Category Archives: Wage Slavery

History

My years of military service and 40 years of hard work were rewarded by the freedoms afforded by this wonderful nation. Not once did I discriminate or abuse anothers rights. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution have been the basis on which this wonderful exceptional Nation was founded. Slavery was a terrible thing, however the lives of over 700,000, mostly white men finally settled the issue. Yes, there has been discrimination, Catholics, Jews, Italians and many others to include my ancestors the Irish. They all accepted it and solved it by hard work and accepted the American way. The news print, news TV media, TV shows, motion picture industry and educational liberal machine has perpetuated the Cancel Culture. I am appalled at the biased reporting. When the unarmed demonstrators entered the Capitol building, both papers screamed Insurrection, not even close. The Idaho Press headlines today read Anti-school indoctrination was passed by the Legislature. This is an attempt to level the playing field. I will bet you the students in the gallery dont know true history.

Bad ideas

Bad ideas in Idahos Legislature often resurface. Rep Joe Palmers bill to more than double electric vehicle registration fees is dead for this session, but it will boomerang back next year in some form.

Electric vehicle owners in Idaho are willing to pay their share for road maintenance. But pulling numbers out of the air is not a fair approach. There will continue to be more alternatively fueled vehicles in Idaho, so the gas tax a reliable source of revenue since the 1920s will be less useful every year.

Tying a use fee to the miles driven by each vehicle is a better, though not perfect, approach. If, as in Palmers failed legislation, 2.5 cents per mile is a number that would be fair for electric vehicles as an alternative to paying a flat fee, then it is also fair for gasoline-powered automobiles.

Legislators need to find a better solution to funding roads than spitballing fees to discourage the use of electric vehicles.

Radical

I have learned. Being a Democrat. I am part of the radical left. According to the r.n.c. thats because I believe that everyone should get a fair shake. When it comes to paying taxes. Even the top one percent does not do. We need to create more green type jobs for our future. Drive down high drug costs. We need police reform. So when police cross the line with excessive force. They need to be punished. We also need to raise the minimum wage to $ 12.00 dollars an hour. Everyone needs a fair shot. When it comes to being to have a decent life. For you and your family. So, yes. I am a left wing radical.

Initiatives

This years Legislature and Governor enacted legislation that makes it almost impossible for the people to propose and pass/reject an initiative or referendum. Idahos history bears no signs of of problem with this area. In our history, wed have 31 initiatives proposed, and 16 passed. With referenda, weve had just 6, with 2 passed. California, on the other hand, has had over 300 initiatives. I am a fiscal conservative, and I was raised to believe that Republicans believed in the power of the people to govern. Shame on them for this pro-government, almost imperial, law. They remind me of the gasbag Democrats I grew up hating.

Think

I wonder if our retrumplican Lt. Gov. and state legislators have ever heard of the McCarthy hearings in the 50s and 60s, or about what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Apparently not. I noticed that our Lt. Gov. while railing against different forms of government and ideologies didnt mention Fascism. I wonder why?

Rep. Nichols, Middleton, said our rights were given to us by God. Really? So after giving Moses the ten commandments he waited five thousand years then came to Idaho and wrote our state constitution. Or does he communicate only with Rep. Nichols tells her what he likes and dislikes and she then gets to tell everyone what to do like it or not.

Rather than choose to find paths that will help our state move forward in a sane responsible manner our legislators have decided to follow an agenda of goofy conspiracy theories and nonsense that has no truth, facts, or proof. Only I HEARD.

Qanon, the I.F.F. and other crazy no facts idiots are destroying our nation. THINK FIRST!

Climate

Idaho is poised for a very bright and clean future because our state is already blessed with an abundance of natural beauty and resources. We are the envy of many other states. One of our greatest assets includes a significant capacity to produce agricultural products that will meet our nations needs long into the future. Yet we can only do so if we are able to preserve and protect the environment that we all live in and depend on.

One of the ways we can ensure a sustainable future for Idaho and our farmers is by quickly passing the Growing Climate Solutions Act (GCSA). This bill, recently reintroduced with Senator Mike Crapo as a cosponsor, will help create consistency and reliability for ag producers who want to participate in carbon markets by creating a certification program within the US Department of Agriculture.

My sincere thanks go out to Senator Crapo for seeing the value in farmer-friendly legislation, like the GCSA, that seeks to leverage the power of the free market to address a changing climate.

Support

Im writing to elevate the story of the 19-year-old intern at the Idaho Legislature who has accused Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger of sexual assault. Von Ehlinger happens to also be a teacher. This story must be seen by as many people as possible.

As an adjunct professor of English, I teach young, impressionable people usually they are in their late teens to early twenties. What Ive learned from teaching this age demographic is that these individuals need support and guidance. Rep. von Ehlinger is accused of assaulting a young intern and is claiming that it was consensual, and his colleagues have come to his defense, to the extent that some of them are doxing the victim. This is a story that risks being dominated by the louder, more powerful voice, which, in this case, is the perpetrator and those on the far-right that support him.

CRT

The phrase critical race theory keeps appearing again and again in Idahos legislature this year, but I have yet to see anyone define it. Even in the Idaho Press Tribune article about finalists for the West Ada superintendent position, the writer indicated the finalists had to struggle to define it. I have not seen or heard anyone identify the source which created the phrase. Nor have I seen or heard anyone referencing any studies about how, when or where it is being taught. Even if you google critical race theory, all one can find is the phrase being used by our legislators, Fox News Network and the Idaho Freedom Foundation. I would like to see the Idaho Press interview all the legislators who are against whatever critical race theory is to provide their definition(s) and information identifying where it is currently being used to indoctrinate anyone in any school anywhere before creating a law which includes such a vague phrase.

The Idaho Press does not vouch for the factual accuracy or endorse the opinions expressed in Letters to the Editor. If you would like to respond to anything you read here, please submit a letter at idahopress.com/opinion

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Letters to the editor, May 2, 2021 - MDJOnline.com

Heres what you need to know:President Biden visited Philadelphia on Friday to mark Amtraks anniversary and used the occasion to promote his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, which includes $80 billion for mass transit.CreditCredit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

For a majority of his political career, President Biden was a commuter, making the 90-minute Amtrak Metroliner trip between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Del., when the Senate was in session. There were even a few trips thrown in when he was vice president.

On Friday, he arrived in Philadelphia transported by presidential plane to celebrate the railroads 50th anniversary; deliver a passionate case for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, which includes $80 billion for mass transit; and reminisce.

Amtrak became my family, Mr. Biden said, ticking off the railroads environmental and economic benefits while standing in front of a parked Acela train at the William H. Gray III 30th Street Station.

It provided me with, and Im not joking, an entire other family, he added. Amtrak doesnt just carry us from one place to another, it opens up enormous possibilities.

Mr. Biden, blue presidential baseball cap pulled down over his brow on a blustery day, proceeded to go through an anecdotal memory reel.

On many nights, he would be so exhausted that he would wake up in Philadelphia after sleeping though his stop, he said.

Then there was the time he rushed from D.C. to Wilmington to watch his daughter blow out her birthday candles on the platform, then rode back to Washington for a vote.

When Mr. Biden was vice president, his buddy Angelo, one of the conductors, would squeeze through the phalanx of jittery Secret Service agents, risking bodily harm, to wish him well.

Angelo came up and said, Joey baby! and would grab my cheek and squeeze it like he always did, Mr. Biden recalled. I thought he was going to get shot.

Many politicians have emphasized their workaday origins (the image of Abraham Lincoln as a rail-splitter was an early campaign ad). Mr. Bidens Amtrak Joe nickname was earned from an estimated 8,000 round trips on the line, often in a window seat, often reading the days newspaper by the morning light en route to the Capitol.

This is a birthday I certainly wouldnt miss, he wrote on Twitter, posting a picture of himself on the train from his middle-age years.

The trip is part of what the White House is calling the Get America Back on Track Tour, with Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hitting the road to sell the infrastructure package. The plan calls for improvements to Amtraks high-traffic Washington-to-Boston corridor and expanded service to Las Vegas, Nashville, Atlanta and Houston.

