Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Sunday, May 30, 2021 | 2 a.m.

A year after the murder of George Floyd, America remains a nation torn by bigotry.

We find ourselves facing withering street-level attacks on Jews and Asians. Police killings of Black Americans continue unabated. Extremist political leaders on the right wage war on being Black in America, including with amplified assaults on voting rights for people of color across the country. Common-sense police reform remains lacking at the federal level. Now comes an angry effort by conservatives to prevent even teaching about race issues and racism in schools.

We have even witnessed some elected officials downplaying slavery itself, trying to convince Americans that the forced bondage of millions of Blacks and the unspeakable horrors they faced werent really as bad as history tells us it was.

The unifying thread to these problems? The Republican Party, Fox News and other right-wing media, and state-sponsored agitators from Russia continue to promote any issue that will further divide Americans, frighten white voters and encourage hatred of other Americans right down to the neighborhood level.

For profiteers in extremist media Fox News Rupert Murdoch and his ilk division is big business. And now it has become apparent that social medias business model is fueled on hate and conflict as well. These platforms trade in audience engagement, and for thousands of years few things get humans more engaged than ethnic and religious animus.

Meanwhile, right-wing media and social media work hand-in-hand to pump a steady stream of misinformation through the media ecosphere, where its shared in echo chambers that encourage Americans to disbelieve legitimate media and make the lies essentially impervious to fact-checking. These forces of propaganda and misinformation have not only driven the nation apart, theyve separated the right into camps that believe a badly distorted version of reality.

As social media morphs into a 24/7 engine of hate, one must ask when we as a culture say weve had enough of all this.

Enough with the conspiracies. Enough with lies. Enough with detached billionaires profiting from racism. Enough dancing slavishly at the end of a hate-filled, Russian-spawned meme.

With the anniversary of Floyds killing this past week, we owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, our nation and our planet to resolve to put in the hard work necessary to heal our country, value truth and honestly address the ills of our racial and ethnic divisions.

After Floyds killing, millions of Americans across the ethnic spectrum flooded the streets to say Enough to systematic racism and police abuses. Their historic demonstrations prompted forward motion on addressing inequalities, including at the federal level with the House-approved George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and in some state legislatures, including Nevadas. Case in point: Gov. Steve Sisolaks signing of two bills this past week to limit no-knock warrants and empower the state attorney generals office to investigate police departments over patterns of civil rights violations.

But as were all too well aware, the steps toward progress created panic and terror among the right-wing forces defending the white power structure. The George Floyd Act became mired in the Senate amid Republican opposition. Republican-dominated legislatures in some states passed laws making it a crime to criticize or insult a law enforcement officer, or decreasing protections for the type of social-justice demonstrators we saw last year. Then, of course, was the state-by-state campaign to suppress the vote among Blacks and other Americans of color.

Through it all, right-wing media and social media poisoned minds in support of these hateful actions, and Russian operatives took advantage of the situation to sow discord.

Americans must commit to overcoming these dark forces and putting the nation on a trajectory to fairness and equality.

Meanwhile, its essential that any candidate who dreams of running for office in 2022 resolve to stand for the best of American values: truth, open-heartedness, tolerance and inclusivity.

Visit link:

Truth, tolerance, compassion are what's needed to heal this nation - Las Vegas Sun

WASHINGTON When the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor, they were describing precisely why we set aside Memorial Day to honor all who have died in service to our nation.

We often declare, rightly I think, that those who gave their lives for our country were fighting for freedom. But after a year marked by a searing confrontation with racial injustice, in the present and in our history, we would do well to ponder the military sacrifice of Black Americans from the Civil War forward. In World War II alone, 1.2 million Black Americans served in the military. What did freedom mean for those who faced racial oppression?

Black men have fought in every single war for the United States, most of them at times when they werent even considered first-class citizens, says Christopher S. Parker, author of Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South.

In his interviews with Black veterans, Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington, found a patriotism rooted not in the reality of their moment but in aspirations for the future hope that America would recognize its founding values. Its the thing that kept them going, he told me.

Black Americans military service has been key to later advances in equal rights from the time of the Civil War, when formerly enslaved people signed up to fight for the Union. Their units, Parker notes, were separately designated as United States Colored Troops.

President Lincoln, a late convert to allowing Black men to fight in the war, himself declared that without the role of the Black soldiers, the war would not have been won, says Henry Louis Gates Jr., university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

Black military service had a direct relationship to the achievement of the rights of citizenship, Gates told me. In Lincolns final speech, he tentatively floated the idea of Black male suffrage for the men who had played such a decisive role in the Unions victory and for a small group of very intelligent Black men. Some scholars argue that this statement led to Lincolns assassination, since John Wilkes Booth was in the audience and essentially said that this was the last straw.

Gates, whose books include Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow, noted that Lincolns mostly southern black warriors (as he called the Black soldiers in 1864) would, along with northern Black abolitionists, ministers, and free Black men in the South, go on to play key roles in Reconstruction.

If the Civil War was unquestionably a battle for freedom, so was World War II. It led, as Gates noted, to the Double V campaign in the Black community, victory over fascism abroad, and simultaneously victory over anti-Black racism at home.

In his magisterial book From Slavery to Freedom, the late historian John Hope Franklin showed how racial subjugation stood in direct contradiction to the war aims President Franklin Roosevelt outlined in his Four Freedoms speech.

The experience of living in two worlds had prepared Negroes to wage two fights simultaneously, Franklin wrote. They felt compelled to carry on the fight for better treatment at home so as to give real meaning to the ideal of the Four Freedoms.

Franklin cited the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, who advocated for civil rights far more forcefully than her husband. The nation cannot expect colored people to feel that the United States is worth defending, she said early in the war, if the Negro continues to be treated as he is now.

Service in World War II and later in Korea were crucibles for future civil rights leaders. Parker noted that Hosea Williams served in an all-Black unit under Gen. George Patton. In 1965, with a young John Lewis, Williams would lead voting-rights marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Jackie Robinson, who would integrate Major League Baseball, was an Army lieutenant. In 1944, he refused to move to the back of an Army bus. He was court-martialed but acquitted.

A lot of people talk about patriotism these days, Parker told me. But what is patriotism? Its a commitment to a set of founding values so complete that one is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

This can be said of all we honor on Memorial Day. But Parker and Gates, like Franklin before them, are right to call our attention to Black Americans who served and sacrificed on the basis of what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called a promissory note, written in our founding documents one that still awaits full payment. Its hard to imagine a more sweeping sense of faith and hope.

E.J. Dionne is on Twitter: @EJDionne.

See the original post here:

From the desk of Service, patriotism and the promise of black liberation - Ukiah Daily Journal

COLUMBUS, Ohio Prior to the pandemic, Stevi Knighton had found a rhythm, juggling single parenthood, work and her passion for poetry and performance.

But by the summer of 2020, shed been laid off from her job as a grants and services coordinator. The gig she lined up on the main stage at the Columbus Arts Festival was canceled. To earn income, she delivered groceries, sold custom T-shirts and performed virtually all while caring for her two sons, 10 and 12, who were forced to attend school online.

Knighton collected unemployment, but shes still trying to track down a much-needed stimulus payment. She has a new job working from home for an education solutions company but it pays a low wage.

My T-shirts say, Hope is powerful, said Knighton, 37, of the Near East Side. Its the thing that keeps you going. I have a lot of hope that everything will work out. But, full disclosure, Im definitely nervous.

One year after the pandemic, studies show that women particularly mothers and people of color have an uphill battle to economic recovery. The higher rates at which they were pushed out of the labor market exposed longstanding systemic inequalities.

Disproportionate impact for mothers

In January, about 10 million, or a third, of women living with their school-age children, were not working, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau. This was 1.4 million more than January 2020.

By contrast, the number of fathers of school-age children who were not working was 3.8 million.

Not only are women more likely to work in service positions or other jobs impacted by pandemic closures, but they are also responsible for a larger share of childcare and unpaid domestic laborincluding managing their childrens schooling according to a report by The Hamilton Project economic policy initiative.

While all single mothers had greater declines in active work, women of color suffered the most. For example, the rate at which Black, non-Hispanic single mothers lost jobs was 7.5 percentage points higher in January 2021 than in January 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For white, non-Hispanic single mothers the increase was 5 percentage points.

The bureau also reported the percentage of unemployed single mothers by race, showing Asian, non-Hispanic women at 9.5%, followed by Black, non-Hispanic women at 9.3%, Hispanic women at 8.8% and white, non-Hispanic women at 5%.

In Columbus, the nonprofit organization Motherful focuses on providing resources, community and education to single mothers. Executive Director Heidi Howes said the pandemic highlighted just how much care work mothers do at home, now compounded by schooling and the increased risk of burnout.

This is the invisible work of women and moms that we dont pay for and we dont acknowledge, said Howes, who co-founded Motherful in 2018 with Lisa Woodward. For some of the moms weve been in contact with, it has been disastrous.

