Monthly Archives: March 2022

By Kieran Guilbert, Thomson Reuters Foundation

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Fashion giant H&M is failing to fulfill a pledge to ensure garment workers who supply its high-street stores are paid a fair living wage, forcing many employees to work excessive hours in order to survive, civil society groups said on Monday.

Based on interviews with 62 people in six H&M supplier factories in Bulgaria, Turkey, India and Cambodia, campaigners said none of the workers earned anything near a so-called living wage that would allow them to cover their families basic needs.

Major brands are under growing pressure from campaigners and consumers alike to improve working conditions along their global supply chains, and render them free of exploitation and slavery.

The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) said Swedens H&M - the worlds second-largest fashion retailer after Zara owner Inditex - had not met a commitment made in 2013 to ensure its suppliers would pay a living wage to some 850,000 textile workers by 2018.

H&M needs to take action immediately to stop the scandal of poverty wages and workers rights violations, said Bettina Musiolek of the CCC, an alliance of labor unions and charities.

However H&M - which has more than 4,800 stores in 69 nations - said it had reached at least 600 factories and 930,000 garment workers with its fair living wage strategy, and did not share the CCCs view of how to create change in the textile industry.

There is no universally agreed level for living wages, and wage levels should be defined and set by parties on the labor market through fair negotiations between employers and workers representatives, not by Western brands, a H&M spokeswoman said.

The CCC report found that workers in H&M supplier factories in Cambodia earned less than half the estimated living wage, dropping to about a third for those living in India and Turkey.

Many worked overtime hours that exceeded the legal limit without being properly paid, while others were only paid the minimum wage if they worked extra hours and met their quota, which the United Nations defines as forced labor, the CCC said.

Instead of empty public relations talk, we want to see transparent changes in the real wages of workers in H&Ms supply chain, Judy Gearhart, executive director of the U.S.-based International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), said a in statement.

The ILRF urged H&M to publish a road map with time-bound, measurable wage increase targets and outline how they will change purchasing practices to ensure workers get a living wage.

However the issue of living wages is bigger than one brand, and too few companies have initiatives to drive up wages, said Peter McAllister of the Ethical Trading Initiative, a group of trade unions, companies and charities of which H&M is a member.

If we are to make sure all garment workers receive a decent wage then encouraging industry-wide action must be a priority, the groups chief executive told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson is best known for his Century Cycle, a collection of 10 stories, each one set in a different decade of the 20th Century, that look at the lives of Black Americans and their struggles in a callous and unjust world.

Gem of the Ocean, which is currently onstage at Portland Center Stage, is the first of these stories chronologically, setting its action in 1904 and introducing audiences to Aunt Ester Tyler, a shamanistic woman who acts as a spiritual advisor to misguided Blacks who need to get their souls clean. However, absolution doesnt come easy, as one particular young traveler soon learns.

As Gem begins, Ester (Treasure Lunan) lives at 1839 Wiley Avenue in Pittsburghs Hill District with her caregiver Eli (Victor Mack) and her protg Black Mary (Andrea Vernae). When disgruntled mill worker Citizen Barlow (Henry Noble) arrives at her home, Ester, surprisingly, allows him in, promising to give the divine cleansing Citizen thinks he desperately needs (but not in the way he expects).

Gem of the Ocean sets itself apart from other plays in the Century Cycle by indulging in magical realism. Aunt Ester claims to be 285-years-old and remembers coming to America on slave ships. Her wisdom is a mix of African ritual and Biblical allegory thats just insightful enough to make the audience wonder how much of it is true.

The production wisely plays into the polysemy of the storyEsters home is a ramshackle old house, but it creaks and groans like a ship at sea. Citizens vision quest in the second half might be a genuine spiritual experience or simply the result of a wily old womans theatricality.

Lunan leans into the ambiguity, giving a performance that pays off tremendously. They imbue Ester with both wisdom and a cackling sense of humor that leaves the audience unsure of her powers, but grateful to see her onstage nonetheless.

