Actors with Disabilities All but Invisible on TV
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About one in eight Americans is disabled, but you wouldn’t know it from watching TV. In the new fall TV season, only six characters out of 587, about 1 percent, will have a disability. Even more amazing is that only one of those actors has a disability in real life.
October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month and a new report shows persons with disabilities are all but invisible on the nation’s five broadcast networks— ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox and NBC. That also means there are few opportunities for actors with disabilities to be cast.
The report, “Where We Are On TV,” by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) also found that of the six disabled characters, all are white and five are male. Yet 51 percent of all disabled people are women and only 18 percent are white. Robert David Hall, who plays Dr. Albert Robbins on the CBS show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and has a prosthetic leg, is the only real-life disabled person cast in a regular role in a series. The other five are all actors portraying disabled people. You can download the report here.
Outsourced: No Laughing Matter
Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs with Justice.
Last week, NBC launched a new show that tries to find comedy in the all-too-real conditions of outsourcing. While the first episode was witty—making light of age-old cultural clashes and stereotypes, there is nothing funny about the reality of outsourcing and the impact it has both on the American worker and their counterparts around the world.
For decades, big companies like the one portrayed in “Outsourced” have been engaged in a global race to the bottom, constantly seeking to maximize their profits by cutting wages, benefits and working conditions. Corporations have learned to avoid local worker bargaining power by organizing themselves globally and exerting a downward pressure on wages along the supply chain that brings goods from manufacturing to consumers.
CWA: Comcast-NBC Merger Bad for Workers and Consumers
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The proposed merger between cable TV giant Comcast and NBC-Universal (NBCU) would lead to job cuts, reduce competition in the cable industry and restrict consumer access to online video content, a senior leader of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) told lawmakers.
On top of all that, Comcast has a long record of violating workers’ rights, CWA Vice President James Weitkamp told a field hearing of the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month. After its last big merger, with AT&T Broadband in 2002, Comcast immediately set about crushing AT&T’s unions, he said. Comcast also pays its workers about a third less in wages and benefits than unionized telecom companies.
10 Reasons to Support the U.S. Auto Industry
Chances are the upcoming holiday get-togethers will provide plenty of encounters with relatives and friends who are against helping out the auto industry. Opponents of a bridge loan have plenty to say. And we should, too. Here’s a quick list of reasons for countering arguments by Uncle CEO and Cousin It.
1. Unlike the taxpayer giveaway to Wall Street, the funds for the auto industry are loans. These loans have to be paid back. The Big Banks who got our $700 billion get to keep it.
2. It’s cheaper to support the auto industry than to let it die. Anderson Economic Group and BBK Ltd. determined that over a two-year period, a $30 billion bridge loan with only half of the amount repaid would result in a $16.4 billion cost to taxpayers in lost sales, taxes and jobs, while a bankruptcy would cost $65.9 billion when costs for pensions, unemployment insurance, loan losses and professional and other fees are added.
