Labor Rights Equals Civil Rights

Hi everyone!  I hope you all had a great summer. I am excited for the 2019-2020 school year! I'm sure you are all excited as well. While I know that labor law might not be of great interest to many, this is a big passion of mine and I hope whoever reading posts from my blog finds the information intriguing and helpful.  With that, we are going back to our monthly informative posts about labor law! Our first post for the 2019-2020 school year is going to be about child labor laws.  Child labor laws are regulations mandated by the state and federal government in regards to working minors. Compliance of child labor laws by firms hiring anyone under 18 is important.  So, what exactly is the law? Let's look at child labor laws at the federal level first:  Children under the age of 14 are usually not allowed to work unless the workplace falls under a few exceptions. I will pull up a neat list of exceptions and link the source where I got it from below. These exceptions are:  being em

 Good luck with AP Exams and Finals everyone! Go Falcons!  I will be back after the summer with more content about labor rights! Until then, feel free to reach out to me through email and I will get back to you shortly. 

Hey guys! So for this month's topic, I want to talk about something new. This loosely correlates with labor rights but I still think it's relevant and important to discuss.  I was browsing through YouTube and saw something interesting. I saw a video about how much money public figures, namely celebrities, make. For one song produced and sold, for every movie made, celebrities make millions. And once they release these projects, a slew of companies hire them as spokespeople for their companies. Models and actors are paid an upward into the millions.  Now, I'm not hating on these celebrities. I'm a fan of a good number of celebrities and love listening to music and watching movies. I definitely think that artistic talent should be awarded accordingly and my post here today isn't necessarily meant to be cynical commentary on their profession as a whole, but rather a criticism of the wage disparity that is evident between celebrities and essential workers.  Essential wo

 Hey guys! So this month's topic is going to be on maternity leave!  I don't think the topic of Maternity Leave is talked about early as much as it should be. Maternity Leave is written the FMLA--Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. This requires pregnant mothers 12 full weeks of unpaid leave if they work in a company with fifty or more people. I'm sure that by reading this definition, you can definitely point out the problem right away. What happens to pregnant mothers in a company with less than fifty employees? While there are some states who have permitted the extension of the FMLA to smaller businesses, many mothers do not have the right to maternity leave.  Honestly, to get straight to the point, U.S maternity leave is bad. For such a developed country, I know we can do better. How is paid leave not a national statute? Japan has 36 weeks of paid maternity leave, where women can earn about two thirds of what they usually earn when working. Sweden has 35 weeks, where d

 Hello everyone! As high school students, your teachers have probably mentioned the education worker's strike at least once in the classroom. So, today, we're going to talk about it!  The education worker's strike started on February 22nd, 2018. LAUSD-The Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest education district in the whole country and the teachers are on strike, garnering mass attention from the media. So, why are teachers leaving their jobs and protesting?  LAUSD teachers were influenced by the West Virginia teachers who protested for better pay, better school resources and facilities, and four day weeks. There simply wasn't enough federal resources that were going into public education. Teachers believed that now was the time for them to stand up against the flawed education system and create change.  Did the strike happen over night? Simply put, no. The strike happened after numerous negotiations and concessions failed. When it seemed that compro

  I have a love hate relationship with fast fashion. I love it because, well, it's cheap. I like buying a cute outfit for five dollars. As a consumer, all I see is the price tag. Where it came from, how it was made, honestly didn't concern me that much. It was only after I started getting interested in labor rights that my perspective on this started to change.  Fast Fashion pertains to brands such as Forever 21, H&M, Shein, etc. The term fast fashion is used because they swap styles every other day. New clothes are brought in every week and sold out, only to be replaced with another batch of trendy new styles. While for us consumers, this is fun and exciting and a cheap way to sharpen our wardrobe, this comes at the expense of millions of underpaid and abused workers.  Fast fashion workers are notoriously overworked and underpaid. In countries such as Bangladesh where labor is the main source of capital, workers work under severe conditions to produce a massive amount of c