THE RAW sewage from Pamela Rushs toilet travels through a straight plastic pipe directly into the backyard of her dilapidated mobile home. It smells badly in hot weather. Mosquitoes swarm and the children are forbidden from playing there. But when it rains, the stuff pools and it is unavoidable. Because the soil in Lowndes County, Alabama, where Ms Rush lives, sits atop a relatively impermeable base of limestone, a proper public sanitation system for the sparsely populated place would be expensive. Sanitation is left to private systems, which poor residents like Ms Rush cannot afford. Foul-smelling flooded lawns are a common sight. They are also the reason that hookworma parasitic disease transmitted largely by walking barefoot on open sewagehas been detected among the residents there. It is a disease most often encountered in developing countries. Yet decades after it was thought to be eradicated, it can be found in America, again.

Lowndes County is part of the Black Beltthe swathe of land named for its fertile topsoil which produced vast amounts of cotton on the back of slave labour and, later, sharecropping, and where emancipated black workers farmed rented land. Despite all the wealth that was extracted from the fields, those who remain there today have little; the median household income is a mere $29,785 and the official poverty rate is 30%. Three-quarters of residents are black, and they are nearly eight times as likely to be poor as whites in the county. Across America, black people remain disproportionately poor. More than 20% live in poverty, twice the rate of whites. After a moderate amount of progress was erased by the Great Recession, median black household wealth nationwide is one-tenth that of white households, just as it was 50 years ago.

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The mobile house in which Ms Rush lives today has mouldy cupboards, an unusable bathtub and holes plugged with many ingenious patches. Her income is meagre$770 a month in disability benefit, $129 for each of her two children in child support. Her ten-year-old daughter has health problems that require a visit to a specialist in Birmingham 100 miles away every three monthsa difficult journey without a car.

In one county in South Dakota, life expectancy is lower than in Sudan

While on a tour of the region, Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, remarked that he had never seen such conditions in the rich world. But it is seldom a concern of candidates for political office. Since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, poverty alleviation has hardly been at the centre of either partys political campaigns. Part of that is because of the brutal maths of vote-getting. As income declines, so does the propensity to turn out at the ballot box.

The problem is more than black and white, however. About 22% of Hispanics live in poverty. Yet, though many of them are poor when they immigrate to America, successive generations are likely to be less so. A study of tax-returns data showed that poor Hispanics, especially men, have much higher mobility than poor blacks. Asians, too, have a better record of moving up. Though pockets of poverty remainamong those born in Bangladesh and Cambodia, for examplerates are the lowest of any race, at 11.9%. Native Americans fare the worst. On some reservations, the estimated poverty rate is 52%, and 60% among children. In one county in South Dakota, life expectancy is lower than in Sudan.

Working out what issues are caused by history and what are a result of current policies also contributes to the analytical paralysis of policymakers. The yawning gap in poverty levels of blacks and whites partly results from the centuries of discrimination faced by black Americans before the civil-rights era. Macroeconomic shifts unrelated to race, like deindustrialisation, have also damaged black families and livelihoods.

Some modern conservatives are putting forward solutions to poverty that go beyond public-funding cuts and private charity. These still tend to be studiously race-neutral. Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute has pitched more substantial wage subsidies as the heart of a new conservative anti-poverty agenda. After reforms in 1996, the safety net has already become more centred on workfare (such as the earned-income tax credit) than welfare. But many Republicans continue to see welfare as a poverty trap wrought from overreliance on the safety net, however patchy.

Looking at the same issues, progressives within the Democratic Party arrive at a very different set of answers. The failure is not personal, but of public policy, because of slavery, mass incarceration or redlining that denied mortgages to residents of minority neighbourhoods. This has led to the more left-wing members of the party to call for reparations to black people.

Yet reparations are also a political third rail. Even todays crop of Democratic presidential candidates, who have been drifting left in almost every other respect, have shied away from endorsing the idea, though some have pledged to appoint a committee to study the issue. The clearest explanation for this comes from Martin Gilens of Princeton University, author of Why Americans Hate Welfare. It found that overly racialised attitudesthe idea that white money was going to non-white peopleprevented widespread support of means-tested programmes. In large measure, Americans hate welfare because they view it as a programme that rewards the undeserving poor, Mr Gilens writes.

Implicit benefits for minorities are difficult enough to create and maintain. An explicitly race-based programme such as reparations would attract even more condemnationand one sure to fail without a Democratic president and supermajorities in Congress. In all likelihood, the reduction of racial disparities in poverty will have to be done through race-neutral means. As policymakers grapple with how to do that, enterprise and philanthropy are trying to fill the gap.

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Poverty in America continues to affect people of colour most - The Economist

By Brandon Showalter, CP Reporter | Saturday, September 28, 2019 Jacqueline Rivers, Harvard lecturer on sociology, speaks at Truro Anglican Church in Fairfax, Virginia, on September 21, 2019. | Karen Rummel

FAIRFAX, Va. The United States has conducted a 400-year experiment on the black family and it's incumbent upon Christians to respond to the ongoing crisis, according to a Christian sociologist from Harvard University.

In a lecture titled "America: A four-hundred year experiment on the black family" held in the sanctuary at Truro Anglican Church on Sept. 21, Jacqueline Rivers, a sociologist at Harvard University, exhorted the hundreds in attendance from dozens of local churches to engage the social crises that have afflicted black Americans with all of the available tools, scientific data and the eternal truths of God's Word.

Rivers' lecture was given in commemoration of both the launch of the Truro Institute and the 400th anniversary of the slave trade in North America, which began in the Anglican colony of Jamestown.

"We are people of the Spirit. We are Christians. We serve Jesus. And for that reason, the question of the family is all the more important. It's important because marriage really is an illustration of the relationship not only between Yahweh and Israel but also between Jesus and the Church," Rivers said.

"In these days when marriage is under so much fire from so many different directions, it's important for us in the church to engage," she said, "because if the Holy Spirit is going to use us to address the problem, we need to be well-equipped and understand what the problem is."

Offering a distinctly sociological analysis, the Harvard lecturer noted that the problems experienced in the black family are not unique to the black family. But as a class of people, African Americans have experienced specific cultural and structural abuses and injustices that no other group in the United States has, she stressed.

Between 1970 and 2010 there was a significant decline in married black women between the ages of 40 and 44, she said. In 1970 the figure was 61 percent; by 2010 it had dropped to 37 percent. While not married, many of those women are still having babies, leading to a rise in out-of-wedlock birthrates.

When the late Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan issued his report,The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for which he was widely pilloried, she noted, only 25 percent of black children were born outside of wedlock. By 2005, the figure had risen to approximately 70 percent, a statistic that has remained steady ever since. The latest figures Rivers could find showed that the number had decreased slightly, to 69 percent. This phenomenon has contributed to the ongoing breakdown of families, fueling the scourge of children being raised without both parents, and widening the gap between the races.

"The problem is that this is not just about conforming to some sort of old-fashioned values or to some white cultural stereotypes, or even what the Gospel says. They are actually, in addition to the spiritual ramifications, real tangible effects in the lives of black people, black families because of this retreat from marriage," Rivers said.

Such a retreat from marriage has, in part, yielded increased poverty rates across the board but especially among blacks. And the earnings gap between married blacks and single black women is not closed when things like the earned income tax credit is taken into consideration. The breakdown in marriage in the black community pre-dates recent decades, Rivers elaborated. Enslaved black people were not allowed to be legally married; their purportedly Christian slaveholders forbade them from doing what the Bible commanded as it pertains to marriage.

By forbidding marriage, the man's role as husband and father was severely undermined as he was not in a position where he could provide and support his family and neither parent could protect and safeguard their children. Nor could men protect their wives from the slaveholders who would rape them, she explained.

"And this was in an age when men had the unchallenged role of protector and provider. What made this worse was that in slave marriages, the couple would not even live on the same plantation,"Rivers said.

The picture of what life was like from that era which exists in the imaginations of many Americans comes from movies such as "Gone with the Wind" where thousands of slaves dwelled on a large plantation. But the truth is that most enslaved persons lived on small holdings.

Very often there wouldn't be anyone for a woman to marry. Enslaved Africans did not want to marry a blood relative, so that then further limited the people the women had to choose from. Very often, slave marriages were between men and women on different plantations and husbands were called "broad" husbands. They required a pass from their slaveholder in order to visit their wives, which was allowed only on the whim of their master. At most, they only saw their wives a few times per week, which encouraged infidelity, especially among men.

"And that continues to be a major problem in the black family even now," she said.

Taken together with masters raping the enslaved women, the black family was fundamentally unstable in light of their circumstances. Masters could decide at any point to sell away a child, a mother, a father, intentionally rupturing the familial structure for their own economic benefit. There was an internal slave trade in the United States after the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which meant that, to some extent, slaveholders in the mid-Atlantic states were likely to treat enslaved people like breeders and less likely to respect the common law marriages between enslaved men and women, Rivers added.

Thus, key aspects of marriage, exclusivity and permanence, were deliberately undermined for black people. Yet despite this, deep familial bonds were formed among the enslaved. Immediately after the Emancipation Proclamation, many common law marriages were soon formalized.

Further contributing to the disparities between white and black families were government policies that disproportionately favored whites over blacks decades after slavery ended. FDR's New Deal, for example, brought good-paying employment and economic benefits and relative stability to whites, but given the nature of jobs they had at the time, blacks were denied key benefits such as unemployment insurance and Social Security. Because economic programs were administered locally, southern officials would deny black people the benefits they were entitled to under the law, giving the white middle class a significant advantage. Similar tactics were employed with the G.I. bill, limiting housing, occupational training, education for black men.

"All of this further undermines marriage," Rivers emphasized, "because by the middle of the 20th century you find that black men are earning less than a living wage, and that they're not able to take care of their families, which makes for angry wives, makes for disappointed and bitter children, for men who are plagued with shame and guilt."

As much as the Moynihan report was derided, in part because it contains offensive language, the central argument the senator made was that a material difference between middle class black families and poor black families was that black men did not have the type of jobs they needed to take care of a family. Moynihan was arguing for that kind of employment for such disadvantaged black men, she said.

Ever since, employment opportunities for men, especially black men with limited education, have only worsened. If jobs have not been shipped overseas they have been replaced by automation. As a result, poor black men have become less marriageable.

"[Black] women look at them and say, we have a saying, 'I can do bad all by myself,'" Rivers said.

Yet another scourge that has devastated the black community is mass incarceration, she continued. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of incarcerated persons in the U.S. rose from approximately 300,000 to over 1 million. In the 100 years before 1980, the number of prisoners had only increased by 285,000.

"Something's really broke," she said, referencing data from Pew, "and it has been much, much worse for black men than for white men. And the men who have really suffered, both black and white and Hispanic, are men with less than a high school education."

Blacks comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population yet represent 33 percent of the prison population. And when it comes to drug convictions, they are convicted and receive prison sentences at disproportionate rates compared to whites, deepening the structural issues.

"This is not just about who is doing what. This is about racial injustice in the justice system," she said, citing changes in three strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentencing where judges no longer had discretion to consider extenuating circumstances and the way in which the government prosecuted the war on drugs.

Blacks have been much easier targets since much of the drug trade they participated in took place on the streets and were thus more visible, whereas whites have tended to use and trade drugs behind closed doors. Disproportionately heavier sentences were given to users of crack cocaine, mostly blacks, than powder cocaine, mostly whites, she added.

With so many black men incarcerated, they were not available to be married, she said, returning to her main point about the retreat from marriage.

"One-third of all poorly educated black men will be incarcerated over the course of their lives and it changes the trajectory of a man's life," she added.

Rivers urged those in attendance to speak out against mandatory minimum statutes, call for public policy that turns such laws around, and consider alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders.

"When you incarcerate nonviolent offenders, what we're doing is putting them in the company of people who cause them to move further into crime," Rivers said.

She concluded her remarks on a hopeful note, stressing that though decades of unaddressed structural problems have harmed many blacks, "with the right social policy levers and church-based action, it's possible to begin the long, slow process of shifting marriage patterns in the black community and in the nation."

Rivers is a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy of the J. F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Kennedy School. She's also the executive director of the Seymour Institute on Black Church and Policy Studies, which seeks to create and promote a philosophical, political and theological framework for a pro-poor, pro-life, pro-family movement within the ecumenical black church, both domestically and internationally.

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How to address America's '400-year experiment on the black family': scholar - The Christian Post

Wage slavery is a term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. It is usually used to refer to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[1][2]

The term "wage slavery" has been used to criticize exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops)[3] and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.[4][5][6] The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character"[7] not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution.[8][9][4]

Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis.[10] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery,[11][12] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North.[13][14] The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful and appropriate. According to Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase".[15]

The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism.[16][17][18][19] Historically, some labor organizations and individual social activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.[5][18]

The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world.[21] In ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves".[10]

In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:[12]

The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him... what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune... These men... [have] the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need.... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?

The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery).[9][22] Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were "free but in name the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off.[23][24] This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time".[25][26] In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself".[27]

Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious.[28] They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed".[29] Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment.[30] The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job.[31] However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other".[32][33] Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper".[34]

Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century.[5] In 1869, The New York Times described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South".[30] E. P. Thompson notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right".[16] A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women".[17] This perspective inspired the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 which had the "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions the protection of the workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society" when the unions "take over the whole industry of the country".[18] "Research has shown", summarises William Lazonick, "that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop".[19]

The use of the term "wage slave" by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836.[35] The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers' self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages.[5]

Karl Marx described capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy because it is based on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented, or alienated in a class society). According to Friedrich Engels:[36][37]

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.

Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery:

According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky, workers themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage slavery. Chomsky noted that the 19th-century Lowell Mill Girls, without any reported knowledge of European Marxism or anarchism, condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newly-emerging industrial system and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self", maintaining that "those who work in the mills should own them".[43][44] They expressed their concerns in a protest song during their 1836 strike:

Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as IShould be sent to the factory to pine away and die?Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,For I'm so fond of liberty,That I cannot be a slave.[45]

Defenses of both wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature arguing that hierarchy and a social system's particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the status quo is naively utopian and will result in more oppressive conditions.[46] Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their respective systems created a lot of wealth and prosperity. In some sense, both did create jobs, and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave-owners risked losing money by buying chattel slaves who later became ill or died; while bosses risked losing money by hiring workers (wage slaves) to make products that did not sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. The "rags to riches" story occasionally comes to pass in capitalism; the "slave to master" story occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become business owners, self-employed, or slave-owners themselves.[47] Thus critics of the concept of wage slavery do not regard social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, as a redeeming factor.[48]

Anthropologist David Graeber has noted that historically the first wage-labor contracts we know about whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city-states in the Indian Ocean were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money and the slaves another, with which to maintain their living expenses). According to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or in Brazil. C. L. R. James (1901-1989) argued that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution first developed on slave plantations.[49]Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern management to the slave plantation".[50]

The usage of the term "wage slavery" shifted to "wage work" at the end of the 19th century as groups like the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor shifted to a more reformist, trade union ideology instead of worker's self-management. Much of the decline was caused by the rapid increase in manufacturing after the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent dominance of wage labor as a result. Another factor was immigration and demographic changes that led to ethnic tension between the workers.[5]

As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out:

[I]ncreased centralization of production... declining wages... [an] expanding... labor pool... intensifying competition, and... [t]he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a critique that referred to all [wage] work as slavery and avoided demands for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding... co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages.[5]

Some anti-capitalist thinkers claim that the elite maintain wage slavery and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry,[51][52] educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, state violence, fear of unemployment,[53] and a historical legacy of exploitation and profit accumulation/transfer under prior systems, which shaped the development of economic theory. Adam Smith noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low and have the upper hand in conflicts between workers and employers:[54]

The interest of the dealers... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... [They] have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.

The concept of wage slavery could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like Gerrard Winstanley from the radical Christian Diggers movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness, that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself".[55]

Aristotle stated that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)",[56] often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind".[57] Cicero wrote in 44 BC that "vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery".[10] Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine;[58] Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism;[9] and the Distributist school of thought within the Catholic Church.

To Karl Marx and anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state. This class situation rested primarily on:

And secondarily on:

Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States.[60] Fascism was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Italy and Germany increased after the fascists took power.[61][62]

Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like Buenaventura Durruti, to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.[63]

According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book The Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is".[64] Because they explore human authority and obedience, both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.[65]

According to research[citation needed], modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to:

Thus job loss entails the loss of this identity.[66]

Erich Fromm argued that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high wages) a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a state of being (creativity, love, sadness, taste, sight and the like) with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. In his view, the state of being flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self, created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a state of being.[67]

Investigative journalist Robert Kuttner analyzed the work of public-health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall about modern conditions of work and concludes that "to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally". Under wage labor, "a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours" while "epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work".[68]

Wage slavery and the educational system that precedes it "implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption... in spite of... good intentions... [Leadership means] power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his... [and the] order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men'... In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy". For the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader "sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion".[69] Wage slavery "implies erosion of the human personality... [because] some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows".[70]

In 19th-century discussions of labor relations, it was normally assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of social factors that maintain the hegemony of the employer class.[42][71]

In an account of the Lowell Mill Girls, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote that generously high wages were offered to overcome the degrading nature of the work:

At the time the Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was the lowest among the employments of women.... She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. In the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed about. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation.[72]

In his book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to "ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interestsor skewers the disfavored ones" in the absence of overt control:

The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.[73]

Parecon (participatory economics) theory posits a social class "between labor and capital" of higher paid professionals such as "doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers and others" who monopolize empowering labor and constitute a class above wage laborers who do mostly "obedient, rote work".[74]

The terms "employee" or "worker" have often been replaced by "associate". This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by labor movements. Billboards as well as television, Internet and newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.[75]

Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled workers in developed countries particularly in the growing service sector indicate that the more workers depend on low wages and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign unremunerative motivation.[76] Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee's willingness to feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally associated with job-switching or union activity.[76]

At the same time, employers in the service industry have justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g. just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs and the like).[77][78]

In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking"[79] were devised employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".[80]

Some social activists objecting to the market system or price system of wage working historically have considered syndicalism, worker cooperatives, workers' self-management and workers' control as possible alternatives to the current wage system.[4][5][6][18]

The American philosopher John Dewey believed that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business".[81] Thomas Ferguson has postulated in his investment theory of party competition that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state.[82]

Noam Chomsky has argued that political theory tends to blur the 'elite' function of government:

Modern political theory stresses Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of persons with property,...

