By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Sunday’s Washington Post featured a *compelling – and sad – story that reaffirms NCL’s concerns about farmworker kids. In “A Harvest of Reduced Expectations,” by reporter Kevin Sieff, the youngsters interviewed describe constantly moving from town to town during the school year – following their farmworker parents, showing up at new schools in the middle of the year, and failing to enjoy any continuity in their education. As a result, many drop out.

One teenage girl talked about living in farmworker’s quarters, which are typically run down and lacking in the niceties so many of today’s teens take for granted – a good bed, a desk on which to do homework, regular hours for meals and bedtimes. One boy is pictured sitting on his bed reading over his homework; he has no desk and lives in a threadbare makeshift living quarters.

But most troubling in the teenage girl’s story is that though she is glad to be able to be with her father and take care of her siblings, she is often surrounded by farmworkers who are NOT there with their wives and families. During the weekends many of these men bring prostitutes back to the quarters where these children live.

Reid Maki at NCL has worked tirelessly with the other members of the Child Labor Coalition, which NCL co-chairs, to gain passage of the *CARE Act, which will help to get farmworker kids out of the fields and in school full-time. This Washington Post article is particularly well headlined: A Harvest of Reduced Expectations; the piece does a great job of shining a light on the substandard and unacceptable living conditions of so many farmworkers – and their kids. Let’s pass CARE and get these kids into schools where they will be learning on a continuous basis and not exposed to a world that is hardly fit for adults, let alone children.

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Since our founding in 1899, the National Consumers League has worked hard to advocate for the better health of women and children. Florence Kelley, the League’s first leader, grew up in a family in which five of her mother’s eight children died from infection or disease. Babies during that time – the period right after the Civil War – were relatively safe while breastfeeding. Once weaned, they were exposed to illness from unsanitary food, water, and milk. Today, though we pasteurize milk and have access to safe drinking water, breastfeeding remains the best option for babies and their mothers, at least for the first 6 months of a child’s life.

That is why NCL was disturbed to read about an Internal Revenue Service decision that denies nursing mothers the ability to use their tax-sheltered health care accounts to pay for breast pumps and other breastfeeding supplies. NCL has written to the IRS to ask that the agency reverse its decision.

According to IRS Publication 502, reimbursable items include those that aid in the “prevention of disease.” The IRS apparently has determined that breast-feeding does not help in the prevention of disease. NCL could not disagree more. Medical evidence that far more widespread breastfeeding would not only “prevent disease” in the United States, but would save our health care system billions of dollars is overwhelming.

Consider the following evidence about the myriad health benefits to both breastfeeding mother and child:

• According to a Harvard study published in April of this year, if 90 percent of American families would comply with medical recommendationsto breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States wouldsave $13 billion per year and prevent an excess 911 deaths,nearly all of which would be among infants ($10.5 billion and 741deaths at 80 percent compliance).

• The risk of infant death due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is lowered, and respiratory infections such as pneumonia, and necrotizing enterocolitis is nearly eliminated if mothers breastfeed their infants until at least six months after birth.

• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has found that breastfed infants have a lower risk of contracting ear infections, stomach viruses, atopic dermatitis, type 1 and 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, and other health problems.

• Mothers also benefit from breastfeeding because of lower risk of contracting type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and postpartum depression (PPD).

• Breastfed infants typically need fewer sick care visits; Congress recently acknowledged the importance of breastfeeding in landmark health care reform legislation by requiring that workplaces provide women with a private place to nurse or use a breast pump.

As Dr. Robert W. Block, president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) noted in the New York Times this week, “The old adage that breast-feeding is a child’s first immunization really is true … So we need to do everything we can to remove the barriers that make it difficult.”

We agree with Dr. Block. And NCL reached out to our friends at AAP to share our letter and join forces with those who work to protect and improve the health of babies.

NCL strongly believes we need to encourage, not discourage, barriers to widespread breastfeeding. As in Florence Kelley’s day and ours, breast-fed babies get the best of all protections. Unfortunately, the IRS determination NOT to allow parents to use their tax-sheltered flex accounts to cover the cost of breast pumps has the impact of further discouraging women from breastfeeding and directly undermines what is by every measure a critical practice for improved public health. We believe the cost of breast pumps should and must be covered cost in these flex plans. We hope that NCL’s voice, along with the voices of AAP and so many others, will help to press the IRS Commissioner to reverse his decision.

By Jacob Markey, LifeSmarts Summer 2010 Intern

November is finally here, and LifeSmarts is, appropriately, focusing on topics in Consumer Rights and Responsibilities! As a political science major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, very few moments get me as excited as election night — watching the polls come in and finding out the winners (especially if the people I vote for win).

Tuesday, November 7 is Election Day, one of the most important days of the year for both the short and long-term state of the country. Voting is one of the most important actions a citizen can take in a democracy. By voting, you can have your say in who is elected, the direction of the local, state or national government, and what could potentially be accomplished in the future. In honor of Election Day, I think a blog post about elections and voting rights will be fun.

