Category Archives: Wage Slavery

At least 33 companies unwittingly paid an organised criminal gang that placed hundreds of Romanian victims onto construction sites.

A report by the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner revealed that a criminal gang placed up to 500 victims on building sites in London and the South East between 2009 and 2018.

The analysis was based on interviews across the supply chain and relied on an investigation by the Metropolitan Police, whose investigators said that the number of businesses uncovered was only a fraction of the total.

The companies that paid into the bank accounts of the Lupus gang included contractors, agencies and payroll umbrella firms. The cumulative transactions for each business ranged from 100s to 100,000s.

It is estimated that between 300 and 500 victims were placed on construction and demolition sites during the 10-year period. The gang is thought to have made about 2.4m from the slave-labour ring, while their victims received as little as 18 per day and were forced to live in cockroach and rat-infested properties owned or managed by the criminal network.

The organised criminal gang found various ways to skirt around security on construction sites. The victims were usually placed in roles such as cleaning or general labour jobs, since these were less scrutinised than skilled trades. However, the gang also worked in hand with a corrupt skills-testing facility, which helped them to get hold of CSCS cards which provide proof that individuals working on construction sites have the appropriate training fraudulently in order to place slave-labour victims in skilled roles.

The police also found that fake health and safety accreditation and qualifications were submitted and accepted by construction employers. Often, this meant that a worker was placed in a dangerous job without being trained to do it.

The flexibility of labour contracts was also misused, by which a replacement worker was sent to a job, and workers were therefore easily moved around.

Of the 33 firms that were identified, one was a subcontractor that learned that 12 workers were potential victims, but continued to keep them on site in order to protect them from the gang and assist the police.

The construction director also moved all of the victims onto one large site and reduced their workload, since the workers were frail and living in inhuman situations, without proper facilities and food. The contractor also introduced a pilot free-food scheme on a few sites, as a way to feed the workers. Once the investigation was complete, it was found that the members of the gang had themselves joined the company as self-employed workers in order to familiarise themselves with the system.

The construction director said it was very hard to spot the signs of modern slavery. Our advice to other organisations is: ask awkward questions. Make sure people are who you think they are. This is a bigger problem than the industry realises.

The anti-slavery report also warns that, given the shortage of labour in construction, there is a huge risk of modern slavery along the supply chain. There are concerns that, when under pressure, businesses could ignore the usual protocols and processes for bringing workers on site, it adds. The risk has worsened during the pandemic and amid the labour shortages that have been accentuated by workers leaving the UK following Brexit.

Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner Dame Sara Thornton, whose office published the report, said: "While the sector is striving to meet its sustainability and carbon targets, it faces particular challenges in the ethical management of labour. Operation Cardinas is a harrowing reminder that no organisation can afford to be complacent, and that every worker has a role to play in spotting the signs.

She also called on the government to make leadership-level changes by creating a single enforcement body that brings together the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and HMRCs National Minimum Wage team.

The commissioners office declined to reveal the names of the 33 identified firms.

Three members of a Romanian family,the Lupus, who were involved in the gang were jailed for 10 years; six others people from the gang are awaiting sentencing in a Romanian court.

Construction News has previously gone undercover with a BBC team to report on the ease of acquiring slave labour in the UK.

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Dozens of firms 'unwittingly' paid for slave labour in London and South East - Construction News

Oren M. Levin-Waldman is faculty member in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark, and Socioeconomic Research Scholar at Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity Research. Learn more at the professors Website: https://www.econlabor.com/. Direct email to olevinwaldman@gmail.com

Listen to SocioEconomic Research Prof. Oren M. Levin-Waldmans discussion of his most recent essay Polarization in the U.S.: A Tale of Two Economies.Listen to this broadcast Live or On Demand via the following hyperlink http://tobtr.com/s/12094687 this Wednesday, May 4, 2022. He can be heard every second Wednesday morning from 10-11am ET on the Westchester On the Level broadcast. Please note that the hyperlink changes every second week and is specific to the essay discussed. Listeners are welcome to share their inquiry with respect to the topic of the subject discussed. The call-in number to the broadcast is 1-347-205-9201. When calling, whether asking a question or sharing your perspective, you will be asked to reveal for first name so that you may be addressed respectfully.

NEWARK, NJ May 3, 2022 It has been commonplace to assume that the increased polarization in the nation is ideological, and on a certain level it is. But the polarization mostly results from what can be called a tale of two economies. Blue state economies are not the same as red state economies, and yet, policymakers, the chattering class, and other elites, who are primarily in blue states have little understanding of these differences. Because of this lack of understanding there is a deep divide.

Red states take policy proposals from these elites as attempts to tell them what to do. Worse, these proposals are presented as what is good for them. As an example, in red states where there is much more mining activity than in blue states, green energy proposals that assume the elimination of fossil fuels simply dont go over too well. The imperative for green energy just isnt that strong in red states. Moreover, for workers in the mining industry, they have good paying jobs, and the idea of making solar panels earning considerably less is not that appealing. And yet, these may be good jobs for blue state economies.

Red state economies still have remnants of what many blue state economies used to have, i.e. manufacturing bases. While the consequences of globalization are everywhere, they are more pronounced in blue state economies. In blue state economies there are more skilled and well paid workers at the top of the distribution and more poorly skilled and poorly paid workers at the bottom. In red state economies, there is less dispersion between the top and the bottom, and more in the middle. Which is to say, red state economies still have a middle class that blue state economies no longer appear to have.

On the contrary, blue state economies have over the last four decades seen a dwindling of the middle class. In blue states there is greater income inequality than in red states. In red states there is more of a middle class, and particularly a blue-collar middle class. In blue states, there are more people with at least college, graduate and/or professional degrees at the top, and more people with less than a high school education at the bottom. In red states there are more high school graduates and people with associates degrees.

Already we can see that more educated professionals/managers who are members of the elite live in blue states, and in many cases they have what they believe are answers to the nations problems. But their answers to problems which they may assume to be the same in red states are out of touch with the nature of red states.

Those in blue states typically believe that the answer to rising income inequality is higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for programs that will be of benefit to the poor. Clearly there are poor people in red states, but they may not be the dependent poor to the degree that they are in blue states; rather they are the working poor who could benefit tremendously from wage increases in an economy not attempting to stifle growth.

Because the dispersion between the top and bottom is not that great in red states, those in red states dont see the same need for redistributive policies as those in blue states may. In fact, because the wealthy arent concentrated in red states, they may not see greater taxation on the wealthy as a help to anybody. Instead, they see such statements as gimmicks for greater taxation that will only fall on the shoulders of the middle class.

If red state economies are perceived as providing greater opportunities, especially for skilled blue-collar workers, ordinary workers may not see the need for the same level of public spending that those in blue states see the need for. To the extent that those in red states favor smaller government it may have more to do with the nature of their respective economies than with ideology. In fact, it may be fair to say that it is ultimately economics that drives ideology.

At the same time, there may be a real anxiety among those in red states that may not be found in blue states. That is, workers are fearful that it is only a matter of time until their economies go the way of blue state economies. This can truly drive their politics. Politicians who talk about ways to boost wages and attract industries, or even bring back manufacturing, are more likely to gain traction than those who simply talk about more public spending.

Differences between blue states and red states have very little to do with liberal vs. conservative or Democrat v. Republican, but are a tale of two economies. By not understanding these economic differences as the source of polarization in the U.S., we greatly miss the point. It is true that one is more likely to find a commitment to woke politics in blue states than in red states, but woke politics is nothing more than a diversion from the economic problems that plague the nation.

Still, by not recognizing the relationship between economics and politics, and even political ideology, we only exacerbate the polarization. So deep is the polarization that one can conceivably see the country splitting into two separate nations driven by their own politics. One might recall that as much as the American Civil War was driven by slavery and whether it would be allowed to continue in newly admitted states to the union, it too was fundamentally about two very different economies.

The southern economy was an agrarian plantation economy very similar to the feudalistic order in old Europe. The northern economy was a commercial one at the beginning of an industrial revolution requiring wage labor. From the Norths perspective, a national industrial economy required wage labor and for that reason slavery had to be ended. For a plantation economy, wage labor would have been too expensive.

Obviously there are differences, but the nation finds itself in a similar position. Red state economies have not been ravaged by globalism to quite the same extent as blue state economies. The policies promoted by those in blue states are not seen as marks of progress. From the perspective of the red states, the elites of blue states are viewed as attempting to hasten the process of Schumpeters creative destruction. Although the model is often hailed as progress in capitalist markets because the old and obsolete are replaced by the new and technologically advanced, it also leaves much destruction in its wake, which is typically borne by ordinary workers.

It is only when the elites can begin to address the needs of ordinary workers that there might be a chance to finally end the polarization. But to date, the elites have only dismissed ordinary workers as nothing but deplorables.

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Oren M. Levin-Waldman, Ph.D

https://www.econlabor.com/

(914) 629-6351

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Dr. Oren M. Levin-Waldman is the Author of the following published books.

Restoring the Middle Class Through Wage Policy: Arguments for a Middle Class

Understanding Public Policy in the United States.

The Minimum Wage: A Reference Handbook

Wage Policy, Income Distribution and Democratic Theory

The Case of the Minimum Wage: Competing Policy Models

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Oren M. Levin-Waldman, Ph.D

(914) 629-6351

See the original post here:

Polarization in the U.S.: A Tale of Two Economies By Oren M. Levin-Waldman - Yonkers Tribune.

Socialist Equality Party (SEP) campaigners are finding widespread concern about the soaring cost of living, unaffordable housing and unsafe working conditions, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence and the danger of world war. The popular sentiments are at odds with the right-wing campaigns for the May 21 election being run by Labor, the Liberal-Nationals and all the other parliamentary parties.