[In] representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain [] there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly and critically [] the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere [] That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.[83]

In this regard, Chomsky has used Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom",[84] the militant history of labor movements, Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's theories supporting an innate and universal moral faculty,[85] to explain the incompatibility of oppression with certain aspects of human nature.[86][87]

Loyola University philosophy professor John Clark and libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin have criticized the system of wage labor for encouraging environmental destruction, arguing that a self-managed industrial society would better manage the environment. Like other anarchists,[88] they attribute much of the Industrial Revolution's pollution to the "hierarchical" and "competitive" economic relations accompanying it.[89]

Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "[t]he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits] of the employer's business".[90] Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination.[91] As Pateman argues:

The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can 'acquire' an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the 'exchange' between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property ... The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property.[92]

In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature and the latter being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy:

Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage.[93]

Some advocates of right-libertarianism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, address this inconsistency in modern societies arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights:

The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.[94]

Others like Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:

[I]f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work.[95]

In the philosophy of mainstream, neoclassical economics, wage labor is seen as the voluntary sale of one's own time and efforts, just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a farmer would sell wheat. It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship and carries no particular moral implications.[96]

Austrian economics argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor because otherwise that person has no self-ownership and will be owned by a "third party" of individuals.[97]

Post-Keynesian economics perceives wage slavery as resulting from inequality of bargaining power between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not "allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".[98]

The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:

Quotations related to wage slavery at Wikiquote

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Wage slavery - Wikipedia

Literal slavery is a horrible practice that still persists into the modern age. But, I want to talk about another form of human exploitationemployment slavery, which can also ruin a persons life. Generally, I consider this a self-inflicted slavery because its ultimately a persons choice to work under such conditionsbut I also understand that brainwashing can occur, creating the illusion that theres no way out.

Slavery (in general) exists because of the inclination among people to obtain the benefits of human resources, while providing little (or nothing) in return. Human work is the most intelligent, efficient way to create a system of wealth and power. For the morally bankrupt, such benefits are sought for free.

Employment, in the best case scenario, is a business deal of mutual benefit. But in other instances, the company is expending such minimal resources that they are taking advantage of you. In the worst case scenario, through a combination of slave-driving principles and psychological techniques to break you down, such a job can morph into something very similar to actual slavery.

If you dont know any better, its easy to fall into slavery conditions. Here are signs that your sense of freedom in life is totally gone:

Because of the way employers conveniently ignore yearly inflation, todays minimal wage is not enough to maintain any semblance of a normal lifestyle. Minimal wage makes some sense in small businesses just starting out. But, In America, $8.25 an hour, or less, from a large, billion-dollar corporation is inexcusable. In this case, your annual wages cost a second of the companys hourly profits. In other words, your hard work is a very bad deal for you, and a killer opportunity for the suits upstairs.

Youre lucky you even have a job! is a psychological taunt that bad employers use to try and keep their wage-slaves from believing they can do any better. Such statements are made to maintain a sense of control. Understand, voluntary slavery is not a rare phenomenon. It happens when a person is brainwashed into the belief that they have nowhere else they can go.

If your manager uses psychological put-downs like this to denigrate your professional abilitiesunderstand that its being done for a reason.

The idea of getting a raise and a promotion may be dangled in-front of you, but youve seen no evidence to suggest that it really happens. In fact, only a very small percentage of your co-workers ever obtain this goal, and they tend to be the cronies of upper-management. If this is the case, then what exactly is your reason for working at this company?

Inconvenient hours are inevitable in jobs, but some companies will abuse the system. This ranges from illegally denying overtime pay, to scheduling month-long bouts of cloping (working until closing hours late at night, then opening hours the next morning) that leaves the employee physically and emotionally drained.

An employee in this system may feel the intense pressure by the bosses to conform to abusive hours, under the threat of being denied promotions or even getting fired for seeking better treatment.

Americas two-week annual vacation time is one of the weakest in the Western world, and American workers tend to not even use it. This is because many employers will hint that vacationers are likely to end up on the shit-list of not getting promoted. They may even hint that unruly vacation-seekers will be the first to get laid-off or fired at the earliest opportunity.

A system of slavery does not allow free-time for individuals to maintain their own lives outside of their work. This could cause dissent and break the system of total control. An unspoken methodology among abusive managers is to destroy the lifestyles of employees so, instead of tending to family or hobbies, they work at full capacity.

Feeling motivated based on high-standards and being scared to go below those standards is one thing, but being genuinely scared of the people youre working for is another.

Slave-masters maintain systems of fear, to break down their subjects and perhapsin timebuild them back up. For the best example of thisplease see Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones.

Psychological and verbal abuse is usually what occurs. An abusive employer understands exactly what strings to pull to generate feelings of shame or guilt, and theyll use the professional context to destroy a subjects sense of self-worth, perhaps by implying worthlessness at the vocation theyve devoted their life to.

In other instances, the abuse is very overt and could include yelling, tantrums and even physical assaults. But the outcome is the same: the employee living in a constant state of paranoia, fear, and subservience.

Read carefully the ten warning-signs youre in a cult by the Cult Education Institute. Some of these that could be very applicable to a workplace include: absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability, no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry, the leader (boss) is always right, and former followers (employees) are vilified as evil for leaving.

If the job feels less about, you know, getting the job doneand is more about the influence, charisma and infallibility of the bossthen get the heck out of there. This means the person in charge is getting a side-benefit to running or managing the workplace: power and dominance.

The number one sign youre a slave and not an employee is that youre working an unpaid internship, and its not for college credit. You may be promised great benefits and valuable connections, at what amounts to harsh workplace conditions, long hours, and zero pay.

A huge mistake I see young professionals make, and it really irks me, is naivety about peoples intentions. I went to film school for my bachelors, and many students I knew lusted after top internships at film studios or with big names in the entertainment industry. Such internships are often offered regardless of college credit.

When a person is blindsided by their desire to make it and get in with big names, they are likely to make bad decisionsand unscrupulous employers will prey on this desire.

Internships are great IF its part of a students actual curriculum. It means hands-on work and real experience versus useless classrooms. But, the questionable non-credit internships I warn about also exist to lure young people into systems of slavery. Its gotten so bad these types of arrangements are quickly becoming illegal in California.

The reality of such internships is that the slave-drivers only desire one thing: unpaid work. There is NO promise that you will move up or land any type of a paid job. When your internship finishes, they will discard you and find the next victim.

The biggest reason to avoid internships is the mentality behind the deal. Imagine a law firm or a film studio that is a multi-billion dollar operation. How hard would it be to throw their new recruit at LEAST minimum wage? The fact such a company would, despite their huge profits, still desire unpaid labor is indicative of a slave-driving mentality that funnels wealth to the top at the expense of the people on the bottom making it possible.

As a professional, it would be best for you to avoid doing any type of business with any individual or company that possesses a philosophy like this.

Employment-slavery situations are common. Very common. But ultimately, the biggest factor in determining how bad it is, is a single question: are you happy?

If you are happy at $8.25 an hour with no benefits, because you like the people you work with, you like the nature of the work, and you feel its moving you somewhere you want to bethen its not slavery. Youre making an investment thatll either pay off, or it wontbut at least you enjoy what youre doing.

However, if you are miserable in your current conditions, its quite possible that the uneasy feeling in your gut is your intuition telling you that someone is taking advantage of you.

Employment is supposed to be a business contract, and an exchange of services. Never a system of control. Sometimes, just the willingness to walk away is your strongest defense against a terrible job situation.

For more about avoiding systems of employment-slavery, please see my short books: Freedom: How to Make Money From Your Dreams and Ambitions, and How to Quit Your Job: Escape Soul Crushing Work, Create the Life You Want, and Live Happy.

(For more books, also check out the Developed Life bookstore, http://www.developedlife.com/bookstore).

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8 Signs You're a Slave Instead of an Employee

MAMOU, Louisiana Travis Manuel and his twin brother, Trey, were shopping at Walmart near this rural town when they met two Mexican women who struck them as sweet. Using a few words of Spanish he had picked up from his Navy days, Travis asked the two women out on a double date.

Around midnight the following Saturday, when they finished their shift at a seafood processing plant, Marisela Valdez and Isy Gonzalez waited for their dates at the remote compound where they lived and worked.

As soon as they got in the Manuel brothers car, the women began saying something about patrn angry, Travis recalled. While he was trying to puzzle out what they meant, his brother, who was driving, interrupted: Dude, Trey said. Theres someone following us.

Trey began to take sudden turns on the country roads threading through the rice paddies that dot the area, trying to lose the pickup truck behind them. Finally, they saw a police car.

I said, were gonna flag down this cop for help, Travis recalled. But the cop pulled us over, lights on, and told us not to get out of the vehicle, Trey added, noting that the pickup pulled up and the driver began conferring with the police.

An officer asked Trey and his brother for ID. From the backseat, their dates began to cry.

Travis tried to reassure them. They werent doing anything wrong, he said, and they were in the United States. I was like, Theres no way they are going to take you away.

He was wrong.

The man in the truck was the womens boss, Craig West, a prominent farmer in the heart of Cajun country. As Sgt. Robert McGee later wrote in a police report, West said that Valdez and Gonzalez were two of his girls, and he asked the cops to haul the women in and scare the girls.

The police brought the women, who were both in their twenties, to the station house. McGee told them they couldnt leave Wests farm without permission, warning that they could wind up dead. To drive home the point, an officer later testified, McGee stood over Valdez and Gonzalez and pantomimed cutting his throat. He also brandished a Taser at them and said they could be deported if they ever left Wests property without his permission.

A little after 2 in the morning, they released the women to West for the 15-minute drive through the steamy night to his compound a place where, the women and the Mexican government say, workers were stripped of their passports and assigned to sleep in a filthy, foul-smelling trailer infested with insects and mice. Valdez and Gonzalez also claimed that they and other women were imprisoned, forced to work for little pay, and frequently harassed by West, who demanded to see their breasts and insisted that having sex with him was their only way out of poverty.

These women were not undocumented immigrants working off the books. They were in the United States legally, as part of a government program that allows employers to import foreign labor for jobs they say Americans wont take but that also allows those companies to control almost every aspect of their employees' lives.

Each year, more than 100,000 people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Africa come to America on what is known as an H-2 visa to perform all kinds of menial labor across a wide spectrum of industries: cleaning rooms at luxury resorts and national parks, picking fruit, cutting lawns and manicuring golf courses, setting up carnival rides, trimming and planting trees, herding sheep, or, in the case of Valdez, Gonzalez, and about 20 other Mexican women in 2011, peeling crawfish at L.T. West Inc.

A BuzzFeed News investigation based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Many of those employers have since been approved to bring in more guest workers. Some have even been rewarded with lucrative government contracts. Almost none have ever been charged with a crime.

In interview after interview, current and former guest workers often on the verge of tears used the same word to describe their experiences: slavery.

We live where we work, and we cant leave, said Olivia Guzman Garfias, who has been coming to Louisiana as a guest worker from her small town in Mexico since 1997. We are tied to the company. Our visas are in the companys name. If the pay and working conditions arent as we wish, who can we complain to? We are like modern-day slaves.

In a statement, the Department of Labor, which is charged with protecting workers and vetting employers seeking visas, said that the H-2 programs are part of a wider immigration system that is widely acknowledged to be broken, contributing to an uneven playing field where employers who exploit vulnerable workers undermine those who do the right thing.

The number of H-2 visas issued has grown by more than 50% over the past five years. Unlike the better-known H-1B visa program, which brings skilled workers such as computer programmers into Americas high-tech industries, the H-2 program is for the economys bottom rung, designed to make it easier for employers to fill temporary, unskilled positions. Proponents argue that it gives foreigners a chance to work here legally, send home much-needed dollars, and return to their families when the job is over.

In March, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defended the guest worker program before a Senate committee, noting that such "temporary workers are needed in lesser-skilled occupations that are both seasonal and year round," and that aspects of the program are "critical" to "American workers, the local community, and companies that provide goods and services to these seasonal businesses.

Tens of thousands of companies, ranging from family businesses to huge corporations, have participated in the program since it took its modern form in 1986. Employers pledge to pay their workers a set rate, which can range from the federal minimum wage to a higher prevailing wage that varies from state to state and job to job. As for the employees, they can only work for the company that sponsored their visa. They are legally barred from seeking other employment and must leave the country when the job ends.

For some people, such as the hundreds of soccer coaches who youth sports camps bring in every year from the United Kingdom and elsewhere, an H-2 visa offers an opportunity to make some money while spending time in another country. Many companies treat their H-2 employees well, and many guest workers interviewed for this article said they are grateful for the program.

But public records and interviews reveal how easy it is for companies that sponsor H-2 visas to abuse their employees.

Many companies pay their guest workers less than the law mandates. Others pay them for fewer hours than they actually work, or force them to work extremely long hours without overtime. Some, on the other hand, offer them far less work than promised, at times leaving workers without enough money to buy food. Employers also whittle away at wages by imposing an array of prohibited fees starting with bribes to get the jobs in the first place, which can leave workers so deep in debt that they are effectively indentured servants.

Guest workers often toil in conditions that are unsafe, inhumane, or simply exhausting, wielding dangerous machinery beneath a scorching sun or standing for hours on end in sweltering factories. And at the end of their shift, many workers retire to grim, squalid quarters that might be little more than a grimy mattress on the floor of a crowded, vermin-infested trailer. For such housing, some employers charge workers extortionate rent.

Though it is against the law, employers often exert additional control over guest workers by confiscating their passports, without which many foreign workers, fearful of being deported, feel unsafe leaving the worksite. Some employers extend their influence over workers to extremes, screening their mail, preventing them from receiving visitors, banning radios and newspapers, or even coercing them to attend religious services they dont believe in. Some foremen sexually harass female workers, who live in constant fear of losing their jobs and being deported.

The world has become accustomed in recent years to hearing of guest worker abuse in countries such as Qatar or Thailand. But this is happening in the United States. And the problem is not just a few unscrupulous employers. The very structure of the visa program enables widespread abuse and exploitation.

The way H-2 visas shackle workers to a single employer leaves them almost no leverage to demand better treatment. The rules also make it easy to banish a worker to her home country at the bosss whim. And guest workers tend to be so poor and, often, so indebted from the recruitment fees they paid to get the job in the first place that they feel they have no choice but to endure even the worst abuses.

Court documents and interviews revealed numerous cases where workers who tried to speak out said they received threats to their lives. Many others claimed they were blacklisted by employers, losing the opportunity to get jobs that, however miserable, give them more money than they could earn in their own countries.

The government has been warned repeatedly over almost two decades that the guest worker program is deeply troubled, with more than a dozen official reports excoriating it for everything from widespread visa fraud to rampant worker abuse, and even calling for its elimination. Since 2005, Labor Department investigation records show, at least 800 employers have subjected more than 23,000 H-2 guest workers to violations of the federal laws designed to protect them from exploitation, including more than 16,000 instances of H-2 workers being paid less than the promised wage.

Those numbers almost certainly understate the problem, as the federal government doesnt check up on the vast majority of companies that bring guest workers into this country. The Labor Department noted in its statement that it has limited resources, with only about 1,000 investigators to enforce protections for all 135 million workers in the U.S. Still, it said, it recovered more than $2.6 million in back wages owed to roughly 4,500 H-2 workers in the 2014 fiscal year. In that year, the agency said, it found violations in 82% of the H-2 visa cases it investigated.

Kalen Fraser, a former investigator for the Labor Departments Wage and Hour Division who specialized in H-2 visa cases, said that while some companies stumble over complex rules, a substantial portion maliciously violate worker protection laws. Theres a big power imbalance there, and the worst guys get away with everything.

Route 95 between Chataignier and Mamou, Louisiana, winds through endless acres of rice paddies that teem with crawfish after the grain is reaped. The country is dead flat, and stretching to the horizon theres little but lush fields of green, dotted with glassy brown pools beneath a heavy sky. Near a bend in the two-lane highway sits the L.T. West crawfish plant.

It was there that Valdez, Gonzalez, and the other women, tired and stiff from a crowded, 1,500-mile ride up from Mexico, stepped out into the dark, wet heat on the night of April 9, 2011.

Valdez said it was need that had brought her there need and principle. I wanted to work and make money and do it in a legal way, she said in a recent interview, so I didnt have to cross the border illegally or undocumented.

She had left behind her 5-year-old son and her 8-year-old daughter, along with her mother, who was taking care of the children, and her dream at least for a time of finishing her college degree. She was 26. It was her first time away from home.

She landed in one of Americas most distinctive and insular regions. Acadiana stretches from the bayous near the Gulf of Mexico up through Lafayette and into the Cajun Prairie north of Interstate 10. It is a place where Spanish moss drips so thick off trees they can hardly be discerned, French is still many peoples first language, zydeco music blares from the radio, and social life for generations has centered around great feasts of boiled crab, shrimp, and crawfish.

Valdez and Gonzalez claim they were assigned, along with three other of the youngest women, to an isolated trailer that lacked safe drinking water. Valdez was terrified of the dark, of the sounds of animals in the brush, of snakes. The women talked that first night about their goals and what their families would do with the money they earned.

I felt very strange, she said. Being with all these people I didnt know, having to leave behind my life, my family, my things, in a country I had never been in before. I felt very sad. I felt sad, but the truth is the need we had at that moment was so great that we had to do it, we had to be there.

Valdez lay awake, she said, thinking about where I was, how did I get there, why I was in this position. A few hours later, the women were rousted and sent to peel crawfish.

After hatching and maturing in the shallow ponds that spool over the landscape, the crustaceans rusty brown and squirming are plucked from baited traps. The mudbugs are stuffed in mesh sacks, heaved into the back of pickup trucks, then cooked in steel baths until they are bright red.

Then the women go to work. Still steaming, the crawfish are dumped by the basketful onto long metal tables. The workers crowd in, standing shoulder to shoulder or perching on stools. Hour after hour, they pull the heads off and extract the tail meat.

The hot crawfish would hurt your fingers, Valdez said. But the worst thing was the smell. It stung your nostrils, she said. The smell stuck to everything. We carried it home with us.

In its application for H-2 visas, filed in November 2010, L.T. West committed to pay the workers $9.10 an hour, plus overtime. The company also promised the Labor Department it would issue detailed pay statements.

The women soon learned, however, that they would sometimes be paid for each pound of crawfish tails they peeled. Federal law allows guest workers to be paid a piece rate, but only if the employer makes up any difference between that and the promised hourly wage.

L.T. West did not backfill their wages, according to the womens complaint. Some weeks, they said, their piece-rate wages amounted to the equivalent of less than $4 an hour. Sometimes they were given only about 15 hours of work per week.

Craig West denies that he shorted the women. But notes from a Labor Department investigation show that he did not keep proper pay records, making it impossible to verify that assertion.

The women also said West forbade them from leaving his plant and ordered one of his employees to confiscate their passports and visas their only proof, in a region that takes border enforcement seriously, that they were in the U.S. legally. On numerous occasions, they said, West threatened to call police or immigration authorities.

A few days after the disastrous double date, two of the women claimed, West pointed a gun at Valdez, the red beam of his laser scope directly on her face, and told her never to leave the work camp.

