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Virtual Reality in Education Market Share, Growth Forecast- Global Industry Outlook – AlgosOnline

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

Virtual Reality in Education Market Share, Growth Forecast- Global Industry OutlookPublished: 13 hours ago Author: Ashwin NaphadeCategory: #news

Market Study Report has added a new report on Virtual Reality in Education Market Analysis that elucidates an in-depth synopsis of this business vertical over the forecast period. The report is inclusive of the prominent industry drivers and provides an accurate analysis of the key growth trends and market outlook in the years to come in addition to the competitive hierarchy of this sphere.

The research report on Virtual Reality in Education market comprises of key development trends that define the industry in terms of profit potential and expansion scope. It also highlights the challenges & constraints that may negatively influence the market outlook alongside the various growth drivers and opportunities affecting the future remuneration of this business vertical. In addition, the study encompasses data regarding the impact of COVID-19 in an effort to gain insights about the projected performance over the study duration.

Request a sample Report of Virtual Reality in Education Market at:https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/2539660?utm_source=algosonline.com&utm_medium=SK

Major aspects from COVID-19 impact analysis:

A summary of the geographical landscape:

Significant Features that are under Offering and Key Highlights of the Reports:

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Virtual Reality in Education Market Share, Growth Forecast- Global Industry Outlook - AlgosOnline

Virtual rape and sexual abuse: The dangers of immersive technology – SBS News

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

The rapid advancement of immersive technology has sparked grave concerns about the potential for virtual rapes, image-based abuse and physical and sexual assaults.

Australias eSafety Commission has warned new harms may emerge from hyper-realistic technology such as VR headsets and haptic suits - a wearable device which produces vibrations and engages a users sense of touch.

While eSafety has not as yet received any reports of mishaps with haptics, or other misuses of these technologies, we anticipate that as they become more widely used these immersive technologies will give rise to a range of online safety issues, says eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant.

In 2016, gamer Jordan Belamire wrote about experiencing a virtual sexual assault while playing the fantasy game QuiVR.

Ms Belamire had been playing with her husband and brother-in-law in multi-player mode when she was groped by another gamer.

The virtual groping feels just as real, she wrote at the time.

Of course, youre not physically being touched, just like youre not actually one hundred feet off the ground, but its still scary as hell.

Australian laws don't really cover virtual rapes and sexual assaults, experts say.

Getty

It followed mass uproar over a virtual rape in the 1990s on the text-based multi-user game LambdaMOO, after someone hijacked the system and played out various forms of sexual assault using peoples avatars.

Professor Kieran Tranter from QUT School of Law says the haptic suit example is really at the extreme outside end of what our law imagines.

You are attaching something that has the potential to engage with your body in a sexual way, so there will be issues about consent around that, Professor Tranter told The Feed.

If there is unwanted sexual conduct, could we even identify the perpetrator and if we cant, could we argue that the platform or even the hardware manufacturer is precariously liable for the assault?

Professor Tranter says it would be difficult without substantial reforms to achieve a prosecution for sexual assault.

However, he says outside the area of sexual assault, there could be some options for victims to pursue under the Commonwealth Crimes Act regarding conduct on cyberspace.

eSafety predicts the use of immersive technologies will increase throughout the next decade and may soon be almost indistinguishable from actual experiences.

According to eSafety, immersive technology is a wide-ranging term that covers virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, a blend of AR and VR, and haptic technologies.

Together, these form a new universe of extended reality -- and according to eSafety, smell and taste sensations will soon be added to the mix.

Haptic technology company HoloSuit provides full-body gaming experiences through wearables.

On its website, it claims, the user will be able to experience a completely new level of immersion and free body movement.

HoloSuit says this will allow gamers to do things like throw the gun on the ground and surrender with their hands raised to see if enemy players will show mercy.

As well as gaming, immersive technologies are also being integrated into the sex industry. Sex Like Real is one of the largest VR porn companies, recording over half a million monthly users in 2018.

In 2020, it launched a new interactive experience that uses multi-camera videos and allows users to interact through synchronised teledildonics - haptic devices designed to stimulate sexual excitement.

A screenshot taken from the Holosuit site.

Holosuit

There is concern that immersive technologies could ramp up image-based abuse and lead to increased sharing and streaming of non-consensual images and videos.

eSafety cautions augmented realities could be used to fake a sexually explicit three-dimensional image or video of a real person and interact with it, without their consent.

It says there is also a risk of non-consensual sexual activity if haptic sexual devices are hacked or controlled by someone without approval.

A Sex Like Real VR system.

Sex Like Real

In 2017, Canadian sex toy maker We-Vibe was made to pay a settlement of $5.3 million to customers for collecting user-sensitive user data. This information included when they were used and vibration settings, linking it all to users email addresses.

eSafety believes location and biometric information, such as fingerprints, which are collected by AR and VR technologies, could also pose risks such as identity theft, stalking and extortion.

eSafety has also raised significant concerns about the use of immersive technologies as a tool for online child sexual abuse.

One of the main risks, it says, is that predators may hide behind an avatar or a fictional character to groom children and persuade them into sexualised conversations and actions.

eSafety is concerned about online grooming through immersive technologies.

Peter Byrne/PA Wire

The eSafety Commission says if you receive threats or abuse in an immersive environment, you should report the incident to the platform and collect evidence, such as screenshots - unless the person involved is under 18 years of age.

Ms Inman-Grant says its important to supervise children when theyre online and make them feel comfortable to ask for help.

In practical advice when parents and carers are deciding if their child should play an immersive technology game, they should think about whether its something they would want their child to experience in real life, she says.

Professor Tranter says its important to keep talking about these technologies as they continue to advance.

This is a really important discussion, he says.

Up until now, a lot of our discussion around digital media has always been well, if you don't want to experience those things don't use it.

And increasingly, we're in a position where thats not a reality and I suspect we're going to be facing these issues more and more

If you or someone you know is at serious risk of immediate harm call Triple Zero (000).

You can report image-based abuse to the eSafety Commission at esafety.gov.au.

If you suspect online child sexual abuse or grooming by a sexual predator report it to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation via the Report Abuse button on accce.gov.au/report.

