Category Archives: Wage Slavery

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (WCBD) Democratic presidentialcandidate Tom Steyer spoke one-on-one with News 2s Brad Franko to discuss hiscampaign and performance in the Palmetto State.

Recent polls from Real Clear Politics shows Steyer is now among the top three democratic candidates for president in South Carolina.

But is South Carolina the end-all-be-all for his campaign? Steyer says diversity is key and feels his campaign is appealing to everybody across the spectrum.

Nevada and South Carolina are the first two states that arediverse, he said. There are a lot of black people and there are a lot of Latinos,a lot of Asian Americans, Native Americans as well as white people. I know thatanybody, who wants to put together a coalition of democrats needs to appeal to everybodyacross the spectrum and if anybody wants to beat Donald Trump in November of2020, then they have got to be able to relate to those people and have everyoneshow up to the polls in November.

Steyer admitted that South Carolina has special importance. Itabsolutely does, and Ive said that for a long time.

Running for president is a cutthroat process. Recently in South Carolina, a newspaper talked about Steyers financial investment in the state and a former party chairman said what he is doing isnt investing but paying people off.

What were doing in South Carolina, we have the most peopleon the ground of anybody in South Carolina. If you call hiring people andpaying them for doing work, paying people off I think thats what they callthe American way in fact, we have a diverse group of people, take a lookwhose working for us, who is endorsing me, if youre asking people to do workfor you, to do community organizing Im a community organizer, I know thebest way to do community organizing the only really effective way is havepeople go into those communities that they are a part of and that they know.So, the idea of paying people off; people are doing work and so they getpaid. Thats entirely appropriate andthats the way community organizing works.

He went on to say, My wife moved to South Carolina for goodness sakes. My being on the ground more than any other candidate, our having a bigger group of people working on the ground than anyone else, the fact that Im the only candidate that will say he or she is for reparations for slavery, the fact that Im talking honestly about race, willing to take on Mr. Trump on the economy, saying I think his economic policies stink for working people and I can show it. Im talking about a completely different kind of economy with a much higher minimum wage; a tax cut of 10% for everybody who makes less than $250K and the creation of over four and a half million good-paying union jobs across the county to rebuild it in a climate-smart way I think what Im doing in South Carolina is resonating because in fact people can get a chance to see me, see who I am, see who my family is, they can listen to me and know that what I am talking about is a real-world and its much better than this kind of Mar-a-Lago economy that Mr. Trump has been promoting.

The South Carolina Democratic Primary will be held on Saturday,February 29th.

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Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer speaks one-on-one with News 2 - WCBD News 2

Like you do, perhaps. Our societies means Anglo ones: America, Britain, Australia perhaps. You can judge for yourself if your society is on the list. What underlies all this? How did we get here? To things like today: a fresh-faced new government advisor supports eugenics, because he thinks minorities are genetically inferiorall of which, of course, isa literal form of genocide as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. He was hired.by the wayfor hisblog comments. What the? What on earth?Genocide stalking the halls of powerby way of the comments section?

Such stuff isnt just horrific. Its surreal and absurd.It makes the jaw drop like a stone and the head spin in whiplash. Its now just as if we now live in a dystopia written by pedophiles, wannabe basement-dwelling fascists, militant authoritarians, men who put kids in camps, silent majorities who shrug at it all, elites who wonder what the problem is, billionaires who profit in glee at all the above, and other assorted forms of human failurewe do. But I digress.

When I look at our societies, I see three obvious patterns. They tell me our societies arent going to make it. Not just because, well, those patterns are therebut also because as societies we dont seem capable of understanding or acknowledging theyre therewe wont own up, confront, recognize, admit them. All that put together is the stuff of something very much like an inevitable social collapse. How do you treat a patient who wont admit how sick he really is? My patterns link the hard stuff to the soft stuff economics, politics, society, to values, priorities, what we genuinely consider worthy. They are subtle things. Theyre aboutwhywe make and go on making the astonishingly foolish choices we do.

The first thing I see when I look at our societies is a pattern of staggering economic mismanagement.How is it that we had endless money for wars, for aggression, for intelligence agencies to launch covert plots to install dictators (Im not making that up), for rage, for violence? For bank bailout? But none to bail outthe working class, the middle class, the average family? How is it that hedge funds get endless free money from the government, every single nanosecond of every single day but literally a full half of American work low-wage jobs? What the? You see what I mean by staggering economic mismanagement.

And yet elites, as a whole, refuse to own up to this.Just today I saw Barack Obama tweeting how successful his economic policies were. Sorry, reality says the opposite: 75% of Americans struggle to pay the bills, 80% cant raise a tiny amount for an emergency, incomes have stagnated for decades. Hardly the stuff of an economic miracle. But when Barack says it, you probably believe it. I get it. Hes a nice guy. His heart is in the right place. But thats not enough to create a working society, much less economy. Every pattern Ill speak about is a hidden one we refuse, as a society, to own up to it. And so what can we do about it?

Underlying that pattern of staggering economic mismanagement is a set of values.We value, as a society, violence, cruelty, aggression, hostility, over and above everything else, especially their opposites: kindness, decency, gentleness. What kind of society do those values build? Can they yield anything but the dystopia we live in?

