Week 13 Blog Post

 This week in school is very exciting as we are nearing the end of the semester. This year has been quite rigorous for me considering the course load that I have taken on, and I am excited to be able to wrap things up and get some rest in this summer before the next school year begins in the Fall of 2022. Everyone has been putting in a lot of work and effort to do their best, and I hope that we can all finish out strong.

This week in our journalism class, we began brainstorming for our second to the last unit assignment of the semester. This assignment is going to be an op/ed piece written by us. It was interesting to see everyone’s different ideas in our forum post. It was also cool to see some overlapping ideas or ideas that connected to each other. I know that I personally had some overlapping ideas with other students and I thought that it was neat to see us on the same brainwave and be concerned about similar topics. I think that everyone is going to be able to produce something interesting and unique for this assignment and I am excited to see what will be produced. For my own brainstorming portion, I came up with a few ideas that I thought could make a strong story and that I had a strong opinion on, as well as that I think other people would be interested in reading. After thinking more through all of my ideas, I decided that I wanted to go with my idea of writing an op/ed piece on the issues with the labor work force in Hawaii. Employers of businesses here are not legally required to give their employees a break, whether that is a quick ten minute rest break or a nice longer 30 minute lunch break. Hawaii is the only state in America that does not require workers to have this break. I think that this is super bizarre and unacceptable, especially with the amount of workers here that have labor intensive jobs and are out working under the hot sun. As a worker myself, the effects of not receiving a break on the job have been made very real and clear to me and definitely have taken a toll on my health. I have worked a number of different jobs here, and not one has given me a break while on the job. I have discussed this with other friends of mine who work here on the islands, and they have expressed the same concerns and frustrations to me. My last unit assignment touched on this issue a little, as I mentioned my friend who works on the tour boats here. They too are not allowed a break, to sit down, eat, or drink water while on a shift, even though the job can be incredibly labor intensive at times. I think that it will be good to write my op/ed piece on this and shed some more light on the unfair rules in the workplace.