“Hyatt bikini pictures and hotel workers rights”/”Hyatt humiliates housekeepers, then fires them”

Taken from: http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/03/07/hyatt-bikini-pictures-and-hotel-workers-rights

March 7, 2012

“When I got to work that day, I heard a lot of laughter and jokes, including a manager that was around. When I got up close to look at what they were laughing at, what I saw were a bunch of pictures that were extremely humiliating and shameful. And I just felt so ashamed and humiliated as a woman that I got extremely upset and took down my picture and that of my sister.”

On Oct. 14, two weeks after Martha Reyes tore down the pictures, she and Lorena Reyes were fired from their positions as housekeepers at the Hyatt Santa Clara. Both have worked in hotels for more than two decades.

The pictures that started it all? Cartoon images of skinny white women wearing bikinis, with the faces of the hotel’s housekeepers tacked on.

“The pictures were pictures of women in bikinis with our faces pasted on. To be honest, for me as a woman it was—imagine, I’m a mom of five kids and nine grandkids. To be put in that kind of picture is extremely uncomfortable,” Martha told the Guardian.

When they were fired, the sisters were told that they were wasting company time by combining their ten-minute and lunch breaks. But the sisters believe that they were targeted after Martha tore down the pictures—and later, when confronted by a superior who demanded the images back, refused to return them.

As for the too-long lunch break claim: “We haven’t come across anyone else who’s been fired for it,” said Adam Zapala, an attorney with the firm Davis, Cowell, and Bowe, who is representing the sisters. “So it raises the suspicion in our mind.”

As we reported in November, the sisters have filed complaints against the hotel with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They are asking for their jobs back and for back pay, saying they were wrongly terminated.

The complaints are specific to the Reyes’s case. On March 8, UNITE HERE Local 2, which represents Hyatt workers in several Bay Area hotels, will push back at Hyatt on a different level.

The group is planning an International Women’s Day protest at the Grand Hyatt in Union Square.

“On March 8, 1911, garment workers, all women, took to the streets demanding a 10 hr work day and an end to child labor. It was after that year that people started to celebrate March 8 as International Working Women’s Day. This action comes out of that tradition,” explains Julia Wong, an organizer with UNITE HERE.

International Women’s Day no longer specifically honors workers. But the bikini pictures bring up an issue that affects all women; sexual objectification. “It’s making fun of what women’s bodies look like, sexualizing them, in an industry where its not safe to be sexualizing housekeepers,” said Wong, referring to widespread sexual harassment of hotel housekeepers. The extent of this issue was revealed to a degree last year in the aftermath of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal.

“It’s really a fight for women’s rights in the workplace,” said Wong.

***

If you are interested, please help by signing this petition at: http://sumofus.org/campaigns/hyatt/?sub=taf

Martha Reyes walked in the employee entrance of the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency to the sound of her male colleagues laughing.

She believed they were laughing at her.

It was “Housekeeping Appreciation Week” at the Hyatt and to celebrate, a digitally altered photo collage of Hyatt Housekeepers’ faces — including Martha’s and her sister Lorena’s — superimposed on bikini-clad cartoon-bodies was posted on a bulletin board at work.

She felt humiliated and embarrassed. But she knew her sister Lorena — also a housekeeper at Hyatt — would be even more so. Martha tore the posters of her and her sister down.Then, with management present, a coworker told Martha she needed to return the photos.

She refused and said if they wanted it back, they’d have to take her to court.

Hyatt management fired Martha and Lorena just a few weeks later.

Sign our petition to Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian asking him to apologize to Martha and Lorena and reinstate them with full back-pay. The Reyes sisters and community allies will deliver it next week to Hyatt officials.

They were fired for allegedly taking too long on their lunch break. But we don’t buy that excuse for a second. Here’s why:

Martha and Lorena worked at that hotel as housekeepers for 7 and 24 years respectively. During that time, the Reyes sisters were good employees. On the day she was fired, the HR Director told Martha she was an “excellent worker” and that there hadn’t been any complaints about her. Before the day Lorena was fired, she had never in her 24 years been written up for a single break violation.

The firing of the Reyes sisters is a new low, even for Hyatt.

What happened to the Reyes sisters is just another example of Hyatt’s culture of disrespect for its workers: Hyatt housekeepers have high rates of injury, and in 2011 various state and federal agencies issued 18 citations against Hyatt for alleged safety violations. Hyatt has even lobbied against new laws that would make housekeeping work safer.

