Monthly Archives: February 2021

A funny thing happened on the Senate floor in the wee hours of February 5. As senators worked through a series of amendments in the vote-a-rama to advance President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion rescue package, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) moved to strike any provision raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour this year. And none other than progressive lion Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) rose to agree.

Pundits theorized that Ernst sought to trap Democrats, especially those from battleground states, into voting in favor of a minimum wage increase while the nation is still in the throes of the pandemic. But thats not congressional Democrats position: Sanders and his allies support raising the minimum wage gradually, over a four-year period. In the end, no Democrats opposed Ernsts amendment.

The belief that Democrats want to dramatically and immediately raise the federal minimum wagea belief the National Restaurant Association has eagerly fueledisnt the only myth floating around about the proposal. Critics also declare that increase is only popular with progressives and that it will be a job killer for restaurants and other hard-hit small businesses, especially in lower-wage regions.

One of us runs a restaurant in a very high-cost market, so we understand concerns that raising the minimum wage might limit hiring or even drive more restaurants and other small companies out of business. But we need to get some facts straight.

First of all, raising the minimum wage isnt just a progressive position. There is now robust bipartisan support among voters for a significant increase in the federal minimum wage, which has not budged in a dozen years. In November, Florida voters approved an increase to the state minimum wage by a margin 11 points wider than Donald Trumps victory there. (Florida became the first state in the South, and eighth in the nation, to approve a gradual hike to $15.) Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac poll conducted in late January found that 61% of Americans favor the increase to $15 at the federal level.

A new Brookings analysis shows that pre-COVID-19, about half of workers earning less than $15 an hour were essential workersa share that is likely higher now because of the pandemics disproportionate effects on low-wage occupations. Voters across the spectrum have come to agree that it is simply not possible for workersessential or otherwiseto survive on the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour or the state wage floors close to that.

But its even less possible to survive on restaurant and other service work that relies on tips and is still paid a subminimum rate: $5 an hour or less in 38 states. Heavy reliance on tips rather than wages meant that for many workers laid off during the pandemic, total earnings were too low to even qualify them for unemployment insurance, as labor researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found last year.

Over 110,000 restaurants have shuttered during the pandemic, and Black restaurateurs and other owners of coloralong with their workershave been hit especially hard. But just as voters have realized that the minimum wage in America is a poverty sentence, leaders in the restaurant businessthe nations largest source of private sector jobsare waking up to the fact that the industry will not survive unless it changes dramatically. On this point in particular, the restaurant industry is a microcosm of the American economy.

Many restaurants must raise wages to attract and retain workers, who face new safety risks as well as the loss of income from a big drop in tips. Evidence shows that raising wages can cut expensive employee turnover in half and trigger a shift to new business models, as Seattle and other local markets show. This adaptationwhich is a crucial part of the future of retail more generallyis just one thing that pessimistic economic projections of the effects of a federal minimum wage hike (like that by the Congressional Budget Office) ignore or downplay.

Whats more, tipping and the cruel logic of a subminimum wage are vestiges of slavery. After emancipation, employers in the South mobilized to keep Black labor as cheap as possible, winning the legal right to have workers in key occupations (such as waitressing) survive on customer tips rather than employer-paid wages. To this day, food servers reliance on tips makes restaurant customers very powerful, contributing to the worst incidence of reported sexual harassment of any industry.

A phased-in move to one fair wage, with tips supplementing rather than replacing a robust base wage of at least $15 per hour nationwide, is now critical. And its not just industry icons like Danny Meyer and Jos Andrs who have come out in favor of such a move, but also Main Street employers and a national network of hundreds of restaurateurs organizing for fair wages as part of industry innovation. Last year, even McDonalds announced that it would not oppose the raise.

Minds are also changing across the capital markets that have done so much to drive short-term thinking about whats good for business. A new policy package created by a commission of conservative and progressive leaders from business, investment, economic research, and other fields has endorsed the move to $15 and one fair wage as the law of the land, emphasizing that capitalism needs to work for everyone. The time for virtue-signaling is over, wrote the commission, which one of us serves on.

