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内容：iris0928编辑: Humphrey Zhang
PartI: Speaker Female Workers Asked ToJoin In 'A Day Without A Woman' Protests [Rephrase 1,02:40]
Source: NPR http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/08/519161040/female-workers-asked-to-join-in-a-day-without-a-woman-protests
PartII: Speed
On Women's Day, take the next step forgirls' education
By NgoziOkonjo-Iweala and Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi| March 8, 2017
[Time2] (CNN)In the movie "Hidden Figures," Janelle Monáe's character Mary Jackson petitions a Virginia State Court judge for the right to enroll in engineering classes at the local all-white high school. She reminds the judge that he was the first in his family to join the Armed Forces and to attend college. Now he can help her be the first female engineer at NASA. "Your Honor," Jackson says, "out of all the cases you're going to hear today, which one is going to matter one hundred years from now? Which one is going to make you the first?"
"You are the first," is a phrase that the two of us, despite living in starkly different countries, have heard more times than we can remember. It resonates for us both as the world marks International Women's Day. Most notably, we are the first women appointed to our respective cabinet positions. A woman in a leadership role is a rarity in our regions, let alone women like us with economics and computer science backgrounds. No wonder: today, in 2017, 130 million school-age girls around the world are not even in school. The main reason? Existing financial resources for education, especially for girls, both within countries and by multilateral and bilateral donors, are woefully inadequate. We must, as a global community, commit to reversing troubling trends and improving outcomes when it comes to girls' education -- and education for all children.
The world renewed its commitment to changing this situation when it pledged to ensure "inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all." And this Sustainable Development Goal comes bound to the promise of results by 2030. The goal is based on the knowledge that education is the pathway for safer, more prosperous and inclusive societies. For we know that educating a girl does far more than place a child behind a desk. It is the surest pathway to reducing infant mortality, mitigating high birthrates, slowing migratory pressures and unlocking economic potential. [331words]
[Time3] As noted in a recent report by our Commission, a one-year increase in schooling for girls is associated with reduction in mortality of 4.2% for children under the age of five. Furthermore, a child that begins preschool education in 2017 will see lifetime earnings nearly five times that of their parents and 12 times the cost of their education. And a case study from Brazil shows us low-income girls who participated in community preschool programs were two times more likely to reach fifth grade and three times more likely to reach eighth grade than their peers who did not attend preschool.
Yet at a time when we need to invest more, we are investing less. The share of international aid to education has fallen from 13 to 10% since 2002. At the national level, there is significant variation among countries. But we can say that, on average, education's share of total government spending has slightly declined across countries of all income groups since 2000. Furthermore, children caught in emergency situations -- whether armed conflict or a natural disaster -- see their education treated as a luxury rather than a necessity. In practice, humanitarian aid for education remains critically underfunded, with less than 2% of pledges directed toward education. The outcomes are clear enough. According to the Education Commission's Learning Generation report, at current trends, by 2030, 825 million children in low and middle-income countries -- half of the world's 1.6 billion children -- will lack the basic secondary-level skills. For Africa there is a particular sense of urgency. A few countries such as Togo and Ethiopia have made strides by raising enrollment levels and expanding domestic financing for education. But these successes are counterbalanced, and indeed outweighed, by wide deficits that must be tackled. If things stay the same, by 2030, only about half of Sub-Saharan Africa's youth will complete high school. [312words]
[time4] Not far away, Syrian children are not doing any better. For them, getting an education is a matter of life and death. There have been at least 84 attacks on schools across Syria in 2016 alone, with at least 69 children losing their lives and many others injured. And since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, of the more than 2.3 million registered Syrian refugee children, 1.6 million are of school-age and of those only 53% are enrolled in school.
In response to this alarming situation, we are calling for the largest expansion of educational opportunity in history. It is doable. The Education Commission, on which we both serve as Commissioners, has outlined a plan to gradually increase annual education spending in all low- and middle-income countries from $1.2 trillion today to $3 trillion by 2030. This plan is underpinned not just by more funds directed toward education globally, but the better use of existing funds -- a blend of reform and investment. Now we look to national governments to expand their financial commitment to education. And where governments do step up and commit to expanded education financing, we believe this pledge should trigger support from the international community. This compact has led the Commission to develop a breakthrough proposal for an International Financing Facility for education -- a body that can close the financing gap by bringing the World Bank, regional development banks and donors together in a more coordinated fashion, proving the power of international cooperation. At a time when millions of migrant and refugee children around the world are displaced -- when countries like Lebanon and Chad must do the impossible to accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugee girls and boys in their classrooms -- ensuring there are adequate resources flowing to effectively educate our children is the wisest and smartest way to invest.
