Category Archives: Wage Slavery

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Most folks in Black and brown communities have heard of The 1619 Project that was published by the New York Times Magazine in 2019. This important and ambitious project, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, pulled back the curtain of euphemistic rhetoric composing American historiography that points only to the good in our history and sweeps under the rug the evil deeds perpetrated against people of color for more than 400 years.

The 1619 Project sought only to do one thingstart an honest conversation about how toxic attitudes about race have shaped this nations past and made America the country it is today.

For her effort and her scholarship and her truth-telling, Ms. Hannah-Jones has been subjected to foaming-at-the-mouth attacks by conservative politicians and right-wing pundits. These racially motivated jingoists have stirred The 1619 Project into the witches brew of grievance politics and created a screaming mob of frightened White people who fear that an open discussion of Americas history will take something away from them. They want to wage war against anyone who dares to reveal Americas true history.

This is a battle for the truth. And Nikole Hannah-Jones and the people who developed The 1619 Project should not be left to fight this battle alone. We all must arm ourselves with the knowledge of the truth and enter the fray. It is our duty. And I would like to play my part by pointing out some truth about American history.

Some of the loudest howling from the American White supremacists against The 1619 Project has been to denounce the statement that one of the principal factors driving the American Revolution was the fear that Britain would bring an end to slavery in the colonies.

With wild-eyed frenzy, conservative commentators argue, How could such noblemen as our founding fathers be motivated by such a low-down motive?

But given the fact that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroefour of the first presidents of the United States and participants in the Revolutionwere slaveholders, it is clear that these screeching conservatives are attempting to obfuscate historical facts to prevent an open and critical examination of the issue.

There are numerous historical data points that can be examined regarding the causes of the American Revolution, enough to fill books comprising a large library. But the examination and consideration of a few facts will corroborate what the project has said about the relationship between slavery and the American Revolution.

There were three sets of events that are interconnectedalthough their connection is often overlooked by most historiansthat led to slavery being a driving factor of the American Revolution.

The first set was the taxation issues of the 1760s. As a result of the costly French and Indian War, Britain began to tax its North American colonies on items such as glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. There were other taxes, including the notorious Stamp Act, which levied taxes on paper products and documents on paper.

The colonists protested these taxes vigorously, and eventually, all these taxes were rescinded, except for the tax on tea. The colonists saw these taxes by England as arbitrary, and a distrust began to grow among the colonists towards Britain and how it might oppress its subjects in the colonies.

Secondly, the British Parliament passed the Declaratory Act of 1766. When Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, it simultaneously sought to strengthen its control over the colonies by declaring that the British Parliaments taxing authority was the same in America as in Great Britain. In this way, it was asserting its complete authority to make laws binding in its colonies in all cases whatsoever.

Even with the passage of the oppressive Declaratory Act, there was not a great deal of fervor for independence among the colonists until the third series of events were precipitated by the Somerset case in 1772. James Somerset was an enslaved Black man who had been taken from Norfolk, Virginia, to London by his enslaver, Charles Stewart.

Once in England, Somerset began to realize that he might live as a free person. Stewart got wind of Somersets interest in freedom and had him chained in a ship scheduled to sail for Jamaica, where Somerset was to be sold. Abolitionist friends of Somerset petitioned the highest court in England for his release. And after months of legal maneuvers, Lord Mansfield, chief justice of the highest court in Great Britain, ordered Somersets freedom, stating that slavery is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. And further, he ruled, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.

This ruling by Lord Mansfield sent shock waves through the American colonies, especially those in the agrarian south. It was clear that Britain would not long abide slavery in its possessions overseas. The Declaratory Act now had real significance because all English colonies were created by charters granted by the crown.

And in each of those charters was a repugnancy clause stating that no colony could make laws that were repugnant to the laws of England. This left the colonists no way to contest laws freeing slaves in the colonies. Three colonial acts relating to other matters already had been struck down by English authorities in the two years preceding the Somerset decision. So, Lord Mansfields remark about slavery being odious was a very real threat to slavery in the Americas. The repugnancy clause in colonial charters, coupled with the Declaratory Act and the decision in the Somerset case, threatened economic doom for the colonists, especially southerners. Almost all the wealth in the southern colonies was created by slave labor. The only reason White enslavers had so much wealth was because enslaved Blacks had none.

Not only did the enslavers in America know of the Somerset case, the enslaved knew of it as well. A Virginia Gazette advertisement printed on June 30, 1774, stated in part about a runaway slave:

He will probably endeavour to pass for a Freeman by the Name of John Christian, and attempt to get on Board some Vessel bound for Great Britain, from the Knowledge he has of the late Determination of Somersets Case.

The handwriting was on the wall. Southern planters, as well as northern slaveholders, would not be able to hold onto their slaves for more than a generation or two. America would become a very different place without slavery. Rather than have that happen, the colonists went to war.

These are facts White supremacists and their right-wing pundits do not want you to know. But these facts are not hard to confirm. Books that speak to these facts are in libraries and online. We must arm ourselves with the facts and use them to battle for truth. We cannot let Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project fight this fight alone.

Oscar H. Blayton is a former Marine Corps combat pilot and human rights activist who practices law in Virginia. His earlier commentaries may be found at oblayton1.medium.com.

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Support Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project - MSR News Online

Tuesday, December 25

3 p.m. - National Weather Service says slippery conditions are expected Tuesday in parts of Iowa

11:42 a.m. California law banning sale of some pork could reach the Supreme Court, Grassley says

A California law banning the sale of pork from pigs confined in small spaces will take effect Jan. 1. But U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley says a related appeal could soon reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Californias Proposition 12 sets housing restrictions for breeding sows. It prohibits businesses from selling pork that doesnt meet those standards and that includes many Iowa producers.

In July, an appeals court rejected a challenge from farm groups that argued the law is unconstitutional because of a commerce clause that says states cant regulate commerce in other states.

Grassley says California shouldnt be telling Iowa farmers how to raise their livestock. Other states do not tell California how to grow grapes or almonds and, for instance, how much water they can use to produce their wine and almond butter.

Grassley says the Supreme Court could decide in the next few weeks whether or not to review the lower courts decision.

11:40 a.m. Grassley says hell focus on free trade agreements in 2022

Free trade is a top priority for U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley heading into 2022.

Grassley says hell be pushing for the Biden administration to negotiate more free trade agreements. Those are agreements between countries to import and export goods with reduced or no tariffs.

I'm going to be using my speeches and my activities and interviews like this to push the administration to negotiate more free trade agreements, because free trade agreements are very important for prosperity and agriculture, because we export so much.

Beside trade, Grassley also hopes to get a bill hes led on transparency in the cattle market through a Senate ag committee hearing. He says committee Chair Sen. Debbie Stabenow has indicated there could be a hearing on that bill next month.

9:11 a.m. Online game from U Iowa researchers designed to teach kids about the flu

As Iowa continues to experience a more severe flu season this year, University of Iowa researchers have developed an online game to teach kids about influenza called Flus Clues.

University of Iowa researchers teamed up with the nonprofit Families Fighting Flu to create the interactive online game.

It takes kids around the world to India, Nigeria, Argentina and Taiwan to identify influenza outbreaks. They then help to design a vaccine to save lives.

Maurine Neiman is a biology professor at the University of Iowa. She says the game is designed so no one loses. So we wanted them to get the message that any vaccine, even if imperfect, is still going to be better than not doing anything at all. So that's why we set it up the way that we did.

Neiman says the game also features a variety of scientists from different backgrounds and cultures to show kids anyone can be a scientist.

The game is available to play online.

8:50 a.m. Iowa task force looks to address lack of diversity among state educators

A legislative task force is suggesting ideas to recruit teachers of color and address a lack of diversity among Iowa educators.

About a quarter of students in Iowa schools are members of racial and ethnic minorities, compared to only about 3 percent of teachers.

Brittany Garling is the dean of the education department at Buena Vista University and was on the task force. She says growing teacher diversity is important in order for students to see themselves represented in the classroom.

And thats the biggest thing, is what does it look like to have someone that has a Hispanic background, has Punjabi background, has all the different types of ethnicities we have in school districts, and see themselves in a teacher thats in the field.

The task force says Iowa lawmakers should consider ways teachers could complete certification without having to pass the licensing exam known as Praxis.

The task force is also recommending an apprenticeship program that would allow 11th graders to become classroom aides and earn academic credits while working with licensed teachers.

But Ain Grooms, an education professor at the University of Iowa, says not only are there very few teachers of color, theyre also more likely to leave the profession often in response to racism they encounter on the job. Grooms says state and district officials must deal with that, too.

Whats the point in creating a pipeline program if youre not also trying to address the problems of what happens when people get into the schools and live in those communities.

8:40 a.m. Sioux Citys downtown continues to grow

Sioux City is seeing positive growth in its downtown after the completion of four major city renovation and construction projects. City officials say they are just beginning to scratch the surface on the impact of the revitalization.

