Celebrities, activists added to MTV's 'See Us Unite For Change' celebration of AANHPI Heritage Month

Olivia Munn, left, and Henry Golding, center join host Ken Jeong in the MTV celebration.

With Ken Jeong set to host, MTV's AANHPI Heritage Month celebration announced more celebrities joining the star-studded  television event.

MTV's "See Us Unite for Change" event just announced a massive expansion to their roster. With additions of Olivia Munn, Henry Golding, the Black Eyed Peas, Steven Yeun, Mike Shinoda and Sesame Street's Elmo and Alan. Additional presenters also include Chloe Bennet, Cheryl Burke, Tim Chantarangsu, James Hong, Alan Kim, Michelle Kwan, Lisa Ling and Jeremy Lin. the celebration is set to kick off on May 21st at 8 p.m. ET/PT and will include performances from Jhene Aiko, Saweetie, and Sting.

"To truly shift perceptions on a larger scale, we must come together to take a stand against discrimination, slander and violence in all of its forms, utilizing every platform and tool that we have access to," said See Us Unite campaign Executive Producer Sheila Lirio Marcelo.

"But anti-Asian hate has had a long history in this country, and to truly shift perceptions on a larger scale, we must come together to take a stand against discrimination, slander and violence in all of its forms, utilizing every platform and tool that we have access to."

"Ultimately, our culture is our greatest asset in our effort to change hearts and minds," she added.

Featuring music, comedy performances, short films, and inspirational speakers, the event will spotlight notable Asian American Pacific Islander contributions to art and media and education.

Asian American public figures and those working to combat violence against the AAPI community will also speak. Other speakers include Amanda Ngoc Nguyen, Ai-Jen Poo, Prof. Karthick Ramakrishnan and John C. Yang.

The Asian American Foundation partnered with the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, The Henry Luce Foundation and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to fund the event.

The goal of the event, which is a partnership between MTV Entertainment Studios and the Ford and MacArthur foundations, is to help educate its viewers about the powerful impact the AAPI community has had on American culture and help garner support against the hate and discrimination that continues to afflict the AAPI community in the wake of the pandemic, and beyond.

News of the celebration emerged amidst these ongoing acts of violence against the AAPI community. "We are outraged and deeply saddened by the escalation of hate crimes against AAPI communities and stand with them in the fight against xenophobia and bigotry," said MTV President Chris McCarthy. "Hate against one of us is hate against all of us and by working together on a global scale, we can help end this senseless violence."

"Despite these difficult times for our community, the formation of TAAF and their bold work on the See Us Unite campaign represent the best of what can emerge when we share a collective resolve for change," said actor Daniel Dae Kim, who is also on the TAAF board of directors. "They're both great signs for our future."

See Us Unite for Change will air Friday, May 21 at 8 PM EDT on MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET, and Nickelodeon. Click here for more information.

LABOR DAY: 7 AAPI labor leaders you should know

Originally posted by the AFL-CIO in May of 2019 to cocmmemorate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we are reposting today in celebration of Labor Day.  - Editor

By Kenneth Quinnell
A blog from the AFL-CIO

Each May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, when we celebrate the accomplishments, culture and history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. 

Today, we are going to take a deeper look at members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community who have advanced the cause of worker justice. Here are seven labor activists who you should know about for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month:

Wikimedia Commons

Ai-jen Poo: Ai-jen Poo started organizing domestic workers in 1996 and helped found Domestic Workers United. In 2010, DWU was key in the passage of New York's Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, the first law in the country to guarantee domestic workers labor protections. The next year, DWU helped organize the first national meeting of domestic worker organizations, leading to the formation of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She has been NDWA's director since 2010. Her other efforts on behalf of working people include Caring Across Generations, which campaigns for affordable health care for our aging population and for access to quality jobs for the caregiver workforce.

Larry Itliong: Born in the Philippines, Larry Itliong was a farm worker in California. In 1956, he founded the Filipino Farm Labor Union and later organized a group of Filipinos to strike against grape growers in Delano. For eight days they were harassed and faced violence and saw no progress. Itliong approached César Chávez and the two groups joined together to launch the Delano Grape Strike of 1965 that eventually led to the creation of the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chávez became director and Itliong assistant director. He continued to organize with the UFW and the Filipino American Political Alliance until his passing in 1977.

Maf Misbah Uddin: In 1988, Maf Misbah Uddin began work as an actuary in New York City. He became active in the Accountants, Statisticians and Actuaries Local 1407, becoming president in 2000. He also became treasurer of AFSCME District Council 37. As treasurer, he improved the transparency of the union's finances. His work was vital in keeping DC 37 on budget in the devastating aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which did extensive damage to the union's headquarters. He is also founder and president of the Alliance of South Asian American Labor.