Responding to reports of food insecurity, Motherful supplements groceries for up to 30 families per week, due in part to a collaboration with Trader Joes.

South Side mom Ciera Shanks takes advantage of this service, which is helping her save money to improve life for her 10-year-old daughter.

I only make $15 an hour, and I still dont have food assistance, said Shanks, who is 30. I make too much. Its only because of (Motherful) that Im able to follow this financial plan.

Last year, Shanks was making ends meet by working part-time at the YMCA, studying early childhood education at Columbus State Community College and driving for Uber. She was laid off amid the pandemic and stopped working for Uber to avoid exposure to the virus.

She eventually found a job working from home for an addiction and behavioral health facility, but the stress of the new position, along with managing her daughters education, took a toll. She decided to take a break from school.

I got depressed and had to go into counseling for myself and have my daughter go into counseling when COVID first hit, because it was a really hard transition, she said. I felt like I had finally gotten on my feet emotionally doing what I love, and it was taken away.

'Motherhood is a very difficult job'

According to survey data analyzed by The Hamilton Project, women with a lower rating on the mental health index are associated with poor economic outcomes. And multiple women benefitting from Motherfuls resources have reported some mental health struggles.

Shanks is not the only one experiencing a detour in her education and career paths. Mothers often experience V-shaped employment patterns, or up-and-down work cycles. Brought on pay disparity and unequal access to promotions and advancement, this trend may be prolonged by the pandemic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau report.

As a result, women could see a decrease in total lifetime earnings.

Access to affordable childcare could help mothers return to the labor force, but some still fear their children will be exposed to the coronavirus.

At the onset of the pandemic, Nyshia Gentry put her 3-year-old son in daycare, but had to pull him out and get him tested when one of the teachers came down with COVID-19. Additionally, her 7-year-old had to transition to virtual learning following an outbreak in his classroom.

Gentry, who has since been laid off from her job at a warehouse, is looking for work-from-home opportunities.

I'm scared if anything happens at school again, Id have to quit, said Gentry, 26, of the South Side. (But work-from-home employers) expect you to be a lot more flexible. Its like, No, I have kids. They think because you're at home, you should be able to work any time.

Gentry said she is often frustrated by the strong single woman stereotype, which can be harmful.

We need help, too, she said. We need a break, too.

In Howes opinion, that help should come in the form of a mothering wage.

Motherhood is a very difficult job, she said. We dont recognize or value mothering skills. We think about it as a personal choice, but were raising workers to be part of this capitalistic society. Its all on mothers who dont get paid to raise them.

When it comes to race, the coronavirus pandemic has shed light on major economic and health disparities.

There was already a large racial wealth gap brought about by the legacy of slavery, segregation and housing discrimination. For instance, in 2019, the median Black household wealth in the country was 13 cents for every $1 of wealth for median white households, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research organization.

Given the correlation between poor living conditions and poor health, people of color had the highest COVID-19 mortality rates. More likely to be employed in frontline positions, they had greater exposure, and were forced to take more time away from work due to coronavirus symptoms, as outlined in a report by the National Partnership for Women & Families.

However, there were many people of color who could not afford to take time off during the pandemic. For shorter leaves (10 days or less), half of Latino workers and one third of Black workers had no form of paid time off, according to the report. And compared to white workers, Black workers were 83% more likely to be unable to take unpaid leave.

(The percentages for Latino and Native American, Pacific Islander and multiracial workers were 66% and 100%, respectively.)

To meet FMLA requirements for unpaid leave, employees have to be on the job for a certain period of time. Research shows that people of color have less access to full-time work, and are more likely to experience discrimination in the labor market. Furthermore, if they do have access to paid leave, they are less likely to have enough savings or resources to make ends meet.

'Everything came to a halt'

Keisha Riley knows some of the economic struggles all too well. Prior to the pandemic, the South Side mother of four was making money by cooking, cleaning, selling items at flea markets and working as an independent home health aide.

For several years, she was providing building maintenance for a community center, but chose to leave.

I had an issue with some of the treatment there and the pay, said Riley, 48, of the South Side. I just didnt feel like they were in my corner as an employee.

She also began caring for her 79-year-old mother, who struggled with rheumatoid arthritis. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic made matters worse.

Everything came to a halt, she said.

Riley said she has been frustrated by the time-consuming application for unemployment and food assistance.

She said she has been grateful for programs that helped her lower utility bills and access internet service at home. But she has seen other people of color struggling even more.

I've known people that have lost people, she said. They don't have access to certain things. Just in general, people are losing their homes.

Riley's mother died in April.

On top of health and economic struggles, Black people have also had to contend with the psychological impact of last years social justice uprising not to mention the everyday fear of police violence in their neighborhoods. Columbus has seen its fair share of high-profile police killings of Black people, including the deaths of Casey Goodson, Jr. and Andre Hill in December alone.

Communities of color may also be waiting a while for true economic recovery. For instance, although the national unemployment rate dropped to 6% in March, it is 13.4% for Black workers and 11.5% for Latino workers.

In the meantime, Riley said she registered her food-delivery business with the state.

My goal is to buy property this year and to get my business off the ground, she said. I definitely don't want to depend on anybody else. And I feel like the pandemic has shown us that you really need something of your own.

___

(c)2021 The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio)

Visit The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio) at http://www.dispatch.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

2021 http://www.dispatch.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The rest is here:

'We need help, too. We need a break, too.' Mothers, people of color face unseen challenges - Union Democrat

JUNE 2, 2021 Updated 15 hours ago

Employment

Last week a major McDonald's franchisee lost four restaurants for asking staff to sign illegal bonded labour agreements. But training bond schemes are more common than you would think because sometimes they're actually legal.

Bonded labour or forced labour sounds like it should be completely illegal,and it is for the most part.

But in some cases, employers can use legitimate training bond schemes to ensure their investment in a worker is paid off.

However, the issue isemployers are misusing legitimate training bond schemes to illegally secure workers intoterm agreements.

What do you think?Click here to comment.

Dundas Street Employment Law partnerRosamund Webby says training bond agreements,colloquially known as "bonding arrangements"are not uncommon.

Typically these training bond scheme involve acompany paying for the training of a legitimate course or apprenticeship under the premise the worker will be bonded to that employerfor certain period it could be a year, or a year and half.

However, Webby says,these arrangements tend normally to be in respect of added extras to the actual employment.

"Such as expensive professional development or training in things that arent actually required to competently perform the basic job an employee is employed to undertake."

Start your day with a curation of our top stories in your inbox

Start your day with a curation of our top stories in your inbox

She says generally, the amount thats repayable also reduces the longer the employee remains in employment.

What is not allowed and in breach of the Wage Protection Act is charging aworker or prospective employee a premium for giving them employment.

In the case of McDonald's former franchisee owner Prakash Hira asked staff topay him $3000 total as a bond agreement for the entire hiring/on boarding & training cost, and for time spent throughout the onboarding processes such as orientation/follow up orientation, training plans and time spent training, uniform costs as well as several administrative costs.

Webby says all of these costs are incurred simply in employing and ensuring a person can perform the basic job.

They are not added bonus extras that the employer doesnt really need to offer.

Hence that contract isn't "worth the paper its written on", Webby says, as the arrangement is likely unlawful, and if its signed, it is likely to be entirely incapable of being enforced.

Workers' rights advocate Nathan Santessohas worked on thousands of exploitation cases and says while illegal training bonds are not common, about onein 20cases he deals involvesa dodgy bonded labour agreement.

He says they were especially common in industries like beauty and massage clinics.

Santesso says he is currently dealing with an employment dispute involving abeauty therapyworker bonded to her employment for two years over a sham training course on laser hair removal.

He says bonds are allowed if there is an actual qualification the employer is paying for, usually to a third party, for the worker to attend, such as flight training.

This protects the employer if the worker decides to take a free training course andleave without working.

Hospitality worker's advocate Chloe Ann King says vulnerable migrant workers whose visas are tied to their employers are often victims of illegal bonded labour arrangements.

"Workers are asked to pay a premium and given a false sense of hope about getting residency. It's totally cruel," Ann King says.

She says exploitative employers often think their contracts trump employment law.

According to MBIE,workers being asked to paypart or all their wages back to employers and payingpremiums for getting employment were among of the most common forms of migrant exploitation.

There have been calls from businesses and worker's advocatesfor the government to act fast on having a modern slavery law in New Zealand, like Australia, the United Statesand United Kingdom already have.

All three countries also have dedicated modern slavery laws, designed to make businesses report on the potential risks of forced labour in their supply chains and what they are doing to address them. New Zealand has no such legislation.

"Workers are asked to pay a premium and given a false sense of hope about getting residency. It's totally cruel." Chloe Ann King,Raise the Bar

Ann King says while this legislation is necessary, current employmentlaw took exploitation seriously. Employers who exploit migrants can be imprisoned for up to seven years and fined up to $100,000.

