Category Archives: Wage Slavery

By Nat Baldino

Policymakers have praised the trillion-dollar investments of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed in November, noting it will create a new generation of high-quality, high-paying jobs, and investments in American infrastructure. Those jobs will be important. But as the Senate considers what working families need in the Build Back Better (BBB) Act, many are left wondering what building back better really means for them.

Black workers in particular have historically been denied opportunities and forced into high-risk, low-wage industriesespecially during the COVID-19 pandemic. An investment in American jobs must address both present and historical harm. True investment must create high-quality jobs and a commitment to Black communities. As the scope of BBB is negotiated, heres what Black workers should pay attention to.

If passed, BBB is expected to create over 3.2 million jobs a year. Many will be through industry partnership grants in high-poverty areas. BBB also reinvests in the Civilian Conservation Corps to create green jobs to fight climate change. This will spawn over 300,000 jobs that prioritize workers who have been historically marginalized.

Why these jobs matter for Black workers: Discrimination has pushed Black workers into low-paying, poor-quality jobs that have little opportunity for growth. Jobs funded by BBB will pay high wages, provide good benefits, and offer room for growth in massive new industries of the green economy. By assigning specific dollar amounts to initiatives aimed at hiring workers who have been underrepresented, Black workers can join the new wave of green jobs.

Dont think youre qualified for these types of jobs? BBB also creates career pathways for workers who have been historically marginalized to enter new fields. Many of these green jobs will be available through subsidized employment: government-funded initiatives to create jobs in new sectors through things like Job Corps, apprenticeships, and specific job opportunities for people who were formerly incarcerated.

Why career pathways matter for Black workers: Programs like theseallow participants to be paid living wages while being trained. This meansthat rather than going into debt to get industry experience, you will be able tosupport yourself even while in training. Subsidized employment programs often support workers in finding full-time employment after the program ends through mentorship and industry connections.

BBB has specific funds to invest in in-home care. An investment in the field itself will mean higher wages and a better standard of living for in-home health care workers. Grocery store workers and essential agriculture workers will also see investments in their industries that will increase their wages. Some of the money going out to each state is set aside for improving wages across the board, raising the standards for the nation. BBB will also strengthen the jobs of child care providers and pre-K teachers by increasing pay to a living wage equal to K-12 teachers with similar credentials and experience.

Why these jobs matter for Black workers: Over half of home health aides are women of color, the majority of whom are Black women. 15 percent of the early child care workforce is Black and paid below the federal poverty rate. Black women in particular have long been forced to do care work. Care workers have been perennially overworked and underpaid, especially as frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing a trend that began during slavery.

If kept in the package, four weeks of paid leave could allow Black workers to take paid time off to care for themselves and their loved ones during times of illness. BBB also includes funding for pregnant women, young parents and families, sexual assault and domestic violence prevention and support services, and care for older individuals from marginalized backgrounds. In addition, BBB provides a child care guarantee that will provide access to affordable, high-quality child care for children and families.

Why these investments matter for Black workers: Compared to white workers,Black workers are 83 percent more likely to be unable to take leave when needed.And, with the historically high cost of child care and discrimination trapping Black workers in low-paying jobs, more than one in four Black parents relied on family members to either help pay for child care or provide child care directly during the pandemic. Investment in paid leave and child care is essential to keeping Black workers in the workforce.

BBB increases the maximum federal Pell Grant by $550 annually, making it easier for workers with low incomes to afford college. HBCUs will also see more funding, allowing these institutions to support more students with low incomes to attend college. In addition, BBB will provide funding for adult education through programs like English, math, digital skills, and GED programs, as well as community college-based short-term workforce training.

Of course, investing in Black futures means investing in Black workers now. To do so, Congress needs to pass the strongest possible version of Build Back Better.

Originally posted here:

5 Things Black Workers Need to Know About BBB - The Center for Law and Social Policy

Thousands of parcels are likely to be delayed in Sydney as couriers strike over their pay rates.

About 100 franchisees of Aramex couriers (formerly Fastway couriers), representing the majority of the companys greater Sydney delivery drivers, are striking for 24 hours on Friday.

The Transport Workers Union says the couriers are fed up with outrageously unfair pay rates that earn them an average of $2.10 per parcel they deliver.

Central to the dispute is Aramexs franchise model, which requires couriers to use their own vehicles and pay the associated expenses.

Aramex describes its couriers as independent business owners.

This means our couriers have a vested interest in getting your parcel to you safely and as fast as possible, the company says on its Australian website.

TWU NSW president Tony Matthews says the companys model is nothing short of modern slavery on wheels, with some couriers working more than 50 hours a week and taking home just a few hundred dollars after costs.

It should go without saying that its unacceptable for couriers to be working for less than half the minimum wage in some cases - but thats the reality for Aramex couriers under these extremely unfair franchise contracts, Mr Matthews said.

Aramex says it takes a zero-tolerance approach to any form of modern slavery in its operations or supply chains.

Its modern slavery statement, intended to meet Aramexs obligations under the applicable Global Modern Slavery legislation including laws in NSW, identifies the risk of modern slavery in its operations and supply chains as low.

Risks that may arise include migrant labour exploitation, equality, fair pay, excessive hours, safety and human trafficking, the statement reads.

Couriers are also protesting what they say are exorbitant deductions for parcels that are not delivered.

One courier who had COVID-19 was unable to deliver parcels and penalised more than three times what they would have been paid if they had been able to deliver the parcels, the TWU says.

All that does is creates enormous pressure on couriers to continue working while theyre sick, and thats not good for them or the community, Mr Matthews said.

Aramex also runs Blu Couriers, an Amazon Flex style delivery network providing individuals the opportunity to work on their own terms delivering parcels in their own cars.

Aramex has been contacted for comment.

Fridays strike is the latest industrial action in the parcel delivery business in recent months, with unions staging strikes and other stop-work action against AusPost, StarTrack, and FedEx in the lead-up to Christmas.

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Thousands of parcel deliveries to be delayed as Sydney couriers go on strike - 7NEWS

