How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life.
It’s a sweltering April afternoon in Bhaunti village, about an hour’s drive from the heart of Kanpur, India. Inside a large hall, shaded from the harsh sun, the air is thick with the scent of marigold and rose. Groups of women, dressed in bright cotton sarees and salwar suits, work with quiet concentration. Some sit in circles, carefully sorting flower offerings collected from nearby temples; others pluck delicate petals with practiced hands. At one end, a few women lift heavy tubs of freshly washed blooms, carrying them outside to spread on large sheets, where the sun will slowly draw out their moisture, preparing them for the next stage of transformation.
Inside the factory, 38-year-old Preity Mishra moves with quiet efficiency, neatly packing incense boxes with an ease that comes from years of practice. She first joined the factory seven years ago, after unexpectedly losing her previous job, where she had worked for nine long years. At first, Preity admits, she was hesitant. Preity, along with the other women, works for Phool, a company that converts flower waste into incense sticks, cones, essential oils, and dyes. “I thought it would be dirty work,” she recalls, brushing a speck of sandalwood dust from her sleeve. But her perspective quickly changed once she learned where the flowers came from. “When I found out the waste came from temples, I began to see it differently,” she says. “These flowers are sacred and offered in prayer. It felt like I was giving them a second life, which is noble work.”
Preity Mishra inspecting a box of incense sticks.
The story of Phool traces back to 2016, when Ankit Agarwal, a computer engineer turned entrepreneur, accompanied a visiting friend on a trip to Kanpur’s ghats along the Ganga River. It was the time of Makar Sankranti, an Indian festival marked by ritual river dips. Though the water appeared visibly polluted, devotees continued to bathe as part of the tradition. “My friend began asking me questions about the purity of the water, why people still took dips despite the pollution,” Ankit recalls. “I realized I didn’t have the answers. In the meantime, a huge tractor of flower waste came and was dumped into the river.”
That moment planted the first seed of what would eventually become Phool, which means “flower” in Hindi. “I returned to my job, but I couldn’t focus. I was working, but I wasn’t content,” Ankit says, sitting in his office in Kanpur. “I eventually quit and came back to research how this flower waste could be reduced or stopped entirely from polluting our rivers.”
India, with its countless festivals and year-round celebrations, generates a significant amount of solid waste, including an estimated 800 million tons of flower waste per year. As many of these flowers are grown using pesticides and insecticides, when this floral waste is dumped into water bodies, it begins to decay, producing a foul odor and contributing to serious water pollution—much like what Ankit and his friend witnessed in the Ganga River.
After he returned home to Kanpur, Ankit began crunching the numbers, calculating how many temples were in the region, how much flower waste was generated daily, and the scale at which it was being dumped. The results were staggering. According to government data, there are about 108,000 temples and mosques in India where flowers are offered every day, before being dumped in landfills or bodies of water, contributing significantly to the country’s water pollution and ecological damage.
A worker scatters flower petals on a plastic sheet to help them dry.
Ankit began reaching out to temples, hoping to convince them to hand over their floral waste so that it might have a second life. “It was difficult to convince them,” he says. “Flowers offered at temples hold deep religious significance, so naturally, there was hesitation.” The temples weren’t resistant out of indifference, but an abundance of caution. “They were sincere in their concerns,” Ankit acknowledges. “They wanted to know why I wanted the flowers and what exactly I intended to do with them.”
Once Ankit succeeded in securing the flower waste, he spent the next several months immersed in research, exploring different ways the discarded blooms could be transformed into something meaningful. “I spent around eight months studying how this waste could be turned into compost or used in other sustainable ways,” he says. Then, he had a breakthrough. “Incense sticks are usually made from charcoal,” he recalls thinking. “Why not try making them from temple flower waste instead?”
Ankit and his co-founder, Prateek Kumar, began operating out of IIT Kanpur, slowly putting their idea into action. Every day, Ankit would ride his two-wheeler to find a daily-wage laborer to help with tasks like sorting flower waste and basic processing. But the pair struggled to find reliable help—a new worker would show up each day, and rarely would anyone return, even when Ankit personally asked them to come back. It became clear that if the project was to grow, they needed a more stable workforce.
Then, by chance, a woman came to their office one morning looking for work, and Ankit offered her a day’s job. As with many others, he asked her to return the next day—and to his surprise, she did.