But the problem was, theLabour Inspectorate and the Employment Relations Authority, where employment disputes are heard, have been underfunded and did not have the resources to enforce the law.

She says both departments were overlooked in this year's Budget.

Disputes are facing up to two years of wait time before they are heard at the ERA due to a backlog of cases post-Covid.

As for Hira, the former owner of four McDonald's restaurants, the union representing the workers of his stores say it will not take further action against the company, Hira Corporation.

"We complained and head office acted quickly on the complaint and [Hira] lost his company. That's a win for us," Unite Union national director Mike Treen says.

More:

Training bond schemes misused by employers to exploit workers - Newsroom

Throughout its historywherever it arrived and settled in as the dominant economic systemcapitalism provoked struggles over the redistribution of wealth. In other words, this system always distributes wealth in a particular way and likewise produces dissatisfaction with that particular distribution. Those dissatisfied then struggle, more or less, consciously or not, peacefully or violently to redistribute wealth. The struggles are socially divisive and sometimes rise to civil war levels.

The French Revolution marked the end of French feudalism and its transition to capitalism. The revolutionaries slogans promised the transition would bring with it libert, galit, fraternit (liberty, equality and fraternity). In other words, equality was to be a key accompaniment to or product of capitalisms establishment, of finally replacing feudalisms lord-serf organization of production with capitalisms very different employer-employee system. Transition to capitalism would erase the gross inequalities of French feudalism. The American Revolution likewise broke not only from its British colonial master but also from the feudal monarchy of George III. All men are created equal was a central theme of its profound commitment to equality together with capitalism.

In France, the United States and beyond, capitalism justified itself by reference to its achievement or at least its targeting of equality in general. This equality included the distribution of wealth and income, at least in theory and rhetoric. Yet from the beginning, all capitalisms wrestled with contradictions between lip service to equality and inequality in their actual practices. Adam Smith worried about the accumulation of stock (wealth or capital) in some hands but not in others. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had different visions of the future of an independent United States in terms of whether it would or would not secure wealth equality later dubbed Jeffersonian democracy. There was and always remained in the United States an awkward dissonance between theoretical and rhetorical commitments to equality and the realities of slavery and then systemic racist inequalities. The inequalities of gender likewise contradicted commitments to equality. It took centuries of capitalism to achieve even the merely formal political equality of universal suffrage.

Thus, there should be no surprise that U.S. capitalismlike most other capitalismsprovokes a widely troubling contradiction between the actual wealth inequality it produces and tendentially deepens (as Thomas Piketty has definitively shown) and its repeatedly professed commitment to equality. Efforts to redistribute wealthto thereby move from less to more equal distributionsfollow. Yet, they also disturbingly divide societies where the capitalist economic system prevails.

Wealth redistributions take from those who have and give to those who have not. Those whose wealth is redistributed resent or resist this taking, while those who receive during the redistributions of wealth develop rationales to justify that receipt. Each side of such redistributions often demonizes the other. Politics typically becomes the arena where demonizations and conflicts over redistribution occur. Those at risk of being deprived due to redistributions aim either to oppose redistribution or else to escape it. If the opposition is impossible or difficult, escape is the chosen strategy. Thus, if profits of capitalists are to be taxed to redistribute wealth to the poor, big businesses may escape by moving politically to shift the burden of taxation onto small or medium businesses. Alternatively, all businesses may unite to shift the burden of such redistributive taxation onto higher-paid employees wages and salaries, and away from business profits.

Recipients of redistributions face parallel political problems of whom to target for contributing to wealth redistribution. Will recipients support a tax on all profits or rather a tax just on big business with maybe some redistribution flowing from big to medium and small business? Or might low-wage recipients target high-wage workers for redistributive taxation?

All kinds of other redistributions between regions, races and genders display comparable strategic political choices.

Conflicts over redistributions are thus intrinsic to capitalism and always have been. They reflect but also deepen social divisions. They can and often have become violent and socially disruptive. They may trigger demands for system change. They may function as catalysts for revolutions. Because pre-capitalist economic systems like slavery and feudalism had fewer theoretical and rhetorical commitments to equality in general, they had fewer redistribution struggles. Those finally emerged when inequalities became relatively more extreme than the levels of inequality that more frequently provoked redistribution struggles in capitalism.

No solution to divisive struggles over wealth redistribution in capitalism was ever found. Capitalisms keep reproducing both theoretical and rhetorical appeals to equality as self-celebrations alongside actualities of deep and deepening wealth inequalities. Criticisms of capitalism on grounds of wealth inequality dog the system everywhere. Divisive social conflicts over capitalisms unequal wealth distributions persist. Endless efforts to find and implement a successful redistributive system or mechanism continue. The latest comprises various proposals for universal basic incomes.

To avoid divisive social conflict over redistribution, the solution is not to distribute unequally in the first place. That can remove the cause and impetus for redistributive struggles and thus the need for endless and so far fruitless efforts to find the right redistribution formula or mechanism. The way forward is to democratize the decision about distributing wealth as it emerges from production. This can be accomplished by democratizing the enterprise, converting workplaces from their current capitalist organization (i.e., hierarchical divisions into employerspublic or privateand employees) into worker cooperatives. In the latter, each worker has one vote, and all basic workplace issues are decided by majority vote after a free and open debate. That is when different views on what distribution of output should occur are articulated and democratically decided.

No redistribution is required, necessitated, or provoked. Workplace members are free to reopen, debate and decide anew on initial wealth distributions at any time. The same procedure would apply to workplace decisions governing what to produce, which technology to deploy, and where to locate production. All workers collectively and democratically decide what wage the collective of workers pays to each of them individually. They likewise decide how to dispose of or allocate any surplus, which is above the total individual wage bill and replacement of used-up inputs, that the enterprise might generate.

A parable can illustrate the basic point. Imagine parents taking their twinsMary and Johnto a park where there is an ice-cream vendor. The parents buy two ice creams and give both to Mary. Johns wails provoke a search for an appropriate redistribution of ice creams. The parents take away one of the ice creams from Mary and hand it to John. Anger, resentment, bitterness, envy and rage distress the rest of the day and divide family members. If affection and emotional support are similarly distributed and redistributed, deep and divisive scars result. The lesson: we dont need a better or right redistribution; we need to distribute more equally and democratically in the first place.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Continue reading here:

Why We Need to Democratize Wealth: the US Capitalist Model Breeds Selfishness and Resentment - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

Why was a minimum wage system introduced by the government?

When our government introduced the National Wages Consultative Council Act 2011, it was intended to address the low wages prevailing in the country, especially in the private sector. Employers were then paying very low basic pay not only in the Klang Valley but throughout the country. Under this act, the Minimum Wage Order 2012 was introduced, establishing a minimum wage of RM900.

The underlying factor for the government in introducing the minimum wage order was to mitigate the unfair low-wage system prevailing in the country. It was a case of government intervention when the employers failed to pay equitable rates of pay, thus driving wage levels in a race to the bottom!

Fast forward to 2021 and what we need to ask is whether the minimum wage system is still relevant given that wages, even for degree holders, have been compromised due to the weak labour employment market.

Unemployment among the youth in 2020 terms was estimated to be 11.7% whereas total unemployment was hovering around 4.8%. Even more alarming is that about 70% of jobs seekers were youth, according to a report published by the EIS-UPMCS Center For Future Labour Market Studies.

According to a Ministry Of Higher Education survey, about 10% of fresh graduates were paid between RM1,001 and RM1,500 a month since 2010. The survey also found that in 2020, more graduates fell into this income bracket reaching a decade-high 22.3%.

These statistics suggest that low wages among the youth and fresh graduates have a nexus with the high rate of unemployment among the youth and fresh graduates. With the prevailing economic conditions, our youth and fresh graduates, are forced to accept low wages just to secure a job however incompatible the wages may be.

Low wages, by any standards, are an indication that our young workers are being exploited due to the prevailing depressed employment opportunities.

A Bank Negara study in 2018 stated that, for a single adult to sustain himself in Kuala Lumpur, he or she would need RM2,700 a month. The study also revealed that a couple without children would need RM4,500 and a couple with two children would need RM6,500 a month.

The study is based on what is termed as a living wage a living wage is defined as the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet his or her basic needs including food, housing and other necessities.

On the other hand, a minimum wage is set by the government with the aim of protecting workers against unduly low pay.

Given the 2018 Bank Negara study, the truth is that middle and low-income workers are not earning enough household income to sustain themselves. So, workers are forced to work excessive hours of work working overtime, working on rest days and public holidays, and even working a second job to supplement their household income.

Working prolonged hours and, by extension, enhancing production for employers, results in the deterioration of the workers physical and mental health.

Working long hours of work is as good as modern-day slavery: in the absence of decent, sustainable wages for an eight-hour work day, workers are forced to supplement their incomes by working excessive overtime, working on rest days and public holidays and even taking on a second job.

So is the existing minimum wage system still relevant under the circumstances?

