When we bought our homes, none of us knew that Hooker Chemical Corporation, a division of Occidental Petroleum, had dumped 200 tons of a toxic, dioxin-laden chemical and 21,600 tons of various other chemicals into Love Canal.  We just knew we were getting sick.  We knew there were too many miscarriages, too many birth defects, too many central nervous systems problems, too many urinary tract disorders, and too much asthma and other respiratory problems among us.

Hooker and Occidental knew the chemicals they had buried in the canal could damage the health of the people who lived in the surrounding neighborhood.  When the company sold the land to the town school board for only $1.00, the deal contained a stipulation that if anyone was harmed by the buried waste, Hooker and Occidental would not be responsible.

After we organized and won evacuation from Love Canal in 1980, I moved to Virginia to give my children a home safe from dioxin and other toxic contamination, and to start an organization that would help people fighting toxics in their neighborhoods.

Soon after, I realized that Love Canal was not the only dioxin problem. There were sites all across the country contaminated with Dioxin.  Dioxin poses a serious health risk to both children and adults. In response, more than 100 countries have signed a treaty that calls for a global phase out of dioxin. Dioxin is a powerful cancer causing agent and human carcinogen.

You don’t have to live next to Love Canal in New York or Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, to suffer the effects of dioxin.  The average boy, girl, woman, or man in the U.S. has enough or almost enough dioxin in their bodies to damage their health.

The only way we can save our families from further exposure is to eliminate the sources of dioxin in everyone’s backyard.

We now have an opportunity to do that.

The EPA is soliciting comments on their proposed cleanup guidelines for dioxin.

EPA is proposing an interim preliminary remediation goal (PRG) for residential soil at 72 ppt TEQ and commercial/industrial soil at 950 ppt TEQ which are based on non-cancer effects.

What’s shocking is that if cancer effects were used to determine the cleanup goals, the levels would go down to 3.7 ppt and 17 ppt respectively at the generally accepted one-in-a-million cancer risk. EPA did not fully use cancer effects to determine the cleanup goals, despite dioxin’s classification as a “known carcinogen.”

Take action by joining parents and families across America in telling EPA you want stronger cleanup guidelines for Dioxin.

At the request of Dow Chemical and the American Chemistry Council, the EPA has extended the public comment period on their proposed cleanup guidelines for Dioxin to Friday April 2^nd. Now more than ever, we need your help to counteract lobbying by Dow Chemical and the chemical industry. Join thousands of Americans by telling EPA that more stringent guidelines must be developed for Dioxin cleanup.

Here’s some other ways you can help protect American families from Dioxin:

• On Twitter? Tweet this!  RT@chej Protect American Families from Dioxin – Take Action Today http://bit.ly/ac6r5H Please RT!
• On Facebook? Post this to your friends – Protect American Families from Dioxin – Take Action Today http://bit.ly/ac6r5H
• Tell your friends and family using CHEJ’s tell-a-friend form.

Remember, there is still time to take action and let your voice be heard!

Lois Marie Gibbs is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) located in the metropolitan Washington Area.  In 1978, Lois founded the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association, and CHEJ in 1981, an organization that has assisted over 10,000 grassroots groups with organizing, technical and general information nationwide.  Her vision has guided CHEJ’s efforts to provide critical organizing and technical assistance to communities engaged in their own environmental struggles.

Lois has been recognized extensively for her critical role in the grassroots environmental justice movement.  She has spoken at numerous conferences and has been featured on many television and radio shows including 60 Minutes, 20/20, Oprah Winfrey, Good Morning America, and the Today Show.

But when it comes to our own problems with neighbors, co-workers or our kids’ schools, we can feel frazzled and helpless. Calling police is stressful, courts expensive, and neither guarantees resolution.  Community Mediation is a practical (and practically free) solution for community disputes in a growing number of cities nationally. This week, Statewide Mediation Week in California, is a great time to put some helpful numbers on your fridge for when it you need support working out a conflict.

