Category Archives: Wage Slavery

I step into the tobacco field as the first rays of sunlight begin to pierce the early-morning fog. The men of the cutting crew are already hard at work harvesting the tall burley tobacco plants that have taken root in the soil over the past few months. The sound of hatchets resonates across the field: thwack, thwack, thwack.

With each swing, another tobacco plant is felled in the fields of Shelby County, Ky.

The workers skewer freshly cut plants onto a wooden tobacco stick, five at a time, the slender metal cone placed at one end of the stick allowing them to pierce the fibrous stalk. Their shirts are already completely soaked through not just with sweat, but with the morning dew that coats the green and yellow leaves of the tobacco plants.

Over the course of the morning, the field slowly transforms from a leafy jungle into a set of uniformly shorn rows.

Driven by my interest in the cultures and traditions of my home state of Kentucky, I photographed my first tobacco harvest eight years ago. Each year since then, Ive eagerly returned.

Tobacco the product shown in these photographs is used in cigarettes is an agricultural product unlike any other. Its use has been declining in the United States since the mid-1960s. As of 2018, about 34 million American adults, or about 14 percent of the adult population, smoked cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1965, that number stood at 42 percent. Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease, disability and death, according to the C.D.C.

Historically, the plants cultivation has relied on the labor of both enslaved and impoverished people. Before 1865, enslaved workers were a major source of labor in Kentuckys tobacco fields. (North-central Kentucky relied on slavery more than any other region in the state.) In recent years, foreign workers have done the grueling seasonal work that Americans largely avoid.

As a photojournalist, Ive long felt that the men who perform this work deserve to be seen, and their labor acknowledged.

Once a field is harvested, the sticks of tobacco are left in place for a few days to cure in the late summer sun. Next comes the housing. The sticks, heavy with the weight of five stalks, are loaded onto wagons and towed to nearby tobacco barns. The crew starts work early, just as they do on cutting days.

Inside the barns, scaffolds of heavy timber beams reach from the ground to the roofs. Some of the men hoist themselves up and climb high into the rafters. One by one, the loaded sticks are lifted up.

In barns across Shelby County, the tobacco leaves will slowly cure for at least six weeks. During that time, the color of the leaves transitions from a vibrant yellow to a flat, dark brown. Eventually the leaves will be stripped down to the stem and sold at market.

Ray and Stephanie Tucker of Tucker Farms have run a tobacco farm together in Shelby County since they were married 27 years ago. (Rays family has been in the business for six generations, and Stephanies for four.) They grow crops across several towns, including Bagdad and Pleasureville.

Despite others qualms about the product, the Tuckers plan to continue to grow burley tobacco as long as it remains economically feasible. The crop is not only important to us, but also to support the 26 families of our workers, Stephanie Tucker said.

This year, their crews harvested 200 acres worth of tobacco, which was housed in 45 individual barns.

Compared with the farming of corn and soybeans, which provide the majority of Tucker Farms agricultural portfolio, the process of cultivating, harvesting, housing and stripping tobacco remains largely the same as it was 100 years ago.

One thing that has changed, however, are the workers who harvest the Tuckers crops.

For the last 22 years, the Tucker family has relied on foreign workers who enter the country under the H-2A program, which brings temporary agricultural labor to the United States.

Twenty-five men from Nicaragua and one from Mexico travel to Shelby County for the harvest. The labor is physical, repetitive and exhausting. Long days are punctuated by a few short breaks and a lunch of home-cooked beans and rice.

Theres no escaping the harsh realities of the job. The working conditions are uncomfortable. The work itself is strenuous. Health experts have long pointed to the serious threats workers face from nicotine poisoning, pesticides and dehydration. And yet the same group of men leaves their homes and return year after year to work for the Tuckers.

Most of the workers, who were paid $12.96 an hour this year, send a majority of their paychecks home to their families. In Nicaragua, where a recent estimate placed the living wage in the capital, Managua, at $360 a month, the hard-earned money goes a long way.

I come back to Kentucky each year because thats where my work is, and it pays much better than working in Nicaragua, said Felipe Ponce, a crew leader from the coastal town of Corinto who has worked for the Tuckers for 20 years.

With his earnings, Mr. Ponce said that hes able to support his family back home his wife, his three daughters and his mother, all of whom he stays in contact with via daily WhatsApp calls.

For the Tuckers and the men who work for them, the weather is one of the big challenges. A cold spring and an abundance of rain significantly delayed this years planting. A rainy harvest season in August and September again put pressure on their ability to cut and house in a timely manner.

Visa complications and lingering pandemic-related travel restrictions also prevented a number of the workers from arriving on time. Ballooning costs of fertilizer, fuel and a growing scarcity of spare parts for their farm equipment also threatened the business.

For me, documenting the tobacco harvests is a highlight of working as a photographer in Kentucky. Reuniting each year with the crew is a joy. I marvel at their skill, ingenuity and efficiency.

My hope is that the men whom Ive photographed for the past eight years know the respect and admiration I feel for them.

At the end of each long day, the harvesting crew returns to their bunkhouse at Tucker Farms, where they split into groups and begin preparing dinner for themselves. Leftovers from dinner pull double duty as the next days lunch.

Once their food prep is complete, the men settle into an evening routine: laundry, cards, television. They also connect with their families back home.

As the summer sun sets below the horizon, the workers turn in for the night. In just a few hours, theyll be back in the fields with a hatchet in one hand and a stalk of burley tobacco in the other.

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The Searing Beauty, and Harsh Reality, of a Kentucky Tobacco Harvest - The New York Times

Six days a week, the textile workers wove and spun cotton in the deafeningly loud mill on Factory Island. They labored from 15 minutes before sunrise until 7 p.m. in the spring and summer months, with just a half hour each for breakfast and lunch. In wintertime, they often worked by oil-lamp light. The air was thick with tiny cotton strands that got caught in their throats and caused respiratory illnesses.

Nevertheless, most were grateful to be free of the boredom of life on lonely family farms in the rural hamlets. For the first time in their lives these women were able to earn real wages and live relatively independently. But there were grievances simmering.

The women were fed up with living in crowded company-owned boarding houses, sleeping in cramped, uncomfortable bedrooms that had poor ventilation and lacked privacy. They were constantly under the watchful eye of boarding house attendants who made sure the rooms were kept scrupulously clean and carefully supervised. The previous year the company had imposed a wage cut, allegedly necessary to remain profitable, and there was talk of another.

Then came the breaking point the company announced a new rule prohibiting workers from seeking their own housing. As a citizen review committee later reported, the women, who had previously been distinguished for growing intelligence and hitherto perfect propriety of behavior, turned out right after breakfast and greatly disturbed the quietude of the usually peaceful village of Saco.

According to an account in the Boston Post, between 8 and 9 a.m. the strikers waded through the clay-mud, for which Saco is peculiarly distinguished. Most of them wore India-rubbers, but many of them had only thin shoes to trudge through the muck. Some bystanders were disgusted by the workers decidedly un-feminine behavior and their flagrant disregard for authority.

Vile! shouted one. Wretch! spat another.

But the textile workers defiantly chanted back:

We are not slaves! We scorn the name!

We ask not friends or foremans favor.

Were freemans daughters and we claim

The rights that womans father gave her!

Not all the locals were offended by this act of defiance, and some men even joined the strikers to support the weaker party in the labor struggle especially when the party is women, the committee observed.

It was the first turn-out of female workers in Maine and part of a broader struggle by textile workers throughout New England for dignity and fair treatment in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. As young Yankee Protestant women in the 19th century, they were expected to be submissive, pious and pure. But when they found themselves among an emerging working class in the machinery of a profit-hungry corporation, many realized the power they could wield if they withheld their labor to force their demands.

The Saco women were also part of a much larger story about the birth of the modern corporation and how it laid the foundation for the global capitalist system we live under today. As historian Sven Beckert argues in his book Empire of Cotton, the formation of this new economic system began in the 15th century with the militarization of trade, massive land expropriation, genocide and slavery. Beckert calls this war capitalism. The military power of American and European states was essential to the emergence of the global cotton industry and the development of the Industrial Revolution.

