Category Archives: Wage Slavery

A Brentwood couple, have been charged with conspiracy, extortion and labor trafficking of their in-house nanny, the district attorneys office announced in a press release Monday.

Ijeoma Chukwunyeluand Nnamdi Onwuzulike made their first court appearance last month, and entered pleas of not guilty in Contra Costa Countys first criminal labor trafficking case. In addition to labor trafficking under Penal Code section 236.1(a), defendants are charged with extortion and conspiracy to violate Labor Code section 1199 which requires employers to follow Californias minimum wage and hour requirements.

In this case, a woman was recruited from outside the United States to be a nanny for a family with young children in East Contra Costa County. Defendants instructed the victim to obtain her passport and visa fraudulently and claim she was coming to California for three weeks as a tourist to attend the wedding of her son and the defendants daughter. Because of her economic circumstances, and fear that the job opportunity would be given to someone else, the victim followed the instructions she was given. She was not aware of her legal rights to minimum wages, breaks, overtime or employment conditions under California law.

When the victim arrived in California in April of 2017, defendants took possession of her passport and visa. From the time she started until October of 2018, the defendants required her to perform work beyond what she was hired to do. She was required to sleep on the floor of the childrens room so she could care for them round the clock, to cook for the entire family and clean their 5-bedroom house for no additional wages. They did not provide the victim with breaks or days off from her work responsibilities as required by California Law. The defendants never paid her overtime for any of the additional hours she worked and continued to employ her with knowledge that her visa expired. This made the victim a particularly vulnerable worker without immigration status who was fearful of deportation.

This investigation was a collaborative effort between the Brentwood Police Department, the Contra Costa County District Attorneys Office, Homeland Security Investigations, the United States Department of Labor, and the California Department of Industrial Relations/Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and the Victim Witness Assistance Program within the DAs Office. The investigation began when American Medical Response (AMR) personnel recognized a victim in need of assistance and connected her to resources that could help her.

As the COVID-19 pandemic causes massive job losses and severe economic instability, California workers are more vulnerable than ever to exploitative employment practices. Our collaborative efforts on this investigation led to a successful filing of this case. I am proud to work with our partners at all levels of government to protect workers and seek justice for those harmed by predatory behavior, stated Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton.

The California Labor Code and a series of 17 Wage Orders maintained by the California Department of Industrial Relations set forth state minimum wage and overtime requirements for nearly all types employees, including live-in domestic workers. The orders can be found here: https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/WageOrderIndustries.htm and information about worker rights can be found here: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/dlse.html. These rights apply to California employees without regard to the persons immigration status. Such illegal practices by employers could carry both civil and criminal liability for the employer even if the worker agrees with the employment conditions out of financial desperation, concern for their immigration status, or simply because the employee did not know their rights.

The experience of this domestic worker represents countless more who are preyed upon because of economic desperation. These criminal acts are not only illegal but immoral, said California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower. Human trafficking is modern day slavery, an we are committed to stopping it by partnering with agencies to eradicate this horrific crime.

The case is being prosecuted by the DAs Office, which is a member of the Contra Costa Human Trafficking Taskforce. The Taskforce is comprised of local, state and federal law enforcement and community-based victim service partners. The Task Force works collaboratively to identify and investigate all forms of trafficking in our community while providing victims with culturally competent services and support.

Our agency remains relentlessly committed to dedicating resources to disrupt and dismantle organized crime associated with human trafficking, and will continue to work collaboratively with our Taskforce partners to make an even greater impact, said Investigations Lieutenant Walter OGrodnick with the Brentwood Police Department.

Any person who thinks they may be a victim of labor trafficking in Contra Costa County can make a report to the DAs Office Human Trafficking Tip Line at 925-957-8658.

HSI appreciates the opportunity to partner with the various agencies in the Contra Costa County Human Trafficking Task Force in order to provide victims with the resources they need and deserve and to hold the violators to account for actions akin to modern day slavery, said Tatum King, Special Agent in Charge - HSI San Francisco.

Case information: People v. Nnamdi Onwuzulike and Ijeoma Chukwunyelu, Docket Number 04-199478-9

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Brentwood couple charged with labor trafficking of nanny - thepress.net

If restaurants have struggled during the pandemic, restaurant workers are struggling even more, in part because their economic situation was already precarious before the outbreak. The federal subminimum wage for tipped workers is still the same as it was nearly 30 years ago: $2.13 an hour. Now, as many restaurants reopen and workers return, some restaurant owners are arguing that the industry needs to fundamentally change.

In New York, chefs including David Chang and Tom Colicchio are asking the state to adopt a Safe and Just Reopening plan that eliminates the subminimum wage (at $11.80 an hour, New Yorks is higher than the federal version, but still below the states $15-an-hour minimum wage) and allows servers to share tips with back-of-house and kitchen staff. The plan also calls for restaurants to be able to charge a 5% safe reopening fee and seeks payroll tax relief for restaurants.

Many restaurant workers who lost work as the outbreak grew are in crisis now, says Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, an organization that aims to lift tipped workers out of poverty. As the COVID-19 outbreak grew, the nonprofit learned about the details of personal struggles as some workers applied for its emergency coronavirus relief fund. Three months ago, workers were writing in, saying, I really need this money to get groceries for my kids, she says. Now, three months later, theyre telling us, I am at the breaking point. I think Im going to have to steal food for my children. I dont have money for gas to get to the food bank.'

Some workers are facing eviction. Others cant pay their utility bills. I just dont think that people understand the severity of the crisis, Jayaraman says. Now, as many are being asked to go back to work, they face a different problem: Tips are way down because fewer people are eating out. We cannot ask the workers to risk their lives to go back to a very risky situation for a subminimum wage, she says. Not only can we not ask itmany workers are just refusing to do it, which is resulting in a lot of employers just going ahead and paying the minimum wage because they cant get their employees to come back otherwise. So even at a market level, its happening, and thats why legislators need to step in right now rather than putting all of these workers at such severe risk for a subminimum wage.

The subminimum wage is a legacy of slavery, as a recent report from One Fair Wage explains. At the time of Emancipation, restaurant owners turned to newly freed slaves for cheap labor. Tipping at the time was common in Europe, but only as a supplement to full wages; in the U.S., new laws changed the practice so workers would have to rely primarily on tips. Today, in New York, tipped workers are still more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line than other workers in the state, and nearly twice as likely to live on food stamps. Tipped workers who are women and people of color are even more likely to live in poverty.

The restaurant industry needs immediate relief, and needs to address long-standing racial inequities in our industry at the same time, 50 restaurant owners and 200 restaurant workers wrote in a letter to state legislators in New York. (Its worth noting that some restaurant workers have resisted changes to the status quo in the past, fearing that theyll lose tips.) Jayaraman says that momentum is building in many of the 42 other states that also still have a subminimum wage. Some people are calling it the great awakening, she says. Weve been counting, and I think weve been approached by close to 200 restaurants nationwide wanting to transition to full livable minimum wage, either because of the pandemic, or after George Floyds murder, a lot of restaurants reached out to think about how to move away from this legacy of slavery. Joe Biden has also endorsed the idea of one fair wage for all workers. I think, finally, people are seeing that we cant go forward with a system that didnt work, Jayaraman says.

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This coalition wants to fix the restaurant industry's inequities - Fast Company

The first instalment in this two-part series, which focused on dismantling the Irish slaves myth, made three critical assertions: first, that the attempt to draw equivalence between Irish (and British, Scottish) indenture and African chattel slavery was untenable, and callous in the extreme and almost always deliberately concocted at source through flagrant manipulation of numbers and chronology; secondly, that the narrow channels in which the debate has been confined obscure important developments in the evolution of race and race-making in the plantation societies of the Americas; and third, that although indenture and racially-based slavery for life were not comparable in terms of scale or importance in generating the economic foundations that would launch global capitalism, it was also mistaken to regard them as galaxies apart: they were distinct but related forms of exploitation at the birth of the modern world.