In just four years, the city has completed two hotels, an Expo center and a square of industrial buildings.

Economic development director Marty Dougherty says the pandemic has slowed down some of these projects impact, but he says theyve spurred on increased tourism and brought new business to the area.

Success builds on success. And you know you see investment in properties. Were seeing an investment in those areas and the assessed value of those properties increasing tremendously.

One of the projects was the reopening of the Warrior Hotel in 2020. In 2020, the city reopened the historic hotel after more than 40 years of vacancy.

Lila Plambeck is the director of sales and marketing at the hotel. She says even with the pandemics toll on business, theyve accommodated 25,000 people for stays and events. We turned the lights back in this building and all the sudden we saw the lights go on in Bluebird Flats across the way, down the street Copper Flats, so a lot of downtown living is happening.

7 a.m. - Iowa officially became a state on this day in 1846

Tuesday marks Iowas 175th anniversary of statehood.

The Iowa State Historical Society is celebrating with programs featuring Iowa history available both in-person and online.

State Historical Society curator Leo Landis says one of the first celebrations of Iowas statehood anniversary was in Burlington in 1896. It was marred on its first day by a tragedy of a collapse of the reviewing stand that was being used. Former Gov. Buren Sherman broke his leg at that event. So our 50th anniversary of statehood started off on a little bit of a dark note, but then the celebration through the rest of the programs at Burlington went well.

Landis says this years celebrations include pop-ups sent to each county in Iowa, as well as a virtual tour of the State Historical Museum of Iowas People and Places exhibit.

Iowa officially became a state on this day in 1846.

Landis says Iowa joined the union at a tense time in American politics. The issue of slavery is becoming more and more prominent. There are concerns about what working life is like, who should be able to vote. Women are starting to agitate for equality.

5 p.m. - State reports 10.6% 14-day positivity rate

7 a.m. - Ag guest workers will get a pay bump come the New Year.

Tens of thousands of agricultural guest workers are getting a raise in 2022.

Thats thanks to a lawsuit filed by farmworker advocates against the Trump administration which had effectively frozen farmworker pay.

Eriberto Fernandez, with the United Farmworkers Foundation, says if employers are priced out of hiring temporary H-2A visa workers because of the wage increase, they should try looking local.

What growers should really consider is increasing the benefits package that they provide to local farmworkers. I think it might be less expensive than what they are paying H-2A workers.

The wage increase depends on where farmworkers are employed but will be about a six percent increase on average.

Entry via Harvest Public Media

7 a.m. Farmers will soon have access to more mental health resources in Iowa

Iowa State University Extension is expanding their mental health outreach to a particularly vulnerable population: farmers. The organization is using a $500,000 grant to make mental health resources more accessible to rural communities.

Farmers across the state can access free programming on suicide prevention and mental health first-aid throughout the year.

Demi Johnson, the programs coordinator, says that farmers face unique barriers to receiving mental health care. Thats why the organization has designed the classes to tackle problems specific to those in the agriculture industry.

Weather uncertainty, long hours, a lot of isolated work, supply chain shortages and knowing how those can add to distress if somebody is already at a breaking point.

Moore says its important for those who interact with farmers to recognize signs of distress, so they are working to train rural physicians, pastors and bankers to identify the signs.

Dr. Mike Rosmann is a psychologist and farmer in Southwest Iowa. We don't control the weather or farm prices. But we can control how we manage ourselves and handle stress.

8 a.m. A Refugee resettlement center in Cedar Rapids is looking for literacy tutors

A refugee resettlement center is looking for more tutors to help new Afghan arrivals read and write. Anne Dugger is the director of education services at the Catherine McAuley Center in Cedar Rapids. She says the majority of the new Iowans they have assessed are emerging literacy learners. That means they cant read or write well. Working with one-on-one tutors is one way to help them.

This is how we build our community. You become a friendly face in a crowd, you become just a friend, as a person moves about their week, whether or not you see each other out in the community, they have somebody that they know is there for them.

The Center plans on conducting more than 90 literacy assessments around the holidays.

11 a.m. - State reports 10.7% 14-day positivity rate

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National Weather Service says slippery conditions are expected tonight in parts of Iowa - Iowa Public Radio

Slavery is one of humanitys great evils. Despite its ubiquity throughout human history, some forms were particularly abhorrent and vile. While all slavery was and is wrong on moral grounds, it also has economic problems. Taken together, these reasons suggest that slavery should end on its own, even if it never does in practice.

Slavery is economically inefficient. If slaveholders made decisions purely on economics and not corrupt emotion, the practice would likely cease to exist in many of its forms.

While modern defenders of slavery are hard to find, many nonetheless believe it is economically efficient. After all, slaveholders have no labor costs. Many people wrongly believe this simply means the twisted enterprise is an economic powerhouse, but limiting slavery to wages misses other costs that diminish the economic value of slavery to the slaveholder.

No single explanation is the key to the shackles. If a single inefficiency were so powerful and evident, slavery would never have taken hold in America or elsewhere, and modern slaves would be set free today. Instead, it is the totality of factors and costs that add up to be more expensive than free wages in many examples. It is also important to focus on accounting costs rather than purely economic value because some may gain such great utility from oppressing others that it is efficient for them, even if it means lower output.

Wages are about the only thing a slaveholder saves when compared to having employees. They may save on employment benefits (health, dental, retirement), as well, but these are optional even within competitive free markets. What the slaveholder saves in wages he does not necessarily make up for in revenue from his output.

A slaveholder has to pay for the room and board, food, clothing, and medical treatment of his slaves. Of course, this can be incredibly minimaleven dehumanizingbut costs nonetheless he would not incur if he did not treat them as living property. A wage reflects value added and is not meant to compensate workers for the food and board they need to survive. With slavery, instead of paying a low wage commensurate with the value created, the slaveholder pays for these living expenses directly.

Additionally, the slaveholder has to invest in near-24-hour security to keep his slaves from escaping. This may mean infrastructures like fencing, buildings, chains, locks, cameras, and more, and it could also include personnel to watch and keep slaves locked away. The revenue from the slave labor is thought to so exceed these costs that it is irrelevant. That is a shortsighted view.For setups where slave or sweatshop workers may not be housed in a prison-like location, the slaveholder still mustemploy security or enforcers to round people up and subdue them. When added together, these costs begin to have weight. They may decrease in the long run, but they are still ongoing costs that exceed the efficient investment for a free market workforce.

There is also an opportunity cost to consider. Not only does the slaveholder have to pay the actual accounting cost to maintain a worker population and secure them, but he also loses the things he could have if he did not pay for those things. He could have more capital, better quality inputs, and better facilities. The revenue from the slave labor is thought to so exceed these costs that it is irrelevant. That is a shortsighted view. Consider scale, as well; in American slavery, the slave population grew due to birth rates. A higher population costs more to feed and shelter, as well as secure and patrol. Eventually, the numbers could be so overwhelming that it is too expensive to prevent a revolt or escape. Thus inefficiency may grow worse over time.

In the free market, some are paid even above the equilibrium wage for an industry or job at a rate known as an efficiency wage. This wage is higher because it attracts exceptional workers who can do the job with greater skill and efficiency, more than justifying their wage. While this type of wage is mainly used in high skill sectors, and slavery is usually centered around low skills, the worker attitude is relevant. Slaves have no incentive to work harder or better. In fact, in all likelihood, they resent and hate their oppressors. This means they will not be working as efficiently as possible. This turns into inefficiency for a few reasons.

If the slaveholder forces them to work hard at a low-skill job, they can threaten pain or withhold food or comfort. This means the slave has no options and must keep up the output, but due to fear, pain, or exhaustion, is less likely to be operating at full capacity. The mental resistance likely drags this even further. A slaveholder demanding ten units of output could get them. But a motivated worker at full capacity may be able to put out far more units. And when slaves are harmed, they cannot produce as much. Any worker who is killed or incapacitated must be replaced, which is costly to the operator. Even for low-skilled work, as most slavery and sweatshop work is, some level of a learning curve is present that drags the efficiency of the operation.

Working for no pay will mean profit because revenue exceeds cost when wage is not included. But as with the efficiency wage, paying workers can actually bring in more revenue because it brings greater skill, harder work or better attitude, and more efficient labor to the enterprise.

Businesses are always trying to cut costs to increase profit and also to save money to invest in development or expansion. An enterprise that does not innovate or expand will not remain profitable forever, and part of the incentive to innovate is in improving products.

Blinded by the short-term expediency of not paying for labor, slaveholders likely disproportionately favor labor.

Slave labor is unlikely to come to the boss with innovations, ideas, and tips for better products or techniques for saving time or resources, which is common in free markets. And bosses who already do not pay for labor are not likely to consider labor costs as part of the process of streamlining and improving. To this end, by blinding oneself to a huge cost, the slaveholder is likely blinded to costs as a whole and to improving things.

