 hours worked.

The Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which represents 900 restaurants, did not endorse or oppose the ballot measure that enacted the local ordinance, but won several changes, such as allowing employers to require a worker give "reasonable notice" when calling in sick, said Kevin Westlye, executive director. The law has been successful, he said.

"There's been some concern that employees are abusing the ordinance. There's been a little bit of that, but not as widespread as people thought at the beginning," Westlye said.

Interesting, no abuse and the association didn't bother to step into it, sweet.

But what you should pay attention to is who currently supports such measures on the national level, because if we’re fortunate enough to elect him President:

Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, supports the legislation.

I suppose the real thing to think about here is why vote for anyone other than Obama? But in DC... you have a choice as a Republican in the primary on September 9th, supporting an incumbent concerned with some citizen’s services and a guy who seems to think just like John McCain. Hmm, which should DC voters chose? Hmm, they both kind of suck.

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Remember those bad tomatoes? Remember those vile little red demons, just waiting to make you sick with salmonella?

Well, wait no longer, they weren’t the culprit. Nope, it was peppers from Mexico.

A strain of the salmonella bacteria that sickened more than 1,300 people has been found in a serrano pepper and a sample of irrigation water at a farm in Mexico, U.S. health officials said Wednesday.They called the discovery a "breakthrough" but cautioned that tomatoes may still be a culprit in the nearly four-month outbreak that has alarmed consumers and cost the domestic produce industry hundreds of millions of dollars

It’s funny how there’s a “smoking gun” and still, “don’t eat tomatoes” keeps popping up.

But in all of this, what I think we have is a big fat thank you to Free Trade! Yeah for Free Trade! It’s brought us cheaper products, fruits, vegetables and now even a pilot product of truck drivers from Mexico (PS, they don’t have anti-lock brakes nor are they required to rest).

How about a little more from the LA Times story:

The rare Salmonella Saintpaul strain was found at a farm in Nuevo Leon state in northeastern Mexico, said David Acheson, food safety chief for the Food and Drug Administration. The farm grows serrano and jalapeno peppers but not tomatoes, he said.Contaminated water is a common launchpad for salmonella, experts said. Fecal matter can seep or be washed into wells, canals and other untreated water sources used to irrigate crops, said Douglas Powell, scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University.

I especially love the reference to FECAL matter. It just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, okay, and a little pukey, too.

While the tomato scare was all over the news for weeks and stores all over the place were pulling tomatoes, many of us were left wondering WTF? I know when I went to get a burger, no tomatoes. When I ordered a salad, no tomatoes, even the cute little cherry and grape tomatoes (which were never suspected) were taken away. And the warnings were issued before testing found any contamination from tomatoes. Again from the LATimes:

No tomatoes have tested positive for the strain.On Wednesday, lawmakers pressed King and Acheson about the slow pace of the investigation, traceability standards and conflicting messages about what was safe to eat.In early June, the FDA issued a warning against three types of tomatoes, leading some retailers to pull all tomatoes from their produce bins. The advisory was lifted in mid-July -- not because tomatoes were in the clear but because any affected fruit would have spoiled by then.A week later, the agency said that only jalapeno peppers from Mexico were linked to the outbreak. The FDA is now telling consumers that domestic tomatoes and peppers are in the clear, while fresh jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico should be avoided.

I think the real culprit here is the extent to which our food supply is not locally based. It’s difficult to find locally grown fruits and vegetables. I tend to pick things up from farmers markets because the items are more often produced by local farmers instead of huge conglomerates. I’d prefer to have the option of joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group where a group of residents band together to purchase direct from a local farm. CSA’s give you a choice in terms of perishable foods that don’t always exist in local food supply chains.

But as much as I love the idea of a CSA and have actively looked for one to join, I’m still drawn to the farmer whose produce I can look through and pick and choose. I suppose it’s all about choices, huh?

Family farmers are rare these days.

Kids I grew up with who were farmers didn’t continue in the family tradition. The pig farmers, corn and hay farmers the kids who took time out of school to harvest winter wheat in the spring and the kids who lived on the strawberry farms (like my mother had) are a thing of the past.

