Usually, actions can be easily categorized as voluntary or coerced. You choose where you work. You are coerced into paying taxes. However, long-standing concepts such as wage slavery challenge this simple classification. While socialists use this term to justify greater force and coercion (akin to southern US slaveholders), there is nonetheless a kernel of truth here. The truth is this: the rules are rigged.

Social media encourages catchy slogans over detailed exposition, and arguments like taxes are voluntary and wages are slavery are quickly rewarded with internet points. Both comments are mirror images of the same proposition: that wages and taxes are either both voluntary or both coerced. You can choose, the argument goes, to avoid paying taxes by not working and not buying consumer goods. Pointing out that one must work to live appears to prove that you do not work voluntarily but only under duress: to avoid starvation.

Shallow arguments like these can be quickly brushed aside by simply referring to the definition of the terms:

Voluntary: done or undertaken of ones own free will.

Coerce: to pressure, intimidate, or force (someone) into doing something.

The corner drug store offers a reward for work: money. The government threatens imprisonment to collect taxes. While this is enough to address newly minted socialist undergrads on Twitter, it fails to address underlying issues raised by more thoughtful scholars.

In a free market, employment is clearly not slavery, but states everywhere reduce and limit the freedoms of employers, employees, and consumers. While this may not reduce wage earners to a state of slavery, market arrangements in an interventionist market such as this are not quite voluntary either.

The Marxist tradition has expended a lot of effort to classify societies into various modes of production, e.g., slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. These modes, while currently out of favor, generally sought to highlight key features and relationships that differentiated one mode from another. As socialist David Graeber put it:

in the case of [the] slave mode of production, the exploiters directly own the primary producers; in feudalism, both have complex relations to the land, but the lords use direct jural-political means to extract a surplus; in capitalism, the exploiters own the means of production and the primary producers are thus reduced to selling their labor power.

The presenceor lack thereofof outside options (the ability to earn a living outside of formal wage labor) is critical for socialists when describing coercion within capitalism.

Imagine a small merchant who runs a corner drug store. Now imagine that a massive corporation seeking to limit competition uses the state to make self-employment prohibitively expensive;more people will be forced to turn to wage labor. This serves to increase the size of the labor pool, reduce wages, and reduce competition from small firms.

Another example is the AB 5 legislation in California, which temporarily disrupted the gig economy before voters overturned it with Proposition 22. Ignoring the stated motivations, the actual impact was to drastically restrict the ability of people to work for themselves as independent contractors.

Consider other ways the governments can restrict the choices of wage earners:

This is not simply theoretical. A fascinating study out of UCLA measured the effect in the British West Indies of plantation owners using the state and legal coercion to restrict the outside options of former slaves and thus secure a steady supply of cheap labor. Return to plantation owners was highest where they could successfully lobby to restrict homesteading (or squatting) of abandoned land. They also used the tax code to benefit themselves at the expense of small plot holders. The same spirit of coercion, if not the exact same tactics, were used in the American South after emancipation to keep former slaves on plantations.

Underneath the vapid squawking of woke Twitter parrots, there exists a real issue: the incentive structure is being manipulated to hide coercion beneath the guise of free will. The rules are rigged. Let us not be tricked into defending a current system we do not support.

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The Sport Is Rigged in opposition to Staff in an Interventionist Financial system - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

Unions and humanitarian groups say the coronavirus pandemic, which has put unprecedented pressure on supply chains, has highlighted the importance of ensuring the human rights of workers are upheld.

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About $US150 billion ($203 billion) a year is generated in the global private economy from forced labour alone, with almost 25 million people in the Asia-Pacific region estimated to be enslaved in global supply chains.

"Modern slavery has no place in our society. This is why we have been relentless in our opposition to these grave violations of human rights through implementing a strong program of initiatives to combat modern slavery in Australia and abroad," Assistant Minister for Customs, Community Safety and Multicultural Affairs Jason Wood said.

The government will outline its own efforts to fight slavery throughout its procurement activities, focusing on high-risk areas in investments, textiles, overseas construction, and cleaning and security services.

Woolworths Group, which includes its supermarkets, Big W and Dan Murphy's, revealed it had confronted six suppliers from Malaysia, where workers from Myanmar were reimbursed thousands of dollars each in recruitment fees.

The company said it was watching for increased human rights risks relating to climate change, cotton sourced from China and the management of COVID-19.

It also found its seafood, cocoa and nuts suppliers in Bolivia, Ivory Coast and Vietnam had exposed its companies to extreme risks of forced labour.

"This is due to the inherent risks in agriculture, high levels of product exported from high-risk countries and substantiated cases of forced and child labour associated with a product category," its report said.

It found five non-food categories had "extreme risks of forced labour" and following allegations of forced labour in Xinjiang province in China, it had started tracing its garment supply chain there.

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"We have no direct suppliers producing goods in Xinjiang and are conducting further due diligence on cotton sourced as a raw material," it said.

Unchained founder and chief executive Stephen Morse said exploitation in Australia took on many forms, with the Australian Institute of Criminology estimating that between 2015 and 2017 there were up to 1900 victims of modern slavery in the country.

He said a recent report showed the overwhelming majority of international students were still subject to wage theft and poor employment conditions.

"There are some shining lights in leadership on this issue from some of our biggest companies but many are still falling short," Dr Morse said. "There is some way to go but we are taking some positive steps."

Wesfarmers, whose stores include Bunnings, Kmart, Target and Officeworks, identified more than 340 "critical breaches" across 105 suppliers in the 2020 financial year.

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Its audit found the biggest risk in its Australian workforce, usually through third parties, was migrant labour exploitation through cleaning contractors.

"There is both a moral and a business case for the steps we are taking to identify, report, addressand ultimately eliminate any exploitation of vulnerable people with whom we may be involved, directly or indirectly, overseas or at home," Wesfarmers chairman Michael Chaney said.

The report found Wesfarmers' supply chains risked exposure to human trafficking through apparel purchasing in Cambodia, as well excessive overtime in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Four critical breaches related to three suppliers that were "exited" immediately and no further supply orders were placed at the remaining 17 suppliers with 40 critical breaches.

Our Morning Edition newsletter is a curated guide to the most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up to The Sydney Morning Heralds newsletter here, The Ages here, Brisbane Times here, and WAtodays here.

Rob Harris is the National Affairs Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based at Parliament House in Canberra

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'Grave violations of human rights': Supermarkets, retailers uncover exposure to modern slavery - Sydney Morning Herald

10 December is Human Rights Day marking 72 years since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, forged amid the destruction and persecution in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Recent decades have ushered in unprecedented levels of development and progress. Yet, the world continues to face growing inequality. At the start of this year, the UN Secretary General Antnio Guterres warned that 70% of the worlds population was facing ever increasing inequality, fueling both anger and desperation.

Within weeks of the announcement, the COVID-19 virus had spread to every corner of the planet. We are all in this together reflected Guterres in April 2020. But the virus and the response to it so far has only laid bare deepening divides.

Where does business sit in the face of such societal demands? On 10 November 2020 the business and human rights movement commemorated the 25th anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his fellow human rights defenders in Nigeria. Kens environmental and social demands to the Nigerian government and major international oil companies were perhaps the start of the movement.

We have made progress since 1995, with milestones such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, modern slavery legislation, emerging mandatory due diligence demands and greater disclosure requirements. The Corporate Human Rights Benchmark has shown year on year improvement across hundreds of companies.

But there are as many laggards as there are leaders. When it comes to remedies for the victims of human rights abuses, arguably we are no further forward in 2020 than we were on the day after Kens hanging.

Our message for Human Rights Day 2020 is for human rights to find a permanent place in the boardroom itself.

Our message for Human Rights Day 2020 is for human rights to find a permanent place in the boardroom itself. This means addressing the economic and social inequalities resulting from flawed business practices. Businesses must also acknowledge legacies of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo ask questions about who holds power within companies and how well the compositions of boardrooms reflect wider society.