West, a solidly built man with a honey drawl, vehemently denied that he mistreated his workers, taking particular umbrage at the allegation involving the gun. He is a hunting instructor and runs the church skeet shoot, he said in an interview outside his home in June, and would never recklessly point a weapon at anyone.

The real story, West said, is that Valdez, Gonzalez, and some of the other women in their trailer were wild, partying and arranging to have cases of beer dropped off at his property. In a sworn deposition, one L.T. West employee said the women went out often and sometimes came back after having been drinking. Another said that West did not get angry if they went out without his permission.

West also denied trying to use the Mamou police to intimidate the women. He called them, he said, because some of the workers had expressed fears that a rapist would sneak onto the property.

Police officers, however, tell a different story. Two testified that when West arrived at the station that night, he was in a state of fury. In a sworn deposition in 2012, Mamou Police Sgt. Lucas Lavergne described Wests behavior this way: He said like looking toward the girls, he said, Mucho fuck you. Mucho kill you.

What happened that night, Travis said, was nuts and wrong. Reflecting on Wests and the polices attitude toward the women, he said, It seemed like we had messed with his property, like we had stolen a horse or did damage to his property.

His brother Trey added, Shortest date ever.

By scouring legal and administrative documents, BuzzFeed News identified more than 800 workers over the last 10 years who complained to authorities that they had their passports confiscated, were held against their will, were physically attacked, or were threatened with harm for trying to leave their housing or job sites. The number who experienced these abuses but did not speak out may be much higher.

In January 2013, a group of Mexican forestry workers said that they had been held at gunpoint in the mountains north of Sacramento and forced to work 13 hours a day and handle chemicals that made them vomit and peeled their skin, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in federal court last year by a Department of Homeland Security investigator.

Their employer, a small forestry contractor out of Idaho called Pure Forest, had also illegally charged the workers about $2,000 apiece for their visas, paid for out of deductions from their paychecks, the workers said. After additional fees were levied for food, they said, they were sometimes left with less than $100 for two weeks of grueling work. In one case, a worker said he was charged $100 for a pair of used shoes held together with nails.

Two of Pure Forests foremen reportedly carried firearms and threatened to shoot workers in the head and leave them in the woods if they did not work harder, the DHS special agent, Eugene Kizenko, wrote. He added that multiple workers heard these threats.

Five workers who escaped sued Pure Forest in federal court last year. They filed the suit, which is ongoing, using pseudonyms; the complaint states that the workers fear retaliation due to threats of bodily injury or death made by defendants.

Pure Forest denied the allegations in court papers and in an interview. Completely false, Owen Wadsworth said by phone. His father, Jeff, owns the company, and Owen was also named in the workers suit. We've had nothing but good working relationships with all our employees, he said. The H-2 program seems more set up to put the company, the owner or the employer, in a bad situation, he added, and whatever allegations or negative that come up, it's treated almost like it's true, and they'll assume that you're the bad guy.

A particularly effective force to keep workers in line is debt.

Interviews and court records reviewed by BuzzFeed News turned up hundreds of workers who claimed they were forced to pay for their visas. Thats illegal; companies are responsible for making sure their labor brokers don't charge bribes. But diplomats from the U.S. and Mexico say such bribes are rampant. In cables released by WikiLeaks, U.S. consular officials in Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic describe reports of recruiters demanding fees for visas and also committing fraud in order to get visas approved.

Jacob Joseph Kadakkarappally was eager to come from India to the U.S. to work as a welder at the Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard of Signal International in late 2006. But he didn't have the approximately $14,500 recruiters demanded for the visa and other fees, so first he pawned the gold bangles his wife wore every day on her wrist. Then he hocked a gold chain that, he later testified, is considered to be holy, a symbol of wedding.

Other Signal workers from India, who had been misled into thinking they would get green cards, went deeply into debt or sold property to pay fees. Once the workers arrived in the U.S., Signal housed them in a labor camp, up to 24 men to a trailer, for which Signal charged them each $1,050 a month.

After Kadakkarappally and others began asking for better working and housing conditions, security guards raided his trailer early one morning and managers told him he was fired.

I almost lost my breath, Kadakkarappally testified. He pleaded with managers, he said, recounting his huge debts and telling them that I would not be able to support my family. A fellow worker slit his wrist in a failed suicide attempt.

Kadakkarappally and four other welders eventually sued Signal, and in February a federal jury in New Orleans awarded them $14 million. This month, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced that Signal had agreed to a $20 million settlement that resolves those claims and those of 200 additional Indian welders in 11 related lawsuits. Signal, which filed for bankruptcy to carry out the settlement, also agreed to apologize to its guest workers. Signal did not respond to requests for comment.

Such a victory is extremely rare. Very few H-2 workers have the resources or support to file a lawsuit. Many workers become prisoners of their debt. The best way to pay it off is with a job in the U.S. and the only job H-2 workers can legally get is the one with the company that sponsors their visas.

In so many cases, these workers end up being abused, said Jennifer Gordon, a law professor at Fordham University and a former MacArthur Fellow who has conducted research into the discrimination against and mistreatment of immigrant workers. In routine ways, all the time, the workers pay fees, they are threatened, their families are threatened. And the employer knows that if you get workers through that program, theyre not going to complain.

That stark power imbalance can be downright dangerous, contributing to on-the-job injuries and even deaths.

Leonardo Espinabarro Telles entered the country on an H-2 visa in April 2011, to work for Crystal Rock Amusements as it moved from Pennsylvania to Vermont and back, staging that most American of pastimes: county fairs. The Mexico native had been on the job about three months, living in a crowded converted horse trailer without a working bathroom, when the crew of 17 guest workers arrived in northern Vermont for the Lamoille County Field Days.

A little before 3 in the afternoon on Tuesday, July 19, Espinabarro went to retrieve electrical connectors from a trailer housing the hulking Caterpillar generator that powered the carnival rides.

Inside, two feet separated the trailer wall from the generators massive spinning fan blades. The protective guard over the blades had either broken or been removed. At ankle level, pulleys and fan belts were also exposed.

Espinabarro was alone, so no one witnessed what happened, but co-workers heard cries for help. One man rushed to the trailer to see Espinabarro standing upright, then watched him collapse and fall out of the trailer. His clothing had gotten tangled in the machinery, and the fan blades had ripped through his body. From neck to waist, his back was carved open, his organs spilling out. He was dead by the time he reached the hospital.

Inspectors from the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that Crystal Rock management knew the fan blades were unguarded at the time of the accident but had not told the workers. No one had posted proper warning signs. Nor had they delivered safety training in any language.

Vermont OSHA levied $114,550 in fines. The case is still open, because Crystal Rock has not paid.

Asked whether he had ever trained his guest workers how to be safe around heavy equipment, Crystal Rocks owner, Arthur Gillette, told an inspector: How can you train these guys?" adding, "Do you train someone to eat a hot dog?

Gillette, whose company has been certified for at least 358 visas since 2002, added that Mexican workers were mechanically inclined and would figure things out and that if the investigator had ever been to the country she would understand that. He explained: The streets of Mexico, cars were stolen and disassembled with just the frames left on the street.

The Labor Department conducted its own investigation following the accident, finding that Gillette routinely underpaid workers and owed more than $60,000 in back wages. This month, the Maine state fire marshal criminally charged Gillette with falsifying physical evidence after an accident on a roller coaster injured three children at a carnival in Waterville in June.

Gillette, reached by phone, said the criminal charges in Maine were unjust and denied tampering with evidence.

He said both the Labor Department and Vermont OSHA investigations of Crystal Rock, which is now out of business, were unfair. Ive worked dozens of carnivals and dealt with hundreds of foreign employees, he added. The vast majority of the guys that worked for me said I am more than fair. That I owe them nothing. That we are square.

Guest workers in other industries have died after being run over in grisly accidents, or collapsing for unknown reasons. Theyve had limbs amputated and suffered other catastrophic injuries.

On-the-job injuries happen to all kinds of employees, of course, but employers virtually unchecked sway over H-2 workers as well as some employers attitudes about foreigners can foster a cavalier attitude toward workplace dangers. It can also keep workers from pointing out safety violations or even reporting injuries.

In a 2012 report from the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers surveyed 150 forestry workers in Oregon, about a third of them on H-2 visas, and found that more than 40% had been injured on the job in the previous 12 months. Fifteen of the workers had suffered broken bones, and another 18 had dislocated one or more bones. And yet workers kept quiet about many of their injuries including more than a quarter of the broken bones and nearly half of the dislocated ones.

The report concluded: They were afraid they would be fired, and they were afraid of otherwise getting in trouble.

Topolobampo occupies a peninsula at the mouth of a bay off the Sea of Cortez in violence-ravaged Sinaloa, the home state of the infamous drug lord Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn. The sparkling sea along the malecn belies a deep listlessness, more stifling than the tropical heat, that has settled over the town. The seafood plant along the waterfront closed down years ago. Mangy dogs range along barely maintained streets, while a few tiny restaurants with cement floors have almost nothing on the menu. Decent jobs outside of the drug trade are hard to find.

As much as a third of the population of 6,500 travels to the swamps and prairies of Louisiana every year to catch and process seafood, according to local recruiters. Those who make the trek are colloquially known as Louisianeros. The rewards of their work are easy to see: solidly built houses, clean tile floors, modern appliances, and framed degrees from private schools. Less visible are the costs: children who grow up in someone elses family, because their own parents are working on the other side.

Fernanda Padilla was just 3 when her mother, Guadalupe, started coming to Louisiana for 10 months a year to process shellfish. I couldnt understand, said Padilla. I used to tell her, I dont care. Ill eat rice and beans every day, but be here with me.

But at 17, Padilla dropped out of school and decided to follow in her mothers footsteps to make money. She secured an H-2 visa and arrived at her new job at Bayou Shrimp in April 2009. She was pregnant, but her pay stubs show she worked more than 60 hours some weeks. Forty days after her daughter was born, Padilla was back at work at the plant, leaving her baby with a friend.

Padilla, who has since had a second child, worked in the Louisiana shrimp industry for five seasons before losing her job last year. She said she used to worry that, like her own mother, she was abandoning her children in order to provide for them.

Five years working there seemed like no time had passed at all, and my daughter had already grown up and I didnt even realize it, Padilla said, adding that she is now cobbling together a living with odd jobs.

North of the border, H-2 visas are also important to the economy.

Louisiana is the nations second-largest seafood-producing state, and its crawfish industry used to rely on local labor. But competition from cheap Asian imports, along with the demand by huge retailers such as Wal-Mart for ever lower prices, have squeezed profit margins and put downward pressure on wages below the point, producers say, where people in America will take the jobs on a seasonal basis. In the 1990s, processors including Craig West hoped that machines could be built to take over the repetitive task of extracting the tail meat from the crustaceans. But eventually crawfish farmers discovered that the best and cheapest option is a Mexican on an H-2 visa.

The visa comes in two types: H-2A for agricultural workers and H-2B for nonagricultural unskilled workers, with varying rules and provisions. While many workers say that regulators dont do enough to protect them, their employers generally have the opposite complaint. They say they are burdened by endless bureaucratic hurdles and inspectors who ding them for tiny infractions of incomprehensible rules.

Ben LeGrange, the general manager of Atchafalaya Crawfish Processing, in Henderson, Louisiana, said most crawfish processors treat their workers well, and isolated incidents shouldnt taint the whole industry. He said he tries to treat guest workers as an extension of someone in my family and that without them the whole company, which also employs six American workers, would be in jeopardy.

Standing on his expansive lawn beside a riding mower, West, who co-owns the crawfish producer L.T. West with his brother, said he treats his workers well. My wife got holy water for them, he said, adding that when they were not working he and his wife, Cathy, drove workers to Walmart or church, and sometimes invited them to relax in the shade of a tree that protects his house from the sun.

But seven of his workers, including Valdez and Gonzalez, claim West took a different kind of interest in some of them.

Some of their allegations include that he took to bursting into their trailer unexpectedly, even when they were dressing, and called them his property and his Mexican ladies, according to their complaint. Some of the women recall him saying things such as mucho booby and mexicanas mucho booby, gesturing for them to lift up their shirts. He instructed one of his other workers to tell the women in Spanish that the only way they could get out of poverty was to accept his propositions, which included requests that they come to his house when his wife was away. In the suit, the women did not allege he actually had sex with them.

West, with his wife looking on, flatly denied the allegations, saying the women had made them up.

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The New American Slavery: Invited To The U.S., Foreign ...

Employment is a relationship between two parties, usually based on a contract where work is paid for, where one party, which may be a corporation, for profit, not-for-profit organization, co-operative or other entity is the employer and the other is the employee.[1] Employees work in return for payment, which may be in the form of an hourly wage, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does or which sector she or he is working in. Employees in some fields or sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payment or stock options. In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits can include health insurance, housing, disability insurance or use of a gym. Employment is typically governed by employment laws, regulations or legal contracts.

An employee contributes labor and expertise to an endeavor of an employer or of a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU)[2] and is usually hired to perform specific duties which are packaged into a job. In a corporate context, an employee is a person who is hired to provide services to a company on a regular basis in exchange for compensation and who does not provide these services as part of an independent business.[3]

Employer and managerial control within an organization rests at many levels and has important implications for staff and productivity alike, with control forming the fundamental link between desired outcomes and actual processes. Employers must balance interests such as decreasing wage constraints with a maximization of labor productivity in order to achieve a profitable and productive employment relationship.

The main ways for employers to find workers and for people to find employers are via jobs listings in newspapers (via classified advertising) and online, also called job boards. Employers and job seekers also often find each other via professional recruitment consultants which receive a commission from the employer to find, screen and select suitable candidates. However, a study has shown that such consultants may not be reliable when they fail to use established principles in selecting employees.[1] A more traditional approach is with a "Help Wanted" sign in the establishment (usually hung on a window or door[4] or placed on a store counter).[3] Evaluating different employees can be quite laborious but setting up different techniques to analyze their skill to measure their talents within the field can be best through assessments.[5] Employer and potential employee commonly take the additional step of getting to know each other through the process of job interview.

Training and development refers to the employer's effort to equip a newly hired employee with necessary skills to perform at the job, and to help the employee grow within the organization. An appropriate level of training and development helps to improve employee's job satisfaction.[6]

There are many ways that employees are paid, including by hourly wages, by piecework, by yearly salary, or by gratuities (with the latter often being combined with another form of payment). In sales jobs and real estate positions, the employee may be paid a commission, a percentage of the value of the goods or services that they have sold. In some fields and professions (e.g., executive jobs), employees may be eligible for a bonus if they meet certain targets. Some executives and employees may be paid in stocks or stock options, a compensation approach that has the added benefit, from the company's point of view, of helping to align the interests of the compensated individual with the performance of the company.

Employee benefits are various non-wage compensation provided to employee in addition to their wages or salaries. The benefits can include: housing (employer-provided or employer-paid), group insurance (health, dental, life etc.), disability income protection, retirement benefits, daycare, tuition reimbursement, sick leave, vacation (paid and non-paid), social security, profit sharing, funding of education, and other specialized benefits. In some cases, such as with workers employed in remote or isolated regions, the benefits may include meals. Employee benefits can improve the relationship between employee and employer and lowers staff turnover.[7]

Organizational justice is an employee's perception and judgement of employer's treatment in the context of fairness or justice. The resulting actions to influence the employee-employer relationship is also a part of organizational justice.[7]

Employees can organize into trade or labor unions, which represent the work force to collectively bargain with the management of organizations about working, and contractual conditions and services.[8]

Usually, either an employee or employer may end the relationship at any time, often subject to a certain notice period. This is referred to as at-will employment. The contract between the two parties specifies the responsibilities of each when ending the relationship and may include requirements such as notice periods, severance pay, and security measures.[8] In some professions, notably teaching, civil servants, university professors, and some orchestra jobs, some employees may have tenure, which means that they cannot be dismissed at will. Another type of termination is a layoff.

Wage labor is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labor under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labor market where wages are market determined.[6][7] In exchange for the wages paid, the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer, except for special cases such as the vesting of intellectual property patents in the United States where patent rights are usually vested in the original personal inventor. A wage laborer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labor in this way.[8]

In modern mixed economies such as that of the OECD countries, it is currently the dominant form of work arrangement. Although most work occurs following this structure, the wage work arrangements of CEOs, professional employees, and professional contract workers are sometimes conflated with class assignments, so that "wage labor" is considered to apply only to unskilled, semi-skilled or manual labor.[9]

Wage labor, as institutionalized under today's market economic systems, has been criticized,[8] especially by both mainstream socialists and anarcho-syndicalists,[9][10][11][12] using the pejorative term wage slavery.[13][14] Socialists draw parallels between the trade of labor as a commodity and slavery. Cicero is also known to have suggested such parallels.[15]

The American philosopher John Dewey posited that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business".[16] Thomas Ferguson has postulated in his investment theory of party competition that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state.[17]

Australian employment has been governed by the Fair Work Act since 2009.[18]

Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) is an association of national level with its international reputation of co-operation and welfare of the migrant workforce as well as its approximately 1200 members agencies in collaboration with and support from the Government of Bangladesh.[9]

In the Canadian province of Ontario, formal complaints can be brought to the Ministry of Labour. In the province of Quebec, grievances can be filed with the Commission des normes du travail.[12]

Pakistan has no contract Labor, Minimum Wage and Provident Funds Acts. Contract labor in Pakistan must be paid minimum wage and certain facilities are to be provided to labor. However, the Acts are not yet fully implemented.[9]

India has Contract Labor, Minimum Wage, Provident Funds Act and various other acts to comply with. Contract labor in India must be paid minimum wage and certain facilities are to be provided to labor. However, there is still a large amount of work that remains to be done to fully implement the Act.[12]

In the Philippines, employment is regulated by the Department of Labor and Employment.[19]

In the United Kingdom, employment contracts are categorised by the government into the following types:[20]

For purposes of U.S. federal income tax withholding, 26 U.S.C. 3401(c) provides a definition for the term "employee" specific to chapter 24 of the Internal Revenue Code:

"For purposes of this chapter, the term employee includes an officer, employee, or elected official of the United States, a State, or any political subdivision thereof, or the District of Columbia, or any agency or instrumentality of any one or more of the foregoing. The term employee also includes an officer of a corporation."[21] This definition does not exclude all those who are commonly known as 'employees'. Similarly, Lathams instruction which indicated that under 26 U.S.C. 3401(c) the category of employee does not include privately employed wage earners is a preposterous reading of the statute. It is obvious that within the context of both statutes the word includes is a term of enlargement not of limitation, and the reference to certain entities or categories is not intended to exclude all others.[22]

Employees are often contrasted with independent contractors, especially when there is dispute as to the worker's entitlement to have matching taxes paid, workers compensation, and unemployment insurance benefits. However, in September 2009, the court case of Brown v. J. Kaz, Inc. ruled that independent contractors are regarded as employees for the purpose of discrimination laws if they work for the employer on a regular basis, and said employer directs the time, place, and manner of employment.[19]

In non-union work environments, in the United States, unjust termination complaints can be brought to the United States Department of Labor.[23]

Labor unions are legally recognized as representatives of workers in many industries in the United States. Their activity today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, and on representing their members in disputes with management over violations of contract provisions. Larger unions also typically engage in lobbying activities and electioneering at the state and federal level.[19]

Most unions in America are aligned with one of two larger umbrella organizations: the AFL-CIO created in 1955, and the Change to Win Federation which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Both advocate policies and legislation on behalf of workers in the United States and Canada, and take an active role in politics. The AFL-CIO is especially concerned with global trade issues.[17]

According to Swedish law,[24] there are three types of employment.

