Daily Archives: May 9, 2017

May 9 FEATURE BOTTOM, NEWS & VIEWS, Views No Comments on CONFEDERATE MERMAIDS: Making room for Southern heritage of kindness, courage and compassion

Apparently, for each Confederate monument New Orleans takes down, Wilmington will put one up. Bless our hearts! OK, gang, heres the plan. I crouched down like Moe of The Three Stooges. (For those unfamiliar with early 20th century slapstick, think Charlie Day from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia.) Goldie, youre the lookout. Everybody in the car! Were going down to Fort Fisher to take care of that new monument to the Confederacy.

Both mutts curled on the floor, mostly because I forgot to feed them before talking about anything. Gwen sighed and pointed to the smiling mermaid on her purple T-shirt.

Thats it! I snapped my fingers to signal yet another a-ha! moment inspired by my daughters calm wisdom. Youre right. If anybody does anything destructive to that most unnecessary interpretive marker, they will be labeled as part of the violent left. Your idea is more elegant.

Gwens elegant idea is to go to Fort Fishers newly consecrated Confederate interpretive historical marker on Confederate Memorial Day, and erect another monument designed only to educate the public and deepen our appreciation of alternative history. The monument should be of fitting and accurate proportions, perhaps an angelic-faced woman, torso clad in a gray coat, braced nobly on her long dolphin-like flipper and tail. The educational plaque should read:

How grand a myth this watched over! Confederate mermaids fought bravely alongside regulars throughout the War of Northern Aggression. Molly, the last-known Confederate mermaid, was killed sipping a sweet tea and defending these very bulwarks. The lost cause of mermaids was defeated only by the Unions overwhelming material resources, grasp of science and ability to read primary historical sources, such as each Confederate states actual Articles of Secession.

Growing up in the North, I was accurately taught the common Confederate soldier was uncommonly fierce, courageous and deserved respect. While some may have fought for kith and kin, the mass of these men were duped by politicians, landowners, slave owners intent on maintaining their peculiar institution, and personal power. I also was taught the Civil War was over. After living here for nearly a quarter-century and witnessing Novembers election, I believe the results of that conflict may be inconclusive.

Southern apologists argue to this day slavery itself wasnt the root cause of the rebellion. Like our mermaid, its only a myth. After living here a while, I think they may have a point. The true root cause was something even more antithetical to the American dream. The Confederacy grew from the same insidious seed that spawned nearly all empires until 1776, the proposition, All men are not created equal. The belief in a natural hierarchy is a powermongers wet dream. It practically demands the strong conquer the weak as a matter of natural law, permits genocide and ethnic cleansing, as well as mere human bondage and the eternal subjugation of the weaker sex. How many millions of lives have been wasted throughout history because somebody, or some group, firmly believed there is a natural hierarchy and they are in fact the master race?

Theres a staggering number of Confederate monuments in this part of the preserved Union already. Practically speaking, do we really need another? If we, American citizens, really want to honor a Southern heritage of courage, kindness and compassion to mark the nobler elements of Antebellum South, then lets put down our sweet tea and stop crying in a warped rearview mirror. Turn our eyes forward and bring some of the honorable pieces of the heritage to the present. Outlaw wage slavery and raise the minimum wage. Overturn Citizens United, and fairly tax corporate plantations and the wealthiest among us. Support labor rights, womens wage equality, equal access to education, and affordable health care. Support racial justice and work to heal the deep national scar that is a legacy of our peculiar institution.

Were not likely to actually erect a monument to the Confederate Mermaid. But if we insist on raising monuments to the past, for every marker we raise to the Lost Cause, we should erect 10 monuments to the 400 years of Unknown Slaves (U.S.) that actually built swaths of the United States. We should also raise at least that many for each of the First Nations peoples whose cultures were wiped out to make room for the Southern heritage of kindness, courage and compassion.