Global Virtual Reality in Aerospace and Defense Thematic Research 2020 – ResearchAndMarkets.com – Yahoo Finance

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

TipRanks

The markets have been on a tear of late despite the headwinds presented by the novel coronavirus pandemic. The question is how long this will last?Writing from Goldman Sachs, the firms chief US equity strategist David Kostin says that the markets will outperform both other investments and analyst expectations over the next two years. He sees the S&P 500 hitting 4,600 by the end of 2022, which would represent a 25% gain.Backing his stance, Kostin gives four reasons for his bullishness. The first three reasons are the obvious ones: the economy is improving, earnings are rising, and interest rates are low these all draw investors into stocks. But under them all is Tina' (there is no alternative). The stock market is the only place right now where investors can find big returns and, according to Kostin, "equities become the default opportunity."With investors moving into stocks, theyre going to look for data to back their choices. After all, even without an alternative, investors want to find the right moves.With this in mind, we used TipRanks database to pinpoint three stocks with a Strong Buy consensus rating, and a Perfect 10 Smart Score. The Smart Score is a data analysis tool, which uses the real-time information collected in the database. The stock data is collated according to 8 separate factors, each of which is known to predict growth and share appreciation. The factors are averaged together, and given as a single-digit score, on a scale from 1 to 10, letting investors know at a glance the likely way forward for a stock.The Strong Buy rating and the Perfect 10 dont have to go together, but its a strong positive sign for investors when they do. Let's take a closer look. Turning Point Brands (TPB)Turning Point may not be a household name but theres a good chance that youve heard of some of its brands. The company owns both Zig Zag, the well-known maker of rolling papers and branded gear, and Stokers chewing tobacco. Turning Point has a range of consumer products with active ingredients, including chewing tobacco, as well as snuff and vapes. The company registered an earnings increase from 4Q19 to 1Q20, bucking the corona trend, and has seen quarterly revenues level out at $104 million in Q3, up 15% from the first quarter. Earnings have been rising consistently for the past three quarters, with Q3 EPS at 75 cents.The companys stock has been rising, too. Shares in TPB are up an impressive 50% year-to-date, wiping out all losses sustained during the shutdown policies last winter.Covering this stock for Craig-Hallum is 5-star analyst Eric Des Lauriers. He rates TPB shares a Buy, and his $60 price target suggests room for 41% growth in the coming year. (To watch Des Lauriers track record, click here)Backing his bullish stance, the analyst writes, Turning Point Brands (TPB) delivered another strong beat and raise quarter, beating all analyst estimates as the two base businesses benefitted from long term secular trends and growth initiatives [We] expect the strong trends in the base businesses to continue through 2021 and expect significantly increased profitability in NewGen as competitors exit the market. With strategic investments and M&A picking up, we are increasingly bullish on TPBs long-term outlookOverall, the Strong Buy consensus rating on Turning Points Brands is unanimous, standing on 5 Buy-side reviews. The stock is selling for $42.60, and its $46.46 average price target implies ~9% upside from current levels. (See TPB stock analysis on TipRanks)Gladstone Lands (LAND)Next up is a unique REIT, real estate investment trust. Gladstone owns and manages farmland, acquiring high-quality farms and related properties which it then leases to independent farmers or to farming corporations. The companys properties are actively involved in the production of a wide range of crops, including strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cabbage and watermelons. Gladstone boasts 100% occupancy of its properties, an enviable position for any REIT.During the first quarter, when most companies felt the pain of the lockdown policies, Gladstone posted its strongest earnings and revenues of 2020. The most recent results, for Q3, showed revenue of $13.99 million, up 10% sequentially. Since the third quarter, Gladstone has acquired four new farms, totaling nearly 1,400 acres, and collected 99% of rents due in October. Even better, for shareholders, to companys portfolio has exceeded $1 billion in total value. Like most REITs, Gladstone pays out a regular dividend. The payment, of 4.4 cents per regular share, is paid out monthly. At an annualized rate of nearly 53 cents per share, it gives a yield of 3.6%. Among the bulls is Maxim analyst Michael Diana who wrote, We have covered LAND since it went public in January 2013, and have consistently regarded its investment thesis (appreciation in the value of farmland) as sound, its strategy (focused mainly on non-commodity crops such as fruits and vegetables) as superior, and its execution (buying high quality farms at reasonable cap rates) as strong."To this end, Diana gives LAND a Buy rating and a $20 one-year price target, which indicates room for 35% growth. (To watch Dianas track record, click here.)Overall, along with its Strong Buy consensus rating, LAND shares have a 12-month average price target of $18.17. This suggests an upside potential of ~23% in the year ahead. (See LAND stock analysis at TipRanks)MarineMax (HZO)The last stock on our list is a retailer, in the water-leisure niche. MarineMax sells boats, yachts, and support services such as winterization, new and used, across the spectrum of price points. The company advertises itself as recreational retailer focused on premium brands. HZO has seen strong appreciation in 2020, bucking the coronavirus. The shares are up 89% year-to-date, far outpacing the NASDAQ and S&P 500.The share growth has been based on powerful results for the companys fiscal year, which ended on September 30. In the fiscal Q4, just reported, EPS was down sequentially, but beat the forecast by a wide margin. Quarterly revenue came in at $398 million. Fiscal 2020 full-year revenue was $1.5 billion, and reflected 25% same-store sales growth during the year. EPS for fiscal 2020 was $3.37, more than double the previous years figure.When a company reports results like that, its no surprise to see it has a Perfect 10 from the Smart Score. B. Riley analyst Eric Wold is impressed by MarineMaxs same-store sales and its overall position in its retail niche. He writes, HZO reported impressive 4Q20 SSS growth of +33%, which was up against a two-year comp stack of +13%, and compared to our +25% estimate and the consensus estimate of +14%. We believe the company's broad network of retail locations, strong manufacturer relationships and investments into a digital/virtual platform can help the company take meaningful shareand even in situations where most are shutdown during a pandemic.In line with his comments, Wold gives the stock a Buy rating. His $40 price target implies an upside of ~27% over the next year. (To watch Wolds track record, click here)All in all, MarineMaxs Strong Buy consensus rating is based on 6 reviews, breaking down to 5 Buys and 1 Hold. The stock is selling for $31.53, and its $35.80 average price target suggests it has room to grow 13.5% from that level. (See HZO stock analysis on TipRanks)To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights.Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

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Global Virtual Reality in Aerospace and Defense Thematic Research 2020 - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Yahoo Finance

Blossoms live in London: indie heroes get up close and personal with virtual reality gig – NME

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

10 months into the pandemic, the nerve-racking novelty of virtual gigs has worn off. Its doable, often enjoyable, but musicians and fans alike are no longer fizzing with excitement at the prospect of reaching out to one another behind a screen. Indie-pop heroes Blossoms know this, and they waltz into their first gig in nine months, at Londons O2 Academy Brixton, with a sense of laidback confidence.

I just took off my shoes because I feel like the carpets asking for it, frontman Tom Ogden says after the first three songs. You can see why: its a cosy set-up, all five lads from Stockport as well as three touring musicians are facing one another in a circle, fairy lights tracing the stage with orange table lamps dotted around the room. Bass player Charlie Salt says he is just relaxed, yeah, while lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst is enjoying a cup of herbal tea in a polka-dot mug.

