Compiled by Mark Carney
Raise a stink now or your kids are going to be condemned to living in a police state.
Offended by the extensive use of strip-search machines in airports by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Mark Hinkle, the Libretarian Party Chair, is urging their immediate elimination.
“We have reached a point where our government has no qualms about humiliating us. The fact that I want to travel on an airplane does not make me a threat, and it does not allow anyone to conduct a warrantless search under my clothing,” Hinkle said.
Other groups, like the American Pilots Association and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), have also urged the government to discontinue their use. EPIC, in fact, recently filed a lawsuit against the program, arguing that it violates several laws, including the federal Privacy Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act and the Fourth Amendment.
Hinkle noted the perverse uses to which these images may be put, saying, “Regardless of policy, some security personnel will want to store the images, and they will fi nd ways to do it. This is already reported to have happened in Florida, where U.S. Marshalls stored thousands of images from a courthouse scanner.”
Hyatt housekeepers file injury complaint with OSHA
On Tuesday, November 10, Hyatt hotel housekeepers in eight cities fi led injury complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), alleging repetitive motion and other kinds of injuries. In California alone, Hyatt housekeepers in San Francisco, Santa Clara, Los An geles and Long Beach are involved in the complaint. According to the complaint, at some Hyatt properties housekeepers are required to clean as many as 30 rooms a day.
When cleaning a room, the housekeeper not only vacuums the carpet and cleans the bathroom, but also changes the sheets, which requires her to lift a mattress weighing more than 100 pounds.
In the press conference call announcing the complaint, Gary Orr, an occupational ergonomics expert, pointed out the increasing frequency of repetitive motion injuries, particularly within the service industry. Indeed, he emphasized that, in the hotel industry, being a housekeeper may be the most dangerous job of all.
A recent study published in the American Journal of co-workers to suffer an injury, Industrial Medicine found that housekeepers are injured more frequently than other hotel workers, female hotel workers are 50 percent more likely than their male and Hispanic women are twice as likely to be injured at work as their white female co-workers. In this same study, Hyatt housekeepers had the highest injury rate of all the hotel workers analyzed.
“It is critical that we explore ways of making hotel work safe to reduce the high rates of injury that we see among housekeepers”, Orr stated. Among other things, Orr recommended “common sense changes like fitted sheets, mops, or caps on daily room quotas that can make the difference between healthy bodies and hurt housekeepers.”
Daily Bail supports raising retirement age In an editorial posted on the website The Daily Bail, the author agrees with the incoming speaker of the House of Representatives, who wishes to raise the retirement age to 70. What bothers him, however, is the reason he allegedly gave for this reform: Boehner reportedly said that paying for the war will require reforming the entitlement system. “We need to look at the American people and explain to them that we’re broke,” Boehner said.
