Here we are, nearing the end of a 2020 without comparison, reflecting on the stuff that's mattered to us throughout the year. When the second annual edition of The Sprudge Twenty (presented by Pacific Barista Series) launched in January, the world was a very different place. But through these long months across an endless year, time and again we've returned to these stories, and the people behind them, as an ongoing source of human connection and understanding.

At the onset of this year's class we set out looking for twenty people who were changing the world of coffee; little did we realize the world would be changing right alongside us. This annual leadership initiative, produced in partnership with Pacific Barista Series, is built to honor and amplify leaders in the specialty coffee industry. That's the funny thing about leadership: it calls on you in good times and bad. It doesn't take a week off, much less a summer. Our goal with The Sprudge Twenty is to identify and uplift the voices that matter in the worldwide coffee industry, and to center their stories for the entire industry to learn and grow.

That includes us. We, the humans who publish this website, learned a great deal from our 2020 class, and today we're going to share with you a few of our favorite moments from this summer's interview series. We'll also be sharing these stories again in the coming days, as the year finally comes to a close.

It has been our distinct and recurring privilege to publish these stories for you. Let's take a look back at some of the best of it.

From Bartholomew Jones: The Sprudge Twenty Interview, published July 21st 2020, nominated by Cameron Heath.

What issue in coffee do you think is critically overlooked?

For us, its the issue of Black people and specifically Black businesses and entrepreneurs doing business together across the diaspora. Its interesting to me how people can love single-origin coffee and ignore single-origin people.

A lot of times, third wave coffee shops end up moving into Black and brown neighborhoods and doing business as if theyre in a white neighborhood. They dont look or see their business as a means of participating in the community. They do business in spite of the community instead of with the community. And theyre missing out on income when they do it and participating in the eradication and erasure of a lot of the identity of these neighborhoods. Weve done events at shops before, hip hop eventseverything for us is coffee reimagined from a Black perspectiveand people from the neighborhood will come to the show, which is great, but you can visually see other people who are used to going to this coffee shop being very uneasy with the neighborhood taking part. Its like, Why is this visibly poor Black person around me?

Im not interested in bashing or being mad but its very problematic when you look at the understanding of what theyre participating in. You are participating in a Black discovery when you drink coffee. You have to acknowledge that and understand that youre dealing with Black people along the way. But people seem so surprised. Coffee, like many other things, has been colonized. When things are colonized they lose their identity and losing your identity is dehumanizing. In slavery, people lost their names. You received a new identity given by your colonizer. Thats a big part of the X in our name, CxffeeblackMalcolm X and others in the Nation of Islam wanted to take back their names and use X to represent a link to their identity. Thats what we want to do with coffeelet people interact with coffee from a Black identity.

Its often overlooked. People drink coffee without acknowledging the Black roots and history and the Black future of it, too. And thats important. Its not only a Black history in coffee but also a Black future. We have to realize by participating in the present were part of this journey that has an undeniably Black destination.

From Ever Meister: The Sprudge Twenty Interview, published July 27th 2020, nominated by Jenn Rugolo.

What do you see as coffees role in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and racial equality?

Coffee is and always has been political, whether or not we want to accept it. Its very origins are based in brutal colonialism and relentless imperialist capitalism, and despite the advances that have been made in the industry around the world, the coffee sector at large is still affected by the roots of that history. I think that gives specialty coffee in particular a unique opportunity to be part of the active dismantling of racist, imperialist, ruthlessly capitalistic systems that have encouraged and scaffold its growth. This segment of the marketplace was designed as a responseas a slap in the face!to commercial, commodified, cheap coffee, and we have it within our power to continue to shift the paradigm of how things are done. Specialty coffee has the most brilliant and creative thinkers, has fostered the most out-of-left-field solutions, and has the guts and grit to enact real and lasting change, if we can come together to do it. I believe we canit will take a lot of work and a lot of honest self-reflection, but I believe that specialty coffee can be a more equitable, fair, empowering, positive force in the world. I genuinely do.

From Angie Katherine Molina Ospina: The Sprudge Twenty Interview published July 14th 2020, nominated by Paul Kevin Doyle.

What issue in coffee do you care about most?

The fair remuneration of the entire value chain. Im constantly watching the dynamic of the industry from the producer perspective but also from the business owners perspective and I think that in order to keep healthy relationships with our producers and clients, we have to be transparent and fair in what part of the cake we are getting. Every person involved in the process of producing, selling, and making a cup of coffee deserves to be fairly remunerated for their job, which is not always the case. Through our company weve been trying to make things a little bit different, which has allowed us to find the right partners in order to move forward together.

From Oliver Stormshak of Olympia Coffee Roasting Company: The Sprudge Twenty Interview published May 14th 2020, nominated by Richelle Parker.

Whats your favorite coffee at the moment?

Ethiopia Gola. Ive been working with Desta Gola, a single producer in Wenago Yirgacheffe, for a number of years now, but this is the best harvest yet, and honestly, the only difference is storing the coffee in Grain Pro bags that we provided to help with the longevity. Its a total success story of putting all the dots together and creating solutions that makeup one of the best coffees youll ever drink.

From Jake King: The Sprudge Twenty Interview published May 21st, 2020 nominated by Connan Moody.

What is your idea of coffee happiness?

My idea of coffee happiness would have to be a clean and safe space for everyone to share their favorite cup of coffee with their friends.

If you could have any job in the coffee industry, what would it be and why?

I would love to continue growing GYST into a platform that helps growth for coffee professionals across the supply chain.

From Kendra Sledzinski: The Sprudge Twenty Interview published May 26th 2020 nominated by Kayla Baird

What issue in coffee do you care about most?

Equal access to education, resources, and professional development and opportunities. The industry is incredibly complex with lots of moving parts and many issues more critical than this, but I say it because its within my immediate reach. So many coffee professionals start as baristas. I think back to the days when I subscribed to some elitist coffee thought and language, and I cringe when I think of it.

These days, I want to use my experience as a trainer and educator to empower people with the knowledge they can grow with. This means promoting diversity and giving someone who is only working in coffee because its the job they have just as much attention as someone who wants it as a career. It also means listening. I stayed interested in coffee early on in my career because I was lucky to have managers and leaders who took me and my curiosity seriously and encouraged me to grow and learn. When I was training baristas, I would tell them that regardless of how long they occupy the role, knowing how to make coffee well is a valuable (and employable) life skill. I had the time of my life as a barista made easier by safe, healthy, and supportive work environments. Because of that, its important to me to help others have a positive experience working in coffee, too.

From Felip Sardi: The Sprudge Twenty Interview published July 7th, 2020 nominated by Clementine Labussiere.

If you could have any job in the coffee industry, what would it be and why?

I would love to continue being a coffee producer. As a producer I am constantly in contact with nature, working with and for it, and enjoying every minute of my day.

Who are your coffee heroes?

Small-scale coffee farmers around the world.

From Ellan Kline: The Sprudge Twenty Interview published May 19th, 2020 nominated by RJ Joseph.

What issue in coffee do you care about most?

Ellan Kline: Addressing any specific issue in coffee is a straw man to distract us from the absolute catastrophe that is capitalism. For example, insuring that producers (including migrant labor) are actually paid appropriately for the work and resources put into producing coffee rather than the quality of the final product in a sustainable way means that rentnot rent risesneed to be capped in proportion to a living wage for both commercial and residential property in areas where coffee is consumed. Thats just one example of how everything is interlinked in a way that prohibits simply addressing individual issues.

What cause or element in coffee drives you?

I want to make peoples lives better by supporting their empowerment. As an educator, I strive to create spaces that allow people to feel comfortable with play and failure because thats how we grow.

What issue in coffee do you think is critically overlooked?

I think weve spent too much time as an industry focusing on individual issues rather than looking at the gestalt and addressing root problems. We need to shift our focus from individual representation to dismantling supremacy structures, from focusing on what individuals are paid to global financial equity.

Nominations for the Third Annual Sprudge Twenty will open in January 2021. Check back for updates and sign-up for our newsletter for the latest.

The Sprudge Twenty is presented in partnership with Pacific Barista Series.

Go here to read the rest:

The Very Best Of The Sprudge Twenty For 2020 - Sprudge

2020 has been an extraordinary year for employers as the pandemic and its effects continue to have a profound impact on labour markets and workplaces the world over. Many businesses were forced to rapidly transition to remote working while dealing with unprecedented economic challenges, as countries shut down and governments introduced schemes and subsidies to avoid devastating global job losses. Employers have taken on a level of responsibility for worker health and safety like never before, implementing measures to protect workers not just from an infectious virus but also the damaging impact of the pandemic on mental wellbeing. With vaccines being rolled out around the world, many employers are now asking if they can or should mandate employee inoculation. All this during a year when the focus on inequality inside and outside our workplaces deepened following worldwide anti-racism protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the reverberations of the #MeToo movement continued to be felt, and the climate crisis intensified.