Finally, this is not just about fairness to workers. As a sizable body of economic research makes clear, raising wages on the bottom of the economy boosts consumption, and thus supports the growth of local economiessomething thats desperately needed to help our communities recover from the COVID-19 recession. Lets recall that Franklin Roosevelt and Congress created the federal minimum wage during the Great Depression.

Its time for the Senate to back a phased-in raise to the minimum wage and end the subminimum tipped wage, which is both racist and sexist. The evidence shows that we can offer dignity to millions of low-income workers and boost the economy at the same time.

More:

How a $15 minimum wage could help restaurants and other hard-hit small businesses - Brookings Institution

By Rebekah Entralgo

If its passed by Congress, President Joe Bidens COVID-19 relief proposal would do a lot more than fund relief payments and vaccine rollouts. It would also raise the wage floor for all U.S. workers and give a particularly long overdue raise to restaurant servers, taxi drivers, manicurists, and other tipped workers.

For Tanya Wallace-Gobern, getting rid of the subminimum wage for tipped workers is a matter of racial justice. Passing a living wage bill for tipped and non-tipped low-wage workers is essential to reducing inequality, she said in arecent briefing.

As the executive director of the National Black Worker Center Project,, Wallace-Gobern oversees a network of eight centers across the country that aim to build power and transform working conditions for Black workers. The subminimum federal wage for tipped workers, which has been stuck at just $2.13 since 1991, is a clear barrier to their goals.

While employers are technically supposed to make up the difference if workers dont earn enough in tips to reach the current $7.25 federal minimum, this rule is largely unenforced.

Meanwhile, studies have long found a racial bias in tipping. A survey by One Fair Wage found that prior to the pandemic, 60 percent of Black tipped workers earned less than $15 per hour, compared to 43 percent of white tipped workers. And since the pandemic, 88 percent of them have seen their tips plunge by half or more.

The legislative vehicle for the Biden plan, the Raise the Wage Act, would boost the overall federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025. For tipped workers, it would rise to $4.95 this year and then by $2 per year until it matches the overall $15 minimum in 2026.

The subminimum tipped wage is a shameful relic of slavery. Tipping became prevalent in the United States only after the Civil War, when restaurants and railway companies embraced the practice because it meant they didnt have to pay wages to recently freed slaves.

That past hangs heavily over many Black workers.

Lets face it, Wallace-Gobern told me, 50 years after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty, Black people in the South still contend with economic hardships, persistent poverty, and the enduring legacy of slavery.

Wallace-Gobern, who is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, argues that policies designed to empower Black workers will help every other worker, too.

Black workers are the canaries in the economic coalmine of our country, Wallace-Gobern said. When the canary died, that was a signal that the conditions were bad for the miners. Thats the role Black workers play. If you improve their working conditions, that will lift all workers.

New studies agree with her.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that nearly a third of all Black workers would get a raise under the Raise the Wage Act. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it could also raise wages for 17 million workers overall. Another 10 million workers earning just above $15 could also see an increase.

With the National Black Worker Center Project, Wallace-Gobern is aiming to strengthen the capacity of Black worker centers to win minimum wage increases, build up a cadre of civil rights organizers, and advance a Southern strategy on racial justice and democratic freedoms.

The challenges are many. Particularly in the South, worker advocates are up against anti-union right to work laws and pre-emption restrictions that block cities from improving labor protections at the local level. But Wallace-Gobern is optimistic about the future.

Young people are ready to lead if we step aside and give them space, she remarked. I welcome the opportunity for them to stand on our shoulders and take us to heights that I and my grandparents could never imagine.

Previously published on otherwords with Creative Commons License

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End the Subminimum Tipped Wage - The Good Men Project

Joseph Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States. It has been traditional for presidential succession to proceed peacefully for hundreds of years except the 45th to the 46th President.

Historians have judged American presidents and unquestionably Donald Trump will be judged as one of the worst in American history.

There is some consensus on who are the great American presidents. George Washington is often mentioned not only because he won the Independence War but for the fact that he stepped down after serving two terms and returned as a private citizen to his home in Mount Vernon. Invariably, Abraham Lincoln is mentioned as he assumed the presidency at the height of the Civil War. In that same vein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his herculean effort to bring back the economy from the devastation of the economic depression. Lyndon Johnson also was at the helm when Civil Rights legislation and the Great Society Programs were passed even though Johnson was less than truthful in his pursuit of the Viet Nam War.

