Union workers broke open the cookie jar in 2024, after years of stagnant wages and rising prices. With strikes and the threat of strikes, workers did more than forestall concessions: They gained ground. Union workers in the private sector saw 6 percent real wage rises for the year. Just the fear that workers would organize drove up wages at non-union employers like Delta Airlines, Amazon…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Thousands of Amazon workers on Thursday launched the largest strike against the retail giant in U.S. history, pressuring the company at the height of the holiday period to follow the law and bargain with those who have organized with the Teamsters union. The strike includes warehouse workers and drivers at seven distribution centers in some of Amazon’s largest markets, including New York…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Starbucks workers launched five days of escalating strikes across the United States on Friday, accusing the coffee giant of reneging on its commitment to engage in productive bargaining talks with the union that now represents more than 11,000 baristas at over 500 stores nationwide. The walkouts will start in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle on Friday before expanding “coast to coast” amid…
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Thousands of Amazon workers on Thursday launched the largest strike against the retail giant in U.S. history, pressuring the company at the height of the holiday period to follow the law and bargain with those who have organized with the Teamsters union. The strike includes warehouse workers and drivers at seven distribution centers in some of Amazon’s largest markets, including New York, Atlanta and San Francisco; Teamsters have also set up picket lines at many other warehouses nationwide. “We’re engaging in a coordinated action to try to put the pressure on Amazon to stop breaking the law, come to the table,” says Connor Spence, president of Amazon Labor Union-IBT Local 1, which represents workers in New York. “This is an unfair labor practice strike over their refusal to bargain.” We also speak with Ronald Sewell, an Amazon associate in Georgia, who says workplace safety is a major driver of worker discontent, including insufficient access to water and overheating. “The danger is real. It’s not something that we’re making up,” says Sewell.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Read RFA coverage of this story in Uyghur.
Chinese exports of tomatoes, chili peppers, marigolds and other farm products grown in the far-western region of Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor as well as the coercive transfer of land from Uyghur peasants to Chinese businesses, new research shows.
The growing of these goods is also tainted by the forced assimilation and political indoctrination of Uyghur workers, according to 136-page report by Adrian Zenz and I-Lin Lin of the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Dozens of Western companies, including Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Del Monte, PepsiCo, McCormick, Unilever and L’Oreal, are importing these goods, although they often enter supply chains through intermediaries, blurring their origin, the report found.
The report identified 72 international companies and 18 Chinese firms with production in Xinjiang or supply chain links, or a risk of such links, to the region’s agricultural products.
“It means that we have a much bigger system of forced labor and forced land transfer that is affecting many agricultural communities in Xinjiang and is directly serving the political goals of the regime to achieve political long-term transformation of these populations and taint the supply chains as a result,” Zenz told Radio Free Asia in an interview.
Sources of information
The investigation used planning documents from various Chinese administrative levels, state reports, budgets, academic papers, propaganda narratives and witness reports.
It was also based on internal state documents, corporate documents, information from the Made-in-China website, data from e-commerce platforms, the global supply chain intelligence platform Sayari and the U.S. customs database ImportInfo.
Chinese companies implicated in Uyghur forced labor included COFCO Tunhe Tomato, Xinjiang Chalkis, which processes tomatoes and fruits, and Chenguang Biotech Group, a high-tech firm that specializes in the extraction and application of plant active ingredients.
The three companies operate subsidies in the United States or Europe and have been implicated in rights abuses in Xinjiang, the report says.
The report singles out U.S. ketchup-maker Kraft Heinz for ongoing collaboration with China’s COFCO Tunhe Tomato, providing the Chinese company with tomato seeds and technical collaboration.
It also says cosmetics maker L’Oreal buys products from non-Chinese-based intermediaries in Asia whose supply chains are connected to Chinese-based companies or to suppliers of products whose domestic goods are sold in Western supermarkets.
Unilever Pakistan Foods, a Unilever subsidiary, buys tomato products from COFCO Tunhe Tomato and exports them to the U.S. Canada and the United Kingdom.
Abuses in Xinjiang
The Chinese government has come under attack in recent years for abuses in Xinjiang that include the mass detainment of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live in Xinjiang and the use of Uyghur forced labor there.
“Xinjiang operates the world’s largest contemporary system of state-imposed forced labor, with up to 2.5 million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic groups at risk of coerced work,” the report says.
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The report also cites pressure on Uyghurs to give up the right to farm their land to commercial operators who coerce them into wage labor in processing bases operated by Chinese agribusinesses.
The report’s findings show that land-use transfer shares in Xinjiang grew nearly 50-fold between 2001 and 2021, indicating a “staggering scale at which ethnic peasants were rendered landless and then pushed into state-mandated work.”
“This is resulting in profound livelihood changes and [the] tearing apart of organic communities, ensuring that Uyghurs are more easily and thoroughly controlled, surveilled, and assimilated,” it says.
The U.S. government and over 10 Western parliaments have declared that the abuses in Xinjiang amount to genocide and crimes against humanity. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which took effect in the U.S. in June 2022, prevents companies from importing any goods produced in Xinjiang unless they can prove forced labor was not used.
‘Vicious lie’
When asked to comment on the report, Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said China has “repeatedly emphasized that the so-called ‘forced labor’ issue is a vicious lie fabricated by anti-China forces.”
“Xinjiang implements proactive labor and employment policies, effectively safeguarding the basic employment rights of people from all ethnic groups,” he said via email.
Liu accused the U.S. of repeatedly spreading rumors and stirring up trouble regarding Xinjiang by using human rights to engage in political manipulation and economic bullying in an attempt to undermine the region’s prosperity and stability and curb China’s development.
Liu further said that Zenz, known as Zheng Guoen in China, is a member of a far-right organization established by the U.S. government, and a key member of an anti-China research institution set up and manipulated by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“He makes a living by fabricating anti-China rumors and slandering China,” Liu said. “His so-called report has no credibility, academic value, or academic integrity.”
Company responses
Zenz and Lin said they contacted the companies named in the report with detailed requests for comment, but several could not be reached, while others provided invalid email addresses.
Some did respond. U.S. ketchup-maker Kraft Heinz said it used COFCO-supplied tomato products only in China and Central Asia, despite information by the researchers that its subsidiaries in Indonesia and India also bought tomato paste from COFCO in 2023 and 2024.
French cosmetics manufacturer L’Oreal denied a direct supply chain relationship with suppliers linked to Xinjiang, but did not address the indirect supply chain ties outlined in the report.
U.S. spice-maker McCormick didn’t comment on specific allegations, but said its policy prohibits the use of forced labor in its supply chain.
American fruits and vegetables distributor Del Monte said its multiple COFCO Tunhe suppliers certified that they did not use forced labor.
Concern over findings
Rushan Abbas, executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, said the research findings present the most comprehensive evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the Uyghurs extending deep into the agricultural sector, affecting global supply chains, and implicating major international brands.
“The forced transfer of land rights from Uyghur farmers to Chinese corporations, combined with coercive labor practices and political indoctrination, represents yet another facet of the regime’s systematic assault on Uyghur rights and identity,” she said in a statement.
“Of particular concern is the ongoing strategic relationship between Kraft Heinz and COFCO, a state-owned enterprise in East Turkistan that actively participates in the surveillance of Uyghur households and enforces policies linked to cultural assimilation and forced labor,” Abbas said, using Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang.
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of international lawmakers from democratic countries focused on relations with China also raised concern over the report’s findings.
“Disturbingly, goods linked to forced labor are being sold worldwide under trusted, household brand names deceiving consumers and perpetuating the cycle of exploitation,” 46 lawmakers from the group said in a statement.
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Mettursun Beydulla for RFA Uyghur.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Teamsters launched what the union described as “the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history” on Thursday morning to protest the e-commerce behemoth’s unlawful refusal to bargain with organized drivers and warehouse workers across the country. Workers in New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, and other locations are expected to participate in Thursday’s strike…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Dec. 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
While left-wing governments hold power across most of Latin America, ultraright social forces remain a threat. In Bolivia, powerful left-Indigenous social movements have managed to keep an insurgent right wing at bay since the devastating coup of 2019. But a growing political crisis for the plurinational state highlights the urgent need to maintain unity in the face of an ever-powerful right.
The coup of 2019 was a catastrophic attack on Bolivian democracy. It saw the rapid ascent of ultraright conservatives from the lowland city of Santa Cruz — the axis of regional-class antagonism to the then President Evo Morales and his party, the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS — directed by businessman Luis Fernando Camacho, the leader of the business group Comité Pro Santa Cruz and former leader of the Nazi youth group Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC).
The coup unfolded when middle-class protesters took to the streets to dispute Evo’s victory in that year’s elections. As the protests escalated, the head of the armed forces “suggested” Morales resign, forcing him into exile in Mexico.
In the resulting power vacuum, the right-wing evangelical Jeanine Áñez seized the presidency, and as social movements resisted, she presided over two mass killings — of nine protesters in Sacaba, Cochabamba, and of ten protesters blockading the Senkata gas plant in El Alto who were shot dead by a military exempted from criminal liability by a sudden presidential decree.
Áñez swiftly reestablished diplomatic ties with the United States and Israel, with whom Morales had had strained relations. Clutching a giant Bible, Áñez declared, “The Bible has returned to the government,” as she paraded through the government headquarters. Soldiers were filmed burning the Wiphala flag, representing highland Indigenous peoples, signifying a new turn against the decolonizing policies of the state. A frenzied crackdown on leftists ensued as the coup government issued arrest warrants against journalists and MAS-supporting politicians.
A year later, Bolivia’s left-wing party, the MAS, staged a stunning political comeback. It came after campesinos, Indigenous groups, and the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), Bolivia’s major trade union federation, brought the country to a standstill by forming roadblocks to demand that the dictatorship government hold elections. Faced with the insurgent popular forces, the government buckled.
In the elections that followed, the MAS swept to power in a landslide, repudiating the neoliberal and racist policies initiated by Bolivia’s elites. Those elites remain, nonetheless, active and powerful.
In a recent article in Nueva Sociedad, Cristóbal Rovira argues that as in Europe, far-right political projects are on the rise everywhere in Latin America. In the 2019 coup in Bolivia, two key strands of right-wing mobilization emerged, the newest being the self-styled pititas — urban, young, middle-class protesters. Some were students at the universities in La Paz, such as the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA), whose then rector, Waldo Albarracín, was a longtime critic of the MAS.
Their modus operandi was the formation of makeshift string barricades in the streets. They shared memes likening Bolivia to a dictatorship, and their protest chants decried Morales’s “communism” and compared Bolivia to that old bogeyman, Venezuela.
The pititas were joined by a more dangerous element: the ultraright concentrated in the wealthy eastern region of Santa Cruz with ties to Brazilian fascists and Washington, DC. This faction coalesced around Camacho, who went on to become governor of Santa Cruz in the 2021 regional elections. His old organization, the UJC, launched a campaign of terror in Santa Cruz in the wake of the coup, setting off bombs outside the headquarters of the local peasant union.
The coup of 2019 was a catastrophic attack on Bolivian democracy.
The formation of the UJC in 1957 is linked to the arrival in Bolivia of German Nazis who fled Europe after World War II. In recent decades, it has functioned as a kind of paramilitary group protecting the interests of loggers and agribusinesses. It seeks to establish an autonomous Santa Cruz state, and it uses racist rhetoric to castigate the highland Indigenous “savages” associated with the national government.
The far right also exploits the long-standing cultural divisions between the eastern and western regions, the Andean highlands and the lowlands, respectively. Until the mid-twentieth century, the city of Santa Cruz was an isolated backwater, presided over by white elites who viciously exploited the small and dispersed Indigenous populations who lived in the wider region. The discovery of oil and gas deposits in the 1960s generated huge economic growth. Today Santa Cruz is the powerhouse of Bolivia, fueled in the past two decades by the expansion of the agricultural frontier for soy production, logging, and livestock, which are devastating the biodiverse landscapes and usurping Indigenous territory.
In these eastern territories, vast tracts of land are still owned by a small wealthy elite, many of them having acquired the land during the dictatorships of the 1970s and ’80s. One of these landowners is Branko Marinkovic, the openly fascist descendant of wealthy Croatian immigrants, who, as minister of economy and public finance under Áñez, was rewarded with 34,000 hectares of land. In 2008, Marinkovic was arrested and went into exile in the United States and, subsequently, Brazil after orchestrating an assassination attempt against President Evo Morales.
Cruceño elites — those associated with the Comité Pro Santa Cruz — have fashioned an identity as cambas to refer to their lowland identity, which they juxtapose with the racialized and often pejorative term collas, meaning highland Indigenous peoples. They are well integrated with the far right regionally. Marinkovic, for example, is a close associate of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president; earlier this year, he was detained at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, where he was on his way to meet Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, for dinner.
Unlike the right-wing supporters of Milei and Bolsonaro, who were able to win national power at the ballot box, the ultraright in Bolivia remains heavily concentrated in the east of the country and has not yet been able to court wider support translating into electoral success nationally. In June 2022, Áñez was sentenced to ten years in prison for her role in the coup, and that December, Camacho was kept in preventive detention on charges of terrorism and embezzlement of funds. Despite their imprisonment and relative marginality, however, the forces that brought these two figures to prominence remain significant.
The ill-fated coup attempt of June 26, 2024, showcased the commitment of Bolivian movements to resisting threats to democracy. Troops led by an aggrieved army general sent a tank into the presidential palace in La Paz in what many feared was an effort by the military to seize power in the context of an ongoing internal conflict within the MAS. General Juan José Zúñiga demanded the release of Añez and Camacho.
Although the “coup” fizzled out of its own accord within a few hours, Bolivia’s social movements immediately rushed to take a stand. “We will take to the streets. We will defend democracy!” declared Guillermina Kuno, an Aymara leader of the Bartolina Sisas, Bolivia’s national union of Indigenous peasant women, at a press conference. Social movements flooded Plaza Murillo in a show of strength against military interference.
Unlike the right-wing supporters of Milei and Bolsonaro, who were able to win power at the ballot box, the ultraright in Bolivia has not yet been able to court wider support translating into electoral success nationally.
The incident nonetheless bodes ill for a country still reeling from the 2019 coup. It certainly would not be the first time that military leaders had subverted democratic rule in Bolivia. Amid a litany of military coups, one of the most tragic in recent history was the putsch led by Luis García Meza in 1980. Troops entered the headquarters of the trade union federation and kidnapped socialist party leader Marcelo Quiroga, who was tortured and killed. As a result, almost the entirety of the labor movement leadership was forced into exile.
In the late 1970s and ’80s, the peasant movement was a fierce defender of democracy in Bolivia in the face of authoritarian regimes. The MAS has its early origins in the mobilizing strategy of that peasant movement. It first came to power in 2005 under Morales, on the back of a cycle of uprisings between 2000 and 2004 led by peasants, miners, workers, and Indigenous groups against the privatization of the country’s resources and other neoliberal policies.
With revenues from the newly nationalized oil and gas industries in the late 2000s, the economy boomed, and inequality reduced drastically. Social spending transformed the lives of the poor people, workers, Indigenous communities, and women. In a country marked by deep racial discrimination against Indigenous peoples, the state newly proclaimed the importance of Indigenous languages and ways of living.
Today Bolivia’s left is mired in a new crisis. The country’s economic outlook is deteriorating. Diesel and basic food prices are rising sharply, putting pressure on ordinary people and exacerbating social tensions. The economic boom of the 2000s created a new middle class that is now seeing its fortunes turn and the value of its savings tumble.
Marcelo Quiroga once observed that “nonrenewable natural resources are today’s bread and tomorrow’s hunger.” A legacy of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans in the fifteenth century, Bolivia’s economy remains stubbornly reliant on the export of primary commodities. It is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Revenues from hydrocarbons have plummeted since the glory days of the 2000s, and foreign exchange reserves have dried up. Due to the collapse of exports, Bolivia has run out of dollars, which in turn means it cannot import diesel.
Meanwhile, a bitter rift in the ruling MAS party between those loyal to Evo Morales, the ex-president, and Luis Arce, the current president, is crippling the Left. Both Arce and Morales want to run as the MAS candidate in the 2025 elections.