A group of women rolling incense sticks by hand.
While they worked side by side, he started a conversation. Could she come regularly? Could she help bring in other women like her? She readily agreed. “It would be better to come here and work with flowers,” she told him, “than to go to seven or eight homes every morning to clean toilets. Even then, we don’t always get paid—just some leftover food or old clothes.”
Ankit was struck by her words. The next day, they visited nearby neighborhoods together, and soon, 35 women had joined the initiative. He trained them, helped them get their Aadhaar cards for the first time, assisted them in opening bank accounts, and taught them how to use mobile phones—all small but powerful steps toward economic empowerment and independence.
“It wasn’t easy at all,” Ankit says. “But we conducted a three-day workshop to teach them the basics. I didn’t want them to remain stuck in the informal sector. I wanted to bring them into the formal workforce, with dignity, stability, and skill.”
A worker monitors one of the factory's machines.
This commitment is fundamental to Phool’s success, and remains an important part of their work culture. “When we established the company, one thing was clear: There would be transparency. That’s why you’ll see there are no walls in the office—just glass partitions to divide the teams,” Ankit explains. “We also made a conscious decision to ensure that the women working with us have a clear path to grow. That’s why we move them from sorting to incense stick making, and then to packaging—so they not only feel a sense of progression but also develop leadership qualities in the process.”
Another important aspect, he shares, is supporting his employees in sending their children back to school. “We currently have 500 people working with us, and 490 of them are women,” Ankit says. “Around 60% of them have enrolled their children back in school. Our mission is to support all of them so that [over the next few years], 5,000 children return to classrooms. This is something we’re intentionally working on, even if we don’t speak about it publicly.”
As for the company itself, Ankit and his team remain dedicated to product innovation and exploring new possibilities with flower waste. Recently, the team even succeeded in creating sustainable “leather” from discarded flowers.
Workers dividing and sorting incense cones for packing.
Nachiket Kuntla, who heads the research and development division at Phool, believes this innovation could be a major breakthrough for the leather industry and the broader sustainable market. “We spent a good 7–8 years researching and experimenting with this idea,” says Nachiket. “We’ve now developed a product that is sustainable and matches leather in terms of texture, quality, and feel. We’ll be launching a pilot product in collaboration with a fashion brand by the end of this year.”
Phool’s journey is a reminder that sustainability doesn’t have to come at the cost of tradition—it can actually grow from it. What began as a simple act of questioning river pollution has now bloomed into a movement that empowers women, preserves faith, and protects the environment. As the world looks for other, cleaner ways forward, perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves: What else are we throwing away that could bloom again?
[post_title] => The Sacred Cycle
[post_excerpt] => How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life.
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How women artisans in Kashmir are reconnecting with an old tradition to weave new hope.
Every morning, as the sun rises over the old city of Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir, 48-year-old Rafiqa Ramzan steps out of her modest home and walks through the maze-like alleys of her neighborhood to catch the bus to work. On the way, she prays at the famous nearby Sufi shrine, Hazrat Makhdoom Sahib (RA), for her 17-year-old son's well-being and the stability of her job.
Ramzan, a single mother, works as a katanvajian—a woman who spins pashmina (cashmere) wool—a craft she learned from her mother when she was just 10 years old. In her youth, she would often compete and spin alongside her friends in her locality, and remembers the soft background noise of the radio, filling the air with old Kashmiri songs and folktales. The job, however, wasn’t sustainable: She continued spinning in adulthood, making it her livelihood, but by her early thirties, the meager wages forced her to give it up. After abandoning her spinning wheel (called a "yinder" in Kashmiri) for over a decade, she only returned to her roots in early 2023 after joining Zaevyul.
Named for the Kashmir word for “delicate,” Zaevyul is a first of its kind artist-centric initiative that operates as a small factory, helping women revive and recreate the region's heritage pashmina shawls. Wajahat Qazi, a writer-turned-entrepreneur, created the initiative in 2022 as a for-profit social enterprise aimed at reviving the historic craft and providing dignified livelihoods to local artisans. Originally, Qazi distributed carded pashmina to women to spin at home, but logistical challenges prompted him to bring the entire production process in-house, something unusual within the industry. However, he soon found that the shift not only improved quality control, but also fostered trust among the women, many of whom come from conservative families.