In the article that follows I want to turn to a related question, and one that has drawn attention as controversy over the Irish slaves myth has raged on social media: Irish complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. On 12 June theIrish Timespublished anarticlepenned by Ronan McGreevy under the headline Many Irish were implicated in the slave trade and the legacy lives on [since altered: the online version is now headed Links to slave trade evident across Ireland]. McGreevys piece reiterates some of the same points made in a similararticlethat appeared in the (London)Sunday Timesseveral years earlier, quoting independent historian Liam Hogan and citing thedatabasecompiled by researchers at theCentre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownershipat University College London. Some of this has since made its way into social media, including a post by Hogan himself onMediumand a widely-shared blog from Waterford entitled Tainted by the Stain of Original Sin: Irish Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade.[1]

Individually and cumulatively these convey a strong impression that the Irish were deeply implicated in the slave trade, and it is this assertion that I want to explore in some depth below. Readers will recall that while acknowledging the important work that has been done in countering the Irish slaves myth, I expressed reservations about the ways in which trends in Irish history writing over recent decades have shaped the discussion. In particular the dismissal of Irelands colonial subjection as either overdrawn or insignificant, and the framing of this discussion in narrow terms of national identity rather than the wider framework of social relations and class conflict, combine to impede an honest reckoning with the past.

An Obscenely Unequal Society

These problems are conspicuous in the way Irish complicity in the slave trade has been framed in the coverage noted above. It is impossible, for example, to spend more than an hour digging in to the Irish connections highlighted in the UCL database without being knocked over the head with the obvious fact that those slaveowners resident in Ireland who were compensated by the British government after emancipation represented, overwhelmingly, the cream of the Anglo-Irish elite, drawn from the (Protestant) landed gentry and with a large proportion of them playing prominent roles in overseeing British colonial administration in an Ireland then under fairly intensive military occupation. A considerable number of them were drawn from the officer class in the British military at the time almost exclusively the preserve of sons of the landed aristocracy and most were large landlords, often owning more than one estate in Ireland alongside residences in London and often multiple plantations in Britains sugar colonies in the Caribbean. One could hardly find a more perfect illustration of the close interrelationship between the ascendancy/gentry and membership of the Anglican Church, British army garrison and [Britains] Irish administration, though the close correlation between Irish slave-owning and the elaborate nexus of British power in Ireland goes completely unacknowledged.

While it is this class that benefitted most directly from slave-owning, two important qualifications are in order. First, there are wider layers of Irish society that profited indirectly from the transatlantic slave trade merchants and big farmers, others engaged in selling provisions to, and purchasing the staples generated by, slave labour in the colonies. Secondly, even among slave owners, there are exceptions to this profile a layer of Catholic elites who also found their way into slave-owning, and whose role we will discuss below. But the arresting fact so conspicuously absent from every recent discussion of Irish complicity is thatthe same unrepresentative Irish elite which benefited directly from the exploitation of African slaves in the British sugar colonies was simultaneously engaged in the exploitation of a desperately poor landless majority in Ireland with a vast military machine at its disposal in both locations to enforce its rule.

While it is possible that the omission of this aspect of Irish complicity can be put down to lack of depth in popular treatment of the subject, its far more likely that the historiographical context touched upon in the first essay has shaped, in profound ways, the packaging of Irelands relationship with transatlantic slavery. In places Hogan has pushed back against the notion that the Irish were uniformly immersed in transatlantic slavery, though little of this nuance has made it into popular discussion. He has been quoted as suggesting that the reluctance to acknowledge an Irish role in slave-trading is rooted in a post-colonial aversion to acknowledging the dark side to Irish history, but readers are justified in being sceptical about the bona fides of an establishment on both sides of the border which devotes such considerable energy to denigrating the revolutionary tradition in Irish history. Conservative trends in academic writing noted earlier find more crass and heavy-handed expression across mainstream print and television media, and are rarely subject to criticism.

Three major, interrelated problems mar the discussion of Irish complicity in the slave trade: a deep aversion to acknowledging the effects of colonial rule in Ireland that coincides, neatly enough, with a framework that emphasises Ireland as an imperial power in its own right: thus the assertion among revisionist historians of an Irish empire in the nineteenth century, at a time when the country did not enjoy even limited self-rule. At many levels this is a complete absurdity, and although beyond the scope of this article, its worth considering the political context in which such an assertion has managed to gain traction.[2]

A third major defect, not unrelated to these, is the conflation of the conditions facing Irelands landless majority with that of an ostentatiously wealthy ruling class, whose opulent lives contrasted so sharply with the circumstances confronting ordinary people. Thedistinction madelater by James Connolly between the Irish rural and urban working classes and the rack-renting landlord and profit-grinding capitalist is pertinent here. As one reflective daughter of the gentry recalled, until its fall in the late nineteenth century Anglo-Irish landowners presided over a feudal order, usually ensconced behind high walls in the Big House, and inhabiting a world of their own[,] with Ireland outside the gates.[3] Absent a frank acknowledgment of these vast disparities, the framing of Irish complicity in transatlantic slavery rests on a complete obliteration of class in 18thand 19thcentury Ireland at the time an obscenely unequal society, and one perched in 1834 (the year Britain compensated former slaveowners) on the very precipice of mass starvation.

Ruling Ireland at the Height of the Slave Trade

As the profile of Irish slave ownership suggests, the profits accruing from involvement in transatlantic slavery were distributed unevenly, with those at the top of Irish society taking the lions share. Overwhelmingly these individuals were drawn from the landed gentry, which after the Cromwellian transformation commencing in the mid-17thcentury hailed overwhelmingly from Protestant and settler backgrounds. Land ownership provided the fulcrum of colonial power for more than two centuries afterward, and by the third quarter of the 17thcentury the sectarian dimension to land ownership was clearly established, with consequences that would endure down to the present day. In a country whose population were overwhelmingly Catholic, more than 95 percent of land was in the hands of an Anglo-Irish elite whose ascendancy dated to the Elizabethan, Cromwellian, and Williamite conquests. A substantial proportion of these were absentee landlords, living most of their time either in England or in the British colonies, including the West Indies.[4]

There were, of course, enlightened individuals among this class who treated their Irish tenants and labourers with a degree of paternalism, but on the whole they saw themselves as a socially and culturally distinct class, and as unapologetic agents of British colonialism in Ireland. They recruited their loyal retainers and the most influential personnel on their estates either from the settler community or directly from England. John Scott, the future Earl of Clonmell, captured the landlords acute sense of separation when he wrote, in 1774, that a man in station [in Ireland] is really like a traveller in Africa, in a forest among the Hottentots and wild beasts. While a cautious man might subdue and defend himselfhe must be eternally on the watch and on his guard against his next neighbours.[5]Thomas Carlyle, the pro-slavery propagandist who dreaded the advent of mass democracy in Britain, noted a kind of charm in the poor savage freedom he observed among rural labourers in the west of Ireland, concluding that the area was as like Madagascar as England.[6]

The massive English garrison stationed in Ireland functioned largely as an instrument for the imposition of gentry rule. In 1834 the same year Britain enacted slave compensation an observer in Tipperary noted the array of bayonets that gave Ireland the appearance of a recently conquered territory, throughout which an enemys army [has] distributed its encampments. It was not only their numerical strength that was striking, but the militarys function. The whole machinery of law and order was at the disposal of the landed elite and, to a lesser extent, the established (Anglican) Church. Magistrates, bailiffs, police inspectors and court officials were largely drawn from among its closest allies, and almost reflexively the gentry treated this repressive apparatus as its own. They had ready access to the colonial administration in Dublin Castle, evident in the request from one Mayo landlord (at the height of the Famine) that a police barracks be erected on his estate to assist in the collection [of] rent.