In the north-eastern state of Queensland, the SEP is standing in the Senate. Its candidates are Mike Head, a longstanding leader of the party and contributor to the WSWS, along with John Davis, who plays a prominent role in the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, the SEPs youth movement.

Over recent days, the SEP has campaigned near Inala in Brisbanes western suburbs.

Together with surrounding areas, Inala has high levels of unemployment and increasingly unaffordable private rental housing. It is home to a diverse working-class population, including indigenous people, Pacific islanders and immigrants from throughout Asia and the Middle East.

It is also an industrial area, featuring an Australian Post distribution centre, supermarket warehouses, a Volvo truck plant and a Primo meat facility.

The SEP is focussing its election campaign in such working-class communities, which are being severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the soaring cost of living.

Asked for her thoughts on the election, Shannon, a young indigenous worker, told Head: Im worried. Im pretty appalled at the pissing contest between Labor and Liberal as to who can be more evil, particularly around issues with refugees.

I really want to see the prison system and the police system abolished because there is too much police brutality. There are too many deaths in custody. Nothings being done about it, and that needs to be a priority, and Im not seeing that as a priority from any of the parties.

Im a proud indigenous woman and I see the black deaths in custody as appalling and I want to see something done about that. Also the working class seems to be forgotten a lot of the time. We still have issues of homelessness and things like that. We have enough houses. There is enough housing. In my hometown there are so many houses empty or Airbnb.

Things like Airbnb have made it really hard for people to access housing. None of the parties are looking at housing affordability. They say they are, but Im yet to see any action, so that is disappointing for me. House prices, rents are just going up and up, and wages are not going up at the same rate. So housing instability is getting worse and worse, particularly since the pandemic hit.

Speaking about the rising cost of food, Shannon said: When you look at remote Aboriginal communities, its $6 for a can of tuna. Its an absolute crime. Its appalling that they put the prices up, just because they can, because theres nowhere else for those people to go to buy food.

Its just getting worse and worse. We are seeing more and more people living in poverty, and living with a lot of food instability and housing instability.

Shannon denounced government policy on the COVID-19 pandemic. Were forgetting immuno-compromised people, people with disabilities, the elderly, and poorer people who cant access medical assistance. Our government has forgotten vulnerable people in the name of getting travel and tourism back up and running.

My mums a teacher and they have 400 kids away in one week at her school because of COVID. Shes got to go to work every single day and be exposed and shes really worried. Shes 60 now and pretty healthy but her parents are quite elderly so shes always conscious about going to visit them in case she transmits COVID to them. So people are unable to visit their families, and things like that because our government is not taking things seriously. To have 400 kids away out of a school of about 3,000 is pretty hectic.

Shannon was disgusted with the Labor Party. Theres always been that idea that Labor is the lesser of two evils but were seeing, particularly in the lead-up to this election, that Labor is just as dismissive of human rights, like with refugees. I saw a tweet from the Labor Party saying they will send refugees back, theyre all for detaining people and sending people back.

We have enough room in this country to grant asylum to every single person seeking it. We have the resources, we have the money and we have the space. Most of the elders I speak to in the Aboriginal community are all for letting refugees come here, and call Australia home, but theyre not being listened to either.

Ive seen as well that Labor supports Israel. We need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, especially at this time when things are happening there, and we are not seeing that from Labor.

My understanding is that the Australian government is obsessed with how they are viewed by the United States, and I feel that we dont really need their support. We dont need to be their bitch or deputy sheriff.

Andrew, a scaffolder and construction worker, spoke about the dangerous conditions that he and other workers are subjected to. Im working class and I want to make sure that when I go on a worksite Work Health and Safety is put in place so I can do my job and come home safe.

The way it is now, I see nothing being done about it. Like you said, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. We are there slaving our backsides off every day. Theyre making bucket loads of money and were getting minimum wage. How is that fair?

Andrew said he had suffered a serious work injury. I was scaffolding on a job site and I wasnt issued a harness for the morning. I said to the boss I wouldnt go up to the two-storey level until I got my harness, and he said, suck it up and get up there. It was a wet day and five minutes later I slipped off and did my back in. I've been off work for three and a half months and I cant get back until at least the end of the year, which is another six to eight months.

I should have said no, and quit, but you have to pay your bills. As you said, take the money out of the hands of the wealthy. What are they going to do? What would they have to stand on? Its like wage slavery. The minimum wage is $22 an hour and they can make thousands a day. Come on, how is that fair?

Asked about what Labor and the Coalition were saying in the election campaign, Andrew said with disgust: I dont listen to them any more. Its all about money. Business should not be just about money. What about your employees? What about your duty of care? Take the money out of it! Think about us. I am a family man. I have two young kids. I couldnt even do anything for them for two or three months, due to my back.

Asked about the trade unions, Andrew commented: The unions are just a cover-up now I think. They put in claims and all sorts of things but theyre not going to do anything. Its been years since weve heard anything back from them. As long as they have money in their pockets, they dont care.

Contact the SEP:Phone:(02) 8218 3222Email:sep@sep.org.auFacebook:SocialistEqualityPartyAustraliaTwitter:@SEP_AustraliaInstagram:socialistequalityparty_auTikTok:@SEP_Australia

Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Suite 906, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

The working class must have a political voice, which the Australian ruling class is seeking to stifle with this legislation.

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SEP (Australia) election campaigners find widespread opposition to inequality and cost of living crisis in Queensland - WSWS

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Ever since Standard Oil founder Henry Flagler arrived on its shores at the height of the Gilded Age andtransformed the landscape with quasi-slave labor, the southeast Florida island of Palm Beach has been a magnet for the US ruling class, the winter playground of presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, Trump), moguls (David Koch, Este Lauder, Ronald Perelman), and some particularly noxious financiers (Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein).

But on a hot Saturday afternoon in early April, a different kind of crowd filled the towns sunny streets. The farm-labor advocacy group Coalition of Immokalee Workers, representing tomato pickers, had convened several hundred farmworkers and activists for a march. Holding red tomato-shaped signs that said Respeto and Dignidad, they made their way past the opulent boutiques and hulking resorts, chanting, Get up, get down, fair food has come to town. The pickers normally toil two hours inland from Palm Beach, in fields that produce two-thirds of the countrys winter tomatoes. On this day, they had traveled to the coast to target one of the islands reigning masters of the universe: billionaire Nelson Peltz.

If youve heard of Peltz, its likely because he made tabloid headlines recently for the wedding of his daughter Nicola to Brooklyn Beckham, son of soccer legend David Beckham and Victoria Posh Spice Beckham, at Peltzs $94.9 million Palm Beach mansion. Peltz, a Trump supporter worth $1.6 billion, has drawn the ire of the CIW because he chairs the board of Wendys; the hedge fund he co-founded, Trian Partners, holds an 11.5 percent stake in the square-burger giant. (Several past and current Trian execs also serve on Wendys 11-person board, including Peltzs son, Matthew.)

Wendys is an outlier among the United States five biggest fast-food companies: Its the only one that has refused to sign on to CIWs Fair Food Program, a worker-driven initiative that ensures pickers get a bonus on top of their poverty wages and that their farm employers abide by a code of conduct. (Wendys said in an emailed statement that it wont join the program because it sources its tomatoes from greenhouses and has its own code of conduct.)

The Fair Food Program, launched by the CIW in 2011, has been an essential safeguard in a state that has all but banished unions. On top of its commitment to fair wages, the program employs third-party monitoring to prevent abuses in the field, which can include sexual harassment, stolen wages, denial of breaks, and even outright slavery. Since 2016, the CIW has urged consumers to boycott Wendys until it joins. While that effort has yet to bear fruitWendys officials and Peltzs team have refused to even meet with the groupthe same strategy has succeeded in pushing other big tomato buyers to commit. In 2005, Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) became the first to sign. Since then, Subway, McDonalds, Chipotle, and Burger King have all joined, in some cases after protracted battles, as have retailers Trader Joes, Walmart, and Whole Foods.

Workers from other industries are taking note of the CIWs successes. Joining the tomato pickers, college-student activists, and aging lefties at the Palm Beach protest were six employees of the meat giant Tyson. These workers made the trek from Springdale, Arkansas, as members of Venceremos, a poultry workers-rights group, to learn firsthand how their counterparts in Immokalee have organized to improve their lives. In isolated, largely white rural communities, you feel so powerless, says Magaly Licolli, the groups co-founder and director. Seeing what the coalition has accomplished gives us back a sense of hope.

Building worker power in Floridas tomato field required a long and ongoing struggle. Draconian right to work laws effectively make traditional union organizing impossible throughout the South. Back in the 1990s, after years of fruitless organizing to push the Immokalee areas local land barons to raise wages and improve conditions for tomato workers, the CIW decided on a different tactic: It would take on the buyers, the public-facing fast-food chains that use tomatoes to garnish burgers and tacos. While working with the US Department of Justice to root out cases of outright slavery in the fields, the group formed alliances with college-student activists to launch boycotts of popular brands, cajoling them to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes, to be deposited into a fund that would ultimately be delivered to farmworkers as a bonus. By stirring up enough ruckus, they also pressured the fast-food companies to agree to only buy from growers who submit to a worker-led code of conduct mandating safe conditions and freedom from harassment.

A day before the rally Palm Beach, I stopped by the CIWs community center in Immokalee, a hardscrabble town of 24,000 in the heart of southern Florida farm country. The coalitions HQ is a modest baby-blue structure just across the road from where repurposed school buses pick up workers to transport them to tomato fields. The building buzzed with activity as CIW members prepared for the rally: painting signs, arranging T-shirts and other worker-justice swag, and rehearsing a planned street theater performance.

