Category Archives: Wage Slavery

How can the U.S. Department of Agriculture advance racial justice, equity, and support for underserved communities?

The agency is collectingcomments on that question, and a recent comment was submitted to the agency from Farmworker Justice and the United Farm Workers Foundation.

"We applaud the Administrations commitment, set forth in Executive Order 13985, to addressing the entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, as well as our public and private institutions, that have denied equal opportunity to underserved individuals and communities. We write to emphasize that, for USDA, such a commitment requires a focus on the challenges and concerns of the roughly 2.4 million farmworkers who labor on our nations farms and ranches.

The Departments Request recognizes that too many American communities have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of the nations economic, social, and civic life. It lists several groups that have faced such adversity: Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.

Almost every farmworker in the country falls into at least oneif not moreof these underserved categories, and in many cases, their status as agricultural workers exacerbate other existing patterns of discrimination.

The history of agricultural labor in the United States is a history of racism, beginning with the era of slavery and persisting to this day. For example, the racism that pervaded the agricultural sector during the Jim Crow era remains enshrined in our modern labor laws. During the New Deal period of labor reforms in the 1930s, President Roosevelt and his allies obtained the support of southern congressmen by excluding farmworkers and domestic workers from key labor protections. Members of Congress at the time were explicit that they did not believe Black people deserved the same wage protections as white people.

The exclusion of farmworkers from key labor protections was wrong then, when most farmworkers were Black, and it is wrong now, when an estimated four out of every five farmworkers are Hispanic/Latino.

Many farmworkers also experience serious harms because of our countrys broken immigration system. More than three-quarters of farmworkers are immigrants, mostly people of color from Mexico as well as other nations. More than half are undocumented or here on precarious temporary work visas. Without permanent legal status, these workers are vulnerable to employer exploitation and abuse. Every time an undocumented worker bravely chooses to speak up about dangerous conditions or unfair treatment, she risks retaliation in the form of deportation.And when workers do challenge unfair practices, they generally find that they have little recourse. For the most part, the federally funded legal aid programs which have been designated to provide legal services to indigent farmworkers are prohibited from representing undocumented immigrants.

It is no coincidence that the denial of equal labor protections in agriculture and the infliction of harm on agricultural workers through our nations broken immigration system affect a population that is predominantly people of color.

Approximately one-third of farmworkers report family incomes below the poverty line. As a result of their poverty, many farmworkers live in substandard homes in crowded conditions.

Further, many farmworkers experience food insecurity, unable to access or afford the fruits and vegetables they harvest. And despite living in poverty, many farmworkers immigration status denies them access to benefits that can support their health and well-being, such as SNAP or Medicaid.

Mortality among agricultural workers due to climate change is yet another indicator of socioeconomic and health disparities in agriculture. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that compared to all other civilian occupations, crop workers are 20 times more likely to die of heat-related causes, and the majority of these deaths occur among immigrant workers.

Given the nature of agricultural work, farm workers are on the frontlines ofexposure to extreme temperatures and wildfires, and they lack refuge from the elements. This year, as temperatures rose to well over 100 degrees in the West and the Plains, the recommendations of state and local officials to stay indoors and seek climate-controlled spaces stood in sharp contrast with the reality of farmworkers, who were performing strenuous work under scorching temperatures.

Moreover, some farmworkers are paid for what they produce, not by hour. These piece rate wages create a perverse incentive for workers to push the body beyond what it is meant to endure, as taking necessary breaks for water or rest means lost income.

Informed by this outreach, other concrete actions that USDA could take to respond to the needs of farmworker communities include:

Prioritize programs, policies, funding and research that address the needs, conditions, and aspirations of farmworkers. Ensure that farmworkers and their organizations receive funding to help address the COVID pandemic and the devastating impact it has had on farmworkers and their communities. Coordinate with other relevant agencies such as EPA, OSHA, and HHS to address the health risks that environmental factors like pesticides, heat stress, and wildfires pose to farmworkers and their families. Adopt procurement policies and practices that incentivize better working and living conditions for farmworkers. Support legislation that seeks to reform our broken immigration system by providing farmworkers a path to citizenship. Support legislation that ends discrimination against farmworkers by ensuring they have equal access to labor protections, and support regulatory policies and actions that implement wage, occupational safety and other protections. Support legislation which guarantees farmworkers right to engage in collective bargaining. Support worker-centered corporate social responsibility projects and promote employers that adopt strong workplace protections and provide farmworkers with a voice at work.

As USDA seeks to transform its approach to vulnerable communities in the agricultural sector, it cannot leave behind the farmworkers who labor on our farms and ranches. It is past time for USDA to recognize farmworkers as the essential stakeholders that they are, responding to their concerns and ensuring that agency programs do not benefit employers at workers expense.

TK: All in all, there are points given that reasonable people shouldendorse. I especially like the point in the comment about promoting employers who adopt strong workplace protections and provide farm workers with a voice at work. Credit should be given where credit is due.

Continued here:

Farmworker Justice and the United Farm Workers Foundation comments to USDA on how to advance racial justice - The Packer

Q:Did you considerMoseto be a dictator?

AGS:After Feb. 7, yes, many Haitians called him a dictator. The other thing I didn't mention is he was trying to get rid of the constitution. He was planning a referendum in which the constitution would be overturned and there would be a new constitution that removed any possibility of criminally prosecuting officials for wrongdoing in office. This is the kind of thing that many Haitians were appalledby, andmade them say we need to get him out. There also was debate in the U.S. government over Mose. Whereas the Bidenadministration continued the Trumpadministrations support for Mose after taking office on Jan. 20, the House Foreign Affairs Committeehad been holding hearings and pushing the Biden Administration to stop supporting Mose. They stressed his harmful effects on Haitians and the need for them to be able to choose their next government without our meddling. This possibly led people in the PHTK to feel threatened and then to sacrifice Mose so that they could continue to rule. But if they get their wish, and foreign troops come whose task will be essentially to suppress the population in the name of keeping order,that's going to be very troubling.

Q: Do you feel like the U.S.and international community could have done more to preventthe assassinationfrom happening?

AGS:Absolutely. Haitians have been crying out for us to stop supporting Mose. If you look at the signs that people had in the streets in February, they asked us and the UN to stop supporting a president who had become a dictator and was trying to cancel their constitution. That, again, supports the idea that this is manufactured chaos to keep the PHTK in power, as opposed to drug traffickers being responsible, which is the narrative that was getting pushed at first.

Q: Earlier, you mentioned the U.S. policy objectives in Haiti. How would you describethose?

AGS:We like to talk about wanting to spread democracy, but unfortunately our record in Haiti has not supported that. Id say our real policy objectives are two things. One is the promotion of U.S. business interests. While the rest of us are not always paying attention, we are often interfering with what Haitians want, like a minimum wage (which is especially needed for Haitians working in sweatshops owned by foreign companies). When Haitian leaders have tried to do that, American companies have complained that it will increase the cost of doing business in Haiti. And the State Department has then pressured to have those laws withdrawn or they've had presidents removed, by which I mean not assassinated, but the U.S. Embassy sends a limo and says your time is up to Haitian leaders. The amount the minimum wage was going to be raised by is embarrassing by our standards (for instance, we fought against raising the minimum wage to $0.61anhour a few years ago). But American businesses did not want to pay even a little more, because to them the advantage of this country nearby is that labor is cheap, and it's so much less expensive to ship products from Haitian sweatshops to the U.S. than from China.

The second U.S. policy objective, I'm sad to say, is often keeping things stable there so people don't try to come here. Therehasbeen particularly strong anti-immigrant sentiment about Haiti, even more so than, say, from Cuba. Many have said it's because of a kind of demonization of Black Haitian immigrants.In reality, HaitianAmericans are wonderful, integral, brilliant parts of our country. Look just at the COVID epidemic; so many Haitians have been on the front lines as nurses, nursing home aids, doctors or scientists. But there are people who think, Too many Haitians are coming. We saw this in 2016 in San Diego, where you had Haitians arriving here after their post-earthquake refuge in Brazil turned hostile (they were invited to work constructing buildings for the 2016 Olympics, but once the construction was finished and there was a recession in Brazil, they were scapegoated and often violently chased from the country). There wasa wealth of organizations here in San Diegowilling to welcome Haitian refugees and help them resettle. But there were also voices who said, No, there are too many of them coming.

Q:Would you say that Haiti is still suffering today from the effects of the 2010 earthquake?

AGS:Yes, definitely. And not just the earthquake itself but the way the international community, which claimed it was going to help Haiti,actually madethings worse (in the manmade disaster that followed the earthquake). One of the people I write about is a Haitian filmmaker namedRaoul Peck, who was Oscar-nominated for hisfilm on James Baldwin. He also made an earlier film called Fatal Assistanceaboutthe international response to the earthquake and how it made things worse. For instance, land was confiscated from Haitians, supposedly to give them jobs. But this meant that farmers were kicked off their land and being able to feed themselves, to give the land to South Korean garment manufacturers, which then didn't pay them livable wages. There are lots of stories like that, with money that was supposedly raised and not actually used to help Haitians. In general, the international community directed the reconstruction of Haiti more than the Haitian government did and they did not listen to Haitians about what they needed. They often imposed policies that benefited foreigners and made things worse for Haitians.

Q:Why do you think stable democracy has been so elusive for Haiti for so long?

AGS:Foreign interventions are one big reason. Whenever there has been a ruler who wants to do things that foreigners don't like, there has been a risk that foreigners will invade and effect regime change. Many people dont know that the U.S.occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. The U.S. problem with Haiti really goes back much longer, 200 years ago, when Haitians were the first people in the New World to free themselves from slavery and they had a revolution. There weredefinitely Americanswho thought that was good; they saw the Haitian Revolution asbeinglike the American Revolution and thought it was good for Haitians that they managed to free themselves from the French and to rule themselves. But keep in mind, when Haiti became independent in 1804, we had Thomas Jefferson, who was a slaveholder, as president. And Jefferson and other whites did not look at the Haitian Revolution favorably; they essentially said, Look at those horrible savages who just killed their masters. We better punish them and keep them isolatedor enslaved people here will have the same idea. We've had this long history of demonizing and trying to isolate Haitians, and then seeking to invade them when they try to enact policies that we don't like. One example is the Duvalier dictatorship, which was so destructive in Haiti. The U.S. meddled in the electionby whichDuvalier first came to power because they did not like his opponent. And then, despite all the evil things that he did, we helped keep him in power for one big reason he wasn't a Communist. There was this worry that Haiti might fall just like Cuba if we didnt keep him in power. So yes, we've had a long history of meddling. That's something that people often fail to see when they say, Oh, look at that country, it's so troubled! Why cant they fix themselves? I'm not saying Haitians would be without problems if they were left alone. But many problems happen because Haitians are not in fact permitted by the international community to make decisions for themselves.

Q:What do you see as the path forward for Haiti in the wake of this tragedy?

AGS:I would like to see the international community give support, and I'll stress the word support, to Haitian civil society and to the opposition parties to have a transition from this government, which so many Haitians see as illegitimate. What I don't want to see is people saying, We need to go in there and send troops, which is what Claude Joseph has been trying to do. Increasingly, his effort to get foreign troops to arrive to create order has seemed to be an attempt to make sure the PHTK retains power. And that would destroy real democracy and dash the hopes of Haitians.

Continued here:

Ask the Expert: The Assassination of Haiti's President - CSUSM NewsCenter

by Isaac Yu | Jul 15, 2021 1:28pm

(11) Comments | Post a Comment | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Politics, Fair Haven, Campaign 2021

New Havens leading mayoral candidates tackled policing, education, and housing challenges rather than each other.

That happened Wednesday evening in Fair Haven.

Speaking to the Democratic committee in the neighborhoods Ward 15, the candidates for the Democratic nomination, one-term incumbent Justin Elicker and challenger Karen DuBois-Walton stood amidst chirping birds in the idyllic English Mall greenspace, and offered idea after idea to address the interconnected issues.

Combined, they offered a vision of the city that often aligned more than not, with different specifics filling it in.