The second pattern I see when I look at our societies is a history of shocking institutional failure, built on moral degradation.Were the societies who built an international slave trade. We literally plundered a continent for its people, and made them our slaves. We then put them to work, and created the kind of society so horrific that escapees were hunted down by informers and police. Can you imagine? Or have you blocked it all out?

(Go ahead and tell me what moral atrocity ranks up there with building a centuries long slave trade that engulfed the planet. But morality isnt, as we think, a thing of no consequences, a thing to have on a Sunday, and then forget about on Monday. That is our big mistake, perhaps our biggest.)

That history of horror shapes us to this very day: it deprived us of ever being able to build the institutions of a functioning modern democracy.Why are we literally the only societies in the rich world without working healthcare, education, retirement, and so on? Why do what of those we have degrade by the day? Because the residue of slavery haunts us: too many (white) people think: I wont invest in them! Theyre dirty, filthy subhumans! Why, their grandparents were my grandparents slaves! Maybe they dont say it. But they certainly think it. Its hardly a coincidence the societies which pioneered the global slave trade and then segregation are today the ones without decent public goods, which require a whole society to cooperate, and accept one another as equals. Its a relationship. Slavery and segregation were to mean that America would never develop any functioning modern social systems, really.

And yet that thread of institutional failure, too, we refuse to accept and own up to.When have you seen the obvious link above discussed seriously that a) public healthcare, retirement, college, childcare etc are what make a society civilized, and b) our barbarisms long hangover is what prevented us ever becoming a civilized society? I havent ever, really. Maybe its hinted at, or intimated. Maybe we go so far as condemning our brutal and sordid past. But we dont really own up to the social consequences of our history of horrific immorality: that such immorality had profound real-world effects. It left us institutionally stunted, underdeveloped, broken, unable to treat each other like human beings.But societies who cant build institutions to treat each other like human beings can scarcely ever progress beyond exploitation, abuse, authoritarianism, tribalism, and hate. Wait isnt that exactly where were trapped?

The third pattern I see is a kind of shattering mismanagement of social norms and expectations. Who else in the world denies their neighbors things like healthcare, education, and retirement? Nobody especially nobody in societies that have the means. Yet we do. Why is that? Why are we so indifferent to each other? So cruel, so aggressive, so hostile?

Probably because we are too busy teaching our kids, and each other, that the only point in life is something like this: to be more competitive than the next person, so you can accumulate more stuff than them, so you can make them envious, so you can feel supreme. The point of life isnt to care for your neighbour, to do great and beautiful things, to write a world-changing book or make a life-changing discovery its to make more money. Why? Because thats how you show you are strong. And weakness is death. Because only the strong deserve to survive, after all.Capitalism and patriarchy and supremacy intertwine to make the survival of the fittest our deepest and only true moral law.

Thats what I mean by a kind of shattering mismanagement of social norms and expectations. Weve internalized that value, most of us: that the weak deserve to perish, and the strong survive. We might not think we have, and we might not say we do, but our actions belie us. We grin at our reality shows and long for our perfect pecs and boobs and sigh wistfully over this billionaire or that celebrity. My God! Arent they a perfect person? Well happily spend a small fortune on the plastic stuff of self-aggrandization. But invest in healthcare or retirement for all? LOL.

So we go on dehumanizing ourselves, and everyone around us, as a necessary consequence. We buy into the systems of our own undoing. Sorry, you arent good enough, pretty enough, tough enough, mean enough, selfish enough. Youre just not competitive enough to make it, son. We dont value things like gentleness and humanity and decency not really. Theyre a sure way to get fired or demeaned or picked on or bullied, if you dare to show them, really. The storys the same, from grade school to working life.

Weve become societies of bullies, in other words. But societies of bullies are also societies of cowards.And that cowardice is easy to see. Were happy to call out celebrities for using the wrong pronoun. But calling men who puts kids in cages fasciststhats over the line. Were happy to spend hours a day on Facebookwhich makes us feel miserable and unhappyand who do we take our fury out on? Each other and ourselves, mostly. We dont stick up for people much. We dont put ourselves on the line. Why bother, when the stakes or life or death? Ah, but that is the precise moment we accept that rule of the strong over the weak, too. Cowards and bullies, united in predation.

Were the worlds great materialists, and materialist individualism of this kind has been our downfall.It has led us, through greed and selfishness, to settle for the moral law that the strong should survive, and the weak perish. What other destination can materialist individualism yield? When enough of us say: the only that counts in life is my happiness, and my happiness is a function of how much stuff I havethen by definition, our society cant be a place that has things like healthcare, retirement, education. We cant really have a democracy, in which equality, freedom, and justice are valued. We cant have a society in which things like inherent self-worth exist and are given by all to all.Societies of bullies and cowards, competing to accumulate more things they cant afford in the first place, like the ones weve become, are doomed to exploit and abuse and prey on each other all the way down the abyss. And that is where we are self-evidently heading, fast.

Let me sum up my thre patterns.We mismanaged our economies, because we valued violence and aggression and cruelty over simply, gently, wisely, investing in each other. We mismanaged our institutions and moral possibilities because we valued comfortable denial and numbing complicity and dim-witted pleasure over growth, forgiveness, self-understanding, the struggle of becoming something truer and better, the test of maturity. We mismanaged our societies because we chose individualism and competitiveness and greed over cooperation and fellowship and generosity. Those choices have now caught up with us. How are we to unmake them?