The leader of the Islamic State group killed in a U.S. raid overnight in northwest Syria was largely a mystery, with almost no known photos, never appearing in public or in the groups videos.He met his end in the same rebel-held Idlib province where his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was hunted down by the Americans more than two years ago, some distance from the main theaters in eastern Syria and Iraq where the group once held vast swaths of territory in a self-declared caliphate.A veteran militant since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he took the name Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi when he took over command of IS after al-Baghdadi was killed in the October 2019 raid. It was up to him to lead the groups remnants as they regrouped following the downfall of their caliphate and shifted underground to wage an insurgency in Iraq and Syria.His death comes as IS militants, after years of low-level hit-and-run ambushes, had begun to carry out bolder, higher profile attacks. Last month, IS attacked a prison in northeast Syria to free jailed comrades, leading to a 10 day battle with Kurdish-led forces that left some 500 dead. President Joe Biden said al-Qurayshi was directly responsible for the prison strike, as well as the mass killings of the Yazidi people in Iraq in 2014.He was responsible for the recent brutal attack on a prison in northeast Syria ... He was the driving force behind the genocide of the Yazidi people," Biden said Thursday. We all remember the gut-wrenching stories, mass slaughters that wiped out entire villages, thousands of women and young girls sold into slavery, rape used as a weapon of war."It is unclear whether al-Qurayshi's death will break the groups momentum.His real name was Amir Mohammed Saeed Abdul-Rahman al-Mawla, an Iraqi in his mid-40s, born in 1976 and believed to be an ethnic Turkman from the northern Iraqi town of Tel Afar. He held a degree in Islamic law from the University of Mosul.His adoption of the nickname al-Qurayshi when he became ISs caliph, suggested that he, like his predecessor, claimed links to the tribe of Islams Prophet Muhammad.Like his predecessor who was killed in the village of Barisha only about 15 miles away al-Qurayshi spent his last days in Idlib province, an area held by insurgent groups hostile to IS.He was staying in a three-story house in the town of Atmeh, near the border with Turkey. The early Thursday raid on the house killed him and 12 other people, including four women and six children, according to first responders.After the raid, few people in Atmeh knew who the family renting the house was. Journalists at the site quoted neighbors as saying that the man who lived on the top floor with his family had earlier identified himself as Abu Ahmad, a Syrian who was displaced by war from Aleppo province. Children's toys, a crib and religious books, including a biography of Prophet Mohammad, were found in the bombed house. Idlib province, the last major rebel stronghold in Syria, is home to 3 million people, many of them displaced by the civil war, making it easy for strangers to blend in. The house, surrounded by olive trees, appears to have been chosen by al-Qurayshi to be as far away as possible from the eyes of onlookers.Around midnight Wednesday helicopters landed in the area carrying U.S. special forces and closed on the house.If you dont leave, we have orders. We will fire missiles toward the house. There are drones overhead, a man speaking with Iraqi dialect could be heard saying through a loudspeaker. An audio was circulated on social media.An explosion shook the area later and knocked out much of the top floor.Videos released by the oppositions Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets, showed a paramedic rushing a little girl from the house into an ambulance. A photo of a girl circulated on social media later showing a girl who appeared to be about five with blood on her face.They killed my mother and father, the girl was quoted as telling paramedics who rescued her.It was not clear if the girl was al-Qurayshis daughter.Al-Arabiya TV said three of the four women who were killed in the raid might have been the wives of the extremist leader. It is common for members of extremists group to be married to up to four women, which is allowed under Muslim tradition.Since taking command of IS, al-Qurayshi has topped the wanted list of the U.S. and other regional governments fighting the extremists. He did not appear in public, and rarely released any audio recordings. His influence and day-to-day involvement in the groups operations is not known, and he has no known successor.On March 18, 2020, the State Department listed al-Qurayshi as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. A few months later, the U.S. doubled its reward to $10 million for information leading to his identification or location. Al-Qurayshi was also known by the two other noms de guerre, Abu Omar al-Turkmani and Abdullah Qaradash.The U.S. Treasury Department said al-Qurayshi helped drive and justify the abduction, slaughter and trafficking of members of Iraqs Yazidi religious minority and that he oversees the groups global operations. Thousands of Yazidi men were killed from the group, and thousands of women taken as slaves in what rights groups say amounts to a crime of genocide.Al-Qurayshi began his militant work shortly after former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was removed from power. A year after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, al-Qurayshi joined al-Qaida in Iraq, run by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.Al-Qurayshi was arrested by U.S. troops in Mosul in 2004, where he was held for two years. During his imprisonment, he became al-Baghdadis top security henchman.Following al-Zarqawis death in a U.S. strike in 2006, al-Qurayshi became a senior official with the al-Qaida affiliate's successor group, the Islamic State in Iraq, which under al-Baghdadi transformed into the Islamic State group.When IS overran much of northern and eastern Syria and northern Iraq and declared its caliphate in 2014, al-Qurayshi became a senior official in the leadership. As the groups caliphate crumbled in the years-long war with a U.S.-led coalition in both Iraq and Syria, he went into hiding.

The leader of the Islamic State group killed in a U.S. raid overnight in northwest Syria was largely a mystery, with almost no known photos, never appearing in public or in the groups videos.

He met his end in the same rebel-held Idlib province where his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was hunted down by the Americans more than two years ago, some distance from the main theaters in eastern Syria and Iraq where the group once held vast swaths of territory in a self-declared caliphate.

A veteran militant since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he took the name Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi when he took over command of IS after al-Baghdadi was killed in the October 2019 raid. It was up to him to lead the groups remnants as they regrouped following the downfall of their caliphate and shifted underground to wage an insurgency in Iraq and Syria.

His death comes as IS militants, after years of low-level hit-and-run ambushes, had begun to carry out bolder, higher profile attacks. Last month, IS attacked a prison in northeast Syria to free jailed comrades, leading to a 10 day battle with Kurdish-led forces that left some 500 dead.

President Joe Biden said al-Qurayshi was directly responsible for the prison strike, as well as the mass killings of the Yazidi people in Iraq in 2014.

He was responsible for the recent brutal attack on a prison in northeast Syria ... He was the driving force behind the genocide of the Yazidi people," Biden said Thursday. We all remember the gut-wrenching stories, mass slaughters that wiped out entire villages, thousands of women and young girls sold into slavery, rape used as a weapon of war."

It is unclear whether al-Qurayshi's death will break the groups momentum.

His real name was Amir Mohammed Saeed Abdul-Rahman al-Mawla, an Iraqi in his mid-40s, born in 1976 and believed to be an ethnic Turkman from the northern Iraqi town of Tel Afar. He held a degree in Islamic law from the University of Mosul.

His adoption of the nickname al-Qurayshi when he became ISs caliph, suggested that he, like his predecessor, claimed links to the tribe of Islams Prophet Muhammad.

Like his predecessor who was killed in the village of Barisha only about 15 miles away al-Qurayshi spent his last days in Idlib province, an area held by insurgent groups hostile to IS.

He was staying in a three-story house in the town of Atmeh, near the border with Turkey. The early Thursday raid on the house killed him and 12 other people, including four women and six children, according to first responders.

After the raid, few people in Atmeh knew who the family renting the house was. Journalists at the site quoted neighbors as saying that the man who lived on the top floor with his family had earlier identified himself as Abu Ahmad, a Syrian who was displaced by war from Aleppo province. Children's toys, a crib and religious books, including a biography of Prophet Mohammad, were found in the bombed house.

Idlib province, the last major rebel stronghold in Syria, is home to 3 million people, many of them displaced by the civil war, making it easy for strangers to blend in. The house, surrounded by olive trees, appears to have been chosen by al-Qurayshi to be as far away as possible from the eyes of onlookers.

Around midnight Wednesday helicopters landed in the area carrying U.S. special forces and closed on the house.

If you dont leave, we have orders. We will fire missiles toward the house. There are drones overhead, a man speaking with Iraqi dialect could be heard saying through a loudspeaker. An audio was circulated on social media.

An explosion shook the area later and knocked out much of the top floor.

Videos released by the oppositions Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets, showed a paramedic rushing a little girl from the house into an ambulance. A photo of a girl circulated on social media later showing a girl who appeared to be about five with blood on her face.

They killed my mother and father, the girl was quoted as telling paramedics who rescued her.

It was not clear if the girl was al-Qurayshis daughter.

Al-Arabiya TV said three of the four women who were killed in the raid might have been the wives of the extremist leader. It is common for members of extremists group to be married to up to four women, which is allowed under Muslim tradition.

Since taking command of IS, al-Qurayshi has topped the wanted list of the U.S. and other regional governments fighting the extremists. He did not appear in public, and rarely released any audio recordings. His influence and day-to-day involvement in the groups operations is not known, and he has no known successor.

On March 18, 2020, the State Department listed al-Qurayshi as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. A few months later, the U.S. doubled its reward to $10 million for information leading to his identification or location. Al-Qurayshi was also known by the two other noms de guerre, Abu Omar al-Turkmani and Abdullah Qaradash.

The U.S. Treasury Department said al-Qurayshi helped drive and justify the abduction, slaughter and trafficking of members of Iraqs Yazidi religious minority and that he oversees the groups global operations. Thousands of Yazidi men were killed from the group, and thousands of women taken as slaves in what rights groups say amounts to a crime of genocide.

Al-Qurayshi began his militant work shortly after former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was removed from power. A year after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, al-Qurayshi joined al-Qaida in Iraq, run by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Al-Qurayshi was arrested by U.S. troops in Mosul in 2004, where he was held for two years. During his imprisonment, he became al-Baghdadis top security henchman.

Following al-Zarqawis death in a U.S. strike in 2006, al-Qurayshi became a senior official with the al-Qaida affiliate's successor group, the Islamic State in Iraq, which under al-Baghdadi transformed into the Islamic State group.

When IS overran much of northern and eastern Syria and northern Iraq and declared its caliphate in 2014, al-Qurayshi became a senior official in the leadership. As the groups caliphate crumbled in the years-long war with a U.S.-led coalition in both Iraq and Syria, he went into hiding.

See the rest here:

Who was the ISIS leader killed during the US raid in Syria? - WYFF Greenville

Martin Fey| For The Bulletin

What does a ruling political party do when everything is going wrong and popular support is tanking? Divert the publics attention by creating a bogeyman, of course. Thats the strategy of the struggling Democrat regime, led by a man who realized his life-long presidential ambition only after losing the mental acuity needed to do the job.

President Joe Biden boasted he would shut down the virus last spring; instead, COVID-19fatalities during Bidens first year in office, with vaccines available, exceeded the total reached under President Trump without vaccines. Bidens over-confidence likely contributed to the COVID test shortages that continue to hamper our response to the Omicron variant.