American citizensAntebellum SouthArticles of Secessioncivil warConfederate MermaidConfederatesencore magazineMark BasquillNew OrleansPOTUSThe ConfederacyThe Three StoogesTrumpUnionWilmington

NEWS OF THE WEIRD MORE GRASS: Greensky Bluegrass returns to ILM in support of their latest album

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CONFEDERATE MERMAIDS: Making room for Southern heritage of kindness, courage and compassion - encore Online

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

Everything about Frances newly elected president Emmanuel Macron suggests a theatrical production of hype and illusion. He is being sold to the masses as an outsider and centrist, a benign liberal.

In reality, enter the economic hitman who will blow French society apart in the service of the oligarchy.

At age 39, Macron has been described as a political wonderboy and Frances youngest leader since Napoleon Bonaparte.The former Rothschild banker who reportedly once had the nickname the Mozart of Finance is now promising to renew France and bring the nation together, where people will no longer vote for extremes.

Fittingly for the Mozart of Finance, the new president used the grandest of backdrops for entrance on the world stage,when he made his victory speech on Sunday night in the courtyard of the Louvre,noted the Financial Times. His dramatic walk to the stage through the world-famous museum courtyard took a full four minutes. The night lights and shadows played with Macrons unsmiling, stoney face as he strode purposely forward amid the strains of Beethovens Ode to Joy. The choice of the European Unions national anthem, rather than Frances, is a harbinger of Macrons political project and the globalist interests he serves.

Geographically, the Louvre is situated midway between the traditional political venues of the Place de la Concorde for the right, and La Bastille for the left. Here was Macron intimating once again, as he did during his campaign, that he represents neither right or left. He has vowed to overturnthe bipartisan structure of French politics, creating a new centrist movement. Just like his other moniker of being an "outsider,however, this image of Macron is a deftly manicured illusion.

Superficially, there is a semblance of variance from the political establishment. Macron formed his En Marche (Forward) movement only a year ago. He has never held elected political office. And until three years ago hardly anyone had ever heard of him. Now he is to become the eighth president of the French Fifth Republic.

Paradoxically, Donald Tusk, the head of the European Council, congratulated the French people for choosing liberty, equality and fraternity, and saying no to fake news. Paradoxical because everything about Emmanuel Macrons meteoric rise through elite banking and his equally stellar crossover to politics smacks of fabrication and fakery. With his elite education at the Ecole National Academie (ENA) where future French political leaders are groomed, to his precocious elevation in investment banking, followed by his seamless entrance into top-flight government politics, Macron is evidently a person with powerful guiding forces behind him.

Former banking colleagues recall that he wasnt particularly capable in his four years at Rothschilds while on a multi-million-euro income. But he mastered the art of networking.In a Financial Times profile published before the election, a senior banker is quoted as saying: What Mr Macron lacked in technical knowledge and jargon at first, he made up for with contacts in government."Other sources recall that it was never quite clear who Macron worked for.

As the Financial Times noted: At the bank, Mr Macron navigated around the numerous conflicts of interest that arise in close-knit Parisian business circles, making good use of his connections as an Inspecteur des Finances an elite corps of the very highest-ranking graduates from ENA.

After quitting private finance, Macron joined the government of Socialist President Francois Hollande, where he at first served as a special advisor.In 2014, Hollande appointed him as economy minister where he drew up a draconian program to undermine French employment rights in favor of corporate profits. Macron resigned from his ministerial post only last year when he set up his own political party in anticipation of contesting the presidential election.

Macrons En Marche does not have any members in parliament. His government will thus likely be comprised of patronage and technocrats selected from years of networking in the financial and lyse Palace establishment. What little is known about Macrons policies is his stated commitment to more stringent economic austerity, promises to slash 60 billion in public spending over the next five years and axe up to 120,000 state sector jobs. He is also setting to drive through more business friendly changes in labor laws that will allow bosses to more easily hire and fire employees. He is giving companies license to negotiate increased working hours and lower salaries outside of statutory law. So, the notion that Macron is some kind of benign centrist is an insult to common intelligence. He is a centrist only inthe sense of illusory corporate media branding; in objective terms, Macron is a dedicated economic hitman for global capitalism.