Those patterns outlive any one leader.Or party. Or institution. They are so, so deep in us its hard to see what could excise or extricate them. They are inoperable tumours of the soul, not just little flaws in the mind. They arent simple or easy or straightforward to understand much less transcend. Is there a blade sharp enough to cut them out of us?

That is why I dont think our societies have much of a future, my friends.Societies dont often rise to the challenge of reinventing their foundational values, their defining sets of priorities. Rome was brought down by its callousness and hunger for empire in the end. Soviet Russia, by its craving for power and control.

What about us?I dont think that we are going to transcend what by now are so visibly our foundational values: hostility, aggression, cruelty, violence, selfishness, greed, individualism, materialism, pleasure-seeking over truth-telling. They seem to be the only things we really, genuinely care about as societies, cultures, people. Give enough of us enough of those and there is no level of degradation and despair we wont settle for. And so I think the real story of our collapse is that those old, old values are toppling us, eroding our foundations, while corroding our pinnacles. And we are becoming dust in historys wind. Perhaps, in the end, that is all we deserved.

(Umair Haque writes for Eudaimonia and Co where this perspective was first posted.)

-cw

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This is What a Society Without a Future Looks Like - City Watch

Fears have been raised over what the Governments plans to introduce a points-based immigration system would mean for Merseyside.

Radical plans introduced by Boris Johnsons government on Wednesday would mean blocking immigrants set to earn under 25,600 a year from entering the country - with that group considered low skilled.

As well as earning that amount, immigrants will also need a job offer - and to speak English to a certain level in order to get a work visa.

Now, industry experts on Merseyside have said the new cap, to be introduced from January 1, could mean not only spiralling numbers of unfilled vacancies in already struggling sectors such as care - but also opening the door for employers to operate under the radar.

That's despite the government saying there would be some exceptions for people earning close to the 25,600 figure and applying to shortage areas such as the NHS.

Employment and business experts at Liverpool John Moores University have said the points-based system will present a double jeopardy for the city.

Dr Patricia Harrison told the ECHO: Stopping low paid immigration to Merseyside could simply exacerbate the already dire situation of unfilled vacancies in sectors like distribution, care, agriculture and manual tasks like labouring and car washing.

According to recent ONS figures, the Liverpool City Region has approximately 30% of workers in jobs paying less than 25,000 per year.

Our research shows that many of these job are low paid and insecure. Depriving local economies, like Merseyside, of capable and willing immigrant labour is not going to produce more money for wages.

When announced, the plans prompted an outpouring of fury from businesses and council who warn sectors like social care face "disaster".

The Home Office, who said there will be some exceptions for people who earn 20,480 to 25,600, told businesses they should simply end their "reliance on cheap, low-skilled labour".

Tom is Business Editor for the ECHO, Business Live and the Liverpool City Region Business Post

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Dr Harrison said that Liverpool, like the rest of the UK, has significant skill shortages in care workers.

She added: Whilst special provision for 10,000 seasonal workers to take low paid harvesting jobs is proposed, there is no such provision for other occupations, and we could be facing a black-hole in care provision against a backdrop of an ageing population.

As Wirrals director of childrens services Paul Boyce recently warned that in order to attract social care workers, local authorities were having to outpay each other on salaries. As if they had the money.

Dr Harrison and colleague Helen Collins conduct research into low pay, zero hours and the gig economy.

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Ms Collins said: In all likelihood, for areas such as Liverpool, this post-Brexit immigration planning runs the risk of driving such jobs further into precarity, in turn, enabling less scrupulous employers to operate under the radar of employee protection mechanisms such as the Modern Slavery Act.

If, and its a big if, this potential boost to training is the genuine motivation behind the Governments vision then this needs to be properly financially planned between the Home Office and Number 11 before the Budget, whether it happens on March 11 or later.

A policy statement published by the Government on Wednesday said free movement would end, laws surrounding this would be repealed and a new Immigration Bill would be introduced.

That would mean a "firm and fair" system which would "attract the high-skilled workers" to create a "high wage, high skill, high productivity economy".

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Devastating impact Tories' new immigration policy will have on Merseyside - Liverpool Echo

A poll published just over a week ago by Vice found Sanders and Biden statistically tied among black voters. Just two days ago, Biden was asked about the poll and denied that Sanders was leading him among any segment of black Americans.

Why is Senator Sanders leading you with black voters under the age of 35? Antonia Hylton, a reporter for Vice News, asked at a presidential forum hosted by her outlet on Monday.

He is not leading me, black voters, under the age of look, just all I know is, I am leading everybody, combined, with black voters, Mr. Biden responded, engaging in some of the hyperbole he often disavows.

Some audience members gathered at an events center here laughed. Mr. Biden did not.

Today the Daily Beast published a story which seems aimed at rattling some of that support for Sanders. The outlet obtained (it doesnt say how) interviews of Sanders from the 1970s, back when he was leading a fringe socialist party called the Liberty Union Party. In those interviews, Sanders repeatedly compared the situation of Vermont workers to slaves:

Basically, today, Vermont workers remain slaves in many, many ways, Sanders said in another interview in 1977, in which he compared the burgeoning service industry in the nearly all-white state to the enslavement of black Americans at the nations founding. The problem comes when we end up with an entire state of people trained to wait on other people.