“It was difficult initially to draw women to this proposition, but once they saw the workspace and the respect they were given, it took off,” he says.
Wajahat Qazi, founder of Zaevyul, providing instruction to a spinner. (Shoaib Mir)
Known as “soft gold,” pashmina was first introduced to Kashmir by the fifteenth century ruler Zain-ul-Abidin, affectionately called Budshah or Great King by his subjects. His reign left a lasting influence on the region's socio-economic fabric, one of which was inviting skilled artisans from Persia (modern-day Iran) to share their expertise with the local population. This included the rigorous techniques of spinning pashmina shawls, still practiced today throughout the region and the fashion world, from Brunello Cucinelli to Louis Vuitton and Hermes.
Over time, pashmina became synonymous with Kashmir's identity. And the women of the region have been an integral part of shaping the industry for centuries, as they are typically its leading artisans. But beginning in 2006, the craft became badly impacted by the influx of cheaper, machine-made imitations, degrading the market for hand-spun pashmina. According to Kashmir's Handicraft Department, there were an estimated 377,000 artisans in the region at the time, nearly half of them women. But as a result of the industry’s decline, dwindling incomes forced thousands of people to leave the craft and seek alternative livelihoods, Ramzan included.
"Before joining Zaevyul, I faced many difficulties,” she says. “I relied on my brothers, and seeing how everything is overpriced broke me inside. The thought of being a burden began to take a toll on my mental health. But by the Almighty's grace, I learned about Zaevyul, which changed my life.”
When she first began earning a living from spinning, Ramzan would take home 1500 to 2000 Rupees per month. The time and effort she invested in the labor-intensive spinning process did not match the meager remuneration she received, which also wasn’t enough to support her son. But now, at Zaeyvul, she earns 8000 to 10000 Rupees per month, and has found so much more than a higher income.
“Before, I would spin pashmina alone at home, but we share our joys and sorrows here,” she says with a smile. “This sense of community has started healing me from within and increased my productivity. Being here gives me a sense of empowerment like someone has given wings to a crippled bird."
Today, Zaevyul employs 40 people, including 30 women, who work as spinners, weavers, and administrative staff, all of whom operate out of a spacious, well-lit karkhana—a manufacturing house specifically designed for artisans. For Qazi, the entire process and purpose of Zaevyul is also multilayered.
“I was struck by the need to create something meaningful,” he says. “My focus turned to the handicraft sector, particularly pashmina, a craft historically sustained by a gendered division of labor—women spun and carded the delicate fibers, while men wove them into luxurious shawls.”
Meemah (who opted to go only by her first name), like Ramzan, also works at Zaevyul as a spinner, and similarly notes the financial stability the venture has given her, alongside improving her mental health and offering her a sense of direction.
“I have often been at the receiving end of the turmoil we’re living in,” she says. “There have been days where I used to feel entirely depressed…I wasn’t myself, and spinning pashmina takes patience. I had to stop. But after learning about this place and joining it, I have been helped a lot, both mentally and financially.”
She shares this as she meticulously spins her pashmina wool in its original white color.
“I pray that we get many more orders and that more women join us. It’s a relief to work in an office-like setting,” she continues. “This place is more than just a workplace. It's a place where we've met other women and formed a community. We're not lonely here. It's a 10-to-4 job with breaks for prayers, meals, and rest.”
Rafiqa Ramzan (in green) spins pashmina alongside her friends at work.(Shoaib Mir)
Zaevyul is especially conscious of honoring this work-life balance, and ensuring the safety of its employees. With approximately 700,000 troops deployed in the region, Kashmir is one of the world's most militarized conflict zones. The ratio of military personnel to civilians is particularly striking, with one soldier for every 30 locals, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a UK-based think tank. This makes everyday commuting for work a tedious endeavor. But Zaevyul provides transportation to alleviate this difficulty, relieving the potential stress it may cause for its workers. Every day, a bus ferries 30 women artisans from different parts of Srinagar to Zeevyul, located in the city’s outskirts.
"Given the political instability in Kashmir, it wouldn't have been possible for me to travel back and forth here without bus service,” Ramzan says as she boards the bus with other artisans to head home. “The environment here is safe, providing us all with a sense of security, for us and our families. Moreover, working here has given me a perfect work-life balance, which wasn't possible when I was spinning day and night alone at home."