Amid the din in a shady corner of the back patio, I caught up with Venceremos Licolli. Before helping launch the group in 2019, she had been director of the Northwest Arkansas Workers Justice Center for several years. When she started at the center, the group was struggling to raise awareness about the problems plaguing meatpacking work; things like ever-faster-moving kill lines, which subject workers to high rates of repetitive-stress injuries; and a rising use of caustic chemicals for sterilizing chicken meat, which can lead to respiratory issues.

Magaly Licolli

Tom Philpott

Encouraged by allies in the NGO world like Oxfam, NAWJC and other poultry worker centers across the country began pressuring government agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Department of Agriculture to ramp up regulation through letter-writing campaigns and reports. In 2016, the strategy succeeded in pushing the Obama administration to scrap a long-brewing plan to let poultry companies dramatically speed up their kill lines.

But then the Trump administration quickly reversed Obamas move. The setback revealed the workers complete lack of power in the political system. After the defeat, we felt lost, she said. The workers didnt trust any of the mechanismsOSHA, the USDA, the Department of Laborthat are supposed to help them.

Then she heard about how the Coalition of Immokalee Workers was making real progress in improving pay and conditions, even as workers in her industry seemed stuck. In 2018, she and several poultry workers traveled to Immokalee to see the Fair Food Program in action. Her group tagged along with CIW representatives who were conducting a field workshop to inform tomato pickers of their rights, and remind them to report any infractions of Fair Food Program rules by their employers. And this one farm workerright in front of his supervisorstarted telling the Coalition people, this supervisor is rude to us,' Licolli said. The worker felt protected enough to complain about his supervisor, right in front of him! Licolli and her poultry-worker comrades were stunned. That sort of thing would have never happened in the poultry industry, where workers live in fear of being fired or demoted for making their complaints known to bosses, Licolli recalled thinking. It was a powerful moment for us, like, wow, these workers have the right to speak up.'

After seeing that spectacle, and learning more about the code of conduct and the pay gains CIW had made, the Arkansas workers in attendance were like, Magaly, why dont we embrace this in the the poultry industry? Licolli recounted.

In 2019, Licolli left the NAWJC (which is now defunct), and, along with several of the workers who had been on the Immokalee trip, launched Venceremos, Spanish for We will win. From the start, the group planned to employ CIW-like tactics, taking the fight directly to the chicken-eating public rather than limiting themselves to quiet attempts to persuade federal regulatory agencies to act.

Soon after, the pandemic turned the slaughterhouse floor, already a place where injuries are routine, into a site of deadly risk. It laid bare the ruinous conditions inside meatpacking plants and revealed the unchecked power of the industrys executives, who successfully lobbied the Trump and Biden administrations against implementing emergency rules to protect workers from the virus. The result was a public-health catastrophe. In a 2021 report, the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found at least 59,000 of the industrys workers tested positive for the virus during the first year of the pandemic, and at least 269 died. And meatpacking-plant outbreaks emerged as prime vectors for spreading the virus into rural America. Instead of addressing the clear indications that workers were contracting the coronavirus at alarming rates due to conditions in meatpacking facilities, the report concluded, meatpacking companies prioritized profits and production over worker safety, continuing to employ practices that led to crowded facilities in which the virus spread easily.

GIWs Gerardo Reyes speaking to protesters.

Vera Chang

One of the Tyson poultry workers who attended the CIW rally, who asked to be called Rosa, told me she fell sick at the height of the pandemic in 2020, with Covid-like symptoms including headaches and exhaustion. Before she could get a definitive diagnosis, her 80 year-old husband, who also worked at Tyson, fell ill and died in the hospital within three days, from impaired lung function. They both tested positive for Covid. Devastated by his death and still sick herself, Rosa remembers, It was the worst day of my life. Back at work at Tyson, she recently strained her back at her post ripping breasts from chicken carcasses whizzing by at the rate of 39 per minute. In response, she says, Tyson moved her to a less taxing but lower-paying position. After two decades of service in the trenches feeding Americas chicken habit, Tyson pays her an hourly wage of $15.85.

After hearing dozens of stories like Rosas, Licolli and Venceremos went into emergency mode, bluntly telling any journalist who would listenincluding meabout the fear and stress workers felt as they continued laboring shoulder to shoulder as colleagues fell ill and died. Licolli raised hell in a way that other worker centers in the poultry space dont: She organized protests at Arkansas plants; took to Facebook Live to stream videos of herself naming workers who had died of Covid, right outside of Tyson plant; and teamed up with the environmental group Food & Water Watch to launch a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission rebuking the company for launching ads claiming that its workers were safer than ever, even as the virus raged.

And Licolli observed how, in the tomato fields around Immokalee, tomato pickers weathered the pandemic with significant protections. After Covid cases spiked early in the pandemic and the state of Florida ignored pleas to send medical resources to the remote rural town, CIW mobilized the nonprofits Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health to work with local public-health institutions to set up rapid testing centers in tomato country, at hours convenient for workers. By September 2020, the group had pushed growers bound by the Fair Food Program to implement mandatory Covid protocols that include free masks, social distancing in the field and on transportation buses, quarantine housing for workers who test positive, and provision and delivery of groceries and other necessities to quarantined workers.

These days, the Fair Food Program covers 90 percent of tomatoes produced in the Immokalee region and around 30,000 workers, according to an assessment by the Bridgespan Group, a consultancy for mission-driven organizations. Since the outset of the program, Bridgespan found, these pickers have experienced a 50 to 70 percent increase in their take-home pay, along with substantially improved and independently monitored working conditions in the fields.

As the worst days of the pandemic seem to be behind us, Licolli and her Venceremos peers have shifted out of emergency mode. Inspired by the CIWs strategy, they are thinking bigger, more systematically; they want to take on the issues that made poultry workers so vulnerable to Covids ravages in the first place.

Bright and early the morning after our patio chat, the CIW and Venceremos crews made the trek in buses from Immokalee toward Palm Beach. They traversed rural roads dissecting sugarcane fields along the southern edge of the Lake Okeechobeea region made famous by Edward R. Murrows landmark 1960 documentary expos of dire labor conditions on US farms, Harvest of Shame.

The buses arrived at Palm Beachs Bradley Park, which sits in the shadow of the Royal Poinciana South building, where a two-bedroom apartment rents for $14,000 per month (more than the average annual wage of an Immokalee farmworker). A band played some raucous son jaracho (traditional music from the Mexican state of Vera Cruz) to warm the crowd, as dog-walking Poinciana residents milled about at the parks edges looking confused by the commotion.

Then CIW organizers delivered a bit of street theater on a portable stage to dramatize their complaints. Lucas Benitez, a former farmworker who co-founded the CIW in 1993 and has since emerged as a celebrated figure in worker-justice circles, narrated in Spanish with an English translator at his side. Farm workers acted out a burlesque of life in the tomato patch under two fundamentally different labor regimes: one with pickers working under the protection of the Fair Food Program, the other with them toiling under the gaze of a cruel and uninhibited boss. One treated workers like human beings, and the other treated them like property.

Street theater.

Vera Chang

Gerardo Reyes, also a former farmworker and now a CIW senior staffer, donned a white wig with an alarming bald spot to portray Wendys Chairman Nelson Peltz in the drama. He towered over another player dressed up as a puppet version of rosy-cheeked, red-haired rag doll that serves as Wendys mascot. The message was clear: Peltz controls Wendysand Wendys declines to participate in a program that protects workers from abuse and pays them an extra penny per pound for tomatoes. Wendys says it wont join the program because since 2019, it has sourced all of its tomatoes from greenhouses, not from Floridas fields. CIW counters that there are labor abuses in greenhouses, too, so the fast-food giant should join.

Afterward, the parade wound through the gilded streets of Palm Beach, at one point stopping in front of Pelzs hedge fund Trians local offices while organizers delivered speeches and slogans to the cheering and chanting crowd. Across the street, amid the ruckus, patio brunchers at the Italian restaurant Trevini had no choice but to take note of the calls for justice and the denunciations of one of the islands highest-profile denizens.

As the march rounded the corner to stop at the local headquarters of JP Morgan Chase (a major Wendys shareholder), I caught up briefly with Greg Asbed, a CIW co-founder, and asked whether he thought Wendys would ultimately sign the Fair Food Program. He said it likely would; in addition to consumer boycotts heating up on multiple college campuses that house Wendys locations, some shareholders (not JP Morgan Chase) were also applying pressure.

Trevini restaurant patrons look on at the protest.

Vera Chang

Even though Trian controls the board and has shown no interest in cooperating in the program, as the groundswell continues, Peltz and his allies will have to ask themselves, Whats so bad about joining a successful social responsibility campaignwhats the downside? Asbed said. Meanwhile, there is a downside to dealing with a campaign about not doing it right. Given CIWs track record of getting Burger King and Chipotle onboardboth of which resisted bitterly before signingI believed him.

I checked in with Licolli after the march. She stressed that Venceremos remains in its infancy. Whereas the CIW has been organizing tomato workers since 1993, her group only launched in 2019. Building sufficient trust, confidence, and commitment among workers to confront the poultry industry with high-profile public campaigns will take time. The Venceremos contingent that traveled to Florida were very energized by what they saw, she told me. After watching tomato pickers and their allies march in one of the richest cities in the US and demand justice, they said, if they can do this, we can obviously do it, too.

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Tomato Pickers Won Better Protections. Can Their Strategy Work for Poultry? Mother Jones - Mother Jones

Two events occurred Monday night one historic, the other rather insignificant which placed an unflattering spotlight on the Supreme Court of the United States.

The historic event was that Politico published an unprecedented leak of a draft majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, which would overrule Roe v. Wade and permit state lawmakers to ban abortion in its entirety in the US. Alitos draft opinion is not the Courts final word on this case, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, but the leaked opinion is the latest in a long list of signs that Roe may be in its final days.