In the first interview, published in October 1976 when Sanders was the Liberty Union Partys nominee for governor, the future senator responded to the announced sale of the century-old Vermont Marble Company to a Swiss conglomerate by calling for worker control of businesses, calling it absolutely absurd that the family that owned Vermont Marble could have the unilateral right to sell the company without the approval of its employees.

We believe ultimately that companies like Vermont Marble should be owned by the workers themselves and that workersnot a handful of ownersshould be determining policy, Sanders said. If a worker at Vermont Marble has no say about who owns the company he works for and that major changes can take place without his knowledge and consent, how far have we really advanced from the days of slavery, when black people were sold to different owners without their consent?

As the Daily Beast points out, Vermont at the time was 99 percent white.

There are some pretty obvious differences between having a job and slavery, starting with a fact that employees at Vermont Marble could choose to quit and either work somewhere else or try to launch their own rival company.But there is actually quite a long history of this sort of criticism of wage slavery from the far left. What Sanders was saying about it at the time seems consistent with his other socialist views in the 1970s. Last year, CNN published a review of Sanders public statements from this same time period and found he was also a fan of nationalizing major industries:

During this time, Sanders and Liberty Union argued for nationalization of the energy industry, public ownership of banks, telephone, electric, and drug companies and of the major means of production such as factories and capital, as well as other proposals such as a 100% income tax on the highest income earners in America. Sanders also rejected political violence and criticized the anti-democratic nature of communist states such as the Soviet Union.

I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries, Sanders said in one interview with the Burlington Free Press in 1976.

This is one of the ongoing criticisms of Sanders from some on the left. His take on slavery (at least his 1970s take) seems to be based on his socialists views about the ownership of capital and class divisions. He sees it as part of a continuum. But that downplays or even ignores racism as a key distinction between slavery and work. Given the widespread focus on identity politics on the left today, that obviously doesnt play very well.

Im not at all confident this will get much play in the media but even if it does, Sanders will sidestep questions about it the same way he has about his past socialist views, i.e. hey, that was a long time ago. Still, I do wonder if this was a leak from a rival campaign looking to lay some groundwork for more awkward conversations about his past views.

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Bernie Sanders in the 1970s: Having a job is a lot like slavery - Hot Air

Concerns over the ongoing situation of up to 10,000 garment workers in Leicester, who are feared to be trapped in conditions of modern slavery and paid 3 an hour, have been raised in Parliament.

Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, raised a question on Tuesday about the continuing state of working conditions in factories supplying the UKs booming fast fashion industry, and sought a meeting with business secretary Kelly Tolhurst for clarity over enforcement of the national minimum wage.

Speaking to the Guardian, Bridgen said what is happening in Leicester is a national shame and must not be allowed to continue.

This is Leicesters dirty secret, he said. These illegal businesses are not only keeping their workers in miserable conditions, theyre also undermining the marketplace for legitimate businesses to make a living in a very difficult market. Ive seen the buildings where these workers are and it is shocking: the buildings are condemned if there was a fire there then hundreds would die, and this is Britain in 2020. Its a national shame.

Persistent investigations into the UKs domestic garment industry has raised the spectre of serious labour abuses thriving in factories across the north west of England with relative impunity.

Last February, an Environmental Audit Committee heard evidence of environmental and labour abuses flourishing in the UKs fashion industry. MPs found that the Modern Slavery Act was not sufficient to stop wage exploitation at UK clothing factories and issued a series of recommendations, including forcing brands to increase transparency in their supply chains. However the government refused to implement any of the committees recommendations, which also included moves to improve environmental sustainability and limit waste.

In November 2019, a scoping survey on the Greater Manchester textile and garment industry that included 182 companies operating across the region, also found evidence that workers were being paid as little as 3-4 an hour.

The survey, conducted by HomeWorkers Worldwide, a labour rights NGO, found that the garment workforce across the region was diverse with British workers employed alongside European and other migrant workers, but that many were working in insecure environments without permanent contracts. Some of the most vulnerable workers were undocumented migrants who had little recourse to public assistance or support.

One worker quoted in the report described illegal working practices at one factory: Were paid in cash instead of a bank transfer. They give us payslips but they only show 16 hours a week at 7.50 an hour, whereas in fact were doing many more hours than that usually we do 40 hours a week from 8am to 6pm and were paid around 500 a month.

Other workers interviewed for the survey claim that they have been forced to hand over part of their wages to their employer, and faced demands for money in return for help with passport applications.

The survey also highlighted concerns from small manufacturers that they were under increasing pressure from large retailers whose purchasing practices were driving down prices to levels at which it was impossible for them to pay their workers properly.

Last November campaigning group Labour Behind the Label said there needed to be greater accountability for brands sourcing goods from factories across the UK. It called on fast fashion brands sourcing clothing from factories in Leicester to end potential labour exploitation and increase transparency in their supply chains.

Transparency is the first step to holding brands accountable to the conditions their workers could be facing, said Meg Lewis, spokesperson at Labour behind the Label . A lack of accountability can lead to situations where really serious labour abuses can flourish and the anecdotal evidence we have received from Leicester indicates that this is happening in the UK.

