Asian American history is American history. These AAPI leaders transformed the US for generations to come
Imagine getting through this pandemic without Zoom. Or not having any days off work, toiling seven days a week with no overtime pay.
Asian Americans have improved the lives of fellow Americans in countless ways. But some of the biggest contributions don’t end up in history books.
Here’s how five Asian Americans of different ethnicities helped shape America:
Larry Itliong bolstered farm workers’ rights and working conditions
After losing three fingers working at an Alaska cannery, Larry Itliong spent decades fighting for better pay and treatment for agricultural workers.
Why doesn’t the US value child care? A historic look
The pandemic has laid bare the stunning paucity of opportunities for children and their parents a situation that’s brought financial and emotional disaster not just to American mothers, but to the U.S. economy
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Alfred Lubrano / The Philadelphia Inquirer | 7:00 am, May 12, 2021 ×
Mai Miksic works for Public Citizens For Children and Youth. COVID was a reckoning, she said. Jose F. Moreno / Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS
Child care ranked low on the list of jobs a mother had in 18th century colonial America.
What mattered more was survival. Wives and husbands toiled on farms, or in shops, and the work of bathing and feeding young ones fell to older children or other women, either enslaved or servants.
AFT
Reopening schools has been one of the most contested issues of the COVID-19 era, and few have been happy with the pace – parent, teacher or student. One person who thought New York City has tackled it correctly is Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Unlike some national labor figures, Weingarten remains influential among local education unions in New York, where she headed the United Federation of Teachers from 1998 to 2009.
7. John Samuelsen
International President, Transport Workers Union
As international president of the Transport Workers Union, John Samuelsen represents 150,000 transit workers, including 41,000 at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, his former employer whose tracks stretch from New York City to Poughkeepsie and Montauk. After a $3.9 billion bailout in March 2020, the MTA is receiving another $6 billion in aid via the American Rescue Plan, sidestepping once again the looming jobs catastrophe caused by the pandem
Germany faces a major crisis. The German birth rate is considerably below what’s needed to replace the population. German seniors, meanwhile, are living longer and drawing more on state resources for their pensions and health care. There are basically two ways out of this demographic crisis. First of all, Germany could boost its birth rate. The German state provides generous family leave and child-care policies not to mention the famous Kindergelt, the direct monthly payments of child benefits and the fertility rate has indeed edged up over the years from 1.24 children per woman in 1994 to 1.57 today. But the trend in industrialized countries suggests that it will be difficult to push the rate much higher. The closest to the replacement rate of 2.1 children that any EU country gets is France at 1.88.
Policymakers Used to Ignore Child Care. Then Came the Pandemic.
Experts who sounded the alarm about the care economy were often shunted to the side of policy discussions. Not anymore.
Credit.Maria Nguyen
May 9, 2021
When the economist Nancy Folbre got a call from the MacArthur Foundation in 1998, she was expecting rejection: a courtesy call to deny the funding application she’d submitted.
She had reason to think an institution might overlook her work. It explained how the care sector defined as economic activity in the home and the market was a crucial part of the economy but operated differently than other types of businesses.