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Walkout

Report: Hispanics Could Solve California Shortage of Professionals

Immigrants Kids Even Less Active Than U.S.-Born

One Giant Step Forward: Labor Groups Reach Accord on Immigration

McDonald’s Aims for a Low Pesticide for its French Fries

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Walkout

On March 18, the HBO cable television network premiered “Walkout,” a film based on the 1968 protest by thousands of Mexican American students from five East Lost Angeles high schools.

On March 27, some 40,000 high school students in Southern California walked out to protest of anti-immigration legislation. “Walkout” director Edward James Olmos was right when he said the struggle for equality and civil rights is far from over.

Back in 1968, Latino students were tired of racial injustice, discrimination in the school system and lack of equal opportunities. The youth came together and led a multi-school walkout that became part of the rising Chicano movement. “Walkout” shares that historic story.

The movie shows how students organized walkouts after lobbying the school board for improved facilities, bilingual education, revised textbooks and the ability to speak Spanish in class without being reprimanded.

The youth-led movement, inspired by the civil rights movement, also demanded implemention of a curriculum that included Latin American history, and elimination of janitorial work as punishment.

“Our schools are the back of the bus,” yelled one student leader in the movie.

The walkouts were peaceful demonstrations that erupted into unnecessary acts of violence when an overzealous and aggressive racist police force beat and arrested unarmed students.

An outraged community was awakened and a fight for justice was born that first got parents involved, then community leaders, eventually forcing the school board to pay attention.

In the end the Chicano movement produced real changes, increasing Latino college enrollment by nearly 25 percent two years after the protest.

Moctesuma Esparza, who produced the film, was a college student at the time.

He was one of the main organizers of the student walkouts of that time and was arrested with 12 others — “East L.A. 13,” as they became known. All were eventually acquitted.

“I remember, growing up in the ’50s, when someone said you were ‘Mexican’ it was almost like being slapped in the face,” the 57-year-old recalled in a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle.

Esparza went on to say, “How one’s ancestry could be pejorative is hard to grasp today, but there have been people who have experienced discrimination and overcame it, and that’s one of the things we were looking to do, to stand up for our rights and be treated like all other Americans.

“The free speech movement of ’64 at Berkeley, the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, what Cesar Chavez was doing in the fields and the growing women’s movement were all very vivid examples to us.

“There was a feeling we could change the world,” he concluded. “That’s what protected and motivated us.”

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Source pww.org

Author: Pepe Lozano

Report: Hispanics Could Solve California Shortage of Professionals

California will face a shortage of close to a million university-graduate professionals by 2025, according to a new report that attributes the phenomenon to the retirement of baby boomers and the increase in the Latino population.

“California’s Education Skills Gap: Modest Improvements Could Yield Big Gains,” a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, reveals that many of those born between 1946 and 1964 will have retired by 2025, leaving a shortage of professionals.

Meanwhile the new generations of Californians include a high number of Latinos who historically have a low level of university education.

The California economy will need nearly a million more university graduates by 2025 than what demographic studies now foresee.

The state’s public institutes of higher learning currently produce a little more than 110,000 graduates per year, while private colleges contribute another 40,000.

California colleges and universities must increase their number of graduates by close to 60,000 a year, around 40 percent above the present level in order to fulfill expected demand by the year 2025, a very difficult goal according to the study.

“California faces a critical challenge,” according to PPIC Associate Director Hans Johnson, who co-authored the report with Ria Sengupta.

“But the good news is the state can dramatically improve the prospects for its economic growth and the futures of its young adult residents with relatively modest investments in the pathways students take to college graduation,” Johnson said.

In 2005 there were some 5.7 million university graduates between the ages of 25 and 64, and the PPIC analysis estimates that between 2005-2025 the state will produce 5.4 million new professionals with bachelor’s degrees, of which 3.3 million will come from California universities while 2.1 million will come from out of state.

In the same period, 3 million university graduates will retire from the work force because of their age, for a net total of 8.1 million graduates in 2025 aged between 25 and 64.

“Increasing graduation rates is also a promising fiscal approach. The state has already invested in these students’ higher education, and keeping them in college a bit longer is less expensive than other options,” the report says.

It also stresses the need to raise the number of high-school graduates who go straight into university in California, which is in 40th place among all the states in the country in that regard with 55 percent.

“Gradually raising the first-time college attendance rate to 61 percent — the national average - would increase the number of college graduates by more than 100,000 by 2025,” the study says.

It also mentions the need to offer greater economic aid to finance university costs — calculated at $25,000 per year for UC universities — as well as improving students’ grade scores and preparation. 

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Author: Luis Uribe

Source: EFE

Immigrants Kids Even Less Active Than U.S.-Born

Many immigrant children get even less vigorous exercise than their U.S.-born counterparts, the largest study of its kind suggests. Plenty of earlier evidence shows that U.S. children are pretty inactive. The new study of nearly 70,000 children simply found even lower levels of activity among immigrants.

Almost 18 percent of foreign-born children with immigrant parents got no vigorous exercise on any days of the week, and 56 percent didn’t participate in organized sports.

By contrast, 11 percent of U.S.-born children with American parents got no vigorous exercise, and 41 percent didn’t participate in sports.