There are no laws about minimum salary in Sweden. Instead there are agreements between employer organizations and trade unions about minimum salaries, and other employment conditions.

There is a type of employment contract which is common but not regulated in law, and that is Hour employment (swe: Timanstllning), which can be Normal employment (unlimited), but the work time is unregulated and decided per immediate need basis. The employee is expected to be answering the phone and come to work when needed, e.g. when someone is ill and absent from work. They will receive salary only for actual work time and can in reality be fired for no reason by not being called anymore. This type of contract is common in the public sector.[25]

Young workers are at higher risk for occupational injury and face certain occupational hazards at a higher rate; this is generally due to their employment in high-risk industries. For example, in the United States, young people are injured at work at twice the rate of their older counterparts.[27] These workers are also at higher risk for motor vehicle accidents at work, due to less work experience, a lower use of seatbelts, and higher rates of distracted driving.[28][29] To mitigate this risk, those under the age of 17 are restricted from certain types of driving, including transporting people and goods under certain circumstances.[28]

High-risk industries for young workers include agriculture, restaurants, waste management, and mining.[27][28] In the United States, those under the age of 18 are restricted from certain jobs that are deemed dangerous under the Fair Labor Standards Act.[28]

Youth employment programs are most effective when they include both theoretical classroom training and hands-on training with work placements.[30]

In the conversation of employment among younger aged workers, youth unemployment has also been monitored. Youth unemployment rates tend to be higher than the adult rates in every country in the world.[citation needed]

Those older than the statutory defined retirement age may continue to work, either out of enjoyment or necessity. However, depending on the nature of the job, older workers may need to transition into less-physical forms of work to avoid injury. Working past retirement age also has positive effects, because it gives a sense of purpose and allows people to maintain social networks and activity levels.[31] Older workers are often found to be discriminated against by employers.[32]

Employment is no guarantee of escaping poverty, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that as many as 40% of workers are poor, not earning enough to keep their families above the $2 a day poverty line.[25] For instance, in India most of the chronically poor are wage earners in formal employment, because their jobs are insecure and low paid and offer no chance to accumulate wealth to avoid risks.[25] According to the UNRISD, increasing labor productivity appears to have a negative impact on job creation: in the 1960s, a 1% increase in output per worker was associated with a reduction in employment growth of 0.07%, by the first decade of this century the same productivity increase implies reduced employment growth by 0.54%.[25] Both increased employment opportunities and increased labor productivity (as long as it also translates into higher wages) are needed to tackle poverty. Increases in employment without increases in productivity leads to a rise in the number of "working poor", which is why some experts are now promoting the creation of "quality" and not "quantity" in labor market policies.[25] This approach does highlight how higher productivity has helped reduce poverty in East Asia, but the negative impact is beginning to show.[25] In Vietnam, for example, employment growth has slowed while productivity growth has continued.[25] Furthermore, productivity increases do not always lead to increased wages, as can be seen in the United States, where the gap between productivity and wages has been rising since the 1980s.[25]

Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute argue that there are differences across economic sectors in creating employment that reduces poverty.[25] 24 instances of growth were examined, in which 18 reduced poverty. This study showed that other sectors were just as important in reducing unemployment, such as manufacturing.[25] The services sector is most effective at translating productivity growth into employment growth. Agriculture provides a safety net for jobs and economic buffer when other sectors are struggling.[25]

Scholars conceptualize the employment relationship in various ways.[33] A key assumption is the extent to which the employment relationship necessarily includes conflicts of interests between employers and employees, and the form of such conflicts.[34] In economic theorizing, the labor market mediates all such conflicts such that employers and employees who enter into an employment relationship are assumed to find this arrangement in their own self-interest. In human resource management theorizing, employers and employees are assumed to have shared interests (or a unity of interests, hence the label unitarism). Any conflicts that exist are seen as a manifestation of poor human resource management policies or interpersonal clashes such as personality conflicts, both of which can and should be managed away. From the perspective of pluralist industrial relations, the employment relationship is characterized by a plurality of stakeholders with legitimate interests (hence the label pluralism), and some conflicts of interests are seen as inherent in the employment relationship (e.g., wages v. profits). Lastly, the critical paradigm emphasizes antagonistic conflicts of interests between various groups (e.g., the competing capitalist and working classes in a Marxist framework) that are part of a deeper social conflict of unequal power relations. As a result, there are four common models of employment:[35]

These models are important because they help reveal why individuals hold differing perspectives on human resource management policies, labor unions, and employment regulation.[36] For example, human resource management policies are seen as dictated by the market in the first view, as essential mechanisms for aligning the interests of employees and employers and thereby creating profitable companies in the second view, as insufficient for looking out for workers interests in the third view, and as manipulative managerial tools for shaping the ideology and structure of the workplace in the fourth view.[37]

Literature on the employment impact of economic growth and on how growth is associated with employment at a macro, sector and industry level was aggregated in 2013.[38]

Researchers found evidence to suggest growth in manufacturing and services have good impact on employment. They found GDP growth on employment in agriculture to be limited, but that value-added growth had a relatively larger impact.[25] The impact on job creation by industries/economic activities as well as the extent of the body of evidence and the key studies. For extractives, they again found extensive evidence suggesting growth in the sector has limited impact on employment. In textiles however, although evidence was low, studies suggest growth there positively contributed to job creation. In agri-business and food processing, they found impact growth to be positive.[38]

They found that most available literature focuses on OECD and middle-income countries somewhat, where economic growth impact has been shown to be positive on employment. The researchers didn't find sufficient evidence to conclude any impact of growth on employment in LDCs despite some pointing to the positive impact, others point to limitations. They recommended that complementary policies are necessary to ensure economic growth's positive impact on LDC employment. With trade, industry and investment, they only found limited evidence of positive impact on employment from industrial and investment policies and for others, while large bodies of evidence does exist, the exact impact remains contested.[38]

Researchers have also explored the relationship between employment and illicit activities. Using evidence from Africa, a research team found that a program for Liberian ex-fighters reduced work hours on illicit activities. The employment program also reduced interest in mercenary work in nearby wars. The study concludes that while the use of capital inputs or cash payments for peaceful work created a reduction in illicit activities, the impact of training alone is rather low.[39]

The balance of economic efficiency and social equity is the ultimate debate in the field of employment relations.[40] By meeting the needs of the employer; generating profits to establish and maintain economic efficiency; whilst maintaining a balance with the employee and creating social equity that benefits the worker so that he/she can fund and enjoy healthy living; proves to be a continuous revolving issue in westernized societies.[40]

Globalization has effected these issues by creating certain economic factors that disallow or allow various employment issues. Economist Edward Lee (1996) studies the effects of globalization and summarizes the four major points of concern that affect employment relations:

What also results from Lees (1996) findings is that in industrialized countries an average of almost 70 per cent of workers are employed in the service sector, most of which consists of non-tradable activities. As a result, workers are forced to become more skilled and develop sought after trades, or find other means of survival. Ultimately this is a result of changes and trends of employment, an evolving workforce, and globalization that is represented by a more skilled and increasing highly diverse labor force, that are growing in non standard forms of employment (Markey, R. et al. 2006).[40]

Various youth subcultures have been associated with not working, such as the hippie subculture in the 1960s and 1970s (which endorsed the idea of "dropping out" of society) and the punk subculture, in which some members live in anarchist squats (illegal housing).

One of the alternatives to work is engaging in postsecondary education at a college, university or professional school. One of the major costs of obtaining a postsecondary education is the opportunity cost of forgone wages due to not working. At times when jobs are hard to find, such as during recessions, unemployed individuals may decide to get postsecondary education, because there is less of an opportunity cost.

Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal) to the workplace.[41][42]

When an individual entirely owns the business for which they labor, this is known as self-employment. Self-employment often leads to incorporation. Incorporation offers certain protections of one's personal assets.[40] Individuals who are self-employed may own a small business. They may also be considered to be an entrepreneur.

In some countries, individuals who are not working can receive social assistance support (e.g., welfare or food stamps) to enable them to rent housing, buy food, repair or replace household goods, maintenance of children and observe social customs that require financial expenditure.

Workers who are not paid wages, such as volunteers who perform tasks for charities, hospitals or not-for-profit organizations, are generally not considered employed. One exception to this is an internship, an employment situation in which the worker receives training or experience (and possibly college credit) as the chief form of compensation.[41]

Those who work under obligation for the purpose of fulfilling a debt, such as indentured servants, or as property of the person or entity they work for, such as slaves, do not receive pay for their services and are not considered employed. Some historians[which?] suggest that slavery is older than employment, but both arrangements have existed for all recorded history.[citation needed] Indentured servitude and slavery are not considered[by whom?] compatible with human rights or with democracy.[41]

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Employment - Wikipedia

"Graceful, engaging work." -- History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive

"Scraping By is an impressive, eloquently written study that provides a seminal history of Baltimore's working class, and makes a fine addition to the already outstanding list of titles in the Studies in Early American Economy and Society series." -- Maryland Historical Magazine

"Scraping By is about breaking new ground: the often nasty, unhealthy labor essential to Baltimore's growth as a boomtown from the 1790s to 1830s. Rockman breaks new ground himself in studying 'low-end laborers': slaves, free blacks, European immigrants, and the native-born who struggled to cobble together a few days' ill-paid toil... Highly recommended." -- Choice

"A creative treatment of an intriguing and important topic... The effort to make slavery history a part of labor history, and vice versa, is commendable, effective, and overdue." -- Peter H. Wood, Duke University

"Scraping By offers an entirely new way of understanding the early republic. Through a combination of prodigious research, keen insight, and graceful, lively prose, Seth Rockman brings to life the labor and laborers who built early America from the cobblestones up. Here are workers free and enslaved, male and female, black and white, immigrant and native born, all struggling to attain the basic wherewithal of survival in a boomtown of their own making. This is no local story but a fresh paradigm, nothing less than the future of American social history." -- Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University

"The economy of the Early Republic has long served as a kind of Rorschach test for American historians, with some perceiving a world of unprecedented opportunity and upward mobility and others a class-ridden society riven by inequality, exploitation, and conflict. In this exhaustively researched and vividly rendered book, Seth Rockman reminds us that these competing visions represent two sides of the same coin, that the ability of some Americans to prosper hinged on their ability to mobilize and exploit the labor of others, including enslaved and free people of color, women, indentured servants, immigrants, and others excluded from the full promise of American freedom. Scraping By is essential reading for anyone interested in American economic history." -- James T. Campbell, Stanford University

"Seth Rockman has written a powerful book... Scraping By is an ambitious, impressive, and fully realized piece of work that will engage and educate scholars, teachers, citizens, and activists. The book will take its place on the shelf beside the classics of early American labor history, written by Ira Berlin, William B. Morris, Gary B. Nash, Billy G. Smith, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Alfred F. Young." -- Marcus Rediker, William and Mary Quarterly

"Seth Rockman has written a book to be reckoned with... This is a terrific book, at times abrasive, which deserves a wide audience. That would include undergraduates, for whom Rockman's vivid writing and clear argument should resonate, especially within an economic climate that is forcing millions more to scrape by." -- John Bezs-Selfa, American Historical Review

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Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early ...

In the latest in a series of interviews, Bruce Baker of the After Slavery Project interviewed historian Michael W. Fitzgerald of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota about the evolution of his scholarship on Reconstruction, and about his forthcoming study of post-emancipation Alabama. Fitzgerald is a prolific author, with two highly-acclaimed monographs, a number of important articles and a recent survey in print, and a third major monograph on the way. He took part in the AS-sponsored Wiles Symposium and contributed an essay to the edited volume After Slavery: Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (Florida, 2013).

BB: Lets talk a little about your background and your earlier work and then move on to discuss the book you are finishing up on Reconstruction in Alabama. First of all, where are you from originally?

MF: I was raised in Canoga Park, California, which is a suburb in the west end of the San Fernando Valley. My Dad is from Chicago, and my mom is from Florida. I was a kid in the 1960s and early 1970s. I did my BA and PhD at UCLA.

BB: Who did you work with there?

MF: Alex Saxton was my chair, and was a model of political engagement combined with tolerance. Armstead Robinson was there for a couple of years while I was coming in and was very helpful in terms of focusing my research on Reconstruction, as was Margaret Washington. But my dad was a history teacher, so we did the whole Gettysburg tour, and we had history books around the house. And with a mother from the South and a dad from the North, the race relations stuff of the sixties was being very much talked about in our home, even in Los Angeles. So Im part of that generation for whom watching the racial chaos of the sixties and the seventies play out had a strong impact.

BB: Thats interesting. One of the things that I saw as I was reading up and thinking about this is that while you were working on your PhD you were working on the Marcus Garvey Papers. To what extent you see that experience feeding into your later scholarship and interests?

MF: Well, very much so. I actually teach African American history here, but it had never occurred to me that I was an African Americanist rather than a Civil War era historian. Certainly the notion that black nationalism is a force in American life has been muted by the political agenda of Reconstruction scholarship, which tends towards celebration of the integrationist impulse of the Radical Republican movement. That issue has been more interesting for me than for a lot of Reconstruction scholars because I do see the community sentiment as one of the things that is driving black politics in the Reconstruction era. While I was writing my dissertation, I spent a couple of years as a graduate student doing that, and those sets of issues were on my mind as I was writing the manuscript.

BB: How close was your first book, about the Union League in the Deep South, to what your dissertation was?

MF: It is my dissertation, almost unedited. Essentially what Im looking at is the first black political mobilization and seeing it largely as a labor phenomenon, as driven by African American disaffection with gang labor, overseers, women and kids in the workforce, the kind of centralized plantation system derived from slavery. Its incredibly unpopular among the freedmen. And the political mobilization of Reconstruction becomes a force tearing the old structure of the plantation apart and pushing in the direction of sharecropping. The argument is essentially that the labor mobilization, the explosive mobilization in 1867, 1868 into the Union Leagues is one of the reasons why decentralized farming takes hold. White planters start to decide they have to rent land to freedmen because the freedmen are just not working in a way that they can make a profit on. And the reason this is interesting is that in graduate school my major political activity was organizing tenant union locals for Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, the West L.A. tenant movement. My buddies were all activists in that movement. And it was funny because UCLA in the late seventies, early eighties was this pronounced social history, left place, and I was kind of on the moderate end of that because I actually believed in electoral politics. The tenant union activities resonated with what I was finding in Alabama in terms of how outside organizers could start things rolling. In terms of the emotional energy of the book, thats kind of what inspired me, that I was playing off the ideas with what I was finding doing tenant politics in the late seventies, early eighties.

BB: In some ways that sounds similar to the scholarship from that period and a little bit before on the Populists. Things like Lawrence Goodwyns work and Robert McMaths on how does a movement work, how does organization happen.

MF: And I was reading those books. As an undergraduate I actually read the long version of Goodwyns book when it first came out. I was very into it.

BB: How did you choose Alabama and Mississippi for your dissertation?

MF: Theres a charming story. Im in my first year as a graduate student, and I read about this movement in Armstead Robinsons seminar. And I said, Union Leagues, thats really interesting. So I go over to the old card catalogue in the university research library and look up Union League, and theres almost nothing there. And I say, Gee, how frustrating. And then I thought about it and said, Hey, wait a minute, this is interpretively significant. Theres nothing here. And it turns out almost nothings been written. Well, the last full-scale history of Alabama in Reconstruction is Fleming in 1905. There really hasnt been a full revisionist state study, though certainly elements have been done. And so once I got into it, I realized that there was some writing room. Thats one thing. And the other thing is I was thinking a two-state study because you dont want to have it be utterly unique to the politics of one state rather than the other. Alabama has the best evidence, and I spent more time on Alabama than I did on Mississippi.

BB: Is that part of why you got interested in Alabama and stuck with Alabama for the Urban Emancipation book?

MF: Yeah. You know, Im not at a big research university. Im at a liberal arts college, which means that time to pick up a whole new field and do it comes tougher to me. So if you want to do good scholarship, the inclination is to stick with things you know and expand on them. And thats what Ive done. In fact, Armstead Robinson told me in the old days, Alabama, nobodys done it. Go do it. And he was right. So the Reconstruction in Alabama book I am writing now is the culmination of my career, and it draws on all the work Ive done.

BB: Before talking about Urban Emancipation, I wanted to take a digression into a couple of the articles that you did. You did an article in Agricultural History about the motivations for the Ku Klux Klan. Also the article in the recent After Slavery collection builds on that and expands that. Both of those emphasize the connection between Ku Klux Klan activity and the material circumstances brought about by emancipation. In some ways, the argument that the Ku Klux Klan was responding to petty property theft by African Americans is something that Walter Fleming would have agreed with. The question that leads me to is, what kinds of things can we take from the very old generation of scholarship, like Fleming and so forth, to use as a basis for current studies? (Obviously not the assumptions about racial hierarchy) But more than some other scholars of our generation, I think your work often goes back and says, Well, wait a minute, there is a good idea here. Lets see what we can do with it.

MF: Youre probably referring to the Fleming essay also that I have in that new book about the Dunning School. The problem with redeeming Fleming is that hes a Klan enthusiast. He really thinks that in order to get what whites need, racial violence was essential. And he rather applauds it. Once he wrote his Reconstruction book, he actually collaborates with Klan-style groups to promulgate the memory of the wonderful KKK. The founders of the KKK wrote a memoir, and Fleming wrote the introduction to that memoir accusing them of backsliding, that they arent enthusiastic enough about the wondrous violence they used. So its hard to get happy around Walter Lynwood Fleming. But hes there. Hes intelligent, and the other thing is that he has letters that former Klansmen wrote him that he sticks in the footnotes. He provides us all these wonderful primary sources for Ryland Randolph and other really unpleasant people. So the fact is that theres all kind of evidence from racists that this white supremacist guy has access to that we dont. The other thing is that his animating view is that class the tension between Black Belt planters and whites up in the hillsreally is a big thing in white Democratic politics. Hes not wrong about that. There are elements of what he does that you can take, but you need to say what he is all about, very clearly. The part of those two Klan essays that people could object to is that I do think that whats going on is that as the shift goes on from gang labor, overseers, and the rest, to decentralized tenant farming, like sharecropping, that you go from a situation where the planters are feeding the hands and feeding their families, as part of the wage, to a situation where the hands are providing their own provisions over the crop year by borrowing money from the planter or the local merchants. So they are in a situation where they are providing for themselves. And when you have a bad crop, there is a tendency for them to steal somebodys hog and remember, this is the era of open ranging, where people dont fence in their hogs, but they actually send them off into the woods. And now freedmen have dogs and guns. So if you take the planters correspondence seriously, they wail about it all the time: The freedmen are stealing our hogs.