In December last year, the country’s Plurinational Constitutional Court ruled that Morales was not eligible to run again under the constitutional term limits. But this has not deterred Morales from amassing a considerable support base in a massive march to La Paz to demand that he be allowed the candidacy.
Morales has the loyalty of some sectors within the social movements, but he is unlikely to win favor with the electorate as a whole. A recent poll suggests that 65 percent of voters would not vote for him. Indeed, one of the major factors behind the coup in 2019 was Morales’s decision to overturn a referendum in which the electorate decided he should not be able to run for a fourth term in office, then prohibited by the constitution.
The COB, led by Juan Carlos Huarachi, remains loyal to Arce, while the peasant union is split down the middle; there are, in effect, two parallel organizations within it, loyal to Morales and Arce, respectively. These divisions are having a corrosive impact on the unity of workers’ and Indigenous peoples’ movements, which is the base of the MAS.
In the context of economic hardship, a number of social sectors have organized blockades to demand action by Arce on the economy. Not all of these sectors are in favour of Morales, however. The Ponchos Rojos, a highland Aymara peasant force, which has historically been highly autonomist, is not pro-Morales but has been protesting vociferously against Arce in recent weeks.
Camacho has recently called for replacing masista — socialism — with the Cruceño model of growth: agrarian extractivism that enriches agribusiness elites without the state redistribution offered by the MAS. There is a deep risk that as the internal conflicts intensify, the right wing will again seize the chance to commandeer democratic institutions, entrench inequality, and reverse the socially oriented policies of the MAS. Bolivia’s leftist movements have trounced the ultraright before. Whether they can continue to do so is uncertain.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Workers at a Amazon warehouse and delivery center in New York announced approval of strike authorizations on Friday, giving the retail giant — who have refused to negotiate for months — until Sunday to come to the bargaining table or risk a major work stoppage at the height of the holiday shopping season. The unions representing Amazon workers at two New York City facilities — the JFK8…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”
In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.
Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.
Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”
Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”
In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).
Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)
The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).
As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.
The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?
And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?
The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?
That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”
The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Two outgoing independent senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, voted on Wednesday to block the renomination of Lauren McFerran, who currently heads the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an agency that oversees workers’ rights protections in the United States. McFerran’s renomination would have allowed her to serve another five-year term and blocked…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above.
Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa in Portuguese. It feels as if the “sun has gotten stronger,” so much so that it’s led her to shift her working hours from daytime to the dead of night.
Abandoning the practice that defined most of her days, she now sets off to the river in the pitch dark to chase what fish are also awake before dawn. It’s taken a toll on her catch, and her life. But it’s the only way she can continue her work in the face of increasingly dangerous temperatures.
“A lot of our fishing communities have shifted to fishing in the nighttime,” said Pinto da Costa, who advocates nationally for fisherfolk communities like hers through the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil, or the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Fisherwomen of Brazil.
Moving from daytime to overnight work is often presented as the most practical solution for agricultural laborers struggling with rising temperatures as a result of climate change. But it is no longer simply a proposal: This shift is already underway among many of the communities that catch, grow, and harvest the world’s food supply, from Brazil to India to the United States. Studies show the most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in most crop-growing regions has been to start working when it’s still dark out, or even to shift to a fully overnight schedule.
“The obvious piece of advice that you’ll see given is, ‘Work at night. Give workers head torches,’ and so on,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “But the reality is, that can lead to other rights violations, other negative impacts.”
That’s been the case for Pinto da Costa and her fishing community in Brazil. Nighttime work has been an additional hardship for a community already struggling with the impacts of climate change. The region has experienced decades of severe drought conditions, causing fish to die off and physically isolating people as waterways dried up.
Research shows that regularly working during the night is physically and mentally disruptive and can lead to long-term health complications. Nighttime fishing is also threatening social and communal routines among the fisherfolk. A daytime sleep schedule can curb quality time spent with loved ones, as well as limit when wares can be sold or traded in local markets.
It’s also impacting their ability to support themselves and their families through a generations-old trade. “We’ve actually been working more hours with less food, with less production,” said Pinto da Costa, noting that working at night has made their work less efficient and led them to find less fish. “This is across all regions of Brazil,” she added.
The impact of a shift to nighttime hours is an understudied piece of the puzzle of how climate change and rising temperatures threaten the world’s food supply and its workforce. But for many experts, and those on the front lines, one thing is clear: Overnight work is far from a straightforward solution.
“It’s a very scary time for us,” said Pinto da Costa.
Outdoor workers, with their typical midday hours and limited access to shade, face some of the most perilous health risks during periods of extreme heat. A forthcoming analysis — previewed exclusively by Grist — found that, on average, the amount of time considered unsafe to work outside during a typical 9-to-5 workday will increase 8 percent by 2050, assuming greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current trajectory.
Led by Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Mehrabi, the analysis measures the number of extreme heat days by geographic region, and then breaks down daily and hourly temperatures by the estimated amount of population exposed. The research reveals that an estimated 21 percent of the global population already faces dangerous levels of heat stress during typical workday hours for more than a third of the year. By 2050, without cuts to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions (known as the “business-as-usual” scenario), that portion will jump to 39 percent.
“The number of days that people will experience a violation of their rights to a safe climate is going to substantially increase, but then also the number of possible working hours in a season, and productivity, is going to be substantially reduced,” said Mehrabi. “It’s a massive lose-lose situation.”
Their analysis finds that outdoor agricultural workers will encounter the largest health-related risks, with laborers in some areas being hit harder than others.
India, in particular, is projected to be one of the countries whose workforce will be most exposed to heat stress under the business-as-usual climate scenario. There are roughly 260 million agricultural workers in India. By 2050, 94 percent of the country’s population could face more than 100 days in a year when at least one daytime working hour exceeds a wet-bulb temperature of 28 degrees Celsius, or 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit — a conservative threshold of what is considered safe for acclimatized workers experiencing moderate rates of work. (Unacclimatized workers, or those unaccustomed to working in such environments, will face greater levels of heat risk at the same temperature and amount of work.)
In Brazil, another of the world’s top agricultural suppliers, heat risk is not as dire, but still poses a substantial risk for outdoor workers, including Pinto da Costa’s community of fisherfolk. By 2050, roughly 41 percent of the country’s population could experience more than 100 days a year when wet-bulb temperatures exceed the recommended threshold for at least one hour a day, according to the Boulder team’s analysis.
Mary Jo Dudley, the director of Cornell University’s Farmworker Program and the chair of the U.S. National Advisory Council of Migrant Health, said that the analysis is significant for what it reveals about the human health consequences of extreme heat, particularly as it relates to the world’s agricultural laborers. She’s seeing more and more outdoor agricultural workers in the U.S. adopt overnight schedules, which is only adding to the burdens and inequities the wider workforce already suffers from. This is poised to get worse. Zulueta and Mehrabi found that 35 percent of the total U.S. population will experience more than 100 days of wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 28 degrees C, or 82.4 degrees F, for at least one hour a day every year by 2050.
“This transition to a nighttime schedule pushes an extremely vulnerable population into more difficult work conditions that have significant mental and physical health impacts,” said Dudley.
Rebuking the human body’s circadian rhythms — that 24-hour internal clock that regulates when you sleep and wake — ramps up a person’s risk of health complications, such as cardiovascular disease and types of cancer, and diminishes their body’s ability to handle injury and stress. Working untraditional hours also can reduce a person’s ability to socialize or participate in cultural, communal activities, which are associated with positive impacts on brain and body health.
Women are particularly vulnerable to the social and economic impacts of transitioning to nighttime schedules. Despite making up nearly 45 percent of artisanal fishers in Brazil, women receive lower pay than their male counterparts. That means that when harvests decline with nighttime fishing, their margins are even smaller.
In the Brazilian state of Bahia, tens of thousands of women fishers work to collect shellfish en masse, while in Maranhão, women fisherfolk herd shrimp to the shore using small nets. Clam harvesting in Brazil’s northeast is also dominated by women. Because these jobs traditionally happened during the day and close to home, they allowed women to balance cultural or gendered family roles, including managing the household and being the caregiver to children. Shifting to evening hours to avoid extreme heat “poses a fundamental challenge,” said Mehrabi. “When you talk about changing working hours, you talk about disrupting families.”
Overnight work comes with other risks too. In many areas of Brazil, nighttime work is “either impossible” or “very complicated” because there are procedures and regulations as to when fisherfolk in different regions can fish, said Pinto da Costa. Nighttime fishing is regulated in some parts of Brazil — measures that have been shown to disproportionately impact artisanal fishers.
Even so, says Pinto da Costa, many are braving the risks “just to reduce the amount of exposure to the sun.”
“Honestly, when I saw that this was accepted in the literature, that people were giving this advice of changing their working shifts to the night, I was shocked,” said Zulueta, the author of the Boulder study, citing a paper published earlier this year where overnight work is recommended as an adaptation tool to reduce agricultural productivity losses to heat exposure. Under a policy of “avoiding unsafe working hours,” shifting those hours to the nighttime “is not a universally applicable solution,” she said.
Growing up a pastoralist in Ahmedabad, India, Bhavana Rabari has spent much of her life helping tend to her family’s herd of buffalo. Although she now spends her days advocating for pastoralists across the Indian state of Gujarat, the routine of her childhood is still ingrained in her: Wake up, feed and milk the herd, and then tend to the fields that surround their home.
But extreme heat threatens to change that, as well as the preservation of her community. When temperatures soar past 90 degrees F in Ahmedabad — now a regular occurrence — Rabari worries about her mom, who hand-collects feed for their buffalo to graze on. Other pastoralists are nomadic, walking at least 10 miles a day herding cattle from region to region in the hunt for pastureland.
“If we lose our livestock, we lose our culture, our dignity,” said Rabari. “If we continue our occupations, then we are dignified. We live with the dignity of our work.”
But rapidly rising temperatures are making it hard to hold on to that dignity of work. “The heat affects every life, every thing,” said Rabari.
Working overnight is a tactic Rabari has heard of other agricultural workers trying. But the idea of tending to the herd in the dark isn’t something she sees as safe or accessible for either her family or other pastoralists in her community. It’s less efficient and more dangerous to work outdoors with animals in the dark, and it would require them to overhaul daily lives and traditions.
“We are not working at night,” said Rabari. But what the family is already doing is waking up at 5 a.m. to beat the heat, collecting milk from their buffalo and preparing products to sell in the market during the dusky hours of the morning.
Rabari’s family and other pastoralists across Gujarat are increasingly in an untenable position. Hotter temperatures have already caused pastureland to wither, meaning animals are grazing less and producing less milk. More unsafe working hours means lost work time on top of that, which, in turn, changes how much income pastoralist families are able to take home.
The result has been not adaptation, but an exodus. Most pastoralists Rabari knows, particularly younger generations, are leaving the trade, seeking employment instead as drivers or cleaners in Ahmedabad. Rabari, who organizes for women pastoralists through the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan, or the Pastoral Women Alliance, says women are most often the ones left behind to tend to the herds.
They “have to take care of their children, they have to take care of the food, and they have to take care of the water,” she said. “They face the heat, they face the floods, or the excess rain.”
Halfway across the world, April Hemmes is facing off against unrelenting bouts of heat amid verdant fields of soybeans and corn in Hampton, north-central Iowa. A fourth-generation small Midwestern farmer, Hemmes works more than 900 acres entirely on her own — year in and year out.
The Midwest is the largest agricultural area in the United States, as well as one of the leading agricultural producers in the world. It’s also an area that has been battered by human-caused climate change. In fact, scientists just recently declared an end to the drought that had devastated the region for a whopping 203 weeks. The conditions impacted crop yields, livestock, the transportation of goods, and the larger supply chain.
Hemmes has the luxury of not having to face the same degree of heat stress that Rabari and Pinto da Costa are confronting elsewhere in the world, per the Boulder analysis. When compared to India and Brazil, the U.S. is on the lowest end of the worker health impact scale for extreme heat. And yet, heat is also already the deadliest extreme weather event in the U.S., responsible for more deaths every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.
A few years back, while building a fence on her farmland, Hemmes suffered her first bout of on-the-job heat exhaustion. Suddenly, her heart started to race and her body felt as if it began to boil from within, forcing her to abandon her task and head indoors, away from the menacing heat. It was a wake-up call: Ever since, she’s been hyper-cautious with how she feels when tending to her fields.
This past summer, the heat index repeatedly soared past 100 degrees in Hemmes’ corner of Iowa. She found herself needing to be extra careful, not only pacing herself while working and taking more frequent breaks, but also making sure to get the bulk of the day’s work done in the morning. She even began starting her day in the fields an hour or so earlier to avoid searing temperatures compounding with brutal humidity throughout the afternoon.
“This [farm] has been in my family for over 125 years,” she said. “I do everything from banking to planting to spraying, everything. So it’s all on me, and it’s my family farm. I’m very proud of that.” In 1993, her dad and grandfather both retired, and she took over operations. She’s been more or less “a one-woman show” since. Keeping her farm well-managed is a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly. “You do what’s best for the soil. Because that’s the inheritance of future generations,” she said.
When Hemmes looks at how to prepare for a future with hotter working conditions, she knows one thing: Nighttime work is out of the question.
Not only are summertime mosquitoes in Iowa “terrible after dark,” but Hemmes says some of the chemicals she uses are regulated, restricting her from spraying them during the nighttime. In addition, she would need to get lights installed throughout the fields to alleviate the risk of injury when she uses equipment, and she would be even more fearful of that equipment breaking down.
“It would take more energy to work at night,” said Hemmes. “I think it would be far more dangerous … to work after the daylight was gone.”
Like Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is involved in advocacy for her community. With the United Soybean Board, Hemmes advocates for women in agriculture. With more resources at her disposal than Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is focused on how to ensure solo-farming operations like hers have access to the technology they need to overcome heat spells — and never have to seriously consider an overnight harvest schedule.
On her own farm, she’s invested in “expensive” autonomous agriculture technology that allows her to take breaks when she needs to from the blistering sun. And she would like to see more precision technology and autonomous agriculture tools readily applied and accessible for farmers. She currently uses a tractor with an automatic steering system that improves planting and plowing efficiency and requires much less work, which she credits as one of the pivotal reasons she’s able to successfully manage her hundreds of acres of fields on her own.
She also hopes to see farmers tapping into their inherent flexibility. “What farmers are is adaptable,” she said. “I don’t have an orchard on my farm, but if I did, and I saw this thing [climate change] coming, you know, maybe you look at tearing the trees out and starting to plant what I can in those fields. Maybe the Corn Belt will move up to North Dakota. Who knows, if this keeps progressing?”
In Gujarat, Rabari and the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan are working to secure better representation for pastoralists in policymakers’ decisions about land use. The hope is for these communities to inform policies that would allow pastoralists job security and financial safety nets as climbing temperatures make it difficult to work and turn a profit.
Women pastoralists in particular are entirely left out of these policy spaces, said Rabari, which isn’t just an issue of exclusion but means their unique ecological knowledge is lost, too. “We have a traditional knowledge of which grass is good for our animals, which grass they need to eat so we get the most meals, how [they] can be used for medical treatment,” she said.
Pinto da Costa and the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil are also advocating for monetary relief from the Brazilian government to offset the losses her fisherfolk community has faced from climate change and shifting work hours. In addition, she is looking for technical support to improve fisherfolk’s resources and equipment.
“I have maintained my energy and motivation to continue to fight for our rights,” said Pinto da Costa.
For all, it’s a race against time. Eventually, even working at night may not be enough to keep outdoor agricultural work viable. The Boulder researchers found that an overnight working schedule will not significantly alleviate dangerous heat stress exposure risk in key agricultural regions of the world — particularly across India. After all, heat waves don’t only happen during the day, but also take place at night, with overnight minimum temperatures rising even more rapidly than daytime highs.
Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who has separately researched the impact of overnight work adaptations on global agricultural productivity levels, said the Boulder team’s analysis has a “novel” result, and lines up with what his team has found.
“Warming past 2 degrees C, which we will experience over the next 30 years, would mean that even overnight shifts wouldn’t recover productivity,” said Zobel.