In addition, calls for greater supply chain transparency and decent work are crucial in tackling economic inequality. But while this is welcome, it is not enough to overcome inequality on its own. We must ask how greater transparency and diversity can challenge the power structures that are driving increasing inequality both within business and across society itself?

During 2021, we would like to see business asking deeper questions about how it will challenge inequality and respect human rights.

Within business this must include considerations for workers to earn a wage that supports them and their families to afford a decent life. It also means that women are paid the same as men for equal work, fair treatment and have equal opportunities. Workers should have a voice and the right to organize and no one should be forced to buy their own job through recruitment fees.

Executives must lead by example: board remuneration committees must act to narrow the differential between the highest and lowest paid members of staff from the CEO to the cleaner. Boardrooms must have the right skills and knowledge around the table to allow them to make the right decisions in terms of human as well as business impact; and perhaps one day the two will be seen as the same thing.

Outside of the company itself, business must proactively engage in wider societal discussions about how to reduce inequality and stand up for human rights. Young people around the world are demanding that as we look to re-build in the post-pandemic world, the focus should be on restructuring the economy so it deals better with challenges like inequality and climate change, rather than just getting our economy back to normal as soon as possible. Perhaps less "building back" and more "moving forward differently".

The jobs of millions of women, minorities and low-income earners around the world have been put at risk as the pandemic accelerates digitalization and automation. While jobs are central for the transitions ahead, so are new forms of investment, financial equity and informed consent for all communities. The transition must be a just one, ensuring respect for fundamental rights, in particular for the most vulnerable and marginalized.

Business advocacy for human rights is welcomed when building on the fundamental respect for human rights and an understanding of its own role in contributing to inequality.

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Human rights must find a permanent place in the boardroom. Here's why - World Economic Forum

The pace of social and economic shifts often exceeds the capacity of communities and individuals to adapt to them. In the wake of centuries of structural racism and decades of economic adjustment to globalization, we now find ourselves confronting at least two major disruptions: the COVID-19 recession and the changing nature of work. These disruptions are seriously testing the strength and endurance of our democracy, revealing massive gaps and inequities in our aging public sector institutions.

Our education and labor market support systems are among the public sector infrastructure that have failed to keep up. This paper focuses on education and labor market reforms aimed at fixing two key problems hindering workers, employers, and regions: an educational system that poorly serves its largest student population (so-called nontraditional adults) and a credentialing system full of noncredit courses and certificates with little assurance of quality or transparency. The goal is to change and update existing policies and programs so that they are more functional as a system, rather than creating more new standalone programs.

The traditional model of higher educationin which a young person invests once in early-career education to get a college degree and then transitions to workis no longer sufficient to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change, leaving the majority of Americans behind. The recent history of rolling back de jure segregated vocational education has not been replaced by a bachelor-degreed majority, but by a de facto maze of unaccredited learning, wasted resources on incomplete degrees, and insufficient employer investments in work-based training.

As a result, job seekers often have trouble communicating their value to employers, navigating their career options, and accessing additional education. Employers default to what they know (degrees and personal networks) and tend to underinvest in training, which leaves them paying a premium to compete in narrow pools for talent and ill-equipped to find or cultivate the full range of talent that exists. These market failures contribute to rising inequality and persistent occupational segregation.

Desegregating work and learning through earn-and-learn strategiesas other industrialized countries have donewould provide multiple paths to jobs and careers for people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, unleashing the full potential of our homegrown talent. It would also boost private sector innovation as new workers apply ideas, methods, and technologies learned in the classroom to problems in the workplace.

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Jobs and labor markets are constantly in flux. Major shocks (such as state and local COVID-19 lockdowns) can displace millions of workers almost overnight. Technologies like artificial intelligence or robotics can shift the workforce needs of entire industries. And cyclical and structural shifts in the economy (such as the long-term decline of the manufacturing industry following trade liberalization) leaves many adults in the position of making a major career transition in mid-life, while they also have family obligations and bills to pay. Left unchecked, these market disruptions can lead to mass displacement, long-term disconnection from the labor force, and cycles of regional economic decline.

In times of crisis, government plays an especially important role in buffering people from the most extreme forms of economic disruption and reversing the cycle of decline by stimulating growth. During the Great Depression, for instance, the New Deal created publicly supported jobs, made massive investments in infrastructure, and invented new forms of social insurance that, taken together, catapulted our country out of a depression and into a postwar boom that positioned the U.S. as a global superpower.

But these New Deal-era programs and policies also intentionally strengthened racial and gender inequality in the labor market. For example, agricultural, domestic, and some service workers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, classifying certain occupations with a disproportionate share of female, Black, and Chinese immigrant workers as a separate and subordinated class of workers.

In many ways, this stratification in our policies persists. For instance, the lower minimum wage for tipped workers has its roots in slavery, and has been frozen at $2.13 per hour since 1996. Workers in nonstandard work arrangements (often known as gig workers) do not have the same protections from discrimination or access to safety net programs such as unemployment insurance, disproportionately impacting women and people of color.1 Decades of aging and disinvestment in our education and labor market institutions has further weakened the capacity of these institutions to respond to major shocks or to address the persistent effects of gender and racial injustice.

Now, we are facing two additional disruptions within this context: the COVID-19 recession and the changing nature of work. These disruptions are revealing the massive gaps and inequities in our aging public sector institutions. As of December 3, the U.S. is on its 37th consecutive week of more new unemployment claims than the worst week of the Great Recession, and employment levels remain 9.8 million jobs lower than in February 2020. These job losses are concentrated among workers with less education and in low-wage service jobs, which means that women, youth, Black, and Latino or Hispanic workers are disproportionately impacted because of occupational segregation. In essence, we have a lot of workers without a postsecondary degree who have been displaced from industries that may take a very long time to recover, and we dont have the institutions we need to create seamless career transitions into decent work.

Although a traditional four-year college degree is the dominant occupational pathway in the U.S., a large majority (69%) of Americans do not have a college degree. The rising cost of postsecondary education has prevented many from even trying to enroll in or complete college, and has saddled most of the rest with decades of debt payments. There are also large racial disparities in college degree attainment rates.

The haphazard proliferation of alternatives to the traditional college degree has, over time, generated a confusing and chaotic landscape of credentials and programs. Both workers and employers struggle to understand quality levels and qualification levels2 to make informed choices about the value of these offerings. The pandemic has accelerated the shift to online and distance learning, but users of these programs similarly struggle to fully understand the product or service they are investing in or its value to a specific employer. Unaccredited programs also limit the ability of the learner to demonstrate how their learning has progressed to more advanced levels, or easily transfer some of that credit into a new occupational pathway (for career switchers). Without more transparency, many hiring managers assume these alternatives are of lower quality or, at best, more risky.

With the historically severe disparities in impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must think big and act immediately to address long-standing structural barriers to education and economic opportunity. This paper focuses on critical reforms we can make to the public education and training ecosystem by expanding earn-and-learn strategies to better meet the current needs of individuals, employers, and a rapidly evolving economy. Expanding earn-and-learn offers long life learning options suitable for working adults, rather than only having quality education options designed for traditional college-age students.

Second, by blending work and learning, earn-and-learn strategies can help address the legacies of racialized tracking in education and the subsequent proliferation of nonaccredited, online, and informal training options that fail to effectively signal quality in the labor market. Investing in the public sector expansion of earn-and-learn opportunities will help drive a more equitable and inclusive recovery that better positions America for success in the 21st century.

It is critical to acknowledge the legacies of tracking in the U.S. and the powerful role vocational education played in reinforcing structural racism. Trackingor the practice of sorting students into learning cohorts based on abilitysegregated vocational education from academic education by requiring lower-achieving students (often immigrant, Black, Latino or Hispanic, and low-income students) to take vocational curricula from an early age.