Its not a major motive for the Klan. The major motive for the Klan is electoral violence and putting black people generally in their place. But if were talking about a third-tier motive, and one that is easily defended in the public sphere, they talk about theft all the time. If there is an issue of a freedman appropriating their livestock, the planters they can live with it, if cotton pays, but what about the neighbors who were not planters? If freedmen are stealing anything, its going to be from both groups, but only one group gets the benefit from the labor of freedmen. Im not sure if I used the term in the article, but I think its like an ethnic cleansing from the point of view of non-planter whites who really want to drive the freedmen out of their neighborhood for a number of reasons. I think thats what is going on.

BB: Kind of like later whitecapping violence where poor white tenants are driving all the African Americans out of the neighborhood so they can get better wages and better terms.

MF: The other thing is a lot of poor whites are moving from the piedmont and the hills down to the Tennessee Valley or other areas, so they dont like freedmen as rivals as tenants either. And thats another mechanism thats driving this along. What I would also say is that there is a difference between the two articles. When I did the first research, which was in the Agricultural History piece in the late nineties, the research method was to take my list of four hundred or so indicted Klansmen and try to find them in the reels of microfilm and whatever indexes existed. It was a laborious process. It was driven by just, Oh, that name sounds familiar, let me double check on my list. So theres sort of a haphazard quality to it, and I just did 1870. I did the agricultural census, and I did the population census. I found, lo and behold, of everybody I could find that was indicted as a Klansman, they are almost all destitute. So the median wealth for accused Klansmen in 1870 that I found in that first case was zero. They just have no money. And theyre all in their early twenties, and theyre all, so far as I can tell, poor. So I figured, okay, first article, poor whites attacking labor rivals, attacking people for these kinds of class reasons. By the time I wrote the second article, the piece for our anthology, we have Ancestry.com and other things where you can find them more readily. So I took the research back to 1860, too. Theyre still poor in 1870. I found more names, and theyre still quite poor, but if you go back to the families in 1860 before the Civil War, they werent so poor. A lot of them are from slave-holding families. About half of the ones I could find are from slave-holding families, some of them prosperous slaveholders. In 1870, theyre poor. In 1860, theyre not, which kind of gives you a sense of their potential motivation. They come from families who have been impoverished by the war. The two articles are in tension simply because the research available to me changed. But I think that the newer version is interesting, too.

BB: One of the things you were talking about just then about poor whites moving down from the hills into the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt, in some ways that parallels the movement of African Americans from the countryside into the city of Mobile. So that might be a good transition for you to talk about your Mobile book. How was it different studying a city from the very rural environments of your first book?

MF: My first book has a chapter on whats going on in the cities, and a good deal of that chapter deals with Mobile. The thing that struck me was this chaotic factional situation in Mobile where two different factions of the Republican party, largely black and native white, are at each others throats to the point that you had actual fistfights, real fights between two Republican factions. And I was wondering, What in Gods name is going on in Mobile? So as I began to ponder the next project, I got intrigued with trying to figure out what the Mobile explanation was. What I found was that there were two factions, both of them interracially led. Theres kind of a moderate, native white southerner-dominated faction of which all the leaders are light-skinned according to the ones I could find in the census theyre all lightskinned, literate, and a good number of them are Afro-Creoles. So you have this group that is sort of into legal means. You have another group, led by carpetbaggers, and kind of stereotypical carpetbaggers, where the leadership is all dark-skinned, and most of them are former slaves and not as literate as the other group. This Radical group is much more inclined toward mass action: streetcar occupations to integrate streetcars, strikes on the docks. And these two groups are struggling for leadership all through the era to the point that they actually defeat an incumbent Radical Republican congressman, an African American congressman, because they ran a moderate light-skinned Creole against him and divided the Republican vote. This dispute ties into broader social trends. What I did was I analyzed this urban black factionalism, and tied it to the process of emancipation. Huge numbers of freedmen are moving into the suburbs of Mobile, and these immiserated recent migrants from the countryside become the basis for all this direct action on the docks and in streetcar occupations and in other forms of popular direct action tactics. I wish the book had gotten more attention because I think its a model for whats going on in southern cities. You can analyze Republican factionalism in terms of whats going on in the black community in the urban areas where factionalism is most intense, because there are patronage positions for activists to fight over.

BB: Steve Wests recent article about black politics in Greenville, South Carolina, a year or two ago is a little bit like that. Hes actually talking there about the late 1880s, and elections there over whether the city is going to be wet or dry.

MF: There was a book on blacks in Charlotte, I think, back fifteen or twenty years ago, that found very strong differences over the prohibition issue between the respectable middle-class folks, which I think is part of the West article, if I remember correctly, and political activists who are Republican party people who are more in touch with this broader constituency that is not thrilled with this. I think that actually kind of works here. Theres also an interesting thing in that book about this subculture of black activists who are dependent on federal jobs and how their lives work as political activists and how they support themselves as political activists. My sense is that no one has done it. The problem is that a one-city study doesnt get as much attention as it deserves in terms of the wider interpretation, which is something youre going to discover when your magnum opus on Greenville comes out.

BB: Right, whenever that is! Although youre working on the big book on Alabama, and well come back to that in a moment, you did write a much broader scope book a few years ago called Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in America. Could you talk a bit about the experience of why you chose to write that, how it obviously the elephant in the room is Eric Foners Reconstruction how the view of Reconstruction that you present in your book varies from the view that has become standard from Foners synthesis?

MF: Im quite an admirer of Foners. I think that his book is still the gold standard, and everyone has to situate themselves relative to the excellence of that work. In particular, his emphasis in the late 1860s on the interconnection between whats going on on the plantation and popular politics is very consistent with my Union League stuff. So Im a thorough admirer. But Ive spent, now, twenty-five years teaching in the classroom, and Ive tried to assign Foners short history, and its so good and so sophisticated that I had trouble getting my excellent, smart undergraduates to engage with it. I had an undergraduate who went on to library school, from Atlanta no less, who told me she skipped reading the book for my Civil War class! I was trying to figure out what portions of the Reconstruction struggle could be communicated effectively to an undergraduate audience. Another reason for writing the book is that some scholarship has come out since Foner. Factionalism in the black community is something Im very interested in. And the railroad issue is interesting to me. I was trying to integrate African American agency into the decisions on railroad programs that turn out so badly. They arent really responsible, but I do think we should pay attention to at least how theyre thinking about these issues. Ive always been an admirer of Mark Summerss book on railroads. So class within the black community, faction within the black community, and the economic development issues that dont get a tremendous amount of emphasis in Foners book I think are important. The other thing was the press approached me and asked if I wanted to do this. It occurred to me vaguely that if I wanted to write a Reconstruction history of Alabama, I needed a better grounding in national politics. It forced me to do the background reading in other states and Washington, D.C. Im conceptualizing what Im doing in Alabama as what state studies might look like going forward. I felt like I wanted to contextualize it in the national context because, to tell you the truth, to go back to Fleming, Fleming thinks his Alabama study is the South writ small. I would follow that aspect of his work. Alabama is, to some extent, the model Deep South state, and it is so central to the national consciousness of how the civil rights movement played out that I think that its a nice place. Because there havent been a lot of state revisionist studies, or post-Foner full scale histories of states. What that means is that Flemings book remains the standard place to look for the narrative for Alabama, and thats ridiculous in the twenty-first century.

BB: If we think about the revisionist period, there are a lot of other state studies. So if we think about the Dunning School, and he sends his various students off to do their state studies, then we did get, in the revisionist period, other state studies of particular states. So, Simkins and Woody start things off with South Carolina. Its not as revisionist as some of that later ones. And then you get other studies like Jerrell Shoffner for Florida, and so forth. And in all these various states, but why do you think, in the context of Reconstruction historiography, Alabama historiography, why didnt somebody write a book about Reconstruction in Alabama?

MF: I have no idea. Maybe Atlanta is a cooler place to do research than Montgomery. I dont know. Ive always thought Montgomery is an interesting place. It has a lot of history. Another reason for this absence is that scholars know a state study is probably not going to galvanize the whole field, whereas detailed studies on some novel angle that is of interest to people oftentimes make a bigger splash. But let me tell you what I think is going to be my contribution with the Reconstruction in Alabama book. Beyond just the synthesis of everything else Ive done, my sense of the great accomplishment of Foners book is to take the scholarship on, and use the fresh primary source materials in the Freedom papers project, at the University of Maryland to excellent advantage. He integrates whats happening socially on the plantations with the great political struggle of military Reconstruction when blacks get the right to vote. So for the late 1860s, its a wonderful synthesis of political and social history, and its exactly the sort of thing I was trained to do at UCLA in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. This is the brilliance of Foners work, and in the fact that its so utterly plausible. But only the last hundred pages of Foners book deal with the period after the Greeley election, after 1872. His interpretationits still greatbut in terms of the labor connection to Reconstruction politics, it kind of runs out of steam in the early seventies. And you see less of it. He talks about the depressions impact, certainly. I think you might make an argument that whats going on in Alabama in the 1870s is kind of like whats going on in South Carolina, with fairly strong divisions among the white opposition. The place I would look for this is Permans book on factional politics during Reconstruction. Heres what I would say. Foners argument in his Reconstruction book is that the Klan is led by planters. The upper class, the political elite has decided that Reconstruction is intolerable, and that violence is the only way they can beat people at the polls and put black people back in their subordinate position. I think hes right. The Klan has, early on, a lot of elite participation, and at a time when plantation agriculture is collapsing, 1867, there is a lot of fury among planters. And theres a lot of violence coming from planters and overseers in 1865 and 1866 as they try and deal with people on the basis of freedom. So Foners argument is that the Klan is upper-class led. But with sharecropping, a couple of years in, the plantation system improves.

Once the freedmen go to work as sharecroppers and the price of cotton recovers, planters are not so desperate anymore. And in 1870 when the Democrats temporarily regain the governors office in Alabama, I think you start getting a conservative push-back of planters who are tired of the violence and whose major issue is becoming labor shortage. Once cotton reaches twenty cents a pound, tenants are really desired. Big planters really dont like it when you push their tenants out. And by 1871, 1872, the Greeley campaign, this dissident conservative tradition reemerges, especially in the old Whig counties of the black belt. Part of this is that the Klan is driving so many freedmen into their neighborhoods that the areas that are not violent have this relative surplus of labor. I did something sort of interesting, statistically. The way to do a quantitative sample of wealth among black people is to use this 1 percent sample of the census that the demographic history program at the University of Minnesota has. What I found is the freedmen in 1870 are poorer in the richest areas of the Black Belt than just about anywhere else. So workers are being driven from areas where blacks are more prosperous to the areas where theres so much labor that theres a surplus. These are the richest areas of Alabama, and freedmen are keeping less of their money. Somebody must be making money off them. You read the planters letters, and they say, Oh, weve got 60 percent, 100 percent interest rates down at the store. Things are going really nicely. I think whats going on is that in the early seventies there is a real attempt among a lot of planters to try and coexist with the black majorities that they think will be permanently governing their counties. I think thats whats going on. Whats interesting is that I think that Foner, because he tends to see the planters as the villains, hes missing the stuff that Perman is talking about, about these former Whigs who are moving towards some kind of coexistence, or are trying to win through less violent methods. It makes sense to integrate the labor and the political history. It just doesnt play out the same way in the seventies that it does in the sixties. Then in the fall of 1873, the economy collapses, everything tanks, and the planters suddenly instead of having a labor shortage are trying to desperately drive people away from their plantations. And theres this big wave of theft fears again. So what happens is you get this white-line, White League as the political situation changes. And some planters still arent that thrilled. You find in South Carolina that the planters oppose racial extremists in the areas where blacks are 80 percent, 90 percent of the population. I think its exactly whats happening in Alabama. So what I think my book is doing is taking the Foner labor emphasis and extending it to the seventies with somewhat different results. Theres this conservative subculture who hadnt been thrilled with secession, who hadnt been thrilled with the war going on and on, and had basically been persuaded that states-rights Democrats crazy people had wrecked their lives and they were going to do it again. The argument is that there is a subculture of whites whose racial views dont move them towards the more extreme forms of violenceuntil the economy tanks in 1874.

BB: So with your book, what is the end date going to be?

MF: Theres a new constitution in Alabama in 1875. It solidifies a lot of stuff. I know that people talk about the long Reconstruction but my Reconstruction is already long enough because to make the argument Im making, I have to go back before the war and talk about the origins of conservative dissent. So I dont even get to the African American core chapter till Chapter Five because Ive got to do the war, Ive got to do occupation, Ive got to do the impact of whats going on in Presidential Reconstruction. So my book ends in 75 because I figure my lifespan is finite. I need to finish this damn thing.

BB: Certainly the new constitution is a good end-point. In a way, theres a long Reconstruction in some places, and a shorter one in Alabama or in southwest Georgia as Susan ODonovan found. Reconstruction is effectively over for African Americans by 1868. They dont even really get much out of the seventies.

MF: And part of this that is just distressingly current is the amazing number of ways to prevent local black majorities from meaning anything. There are counties where blacks are still a majority, but they just strip those counties of self-governing powers. Theres a board of supervisors, but they have no power. The power is officials appointed by the governor. You set up a committee to vet jurors so African Americans wont serve on juries. Its very impressive. The ways you can make an electoral system do what you want it to if you decide to play games with the ballot box is incredibly instructive in our contemporary situation. Im sort of hoping there are some lessons there.

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, Michael William. The Union League movement in Alabama and Mississippi : politics and agricultural change in the deep South during Reconstruction. Ph.D. diss, UCLA, 1986.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in Reconstruction Alabama. Agricultural History 71 (Spring 1997): 186-206.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Steel Frame of Walter Lynwood Fleming. In The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, edited by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, 157-178. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. Ex-Slaveholders and the Ku Klux Klan: Exploring the Motivations of Terrorist Violence. In After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, edited by Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly, 143-158. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

McMath, Robert C. Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers Alliance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

ODonovan, Susan Eva. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Summers, Mark W. Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

West, Steven A. A Hot Municipal Contest: Prohibition and Politics in Greenville, South Carolina after Reconstruction. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era11 (Oct. 2012): 519-51.

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After Slavery | US Slave Emancipation and its Aftermath

The liberal tradition is employed by the left and the right to justify their positions concerning contemporary capitalist society. An issue often raised concerns US slavery, whether it made life better for slaves, whether it was better or worse than wage slavery in the north. While weve all heard Noam Chomsky talk about this, its probably a good idea to look for other sources on what 19th century liberals actually thought about freedom. Micheal Sandel has written about Lincolns conception of freedom and how it relates to wage labour and slavery in a book called Democracys Discontent: America in a search for Public Policy. The following quotations are taken from a chapter called Free Labour versus Wage Labour:

Although he shared the abolitionist moral condemnation of slavery, Lincoln did not share their voluntarist conception of freedom. Lincolns main argument against the expansion of slavery rested on the free labour ideal, and unlike the abolitionists, he did not equate free labour with wage labour. The superiority of free labour to slave labour did not consist in the fact that free labourers consent to exchange their work for a wage whereas slaves do not consent. The differences was rather that the northern wage labourer could hope one day to escape from his condition, whereas the slave could not. It was not consent that distinguished free labour from slavery, but rather the prospect of independence, the chance to rise to own productive property and to work for oneself. According to Lincolm, it was this feature of the free labour system that the southern critics of wage labour overlooked: They insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern labourers! They think that men are always to remain labourers here but there is no such class. The man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself. And next year he will hire others to labour for him. (181)

Lincoln did not challenge the notion that those who spend their entire lives as wage labourers are comparable to slaves. He held that both forms of work wrongly subordinate labour to capital. Those who debated whether it is best that capital shall hire labourers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them ot it without consent, considered too narrow a range of possibilities. Free labour is labour carried out under conditions of independence from employers and masters alike. Lincolm insisted that, at least in the North, most Americans were independent in this sense: Men, with their families wives, sons and daughters work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favours of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.

In Lincolns hands, the conception of freedom deriving from the artisan republican tradition became the rallying point for the northern cause in the Civil War. In the 1830s and 1840s, labour leaders had invoked this conception in criticizing northern society; wage labour, they feared, was supplanting free labour. In the late 1850s, Lincoln and the Republicans invoked the same conception in defending northern society; they superiority of the North to the slaveholding South consisted in the independence the free labour system made possible. (183)

The Union victory in the Civil War put to rest the threat of free labour posed by the slave power, only to revive and intensify the threat posed by the wage system and industrial capitalism. Lincoln had led the North to war in the name of free labour and the small, independent producer, but the war itself accelerated the growth of capitalist enterprise and factory production. (183)

In 1869 the New York Times reported on the decline of the free labour system and the advance of wage labour. Small workshops had become far less common than they were before the war, and the small manufactures thus swallowed up have become workmen on wages in the greater establishments, whose larger purses, labour-saving machines, etc., refused to allow the small manufacturers a separate existence. THe article criticized the trend it described in terms reminiscent of the labour movement of the 1830s and 1840s. THe fall of the independent mechanic to wage earner status amounted to a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed in the South.

The 1870 census, the first to record detailed information about Americans occupations, confirmed what many workers already knew. Not withstanding a free labour ideology that tied liberty to ownership of productive property, American had become a nation of employees. (183)

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Abraham Lincoln on Freedom, Wage labour and Slavery

Forward, ho!

Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounded imperiously deep in the forest.- Jack London- Call of the Wild

I have this quote stuck up at my desk at eye level and I read it several times during my work day. Call of the Wild is one of my favourite books and when things seem not quite right in life, I can pick it up and read it to soothe whatever angst I am feeling. I love the style of Londons writing as much as the content and themes of the book- his colourful characters and perfectly abbreviated descriptions of nature can lead me to a land of daydreams and lustful desire for wilderness and wildness. The books central theme of heeding the call within reminds me of what I love and why I do it. I dont believe in fate, pre-destined paths and soul mates but I do think each of us has something, or even several things, that feel like home to us. The thing that when we do it or perhaps even think about it, brings us a sense of calmness, completeness and dispels that gnawing feeling in the gut that accompanies those tasks, thoughts and people that are not innately right for us. The best (and probably least imaginative) explanation I have is that it comes from the big formative years of our lives- our childhood and youth. I think that finding what this call is within ourselves is one of the first steps to reclaiming our happiness and taking responsibility for it.