Voices of Labor

May Chen: Before moving to New York in 1979, May Chen taught high school and college courses in California and founded a day care center. In New York, she did some work for UNITE HERE Local 6 of the Hotel, Restaurant, Club Employees and Bartenders Union. Inspired by the 1982 garment workers' strike in Chinatown, she joined the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). There she worked on the Immigration Project, the first union-created legal advocacy department for immigrant workers. She later worked in ILGWU's education department and served the New York City Central Labor Council, the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, ILGWU Local 23-25, the New York Metropolitan Area Joint Board. Before retiring in 2009, she served as international vice president of UNITE HERE.

Philip Vera Cruz: Born in the Philippines, Philip Vera Cruz worked on farms before moving to the United States. In 1943, he moved to California and became a farm worker. After joining the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, he was a key part of the strike of grape pickers in Delano, California, in 1965. He served as vice president of UFW until 1977. After that, he helped create the Farm Workers Credit Union and he created Agbayani Village, a retirement community for farm workers.

Sue Ko Lee and the Dollar Store Strikers: Sue Ko Lee worked in the National Dollar Store's San Francisco factory in sweatshop conditions in the 1930s. ILGWU began organizing the Chinese Ladies Garment Workers Union Local 361, and it won a union election in 1938. The owner immediately sold the company to a new company headed by the factory manager and a former National Dollar Store employee in attempt to set aside the contract and break the union. Lee and her fellow workers went on strike and actively organized the strike, obtaining solidarity from their white co-workers. The unified front led to a contract that improved salaries, benefits and working conditions for the workers and helped break down racial barriers in San Francisco. Lee went on to become secretary of the union local and the San Francisco Joint Board.

Velma Veloria: After graduating from San Francisco State University and working on anti-war and Filipino rights causes, Velma Veloria became an organizer for the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU), ILWU Local 37 for cannery workers and SEIU. She fought for justice for Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, ILWU local leaders who were assassinated in 1981. Later, she began working in support of political campaigns. Veloria used her experience to win a seat as a state legislator and pursued a variety of causes important to women and people of color. She organized numerous trade missions to Southeast Asia and helped strengthen relations between the United States and countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia.

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The Philippines is a major source of exploited domestic workers in the US

The story by Alex Tizon, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, entitlted "My Family's Slave," was the last story by the respected reporter and although it stained his reputation but -- as he intended -- it also aimed a spotlight on the issue of human trafficking. 

The story published in The Atlantic in 2017, was a domestic worker they called "Lola" (Tagalog for Grandmother) for decades, how she cooked for them, cleaned house, and raised the Tizon children without pay and suffered cruel physical punishment. 

"She lived with my family for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings, and cooked and cleaned from dawn to dark — always without pay," Tizon writes in the cover story in The Atlantic. "I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized she was my family's slave."

The story published after the author's death went viral at the expense of Tizon's sterling reputation in the journalistic community. It also brought out into the open the dark secret more common than the Filipino American community would like to admit.

GRAPHIC BY SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

Every year, hundreds of Filipino workers are trafficked to the US to work in servitude and debt bondage. The problem isn’t confined to the underworld. It plays out daily in the homes of wealthy expats, diplomats and wealthy people investing in US businesses as a means to safeguard their money.

“Human Trafficking at Home: Labor Trafficking of Domestic Workers” details the plight of nannies, house cleaners, and home health aides, and offers detailed solutions to plug the gaping holes that currently exist in legal protections for this mostly women of color workforce. 

The report, released at the end of July, showed most victims were female adults originally from other countries, including the Philippines – 100 workers – followed by Mexico (60), the US (33), India (21) and Colombia (20). There were also 11 from Indonesia.

The vulnerability of workers from the Philippines was laid bare last year, when the South China Morning Post reported on Filipino workers who were victims of labor trafficking in the US. Some had fallen prey to bogus jobs and many ended up trapped in the households of both Americans and expatriates, including diplomats and officers of international organisations.

In advertisements seeking workers on the internet and India-based newspapers, an Indian American couple from Stockton, California lured poor South Asians by making false claims regarding the wages and the duties of employment. Then, once the workers arrived at the the couple's Stockton residence, the couple forced them to work 18 hours a day with limited rest and nourishment. Few of them were paid any wages. 


