Category Archives: Wage Slavery

by Gary Kennedy

The views of the author in this column are not necessarily those of The Town Line newspaper, its staff and board of directors.

The past couple of years have been hard for us. Our veterans have found it to be extremely so. I have lost many friends and more are preparing to meet their maker. Its a time when we pray and hope that for the most part we got it right. Its a heart breaker to say good bye and rely on what comes next. Its a time to make amends and seek forgiveness for those things we know shouldnt have occurred or we should have not been part of or allowed. I had someone I have loved for a very long time ask me, Gary do you think that I have been a good enough person to be allowed to have another chance to prove myself? What would your answer be? Mine was, you have always had a good heart and never went out of your way to hurt anyone. You gave when others were in need. Im sure those things are taken into account and used in the ultimate assessment.

I find myself staring up at the night sky often now with extreme imagination and wonder. I am amazed at the beauty and perfect harmony the celestial bodies display when the sky is clear and my heart is wide open with questions.

I try my best to make sure they are represented in a now political way and that promises that are made are promises that are kept; whether youre a Democrat or Republican. I believe after God and family should come those that have given their all so that we may live. There is so much we can and should do for each other but it seems we are still doing battle with those who want things to change in illogical ways. We have our politicians choosing causes to wrap their political position around. For the most part we agree on most things but we cant look at each other and agree. To each his or her own seems to be the way of things.

Think about all the negatives we are living through and see how many of those things we actually agree with. We want our children educated properly; we want food and clean air and water. We all want work and opportunity and the chance to accomplish our dreams. Every country has its venue and has to transcend the growing pains that walk hand in hand with accomplishment. We are aware that some countries live under extreme and severe conditions. No one knows this any better than our veterans who have lived and died in some of these sad depraved places and conditions. Soldiers see it all and for the most part wish they could really make a change. We can influence but the people have to be the ones who see change through. We are undergoing some of those ourselves currently.

Recently, Covid has brought us together as well as torn us apart. We are a nation of freedom living under a constitution that some brilliant men with hindsight and foresight put together to salvage almost any situation for their people and their need for guidance and direction in future events. There are those who would toy with that which has been proven to be an honorable document built on principle and the love of God and our fellow man. Unfortunately, it is being put to the test currently by some who hate America and would love to see us fail. It saddens me and all the veterans that I know who have given their best to eradicate the worst, thus allowing the future to have the chance at the best and to prosper.

War in the world creates Veterans Administrations and those V.A.s need the support of honest men and women to carry on and show the future that what has been promised will come to pass. If you have no fear of the Russians sitting on the Ukraine border or Chinas threats on a great place such as Taiwan, then you had better learn another language because that is the only way you will possibly survive. Along with our government, our Veterans Administration has been allowed to become weak and undependable. We hear all the time that our veterans are really receiving the best care possible. If you are involved and look more carefully you will see the sad state of affairs we are going through.

Our southern border is open with millions of aliens coming through with drugs, child abuse, prostitution and crime of all sorts. Many of these are criminals who have been convicted and released by our courts. At last count there were people from 150 plus different countries coming through the Texas Wall. The local law enforcement has fought day and night to stop this but they keep on coming. At the cost of our arm forces and veterans these aliens are being supported. Inflation is the highest it has ever been. Look at our grocery stores, and ours are nowhere near as bad as other states. The drugs are killing our children and we are at an educational stand still. I have been to Southeast Asia and seen the poverty, slavery implemented to build an empire; and an empire they are successfully building. In China, they have built future cities with no one living there yet. The normal Asian people are wonderful people but the governing principal is that of evils.

We need skilled craftsmen badly. They are paid at a higher scale than the men and women in suits, if you can find one to help you out. The future is in the trades. I am a father of middle income children and they work days and night to do it. They were taught respect and work ethic. They live a good family Christian life. My heart breaks at this worlds possible outcome. Test missiles are being tossed around and a race to space has begun. Also Covid was no accident. Millions have died and multi millions of hearts have been broken.

The V.A. has put security on its doors and send a very large percentage of their patients (veterans) outside for help. The VA is paying the outside doctors approximately 35-51 percent of the billing of those doctors and state, that is the maximum and to not bill the veteran. So what does that say to you? Well I have experienced this first hand and have been very fortunate. Some doctors, as V.A. knows, are now refusing to take veteran patients. V.A. knows this but they are pushing this as far as they can. Top of the line doctors will not be dictated to regarding their fees. I have researched this and have been told, We are professionals and so is our staff, so we must pay them a professional wage. Long story short, they cant take anymore veterans at VAs dictated rates. If you think about it you will see the rational of their situation. Its not that they dont want to help veterans but they are being asked to foot the bill.

VA is building lots of structures but they arent paying a fair wage to their doctors and they arent staying current with the need for new and modern equipment. If its a specialty procedure you need you have to be sent outside of the V.A. system. Many doctors have left the VA to work for some of our coastal hospitals. It would not be unusual for a veteran to be sent to a doctor that use to work for the VA. I dont know who they think theyre kidding with this game that they are playing. VA is using a middle man called OPTUM, a Community Care Network at 3237 Airport Road, La Crosse, Wisconsin 54603. If you dont have an approved prior consult they wont authorize the payment of your bill. The good part is for the most part you dont have to pay if it was authorized on this end. If not, you may later see the hospital or doctors office billing you, claiming the authorization rested with you. They could have a strong case if they relied upon previous on-going procedures. I have been a victim of this in the past myself. It took a lot to save my credit. I am working on some of this currently to help protect veterans that I have stood for, in the past.

It should be obvious that the problem rests with upper level management for going this route and allowing the V.A. system to run at only a small percentage of its capability. You have heard me in the past couple of years complaining about the VAs partial shutdown while all other hospitals and rehab centers are running. We have one of the greatest rehab centers in New England that is mostly shutdown. The example I have given in the past is the VA gym and swimming pool which serviced many rehab sessions. They will pay you to go to the YMCA but that doesnt work for most disabled vets especially with PTSD. All is open but VA is shutdown. They blame it on Covid. The gym and pool are in a separate section of VA with a private entrance in the rear. (No excuse). They have a plan of their own and not one to benefit the veterans. Management and the plan need to be looked at. It is for veterans they exist at what they do and the plan should be shared with veterans.

I always appreciate your input. It helps all veterans. We need audience with those who allow this to continue. To be a veteran is a proud thing. If we are disabled because of service we should wear that also with pride and dignity. Maybe its time for VA to take a different course. We dont need more non-experienced advocates we need to search for the answers to the problems. Please share your experience with us. We really want to help. Communication is a two way street, lets use it. Stay safe and God bless.

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In the extraordinary Recitatif, Morrison withholds crucial details of racial identity, making the reader the subject of her experiment.

January 23, 2022

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, Recitatif. The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her uvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. Its hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, The Source of Self-Regard, was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certainpage by page, line by linethat nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With Recitatif she was explicit. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.1

The characters in question are Twyla and Roberta, two poor girls, eight years old and wards of the state, who spend four months together in St. Bonaventure shelter. The very first thing we learn about them, from Twyla, is this: My mother danced all night and Robertas was sick. A little later, they were placed together, in Room 406, stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race. What we never learn definitivelyno matter how closely we readis which of these girls is black and which white. We will assume, we can insist, but we cant be sure. And this despite the fact that we get to see them grow up, becoming adults who occasionally run into each other. We eavesdrop when they speak, examine their clothes, hear of their husbands, their jobs, their children, their lives. . . . The crucial detail is withheld. A puzzle of a story, thena game. Only, Toni Morrison does not play. When she called Recitatif an experiment, she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.

But before we go any further into the ingenious design of this philosophical2 brainteaser, the title itself is worth a good, long look:

Recitatif, recitative | rsttiv | noun [mass noun]

1. Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note: singing in recitative.

2. The tone or rhythm peculiar to any language. Obs.

The music of Morrison begins in ordinary speech. Her ear was acute, and rescuing African American speech patterns from the debasements of the American mainstream is a defining feature of her early work. In this story, though, the challenge of capturing ordinary speech has been deliberately complicated. For many words are here to be sung... on the same note. That is, we will hear the words of Twyla and the words of Roberta, and, although they are perfectly differentiated the one from the other, we will not be able to differentiate them in the one way we really want to. An experiment easy to imagine but difficult to execute. In order to make it work, youd need to write in such a way that every phrase precisely straddled the line between characteristically black and white American speech, and thats a high-wire act in an eagle-eyed country, ever alert to racial codes, adept at categorization, in which most people feel they can spot a black or white speaker with their eyes closed, precisely because of the tone and rhythm peculiar to their language....

And, beyond language, in a racialized system, all manner of things will read as peculiar to one kind of person or another. The food a character eats, the music they like, where they live, how they work. Black things, white things. Things that are peculiar to our people and peculiar to theirs. But one of the questions of Recitatif is precisely what that phrase peculiar to really signifies. For we tend to use it variously, not realizing that we do. It can mean:

That which characterizesThat which belongs exclusively toThat which is an essential quality of

These three are not the same. The first suggests a tendency; the second implies some form of ownership; the third speaks of essences and therefore of immutable natural laws. In Recitatif these differences prove crucial, as we will see.

Much of the mesmerizing power of Recitatif lies in that first definition of peculiar to: that which characterizes. As readers, we urgently want to characterize the various characteristics on display. But how? My mother danced all night and Robertas was sick. Well, now, what kind of mother tends to dance all night? A black one or a white one? And whose mother is more likely to be sick? Is Roberta a blacker name than Twyla? Or vice versa? And what about voice? Twyla narrates the story in the first person, and so we may have the commonsense feeling that she must be the black girl, for her author is black. But it doesnt take much interrogating of this must to realize that it rests on rather shallow, autobiographical ideas of authorship that would seem wholly unworthy of the complex experiment that has been set before us. Besides, Morrison was never a poor child in a state institutionshe grew up solidly working class in integrated Lorain, Ohioand autobiography was never a very strong element of her work. Her imagination was capacious. No, autobiography will not get us very far here. So, we listen a little more closely to Twyla:

And Mary, thats my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean. So when the Big Bozo (nobody ever called her Mrs. Itkin, just like nobody ever said St. Bonaventure)when she said, Twyla, this is Roberta. Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome, I said, My mother wont like you putting me in here.

The game is afoot. Morrison bypasses any detail that might imply an essential quality of, slyly evades whatever would belong exclusively to one girl or the other, and makes us sit instead in this uncomfortable, double-dealing world of that which characterizes, in which Twyla seems to move in a moment from black to white to black again, depending on the nature of your perception. Like that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of...

When reading Recitatif with students, there is a moment when the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.3

For example: Twyla loves the food at St. Bonaventure, and Roberta hates it. (The food is Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it.) Is Twyla black? Twylas mothers idea of supper is popcorn and a can of Yoo-hoo. Is Twyla white?

Twylas mother looks like this:

She had on those green slacks I hated.... And that fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them.... [But] she looked so beautiful even in those ugly green slacks that made her behind stick out.

Robertas mother looks like this:

She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross Id ever seen. I swear it was six inches long each way. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made.