Increased desperation in the early decades of the nineteenth century saw police and military deployed regularly to suppress agrarian unrest and enforce evictions, and a number of bloody confrontations marked the tithe war of the 1830s, including the deaths of fourteen civilians at the hands of militia at Bunclody in 1831 and of eleven policemen the following year in Kilkenny. Between 1800 and the outbreak of famine the government enacted some 35 Coercive Acts aimed at containing agrarian violence.[7]

Irelands Catholic Elite: an Underground Gentry

Despite the preponderance of the Anglo-Irish elite at the top of society, its mistaken to view Irelands social order in this period in purely sectarian terms, and even the direct spoils of slave-holding extended beyond the settler elite. Despite Cromwells triumph, elements of the deposed Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman nobility had survived with their privilege largely intact. A small number seeing which way the wind was blowing converted to Protestantism. But a more substantial Catholic elite comprised of assimilated Old English and elements of the fallen Gaelic clans had, despite being excluded from the highest levels of power, made their peace with British rule in return for holding on (often as middlemen) to some of their formerly considerable property.

At a time when the masses of the Irish peasantry were mostly un-churched and only nominally committed to far-distant Rome, this Gaelic and especially Old English elite provided the lay leadership for Irish Catholicism. Closely tied to the hierarchy, they financed an ambitious programme of church-building, overseeing Catholic education and sending their sons off to colleges and seminaries on the European continent: it was almost exclusively from their ranks that the church appointed bishops. The Catholic elite looked back obsessively almost to the point of neurosis, Kevin Whelan observes to a Gaelic golden age when they had dominated Ireland, and while they sought restoration, increasingly they pursued an accommodation with British power pledging loyalty to the Crown in return for a relaxation of laws restricting public worship and excluding them from the professions and elected office. Ironically, their influence seems to have been left most unimpaired in Connacht where, having avoided Cromwells worst excesses, the flower of the Catholic gentry flourished.[8]This explains the inclusion of large Catholic landowners like Galways Peter Daly among the list of slaveowners compensated by London.[9]

The elemental conservatism of this small Catholic underground gentry intensified under the strain of revolutionary upheaval in France, heightened again by the social discontent unleashed in the 1798 United Irish rebellion and, in the early 19th century, by increasing agrarian polarisation across Irish society itself. These tensions brought landed Catholics totally out of sympathy with political radicalism into ever-closer collaboration with British rule in Ireland. Throughout the 17thand 18thcenturies they walked a fine line between exploiting the disaffection of the Irish peasantry to further their own class ambitions and straining to ensure that the upheavals unleashed against English invaders did not spill over into attacks on property: above all, Nicholas Canny writes, they were averse to revolutionary action [which] would have placed their own lands and positions in jeopardy.[10]This dynamic controlled mobilisation confined within the narrow channels of the constitutional question provided a template that would underpin Irish nationalism up to the present.

Though it is beyond the scope of this article, the resident Catholic gentrys involvement in transatlantic slavery was mirrored in the more substantial activity of its counterparts in exile on the European continent. In France especially, the tight-knit expatriate communities (mainly Old English) driven by Cromwells triumph to relocate from Galway, Cork and Waterford to port cities like Nantes and Bordeaux formed a mercantile littoral that was deeply engaged in slave-trading particularly in French-controlled San Domingue (Haiti). Whelan describes them as an Irish nation in waiting, and there were fragments of the same groups further south in Spain and in the regiments dispatched for the task of empire-building by Catholic Europe, but their power was fading by the late eighteenth century.

To the extent that Catholic Ireland can be said to have shared in the profits of slavery, this was concentrated mainly among the big merchants and provision suppliers in southern port cities an aspiring (minority) Catholic bourgeoisie which came increasingly to resent the political domination of the landed elite, both Protestant and Catholic. Overwhelmingly the formers fortunes (and the Irish economy more generally) were tied to an expanding British domestic market rather than provisioning the slave colonies. Nini Rodgers suggests, plausibly, that the growing prosperity attending their involvement in slavery helped bolster the confidence of this rising middle class in pushing aside the Catholic gentry and assuming leadership in seeking an extension of Catholic rights.[11] Still, their role in the broader story of Irish involvement in transatlantic slavery is a strictly subordinate one: they owed their position almost entirely to the commercial connections that came their way through the British empire, and by the late eighteenth century even British traders were losing their West Indian markets to cheaper American suppliers.

At a very general level it is no doubt true that, as Rodgersasserts, every group in Ireland produced merchants who benefitted from the slave trade, but as we move down the social order these benefits become less impressive. Perhaps it makes sense to include the ordinary sailors manning Liverpools transatlantic fleet among slaverys beneficiaries, or to assign complicity even to townspeople who consumed slave produce, like sugar; but their stake in maintaining slavery hardly compares with those at the top of Irish society.

The Irish Peasantry: A Stake in Slavery?

British involvement in transatlantic slavery intensified dramatically after the establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672, and by 1760 Britain had overtaken its European rivals as the foremost among those countries involved in the triangular trade. At its most profitable in the peak years of the second half of the 18thcentury, nearly 70% of British tax revenue came from tax on goods from its colonies, and after 1800 slave produce American cotton especially played an essential role in fuelling the dramatic industrial expansion bolstering Britains position in the global economy.

Although it is unquestionably the case that some of the wealth generated during the years between 1760 and British abolition in 1833 made its way to Ireland, its important to recognise that its impact was highly uneven. While this period is viewed by economists as an expanding age for the Irish economy, this expansion was marked by a striking paradox: the concentration of land in the hands of a small minority meant that while agricultural production continued to increaseso did the extent of poverty. This contradiction rested, Tuathaigh suggests, on the uneven distribution of the rewards of increased output.[12]

The notion that Ireland as a whole benefitted from slavery is impossible to square with extensive evidence that all through the period between the late eighteenth century and the onset of famine, conditions for the largest cohorts of Irish peasants small farmers, cottiers and labourers (who, combined, formed a majority of the overall population) declined steadily, year on year. In 1791, 85% of houses in Ireland were of the poorest condition most of them one-room mud cabins with dirt floors. Explosive population growth fuelled increased competition for meagre plots of mostly poor land, and desperation combined with the landlords profit-motive to drive further sub-division. A major survey of British government reports concludes not only that the majority of the Irish people [were] miserably poor, but that they retrogressed rather than progressed during the first half of the nineteenth century. This varied by region with Ulster somewhat insulated by the custom of tenant right and much of western seaboard, by contrast, marked by a condition of continuous and deep poverty but the general trend is clear.

Far from feeling any tangible lift in their circumstances under the impact of slave commerce, the mass of the Irish people were moving further into immiseration, and would in the late forties face a ravaging hunger almost completely unprotected. Alice Elfie Murray offered a poignant description of conditions in Connacht on the eve of the Great Hunger:

The Connaught labourers sometimes hired land for potatoes from their neighbours, [or] took possession of a portion of the waste ground[.] When their potatoes were planted they were often forced to leave their homes and beg in some neighbouring district. Even in Connaught, however, there was a great dislike to begging, and the peasantry were ashamed to be seen by their neighbours supporting themselves in this way. It was rare for any of them to go harvesting in England [as some 35,000 elsewhere in Ireland did annually], for they could not manage to raise the few shillings necessary for the journey. The small occupiers were nearly as destitute, and when their neighbours did not assist them they often died of starvation, as nothing would induce them to beg. There was no season of the year in which the Connaught peasants were sufficiently supplied with food. Their diet was simply inferior potatoes called lumpers eaten dry, [and] small farmers were often forced to bleed the one cow they possessed when their stock of potatoes was exhausted.[13]

This desperation manifested in one of two ways: localised, collective violence carried out by peasant secret societies or (probably more commonly) a fatalistic acquiescence to their circumstances on the part of the powerless majority. An English visitor to Ireland at the close of the eighteenth century noted the sharp contradiction between the language of liberty and a situation approximating slavery: a long series of oppressions, Arthur Young wrote, have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission:

A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security; a poor man would have his bones broke if he offered to lift his hands in his own defence. Knocking-down is spoken of in the country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their master; a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people must live.[14]

Liam Hogan has written movingly about conditions on the eve of the Famine, when the extravagance of the covered sedan chair that ferried robed judges back and forth to high court through the streets of Limerick coexisted alongside the ejected tenantry from the surrounding counties who make a run to the cities in search of food but ended up, many of them, as living skeleton[s]bones all but protruded through the shirtliterally starving in the towns dank cellars.[15] Nini Rodgers, comparing the circumstances of Irish cottiers and labourers with those of antebellum slaves in the US upper South, suggests that in purely material terms the former had it worse.[16]This is, of course, a highly problematic comparison: slaverys burden can hardly be reduced to material deprivation, and in many ways the late antebellum years were extremely traumatic for slaves in the upper South, as families were being dispersed and kin sold south and westward to feed the voracious demand for labour opened up by cotton expansion. But as an indicator of the oppression confronting a desperate majority in Ireland it offers a corrective to facile assertions about Irish complicity in slavery. Overwhelmingly the benefits of Irelands involvement in transatlantic slavery went to the same class that presided over the misery that culminated in the horrors of famine and mass starvation.