As we look ahead to 2021, many challenges remain. There will be some tough months ahead, but there are also opportunities. 2020 revealed an enormous capacity for rapid business transformation and the willingness and ability of employers and employees to adapt and innovate at pace out of necessity. Many workplaces will change for the better, with workers able to enjoy greater flexibility in how and where they work. Companies that build on the high levels of employee engagement and support that we have seen this year are likely to reap benefits in terms of employee trust, loyalty and productivity. The crisis has also caused many businesses to pause and rethink, to make sure their purpose meets the needs of workers, customers and communities. Our new work paradigm could help bring real and meaningful change.

In this review of 2020 and preview of 2021, we identify the top trends impacting global employers and share our predictions for the coming months. We also have produced country by country reviews of 2020 and previews of 2021 for over 35 countries across EMEA, APAC and the Americas.

Remote working

While the mass global migration to home working started as a necessary temporary lockdown measure, as the pandemic continued to prevent a return to normal, home working became a longer-term reality for millions of employees around the world. Businesses had to move quickly to set up the infrastructure and equipment to enable remote working, deal with employees stranded abroad due to closed borders, and manage the panoply of risks related to a remote workforce (including cybersecurity, wage and hour, health and safety, home office expense reimbursement to name but a few). This raised unprecedented practical challenges as many countries did not have the legal infrastructure in place to address employers and employees obligations and rights in relation to home working on this scale.

Remote working as a longer-term or even permanent option raises additional challenges, from corporate establishment and tax implications for employees working from outside their home country, to potential impacts on organizational culture and employee expectations. Our Global Remote Work Guide addresses the key challenges across 32 countries.

In recent months, we have seen an upsurge in new laws regulating remote work / telework a trend we expect to continue. For instance, Spain approved a new remote work law in September 2020. In France, social partners concluded a new national agreement on telework in November 2020. Russias new rules will come into force on 1 January 2021. New rules on remote work / teleworking are also expected during 2021 in Poland, Colombia, Brazil and remain under discussion in Portugal and Germany. In Hong Kong, while not directly aimed at remote working, recent amendments to discrimination legislation have made it clearer that employers can be liable for the conduct of their employees towards other individuals when working in locations outside the office, such as co-working spaces.

In workplaces where employees can work from home longer-term, we expect many employees will opt for a more flexible and hybrid experience going forward, working partly in and out of the workplace. This will have consequences not only for the amount of workspace required and how it is configured, but also workplace culture, forcing employers to think about how to create a level playing field and shared experiences for all employees, regardless of where they are based. Employers that embrace a hybrid work environment and make it work for everyone, are likely to reap dividends.

Government support schemes / subsidies

An extraordinary number of government funded support measures were introduced around the world this year in an effort to keep businesses afloat and protect jobs. Many consisted of some form of employment support scheme allowing employers to furlough / stand down employees and / or reduce working hours and with government funding to top up wages for hours not worked (e.g. in UK, France, Germany and Denmark). Other countries (e.g. Hong Kong, Ireland, Australia and the US) offered wage subsidy schemes or enhanced unemployment benefits for employees working in businesses that could demonstrate a decline in business.

Most of these schemes came with significant conditions, including restrictions on employers terminating employees, or at least declaring an intention to retain employees, with the risk of clawback if the conditions were not met. There was also the potential for serious brand damage for businesses taking funds that were not seen as strictly necessary for survival.

Some countries went further; Italy for instance imposed a ban on all employers making economic dismissals, whether or not they themselves had benefited from government support. The ban started in March 2020, remains in place at the time of writing, and has been extended to 31 March 2021 (and possibly beyond). Spains termination ban obligates employers who benefitted from state support to retain staff six months after business resumption. In the UK, the press has reported that a number of high profile businesses returned furlough subsidies after backlashes when healthy revenues or senior level salary raises were announced.

While many of these schemes have been or are starting to be phased out, some will continue well into 2021. Employers should check that there are no on-going restrictions in place before taking any significant cost-cutting measures.

Restructuring / cost saving measures

With many workplace closures running into many months, and widespread labour market disruptions continuing, the global subsidies have not been enough to prevent all fallout, and some of the badly hit sectors had no choice but to implement significant and wide ranging cost saving measures.

Restructuring fairly and lawfully is challenging at the best of times and more complex than ever as a result of considerations introduced in response to the pandemic. As discussed above, many employers have been subject to restrictions on termination, whether thats an express ban on all economic terminations, such as in Italy, Spain, Argentina and India, or a ban on dismissals during / after receiving government support, such as in Portugal and Hong Kong. Some countries that offered employer subsidies didnt impose an express ban on dismissals but nonetheless strongly encouraged employers not to implement layoffs e.g. the Netherlands and UK (during the original furlough scheme). In France, while dismissals have not been banned, the administration is likely to be more demanding on social plans and subsidies may need to be repaid if dismissals proceed.

Business justification is an essential element of a restructuring process, and while the pandemic is likely to be a justification for layoffs, its worth remembering that the threshold differs across countries. In some, including the UK, US and Australia, it can be relatively straightforward to justify a redundancy, whereas in others, the threshold is higher, e.g. in France, Spain and Japan, where evidence of losses or a decline in revenue is required over a set period. Where government subsidies remain in place, even if there is not an express ban on dismissals, the justification for dismissals may be challenged at least until any subsidies have been exhausted. Even in those countries typically considered less risky, businesses may need to account for new laws and requirements. In the US, for example, several states enacted significant changes to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) acts laws that require employers to give advance notice to employees of qualified plant closings and mass layoffs based on statutorily defined thresholds.

Communication, information and consultation, all essential components of a restructuring program, are made all the harder when employees are not in the workplace or on a period of furlough / leave. This year many employers have had to navigate consultation remotely. Some countries suspended some of the formalities required; for instance in France, timeframes for approval of social plans were suspended for a limited period and video conference was recommended for works council consultation. In China, where wet signatures are generally mandatory for employment documents, for a time companies could use e-signatures as a result of the pandemic.

At the same time, this year we have seen many examples of trade unions and works councils working constructively alongside employers in a spirit of collaboration to find ways for businesses to stay viable while protecting as many jobs as possible.

We anticipate that restructuring will continue to be a major focus for many businesses well into 2021.

COVID-19 testing and vaccinations

The pandemic has brought health, safety and medical issues to the fore in the workplace in a way we havent seen before. Employers have had to grapple with infection prevention measures in the workplace, the provision of masks and protective equipment, implementing social distancing, temperature and symptom testing, tracing apps, virus testing, and more recently, questions around the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine and whether this could or should be made mandatory.

These challenges engage a complex range of legal considerations including health and safety laws, employment and discrimination laws, personal injury risk, human rights as well as significant privacy issues, many of which we considered in our article on the top issues for global employers to address in return to work plans.

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are starting to be rolled out around the world, a question many employers are asking is whether they can or should mandate employee inoculation. Aside from the legal issues of which there are many it is probably too early to say, given that, at the timing of writing, there are so many unanswered questions: When will the vaccines become widely available to working age people; which vaccine/s will be available to a given population; how effective are the vaccines likely to be and for how long; will taking a vaccine remove the need for other infection protection measures including social distancing; what public health approach is likely to be taken in a given country; will some countries require inoculation as a condition of border entry, or for access to certain facilities or services (which could mean that an employee needs to be vaccinated if their job depends on accessing those facilities or services)?

In the absence of more information and public health guidance, it will be challenging for an employer to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment on whether there is a compelling reason to mandate employee vaccination (risk assessments are likely to be required in most countries from an employment and privacy perspective).

Aside from the significant employment and data privacy risks involved in mandating the vaccine, doing so could also give rise to discrimination claims in countries that protect against discrimination on the grounds of religious or philosophical belief (e.g. across the EU) (it is untested whether being an anti-vaxxer is a philosophical belief) or on the grounds of disability (where for instance having a disability impacts on the risks of vaccination for that individual). In the US, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released guidance in December answering questions about the applicability of various federal anti-discrimination laws, including those prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability, religion, genetic information and pregnancy in relation to COVID-19 vaccinations.

Given the numbers of people reported to be ready to refuse a vaccine, this is likely to be a controversial issue for months to come. For employers considering the issue now, it would be sensible to explore a range of options when the vaccines do start to become available on a mass scale, including: rolling out positive information campaigns to provide clear facts and address misinformation, boost confidence and engage employees to take the vaccine; and support and make it easy for employees to get the vaccine when it is available by offering for instance, unpaid time off. As pro- and anti-vaccine positions tend to be strongly held, there is also the scope for conflict around this issue within the workplace, as between colleagues as well as between employees and employers, whatever position is taken. It may well be worth anticipating and preparing to manage that well in advance.

Health and wellbeing

For most companies, protecting the health, safety and mental wellbeing of the workforce has been the number one priority in recent months. Even before the pandemic, employee health and wellbeing was rising up the business agenda but the current crisis has raised the stakes dramatically, as employers have not only had to keep workplaces COVID free, but also support employees mental wellbeing as they experience unprecedented levels of isolation, stress, anxiety and depression.