·National Association for Community Mediation http://www.nafcm.org/where you can find a mediator in your area

·If you are in the Bay Area call Community Boards, San Francisco’s non-profit conflict resolution center http://www.communityboards.org 415-920-3820

I run Community Boards (http://www.communityboards.org) where we help hundreds of people every year reach mutually satisfying solutions with the help of trained neutral mediators. And it costs next to nothing. Before I became a mom and Community Boards’ director, I was a disputant, in terrible conflict with a housemate. Now, fifteen years later, that antagonist is my friend and colleague. We wouldn’t enjoy collegiality if a small claims court had forced us into a cookie-cutter resolution. Mediation builds community in the place of strife.

For Natalie, mediation saved her home: “My three kids make lots of happy kid noise and our dog barks, and my downstairs neighbor was going nuts. She complained to our landlord and even called the police one night because of the noise. I was terrified we’d get evicted. Every time my kid hollered I’d get a stomach-ache. I didn’t think mediation would work, but the mediator helped us remain calm and to come up with a solution together that everyone could live with.”

For Jenny, mediation saved her job and a friendship. “I started a small business with my good friend, but things started to sour when I had to miss work because of my son’s chronic ear aches. She wanted me to give her a larger share of the business, and I wanted all the energy I put into our start- up to matter and to get the flexibility I wanted from self-employment. We sat down with neutral mediators who really helped us air the problems, appreciate each other’s grievances and save our business and relationship.”

How I wish I could get Glenn Beck to the peace table, and I’d give my eye teeth to mediate Republicans and Democrats through the health care bill! But while we can’t use mediation for all our problems, for many quality of life issues, it can make a huge difference.

And let’s talk about being good role models for our kids. When we can show them that grown-ups also have problems and that we can get help to work out peaceable solutions, we’re showing them how to live peaceably in this world.
______________________________________________________

Darlene Weide is the Executive Director of Community Boards, mediator and trainer. Sbe lives with her family in San Francisco.

Speaker Pelosi kicked off the event, offering specifics of why reform will benefit kids and families:

“We will extend the successful SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) initiative through 2019. Insurance companies will no longer be able to come between children and their doctors. We will support the education of nurses and social workers who care for children and their parents every day. We will guarantee affordable oral, hearing and vision care for our kids, improve reimbursements for primary care physicians, and ensure the Medicaid covers primary and specialty care.”

Marian Wright Edelman adds:

“This bill will guarantee access to coverage; not only for 31 million American people who are uninsured, but it will extend guaranteed access to health coverage to more than 95 percent of our children. No, we have not gotten all the way across the finish line but we are very close toward it, and this is a huge step forward. And millions of low-income parents and adults for whom health coverage is simply out of reach are going to benefit.”

With a special note for foster kids:

“All those parents who have older children are going to see that coverage can be extended until they are 26, and I am particularly pleased that children in foster care, our most vulnerable children, will be able to get extended health coverage until they are 26 years old.”

When I spoke, I made sure to share this zinger of a fact: “Across the country, families are seeing health insurance rate hikes of up to 39 percent. And that’s not because insurers are facing tough times. In fact, last year the five largest insurance companies earned 56 percent more in profits and they covered 2.7 million fewer people.”

And this one: “Families USA has estimated that without change, 275,000 people will die prematurely in the next 10 years because they don’t have health insurance coverage. ”

Then I got to share this personal story from a MomsRising member. With all the kids at the event, I couldn’t help tearing up as I told her story: “A few months back, we got a letter from a Moms Rising member in Florida. The mother of three young children, who told us that she didn’t have health insurance and she couldn’t afford a crucial test that would show whether her cancer was in remission or not. So she has to face her kids and her family every single day not knowing if she’s getting better or not. And she told us to stand here today for her.”

So we did.