Frederick Douglass, Slavery and the Cause of Humanity

The difficulty of focusing public outrage on the singular horror accompanying racially-based slavery without losing sight of other forms of inequality was one that we face not only retrospectively as in the current discussion around indenture and chattel slavery but one that abolitionists faced in their own time. The escaped slave Frederick Douglass was shocked by the conditions he encountered during visits to Ireland in the mid-1840s. I see much here, he wrote in March of 1846, to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over. He wrote movingly of finding it painful to walk Dublins streets, then almost literally alive with beggars, displaying the greatest wretchedness mere stumps of men, without feet, without legs, without hands, without armspressing their way through the muddy streetscasting sad looks to the right and left, in the hope of catching the eye of a passing stranger[.][17]

And yet, despite all this, Douglass was (rightly) unwilling to draw an equivalence between these dire circumstances and the predicament of his own people in the American slave states. His co-agitator Henry Highland Garnet faced the same dilemma in Belfast where, when thousands came to hear him speak at Newtonards, he baulked when asked by the Presbyterian moderator to denounce tenant slavery in Ireland. Their hesitation stemmed from a number of sources, including a tendency to accept thelaissez-faireoutlook of their day, which held that failure to rise under free labour conditions was the responsibility of individuals rather than anything systemic in emerging capitalism. Marx hadpointed towardan alternative framework when he insisted that the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world, but circumstances made any deeper exploration almost impossible at the time.

By far the main impediment to acknowledging a connection between chattel slavery and other forms of exploitation under capitalism was the regularity with which slaverys apologists tried to bundle false sympathy with the predicament of poor whites into a racist defence of human bondage. There are close parallels, of course, in the far-Rights attempts to concoct a white slaves myth to counter the surging global protests against racism. Douglass pinpointed the dynamic precisely when he observed that a large class of writersare influenced by no higher motive than that of covering up our national sins[;] and thusmany have harped upon the wrongs of Irishmen, while in truth they care no more about Irishmen, or the wrongs of Irishmen, than they care about the whipped, gagged, and thumb-screwed slave. They would as willingly sell on the auction-block an Irishman, if it were popular to do so, as an African.

In a situation where pro-slavery ideologues were trying to convince the public that the slaves had it good, Douglass and others were compelled, for obvious reasons, to focus on exposing the singular brutality of slavery. From our perspective more than a century and a half later, its clear that abolition ended slavery but left deeply embedded racism and global exploitation intact. The systemic inequalities that continue to block the possibilities for human freedom and which today threaten our very survival are felt most acutely by workers who carry the stigma of race carried over from the birth of our modern world. But their fate and ours are bound up together, no less than they were in 1840.

Notes.

[1]Liam Hogan, Following the money Irish slave owners in the time of abolition,Medium(13 Oct 2018); Cliona Purcell, inWaterford Treasures(9 June 2020).

[2]On the impact of renewed armed conflict after 1969 on nineteenth-century historiography, see Christine Kinealy,The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion, pps. 2-5.

[3]Patrick J. Duffy, Colonial Spaces and Sites of Resistance: Landed Estates In 19th Century Ireland, p. 376:http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/5594/1/PD_Colonial.pdf.

[4]Duffy, 371; Terence A.M. Dooley, Estate ownership and management in nineteenth- and early twentieth century Ireland:http://www.aughty.org/pdf/estate_own_manage.pdf.

[5]Kevin Whelan, An Underground Gentry: Catholic Middlemen in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, inTheTree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760-1830, p. 35.

[6]Duffy, p. 381.

[7]D. Byrne, cited in Duffy, pps. 376-7; violence at Bunclody and Kilkenny, p. 378.

[8]Whelan, pps. 10-11, 17, 46-48; Nini Rodgers,Ireland: Slavery and Antislavery, 1612-1865, p. 95.

[9]A single Co. Antrim family the McGarel brothers from Larne claimed for nearly 3 times as many slaves (3546) as all nine Galway claimants combined.

[10]Gearid Tuathaigh,Ireland before the Famine, 1798-1842, p. 10; Nicholas Canny,Making Ireland British: 1580-1650, pps. 444-5; 521.

[11]Rodgers,Ireland: Slavery and Antislavery, pps. 158, 173.

[12] Tuathaigh, pps. 2, 124.

[13]Alice Effie Murray, History of the Commercial and Financial Relations between England and Ireland from the Period of the Restoration, p. 366; figures on seasonal labour from Donald MacRaild,Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922, p. 24.

[14]Arthur Young,A Tour In Ireland, 1776-1779, pps. 166-7:https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22387/22387-h/22387-h.htm

[15]Hogan, The 1830 Limerick Food Riots,The Irish Story:https://www.theirishstory.com/2016/02/23/the-1830-limerick-food-riots/#.XwtEXJNKj1I.

[16]Rodgers,Ireland: Slavery and Antislavery, pps. 315-6.

[17]Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, March 1846:https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/support12.html.

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Ireland and Slavery: Framing Irish Complicity in the Slave Trade - CounterPunch

It cant be said often enough that being able to consume the products of a different peoples culture is a far cry from being able to understand the people that created the cultural product being enjoyed. In more concrete terms, liking lamb biryani doesnt automatically make you an expert on Indian culture.

In the case of Marlon Johnson and Anne Flattes new documentary River City Drumbeat, appreciating the performances of the River City Drum Corps doesnt mean the listener/viewer necessarily appreciates the musics significance to its performers or audiences. Johnson and Flattes film does an admirable job of filling in such knowledge gaps.

That sense of understanding begins with the African proverb which opens the film. The proverb says We desire to bequeath two things to our children: the first one is roots, the other is wings. River City Drumbeat shows how both goals are put into practice by the Drum Corps.

This musical organization operates out of the western part of Louisville, Kentucky. Aerial and ground level shots of the West Louisville area shows the viewer that this part of town is an impoverished residential area. The economic divide becomes more visually acute when the gleaming towers of the citys more prosperous parts can be seen. The bands name comes from the river thats a major geographical feature of Louisville.

Edward Nardie White, co-founder of the Drum Corps, didnt initially dream hed be the head of such an organization. He grew up in a time and place where involvement in the arts was not considered something that black people did. Yet athletics held little appeal for him. Wife and eventual Drum Corps co-founder Zambia Nkrumah sparked the idea for the group by getting Nardie interested in African culture. Inspired, Nardie looked for a way to introduce African culture to the next generation. The answer was to teach interested neighborhood kids African drumming.

However, saying the Drum Corps exists only to teach its young charges how to play a musical instrument does the organization a severe disservice. As former Drum Corps member Albert Shumake recalls, Nardie instilled in his students an awareness and appreciation for both their African heritage and how Blacks have contributed to American society. Equally importantly, life skills also get taught via Drum Corps.

Johnson and Flatte show that these claims are not exaggerations. The pipe drums used in the African drumming classes are made and designed from scratch by the students in the class. High school student Imani V. Keith got encouraged by Nardie to step up and take a leadership role in the Drum Corps. But one of the films more empowering moments comes from showing why the claim we are all drummers is not an exaggeration once a person becomes aware of the rhythm of their heartbeat.