The commuter railroad traces a roundabout route through Mr. Bidens mid-Atlantic life, through loss, revival and relentless transit as a person and politician. And on Friday, he spoke about Amtrak as if it were his friend, not a battered and underfunded federal railroad system patched together from the remnants of dying regional lines.

Mr. Bidens journey mirrors that of Amtrak. He began riding in the earliest days of the railroad in the 1970s, when he traveled back home every night to care for his two young sons, Hunter and Beau, after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash.

Ive been riding an Amtrak for almost as long as theres been an Amtrak, he said.

Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, told local news reporters on Friday that he would not support a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., saying he believed a constitutional amendment was needed instead of legislation.

It is the latest example of Mr. Manchin, a critical swing vote, pushing his party toward the center on major issues. Among other things, he has pushed for a smaller corporate tax hike in President Bidens infrastructure plan and for more limited unemployment benefits in the $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

In a radio interview with Hoppy Kercheval of West Virginias MetroNews, Mr. Manchin said he had done a deep dive on the issue and pointed to findings from former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and from the Justice Department under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

They all came to the same conclusion: If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment, Mr. Manchin said. It should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote.

Even with Democrats in control of the 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harriss tiebreaking vote, the statehood legislation already had dim prospects before Mr. Manchin made his decision public. Several Senate Democrats have not publicly voiced support for the proposal, and no Republicans have come out for it, leaving the measure short of the support it would need to clear a filibuster.

Mr. Manchin has also made clear that he opposes eliminating or weakening the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold needed to end debate in the Senate.

The Democratic-controlled House passed the statehood measure along party lines last week, and Mr. Biden has said he supports it.

The legislation would establish a 51st state called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth in honor of Frederick Douglass, the Black emancipation and civil rights leader and would give the new state a voting representative in the House and two senators to represent its more than 700,000 residents.

The Biden administration is starting to see some success in its efforts to suitably house the migrant children flooding to the southwest border, with a fraction of the number of children in Customs and Border Protection custody than there were a month ago.

Over the past month, the number of migrant children in the jail-like facilities of the Border Patrol dropped 83 percent, from 5,767 on March 29 to 954 on Thursday, according to government statistics. The length of time children are staying in border shelters is down as well, from an average of 133 hours to 28. By law, children are not supposed to stay in border shelters for more than 72 hours.

The improvements are attributable in part to an increase in facilities overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services where children can be housed under better living conditions.

More children are also being discharged from government custody, most often to live with a relative.

The number of migrant children arriving alone at the southern border has decreased by a much smaller amount, from 626 on March 29 to 525 a month later, according to an official briefed on the data.

While the number of migrants at the border surges each spring, the surge this year has been much higher than normal.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, led Republican senators on Friday in protesting a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the legacy of American slavery, calling the guidance divisive nonsense.

In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Mr. McConnell, of Kentucky, and three dozen other Republicans singled out a reference in the proposal to The New York Times Magazines 1619 Project, which was included as an example of a growing emphasis on teaching the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society.

Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it, the senators wrote. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.

It was the latest bid by Republicans to stoke outrage within their conservative base about President Bidens agenda, which party leaders are portraying as a radical overreach into every corner of American life. With Mr. Biden pushing a number of popular domestic programs, Republicans have increasingly turned to litigating cultural issues, which they believe will help them regain majorities in Congress in 2022.

The White House, citing guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced Friday that it would begin restricting travel from India to the United States next week, a major new test of the Biden administrations pandemic response.

The decision was one of the most significant steps yet taken by the White House in response to the crush of new infections in India, where over 3,000 people are dying each day as citizens gasp for air on the streets. The country recorded almost 400,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday alone.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the policy would go into effect on Tuesday. The travel restrictions will not apply to citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States, their spouses or minor children or siblings, or to the parents of citizens or lawful permanent residents who are under 21. People who are exempt from the ban must still abide by the guidance the United States has already put in place for international travelers, including a negative test for the virus before traveling and again upon entering the country from India, and they must quarantine if they are not vaccinated.

Doctors and news reports in India have cited anecdotal but inconclusive evidence to suggest that a homegrown variant called B.1.617 is driving the countrys outbreak and that people who have been fully vaccinated are getting sick.

As federal health officials, including Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the C.D.C. director, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the governments top infectious disease expert, discussed the possible move in recent days with White House officials, they emphasized that there was little known about how coronavirus vaccines respond to that variant.

One U.S. official said the travel restrictions could be modified once there was more data on vaccine response.

Researchers say that data so far suggests that another variant that has spread widely in Britain and the U.S., the highly contagious B.1.1.7, may also be a significant factor.

In the past 24 hours, U.S. military cargo planes began the first deliveries of emergency supplies promised to India by the Biden administration, with shipments of small oxygen cylinders, large oxygen cylinders, regulators, pulse oximeters, about 184,000 rapid diagnostic tests, and about 84,000 N-95 masks, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.

After President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, the Biden administration announced Monday that it intended to make up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine available to other countries, so long as federal regulators deem the doses safe. It was a significant, albeit limited, shift for the White House, which had been reluctant to export excess vaccines in large amounts.

As hospitals face shortages of intensive-care beds, relatives of the sick are broadcasting desperate pleas on social media for oxygen, medicine and other scarce supplies. Many Indians say they do not know if they are infected with the coronavirus because overwhelmed labs have stopped processing tests.

Several Indian states said they could not fulfill the governments directive to expand vaccinations to all adults beginning on Saturday because they lacked doses. Only a small fraction of the country has been vaccinated so far.

Linda Qiu contributed reporting.

The Transportation Security Administration extended a mandate Friday that requires travelers to wear masks at airports, on airplanes and on commuter bus and rail systems, through Sept. 13. The mandate was set to expire on May 11.

Right now, about half of all adults have at least one vaccination shot and masks remain an important tool in defeating this pandemic, Darby LaJoye, a T.S.A. spokesperson, said in a statement.

The original order took effect in February and was part of the Biden administrations goal to require masks for 100 days. Exceptions to the mandate are travelers under the age of 2 and those with certain disabilities that dont allow them to wear a mask safely.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed mask rules earlier this week, saying that fully vaccinated Americans no longer need to wear a mask outdoors while doing activities alone or in small gatherings. But the C.D.C. stopped short of not recommending masks outside altogether and still recommends wearing a mask indoors.

Airlines started requiring passengers to wear masks nearly a year ago, but they had no federal mandate to back up their rules. As the orders expiration date got closer, leaders in the airline industry began to push for an extension. The Association of Flight Attendants applauded the extension in a statement. Earlier this month, it called for the directive to be extended to make it easier to deal with passengers who were not complying with mask rules set by airlines and airports.

A new group dedicated to promoting President Bidens ambitious agenda is beginning a multimillion-dollar ad campaign trumpeting his Covid recovery package and infrastructure proposal while contrasting Mr. Bidens low-key style with his bombastic predecessors.

Building Back Together, a progressive organization run by Biden allies, will air minute-long television commercials next week in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin that highlight the presidents response to the coronavirus and his wide-ranging economic plans. The group is planning to spend over $3 million on a monthlong effort, including a shorter advertisement that will appear on digital platforms in the same four states and in North Carolina.

Both spots differentiate Mr. Bidens approach from that of former President Donald J. Trump.

You wont hear him yelling or sending angry tweets, because for Joe Biden, actions speak louder, says a narrator in the television commercial.

The shorter digital advertisement concludes, No drama, just results.

The strategy illustrates how determined Democrats are to effectively keep running against Mr. Trump.

The message is simple: Chaos is out, competence is in, and help is here for Americans, said Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to Building Back Together who is close to Mr. Biden and top West Wing officials.

The group, whose formation was first reported in February, is going on the air in vote-rich and costly markets: Las Vegas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, as well as Scranton, Pa., Mr. Bidens childhood home. The group has drawn some scrutiny because it has said it will not disclose the identity of its donors.

The last time America came close to creating a national child care system was in 1971. There were a total of 15 women in Congress. And a young Joe Biden, then a councilman in New Castle County, Del., was beginning to consider running for a Senate seat. But President Richard Nixon vetoed what was a largely bipartisan effort, worried that it would have family-weakening implications.