Does that help? We might think the puzzle is solved when both mothers come to visit their daughters one Sunday and Robertas mother refuses to shake Twylas mothers hand. But a moment later, upon reflection, it will strike us that a pious, upstanding, sickly black mother might be just as unlikely to shake the hand of an immoral, fast-living, trashy, dancing white mother as vice versa.... Complicating matters further, Twyla and Robertadespite their crucial differencesseem to share the same low status within the confines of St. Bonaventure. Or at least thats how Twyla sees it:

We didnt like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we werent real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians ignored us.

At this point, many readers will start getting a little desperate to put back in precisely what Morrison has deliberately removed. You start combing the fine print:

We were eight years old and got Fs all the time. Me because I couldnt remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldnt read at all and didnt even listen to the teacher.

Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorlyor are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both?

As a reader you know theres something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries, but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle. You get granular.

Meanwhile, Robertas mother brings plenty of foodwhich Roberta refusesbut says not a word to anyone, although she does read aloud to Roberta from the Bible. Theres a lot of readable difference there, and Twyla certainly notices it all:

Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe thats why I got into waitress work laterto match up the right people with the right food.

She seems jealous. But can vectors of longing, resentment, or desire tell us whos who? Is Twyla a black girl jealous of a white mother who brought more food? Or a white girl resentful of a black mother who thinks shes too godly to shake hands?

Children are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite. They say to themselves: Things are not right. But children also experiment with injustice, with cruelty. To stress-test the structure of the adult world. To find out exactly what its rules are. (The fact that questions of justice seem an inconvenient line of speculation for so many adults cannot go unnoticed by children.) And it is when reflecting upon a moment of childish cruelty that Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the systemwhatever their position may be within itand those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody. Because there is a person in St. Bonaventure whose position is lower than either Twylas or Robertasfar lower. Her name is Maggie:

The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses.... Maggie couldnt talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I dont know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked.

Maggie has no characteristic language. She has no language at all. Once she fell over in the school orchard and the older girls laughed and Twyla and Roberta did nothing. She is not a person you can do things for: she is only an object of ridicule. She wore this really stupid little hata kids hat with earflapsand she wasnt much taller than we were. In the social system of St. Bonaventure, Maggie stands outside all hierarchies. Shes one to whom anything can be said. One to whom anything might be done. Like a slave. Which is what it means to be nobody. Twyla and Roberta, noticing this, take a childish interest in what it means to be nobody:

But what about if somebody tries to kill her? I used to wonder about that. Or what if she wants to cry. Can she cry?

Sure, Roberta said. But just tears. No sounds come out.

She cant scream?

Nope. Nothing.

Can she hear?

I guess.

Lets call her, I said. And we did.

Dummy! Dummy! She never turned her head.

Bow legs! Bow legs! Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didnt let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldnt tell on us.

Time leaps forward. Roberta leaves St. Bonnys first, and a few months after so does Twyla. The girls grow into women. Years later, Twyla is waitressing at an upstate Howard Johnsons, when who should walk in but Roberta, just in time to give us some more racial cues to debate.4

These days Robertas hair is so big and wild that Twyla can barely see her face. Shes wearing a halter and hot pants and sitting between two hirsute guys with big hair and beards. She seems to be on drugs. Now, Roberta and friends are going to see Hendrix, and would any other artist have worked quite so well for Morrisons purpose? Hendrixs hair is big and wild. Is his music black or white? Your call. Either way, Twylaher own hair shapeless in a nethas never heard of him, and, when she says she lives in Newburgh, Roberta laughs.

Geography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes, and Newburghsixty miles north of Manhattanis an archetypal racialized American city. Founded in 1709, it is where Washington announced the cessation of hostilities with Britain and therefore the beginning of America as a nation, and in the nineteenth century was a grand and booming town, with a growing black middle class. The Second World War manufacturing boom brought waves of African American migrants to Newburgh, eager to escape the racial terrorism of the South, looking for low-wage work, but with the end of the war the work dried up; factory jobs were relocated south or abroad, and, by the time Morrison wrote Recitatif, Newburgh was a depressed town, hit by white flight, riven with poverty and the violence that attends poverty, and with large sections of its once beautiful waterfront bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. Twyla is married to a Newburgh man from an old Newburgh family, whose race the reader is invited to decipher (James and his father talk about fishing and baseball and I can see them all together on the Hudson in a raggedy skiff) but who is certainly one of the millions of twentieth-century Americans who watched once thriving towns mismanaged and abandoned by the federal government: Half the population of Newburgh is on welfare now, but to my husbands family it was still some upstate paradise of a time long past. And then, when the town is on its knees, and the great houses empty and abandoned, and downtown a wasteland of empty shop fronts and aimless kids on the cornerthe new money moves in. The old houses get done up. A Food Emporium opens. And its in this Emporiumtwelve years after their last run-inthat the women meet again, but this time all is transformation. Robertas cleaned up her act and married a rich man:

Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.

For the reader determined to solve the puzzlethe reader who believes the puzzle can be solved, or must be solvedthis is surely Exhibit No. 1. Everything hangs on that word they. To whom is it pointing? Uppity black people? Entitled white people? Rich people, whatever their color? Gentrifiers? You choose.

Not too long ago, I happened to be in Annandale myself, standing in the post-office line, staring absently at the list of national holidays fixed to the wall, and reflecting that the only uncontested date on the American calendar is New Years Day. With Twyla and Roberta, its the sameevery element of their shared past is contested:

Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.

But I didnt know. I thought it was just the opposite.... You got to see everything at Howard Johnsons and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.

Their most contested site is Maggie. Maggie is their Columbus Day, their Thanksgiving. What the hell happened to Maggie? At the beginning of Recitatif, we are informed that sandy-colored Maggie fell down. Later, Roberta insists she was knocked down, by the older girlsan event Twyla does not remember. Later still, Roberta claims that Maggie was black and that Twyla pushed her down, which sparks an epistemological crisis in Twyla, who does not remember Maggie being black, never mind pushing her. (I wouldnt forget a thing like that. Would I?) Then Roberta claims they both pushed and kicked a black lady who couldnt even scream. Its interesting to note that this escalation of claims happens at a moment of national racial strife, in the form of school busing. Both Robertas and Twylas children are being sent far across town. And as blackor whitemothers, the two find themselves in rigid positions, on either side of a literal boundary: a protest line. Their shared past starts to fray and then morph under the weight of a mutual anger; even the tiniest things are reinterpreted. They used to like doing each others hair, as kids. Now Twyla rejects this commonality (I hated your hands in my hair) and Roberta rejects any possibility of alliance with Twyla, in favor of the group identity of the other mothers who feel about busing as she does.5

The personal connection they once made can hardly be expected to withstand a situation in which once again race proves socially determinant, and in one of the most vulnerable sites any of us have: the education of our children. Mutual suspicion blooms. Why should I trust this person? What are they trying to take from me? My culture? My community? My schools? My neighborhood? My life? Positions get entrenched. Nothing can be shared. Twyla and Roberta start carrying increasingly extreme signs at competing protests. (Twyla: My signs got crazier each day.) A hundred and forty characters or fewer: thats about as much as you can fit on a homemade sign. Both women find that ad hominem attacks work best. You could say the two are never as far apart as at this moment of racial strife. You could also say they are in lockstep, for without the self-definition offered by the binary they appear meaningless, even to themselves. (Actually my sign didnt make sense without Robertas.)

As Twyla and Roberta discover, its hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to rexamine a shared history. Such rexaminations I sometimes hear described as resentment politics, as if telling a history in full could only be the product of a personal resentment, rather than a necessary act performed in the service of curiosity, interest, understanding (of both self and community), and justice itself. But some people sure do take it personal. I couldnt help but smile to read of an ex-newspaper editor from my country, who, when speaking of his discomfort at recent efforts to reveal the slave history behind many of our great country houses, complained, I think comfort does matter. I know people say, Oh, we must be uncomfortable.... Why should I pay a hundred quid a year, or whatever, to be told what a shit I am? Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you. As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?

The long, bloody, tangled encounter between the European peoples and the African continent is our history. Our shared history. Its what happened. Its not the moral equivalent of a football game where your side wins or loses. To give an account of an old English country house that includes not only the provenance of the beautiful paintings but also the provenance of the money that bought themwho suffered and died making that money, how, and whyis history told in full and should surely be of interest to everybody, black or white or neither. And I admit I do begin to feel resentmentactually, something closer to furywhen I realize that merely speaking such facts aloud is so discomfiting to some that theyd rather deny the facts themselves. For the sake of peaceful relations. To better forget about it. To better move on. Many people have this instinct. Twyla and Roberta also want to forget and move on. They want to blame it on the gar girls (a pun on gargoyles, gar girls is Twyla and Robertas nickname for the older residents of St. Bonaventure), or on each other, or on faulty memory itself. Maggie was black. Maggie was white. They hurt Maggie. You did. But, by the end of Recitatif, they are both ready to at least try to discuss what the hell happened to Maggie. Not for the shallow motive of transhistorical blame, much less to induce personal comfort or discomfort, but rather in the service of truth. We know that their exploration of the question will be painful, messy, and very likely never perfectly settled. But we also know that a good-faith attempt is better than its opposite. Which would be to go on pretending, as Twyla puts it, that everything was hunky-dory.

Difficult to move on from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed. Citizens from Belfast and Belgrade know this, and Berlin and Banjul. (And thats just the Bs.) In the privacy of our domestic arguments we know this. We must be heard. Its human to want to be heard. We are nobody if not heard. I suffered. They suffered. My people suffered! My people continue to suffer! Some take the narrowest possible view of this category of my people: they mean only their immediate family. For others, the cry widens out to encompass a city, a nation, a faith group, a perceived racial category, a diaspora. But, whatever your personal allegiances, when you deliberately turn from any human suffering you make what should be a porous border between your people and the rest of humanity into something rigid and deadly. You ask not to be bothered by the history of nobodies, the suffering of nobodies. (Or the suffering of somebodies, if hierarchical reversal is your jam.) But surely the very least we can do is listen to what was done to a personor is still being done. It is the very least we owe the dead, and the suffering. People suffered to build this house, to found that bank, or your country. Maggie suffered at St. Bonaventure. And all we have to do is hear about that? How can we resent it?6

It takes Twyla some time to see past her resentment at being offered a new version of a past she thought she knew. (Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldnt forget a thing like that. Would I?) But, in her forced reconsideration of a shared history, she comes to a deeper realization about her own motives:

I didnt kick her; I didnt join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night.... And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldnt scream, couldntjust like me and I was glad about that.

A few pages later, Roberta spontaneously comes to a similar conclusion (although she is now unsure as to whether or not Maggie was, indeed, black). I find the above one of the most stunning paragraphs in all of Morrisons work. The psychological subtlety of it. The mix of projection, vicarious action, self-justification, sadistic pleasure, and personal trauma that she identifies as a motivating force within Twyla, and that, by extrapolation, she prompts us to recognize in ourselves.

Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of Recitatif is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identitiesthe fact that they are both somebodythey simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies. The fags who wanted company in the chapel are nobodies to them, and they are so repelled by and fixated upon Maggies disability that they see nothing else about her. But there is somebody in all these people, after all. There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human. Which acknowledgment is often misused or only half used, employed as a form of sentimental or aesthetic contemplation, i.e., Oh, though we seem so unalike, how alike we all are under our skins.... But, historically, this acknowledgment of the humanour inescapable shared categoryhas also played a role in the work of freedom riders, abolitionists, anticolonialists, trade unionists, queer activists, suffragettes, and in the thoughts of the likes of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Morrison herself. If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference. When applied to racial matters, it recognizes that, although the category of race is both experientially and structurally real, it yet has no ultimate or essential reality in and of itself.7

But, of course, ultimate reality is not where any of us live. For hundreds of years, we have lived in deliberately racialized human structuresthat is to say, socially pervasive and sometimes legally binding fictionsthat prove incapable of stating difference and equality simultaneously. And it is extremely galling to hear that you have suffered for a fiction, or indeed profited from one. It has been fascinating to watch the recent panicked response to the interrogation of whiteness, the terror at the dismantling of a false racial category that for centuries united the rich man born and raised in Belarus, say, with the poor woman born and raised in Wales, under the shared banner of racial superiority. But panic is not entirely absent on the other side of the binary. If race is a construct, what will happen to blackness? Can the categories of black music and black literature survive? What would the phrase black joy signify? How can we throw out this dirty bathwater of racism when for centuries we have pressed the baby of race so close to our hearts, and madeeven accounting for all the horrorso many beautiful things with it?

Toni Morrison loved the culture and community of the African diaspora in America, evenespeciallythose elements that were forged as response and defense against the dehumanizing violence of slavery, the political humiliations of Reconstruction, the brutal segregation and state terrorism of Jim Crow, and the many civil-rights successes and neoliberal disappointments that have followed. Out of this history she made a literature, a shelf of books thatfor as long as they are readwill serve to remind America that its story about itself was always partial and self-deceiving. And here, for many people, we reach an impasse: a dead end. If race is a construct, whither blackness? If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself? I think a lot of peoples brains actually break at this point. But Morrison had a bigger brain. She could parse the difference between the deadness of a determining category and the richness of a lived experience. And there are some clues in this story, I think. Some hints at alternative ways of conceptualizing difference without either erasing or codifying it. Surprising civic values, fresh philosophical principles. Not only categorization and visibility but also privacy and kindness:

Now we were behaving like sisters separated for much too long. Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knewhow not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Ohand an understanding nod.

That people live and die within a specific historywithin deeply embedded cultural, racial, and class codesis a reality that cannot be denied, and often a beautiful one. Its what creates difference. But there are ways to deal with that difference that are expansive and comprehending, rather than narrow and diagnostic. Instead of only ticking boxes on doctors formspathologizing differencewe might also take a compassionate and discreet interest in it. We dont always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We dont have to take it personally. We can also just let it be. Or we can, like Morrison, be profoundly interested in it:

The struggle was for writing that was indisputably black. I dont yet know quite what that is, but neither that nor the attempts to disqualify an effort to find out keeps me from trying to pursue it.

My choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture.8

Visibility and privacy, communication and silence, intimacy and encounter are all expressed here. Readers who see only their own exclusion in this paragraph may need to mentally perform, in their own minds, the experiment that Recitatif performs in fiction: the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial. To perform this experiment in a literary space, I will choose, for my other character, another Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. I am looking at his poems. I am looking in. To fully comprehend Heaneys uvre, I would have to be wholly embedded in the codes of Northern Irish culture; I am not. No more than I am wholly embedded in the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison writes. I am not a perfect co-conspirator of either writer. I had to Google to find out what Lady Esther dusting powder is, in Recitatif, and, when Heaney mentions hoarding fresh berries in the byre, no image comes to my mind.9

As a reader of these two embedded writers, both profoundly interested in their own communities, I can only be a thrilled observer, always partially included, by that great shared category, the human, but also simultaneously on the outside looking in, enriched by that which is new or alien to me, especially when it has not been diluted or falsely presented to flatter my ignorancethat dreaded explanatory fabric. Instead, they both keep me rigorous company on the page, not begging for my comprehension but always open to the possibility of it, for no writer would break a silence if they did not want someonesome always unknowable someoneto overhear. I am describing a model reader-writer relationship. But, as Recitatif suggests, the same values expressed here might also prove useful to us in our roles as citizens, allies, friends.

Race, for many, is a determining brand, simply one side of a rigid binary. Blackness, as Morrison conceived of it, was a shared history, an experience, a culture, a language. A complexity, a wealth. To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimists right but an activists indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done. And what is the purpose of all this work if our positions within prejudicial, racialized structures are permanent, essential, unchangeableas rigid as the rules of gravity?

The forces of capital, meanwhile, are pragmatic: capital does not bother itself with essentialisms. It transforms nobodies into somebodiesand vice versadepending on where labor is needed and profit can be made. The Irish became somebodies when indentured labor had to be formally differentiated from slavery, to justify the latter category. In Britain, we only decided that there was something inside womenor enough of a something to be able to vote within the early twentieth century. British women went from being essentially angels of the housewhose essential nature was considered to be domesticto nodes in a system whose essential nature was to work, just like men, although we were welcome to pump milk in the office basement if we really had to.... Yes, capital is adaptive, pragmatic. It is always looking for new markets, new sites of economic vulnerability, of potential exploitationnew Maggies. New human beings whose essential nature is to be nobody. We claim to know this even as we simultaneously misremember or elide the many Maggies in our own lives. These days, Robertaor Twylamight march for womens rights, all the while wearing a four-dollar T-shirt, a product of the enforced labor of Uyghur women on the other side of the world. Twylaor Robertacould go door to door, registering voters, while sporting long nails freshly painted by a trafficked young girl. Robertaor Twylamay practice self-care by going to the hairdresser to get extensions shorn from another, poorer womans head. Far beneath the black-white racial strife of America, there persists a global underclass of Maggies, unseen and unconsidered within the parochial American conversation, the wretched of the earth....

Our racial codes are peculiar to us, but what do we really mean by that? In Recitatif, that which would characterize Twyla and Roberta as black or white is the consequence of history, of shared experience, and what shared histories inevitably produce: culture, community, identity. What belongs exclusively to them is their subjective experience of these same categories in which they have lived. Some of these experiences will have been nourishing, joyful, and beautiful, many others prejudicial, exploitative, and punitive. No one can take a persons subjective experiences from them. No one should try. Whether Twyla or Roberta is the somebody who has lived within the category of white we cannot be sure, but Morrison constructs the story in such a way that we are forced to admit the fact that other categories, aside from the racial, also produce shared experiences. Categories like being poor, being female, like being at the mercy of the state or the police, like living in a certain Zip Code, having children, hating your mother, wanting the best for your family. We are like and not like a lot of people a lot of the time. White may be the most powerful category in the racial hierarchy, but, if youre an eight-year-old girl in a state institution with a delinquent mother and no money, it sure doesnt feel that way. Black may be the lower caste, but, if you marry an I.B.M. guy and have two servants and a driver, you areat the very leastin a new position in relation to the least powerful people in your society. And vice versa. Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them. Morrison is the great master of American complexity, and Recitatif, in my view, sits alongside Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Lottery as a perfectand perfectly Americantale, one every American child should read.

Finally, what is essentially black or white about Twyla and Roberta I believe we bring to Recitatif ourselves, within a system of signs over which too many humans have collectively labored for hundreds of years now. It began in the racialized system of capitalism we call slavery; it was preserved in law long after slavery ended, and continues to assert itself, to sometimes lethal effect, in social, economic, educational, and judicial systems all over the world. But as a category the fact remains that it has no objective reality: it is not, like gravity, a principle of the earth. By removing it from the story, Morrison reveals both the speciousness of black-white as our primary human categorization and its dehumanizing effect on human life. But she also lovingly demonstrates how much meaning we were able to findand continue to findin our beloved categories. The peculiar way our people make this or that dish, the peculiar music we play at a cookout or a funeral, the peculiar way we use nouns or adjectives, the peculiar way we walk or dance or paint or writethese things are dear to us. Especially if they are denigrated by others, we will tend to hold them close. We feel they define us. And this form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the humanthe insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as nobody. A direct descendant of slaves, Morrison writes in a way that recognizes firstand primarilythe somebody within black people, the black human having been, historically, the ultimate example of the dehumanized subject: the one transformed, by capital, from subject to object. But in this lifelong project, as the critic Jesse McCarthy has pointed out, we are invited to see a foundation for all social-justice movements: The battle over the meaning of black humanity has always been central to both [Toni Morrisons] fiction and essaysand not just for the sake of black people but to further what we hope all of humanity can become.10

We hope all of humanity will reject the project of dehumanization. We hope for a literatureand a society!that recognizes the somebody in everybody. This despite the fact that, in Americas zero-sum game of racialized capitalism, this form of humanism has been abandoned as an apolitical quantity, toothless, an inanity to repeat, perhaps, on Sesame Street (Everybodys somebody!) but considered too nave and insufficient a basis for radical change.11

I have written a lot in this essay about prejudicial structures. But Ive spoken vaguely of them, metaphorically, as a lot of people do these days. In an address to Howard University, in 1995, Morrison got specific. She broke it down, in her scientific way. It is a very useful summary, to be cut out and kept for future reference, for if we hope to dismantle oppressive structures it will surely help to examine how they are built:

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

Elements of this fascist playbook can be seen in the European encounter with Africa, between the West and the East, between the rich and the poor, between the Germans and the Jews, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the British and the Irish, the Serbs and the Croats. It is one of our continual human possibilities. Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting. But it is still a man-made structure. The capacity for fascisms of one kind or another is something else we all shareyou might call it our most depressing collective identity. (And, if we are currently engaged in trying to effect change, it could be worthwhileas an act of ethical spring-cleaningto check through Tonis list and insure that we are not employing any of the playbook of fascism in our own work.) Fascism labors to create the category of the nobody, the scapegoat, the sufferer. Morrison repudiated that category as it has applied to black people over centuries, and in doing so strengthened the category of the somebody for all of us, whether black or white or neither. Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberationas cathartic as it may feel.13

Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.14

Still, like most readers of Recitatif, I found it impossible not to hunger to know who the other was, Twyla or Roberta. Oh, I urgently wanted to have it straightened out. Wanted to sympathize warmly in one sure place, turn cold in the other. To feel for the somebody and dismiss the nobody. But this is precisely what Morrison deliberately and methodically will not allow me to do. Its worth asking ourselves why. Recitatif reminds me that it is not essentially black or white to be poor, oppressed, lesser than, exploited, ignored. The answer to What the hell happened to Maggie? is not written in the stars, or in the blood, or in the genes, or forever predetermined by history. Whatever was done to Maggie was done by people. People like Twyla and Roberta. People like you and me.

This essay is drawn from the introduction to Recitatif: A Story, by Toni Morrison, out this February from Knopf.

Go here to read the rest:

The Genius of Toni Morrison's Only Short Story - The New Yorker

First published JAN 26, 2022 Updated Jan 26, 2022

Brent Wilton

Brent Wilton is a Director of Thana Business and Human Rights Limited. A New Zealand trained labour lawyer, he has spent the past 32 years representing companies from around the world across a range of labour and human rights issues. http://www.tuhana.co.nz

Comment

Companies and governments are ignoring the "social" - read "human" part of the ESG equation, argues Brent Wilton.That matters not just for people, but for our export-oriented economy.