It also sacrifices the most efficient mix of capital and labor. Blinded by the short-term expediency of not paying for labor, slaveholders likely disproportionately favor labor. Although a machine could work for free, as well, slaveholders may not invest in capital, which could produce more efficiently, because they already do not pay the slaves, so buying the capital is expensive to them. Moreover, if competitors are innovating or using capital and commodity prices begin to fall, the price of the slaveholders product falls, and his revenue decreases.

A final drag on efficiency comes through opposition from the public or private actors. This looks different in different eras and locations. Abolitionists may be a thorn in the side of a slaveholder. They could persuade people not to do business with the slaveholder, condemn him in public as a bad person, or protest or physically intervene with things like supply shipments, product sales, or other.

In the modern era, many countries make slavery formally illegal. This means slaveholders have to undertake great costs to stay secret and hidden or pay bribes to authorities to overlook it. If it became known, the press would condemn it and shine a spotlight on it, which would likely lead to humanitarian groups and government bodies intervening.

Slavery is an old institution. If it were inefficient enough, it never would have taken root. Certainly, there is expediency, but expediency is not efficiency. While all decent people already abhor slavery, many fail to account for the many short-term and long-term economic costs that, taken as a whole, make most forms of slavery inefficient despite the seemingly intuitive belief to the contrary.

Economics is not a magic bullet to end modern slavery, just as it did not end historic slavery. It does reveal that slavery is difficult to sustain. There very well may be instances where slave labor happens to be efficient economically, but by and large, people who believe this are missing key factors. The practice of slavery is immoral and must be ended. Slavery is also inefficient. Hopefully, that inefficiency prevents it in some cases and can impede it in present and future instances. Using economics to make it even more costly may be one policy approach to consider.

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Actually, Slavery Was Never Economically Efficient ...

It allows employers to extend unlimited advances to workers and charge an unspecified interest rate on such loans

Debt bondage is a form of slavery that exists when a worker is induced to accept advances on wages, of a size, or at a level of interest, such that the advance will never be repaid. One of Indias hastily-passed Labour Codes the Code on Wages, 2019 gives legal sanction to this horrifically repressive, inhuman practice, by allowing employers to extend limitless credit advances to their workers, and charge an unspecified (and hence, usurious) interest rate on them.

Despite previously existing legal protections, vulnerable agricultural, informal sector and migrant workers were already becoming trapped in a vicious cycle of mounting debt and dwindling income, stripping them, their families and future generations, of their most basic rights. It remains one of the most pernicious sources of control and bondage in India, and is incompatible with democracy.

What is shocking is that instead of preventing such enslavement of workers and protecting their fundamental rights, the present government appears to openly abet the practice, by undoing even the weakest safeguards earlier in place under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 (now subsumed in the Code).

Rule 21 of the Minimum Wages (Central) Rules, 1950 (corresponding to the Act) spelt out certain deductions permissible from the wages of workers. The sub-rule (2)(vi) allowed for deductions for recovery of advances or for adjustment of over payment of wages, provided that such advances do not exceed an amount equal to wages for two calendar months of the employed person.

Additionally, it stated, in no case, shall the monthly instalment of deduction exceed one-fourth of the wages earned in that month.

Compare this with Section 18(2)(f)(i) of the Code on Wages, which introduces two major changes to the foregoing.

This section allows deductions from wages for the recovery of advances of whatever nature (including advances for travelling allowance or conveyance allowance), and the interest due in respect thereof, or for adjustment of overpayment of wages.

The subtle manipulations introduced have huge implications. One, it has done away with the cap of not more than two months of a workers wages under the earlier Act, that an employer can give as advance. This allows employers to lend unlimited advances to their workers, tightening their grip.

Two, it has legalised the charging of an interest rate by the employer on such advances, by adding the clause on interest, and with no details on what might be charged. The net impact is an open sanction for the bonded labour system to flourish.

Moreover, the Code increases the permissible monthly deduction towards such recovery, up to one-half of the workers monthly wage, as compared with one-fourth under the earlier Act.

Not that the presence of any law under our Constitution even before the Labour Codes such as The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 or various Supreme Court judgments, have ever deterred the bonded labour system from being widespread across sectors, from agriculture to quarrying, spinning, and more.

In Baran district, Rajasthan (2011-12), a series of Sahariya (a primitive tribal group) families boldly came out one after the other and spoke of their harrowing experiences of violence and even rape at the hands of Sikh, caste Hindu, and Muslim landlords, for whom they had worked as halis for generations. The mostly upper-caste government officials from the Collector onwards put up a wall of resistance in acknowledging them as bonded labourers as per the Act, thereby denying them any sort of relief or rehabilitation, till pressure was mounted.

In a large-scale primary survey in a mining cluster of Nagaur district, Rajasthan for the Mine Labour Protection Campaign (2015), we found that one in three workers interviewed had taken advances from their employers ranging from 1,000-1,50,000 at the time of joining work. Of them, about 50% said they took the amount to pay off the earlier employer or a moneylender.

But in Parliament, the existence of bonded labour has simply been denied among elected representatives, or grossly understated.

Debt bondage and forced labour flourish because the Government has done nothing to ensure the economic security of labourers. And it is set to worsen if this labour code provision is allowed to take shape.

It is no coincidence that the disproportionate effect of this huge regression in the Labour Code will fall on Dalits and the landless. In the Nagaur study, for instance, we found that 56% of the workers were Dalits, as contrasted with only 3% of the mine owners.

The vast proportion of landless agricultural labourers in India, to date, are Dalits.

Anand Teltumbde powerfully writes in Republic of Caste, The dominant castes understood that if dalits came to own the means of survival, they would repudiate their servile status and its attendant social bondage... Economic independence is an aspect of liberty and its absence, as a corollary, spells slavery.

Indeed, this is exactly what B.R. Ambedkar feared would play out in India, and hoped to prevent, through his pamphlet, States and Minorities, released in the 1940s (see Article 2). In her Ambedkar Lecture, 2018 at the University of Edinburgh, Rupa Viswanath, Professor of Indian Religions at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Gttingen, expounds on Ambedkars later-age line of reasoning that what makes the translation of one-man-one vote to one-man-one-value possible, is the workers economic freedom.

Ambedkar understood that economic enslavement was an extreme form of coercion that rendered political freedom meaningless, and that democracy itself required state intervention in the economic structure to prevent such practices, she says.

While he proposed a complete recast of rural and agrarian land structures, and state ownership of land as crucial to this, she explains, he also defined democracy as resting on two premises that required the existence of economic rights.

The first, relevant to the present discussion on Labour Codes, was that an individual must not be required to relinquish his Constitutional rights as a condition precedent to the receipt of any privilege. But that is exactly what the unemployed are forced to do merely for the sake of securing the privilege to work and to subsist, she notes.

The larger picture we must keep in mind, therefore, is this. Government after government, under the garb of being pro-worker, has schemed to intervene in exactly the opposite direction as desired by maintaining and deepening economic inequality to the advantage of the privileged castes and classes, thereby keeping true political freedom out of the workers reach. And it is this line that the Central government has pursued with even more gusto, in the recasting and passing of these retrogressive labour codes.

If the farm laws could be repealed, then these anti-labour codes, with numerous other dilutions that snatch away the mostly non-existent rights of the far more vulnerable class of workers, must surely go.

Sowmya Sivakumar is an independent writer

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How the Code on Wages 'legalises' bonded labour - The Hindu

Old-school human resources departments are a thing of the past. Ghost soldiers dont want to share their work problems with a suit whose role is to pacify you on behalf of government. Work and personal life have been irretrievably blurred in the Zoom world. I predict a growing use of pastoral care agencies like Sarah McCaffreys Solas Mind, which provides mental health support to freelancers in the creative sector.

Lockdown life revealed how fragile we all are and how much we want to talk about it. The answer to office work in the future is clear: Employees should commute to the office for the same three-day week, then melt away to their newly treasured secret worlds.

Tina Brown is a journalist and author and the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker magazines.

Covid disruption could be the turning point for adopting finally quality work-life practices proposed for decades. Flexible schedules, equal opportunity for women and minorities, a good balance between work and family, and socially responsible companies have long been on the horizon as distant hopes.

One driver is technology. Tech contributes to change by enabling work from anywhere. It transforms institutions and makes services more accessible, whether education online or health care through telemedicine, robotic surgery or home health monitoring. Labor shortages in poorly paid rote jobs make room for robots, such as the robotic restaurant in my tech-heavy neighborhood. Goodbye, wage slavery.

But tech wont create a workers paradise without bigger reforms. In-person face time is still an advantage for workers who can get to a workplace, which means that they need accessible child care and transportation, which have yet to materialize on a large scale. And a tech-dominated world carries troubling possibilities for control through increasingly sophisticated surveillance techniques, unless worker autonomy is protected.