CNN has been running a new documentary on Lincoln and it deviates from the romantic notion of Lincoln and emancipation. Lincoln like most white Americans of his generation wrestled continuously on the question of slavery.

Lincoln was bothered by the cruelty of slavery. Nonetheless, in his early career as a public figure never was an abolitionist. In his epic debates for the Senate race in Illinois, what became known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of being in favor of emancipation and giving black folks the same rights as white Americans.

Douglas being engaged in race-baiting was not entirely honest. Lincoln was not in favor of expanding slavery into the new territories or the new frontiers that had emerged as a critical question dealing with political hegemony. From the inception of the country, the southern states were able to exercise more power over the Legislative and Executive Branch than those concentrating in northern states. If slavery was allowed to expand to the new western territories, that would mean the extension of the political power of those advocating the perpetration of slavery.Such further shifting of free labor would also inhibit the advance of industrial capital.

Douglas won the Senate race but with the formation of the Republican Party, Lincoln became the Partys standard-bearer in the presidential election of 1860. On ascending to the presidency, the Confederate or slave-owning states immediately seceded from the Union. Abraham Lincoln insisted on his messaging that he was fighting the Civil War not to free the slaves but to preserve the Union.

As the war progressed, Lincoln and his Generals were very much aware that the backbone of the Confederate states was the slave economy and if Africans voted with their feet, it would weaken the capacity of the Confederate states to effectively wage the war. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1, 1863, that would free all slaves in states which were in a state of rebellion against the Union.

President Lincoln even after the Emancipation Proclamation could not envision the free black population living as free men and women with the same rights as white Americans. He floated the possibility of free blacks leaving America en masse and establishing residence somewhere in Central America. The black abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, in meetings with Lincoln made it abundantly clear that black folks were not going anywhere.

By his second term, Lincoln recognized the folly of any mass migration. Black folks had contributed to the wealth creation of America and were entitled to the spoils, at least their share of the spoils.

The Radical Reconstructionists were adamant about reparations and explored the possibility of the free black population being given 40 acres and a mule.

After Lincolns assassination and the Democrat Andrew Johnson succeeded, Andrew Johnson was vehemently opposed to the U.S. Government giving black people any reparations for their labor and insisted that poor whites were not getting a similar rescue package.

The Confederacy refused to accept their defeat on the battlefield. Immediately after the Civil War, the secessionist states introduced the Black Codes which were an attempt to keep black people in a state of subservience. The Black Codes introduced harsh penalties for black workers who abandoned working on plantations. The criminal justice system was used to exploit black labor and black people were sentenced for frivolous crimes and sent to prison to work as gang laborers in surrounding farms.

The Federal government abandoned its protection of the freed African-Americans. The violence of the Klu Klux Klan was used to prevent black people from exercising the right to vote. In 1877 with the Tilden-Hayes presidential compromise, Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the Southern States for electoral college votes to become President of the United States.

With the Federal troops withdrawal, the white terrorists were given free reign to subjugate black folks. The Jim Crow Era had been ushered in. The Supreme Court traditionally refused to recognize the humanity of black citizens. In the case of Dred Scott, in 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that blacks were protected by the United States constitution and even if they migrated to free states they were still defined as slaves. The Supreme Court in 1896 would declare separate but equal was not a violation of the constitution. The Union was intact but black folks had been forced into a new form of bondage.

Originally posted here:

Part 1 Race and the American Presidency: From Abraham to Joseph | New York Carib News - NYCaribNews

By Bonny Ling

On January 28, 2021, public prosecutors in Taichung indicted four individuals on charges of human trafficking, violations of the Employment Services Act, and forgery of documents for their role in exploiting Vietnamese migrant workers in Taiwan.

The four involved worked at the Hong Yu Employment Service Agency Company () in Taichung to recruit migrant workers from Vietnam. Established in 2017, Hong Yu placed 126 Vietnamese migrant workers in the construction sector around Taiwan from July 2018 to August 2020.

The indicted were key members of the recruitment agency: the proprietressDiao Yu-hong (), deputy general-manger Hsu Shih-chang (), accountant Lin Chia-chin (), and language interpreter Ngo Quoc Ha (). The four defendants reportedly set up a complex web of 19 shell companies in manufacturing, using false residential addresses and names of over 200 Taiwanese individuals.