Opinion: Have you read your companys ESG statement lately?

Maybe you have. Environmental, social and corporate governance reporting is more mainstream than its ever been and is seen by many organisations as an integral part of efforts to improve sustainability and respond to enhanced calls for ethical practices.

But while we might be doing a reasonable job of ticking off the E and the G components of ESG, weve largely ignored the S - and the social impacts of business and state activity. Weve overlooked our people.

Heres how. Basically, our last few governments have largely failed either to address their own social responsibilities, or to provide guidance to companies navigating these issues.

A good example is New Zealand's response to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

These principles set out expectations for governments to be proactive in safeguarding human rights and protecting people from harm.

They also set out how businesses can fulfill their obligation to respect human rights in how they operate, and how both government and business can remedy any harm caused to people by their actions and omissions.

These principles were endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011 and around the world governments have moved to establish national action plans to address how they might realise those expectations in both law and practice and how they might help companies with their obligations.

New Zealand has not.

Modern slavery legislation

For example, other countries have included human and labour rights in recent trade agreements. Not New Zealand.

And other countries are looking at legislation around issues like human rights due diligence and abuses. New Zealand has been slow here too.

The UK passed modern slavery legislation in 2015, Australia and the US in 2018. Here, more than a decade since the UNs principles were introduced, and following lobbying from many, many quarters, New Zealand has taken its first tentative steps towards legislating against modern slavery.

A working group comprising top academics and community leaders is at last being established. Lets hope were on track.

People are, by definition, at the very heart of human rights. And human rights are increasingly seen as fundamental to the wider sustainability debate. It seems while governments globally are legislating more in this area, New Zealand has to date missed a trick and put its team of five million at risk of exploitation, corruption and abuse. The evidence is in the many news reports including from Newsroom- of workers being trafficked, harassed, coerced, paid rates well under the minimum wage, even having their passports confiscated.

International obligations

Whats more, we ignore the S in ESG at our peril if we hope to enter or remain in export markets. Being able to prove that your company commitments around ESG and sustainability are real, not mere words, has never been more important, particularly as more countries and regions - including the EU - begin requiring compliance as a market entry prerequisite.

In the private sector, companies are now beginning to identify shortcomings in their own effort to treat workers fairly and with respect. Some are also requiring companies to which they are connected by a business relationship to undertake human rights due diligence of their own operations.

That includes identifying, mitigating and remedying any harm to people that might be occurring in their supply chains.

Protect one, protect all.

While the spotlight has fallen mainly on Governance (issues of bribery and corruption within business and governments) and Environment (behaviour around environmental damage and use of natural resource), we now need to make haste with regard to our social responsibilities.

Its also critical that the S in ESG not be viewed in its own silo, separate from the E and G. All three need to be integrated across both company and government responses. Actions in one area impact across others and to act in one without thinking of the consequences more broadly weakness the effectiveness of those efforts.

Fortunately, New Zealand can learn from what others have done and use that knowledge to move quickly to address the issues.

Its pleasing to see the work beginning, but the clock is ticking and New Zealand as an export orientated country is at risk of exclusion if it is not serious about addressing these gaps with urgency.

See the original post:

NZ needs to move fast to put the S into ESG - Newsroom

Siddiq Shehab arrived in the Gulf from his native Mangalore in South India in 1982, carrying an almost empty suitcase. Siddiq left everything behind and travelled to the Gulf to work for one of the largest contracting companies so he could save money for his marriage.

Two years later, Siddiq got married, but he returned to the Gulf where he stayed for 39 more years. He only saw his family for two months once every two years, as he had to stay in the Gulf and work, spending all his income to support his family and parents.

Siddiq, who worked as an electrical supervisor, never thought he would return home empty-handed after not receiving his salary for 18 consecutive months. With no choice, Siddiq left the Gulf for good in March 2021 with the contracting company owing him $48,900 in salary arrears and end-of-service benefits, burying his dream of securing a dignified life after retirement.

Siddiq and 18 of his colleagues who make up the last remaining employees of a company that once had over 1,000 employees have been receiving their salaries irregularly since 2017. The company had allowed them to live in its designated workers accommodation where they had to make ends meet $53 a month and rely on charity for food with minimal healthcare services access. On top of that, Siddiq, who had turned 70 years old, faced another dilemma when his residence permit expired in May 2019, thus putting him at risk of imprisonment and deportation since he has become an irregular migrant worker.

Siddiqs and his colleagues stories shed light on the problem of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the Gulf countries who are deprived of their wages and their end-of-service benefits a common violation committed by kafeels (Arabic for sponsor) and employers. Workers rights organizations describe this as wage theft. There are laws that regulate the relation between the employer and employees; however, they are full of loopholes that some employers exploit if they want to.

Even though there are mechanisms to lodge complaints and litigation procedures to resolve disputes, there are various difficulties and obstacles that most of the time prevent migrant workers from resorting to them to preserve their rights.

By the time the residence permits of Siddiqs 18 colleagues, who worked in the company for different periods of time that ranged between three and 38 years, ended, the company owed them money that ranged between $7,089 and $108,152 each. The total amount of money owed to them is $526,000 an amount that is enough to construct a 500 square meters medium-sized villa in the Gulf.

However, the large company, which implemented public and private sector projects worth hundreds of millions of dinars, never paid these dues.

According to the Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Developments contractual Relationship Improvement Initiative document, which was prepared in August 2020, there are 1.2 million migrant workers whose wages have been delayed.

These workers constitute 8.3% of the total workforce in Saudi Arabia where 79% of this workforce is made up of migrant workers. This reflects the problem of wage theft in the Gulf. The workforce in Saudi Arabia constitutes about 50.2% of the total workforce in the Gulf countries, and Saudi Arabia alone hosts47.3%of the total number of migrant workers present in the Gulf.

Its estimated that there are 24 million migrant workers in the Gulf countries, constituting 83.3% of the total workforce of the Gulf countries. Migrant workers constitute the majority of the workforce in Qatar (94.0%), the United Arab Emirates (92.5%), Kuwait (84.2%), Bahrain (79.4%) and Oman (78.4%).

The document, written within the framework of Vision 2030 initiatives, reveals the real magnitude of the problem, and aims to improve contractual relations between employers and employees based on international standards. In December 2020, Saudi Arabia signed the Protection of Wages Convention, 1949 (No. 95); hence becoming the only Gulf country to sign this convention that aims to protect wages of workers as much as possible so far.

The implementation of this convention requires fulfilling three main elements: efficient supervision, appropriate penalties, and means for compensating the victims.

key principles of Convention (No. 95) *Workers shall be free to dispose of their wages as they choose. *Wages must be paid in national currency. *In cases of partial payment in kind, the value should be fair and reasonable. *No unlawful deductions are permitted (right to receive wages in full). *In cases of employer insolvency, wages shall enjoy a priority in the distribution of liquidated assets. *Regular payment of wages, including full and swift final settlement of all wages within a reasonable time, upon termination of employment. Source:International Labor Organization

In Bahrain,Minister of Labor and Social Development Jameel Humaidansaid that 2,863 workers in 18 companies received irregular wages in 2018, adding that companies delayed wages payment for periods that ranged between two months and six months.

In addition to legal migrant workers, who are theoretically protected by employment contracts but practically face the risk of wage theft due to employers exploitation and deception, there are hundreds of thousands of irregular migrant workers who are in fact the most vulnerable to wage theft. This category of migrant workers who work outside legal frameworks is called wandering workers or free visa workers.

Except forSaudi Arabia, there are no accurate numbers of irregular migrant workers in the Gulf and the data only shows the numbers of those whose residence permits have expired or whose residence permits were cancelled by their sponsors. The law views these workers as violators although they have not intentionally violated the laws and they have simply found themselves in this situation because renewing their residency permits is not possible except through a sponsor.

These workers situation becomes more dangerous if their sponsors lodge a complaint accusing them of Horoob (absconding). Those are the most fearful of getting caught regardless of why they escaped even if its due to abuse and violation of their rights.

The penalty for absconding in Gulf countries is arrest and deportation. In Kuwait, for instance, these workers are also blacklisted and banned from re-entering the country for a certain number of years. In Saudi Arabia, these workers face being fined $13,000 and imprisonment for six months followed by deportation and a permanent ban from re-entering the country. Hence, these workers who face this accusation of absconding keep a low profile while working in secret, hence becoming more vulnerable to exploitation and wage theft.

A migrant workers rights activist, who requested to remain anonymous said: A form of irregular employment has emerged in the Gulf due to exploiting the sponsorship system to sell visas. Employers or ordinary individuals issue migrant visas as domestic workers, then, with the permission of the employer, allows them to take other jobs in exchange for payments that range between $3,200-$3,700 (every 2 year) and the worker usually pays the sponsor once every two years.

Some workers willingly travel (to this destination country) fully aware of the situation as they need (to make a living) and are (often) promised by agents (who facilitate their travel) plenty of job opportunities in the Gulf. Sometimes, the sponsor does not renew the visa, and the worker does not have the capability to return home; hence he unwillingly ends up in a legal dilemma.

In addition to migrant workers who face the risk of wage theft, domestic workers, particularly females, also face similar risks. Domestic workers, whoconstitute25% of the total migrant workforce in the Gulf, work in residences which are not inspected, and their work is also not governed by labor laws.

The only exception, however, in this regard is Bahrain which included domestic workers under 13 Articles of labor law in 2013. Although Gulf countries except Oman have set laws to protect migrant workers, a report by the author of this investigation with the title Domestic Work: A Comparative Overview between Bahrain and the Rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries showed that these laws are still superficial when defining the rights of domestic workers and are governed by a social culture that fears granting this category of workers their full rights and equating them with the rights enumerated in these countries labor laws and in accordance with the Convention on Domestic Workers which none of the Gulf countries have signed. Gulf countries also exclude domestic workers from their wage protection systems.

Migrant workers are the human fuel of GCC economies

Migrants have played a significant role in building Gulf countries' economies since the 1970s. During the past three decades, they have contributed to their growth. Migrants constitute the largest percentage of population growth that reached 151.5% in all six Gulf countries.

Figures indicate that the number of migrants have tripled when compared with the national population increase in the past three decades where the number of citizens has increased by 87.5%, that of migrants increased by 267.4%.

During this period, Gulf economies recorded agrowth, in their GDP from $210 billion to $1,817 billion (765%).

The number of migrants in Gulf countries reached 30 million, constituting 11% of thetotal number of migrant workers worldwidewhich is estimated at 272 million. This is despite the fact that the population of all six Gulf countries does not exceed 0.8% of the worlds population. Migrant workers in Gulf countries constitute 14.2% of the total number of people migrating for work internationally and which reached 169 million according to figures byILO.

The number of migrants in Gulf countries reached 30 million, constituting 11% of thetotal number of migrant workers worldwidewhich is estimated at 272 million. This is despite the fact that the population of all six Gulf countries does not exceed 0.8% of the worlds population. Migrant workers in Gulf countries constitute 14.2% of the total number of people migrating for work internationally and which reached 169 million according to figures byILO.

Period: Three decades from 1990 until 2019. Source: United Nations and World Bank

Wage theft is a permanent problem that migrant workers face in the Gulf. The coronavirus pandemic, which negatively affected Gulf economies and the global economy, helped expose the violations of migrant workers rights.

