Campus Engagement 2

For my second campus engagement I went to the Equal Pay forum put on by our classmates Nena and Nicole. There were four panelists; Janet Elinoff, Curtis Hierro, Maria Roman, and Anne Schiavi and the moderator was our very own Meredith Tweed. The idea of equal pay has always been something that I've heard about and something that I knew was still present, I guess I just never understood the full extent to which it still effects us. "When The WAGE Project looked exclusively at full-time workers, they estimated that women with a high school diploma lose as much as $700,000 over a lifetime of work, women with a college degree lose $1.2 million and professional school graduates may lose up to $2 million" (Now).

It seems like lately women are the brunt of a lot of jokes when it comes to demanding not only equal pay, but equality in general. Sometimes the jokes aren't even coming from the most obvious suspects. Hilary Rosen was recently quoted on CNN's AC360 saying that Mitt Romney's wife has no right talking about women's economic struggles when she "had never worked a day in her life" (Huffington Post). This is an extremely problematic statement because she has raised five children, but to many this is not considered a job. Women frequently face the problem of what is called the "second shift" where they leave their daytime jobs to go home and continue working to take care of a family. Women are frequently unaccounted for when it comes to unpaid labor. This was frequently brought up during the panel discussion with Nena and Nicole's moms when they talked about raising their children as single or divorced parents. They spoke about how they frequently had to give up any personal time they had when they were not at work for themselvesso that they could dedicated their time to their children, and the feelings of guilt they had for maybe not giving enough time. "Women's earnings were 77.4 percent of men's in 2010, compared to 77.0 percent in 2009" (Pay Equity). There is a gradual increase in pay for women, but still not enough to raise a family or live comfortably.

Personally, I feel like I have not been affected by this pay gap because I work in the hospitality industry. Frequently women make more than men when it comes to tip wages, for obviously problematic reasons. I do however, feel like I have experienced discrimination in the workplace for being a woman. One of my previous employers was accused of sexual harassment by many members of our team, but instead of being fired he was transferred to another store. It is important to understand that this issue is very much present, and on April 17, or Equal Pay Day, I made sure to spread the word.

Word Count: 456

Works Cited

Minh-Ha, Trihn. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington [u.a.: Indiana Univ., 1989. Print.

"National Committee on Pay Equity NCPE." National Committee on Pay Equity NCPE. 19 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .

Rosen, Hilary. "Ann Romney and Working Moms." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 04 Dec. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .

"Women Deserve Equal Pay." National Organization for Women (NOW). Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .

Girls Like Us

"Many of these men wouldn't dream of sexually abusing the girl next door but when it comes to a "prostitute," even a "teen prostitute," they figure it doesn't really matter. She's already out there. She kinda wants it anyway. She is working her way through college. She needs to feed her kids. I'm actually helping her." (Lloyd, 97)

Sex traffickers frequently target children from the ages of 12 to 18. Young kids are more desirable because they will stay youthful longer, and older women/men may not be as appealing to Johns. Traffickers do not usually go any younger than 11 because this would put them at risk for being caught by the police. The real misconception when it comes to children and sex work is that these children are the same as prostitutes. The term prostitute implies that there is a choice, and that these children are "criminals or sexual deviants or at best victims of their environment: desperate for survival, the kids “choose” to sell their bodies for profit." (Not For Sale) This false identity placed on trafficked children leads the public to believe that they "did this to themselves" or "don't deserve our sympathy."

Typically according to the sex trafficker stereotypes and the Not For Sale website, girls that are trafficked most likely come from poor communities. They are often from broken homes that have drug addicted parents, or they bounce between different foster homes. These girls can be taken from their homes and forced into the sex industry, but not only that they can be forced into hard labor or slavery as well. These girls are most likely not reported as missing because they may get lost in the system, or the neighborhood they come from does not have leverage enough to get attention from the police.

My confusion with this quote is at what point does a child stop being a child? At what point does someone turn their back on a child because they feel like they are a sexual deviant, or that they were "asking for it." In a global perspective I believe that we all have a distorted view of human trafficking and there are many countries that place the blame on children. I think it is really important to understand who the criminals are. Not the children forced to work, but the men, women, traffickers, Johns, or Pimps responsible for their captivity.

Word Count: 342

Lloyd, Rachel. Girls like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Print.

"Slavery Not For Sale: End Human Trafficking and Slavery." Slavery Not For Sale: End Human Trafficking and Slavery. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. .

Service Learning Blog 2

These past two weeks have been a really great change in the dynamic of the Service Learning project. Last week I spent both Tuesday and Thursday out in front of the Student Union tabling for YAYA and asking for donations. It felt very empowering to see how many people were willing to donate with what little knowledge they may have had about YAYA or our project. It is great to see that people want to help, they just need the information brought to them so they know to do so. With the work from tabling and the hard work the other class members put in, I believe we did an amazing job reaching our fundraising goal. To see how happy Abi was when she counted up the money was great, and she is just one member of YAYA. I wish that I could have been there to see the reaction from all the other members and the farm workers themselves.

Other than the money we have already raised, it is still necessary that we start raising money for the shirts that we would like to give to YAYA to distribute to the farm worker community. I think that we should continue to ask for donations outside the Union, but we also need to come up with some more creative ideas to get donations as well. I believe we all really care about doing a good job and giving what we promised to the community, and I think that is a huge motivator.

One concern that I do have, however, is the time constraints we are under. We have just been assigned a new project on Human Trafficking and this is a subject I know we are all extremely passionate about. I don't want our service learning project to have to take a back burner because of the new project. They are both equally good projects, and I want to make sure we spend equal amounts of time working on both. With that being said, meeting times will still continue to be a struggle with finals week looming upon us, but we are a great class and I believe we can pull through.

I believe that through this project I am learning a lot about working as a team. I think we often criticize NGO's thinking that things could be done better. I think this gives us all a good idea of the types of struggles certain organizations face when trying to do their own service projects.

Word Count: 416