Martha is the mother of five children and fears she may lose her house. Lorena is a mother of three and is struggling as the sole supporter of her family. As long-time employees of Hyatt, the Reyes sisters deserve some basic decency and the right to complain about their workplace without being fired.

As potential Hyatt customers, we have to draw the line. Sexually degrading housekeeping staff is unacceptable by any measure and the CEO of should take responsibility for Hyatt’s culture of disrespect for its workers now.

With May Day just passed — a day when people all over the world pause to acknowledge the work of people like Martha and Lorena — we at SumOfUs.org are humbled by workers like the Reyes sisters who dare to stand up for their rights. We are proud to stand with them, and join our partners at UNITE-HERE, in demanding justice for the two sisters.

“N.Y. Mom Fired After Donating Kidney to Help Her Boss”

Taken from: http://gma.yahoo.com/n-y-mom-fired-donating-kidney-help-her-162333834–abc-news-health.html

April 23, 2012

A New York Long Island woman said she was fired after she donated a kidney to help save the life of her boss.

Debbie Stevens, a 47-year-old divorced mother of two, filed a formal complaint with the New York State Human Rights Commission last Friday, claiming her boss used her for her organ then fired her “after the woman got what she wanted.” Stevens’ boss, 61-year-old Jackie Brucia, is one of the West Islip controllers for Atlantic Automotive Group, a billion-dollar dealership operator. Brucia hired Stevens in January 2009 as an assistant.

“She just started treating me horribly, viciously, inhumanly after the surgery,” Stevens told ABCNews.com. “It was almost like she hired me just to get my kidney.” Although Stevens turned out to be less than a perfect kidney match for Brucia, Stevens donated her organ to an out-of-state stranger so that Brucia could move up on the organ donor list.

Stevens left the company in June 2010 to move to Florida. She returned to New York in September to visit her daughter, and decided to stop in at the dealership, according to the complaint. It was during this visit that Brucia told Stevens of her need for a kidney transplant. ”She said she had a possible donor, a friend or something,” Stevens said. “But I told her if anything happened that I’d be willing to donate my kidney. She kind of jokingly replied, ‘You never know, I may have to take you up on that one day.’”

A few months later, Stevens moved back to Long Island and asked Brucia if she had any job openings. Brucia hired her within weeks.

Then, in January 2011, Stevens said her boss called her into her office and asked if she was serious about donating her kidney. ”I said, ‘Yeah, sure. This isn’t a joking matter,’” Stevens said. “I did not do it for job security. I didn’t do it to get a raise. I did it because it’s who I am. ”I didn’t want her to die,” Stevens said.

When tests revealed that Stevens was not the best match, doctors agreed to let her give her kidney to someone in Missouri, which gave Brucia a higher place on the organ donor list.

Stevens underwent surgery on Aug. 10, 2011. She said doctors hit a nerve in her leg, causing her discomfort and digestive problems.

She returned to work four weeks later, and said that’s when the problems began. ”I don’t have words strong enough or large enough to describe her treatment of me,” Stevens said. “Screaming at me about things I never did, carrying on to the point where she wouldn’t even let me leave my desk. It was constant, constant screaming.” Stevens said she was demoted and moved to a car dealership 50 miles from her home. She said the mental stress got even worse, with her supervisor calling her an “actress.” ”It got so bad that I’d start to tear up at times,” Stevens said.

After consulting a psychiatrist for her mental stress, Stevens’ hired attorneys who sent a letter to Atlantic Automotive Group.

Stevens was fired within a week.

When reached by ABC News, AAG referred all calls about the case to Jackie Brucia, Stevens’ supervisor, who could not be reached for comment, at either the car dealership or her home. It is not known whether Brucia has legal representation at this time.

Stevens’ attorney, civil rights lawyer Lenard Leeds, said he planned to file a discrimination lawsuit against AAG, and would likely seek millions of dollars in compensation. ”Our ultimate goal is to bring this before federal court,” Leeds said. “We’re alleging they discriminated against her for her disability and they retaliated against her when she complained about the harassment.”

Leeds said the damages sought will be for Stevens’ lost pay, psychological and physical well being. ”I have no comment on her. I’m just going walk ahead and live my life,” Stevens said.