If we do this now, we could be part of the generation responsible for making sure that being the first will no longer be the defining aspect of a woman's resume. And that, for sure, will matter one hundred years from now. [350words] Source: CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/07/opinions/girls-education-okonjo-iweala-lubna-al-qasimi-opinion/index.html
Separating mothers and kids is wrong onevery level
BYRaul A. Reyes| March 7, 2017
[Time5] (CNN)The most anti-immigrant administration in modern history appears poised to outdo itself. On Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly confirmed to CNN that his agency is considering separating children from their parents at the US border.
"We have tremendous experience of dealing with unaccompanied minors," Kelly told Wolf Blitzer. "We turn them over to (Health and Human Services) and they do a very, very good job of putting them in foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States." Kelly explained that this would be part of a strategy to deter Central American migrants from making the trek north to seek asylum. What's wrong with this idea? Just about everything. You do not have to be a lawyer or a child welfare expert to grasp that forcibly removing children from their parents is cruel and inhumane. If such a practice were implemented -- and it is not official policy; not yet, at least -- it would face major legal hurdles, all while expanding our government bureaucracy and failing to solve the original problem. Kelly's remarks echo a report from Reuters that DHS is weighing such a plan -- a chilling prospect that could inflict immeasurable psychological trauma on young children who have just completed a perilous journey to the US from their home countries. To be clear, the parents and children who would be affected are not the people we typically think of as undocumented immigrants. Unlike most undocumented immigrants from Mexico, who come to the US to work, these people are literally fleeing for their lives. They are arriving at the US border from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, three of the most dangerous countries on earth. Migrants from these countries arrive at the US border to make their case for asylum, which they are entitled by law to do. Successfully making that case is complicated for anyone -- a long process that entails meeting with lawyers and case workers, appearing before a judge, and navigating the byzantine U.S. immigration court system. It can be difficult for adults to pass the tests and meet the screening requirements. Under the proposed DHS policy, it would become virtually impossible for mothers and children who are unable to corroborate their stories of "credible fear of persecution" to meet the standards for asylum. [388words]
[time6] The children in this situation already face language barriers and a lack of access to legal representation. If they are separated from their parents, it's easy to imagine that some would become withdrawn and unresponsive to anyone they perceived as a government representative. The all-too-possible result is that they might be deported, with or without their mothers, back to the harrowing conditions they fled. Kelly told CNN that he was considering this new policy "in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network." But where is the empirical evidence that shows that a deterrence strategy aimed at Central American migrants works? When people are in a life-or-death situation -- with their children -- no risk is too great. Indeed, this new proposal could lead to an increase in trafficking, as desperate families turn to human smugglers to help them reach safety. To be sure, the influx of Central Americans migrants was a problem the Obama administration wrestled with too; it settled on a media campaign in Central America to discourage migrants from beginning their journey and increased deportations of recent arrivals and their children. Neither of these efforts worked. According to the Reuters report, between October 1, 2016 and January 31, 2017, about 54,000 children and their guardians were apprehended at the border, more than double the number caught in the same time period a year earlier.
A smarter approach by the Trump administration would be to reform our immigration court system: make more attorneys available to children seeking asylum and increase the number of immigration judges, which would help ease the backlog of people in detention. The government could also expand the CAM (Central American Minors) program, which allows potential refugees from that region to apply for refugee status in their home countries. It seems unlikely that this administration is interested in pursuing such thoughtful moves, but it would do well to look to them for a real, if not perfect, solution. [325words]
[The rest] If the Trump administration attempts to implement this new policy instead, it is setting itself up for myriad legal challenges. Family unity is a guiding principle of existing US family and immigration law, and even of the UN High Commission of Refugees. Not allowing parents and children to pursue their asylum claims together would also arguably violate their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
A smarter approach by the Trump administration would be to reform our immigration court system: make more attorneys available to children seeking asylum and increase the number of immigration judges, which would help ease the backlog of people in detention. The government could also expand the CAM (Central American Minors) program, which allows potential refugees from that region to apply for refugee status in their home countries. It seems unlikely that this administration is interested in pursuing such thoughtful moves, but it would do well to look to them for a real, if not perfect, solution. If the Trump administration attempts to implement this new policy instead, it is setting itself up for myriad legal challenges. Family unity is a guiding principle of existing US family and immigration law, and even of the UN High Commission of Refugees. Not allowing parents and children to pursue their asylum claims together would also arguably violate their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment. [226words] Source: CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/07/opinions/separating-mothers-children-immigration-reyes/index.html
PartIII: Obstacle
THE WOMEN’S STRIKE AND THE MESSY SPACE OF CHANGE
By JiaTolentino |March 7 at 7:55 PM
[Paraphrase 7] Tomorrow is the Women’s Strike, the fourth of ten actions that have been called for by the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington. The strike was planned to coincide with International Women’s Day, and the march organizers, in tandem with a team organizing protests in forty countries around the world, have asked women to take whatever form of action their lives allow for. Take the day off from “paid and unpaid labor,” including housework and child care, if you can, or avoid shopping at corporate or male-owned businesses, or simply wear red in solidarity. There will be rallies in at least fifty cities around the United States.