In response, employers are considering how they can better support employee health and well-being. More employers are offering employee assistance programs or other counselling services, providing access to mindfulness or resilience courses, communicating regularly with the workforce about available resources, and exploring ways to create a more supportive work environment. Others are reviewing the feasibility of providing additional benefits (e.g., expanded leave options, caregiving and childcare resources, tuition reimbursement, financial wellness programs) to help employees meet personal and work challenges. Some larger employers even outside the healthcare sector - are looking to appoint Chief Medical Officers for the first time to steer the companys wellbeing strategy.

While the pressure on employers builds, legislative progress in this area has been slow and inconsistent. In some countries there are no legal obligations; in others, there are specific mental health duties on employers; and elsewhere laws which apply for other purposes have been expanded or moulded to encompass mental health considerations. A legislative theme which is becoming increasingly common is the introduction of rights to disconnect from the work computer, calls and emails during non-working hours. This right is fairly new to the legal landscape, having first been introduced in France in 2017. Since then, other countries, including Italy and Spain, have introduced a similar right and Canada is now pushing ahead with this as part of its governmental response to the mental health aspects of COVID-19. The EU is now paving the way for a proper EU-level right to disconnect; on 1 December, the Employment Committee of the European Parliament ('the Committee') adopted a proposal for a resolution on the right to disconnect. Our Mental Health Matters report looked at rights to disconnect and the wider regulatory framework in 16 countries.

The focus on the health and wellbeing of the workforce is only set to continue and intensify in the coming months.

Equality, gender pay, harassment

Workplace equality issues were already high on the business agenda as we entered 2020, as the reverberations of the #MeToo movement continued to be felt and gender pay legislation was being rolled out in a number of countries. When the pandemic was declared and the world went into lockdown, the focus turned away from diversity to the economy and job retention. However, after George Floyds death in May sparked worldwide protests and social unrest, inequality inside and outside the workplace took centre stage, with employees the world over looking to their organisations to speak up and speak out against racism and to drive real and meaningful change.

We have seen businesses take a variety of steps these past months including: periods of education and reflection at senior levels; revisiting policies and practices; implementing zero tolerance policies; monitoring and addressing employee behaviour; undertaking root and branch reviews; setting more ambitious targets.

The starting point for many organisations and something that many businesses are looking to do at the moment - is to undertake an analysis of the makeup of the workforce. From a legal perspective this is not as simple as it may sound, as global privacy laws limit the personal data that can be collected and processed about employees. Generally speaking, data about personal characteristics (race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) can only be collected where there is a prescribed reason to do so under the relevant privacy laws e.g.: because its essential for performance of the contract (this is pretty limited), the employer has a legitimate business aim; theres public interest; or a legal requirement (also limited e.g. in South Africa employers have to monitor race to comply with employment equity laws, but this is not common elsewhere, particularly for race / gender / sexual orientation monitoring).

In some countries, for instance in the UK, equality monitoring is generally encouraged by equality bodies, but it is not necessarily common or encouraged elsewhere and privacy considerations will often trump the diversity objective (see e.g. Ireland, France, Italy and Spain). There are ways to navigate this (e.g. by using consent or anonymising data) although the alternative options come with significant limitations. The best starting point when considering any equality monitoring is to think carefully about why the data is required, what the business will do with it and whether there are other ways of achieving the diversity objective by other means. If the business does go ahead, it is imperative that safeguards are put in place to protect the data when it is being collected and stored.

Many businesses who have identified inequalities have been keen to take swift action this year to redress the inequality, to demonstrate their commitment to diversity objectives. However, the extent to which action is permitted by the law is a vexed area. Most countries permit positive or affirmative action to address inequality (e.g. the UK, the US, South Africa, Japan), but such measures tend to be limited in scope and prohibit unconditional preferential treatment. For instance, diverse interview slates have become a popular mechanism to ensure that there is at least one person from the relevant underrepresented group in the running for every interview. In the UK, while affirmative action is permitted, the rules around recruitment are very limited and - while there is little law or guidance on this - arguably a diverse slate would not be allowed where candidates are specifically sought on the basis of protected characteristics. While employers can take steps to increase the pool from which candidates are drawn as long as there is sufficient evidence of disadvantage to the underrepresented group and the steps to increase representation are proportionate that is not a quick fix. This can be very frustrating for businesses, when the law does not allow them to move as quickly as they would like.

While the focus on gender pay has diminished this year, with some countries relaxing reporting requirements, we expect that pay equity and wider equality issues - will return to the agenda during 2021. New rules in Spain come into force in April requiring all companies to maintain a pay register, and employers with 50 or more employees must develop an equality plan and pay audit to address gender equality. Irelands gender pay bill was halted due to the pandemic and Brexit, but is likely to progress during 2021. The UAE introduced equal pay legislation this year, and further gender equality laws are expected there during 2021 as the UAE continues to advance its status on the global gender equality index. In March 2020, the EU released its Gender Equality Strategy and has committed to tabling binding measures on pay transparency across the EU by the end of 2020 and improve gender balance on corporate boards. In the US, states and localities continued to enact laws to address equal pay issues, including banning salary history inquiries, prohibiting retaliation against an employee for discussing wages or compensation with another employee and requiring certain posting and/or compensation disclosures. Employers could see changes targeting the gender pay gap at the federal level under the incoming Biden administration. Also in the US, on December 1, 2020, Nasdaq filed a proposal with the SEC seeking approval of new listing rules that would require most Nasdaq-listed companies to 1) publicly annual disclose annually, to the extent permitted by law, diversity statistics regarding their boards of directors and 2) have, or explain why they do not have, at least two Diverse directors, including one who self-identifies as Female and one who self-identifies as either an Underrepresented Minority or LGBTQ+.

Going into 2020, sexual harassment, and the use of non-disclosure agreements was one of the most significant employment law issues across the globe. While legislative developments slowed this year, there are changes coming up. In January 2021, the new Chinese Civil Code comes into effect requiring all employers in China to implement measures to prevent and address sexual harassment in the workplace, which is likely to require at the very least - new or updated policies and procedures for handling complaints. Denmark has seen a real focus on sexual harassment following a number of high profile cases during 2020 and this is likely to continue into 2021. In the US, new state laws addressing workplace discrimination and harassment took effect in 2020 (or are scheduled to take effect in 2021), including laws that mandate sexual harassment training; expand the coverage of existing laws to include smaller companies, independent contractors, apprentices and/or interns; limit or prohibit non-disclosure, non-disparagement and no-rehire provisions for settlements and/or employment agreements; and require reporting of adverse judgments and administrative rulings.

Diversity is likely to be one of the biggest issues on all global businesses agendas going into 2021.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)

In August 2019, over 180 CEOs of the Business Roundtable overturned a 22-year-old policy statement that defined a corporations principal purpose as maximizing shareholder return and embraced a more stakeholder-driven approach to governance. The new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation declares that companies should serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate. A cornerstone of this new stakeholder capitalism model is Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing, which has become a standard for top-tier institutional and public institutions, private lenders and other stakeholders.

With all the signs pointing toward the continued growth of ESG and reporting and disclosure requirements, ESG considerations are likely to be at the top of many businesses agendas as we enter into 2021.

Many of the issues that we have already discussed here will be relevant to a companys ESG strategy: diversity, gender pay and wellbeing are likely to be the main focus of most ESG initiatives, making it increasingly important for companies to make real and impactful change here. ESG will also place a sharper focus on human rights issues including legislation on slavery in supply chains which already exists, or is in the pipeline in a number of countries (including the UK, California, France, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands). We also expect to see employees as well as stakeholders, customers and others deploy ESG standards to exert pressure on businesses to take action on environmental / climate issues, as well as a stand on social justice issues.

Going into 2021, we expect the focus on ESG to increase. While this will undoubtedly add to the significant pressure that businesses are already under, there is likely to be a workforce dividend in taking ESG seriously; businesses with higher ESG ratings are likely to gain a competitive advantage, making it easier to retain staff and attract talent.

Disputes and whistleblowing

Employment litigation slowed in 2020 as courts the world over temporarily shut down due to the pandemic, trials and hearings were suspended, and employees went remote. We expect this trend to reverse in 2021, as layoffs and therefore terminations - increase and more COVID-19 related claims emerge, related to leave, discrimination, and unlawful termination, as well as (in the US) class action claims for wage and hour law violations. Employers - and insurers are also braced for a wave of health and safety litigation related to exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace.

Whistleblowing is also likely to be in focus this year. EU countries have until 17 December 2021 to implement the EU Whistleblowing Directive (extended to December 2023 for small entities with 50 to 250 employees), which aims to establish channels for reporting concerns about breaches of EU law within workplaces (as well as to public authorities). Companies operating in the EU with 50 or more employees will have to set up secure reporting channels and provide protection for whistleblowers against dismissal, demotion and other forms of retaliation. This may require new or updated policies and systems to meet the Directive requirements, although the detail of what is required will depend on how each country implements the Directive. For some countries, where currently there is little or no comprehensive whistleblowing protection (e.g. Germany, Belgium), this represents a significant change.