Another potent driver of change is worker activism, led by younger top talent. Emboldened by competition for their skills and fueled by a mistrust of establishments, they protest undesirable customers, environmentally unfriendly products, rigid work requirements, discriminatory treatment and serial harassers. They seek greater participation in decisions, self-organizing to act directly rather than waiting for permission. They reinforce external pressure groups in holding businesses to ever-higher standards, and thus help corporate social responsibility programs and environmental, social and governance reporting become mainstream expectations.

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The Big Question: Is the World of Work Forever Changed? - The New York Times

Almost 95 percent of childcare providers are women, and almost 38 percent are Black or Latino. (All Our Kin / Instagram)

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said, Childcare is a textbook example of a broken market. Shes right. Women have disproportionately left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, partially due to a lack of childcare.However, the U.S. childcare system was broken well before the pandemic.Racist and sexist beliefs have allowed this market to fail and ensured we never had a system designed to work for all families, childcare providers or children.

Racism and sexism in childcare can be traced back to forcing enslaved Black women to provide childcare, and continued as they became domestic workers who were often excluded from job protections. It shows up today in the form of low wages and lack of benefits for the disproportionate number of women of color working in childcare.

The pattern is repeating itself during the COVID-19 pandemic.Gladys Contreras was one of an estimated 100,000 licensed in-home family childcare educators across the U.S., two-thirds of whom stayed open to care for the children of essential workers. When the pandemic began, 11 out of 12 families withdrew their children from her Connecticut-based program, leaving only one paying family.Not wanting to leave that family in the lurch, Contreras stayed open and operated at a loss, choosing between paying rent and putting food on her table.

When help came, Contreras, who emigrated from Peru, found it difficult to navigate Small Business Administration programs, due to language and technological access barriers.When asked how she fared, she said, Not being able to work was hard. It was a nightmare for everybody.

This year, she gradually welcomed back children and helped families deal with the trauma of isolation, lost wages and grief.However, she still has a lot of debt and is unsure she can sustain her childcare business.

On average, educators who care for children in their homes work 60-plus hours per week and often make far below minimum wage, averaging just $6.10 per hour in Connecticut. Contreras, like most childcare educators, absorbed the difference between the actual cost of care and what the market (parents or the government) pays. This is reflected in their low salaries, razor-thin margins and minimal, if any, financial reserves.

While the pandemic has shown a spotlight on their contributions, these sacrifices arent new to childcare providers. Black women caring for other peoples children ahead of their own families needs can be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow laws. Women of color often worked in white households where they were expected to work as family, justifying long hours and low pay. But as Carolyn Reed, a Black domestic worker organizer in the 1930s, put it, I dont need a family, I need a job.

Black women caring for other peoples children ahead of their own families needs can be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow laws.

When the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, guaranteeing minimum wages and standardizing hours, domestic workers, primarily Black women working in white family homes, were excluded. The law was modified to include domestic workers in 1974, however childcare workers still lack living wages and job-based benefits.

Currently, early education and childcare represents the most racially diverse and lowest-paid sector of the teaching workforce.Almost 95 percent of childcare providers are women, and almost 38 percent are Black or Latino, according to US Labor Department data. In K-12 and postsecondary education, approximately 25 percent of staff are people of color.In 2020, the median annual income of childcare providers was $25,460, leaving many of these women teetering on the federal poverty line. This is less than half of the average public school teacher salary for 2019-2020, which was $63,645.

Contreras is hopeful that her country will give her the respect she deserves by ensuring she gets a livable wage.However, for many families childcare is already a big expense and most families cannot afford to pay more.

As Congress works on a plan for families, there are solutions.Over 22 years, All Our Kin has trained, supported and sustained more than 1,100 family childcare educators, including Contreras. Our programs help educators become licensed, gain knowledge on child development and run small businesses.Every dollar invested in this program yields $15 to $20 in gross regional product.

With significant federal investments in childcare, states can adapt this model.Bidens Build Back Better framework, which passed in the House of Representatives, would make historic investments for universal preschool and childcarenow it is urgent for the Senate to follow suit.This investment makes economic sense, chips away at our gender and racial biases, and prioritizes children, families and their caregivers.

If you found this articlehelpful,please consider supporting our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

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The Real Reason Childcare Doesn't Work? It Isn't What You Think. - Ms. Magazine

Grocery stores throughout the Berkshires, including Wild Oats Market in Williamstown, employed measures such as Plexiglass partitions, to keep employees and customers safe during the coronavirus pandemic. Grocery stores are among those looking for help, amid a labor shortage.

In our first Project Paycheck report, I shared theories from local experts (thanks again, folks) on why Berkshire Countys workforce has so dramatically contracted during the pandemic.

Before our next full installment goes online Monday, I want to present early comments weve been getting from readers you know, people who are experts, writ small, in how the pandemic has affected their lives and jobs.

Better pay in other areas than what you get here. Cost to live here and low pay has people traveling to other areas daily to work.

How one Project Paycheck reader answered the question, 'Where did all the workers go?'

Heres a sample that came in through The Eagles Facebook page:

It's not a work shortage. It's a wage shortage.

Why would anyone want to work these days?

"There has always been a shortage of workers in the Berkshires. South county teenagers could pick what they wanted.

"They went somewhere with affordable housing and living wages.

Better pay in other areas than what you get here. Cost to live here and low pay has people traveling to other areas daily to work.

Clearly a theme there, right?

The Berkshire Eagles Project Paycheck explores work life changes in the region driven by the coronavirus pandemic. Led by Investigations Editor Larry Parnass, it probes why Berkshire Countys workforce remains at its smallest size in decades and what that means for the regions economic well-being.

We are also hearing from people who filled out our quick online survey. Ill recap those once Ive had a chance to get back to some people about sharing their comments. (Please consider filling it out! Your views matter. Add your voice to our project.)

In the weeks ahead, Ill zero in on the wage issue. Its clear to me this is a major factor. What will it take for employers in Berkshire County to reconsider, for real, what they pay for jobs they can and cant fill.

To be sure, pay in some fields is moving up. Still, the needle isnt yet moving on workforce numbers, as Jonathan Butler of 1Berkshire told me recently. Are any wage increases to date seen as baby steps, rather than strides forward in compensation?

Not everyone who posted in response to our initial stories was on board with the concept of a labor shortage.

Is this like the B.S. turkey shortage story liberal media pushes?

Democrats must be paying people not to work.

What happened to all the workers? I know so many people receiving food stamps they actually got increases, free health care ... must be nice .

Whats your work life story of 2021? Please take our Project Paycheck survey. You can also offer suggestions and share thoughts by contacting the projects lead writer, Larry Parnass, by emailing him at lparnass@berkshireeagle.com, or by calling him at 413-588-8341.

The sharpest criticism of the project thats come in took aim at the way we described the venture at the start: As with any region, the strength, and resilience, of the Berkshire economy depends on people working and getting paid."

Steve Dew of Williamstown posted a link to our first story and offered a different view on that premise.

This framing is totally backwards. The strength and resilience of our economy here in the Berkshires depends on employers treating their employees with respect and fairnessand, most importantly, paying them suitable wages, Dew posted. One example: Our county's largest employer, Berkshire Health Systems, is notorious for overpaying its administrators and going to war against organized labor over pay and safety for nurses and other frontline workers.

I called Dew to talk about this.

It was fair enough as far as it goes, he told me, referring to the way we described the Project Paycheck mission. But theres another side to that."

I asked Dew to talk about what it will take, in his view, to have employers, as a whole, do more to respect and compensate workers.

Its very simple: a re-invigoration of the labor movement in this country. Employers are not going to do this unless theyre pushed to, he said. To his ear, some of the comments from business about the workforce issue sounds medieval: Theres been an ugly peasants get back to work vibe during the pandemic.

To get on the right side of things, he says, employers should be using this pandemic work crisis to rethink, in a deep way, the entire workplace equation. If we dont hold employers accountable I feel like the message (in The Eagles project description) skirts dangerously close to a 'peasants get back to work' kind of approach.

Dews post drew an amen from Dennis Irvine, who replied that my description of the projects purpose worked to distract from whats obvious. That elephant in the room, he said, is pay. No, more than that. Genuine living wages, Irvine posted.

Everyone deserves enough to shelter, feed, clothe, and maintain their health. Entry level and beyond. I think many people are struggling and local wages are their last resort, he wrote. The frightening message in these sort of articles isn't 'where have they gone' but the implicit 'how long will local employers have to hold out until local workers run out of pandemic resources and can be forced into wage/debt slavery again?' It never seems to occur to the employers who complain about a lack of help to offer better wages and benefits.

Has the pandemic changed where you work? Why you work? How you work? The Eagle's new Project Paycheck series is exploring these issues and invites your help.

One of the most obvious explanations of the Great Reassessment of work, or what some call the Great Resignation, point, of course, to the pandemic.

One reader said that vaccine mandates are keeping people from working, and wrote: Drop the mandates and people will work. If there truly is a worker shortage then why are so many companies firing good employees for not getting the shot?