With Omicron just beginning to percolate, things started rapidly deteriorating for Democrats during the Afghanistan debacle last summer. Weak-minded but still headstrong, Biden disregarded the advice of his generals. He set a firm pullout date so the last Americans would leave by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, no doubt imagining himself giving an historic Rose Garden speech marking the end of Americas longest war. Instead, Afghanistan ended as Americas greatest foreign policy embarrassment since the evacuation of Saigon.

Then Democrats brought back an old enemy. Trillions in borrowed federal spending, with the prospect of far more under Build Back Better, created a supply/demand imbalance that opened the door to inflation. By winter, the inflation rate was higher than it been in 40 years, eating away the real wage gains Americans had enjoyed during the Trump presidency. Biden and his party first dismissed price increases as a temporary condition, and when real inflation became undeniable they cast it as proof of prosperity. America winced.

Biden opened the southern border to 2 million new illegal migrants, shipping thousands of them with COVID all over the country while demonizing Americans who declined vaccination. The double-standard didnt sell well.

During a recent rambling two-hour press conference, Biden gave Russian President Vladimir Putin a virtual green light to invade Ukraine, leaving his staff to clean up the mess. Democrats and the president embraced defunding and reimagining police work, and now lawlessness rages in many urban areas.

With failures and foolishness weighing down the party, Democrats have created some fearsome diversionary mirages, relying on their minions in the media and the Deep State to inflate them in the public mind.

Chief among them is the fiction, grounded on the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, that supporters of former President Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government of the United States, and that they intend to try again. This casts any opposition to the Democrat Party as terrorist, white supremacist, and treasonous. Defining Jan. 6 as an insurrection is also an effort to rally disillusioned Democrats with a nightmare vision of a Hitlerian ex-president, backed by an army of Second Amendment brownshirts, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to reclaim power.

Americans have seen the videos taken during the Jan. 6 riot. That visual record shows that if Jan. 6 were a conspiracy to overthrow the government, as Democrats would have us believe, the country has little to fear. The only person shot (and killed) was an unarmed woman rioter, and the only person who brandished and fired a gun was the DC police lieutenant who gunned her down as she stepped through a broken window draped in a Trump campaign flag.

The occupation of a portion of the Capitol lasted a couple of hours and consisted mainly of trespassers taking selfies, chatting with cops, stealing minor souvenirs, and sitting triumphantly in seats of power that werent theirs. Almost all the charges levied against the interlopers have been trespassing, criminal trespass, destroying government property, entering a restricted area, and the like. Despite that, and with civil rights violations reminiscent of Woodrow Wilsons presidency, dozens were put in solitary confinement and denied bail for months.

On the anniversary of the riot, the Democrat leadership competed for the best hyperbole award by putting the three-hour riot on a par with the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9-11. The public didnt seem impressed, perhaps because any reasonable person knows that more than flagpoles and pepper spray are needed to topple the government of the most powerful nation on earth. So, Democrats have resorted to stoking fear by hinting darkly that Jan. 6 was just a dress rehearsal for the real thing.

Others say Republicans will accomplish their coup dtat via another fiction, white supremacist-style voter suppression. Even though newly enacted voting reforms in Georgia make voting easier than it was under the old law, and easier than it is in President Bidens home state of Delaware, Democrats have gone on a rampage against voter ID and ballot safety requirements. Their own pending voting rights bill would institutionalize the loose voting standards adopted during the pandemic emergency.

In a recent podium-pounding rant, Biden likened opponents of the voting rights bill to such notorious segregationists as Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who sought to destroy the American union to maintain slavery, Alabama Sheriff Bull Connor, who ordered firehoses and dogs turned on peaceful civil rights marchers in the early 1960s, and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who personally blocked a door to prevent the entrance of black students assigned to a formerly all-white school in his state. Liberal media outlets applauded Biden, without noting that all those miscreants were Democrats and that the bill would likely run afoul of the states constitutional mandate to set the Times, Places and Manner of elections.

On voting requirements, Democrats are again misreading their audience. A poll of 1,200 voters conducted last August by the Honest Elections Project revealed that 81 percent of those surveyed, including 77 percent of Black respondents, favored a photo ID requirement to vote.

Consider the crisis at the southern border, an anomalous foreign policy, COVID mismanagement, constant race baiting, reimagined policing, and inflationary spending. The Democrat Party will not be undone by any Republican cabal, but by trying to convince America that their fictions are truths.

Martin Fey is a member of the Quiet Corner Tea Party Patriots.

Continue reading here:

View from the Right: The Democrat party passing fictions as truths - Norwich Bulletin

The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with Mark Kruger about his new book, The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Douglas Lyons: Mark, could you tell us something about your background and how you became interested in this little-known yet extraordinary and revolutionary event in American history?

Mark Kruger: Thanks very much for inviting me. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the late 60s and that was a life changing event, just being on that campus then. After that I went to law school at Washington University in St. Louis and then later received a PhD from Saint Louis University.

Through the years in reading labor history, I kept coming across these short remarks about how during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 workers seized power in St. Louis. I had to wait until my retirement when I had time to sit down and look at it to begin to try to piece together the answers to some of those questions. So, the subject was on my mind for a number of years but it was really about four years ago that I began to really research it and delve into it.

DL: Were you involved in left-wing, working class politics?

MK: I formed a group that would go after individual kinds of problems, political, environmental, that sort of thing. For a while I was involved with the Workers League [forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party]. They came down from New York and sponsored a talk on campus on the Vietnam War. And also, the YSA [the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Party]. I always liked the Black Panther Party because they had that class analysis, so I began selling their newspapers on the Washington University campus.

DL: What's so important about your book is that you put the St. Louis Commune in the international context of the First International, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1848 revolutionaries. I was wondering if you can explain more about this influence on the American working class.

MK: As I got into it, I realized that this was almost more of a European event than it was an American event, because the roots of the St. Louis Commune were in Europe and that you had to look at those events to understand the Commune. So, for example, you had the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe but especially in the German-speaking states and after that was suppressed those people moved to the United States and many of them settled in St. Louis because the city had a very long history of German immigration. It was very attractive to German immigrants to come here because there were a lot of people who spoke their language and had their culture. All of those things were present.

You had all these revolutionaries from the German-speaking areas coming to St. Louis, as well as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago and other places. Then, in 1871, the Paris Commune was suppressed. A lot of those people also came to the United States, many of them settling in St. Louis because it was originally a very French city.

Marx formed the First International in 1864, and that moved headquarters to the United States in 1872. So, you had a thread between all these revolutionaries where they were all members, or mostly members, of the First International. And it came together in the city. St. Louis had a very strong section of the International with German, French, Bohemian, and British or English-speaking sections. You had all of these European influences that ultimately resulted in the St. Louis general strike that grew out of the Railroad Strike of 1877.

DL: What was the city itself like? Could you compare it to others such as Chicago or Pittsburgh?

MK: It was the fourth-largest city in the country and growing by leaps and bounds. There were even efforts to move the nations capital to St. Louis. The city was big in manufacturing. It had large iron ore deposits in the Carondelet area of the city. It rivaled Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Birmingham, Alabama in steel production. There was massive trade going through the city into the West and South. Hence, its claimed today to be the Gateway to the West.

St. Louis is sort of a mix between a northern and southern city and some people have joked that it combined the best of northern hospitality with southern efficiency. It was a racist city, but at the time it was a very racist country so that was not unusual. But before the Civil War, because of the German immigrants, there was a very strong anti-slavery feeling to the city and as a result there was strong support for the Republican Party and strong support for Abraham Lincoln.

The state of Missouri on the other hand was very conservative, very Confederate in the southern and western parts of the state. St. Louis was kind of an island in this sea of Confederacy. The governor of Missouri during the Civil War was Claiborne Jackson who was a Confederate sympathizer, trying to get Missouri to join the Confederacy. St. Louis residents resisted, especially the Germans, many of whom became Union generals and very strong Unionists.

DL: Your book does a fantastic job covering Joseph Weydemeyer, a German revolutionary and friend of Karl Marx. Were there other prominent 1848ers in St. Louis?

MK: In St. Louis, the big hero was Franz Sigel. There is still a statue to him in Forest Park. He had been in the Prussian army and then took part in the 1848 revolutions and at one time considered going to Italy to fight in the revolution there, but instead came to the United States and fought for the Union during the Civil War. To this day he is still a hero among the German-descent citizens here.