After Hong Yu organized the recruitment of workers from Vietnam, it then contracted 38 different construction companies around Taiwan to hire out the workers originally allocated to manufacturing. During the three years of its operation, Hong Yu thrived by exploiting its recruited workers by deducting and pocketing half of their pay every month. In what is described by the public prosecutors as the largest organized human trafficking operation undertaken by a registered recruitment agency in Taiwan, Hong Yu reportedly took in illegal gains of about NT$25 million (about US$900,000).

Whereas Hong Yu charged the construction companies monthly NT$36,000 to 42,000 about US$1280 to 1500 plus other fees, the workers themselves did not receive the full amount. The agency deducted around half of the workers wage under the guise of paying labor insurance and other costs, leaving them only around NT$16,000 to 19,000 (about US$570 to 680) of their monthly wage.

The Vietnamese workers reportedly undertook heavy overtime to supplement their monthly earnings and feared taking time off. For those who did raise questions about their employment, the agency threatened them with deportation a threat backed up by the confiscation of their passports and personal papers.

It is important to point out that much of the coverage reporting on the indictments centered on the unscrupulous agency owner: Diao Yu-hong (). This is because she is a naturalized Taiwanese citizen of Vietnamese origin. Therefore, many headlines were reporting on this case, focusing on how a person exploited her compatriots. Such examples can be seen in the Liberty Times Vietnamese Woman Sets Up Shell Labor Agency and Deducts Compatriots Salary for an Easy Profit of NT$25 Million ( 2500), United News Shell Companies Recruit Foreign Workers; New Immigrant Defrauds Compatriots ( ) and China Times Illegal Labor Recruiter Exploits Compatriots; Vietnamese Woman Pockets NT$25 Million ( 2500).

In comparison, little is known about the deputy general manager, accountant and the interpreter, who, it is assumed, also had extensive knowledge of the complicated operation. However, the human-interest emphasis on the founders Vietnamese origin has the unfortunate effect of shifting attention from a much-needed examination about the complexity of labor migration to Taiwan and how it structurally embeds labor exploitation risks.

Under the current system, migrant workers heavily depend on labor agencies in their home countries to arrange their employment abroad. Once they arrive in Taiwan, they are again dependent on these entities in their relationship with Taiwanese employers. Taiwanese employers use labor agencies effectively as their contracted human resource team for their foreign worker pool, often citing difficulties of managing across cultures and languages. Migrant workers pay for this human resource service, whereas most professional (so-termed white-collared) workers do not bear their own employments administrative costs.

The deductions pocketed by the fraudulent recruitment agency must be seen against the background that heavy deductions are normalized for a migrant workers pay in Taiwan. Under the Standards for Fee-Charging Items and Amounts of the Private Employment Services Institution, migrant workers pay monthly service fees to their labour agency in Taiwan for [e]xpenses required for undertaking employment services matters (Article 2(5)). This monthly service fee is set at the following rates (Article 6):

In contrast, service fees charged on employers are NT$2,000 per year and not monthly, as for the migrant workers (Article 3(2)). This means that migrant workers pay roughly nine to 11 times more for service fees than their employers, depending on the specific year of their employment.

The service fees that migrant workers pay in Taiwan represent a hefty portion of their monthly wage. For instance, migrant workers in domestic care receive NT$17,000 (about US$600) as their monthly minimum wage, excluding overtime pay. In their first year, service fees paid to their labor agency in Taiwan would be about 10% of their minimum monthly pay. For migrant workers outside domestic care, this figure would be around 7.5% since their minimum monthly wage of NT$24,000 as of January 1, 2021 is higher than those in domestic care whom the Labor Standards Act does not cover. These are high costs in proportion to their total monthly wage.

