Monthly Archives: December 2014

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Why We #StandWith​Peggy


A Better Balance The Work and Family Legal Center
We Stood with Peggy Young at the Supreme Court to Fight Pregnancy Discrimination
Rally at the Supreme Court in Support of Peggy Young
Dear friend,
Earlier this week, Peggy Young’s pregnancy discrimination case came before the Supreme Court. Peggy was forced off her job while pregnant, losing income and her health benefits in the process. Women should not have to choose between their jobs and the health of their pregnancies. We stood with Peggy inside the court room, at the rally on the steps outside of the Supreme Court and online. Thank you for taking the time to show your support, so many of you helped us to show solidarity with Peggy and all pregnant workers that #StandWithPeggy peaked at 2,300 tweets per hour on Wednesday!
ABB Co-President Dina Bakst was inside the court for the arguments. You can read her Op-Ed, Supreme Court Must Make Clear That Pregnancy Discrimination Is Unjust co-authored with MomsRising here.
The rally emceed by ABB’s Southern Office Director Elizabeth Gedmark was a complete success! More than 200 advocates and supporters came together for the event, enthusiastically chanting and carrying signs despite the wintery weather. Stories were shared of other pregnant workers, who were pushed out of their jobs, like ABB Client Officer Lyndi Trischler. You can read her story here.
ABB’s Senior Staff Attorney Phoebe Taubman was on To The Point with Warren Olney.  If you missed this informative radio program you can listen to it here.
Thank you for all of your support!
The A Better Balance Team,
Sherry, Dina, Phoebe, Jared, Elizabeth, Risha, Morenike, Rachel, Jake, Molly & Lynn
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Don’t miss the final story in our Product of Mexico series: Children work the fields


Los Angeles Times
Dear Readers:Meet Alejandrina. She was 11 when Los Angeles Times journalists first began reporting her story. Alejandrina, a little girl who likes lip gloss and longs to go to back to school, works 14 hours a day picking chile peppers for a farm that supplies a U.S. distributor.
Mexican law requires workers to be at least 15, but Alejandrina is among an estimated 100,000 children younger than that who work the fields. As she told The Times: “I work because we don’t have any money and we need money to eat things.”
Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti tracked Alejandrina’s nomadic existence for a year. Read her story, which is also the story of so many others: Children harvest crops and sacrifice dreams in Mexico’s fields
This marks the fourth and final piece in our Product of Mexico series, an investigation into conditions on Mexican farms that supply Americans with much of our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and other produce.
We’ve told readers about unbearable conditions at labor camps and taken them into Bioparques, a supplier to Wal-Mart and one of Mexico’s biggest tomato exporters, where Mexican officials found workers held captive. We’ve examined company stores, where a lack of price tags and big mark-ups leave many farmworkers trapped in a cycle of debt.
I want to thank all of you for reading this important series and sharing it with others. Here’s a sneak peek at a video coming Monday that features Marosi and Bartletti talking about the reporting behind this eye-opening series.
Davan Maharaj, Editor
P.S. We’ve created some extra content available only to our subscribers. Bartletti, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist whose interest in photography dates back to his service in Vietnam, has covered Mexico for decades. He shares some of his best photos and memories of what it took to capture the images.
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Lindsey Allen, Rainforest Action Network


Ran
Take a moment to reflect on 2014, a year of action.

Watch this video to see 2014 in action!

Another year has flown by and it’s absolutely incredible how much we have accomplished in just one year.

All of us at Rainforest Action Network could not be more grateful to our network of hundreds of thousands of supporters, like you, who made it all possible.

Together, we defended the rainforests and its inhabitants, demanded an end to dirty energy, challenged corporate power and fought climate change. 2014 has demonstrated people are energized and ready to take action to ensure people and planet are placed above corporate greed.

We kicked off 2014 right, by organizing over 280 vigils in less than 72 hours with more than ten thousand activists to urge President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline following the release of the State Department’s Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.

And as we come to a close to 2014, after seven long years of campaigning against Cargill — the biggest privately held corporation in the US — we have seen a groundbreaking commitment along with a seismic shift in the palm oil sector to protect disappearing rainforests and to keep massive amounts of carbon in the ground and out of the atmosphere.

And we couldn’t have done any of it with you!

Take a moment now and watch how together, we made the impossible, possible.

Thank you for all you do,

Lindsey Allen, RAN Executive Director Lindsey Allen
Executive Director
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FOR SALE: 1 Bazooka (slightly used)


“If you want to own a bazooka, you can own a bazooka” — Gavin Seim, “I Will Not Comply” organizer

Seriously. This is what the folks trying repeal 594 really think — that it’s A-OK to have your own bazooka.

Gavin Seim said this gem during a rally on S‌atur‌d‌ay, Decem‌ber 1‌3, the day before the second anniversary of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And what’s worse, another speaker at the rally, Rep. Elizabeth Scott from Monroe, is getting ready to introduce bills to weaken and repeal background checks when the legislative session starts in January.

You helped make history by passing 594 at the ballot box this fall. Contribute $3 t‌od‌ay to help us keep background checks the law in Washington!

It’s as simple as that.

If Rep. Scott is successful this session, all of our hard work will be for nothing — and it won’t matter that background checks passed with nearly 60% support.

We’ll be right back where we started, unless you help us stop them with a contribution today.

Step up right now, and contribute $3 to keep background checks protecting our families.

We’ve won at the ballot box, and now we need to win in Olympia.

Thank you for keeping up the fight.

Zach Silk
Campaign Manager
Yes on 594