Daily Archives: February 21, 2022

The Socialist Movement of Workers (MST) and the Union of Cane Workers (UTC) denounced that the increase in the minimum wage for workers in the sugar industry, announced by the government, will not benefit the majority of workers because they receive payments piecework by production and do not enjoy a formal employment relationship with a salary.

Most sugarcane workers, herdsmen, carters, and other functions within sugar agricultural work do not earn a salary per day but rather piecework payments, around 200 pesos per ton of cane cut. They do not benefit from the salary increase decreed by the government, they declared in a statement.

The representatives of these organizations demand that the payment per ton of cane cut be increased to at least RD$580, and have maintained a fight against semi-slavery, precariousness, and super-exploitation, for decent wages, freedom of association, pensions, access to health, housing dignity, and an eight-hour working day because currently in the sectorthe workdays run up to 14 hours.

According to the declaration of these organizations, the working class does not have representatives in the dialogues of businessmen, government, and union bureaucrats.

The union bureaucrats of the CNUS, CASC, and CNTD also represent business interests. That is why Abinader rewarded his leaders with privilege pensions of 75 thousand pesos. The CNUS, which in the past supported the PLD governments and Gonzalo Castillos candidacy, now fervently supports Abinader and even invited him to be a speaker at its Congress in December last year, they stated.

Increase

Last Tuesday, the President of the Republic, Luis Abinader, and the Minister of Labor, Luis Miguel de Camps, announced an unprecedented salary increase of 101.8% for agricultural workers and 97% for administrative workers in the sugar sector, retroactive to January 2022.

Continued here:

Organizations denounce majority of workers in sugar sector will not benefit from salary increase - Dominican Today

As the economy recovers from a global pandemic, many business owners are pointing to labor shortages caused by the Great Resignation as a source of frustration.

The term refers to the more than 33 million U.S. workers who have quit their jobs since the spring of 2021, largely due to low wages and burnout. The restaurant and service industry is experiencing one of the largest shockwaves to its workforce, adding just 108,000 jobs in January 2022, and remains 900,000 jobs short of where it was prior to the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But restaurant workers and their allies are offering a different perspective: This is not a Great Resignation, but rather a Great Rejection of low-wage work.

On Valentines Day, 2022, One Fair Wage a national coalition organized around the movement to increase wages for service workers announced it is embarking on a $25 million campaign to remove the subminimum tipped wage in 25 states by 2026, marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.

Typically Valentines Day is the highest-grossing day in the restaurant industry, but this year the restaurant industry is struggling, said Saru Jayamaran, President of One Fair Wage, during a virtual event. Not because of Covid-19 and the decline of business and sales, but because this is the worst staffing crisis in the history of this industry in the U.S. [] One million workers have left the industry, and of those who remain, 54 percent say they are leaving, and 80 percent say that the only thing that would make them stay or come back is a full, livable wage with tips on top.

According to Jayamaran, the breaking point came when pandemic conditions required restaurant workers to do so much more for so much less enforcing masks and Covid-19 vaccination requirements on the same people for whom they rely on for tips.

In 43 states and on the federal level, tipped workers are paid as little as $2.13 per hour in direct wages, with tips making up the balance of the federal minimum wage, which remains stagnant at $7.25 per hour. Ending the subminimum wage for tipped workers, recent analysis from the Center for American Progress suggests, would help alleviate poverty, sustainably grow the economy, and advance gender, racial, disability, and economic justice.

Ending the subminimum wage would also abolish a shameful relic of slavery. Tipping became prevalent in the United States after the Civil War, when restaurants and railway companies embraced the practice because it meant they didnt have to pay wages to recently freed slaves. The racial biases that created the practice of tipping are still prevalent in the industry today.

Although Black workers represent the majority of the tipped service industry, they are also the ones making the least. A survey by One Fair Wage found that prior to the pandemic, Black tipped workers income, including tips, was already substantially lower than their white counterparts earnings, with 60 percent of them reporting earning less than $15 per hour, compared to 43 percent of white workers. Since the pandemic, 88 percent of Black tipped workers, compared to just 68 percent of all workers surveyed, have seen their tips plunge by half or more.

Ending the subminimum wage would not just benefit workers, but employers as well.

Its not rocket science, said Russell Jackson, a supporter of One Fair Wage and the head chef and owner of Reverence NYC in Harlem. For us, we pay a living wage, we have a fair tip share, and we think about how we treat our staff. [] What we need is legislation with teeth that will help us to be consistent across the board.

Progress has already been made in Washington, D.C., where organizers recently gathered enough signatures to place an initiative to phase out the tipped wage back on the ballot. Similar legislation is making its way through the state houses in Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts, among others. If they are successful, they will join the seven states that have already eliminated the subminimum wage for tipped workers.