In the Commons yesterday, business minister Kelly Tolhurst agreed a meeting to discuss conditions in Leicester but said, This is a particular sector that has been under focus; there has been much work that has been carried out by HMRC and cross-border agencies HMRC enforce the national living wage.

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'National shame': MP sounds alarm over UK fast fashion factories - The Guardian

Thousands of clothing industry workers in an English city are feared to be receiving 3 (3.52) to 4 (4.70) an hour in conditions of modern slavery, MPs have heard.

Conservative Andrew Bridgen asked ministers to meet with him to discuss allegations he made connected to Leicester.

He offered no further specific details when raising the issue in business, energy and industrial strategy (Beis) questions.

Speaking in the Commons, Mr Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) said: Would the minister agree for a meeting with me to discuss the situation in Leicester, where I believe there are approximately 10,000 people in the clothing industry being paid 3 to 4 an hour in conditions of modern slavery?

Business minister Kelly Tolhurst replied: Yes, I would be absolutely happy to meet with him.

This is a particular sector that has been under focus, there has been much work that has been carried out by HMRC and cross-border agencies HMRC enforce the national living wage but Id be happy to get any details that he particularly has thatd be helpful.

The minimum wage is currently 8.21 (9.64) an hour for people aged 25 and over, which will increase to 8.72 (10.24) from April 2020.

For workers aged 21 to 24, it is 7.70 (9.04) an hour rising to 8.20 (9.63) in April, for 18 to 20-year-olds it is 6.15 (7.22) rising to 6.45 (7.22), for under-18s it is 4.35 (5.11) rising to 4.55 (5.34) and for apprentices it is 3.90 (4.58) rising to 4.15 (4.87).

Labours Rachel Reeves, who chaired the Beis committee in the last parliament, said the Government was offering warm words on enforcing the minimum wage.

She said: The truth is in the last 10 years just nine firms have been prosecuted and fined for non-payment of the minimum wage.

Where those fines are levied they are only half of the level that they could be levied at.

Why is that if this is such an area of importance for this Government?

Ms Tolhurst replied: I would like to correct her that there have been 14 prosecutions for the national minimum wage.

But also what Id like to make clear to the House is there are other ways in making sure employers pay without just bringing prosecutions.

Shadow minister Rachael Maskell said there has been a decade of workers being exploited under this Governments watch.

Ms Tolhurst described this as a complete misrepresentation of the Governments work over the last 10 years.

The rest is here:

MP: 10,000 people working in 'conditions of modern slavery' in clothing industry in English city - Irish Examiner

Cameron Rowland Jim Crow, 2017 Jim Crow rail bender 35 1/2 x 7 7/8 x 17 3/5 inches (91.4 x 20 x 44 cm) Jim Crow is a racial slur, derived from the name of the minstrel character played by Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s. A Jim Crow is also a type of manual railroad rail bender. It has been referred to by this name in publications from 1870 to the present. The lease of ex-slave prisoners to private industry immediately following the Civil War is known as the convict lease system. Many of the first convict lease contracts were signed by railroad companies. Plessy v. Ferguson contested an 1890 Louisiana law segregating black railroad passengers. The Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional. This created a precedent for laws mandating racial segregation, later to be known as Jim Crow laws.

A new exhibition from Cameron Rowland: 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73 opens at the ICA London on Tuesday 28th January.

WHEREAS divers Persons are holden in Slavery within divers of His Majestys Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services.

An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves, 1833.

29th January 12th April 2020 Public opening: Tuesday 28th January, 6 8pm, all welcome

About The ArtistCameron Rowland is an American artist, chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in 2019. He is one of the six fellows from New York City. Rowland graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in 2011, and after being awarded the MacArthur Fellowship returned there to address the student body. He spoke about his 2018 work Depreciation that critically examined the economics of slavery. Cameron Rowlands art has been featured in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.[3] Rowlands artwork focuses on critiquing systems and institutions that perpetuate or benefit from racial injustices. Notably, his work featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art, entitled 2015 MOCA REAL ESTATE ACQUISITION, revealed the Museums history of benefiting from racist systems like redlining. In it, he used the Museums donor plaque listing the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeless sale of the land on which the Museum sits to point out the 8.4 million dollar profit the Museum gained from the redlining process.[4] Other works of his use such objects as manhole leveller rings, wooden desks, and wooden benches manufactured by prison labourers for far less than minimum wage.

Cameron Rowland 2015 MOCA REAL ESTATE ACQUISITION, 2018 Donor plaqueThe redlining map of Los Angeles drawn by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1939 gave Bunker Hill, block D37, the lowest possible rating. D37 extended from West 4th Street to West Temple Street, and from Figueroa Street to South Hill Street. The report indicated that residents were low-income level and were predominantly Mexicans and Orientals. The HOLCs Residential Security Map report for Bunker Hill states:

It has been through all the phases of decline and is now thoroughly blighted. Subversive racial elements predominate; dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in evidence. It is a slum area and one of the citys melting pots. There is a slum clearance project under consideration but no definite steps have as yet been taken. It is assigned the lowest of low red grade.