Seeing that ethos of empowerment in action in the River City organization makes River City Drumbeat different from other art-themed documentaries. The joy of making art is not the end-all and be-all of Johnson and Flattes film. While there are excerpts from various drum teams performances, the snippets last long enough to give a feeling for the musics flavor. If the sometimes thunderous results could be characterized as anything, it would be as the musical version of the famous I Am Somebody shout. The behind the scenes footage of the various drumming classes put on by the River City Corps shows that drumming as one is not a skill a child is born with, but is something learned with practice and increased confidence.

One notable choice by Johnson and Flatte is their decision to not use on screen titles to identify their films central subjects. Helping the viewer understand whos who by using such identifiers may seem de rigeur for documentaries. Yet such titles can also have the effect of creating emotional distance between the viewer and the Drum Corps members. For a film working to immerse the viewer in the lives of Nardie and the other group members, this would be a mistake. Some viewers othering tendencies are already triggered by the reality that Nardie and the Drum Corps members profiled are Black. Removing the identifiers compels the viewer to learn to identify the films central subjects by individual look and background. Albert and Jailen, for example, may both be youngish black males. But one is a 30-ish father whos Nardies successor while the other is a high school student who initially tried pursuing both athletics and drum corps.

Understanding Nardie, Albert, Jailen, and the other subjects as individuals is key to understanding that River City Drumbeat is at its core a chronicle of passages and how Nardie and the others are affected by them. Imani and Jailen, for example, are graduating high school and face the possibility of life without Drum Corps. Albert wants to pay forward the benefits of being a Drum Corps member yet is aware hes filling Nardies very big shoes. Nardie feels both his age and the appeal of taking up an abandoned artistic dream.

Just because theres no obvious conflict in River City Drumbeat doesnt mean there is no struggle for the people followed by Johnson and Flatte. Louisvilles historic involvement in the slave trade still casts its long shadow over the present. The economic slavery of low wage work has its own form of emotional brutality. A teachers flat assessment that a student will never amount to anything feels like an attempt at abruptly closing off the students future. If the metaphor of roses growing out of concrete resonates with River City Drumbeats students, its because the image captures their attempts to live beautiful lives despite social and historical obstacles.

Alberts back story in particular demonstrates that transcending such difficult life situations is not impossible. His parents were both drug addicts. Albert himself went to six different schools before he completed elementary school. Fortunately, his mother understood that Nardie and Zambia offered her son an opportunity for a life not overshadowed by her own poor life choices.

River City Drumbeat avoids stating the naive proposition that if more Black children learned African drumming, then the social problems that plague Americas Black communities would eventually disappear. Nardies pained recounting of his granddaughters embrace of the gang lifestyle offers a sobering reminder there probably isnt a one-size-fits-all way to give Black children roots and wings.

But for the many young students whove successfully gone through the Drum Corps program, their powerful public performances demonstrate both their increased sense of groundedness in the world and their awakened awareness of their own possibilities. The performances could be called musical declarations of gratitude for the support their community has given them.

Without resorting to polemical didactics, Johnson and Flatte have brought to these culturally dark times a stirring tale of political and cultural advancement. Kudos also go to the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and SFFILM for providing much needed financial support to help River City Drumbeat reach completion.

(River City Drumbeat is now available at the Roxie Virtual Cinema and will be available via the Smith Rafael Virtual Film Center as of August 14.)

Link:

River City Drumbeat-Review - Beyond Chron

The recent release of the musical Hamilton by the Disney+ channel on July 3 received favourable reviews across Canada and the United States.

Critics have lauded the musical for its innovative mash-up ofhip hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B, and Broadway, and for how the show jubilantly demonstrates hip hops entwinement with American traditional ideals of self-invention and freedom.

The musical has also been praised for casting mostly Black and brown faces in roles of the American Founding Fathers, a move that underscored how political ideals in the United States belong to and are creatively advanced by all Americans.

What is especially interesting in the summer of 2020 is that Hamilton was presented at a time of intense political divisiveness and protest in the U.S. The streaming of Hamilton also gained dramatic significance in the context of the recent Black Lives Matter protests in face of racist police violence.

Many have interpreted the July 3 release, one day before American Independence Day, as intended to remind patriotic Americans of their ability to unite and work towards a fairer government and society.

Ever since the musical was originally staged in 2015, many professional historians were surprised that a musical about statesman and Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, mostly known for having his portrait on the 10-dollar bill, would be such a commercial and critical success.

Given Hamiltons interest in challenging traditional narratives, demonstrated both by shows largely Black and racialized cast and brilliant appropriation of diverse musical and theatrical traditions, some historians of the American Revolution have been puzzled that the show didnt explicitly address how the white historical figures were connected to the history of slavery and anti-Black racism.

Although the shows creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, portrayed Hamilton as a man dedicated to the abolition of slavery, historians like Annette Gordon-Reed have argued that Hamilton was only moderately concerned about eradicating the institution of slavery in the U.S.

For Hamilton, ensuring the survival of the U.S. as a nation-state trumped any other concerns, including slavery. This meant making awkward compromises with the Southern slave-holding states.

Neither the musical nor most historians have addressed how Hamiltons political ideas affected Indigenous Peoples. Hamilton was not as directly involved in diplomatic negotiations with Indigenous nations, unlike President George Washington.

However, Indigenous Peoples cannot be separated from the story of the founding of the U.S. This claim is most recently put forth in a study suggesting Indigenous history is central to all U.S. history. This is particularly true for the first decade following the end of the American War of Independence.

After Britain had surrendered its claims to North America, with the exception of Canada, to the U.S. in 1783, a number of powerful Indigenous nations still occupied lands west of the Appalachians. These nations included the Cherokees and the Creeks in the Southeast as well as a confederacy of nations consisting of Shawnees, Wyandots, Lenapes (Delawares), Ojibwes, Ottawas and others in the Ohio region, known as the United Indian Nations.

Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), the Mohawk leader who had been closely aligned with Britain since before the American Revolution, was one of the initiators of the United Indian Nations in September 1783. There was a constant fear among U.S. politicians that these Indigenous nations would align with Britain and Spain against the United States.

As historians Gregory Lablavsky and Jeffrey Ostler have shown, Hamilton advocated for a federal military force that would be able to confront the savage tribes on our Western frontier [who] ought to be regarded as our natural enemies during the constitutional ratification debate in 1788.

According to Hamilton, the Indigenous nations in the west would support the Spanish in Florida and the British in the Great Lakes region because they have most to fear from us and most to hope from them.

In Hamiltons opinion, a strong national army was necessary to deal with the European and Indigenous threats to the new nation. Once the U.S. constitution was ratified in 1788 with its emphasis on a strong central government, Hamilton became the first Secretary of the Treasury in 1789.

In that role, Hamilton ensured that the American government had an army at its disposal that could be deployed to wage genocidal warfare against Indigenous nations.

In June 1790, Brig.-Gen. Josiah Harmar, the commander in charge of the U.S. military efforts against the United Indian Nations in the Ohio region, received instructions from Secretary of War Henry Knox to go on the offensive to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti. This was a demeaning reference to the Indigenous warriors who were defending their lands and families.

The verb extirpate was used in the 18th century as synonymous with exterminate.

Although the Indigenous confederacy was able to hold back the U.S. army for several years, the American military wore down the confederacy by 1794 by repeatedly destroying Indigenous villages and cornfields. The actions of the army forced Indigenous Peoples to surrender the fertile Ohio Valley to the U.S. in 1795.

Joseph Brant and his followers, mostly Mohawks and other members of the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations confederacy, escaped American expansion by resettling on the Grand River in Upper Canada. However, Brant and the Haudenosaunee soon became embroiled in complex negotiations with British officials over the meaning of the Haldimand Proclamation of October 1784 that originally created the huge tract of land for the Six Nations along the Grand River.