Amid all the comments came this one from Justin Ellis, whose Facebook account identifies him as the manager of an AT&T retail store.

Im hiring! People can start immediately! he posted.

Naturally, someone replied with a question: What do you pay?

Answer: Minimum wage, plus commission.

Coming next: Behind the scenes at a Dalton restaurant, where the pandemic labor shortage is forcing change.

Original post:

'Project Paycheck' readers weigh in on what's driving the jobs gap in Berkshires - Berkshire Eagle

On November 27, 1871, Italys King Vittorio Emanuele II gave an impassioned speech at the Italian parliament, finally ushering in the complete unification of his country. For centuries, the peninsula had been divided into a patchwork of regions, mostly dominated by the monarchies of Austria, France, and Spain. Napoleon had worked to change this arrangement after the French Revolution, but, after Habsburg diplomat Count Klemens von Metternichs reversal of his reforms at the Council of Vienna in 1815, the three foreign dynasties largely regained their strongholds.

In reaction came an aggressive Italian political movement, reintroducing the long-held concept of Risorgimento national resurgence. In the 1830s, it was spearheaded by Genoa-born intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini, attracting thousands of young Italians at home and abroad. Above all, they wanted to see the European empires leave the country. Giuseppe Garibaldi, an important disciple of Mazzinis and a member of the Young Italy secret society, stayed in touch with the Genoan for many years and, in 1848, heeded his call to return home and fight. In the meantime, Garibaldi made his name as an important guerrilla leader in South America a man who knew how to lead a large merchant crew, or an army.

But things didnt go as Mazzini had forecast. He had written Garibaldi that the huge Austrian army in the north of Italy was in a state of near collapse. Traveling through the north months afterward, Garibaldi found just the opposite was true, and the Italian forces were heavily defeated in the Battle of Novara against Habsburg opposition. As for Mazzini, by March 1849, he was appointed to the three-man tribunal running a radical republic in Rome that had just been created. From the start, everyone agreed, Mazzini was very much the lead man.

The battle of Rome would set the radical defenders of the republic, including forces coming from the north with Garibaldi, against a highly disciplined French army intent on reinstalling the runaway Pope. Garibaldis men almost all volunteers, arriving from numerous countries were celebrated for their bravery in forays against the French army that stunned newspaper readers in Europe and America. But as the monthslong battle unfolded, Garibaldis view of Mazzini, his longtime mentor, drastically changed.

Garibaldi had been appointed a general not commander in chief. Yet his military dexterity gave him a high-profile, if short-term, victory on April 30, 1849, as his troops made their way into the city. When Garibaldis Legionnaires entered Rome, writes biographer Christopher Hibbert,

the people looked at them with astonishment . . . their bearded faces shaded by the brims of high-crowned, black-plumed hats, were covered with dust, their hair was long and unkempt; some carried lances, others muskets and all of them wore in their blackbelts a heavy dagger . . . and there was no mistaking the broad-shouldered figure on the white horse. Despite the freckled skin burnt red by the sun and the flamboyant black felt hat with its high plume of ostrich feathers, Garibaldi, to some, looked like the Messiah.

Yet by June 30, 1849, an exhausted Garibaldi appeared before the republican assembly to say that he would have to surrender to the French siege. Mazzini, meanwhile, demanded that they keep fighting strongly suggesting that having martyrs would help their cause. Disgusted, Garibaldi resigned his command and promptly left Rome with his army of four thousand men. Garibaldi would, sometime later, form an alliance with Vittorio Emanuele to complete the fight for Italian reunification now under the Savoy monarchy.

The embattled Roman Republic had attracted much attention in the United States. The most important mainstream media in mid-nineteenth-century America was the countrys largest newspaper, the New York Tribune, known for its antislavery editorial stance. The editor in chief, Horace Greeley, six years younger than Mazzini, had become a major public intellectual after starting the Tribune in 1841. A passionate supporter of social reform, by 1857, Greeley would be a leading figure in the new Republican Party.

The Tribune was a major conduit through which Americans learned about 1848 in Europe, explains Greeley biographer Mitchell Snay. Greeley had accurately predicted that his audience would be fascinated by the revolution going on in Italy in the late 1840s. As the dismal issue of slavery increasingly obsessed the United States, he said yes to his front-page columnists request to move to Europe and report from there. Margaret Fuller would capture the interest of Greeleys readers and remind them of their own revolution, just three-quarters of a century earlier.

Mazzini and Greeley who would never meet shared a political philosophy that was common to their class in the first part of the nineteenth century. Utopian socialism preached the union of classes to solve social problems. Both men were dedicated to curtailing turmoil between the working and upper classes. At times, Mazzini had called himself a socialist. His definition, though, was wildly different from the Marxist socialists who would soon play a major role in the second half of the nineteenth century at least in Europe. Noted Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini would define Mazzini as one who hoped for social reform but carefully eschewed any talk of class conflict. This, too, defined Greeleys politics. On both sides of the Atlantic there were various forms of this ism: communitarianism, Fourierism, Associationism, and others. They all involved social reform, not revolutionary action.

Margaret Fuller had spent all her professional life among the utopian socialists. A blue blood New Englander from Cambridge, Massachusetts, she had authored a feminist book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and edited Ralph Waldo Emersons literary publication the Dial before being hired by Greeley to write for the Tribune in 1844.

Eighteen months later, she headed for London, where she was introduced to Mazzini, who thoroughly mesmerized her from the very beginning. Fuller would have been stunned at Eric Hobsbawms description of Mazzini, in his own Age of Revolution more than a century later, as the woolly and ineffective self-dramatizer. Fullers initial description of him was a man of beauteous and pure music.

They kept in touch, especially after Fuller returned to Rome, just before Pope Pius IXs prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, was brutally knifed to death in the middle of an angry crowd. The pope quickly fled south. Over the next several months, until July 1849, Fuller would cover the ongoing battle of radical troops against the French forces trying to reinstall the pope. And she would use Mazzini as her major source of information.

At the same time, Fuller, close to forty, was experiencing her own personal crisis. Much to Greeleys consternation, Fuller had disappeared for six months in the early spring with hardly a word about where and why she was not writing. Alone and afraid in Aquila, she had given birth to a son. Soon afterward, the father, a young member of the Roman Civil Guard, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, had joined her in a quiet marriage ceremony. A friend in Massachusetts counseled her to stay in Italy and not return home. She hired a wet nurse and returned to Rome to cover the war.

The European revolutionary movement which Fuller embraced and then saw crushed, emerged out of very real and widespread social misery, write Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, editors of a collection of her writings. The Europe Fuller encountered on her travels during 1846 and 1847 teemed with unemployment, famine, and social unrest, as well as . . . despotic governments unable or unwilling to fashion solutions to these problems.

Solutions were being proposed by others. Friedrich Engelss The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, and the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, were pointed out to Fuller by a German journalist, though she did not write about either for the Tribune. In this period, Fuller, who had had a long interview with the writer George Sand, began calling herself a radical. But academic Margaret V. Allen concludes, her columns show that she implicitly believed that knowledge of wrongs or evils led to their correction. Poet Elizabeth Browning had claimed that Fuller became one of the out and out reds, but Reynolds and Smith write that Fullers militancy had its limits doubting that she had become a red at all.

Fuller certainly was a steadfast admirer of Mazzini writing that he was immortally dear to me a thousand times dearer for all the trial I saw made of him in Rome. Her idolatry seemed to increase as the siege went on. But, as Italian American historian Roland Sarti former department chair of history at the University of Massachusetts writes, while many feminists in England were inspired by Mazzini, One suspects that, in some cases, he cultivated them for the sake of the men they were close to. Fuller, he commented, was an important figure among the Transcendentalists, which would have interested Mazzini. But he adds, She was of minor importance to Mazzinis life. Tragically, Fuller and her small family died in a shipwreck off the coast of New York on July 1, 1850.

The fall of the Roman Republic, a hairbreadth from the midpoint of the nineteenth century, was quickly followed by Mazzinis profound change in direction once back in London, where he would live as an migr for the rest of his life.

He was still heavily involved in advocating for the unification of Italy. But over the next twenty years, he would become obsessed by a ferocious hatred of the up-and-coming Marxist socialists. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emphatically denounced his and similar brands of reactionary socialism, by which they meant conservative critiques of capitalism, writes scholar Jonathan Sperber in his authoritative Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. They made short shrift of bourgeois socialism what we would today call social reform the amelioration of the condition of the working class within the capitalist society.

This social reform was at the very heart of Greeley and Mazzinis definition of early socialism. But little by little as the proletarian movement assumed a more revolutionary character, writes Salvemini, and the word socialism became removed from the idea of a simple, cooperative form of democracy and grew to be identified with that of the class struggle as happened from 1848 to 1851 under the impulse given by [Louis Auguste] Blanqui and Marx Mazzini became profoundly antagonistic towards this new movement, with ideas differing so widely from his.