“Stuart Chaifetz Secretly Tapes His Autistic Son at School, Discovers He’s Being Bullied by Teachers”

Taken from: http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/stuart-chaifetz-secretly-tapes-autistic-son-school-discovers-220500111.html

April 24, 2012

When his 10-year-old son, Akian, started getting into trouble at school, Stuart Chaifetz was stunned. The notes from Horace Mann Elementary School in Cherry Hill, N.J., said that Akian, who has autism, was having violent outbursts and hitting his teacher and his aide – behavior that the boy had never exhibited before.

“I could not understand why this was happening,” Chaifetz, a 44-year-old animal rights activist in New Jersey, wrote on his website. “I had never witnessed Akian hit anyone, nor could I dream of him lashing out as had been described to me.”

In October 2011, he met with Akian’s teachers and school therapists. A behaviorist was called in, but during several classroom visits he didn’t see Akian become violent. “He tried to create a scenario that would push Akian so far that he would lash out,” Chaifetz explained. “And Akian did not.”

“If Akian was pushed and didn’t do anything, what was setting him off?” his dad wondered. After six months of meetings yielded no answers, he decided that he needed to know what was happening in his son’s class. Like Akian, all of the other kids in his class also have autism, and complications from the disorder prevent them from being able to communicate to their parents about what goes on in the classroom.

“The morning of February 17, I put a wire on my son, and I sent him to school,” Chaifetz says in a video he created to showcase the audio clips. “What I heard on that audio was so disgusting, vile, and just an absolute disrespect and bullying of my son, that happened not by other children, but by his teacher, and the aides — the people who were supposed to protect him. They were literally making my son’s life a living hell.”

The recordings are raw and intense. Angry adults yell at kids to “shut up,” “shut your mouth,” and “knock it off.” Adults have inappropriate personal conversations in front of the children, discussing how drunk they were the night before, complaining about their husbands, and talking in detail about adult issues. More than once, an adult goads Akian to the point of tears — and then laughs at him.

“Go ahead and scream,” one adult hisses menacingly at Akian. “Because guess what? You’re going to get nothing… until your mouth is shut.”

And later: “Oh, Akian, you are a bastard.”

“The six and a half hours of audio I had proved that my son wasn’t hitting the teacher because there was something wrong with him — he was lashing out because he was being mocked, mistreated and humiliated,” Chaifetz writes on his website, No More Teacher/Bully. “His outbursts were his way of expressing that he was being emotionally hurt at school.”

Chaifetz gave the entire six-and-a-half-hour recording to the Cherry Hill School district (you can hear more of the clips here). One aide, Jodi Sgouros, was fired. Another aide and the teacher, whom the Collingswood Patch identifies as Kelly Altenburg, were reassigned but not fired.

“I don’t know why the teacher wasn’t fired,” Chaifetz writes on his blog. “Maybe the District had no choice; perhaps tenure or HR regulations did not permit them to do so. I know that they were sincere and shocked when they found out what happened. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in this.”

On Tuesday, officials at the Horace Mann School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, directed calls from Yahoo! Shine to the Cherry Hill School District’s offices; a call to a spokesperson there was not immediately returned. Cherry Hill Public School District spokesperson Susan Bastnagel told the Collingswood Patch on Tuesday only that the incident is “an internal personnel matter that the district took seriously and handled appropriately.”

Chaifetz disagrees, and has started a Facebook page and launched a petition at Change.org calling for the teacher’s dismissal. He’s already gathered nearly 18,500 signatures. “No one who treats children like that, who calls them vicious names, who humiliates them, who batters them verbally, deserves to be a teacher,” Chaifetz says in the video. ”How is it possible that teachers and staff can do these things, and you have evidence — not just accusations, but evidence — and they’re still teaching?” he said in an interview with Babble.com. To me, that’s the bigger outrage here. How many times has this happened before? How many times will it happen again if I remain quiet?”

For his part, Chaifetz says that what he really wants from the teacher and aides involved is a public apology and a willingness to take responsibility for their actions.v”I want an apology, not for me, but so one day I can play this video back for my son and say Akian, you didn’t deserve anything that happened to you,” he says in the video. “I’m not going to sue anybody. I’m not going to file a lawsuit. It’s not about money. It’s about dignity. This is to reclaim my son’s dignity.”