Comparisons between the strike and the post-Inauguration march—now estimated to be the largest political demonstration in U.S. history—are inevitable, and likely to be unfavorable to the strikers. The decline in unionization has insured that most American workers are unfamiliar with striking and what it entails. And it is, of course, much harder to strike on a weekday than to protest on a Saturday. It is also more difficult to facilitate, measure, and publicize absence than it is to celebrate presence, the way one does at a march. When tens of thousands of immigrants went on strike on February 16th, they did attract some favorable public attention—as well as employer retribution—but a general strike the next day, and a tech-industry strike one week later, escaped public notice almost completely.
What’s more, among some liberal-leaning women writers, one finds an oddly defeatist assumption that a strike can only perpetuate the conditions that it explicitly seeks to draw attention to and combat. Meghan Daum, for instance, in the Los Angeles Times, has predicted that the strike will “mostly be a day without women who can afford to skip work” and “shuffle childcare and household duties to someone else.” (She adds that women are “too essential to play hooky,” which is, of course, the animating basis for strikes in general.) At Quartz, Maureen Shaw noted that “in practice, most American women cannot afford to opt out of either paid or unpaid labor,” and so “tens of millions of people have neither the benefits nor the flexibility to take the day off in protest.” Sady Doyle, at Elle, argued that women’s work is missing a common definition and project, and that “without a specific, labor-related point, after all, a ‘strike’ is just a particularly righteous personal day.” The piece was headlined “Go Ahead and Strike, but Know That Many of Your Sisters Can’t.”
There’s an underlying note of guilt and aversion in these arguments—a sense that privilege renders a person politically ineffective. In reality, though, as the Women’s March demonstrated, privileged women are uniquely positioned to use their surfeit of cultural leverage to clear space for the causes of everyone else. And that seems to be the fundamental idea of the Women’s Strike: that it could help to forge solidarity between women with favorable working conditions and women who have no such thing.
In response to Doyle’s piece, Magally A. Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths pointed out, in The Nation, that, in recent years, female workers who enjoy far less of a safety net have been forming diverse coalitions and engaging in smaller, significantly riskier strikes. Last year, there was a wave of prison strikes, which were supported by Black Lives Matter organizers, who also supported the action at Standing Rock. The last big strike in the U.S. was the immigrant strike in 2006, in which more than a million people boycotted economic activity and took to the streets. The Women’s Strike has been endorsed by immigrant groups; by the bodega owners who recently went on strike in New York City; by associations of migrant workers, domestic workers, and restaurant workers. It feels strange to watch women with privilege recuse each other from participation on behalf of less-privileged women whose actual, vocal positions they do not appear to have taken into account.
This isn’t to say that inequality between women doesn’t seriously complicate the idea of a unified strike. The public-school systems in Alexandria, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will both close down tomorrow, after a critical mass of employees requested a single day’s leave. The chain of women’s labor—teachers, day-care providers, mothers who work in or out of the home—has been strained considerably; without the notoriously unreliable aid of men, there is simply no way for all those women to strike at once. And the financial burden of a strike falls hardest on the people with the fewest resources—the Washington Post quoted a day-care provider who said, with good reason, that she could better support the movement by going to work. And yet, something worthwhile has already been registered: the indispensability of these school districts’ female employees, the inextricability of their work from the community’s functioning, and the seriousness and commonality of women workers’ concerns.
A strike illuminates the system in which it takes place, and the messy space between perfection and failure within which change tends to happen. It pushes people to think about the entities that pay them, the people whom they rely on, and also the people who rely on them. At n+1, Dayna Tortorici made the case recently that the Women’s Strike helps to highlight the interrelatedness of labor conditions across all demographic lines. “The effort to break unions and make labor more ‘flexible’ has forced an unprecedented number of us into labor conditions that were once, as Maria Mies has written, ‘typical for women only,’ ” Tortorici argues, noting the precedents set, in centuries prior, by female mill workers, textile workers, and washerwomen. “This includes work not covered by trade unions, work without a proper contract or means of collective bargaining, work that falls outside the protections of labor laws . . . . The more people find themselves indirectly employed, for instance by tech companies and temp agencies, the more they learn from women’s labor movements of the past.”
Reflecting on the Women’s Strike made me feel embarrassed about the ease of my own working conditions: I work from home, on a flexible schedule, with no children or dependents, and if I were to go on strike for a day, the only person likely to notice is my editor, whose day might even improve as a result. (On Monday, Condé Nast employees received an e-mail from human resources sanctioning the use of a personal day or a volunteer day for A Day Without a Woman.) But I can’t see much use in becoming emotionally or ethically paralyzed by the difference between my situation and that of, say, an undocumented housekeeper and mother of two. I’d rather strike, and look for structures that can fill the gap between us. Her concerns, regardless, are my concerns, too. [1135words] Source: The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-womens-strike-and-the-messy-space-of-change
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发表于 2017-3-9 09:26:50
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