My call that is sounding is of the soil, seeds and leaves which makes my horticulture course feels right. One by one all of the aspects of my life are shifting into place and I truly believe that it is because I am doing what I am meant to be. The happiness and confidence that is coming from doing what nourishes me is overflowing into other areas. The biggest difference by far is that I feel awake. And being awake means feeling alive. Being alive means not being another loser going through the motions on autopilot, thinking about, but never acting on those niggling thoughts that something is out of place and there must be more to life.

Its only been about eight months since the inception of this blog and the main themes of escaping wage slavery and living a more deliberate and meaningful life are already coming to fruition. I use the word fruition in a loose sense, as I am coming to learn my major goals are ongoing and unlikely to ever cease in my life. I currently dont need to earn a full time income to support my needs (although saving money is not an easy task) and virtually all of my time is spent on activities that I find meaningful and add value to my life and hopefully others. Im busy but my days and nights are not loaded with useless busyness, tasks to fill in gaps, doing things to kill time.

Killing time. The thought inspires a horrible sense of dread in me. We all have the same number of hours in the day and life is way too open handed with opportunities to comfortably entertain the idea of killing time. Wasted time, money and food used to be my top personal criticisms and it is the economy and salvation of those in between and once passive moments of time that have been the biggest beast to conquer. If you finding you are killing time waiting for someone or something find ways to use that time. Creatively daydream, write, read, listen to a podcast- please, please, please dont kill your time.

The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you cant save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly. Benjamin Hoff- The Tao of Pooh

My 40 Before 40 list feels like it is going slowly, but this is only because so many of the items on the list are really, really big and require a long term commitment (something I have never excelled at). In the last week alone I have worked on the following items:

I have also adjusted the list to better fit me by changing Run a half marathon (I actually dont enjoy running at all) to Hitchhike 10,000kms and Visit Every Continent (this is implicit in the other items) to Attend Burning Man. I figure a couple of changes as I grow is not only permissible but something to be encouraged. Having strict goals and ideals often puts blinkers on life and prevents us from seeing the other opportunities that arise.

Be flexible and spend your time wisely.

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African Americans frequently experience many perilous problems, such as dire economic situations and feelings of hostility from the cultural mainstream in America (Kaufman, 1971). The cultural collision between African Americans and whites continues to create several problems in society.... [tags: Race, Slavery]:: 9 Works Cited 894 words(2.6 pages)Better Essays[preview] The Hypocrisy of American Slavery, Through the Eyes of Frederick Douglass - The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself is a powerful book in many respects. Douglass invites you to vicariously witness the monstrous atrocities he experienced during the antebellum period; a time when said atrocities were not only encouraged, but looked highly upon. Throughout his narrative, Douglass expresses his exponentially growing anger and fortitude. When the reader arrives at The Appendix, it soon becomes that much more apparent that the vice of slavery that is most troublesome to him, is the curtain of pseudo-Christianity surrounding it.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 3 Works Cited 1599 words(4.6 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] slavery and the plantation - slavery and the plantation During the era of slavery in the United States, not all blacks were slaves. There were a many number of free blacks, consisting of those had been freed or those in fact that were never slave. Nor did all slave work on plantations. There were nearly five hundred thousand that worked in the cities as domestic, skilled artisans and factory hands (Green, 13). But they were exceptions to the general rule. Most blacks in America were slaves on plantation-sized units in the seven states of the South.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 6 Works Cited 2101 words(6 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Slavery in the Bible - Slavery in the Bible The first mention of slavery in the Bible is found in Noah's declaration, "Cursed be Canaan. The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers" (Gen. 9:25). He said this after waking up from a naked, drunken stupor and learning that his son Ham had mocked him. Although Ham was the guilty party, Noah's statement was directed at Ham's youngest son Canaan. If he was involved with his father in this act of disrespect, the statement can be taken as the pronouncement of a curse, "Cursed be Canaan." It is possible, however, that Canaan did not join his father in making fun of Noah.... [tags: Slavery Essays]780 words(2.2 pages)Good Essays[preview] Slavery Around the World - Throughout this course we have learned about slavery in many parts of the world. I have learned some new things about slavery that I had never been taught before. Slavery has been a major stab wound to the heart of the world ever since it first existed. Slavery has caused years of turmoil and depression to large ethnic groups of people who have done nothing to deserve what came to them. The sad part about the whole slavery situation is that, it was never completely abolished from the world. Maybe on paper slavery may have been abolished, but there are still forms of slavery that exists in the world today.... [tags: Slave, Mende Nazer, child slavery, Sudan]:: 3 Works Cited 1588 words(4.5 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] The abolition of slavery in Africa and the Middle East - ... The Western civilizatory mission can not accept slave work in a world in which the progress and the 'humanity' it was characterized by freedom and wage labor.9 Actually, the end of slavery in Africa was one of the 'motivations' of the 'scramble of Africa'. Colonialism was a way to overcome the savagery and bring natives to progress and civilization through wage labor and production for the market.10 Once the colonial rule was established and slavery legally abolished, images of 'benign' slavery were a way to keep good relations with the local rulers.... [tags: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society]1001 words(2.9 pages)Better Essays[preview] Slavery, A World History - A labor system that had previously existed throughout history, in many instances and most countries is known as slavery. So what exactly is it. How did slavery begin. And what does it mean in our world today. These are complex questions that are often asked and, possibly, by understanding the forms it takes and the roles such slaves perform. What daily life is like for those enchained and what can be done to end this demeaning practice may help in answering those questions. It is known that slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought, sold and are forced to work.... [tags: labor systems, laws don't abolish slavery ]:: 2 Works Cited 1098 words(3.1 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Racial Slavery and the Development of Our Nation - ... Confrontation between the Native Americans and settlers in western Virginia spearheaded an uprising that demanded Governor Berkeley to provide more land to the poor whites. Berkeley stood by his decision to maintain peaceful relations with the local Native American population, which sparked a series of uprisings and massacres that grew into full rebellion against Berkeley and his men. Berkeley fled when Nathaniel Bacon and his ranks burned Jamestown to the ground, which led to Bacons rule over Virginia for a short while until England sent warships to regain control.... [tags: united states, freedom, liberty, slavery]:: 1 Works Cited 1436 words(4.1 pages)Better Essays[preview] Interpretations of Slavery - Interpretations of Slavery INTRODUCTION Slavery is known to have existed as early as the 18th century B.C. during the Shang Dynasty of China. Slavery was widely practiced in many other countries, including, Korea, India, Greece, Mexico and Africa. (Britannica 288-89). When most people consider slavery, however, they think of Western slavery in North America because it is well documented and it was such a horrible institution. Even though there is no one definition of slavery, the people who study it (historians, anthropologists and sociologists) agree that certain characteristics are present in all forms of slavery.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 8 Works Cited 3740 words(10.7 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Slavery in America - Slavery in America By 1850, ninety-two percent of all American blacks were concentrated in the South, and about 95 percent were slaves. Pre-civil war slaves in America went through a great deal of turmoil and discontent in the South. Slavery has had a huge effect on our country. Many slaves were beaten to death and some did not survive the ruff life of slavery. Slavery then went on to cause the War between the North and the South known as the Civil War. In 1916, a Dutch ship brought twenty enslaved Africans to a Virginia Colony at Jamestown.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 2 Works Cited 410 words(1.2 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery In 19c - Slavery in 19th Century A justified institution as the 19th century emerged; the infamous institution of slavery grew rapidly and produced some surprising controversy and rash justification. Proslavery, Southern whites used social, political, and economical justification in their arguments defining the institution as a source of positive good, a legal definition, and as an economic stabilizer. The proslavery supporters often used moral and biblical rationalization through a religious foundation in Christianity and supported philosophic ideals in Manifest Destiny to vindicated slavery as a profitable investment.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1159 words(3.3 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery In America - Slavery in America Introduction There has been much debate on the topic of slavery in the early times, although most of the countries considered slavery as a criminal activity. Some countries such as Myanmar and Sudan do not abolish it. They even expedite the slavery system. It is no doubt that slavery violent the human rights. However, it was commonly spread in the early times from 17th to 19th century. In this research, I will talk about the origin of the slavery, the reasons for people to becoming slave and the life of the slave.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1493 words(4.3 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery In Illinois - Slavery in Illinois This essay talks about the dated events that happened in Illinois, focusing on slavery, from the time it begun, whether it should be implemented or not, its abolishment, and up to the time it ended. The paper also contains a well-opinionated reaction about slavery, how it is different from today. The Civil War Period has always been the primary hub of teaching in any American History classes. The era between the American Revolution and the Civil War was of a great importance since it has been the best and worst part of the western civilization during those times.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 4 Works Cited 1565 words(4.5 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery in Literature - Slavery in Literature Frederick Douglass was born into the lifelong, evil, bondage of slavery. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, depicts his accomplishments. The narrative, however, is not only the story of his success. It is not simply a tale of his miraculous escape from slavery. Frederick Douglass' narrative is, in fact, an account of his tremendous strides through literacy. He exemplifies a literate man who is able to use the psychological tools of thought to escape the intense bonds of slavery.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1499 words(4.3 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery and Reparations - Slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism have caused inestimable damage to billions of people throughout the world. They have also formed the basis for the accumulation of immense wealth in the hands of a small elite The slave trade involved the brutal relocation of tens of millions of people in which families, communities and societies were destroyed and in which millions lost their lives in the most inhumane conditions. At the same time, slavery was a fundamental element of the strengthening of mercantile trade and the rapid accumulation of capital that formed the basis for the emergence of the capitalist system as we know it today.... [tags: Slavery Essays]4382 words(12.5 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Defense Of Slavery - Throughout history many things have happened that were by many thought to be unconscionable. Yet, the people who were putting their mark of unacceptance upon those committing these thought to be deplorable acts, were unaware of the actual situations, and in many cases, committing the same acts themselves. This was true during the Holy Wars, the Crusades and similar events. People who were not involved, often thought these acts of inhumanity to be reprehensible, but the parties involved, in their minds, had just cause for what they were doing.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1105 words(3.2 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery In America - Slavery in America stems well back to when the new world was first discovered and was led by the country to start the African Slave Trade-Portugal. The African Slave Trade was first exploited for plantations in the Caribbean, and eventually reached the southern coasts of America. The African natives were of all ages and sexes. Women usually worked in the homes cooking and cleaning, while men were sent out into the plantations to farm. Young girls would usually help in the house also and young boys would help in the farm by bailing hay and loading wagons with crops.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1011 words(2.9 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Racism and Slavery - Did race prejudice cause slavery. Or was it the other way round. Winthrop D. Jordan, in his monumental study of white American attitudes to black people from 1550 to 1812, argues that prejudice and slavery may well have been equally cause and effect, 'dynamically joining hands to hustle the Negro down the road to complete degradation. But we must go deeper than that, if we are to understand the rise of English racism as an ideology, the various roles it has played in the past, and the role it is playing today.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1802 words(5.1 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Lydia Maria Child's Propositions Defining Slavery and Emancipation - There has been many debates about the righteousness of slavery in the United States. There were many supporters of slavery as well as people who opposed slavery. Slavery has concentrated on African slaves In the United States. Law and public opinion regarding slavery differed from state to state and from person to person. Slavery has brought about a lot of controversy and stirred emotions even in today's society which has left a big impact on the people. In the documents, Ads for Runaway Servants and Slaves (1733-72), Lydia Maria Child's Propositions Defining Slavery and Emancipation (1833) and Lydia Maria Child's Prejudices against people of color (1836), describes the life of slaves alon... [tags: slavery, african-american, servants]:: 9 Works Cited 1425 words(4.1 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Slavery in Jamaica - Jamaica has been a land exploited and oppressed by white nations for much of its history. First colonized by the Spanish and then the British, it seems hard to imagine a time when it was just the native people living in peace and harmony with the land. Many years after the white man first jammed himself onto the beaches of Jamaica, reggae music was born. A continuing tradition, this easy-to-groove-to music style originated as a voice against this oppression; it was the peaceful islanders way of finally communicating their plighted history to all who would listen, or all who could appreciate a good beat.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 6 Works Cited 4438 words(12.7 pages)Strong Essays[preview] slavery in brasil - Because certain forms of slavery had existed for centuries on the continent of Africa, Brazilian historians used to say that blacks imported from across the Atlantic were docile and ready to accept their new status as slaves. This assertion is based on the unwarranted assumption that was true of a limited area of Africa was typical of the continent as a whole. All slavery in brazil was essentially the same depending on the task or the labor the slave had to preform. In many cases the slaves was there to perform labor that was deplorable to the nobility.... [tags: Slavery Essays]743 words(2.1 pages)Good Essays[preview] Views On Slavery - There are many perceptions as to how people view slavery. When people talk about slavery, the first thing that comes to their mind will be African American Slaves in the United States. They will also think of how they were brought to the United States against their own will and unequally exploited. However, according to Stephen F. Austin, during the eighteen-twentys and thirtys Mexicans also had slaves. He compares American Slaves and Cruz Arocha as a Mexican Slave. Although there are many differences between Cruz Arocha and the American slaves, especially in the ways they are treated.... [tags: Slavery Essays]761 words(2.2 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Women and Slavery - SLAVERY AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD The simple fact is that everybody has heard of the Underground Railroad, but not everyone knows just what it was. First of all, it wasn=t underground, and it wasn=t even a railroad. The term AUnderground Railroad,@ actually refers to a path along which escaping slaves were passed from farmhouse to storage sheds, from cellars to barns, until they reached safety in the North. One of the most widely known abolitionists in history is a slave by the name of Harriet Tubman.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 2 Works Cited 1466 words(4.2 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Slavery in America - For this assignment we were asked to read the book Modern Medea written Steven Weisenburger, which deals with slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. In my paper I will discuss how the book portrays the daily life as a slave, the issue of freedom, and the racial realities during this time. This particular book tells the story of a slave by the name of Margaret Garner, who one day escaped from her plantation in Covington, KY, and took along with her Robert which was her husband, her four children, and Robert's parents.... [tags: Slavery Essays]1843 words(5.3 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Support of Slavery by the Christian Church - Support of Slavery by the Christian Church The belief in some higher presence, other than our own, has existed since man can recollect. Religion was established from this belief, and it can survive and flourish because of this belief. Christianity, one of several forms of religion that exist today, began sometime during the middle of the first century. Christians believe in a higher presence that they call "God." This belief in God is based on faith, not fact; faith is "unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence." (Webster's New World College Dictionary, 1996, p.... [tags: Slavery Essays]:: 6 Works Cited 2850 words(8.1 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] The Contrasting Views of Pro-Slavery vs. Abolitionist - ... Samuel Cartwright was a physician and pro-slavery advocate during the 1800s and is well known for his diagnosis of drapetomania, a supposed disease that made slaves runaway. He concluded that the reason African slaves sought to escape was because they were treated inadequately by their masters. Delving deeper in his writings it is discovered he too, like George Fitzhugh, approved of enslavement. Both men advocated the issue and have similar analyzes on how slaves are or should be treated. Cartwright expresses to his audience that slaves will most likely run (drapetomania) if they are treated poorly by their master; according to my experience, the "genu flexit"--the awe and reverence, m... [tags: positions, goals, party, slavery]1248 words(3.6 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: Viewpoint of the Antislavery and Abolotionist Movements - ... They were very well envisioned, however their efforts were only effective for so long due to the vast amounts of funding necessary for compensation of slave owners and shipment of freed slaves to their new settlements. There were far too many slaves and it was certain that the plan would never reach economic sufficiency to follow through with their project, as well as the fact that the growing cotton industry in the South called for much labor work and slaves were the easiest access of productive laborers.... [tags: homelands, slavery, influence, war]751 words(2.1 pages)Better Essays[preview] A Study of the Healing Process from Slavery and Racism - A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.-Frederick Douglass When you think of slavery, you may want to consider the effects of an earthquake because thats how powerful it was. Like many earthquakes, slavery produced various damaging ramifications to everything around it. This included devastation to family structures and in worst cases the loss of human life; and without doubt slavery claimed the lives of many just as Harriet Jacobs expressed I once saw a slave girl dying after the birth of a child nearly white.... [tags: Racial Relations, Slavery, Racism]2560 words(7.3 pages)Powerful Essays[preview] Looking Poitively at the Effects of Slavery in the USA: Personal Narrative - A Blessing in Disguise Slavery and capitalism have an interesting relationship. Slavery has existed nearly everywhere in the world, under almost every political and economic system, and was in no way a stranger to capitalism or the United States. America experienced endless economic benefits from slavery, but it was simultaneously a despicable violation of human rights. Natives of Africa were not only captured, but transported to what is now the United States and forced to do work. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, European colonies heavily depended on the labor of the Africans for their economic survival.... [tags: economic systems, capitalism, slavery]:: 5 Works Cited 1012 words(2.9 pages)Strong Essays[preview] Wendell Phillips: A Leading Reformer for the Abolishment of Slavery - Wendell Phillips was a leading reformer for the abolishment of slavery and was known as a passionate abolitionist who was willing to risk his own future to defend the cause he firmly believed in. He was born on November 29, 1811, the son of a wealthy Boston family. With a background of attending the famous Boston Latin School as a kid and later on obtaining a degree from Harvard Law School in 1834. Phillips did not consider himself a reformer until the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society where he heard William Lloyd Garrison speak.... [tags: anti-slavery leaders]727 words(2.1 pages)Better Essays[preview] The Reality of Sex Slavery in the Present Day - In Margaret Atwoods novel, Oryx and Crake, she constantly placesthe reader in an uncomfortable environment. The story takesplacein a not so distant future where todays world no longerexistsdue toanunknown catastrophe. The only human is a man who calls himself theAbominableSnowman or Snowman for short, but in his childhood days his name was Jimmy. If the thought of being all alone in the world is not uneasy enough, Atwood takes this opportunity to point out the flaws of themodernworldthrough Snowmans reminiscing about Jimmys childhood. The truthsexposed are eventsthatpeople do not want to acknowledge: animal abuse for human advancement, elimination of human interacti... [tags: oryx and crake,margaret atwood,modern slavery]:: 2 Works Cited 1386 words(4 pages)Strong Essays[preview]

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Free Slavery Essays and Papers - 123HelpMe

Vince Emmer, your golf metaphor for big government is a really, really sad attempt to dis big government. But columns have always been the work of a duffer.

First thing your metaphor misses is there is a par to each hole. You don't make us understand what constitutes under and over the balance line that would be consensus. What is the bogey or the hole in one, spending wise?

Next most golfers play 18 holes, and the game is much more about the back nine than the front end.

But of course your brand of economics never ventures onto the back nine, where the sand traps of wage slavery and rust-belt industry are negotiated only by Asian players.

Case in point, saying each household owes $56,000 a year is just a fear tactic. With the current tax structure, and the many ways government finances debt, nobody actually owes this. Instead we pay forward a portion of the earning (which the government is borrowing, interest free) plus various fees and taxes to local agency, where one chooses to be a member of the same civility. This would be the front nine.

The back nine is the fact that the structure of government is much the same as corporations, in that they are champions or duffers to the extent they can carry debt.