On the federal level, the House passed legislation in 2021 that would eliminate the subminimum wage and boost the federal minimum to $15 by 2025, but that bill has stalled in the Senate.

Its time for statesand the policymakers who represent themto follow the lead of millions of workers refusing to work for poverty wages and thousands of independent restaurants raising wages to recruit staff, and permanently raise wages and end subminimum wages once and for all, said Jayaraman. This is the only future for the service sector and the economy overall: wages must go up or there will be no future.

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Campaign Seeks to Abolish the Subminimum Wage in 25 States by 2026 - Truthout

Exploited and abused for generations by white colonial powers and manipulative economic structures, there is a growing feeling of solidarity within parts of the African continent, as exemplified by the #NoMore movement. Covid vaccine inequality and environmental injustice, together with recent events in Ethiopia have galvanized people.

Ideas of African unity and rage against former imperial forces are nothing new; the chain of suppression and exploitation of African nations is long, running from slavery and colonialism (including colonial extraction) to wealth and climate inequality, racial capitalism and now Covid vaccine apartheid.

Despite the fact that many would say Africa was united long before Europe family to tribe, tribe to nation, nation to continent, with 54 countries spread over a vast area establishing a defined Union of Africa seems unlikely, if not impossible. Standing in solidarity, rejecting western intervention, challenging the exploitative status quo and reductive notions of development based on a defunct western model is not; indeed, if African nations are to prosper and create vibrant economies allowing its burgeoning young population to fulfil their enormous potential, they must.

Poverty amidst abundance of resources

Blessed with rich environments and vast natural resources, Sub-Saharan Africa should certainly not be poor. But for huge numbers of people across the continent grinding poverty and hardship are the norm.

According to the World Bank report Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa, while those living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 a day) has fallen in the last twenty years, the number of poor people [living on $5 a day or less]has increased from 278 million in 1990 to over 413 million Over 80% of those living in stifling poverty are found in rural areas where education and health care are scarce.

Natural resources dominate many African economies and, along with agriculture, are central to the livelihoods of the poor rural majority. African natural resources that are owned by multi-national mining companies, dug out of the ground by grossly underpaid local workers, are exported for production in goods that are sold in the rich developed nations. This has been the role of Sub-Saharan Africa for generations, and is fundamental to the prosperity of advanced countries: they need the raw materials and they need them to be dirt cheap.

The handful of conglomerates that dominate, collude in enabling monopoly buying structures. Contracts agreed at national levels are administered by middle-men, often corrupt, in the pockets of the corporation; the local workforce have little choice but to accept whatever terms of employment are offered; poverty entraps and silences rebellion.

It is a crippling model of suppression and exploitation; a form of wage slavery that holds not just the workers in its suffocating grip, but the nation and continent. It is one of the main reasons African nations that are overly dependent on raw materials, whether cotton or oil, coffee, diamonds or Cobalt, are poor. Poverty is political, the result of short-term political and economic decisions taken in The West by duplicitous corporate-controlled governments.

The other reasons that ensure Africa remains poor and dependent are historical and economic: Colonization, which persists as economic and cultural imperialism, together with a certain mind-set of superiority/inferiority. A mind-set that maintains consciously or unconsciously that some people (black, brown) are worth less than others and, as Covid vaccine inequities demonstrate, can be sacrificed. The economic structures, global institutions and economic ideologies championed by abusive self-centered governments and promoted in the business schools around the world are all designed to ensure Africa remains poor: Imperialism never ended, it just changed form.

When colonial powers withdrew from the global south they needed new ways of maintaining the enslavement of Africa and Africans. Three interrelated weapons where used to create dependency: Aid, debt and the toxic Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the overarching umbrella of control.

In the 1980s SAPs where introduced; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) gave highly conditional loan packages to African nations in order to aid their development; in fact the loans/SAPs, which destroyed African economies and agriculture, were simply forms of debt entrapment. Once a country is indebted it becomes easy to control. SAPs hollowed out national economies and incorporated Africa into the global political economic system, dominated by the US. Its economic warfare: the rich countries set up these unaccountable institutions and systems to control the poor nations.

The IMF, WB, World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), were given enormous political influence/control of African governments and economies. Funding for public services (e.g. education and health care) was slashed to repay loans; countries were forced to liberalize their economies, and privatize, selling off key areas like utilities to western or western-backed companies.

In his book Confessions Of An Economic Hitman, John Perkins designates this process of economic terrorism as Predatory Capitalism: he describes how in an earlier period, during the 1950s the IMF, CIA and US State Department set up a faceless bank to lend money to African countries that were producing raw materials; any national President that refused the loan was at risk of being handed over to the Jackals, as Perkins describes the CIA thugs that accompanied him.