“How do you solve a problem like that?” Mehrabi said. “The reality is that the workers most at risk are the people contributing least to the climate change problem. That’s not to say that we can’t have better policies around hydration, shading, health. But it’s just kind of trying to put a BandAid on a problem. It doesn’t actually deal with the problem at its root cause, which comes down to this trajectory of fossil fuel consumption and emissions.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat is forcing farmers to work overnight, an adaptation that comes with a cost on Dec 11, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Arlene Martinez about Amazon‘s subsidized misconduct for the December 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Jeff Bezos (CC photo: Daniel Oberhaus)
Janine Jackson: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” So wrote Upton Sinclair in 1934. It’s hard not to think about that as we see corporate news media report on Amazon, whose leader is, of course, the owner of the Washington Post, but whose influence as retailer, landowner, policy shaper is multi-tentacled in ways you and I probably don’t even know.
That outsized, multi-front power is behind the resistance to Amazon, the urgent need to illuminate what a private company on this scale can do in the country and the world’s political, consumer, regulatory, labor ecosphere, and what needs to happen to address that power.
Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Arlene Martinez.
Arlene Martinez: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Good Jobs First (11/29/24)
JJ: You wrote recently, with colleagues, that the #MakeAmazonPay campaign was about calling attention to Amazon‘s
mistreatment of workers, disregard for consumers whose data it misuses, bullying of small local businesses and accelerating climate destruction, especially during the holiday shopping season.
That’s before we get to how we the people enable all of that through government subsidies, which we will talk about.
But first, let’s talk about some of the documented complaints and concerns about Amazon‘s day-to-day practices, the way they operate. Because it’s not about “hating them because they’re beautiful.” It’s not about jealousy because they built a better mousetrap. This is concern about things that just shouldn’t happen, period, right?
The Nation (5/2/24)
AM: That’s right. And I really liked the way that you opened up our conversation here, because it’s really hard to overstate just how powerful Jeff Bezos is, and how many areas Amazon is in, and the way that they run their business across all the different areas that they touch, how harmful it is, whether you’re talking about the environment, and all the data centers that they’re building as they capitalize on AI, artificial intelligence. Or the way that they are so punishing to workers that the injury rate is several times that of any other warehouse company. How they drive down wages wherever they locate. How they squeeze small businesses; a report from the Institute of Local Self-Reliance found that 45 cents of every dollar that a business made selling on the Amazon platform went to Amazon.
So I could just go on and on, but there are so many ways that Amazon harms the entire ecosystem of business worldwide. And one of the worst parts about it, and there are a lot of bad parts about it, is that we are subsidizing that, because communities are giving Amazon billions of dollars in direct cash payments. They don’t have to pay their taxes, or they’re given straight cash, or reduced land, whatever the case may be. And that doesn’t even begin to include the procurement and other public contracting money that they received. I’ll open there.
JJ: Well, and I want to get into that. I think for many folks, maybe they’ve heard about workers being cheated out of wages, but that is so crucial to the subsidy conversation. But let’s start with the fact that we do have evidence that Amazon is under-serving their workers, not just in terms of wages, but also in terms of health and safety, and what do we know about that?
Good Jobs First: Violation Tracker
AM: We run a database called Violation Tracker, where we look at over 450 regulatory agencies that we get data from, so we can begin to see part of Amazon‘s behavior toward its workers. We capture how much money Amazon has stolen from its workers, in the form of wages, and we also look at some health and safety violations.
One of the reasons that Amazon‘s dollar total is so much lower than, for example, Bank of America, which has billions and billions and billions of dollars in penalties and fines—Amazon‘s comparative total is so much lower because the federal agencies that are in charge of protecting workers only have the authority to give thousands of dollars in fines, versus a regulatory agency that oversees banks that can give billion dollars in fines in one single case. So what we see is, as bad as Amazon‘s record is, and it is bad, it would be worse if we treated workers with the same care and with the same concern that we do as investors who got cheated on an investment.
JJ: That’s so deep, because it speaks to, like, folks might want to get mad at a corporation, like Amazon, but then you also have to understand the weakening of the regulatory agencies that are meant to be addressing that. It’s not as simple as one might hope it would be. And folks have heard, for example, on this show, talking about the IRS saying, “We understand that rich people cheat more on their taxes than poor people, but it’s easier for us to go after poor people, because it’s much simpler.” And so a company like Amazon can just make things so complex, in a regulatory framework, that it’s very hard to address the harm that they’re doing. It’s kind of a big-picture problem.
Arlene Martinez: “So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big.”
AM: Yeah, that’s right. So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big. If, for example, some of the antitrust legislation had been implemented and upheld, Amazon never might have been able to grow to this size. That’s why it’s been so promising in recent years to see the FTC and Lina Khan really take on corporate giants like Amazon, which have essentially become monopolies and dominate entire spaces. So it really is a big structural issue.
I get asked a lot about, should people just not shop on Amazon? Well, that would be nice. I mean, I don’t shop on Amazon, but that isn’t the answer. Like I said, it would be nice, but the answer is really these structural problems that enabled Amazon to get so big in the first place. And these regulatory agencies need to flex their muscle to make sure that Amazon is broken up, or contained, or not allowed to dominate entire industries and sectors the way that it is.
And you’ve probably seen it’s moving into even more areas. Now it’s going into chips, and now it’s going into pharmacies and healthcare. And its goal is to dominate the world, and it’s headed there without some proper agency there flexing their muscle to rein it in.
JJ: I wanted to pull you out on one question, which is data centers, which is, we hear, and folks at the local media level may hear, Amazon‘s coming in, and they’re going to locate here, and that’s going to provide jobs. And sometimes what they’re talking about is data centers. Why don’t data centers equal jobs? Can you talk a little bit about that?
ProPublica (8/4/24)
AM: Data centers are essentially huge warehouses that just store big, basically, server farms. They’re just running data all the time, and there’s very few people that are needed to actually staff these facilities. So they don’t create many jobs, because there aren’t many functions that are required as part of these data centers. I mean, there’s the construction phase, and then a few dozen people that are needed to staff them.
And yet they’re getting what’s often several million dollars per job. We did a study in 2016 that looked at the average for the Apples, the Googles, the Amazons, the Metas, was about $2 million per job. But we’ve seen a lot of cases now where it’s a lot higher per job, and a community can never make that money back.
But I think the other question, too, and I think what gets missing from a lot of stories that I see about data centers, is why data centers are getting subsidized in the first place. When you think about what an incentive was supposed to even do in the first place, it was to spur something to happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
We know that AI is the future. These companies are racing to build data centers, because they have to, to remain competitive. So there is absolutely no business case to be subsidizing companies to build a data center, especially considering the low job return.
Nonprofit Quarterly (8/7/24)
JJ: In this deep piece about corporate government giveaways, you cite Neil deMause, who is a FAIR favorite, who, with Joanna Cagan, wrote Field of Schemes about subsidizing sports teams’ building of new arenas, and it’s kind of a familiar template, where folks say we’re going to bring in profit, and yet it’s something that would happen anyway. There’s kind of a—it’s not even a bait and switch, it’s just misinformation that is put forward to cities, when something like a sports team, or something like an Amazon, says, “We’re going to bring a lot of stuff to your community, and therefore you should subsidize our taxes.”
And some of us are like: “Well, wait, you’re a business. You’re going to make a profit here. Why would we subsidize it?” There’s kind of a big-picture misunderstanding here.
AM: Yeah, and part of it is that it just becomes irresistible for a lot of politicians to have the opportunity to stand next to a Jeff Bezos, or some other high-ranking official, or a billionaire owner of a sports team. And then you have access to these box-level seats that you couldn’t afford on your own. And all of that is really irresistible. So there’s really a very human element to giving subsidies that are proven to not drive economic development, like a stadium, which study after study has shown does nothing to improve the lives of residents in that community, but it just becomes very irresistible.
And I think on a local level, too, with someone—I was a reporter for many years, covering a lot of city council meetings and school board meetings, and knowing that these council members, most of them who are part-time, get a few hundred dollars a month in pay, they want to do good for their community, and they think bringing in an Amazon is a good move for their community, without realizing what they’re really doing is bringing in a company that hurts their workers, pays them very little and damages their existing small businesses in their community. But they’re thinking they’re doing a good thing.
JJ: Well, and part of it is a kind of numerical thing where media talk about, “Well, these folks will pay this money in taxes,” and that makes it sound like it’s a profit. There’s kind of a basic math problem that sometimes happens here. When you talk about tax breaks to be given to whatever entity, media can sometimes present that as though that’s money that’s going into the tax coffers, which is not what’s happening.
Nonprofit Quarterly (8/3/22)
AM: That’s right. I mean, there’s a lot of companies that really profit based on the size of the incentive. There are a lot of site location consultants, for example. The bigger the subsidy, the more their percentages. So their drive is to get the biggest subsidy possible, even though it isn’t in the best interest of their community.
JJ: Subsidies are sold to communities as profit, as though it’s going to be money, somehow, that’s going to go right into the community, when that’s not the way it plays out.
AM: Yes, and this is a big issue in our space, in terms of the media coverage that we often see. It’s because you get what are called “economic impact reports,” and I say “economic impact” in quotes because it isn’t actual economic impact, and it’s nowhere close to being a cost/benefit analysis. What it does is it takes this big, big smorgasbord of everything, every dollar that’s spent on construction phase, or supply chain, or the entire salary sometimes of a worker is included in this economic impact report. And a lot of times you have no idea what’s actually in there, because the people who produced it say it’s proprietary, and they won’t give it to the public.
And a lot of times, those people that are hired to produce the economic impact report, and we see this a lot in the stadium space, are people who are working for the team owners, or who are working for Amazon, they will be the ones producing these economic impact reports. So you have a real conflict of interest that I think is missed sometimes in the reporting, and just makes these studies bogus.
When I talk to reporters about how to cover and report on economic development incentives, I tell them to ask for everything that went into that economic impact report. And if they don’t release it, then don’t include their numbers, and say that they won’t give it to you.
JJ: That gets right to the point of transparency, which I just wanted to ask you about. I think that, whether you understand an issue or don’t, transparency about what’s happening ought to be ground zero. And yet that is difficult to get from some corporations, and also from some government agencies. But journalists should have that as a basic fundamental.
AM: Yes. And we also run these databases called Amazon Tracker and Subsidy Tracker, and both of them look at companies that have received subsidies. And you’ll see, among Amazon subsidies, and also Subsidy Tracker, which is broader, you’ll see a lot of entries that say “undisclosed,” because even though a company is getting public money, they’re not releasing the value of that subsidy. Reporters should insist on that, and make it really clear in stories when they’re not getting it.
Real News Network (7/22/23)
JJ: And I’ll end on that. But I will say that, obviously, I’m angry about media for my job, but it’s not that they don’t do critical stories sometimes; it’s this connecting of the dots. So when I see a storyline that says that Amazon or Walmart is a “successful business,” and then I see another story that says, oh yeah, a lot of their workers still need to rely on public assistance to not starve. But then on the other page, I’m still reading Amazon as a “successful business.” So I feel like at a certain point, it’s not about there’s never any good stories or critical stories. It’s about a failure to connect the dots, to say, “What does it mean for a company to be ‘successful’ right now, and what harm is required to get to that?”
AM: Those are all such great points, and it’s true that we have seen a lot of really amazing reporting around Amazon, and Bloomberg is the outlet that reported about how Amazon was driving down wages in the warehouse sector, because they took an industry-wide look, and were able to see that anytime Amazon entered a community, wages dropped for the entire sector, including non-Amazon workers.
And the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, wrote one of the first stories, 12 years ago, to report on ambulances being placed outside of Amazon warehouses, rather than Amazon investing in air conditioning and heating for their workers. So they were getting ill from heat exhaustion.
So there has been a lot of amazing reporting, but I think you’re right in connecting all those dots, it’s very hard to see. And when Amazon releases a press release about how they gave a $500,000 loan, reporters repeat that as if it’s some gift, even though it might not include the fact that Amazon got a billion dollars in that same community as a subsidy. So it is a mixed bag.
JJ: I appreciate the bright critical spots. I’m upset about the fact that it doesn’t seem to get stirred into an understanding of what we, as a democratic society, should ask from corporations, and why do we call a company “successful” whose workers need to rely on public assistance? There’s some kind of connected story that’s not happening there.
ProMarket (5/30/17)
AM: I’ll just add, I remember as a reporter—and I was a reporter for many years—I was very fixated on holding government accountable. Really felt like that was a big role of mine, and I spent a lot less energy thinking about holding corporations accountable. And now that I’ve left the space, and I’m in this nonprofit watchdog space, and a lot of my work involves corporate governance, and overseeing their practices, I really see those gaps even more stark, and how, in general, I think journalists don’t do the best job about covering companies, and we could do a lot better, which is why I think shows like yours are so helpful, why I hope organizations like ours are useful, so that we start putting the same kind of scrutiny on corporations that we have long done on governments.
JJ: I will just add, we hope for journalists to look to see critically powerful actors, and those powerful actors are in corporations, and they’re in government. And then here’s us, we the people, and that’s where we would look for journalists to look out for the public interest, however that is affected by whatever forces are in power, and that’s why I appreciate your work.
AM: Thank you so much.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Arlene Martinez. She’s deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. You can find their extensive work on Amazon and other corporate and government accountability on GoodJobsFirst.org. Arlene Martinez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AM: Thanks for having me, and thanks for your work.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In November, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) sided with Amazon workers in ruling that it is illegal to force workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions, upending a doctrine of U.S. labor law that has existed since 1948. The anti-union propaganda sessions, which are formally referred to as “captive audience meetings” are a controversial practice that has long been…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For nearly 90 years, the wealthiest country in the world has allowed thousands of disabled people to be paid mere pennies on the dollar. Now, after decades of advocacy from disability justice activists, the U.S. Department of Labor has finally announced plans to end the exploitative practice. Any move to reverse a decades-old injustice is cause for celebration. But as a second Donald Trump…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
30 years ago, in 1994, then-US Labor Secretary Robert Reich issued a prescient warning to all Americans: “We are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society.” Reich also predicted that, as wealth inequality continued to explode in the US, working people would be consumed by righteous populist rage that could be easily manipulated; the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement decades later proved Reich to be devastatingly right. In this special livestreamed edition of Inequality Watch, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis continue their deep dive into the history and political repercussions of our historic wealth imbalance by talking to Robert Reich himself. In this wide-ranging discussion, the former Labor Secretary explains how wealthy oligarchs have bought off our democracy, profited from dividing us, and smothered serious efforts to mitigate the climate crisis as well as popular progressive policies like universal healthcare and affordable housing.
Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Written by: Stephen Janis
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello. My name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch on The Real News Network. Now, as you may or may not know myself and my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, normally host the police accountability report. But we also focus our investigative reporting skills on another topic we think is just as important, the explosion of economic inequality in the US.
It’s an issue that affects almost everything we do. It’s why our healthcare system pushes so many into bankruptcy. It’s why working people have been working longer and harder. Yet, the real wages have barely risen over the past 40 years. And it’s why discussions about problems like climate change are submerged, no pun intended, in a tsunami of misinformation. It is in a sense the issue that none of us can afford to ignore.
On our last Inequality Watch, we spoke with legendary economist, Richard Wolff. And we discussed one of the most obvious symptoms of this unequal system, billionaires. We examined not just the impact of billionaires on our election, but how wealth influences and often constrains our political debate and how we approach complex social problems.
I mean, think about the last election and the debates that defined it. Did we hear a word about how our country bankrupts people who get sick? Did we hear anything about living wages or a real and thoughtful debate about how to create affordable housing or fight climate change or really save social security? Of course not.
Instead, billionaires who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns and super PACs and think tanks have corralled common sense by conjuring false conflicts that prompted us to fight amongst ourselves and they get richer. And the mainstream and social media have gleefully and gainfully fueled our culture wars.
But there is a good reason for this, because the system that sustains extreme wealth is not only flawed, but absolutely constructed in a way that is self-sustaining. And it does so in part by blinding our minds to the truth. It’s like inequality is making us sick. And the political movement that could save us is prevented from revealing a cure.