Prof Yeah Kim Leng from the Sunway University Business School feels that, given the Bank Negara study 2018, workers will need a side income to make ends meet on a minimum wage of RM1,200. (Free Malaysia MT 28.10.2019).

It is, therefore, apparent that workers cannot survive on the current minimum wage of RM1,200 a month.

Given this reality, we need to deliberate whether we need to shift from a minimum wage system to a living wage module.

The existing National Minimum Wage Council ought to be rebranded to a national living wage council with the absolute power to decide on a living wage rate of pay without being subservient to the government.

As no wage system can remain stagnant, a bi-annual revision of the living wage like the existing mechanism for the minimum wage ought to continue.

It is argued through academic research that there is a correlation between the rate of unionisation and income inequality: the lower the rate of unionisation, the higher the income inequality.

In Malaysia, it is an indisputable fact that existing labour laws impede organising efforts by unions.

Take the case of workers in the electronics industry. According to international standards, the electronics sector is classified under the electrical and electronics sub-sector. Going by that internationally accepted classification, the existing Electrical Industry Workers Union (EIWU) ought to have been accorded the right to organise workers in the electronics sector.

If the EIWU had been accorded the right to organise workers in the electronics sector, the chances are that wage inequality could have been addressed substantially in that sector, which employs thousands of workers.

But the government did not permit the EIWU to organise these workers so as to suppress the numerical strength of the EIWU and, in the process, perpetuate wage inequality in the electronics sector. Ultimately, the governments ploy was to dilute the unionisation of these workers into a regional demography.

It is thus obvious that a fundamental flaw in the countrys income inequality lies in the correlation with the rate of unionisation in the country.

Where unionised workers are covered by collective agreements, which provides for salary adjustments once in three years, about 93% of the unorganised workers are left to the whims of their employers in granting such periodic salary adjustments. And where unionised employees are entitled to annual salary increments, by virtue of the collective agreements that are in force, 93% of unorganised workers have no legal right to demand such annual increments from their employers.

What then are the challenges? Until laws that curtail organising efforts are removed, our trade union movement will continue to function without the strength of numbers. Without laws to promote a vibrant and progressive labour movement, we will continue to function as an ineffective movement to transform the socioeconomic position of the working class.

Under the circumstances, the trade union movement has to pursue a transformation of the existing repressive labour laws so as to provide a conducive legislative ecosystem that would promote the unionisation of workers.

Economist Shankaran Nambiar from the Malaysian Institute Of Economic Research, while agreeing that the current minimum wage cannot meet minimum living standards (of the civil servants), felt the government should wait for the economy to improve before raising the minimum wage.

That proposition is devoid of any justification for the simple reason that the government is under an obligation to address the existing income disparity to ensure that civil servants are paid an acceptable living wage. And, by extension, a living wage should also be implemented for private sector workers.

In parting, the government must accord Cuepacs the right to collective bargaining, under International Labour Organization Convention 98, read together with Convention 154.

Cuepacs, as the single largest trade union organisation representing civil servants, must be given the right to collectively bargain for and on behalf of the civil servants and not be at the mercy of the government dictating civil servants wages and terms and conditions of employment. The right to collective bargaining must be accorded to Cuepacs consonant with the guiding conventions of the ILO.

So, what position should the labour movement take under the circumstances?

The challenges are set out in clear terms.

First, the labour movement has to relentlessly pursue a transformation of the embedded pro-employer labour laws. We need to continue our struggle to ensure that the government conforms with the core ILO labour standards such as Convention 87, 98, 154 and 190.

Second, we need to pursue a holistic realignment of the socioeconomic policies of the government that has given preference to employers and which have margainlised both the working class and the trade union movement.

Thirdly, we need to demand that the outdated minimum wage system be recalibrated to a living wage module based on the 2018 Bank Negara study.

K Veeriah is a veteran trade unionist based in Bukit Mertajam, Penang

Our voluntary writers work hard to keep these articles free for all to read. But we do need funds to support our struggle for Justice, Freedom and Solidarity. To maintain our editorial independence, we do not carry any advertisements; nor do we accept funding from dubious sources. If everyone reading this was to make a donation, our fundraising target for the year would be achieved within a week. So please consider making a donation to Persatuan Aliran Kesedaran Negara, CIMB Bank account number 8004240948.

See the rest here:

The minimum wage vs living wage conundrum - Aliran

This spring, public health officials have been laser-focused on getting more Americans vaccinated against COVID-19. So why do racial disparities persist around vaccination? And once more Americans are vaccinated, how do we ensure that Black and Latino families arent left vulnerable to future public health crises? In the latest episode of Better Off, Mary Bassett talks about the historical roots of health inequities, and the big changes needed to close those gaps.

Guest: Mary T. Bassett, director of the Franois Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

[Music]

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: From the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, this is Better Off. A podcast about the biggest public health problems we face today . . .

Mary Bassett: We have to remember the kinds of vulnerabilities that made the US have a disproportionate share of the worlds deaths, as compared to our population, despite our vast resources.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: . . . and the people innovating to create public health solutions.

Mary Bassett: And those wont be fixed with a vaccine.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: Im your host, Anna Fisher-Pinkert.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: I got my COVID-19 vaccine in a busy clinic in Boston. As soon as the nurse gave me the shot, she handed me a little timer set for 15 minutes, the length of time they ask you to hang around to make sure you dont have any adverse effects. I sat in the waiting room, surrounded by masked people sort of squirming impatiently in their seats. And one by one, the timers went off [beeping sound]. Theres one [beeping sound], theres another one. . . each little beep inching us closer to the end of the pandemic. The people walking out of the clinic looked lighter, happier, than the people walking in.

But the vaccines arent reaching everyone. The vaccination rate for Black and Latino Americans is lower than for white Americans. And the death and hospitalization rates are higher. The pandemic has revealed how our health care system repeatedly fails people of color. And even if we get everyone vaccinated thats just one virus. How do we avoid going down the exact same path again? How do we address the entrenched health disparities in this country?

So, in this episode were going to dive into all those big questions because this week, were better off with Mary Bassett, health and human rights expert.

Mary Bassett: My name is Mary Bassett and I am the director of the Franois Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human rights at Harvard University.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: As of mid-April, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the vaccination rate in the U.S. for white people was 1.8 times higher than the rate for Latino people, and 1.6 times higher than the rate for Black people. So I asked Mary Bassett to talk about why this gap exists.

Mary Bassett: It has simply has to do with access. Where you get a vaccine, where this vaccination sites are located, what it takes to get an appointment, whether people have access and capacity to use the internet. . . Whether they have the time to take an appointment at any time its offered to them, and that kind of flexibility in their lives, whether they have transport. Its all getting better. Thats for sure. And more and more people of all groups are getting vaccinated.

But the racial, ethnic disparities that weve witnessed throughout this pandemic have been replicated in terms of the ability to administer vaccinations to the people who arguably most need that protection.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: But this winter, a lot of media sources were more focused on vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans. Like this story from CNN in February:

News anchor: Health officials worry misinformation could complicate the process of getting shots in the arms of Black and Brown communities. New CDC data from the first month of vaccination shows Black and Latino people lagging way behind in the states reporting racial breakdowns. So far, 60%. . .

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: So, is hesitancy a part of the picture?

Mary Bassett: Of course it is. I mean, Anna, I would argue that everyone has the right to get their questions answered, and their reasonable concerns addressed. Education, it should be part of any vaccine campaign, and telling people to line up and do as theyre told is not ever a good public health strategy or ever a good strategy at all.

As people know, theres a very troubled history. And even more than that, theres peoples day-to-day experience with health care systems in which they dont experience dignity and respect, which everyone is entitled to expect when they seek health care, that makes people of African descent in particular very wary.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: But if you want to look at the numbers, a March 2021 poll, for example, from NPR, PBS News Hour, and Marist shows that, actually, 73% of Black people and 70% of white people plan to get the shot. So, in other words, hesitancy isnt limited to people of color.

Mary Bassett: Im just perplexed as to why people, when people talk about vaccine hesitancy, theyre not worrying about white Republicans who have, you know, by far the highest proportion of people who are declaring that theyll never get right vaccinated. And I worry, about why people keep coming back to certain cultural tropes, this notion that Black people are defiant, resistant.

[Music]

Im from a neighborhood in Manhattan called Washington Heights. Most of my family still lives there. And my sister accompanied my mother, who was 92 and fully eligible, to get vaccinated. And when she got there, it was the vaccination site in Washington Heights, but she said, when she pulled up, it looked like people were coming from the opera.

They were from Westchester, New Jersey, and they had figured out that they could get vaccinated at this site. When she went in there, there was nobody around who spoke Spanish. The neighborhood, you know, has a very large Spanish speaking population.

So there were lots of signals that youre actually not welcome here. Whether they were intended or not.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: From Dr. Bassetts vantage point, access to vaccines is just one of many areas of the pandemic response where people of color have been left out. Black and Latino people are overrepresented in the essential workforce, and in the prison system which means there are a lot of people of color who could not stay home and could not stay socially distant.