Whatever one might think of his defeated rival Marine Le Pen of the Front National, she certainly had Macron accurately summed up when she referred to him as the candidate of finance.Independent Socialist Jean-Luc Mlenchon, who was narrowly knocked out in the first round of the election on April 23, predicts that Macron will be a disaster for French society, blowing apart economic inequality and social contracts to turn the country into the kind of poverty-wage slavery seen in the US and Britain.

There is sound reason why the French and European political establishment exulted in Macrons victory. He is no outsider, overturning the status quo for a more democratic outcome. He is in fact a consummate insider who will pursue policies pandering to elite interests, at the expense of the great majority.

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Macrons centrist [sic] victory brought joy to Europes political establishment, reported the New York Times, while the BBC informed of palpable relief among European leaders.Outgoing President Francois Hollande the most unpopular French leader ever warmly congratulated Macron, as did incumbent prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve and other senior government figures. Macron had been endorsed by Hollandes so-called Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans. So much for his vaunted outsider image. Macron was also endorsed prior to the weekend vote by former US President Barack Obama and European leaders,including Germanys Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The irony of such brazen electoral interference is of course that this was what such Western leaders have accused Russia of. Again, it also shows that Macron will be a centrist in more ways than is meant. He will serve as a dead-center advocate of the transatlantic politics of Washington-led neoliberal capitalism and NATO militarism. The French President-elect published a political autobiography earlier this year entitled Revolution. The only thing revolutionary about Macrons victory is that the political establishment has invented an image for itself that upturns reality.

The intense media marketing of Macron as a centrist outsider is a coup against the meaning of words and plain language. It is also worth noting that over 16 million French voters abstained or spoiled their votes against the 20 million who opted for Macron. French society, as for other Western nations, is riven by the ravages of global capitalism. And now here comes the Mozart of Finance to allegedly bring harmony from the appalling discord he and others like him have sown.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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'Centrist' Macron? Yes, a dead-center insider for global capitalism ... - RT

OUR Walmart members from across the country descend on Bentonville, Ark., for Walmarts annual shareholders meeting in June 2015. | OUR Walmart

We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.

Abraham Lincoln thundered this warning to Illinois Republicans gathered in Springfield in 1858, articulating Northerners fears that their future, indeed their very understanding of the meaning of America as a land of expanding opportunity and equality, was under attack from the Souths slave dynasty and its allies throughout the country.

Ive been thinking a lot about that line lately, and not just because I recently assigned whats known as Lincolns House Divided speech to my first-year history seminar. The reason this passage jumped from the page this semester is because itrhymeswith our current political moment.

Lincolns nightmare did not come to pass, of course, because he, the Northern people, and Southern slaves united to fight and win the Civil War that saved the Union and by executing emancipation made that Union forever worthy of the saving, as Lincoln put it.

But while chattel slavery was vanquished on the battlefield 150 years ago, today we find ourselves awakening again to the reality of our country being Southernized to the detriment of the American ideals of freedom and equality.

Walmart redefines corporate culture

Let me point to three examples.

First, theres the rise of Walmart. The behemoth from Bentonville is now a global phenomenon, but it initially rose to dominance in the post-World War II years in the remote Ozark region of Arkansas, where founder Sam Walton took advantage of rural unemployment to construct a corporate culture wedded to bothtechnological innovation in the movement of goodsandpatriarchal tradition in the management of labor.

The result was a highly profitable company committed to rewarding consumers by squeezing every last dollar from the supply chain along with every last dime from employees wages. An apparent bundle of contradictions, Walmart grew into an increasingly global operation while successfully promoting itself as the friendly neighborhood store.

Along the way, its leaders exploited the legacy of white Southern resistance to federal power by brazenly breaking labor laws to resist unionization and skirt worker protections on overtime, minimum wage, and unemployment insurance.

When Walmart began its move to the urban North in the 1990s, exporting its model of wringing low prices from low wages, it directly challenged the more labor-friendly, higher-wage communities forged in the crucible of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. As Nelson Lichtenstein wryly notes in his excellenthistory of the company, It was as if Lees army was once again moving across the Potomac and into Yankee territory.