DL: Why did these German revolutionaries support Lincoln?

new wsws title from Mehring Books

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history.

MK: Lincoln kind of fit into the Marxist perspective of the capitalists taking control from feudalists in the South. Marx would support that as part of the progressive movement toward socialism. So, Lincoln was a very progressive figure and was supported by a lot of these German revolutionaries.

DL: You mentioned racism in St. Louis and Missouri, but, during the strike, white and black workers united along class lines, as did different nationalities.

MK: Its always hard to put your yourself in the place of people 150 years ago. You get bits and pieces, like a puzzle, and you try to give an idea of what something looked like. But 1877 was a very racist time and you had a young working class in the United States. Slaves were only recently freed, and as a result, a lot of the early unions were racist in nature. Most unions did not allow blacks. Blacks formed their own unions in many cases. Only later did we overcome that. The Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union (NLU) were two unions that went out and specifically attempted to organize women and black people, which was very unusual 150 years ago. The NLU was immense in its membership, having about 800,000 members. They were two unions that tried to organize on the basis of class rather than race.

What emerged in St. Louis in 1877 was a coming together of black and white people in the general strike. You had black workers on the bargaining committee that met with the railroad owners. You had white workers supporting black steamship workers and helped them get a 50 percent raise in wages. You had blacks marching with whites through the streets. The newspapers at the time were full of descriptions of black hordes marching with white people and taking over society, so the Commune actually brought together black and white workers in a class focus.

DL: One episode which definitely showed the evolution of American society was when two former Union and Confederate generals united and took orders from the government to squash the revolutionaries.

MK: When I saw that a Union general and a Confederate general were both chosen to lead the forces against the St. Louis community, against the workers, I thought how symbolic is that: Two former enemies that were killing each other came together now to suppress the workers. In the antebellum South, the generals supported the southern plantation owners, the feudal interests. In the North, the capitalist class was emerging, and they controlled their own forces, so when the North won the Civil War and the northern capitalists took control of the American government, the army then was going to follow the orders and support the interests of that ruling class. The new enemy was not slaveowners in the South; the new enemy of those capitalists was the working class.

DL: Can you talk more about the labor movement after the Civil War and how it coalesced around the international trends you study?

MK: At that time, what was happening in Europe and in the United States was a big change in the working class with the industrial revolution and new machinery in the factories. A lot of the skilled workers were being forced into factories as wage earners. Before they were earning a pretty good wage and they controlled their own lives and working conditions. But now their skills were not valued, and as a result their higher wages were lowered because they were just running the machines like any unskilled worker.

Low wages and bad working conditions were ubiquitous all through American industry. This is a very young working class that really is searching for its consciousness. At the same time, you have all these German and French revolutionaries coming to the United States and joining the working class and trying to instill this class consciousness in the workers and unite them.

DL: Why do you think the Great Railroad Strike followed a spontaneous course, and why did it draw in skilled and unskilled workers, white and black workers, and the unemployed?

MK: Conditions were so bad for the working class at that time. The railroad industry plays a big part in the book because the working conditions were so dangerous and with the three pay cuts in 1877. But the whole working class was really suffering. There was no social safety net. If you could not buy coal to heat your house, then you would freeze to death. If you could not buy food, you would starve to death, and that was a pretty general situation. All it took was one spark and then everybody who was in the same boat began to react. These strikes began happening in Martinsburg, West Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland, and then spreading west from there. It was all spontaneous and within a week it had reached California. That is how fast it was moving.

DL: But in St. Louis the Workingmens Party (WP) harnessed this eruption.

MK: Workers did form, out of the First International, the Workingmens Party of the United States, but in 1877 it was only a year old. You have got a young party that is watching this, and they are taken by surprise. In the eastern states it happened too fastthey could not react to it but in St. Louis it took a few days to reach the city and the party tried to provide some leadership. They organized a general strike, and when the city was abandoned, they took it over. But they were not ready to take leadership and make it a national movement, rather than individual movements in different localities.

DL: The demands of the WP, such as nationalization of the railroads and telegraph industries under the control of the working class, underscore the influence of the First International.

MK: The 1848 revolutionaries that came to St. Louis provided the philosophy of class consciousness that was otherwise lacking among workers in the city. You had with the WP a radical leadership. James Cope was one of the leaders and he was a member of the London, England trades council before he came to the city. Albert Currlin was a member of the First International and a founder of the party. Twenty percent of the WP lived in St. Louis, so you had a lot of revolutionaries and radicals, and that had the effect of changing what was a strike over wages and working conditions into something broader. These were Marxists that recognized this was a struggle between classes that was emerging, and they tried to provide that leadership and that philosophy to educate the workers.

The WP held these mass meetings where a number of speakers were talking about not just wages and working conditions such as the eight-hour day and the end to child labor, but also planned out the takeover of these different industries to be run for the benefit of the working class rather than a few rich capitalists. They infused the philosophy of socialism.

DL: This era was termed the Gilded Age, and today the term the Second Gilded Age is being used to describe the state of society. What similarities do you see between 1877 and today and what do you think will happen when another working class uprising happens in the United States?

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

MK: There were so many things about the Gilded Age that are similar to today. The expansion of capitalism, the control of the government by the capitalists, the suppression of working class organizations. And today unions are at their weakest point they have been in many years. You have voter suppression and a tremendous gap in wealth between the capitalists and the workers. A lot of the conditions are there for a struggle to emerge.

When I was a kid, I grew up in a very working class town just north of Chicago which has become infamous in recent days Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city of [fascist killer] Kyle Rittenhouse. The town was extremely working class. American Motors was headquartered there and so was Simmons Mattress. Everyone it seemed belonged to a union and all of my friendsall of their fathers belonged to unions, and they all lived in middle-class neighborhoods, a very middle-class life. That was the post-war period when the economy was good, and the unions were strong.

When I was a sophomore in Madison in 1968, I thought there was going to be a revolution before I graduated college. People were talking about what are you going to do after the revolution. But today is similar to 1877, nobody expected it to break out when it did and so that could happen at any time.

I think that what was lacking in St. Louis in 1877, which is lacking today, is a leadership that was socialist, was Marxist. There was a Workers Party there, which attempted to lead this uprising. But it was young and inexperienced. I think a socialist leadership is necessary if something is going to happen now.

DL: We saw the immense power of the youth and workers after the horrendous murder of George Floyd. That was a huge spontaneous uprising sending shockwaves throughout the entire world. But I would have to disagree with you on the leadership, because we have the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party.

I would also have to argue that the trade unions have not done anything for workers. They are going along with the capitalist class to keep workers in COVID-infested workplaces and schools for profit. We are calling on the working class to create new organizations of struggle based on internationalism and socialism, rank-and-file committees. This will not come through the corporatist and nationalist AFL-CIO and other unions.

MK: I think you are right. When we talked about the earlier movements, leadership is so important. When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged, one of the things that they stressed was a lack of leadership. And they were proud of that. The first thing that entered my mind was the Students for a Democratic Society meetings in the 1960s, where there was no leadership in those meetings. It went on for hours and hours and hours, and accomplished very little. The leadership of a socialist organization like yours I think is crucial to any kind of working class movement.

Marx talked about building up workers organizations and then a workers party, and he said that if workers supported any of the mainstream parties, the capitalist parties, they would be exploited by those parties for their votes but they would not get anything in return. And that seems to me to be exactly what has happened in this country. It is going to take some real leadership, I think, in order to point the working class in the direction of class interests rather than just a few more dollars or one hour less of a workday.

That is totally related to my biggest fear right now and that is the emergence of fascism in the United States. This is being fed by the Republican Party today. The threat is a lot stronger than I think a lot of people realize.

DL: This brings me to the other capitalist party that divides the working class through identity politics, the Democratic Party, which, through its main organ, the New York Times, has waged a falsification of history in the 1619 Project. What are your thoughts on this?

MK: I did read a number of those articles and interviews that are in your book, and to me it is so simplistic and wrong to say that race is the one factor that has defined all of history. History is so complicated, and there are so many different things going on at the same time. It takes a great deal of thinking and research to try to understand what forces are at work and what effect they were having.

To me, the 1619 Project is the logical consequence of identity politics. I do not say that looking at certain groups or focusing on them to understand those groups is not important, for example, the Black Power movement. I think it serves some ends in understanding what has happened to that particular group. Courses on womens history helps women understand why they have been repressed in the society. But it is not the answer to the ultimate question.

