Breast-feeding Moms! Discrimination At Starbucks

Workerbee the memo said

Starbucks policy is that mothers have a right to breastfeed in their stores without being asked to move, hide, cover up, or leave?

Explain to me how such “moron”s become Managers in the first place. This seams to me like one more example of how the Management Culture at starbucks is seriously flawed.

After all this is not the first time a women has been denied the right to breast feed at a Starbucks.

Under such conditions, are we seriously supposed to believe that internally driven reform is probable.

A unionized worker in this situation would have been empowered to speak against this Manager poor judgment advocating for the customer with out facing the threat of retaliation, and there by serve Starbucks interests.

This is impossible under the current Starbucks climate of fear which is the direct result of a poorly organized corporate structure of accountability that holds most employees accountable to a few managers instead of a structure in which the manages are accountable to the employees they manage who are accountable to the customers themselves.

The important point is this. If this customer had not kept quiet, there would have been little chance this manager’s illegal activity on behalf of Starbucks could have been addressed.

Yet a this same individual presumably can fire employees “at will,” run an entire store into the ground, do irreversible harm to Starbucks reputation.

Starbucks has created an inverse correlation between employee’s ability to impact Starbucks and accountability. The les power exercised the more rigidly accountable the employee is for their actions, the more power exercised the less rigidity in accountability.

So that Sarah Bender is short $6, this is regarded as a reason to fire, but when the supervisor and managers claim Sarah Bender is short $6 this is not.

The fact is that those $6 may have disappeared at any time. So everyone who could have touched that money should receive the same remedy.

The fact that they don’t points to a reality that management no matter how incompetent are given the benefit of the doubt, while the same is not true for the rank in file worker.

This is completely illogical since managers are recruited by other managers and are accountable to them, which creates the conditions ripe for corruption, inefficiency and favoritism with no or little internal checks.

A basic truth of human nature is that we are fallible. Those organizations that are strongest are those where the effect of this human condition is accounted and dispersed so that no one individual is empowered to do harm to the entire organization.

Starbucks organization is structured in exactly the opposite manner. A few employees are empowered to do irreversible harm to the entire organization while most of the rest are disempowered to stop that harm from taking place.

Unions on the other hand, the IWW in particular, are organized so that administrators and officers are accountable through elections to the workers themselves.

Beauty and the breast: Art exhibit, “Nurse-Out” seek to deconstruct public breastfeeding taboo

By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian

posted August 5, 2005

BRATTLEBORO – The New York gallery of a top Italian fashion house was the last place where Amy Jenkins expected her work to be censored. But when the New Hampshire artist responded to an invitation from curators for Salvatore Ferragamo to create a piece of artwork inspired by one of the designer’s products, the company abruptly declared the work “distasteful” and pulled it from their opening.

What image could put off executives of an industry that routinely pushes the boundaries of acceptability? Breastfeeding.

Jenkins, who lives in Peterborough, NH, and Brooklyn, said she doesn’t normally do corporate commissions, but then a pair of little red Ferragamo shoes caught her eye. It turned out the shoes were called “The Audrey” — after Hepburn. “My daughter’s name is also Audrey, so I thought the coincidence had a calling,” Jenkins said.

“The creative impulse really was that, if nothing else, I wanted to try and capture that moment for myself, just looking down at her and knowing she was going to be changing and growing; this was a brief, passing phase in our relationship and I wanted to really capture its essence,” Jenkins said. “I felt if I could do that, capture it for what it is for me, then it would resonate for other people, too.”

Jenkins created “The Audrey Samsara” — a 19-minute video in which her 18-month-old daughter, wearing only the bright red, slightly oversized Ferragamo shoes, crawls onto her mother’s lap, nurses, falls asleep, and wakes up again four times. Jenkins’ face is not visible. She is shrouded in black, with only her hands and part of a breast showing. The work is reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance painters, Jenkins noted. “In the pictures she’s actively nursing, which is almost like a Madonna and child, and when she’s across my lap sleeping it’s almost like the Pieta.”

The word “Samsara” in the title is a Buddhist reference about the life cycle, a concept for birth and death, she said.

The shoes Jenkins sees as a metaphor for growth, and Audrey is nude in the pictures “because I didn’t want to date it to a specific time or fashion; it was the timelessness of the act of breastfeeding. And I wanted to be all in black because I wanted to recede into the background; it was about her and her relationship with me only through gaining sustenance.”

Jenkins said she was never told exactly why her piece, which was pulled from the Ferragamo store’s gallery just hours before the opening last year, was considered “distasteful,” but she speculates it’s because nursing demystifies a breast.