Working time

The regulation of working hours was a big issue for employers operating in the EU in 2019 after the European Court of Justice made a decision (CCOO v Deutsche Bank) that required EU Member States to ensure that employers operate systems to set up objective, reliable and accessible systems to measure the duration of daily working time. Some countries acted quickly to update their laws to reflect the ECJ decision (Spain introduced its new law in May 2019), and elsewhere, including in Germany, legislation was prepared to implement the ruling. While legislative progress has been slow since then with few legal changes, we have seen that - while the ECJ decision does not impose a direct requirement on businesses - many are using the decision as a catalyst for reviewing working time recording practices anyway. The widescale move to remote working coupled with the focus on supporting worker mental health - has only strengthened the focus on time recording this year and this is a trend that is set to continue into 2021. For more information on the legal position across the EU, read our Recording Working Hours report.

In other local working hours developments, this year in Japan, we saw important new restrictions on overtime become effective for small and medium sized companies (they became effective for large companies in 2019) and South Korea reduced the maximum working hours per week and introduced new obligations in relation to flexible working schedules and rest periods. As mentioned under our Health and Wellbeing section above, we also expect to see more laws coming in during 2021 relating to the right to disconnect, with new rules currently under discussion in various countries including Luxembourg, India and the US.

More widely, the pandemic may ultimately change the way that businesses and lawmakers think about working time and working arrangements, as many of the current national models on working time arrangements make little sense when employees are working predominantly from their homes and not commuting into workplaces for fixed hours. We expect to see many working hours developments in the coming year.

Worker mobility

While most global mobility came to a swift halt in 2020, there have been important legal developments this year which will have an important impact when work travel returns at scale. While the way in which we travel is unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels (research suggests corporate travel is unlikely to rebound until late 2023 or 2024), travel will remain essential for many workers.

During 2020, many EU countries implemented the revised EU Posted Workers Directive which governs the treatment of workers posted from one EU state to another. The revised rules, among other things, increase rights of posted workers to receive all core elements of remuneration in the host country, and confer additional rights on workers posted longer-term (longer than 12 or 18 months). The new rules apply in addition to the existing rules, including notification and other administrative requirements (e.g. to register the posting in advance with the relevant authorities, appointing a liaison person for the authorities, carrying an A1 social security form, etc.). These rules apply whenever a worker is working in another EU country, regardless of the length of the posting, so even a trip of a couple of weeks could trigger the rights if work is carried out during that time (vs attendance at business meetings / pitches / conferences, which is generally excluded).

The other major development in relation to mobility (among other things) going into 2021 is, of course, Brexit. At the time of writing the UK is still negotiating a trade deal with the EU and the final arrangements following the transition period, which ends on 31 December 2020, are currently unknown. However, what is known is that freedom of movement for UK nationals into the EU and vice versa, is about to end. For immigration into the UK, the deadline for EU citizens to make an application under the Settled Status Scheme (which opened in 2019) is 30 June 2021. The UK government has also published details of the new skills-based immigration rules which came into force on 1 December 2020 and will be used for new EU national recruits from 1 January 2021. Organisations wishing to hire workers without pre-settled/settled status will need a sponsor licence. UK nationals going to the EU for business or personal reasons will be subject to a 90 day cap in an 180 day rolling period, so businesses will need to monitor employee time spent abroad to ensure that the limitations are not exceeded.

Digital transformation and privacy

Even before the pandemic, employers and employees were experiencing the impacts of new technologies in workplace, from privacy and data security risks to skills gaps and talent shortages. Evidence suggests that the pandemic has accelerated companies use of digital and automation. A study by Deloitte found that 68% of business leaders globally used automation to respond to impacts from COVID-19, with three in four organizations worldwide now using automation technologies such as robotics, machine learning and natural language processing.

Many jobs that have been the worst affected by the pandemic are at the highest risk of automation. Technology adoption undoubtedly will lead to shifts in the size, composition and location of workforce. According to a recent World Economic Forum report, by 2025, 85 million jobs may be eliminated due to automation. Whether automation can create a greater number of new jobs at pace remains to be seen. It is certain, however, that emerging technologies will continue to transform the workplace, requiring employers to retool their processes, account for new risks, and reassess workforce needs, including reskilling and upskilling.

While the pressure on employers is greater than ever and 2021 will be incredibly challenging for many sectors and businesses, this extraordinary year has revealed opportunities for businesses and workplaces - to transform in ways that were previously unimaginable. Those that use this time to leverage the appetite for change and reconsider the future of their workplaces, are likely to come out on top.

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Global employment law trends and predictions at the close of an extraordinary year - Lexology

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Joe Biden will become president on Jan. 20, and his administration is taking shape. But it will be a shared presidency.

To win the support of Democratic activists the foot soldiers in both the mass protests that raged across the country and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign Mr. Biden agreed to adopt much of the lefts socialist agenda.

Indeed, the administration may be his in name only. Mr. Biden will be under pressure from Democratic congressional leaders, most importantly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the extreme liberal from San Francisco, to back their radical agenda. Beyond his prime when taking office, Mr. Biden is not expected to run for reelection and will be a lame duck from day one. In fact, many observers believe Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, another far-left liberal from California, will effectively control the administration which will push its agenda further left.

At the top on the Democrats priority list is not raising the minimum wage, gutting the military or forced health care for all. Nope. Their first priority is rigging elections. So, if you thought the 2020 election season was a nightmare, then you are really not going to approve of the Democratic plan to turn that debacle into a never-ending reality.

The title of H.R. 1, dubbed For the People Act (the Senate companion measure is S. 949.) reminds one of the Orwellian double speak, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. It ought to be called, For the Democrats Act.

H.R. 1 a monster initially coming in at 622 pages when first introduced would remake the American political system to ensure progressive victories for years to come.

Its designation as number 1 demonstrated its importance to the Democratic leadership. Of course, with Donald Trump as president it was doomed to fail. However, come January the political situation will be very different.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying she wants to start the year by again passing voting-rights legislation called H.R. 1. After becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, supposed moderate Joe Biden pledged his support for the lefts radical agenda, including H.R. 1.

Explained Mr. Biden: A first priority of a Biden Administration will be to lead on a comprehensive set of reforms like those reflected in the For the People Act (H.R. 1) to end special interest control of Washington and protect the voice and vote of every American.

Again, more liberal double-speak: the complex legislation would impose progressive control in Washington and override the interests of all Americans. Many provisions would harm the public and our democracy. Among the four worst ideas:

1. Force Americans to support opposing candidates by creating a system of government financing for campaigns.

H.R. 1 includes public funding, long a favorite of the left. The federal government would provide a six-to-one match for smaller private contributions to candidates. A congressional candidate could get up to $5 million in public money. Forcing Americans to underwrite views they oppose is an unfair and inappropriate use of their tax dollars. Candidates unable to find private support should not be able to conscript other peoples money for their campaigns.

2. Override state election authority by mandating a plethora of procedures that would increase opportunities for vote fraud.

H.R. 1 would enact the lefts wish list to reduce election security: mandate automatic, online, and same-day registration; halt the purge of registration lists to improve accuracy; require universal absentee and universal voting. States would be helpless to stop electoral abuse.

3. Register 16-year olds and convicted felons to vote.

H.R. 1 also imposes a potpourri of other partisan favorites, such as registering 16-year-olds and forcing states to allow convicted felons to vote. Whatever the merits of such ideas, they should be left up to states. The federal governments constitutional power to set standards is not absolute. It is one thing for Washington to impose a few fundamental principles for voting nationwide. It is quite another to micromanage the process and impose what amount to special interest favors.

4. Making Election Day a holiday for federal employees, while encouraging private companies to do the same.

For more than two centuries the American people have done their civic duty without public reward. Taxpayers should not be expected to pay for a days work so a federal worker can vote. Nor should private employers be forced to foot the bill for their employees. If a state finds that some people have trouble finding the time to vote, it could keep the polls open longer.

The underlying principle of election reform is one all Americans should embrace. It is the specifics that are in dispute. Which is why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected the omnibus bill but said that he would consider individual provisions. He specifically suggested a ban on ballot harvesting. Other potentially bipartisan ideas include toughening restrictions on foreign financing and slowing the famed revolving door. However, Democrats have shown no interest in abandoning the provisions drafted for their benefit. Their objective is to forever win, not clean up elections.

Moreover, victory on H.R 1 would be merely the start. The left also is campaigning to kill the Senate filibuster. Then a bare congressional majority could create new states, adding reliable Democratic House and Senate votes, pack the U.s. Supreme Court with judicial activists ready to remake the U.S. Constitution, and engage in social engineering on a massive scale, with no legal or political constraint. Relaxing election security would reinforce this process.

H.R. 1 is the ultimate legislative Trojan Horse, presented in the name of the democratic process while designed to subvert the underlying democratic republic. Following nearly a year of changing election rules, and a grassroots Stop the Steal campaign, it is more important than ever to protect the integrity of elections.

