Throughout this past year, we fought against roll-backs to child labor laws, chemical reform protections, reproductive freedom, same-day voter registration, and the Maine Human Rights Act.

We sent you action alerts, and you sent thousands of messages to law-makers. Click on the title to read the original alert.

And the winner is (now, I know that most people start with number five, and count down to number one … and there’s a bunch of fan-fare and hoopla and suspense … but, I’m not going to do it that way).

ahem.

And the winner is…

1. beards?

February 23, 2011 – This alert was about this (now famous) quote by Governor LePage, “The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards.”

The Governor’s quote referred to a proposal to roll-back the chemical policy reform that Maine has been leading the nation with. Well, you said “not so fast, Governor.” You sent over 900 messages.

You helped to stop the roll-back.

2. Governor LePage Just signed the bill…

During the session, we fought hard to protect voting rights.  You sent almost 400 messages to legislators. The bill passed, and on June 21, 2011, Governor LePage signed a bill that would eliminate same-day voting rights in Maine. A group of Maine voters immediately gathered at the offices of the Maine Women’s Lobby to file an application to veto the bill. Throughout the summer, we all fought hard to protect voting rights in Maine.  And, on election day 2011, you stood proud with the rest of the Protect Maine Voting Rights Coalition to celebrate the successful people’s veto. The law that allows voters to register and vote on Election Day stands in Maine. Burn.

3. bathroom politics

The Maine Women’s Lobby has fought for civil rights for more than three decades. The victories – and critical protections – were hard won. During this past session, legislation was proposed that would undermine the Maine Human Rights Act and invalidate critical protections for transgender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. You sent almost 350 messages to the legislature asking them to defeat a proposal that would scale back the Maine Human Rights Act. The proposal was defeated. Oh Yeah.

4. don’t script me

We saw four bad anti-choice bills this past session. I mean big bad scary bills – the kind they pass in Texas (sorry about that to all my Texan friends). This particular piece was in response to a bill that would have required a woman to listen to a (biased) script before she could make choices about her own body. You sent over 320 messages to law-makers asking them to protect a woman’s choice of whether – and when – to have children. All four bills were defeated. We do things a little differently up here in Maine than they do in Texas (again, apologies).

5. What’s Next – Running with Scissors?

Now this one. wow. This was about the proposed roll-back to child labor laws. I know, huh?

The 1800′s called and they want their regulations back.

YOU sent 920 messages. You protected Maine laws that had existed for over one-hundred years. Mainers believe that for our youth, school is their job.

For more in the Child Labor law realm, you can read: the boss ate my homework, Is exploitation the new business friendly?, Jobz v. skool, and lots of others by visiting our online archive.

All said and done, this year alone YOU’VE sent over 3,000 messages to law-makers. GOOD JOB – and thank you. Subscribe right now.

Please contribute right now to help us continue this important work.

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Happy New Year,

Charlotte Warren
Associate Director

The Maine Women’s Policy Center is Planning Safe Cosmetics awareness events at campuses across the state, email Asheldon@mainewomen.org to get involved.

Campaign for Safe Cosmetics: MyFoxATLANTA.com

“LD 1129 is an anti-scientific, chemical industry wish list,” observed Mike Belliveau, Executive Director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center. “Industry lobbyists talk about this as a pruning of the Kid-Safe Products Act but what they’ve proposed is nothing short of a clearcut.”

Opponents identified 28 individual rollbacks in LD 1129 that would amount to a complete disabling of the law.  The most egregious of these impacts include the elimination of protection for the fetus and for teenagers, limiting action to only those products marketed specifically for young children, favoring industry-funded science over independent science, ignoring many chemicals already proven harmful to children, creating new and costly burdens for state experts, taking away the rights of Maine people to petition the government to take action, and surrendering Maine’s right to act independently from the federal government.

Opponents of LD 1129 included parents, scientists, physicians, nurses, business owners, and public health advocates.

Jim Wellehan, President of Lamey-Wellehan, stated, “As a Maine business, I can tell you that there is nothing more important than making sure our merchandise is safe for our customers.  The Kid-Safe Products Act supports us on two fronts: it helps us get good information about what’s in the products on our store shelves, and it helps drive down health care costs for all of us.  Let’s never forget that healthy families are the key to a healthy economy.  Weakening this important law doesn’t do a thing to help Maine businesses, or bring new business to Maine, but it would certainly take Maine’s economic recovery in the wrong direction.”