Of course, Gem isnt without its more grounded, serious elements. The backdrop of the story is growing tensions between the resentful employees of a local tin mill and the wage-slavery practices of the mills owners. The two sides are represented by Solly Two Kings (WRICK Jones), a former Underground Railroad conductor who is sympathetic to the millers plight, and Caesar (Bobby Bermea), the local policeman who is Marys estranged brother.

Despite only appearing sporadically, Caesar is a surprisingly fascinating villain. Hes been able to advance and prosper in the immediate post-slavery age, but is unaware (or unwilling to admit) that he only succeeded by stepping on his fellow Blacks. His villainy is especially relevant given Portlands recent clashes with law enforcement, serving as a reminder that whats legal and whats right dont always intersect.

Caesar is unerringly devoted to upholding the law and makes no concessions, to the point where he shows no moral qualms about killing a suspect over a stolen loaf of bread. Even still, he wants desperately to maintain a relationship with his sister, ignoring how much she and everyone else despises him.

The cast is uniformly strong, but the one who ends up having to carry most of the play is Noble. Citizen is our everyman and our guide to Esters strange world. He has to reflect our curiosity and wonder at this maybe magical, maybe mundane matriarch, but never let his pain and desperation be forgotten.

Noble fulfills the plays demands, radiating energy and never letting his journey be swept away in the chaos. At the same time, Jones ably brings Solly to life, giving the character a wry sense of humor and rebellious spirit, but also a sense of gravitas and seriousness when called upon.

By storys end, Gem of the Ocean reminds the audience of the fact that while freedom is the ideal, it isnt freeand that for Black Americans, that bill has yet to be paid. So long as exploitative capitalism, oppressive law enforcement, and erasure of Black history live, freedom is under threat, and its on all of us to remember our past, learn in the present, and apply those teachings to a more equitable, more just future.

SEE IT: Gem of the Ocean plays at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, pcs.org. 7:30 pm Wednesday-Sunday, 2 pm Saturdays and Sundays, 2 pm select Thursdays. Schedule may vary for some shows. Tickets start at $25.

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Portland Center Stage Delivers a Powerful Production of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean - Willamette Week

Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) at a rally outside the U.S. House on Feb. 8, 2022, calling for a raise to the minimum wage. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)

The parade of Equal Pay Days kicked off recently. The dates mark wage gaps for all women, Black women, Latina womeneach one more disheartening than the last. But then what? After we stand by the side of the road and watch, we go back to our lives, unsure why this is still going on, and what to do about it.

Its not a simple problem to tackle, thats for surebut its also not impossible. Lets start with the reality, and then look at the history and then some actions that would offer transformative change.

First, the wage gaps by gender, race and ethnicity happen at all levels, but the weight at the bottom is pulling us all down. The fact is that the low-wage workforce is wildly disproportionately made up of workers from historically marginalized populations: women and people of color.

When Oxfam recently analyzed data on who earns low wages in the U.S., we were prepared to find that the low-wage workforce was skewed by race and gender. What we didnt expect are the staggering gaps.

Nearly a third of the workforce (32 percent) is earning less than $15 an hour: roughly 52 million workers struggling to get by on less than $30,000 a year, even now, in the face of surging inflation and skyrocketing gas prices.

Simply put, federal law has enshrined a double standard. It has created a low-wage workforce that law ignores and employers exploit.

However, when you drill down, the structural nature of low wages jumps out. While 25 percent of men earn less than $15, 40 percent of women do. While 26 percent of white workers earn less than $15, nearly half of Black and Hispanic/Latinx workers do. Women of color? A full 50 percent earn less than $15; in some states, it soars to 70 percent.

So, how did this happen? It cant be an accident. And its not. Its the result of a long, tangled history in our country, one built on structural racism and sexism, along with a legacy of slavery and a broken immigration system.

