Monthly Archives: July 2017

July 5, 2017 by Charlotte Anscombe Credit: University of Nottingham

The sight of people cleaning cars in disused petrol stations and by the side of the road is now a common scene in towns and cities across the country, but have you ever stopped and thought about whether the person polishing your car is being treated fairly?

Up and down the country 'cheap' car washes are being exposed as 'hives' of modern slavery. Employees are being poorly paid, are being provided with little or no protective equipment and are made to work long hours without breaks.

The UK government estimates that there are 13,000 slaves in the UK. Globally, there are 46 million slaves alive today. However, government agencies, such as the police, face barriers to the identification and prosecution of perpetrators.

However, government agencies, such as the police, are faced with barriers which can impact on how easily they can identify and prosecute the perpetrators.

"Although they might not be aware of it, people are faced with modern slavery in their everyday lives," said Dr Alexander Trautrims, an expert in supply chain management at Nottingham University Business School and the lead on the Unchained Supply, a Rights Lab project.

"The signs of labour exploitation are often hidden, and are often seen as somebody just being in a bad job, making it hard for the general public and law enforcement to identify victims.

"Whilst companies have to disclose certain information and data on their business activities, their performance and the impact they have on society, it is difficult to see whether the information they provide is always accurate."

With this in mind, Dr Trautrims and Dr Thomas Chesney, also from the Rights Lab, have developed a new computer programme which will enable government agencies to uncover businesses that are using slave labour without them ever having to step foot on the company premises.

The team of experts have created a tool which can help to verify if the data being provided by a company is accurate. To make this even easier, the programme enables interested parties, such as the police, to make these decisions, merely by observing the company's activities.

"By using this programme, we aim to scrutinise businesses or organisations by using data that is publically available, so that outsiders who have no access to company accounts can use proxies and assumptions around the business that allows them to see what is taking place within the company itself," said Dr Trautrims.

As the number of cheap car washes using modern day slaves is on the increase, the team felt that a good pilot for the programme would be a business such as this in Nottingham, to illustrate how it may be violating UK minimum wage regulations.

Dr Chesney says: "What we want from this programme is to be able to look and observe what is going on within a business and to create a model which captures the realistic behaviour behind it."

From an external perspective, Dr Trautrims and his team were able to count how many cars were being cleaned by the car wash in an hour. Using the charges per car displayed by the car wash, they were then able to calculate how much the company was making on average a day. They are also able to see how many workers are based at the business, and over the space of a month, the computer programme can use this data to determine the amount of profit the company is making.

As well as the data that the team can collect by observing the car wash, they also used Google traffic datawhich is publically available, and means that they don't have to sit and count the number of cars going past.

"Whilst a car wash is relatively open and easy to observe, a lot of businesses will be behind walls, so you can't see what is going on," says Dr Trautrims.

"There are ways around this though as what we can see, is what is going in to the building, and what is coming outlike with the Google traffic data. So for example, in a factory you can see how many vans are going in and coming out. You can then make assumptions which allow you to come up with a robust statement saying that whatever they are claiming to be doing in therecannot be true. We can prove it from our external observations, without having to raid a business or go into it.

"You could, for example scrutinise the costs the company is claiming to the tax office for personal protection equipment and then the size of the car park, and you could make the assumption that there isn't enough protection for the people who work there. Or you could do it the other way around and say that maybe there are more workers in there than you say there areand why aren't they being accounted for?"

Dr Chesney adds: "We are not saying that all car washes are illegitimate, but we want to put a system in place which can help law enforcement agencies to uncover the ones who ARE breaking the law.

"We are now looking at a whole range of applications where this programme could be used. For example- we're reviewing harvesting fields in Spain.

"We can easily see how many workers there are and how many oranges are coming out. If you are using slaves then that means you have workers that are not accounted for in any of your records. So you could have a farmer who sells a certain amount of cabbage and declares a profitbut then they are only declaring a certain number of workers in the fields who couldn't possibly have achieved the amount of harvested produce.

"Our aim is to create a monitoring system to assist law enforcement agencies and to help expose those who aren't treating their employees in the right way."

Detective Superintendent Austin Fuller, of Nottinghamshire Police said: "We are really excited about piloting this new programme. We worked closely with Dr Trautrims and Dr Chesney to help develop it and have high hopes about what it can achieve. We're really stepping up a gear now to combat this horrific abuse and exploring all avenues to prevent it from happening in Nottinghamshire. We continue to urge people to look out for the signs of modern slavery and report any suspicions as soon as possible."

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Researchers developing monitoring system to expose modern slavery - Phys.Org

By Ben Railton

Special to The Washington Post

By now, most Americans have seen the jarring dash cam video of police officer Jeronimo Yanez shooting Philando Castile as Castile calmly reached for his license. Just as shocking, a jury acquitted Yanez. The verdict, in the eyes of many, was just one more piece of evidence for how American laws work to protect the powerful and oppress the powerless.

But while the American legal system can be seen as largely constructed to maintain the status quo, it has also served as an agent of change to expand rights -- even in the years before the Constitution was ratified. Activists -- even slaves -- have used the courts to weaponize American ideals and escape oppression.

Before debates about the Constitution began, states grappled with how to adapt the lofty ideals promised by the Declaration of Independence to the reality of slavery. The first was Massachusetts. Its 1780 Constitution marked Revolutionary America's first attempt to create new legal and political arrangements that gave individual citizens rights in the newly liberated nation.

Yet in Massachusetts, as in every other American colony, the constitutional promise that "all men are born free and equal" didn't hold true for African-American slaves. The application of the law exposed the imbalance between the powerful and the powerless, the included and excluded.