At independence, many African countries were self-sufficient in food production and were in fact net exporters of food; SAPs and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, changed all that. Countries were forced to withdraw State subsidies to agriculture (while farmers in Europe and the US receive huge subsidies); farmers suffered, food prices increased, food insecurity was created, dependency on aid and Western benefactors ensured and with it control by the US and her puppets, of Africa, its direction and development, or, as these paranoid selfish states would have it, its non-development.

Development as Westernisation

Within the narrow socio-economic paradigm that dominates global affairs, development and perpetual economic growth are regarded as all important. Dominated by quarterly national GDP figures, it is a reductive model designed by donor nations to serve not the people of Africa or Asia, but western corporations and the unjust, defunct Ideology of Greed, so beloved.

The very idea of development, has become synonymous with Westernization, including the way of life, the values, behavior and attitudes of the rich, successful nations of The West: a hollow, deeply materialistic way of life rooted in division, selfishness and conformity that has poisoned and vandalized the natural environment, created unhealthy, unequal societies of anxious suppressed human beings.

In order to develop economists maintain Africa must industrialise and manufacture no country has ever developed without manufacturing. All this is true, and some African nations, like Ethiopia, which has a vibrant leather industry, are beginning to do just this. But this is only true within the suffocating boundaries of the existing model of extreme capitalism based on unsustainable consumerism.

There must be another way; perhaps as we sit at this transitional time, not just for Africa, but for the world as a whole, the opportunity presents itself to re-design the socio-economic structures, reimagine civilization, and in so doing save the planet. And perhaps Africa, unburdened, energised and dynamic can play a leading role; working with the West, but rejecting the model of conformity and exploitation, the conditionality of support.

The existing development paradigm sits within the overarching political-economic system, a system of global monopolies, centralized control, massive inequality, grinding poverty, financial insecurity and stress. Not only should this model of development be rejected by Africa, and it would be were it not for the Noose of Debt, and the fact that it is presented as the one and only show in town, but the poisonous spring from which it flows Market Fundamentalism as some call it must also be radically dismantled.

It may appear impossible to challenge, but there are alternatives to the current unjust political-economic system. And as the environmental and social impact of the Neo-Liberal experiment becomes more apparent, as well as the economic pain of the majority, more and more people around the world, especially within Africa, where the environmental emergency has inspired powerful movements of activism, recognize the urgent need to reject this way of organizing life and are demanding change.

Western powers (dried-up imperial forces) do not want Africa and Africans to flourish and become strong, this is clear to all. Africas destiny must rest in the hands of Africans, in particular young Africans (the median age in Africa is around 20, Europe is a greying 43, US a complacent 39), who are increasingly standing up, organizing, particularly in regard to the environment, and calling for change.

But what should that change look like? Not a shadow of Western nations, but a creative evolving movement of development in which the people have a voice; social and environmental responsibility are championed and lasting human happiness sit at its core. Unity is essential, African unity is essential; together, not necessarily under some defined structure, but coordinated cooperation and support through the medium of the African Union and civil society.

The first and most basic step towards establishing a less brutal, more just system would be the equitable distribution of the resources of the world the water, land and food; the machinery needed to build infrastructure; the skills, knowledge and expertise.

The world is one: We are brothers and sisters of one humanity. And if we are collectively, within Africa and the world, to establish An Alternative Way, this basic fact needs to form the foundation and provide the touchstone of new systems and modes of living. Only then will we begin to build a global society in which the values of unity, compassion, tolerance and sharing, which are found in tribal societies all over Africa, may flourish.

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The keep Africa poor and dependent project - NationofChange

Nesrine Malik (Scared to be woke? Its time for progressives to take a stand in the culture wars, 21 February) sets out the bemusing battlefield surrounding the concept of being woke and how it has been weaponised by the right wing of Conservative repression. Part of the issue is clearly the way different groups and factions define the meaning of woke. She correctly deduces that Labour needs to own it.

We have already been pointed in the necessary direction by a man speaking in the saddest of situations. Dave Merritt, the father of the young lawyer Jack Merritt, who was killed in the London Bridge terror attack in 2019, gave a moving speech after his sons inquest. He described how proud his son would have been to be called woke. He defined its meaning very simply as the opposite of ignorant.Ric CareySouthsea, Hampshire

Nesrine Malik expresses the problem brilliantly. But Im so angry I couldnt read her piece all in one go. Angry because its impossible to imagine anyone on Labours current frontbench saying anything a tenth as powerful, and angry that I, and many thousands of other members, were gulled into believing that Keir Starmer had a fairly radical and progressive agenda. He must have known perfectly well that he would never get elected if we knew then that he would align himself so completely, whether through conviction or tactics, with Labours right wing.Richard BarnesWindermere, Cumbria

The weaknesses of the west are not the result of a painful woke psychodrama, as the Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden claims (Report, 14 February). His slur is simply another distraction for those who are angry that the high-skilled, high-wage jobs promised by the neoliberals never materialised. We are among the largest economies in the world, yet 30% of children live in poverty and we have food banks. Years of austerity are now being followed by a catastrophic cost-of-living crisis. None of that was caused by woke ideas.