Now, as president, Mr. Biden plans to vastly expand access to care for infants and toddlers in a highly ambitious national effort that lawmakers, advocates and child care workers believe may fundamentally transform Americas cultural ambivalence toward child care, and help bridge gender and racial inequities that the coronavirus pandemic has widened.

In his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, the president laid out the broad contours of his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. It includes a total of $425 billion to scale up and enhance the child care industry so that affordable, high-quality early education is available to almost every parent.

It is so amazing that what has been a secretly whispered stress campaign for so many parents for so long is finally seeing prime-time attention, said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who has been championing child care reforms and family-friendly policies since she was elected in 1993.

The last investment in child care that was considered significant was in 2018, when Congress injected about $2.8 billion into a national funding program for low-income families, known as the Child Care and Development Block Grant, bringing the programs total funding to $5.2 billion. As the pandemic drove the child care industry to near collapse, Congress passed a set of temporary relief measures amounting to a total of more than $50 billion to help shore up providers.

Price tag aside, there is now more momentum and bipartisan support than ever before for an overhaul of the child care system, experts say.

In just the past week, congressional lawmakers including Ms. Murray, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts have introduced three separate but similar child care reform bills. In recent years, several states, like Alabama, have successfully expanded their early childhood programs. And the last year laid bare for voters across the political spectrum particularly mothers how essential child care is for their productivity. Even the right-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce acknowledged on Wednesday that without some kind of investment in child care, the economy could not fully recover.

The conversation has completely changed, said Charlie Joughin, communications director at the First Five Years Fund, a bipartisan advocacy group. We definitely know that there is no shortage of support for some kind of solution to the challenges that families are facing.

But Mr. Biden faces pressure from Democrats to earmark more federal money for child care. And the presidents plan to pay for the $1.8 trillion package by increasing taxes on the richest Americans has already drawn harsh criticism from some Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress, setting up a clash in the coming weeks.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will travel to Kyiv next week, a clear signal of the Biden administrations support for Ukraines government against threats from Russia.

In a statement announcing his trip, the State Department said that Mr. Blinken would reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russias ongoing aggression.

Mr. Blinken will meet in Kyiv on Wednesday and Thursday with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, senior officials and civil society representatives. His visit will be preceded by a three-day stop in London.

Mr. Blinken will be the most senior American official to visit Kyiv since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled there in February 2020, soon after Congress impeached and acquitted President Donald J. Trump on charges that he abused his power by leveraging U.S. policy toward the country in an effort to incriminate Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a Democratic candidate for president, and his son Hunter.

As president, Mr. Biden has offered strong support for Ukraine against Moscow, which annexed Crimea in 2014 an act the United States has never recognized and fomented a Russian-backed separatist rebellion in the countrys east that has claimed more than 13,000 lives.

But Russia has tested that support, intensifying its military intimidation of Ukraine this spring with a huge troop buildup along the countries shared border, which many analysts said could be a precursor to an invasion. Russia announced plans to withdraw many of those forces earlier this month. But earlier this week, John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters that it was too soon to tell and to take at face value Russias claim.

The number of people targeted by the F.B.I. for court-approved searches and surveillance in terrorism and espionage investigations dropped sharply in 2020, a report released Friday said, amid the pandemic and the continuing political and legal fallout from the F.B.I.s botched use of its eavesdropping power in the Trump-Russia investigation.

There were just 451 targets of wiretap and search warrants obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 2020, according to the newly declassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That was the lowest number of FISA targets in the eight years that the office has been releasing annual transparency reports disclosing statistics about the governments use of national-security surveillance powers. The number of targets of FISA warrants peaked in 2018 with 1,833; dropped significantly in 2019 to 1,059; and then plunged again.

The two-year drop in targets starting in 2019 corresponded with scorching political scrutiny on the F.B.I.s use of FISA to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with close ties to Russia, Carter Page. In late 2019, an inspector general further unveiled serious flaws in applications for those wiretaps, and a follow-up audit of unrelated cases found pervasive sloppiness in the F.B.I.s preparations to seek FISA orders.

The problems led both the F.B.I. and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to impose new bureaucratic restrictions on the process that played out in 2020 like requiring officials to swear that applications to the court contain all information that might reasonably call into question the accuracy of the information or the reasonableness of any F.B.I. assessment in the application, or otherwise raise doubts about the requested findings.

Still, a variety of factors were responsible for the fluctuating numbers, so isolating the effects of any one cause is difficult, Benjamin T. Huebner, the chief civil liberties, privacy, and transparency officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a briefing with reporters on Friday ahead of the reports release.

The new report also showed that the number of foreigners abroad targeted for warrantless surveillance, with help from American companies like Google and AT&T, dropped slightly to 202,703 in 2020, down from 204,968 in 2019. That slight dip broke a yearslong pattern of a steadily rising number of such targets.

Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary, said on Thursday that in a lot of cases gig workers in the United States should be classified as employees, not independent contractors. In some cases they are treated respectfully and in some cases they are not, and I think it has to be consistent across the board, he told Reuters.

Shares of Uber, Lyft, Fiverr and DoorDash fell sharply on the news. These companies business models depend on classifying workers as independent contractors, who are not entitled to labor protections like a minimum wage or overtime pay.

But how much control does Mr. Walsh have over how companies classify their employees?

Theres no single law that makes workers employees or contractors. The Labor Department can enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes the federal minimum wage and overtime pay. This law applies only to employees, and who should fall into that category has been the subject of a long-running debate.

In 2015, the Obama administration issued guidance that many interpreted to mean that app-based workers should be considered employees. It was rescinded by the Trump administration.

In 2021, the Trump administration issued a rule that would have made it easier for the same companies to classify workers as contractors. It was nixed by the Biden administration. Mr. Walshs comments suggest his interpretation will be similar to the Obama administrations. And David Weil, reportedly President Bidens nominee to lead the Labor Departments wage and hour division, wrote the 2015 guidance.

New guidance wouldnt change the law, but it could change how the Labor Department decides whether to bring lawsuits against gig economy companies. Its implicitly a sign to employers that you should comply with this interpretation or theres a risk of enforcement, Brian Chen, a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, told the DealBook newsletter.

Although such guidance is nonbinding, Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School, said courts tend to give it deference when making decisions. I wouldnt be surprised if we saw specific action coming from the department sometime this year, said William Gould, a Stanford law professor and the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

President Biden will meet with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea in Washington on May 21, the White House announced on Thursday.

President Moons visit will highlight the ironclad alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people, and economies, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. President Biden looks forward to working with President Moon to further strengthen our alliance and expand our close cooperation.

In an interview with The New York Times published last week, Mr. Moon urged Mr. Biden to sit down with North Korea and kick-start negotiations, calling denuclearization a matter of survival for South Korea.

Mr. Bidens predecessor, Donald J. Trump, left office without removing a single North Korean nuclear warhead. Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, has resumed weapons tests.

He beat around the bush and failed to pull it through, Mr. Moon said of Mr. Trumps efforts on North Korea. The most important starting point for both governments is to have the will for dialogue and to sit down face to face at an early date.

He also called for the United States to cooperate with China on North Korea and other global issues, like climate change. Deteriorating relations between the two countries could threaten negotiations over denuclearization, he warned.

Mr. Biden met with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan at the White House on April 16, marking the first in-person visit of a foreign leader during his presidency.

On the campaign trail, Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed to bring science back to the White House, the federal government and the nation after years of presidential attacks and disavowals, neglect and disarray.

As president-elect, he got off to a fast start in January by nominating Eric S. Lander, a top biologist, to be his science adviser. He also made the job a cabinet-level position, calling its elevation part of his effort to reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy.

In theory, the enhanced post could make Dr. Lander one of the most influential scientists in American history.

But his Senate confirmation hearing was pushed off for three months. The slow pace, according to Politico, arose in part from questions about his meetings in 2012 with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who had insinuated himself among the scientific elite despite a 2008 conviction that had labeled him as a sex offender.

Link:

Biden Promotes His $2.3 Trillion Infrastructure Package and His Love of Train Travel - The New York Times

Americas transition from a nation of dispersed communities and local economies to a national market generated exciting opportunities. It also created new winners and losers and fundamentally altered the peoples relationships to their neighbors, families and government. When they argued about whether to dredge a river or build a canal, Americans of the antebellum period were really arguing about what kind of country they wanted to live in. And thats exactly what politicians are still fighting about today.

