Category Archives: Wage Slavery

JAMES Watson (Letters, April 8) repeats the oft-expressed canard that our children and grandchildren will have to pick up the bill for the National Debt. This is just incorrect. The National Debt started in 1694 and has grown steadily with the economy ever since. It has never nor will it ever be repaid.

It is not a debt in the domestic sense. Money is created by the government and the difference between government expenditure and taxes raised is added to the National Debt under double-entry accounting rules. It is a debt to the Bank of England which is in turn owned by government so repayment would simply deflate the economy.

Banks create money under licence from the government. To maximise the economy there should be full employment at decent wages. If banks create insufficient money to achieve this in the private sector then government should do so by spending in the public sector.

The only limit to public expenditure is from the onset of wage-driven inflation which government can address by reduced expenditure and increased taxes.

Current inflation is due largely to the rise in international commodity prices. No amount of interest rate fiddling by the Bank of England can address this.

There is no reason why Rishi Sunak cannot help the impending poverty and hardship for those at the bottom of the social scale. Only political dogma, economic ignorance and characteristic meanness of spirit prevents this. He did so when Covid hit so why cannot he do it again?

John Moreland, Killearn.

COST OF LIVING WILL BE KEY FACTOR

REBECCA McQuillan ("Dont celebrate yet, Nicola. SNP reign could be shaken by cost-of-living crisis", The Herald, April 8) puts forward some interesting analysis regarding voting patterns and the forthcoming local elections. The cost of living crisis is going to impact on every household in the country as she says, but it will disproportionately affect the vulnerable who include those on benefits (and state pensions) who received a lower-than-inflation increase from the Chancellor.

Ms McQuillan mentions recent opinion polls; one of the findings was that 63% of voters felt Finance Secretary Kate Forbes should be doing more in the midst of the crisis, sentiments I am sure Ms Forbes would agree with. However, the Scottish Parliament has no borrowing powers, its hands are tied and is dependent on Rishi Sunak whose response to the cost of living crisis was to give every household a 200 loan, to be paid back, and to reduce household council tax bills by 150 per year. All very well, but if you are exempt from paying council tax, you may well be missing out on 150 and if you are living in fuel poverty, paying back a loan could be the straw that breaks the camels back.

This cost of living crisis is a real one for millions of hard-working families, millions who depend on benefits and millions who have been grateful for the Scottish Governments mitigating measures in the form of its welfare fund, which has increased massively during the pandemic. The Scottish Government has prioritised tackling child poverty, as Ms McQuillan alluded to, with the Scottish Child Payment due to more than double this year to 25 a week.

The cost of living will certainly be a factor in the local elections how could it not be? Voters will have the final say and they have given a clear verdict over the last decade and half here in Scotland. At no time during this time has Scotland voted for a Conservative government at Westminster, or for that matter, a Labour or LibDem majority in Scotland, and with the present opposition in Scotland I dont think that is about to change any time soon.

Catriona C Clark, Falkirk.

LET DOWN BY OUR LEADERS

THINGS are not working in our country at the moment, nor have they been for several years. I agree with Kevin McKenna's column ("Sturgeon and Salmond should move on: Their time is over", The Herald, April 9) with regards to Scotland. Boris Johnson should now not be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and those in his own sycophantic party who voted him into that very important position should hang their heads in shame.

Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and others are not fit to hold the positions in which they find themselves the former because he is currently living up to the oft-quoted phrase "there are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics", and the latter because, as Lawrence Pertillar says in his poem Wishes to be Liked", "Nor will I ever believe one I suspect, To have a leadership position.

But cannot make a decision. With kept wishes to be liked."

I am so, so angry about the political state of our country, and indeed the world, that I spent time tracing a copy of a poem called Parable of the Talents by the American Octavia E Butler, which I wish to repeat here:

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be lead by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery".

Sadly the last sentence cannot be heard by the Russians who are living under the rule of Putin.

Walter Paul, Glasgow.

BUCK STOPS WITH THE VOTERS

I WOULD disagree with Nicola Sturgeon's mealy-mouthed acceptance of blame while tying herself in knots with the double negative "I didn't not say to sign the ferry contracts" and "we are a collective therefore the buck stops with me".

I say this, not in her defence, but because she is simply exploiting the gullible electorate who have voted her and the SNP back into power despite her previous "judge me on education" Curriculum for Excellence lying in tatters, and they may vote for her again. No, the buck stops with them, not Ms Sturgeon.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. But it seems she can fool some of them all the time.

Voters should remember this the next time they or a loved one's consultation or medical procedure is cancelled or comes too late, when they cannot get an appointment or procedure this side of Christmas. Many still seem unaware it is the Scottish Government that has full autonomy over the NHS in Scotland but clap like performing seals when the First Minister deflects this as the fault of a big bad posh Tory in Westminster.

They should remember this when they are driving around the traffic cones, barriers, temporary traffic lights and over the thousands of potholes on their way to the polling booth and perhaps think of how many drug deaths could have been avoided, food banks made extinct, littered streets cleaned and services supported with the millions squandered on malicious prosecutions, compensation pay-outs, pretendy foreign embassies and the ferry follies while reducing the shipbuilding pride of the Clyde to joke status.

No, it's not Ms Sturgeon; the buck stops with us.

Allan Thompson, Bearsden.

CREDIT TO THE PM WHERE IT'S DUE

STEWART F Falconer (Letters, April 8), asserts that there is not one thing that Boris Johnston can be proud of.

I will give off the top of my head just two examples. The first was his swift decision-making when this dreadful Covid virus first raised its head and showed it was a truly deadly danger to mankind. Whilst other countries dithered and procrastinated, especially the EU members, Mr Johnson acted by investing billions to find and secure a safe vaccine from scratch. Had he waited like everyone else who knows how many extra thousands would have died or been seriously ill and of course as a result of which, the NHS would have fallen over.

The second is the leadership role the Prime Minister has taken in Ukraine in terms of sanctions and aid. It is on record that its President acknowledges the vital role undertaken by the UK Government in supplying the defensive armaments that has helped to mitigate the still-dreadful death toll being suffered by the Ukrainian people.

So yes, I agree with the sentiments expressed in the letter of April 6 from Allan Sutherland which so upset Mr Falconer. Partygate, Wallpapergate and the rest of the gates still to be unearthed can wait their time to be answered, but in the meantime give credit where it is due to this Prime Minister.

James Martin, Bearsden.

See the article here:

Letters: Sunak could easily help the poor. Why won't he? - HeraldScotland

Morgenthau, one of the twentieth centurys foremost scholars of international relations, believed the state was the highest authority on the international stage, making the creation and enforcement of international law far more difficult than in a domestic context.

A brief comparison between the US Constitution and the UN Charter illustrates his point. The US Constitution, as those of who have followed the raging debate on gun control with horror will know, is the subject of constant discussion and revising in the United States.

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Since its drafting, the constitution has been subject to 27 amendments which have covered everything from abolition of slavery and the right of women to vote to the national prohibition of alcohol and the creation of presidential term limits reforms which have transformed power relations within the United States and changed the way its citizens live their daily lives.

In contrast, the UN Charter appears to be fixed in aspic. Since its drafting in 1945 admittedly almost 200 years later than the US Constitution the founding text of the United Nations has seen only five changes made. Four of these were to expand internal bodies like United Nations Security Council or the Economic and Social Council as more states joined and the single qualitative amendment to the UN Charter in 1968 was, ironically, to change the requirements for amending the Charter. After that, and one more for another increase in the

size of the Economic and Social Council in 1973, the UN Charter has not been updated since.

Who could not argue that the world has been transformed since 1945? Not only have the powers of the world waxed and waned, with countries like India and Germany having emerged as influential global actors just as Russia becomes an international pariah, but the technologies states use today to wage war would have been unimaginable to those drafting the charter in 1945.

For centuries, battlefields looked like the Somme. They were distant fields, far from towns and cities, where men fought and died. Todays wars, however, are waged predominantly in urban environments where civilians are increasingly forced into the firing line. Across the

world, cities which have stood for centuries Aleppo, Bucha, Gaza, Mosul are now synonymous with the murder of innocent people in their living rooms and on the streets of their home.

Yet long after this horrifying development has become the norm in modern conflict, international law has struggled to adapt. As war returns to the European continent, it does so in a new way with new weapons and new methods of killing without a human being ever needing to step foot on the battlefield.

And just as these new forms of warfare emerge, the international order which must regulate them is at risk: both from the unprecedented assault from rogue states like Putins Russia but also from the gentle erosion of its relevance through a lack of enforcement.

Indeed, this was the topic of discussion when I took part in negotiations to limit the use of explosive weapons in populated areas at the UN in Geneva this week. Now, 90% of the victims of these weapons, designed mostly for open battlefields rather than populated areas, are civilians. We are seeing it now in Ukraine, with Russian forces targeting peoples homes, schools, hospitals, and train stations.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the US Constitution, argued to the end of his days that the text he had drafted was a living document to be shaped and updated by every generation so that it may remain as relevant to them as it was to its drafters. No society, he argued can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.

Jeffersons centuries-old warning was right. The well-meaning drafters of laws and norms around the use of force in international relations created an international system born from the ashes of the Second World War and respected by those who remembered its horrors. As that generation passes, the system they created must continue to be strengthened.

In the absence of a universally accepted hierarchy of power in international relations, Morgenthau argued that states must assume responsibility for the creation and enforcement of international law. It is not enough to create an international architecture of treaties and

agreements then leave it to wither and rot under an empty sky.

States must nurture and update these treaties to not only make them relevant to the modern international system, but actively enforce them.

Words on a page will not bring about world peace. The UN is and will remain the foremost architect of an international order which can create and preserve peace among nations but only if these rules are enforced by states.

If we believe that an enforceable system of international laws, norms and treaties are the best way to keep us free and at peace, then we must be willing to not only defend that system from the assault it is currently under, but ensure we breathe new life into it to be robust enough for the moment we find ourselves in. That will take leadership.

From the use of chemical weapons in Syria to Putins war of aggression against his neighbours, global leaders have broken international law with little or no meaningful consequences. Just last month, the Prime Minister described Saudi Arabia a state which orchestrated the murder of a journalist and the dismemberment of his corpse as a key international partner.

Putins abhorrent crimes in Ukraine did not emerge from nowhere: he saw that the international rules-based order has been freely violated by many including himself for years and that no consequences were ever faced. This age of impunity must end.

Stewart McDonald MP is the SNP spokesperson on Defence

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Now 90% of victims of weapons of war are civilians international law must react to this new reality - Stewart McDonald - The Scotsman

Claire Schwartz: How would you describe the current political landscape as represented by the field of presidential candidates?

Franoise Vergs: On the far right you have Marine Le Pen [the National Rally candidate] and ric Zemmour [the journalist and pundit who has long cultivated relationships with far-right politicians]. And then you have Valrie Pcresse [who is running on the ticket of the Soyons Libres party she founded in 2017] and Emmanuel Macron. Macron is the candidate of the right, the candidate of the dominant classes and of business. He is a neoliberal who wants to roll back the social protections that were won through the struggles of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s: retirement pensions, minimum wage, everything. He is extremely dangerous.

Houria Bouteldja: On the left, we havent had a good candidate in a long time, and now we have one in Jean-Luc Mlenchon [a former member of the Socialist Party, running as the candidate of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, which he founded]. The French left is very Islamophobic, and a few years ago Mlenchon, too, spoke about Muslims in very problematic ways. But in the past three years, hes really changed. Now he recognizes that the French police are becoming more and more fascist. And he has moved, too, on international issues. For example, in November [when France sent police to the overseas department of Guadeloupe to stamp out uprisings over Covid-19 measures and high fuel prices] he denounced the state repression of the Guadeloupean people. Im not saying that Mlenchon is a revolutionary, not at all. But in the framework of the French system, he has become very radical.

FV: On the left (in quotes because one wonders where is the left in that left), you have the Socialist Party candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the perfect figure of socialist betrayaltotally in tune with liberalism. Her policies are anti-migrant. Shes never said a word about police violence. The disappearance of that Socialist Party would not be a loss. Nathalie Arthaud for Lutte Ouvrire, a Trotskyist organization, and Phillipe Poutou for the New Anticapitalist Party, also Trotskyist. The Green Party defends a white bourgeois ecology. The Communist Party has nothing much left of communism. Another candidate of the far left did not receive enough signatures to get on the ballot.

I agree with Hourias analysis of Mlenchon. It is extremely important that Mlenchon has brought back the idea of a non-aligned position with regard to the war in Ukraine. That Western media and politicians do not understand what it means, or pretend not to, is not surprising. A short reminder. The idea for a movement of the non-aligned emerged during the 1955 Bandung conference [a gathering of people from Asian and African nations]. It concerned states that did not want to formally align themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union, but sought to remain independent or neutral. The objectives, as described in the Treaty of the Non-Aligned Movement, were to create an independent path in world politics that would not result in member States becoming pawns in the struggles between the major powers. It was neither Washington nor Moscow, making room for opinions on global matters and wars from the South.

By endorsing a non-aligned positionrefusing the supposedly unanimous position (see the position of African and Asian states) that is not just pro-Ukraine, but also pro-NATOMlenchon is reconnecting with that history. Our task, then, is to bring content to this non-aligned movement and to refuse to let it stand in for some kind of passive pacifism, where we are against war in some general, abstract way, and not against NATO, against imperialism, against the increasing militarization of Europe. Still, I do not take a public position on the elections out of principle, because even though Mlenchon has supported the strike in Guadeloupe and protested against the repression of the Guadeloupean people, I still think his position on the overseas territories needs to be amended. Im waiting for a left that would really move forward with the processes of its own decolonization.

All the same, there is something really at stake in this election, and it is crucial that Mlenchon wins a lot of votes. It will say that something else is possible. And then we will have to work.

CS: You pointed to an anti-racist shift in Mlenchons position over the past three years. It strikes me that in that same period Macron has become increasingly explicitly Islamophobic. Can you speak to the social contexts of those changes?

HB: If you look back, youll realize that Macron was not always as Islamophobic on the face of it. He ran a campaignthe first one, in 2017where he distinguished himself by the fact that he didnt appear Islamophobic. But as head of state, he was entrapped by the states racial logic. In fact, it only took one uprisingthe gilets jaunes protests [which were sparked in 2018 by a planned rise in taxes on diesel and petrol and soon transformed into a wider anti-government movement]for him to become Islamophobic. Why? The gilets jaunes was not simply an uprising of poor whites; it was an uprising of poor whites who didnt consider Islamophobia a priority. Even if many who participated in the uprisings were themselves racistas by and large French people aretheir priority wasnt to rage against nonwhites; it was to target the state, to make social demands. And in an attempt to reconstruct unity on the basis of whitenessto reconstruct a unity between poor whites, the bourgeoisie, and the statethe bourgeois state imposed an Islamophobic agenda. In other words: The state turned poor white people against Muslims in order to prevent unity of the working classes.

FV: The anti-migrant politics do not have the vast support in France that the media suggests. French people, the youth, say to themselves: Okay, we are told we are French, i.e. white, but we are poor. We cannot find jobs. Our children cannot find jobs. In some parts of the countryside, you have to go 200 kilometers before finding a hospital. The gilets jaunes repopulated the language of the French Revolution: The people against the aristocrats. Suddenly there was a real fear among the bourgeoisie that people would turn against the state, so the state has wielded the specter of immigration to remind the French people that Frenchness is really about not being Muslim. There is a perpetual reconstitution of what it means to be French by way of these colonial and racist tropes. It very often takes place on the Muslim body, especially the body of the Muslim woman. A woman wears a burkini, andoop!the French nation-state reconstitutes itself. It is a constant process in which media, TV, films, books, declarations, manifestos, petitions, play an important role. The violent reactions of the state and the dominant classes show a deep fear of losing their position.

CS: Where have you seen movements to contest these attempts toward reconstituting Frenchness by way of a racialized other?

HB: After George Floyd was murdered, there was a mobilization. The movement in the US was refracted in France through the struggle for justice for Adama [Traor, a Black man who died in French police custody after having been violently restrained]. Thirty thousand peoplemostly Black and Arab people, who came to France in postcolonial contextsmarched in the streets. This mass mobilization against racism, plus the gilets jaunes? For the powers that be, it was a nightmare.

The first chance that presented itself for the state to break up these mobilizations and reassert its identity was the murder of Samuel Paty [a French secondary school teacher who was beheaded, allegedly because of a lesson about free speech in which he shared cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad naked]. That moment was really a tipping point. After Patys murder, there was a general ambiance of sacred unity around the new martyrwho had died, as it was being figured, at the hands of Islam. What Mlenchon did at that moment was critical. He said, I stand by my values, which is that we need a unity of the popular classes. Against every expectation, he refused the division and separation sown by the bourgeois state. This is why Mlenchoneven as there are many things one must critique him forplayed an absolutely vital role, one that fundamentally distinguishes him from the other candidates. He is the only one who understands the function of Islamophobia as a counterrevolutionary tool. Its not that were trying to figure out whether hes a revolutionaryhes not. Still, I really do think hes something remarkable in France, where were going on 20 years of incessant Islamophobia.

CS: Where do you see these insurrectionary energies coming from?

HB: On the one hand, I attribute them to our antiracist struggles, and on the other, to the fact that the French government is becoming more and more right wing. The far right is becoming stronger and stronger.

FV: What we are seeing is really the return of the 19th-century bourgeoisievery conservative, racist, colonial, Catholic, antisemitic, anti-migrant, terrified of the proletariat. Macron is really a child of that conservative French bourgeoisie, but he is able to mask it behind his youth, his cosmopolitanism, etc. He wants to appear as the young president who will close the chapter on colonial historyso he asked historians to write reports on the war in Algeria, on the stolen objects in the museum, etc. He wants colonialism to be memorysomething people put behind themso it wont be political history, which can be activated in the present. His form of ceremonial reconciliation is aimed at erasing the radical dimensions of reparation and restitution, and representing Frenchness as a new form of humanitarianism. He says, We recognize the crime, slavery was bad, colonialism was bad, objects were stolen, etc., while at the same time carrying out an incredible repression of real reckoning. There are tremendous attacks on decolonial theory in schools and universities, for example.

We are certainly seeing a rise in new forms of fascismstate feminism, corporate feminism, attacks on the university, attacks on decolonial theorybut there is a lot of emerging discussion and debate. In the womens movement, feminists against mainstream feminism are becoming stronger. Likewise, though the repression of the gilets jaunes was really brutal, this brutalitythe police doing to white people what they have always done to people of colorshowed that, if you turn against the state, whiteness will not always protect you. This also showed the possibilitythe necessityof constructing an alliance between the poor white proletariat and decolonial movements.

HB: Peoplepoor people, including nonwhite peopleare angry, and they are expressing their anger by demonstrating in the streets.

FV: But we still have a lot of work to do to connect antiracism and antifascism. Not all antifascists have been connected with antiracist movements.

CS: The ongoingness of colonial histories finds vexed expression in the figure of ric Zemmour, an Algerian Jew who takes no pains to couch his Islamophobic and anti-migrant racism. As far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Penthe father of current presidential candidate Marine Le Pentold the French newspaper Le Monde: The only difference between ric and me is that hes Jewish. Its hard to call him a Nazi or a fascist. This gives him greater freedom. In opposition to the historical idea of the Jew as Frances other, we now see this figure of the Jew as, in a manner of speaking, the fullest realization of French nationalism. How might we understand Zemmour in historical context?

HB: I think you can consider Zemmour from a psychoanalytic anglebut psychoanalysis tied to political history. His neuroses are really a product of republican integration. Hes a good student, in a manner of speaking. That is to say, his parents accepted the narrative of integration. They came from Algeria. They were Jews, but not too much. They were first and foremost French. I imagine that when one is a Jew from Algeria in a France that is simultaneously Arabophobic and antisemitic, one is very worried about structural racism, and that worry shaped their route to integration, which is the only thing France offers everyone. In fact, I think Zemmour is tortured by this journey that he wants to complete. He wants to disappear the Jew in him, and he cant stand to see Muslims or other Jews who want to maintain a sense of their identity. And, in fact, this completely delirious Islamophobia is in response to a Muslim world that accepts itself and doesnt hidewhere people observe Ramadan, go to the mosque, have Muslim or Arab names. He wants all victims of racism to stop resisting and dissolve into the sea of whiteness. He wants to make it all disappear because people who resist remind him of his own cowardice. In other words, he wants everyone to make the same sacrifice he made.

His attempts to rehabilitate Marshal Ptain [chief of state of Vichy France from 1940 to 1944], who participated in the final solution, are the logical conclusion of his journey. In undertaking this process of hysterical assimilation, Zemmour is saying, in a certain way: I want the French to exterminate meculturally, if not physically. Hes saying, in fact: I want the whites to finish their work.

France produced this creature. Hes a creature of colonialism because hes Algerian. Hes a creature of the relationship of France to nonwhites in general and to Jews in particular.

FV: It is important to remember, too, that even if Ptain is widely recognized as a collaborationist of Nazism, many Vichy-era judges, magistrates, police chiefs, army officers and civil servants remained in their posts after the war, or found careers in the overseas departments and then back in France again. The full circulation of their violence is not often discussed.

One of the most infamous figures is Maurice Papon, who was the secretary general for the police in Bordeaux [during World War II], where he participated in the deportation of Jewish children. And then he became the prefect of Constantine [during the Algerian War], where he repressed and tortured Algerians. In 1961, as a prefect in Paris, he orchestrated the October 17th massacre of Algerians demonstrating against the curfew that was imposed on them. So, at the state level, there is profound complicity between colonial repression and antisemitism. When Papon was on trial for the deportation of Jewish children, the 1961 massacre was not included in the accusation. But colonialism and the making of antisemitic France are deeply connected.

CS: Even as these circuits of violence expose how antisemitism and colonialism have both been mechanisms for reconstituting French nationalism, theres also a way that the Holocaustthat urtext of antisemitic violenceis repeatedly called up in conversations at the highest level of the state. Whats the role of the memory of the Holocaust in particular in the construction of contemporary Frenchness?

FV: Its part now of the national narrative. We atone for that. Vichy was bad. And so now we can be past that. But it allows for the weaponization of the specter of antisemitism. There are Islamophobic Jewish organizations in France, condemning BDS, and anything that appears pro-Palestinian.

CS: After the election, what comes next for the left and for decolonial struggle in France?

HB: After the elections, the conversation about decolonialism will die down among the white left. We are in a dialectical relationship with them. In a certain sense, the left vampirizes us, taking over the management of our questions. That is to say, in order for the left in France to represent itself in a certain way, it is necessary to make us disappear. Their movement is not our movement. Even if Mlenchon is more interesting than the other candidates on the question of Islamophobia, and more sympathetic to our struggles against police violence, he is not us.

The elections are cyclical, but the struggle is continuous. We will continue to pursue our project of building an international decolonial movement. We began one important iteration of this project in May 2018, when we convened the first Bandung du Nord conference, an international gathering of nonwhite movements and people in Paris, in a historical filiation with the 1955 Bandung. Whereas the original conference gathered nonwhite people in alliance with all of the colonized South, we called our reworking the Bandung of the North because our task is to create an alliance of nonwhite people living in the Northto think together about the coarticulation of anti-imperialism and anti-racism. And inside of these articulations, were thinking about questions of gender, ecology, economy, capitalism, etc.but always on the condition that our anti-racism is formulated in terms of an anti-imperialist struggle. In France, any struggle that is anti-racist without attending to anti-imperialism will produce an integrationist politicbecause that would mean that were looking to improve our situation only within the imperial borders of the Republic. We are not.

We believe that the South leads its own struggle. If one needs to fight against Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, African autocrats, or whoever, we are in solidarity with people who lead those struggles, but we do not lead them. Our best mode of solidarity with the global South is to fight against our own imperialismright now, against Macron, against NATOand therefore to liberate the South, in a certain sense, from us.

More here:

Waiting on the French Left to Decolonize Itself - Jewish Currents

Followers are criticizing TikTok influencer Drew Afualo, whos known for public takedowns of misogynists, over her partnership with Shein, a fast-fashion brand that has been accused of exploiting its workers.

Afualo, who has 6.9 million TikTok followers, posted about her brand deal with Shein on March 16. In her video, she shows off a haul of items she has from Sheins SheinX collection, which is a collaboration with independent designers. The TikToker also alerts viewers of a discount code they can use when shopping at Shein.

https://www.tiktok.com/@drewafualo/video/7075852791062908206?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7016721189293147654

Afualo defended her partnership against critical comments, stating that not everyone can afford to shop sustainably, sustainable fashion is a privilege, and that commenters are casting stones from a glass house. She also cited that Shein sells affordable plus-size clothing. (The Daily Dot has reached out to Afualo for comment via email.)

Shortly after Afualo posted about the partnership, TikTokers posted videos criticizing the move. TikToker @agojaa said she was disappointed in Afualo and cautioned viewers against [glorifying] influencers.

It really saddens me that Drew chose to collaborate with a brand which is well known for exploiting people, focusing on fast fashion, and microtrends, @agojaa says in her video, which by Thursday had been viewed over 35,000 times. Which are probably the biggest issue in fast fashion at the moment.

She also says Drews haul was problematic itself and that she disagrees with Afualos promoting and profiting off of Shein.

An investigation from Sixth Thone found that some of Sheins factories are considered a fire risk, and the BBC reported on an investigation from Public Eye that found that Shein employees work extended hours to make a living wage.

Alice March, another TikToker, posted her thoughts about the partnership on March 22. She said that even though she fucking [loves] Afualo, she was upset that the influencer publicized how much money she has made via TikTok and then implied that she cannot afford to shop sustainably or buy clothes in her size from a brand other than Shein.

The problem isnt you shopping fast fashion, March says, addressing Afualo in her video that got over 25,000 views. Its you being a front face to you supporting women and speaking against men. And then promoting a company that completely exploits women in other countries. (The Daily Dot reached out to @agojaa and March via Instagram direct message.)

TikToker and climate activist Karishma Porwal announced she was unfollowing Afualo because of the partnership.

Its the blatant lack of accountability in her comment section that really disappointed me, Porwal says in a TikTok posted on Friday that received over 67,000 views. Yes, you deserve to dress cute. And women of the global South deserve to eat. They deserve to save up for their children to send them to school. They deserve to work in a factory that wont collapse on them.

In a phone interview with the Daily Dot, Porwal said she referenced what she learned from watching The True Cost, a 2015 documentary about the labor practices involved in fast fashion production.

In the comments section of a follow-up video, Porwal apologized for speaking for plus-size women like Afualo and assuming her financial situation. However, Porwal doubled down on her take on the partnership.

Any influencer being paid by Shein/Zara/H&M or any other fast fashion brand is accepting money made from slavery, Porwal commented.

The same day that Porwal posted her initial TikTok, Afualo tweeted a response to the criticism. She said critics were reducing [her] character down to nothing more than one deal [they] PERSONALLY dont care for is trash.

Watching thin women try to call my feminism performative after seeing one brand deal they dont like, truly is so rotten, Afualo tweeted.

While @agojaa and March havent posted about whether or not they received backlash for their videos about Afualo, Porwal posted a TikTok saying that she was receiving messages telling her to kill herself for criticizing Afualo.

In her TikTok, she included a screenshot of a tweet that tells Afualo to keep [her] foot on their necks, they being people criticizing Afualo. At the time of publication, the tweet appeared in Afualos likes on Twitter.

In a phone interview with the Daily Dot, Porwal said that the tweet was such a violent thing to say and that Afualo liking it was problematic.

Porwal also told the Daily Dot that Afualo blocked her on TikTok.

That, to me, is a telltale sign of like, you know that youre wrong. And you dont want to be held accountable for what happened, Porwal told the Daily Dot. You dont want to have a conversation.

*First Published: Apr 7, 2022, 2:54 pm CDT

Tricia Crimmins is the IRL staff writer at the Daily Dot. She is also a New York-based comedian studying at Columbia Journalism School. Previously, she has written for Mashable, Complex Networks, and Moment magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @TriciaCrimmins.

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Its the blatant lack of accountability: Anti-misogyny TikTok influencer accused of hypocrisy over Shein partnership - The Daily Dot

Review of Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War, by Matthew E. Stanley (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

How should we remember the Civil War? For many liberals today, the story is one of the North winning the war but losing the peace, acquiescing to a sectional reconciliation that left white supremacy intact. Racism won out, plain and simple.

But this is only part of the story. The precipitous decline in union membership, labor militancy in the workplace, and Marxist scholars in academia have conspired to obscure what historian Matthew Stanley brings to light in his recent book: that the Civil War, for black and white workers alike, was an enduring touchstone for popular struggles from Reconstruction to the New Deal, shaping class consciousness in the process.

Grand Army of Labor:Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War shows how industrial workers, farmers, and radicals deployed an antislavery vernacular in their struggles against Gilded Age and Progressive Era capitalism. They cast themselves as the natural torchbearers of the antebellum free labor ideal, which, they argued, targeted not only chattel slavery, but wage labor heralding what Karl Marx envisioned as a new era of the emancipation of labor.

Stanley details the collective construction of a red Civil War, built by radical workers in countless trade union halls, workshop floors, and third-party soapboxes. In this crimson-hued vision, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln featured as paragons of abolitionism, the vanguard of W.E.B. Du Boiss abolition-democracy. And although the Union Army had crushed the landed aristocracy of the Slave Power, capitalist expansion had bred new monied interests and created new forms of corporate dominance. That despotism called for a new generation of emancipators.

The Knights of Labor a trade union federation founded in 1869 that reached a peak of 800,000 members in the mid-1880s was one prominent organization that brandished Civil War language to fight wage slavery. War gave one kind of master for another, one Knight explained at a Blue and Gray Association meeting in 1886, and wealth once owned by the masters of the South has been transferred to the monopolists of the North and multiplied a hundred-fold in power, and is now enslaving more than the war liberated. The Knights advocated a class-based, cross-racial alliance to wage this next stage of the war for emancipation. They proved remarkably adept at organizing black southerners and convincing their white counterparts of the necessity of it.

In the 1880s and 1890s, agrarian reform parties such as the Greenbackers and Populists mobilized producers across sectional and racial lines. Veterans were central to these campaigns. But the Blue-Gray collaborations in the Populist Party evoked something far different than the white nationalist reunions of the day that often went by the same bichromatic name; devoted instead to causes not yet won, as Stanley argues, the radical worker-veterans and their comrades used the words and wounds of war to envision a left alternative of the producing class liberated from the yoke of economic bondage.

Fittingly, as the Populists spoke in neoabolitionist dialect, their opponents recycled old slurs once hurled at their antebellum forebears. Denounced as Jacobins, socialists, and communists, many Populists at least for a time reveled in bridging wartime divides along class lines as their antagonists waved the bloody shirt or wept over the Lost Cause. Populists harnessed Civil War memory for a very different sort of commemoration, a reconciliation predicated on mutual opposition to elites, to the conditions of industrial capitalism, or to the economic system altogether.

While the Populist movement died out by the mid-1890s, the antislavery vocabulary endured in other class-based projects. The American Socialist Party, founded in 1901, relied heavily on the antislavery vernacular. Socialists frequently spoke of class struggle as an irrepressible conflict and an impending crisis. The Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs cultivated a self-image as a second Great Emancipator, a Midwestern radical vowing to organize the slaves of capital to vote their own emancipation. He asked, Who shall be the John Brown of Wage-Slavery? and answered elsewhere: The Socialist Party.

But as Stanley shows, the radical lefts appropriation of Civil War iconography didnt go unchallenged. The federal governments repression of labor radicalism and left-wing politics during and after World War I elevated a reformist current of Civil War memory over the revolutionary one. The reformist narrative prized social order, legalism, and loyalty to the state wresting the image of Lincoln from the reds and draping him in patriotic cloth.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) played a leading role in repurposing Lincoln. Stanley writes that the AFLs conservative president, Samuel Gompers, envisaged the Civil War not as an inclusive stage of impending proletariat revolution but as a nostalgic event of national trial, rejuvenation, and harmony. To Gompers, this meant not only a balance between labor and capital but, just as importantly, between white workers emphasis on white of all regions of the country. The craft unionism that he espoused excluded black workers en masse.

Gone was the Lincoln who challenged the rights of property on a mass scale with uncompensated wartime confiscation; the AFLs Lincoln stood for conciliation, compromise, and healing. The antislavery vernacular suffered a similar deradicalization. Emancipation now signaled a break from partisanship and labor militancy, an incremental process of reform within capitalism guided by conservative labor leadership. Perhaps most perversely, Lincoln was cast as the great emancipator of white laborers, with antislavery rhetoric retooled to accommodate segregation in the workplace.

In short, the loyalty politics of the AFL economic, patriotic, and racial assimilated organized labor into the US body politic on conservative terms.

A counter-memory of the radical Civil War lived on.

In the 1930s, the red Civil War flourished in Communist Party organizing, particularly with black southerners, who were seen as naturally hostile to the white ruling class. When Black Communists Hosea Hudson and Angelo Herndon likened their organizing efforts to a restored abolitionism that might finish the job of freeing the Negroes, white comrades agreed, Stanley writes. When James S. Allen, a Marxist historian of Reconstruction and editor of the Communist Partys newspaper the Southern Worker, penned a defense of the Scottsboro Boys, it represented to many Southern whites a reconstituted carpetbagger threat. Allen himself saw the Communist Party as a means by which to complete the unfinished tasks of revolutionary Reconstruction.

The Cold War ultimately decimated the labor left and with it the anti-capitalist and anti-racist revolutionary exemplar of the Civil War. But Stanleys exhaustively researched and illuminating study reveals just how durable the cultural counterinsurgency of Civil War memory has been. As thousands of labor activists and organizers had long insisted, and as too many Americans have long since forgotten, the struggle of the 1860s was never just a national one or a racial one but one about liberation from all manners of despotism. It was a blow to white supremacy that heralded a broader emancipation a more devastating blow to the rule of property.

For todays socialists, the history of the American Civil War can again be plumbed for inspiration in fashioning an anti-capitalist, anti-racist politics and a radical vernacular for solidarity and revolutionary transformation. The red Civil War is ours for the taking.

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The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left - Jacobin magazine

PALM BEACH Calls for solidarity echoed through Palm Beach and downtown West Palm Beach on Saturday afternoon as about 400farmworkers and supporters marched to call attention to what they say are unfair and exploitative working conditions perpetuated by Wendy's.

The five-mile March to End Modern Slavery in the Fields" kicked off Saturday at about 1:15 p.m. as farmworkers withthe Coalition of Immokalee Workerscalled on the fast-food restaurant chain to join the Fair Food Program.

The program targets assault, verbal and physical abuse, wage theft and the mistreatment of farm workers nationwide.

"It's about justice," Toms Terraza, a 43-year-oldfarmworker who livesnear Homestead, said in Spanish. "We're fighting for our basic rights in the fields, inconstruction, in roofing and in many different job fields."

Terraza said all workers need access to legal resources if their rights are violated at work. Hot weather, inadequate access to clean drinking water and few rest periods make farm work dangerous, he said.

The march targeted Wendy's Board Chairman Nelson Peltz, who lives in Palm Beach. Organizers said they hope toput pressure on Wendy's top decision-maker to start conversations on their concerns about working conditions.

As the United States gets warmer, outdoor workers and farmworkers are at increased risk for heat-related injuries and death.

Though heat-related injuries are hard to track and likely undercounted, excessive heat seriously injured nearly 70,000 U.S. workers and killed 783 peoplebetween 1992 and 2016, per federal data gatheredby the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, PBS News Hour reported last August.

"They must listen to us,"Terraza said of Wendy's and other food companies. "They have to recognize and uphold human rights."

Agriculture in Palm Beach County: Opinion | End the injustice of sugarcane burning

More: 'Almost impossible': Food banks struggle to feed needy as pandemic keeps volunteers away

Lack of care and resources for workers tasked with harvesting the nation's food leads to exploitation, organizer Gerardo Rayes-Chvez said.

"Since I was a kid I've been working in the fields," Rayes-Chvez said of his 14 seasons picking oranges, tomatoes and watermelon. "Now I'morganizing people in the fields ... the dignity of workers is at stake here."

The Fair Food Program is an antidote to exploitation, according to Reyes-Chvez.

McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Yum! Brandsand Chipotle, as well as major grocers and food service companies such as Whole Foods, Walmart, Aramark and Compass, have joined the Fair Food Program,the coalition said.

Saturday's march garnered support from farmworkers around Florida and as far away as Minnesota and Vermont. Attendees wore T-shirts that identified them with worker's groups that read "We Count!" and "Justice for Farmworkers," and "Worker Power. Tenant Power. People Power."

Poetry, music, call-and-response, and a theatre-like performance called on marchers to demand change from U.S.-based fast food and chain restaurants.

In the case of Wendy's, aspokeswomantold the Palm Beach Daily News and Palm Beach Post on Thursday that the company sourcesfood such as tomatoes"exclusively from indoor, hydroponic greenhouse farms," while the Fair Food Program operates in outdoortomato growing and harvesting environments.

"The idea that joining the Fair Food Program, and purchasing field-grown, commodity tomatoes, is the only way that Wendys can demonstrate responsibility in our supply chain is not true," spokeswomanHeidiSchauer wrote in a statement to the newspapers.

The organization saidKerry Kennedy, an attorney who is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, andArchbishop of Miami Thomas Wenski participated in the march.

Other members of the South Florida faith community supported the mission Saturday.

Kim Roblez, the 40-year-old pastor of Miami Shores Presbyterian Church, brought a group of congregants to the march to show solidarity with farmworkers.

"We're coming because we believe that Jesus was one that always stood with the oppressed and marginalized and it's our call to do the same," she said. "I would like to see the entire industry change so we don't have any more abuses in the fields."

Speakers and poets at Saturday's rally shared testimonials from farmworkers that included people being injured on the job, not having access to clean water to drink while working, and being sexually harassed and at times assaulted while working on farms.

Rayes-Chvez, who lives in Immokalee, said the Fair Food Program allows workers the right to complain about working conditions without fear of retaliation, the right to be parts of health and safety committees and frequent assessments of working conditions.

"We need to work free of abuses that include modern-day slavery. That is a serial killer as well as sexual assault and child labor. We need zero tolerance," he said.

The 2016 march generated controversy because of geographiclimits Palm Beachhadset on the march. In the end, about 500 people protested through town streets on March 12, 2016, and the town later paid more than $160,000 in attorneys' fees and costs after a federal lawsuit filed by the march organizers.

kkokal@pbpost.com

@katikokal

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Farmworkers protest for end to 'slavery in the fields,' target Wendy's chairman - Palm Beach Post

SLAVERY is an abomination; it never should be or should have been tolerated. I can guarantee you that nobody in my family as far back in the generations I can trace ever owned a slave or a plantation. My ancestors who had gainful employment didnt have philanthropic employers and were paid as little as the Establishment thought they could get away with. It is a fallacy to suggest that society in general profited from historical slavery, it was the few in the Establishment who did so and to suggest that the common man in the UK profited from it is farcical.

When the UK is still struggling to right the wrongs done to the Windrush Generation its ridiculous that its in vogue to apologise for the actions of a few long-dead capitalists who were handsomely rewarded firstly for being involved in the slave trade and then again from the public purse when the practice was outlawed. The fact that today we have a Government-mandated minimum wage that is recognised to be less than the living wage shows that the Establishments attitude towards the workforce hasnt changed dramatically. Dare I mention P&O?

Why todays politicians and activists feel the need to apologise for the actions of a few individuals who profited from slavery beats me, as it does nothing for those who were adversely affected by the practice and the descendants of those who profited from the trade carry on regardless. What about all the Scots who were forced off the land and made to emigrate; does that not warrant a few statues being tumbled?

David J Crawford, Glasgow.

FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE BANKS

I ENVY Rosemary Goring ("The customer is no longer king. The customer is now always on hold", The Herald, March 30). At least she can vent her anger and frustration in a column in a national newspaper. Her bank will continue to treat her like dirt, as all our banks treat us all, but at least shes got it off her chest. The rest of us suffer the same contempt and indifference with no steam valves available. My own bank used to be Scottish, venerable and customer-friendly. Now it has changed its name to a tabloid jingle and seems to think I should be more interested in getting cash back if I spend money in the fawning retail outlets it has signed up than actually having someone to talk to when I need it.

Ms Goring captures graphically the telephone misery and will-to-live erosion of trying to phone them. Clicking contact us on their website leads you on a fruitless game trying to dodge their traps to force you down one of their predetermined routes to bland generic nothingness. They never offer even an email address where you can state your issue and wait for an answer. This would waste their time and its far preferable for them to waste yours. Of course they have no trouble issuing emails to you when it suits them. But try replying to their email and you will swiftly be told no one reads such replies and you should go to the website. In my professional life I used to act for a bank. If I had treated it as my client the way it now treats me I would have been rightly and summarily terminated.

We really ought to be able to fight back. Banks are far from the only culprits among the corporate mighty. But lets start with them. Is there any bank out there which promises and achieves instant telephone and email availability the way helpful businesses do? How about a league table putting banks into a pecking order in these respects? I for one would happily switch to the league leader. Right now banks cant contain their indifference to the plight of an individual customer. But if we start to move away in droves?

Donald B Reid, Bearsden.

WHY THE RAGE AGAINST MUIRBURN?

IT was very interesting to read the report on the fire on the island of Gruinard ("Island of Death fire gives native wildlife the chance to regrow", The Herald, March 30). The gist of the report was that a controlled fire would have a beneficial effect on allowing regrowth of native species and hence native fauna. This is in contrast to uncontrolled moorland fires which actually burn the underlying peat and cause a massive release of carbon dioxide and are extremely difficult to extinguish.

I wonder why then there have been several letters to The Herald criticising muirburn on sporting estates? Could it possibly be that they are ignoring the facts and the welfare of native flora and fauna in order to wage war on sporting estates and the rural economy in some ill-conceived attempt to wage a class war?

David Stubley, Prestwick.

KITCHEN SMOKE ALARMS ARE TOAST

RICK Lawrie (Letters, March 31) asks if someone can explain why his old smoke alarm is activated when he burns the toast whilst his new system is not.

Smoke alarms are no longer recommended for use in the kitchen and heat sensors should be used instead. If the new system is, as he says, correctly installed it should include a heat sensor in the kitchen and not a smoke alarm. The new system should reduce if not eliminate false alarms from burnt toast.

David Clark, Tarbolton.

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Letters: Forget the row about slavery: when are we going to see apologies to the Scots who were forced off the land? - HeraldScotland

Low-wage migrant workers have been forced to pay billions of dollars in recruitment fees to secure their jobs in World Cup host nation Qatar over the past decade, a Guardian investigation has found.

Bangladeshi men migrating to Qatar are likely to have paid about $1.5bn (1.14bn) in fees, and possibly as high as $2bn, between 2011 and 2020. Nepali men are estimated to have paid around $320m, and possibly more than $400m, in the four years between mid-2015 to mid-2019.

The total cost incurred by Qatars low-wage migrant workforce is likely to be far higher because workers from other labour-sending countries in south Asia and Africa also pay high fees.

Migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal, who make up around a third of Qatars 2-million strong foreign workforce, typically pay fees of $3,000 to $4,000 and $1,000 to $1,500 respectively. This means that many low-wage workers from Bangladesh who can earn as little as $275 a month have to work for at least a year just to pay off their recruitment fees.

With just months to go until the World Cup kicks off, the findings reveal the scale of exploitation endured by some of the worlds poorest workers, including many who have been employed on World Cup-related construction and hospitality projects.

The figures, which have been calculated by the Guardian and corroborated by a number of labour rights groups, are an estimate based on the prevalence and cost of recruitment fees and related expenses reported by numerous human rights groups and labour experts between 2014 and 2022.

The charging of recruitment fees is illegal in Qatar and beyond a maximum limit in Nepal and Bangladesh, but the practice is widespread and deeply entrenched. It is commonplace in all the Gulf countries. The figures calculated by the Guardian include all fees, including those within the maximum limit.

It takes different forms, but often sees companies or brokers in Qatar and recruitment agents in labour-sending countries colluding to force workers into paying for their own recruitment. The fees are paid to agents in workers home countries before departure.

Workers often have to take out high-interest loans or sell land to afford the fees, leaving them vulnerable to debt bondage a form of modern slavery as they are unable to leave their jobs until the debt has been repaid.

Despite the costs, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi and Nepali workers continue to seek work in the Gulf and beyond each year, largely due to a lack of jobs and low wages at home. Many pay the fees knowing the risks but calculating that it will pay off in the long term.

Their dilemma was plain to see in the departure hall at Kathmandus international airport, where workers made hurried video calls to their families, thick red tikka smeared on their foreheads; a symbol of good wishes from friends.

Im feeling really worried, said one worker, going abroad for the first time. But I have to go. I have money problems.

Another, taking up a construction job in Qatar, waved goodbye to his baby son on his phone. Im so sad to be leaving my children, he said. I paid 150,000 [Nepalese] rupees [NPR] [$1,230]. The agent told me, If you want to go, you have to pay.

The Qatari authorities say they have taken steps to address the problem by opening recruitment centres in eight countries, starting in 2018, where workers must go to complete various administrative tasks and sign their contracts before departure.

While the centres may have reduced the incidence of contract substitution where workers find different terms and conditions in Qatar to what they were promised at home experts said they have done little to curb recruitment fees, because these are paid much earlier in the recruitment process.

A 2021 report on recruitment between Nepal and Qatar led by migrant rights group FairSquare said Qatar has largely seen recruitment and fee payment as an origin state concern, and recruiters have generally been subject to relatively limited regulation.

However, the local organising committee of the World Cup introduced a scheme in 2018 to ensure companies with stadium contracts repay the recruitment fees of their workers, as well as some workers on other projects. Workers are not required to show proof that they have paid fees, which is almost impossible to do given that the practice is illegal. Companies have pledged to repay roughly $28.5m to about 49,000 workers. So far around $22m has been reimbursed.

The number of workers who will benefit, however, is only a tiny fraction of the total in Qatar. In many cases, the repayments only cover part of the recruitment fees, and do not provide any additional compensation or account for the cost of the workers loans.

The Guardian understands the scheme has also not been extended to thousands of workers in the hospitality sector who are playing a direct role in the World Cup. Last year, the Guardian interviewed workers in Fifa-endorsed hotels who said they had paid recruitment fees of up to $2,750.

The supreme committee organising the World Cup said in a statement, We remain committed to delivering the legacy we promised. A legacy that improves lives and lays the foundation for fair, sustainable, and lasting labour reforms.

Narad Nath Bharadwaj, a former Nepal ambassador to Qatar, called the practice a gruesome story, saying more than 90% of workers pay fees.

Payment is illegal and mostly takes place under the table, so the workers have no proof they have paid. But they are unable to get a job if they do not pay 150,000 or 200,000 NPR. For better jobs the rate is higher, he said.

While some workers are recruited for free or minimal cost, the vast majority are forced to pay; often victims of deals between employers and agents in Qatar and a chain of recruiters and brokers in Nepal and Bangladesh.

In some cases, employers or agents in Qatar secure visas to recruit workers and then demand kickbacks of about $300 to $500 for each worker from agents in labour-sending countries in exchange for the visas, the cost of which is passed on to workers.

A report for the Qatar Foundation said: The costs borne by workers are essentially bribes demanded (extorted) by recruitment agents to secure the jobs in Qatar for which they enter into debt with high-interest rates.

Bangladeshi workers, like Aman Ullah, pay by far the highest fees. In 2016, Ullah was charged 360,000 taka ($4,190) for a job in Qatar. He was promised work as a welder on a monthly wage of 2,500 Qatari rial ($686), but on arrival, he was taken out to the desert to work on a farm for 800 rial.

There was no limit to the work, he said. We had no electricity or air-conditioning and were not allowed to leave the compound. His employer would not let him return home until he begged for permission to visit his sick mother. Back in Bangladesh, with nothing to show for his time in Qatar, his debt had ballooned to 800,000 taka forcing him to take out further loans to pay off the original debt.

Even in death, workers are not released from their recruitment debt. Hoping to earn money for his daughters dowry, Mahamad Nadaf Mansur Dhuniya, from Nepal, paid an agent 150,000 NPR for a construction job in Qatar in 2018. He could only afford the fee by taking out a loan with an annual interest rate of 48%. Last year, he was found hanging in his workplace.

His wife, Mairul Khatun, is unsure why he killed himself. I think it may have been the pressure of the loan, his daughters marriage, the need to look after his family, she said, from her home in southern Nepal.

Her hands and feet are smeared in mud from labouring in the nearby fields, for which she earns 300 NPR a day and a few potatoes, which lie on the ground beside her.

She may have lost her husband, but his debt remains. I have a lot of tension now. Before, we sometimes ate meat and milk but weve stopped now. How can we afford these things? Khatun said. I cant sleep at night.

The Qatar government said companies involved in illegal recruitment practices have been severely punished. Twenty four recruitment agencies were recently shut down and had their licences revoked for breaking Qatars laws.

A spokesperson said: There are complex challenges that need to be overcome to protect economic migrants globally, including in Europe. For its part, Qatar is committed to eradicating illegal recruitment practices in its labour market and supporting efforts to tackle abuse and exploitation throughout the global economy.

Dr Ahmed Munirus Saleheen of Bangladeshs ministry of expatriates welfare and overseas employment said: The government of Bangladesh is strongly committed to ensuring safe, orderly, regular and responsible work migration.

He blamed visa trading by middlemen in both the country of origin and destination for the high cost of recruitment and said legal action was immediately taken against recruitment agencies when complaints of unfair recruitment practices were received.

The Nepal government did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at http://www.befrienders.org

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Revealed: migrant workers in Qatar forced to pay billions in recruitment fees - The Guardian

I FIND it difficult to rationalise David Livingstone being included in the report purporting he was an integral figure in Glasgows complicity in Atlantic slavery (City statues singled out for links to slave trade, The Herald, March 29). To imply that as a child labourer from the age of 10 in H Monteiths Blantyre Mill earning money first to support his parental household including seven siblings, and later his medical studies, he was somehow condoning the mill owners partnership with two Glasgow West India merchants is surely stretching into the realms of fantasy.

Furthermore, from study of his diary and other writings it is abundantly clear that he was totally opposed to slavery. For example, in a letter to the editor of the New York Herald he wrote: And if my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian slavery should lead to the suppression of the east coast slave trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together. It is also recorded on the legend board on the site of the former slave market site in Zanzibar, The trade in men, women and children was stopped by decree from the Sultan of Zanzibar following the appeal made by Dr David Livingstone in 1857 to the men of the English Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to liberate Africa from slavery.

Finally, the brass plaque on his grave in Westminster Abbey includes reference to his effort to abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa. David Livingstones Glasgow statue can rightly be regarded as commemorating his anti-slavery stance.

Jon Cossar, Edinburgh.

* BILL Brown (Letters, March 30) bemoans the invasion of "woke" issues in our daily lives and cites the example of two brave British soldiers and their heroic military achievements, both of whom had historical links with slavery.

He then adds that the British Army's links with the slave trade were rightly ignored and that their heroic deeds could not have been carried through if they had disobeyed orders and dissociated themselves from those "attitudes".

Mr Brown ends with the words "is it fair to punish someone for obeying orders and being like everyone else of that time?"

Very similar words were applied at the time of the Nuremberg trials. The Nazis obeyed orders too.

Kevin Orr, Bishopbriggs.

MASKS ARE FOR GOOD OF SOCIETY

MARK Innes (Letters, March 28) does some very selective quoting. If he thinks "there is no evidence that cloth and surgical masks offer any protection against viruses" then he should ask himself why we see most people wearing them in those cities in Far East countries which have learned to cope with MERS and SARS, and now Covid. These are countries which cumulatively, relative to population size, have done far better than us.

I think he shares a common confusion that the usual face masks work by protecting the wearer directly. I do agree that, if you are indoors in a ward full of Covid sufferers, you will need much stronger and more expensive masks, like a surgeon in an operating theatre. But outside of this, in shops and public transport, the usual masks work well but in a different way. They work by protecting others from the wearer, who may not know he or she is infectious. The difference is that Covid virus that is breathed out wants to hitch a ride on a tiny water droplet or cloud of vapour. The mask interferes with that, and stops it going very far (the details depend on an understanding of fluid mechanics).

Thus we are talking about a public health measure, where we do something to protect others for the good of society, and not thinking only about protecting ourselves. Alas, wearing face masks only works well if almost everyone complies. Thus if most of us stop wearing them then their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Peter Gray, Aberdeen.

ANDREW AND A MOTHER'S LOVE

I AM sure that most, if not all, were impressed with the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey, particularly with the address by the Right Reverend David Connor, the Dean of Windsor, which was so fitting in content and delivery ("Andrew plays prominent role in memorial service to Prince Philip", The Herald, March 30). What did take most people by some surprise was the high profile of the disgraced Duke of York in escorting the Queen to her place in the Abbey.

The background to his involvement in this way is not known. Did Andrew promote his own significant involvement in this way? Did his mother request his assistance in particular? Whatever the reason, the Queen was openly declaring that, in spite of everything, she still finds time for her son and one is reminded of the words of Washington Irving: "A mothers love endures through all."

Ian W Thomson, Lenzie.

* RE Denis Bruce's comments on the "streamlined royal family of the future" (Letters, March 29), we are certainly witnessing the end of an era. Even the Commonwealth, so close to the Queens heart, may be on borrowed time. Our colonial past was of its time; we cannot change history.

A streamlined institution under William as king may well fit the bill and, with it, a more modest lifestyle. He and Kate must move with the times, and will, I am sure.

Brian D Henderson, Glasgow.

LODGING, A COMPLAINT

DAVID Miller comments on the 2 a month he was paid as an apprentice accountant in the 1950s (Letters, March 30). In 1955 I applied for a student apprenticeship with a luxury car maker of that time. The wage was 3/15s a month but it was a condition of employment that all students had to stay in the firms hostel for which the charge was 4 a month. On successful completion of the first year, the wage increased to 4/5s a month. I declined the offer.

David Waters, Blackwood.

ALARMING OCCURRENCES

CAN somebody explain to me why my old-style smoke alarms which I retained alongside my new, all-singing, all-dancing and expensive system go off when I burn the toast but the new system does not? It does however spring into action with a dreadful din all over the house when somebody is vaping, which is an apparently harmless pastime.

The system is correctly installed. This is a bit worrying, to say the least.

Rick Lawrie, Aberdour.

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Letters: It is a nonsense to put David Livingstone in the line of fire over slavery links - HeraldScotland

Modern slavery has become a major talking point in recent years.

Many of us are familiar with the statistics: 40.3 million people are a victim of modern slavery, half of which perform forced labour. While not uncontentious, these figures are now well-known thanks to the advocacy of public figures and politicians.

While the abuses described by the term modern slavery do sadly occur, there are reasons to suggest that modern slavery is being weaponised for political purposes.

The big, invisible problem of modern slavery allows the global system of production and its exploitative features to continue relatively unopposed;it is a useful tool in trade warsand it helps to control the borders.

Modern slavery is a non-partisan issue. No one in their right mind is in favour of slavery.

Problematically, modern slavery is ill-defined: it evokes historical slavery and the most shocking kinds of exploitation. Neither of these facts does people being exploited much good.

The term modern slavery describes abuses such as forced marriage, domestic servitude, bonded labour, and other forms of exploitation where labour is performed under the threat of punishment without the possibility for victims to leave the abusive situation.

Modern slavery is obscured from view while simultaneously occurring right under our nose. It taints the products that we all consume every day, while every business is at risk of being linked to modern slavery that occurs deep in their supply chains.

There is truth to all of this. And yet, without trivialising the abuses that people suffer, we should ask why politicians have become so devoted to addressing this elusive problem.

Arguably, modern slavery is hyperbole that shifts the Overton Window.

This term refers to the broadening of public debate: notions that were previously deemed to be radical become more commonly accepted when the Overton Window expands.

Why is this relevant for modern slavery?

Up until a few years ago, few people would have been familiar with modern slavery. In contrast, the existence of sweatshops in developing countries was relatively well-known. Slavery, however, was considered a thing of the past.

Crucially, conditions in sweatshops do not technically constitute modern slavery. People in sweatshops generally do not perform labour under threat and are usually free to leave.

To be clear: people working in sweatshops do have their labour and human rights routinely violated, but they are not commonly subjected to forced labour.

The point is that all the attention for modern slavery detracts from lesser abuses such as long hours, low wages, disregard for health and safety in the workplace, repression of organised labour, and other forms of hardship experienced by workers.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that if fashion brands would have inspected their supply chains looking for modern slavery, they would likely not have prevented the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed 1,134 garment workers.

The UK introduced its Modern Slavery Act in 2015and Australia followed in 2018.

The acts require entities meeting a revenue threshold to report on modern slavery risks in operations and supply chains, actions taken to address the risks, and progress being made.

Both the Modern Slavery Act in the UK and in Australia were introduced by conservative governments. This is remarkable for several reasons.

Conservatives have a dislike for red tape, they are not the defenders of the downtroddenand they are typically free marketeers and champions of global trade.

Why would conservatives go against their own ideological agenda? The answer is simple: they are not.

No red tape is created, as there are no sanctions for non-compliance. In the UK, two in five companies are non-compliant. Entities do not regard reporting to be too onerous either, with the average length of statements of ASX200-listed companies being only eight pages.

Conservative governments have also not suddenly become the champions of the working people. In both the UK and Australia, conservative governments suppress wage growth, undermine job securityand agitate against trade unions and their members.

Finally, by producing modern slavery statements, business operations and supply chains arguably become sanitised.

No modern slavery found? Nothing to see here!

I am not, of course, suggesting that modern slavery does not exist, or that businesses should not examine their operations and supply chains to identify labour exploitation.

What I am saying is that there is a significant degree of political opportunism at play.

The attention to the plight of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region in China is an example of this.

While concerns expressed by Western governments about forced labour in Xinjiang are justified, they became especially prominent in the context of the trade war between Western nations and China, while the abuse of Uyghurs has been known for two decades.

A bill proposed in Australia would prohibit the import of goods produced using forced labour. Similar legislation already exists in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Labor has identified 64 goods from 41 countries as being tainted by forced labour.

At present, 62 Withhold Release Orders have been issued for goods from 11 countries, meaning that U.S. customs are holding these goods. 44 of such orders (70 per cent of the orders that have been issued) relate to goods from China.

While China is the workshop of the world, and although concerns about forced labour are legitimate, modern slavery does seem to be used as a tool in the trade war with China.

The UK and Australia are countries where border control is something of a political fetish.

The Australian Border Force (ABF) is responsible for the implementation of the Modern Slavery Act, including offering guidance to reporting entities about compliance, a task that the corporate regulator (ASIC) or the workplace regulator (FWO) would arguably be better at.

On the first day that the Australian borders reopened for international travellers, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) immediately expressed concern that criminals would seek to exploit eased travel restrictions by trafficking people and exploiting them in Australia.

The attention towards human trafficking and modern slavery seems to have a lot to do with deciding who gets to enter and possibly stay in Australia,and under what conditions.

The UK is also a good case in point, where some must wait over 500 days to see whether their claim to be a victim of trafficking or modern slavery is confirmed by authorities, or whether they will be prosecuted for a crime they may have been forced to commit.

The proposed UK Border and Nationality Bill adds insult to injury.

It seeks to introduce deadlines by which modern slavery victims need to come forward to be eligible for supportand it increases the burden of proof against which the claims of abuse will be tested, while limiting the situations in which leave to remain in the UK is granted.

Australia will review its own Modern Slavery Act in 2022. Australians should also be on the lookout for a Draconian border bill, introduced in the name of addressing modern slavery.

Martijn BoersmaisAssociate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at the University of Notre Dame Australia.

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Modern slavery shouldn't be weaponised by conservative governments - Independent Australia