Were afforded this level of detail because the gig is being broadcast with a virtual reality option; despite the novelty, there must be a little less adrenaline without thousands of faces in front of you. Still, the hour-long setlist is tight and familiar, with no unnecessary gaps between all the big hits. The slow-burning Getaway is performed with a great sense of ease, while the glacial Honey Sweet is at its swaggering best.

Its a highlight to hear the bands two new Christmas songs, Christmas Eve and Its Going To Be A Cold Winter, live for the first time. Lights turn from orange to green back to red and Christmas trees, framing the stage, make the place feel like home. Oh No boasts the glorious warmth that defined the bands disco-inflected album Foolish Loving Spaces, and At Most A Kiss is a rousing delight.

The virtual reality option, on the other hand, is a mixed affair. If you download the Melody VR app, you can switch between six different camera angles and spin on a 360-degree axis in your living room to experience the whole thing. Its a good idea in theory, but frustrating in practice: your phone screen, or iPad of whichever size, is never going to be as wide or immersive as, well, your eyes, and such technological strain might actually just make your stream buffer, meaning you miss Charlemagne entirely.

Still, this isnt Blossoms fault theyre on terrific form and grateful to be back, while seemingly aware that theres no beating the real thing. I enjoyed that more than I thought I would, Ogden concludes. Theres certainly enjoyment to be found here and more incentive than ever to look forward to a proper return next year.

Credit: press

Blossoms played:

The Keeper

Your Girlfriend

Theres a Reason Why (I Never Returned Your Calls)

I Cant Stand It

Getaway

My Swimming Brain

Sunday Was A Friend of Mine

If You Think This Is Real Life

Honey Sweet

Its Going To Be A Cold Winter

Blow

Like Gravity

Falling for Someone

Oh No (I Think Im in Love)

At Most a Kiss

Charlemagne

Blossoms live in London: indie heroes get up close and personal with virtual reality gig - NME

Global Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Market 2020 : Industry Scenario, Strategies, Growth Factors and Forecast 2026 – The Courier

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

The unprecedented onset of a pandemic crisis such as COVID-19 has been instrumenting dominant alterations in the global growth trajectory of theHealthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Market. The event marks a catastrophic influence affecting myriad facets of the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market in a multi-dimensional setting. The growth course that has been quite unabashed in the historical times, seems to have been struck suddenly in various unparalleled ways and means, which is therefore also affecting the normal growth prospects in the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market. This thoughtfully compiled research report underpinning the impact of COVID-19 on the growth trajectory is therefore documented to encourage a planned rebound.

A thorough analytical review of the pertinent growth trends influencing theHealthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality markethas been demonstrated in the report byZion Market Research. Adequate efforts have been directed to influence an unbiased and time-efficient market related decision amongst versatile market participants, striving to find a tight grip in the competition spectrum of the aforementioned Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market. The report also illustrates minute details in the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market governing micro and macroeconomic factors that seem to have a dominant and long-term impact, directing the course of popular trends in the global Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market.

Free Sample Of Report @https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/sample/healthcare-augmented-virtual-reality-market

The study encompasses profiles of major companies operating in the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Market.Key playersprofiled in the report includes:Vuzix, Qualcomm Incorporated, Augmented Pixels, Inc., Koninklijke Philips NV, CAE HEALTHCARE, Layar, Intuitive Surgical, 3D Systems, Inc.

The report is rightly designed to present multidimensional information about the current and past market occurrences that tend to have a direct implication on the onward growth trajectory of the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market.

The following sections of this versatile report on the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market specifically shed light on popular industry trends encompassing both market drivers as well as dominant trends that systematically affect the growth trajectory visibly. The report is a holistic, ready-to-use compilation of all major events and developments that replicate growth in the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market. Besides presenting notable insights on Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market factors comprising above determinants, the report further in its subsequent sections of this detailed research report on Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market states information on regional segmentation.

Download Free PDF Report Brochure @https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/requestbrochure/healthcare-augmented-virtual-reality-market

In the subsequent sections of the report, readers are also presented with versatile understanding about the current state of geographical overview, encompassing various regional hubs that consistently keep witnessing growth promoting market developments directed by market veterans, aiming for ample competitive advantage, such that their footing remains strong and steady despite the cut throat competition characterizing the aforementioned Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market. Each of the market players profiled in the report have been analysed on the basis of their company and product portfolios, to make logical deductions.

Global Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Geographical Segmentation Includes:

Some Major TOC Points:

Chapter 1. Report Overview

Chapter 2. Global Growth Trends

Chapter 3. Healthcare Augmented & Virtual RealityMarket Share by Key Players

Chapter 4. Breakdown Data by Type and Application

Chapter 5. Healthcare Augmented & Virtual RealityMarket by End Users/Application

Chapter 6. COVID-19 Outbreak: Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Industry Impact

Chapter 7. Opportunity Analysis in Covid-19 Crisis

Chapter 9. Market Driving Force

And Many More

Continued

Research Methodology Includes:

The report systematically upholds the current state of dynamic segmentation of the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market, highlighting major and revenue efficient market segments comprising application, type, technology, and the like that together coin lucrative business returns in the Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality market.

Inquire more about this report @https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/inquiry/healthcare-augmented-virtual-reality-market

Thanks for reading this article;you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.

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Global Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Market 2020 : Industry Scenario, Strategies, Growth Factors and Forecast 2026 - The Courier

ESI Group Gathered Industry Leaders in a Global Digital Event to Discuss Transformation and Cross-Fertilization of Ideas Across Industries – Business…

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ESI Group (Paris:ESI), global player in virtual prototyping software and services for industries, launched its first global digital series of events with leaders of various industries ESI Live. The objective: share experiences in digital transformation, across industry sectors. Globalized competition, shorter lead time, costs pressure, stringent environmental regulations, and the COVID-19 pandemic drive manufacturers to innovate. Automotive, Aerospace, Heavy Machinery, Energy how does each industry break new ground to better meet consumer expectations?

ESI Live started on November 5th and continued with an Americas bonus session held on November 17th. These first events gathered over 600 attendees from across the globe and from all the Group industry sectors, and even more thanks to the replays, which are available now on-demand.

Among speakers taking part of the event, in the Automotive sector:

- Atsushi Mizutani, Expert leader, Production Engineering R&D Center at Nissan Motors Corporation, demonstrated how virtual prototyping is speeding up the development of car parts made from carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP). Light yet extremely strong, this material will be used to make safer and more fuel-efficient cars.

- Dr. Weiran Jiang, Simulation & Advanced Modeling Director at Farasis Energy. The Chinese American battery provider won in record-breaking time a call for tenders made by a premium German automotive OEM. Thanks to ESIs expertise, the reliability of the virtual prototype of the new Farasis battery model was decisive in a zero real prototype approach stipulating the elimination of any physical prototype.