Mazzini blamed the French socialists for frightening the bourgeoisie and bringing Louis Napoleons reactionary imperial regime to power in Paris. Thus began the systematic campaign against socialism which he was to wage until the end of his life. When the Paris Commune raised the red flag over the French capital in 1871, Mazzini viciously attacked the Communards, turning many former disciples against him. Mazzinis social system, from the practical point of view, no longer corresponded with prevailing social and political realities, summed up Salvemini.

In contrast to Mazzini, Greeleys political philosophy, also eschewing class conflict, remained very much intact and popular in the United States. His own career, from teenage printing apprentice from a poor farming family to editor of the countrys most successful newspaper, was often used as an example by Republican Party leaders.

The Tribune did expose shocking working conditions in many New York City shops, writes noted Columbia historian Eric Foner in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. Indeed, unlike many other Republicans, Greeley supported a legislative limit on hours of labor . . . [but] strikes were a form of industrial war, the antithesis of the labor-capital cooperation which Greeley desired. If Greeley recognized the social barriers to economic advancement, he also insisted on confronting intemperance, licentiousness, gambling and other vices, in the lowest class. As Snay points out, Greeleys persistent emphasis on the essential harmony between classes underscored his deep aversion to Marxist socialism.

In the U.S. . . . particularly in the large Eastern cities, where large-scale immigration was increasing class stratification and holding down the real wages of all workers, the prospect for rising to self-employment was already receding . . . we know today, of course, writes Foner, that in spite of the wide acceptance of the ideology of social mobility, the years after 1860 saw a steady diminution of the prospects for a worker or farm laborer to achieve economic independence. Yet at the time, Abraham Lincoln would insist that the North had no class who are always laborers. This came out of an ethos from colonial times that involved a decades-long stigma against being a wage slave. In the Republican Party, being a wage slave was only a temporary existence; so organizing workers was not necessary.

This then would remain a key part of Republican ideology. Paradoxically, writes Foner, at the time of its greatest success, the seeds of the later failure of that ideology were already present. In the 1860s, Greeleys party was advocating an economic system that had already begun to lose power. By then, it was estimated that almost 60 percent of the American labor force was employed as wage workers, demonstrating that the new political party, from its inception, advocated for a system that was already a part of Americas past.

Despite the profound problems of the Mezzogiorno, in Italy as in the rest of Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century a mass labor movement emerged for the first time in history. Nineteen socialist and labor parties were founded . . . between 1880 and 1896 along with a nationwide trade union federation, writes Sperber. By then, the shift between utopian socialism and Marxist socialism was complete, while in the United States, that moment never really occurred. While Mazzini died with a much-diminished following, Greeleys celebration of economic independence remained very much alive. And it would bear a lasting influence in the enduring split between the US and European Left.

More here:

The Fight for Italian Reunification Inspired the International Left - Jacobin magazine

Measured by the course of history over the last half century, the arc of the economic universe has bent badly toward injustice.

It has been more than eighty years since the National Labor Relations Act offered the first significant federal protections of industrial workers rights to organize and the Social Security Act laid the basis for an attenuated welfare state. New Deal policies were hardly panaceas; African Americans, immigrants, and women never enjoyed their fruits on an equal basis with white men. Yet over time the struggles of unions and the civil rights and feminist movements widened the protections workers were able to win from the law and from organizing. Between World War II and the mid-1970s, as union density crested at 35 percent of the non-agricultural workforce in the 1950s and then spread through the public sector in the 1960s, the United States experienced a broadly shared prosperity.

The arc of the economic universe has bent badly toward injustice.

But over the last four decades, we have witnessed the near total destruction of this promise of worker empowerment. Beginning with Reagan, the U.S. economy was reorganized wholesale. Having failed to build up political leverage to ensure that private economic power remained accountable to the common good, workers saw private interests progressively shred the limited social bargain of the postwar years. Union membership has plummeted to 10.5 percent overall and only 6.4 percent in the private sector. Even more telling is the near disappearance of strikes. In the 1970s there were, on average, about 289 annual work stoppages involving at least 1,000 workers. As bargaining power shifted decisively to employers, that average has plunged, reaching only 13 per year over the last decade.

The result today is a staggeringly unjust global economy in which just eight men own as much wealth as half the worlds population. We now face a perverse concentration of wealth among the super rich, pervasive financialization of the economy, an upsurge of low-wage and precarious work, and the heightened power of monopolistic tech firms. These transformations have relentlessly undercut worker bargaining power, triggered an explosive rise in inequality, and continue to undermine what remains of democratic governance. And even as they tighten their grip, the architects of inequality seek to control the alternatives we envision for our future. In recent years they have promoted fevered Future of Work scenarios that imagine the disappearance of jobs before sweeping waves of automation and artificial intelligence, hyping visions of the future of work that place capitals needs at the center.

The left is alive with creative energy not seen in many decades. We must exploit it to make the future of workers, not the future of work, our central concern.

Despite this grim turn of labor history in the United States, there are many new reasons for hope. Interest in unions is surging, and worker organizing is gaining ground in influential sectors, including new media and higher education. Young people have begun to question some of the central assumptions of capitalism and have revived interest in democratic socialism. The attention that activists have given to the intersectional nature of most struggles for justice has diminished the conflicts that once pitted advocates of a universalistic, majoritarian left against those who feared that the voices of minorities and the excluded would be marginalized in such a movement. The left is alive with creative energy not seen in many decades. We must exploit it to make the future of workers, not the future of work, our central concern.

This new labor energy is partly reflected in the encouraging extent to which national politicians are acknowledging the need to rebuild worker power. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have each offered bills that would empower workers. Warrens Accountable Capitalism Act would require that all corporations designate 40 percent of seats on their boards of directors for representatives elected by employees and that those with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to obtain charters from the federal government. Sanderss Workplace Democracy Act would ease union organizing and legalize secondary boycotts.

Although legislative initiatives such as these are clearly necessary, we believe they are also insufficient. Laws will not save us. Workers struggles and organizations must play a central role in shaping the twenty-first century if we are to win the changes we need. But workers will not be able to do that by clinging to strategies of the past. The world that gave rise to the New Deal and the Great Society in the United States and to social democracy in Europe no longer exists. The strategies that arose in response to twentieth-century capitalism, from traditional collective bargaining to co-determination, are therefore unlikely to be sufficient to the needs of the future.

This new labor energy is partly reflected in the encouraging extent to which national politicians are acknowledging the need to rebuild worker power.

The outlines of new labor thinking are visible in the recent efforts of unions and their allies to remake collective bargaining and organizing campaigns for the twenty-first century. These efforts have given rise to a conscious rethinking and broadening of the participants, processes, and purposes of organizing and collective bargaining.

First, while twentieth-century collective bargaining was generally binary and involved only employers and unions, recent efforts have attempted to broaden participation to give the community and other stakeholders a place at the bargaining table.

Second, while traditional collective bargaining was generally conducted behind closed doors by seasoned professionals who haggled over details, recent efforts have infused the processes of bargaining with greater militancy, opened it up to greater transparency, and employed political action as a form of bargaining.

And third, while traditional collective bargaining was focused on winning a serviceable contract that would signal a demobilization of the unions membership, recent efforts have undertaken contract campaigns as steps in a long-term strategy of worker empowerment. They try to build enduring alignments between unions and their allies that accumulate lasting power through campaign victories, a shared and increasingly fleshed out infrastructure, and a common vision and narrative.

Labor activists willingness to experiment can be traced to a conjuncture of developments triggered by the Great Recession. President Barack Obamas agenda was derailed by the 2010 midterm elections, which sidelined the unions hoped-for labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act), propelled to power antiunion Republican governors such as Wisconsins Scott Walker, and tightened the grip of austerity politics on all levels of government. Union leaders increasingly recognized that they needed a bigger vision if they hoped to turn back the union assaults that gathered strength. Having secured Obamas reelection, they embarked on new initiatives.

Laws will not save us. Workers will not be able to build a better futureby clinging to strategies of the past.

In 2013, for instance, President Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America helped launch the Democracy Initiative, an alliance of labor, civil rights, and environmental groups to counter the corrosive influence of corporate money on politics, fight voter suppression, and address other obstacles to significant reform. Meanwhile, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka moved to involve worker centers and other non-union worker organizations in the planning for the 2013 AFL-CIO convention.

The most significant catalysts for change were the emergence of new models of mobilization and organizing. A turning point for these came in 2011, with the launching of three such models, each of which in their own way signaled new departures.

In January the executive board of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) approved an ambitious campaign called the Fight for a Fair Economy, which saw SEIU commit tens of millions of dollars to organizing projects among low-wage workers in multiple cities. That effort would spawn local campaigns such as Minnesotans for a Fair Economy (MFE) and ultimately lead to the Fight for 15, a national movement to gain a living wage for fast food workers.