During their trial earlier this year where they were found guilty, it was learned that the couple kept their domestic workers from leaving, and induced them to keep working for them, by threatening them, by creating an atmosphere of fear, control, and disempowerment, and at times by physically hitting or burning them. When a victim pushed back or said she wanted to leave, it got worse.

Nannies, house cleaners, home health aides, and other domestic workers frequently labor for extremely low pay, sometimes in conditions so abusive it amounts to exploitation and human trafficking, according to a report released July 24 by Polaris and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). 

“Domestic workers do the work that makes all work possible. Yet they work in a ‘wild west’ environment where working conditions are based on the good will of their employer rather than a set standard. This creates a breeding ground for exploitation, including labor trafficking,” said Ai-jen Poo, NDWA Executive Director. 

The federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, introduced in Congress by Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-WA, on July 15th, would take important steps toward providing these workers the rights they need, as would significant changes to regulations governing temporary employment visas for immigrant workers. 

“[Domestic workers] provide essential care and support to aging parents, people with disabilities, children, and homes,” Harris said in a statement announcing the bill. “However, our nation’s domestic workers have not been afforded the same rights and benefits as nearly every other worker, and it’s time we change that.”

GRAPHIC BY SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

The highest number of labor trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, almost 23 percent, involved domestic workers. This is likely a small fraction of what is really happening as human trafficking in all its forms is notoriously underreported. Workers were often controlled through the withholding of earnings, misrepresentation of the job, excessive working hours, and emotional abuse. According to NDWA, 67 percent of surveyed domestic workers indicated their job expectations were only covered during informal conversations, with 74 percent saying they could not decline taking on more work.

FOR MORE INFO: Click here to read “Human Trafficking at Home: Labor Trafficking of Domestic Workers.” Additionally, Polaris has created a data fact sheet, a guide for families who hire domestic workers, and an overview of what makes certain situations instances of labor trafficking. 

“The importance of domestic workers to the functioning of our economy as a whole—let alone the functioning of our individual households—cannot be overstated,” said Lillian Agbeyegbe, Polaris’s learning and impact manager and the report’s author. “Yet, too often we learn about cases where someone has been held as a virtual slave in a home for years on end, and we are always shocked and surprised. We shouldn’t be. It is long past time to recognize that caring for our loved ones and our homes is real, vital work and that the people who do it deserve fair wages, decent working hours and the legal protections that can keep them from being trafficked.”

“The National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, a 21st-century framework to bring dignity and respect to domestic workers, is part of a bigger solution to ensure that the trafficking of domestic workers ends once and for all.”

GRAPHIC BY SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

Other findings of the report:

• 85% of domestic worker trafficking survivors report having pay withheld or being paid well below minimum wage

• 81% have lived in abusive living conditions

• 80% have been tricked with false or otherwise deceptive contracts

• 78% have had employers threaten to report them for deportation if they complain

• 77% report having their movements restricted or monitored by their employers

• 75% experience isolation from the outside world, with employers cutting off access to communication

• 74% report having experienced emotional or verbal abuse by their employer

• 73% report working excessive overtime, more than 48 hours per week

• 66% report having experienced physical or sexual abuse, either by their employer or a family member of their employer

• 62% report having their passports or other ID taken away from them by employers

• 45% report being in fear of physical harm if they were to try to leave their employment situation

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Ai-Jen Poos message to graduates, 'Empathy is our superpower'

Labor leader Ai-Jen Poo delivered the commencement speech at Smith Collge in Massachusetts.

In her Smith College Commencement address, activist and social innovator Ai-jen Poo urged the Class of 2019 at Smith College to take that extra step to not only to seek change, but to transform the country.

“Together, we have the power to not only change the country,” Poo said. “We can run the country, too. We can change the logic of power in our country -- to fundamentally disrupt the hierarchy of human value that defines our culture, our politics and our economy.”

Poo noted that although women have made progress, they have not yet seen transformative change. “We won more opportunity in a context set by men,” said the labor leader and cofounder of Supermajority, an advocacy agency.

“We don’t want to run things for the sake of running them. We want to run them because we’re going to do things differently,” Poo said.

Poo reminded graduates of the 140-year old institution that the history of the nation includes colonization, slavery, and waves of migration by different ethnic groups, which have been the basis of some injustices felt today. Poo said that the message of a united country is both fraught and remarkable.

“The idea that we are both many and one is both the source of so much pain and conflict and precisely what makes us so unique and extraordinary as a nation,” Poo said.

As an organizer, Poo said that embracing empathy and vulnerability is a message that has allowed her to connect with women who want to be both powerful and human.

Poo told the almost 1300 graduates -- bachelors' and advanced degrees -- that in her experience, empathy is the essential ingredient to making change and moving forward.