- Dr. Jiri Svoboda, from the auditing and certification organization TV SD, showed how, thanks to a method combining physical and virtual testing, to ensure the performance and safety of autonomous vehicles.

In the Aerospace industry:

- Kaname Kawatsu, Associate Senior Researcher at Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), has relied on simulation to develop risk assessment models evaluation for affordable maintenance and space system robustness.

- Thierry Eftymiades, Senior Vice President Engineering at Latcore, aeronautical equipment manufacturer, focused on the collaborative benefits of the virtual reality solution IC.IDO.

Immersion in the model allows their stakeholders around the globe to quickly appropriate the future product and understand its interaction with its environment, from the first steps of the project.

For Heavy Machinery & Energy Industries:

- Galen Faidley, Senior Engineering Project Team Leader at Caterpillar Inc., who has implemented ESIs immersive virtual reality solution in its manufacturing processes to speed up machine development.

- Jean-Marie Hamy, Advanced Reactors & Design School Department Manager at Framatome, carried the ASTRID project for the implementation of virtual reality to design new nuclear reactors. IC.IDO made it possible to create at the same time the design of future buildings as well as their interconnection. The solution stood up thanks to its easy implementation and interoperability with CAD models coming from various sources. The results met the goals: to facilitate zero default conception in a collaborative way, restrict the number of physical interventions at the end of processes, enable to simulate the integration of complex systems and operational feasibility in constrained environments, and finally to allow training of the different teams involved in the project.

Mike Salari ESI Group EVP and Americas Regional Manager, facilitated a high-level discussion with David Johnson, VP Production Engineering and New Model Quality for Nissan North America, Scott Pryer, Partner at Pryer Aerospace and Beckwood Press and Marcus Paulo Nery, LATAM Virtual Integration Lead at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Cristel de Rouvray, CEO of ESI Group, hosted a thought leadership panel with Vincent Champain, SEVP Digital & IT at Framatome, and Ignacio Martin, BiW R&D General Director at Gestamp. In both panels the speakers discussed their companys approach to digital transformation and how theyre benefiting from synergies between industries.

With this digital series, ESI reinforced its commitment to our Planet. The company estimates that by avoiding all travel, they helped save around 223 tons of CO2 in total.

Click here to access all the on-demand content.

About ESI Group

Founded in 1973, ESI Group is a leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping solutions and a global enabler of industrial transformation. Thanks to the companys unique know-how in the physics of materials, it has developed and refined, over the last 45 years, advanced simulation capabilities. Having identified gaps in the traditional approach to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), ESI has introduced a holistic methodology centered on industrial productivity and product performance throughout its entire lifecycle, i.e. Product Performance Lifecycle, from engineering to manufacturing and in operation. Present in more than 20 countries, and in major industrial sectors, ESI employs 1200 high level specialists. In 2019, its turnover was 146M. ESI is headquartered in France and is listed on compartment B of Euronext Paris. For further information, go to http://www.esi-group.com.

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ESI Group Gathered Industry Leaders in a Global Digital Event to Discuss Transformation and Cross-Fertilization of Ideas Across Industries - Business...

The end of the office holiday party or simply time to get creative? – The Guardian

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Danzig

After a year that has upended work life for millions of Americans, many companies are still keen to show appreciation for their employees with a holiday party.

But with the pandemic still raging across the US and budgets tight, this year the sometimes loved, sometimes loathed festive tradition is getting a socially distanced online makeover.

Virtual party activities range from the straightforward, such as a keynote address by a guest speaker or a festive networking session, to the elaborate in the form of wine tasting, cooking lessons with Michelin-starred chefs and guided ugly sweater making competitions.

Some companies are booking virtual reality venues where employees can move around as avatars, watch performances and interact with other guests.

While most are going online, some workplaces including the White House are sticking to in-person parties, despite Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines warning of the risks of doing so. Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Donald Trump, reportedly tested positive for coronavirus after attending a staff Christmas party at the White House on Friday.

Lisa Frydenlund, an HR knowledge adviser at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) said parties will look very different this year, with most interactions virtual, and that companies are having to become more creative.

Theres just a whole lot more thought about how do we celebrate the end of the year in a very challenging year and how do we acknowledge our employees? So it is changing from what the norm was, she said.

With constrained budgets and amid huge numbers of layoffs, she expects many will bypass a party all together, or postpone until next year, while others will instead opt to give presents or gift cards to their employees, put aside time for volunteering or give them additional time off.

JoAnn Gregoli said her events company Elegant Occasions is organising corporate Zoom parties featuring mixologists, cookie baking classes and virtual paint and sips where guests are sent painting supplies and a bottle of wine.

But some of her clients are still hosting in-person events, including a party at an outdoor skating rink in New York with hot chocolate stations and boxed meals and a drive-in concert with food trucks.

Philip MacGregor, of high-end events company Ron Wendt Design, said several of their corporate clients have held Zoom events, including a cooking lesson by a Michelin-starred chef and a sommelier-run wine tasting. Guests are sent all the ingredients beforehand.

Other online Christmas party services include Scratch Goods in Chicago, which runs virtual face mask parties, and Unexpected Virtual Tours in Atlanta, which said it has been inundated with requests for its ugly sweater events.

But amid Zoom fatigue, others are turning to new platforms.

Networking app Upstream recently launched a holiday mixer service that tries to mimic attending an in-person event with festive music and emojis where guests can chat in the virtual lobby before getting matched with others for one-on-one breakout sessions.

Co-founder and chief executive Alex Taub said the format, whose users include General Electric, is especially good for introverts because you only have to talk to one person at a time.

Marketing platform Event Farm has created an entire virtual event space which companies can book to host parties where guests can interact and attend events such as live comedy or cooking classes with a celebrity chef.

Payment service PayPal, meanwhile, has built its own platform to host a 29-hour virtual party for employees around the world to tune into when they want with magic shows, origami, cooking workshops and live performances. They will be able to tap colleagues on the shoulder to chat and take photos.

But with the US workforce suffering from increased stress, isolation, anxiety and depression, the prospect of more screen time could be seen as more of a chore than a celebration.

The idea of adding yet another virtual meeting, even if it is a holiday party, may not be particularly appealing to many employees, said Bradford S Bell, director of the Centre for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University.

At the same time, one of the main challenges for many employees has been an increased sense of isolation Holiday parties can serve as a way to connect employees socially, and in a way that is not directly work related.

Nir Eyal, behavioural expert and author of Indistractable, said virtual holiday parties serve an important role during the pandemic.

If we dont have some kind of signpost or mile marker in our life to say this is an occasion, we have reached this point together, then it kind of all becomes meaningless in a way, said Eyal, who has been invited to be a keynote speaker at several virtual company parties.

Erica Keswin, a workplace strategist and author of Rituals Roadmap, said if done thoughtfully, a virtual party can offer people a sense of psychological safety.