But today, we’re going to find it and take a healthy dose of economic justice medicine to allow us to overcome the disease that ails all of us. And I will also be in the live chat to answer questions for you when I can. And to do so, we are so lucky to be joined by one of the foremost thinkers on this subject, Robert Reich. The former Clinton labor secretary, has been at the forefront of debates over the impact of inequality on our society, constantly steering our deranged national discourse towards sense and sanity through facts, insight, and expert analysis.
He is a champion of labor and the rights of workers. But he’s also a soothsayer who predicted the rise of our politics of disillusionment merely three decades ago due to, you guessed it, rising inequality. Let’s just watch a brief clip of him talking about it in 1994, almost 30 years ago through the day. I would love to play every moment of this video. But when I get a chance, I will post a link in the chat for you.
Robert Reich:
If American business continues to pursue short-term profits at the price of insecurity and falling living standards for a large portion of our society, it will sooner or later reap the bitter harvests of popular rage. The American public is basically pro-business. But that support rests upon an implicit bargain. And American business betrays that bargain every time it fires an older worker in order to hire a younger one at a lower cost. Every time it provides gold-plated health insurance to top executives, but it cuts health insurance or denies health insurance to its regular workers.
Every time it labels an employee who had been a full-time employee an independent contractor for the purpose of getting that employee off the payroll and lowering various benefits. Every time it discards its workers, rather than investing in their future capacity to produce and produce more and produce better and produce smarter, particularly when profits are booming. What America must do fundamentally is empower every man and woman to earn their way into the new middle class.
Taya Graham:
Okay. You can see we have the right guest for the topic at hand to say the least. I mean, do we have Nostradamus here or do we have an economist who actually took the time to look at the impact of globalization and computerization and automation and rabid corporate profit-seeking and actually saw the impact it would have on people?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. It’s really interesting because when I watch that clip, I have an epiphany because we had been at the Republican National Convention and we had talked to people and tried to push them on like, “What specific policies?” And there was this real sense of nostalgia and angry nostalgia in the people that we talked to.
And I think now when I’m watching the clip, I get the sense that what they were nostalgic about was a time period when this country actually cared about the middle class and working class. I think they were really … They would be angry about immigration or something, but it seemed to me all focused on this idea, we need to go back. But go back to what? Go back to when there were people who were leading this country who actually cared about how policies affected working-class people.
And I think that’s what this clip foretells, that these devices would come forward and just basically define the future, which is what we saw at the Republican National Convention.
Taya Graham:
Stephen, I think that’s an excellent way to categorize some of the grievance that we saw, as well as it was nostalgia as well. And it was nostalgic as well. That’s a really excellent point.
Stephen Janis:
But a twisted form of nostalgia, too, that doesn’t see the future and really doesn’t see any possibilities. And that’s what Professor was talking about there.
Taya Graham:
But before we go back to Professor Reich, I want to revisit some of the ideas from our last show so we can build on them. Now, this is a method we use on the show to add some context to the facts of how wealth inequality impacts all of us. So, last time, we came up with a way of categorizing billionaires to help us understand this idea. We wanted to discuss the relationship between how extreme wealth is acquired and how that process infiltrates our political discourse, shapes public policy, and influences how we vote.
So, I want to take a minute to review these ideas so that we can explore their mechanics, and I want to examine the operating system of our inequality economics. So, Stephen, we came up with three types of billionaires that we argued had an outsized impact on our political discourse. Can you review them for us quickly and tell us why they’re important?
Stephen Janis:
Well, we came up with carbon billionaires who are billionaires that make money off fossil fuels. We had conflict billionaires who are billionaires that make money off creating social media and a media ecosystem that thrives off of discourse, discord and strife and anger. And then we came up with capture billionaires are the people who extract money through private equity or through investment bank or whatever.
So, we came up with those three to say, “Here is a political economy that emerges from these three billionaires.” And especially today, we’re going to focus on the conflict billionaires because of the way their ecosystem has created this public square that is all about conflict and not about solving problems. So, those are the three just quickly overview of how they work.
Taya Graham:
Okay. So, that was a great summation. And so, for the purpose of our discussion today though, I just want to focus on one genus of billionaires, specifically the conflict variety. That’s because I think they have create, what we would call, a conflict-rich environment. And the reason I make this point is because we need to keep this idea in mind as we unpack this subject with our guests. This means the waters, so to speak, are muddied by this so-called conflict environment.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the problem is one thing we saw talking to voters, like I said, they had very little grasp of policy. And I think that’s because we’re all immersed in a conflict, kind of what you said, like a conflict-defined ecosystem of information that makes it impossible to really discuss complex policy. You’re just basically there to dunk on people. And really a lot of the voters seem really misinformed in many ways about their own self-interest. So, we’re trying to create a way of analyzing that and looking through the lens of conflict economics and, by extension, conflict media.
Taya Graham:
I’d just like to add that this very immersive information complex that we’re confronted with daily uses a very specific conveyor to decide what we see and read. So, what rises to the top of the algorithmic ladder gets there because it generates the most antipathy and the most animosity. I mean, social media companies have literally helped fuel ethnic conflict and civil wars, and that’s where the conflict billionaires pave the way for extreme wealth without accountability. You can’t fight the power, so to speak, if we’re fighting each other.
So, we need to remember that as we try to evolve our thinking about this topic of economics, because that system can simply bury the information, bury the discussion, and bury the analysis that seeks to hold it accountable. And that brings me again to our guest, former labor secretary and labor rights champion, Robert Reich.
Let me give or at least try to give a brief introduction. His latest is The System: Who Rigged It, and How to Fix It. He served as the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration for which Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. And of course, he has a Substack, Robert Reich, a YouTube channel named after him, and he’s the co-founder of Inequality Media, a nonpartisan digital media company whose mission is to inform and engage the public about inequality and the imbalance of power in our society.
And if any of you watching want to learn more about the economics of inequality, please follow Professor Reich and his colleagues at Inequality Media. Professor Reich, welcome to the Inequality Watch, and thank you so much for joining us.
Robert Reich:
Well, thank you, Taya. Thank you for inviting me. And Stephen, it’s very, very good to talk with you as well.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Taya Graham:
So, first, if you don’t mind, it would be great if you could give us some sense of the historical perspective on the magnitude of inequality at this moment in our history. And maybe even more importantly, what did you see 30 years ago that told you this extreme inequality was on its way? What did you see that no one else could? Or was it that other people saw it but refused to admit the truth? I mean, how did you know?
Robert Reich:
Well, I don’t want to take credit for knowing what other people did not know. I think that, “Oh, Washington, DC has a tendency to exaggerate things that are politically powerful and self-politically like conflict.” But submerge, as you suggested, Taya, a few minutes ago, submerge some of the real important structural issues that we ought to be talking about.
And as secretary of labor, it seemed to me very important to talk about those structural issues. I took some heat for it, but I think it was worth it. You mentioned before that the conflict industry, particularly with regard to social media, tries to sell various time and goods and services on the basis of conflict, and that’s absolutely right. But there’s something else going on here as well, and that is that the more we are angry with each other, working-class people, middle-class people in America, the less we look up and see where all the wealth and power in our society has actually gone.
It’s gone to the top and it’s gone to the top in a fairly short amount of time. I mean, starts in the late ’70s, early 1980s, the Reagan administration and the deregulation of Wall Street, globalization through trade, the ability of companies to put the squeeze and really corrupt and overwhelm their labor unions. And finally, the ability of companies to monopolize their markets all contributed to this extraordinary rise in inequality, which can only be compared I think to what happened in the late-19th century, early-20th century. It was called then the First Gilded Age, or it was called the Gilded Age really is the First Gilded Age.
Because what we’re seeing right now is comparable, the same degrees of inequality, the same robber barons, that’s what we used to call them in the First Gilded Age. There are robber barons. There are people who are abusing their wealth and using it to essentially corrupt our democracy.
Stephen Janis:
Wow. Professor, so is it okay if we refer to this as a Second Gilded Age from on, that would be helpful. There’s this idea, this notion, that politics are irreparably divided. But how much of that divide is a result of the economic inequality and the forces of inequality you talked about? I mean, is it really a divide or is it really just that this sometimes unexpressed notion of inequality is driving us to loathe each other in some way?
Robert Reich:
Well, I think you have a huge number of people in this country, Stephen, who although they’ve worked harder than ever, they’re playing by the rules. They are not getting ahead. Now, the American dream used to be that if you did play by the rules and you worked hard, you would do better and better economically over your lifetime and your children would do better than you. And that was what happened in the first three or four decades after the Second World War.
We created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, larger than America had ever seen. And people did better and better and better, and their children did better than they did. But that all came apart. It came apart in part because of corruption, because the rules of the game changed, because you had a really fundamental shift in the structure of the economy brought about by a few extremely wealthy people and extremely big corporations.
Now, we can get into the details of what happened. But I think the important point for this discussion is that the Republicans effectively used this anger and frustration and disillusionment to go after cultural elites. The Democrats did not use this anger, frustration, and disillusionment to go after, to me, the real culprits, which were economic elites.
Stephen Janis:
Agreed. Agreed by that.
Taya Graham:
Wow. That’s a powerful analysis.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, it really is interesting how the anger has been misdirected quite efficiently by Republicans. They’ve been very, very effective at that, at scapegoating, as I think you’ve talked about before.
Taya Graham:
Yeah. And the Democrats have, unfortunately, missed the vote there.
Stephen Janis:
No. The Democrats have been the recipients of it, because they seem like institutionalists and elitists at this point. And it just does what the Professor’s talking about. All the anger just rises and makes them incapable of articulating a vision of a fair future for people.
Taya Graham:
And it is ironic that they’re considered the elitists, but at the same time you see them with the great celebrities. But then, of course, the Republican Party, you have a cabinet full of billionaires. So, how’s that not elitist? But I actually wanted to address something and I have this clip I wanted to share with you because there had been criticism of a policy that had occurred under the Clinton administration, which is NAFTA with regard to alienating the working class and costing jobs for blue collar workers. So, I just want to play your critique from your Coffee Klatch podcast and just have us all take a listen to it.
Robert Reich:
I was very proud to be part of the Clinton administration. I was a cabinet member of the Clinton administration. But that was an administration that embraced NAFTA and Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization and deregulated Wall Street, got rid of the basic, basic 1930s acts that would’ve separated and did separate investment from commercial banking.
Said to Wall Street, “Go ahead, do whatever you want.” And put antitrust and monopolization on the backburner and said, “Big companies, you want to merge, go ahead.” And did not actually move toward labor law change and reform.
Taya Graham:
Now, Professor Reich, we can’t go back in time and undo NAFTA. But what can be done going forward? Is there any way we can fix the damage that occurred in a meaningful way or is there just no way to put the genie back in the bottle?
Robert Reich:
Well, we can put the genie back in the bottle. In fact, I think the Trump administration, ironically, is talking about very, very large tariffs on Mexico and on Canada. Now, I’m not suggesting this is a good thing. But it certainly goes back to the years before NAFTA. I think the real issue here is developing a set of policies, and I do not expect the Trump administration filled with billionaires and planning to give them even more of a tax break will do this.
But the real issue is how to equip every American, even those without college degrees, with what they need to do well in this new economy. I don’t think we need to take globalization for granted. I don’t think we need to take for granted that Wall Street is going to become the center of the economy. I think that’s been an extraordinarily bad thing for most workers.
We should not take for granted that big companies are going to be as profitable as they are or as big as they are. They should be broken up. We can change the structure of the economy to make it an economy that works for everybody instead of working for just a handful of people at the top.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. I mean to your point there, which is interesting and my next question is, first of all, I’d like to know what you think about things like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act in terms of addressing those issues, but also explain why the voters we talked to seem so unaware of these policies. They’re massive industrial policies, which I would think would be good for working people, but the people we spoke to just aren’t aware of them.
So, for the first question is, is that a good way to address what you’re talking about having these industrial policies? And secondly, why doesn’t it permeate the political discussion and why are voters unaware of these things that could be beneficial to them?
Robert Reich:
Well, they’re unaware, I think, in large part, because the Biden administration did not know how to tell them about it. I mean, voters when they just see Inflation Reduction Act or they see policies or they see an Infrastructure Act or they see numbers attached to these things and their eyes glaze over. They have no idea what they mean.
I mean, to talk about these things in a practical way, you’ve got to go back to people’s kitchen tables and say, “This is what this means in terms of your pocketbook. It’s going to happen not now, but it’s going to happen six months from now.” Or “This is what the goal is and you can check in along the way and let’s see whether you are doing better and your children are doing better and you’re getting better jobs.” But there was no attempt to do that. No contextualizing, no narrative, no story, just a bunch of policies.
Stephen Janis:
No story. Yeah. I’m sorry. Just to follow up. But do you think in terms of addressing the need for people who don’t have college degrees to have good jobs, are those the policies that you would think would be best to do? I just want to make sure to clarify that. Do you support that industrial policy or do you think that it’s not going to work in the long run?
Robert Reich:
I think that those policies are very important. They’ve already started to work, but they’re just the beginnings. I mean, people need, for example, paid family leave. They need help with caregiving to children and to elderly people in their families who need care. Most people need help with housing. We have a housing crisis across the country. I mean, these are kitchen table issues. But the political classes really not directly dealing with them.
Stephen Janis:
That’s interesting.
Taya Graham:
I just wanted to follow up just to try to understand how a system like this develops in DC. I mean, you’re obviously very pro-worker, very pro-labor person. Can you understand how a concept and a policy like NAFTA happens? I mean, couldn’t they foresee the impact it would have on workers? I mean, did it happen because corporations were picturing greater profits and they were influencing the process? I mean, can you help us understand what happens in the DC bubble, so a policy like this gets pushed forward and the American worker ends up hurt?
Robert Reich:
It happened because big corporations and very wealthy people who stood to gain a lot of money pushed the George H.W. administration to negotiate the North America Free Trade Act. And then it was very hard for Bill Clinton and the Clinton administration to do an about-face. In fact, the same forces that actually got NAFTA to be enacted in the first place were still there under the Clinton administration.
Organized labor, now this is important. Organized labor constituted about a third of the entire private sector workforce in the 1950s and 1960s. But by the time of the Clinton administration organized labor was down to about 10% of the private sector workforce. Today, it’s down to 6% of the private sector workforce. So, in other words, you’ve had a total collapse of organized labor as a political force. It’s just not there.
Taya Graham:
Wow.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
Stephen, we covered the Republican National Convention. I think you wanted to ask him about some of the grievances that we saw.
Stephen Janis:
Well, we asked about that. I do want to ask you something just and delve into the personal with you, because we watched your documentary, Saving Capitalism, which is excellent. And the thing that struck me after going through all your stuff is the consistency in your care for working people, your support of working people, and the idea that government should be effective in some ways, which shouldn’t seem revolutionary, but it kind of is.
But I was just wondering, I was wanting to know your earlier story. How did you come to this philosophy that seemed to guide you through your life? Was it something a book you read at one point or experiences when you were younger? I felt like it left me wanting to know more about you in terms of how you arrived at this worldview that has been consistent.
Robert Reich:
Well, it’s interesting to me that you would ask the question, because this worldview is so basic to me and to everything I experienced, particularly as a young person. The Civil Rights Movement convinced me that government could play a very important part in giving people opportunities and overcoming oppression and bigotry. The anti-war movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement of which I was a part, convinced me that if people came together and expressed themselves and mobilized and organized, they could change the course of government policy and bring about better consequences.
I was weaned on the notion, my parents and grandparents, that under Franklin D. Roosevelt government really did save the country, that saved the economy, saved the working class, saved the middle class. So, it didn’t strike me as very unusual. What strikes me as unusual is the idea the government is somehow the enemy. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan was president when he said, “Government is the problem.”
Government is not the problem. I mean, the problem really is the corruption of government by big economic interests that have changed the rules to make sure that they do better and better and better, and everybody else is essentially stepped on.
Taya Graham:
You mentioned something in 1994 and that video just … I really want everyone to watch that because it was so prescient. You mentioned something that few people saw, not only the trajectory that would create a two-tiered system, but that people would begin looking for scapegoats. And it seems that your prediction was accurate, especially in light of the heated conversation around immigration where the loss of American jobs and benefits is blamed on immigrants. Let’s just take a listen to a piece of that clip and then I’ll ask you a question so you can respond.