No doubt the four individuals, if convicted, will be used to exemplify Taiwans commitment to combat human trafficking. The Taichung public prosecutors have asked the court to deal with the case without leniency because the exploitation is a transgression against the fellowship of kinship (). Beyond the heavy killing the chickens to scare the monkeys () rhetoric of punishment, however, the case raises fundamental questions about the system of oversight for the 1,500 labor agencies registered and operating in Taiwan to hire workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Under international law, states must protect against human rights abuses within their territory. This means that Taiwan must have an effective legal framework to prevent, investigate, punish, and redress human rights abuses. The Hong Yu arrests point uneasily to Taiwans legal framework dealing with the registration and monitoring of labor recruitment agencies.

How did the fraudulent shell company structure, with 19 dubious firms and their respective paper trails, get past registration? Moreover, how did it then remain undetected for almost two and half years before suspicions were first raised, apparently after a tip-off to Taichung City Governments Labor Affairs Bureau in September 2020? Does this attest to a weak system of monitoring and oversight, failing to ensure that recruitment agencies operate in accordance with the applicable laws and regulations? What mechanisms ensure workers can report, without fear of retribution, when their passports are confiscated or when abuses occur?

The same questions exist for Vietnam as the country of origin. It is important also to understand which business(es) Hong Yu collaborated with in Vietnam to organize the migrants departure paperwork? There needs to be a careful cross-border investigation to examine whether labor recruitment agencies and individuals in the country of origin also profited illegally from the fraudulent recruitment scheme in Taiwan.

The case also points out that the concept of human rights due diligence, at least among the construction sector, has yet to take off as a central component of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights in Taiwan. Questions here would remain on whether, if any, of the 38 firms that employed the migrant workers from Hong Yu had conducted human rights due diligence to establish whether the workers were employed in a coercive relationship.

In recent years, many countries of origin of migrant workers have embarked on tentative measures to improve labor migration. One of the most well-known of these efforts is the regulation proposed by Indonesia in July 2020 to split the recruitment fees between the government of Indonesia and the overseas employers so that Indonesian workers would not become heavily indebted just for securing a job abroad. The proposed regulation, however, received heavy criticisms from the Taiwan government and employer associations.

In early January 2021, Indonesia announced the regulation could not take effect due to funding shortfalls that prevented their implementation in Indonesia. This must have offered some relief for the Taiwan government, which held firmed last year, without basis in international law, that Indonesia cannot unilaterally embark on measures to improve the situation of its migrants (see analysis here). Nevertheless, what is happening in developments around Taiwan is a deep push by U.N. agencies, governments, civil society organizations, business groups, and individual brands to advocate for a different type of labor recruitment of migrant workers.

AU.N. officialsaid: Structures where migrant workers are essentially forced to pay for work opportunities mean they carry additional vulnerability to the destination workplace. To reduce the risk factors that contribute to persistent modern day slavery, we have to restructure these systems so that the employers are paying the costs. Recruitment agencies that profit from the desperation of migrant workers to gain decent work must be held accountable.

In November 2020, the government of Vietnam passed revisions to the Law on Contract-Based Vietnamese Overseas Workers (Law 72), which removes brokerage commissions paid by migrant workers to recruitment agencies from 1 January 2022. Although this round of revisions did not go as far as dropping recruitment fees completely in Vietnam, it is a clear sign that this travel direction is towards a no-fees model of labor migration. UN agencies like the International Labor Organization have long advocated that migrants do not bear the cost of their own employment recruitment in both countries of origin and destination.

Taiwan can only build a migrant labor recruitment system that reduces gross labor exploitation risks if we reflect comprehensively and honestly about structural faults. These faults have persisted for decades in the current way of bringing migrants to meet local labor demands.

The Hong Yu prosecution offers this critical chance. This is the time to fully acknowledge the abuse of the 126 migrants, who toiled for years in Taiwans construction sector for half their pay, by probing behind the faade of nationality and the collective outrage against compatriot-based exploitation. Only by moving beyond this artificial narrative can we meaningfully begin to build a labor system based on migration with dignity.

The author thanks the quoted colleague for thoughtful discussions.

The News Lens has been authorized to repost this article. The piece was first published by Taiwan Insight, the online magazine of the University of Nottinghams Taiwan Studies Program.

READ NEXT: Human Rights Abuses in Laos Are Rampant. International Businesses Should Take Action.

TNL Editor: Bryan Chou (@thenewslensintl)

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Prosecution of a Fraudulent Labor Agency in Taichung: An Insight on the Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Taiwan - The News Lens International