It has turned into a kind of occupational segregation so ingrained that its become dangerously invisible. Consider gender: Women are often employed in jobs involve tasks historically considered womens work: serving, cooking, cleaning and caring for people. And race/ethnicity: Hispanic/Latinx workers make up a huge part of the agricultural workforce; women of color make up most of the workers in domestic labor.

And these jobs? Often fall outside the protections offered in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Employers can still pay tipped workers (two-thirds female) $2.13 an hour (stuck since 1991). Farm workers and domestic workers do not enjoy protections like overtime and rights to organize which are provided to most workers under the FLSA.

This is not a coincidenceits a direct result of discrimination against these populations. When the FLSA was first passed in 1938, it specifically exempted farm workers and domestic workers because of pressure from Southern legislators who insisted on excluding Black workers.

Not that the work, and the workers, are not essential to our economy and society. These workers harvest, cook and serve our food, and care for our children and parents. Their work has value, they have dignity.

But here we are: Simply put, federal law has enshrined a double standard. It has created a low-wage workforce that law ignores and employers exploit.

And in 2022, it has become nothing less than a civil rights emergency. Why are we comfortable, as a nation, in watching certain communities slide into despair and poverty-even as theyre working hardwhile corporations and shareholders enjoy record profits, and executives bring home record compensation?

It has to stop. Congress should do all in its power to mandate that employers pay wages that dont leave workers in precarity or even poverty.

At the end of the day, in light of this heavy history, where do we go?

Well, one solution is straightforward, and simple: Raise the federal minimum wage, and establish one universal wage. Thats on the table in Congress, in the form of theRaise the Wage Actbut you wont be able to find it. While it passed the House, once it entered the Senate it got lost under a blanket ofcorporate influence and political cowardice.

States have acted; many large corporations have acted, some announcing a$24 hourly starting wagefor certain workers. So why is the Senate blocking a piece of legislation that would have a transformative impact on wages and well-being of people in this country?

Raising the wage to $15 and establishing a universal minimum wage would go a long way toward chipping away at the gender and race wage gaps in this country. After years of watching the parade, maybe we can finally do more than watch: Lets shift the dates, reward the workers, and value the work properly.

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Millions of Women Would Benefit From a Minimum Wage HikeFar More than Men - Ms. Magazine

CEO Peter Hebblethwaite - who earns a base salary of 325,000 - did not answer when asked if he could live on 5.50 an hour, which is the new average wage paid to the companys seafaring staff.

Mr Hebblethwaite told a joint meeting of the Transport and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committees this morning that consulting unions on the new crewing model would have been a sham and that no union could accept our proposal.

He told MPs: We assessed that given the fundamental nature of change, no union could accept it and therefore we chose not to consult because a consultation process would have been a sham.

We didnt want to put anybody through that.

We are compensating people in full and up-front for that decision.

Almost 800 staff were made redundant last Thursday, including seafarers operating P&O Ferries route from Hull to Rotterdam in The Netherlands.

New crew have been hired on wages that fall more than 3 an hour below the UK minimum wage.

The entirely different model P&O now has, is about half the price of the previous model, Mr Hebblethwaite said.

Commenting on whether he believed that was a fair wage or whether he saw it as modern day slavery, Mr Hebblethwaite said: The rates we are paying are in line or above ITF minimum standards and it is the operating model that the vast majority of operators across the globe work to.

So this is the competitive standard.

When it was pointed out that the rate was below minimum wage, which is 8.91 an hour for workers over the age of 23, Mr Hebblethwaite replied: Where we are governed by national minimum wage, we will absolutely pay national minimum wage.

This is an international seafaring model that is consistent with models throughout the globe and our competitors.

Mick Lynch, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), told MPs that P&O Ferries made flagrant breaches of the law.

He said: Theyve done it deliberately and theyve factored in what theyre going to have to pay for it.