Robert Reich:
Middle-class families have not been able to regain their footing. They push these coping mechanisms about as far as they can go, and they still feel that they are losing the American dream. My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners at a larger group of Americans left behind whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated.
Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?
Taya Graham:
It makes me think of that saying “What’s past is prologue.” I mean, it’s just so prophetic and they seem to predict perfectly, these recent culture wars have been inflamed by social media companies that profit from the outrage. And I do think it can be argued that there are some problems at our border with how immigrants are processed in our country.
But to see that foreign-born people who are producing food or working in fields or working in food processing plants or working in our dairies or harming us, it seems like a rhetoric designed to avoid looking at the real culprits of our economic distress. So, I would like to know what you would say to people who are being inundated with this divisive and arguably inaccurate rhetoric to explain why the scapegoating is occurring and who it really benefits.
Robert Reich:
Well, the scapegoating benefits the people who really are behind the corruption of our American politics, the big corporations, very wealthy and Wall Street. Now, it benefits them because they’re off the hook. They are not seen by anybody as the real culprits, because the Democratic Party is not focusing on them. The Democratic Party doesn’t want to bite the hands that feed them. The Republican Party is basically their handmaidens.
And so, who is it out there who people understand to be the causes of stagnant wages, insecure jobs and lack of healthcare, lack of … well, everything that we’ve talked about that people need. I think it really comes down to a very simple proposition and that is that people understand that there’s a problem. There’s a huge problem that the economy is really not working, but they want to know why.
And if one party is making up excuses, talking about the deep state and immigrants and blaming communists and saying Democrats are socialists and just making up all kinds of scapegoats. And the other party that is the Democrats are not actually talking about the corruption that comes from huge money infecting our politics from big corporations and from wealthy people and from Wall Street.
Then who are you going to believe? Well, you don’t have much choice. You’re only given the Republican story. This is what one of the big tragedies of our time. The Democratic Party has not just turned its back on the working class. The Democratic Party has actually stopped telling the accurate story about why the working class and the middle class are in such trouble today.
Stephen Janis:
Professor, how much do you think that problem is? Because Democrats embraced, and I know this is a fraught word, neoliberalism, because I’ve covered a lot of local governments and state governance and it’s always public-private partnerships. We’re going to solve this with a tax break for a corporation. This will solve everything.
How much of the Democrats succumb to the notion of neoliberalism has made it almost impossible for them to articulate an argument that they really care about the working class so that their policies are focused on the working class? How much is neoliberalism a problem?
Robert Reich:
Well, neoliberalism is at the core of the problem for the Democrats. If by neoliberalism you mean privatization, deregulation, international trade, all of the things that basically the big corporations and the wealthy and Wall Street wants. But the underlying problem has to do with money. Once the Supreme Court began opening the floodgates to big money and politics, and I’m talking about really before the cases that we all know about, I mean it really starts with Buckley versus Valeo in the early-1970s.
Once the Supreme Court begins to open American politics to that corruption, then there’s almost no end to it. Because the corruption changes the rules of the game. And the rules of the game being changed enables the wealthy to become even wealthier, the big corporations to become even bigger, and then they can turn around and use even more of their money to corrupt the process even further. It’s a ratcheting effect that is extraordinarily dangerous.
Taya Graham:
I was thinking about one of the messages that seem to underlie almost all of our political debates, which is the idea that it’s a zero-sum game. In other words, all policies lead to either winners or losers. But you wrote a book that suggests otherwise, called The Common Good. Can you talk about this idea a little and maybe why it seems or maybe just feels almost impossible to really discuss and embrace the common good in the current political environment?
Robert Reich:
I think most Americans, average people, your friends, people in your community understand the notion of the common good. People are generous. I mean, they see somebody who is in trouble on the sidewalk and they respond to those people. They see somebody who is in a car crash and they immediately call the police and they respond.
This is not rocket science. This is not a perversion of the public norms. No. The common good is alive everyday reality. The people who are the first responders, the people who are nurses and nurses’ aides and social workers and teachers, they all understand the common good. The people who don’t understand the common good, unfortunately, are trapped in a system in which big money has corrupted them and big money has corrupted the part of the system that they exist in.
Stephen Janis:
So, that brings up a really interesting point because there’s this internal debate in the Democratic Party about they went to left or they need to go more left or center. But really, it’s about a discussion about policy and how do we get to this point, we’re saying something like Medicare for All, which makes common sense, is an ideological position? Why do we think of policies that make sense, speaking to the idea of the common good, policies that help people are somehow leftist or ideological? It doesn’t really make any sense. Why do we view them way? Is that the wrong way to view them?
Robert Reich:
It’s completely the wrong way to view them. I don’t even know what left and right means anymore. Because people who are associated with the left do talk the language of the common good. People with a right talk the language that is most conducive to the rich, getting richer, to big corporations and Wall Street and very wealthy people doing even better. Why can’t we all speak the language of the common good? Shouldn’t that be the political debate we’re having or we should have?
Stephen Janis:
I think so.
Robert Reich:
I frankly don’t understand it. And it becomes even stranger today because when people say Democrats should move to the center, what’s the center in democracy and fascism? I don’t understand what the center is.
Stephen Janis:
It’s kind of a hybrid, an impossible hybrid. You can’t have a hybrid of autocracy and democracy. But yeah. No. I’m glad you made that point, because I really feel like we get lost the minute this debate starts like, well, they wanted Medicare for all, so they went too far radical for the people of this country. Or they want to have job programs or things that are … It just makes no sense and we can’t get trapped in that. I mean, Professor …
Robert Reich:
Particularly, Stephen, when you look at other advanced nations that are not even as wealthy as we are, that are wealthy, but they’re not even as wealthy as the United States. They have paid family leave. That’s common. They provide their people by law with four weeks or five weeks vacation every year. I mean, that’s the law. They provide medical care to almost everybody. They provide access to college that is almost free to everybody. I mean, these are standard common goods in most other advanced nations. We are the outlier. We are the extremes with regard to catering to the big corporations and the financiers and the very, very wealthy.
Taya Graham:
I was actually really excited because you’re a former cabinet member, so I thought you would have some interesting insights into President Trump’s cabinet picks. And one that I’m particularly interested in is the proposed department of government efficiency, which has been tasked to look for government waste and inefficiency. And in my opinion isn’t a bad idea in theory.
But the fact that not one but two billionaires are in charge is something that I find extremely problematic. I mean, they’re great at accruing capital, but treating something that’s a public good as a for-profit enterprise, from what I’ve seen in my own city, Baltimore, doesn’t necessarily benefit the public. So, I was just wondering, is there any way that a Department of Government efficiency could be useful and what would that look like and do you think this one has any potential?
Robert Reich:
Yeah. The most useful thing that something like this could do would be to look at what are called tax expenditures. Now, when I say that word, people’s eyes glaze over. But I’m going to say it again, tax expenditures. These are things like the mortgage interest deduction or all of the benefits that corporations get from a rapid appreciation, depreciation or all of the other specific tax breaks and loopholes for Wall Street in the tax code.
If you go after them, I mean, look at the carried interest tax loophole that goes really to hedge fund managers and to private equity managers. There is literally no reason for that loophole. That’s inefficient. It means that everybody else has to pay more in taxes. Let’s get rid of it. And look at the mortgage interest deduction. I mean, I can understand for low-income or middle-income homeowners. But why should homeowners who are earning over $500,000 a year and are living in mansions, why should they get a mortgage interest deduction? Get rid of it.
And we could go through all of the special loopholes and tax breaks that have been put into the tax code because big corporations and wealthy people have the clout to get them. Start there. Elon. Elon, are you hearing me? There.
Stephen Janis:
Wait. Professor, I just want to assure you, we did a documentary called Tax Broke, which we did for five years, follow tax breaks given to corporate developers. Any time …
Taya Graham:
Yeah. And if you want to talk about people’s eyes glazing over talk to them about tax increment financing.
Stephen Janis:
Anytime you want to talk about tax breaks for corporate entities, you just call us up. Anytime, because we can talk about it for hours. And I agree. It’s like this invisible economy or invisible landscape that just gives so many benefits to people who don’t need it.
Robert Reich:
It’s huge. Stephen, here’s another thing that Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy are to be focusing on, all of the government contractors, government contracting, and the spending we do as taxpayers for government contractors is so much greater than the direct government spending on government employees. I mean, go after the contractors like SpaceX, for example.
Stephen Janis:
I don’t know if that’s going to happen though.
Taya Graham:
Wow.
Stephen Janis:
That would be interesting, yes, to see if he turns on himself. I would be …
Taya Graham:
Maybe Vivek will do it.
Stephen Janis:
And to this idea, because you’re bringing up … I mean, God, I can’t tell you how much corporate tax breaks infuriate me. But that conversation never seems to make it to the surface, because of the media ecosystem we’re in. There are people like you who are doing this. But how do we get of above and beyond? And so, the discussion is about things that you point out that really matter, like tax breaks. How do we get beyond the system we’re in right now of a media that seems to just only provide us with conflict?
Robert Reich:
I mean, you know better than I do. One of the great frustrations of my life, at least, is that the media, the mainstream media and Fox News and Newsmax, whether you’re talking about the right or even the center, they don’t go after what’s really important. They don’t try to educate the public about what the public needs to know.
They just tantalize or they talk about scandals. But they don’t talk about reality. And I don’t know how to change that. I mean, there’s more money to be made in getting people upset and fearful, but you talk about some of these tax breaks that are warranted. You can make people pretty outraged. Why don’t we do that?
Stephen Janis:
It’s a great question. I was watching CNN and they had an expert on social security and he kept talking about how social security was going to be insolvent. But he never brought up the idea that there’s a cap on social security taxes. And I was like, “Bring it up.” And I was screaming at the television set. And doesn’t that stuff infuriate you? I mean, come on. You know that if they lift the cap on social security, we could be much more solvent, right?
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Robert Reich:
Most people do not know. Most people know that they have to pay social security taxes.
Stephen Janis:
100%.
Robert Reich:
But they didn’t know that Elon Musk finishes paying his social security obligations at 18 seconds past midnight January 1st of the year. I mean, this is what people need to understand.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
That’s such an excellent point. I just wanted to follow up because you were the director of the Federal Trade Commission. And please correct me if I’m wrong. But you wanted children not to be targeted by companies selling sugary and unhealthy foods. And it seemed to me your reward for that was having the FTC being starved of money until it shut down. So, I was just wondering if that effect of corporate interest on our government is still that naked or do you think this could happen to other government agencies, especially under the new administration?
I mean, as a reporter, to me, it’s an astonishing story. It’s just they cut the money off because they didn’t like the fact they were going to lose out on their sugary cereal money. So, I was just wondering, is this something that could happen again and what can we do as investigative reporters, journalists, people to try to engage with this?
Robert Reich:
Well, it is going to happen again. It’s already happening. I mean, look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is really helping and protecting a lot of people. They may not know exactly how they’re being protected, because it’s a little bit complicated. But that’s one of the places that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, they want to eliminate.
Most people don’t know that the federal government provides federal aid to education that’s mostly goes to poor school districts. So, you get rid of the education department and you’re hurting a poor kids. That’s what you’re really doing. Most people have no idea, and yet that’s going to go on as well.
Taya Graham:
Wow.
Stephen Janis:
So, you have one final question.
Taya Graham:
Well, I was actually curious about how important you think independent media is right now, non-corporate media, like your inequality media or maybe Professor Wolff’s Democracy at Work. Do you think it can make a difference, because there is so much noise, but how important do you think it is right now?
Robert Reich:
Non-corporate media is extraordinarily important. But here’s the problem. You have to have some way of financing your media. Now, subscription services are useful to some extent, but it’s expensive. It takes a bigger chunk out of the paycheck of a low-income person than a high-income person. So, how do you finance the media you need?
Years ago, we thought national public radio and public television were good things, and they ought to be financed out of taxpayers’ funds. But they’ve been vilified by the right. Well, what’s the alternative? Social media has become too often a kind of cesspool of disinformation. How do you make social media work? Well, you certainly don’t put Elon Musk in charge of what used to be Twitter.
Taya Graham:
I just have to ask you something, and this may seem like an extreme question. But there are billionaires, you can tell I’m a little obsessed with them, who really poured their money into political campaigns. I mean, Vice President Harris received support. I mean, she raised over a billion dollars. But Trump was no slouch, and he had at least 50 billionaires, including Elon Musk, pour money into his campaign.
So, my question is, is that when there are individuals with this extreme wealth and they’re able to influence our politicians, I believe they’re thwarting the will of we the people. So, this may sound radical, but are billionaires, authoritarians, and are they actually actively undermining our democracy?
Robert Reich:
Well, some billionaires are. I mean, I don’t think it’s sensible to simply say every billionaire is abusing his or her status and power and money. But when they put money, their own money, their own billions of dollars, or their own hundreds of thousands of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign or into somebody’s campaign to prevent somebody from getting into office or into a campaign that is an issue campaign, that is a corruption of the political system. That kind of abuse I think has to be stopped.
The Supreme Court has been proven wrong in terms of its series of decisions that said that money is the equivalent of speech and corporations are people. I mean, it’s absolutely absurd.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. But I just wanted to say, I mean, it’s interesting because a lot of times when I was watching some of your discussions, especially in the documentary, you were talking about how money equals power. But that’s a lot of concentrated power in a billionaire. Isn’t that inherently unhealthy to have so much power in like 800 people who can really shape, as Taya said, our system in ways we don’t even understand?
Robert Reich:
It is. And if we had a sensible tax system, the tax wealth, we would not have that kind of problem. But we can’t get that kind of tax system because the billionaires and people who are almost billionaires have too much power. You see, that’s the chicken and egg dilemma we’re in right now. And short of a revolution. And I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how we get out of that chicken and egg dilemma.
Stephen Janis:
I know. I know. I mean, a revolution would be interesting. I’d love to cover it. I mean, it might not be fun. But I often think about that because it’s so entrenched in our political system and that power is immovable or immutable in many ways. It’s made immutable by that. And how we could go back to say the 1950s, when what? I hear this, and I don’t know if this is right, Professor, but there was a marginal tax rate of 92% or something on the highest earners. I don’t know how we get back to that or is it even possible?
Robert Reich:
First of all, it was not quite that.
Stephen Janis:
Okay.
Robert Reich:
Once you include all of the deductions and tax credits, it was more like 52%. But can you imagine 52% tax rate federal on the highest earners would be impossible to enact today. And that was under the Eisenhower administration.
Stephen Janis:
He’s Republican.
Robert Reich:
That was not even a Democratic administration.
Stephen Janis:
I know. I know. Amazing.
Taya Graham:
I just had to ask you one more question because I had recently watched your documentary, Saving Capitalism. And there’s something that you said in there that was haunting me. And so, this is paraphrasing a little bit. But you essentially said that people, regular, non-wealthy people have literally 0% impact on public policy. And to me that is a terrifying statement. Could you elaborate on it a little bit and just help us understand it and if there’s any remedy?
Robert Reich:
Well, that actual conclusion comes from a study done by two political scientists, a very famous study in which they looked at something in the order of 1,800 random public policy issues before Congress during a limited period of time, even before the Citizens United decision. So, this is before we had the degree of corporate money in politics.
And their conclusion was that the concerns of average Americans have an insignificant effect on public policy that corporations and very wealthy people and Wall Street really did determine the public agenda. Now, this was again before Citizens United opened the floodgates to big money in politics.
I think that we have got to have a constitutional amendment that stops big money in politics that restores the notion that corporations are not people and money is not speech. Those two notions. And also, we have public financing of elections so that small donors are matched by a public fund, and that gives an incentive to politicians who agree to limits on their own funding to seek public funding instead.
Taya Graham:
That’s excellent. Professor Reich, we cannot thank you enough for your time. And I do want you to know that in your honor, I did wear my Union Steward pin. I’m a communication worker’s union steward. So, I just want you to know I wore that in your honor, Professor.
Stephen Janis:
This is a union shop here.