The other event that also occurred last night is that I sent two tweets. One praised whoever leaked Alitos opinion for disrupting an institution that, as I have written about many times in many forums, including my first book, has historically been a malign force within the United States. And a second celebrated the leak for the distrust it might foster in such a malign institution.

The former tweet was phrased provocatively, and it attracted some attention from those on the right, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). So let me clarify that I do not advocate arson as a solution to the Republican Partys capture of the Supreme Court. I metaphorically compared the leak of Alitos opinion to lighting the Court on fire because, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his statement on the leak, the Court has extraordinarily strong norms of confidentiality that it zealously protects.

The fact that someone inside the Courts very small circle of trust apparently decided to leak a draft opinion is likely to be perceived by the justices, as SCOTUSBlog tweeted out Monday night, as the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

To this I say, good. If the Court does what Alito proposed in his draft opinion, and overrules Roe v. Wade, that decision will be the culmination of a decades-long effort by Republicans to capture the institution and use it, not just to undercut abortion rights but also to implement an unpopular agenda they cannot implement through the democratic process.

And the Courts Republican majority hasnt simply handed the Republican Party substantive policy victories. It is systematically dismantling voting rights protections that make it possible for every voter to have an equal voice, and for every political party to compete fairly for control of the United States government. Justice Alito, the author of the draft opinion overturning Roe, is also the author of two important decisions dismantling much of the Voting Rights Act.

This behavior, moreover, is consistent with the history of an institution that once blessed slavery and described Black people as beings of an inferior order. It is consistent with the Courts history of union-busting, of supporting racial segregation, and of upholding concentration camps.

Moreover, while the present Court is unusually conservative, the judiciary as an institution has an inherent conservative bias. Courts have a great deal of power to strike down programs created by elected officials, but little ability to build such programs from the ground up. Thus, when an anti-governmental political movement controls the judiciary, it will likely be able to exploit that control to great effect. But when a more left-leaning movement controls the courts, it is likely to find judicial power to be an ineffective tool.

The Court, in other words, simply does not deserve the reverence it still enjoys in much of American society, and especially from the legal profession. For nearly all of its history, its been a reactionary institution, a political one that serves the interests of the already powerful at the expense of the most vulnerable. And it currently appears to be reverting to that historic mean.

There have only been three justices in American history who were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and who were confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half the country. All three of them sit on the Supreme Court right now, and all three were appointed by Donald Trump.

Indeed, if not for anti-democratic institutions such as the Senate and the Electoral College, its likely that Democrats would control a majority of the seats on the Supreme Court, and a decision overruling Roe would not be on the table.

So it is ironic for that reason, and others that Alitos draft opinion overruling Roe leans heavily on appeals to democracy. Quoting from an opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Alito writes that the permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.

If Alito truly wants to put the question of whether pregnant individuals have a right to terminate that pregnancy up to a free and fair democratic process, polling indicates that liberals could probably win that fight on a national level.

In fairness, polling on abortion often misses the nuances of public opinion. Many polls, for example, allow respondents to say that they believe that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances or in most cases, leaving anyone who reads those polls to speculate under which specific circumstances people think that abortion should be legal.

Perhaps the best evidence that proponents of legal abortion could win a fair political fight, however, is the Supreme Courts own polling. After the Court allowed a strict anti-abortion law to take effect in Texas last fall, multiple polls found the Supreme Courts approval rating at its lowest point ever recorded.

But public opinion may not matter much in the coming political fight over abortion, because Alito and his fellow Republican justices have spent the past decade placing a thumb on the scales of democracy making our system even less democratic than one that already features the Electoral College and a malapportioned Senate.

Alito authored two opinions and joined a third that, when combined, almost completely neutralize the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation that took power away from Jim Crow and ensured that every American would be able to vote, regardless of their race.

Similarly, the Courts Republican majority held in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that federal courts will do nothing to stop partisan gerrymandering. Alito is also one of the Courts most outspoken proponents of the independent state legislature doctrine, a doctrine that, in its strongest form, would give gerrymandered Republican legislatures nearly limitless power to determine how federal elections are conducted in their state even if those gerrymandered legislatures violate their state constitution.

One of the most troubling aspects of this Courts jurisprudence is that it often seems to apply one set of rules to Democrats and a different, more permissive set of rules to Republicans. Last February, for example, Alito voted with four of his fellow Republicans to reinstate an Alabama congressional map that a lower court determined to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

In blocking the lower courts order, Alito joined an opinion arguing that the lower courts decision was wrong because it was handed down too close to the next election.

But then, in late March, the Court enjoined Wisconsins state legislative maps, due to concerns that those maps may give too much political power to Black people. March is, of course, closer to the next Election Day than February. So it is difficult to square the March decision with the approach Alito endorsed in February though it is notable that the March decision by the Supreme Court benefited the Republican Party, while the previous decision was likely to benefit Democrats.

I could list more examples of how this Court, often relying on novel legal reasoning, has advanced the Republican Partys substantive agenda on areas as diverse as religion, vaccination, and the right of workers to organize. But really, every issue pales in importance to the right to vote.

If this right is not protected, then liberals are truly defenseless even when they enjoy overwhelming majority support.

In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Supreme Court held that it has the power to strike down federal laws. But the actual issue at stake in Marbury whether a single individual named to a low-ranking federal job was entitled to that appointment was insignificant. And, after Marbury, the Courts power to strike down federal laws lay dormant until the 1850s.

Then came Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the pro-slavery decision describing Black people as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. Dred Scott, the Courts very first opinion striking down a significant federal law, went after the Missouri Compromises provisions limiting the scope of slavery.

Its not surprising that an institution made up entirely of elite lawyers, who are immune from political accountability and cannot be fired, tends to protect people who are already powerful and cast a much more skeptical eye on people who are marginalized because of their race, gender, or class. Dred Scott is widely recognized as the worst decision in the Courts history, but it began a nearly century-long trend of Supreme Court decisions preserving white supremacy and relegating workers into destitution a history that is glossed over in most American civics classes.

The American people ratified three constitutional amendments the 13th, 14th, and 15th to eradicate Dred Scott and ensure that Black Americans would enjoy, in the 14th Amendments words, all of the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

But then the Court spent the next three decades largely dismantling these three amendments.

Just 10 years after the Civil War, the Supreme Court handed down United States v. Cruikshank (1875), a decision favoring a white supremacist mob that armed itself with guns and cannons to kill a rival Black militia defending its right to self-governance. Black people, the Court held in Cruikshank, must look to the States to protect civil rights such as the right to peacefully assemble a decision that should send a chill down the spine of anyone familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South.

The culmination of this age of white supremacist jurisprudence was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which blessed the idea of separate but equal. Plessy remained good law for nearly six decades after it was decided.

After decisions like Plessy effectively dismantled the Reconstruction Amendments promise of racial equality, the Court spent the next 40 years transforming the 14th Amendment into a bludgeon to be used against labor. This was the age of decisions like Lochner v. New York (1905), which struck down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking their workers. It was also the age of decisions like Adkins v. Childrens Hospital (1923), which struck down minimum wage laws, and Adair v. United States (1908), which prohibited lawmakers from protecting the right to unionize.

The logic of decisions like Lochner is that the 14th Amendments language providing that no state may deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law created a right to contract. And that this supposed right prohibited the government from invalidating exploitative labor contracts that forced workers to labor for long hours with little pay.

As Alito notes in his draft opinion overruling Roe, the Roe opinion did rely on a similar methodology to Lochner. It found the right to an abortion to also be implicit in the 14th Amendments due process clause.

For what its worth, I actually find this portion of Alitos opinion persuasive. Ive argued that the Roe opinion should have been rooted in the constitutional right to gender equality what the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once described as the opportunity women will have to participate as mens full partners in the nations social, political, and economic life and not the extraordinarily vague and easily manipulated language of the due process clause.

Indeed, one of the most striking things about the Courts Lochner-era jurisprudence is how willing the justices were to manipulate legal doctrines applying one doctrine in one case, then ignoring it when it was likely to benefit a party that they did not want to prevail.

In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited goods produced by child labor from traveling across state lines. The reason Congress structured this ban on child labor in such an unusual way is because the Supreme Court had repeatedly held prior to Dagenhart that Congress could ban products from traveling in interstate commerce among other things, the Court upheld a law prohibiting lottery tickets from traveling across state lines in Champion v. Ames (1903).

But the rule announced in Champion and similar cases was brushed aside once Congress decided to use its lawful authority to protect workers.

The Court also did not exactly cover itself in glory after President Franklin Roosevelt filled it with New Dealers who rejected decisions like Lochner and Hammer. One of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the Roosevelt era, for example, was Korematsu v. United States (1944), the decision holding that Japanese Americans could be forced into concentration camps during World War II, for the sin of having the wrong ancestors.

The point is that decisions like Alitos draft Dobbs opinion, which would commandeer the bodies of millions of Americans or decisions dismantling the Voting Rights Act are entirely consistent with the Courts history as defender of traditional hierarchies. Alito is not an outlier in the Courts history. He is quite representative of the justices who came before him.

In offering this critique of the Supreme Court, I will acknowledge that the Courts history has not been an unbroken string of reactionary decisions dashing the hopes of liberalism. The Courts marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), for example, was a real victory for liberals although, as several commentators have noted, there is language in Alitos draft Dobbs opinion suggesting that, if Roe falls, LGBTQ+ rights could be next.

But the Courts ability to spearhead progressive change that does not, like marriage equality, enjoy broad popular support is quite limited. The seminal work warning of the heavy constraints on the Courts ability to effect such change is Gerald Rosenbergs The Hollow Hope, which argues that courts lack the tools to readily develop appropriate policies and implement decisions ordering significant social reform, at least when those reforms arent also supported by elected officials.