Instead, the west has been divided by politicians playing fast and loose with democracy, undermining the validity of elections, refusing to take responsibility for their actions and widening the divisions between people through racist tropes. Politicians have weakened European institutions, either by undermining Nato (as Donald Trump did) or Europe itself (as the populists have done).

The woke are not undermining the west. They are seeking to ensure that all are represented and have a place in society.

Decolonising the curriculum is about telling a more complete picture, ensuring that everyone sees themselves reflected in a classroom and that we do not hide from the past. Spoiler alert: the empire was brutal, cruel and exploitative. It involved slavery, murder and the stealing of land and resources from other people. Perhaps understanding the past and ensuring all are represented will bring greater unity rather than the divisions Dowden claims.Prof Andrew MoranSaffron Walden, Essex

Reading Marina Hyde (You cant erase history. But if you lived on Prince Andrew Way, you might have a go, 18 February), I was reminded to check whether my Tory MP had answered my fourth request to explain what woke means (apart from not being asleep). Again, no explanation. I assume that even Tory central office doesnt know.Rosemary GillSalisbury, Wiltshire

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We must wake up to the danger of rightwing woke wars - The Guardian

The Gangs All Back

After two-plus years of globetrotting shows, short films, video games and social media hijinks, the rebellion against fashion week appears to be over. The Milan Fashion Week schedule is packed, with Fendi, Prada, Versace and other mainstays joined by Bottega Veneta, Gucci and a handful of other holdouts that used the pandemics disruption to experiment with alternative forms to the conventional fashion show. Even Armani, which cancelled its January mens and couture week shows during the Omicron surge, is returning to Milan this week.

On paper, then, the schedule is back to its former glory. Will the reception be different though? The pandemic accelerated the transition of fashion week from an industry event to a consumer-facing one. Brands care even more about how a show pops on social media than they did before. The shows that produce a viral moment by casting movie stars as models or conceiving a particularly inventive set are the most successful, sometimes independent of the quality of the clothes themselves. As Diesels Glenn Martens put it to BoFs Tim Blanks last summer, the point of physical shows is to bring a bit of fashion drama.

The Bottom Line: In New York and London, the narrative at fashion week tends to involve plenty of handwringing about the industrys future. Not so in Milan, where the biggest brands are riding a collective hot streak. The most-anticipated shows are all about building momentum for another year of record sales, whether its Martens first Diesel show at Milan Fashion Week, Guccis next reinvention, the next chapter in Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons partnership or Matthieu Blazys debut at Bottega.

Farfetchs Future

Luxury sales are booming, but unfortunately for Farfetch, too many shoppers are opting to buy their Bottega bags and Saint Laurent boots in person. The marketplaces third-quarter results missed expectations, and the company needs a big holiday to prove it has retained all those new customers who started shopping online during the pandemic. Investors are sceptical: Farfetch shares are down more than 50 percent this year, and are closing in on lows not seen since spring 2020. Shopifys recent earnings miss is ominous for other e-commerce platforms, though Mytheresas solid results this past week offer some hope luxury may be at least partially exempt from wider shopping trends.

The Bottom Line: Farfetch is never one to sit still and let itself be buffeted by market forces. It said in January it was acquiring Violet Grey, a deal meant to kickstart a major push into the beauty category. But the real question is over the status of talks with Richemont to take a stake in Net-a-Porter, which would mark a fundamental shift in the luxury e-commerce landscape.

Responsible Supply Chains

While the pandemic shone a spotlight on bad labour practices in fashions supply chain, two years on not much has changed. Thereve been reports of record wage theft, worsening working conditions and mounting risks of modern slavery. At the same time, governments are playing a bigger role in policing supply chains, whether its the US ban on importing goods from Chinas Xinjiang region or pending legislation in New York, putting a greater spotlight on fashion brands manufacturing practices. What fashion can do about those issues will be in focus this week at the OECDs annual forum on responsible supply chains. The digital event will bring together members of government, business, trade unions and civil society to share learnings and discuss best practices.

The Bottom Line: Regulators are demanding big brands take more responsibility for labour rights abuses in their supply chain and the topic of due diligence is only likely to keep moving up companies agendas.

Sarah Kent contributed to this item.

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Milan Fashion Week Is Back to Its Pre-Pandemic Glory. Whats Changed? - The Business of Fashion