The claim that the American Revolution was primarily in order to preserve slavery in the United States, is, to me, ridiculous. It totally ignores the Enlightenment. All the leaders of the American Revolution were students of the Enlightenment, children of the Enlightenment. The 1619 Project does not touch the issue that the purpose of colonies was to exploit them and provide profits for the mother country. You had the fledgling capitalist corporations in England setting up colonies, and the whole idea was to take as much from them as possible and line your pockets with that exploitation.

There are a number of factors that go into the American Revolution. A lot of the colonists were slaveowners. But we are talking about the 1700s, and there were slaves all over the world at the time, not just in what was to become the United States. So to say that a countrys entire history is based on its treatment of black people I think is very simplistic, very one dimensional. And what it has is the effect of dividing the working class into a number of different groups, each with their own interest, each with their own complaints, and failing to see the common denominator.

I just read a book by Les Payne called The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. No one was more race conscious in his earlier years than Malcolm X. He attributed all the problems of black people to the blonde-haired blue-eyed devil, white people. An extremely racist-focused interpretation of history. But then he began to change in his later years. There were a couple of things in the book that caught my attention: Malcolm told [civil rights leader and later Congressman] John Lewis in Nairobi, Kenya, to shift focus from race to class. Malcolm came to a certain understanding that class and capitalism lead to racism, rather than it being some kind of natural thing, a natural conflict between white people and black people. I think that is where the 1619 Project goes wrong. It just focuses on one thing, tries to draw conclusions based on one element in American history, and that is much too narrow and much too simplistic to explain anything.

DL: Martin Luther King Jr. moved towards a class analysis of society as well, which the 1619 Project completely ignores.

MK: Right, they went from marches in the South for black civil rights to the Poor Peoples Campaign, trying to unite black and white workers. It may be a coincidence, but that raises the question of his assassination, when he started this campaign. This raises a point with the Workingmens Party. For them the problem of racism and the repression of women would all be solved when capitalism was ended, the basic problem that led to both of those problems was capitalism.

DL: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this important book and subject.

MK: Thank you for having me. Its not everybody that is interested in a weeklong event that occurred in St. Louis 150 years ago. But I always thought that the first general strike in American history, and the only time an American city was being run by communists, was pretty interesting.

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An interview with Mark Kruger, author of The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland - WSWS

Conservative groups across the US, often linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors, are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.

Literature has already been removed from schools in Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Librarians and teachers warn the trend is on the increase, as groups backed by wealthy Republican donors use centrally drawn up tactics and messaging to harangue school districts into removing certain texts.

In October, the Texas state representative Matt Krause sent a list of 850 books to school districts, asking that they report how many copies they have of each title and how much had been spent on those books.

The Texas Tribune reported that the books included two by Ta-Nehisi Coates; LGBT Families by Leanne K Currie-McGhee; and Pink is a Girl Color and Other Silly Things People Say, a childrens book by Stacy and Erik Drageset. Krauses list sparked panic in schools, and by December a district in San Antonio said it was reviewing 414 titles in its libraries.

In Pennsylvania, the Central York school board banned a long list of books, almost entirely titles by, or about, people of color, including books by Jacqueline Woodson, Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X Kendi, and childrens titles about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Lets just call it what it is every author on that list is a Black voice, one teacher told the York Dispatch.

Four high schools in Utahs Canyons school district removed copies of at least nine books, the Deseret News reported, including Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; the Bluest Eye, a book by the Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison that addresses racial and gender oppression; and Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez, a story about romance in a racially divided 1930s Texas.

Groups purporting to be grassroots efforts have frequently led the charge, petitioning school boards or elected officials to remove certain books. Though some of these organizations present themselves as a local effort that sprang up around groups of parents united behind a cause, many of the groups involved in banning books are in fact linked, and backed by influential conservative donors.

Most of the books relate to race or gender equality, at a time when some Republicans are mounting an effort to prevent teaching on race in schools by launching a loud campaign against critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Associations Office for Intellectual Freedom, said the number of attempts to ban books had soared through 2021.

Whats unique is it appears to be an organized effort by a number of advocacy groups to activate members in local chapters to challenge books in school libraries and public libraries in the United States, she said.

Weve noted that there are a number of groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education that have particular views on what is appropriate for young people, and theyre trying to implement their agenda particularly in schools, but also taking their concerns to public libraries as well.

Caldwell-Stone said ALA received 156 book challenges an attempt to remove or restrict one or more books in 2020. In the last three months of 2021 alone, the organization saw 330 book challenges.

In most incidents there is a common format. According to the conservative groups, one parent of a child at school has spotted an allegedly unsuitable book, and has raised the alarm. But the movement is far from organic.

The name Moms for Liberty might suggest a homely, kitchen-table effort. In reality, Moms for Liberty is associated with other supposed grassroots groups backed by conservative donors, who appear to be driving the book-banning effort.

Moms for Liberty groups are promoted on the website of Parents Defending Education (PDE), another conservative group, and in May Moms for Liberty joined with PDE to write a letter to Miguel Cardona, the US education secretary, expressing concerns over federal efforts to include teaching about the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in US society.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment.

Asra Nomani, PDEs vice-president for strategy and investigations, has appeared on Fox News to rail against some books, including Woke Baby and Gender Queer, being in Virginia libraries, and PDE carries a list of books it deems problematic on its website.

PDE, which launched in spring of 2021, has emerged as one of the key organizations in the conservative fight for influence in public schools. The group describes itself as a grassroots organization, but has ties to deep-pocket conservative money and influence.

PDEs president, Nicole Neilly, was previously the executive director of the Independent Womens Forum and worked at the Cato Institute, a rightwing thinktank co-founded by Republican mega-donor Charles Koch. The Intercept reported that the IWF has received large donations from Republican donor Leonard Leo, a former vice-president of the Koch-funded Federalist Society who advised Donald Trump on judicial appointments.

PDEs website offers templates as to how aggrieved people can get involved. The group is behind an effort to create a web of coordinated Instagram pages that highlight perceived liberal bias at specific schools, and offers a step-by-step guide to doing the same, from how to create a specific gmail address to match the mission to how to describe the instagram account. The guide advises: For the full name field, use Woke at [school name]. For the username field, use wokeat[school name].

PDE, which has also railed against critical race theory, even tells parents they should spy on teachers online activity to seek incriminating material.

Look at the social media pages of teachers and administrators at your school. They are often quite proud of what theyre doing and sometimes post incriminating statements or materials, PDEs website says.

Another aim, beyond banning books, is exposed in PDEs efforts to encourage conservative parents to run for school boards an often ignored position that wields a considerable amount of power.

PDE offers a guide on how parents can run, and while also describing how to gain influence on Parent Teacher Student Associations. It even offers specific questions disgruntled parents can pose to their school boards.

PDE did not respond to a request for comment.

No Left Turn in Education, whose chapters are promoted on PDEs website, is another of the groups leading the charge. No Left Turns website contains a list of more than 60 books it deems inappropriate.

Again, the group has links to deep-pocketed conservatives. The Milwaukee Journal reported that Elana Fishbein, No Left Turn in Educations founder, has provided free legal representation for parents wishing to challenge school districts. According to Journal, most of those lawyers are affiliated with the Liberty Justice Center and Pacific Legal Foundation, which receive funding from the prominent GOP donor Dick Uihlein, a Wisconsin-based billionaire.

No Left Turn in Education did not respond to requests for comment.

The banning of books about race or LGBTQ issues does not just affect those communities, said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association. It also withholds the opportunity for all students to learn an honest and accurate truth of our history.

Censoring the full history of America impacts all of us as a country, Anderson said.

If were not willing to embrace the beauty of America, which is that our diversity is our strength, then we weaken the core idea of America. So its offensive, certainly, to people of color and other Americans who have traditionally been marginalized, but ultimately were short-changing every single student if we dont tell the truth.

In Texas, Krause, who was running for state attorney general when he released his list of 850 books he has since dropped out of the race did not respond to the Guardians questions about how he came up with his list of books.

Krause told Education Week he chose to act after school boards began reviewing books of an inappropriate nature.

None of us wants grossly inappropriately material in our schools, he said.