This constraint on the judiciarys ability to effect progressive change was most apparent in the aftermath of perhaps the Courts most celebrated decision: Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Brown triggered massive resistance from white supremacists, especially in the Deep South. As Harvard legal historian Michael Klarman has documented, five years after Brown, only 40 of North Carolinas 300,000 Black students attended an integrated school. Six years after Brown, only 42 of Nashvilles 12,000 Black students were integrated. A decade after Brown, only 1 in 85 African American students in the South attended an integrated school.

The courts simply lacked the institutional capacity to implement a school desegregation decision that Southern states were determined to resist. Among other things, when a school district refused to integrate, the only way to obtain a court order mandating desegregation was for a Black family to file a lawsuit against it. But terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan used the very real threat of violence to ensure few lawsuits were filed.

No one dared to file such a lawsuit seeking to integrate a Mississippi grade school, for example, until 1963.

Indeed, much of the South did not really begin to integrate until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which allowed the Justice Department to sue segregated schools, and which allowed federal officials to withhold funding from schools that refused to integrate. Within two years after this act became law, the number of Southern Black students attending integrated schools increased fivefold. By 1973, 90 percent of these students were desegregated.

Rosenbergs most depressing conclusion is that, while liberal judges are severely constrained in their ability to effect progressive change, reactionary judges have tremendous ability to hold back such change. Studies of the role of the courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rosenberg writes, show that courts can effectively block significant social reform.

And, while such reactionary decisions may eventually fall if there is a sustained political effort to overrule them, this process can take a very long time. Dagenhart was decided in 1918. The Court did not overrule it, and thus permit Congress to ban child labor, until 1941.

There are several structural reasons courts are a stronger ally for conservative movements than they are for progressive ones. For starters, in most constitutional cases courts only have the power to strike down a law that is, to destroy an edifice that the legislature has built. The Supreme Court could repeal Obamacare, but it couldnt have created the Affordable Care Acts complex array of government-run marketplaces, subsidies, and mandates.

Litigation, in other words, is a far more potent tool in the hands of an anti-governmental movement than it is in the hands of one seeking to build a more robust regulatory and welfare state. Its hard to cure poverty when your only tool is a bomb.

So, to summarize my argument, the judiciary, for reasons laid out by Rosenberg and others, structurally favors conservatives. People who want to dismantle government programs can accomplish far more, when they control the courts, than people who want to build up those programs. And, as the Courts history shows, when conservatives do control the Court, they use their power to devastating effect.

This alone is a reason for liberals, small-d democrats, large-D Democrats, and marginalized groups more broadly, to take a more critical eye to the courts. And the judiciarys structural conservatism is augmented by the fact that, in the United States, institutions like the Electoral College and Senate malapportionment give Republicans a huge leg up in the battle for control of the judiciary.

Of course I do not believe that we should literally light the Supreme Court of the United States on fire, but I do believe that diminished public trust in the Court is a good thing. This institution has not served the American people well, and its time to start treating it that way.

Originally posted here:

The Roe opinion and the case against the Supreme Court of the United States - Vox.com

On hearing this week that a purple-haired Extinction Rebellion activist (keen on vintage clothes and fantastic sex) had suggested that Baby Boomers should be euthanised as revenge for their contributions to climate change, I expected the culprit to be the usual fresh-faced millennial who weve all become bored of being scolded by. But on seeing photographs of 59-year-old (only three years younger than me) Jessica Townsend, it all made even more recognisably ludicrous sense, despite her comment supposedly being a joke. (Would she have made it about any other group? No. Therefore it wasnt a joke.) For she is one of the growing tribe of left-wing old people who identify as Forever Young.

Its an easy mistake to make. It was always going to be hard for anyone who grew up in the Sixties or later to age gracefully; I was born in 1959 and I dont think Ill ever get around to it. But then, I dont joke about exterminating people according to how old they are.

Before the Sixties, youth was something people wanted to get over as soon as possible so they could join the adult world with all its arcane pleasures. But the moment the pill led sex before marriage to become normalised, adulthood lost a great deal of its appeal. Philip Larkin wrote Annus Mirabilis about this development (Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles first LP / Up to then thered only been / A sort of bargaining / A wrangle for the ring / A shame that started at sixteen / And spread to everything) and returned to it in High Windows (When I see a couple of kids / And guess hes fucking her and shes / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm / I know this is paradise / Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives). The young seemed to be having the best sex so of course adults wanted to dress like them and eventually act like them, too.

Then the Boomers didnt do the decent thing and die, due to the wonder of modern medicine; instead, theyre reporting at A&E with unparalleled recreational drug use and at sexual-health clinics with a little something they picked up on their last 58-70 holiday. Stairlift to heaven indeed! These are the SKIs (Spending Kids Inheritance), or what I call the YOLOAPs. Wrap up warm and Ill meet you at the cyber caf!, I heard a lovely lady in her seventies shouting gleefully into her iPhone on the bus.

On paper, Townsend should be one of these happy old dears getting high on the modern world; she enjoys lemon drizzle cake, hot buttered toast, mushroom risotto and burgundy wine. Its a lovely life being a writer, and she has apparently had a career as a playwright and screenwriter, though disillusion with her craft appears to have been fermenting all the while: When I was first a writer in my twenties there seemed at that time to be no big subjects to write about, and I felt slightly badly placed to be born into cosy times most of the plays, films and novels I read were about white, middle-class, heterosexual couples betraying each other. It was while researching a novel set in 2030 that she became interested in climate change before becoming an Extinction Rebellion activist, co-founding the XR podcast and the Writers Rebel group.

Her words speak volumes even if her volumes dont. Those who latch on to the climate-change panic are, in my experience, not terribly gifted people who nevertheless crave the spotlight; hence the spectacular but silly protest events of XR, which are high on media opportunities but low on persuading the public. Meanwhile, those who have been successful in their chosen careers often feel a bit establishment, and see cosying up to climate crusaders as a way to give them back a bit of their edge see Emma Thompson taking a flight of over 5,400 miles between Los Angeles and London, thus stomping out a one-and-a-half-tonne carbon footprint, in order to show solidarity with Extinction Rebellion. XR activists, though they demand that flights be used only in emergencies, then simpered that Dame Emmas jaunt was an unfortunate cost in our bigger battle to save the planet.

Faced with an uninspiring writing career, as Ms Townsend appears to have been, what could be more of a kickstart to the electric scooter of creativity than a leading role in the latest struggle between good and evil? She claims that those who oppose her chosen tribe will go down in history in the same way as those who opposed the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of the working classes, the Suffragettes. In short, she is one of the Righteous Old, not to be confused with those bumptious Boomers living it up at their local cyber caf.

Members of the climate-change crew have previous in identifying as things theyre not, it must be said. Though their meetings make your average UKIP rally look like Reggae Sunsplash, they identify as diverse and inclusive, so thats okay. They identify as non-polluters though some of their leading lights appear to have clocked up the frequent-flyer points faster than anyone since pre-shamed Prince Andrew, hopping on planes quicker than you can say Instagram. One of them was shown on social media enjoying safari holidays in Uganda, boozing on the beach in New Zealand and bungee jumping over the Nile. Thats not a simple carbon footprint thats a carbon clown-shoe footprint.

Of course its not just climate change that attracts the Peter Pan Tendency to politics; Ive written here before about the Grumpy Old Woke Bros who have taken it upon themselves to instruct uppity women and members of the working class on how to behave. Way back at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017, the then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttered: A gang of angry old men are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019, the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.

Kate Bush has written some lovely songs, but I really believe that The Man With the Child in His Eyes gave a bunch of foolish males the stupid idea that if they never grew up, it would be really attractive. Newsflash: its not. When men used to be accused of having the male menopause, we mocked them as sad old salary men, keen to get hold of the fast car and the foxy girlfriend after a lifetime of wage slavery but lefties, bohos and artists are just as bad.

Both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard strike me as appalling people, but I did feel sorry for her when a witness claimed she told me she didnt like hanging around at his house with his friends because it was boring and it was all old men playing guitars and it wasnt interesting her. A young friend of mine was taken with a famous writer twice her age some years back until it transpired that his idea of fun was hanging out with other middle-aged famous writers swapping the most obscure Bob Dylan lyrics back and forth.

In unattractive rous from Hefner to Westwood, there is the conviction that attractive young women are genuinely keen on having sex with them; they obviously possess magic mirrors. Yes, the occasional woman suffers from this delusion too see Madonna wiggling away on TikTok in a thong but men are far more prone to this most debilitating of diseases. And I can see why theyre confused. If you can get applause for identifying as the opposite sex, when every cell in your body says otherwise, why on Earth shouldnt you be considered stunning and brave for identifying as Forever Young?

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome To The Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published Academica Press.

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Old lefties need to grow up - Spiked

The conversation about reparations for slavery entered a new stage earlier in 2021, with the U.S. House Judiciary Committee voting for the creation of a commission to address the matter.

The bill, H.R. 40, has been introduced every Congress since 1989 by Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and John Conyers, until his death in 2019. But this year marks the first time that its request to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans has cleared the committee stage.

Calls to redress the lasting impact of slavery and racial discrimination have been amplified recently following further evidence of the impact of systemic racism both through the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others at the hands of U.S. police.

To many, the question going forward is not so much whether or not reparations are in order, but what kinds of reparations might be appropriate.

Most of the conversation to date has focused on reparations in terms of payouts of some form. Prominent author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a powerful argument for reparations, said payments must be made by white America to Black America much as Germany started paying Israel in 1952 to compensate for the persecution of Jews by the Nazis.