Elicker took one swipe at DuBois-Walton, for having served on the board of Yale New Haven Hospital, but otherwise presentations were free of the attacks both have levied on each other throughout the campaign.

Ultimately, the 11 committee members present voted unanimously by hand to endorse Elicker. Both co-chairs, Rob Roberts and Kevin Diaz, indicated that they will vote for him at the July 27 Democratic convention, when the party formally endorses a candidate. Thirteen of the citys 30 Democratic ward committees have now cast these nonbinding votes; Elicker has won all but two. (A full list of vote counts appears further in the story.)

Responding to questions, candidates discussed some of the most pressing issues hanging over the race:

DuBois-Walton proposed expanding an officer-residency policy she implemented as head of New Havens housing authority level could be broadened citywide. We have found it very effective to offer a residency program to have an NHPD officer live rent-free in the complex in exchange for providing patrol services, she said. But more importantly, they become integrated as part of the community, getting to know the residents, and residents kids, and creating that community policing were looking for. She also referenced a 15-point public-safety plan her campaign has released. (Click here to read about some steps the housing authority took as the pandemic crime surge began.)

Elicker discussed the importance of rebuilding NHPD ranks with a new class of officers in October and beyond. He said that federal American Rescue Plan pandemic-beat funding is being used to add beat officers. Meanwhile, his administration has been creating a pilot form of a Crisis Response Team to send social workers or other non-police professionals to many 911 calls that dont require cops. Once implemented, the citys team will handle calls concerning sex workers and drug users more effectively, he said.

Sally Esposito spoke of a woman she knew who could face homelessness when her lease is up in September. Long-term solutions to unaffordable housing are great, Esposito said. But what about now?

Elicker said that residents under imminent threat of eviction may qualify for new federal funding made available during the pandemic; landlords are in fact required to apply for such funding before evictions. He promised his staff would focus on the issue, and urged people to contact him directly to be connected to available government help.

DuBois-Walton proposed that employers be required to pay a housing wage in order to benefit from federal ARP funds flowing to the city this year, helping people pay the rent. She spoke as well about forgiving rent, which she did at the height of the pandemic for many public-housing residents.

Neighbor Mary Ann Moran asked about problem tenants at the rebuilt Quinnipiac Terrace public-housing development. She said she has spoken with the complex staff about why the tenants are not evicted more promptly; she said a staff told her she was scared to death of retribution. She asked whether officials can arrange for regular police patrols at the complex to keep crime down. DuBois-Walton said she would like to see a city cop live there under an expanded residency program.

DuBois-Walton pointed to the success of the New Haven Promise college scholarship program. She has proposed a Pre-Promise Program to support quality pre-kindergarten learning for all New Haven children. Introducing early pathways towards careers in biotech and public safety could help address NHPDs staffing troubles and help New Haveners benefit in the citys growth, she argued. Leveraging Yale as a partner to invest in educational initiatives would be a necessary companion to upping the universitys voluntary payment, she added.

New Haven is the place that does things that other places dont think is possible, DuBois-Walton said. Its in our DNA.

Elicker said that the district should look to other towns like New Canaan that spend more money per child than New Haven does. Paying paraprofessionals a higher wage as well as creating a culture of actively choosing NHPS are also important, he said.

In addition to focusing policy, the city needs to work harder to convince parents like me to send their kids to public school, Elicker said.

Earlier in the day, the candidates did duke it out as usual, on WNPRs Where We Live. Click here to listen to that episode here.

Following are results and stories about other ward votes.

Ward 4: Elicker near-unanimously (no official final vote tabulation)Ward 8: Elicker, 16-4Ward 9: Elicker, 7-0Ward 10: Elicker, 14-0Ward 14: Elicker, 15-11Ward 15: Elicker, 11-0Ward 18: Elicker, 20-4Ward 21: Elicker, 12-10Ward 25: Elicker, 31-12Ward 26: Elicker, 26-12Ward 27: Elicker, 7-0Ward 29: DuBois-Walton, 17-7*Ward 30: DuBois-Walton, 19-1

Mayce Torres, who has also filed to run as a Democrat, received one vote in Ward 29.

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one-term incumbent Justin Elicker and challenger Karen DuBois-Walton stood amidst chirping birds in the idyllic English Mall greenspace, and offered idea after idea to address the interconnected issues.Combined, they offered a vision of the city that often aligned more than not, with different specifics filling it in.Elicker took one swipe at DuBois-Walton, for having served on the board of Yale New Haven Hospital, but otherwise presentations were free of the attacks both have levied on each other throughout the campaign.

-This is what the campaign tactics should be, presenting concrete ideas and realistic solutions instead of attacking each other and offering vague pie in the sky suggestions with no details. I hope from here on out, the candidates will provide more positive and constructive campaigns with detailed plans and realistic ideas based in facts rather than sniping at each other and making unrealistic suggestions and criticizing each other for things that are more complex than a simple sound bite to fix. The voters deserve facts and truthfulness, not negativity and unrealistic promises.

Yale plans to gentrify neighborhoods it starts with housing inequality.

Criminality is a part of that as it increases the number of people abandoning their homes; too scared to worry about finances or credit.

This will help to attract students. Yale needs you out and need your homes.

The police forces are a part of it. I dont blame them perhaps they dont know. Those men and women are used in politicization to ensure your vote. Down right criminality. We only have 300 cops! Why would the union allow it?

The target: the Black and Brown neighborhoods nearby. The poor; yes, if your 40 hour job is not enough!

They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages.

They are God, King

The treasonous Mayor Elicker just a pawn serving his master. Mrs. D not much different. Both capitalist. Follow the money.Both lie and sleep well due to indoctrination into an university that only care about the health, wealth, and growth of their institution. What non profit? Built into the constitution. Out of the 5,000 plus organizations in our city; do any other have constitutional rights? The rights my dad went to Vietnam for!

While people are dying they move forward with their plan to make New Haven their collegiate city.

Question everything! SOSwe are dying here.

How many of us has suffered malpractice but cant get justice? I have! If we all came together Im sure we could make a difference.

If all who understood Yale was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of slaves! If universities around are atoning, why cant you?

We arent the only city this happens to.

Many across the country suffer.

By the way, as a candidate Im not printed. Misinformation has been disseminated. I am a candidate.

Media, Democracy Fund, Democratic Party all should atone. Not all candidates start in the same place. We passed racism as a health disparity yet we allow oppression to hurt our voice.

Stand against corruption!

Both candidates talked about their experiences as New Haven Public School parents and the importance of making the district attractive to New Haveners who might otherwise send their kids to neighboring districts or private schools

Since Elicker suddenly cares so much about NHPS, why didnt he vote for the principal at Brenann Rogers to be fired? Or for the school formerly named after the founder of slavery to be named after an indigenous person such as Napaupuck, an indigenous person who was beheaded and whose head was put on a pedestal infront of New Haven city hall for privilege to admire.

Who is going to address the lackluster performance of support services, such as the ambulance which takes leisurely rides when transporting Black and Brown people to the emergency room - does that even get considered when reporting crime and trauma statistics? How many lives could have been saved if they had been transported and cared for on time? Why is one dispatch governing so much space? Who is going to address the poorly functioning 9-1-1 system.

When will there be a discussion which really focuses and has real and present solutions for the oppressed? Where is the focus on the residents of New Haven? The poor people? The folks who are barely surviving because Yale took up all the space and the poor people have to carry them on their backs? Where is the concern for the working parents, the people who cannot afford private schools or dont have the means to send their child to schools outside of the district? When will anyone care about us who live here and remain oppressed because people make promises they never intended to keep?

It is very expensive to be poor in New Haven, yet so many wonder why Racism had to be declared a public health crisis.

Firstly, where was Mayce Torres , who is a candidate for mayor and why is she being shut out?

Trini-Digital- we usually dont name schools after murderers, even if they are indigenous. Please provide complete reliable information on your choice, NaPaupuck. I can see it now- Charles Manson Family Academy. After all, Charlies followers called themselves Family How about it???

posted by: CityYankee on July 15, 2021 4:42pm

Firstly, where was Mayce Torres , who is a candidate for mayor and why is she being shut out?

You are correct.

posted by: Trini_Digital on July 15, 2021 3:16pm

When will there be a discussion which really focuses and has real and present solutions for the oppressed? Where is the focus on the residents of New Haven? The poor people? The folks who are barely surviving because Yale took up all the space and the poor people have to carry them on their backs? Where is the concern for the working parents, the people who cannot afford private schools or dont have the means to send their child to schools outside of the district? When will anyone care about us who live here and remain oppressed because people make promises they never intended to keep?

Good Point.But we should also ask this question to the BOA which Black And Latino Are the major in control.

I think anyone on the fence between the two candidates should check out WNPRs Where We Live....it was so revealing about the two candidate. Suggestion: NHI write a follow-up about that debate because this article doesnt do it justice.

Thoughts:

Elicker: Needs to change sneering and dismissive tone towards KDW. I expect an incumbent mayor to speak resolutely and confidently about their accomplishments without being disrespectful towards the candidate. Good response about crime in housing developments and new investments into programs for underserved kids. I found it odd Elicker had trouble acknowledging directly the Black and Brown communityperhaps he didnt want to offend. Pro-tip for the campaign, most of us folks Black and Brown folks prefer to be address directly. Its time to retire this person of color nonsense. Its also ok to address your opponent by their name as well instead of she or my opponent.

KDW: Need crisper answers any equity. We all support equity in New Haven so what exactly does it mean in terms of nuts and bolts of getting real policy done. The term equity is also hackneyed at this point. Good response on the need to for a Mayor to think outside the box and be a creative leader instead of blaming everything on Covid-19. I want to hear more about KDWs plan to tackle climate change and tackle NHs transportation challenges (re: bus system overhaul, bike lanes, and sea rise mitigation).

DEar 3/5s I think your use of the word oppressed is really hyperbole. What is keeping you here? You dont like it? What or who is forcing you to stay? Especially since the poor are beating landlords and other bill collectors left and right; why dont they ( not you personally) use all the money they have saved not paying their debts and go elsewhere to make a fresh start? If they dont leave; it is because they are not truly oppressed, like the people of Cuba , North Korea, China, etc. They are disgruntled because they cannot fulfill every avaricious desire they have and they want the rest of us to pay for their inability to run their own lives. Just call it what it is. Yes, the rich are greedy but so are the poor, and so are the middle class. We are all greedy.

My apologies, 3/5s. I should be responding to Trini Digital but I mistakenly took your quoting of Trini as yours. Sorry.

posted by: CityYankee on July 16, 2021 8:54am

DEar 3/5s I think your use of the word oppressed is really hyperbole. What is keeping you here? You dont like it? What or who is forcing you to stay?

I notice when people criticize America, theyve been deemed un-American and unpatriotic.And are told Love It or Leave It or as you say. What or who is forcing you to stay.This is a totalitarian argument to silence dissent.The country was founded, after all, by Englanders fleeing oppression who then stole land from native peoples.

Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.Samuel Clemens

@ Triniti_Digital The process of renaming the Columbus School was open to the public for their input, after a diverse committee of community members, educators & people affiliated with the school was established by the BOE to make recommendations to the BOE. After the committee heard from the public & deliberated among themselves they made their recommendation to the BOE which was accepted.It was determined that the school would not be named for a person, but the name would reflect the character and mission of the school: Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration.Triniti has consistently promoted the idea that the school should be named for an indigenous person named NAPAUPUCK. Napaupuck was a 17th century Quinnipiac man who was a convicted and confessed murderer of some white New Haven settlers. Some of his own people testified against him in court. He was gruesomely executed by beheadding. Why would Triniti, Elicker or anyone else recommend such a person have a school named for him?Columbus was directly or indirectly responsible for unleashing a number of atrocities upon red, brown and black peoples which severely tarnished his legacy, but he is not the founder of slavery.Regarding the ex-principal of Brennan-Rogers School, there was never a vote for the firing of the principal for Elicker to cast. Dr. Tracey and the BOE never considered or voted on termination.It really would have been hypocritical for the BOE to fire an administrator for using the N-word when a member of the BOE publicly used the N-word at a BOE meeting!Contrary to misinformation that has circulated around town for weeks, the ex-principal never used the N-word in any direct derogatory preference to Black people. Neither did the BOE member!So why all the divisive hyperbole? Why the double standard? Why all the false allegations of NHPS students being psychologically traumatized and in dire need of counseling because one white school administrator simply uttered the N-word?