As the conservative effort has grown, there has been pushback in many states, from authors, teachers, librarians and students. Carolyn Foote, a library advocate who co-founded the group FReadom Fighters to push back against banning efforts, said the conservative efforts represent a danger to democracy.

The supreme court protects young peoples right to choose library materials to read as a first amendment right. It also is growing to include more and more titles, which is concerning, and a minority of parents are impacting all students, Foote said.

The Pennsylvania ban was overturned in September 2021 after students protested outside their York County high school and outside school board meetings. In Virginia, high school students managed to overturn the Spotsylvania book ban in similar fashion, while Caldwell-Stone said the ALA will continue to highlight the book-banning efforts.

We dont oppose the ability of parents to guide their childrens reading, she said.

What we have deep concerns about is one parent, or one small group of parents, making decisions for an entire community about what is appropriate reading, based on their own moral and religious values.

Continue reading here:

US conservatives linked to rich donors wage campaign to ban books from schools - The Guardian

For the first time, the United States has been added to the list of backsliding democracies. And majority of young people no longer believe that they will do better than their parents, a key indicator of faith in the American dream.

Few may doubt that the United States is in one of the darkest, most challenging times in its political history, one rife with cynicism and pessimism. Fourteen months after the election, many in the Republican Party still do not accept that Joe Biden won the presidential election of 2020.

But history shows that politics change, sometimes beyond expectations. Fewer than 10 years ago, few may have thought that American democracy would be as imperiled as it is now. Likewise, positive political shifts that were once hard to imagine have become widely accepted, including the abolition of slavery, universal adult suffrage, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, easy access to birth control, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

Time and again, politics has changed in unlikely directions, sometimes resulting in heartening new political horizons.

In American politics, long periods of political order and stability are regularly followed by shorter bursts of significant political change. There have been six great political realignments in the history of American politics, and they have typically occurred during major crises such as the Great Depression or the Civil War.

Recognized realignments include the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, which reversed a trend of growing national power and higher taxes that had dominated politics since the founding of the nation. Andrew Jacksons election in 1828 led to universal suffrage for white males, increasing the electorate substantially.

Abraham Lincolns victory in 1860 led to the abolition of slavery, and national power again became dominant when the Union prevailed over the Confederacy in the Civil War. Following William McKinleys win in 1896, progressive reforms such as the federal income tax and antitrust laws were instituted to address a growing wealth gap.

Franklin Delano Roosevelts election in 1932 led the national government to regulate the economy, creating a vast web of New Deal programs that established for the first time a social safety net for people devastated by the Great Depression. The funding for many of those programs was slashed and national power was devolved back to state and local governments after Ronald Reagans landslide victory in 1980.

Adjustments in political times recur every 40 years or so in U.S. politics, and it is long overdue. The periods prior to realignment are typically quite politically unstable and politically divisive. For example, mob violence between pro and anti-slavery forces broke out prior to Lincolns election in a series of incidents known as Bleeding Kansas, which has been called a small civil war.

Food riots and labor strife were rising prior to McKinleys election, due to the economic panic of 1893. Hunger marches and makeshift housing called Hoovervilles emerged across the nation, named as a jab at then President Herbert Hoovers inability to address the economic fallout of the Great Depression prior to Franklin Roosevelts election.

Radical politics often become more visible in the mainstream. For instance, in normal times, it would be unusual in mainstream American politics for a Democratic socialist to gain as much traction as Sen. Bernie Sanders did during the 2016 presidential election, gaining over 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries.

Similarly, communist organizing was as strong as it has ever been in the United States during the 1930s and other revolutionary groups gained great visibility in the 1970s.

It is quite possible that the United States is in the midst of a major political realignment. It is true that a majority of Republicans continue to remain loyal to former President Donald Trump, believing that he won the election of 2020. Rep. Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney stood alone on the Republican side of the House chamber during recent events commemorating last years attack on the Capitol.

And yet, the evidence suggests that Biden defeated Trump soundly. The one-term Trump presidency yielded few major legislative victories apart from cutting taxes and judicial appointments.

Scholars have called this kind of political failure a disjunctive presidency, to indicate that the coalition supporting a long dominant party is fragmenting, a phenomenon that typically occurs right before a major political realignment.

Elected in 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter was a failed, one-term president who could not hold together the fragmenting New Deal governing coalition, right before the Reagan landslide in 1980 ushered in years of Republican dominance based on small government, lower taxes and devolution of power from the national government to the states.

Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats came to dominate politics after winning over 60 percent of the popular vote in 1936, and for many years thereafter.

Despite these recurring patterns across U.S. history, many people may find it impossible to imagine a different political order other than the one they are in at the moment.

Political history provides reasons for citizens to hold on through challenging political times. To be sure, it is hard to live through political instability, not knowing what will come next. But the certainty offered by cynicism and pessimism, however comforting in the short term, leads to political dead ends in the long run.

Historical patterns suggest that it is far better to have faith that this political darkness will end. But faith without works is not enough. Freedom from slavery, the minimum wage, and votes for women, were only won after years of organizing, resistance and activism.

Cynicism and pessimism make such work impossible. Though it may be painful, democracy requires nothing less.

Susan Burgess is a distinguished professor of political science at Ohio University, a senior professional lecturer at DePaul University and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project. She wrote this for The Fulcrum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems.

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Susan Burgess: Keep the faith: History shows dark night of politics will end - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

As businesses plan for the new year ahead, we've taken a look at what to expect in employment law in 2022.

Employment Law Bill

In the Queen's Speech in December 2019, the government announced that a new Employment Bill would be brought forward to seek to protect and enhance workers' rights post Brexit. While we still do not have a timetable for the long awaited Employment Bill, government has confirmed that it intends to bring it forward "when Parliamentary time allows" and it is anticipated that it will be published at some point in 2022.

The measures expected to be included in the Bill are wide-ranging (see Horizon Scanner) and we have highlighted some of the key developments below.

New Single Enforcement Body

In June 2021 the government published its response to the consultation on the proposal to create a single enforcement body to offer better protection for workers in relation to National Minimum Wage, holiday pay, Statutory Sick Pay, modern slavery and labour exploitation. The new Single Enforcement Body will bring three existing bodies into one organisation with wider powers to protect employment rights and improve employers' compliance.

The statutory provisions to create the new Single Enforcement Body are expected to be included in the awaited Employment Bill.

Flexible Working

The government consultation on flexible working closed last month and we now await their response. The consultation considered five key proposals: making the right to request flexible working a day one right, whether the eight business reasons for refusing a request all remain valid, requiring the employer to suggest alternatives, the administrative process underpinning the right to request flexible working, and requesting a temporary arrangement.

It also looked to consider how to make the most of the lessons learnt from working practices during lockdown and employers' responses to new approaches to working and to consider how to secure genuinely flexible working friendly cultures across and within organisations. Last month CIPD published new guidance on flexible working which was commissioned by the government's flexible working taskforce. (See Update: New Guidance on Hybrid Working)

Depending on the response to the consultation, any measures proposed on flexible working are likely to be included in the Employment Bill.

Harassment in the Workplace

In July 2021 the government announced it will introduce a new mandatory duty on employers to protect workers from harassment and victimisation in the workplace and strengthen and clarify laws on third-party harassment. It is expected that employers will be required to take "all reasonable steps" to prevent harassment and that an incident will need to have occurred before an individual can make a claim.

Although we still do not have a date for the new mandatory duty, it is expected in 2022 and will ensure that harassment will be very much on the agenda for businesses in the forthcoming year. Employers should now be strengthening their efforts to create an environment in which harassment complaints can be reported and investigated properly and deliver or refresh training for staff.

National Disability Strategy

In July 2021 the government published a National Disability Strategy setting out various steps that it will take to remove barriers faced by disabled people in all aspects of their lives including work, justice, politics, transport, housing and leisure services. A government consultation on workforce disability reporting (voluntary and mandatory reporting) has recently been published and will close in March 2022 so we may expect to see the government's response to it later in the year.

Social awareness and a greater understanding of disability issues will continue to grow into 2022 and employers will want to ensure that their policies and practices reflect that knowledge and understanding, keeping disability inclusivity firmly on the agenda for the coming year and beyond.

Diversity and Inclusion

Following on from the FCA's discussion paper in July 2021 on diversity and inclusion in the financial services sector it is likely that the regulator will explore the introduction of new rules and regulations designed to put D&I at the forefront of corporate governance in the sector moving forward. While there has been widespread discussion within the financial services sector and from other professional regulators, this is a subject which resonates across every sector.