He said the company is threatening and blackmailing its former employees, telling them they must sign a document or youll potentially get no award whatsoever, and you have to give up all of your legal rights.

He added: This is absolutely outrageous.

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P&O Ferries boss admits unions were not consulted over sackings and new crew paid below minimum wage - The Yorkshire Post

IF YOU WORRY about the polarization of intellectual life, youre certainly not the first. Consider Zera Yaicob, the Ethiopian philosopher who defended a form of intellectual freedom in his Hatata (Inquiry) of 1667. Zera Yaicob was torn between the religious sects that mingled in 17th-century East Africa. He engaged with Muslims, Coptic Christians, Jesuit missionaries, African Jews, and the local Oromo people, finding that they all said the same thing: My faith is right and those who believe in another faith believe in falsehood, and are the enemies of God. At once stimulated and bewildered, he wondered, Who would be the judge for such kind of an argument? [1]

It is easy to sympathize with Zera Yaicob when reading recent scholarship on the origins of modern science, which is riven by two orthodoxies in particular. One orthodoxy is that modern science was invented in early modern Europe. Important contributions came from other times and places, of course, but the decisive move toward modern science happened in Western Europe in the 17th century. The task of the historian of science is to understand how and why. If you disagree with this narrative, you may be accused of relativism, postmodernism, political correctness, or of not doing your job.

The second orthodoxy is that the first orthodoxy is wrong: science is global, not European. It took shape over many centuries, with the help of many cultures. To think otherwise is to buy into a myth about the inevitable rise of the West. The notion of the West is itself the product of recent geopolitics. The idea that science is Western is not just wrong, but wrong-headed. It is like a bad cold, or the Cold War. We just need to get over it.

Who would be the judge of such an argument? The two schools not only make different claims but make them in starkly different ways. The first school is old but cohesive. The second is young but diffuse, made up of many stories rather than one story. It is easy to see why. Writing a history of European science is hard enough, with five centuries to cover and many scientific disciplines to master. Writing a history that takes in the rest of the world is a political and methodological minefield. Doing this in a way that appeals to the general reader looks like a fools game.

James Poskett, a historian of science and technology, is no fool. His new book, Horizons, is superb. It runs from 1400 to 2000, from the construction of the Samarkand Observatory to the completion of the Human Genome Project. It covers the human sciences as well as the natural sciences, taking in medicine and engineering along the way and covering a great range of people, places, and predicaments. We learn about an Ottoman astronomer captured by pirates in the 16th century; a Tahitian chief charting the Pacific Ocean in the 18th century; a geneticist working to save his life in communist China. Inevitably, there are gaps: Australia, the Holy Roman Empire, economics, most of the earth sciences, experimental science before 1800, Africa after 1800. The book is under 400 pages after all (without footnotes), and so it does not purport to be complete, which would indeed be foolish.

Horizons is global not only in its geographical scope but also in its narrative technique. Poskett uses concrete examples to reveal connections and similarities between parts of the world that are usually studied separately. The Ottoman astronomer Taqi al-Din spent much of his youth bouncing around the Mediterranean Sea, from Cairo to Rome to Istanbul. He bounced around intellectually as well, translating Arabic works into Latin while he was in Rome and introducing European clocks to a new observatory in Istanbul. Some scientists stayed put, including Isaac Newton, a global mathematician who never left England. There he sat, spider-like, at the center of a web of travelers that stretched from Senegal to Peru. Other scientists were more like flies than spiders, trapped in global webs. The physicist Lev Landau made one of his most important theoretical breakthroughs while spending a year in one of Stalins prisons. The physician Graman Kwasi was equally remarkable. Born in West Africa around 1690, Kwasi discovered a treatment for malarial fever while working as a slave on a sugar plantation in the Dutch colony of Suriname.