Two Massachusetts slaves highlighted this contradiction.

Sedgwick took Freeman's case.

In May 1781, the same month that Bett's case was heard in Great Barrington's County Court, a Worcester slave, Quock Walker, sued his former master Nathaniel Jennison for battery. Walker, likewise believing he had a legal right to freedom, had run away from Jennison and gone to work at the neighboring Caldwell farm, where the abolitionist brothers John and Seth Caldwell helped Walker find a lawyer and take his case to Worcester County Court.

The county courts decided in both Freeman's and Walker's favor. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest legal authority, was tasked with enforcing the state's foundational laws and applying its promised rights and freedoms to all residents. Freeman, Walker and their allies pressed the court to decide whether the Constitution's laws and rights pertained to slaves, hoping to change the conversation to include, rather than exclude, this Massachusetts community.

It worked. The Supreme Court Chief Justice William Cushing explained that the 1780 Constitution and the new nation's ideals rendered slavery illegal because "a different idea" had taken hold when the Constitution declared "all men are born free and equal." As a result, he could only conclude that slavery was "inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution."

Within a decade, pressured by both the court decisions and their communities, Massachusetts slave owners voluntarily freed their slaves, often by changing the arrangements to those of wage labor. The 1790 federal census listed no slaves in Massachusetts, making it the first state to comprehensively abolish slavery.

Abolition in Massachusetts happened because Freeman and Walker took the state's and the country's founding laws and precepts at their word. In highlighting the contradiction between concepts of equality and rights and the circumstances of slavery, they found powerful allies who helped bring their cases to the state's most powerful legal bodies, forcing collective decisions that would reverberate across the state.

Protection of the powerful is written into the law of the land, but so too are avenues to use ideas of freedom and equality to change communal conversations and legal practices. And it is this tradition that has begotten constitutional victories expanding rights and freedoms to increasingly greater number of Americans over the past two centuries.

A San Francisco-born Chinese American cook worked with attorneys and community organizations to win the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which made clear that the 14th Amendment's promise of birthright citizenship should apply to all Americans.

When that promised citizenship was still not extended to Native Americans, Yakama performer Nipo Strongheart and other native activists gathered tens of thousands of signatures on petitions, allied with the Indian Rights Association, and pressured Congress to pass the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act.

And it was individual African American parents in Topeka pursuing educational opportunities for their children who worked with NAACP lawyers and their allies to win Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The landmark Supreme Court decision demonstrated that all Americans were included equally in our public education system, began the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation and launched the Civil Rights Movement. Those parents, like Strongheart, Wong, and Freeman and Walker before them, used ideas to create a more just society, providing hints as to how today's activists can best work to achieve progress.

Railton is a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University.

Link:

BEN RAILTON: How two Massachusetts slaves won their freedom - Lowell Sun

By Leith van Onselen

The Turnbull Government announced on Monday that it would expand its controversial Youth-Jobs PaTH program to prepare, trial and ultimately hire young Australians into the retail sector, which has driven a strong push-back from the union movement, Labor and The Greens. From 9News:

Up to 10,000 internships will be offered to unemployed youths over the next four years in a deal struck between the federal government and retail sector.

But not everybody is pleased with the scheme, with unions arguing if there are retail positions available, employers should instead be offering young welfare recipients ongoing work.

Jobless youths aged between 15 and 24 will undertake training before securing 12-week placements with major retailers under the governments PaTH internship program.

They will get a start at a job and, you know what, they could go on to great heights, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Monday

The PaTH scheme (Prepare, Trial, Hire) offers young jobseekers $200 a fortnight on top of their income support payments to undertake internships, and gives employers a $1000 upfront payment for taking them on

But Australian Council of Trade Unions president Ged Kearney said the program offered no path to qualification, employment or workforce protection.

This is a government-sanctioned program that actually borders on slavery, she told reporters in Melbourne.

If this does create new jobs, then pay the kids for the jobs. Pay them a wage. Theyre going to be productive. Theyre going to be contributing to the bottom line of these businesses

Labor and the Greens are opposed to the program, insisting it will allow young people to be exploited by employers.

If the PaTH program becomes simply a supply of cheap labour for employers who would otherwise be paying people full time wages to do that work, then thats a bad thing, deputy opposition leader Tanya Plibersek said.

About 620 young people have been given internships through the PaTH scheme since it began on April 1, with 82 young people securing ongoing work.

Separately, the policy director at Interns Australia, Clara Jordan-Baird, also criticised the program, noting that it risked normalising internship culture in the retail sector:

My first job was at Bakers Delight. I didnt need to do unpaid work experience for 12 weeks to learn how to do it. Nobody needs to. After a short period, you are performing productive work and deserve to be paid for it as an employee.

It shouldnt be normal to pop into your local Coffee Club and see an intern waitress working for free.

MB noted similar concerns when PaTH was initially announced. That is, while the PaTH program may help at the margins, it wont do much to increase the overall supply of youth jobs and could also lead to employers substituting a regular employee for an intern, saving themselves money in the process.

Consider PaTH from an employers perspective. They will get a free kick as the Government is not only the one paying the intern, but the employer also receives $1,000 up front for employing the intern without the need to worry about sick days, annual leave or penalty rates.

Why would an employer hire a young worker on a casual basis when they can effectively get paid to take on an intern? Indeed, the evidence on these types of programs shows that employers will generally substitute a worker receiving a wage subsidy for another worker who would otherwise have been hired.

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Retail sector taps youth slaves - MacroBusiness (blog)