See original here:

Candidates Offer Solutions, Forget To Fight - New Haven Independent

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but Over the last few months the American people have been bombarded with the term systemic racism.

Racism is a term that I am familiar with; however, systemic was not in my usual vocabulary so I sought out a definition and here is what I found.

A systemic problem is a problem which is a consequence of issues inherent in the overall system, rather than due to a specific, individual, isolated factor. Something thats systemic affects all parts of a thing. If every dog at doggy daycare has fleas, its a systemic problem.

Like most issues in America, a group will select a catchy phrase and ride it to the extreme.

Are there cases of racism in America? Definitely!

Is there rampant systemic racism in America? I would argue there is not.

Lets look at the definition of systemic a little closer.

First off: A systemic problem is a problem which is a consequence of issues inherent in the overall system, rather than due to a specific, individual, isolated factor.

Is racism inherent in the overall system of America? Inherent literally refers to something that is stuck in to a thing so firmly that the two cant be separated. If this is the case, there is little hope for those who are championing the cause of the elimination of racism in America. The apparent solution would be the destruction of America as we know it today and doing a complete make over.

I am not a denier of racism in America. As a historian by trade, I surely understand that racism has been a major factor in American history. There was a time when a large portion of the American population lived as slaves, and it is important that Americans are aware of that.

It is also true that while perpetual slavery affected Africans brought to America for their labor, there were also European slaves brought to America. Those slaves were called indentured servants. The major difference was that the indentured servants had a time limit set on how long they had to work as slaves.

By definition, if inherent systemic racism exists in America, slavery would still be practiced today. Inherent literally refers to something that is stuck in so firmly that they cant be separated.

At the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence, there were a little over two million people in the colonies. Over 600,000 were African transplants who were in perpetual slavery. Approximately one million were European indentured servants and the rest were European freeman.

There is no question that African slavery as an institution was allowed to exist for 20 years without interference from the federal government as a compromise to get the Constitution of the United States accepted. However, it was not systemic as many of the individual states moved to ban slavery. This ban was found in the northern industrial states that relied on the indentured servants and wage slaves supplied by the migration from various European nations.

Was there racism involved in the perpetuation of slavery? Yes! Was it systemic to all America? No! It obviously was not inherent in the overall system. It was due to specific, individual, isolated factors. Not every dog at doggy daycare had fleas, not every American championed slavery. Nor did every American institution protect slavery.

While racism exists in America today, it is not systemic. It is based in pockets of individual racists. America has been, and continues to be, an evolving nation. America of today is not the America of 1787 nor will it be the America of 2050. If racism were systemic to America, nation-wide slavery would still exist. The Supreme Courts acceptance of Separate but Equal would continue to be the accepted law of the land based on the Dredd Scott decision. However, it was over turned in Brown v. Board.

I find it interesting that the political party that now cries systemic racism is the very party that championed the racist causes in America prior to the 1960s. For the most part, southern slaveholders were Democrats. Those who fought to protect slavery in the 1860s were Democrats. The founder of the KKK was a Democrat, as were most of the original members. Those who openly segregated Americans of African descent were Democrats. Yes, I am aware of defacto-segregation outside the Democrat south.

Democrat governors stood in the doorway of schools to oppose federally-mandated integration. Sheriff Bull Connor, who turned dogs loose on the freedom marchers, was a Democrat. I wonder if these are historical facts that the liberal left want taught under the title of Critical Race Theory.

Yes, I am also aware that much of the civil rights movement and gains made for the American citizen of African descent was championed by Democrats after the 1960s. I do, however, believe that some of the greatest racists of today are those championing the dumbing down of American education. They seem to believe that the very students they are hoping to help are incapable of reaching educational goals that have been set for all students. Therefore, those goals should be lowered or eliminated altogether.

Let me speak from experience of having taught students from various ethnic groups. I found all students were capable of learning that which was required. In my eighteen years in the classroom, I found that intelligence knows no race. Experience and background affects all students and it is the teachers job to use that experience and background to their advantage. That is what real teachers do.

If America is systemically racist, there would have been no Civil War to end slavery. There would have been no move to end segregation. If inherent systemic racism was the case, the very congressmen and -women of African descent accusing America of inherent systemic racism would not be in the office they now hold. Barrack Obama would never have been elected President of the United States for an inherent systemic racist system would never have allowed it to happen.

Therefore, I would contend that racism is not systemic to America. It is an individual evil that needs to be isolated if it cannot be completely destroyed.

Thought of the week I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

See the article here:

No One Asked Me But (July 14, 2021) - mvprogress

Shemon and Arturo, The Return of John Brown1

The fires, for now, have been put out.

The Trump circus has reluctantly moved out, though not before putting on a spirited finale as the clock ran down. It is spending what might be a short political winter in balmy south Florida, finishing the thankless work of eviscerating the party of Bush and Cheney, of Iraq, Guantanamo, and Katrina. The responsible people are back doing what they get paid for: arguing over whether recent spending bills will produce a Biden boom or just runaway inflation (the honest confess they have no clue). Smart people are wondering whether infrastructure means expanded Amtrak service or beefed-up childcare services. Needles are going in American arms, and vaccines flood the land, as bodies pile up in Indian crematoria and Indian hospitals plead for more oxygen; statespeople debate the merits of easing restrictions on vaccine patents, while pyres burn through the night. The EU, desperate for tourist dollars, envisions a digital health pass allowing free, closely monitored movement to and across the continent, though its citizens remain under curfew, in some cases not permitted to travel more than 10 kilometers from their homes. The very rich, and even just the pretty-well-off, havent missed a beat, with stock markets soaring to historic highs throughout the pandemic; for all its demonstrated haplessness in handling a global public health crisis, the political class moved in lock-step solidarity when it counted, rushing in the crisiss first days to salvage asset values (a routine so familiar, they do it in their sleep). Yet even as the economy opens up, floating on an ocean of still more federal debt, the April jobs report suggest it is barely adding any jobs, certainly nowhere near the rate necessary for a recovery; some eight million remain missing, perhaps never to return, with many workers seeming to have dropped out of the labor market altogether (a trend since 2000, accelerated by the shutdowns). The 15 dollar minimum wage was the first provision to go when it came time to cut fat from a stimulus bill totaling almost 2 trillion dollars, and online shopping giant Amazon celebrated a bumper year by crushing a unionization drive in Alabama. The DEI industry is in full flower, as companies and institutions awash in cash loaded up on consultants, new hires, and training seminars for their employees. We were even conceded a conviction for George Floyds killer, as cops just this once broke ranks to claim, against all evidence, that Derek Chauvins action deviated from policing best practices. It takes some work to find a Fuck 12 tag on the otherwise tattered ramparts of Americas beleaguered big cities.

Now that the one-year anniversary of the events of late May and early Junecrowned, dramatically, by the immolation of the Third Precinct station in Minneapolishas come and gone, the need to draw up a balance sheet of what unfolded becomes urgent. This bit of stock-taking is not just a matter of setting the record straight: it means giving the events their vibrancy, their still-living force, back.2 But we must also be sure not to slip into the bad habit of commemoration, the rituals of monumentalization, whose effect is to consign them to the bygone past, to stitch them into a solemn tapestry of poignant defeat. It is urgent to reclaim the George Floyd rebellionriots and allfrom the knee-taking, kente cloth-draped Democratic politicians, from the consulting industry and the blue-check liberals, but also from the patronizing socialists who only piped up during the events to decry the inevitable (and perfectly logical) episodes of looting, as well as those who spent those weeks waving off the largest mass movement in the US in a half-century in favor of parsing what went wrong in the South Carolina Democratic primary. We have to consider what was novel, even unprecedented, about these events and the movement they gave rise towith its often conflicting tendencies, its distinct phases, its breakthroughs and recuperationsas well as how they might be located within a protracted cycle of struggles dating back decades, or indeed haltingly traced back to a peculiarly American primal scene: Civil War and Reconstruction. Though buried in the rubble of repression and recuperation, the George Floyd rebellion can begin to be seen for what was unprecedented about it: distinguished by its tactical successes, its scope, and its internal composition, it can now even be understood to mark the resurfacing of the long-dormant American old mole. For a brief moment, late last spring, we caught sight not only of the guise the struggles of the future will assume, but even that coming rupture James Boggs christened, in 1963, the American revolution.

The George Floyd rebellion of late spring 2020 was a Black-led, multiracial rebellion the likes of which have not occurred in recent US history. The rebellions emblematic scene took place, of course, in South Minneapoliss Third Precinct, less in the figure of a police station in flames than in the livestreamed spectacle of police vehicles abandoning the building in the nick of time, routed, humiliated, and for once, afraid. What distinguishes last springs rebellion, however, is not just its tactical featsa mid-sized American city transfigured into Athens, or Cairobut above all the movements racial composition and its spatial distribution. Unlike the wave of urban riots in the mid-to-late 1960s, or the Los Angeles riots of 1992, these riots were remarkable for the widespread support expressed for them by white demonstrators, as well as their direct participation in them.3 Just as significant were the geographical contours of the rebellion, which exploded simultaneously across the country, in cities large and small, and in doing so remade the map of urban revolt. Wherein the Watts riots of 1965 or the riots of 1992, for example, the action unfolded primarily in South Central LA, in working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods, the most heated confrontationsburning cop cars, lootingin the early phase of Los Angeless Floyd riots occurred in its gentrifying downtown and in the overwhelmingly white Fairfax District (a center of the citys Jewish community), before spreading to Hollywood and Long Beach, and even to toney Santa Monica and the Valleys Van Nuys. But even this litany of place names cannot capture the pervasiveness of the rebellion in its first week, nor the compound of elation and uncertainty, anticipation and menace, that hung in the air across the city as the authorities tried in vain to contain it: with a curfew that was mocked and ignored by all, with threats that could not be carried out, with pleas that fell on deaf ears, and finally with detachments of the National Guard, rolling through neighborhood streets in dingy gray and green.4

Across the country, police forces lost control of cities they once had under their thumb. The night before a curfew was put into place in New York City, shops up and down 5th and Madison Avenues were looted; a few nights before, President Trump had been whisked to an underground bunker, as demonstrations reached the gates of the White House. Soon, military helicopters would be hovering over DC crowds they could not otherwise disperse, using tactics honed in operations overseas. Tom Cottons call (duly published by the paper of record) for the President to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act was not just a bit of grandstanding, a white boys fantasy of martial law: it expressed a palpable fear, on the part of political class, that the patchwork of local police forces and unreliable, poorly-trained National Guard detachments could not impose order again.5 The spectacle of massive urban police forces, soaking up huge chunks of the municipal budgets of the countrys largest cities (53 percent in Los Angeles) and always eager to brandish surplus military gadgets remaindered from imperial forays, incapable of putting the insurrectionary cat back in its bag surely raised questions, for those whose social power depends on these forces, regarding the rate of return on their investment. Equally disconcerting, for those few who reckon seriously with history, was the entry of National Guard detachments into the fray. Long a staple of urban riots in the US, the Guard is by no means a predictable actor. Unschooled in the arcana of police violence, many appeared in the streets bewildered, with little of the stigma attached to police forces; had confrontations between cops and insurgents intensified, there is no certainty these units would have sided en masse with the local police formations. Finally, even the most inept police commanders and political actors had to be wargaming out the next steps, beyond the inevitable looting and property damage. In cities already beset by severe housing crises, and suddenly confronted with newly unemployed workers unable to meet rent, might some of the more daring protestors attempt occupations at first opportunistically, followed by more concerted effortsof existing housing stock, empty hotels, or even unoccupied office and retail space?