The ability to carry debt in capitalist societies keeps the operation under par even with forays into the woods like Afghanistan and Iraq, and breath test-qualified mortgage-backed securities, etc. If you equate the per-household equivalent in the corporate world, it would be the cost passed onto consumers, hidden fees and the fact banks are borrowing peoples savings at a rate as close to interest free as it can manage.

But of course, our current neo-liberal economist and business school caddies don't even know the difference between the putter and the driver in this matter. Face the fact governments are financed by more than one club and must always play the full round, while business can spin off debt into subsidiaries and spend their time in the clubhouse.

Eric Olander

Glenwood Springs

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Letter: Par for the column - Glenwood Springs Post Independent

The statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va.

At 9 p.m. last Tuesday night, city workers began to enclose in plywood the Confederate monument that sits in Birminghams Linn Park. By the following afternoon, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had announced that he was suing the city for violating state law.

Activists in Birmingham first began calling for the removal of the 52-foot Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. That, in turn, prompted Gerald Allen, a state senator from Tuscaloosa, to introduce the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act to prohibit cities from removing or altering historic monuments more than 40 years old without the approval of a state committee. The predominantly (if not entirely) white Republicans who control the legislature passed the bill along party lines. Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed it into law in May.

Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered the monument to be covered amid a renewed and urgent call from activists and officials to remove such tributes to the Confederacy, after white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, rallied around a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and proceeded to attack counter-protesters, killing one woman. Several citiesfrom Baltimore to San Antoniohave since taken down Confederate monuments while others debate similar actions.

Mayor Bell, who is black, says he doesnt necessarily want to remove the statuedespite demands from local activistsbut he does think it should provide a broader context that condemns the Confederacy, rather than celebrates it. The Confederacy was an act of sedition and treason against the United States of America and represented the continuation of human bondage of people of color, Bell told the Prospect in an interview. Its anathema to anyone supportive of the United States government to have such a structure sitting on public property.

Furthermore, he points out, Birmingham didnt become a city until 1871, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. And the monument wasnt erected until 190550 years after the war endedwhen a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the memorial as a gift to the city.

Its my desire to no longer allow this statute to be seen by public until such time that we can tell the full story of slavery, the full story of what the Confederacy really meant, Bell told reporters last week. Now, Bell says, the city is exploring its legal options in light of the states lawsuit. The state attorney general is asking a district court to fine the city $25,000.

I don't believe that the legislative body has the authority to dictate what monuments or statues we have on public property. Thats a right that the municipal government should control, Bell says. This was built with private dollars and is now protected by the state. The city should have the power to eliminate any source of contention and to maintain public tranquility.

THE STATE OF ALABAMA'S CRACKDOWN ON BIRMINGHAMis just its latest attempt to limit the authority of the majority-black city, which has a black mayor and a majority-black city council. In February 2016, the Birmingham city council approved a $10.10-an-hour minimum wage. Two days later, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law prohibiting Alabama cities from passing such ordinances and voiding a wage hike for tens of thousands of Birminghams low-wage workers.

The experience of Birmingham is indicative of a broader GOP-led assault on the political power and home rule of Southern cities, home to large black populations, often led by black politicians, and, increasingly, purveyors of progressive policies that seek to improve upon the low standards of state law. From the removal of Confederate monuments to the enactment of local minimum wages, Republican-controlled statehouses are preempting blue citiesand undermining black voices.

These are nothing more than 21st-century Jim Crow laws, Johnathan Austin, chair of the Birmingham City Council, said of the monument removal and minimum-wage preemption laws in an interview with the Prospect. The state of Alabama is trying to control the [states] largest cityand largest black city by prohibiting us from governing ourselves.

Twenty-five statesincluding nearly every Southern statehave laws that prohibit cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage. The five states that have no minimum wage of their own (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee), adhering to the federal minimum instead, are in the South. Now, at least six states have laws limiting the power of cities to remove Confederate monuments, with most passed in the last couple years. All of them are in the South, where Republicans control every single legislative chamber. Despite their calls for local control and fewer regulations, state Republicans are now regulating both the cultural and economic authority of localities.

Last year, state legislators passed the Tennessee Heritage Preservation Act of 2016, which requires public notice, hearings, and a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature in order to remove historic monuments. In 2015, North Carolina signed the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act, an Orwellian amalgamation of nouns that requires a state historical commission to approve any removal of monuments. Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia also have similar laws.

In Memphis, a majority-black city, officials are ready to suethe stateif it denies its a new waiver request to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis downtown, as well as a statue of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan founding member Nathan Bedford Forrest. The move came after the city tried and failed to slog its way through the byzantine maze of GOP-instituted regulations protecting such statues. The matter may very well end up before the state Supreme Court. Legislators in Tennessee, which has the highest proportion of minimum-wage workers in the country, also passed a law in 2014 that prohibits cities from enacting minimum-wage ordinances higher than the state level, which is chained to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

As Barry Yeoman reported for the Prospect last week, protesters in Durham, North Carolinaa liberal city stripped of its authority to take down monuments by the right-wing legislaturefound a way around that impasse by pulling down a Confederate statue themselves. I understand why people felt this was the most expedient way, Jillian Johnson, an African American member of the city council, told Yeoman. There was no legal way to make it happen.

Meanwhile, the Durham council has also been barred from increasing the minimum wage (save for city employees) by the same infamous legislation that restricted transgenders bathroom use.

Durham is just one of dozens of Democratic-controlled citiesAtlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Charleston, Durham, Jackson, Nashville, Memphis, and so on, the blue dots in red stateswhich have lost the authority to raise wages for their (predominately black) workers struggling to get over the poverty line or to remove prominent monuments to a racist and oppressive ideology so their residents dont have to see a general fighting for slavery looking down on them as they go to work.

Republicans insist that protecting these monumentsthe majority of which were built in the early 1900s or during the 1960sare about preserving the history and heritage of the South. Just as they insist that prohibiting local increases to the minimum wagewhich hasnt been lifted on the federal level in eight yearsis about protecting low-wage workers from job loss.

In these ways, GOP lawmakers are actually memorializing the values of the Antebellum South: White supremacy and lowor, rather, nowages.

This article has been corrected to clarify that the city of Memphis has not yet sued the state, but intends to if its waiver to remove its Confederate monuments is denied, and that one of the statues is of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

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On Monuments and Minimum Wages - The American Prospect - The American Prospect

What if The Bible was written by divinely-inspired men, but not by God? Imagine if there were a Goddess as well as a God. Imagine that homosexuality is a quality of a beautiful, special class of people...

Why doesn't our nation strive for peace by all means, and end wage slavery in the developing world? Why have we taken and mutilated the land of Native Americans, and killed off most Native Americans? Why have we caused environmental damage worldwide? This is not Christian.

I love just as Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Asians, and Christians. We are all sisters and brothers in the love that we believe in. Think about how the military-industrial complex is treating our aforementioned brothers and sisters. This is a nightmare. My question to the dominant group of Christians is, what are you really afraid of? Use common sense at this point. The truth will set you free. We are in the middle of our own fascism. Millions are dead from war, millions are in wage slavery. Read "Killing Hope" by Blum, http://www.workersrights.org and "Made in China" by Ngai to begin to change. We are not a Christian nation.

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Letter: Environmental damage is not Christian - Roanoke Times

When FANTASTIC NEGRITO released his Grammy award-winning album The Last Days of Oakland in 2016, it received critical acclaim for its honest look at racism, gun violence, wage slavery, and other challenges facing our country. That continues with the re-release of the album on September 1, 2017 via Cooking Vinyl, which features two new tracks, "Push Back" and "The Shadows", which anticipated the events of today.

Almost prophetic in its subject matter, both "Push Back" and "The Shadows" reveal the soul of an artist trying to make sense of the political world around him that affects not only the governments but the fate of families, especially for people of color. Tackling the results and lack of progress from the current Administration head on in "The Shadows" ("I got trouble on my mind / I've been reading the headlines / That man that said "you're fired" / Brought the Devil out of retirement") and the Border Wall and immigration in "Push Back" ("They're trying to build a wall / But that won't help at all"), these two tracks are a direct response to the current state we as a country are in.

"Being African American in this country is f****** brutal," he explains. "It's painful and we, as individuals, have a way to combat that. And Fantastic Negrito for me is a way to combat that."

In addition, Fantastic Negrito will be supporting Sturgill Simpson on his Fall U.S. tour. TOUR DATES Supporting Sturgill Simpson

SEP 07 Smart Financial Centre / Sugarland, TX SEP 08 Verizon Theatre / Grand Prairie, TX SEP 09 AUSTIN360 Amphitheatre / De Valle, TX SEP 14 Radio City Music Hall / New York, NY SEP 15 Merriweather Post Pavilion / Columbia, MD SEP 16 Blue Hills Bank Pavilion / Boston, MA SEP 19 Fox Theatre / Detroit, MI SEP 21 Fox Theatre / St. Louis, MO SEP 22 Huntington Bank Pavilion / Chicago, IL SEP 25 Red Rocks Amphitheatre / Morrison, CO SEP 28 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall / Portland, OR SEP 29 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall / Portland, OR SEP 30 Marymoor Amphitheater / Redmond, WA OCT 06 The Greek Theatre / Los Angeles, CA

Fantastic Negrito's The Last Days of Oakland took home the 2017 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album Grammy Award. While blues is an integral part of Fantastic Negrito's overall foundation, his music defies genre, blending hip hop, rock, and other styles to create a sound that led Pitchfork's Greil Marcus to say "he could be inventing the blues for the first time."

He made his national television debut as Fantastic Negrito on the season finale of Fox's Empire, performing both his single "Lost in a Crowd"-the track that brought him to national attention, winning NPR's inaugural Tiny Desk Concert Contest-and the hit song "Good Enough" alongside "Empire's" Jamal Lyon.

Photo Credit: Max Claus

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FANTASTIC NEGRITO Addresses Current Events in New Tracks - Broadway World

Thailands $7 billion fishing trade is among the worlds biggest. In recent years, its also been one of the most severely scandalized an industry blighted by reports of slavery on fishing trawlers. Many of these tales recall 18th century-style barbarity at sea.

Each year, Thailands docks have traditionally launched thousands of trawlers into the ocean, often with crews of roughly 20 men. Most are not complicit in forced labor. But less scrupulous captains have taken advantage of the oceans lawlessness.

In port cities, theyve bought men from Myanmar and Cambodia for $600 to $1,000 per head. Duped by traffickers, the migrants come to Thailand seeking under-the-table work in factories or farms.

Instead, theyve found themselves hustled onto fishing boats that motor into the abyss, thousands of miles from civilization, where they are forced to fish for no pay. Various investigations have uncovered thousands of cases.

As one deputy boat captain of a Thai trawler told GlobalPost: Once a captain is tired of a [captive], hes sold to another captain for profit. A guy can be out there for 10 years just getting sold over and over.

Related: Read our award-winning investigationSeafood Slavery

But Thailand is now installing a new system that if effective could seriously reform an industry that has been murky for far too long.

Were trying to change as fast as possible, says Adisorn Promthep, director general of Thailands Department of Fisheries. We want to make sure no vessel escapes our scope.

Installed last year by Thailands military government, Adisorn is charged with bringing transparency to a business marked by opacity.

For years, fish have been routed through a dark supply chain that obscures their origins. This has given exporters plausible deniability with regard to forced labor.

Practically everyone has acknowledged the accounts of escaped or freed slaves, who have come ashore reporting tales of murder and beatings aboard trawlers. But there has been genuinely no way of proving whether this pound of mackerel or that box of fish sticks was sourced from a captive.

This is not a concern limited to Asia. It has serious implications for shoppers in the United States and European Union, two primary importers of seafood from Thailand.

Recent investigations by Greenpeace have implicated Nestl Purina and The J.M. Smucker Company producers of Fancy Feast and Meow Mix cat food, respectively in sourcing fish from factories accused of forced labor violations. Other reports have shown Costco and Walmart entangled in tainted supply chains allegations that led both to join a Seafood Task Force to clean up criminality in the seafood industry.

Here are some key elements of the Thai governments new plan, which is designed to reduce overfishing as well as root out forced labor.

Obscuring the origins of fish caught on dodgy vessels has traditionally proved rather easy. The fish is often offloaded to a massive mothership, a sort of way station and marketplace floating on distant seas, hundreds of thousands of miles from Thai shores. There, slave-caught fish gets mixed in with legit catches.

But under new rules, Adisorn says, every batch of fish will be recorded in an extensive digital log book. Once fully operational, this will illuminate the entire supply chain so that any factory, any consumer, should be able to check where the fish actually came from.

Thai authorities have actually banned offloading fish from trawlers to motherships for the time being. This applies to any boat officially flying the Thai flag and is designed, in part, to stop captains from buying and selling captives on motherships.

There is a caveat: These transshipments may be allowed if monitored by onboard observers. These observers are paid roughly $120 per day an incredible salary, considering Thailands daily minimum wage hovers around $10. These observers are technically freelancers. But they will be trained by Thailands fisheries department. Their main job is to collect data on the supply of fish in parts of the ocean prone to overfishing.

But the Thai government also expects them to deter illegal labor practices on board. Only a few dozen have been trained for deployment so far.

Every boat that can carry 60 tons or more will be outfitted with a GPS-style monitoring system that is just like the navigator in your car, Adisorn says.

Captains used to file paper documents about their whereabouts. Thats no longer good enough, Adisorn says. We need to know where theyre located. At all times.

Moreover, most of the boats now undergo rigorous inspections at newly installed control centers every single time they leave or return to port. Thai officers wont just check equipment and inspect nets full of wriggling fish. Theyre also supposed to check that crew records match the actual fishermen on board.

If a captain has 10 laborers, and one isnt supposed to be there, the arrest happens at the port, Adisorn says. The prosecution starts right there.

We have about 10,000 vessels total that we have to check. We cant check all of them, he says. Last year, officials tried to do that, he says, and managed to cover roughly 85 percent. But sometimes, when you try to do too much, the quality isnt good enough.

The officers have since been ordered to conduct more intensive checks on fewer boats a shift to give them ample time to properly scrutinize each crew. Adisorn recalls one recent case in which an officer, skeptical about a young fishermans age, pulled the worker off the boat and checked his bone density at a local hospital. He turned out to be underage.

This complex set of rules and tracking systems is now roughly 80 percent operational, Adisorn says. Such a sweeping effort to sanitize the Thai fishing industrys turbid supply chain will face great resistance from many factions. Among them: unscrupulous officials, corrupt factory owners and uncooperative boat captains.

The current government of Thailand, a junta that seized power in 2014,is also an unlikely crusader for liberty. Critics of the royally backed army government can be treated as seditionists. Some have been locked away for mere Facebook posts.

But the governments anti-slavery plan is already earning cautious praise from Greenpeace, an organization that is more often railing against the fishing industrys abuses.

I actually think theyre trying to do the best they can, says Anchalee Pipattanawattanakul, a Bangkok-based campaigner for the group. They want to show theyre being transparent. They mostly want the EU to see them as progressive.

Two years back, the EU sowed fear among Thai officials by threatening to ban all seafood shipments from Thailand if illegality continued unabated. That threat remains in place.

These reforms were also prodded along by the US State Department, which ranked Thailands trafficking problem in a tier alongside the worlds worst offenders such as Haiti or Sudan.

The US has since lifted Thailand from that bottom ranking a move to acknowledge a wave of prosecutions and asset seizures against traffickers that add up to more than $21 million.

Meanwhile, Thai officials privately note that US pressure has relented under President Donald Trumps administration, which has proved uncommunicative and not terribly interested in the trafficking issue.

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Why the West should care about Thailand's new fight against fishing slavery - PRI

( August 24, 2017, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) New research, commissioned by the India Committee of the Netherlands and Stop Child Labour, reveals that modern slavery, low wages, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions are rampant in granite quarries in South India. In some quarries, especially in waste stone processing, child labour is found.

There is an enormous gap in working conditions between permanent workers (mainly supervisors) and casual workers (70% of the workforce). The first group receives safety equipment, insurance and an employment contract, while the casual labourers doing the dangerous manual work, lack those fundamental labour rights.

The research shows that granite sourced from the investigated quarries is imported by 33 natural stone companies and 3 banks from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Spain, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the USA*. China is also a major importer, processor and re-exporter of Indian granite for the international market. Only a few companies are member of a sustainability initiative aiming to improve working conditions in the natural stone sector, but these initiatives still hardly tackle the deplorable working conditions in granite quarries. The draft report was sent to all 36 companies and banks, but only 5 reacted.

Focus on links between quarries and importers

India is a top exporter of granite, widely used for wall and floor tiles, tomb stones and kitchen tops in western countries. Western governments are an important end-buyer of granite for buildings, pavements, public squares etc. Half of the total world exports of raw granite comes from India.

The research was conducted in 22 quarries and 6 waste stone processing sites in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka in South India. These three states account for 75% of the granite production in India. Almost half of the sampled quarries have direct linkages with foreign importers. Other quarries also produce granite for export markets, but this is traded through intermediaries.

Modern slavery

More than 70% of the workforce in granite quarries are casual labourers employed on a daily wage or piece rate basis. With wage advances of one to three months wages and high interest loans, the quarry owners are tying workers to the job. Nearly 25% of the workers are recruited by providing loans, with annual interest rates of 24% to 36%. More than half of the migrant workers owe large amounts to quarry owners or contractors. This creates debt bondage, as workers must clear the amount before they can change employer. In nine quarries this form of modern slavery is prevalent.

Middlemen are recruiting worker, mostly migrants, but offer them no contract and do not respect legal requirements. Migrants constitute around two third of the total workforce in granite quarries. Workers are mostly from so-called lowest caste of Dalits or Adivasi (tribal people). They are extra vulnerable due to their low social status in Indian society.

Health and safety in great danger

None of the workers hired through middlemen have access to a mandatory retirement scheme nor are they covered under health insurance, while these workers are most exposed to health risks.

Quarry workers face many occupational hazards and often get injured. Deadly accidents often remain unreported. Workers are also exposed to noise and dust causing work-related illnesses, like the incurable lung disease silicosis. Around 62% of the workers report that they are not receiving safety equipment such as a helmet, goggles, boots, respirator/mask and gloves, except during labour inspections.

Less child labour but still present

Child labour (below 18 years) used to be rampant in granite quarries in the early 2000s, but declined because of interventions by the government, industry and civil society organisations. However, the research revealed instances of child labour in main quarry operations in seven of the sample quarries. None of the investigated sites have a prevention and rehabilitation system for child labour in place.

Child labour is still rather prominent in waste stone processing. Nearly 80% of waste stone processing is done by women and children. Children below 14 years account for nearly 3% of the waste stone processing workforce and 5% of this workforce is between 15 and 18 years old.