Changing customer and shareholder expectations is driving a culture of encouraging diversity and inclusion in the workplace. While many organisations now have strategies in place to promote D&I, there is still a visible gap between the aims of the businesses and the reality in the workplace. Board rooms will want to ensure that D&I is very much on the agenda for 2022.

Expected Cases

Our Horizon Scanner has a round-up of future key cases for 2022.

Originally posted here:

What's ahead in employment law for 2022? - Lexology

By Steven Monacelli

A report commissioned by Mayor Eric Johnson about the Dallas workforce released in November revealed only 40 percent of jobs in Dallas pay more than $32,000 significantly less than the family-sustaining wage of $42,000 or more identified by the report and that Black workers hold just 15 percent of those jobs despite making up 25 percent of the population. This job and income inequity is a part of a broader constellation of racial inequities solidified over decades of slavery and Jim Crow oppression that persists to this day despite significant federal, state and local reform.

As the City of Dallas continues to engage in conversations regarding racial inequity and what can be done from the perspective of local government, a nonprofit organization called OneTen is hoping to tackle the issue of racial wealth inequality from the perspective of the private sector. To achieve that, OneTen has built a network of employers, education and training programs, and community organizations who work together to address the various barriers that limit the access to opportunity for Black job seekers.

OneTen says 79% of family-sustaining jobs in the United States require a four-year college degree, a credential 76% of Black adults in America lack. This is a massive barrier that keeps Black families from accumulating wealth. It isnt one that Black families face exclusively. Nationally, 66% of White adults in the workforce lack a four-year degree. Yet Black families have $155,000 less net worth than White families, reflecting the barriers to developing long term family wealth that are particular to the Black community.

OneTen sees this in large part as a problem of unnecessary credentialism and does not believe pushing for more four-year degrees is the necessary solution. Rather, OneTen advocates for employers to shift focus from credentials to skills and replace four-year degree requirements with clearly defined competencies that will open up new pathways for employment. They estimate that 4 million jobs could be re-credentialed to remove the four-year degree.

To date, OneTen has secured buy-in from 57 major employers and 53 education and training programs across the nation. In the Dallas area, 25 employers have agreed to eliminate college degree requirements from family-supporting career opportunities. They will work with OneTen to connect prospective employees who face barriers to employment with community partners who can provide additional assistance such as childcare.

The CEO of OneTen, Maurice Jones, spoke with DW about what OneTen is doing nationally and locally to achieve the bold goal of hiring or promoting one million Black individuals who do not have four-year college degrees into family-sustaining careers over the next 10 years.

You cannot address the wealth disparity in this country without quality jobs being a strategy that you pursue aggressively, Jones said. Were not trying to pit skills against degrees. What were saying is that there are multiple pathways to getting the skills that youre looking for in the workforce.

Jones laid out the example of the growing need for capable computer coders. Instead of focusing on credentials, a company would focus on the skills needed to do the job. We would work to match them with coding boot camps and other organizations who can help them find Black talent. And that prospective talent might need childcare, so we can help them with that as well.

In 2021, OneTen measured 17,000 hires and 4,000 promotions toward their goal of one million Black individuals with a family-sustaining career. As their coalition of employers grows so will the employment numbers. Its a likely scenario. Many companies have taken more aggressive steps to promote a diverse and inclusive workforce in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, and many other Black lives. And many employers are trying to hire as fast as they can.

Weve got 10 million jobs open around the country. Not only do we have unfinished business, but we are leaving so much talent on the sidelines because of self-inflicted wounds, Jones said. I think we have a unique moment where theres a recognition of the need for the private sector to do more to make their workplaces more inclusive and diverse and to do more to help the country to become a more perfect union.

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OneTen Network Aims To Close Racial Wealth Gap With Skills-Focused Hiring - Dallasweekly

Illustration by Ryan Inzana.

The United States is the product of an accountability movement that was never fully realized. Thomas Paine called the country into being with Common Sense, a pamphlet that invited the beleaguered residents of 13 British colonies on the eastern shore of North America to indulge their fury at the imperial abuses of King George III. He ridiculed the men of passive tempers who look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, Come, come, we shall be friends again for all this. Rejecting the prospect of reconciliation with the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land, Paine encouraged Americans to ask themselves pointed questions:

Adapted from John Nicholss new book, Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis (Verso).

Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

This was about more than refusing to shake hands with the murderers, however. It was, Paine recognized, about forging a new mentality that would see beyond the lie of reconciliation with those who abused positions of authority to the detriment of the people.

No excuses. No forgiveness. The stakes were too high for that. The American people needed to make a clean break with their imperial overlords, and with the foolishness that would suggest that a relationship so broken as that of Great Britain and the United States could be mended. A failure to do so would squander the power to begin the world over again. When that revolution prevailed, Paine entertained the hope the new nation might form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth.

Unfortunately, that never happened. George III and the petty royalists of Great Britain were repudiated. But then the petty royalists of the United States took over. Men in wigs, enslavers from the South and slave traders from the North, wrote a constitution that embraced the sin of human bondage, denied the franchise to the vast majority of Americans, and saddled the new republic with an economic system so crudely rapacious that it instantaneously made a lie of the founding premise that all men are created equal. As Gore Vidal observed, Long before Darwin the American ethos was Darwinian. The drafters of the Constitution, who excluded Paine and the truest revolutionaries from the process, set the United States on a course that would see genocide, civil war, systemic racism and sexism, economic inequality on a feudal scale, and social divisions so stark that they would be exploited, decade after decade, century after century, by charlatans who capitalized on a system that invited their villainy. The worst of their kind, a royalist who worshipped the queen of England, came to power in 2017 after losing the popular vote. Taking advantage of an Electoral College that permitted losers to become winners, Donald John Trump claimed a presidency for which he was wholly unfit, and proceeded on a ruinous course that would eventually see the country ravaged by disease, mass unemployment, and seemingly irreconcilable division.

Trumps presidency was the ugliest manifestation of a system where the rot had grown so severe, so overwhelming, that after Covid-19 hit, when hundreds of thousands were dying, when millions were sickened, and when tens of millions were left jobless, the stock markets soared to new highs. While nurses risked their lives with inadequate personal protective equipment against a pandemic, while bus drivers fell ill because they were required to work as the disease spread, while immigrant workers in meat processing plants died because their employers failed to put adequate protections in place, billionaires retreated to second and third homes and monitored the steady increase in their fortunes from federal emergency relief packages that literally redistributed wealth upward. Trumps malfeasance was jarring, as Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington noted in the midst of the crisis. States have been sort of left to play out The Hunger Games on procuring swabs, she said. I mean, literally, we have governors, my governor included, calling random people in China to try to get swabs off the back of a truck somewhere and get them here, only to find out then that perhaps theyre not validated; theyre not good for use. Same thing with PPE. I just think that the president has sort of come to this place where hes willing to sacrifice peoples lives.

But it wasnt just the president; it was cabinet members, senators, governors, media personalities, and CEOs. The whole corrupt system was exposed. Yet it did not fall; it ran according to plan. In a moment of crisis, the rich and the powerful peddled the fantasy that no one was immune to the threateven as they boosted their own immunity with fresh infusions of the wealth and privilege that had always protected them from the misery they imposed upon others. As the pandemic was being declared, Naomi Klein predicted how things would play out. The Feds first move was to pump $1.5 trillion into the financial markets, with more undoubtedly on the way, she explained. But if youre a worker, especially a gig worker, theres a very good chance youre out of luck. And without comprehensive bailouts for workers, we can expect more bankruptcies and more homelessness down the road. Current Issue

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Klein knew what to look for because she wrote the book on how economic and political elites exploit crises to implement their cruelest agendas. Look, we know this script, she explained in March 2020. In 2008, the last time we had a global financial meltdown, the same kinds of bad ideas for no-strings-attached corporate bailouts carried the day, and regular people around the world paid the price. And even that was entirely predictable. Thirteen years ago, I wrote a book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, [which] described a brutal and recurring tactic by right-wing governments. After a shocking eventa war, coup, terrorist attack, market crash, or natural disasterthey exploit the publics disorientation, suspend democracy, push through radical free-market policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.