Prior to the 1820s, Americas infrastructure was a rudimentary and scattershot affair. Roads were locally built and maintained. Riverways were mostly undredged. Canals and railroads were nonexistent. The downstream journey from Pittsburgh, an emerging western market hub, to the Southern port city of New Orleans took at least six weeks; the return trip, upstream, took 17 weekswhich is why most people transporting goods simply broke their boats up for timber upon arrival in New Orleans and walked or rode back home. When newly elected Senator Henry Clay first made the journey from his home in Lexington, Kentucky, to Washington, D.C., in 1806, it took three weeks of hard overland travel.

Many Americans, particularly those who lived inland from coastal townsthose pushing outward beyond the Alleghenies and Appalachian range, extending as far as the Old Northwest territorieswere essentially cut off from a regional, let alone national, market. Like many of their neighbors in the new state of Indiana, Abraham Lincolns family cultivated only a small portion of its land to grow corn and vegetables and raise hogs and cattle, leaving the rest fallow and overgrown. As a neighbor later explained, there wasnt no market for nothing else unless you took it across two or three states. Though Lincolns father, Thomas, attempted on several occasions to take pork and corn by flatboat to New Orleans, in the absence of roads and canals, and with large parts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers largely unnavigable, the cost of transportation all but erased the profit margin.

Without a market for goods, and in the absence of a developed cash economy, most families did what was logical, producing enough for home consumption and little more, perhaps selling a small surplus to neighbors, bartering with others for goods and services, manufacturing clothing and other necessities at home, and purchasing what few items they could not produce themselvessugar and other dry goods, glass for windowsfrom a nearby country store. Survival demanded a collective outlook. Like other families, the Lincolns relied on a growing kinship network of cousins and in-laws who established small, adjoining homesteads and built an informal system of cooperative farming, home production and bartering.

That soon changed. Following the War of 1812, which exposed the logistical dangers of a fragmentary transportation system, federal and state governments made significant investments in roads and turnpikes.

Then came Canal Fever.

Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal, a 363-mile wonder stretching from the Hudson River in Albany to Buffalo, thus making it possible to ship freight between New York City and the Great Lakes, set off a decade of construction that saw $102 million of public and private capitala staggering sum in its dayinvested in new connective waterways as far and wide as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Virginia.

Canal fever was followed by a boom in steamboat construction, which not only reduced the time required to carry goods downstream but made it feasible and worth the cost to move freight upstream. Suddenly, a trip from New York City to Albanytwo weeks by sailboat, or a full day by coachtook just eight hours. This efficiency, in turn, reduced regional price disparities for different goods. In 1816 a resident of Cincinnati paid roughly $0.16 more for a pound of coffee than counterparts in Southern cities closer to New Orleans. Riverboats cut the difference to about $0.02.

Railroads were the final piece of the puzzle. Trains were virtually unheard of when Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington, D.C., by carriage to assume the presidency in 1829. Eight years later, he left the capital city by rail. By the end of the decade, the country claimed 450 locomotives and 3,200 miles of track. By 1850, 9,000 miles of track. On the eve of the Civil War, 30,000.

If canals and steamboats made travel faster, railroads were practically science fiction come true. The same three-week trip that Senator-elect Henry Clay made from Lexington to Washington, D.C., in 1806 took just four days by 1846.

Together, twin revolutions in transportation and information (inspired by the U.S. Post Office, which subsidized the delivery of newspapers and magazines, and after 1848, the telegraph) drew disparate communities into closer connection with one another and with an emerging market economy that relied on credit, surplus production and trade. America evolved quickly from an agrarian republic into a capitalist democracy.

It was a world that many Americans welcomedbut which equally as many dreaded and resisted.

Opposition to federal investments in internal improvements (the popular term for what we, today, call infrastructure) emerged as early as the 1810sthe Era of Good Feelingswhen presidents James Madison and James Monroe both vetoed bills that would have directed funds to the improvement of national roads. Despite his assertion of the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority, Madison doubted the governments authority to undertake most work without the benefit of a constitutional amendment.

It was a position echoed by Monroe, who vetoed plans to erect tolls on a national highway, and Andrew Jackson, who famously vetoed funding for the Maysville Road in 1830. All three presidents professed support for internal improvements, but only if they were principally financed by state and local governments, or by chartered corporations.

Qualms about the constitutionality of funding for infrastructure reflected a broader concern about the proper size and scope of the federal government. Often, that concern struck a nerve with Southern representatives who feared that a central government strong enough to build national roads might be strong enough to interfere with slavery. If Congress can make canals, a longtime representative and senator from North Carolina warned, they can with more propriety emancipate.

But opponents of federal funding for internal improvements feared more than just an empowered federal state. They understood that internal improvements would usher in a new realityone in which a cherished agrarian republic gave way to a mixed economy of farms and small towns, factories and cities, agriculture and commerce. In a short story published in 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a steadfast Jacksonian Democrat in politics, likened the railroad to a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions.

In North Carolina, opponents of state funding for internal improvements popularized an election ballad that framed canals and roads as the ruin of their agrarian paradise:

So therefore let it be our care,To keep these men away from there,Who build their castles in the air,Who dream they can vast things perform,Aid in a breadth Gods works reform,[But to] us send such men as willCut no canals through vale nor hill.

In the eyes of opponents, where canals and railroads cut a swath through the countryside, they seemed to decimate local communities and turn once healthy, independent farmers into washed-out wage laborers. A New York editor invited readers to gaze on the sallow complexions, emaciated forms, and stooping shoulders of mill workers and consider what a crime against society it was to divert human industry from the fields and the forests to the iron forges and cotton factories.

The debate over internal improvements ultimately folded into the larger divide between Jacksonian Democrats, who generally opposed them (along with a national bank and tariff) and Whigs, who rallied behind Henry Clays American Systema bold agenda to modernize the American economy through a protective tariff that would encourage homegrown industry, investments in internal improvements and a banking system that could support these ambitions with a stable influx of paper currency.

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What the Infrastructure Fight Is Really About - POLITICO

Various University of Georgia departments have come together to sponsor the 2021 Symposium on Recognition, Reconciliation and Redress this Friday and Saturday, a virtual look back at slavery on campus and the repercussions Athens faces today because of it.

The two-day event will consist of 14 sessions detailing the universitys ties to slavery, including lectures from guest speakers and performances from UGA students and community members. Sessions one through seven will be held Friday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. The remaining sessions will be held the next day from 9 a.m. until 5:45 p.m.

Each session will last about an hour and groups will break for a 30-minute lunch both days.

Topics of discussion will include Athens connection to the Indian Removal Act, the fight for reparations and justice for former residents of Linnentown and the experiences of Black UGA students decades after racial integration in the 1960s.

Also prompted to speak at the symposium are Phaidra Buchanan and Kyle Patel, co-founders of Beyond Baldwin, a student-led organization that formed after construction workers uncovered slave remains while renovating Baldwin Hall in 2015. Beyond Baldwin advocates for a higher minimum wage for university employees, and pushes UGA to acknowledge its history of racism, and also fighting for closure of the race gap separating students and faculty on campus.

Aside from lectures and discussions, musical and theatrical performances will shine a light on racial injustice. Students and faculty from the Department of Theatre and Film Studies will perform a piece that will explore the methods and benefits of collaborative interdisciplinary teaching for the study of slavery, according to the symposiums program. The symposium will close with a performance from East Athens Educational Dance Center Performance Group.

This virtual symposium will be a space for a conversation among a broad group of people and organizations interested in exploring racial justice within and beyond the UGA community, according to a description on the events program.

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required and can be found on the symposium website.

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UGA to host symposium on campus enslavement history - Red and Black

The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority has said there are still 100 factories it intends to visit in the coming months as part of its investigation into allegations on modern day slavery in citys textile trade.

The watchdog is leading Operation Tacit, a probe into alleged exploitation in the sector triggered by a raft of newspaper stories last year suggesting workers were being abused, poorly paid and pressed into meeting orders in substandard premises.