Mary Bassett: I would have thought that there would be recognition that certain occupations create high-risk situations.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: We know that age is a huge risk factor for COVID-19 but Mary Bassett argues we need to look at racial disparities more closely. While the majority of Americans who have died of COVID-19 were over the age of 65, younger Black and Latino people have died at much higher rates than their white peers.

Mary Bassett: Even though the risk of death is much higher in somebody whos 90 years old, the fact that we were seeing, relative to whites, Blacks and Latinos, having five- to ninefold the risk of dying when they were young to middle-aged adults is simply wrong. Not only because its terrible to die before youve had a chance to have, you know, a full arc of life, but because these are people who have families who are breadwinners, who have children who are dependent on them. And the knock-on effects are very large.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: But the roots of these racial and ethnic disparities are far older than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mary Bassett: I think as we think about the vaccine, we have to remember the kinds of vulnerabilities that made the U.S. have a disproportionate share of the worlds deaths, as compared to our population, despite our vast resources, both material and human.

And those wont be fixed with a vaccine.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: Even if we manage to vaccinate our way to herd immunity, which some scientists are skeptical about, the COVID-19 vaccines only protect against one virus. In public health, thats called a downstream solution. It doesnt fix whatever issue is upstream.

Mary Bassett: I think that theres a tendency that we all have to, you know, look forward to a biomedical fix. And certainly, these vaccines are triumph of science. I dont mean to say that science hasnt vastly increased our ability to protect health, but it doesnt solve the problem of people who are working in low-wage jobs without protections at their work site, who are working multiple jobs because they cant afford to live on what they earn at their job. It doesnt fix the fact that there were all these people who went to work without personal protective equipment.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: In the U.S., where you work, what you earn, and your health outcomes are all intertwined. And so I asked Dr. Bassett, how do we begin to address those issues? And her answer was. . . pretty big!

Mary Bassett: I think we also have to talk about capitalism. Capitalism has been, joined at the hip or as Ibrahim Kendi says, are conjoined twins with the phenomenon of racism, which is based on the idea of the superiority of whites to people of color, particularly people of African descent. And that ideology was what permitted nearly 250 years of exploitation of enslaved labor, which was not just a quaint system that let America have a sort of slightly sordid start. It was enormously profitable. And it profited the North and the South.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: The legacy of slavery still has an impact on the health and well-being of Black Americans.

Mary Bassett: The legacy has meant that people of African descent in this country have never in a single year that weve had statistics had life expectancies that were equal to the life expectancies of people descended from Europeans.

We have narrowed the gaps. Weve never eliminated them. In some cases, the relative gaps have actually risen. In New York City, where I was the health commissioner, the infant mortality relative gap went up to three to one.

Despite the fact that this is not natural, its been so prolonged in our country that people start to think that, you know, nobodys surprised when Black people have higher mortality rates, its just always like that. Well, its not natural or inevitable. So Ive lately been thinking about the idea thats been floating around for a long time. . . And its the idea of reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, for the 250 years, nearly, of enslaved labor and the terror that followed.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: Reparations are a controversial idea in the United States. A 2020 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 1 in 10 white Americans supported reparations, and only about half of Black Americans support the idea. But in 2021, the city of Evanston, IL became the first U.S. city to offer reparations. In this case, specifically for the descendants of Black residents who were excluded from home ownership by racist housing policies in the 20th century, including redlining. Qualifying households are set to receive $25,000 for home repairs or down payments on property.

Mary Bassett: So what theyre planning in Evanston is a good start and its an honest. Uh, effort, I think by a local jurisdiction, but this is not a problem to be solved by local jurisdictions. This requires the federal government, because all that happened was entirely legal and not only, permitted, but often endorsed and led by the federal government. Redlining, for example, wasnt just related to the private prejudices of developers. It was, put in place and championed, in fact, by the rating system that was developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s, a government entity, a federal government entity.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: What has been happening more frequently at a local, state, and national level is a new interest in discussing racism as a public health crisis.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer: Im announcing today that Im signing an executive order declaring racism a public health crisis in Louisville.

Mary Bassett: Thereve been lots of them declarations, that racism is a public health crisis. I think theyre close to 180 of them by various jurisdictions.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh: But first I want to declare racism to be a public health crisis in the city of Boston.

Michigan Mayor Gretchen Whitmer: Today I also signed an executive directive declaring racism as a public health crisis in Michigan.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: Most recently, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, also issued a statement on racism and health.

Mary Bassett: Well, it really, its important that the federal public health agency is acknowledging this, right? I took a look at the CDC website. And the, the only time they use racism was to say something like discrimination, including racism. The acknowledgement of, of the impact of racism on our bodies and our health is important in and of itself.

So declarations matter. Words matter. But additionally, they did say more things than that. They talked about how theyre gonna look at how theyre allocating their budget. They talked about taking a look at themselves. They meaning the CDC. They need to have an agency that looks like our country. Thats what Bill de Blasio wanted in New York City. And we were able to do that. The health department, when I joined it as commissioner, had not a single Black or Latino in its leadership. And when I left, the over half of the agency leadership was non-white.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: From Mary Bassetts perspective as a former New York City health commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio, its important that everyone who works in public health wrestle with the issue of racial equity.

Mary Bassett: One person isnt going to figure this all out. What I did, as health commissioner was, I said to the entire agency leadership, whether they worked in finance or in human resources, or ran the lab. . . no matter what their area I wanted them to apply a racial equity lens, their work and it was extraordinary what people came up with.

Its really important that there be leadership and Im really grateful to Dr. Walensky for taking that step, but it still takes courage, I would say.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: In the summer of 2020, at the peak of the protests over George Floyds murder, a colleague of mine interviewed Mary Bassett and asked her if she felt hopeful that real change could happen toward dealing with structural racism. And she answered, Im more hopeful than Ive been in a long time. When I spoke to Dr. Bassett, there was no verdict yet in the case against Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd. I asked her if she still felt hopeful.

Mary Bassett: I do. I do. Because my whole working life really has been a pushback. Ive witnessed a pushback against the great society legislation of the 1960s. Remember that the last time the majority of white voters voted for a Democrat was in 1964.

This past summer I witnessed an outpouring that I just havent seen in well over a generation. In 50 years, really. And it was a multi-racial outpouring. And I think that there is a growing willingness to embrace the reality that racism hurts all of us. The United States has departed from its peer nations in terms of our life expectancy, despite spending more on health than any other nation. Our life expectancy is declining, and the pandemic is going to push it down further and make it even more unequal. So, I think theres a good reason for everyone to feel that we have a stake in this. And clearly many, many people did who, who took to the streets to say that this lethal racial hierarchy is not something that we are willing to endure any longer Black and white.

So that makes me hopeful.

Anna Fisher-Pinkert: Hope is something we all need in 2021. And I think everyone is finding it in different places. You can choose to find it in a protest, a declaration, or in a little vial of vaccine.

Thats all for this week. Thanks for listening.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @HarvardChanSPH.

Subscribe to Better Off in your favorite podcast app. If you like the show so far, rate and review us, and tell your friends about the podcast, too.

Were better off with our team:

Chief Communications Officer: Todd Datz

Senior Digital Designer: Ben Wallace

Production Assistant: Brian Le

Im Anna Fisher-Pinkert, host and producer of Better Off a podcast of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

See more here:

We're better off with health equity | News - HSPH News

Five people are offering an alternative to the main four parties at the Cambridge City Council elections on May 6.

Two independent candidates, along with three others representing the parties Rebooting Democracy, UKIP and the Workers Party of Britain, will be vying for residents votes.

Elections will take place in all 14 wards of the city, and all 42 council seats will be up on Thursday, May 6 with each ward electing three councillors. Labour currently controls the council, but the Liberal Democrats, Greens and the Conservatives are hoping to make gains.

You can read about these four parties in our separate Q&A.

Independent candidates Sam Davies and Al Dixon will be standing in Queen Ediths against candidates for the main parties. Ms Davies, who has lived in the ward for 20 years and in Cambridge for 30, is hoping to be elected to speak up for our communitys interests without the compromises that inevitably come with adhering to wider party-political loyalties.

She helped set up and runs the Queen Ediths Community Forum and says she will push hard on getting outcomes with her absolute focus being on Queen Ediths.

Weve seen over the last year the amazing things that we can achieve when we bring together all our strengths for the greater good, so Im keen to implement innovative ideas which will foster that instinct, such as participatory budgeting; local seed funding for grassroots projects; and developing a community-led vision for a Green Queen Ediths, she said.

Mr Dixon, who is also standing in Queen Ediths, grew up in the ward attending Queen Ediths Primary School and then Netherhall School before later moving away and returning to look after his mother.