As a scholar who has written on economic justice and the labor movement, I agree that reparations must have economic substance, because the impact of racism is inherently linked with power and money. But my research suggests another model for reparations: If one of the most significant aspects of slavery even if not the only one was a massive disruption of labor relations, then a crucial part in the reparations discussion could involve reshaping the labor relationship between employers and employees today.

I believe such a reshaping of the labor relationship would substantially benefit the descendants of enslaved people in the United States. Labor, as my research has argued, has implications for all aspects of life and labor reform would, I believe, address many of the problems of structural racism as well. In addition, reshaping the labor relationship would also have positive effects for all working people, including those who still experience enslavement today.

Labor relations can be considered distorted when one party profits disproportionally at the expense of another. In other words, it is a departure from a fair days pay for a fair dayss work a concept that forms a bedrock demand of the labor movement, alongside good working conditions.

This is not just a matter of money but also of power. Under the conditions of slavery, the distortion of labor relations was nearly complete. Slave owners pocketed the profits and claimed absolute power, while slaves had to obey and risk life and limb for no compensation.

Black Americans continue to be disadvantaged in the labor market today. As CEO compensation soars, the number of Black CEOs remains remarkably low there were just four Black CEOs at Fortune 500 companies as of March 2021. In general, the wage gap between Black and white employees has grown in recent years. Fueling these disparities, as well as building on them, is the structural racism that reparations could be designed to address.

Unionization can be a tool to rebalance labor relations and can diminish this racial gap, studies have shown. But union membership in general and among Black workers in particular has declined in recent decades. And a weaker labor movement is associated, studies show, with greater racial wage disparity.

Another tool to rebalance labor relations is worker-owned cooperatives, which have a long tradition in African American communities as economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard has noted. From early on, she points out, African Americans realized that without economic justice without economic equality, independence and stability social and political rights were hollow, or actually not achievable. Gordon Nembhards work also shows that such cooperatives were often fought and ultimately destroyed because they were so successful in empowering African American communities.

Some in the labor movement are beginning to link reparations with union rights. Labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan has suggested that the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a bill before Congress that would strengthen workers rights and weaken anti-union right-to-work laws, should be viewed as a practical form of Black reparations. He argued in an article for The New Republic that wealth redistribution through union membership is more permanent and lasting than a check written out as Black reparations, however much deserved, and far more likely to get a return over time.

While there is considerable disagreement about the profits employers should be able to make from the labor of their employees, there is little disagreement about the wrongness of practices like outright wage theft which today takes the form of employers not paying part or all promised wages or paying less than mandated minimum wage. Even those who rarely worry about employers making too much profit would for the most part likely agree that wage theft is wrong. Agreement on this matter takes us back to slavery, which might be considered the ultimate wage theft.

Addressing the ongoing legacy of slavery and systemic racism requires not only economic solutions but also improving labor relations and protecting workers against wage discrimination, disempowerment at work, and violations such as wage theft that disproportionately affect workers of color.

Reparations that fail to pay attention to improving labor relations may not achieve economic equality. The reparations paid to Israel by Germany, for instance, have not helped to achieve economic equality the Israeli economy is still, alongside the U.S.s, among the most unequal in the developed world, with the richest 10% of each countrys population earning more than 15 times that of the poorest.

Simple monetary payouts are not, I believe, sufficient to solve the problem of racial inequality. Wage theft can again serve as the example here. While repaying stolen wages as New York state did in 2018 by returning $35 million to workers is commendable, repaying stolen wages does not in itself change the skewed relationships between employer and employee that enable wage theft in the first place. Greater empowerment of working people is needed to do that.

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So while redistributing money can be part of the solution, it may not go far enough.

Tying reparations to the improvement of labor relations which can happen through the empowerment of working people or the promotion of worker-owned cooperatives would not only help those most affected by wealth and employment gaps, Black Americans, it would also benefit others who have traditionally been discriminated against in employment, such as women, immigrants and many other working people.

Improving labor relations would address systemic racial discrimination where it is often most destructive and painful: at work, where people spend the bulk of their waking hours, and where the economic well-being of families and by extension entire communities can be decided.

Excerpt from:

Slavery was the ultimate labor distortion empowering ...

Political ideology and movement opposed to capitalism

Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, usually some form of socialism or communism. Another manifestation of anti-capitalism is barter.

Socialism advocates public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals, with an egalitarian method of compensation.[1][2]

Socialists argue that the accumulation of capital generates waste through externalities that require costly corrective regulatory measures. They also point out that this process generates wasteful industries and practices that exist only to generate sufficient demand for products to be sold at a profit (such as high-pressure advertisement); thereby creating rather than satisfying economic demand.[4][5]

Socialists argue that capitalism consists of irrational activity, such as the purchasing of commodities only to sell at a later time when their price appreciates, rather than for consumption, even if the commodity cannot be sold at a profit to individuals in need; they argue that making money, or accumulation of capital, does not correspond to the satisfaction of demand.[4]

Private ownership imposes constraints on planning, leading to inaccessible economic decisions that result in immoral production, unemployment and a tremendous waste of material resources during crisis of overproduction. According to socialists, private property in the means of production becomes obsolete when it concentrates into centralized, socialized institutions based on private appropriation of revenue (but based on cooperative work and internal planning in allocation of inputs) until the role of the capitalist becomes redundant.[6] With no need for capital accumulation and a class of owners, private property in the means of production is perceived as being an outdated form of economic organization that should be replaced by a free association of individuals based on public or common ownership of these socialized assets.[7] Socialists view private property relations as limiting the potential of productive forces in the economy.[8]

Early socialists (Utopian socialists and Ricardian socialists) criticized capitalism for concentrating power and wealth within a small segment of society,[9] and for not utilising available technology and resources to their maximum potential in the interests of the public.[8]

For the influential German individualist anarchist philosopher Max Stirner, "private property is a spook" which "lives by the grace of law" and it "becomes 'mine' only by effect of the law". In other words, private property exists purely "through the protection of the State, through the State's grace." Recognising its need for state protection, Stirner argued that "[i]t need not make any difference to the 'good citizens' who protects them and their principles, whether an absolute King or a constitutional one, a republic, if only they are protected. And what is their principle, whose protector they always 'love'? Not that of labour", rather it is "interest-bearing possession ... labouring capital, therefore ... labour certainly, yet little or none at all of one's own, but labour of capital and of thesubject labourers."[11] French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon opposed government privilege that protects capitalist, banking and land interests, and the accumulation or acquisition of property (and any form of coercion that led to it) which he believed hampers competition and keeps wealth in the hands of the few. The Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Gimnez Igualada saw:[12]

capitalism [as] an effect of government; the disappearance of government means capitalism falls from its pedestal vertiginously...That which we call capitalism is not something else but a product of the State, within which the only thing that is being pushed forward is profit, good or badly acquired. And so to fight against capitalism is a pointless task, since be it State capitalism or Enterprise capitalism, as long as Government exists, exploiting capital will exist. The fight, but of consciousness, is against the State.

Within anarchism there emerged a critique of wage slavery, which refers to a situation perceived as quasi-voluntary slavery,[13] where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[14][15] It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. The term wage slavery has been used to criticize economic exploitation and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops),[16] and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.[17][18][19] Libertarian socialists believe if freedom is valued, then society must work towards a system in which individuals have the power to decide economic issues along with political issues. Libertarian socialists seek to replace unjustified authority with direct democracy, voluntary federation, and popular autonomy in all aspects of life,[20] including physical communities and economic enterprises. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the context of a critique of societal property not intended for active personal use,[21][22] Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines, while later American anarchist Emma Goldman famously denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves."[10] Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism was incompatible with human liberty. "The only demand that property recognizes," she wrote in Anarchism and Other Essays, "is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade."[23] She also argued that capitalism dehumanized workers, "turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron."[23]

Noam Chomsky contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace.[24] Many libertarian socialists argue that large-scale voluntary associations should manage industrial manufacture, while workers retain rights to the individual products of their labor.[25] As such, they see a distinction between the concepts of "private property" and "personal possession". Whereas "private property" grants an individual exclusive control over a thing whether it is in use or not, and regardless of its productive capacity, "possession" grants no rights to things that are not in use.[26]

In addition to individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker's "big four" monopolies (land, money, tariffs, and patents), Kevin Carson argues that the state has also transferred wealth to the wealthy by subsidizing organizational centralization, in the form of transportation and communication subsidies. He believes that Tucker overlooked this issue due to Tucker's focus on individual market transactions, whereas Carson also focuses on organizational issues. Carson holds that "capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable."[27] Carson coined the pejorative term "vulgar libertarianism", a phrase that describes the use of a free market rhetoric in defense of corporate capitalism and economic inequality. According to Carson, the term is derived from the phrase "vulgar political economy", which Karl Marx described as an economic order that "deliberately becomes increasingly apologetic and makes strenuous attempts to talk out of existence the ideas which contain the contradictions [existing in economic life]."[28]

Karl Marx saw capitalism as a historical stage, once progressive but which would eventually stagnate due to internal contradictions and would eventually be followed by socialism. Marx claimed that capitalism was nothing more than a necessary stepping stone for the progression of man, which would then face a political revolution before embracing the classless society.[29] Marxists defines capital as "a social, economic relation" between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital. They believe that private ownership of the means of production enriches capitalists (owners of capital) at the expense of workers ("the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer"). In brief, they argue that the owners of the means of production do not work and therefore exploit the workforce. In Karl Marx's view, the capitalists would eventually accumulate more and more capital, impoverishing the working class, and creating the social conditions for a revolution that would overthrow the institutions of capitalism. Private ownership over the means of production and distribution is seen as a dependency of non-owning classes on the ruling class, and ultimately a source of restriction of human freedom.

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Anti-capitalism - Wikipedia

Domestic worker cleaning spongeI worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, without any rest. I worked like a slave and was treated like one.