As previously reported by LeicestershireLive, officials from Operation Tacit have visited more than 220 garment factories in the city since last August and said, while they found some evidence of workers not being paid the minimum wage, they had so far not discovered anything that met the legal definition of modern day slavery.

However the GLLAs head of enforcement Ian Waterfield has said the probe is far from over and he expected there would be prosecutions for offences, other than modern day slavery, before Operation Tacit ceases at the end of the summer.

He told a Leicester City Council meeting this week: We are visiting factory premises at least three days a week in Leicester.

These are a mixture of engagement visits to encourage them to be better and also enforcement.

He told councillors there were still 100 premises Operation Tacit, which has involved the National Crime Agency, wanted to take a look at based on intelligence suggesting there may be issues like VAT fraud,

He said: We have not found endemic levels of underpayment of national minimum wage or endemic unsafe working conditions.

But we have found some issues around the underpayment of minimum wage and the safety of working conditions and other health and safety issues and we have identified elements of financial fraud attached to VAT.

What we really haven't found is what the media were portraying.

He said there had been two solid leads suggesting modern slavery was occurring at businesses but when investigators scratched under the surface and spoke to workers the issues were around the underpayment of wages.

Mr Waterfield said cases of a failure to pay minimum wage would be passed on to HMRC for potential further action.

He said that in 16 per cent of visits to Leicester factories issues of concern were raised but that was not a higher rate than would be found in other industries like hand car washing and construction.

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Mr Waterfield said some of the GLAA work was now focused on helping firms who had been dropped by large fashion brands like Boohoo over concerns about poor practice in their supply chains.

He added: We want to weed out the unscrupulous employers but we want a vibrant sector.

He said: What we have found is not isolated to Leicester. Its the same in Manchester. Its the same in Birmingham.

The city council has stressed it felt the garment trade in the city had been unfairly portrayed by the media last summer - particularly after headlines suggesting squalid, cramped working conditions in Leicester textile workshops were a factor in the Covid-19 spike that plunged the city into the UKs first local lockdown.

It has said the city was besieged by headlines which have not been supported by facts.

However opposition Liberal Democrat councillor Nigel Porter accused the council of putting on a blindfold.

He said: Theres a gap between what most sensible people see and the council.

Forced labour does exist in Leicester and the Labour council has put on a set of rose-tinted spectacles and for whatever reason is unwilling to acknowledge or accept there is a problem still.

He added: Just because you have not been able to locate it does not mean it does not exist.

Deputy city mayor councillor Adam Clarke accused Coun Porter of talking rubbish and failing to listen to what the GLAA had said.

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100 more Leicester factories to be inspected in modern day slavery probe - Leicestershire Live

ATLANTA (JTA) To the end of his life, the civil rights hero and later congressman John Lewis remembered the half-mile walk from his familys farm in rural Pike County, Alabama, to the Dunns Chapel School.

There was no school bus for Black children; Lewiss hike was short compared with the miles walked by many of his classmates. They were being educated in surroundings separate from whites, but hardly equal.

The school was a small, wooden, whitewashed building with a large window. An interior wall partitioned the space into two rooms, heated by potbelly stoves, burning wood that students fetched from a nearby forest. Water was drawn and carried from a farmers well up the road.

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Dunns Chapel was a Rosenwald school, one of nearly 5,000 such schools built across 15 Southern states from 1912 to 1932. This effort was an outgrowth of a collaboration between Julius Rosenwald, the son of German Jewish immigrants and a leading philanthropist of his time, and Booker T. Washington, the renowned educator born into slavery in Virginia.

In the years they operated, Rosenwald schools educated one-third of rural Black children in the South, an estimated number of more than 663,000 students. Lewis was one. Others included writer Maya Angelou, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and playwright and director George Wolfe. A study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that the educational gains by Rosenwald school students spurred many Black young adults to migrate north, and those who remained in the South had wage gains over their peers who did not attend the schools.

The Rosenwald schools closed several decades ago, a process accelerated by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that racially segregated, separate but equal schools were inherently unequal and violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Of the roughly 10 percent of the schoolhouses that remain, some have been repurposed as museums or community centers, while others have decayed with the passing years. A small number still operate as schools.

Atlanta-based photographer Andrew Feiler, a fifth-generation Georgian Jew, has spent several years traveling throughout the South documenting what remains of the school sites. Now the images have been compiled in his book A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, published this month by University of Georgia Press. Lewis authored the foreword not long before his death in July from pancreatic cancer at age 80.

Rep. John Lewis, who represented Georgias 5th District for 33 years before his death in 2020, attended a Rosenwald school as a child. (Andrew Feiler/ via JTA)

The 136-page book, featuring 85 black-and-white images, is the product of 3 1/2 years of research and 25,000 miles of driving. Feiler photographed 105 of the structures that once housed Rosenwald schools, along with some of the men and women whose lives were changed by the education they received in their classrooms.

It simply became imperative that I share these stories as part of this endeavor, so each image or pair of images comes with a narrative written by me, the 59-year-old Feiler said. This is a book of photography, but it is also a book of stories.

Rosenwald, who was born in 1862 and died in 1932, was part owner and president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., back when the Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalog was the Amazon of its day. As a member of Chicago Sinai Congregation, he was influenced by the social justice teachings of Rabbi Emil Hirsch, one of which held that property entails duties.

A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, by photographer Andrew Feiler. (Courtesy University of Georgia Press)

For his part, Rosenwald believed that Jews should uniquely sympathize with the plight of African-Americans.

The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer, he said.

In 1912, a couple of years after reading Washingtons autobiography, Up From Slavery, Rosenwald met its author, the founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (today called Tuskegee University). Together they set out to change the educational landscape of the region.

Rosenwald personally invested $4.3 million more than $80 million in todays currency to construct the schools. In varying ratios over the years, matching funds came from the Black community and white-controlled governments.

Rosenwalds philanthropic philosophy was give while you live, believing that a foundation should expend its funds within a predetermined period. To that end, he stipulated that the Rosenwald Fund, created in 1917 to support the schools and his other philanthropic projects, should cease operations within 25 years of his death.

By the time the fund stopped operating in 1948, some $70 million (equaling more than $700 million today) had been spent benefiting schools, colleges and universities, Jewish charities and institutions serving the Black community. Recipients of Rosenwald-funded fellowships included singer Marian Anderson; poet Langston Hughes; authors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and W.E.B. Du Bois; diplomat Ralph Bunche; photographer Gordon Parks; and choreographer-dancer Katherine Dunham.

The fund also financed early litigation by the NAACP, the nations oldest civil rights organization, that led to the historic Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka making integrated education the law of the land. The decision also began the close of the era of the Rosenwald schools.

Despite some recent efforts to tell the story of the Rosenwald schools, including the 2015 documentary Rosenwald, it remains a lesser-known piece of American history. Thats what attracted Feiler to the project.

Photographer Andrew Feiler at the Carver School in Coffee County, Ga., working on his project documenting the sites of former Rosenwald schools. (Jim Cottingham/ via JTA)

Feiler spoke to Jeanne Cyriaque, a historian of African-American culture, and she detailed her efforts to preserve what remained of the Rosenwald schools.

As the African-American Programs coordinator for Georgias Historic Preservation Division, Cyriaque sought out the oldest structures in Black communities in the states 159 counties.

In that quest I would ultimately become a preservationist of remaining [Rosenwald] schools and an advocate for documenting their powerful stories of African American achievement in education, she wrote in a contribution to Feilers book.

Feiler said the story of the schools shocked me.

How could I [have] never heard of Rosenwald schools? The pillars of this story Jewish, Southern, progressive, activist these are the pillars of my life, he said. That afternoon I sat at my desk in Atlanta and Googled Rosenwald schools. I quickly found there were a few books on the topic, but there was no comprehensive photographic account. I set out to create exactly that.

Feiler, a Savannah native, began taking photographs as a 10-year-old, wielding a Kodak Instamatic. His avocation has since become a vocation.

A restored classroom at the Pine Grove School in Richland County, South Carolina, one of the Rosenwald schools funded by the Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald to educate Black children in the segregated South. (Andrew Feiler/ via JTA)

Starting in mid-2008, I went through four-and-a-half very difficult years the death of a business partner, near-death of my brother, health collapse of my father and over three years of real estate workouts during the Great Recession, he said. Collectively these experiences caused me to ask what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I still manage our family real estate business, but I now do it part-time.