Qazi notes that his employees’ continued “economic empowerment” is crucial to maintaining Zaevyul. Hand-spinning pashmina remains a labor-intensive process, and the wages must justify the cost. It also requires immense skill and patience for women who are typically largely responsible for the bulk of household work.
“If you’re not paying them well, it doesn’t make sense for them to dedicate their time to this craft,” he says.
The challenges, however, are manifold. The cost of hand-spun pashmina is significantly higher than machine-spun alternatives, limiting its reach. And while pashmina enjoys global brand recognition, the premium price of handmade products restricts its affordability. This has led to a decline in demand for hand-spun pashmina, which continues to push artisans out of the craft, some never returning.
Despite these hurdles, Qazi is committed to his vision of Zaevyul, continuing to operate on the principles of empathy, authenticity, and ethical production, all while reviving this pristine craft and creating a broader, positive socio-economic impact. It has certainly made a material and monetary difference to all who work there, but also offers them pride and dignity in the work itself.
Looking ahead, Qazi dreams of expanding Zaevyul. The current workspace can accommodate up to 200 women, but financial constraints remain a barrier. His next challenge will be to identify and connect with new markets, conscious consumers, and ethical buyers who are passionate about supporting marginalized artisans and craftspeople.
“Our premise is to revive the craft in its most authentic form and help more women and weavers,” he says.
Like the women he employs, for Qazi, Zaewuyl is more than a business—it’s a movement to preserve Kashmir’s cultural heritage while empowering its artisans, one thread at a time.
[post_title] => Threading the Needle
[post_excerpt] => How women artisans in Kashmir are reconnecting with an old tradition to weave new hope.
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How the rush back to the office hurts disabled workers—and everyone else.
It has long been possible to shift how we work in the United States, and all it took was a global pandemic and a massive sea change that personally affected white, middle class cis men for it to happen. “When everything first shut down in March 2020, my husband's employer was quick to find a way to allow their employees to work from home, including staggering times for people to come in and get their work computers,” Karistina Lafae, an author and digital media creator, remarks wryly. It was a stark contrast to the hostility she faced when she'd received a similar accommodation. “I got so much more work done at home than I could ever get done in the office,” she says, only to be pushed out of the workplace as a result.
Lafae has multiple disabilities, including Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, usually just abbreviated as ME/CFS (and infamously referred to as “yuppie flu”), which make it easier for her to do her job when she’s able to work remotely. But prior to the onset of the pandemic, she experienced jealousy and resentment from coworkers over the same kinds of work from home accommodations that her husband and millions of other workers would later benefit from.
While many don’t think of it this way, widespread remote work during the pandemic was functionally a disability accommodation, a phenomenon Brooklyn Law Professor Shirley Lin refers to as “mass accommodations.” It was also one some disabled people, like Lafae, had been requesting for decades, only to face skepticism and denial, inadvertently highlighting a struggle over who deserves to be included in the workplace, and who is ultimately doomed to be shut out. For her and many other disabled workers, the pandemic marked a strange inflection point: Seemingly overnight, millions of white collar workers could work from home in order to protect themselves from the risk of infection and cooperate with mandatory shelter in place orders, normalizing a human-first work culture they’d long been fighting for, but had frequently been denied.
Still, the change was accompanied by arguments and pushback that felt very familiar to disabled people seeking accommodations, revealing deep-seated fears and insecurities on the part of supervisors and upper management, and deeper flaws within American work culture at large. These arguments, like the pandemic, are not over, and the stakes for workers remain high. With the number of disabled people on the rise, and the needs of people with long covid becoming a cultural flashpoint, it’s critical to engage with why this might be the case, and to explore the rights of disabled workers and the origins of the social attitudes that have made their position so precarious in the first place. Not doing so would leave discussions about working conditions fundamentally hollow, particularly as work culture returns to “normal,” because discrimination that starts with disabled workers rarely stops there.