The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles was formed in 1948 under the California Community Redevelopment Act of 1945, in conjunction with the 1937 and 1949 federal Housing Acts, which authorized its slum removal. The CRA was granted powers of eminent domain to be used in the redevelopment of blighted areas. A primary purpose for the CRAs redevelopment projects was to increase tax revenue for the city. One of the first redevelopment projects proposed by the CRA was in Bunker Hill, on the basis that the neighborhood spent more tax dollars on police, firefighting, and healthcare than it generated. A CRA pamphlet promoting the project stated, Blight is a liability, Blight is malignant, Blight is a social peril. The CRAs slum clearance project in Bunker Hill was adopted in 1959. Through seizure and through sales under the threat of eminent domain, all 7,310 residential units were demolished and their residents were forcibly removed. The CRAs slum clearance in Bunker Hill was one of the first redevelopment projects to rely on tax increment financing.

In 1980, the CRA issued a request for proposals for a project called California Plaza. Proposals were required to include an outdoor pedestrian plaza, a parking structure, and a modern art museum. The winning group of architects called themselves Bunker Hill Associates. The museum outlined in this proposal became The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 1983, the CRA offered MOCA a lease on the land located at 250 South Grand Avenue for a ninety-nine-year term at no rent.

In October 2015, the CRA sold the land at 250 South Grand Avenue to MOCA for $100,000. One month later, in November 2015, a tax assessment triggered by the sale recorded the value of the land at $8,500,000.

Mark Westall is the Founder and Editor of FAD magazine, ' A curation of the worlds most interesting culture'[PLUS] Art of Conversation: A tri-annual 'no news paper'

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Cameron Rowland: 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73 - FAD magazine

Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for social equality By Tom Mackaman and Niles Niemuth 23 January 2020

On Monday, the United States observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a holiday commemorating the birth of the civil rights leader.

Since its inception in the 1980s, the holiday has aimed to turn King into a harmless icon of social conciliation, while obscuring his radical criticisms of American capitalism and militarism. But now, in 2020, this has been joined by a new thrust. Kings conception of a mass democratic movement for civil rights based on the unified action of all the oppressed sections of the population is being replaced with an essentially racialist narrative that presents all American history in terms of a struggle between whites and blacks. This racial narrative requires the marginalization of Kings historical role.

This is exhibited starkly in the New York Times 1619 Project, whose reframing of the history of American race relations makes no mention of King. This is not an oversight on the part of a project that proclaims itself as nothing less than a new curriculum for school children. The core of Kings politicsthe struggle for equalityruns counter to the aims of contemporary liberalism, which is predicated on a fight for privileges among the upper-middle class.

King, a Baptist minister and theologian, emerged as the most prominent leader and voice of the mass civil rights struggle for racial equality that emerged in the period after World War IIfrom the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955 against Jim Crow segregation until 1968, when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while supporting striking sanitation workers.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929, during a period that scholars have called the nadir of American race relations. In the Jim Crow South beginning in the 1890s, a raft of laws stripped the right to vote from the vast majority of blacks. All public space was segregated by law or customschools and colleges; busses, trains, streetcars; water fountains and bathrooms; diners and movie theaters. Interracial marriage was illegal, and even casual interactions between whites and blacks, for example on city sidewalks, were to play out in a custom designed to humiliate and degrade blacks.

The Democratic Party ruled the Jim Crow South unchallenged. Behind it stood the ever-present threat of state-sanctioned racist violence. By one count, mobs and bands of killers lynched more than 4,000 blacks in the South from the 1870s through the 1940s.

Yet racism was not an end in and of itself. As C. Vann Woodward long ago established in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), it was imposed as a direct response to the Populist movement of poor farmers, which, in the 1880s, had raised the specter of interracial unity among the oppressed. That Woodwards book was upheld as the historical Bible of the civil rights movement reflected that movements agreement with its key finding, that, as King put it, racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the racesthe position advanced by the 1619 Projectbut was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.

The Populist movement collapsed a few decades before Kings birth. Its inability to overcome the southern oligarchy resulted from its social composition among isolated rural farmers, an undifferentiated and rapidly declining section of the population. Yet its achievements were extraordinary. Shaking the two-party system to its foundations, Populisms challenge to capitalism ultimately fed into the emergence of American socialism.

While King looked to Populism for inspiration, it was ultimately a far more profound transformation, arising from the powerful development of American capitalism, that provided the basis for the civil rights movement: the development of the working class.

In 1900, after the defeat of the Populist movement, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South, most in conditions of rural isolation. In the 1920s, over 1.5 million blacks left the South for northern cities, bound for wage work. Many more moved to cities in the Southincluding Atlanta, where King was born, as well as Alabamas industrial cities of Birmingham and Montgomery, which birthed the modern civil rights movement. By 1960, only 15 percent of African Americans remained on farms, a dramatic social transformation which historians now term the Great Migration.

In the cities, the black migrants faced new forms of racism and, as in East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919, occasional paroxysms of vicious violence, typically overseen by their historical antagonists in the Democratic Party. Yet it is undeniable that this vast movementfrom country to city, from farm to factory, and from South to North and Westwas an intensely liberating development. Its impact on American culture can only be called exhilarating.

The arrival in the cities of this brutally oppressed people, a mere half-century separated from chattel slavery, germinated the cultural and intellectual florescence associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the first mass African American political organizations and trade unions, as well as the great forms of popular music including ragtime, rhythm and blues, jazz, and rock and roll.