“Where the fashion industry might be coming from is that the breast should not be a utilitarian object,” said Jenkins, who is still nursing her daughter. “When it becomes a useful thing, it’s no longer a sexy, touchable object.”

There’s also an economic motivation, according to Svetlana Mintcheva, arts program director for the National Coalition Against Censorship. She noted in a 2004 column on Censorship News Online: “As former top model and media activist Ann Simonton stated in 1984, ‘If women’s breasts weren’t hidden in shame or seen as obscene and wicked, how could Madison Avenue, pornographers, movies and television profit from their exposure?’”

Although Jenkins said she does not count herself among a growing movement of “lactivists” — breastfeeding mothers and their supporters who speak and act out for women’s right to nurse in public — she supports the movement. “I haven’t personally done any activism myself, and the artwork I think is not a political statement, but rather a creative act. I didn’t make it as a political statement, but if other people see that in it it’s OK, it doesn’t bother me.”

Still, had she had a support group at the time she was censored, “it would have been very appropriate to gather a group of women together and go sit in front of Salvatore Ferragamo and nurse,” she said.

That was what happened in June, when some 200 women converged at ABC headquarters on Columbus Avenue in New York to nurse their babies in public after talk show host Barbara Walters admitted on her program to being uncomfortable seated next to a nursing mother on an airplane.

The New York protest followed others around the country, sparked when a Starbucks employee asked a mother to nurse her baby in the bathroom — an incident that incensed nursing moms and their supporters. “When you take your restaurant or fast-food meals into a public restroom, sit on the floor and eat it there, then I will consider breastfeeding my child there,” wrote one blogger on the website amptoons.com. “The argument of someone’s ‘discomfort’ and ‘common courtesy and decorum’ falls into the hypocrisy category when more of a woman’s breast is on display at the beach, in the office, in the park or for a night on the town,” she wrote.

Still photographs from Jenkins’ work will be part of a Brattleboro’s Second Annual Art of Breastfeeding Show, set to kick off Aug. 5 with a “Nurse Out” in which a group of mothers plan to gather and publicly breastfeed their children. The show, which runs through August at Amy’s Bakery Arts Café and the Catherine Dianich Gallery, showcases the work of local, regional, and national artists on subject.

It corresponds with World Breastfeeding Week, Aug.1-7, designated by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action. This year, the week focused on the benefits of breastfeeding for two years and beyond, introducing foods after six months while breastfeeding is continued.

A Swedish nutritionist, Stina Almroth, established the scientific basis for exclusive breastfeeding when she discovered that healthy breastfed babies needed no additional water, even in hot climates. The conclusion meant aide organizations didn’t have to teach mothers in developing countries to boil water and give it safely to their babies, according to international breastfeeding advocate Ted Greiner. “This also reduced the risk that they would use other supplements unnecessarily and prematurely. At the very least, supplements in the early months of life replace breast milk and, unless they are sterile, can be a source of infection in the infant,” Greiner wrote in a paper for an international conference in Italy in 2000. The World Health Organization also promotes breastfeeding “well into the second year of life,” Greiner noted.

According to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital lactation specialist Dawn Kersula, mothers have the right to nurse publicly in Vermont, one of only six states that have passed laws securing that right.

“Mothers are so used to nurturing their babies at the breast. In public or in private, they’re just feeding their babies and keeping them happy — with the healthiest food in the world,” said Kersula.

The Second Annual Art of Breastfeeding Show features works in photography, painting, and mixed media. It includes an oil painting from Putney artist Collin Leach, billed as a personal paean to the artist’s child; and the Native American-influenced painting of a woman’s body by artist and art educator Lydia Thompson, which celebrates a woman’s body as a vessel for the birth of a child. Marlboro College professor John Willis has included photographs of his young son nursing.

There is a sculpture by Susan MacDormand, and a piece on loan from Africa — a wood carving of a mother looking down while nursing a walking child who reaches up to her breasts. Another, more sentimental sculpture, is a hand-carved cradle made in 1971 at Packer’s Corner Farm in Guilford, which has held 44 babies. The cradle was made by Vermont author, actor, professor, and comic Peter Gould from old barn boards with no nails, and has four hand-carved animals that work as brakes. The display includes is a list of all the babies who used it.

The show also includes works by Anita Dunlap Childs, Marcella Hackbardt, Susan Wadsworth, Jean Davis, Lynne Weinstein, Jaja McLaughin, Evie Lovette, Ellen Tumavikus, Asha McLaughlin, Pete Guenther, Catherine Dianich Gruver, Simi Berman, Laura Isabella, Andrea Wallens-Powell, and others.

http://www.vermontguardian.com/culture/0904/Breastfeeding.shtml

no gods no masters