Today, we talk about industries as if all tomato farmers have banded together or worse, are equal to Steel producers or textile mills. When it comes to food, these groups are vastly unequal because what we put in our bodies is way more important and affects way more people than does the production of eye bolts, zippers or blankets.

But, then again, it’s not like this hasn’t come up before (from the Washington Post )

This isn't the first time produce growers looked to Congress for help with a food-safety issue.

Even though the 2006 bagged spinach recall involving Dole Food and Natural Selection Foods was more contained, growers took a $100 million hit, according to the United Fresh Produce Association.

Spinach growers got a financial-aid provision part way through Congress but didn't succeed.

In March 1989, the U.S. banned the entry of seedless grapes from Chile after two grapes were found to have been contaminated with cyanide, leaving Chilean growers, exporters and importers with millions of dollars in losses. The industry tried to recover about $210 million only to get word four years later that a federal judge ruled that the FDA wasn't responsible because it was doing its job.

It’s happened before, the poisoning of our food. So, when the issue of tomatoes came up, I didn’t stop eating tomatoes. I just shopped more for tomatoes grown on family farms and sold at the local farmers markets. That’s why when I heard about the peppers from Mexico, I thought about the tomato farmers who pay a living wage to their pickers and I wondered if the farmers suffered losses like those reported in the LA Times and like the information below from the Washington Post:

But before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration lifted the tomato advisory July 17, U.S. tomato growers were left holding the shopping bag.
Growers said they lost $100 million in sales during the investigation, which they charge was conducted poorly and without enough consultation with them.

I wondered if growers (large and small) suffered losses like this, well, what happened to their pickers? If the workers can’t work on these farms due to losses like this from an issue related to imported food, do we also run the risk down the road of driving our own farmers out of business and a need for greater importation of food?

In the end, I think the Post got it right with this one:

The late reprieve for the industry shows how difficult it is to conduct international investigations of food-borne illnesses with limited resources and imperfect ways to trace a product back to its source.

This is what Free Trade has gotten us, a lot of rotten tomatoes here and imported peppers that will simply make you sick. Fabulous, huh?

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Today is a sad day. Not only is the NAFTA queen being called the comeback kid, but DC City Council voted on Tuesday to say Fuck You to waitresses and Health Care workers in the city.

Yep, that's right, please remember to thank

Harry Thomas Jr. (Ward 5)
Mary Cheh (Ward 3)
Kwame Brown (At-Large, I guess I should expect this from a former Wal-Mart executive)
Yvette Alexander (Ward 7, WTF Yvette?)
Vincent Gray (Council Chair)
Jack Evans (Ward 2)
David Catania (At-Large-Independent former Republican)

For Voting their Fuck You to DC workers.

From DC's Metro Washington Labor Council:

With an estimated 200,000 workers in DC who do not currently get paid sick time, with high concentrations in low-wage food service, retail, and construction -- including part-time workers and workers in seasonal positions - sick leave advocates say many DC workers may now never meet the one-year full-time minimum to access paid sick and safe time.

I do taxes as a volunteer in DC. I sit across from the table and look at the financial picture of worker after worker after worker. What is the most disgusting part of yesterday's vote is that they could have included servers and still did the ridiculous 12 months full time requirement and still taken them out of the mix, but Health Care workers? That's one aimed directly at single moms. It's aimed at the visiting nurses who aren't represented by a union, the certified nursing assistants, homehealth aides, mental health aides, etc... These are the lowest paid health workers out there. And I do their taxes. They make less than $30k a year working full time when they do work full time. Most do not. Most work multiple jobs and all of them are part time.

So, thank you Carol Schwartz for pushing this measure (I can't believe I'm thanking a Republican), but to the unanimous support the final bill recieved, shame on DC Council. Shame on each and every one of you for voting the Fuck You to DC workers.

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Or for that matter, are injured. But did you know that few low wage workers are ever paid any leave time in order to recover from an injury or to get over the flu?

Well, now, there's something you can do about it. You can RALLY ONLINE in support of paid time off.

It's time that we all get the time necessary to get better. No one should ever have to choose between putting food on the table and taking a day off to get over the flu. It's just not right. It's not right, at all!

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