War capitalism entailed the financing of armies to invade and expropriate the lands and waters of native people, the building of roads and canals to ship the cotton, tariffs to protect the domestic textile industry from cheaper imports, and the chartering of corporations to fund and organize this hugely expensive new global enterprise. It required governments to use their power to enforce private property rights on land stolen from indigenous people, as well as the legal right to own the enslaved people who picked the cotton grown on that land. As Beckert notes, governments also encouraged global capitalism by creating courts and other bodies to arbitrate business disputes, enforce contracts and maintain trading standards.

The Saco strikers werent chattel slaves like African-American workers in the South, but the term wage slave was commonly used in the 1800s in reference to the fact the workers were dependent on the capitalists for their daily bread. The Saco womens scorn for the term, like their claim to be freemans daughters, drew on the nations revolutionary heritage and the promises of liberty and equality. Worker resistance in the North to this new form of exploitation happened simultaneously with the revolts of enslaved people on Southern plantations.

Slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence, wrote Beckert, were not aberrations in the history of capitalism but at its very core. He goes on: The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a site of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. [A]s in so many other ways, the empire of cotton ushered in the modern world.

Industrialization had been a polarizing issue in the early days of the United States. Observing the unwashed working masses in the urban slums of England, Thomas Jefferson expressed hope that the United States would remain an exporter of raw materials and those factories would remain in Europe. He famously envisioned a largely agricultural republic of self-sufficient yeoman farmers. These hard-working, virtuous, salt-of-the-earth people, Jefferson believed, were the most trustworthy citizens to run the country. As he wrote in 1781:

It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there [in Europe], than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

Jefferson argued that because lands in Europe were either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator, the English were forced to develop a manufacturing industry to support the surplus population of newly landless people. In the 18th and 19th centuries, England and other European countries began to confiscate and divide land that had for centuries been used in common by villagers to graze livestock and grow food. As Marxist geographer David Harvey writes, this process of enclosure was anything but peaceful. It entailed taking land enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation.

The English aristocracy claimed they could farm these newly fenced properties more efficiently and profitably than the peasants whod relied on the land for subsistence. A similar process occurred in Maine with the theft of indigenous land, but in the early 19th century 90 percent of the white settlers still farmed on small plots, and industrialization didnt seem inevitable.

Britain soon dominated the cotton manufacturing industry. It relied on slave labor in the U.S. to produce 77 percent of its raw cotton at the dawn of the 19th century. However, after President Jefferson passed the Embargo Act of 1807, cotton and other exports rotted in domestic storehouses, prompting trade-dependent New England merchants to consider investing their capital at home.

In 1810, Moses Brown, an abolitionist whose family had made a fortune in the slave trade, enlisted the assistance of English industrialist Samuel Slater whod stolen some English textile machinery designs to build the first automated cotton yard mill on this side of the Atlantic, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1815. The Rhode Island System had many features that later textile mills would be known for, like a company store, company housing, and callous exploitation.

Brown and Slaters company initially employed a workforce of local farmers wives and daughters, but as it scaled up and added more looms, workers became scarce. The firms recruiters searched all over what was then Southern Massachusetts before they finally found some young female workers 200 miles north, in present-day Hallowell, Maine.

Children were also employed at the Pawtucket mill. According to some accounts, Slaters floor managers would occasionally drag child workers into whipping rooms and brutally flog them for various infractions. This practice continued throughout the 19th century, including in Maine.

By mid-century, the first textiles mills were in operation here, and women from all over the state also headed south to toil in Massachusetts textile factories. Portlands anarchist journalist, Jeremiah Hacker, wrote in 1849:

There are hundreds of young females shipped from [Maine] every year to the factory prison-houses, like cattle, sheep and pigs sent to the slaughter. Every steam boat and car that leaves this State for Massachusetts carries more or less of these victims to the polluted and polluting manufacturing towns where they are prepared for a miserable life and a horrible death in the abodes of infamy.

The Industrial Revolution had arrived, and it was never going to leave.

Will Chapman is theLibrarian and Archivist at Museums of theBethelHistorical Society. Andy OBrien is the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach them atwill@maineworkingclasshistory.comandandy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.

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Radical Mainers: War Capitalism and the Rise of the Modern Corporation in Maine - Mainer - Mainer

As restaurants reopen across the nation, were hiring signs can be found in nearly every storefront, revealing the food service industrys newest plight in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The national shutdowns that began in March 2020 and continued with cyclical openings and closings throughout the past year have left many service workers without jobs, disproportionately affecting women and people of color and pushing many people into other industries. Closer to home, Brown Universitys Brown Dining Services (BDS) has struggled to find enough staff to operate the dining halls safely and effectively, reinforcing the need for higher wages across the industry, regardless of whether or not the workers are tipped. BDS also employs many workers of color to serve a plurality-white community of students, reinforcing the disparities that plague the food service industry.

The need for a livable tipped wage has never been greater, especially as increased unemployment benefits draw to a close and many service workers will be forced to work multiple jobs, risking their health and safety to make ends meet. Although most people believe that the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, under federal law businesses only have to pay their workers $2.13 an hour if they are designated as tipped workers. The tipped minimum wage has not increased since 1991. The Biden administration needs to use this moment of need during a pandemic to ensure that food service employees are paid a livable wage.

Nationwide, the food service industry has been ravaged by Covid-19, which caused over 100,000 restaurants to shut their doors permanently or for a period of time during the first six months of the pandemic. However, even existing restaurants are struggling to attract and retain employees amid issues of reduced capacity seating, takeout orders, lack of tips, safety concerns, and more. According to the National Restaurant Association, more than eight million restaurant employees were laid off or furloughed, and the industry lost $280 billion in sales during the first 13 months of the pandemic.

Now that many of those workers can return to work, many dont want to, choosing more fruitful careers in retail or tech instead. A survey by One Fair Wage found that 53 percent of all restaurant workers are considering leaving their job, with 76 percent of those workers citing low wages and tips as the reason. The added dangers of unvaccinated customers and minimal social distancing in kitchens are just some of the safety concerns that 55 percent of restaurant employees cite as reasons they may leave the industry. 39 percent say theyre considering leaving due to customer hostility.

Businesses such as Chipotle and McDonalds have resorted to offering referral bonuses and raising wages for current employees. Chipotle increased average hourly pay to $15 an hour, and added new referral bonuses of $200 for crew members, while McDonalds raised its wages by 10 percent for company-owned restaurants, and is collaborating with franchises to include paid time off and childcare.

Risks in the food service industry are particularly prevalent for workers of color. Historically, federal minimum wage laws have been passed with the intention of excluding Black Americans by exempting predominantly Black occupations such as domestic and agricultural workers from receiving an equal wage. The passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938 granted protections against child labor and essentially established a minimum wage for white Americans bydeliberately excluding farmwork and domestic work from the act in order to maintain systemic economic barriers for Black Americans.

Amendments to the FLSA in 1966 and 1974 included some agricultural and domestic workers, but perpetuated the wage and wealth gaps by failing to adequately protect or compensate tipped workers who could only expect to be paid 50 percent of the federal minimum wage. According to the US Census Bureau, 47 percent of restaurant employees are members of racial minorities. Therefore, these acts disproportionately impact people of color. Research by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that food service workers are more likely to be immigrants and workers of color compared to workers across all industries. The pandemic disproportionately impacted communities of color, with higher mortality rates across industries.

"Critics argue that the relief is hindering people from returning to work, but the reality that people are making more from unemployment than from working should be a wakeup call."

In North Carolina for example, Black people represent 22 percent of the working-age population but accounted for 36 percent of Covid-19 related deaths in that cohort in the past year. Similarly, Hispanic people comprise 9.5 percent of that population yet accounted for 17 percent of those deaths. McClatchy North Carolinas data analysis found that 87 percent of food production workers that died from Covid-19 in North Carolina were Black or Hispanic. Minorities are overrepresented in the food service industry and Covid-19 related deaths; people of color in this industry are significantly more at risk upon returning to work than their white counterparts. With workplace hazards including hospitalization or death from Covid-19, the $2.13 tipped minimum wage compounds the burden on workers of color.