A  leader in organizing domestic workers, Poo quoted her mentor, Gloria Steinem, who graduated from Smith in 1956, and urged graduates to imagine a new paradigm of power -- one in which women are “linked, not ranked.”

“We need you to take responsibility now -- not just for yourself, your community, or even just the people who share your values. We need you to take responsibility for the whole -- for the whole entire project of taking this vision of democracy into the future -- running it all. And doing it differently. Doing it together. With a whole lot of empathy.”

“Empathy is our superpower,” Poo said.

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Labor organizer will receive AAAJ's Courage Award, Oct. 4

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Ai-Jen Poo was a guest of Mereyl Streep during the Golden Globes Awards.

AS SHE walked alongside Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes earlier this year, people kept asking, "Who is that woman?"

That was the first glimpse that most of America had of Ai-jen Poo, but it wasn't the last. Her presence at the awards underlined the impact of the #MeToo movement enregized by women in the entertainment industry who finally aligned themselves with working women less glamorous careers.

"Domestic workers, as some of the most at-risk and invisible workers in the nation, want to send a clear message: from the casting room to the kitchen, all women deserve dignity and safety where they work," said Poo that evening in Hollywood.

Poo will receive the 2018 American Courage Award from the Asian American Advancing Justice (AAAJ) during the organization's annual conference that will be held in Washington DC in October.

On October 4, AAJC will celebrate its annual American Courage Awards, an opportunity to recognize and celebrate individuals, groups, and corporations for their commitment and contributions to civil rights.

AAJC awards Poo the American Courage Award for her unwavering advocacy for marginalized individuals and families nationwide. Through her work with domestic workers, her voice in the #MeToo movement and other women’s movements, Poo continues to be an inspiration and voice for the community.

At her core, Poo is an organizer. Her accolades include being recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders as the result of her work in labor organizing.

Poo has been an active force of change for the AAPI community and other marginalized communities since her start in the 1990s at the New York Asian Women’s Center through her journey to organizing around ensuring basic labor protections for domestic workers in New York State. She then co-founded Domestic Workers United (DWU) in 2000, an organization critical in passing the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010, the first law in the United States to guarantee basic labor rights for domestic workers. Her work in New York was amplified when California passed a similar law and President Barack Obama expanded protections for home-care workers.

Currently, Poo operates as the Executive Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), an organization she co-founded in 2007, as well as the Co-Director of Caring Across Generations. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is now an affiliation of more than 60 organizations that works for the respect, recognition, and inclusion in labor protections for domestic workers and has effectively organized towards guaranteeing rights for who are involved in domestic work. Since she co-created Caring Across Generations in 2011, the campaign has been working towards building a movement of all ages and backgrounds to transform the way we care about our aging and caregiving populations.

Recognized in 2012 by Gloria Steinem for her empathy and creative organizing tactics, Poo has made waves in the lives of multiple communities. In her book The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America, Poo exhibits her innovative new approaches to how society approaches old age. Her positive and inclusive approach of viewing the elder boom as an opportunity rather than an obstacle resulted in the book being lauded by the New York Times among many other positive reviews. The book, like Poo herself, ultimately aims to organize change for a better society.

For more information about the Asian American Advancing Justice conference and the American Courage Award, click here.

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The other women at the Golden Globes were activists

Ai-jen Poo, right, was a special guest of Meryl Streep at the Golden Globe awards show last Sunda.

IT WAS HARD to miss the unfamiliar women at the Golden Globes awards held Sunday (Jan. 7). They were seated up front in seats usually reserved for Hollywood's most well-known stars. 

The unfamiliar faces were women activists invited as guests of luminaries such as Meryl Streep, Amy Poehler, Emma Stone, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Susan Sarandon and Emma Watson.

It was in keeping with the unofficial theme of the night sparked by the #MeToo movement and the sexual harassment and misconduct that powerful men foist on women, including the entertainment industry.

The activists stood out in contrast to the glamorous stars of the motion picture and television industries because  seven of the eight were women of color and the eighth was a lesbian, tennis legend Billie Jean King. 

RELATED: Aziz Ansari makes history with Golden Globes win

Recognition of minorities is still a hurdle the entertainment industries need to tackle. The evening underlined that situation with only four awards given to people of color: Aziz Ansari for his acting in Master of None, Guillermo del Toro for directing The Shape of Water, Sterling K. Brown for his role in This Is Us and the first black woman to win the Cecil B. DeMille award, Oprah Winfrey, whose rousing acceptance speech was a rallying cry to end sexual harassment and abuse.