Its a feeling of, You know what, this year was unlike any other year but were going to be OK and bringing people together for that reason, to make them feel that.

She said many companies are making their events more inclusive by holding events in the daytime and including family and housemates.

Rather than killing off the festive tradition, she said coronavirus and post-pandemic working practices could make it even more important as a corporate institution.

I actually think theres going to be more meaning around the times that we do come together because the remote work is not going away.

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The end of the office holiday party or simply time to get creative? - The Guardian

Here’s why there’s no chance of a liberal takeover of Washington – CNN

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

"We know the direction the country would take, and we're going to continue to make sure that Georgians understand that our very way of life here in Georgia and across the country is under attack by the left," said Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) during Sunday night's candidate debate. (She also said that her opponent, Democrat Raphael Warnock, would bring in "socialism" on eight separate occasions in the debate.)

It's all part of the broader Republican messaging effort to suggest that if Democrats retake control of the Senate, that they will somehow name Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-New York) president and begin the dismantling of capitalism. Or something.

What that rhetoric misses is this: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D).

Manchin is, unapologetically, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate caucus. And he's on the record as:

Which, well, virtually ensures that the picture Senate Republicans are trying to paint of a Democratic Senate majority will never come to pass.

Because, at best, Democrats will have 50 seats -- come January 6. Which means that if Manchin sides with Republicans on ANY vote, Democrats lose that vote. Heck, even a tweet or an off-hand statement expressing disapproval for a Democratic agenda item from Manchin could force his party to recalibrate its legislative strategy.

Which makes Manchin a very, very powerful figure in Washington over the next few years -- especially if his party winds up sweeping both seats in Georgia next month.

And makes it impossible to realistically imagine that any sort of progressive dream will be coming true no matter the outcome in the Peach State.

The Point: Watch what Manchin says and does between now and January 20, 2021. His voice could well be the most important one in the Senate when the next Congress convenes.

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Here's why there's *no* chance of a liberal takeover of Washington - CNN

LETTER – The Liberal Democrats are an alternative – Daily Echo

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

I thank, Gerald Ingram, for his polite response to my own letter.

Where, I still claimed that readers ought to be more supportive of the Liberal Democrats, as they believe in having a United Kingdom.

Plus we should have stayed full members of the EU.

Where, we were the second strongest economy and third largest member within the 28.

Gerald suggests the Lib/Dems should join the Labour Party as a left wing opposition.

I, for one, would never support the Labour Party.

I would never vote Conservative.

That is why I still claim the Liberal Democrats are an alternative.

Politics is changing.

Your Prime Minster has now grabbed the Green Party policies over climate change looking for new energy sources.

Something he would have written off as nonsense.

Rather as he did with the coronavirus.

Plus, of course, our membership of the European Union which the Conservatives were very much in favour of. Indeed, built on.

It was the Labour Party, who were are not in favour.

Feels like Trump's America.

Richard Grant

Burley

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LETTER - The Liberal Democrats are an alternative - Daily Echo

Conservatism and Liberalism: Two Books on the Great Divide – The Wall Street Journal

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

Every man and every woman, it seems, knows Gilbert and Sullivans quipping lines from Iolanthe (1882): That every boy and every gal / Thats born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative. When the lines were first sung, the labels matched up with Britains political parties, but they obviously have a wider applicationeach calling to mind, then and now, a cultural outlook, an inclination, a temperament, even a philosophy. Over time, of course, even the firmest definition will shift, making easy summary difficult and historical circumstancecontext, that iscrucial to our understanding of what liberalism is and how conservatism differs from it. These days, we may also ask: What sets the two sides of democratic politics so far apart?

Edmund Fawcett, a former editor and correspondent at the Economist, grappled with one end of this polarity in Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, published in 2014 and revised four years later. He now explores its opposing force in Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. A self-described left-wing liberal, Mr. Fawcett believes that both categories of thought (and politics) are facing critical tests, making it all the more urgent that we grasp their genealogyhow they developed and what they have come to represent. He calls his explorations historical essays, and indeed they are written in a reflective mode, though at times in an impassioned style. Members of both thought-categories will find much to learn from both books, not least from the historical figures Mr. Fawcett brings into view.

Mr. Fawcett notes that, in the broadest terms, the modern era in advanced societies has been governed by a liberal outlook, one in which the liberty or freedom of the individual has been increasingly protected from the state or liberated from custom, hierarchy and the institutionsnotably, the churchthat once dictated social relations and guided mans understanding of himself. The origins of this outlook, he notes, can be traced to the Enlightenment, when reason was elevated to an exalted position and, it was believed, a rational scrutiny of both principles and institutions would lead humanity away from dark superstition and upward toward the light.

Enlightenment thinkers, Mr. Fawcett reminds us, encouraged the idea that society might be understood and thereby changed for the better. They also sought to sever moral codes from their traditional mooring, or at least to rethink them: As Mr. Fawcett puts it, David Hume and Immanuel Kant welcomed liberty from ethical tutelage so that men could determine their own standards of conduct. The German statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt saw education as a way to realize individual possibility rather than, as tradition would have it, train for an occupation or a social role. Benjamin Constant, in France, focused on the concept of liberty, which he defined as a condition of existence allowing people to turn away interference from either society or the state. Calling absolute power radically illegitimate, Franois Guizot insisted that human imperfection meant that no person, class, faith or interest should have the final say. Like other French liberals of his day, he sought a juste milieua place where interests and ideas could be balanced. Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent also challenged the assumptions of the ancien rgime, helping open careers to talent and remove restrictions on office-holding long governed by religion and class.

These currents of thought we associate with the 18th century, and for good reason, but after the shock of the American and French revolutions, they were dammed up by the Napoleonic Wars and an interlude of restoration. It was only in the 1830s that the dam broke. A period of rapid changebrought on by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, the railways remarkable shrinking of distance, and episodes of agricultural depression and financial crisisdemanded a re-assessment of established patterns of thought and governance. Enlightenment-driven liberalism was one mode of response; conservatism, one might say, was a response to the response.

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Conservatism and Liberalism: Two Books on the Great Divide - The Wall Street Journal

White clicktivism: why are some Americans woke online but not in real life? – The Guardian

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

In the winter of 2018, Gwen Kansen, a 33-year-old self-professed liberal, met a man called Elias in a bar. Within minutes, she knew he was intense. His phone screensaver was of Pepe the Frog a symbol of the alt-right movement. His style reminded her of a Confederate soldier, and he wore badges proudly proclaiming his hatred for political correctness.

It was not long before he disclosed he was a member of the Proud Boys, a far-right, male-only political organization. Still, Kansen didnt put an end to the date. They drank rum and cokes; spoke about music, books and exes; and that night, he walked her home. The two had a brief fling. Later, Kansen wrote an article about coming to terms with her so-called liberal beliefs while still choosing to entertain the affair.