Considering these risks, and the fact that the tipped minimum wage has been frozen at $2.13 an hour since 1991, it is important to note that tipped wage itself is a relic of chattel slavery and the Jim Crow era. Businesses such as the The Pullman Company used tipping as a way to avoid compensating newly freed Black slaves for their work. It is not a coincidence that Black workers deal with an extremely low tipped minimum wage in the present.

In the context of the pandemic, insecurity over tips is just one factor in the employment crisis. The incentive to return to work has also been partially mitigated by the government funded unemployment programs, which gave those who qualified an extra $300 a week through September 6, 2021.

This unemployment bonus often pays more than what a tipped worker would make in the same amount of time, especially in the context of Covid-19, when 19 percent of Americans say that they tip less than they did before the pandemic. Critics argue that the relief is hindering people from returning to work, but the reality that people are making more from unemployment than from working should be a wakeup call. Both the tipped minimum wage and the wages of non-tipped food service workers should be raised nationwide.

Raising the tipped minimum wage is crucial, because even in places where food service workers are making minimum wage (which is what the tips plus tipped minimum wage is supposed to be equal or greater to) people still arent returning to work since they arent making enough money to support themselves or their families. The issue of tipped minimum wage is deeply entrenched in systemic racism. This national issue hits closer to home on Brown Universitys campus, where recent reports of an understaffed, overworked, and unsanitary environment have plagued BDS. These serious concerns bring to light fundamental problems within BDSs system that were only exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. BDSs current plight serves as a microcosm for the food service industry across the country, as restaurants and fast food chains are struggling to attract and retain employees.

BDS started a partnership with Bon Apptit Management Company in 2016, an on-site restaurant company. An announcement on the Brown Dining website attributes difficulties to the Covid-19 pandemic, asserting that nationwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the food industry in many ways, such as increased labor shortages arising from new demands and restrictions on workers; changes in consumer expectations; closures of food-production facilities, and restricted food trade policies.

Due to the understaffing issues within BDS, prep workers who make Browns food in prep rooms are dependent on one-half to two-thirds the number of staff that they would normally have. The individual responsibilities have therefore increased for each employee and many people are encouraged to put in overtime.

BDS came under serious scrutiny in the past for mistreatment of workers; a lawsuit filed in 2019 by two students, Maxwell D. Kozlov and Benjamin D. Bosis, accused Brown University of violating Fair Labor Standards and state employment laws by not paying them for excessive overtime and on-call hours.

Brown University settled this lawsuit for a total of $620,000 and implemented a 20-hour work week maximum for students. According to spokesman Brian Clark, Brown shifted the structure of the student management team so that there would be less pressure on students. This alteration to BDSs operating structure meant that there are now fewer students working fewer hours. Further reducing available labor is the fact that BDS laid off many subcontracted employees at the beginning of the pandemic and has not rehired them in adequate numbers.

On November 1, BDSs union contract, which was created in 2014 to protect the safety and rights of the workers, will expire. As a new contract is negotiated, issues of labor, equipment, raises, and health insurance premiums are at the top of the negotiating list. The existing union contract was not created for issues presented by Covid-19, and like many restaurants and businesses within the nationwide food service industry, the demand for workers rights is reaching a tipping point.

The issues that BDS is experiencing show that raising the tipped minimum wage is a start, but not the end of the industrys labor problem.

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How the Tipped Minimum Wage Furthers the Wealth Gap Against Black Americans - Brown Political Review

The past 24 months have seen a significant increase in calls for social justice, and the business world has not been exempt. The public is demanding that companies be better corporate citizens, that they move people and the planet from the periphery to the core of how businesses operate. Theres no denying that a fundamental shift is happening. We saw it with BlackRock CEO Larry Finks 2019 Letter to CEOs, which famously declared that corporate purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits. Businesses are now expected to have an aspirational reason for being that extends beyond delivering profits to shareholders.

Despite the increased demand for purpose-led businesses, many corporate leaders continue to miss the mark on how to embed purpose into their organizations DNA. Theyve learned how to say the right things; they have been less effective at actually co-creating a better society. It may be tempting for a corporation to slap a statement of purpose on its website without transforming its business practices, but employees and customers are increasingly holding companies accountable for not following through. Big-ticket charitable donations for Black Lives Matter or encouraging employees to volunteer in their local community may make for feel-good headlines, but without deeper change they risk being derided as tokenistic marketing ploys as was the case with a Pepsi ad pulled for co-opting the BLM protest movement.

To uncover why many companies are failing to embed social purpose into their business, we have to unpack the foundational systems used to do business, so much of which in North America is built on an economic system founded on slavery. In many ways, 21st-century business models echo the slave practices of generations past so much so that we now call the worst corporate practices in distribution warehouses, on fishing vessels, in cocoa plantations and in sweatshops modern slavery.

The most striking parallel between slavery and contemporary business management can be found in the task idea, which 19th-century management pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor described as the most prominent single element in modern scientific management. The task system is closely identified with Henry Laurence Gantt. Born to a slave-owning family in Maryland, Gantt developed a task and bonus system, which paired a flat task and a time wage with bonuses for overwork. It has a much longer history beyond Gantt and Taylor, and was one of the principal methods of organizing labour under slavery.

Management tools can separate us from our humanity.

Contemporary business leaders are still trained to see bonuses as an essential management tool to reward overtime. The concept has been entrenched in our work culture across industries and has rarely been called into question. In the apparel industry, for instance, the concept typically drives the use of piece rates, where workers are often paid less than the legal minimum wage to try to meet gruelling production targets.

In addition to his task and bonus system, Gantt also developed a horizontal bar chart to track every workers progress for the day. The Gantt chart is still a popular scheduling tool, though business textbooks rarely highlight the slavery-era roots of these management systems.

Our management tools can separate us from our humanity, Caitlin Rosenthal told the Harvard Business Review. Rosenthal, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, studied account books from American plantations and found that slave owners developed management tools that are still in use today, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics tools that help maximize the value and the surveillance of human capital.

If you want to use those metrics for different purposes, then its going to be a difficult job, Rosenthal added, calling it an uphill battle to turn metrics produced to reveal profit into something that can help us to be more humane.

Perhaps, then, we shouldnt be surprised that todays corporations are struggling to add social purpose on top of existing structures. That wasnt the purpose of the modern corporation companies arent built to be socially driven.

In an era where employees and customers expect more from businesses, it may be time to reconsider how we incentivize labour. Giving employees an opportunity to make a difference at work, providing a platform that allows each employee to express their individual capability, and ensuring a collaborative environment to achieve more than each employee could do on their own are all things todays business leaders must now see as a core element of their management strategy. Combining compassion with accountability can go a long way to creating a psychologically safe workplace and motivating teams.

Instead of a bonus program based on efficiency or overwork, how about a profit-sharing or stock-option plan? That was the thought process of Eileen Fisher, a pioneering designer who responded to an emerging contemporary feminist sensibility that demanded easy-to-wear professional clothing. In the 1980s, Fisher started a clothing company that shared her name, and as her success grew, she thought about what would happen to her company after she retired. At first, selling seemed like the best option. She tested out the viability of an IPO: I remember being up on stage and looking out at a roomful of men in suits no women wearing my clothes, no conversation about clothes. It was all about the numbers. It was really just about the money, she told CNN last year.

Knowing that investor-controlled, capital-focused companies hinder leaders efforts to adapt to a world of finite resources and growing inequality, Fisher decided to sell shares to employees instead of going public, and today 40% of the company is held by its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Her decision allowed her to keep her companys actions aligned to its purpose. Eileen Fisher was also one of the first clothing companies to offset 100% of its carbon footprint, and its become a pioneer in advancing localized, sustainable production.

In a world that is dynamic and hyper-connected, and where companies are being held accountable not only for outputs but, more importantly, how those outputs are achieved, are organizational charts still relevant? Employees often have hybrid responsibilities that make it difficult to categorize them on an organization chart. Shifting a businesss structure toward one that drives profit through purpose is an evolution that will require fundamental operating and cultural changes, and its a difficult first step to navigate.