For this reason conservatives and moderate Democrats fooled and bullied into supporting measures such as Defund the Police, should unite in opposition to H.R. 1. Passing this awful measure will lead to more cynicism, civil unrest and an uncertain future for our republic.

Matt Waters is president of the Turn the Tide Committee. He can be reached at mailto:matt@stopHR1.org matt@stopHR1.org.

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How H.R. 1 allows Democrats to threaten democracy - Washington Times

NEW YORK, NY APRIL 17 2020: Public health workers, doctors and nurses protest over lack of sick pay and personal protective equipment (PPE) outside a hospital in the borough of the Bronx on April 17, 2020 in New York, NY.

In what can only be described as a big middle finger to healthcare workers, essential workers and all workers and oppressed persons who are rising up against police terror and fascism, the bourgeois weekly Time has named President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as its Persons of the Year.

By mid-September, the death toll of health care workers in the U.S. from COVID-19 had topped 1,700 and climbing. (National Nurses United) By Dec. 15, the death toll overall in the U.S. from the virus had climbed to almost 304,000, with more than 16.7 million cases reported.

Yes, in the middle of this catastrophe, Time magazine found it appropriate to shine yet another spotlight on the bourgeois ruling class, ignoring health care workers entirely and disrespecting the historic revolutionary uprisings and mass marches that followed the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Battling the capitalist media

It is easy to dismiss Time, Forbes or any sort of capitalist-funded media as against the people because they are! There is no doubt that the mainstream magazines, papers and television news channels are corporate-sponsored and capitalist-funded, right down to local news stations.

It is appropriate to say that the ruling class has a total monopoly on major press. It is also appropriate to say that one task of the working class is to wage a struggle against that monopoly and that bourgeois press, to forward the fight for socialism and anti-imperialism.

One example of this in action was the 2018 appearance of Workers World Party founding member Deirdre Griswold on the television talk show of right-wing reactionary Tucker Carlson. Griswold schooled him on the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea but most importantly, she spoke directly to millions of viewers, giving them the real story of why socialism matters. In that capitalist forum, Griswold defended a revolutionary socialist nation fighting U.S. imperialism defended the DPRK unequivocally, as Workers World Party has always done.

In the midst of bourgeois media propaganda that champions the capitalist ruling class and spreads the lies of U.S. empire, it is a critical task of workers and oppressed persons of the world to struggle to fight for our own autonomy and self-determination in the media.

Time magazine ignores victims of U.S. capitalism

Who were the real People of the Year in 2020? Time could have shone a much-needed spotlight on healthcare workers across the country, from nurses to technicians to cleaning people, who have saved lives in underfunded hospitals with no beds and little or no PPE. Many have had to wear trash bags over their clothes! They are working grueling hours with few or no breaks, many for poverty wages. Many have died from the virus itself.

Instead, Time published a massive article on how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris saved the U.S. from President Trump. What that coverage glossed over is Joe Bidens long record of building up the death-dealing military and prison-industrial complex, and Kamala Harris habitual mistreatment of sex workers and transgender people when she was prosecutor and top cop of California.

Time humanized two staunch supporters and creators of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist empire while ignoring and dehumanizing the countless workers and oppressed people who have died alone and often penniless due to capitalist ruling class negligence and outright hostility to workers and oppressed people during the pandemic.

Overdue awakening

In June 2020, Times cover was a photo of a Black Lives Matter uprising with the headline, The Overdue Awakening. The article briefly outlined the uprisings, at that point only about a month old, along with police attacks on protesters in D.C., the mass arrests, the rise of U.S. citizens beginning to understand police terror as a very real problem and, of course, how Trump and his administration were adding fuel to the fire.

The article gave an even briefer look at the U.S. history of anti-Black terror, from chattel slavery to the underlying anti-Blackness of Social Security and other federal programs, to the current prison-industrial enslavement system. After acknowledging the murder of George Floyd, the Time article ended with an ironic statement: Awakening can be painful. But in America, a reckoning is overdue.

Time called for a supposed awakening. But after a Black-led uprising brought millions and millions of workers and oppressed people multi-gender, multinational and multi-generational into the streets, what did this capitalist propagandist do?

The bourgeois magazine glorified as People of the Year two people who ran on a platform directly, explicitly opposing the uprisings. Two people who have unequivocally supported the police and condemned the protesters.

So what sort of awakening is really needed? What about more mass protests and actions to build solidarity with those who are saving lives in the middle of the pandemic and those who are challenging death-dealing institutions of racism and incarceration, of woman-hating and queer-phobia, of ableism and ageism.

What about an awakening to the need to defeat capitalism and imperialism and build socialism?

We as Marxist-Leninists know who the real People of the Year are the workers and oppressed people of the world, united, who are waking up the planet!

Devin Cole is a transgender Marxist writer and organizer. They are the president of Strive (Socialist Trans Initiative), a transgender advocacy organization, and a member of Workers World Party, Central Gulf Coast (occupied Muscogee Creek land northwest Florida).

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The real People of the Year workers & oppressed people of the world! - Workers World

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

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

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

Voluntary: done or undertaken of ones own free will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Reconstruction of America - Foreign Affairs Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via: NPR, image: Pexels)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Mook lives in Poultney.

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

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

Good evening to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In The Sprout: A familiar face expected back at USDA

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

In Other Headlines:

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

Internationally:

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

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

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

The Kicker:

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

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

True enough.

On that note, have a great night.

More from iPolitics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: American slavery and the 13th Amendment

It is a common belief that slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment, but a closer look at Section One of this amendment will disprove that idea.

I am not a member of the Black, Indigenous and People of Color community, and would like to acknowledge my privilege as a white person. I have never been impacted in the same way many within the BIPOC community have been by incarceration or forced servitude. But, I want to respectfully shed light on the effects of modern-day slavery on this community.

Slavery has always been constitutionally protected. The Three-Fifths Compromise is an important example of this. The U.S. Constitution allowed for the South to have more members in the federal House of Representatives by counting three-fifths of slaves toward the overall population of the state. The compromise also codified slavery as an American institution, which empowered slave owners.

The first major advancement toward the abolition of slavery was in 1807, when the slave trade was banned. Ending legal trade, however, did not truly impact the institution, as many American slaves remained in bondage and households still relied on their labor.

Traditional slavery continued legally until the 1865 passage of the 13th Amendment, which states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted is allowed in the United States. So, involuntary servitude aka slavery is still legal for those who are serving time for a crime.

As a result of this amendment, our country still manages to profit off of slavery.

Unpaid labor is rampant throughout U.S. correctional facilities. The Louisiana State Penitentiary, also dubbed Angola, is a perfect example. Once a plantation, Angola is now a prison that forces inmates to work on a large farm, with threats as severe as solitary confinement looming over those who refuse labor.

Even a liberal stronghold like the state of California benefits from the institution of prison labor. Prisoners were paid just $1.45 a day to do life-threatening work fighting the states wildfires their labor was valued over their lives.

The 13th Amendment simply allowed a transfer of slave ownership from the individual to the state. With the highest number of prisoners around the globe, the United States is in turn the largest state-enforced system of modern slavery in the world.

You might be asking why this matters. Why should I care about the plight of the imprisoned?

First, you have to understand that more than 2 million people are currently incarcerated in the U.S. again, the highest number worldwide.

Many of the products you consume were produced by prison labor, and you probably dont even know it. Walmart used prisoners to build a store until 2005, when the company decided it would not support prison labor and even to scrape codes off of products so that they could be resold.

Victorias Secret used prison labor to manufacture its garments and lowered production costs by not adequately paying inmates. TJX continues to exploit prisoners for production and has faced legal ramifications from shareholders, but has since agreed to disclose information regarding its use of prison labor.

What should be done about this issue? Truthfully, I do not know what would reform a system we are so dependent on.

A simple solution is to pay prisoners a fair wage and work on removing the 13th Amendments provision allowing for state-based slavery. But those are just words. We must determine how to deconstruct a powerful American institution so we can enact fundamental change in the criminal justice system.

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Politics Philosophized: The end of slavery Part 2 The Daily Free Press - Daily Free Press

The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited the most widespread series of protests in U.S. history. Working peoplenot only Black, but people of all raceswere the driving force. Even labor leaders who are usually reluctant to weigh in on hot social issues spoke out.

The challenge now is to bring the militancy and energy of this years revived Black struggle into the workplaceamid the coronavirus-driven economic crisis.

A deep look at U.S. labor history shows that labor can make big steps forward when Black workers are in motion in their communities. In our past, a mobilized Black community has brought the energy and self-confidence of powerful collective action in the streets into workplace organizing. Its also brought a grassroots orientation that challenges top-down conservatism.

Will the same be true for unions today?

The potential could be glimpsed in the early weeks of the pandemic, when union and non-union workers alike took action over unsafe working conditions, in worksites ranging from hospitals to Amazon warehouses to grocery stores. Because so many essential workers are Black and Latino, they were often at the center of the action, from Detroit bus drivers to Pittsburgh sanitation workers to Georgia poultry workers.