Robert Reich:
I appreciate that. And I appreciate the time with both of you. These are big and important issues. They’re not going away. My concern is that they’re getting worse.
Taya Graham:
Yes.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
Ours as well.
Stephen Janis:
Ours as well. Well, thank you so much.
Taya Graham:
Thank you, Professor.
Stephen Janis:
And remember, anytime you want to talk about tax breaks, call me.
Taya Graham:
Yes. Tax increment, financing, payment, loop taxes, we’re the ones to call.
Robert Reich:
I want to talk about it all the time. So, I’ll call you all the time.
Taya Graham:
Okay. Great. I look forward to it.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you so much.
Robert Reich:
Bye-bye.
Taya Graham:
Thank you.
Stephen Janis:
Bye.
Taya Graham:
So, first, I just have to thank our guest, Professor Robert Reich. I don’t think there is a more distinct or important voice in the struggle against and search for solutions to inequality. His willingness to take the time to share his insight with us is invaluable, and we so deeply appreciate it.
Stephen Janis:
I just hope he calls me about tax breaks because …
Taya Graham:
I do too.
Stephen Janis:
I feel like I’m out in the wilderness here. No one wants to talk about tax breaks. They think I’m kind of weird and obsessed.
Taya Graham:
I know. We can only talk to each other about tax increment financing. It’d be nice to talk to someone else about it.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. So, maybe I hope he does keep his promise and give me a call.
Taya Graham:
I actually want to go back, maybe get my CPA or something, so I can actually understand the tax code. It seems like that’s where all the money hides.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. That’s where all the action is.
Taya Graham:
Really is. Who would’ve thought.
Stephen Janis:
In this great inequality divide we have.
Taya Graham:
Very true. So, I just want to do a little closing speech here. So, if you don’t mind, we’re just going to jump right in.
Stephen Janis:
Can’t wait to hear it.
Taya Graham:
Okay. So, now, after diving deep into the two forces shaping and breaking the American economy, one thing is crystal clear. Both wealth inequality and globalization are symptoms of the same disease. That disease is a system designed to prioritize the profits of the few over the well-being of the many.
And the stories may differ whether it’s a billionaire dodging taxes or a factory worker losing their job to offshoring. But the results are eerily similar, a hollowed-out middle class, skyrocketing inequality, and a political system that seems incapable or unwilling to fight back. So, let’s break it down.
Globalization in its current form has done more than just shift manufacturing overseas. It’s created a race to the bottom where corporations scour the globe for the cheapest labor and the fewest regulations, leaving American workers to pick up the pieces. Wealth taxation, or rather, the lack of it ensures that profits from this exploitation stays concentrated at the top, untouched by the very policies that could help level the playing field.
Together, these two forces create the two-tiered economy we’ve spent this conversation dissecting, a system where the rich live by a different set of rules than everyone else. But here’s the kicker, it doesn’t have to be this way. The solutions we’ve discussed implementing a wealth tax, we’re writing trade agreements to prioritize workers over corporations, maybe even investing in green jobs and infrastructure. These aren’t just pipe dreams. These are viable evidence-backed policies that could transfer our economy into one that works for everyone.
And the question isn’t whether we have the resources or the tools, it’s whether we have the political will. And that’s where the stakes get even higher. Because as Robert Reich so astutely pointed out, the wealth isn’t just money, it’s power. The billionaires who dodge taxes and the corporations that exploit globalization aren’t just enriching themselves. They’re shaping the very policies and systems that allow them to keep doing it.
It’s a feedback loop that corrodes democracy leaving the rest of us stuck in a system that feels increasingly rigged. So, what do we do? First, we need to change the narrative. The idea that taxing billionaires or reigning in globalization is somehow radical is a lie perpetuated by those who benefit from the status quo.
What’s radical is allowing an economy where the wealthiest 1% own more than the bottom 90%. What’s radical is ignoring the voices of millions of workers while bending over backwards for corporations. And what’s truly radical is thinking we can continue down this path without catastrophic consequences.
Now, second, we need to build power not just in Washington, but in our own communities, whether it’s organizing unions to demand better wages, supporting candidates who will fight for economic justice, or simply having conversations that challenge the myths of trickledown economics and free trade. The change starts with us. The billionaires might have the money. But history has shown us time and again, that people united around a common cause can be an unstoppable force.
So, as we close, I want to leave you with this. The fight against the two-tiered economy isn’t just about money. It’s about dignity. It’s about whether we value people not for the profits they generate, but for their inherent worth as human beings. And it’s about whether we’re willing to demand an economy and a democracy that reflects those values. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.
But I think the solutions are within reach, and it’s up to us to decide whether we’ll keep playing by the rigged rules of the game or whether we will rewrite them entirely. Let’s make the choice together while we still can. Okay. Stephen, you know how I love to speechify. Is there anything you would like to add?
Stephen Janis:
Well, I mean, it’s really interesting having come after. That’s a pretty hard act to follow. But I will say that movement building strikes me as very difficult and a very, let’s say, dicey proposition in the media ecosystem we talked about before, because it’s not structured around accumulating some epistemology or knowledge of a subject like we do with tax breaks. It’s more about emotion and being aggrieved.
And I just worry about that. I worry about the type of system we have to come to some conclusions about specific things we want to. You have to change something specific. You can’t just say, “We’re going to fight for change.” It’s got to be something that looks specific. And we spent all these years, for example, trying to change this horribly unequal system about tax breaks for developers. And it’s been very hard and we’ve been on our own. And we even received pushback from people who I think would actually think it was a good idea.
And the Democrats completely punted on it, wouldn’t even allow a vote on the bill that would’ve shown people what happened. Now, we’ve talked about this before, but I worry about that because it’s hard. It’s really hard to permeate people’s TikTok lives and say, “Okay. This is a very complex issue, but we don’t change it. And I think if we don’t address that, it’s going to be very hard to bring about real change.” So, that’s my opinion.
Taya Graham:
I think you’re right. And I just wanted to speak to some of the folks in the comments and in the live chat who ask about my analysis. And I’ve seen a few people say, “Taya, you’re a criminal justice reporter. The police accountability reporter.” I still am. But my reporting has always at heart been about government accountability and that’s exposing corruption or inequity. And whether that’s blue or red, it doesn’t matter to me.
Right now, I think the greatest inequality and justice isn’t necessarily coming from left to right or Demo-Republican. It’s the top 10% versus the bottom 90%. It’s like the top 1% is driving the car of our democracy and the two parties in the back seat, and we’re the ones being taken for the ride.
Stephen Janis:
So, you’re doing Dave Chappelle.
Taya Graham:
So, my analysis will always be based on searching for policies that do the most good for the most people. And as far as I can tell, that’s not how billionaires think. But as always, I do want to know your thoughts in the comments. You know I read them and I answer as many questions as I can. And I really do appreciate your input and insights. I always have more to learn, and that’s why I love being a reporter. You get to keep asking questions.
Stephen Janis:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
And I want to thank you all for being patient, for watching us and joining us. And of course, we have to thank our great studio, David and Cameron and Adam and Jocelyn, and Kayla and James and our editor-in-chief, Max. See you all in the comment section. This is Taya Graham and Stephen Janis reporting for The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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Progressive International (11/25/22)
This week on CounterSpin: Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more like representing that conflict than confronting it.
Good Jobs First monitors megacompanies like Amazon and their impact on our lives. Their database, Violation Tracker Global, notes more than $2.4 billion in misconduct penalties for Amazon since 2010. The most expensive of those fines have been connected to the company’s anti-competitive practices; the most frequent offenses are related to cheating workers out of wages and jeopardizing workers’ health and safety. Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. We’ll talk to her about the effort to #MakeAmazonPay.
Amazon Seattle HQ (cc photo: kiewic)
Also: A few years back, Amazon, like it does, dangled the prospect of locating a headquarters in New York City. And the city, like it does, eagerly offered some $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to entice the wildly profitable company to bring its anti-union, environmentally exploitative self to town. The deal fell through for reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talked about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes. We’ll hear just a little of that conversation today.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? “By 1933 a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed; another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward… As we face our own crises today—a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, growing racism, climate change—and lie awake at night, facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer us new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Frank about her new book and what taking a fresh look at poor and working people’s struggles in the dark 1930s can teach us about how to navigate our own perilous moment in history.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
A proofread transcript will be made available as soon as possible.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Amazon workers and their allies are participating in a series of global actions aimed at holding the online retailer “accountable for labor abuses, environmental degradation, and threats to democracy,” according to the labor group UNI Global Union. Dubbed “Make Amazon Pay,” the campaign is set to last from November 29 to December 2 and will include strikes and protests across six continents…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Longtime Working People listeners will be familiar with Max and Mel’s extended work discussing the supply chain, the workers who keep that system running day in and day out, and the dangerous and exploitative working conditions that many workers labor under. Our global economy relies on these workers to stay running–and bosses around the world use this pressure as a cudgel against the workers.
For today’s episode of Working People, we’re zooming out and taking a look at the global supply chain with Judy Gearhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about “the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff.” With decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates supporting worker struggles in the Global South, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth to her listeners.
Additional links/info:
Permanent links:
Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Hi, I’m Judy Gerhardt. I’m a research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University at the School for International Service, and I host a podcast called the Labor Link Podcast, which is about workers organizing and global supply chains.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Hello everyone. It’s your host, Mel er, and welcome back to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to.
(01:18)
And please support the work we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Long time TRNN supporters will be familiar with my previous work on the US supply chain and the integral role that railroad workers played in maintaining the network of goods and services that keep our country running as we learned in 2022. Without the workers, these networks don’t run. Bottlenecks happen and the national and global economy can grind to a stuttering halt. If you haven’t read my previous coverage on it, then please check it out at the link in our show notes on today’s episode of Working People, we’re going beyond the borders of the US and trending our focus on the international workers who keep the world’s global economy running.
(02:04)
This is likely going to become a series of interviews with workers from all over the world, but I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. So to start this conversation, I thought it would be important to bring on someone who’s been doing the important work of giving a platform to the workers who make these global industries run. I want to talk to her about her life and research and dig into the important work that she’s doing now. As always, it’s my goal to give you our listeners the context you need as we pull back the curtain on contemporary labor organizing both in this country and worldwide. So with us today to help us get that conversation rolling is Judy Gerhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff with decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates, supporting worker struggles in the global south, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth, her listeners from their website.
(03:01)
The Labor Link Podcast touches on many aspects of the global economy, trade policy, international development programs, corporate accountability, and the international human rights norms meant to protect workers from abuse. The first Labor Link podcast series featured organizers leveraging transnational campaigns to build power. And this second series is on Fisher driven solutions to the seafood industry, featuring interviews with Fisher organizers from around the world who are overcoming challenges and using creative strategies to advance fisher’s rights in the global fishing industry. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Judy. I’m really excited to have this conversation.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Thank you so much, Mel. I really appreciate you and Max having me on.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So to start off our conversation, I first wanted to give our listeners a chance to get to know a little bit more about you and your work, your career. How did the last couple decades of organizing nonprofit work bring you to this current research?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Wow. So I have been working, I think I started about 30 years ago actually doing organizing work in Mexico and I got to know a lot of amazing people who were organizing women in the export processing factories, the macula ladora in northern Mexico. And really that was the beginning. I mean, I went to Mexico knowing that I wanted to work on economic rights. I had done that college study abroad in France when Miran, the socialists were in power, and I had been going to college in Philadelphia where it had the highest per capita homelessness rate. So that had gotten me all thinking, okay, I need to understand economic rights. And when I went to Mexico and met people who were organizing workers and the workers themselves, I fell in love with the movement. I fell in love with these people who are, they’re trying to do good in the world, but they’re also trying to build power for the people who don’t have it. And I really found their campaigns and their struggle compelling.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So what did you end up doing after you finished that work in Mexico? Where did you go next?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
So it’s a little bit of a meandering story. So I went to grad school and I went and worked for the United Nations. I went to back to Honduras and worked for the International Labor Organization and for unicef, and I realized that international instruments are blunt end instruments. There was a lot of campaigning at the time about child labor in the Honduran export factories. You’ll remember maybe some people will remember the Kathy Lee Gifford scandal. That happened because there were 14 year olds making clothing for her. And being in Honduras at the time, I was really aware of the complexities of what was happening because you had 50% of kids in school got through elementary school, and by the time they were 13 or 14, if they hadn’t finished elementary school, they couldn’t go on to middle school. So they had to work. And our international campaigns ended up pushing a lot of 15 to eight to 17, 15 to 16, 17 year olds out of the workforce because all the global brands said no more child labor.
(06:25)
And then you had this sort of moment of struggle. And for me it meant I could see the power of the international mechanisms, but I also knew that we needed to figure out a way to connect with workers on the ground and what kind of remedy they needed. I then landed back in New York and I got a job with Social Accountability International, working on workplace standard, voluntary workplace standard, the basis for social audits. And in the beginning I thought, this is great because at the time you had a lot of companies putting out codes of conduct that didn’t include freedom of association and collective bargaining didn’t include a living wage. So I was part of a group of people trying to convert international human rights norms into language that was atory for companies basically saying, you should do this, you should do that. This is what it means for what you need to do in your supply chain.
(07:25)
And because it included those core rights, I found it compelling and I thought we could use it as an education instrument, which we did. We did a lot of worker training, we had a lot of trade unions. We partnered with the apparel unions globally, and we used that tool to help them in their negotiations and collective bargaining. But I ran into a bit of a wall at some point because the social auditing was, it was a voluntary mechanism. They reported the results of the audit, but not enough of the details. So it was confidential like so many of these initiatives. And at the time I started realizing I was not going to be able to change those core flaws in the social auditing and the voluntary compliance mechanisms. I was lucky enough to become the executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, and then I spent 10 years working with amazing organizers and campaigners around the world and doing worker tours supporting, I was part of the team of people who helped negotiate the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which is a binding first of its kind transparent agreement. It’s basically a collective bargaining agreement between transnational apparel brands and the Bangladeshi unions and global unions. And that brought me to today where I’m really trying to figure out how do we take those amazing organizers and share their stories with other people so that they themselves can influence policy and also academic thinking to the extent I’m not a real academic, but to the extent that I’m part of the academy at this point.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So the work that you do with the research center then is really kind of doing these interviews, talking to these workers, gathering this information and trying to present it to not just academic audiences, but translate this into potential policy objectives for the various organizations that you work with. Is that kind of a good understanding of the kind of work that you’re doing now?
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah. Everything we do is trying to bridge between the global policy trade or corporate policies and what the workers on the ground are actually doing. I work with some great colleagues at the accountability research center who they work with health rights advocates in Guatemala or on education reform in the Philippines. Their work is a lot about community driven government accountability, and it was a perfect place for me to land with worker driven corporate accountability, this idea that we need to enable the workers and the organizers on the ground to influence the policies that are affecting them.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I think this is kind of a good segue to really get into what your current focus is with the Labor Network or Labor Link podcast rather. Your first, or your series, I should say that you worked on was about these transnational campaigns to build power. Before we get into your current work with the Fishers in the fishing industry, was there anything that surprised you as you were interviewing these workers about the campaigns they were engaged in or about the workers themselves?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
So I think the thing that first surprised me is when I started working more heavily on research for arc, I was doing a lot of long form interviews, and when I first sat down to write the report that I had gotten a grant to write, I pulled the transcripts, which I guess many academics do all over the world, but I read the transcripts. I’m like, there’s so much smarter than me. What they have to say is so much more powerful. And that’s where I started saying, wait a minute, how do I figure out a way to put this out? So through the Labor Radio podcast cust Network, I met Evan Matthew Pap, who helped me with the first series through Evan. I met Jules who’s helping me with, who’s producing the second series, and it made it somewhat possible. I really hats off to what you do at working people.