One of North Americas original purpose-driven companies, Dr Bronners, has become a leader in the personal care industry, with more than US$120 million in sales annually, by staying true to its original mission of serving people and the planet. In Honor Thy Label, a book released earlier this year, the companys vice-president of special operations, Gero Leson, details the challenges of building and ethically scaling organic, fair trade and, most recently, regenerative organic certified agricultural supply chains across the Global South when those supply chains did not yet exist. The company motto of all-one! has permeated its business model in which social responsibility and environmental consciousness serve as uncompromising components of corporate structure, both in its global supply chains and at home in California. In a country where the median CEO-to-worker pay ratio exceeds 300 to 1, Dr. Bronners capped CEO salaries at five times that of their lowest-paid workers, who make a minimum wage of $18.71 an hour in a state where the minimum wage is $14.

You can call almost anything purpose-aligned. We [prefer] purpose-driving.

-Maureen Young, director, Coast Capital Savings, Social Purpose Office

In Canada, where B.C.s Coast Capital Savings is expanding its footprint, the credit union is leaning into social purpose, placing it firmly at the centre of its business strategy as it grows into a national organization. On top of the 10% in profits that Coast Capital Savings already invests into its communities, its applying a purpose lens to everyday business decisions, putting programs, initiatives and products into three categories: purpose driving (helping to advance the social-purpose economy), purpose neutral and purpose contra (or detracting from their mission).

We initially used purpose aligned as opposed to purpose driving and quickly realized it was a weasel word, says Maureen Young, director of Coast Capital Savings Social Purpose Office. You could call almost anything purpose aligned. We eventually landed on purpose driving placing an emphasis on maximizing purpose-driving actions and surfacing purpose contra and addressing them quickly.

Corporate leaders that do the hard work of tying social purpose to all aspects of business with committed leadership and financial investment have generated sustained results, stayed relevant in a rapidly changing world, and deepened ties with stakeholders. The 2018 Global Leadership Forecast found that firms without a sense of purpose underperform the market by 40%, while purpose-driven companies outperform the stock market by 42%.

The future is tenuous but also ripe with opportunity for those who understand the need to truly connect with stakeholder expectations and are not afraid to turn business-as-usual on its head to create a human-centred economy. This may now seem like an option, but soon it will be the only way forward.

Shilpa Tiwari is executive vice-president of social impact and sustainability at Citizen Relations and the founder of Her Climb.

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Are companies with purpose-driven pledges accounting for slavery? - Corporate Knights Magazine

Three senators on Thursday made a bipartisan push aimed at blocking a proposed $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia.

Sens. Rand PaulRandal (Rand) Howard PaulSenators make bipartisan push to block 0M weapons sale to Saudis YouTube temporarily suspends Ron Johnson's channel over COVID-19 misinformation Fauci blasts Paul for saying he is responsible for COVID pandemic MORE (R-Ky.),Mike LeeMichael (Mike) Shumway LeeSenators make bipartisan push to block 0M weapons sale to Saudis On The Money Biden caps off infrastructure week Senate Republicans call on colleagues to reject government spending bills without border wall funding MORE (R-Utah) and Bernie SandersBernie SandersSenators make bipartisan push to block 0M weapons sale to Saudis Popping the progressive bubble Defund Biden: The only way to put America on a budget MORE (I-Vt.) introduced a joint resolutiondisapproving of the proposed arms sale to the Middle Eastern country, pointingtoits role in Yemens civil war.

The joint resolution seeks to block the sale of items and services including 280 air-to-air missiles, 596 LAU-128 Missile Rail Launchers, containers, support equipment, spare and repair parts and logistical support services.

A message needs to be sent to Saudi Arabia that we dont approve of their war with Yemen, Paul said in a statement. By participating in this sale, we would not only be rewarding reprehensible behavior, but also exacerbating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen. I urge Congress and the Biden Administration to consider the possible consequences of this sale that could accelerate an arms race in the Middle East and jeopardize the security of our military technologies.

As the Saudi government continues to wage its devastating war in Yemen and repress its own people, we should not be rewarding them with more arms sales, Sanders said in a statement.

Last week, Rep. Ilhan OmarIlhan OmarSenators make bipartisan push to block 0M weapons sale to Saudis McCarthy pledges to restore Greene, Gosar to committees if GOP wins House Boebert faces heavy criticism after Gosar floor speech MORE (D-Minn.) introduced her own joint resolutionaimed at blocking the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, citing the same reasoning.

It is simply unconscionable to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia while they continue to slaughter innocent people and starve millions in Yemen, kill and torture dissidents, and support modern-day slavery, Omar said in a statement.

The State Department approved this $650 million weapons sale, the first major arms deal made with Saudi Arabia during Biden's presidency, earlier this month.

While President BidenJoe BidenHouse Democrats push vote on social spending plan to Friday Fauci says all adults should 'go get boosted' Senate confirms Park Service director after years of acting heads MOREcut off U.S. support for Saudi-led operations in Yemen's civil war, he has been criticized by Democratsandactivists for not doing more to punish civil rights abuses in the kingdom, including the 2018 killing of U.S.-based Saudi journalistJamal Khashoggi.

The Hill has reached out to the White House and the U.S. Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C., for comment.

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Senators make bipartisan push to block $650M weapons sale to Saudis | TheHill - The Hill

Nearly two years into a global public health crisis, most people are experiencing some degree of pandemic burnout, but COVID-19 and its ensuing economic effects have not impacted everyone equally. People who were systematically marginalized before the pandemic are bearing the brunt of its devastation, especially women of color with low incomes. Although Black women and Latinas are often the economic engines of their families and communities, their health, safety, financial and overall wellbeing are constantly deprioritized. Only by leveraging the economic power of Georgias women of color can we create a truly prosperous state.

Prior to the pandemic, Black women and Latinas faced substantial barriers to economic success and disparities in jobs and wages. Black women and Latinas in Georgia are about two times more likely to live in poverty than white women. According to 2019 data, 16 percent of working-age Georgia women live in poverty compared to 14 percent in 2017.[1] Black and Latina working-age women in Georgia are the most impacted, where more than 1 in 5 (21 percent) live in poverty.[2] Additionally, women in Georgia are paid just 80 cents for every dollar paid to men, and Black and Latina full-time working women are typically paid just 63 cents and 55 cents respectively for every dollar paid to men. This is critical because most Georgia families with children rely on mothers earnings. Nearly two-thirds of mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners (head of household or earning at least 25 percent of household income) in Georgia households, and nearly 80 percent of Black mothers are primary breadwinners (head of household or earning at least 40 percent of household income) for Georgia families.

A legacy of racist policies and discriminatory practices combined with systems of patriarchy and white supremacy have contributed to an economy that limits economic opportunity for Black women and Latinas in Georgia. Their work is often undervalued and underpaid, their role as mothers and caregivers is treated as invisible, and the existing care infrastructure and safety net are insufficient to support their needsparticularly for single women with children. For example, under the 1935 Social Security Act, unemployment insurance and retirement insurance programs explicitly excluded agricultural and domestic workers, sectors where most Black women worked, and Black women were excluded from better-paying, higher-status jobs until the 1970s. Today, Black women and Latinas are continually subjected to occupational segregation and overrepresented in jobs that pay low wages and that do not offer upward mobility or stability. For example, as of 2018, Black & Latina women of working age make up 51 percent and 26 percent of maids and house cleaners, respectively, but only 12 percent and 3 percent of the total Georgia population.[3] And this job pays a median weekly wage of $457 per week and is unlikely to offer health insurance or other benefits. Overall, the job market and employers are failing to support a livable wage for women of color.

These policies and systems have left Black women and Latinas with limited economic opportunities and financial reserves to weather economic hardship. With a median wealth of just $200 and $100 respectively, Black women and Latinas have few resources to draw on when impacted by job losses, which they suffered disproportionately throughout the pandemic. They were more likely to work in industries that were hit hard by layoffs including hospitality, retail and restaurants. They also faced a greater risk of exposure to COVID-19 as they were overrepresented in jobs deemed essential providing child care, grocery and convenience services and building cleaning services.