But Horizons is not just a collection of global biographies. These are embedded in a grand narrative about the last 600 years of world history. First comes the expansion of Islamic empires in the vicinity of the Silk Road. Next comes European imperialism: the colonization of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and the exploration of the great expanses of Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. European empires became industrial in the 19th century, fueling nationalistic wars in the process. The 20th century was the age of ideology: fascists, communists, and anticolonialists staked their claims in the first half of the century; and decolonization and the Cold War dominated the second half. The book ends in the present, with the world in the grip of a new Cold War between China and the United States. The war in Ukraine, which broke out while I was writing this review, adds a tragic twist to the narrative.

Poskett links these geopolitical developments to intellectual ones, and much of his books originality lies in these linkages. The chapter on 19th-century biology, for example, is not simply a survey of the global reception of Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. It is an argument for the connection between biology, war, and nationalism, a connection captured in the phrase struggle for existence. Biology was a battlefield, with naturalists using martial metaphors in their theories and gathering specimens in the course of military expeditions. This was true across the globe: in Napoleonic Egypt, in the newly independent Argentina, in a Japan wracked by civil war, and in modernizing China. The titles of other chapters hint at similar arguments: Newtons slaves, Industrial experiments, Genetic states, and so on. This is not just a history of science. It is a history of the modern world seen through the lens of science.

At the same time, it is the story of the scientists who have been written out of history, in Posketts words. Their excision was a product of the imperial history that drove so much of modern science. Overcoming this history means many things. It means writing the East into the history of modern science rather than consigning it to an ancient or medieval past. It means closing the gap between Islamic astronomers such as Taqi al-Din and European ones such as Nicolaus Copernicus. It means seeing that Cold War science was about Japan, Mexico, and Israel, not just about the USA and the USSR. It means realizing that imperial science was often done by the victims of empire, such as the Peruvian Indians whose labor helped to prove Newtons theory of universal gravitation. These people were barely distinguishable from beasts, according to the French astronomer Charles-Marie de la Condamine. Yet the Frenchman relied on the astronomical expertise of these beasts in some of the most precise measurements done in the 18th century.

Indigenous knowledge is a major part of the book, but Poskett is no relativist. He does not say that science is just one form of knowledge among many other forms of knowledge. By science he means canonical topics like universal gravitation, natural selection, botanical classification, and molecular biology. The point is that the canon itself is global. As a result, Poskett is not afraid to praise the canon. He writes in terms of discoveries, breakthroughs, ingenious instruments, and keen scientific minds. He does not shy away from comparative judgments. The Aztecs were particularly advanced among American peoples in precolonial times; Russia seemed stuck in the past in the 17th century. This is a celebration of science as well as a critique of empire.

All this makes for a good story. But is it true? Or is it just another myth? There is no simple answer to this question. Horizons has several lines of argument, some more convincing than others. Poskett certainly shows that modern science was made by many people outside Europe who are undervalued in existing histories. He also shows that world history and global exchange are an excellent framework for understanding past science.

But he sometimes goes further. He writes that the Eurocentric story told by past historians is a myth. He also charges these historians with European exceptionalism. This suggests that there was nothing exceptional about Europe in the history of modern science. A different thesis is that Europe was exceptional, but mainly because of the wealth and power brought about by empire. A third thesis is that science develops when cultures come together and not when they stay apart.

These are all comparative claims. They compare Europe with the rest of the world, empire with other historical phenomena, and cultural exchange with cultural separation. To evaluate these claims, we need to see both sides of the comparison. The problem is that Horizons only shows one side of each comparison.

Take the two chapters on the Enlightenment. These open with the statement that we can better understand Enlightenment science by thinking about the rise of European empires. There is ample evidence for this in the ensuing pages, which link Newtonian physics to the slave trade, the colonization of the Americas, and the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. But there is no evidence for the much stronger claim a few pages later: that the rise of European empires best explains the science of the Enlightenment. To defend this claim, Poskett would need to review all the other explanations for the growth of 18th-century science, from coffee houses to cameralism. But the other explanations are barely mentioned here.