“Teacher Fired over Trayvon Martin Fundraiser”

Taken from: http://www.tolerance.org/blog/teacher-fired-over-trayvon-martin-fundraiser

April 9, 2012

What do you do with a teacher who provides students with authentic learning opportunities? A teacher who invests her own resources to support students? A teacher who was voted Teacher of the Year two of the last three years?

If you’re Superintendent Jacqueline Cassell at the Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School in Pontiac, Mich., you fire her.

When Brooke Harris contacted us last week, her first concern was not her career—it was her students. She worried that she had let them down by not fighting harder for her job. She worried that their essays onTrayvon Martin would no longer be included in the school newspaper. She worried that the superintendent in charge of their education would continue to underestimate them.

We’re worried about Brooke’s students too.

Last month Brooke Harris’ eighth-grade class asked her about the “kid who was killed over some skittles;” she seized the opportunity to bring her students’ lived experiences into the classroom—a strategy we and other experts advocate. Brooke’s students identify with Trayvon Martin. Many of them are African American. Many have been stopped by police who thought they looked suspicious.

In fact, her students engaged so deeply with the issue that they asked to take it beyond essays and class discussions—they wanted to take action to help Trayvon’s family. They, like many students across the nation, wanted to show their support by wearing hoodies. Each student who participated would pay $1. Proceeds would be donated to Trayvon’s family. Again, Brooke saw a teachable moment. She and her students began the formal process of organizing a school event.

Students wrote persuasive letters to the principal and superintendent. Brooke and a co-worker filed the necessary paperwork. The principal immediately signed off on the fundraiser. Superintendent Cassell was less enthusiastic. She refused to approve the proposal, despite having supported many other “dress down” fundraisers. Brooke’s students took the disappointment in stride, but asked to present their idea to Cassell in person.

And that’s when things got weird.

Brooke asked that a few of her students be allowed to attend her meeting with Cassell. Outraged by the request, Cassell suspended Brooke for two days. The explanation given—she was being paid to teach, not to be an activist. Those two days morphed into a two-week, unpaid suspension when Brooke briefly stopped by the afterschool literacy fair (she had previously organized) to drop off prizes (paid for with her own money) and to pick up materials for several students whose parents were unable to attend. Supporting her students was insubordination.

The final offense? Brooke asked Cassell to clarify her original transgression so she could learn from her mistake. Cassell referred her to the minutes of their first meeting. Still confused, Brooke again requested an explanation. Cassell fired her.

The Pontiac Academy for Excellence is a nonunionized charter school. According to Superintendent Cassell, Brooke’s contract makes no provisions for formal appeal, and Michigan is an “at will” employment state. What does this mean to Brooke? She has no right to an explanation of why she was fired. She just was.

There is a reason Michigan’s English Language Proficiency Standards call for students to “engage in challenging and purposeful learning that blends their experiences with content knowledge and real-world applications.” Students learn better this way.

Real life is not clean. It is not clear cut. It is not safe. But it is the world our students live in and they will be required to navigate it as adults. Teachers must bring this outside world into the classroom. The only way this will ever happen is if we create an environment in which teachers feel safe discussing controversial issues with their students. Stories like Brooke’s are outrageous in their own right, but even worse, they create an atmosphere of fear among teachers.

This fear is choking our educational system, but we can pry its fingers loose if we work together. In Brooke’s forced absence, her students held their own, unsanctioned hoodie day. They made their voices heard over the fear. So can you.

Sign our change.org petition calling for Brooke Harris’ reinstatement at the Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School and tell administrators we will not tolerate the silencing of our nation’s best teachers.

“Paterno legacy damaged by scandal, but not erased”

Taken from: http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=dw-wetzel_joe_paterno_obituary_012212

January 22, 2012

Truly great leaders are measured by the lives they reached, the people they motivated and the legacy of their lesson that can extend for years to come, like ripples from a skipped stone across an endless lake.

For Joe Paterno, the impact is incalculable, the people he connected with extending far beyond the players he coached for 62 years at Penn State, the last 46 as head football coach. Paterno always tried to be the giant who walked among the everyman both in the school’s greatest moments and, it turns out, in its worst.

Paterno died Sunday at a State College, Pa., hospital, suffering in his final days from lung cancer, broken bones and the fallout of a horrific scandal that not only cost him his job, but also his trademark vigor and a portion of his good name. He was 85 years old.

