Law and Disorder March 13, 2023

Civil Rights, Human Rights, Immigration, worker's rights

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Zachary Sklar: The Work: A Jigsaw Memoir

Screenwriter and journalist Zachary Sklar grew up in Hollywood as, in his words, “a child of the blacklist.” His fine book The Work: A Jigsaw Memoir has just been published. We will speak with him today.

In the 1950s, Zach’s father George Sklar, a playwright and screenwriter, was blacklisted from the movie industry for his past membership in the Communist Party. His mother, Miriam Blecher, was a modern dancer in the Martha Graham company and founding director of The New Dance Group. During the McCarthy era, many of their friends were hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, calIed HUAC. Several of them fled the country. Others were imprisoned. As a result, Zach grew up in an atmosphere of all-pervasive fear.

Richard Nixon rode to power on fear. After he retired, a reporter asked him what his secret was. He replied instantly, “It was fear, fear, and they don’t teach you that in the Boy Scouts.”

Zach’s beautiful collection of personal essays tells his story of how he overcame the fear he experienced as a child growing up in Hollywood during the blacklist years.

Guest – Zachary Sklar is a writer, editor, and teacher. A graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, he has taught magazine writing at that institution and also has served as the executive editor of The Nation magazine. Zach Sklar edited several books about the CIA for Sheridan Square Press, including Ari Ben-Menashe’s Profits of War and New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s bestselling On the Trail of the Assassins, which makes the case that the CIA was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Zach later co-wrote with Oliver Stone the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the movie JFK. He has been a creative adviser at Sundance Screenwriting Labs for more than two decades, and currently teaches screenwriting for the Harlem Dramatic Writing Workshop in New York. Zach Sklar was a friend of our show’s co-founder Michael Ratner and edited Michael’s memoir Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer.

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Exploiting The Labor Of Migrant Children

The New York Times headline, in its February 25th edition, says it all: “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” Yes, last year 130,000 unaccompanied minors entered the United States, and last year the federal agency responsible for placing these children in suitable situations as their cases are processed, lost track of at least 85,000 of them. But we know where all too many of them can be found: working 10-12 hours a day in violation of our nation’s child labor laws in the American supply chain for many major brands and retailers…retailers like Ford and General Motors. Retailers like Walmart and General Mills, whose brands include Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley, and PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats…and the list goes on.

So, underaged children, here in the U.S., and needing to earn money to send to their destitute families back home, or pay off the smuggler who brought them to the United States, are working under long, unsafe and exploited conditions, for some of America’s largest corporations. Never mind that the federal child labor provisions, authorized by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, also known as the “child labor laws,” were enacted to ensure that when minors do work, the work is safe and does not jeopardize their health, well-being or educational opportunities, and that sets age limits for various types of work.

As we will shortly learn from our guest for this topic today, that Act is being violated over and over again in 2023. Twelve-year old roofers in Florida and Tennessee, underage slaughterhouse workers in Biden’s home state, Delaware, and children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota. The shame of this should be mind boggling for the American people. But as we now begin interviewing today’s guest, this is still the despicable reality of the lives of these minors now in our country.

Guest – Professor Sara Rogerson, the Director of the Justice Center at Albany Law School, where she is also the faculty Director of the Immigration Law Clinic, in which students represent immigrant victims of crime. Her scholarship addresses flaws in the administration of immigration laws and policy, including intersections with domestic violence and international law. SSRN.com

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Law and Disorder July 11, 2022

Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Immigration

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Kennedy v. Bremerton School District: Rights To Religious Expression In The Workplace

On June 27, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. At issue was school employees’ First Amendment rights to religious expression while on the job. The Court held that a school district infringed on football coach Joseph Kennedy’s First Amendment rights when it disciplined him for engaging in “private” prayer. Kennedy was a coach at the Bremerton School District in Washington State. After games, he knelt on the field with some students joining him in prayer.

That so-called private prayer occurred on the 50-yard line. The school district forbade the coach to pray on the field after games. It did allow him to pray in a private location behind closed doors. After Coach Kennedy continued on the field to give his thanks to God, the school district placed him on administrative leave. It gave him a poor evaluation, despite a history of positive ones. Kennedy did not return the following year and sued, seeking reinstatement. He also relocated to Florida. The Supreme Court upheld Kennedy’s right to pray in public on the field after the game.

Guest – Andrew Seidel is a constitutional attorney and vice president of strategic communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which litigated Kennedy v. Bremerton. He’s also the author of several books including The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom, which hits shelves in September and explains a lot of what is happening at the court right now.

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Attorney John Philo: Sugar Law Center

Maurice Sugar was a workers’ lawyer and a socialist, one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild, the first General Counsel to the United Auto Workers and a staunch defender of working people’s rights. He was also a talented poet and songwriter of political songs and poems. In the 1950’s, during the height of the Cold War, Walter Reuther was elected President of the UAW. His first official action was to fire Sugar. Maurice and his wife Jane Sugar, who was an activist and union organizer of teachers, homesteaded over 100 acres of property in the Black Lake area of Michigan.  At their deaths – he in the 1970s and she in the 1980s – a trust was created which formed the financial seed money for the founding of the Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit, Michigan.

In 1990, shortly after the death of Jane Sugar, a group of National Lawyers Guild national leaders, including NLG founding member Ernie Goodman, former National President Bill Goodman – both Trustees of the M & J Trust – and former national president Debra Evenson, used the endowment from the Sugar Trust to establish the Sugar Law Center. It brought to life a long-standing vision of creating a national public interest project of the NLG that would tackle the critical questions of the intersection between civil rights and economic justice.  The Sugar Law Center began with a primary focus on plant closings and worker dislocation and Julie Hurwitz was the founding Director. Now, 32 years later, as a nationally recognized public interest workers rights’ law project, the work of the Sugar Law Center has expanded to take on issues of runaway corporate power, racism, community dislocation, gentrification, poverty, environmental injustice; women’s rights and many others.

Guest – Executive Director of the Sugar Law Center, John Philo. John has litigated cases in dozens of states representing low-wage workers, communities, and injured persons on matters of employment, constitutional, and tort law. John is also a former president of the Detroit Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and a contributing author to the National Lawyers Guild’s Employee and Union Member Guide to Labor Law and the Institute of Continuing Legal Education’s Torts:  Michigan Law and Practice.

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