What makes the Black Lives Matter protests so important isnt just their size. Its the fact that demonstrators are linking the struggle against racist police violence to the whole racist system. The basketball players walkout in August highlighted the connection between racism in society and at the workplace.

Black workers have never drawn a line between civil rights in the community and worker rights on the job. That has everything to do with the central role Black labor has always played in the U.S. economy, from the unpaid labor of slavery to the low wages paid to Black workers by modern industrialists to boost profits.

Labor history shows that Black workers dont protest in the streets while keeping quiet at work.

Black workers were key to labors 1930s upsurge in many industries, particularly in the South, even if many Southern struggles were ultimately unsuccessful. In the Midwest, the steel, auto, and meatpacking industries could not have been unionized had not rank-and-file organizers, including socialists of all currents, taken on the racism of the companiesand often of their white co-workers.

Many workplaces and unions at the time were Jim Crowbarred to Black workers. In New York City, a Black community boycott of two privately owned bus lines in 1941 forced the companies to hire Black workers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Black workers were the driving force of the Southern civil rights movement. A key strategist of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56the breakthrough struggle of the civil rights movementwas E.D. Nixon, the Alabama president of an all-Black railroad union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon was among those who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a dynamic but largely unknown 27-year-old preacher. The Brotherhood was a key connection between Black union members in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland and mostly non-union Southern workers.

The Southern civil rights movement prodded the highly conservative AFL-CIO bureaucracy into supporting it, even as nearly all-white building trades unions kept fighting to maintain a color bar into the 1960s. More generally, the level of mobilization in the Black community and the confidence that came with winning the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reinforced the desire to fight at work as well.

The Southern Black struggle then came North in the form of the Black Power movement. By then Black workers represented big numbers in major industrial unions, such as auto and steel. Black workers were an essential part ofand often a leading force inthe strike wave that began in the mid-1960s.

That period saw a massive expansion of public sector unionism, with Black workers a key component. The welfare rights movement in New York City, with Black women at the center, is one example. That movement was linked to social workers unionization efforts in the Social Services Employees Union, an independent organization that struck in defiance of the law and got the support of King and other civil rights leaders as well as community groups. SSEU helped open the way for AFSCMEs recognition and formal public sector bargaining rights in New York.

The assassination of Dr. King led to street rebellions across the U.S. in 1968. Three months later, in auto, Black workers Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) led a 1968 wildcat over speedup and discrimination, which spurred similar organizations and strikes elsewhere in auto and in other industries. The workers also took on internal struggles in the United Auto Workers. The UAW had been willing to support the Southern civil rights movement and the 1963 March on Washington, but it sought to suppress Black members demands internally.

The 1970 national postal wildcat was strongest in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, strongholds for Black workers. Black workers were the absolute majority of postal workers in Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Detroit. That job action was likely the largest-ever Black participation in a strike.

Labor struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s were widespread and certainly not limited to Black workers. But the militancy of Black workers was an essential ingredient. Could that same dynamic emerge today?

Potentially. But this time Black workersand their Latino, Asian, and white co-workerswill have to undertake the basic task of union organization on a much greater scale. In 1970, more than 24 percent of workers belonged to unions. The Black Power movement could therefore find a connection in heavily Black unionized workplaces in auto and the post office. Today the path from protest to the workplace is more difficult.

But the same dynamic still exists. The Fight for 15 movement, even though it did not result in union contracts, won a $15 minimum wage through legislation in some states and cities in large part because of the participation of low-wage Black workers. And Black workers are more likely to be in unions than any other group.

Certainly, Black workers have lost important footholds in the unions over the last few decades, with plant closures and shifts of production to the largely non-union South. And now the pandemic economic shutdown has hammered the hospitality and service economy, leading to layoffs in union hotels that hit Black and Latino workers particularly hard.

But Black workers are still a strong component of labors remaining base in the private sector, such as auto and UPS, and in the public sector, where they are 20 percent of the total. That means Black workers have an outsized role to play in any resistance to pandemic-driven government budget cuts.

The Chicago Teachers Unions strikes of 2012 and 2019 showed how a bold union can win public support for demands that address racist realities. The CTU fought for The Schools Our Children Deserve, for Black teachers facing job loss, for rent control and sustainable housing and services for homeless students, and against evictions. The potential for such connections is much wider after the anti-racism protests of 2020.

Its a huge fight. But it always has been. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 give labor activists the opportunity to revive that tradition.

Tim Schermerhorn is a retired transit worker in New York City and a former vice president of Transport Workers Union Local 100. Lee Sustar is a journalist in Chicago and member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981.

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The Movement for Black Lives and Labor's Revival - Labor Notes

On October 16, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein issued a new defense of the 1619 Project in which he now argues that its best-known claimthat the year 1619 and not 1776 represents the true founding of the United Stateswas a metaphorical turn of phrase not intended to be read literally. Further confusion is attributed to an editorial error arising from the difficulties of managing a multi-platform media operation. Published under the title, On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project, Silversteins essay is a convoluted lawyers argument that attempts to palm off historical falsification as merely minor matters of syntax, punctuation, and a somewhat careless use of metaphor.

When the 1619 Project was published in August 2019, to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in colonial Virginia, no historical claims were too grandiose for Silverstein and lead writer and project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones. The 1619 Project, the Times proclaimed, would reframe all of American history to show that the past and the present can only be understood through the prism of slavery and the endemic racial hatred of whites for blacks.

In supporting this larger claim, the 1619 Project asserted that the events of 1776 were, in essence, a preemptive counterrevolution aimed at thwarting a British plan to end slavery in North America. Then, in the aftermath of the separation from Britain, black Americans fought back alone, the Times asserted, to make America a democracywithout the assistance of abolitionists, the Union army, Abraham Lincoln, or any other white person, all of whom benefited from slavery and white capitalism.

Furthermore, according to Hannah-Jones and the Times, true history had been suppressed by dishonest white historians hellbent on maintaining their racist founding myth of 1776. After two centuries of a historical narrative centered on the false elevation of 1776, the 1619 Project declared that it was finally time to tell our story truthfully.

In spite of Silversteins deletion of the true founding claim and his other word changes, the Times essential position remains the same: The American Revolution was a retrograde event, in which the defense of slavery was the critical motivation. Yet, to this day neither Silverstein nor any other defender of the 1619 Project has bothered to confront the obvious historical questions that this position raises in relationship to both American and world history:

If the American Revolution was a reactionary event, why was it hailed by contemporaries beyond the shores of the United States as the dawn of a new democratic age? Did the American Revolution play no role in the chain of events that produced the French and Haitian revolutions, as well as the industrial revolution, the working class, and socialism? Why was Tom Paine made an honorary citizen of the new French Republic? If the proclamation of human equality in the Declaration of Independence is only a founding myth, and not a discovery whose revolutionary meaning tears through all subsequent history, how do we explain the fact that every progressive social movement has inscribed this maxim on its banner? How was it that the United States developed, within a generation, a mass anti-slavery movement, and within four score and seven years a great Civil War that destroyed slavery? Were all those who identified the American Revolution with the cause of freedom, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King included, merely dupes of the American founding fathers?

The most obvious error made by the 1619 Projectthat the American Revolution was waged to stop British abolition of slaverybecame indefensible after the Times own fact checker, Leslie Harris of Northwestern University, felt compelled to admit that she had vigorously opposed it. Silverstein tried to manage this exposure of the Times dishonest suppression of the fact-checkers objection with a clever cut and paste modification of Hannah-Jones false claim. The original categorical denunciation of pre-1619 Project historiography had read:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. [Emphasis added]

Silverstein added two words so that the amended version now reads:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. [Emphasis added]

In the original version, the defense of slavery is presented as one of the primary reasons the colonists decided for separation from Britain. In the 1619 Project version 2.0, the concern over the fate of slavery motivates only some ofHow many? Who? Where?the colonists. Presto! Problem solved. Or so Silverstein thought. But the modified statement is still false. Far from being conflicted over slavery, until 1833 the British Empire maintained its own lucrative slave plantations in the Caribbean, where Loyalist slaveowners fled, human property in tow of His Majestys Navy.

As for the Projects quietly-deleted true founding thesiswhich was emblazoned on the Times website and repeated again and again by Hannah-Jones on social media, in interviews, and her national lecture tourSilverstein now claims that this was the product of nothing more than a minor technical error, the sort of snafu that is an inevitable outcome of difficulties for modern-day editors, such as himself, in managing a multiplatform publication and figuring out how to present the same journalism in all those different media. With all of these formats to tend to, the beleaguered editors of the Times just couldnt get the story straight! Silverstein does not seem to grasp that the criteria of objective truth do not change as one moves from printed newspaper to website, or from Facebook to Twitter. What is a lie in one format remains a lie in another.

In addition to chalking up the mistaken true founding claim to his far-flung editorial responsibilities, Silverstein attempts to defend Hannah-Jones by implying that readers failed to appreciate the sense that this was a metaphor. He should have been more attentive, he says, to online language [that] risked being read literally. This is among the most inspired of Silversteins excuses. From here on in, whenever Times correspondents like Judith Miller are caught lying, its editors may claim that the journalists are writing in metaphors that are not to be read literally.

