Do you know Lilly Ledbetter? Well, I don’t either (at least not personally), but her story is a familiar tale of women and pay discrimination. Girl meets world, girl gets job, girl works at Goodyear Tire for 20 or so years, girl gets anonymous memo at the brink of her retirement indicating that she has been the victim of chronic pay discrimination (making, on average, 30% less than numerous male peers). Girl’s plea gets rejected by the Supreme Court. Yea, that sounds about right. No, but seriously…

Lilly’s supervisors had prohibited her from discussing pay with her coworkers, enabling this vast discrepancy to persist for her entire professional career. When she did find out though, she brought the charges before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Long story short, Lebetter was awarded a bunch of money for back-pay, punitive damages, anguish etc… only to have it revoked because, well, it took her too long to file the law suit. According to Title VII, discrimination charges must be filed 180 after the initiation of the discrimination. That’s right, even though she found out about the discrimination 20 years after it’s initiation. Read more about it here.

Academics, politicians, and laypeople have all hypothesized about women and the infamous pay gap: women’s inability to negotiate pay, awkward gender dynamics in the workplace, women prioritizing motherhood over the office, etc… but this is a very real example of a woman speaking out against sex-based discrimination (and did I mention she is 70!), and the system is quashing her demand for justice. Senate republicans blocked a bill that would have instituted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. McCain also spoke out against the bill, claiming that it would enable frivolous lawsuits to hurt big business. I’m speechless…

I recently heard a report on NPR about the role Yahoo played in China helping the Chinese government track down and imprison a political dissident Shi Tao-
Shi Tao’s political offense was contacting the Asia Democracy Project through his Yahoo email account to tell them about an order the Chinese Government gave to all journalists: not to report on any democratic protesters on the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square (June 4, 2004).

The Chinese government found out about this email, and demanded that Yahoo provide the user’s private information, which Yahoo did without asking why. This became a US scandal when the US Yahoo representatives told the US Senate that Chinese Yahoo had done no such thing, which it later retracted, claiming that it had made this claim on the grounds of an inaccurate translation from the Chinese Yahoo office.

My friend sent me this article today, Studies say death penalty deters crime - Yahoo! News, and I found it pretty interesting. He knows I'm against the death penalty mainly because I believe that it does not deter crime.

The article might change my views. Apparently there have been several studies in the past 6 years that are all suggesting that for in each state, an execution deters between 3-18 homicides. This is accounting for other factors like unemployment data, income per capita and others. I haven't looked at the studies myself but they sound pretty good - but have attracted a lot of controversy.

So say it's true - that more executions could prevent more innocent people from dying. Does that necessarily make the death penalty right? Perhaps.

Some things are intrinsically wrong, no matter what the consequences are. For example - we can't force people to be organ donors even if it means many more people would be able to stay alive.

I think what it boils down to is your opinion on the purpose of sentences for crimes:
1) to prevent other people from doing it
2) to stop those who commit crimes from committing more crimes
3) or to exact punishment on people who commit crimes - to make them "pay".
Personally I'm with number 2. What's your take on sentences? On the death penalty?

Good luck with finals everyone! Sign up to blog for the summer!

Today's Daily front cover prominently features a very interesting story about Azia Kim's involvement in ROTC, but the biggest news of the day--that Stanford is joining the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Fair Labor Association (FLA)--received no notice on the news pages, and was relegated to a long op-ed by President Hennessy.

The WRC is a consortium of colleges pledging to ensure sweatshop labor is not used to produce licensed apparel with their logos, with a governing board split evenly among university administrators, representatives of United Students Against Sweatshops, and human and labor rights experts. Their website has a list of useful FAQs. (One thing to note, in particular, is that the WRC requires participating colleges to pay 1% of their gross licensing revenues up to a maximum of $50,000. I'd be curious to know how much that would end up being for Stanford.) The FLA, by contrast, is an organization with more corporate influence; according to its website, it's a "multi-stakeholder coalition" of corporations, universities, and NGOs. Hennessy makes a good point in his op-ed that an optimal solution would have both labor activists and corporations working together in one organization; I imagine that either side would be very distrustful of an organization dominated by the other side.

Notably, Hennessy said that Stanford will not join the DSP, or Designated Suppliers Program, an additional program of the WRC that takes a significantly more activist role in ensuring sweatfree labor. In this program, universities are obligated to shift their licensed apparel (over a several year period) into factories which primarily produce college apparel. The argument is that doing so ensures that the colleges will have significant negotiating power. (Technically, the DSP will allow factories in which less than 50% of the apparel is from colleges, so long as the rest of the apparel comes from makers that will abide by the DSP's standards, but that seems unlikely.)

I came across this BBC article called "Cruelty in the Kitchen" on how some animals are ok to eat (Whales in Japan, and Dog in Vietnam) and others are not ok (In the US/Europe, eating whale and dog meat would be unthinkable).

The author discusses how people argue that whales are endangered species (but not all of them are, and Japan didn't make them that way, Europe and America did). He also discusses how many people think killing whales with harpoons is cruel.

But what's not cruel about slicing the beaks off chickens minutes after they are born, or keeping sows in 2" by 7" gestation crates for their entire lives? Why is it ok to eat chicken and pork but not whale and pig? I would eat any animal given the right circumstance.

Let me be clear. I love eating meat. A tasty steak makes my mouth water and I'm sure I've eaten hundreds of pounds of meat in my lifetime. But I won't eat it anymore. It's wrong.

If you think kicking a stray dog in ribs or breaking the neck of a stray cat is wrong; you must realize you do the same thing every time you eat meat that is not locally produced. You are supporting an industry that does horrendous things to living, feeling creatures.