Throughout the pandemic, recovery has been slowest for Black and Latina workers. Black workers remain consistently underrepresented among unemployment insurance (UI) claims, due in part to being paid lower wages or having unstable jobs that dont meet UI eligibility thresholds. Although Black women have remained active job searchers in Georgia over the past 18 months,[4] they are often subjected to jobs in industries with the highest risk of job loss and face ongoing racial discrimination and bias in the workplace, which together may keep them out of jobs longer and make it harder to land a quality job. Their high levels of underemployment (11.9 percent in the third quarter of this year, the highest of any other group[5]) demonstrate another trend that is likely happening to Black women, where their unemployment levels have dropped over the course of the pandemic recovery but they have not landed quality or full-time employment and have resorted to part-time work to try to make ends meet and/or accommodate child care challenges.

Hispanic women in Georgia have experienced the greatest swings in unemployment from the pandemics start through the ongoing recovery, ending in very low unemployment rates for Hispanic women in Quarter Three (Q3) 2021 (0.7 percent). They are the only demographic of women that experienced explosive growth in their labor market participation (+20.9 percent by Q3 2021) concurrently with high underemployment in (10.3 percent in Q3 2021). This suggests that while they experienced some of the harshest unemployment earlier in the pandemic (19 percent in Q2 2020), their lack of access to other public supportssuch as very low UI enrollment levelshave pushed them back into the workforce faster than other groups, but into jobs that offer reduced or part-time pay.[6]

Despite these disparities, Georgias leaders chose to end the states participation in the extended federal UI benefits in June 2021. This included ending the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) benefits that expanded access to self-employed, gig and part-time workers unable to work as a result of COVID-19. Given that many Black women and Latinas are underemployed and working in these types of positions, ending these benefits may have impacted them disproportionately. Also, UI enrollment trends among women versus men in the pandemic recovery show that when the federal pandemic UI programs left Georgia, disparities in UI enrollment climbed to their highest levels since the start of the pandemic.

In addition to unemployment insurance, other public benefits and supports are necessary to help families make ends meet during times of financial hardship. Georgia has one of the lowest Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) monthly benefit amounts in the country$280 for a family of three. And TANF, or cash assistance, doesnt reach many of Georgias families living in poverty. In fact, for every 100 families in poverty in Georgia, only five receive the benefit. Georgias low TANF benefits and limited reach are a racial justice issue given thatBlack TANF recipients are the largest racial/ethnic group on the program in Georgia. Further, policies like work requirements and family caps in Georgia were justified through racist narratives of Black women.

Presenting another obstacle is the lack of child care infrastructure in Georgia that has been strained further during the pandemic. Our lack of investment in care infrastructure is rooted in a legacy of slavery and unpaid labor. Historically, Black women were forced to care for the children of their enslavers and then, when slavery was abolished, they were relegated to care and domestic work. Today, Black women and Latinas remain overrepresented in the child care workforce. For example, 1 in 5 child care workers is Latina (20 percent) or Black (19 percent) though they make up just under 8 percent and 7 percent of the overall workforce respectively.

Child care challenges disrupt workforce participation, especially for single mothers, and have major impacts on the states economy. In fact, Georgias lack of child care infrastructure leads to at least $1.75 billion in economic activity losses and an additional $105 million in annual tax revenue losses. And the high cost of child care hinders womens labor force participation. The average cost for full-time weekday center-based child care in the Atlanta metro area for children ages 0 to 5 is $179.75 per child per weekmore than $9,300 per year, a hefty sum many families cannot afford. While the average number of staff at child care centers is rising, it has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and national stories report that insufficient wages have contributed to the exodus of child care workers. Without affordable child care options, many women have to work part-time or drop out of the workforce to care for their children.

Our policymakers must consider the holistic needs of Georgias women as workers, mothers, caregivers and breadwinners. GBPI has been striving to advance an economic policy agenda with an intersectional lens on race and gender. While we focus largely on state policies, when we see state leaders not stepping upas has been the case too often during the pandemicwe look to federal lawmakers to enact equitable policies. The American Rescue Plan Act sent $4.7 billion in flexible funding to Georgia, money that is still unaccounted for. The state must put those dollars towards equitable investmentse.g., restoring budget cuts to ensure money flows to communities of color, direct payments made through a state Earned Income Tax Credit or an Opportunity Weight to ensure equitable education fundingthat target those most impacted by the pandemic, particularly Black and Latina women. Those federal investments and existing state funding and revenue sources can be leveraged to foster greater economic equity across Georgias households. Additionally, Congresss new Build Back Better recovery plan includes opportunities for an equitable recovery, but more must be done to support paid leave and child care and to modernize and expand UI accessibility so that underpaid Georgia workers, who are disproportionately Black women and Latinas, can supplement lost wages while seeking work after an involuntary job loss.

Finally, public policy and systems change must include narrative and cultural changes as well. Black and Latina womens labor is often undervalued and invisibilized yet we rely on them to play critical roles in Georgias families, workforce and communities. We must uplift the full humanity of Black and Latina women, end dehumanizing stereotypes and tropes (e.g., welfare queen), and address occupational segregation as well as gender and racial pay and wealth gaps. Centering Black and Latina women in our economic policy decisions is the only way to create a truly equitable Georgia where everyone can prosper.

[1] GBPI analysis of Census American Community Survey data; numbers based on 2019 5-year estimates.

[2] Ibid.

[3] GBPI analysis of US Census 2018 Population Estimate.

[4] GBPI analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata from Q1 2020 to Q3 2021.

[5] Ibid. GBPIs unemployment and underemployment rate analysis is based on IPUMS Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata, which produces slightly different numbers for some months than state employment statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that also incorporate other sources; however, the CPS microdata are the only timely and publicly-available source for disaggregated state-level employment data.

[6] Ibid.

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Unequal Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic has Impacted Economic Security for Black Women and Latinas - Georgia Budget and Policy Institute

THE causes of modern migration lie in empire and slavery. From the early 1500s until the late 19th century, 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean, with two million dying on the way.

Over 1.5 million Indians people from what is now India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bangladesh were transported around the British empire.

Almost all modern-day migration to Britain of people descended from these migratory millions arrived here from the British empire in order to meet the labour market demands of the mother country.

This, until the restrictions that accompanied the postwar Immigration Acts, was allowed by the free movement of people around the British empire.

Such unforced movement was principally the free movement of migrants from Britain to the colonies and dominions.

Over 22 million British people left Britain to live and work in the empire. Some 2.3 million emigrated in the first decade of the 20th century alone.

The 17th-century prototype for this pattern of migration as the instrument of colonial domination was the settlement of Ireland.

Some 100,000 British settlers had invaded the Irish mainland by 1640 and drove the existing inhabitants off the best land.

The obvious utility of emigration for the consolidation of empire should not blind us to the triggers for these patterns of migration, which included agricultural depression and the effects of land enclosures in driving people from the land, religious persecution and civil strife.

Karl Marx made the point thatin reducing the Irish population by eviction and forcible emigration, to such a small number that English capital (capital invested in land leased for farming) can function there with security.

It has the same interest in clearing the estates of Ireland as it had in the clearing of the agricultural districts of England and Scotland.

The drivers for migration today lie principally in the ravages of imperialist war, the poverty of people living in countries burdened with the legacy of colonialism and the effects of the global climate crisis.

This contemporary tide of distressed humanity invariable runs up against the borders that the more developed capitalist countries defend with ruthless efficiency and an indifference to the human cost.

For the European Union, freedom of movement is a highly conditional right exercised in the interests of each state in which the demands of the market in human labour is paramount.

The Belarus government, under siege from a US-sponsored and EU-supported colour revolution has allowed various capitalist airlines, including some registered in the EU, to provide transit for people many from the Middle East and Afghanistan anxious to find a more secure living in the EU, mostly it seems, in Germany.

Belarus still retains substantial elements of its socialist planned economy, is not a member of the EUand is not bound by any obligation to police the EUs racist immigration regime.

Germany, of course, under the (continuing) leadership of Angela Merkel, was happy enough to take its pick of the more educated Middle Eastern migrant population in order to enhance the skill-set of its working population.

Meanwhile Polish sensibilities, most evident but not exclusively on the right wing, are upset that Germany and Russia appear to be seeking a compromise that might favour the energy deals which unite the two countries against US and EU opposition and doing so with the usual indifference to Polish concerns.