The article was met with backlash. People spammed her Twitter, questioning her morals, dating standards and self awareness. How could a so-called liberal woman choose to date a member of a group known for its anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric, associations with extremist gatherings, and a white nationalist agenda? The consequences of this group are real-life harm: death threats, racial slurs, violence and even murder, and yet Kansen saw it as an opportunity to dabble in a forbidden experience.

The story might sound extreme, especially following a summer of listening and learning. Following the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, many white Americans have spent the past year taking part in a social justice movement online and on the ground, combating systemic racism and opposing police brutality. Bookstores sold out of race education books, social media timelines were consumed with Black Lives Matter support, and protests drew diverse crowds.

But then we saw the election results. Trump won the support of 74 million Americans this year including 55% of white women and 61% of white men. Even in liberal hotbeds like New York, California and Washington, Trump maintained 48%, 47%, and 36% of the white vote.

Given continued white support for a man who has refused to denounce white supremacy, lied about the severity of the coronavirus, and hasnt been shy about his sexist and misogynistic beliefs, can liberal white Americans really be doing the groundwork their social media profiles would have you believe?

I thought maybe the [Proud Boys] were four steps away from the Nazis, Kansen said by phone one Monday evening. I now realize maybe theyre one or two.

When speaking with Kansen, I was curious to know her definition of liberal. Im a Democrat. Ill be friends with anyone, like anyone from different sides of the political spectrum. I guess that makes me liberal, she said. Liberals are more open to experiences.

Maybe they are. But a woman of color would be physically threatened if their date exposed their Proud Boy membership over a few drinks. Kansen, a white woman, did not feel at risk and so it was partly her privilege not her tolerance that gave her a hall pass to entertain a member of a white supremacist group.

Although she compares them to the Nazi party, she still felt a relationship with a Proud Boy was fair game. If youre saying that Im more interested in myself than I am in having integrity towards a cause then yeah, youre right, she said. Kansens date isnt one most would consider progressive, but she liked him, and so what she saw as her liberal duties slid. Kansens ability to set aside the mans differences extreme ones that contribute to a systemic problem liberals claim to want to dismantle is not so uncommon, especially among family members and longtime friends: 35% of Biden voters in 2020 reported they have a few close friends who supported Trump.

Does this simply come down to being more accepting of others political views? A superior mastery of compartmentalization? Or does it stem from a place of selfishness, as ultimately it is not their wellbeing that will suffer?

And what should it leave us to believe about the inner workings, impact and true beliefs of self-professed liberals who behave in ways that dont align with those beliefs?

Amanda Booth first witnessed the phenomenon of labeling yourself progressive online while endorsing different values in real life when her white co-workers mentioned buying property in East Austin. The area is popularly known as a redlined neighborhood, primarily housing Austins Black and brown community. Recently, the East Side has undergone major renovations with new modern houses, trendy bars, and local coffee shops, as gentrification pushes out the original inhabitants of the area.

But when Booth, a 24-year old content designer in Austin, confronted her co-workers by explaining that Black and Hispanic people were being displaced from the area, her remarks were met with silence. Both of these guys proudly express themselves as being more on the progressive side of the Democratic party, Booth said. Mind you, both of them have houses on the East Side now.

Its not enough to believe in racial justice and that Black people deserve things. White people need to begin giving up their privilege. The least they can do is try to plug into Austins anti-displacement efforts. But I dont really see those people doing that, Booth continued.

Online, her co-workers share a lot of anti-racist rhetoric. They share videos by Black activists and quotes like Its not enough to be not racist. You have to be anti-racist. But Booth thinks people are watering anti-racism down if they are putting in very little practical effort to match their online beliefs.

There is this cognitive dissonance where they are like, Oh yeah, our city is so segregated. Our systems are built on racism and anti-Black sentiment. But then they dont give up anything, she says. They feel like realizing it, or accepting their privilege, is enough.

Very high-profile examples of police shootings coupled with the breathtaking rise in incarceration, maternal and infant mortality, and coronavirus deaths in the Black community have inspired a great awakening for people especially white people seeing it for the first time. But what if this has led to a shift in posturing, without a real shift in accountability?

People intellectually understand white privilege and can see it, but also like how it makes their life easier, explains Shannon Cavanagh, an associate professor in the department of sociology and a faculty research associate at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Those guys who buy in East Austin because its cool and hip and cheaper than living on West 6th Street might be displacing a faceless Black family but there is a Whole Foods now and a cool bar scene, she says, adding: They wanna do the right thing but its hard financially mostly and the status quo actually works for them.

The fake indicator of progress of acknowledging privilege publicly while working against it privately has tricked many white liberals into thinking they are actively bettering conditions for people of color. Social media holds an immense influence in this way of thinking. Its simple to tweet that youre doing the work, add #BLM to your bio, attend a protest and donate to a bail fund not without posting photos and screengrabs, of course but once it comes down to the real, hard work, the momentum stops. Oftentimes, our social media presence reflects how we want to be perceived, rather than our authentic selves, or our real day-to-day experience. Being woke is on trend at the moment, and everyone is tapping in, virtually at least.

The issues that helped awaken folks to systemic racism police killings, mass incarceration, Covid deaths are fundamentally structural and require a structural response, Cavanagh explains. Racism is baked into our medical system, educational system, housing, employment sure, white people need to do more individually but our institutions are the things that really need to change.

Despite racism being a structural problem, individual actions still matter. But, Cavanagh warns, people may believe in equality while opting out of decisions that are hard for them personally. Voting can be thought of as a relatively low-cost act of solidarity and commitment to justice, unlike cutting off ties to your racist mother, she says.

The events of the last decade or so much of it illuminated and amplified by social media have made white people confront systemic racism in a new way. Or it might all be performative social media is a performance and being racially woke is a new flavor.

Whether it be cutting off relationships with people who vote to uphold white nationalist beliefs (after trying to educate them, of course) or opting for a neighborhood that wont place you as a gentrifier, there are several ways that white liberals can practice what they post. By giving up privilege, higher salaries, houses in gentrified parts of Texas, and other situations that convenience them, white liberals could prove that theyre actually doing the work, beyond lip service and black squares. Maybe thats why white people keep voting for Trump they are invested, financially but also psychologically, in keeping the society tipped in our favor, Cavanagh says.

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White clicktivism: why are some Americans woke online but not in real life? - The Guardian

The Liberal Arts Institution and the Scaled Online Learning Platform Provider | Learning Innovation – Inside Higher Ed

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

Say that the leadership from a liberal arts institution of higher learning and a scaled online learning platform provider should get together to discuss a potential partnership.

What might they talk about?