Silverstein cites the original, metaphorical, version of the 1619 Project. This is the version that was sent out to school children. It read, with emphasis added:

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our countrys history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nations birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the countrys true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?

He then quotes the revised passage, that has been made to the online publication only:

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our countrys history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nations birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the countrys defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?

Perhaps Silverstein hopes his readers will carelessly jump over this scissors-and-glue work. He writes that the difference in the two passages is to the wording and the length, not the facts. But actually, there to be read literally in black and white, the first passage refers specifically to an allegedly false fact. If a metaphor is being employed in the original version, it is very well concealed.

Silverstein repeats Hannah-Jones conceit that historians have ignored the African American experience. Such a claim exposes both Silversteins and Hannah-Jones ignorance of historical literature. The 1619 Project is as much a falsification of historiography as it is of history.

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

Since the 1930s, an enormous body of scholarship has developed on the periods of American history that the 1619 Project breezes through as so many turnstiles in the unfolding history of white racism: the colonial era and the emergence of slavery; the American Revolution and the entrenchment of slavery in the antebellum South with the development of cotton production; the development of the free labor North, antislavery politics and the destruction of slavery in the Civil War; the struggle for and ultimate failure of Reconstruction; and the replacement of slavery by sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, industry and wage labor. These vast subjects have attracted the attention of significant historians, and fascinating and intense debate among them and their studentsW.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, C. Vann Woodward, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Eugene Genovese, Don Fehrenbacher, David Potter, James McPherson, Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, Eric Foner, David Brion Davis, Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, and James Oakes, to name only a few.

This scholarship has been ignored by the 1619 Project. There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones passing acquaintance with American history extends beyond her reading of two books by the black nationalist Lerone Bennett, Jr., the longtime editor of Ebony magazine.

In an attempt to buttress the claim that the 1619 Project is finally bringing to light suppressed history, Silverstein cites a recent study of US history textbooks by the Southern Poverty Law Center that found popular history textbooks do not provide comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved peoples. As if it aids his cause, he points to one of the studys key findings, that only 8 percent of high school seniors were aware that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.

No doubt it is true that American students know little about slavery and its centrality to the Civil War. But this speaks to a larger crisis of historical consciousness. The public schools, starved of funding, have shifted limited resources away from social studies and the arts to practical pursuits, a process pushed forward by Barack Obama, who said in office that folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. The same shifting of resources away from history has taken place at the universities. There were over 19 million Americans enrolled in college in 2017, but only 24,255 graduated with degrees in historya 33 percent decline since 2001while 381,000 degrees were awarded to business majors.

Under these conditions, is it really any wonder that high school seniors know little about the causes of the Civil War or even precisely when it took place? But what share of American high school and college graduates can explain the causes of either World War I or World War II, or even correctly identify the years during which these wars were fought? What percentage of American students could state with even approximate accuracy the years of the American involvement in Vietnam, let alone explain the reasons underlying its intervention?

The lack of knowledge is even greater when it comes to the subject that is virtually absent from public discussion in the United States: the history of the working masses and the class struggle that they have waged against American capitalism. This is a subject that involves the fate of the vast majority of the population, including the countless millions of impoverished immigrants who arrived on the shores of America and then fought to raise the dignity of labor, to use an old phrase. This history finds not the slightest echo in the 1619 Project, which does not acknowledge the existence of class struggle in the United States.

There is plenty of oppression and suffering in the history of what John Brown called this guilty land to go around. The United States has long been the country with the most powerful and ruthless capitalist class on the planet. Before that it was home to the richest and most powerful slave owning class. But the explosive development of industrial capitalism in the aftermath of the Civil War gave rise to the most polyglot working class. Under these conditions the great challenge confronting the socialist movement has always been to unite workers across innumerable racial, national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional barriers to confront their common antagonists.

The 1619 Project has been a case study in historical ignorance and dishonesty. Silversteins latest exercise in self-justification continues the pattern of falsification and evasion. When the 1619 Project was criticized as poor journalism, Silverstein claimed it was history; and when it was criticized as bad history, he claimed it was mere journalism. Now, when it is proven that the 1619 Projects central thesis is false, Silverstein announces that the argument was merely metaphorical and not meant to be taken literally.

In the end, the New York Times argument is a variation of a crooked politicians age-old evasion: We know that you think you know what we said. But what you read is not what we meant.

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It is all just a metaphor: The New York Times attempts yet another desperate defense of its discredited 1619 Project - WSWS

Its clear how the Republicans intend to steal the election. To paraphrase James Carvilles oft-paraphrased line, Its the courts, stupid! The pathetic Judiciary Committee hearings supposedly intended to test Amy Coney Barretts fitness for the Supreme Court were conducted with all the smug Republican aplomb of bureaucrats who knew the fix was in. The real prize for the extremists has always been the courts. Ever since the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision ushered in the era of desegregation, and Roe vs. Wade in 1973 effectively legalized abortion, the extremist right has fought to implant the courts with fanatics, reactionary white males, homophobes, racists, and misogynists, and blatantly un-American theocrats who want to impose their own narrow, often lunatic beliefs on the rest of the country.

The Republicans know they cannot regain the House, at least not unless millions of electronic voting machines are hacked (which with Russian help could happen) and paper ballots dumped. And if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win convincingly, Republicans may well concede the presidency. However, even if the Democrats to win the Senate, key races will be very close.

Lets say five seats are won by the Democrats by 3% or less, i.e., 51.5%-48.5%. Immediately, Republicans claim mail-in ballot fraud. Al Gore and the Democrats did the nation a tremendous disservice in 2000 by not fighting the stealing of the election in Florida; John Kerry followed suit in 2004 by ignoring the highly suspect Ohio returns. Today, if an election in Red-Land is remotely close, we expect the Republicans to steal it. Texas, in fact, is not a red state: it is deep purple but between voter suppression, gerrymandering, and local good ol boy manipulation, Republicans control the legislature and the electoral votes. Florida is a blue state; not by much, but it is. Suppression of black voters has a long history in Florida; Florida police are supposedly taking steps to prevent the Trump campaign to intimidate voters by showing up at the polls armed to the teeth. On the national level, the Republican campaign to suppress the vote is backed by many of the partys major funders. It is a racially driven policy to undermine our basic electoral rights and install the right wing as the permanent party in power. It can only succeed if the courts, and Supreme Court especially, are on board.

Race. Abortion. Gay marriage. Those are the red flag issues. Guns get the loonies all worked up but racism, misogyny, and homophobia mobilizes the Republican rank and file. And that hatred drives the extremist takeover of our judiciary. Strip away the coded language and the cries of save the babies and at bottom, its about hate.

The media has been forced by the Black Lives Matter movement to address racism more openly than at any time since the heyday of the civil rights movement, 1954-1965. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed in 1964 and 1965 a century after the Civil War, many Americans felt we had turned the corner on racism. The laws were steered through Congress by a Texan, President Lyndon Johnson, and a leading member of the House of Representatives, Harlems Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., known for his militant stands against racism and segregation. America basked in the liberal afternoon warmth of FDRs legacy, the victory over fascism in World War II, the tragically lost dynamism of the Kennedy years, and LBJs smashing presidential victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. The Vietnam war had its genesis in a deeply held American racism that equated whiteness with superiority and the right to raise the worlds backwardprimitivesavage brown, black, and yellow people to the level of our enlightened free market, wage-slave, finance-driven civilization. The indiscriminate bombing and napalming of villagers in Korea and Vietnam would likely have been immediately decried were the victims white Europeans (World War II excepted). Racism is not simply a cancer in our society, it is knit into the fabric of our domestic policies and foreign relations.

It doesnt take a malicious majority to destroy a nation or any community. A neighborhood with 5% of its people engaged in some form of violent crime would in effect be a war zone (1250 of 25,000 inhabitants). If a significant percentage of Americans are racist, whether aggressively so or in a more passive-aggressive manner, the impact on our society will be immense.

The lynch mobs of the first half of the 20th century comprised the children and grandchildren of those Confederate soldiers who, by the Civil Wars end, were massacring freed slaves and assassinating black leaders who took Emancipation and Reconstruction seriously. Racism never died, it didnt even go underground. Once Reconstruction ended in 1877, the white South turned to figuring out how to impose slavery within the law. (Not to mention widespread racial discrimination in the rest of the country). They came up with feudal tenant farming; the theft of more than one million farms from southern black owners; minimal appropriations to infrastructure and services in black communities; prison chain gangs for the most minor offenses; and unrestricted violence against black men and women and, yes, children too.

Those who devised the strategy for the rights resurgence kept their eye on the prizethe courts. And now with the Supreme Court tamed, with three awful Trump appointees finally turning it into an extremist rubber-stamp that can overturn elections, weve reached the natural outcome of a nation that never gave up hatred as a driving engine at its core. Most of us may not hold these beliefs, but enough do to create a critical mass of fanaticsthe zombies of TV-landwho can destroy a nations culture the way a violent mob can destroy a community.