Migration is a hot topic in German politics and the divisions do not fit easy stereotypes. Germanys Green Party is enthusiastically in favour of a confrontation with Russia, China and any state in the region that aligns with either, including the stationing of Bundeswehr troops abroad

Its latest policy is for a robust reinforcement of the European Unions eastern border, the better to protect its particular concept of European values.

The far-right Allianz fur Deutschland (AfD), which has much of its electoral base along Germanys eastern borders, is a conduit for the opposition to migration into Germany.

The unorthodox left-wing German Bundestag deputy from Die Linke (Left Party), Sahra Wagenknecht, has challenged liberal responses to the rise of the far right to make the point that in challenging racism it is necessary to name those responsible for the flight of refugees and migrant workers and for the massive austerity cuts which dramatise all social problems in which migrants are entangled.

She had calumny heaped upon her for suggesting that in a factual and democratic debate about migration that there are many people who oppose racism and xenophobia and at the same time consider the regulation of migration to be essential.

The German Communist Party (DKP) makes the satirical point that the EU and Nato are threatening new sanctions against a dictator (Alexander Lukashenko) because, unlike other dictators, he refuses to seal off the borders with barbed wire.

The European Union is actively discussing measures to reinforce the confines of the superstate with an enhanced physical barrier to supplement the steel fortifications it has subsidised with a 9 billion subvention to Turkey and the less visible but more murderous commercial arrangement it has with the piratical commanders of what passes as Libyas coastguard.

On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall,which protected peace for three decades,one group of EU states including Poland, Latvia and Lithuania demand an EU effort to wall off the eastern border of the EU (and Nato).

In a demonstration of the peculiar political unity that characterises the EU, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says No there shall be no EU money for the fortifications, but EU Council president Charles Michel thinks there should be.

And as a contingent of British military engineers arrives to reinforce the border barriers, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg joins in the chorus defending European freedom and values against a freedom of movement for the Kurdish and Yezidi refugees camped out in the border forests.

Turkey, patron to fractious slave-holding Libyan militias, is busily bombing people living in the border areas of Syria while Turkish airlines transport the victims of this conflict to Minsk.

British Home SecretaryPriti Patel is minded to introduce into the English Channel precisely the measures which European Union states employ to stem the flow of African migrants who are obliged to pay the criminal gangs which, under the patronage of various European powers and the US, manage the slave economy of Libya and control and tax the migrant flow across the Mediterranean.

The judgement of lawyers that Patels plan would be illegal, doesnt appear to have blunted her enthusiasm and there is an active media campaign to demonise the desperate souls who risk life and limb to cross the English Channel.

The government of France is currently one object of her animosity.

France, of course, is the transit route for many of the African and north African, Afghan, Iraqi and Iranian migrants and refugees who want to come to Britain.

These are mostly English-speaking people from former British colonies, or areas under the political influence of British imperialism, or fleeing imperialist war.

French-speaking migrants from existing and former French colonies and Francophone Africa naturally tend to stay in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron faces a contest with several far-right, anti-migrant politicians, including the patrician Michel Barnier who led for the EU in the Brexit negotiations.

Thus Macron has a clear incentive to appear tough with Britain, and until the elections are over there will not be much extra effort from the French side to manage the flow of migrant crossings.

Patel can rely on winter conditions in the Channel to raise the death rate and stem the flow of crossings. In this she is no less morally compromised than the Turkish generals or Libyan jihadis to whom the EU has subcontracted the policing of Fortress Europe.

Her Nationality and Borders Bill along with the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill are designed to further demonise the already discriminated people in our communities. Both Bills must be defeated.

Anyone with pretensions to left-wing politics who makes the people fleeing poverty, climate change and imperial war an enemy of theworking class is in danger of joining this morally bankrupt crew.

This is not to say that either the migratory flows of labour within capitalist Europe for which the EU treaties legislated or the present-day refugee flows do not threaten the capacity of the actuallyexisting working class to maintain wage levels and conditions of work.

This is capitalism. Of course they do. And in challenging Die Linkes runaway accommodation with liberalism and German capital, Wagenknecht has compelled a rethink.

When famine and unemployment in 19th-century colonial Ireland drove Irish workers to Britain, Marx wrote: The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.

In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.

He cherishes religious, socialand national prejudices against the Irish worker This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation.

It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.

Wages are always under attack and for a decade have been at a standstill.

No-one can credibly claim that the competition for work presented by migrant workers is the decisive factor in driving down wages, even if it has some effect at the margins or in particular sectors.

This is our Auf Widersehen moment. The world has been spanned by migrant British workers over two centuries.

From a moral point of view a working-class response lies not in scapegoating migrants. Rather the working-class interest is in fighting for wage equality, union organisation, collective agreementsand sectoral bargaining which raisethe wages of all workers.

Refugees should not be charge on the state, they should be integrated into the working population and pay their taxes.

Lukashenkos strategy may be working. He and Merkel have been in conference. There may be a resolution to this particular border problem in the offing.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.

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The truth about immigration waits at the Polish border - Morning Star Online

The subtitle of Jon Grinspans recently published book, The Age of Acrimony, is somewhat misleading. It reads, How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 18651915.

Americans were and are divided into mutually antagonistic classes, however. A more accurate description would be, at least in part, How US capitalism established the modern two-party system of bourgeois rule. As the author shows, this included the effective disenfranchisement of the poorest and most exploited sections of the working classthe restriction, not the fixing, of democracy.

Grinspan, the curator of political history at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History, has written an interesting and informative book, even if limited both in its scope and by its theoretical outlook. He deals with the half-century following the US Civil War.

The Second American Revolution ended chattel slavery, and the Reconstruction Period was characterized by significant reforms, including the extension of the right to vote to several million former slaves. It soon gave way to counterrevolution, however. The Republican Party abandoned Reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877, which installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White Houseafter a bitterly disputed election in which Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular votein exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederacy, was a fundamental turning point.

The shift reflected the dominant interests of the ascendant bourgeoisie. Having established its supremacy through the Civil War, it was more than willing to make a deal with its former foes. Slavery did not return, but it was supplanted by the Jim Crow system of segregation, terror and second-class citizenship for the African-American population in the South, while the North led the way in the massive industrialization of the country.

Republicans continued to wave the bloody shirt well into the 1880s and even later, using memories of the Civil War to appeal to a broader base that remembered the fight against slavery. The Democrats rebuilt their electoral fortunes, based both upon the former slaveholders and their supporters in the South, and the growing patronage machines in the northern cities, resting on the growth of industry and the working class, including several million immigrants.

Election campaigns during the 1870s were a time of torchlight parades and mass activity. The large voter turnouts included newly enfranchised African-Americanswomens suffrage would not arrive for almost another half-century.

Party affiliation was emphasized, but political issues receded into the background in the years after Reconstruction. This was a time when the class struggle erupted in such battles as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Partisanship was a way to divert attention from the class issues and the need for the political independence of the working class. Voters were instead divided along tribal lines, into the two big parties of big business. Although much has changed in the past 150 years, similar techniques are used today.

Grinspan writes about the fears of the ruling class during this period:

Racist pogroms tore apart southern cities, and ethnic and class tensions caused riots in Manhattan in 1870, 1871 and 1874. Across the Atlantic, Paris exploded in 1871, as the revolutionary Paris Commune seized control of the city, before being brutally put down by the French state, which massacred twenty thousand. Americans frightened themselves with predictions of their own coming commune Then, in the spring of 1877, one hundred thousand railroad workers struck around the United States, protesting the wage cuts that had shrunk their earnings by nearly one-quarter since 1873. The movement was crushed by state militias and federal troops, killing about one hundred strikers. Fearing communes abroad and strikers at home, the wealthy began to talk about the coming fall of civilization, pointing to various barbarians at various gates.

The reference to the Paris Commune is particularly significant, reflecting the international character of the class struggle as the system of capitalist production grew. Both Democrats and Republicans began to rely on growing middle-class layers as a force for political stability, a buffer and a means of silencing a revolutionary movement within the working class.