AP Image, Gerald Herbert. DC MomsRising members, Speaker Pelosi, and me

(For a full length transcript of the event, check out http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=2190)

One thing that you can’t see in these photos is the crowd of reporters. There were tons of them there, and they were actually looking downright cheerful thanks to the babies who accompanied their moms to the event. It was a pretty special thing to have so many kids at an event like this, if talking with Capitol security is any indication– it took some time to confirm that strollers would actually be allowed in! Fortunately we got the all-clear and were glad we could include kids in the event. Their presence reminds us that since they can’t vote, they need us to be their voices in the halls of Congress.

I want to also share that Speaker Pelosi loved the diapers decorated with MomsRising members’ messages in support of health reform. Keep the comments and personal stories for health reform coming on our petition here!

This was an amazing event thanks to all of our members, both on the ground and online. The energy of all of us standing up together for our kids is what made this possible. Thank you so much for all you do.

VIDEO: MomsRising members speak up for healthcare on Capitol Hill

A report  released this morning by UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research finds that 1 in 4 Californians under 65 years old – 8.2 million people – were uninsured in 2009. This represents a 19.5% increase in just two years.

In his blog, Anthony Wright rightfully warns: “The shocking increase in people losing insurance spotlights the problem that even for those of us who are insured, coverage may not be there for us when we need it.”

And, perhaps worst of all, our children are suffering disproportionately.  We now have 1.5 million children in California who are uninsured – an increase of 400,000 or 35%  in just two years.  Although it hasn’t been able to keep pace with the growing demand, California’s public programs – Medi-Cal and Healthy Families – now cover 5.6 million children who otherwise would not be insured.

In the face of this crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed eliminating the Healthy Families program entirely and reducing Medi-Cal eligibility significantly.   Leaders in the California legislature are making decisions now about the Governor’s proposed budget cuts.

Please take a moment to urge them not to make any cuts to these vital programs when our families need them most: http://action.momsrising.org/cms/letter/letter_1007

Thank you!

My friend is not alone. I attended a talk by McKinsey & Company consultants Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston on their research about top women business executives and how they accomplish things in work and life. Barsh and Cranston said that the women they interviewed for their book concurred that there is no such thing as work-life balance, only “managed disequilibrium.” The key is to find ways to cope.

Ordinary women, executive women, and even First Lady Michelle Obama are all talking about the work-life equation and the challenges it poses. And now, this week, NPR is doing a series of reports on the “revolution” taking place at work, because it’s not just women–or even parents–who want flexibility and choices in how, when, and where they work, but also Generations X and Y, people nearing retirement, and low-wage workers. People want options to work flexible schedules and remotely from home, the first NPR report explains, to reduce their time wasted commuting, increase their productivity, and spend more time with their children (one mother—now a business owner who gives her employees these options—said she had to drop off her own kids at day care at 6 a.m. every day to get to work on time).

There are other ways to make the workplace more compatible with today’s workers’ lives, including results-only work environments, taking infants to work, redesigning career tracks, and opting for contract work when that is feasible. I have co-authored a book with Joan Blades about these and other ways employers and employees can create what we name a “custom fit” between work and life demands. It will be published on Labor Day, 2010, by Jossey-Bass. We hope it inspires leaders from the boardroom to the cashier counter to invent new ways to work—so that we can end the impossible tug-of-war between on-the-job responsibilities and off-the-job commitments.

I’ve been thinking about this question ever since someone named Jennifer left this comment in response to something I wrote last week about pay inequity:

It’s ironic that mothers make less in the corporate world …  My ability to be an effective leader has grown exponentially from the experience of being a mother.

Sleep-deprived zombies or super efficient multi-taskers? You be the judge.(1)

I was so glad to hear someone say this. We often think of ourselves as being worse at our jobs when we have kids. Moms joke about having “mommy brain,” (which isn’t really that funny. It’s kind of scary, for example, to find yourself losing your train of thought in the middle of a presentation.). We talk about the crazed multitasking we do to survive, which can leave us with work notes in the diaper bag, and an extra diaper in the laptop bag.