In July, Jobs with Justice, the national network of unions and community allies, joined with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to create the Caring Across Generations campaign, a national initiative to transform the long-term care system and empower care workers. Over time it built an alliance that united over 200 organizations, networking among care workers, families whose loved ones need care, and care recipients who wish to live at home with dignity and independence.

Finally, in September came the seemingly spontaneous eruption of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which seeded new and unexpected alliances among unions and their allies in many cities and spurred a discussion of inequality and the predatory nature of financialized capitalism that resonated well beyond the participants in its encampments.

Recent years have seen a conscious rethinking and broadening of the participants, processes, and purposes of organizing and collective bargaining.

A year later, in September 2012, a precedent-setting strike by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) against the austerity regime of Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel attracted the attention of the entire labor movement and foreshadowed new approaches to bargaining. Led by Karen Lewis, whose Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators slate was elected to the CTUs top posts in 2010, the union prepared an innovative bargaining campaign in partnership with community groups and parents. It called for smaller class sizes, improved facilities, and a host of other items that went beyond the confines of wages, hours, and other narrowly defined work issues about which the union was legally permitted to bargain. The union also documented the schools financial mismanagement. It showed how tax-increment funding that could have helped schools was instead lavished on private entities such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and it exposed risky interest-rate swap deals, in which Chicagos school system ended up squandering more than $100 million. By making the financial industrys exploitation of the school district an issue, the CTU earned public support for its call for adequate school funding.

Although the CTU did not win all of its demands, its campaign inspired others to take on austerity politics. In 2013 the St. Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT) mounted a contract campaign that resembled the CTUs. It patiently built an alliance with parents and community groups, and with them jointly drew up twenty-nine demands, including one insisting that the school district cease doing business with banks that foreclose on their students families. The union refused to back down when the school district refused to negotiate over many of them.

After rallying broad community support, the St. Paul teachers won most of what they sought. I had negotiated almost a dozen previous contracts for the SPFT, explained the unions president, Mary Cathryn Ricker. But, for the first time, I felt that signing a contract was just one step in building a larger movement. Meanwhile, SEIU Local 503, which represents homecare, childcare, and university and state workers inaugurated a campaign called In It Together that built alliances with the community by calling for a broad investigation into the ways in which banks were ripping off Oregonians, and demanding a state lawsuit against banks to recoup millions that were lost from retirement funds due to the secret manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).

A new strategy of bargaining and alliance building emerged from these campaigns. In May 2014 many of the activists involved convened in Washington, where they gave that strategy a name: Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG). Soon that style was spreading to new settings such as Los Angeles, where the citys leading public-sector unions and their community-based allies launched the Fix L.A. Coalition in 2014. That coalition brought SEIU, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and other public-sector unions together with community groups, and faith-based organizations. They exposed the fact that more taxpayer money was spent paying fees to the Wall Street firms that marketed L.A.s municipal bonds and other financial services than on maintaining the citys streets. Furthermore, they demanded that L.A. use its $106 billion worth of assets, payments, and debt issuance as leverage to demand better deals with Wall Street, so that it can invest more in our communities.

At the outset, BCG campaigns were meticulously planned. In some cases the groundwork was carefully laid over a period of more than a year before they were launched. Yet the basic principles of that approach have proven to be adaptable in more spontaneous struggles, as the teachers mobilizations of 2018 illustrated. Beginning in West Virginia in January 2018, and spreading to such union-averse states as Oklahoma and Arizona, those mobilizations were, in effect, organizing, bargaining, and political campaigns all at once.

The workplace-centered economism of New Deal America is yielding to broader forms of organization, social bargaining, and democratic experiment.

Teachers across the country gravitatedtoward a common good framework, linkingtheir struggles to the needs of their communities and targeted the most powerful economic forces in their states. In West Virginia, teachers in all of the states 55 school district walked off the job, called attention to the fact that the states wealthiest were paying scant taxes, and refused to return to work until all state workers had received a pay increase equal to the one the state legislature granted them. In Oklahoma they protested the states failure to fairly tax wealthy oil and gas interests. In Arizona they demanded that the state enact no further tax cuts until the states per-pupil spending on education reached the national average (and briefly succeeded in getting an initiative on the 2018 ballot that would have taxed the wealthy to fund schools before the Arizona Supreme Court had it removed on a technicality).

Since the vast majority of strikers were not union members, these walkouts were both massive organizing campaigns and democracy campaigns as well; they posed explicit political demands (such as raising taxes) to fund public schools more adequately. They instinctively adopted a BCG approach in that they were not just about wages or benefits but also about improving education and fighting for fairer taxation. The teacher walkouts ensured that more workers walked out on strike in 2018 than any year since 1986.

In January 2019, United Teachers of Los Angeles extended that militancy. The strike it launched was not only the eighth major U.S. teachers strike over a twelve-month span, but also the largest one yet, and the one most explicitly employed a BCG approach. With strong community support, teachers stayed off the job for a week. They settled for the same raise that the school district had offered at the outset, and instead used their strike to win the hiring of a nurse in every school, a reduction of class sizes, the extension of a program that exempts schools from administering random searches of their students, and a cap on the spread of charter schools.

Innovative organizing and bargaining initiatives have not remained confined to the public sector. By 2016 the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Committee for Better Banks, and allied organizations laid the groundwork for organizing to improve pay and benefits for the nations more than one million non-union bank workers. Employing a common good approach similar to that pioneered by teachers unions, this coalition positioned itself as a defender of consumers and an opponent of predatory financial practices.

It began demanding an end to the sales goals and metrics that force bank workers to sell predatory financial products as a condition of employment, and more broadly to reform the finance system so that it serves the people instead of operating as a driver of inequality. Wells Fargo workers connected to this campaign acted as the whistleblowers who exposed the banks cheating scandals in 2016. Bank workers at Santander, a Spanish-based multinational bank that is the leader in the U.S. subprime auto loan market, have helped expose their employers predatory practices. These campaigns show how bank workers can help regulate their industry from below, exposing and stopping banks from cheating consumers and engaging in practices that threaten the broader health of the economy.

Innovative organizing and bargaining initiatives have not remained confined to the public sector.

Two recent victories illustrate this. Tim Sloan the CEO of Wells Fargo was forced to resign after congressional hearings where he was confronted by Wells Fargo workers who blew the whistle on Wells Fargos reinstitution of toxic sales goals. The was followed by Bank of American increasing the minimum pay for bank workers to $20.00 an hourmeeting one of the dmands of CWA and the Committee for Better Banks.

The titans of private equity have also presented a promising target for labor activists, particularly since such firms control a range of companies in multiple sectors and nations. Consider the Blackstone Group, the worlds largest private equity firm that controls 150 companies with a combined value of more than $400 billion and 600,000 workers. Blackstone is the largest owner of office space in the world, the worlds largest private owner of real estate, the largest owner of logistics companies in Europe, and the worlds largest investor in hedge funds.

Activism around Blackstone offers an example of how diverse campaigns targeting one such firm can be run at once, tying together a variety of issues and organizations to challenge the full scope of the companys activities. Organizers are planning campaigns that would mount drives at the non-union companies Blackstone owns, form a tenant union of Blackstone renters, and prevail on union pension funds to use their leverage to prevent Blackstone from foreclosing on homes in post-hurricane Puerto Rico. At the same time, union allies are preparing legislation in several states that would tax private equity executives to recover the states shares of the billions in tax revenue that are lost to the carried-interest loophole that protects the hyper-wealthy executives of private equity giants.

Even Amazon has not been impervious to pressure from workers and their allies. Perhaps the most difficult problem workers have faced in recent years is how to cope with the power of monopolistic corporations . Researchers have found that the rise of huge employers has led to the emergence of a monopsony in many labor markets, where those employers set wages artificially low without fear of competition for workers. No big employer has come to symbolize the problem more than Amazon, which pays its warehouse and delivery workers poverty wages even as it wrings tax incentives from the local communities where it builds its distribution centers.

Creative challenges to Amazons power began to emerge by 2018. Somali immigrants make up a huge slice of Amazons warehouse employees in the Twin Cities. In 2018 many of those workers began organizing through the Awood Center, an East African workers center, to demand a voice in determining their workload, regular consultations with community representatives, prayer time on the job, among other things. In October 2018, Amazon announced their minimum wage increase to $15. The company didnt have a set wage beforehand, so the raises for workers ranged from a few dollars to nothing. And as it raised the minimum wage, the company also cut bonuses and stock options for existing warehouse workers. The wage increase still does not address core issues leading to very high turnover, including excessive hours and pace of work.

At the same time, activists in many of the cities Amazon induced into bidding for the siting of Amazons HQ2 facility actively opposed tax giveaways and subsidies that their city leaders were offering to the nations richest company, contending that Amazons arrival would drive up housing costs and increase inequality. They also objected to the undemocratic and secretive process through which cities courted Amazon. Opposition was so great to Amazons announcement that it would cite one of its HQ2 centers in Long Island City, New York, that the company felt compelled to reverse its decision in February 2019.