The same goes for cultural exchange. There are many illuminating examples of cultural exchange in Horizons, often centered on artifacts such as maps, books, and instruments. This creates the impression that science thrives on interactions between diverse cultures. On closer inspection, many of these exchanges hint at long periods of separation. European astronomy and Incan astronomy did meet in 1736, when La Condamine and his team took their measurements in Peru. But for all we know, that was the first and last meeting between these two astronomical cultures. Moreover, the periods of separation may help to explain why the exchange was so fruitful. Cultural exchange works because cultures are different, and they are different partly because they develop separately.

Another one-sided comparison involves 17th-century Europe. Yes, there is a section called The Scientific Revolution, 14501700. But as far as Europe is concerned, the narrative leaps from 1543, when Copernicus declared that the Earth goes around the sun, to 1687, when Newton explained why it does. The most talked-about decades in the history of European science are passed over in near-total silence. The chapter on Renaissance astronomy has nothing to say about the invention of the telescope or the discovery that planets move in elliptical orbits, two milestones that feature in any ordinary history of Renaissance astronomy. This makes sense if the aim is to valorize non-European scientists. But it makes no sense if the aim is to show that Europe was unexceptional. Arguments against exceptionalism cant just ignore the alleged exceptions. And arguments for the link between science and empire cant ignore 17th-century Europe. On the received view, Europe already led the world scientifically in 1700, a century before it led the world in political or economic terms. The received view may be false, but it deserves a better falsification.

On current evidence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Europe was exceptional after all. Chapter one of Horizons helps to explain why European natural history was distinctive: it was transformed by the new knowledge generated by the colonization of the Americas. Chapter two is a global survey of astronomy that contains many surprises, but nothing quite as novel as telescopes and elliptical orbits. The material on China does little to disturb the conventional view that Europe raced ahead of China in terms of scientific achievement after 1500, and that China has only just caught up. The chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries cover an amazingly diverse group of scientists who had one thing in common: they all or nearly all learned much of their science from institutions that were either in Europe or were modeled on institutions in Europe. Europe is a black hole in Horizons. It is barely visible, but everything seems to gravitate around it.

Why does this matter? Why do we feel the need to show that modern science owes as much to Tokyo and Timbuktu as it does to Paris and London? After all, there is no rush to show that all cultures have made equally important contributions to slavery, for example. This is presumably because we value science but not slavery. We assume that science is a mark of rationality and a source of material progress, a sort of IQ test for world cultures.

Horizons doesnt exactly support this assumption. It suggests that the main functions of science over the last 600 years have been to wage war, build empires, and rationalize racial prejudice. The book also suggests that any improvements that science has made to our understanding of the natural world are a historical accident. The narrative is driven by the interactions between individuals, nations, and empires. The narrative is not driven by the interactions between theory, experience, and mathematics. In the index there is a large entry on empire, but no entry on empiricism. Horizons has a lot to say about the politics of science, but little to say about the epistemology of science, and what it says about the former does not flatter science. This is a celebration of science that does not explain why science is worth celebrating.

Horizons shows the immense potential of global histories of science, but it also shows the continued need for other approaches. We need histories of science in Europe, because we need to know what happened inside the black hole. We need epistemic histories of science, because the value of science depends on its ability to understand the natural world. We also need relativist histories of science, because science is not the only way to be rational, and not always the best way. And we need national and regional histories, because cultural separation is as much a part of modern history as cultural exchange.

Let us remember Zera Yaicob. We need to decolonize history, but we also need to depolarize history. Only then will we get over the Cold War.

Michael Bycroft is an assistant professor in History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick.

[1] Zera Yaicob, God, Faith, and the Nature of Knowledge, in African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 457461, on 457. Quoted in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism (Duke University Press, 2008), 128.

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Arguing About the Origins of Science - lareviewofbooks