The Kid-Safe Products Act (KSPA) has been extremely popular among lawmakers and the public right from the beginning.  The law passed by a margin of 129-9 in the House and 35-0 in the Senate.  Of those who voted for the law in 2008, 74 are still in office (1 Independent, 32 Republicans and 41 Democrats).  In addition, a February 2011 poll showed 91% of Maine voters support the law.  Representative James Hamper, a Republican from Oxford was one of the nine who voted against KSPA in 2008 and is the sole sponsor of LD 1129.

Megan Rice, a mother of two from the town of China stated, “Friday’s vote on BPA shows that the Kid-Safe law is working exactly as you intended it.  The process was careful, methodical, and based on the best peer-reviewed science available today.  Why would you undermine Maine parents and take away the opportunities you’ve given us to protect our children from toxic chemicals?  I am appalled at LD 1129.  It simply makes no sense to put our kids at greater risk.”

Bettie Kettell, a nurse from Durham, spoke on behalf of the American Nurses Association and told the committee, “Exposure to toxic chemicals can lead to expensive chronic disease, including reproductive problems, developmental and learning disabilities, and cancer.  Exposure in the womb, during infancy, or in childhood can set the stage for a lifetime of health problems.  University of Maine research shows that just four childhood illnesses linked to chemical exposure result in at least $380 million in health-related costs.  This is a burden shared by every family and business in Maine.”

Efforts to dismantle the Kid-Safe Products Act started earlier in the year with LD 1, the Governor’s bill to eliminate many of Maine’s environmental regulations.  Because no Maine business testified against the Kid-Safe Products Act in 2008, the attacks were seen by many as the new administration’s attempt to carry out a wish list from the out-of-state chemical industry.

Maine is one of 18 states that have passed laws to protect children’s health from toxic chemicals in consumer products. After 3 years, progress under the Kid-Safe Products Act has been modest.  Just two priority chemicals have been named under the Kid-Safe Products Act in its first three years.  Only one specific use of a chemical has been proposed for phase out in favor of safer alternatives – the use of BPA in sippy cups and other reusable containers.

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Concerned about the attacks on the chemical industry on the Kid-Safe Product Act? Join us for the Alliance and a Clean and Healthy Maine Day at the State House! Thursday April 14th, 8:30 am – 1 pm, at the Augusta State House

RSVP here

We all have our morning routines. My daily regimen includes an assortment of personal care products, including shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, lotion, a little bit of makeup; about a dozen products a day, which is exactly the national average for women in the U.S. In the process, women like me are exposed to more than 160 chemicals (men about half that), most of which would be considered unnecessary but “safe,” however, many others are well known toxins, carcinogens and pollutants.

Typical ingredients include things like bacteria-killing nanosilvers; 1,4 Dioxane (known cancer causing substance found in 22 percent of personal care and children’s products); Mercury and cow placenta (icky for sure, and chock-filled with hormones that can spark premature breast development in toddler girls) — the kind of substances that would earn you serious prison time if you dumped them into a local stream.

Read the whole article here

1.) Paid Sick Days Campaign

We kicked off the year in full force with an exciting new campaign for a critical protection: paid sick days. While, unfortunately, the bill did not make it through the legislature this year, significant advances were made by way of increasing public understanding and dialogue of the policy and demonstrating public support for this workplace standard.

A highlight from the campaign was when we partnered with the Maine People’s Alliance and MomsRising.org to deliver a heap of fortune cookies with personalized messages in support of paid sick days to the legislature. Why? Because healthy workplaces are worth a fortune!

What’s next? We’re not giving up! Right now, more than 200,000 Maine workers lack even a single paid sick day from work. Thousands of others risk discipline or termination simply for using time they’ve already earned. Maine Women’s Lobby will continue to work with the Maine Working Family Coalition to advance legislation to support working Mainers, including paid sick days.

Read all about it here – for all of our blog posts from the campaign.