Elite groups often stigmatize vocational education as having lower social status, although many Americans do not share that sentiment or value a college education to the same degree. Nevertheless, in the dominant culture, the term vocational is often associated with a negative stigma in the U.S. that is much stronger than in other countries.

In part due to equity concerns, the U.S. has scaled back vocational education since the 1980s. Although this has reduced barriers to accessing college preparatory coursework in secondary schools for all students, it has also reduced the options available for students who prefer hands-on learning or cannot afford to complete a degree, as well as for employers who want a stable pipeline of workers for craft industries, clinical professions, the trades, or technology. In addition, employers tend to underinvest in training, and there are substantial racial disparities in access to training once someone has a job. The lack of options for formal higher education that is more hands-on makes it impossible for people to reach more advanced levels of education and pay without going to college. This dead end reinforces the lower social status of vocational training in the U.S.

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Earn-and-learn strategies combine work experience and education while simultaneously providing income. They offer a promising solution to overcome the historical segregation of work and learning, but our current earn-and-learn options are outdated and small in scale.

Although we can and should make college much more affordable, a narrow policy focus on free college as the only solution to rising inequality limits options for people who want to keep advancing their education but also want or need to keep working. Moreover, some forms of knowledge and expertise can only be mastered by doing them. Academic, classroom-based education teaches theoretical, conceptual, and abstract knowledge and skills. Other, more applied skills and knowledge are best learned through hands-on experience and observation. For example, advanced cybersecurity is best learned through a combination of classroom learning and practical experience.

Asking people to invest a lot of time and money into their education only once, very early in their career, does not meet the needs of todays economy. Employers are deploying high-level technology in a variety of industrial settings, and many seek to establish an agile, evolving culture of work. The sequential model of education does not suit this approach.

Many employers report that college graduates without work experience do not have the right mix of hands-on experience and abstract/theoretical knowledge. Moreover, employers in countries that have mature systems for postsecondary applied learning, such as the Swiss vocational education and training model, show a healthy return on investment. The existing setup of segregated pipelines of academic learning on one side and one-off, noncredit work-oriented training programs on the other creates costs for employers, such as failing to identify or promote qualified talent, high recruitment costs, labor turnover, and quality risks. This constrains innovation and limits economic mobility.

Growing evidence suggests that the best workforce program outcomes come from sector-based trainings that are work-based, part of a longer career pathway program, and include access to one-on-one career navigation assistance and other wraparound services. In particular, evidence suggests that apprenticeship programs work better and are more cost-effective than occupational training that is disconnected from work experience. Figure 1 shows examples of the most common earn-and-learn strategies in the U.S. today, both within the public workforce system and beyond.

The earn-and-learn programs under the public workforce systemauthorized under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)are underused and hard to scale. Publicly funded job training options are tiny overall compared to investments in traditional public higher education or classroom-based job training. Funding for public higher education was $385 billion in 2017-18, compared to about $14 billion for employment services and training across 43 programs. The net result is that higher education is the main provider of publicly funded training for most Americans, and most of the $14 billion for employment services and training goes to services (most of which isnt training) for special populations such as veterans and people with disabilities. However, there are important insights to be gained about the limits of current workforce policy ecosystem from analyzing how these selective programs work. For example, the current program ecosystem includes some training for low-income adults and dislocated workers under WIOA.

According to Labor Department data, over half (56%) of WIOA-funded training participants in the adult and dislocated worker programs receive occupational skills training that is separated from work. This is the type of training one receives in a typical community college program and includes both credit-based and noncredit training. Less than 1% of these training participants are enrolled in registered apprenticeships or incumbent worker training. However, earn-and-learn participants in these two forms of training earned almost double the annualized median earnings of the occupational skills training participants.3 This is counterintuitivewe are grossly underutilizing apprenticeships and incumbent worker training, two of the most powerful ways of helping people successfully transition into higher-paying jobs.

For example, the U.S. had roughly 238,000 new registered apprentices in 2018. However, if the U.S. had the same share of new apprentices per capita as Germany, we would have 2 million new apprentices per year; if we had the same share as the United Kingdom or Switzerland, that number would be 3 million.

The use of earn-and-learn training in WIOA adult and dislocated worker programs is likely low because of rigid and layered program requirements. For example, local areas cannot spend more than 20% of their local allocation on incumbent worker training under WIOA regulations. The WIOA legislation also requires training providers (except for registered apprenticeship providers) to supply quarterly job placement and wage data for all students in a programnot just those who are receiving WIOA fundingin order to qualify for the eligible training provider list. This has proved to be an onerous requirement for publicly funded two-year community colleges, let alone private or online providers. And even though registered apprenticeships are automatically eligible for WIOA funding, they are governed by separate federal legislation that is not well coordinated with WIOA adult and dislocated worker programs in terms of intake, target populations, or training durations (WIOA is short term, while registered apprenticeships are long term).

Several regions have attempted to invest more significantly in earn-and-learn strategies. For example, CareerWise Colorado, a nonprofit private model that draws insights from the Swiss model of vocational education and training, is one of the most innovative earn-and-learn initiatives in the U.S. because of its emphasis on youth apprenticeships in a wide range of industry sectors (beyond the trades). However, it is only four years old and has fewer than 1,000 youth apprentices, according to the CareerWise website.

Nationwide, states have struggled to coordinate various regional pilots and approaches while also maintaining quality standards. U.S registered apprenticeship programs serve workers who are a decade older, on average, than apprenticeship programs in peer nations, and states are effectively splitting their attention to build modern youth and adult apprenticeship programs in nontraditional industries as separate pathways from the long-standing model in the U.S. governed through the outdated National Apprenticeship Act of 1937.

A lack of state-level policy infrastructure and institutional capacity means that employers interested in apprenticeships or incumbent worker training generally have to invest significant resources in creating their own one-off programs and then getting them approved by state or federal programs in order to get access to candidates and funding resources. Employers in the U.S. are not well organized into associations or sector councils that can provide clear signals to educators about shared talent and skill needs, or signal to workforce systems which occupational pipelines have long-term unmet talent needs. Employers also have no meaningful authority over curricula, content, or quality assurance for school-based programs. Many employers have no choice but to work with the various arms of the decentralized higher education system, because it has more substantial optionseven though it tends to focus more narrowly on theoretically oriented learning as opposed to more applied, work-oriented learning.

Establishing a strong culture of learning in the workplace takes active coordination. In traditional apprenticeship occupations, unions have long played the role of coordinating between employers, educators, and learners, and the roles and expectations are fairly well understood by everyone involved. For occupations and industries that are new to apprenticeships and have low unionization (such as technology and health care), there is an institutional vacuum in the intermediary role that is often a barrier to scaling apprenticeships. In large part, this is because the model is so unfamiliar, and there tends to be limited shared infrastructure to make the process easier. For employees already in a workplace, the lack of an established learning culture and infrastructure in many firms can be a barrier for employers and workers to easily blend the activities of working and learning to facilitate continuous adaptation and innovation.

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The current crisis provides an important opportunity to move from siloed programs into a more equitable training ecosystem with multiple pathways for career mobility. Earn-and-learn pathways differ from traditional academic and vocational education in that they combine academic education with work experience andif designed smartlycan provide a paid route to a college degree and lifelong learning rather than a separate and unequal track away from it. They also give workers a chance to show their value to an employer and provide access to professional networks that are essential for finding employment opportunities, accessing career-related information, and earning promotions. For employers, earn-and-learn offers a stable pipeline of talent that possesses a combination of academic and industry-specific knowledge, which a classroom education alone cannot deliver.

Blended learning helps firms internalize an agile, learning-oriented workplace culture appropriate for todays rate of innovation and economic change. The pace of growth in both new technologies and new applications has compressed to many times shorter than a typical persons career. Earn-and-learn pathways can both keep workers skills fresh in the innovation economy and address the structural inequality that is holding our economy back, because the existing system does not maximize activation of the talent we already have. However, given the legacies of tracking, revisiting the question of how to expand beyond only offering a traditional four-year college path to economic mobility requires careful attention to racial and gender equity in employer-side hiring practices and building quality applied training options that learners with a wide range of interests and abilities will find attractive.