Given the obesity epidemic and immigrants accounting for about 13 percent of the U.S. population, the authors said it is important to know whether there are ethnic differences in physical activity and sedentary behaviors. They were led by Dr. Gopal Singh, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau.

Here’s how the researchers explain their results: Immigrant families surveyed were on the whole poorer than nonimmigrants and lived in less safe neighborhoods. That means they likely had less time for exercise and sports, and worse access to places to engage in those activities.

But also, many immigrant parents place a high emphasis on reading, language lessons, studying and other inactive pursuits.

The study appears in Monday’s Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It is based on 2003-04 telephone interviews with parents of children aged 6 to 17, including white, black, Hispanic and Asian immigrants.

Singh said the results among Hispanics were particularly striking: nearly 23 percent of children in families where both parents were born in Spanish-speaking countries got no vigorous physical activity. Also, two-thirds of them didn’t participate in organized sports.

Dr. Mita Sanghavi Goel of Northwestern University said the results in Hispanics are troubling because of high rates of obesity and diabetes — both related to inactivity — among Hispanics, the nation’s largest immigrant group.

“That just highlights how important it is to intervene early and set healthy lifestyle patterns early on,” Goel said.

Rates for others who got no vigorous activity were 13 percent for blacks, almost 10 percent for whites and 7 percent for Asians. For no participation in sports, the rates were 49 percent for blacks, 38 percent for Asians and 32 percent for whites.

Newer government advice recommends an hour of moderate-to-vigorous exercise most days. Just last month, a study found that fewer than a third of U.S. 15-year-olds got even that minimum amount.

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Author:  Lindsay Tanner

Source: AP

One Giant Step Forward: Labor Groups Reach Accord on Immigration

The nation’s two major labor federations have agreed for the first time to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system, leaders of both organizations said on Monday. The accord could give President Obama significant support among unions as he revisits the stormy issue in the midst of the recession.

John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joe T. Hansen, a leader of the rival Change to Win federation, will present the outlines of their new position on Tuesday in Washington. In 2007, when Congress last considered comprehensive immigration legislation, the two groups could not agree on a common approach. That legislation failed.

The accord endorses legalizing the status of undocumented immigrants already in the United States and opposes any large new program for employers to bring in temporary immigrant workers, officials of both federations said.

But while the compromise repaired one fissure in the coalition that has favored broad immigration legislation, it appeared to open another. An official from the United States Chamber of Commerce said Monday the business community remained committed to a significant guest-worker program.

In the new accord, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win have called for managing future immigration of workers through a national commission. The commission would determine how many permanent and temporary foreign workers should be admitted each year based on demand in American labor markets. Union officials are confident the result would reduce worker immigration during times of high unemployment like the present.

Thousands of immigrant farm workers and other low-wage laborers come to the United States through seasonal guest-worker programs subject to numerical visa limits and have been criticized by employers as rigid and inefficient. Many unions oppose the programs because the immigrants are tied to one employer and cannot change jobs no matter how abusive the conditions, so union officials say they undercut conditions for American workers. Highly skilled foreign technology engineers and medical specialists also come on temporary visas.

Advocates for immigrants said a unified labor movement could substantially bolster their position as they push for legislation to restructure the ailing immigration system.

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Authors:  Julia Preston and Steven Greenhouse 

Source: New York Times

McDonald’s Aims for a Low Pesticide for its French Fries

“You want fries with that?” It’s safe to say that most of the 47 million customers that McDonald’s serves every day answer “Yes.”

But those customers, it’s safe to say, did not know they were ordering up pesticides with that, too.

McDonald’s, the largest fast-food chain the world and the largest buyer of potatoes in the United States, is under pressure from shareholders to do something about pesticide use on the potatoes it buys.

Potatoes have been on or near the list of the Environmental Working Group’s dirty dozen foods with the most pesticide residue for years. That means, according to a government analysis, that after a typical person buys a typical potato and prepares it in a typical way, it’s among the fruits and vegetables most likely to be laced with pesticides.

The spud is the No. 1 most popular veggie in the U.S. The average American eats 130 pounds of potatoes every year — that’s 44% more than the next veggie on the list, the tomato.

The bigger concern with pesticide use, typically, is the health of farm workers, farm soils and the wildlife and people living on or near farms. Potatoes are the largest vegetable crop in the U.S., accounting for 15% of farm sales receipts, according to the Department of Agriculture. Roughly 50% of the U.S. potato crop goes to French fries, potato chips and other potato products.

 ”Potatoes … use more pounds of pesticides per acre than most crops,” according to Beyond Pesticides:

Most of these pesticides are linked to serious chronic effects such as cancer, endocrine disruption and reproductive/developmental effects. Many leach to groundwater and contaminate surface waters. Intensive potato cultivation and pesticides usage have been implicated in the high rates of rare cancers in young children in rural western Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada.

McDonald’s, for agreeing to survey its potato suppliers — which include two of the largest U.S. potato businesses, ConAgra Foods Inc.’s Lamb Weston unit, and J.R. Simplot Co. — deserves credit for working to reduce the use of toxic pesticides on food crops. The shareholder groups that pressured McDonald’s to make this move — the Bard College Endowment, Newground Social Investment and the AFL-CIO Reserve Fund — deserve even more. That’s what socially responsible investing is all about.

To read the full article click here.

Author: Lisa Baertlein

Source: Reuters