Restaurant Workers and Sexual Harassment

Restaurant Workers and Sexual Harassment
"When the federal government began creating job protections during the New Deal era, Congress explicitly excluded jobs associated with women and black people: domestic and farm work." [1]

Fifty-two percent of female restaurant workers report sexual harassment on the job, according to the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. The ROC United survey fond that restaurant workers who depend on tips and live in states that exempt tipped workers from standard minimum-wage rules are far more likely to report sexual harassment. Women workers in those states are also three times as likely to report being asked by management to make their outfits sexier.

There are as many people in food services alone (roughly 12 million) as there are in all forms of manufacturing. [2] 

Addicted While Pregnant
"In Pennsylvania overall, the number of pregnant women hospitalized for substance abuse has more than doubled from 2000 to 2015; in 2015, 4,600 pregnant women were hospitalized because of a drug problem." "The last thing anyone should want to do is deter pregnant women from seeking medical care or drug treatment. But criminalizing their drug use will cause addicted women to stay away from the very people who can help them, lest they end up under arrest. That doesn't help anyone." [3]

Seven states already have statutes criminalizing self-induced abortions, and another 18 have laws on the books that can be used to prosecute women who terminate their own pregnancies. "Drug dependency is a medical condition -- not a crime. Pregnant women do not experience drug dependency because they want to harm their fetuses or because they don't care about their children."

The National Association for Pregnant Women adds that: "There is also a general lack of available substance use disorder in Pennsylvania, especially in Butler County and especially for pregnant women."

Crosshairs of Police Violence
"Over the course of the past three years, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired protests across the country against police violence." "In each city, SWAT teams equipped with tea gas, armored vehicles and rifles patrolled the streets, and protesters were subject to mass arrests and police brutality. In Ferguson, 10 days of protesting led to 150 arrests -- 80 percent of them for 'failure to disperse.' Nearly 200 protesters were arrested in Baton Rouge." [4]

It was in 1997 that the Department of Defense began to supply surplus military equipment to police departments across the country. A 2014 report by the ACLU found that 42 percent of those visited by SWAT teams to execute a search warrant were black, and another 12 percent were Latinos. In other words, more than half were people of color.

According to a 2009 study, 9.1 percent of black Americans experienced post-traumatic disorder, compared with 6.8 percent of white Americans. The American Heart Association has found that nearly 43 percent of black American adults have high blood pressure, compared with just over 33 percent of white non-Hispanic adults. Today, black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, and black women more than twice as likely as white women. Black men are three times more likely than white men to die at the hands of law enforcement. [5]

Footnotes
[1] Kai Wright, "Safety in Numbers," The Nation, November 20/27, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Katha Pollitt, "Addicted While Pregnant," The Nation, December 18/25, 2017.

[4] Collier Meyerson, "When Protesting Police Violence Puts You in the Crosshairs," The Nation, December 18/25, 2017.

[5] Ibid.