Additional specialized programs will not accomplish this. We need to focus on the systems level: across federal agencies, funding streams, and legislation. Achieving a user-friendly earn-and-learn ecosystem at scale will be a long-term effort, but we can start with four key changes:

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Increasing opportunities for on-the-job learning and offering a blend of work-based instruction and related classroom instruction would help foster an economy that works for more people, places, and sectors. It will also make higher education accessible to a wider range of Americans who are not able to access quality higher education as it is currently structured and offer youth and adults an initial opportunity to gain work experience and professional networks in a new field.

Desegregating the cultures of work and learning will benefit employers and workers in the long run, but will require a reconfiguration of how education and labor market institutions partner with employers and job seekersnot just a new program. The future of work also requires a mindset shift in which employers play a more active role in cultivating diverse talent, rather than consuming ready-made talent from a narrow pool.

The uneven impacts of the COVID-19 recession represent an opportune time to redesign public institutions and private sector approaches to talent development, address long-standing structural inequalities in the labor market, and desegregate access to economic mobility.

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Desegregating work and learning through earn-and-learn models - Brookings Institution

In 1882, Walt Whitman, the American poet of democracy and nearly everything else in the human spirit, worried that his book Specimen Days, compiled from jottings, diaries, and memorandums written during and after the Civil War, would be read as nothing but a batch of convulsively written reminiscences. But he decided to publish it anyway. The writings were but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times, Whitman admitted. The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness.

The American Civil War was a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. Some 750,000 combatants and other military personnel perished on the battlefield and from disease. Great political, constitutional, and economic transformations followed from the results of the struggle. The American experiment died but was then reborn. The republic tore itself asunder over slavery and conflicting views of the federal Union. After unimaginable slaughter, the United States experienced a second founding of its polity and its constitution. Nearly everything had changed. The Civil War, wrote the southern poet and essayist Robert Penn Warren in 1961, is the countrys felt history, the past lived in the national imagination. It draws Americans, he said, as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of national as well as personal fate. Americans still contemplate its enduring influence in classrooms, in jurisprudence, in scholarship, in elections, and in the public square.

Today, Americans are polarized in a cold civil war. Many core questions of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era remain unresolved: Who is an American? What is equality, and how should it be established and protected? What is the proper relationship between states and the federal government? What is the role of government in shaping society? Is federalism a strength or a weakness?

In November, the United States held a presidential election that inspired record turnout, but many Americans legitimately worry that some of the countrys basic institutions are broken. One political tribe has to fight constant efforts to suppress the right to vote; the other tribe cries voter fraud without evidence. The federal enforcement of voting rights, once a matter of settled law, is now a free-for-all in the courts. The Senate and the Electoral College are undemocratic institutions by any contemporary measure. The Supreme Court is more politicized than at any time in nearly a century. The idea of equality before the law has become as fiercely controversial as it was when it debuted in the Constitution in amendments that followed the Civil War. President Donald Trump turned the White House into a vehicle for authoritarianism and personal corruption, shattering norms and creating a level of chaos unrivaled in U.S. history since the crisis sparked by the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Meanwhile, the ideology of white supremacy, always waiting in the wings of the American consciousness, has experienced a potent and violent resurgence on the political right.

These echoes of Reconstruction abound and will shape the coming era. If there are any lessons that Americans should take from that troubled time, they are that when it comes to protecting basic rights, there is no substitute for federal power, and that in the wake of national crises, healing and justice must be pursued togetherwhich is no small feat.

The most stark and immediate legacy of the Civil War was loss. From his three years of working in hospitals, caring for suffering and dying soldiers, Whitman weighed that loss in anguished terms. Civil War prisons, he wrote, could find comparison only in Dantes pictured hell. He evoked the lonely passing of those slain in battle but left unburied: Somewhere they crawld to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleachd bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet).

Some of the countrys best writers wondered if there could be any meaning at all in the trenches filled with corpses. The writer Ambrose Bierce, a badly wounded veteran of the Union army, was haunted all his life by what he called phantoms of that blood-stained period. Death on the battlefield, he wrote, was not picturesque, it had no tender or solemn sidea dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. The poet Emily Dickinson saw the mounting dead in her imagination: And then I hated Glory / And wished myself were They.

In the roiling contest over the memory of the war that took place in the decades that followed it, most Americans would come to prefer more sentimental narratives: stories of unquestioned valor on both sides, tales of sacrifice and reconciliation in which no one was wrong and everyone could be right. But an assault on the dignity and rights of Black people became the terrible price paid for sectional reunion. A racially segregated society would demand and forge a segregated memory of the struggle that ended slavery.

The fall of the Confederacy and the second founding embodied in the constitutional amendments of the Reconstruction era, which lasted from 1863 to approximately 1877, could not banish racism and neoslavery in the United States or solve the inherent challenges of federalism. In the decades that followed, despite technological and social progress, it remained the case that racial and ethnic strife were often easier to foment and more politically useful than democracy.

In his first annual message to Congress, delivered on December 3, 1861, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln expressed his hope that the Civil War would not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. At that point, he still hoped to limit the Norths aims to preserving the Union, rather than expanding the mission to include ending slavery. Just over three years later, in his second inaugural address, Lincolnwho by then commanded a war machine that officially sought abolitionadmitted that now all knew that slavery was, in fact, the cause of the war. He declared that both sides had looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Then, with a chastened sense of tragedy and firm purpose, he acknowledged that the war had brought about the very revolutions that he and many others had tried to avert. The extended crises that followed, and the lasting markers of what those revolutions meant, are what became known as Reconstruction.

After Confederate forces surrendered in 1865, most of the armies of the United States and the Confederacy disbanded. But varying degrees of military occupation lasted for around three years across much of the South, and in some areas until 1871. As the historian Gregory Downs notes in his book After Appomattox, in the early years of Reconstruction, the federal government enacted an ideologically and spatially ambitious occupation of the conquered South. But the politics of restoring the Union and extending basic human rights to freed slaves became war by other means. Without any blueprint, members of Congress in the Republican Partyin particular, a faction known as the Radical Republicansadopted an aggressive vision of using activist government to remake the South and the rest of the country. The lesson of their efforts was clear: true freedom can be forged and protected only by the state, by law enforcement, and sometimes by military means.

The Radical Republicans, who were ascendant in Washington in 186668, made revolutionary strides for racial equality by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first statutory definition of citizenship rights in U.S. history, and by pushing forward the 14th and 15th Amendments. The 14th Amendment enshrined birthright citizenship and equality before the law in the Constitution, and the 15th Amendment extended voting rights to Black men. The Radical Republicans sought to root out the causes of the Southern rebellion and dismantle its leadership and to create a new political order. They crafted the four Reconstruction Acts, passed in 1867 and 1868, which divided the defeated Confederate states into five military districts and established new governments in all of them. The result was an experiment in multiracial democracy. Black men embraced the right to vote as a sacred act; in 1868, their support was a crucial factor in the victory of the Republican candidate for president, Ulysses S. Grant. More than 1,500 Black men were elected to state and local offices during Reconstruction across the South, and 16 won seats in the U.S. Congress. The Republican regimes in the South, while they lasted, fostered the regions first public schools, democratized political institutions in the former slave states, and in limited ways tried to redistribute property to freed slaves.

This agenda put the Radical Republicans on a collision course with Johnson, who, after replacing the martyred Lincoln, pushed for a lenient vision of Reconstruction based on the protection of states rights, white supremacy, and a decidedly nonrevolutionary approach to the remaking of the federal Union. His slogan was the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is. In practice, this meant that as long as former Confederate states renounced secession and ended slavery (however reluctantly), they could swiftly regain full statehood without having to confer any civil or political rights on freed slaves. Johnson envisioned a postwar order in which former slaves would transition into permanent serfdom, destined for labor but no independent economic life and no place in politics. He resisted radical Reconstruction by vetoing nearly every act passed by the Republicans in Congress. But Republican success in the midterm elections of 1866 gave them a veto-proof legislature, and they overrode most of Johnsons vetoes.