Here, I'm taking an expansive view of liberal arts institutions, one that covers all residential colleges and universities that require students to progress through a broad liberal curriculum to graduate. The scaled online learning platform providers that I have in mind include Coursera and edX. FutureLearn, Udacity, Udemy, Canvas Network and others are also sometimes mentioned as online learning platforms designed to serve students at scale.

I propose an agenda covering five topics, three of which are opportunities and two of which are challenges.

Opportunity No. 1: Advancing Liberal Arts Learning

Any partnership between a liberal arts school and a scaled online learning platform providers must -- ultimately -- be built around a commitment to strengthen the liberal arts model of higher education. These partnerships cannot (solely) be about the development of new revenues. Instead, the goal of these partnerships should be to leverage experimentation in online education at scale to advance "traditional" teaching and learning.

It will be difficult for individual colleges and universities to accomplish this goal on their own. Fortunately, partnering with Coursera and/or edX is not only about getting access to an online learning platform designed to operate at scale. Partnership with edX and Coursera comes with access to a community of practice. EdX lists 60 charter member colleges and universities, and many more additional nonprofit institutions, on its site. Coursera lists 225 partners, with over 50 university partners in the U.S. alone.

Any discussion of a partnership between a school and edX or Coursera should start, I think, with how these networks of institutions are learning together to advance liberal arts learning. There is a conversation to be had about the relationship between online courses aimed at hundreds (or thousands or tens of thousands) and the intimate and relational-based mode of teaching and learning that is a hallmark of the residential, educational experience. These two modes of instruction, one intimate and one at scale, should not be viewed in opposition. There are ways in which each can advance the other by lowering costs and improving quality. The conversation to be had is how to bring these two methods of teaching and learning into alignment.

Opportunity No. 2: Noncredit and Nondegree Programs

The fastest-growing segment of the postsecondary market is noncredit-bearing and nondegree-granting online certificates and other programs. The question is, will these programs be limited to skills-based certificates, or is there room in this market for a more liberal arts-based approach?

On the one hand, we know that there is an enormous global demand for lifelong learning. The first part of the MOOC experiment, post-2012 until 2020, proved that learners would participate in free (or very low cost) open online educational offerings. However, what we learned from the first phase of MOOCs is that free open online learning is not financially sustainable (at least on its own) in the long run. There needs to be a balance of nondegree/noncredit online courses that learners will pay for schools to continue investing in online learning at scale.

Learners will pay for skills-based online certificates in topics such as data science, programming, machine learning, etc. Can noncredit and nondegree online programs move up the value chain to encompass rigorous educational opportunities in areas such as critical thinking, analytical and quantitative skill development, communication, and leadership? The value of a liberal arts education is that it trains students to not only get that first job after graduation but to adapt and evolve to a lifetime of productive work and contribution. A liberal arts education teaches one how to think and to continually learn, skills that will become increasingly important in an age of smart robots and global competition.

The conversation here between leaders of liberal arts schools and leaders of scaled online learning platform providers is about the opportunity for a distinctively liberal arts approach to noncredit and nondegree programs.

Opportunity No. 3: Funnels and Pathways Into Degrees

We are in the middle of a shift in the traditional admissions funnel. I'm mostly thinking of master's programs, although I could see how this change will eventually move to the undergraduate level. This is a shift from a funnel built on advertising and marketing to one built on learning. In the past, colleges and universities were forced to spend ever-increasing dollars on digital marketing and advertising (think Google keywords). The future belongs to the integration between noncredit online programs and credit-bearing (residential and online) degrees.

Within the next few years (I expect this change to come fast), applicants to master's programs will no longer be screened by test scores or transcripts. Instead, qualified applicants will be discovered (and admitted) based on their noncredit online programs' performance. When accepted, these newly enrolled students will receive credit for completing the online certificates, lower their overall tuition cost and decrease the time to graduation. Schools will benefit by getting a better prepared and more diverse set of learners, as noncredit online programs are both globally accessible and better predictors of subsequent performance than test scores or prior grades. (At least I believe this will prove to be true -- but there is research to be done.)

The conversation here is about how noncredit and degree programs are not substitutes but complements. This is a concrete example of how scaled online learning and intimate residential learning can work together to benefit both learners and schools.

While there is much to discuss around these three opportunities, there are also significant challenges to any relationship between a liberal arts school and a scaled online platform provider. Here are two that we might discuss:

Challenge No. 1: Online Degrees at Scale

Coursera and edX are moving quickly -- and successfully -- into degrees. This is an exciting development, as online degrees at scale can bend the educational cost curve. There are real questions and concerns on liberal arts campuses, however, about how to bring intimacy and rigor to any scaled online degree program.

Liberal arts institutions know how to offer high-quality degree programs. We have been doing this for many years. The challenge is how to provide degree programs that are affordable to students while also being financially sustainable for institutions. That is a hard problem and getting more difficult each day. Leveraging digital platforms to scale online degree programs may be one solution for driving down costs while maintaining quality. Creating these programs to build on the core strengths of a relational-based educational philosophy, one defined by rigor and intimacy, will be exceedingly difficult.

Liberal arts institutions would love to make online degree programs more affordable and accessible while also bringing in the tuition dollars necessary for long-term financial sustainability. Getting to this goal will hard. We should discuss how to go forward.

Challenge No. 2: The Long Game

The second challenge that leaders of liberal arts institutions and leaders of scaled online learning platforms might want to discuss is the long game. Today, edX has over 34 million learners on its platform, and Coursera has over 76 million learners. What edX and Coursera do is not only provide a platform in which online learning can scale, they also aggregate a user base of global learners.

Should liberal arts colleges and universities depend on platform providers such as edX and Coursera to reach the global learner population? What is the risk to schools of being tied into these partner ecosystems instead of going their own ways to build their own branded college and university platforms and global educational brands? Do schools that invest in partnerships with edX and Coursera risk commodification of their educational offerings? How do colleges and universities differentiate their institutional brands when they are among many institutions on a platform?

These are difficult discussions about long-term strategy. These questions do not argue against partnering with platforms such as edX and Coursera. I'd argue that the best way to answer these questions is to experiment and partner -- but to do so with eyes and ears wide-open.

The conversation that liberal arts schools have with scaled online learning platform providers should be around the colleges and universities' concerns and goals. The liberal arts are about asking questions, thinking critically and discovering how to be an active participant in shaping one's future.

Partnering with platforms such as edX and Coursera will be one way to create the liberal arts higher education of tomorrow.

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The Liberal Arts Institution and the Scaled Online Learning Platform Provider | Learning Innovation - Inside Higher Ed

The collective suicide of the liberal class: We will all pay the price for their cowardice – Salon

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque.They long ago sold their souls and abandoned their most basic principlesto line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And sothe liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional-managerial class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

This defection, as Nader understood, was theonlytactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d'tat. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class'moral and political cowardice.