Twenty years on, Walmarts corporate culture is now the new normal, and not only for retailers. Celebrants and critics of the so-called gig economy point to companies like Uber and Lyft as exemplars of a new employment regime offloading much of the costs of labor onto workers, but these app-based upstarts simply build upon Walmarts innovations that have made working for others less secure, less stable, and less remunerative in the twenty-first century.

The mass incarceration state

If Walmarts penetration of the North represents the Southernization of our business culture, then mass incarceration of black and brown men signals the same in our criminal justice system, what legal scholar and activist Michelle Alexander has termed the New Jim Crow.

To be sure, mass incarceration is a national phenomenon, but its logic derives from enduring ideologies of racial hierarchy rooted in Southern slavery and segregation that have long associated blackness with crime, disorder, and threats to white safety.

The criminalization of persons of color was a primary weapon in the decades-long political project waged by the Republican Party to shatter the New Deal coalition along racial lines, from Nixons law and order campaign beginning in the late 1960s to Reagans war on drugs in the 1980s.

Jumping partisan lines to inform Clintons politics of personal responsibility in the 1990s, it is now firmly implanted as our nations crime policy, where practices like stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, mandatory sentencing, and three-strikes laws have long enjoyed consistent public support, especially amongst whites.

When political analysts refer to the GOPs successful Southern strategy, they mean the mass conversion of Southern whites from Democrats to Republicans since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the term points to something bolder and broader: the remaking of national politics along Southern lines, where racial identity to a large extent governs party affiliation and voting. The Republican sweep in the 2016 election is but the latest manifestation of the Southernization of American political life.

Right-to-work: A Southern tradition

Accompanying the Southern takeoversof our business culture and criminal justice system is a similar transformation in labor law, and thesudden expansion of right-to-work states in the industrial heartlandbears this out.

Despite the highfalutin rhetoric, a right-to-work law doesnt grant anyone the right to get or hold onto a job. Instead, it forbids an employer and union from bargaining a contract requiring that all workers contribute to the contracts enforcement, even though under American law, a labor agreement must cover all workers (union members or not) and the union must represent and protect all workers (again, union members or not).

In short,right-to-work laws aim to prevent union stability and security by denying them a steady resource stream via obligatory worker contributions.

Setting aside legitimate questions about individual freedom, worker voice, and industrial democracy raised by labor laws, its important to note thatthe strange careerof right-to-work originated in the post-World War II moment, when white Southern elites feared that a suddenly powerful labor movement reshaping politics in Detroit, Chicago, and communities across the urban North and the Pacific coast might soon challenge the Souths political economy of low wages, racial segregation, and worker disfranchisement.

In 1947, their Democratic representatives in Congress (in an era of regional mass black disfranchisement) collaborated with northern Republicans (also alarmed at the rise of unions) to produce the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed individual states to pass right-to-work laws.

I like right-to-work. My position on right-to-work is 100 percent. Donald Trump

The result was the creation of two labor relations regimes within one country. In the Northeast, Midwest, and west coast, there emerged a fair share economy committed to improving workers lives via both the integration of unionism (by allowing but not mandating, mind you collective bargaining agreements where all workers would contribute to their enforcement) and the enactment of moderately redistributive welfare policies that raised the social wage for all (from funding public schools and parks to managing unemployment and antipoverty programs to passing fair employment practice statutes).

Meanwhile, Southern states embraced a right-to-work regime to keep unions out, keep labor costs low, and keep at bay any interracial alliance of workers, while continuing to minimize government expenditures conducive tothe common good.

After several decades of this sectional split, the right-to-work movement has suddenly pivoted north and gone national. Since 2012, six Midwestern states Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri have all passed right-to-work laws, meaning there are now more right-to-work states (28) than fair share ones (22, plus the District of Columbia).

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have just introduced a national right-to-work law, one with a greater chance of passage than anytime before, in part because of President Trumps open support. I love the right to work, then-candidate Trump said in February 2016. It is better for the people. You are not paying the big fees to the unions.