His first book, published in 2015, was Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color: The Past, Present, and Future of One Historically Black College, a tour of abandoned classrooms and facilities at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. The school, on the citys west side, emerged relatively recently from bankruptcy and is seeking reaccreditation.

Feilers latest work was influenced artistically by the early history of the Rosenwald schools, specifically a pilot project built near Tuskegee.

Washington sent Rosenwald photographs of the children and teachers proudly gathered in front of their new schools, Feiler said. These deeply moved Rosenwald and contributed to his support for expanding the program. Making such photographs became common, and they are a prominent visual element of the programs history.

Feiler usually works in color, but I found this history so compelling that I decided to pay homage to these historical images and shoot my Rosenwald schools work entirely in black and white and horizontal, he said.

A portrait of Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald at the Noble Hill School in Bartow County, Georgia one of his namesake Rosenwald schools for Black children in the segregated South. (Andrew Feiler/ via JTA)

Feiler hopes his book can add to the steps that have been taken to preserve Rosenwalds memory. In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared the Rosenwald schools a National Treasure, placing them on its list of Most Endangered Places and providing assistance to help save these icons of progressive architecture for community use.

On January 13, the day that he was impeached by the House of Representatives, US president Donald Trump signed the Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools Act of 2020, which directs the Department of the Interior to study the sites of the former schools for preservation. Its a first step toward creating a multistate national park that would include some of the surviving schoolhouses and a visitors center in Chicago. Backers say it would be the first national park site to honor a Jewish American.

The Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation has erected markers acknowledging the role played by the Jewish philanthropist at Tuskegee University in Alabama, and at the sites of Rosenwald schools in Warrenton and Rectortown, both in Virginia.

Rosenwald and Washingtons shared vision changed the educational landscape of the South and expanded the horizons for generations of students. That certainly was the case at the Dunns Chapel School, where the young John Lewis loved to read biographies and learned that there were black people out there who had made their mark on the world, as he wrote in the foreword to A Better Life for Their Children.

The structure itself may have been basic in design and lacking amenities, but as Lewis remembered: It was beautiful, and it was our school.

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Jewish photographer makes it his mission to preserve legacy of Rosenwald schools - The Times of Israel

Missing from the Congressional debate over raising the $7.25 federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is any acknowledgement that poverty-level wages are integral to aclass system that rewards the rich and punishes thepoor.

With few exceptions, where aperson ends up in lifein terms of health, wealth and general wellbeingis determined by the economic class into which they are born. People born poor die poor. People born rich die rich. This basic, intrinsic feature of American political economy is shaded from view by our cultures celebration of the so-called meritocracy, the myth that if aperson works hard enough, they can win at any table, despite the stackeddeck.

Government can intervene to lift people out of poverty. The 1944 GI Bill, for example, enabled the families of millions of World War II vets to enter the middle class. Because of structural racism, however, most of those who benefited were white. The legislation did not guarantee the same housing and educational benefits to 1.2 million Blackvets.

On March 5, the Senate had another opportunity to lift millions out of poverty, this time by raising the minimum wage to $15. But 50 Republicans, seven Democrats and an Independent voted against the bill sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.). In doing so, they denied araise to the 32 million workersabout 21% of the workforceincluding 31% of Black workers, 26% percent of Hispanic workers and 20% of white workers. That number includes the 1.1 million Americans who earn $7.25 or less, and the approximately 20.6 million who earn a near-minimum wage of up to $10.10, according to the Pew Research Center.

Like $7.25 an hour, $10.10 is not a living wage, the earnings needed to cover the cost of afamilys basic necessities, as defined by the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Living Wage Calculator project. By MITs calculation, acouple with two children who each earn $10.10 an hour would both need to work more than 65hours aweek, 52 weeks ayear, to earn the $68,808 living wage they need. Some people try to do it; according to the Census Bureau, around 7.8% of workers hold more than onejob.

On March 5, the Senate had another opportunity to lift millions out of poverty, by raising the minimum wage to $15. But 50 Republicans and seven Democrats voted against the bill.

When former enslaved person and abolitionist Frederick Douglass took his first paying job, he declared, Now Iam my own master. But by 1883, he observed, Experience demonstrates that there may be aslavery of wages only alittle less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with theother.

The condition of wage workers has improved since the depravities of the Gilded Age because of the tireless work of the American labor movement. That movement, however, has atrophied in recent decades, with membership declining from its 1954 high of 34.8% of the workforce to the current 10.8%.

Though his bill was defeated, Sanders vowed to fight on: If any Senator believes this is the last time they will cast avote on whether or not to give araise to 32 million Americans, they are sorelymistaken.

In addition to giving that raise, next on the progressive agenda should be the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the House on March 9, and now heads to the Senate. If passed, it would enshrine the basic right of workers to organize without interference from their employers. It would also allow workers to engage in political strikes, secondary strikes and solidarity strikespowerful tactics once despised by anti-New-Dealers who sought to rein in worker power with the Taft-HartleyAct.

American workers need araise. They also need power over their workplaces and their ownlives.

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What's Really Behind the Opposition to a $15 Minimum Wage - In These Times

One year into the global pandemic, service industry workers ongoing hardship exposes economic disparities in our labor force. A ramped-up vaccination effort and warmer weather months hold great promise for accelerating employment. However, efforts by organized labor to boost its power could stymie that growth. We need opportunities, especially flexible work, that put women and workers in control of their time and earnings instead of union bosses.

The pandemic significantly erased womens gains in the labor force. Some 2.3 million women dropped out of the workforce since the start of the pandemic including 1.5 million mothers of school-aged children. Women suffered some of the heaviest losses such as the 80 percent of the workers who left the workforce in January.

There are two unsurprising reasons for these occurrences. First, women tend to be concentrated in the leisure and hospitality industry where employment took a nosedive because of pandemic closures. Lockdowns and severe restrictions on dining and travel eliminated millions of jobs and forced hundreds of thousands of small businesses to close--some permanently such as one in six restaurants. Second, women shouldered more of the caregiving responsibilities, especially related to school and daycare closures. Many were not lucky enough to avoid disruption to their employment by transitioning to remote work.

As devastating as the numbers are, they could have been worse had it not been for flexible opportunities, particularly in the gig economy. These opportunities allowed women to earn a living around caregiving and household duties. UberEats, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon launched massive hiring sprees in the early days of the pandemic that drew many women to join their ranks. Seven out of ten Instacart shoppers are women, over half UberEats and DoorDash drivers are female and nearly half of Amazon employees identify as women.

Even before COVID-19 flexibility was of utmost importance to women working in the gig economy. A majority prefer to be independent contractors not employees of the companies that contract their services. This is very different from the narrative that organized labor, union-backed lawmakers, journalists, and activist groups are pushing. They characterize Big Tech companies like Uber and Amazon as plantations run by slave drivers exploiting the slaves.

Nothing stirs Americans emotions more than slavery analogies, no matter how wrong and inappropriate. Opponents also describe independent contracting work through the gig economy as anti-worker, but, theres nothing more pro-worker than controlling 100 percent of your labor, schedule, and decision-making.

Independent contracting is an alternative to the employer-employee model. Gig-economy opponents uphold the outdated employer-employee model as the best option for workers though, because, among other things, traditional employees can more easily be unionized.

Freelancing is a wildly popular preference for 57 million Americans, almost half of whom are women. Nearly half of freelancers have unique circumstances, like health issues or caregiving, that prevent them from working in a traditional job. Independent contractors understand that they forgo benefits and wage guarantees that employees enjoy such as overtime, paid leave, and minimum wages. Yet they choose to be independent for other reasons.

Lawmakers should not take that choice away by enacting changes to labor laws. Congress certainly should not be in the business of choosing winners and losers among the worker classifications by prioritizing employees over independent contractors or union members over non-union members. Unfortunately, that is what the House-passed and Biden-blessed Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would do.