The upcoming election is what is known as a midterm election, meaning the President is not up for re-election (his election will be in 2012). Even with the President’s office absent from the ballot, there are still many important races happening across the country. If you are a member of the House of Representatives, you certainly are up for re-election next month, as all House members have terms of two years. The terms for members of the Senate are for six years, but they are staggered so that, on average, one-third of the members are up for re-election during each election cycle. This helps to prevent the likelihood of the same amount of turnover as in the House.

Additionally, in most states there are gubernatorial elections and countless races for senators and representatives. There are numerous local races and many other issues up for referendum in various states.

Not just anyone can vote. Knowledgeable LifeSmarts participants know that there are some important criteria you must meet in order to vote, including:

• Thanks to the 26^th Amendment to the Constitution, if you are at least 18 years old and a U.S. citizen, you are eligible to vote.

• There is no uniform method of voting. Each state runs elections slightly differently and has their own rules. These include hours the polls are open, how you can register, and locations where you may vote.

• Each state has its own set of voting requirements, which you should look into before attempting to register to vote.

• You don’t necessarily have to be in your home state on Election Day to vote. Through absentee voting, you can send in your choices ahead of time. So, if you are out of town on vacation, for work, school, or some other reason, you can use this method to still ensure your vote is counted.

There is so much information about the electoral system. If you are interested in more information about both the upcoming election the electoral process, I recommend you check out any major news site and/or your local paper. They have detailed information that will help to explain much more about American politics and our country’s political system.

I hope you are all as excited as I am about Election Day. If you are eligible to vote on November 7, go out and vote!

By Terry Kush, NCL Senior Director of Operations and Finance

Two weeks ago today, I stood waiting in the Cairo airport anxious to return to Washington, DC. While in Egypt, I participated in two workshops (one in Luxor and another in Cairo) on behalf of the National Consumers League. The workshops, titled “Regional NGO Capacity Building Workshops,” was sponsored and coordinated by the United States Department of Commerce’s Commercial Law Development Program (CLDP) in cooperation with the Egyptian Consumer Protection Agency (ECPA), and funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID). I was joined by our colleagues from Consumers Union, Consumers Federation of America, and Consumers International.

According to CLDP, the purpose of the workshops was to “strengthen management skills, build confidence of NGOs’ staff to use management tools operationally in implementing their activities, and promote public awareness and spread the culture of consumer protection.” However, I believe it is the exchange of “best practices” and shared experiences along with the various strategic planning, market surveillance and capacity building tools that made these workshops very participatory in nature, and; therefore, beneficial to everyone. In Luxor, we hosted roughly 20-25 NGOs from 7 surrounding districts. These organizations represented those new to the consumer movement and those in operation for 1 – 2+ years. In Cairo, an even bigger turn out, we had close to 30-35 NGOs representing 7-8 outposts.

In 2006, the Egyptian government instituted a consumer protection law, which resulted in the creation of the Consumer Protection Agency. Their role is “to protect consumers by implementing the consumer protection law in coordination with other governmental entities concerned with its implementation.” Sounds familiar?! Well, of course it does. They used the framework established in the 1960’s by a speech given by President Kennedy, in front of Congress (March 15, 1962), pointing out “Consumers, by definition, include us all,” and outlined his vision for consumer rights. These governing principals include eight consumer rights:

• The right to satisfaction of basic needs
• The right to safety
• The right to be informed
• The right to choose
• The right to be heard
• The right to redress
• The right to consumer education
• The right to a healthy environment

What I found astonishing is that Egypt has a consumer protection agency at all; and, while the United States works through — maybe — the kinks of re-establishing the consumer protection agency in the White House, consumers remain, as President Kennedy noted, “… the only important group… whose views are often not heard.”

What I also found interesting is some of the similarities that my own organization shares with the umbrella organization ECPA. Like ECPA, the National Consumers League houses a fraud center that consumers can use to file complaints. ECPA, as do we, receives complaints electronically, via fax and in writing. They track unfair practices in the marketplace such as durable goods, car safety and Internet fraud. Many of the smaller NGOs work to educate the consumer about his/her rights as a consumer. Like America, product safety is a never-ending battle. Egyptians would argue that their cases of unsafe products are much higher and a bigger problem than in the United States, since many of the products that come into the country do not have restrictions or guidelines that must be adhered to. At the end of the day, there was a common theme among consumer organizations, “How do we deal with inappropriate and false advertising?” to “How do we create consumer awareness and corporate social responsibility?”

These workshops speak to the ever-growing need for collaboration among consumer NGOs, as the issues increase due to the global marketplace and access to services and goods via the Internet. What we will find is that if consumer awareness is a part of both institutional agendas and government mandate we, as consumer organizations, can have a bigger impact on product safety, corporate social responsibility, fair prices in the global marketplace and fair treatment of not only consumers but workers’ rights around the world.

It is my hope that we take this message around the world as we look to create and expand consumer NGOs nationally and abroad.