Monthly Archives: May 2017

As Americans, we have always tried to do better, to live up to the ideals upon which we were founded 240 years ago.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, but excluded women, we corrected his mistake. When he wrote that power is derived from the consent of the governed, but left out nonwhite citizens, we corrected his mistake. And when the Founding Fathers allowed Americans to buy and sell their fellow humans as property Americas original sin we corrected this injustice.

Or did we? More than 150 years after we ended slavery, we continue to exploit human labor in a misguided attempt to maximize profits for the aristocrats and oligarchs.

Is this the best we can do? Is this progress we can be proud of?

Working 40 hours per week at the federal minimum wage, a worker will earn just $290 per week or $15,080 per year before taxes assuming that worker takes no vacation days, never gets sick, and works Christmas, Thanksgiving and every other holiday. That leaves just $1,250 per month to cover essential needs like housing, food, clothing and transportation. Its just not sustainable.

Families supported by minimum wage jobs are excluded from Americas promise. There is no opportunity to spend time with children, to build wealth or to even participate in civic life. We may have left the plantations, but for too many Americans, the realities arent much different today than they were at Mt. Vernon.

To help these families survive not succeed, but merely survive the government has developed a number of programs like the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps and Medicaid. This helps fill the gap between a full days pay and the dollars needed to subsist, but these programs were intended as a safety net, not as a subsidy to corporations who refuse to pay even a subsistence wage.

That is exactly what they have become Walmart and McDonalds even help their employees with the application process for public assistance.

But welfare comes with strings and a stigma. And what clearer, and more humiliating, sign can an employer send to an employee than to say, We dont even think youre worth a living wage?

Government programs are not the solution, except for those who are truly the most vulnerable members of our society. The solution is to guarantee that every American who works a full-time job can earn a salary that meets their basic needs and lets them participate in their family, in public life and in the economy. The solution is to attach value to the jobs our neighbors do and to our neighbors themselves by showing them that we attach value to their labor. The solution is to rid ourselves of our original sin and remove the last vestiges of a slave culture we claim to have rejected more than a century and a half ago.

The solution is to raise the minimum wage and ensure that its a living wage.

The moral argument for doing so is clear. The economic argument should be clear as well. In an economy that is 70 percent driven by consumer demand, putting more money into peoples pockets means putting more money into the economy, and the closer a worker is to just making ends meet, the faster every additional dollar they have isreturned to the economy a concept known as the velocity of money.

Put another way, raising the minimum wage instantly pumps millions of dollars into the economy. Its good for the individual, good for business and good for the country as a whole.

In nine years, America will celebrate our 250th birthday. We have come a long way in that time, but we still have far to go. Will we be a nation that has moved closer to the ideals of equality so critical to our founding, or will we still be struggling to erase the lingering residue of slavery, our original sin?

If we truly do hope to be an ever more perfect union, the answer should be clear.

Morris Pearl is chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans dedicated to equality for all people. He was previously a managing director for investment firm BlackRock.

Marc Morial is president of the National Urban League and the former mayor of New Orleans.

The views of contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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We ended slavery, so why exploit people with a $7.25 minimum ... - The Hill (blog)

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Adidas executive Aditi Wanchoo is on a mission - to wipe out any slavery in the German sportswear company's supply chain, and she hopes giving workers the technology to speak out will help.

With a background in corporate social responsibility at consultancy firm Accenture, Wanchoo was hired 18 months ago in a new position created by Adidas, one of the first companies to set up a role dedicated to fighting slavery.

In recent years modern-day slavery has increasingly come under the spotlight, putting regulatory and consumer pressure on companies to ensure their supply chains are free of forced labor, child labor and other forms of slavery.

As apparel and footwear industries rely heavily on outsourcing, sportswear companies have faced growing scrutiny.

Wanchoo said Adidas had been actively working on this issue since it was revealed at the 1998 World Cup that footballs were produced by child laborers in India and companies realized they did not have control over their suppliers.

Governments are now trying to tackle the problem with new legislation, such as the UK's 2015 law requiring companies to disclose how they are ensuring supply chains are slavery free.

"We have found that the UK Modern Slavery Act and recent legislative action in France and Australia have helped take the conversations to the boardroom," Wanchoo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview this week in London.

"My role was created to look at building relevant partnerships to continue our work on addressingpotential modern slavery risks for our extended supply chain, i.e. our Tier 2 processing facilities and Tier 3 raw material sources."

Slavery has emerged as a major global problem with the Global Slavery Index by the Walk Free Foundation estimating there are nearly 46 million slaves in the world.

The United Nations has a global goal to eradicate forced labor and slavery by 2030 and end all child labor by 2025.

Wanchoo said she was tackling the issue in various ways such as collaborating with other companies, NGOs and governments, and training suppliers about the risks of bonded labor and the impact of recruitment fees on workers.

TECH TO GIVE WORKERS A VOICE

She said Adidas was also on a major drive to encourage workers to speak up and use this information to eradicate slavery and improve workers' conditions.

The company already has "worker hotlines" giving 300,000 factory workers in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia the opportunity to anonymously ask questions, make suggestions or express concerns via text messages and smart phone applications.

But the company found this was not enough, and over the past year Adidas has run a pilot project in China with apps for workers to anonymously report issues - data that is collected and then analyzed.

Wanchoo said the aim is to introduce such a system in all of the company's 105 or so primary factories in the next five years and then look at cascading this down to second-tier suppliers.

In Turkey these worker grievance systems had uncovered concerns about child labor and reports of illegal workers from Turkmenistan, while in Asia workers had complained about abuse by supervisors, wage issues and food, she said.

She added that efforts to hear directly from workers was paying off. Last year campaign organization KnowTheChain ranked Adidas top out of 20 firms, chosen because of their size, for its efforts to eliminate forced labor and human trafficking.

"We want to make it as easy and anonymous as possible for workers," said Hong Kong-based Wanchoo, whose official title is senior manager - development partnerships, social and environmental affairs at Adidas.

She acknowledged this did not always go down well with suppliers who aim to keep costs as competitive as possible.

"Sometimes there can be resistance from suppliers, but we work with them to demonstrate how this can help them in the long run by improving supply chain transparency, communication, productivity and worker retention," she said.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith @BeeGoldsmith, Editing by Alisa Tang.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org)

BEIJING China's securities markets regulator published rules on Saturday aimed at preventing major shareholders of listed companies from reducing their holdings in an "intensive, massive and disorderly" manner that "disturbed market order and dented investor confidence," according to a statement on its website.

NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A dozen delivery and supply companies and affiliates based in Turkey are banned from doing business with the U.S. government due to their roles in profiteering from humanitarian aid intended for Syria, U.S. officials said on Friday.

Cancun, Mexico (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The rapid reaction by the Democratic Republic of Congo to recent cases of Ebola showed lessons were learned from earlier outbreaks, a top global health official said on Friday, stressing the need to factor health into disaster risk plans.

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Adidas' slavery buster hopes technology can give workers a voice ... - Reuters