Wage theft had the worst impact on migrant workers whose main purpose of traveling to the Gulf was to make a living to provide for themselves and for their families at home. This issue also shed the light on the loopholes in labor laws and the obstacles that migrant workers face when they resort to the available complaint mechanisms and litigation procedures.

At the end of 2019, it had been an entire year since Siddiq last received any salary from his employer, and six months since his last day at work. Siddiq began to get worried due to the companys procrastination in paying his dues. At the time, Siddiq had not visited his family for five years.

Due to his ill health, he finally decided to file a complaint at the Ministry of Labor and Social Development against the company. Siddiq said: In early 2020, (news emerged) about a virus spreading in the world, and we heard that we may be prohibited from travelling. I want to be with my family. Time passed quickly while I was working. Every time I intended to return home, I kept postponing my return for another year because of my financial obligations.

After his residency permit expired, Siddiq could no longer go to the governmental healthcare center. He also could no longer afford buying medication for his chronic health conditions as those cost him $106 per month, i.e. twice the amount which the company paid him ($53) to live on. His colleagues also faced similar problems.

The company informed Siddiq and his colleagues that travelling was prohibited and reassured them that these were exceptional circumstances and they shouldnt worry if their residency permits expired.

Siddiq and his colleagues were only capable of accessing healthcare in case they were infected with Covid-19 as the government announced that it will treat migrant workers without examining their legal residency status.

At this point, ordinary work at ministries (employees attendance at offices) was suspended; hence, Siddiq and his colleagues were not able to follow up on their complaint at the Ministry of Labor. The company stopped communicating with them. They continued to live in their accommodation provided by their employer, but they faced the risk of eviction after the company stopped paying the rent. They lived in dire conditions and they had to rely on charity for their subsistence. The landlord eventually had the power cut off, leaving them to rely on power from a generator. worsening their living conditions even further as they suffered from power outages during the scorching summer heat because they could not afford fuel to refill it.

As Covid-19 spread, work was suspended in several sectors in the Gulf. The pandemic and its economic repercussions on Gulf economies exposed the fragile situation of migrant workers in Gulf countries and their vulnerable position.

Although migrant workers are the backbone of the labor market in the Gulf countries, considering that they constitute 83.8% of their workforce, these countries crisis response did not consider those to be part of their priorities. Instead, they rushed to help private sector companies by activating force majeure measures in their laws to allow affected companies to decrease employees wages or force them to take paid or unpaid leave. On the level of workers rights, this looked more like a measure that paved the way for wage theft during the pandemic.At the same time, the governments helped These companies pay the wages of citizens. They also helped with rent and exempted them from fees to renew residence and work permits of migrant workers, subjecting only migrant workers in the private sector to harm due to force majeure.

Governmental measures to confront the pandemics consequences in the private sector

UAE-Enabling employers to reduce the wages of migrant workers via activating Ministerial Resolution No. 279 of 2020 regarding the stability of employment in the private sector.

Bahrain-Activating Article 43 of the Labor Law which stipulates that if the worker is prevented from executing his work for reasons of force majeure beyond the employers control, the worker shall be entitled to half his wage.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which follows up on violations of migrant workers rights in the Gulf, recorded that the allegations of abuse in Gulf countries between April 2020 and August 2020witnesseda 275% increase when compared with allegations of abuse for the same period during 2019. Out of the 80 allegations of abuse that the center recorded during this period, non-payment of wages was the most frequent of cases as this violation was cited in 81% of cases.

In Saudi Arabia, labor courtssettled31,766 lawsuits during the year when Covid-19 spread (from March 2020 until March 2021). Lawsuits that pertain to wages constituted 59% of them. Other lawsuits pertained to requesting compensations, allowances and bonuses, which all fall within the practice of wage theft.

Areportpublished on the website of Bahrains Ministry of Labor and Social Development noted that up until October 2020, the ministry received 16,532 requests to settle disputes between employees and employers. It added that 50.3% of these disputes were resolved amicably.

The ministry also received 14 complaints lodged collectively, and they were also resolved amicably. This number (16,532) reflects an increase of 52% when compared with the number of complaints filed in the previous year. Although the author of this investigative report communicated with relevant parties in all Gulf countries, she could not clarify the nature of these complaints and whether they pertain to non-payment of wages.

She also could not obtain the number of lawsuits that are related to migrant workers and could not obtain the total number of complaints or lawsuits which are related to non-payment of wages in all the Gulf countries discussed in this investigation.

Migrant workers also faced problems during the pandemic due to the suspension of work at some government departments, including courts and offices where complaints are lodged. Meanwhile, departments that continued to operate were under pressure due to reduced working hours and employees capacity. In theUAE, the suspension of labor courts work resulted in delaying looking into non-payment of wages lawsuits.

The ILO Regional Office for Arab States said, in the summary of its meeting that was held in February 2021: Labor dispute commissions in the Gulf have reduced their operation capacity to 30% due to Covid-19. It also noted that wage protection systems in the Gulf that were set up to punish employers who violate workers rights in terms of wages, (received an enormous amount of complaints).

Workers insurance funds in Qatar and the UAE were also unable (to address) challenges. For example, the Workers Support and Insurance Fund in Qatar was only able to disburse $3.85 million as of August 2020 to 5,500 workers, a large number of other workers did not receive their wages.

There is no statistics about the size of migrant workers whose livelihoods were affected during the pandemic. However, the numbers of migrant workers who have left Gulf countries for good during the pandemic indicates there are unusual circumstances that pushed them to leave. These workers left either because of the termination of their job contracts or work or out of fear of the protective measures that excluded them, particularly amid governmental statements that urged its institutions to expedite nationalization of their labor forces, and reduce the reliance on migrant workers.

Credit Rating Agency Standard & Poors estimated that the population of the six Gulf countries, which this report discusses, hasdecreasedby 4% during the year when the pandemic spread and attributed this decrease to the high levels of job losses in the Gulf.

Gulf governments facilitated irregular migrant workers departure by exempting them from fines for violating their residency status. This raised fears about the dues owed to these workers, pushing international workers rights organizations, civil society, and labor syndicates to mobilize. They launched a globalcampaignthat calls for establishing urgent judicial mechanisms to retrieve these workers wages from employers. The campaign also aimed to draw the worlds attention to these inhumane practices committed against migrant workers.

It must be noted that theMigrant Forum in Asia(MFA), which led this campaign along with other organizations, documented 1,465 cases of wage theft against migrant workers in all Gulf countries between June 2020 and May 2021. These cases, however, were documented based on the victims initiatives and on the organizations which followed up on these cases; thus they represent a model and do not reflect the magnitude of the problem in each country.

Legal migrant workers constituted the largest percentage of these cases in all Gulf countries except Kuwait. This indicates that these victims were subjected to wage theft while working in prominent companies. It also indicates how difficult it is for irregular migrant workers to demand the payment of their dues since most of them work without contracts or on a daily basis. The database which ARIJ has obtained with assistance from MFA showed that 89% of (the 1465 cases) were male and 11% were female. The majority were from India (51%), Nepal (31%), Bangladesh (10%) and Philippine (7%) with (1%) from Indonesia.

This investigative report reveal that there are at least eight indicators out of 11indicators of forced laboras specified by ILOs Special Action Program to Combat Forced Labor that were derived from ILOs theoretical and practical experience. Forced labor is considered a form ofhuman trafficking.

The fact that there are laws that prohibit the practices that these indicators are based on, reflect how dangerous they are. However, these practices have become common due to the lax implementation of the laws that are also full of loopholes. This is in addition to the fragile conditions that those affected live in, and their circumstances that prevent them from seeking help or justice.

Lawyers and activists in Gulf countries have identified 17 types of wage theft that vary in Commonality according to the differences in the strictness of the laws that regulate wages and the contractual relationship between the employer and the employee. In addition to the monthly wage, wage theft also includes the theft of overtime allowances, leave entitlements, and end of service gratuity.

1- Some recruitment agencies in countries of origin and countries of destination impose fees on the individual in order to recruit them. The worker thus ends up in debt (even before taking up their new job) although the laws of all Gulf countries except Kuwait prohibit charging fees to workers.

Ibrahim S. is one of 120 workers who were subjected to wage theft during the pandemic. They were deported without being given their end of service gratuity and after their wages were withheld from 2017. MFA reported that these workers paid between $673 and $1,076 to a recruitment agency in India to employ them in a large construction company in Saudi Arabia. The company, which is owned by investors from Saudi Arabia and India, employs around 10,000 such workers.

Recruitment Fees

2- Replacing an agreement with another for a lesser wage upon arrival

Migrants are deceived by dual agreements, one in the country of origin and another in the country of destination. The agreements have different conditions. (When the migrants realize this is happening to them), it would be too late (to do anything) as they have already become in debt and theres no way back.

Source: Dr. Nasrah Shah, a professor in the faculty of economy at Lahore University, who worked for 30 years in Kuwait University as a lecturer in demography.

3- Termination of services and deportation without paying dues.

4- Blackmail by confiscating passports to force workers to sign work compensation settlements even if not all dues have been paid.

Confiscation of passports is common in Gulf countries although the law in these countries prohibit this practice.

5- Working without a valid visa

An employers consent is mandatory to renew the visa. In Bahrain, courts deem employees who demand their dues after their visa expires as ineligible, even though the employees cannot renew their visa without the approval of the employer.

6- Compulsory working period

All Gulf countries do not allow workers to change their jobs without the approval of the employer or only allows them to do so after a certain period of time has passed. Some employers exploit this period of time to force workers to work for a lesser wage until this period ends.

7- Not paying overtime remuneration

Some laws allow the employer to have certain employees in positions such as security guards to work additional hours. Employers exploit this to note it in the contract without granting them extra money for the additional hours worked.

8- Manipulation of end of service gratuity

The amount of end of service gratuity is calculated on the basis of the employees last wage. Some employers pay their salary dues once every two years of service; hence, the employee may get a lesser amount of money.

9- Changing a workers visa to indicate that they are working for another registered company, although owned by the same original employer often without the workers knowledge.

Changing the companys register deprives the worker of his right to demand any dues such as end of service gratuity a year after changing the companys register even if the holding company of the new firm is the same.

10- Procrastination

Employers often use empty promises to deter workers from filing a lawsuit. They keep making these promises until the limitation period to claim wages and other entitlements due passes. The worker also does not get a remuneration for wrongful termination and does not get the wages and other entitlements due to them for the remaining duration of the contract or a compensation as stipulated by law if the limitation period has passed.(In Bahrain, for example, a worker cannot make any claims if its been one year since the contract was terminated).

11- Employers withhold the employees ATM cards to withdraw money after the agreed wages were deposited, then they hand the wage to workers in cash, often part of it apart from the constant delay in paying peoples salaries on time.