Even if a national right-to-work bill fails to pass (Senate Democrats can be expected to filibuster), the U.S. Supreme Court, now possessing a conservative majority with the addition of Trumps nominee Neil Gorsuch, might take matters into its own hands and rule that fair-share labor agreements are unconstitutional.

If that happens, the once-Southern right-to-work regime will then rule nationwide, and the U.S. Supreme Court will repeat the role it played in nationalizing Southern customs in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled unconstitutional any federal attempt to prohibit slavery anywhere.

Its not about demonizing the South

I realize Im not the first to remark upon the Southernization of our national life, and I also realize that the retail revolution, mass incarceration, and union-busting have been decades in the making. But the same was also true of slaverys expansion in the years before the Civil War.

For Northerners like Lincoln, though, events of the 1850s like the Dred Scott decision came as rude shocks revealing that white Southerners and their Northern allies were prepared to sunder the nation and all its values in order to sanctify and spread slavery, in effect making the peculiar institution no longer peculiar.

Perhaps our generations wake-up call will be the 2016 presidential election, which shattered any illusions of a country-wide consensus on equality for all Americans regardless of race, religion, national origin, or gender.

I honestly dont aim to demonize Southerners, flatter Northerners, or encourage sectional thinking. I recognize that our countrys enduring confrontation with the problems of racism, poverty, and exclusion are national in scope, and they demand national solutions.

But in order to restore the core American dream of liberty and justice for all, we first need to wake up to the national nightmare that weve increasingly been embracing or drifting toward with the adoption of peculiar Southern practices and customs originally designed to resist workers rights and shore up white supremacy.

In the tradition of American reformers stretching from Abraham Lincoln to Senator Elizabeth Warren today, I persist in the stubborn faith that rational thinking and historical awareness will help to get us there. As Lincoln put it in that same 1858 speech, If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. In an era of alternative facts and fake news, I hope that still holds true.

This article was originally publishedatThe Labor Question Today. It appears here with permission of the author.

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What happens in the South doesn't stay in the South - People's World

London, UK - From Monday to Friday between 9 and 11pm, Ramona* works at an office building near Finsbury Square, in the commercial heart of London.

As the last employees trickle out through the rotating glass doors, she puts on her uniform.

Then she begins cleaning: vacuuming five storeys along with another cleaner, clearing out all the rubbish, and washing and drying all the used cutlery and crockery in the communal kitchens which are often filthy by the time she arrives. She has just two hours to complete her work.

Her least favourite task, she says, is cleaning the toilets.

"If the stench of human waste doesn't bother you, the bleach will," the 36-year-old explains.

It is exhausting work, particularly as she has another cleaning job in the afternoons. But Ramona tries to lighten her mood by putting on earphones and listening to salsa music.

Apart from the awkward greetings of those who pass her on their way out, Ramona barely speaks to anyone, but she says she doesn't mind.

"My life now is not so good, but still much better from when I first arrived in London," she says.

Ramona, who is pink-cheeked and jovial, and wears her dyed blonde hair in pigtails, came to London in search of better employment opportunities.

She left her native Bolivia in 2006, shortly before Evo Morales became president, when the country's extreme poverty rate was at an all-time high of 38.2 percent.

For almost a year, she shared a flat with her sister and cousin, taking on commercial cleaning jobs at night in different offices on an informal basis. She'd learn about the work through word of mouth, usually from fellow Latin Americans in her neighbourhood.

"No contracts, no uniforms, nothing when I first started," Ramona, who was paid in cash, recalls. "Sometimes when I called my manager to ask when I would be paid after working for a week, he or she would respond, 'So, do you want this job or not?'"

She hadn't yet met her husband and working such unsocial hours meant that days or even weeks could pass without her speaking to anybody.

Ramona is just one in a largely invisible and vulnerable community of hundreds of migrant night cleaners in London. Her journey to the UK is characteristic of others in the industry. They often enter the country as tourists looking for a way out of poverty, working illegally at first under informal arrangements, which leave them vulnerable to job insecurity and abuse. Undocumented migrants have some avenues for legal advice but taking a case to court puts them at risk of deportation.