Police murders of Black men are a ubiquitous and enduring feature of the American landscape; so, too, are robust community responses to this violence, taking the form not only of riots, but of broader social movements, giving rise to orienting slogans (Black Lives Matter) as well as activist organizations that survive them. What unfolded in late spring across the country seemed to break with or exceed this pattern. Looking back at these events now, we should ask why so many whitenot to mention Latino, Asian, and otherpeople decided to participate in these demonstrations and actions; why the movement spread so quickly across the country; why it had the intensity and dynamism it did; and, above all perhaps, why it happened not just in working-class neighborhoods, in inner cities or poor suburbs (like Ferguson, Missouri), but in city centers, near concentrations of wealth and power. There was, to be sure, an understandable revulsion toward racism in its most extreme form: police violence. But the scale of the response to George Floyds murder far exceeded that following Freddie Grays, or Michael Browns, or so many others.

It is lost on no one that the Floyd rebellion took place in the midst of a once-in-a-century public health crisis. It took 66 days, Joshua Clover wrote last June, to get from the first shelter-in-place order to the first riot.6 The haphazard, bumbling, and often malicious state response to the crisis took place against a backdrop of unyielding social turmoil. The sudden spike in published unemployment numbersfrom 4 to 20 percent in the Los Angeles region, and higher than 25 percent in Detroit and surrounding citieswas a direct result of the unprecedented economic shutdown.7 But this abrupt imposition of worklessness on millions of workers whose survival depends on their ability to sell their labor-power in exchange for wages only exacerbated, dramatically, an ongoing pattern of immiseration dating at least to the economic meltdown of 2008. In many of the countrys largest and wealthiest cities, a very visible housing crisis had set in years before the 2020 shutdowns; the uncertain prospect of mass evictions threatened to enlarge the tent cities and encampments cropping up in city parks, under overpasses, and on sidewalks, often on the edges of well-to-do neighborhoods. The relatively low unemployment rate of the pre-pandemic period was itself a screen behind which the full dimensions of the crisis lurked: millions of workers had simply dropped out of the workforce after losing their jobs in that crisis, and almost all growth in employment since the 2008 crisis took place at the low-wage, low-skill extreme of the labor market. These jobs were often in those industries, like restaurants, retail, and tourism, most dramatically affected by the shutdowns.

The effects of the shutdowns were distributed along crystal-clear class lines. As the Federal Reserve quickly scaled-up its ongoing quantitative easing operations to the tune of 3 trillion dollars in the crisiss early days, a political class supposedly at daggers drawn rushed into law a bipartisan 2.2 trillion dollar stimulus package in just weeks, unleashing a firehose of federal aid to businesses to keep them afloat. The rich were taken care of: plummeting asset prices reversed course and soared, while corporations were given a lifeline to ride out the crisis. Most middle-class service workers had a relatively easy time of it as well, easily retreating to online platforms to work remotely, sealed off from the virus as recently-fired restaurant and retail workers delivered groceries and hot meals to their doorsteps. Meanwhile, workers found themselves divided between those made unemployed by the shutdowns and those forced to workin some cases, by federal orderin order to maintain what the state deemed essential services, defined as critical infrastructure operations (food production and distribution, grocery stores, healthcare, and so on). Degrees of exposure to the virus were distributed largely along these same class lines. Workplaces like distribution centers became sites where the coronavirus spread rapidly; infected workers returning to their neighborhoods and homes passed it on to family members and loved ones. The result was predictable enough. In the nations largest cities, infection rates diverged dramatically between rich and poor areas, with neighborhoods (like Corona in Queens) with concentrations of essential workers devastated in the pandemics early months, while the well-to-do in Manhattan remained cocooned in their overpriced apartments, struggling with the mute feature on Zoom. Meanwhile, the newly unemployed, used to eking by month-by-month on service sector wages, awaited the coming eviction wave, a small number organizing themselves into tenant unions to ward them off, most anxiously awaiting a lifeline from above: unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, if the fiscal gods were answering prayers.

It is no wonder, then, that so many turned out in the streets in response to still another police murder of a Black man, in order to demand an end of the murders and, in some cases, the end of thosethe police themselveswho consistently carry them out. All of a sudden, it clicked: those who came out for the demonstrations had an acute sense, it seems, that the state so willing to kill in the streets was the same state reconciled to the prospect of letting hundreds of thousands, or more, die agonizing deaths in order to save the economy. The apparent incompetence of the state, when it came to the health of its populations, had come to seem more and more a deliberation, a social calculus. The economy to be saved did not include the laborers it employed, only those who owned capital or financial assets; the state rushed in, once again, to save the private sector, while speculating in the same breath on the moral hazard of replacing workers lost wages.

The mass movement that took shape in the streets last spring, particularly in its first week, should therefore be seen as a multiracial, working-class movement centered on, and indeed brought into being in response to, anti-Black state violence. To describe it as a Black-led working-class struggle is to emphasize the movements objectives (the end of state violence against Black people, the demise of a racist institution altogether) and more importantly the actors who formulated them, and devised the tactics required to meet them. To describe the movement in these terms is not to diminish the role played by other workers; it is merely to describe a structure that articulated the movement: its actions. That the movement took its lead from Black proletarians does not mean, either, that it was organized by groups that claimed to represent them. One of the defining features of the movement, in fact, was the clear tension that emerged within itespecially in the first weeks of Junebetween its most militant currents and a broader movement whose social composition was more complex, driven by often irreconcilable divisions. It is this expansion of the movement, bringing in middle-class whites, NGOs, liberals, politicians, and often Black-led activist groups, that accounts for its assuming the scope and scale of a proper mass movement. This expansion of the movement also presented a mortal danger.

We should have no illusions regarding the decisive role played by outright political repression in the movements defeat. It was articulated at local, state, and federal levels. If the entry of active US military units was narrowly averted, we must not forget that the threat of such intervention shaped the calculations and actions of all the actors involved, on either side of the conflict. When the secretary of defense underlined the need to dominate the battlespace, we mostly laughed at one more wannabe performing hardness for the boss, while demonstrating an utter cluelessness about the nature of the conflict unfolding. But these words did tip the federal governments hand: it would defeat the movement by militarizing its response. In a way, thats just what it did. We need only recall the array of federal agencies called uponDepartment of Homeland Security, Bureau of Prisons, etc. to crush the movement at its peak in Washington, DC, or, later, in Portland. But to restrict our analysis to the purely repressive aspects of the response to the movement is to misunderstand the nature of the counterinsurgency mounted.

The most powerful means for undermining the movement was not its repression but its embrace and misrecognition by a host of actorsa host of allies and self-appointed delegateswho entered the fray a week or two in. The sheer fact of the swelling presence of middle-class white people both reshaped the movements composition and changed how it was perceived and treated by the media and the political class alike. Most important was the part played by NGOs, activist groups, and the left wing of the Democratic party (and, later, educational institutions, enlightened corporations, and even, oddly, parts of the US security apparatus). Their embrace of the movement was a smothering one; the price their participation exacted was steep and crippling. The first gesture was to cut the movement off from its own origins, the direct confrontations with the police in late May and early June. They did this first by briskly separating what they deemed good protesters from bad, distinguishing who was allowed to speak and act, and prescribing in advance what forms of action were acceptable: introducing divisions that reflected, for the most part, existing social (especially racial) cleavages.8 The most effective, because time-worn, technique was to posit the existence of outside agents responsible for what was ruled off-limits, with these interlopers characterized as white, on police payrolls, or fascists looking to stoke the flames. Once the direct action tendency of the movement was effectively contained, the energy shifted from the streets to the city council minutes, with suddenly mushrooming groups claiming to represent the movement wheeling out a wide array of policy proposals for political consideration: new training procedures, defunding police departments, new social spending, and so on. Most of these proposals had been drawn up by NGOs, activist groups, and left-liberal political figures long before the movement took hold, rather than originating with it. Above all, these groups appeal to existing local authorities projected the illusion that what was taking place across the country was a political process rather than a social conflict, an at-times contentious dialogue between legitimate representatives of existing interest groups, or between the governed and those who represented them.

These features of the movement and its trajectoryfrom unprecedented uprising to containment and defeat over the course of a month or sorequire that we reflect, again, on just what it means to describe this rebellion as a Black-led, multiracial one. Such considerations are particularly urgent when we register the special role played by Black leaders in the undermining and suppression of the most dynamic aspects of the revolt. In many cases, these anointed leaders represented, despite their appeals to a self-evidently undivided Black community, one part of itthe Black middle-classin opposition to another. What distinguishes these leaders and the role they play in contemporary revolts, is that they are not only drawn from the ranks of churches, non-profit groups, and business owners, as might have been the case decades ago. Today they occupy key political posts in many of the cities affected by riots and mass actions in the movements first week, carrying out the duties of mayors and police chiefs in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, DC (21 of the largest 50 US cities have Black police chiefs).9 In too many instances, it was up to these elected officials to discriminate between what they claimed to representBlack Lives Matter or members of our community who have suffered from systematic racism and oppressionand the actions (looting and violence) they could only disavow. They did so by attributing them in coded terms (anarchists) to white outsiders intent on dooming the movement, or even to what Los Angeles city councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson called domestic terrorists, to be dealt with, presumably, with the ruthlessness such labels call for.10

Every reckoning with the causes and consequences of the George Floyd rebellion must poseand try to answera long list of questions. What, in the first place, was distinct about this uprising relative to its recent precursors: the riots of 2014 and 2015, in Ferguson and Baltimore, and the rise of the slogan Black Lives Matter, but also the almost-forgotten explosion in Los Angeles in 1992 and, still more distant, the great wave of urban riots in the 1960s? What role did the ambient crisis, the combined effects of the pandemic shutdowns, and the ongoing social fallout of the 2008 meltdown play in shaping the particular form of this revolt, as well as its scale and its social composition? In what sense was this revolt defined by its character as Black-led, yet multiracial in nature? How did this fact of its being oriented and pushed forward by Black proletarians differ from previous patterns of protest arranged and overseen by groupsfrom NGOs and activist organizations to local Democratic party politiciansclaiming to represent the interests of a Black community without divisions? Why did white workers, as well as a sizable fraction of the progressive white middle-class, join these demonstrations, and what effect did their participation have? In what sense was the revolt defeated not only by means of brutal repression, but through its embrace and deformation by these same progressive forces? And finally, how, despite their novelty, do the events of May and early June fit into a longer sequence of struggles dating back not simply to the 1960s, but to the wrenching and peculiarly American violence of the Civil War and Reconstruction? I have tried to touch on a number of these questions already (and I will return to them near the end). I now want to turn, for the moment, to the question of the historical resonance of the rebellion.

In an extraordinary chapter (Rebels with a Cause) in his 1963 book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, on the history of class struggle in the US and the paradoxical place of Black workers within it, James Boggs traces a pattern, initially created by American capitalism in the Civil War, that was played out repeatedly over the course of the following century. The history he draws up is organized around three key episodes: Reconstruction, the labor movement during World War II, and the ongoing Black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. The pattern is one in which Black workers are, in moments of profound crisis, called upon to save what Boggs calls the Union, playing on both the political meaning this term has in US history and the sense it assumes in the American workers movement in the mid-20th century. Saving the union means integrating Black workers into a particular cause or movement, whether it be the military defeat of the South, or the mounting intensity of labors struggle with capital in a moment of depression and global war. Whether in the figure of ex-slaves fleeing the South, joining the Union army, and converting the cause of the Civil War into abolishing slavery rather than saving the Union, or in that of Black workers migrating North to enter industry, and the labor movement, only to help set off an extraordinary wave of wildcat strikes, Black workers saved the Union only in order to introduce new dissension and antagonisms within it.