Lets say those five hypothetical Senate races mentioned above mean the difference between the Senate being 52-48 Democrat versus 53-47 Republican. They are challenged through various judicial channels, each court like a gate on a computer chip. Whenever an impartial judge blocks the challenge, it is routed on to the next gate until an amenable judge upholds it. Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures go through legal contortions to declare the election already decided for their candidates. Finally, all five challenges reach the Supreme Court. As a tactical ploy, the Court decides early for one Democratic candidate. See how impartial we are! But then in rapid succession, it upholds the four remaining Republican challenges by throwing out hundreds of thousands of votes. 52-48, Republicans. They can live with that.

And what will we do? What if Biden and Harriss election is stolen as well? No semblance of American democracy will remain.

The only thing that can work against a hijacked election is mass citizen action. A General Strike. Millions laying siege to statehouses and D.C. With all our purported freedoms, Americans have allowed unions and strikes to fade into a quaint relic. Along with strike- and union-busting, restrictive laws against unions, and a steady stream of anti-union propaganda denouncing them, nothing worked better than shipping manufacturing jobs overseas. Americans in the service economy view themselves as powerless or, if higher up the ladder, privileged. They are oblivious to the immense benefits unions brought to their grandparents and parents. But we dont have time to revive unions per se. If the election is clearly being stolen, Democrat leaders should declare a General Strike and they should be prepared to lead mass demonstrations.

Bring it all to a screeching halt. Let Wall Street plunge and freak out. Let the billionaires watch their fortunes evaporate. Let the supply chains dry up and inventories disappear. Force the generals to decide whether they will kowtow to illegitimate power or do their jobs and protect democracy. Scare the bastards so bad that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett will be summoned to a meeting of the real honchos and told its time to stop the charade. Then have Biden lead the charge for a thirteen member Supreme Court with 18 year terms; term limits on judges throughout the judiciary; a major recall campaign for the most law-abusing judges; and a restoration of a semblance of law and order to our legal system. Then we may have a fighting chance against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other malicious biases, because that hatred, along with untrammeled greed, is whats driving the Republican agenda. Without resistance, were finished.

FALL FUNDRAISER

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Save the election, resist the hate - NationofChange

Following the sentencing of his wife Sharmistha Barai, to more than 15 years in prison, Satish Kartan, 46, of Sacramento, was sentenced Oct. 22, 2020, to 15 years and eight months in prison for forced labor violations, the same term as his wife.

In addition, U.S.District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. ordered $15,657 be paid in restitution to three victims, all workers brought from India as domestic labor, in part to cover their back wages and other losses.

On March 14, 2019, after an 11-day trial, a federal jury found Kartan and Barai, 40, guilty of conspiracy to obtain forced labor and two counts of obtaining forced labor. Kartan was also found guilty of one count of fraud in foreign labor contracting. On Oct. 2, Barai was sentenced to 15 years and eight months in prison for forced labor violations.

Kartan earned his sentence by the systematic abuse and exploitation of vulnerable women for the benefit of his wife and family, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California McGregor W. Scott is quoted saying in the press release. He verbally abused multiple victims, withheld basic sustenance from them, and physically intimidated them. Todays sentence will send a loud message to others engaged in human trafficking and labor. Moreover, it will give Kartans victims the peace of mind that he will never be able to abuse them again.

The United States abolished slavery and involuntary servitude more than 150 years ago, said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division. Yet, inhuman forced labor and deprivations of liberty and dignity persist because human traffickers proliferate modern-day slavery, and endeavor to exploit their fellow human beings for profit and other gruesome purposes.

Those engaged in the heinous crime of forced labor will face severe consequences for their actions, said Special Agent in Charge Matthew Perlman of the Diplomatic Security Service, San Francisco Field Office. The Diplomatic Security Service and our partner agencies will continue to aggressively pursue and prosecute those who commit visa fraud to exploit others for their own personal gain.

Authorities appealed to the public to report alleged human trafficking to law enforcement or submit a tip to tips.fbi.gov.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, between February 2014 and October 2016, Kartan and Barai hired workers from overseas to perform domestic labor in their home in Stockton. In advertisements seeking workers on the internet and India-based newspapers, the defendants made false claims about the wages and conditions of employment, the press release said.

Once the workers arrived at the defendants Stockton residence, Kartan and Barai compelled them to work up to 18 hours a day with limited rest and nourishment. Few of them were paid any wage. As part of the conspiracy, the couple kept the domestic workers from leaving and coerced them to continue working by threatening them, by creating an atmosphere of fear, control, and disempowerment, and at times by physically hitting or burning them. When a victim resisted or expressed a desire to leave, the threats and abuse became worse, the court documents quoted in the press release said.

This case was the product of an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the FBI, and the State Departments Diplomatic Security Service.

The Eastern District of California (Sacramento) is one of six districts designated through a competitive, nationwide selection process as a Phase II Anti-Trafficking Coordination Team, through the interagency ACTeam Initiative of the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Labor, the press release said.

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Husband sentenced to more than 15 years for mistreating workers from India - newsindiatimes.com

Politics

29 Oct, 2020 12:09 AM5 minutes to read

Act leader David Seymour wants the Human Rights Commission abolished. Photo / Michael Craig

Act leader David Seymour wants the Human Rights Commission abolished because of its "left-wing manifesto".

"The Commission is a hard-left organisation masquerading as a government department," Seymour said.

The Human Rights Commission today called for the new government to honour human rights and laid out 39 issues it wants politicians to adopt.

Included are creating a written constitution that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi, makes the minimum wage the living wage, creates more employment opportunities for disabled people, builds decent and affordable homes and a formulates national action plan against racism.

It also wants a national strategy to deal with family violence, an end pay discrimination, for police to collect hate crime data and to make the health and disability system work for all disabled people.

Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt said successive governments had made these promises over many years and it was time for the new government to deliver them.

"Human rights place responsibilities on governments. They also place responsibilities on individuals to embrace diversity, support vibrant communities and not be racist or homophobic."

Seymour said the manifesto showed the commission was "no longer interested in helping real people with actual human rights issues, but simply advancing a left-wing agenda".

"The commission has become irrelevant, and even dangerous, when it cannot defend our most basic human right.

"The commission has become a highly politicised, left-wing organisation, and when it comes to actually helping people with human rights, it doesn't help at all.

"Act sees no purpose for it and would abolish it completely," said Seymour.

The Human Rights Commission's 39 human rights issues were collected from all four commissioners and are:

Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt

Everyone should have a warm, dry, safe, decent home Look after the environment as kaitiaki (guardian) for our children and grandchildren We not only have rights, we also have responsibilities to our communities Rainbow communities can express who they are and be respected and safe A community-based health system (physical and mental health) for everyone Public officials must respect the human rights promises governments have made toall of us The welfare system should ensure a secure and dignified life for everyone Honour and implement the growing partnership between kwanatanga (Crown) andrangatiratanga (hap and iwi) Establish a Human Rights Commissioner for Older People Getting the balance right between freedom of speech and the right to be safe Treat people who are deprived of their liberty with respect A written Constitution that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi

Disability Rights Commissioner Paula Tesoriero MNZM

Respect for disabled people by upholding our dignity and celebrating ourcontributions Give disabled young people a fair go in our education system Make houses, transport and public places accessible so everyone can use them Services respect and work in partnership with tngata whaikaha (Mori disabledpeople) More and better employment opportunities for disabled people Better services for those experiencing violence and abuse Make the health system work for all disabled people Public information provided in ways, such as te reo Mori, NZ Sign Language, andbraille, so that everyone can understand Collect better information about disabled people so services can be better designedfor them

Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali'i Dr Karanina Sumeo

Ensure government contracts have job targets for Mori, women, disabled people,55+, vulnerable youth, Pacific Peoples and ethnic minorities End pay discrimination Free early childhood education Establish fair employment contracts for all Make the minimum wage a living wage Establish a safe and trusted process to deal with sexual harassment and bullying Eliminate modern slavery and exploitation in the workplace

Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon

A National Action Plan Against Racism Teach Te Tiriti o Waitangi, local histories and human rights in schools Police to collect hate crime data Make government systems work for Mori e.g. health, justice, education, OrangaTamariki, welfare and housing A public anniversary to commemorate the New Zealand Wars Support Mori to take part in the political process Equal rules for creating general wards and Mori wards Establish a national action plan for the implementation of the UN Declaration onthe Rights of Indigenous Peoples Appoint an Indigenous Rights Commissioner at the Human Rights Commission A government Ministry for ethnic communities Develop a national strategy to deal with family violence

The Human Rights Commission's call was welcomed by the Public Service Association, the Child Poverty Action Group, the Citizens Advice Bureau, the Disabled Persons Assembly and Community Housing Aotearoa.

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Act's David Seymour calling for 'hard-left' Human Rights Commission to be abolished - New Zealand Herald