I think its a fantastic area and it could be so much better, he said in his election launch video. I believe that we are inspired by one another and I very strongly believe that in an area like this where there are 3,500 homes all with people in with all their different experiences, with all their different knowledge and many of them dont even know their talents I think if we come together and when we start creating and thinking together we can come up with amazing ideas and projects. Thats my political philosophy. I think councillors should not be aligned with any national political parties. We should be solving and looking at the issues locally and not in the context of some other agenda.

Keith Garrett, who has stood for MP on three occasions, is standing in Arbury for the first time for his own party Rebooting Democracy, which aims to give power to make decisions to those who are affected by those decisions.

The partys manifesto puts forward a system where decisions are made by randomly selected members of the public who discuss the issues and hear from experts before coming to a decision. Mr Garrett said citizens assemblies are the way forward. He co-founded The Sortition Foundation, which works to do the selection process for citizens assemblies to ensure it is representative.

Citizens Assemblies have been used around the world and across the UK to make decisions in a collaborative manner, he said. These use a randomly selected group of people who deliberate over a period of time, listening to evidence, before coming to an informed collective decision. No party politics, no lobbyists, no vested interests. Just evidence-based decision making by the people themselves.

Lionel Vida is standing in Kings Hedges for The Workers Party of Britain, which aims to give a voice to people who are politically homeless with desire to put their talents, creativity and energies at the service of the working class.

Mr Vida said on the partys website: The Workers Party of Britain is that politically active trade unionist, socialist, party which aims to do away with wage-slavery, and which anchors its complete faith in the organised, collective power, of a live, participatory democratic community; with full rights to recall any stagnant representatives. This, the communitys imperative mandate, is paramount.

Peter Burkinshaw is standing in East Chesterton for UKIP. The party was approached for comment but has yet to respond.

Read more

Elections 2021: Cambridge City Council parties answer your questions

Elections 2021: Cambridgeshire police and crime commissioner candidates answer your questions

Elections 2021: Cambridgeshire County Council parties answer your key election questions

Elections 2021: Cambridgeshire mayoral candidates answer your key election questions

Read more here:

The candidates who offer an alternative to main parties in city council elections - Cambridge Independent

Bruce Levine, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2020

The name of Thaddeus Stevens is too little known today. Bruce Levine, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, has provided a political biography of the leader of the Radical Republicans in Congress during the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction that should help to bring this revolutionary figure broader recognition.

It is fitting that President Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the leader of the Second American Revolution that put an end to chattel slavery. But it was Stevens who, along with Frederick Douglass, best personified the uncompromising abolitionist struggle against slavery in the Civil War era, including the early years of Reconstruction after the defeat of the Confederacy.

What distinguished Stevens from his contemporaries was his implacable opposition to slavery and racism, and his fervent advocacy of the democratic principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. He was certainly among the most significant figures within the Radical Republicanswho constituted the left wing of American politics in the 1860sand, within the framework of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, perhaps the staunchest advocate of egalitarianism.

Levine quotes Douglass assessment of Stevens: There was in him the power of conviction, the power of will, the power of knowledge, and the power of conscious ability, qualities that at last made him more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and cabinet combined. Like Douglass, Stevens prodded President Lincoln to take more decisive action, even as Lincoln masterfully assessed the political situation, responded to demands from Stevens and others, but waited until he judged the time ripe.

Stevens refused to be bound by what was considered realistic or widely acceptable. He created public opinion and molded public sentiment, according to one political associate. As chairman of the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, Stevens played a critical role in the financing of the war. At the same time, he fought to articulate the political goals of the war and pointed the way forward to victory. Stevens was among the very first political figures to call for recruiting Southern slaves into the Union Army, and as early as 1863 he was demanding the measure that would follow two years laterthe 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, not only emancipating slaves in rebel territory, but outlawing slavery forever within the United States.

Stevenss intransigence won him many enemies, and not only within the Confederacy. On the subject of Reconstruction, the New York Times wrote, Mr. Stevens must be considered the Evil Genius of the Republican Party. The New York Herald added, in 1868, that Stevens could be compared to the leaders of the French Revolution, displaying the boldness of Danton, the bitterness and hatred of Marat, and the unscrupulousness of Robespierre. The newspaper did not intend a compliment. A British journalist concurred, calling Stevens the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one.

Stevens was born in 1792 in Vermont, a separate independent republic for more than a decade, before it became the 14th state of the Union in 1791. The young man was shaped by a spirit of agrarian radicalism, the struggles and sometimes violent battles of small farmers. He graduated from Dartmouth College, next door in New Hampshire, and soon moved to Pennsylvania, his home state for the rest of his life.

This future leader of the Radical Republicans began his political career in the 1820s in Pennsylvania. He was active for several years in the Anti-Masonic Party, but by the mid-to-late 1830s had aligned himself with the newly formed Whigs, which became one of the two major political parties on a national level in the US until the early 1850s. The Whigs were bitterly divided on numerous issues, on none more irreconcilably than the burning question of slavery and its expansion.

Throughout his long career, Stevens was among the foremost champions of public education, or the common schools as they were called. Stevenss hatred of aristocracy linked his advocacy for the right of education to his fight against slavery. In 1835, Stevens fought off an attempt to repeal legislation for public education in Pennsylvania. He said that any such effort should rightfully be called An act for branding and marking the poor, so that they may be known from the rich and the proud. Stevens went on:

When I reflect how apt hereditary wealth, hereditary influence, and perhaps as a consequence, hereditary pride, are to close the avenues and steel the heart against the wants and rights of the poor, I am induced to thank my Creator for having, from early life, bestowed upon me the blessing of poverty.

It was as a Whig that Stevens first went to Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, elected in 1848. Militant in his anti-slavery stance, he clashed with pro-slavery Whigs, as well as party leader Henry Clay, the key force behind the Compromise of 1850. Increasingly under fire from those who sought to conciliate the southern slaveholding aristocracy, he chose not to run for reelection to the House in 1852.

The Whigs collapsed over the slavery issue by 1854. Stevens briefly associated himself with the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party, apparently willing to overlook its reactionary views in his search for a political home that could challenge the hegemony of the pro-slavery Democratic Party. In 1855, however, he finally found this home when he joined the newly formed Republicans, the party whose presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would triumph only five years later.

As Levine writes, History seemed to speed up after the 1856 election. The irrepressible conflict over slavery was approaching, but few would then have predicted the bloody Civil War that would take the lives of roughly 750,000 Union and Confederate soldiers. Stevens, however, had long been preparing for a mortal struggle with slavery. He understood the significance of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the US Supreme Court ruled essentially that Congress never had a right to limit slaverys expansion. By that standard, as Levine writes, the Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789, the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and all territorial laws outlawing slavery had always been null and void.

Two years later came John Browns famous raid at Harpers Ferry. Stevens, who had been reelected to the House in 1858, now as a Republican, denounced the act of revolutionary terror, through which Brown hoped to spark a slave rebellion, but only on the grounds that it was doomed to failure. He called Brown a hopeless fool, but a week after Brown was sentenced to death, Stevens was pressing for publication in booklet form of that mans powerful last letters, statements, and interviews. Stevenss words on the subject of John Brown led his pro-slavery opponents to physically threaten him on the House floor.

The election of Lincoln in November 1860 was soon followed by the secession of the slave states of the Deep South. When the Civil War began in April 1861, Stevens was almost 70 years old, a generation older than Frederick Douglass, and at least a decade older than all of the prominent abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Harriet Tubman and others.

But Stevens displayed the energy and determination of a much younger man. Levine quotes a Republican Congressional colleague of Stevens: To most men there comes, sooner or later, a period of inaction, inability for further progress. This is the period of conservatism, and usually comes with gray hairs and failing eye-sight. It converses with the past and distrusts the future. Its look is backward and not forward. The congressman continued, This period Mr. Stevens never reached. The slaveholders rebellion seemed to rejuvenate him and inspire him with superhuman strength.

Stevens predicted a long and bloody war. His views became more and more radical. Twenty-five years earlier, he was, as the author notes, [A] firm believer in the Norths free-labor capitalist society who opposed the stoking of hostilities among its social classes as unjustified and dangerous to prosperity, social order, and republican government.

Stevens certainly remained a defender of capitalism and of the system of wage labor in opposition to slavery. His years of struggle had made him more sensitive to the struggle against inequality, however, and he revised his earlier hostility to the French Revolution. In 1862, writes Levine, Stevens wished aloud that the ardor which inspired the French revolution might find its like in the United States. The revolutionaries of France, like others elsewhere, he recalled with admiration, were possessed and impelled by the glorious principles of freedom. This was required to carry out to final perfection the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Stevenss willingness to challenge the status quo of racism and oppression was demonstrated in other ways. In the 1860 election campaign, both Democratic and Republican Congressmen had called for stepped-up attacks on Native Americans near the Texas and New Mexico borders. Stevens declared in response that he wish[ed] the Indians had newspapers of their own, because if they had, you would have horrible pictures of the cold-blooded murders of inoffensive Indians. You would have more terrible pictures than we have now revealed to us [of white casualties], and, I have no doubt, we would have the real reasons for these Indian troubles.