The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders. How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Antony Blinken, one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as secretary of state? Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Barack Obama's memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to "offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling," as the new climate policy czar? Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the "climate portfolio" at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House's economic policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who as president of the Center for American Progress raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?

The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate theancien rgime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany's drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control:wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world's largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those whoresist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and de-platforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.

The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon, in August.

Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on Aug.25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia members for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse's killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.

We stand on the cusp of a frightening authoritarianism. Social unrest, given a continuation of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, the siphoning off of diminishing resources to the bloated war machine, political stagnation and the failure to contain the pandemic and its economic fallout, is almost certain. Absent a left-wing populism, a disenfranchised working class will line up, as it did with Trump, behind its counterfeit, a right-wing populism. The liberal elites will, if history is any guide, justify state repression as a response to social chaos in the name of law and order. That they, too, are on the Christian Right and the corporate state's long list of groups to be neutralized will become evident to them when it is too late.

It was Friedrich Ebert and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, siding with the conservatives and nationalists, that created the Freikorps, private paramilitary groups composed of demobilized soldiers and malcontents. The Freikorps ruthlessly crushed left-wing uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Hamburg, Halle, Leipzig, Silesia, Thuringia and the Ruhr. When the Freikorps was not gunning down left-wing populists in the streets and carrying out hundreds of political assassinations, including the murder of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, it was terrorizing civilians, looting and pillaging. The Freikorps became the antecedent of the Nazi Brownshirts, led by Ernst Rhm, a former Freikorps commander.

All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.

Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the anti-Semitic parties played in Europe during the late 19thand early 20thcentury. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.

This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. The German Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher in the 1930s said that fascism "is a constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings" and succeeds by "mobilizing human stupidity." This mobilized stupidity, accompanied by what Rainer Maria Rilke called "the evil effluvium from the human swamp," is being amplified and intensified in the siloed media chambers of the right. This hate-filled rhetoric eschews reality to cater to the desperate desire for emotional catharsis, for renewed glory and prosperity and for acts of savage vengeance against the phantom enemies blamed for our national debacle.

The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or the New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora's box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sebastian Haffner wrote, "once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target."

This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.

The collective suicide of the liberal class: We will all pay the price for their cowardice - Salon

BC Liberals to adopt more aggressive tone, pundit predicts – Prince George Citizen

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

Double crossed for their cooperation throughout the pandemic, B.C.s reconfigured Liberal Opposition may take a more aggressive, combative role in the legislature, predicted political analysts.

The first post-election legislative session began on Dec. 7.

Before COVID, they were combative, but in a clumsy way, trying to be populist, said former long-time senior Liberal strategist and now-political pundit Martyn Brown. It's going to be more combative than it was before. But it will be fair, and it will be smart.

The fair and smart refers to the change Brown expects under Shirley Bonds leadership. The MLA for Prince George-Valemount was elected interim leader by her 27 caucus colleagues two days after the former Liberal leader, Andrew Wilkinson, stepped down on Nov. 21.

Bond will be more sensitive to human needs and more compassionate, but razor sharp in her criticisms, said Brown.

These are challenging times in British Columbia, Bond said last week. Question period is always going to be a place that has more vigorous debate.

Premier John Horgan seemed to expect no less. Shirley and I are mature enough to take these things in stride, he said when Bond was named interim leader. I know she'll be quick to respond to any failings of mine, but I also know she'll be quick to offer support where it's required.

In fact, prior to the election, and throughout the pandemic, the Liberals and BC Greens have worked with the New Democrats to present a united front and maintain strong support in public health officials, led by Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix.

Things went well for B.C. in the first wave of the pandemic, in part, because of that cooperation among the three parties, said long-time Vancouver Sun political columnist Vaughn Palmer. They even held joint town halls together.

In March, all parties approved the governments $5 billion emergency COVID-19 funding package on a single day an unprecedented feat including $1.5 billion for economic recovery.

The New Democrats sat on the $1.5 billion for six months, from March to September, then announced it as Stronger BC, (which became) the first plank in their election campaign, said Palmer. Seven days later, Horgan called the election and the government took credit for managing the pandemic just as the second wave was building.

New Democrats double crossed both them and the Greens for their cooperation on managing and communicating the pandemic, said Palmer.

The Liberals didn't want to do anything that would be seen to undermine their support for Dr. Henry, said Brown.

The result was a cooperative, collegial Opposition that avoided pointed criticism of the government in the six-month lead-up to the election, he said.

It was admirable, laudable, but politically, strategically, it was a glaring error, said Brown.

Even if the party ultimately lost votes by cooperating, former Liberal house leader Mary Polak stood by the strategy.

There were choices that we made and one of those choices was to cooperate with the Greens and the NDP throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, said Polak after being defeated in her own Langley riding on election night. Did that hurt us electorally? Probably. But it was still the right decision to make."

The appointment of Peter Milobar as house leader might signal the Official Oppositions intention to take a more aggressive role, said Palmer.

A former mayor of Kamloops and MLA for Kamloops-North Thompson, Milobar was appointed house leader and critic for Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation on Nov. 30.

Milobar was one of the more effective members in the last house, said Palmer. He was effective holding government to account in question period and during estimates, particularly, as a first-term MLA. He got the hang of it quickly.

Milobar works very collegially with Liberal members, said Bond, adding that any strategy the Opposition puts in place will be done as collaboratively as possible within its caucus.

We are going to be laser-focused on making sure we try to get answers for the public, said Milobar of the session that began on Monday.

Instead of a more typical eight to 10 weeks, the abbreviated winter session is expected to run one or two weeks to pass a couple bills.

None of the legislation that was supposed to be coming forward in the fall is anywhere to be seen, said Milobar.

The main bill on the docket covers $1.4 billion in funding for the Recovery Benefit, a one-time COVID-19 relief payment of up to $1,000 for eligible families and $500 for qualifying individuals. Premier John Horgan promised the payment during the October election campaign.

We see a legislative calendar that's essentially one bill to fill a mid-election, scribble-on-the-back-of-a-napkin campaign promise, Milobar said.

The Opposition understands the urgency in getting relief money to the people, but also wants to make sure all legislation goes through proper rigor, debate, and scrutiny, he said.

The Recovery Benefit legislation amounts to $1.4 billion in taxpayer spending, Milobar said. We want to make sure it's being done properly.

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BC Liberals to adopt more aggressive tone, pundit predicts - Prince George Citizen

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

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

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

‘Grave violations of human rights’: Supermarkets, retailers uncover exposure to modern slavery – Sydney Morning Herald

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

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.

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.

"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.

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

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

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

The Reconstruction of America – Foreign Affairs Magazine

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

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

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

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Danzig

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

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