Because Klein had sparked an understanding of how disaster capitalists and their neoliberal allies in positions of power employ the shock doctrine in times of crisis, and because Americans who remembered the exploitation of the 2008 meltdown were speaking up, there was a hope that 2020 would be different. But it was not to be. Despite the jarring circumstances of the first months of 2020, the only change was that those who had robbed us before upped the ante. The public largesse was again grabbed up by the elites. More misery was imposed on the working class. More lies were told. More of the feeble systems for maintaining health and security in capitalist countries were undermined. More people got sick. More people died.

How does that happen in the richest country in the history of the world? Bernie Sanders asked when we first spoke about the pandemic in April 2020.

Why does it always go this way?

Essential workers: Nurses in Wuhan assemble plastic face shields at a hospital for Covid-19 patients. (Chinatopix via AP)

The answer is summed up in a word: impunity. The United Nations defines impunity as the impossibility, de jure or de facto, of bringing the perpetrators of violations to accountwhether in criminal, civil, administrative, or disciplinary proceedingssince they are not subject to any inquiry that might lead to their being accused, arrested, tried and, if found guilty, sentenced to appropriate penalties, and to making reparations to their victims.

With only the rarest and most insufficient exceptions, economic and political elites in the United States have enjoyed a regal level of impunity for more than 230 years. The founders exempted themselves from their own promise that all men are created equal and reaped the benefits of an economic system built on slavery, child labor, wage theft, and corruption. It took a civil war to undo the cruelest of their establishments: the institution of human bondage. When the war was over, former enslavers would, after a brief period of moral reconstruction, renew their fortunes by establishing a brutal system of Jim Crow segregation that was enforced by the night raids of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and chain-gang incarceration. So confident were they in their impunity that they erected statues honoring traitors, which only now are being torn down by the brave champions of a new American revolution that begins with the basic premise that Black Lives Matter.

The cruelest compromises of our founding were written so deeply into the official record that well into the nations third century, schoolchildren were taught that the delegates who forged the three-fifths compromise and counted African Americans as less than human were simply practical men who did what they had to do to get a country up and running. Those same children were taught that there was something great about the 19th-century compromises negotiated by Henry Clay, which doomed millions of men, women, and children to continue in a condition of chained and whipped servitude.

There has been no real accountability for sins against humanity in American history. What accountability did the slave sellers and slave buyers face in a postCivil War era when the United States failed even to deliver on the promise of 40 acres and a mule? They undid democracy, claimed statehouses and congressional seats through rigged white primary elections, and ushered in a new age of American apartheid that enforced separate-but-equal racism, exploitation of sharecroppers, and right-to-work profiteering.

What accountability did Strom Thurmond of South Carolina face for filibustering in favor of racism as a young legislator? He served in the US Senate until he was 100 years old and was honored at the end of his tenure with a celebration during which the minority leader of the chamber warmly recalled a 1948 presidential campaign in which Thurmond declared, All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches. Not in 1952, or 1962 or 1972, but in 2002 did the top Republican in the Senate, Trent Lott of Mississippi, gleefully announce, I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. Were proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldnt have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Thats impunity, andwhile Lott was ultimately eased out of his positionour political leaders continue to practice it with abandon. If you want to know how the United States ended up in the middle of a pandemic with a swindler president who could not be bothered to take the basic steps that were required to save lives, dont start with Trump. Start, perhaps, with Richard Nixon, the Republican president who skipped town before the House of Representatives could impeach him for the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Watergate scandal. Nixon collected a presidential pardon and a pension and lived the rest of his life in luxury, writing books, commenting on foreign affairs, and trying to buff his reputation as an elder statesman. He could have been held to account with the completion of the House impeachment trial and conviction by the Senate. Instead, the Democrats who controlled those chambers conspired with the unelected Republican who succeeded Tricky Dick, Gerald Ford, to let Nixon off the hook with the cruelest lie of all: the promise of healing.

No one was healed. No lessons were learned. Barely six years after Nixon flew off to his beachside mansion at San Clemente, another charlatan from California assumed the presidency and began steering the country into a scandal that made Watergate look like filching a pack of gum from the grocery store. The Iran-Contra Affair was a secret U.S. arms deal that traded missiles and other arms to free some Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, but also used funds from the arms deal to support armed conflict in Nicaragua, the History Channel tells us. The controversial dealand the ensuing political scandalthreatened to bring down the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But, of course, it didnt. Even with clear evidence of explicit and extended lawbreaking by Reagan and those around him, the Democrats who controlled the House and the Senate again let a Republican president off the hook. No impeachment, no trial, no constitutional consequences.

Well, yes, of course Reagan broke laws. He violated his oath of office. He admitted as much: Reagan himself acknowledged that selling arms to Iran was a mistake during his testimony before Congress, we are told at history.com. However, his legacy, at least among his supporters, remains intactand the Iran-Contra Affair has been relegated to an often-overlooked chapter in U.S. history. Intact, indeed.

When even the authors of presidential legacies stop trying to set things right, impunity locks in. The misdemeanors are neglected, unless they are salacious enough to stir the imaginations of Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich. High crimes are charged, sometimes, but they are invariably dismissed by senators who embrace a political code of silence every bit as rigidly as characters in a Godfather movie. The Constitution is a shredded document. The courts are packed with partisan judicial activists who protect their benefactors in the legislative and executive branches. The media can rarely be bothered with anything more than gossip.

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The dumbing down of political morality in the United States didnt begin with Donald Trump; it ended with him. Not because the process was complete (rest assured that things can get worse) but because it seemed to have passed the point of no return. When a president presides over mass death and mass unemployment and remains politically viable enough to claim the nomination of a major party and to mount a reelection bid with even vaguely credible numbers, the rot in the system runs so deep that those who maintain it cannot be rehabilitated.

Thats what makes this moment so haunting. We know that without accountability for the coronavirus criminals, the past will repeat itself, with a more despicable president mishandling a more daunting pandemic, with more reckless jurists striking down more necessary health orders, with greedier CEOs cashing in on starker misery.

This is the point when we have to break the pattern. The guilty men and women have to be removed. Where appropriateand necessarythey can be punished.

The harder they fall: Only now are statues honoring traitors being torn down, thanks to the brave protesters who declare that Black Lives Matter. (Ryan M. Kelly / AFP via Getty Images)

Nothing should be off the table in this countrys response to coronavirus criminals and pandemic profiteers: electoral humiliations, impeachments, investigations, indictments, seizures of assets, jail terms. But we should recognize in seeking all of these legitimate remedies that there is a point to the accountability process that has only a little to do with the present and quite a bit more to do with posterity. Winston Churchill was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that the use of recriminating about the pastis to enforce effective action at the present. And it is effective action in the present that can transform the future.

People whose loved ones died in nursing homes ravaged by preventable outbreaks of the coronavirus can be forgiven for wanting to see officials penalized for their failure to place health and safety above politics and profits. Families who buried parents and grandparents who died because irresponsible leaders failed to lead in imposing mask mandates and social distancing, or because political hacks in judicial robes blocked responsible leaders from imposing those mandates, may well be inclined to demand specific punishments for the reprobates who rejected science and human decency. And workers who have been exposed to illness and death by billionaireswho built their fortunes during a pandemic will be excused for entertaining vengeful sentiments.

But that cant be the end game. There is temporary satisfaction that comes when a powerful figure is subjected to transitory chastisement, and we need not apologize for seeking it. But we must also keep our eye on the prize of transformational justice.

The achievement of that justice requires us to stand at the intersection of punishment and policy. What we recognize when we are in this position is that accountability, done right, drives change.

Trump and his Republican associates should face all the legal and constitutional penalties that their crimes demand. So, too, should the Democrats who transgressed. And so, too, should the reckless billionaires and pharmaceutical extortionists. But we dare not stop there. The pandemic profiteers must be banishedforever ejected from the political and economic future of the nation they have so crudely used and abused.

There are constitutional provisions and statutes that bar political wrongdoers from future service, and that can even bar corporate wrongdoers from future gain-taking. But far more vital is the social shaming that recognizes these evildoers must never again appear on our ballots, occupy positions of public trust, or be accepted as purveyors of sage wisdom on how best to govern. They cant be rehabilitated, as Nixon almost was. Or remembered fondly, as Reagan was. They cant be allowed to evolve into the elder statesmen that the miserable presidents of the turn of the last centuryBill Clinton and George W. Bushaspire to become. They must carry the albatross of shame from this time forth and forevermore.

More:

The Making of a Coronavirus-Criminal Presidency - The Nation