When Republicans in California enacted measures against the Chinese immigrant population, Stevens denounced them and said the treatment had disgraced the State of California. He reminded the House that China has been much oppressed of late by the European nations, which had recently made war upon China because it refused to consent to the importation of poisonous drugs that demoralize its society and destroy its people. He insisted on the rights of the Chinese migrants, adding, in words that are indeed appropriate today, long after the United States has become the leading world imperialist power, that the anti-Chinese legislation is a mockery of the boast that this land is the asylum of the oppressed of all climes.

As noted above, Stevens fought for the recruitment of blacks into the Union Army, tirelessly insisting that the logic of the conflict required the mobilization of the freed and escaped slaves in the fight for their freedom, the policy eventually adopted by the president. Stevens went on to fight for the necessary two-thirds majority in the House for the 13th Amendment, achieved on January 31, 1865, after the first vote had fallen just short of that margin. Steven Spielbergs Lincoln (2012) focused in part on the bargaining and political horse-trading that preceded this vote, but Levine explains that the Republican victory in the 1864 elections and the work of Stevens and his Radical Republican colleagues were also crucial to the victory.

Levine relates an anecdote that summarizes Stevenss forthright defense of revolution. When an Ohio Democrat taunted the Republicans, demanding that they admit they were a revolutionary party, Stevens praised the purifying fires of this revolution and proudly acknowledged, revolution it is.

After the assassination of Lincoln, just days after the surrender at Appomattox that ended the war, Stevens forged ahead, now leading the struggle in the early years of Reconstruction. He secured the necessary approval for the 14th Amendment in 1866, although it fell well short of his original proposals, including full voting rights for the former slaves. He also fought for civil rights legislation in answer to the notorious Black Codes and horrific attacks on freed slaves in Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere. The 1866 civil rights bill and the 1867 Reconstruction Act were enacted after Congress overrode vetoes by President Andrew Johnson, who had quickly revealed himself as a racist sympathizer of the defeated slaveholders.

Another indication of Stevenss radicalism in the early days of Reconstruction was his proposal to transfer land confiscated from the ex-Confederate aristocracy into the hands of the former slaves. This ambitious land reform proposal was resisted by the majority of his Republican colleagues. As the author points out, Republicans also wondered nervously whereif they began redistributing landed property to exploited and impoverished peoplethat road would lead. The New York Times, once again the rigid defender of the ruling elite, warned, It is a question of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North. Levine continues, quoting Bostons Daily Advertiser: there are socialists who hold that any aristocracy is anathema.

Stevens led the impeachment of Johnson in 1868, voted for overwhelmingly by the House. The president was acquitted by the Senate by a margin of only one vote. However, in May of that year. Stevens was already gravely ill, and he died on August 11, 1868, at the age of 76. Five thousand mourners, both black and white, came to pay their respects in the Capitol Rotunda. A crowd of between 15,000 and 20,000, also completely integrated, attended his funeral in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Following Stevenss death, Ulysses S. Grant was the successful Republican candidate for president, and Reconstruction continued under the protection of the federal authorities. By the early 1870s, however, the top leaders of the Republican Party, representing increasingly powerful Northern industrial capitalism, were already preparing a retreat. The stage was set for the 1877 Compromise that resolved the bitterly disputed presidential election of the previous November by installing Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, while at the same time withdrawing federal troops from the South. This in turn set the stage for the system of rigid Jim Crow segregation, along with lynch mob terror and the political disenfranchisement of the black population that continued for almost a century.

At this point, posed with the need for an explanation of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, a serious weakness in Levines approach becomes clear. He laments that the Second American Revolution was left unfinishedin other words, that it did not complete its historical tasks.

What Levine has in mind is that the Civil War, despite its achievements, did not realize the world of racial equality that its most radical figures, including Stevens, envisioned. But this is to ask more of the past than was possible. Each one of the democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries was unfinished, including the most progressive and liberating, such as the Great French Revolution and the Civil War. Their incapacity to fulfill the egalitarian promises on which they mobilized masses was a result of their class nature. The development of capitalism, which emerged out of these revolutions, could do no other than put on historys agenda a new class struggle, between capitalists and workers. And in that, the most fundamental sense, the Second American Revolution was completed. Destroying the economic system based on chattel slavery, it cleared the path for the development of capitalism.

Levine underlines his own confusion over Reconstruction when he states that the basic cause for the retreat from the goals of racial equality was the fact that the Northern public, never firmly devoted to racial equality, tired of the seemingly endless struggle in the South.

The public, however, is divided into classes. It was the ruling capitalist class, the commercial, manufacturing and financial interests, which turned away from the struggle. It had achieved its main aim of unifying the country on the basis of a free-labor economic system. The Northern victory gave a mighty impulse to the development of industrial capitalism. But with that came a new and existential challenge to bourgeois rulethe working class.

In this new context the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, including its most radical wing, quickly retreated from its headier egalitarian promises, including its commitment to voting rights and equal protection under the law for the freed slaves. Stevens did not live to see the full scope of this retreat, which eroded support within the Republican Party leadership for Grant and Reconstruction, culminating in the election Compromise of 1877 and the restoration of the southern Bourbonsnot incidentally, the same year as the Great Uprising of American rail workers. The enemy, in other words, was no longer the former slaveholders, but the militant working class. The authors reference to the public obscures this class reality.

Levines unfinished revolution thesis, which was first developed by historian Eric Foner, suggests that the great task of progressive forces in the US today is to complete it. It assumes that a more egalitarian society must be created under capitalism before there can be any talk of workers taking power. The task, however, is not to perfect capitalism, but to destroy it. Only this will end social inequality and all the ideologies, such as racism, that have always been used to justify it.

In any case, capitalist reaction was not confined to the South, precisely because the ruling class was faced with the need to divide and weaken the growing working class. Although taking a different form in the rest of the country, discrimination and second-class citizenship replaced the progress that had been made in the Civil War and Reconstruction. This project was facilitated by the historical falsification of Stevens, who became the object of decades of calumny. As Levine points out, when the notoriously racist D.W. Griffiths epic motion picture, The Birth of a Nation, appeared in 1915, Stevens was depicted in obvious caricature as a monstrous villain.

The shift was reflected in Civil War historiography. W.E.B. Dubois, the author of Black Reconstruction in America, which was published in 1935, praised Stevens for his grim and awful courage, but his account of this period was overwhelmed by vicious attacks on Reconstruction, which predominated in official histories from the turn of the 20th century onwards. Professor William Dunning of Columbia University, who called Stevens vindictive, truculent and cynical, was instrumental in propagating the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy as a struggle for states rights

As late as 1955, future president John F. Kennedy could write, in his Profiles in Courage, in an assessment that reveals the racist pedigree of the Democratic Party, that Stevens was the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement. It was not until the 1960s, amid the mass civil rights movement and broader struggles of the working class, that historians such as James McPherson began to correct the record on the role of Stevens and his co-thinkers. It was precisely the growth and the increasing integration of the working class, especially in the wake of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, the great labor struggles of the 1930s, and the experiences of World War II, that made possible the heroic struggles for racial equality in the post-World War II period.

Stevens and the Radical Republicans still make the ruling class nervous today, for fundamentally the same reasons as 150 years ago. Some have found a different way of minimizing Stevens, of even ignoring his role entirely, or defaming him. The advocates of critical race theory, now increasingly dominant in the elite universities of the US, were promoted by the New York Times and its 1619 Project, which insisted that all American history must be seen as a racial conflict and as the manifestation of white supremacy, against which blacks fought back alone.

The life and struggle of Thaddeus Stevens are an irrefutable answer to this reactionary falsification of history. It is one more reason to welcome this new biography, despite its failure to fully explain the end of Reconstruction.

Speaking at the time of the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, Stevens said, I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: Here lies one who never rose to any eminence and who harbored only the low ambition to have it said that he had striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.

Stevenss legacy a program of common struggle of the oppressed of every race and language and colorshould be studied by all who seek to understand the past in preparation for new revolutionary struggles.

Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter

Read the original post:

The Danton, Robespierre, and Marat of America, all rolled into one: A new biography of antislavery leader Thaddeus Stevens - WSWS

While unveiled in 1897 to the acclaim of Bostonians, the bronze relief does not escape todays examination of monuments within a broader conversation and reckoning on racism. The memorial foregrounds the soldiers white commander, stressing a racial and social hierarchy even as its meant to illuminate the dignity of the soldiers.

The Black men depicted in the statue, made by renowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, reflect the mostly young men who marched in formation through the streets of Boston to the Common in May of 1863. There on the green, thousands had come to see them off before their voyage into slave-holding South Carolina, where they would wage an assault on Fort Wagner. Nearly half the regiment would be lost. They look resolute. Above them, in the sculpture, is an angel. Behind them and not represented in the monument are the whole communities from which they come, and which they represent, including the Boston Black community.