The Great Migration raised African-American workers as a critical section of the working class. But the fusing of that class across racial and national lines was no mean task under conditions in which capitalist employers knew well that they could pit workerswhite, black, immigrantagainst each other in wage competition. The American Federation of Labor, among the most provincial and reactionary labor organizations on the planet, fed into these divisions. Most of its unions imposed racial exclusions against blacks and agitated against immigrants. Reformist socialists that oriented to the AFL, such as Victor Berger of Milwaukee, also excluded blacks from their conception of the working class.

Under these conditionsthe emergence of a powerful industrial working class, but one hamstrung by outmoded forms of organizationthe Russian Revolution of 1917 hit with meteoric impact. Among the black intellectuals inspired by the Bolsheviks were Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and A. Phillip Randolph, who co-founded the socialist magazine The Messenger in 1917 and went on to head the largest predominantly black trade union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

These intellectuals immediately drew comparisons to the situation of Jews under the seemingly eternal Romanov dynasty. For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact of the Russian Revolution, McKay explained in 1921, is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights denied them under the regime of the Czar.

In the North, socialists took the lead in the fight for the great industrial unions in auto, meatpacking, rubber, and steel, insisting that blacks be accepted on equal footing with all others. Even in the Deep South, socialists fought under the banner of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, winning the allegiance of militant workers, black and white, in such places as Alabama, where the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American youth falsely accused of rape, won the support of workers the world over. It is difficult to overstate the heroism of these workers who braved the wrath of the southern lawmen as well as the Ku Klux Klan.

The Stalinists of the Communist Party, along with the supposedly left CIO bureaucracy, betrayed these workers in the name of their alliance with the Democratic Party, whose southern wing remained in the hands of the white supremacist oligarchy. Nonetheless, socialism remained the bte noire of the Jim Crow politicians, who saw in every stirring of the southern workers the work of outside agitators and communists. And, despite the best efforts of reactionary red-baiters, socialism continued to influence a layer of southern intellectuals and leaders.

King was neither a Marxist nor a revolutionary. But his socialist sympathies, and those of his wife, Coretta Scott King, were well-known. He agitated for a significant economic restructuring of American society, albeit without calling for the overthrow of the capitalist system. Even though he cautiously adapted his politics to the pressures of the red-baiting environment of the United States in the 1950s, King spoke a language utterly incompatible with the racial narrative of contemporary rightwing affluent petty-bourgeois nationalists.

Communism should challenge us first to be more concerned about social justice, King noted in a sermon first delivered in 1953. However much is wrong with Communism we must admit that it arose as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. The Communist Manifesto which was published in 1847 by Marx and Engels emphasizes throughout how the middle class has exploited the lower class. Communism emphasizes a classless society. Along with this goes a strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of the blood in your veins.

King eloquently articulated the democratic sentiments of Americans of all races and ethnicities striving to tear down all the artificial barriers erected by the ruling class in a conscious effort to divide the working class.

In a 1965 sermon King explained that the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson, that all men are created equal, were the cornerstone of the civil rights movement. He did not see that document, which gave expression to the Enlightenment principles which animated the American Revolution, as a cynical ploy or a lieas 1619 Project figurehead Nikole Hannah-Jones imagines itbut an as yet unfulfilled promise, lifted to cosmic proportions, and one the civil rights movement was fighting to make a reality.

He and many others who were part of the mass movement in the 1950s and 1960s understood very well that no lasting progress could be made without the unity of the working class and recognized that under capitalism workers were being oppressed regardless of the color of their skin.

Writing in 1958, King noted that two summers of work in a factory as a teenager had exposed him to economic injustice firsthand, and [I] realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.

Whether or not Kings assassination was more than the work of the small-time hood James Earl Ray, it is a documented fact that, from the early 1960s on, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover aimed to destroy the civil rights leader through a campaign of dirty tricks, media leaks, intense surveillance, and even encouraging King to kill himself. Yet somehow, historian William Chafe writes, King emerged from the ordeal a stronger, more resolute, more courageous leader.

King responded to the attack from the FBI in 1967 by launching his interracial Poor Peoples campaign, an initiative seeking economic justice for all impoverished Americans. He also became among the most outspoken critics of the American onslaught in Vietnam, memorably denouncing the United States government as the greatest purveyor of violence today in his 1967 Riverside Church speech.

He had become convinced, King told his staff the same year, that we cant solve our problems now until there is a radical re-distribution of economic and political power. It was time, he said, to raise certain basic questions about the whole society We are engaged in a class struggle dealing with the problem of the gulf between the haves and the have nots.

Kings recognition of the necessity of interracial struggle and the contributions that whites had made to the civil rights movement informed Kings criticism of the racial separatism espoused by the Black Power movement, which he rightly called, in 1967, a cry of disappointment born of the wounds of despair.

Kings turn to the left caused alarm among conservative civil rights leaders. To them, King respondedin words that echo with the same force against the lavishly funded race experts of todayWhat youre saying may get you a foundation grant but it wont get you into the Kingdom of Truth.

The logic of these positions, indeed his entire lifes work, placed King on a collision course with the Democratic Partythe same party that ruled over the Jim Crow South and the big city political machines in the North, and had led the United States into Vietnam. Even if his political limitations caused him to delay this reckoning to the end, his lifes work had a real impact on the lives of millions.