2.) Lilly Ledbetter in Maine

Right now, the wage gap is at 77 cents to the dollar – which is to say that for every full dollar a male earns, a woman earns, on average, 77 cents. The plaintiff in the employment discrimination case Lilly Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. and namesake for the 2008 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Paid Act, Lilly is one of the nation’s foremost advocates for closing the wage gap. We were incredibly fortunate to have Lilly come to Maine and deliver an inspiring speech on her long-fought battle for equal pay. In the midst of our campaign for paid sick days, her passion and story were particularly inspirational for our work.

Check out some great photos from the event here.

3.) Safe Cosmetics

Toxic chemicals in my shampoo? Oh my! This year, the Maine Women’s Lobby’s sister organization, the Maine Women’s Policy Center, vamped up organizing with young women and worked to support the formation of a student-run group, Women Against Toxic Cosmetics Harm (WATCH). This group of 20 passionate young women worked together to advocate for needed political reform of our broken chemical safety system. In their first six months of operation, they successfully launched three creative and successful press events, conducted campus and community-wide public education, initiated online actions, organized in-district visits, and placed a number of opinion pieces in both campus and local newspapers.

In 2011, we will continue this work by engaging with student leaders and working with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England to create a statewide network of young women advocating for chemical safety reform.

For press clips, and videos from this work, click here.

4.) Elena Kagan

On August 5, with a 63-37 vote, the United States Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And this fall, three women took their seats together on the bench for the first time in United States history. The Maine Women’s Lobby was there all along working to engage Mainers in the process and to advocate for Kagan’s confirmation. We convened a coalition in support of the effort, organized watch parties across the state, and met with our Senators’ staffers. We want to sincerely thank Senators Snowe and Collins and all of our activists out there for making sure that Elena Kagan was confirmed as the fourth woman to join the bench in the Court’s 221-year history.

Read more about the confirmation process here.

5.) She Decides

This fall, the Maine Women’s Lobby launched a new campaign to make sure that women’s economic concerns were front and center this election year. SheDecides is a nonpartisan campaign to demonstrate the importance of women – particularly unmarried women – in the elections. SheDecides is our pocketbook agenda, and it’s a roadmap for candidates who want to speak to the economic reality of women’s lives.

We asked candidates to share where they stand on the minimum wage, paid sick days, family friendly workplaces, paycheck fairness, and access to jobs and education. And, we took those messages to the campaign trail. After holding a kick-off event on Women’s Equality Day, women in bright green SheDecides t-shirts were visible at forums across the state and earned coverage on WMTW and in the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Phoenix. We matched these on-the-ground efforts with online action—our activists generated 500 e-mails to ask candidates where they stood on our pocketbook agenda. Then, the SheDecides team knocked on doors and shared these answers with women voters by sending a voter education mailing to more than 14,000 women statewide. Check out www.SheDecides.org to learn more.

And, that ain’t all! As we gear up for the start of the new legislative session next week, look out for the SheDecides team! We’ll be brushing off those green t-shirts and heading to the legislature to advocate for Maine women!

Researchers note a huge drop – from 50% down to 4% of jewelry containing lead.

Lead interrupts brain development, memory and learning in young children. Fortunately, California has taken action to reduce exposure. Maine’s Kids Safe Products Act is doing the same thing – the Maine BEP recently recommended eliminating the dangerous chemical BPA from children’s  products.

The safety of kids and all people — that’s how laws make a difference.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are you moved by this film to take political action? Click here to write a letter to your senator about the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010

Are harmful chemicals in your cosmetics getting you down?

Join the Maine Women’s Policy Center and Planned Parenthood of Northern New England for the screening of “The Story of Cosmetics” and learn from a panel of experts about what you can do to give the beauty industry a makeover.

Authored by Annie Leonard, The Story of Cosmetics explores health implications for consumers, workers, and the environment. Further, the film illustrates how we can move the industry away from hazardous chemicals and toward safer alternatives.

Can’t wait to check it out? Check out the movie teaser, and then join us next Monday, July 26, for a film showing, followed by a panel discussion with academics, parents, and young activists from Maine.

Monday, July 26, 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
The Salt Institute
561 Congress Street
Portland, ME 04101

Contact Anne at asheldon@mainewomen.org to RSVP.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want to learn more? The Maine Women’s Policy Center & Planned Parenthood of Northern New England will be co-hosting an event July 26th in Portland. Contact asheldon@mainewomen.org to RSVP.