The Shawnees, Wyandots and Delawares continued to defend their lands against the United States until the end of the War of 1812. After 1815, many members of the United Indian Nations migrated to Missouri and Kansas to escape American expansion. During the 1830s, the remaining Indigenous Peoples in Ohio and Indiana were forcibly removed by the U.S. government to reserves in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma and Kansas). Their descendants still live there today.

Clearly, Hamiltons ideas of a federal army and an expanding nation had fateful consequences for the Indigenous Peoples who lived in what is now Ohio and Indiana.

Just like the musical could have dealt more fully with slavery, the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives would have forced audiences to grapple with the implications of Hamiltons policies.

For all its brilliant creativity, the musical missed out on the unique opportunity to inform the public about the impact of the new American nation upon the Indigenous nations of North America. Perhaps one day a new musical will be written about the origins of the U.S. that explicitly incorporates Indigenous perspectives and actors.

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'Hamilton' ignores the statesman's strategy to fund genocidal warfare against Indigenous Peoples - The Conversation CA

Constitution Illustrated R. Sikoryak

Drawn & Quarterly

July 2020

How many artists have created their own genres? Robert Sikoryak may stand among few, especially for genres within the comics form.

He has an eloquently simple concept: combine a set of words with incongruous drawings in the styles of famous comics. For his first 2009 graphic novel, Masterpiece Comics, Sikoryak retold classic works of literature, such as The Scarlet Letter, Doctor Faustus, and Crime and Punishment, featuring Little Lulu as Hawthorne's Pearl, Garfield as Marlowe's Mephistopheles, and Batman as Dostoyevsky's homicidal protagonist.

In 2017, Terms and Conditions earned Sikoryak greater attention for an even stranger premise: the complete, unabridged iTunes user agreement with Steve Jobs drawn in 94 pages of constantly changing styles. For The Unquotable Trump, released later the same year, he applied his formula to political satire, inserting Donald Trump cartoon images and verbatim quotes into comic book covers, with an appropriate emphasis on supervillains.

Now Sikoryak delves even deeper into American politics by adapting the most central US text. Constitution Illustrated provides the complete, unaltered Articles and Amendments in 114 cartoon vignettes. The book is both Sikoryak's widest range of comics homages yet and, more oddly, his most practical. Where the iTunes contract was a comically absurd choice because so few people have ever bothered to read it, the Constitution is, of course, a keystone of US law and culture. Sikoryak even evokes a pocket-sized edition, that ubiquitous prop used by politicians and pundits in need of something to clench and wave above their heads.

I just used my copy to check whether the 19th Amendment established the right of women to both vote and hold office or just to vote. The page features a spot-on imitation of H. G. Peter, the first but uncredited Wonder Woman artist. That pairing is a good illustration of Sikoryak's logic and humor. Though unlike the adaptions in The Unquotable Trump, the page isn't an exact recreation (like John Romita's 1975 The Hulk on the Rampage cover), but a formally freer combination of style and subject. (The 19th Amendment, by the way, is just for the right to vote.)

If you're a comics aficionado, Constitution Illustrated is also the ultimate pop quiz. I didn't keep score as I flipped through the first time, but I chuckled when I recognized the logic behind each discordant pairing, especially the superhero motif. For Article I, Section I describing the division of Congress into the Senate and the House, Sikoryak draws two muscular and oppositely colored patriots sprinting in a mirrored pose cribbed from the 1976 cover of The Greatest Race of All Time! Superman vs. the Flash. The two DC heroes are allies on the same team, but they still compete against each other all too often. That antagonism increases when the House's Super Friends face a row of Senate supervillains in an illustration of the House's sole power to create tax-raising bills and the Senate's power to amend them.

Instead of Spider-Man's antagonists Prowler and J. Jonah Jameson watching Peter Parker fall from a window, Sikoryak draws a presiding Chief Justice and a Senator watching the President in the same posean apt illustration for the protocols for trying an impeachment. President Parker bears no resemblance to either Donald Trump or Bill CIinton, but Sikoryak kindly adds tingling spider senses emanata as a helpful clue (something artist Romita did not include on the original 1969 cover).

A 1943-based colonial Captain America blocks a spray of musket bulletsmetaphorically blocking the states' ability to wage war, a power exclusive to the federal government. Sikoryak leaps to 1992 for Article II, Section 2's description of the President's role as Commander in Chief. I admit I didn't recognize Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.s cover, just the decade-defining style which I took for Rob Liefeld. Happily, Sikoryak provides a cheat sheet in the appendixes, listing the source for each of adaption.

The list of comics artists that get a respectful nod in Sikoryak's Constitution Illustrated is dizzyingly eclectic. It includes Alison Bechdel, Garry Trudeau, Roz Chast, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Charles Schultz, Frank Miller, Scott McCloud, Adrian Tomine, and many more. This book could be used in courses in comics and cartoon history, as it features some of the earliest creators, like Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid) and Windsor McCay (Little Nemo), and some of the most recent, like Noelle Stevenson (Lumberjanes) and Bianca Xunise (Six Chix).

Black artists George Herriman, Jackie Ormes, Matt Baker, Barbara Brandon-Croft, and Aaron McGruder are represented, as well as the presentation of Black characters by non-Black artists. The Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez tribute is the most diverse, implying a hope that the Electoral College, which it describes should reflect the same level of diversity. Less subtlety, Sikoryak draws a chain-breaking Luke Cage to illustrate the slavery-ending 13th Amendment. His 25th Amendment depicts a Black vice-president assuming the presidencyjust as the Black character John Stewart assumed the role of Green Lantern in DC comics.

My favorite, though it's disturbing, is Mandrake the Magician turning his African servant Lothar partially invisible beneath the census directive to count only "three fifths of all other persons", meaning, of course, slaves. The image unites the racism of the Article with the racism of the 1930s characters. It also highlights how any contemporary analysis of the Constitution must address its deep flaws too. Sikoryak's satirical pairings breathe new and sometimes uncomfortable life into the United States' most living document.

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Sikoryak's 'Constitution Illustrated' Pays Homage to Comics and the Constitution - PopMatters

Outbreaks of Coronavirus (Covid-19) on cruise ships are currently disrupting holidaymakers plans across the world. But away from the headlines of the inconvenience to privileged travellers, a global human crisis is unfolding. Seafarers are suffering. And they are largely unnoticed.

Pretty much every country in the world depends on shipping. Globally over 1.6 million people work as seafarers. Ships transport around 90% of the worlds trade. In 2016, then-United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon released a statement saying:

Everybody in the world benefits from shipping We ship food, technology, medicines, and memories.

He also said that the shipping industry has helped improve global living standards and helped lift millions of people out of acute poverty. But he acknowledged:

the vast majority of people are unaware of the key role played by the shipping industry, which is largely hidden from view.

This hidden from view situation has allowed the ongoing exploitation of maritime workers. Partly because of the international nature of shipping, its difficult to regulate.

Wages in the shipping industry are often shockingly low. Last year, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) reported:

super exploitation on merchant ships in UK waters sees basic rates of pay as low as 1.83 per hour

This means UK workers are undercut by workers from overseas, which causes problems for both seafarers in the UK and in countries that supply the majority of crews. But the maritime industry isseen as a special case, which allows the exploitation to continue and causes discrimination against foreign workers.

But its not only financially that maritime workers suffer. A recent in-depth study found that seafarers are likely to suffer in five main areas. Personnel Todaylists them as:

Fatigue impact of long working hours, changes in working hours, shift work and overtime

Working environment heat, noise, ship movement, food quality, length of deployment, access to gym and exercise equipment

Role level of autonomy, task and skills variety, workload, job satisfaction and rank

Socialisation social interaction on board, cultural awareness, transient nature of crews on a ship, and openness of communication

Leadership the level of support offered and influence over conditions and culture.

In 2017, the maritime union Nautilus demanded action from the UK government to tackle exploitation of seafarers in the UK, many of whom were victims of modern slavery, and many more who were living in unacceptable conditions, with infestations and lack of fresh and nutritious food. In 2019, the RMT slammed the government for ignoring what it termed ships of shame. At the time, general secretary Mick Cash said:

Companies will trouser millions of pounds of taxpayers cash while they crew their ships with exploited seafarers from other countries.

