Tweet
Dean Baker pointed out on Saturday an important fact, perhaps the fact that allowed the maid to report Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged assault. Haven’t seen this in any mainstream publication (emphasis added):
Union Maid Reported Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Sexual Assault
Saturday, 21 May 2011 07:39This point should have been mentioned in a NYT article on the risk of sexual assault/harassment that housekeepers face in hotels. As the article notes, many housekeepers are reluctant to bring such attacks to the attention of their supervisors and/or law enforcement both out of embarrassment, but also out of fear of losing their jobs.
In this particular case, the housekeeper belonged to a union that has provisions in its contract that explicitly require the management to take cases of sexual assault or harassment seriously. This meant the housekeeper knew that she could make a complaint to management and not worry about being ridiculed or putting her job at risk. This fact would have been worth mentioning in the article.
“Worth mentioning”? C’mon Dean, you could use stronger language than that! (smile)
Anyway, a Saturday article in the Arizona Republic, also on the risks of sexual assault and harassment that hotel maids face, also fails to mention the fact that being in a union typically means there will be job contract provisions that protect workers who report sexual assault or harassment.
I’m seeing a pattern here, anyone else!? Union Member comments at the bottom of the Dean Baker article:
Chances are greater of seeing an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and a Black Swan in the same tree than a journalist acknowledging the many, many, positive non-financial benefits of unions, even to … non-members and their families! …
Meanwhile, the litany of obvious union shortcomings is frequently recited in the media, but not in an effort to understand their role or improve their performance but to stigmatize and weaken them.
Anyway again, it’s not just a key, union-supportive fact being missing from the mainstream media, but the ‘why’ and the ‘what to do about the why’ that matter.
11 Comments
This is really great to know. It’s sad that our major media are so afraid of the wingnuts, and their wingnut bosses, that they don’t mention the advantages of belonging to a union that made this case possible. It’s also a fact most often ignored in reporting pilot Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson, that union training gave him the skills he needed to save everyone on his plane.
And if you don’t die young, there is an excellent chance that you will end up under the care of members of the SEIU…if that union ever gets its act together.
Thanks to you and Dean Baker. Important info. Excellent point.
Major media are almost entirely composed of children of the ruling class now.
There’s only two ways to make it through the now unpaid early days of internship phase of starter level media career.
You’re expected to work salary hours per week as unpaid intern. 60-70 hours unpaid.
You either go to work on whatever job is paying your bills after that, or your parents support you while you are an intern. Only the old upper middle class + can afford to support children who are out working full time jobs that do not get paid.
This is a pretty big deal. A US Senate staffer once complained to me about being pregnant, waddling around a bit to do work and having to dodge creepy Senators trying to inappropriately touch her. I was horrified. Jeebus, everyone deserves to be free of this harassment!
Baker ‘reveals’ a different completely unreported aspect of IMF scandal:
The third paragraph is even better.
I agree, but more because the culture is driven from the top down and everybody with common sense knows what to do and what to report if they want to keep their jobs. Elite and wanna-be-elite journalists generally know and live by the commonplace stories of reporters losing jobs cuz they reported real and important (aspects of the) news that didn’t fit corporations’ overall mission/ideology. And they analytically observe who is rewarded with the best, top jobs and how they report and don’t report the news.
The solution is to unlearn believing the mainstream corporate-owned ‘news’ and to report or at least disseminate the real news ourselves. Here is a decent place to do so, but obviously unbiased reality needs a bigger microphone.
With the SEIU pushing for Obamacare, if you get sick, die quickly.
Yeah, DSK is looking at six figures. Also looking at the IMF website, it looks like Geithner qualifies for a pension since he was there for 3 years. I wonder how many pensions Geithner is going to have between the IMF, Fed and Treasury.
It’s important to also watch the other of the two world’s largest public lenders, the World Bank. I have never forgotten this regarding another six figure salary (note that SAIC comes up):
“Pentagon helped Wolfowitz’s girlfriend” (Telegraph.Co.Uk, Apr. 18, 2007)
“Wolfowitz’s girlfriend problem” (Salon.Com, Apr. 19, 2007)
World Bank employee benefits here
As an example of how the IMF or World Bank and the Pentagon work together:
(excerpt from “Ecuador protests hit IMF, Pentagon,” Workers World News Service [archives], Jan. 15, 2001 ; current site is Workers.Org)
Baker has worked the story up into a Guardian column. Note the subtitle: