Category Archives: Wage Slavery

The Supreme Court has set itself on a collision course with the forces of change in an inexorably diversifying America.

The six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed by GOP presidents and senators representing the voters least exposed, and often most hostile, to the demographic and cultural changes remaking 21st-century American life. Now the GOP Court majority is moving at an accelerating pace to impose that coalitions preferences on issues such as abortion, voting rights, and affirmative action.

On all of these fronts, and others, the Republican justices are siding with what America has beena mostly white, Christian, and heavily rural nationover the urbanized, racially and religiously diverse country America is becoming.

The Court seems to be pulling the United States back into a prior era without regard for changing notions and understandings of equity, equality, and fairness, Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me. It is about almost trying to maintain a 1940s, 1950s view of what the United States is and what its obligations are to its citizens.

In this backward-facing crusade, the majority may be risking the kind of political explosion that rocked the Court at two pivotal earlier moments in American history, the 1850s and 1930s. In each of those decades, a Supreme Court that also was nominated and confirmed primarily by a political coalition reflecting an earlier majority similarly positioned itself as a bulwark against the preferences of the emerging America. In the 1850s, the Court tried to block the new Republican Partys agenda to stop the spread of slavery just as the Abraham Lincolnera GOP was establishing itself as the dominant political force in the free states; in the 1930s, the Court sought to derail newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelts agenda to manage the economy, regulate business, and expand the social safety net just as his New Deal electoral coalition was beginning decades of electoral dominance.

Read: The revolution will be improvised

Though the legal battles of the 1850s, the 1930s, and today turn on different policies and personalities across three different centuries, they ultimately raise the same question: How long will rising generations allow what Roosevelt called the dead hand of a Court rooted in an earlier time to block their priorities?

No possible revisions to the Courts structurebe they adding members or imposing term limitsnow seem politically viable, but that could change through the 2020s if the GOP majority continues on its aggressive trajectory. Robert P. Jones, the founder and CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, predicts that the GOP majoritys attempt to wrench this country back to a time when a conservative Christian white hierarchy set societys cultural norms and expectations will eventually ignite rising demands for reform. If it is consistently clearly moving in a trajectory that people know is out of step with the country, then were really in a democratic crisis, he told me. Not because of people assaulting the Capitol but because the institutions have lost their legitimacy and people see them as really exercises in raw power.

Because justices typically serve for long periods, the Court always bears the imprint of earlier presidents (who nominated them) and senators (who confirmed them). But that characteristic can become much more combustible when justices installed by an earlier political majority systematically move to block the agenda of the coalition that succeeds it.

One example came in the 1850s when the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Roger Taney regularly sided with the South in legal disputes over slavery. That struggle peaked in 1857 when the Court issued the notorious Dred Scott decision, declaring that freed Black people could never be citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the western territories.

Democrats had dominated the White House for roughly three decades before the decision, and the South had dominated the partys view toward slavery in that era. That was reflected in the Courts composition when it ruled on Dred Scott: At that point, seven of its nine members had been appointed by Democratic presidents who were either southerners (Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk) or northerners committed to protecting slavery (Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce.)

But the ruling came as the free states were largely outstripping the South in both population and economic output, and the new Republican Party was emerging as their dominant political voice.

Precisely as the GOP was rising in influence, the Dred Scott decision essentially declared unconstitutional its platform, which was grounded on a promise to block the expansion of slavery into the territories.

Events overran the Taney Courts efforts to defend slavery when Lincoln, as the GOPs second nominee ever, won the presidency in 1860, and the South seceded before he took office. After the Civil War, the GOP congressional majorities settled their prewar struggle with the Supreme Court by approving the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments that ended slavery, established citizenship for the freed people, and sought to guarantee them civil and voting rights. (It was both ironic and tragic when Supreme Court justices chosen mostly by Lincolns Republican successors allowed white southerners to undermine those protections through a procession of late-19th-century rulings that opened the door to separate but equal segregation.)

The conservative justices appointed mostly by Republican presidents from Lincoln through Herbert Hoovera period when the GOP controlled the White House for 56 of 72 yearsprecipitated the next confrontation between an emerging political majority and a Court rooted in an older era. When FDR took office in 1933, seven of the Courts nine members had been appointed by those earlier Republican presidents. The justices ideological leanings did not align with their partisan pedigree as completely then as they do todayDemocratic President Woodrow Wilson appointed one of the Courts staunch conservatives and Hoover one of its top liberalsbut GOP choices dominated the right-leaning bloc that controlled the Court.

Starting in the 1890s, that conservative Court majority steadily invalidated progressive-era state and federal laws to limit working hours, ban child labor, impose a federal income tax, break up monopolies, and establish a minimum wage. As radical and reform movements sprang up to combat the injustices of the industrial era, conservative judges saw themselves as fighting a holy war to protect American traditions of individual liberty, as the historian Jeff Shesol wrote in Supreme Power, his 2010 book about FDRs confrontations with the Court.

Read: The bitter origins of the fight over big government

The crusading zeal of the Courts conservative majority crashed directly into the agenda of Roosevelt and the massive Democratic congressional majorities elected in 1932. Through FDRs first years, the Supreme Court overturned a succession of his New Deal laws.

Roosevelt and his contemporaries viewed his confrontations with the Court as a battle against the lingering influence of a defeated and displaced political coalition. Robert Jackson, who served FDR as attorney general and later was a Supreme Court justice himself, flatly described the judiciary as the check of a preceding generation on the current one and nearly always the check of a rejected regime on the one in being.

This extended struggle (which peaked in the 193536 Court session) inspired Roosevelts 1937 proposal to pack the Court by adding more members. That legislation famously failed, but as Congress weighed it, two of the Courts conservatives tilted toward support of key New Deal laws in a new round of casesthe heralded switch in time that saved nine. This confrontation ended when deaths and retirement allowed FDR to appoint a liberal majority on the Court, which Democrats reinforced while holding the White House and the Senate for most of the period from 1932 to 1968.

Its unlikely that todays Democratseven though they have won the popular vote in an unprecedented seven of the past eight presidential electionscan establish anything near the lasting political dominance of the Lincoln-era Republicans or the FDR-era Democrats. Yet the rising conflict between the party and the GOP Court majority parallels these earlier episodes in one key respect.

In both the 1850s and the 1930s, the conservative Court majority spoke for the forces most resistant to a changing Americain the first instance, the southerners alarmed about the growing population advantage of the industrializing North; in the second, both the small-town and rural conservatives hostile to big cities swelling with immigrants and the Gilded Age business tycoons fighting new demands from workers and consumers.

Now, as then, a conservative Court majority rooted in the places least affected by change is asserting a central role in the political struggle between Americas past and future. Consider religion. White Christians, who constituted a majority of Americans for most of the nations history, have fallen to about 44 percent of the total as the nation has grown more demographically and religiously diverse, according to the latest PRRI national data. But in PRRI surveys, about two-thirds of Republicans still identify as white Christians (a level last reached for the country overall in the mid-1990s). In 25 states, white Christians now constitute 49 percent of the population or more, per the PRRIs findings. In 2020, Donald Trump won 18 of them. Those same states elected 37 of the 50 Republican senators.

Immigration tells a similar story. The share of Americans born abroad has been steadily rising toward its highest level since the Melting Pot era at the turn of the 20th century. But Trump in 2020 won only two of the 20 states with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents, according to census figures, and Republicans hold only four of their 40 Senate seats. The GOP tilts toward the places least affected by immigration: Trump won 17 of the 20 states with the lowest share of foreign-born residents, and those same states elected 33 of the 50 GOP senators. Combined, those 20 low-immigration states account for only a little more than one-fifth of the nations total population.

The same contrast extends to measures of economic change. Republicans dominate the states with the fewest college graduates but struggle in those with the most, as well as in the states where the highest share of the workforce is employed in science, engineering, and computer occupations, all defining industries of the new knowledge economy. The 22 states with the biggest share of such workers have elected just six Republican senators, while fully 31 of the GOPs Senate caucus represent the 20 states with the smallest share of such employment, according to census figures. Republicans are much stronger in states that rely on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: agriculture, energy extraction, and manufacturing.

Centered in these places least affected by all the transitions remaking 21st-century America, what Ive called the Republican coalition of restoration has developed a much more critical view of social and demographic change than the rest of society. In PRRI polling, for instance, although two-thirds of Republicans say abortion should be illegal in all or most circumstances, 70 percent of all other Americans say it should remain legal in all or most cases. While a 55 percent majority of Republicans say small-business owners should be permitted to deny service to same-sex couples on religious grounds, almost three-fourths of everyone else disagrees. And while about three-fourths of Republicans say discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against Black people, more than two-thirds of everyone else rejects that idea.

Yet on these fronts and others, the GOP-appointed Court majority appears ready to tilt the law sharply toward the coalition of restorations preferences. Warbelow, of the Human Rights Campaign, said that by declaring its intention to reconsider earlier rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and perhaps other fronts such as public prayer, the GOP majority is inverting the Courts usual motivation for revisiting precedent. Historically when the Court has done so, she said, it has been to rectify past wrongs in a way that creates greater rights for all Americans. But the cases that the Court is now considering are not about expanding rights; they are about restricting rights [and] perpetuating a very narrow view of who should be able to operate fully within the world.

Compounding that tension is another dynamic: The Republican Court majority is growing more aggressive as the groups most threatened by its direction are growing in numbers.

The 2020 census, for instance, was the first time that kids of color constituted a majority of the nations under-18 population, and the class that enters school in September is projected to be the last one ever in which white students will compose a majority of the nations public-high-school graduates, according to federal projections. Yet precisely at this moment, the GOP majority appears ready to further constrain, or perhaps eliminate entirely, the affirmative-action programs for minority admissions to colleges and universities that the Court has authorized in one form or another since a landmark 1978 ruling. Similarly, the Court majority has repeatedly retrenched federal voting-rights protections for minorities even as kids of color compose the majority of citizens turning 18 in many of the red states moving most forcefully to limit voter access.

Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution

The Courts upcoming rulings on abortion could trigger similar conflict with generations of younger women who have grown up assuming that right would be perennially available. And though the Court has generally favored expanding rights for same-sex couples, an overturning of Roe that weakens the right to privacy could eventually threaten some of their gains as well, even as far more young people than ever before openly identify in polls as part of the LGBTQ community. A Roe reversal, in fact, could be just the first domino threatening other rulings that have allowed for greater personal freedom in many areas of family life and intimate relationships.

Most Court watchers believe the fear of losing legitimacy led Chief Justice John Roberts to sand down some of the sharpest edges from rulings while the GOP Justices held only a 54 majority, until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death in 2020. But with Republicans now holding a 63 advantageand five justices clearly to his rightwhatever restraining influence Roberts once had has been attenuated, as demonstrated by the willingness of those five to outvote him and the three Democratic appointees on this weeks case on voting rights in Alabama. Now a wide array of groups rooted in the changing Americaparticularly organizations that advocate for greater equity on grounds of race, gender, and sexual orientationare openly wondering what boundaries, if any, will constrain the GOP majority.

Shesol, the historian, thinks the answer is: very few. Hes dubious that the conservative majority will moderate over time, or that even a big public backlash against its decisions will deter it. If you look back over the centuries, he said, Court majorities have been pretty good at riding it out when they face public criticism. They are very insulated by design.

The 1930s confrontation between a conservative Court and President Roosevelt that Shesol chronicled might be the most visible exception to that rule. But, he noted, the majority that backed down before FDR had been blocking progressive legislation for decades and may have lost some of its energy for the fight. To Shesol, this Court looks more like the conservative Court majorities at the height of their power around the turn of the 20th century than the depleted version Roosevelt ultimately conquered.

The 1930s was the end game, Shesol told me. Given the youth of these justices, given the scale of their majority on the Court, and given their zealousness, I worry we are in a similar situation as the 1890sthat we are in the beginning stages of a decades-long struggle.

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The Supreme Court Is on a Doomed Crusade - The Atlantic

Aramex drivers have been watching protest action taken by their counterparts in Australia in recent weeks, and say something needs to be done about the culture on this side of the Tasman, too.

More than100 Aramex courier drivers went on a 24-hour strike in Sydney last week to protest low pay rates and a working conditions the drivers union described as modern slavery.

Transport Workers Union president Tony Matthews, told Australias Channel 7 Aramex couriers worked more than 50 hours a week and took home just a few hundred dollars after costs.

Chief executive of Pro Drive, a group that represents New Zealand drivers, Peter Gallagher says the situation here was as bad if not worse than Sydney, and he was closely observing the situation.

READ MORE:* Aramex offers $600 a week subsidy to courier drivers revealed to be earning less than minimum wage* NZ Couriers claim drivers' Covid-19 wage subsidy: 'They're rorting everyone'* Employment Court rules contract courier driver was an employee

We are certainly not ruling out collective action. A strike in New Zealand is definitely on the cards, Gallagher says.

Pro Drive has made multiple attempts to talk with Aramex NZ over issues of working conditions and fair pay, but the company had yet to respond, he says.

The impact of the Aramex NZ business model on worker mental health is severe, he says.

LAWRENCE SMITH/Stuff

Brian Cossey bought an Aramex Couriers franchise only to find out within months that the workload and pay were well below his expectations. The strain severely impacted his mental health.

Former Aramex driver Brian Cossey says the financial strain, and bullying work culture at Aramex led him to consider suicide.

I had been working 16-hour days, seven days a week for a laughable amount of take home pay. The stress and overwork was leading to me having near-misses on the road, and collapsing in the depot.

I begged management for help, but they did nothing, Cossey says.

Aramex NZ chief executive Scott Jenyns says he is unaware of any drivers reporting suicidal thoughts and such an incident would be treated seriously.

He says the company intends to investigate the matter immediately, and for courier franchisees to contact him directly if they wish to raise any concerns.

Aramex also has a whistleblower code of conduct which allows employees to raise issues anonymously, he says.

LAWRENCE SMITH/Stuff

Cossey is now working in construction a job he says earns him 50 per cent more money and not face mental health issues due to stress and overwork.

Aramex franchisees are classed as contractors, meaning each driver is an individual business owner, rather than employees who would have minimum wage protections.

Aramex markets the courier run as having uncapped earning potential, and drivers cover their own operating costs, and are paid per packaged delivery at a rate set by Aramex.

Cossey says his after-cost take home pay was between $12.68 and $11.72 an hour.

Jenyns says it is not accurate to speak in terms of wages becuase drivers are owner operators, not employees.

But Gallagher says to get caught up in the semantics of payment was disingenuous.

We have done the research using Aramexs own numbers and found that drivers are earning significantly less than the minimum wage after costs. I have spoken to over 40 drivers across the North Island and I am yet to find a single one earning above the minimum wage, he says.

Supplied

Aramex courier drivers sort through freight every morning before they started their run. They say they are not paid for this time, and it often adds hours to their workday.

Drivers buy their franchisee businesses from Aramex for between $15,000 to $30,000, so handing back a round often comes with significant financial loss, he says.

Cossey now works in construction.

I am making 50 per cent more money and I dont wake up every morning wanting to kill myself.

A current Aramex courier driver in Wellington says the culture of bullying and overwork has continued to grow.

Upper management used intimidation when drivers questioned the financial arrangement of the business, she says.

I dont think Aramex actually knows how much toll this takes on us. I have reached a point where I have just had enough. I get up each morning and I dont want to wake up. she says.

Supplied

Aramex NZ chief executive Scott Jenyns says the company has an employee assistance program in place for drivers in mental distress, but driver advocate group Pro Drive say this is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

It was a regular occurrence at the Wellington depot to see drivers crying when they see their payslips, she says.

The way they treat us is just ridiculous. There is no toilet paper at the depot, no clean facilities for us to use when we get back at the end of our run. They treat us worse than animals.

Jenyns says that Aramex has an employee assistance program in place for any driver in mental distress or their family to access counselling.

But Gallagher says this was an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Supplied

Pro Drive chief executive, Peter Gallagher says he hopes that the Sydney strike causes public, and regulatory pressure to be put on Aramex courier company.

The testimony we have seen from drivers across the North Island tells us that Aramex has a model that works people to the point of exhaustion.

The ultimate indignity is when these drivers collapse, Aramex is able to swoop in, recapture the business and resell it, Gallagher says.

Gallagher hopes the strike in Sydney will highlight the issues facing Aramex courier drivers in New Zealand, and put public and regulatory pressure on the company.

Jenyns resigned on Friday after 21 years with the company, A spokeswoman says. A departure date is yet to be announced.

WHERE TO GET HELP:

Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865

Lifeline: 0800 543 354

Depression Helpline, open 24/7: 0800 111 757.

Whakatau Mai/ The Wellbeing Sessions http://www.wellbeingsessions.nz

Healthline: 0800 611 116

Youthline: 0800 376633, free text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz

What's Up (for 5-18 year olds; 1pm-11pm): 0800 942 8787

Kidsline (aimed at children up to age 14; 4pm-6pm weekdays): 0800 54 37 54 (0800 kidsline)

Rainbow youth (LGBTQ youth helpline): (09) 3764155

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Stressed Aramex courier drivers say strike action is on the cards - Stuff.co.nz

A new sweater from Target is causing uproar and sparking debate on whether or not it was ethically made.

The item is the Womens Crochet Crafted Cardigan from the stores Wild Fable brand. The sweater is detailed with floral designs on the front and sleeves. It is also affordably priced at only $35.

However, TikTok creator @seatrick is calling out Target for the sweater, saying there is no way it was produced ethically if its being sold for that price.

The video, which has nearly 80,000 views, points out that crocheted garments typically have to be made by hand. There are apparently no machines that can easily replicate a crochet pattern.

Another user, @MattRose1312, mapped out the amount of time it would take a skilled crocheter to make this sweater and deduced that it would take over 17 hours.

To get it at that $35, they would have to be paying $1.40 per hour, @seatrick points out. Im going to take that a step further because that is the final sale price. That number is actually much lower because they arent just paying for labor and materials.

People in the comment section of the video are not happy with fast fashion processes.

The US has never developed an economy that doesnt rely on a copious amount of slavery and exploitation, one user wrote.

This goes for pretty much all the clothing at target, another person adds.

Some complained that low prices from fast fashion retailers hurt independent crocheters and artisans that wish to be paid fairly for their labor.

hence why no one wants to me for anything I crochet because they gasp at the price Ill charge them. they always say..Ill go somewhere else, one person wrote.

To which @seatrick replied, Yep [grimace emoji] Low cost items like this hurt the entire market that way.

TikTok user @seatrick mentions that the cardigans description does not specify if it was made by hand, but commenters who claim to have seen it in stores say the tag indicates the sweater is handmade.

In another video about the same sweater, a woman (@erstell.knots) points out that a Target staff support member confirmed the garment is handmade in the Q&A section about the sweater. The answer is listed under the items page on the Target website. Her video has reached over 36,000 views.

While some are mad that Target is underpaying workers, others think the company might be lying about the sweaters being handmade.

There are industrial machines by a company called Comez that can replicate crochet stitches. Looking at these, I dont think they are hand made, @GoFrogYourself speculated under @erstell.knots video.

The Daily Dot reached out to @seatrick via Instagram message and @erstell.knots on Instagram for comment. Weve also sent an email to Target.

Must-reads on the Daily Dot

*First Published: Feb 5, 2022, 2:28 pm CST

Elizabeth Rose started her career chasing celebrities around New York City. Now she gets the inside scoop on TikTok stars and trends. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, and her work has appeared on ETOnline, the New York Daily News, and InTouch Magazine.

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There is no humanly wage that can cover the price of this: TikTokers question the cost of new Target crochet sweater - The Daily Dot

Organisations around the world are rallying to show their commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

This race against time requires organisations to undertake a holistic evaluation of their decarbonisation strategies and operations for ESG risks to identify and avoid unintended negative impacts on human rights. Failure to do so may have significant financial consequences, including termination of supply or lending agreements, divestment, litigation and consumer backlash. Australian businesses should take action now.

The issue

Research shows that in the race to net zero, companies may be unintentionally exposing themselves and their stakeholders to adverse human rights risks and impacts.

High emitting companies adopting strategies for transitioning to low carbon operations have collectively been shown they could improve action to identify, prepare for and mitigate social impacts of these strategies.A 2021 study by the World Benchmarking Alliance found that companies need to do better across all of the Alliances just transition metrics,including reskilling workers to mitigate the risk of a stranded workforceand demonstrating a fundamental commitment to respecting human rights by identifying and managing human rights risks as required by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

The renewable energy sector, while rising to the challenge of climate change, has also been shown to be at risk of adverse human rights impacts.Over 200 allegations of serious human rights violations linked to renewable energy projects were recorded by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre in the last ten years, including land and water grabs, violation of the rights of indigenous peoples and the denial of workers rights to decent work and a living wage. Of those allegations, 44% are from the wind and solar sectors.

Green jobs are increasingly being exposed as having attendant human rights risks. This includes the manufacture of solar panels, many of which are made, or have components that are made, in Xinjiang province in China. The US considers the risk of human rights violations in this region to be so great that it has banned the importation of goods from Xinjiang unless importers can prove no forced labour was used.More than 50% of the worlds cobalt reserves, essential for lithium-ion battery manufacture, are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is identified as being at high risk for corruption and labour exploitation, including child labour.Further, the UKs Health and Safety Executive has found that fatalities in the waste and recycling sector are 17 times higher than the average across most other industries.

Drivers for better identification and management of social risks

Transitioning to clean energy at the pace required to achieve net zero by 2050 will require significant capital flows to be directed toward the renewable energy sector. Last year in Australia alone we saw a net shift of approximately A$60 billion of assets under management toward responsible investment strategies.With this shift, we expect Australian investors will increasingly demand that the entities and projects they are funding not only demonstrate the positive environmental and social impacts of their business operations, but also identify and mitigate both environmental and social risks in those operations and their supply chains.

We have already seen a heightened focus by industry participants, including project sponsors, financiers and energy off-takers on these issues with contractual arrangements now more frequently mandating far more stringent and prescriptive obligations on counterparties to ensure appropriate plans and policies are both in place and adhered to so as to mitigate against these risks.

Australian organisations will also face pressure internationally. In 2020, the EU represented Australias seventh largest export destination and second largest source of foreign investment.With the commencement of EU taxonomy directed to promoting sustainable green investment by classifying and reporting on environmentally sustainable activities and the EUs foreshadowed introduction of mandatory environmental and human rights due diligence regime and various mandatory national human rights and/or environmental reporting and due diligence regimes including France,Germany,Norwayand the Netherlands, Australian organisations can expect increased scrutiny of both positive and negative social and environmental impacts in their supply chains from EU based trading partners and investors.

This year, Australian organisations will not only face pressure to extend examination of their supply chains to second and third tier suppliers for modern slavery risks for the purposes of 2022 Modern Slavery reporting requirements, but they are likely to face international pressure to expand that scrutiny to operational social and environmental impacts more broadly.

How can organisations respond? The dos and donts

Do:

Dont:

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The race to net zero by 2050: avoiding unintended consequences - Lexology

The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy by Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath (Harvard University Press, 2022)

When nineteenth-century Radical Republicans advocated for the abolition of slavery, they coupled their demands for racial equality with pleas for distributive equality. The political economy of the South, reformers at the time argued, was undergirded by an undying spirit of oligarchy. In order to live up to the ideals of the newly instituted Reconstruction Amendments, concentrations of wealth and power, as one black Union soldier declared, needed to be moved to the bottom rail from the top.

As law professors Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath write in their timely new book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy, this period in American history brought together for the first time in the mainstream of American political life three core principles anti-oligarchy, a broad and accessible middle class, and inclusion central to what the authors refer to as the democracy-of-opportunity tradition. This tradition places affirmative distributional duties on government and considers the needs of all Americans in the economic and the political spheres.

Over 150 years after the abolition of slavery, as the nation deals with the repercussions of a second Gilded Age and wrestles with similar questions of wealth, redistribution, equality, and democracy (all in the face of a conservative supermajority on the high court), Fishkin and Forbaths accessible work serves as both history lesson and political playbook, offering the Left an underutilized and perhaps counterintuitive tool in the present-day fight against social and economic injustice: the Constitution.

Of course, the use of the founding document to justify certain goals is nothing new. Both the Left and the Right have drawn on the Constitution as a means to their respective ends for centuries, and Fishkin and Forbaths nearly five-hundred-page work offers a richly detailed account of that history. (And before anyone charges them with originalism, the authors make clear that they revisit history not because they think it is binding but rather because they believe certain principles from the nations past have independent merit and stand in need of reinvention today.)

Since the founding era there has been a broad tradition of framing the Constitution as a document that calls on the government to fend off oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth. One need only look to the earliest debates surrounding the nascent republic and how it should be governed for proof. This is where Fishkin and Forbath find some of their richest material.

The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, proclaimed during Americas revolutionary period, is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property. Webster is just one of many in the line of early American thinkers whose pleas for resistance to aristocratic forms of privilege Fishkin and Forbath revisit, tracking their attempts to build and sustain a system of democratic governance. It is a moving and effective message in todays age not of kings and queens but Bezos and Musk.

The question at hand for the founders: how was the preindustrial nation to achieve a system of broadly shared resources? Was it through a Hamiltonian central government or a Jeffersonian small-scale order? The ideological split ended in a compromise known as the Bill of Rights. The first ten amendments acted as a check on Hamiltons plea for a strong central government, and, as the authors write, from then on no mainstream party ever again openly proclaimed itself the party of elite rule. In the century after the founding, lawmakers tied their distributional rhetoric with legislative action, and it is here that todays left can learn a valuable lesson.

For legislators in the early American period, the Constitution was at once a text and a tradition and, at the same time, a system of government whose powers, purposes and precepts one implemented over time, through political and legislative action. Take, for example, the Whigs response to Southern Democrats who argued that the protective tariff violated Congresss power under the Constitution (one of the many primary-sourced debates the authors draw on). Instead of capitulating to a restrictive view of the founding document, the Whigs used it to their advantage. As Fishkin and Forbath write, quoting legislators of the period:

Article Is enumerated powers were not only grants of power but trusts to be executed and duties to be discharged for the common defense and general welfare. The non-use[] of the power was a violation of the trust. [T]he words common defence and general welfare were the expositors of the purpose for which Congress are expressly enjoined TO PROVIDE. And where the general welfare was clearly better served by the exercise of enumerated power than by its non-use, Congress had not only the power but the constitutional duty to act.

This focus on Congresss affirmative constitutional duties has all but been supplanted today by our highly judicialized constitutional culture, to our collective detriment. It was this sense of affirmative duty, as Fishkin and Forbath effectively demonstrate, coupled with elements of racial inclusion, that ultimately ushered in Reconstruction-era reforms (the Freedmens Bureau granting land and other practical aid to formerly enslaved persons, for example), and it was these reforms that underscored the connection between a democratic economic structure and a democratic political structure.

It is in the discussion of the first Gilded Age and the New Deal that followed along with the cast of players involved in this generation-defining battle between capital, labor, and the role of the state where Fishkin and Forbath are at their sharpest and their arguments the most relevant. For it is in this period in which the Left severed the link between politics and the Constitution the effects of which are in play to this very day.

At the end of the nineteenth century, as the nation moved from a patchwork of colonies to an unfurled quilt of cities and vast frontiers, a system of corporate capitalism emerged, and with it a class of propertyless wage earners. As Fishkin and Forbath write, fundamental questions were at stake: Was the wage system of labor compatible with the republican system of government? Were the new giant corporations consistent with the pledge of equal rights? Or did these unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power mean a slide into oligarchy?

One answer came in the form of Lochnerism, a classic economic liberalism defined by its aversion to special privileges and disruptions to the common-law doctrine of freedom of contract. It was a hands-off, laissez-faire response to industrialization that prioritized judicial supremacy in constitutional interpretation. Fishkin and Forbaths revisitation is especially helpful given the Roberts Court resurrection of Lochnerian ideals. The other answer prioritized just the opposite: state interference in the ever more unequal American marketplace, casting legislation and the administrative state, rather than the federal courts, as engines of constitutional political economy.

The latter worldview found a champion in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. New Dealers, as Fishkin and Forbath write, championed their legislative agenda in terms of implementing their new social-democratic economic constitutional order. . . . There would be new statutes . . . new protections for Americans material security . . . all of it in the name of vindicating the promises of the Constitution and Reconstruction Amendments.

After the Supreme Court struck down a slate of FDRs measures, he introduced a court-packing bill that would eventually spur the famous switch in time to save nine. While the move secured a temporary victory for the president and his party, it also ushered in a one-sided settlement, one in which federal courts deferred to Congress on social and economic measures, shifting their focus instead to the enforcement of individual rights and civil liberties. Liberals became enamored of the idea that the Constitution is autonomous from politics, separate from politics, setting the boundaries of politics. This is a one-sided view, for, as Fishkin and Forbath point out, Opponents of New Deal economic policy never gave up on the courts.

The last two chapters of Fishkin and Forbaths book offer a clear narrative of where the Left went wrong, how the Right filled the void, and what progressives should do to reclaim the lost democracy-of-opportunity tradition.

By the 1960s, as Fishkin and Forbath explain, it became unimaginable to mount a progressive constitutional challenge to the courts, because the liberal Earl Warren was chief justice and the Supreme Court became the . . . first mover on civil rights, the politics of racial inclusion became bound up with a politics of judicial supremacy. Other issues once central to the progressive political project labor, redistribution, etc. lost their constitutional character.

Other factors led to the shift toward a more court-centered constitutionalism. One in particular is worth highlighting, for it often gets too little play in popular discussion surrounding the court: the separation of economics from politics. In the postwar years, economic matters, like constitutional ones, came increasingly to be seen as a domain best governed by those with special expertise. Scientific expertise reigned. Political economy as a discipline was on the outs.

The story of how this occurred, the authors admit, is complex. But Fishkin and Forbath do not shy away from exploring certain causes. The Progressive Eras focus on competent management by apolitical professionals played a role. So did the Cold War. The eras brutal purges of communists, socialists and other radical economic thinkers altered the shape of pressing conversations surrounding public policy where they had long been important participants indispensable ones, as far as the democracy of opportunity is concerned.

Ultimately, this shortsighted view of the courts and the Constitution on the part of the Left jeopardized one pillar in the democracy-of-opportunity tradition the focus on concentrations of economic power and undermined the entire trifecta. And while the Left settled into its postwar judicial lull, the Right was engaged in a concerted effort to refashion the federal bench in its image.

And today, Fishkin and Forbath argue, we face the consequence of a Supreme Court lurching right. The authors discourage moderate court reform measures draped in nonpartisanship (i.e., Joe Bidens executive panel on the judiciary) and instead promote a sort of movement politics bent on making a case against the Courts constitutional politics and the visions that animate the conservative supermajority and their ideological allies. They call on activists to construct a rival constitutional, political, and economic landscape in the vein of Republicans during Reconstruction and Democrats during the New Deal.

And as a testament to the strength of their work as a guide for those engaged in the modern judicial reform movement, the authors offer specific instructions to revive the democracy-of-opportunity tradition, all while curbing the power of the Roberts Court. One call feels particularly relevant: a more direct repudiation of the new First Amendment Lochnerism in cases dealing with campaign finance and labor law. To challenge the courts current jurisprudence, they suggest using the lens of constitutional political economy to strengthen labors bargaining power and disrupt the current status quo connection between financial worth and political clout.

Taken as a whole, Fishkin and Forbaths work amounts to an epic repudiation and refashioning of the core tenets that have guided liberal judicial politics for a generation. It should act as a sort of manifesto for those in the fight to craft new tenets, to create a more just and equitable society where the people realize the full promise of their Constitution.

Read more:

How the Left Lost the Constitution - Jacobin magazine

The Value Gapis a MarketWatch Q&A series with business leaders, academics, authors, policymakers and activists on reducing racial and social inequalities.

Everyone not just executives, managers and HR representatives has some kind of power to start dismantling racism at work, says Y-Vonne Hutchinson. And the journey starts with identifying and leveraging that power, finding coworkers to back you up, and having an effective conversation with your boss, after lots of careful preparation.

While inequitable workplaces have existed for centuries, Hutchinson notes that her new book, How to Talk to Your Boss About Race, out Tuesday, comes during a time of glaring pandemic-exacerbated inequalities that disproportionately impact women and people of color. It comes in the midst of sustained attention to systemic racism and the corresponding backlash, as well as a tight labor market in which many low-wage workers have sought safer and better-paying jobs.

Now is the time to push for change, writes Hutchinson, the CEO and founder of the diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm ReadySet and a former international labor and human-rights lawyer.

Even a year and a half after outrage over George Floyds murder pushed many companies to make bold DEI commitments; pledge billions of dollars toward racial justice; and endorse the Black Lives Matter movement, plenty of indicators show they still have a lot of work to do in achieving racial equality in the workplace.

Hutchinson mines lessons from the civil and labor rights movements, corporate cautionary tales, the social sciences and her own personal experience often laced with humor to give readers the necessary vocabulary, context and practical advice to confront race and racism at work.

She says she learned how to have these conversations herself through painfully awkward and, at times, traumatic trial and error, including an attempt early in her career to report her colleagues racist behavior. (Her bosses defended the offenders, called her overly sensitive and later declined to renew her contract, she says.)

Hutchinson spoke with MarketWatch about how to tell if your workplace is racist (spoiler: it likely is), find where your influence lies, and recognize when a fight isnt worth fighting. The interview has been edited and condensed for length:

MarketWatch: Your book is called How to Talk to Your Boss About Race, but its really about using that conversation as a springboard and equipping yourself to change the whole system at work. How do you make that more approachable and digestible for somebody who feels overwhelmed by it?

Hutchinson: It is completely understandable that somebody will see these systems of power, these systems of oppression and marginalization and the broader corporate context in which they sit, and also their position relative to that, and feel disempowered. But nobody changes everything all at once, right? Change happens incrementally, and it happens in community.

So I would say for somebody who feels like its a daunting task, first, youre right. Second is, its not just for you to fix. And then the third thing is, when youre going about it, you do it a little bit at a time. And you accept the fact and remind yourself continuously of the fact that this is a process it took a long time to build these systems and its going to take a long time to dismantle them. Theyre actually built quite effectively, so its really, really hard. Its almost as if somebody was trying to protect all of their money and power.

MarketWatch: Now, your book poses the question, Is your workplace racist? up front, then answers it by saying the short answer and also the slightly more nuanced answer is nearly certainly yes. I think a lot of people, particularly those who think their workplaces are pretty progressive, might be surprised to hear that. Can you unpack that for us?

Hutchinson: Racism is written into our Declaration of Independence, into our Constitution. The White House was built by slaves. It is so woven into the fabric of this country. It is embedded in almost every aspect of our lives, and that is by design. And it would be exceptional to work in a place that managed to avoid the influence of what is so pervasive everywhere else. For me, it seems like an obvious answer that yes, your workplace is racist like every workplace is.

[But] one of the reasons racism is even more insidious and more effective now is that it kind of operates where there is doubt. Externally, overt racism is happening more and more, but within the company there is still at least the desire to appear equitable. At least now youre not going to have a workplace that says We dont hire this kind of person or You cant get promoted if youre Black or brown overtly.

We have to get out of our feelings about racism. What we inherited, its here and if we want to dismantle it, we really have to accept that fact.

MarketWatch: Maybe you can talk a little bit about other warning signs that you work at a place thats racist.

Hutchinson: The first thing I look at is: Who holds power in an institution? And usually, thats whos in a leadership position, who is in the C-suite, whos on the board, whos managing people. You see a lot of organizations, especially recently, that place an emphasis on diversity. And they bring in people but usually, those people arent brought in with a lot of power. Theyre brought in at sort of the entry level. And even when theyre brought in as leaders, the formal and informal power that they hold is not necessarily as much as their white counterparts.

I think the second is: Who gets listened to, who gets recognized, who gets amplified, whats normalized? What is considered the default, and is that default associated with whiteness? Are there racist power structures? Is [my organization] having a racist impact? Is it harming people from underrepresented racial groups?

I dont think that because youre vulnerable, youre powerless. I think those are two different things.

MarketWatch: To your point about using the word racist plainly to describe a power structure or a workplace, you reserve some pretty choice words for conversations about unconscious bias, which I think is where a lot of organizations right now are still kind of stuck. What do you think are the natural limitations of focusing on something like that?

Hutchinson: Well, its a fundamentally different concept with different historical roots than racism. The reason why people gravitate to the unconscious-bias conversation is that it is a comfortable conversation, right? Its a conversation without taboo. Its a conversation that doesnt implicate the person having it, because we all have unconscious bias. It doesnt name those things that are socially uncomfortable. And because its a relatively new term, it doesnt have the historical impact, historical baggage, that conversations about racism have.

In some ways, unconscious bias conversations can be useful. They open the door to conversations about bias. But you have to move beyond them really quickly, because anytime you get stuck in unconscious-bias framework, youre not going to get anything done. The solution to solving your unconscious bias because its unconscious is being aware of it. Theres no structural implications or structural approaches. Theres no acknowledgement of overt bias or harms.

For many people, [conversations about race] also implicate present power structures, and theyre harder to have. People get more defensive in conversations about race. People feel more triggered, more targeted, in conversations about race. Racism is responsible for some very real, horrific violence in this country. You can kind of keep unconscious bias and make it a workplace, corporate kind of thing. But when were talking about racism, were talking about redlining. Were talking about lynching. Were talking about slavery. Were talking about genocide. Were talking about the destruction of whole towns and communities.

Thats the legacy that we bring into conversations about race, and the legacy that we have to reconcile if were going to solve the racism inherent in our organizations. And its a reality thats hard for a lot of people to confront, but necessary if they actually want to make progress in doing the work that they say that they want to do.

MarketWatch: You write that in order to leverage your social position at work to push for change, you have to figure out what kind of power you personally have to influence people. If Im an hourly worker making minimum wage and maybe worried about my job security, especially during COVID, or Im a gig worker whos classified as a contractor, I might respond by saying I dont really have all that much power in my position. What would you say to someone like that?

Hutchinson: I think its important to acknowledge that you are more vulnerable. I dont think it behooves anyone to dismiss the reality of precarious, low-wage work, particularly right now. That being said, I dont think that because youre vulnerable, youre powerless. I think those are two different things. And I think your sources of power may look different.

In the book, I talk about collective power and the power of organizing: You alone may not have that power, but you working with other people can have a lot of power a lot of social power, influential power, visible power. Im just thinking about movements like the Fight for 15 and the collective organizing of low-wage workers there showing that when people get together, there are some ways in which we can correct the traditional power balance.

Its easy to delegitimize one person, gaslight one person. Its easy to discourage one person. I think its a lot harder to discredit a movement.

I would also say that there are other sources of power beyond those that are centered around hierarchy or economic power. I talk a lot about social power in my book, because I think theres a lot of movement happening socially when it comes to this recognition of workers rights and the right to be free from discrimination and [racism], etc. And so you may not have power when you think about legitimate power. Thats the power that your boss has over you; its the power that [can come from] traditional power structures, traditional hierarchy. You may not have access to that as much.

But you probably do have some access to influential power, whether its power through social media, power through your relationships at work and the allies that you engage there. I think that its not as simple as just, I dont have power. I wrote that section to really get people to thinking not about if they have power but what types of power they have, and how they can access them.

This work doesnt happen in isolation. Its not just about you as the individual. [Its] so important to understand that. You, any individual, is disempowered when they go up against a system. Its about, how do you think about engaging collectively, and leveraging that collective power to move the system to where you want to go? Unionization, collective action, all of this stuff has been demonized. And not all unions are perfect, Ill totally admit that.But I think weve been tricked into thinking its up to us as individuals to change our workplaces, and social change has never happened like that never, ever, ever, not in any space has one person totally revolutionized the system.

Even when we think of prominent civil-rights activists we think of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Ida B. Wells no matter who youre thinking of in terms of civil rights, labor rights and these movements, they happen as part of a collective. They all had a machine behind them, and history erases that machine.

MarketWatch: A common thread throughout your book is the argument to not go it alone when youre trying to engage your boss on race, especially if youre a person of color, and to always enlist backup in the form of allies. Why do you think that is so important?

Hutchinson: Because backlash is real. I think we internalize the myth that and Ive been talking about this more and more with other groups that the Martin Luther King Jr. quote that everybody loves to use, The [arc of the moral] universe is long, but it bends towards progress. I think theres a sort of self-serving idea, particularly on behalf of white people, people in power, that progress is the natural outcome of agitation, and retaliation, while present, is actually an aberration. And I think historically what we see is that no, with major movements, progress is often followed by periods of really intense backlash.

I advise people to work as part of a group because when you work as a singular person, you become a target for that backlash. Its really easy to isolate one person. Its easy to all of a sudden give poor performance reviews to one person. Its easy to delegitimize one person, gaslight one person. Its easy to discourage one person. I think its a lot harder to discredit a movement, discredit a bunch of people who are working in unison.

MarketWatch: In your book, you coach the reader in great detail on understanding their identity and what power they have, practicing arguments and retorts in advance, and finding some carefully considered words to use during this conversation with their boss. Is there a piece of advice in there that youd really want to emphasize and drive home, something you think is absolutely imperative to having these conversations?

Hutchinson: The most important tip that I can give is to know what your objective is in this conversation and to make sure it is realistic and actionable. Everything in your conversation flows from this. What kind of specific changes do you want to see? Are they within your bosss power to effectuate? What would be the impact of these changes? How do they align with your bosss other priorities? What metrics will you use to [assess] the success or failure of your conversation based on that goal?

If youre facing that kind of pushback, youre probably not the person to change them. And sometimes a departure can be just the wake-up call that a company needs.

MarketWatch: We are still in the midst of a tight labor market; were in the middle of what you may have heard is called The Great Resignation. How do you know when to quit, and when a fight is not worth fighting at your workplace?

Hutchinson: First, I think the conversation that you have if you decide to talk to your boss about race, or talk to anyone its going to be very telling. What do they do? Do they immediately have a defensive reaction and shut down the conversation? Thats a sign. Are you seeing surface-level investment, but investment that isnt actually about changing anything? Leadership thats disengaged, disinterested or, at worst, opposed to this? Thats another sign.

Do people ask folks of color to put forward this work, push this work ahead, without actually investing in them? Are extra burdens and extra harms being created without regard for the impact and without compensation or recognition? Are you now facing retaliation? That happens a lot in these conversations. Do you start getting marginalized on your team? Have your performance reviews all of a sudden taken a dive? Are you given less-prestigious assignments? Are your managers no longer giving you feedback? Are you seeing social exclusion? That, to me, is also a really big red flag.

Related: More employees are filing retaliation charges heres what every whistleblower should know

And then finally, I would say think about where HR is in all of this. In all likelihood, HR is probably not your friend. HRs job is to protect the company from liability. And once you start pointing out discrimination and potential violations of federal civil-rights law, you become a liability. And so then the question becomes, do you feel like you have an ally in these structures? Chances are you dont. Do you feel like you have another adversary? If you do, thats probably also when its time to go.

I always recommend: Dont let it hit rock bottom. If you start to get the inclination, particularly in this labor market, that hey, this isnt the right space for you, and you can leave on good terms with some people people who can give you a recommendation, whatever and go to a place thats better for you, dont belabor it. Just do it. Because those institutions, Im not saying theyre not going to change, but if youre facing that kind of pushback, youre probably not the person to change them. And sometimes a departure can be just the wake-up call that a company needs.

So if you have the privilege, the economic privilege, to be able to look for other work and survive a job transition, and youre facing those kinds of hurdles, I would certainly recommend that you consider it.

Do you start getting marginalized on your team? Have your performance reviews all of a sudden taken a dive? Are you given less-prestigious assignments?

MarketWatch: You became a new parent during the writing of this book. You also went through a lot of personal challenges, including the death of your sister. Im so sorry for your loss. You write that working with someone to establish boundaries and self-care routines including therapy, etc., helped you process and cope with that. What advice do you have for folks who are taking on this anti-racism work in their workplace when it comes to taking care of themselves and avoiding burnout, especially if they are also a person of color?

Hutchinson: Yeah, what a time we live in where theres just this sort of cognitive dissonance between the reality and work the expectation that you show up every day and do your job plus a little bit extra while the world is on fire, and sometimes literally. I think its really cruel. Its really hard.

I think its a tall enough order to ask somebody to think about how they make their organizations less racist. I certainly dont expect within this conversation were going to cover the scope of how to dismantle capitalism, but I think that that realization, No. 1, is super important. These are I struggle to say abnormal because racism is a normal aspect of our country, ableism is a normal aspect of our country, work above all else is normal in our country but this just feels like extraordinary times. And we are trying to normalize a situation, a series of events and a social/political reality that is fundamentally not normal. So I would say recognize that; I think thats the first thing. And be realistic about the expectations that you set for yourself.

Putting your mental health first, saying no This extra work is actually personal work for us, and its work that is quite often associated with really deep trauma and history, and our current reality, and current harms that were facing. So I think its OK to say no to these things even though they feel personal. It is really not your responsibility as a traumatized person to change the trauma.

Its great you want to do it. That is a very selfless act that you are doing, and its good for the community. But fundamentally its not your responsibility, and it is going to be really hard for you to do it. So its OK to say no. Its OK to say, Actually, Im not the one who needs to do the work right now. Youre the one that needs to do the work. Its OK to say, OK, Im going to do this, but you need to pay me.

I think Black and brown people really need mental health support as were navigating this time and as we navigate these traumatizing institutions. So making sure you have something in place, and acknowledging that that is a privilege not everybody can afford a therapist is really important, but also thinking through what other free resources you may be able to access.

One thing that is free, though, that we can all do, is build our communities outside of work. I think particularly for us in the U.S., there is a sort of conflation of work with our identity, and were often encouraged to self-actualize through our work and we often talk about excellence in a workplace setting. And often for us as Black and brown children, its drilled into us that the way out of our oppression is through respectability as obtained in the workplace.

And so when this workplace becomes your source of identity but also the source of your trauma, it can be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly disruptive. And so I really encourage people, No. 1, form an identity outside of work, but No. 2, nurture those relationships that have literally nothing to do with how you produce money.

I think where you have healthy family dynamics and your biological family is one thats healthy to engage with, great. But also, if you need to build a chosen family, do that. Figure out what kind of community you need to surround yourself with to feel nurtured and supported. Invest in the friendships. Stop putting work first, because work is not putting you first.

Even if youre not working on racial and cultural issues, work-life balance is really important. If you wake up working and go to bed working, at the end of the day its going to start fing with you. It messes up your sense of reality, and your sense of relationships, and your sense of your place in the world. Your place at work becomes your place in the world. So you really have to intentionally fight against that.

Continued here:

'Backlash is real': Yes, your workplace is probably racist but how do you even begin to tackle this problem? - MarketWatch

On Thursday, great-granddaughter Lorna Rainey addressed reporters at a news conference to unveil the Joseph H. Rainey Room at the U.S. Capitol.

In 1832, Rainey was born into slavery in Georgetown, South Carolina. By 1870, Rep. Joseph H. Rainey was elected to Congress.

Lorna Rainey stated, As we honor this man, please let us remember what he stood for, what he put his life in danger for and why his legacy endures today.

In 1870, he became the first African American elected to the House of Representatives. On Thursday, Joseph H. Rainey became the first Black member of the House to formally have a room in the Capitol named after him.

Also in attendance were No. 3 House Democratic leader James Clyburn and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the minimum wage, filibuster, food insecurity, or prison reform are among many of the issues directly impacting Black progress. Yet legislatively, Democratic leadership has failed to produce action. Instead, they offer the next best thingwords, symbols, rooms.

Joseph H. Rainey, however, was a man of action and purpose. He was an advocate for rights for working people, immigrants, former slaves, and he supported self-government for Native American tribes. He also helped found the state Republican Party and represented Georgetown on the partys central committee.

In an attempt at more than feel-good symbolism, Clyburn utilized the opportunity to remind the attending press of the persistent challenges facing Black America, including hiring disparities.

Clyburn noted that eight African Americans were elected to the House from his home state during the 19th Century. He continued, The problem is theres 95 years between No. 8 and No. 9, Rep. Clyburn said, referring to his own election in 1992.

While Clyburn advocates for a less Ivy League type to assume the Supreme Court, Joseph H. Rainey was never formally educated. Still, he rose to unimaginable ranks fighting for those who couldnt fight for themselves.

As Democratic leadership fails to deliver substantive change and campaign promises, photo opportunities honoring men and women more courageously than themselves remain bittersweet for many in the Black community.

Read the original here:

First Black Congressman Joseph Rainey honored at White House - The Black Wall Street Times

MEMBER of Rajya Sabha, Elaram Kareem, of the Communist Party of India [CPI] introduced on Friday, a Private Members Bill [PMB] seeking the repeal of the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security, 2020 and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 in their entirety. Titled, The Labour Codes (Repeal) Bill, 2021, its preamble says it seeks to repeal certain enactments related to labour sector.

The Statement of Objects and Reasons [SOR] of the Bill says that The Code on Wages, 2019 was enacted to repeal The Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976. The Code on Wages, the SOR suggests, incorporates certain provisions of these Acts selectively to the sole advantage of the employers and distorting and diluting almost all the rights and protection related provisions for the workers and employees. It was also brought with pushing a major section of employees, namely, Sales Promotion and Working journalists, out of the coverage of the Act and left to the discretion of the employers so far as wage is concerned. The Code on Wages, the SOR adds, did not incorporate the concrete formulae of Minimum Wage (based on 2700 calorie intake, among other things) decided unanimously by 15th Indian Labour Conference, along with the Supreme Court judgment in theRaptakkos Brett case in 1992, which was again unanimously recommended by 44th, 45th and 46th Indian Labour Conferences. The Centre was a party to the 45th and 46th Indian Labour Conferences, the SOR reminds.

The SOR suggests that although provision of the tripartite Minimum Wage Advisory Board has been kept in the Code, provision has been so designed that the recommendation of the Board will not be binding on the Government.

The SOR adds that minimum wages can be an effective tool for addressing poverty and inequality. There are, the SOR points out, well-tested mechanisms/formulae that have been evolved over the years, which also got consensus of all stakeholders, to address issues and concerns over setting and implementation of minimum wages. These mechanisms, the SOR claims, can ensure that minimum wages achieve a substantial and beneficial impact on subsistence wage and low-paid workers. But the Code on Wages, 2019, didnt address these two main concerns, that is, on fixation of minimum wage and strict implementation thereon, the SOR argues. The fixation has been, deliberately, kept under the discretion of the governments and the Code dilutes, virtually to nullify, even the pre-existing enforcement mechanism which, in turn, facilitate the employers to evade from any legal obligations, the SOR laments. The SOR justifies the repeal of the Code on Wages, 2019, because it curbed the rights of the unions to have access to the balance sheet and other accounts of the company for the purpose of negotiation on payment of Bonus.

The Code, while changing the designation of Inspector as Inspector cum Facilitator and restraining their regular and routinely mandated duties for regular inspection to verify the compliance of Act by the employers and allowing inspection only with the prior permission from the highest level of the appropriate government, virtually banned or crippled the system of inspection itself, thereby giving a complete go-bye to strong enforcement of the Act itself, the SOR says.

The SOR apprehends that the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 distorts and dilutes almost all the rights and protection related provisions for the workers and employees. The Industrial Relations Code will lead to the hire and fire regime at the will of employers and thereby adversely affect the industrial workers, it says.Formation of trade unions will become more difficult and virtually impossible through imposition of numerous restrictive conditionalities stipulated in this Code. It intends to make the right to collective trade union actions including right to strike virtually banned through number of conditionalities. All these are being pushed through under the slogan of promoting growth and employment, the SOR claims. It alleges that the Codeopen-endedly empowers the Executive to alter many substantive provisions of the enactment passed by Parliament through executive order without sanction of Parliament, or through liberal grant of exemptions to employers.

The SOR is also aggrieved that the Code on Social Security, 2020 distorts and dilutes most of the social security benefits and related provisions for the workers in both organised and unorganised sectors. The SOR suggests that the Code seeks to repeal eight existing functional social security legislations on the plea of simplifying and rationalising them but actually diluting them grossly to the detriment of the beneficiary workers interests.Italleges that social security benefits available to a section of workers in the organized sector will be diluted by giving relief to employers in respect of their obligations towards social security contributions. Furthermore, it looks to establish government control over the accumulations available through social security funds with the Employees Provident Fund Organisation, the Employees State Insurance Corporation, and the Cess fund under Construction Workers Welfare Scheme, none of which the government contributes to. Schemes for the universalization of social security have been left to the discretion of the executive.

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2019, which replaces 13 labour laws, did not stipulate even the basic humane working condition of eight hours work in a day, and left it to be decided by the appropriate governments, the SOR suggests. The concepts like daily working hours, weekly working hours, period of work, intervals for rest, overtime duty and spread-over-hours which are well-defined in the Factories Act, 1948 and in all the relevant Acts, are sought to be removed by this Code, the SOR claims. The Code will make already distressed condition of contrat workers who represent almost half of the productive workforce, miserable akin to slavery, the SOR adds. The SOR fears that the Code will provoke increasing replacement of regular workers by contract workers affecting productivity and operational efficiency.

Sector specific provisions relating to the working conditions in the particular sector/occupation/work process and related issues in plantation, beedi and cigar, mines, construction, motor transport, dock workers, sales promotion, working journalists etc. have also been subsumed and diluted. Crucial provisions regarding the responsibilities and obligations of principal employers have been removed, and the powers and role of the statutory tripartite board on contract labour, etc. have been diminished, the SOR claims.

The SOR concludes that in order to protect the interests of workers in the labour sector, it has become imperative to repeal the four enactments.

It is unlikely that Kareems PMB will secure the support of the union government, which is crucial for the success of any legislation in Parliament. According to PRS Legislative Research, only 14 Bills till now have turned into legislations, six of them were passed in 1956 alone. The last PMB passed by Parliament in 1968 was The Supreme Court (Enlargement of Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction) Bill, 1968, that became an Act on August 9, 1970. Of the total 328 PMBs which were introduced in 14th Lok Sabha, only 14 were discussed. The Rights of Transgender Protection Bill, 2014 moved in Rajya Sabha byDravida Munnetra KazhagamParliamentarian, Trichi Siva, was passed in Rajya Sabha unanimously, but was never discussed in Lok Sabha. The union government, however, introduced its own Bill on the same subject later, which was subsequently enacted.

Read the bill here.

Read the original here:

Private Member's Bill introduced in Rajya Sabha for the repeal of Labour Codes - The Leaflet

Alaska can seem far-removed from the Jim Crow South, but when a sitting legislator advertises his membership in the white supremacist organization Oath Keepers, and when another legislator introduces legislation to ban the teaching of certain aspects of racism in U.S. history, we all have an obligation to confront white supremacy right now.

Rep. David Eastmans membership in and defense of the white supremacist organization Oath Keepers, which played a leading role in assaulting the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020, has led to widespread demands that Eastman be expelled from the legislature. In addition, legislation (HB 228) has been introduced that would prohibit the teaching of racist practices, institutions, and violence documented by the New York Times 1619 Project. These facts should compel us to ask ourselves about our own role in confronting our nation and states history, and what our individual responsibility might be to create equal opportunity and honor the human rights of every single one of our neighbors.

House Bill 228 would prohibit teaching basic historical facts, including the nature of the slave trade and how it brought African-Americans to the American colonies; the relationship between slavery and early political power struggles in the United States; the nearly incomprehensible violence on plantations; the Jim Crow era and laws that established segregation in so many aspects of U.S. society; and the relationship between segregation and our built environmentfrom forgotten slave markets to the location of interstates. Denying this history, or prohibiting the teaching of it in schools, wouldif successfulmake it impossible to rectify inequality by making it impossible to understand racisms roots.

I believe nearly everyone wants to live in a world founded in respect, equity, fairness, and celebration of our unique differences and commonalities. None of us were alive when these terrible moments of history took place, and most people are not consciously or intentionally racist. For example, I have no reason to believe the sponsor of HB 228 wants to advance racism. This is not about vilifying or pointing fingers. We all have a responsibility to do what we can to create a better future for all. That starts with understanding we have inherited systems and institutions that have a legacy of harm. By no means should any of us feel guilty to be born into a society with longstanding inequality and racist power structuresinstead, we should be liberated to see those power structures honestly, and consider our role in building a society with truly equal opportunity for all.

Thanks to the work of countless activists, we have normalized an ethic of racial equality over the last half century. To truly achieve that vision, we have to face our history and do our part to recognize the inherent biases we all learn from a young age. No one is immune from bias and prejudice in a racialized society, including those working every day to address racism. But by no means should any of us feel guilty to be born into a society with longstanding inequality and racist power structuresinstead, we should work together to see those power structures honestly, and consider our role in building a society with true equity for all.

As someone who grew up in the South with school boundaries drawn to separate kids by race, I saw firsthand how diversity was extinguished by tracking wealthier, whiter students into advanced classes and poorer, darker skinned students into standard or remedial classes. The most prominent boulevard in my hometown was lined with statutes of traitors who led the effort to destroy the United States in order to create a new nation shaped around slavery. The interstates in my city were placed to obliterate middle class black neighborhoods, a central function of the criminal justice system was to keep Blacks locked in a cycle of joblessness, poverty, and crime that could feed further racist fears. None of this was exceptionaltowns across the South still have statues of murderers, traitors, terrorists, slave owners, while most lack the most basic memorial to the more than 4,000 blacks who were murdered through lynching. Even today, many people dont know that lynching was a form of public terrorism, a well-organized spectacle of fear that included public advertisement, picnics, festivities, and postcards to commemorate the occasions. That public vigilante execution of Black Americans was so normal speaks to the depth of racism in America, to speak nothing of the acts of violence that happened to Indigenous peoples across the country, and other people of color. These acts of racism were also not limited to the South. Similar examples of systemic racism can be found across our country, and in our great state of Alaska.

I understand that the sheer magnitude of these crimes and violence make them difficult to think about, to acknowledge. But we have to be honest with ourselves about what happened, its effects on the present day, and our responsibility to each other, right now. That includes realities of racist violence in Alaska, including similar Jim-Crow era segregationist policies such as No Dogs/No Natives which was held by many establishments, the enslavement and internment of Unangax people, the theft of Native land, to the bombardment of Kake, Angoon, and Wrangell, and the kidnapping of Native children into a boarding school system rife with abuse. This is our history in our nation and in Alaska a history that belongs to everyone and denying it prevents our future generations from learning the lessons of this history and creating a better society for all. We are doomed to repeat history that we cannot teach.

Racism happens beyond the level of the individual. Structural racism is a set of public policies, institutions, and cultural beliefs that perpetuate racial inequality. It is critical we focus our attention on making change at this level. Yes, changing individual views is important, but this is not about a puritanical crusade against the individual, this is about making sure we can learn from our history so we can change the systems that continue to harm our fellow community members and neighbors. To address these issues is an act of love for our fellow neighbors, it is not an act of blame or an attempt to vilify, and we should not give into fearmongering tactics that pit us against each other. Let us focus on policies and structures that can most certainly be changed, all while attempting to understand how racist mores may manifest themselves in our own views of the world.

We cannot wait until we are all perfectly anti-racist before we start this work. We are all imperfect and we are all still learning. Yet we can all take steps to work towards a more racially just society. So what does progress really look like? What should our agenda and responsibility be for an anti-racist society? Here are some policy ideas.

Recognizing that anti-Black racism is inextricably related with land theft from and genocide against Native Americans, in Alaska it is particularly important to support public policies that finally recognize the right to Indigenous self-governance and stewardship of the lands we call home. This basic premise has myriad implications, from tribal recognition to partnership on child custody to adequate provision of funds for rural schools, to compacting over public education, to prioritization of subsistence harvests to funding for rural public safety, to returning land back to Indigenous peoples, and other measures of uplifting tribal sovereignty.

With the understanding that racism is a cultural phenomenon, and that eradication of racism is only possible when children are allowed to see each others humanity, we must remain committed to an adequately funded and de-segregated school system, in urban as well as rural communities. Our schools are the most powerful institution that can create equal opportunity, but they can also be the most powerful institution to perpetuate racism, which is why racists fought so hard to maintain segregated education.

Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasized racial equality is impossible amidst profound poverty and economic stratification. We have to leverage statutes, institutions, and cultural norms to defend and expand the middle class, including a strong role for public employment, robust unions, and meaningful norms that make mistreatment of working people taboo. When poverty is most acute among minorities, equality demands an economic agenda around wage growth and economic mobility.

Follow the leadership of community-based organizations such as the Alaska Black Caucus, the NAACP, Native leadership, and other BIPOC groups, who are closest to many of these issues and understand how best to address them. That includes protecting voting rights in statute, for which civil rights organizations have advocated.

None of these public policy goals are possible if we deny the very existence of racism in our schools, or emulate totalitarian societies by censoring our history, particularly self-evident history as documented by a press whose freedom is enshrined in our Constitution. The Jim Crow South may seem very far from Alaska, but there is no place in the United States that has not been touched by racism policies and practices. At a time when white supremacists are trying to unravel our democracy and normalize Neo-Nazism, and legislation has been introduced to censor history in our classrooms, we cannot pretend that white supremacy is a distant threat.

Zack Fields represents Downtown Anchorage in the Alaska House of Representatives.

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Defeating White supremacy: Racial apartheid and the path to justice - Anchorage Press

After a long series of setbacks, restaurant workers rejoice as a new effort is slated to abolish an exception to D.C. minimum wage laws. Formally titled the District of Columbia Tip Credit Elimination Act of 2021, the new ballot initiative would require employers to pay tipped workers the minimum wage of $15.20 instead of their current $5.05 wage. According to Ryan OLeary, one of the key advocates for the initiative, it is slated to gain the signatures necessary to be put up as a city-wide referendum along with either the primary or general mayoral election in June or November of this year respectively.

Initiative 82, the shorthand for the Act, is not the first attempt to eliminate the sub-minimum wage in D.C. In 2018, a nearly identical proposal named Initiative 77 was put up to referendum. Initiative 77 passed by a 10-point margin in the city, with the most resistance coming from restaurant owners and the whiter and richer residents of Wards 2 and 3 in northwest D.C. Although the campaign amounted to a resounding victory, the D.C. Council repealed Initiative 77 a few months after it was passed. While the council included in the repeal bill several provisions to try to assuage the concerns of frustrated restaurant workers, such as a hotline to report wage theft and mandatory sexual harassment training, these measures were never funded and did not take effect.

Despite the repeal, D.C. leadership now appears willing to consider the new initiative, according to OLeary. New council members who support the initiative, including Christina Henderson, an at-large council member, and Janeese Lewis George from Ward 4, have replaced members who voted to overturn Initiative 77. In addition to a more favorable council, OLeary noted that the restaurant industry responsible for an aggressive astro-turf campaign in 2018 has put up far less resistance now.

Covid happened. Not only have servers recognized what their worth is and what theyre willing to take or put up with on the job, not only have restaurants individually started noticing how much wage shortage there is and how difficult it is to hire, OLeary said, but also the restaurant industry itself, RAMW (Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington), has come to us basically saying we dont want to fight this again.

Advocates for Initiative 82 describe how instituting minimum wage is vital to improving the welfare of restaurant workers in D.C. Aiai Price-Smith (COL 24), who worked a sub-minimum wage tipped job in the Georgetown area, described her experience in the industry. I dont know my coworkers situation, but I cant imagine paying for anything near D.C., Price-Smith said.

Tipping culture was born out of a legacy of racism and still makes marginalized communities vulnerable, according to community activists. The practice of tipping, adopted from European tradition, was popularized by white employers seeking to avoid paying Black workers following the end of slavery. The national sub-minimum wage was later codified into law and last raised by congress in 1996 to $2.13, where it remains today. While D.C. has a somewhat higher sub-minimum wage at $5.05, it is still less than a third of the minimum wage. Initiative 82 is extraordinarily popular among restaurant workers, 88 percent of whom support the initiative.

Today tipping culture continues to put marginalized communities at a disadvantage. Women, people of color [and] trans women and men routinely make less money than someone who looks like me in tips, OLeary, who is a white man, said. At the very heart of this is wage discrimination. He also noted how dependence on tips can lead to situations where servers endure harassment from customers just to ensure a tip is given.

Critics of the initiative have warned that the new rules would disincentivize tipping in general. Others have claimed that paying the minimum wage would cause restaurant prices, which are already under inflationary pressure, to skyrocket and cause small restaurant owners to suffer. Initiative 82, I believe, will increase the operational cost of running a restaurant. As a result, small operators will be forced out in favor of large corporate chains, Greg Casten, one restaurant owner, said in an opinion piece. One study calculated that while any menu price increases would vary depending on the current wages paid to workers, most increases would be modest and at most 20 percent.

According to OLeary, most research shows that many of these concerns are not founded in reality. States that have phased out the sub-minimum wage are practically devoid of any of the alleged consequences described above. Data shows that tipping is generally unaffected by changes in the sub-minimum wage and is fairly consistent throughout the country. In fact, these states actually have reduced both poverty and wealth inequality.

The practical reality of our tipping culture says otherwise: ask yourself, have you ever asked your server what her base hourly wage was to determine the amount that you plan to tip her? Of course not, Mary Cheh, Ward 3 city council member, wrote after the campaign to repeal Initiative 77 in 2018.

OLeary added that restaurants in the eight states that dont have a sub-minimum wage fared better during the pandemic, experiencing fewer closures than in places such as D.C. One Fair Wage, a national advocacy organization, has published a list of 85 restaurant employers in D.C. that are able to successfully provide their employees with at least the minimum wage, demonstrating that eliminating the sub-minimum wage is more than possible.

Weve sat at the current sub-minimum wage for 30 years, prices have gone up annually for 30 years in restaurants, and so I always feel a little sus when a business tells me when they wont be able to afford something, OLeary said. Your employees can be some of your best customers if they could afford to eat there.

OLeary also spoke about how Georgetown students could help support the law by simply registering to vote in D.C. He also noted that if students wanted to get more involved, they could sign up to become ballot petition signature collectors and get paid for each signature.

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Initiative 82 on track to end the sub-minimum wage for DC tipped restaurant staff - The Georgetown Voice