The emancipation of Black workers in the South, carried out not by means of Lincolns proclamation but by a ruthless war carried out by the Union army, would be definitively overturned with what Boggs calls the Bargain of 1877, in which erstwhile enemies, Northern industrialists and the Southern landowning class, agreed to cede political control of the South and social control over Black workers to the vanquished plantation owners, with Northern capital gaining an upper hand over the US economy as a whole. W.E.B. Du Bois called this turning point the counter-revolution of property; but Boggs, like Du Bois before him, stresses that it was the nascent US labor movement that underwrote this agreement. Among the historical conditions that gave rise to the American workers movement, the abandonment of recently emancipated Black workers was decisive. Their return to conditions of servitude, under a caste system as brutal as that of slavery itself, laid the groundwork for the formation of a segregated labor movement, one in which millions of American workers were not recognized as such, their struggles seen as racial in nature. Boggs describes this betrayal, on the part of the US labor movement in solidarity with the Northern capital, as the first major defeat of the class struggle in the United States (my emphasis). Labor struggles shifted toward industries that flourished in the muck and gore of war, steel and railroads, which saw massive strikes in 1877 and the early 1880s; labor unions, with the American Federation of Labor in the lead, formed along segregated lines. Jim Crow prevailed not just in the South, but in Northern industry, and in the workers movement as a whole. Black struggles, which before the war were described as rebellions, were now invariably described as race riots, with no bearing on class struggle as a whole. Even American Marxists, Boggs observes, have always thought of the working class as white and have themselves discriminated against Negroes by hesitating to recognize them as workers.

Decades later, in 1941, it took the threat of a March on Washington, organized by Black workers under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, to compel FDR to issue an executive order mandating the integration of the US defense industries, now on a war footing. Just a few years before, Black workers had integrated the steel industry (taking the worst jobs), and had joined the assembly line at Ford, a concession on the unions part meant primarily to head off the prospect of Black workers becoming scabs and strikebreakers. It took, Boggs notes, the prospect of worldwide conflagration to break Jim Crow in the factories and the US labor movement altogether. From the moment they entered US industry, Black workers began to seize upon all the weaknesses of American capitalism, Boggs writes, within the armed forces and in the defense industry. Throughout the war, hundreds of revolts took place among the Negro soldiers and sailors, most of them hushed up; despite a no-strike pledge signed by union leadership, the war industries in the north also witnessed hundreds of wildcat strikes, often led by recently employed Black workers. Having been integrated into production to save the Union, these workers waged their own war on two fronts, carr[ying] on offensive battle against both management and the white workers often causing splits inside the union and among the workers. These actions continued throughout the first decade of the postwar period, as workers in the auto industry, often led by a militant core of now-seasoned Black workers, continued to launch wildcat strikes, in view of seizing and maintaining control over the labor process within them. It was only with the large-scale introduction of automation in the automotive industry, underwritten by union bureaucrats, that these initiatives were defeated. Automation, which allowed plant managers to reformat the labor process and expel a significant fraction of now redundant Black workers from assembly lines, represented an occasion for companies once again to take control of their shop floors, and union bureaucracies of their own organizations.

It is no coincidence that Boggss The American Revolution appeared exactly 100 years after the emancipation of Black workers from the yoke of slavery. The story he tells of class struggle in the US begins at a moment in which the working class was largely agrarian and, in the case of Black workers, subject to new forms of servitude they would only break with the great migration to the industrial North decades later (an exodus from Jim Crow that would echo a prior flight from the South and bondage in the midst of the Civil War). The exemplary episode of the formation and activity of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and Black workers special role within it, marks a high point in the historical arc he describes. But already in 1963 Boggs could describe a vast historical mutation underway, one that would have profound effects on the nature of class struggle in the US. Just a year before Johnsons Great Society legislation, Boggs wrote from the threshold of a coming, and prolonged, period of crisis and decline that would follow hard upon the postwar boom. A wave of urban riots would kick off this process, first in Watts, then in the industrialized North (Detroit, Newark) and, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in scores of cities across the country (in a pattern echoed in the Floyd rebellion). Just around the corner was 1968 and the Tet Offensive, but also the oil crisis of 1973 and a near-decade of economic crisis (stagflation).

When Boggs describes the effects of automation on the automobile industry in the 1950s, he emphasizes the primary objective and effect of this revolution in production: that capital, in collaboration with union management, regain control over the shopfloor and over the union rank and file. This process spells the end of the Union itself, he writes, a death sealed by the CIOs merger with the AFL in 1955. But Boggs also is attuned to the impact of automation on the rank and file, and the broader working class. These effects were apportioned unequally, and generally along racial divides. As sizable gains in labor productivity brought about new production processes that rendered many auto workers redundant, Black workers tended to be the first to be expelled both from industry and from the union itself. For Black workers, deindustrialization, the process whereby the manufacturing cores share of employment declines relative to other sectors, was sped up, unfolding more dramatically and suddenly than it did for their white peers. Throughout the second half of The American Revolution, Boggs calls those Black workers expelled from industry and the labor movement the unemployed and the outsiders.

What these terms seem to designate is less a sociological grouping than a broad, social, and material process in which Black workers bear the brunt of an increasingly crisis-prone capitalist economy. Over the course of the next half-century or more, up to the present, Black unemployment rates would on average be double those of white workers and, in times of acute crisis, almost three times as high. When speaking broadly of the unemployed, we must also consider what economists call the labor underutilization rate, a category that tries to capture persistent trends in underemployment for certain groups of workers, as well as the extent to which these workers, unable to find consistent work (or work that matches the skills they bring to the labor market), will drop out of the work force altogether. Over the past two or three decades, commentators have tended to describe these jobs as precarious ones: without any of the job security or benefits accorded the workers organized into the great industrial unions of the middle of the last century.

While many workers expelled from the industrial core would remain un- or under-employed, and on the outskirts of the organized labor movement, others would be absorbed into a rapidly expanding service sector, especially beginning in the 1970s. As this sector began absorbing some of those made redundant by automation in manufacturing plants, it also began to absorb women, who started pouring into the workforce at the same time. What distinguished the so-called service sector from the manufacturing core of the economy was the fragmentation of workforce it registers and, with this fragmentation, its reorganization along more clearly gendered and racialized lines. One of the salient tendencies of the industrialization process is the relative convergence of labor processes across what were once distinct craft-based industries and, with it, a convergence of skills (workers become machine operators) and wages across once distinct lines of production (steel and automobiles, say). As Boggss account of the rise and fall of the CIO makes clear, these material conditions at the level of the labor process make possible the integration of Black workers into a broader, more coherent workforce. The full integration of Black workers was, of course, never complete: they were often assigned the worst jobs in these industries, were paid less than their white peers, and were the first to be fired when automation-induced job cuts were introduced. These divisions were, however, on occasion overcome; indeed, the specific conditions of employment in the automobile industry made it possible for Black workers to assume key roles not only in the production process, but also in the union and its struggles. The upshot was, Boggs writes, at times to raise problems which the white workers and the union had never before had to face, often causing splits inside the union and among the workers. But these splits had the effect not of weakening the union, but of strengthening it, as is evidenced by the wave of wildcat strikes the union rank and file set off throughout the war and the first decade after.

The tendency toward convergence and integrationof labor processes, wages, and skills, but also of Black and whitecharacteristic of the industrialization arc is seemingly reversed with the explosion of the service sector. Here the tendency is toward fragmentation and segmentation. Vast disparities open up between skills and wages, as labor processes are differentiated as dramatically as they were in the pre-industrial epoch. These disparities create a polarization of the labor market, in which a small fraction of well-remunerated jobs are set off against an ever expanding bottom end of the labor market consisting of low-skill, low-wage occupations.11 This polarization in turn depends on the segmentation of the workforce and the coding of certain types of labor as womens work, or appropriate for Black workers (and especially Black women). Black workers are not only subject to higher rates of un- and under-employment than white workersagain, especially in recessionsbut tend to be concentrated, when employed, in specific, often poorly-paid, segments of the labor market. Underrepresented in what remains of the manufacturing sector, as well as in construction, they are shunted into what are often called caring occupations, in health and education, where they often land at the bottom end of the wage scale.

These tendencies toward un- and under-employment, relative to white workers, as well as the broader segmentation of the labor market along racial lineswith Black workers disproportionately assigned low-wage service occupationscreate at times insurmountable fractures within the working class, as workers are divided by industries, workplaces, skills, and so on. These divisions, and the general tendency toward fragmentation and divergence outlined above, make it especially difficult to organize workers into powerful workplace organizations of the kind that emerged in a rapidly industrializing US (a phenomenon, it should be repeated, that took hold in an environment of depression and global war). Above all, they make it possible, and even encourage, white workers to differentiate themselves from their Black counterparts, with whom they otherwise often share a great deal. White workers often find themselves differentiated from Black workers by the labor market, even and especially when they are forced to compete with those same workers for specific types of service sector occupations. Anti-Black racism is a consistent feature of American life. But it is undeniable that the particularly virulent racism of the last 30 years, including the overt and highly-articulated racism of the erstwhile liberals of the ruling class (think of the role played by superpredator trope in the Democratic Party of the 1990s) has its roots in these structural transformations.

The process I am describing amounts to a profound transformation of the labor market and the social division of labor and, with them, the composition of the working class in the US. These new segmentations, introducing widening fractures within the labor market with respect to both wage levels and definitions of skilled labor, are reinforced by workplaces that tend to be smaller and more spatially dispersed. The re-racialization of the labor market requires these articulations, which allow certain kinds of occupationsespecially low-skill care workto be encoded as Black jobs. By no means do Black workers have a monopoly on low-wage, low-skill personal service work. It is the very susceptibility of white workers being reassigned to such occupations that reinforces the racial stigma associated with them, and undoubtedly contributes to the more generalized, socially pervasive rise in white racism and resentment towards Black workers. Of particular note is the place of Black women workers in the contemporary service economy. Since the conclusion of the Civil War, Black women have historically had much higher labor force participation rates than white women (or Black men); but they have equally been excluded from both jobs in industry and the clerical work generally assigned to white women. This left work on farms and, especially, domestic labor in the homes of white families as their only source of income. Domestic labor of this sort was not only encoded as Black womens work, it was deliberately excluded from New Deal-era social welfare provisions (the Social Security Act of 1935 excluded farm laborers and domestic workers from coverage).12 Today, Black women are considerably overrepresented in low-wage service occupations, and in particular in caring occupations, compared to their white counterparts. The historical legacy of Black womens exclusion from industrial and office work accounts for their overrepresentation in occupations like home health care aides, nurses assistants, and childcare providers: among the fast growing occupations of the past decade, and the lowest-paid.13

This breaking apart and recomposition of the labor market and the US working class since the 1960sa recomposition that intensified racial and gender divisions within themis part of a much broader pattern of crisis and disorder that beset the US economy from the late 1960s onward, unfolding over decades. When Boggs wrote The American Revolution in 1963, the US was on the verge not just of Johnsons Great Society legislationwhat would turn out to be the last hurrah of the New Deal order set in place in the 1930sbut also of the social explosions of the 1960s: the riots in Black cities on the one hand, the student and antiwar movements on the other. These social ruptures were accompanied by a slow-moving crunch on private sector profitability, a systemic crisis that would emerge full-blown with the oil crisis in 1973. By the early 1970s, a new political edifice was being constructed to confront these dilemmas. It is no accident that the crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the rise of a new Black political class, which began to assume power in major US cities (Maynard Jackson in Atlanta and Tom Bradley in Los Angeles). These political personnel represented the rise to power of a newly consolidated and expanded Black middle class, the primary beneficiaries of civil rights struggles of a generation before. But Black political power represented a poisoned gift, the helm of the municipal ship transferred at the very moment the devastations of deindustrialization began to surface in major US cities. The shrinking industrial workforce, combined with a property tax base that declined dramatically as the white working class fled for the suburbs, compelled city governmentswhatever their stated political commitmentsto slash social welfare spending dramatically and impose fiscal austerity. These conditions continued unabated throughout the decade, as a prolonged stagflation crisis beset the nation, combining rampant unemployment and inflation. Blighted inner cities were neglected and left to crumble.