Johnsons continued obstructionism, obstinate personal behavior, and virulent racism led to his impeachment in early 1868. Owing to a complex set of deals and votes, as well as the Republicans use of a law of dubious constitutionality, Johnson was not convicted and removed from office. By the spring of 1868, the Republicans did not want to be tarnished as the party of impeachment (an unpopular position then, after so many years of strife), nor did they want to hurt Grants chances in the election that fall.

That Reconstruction did not ultimately succeed proves only that revolutions, even those firmly grounded in law, always prompt counterrevolutions. By 1870, all of the ex-Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union. But in the South, the Democratic Party revived itself by clinging to an ideology of white supremacy, stoking embittered war memories, and deploying violence through the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. In time, these revanchist forces defeated Reconstruction on the ground. In the 1870s, white Southerners redeemed their states, their societies, and especially their control over the racial order. Several thousand African Americans, as well as some white Republicans, were assaulted, tortured, or murdered, especially when they attempted to vote. In 1873, a paralyzing economic depression hit the country, leading to a national retreat from Reconstruction. Numerous corruption scandals tarnished the Grant administration, limiting its leverage. Meanwhile, as the war receded, the Republican Party began to change, leaving behind its abolitionist, egalitarian roots and aligning itself with big business and railroad interests. By the late 1870s, the Republicans were the party of low taxes and high tariffs.

These political changes were accompanied by demographic and economic shifts. In the wake of the war, immigration surged; three million new immigrants entered the country between 1865 and 1873. In the South, whites violently and successfully opposed efforts to distribute land to freed slaves. By 1868, a new system of tenant farming and sharecropping had emerged. In a cash-poor economy with few sources of credit, millions of former slaves, as well as some poor whites, became mired in dependency, working on halvesgiving half of their crop to a landlord and using the other half to try to feed their families and acquire goods from furnishing merchants, whose extortive practices usually forced farmers into a dead end of debt. By the 1890s, roughly 20 percent of former slaves and their descendants owned some land or other property, but the vast majority possessed no real hope of material independence, as their political liberty was slowly crushed.

Meanwhile, an emerging alliance between big business and the political class began to stifle some of the victories won by the emancipation revolution, as financial scandals distracted Republicans and the country from the cause of equal rights. Railroads, built with ample federal subsidies, became the symbol of the dawning age of American industrial capitalism. By the end of the century, for the first time in U.S. history, nonagricultural workers outnumbered farmers and wage earners outnumbered independent artisans.

As poor Blacks and whites in the South found farming less and less tenable, they moved to cities, and especially new mill towns. With investments from Northern capitalists, textile mills grew steadily all across the former Confederacy. As one North Carolina evangelical preacher shouted, Next to God, what this town needs is a cotton mill! In 1860, the South had some 10,000 mill workers. By 1880, that number had grown to 16,700; by 1900, it was 97,500. In this way, the so-called New South bred not only a system of racial apartheid but also a vulnerable new class of wage earners in an industrializing economy.

Racial strife and economic transformations played out vividly in the American West, as well. The Indian Wars between 1860 and 1890 left a trail of blood and agony across many landscapes; in a sense, the Civil War did not end in 1865. From 1860 to 1864, the Navajos of Arizona fought white incursions into their lands; defeated and starving, their houses and livestock destroyed, they were forced in the Long Walk to a reservation in New Mexico. At the Sand Creek massacre in Colorado in 1864, an entire Cheyenne village was slaughtered by the state militia. The most famous battle of the Indian Wars took place along the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana in June 1876, just before the United States was to celebrate the centennial of its independence. There, Lakotas and Cheyennes, led by Chiefs Rain-in-the-Face, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, surrounded and annihilated 256 U.S. cavalry troops under the command of the Civil War veteran George Custer. But it was a Pyrrhic victory for the Native American people of the Upper Plains, one that provoked a brutal counterstrike. By 1879, 4,000 U.S. troops forced the surrender of the Utes in western Colorado and in effect requisitioned their ancestral lands. In California, white ranchers and farmers often forced Native Americans into captive labor; some practiced Indian hunting, treating the indiscriminate slaughter of Native Americans as a murderous sport. By 1880, 30 years of such violence had left an estimated 4,500 indigenous people dead.

The dispossession of Native American peoples across the West resulted from ecological as well as human conquest. Indigenous groups depended on buffalo in the Great Plains, on sheepherding in the Southwest, and on salmon fisheries in the Northwest. By seizing lands and expanding railroads, white settlers threatened all three livelihoods. In 1820, there were some 25 million buffalo on American soil; by the 1880s, there were just a few hundred. Washington made treaties with tribes but routinely violated them.

Other, less overt forms of dispossession took a toll on Native Americans, as well. The federal government instituted a reservation system and established a reform policy of separating Native American children from their families and educating them in Christian schools, hoping to break their identification with their tribes and prepare them to become property-owning farmers. But the limits on such assimilation were clear: Supreme Court decisions in 1884 and 1886 defined Native Americans as wards of the state, denying them the right to become U.S. citizens and therefore all the protections of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Among all the enactments of Reconstruction, none embodies its lasting significance better than those two amendments, which spun a tenuous web of possibility for the American ideal of equality. Both were products of political compromise; their lack of specificity meant they would be perpetually open to interpretation. But as the historian Eric Foner writes in The Second Founding, ambiguity creates possibilities.... Who determines which of a range of possible meanings is implemented is very much a matter of political power. Indeed, that is the legacy of Reconstructions Second Constitution: a series of never-ending fights over race and federalism.

Today, Americans live in a country forged by Reconstruction and remade again by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the profound social movements that forced their passage. Pluralism and equality were born and reborn in those two revolutions, which took place a century apart. But the events of recent years, especially during the Trump era, serve as a reminder that no change is necessarily permanent and no law can itself protect Americans from their own worst impulses: racism, nativism, authoritarianism, greed. The past few years have revealed the potency of sheer grievance, whether born of genuine economic travail or ludicrous conspiracy theories. It should be clear to all now that history does not end and is not necessarily going to any particular place or bending in an inevitable arc toward justice or anything else.

Some of the convulsions of the Civil War and Reconstruction advanced the American experiment, and some set it back. Whitman worried that the real war will never get in the books and that its undreamd of depths of emotion and the infinite dead would be forgotten. His fear was misplaced: poets have chronicled the war and its toll, scholars have searched and found Whitmans convulsiveness, historians have written its great and terrible story. Americans, however, have not yet solved the most profound questions the era left in its wake, and their country is now in desperate need of another remaking.

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The Reconstruction of America - Foreign Affairs Magazine

Its the holiday season, which should mean that everyone dining out should be even more generous with their tips and extremely kind to the service workers making their restaurant meals possible. But no. This is America in 2020, so that means that as we head into the most wonderful time of the shittiest year in decades, workers are seeing huge dips in tips and a big increase in harassment.

As reported by NPR, a new report from One Fair Wage surveyed about 1,600 workers in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois and Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., and the picture they painted of what life is like on the frontlines of the service industry is grim.

The study found that more than 80% of workers are seeing a decline in tips. This is massively bad for workers who rely on tips to make ends meet, and who must go to these jobs knowing they are at a disproportionately high risk of contracting COVID-19. And on top of that, 40% reported an increase in harassment from customers.

The report is titled Take Off Your Mask So I Know How Much to Tip You, and that says a lot about where we are right now. According to a resident of One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman, The most horrific thing, that honestly all of us who are involved in the study were all blown away by, was the huge increase in hostility and sexual harassment. Because of course, weve found a way to combine some of Americas favorite things in one horrible problem: harassment, capitalist exploitation, and exposing people to the coronavirus into one. Go USA?