Ramona qualified to be a resident of the UK when she met and married her husband, a Spanish citizen of Ecuadorian descent.

But the road can be just as tough for those workers who enter the UK legally. Several cleaners that Al Jazeera spoke to had spent a number of years working both legally and illegally first in another EU country, exposed to the same problems, before exercising their right to move to the UK under the principle of the single market. All nine cleaners that this reporter spoke to were legal residents in the UK at the point of their interviews.

The precariousness that Ramona faces is similar to that of Colombian sisters Gloria, 43, and Desdemona, 47.

But their path to London was far more arduous. In 2001, they smuggled themselves to Spain where they worked undocumented as fruit collectors and then as domestic cleaners until three years ago.

Then, after securing EU citizenship, a brother-in-law living in London invited them to the UK. They stayed with him for a short period of time and began working as commercial cleaners.

"Life is hard," Gloria says in Spanish. "I wake up at 1am to take the bus to work, and my office is near St Paul's Cathedral. My shifts are between 2[am] to 4am, and 5[am] to 7am every day."

"When we first came here," Desdemona laughs, "we had this impression of London as a city full of blond people with blue eyes, who were rich and had a lot of money. We didn't know there were other poor people like us, too."

Neither sister speaks any English.

"It's difficult even going to buy groceries at a supermarket because I'm too scared to ask for help," Gloria says.

Their older sister died in Cali in Colombia in September 2016, but they couldn't afford to return home for the funeral. Gloria was also worried that she wouldn't be able to re-enter the UK if she left.

Most of the time, the cleaners say they don't know where exactly they are going to work until their first day.

"I really wanted to learn English, and after saving for over a year, I finally paid 1,400 pounds (roughly $1,760) to attend morning classes at a language centre," Ramona says.

She remembers the exact amount she paid because she ended up failing the course.

"I slept through every lesson. It was so difficult to keep focus when I'd been cleaning for 14 hours through the night."

After that came a particularly painful period of time when one of Ramona's several employers did not pay her for three months straight.

Calls to the cleaning company went unanswered, and when she finally got hold of her manager, she was told that she had been dismissed.

"He said, 'We lost your contract. Don't call again,'" she says ruefully. There was nothing she could do as she was working illegally at the time and feared being sent back to Bolivia.

Her savings were being depleted at an alarming rate, and she would walk from office to office to save on bus fares, even if it took over an hour.

She didn't consider seeking legal aid or exposing the employment abuse she was suffering. "It's better to be exploited than to have no job," she reflects.

Desdemona and Gloria see their work as a trap.

"We have no TV and no internet in our home. If we're not catching up on sleep in our free time, we go to the park and eat outside in the cold," Desdemona says. "How is this life?"

The stories of Ramona, Gloria and Desdemona are all too ubiquitous. There are hundreds of night cleaners like them living in London.

There are no official statistics for the total number of people cleaning London's offices at night.

According to a 2014 report published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation in the UK that advocates and enforces equality and non-discrimination laws, the non-domestic cleaning sector as a whole contributes more than $10bn (PDF) to the economy each year and comprises "a largely invisible workforce of around half-a-million people" predominantly made up of women and ethnic minorities.

Likewise, there are no hard numbers on the extent of the abuse specific to the night cleaning industry, but social justice advocates interviewed for this article say they have no doubt that it is rampant. According to the EHRC report, abuses include workers being harassed and treated as "the lowest of the low", being underpaid, unfair dismissal as a result of pregnancy, and the lack of facilities to take breaks.

The Office for National Statistics states that the minimum wage for workers above the age of 21 is 6.50 pounds (about $8) an hour. Almost all nine cleaners interviewed for this article were paid this bare minimum.

Carolina Gottardo, director of the Latin American Women Rights Service (LAWRS) based in central-east London, told Al Jazeera that anecdotal evidence points to a large percentage of night cleaners being Latin American.

"Just go to any office in the evening, and you'll see," she says.