Some companies circumvent the law that stipulates paying workers via a bank deposit. They exploit the workers lack of knowledge of their rights and their need to work and make a living. These companies keep the workers ATM cards so they can deposit and withdraw money on their behalf which is often considered a criminal act. In Kuwait, for instance, this is considered a crime of forgery that the perpetrator is punished for according to the penal code. The aim of such a practice is to mislead the authorities in case the worker demands his wages and entitlements and to hide the exact amount of his wage. In Kuwait, for instance, this is a violation of the Labor Law of Kuwait No. 6 of 2010.Meshari AlHumaidan, a Kuwaiti lawyer

12- Recruitment agents deduct a sum of the agreed salary, hence violating the agreement between the recruitment agency and the employers

This practice is very common in the case of domestic workers and security guards in all Gulf countries where public and private companies hire these employees via agreements with recruitment agencies.

13- Exploiting the salary rates as set for certain sectors

In Kuwait, there are specific salary brackets for work in certain sectors. Employers issue work permits for certain jobs that are linked to government benefits and advantages which the workers are supposed to get. However, after the work permit is issued, the employers change the workers job title and function to another for a wage thats different from what was stipulated in the original contract.

14- Female domestic employees work around the clock

Most laws that pertain to domestic work jobs in the Gulf do not determine what the working hours of those should be. Some of them stipulate that the domestic worker is entitled to a certain number of hours to rest per day. Domestic workers end up working for 15 hours per day without any financial compensation and in violation of all international standards.

15- Some wage theft practices begin in the country of origin based on an agreement between the recruitment agencies and the families who want to hire a domestic worker. The agency and the family agree not to pay the domestic worker a wage for a month or more after the workers arrival to the destination country in order to decrease the capital cost of the domestic worker's employment for the employer.

16- Making domestic workers work for long hours and making them work at relatives houses for free

I have never received a full wage on time ever since I arrived at work ten months ago. According to the contract, my wage is $235 but I only received amounts between $77 and $105 per month while I worked. Then I was asked to work for free in the house of my employers daughter who had fired her domestic worker. I fled because of this treatment, and my passport is still with them. I think they filed a lawsuit against me and accused me of absconding. I do not know for sure, but they must have done that.Sarah (26 years old), a Kenyan domestic worker who works for a family in Riyadh.

17- Not paying workers who returned to their country of origin and could not return to the destination country because their visa expired during the pandemic. Employers refuse to pay them their financial dues owed to them.

Before and after the pandemic, a large number of workers returned to India and got stuck there. Their visas expired, hence, they could not return to the destination country unless the company renew their visas. Some of them worked for these companies for a long period of time such as 30 years. They were thus not paid their wages, their end of service gratuity, and employers did not renew their visas because they are aware that the financial dues constitute large sums of money." SourceSotheer Thironelath Director of humanitarian affairs at the World NRA Council and the director of the Indian Embassys emergency trust fund in Bahrain.

Kafala (sponsorship), main reason for abuse of migrant workers rights

There are many reasons that have made wage theft in its various forms common and even acceptable by the employer, employee and the society as a whole. This imbalance of power between migrant workers and employers in the Gulf is mainly attributed to the sponsorship system, which was introduced in 1928 during the British colonial period.

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Slavery Entrenched by Law: Immigrant Workers in the Gulf Story - Al-Bawaba

The scheduled deactivation of California Correctional Center has become a hot-button issue for the town of Susanville, sparking anger and a still-pending lawsuit to prevent the prison from closing at all. The fears of residents who have become dependent on prisons for their livelihood have been covered widely in the media, but these stories often erase the voices of millions of Californians including people currently and formerly incarcerated at CCC who are demanding these state-funded prisons be permanently shut down.

Prison closure in California is a complex undertaking. The task has many moving parts, including important questions about labor and infrastructure in communities like Susanville, where prison economies have taken over. Yet the fixation on these concerns continues to obscure why we must close prisons in the first place: Prisons are racist institutions that are disastrous to our nations public health and overall economic well-being.

The evidence is overwhelming. Incarceration is an ongoing humanitarian crisis that disproportionately affects Black, brown and poor communities. The U.S. spends $300 billion on the prison industrial complex annually. Theres also a $1.2-trillion effect from lost earnings, adverse health effects and financial damage to the families of incarcerated people. Mass incarceration, historically inextricable from slavery, hurts everyone in the United States and has shortened our average overall life expectancy by two years. During a global pandemic, sustaining deadly and infectious prisons is a terrible strategy to prop up employment in rural America.

Closing CCC, a 60-year-old facility requiring $503 million in infrastructure repairs, will save Californians $173 million per year. The nonpartisan Legislative Analysts Office calculates that shutting down five of Californias 34 adult prisons would save $1.5 billion per year by 2025. Significant, but only a dent in this years whopping $18.6-billion state corrections budget, the clearest indicator of Californias incarceration addiction. Coalitions like Californians United for a Responsible Budget maintain that at least 10 prisons should close over the next five years, achievable through sentencing reforms that increase releases, deep community investment and strong political leadership.

It is true that thousands of people rely on income from working at prisons in California. However, if towns like Susanville cannot survive without a system that criminalizes, cages and harms people, they have an obligation to rethink the structure of their economies. And no, replacing government prisons with private detention centers is not helpful. There are smart public policy solutions that could address some of these communities concerns.

Prison towns should be proactive in demanding more state investment in better jobs, creating new pathways to careers that have a viable future and pay a competitive wage. Prison jobs offer high salaries but are deeply traumatic and lead to negative health outcomes. These are not good jobs. However, the troubles of prison guards pale in comparison with the violence inflicted upon those who are locked in prison cages. Its also no secret that some corrections officers are guilty of perpetuating the toxic culture of prisons.

People against closing prisons are missing a chance to imagine and fight for a new, valuable infrastructure for their towns. This represents a failure of public education, public planning and political will. Lack of innovation, not the closure of a prison, will be the cause of any serious economic consequences in Susanville. In fact, the prison is the problem.

Prisons temporarily sustain small communities through employment but ultimately devastate individuals and society, making them remarkably similar to oil and mineral companies. They harm local environments and the planet while enriching a few special interest groups.

These problems have similar solutions. As a nation, we must transition to a sustainable future. Environmental justice groups are innovating in these areas, winning a recent, major victory in Tonawanda, N.Y., by uniting labor and community interests. Just Transition strategies can move us away from extractive economies like fossil fuels and prisons, providing pathways for workers to new, high-quality jobs with integrity. Prioritizing re-entry, training and other services for formerly incarcerated people would help them join these new economies. Why arent these productive ideas being implemented on a larger scale? Advocates have been demanding them for decades.

One smart job creation idea: Susanville, which is in Lassen County, could have been destroyed by the Dixie fire, one of the largest in Californias history. Climate change is real. Preventing, fighting and recovering from wildfires are more useful jobs than guarding prisons. State governments can end racist mass incarceration and engage with stakeholders to serve real community needs.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sold towns like Susanville on the promise of prisons to address the longstanding unemployment in rural economies. In order to weigh a future without prisons, we need to reckon with the powerful institutions that benefit from these rationalizing narratives.

Lawmakers must reduce imprisonment and promote an alternative, positive vision for California. As the state reduces prison spending, it should increase resources for formerly incarcerated people and invest in towns that would be most affected by prison closure. Thats the conversation to be having: not about what would be lost if a prison closed, but about why prisons must close, and what possibilities come into view when our culture diverts resources away from human caging and toward things that actually keep people safe, like jobs and healthcare.

We need a more substantive dialogue on the issue of prison closure if we are going to inform and empower the public to build a healthier, greener, more just society.

Brian Kaneda is the deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget.

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Op-Ed: When a prison closes, its town has a shot at redemption - Los Angeles Times

Debate

16:35

by Michael Mosbacher

The House of Lords voted in favour of repealing the Vagrancy Act

In an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the House of Lords this week voted in favour of repealing the Vagrancy Act in its entirety, defeating the Government in the process. The Act is a rather unusual piece of legislation to still find on the statute books, not least because it dates back to 1824. Its language is undoubtedly antiquated. The Act calls beggars idle and disorderly persons; those repeatedly convicted of begging shall be deemed a rogue and a vagabond. It has nasty things to say about those endeavouring by exposure of wounds and deformities to gain or obtain alms and those lodging in any barn or outhouse.or in any cart or waggon.

The law has few defenders; when the Government opposed the Amendment it did not offer a thoroughgoing defence of the Vagrancy Act far from it. Home Office Minister Baroness (Susan) Williams stated that the government was committed to repealing the legislation but that its repeal without something in its place would leave the police without the necessary powers to clamp down on persistent begging.

Few would argue that the Vagrancy Act should be the central tool used to fight the complex and interrelated factors that can lead to rough sleeping, begging and its all too common corollaries of alcoholism and drug addiction. Governments use many measures to combat the ill of rough sleeping with mixed success; criminal prosecution is rightly not the foremost tool in this armoury.

There is, however, a strong case for the Vagrancy Act as it stands. The Act sends a moral message that certain forms of behaviour are a non-trivial nuisance and undesirable; society does not approve of them. Aggressive begging is a major problem in cities and it does no good to repeal a law that aims to curb it. Is that really a message we want to send? We live in a society where laws whether we think it a good thing or not constantly make moral judgements on matters that do not clearly harm others. Since that is the case, why is it wrong for the law to make a moral judgement about aggressive begging, especially as it clearly does cause nuisance and potentially distress to others?

Other than the laws quaintness, the main argument made against it is that it criminalises poverty. By any fair-minded reading, this is not correct. It does not criminalise the fact of poverty but certain behaviours associated with poverty. In the mythology of parts of the Left, opposition to anti-vagrancy legislation has a particularly cherished place as Karl Marx himself inveighed against them in Das Kapital. In the German messiahs reasoning vagrancy, legislation was passed to control the peasantry dispossessed by the enclosure of Common Land and thus give the burgeoning proletariat no alternative but to succumb to wage slavery.

In the current climate so much of what is proposed from protestors taking down statues to councils renaming streets is about sending a moral message rather than policy outcomes. Whatever a Bristol jury might have thought, very few would argue that the tearing down of Edward Colstons statue and dropping it into Bristol harbour did anything to improve a single persons life. It is a form of public moralising and should public moralising only come from one direction?

The Government will consider how to respond to the Lords amendment when the Policing Bill returns to the Commons. It may simply seek to overturn the amendment while pledging to repeal it in the longer term. But it should be more robust and make the case for the Vagrancy Act and the opprobrium it attaches to begging. The fact that this law today is foremost a moral statement rather than practical policy makes it very much a law for our time.

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In defence of the Vagrancy Act of 1824 - The Post - UnHerd

As a high-school student with still-shaky English proficiency, I found a collection of Platos dialogues in a garbage pile near my house in Corona, Queens. I had grown up in a mountain town in the Dominican Republic and emigrated to New York City just before my 12th birthday. My mother had left the Dominican Republic a few years earlier, secured the only job she could get, earning the minimum wage in a garment factory, and petitioned for my brother and I to join her. In 1985, we entered New York Citys overcrowded public school system, where the free lunches supplied a good portion of our sustenance. Like many immigrants, we were poor, exposed, and disoriented by our uprooting.

It was not an auspicious beginning for the career I would have as student, academic administrator and faculty member at an Ivy League university. But the jarring journey became, at some point, less of a handicap and more of a peculiar vantage point from which to reflect on the intellectual and social world I had entered. My development was nourished by an education in what some people call the great books. That same education has made me sensitive to a culturally influential critique of the canon that insists that Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, et al, are not for people like me, that they are for white people, or rich people, or people born with class privileges that I lacked.