The power imbalance between customers and service workers who depend on tips is a huge issue here, with nearly 60% of workers reluctant to enforce safety precautions with those who might tip them. Basically, many feel, if you want your tip you cant tell the jerk at table nine to put his mask up. Or worse, you have to take off your mask so some creep can objectify you!

And yes, its mainly women and gender-nonconforming workers who are bearing the brunt of this harassment. Women across the country who work in restaurants are being asked to remove their masks so that male customers can judge their looks and therefore their tips on that basis, Jayaraman told NPR. And while this is absolutely infuriating, its not at all surprising.

For so many of these workers, they dont have a choice about this because they need those tips to just get to minimum wage. Yes, there are a huge number of states that allow for whats called the Federal Sub-Minimum wage which, according to NPR, allows employers to pay tipped workersas little as $2.13 per hour. Thats horrifying! And this exploitation leads to other exploitation and harassment which now leads to them possibly getting a deadly disease! Which they might then spread to people who force them to smile with their masks off!!!

One Fair Wage sums it up in the report: A legacy of slavery, the subminimum wage for tipped workers persists in 43 states, and has subjected a largely female workforce of servers, bartenders, bussers, and others to economic instability and the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry for decades.

Only seven states have eliminated the federal subminimum wage, and workers in those states report half the harassment. Because we can see a correlation between states that value, ya know, giving human being a living wage and their working condition. This same correlation also probably exists in terms of mask mandates and coronavirus precautions and who is following them. Basically: its not surprising that the people who are going out to eat the most during a global pandemic are also assholes who arent tipping well.

So if youre anywhere this holiday season (or any season!) where you can tip: do it. Whether you are ordering delivery or take out, tip at least 20% right now. At least. I know thats a lot but it could mean everything to the people on the frontlines. If you are for some reason feeling that you must go to a restaurant, tip even more. And never, ever, pandemic or not, tell your waitress to smile.

(via: NPR, image: Pexels)

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Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com

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When Workers Need It the Most, People Are Tipping Less and Harassing More - The Mary Sue

One of President-elect Joe Bidens promises is that the US will recommit itself to defending democracy in the world, together with other democratic allies. The EU, it appears, plans to firmly embrace this proposal, with a particular focus on presenting a united front to China.

Yet criticizing Beijings mass internment of Muslim Uighurs or the Kremlins attempts to manipulate elections draws accusations of hypocrisy at a time when many western governments struggle to convince their citizens that representative democracy remains the most trustworthy way to deliver good governance. If the transatlantic alliance is to hold its own in competition with illiberal authoritarian rivals, its members had better fix their democratic problems at home. But how?

Granted, in the context of a decade of global democratic recession, the US and Europe still look quite respectable on the surface. The US presidential election last month was in many ways a triumph of democracy: Americans saw historic voter turnout, a process that broadly worked and officials and judges who refused to be intimidated. In Europe, populists hoping to exploit the Covid-19 pandemic to stoke fear and polarization have instead seen voters support centrist governments and fact-based policies.

Yet it is also true that the widespread commitment to liberal democracy a foundational value of the west is under fire. The fact that, in some cases, the attacks come from opposition parties within the political system is no cause for complacency.

In Germany, for example, the hard-right Alternative for Germany has been plateauing in the polls at around 10 per cent, and its leadership is mired in shambolic infighting. But it continues to wage a quiet and disciplined campaign to undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions. In France, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, remains a serious contender in the 2022 presidential election.

Elsewhere, in Hungary, Poland and Turkey, the authoritarians are in government and have used their positions to change the rules of governance in order to expand or perpetuate their hold on power. And in the US, the alliances anchor democracy, an outgoing president is claiming against all evidence and with the support of his partys leadership that a massive fraud has denied him an election victory.

This democratic backsliding undercuts the cohesion of Nato at a time when conflicts around the world are heating up. It undermines trust between allies, limits intelligence sharing and reduces the effectiveness of diplomacy, deterrence and operations.

As for the EU, which the incoming US administration (unlike its predecessor) sees as a key provider of diplomatic and economic leverage, its budget is being blocked by Budapest and Warsaw in a fight over the rule of law. All this allows adversaries to exploit the wests divisions and gives them a welcome pretext to dismiss critiques of their own failings.

The transatlantic alliance, born out of the crucible of the second world war and the Holocaust, always had liberal democracy at its heart. For decades, the American security umbrella enabled the conditions for stable representative governance to take root in Europe: functioning states, open market economies, inclusive social contracts. Yet when some Nato member states took authoritarian turns as happened in Greece, Portugal and Turkey others turned a blind eye. Our allies domestic affairs, it was held, were none of our business.

This has to change. The alliance is based on the principle that the security of one member is the security of all. The 2008 financial crisis and its long aftermath taught us a hard lesson: in an interdependent world, the vulnerability of one is the vulnerability of all. And security today begins with resilient domestic governance.

Americans, Canadians and Europeans must now help each other think through how their own democracies can be made fit for purpose in an age of great power competition and deepening global networks. State institutions must be able to do their job providing public goods effectively and free from political interference or corruption. Economies must be made fairer, to minimize the kind of structural inequity that fuels popular grievances. Social and racial injustices, as well as the toxic legacy of slavery and colonialism, must be tackled head-on.

In short, we must live up to our own principles again. Then, and only then, can we offer others advice about democracy.

Excerpt from:

The West must live up to its own principles on democracy - Brookings Institution

I am writing in response to Peter Bergers recent commentary on the moral consequences of the Trump presidency. While I agree with his belief Too many of us still fail to recognize how dire our circumstance is, I was surprised in the middle of a moral argument to see his attacks on the Squad and on the progressive movement.

The Squad is made up of four women elected to the House of Representatives in 2018: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan (all easily won reelection in 2020) and will soon be joined by Congresswoman-elect Cori Bush, who won a historic election in the state of Missouri. Bergers indictment of these women is, They dont appear to understand what it means to be a fraction of a fraction of a nation.

A white man telling Latina, Indian, Muslim and Black women they dont understand what it means to be a minority, is absurd. I doubt he would have said the same about the congressional Black caucus when they were only a handful of newly elected congressmen led by Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and their fight for civil rights. Nor would he say that about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and their upstart group of suffragettes who fought for, and eventually won, the right to vote in public elections. Margaret Mead, the renowned anthropologist, said it well: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. The Squad, growing in numbers and influence, is one such group, and are viewed by many as the future of progressive politics in America. As such, they are considered to be a threat by Republicans and by status quo/corporate/mainstream (choose your own adjective) Democrats.

Equally troubling is Bergers judgment on the progressive movement that these women represent, calling it arrogant, unrealistic and doctrinaire. Arrogant is not how I would describe Cori Bush (registered nurse, pastor, previously homeless single mother and activist) who, after being tossed from a Trump rally in 2016, won on her third try, the Democratic nomination over a 10-term opponent. Bush went on to a landslide victory to become the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives from the state of Missouri. Hardly arrogant, I respect these women for their determination, hard work and their vision for a better future.

Real leaders, in order to establish and pursue higher ideals, often ignore accusations of being unrealistic. For example, one might also fault our small group of original Founding Fathers as unrealistic when they wrote: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These high ideals were far from the reality of the time, just as the ideals of liberty and justice for all are still not a reality for too many Americans.

As for doctrinaire, Berger claims to be talking in practical terms about this world. In my view, nothing is more practical in dealing with the worlds problems than the agenda set forth by progressive leaders: environmental, economic, social and racial justice. Our much-hailed doctrine, the U.S. Constitution, cites as a primary purpose of government to promote the general Welfare of its citizens. Progressive social programs that support the well-being of people (nutrition, shelter, basic health care, education, a living wage) are human rights consistent with the highest ideals of decency and democracy. Progressives have exactly the right idea, a 21st-Century Economic Bill of Rights for all of us!