Here begins Bostons Black Heritage Trail a walking tour created by the Museum of African American History that winds its way through the North slope of Bostons Beacon Hill neighborhood. The area was home for more than a century to a free Black community, one of the most active such communities in the nation. The trails sites focus on life before and after the Civil War. Highlights include the museums African Meeting House; the Abiel Smith School, the first public school established for Black children in the United States; and former residences, a number of which served as important stations of the Underground Railroad, the vast network of contacts, safe houses, and routes used by fugitives in pursuit of freedom. The 1.6-mile trail, which can be walked in about two hours, comprises 14 historic sites. Maps and information can be found online and at the Museum of African American History. I suggest walking it in good weather.

I am following the trail for the first time, though I have lived in Boston for years, and am a reader of Black and African diasporic history. I have attended unforgettable programs at the African Meeting House. I have walked past the Shaw memorial more times than I can count. I have stopped at times to gaze upon the bronze faces, on my way downtown, to the State House, or to a wonderful shoe store that existed on Beacon Street when I was an undergraduate at Emerson College. Then, I did not place the monument within the larger framework of the trail.

How did following the entire trail escape me? Did my association of Beacon Hill with the history of Boston Brahmins, with power and wealth, with the industrialists who by and large opposed racial equality because of their ties to Southern cotton, keep me from walking its streets? Did I have the feeling of not belonging on those slopes in the 20th century, on the Beacon Hill of impossible rents (for me), flower shops, and antiques stores? Am I guilty, perhaps, of not seeing something because it is so close to me in proximity? There on Beacon Hill was and is a textbook of the 19th-century Black experience. Am I redeemed if I admit that the more recent and practical question of finding on-street parking has more than once stopped me? (I strongly recommend taking the subway to Park Street Station on the Red Line, a short walk from the Shaw memorial.) No matter, here I am, finally on the trail, map in hand.

The trails second stop, the George Middleton House, sits snuggled between two red brick buildings, likely built after the house was erected in 1787 by Middleton, a Black hero of the Revolutionary War and esteemed activist. It is the oldest standing house built by African Americans on Beacon Hill in fact, it is the oldest house on Beacon Hill, period. There is a particular sweetness to the three-story wooden structure, with wide windows gazing out onto Pinckney Street. I am standing in front of the house, waiting for the spirit of Middleton to speak to me, when the most unexpected thing happens (I cannot guarantee this will occur on all tours): A tall man emerges from the front door. He finds me gazing at the house, now a private residence. I imagine he is accustomed to such behavior, living in a historic house.

We exchange greetings and he shares with me his name and affiliation: Stephen Judge, fifth owner of the house. He lives there with his husband. Here is the story Judge relays: Middleton shared the house with his partner, Louis Glapion, who hailed from the Caribbean. Glapion, Ive since discovered, worked as a hairdresser, an occupation of high standing in the Black community of the day, which would have made both Middleton and Glapion respected members of the contemporary Black community. Several sources support the inclusion of Middleton and Glapion in queer histories.

This information requires the consideration of assumptions I didnt realize I had about what I would find on the Black Heritage Trail. Here I was expecting musty history. I had never heard of Middleton, this early leader of Bostons African American community. Glapions origins remind me of the great diversity of Black Boston in the 18th century (and the centuries before and after), with members coming from all regions of North America, from the Caribbean, and other parts of world. I am reminded that American Blackness has never been monolithic in identity or ideology which challenges the white supremacist myth of the natural hierarchies of race.

What did unite 19th-century Black Bostonians, however, were common goals including racial equality foremost; the abolition of the institution and economics of slavery; the protection and provision of aid to fugitives; ongoing advocacy for the education of their children in the long struggle for equal school rights; and the preservation of their rights as citizens, particularly after the federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that required escaped slaves be returned to their enslavers, and after the 1857 US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, which effectively stripped citizenship from Black people. The court ruled that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States.

I carry my new awareness, as well the historically contested ideas of Black freedom and citizenship, to the next stop of the trail a few blocks away. The Phillips School is a beautiful brick building on top of which sits a cupola designed to increase the natural light and flow of air within the space beneath it. Granite stairs lead into the school, also now a private residence. When it was constructed in 1824, it was seen as one of the best public schools in Boston, educating primarily children from nearby wealthy families. The Phillips School would not be integrated until 1855 after a tireless fight by Black parents. It ended with the Massachusetts Legislature banning segregated schools, the first law in the country to do so. (It would be nearly 100 years until the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional nationwide.)

Much has been written about the critical struggle for equal school rights in Boston and the nation, and the important laws that have emerged as the result of the advocacy of Black communities. Standing before the Phillips School, I try to imagine the experience of the children and young people who personified desegregation, the ones who walked into the schools for the educations their parents so wanted for them, despite the animus raging around them. I try to see girls like the young Sarah Roberts, whose story is beautifully rendered in The First Step, a picture book written by Susan Goodman and illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Her expulsion from her neighborhood and all-white school in 1848 ultimately led to Roberts v. Boston, the first case to challenge a segregated school system.

The Phillips School is the first school on the Black Heritage Trail. The second, near the trails end, is the Abiel Smith School, one of the most significant for several reasons. But there is more between the schools for me to see and consider: a handful of sites including The John J. Smith House, the Charles Street Meeting House, and the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House.

THE JOHN J. SMITH HOUSE stands a large edifice with black shutters on its many windows, a second-floor window seat, and a stately black door that metaphorically opens onto history. There is Smith, a Massachusetts state representative. There is Georgiana Smith, his wife, who works for the Freedmens Bureau, a federal agency established in 1865 to provide relief to formerly-enslaved people and others after the Civil War. See them creating a home and a hub for community organizing and activism here on Pinckney Street. How to visualize the many people who visited while working on emancipation and abolition, and who walked renewed out of the house onto the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill? Perhaps en route to the Hayden House?

A glass-arched entryway and dark green door mark the brick house of Lewis and Harriet Hayden on Phillips Street the sixth stop of the Black Heritage Trail. This door also serves as a passageway to the past, and to one of the most noted stations, or safe houses, of the Underground Railroad, which extended from the South to Canada. The Haydens had themselves been fugitives, from Kentucky, and were among the enslaved who emancipated themselves with the help of fellow abolitionists. Once settled in Boston in the 1850s, they became among the communitys most influential antislavery activists contributing to Bostons longstanding reputation as a sanctuary for fugitives.

Women, men, and children mobilized to protect fugitives. In 1836, a group of Black women in Boston, in an incident later called the Abolition Riot, executed a daring rescue of two fugitives who had self-emancipated from Baltimore. When Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates were brought before a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the Boston women rioted in the courtroom, creating a path for Small and Bates to be spirited into a waiting carriage that sped away. The day I stand outside the Hayden house, bright yellow flowers rest in the buildings two window boxes.

To walk the Black Heritage Trail is to be reminded of difficult American history, of the daily discrimination and segregation Black people faced; of the brutality of slavery and the slave economic system; of the conditions of Black schools; and challenges and threats to Black lives and Black freedom. To walk the Black Heritage Trail is also to be amazed at what the Boston community has endured and achieved, to acknowledge its ongoing advocacy, organization, vision of freedom, and upholding of American ideals.

This is one of Bostons most rewarding walkable histories, says LMerchie Frazier, director of education and interpretation at the Museum of African American History.

The trail ends at the twin sites of the African Meeting House, built in 1806, and the Abiel Smith School building completed in 1835. They comprise the museums Boston campus (there is another campus on Nantucket). The museum organizes exhibitions, programs, and education activities that showcase the powerful stories of black families who worshipped, educated their children, debated the issues of the day, produced great art, organized politically and advanced the cause of freedom as its website so aptly describes.

The African Meeting House, the nations oldest existing Black church building, stands as a space of extraordinary history and community. For 19th-century Black Bostonians, it was a think tank and site of worship, a concert and lecture hall, a site of collaboration between Black and white abolitionists, an incubator of rescue missions, the launch pad for emancipatory movements and the very center of Black Boston.

During visiting hours, the doors of both the meeting house and museum are open to the past, present, and future.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

> The Black Heritage Trail: The Museum of African American History partners with the National Park Service, which offers free guided tours of the trail (currently on hold). Check nps.gov/boaf for updates. Homes on the trail are not open to the public.

> Museum of African American History: The Abiel Smith School and African Meeting House are now open for visitors. Reserve timed tickets at least 24 hours in advances at maah.org.

> The African American Trail Project: This collaborative history project housed atTufts University highlights more than 200 sites across Greater Boston and Massachusetts. Find a map and more information at africanamericantrailproject.tufts.edu.

Danielle Legros Georges, a writer, literary translator, and professor of creative writing at Lesley University, was Bostons poet laureate from 2015 to 2019. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Follow this link:

The Black Heritage Trail: A walking tour deep into Boston history - The Boston Globe