According to No Longer Invisible, a report jointly published by Queen Mary, University of London, LAWRS and the Trust for London, an independent funder focused on poverty and inequality in the city, the first wave of Latin Americans arrived in the UK in the early 1970s.

They quickly filled up work permit quotas for the hospitality and cleaning industries. These migrants were frequently from countries facing political and economic turmoil, including Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. After the work permit scheme for unskilled workers was tightened in 1979, the migration pattern for Latin American workers to the UK changed significantly. A sizable number of asylum seekers, notably those from Colombia and Ecuador, were given permanent residence in the UK under the Family Indefinite Leave to Remain scheme in 2003, a one-off attempt by the British government to grant residency to 15,000 asylum-seeking families.

Since 2000, with stricter enforcement of immigration policy, secondary migration from EU countries has driven the growth of the Latin American community in the UK.

It is also quite common for Latin American migrants to first apply for a Spanish passport or citizenship due to the shared language, and work in Madrid for a few years before moving to the UK, some illegally. Most settle in the boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth, the neighbourhoods with the highest concentration of Latin American workers in London according to the No Longer Invisible report. Of more than 1,000 respondents almost 40 percent has experienced workplace abuses, such as not receiving pay, and 11 percent earn less than the minimum wage.

"They think employment prospects here are better, and they [can] easily find jobs in cleaning and hospitality. But in truth, exploitation is endemic, and women are the most vulnerable of all," Gottardo says. She adds that "female night cleaners are a target for sexual harassment because there are no witnesses to the crime".

Gottardo, who is from Colombia, is determined to change the status quo and explains that LAWRS uses a holistic approach to target these issues. Aside from offering English classes, housing and immigration advice, counselling and therapy, LAWRS is also engaged in advocacy and high-level policy work to push for increased regulation of the cleaning industry in London.

She stresses that the aim of LAWRS is not to empower Latin American women in blue-collar jobs.

"We just provide them with the tools to empower themselves," she tells Al Jazeera.

A range of other government-affiliated sources is available to cleaners seeking support, including the Citizens Advice resource and the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), a public body that arbitrates disputes within organisations with the aim of facilitating more robust employment relations practice. Workers can also file a complaint directly to HM Revenue and Customs about their employers.

This message of empowerment is gaining traction with London's cleaning community.

Alberto Durango is the National Organiser with the Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU), formed to collectively target problems faced by contracted cleaners and other workers across the service sector. Durango was a cleaner for more than a decade after he arrived from Colombia.

He says he has been blacklisted by most cleaning companies due to his political activities organising support for workers who have been discriminated against, so he has decided to spend time on negotiation and advocacy work for CAIWU instead.

"They treat us like machines," Durango says. "Jobs used to be eight pounds [$10] per hour, but now most cleaning companies try to get away with the national living wage [an informal benchmark] of 7.20 pounds [$9], which is obviously not enough if you're living in London. There are so many tactics they can employ to trick cleaners of their wages. For example, they say that you [the cleaner] have to finish cleaning a certain number of rooms or floors within two hours, and deliberately pack so many tasks in that it's impossible.

"If you don't finish, you just don't get paid. One company even makes cleaners pay 60 pounds [$75] out of their own pocket for training."

Night cleaners, Durango says, have it even worse.

According to him, they are more susceptible to depression due to their work hours, and the manual labour is often left to them, meaning that they can develop an array of physical ailments, including spine problems and back pain.

CAIWU was officially registered as a trade union in March 2016. It already has 700 members and is steadily growing in strength. Durango believes that the main draw of the union is the fact that it is egalitarian and has no elected leaders.

They have already staged several walkouts and protests, and Durango says that the most notorious offenders among the cleaning companies are beginning to take notice and show a grudging willingness to comply with their demands.

Speaking to Al Jazeera in November last year, he was in the middle of negotiations to reinstate employment for Gabriel*, a Nigerian cleaner who had been working in different cleaning jobs since 1971, including night shifts.

Gabriel said that he had been unfairly dismissed because he protested against racial discrimination to his bosses while contracted to clean by an external firm at one of the biggest insurance companies in the city.