(11:50)
It’s a lot of work. The thing I guess that surprised me, if anything, other than just this realization that I need to find a way to get their voices heard was the things I discovered about people I’d been working with for years. So the first four people I interviewed, I had known for anywhere from six to 12 years at the time, and I had helped them with worker tours. And when I was the director of the International Labor Rights Forum, we had given awards to their organizations for the organizing work they were doing. So that’s why I had wanted to start with them. But it was really taking that time to do the long form interview that I learned things like the organizer from Myanmar from the Migrant Worker Rights Network in Myanmar. He was an activist from Myanmar, and I compare him and I think the show notes, he’s basically like this Mother Jones character in my head because he comes from Myanmar shows up in Thailand, and he’s just trying to make a living. He’s escaping because he was at risk of losing his life or getting jailed in Myanmar. And so then he goes to Thailand and pretty much immediately starts organizing. And one of the big issues in Thailand is migrant workers can’t form a union. They can join a union, but they can’t form a union. But that didn’t deter haw.
(13:20)
And he and another expat who also had escaped cente, they started seeking out the trade unions and SA Karn, who’s another one of the first interviewees, so Sait Karn from the state Employee Relations Committee is a visionary. I mean, he basically said, okay, I may be maybe representing primarily Thai workers from public sector jobs, but we’ve got to help migrants. And he did, and he supported the Migrant Worker Rights Network and he did a lot of other things to try and bridge that gap, which is something I think the US at the time I met SA was really still beginning and improving upon, but it certainly took us a moment to try and bridge between traditional organized labor and migrant workers, and I think the movement’s better for it.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Right. There are a couple things I wanted to just kind of touch on before we move forward. Really first, to share solidarity with you as a podcast host and a researcher and the realization that you come to that, the people that you interview really are the experts in the industries that they work in. And the job is kind of interviewees to really kind of set and open up a space where these folks, these workers can talk about the experiences that they live every day, whether it be the working conditions, the organizing that they do. And that’s sometimes a tough job. A lot of folks really get uncomfortable when the mic turns on. It’s oftentimes pretty difficult to get folks to feel like they can really talk authoritatively on the experiences that they have because they ask. The same question that we ask often is, how am I a representative for this?
(15:17)
Am I supposed to be here talking about this? And the reality is, yes, working people, a lot of the work that Real News does, what we do is we try to create this space where we recognize that the workers that we talk to are the experts and that they are the ones who are bringing this experience forward for our audience to understand. And that’s a tough job. And so I don’t want you to feel like you’re not doing a good job. I think it’s a really unique position to be in, and it’s a very privileged position to be able to bring these folks forward and provide this platform. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that work that you do and that it’s really important.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Matt, Mel, back at you. I mean, I really appreciate what you all do, and I would be thrilled if you ever want to interview, I’d be happy to facilitate the conversations in the context. It’s really true what you’re saying. I mean, so Tola Moon from Cambodia, who’s one of the first people I interviewed, I mean, there are many of us in the international community who see Tola as this really incredibly brilliant strategist, and he’s very low key. And his organization, the Center for the Alliance of Human Rights and Labor is currently under threat that the Cambodian government might shut them down for an analytic report that they put out about a program being run called Better Factories Cambodia by the International Labor Organization and by the International Finance Corporation. And it’s an analytic report. They’re not trash talking. They did their research and anyway, so much respect. And whenever I interview him, he ends it by saying, thank you so much. It’s always so inspiring to talk to you. I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re so much more inspiring than anything I’ve ever done. I’m just some small town kid who’s fascinated by
(17:24)
What other people do,
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Right? I mean, that’s the same thing here. Folks are like, oh, you’re so cool. You do all this great work. And it’s like, oh man, if you could listen to yourself, I hope you listen back to this episode and understand how intelligent and charismatic and hopeful these workers are. And the thing about work, about wage work in any context at any place in the world in this system is that it is designed to make you feel inferior, to make you feel like you don’t belong or that your contribution doesn’t matter and that you’re just another nut and bolt in this giant machine. And that’s it. The reality is that workers in every context are whole people who care a lot about what they do, who care a lot about the contributions that they have, particularly in the global supply chain. I had this experience when I was talking to railroad workers is that from an outside perspective, you wouldn’t think that folks would be able to feel like they can rise above the drudgery, I suppose.
(18:33)
But the reality is, whether it’s railroad workers, whether it’s farm workers in Southern California, in central California, there is this pride in the work that you do and the contribution that you have to keeping the world running. And that’s something that bosses really don’t believe is a reality, which I feel like is kind of like an ace in the hole for us when we’re organizing, is to say, when you assign and really believe in the dignity of your work and you assert your dignity as a worker, you kind of throw ’em back on their heels a little bit. As the organizing continues, there’s such a rich tapestry of how we interact with the jobs that we do, and it’s really beautiful to kind of be in a space and begin to sort of peel back those layers in conversation as we do as podcast hosts and researchers, and to see the moments click where I guests really start to believe what they’re saying, not that they didn’t believe it before, but that they’re coming to this better realization as they’re trying to tell strangers in our audience about the work that they do. That yeah, it is important. There’s no piece of it that is not, and that is a really gratifying piece of what I do and what you do, I’m sure as a host, facilitating these conversations. So
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, I will say the last one I should shout out from the first series who I didn’t mention yet, is my dear friend Ana actor from the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. And she is, I mean, she definitely is an amazing speaker. She’s actually quite well known now, amazing organizer. In fifth grade, her dad got sick and she went to work in the apparel factories. And what that woman has done with the fifth grade education, she is just continued to self-educate herself. She just is brilliant. I mean, her capacities on so many levels, and then her ability to inspire is just, it’s pretty incredible. And I have to think about more women leaders to include, although in the phishing sector, I have to get to the processing sector. That’s my next hope, because right now we don’t have a lot of women in live capture phishing.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah. Well, that’s a good segue actually. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about this second series. You have four episodes out, I believe, right?
(21:13)
Yeah. Hey, that’s amazing given the breadth of work that you’re doing. So this is focusing on Fisher organizers and the advancement of workers’ rights in both large and small scale fishing industries from around the world. I believe your last episode, you were talking to fishers in Indonesia, if I’m not mistaken, maybe a good way to kind of orient our listeners in this research and with these workers. Can you share a little bit about the conditions that they’re currently laboring under? I know that’s a broad loaded question, but can we kind of give them a little bit of context into what the sort of both large and small scale global fishing industry looks like? I imagine a lot of our American listeners may think of global fisheries and may immediately go to, I don’t know, deadliest catch or something, a very unique American sort of fishery that maybe doesn’t look the same elsewhere. So let’s start there.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Okay. So global fisheries, the majority of them are at capacitor overfished, and they are environmentally, there’s a struggle to make them sustainable. And the environmental, so environmental advocates around the world have been working on this for a long time. However, in 2014, actually even before that, there were some small exposes, but in 2014, major media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian and the AP came out with a series of stories about forced labor on the Thai fleet. And then there were also stories appearing about forced labor on the Chinese fleet, the Taiwanese fleet vessels showing up in South Africa in Australia, Indonesian migrant fishers just walking off the vessel saying, we’ve been slaves on that vessel help us, or other vessels that were pulled aside for illegal unreported and unregulated fishing, IUU fishing, which to the environmentalists, to their credit, have been working for a long time on illegal unreported, unregulated fishing.
(23:38)
And that has brought some cases in where fishing vessels were detained for fishing illegally, and then the forced labor was discovered. So the story that I have from Hatto from SBMI in Indonesia, the largest migrant worker union in Indonesia, they were asked to go and help the fishers who were stranded in South Africa. And then what they discovered is the Indonesian government, the way the laws were set up, they couldn’t get these fishers, the support they needed. And so then that begat a whole body of work for them. But globally, starting around 2014 with all of these exposes, the one in South Africa, the ones on the Thai fleet, there were other cases all around Southeast Asia, the global community started to mobilize, and they really started reacting to forced labor on these vessels. It is horrific. I mean, there are stories of fishers stranded at sea for 15 years.
(24:52)
That’s probably one of the outside timeframes, but there are others who are out there for more. And then of course there are others who don’t come back who are killed at sea or they die from an illness at sea, and then their body is buried at sea, which is something that’s very traumatic for a lot of these people. For the Indonesians, it’s very traumatic, particularly I talked about that with Hato. And the campaigns that have surged from there have focused a lot on forced labor and illegal fishing, and it really brought a lot more work to support fishers and migrant fishers. I want to stop there. So in case you want to ask another question, but there’s so much work to be done just to address that forced labor. However, the thing I got from talking with people like or SA Karn, is we can rescue forced labor victims for decades to come, but it’ll never stop happening until we organize the fishers, until we enable them to stand up to the captain, we enable them to get remedy when they’re not paid, and we enable them to build the social movement that challenges these laws.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
That’s kind of where I was headed in my own thinking. You talk about these exposes in 2014 on that are trying to tackle one issue and pulling back and peeling away layers of what seems to me to be a wholly systemic industry-wide practice of forced labor, the industry in this region and elsewhere. And that in itself feels like an overwhelming sort of experience in its breadth, in its scope in how many fishermen past, present, future may be affected by this. And so I think a good question to ask then is as this organizing has been happening, more concerted organizing has been happening over the last 10 years or so, have there been some campaigns that you’ve spoken with fishers about that they consider to be successes or effective or moving the needle and in a good direction in terms of these organizing objectives?
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, so I think the first couple interviews I did are with the International Transport Workers Federation and the Fisher Rights Network in Thailand. So the ITF has been helping to set up at port and at multiple ports in Thailand fisher organizations. And so the Fisher Rights Network is growing. Again, as I said, they’re not able to form a union technically, but that doesn’t keep them from forming basically a worker center and from pursuing negotiations with the employers. What’s happening a lot in this space is you have a lot of funding and a lot of people with goodwill who are focused on the forced labor. And it’s important work. If you have been forced to be at sea for two years and you haven’t been paid, or if you have a family member stranded at sea and you just want to get them back, it’s crucial work, right? It’s absolutely crucial,
Speaker 2 (28:37):
But it doesn’t stop there. We need
Speaker 1 (28:38):
To talk about the also the and the also and right, so I’m not saying yeah, but I’m saying also and right, we need that work, but that work needs to connect in. And you have a lot of NGOs that do that work that don’t necessarily connect in. So there are some efforts now to connect these pieces together. And I think with migrant fishers, it’s a challenge to learn how to organize. They don’t come from organizing backgrounds for the most part except for the exceptions of the people who are leading some of these efforts. And so how do you bring this consciousness of what it means to organize what it means to work with your fellow fishers? I hope that you’ll get to talk directly with John Harto from the ITF who’s been organizing now going on a decade in Thailand, not quite a decade, but to hear it through his perspective as a former teamster, as an American, it’s quite moving.
(29:42)
But the bravery of these fishers who continue to organize, and I don’t want to tell the story that he tells, but to hear him tell the story of the fisher that inspires him every day is just, it’s pretty jaw dropping because the guy should have died at sea and he didn’t, and he continues to organize, but that one fisher is standing up to his boss and continuing to organize. That’s what the movement’s built on. And I think, Mel, I’m not a trade unionist from history. I’ve always been on the NGO side, although I’ve always been in solidarity with and supporting worker organizing, and I’ve definitely been very deeply involved in worker centers and Latin America, but I think a lot of people beyond the labor movement don’t fully appreciate what it takes to organize the day in the day out and what it means to have your momentum crushed by a fake solution. And that’s what’s happening a lot in global supply chain solutions. So yes, absolutely, we want to get remedy for fishers who have been victims of forced labor. Yes, we want to rescue victims of forced labor, but we need to build from there to the next step of enabling fishers to defend each other.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Right? Well, the industry moves on because the workers are going to be participating in the industry as folks begin to really truly put up that fence that says that forced labor is not the way forward. So then what are the rights of the workers now that they are getting paid now that they have some movement now that they can get off these boats? It moves beyond that and creates a new culture of worker dignity in these industries. And I agree. My experience in union organizing prior to this current job where I actually am a card carrying member of CWA News Guild now was organizing in the IWW as a freelance journalist. And for folks who aren’t union organizers or maybe have never worked in any sort of quote organizing group, whether that’s political organizing, whether that’s union organizing, whether that’s, oh, I don’t know, community meetings, quite a bit of it is, what’s a good way to put it, bureaucratic drudgery sometimes.
(32:27)
It’s a lot of really hopeful, really optimistic, really intelligent, really passionate people butting heads often, at least in the West. And there’s a lot of people on the outside of these organizing groups who really don’t want to see you succeed and will do really horrible things to make your job 10 times harder because what’s that really? Well-known Stokely Carmichael quote in, for example, in order for non-violence to happen, your opponent must have a heart. Essentially. We’re coming up against corporations, we’re coming up against nonprofits even I’m lucky to be at one where folks walk the walk and talk the talk, but that’s not always the case where individuals in positions of power really don’t want to share that power with a workforce. And so organizing is really difficult to try and get the folks who sign your paychecks, who create these conditions in your workplace to see you as a human being is extraordinarily difficult, which is always surprising.
(33:36)
And to also bring people in who have never experienced collective organization before and empower them to make decisions and to participate and to activate them and to keep them activated and to keep their spirits up and to do all of this in order to continue to push forward in what is a marathon, a long game is very difficult. And I cannot imagine what it’s like to be in an industry that I has its baseline as the complete and utter dehumanization of its workers, forcing them into situations for 15 years, forced slave labor, and then to pull these individuals out of this enforced culture of oppression, empower them, and then continue to empower them to assert themselves and the dignity of their work collectively. It’s got to be unreal, both in just the scope and difficulty of it, but also in the sort of payoff. And I can imagine that there’s some serious euphoria of the winds that happen that keep individuals moving forward, right? It’s got to be life affirming, truly, to see that needle move a little bit year after year,
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Even just to build community in migrant communities that are moving a lot. I mean, these are not stable work teams,
(35:15)
So how do you build community? So you talked about layers earlier, Mel, and I think we could talk about the layers of fear factor that happen whenever you’re organizing and you know that your boss doesn’t want you to organize, you feel threatened, but add to that the layer that your identity papers being held by the captain of your vessel. And so you’ve come into port and you’re allowed to leave the vessel, but if you leave the vessel, they don’t give you your papers and then they might report you if you don’t come back. So you have to get back on that vessel, add to that, that you’re indebted to the captain because you didn’t pay the recruiter that brought you over, but instead there’s money coming out of your paycheck that’s reimbursing the vessel owner for you getting over to get that job. I mean, the payment for a job is just another whole crazy level of abuse that happens in this industry.
(36:18)
And then add to that, your language inability in the country you’re in as a migrant, it just keeps adding on. And I’ll say, you said earlier that it’s become systemic. I mean, that’s absolutely true. So Indonesian migrants and they migrant fishers are disproportionately made up of Indonesian migrant fishers, at least all the cases that come in of forced labor and abuse. And the Indonesians that I have spoken with and the organizers I’ve spoken with, it’s standard procedure for them to go abroad, sign a two year contract. So they sign a two year contract on a Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese fleet generally, and then they’re supposed to get paid electronically, and that money’s supposed to go to their family or to them, however they set it up, but then they’re at sea and they don’t have access to wifi, and they have no way to see if they got paid. They have no way to communicate with their families. So our friends at Global Labor Justice, they’re supporting a campaign with Taiwan. The Indonesian fishers in Taiwan got together and started a campaign called Wifi for Fishers now, and they have slogans like No wifi, no wife, because imagine you’re gone for two years. Your wife didn’t get any money, didn’t hear from you,
(37:43)
You
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Don’t know. Might assume you’re dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah. And so they really, they’re trying to figure out a lot of these vessels. They have digital tracking, they have satellite, they have the capacity to provide the wifi. In fact, there are even places where they get into range of wifi access and the captain will take their phones away. They don’t want them to communicate. So the fact that they’re on a two year contract, the fact that there’s transshipment at sea so that the fish get off, but the fishers don’t, and then often they will pull into a port and they can’t use port services because they’re not legal, they’re not allowed to go, their documents are held back. So it’s not like they can get off at port and go run to the embassy and say, I need help. I’m being trapped. I mean, that just, it’s not that easy.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
One comparison that I keep coming up in as we’re talking about this, particularly about migrant status, about language barriers, about the barriers to really free movement on these boats, you hear a lot of the same concerns from organizers who are working with United Farm workers and the migrant farm workers who are working in farms in Southern and central California in Arizona along the border, a lot of them will cross the border without the appropriate visa paperwork. They’re taken advantage of by the farms that hire them. They’re housed in these often cramped, scary conditions in the middle of the desert or wherever they’re being housed. They’re subjected to extreme heat. And the farms themselves, if they’re unorganized, because some of the farms are organized and do have a relationship with UFW as a union will really kind of give and take however much they want because there’s no consequences.