Now the universal, Enlightenment principles King fought for and defended are under vicious assault. It is striking that in the 1619 Project, the Times initiative to write the true history of America as rooted in slavery and racism, Kings contribution to the fight for equality is totally ignored. This doesnt represent a different interpretation of facts or a mere oversight but an outright historical falsification.

The Times is seeking to impose a new narrative on US history in which anti-black racism is presented as an immutable feature of Americas DNA. This, Hannah-Jones argues, emerged out of the original sin of chattel slavery, itself a function not of labor exploitation, but of white racism against blacks.

Promoted by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which is heavily endowed by corporations and billionaires, the 1619 Project proposes itself as a new curriculum for public education. Crumbling schools and hungry children from Chicago to Buffalo are being given lesson plans that argue the American Revolution and Civil War were conspiracies to perpetuate white racism, and that all manner of contemporary social problemslack of health care, obesity, traffic jams, etc.are the direct outcomes of slavery.

Following other eminent historians interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site, Stanford Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, criticized the 1619 Project from the standpoint of its treatment of history, its dismissal of the American Revolution, and the obscure and rapid process through which it was produced. He went further, however, making powerful observations about King and the civil rights movement he came to leadtwo subjects almost entirely absent from the 1619 Project.

Carson noted that the ideals of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment played a key role in the civil rights movement and Kings own role as a political leader. One way of looking at the founding of this country is to understand the audacity of a few hundred white male elites getting together and declaring a countryand declaring it a country based on the notion of human rights, Carson explained.

Obviously, they were being hypocritical, but its also audacious. And thats what rights are all about, he noted. It is the history of people saying, I declare that I have the right to determine my destiny, and we collectively have the right to determine our destiny. Thats the history of every movement, every freedom movement in the history of the world. At some point you have to get to that point where you have to say that, publicly, and fight for it.

It is these principles and perspective which are being explicitly rejected by the New York Times as upper middle-class layers marshal various forms of identity politics to jockey for a greater share of the massive amounts of wealth which have been piled up in the coffers of the top one percent. In this struggle for privilege and wealth the political principles which King stood for can find no place and therefore he too must be excised from the historical narrative.

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Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for social equality - World Socialist Web Site

James Warren takes a look back at the changes in New Zealands employment law delivered in 2019, and shares his outlook for 2020.

Ongoing change is the notorious hallmark of New Zealand employment law, and 2019 maintained that reputation. We saw a number of fundamental revisions in the legal landscape the full implications of which are yet to be seen.

2020, as an election year, may have less legislative reform on the agenda, but the long term outlook remains set to changeable.

2019 in review

Here were the key legislative changes:

Major case law developments included:

Other changes of note from 2019 include:

Overall, the general picture has been one of increasing compliance risk and cost for employers.

Some 2020 horizon gazing

As highlighted above, the current Labour-led coalition government has introduced a range of reforms aimed at increasing the power of unions and further protecting employees. A number of significant proposals remain on the agenda, these include Fair Pay Agreements, new safeguards for migrant workers, and potential tax changes together with new protections for independent contractors.

The outcome of the general election scheduled in 2020 will likely determine whether these come to fruition. A National-led coalition could also be expected to reverse some of the recent reforms, but fundamental reform of the Employment Relations Act 2000 still currently seems unlikely.

The Employment Relations (Triangular Employment) Amendment Act will come into force in June. This will implement a new right for employees of labour hire companies or who are otherwise working for a controlling third party separate from their employer to bring claims against those third parties.

Whatever the result of the general election, the Government is likely to support the general desire amongst employers for changes to the complex and opaque obligations imposed by the Holidays Act 2003. The present review of the Act is very likely to lead to it being amended or replaced, in an effort to simplify the calculations required to manage leave entitlements and pay.

Looking across the Tasman, numerous employee underpayment scandals have led to a focus on wage theft. New Australian legislation may impose criminal sanctions in this area, potentially having direct consequences for company groups which operate in both locations. Likewise, the recent introduction of the Australian Modern Slavery Act and its stronger whistleblowing protections may have an impact. These changes may also be pointers for future reform in New Zealand.

James Warren is a partner in the Employment team at Kensington Swan, with specialist experience supporting organisations in both the UK and New Zealand with workforce change, employee relations and disputes, and the employment issues arising out of commercial transactions.

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Employment law: what lies ahead? | NZBusiness Magazine | The Business Magazine For NZ SME - NZ Business

The phrase slavery was ended on the North American continent conflates the Emancipation Proclamation and the passing of the 13th Amendment. There is no mention of the exception to the 13th Amendment: slavery exists as punishment for crime.

The 13th protects for-profit prisons where inmates are forcibly moved across state lines and work for less than minimum wage, or even no wage at all.

The letter laments the division of our country, quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wishes to return to a mysterious time when the U.S. had more agreeable standards. Which year has the polite order that we should return to?

Our country has systematically divided and oppressed certain groups of people since inception and hasnt stopped. Disorder is a consequence of this system.

Fighting this system, not lamenting disorder or division, requires MLKs radical view of justice.

I recommend a different MLK quote: The Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.

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Letter to the Editor: No polite time in U.S. history - Tulsa World