The United States is a place where productivity—or at least beliefs about productivity levels— is king, even though the nation is not in fact the most productive, despite its brutal work culture. Any perceived threat to our “efficiency” or “productivity” must be neutralized, and with it, any worker who might be deemed less efficient or less productive, something that has often disproportionately affected disabled workers. Prior to the pandemic, and in the rush to fill offices again after shelter in place orders were lifted, working at home—a very common workplace accommodation—was equated with “goofing off,” with managers implying that remote workers weren’t as productive and would take advantage of their employers. Workers might sleep in, slip off work early, play with their kids, stretch ten-minute breaks into hours, or spend more time gossiping in Slack than filing TPS reports (even though they might do the latter in an office, anyway).
Supervisors and members of the C-suite placed in-person office work on a pedestal as they tried to force people back into the office, even referring to it as “return to work,” arguing it was critical to work in person for group cohesion and collaboration. In tense all-staffs, deep schisms emerged between junior staff and higher-ups who hotly insisted that being remote undermined company functions. In fact, research suggests the opposite: Fully remote and hybrid schedules, that allow workers to select the conditions that work best for them, improve retention—saving companies substantial sums in hiring and onboarding—and are also characterized by more productivity, with the New York Times referring to the pandemic shift as a “productivity boom.”
This is true for all workers, regardless of ability, with productivity climbing an astonishing 11.2 percent in 2020—partially because of the mass loss of low-paying jobs, which left fewer people doing more high-wage jobs. But remote work clearly still played a role in the productivity boost, and not just for disabled people. Many former office workers enjoyed saving time and stress related to commuting, for example, and found it easier to lead their lives when they had more control over where and how they worked. But for disabled white-collar workers in particular, the opportunity to work remotely during the pandemic opened up a new understanding of what work could look and feel like, as they saw the personal benefits of being able to manage their own energy levels, pain, and somatic concerns while still participating in the workforce—something that, previously, was either routinely denied to them or required a tremendous amount of effort to obtain.
Once the option was taken away, many felt they were back to square one.
“I get a pit in my stomach that these things I’m asking for that are extremely reasonable are making it so that I’m being discriminated against or put in a pool that’s ‘Casey can’t do this job, she doesn’t have the energy,’” says Casey Doherty, a Washington, D.C.-based disabled woman early in her career. “[But] I’m an adult and I know what I need to do to be able to work still.”
Women like Lafae and Doherty have chronic illnesses that are sometimes referred to as “contested” or “medically unexplained,” making them a part of a subset of disabled workers who can’t always “show” their disabilities to employers when seeking an accommodation, but who benefited greatly when remote work became the norm. Contested illnesses include fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, multiple chemical sensitivity, Lyme disease, and, more recently, long covid. They are also sometimes treated by society and the medical profession as “psychosomatic”—by which people mean “fake,” and not its actual definition, “a product of complicated interactions between the mind and body.”
These conditions have an unclear etiology paired with sometimes erratic, frustrating, and very real manifestations for patients, who tend to acquire lengthy, labyrinthine medical records as a result. Because of this, people who experience contested illnesses may be labeled “chronic illness fakers” manufacturing their distress for attention, a phenomenon writer Anna Hamilton refers to as a “politics of disbelief.” Notably, they are also more common in women, with Black, Indigenous, and Brown women bearing the brunt—the very same women who are less likely to be taken seriously when they present their symptoms to a doctor, thanks to the pernicious presence of medical racism. Members of these communities are also much more likely to experience misdiagnoses, sometimes with fatal consequences.
The medical establishment’s distrust of these women often validates societal attitudes at large: If even a doctor, the ultimate authority figure, doesn’t think someone is experiencing a real problem, why should anyone else?
Disability does not occur in a vacuum. Disabled women and disabled people of color are profoundly affected by their experiences of race and gender. These differences in experience can also be amplified by contested illnesses because of their seemingly invisible nature. Workers cannot necessarily point to specific test results, particular symptoms, or medical histories to “prove” their illnesses to employers, which means that, for example, racist attitudes about “laziness” can collide with a worker’s self-reported symptoms. The needs of a disabled worker may also vary day to day: On one day, they may have the energy and focus to allow them to pass as non-disabled; on another, they may be confined to bed. Some also need access to stigmatized care, such as opioids for management of chronic pain. All of this sets them up for skepticism from a culture that is already primed to distrust disabled people, women, and people of color; that skepticism then feeds back into attitudes from authorities in the workplace who contend that disabled people are lying or exaggerating their needs.