In the collection of Platos dialogues that I rescued from the garbage pile on that winter night in Queens, I encountered an old man named Socrates in his final days. He was defending himself against accusations of corrupting the youth and of introducing new gods to the city. Men of Athens, he protested,

By the end of the collection, we find him in prison on the day appointed for his execution, calmly and easily drinking the poison, laying down, and dying: Such was the end of our comrade, says the first-person narrator, a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright. I did not need to be rich, privileged or cultured to find in those words something that spoke to the deepest sense of my own being. And I did not need to be white or European to be startled by the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Every summer since 2009, I have used these same Platonic dialogues to introduce low-income high-school students, who hope to be the first in their families to attend college, to the philosophic, ethical and political tradition that Socrates inspired. Every year, I see my students roused to serious self-examination and, in many cases, to an earnest and lasting reorientation of their lives. They do not see Thucydides, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and other texts we study, as alien objects belonging to others, but as thinkers who speak with a living voice to issues of urgency and relevance to their own experience. Again and again, I see these young people awaken to a source of self-worth and meaning that is not constrained by the material limitations that have otherwise hemmed in their lives.

The liberatory power of the canon is easily lost in the theoretical haze of the academic humanities. At the same time, institutions of higher education have been all too ready to abandon the idea of liberal education of learning for its own sake in favour of professional and specialised studies. But the old classics still have the power to move and transform young people in ways that no technical education can. We dont have to dilute the practical value of a higher education nor ignore the insights of the academic humanities to restore the vitality of liberal education in our colleges and universities.

In my last year of college, I took a comparative literature seminar with the literary scholar Gayatri Spivak. At the time, I was immersed in what was broadly called theory and, inspired by French deconstruction, was writing a thesis on St Augustines treatise on biblical interpretation, De doctrina christiana (c397-426 CE). I was thrilled by the chance to study with Professor Spivak, who had translated Jacques Derridas groundbreaking work of deconstructive criticism, Of Grammatology (1967).

About halfway through the course, we started reading William Shakespeares King Lear. In class, Professor Spivak would ask us to read passages aloud, insisting that we respect the plays iambic pentameter with five stressed and five unstressed syllables in each line. Thus, in the climactic opening scene when King Lear asks Cordelia to outdo her sisters in declaring her love for him, Professor Spivak drew our attention to the portentous silences the blank beats of the pentameter:

She made us read the passage several times, until we learned to stop and let the mute beats of the metre do their devastating work. Nothing, my lord. Pause. Nothing? Longer pause. Nothing. Long pause again.

How was it that loving Shakespeare had come to feel to me like something dirty?

At one point, when reading from another scene, Professor Spivak stopped, put down the book and said, in a tone that lay somewhere between a confession and a sigh: Im sorry, I love Shakespeare. Im sorry, and resumed her reading. I was relieved that she, the renowned postcolonial feminist theorist, could say this, and that our reading of Shakespeare would not simply be an exploration of the ways in which he was the product of and a mouthpiece for patriarchal, Eurocentric and imperialist discourses. We were also reading a Shakespeare that was lovable, and witnessing a family drama that touched our shared humanity. I too loved Shakespeare, and Professor Spivak was giving me permission to admit it. Across four centuries and multiple cultural chasms, sparks were flying from Shakespeares text that illuminated my whole sense of self.

Beyond feeling relieved, I was also surprised by my own complex reactions to Professor Spivaks half-embarrassed disclosure. How was it that loving Shakespeare had come to feel to me like something dirty? Had I, like Dantes pilgrim, taken a wrong turn somewhere and become entangled in a thicket of confusion, having lost the path that does not stray? How could I reconcile the life-altering encounters with great books that Id had in Columbia Universitys Core Curriculum with the prevailing sense among the literary thinkers I most admired that those texts were morally tainted and that to value them as great was to be complicit in wrongdoing?

There is a widespread conviction among literary scholars that there is no such thing as a great book. Better put, there is a prevailing view in the academic humanities that there is no basis upon which one can make generalisable judgments about the greatness of a book. The claim extends to works of art in general. At first sight, this may sound odd what are museums for, if not to single out and display works that command special attention?

But the challenge to the idea of greatness the challenge to assigning hierarchical value to cultural expressions isnt as preposterous as it might first appear. If, for example, one points to the aesthetic qualities of a work, one must reckon with the fact that aesthetic quality is notoriously difficult to pin down, and that attempts going back to antiquity have failed to give us an objective standard by which to judge. Moreover, aesthetic judgments can easily boil down to individual preferences, which, though perhaps finely attuned to prevailing social norms, are actually the result of particular kinds of education. In other words, its hard to extricate aesthetic value from cultural and aristocratic prejudice.

One might also justify the judgment of greatness in a book or work of art by pointing to its influence on a tradition of thought or to its impact on how we have come to see the world. In that case, a theoretically sophisticated sceptic might argue that such value judgments point not to anything intrinsic in the work, but to a historically contingent configuration of social power, which, the conscientious critic might add, is inextricable from forms of oppression, exclusion and domination present in our contemporary world. In this critical reading, the elite forms of cultural power embodied in values of greatness are undergirded by the exploitation and dehumanisation of the other.

These anti-foundational critiques of greatness carry the high-voltage implication that any hierarchy of artistic value is probably complicit in moral corruption. Up-and-coming scholars who endorse the particular value of certain works, especially canonical ones, do so at their own career-ending peril. In contemporary literary scholarship, its better to stick to critique all the more so when it comes to old books.

Great works are great because of an evident yet elusive capacity to illuminate our shared humanity

But without minimising the insights of critical theory, we can contain its paralysing force by eschewing any effort to define a great book or a classic with reference to some defining essence, whether aesthetic, ideological or historical. We can simply survey the bodies of texts that have come down to us in our few thousand years of written records and note that certain works, and not others, have demonstrated a capacity to illuminate the lives of many different kinds of people in many different historical circumstances. These works somehow transcended the conditions of their own creation they spoke within their time, but also beyond it. I dont need to understand much or anything, really about the political struggles of 14th-century Florence, ubiquitous as they are in Dantes Divine Comedy, to have that work inspire deeper reflection of my own humanity, beginning with its invocation of an individual reaching a crisis point in the life journey we all travel:

What makes Dante a candidate for literary greatness is not his immersion in the theology of the medieval Church, or in the factional intrigues of central Italys politics, but rather his capacity to reveal, in the midst of those trappings, something that is vitally meaningful to, say, a 21st-century, unbelieving Dominican living in the United States. By the same token, it is not Toni Morrisons immersion in the legacy of American chattel slavery that makes her novels arresting and yes, great but her ability to make that human experience alive and accessible to someone who has no historical connection to it. Great works are great because of an evident yet elusive capacity to illuminate our shared humanity. It is the mysterious quality found by a 15-year-old preacher in Harlem named James Baldwin in a course of reading that began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky and that brought about the crumbling of his Pentecostal faith.

One does not need to posit a metaphysical essence to human nature in order to recognise that all people share fundamental similarities from a specific biological organisation, to a specific genetic architecture, to specific forms of cognition, to the existential condition of living with the consciousness of death. The insights of critical theory can be retained without, at the same time, abandoning the ground upon which to form judgments about how works of art can illuminate our common human experience. And we can delight in the uncanny fact that art captures this communality precisely by foregrounding its opposites individuality, subjectivity and particularity.

A conspicuous aspect of our commonality and of its heterogeneousness stems from our experience of ourselves as autonomous individuals; beings capable of ordering our lives according to subjective conceptions of our own good. This capacity for self-determination puts front and centre, for all of us, the question at the heart of Platos Republic, arguably the founding text in Western philosophy.

In the opening pages of the Republic, one finds Socrates debating the sophist Thrasymachus about the nature of justice. Thrasymachus argues that justice is simply a function of power the advantage of the stronger and that those with power set the terms of what is considered just and unjust. The best course of action, argues Thrasymachus, is to behave justly in order to avoid the consequences of contravening a superior power, but to disregard norms of justice and seek ones own advantage whenever possible. Unwilling to submit to Socrates cross-examination, Thrasymachus then tries to leave the discussion, but Socrates begs him to stay, asking: do you think it a small matter to determine which whole way of life would make living most worthwhile for each of us? Here is the animating concern of the Republic and, indeed, the bottom-line question of both philosophy and religion.

In a story from the Pali canon, the ancient collection of Buddhist teachings, the Buddha frames this same question in a memorable way. During a visit by King Pasenadi of Kosala, the Buddha asks him about his whereabouts and the king replies I am paraphrasing Ive been doing typical kingly things, affairs of state and the like. The Buddha then poses the following scenario:

This messenger is followed by three more, from the west, the north and the south, each with the same dreadful news of an approaching cataclysm. Faced with such calamity, asks the Buddha, what should be done? King Pasenadi responds with platitudes: what else should be done but to live by the Dhamma, to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds? The Buddha then presents his at-once startling and self-evident teaching:

When teaching great books to Columbia undergraduates completing the same required Core Curriculum that I took 30 years ago and that consists, roughly, of canonical works in the Western tradition, I often ask them to bring this question When ageing and death are rolling in on you, what should be done? to the intellectual encounters they will have in the course. The question always resonates with students. It is true that they come to college to improve their employment prospects and to gain marketable skills, but they also come gripped by existential dilemmas and looking for a way to orient not just their careers but their lives.

Liberal education is not pursued in the service of disciplinary, professional or occupational goals

Liberal education is an approach to learning that foregrounds our existential condition. It takes seriously the idea that rational enquiry into the fundamental questions of life is a worthwhile endeavour for each of us. There is probably no more powerful tool for such an enquiry than open discussion, in small groups of dedicated readers, of seminal works from our literary and philosophical past.

In the US, most bachelors degrees include a nod to liberal education in the form of general education requirements a set of courses outside of a students major or concentration that is meant to provide a common foundation of knowledge and skills for all. General education is liberal in that it is not subordinate to any specific professional or vocational aim, but focuses on the general competencies required in all fields. But following the theoretical developments in the humanities that I have described above, general education programmes at most US colleges have devolved into a hodgepodge of distribution requirements, often aimed at little more than introducing students to a variety of academic disciplines outside the major. Yet liberal education is precisely an education that is not pursued in the service of disciplinary, professional or occupational goals. A disciplinary approach to liberal education comes close to an oxymoron, and all the more so when the humanities disciplines have largely abandoned the idea of rational enquiry into the human good as a form of education.

If the approach to liberal education that I am describing sounds like the traditional education of social elites, it is because liberal education does significantly resemble that. And this, by itself, is no grounds for rejecting it. In fact, to cast liberal education as a mere affect of privilege is precisely to perpetuate the structures of social power that have long plagued our unequal society, and to put crucial tools for social, political and personal agency beyond the reach of those who need it most.

My point is simple: give the underprivileged access to the cultural wealth that has long been the exclusive purview of the elite, and you will have given them the tools with which to subvert the social hierarchies that have kept them down. Beyond equipping them with marketable skills and the means for economic self-advancement, this deeper work of education is the most valuable gift that colleges and universities can give to young people. It is also the most valuable contribution they can make to a democratic society.