These campaigns are in their earliest stages. They are as yet insufficient in scale, scope, and resources to challenge and win against the richest and most powerful corporate monopolies in history. Winning real power for workers at powerful giants such as Amazon and Walmart is likely still years away. Nonetheless, these campaigns are first steps that offer a taste and glimpse of the role workers and their organizations could play in redistributing wealth and power and moving us toward real democratic socialism.Taken together they show that even as union density trended downward in the decade after the Great Recession, and even as unions absorbed blows like the Supreme Courts decision in Janus v. AFSCME last year, new and promising labor initiatives have been proliferating.

The traditionally bifurcated approach pursued by the U.S. labor movementbargaining on one hand, political action on the otheris failing on every level.

Most importantly, these campaigns have begun the work of radically re-imagining and redefining the goals and mission of unions. They have either implicitly or explicitly broken with the traditionally bifurcated approach pursued by the U.S. labor movement for more than a century. That approach held that workers should organize and bargain collectively to improve their wages, benefits, and working conditions, and that they should pursue political and legislative action to win what they could not gain through collective bargaining. It has become obvious that this approach is failing on every level.

Having been largely blocked from winning significant gains either through organizing and bargaining or through the pursuit of pursuing electoral and legislative strategies, workers and their organizations have increasingly turned to a more unified approach, tying bargaining more closely to politics. Bargaining for the Common Good campaigns have shown that by consciously politicizing their organizing, bargaining, and strikes workers can start to feel and demonstrate the potential power of a movementthat is committed to democracy at work, in our communities, states and country as a whole. The teacher strikes have shown workers that they might win through job actions what they do not win through legislative or political action. And the Amazon HQ2 campaign subverted the long-standing assumption that secret taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies were effective tools to promote economic development. They suggest that the idea of collective bargaining that had emerged in the twentieth century is being redefined and repurposed in promising ways that challenge the erosion of democracy and the rise of inequality.

In the years to come we believe that the workplace-centered economism that was characteristic of trade unionbased social democracies or New Deal America will yield to broader forms of organization, social bargaining, and democratic experiment. The inescapable fact that work relations in twenty-first century capitalism are intimately connected to the structure of communities, social institutions, and lived environments points in that direction. So do efforts to win justice for workers across lines of gender, race, and citizenship status. Winning bargaining power for workers and raising wages will inevitably be connected to efforts to defend public schools and mass transit, create affordable housing, repulse predatory finance, and combat climate change.

These campaigns have begun the work of radically re-imagining and redefining the goals and mission of organizing.

This is a vision with deep American roots. Recent efforts recall the vibrancy that characterized U.S. labor struggles in the era before the twentieth-century institutionalization of unions and traditional collective bargaining. From the Lowell Female Labor Reform Associations resistance to wage slavery in the New England factory towns of the early nineteenth century to the community-based assemblies of the Knights of Labor that took power in small towns like Rochester, New Hampshire, in the 1880s, to the sewer socialism of Milwaukee or Schenectady in the Progressive era, unions of the past had concerned themselves not merely with wages and hours of their members but with a defense of the common good, and the construction of a cooperative commonwealth. Labors crisis is leading unions to rediscover elements of that American heritage and update it for the needs of this century.

It is now for us to take up that urgent work. Democracy cannot co-exist with the overweening power of the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Blackstone, any more than it could co-exist with what Lincoln-era Republicans called the slave power. As Louis D. Brandeis is said to have observed, and as we have relearned painfully in our time, We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cant have both.

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Why the Labor Movement Has FailedAnd How to Fix It - Boston Review

We were all once children, and it is not hard to agree that every child deserves to be loved, provided for and given a safe space to live and grow. However, for many children, that was and still is not the reality they live in. In fact, WHO reports that around 1 billion children between ages 2 and 17 have experienced some kind of abuse in the past year alone. And that number does not even include the unreported cases that can go unnoticed or are never spoken about.

Child abuse can be in the form of mental, physical, sexual or emotional abuse. While these different types of abuse might appear to be different, they are all inhuman acts that can result in deep distress, injuries and even, in some cases, death. On a personal level, what abuse does to a child is that it initially rips the child from their right to be just what they are: a child.

Children whoare exposed to abuse can also end up becoming violent themselves and turn to substance abuse. Not only that, but the mental and emotional impact that abuse entails can be devastating and may result in mental illnesses, risky behavior or even an impaired and disoriented perception of life. But the impact of abuse goes far beyond just affecting the childrenthemselves, because it can also result in major social issues, such as increased violence, inequality, disoriented definition of love, safety and relationships, as well as poverty. While many people might be aware of the disastrous outcomes of abuse, not many know how to cope with it, fight it or even prevent it.

The reality of the situation is that before people can understand how to fight abuse, and child abuse in particular, they should acknowledge thegreat responsibility that having children brings in the first place. What the world needs to understand is that children are not brought into this world to suffer and be abused, but instead they should be given their basic human rights and have the a healthy childhood.

The thing with child abuse is that it can occur everywhere, especially in a childs house. And what was initially meant to be a place where kids can feel safe and loved becomes a child's worst nightmare.

However, the issue with abuse extends far beyond the immediate violence done to the child in the moments they are abused, because in many cases, abusive content of children can be shared online. For instance, there has been an increase in the trade of child sexual abuse material over the past year. It is reported that The National Center For Missing & Exploited Children in the US reviews more than 480,769 images per week each year.

The issue with sexual abuse of children, and really child abuse as a whole, is one that requires a high level of urgency and should be addressed with the utmost importance. It is pivotal that online platforms become more proactive in order to not only take down any harmful content but also to work on preventing it from being shared in the first place. This is a hard conversation that has to be highlighted and spoken about loudly and clearly.

The neglect, injustice and abuse that happens to kids does not stop just there, because the world can be a far uglier place than that. Victims of trafficking are either sold by family members, kidnapped or coaxed into thinking they will get a better life. According to the International Labor Organization, there were about 160 million child laborers aged between 2 and 17 in 2021 alone.

Around 25% of all human trafficking victims are in fact children, most of which are trafficked for forced labor. But trafficked children are not only forced to work for minimum wage and under hazardous conditions, because some also experience sexual exploitation, forced marriage, and slavery.

Globally, there are around 5 million sex trafficking victims, of which 1 million are children. Furthermore, it is reported that women and girls make up 99% of sex trafficking victims. The reason is that traffickers tend to approach socially and financially vulnerable women and girls with the idea that they can offer them a better life.

Let us take the famous master manipulator Jeffrey Epstein, who was a registered sex offender and was accused of sex trafficking when he started paying girls aged 14 to 18 to have sex and bring in their friends for the same thing. The thing about sex trafficking is that it can go on for years without being noticed, and this is largely due to the fact that not enough is done to raise awareness and educate people about it.

While sex trafficking can really happen to anyone, refugees are among the most vulnerable groups due to the difficult circumstances they have to endure. Traffickers prey on their hopes of having a better education and life so that they can more easily trick them in with all these false promises.

Unfortunately, girls are even more affected by trafficking than anyone else, and that is because of gender-inequality and gender-based violence. In fact, girls are more likely to be denied access to education or good opportunities simply because they are girls.

Save The Children even reports that 120 million girls experience sexual exploitation worldwide. Girls are twice more likely to become a trafficking victim and they are usually either trafficked for forced marriage or sexual slavery. It is also important to shed light on the fact that children living in conflict zones are more prone to trafficking and exploitation.

Therefore, the problem of child abuse and trafficking stems from more than just having criminals looking for money, because it also comes from conflict, government corruption and wars.

The first and direct impact of child abuse and trafficking is possibly the psychological distress it can cause. Whether it is PTSD, depression or any other mental illness, going back to living a normal life will be more challenging than ever for those kids.

In addition, kids who had to work under hazardous conditions might lose their chance of getting a real education and thus be trapped in poverty and the vicious cycle it entails. Not to mention the ripple effect that violence, abuse and trafficking can have on the world as a whole. Therefore, it is crucial that more is done to protect children and make this world a safer one for them and future generations.

While we all might feel helpless sometimes and like our voice will not make a difference, this cannot be any further from the truth. Every voice, talk and donation can help save a childs life. The least we can do is talk about it, raise awareness and report any incident we might come across or hear about.

Raising awareness is the most important and crucial step to shed light on the urgency of what children are facing. We owe it to them to work towards making this world safer and better. Talking is always the first step in making something seen and heard.

By talking and raising awareness, you are also educating people and even children about any red flags that can signal potential harm. The reality is that child trafficking can be prevented if enough resources and knowledge is put into fighting it.

Talk, talk and talk about it. Educate others. Donate. Do not turn a blind eye. Do not wait to fight it, when we can do something to help prevent it from happening in the first place.

See the article here:

Child Abuse and Trafficking: The Modern Day Slavery of Children - Al-Bawaba