Bergers analogy of not falling off the roof is a good one. We might well have avoided a bad fall, but we dont have to continue to live on the edge of the roof. Bergers historic example is also apt. We could have ended the Civil War and continued to allow slavery, but the status quo was not the solution then, nor is it today. Progressives do recognize how dire our circumstances are and have a plan to address the problems created by the status quo.

I, for one, believe that together, the Squad and the progressive movement represent our best chance to cause the arc of our democracy to bend ultimately toward justice for all.

David Mook lives in Poultney.

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Mook: Response to Berger | Commentary | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

Todays Evening Brief is brought to you by Talent Fits Here, a campaign created by the Canadian Construction Association. Canadas construction industry is full of innovation and opportunity. Lets help more Canadians discover a rewarding career. Learn more.

Good evening to you.

Do you see that? After nine months of masks, hand sanitizer, distancing and restrictions, there is finally a light at the end of what has been a very long and dark tunnel. There was word today that Pfizers vaccine against COVID-19 has been approved in Canada, and the first shots could be given to Canadians as early as the middle of next week. Health Canada authorized the vaccine this morning. Pfizers shot, which it created with the company BioNTech, is the first to be approved in Canada, and Canada is the third country in the world to give it the green light, after the United Kingdom and Bahrain.

This is a critical milestone in our fight against COVID-19 and in our efforts to provide every Canadian with access to a vaccine, Dr. Supriya Sharma, Health Canadas chief medical adviser, told reporters. Canadians can have confidence in our rigorous review process, and that the vaccine was authorized only after a thorough assessment of the evidence demonstrated that it met health Canadas strict standards for safety, efficacy, and quality.

Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who is overseeing the vaccines distribution, said Pfizer is shipping the first of 249,000 doses that Canada expects to receive before the end of the year on Friday. Charlie Pinkerton reports.

Not everyone will get this vaccine, however. Its only approved for people over 16. Heres why. And if todays news has spurred you to burn your mask in a sanitizer fuelled blaze, you might want to hold off for just a wee bit.

Across the pond, Britains medicine regulator has advised that people with a history of significant allergic reactions do not get the Pfizer vaccine after two people reported adverse effects on the first day of rollout. Thats something Canadian officials are watching closely.

Its really important to say that as we monitor the vaccines, adverse event reports will come up, Sharma told reporters. We are always looking for any additional side effects. And thats why we continue to monitor. But it is still a drug, still a vaccine, and there are potential risks even if they are rare.

Margaret Keenan isnt feeling any side effects. One day after the 90-year-old British grandmother became the first in the world outside a trial to receive the vaccine, she said shes feeling great.It has all been such a whirlwind and everything hasnt really sunk in yet, she said. I feel great and Im so pleased to be able to go home and to spend some quality time with my family.

As part of its dive into how pandemic response funds have been spent, CBC News reported today that two Ontario long-term care providers that received more than $157 million in federal and provincial COVID-19 relief while doling out $74 million in dividends for shareholders this year. Meanwhile, more than 480 residents and staff at Extendicare Inc. and Sienna Senior Living Inc. homes have died.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland warned yesterday that companies that have tapped into the governments wage subsidy program are not to use that money to pay dividends or bonuses. I want to emphasize for any companies that may be listening, that the wage subsidy must be used to pay workers, she told the House finance committee . That is very, very clear and we expect companies to comply with that. To date, the governments lips have been sealed when it comes to revealing which groups and businesses are benefiting from some of its highest-spending programs. CBC News has that story as well.

Still in Ottawa, MPs from multiple parties are making a renewed push to get the federal government to recognize Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day. That day, in 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act came into force, ushering in the end of slavery throughout the British Empire. It included Canada, where slavery had existed for more than 200 years, and there were still a small number of enslaved persons. Jolson Lim reports.

Back on the topic of money, Quebec Premier Franois Legault said today he doesnt expect the premiers request for a $28-billion annual increase to the Canada Health Transfer will be accepted at their meeting with the prime minister tomorrow. But he is hoping that the money which Ottawa gives to provinces and territories to help them pay for health care will arrive before the next election. We understand thats a lot of money, said Legault, whos also the chair of the Council of the Federation that represents Canadas 13 provinces and territories. He told iPolitics judging by their revenue streams, provinces and territories will have deficits that are a lot larger than the federal deficit.

Legault is also threatening Quebecers with immediate fines of up to $6,000 if they throw house parties, refuse to wear masks or breaking physical distancing guidelines. He also says his government will follow the (COVID) situation in the coming days, to evaluate if stricter lockdown measures are needed. Thats from Kevin Dougherty.

The leader of Ontarios NDP wants MPPs to return to Queens Park after the Progressive Conservative government on Tuesday moved to adjourn the fall session two days early. At this moment, when so many folks are in crisis and they need their government to step up and help them, (Premier) Doug Ford is literally calling it quits. Hes throwing in the towel, Andrea Horwath told reporters. I am calling for the legislature to return.

While making her case for MPPs to return to Queens Park, Horwath zeroed in on Tuesdays Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO) report, which found that the government has been sitting on $12 billion that could be put to use fighting the pandemic. Theres important work we can and must do right now to invest that $12 billion in COVID-19 funding that Doug Ford has been keeping from the people of Ontario, she said. We should be working to stop the spread of the virus (and) helping people and businesses stay afloat. Iain Sherriff-Scott reports.

A day after implementing much tighter restrictions to try and curb the spread of COVID-19, Premier Jason Kenney is rejecting criticism he waited too long to do so. He says that kind of talk is Alberta bashing. Actually, wed call it Jason Kenney bashing, and that comes with the territory as premier where the buck stops with you.

In other news, the government introduced legislation this afternoon to implement Canadas newly signed transitional trade agreement with the United Kingdom that will keep trade flowing after it leaves the European Union at the end of the year.

Tomorrow, the government is expected to table legislation that will bring changes to the Canada Elections Act. As CTV reports, Elections Canada had recommended a series of amendments so that the agency can make voting more accessible and safe should Canadians have to go to the polls during the pandemic.

South of the border, things are getting frothy. As the Canadian Press reports, the U.S. is in a bit of a lather, formally accusing Canada of unfairly limiting the ability of American dairy producers to sell their products north of the border.

And, look whos back. Like a boomerang, former MP Maxime Bernier is eyeing his old seat. The Leader of the Peoples Party of Canada has announced he will be running in Beauce, Que., the riding he held from 2006 to 2019. He lost to Conservative Richard Lehoux in the last election. He also lost a bid for a seat in York Centre in a byelection in October. In a fundraising letter announcing his bid to return to the House of Commons, Bernier said he has considered all of my options and he has decided to return to his political home turf of Beauce.

Our defeat in Beauce last year was a discouraging upset, he notes in the announcement. Today, we begin work and planning for the campaign in Beauce. Its going to take everything we have to beat the corrupt establishment.

In The Sprout: A familiar face expected back at USDA

In The Drilldown: Global temperatures will rise by over 3 C: UNEP report

In Other Headlines:

Liberal MP and doctor says hell vote against assisted death bill (CBC)Mink at B.C. farm test positive for virus that causes COVID-19 in humans (CTV)Follow the COVID-19 rules or youll be fined, Quebec Premier Legault warns (CBC)Military was warned of reservists hard-right online ties by allied intelligence agency (CBC)Pornhub bans user uploads after abuse allegations (BBC)Canadian envoy says Kovrig, Spavor healthy despite being in Chinese prison for 730 days (Globe and Mail)Trudeaus half-brother is an anti-vaxxer, bitcoin entrepreneur and (affectionate) critic of the PM (Postmedia)Global Affairs objected to Canadian military decision to cancel training with Chinas Peoples Liberation Army (Globe and Mail)

Internationally:

Although its gotten the nod from regulators north of the border, officials at the FDA may not make a decision about authorizing Pfizers COVID-19 vaccine until next week. Peter Marks, the director of the FDA division overseeing vaccines, said today that a decision would come in days to a week after an agency advisory panel meeting tomorrow. More from The Hill.