Becoming a parent means there are new demands on our time and for many of us–moms and dads–we feel strangely disloyal to our jobs after we have kids. I certainly did. Although my co-workers rarely complained, I still felt like I was two-timing my job every time I helped out in my daughter’s classroom or stayed home because my son had (another!) fever, or skipped a client dinner so I could have mac n’ cheese at home and argue with the kids about whether they would get two stories or three at bedtime.

And yet, when I take stock of my work life, I think having kids made me so much better at my job. I became extremely efficient at getting things done, of course, but that was only part of the story. I also became more grounded, more humble, more serious, and more ambitious. Time became a precious commodity that I did not want to waste, whether it was in a meeting or in my career as a whole. My company benefited from this.

So why do mothers make only 68% of what men earn? [2] And forgetting about the disgraceful pay inequity for a moment, why is it that we feel so horribly guilty when we skulk out of the office at 4:30 (Egad! You leave so early?) to pick up our kids from daycare, or when we have to work from home because the school called and our daughter has head lice (again!). And could these two things (guilt and pay inequity) be related? Why can’t we feel proud of our contributions, despite the compromises on our time?

This is my experience. What about yours? Moms and dads. You can disagree. Just be honest. Has having kids made you better at your job or worse?

Original post from Working Moms Break.

[1] Photo of women working from Library of Congress

[2] International Trade Union Confederation report 2010.

Would you believe me if I told you that a major snowstorm affects the lives of men and women differently? Could I convince you that there is a gender difference, even in the weather? Let me try.

In February, parts of the East Coast had a humongous snowstorm. Nobody could go anywhere for 5 days to a week. There was no paper delivery, no mail, no traffic, just heaps and heaps of snow. Everywhere. So, child care centers closed early, opened late, or just couldn’t operate. Parents couldn’t get out of their houses to go to work, so their children stayed home. Many who couldn’t make it to work didn’t get paid. Some parents resisted paying the usual fees, for care they didn’t use, or couldn’t get to, or that was offered for fewer hours. If the money didn’t come in, it couldn’t go out to the staff. Now, child care is not a business that generates significant income. It is regarded as “unskilled labor” and is performed mainly by women, which keep wages absurdly low. Most child care workers don’t have savings for a rainy, or a snowy, day. Most child care workers, or indeed most workers of any kind, simply can’t miss a couple of days of pay without some anxiety.

The outlines of the perilous state of child care were as clear as tracks in the snow. The cost of care is as high as the cost of the monthly mortgage payment or rent for many families. Providers operate on a shoestring. The fact that almost 50% of child care is done outside the licensing or supervision of any public authority shows that the expense for a child care center is just beyond a huge number of households. These children are with untrained staff in uninspected facilities without any set standards for background checks or safety. Care providers, in or out of a center, are among the poorest paid workers in our economy, earning significantly less per hour than those who fix our cars and unclog our pipes. So there is a total lack of high-quality, reliable child care when and where it is needed. If a mother can’t find good care where she is confident her children will be safe and looked after, how can she go to work? How will she feed her children if she doesn’t go to work? If she is laid off because of the recession, and pulled her child out of care to spare the expense, how can she look for work and accept a position if she can’t, at the same time, find child care again?

Most often, it’s mothers who have to sort out the work/child care fix, a daunting task under the best of circumstances. Most often, it’s women who are in the business of providing the child care, also a daunting task. As both the provider and consumer, women have much to gain by insisting on better pay for the work we do, better care for our children when we work, and better compensation for child care providers, in keeping with the our common social interest in the welfare of our children, and the realization of their potential.

You can read more about this topic in the Washington Post here.