They beat me regularly. The son of Madame tried to rape me several times. They always kept me locked inside the flat on the 13th floor.I couldnt go out for three years!

Fasika, Ethiopian former domestic worker in Lebanon.Read herfull story.

Domestic workis a sector which is particularly vulnerable to exploitation and domestic slavery because of the unique circumstances of working inside a private household combined with a lack of legal protection.

Domestic workers perform a range of tasks in private homes including: cooking, cleaning, laundry, taking care of children and the elderly and running errands. Some domestic workers also live in their employers homes and are often considered on call to undertake work for their employer 24 hoursa day.

The pay is often very low, with wage payments frequently delayed. Some domestic workers may not be paid at all or only receive payment in kind such as food or accommodation.

For some domestic workers, the circumstances and conditions of their work amount toslavery. This happens when employers stop domestic workers from leaving the house, dont pay wages, use violence or threats, withhold their identity documents, limit their contact with family and force them to work.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that at least 67 million men and women work asdomestic workersacross the world, not including children.

Women and girls make up the overwhelming majority of domestic workers, around 80%. ILO estimates that more girls under the age of 16 work in domestic service than in any other category ofchild labour.

Somedomestic workersare migrant workers from other countries or regions, mainly from rural areas to the city. For many, domestic work is one of the very few options available to enable them to provide for themselves and their families.

Domestic workis poorly regulated and undervalued. In many countries,domestic workersare not considered workers but rather as informal help and are excluded from national labour regulations.

Often they do not enjoy the same protections as other workers, such as legal contracts, minimum pay, holidays, health care, social security and maternity benefits. In countries where domestic workers are covered by national labour laws, enforcement is poor and these protections have not been translated into practice.

Anti-Slavery International was one of the first organisations to highlight the issue of domestic slavery, particularly for child domestic workers and migrant women.

In 2011 ourHome Alone campaignplayed a big part in persuading the International Labour Organization to adopt a Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which secures the rights of millions of domestic workers across the globe.

Now we work with children in domestic work in Peru, in Tanzania and with women migrating for domestic work from Nepal and Bangladesh to the Middle East, as well as those migrating within India.

We also campaigned to protect domestic workers migrating to the UKto remove visa regulations tying them to only one employer.

Subscribe to our emails to hear latest news about modern slavery, our work against it around the world, and different ways you can take action. You can unsubscribe whenever you want.

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Domestic slavery: what is it? - Anti-Slavery International

Over seventy years since publication, the first British edition of Eric Williams classic Capitalism and Slavery remains vital, despite establishment critics, argues John WestmorelandEric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Penguin 2022), 304pp.Blood at the root

The republication of Eric Williams classic account of Britains role in the slave economy of the Americas and the Caribbean comes at a time when there is a renewed interest in Britains role in the slave trade, stimulated by the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked cities across the UK and USA.

Williams thesis, first published in the USA in 1944, has rightly been hailed by discerning scholars as a masterpiece. For some reason you will have to guess - the book has not been published here in the UK before. Williams argument has come to be known as the Decline Thesis because it links the decline of the slave economy in the Caribbean with its eventual abolition.

In 1944, Capitalism and Slavery provided a starting point for a new generation of students interested in the history of slavery and the civil rights of Black Americans. Written in an elegant and persuasive style, the book postulates an analysis that owes much to Marxs writings about the origins of capitalism, and where the capital that financed the system that bears its name came from.

In short, Williams argues that the trade in slaves and the profits from the plantations on which they laboured provided the capital that funded the industrial revolution in England and Scotland, and built the great port cities connected with the triangular trade. Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and London were at the northern tip of a trade triangle connecting the coast of Africa with the Caribbean and American colonies. Manufactures left Britain for the west African coast where they were traded for slaves, a human cargo that was shipped to Britains colonies to be traded in turn for the valuable commodities of cotton, tobacco, rum and sugar.

Sugar was the commodity that enriched investors in the City of London. The sugar barons were renowned for preposterous wealth, and many stately homes were built and furnished through sugar wealth. The insatiable appetite for sugar in Europe exacted a terrible toll on the slaves who worked the plantations. The demand for sugar generated the demand for slaves.

However, as capitalism matured, the capitalists started to favour the free market views expressed by Adam Smith and turned against the mercantilist slave system that protected an inefficient and insatiable planter class. Free markets favoured an expanding empire where British finance outmatched foreign competition. This shift in thinking was prompted by the decline of the slave economy in Britains Caribbean possessions that set in after the American colonies gained their independence in 1776. The steps to the abolition of the slave trade and slave emancipation in the colonies thereafter link closely to the development of British capitalism.

Firstly, when the slave trade was abolished in 1807, economic considerations loomed large. In market terms British colonial sugar production lagged behind that of Saint Domingue (Haiti) and Brazil. Indeed Saint Domingue produced more sugar than all the British colonies combined, and the growing market in North America, freed from the obligation to buy British sugar, meant the protection of British sugar from cheaper suppliers made little economic sense.

The economic case for the abolition of the slave trade was strengthened by the calculation that the slave population in the West Indies could be replenished naturally and the navy could be put to more useful tasks than policing the Caribbean.

Secondly, after the capitalist class confirmed its political ascendency in Britain after the passing of the so-called Great Reform Act in 1832, it was swiftly followed by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 that emancipated slaves in the Caribbean. By this time the sugar supply was boosted by production in India and European grown sugar beet. Again the market triumphed over protection. The only negative economic aspect was that the slave owners had to be paid compensation for their loss of property.

The final nail in the coffin of mercantilism came in 1846 when the protective sugar duties were finally abandoned. At this point British pre-eminence in the world saw them commit wholeheartedly to the free market where they held sway. The protective Corn Laws, a constant annoyance to free-market ideologues, were also repealed at this time.

Therefore Williams established a clear connection to the development of capitalism and the move to slave emancipation. This connection of capitalism to the barbarities of the slave trade and slave production continues to enrage conservative thinkers. And its not just that the capitalist system is shown to be rooted in the blood and misery of enslaved Africans. Even more infuriating is Williams exposure of the real reasons for abolition as being in the economic interests of capitalists rather than the evident determination and humanitarianism of the abolitionist movement.

A good many national myths had been developed concerning William Wilberforce and his abolitionist saints, and these are myths that the Tories are out to preserve.

That the publication of Capitalism and Slavery has produced an instant reaction (and condemnation) on the Conservative Home page says something about the likely effect it will have on a new readership.

Tory MP David Davis has taken up the cudgels against Williams and brought all his intellectual might to bear. His argument, the less hyperbolic part, is a regurgitation of arguments first used by the American historian Seymour Drescher in the 1970s. Drescher challenged the data used in Williams economic analysis, which will be dealt with later. What is more novel is that Davis tries to reframe the narrative in a way that not only restores the virtue of Wilberforce and the saints, but tries to claim that British abolition was a moral endeavour that set an example to the rest of the world.

Our history with slavery is a lot more nuanced than many would have you believe, he says. It is doubtful if those experiencing the horrors of the middle passage or performing back breaking work under brutal slave masters and tropical heat would find solace in his nuanced history, much of which seems to have been downloaded from Wikipedias entry on Britains West Africa Squadron.

Deflection, rather than nuance, is what Davis is about. His attitude to Britains role in the slave trade is to acknowledge the shame without explanation of cause or content in order to shift the focus. For thousands of years, humanity had been characterised by the enslavement of one people by another. Over 550 years ago, Europeans began the transatlantic slave trade. While Britain was not the worst practitioner of this evil, we must acknowledge our part; we can no more re-write history than those who tear down statues.

The Tories are keen to turn the history curriculum into a fable about British values, and for Davis the act of ending the slave trade and slavery in the Caribbean is a cause for celebration. So he doesnt dwell on the horrors Britain imposed on foreign subjects, he moves quickly to explain how Britain became the worlds leading force in the emancipation of slaves.

Perhaps Black Lives Matter should take the knee in gratitude to their white emancipators! The history of Britains West Africa Squadron, if the Tories get their way, will no doubt gain a place in the curriculum so that the good parts of the British Empire can be learned. Davis says:

Founded in 1808, the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy had the singular purpose of stopping transatlantic slave ships. For over 60 years, the force patrolled international waters, captured 1,600 slaver ships and rescued 150,000 slaves.

And (wiping a tear from his patriotic eye): It was an astonishing tale of derring-do and heroism, of great deeds done solely for the purpose of destroying a great evil.

This line of argument might absorb some undefended minds in academia, but not many. Setting the record straight on the West Africa Squadron isnt too difficult. More importantly it is part of the history of imperial expansion with solid capitalist motives.

The idea that Britain was a force for decency in the world in the nineteenth century is laughable. Britain was a capitalist force for profits. A list of British ruling-class crimes in search of profits across the globe is too long to go into. Historians like Eric Williams have their counterparts across the globe in former British colonies, and it is better to let them recount their own tales of British heroism and decency. If the British hadnt wiped out the peoples of Tasmania man, woman and child, perhaps they could join in the chorus of approval.

The West Africa Squadron came from the 1807 Act abolishing the slave trade. The thinking was that if Britain had just closed off a market to British subjects they were damned if French, Spanish or Portuguese traders would benefit. For Davis, Britain was all about upholding justice on behalf of conquered peoples in the same way as the USA has considered itself a world policeman in our times. In reality, Britains desire for international justice, as with the USA, was closely linked to the imperial project of gaining British naval supremacy. Britain ruled the waves and waived the rules.

Michael Jordan has successfully debunked Britains honourable abolitionist claims in The Great Abolition Sham (The History Press 2005). Jordan shows that the Act abolishing the slave trade in 1807 contained provisions that pleased the anti-abolitionists. Slaves seized by the navy were treated as prizes by the terms of the Act. They were often dragooned into Caribbean regiments that had been decimated by disease. They were indentured in the same way as apprentices, but without pay. The Act therefore maintained plantation slavery.

