Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

It might be better to call today Equal Pay Day 2008 instead of Equal Pay Day 2009. Why? Because the average American woman would have to add the wages she has earned thus far this year to her wages from 2008 in order to catch up with the average American man’s 2008 earnings. 

Progress has been made: when the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, women earned 59 cents for every dollar made by men; today it’s 78 cents. The Lilly Ledbetter Act, which Obama signed in January, made it easier for women to be able to sue for past discrimination by giving them more time to file. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act while protecting employees who discuss wage information and increasing the remedies available; this bill has passed the house, but you still need to remind your Senators about its importance.

Such legislation will not be enough to truly achieve equal pay, however. It is also necessary to make sure that women have equal access to high-paying professions (which means making sure that women continue their educational gains and generally working to fight the gender biases that undermine women when it comes to interviews and promotions) while, at the same time, working to make sure that female-dominated professions are appropriately compensated. An easy example is that, even when the economy is booming, teachers should earn more than Wall Street bankers; pushing around numbers to create wealth for some people should not be valued more than helping youth become critically engaged citizens—though those teachers who do have that goal in mind often find themselves struggling against the current educational.

But I digress. A more challenging area is domestic work. A more equitable division of unpaid labor in heterosexual couples would offer women engaged in those relationships more opportunities to pursue careers that require long hours, but that’s not the whole story. There’s also the issue of upper-to-middle class (mostly white) women carving out careers alongside (mostly white) men while less wealthy women, usually women of color, watch their children for a relatively low wage. Efforts like the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights can help make some immediate improvements in the lives of these workers, though they cannot alleviate the problematic irony.

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Even as CNN cuts every five minutes to show the latest maps of suspected and confirmed cases of swine flu in the US (with occasional mentions of the rest of the world) there’s a lot that that’s being left out of the story. Here are five things you probably haven’t heard much about in connection with the flu:

1. Industrial Agriculture: Animals living in cramped, unhygienic quarters provide a breeding ground for new viruses, allowing them to hop from host to host, swapping DNA as they go. The drugs that they animals are pumped full of to keep them “healthy” actually make this worse because it means that the viruses that survive and thrive are drug-resistant strains. This current virus does respond to Tamiflu and Relenza, older anti-virals have no effect.
2. Poverty: Many of the first people to come in contact with the zoonotic viruses bred on factory farms live in cramped quarters with little access to hygienic facilities. This means that the disease passes on to more people more quickly. Also, the less money you have, the less likely you are to be able to afford missing work when you’re ill. The disease spreads to co-workers (and customers).
3. Air Pollution: The swine flu can lead to pneumonia. People whose respiratory systems are already under stress—from living in a highly polluted area, for example—are more likely to develop this complication. Given how polluted Mexico City is, it seems odd that this hasn’t been considered as a possible explanation for why the strain is less deadly (so far) in the US.
4. Potential Food Supply Disruption: If the swine flu does reach pandemic status, it’s likely that the food supply would be disrupted (and that you won’t want to go to the grocery store even if it isn’t). I’m sure you’ve already been told not to panic, so I won’t tell you again. I will, however, advise you to stock up on canned goods. If, like me, you live in an earthquake zone, you know you should have done this already.
5. Zombies: OK, so zombies actually have nothing to do with swine flu, but every major story should be connected to zombies by people on the Internet. This law is even more universal than Godwin’s.

The Stranger Slog reports that two African-American Real Change newspaper vendors have been attacked in recent months in apparently racist attacks. Apparently a white vendor, since fired for the use of racial slurs, had threatened to put a hit out on a black employee who had been promoted over him. While it is unclear whether that incident is directly related to the attacks, this sort of incident seems likely to increase until the economy improves (or until racism is eliminated, but as bad as the economy is right now, it seems more likely that we’ll see improved economic figures before that happens).

Real Change is a newspaper that works to empower the homeless and poor. Vendors from Seattle’s homeless population earn sixty-five cents per paper they sell, but that can only go so far. When people feel disempowered, they will often take it out on those with even less power. It’s safer to blame those without power than it is to challenge the powerful; if you can use words or actions to reify your own superiority to another then, at the same time, you may confirm to yourself that you are not at the bottom of society.

As more white people feel their position threatened economically, we are likely to see an increase in crimes committed against people of color, as well as other stigmatized groups, in an effort to reconfirm social status.

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For another trend accelerated by the economic downturn, take a look at this New York Times article about the strains placed on public libraries. Libraries have been functioning as day centers for the homeless for many years now. When I lived in San Francisco, I often witnessed security guards hassling homeless people who had fallen asleep in chairs (and of course registered my objections since, unlike the kids with music leaking out of their headphones, the sleeping people weren’t bothering anyone). People out of work have been using libraries as the starting point for their job searches (goodness knows I do when I’m in need of wifi).

There are a few problems with this, of course. Librarians and library assistants have not been trained as social workers or job coaches; proper funding would include providing staff members capable of giving targeted assistance. Funding is, of course, the other issue. When library systems pay to provide additional terminals or have their employees helping people create resumes, that takes away from other aspects of the library’s mission. In other words, people’s access to information, books, and poetry suffers.

Note that I am not saying that libraries are wrong to prioritize funds in a way that meets people’s needs. What I am saying is that I would rather see money taken from unnecessary government programs (like wars on foreign countries) and applied to meet these needs so that people’s ability to educate themselves would not suffer.

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This New York Times article covers yet another trend that exacerbates the distance between rich and poor which has been intensified by the recession: more colleges are giving weight to applicants’ ability to pay when it comes to admissions. The article notes

The advantage is not across the board; it goes to the students at the margins, the ones who would likely be “maybes” when the admissions committee considers applications. Those students are less likely to get in if they are financially needy, and more likely to get in if they can afford to pay.

What does that mean exactly? It means that a child of a wealthy family who partied a lot and got mediocre grades, possibly despite expensive tutors, will have an advantage over someone who worked through high school to help support their struggling family and managed to earn respectable but not stellar grades. Especially in an age in which universities face budget cutbacks, in some cases reducing the number of students they serve, this could mean more than sorting students into private or public colleges based on family income. It could mean the difference between who goes to university and who doesn’t. 

The most disturbing part of the article was the quote from Steven Syverson, dean of admissions and financial aid at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, who said of the wealthy students: “They shine a little brighter.” No, Mr. Syverson, they don’t. Their family’s money shines. His attitude, however, is the same as that allows people to imagine that “the best and the brightest” work on Wall Street.

There are two ways we can come out of this recession: with reforms in place that will allow for equality or with an even deeper wedge between the classes. I’m not the only one who sees us heading for the latter.

ETA: Dividing lower class and upper class students so that each can receive vocational education appropriate for their station in life is part of making the university system into a system of corporate drone factories.

ETA2: Andy Kroll has a more in-depth look at the crisis of public-college affordability on Alternet.

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