Click here to read more posts from Your (Wo)manInWashington blog 

Beyond the obvious affront on personal free will, the problems with this proposal are so numerous and egregious it’s making our heads spin. Firstly, Europe as a whole already suffers from low female labor participation rates; continent-wide, only six out of ten women work. This is a major problem for the region, as it turns out women have been the key factor driving economic growth worldwide in recent years (”women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China and India,” according to a pre-mancession article in The Economist). Stigmatizing women by telling employers outright that women will not, by law, be as committed to the workplace as men is a foolish and self-defeating move.

Potential economic impact aside, what really riles us up is the huge step backwards the proposition would entail in social and cultural terms. By mandating that women take maternity leave, and saying absolutely nothing about fathers, the EU would send a continent-wide message that being a parent is primarily a woman’s responsibility. Some individuals happen to believe this; that’s their opinion and they’re entitled to it. But this viewpoint and the mandatory maternity leave proposal violate the EU’s own official goals, which state that women and men should have the same opportunities to combine their work, personal, and family lives. Not only would the mandate push women back into an antiquated role of homemaker and caretaker that many of us have struggled, for centuries!, to free ourselves from, it would signal to the citizens of the European Union, and to the world at large, that women belong at home with their babies, and that work, for childbearing women, comes second. Whether or not you would personally make the choice to stay home for the first weeks or months or even years of your child’s life is one thing: feel free to do as you please. But forcing everyone to do this is a sign that, from the top down, society has reached a verdict on parenthood, and that verdict places women firmly in the role of primary caregiver.

Not only does this possible mandate have a potentially disastrous effect on women, but on men as well! For the past couple of decades reform has been slowly but surely brewing regarding fatherhood. Official policy has not always caught up with social norms. The view of the “modern father” of the twenty-first century is not the suit-clad man who returns home from work late at night; he is the Baby Björn touting playground regular who sees fatherhood as a hands-on job. Sweden has provided paternity leave for fathers for decades. The rest of Europe has, in recent years, been catching up. Each day of paternity leave given to fathers is not just a day won in the life of a family, but a huge achievement in the direction of a cultural paradigm shift- one where shared, even equal, parenting is the norm. The damage the EU mandate, which completely ignores fatherhood and sends the message that the care of children is only a mother’s right as well as responsibility, may have on the view of parenting can’t be overstated.

To put it simply: the EU proposition sends a message that is at odds with all the progress recent years have shown about cultural views of parenthood.

Don’t get us wrong, parental leave is a wonderful thing. It gives parents the opportunity to bond with their babies. It gives families options. But mandating that all women take leave for the first six weeks is preposterous! What if the woman is the sole breadwinner in the family? What if she has post-partum depression? What if the couple prefers that the husband be the primary caretaker during the first six weeks? What if she can’t breastfeed? (Breastfeeding seems to be at the core of those arguments that support women staying home rather than men with young children. But not all women choose to breastfeed and some cannot, and some choose to pump so other caregivers can feed their baby breast milk So don’t use breastfeeding as an argument for why men are not as qualified as women to take care of babies. We’re not buying it.)

Sweden, which already guarantees mothers and fathers 18 months of parental leave to be split between the parents as they see fit, has slammed the proposal. In an op-ed, Sweden’s Minister of EU Affairs, Birgitta Ohlsson, writes “On a personal level, if the proposal were to come into force it would prevent me from working. As a mother-to-be I would have had to turn down my new job as Swedish Minster for EU Affairs.” If the proposal passes, it threatens not only to put Ohlsson out of a job, but also to compromise Sweden’s uniquely egalitarian parental leave policies as a whole. Don’t bring bad decisions down on countries that already have better policies of their own.

Hey EU Commission: scrap the proposal! And write a new one that guarantees a certain number of weeks of parental leave for women as well as men — but don’t force anyone to take it. That would truly be taking a step in the right direction.

A Peaceful Revolution is a Huffington Post blog about innovative ideas to strengthen America’s families through public policies, business practices, and cultural change. Done in collaboration withMomsRising.org, read a new post at the Huffington Post each week.