The invited guests were Tarana Burke, senior director of the nonprofit Girls for Gender Equity and founder of the #MeToo movement; Marai Larasi, executive director of Imkaan, a British network of organizations working to end violence against black and minority women; Rosa Clemente, a community organizer focused on political prisoners, voter engagement and Puerto Rican independence; Monica Ramirez, who fights sexual violence against farmworkers and pushes for Latina empowerment; and Calina Lawrence, a Suquamish Tribe member, singer and activist for, among other causes, Native American treaty and water rights.

Among the activists were two Asian/Americans, Ai-jen Poo and Saru Jayaraman.

Ai-jen Poo, who was invited by Meryl Streep, is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and the co-director of Caring Across Generations. She is an award-winning activist, thought leader, and social innovator, and a leading voice in domestic workers’ rights and family care advocacy.

As co-founder of the Domestic Workers United (DWU), a city-wide, multiracial organization of domestic workers, she help lead the way to the passage of the nation’s first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010, historic legislation that extends basic labor protections to over 200,000 domestic workers in New York state.

In 2011, Ai-jen co-created the national Caring Across Generations campaign to ensure access to affordable care for the nation’s aging population and access to quality jobs for the caregiving workforce.

Ms. Poo’s numerous accolades include recognition as a 2014 MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, a 2013 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and was named to TIME magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012, as well as Newsweek’s 150 Fearless Women list that same year.

In 2015 she was recognized as one of Fortune.com’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and the NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50 lists in 2015 and 2016. Her work has been featured in many publications, including Marie Claire, The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, Glamour, and CNN.com. She is author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.

Amy Poehler hosted Saru Jayaraman.

Amy Poehler's guest was Saru Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley. 

After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded ROC, which now has more than 18,000 worker members, 200 employer partners, and several thousand consumer members in a dozen states nationwide. The story of Saru and her co-founder's work founding ROC has been chronicled in the book The Accidental American.

Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was profiled in the New York Times "Public Lives" section in 2005, named one of Crain's "40 Under 40" in 2008, was 1010 Wins' "Newsmaker of the Year" and New York Magazine's "Influentials" of New York City. 

She was listed in CNN's "Top10 Visionary Women" and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, and a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015. 

Saru authored Behind the Kitchen Door, a national bestseller, and has appeared on CNN with Soledad O'Brien, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Melissa Harris Perry and UP with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the Today Show, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Her most recent book is Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Before the Golden Globe ceremonies, the women activists, representing women who don't have the high-profile  or the media platforms of their entertainment hosts, released a joint statement: 

As longtime organizers, activists and advocates for racial and gender justice, it gives us enormous pride to stand with the members of the Time’s Up campaign who have stood up and spoken out in this groundbreaking historical moment. We have each dedicated our lives to doing work that supports the least visible, most marginalized women in our diverse contexts. We do this work as participants in movements that seek to affirm the dignity and humanity of every person.

Too much of the recent press attention has been focused on perpetrators and does not adequately address the systematic nature of violence including the importance of race, ethnicity and economic status in sexual violence and other forms of violence against women. Our goal in attending the Golden Globes is to shift the focus back to survivors and on systemic, lasting solutions. Each of us will be highlighting legislative, community-level and interpersonal solutions that contribute to ending violence against women in all our communities. It is our hope that in doing so, we will also help to broaden conversations about the connection to power, privilege and other systemic inequalities.

Many of us identify as survivors of sexual harassment, assault and violence ourselves and we believe we are nearing a tipping point in transforming the culture of violence in the countries where we live and work. It’s a moment to transform both the written and unwritten rules that devalue the lives and experiences of women. We believe that people of all genders and ages should live free of violence against us. And, we believe that women of color, and women who have faced generations of exclusion—Indigenous, Black, Brown and Asian women, farmworkers and domestic workers, disabled women, undocumented, and queer and trans women—should be at the center of our solutions. This moment in time calls for us to use the power of our collective voices to find solutions that leave no woman behind.

This past year was a powerful one in the fight for gender equity and against sexual violence against women—from the Women’s March to the re-emergence of “me too” as a viral hashtag that brought more than ten years of survivor-centered work to the mainstream. There is still much work to do, and many hands required to do it. We want to encourage all women—from those who live in the shadows to those who live in the spotlight, from all walks of life, and across generations—to continue to step forward and know that they will be supported when they do.

The #TimesUp initiative joins an ever-growing collective of organizations, movements, and leaders working to end gender-based violence. We look forward to partnering with them and others to organize, support all survivors, and find solutions that ensure a future where all women and all people can live and work with dignity.

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