Coronavirus has compounded all these issues, leading to port closures and travel restrictions. Crew changes were suspended in March 2020 as a short-term solution to stop supply interruption. But crew members still have no idea when they will be able to disembark and see their families. The International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) estimates:

300,000 seafarers are trapped working aboard these vessels, and another 300,000 are facing financial ruin at home, desperate to relieve these ships and start earning wages again.

Governments around the world recently signed up to an agreement at the UK-convened International Maritime summit on 9 July 2020. It seeks to safeguard seafarers rights and working conditions during the coronavirus crisis, and all 14 signatories recognise seafarers as keyworkers.

Even so, only 15 countries globally have opened their ports. So some crews are facing being trapped at sea indefinitely, while others are trapped at home. The ITF says:

Governments are the biggest barrier to resolving the growing crew change crisis.

Alarm bells should potentially ring when we consider that the top five suppliers of ratings (non-officer crew members) to the maritime industry are the Philippines, China, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. China, Ukraine and Russia tend to rank pretty low in terms of human rights.

A similar group of countries supply the most officers to the maritime industry, with China topping the leader board and the Philippines, India, Indonesia and Russia following. In 2019, China had the worlds second-largest shipping fleet and constructed a third of all vessels globally. Around a third of all shipping routes pass through the South China sea.

So its problematic that China, Russia, and Ukraine were conspicuously absent from the International Maritime Summit in July. It doesnt take a big leap to see that without three of the top five crew suppliers involved, securing better rights for seafarers is likely to be near impossible.

But its not enough to point fingers at those countries which supply seafarers. In a global industry, all governments have a safeguarding duty to protect workers. And instead, wealthy countries are ignoring worker exploitation to make a better profit and undercut minimum wage contracts. They leave workers from poor countries with no choice but to get on board, because if they dont, they and their families will suffer even more.

For too long we have shuttered ourselves from the chronic conditions and poverty inflicted on people we rely on for all of our basic needs. It seems that shipping is yet another industry where profit is put so far before people that workers are drowning. And given how vital they are to humanitys access to fundamentally important supplies, its past time to pull the curtain back on the global conditions for maritime workers.

Featured image via Unsplash Andy Li

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Seafarers face welfare crisis as Coronavirus compounds appalling conditions - The Canary

Tuesday, 21 July 2020, 4:52 pmOpinion: Binoy Kampmark

In many ways, rapper and footwear mogul Kanye West fitsthe mould. That mould the star or celebrity running forhigh office had already been made by theactor-cum-amnesiac Ronald Reagan, who, with his dabbling inastrology and conveniently re-imagined reminiscences, didmuch to prepare the White House for what one might call thereality show. The fruit from that garden has beenample and bitter.

After announcing his improbable andalmost certainly doomed campaign for the US presidency,West, after flirting with dropping out, decided to at leasthave a campaign rally. Like other countries who havewitnessed celebrities gather the electoral silver and maketheir way into office, West is playing politics emptied ofpolitics, the patient extracted of the nerve. Theanti-political politician is an oxymoron, but it is anoxymoron that has speared and skewered statecraft. Thepolitical classes are petrified in alienation,representatives shielded behind armies of pollsters, publicrelations gurus and party machinery. The voter might as wellvote for a candidate on the autopilot gravy train. Thelunatic you get is the lunatic you see.

West is hisown gravy train, admittedly also stocked up with provisionsfrom his fellow celebrity companion, Kim Kardashian. Hisarticulations are pricks of irritation, rarely credible andalmost always reversible. He does his utmost to convincethat he is some discount idiot savant, trying to soundprofound even as he fumbles. His rallyat Charleston, South Carolina left something for everybody,though no one present should have been confused by theall about me theme.

It all started withpredictable theatre. There was no microphone. West donned abulletproof vest. (You ought to be worth shooting to becredible.) 2020 was shaved into performers head.The audience gathered could not exactly be called vast,though the rapper promised that future events would beglorious, held in rooms where the acoustics will beincredible because I will be involved with thedesign.

The presentation was peppered by suchhowlers as that on the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, whonever actually freed the slaves. What Tubman did,reflected West, was just having the slaves go work forother white people. The fogged up looking glass wasbrought out, with suggestionsby Dani Di Placido in Forbes that this might havebeen some obscure reference to wage slavery and whitesupremacy. That said, a lament follows. Why did West haveto go after a beloved civil rights hero given hisprevious Trump love phase, his own hyper-capitalistambitions and the fact of becoming a billionaire whichcan hardly happen through opposing wageslavery?

Knocking off the gloss of the Tubmanlegacy was part of a show that moved into the realm of theteary and transcendental, with the performer promoting hisinspirational link to the divine. West the mystic spoke ofGods intervention, suggesting that fabulous sky creaturedivines are terribly incurious, and bored, by nature. Iwas having the rappers lifestyle. I was sitting up inParis, and I had my leather pants on and I had my laptopup and I got all of my creative ideas. I got my shoes, I gotmy sound cover, I got communities, I got clothes, I got allthis and the screen [went] black and white and God said,if you f*** with my vision Im going to f*** withyours.

It all had to do with his child, whoserved as a good publicity prop for the occasion. This goodLord of the mind blowing f*** vision had convincedWest that he and his wife should have their baby. And Icalled my wife and she said, were going to have thisbaby. I said were gonna have this child So even if mywife were to divorce me after this speech, she brought Northinto the world when I didnt want to. She stood up and sheprotected that child. To ease any moral or ethicalquandaries, West had a solution for troubled couples: givethem money. Everybody that has a baby gets a milliondollars.

There was much talk about hisentrepreneurial prowess (boosting the Adidas bank balanceand share portfolio), his 132 IQ genius, a person wholiterally went to the hospital because his brain was toobig for his skull.

There were audienceinterventions that rarely taxed the big-brained wonder. Acertain Summer complained about education beingwhitewashed, police brutality and thebrainwashing offered by such technology platforms asTikTok, though West spent more time fussing over not beingable to hear anything above the din and distraction: nocamera flicks, no flashes, no moving, no opening up Doritobags. He also got preoccupied about the exits. You seewhere the two exits are? Is it okay to close the doors, butkeep them unlocked while we are talking?

Campaignsfor the US presidency can start as engorged, dramaticstunts, with the ego maniac festooned with ambitions thatare light on policy but heavy on boastful character. Theperson promoting it ends up riding a historical train hecannot get off. Donald Trump, to some extent, did just that.Many in the Trump camp, leaving aside such ideologicalblunder busts as Steve Bannon, were as disbelieving as manyothers that victory was in the offing that November in 2016.Then the gag got real. West has some way to go before comingclose.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a CommonwealthScholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMITUniversity, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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Home Secretary Priti Patel has been urged to act to protect workers (Picture: PA)

The Home Office is facing increasing pressure to take action against the exploitation of garment factory workers in the UK.

More than 90 retailers, MPs and other organisations have come together to urge the Government to act.

It comes after online fashion giant Boohoo came under fire following an article which alleged workers in a Leicester factory making clothes for the company were paid as little as 3.50 an hour.

In a letter sent to Home Secretary Priti Patel on Saturday, the coalition called for a licensing scheme to ensure textile factories are fit to trade.

The letter said: These reports on the terrible working conditions people face in UK garment factories add weight to concerns which have been raised over the last five years by academics and parliamentary committees about the gross underpayment of the national living wage and serious breaches of health and safety law in these workplaces.

Unless action is taken now, thousands more people will likely face exploitation.

The licensing scheme would ensure workers are paid the national minimum wage and encourage retailers to source clothing locally, the letter states.

Coordinated by the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the letter has been signed by fashion retailers ASOS, Missguided, New Look, Next and River Island among others.