The subsequent decades continued to be ones of explosive class struggle as well as political instability. The irrepressible conflict that led to the Civil War reemerged in another form, this time the conflict between expanding capitalism and the powerful working class that grew alongside it.

Between 1865 and 1901, three US presidents (Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley) were assassinated. Grinspan briefly mentions the infamous Haymarket frame-up of Chicago anarchists in 1886. He writes:

Cities were training militias, passing vagrancy laws, and restricting public rallies with permitting requirements. And across the nation, strikers were met with truncheons and rifles. The National Guard was called out 328 times between 1886 and 1895. In 1894, an Ohioan named Jacob Coxey led a ragtag assembly of unemployed protesters in the first march on Washington. Coxeys army, as they were called, were beaten and arrested for trampling on the grass around Capitol Hill. To the well-to-do of the 1890s, public gatherings seemed newly ominous.

The Civil War marked the completion of the bourgeois revolution in the United States. The abolition of slavery cleared the path for the system of free labor across the country. The Gilded Age, in which Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt and Carnegie became household names, was marked by extremes of inequality never previously seen. It also saw explosive class struggles. The Great Railroad Strike was followed by the Homestead and Pullman strikes in 1892 and 1894, respectively, brutally suppressed by the state.

This was the context within which the ruling class began to move away from the kind of mass democracy it had earlier utilized, in favor of respectability and civility in politics. Mass political involvement was deemed too dangerous at a time of mass struggle.

During this same period, lynching was rapidly increasing in the South, and poll taxes and other methods effectively disenfranchised the freed slaves and their children, but also many poor whites. In the Northern states the techniques were different, but the results were somewhat similar. As Grinspan describes it in his book, as well as in an article in the Washington Post several months ago, reformers could not simply disenfranchise their lower classes. But perhaps, they schemed, they might make participation unappealing enough to discourage turnout. Among other techniques, states passed new registration laws and literacy requirements, moved polling places into unfriendly neighborhoods, and most employers stopped letting their workers take time off to vote.

This all accompaniedparadoxically it would seemthe Progressive Era of the first two decades of the 20th century. It was not, in fact, at all inconsistent. Many reformers found the infringement of voting rights perfectly acceptable, just as they supported the contemporaneous efforts to restrict immigration, efforts that led to the passage of the draconian Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which imposed quotas that reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a small fraction of previous levels, while banning immigration from most of Asia.

The reformist wing of the ruling class saw measures such as antitrust laws, factory inspections, the end of child labor and similar legislation as necessary to forestall revolution. This became especially urgent after the 1905 Revolution in Russia, to which the author briefly alludes. The reforms that ascendant American capitalism could then afford were not the result of the sudden growth of charity among the employers. They came in response to the continuing development of the class struggle, including the founding and early growth of the Industrial Workers of the World. This period also corresponded to the emergence of the United States as an imperialist power, able to bribe a labor aristocracya thin layer of labor bureaucrats and privileged workers.

Not surprisingly, Grinspan discounts the growth of the socialist movement, barely mentioning Eugene Debs in an aside. He separates the relatively small socialist movement from the great stirrings of the working class, and accepts the falsehood that socialism was alien to the US. He neglects to mention the enormous impact in the US of the 1917 Russian Revolution, as well as internationally, and the leadership role of socialists and communists in the building of the industrial unions in the US in later decades.

The infringements on voting met with a good deal of success. Voter turnout fell from a high of 82.6 percent of eligible voters in 1876 to 48.9 percent in 1924. Grinspan writes: From 1896 to 1900, turnout fell 6.1 percent. It crashed another 8 percent by 1904, plunged 6.6 percent in 1912, and crashed a full 12.4 percent by 1920. By 1924, he continues, for the first time in the history of American democracy, stay-at-homes made up the majority of eligible voters.

The collapse of voting was most extreme in the Deep South, where Jim Crow voting laws disenfranchised Black voters, discouraged poor Whites, and enthroned a small, White, wealthy, Democratic electorate. On average, half as many Southerners voted after 1900 as before. This was not confined to the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. In Florida, turnout dropped 52 percent; in South Carolina it fell 65.6 percent between 1880 and 1916. Just 17.5 percent of eligible South Carolinians voted in 1916

Grinspan is informative when demonstrating that race was not the only factor, and not even the biggest factor, in the hollowing out of American democracy over the last century. Voter turnout fell during this period, he writes, especially among populations who were poorer, younger, immigrants or African-Americans. Election Day in the 19th century was a thrilling holiday. In the 20th century, it required literacy, identification papers, education, leave from work

He refers to Joe Bidens hypocritical warning about new voting laws that risk backsliding into the days of Jim Crow, and adds, there is a stronger, subtler parallel: the deliberate discouragement of working class voters, around 1900, by wealthier Americans scared that hordes of native and foreign barbarians, all armed with the ballot would replace them at the polls.

The Jim Crow measures, accompanied by violence or the threat of violence, were the most blatant, but they were part of a broader pattern. As Grinspan notes, while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 fought racial discrimination in voting, the discouragements preventing low-income participation have never been addressed. He points out that the 66 percent turnout in the polarized election of 2020 was the highest percentage in 120 years and was far below the participation of eligible voters in the late 19th century. Thus, during a century when American imperialism regularly posed as the symbol of democracy, it was effectively disenfranchising many millions of its own citizens.

While Grinspan himself may shrink from this conclusion, his study and the statistics he compiles confirm the words of Lenin, the leader of the 1917 October Revolution, on the nature of democracy under capitalism:

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.

This book brings its survey of US voting up only to the early 20th century, but it is necessary to consider at least briefly what has happened since 1915, and where American democracy stands today. The relatively stable two-party system inaugurated in the early 20th century has endured, with some minor challenges, until fairly recently. The American working class has remained politically disenfranchised, failing to build mass parties as happened in Europe and elsewhere.

This can be ascribed in part to the remaining resources of US imperialism, as the leading global capitalist power. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelts New Deal was able to pose as the friend of labor and steal the political thunder of fascistic figures like Huey Long.

Even more decisive, however, was the crisis of working-class leadership, and above all the role of Stalinism, in systematically betraying the working class internationally. In the US, the Stalinists were crucial in helping to tie the insurgent labor movement to Roosevelts Democrats, and in the post-World War II period the anticommunist trade union bureaucracy, basing itself on the temporary postwar boom, took over the task of strangling the movement of the working class.

The last four decades, however, have witnessed a fundamental change. Everywhere the existing parties and trade unionsincluding the Stalinistshave been transformed and integrated into the capitalist state. Racial politics, in the form of the identity politics embraced by the Democrats, has supplemented racism and xenophobia as a means of dividing the working class. The accelerating crisis and decline of American capitalism has led, especially since the stolen election of 2000, to new and more extreme attacks on basic democratic rights.

This is part of the explosive growth of inequality, a Second Gilded Age even more extreme than the first. This level of inequality is not compatible with rights that have been won or tolerated in the past. This is the significance of the emergence of Trump, the ongoing transformation of the Republicans into a fascist party, and the complicity and bankruptcy of the Democrats in the face of the fascist danger.

This deepening onslaught on the working class is provoking a response, visible today in such developments as the growing strike wave as well as the mass protests against police killings. A period of revolutionary struggle has opened up, in the US and internationally.

The defense of the right to vote is bound up with the struggle for the political independence of the working class. It must answer the capitalist states suppression of democracy with genuine workers democracy and a workers state. The fight for socialism, smashing the capitalist classs stranglehold on economic life, is the only answer to the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of war and fascist dictatorship.

new wsws title from Mehring Books

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

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

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How US capitalism established the modern two-party system of bourgeois rule - WSWS

Charles C. Milliken| The Daily Telegram

As I note the descent of America into an autocratic command society, I wonder how the beacon of freedom has become so dim. Obviously, there must be something very attractive about having others in charge of our lives, else why would we be going in the direction were headed, and so rapidly?

The old song echoes Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose. We have plenty to lose, dont we, and desperately want to hang on to it. Therefore a government that promises safety and security has a timeless and powerful message.