He claims his Ecuadorian supervisor consistently showed favourable treatment to fellow Latin American cleaners and blatantly ostracised him at work.

"I'm Latin American, and I think that's wrong," Durango says. "So I will do everything within my power to make sure that Gabriel can go back to work."

Maria Gonzalez-Merello, 43, is an employment lawyer who is also working assiduously to empower night cleaners in London and to ensure that they know their rights.

Every Thursday between 10am and 2pm, she holds free legal counselling sessions at St George's Cathedral in south London for Spanish-speaking migrants. A large number of those who attend are night cleaners.

"What is happening to cleaners in this country today is essentially modern-day slavery," she says.

Laura*, a 51-year-old cleaner from the Dominican Republic who has returned to Gonzalez-Merello's legal session for a follow-up consultation, works only night shifts which begin at 8pm and end at 8am.

She had just emerged victorious from an acrimonious attempt to secure over 500 pounds (about $627) worth of unlawfully withheld wages, thanks to Gonzalez-Merello's help.

"They pretended that they couldn't communicate with me because my English isn't good," Laura says as Gonzalez-Merello translates. "And when Maria got in touch with them on my behalf to claim my wages, they said I never contacted them at all. I had to show them screenshots of my phone records to prove that I had called them numerous times."

Laura says that she is owed more than $2,500 by the same company for cleaning various sites, but is too exhausted to continue the legal battle and would rather focus on finding a new job. She is grateful to Gonzalez-Merello for her assistance, but the ordeal has left her feeling resentful.

"When I worked in Spain," she says, "the pay was lower. But at least I felt respected. I felt like a real human being."

But there has been some hope for workers' rights.

In 2014, Gonzalez-Merello was involved on a pro bono basis in a widely-publicised case involving 35 unpaid workers contracted by an external company to clean at the advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi. Although Saatchi & Saatchi itself was not legally responsible, it eventually paid each cleaner 30 percent of what they were owed until the cleaners' contracts were properly taken over by the new cleaning company. The company that violated the workers' rights is now insolvent.

It's a cold, gloomy Saturday afternoon in November, but not even the overcast weather can affect Ramona's good mood, as she sits in her home in Camberwell, a neighbourhood in south-east London.

"Mi casa es su casa (my home is your home)," she greets me cheerily. She shares the apartment with her husband Basilio, who is also a night cleaner like her, and three other migrant workers from Jamaica. The couple pays a total of $880 for their room, which is crammed with a lifetime's worth of belongings.

Ramona thinks that the rent is exorbitant, but is happy that she is finally seeing peaceful days. Before they moved here, she and Basilio shared an apartment with a mutual friend. One day while she was at work, Basilio called her in a panic. Two men claiming to be the police had entered their home, damaged their bedroom door and rummaged through all their clothes and belongings.

"Don't come home," Basilio had implored her. "It's not safe."

Ramona remembers breaking down at work. They still have video footage of the mess that the men left behind. To this day, neither of them have dared to report the incident to the police since they don't know if the intruders were just anti-immigrant troublemakers. Ramona and other migrant workers remain reticent about contacting the police for help, fearful of not being able to articulate themselves fully in English and of being laughed at.

Ramona enjoys inviting people over and cooking for them, making hearty Bolivian fare including sancocho (chicken soup) and cerdo al horno (a roast pork dish). Mealtimes are accompanied by catchy, upbeat Latin American music, and when she gets homesick, she plays Andean tunes. Over the last 10 years, Ramona has become more confident with her English language skills and is good friends with the receptionists at one of the offices she cleans. Even with the uncertainty surrounding, among many things, the future of migrant workers in the UK with the country's plan to leave the EU, Ramona remains hopeful.

"I am tired of cleaning," she says over lunch. "If you had told me 10 years ago that I could do anything else but cleaning, I wouldn't have believed you. But now, I am ready. I think it is possible... First, a receptionist job, maybe, then better things."

*Pseudonyms have been used at the request of the subjects who wish to protect their identity.

Excerpt from:

'Modern-day slavery': Meet the migrants that clean London by night ... - Businessinsider India