In a process that would play out over decades, an unrelenting economic slowdown compelled cash-strapped local governments to reallocate what was left of their municipal budgets to policing their impoverished populations, just as, at the state and federal levels, crisis conditions gave rise to a prison-building spree. As cities were abandoned to their rustbelt fates, or in a few cases primed for gentrification, as real estate markets collapsed and speculators and developers swooped in, the face of the state mutated dramatically. Throughout the middle of the 20th century, the state played the role of ensuring the reproduction of the capital-relation by regulating labor markets and ensuring a social wage that coordinated the interests of labor and capital, above all by encouraging the sharing of the fruits of labor productivity gains won through the expansion of industry. As the profitability crisis of the late 1960s worsened into a broader economic and social collapse in the 1970s, the dwindling share of surplus value allocated to the state for social spending meant that its administration of social peace gave way to a more directly coercive role, in which the emergence of active social antagonists compelled the state to take sides openly, to resolve the conflicts through the use of direct force.14

Throughout these massive, tectonic shifts in the US social landscape, as the fracturing of the working class along new lines reinforced or reactivated racial divisions within it, new divisions within the Black community or identity surfaced. The expanded Black middle class, which would capture political power in many US cities and even appoint Black police chiefs, not only won access to the best schools and in many cases professional prospects (in the public and private sector) but often found itself at odds with the Black underclass it claimed to represent. Separated from it not only by educational achievement and income but often spatially as well, as the easing of Jim Crow-era housing discrimination allowed well-to-do Black families to leave their former neighborhoods, this class found its claim to represent the Black community compromised by its role in managing the social fractures running through these cities. Positioned between white elites and an impoverished Black working class, and largely absorbed into the Democratic Party apparatus, this class was deputized to play a mediating role between the traditional centers of economic and political power and a subaltern Black population that was increasingly distanced from the dwindling economic core of the country, which had shifted dramatically to business services, real estate speculation, and other activities which do not contribute to the growth of actual production. This task of mediating between an increasingly multiracial elite and what Boggs called the Black outsiders often required, paradoxically, the invocation or enforcement of the very racial divisions they themselves were transcending.

The American Revolution, written at the tail end of the postwar boom, could not entirely anticipate the history I have quickly recounted here: rapid deindustrialization leading to a segmented, racialized labor market; a subsequent and enduring profitability crisis lasting decades; and a dramatic political realignment that would assimilate the winners of the civil rights movement into a post-New Deal dispensation charged with managing this economic and social crisis through punitive means (prisons, police violence). But Boggs did see one thing very clearly: the New Deal compact was collapsing before his eyes. As early as 1955, in fact, with the defeat of the Union, Boggs understood the history of class struggle in the US to have breached a threshold. In The American Revolution, the struggles of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the CIO, along with the decisive role played by Black workers within them, are recounted at great length, but without a hint of wistfulness. The triumphs were considerable: the wildcat waves, the initiative shown by union rank and file, the control over the production process, the willingness of Black workers to directly confront racism on the shopfloor and in the union. The movements weakness, as Boggs saw it, was not to be held against it: the inability of the Union to go on the offensive against capitalist society as a whole, rather than just plant owners at the point of production, was less a failure on its part than a limit inscribed in its very organizational tissue. More importantly, Boggs saw that the conditions that enabled its breakthroughsdepression, war, and an older technical division of laborhad eroded entirely, replaced by a postwar boom, a nuclear-armed peace, and the imposition of automation in core industries. He wrote The American Revolution above all as a polemic against those (Government officials, labor officials, and the university professors, not to mention well-meaning liberals) who contended that the solution to unemployment, particularly among Black workers, was this or that program of full employment, the guarantee of the right to work. To the contrary, he held, what the automation of US industry and the unprecedented material abundance made possible by advances in labor productivity represented was not the right to work but the snapping of the link between the right to live and the need to work, between existence and the wages system.

It is often forgotten that the 1963 March on Washington was organized around the demand not just for civil rights (freedom from discrimination in housing, education, and the labor market), but also for the right to work (jobs, in the form of a federally-funded retraining program for the unemployed).15 The list of speakers that day included not just Martin Luther King, Jr. and Roy Wilkins, but also Walter Reuther, whom Boggs singles out as having run the radicals and communists out of the recently merged AFL-CIO. To this list of demands articulated by a group of civil rights, religious, and labor leaders, and to those pining for the resurrection of the militant CIO of the sit-down strikes and wildcat actions, Boggs opposed the course of the Black struggle in the South as he understood it, and offered a stunning analogy to clarify its meaning. What he saw there, as the conflict intensified in the early 1960s, was less the cherished myth of a non-violent mass movement that exerted a fundamentally moral pressure on the existing political class, resulting in the Civil Rights Act of the next year, than an increasingly violent conflict drawing in any number of actors fighting not only against one another, but also amongst themselves. Pointing to the clear achievements of Kings non-violent tactics (the Birmingham bus boycott, for example), he also underlined the violent nature of the response to them of white civilians and state authorities. Black southerners answered these atrocities perpetrated by white civilians against Negroeslest we forget: the 16th Street bombing in September 1963 was just one of dozens of bombings of Black civilians in Birmingham between the late 1940s and 1963, earning the city the name Bombinghamby, in some cases, taking up arms of their own in self-defense.16 What Boggs saw in the Black struggle in the US South was not simply a non-violent mass movement whose objective was the securing of civil rights for Black citizens, but a mutation of the struggles undertaken by Black workers in northern industrial bastions: a migration of the wildcat strikes in the factories to open confrontation in the streets. These struggles represented, for him, a leap in antagonism, as Black workers found themselves no longer just confronting the boss, the union leadership, and racist coworkers, but waging an offensive against white society.

Amidst the terror campaigns carried out by white civilians in concert with local officials, state governments, and racist police forces, Boggs described what was unfolding in the South in the early 1960s not simply as a movement for civil rightsincluding the right to workbut as something closer to a nascent civil war, the most fitting analogy for which could be found in a contemporaneous conflict in North Africa. It was in the complex dynamics established by the war against the French colonial occupation in Algeriaa war that had recently concluded, in 1962that Boggs saw the future course of the conflict in the US South. This conflict would not only, in an echo of the first Reconstruction, pit state authorities, intent on preserving Jim Crow and segregation, against federal forces, or federal troops against white civilians, including those organized into secret terror organizations (which Boggs compared, strikingly, to the Secret Army Organization in French Algeria). Nor would it entail an at-times violent, but still largely frontal, confrontation between Black civilians and the local authorities (what is involved is not only the likelihood of open and armed revolt of the Negroes against state power in the South [my italics]). The terrain of conflict Boggs sketches out would be extraordinarily complex, with both Black and white insurgents facing off not only against state authorities and racist white workers but also against all the institutions of American society, and particularly those which are supposedly on their side (the labor organizations, the liberals, the old Negro organizations, and the Marxists):

In proposing this analogy, Boggs emphasized the fact that where Algeria represented for the French state an external colony17, the US Southor more accurately, the Black population who live therecan be seen as an internal one. But the point of the comparison was not to map the various actors (nationalists, fascist army officers, and so on) and the parts they played in the conflicts onto one another. The upshot of the analogy was to explore the peculiarly fragmented theater of operations in which both conflicts unfolded. Above all, it was to envision the possibility that the Negro struggle would not simply be waged against the local authorities (police and politicians) and white civilians (some organized into terrorist groups who killed with impunity). It would not only pit one group of white civilians against another in a struggle against Jim Crow, in an echo of the war carried out against the institution of slavery a century before. It would also give rise to division within the Black community itself (Negroes and Negroes), a struggle of newly militant Black workers against old Negro organizations like the NAACP whichhere again, Boggs proposed another dramatic analogylike the union [i.e. the labor movement] at this stage of the struggle has been by-passed by harsh realities.

The scenario Boggs anticipated in the early 1960s was, it seems, echoed in the events of late last spring. The conflict that unfolded then was remarkable in part because it did not merely set a militant Black minority against an unchanging white society, but instead brought to the fore deep divisions within what the media and the political class assume to be monolithic identities. The struggle against anti-Black violence, and first and foremost against the police murder of Black men, women, and children, was often waged against police departments staffed with and run by Black officers, in cities overseen by Black mayors. Within the movement itself, there were in turn splits between Black rioters and Black-led organizations that worked to tamp down the riots or prevent new ones from occurring. The riots were composed not simply of Black partisans, though they were often led by them: they included, in cities like Los Angeles, large numbers of Latinos as well. Just as important, however, was the participation of white workersmany of them, in the midst of the shutdowns, without workin these actions, fighting alongside Black and brown comrades against white, Latino, and Black cops. These divisions within the identities Black and white were, importantly, articulated primarily along class lines. The George Floyd rebellion made it crystal clear that Black proletarians must fight on multiple fronts: not only against racist whites and murdering cops but against a peculiar form of racial domination (lets call it whiteness) in which the Black middle-class is called upon to play a special mediating role between Black workers and class society at large. Naturally, many in the Black middle class, especially students, refused this role assigned to them. By the same token, white workers were split between those who, like their great-grandparents, condemned Black workers in the streets and those who joined them. The white middle class, for its part, was split between those who ignored the events altogether, those who embraced them while condemning violence (i.e. property damage and looting) and appropriated the events for their own purposes, and finally those who threw themselves into the struggle wholeheartedly, understanding at least implicitly that the goal of the classless society is precisely what has been and is today at the heart of the Negro struggle.

White workers in the US find themselves in a novel historical situation, one that accounts for the fractures opening up among them. On the one hand, the labor market in the US remains segmented along racial lines, in such a way that racial divisions within the working class assume an objective form, irreducible to the attitudes and behaviors of workers themselves. But this fragmentation of the labor market is itself enveloped within a longstanding arc of immiseration that affects Black and white workers alike, and exposes them to many of the same forms of direct (police shootings) and indirect (e.g. declining life expectancy for white workers) violence once thought to be inordinately imposed on Black workers. This process of immiseration, characterized by stagnant wages, declining labor force participation, rising rates of labor underutilization, and so on, has slowly chipped away at the advantages accorded white workers in the labor market. This apparent convergence of the fates of white and Black workers has contradictory effects. On the one hand, it probably accounts in no small part for the large number of white workers who participated in the George Floyd rebellion in its riotous first week. The erosion of white skin privilege, in a context of global immiseration, opens the way to new forms of solidarity among white and Black workers. But it also provokes the opposite response: the dwindling discrepancy between white and Black workers just as often incites new and virulent forms of racism, as white workers cling to often illusory figures of distinction and hierarchy within the class. It is this contradictory dynamic which is likely to play itself out in more dramatic forms in coming revolts: some white workers joining Black comrades in an assault on whiteness as other white workers cling desperately to its ruins.

It should be underlined, in this context of splits within the working classbetween Black and white workers, and among white workers as a wholethat the Floyd rebellion unfolded largely at a distance from workplaces, where traditional forms of class struggle are said to occur. This makes a certain sense: the riots occurred in the midst of a massive and sudden spike in worklessness, after all. Many assumed that the essential workers forced to report to the warehouses, distribution hubs, and meat-packing plants during the pandemic would take matters into their own hands, shutting down what was left of the economy. Clashes surfaced across the country, but in a disconnected and unsustained way. We dont know how quickly things might have spun out of control had the street actions been joined by interventions within plants or the logistics sector. In this sense, the rebellion echoed some of the weaknesses of the revolts in the early phase of the 2008 crisisin Greece, in Egyptwhose fury and potency nevertheless left the production infrastructure largely intact.

The workplace struggles to comewe can be sure theyre nearwill most likely assume the spontaneous, wildcat forms Boggs recounts in his history of the CIO and the role of militant Black workers within it. But the conditions that made those struggles so momentous, namely the convergence of war and depression, in a context of rapid industrialization, are no longer our own. We can imagine Black workers will play a crucial role in these struggles; but we can also assume that many of the struggles that erupt within workplaces will reproduce the racial dynamic of US society as a whole, with white workers both joining and attacking Black workers, and frequently enough, one another.

Excerpt from:

The American Revolution: The George Floyd Rebellion, One Year Out - Brooklyn Rail

An alcohol action group is dismayed following news of another South Auckland liquor store being caught out for employment law breaches.