Consider how we grew up. For the most part we had parents who looked after us, fed us, and provided all we needed (if not everything we wanted). It is sad that many children grow up in other circumstances, but for most of us parental care is what we knew for our growing-up years, and for all the chafing under the accompanying rules and restrictions we liked it just fine so fine that over the three generations since I grew up safety and security has extended well beyond childhood into the 20s and even beyond. The bubble-wrapping of children is almost total. Does it seem likely that a generation encased in swaddling clothes is going to find adult dress attractive?

History reinforces the message. When the Hebrews, led out of bondage in Egypt, faced up to the realities of freedom, they balked. Sure, the Egyptians lorded it over us, but at least we had plenty of good food, and we werent wandering around in this wilderness. Greece, Rome, most civilizations of the world until the 19th century had greater or lesser degrees of slavery. I take it as significant, even though slaves often way outnumbered their masters, revolts were few and far between, and made big news (and eventually big movies) when they did. Watch Kirk Douglas as Spartacus for a perfect example of the genre.

The bottom line is that slavery lasted because slavery usually worked, and when it ceased to work, as in most of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, it simply died out. Since it was working very well in the American South, it took the bloodiest war we ever fought to get rid of it. A fascinating book to read in these anti-capitalist times is Cannibals Allby George Fitzhugh, published in 1857. (Available online for free). It is a defense of slavery, and an attack on capitalism, contrasting the wage-slavery forced on disposable workers in the North, with the benevolent lifetime security offered in the South (well, offered isnt exactly the right word, and benevolent would be highly debatable, but you get his drift). Such as it was, a slave had lifetime security. A worker could get tossed out to starve if he were no longer useful. Just as in ancient Rome, slave unrest was rare, and made big news when it happened. Meanwhile, from 1790 to 1860, the slave population quadrupled.

Because of the racial make-up of American slavery, and because it is thoroughly demonized, we fail to examine why it survived so well and so long. We dont even give much thought to what slavery is. Essentially, one man is forced to work for another and receives less than what he contributes. Chattel slavery, as that in the South, is only one form, and not necessary. The Egyptians didnt buy and sell Hebrews, for example. Karl Marx, loving the concept of wage slavery,didnt suppose factory owners bought and sold workers. They were enslaved voluntarily because of necessity they had to eat.

Striking out on our own is frightening. Freedom is full of risks. Freedom demands decisions, and what if we make the wrong decision? Then what happens? So, collectively, we surrender about 40% of everything we make to government which, like masters everywhere and from all time, tells us what to do and how to do it. Apparently, that is just fine with most of us. As I said, slave revolts are few and far between.

Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.

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Are we being offered safety and security or slavery? - The Daily Telegram

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that, as of 2015, there were around 3.16 million domestic workers employed across the Arab states. This is largely due to the deficits in social care for the young, sick, and elderly across the region, leading to changes in household structures. This has also contributed to the increased recruitment of domestic workers from developing countries to work in households as nannies, cooks, and maids. Families in theGulf statesare willing to pay relatively more than what many of these domestic employees could earn in their home countries, which, in the case of Kenya, explains why 57,000 to 100,000 people travel to the Middle East for workevery year. The Kenyan government will often train women to become domestic workers in the Gulf states through education about cultural differences and customs to help improve their employability.

Domestic work represents the possibility of a better life for low-income women, especially as any additional income from these roles may help women support themselves and their families. However, these workers are subject to thekafalasystem, whereby a domestic workerslegal statusin the country is tied to their employer. This system places domestic workers at risk of labour trafficking, physical, mental, and sexual abuse. Migrant domestic workers are often excluded from labour legislation inhost countries, which leaves them at the mercy of their employers until their contract is up. According to theILO, the informal, unregulated and isolated nature of [this] work makes domestic workers vulnerable to abuse and often leaves them stranded in foreign countries with little help and no escape.

The abuse inflicted on domestic workers can range from withheld wages and limited food to verbal, sexual, and physical abuse. According toBalongo, a Kenyan woman that worked in the Middle East, to ensure I didnt get out of the house, my employer would lock the doors whenever they left, Balongos account highlights the extent of servitude to which domestic workers are subjected. Lebanon is one of the Gulf countries where some of the worst treatment of migrant workers, akin to modern-day slavery, has been observed. In 2008,Human Rights Watchfound that around one domestic worker a week died in Lebanon of unnatural causes such as suicides or falls from tall buildings, namely during escapes. A decade later, avideoemerged of the brutal assault of two Kenyan women by two men and a woman on the streets of Beirut. The victims, Rosa and Shamila, were arrested and threatened with deportation while their attackers went free, as happens most often.

In 2012, following years of reported abuse, the Kenyan government revoked work permits and introduced a ban on the flow of Kenyan workers to the Middle East. Prior to this legislation,recruitment agencieshad no obligation to bring workers home following cases of abuse. Instead, they encouraged workers to remain in the workplace or reshuffled them into other homes in order to sustain their ability to profit from their wages. In 2017, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE negotiated anew trade dealwhere Kenyan domestic workers could go to these countries, ideally under the protection of new regulations. With a minimum wage of CAD 520 a month plus housing and food, among many other rights ensured by the new bilateral agreements, the hope was to ensure the safety and protection of Kenyan domestic workers abroad.

Although there are only 29 government-vetted agencies that are now allowed to issue work permits to Kenyans seeking work in the Middle East, theKenyan Ministry of Laboursent a mission to keep track of nationals working in the Gulf states to ensure no disappearances, untracked trafficking, and deaths. As with any issue, criminal organizations like trafficking rings continued their attempt to circumvent regulations and send workers to these countries without any protection. Many workers will opt to seek help from these illegal syndicates as working in the Middle East, despite the risk, is the best way of supporting their families andescaping poverty.

The abuse and exploitation of migrant domestic workers is an issue of international relevance that concerns the violation ofhuman rightsand must therefore be addressed accordingly. Domestic workers who are victims of abuse are entitled to the right to a fair trial or court appearance to expose the horrors they have suffered. This may ensure that the households who perpetrate these abuses are prosecuted and punished so as to deter other households from committing similar crimes. Instead, these women are often threatened with deportation if they report these crimes, as is the case for many Kenyans. However, upon their return home, many face no job security or savings and suffer many psychological scars. There are too few mental and physical health services in Kenya to remedy this situation. The lack of social care has consequently contributed to an increase in human trafficking from Kenya back to the Middle East, despite efforts to return home following abuse initially.

Trace Kenyais a national Counter-Trafficking in Persons (C-TIP) organization. It focuses on the prevention and protection of victims, prosecution of traffickers, and partnerships for a unified response to the issue. However, their success rate is still low when considering the number of women in need of aid. In addition, theMigrant Workers Forumis an informal network that provides many services to women returning from abuse, though it equally lacks the appropriate resources to provide help to all the returning survivors of abuse. TheILOhas attempted to improve working standards by instating fundamental rights for all workers in the Middle East, including weekly rest, reasonable work hours, clear information, and timely payment. Though many countries across the Gulf have signed the ILOs Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers that ensures the safety and good treatment of domestic workers, several, likeLebanon, have yet to apply it or comply with its regulations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened this situation. Movement restrictions have been implemented to limit the spread of the virus, leaving thousands of domestic workers stranded in abusive homes. The added pressure of the pandemic has caused global rates of abuse to skyrocket, and migrant domestic workers are no exception to the trend. Many employers have forced them to workup to 21 hours a day without rest and no day off, provided little food, underpaid, delayed, or withheld their wages, restricted communication with their families, confiscated their passports, and physically or sexually abused them. This has made escaping abuse and seeking help harder while practically eliminating the possibility of returning home.

This situation is a vicious cycle that only continues to become further ingrained in the fabric of Middle Eastern society, and Kenyans are becoming accustomed to the abuse. Both sides need the other in order to maintain an equilibrium, but change is long overdue. As oneKenyan worker stated: many would rather die poor than go back to [Lebanon] for work, despite the potential financial reward.

Featured image: Domestic workers preparing for the ratification of the ILO C189 Kenya: KUDHEIHAs preparation of the procession to Parliament and Cabinet Secretary by IDWF photoslicensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Edited by Emma-Jane Ni

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Modern Day Slavery Under the Guise of Domestic Work: The Plight of Kenyan Workers in the Middle East - The McGill International Review