The PRO Act aims to energize organized labor, which has seen membership numbers plummet among private-sector workers. However, if passed the bill will lead to independent contractors losing income and flexible work opportunities as many did when California passed similar legislation. Millions of workers prefer to negotiate directly with their employer the best compensation package for their individual, unique needs. At the same time, technology is delivering flexible employment opportunities that also meet the unique circumstances of women and workers.

Organized labor and activists view these workplace changes as threats. Therefore, they are pushing the PRO Act and corporate organizing drives such as this months vote to make an Alabama Amazon warehouse the first in the nation to be unionized. Not every woman wants or can hold down a traditional job. There may also be good reasons that a woman chooses not to join a union. Women want freedom, flexibility, and choices in employment. Drawing them back into the workforce can help fuel a V-shaped recovery, but that will depend on good policies and abundant opportunities, not doing organized labors bidding.

Patrice Onwuka is director of the Center for Economic Opportunity at the Independent Womens Forum. You can follow her online @PatricePinkFile.

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Big labor efforts threaten choices and freedoms for working women | TheHill - The Hill

Like millions before him, Manoj migrated from the southwestern Indian state of Kerala to the Gulf in search of work in 2019. He found a job at a construction company in Bahrain that described itself as a regional leader. The pay, at 240 dinars (577) a month, was far more than he could expect to find at home.

Last February, as cases of COVID-19 soared in Bahrain, the company stopped paying Manoj and two dozen other employees. When they complained, their employer stopped providing food and accommodation, too.

Manoj and his colleagues refused to leave and continued to demand their unpaid wages. Once they realised we will not back off, they offered to give us back our passports and pay for our return to Kerala under the condition that we give up our unpaid wages, he said. They rejected the offer. They cut off our electricity after that.

By then, it was the middle of August, when temperatures can reach as high as 40 in Bahrain. Determined to get what they were owed, the workers continued to occupy their accommodation. Without electricity, they had to spend the hottest parts of the day in air-conditioned shopping malls and rely on a portable stove, provided by a Keralite charity, to cook.

By September, some workers had found new employers and others were repatriated on rescue missions, but despite their efforts they have still not received the thousands of pounds in unpaid salary they are owed.

Manoj is one of hundreds of migrant workers from Kerala who were left stranded and without months worth of pay during the pandemic. In the Gulf alone, over 700 Keralite workers have reported non-payment of wages since the pandemic began, according to the Centre for Indian Migrant Studies. But with millions of migrant workers in the region, the true number is likely much higher.

Wage theft the denial of wages or benefits rightfully owed to an employee could devastate Keralas economy. Just under a half of Keralite households include labour migrants, while remittances from migrant workers account for a quarter of the states gross domestic product.

This is a community which has provided a lot, not only to Kerala in terms of financial and social capital, but also to the destinations as well, becoming entrenched and quite influential in many sectors in the Gulf, said Irudaya Rajan, a leading expert on Keralite migration at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram.

Kerala is unique in India when it comes to international migration. From the 19th century onwards, Keralites migrated to all corners of the British Empire, a trend which continued long after India gained independence in 1947. In the 1970s, an oil boom created a surge in demand for labourers in the Gulf, largely filled by Keralites who were drawn there by a lack of employment opportunities at home and the promise of higher wages. By 2018, almost two million Keralites were working in the Gulf, accounting for every one in four Indian migrants.

Initially, most Keralites in the Gulf were employed in the construction sector and other low-skilled jobs in the service sector. But over the years, they have taken up semi and high-skilled occupations, such as fire and safety engineers, nurses, care workers and business administrators.

Since the pandemic began, close to 900,000 Keralites have been repatriated from around the world, the highest number of any Indian state. Almost 95% returned from the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.

Many migrant workers in the Gulf were left without the right to remain in their destination country when their employment contracts were terminated at the start of the pandemic. Under the Kafala (or sponsorship) system in place across many Gulf countries, migrant workers citizenship is dependent on an employment contract with a specific employer and workers are not free to change jobs.

Kafala is like modern slavery, said Khalid Ibrahim, Executive Director at the Gulf Centre for Human Rights.

They hold your passport, so you are not allowed to leave the country, and they pay you as much as they want, mostly not proportional to the size of your work. And you have no right to defend anything, your colleagues or yourself, you have no rights, no access to unions, he added.

Hari had worked for Nasser S. Al Hajri, one of the largest industrial contractors in the Middle East, as a carpenter and painter for thirteen years before his job was terminated without notice in July. He was promised redundancy pay by his manager before the company arranged for his return to India but he is yet to be paid.

They will not rehire me after the pandemic because Im 53 years old. My family is in a financial crisis and I need that money to survive, he said.

As many as 600 workers are allegedly owed wages and redundancy pay from the Saudi construction firm, according to Lawyers Beyond Borders, who have launched legal action on behalf of former employees. Among them, half are from Kerala.

Nasser S. Al Hajri did not respond to a request for comment by openDemocracy.

For workers like Hari, recovering stolen wages is almost impossible. Before he was returned to India, Hari and his colleagues were pushed to sign several legal documents by his employer, which they believe waived their rights.

This makes the possibility of retrieving the money through labour offices in Saudi Arabia minimal. Filing these legal cases in India is not an adequate solution either, said Lawyers Beyond Borders solicitor Subhash Chandran.

Most workers are not aware of how to report their employers for withholding wages, leading to cases being registered late and delayed investigations. And there are complicated issues of legal jurisdiction. Those who have returned to Kerala cannot file legal cases against their employers without a power of attorney in their destination country.

"The existing justice mechanism has largely failed migrant workers in terms of an expedited and just resolution of wage-theft claims even before the pandemic, said William Gois, Regional Coordinator of Migrant Forum in Asia.

This is why we launched the Justice for Wage Theft campaign calling for an urgent justice mechanism, specifically to establish an international claims commission, the compensation fund, and the reform of national justice systems, he added.

For migrant workers like Thomas, who the Indian government rescued after he was left stranded in the Gulf after a construction firm stopped paying his wages, there is little prospect of justice. Thomas spent his life savings on migrating to the region for work.

I dreamt of a better life for my family, especially my children, he said. I need the money that Im owed. How do I look after them right now?

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How migrants in the Gulf are fighting discrimination during the pandemic - Open Democracy

As the autumn harvest season begins, Australian horticulture is reportedly facing a crisis. According to a website set up by the National Farmers Federation where farmers can anonymously self-report crop losses farmers have lost over $45 million since December last year. A shortage of pickers, they claim, means that crops are rotting in the fields.

The farming industry and their political allies argue that the only solution is to allow the immediate return of international workers. This has dovetailed with a conservative narrative accusing unemployed Australians of being work-shy.

According to the CEO of the national peak body for vegetable growers: Whether we like it or not . . . we just simply cant get Australians to do [farmwork]. In July last year, federal agriculture minister David Littleproud agreed: Even when our social security payment for the dole was $550 a fortnight, we couldnt get people off the couch to go and pick fruit.

New South Wales agriculture minister Adam Marshall backed Littleproud up, saying Australians are lazy and soft when it comes to this kind of work . . . they are being paid to stay on the couch. National Party leader Michael McCormackeven encouraged young Australians to consider picking fruit because it would make a great Instagram story.

Needless to say, these arguments are way off the mark, and so are the solutions put forward. The causes of this labor shortage lie elsewhere.

In recent years, international workers have picked around 70 percent of Australian fruit and vegetables. This workforce consists of backpackers and other migrants who come to Australia on Working Holiday Maker (WHM) visas, temporary Pasifika and Timorese workers employed under the Seasonal Worker Program (SWP), plus international students and undocumented migrants.

In 2020, international border closures dramatically reduced the supply of such workers. Meanwhile, state border restrictions prevented many seasonal migrant workers who were already in Australia from following the harvest trail around the country.

With the international travel ban unlikely to be fully lifted this year, we wont be seeing the return of WHM visa holders soon. Victoria has recently struck a deal to bring in 1,500 Pacific Islanders, while Western Australia and Tasmania have recruited a few hundred SWP workers. But with a claimed national shortfall of 26,000 horticulture workers, these moves are unlikely to make much of a dent.

The figure of 26,000 missing workers is most likely an overestimate. The study that produced it didnt take account of undocumented workers, estimated to make up between 80 and 90 percent of the workforce in some regions, many of whom are still in the country.