Elsewhere, federal regulators asked for Facebook to be ordered to divest its Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services as the U.S. government and 48 states and districts accused the company of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors. The antitrust lawsuits were announced by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Its really critically important that we block this predatory acquisition of companies and that we restore confidence to the market, James said during a press conference announcing the lawsuit. The Associated Press reports.

U.S. president-elect Joe Bidens son Hunter said today that his tax affairs are under investigation, putting a renewed spotlight on the questions about his financial dealings that dogged his fathers campaign. As CNN reports, investigators have been examining multiple financial issues, including whether he and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China, according to two people briefed on the probe.

The Kicker:

Finally tonight, the Bad Sex In Fiction awards have been cancelled. Set up in 1993 by the Literary Review, the annual prize honours the most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.

But this being 2020, the judges figured weve suffered enough already: The public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well.

True enough.

On that note, have a great night.

More from iPolitics

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Evening Brief: Light at the end of the COVID tunnel - iPolitics.ca

Besides a raging Covid-19 pandemic that has seen Indonesia produce the second highest confirmed death toll in Asia after India, widespread opposition to President Joko Jokowi Widodos recent Omnibus Law has dominated public discourse in Indonesia for months.

The government claims that the controversial law, which entered into force on 5 November and is officially known as the Job Creation Law, will help provide legal certainty for investors by streamlining more than 70 existing legal provisions into a single piece of legislation. Relaxing labour laws, cutting bureaucratic red tape and making the procurement process easier (especially when it comes to land), will boost investment, the government claims a vital requirement as Indonesia attempts to wrench itself out of a pandemic-driven recession.

However, a coalition of labour, environmental and civil society groups have vehemently opposed the law, saying that it would impede Indonesias ability to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, particularly in relation to Goal 8 on decent work and sustainable economic growth, as well as Goals 13 to 15 concerning climate action and environmental protection. Days after the law was ratified on 5 October 2020, civil society held massive protests and rallies in opposition to the bill, resulting in thousands of arrests.

Trade unions say that the Omnibus Law degrades workers rights and will eliminate the comfort of working and social security, according to Elly Rosita Silaban, president of the Confederation of All Indonesian Trade Union (KSBSI).

As well as removing certain protections against outsourcing, the law cuts leave entitlements and social security provisions for many workers. It weakens minimum wage provisions, extends maximum overtime hours and allows employers to keep workers on temporary contracts for an indefinite period of time, amongst other contentious measures.

Campaigners also say that by scrapping existing environmental protections, the new law poses a serious threat to Indonesias carbon emissions reduction targets. For example, over 60 per cent of Indonesias carbon emissions are said to come from the land use change, forest and peat fires. The rollback of protections laid out by the new law could open the door to unrestrained logging and an upsurge in coal mining. Indonesia is a major coal exporter and coal powers around 60 per cent of the countrys electricity. Indonesia is also one of the few countries in the world to have new coal plants under construction in 2020. Anything that facilitates increased deforestation and more coal mining does not bode well for Indonesias pledge to cut carbon emissions by 29-41 per cent by 2030 as part of its commitment to the Paris Agreement, and to phase-out coal completely by 2040.

The government is also under fire for the drafting process, which took less than six months. The government says that it expedited the bill to help increase employment during the Covid pandemic. But legal experts have deemed the process as flawed for rushing through wide-reaching legal changes with minimal social dialogue or public participation.

While deregulation may increase the number of jobs, the new law will also increase the informalisation of workers, leading to longer working hours while making it easier for employers to sack workers. Job opportunities might be increased in MSMEs [micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises], but the wages and protection will not be sufficient, says International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID) chairperson Dian Kartika Sari.

Raynaldo G. Sembiring, executive director of the Jakarta-based Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), says that there will definitely be an impact on our ability to achieve the SDGs. He tells Equal Times that the academic paper that formed the basis of the Omnibus Law only briefly mentions the environment and fails to mention anything relating to sustainable development, let alone the SDGs.

What the law does, according to some analysts, is follow much of the blueprint set out by the Chinese model of development. Indonesias policymakers view that there is much to learn from the Chinese model of strong state control and export-oriented industrialisation, wrote Jefferson Ng, senior analyst at the Indonesia Programme of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, in his opinion piece for The Jakarta Post in March this year. The Chinese model is highly effective, however, it was also marked by environmental damage, weak labour protections and the pitfalls of over-centralisation, he added.

Alarmed by the Omnibus Law proposals, in October 36 global investors managing approximately US$4.1 trillion in assets published an open letter to the Indonesian authorities, expressing concern over the proposed deregulation of environmental protections.

It said: we fear that proposed changes to the permitting framework, environmental compliance monitoring, public consultation and sanctioning systems will have severe environmental, human rights and labor-related repercussions that introduce significant uncertainty and could impact the attractiveness of Indonesian markets.

In response to this letter, Indonesias environment and forestry minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar defended the law, saying it was designed to encourage investment whilst safeguarding the environment. She wrote that a permanent moratorium on the development of primary forests and peatlands means that no new permits will be issued for the areas included in the moratorium map, spanning more than 66 million hectares.

But Sembiring of the ICEL remains unconvinced. He says the simplification and acceleration of business licenses will have a lot of impact on the environment, as well as peoples access to public information, participation and justice in environmental and land disputes. We can already see there will be many problems, not only in terms of pollution damage, but perhaps also future problems that have the potential to trigger a conflict with the community, he said, referring to possible evictions due to development projects. He also warns that the current requirement that every region in Indonesia should have a minimum threshold of 30 per cent forest coverage will be eliminated by the new law.

Indonesias Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs said in a press statement issued on 2 October that foreign investments into the country that are labour-intensive in nature have been more constrained by labour problems, citing Indonesias large standards of minimum wages and high cost of severance pay in case of termination of employment.

The ministry highlighted that, on average, Indonesias monthly wage is around US$170, while in Vietnam workers typically earn around US$150 a month. It also suggested that severance pay in Indonesia covers an average of 52 weeks of work, compared to 32 weeks in neighbouring Thailand and just 17 weeks in Malaysia.

However, labour unions accuse the government of legalising modern slavery, particularly in reference to new outsourcing regulations that were previously limited to five sectors but will now be extended to all kinds of work according to Said Iqbal, president of the Indonesian Trade Union Confederation (KSPI), speaking at a press conference held via Zoom on 24 October.

He also said that if outsourcing was freely implemented, there would be no job security for Indonesian labourers, who could find themselves being outsourced for life.

In October, President Widodo said that those who are opposed to the Job Creation Law were welcome to file a judicial review to the Constitutional Court, which could result in a revocation of the law. However, this outcome is highly unlikely given how much political capital President Widodo has spent on the project. This hasnt stopped KSPI and KSBSI from filing a judicial review, for which they are currently awaiting the outcome.

The discovery of various typos in final draft of the Job Creation Law and changes made even after the law was ratified in October caused an uproar on Indonesian social media and has even led some activists to question the validity of the law. In a statement released on 3 November, the Jakarta-based Indonesian Center for Law and Policy Studies (PSHK) said that the law still contains formulation errors that have an impact on the substance of the articles, which needs to be interpreted as the fruit of a forced regulatory formation process that sacrifices the principles of transparency, participation and accountability.

It continues: Editorial errors and bad practices in the process of its formation are clear evidence for the Constitutional Court to state that the Job Creation Law is formally flawed so that it must be declared not legally binding in its entirety. While a decision on this still needs to be made, Indonesias workers and its environment will continue to face a less secure and sustainable future.

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Why the Omnibus Law is not only an assault on workers' rights but also on Indonesia's SDG progress - Equal Times