Britain waived the rules by turning a blind eye to ships flagged with countries with whom a mutual trading interest was established. At the Congress of Vienna, where the chance to abolish slave trading was on the agenda, the British, represented by Castlereagh, consented to allow the Bourbon regime in France to continue trading to restock French colonies.

Stopping the slave trade took up only a small number of ships but was an important part of the assertion of British naval supremacy. Britains domination of the Atlantic and West African shipping lanes was to have a massive pay-off when European nations partitioned Africa in a frenzy of imperialist robbery after 1875. Britain secured all the most profitable parts of Africa and ruled their new subjects as racist overlords. Apartheid in South Africa is just one such example from many.

The final point in this debate was made by Eric Williams himself. Emancipation meant little for the freed slaves without their being given some means of support that would help them make an independent living. The former slaves were plantation workers in the main. They were trapped on islands dominated by plantation agriculture. Abolitionist freedom meant the triumph of the free market, an imperialist economic victory. The former slaves were not made economically equal and therefore remained unfree.

Racism, the most obvious British value in the Caribbean, was the ideological cement of British rule. In 1865 at Morant Bay in Jamaica the former slaves rose in rebellion. British troops crushed the rebellion in what came to be known as the Morant Bay Massacre. Whole villages were burned. Those who could not vouch for their innocence were shot, hanged and flogged. Women were hung from trees and some were flogged by British soldiers.

David Davis MP chose not to mention Morant Bay. Too much nuancing obviously spoils a good yarn.

Williams thesis is a major challenge to the history taught in schools and universities. The challenge is dealt with in the time honoured liberal fashion of misrepresenting Williams through omission and exaggeration, and attacking what is left.

For example, A level students studying the abolition of the slave trade are informed by the exam board textbook that:

The weakness of [Williams] argument lies in the definitive assertion that economic considerations were the primary motive for abolition and that every action is motivated by it. This polemical approach reduces the importance of other factors and therefore by focussing so intently upon one feature, opens itself up to criticism.i

This conclusion is offered to students after one introductory paragraph and a selected quotation. It is an example of liberal historical training. Williams sophisticated historical argument is disempowered by reduction that itself amounts to assertion, and this is followed up by considering an array of liberal historians to dissolve any lingering sympathy in a sea of considered liberal opinion.

And thus liberal balance is counter posed to Marxist dogma. And who would aspire to be an unbalanced dogmatist? There is not the space here to consider the liberal critics of Williams in great depth but we can counter some of the major criticisms. Williams could only be accused of focussing so intently on one feature of abolition by someone who has never read Capitalism and Slavery.

Firstly, critics of Williams have argued that the industrial revolution in Britain was not financed by the profits of slavery, rather capital was generated by developments here. The agricultural revolution, for example, freed labour for industrialisation that in turn generated labour saving inventions like steam power.

However, Williams does not argue that slavery begat capitalism, just the opposite; capitalism begat slavery. He writes:

When by 1660 the political and social upheavals of the Civil War came to an end, England was ready to embark wholeheartedly on a branch of commerce whose importance to her sugar and her tobacco colonies in the New World was beginning to be fully appreciated (p.27).

This takes Williams onto an analysis of the mercantilist system, which his critics accuse him of positing as a completely different entity to market capitalism. In chapter 2, The Development of the Negro Slave Trade, Williams shows that the mercantilist system, protected from foreign competition, was an early capitalist method of securing the European market for slave produced commodities.

Williams makes it clear that slavery suited plantation agriculture because free labour abhorred it, and this is a consideration in line with modern corporate investors who have their commodities produced by child labour that is nothing less than modern slavery. Slavery provided an abundance of labour that could be worked to death and replenished. Therefore it made economic sense, and was politically acceptable in Britain too.

In chapter 3, British Commerce and the Triangular Trade, Williams shows exactly how the industrial revolution was stimulated and paid for in good part by slavery. The reductionist criticism of Williams implies that the capitalists here waited for the profits to roll in then invested it, but his approach is far more persuasive than that. Williams shows how the triangular trade stimulated industry, agriculture and further imperial trading opportunities. It developed major seaports like Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow. In these cities industrial capitalism got a boost as well as the docks. Ship building and design, dock building and civil engineering, metal working, rope making, crane design and manufacture all took off. In these great cities industrial capitalism leapt forward contributing to the development of the system as a whole.

The implications for further imperial expansion should be obvious. It led to Britain being the workshop of the world in the nineteenth century as well as the dominant imperialist power.

The second important attack on Williams thesis comes from the American historian Seymour Drescher.

Drescher researched Williams sources and found them wanting. He reversed the Decline Thesis by showing that the abolition of the slave trade was not in line with capitalist reasoning as Williams claimed. For Drescher, the slave economy was not declining, but was actually reaching its full potential. Therefore abolishing the slave trade in 1807 dealt a death blow to a vital economic area, whether slavery was inherently evil or not. Drescher did agree that economics played a part, but not in the way Williams claimed - or in the way that Drescher claims he claimed.

Dreschers argument centres on his oft quoted view that slavery was aborted in its prime and this is the theme of his book, Econocide, published in 1976. But it is not the devastating demolition of Capitalism and Slavery that his supporters think. In the first place, recent research done by the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL supports the economic arguments of Eric Williams. And Capitalism and Slavery is about much more than economics. Williams shows capitalism to be a form of political economy, not just an economy.

This is why Dreschers analysis falls flat in my view. He worships at the altar of classical economists who see capitalism as rational and virtuous. Capitalists do not always make decisions that ward off crisis and they have a long history of doing the opposite. So to say that abolition was somehow contrary to the advice offered by modern economic analysis based on new data crunching techniques is meaningless in explaining why it happened.

For example, Drescher argues that the value of plantations in the Caribbean were rising at the time of abolition, and therefore there was still profit to be made. But isolating economic data in this way exaggerates the importance of it, and by decontextualizing it, distorts it. House prices in Doncaster are rising at the moment, but the reason is not because Doncaster is booming, trust me.

Politicians and campaigners alike fight for change because of how events in the immediate past prompt them to think about the future. As Williams explains, in a quarter of a century Britain had lost American colonies, intensified the exploitation of a vast market in India, and entered into a war with another great imperialist power that would impact upon the world. Britains fortunes no longer relied on its West Indian trade. And the trajectory of British capitalism certainly went against the idea of Econocide.

The final critique from which Williams should be defended flows from the incorrect assumption that his analysis is a form of economic determinism that leaves out the actions of individuals, their courage and tenacity. When people like David Davis and William Hague eulogise William Wilberforce and the saintly Clapham Sect upon which the British abolitionist movement was largely founded, they are in fact following a tradition begun in 1807.

The abolition of the slave trade produced an astonishing volte face in the British establishment. Having spent thirty years blocking all attempts at abolition of the slave trade, once the act of abolition was passed they celebrated it as a triumph for the whole nation. Amid the outpouring of articles, engravings and plates depicting Britannia trampling on the emblems of slavery, the Duke of Norfolk opined that abolition was, the most humane and merciful Act which was ever passed by any legislature in the world.

In chapter 10, The Saints and Slavery, Williams deals with something Marxists are well acquainted with: appearance and reality. Williams intention is not to deny the many commendable attributes of the abolitionists, rather he seeks to set their actions in a changing economic and political world. He writes of the abolitionists: The humanitarians were the spearhead of the onslaught which destroyed the West Indian system and freed the Negro (p.169).

He goes on: The British humanitarians were a brilliant band. Thomas Clarkson personifies all the best in the humanitarianism of the age. His praise is limited to a few of the brilliant band, perhaps too few, but his intention is to reveal what lies beneath.

The abolitionists were not radicals. In their attitude to domestic problems they were reactionary. The Methodists offered the workers Bibles instead of bread and Wesleyan capitalists exhibited open contempt for the working class. Wilberforce was familiar with all that went on in the hold of a slave ship but ignored what went on at the bottom of a mineshaft (p.170).

Williams doesnt write this maliciously. He correctly locates the limited space that humanitarianism enjoyed. The arguments for abolition never strayed into anti-capitalist sentiment even though there was huge popular support for abolition in working-class districts. To connect chattel slavery with wage slavery in mine and mill never entered their heads. Their strategy was purely parliamentarian.

In the abolitionist propaganda and petitions that roasted the planter class, there was no condemnation of their racism. Rather they were fellow Christians who had strayed into cruelty. The humanitarians regularly played on anti-mercantilist sentiment too.

In the call to abolish slavery in the Caribbean many abolitionists supported boycotting West Indian sugar in favour of Brazilian and Indian sugar. Did they know nothing of the appalling conditions suffered by free labour there?

The fact is that the abolitionists pursued a moral cause with determination. When their appeal coincided with favourable economic arguments for abolition, the establishment, at the time and since, chose to seize on the moral arguments to deflect from the economic reasons. This was done to present capitalism as virtuous, and is in substance exactly the same as presenting a war for oil as a war for democracy.

Capitalism and Slavery is a must read book and is the essential starting point for a new readership. It is a book that will hold the readers attention, and presents a powerful analysis in a persuasive and easy to understand way. Reading it is a pleasure.

There are certainly aspects of this topic that Williams does not cover in great depth; it is a relatively short book. One area that students will want to explore further is the role of slaves in freeing themselves, and a good place to follow this up is through the work of C.L.R. James. James was Williams mentor and his book, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution, is a masterpiece.

i Challenges to the authority of the state in the late 18th and 19th centuries (Pearson 2015), p.121

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Capitalism and Slavery - book review - Counterfire