This is a complicated passing. What was once the most consistent and basic of messages – honor, ethics and education – seemingly lived out as close to its ideal as possible was rocked Nov. 5, 2011, when a grand jury indicted Paterno’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, of multiple counts of sexual abuse of children. Many, including Penn State’s Board of Trustees, believed Paterno could have and should have done more to stop Sandusky, especially after allegations of misconduct arose in 2002. Within days Paterno was fired from the program and school to which he’d become synonymous.

Now, a little more than two months later, he’s gone for good, a bitter, brutal ending for an American original. He was the winningest college football coach of all time, compiling a 409-136-3 record. He won national titles in 1982 and 1986 and recorded four other undefeated seasons, including consecutively in 1968 and 1969. He was a bridge from a simpler time to the cutthroat business college football has become, somehow serving as both a progressive force (he believed in players’ rights, a playoff system and welcomed advancements in television) and a stubborn traditionalist (the Penn State uniforms remained basic, he never learned how to send a text message and he still used old-school discipline).

In 2007, when a group of his players got into a fight at a party, Paterno determined it would best if the entire team had to clean Beaver Stadium after home games. “I think that we need to prove to people that we’re not a bunch of hoodlums,” he said at the time.

That was Paterno at his best, this singular figure offering simple lessons. He was the rock. He was the constant. He was the conscience. He was JoePa, his nickname suggesting a fatherly quality to not just his players, not just Penn State students who could still find his number listed in the local phone book and not just Nittany Lions football fans. He was a larger-than-life figure in the small, bucolic town of State College, and if you wanted to draw something good and decent from college football, well, here’s where you always could. Don’t worry, he’d still be there, as unchanged as ever.

He gave millions of dollars back to the school – the library is named after him and his wife, Sue. He raised millions more at speaking engagements across the country. He encouraged vibrant alumni to take incredible pride in their university, unusual for many state schools in the east. Yet he was still this guy out of Brooklyn, with a thick accent and even thicker glasses. He was humble. He was approachable.

It seemed, for anyone who wanted to believe, that he provided perspective amid the circus.

“We’re trying to win football games, don’t misunderstand that,” Paterno told Sports Illustrated’s Dan Jenkins in 1968, when he was just 41. “But I don’t want it to ruin our lives if we lose. I don’t want us ever to become the kind of place where an 8-2 season is a tragedy. Look at that day outside. It’s clear, it’s beautiful, the leaves are turning, the land is pretty and it’s quiet. If losing a game made me miserable, I couldn’t enjoy such a day. “I tell the kids who come here to play, enjoy yourselves. There’s so much besides football. Art, history, literature, politics.” That this attitude would come from the guy who would win the most games ever was part of the charm, as if Paterno was running a ruse on everyone chasing him all those crisp autumns. He was playing chess, they were getting check-mated.

No, the full truth never squares with these kinds of narratives. No, he wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t without fault or selfishness or vanity or difficult moods. He was close enough though. Sometimes, having someone to believe in is enough. “You know what happens when you’re No. 1?” Paterno said more than 40 years ago to Jenkins. “Nobody is happy until you’re No. 1 again and that might never happen again.” It would happen again and again and again, actually.

In his final days, that wide-eyed optimist and aw-shucks success story was gone. The Sandusky scandal had sapped what no opponent ever could. He sat earlier this month at his kitchen table with, not coincidentally, Sally Jenkins, the Washington Post columnist and Dan Jenkins’ daughter, for his last public words. He’d lost his hair from chemotherapy. His breath was heavy. He sipped on a soda. “His voice sounded like wind blowing across a field of winter stalks, rattling the husks,” Sally Jenkins wrote.

He tried to explain how he hadn’t done more to stop Sandusky, how he hadn’t followed up thoroughly, how he hadn’t pressed university administrators for answers. “I didn’t exactly know how to handle it … I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

Some saw no need for him to explain himself again: He’d said much the same thing in a 2011 grand jury appearance. For others, there is no suitable explanation, boys were abused, the mistake too grave for excuses.

This will be forever the battle over Joe Paterno’s legacy. A life of soaring impact, of bedrock values, of generations and generations as a symbol of how to live life to its fullest. The Sandusky case cracked that for some. Ended it. Not for all, though. Paterno reached too many, taught too many, inspired too many. And for years and seasons, for decades and generations to come, those that drew from his wisdom will pass it on and on. That will be his most lasting legacy.

No, his worst day can’t be forgotten. Neither can all the beautiful ones that surrounded it.