Members of Communities Against Alcohol Harm protesting outside a liquor store in tara. Photo: LDR / Justin Latif

Clevedon Road Liquor store owner Satnam Singh Jador has been fined $20,000 and ordered to repay $97,361.66 to four employees for a range of breaches, including not paying the minimum wage for all the hours staff were working.

The Labour Inspectorate noted this case had all the hallmarks of exploitation, due to the workers needing the job to retain their visa status.

The Employment Relations Authority ruling is the second in South Auckland this year.

Super Liquor Papatoetoe was ordered to pay close to $50,000 for exploiting a migrant worker in February, while over the last 18 months, Thirsty Liquor East Tamaki was fined $1000 and Thirsty Liquor Wickman Way in Mngere was fined $2000, both for failing to comply with employment laws.

Communities Against Alcohol Harm regularly opposes liquor licence applications across South Auckland.

The group's secretary, Grant Hewison, said a number of liquor store applications, including for the Papatoetoe and Wickman Way stores, had been approved despite being the subject of Labour Inspectorate investigations.

"It's modern slavery - straight out."

Auckland Council's licensing inspectors needed to treat worker exploitation more seriously by checking if bottle store owners had been complying with employment law, he said.

"In the case of the stores in Papatoetoe and Mngere, the licensing inspectors did not report any issues about the employment law breaches, although Labour Inspectorate investigations were underway.

"If someone is working exorbitant hours, not being paid fairly and being exploited, then that's modern day slavery in my book.

"And given there's been so much published on how rampant employment law concerns are with bottle stores - you would have thought there would be questions asked of liquor licence applicants about whether there were any negative reports about them from the Labour Inspectorate."

Auckland councillor Fa'anana Efeso Collins, who represented the Manukau ward, agreed that employment law breaches should be factored into licensing decisions.

"If people working for liquor store owners are feeling unsafe, then someone has to step in on their behalf, especially if these owners are being exploitative," he said.

"This is definitely something we have to look at.

"The Sale of Liquor Act is supposed to allow the community to have more say, so fuller information should be available, to give the community a much clearer picture of the type of retailer that they are."

From left, Communities Against Alcohol Harm secretary Grant Hewison, Auckland councillor Fa'anana Efeso Collins and Auckland University associate professor Christina Stringer. Photo: Supplied

Auckland University associate professor Christina Stringer, an expert in modern day slavery, said the issue was widespread in New Zealand.

She knew of numerous cases where employees had been required to work "very long, excessive hours" without breaks, often by themselves, while being monitored by cameras.

As was the case at the Clevedon Liquor store, employers are often keeping two sets of records, with one set designed to look like they are operating legally, while a second set shows employees' actual working hours, Stringer said.

In some instances employers are requiring their staff to pay part of their wages back, with threats of having their visas revoked used as a means of control.

Auckland Council needed to work more closely with the Labour Inspectorate teams inside the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to curb the practices, she said.

"Many migrants are sold the dream that working in a liquor store is the pathway to residency," she said. "The Labour Inspectorate is the key agency. But central government can't do this alone. Everyone has a part to play."

In a written response, Auckland Council spokesperson Rob Abbott said council could not "cancel alcohol licences" of stores found to be exploiting workers, as such decisions were the responsibility of the Alcohol Regulatory and Licensing Authority.

"However, council alcohol licensing inspectors can apply to the authority to cancel an alcohol licence where there is evidence a licensee is breaching employment laws that warrants cancellation.

"We also have the ability to consider an applicant's history as an employer and take this into account when deciding whether to support or oppose the granting, or renewal, of a licence application."

MBIE said it only shared its labour inspection findings with local authorities' licensing inspectors "if asked".

But it said recently instituted measures, such as creating a visa for migrants to switch to when they leave exploitative situations, and a dedicated helpline to report bad employers, should make it easier to combat these practices.

"These offences are a case of blatant disregard for minimum employment standards," said Loua Ward, of Auckland's Labour Inspectorate.

"We continue to see workers in the liquor industry who are not receiving a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. [But] cases of worker exploitation in New Zealand will not be tolerated."

Local Democracy Reporting is a public interest news service supported by RNZ, the News Publishers' Association and NZ On Air.

Read this article:

Liquor licences approved for Auckland bottle stores that had broken labour laws - RNZ

ASHEVILLE - Starting July 8, you'll need to be a local, or know someone who is, to dine at Smoky Park Supper Club.

With a return to full-service dining, the restaurant will change its model to what Smoky Park reps called in a press release a "membership-based, community focused restaurant."

That means that at least one member of each party dining at Smoky Park Supper Club must have a membership, which costs only $1 and will be obtainable only by North Carolina residents.

Membership registration can be completed in person. Members will be permitted accompanying guests, such as family members and out-of-town friends.

Like many restaurants we are trying to adapt to changes within the industry as well as changes happening here locally in Asheville, Smoky Parkgeneral manager and co-owner Kristie Quinn said in a statement.

In order to provide the highest quality food and beverages and best possible experience for our guests, while also making work sustainable for our staff, we realized we need to change our business model," she continued. "We made the decision to prioritize our repeat guests and local community because those are the relationships that have always been the most important to us.

Though Quinn did not specifically mention what changes she spoke of, challenges that have lately plagued restaurants have been numerous and, in many cases, unexpected side effects of the pandemic.

Based on a national pool of over 2,800 surveys of food service workers conducted from Oct. 20, 2020-May 1, One Fair Wage found that more thanhalf of female restaurant workers said overall levels of unwanted sexual comments had increased post-pandemic.

Related coverage: The tipping point: Some say the subminimum wage is remnant of slavery, has to go

Restaurants and COVID-19: Good, bad and the ugly: What it's like working in restaurants during COVID-19

Many workersreported tipdecreases during and after the pandemic, with mothers hit the worst.

Other challenges have included supply chain issuesand general bad behavior from restaurant customers whose many transgressions have ranged from not showing up for reservations to verbally berating staff.

Smoky Park co-owner Matt Logan said in a statement that this membership move should allow the restaurant to take care of locals and employees alike.

We are attempting to shift the traditional restaurant model into one that will be more sustainable for the staff and more enjoyable for the people who live here in our community," he said.

Smoky Park Supper Club, built into 19 shipping containers situated near the banks of the French Broad River, is anchored by chef and co-owner Michelle Baileys wood-fired, locally-sourced fare.

Expect a new menu when the new model launches with guest favorites sharing the pagewith new creations, she said.

"Our new model of service will also allow us greater flexibility to host special events and dinners throughout the week," Bailey said.

Smoky Park Supper Club is at 350 Riverside Dr. More atwww.smokypark.com.

___

Mackensy Lunsford has lived in Asheville for more than 20 years, and has been a staff writer for the Asheville Citizen Times since 2012. Lunsford is a former professional line cook and one-time restaurant owner.

Reach me:mlunsford@citizentimes.com.

Read more: Subscribe to the Citizen Times here. Subscribe to my newsletter here.

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Smoky Park Supper Club becomes member-based, allowing only locals and their guests to dine - Citizen Times

Three potential victims of modern slavery and labour exploitation have been rescued during a raid by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) at a hand car wash in Liverpool.

GLAA officers were joined by Merseyside Police and HM Revenue and Customs National Minimum Wage team for the operation on Wednesday June 30 in Wavertree.

The potential victims, the youngest of whom is in his late teens with the other two in their 20s, were safeguarded and taken to a reception centre set up for the operation where they received specialist support.

Two men a 31-year-old Iranian national and 24-year-old Iraqi national were arrested at the car wash on suspicion of committing forced or compulsory labour offences under Section 1 of the Modern Slavery Act.

Both suspects, who were also arrested for suspected immigration offences, were interviewed by the GLAA before being released under investigation later that day.

GLAA officers also conducted searches of the car wash and addresses of the two suspects.

Information received via the Modern Slavery Helpline earlier in the year combined with the GLAAs own intelligence gathering indicated that workers at the site were not being paid the National Minimum Wage, had identification such as birth certificates taken off them, and were constantly monitored on site, suggesting a level of coercion and control.

GLAA senior investigating officer Martin Plimmer said: This operation demonstrates the importance of members of the public being able to spot the signs of modern slavery and more importantly reporting their concerns so we can take action.

Its not dramatic to say that if you pick up the phone and make a report, you could actually be rescuing somebody from a life of slavery. One day in slavery is one too many and we believe we rescued people here who sadly were in that horrific situation.

Our investigations are ongoing and we will ensure that the potential victims continue to receive all the support that they need.

Excerpt from:

Potential victims of modern slavery and labour exploitation found at Liverpool hand car wash - Forecourt Trader

To the Editor:

Re Maybe Trump Wasnt the Worst President Ever?, by Mark K. Updegrove (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, July 1):

James Buchanan has long occupied last place in the rankings of U.S. presidents, but thanks to Donald Trump, it looked as if he was on the verge of surrendering that ignominy. After all, Mr. Trump seemed to be the strongest candidate in the last 100 years to displace Buchanan. Unfortunately for Buchanan, the 142 presidential historians who participated in C-SPANs just released 2021 Presidential Historians Survey decided otherwise.

Apparently, Buchanans encouragement of the Supreme Courts decision upholding slavery in the Dred Scott case, endorsement of fraudulent election results in the Kansas territory to support its admittance to the Union as a slave state, and failure to respond to states seceding from the Union were viewed as more egregiously incompetent than Mr. Trumps being the only president to stand in the way of the peaceful transfer of power and mishandling a pandemic that led to more than 600,000 deaths in the United States so far.

For the countrys sake, there will hopefully be no future contenders for the title of Worst President Ever.

Gene HarringtonEllicott City, Md.

To the Editor:

With the passage of time, historians have become more generous in their evaluations of the performance of Republican presidents, such as Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. But time will not be as kind to Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump has yet to be held accountable for many of his actions while in office, including the cases of obstruction of justice cited in the Mueller Report, perpetrating the Big Lie relating to the 2020 presidential election, and inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. In addition, the prosecution of the Trump Organization by the Manhattan district attorney is only the start of several criminal cases likely to be filed against Mr. Trump in various states.

When C-SPAN issues its next presidential rankings, Mr. Trump could very well displace James Buchanan at the bottom of the list.

Jack NargundkarGermantown, Md.

To the Editor:

When you attempt to overthrow the United States government, that makes you the worst president ever no matter what else occurred while you were in office.

Patricia WilsonMadison, Wis.

These events were interpreted as a call to report only positive news about China and avoid criticizing the country, prompting some to claim that Snows relations with Mao Zedong were cozy and his independence compromised. In truth, Snow believed in free, independent and factual reporting. He repeatedly resisted efforts by others to dictate, alter or censor what he wrote, be it Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph McCarthy, Stalinist officials in Moscow or Chinese and U.S. officials during the Cold War.

Those who think that Edgar Snow would support the repressive policies of the current Chinese government toward journalists are either ignorant of the real meaning of his work or guilty of using him for their own purposes.

Sian SnowFounex, Switzerland

To the Editor:

Re New York Trails Rest of the U.S. in Virus Rebound (front page, June 21) and The American Renaissance Has Begun, by David Brooks (column, June 18):

The forecast for an uneven economic recovery in New York City sharply contrasts with the bright report of an economic renaissance amid Covid by Mr. Brooks. As he observes, many people have moved out of New York City and San Francisco to more rural areas like Idaho and the Hudson Valley. A sizable number of these urban-to-rural migrants are well-off and are working from home.

If that fortuitous arrangement outlives the pandemic, prospects for an economic boom and social revival will almost certainly leave behind hourly workers and small-business owners who depend on urban commuters.

Work from home is either impractical or simply proscribed for the majority of low-wage workers. It is this large segment of the labor force that seems least likely to burst out of the gate as the economy reopens.

Matthew AuerAthens, Ga.The writer is a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia.