Original post:

Why the great books still speak for themselves, and for us - aeon.co

Toson Knight, dean of culture for East English Village High School.

The institution of slavery was a multi-trillion-dollar industry that laid the foundation for several economic factors that would lead to a massive chain reaction for African Americans. By todays standards, the economic value for Black bodies would equal more than $42 trillion for the year 1860 alone. The 400-year-old institution was just the start of economic fulfillment at the expense of Black populations in the United States.

From slavery to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights era until now, the financial impact Blacks have in America hold true to the economic structure of today. Though African Americans generate and have the ability to hinder cash flow through the country, they continue to fight for economic freedoms and wealth in America.

Toson Knight, dean of culture at East English Village High School has witnessed the impact of Americas economics on Black students. Often at a disadvantage, Black schools, teachers and communities have fewer resources severely lessening their chance at obtaining wealth.

With America and the way theyre making money, my biggest problem is that we need to see more of the money being poured into our communities; more of the money being poured into our education system, so that we can eventually benefit from it, said Knight. Of course theyre making the money off of us, but were not really benefiting.

The Civil Rights Movement is, in many ways, synonymous with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s legacy and his dream. Leading one of the most recognizable boycotts in the countrys history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King along with his camp of supporters was able to cost the city of Montgomery approximately $3,000 dollars daily during the 13-month long boycott thus showing the buying power African Americans held at that time.

In 1964, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation across the country, it was thought African Americans would have access to a more tangible piece of the countrys economic structure, but this proved to be more societal and racial propaganda. In 1966, still fighting for Black economic inclusion, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned an article for The Nation, a weekly newspaper, in which he stated in part:

Someone has been profiting from the low wages of Negroes. Depressed living standards for Negroes are a structural part of the economy. Certain industries are based upon the supply of low-wage, underskilled and immobile nonwhite labor.

This sentiment still holds true today. Though progress has been made since the publishing of the article, African Americans continue to grapple with economic inclusion proven by the widening of the racial wealth gap.

Overall, we are still lacking as it relates to our people being able to have access to wealth and we are also lacking as it relates to being able to set our people up where theyre able to get jobs and investments that will put them to a different level, said Knight.

In the same article, Dr. King mentions, Negroes are a structural part of the economy. Demands for equal pay, access to education and racial equality were just some of the issues the Civil Rights Movement worked toward solving. Advancing economic opportunities was one of the goals for Dr. King. Though integration of schools happened in 1954, equal education continues to be a hot topic.

Our educational system, and this is of course stemming back to the Civil Rights Movement, our educational system is poor. Its not properly funded and therefore our kids are not getting the proper education and resources to be able to get good paying jobs, said Knight.

More than 50 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination, Black communities continue to struggle to find their place in the American economy. Though responsible for much of the countrys financial success, Blacks see little of it in return leaving the question, are we closer to or further from Kings dream? As King said in his 1963 I Have a Dream speech:

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

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Kings Dream: Economics, Education and Today - atlantadailyworld

A few weeks ago, in the midst of our catastrophic economy and general social discontent, Prince Harry offered some inspiring words of consolation for working people. The prince, a world-renowned authority on quitting, commented that we should celebrate the fact that record numbers of people are quitting their jobs for mental health reasons this year. This observation inevitably struck a nerve, less for its content than for Harrys sheer ignorance about the actual realities of life as an American employee. But despite the rage at Prince Harrys Marie Antoinette moment, hes not wrong that workers are miserable and looking to jump ship. A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs last September. Clearly, something has got to give.

One of the most miserable groups of American workers is women, who face a burnout crisis and report the highest levels of workplace exhaustion and dissatisfaction. A 2021 study by McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org (ironic) found that 42% of women say they feel burned out often or almost always. According to the same study, 1 in 3 women says they have considered downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce this year.

Paradoxically, women in this country were promised that we would finally be fulfilled and empowered if we entered the workforce. Unlike my mother and grandmothers generation, who were raised to become mothers and wives, my entire generation was taught that our careers will give us deep meaning and allow us to make a difference in the world. That promise rings hollow for several reasons. On a personal level, it creates a mentality in which the loss of ones career can lead to a devastating emotional void, and on a societal level, it has been manipulated for all sorts of damaging corporatist ends. So why is it still orthodoxy in most feminist circles that going to work equals liberation?

At its best, feminism is a political movement that aims to reduce the exploitation and abuse of women. But todays feminism has warped into an easily exploited source of emotional validation. The idea that solutions to personal problems can only be found through change in the public sphere was ingrained by feminist scholars and activists since the 1960s. If a movement seems to sparkle with the promise of self-help, it can be easily co-opted to sell something to its followers, who are primed to buy into promising solutions (after all, change comes from without, not within). Feminism was thus liable to not only become the identity- and affirmation-obsessed spectacle we see today, but also to be swallowed whole by corporatism and sold back to us as the promise of liberation through our careers.

There is no denying that the second wave of feminism saw women gain financial independence and the ability to work at almost any job we wish, alongside men. But tying womens self-worth to their jobs became a measure cynically adopted by the major political parties and by corporate institutions. Through diversity and inclusion measures, big business shrouded their actions in a feminist cloak while squeezing more hours of work out of the middle and lower classes. Instead of womens mass entrance into the labor force increasing overall wealth and prosperity, wages stagnated, costs of living went up, and the single-income family became a dream of the past.

Yet as our jobs become less and less fulfilling, and we fail in our attempts to be girl bosses with a work-life balance that makes us happy, feminists still push the narrative that robust careers are a source of surefire personal fulfillment. Many professional women cling to the illusion of impact driven work, even as it drains them and leaves them to languish in their waning years, when they are no longer useful. The McKinsey study states that women continue to have a worse day-to-day experience at work and proposes a fitting solution: increasing diverse female representation in the corporate hierarchy. While filling more positions with women may help women feel less othered and demeaned at work (as the study claims), it is worth noting that the narrative we are supposed to buy is women hate it at work. We need to get more women in there stat.

Some researchers believe womens happiness and satisfaction in life has declined relative to men since the 70s. And yet, pop-feminism has continued to lean into the corporate system, devaluing any life choice for women that does not center on economic prosperity. Some nonmainstream feminists, such as Marxist feminist Harriet Fraad, have argued that the womens movement should have focused on making housework and home life more appealing for both sexes, while also fighting for better pay and working conditions for those who choose to pursue careers. These are compelling ideas worthy of further examination, which doesnt seem to be coming from todays feminists, who are more focused on identity than economics.

Of course, this system does not only harm women. Lower- and lower-middle-class men today are reduced to a third-tier status in todays workplaces, too. America is known for its poor treatment of such workers, with long hours, low wages, little time off, and no mandated paid parental leave. Countrywide, only 30% of Americans report feeling engaged at work. Jobs that feel like bullshit work subsume the lives of most everyday people to the point that they suffer some form of mental anguish. Yet identity politics obscures that this state of affairs applies to all workers, and the advocates of careerist feminism promote the idea that men have a joyous experience in capitalism that we can also be privy toif we could only break the glass ceiling. Funny how leaning in works for the employer.

The truth is that the lively, fascinating day that Sylvia Plath imagined resenting her future husband for in The Bell Jar is a laughable scenario today in a world where most people actually find their careers to be uninteresting. Many professional jobs appear to be little more than a lifetime spent busily producing nothing of true value, for a profit that someone else reaps, in the best hours of the day and all the best years of your life, under draconian employers who police your every private word and activity. But the liberal feminist narrative continues to inform us that as long as we are granted a level of flexibility by our employers, and go for impact-driven jobs that fulfill us, the workplace works for women.

We are told that fulfillment is to be found in ones accomplishments and accolades and that careers will give us the opportunity to help others. There is nothing more cynical than taking the human impulse toward enterprising self-sacrifice and service and exploiting it for material gain. But this is just what politicians and corporate culture have doneand continue to doby appropriating feminism for their own ends and pushing careerism down our throats. And instead of advocating for a cultural framework that acknowledges the many diverse and noncorporate ways women find personal fulfillment, todays feminists accept our current system and seek merely to have a greater say in its workings.

To put it in laymans terms, modern feminist culture has polished the turd that is wage slavery and presented it to us as liberation. We should always resist the temptation to look to an ideological movement for our salvation, but especially when that movement peddles mindless hustler culture as a certain panacea for complex personal ills. When someone advertises work makes free, you might wish to remain skeptical. Even if its written in pink letters.

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A Woman's Place Is in the Rat Race - Tablet Magazine

A CARLISLE man has admitted a modern-day 'slavery' offence following a high-profile investigation that was triggered by the discovery of man found living in a filthy shed.

Peter Swailes, 56, was today due to face a three-week trial at the citys crown court but he entered a guilty plea to the charge he faced, though the prosecution accepted hehad 'limited knowledge' of the exploitation suffered by the victim, a vulnerable man in his 50s.

Swailes, from Low Harker, north of Carlisle, was originally jointly charged with his father, also called Peter, 80, who lived at Hadrians Caravan Park on Old Brampton Road, Carlisle.

The older defendant denied wrongdoing, claiming the victim chose to live as he did in the unheated 6ft square shed.

But Swailes senior passed away in August last year while waiting for the case to go to trial.

In court today, prosecutor Barbara Webster accepted the basis of plea put forward by Swailes junior, who until today had stood by his not guilty plea to the allegation.

That basis of plea included a statement that the defendant did not live at the north Cumbrian caravan park where the victim was living and was unaware of his squalid living conditions.

But the defendant did accept that the victim had 'on occasions' worked for him and that he paid him less than the minimum wage. Thus his guilt related to financial exploitation rather than living conditions.

The chargehe admitted was that he conspiredwith his father "to arrange or facilitate the travel of another person with a view to exploitation".

The father and son were chargedafter a lengthy joint investigation by police and the UKs Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the body that tackles modern day slavery.

Prosecutors say the 'exploitation' happened between July 31, 2015 and April 25, 2019.

The defendant is likely to be sentenced in early February following the preparation of background reports.

Judge Richard Archer indicated that the sentence he will impose is likely to be one which can potentially be suspended. Judith McCullough, for Swailes, said he was a man in very poor health.

The judge told the defendant: "You have now pleaded guilty to this indictment. "You have done so on a basis, which the prosecution accept.

"The next stage is for me to pass sentence. I have already indicated that this is a case which is so serious that a custodial sentence must follow but I will look with utmost favour on anything in the pre-sentence report or any other documentation which may allow me to impose a suspended sentence ofimprisonment."

At the time the investigation became public, it was widely reported that the victim had lived in the shed for decades.

The prosecution in the case accept that he lived there for a much shorter period, though the man is thought to have been exploited overa period running into decades.

Judge Archer said an aggravating feature of the case was the living conditions endured by the victim and the extent to which Swailes senior had used him.

But Swailes junior had only limited knowledge of his father's offending, the court heard. The victim is now said to be living away from Carlisle and "doing well", the court heard.

Ms Webster added: "He's currently residing elsewhere.

"He has accommodation, which he is extremely happy with and he is in regular contact with his carers, who go in regularly and check on him. He's doing extremely well and he will be cared for till the end of his life because everything has been put in place by the [authorities] for him."

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Carlisle 'shed slave' accused admits guilt on limited basis | News and Star - News & Star