Grassroots by Jennifer Baumgardner

Author:Jennifer Baumgardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

FROM CENTER TO MARGIN

Even if your job won’t exactly mirror your beliefs, it can certainly be influenced by your values. As we’ve discussed before, activism is accessing the resources you already have in the service of social justice. You have resources whether you work at the feminist bookstore Bluestockings or at The Wall Street Journal, but they’re different resources.

Workplaces have long been sites for social good, whether or not it’s political—from being a prime place to get sponsors for the AIDS Walk to businesses adopting a highway for litter patrol. If you start from that vantage point, you enter into a long history of workers changing the workplace and their communities at large from within. In the early years of industrialized capitalism, workers discovered that their power lay in their numbers—if one quit, he or she was replaceable, but if they all quit, the company couldn’t succeed. Trade unions were created to harness this collective power and ultimately to establish protective agreements for the workers, such as overtime pay, safe conditions, and a decent wage. Not only did unions improve working conditions, they became political forces unto themselves, determining the course of elections and lobbying the government. Unions helped to define the worker as a citizen who should be broadly politically engaged, not solely through elections and special-interest groups.

Unions still offer organizing opportuinities for the worker. Lauren Young, for instance, was a thirty-three-year-old senior writer at Smart Money magazine in 2001 when she and thousands of other Dow Jones employees got a provocative e-mail from their union representative. The e-mail asked if union members would prefer that their insurance plan cover contraception. “Of course, I would,” Lauren posted back. “At $35 a pack, you’d have to be crazy not to want your birth control pills covered.” She had been vaguely perturbed about the issue before, but this e-mail solidified her feelings that the insurance plan was sexist. It was patently unfair that the Dow Jones Corporation, an owner of Smart Money (it’s a joint venture with Hearst), didn’t cover contraception but did cover Viagra.

Lauren learned that the e-mail was part of an alliance between her union and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). PPFA has had a Fair Access to Contraception campaign since 2000. Their first major victory came when a Tacoma, Washington, pharmacist named Jennifer Erickson discovered that her employer would not cover her pills. She called Planned Parenthood and was hooked up with their Fair Access to Contraception campaign as well as lawyers from the Western Washington Affiliate to represent her. Erickson v. Bartell Drug Company, decided in June 2001, established that excluding contraceptives from prescription drug coverage was a form of sex discrimination. Since that decision, twenty states have voluntarily mandated that employers who offer prescription drug benefits also cover birth control.

A key element to cases like this is understanding that employers, not insurance companies, determine employee benefits—something few people seem to know. If employees want to change their policy, their first step is to make a pitch to their bosses about contraceptive coverage.

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