It certainly makes no sense to blame young or unemployed workers for the shortfall. To begin with, there are at least some job seekers interested in doing farmwork. In mid-February, the New Daily reported that ten thousand unemployed people had taken up fruit-picking work, with almost a third of those starting after November 2020. DESE has confirmed to Jacobin that the number is now eleven thousand.

Although a federal government program offering fruit pickers $6,000 to relocate to regional areas attracted fewer than five hundred applicants, this was probably due in part to the bureaucratic complexities of applying.

Agriculture Victoria has also offered a $2,430 bonus for those who do at least eight weeks work on a farm, filling Facebook feeds with promotional posts urging locals to take on the Big Victorian Harvest. However, judging by the comments on some of these ads, the uptake might not be too high either. As one commenter asks (and answers): Whats the hourly rate? Oh, thats right. Farmers only pay slave wages and wonder why people arent interested.

This cuts to the heart of the matter. Its not laziness that has stopped workers from picking fruit its their justified sense of entitlement to a fair days wage for a fair days work. If we simply cant get Australians to do seasonal picking work, the main reason is that many fruit and vegetable growers offer work that is stressful, exhausting, but poorly paid.

A number of recent reports into Australian horticulture have shown that the industry is rife with employers who pay below the minimum wage. They undercut the legal minimum wages by deploying a number of tricks: paying extremely low piece rates, falsifying records, or withholding pay slips.

They frequently shortchange their workers in other ways too, by providing substandard, cramped accommodation, or by inflating payday deductions for transport, accommodation, and equipment. The reports also found that horticultural employers have a record of harassing and bullying workers, failing to investigate allegations of sexual harassment, and sacking their employees unfairly.

Nor is this just a case of a few bad apples in an otherwise upstanding industry. As Dr Joanna Howe argues:

The level of exploitation in the Australian horticulture industry is not the exception to the rule. Its the business model used by most farm employers and labor-hire companies.

A number of factors leave farmworkers vulnerable to exploitation, including geographical isolation, the limited rights enjoyed by casual workers, and an industry minimum pay that allows piece rates with no minimum wage floor. Documented and undocumented migrant workers alike also suffer because of their status as noncitizens.

To be eligible for a second-year visa, WHM visa holders must produce pay slips from their employers. SWP participants require continuing sponsorship from their employers to remain in the country. Undocumented workers have to rely on informal employment. In addition, many migrant workers have poor English-language skills, or lack knowledge of their labor rights in Australia.

While migrant horticulture workers are technically entitled to the same wages and conditions as Australians, the different regulatory frameworks associated with multiple visa categories have produced a segmented labor force. This gives employers an incentive to maximize profits by employing more vulnerable, cheap, and flexible migrant workers.

As the report Towards a Durable Future puts it, farmers often prefer this migrant workforce because of their labor productivity, exibility, ease of recruitment and [business-friendly] regulatory burdens, leading to a race to the bottom in labor standards. Because WHM visas are dependent on employment, it gives contractors and recruitment agents the opportunity to exploit vulnerable workers eager to remain in Australia.

Unlike the SWP program, the WHM program isnt officially a labor-market program. As a result, according to the report, there are almost no additional requirements on growers who use the visa to access workers, and no additional mechanisms for oversight and monitoring.

A 35-year-old Indonesian horticulture worker, who spoke to Jacobin on the condition of anonymity, said that in the last ten years, she and her friends

have worked for extremely low piece rates and hourly wages as low as $16$18 per hour. The work is almost always organized through labor hire contractors, who often paid us below the standard wage while taking a large cut.

Her story is by no means unique. Both reports contain testimonies from migrant workers that are even more harrowing.

Farmers arent facing labor shortages as such, but rather a shortfall of particular types of workers namely, workers who they can oblige to put up with poor conditions, low pay, and unreliable hours. Some work visas are designed to cater to this demand by setting low minimum hours per week or by limiting visa holders to horticultural work.

An investigation by the New Daily in November last year looked at a recruitment company established at the start of the pandemic to find Australians farmwork: its team received more than 1,500 applications, but reported that the farmers they approached refused to employ any Australian citizens. More recent data from the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) found that employers rejected 3,500 Australian job seekers who had recently applied for farmwork.

Theres a simple remedy available for farm employers who find themselves short of workers. Farms that have offered higher wages and better conditions including more stable, long-term work have not faced the same difficulties.

Sectors like construction and mining have no problem finding Australians prepared to do physically strenuous jobs that are often located in remote areas, since they offer relatively good work conditions and pay. And thats largely thanks to high union density in those industries, along with the militancy of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union.

In 2019, a group of unions the Australian Workers Union (AWU), Transport Workers Union, and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) formed the Retail Supply Chain Alliance, aiming to improve standards in the sector. But the Alliance hasnt practiced the same kind of militancy that delivered the goods for mining and construction workers.

Those unions are aligned with the Right of the Australian Labor Party, and their officials generally favor institutional mechanisms over militancy as a way to advance the interests of their members. They have signed an accord with supermarket giant Coles, aimed at ending hyper-exploitation in the agricultural sector. One of the Alliances goals is to establish a system that will require suppliers to supermarkets to have a union agreement.

They have also called for a Royal Commission into the sector, and applied to have horticulture pay requirements amended so as to impose a minimum wage floor for workers on piece rates. Theyve also recommended large funding increases for the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), hoping to create a team of regionally based inspectors who can uncover abusive or illegal employment practices.

Some of these proposals are positive, but we should be wary of others, especially since the SDA union has a history of signing sweetheart deals with supermarkets to undercut legal minimums. In the long run, the only way to guarantee meaningful improvements in wages and conditions is to have a collectively organized and empowered labor force.

From that perspective, the record of the Retail Supply Chain Alliance starts to look less impressive. For over a century, the AWU has had a mandate to organize horticultural workers, yet the industry remains largely union-free, with exploitation and underpayment rampant.

Seeing the gap, the National Union of Workers stepped into the sector five years ago and began unionizing migrant farmworkers, sometimes working in partnership with unions from those workers home countries. The NUW since merged with United Voice to form the United Workers Union (UWU), giving it an expanded reach into the hospitality sector as well as other industries.

UWU began by organizing migrant workers in tomato greenhouses and mixed vegetable farms. By banding together and threatening to highlight their mistreatment through the mainstream media, these workers won an overnight increase of $10 an hour.

In 2015, UWU organizers worked with Four Corners, a current-affairs program, to expose exploitation in the Coles and Woolworths supply chains. The expos eventually led to new laws imposing licenses on labor-hire providers an important reform, since labor-hire contractors are often the frontline facilitators of hyper-exploitation.

Despite the difficulties created by COVID-19, UWU continued to recruit SWP workers to the union in 2020 and bolster their rights. In the course of this work, UWU organizers and members have run up against legal barriers, such as the requirement that they give twenty-four hours notice before conducting workplace inspections. This gives employers the opportunity to conceal undocumented workers and practices that are tantamount to modern slavery.

The differences between UWU and the Retail Supply Chain Alliance unions arent just tactical. Although the AWU has supported the Seasonal Worker Program, its leaders want to abolish the Working Holiday Maker visa category. They have also opposed a recently proposed visa amnesty for undocumented workers, arguing that it would undermine efforts to raise wages and attract Australian workers to the sector if undocumented workers received a path to a work visa.

UWU, on the other hand, is in favor of the amnesty, and has worked alongside undocumented workers to share their stories and struggle. As UWU organizer Tim Nelthorpe argues:

Any union thats serious about organizing the horticulture industry knows that if you ignore undocumented workers and their struggle, you cant organize the industry. We have Australian members working in the industry, but its in their interests for the union to organize undocumented workers alongside them.

There may be a long way to go before horticulture is a well-paid line of work that is free of naked exploitation. But the disruption created by COVID-19 is also an opportunity for reform. The Australian government wont lead the way, preferring to carp about work-shy locals. Meanwhile, horticultural workers and their unions are hard at work extracting the rotten core of Australian horticulture.

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Australian Agricultural Bosses Can't Find Workers. Maybe They Should Try Paying More. - Jacobin magazine