Low wages, grossly inadequate housing and no active workers organisations Considering the long working hours, wages in half of the researched quarries do not meet the legal requirements. Overtime is sometimes paid by providing snacks and alcoholic drinks. Daily wages are fixed, depending on work classification, between 3.55 and 6.19 a day. Housing provided for the workers is grossly inadequate. They share small rooms, with little ventilation, water or sanitation facilities and no privacy. Half of the quarries lack clean drinking water while toilet facilities were only observed in four big quarries. In none of the researched quarries an active labour union is present.

Recommendations

The report is offering recommendations to companies, sustainability initiatives, the Indian government and the European Union and its member states. Human rights due diligence by granite companies is needed to systematically eradicate rights violations, increase transparency, conduct risk assessments and implement improvement plans. The Indian government has to enforce existing labour laws and European member states should strengthen their public procurement policy (e.g. for granite).

Download the reportThe Dark Sites of Granite: Modern slavery, child labour and unsafe work in Indian granite quarries What should companies do?here:www.indianet.nl/TheDarkSitesOfGranite.html.

Download the 8 pagesummaryof the report:www.indianet.nl/pdf/TheDarkSitesOfGranite-abstract.pdf.

Originally posted here:

India: Modern Slavery in Granite Quarries - Sri Lanka Guardian

The statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va.

At 9 p.m. last Tuesday night, city workers began to enclose in plywood the Confederate monument that sits in Birminghams Linn Park. By the following afternoon, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had announced that he was suing the city for violating state law.

Activists in Birmingham first began calling for the removal of the 52-foot Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. That, in turn, prompted Gerald Allen, a state senator from Tuscaloosa, to introduce the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act to prohibit cities from removing or altering historic monuments more than 40 years old without the approval of a state committee. The predominantly (if not entirely) white Republicans who control the legislature passed the bill along party lines. Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed it into law in May.

Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered the monument to be covered amid a renewed and urgent call from activists and officials to remove such tributes to the Confederacy, after white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, rallied around a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and proceeded to attack counter-protesters, killing one woman. Several citiesfrom Baltimore to San Antoniohave since taken down Confederate monuments while others debate similar actions.

Mayor Bell, who is black, says he doesnt necessarily want to remove the statuedespite demands from local activistsbut he does think it should provide a broader context that condemns the Confederacy, rather than celebrates it. The Confederacy was an act of sedition and treason against the United States of America and represented the continuation of human bondage of people of color, Bell told the Prospect in an interview. Its anathema to anyone supportive of the United States government to have such a structure sitting on public property.

Furthermore, he points out, Birmingham didnt become a city until 1871, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. And the monument wasnt erected until 190550 years after the war endedwhen a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the memorial as a gift to the city.

Its my desire to no longer allow this statute to be seen by public until such time that we can tell the full story of slavery, the full story of what the Confederacy really meant, Bell told reporters last week. Now, Bell says, the city is exploring its legal options in light of the states lawsuit. The state attorney general is asking a district court to fine the city $25,000.

I don't believe that the legislative body has the authority to dictate what monuments or statues we have on public property. Thats a right that the municipal government should control, Bell says. This was built with private dollars and is now protected by the state. The city should have the power to eliminate any source of contention and to maintain public tranquility.

THE STATE OF ALABAMA'S CRACKDOWN ON BIRMINGHAMis just its latest attempt to limit the authority of the majority-black city, which has a black mayor and a majority-black city council. In February 2016, the Birmingham city council approved a $10.10-an-hour minimum wage. Two days later, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law prohibiting Alabama cities from passing such ordinances and voiding a wage hike for tens of thousands of Birminghams low-wage workers.

The experience of Birmingham is indicative of a broader GOP-led assault on the political power and home rule of Southern cities, home to large black populations, often led by black politicians, and, increasingly, purveyors of progressive policies that seek to improve upon the low standards of state law. From the removal of Confederate monuments to the enactment of local minimum wages, Republican-controlled statehouses are preempting blue citiesand undermining black voices.

These are nothing more than 21st-century Jim Crow laws, Johnathan Austin, chair of the Birmingham City Council, said of the monument removal and minimum-wage preemption laws in an interview with the Prospect. The state of Alabama is trying to control the [states] largest cityand largest black city by prohibiting us from governing ourselves.

Twenty-five statesincluding nearly every Southern statehave laws that prohibit cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage. The four states that have no minimum wage of their own (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee), adhering to the federal minimum instead, are in the South. Now, at least six states have laws limiting the power of cities to remove Confederate monuments, with most passed in the last couple years. All of them are in the South, where Republicans control every single legislative chamber. Despite their calls for local control and fewer regulations, state Republicans are now regulating both the cultural and economic authority of localities.

Last year, state legislators passed the Tennessee Heritage Preservation Act of 2016, which requires public notice, hearings, and a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature in order to remove historic monuments. In 2015, North Carolina signed the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act, an Orwellian amalgamation of nouns that requires a state historical commission to approve any removal of monuments. Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia also have similar laws.

In Memphis, a majority-black city, officials are ready to suethe stateif it denies its a new waiver request to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis downtown, as well as a statue of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan founding member Nathan Bedford Forrest. The move came after the city tried and failed to slog its way through the byzantine maze of GOP-instituted regulations protecting such statues. The matter may very well end up before the state Supreme Court. Legislators in Tennessee, which has the highest proportion of minimum-wage workers in the country, also passed a law in 2014 that prohibits cities from enacting minimum-wage ordinances higher than the state level, which is chained to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

As Barry Yeoman reported for the Prospect last week, protesters in Durham, North Carolinaa liberal city stripped of its authority to take down monuments by the right-wing legislaturefound a way around that impasse by pulling down a Confederate statue themselves. I understand why people felt this was the most expedient way, Jillian Johnson, an African American member of the city council, told Yeoman. There was no legal way to make it happen.

Meanwhile, the Durham council has also been barred from increasing the minimum wage (save for city employees) by the same infamous legislation that restricted transgenders bathroom use.

Durham is just one of dozens of Democratic-controlled citiesAtlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Charleston, Durham, Jackson, Nashville, Memphis, and so on, the blue dots in red stateswhich have lost the authority to raise wages for their (predominately black) workers struggling to get over the poverty line or to remove prominent monuments to a racist and oppressive ideology so their residents dont have to see a general fighting for slavery looking down on them as they go to work.

Republicans insist that protecting these monumentsthe majority of which were built in the early 1900s or during the 1960sare about preserving the history and heritage of the South. Just as they insist that prohibiting local increases to the minimum wagewhich hasnt been lifted on the federal level in eight yearsis about protecting low-wage workers from job loss.

In these ways, GOP lawmakers are actually memorializing the values of the Antebellum South: White supremacy and lowor, rather, nowages.

This article has been corrected to clarify that the city of Memphis has not yet sued the state, but intends to if its waiver to remove its Confederate monuments is denied, and that one of the statues is of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

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On Monuments and Minimum Wages - The American Prospect

Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.

The restaurant is on short shift at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.

Despite working six days a week, Marion, 37, a single mother of two, cant make ends meet on the $9.50 an hour she gets at Popeyes (no apostrophe founder Al Copeland joked he was too poor to afford one). A fast food worker for 22 years, Marion has almost always had a second job. Until recently, she had been working 9am-4pm at Popeyes, without a break, then crossing town to a janitorial job at Bartle Hall, the convention center, where she would work from 5pm- to 1.30am for $11 an hour. She didnt take breaks there either, although they were allowed.

I was so tired, she says. If I took a break I would go to sleep, so I would work straight through, she says.

Even with those two jobs, Marion was unable to save and when disaster struck she found it impossible to cope financially. Last month, the city condemned the house she rented the landlord had refused to fix faulty wiring and the leaking roof and she was made homeless.

Her children, Ravyn, 15, and Rashad, 14, are now living with a friend, two bus rides away. Because of the time and distance, Marion hasnt seen them in a week. She and her dog Hershey, a goofy milk-chocolate colored pitbull, are sleeping at the apartment of fellow fast food worker, Bridget Hughes: Marion on the sofa, Hershey on the balcony.

Its a downtrodden two-bedroom apartment in a sketchy neighborhood. Sex workers stake out the busier street corners; many of the houses are boarded up or burnt out. The detritus of drug addiction litters the streets.

While she tries to save for a deposit on a new home, Marion is sharing with Bridgets husband, Demetrius, and their four children. Not having a home, honestly, you guys, it makes me feel like I am a failure. Like I have let my kids down, says Marion, sitting among the plastic bags that hold her life. The rest of her familys belongings are stored in a van downstairs, a van she cant drive because she hasnt got the money to get it insured.

After she quit her janitorial job, hoping to find something more flexible so she could see more of her children, Marion started interviewing for a second job in fast food. I have always needed two jobs. You basically need two jobs to survive working on low wages, she says. Working so hard for so little security makes her feel like I am getting nowhere, she says. My family is not benefiting. Im working so hard to come home, and still I have to decide whether I am going to put food on the table or am I going to pay the light bill, or pay rent.

It makes me feel like a peasant. In a way its slavery. Its economic slavery.

Unsurprisingly, Marion seems depressed. She looks down when she talks, raising her big, sad eyes only when she has finished. But her whole face lights up when she talks about her kids. They are my world, she says. [They] brighten up my soul. She worries that all this pressure is bad for her self-diagnosed high blood pressure. Like 28 million other Americans, she doesnt have health insurance. She hasnt seen a doctor in her adult working life.

Bridget and Demetrius are hardly doing better. She earns $9 an hour at Wendys, Demetrius makes $9.50 an hour working at a gas station. Rent and bills, including childcare, come to about $800 a month, and they are barely scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck. Hughes says she has missed her childrens graduations, doctors appointments. She tears up as she explains how economic necessity meant she was forced to return to work two weeks after she last gave birth, and had to give up breastfeeding.

But Marion and Hughes are fighters, figureheads in what some see as the next wave of the civil rights movement. The pair are leading voices in Stand Up Kansas City, the local chapter of the union-backed Fight for $15 movement, which is campaigning for a nationwide increase in the minimum wage. And they are determined to make a difference.

The Fight for $15 movement is probably the most high profile, and successful, labor movement in the US, and has successfully pushed for local raises in the minimum wage across the country, mostly in Democratic strongholds. Trump comfortably won Missouri in 2016, although the major cities Kansas City, St Louis and Columbia voted Democrat. But the pair are confident that by coming together, the millions of Americans working low wage jobs can effect change even now.

Its not just us, its all across America, says Hughes. She says she felt invisible before the Fight for $15 movement.

On 14 April 2015, campaigners held what was then the largest ever protest by low-wage workers in US history. About 60,000 workers took to the streets in cities across the country calling for an increase in the minimum wage.

When protesters came to Marions restaurant, she says most of the staff moved to the back of the restaurant to distance themselves from the activists while her corporate boss smirked and laughed as they read their demands and said what they needed. I looked at him and I thought, You dont have these worries, she says. How can you laugh at someone elses pain? And I am going through the same thing. Thats when I joined the Fight for $15.

There is wave. There is momentum. I think that with all of working together, we will win $15 in the end, she says.

Its been almost a decade since the Great Recession, and America has witnessed a record 82 months of month-on-month jobs growth. The national unemployment rate now stands at a 4.3%, a 16-year low. But month after month, it is the low-wage sectors fast food, retail, healthcare that have added new jobs. Wage growth has barely kept pace with inflation. The national minimum wage ($7.25) was last raised in 2009.

Across the US, 58 million people earn less than $15 an hour; 41 million earn less than $12. In Missouri, Kansas City and St Louis councils recently passed local ordinances that would have increased the minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2023 in Kansas Citys case.

But backed by local and national business interests, Missouris governor, Eric Greitens a bestselling author, former Navy Seal and a rising Republican star has moved to roll back the increases, arguing businesses cant afford raises and will leave. Liberals say these laws help people, Greitens said in a statement. They dont. They hurt them.

Not so, says David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economics Policy Institute. We have decades of research on this and it all concludes that increases in the minimum wage have had negligible impact on jobs growth, he says. The academic debate is currently about whether that impact is a small gain in growth or a small drop. Either way, he says, a small rise in the minimum wage has an outsized impact on low wage workers. A $1 an hour rise from the current minimum of $7.25 would give the average low wage worker $2,000 more a year, says Cooper. That is a huge injection of income, he says.

The intense lobbying against an increase is simply a device to keep wages as low as possible so that employers can capture as much profit as they can, he says. Polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of an increase. At least 40 cities and states around the country will raise their minimum wages in 2017, thanks largely to ballot measures. Those measures will deliver raises of around $4,000 a year for more than one-third of the workforce in states like New York and California, according to the National Employment Law Project.

But Greitens is not alone in fighting back, helped by a study of the impact of Seattles minimum wage hike by the University of Washington, which seemed to suggest higher wages had translated to fewer jobs. That the methodology of that study has been heavily criticized (utter BS, according to Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies ) and stands in contrast to piles of studies that found the opposite hasnt negated its popularity with anti-wage hikers.

Marion isnt in it for the politics. She is in it for the money, money that means one thing for her: getting her family back together and giving them a secure life. We pick her up at Popeyes and drive to a pleasant Kansas City suburb. Cicadas thrum as she beams strolling from the car to hug her daughter Rayven and goddaughter Shi Ann.

Shi Ann, in her rainbow hued LOVE T-shirt (the O is a butterfly), plays with princess flip-flops and squirms, giggling in Marions arms. Princesses dont put their fingers in their mouths, laughs Marion. I ask Rayven how it is living without her mum. The idyll is over. Tears fill her eyes. Marion goes inside so we cant see her cry.

Later, Marion says Rayven wants to leave school at 16 and get a job in fast food to help out. Ideally, her mum wants her to go to college but nothing is ideal for the Marion family at present.

After the visit, we drive back into the city to All Souls Unitarian church where Marion and Hughes are set to address a panel of academics, union leaders and others. The neighborhood is a world away from their own. A giant Louise Bourgeois spider menaces a manicured lawn at the Kemper art museum close by. The two women are unintimidated. They hold the room with ease as they talk about their fight with humor and a confidence that things will change.

Guests ask why they dont go back to school, get higher paid jobs. Hughes has a college degree but as the daughter of a low wage worker said she could only afford community college. Employers saw her degree as worthless, and she ended up $13,000 in debt. She did have a job in a tax office but lost it only to find that thanks to Missouris business-friendly rules, she was barred from working for another tax office by a non-compete agreement. (Fast food franchisor Jimmy Johns imposed a similar agreement on its workers but dropped it last year after a public backlash.)

Barred from tax office work, Hughes said fast food was all she could find.

Marion says the argument that fast food workers should leave for other, better paid, jobs misses the point. People like fast food. The companies that make it make fortunes. We are the foot soldiers for these billion-dollar companies. We are the ones doing the work and bringing the money, she says.

At the top of America, when it comes to Trump and them, their goal is to keep us down, she says. Between these billion-dollar companies and Trump, its a power trip.

They can afford to pay more and, she believes, eventually they will. We are still coming. No war has been won over night and we are not giving up.

More than that, she likes working in fast food. I love it. Im good at it. Just like Martin Luther King said, If you are going to be a road sweeper, be the best damn sweeper there is, she says. I dont know. Its just this society is all messed up.

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Fran works six days a week in fast food, and yet she's homeless: 'It's ... - The Guardian

Thousands of workers in hand car washes are thought to be victims of modern slavery , paid little or nothing for an 11-hour shift and forced to live in squalid accommodation.

Many are trafficked into the UK on the promise of paid work before becoming trapped in debt bondage, owing money to their bosses which they stand no chance of ever repaying.

Mirror investigators working with the anti-slavery watchdog found evidence to suggest thousands of mainly Eastern European people could be trapped working on forecourts and car parks.

Unable to speak English, they can work for up to 11 hours a day for little or no pay, and when their shift is done go home to makeshift accommodation, made from shipping containers.

Those who try to quit are threatened with violence or even deportation.

The Government believes up to 13,000 people are victims of modern slavery, which PM Theresa May dubbed the great human rights issue of our time.

The Daily Mirror visited 10 hand car washes and found all displayed at least two of the five tell-tale signs of modern slavery.

Kevin Hyland, the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, whose office drafted the five signs, said: These findings are really powerful.

People think this is something happening on distant shores, on different continents, but actually they need to realise slavery is happening in our cities, towns and villages.

This is something many people will unwittingly see every day without realising whats behind it. These people washing our cars up and down our high streets are potentially victims of modern slavery.

Campaigners say many washers are trafficked into Britain before being told their travel here has cost more than expected.

They can be paid around 40 for 11 hours work, but wages are docked to cover accommodation. Washers are told to work off the debt, but the pay never covers it.

Many do not have immigration papers and bosses threaten to report them if they try to quit.

Only one of the 10 facilities we visited had equipped workers with waterproofs and full protective clothing. At seven out of the 10 staff were unfamiliar with the English language.

Nine of the 10 lacked professional facilities, often with dangerous electrical wiring.

At all 10, we saw three or more workers washing one car, and we witnessed up to seven to a vehicle.

At two out of 10 sites, we found evidence to suggest washers were being housed on-site. We saw metal shipping containers equipped with satellite dishes, surrounded by barbed wire and rubbish bags. Workers were reluctant to have conversations with the public and when approached repeatedly pointed us to a boss.

A car wash service could cost from just 2.99, with a valet service starting at 9.99.

The Car Wash Advisory Service said around 1,000 of the estimated 16,000 hand car washes observe any regulatory requirements and many staff get below the minimum wage, usually cash in hand.

Mr Hyland added: Decent hard working Brits are using these car washes and they arent aware what they are seeing. Sometimes you have six to nine people washing a car.

By the time they have paid for all the other costs and insurances how are they ever going to pay the minimum wage?

We talk about modern slavery being a hidden crime. Sometimes its actually hidden in plain sight.

The National Crime Agency said it was helping in 300 police operations targeting modern slavery, with victims as young as 12.

Last week 11 members of the Rooney family in Lincolnshire were convicted of running a modern slavery ring.

If you suspect someone is being exploited, call the police, or the Modern Slavery Helpline on 0800 0121 700.

5 tell-tale signs of exploitation

1: Lack of protective clothing suitable for contact with industrial cleaning chemicals - workers often wear tracksuits or jeans with trainers or flip flops.

2: Unprofessional facilities - no water drainage, no appropriate electrical wiring, temporary signage only, no public liability indemnity insurance and no visible first aid equipment.

3: Three or more people washing a single car despite low prices of around 5 - this cannot add up to cover the minimum wage, let alone other overheads.

4: Staff unfamiliar with the English language and showing signs of coercion - indicators of control include signs of anxiety and exhaustion in workers and a "supervisor" who is usually polite to customers, yet controls staff.

5: Signs that people both live and work on site - unsuitable metal containers near toilet facilities and hanging laundry.

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Secrets of slavery at your local car wash: Workers paid little or nothing for 11-hour shift and forced to live in ... - Mirror.co.uk