Boohoo has not signed the letter but on Friday its chief executive John Lyttle sent his own note to Ms Patel in which he backed calls for a licensing scheme.

Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the BRC, added: While there is no silver bullet, licensing is a critical step toward resolving this issue.

The public want to know that the clothes they buy have been made by workers who are respected, valued and protected by the law.

Minister for safeguarding, Victoria Atkins, said: Exploiting vulnerable people for commercial gain is despicable and this Government will not stand for it.

We expect all companies implicated in these allegations to conduct a full and thorough investigation to ensure that their supply chains are free from labour exploitation. We have liaised with relevant agencies regarding alleged working practices at garment factories in Leicester. We await the results of these investigations.

Boohoo had more than 1 billion wiped from its share value in two days, while other retailers such as Next and Asos dropped its clothing from their websites.

The fast-fashion company said it will investigate the allegations and end relationships with any supplier it finds to have broken its code of conduct.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk. For more stories like this, check our news page.

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Home Office urged to protect workers amid Boohoo slavery allegations - Metro.co.uk

George Floyd died on Monday, May 25. He was known among his family and friends for his compassionate character and beautiful spirit. However, he died in a matter of minutes at the hands of Derek Chauvin, an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department. Since then, protests have erupted across the country, demanding justice for Black Americans who have been murdered this year, including Breona Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others. In the process, police precincts have been seized, protestors have been fired upon, and stores have been razed. America is returning slowly to a new normal constructed on the ruins of weeks of protests and riots.

However, as we watch this violent crisis unfold, another looms in the background: The pandemic rages on. On May 28, the U.S. death toll surpassed 100,000 people. As of July 13, that number has increased to 137,000, with over 3 million total cases. Yet, reopening orders continue to be implemented across the country, with states like Texas, Florida, and Arizona emerging as new global epicenters for the virus. Adding to this, the American economy is in a state of crisis. The federal deficit is climbing at an unprecedented rate, with the Department of the Treasury borrowing over $3 trillion in only the last three months and economists foreseeing a significant recession in our near future. People are dying, markets are in a freefall, and GDP growth and deficit spending are at unhealthy long-term levels.

Today, however, we must realize that the crisis of policing and that of the economy are inextricable from each other. George Floyd himself, as reported by Joanna Walters in the Guardian, was like many millions of Americans over the last few months: out of work and looking for a new job. His situation was the result of mass businesses closures, a situation which has left millions of other Americans jobless. The crises are converging. Both the calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the scourge of systemic racism are inextricably intertwined, stemming from and perpetuated by the countrys reverent adherence to a corrupt, capitalist system. If we are to cast off the political and social ineptitude that has marked our policies for generations, we must take this moment of large-scale societal change to implement progressive political change.

With regard to the pandemic, despite the heightened urgency of support, the only existing relief package to Americans has been a means-tested $1,200 check without systemic payment freezes or assistance for utilities, rent and mortgages. This has left many millions of Americans in a state of economic limbo. Sandra Black, an economics professor at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, highlighted the insufficiency of such a measure. In an interview with Time, Black remarked that this is not enough money to keep most families afloat And this shutdown is far from over.

Meanwhile, major debt-bearing American corporations have received substantially more government assistance, resulting in moral hazard a situation which encourages corporations to continue their risky practices without liability, to the detriment of the average American. As American workers find it more difficult than ever to make ends meet, financial institutions are saved to the penny. Meanwhile, billionaires continue to profit, with some, like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckeberg, adding over 50% to their respective net worths as most Americans suffer on a months-old relief check. This conundrum is similar to the Great Recession, but our contemporary context makes it an entirely different beast: Even if individuals can find work, they may have to expose themselves to unsafe conditions in order to earn wages. Floyd himself was among the millions caught within this abhorrent paradox. Like so many other struggling Americans, Floyd found himself in search of a new job. However, in merely soliciting a possibly counterfeit bill, Floyd became part of an even more sinister statistical grouping: an unarmed Black person killed by an American police officer.

The intersection of these trends is no coincidence. It is the working of a corrupt, capitalist system. The wage slavery that has arisen amid stagnant wages drives poverty, and poverty drives policing especially in urban areas. These trends further drive community mistrust of police, where the force that allegedly protects the public is increasingly perceived as the problem. Black Americans, who are disproportionately represented amongst these poor communities, are continually targeted by police in their own communities. However, what brings together these two systems that of police targeting and economic disadvantage is racial policing.

Consistent historical evidence has documented overtly discriminatory policing against Black Americans for centuries, but the most recent surge in such behavior was catalyzed by Reagans Tough on Crime campaign and its post-Reagan continuations, especially the 1994 Crime Bill. The War on Drugs and calls to crack down on urban crime became political tools for the mass incarceration of Black Americans. Indeed, as Kenneth Nunn writes in Race, Racism, and the Law, the War on Drugs was a targeted war, the employment of force and violence against certain communities in order to attain certain political objectives. These political objectives are expressly racial the mass incarceration of people of color. Compounding this, many millions of Black Americans are stuck in generational cycles of poverty, their communities also engulfed by gentrification. They are denied political rights by racial gerrymandering and overtly discriminatory polling rules in the South. These distinct yet structurally intertwined systems of oppression are the makeup of an apartheid state, in which White supremacy complements the American neoliberal economic system to maintain a vast prison-industrial complex that disproportionately targets communities of color.

Also inherent in the nature of American capitalism is the defense of private property before social good. The police have revealed themselves to be the mercenaries of corporate interests, stepping in not to protect protestors but to protect burning buildings and endangered private property. Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, even came under fire from the president for refusing to dispel protesters from the Third Precinct station of the Minneapolis Police Department, instead allowing the building to burn in hopes that it would quell the passion of the protesters. It was at this juncture, when private property was threatened, that Trump escalated his federal response, threatening and then pursuing national military action.

Leftists intellectuals have long asserted that the role of police in America has been to uphold the agenda of the monied elite. Recent events have indeed evidenced the inherently violent means of enforcing protection of property in this country, especially in urban areas where looting is most concentrated. Even President Trump asserted this logic in invoking the racially charged words of Miami Police Chief Walter Headley in 1967: When the looting starts, the shooting starts. The violent actions of police demonstrate an insurmountable internal contradiction for police officers: How can the protectors of our communities often meet peaceful protests with military-style repressive tactics? In the midst of this contradiction, organizers have brought awareness to a new rallying cry: Buildings can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be brought back.

While only now coming to the forefront of ongoing discourse, these are long-existing realities of the Black experience in America. As a White man, I cannot say I can truly give this experience and crisis enough consideration in writing this article I can only recognize the systemic inequity and utilize my privilege to become an ally. But I can review the annals of our history, and such a reading provides a dangerous narrative: It is this time, in our era, that the riots are different. This time, compromise and peace are failing to deliver answers, even more so than they did in Los Angeles in 1992. This time, dialogue is breaking through at an alarming rate.

This is because the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening the basic institutions of American society. The market disruptions of March and April were unprecedented, featuring the biggest stock market crash since 2008. As a result, the modern state has expanded across society in a visibly larger way since even March. The coronavirus relief bill shares many traits with major policies of crisis management in the past, especially during the Great Depression and the Great Recession, such as its direct assistance to individuals, companies, and even American cultural funds. Yet, it is distinct in its size: It appears now to be the largest economic stimulus, even adjusted for inflation and real growth, in American history. What may be more important than scale, however, is implication. Similar to the Works Progress Administration in FDRs New Deal and the employment-based direct assistance in Obamas American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the current world situation again evidences that large, rogue markets cannot regulate themselves and that they are undermined by systemic crisis. Again, people are being asked to forgive the mistakes of a system that has never worked for them.

Such large-scale changes, undergirded by major global crises, open up the space for political discourse and make equally large-scale institutional and social change seem like achievable goals. Yet, we cannot merely speculate any longer. We must seize this moment for change.

Image Credit: Photo by Julian Wanis used under the Unsplash License

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A Revolutionary Perspective on Our Crisis, Part I - Harvard Political Review