(39:57)
Oftentimes the government’s not going to step in a way that’s useful a lot of times because the individuals who could investigate these claims, the agencies are underfunded deliberately or otherwise. There’s just not enough people to go around to show up at these places to investigate these issues. I imagine that a lot of this is the same because you’re in the middle of the ocean and even if you get claims about workplace conditions and being abysmal or abuses happening on these boats, it’s likely pretty freaking difficult for these governments to step in international waters. So you have all of these complications. So the point I’m trying to make is what it comes down to is the workers themselves that they are the ones who are collectively able to address, call out these issues, address these issues, force consequences for these issues. And that is no small feat when you’re talking about fleets of boats in the middle of the ocean
Speaker 1 (41:00):
And the distant water fleet is so hard to police and regulate, and increasingly countries don’t allow foreign vessels in their waters, but that doesn’t mean they’re not overfishing. So the Indonesian fishers, I have an interview coming up with aren’t on from salute in North s Lui, and he talks about organizing at port, both for fishers on the Indonesian domestic fleet and the Indonesians going abroad on the distant water fleet. And Indonesia, a number of years ago, said, no more foreign vessels in our waters. But now you have a domestic fleet that pays even worse, but the conditions are terrible. They’re not well financed. They’re overfishing still the same waters that were, they booted out the Korean fishers to try and let their fish recuperate, but they didn’t. They basically continue to overfish. So it’s really a struggle. And then you have the fishers who would, because you can make so little money on the domestic fleet, they’re willing to take that risk of going abroad for two years and not being in contact with anyone. But listening to you now, Mel, I’m thinking we need to find a way to, first, with all the organizing that’s happening now, enable the fishers to sit down and reimagine how this could be. If we could imagine a world where migrant fishers, whenever the vessel comes into port and the ITF is saying it should be every three months, you should be coming into port at minimum.
(42:37)
And if those fissures in whatever port they’re at are able to access communications and support, it could be a completely different world. It is doable, but it takes an amount of coordination because you’ve got whatever country is flying the flag of the vessel, and there’s abuse of the flag registrations, which the ITF has a great campaign on flags of convenience, it’s worth looking at. But then you also have the port that the vessel comes into, and then you have the market state. That’s generally the US and Japan and Europe where we have some
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Influence,
Speaker 1 (43:15):
But we haven’t really been exerting it yet. There was a big campaign of global buyers and retailers saying, supporting the employer pays principle. And we looked into that. I worked with some students last year and did some research on the employer pays principle and companies support it. They support the principle, but they have no way to implement it, and they’re not financing it. So basically the buyer or the retailer, it’s just like in the global apparel supply chains, they’re saying to the vessels they buy from, go do this, but they’re not helping finance it. They’re not going to be steady buyers from those vessels that change their policies. They’re not really taking responsibility for bega the change in the sector.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Well, there’s no incentive for that. There’s no incentive for it. There’s no consequences for not doing it, right.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
There’s only organizing pressure really. I mean, we can talk consumers, but it’s not penetrating in the way that we need it to.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Right? Well, this is the sort of idealist, internationalist, anarchist in me, God forbid, hopefully some of my listeners don’t get mad at me for this, but it’s like, what would be great if we could just get rid of all of these borders that make this shit impossible? Pardon my language. Maybe a truly international community would benefit greatly from not having extra border barriers that make this impossible for individuals to stop off somewhere, contact family, I don’t know, get justice for the abuses they suffer in the middle of the ocean. That’s an extremely reductive idealist position for me to take. But when you hear these kinds of problems, you’re like, why? A lot of these could be solved with the air quotes, relatively simple solutions, right?
Speaker 1 (45:15):
I don’t know, Mel, I’m with you. I mean, capital’s treat across borders. They’re very unfettered. I mean, there are some regulations and some things they need to go through. We could do something if you were to treat migration equally to the people migration to capital, if you created regulations that were as facilitative, things would shift and change. Yes, it’s idealist, but 30 years ago I was working on Latin America and the impact of the US drug trade in Latin American and on human rights, and I never could have imagined we’d see the day that we’re in now with marijuana being legal, if somebody doesn’t rethink migration in a more radical way, I don’t know that we’re going to get there. So keep rethinking it. I’m way out of my depth and all the different repercussions. I mean, not so out of
Speaker 3 (46:20):
My depth,
Speaker 1 (46:21):
But I mean we would need another five hours to even start to hash out all the different repercussions because there’s a big cultural element to how do you mix different peoples and cultures and over time, and that is a segue to something I do want to mention is I’ve been doing this work starting on the egregious abuses of forced labor, but always with this eye too. We can’t just stay there. That’s like just looking at the tip of the iceberg, because the causal factors are really the inability of the fishers to have a voice, to organize, to bargain collectively. The phenomenal amount of discrimination they suffer day in and day out because as migrants, and at the same time, we can’t look at the seafood industry only through the lens of the distant water fleet. What I would hate to see is buyers and retailers finally addressing this piece, the tip of the iceberg, and not addressing the causal factors or the rest of the seafood industry.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
They would treat it as like a checked box. We’ve done our due diligence. Look at this
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Amazing work we did in this one piece, because I will tell you the future episodes I’m hoping to do with Fisher organizers. I’m looking at organizing in coastal fishing in Africa and Latin America, and there you’ve got a lot of tensions coming up between the industrial fleet and the coastal fishers who are really largely fishing for food security. So much of the global movement, the mechanisms we have as a global movement are trade related. And if you only look at what can I change using trade policy or global corporate policy, you’re going to miss this other layer. And with the seafood industry, these two butt up against each other, so you have the industrial fleet that’s further off the coast, that’s mostly is more likely to be doing export. And so we have mechanisms and policies that we can bring to bear on countries to change how that industrial fleet’s governed,
Speaker 3 (48:38):
But
Speaker 1 (48:39):
We need to also be looking at that coastal fleet because those coastal fishers, they’re managing the waters, the fisheries, they’re really providing it’s food security. What they’re doing, and this is where I really get to the cultural rights. Sorry, it was a long segue. It was long. It’s okay. But when you talk to coastal fishers, this is not just about livelihood and food security. This is a way of life for centuries for a lot of these people. And I think a lot of people think, oh, we just have to fish last along the coast. It’s like, well, maybe there’s got to be a different path because this is their way of life and we’re really threatening something much more profound than what we would be threatening if we’re curbing the industrial vision.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Right? Important conversations and important nuance to this entire topic. I’m actually really looking forward to future episodes that you do, and I think this is kind of a great place where we can kind of close out our conversation. Can you share with our listeners where they can find your work? We’re going to be putting links to the Labor Link podcast in our show notes. Are there maybe one or two representative episodes of the last two seasons that you think our audience would be interested in or an episode that’s a good maybe primer for the second series that any of our interested audience members can kind of start with?
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Yeah. I think for the Fisher Driven solutions this current season, start with the first one with John Harto. As much as I’m really working to enable people to listen to the Fisher organizers, I think John will really get everybody thinking about what these fishers brave they are. This is really choosing among my children here now that’s D, listen to it all. Yeah,
(50:48)
They’re all fun stories. I mean, because then it segues to the Fisher Rights Network where they’re really, I mean, these guys are really, they have to be so crafty because like we talked about the fear factors, these trying to organize when and build trust with people who are so fearful. It’s phenomenal work that they’re doing. And then of course, Hoya, who’s also from Central and Cambodia organizing migrant fishers in Thailand from the Cambodians, and he’s got a fascinating story to tell. He was originally there as a Buddhist monk, and then he left and started organizing migrants. It’s just another amazing story. And then the one that is really fun and most recent is, and people should check this out, so it’s with Harto from SBMI in Indonesia, and there’s a little piece in there with Charlie Fritz from Greenpeace, and they’re talking about a film called Before You Eat that they produce with Greenpeace that really, if you want visuals on this stuff, check out before you eat or check out Outlaw Ocean. But okay, here I am promoting everybody else but my own show, and given that we share a producer, I better get on with it.
(52:09)
So the way to find the Labor Link podcast, we are on Spotify and we also set up a website, so maybe it’s easier for some people. Labor Link podcast.org. You can find us through the Labor Radio Podcast network and on Spotify, and also go to labor link podcast.org.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Cool. Cool, cool. Yeah, we’ll put all of those links in the show notes so that folks can check out Judy’s work and stay up to date on what’s happening. The process of putting together a podcast is extremely difficult. We make it seem easy, but it’s definitely not. There’s a lot of work that goes into it, and one of those things is really promoting episodes that folks see them. So we’ll be adding a bunch of links to those episodes because they are incredible conversations, and you absolutely will find something interesting and impactful in what you’re listening to. And this will be my final note before we get to the closing paragraph here, but one thing that I learned in the research that I did for the National Supply Chain Network as it relates to railroaders, is that things that seem boring on their face really are pretty intricate, interesting and precarious when it comes to the supply chains, both nationally and internationally. You might go a little crazy going down that rabbit hole to realize just how precarious global supply chain networks actually are. I’m sure folks can remember the ever given Suez Canal disaster and how that completely choked up the global supply chain almost immediately, right
Speaker 1 (53:53):
In the middle of the pandemic.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Yes. And how long it took to recover from that. Just one small piece can kind of knock the card pyramid down. So if you find that your knee-jerk reactions to say, oh, that boring stuff, then peel back a little bit of the onion there and take some time to look into it because it becomes endlessly fascinating, infuriating, enraging, and ultimately, you begin to see these sort of moments and spaces for productive and transformative organizing when you start to understand these systems. So that’ll be my final little note here. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Judy, please come back anytime. Let’s link up and continue talking and talking with folks and send me all the interviews that you can. I can’t wait to speak to the folks that you speak to. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah, thank you so much, Mel, and thank you for the show that you all produce. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, yeah. I appreciate the work that you do as well. And as always, I want to thank you all our listeners for listening, and thank you so much for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel er and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
German automaker Volkswagen said Wednesday that it has sold its operations in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, where Beijing has been accused of widespread human rights abuses against Uyghurs.
Activists and experts have accused VW of allowing the use of Uyghur slave labor at the its joint-venture plant with Chinese state-owned company SAIC Motor Corp. in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital.
In a statement, the company cited “economic reasons” for its pullout from Xinjiang, home to about 12 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, where it also has a test track in Turpan.
“While many SVW [SAIC-Volkswagen] sites are being, or have already been, converted to produce electric vehicles based on customer demand, alternative economic solutions will be examined in individual cases,” the statement said.
“This also applies to the joint venture site in Urumqi,” it said. “Due to economic reasons, the site has now been sold by the joint venture as part of the realignment. The same applies to the test tracks in Turpan and Anting [in Shanghai].”
The plant was sold to Shanghai Motor Vehicle Inspection Certification, or SMVIC, a subsidiary of state-owned Shanghai Lingang Economic Development Group for an undisclosed amount, Reuters reported.
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The sale comes two months after an expert who obtained a leaked confidential copy of Volkswagen’s audit of its joint venture plant in Xinjiang said the document contained flaws that made it unreliable.
Volkswagen declared in December 2023 that the audit of its Urumqi factory showed no signs of human rights violations.
But after analyzing the leaked audit report, Adrian Zenz, senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, found that contrary to its claims, the audit failed to use international standards and was conducted by questionable examiners.
Zenz, an expert on Xinjiang, concluded that the audit’s methodology was faulty and insufficient and that the report was “unsuited to meaningfully assess the presence or absence of forced labor at the factory.”
Zenz called the news a “huge victory for the Uyghurs.”
“This step was long overdue, he told RFA. “Sadly, it took public pressure and showcasing the full extent of the sham of the audit.”
Strong international pressure
Gheyyur Qurban, director of the Berlin office of the World Uyghur Congress who has led anti-Volkswagen activities, said Volkswagen’s withdrawal from Xinjiang was not due to economic reasons, but was linked to strong international pressure over the Uyghur issue.
He said the World Uyghur Congress, a Uyghur advocacy group based in Germany, pressured the automaker to leave the region and forced it to defend itself before the international community.
In the statement, Volkswagen also said it was extending its joint venture agreement with SAIC until 2040 to introduce new vehicles to meet China’s growing market demand for electric cars. The original agreement was in place until 2030.
The news came as the G7 Foreign Ministers’ meeting issued a statement expressing concern over the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Tibetans in Tibet persecuted by the Chinese government.
The G7, or Group of Seven, comprises the major industrial nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States and the European Union.
“We remain concerned by the human rights situation in China, including in Xinjiang and Tibet,” said the statement, which urged China to abide by its international human rights commitments and legal obligations.
But Rushan Abbas, chairperson of the executive committee at the World Uyghur Congress, said that the carefully worded statement was insufficient.
“The genocide persists, conditions worsen and concrete actions remain lacking,” she said, referring to China’s violence targeting the Uyghurs, which the U.S. and some Western parliaments have recognized as genocide.
“While de-risking supply chains is vital, it must be paired with bold measures to hold China accountable for state-sponsored forced labor,” Abbas said. “Awareness demands action. We urge G7 nations to move beyond rhetoric and lead in holding China accountable for its human rights abuses.”
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur and Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
WASHINGTON – The United States has banned another 29 Chinese companies from exporting their goods to America due to their alleged use of Uyghur slave labor. It’s the largest single blacklisting since the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act became law in 2021.
The listing, announced late Friday by the Department of Homeland Security, brings the total number of Chinese companies barred from exporting to America due to Uyghur forced labor to 107, following the blacklisting of three other Chinese companies earlier this month.
The companies include producers of agricultural, aluminum and polysilicon products, as well as copper, gold and nickel miners, it says, accusing them of “working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transfer, and receive workers, including Uyghurs, out of Xinjiang.”
Washington accuses Beijing of carrying out a “genocide” of the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority in far-western Xinjiang, including by forcing Uyghurs to work for little or no pay. Chinese officials deny the claims and say many Uyghurs are in fact in vocational training.
But that has done little to convince U.S. lawmakers. The 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was passed on a bipartisan basis, allows the Department of Homeland Security to ban Chinese firms that it believes are using slave labor from selling their goods to Americans.
The blacklisting also comes amid an ongoing investigation by the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party into claims that U.S. venture capital firms are funding companies involved in Uyghur slave labor and thereby financing “genocide.”
Pressure campaign
In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that the latest bulk blacklisting shows Washington’s resolve “to ensure that goods made from the forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang do not enter the United States.”
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Rishat Abbas, the chairman of the Istanbul-based Uyghur Academy, told Radio Free Asia that the blacklisting represented “a critical move in the fight against forced labor in supply chains” in China.
“By restricting goods from over 100 Chinese companies linked to the exploitation of Uyghurs in East Turkistan, this action sends a strong message to the Chinese Communist Party,” Abbas said, using the preferred Uyghur name for the Xinjiang region of China.
Abbas added that the mounting international pressure was pushing Beijing toward a position where it may soon be forced “to reassess its policies of oppression toward the Uyghur population.”
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Workers in the food industry earn some of the lowest wages in the U.S. economy, and after a long day of preparing, cooking, or serving food at work, many struggle to put food on their own tables. A hefty 29% of U.S. jobs were linked to the food and agricultural industries in 2021, and job growth in food sectors is on the rise. But the low pay has consequences. According to the U.S.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It is the largest successful union election in recent memory: 10,000 nurses will be joining the Teamsters. They work for hospital conglomerate Corewell Health at eight hospitals and one outpatient facility, all in southeast Michigan. “We’re so excited we can hardly stand it,” said Katherine Wallace, a nurse at the hospital in Troy, who has been a core part of the campaign since October 2023.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Lori Chavez-DeRemer, one of most pro-union Republicans to recently serve in Congress, to be his Labor secretary. Chavez-DeRemer lost her reelection bid to represent Oregon in the House by a narrow margin. Her campaign was backed by about two dozen unions, including those representing flight attendants and grocery store workers. Sean O’Brien…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