Outdoor Dining? For Me, Not Yet

To the Editor:

Re Outdoor Dinings Next Challenge, by Pete Wells (Critics Notebook, Food, June 30):

The original purpose of building outdoor dining structures this last year was to ensure the air flow and social distancing made necessary by the pandemic. These two qualities are sadly lacking in many of the restaurant structures I had hoped to dine in but could not safely choose.

As someone whose health issues preclude vaccination, I must note and complain that many of these structures do not meet these standards.

Yes, design of these outdoor rooms is becoming more attractive and even impressive. But they really dont meet my needs of adequate ventilation and room for social distancing. I had hopes of easily choosing a place to dine, but sadly, I must wait until we accomplish herd immunity.

Jessica FrommTeaneck, N.J.

Read the original:

Opinion | Should Trump Displace Buchanan as the Worst President Ever? - The New York Times

Argentinas failure has been not to create more formal private jobs over the last 50 years, a period during which the countrys population doubled. From the side of the workers, the most representative and fundamental figure of the previous half-century has been Hugo Moyano. A hero of the struggle against neoliberalism for his teamsters and villain of the combat against capitalism for free- market advocates, getting to know him more intimately allows a better understanding of what has been going on in our countrys labour world.

Now aged 77, Hugo Moyano is approximating the metaphor of herbivorous lion of Pern in his last months milder, more conciliatory and weary. The 140-minute conversation (published word for word in PERFIL) ranges over various issues. At times it resembles the free association therapy typical of psychoanalysis, where the method is not to refute but to go with the flow, in this case leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions.

Before we started this interview, you told me that at the age of 10 you were already working in a cold cut factory in Mar del Plata, La Atlntica.

I started chopping and boning meat there, labelling the salami four by four, attaching toothpicks and then hanging everything out to dry. Afterwards I was a delivery boy for a butcher. By the age of 16 I was already attending the counter and packaging.

And then at the age of17 you entered Verga Hermanos, the first trucking company you worked for.

Yeah, transport. My dad worked there. Before that he had also worked in Platamar. He asked me if I wanted to do the same. I was then working off a bike, the only thing we had in the family a Reyes [Epiphany] present for my younger sister. I took it off her and went to work on a womans bicycle. Thats where my story begins.

At the tender age of 18, you were elected a union branch delegate in Mar del Plata.

I was indeed very young. It happened in an instant at a meeting. Garbage collectors were then still not recognised as belonging to the union. We fought over that and we had a secretary-general in the union who was a great guy a Communist. He went to the Labour Ministry with a presentation and then came and read out to us what had been discussed. There were some comings and goings but the garbage collectors could not join. They wanted to in order to improve their wages. At some point a comrade said: Why dont we have done with this, why dont we go on strike? And they told him in answer that we could all go to prison. Then an old man spoke out: And do you imagine that the prisons were built for dogs? No, they were built for men! If we have to go to jail, we will. Those things encouraged me. I was just a kid but older people were talking that way.

In 1971 at the age of 27 , you were elected secretary-general of the CGT (Confederacin General de Trabajo) Delegation, a meteoric rise.

I competed with the previous secretary-general. I realised that people saw that since I was young, I had plenty of drive. When there was a vote for the first time in history [it was a Sunday], there was a queue stretching over something like 70 blocks. That was an eye-opener for our people in Buenos Aires. They began to see Mar de Plata as an important branch. With that momentum I won the election.

Do you attribute being so adult at the age of 18 to having started work at 10, giving you the vigour of youth and the experience of somebody more mature?

I had plenty of drive but its not as if we swept all before us, as many people would make it seem, no. Our claims were incessant. I said at the time that if we had opposition, we would not be able to manage the union but I never did have any opposition. Opponents for sure, there are always opponents everywhere, but they were never organic or up to presenting a list against me in the union. Even though there was freedom and democracy. The popular recognition of us teamsters is huge.

When did you stop driving a truck?

I left Verga because they had trucks in Buenos Aires but none of their own locally. I drove unregistered lorries aged only 18 [or] 19 but the drivers of Buenos Aires let me drive their trucks all the same. I remember we drove out of Buenos Aires with a packet of yerba mate and chatting and then the other said: You drive and went to sleep. It was a Volvo 495, a huge vehicle for those times. When we reached Dolores, the police stopped and my sleeping partner only woke up when I slammed on the brakes. The cop looked at my very youthful face and said: Che, you wouldnt have a bit ofyerba, would you? Yes, take it, I said, handing over the quarter-kilo packet of yerba we had just bought. As we were driving on, I said to him: Just as well he didnt ask for any licence! My sidekick looked at me and said: Why do you think I gave you that packet of yerba? I have lots of anecdotes like that

Until what age did you drive?

Until my union activities began in 1971.

In 1987 you were elected secretary-general of the teamsters with four reelections (1991, 1995, 1999 and 2003). Also in 1987 you were elected deputy for Buenos Aires Province. Was that with Antonio Cafiero?

Yes, I was on Cafieros [Renewal Peronist] list. Previously I held various posts on the Mar del Plata branch of the Justicialist Party secretary-general. chairman, deputy chairman and secretary.

The secretary is often the one who has to do all the work

Yes, he has to work.

Did you already notice your differences with Carlos Menem, that things would not work out well with him?

Yes. I respect elected governments but if they distance themselves from defending the workers, Im always going to stay in the same place. I never liked Menems policies. I dont want to exaggerate but when he began to hand over the assets of the Argentines, our position was firm.

Argentina today has seven million formal private-sector workers just as when you started out. To what do you attribute Argentinas failure to create jobs?

There are many factors, primarily neoliberal policies.

During the dictatorship and the 1990s?

Of course, it allowed businessmen not topay attention to worker claims.

Thus creating informal employment?

Thats what neo-liberal policies caused.

There are only seven million people in formal private-sector jobs when the population has doubled [since 1970].

The national policies have to do with that. As the General [Pern] said, there is nothing better than an example. They tell us it costs 10 pesos to import a jug and 30 to make it here so we start importing. But when the factory here shuts down and the workers are fired, were giving jobs to foreigners, paying more than the value of a jug. This country went overboard with imports, closing down many textile factories when measured against the volume of imports. In the 1990s imports did indeed sometimes cost less than the national product. Peso-dollar parity produced chaos.

What did you think whenJoe Biden said: Wall Street did not build this country, the middle class did and the trade unions were the ones who built the middle class.?

It made me think that at last they are starting to understand Juan Pern and they understand because its the reality. Wealth is created by the workers. The conditions for creating jobs must exist. Theres a lot to be done.

When did you find out about the existence of Jimmy Hoffa, the archetypal teamster of United States trade unionism?

Fundamentally after seeing the movie, for all the talk about it. [My son] Pablo is in the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), as I was too but hes climbed a bit higher. I was ITF vice-president worldwide for land transport whereas hes ITF vice-president worldwide for transport in general aviation, shipping, the lot.

What do you think when Amazon, the biggest employer in the United States, takes a vote over a trade union and the workers vote against having a trade union?

That it could be a manoeuvre, that they want to modernise slavery to me it can be no other thing. Im not saying that there is nothing in the law which needs changing. There are things which may be modified but the trade unions should do it. Our collective bargaining agreement goes back to 1987 as its sole base. The average time on the road was 35 to 40 percent before that year whereas today it is 70 to 80 percent. You used to set out for Mar del Plata at 6pm and arrive at 6am the next morning in those big lorries. Today a truck takes seven or eight hours, 10 at most. You have to go, adapting things to this reality without going back in time. I do not deny that there are things which are useless to workers in practice. One example is sending people out on the street to work without safety.

If Rappi, PedidosYa or at one time Uber construct mechanisms of labour relations without trade unions, what is your reflection on that? Are those also new generations of modern slavery?

There are employees who do not even know who their boss is. They send them to certain places with all the risks that signifies, whether it be night or day.

Motorcycle and bicycle transportation are other forms of what teamsters do.

Humanitys most important invention is said to be the wheel. We move on wheels. Thats an advantage. There are many things to update while ensuring that there is no direct risk, either immediately or in the future.

If they generate advantages for the common good, we need to modify what is adverse, dont we?

Logically.

In Argentina, 86 percent of freight transport is trucked. What is the situation in other countries?

High everywhere. The lorry is more practical. When they talk of door-to-door transport, this means going straight from the factory to the place of work. If the item is transported by rail, you have to unload it from the train and then take it. Trucks save time as well as being much more practical, efficient and cheaper.

How do you imagine a future in which cars and trucks do not need human drivers? With 5G that will probably come to pass in 15 years, land transport could be driverless.

In the United States they wanted to put that in practice and it failed.

So its not going to happen?

It wont be easy. Many things are changing but it does not seem to me that its going to be easy. Almost impossible. Not only the roads need to be taken into account. For example, you have double-decker lorries. Our workers who drive them pick up a bonus, a wage and a half. They are very expensive vehicles and there are few of them. In many places the roads are not ready for them and the bridges are not high enough for the most modern trucks. Those things need study and adaptation.

Things neither you nor your son will see?

If I live as long as my mum, perhaps I will see some of those things.

Last Teamsters Day Alberto Fernndez said: If Hugo hadnt headed the CGT with Nstor, we wouldnt have been able to do what we did. How was your link with Nstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner from 2003 onwards?

It was very good with Nstor, he was very special. I got to know him when introduced by a comrade [Julio] Ledesma, who was militantly with the Kirchners. He said to me: Why dont we go and talk to Kirchner to see if we can get him to team up with [ex-president] Adolfo Rodrguez Sa? Each of us was working in the others campaign and we tried to bring them together.

To beat Menem?

Of course. He attended me in an office and we greeted each other. No problem with me, Nstor told me, whoever carries more weight [presumably in opinion polls] tops the ticket. Afterwards I saw him in the [Labour] Ministry when he was president.

And what was Cristina like?

She was different. We also discussed the same things, family benefits and payroll taxation. I was always trying to get on top of her. If something was, say, 70 pesos, I would ask for 130 peos. Then I would say: Cristina, 100, and youve got yourself a deal. And she would reply: But, Negro, the difference is now down to five pesos, to which I would respond: Five pesos are four kilos of bread, Cristina. I approached her from that angle and she would accept. Once I asked her: How is it possible that two-month gas bills in [posh] Barrio Norte are the same as in a working-class neighbourhood? Thats what the lads should be disputing. A two-month gas bill cannot be worth less than a gas canister in our neighbourhoods. With arguments like that I always won her over.

And Alberto Fernndez?

I often talked to him when Nstor was president. We have a good relationship.

And how does he differ today from when you knew him as Cabinet chief?

To me hes the same. He has a pretty important intellectual capacity. The situation of the country is different. Many people do not understand that. The worker does because not only did he take over a country in debt but the pandemic has done a lot of damage. Despite all that he keeps moving forward.

As vice-president, Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner has modified the wage bargaining guideline from around 30 percent by giving Congress employees about 40 percent, and then a few weeks ago your trade union clinched 45 percent, thus leading all the other trade unions to claim the same. Were the teamsters the wage bargaining benchmark for everybody else?

Everybody discusses wages in accordance with the inflation weve had. Weve signed a trigger clause [providing for the renewal of collective bargaining if inflation tops the wage increase]. Every year we have a special bonus for the start of classes [March] and the end of the year. We wont modify anything weve been signing for ages. I dont know about other trade unions. Theyve had some inconveniences but that does not modify other things.

[Economy Minister] Martn Guzmn set an inflation target of almost 30 percent with the first wage bargaining along those lines. But inflation topped that 30 percent to hit 45 percent. Dont you fear that if collective bargaining confirms 45 percent, inflation could move up to 50 percent?

That worry exists. You dont want it to happen but it does. We have a very good relationship with the business sector whose situation is understandable with many inconveniences, for example, the issue of tyres.

Which are imported and they cannot get them.

Of course. Fuel and highway tolls have also gone up, sums adding to costs. Thats pretty understandable even if some negative personalities go badmouthing transport. Thats all lies. I can assure you that when we sit down with serious business people, the wage discussion is totally responsible and respectful.

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Moyano: Weve always defended workers to the death - Buenos Aires Times