All forms of disablism are harmful in the workplace—and beyond—but a closer examination of the specific attitudes that surround contested illnesses is merited, especially in ostensibly progressive circles, if we want to have any hope of eradicating it. While those on the left often attempt to display positive change and evolution in the way they address the disability community, contested illnesses are still treated with disdain and disbelief—including, sometimes, by fellow disabled people who attempt to draw lines between themselves and the chronic illness community. This creates an inherent lack of solidarity that can leave chronically ill people out in the cold while ultimately undermining everyone’s equitable access to society.
Intergenerational work by the disability community, who have put their own bodies on the line in the fight for civil rights, has created a legal framework of protections and supports for disabled workers. However, this framework is still scrambling to understand people with invisible illnesses and their needs, both at an individual and an institutional level. In the United States, disabled workers are entitled to “reasonable” workplace accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some workplaces provide accommodations via a very flexible process rooted in the needs of the worker, while others take full advantage of an “interactive process” that starts with an accommodation request and can require weeks or months of negotiation and documentation. This process can be so frustrating, demoralizing, and infantilizing that some disabled workers give up entirely. It’s also often even more complicated for those with contested illnesses. This is very much by design.
“I’m spending so much money just to get a letter [from my doctor] that says, ‘Casey’s sick,’” Doherty says, describing the onerous repetition behind a hard-fought remote work accommodation, which requires her to obtain a new letter every three months for her employer. It’s hardly a unique experience, but it’s one that can be especially trying for people with chronic illnesses, who are more likely to face requirements to continually recertify.
While these issues may pertain to disability specifically, they don’t stop there. Disbelief by default creates barriers to inclusion that require a cultural shift to dismantle, and the tolerance of distrust for one class of workers also opens the door for distrusting all. It’s a slippery slope: Are menstruating people, for example, lying about or exaggerating painful periods? Are parents overstating their need to leave work on time to pick up children from school or childcare facilities? All workers deserve access to the conditions that allow them to do their best work, but this requires a working environment that believes all workers when they share what those conditions are.
No diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, employee resource group, sensitivity training, or interactive process can make up for the fundamental belief that disabled people are not telling the truth, and that, by extension, their needs in the workplace are a product of attention-seeking or laziness. But if all disabled people are positioned as liars, the particular viciousness that underlies responses to chronic illness is especially sharp for a community already culturally treated as “fakers,” or people attempting to exploit the system in some way.
Unfortunately, the notion that accommodations can be highly customized to the individual is novel, and the more abstract an accommodation feels, the less it is trusted, and not just by management, but also by colleagues. Disabled workers across the board routinely report frustrating encounters with coworkers who question or disrespect their accommodations, sometimes with support or affirmation from the supervisors who should be curbing such behavior. This hostility feeds the rise of bitter attitudes about disabled workers somehow “getting away with something” or receiving “special treatment”—often from people who don’t need these same accommodations themselves, and who aren’t materially impacted by a workplace’s decision to provide them. Those with chronic illnesses can experience this more acutely.
“People say ‘I know you’re doing your work,’” Rosie says, who works in clinical research in the Midwest and is using an alias to protect her identity. “This has always been very interesting to me, that I’m not one of ‘them.’”
Rosie, like other disabled workers—and not just those in the chronic illness community—reports a constant pressure to perform in order to continue to avoid being “one of them,” fearing she might otherwise inadvertently contribute to perpetuating disablism in the workplace. A disabled worker may also be more likely to push themselves past their limits or suffer in silence, similarly fearing disbelief and subsequent discrimination while also feeling as though they represent the entire disability community, especially since disabled workers are often compared to each other in a workplace, in an industry, and in general.
In a culture where disability identity has become memeified and the notion of “acceptance” is pedaled in a never-ending slew of awareness days and inspirational memoirs, there’s a distinct lack of action and understanding when it comes to making meaningful structural changes that might actually change this. And these changes shouldn’t just be for office workers: In order to safely work from home during the pandemic, white-collar workers were, of course, supported by an army of “essential workers”—health care providers, grocery store clerks, power plant employees, and many others who needed to work on site to keep society functioning—for whom remote work was an abstract concept, but who still needed accommodations of their own such as social distancing and PPE to do their jobs safely. For them, the fight over remote work while they put their lives on the line for basic protections was a reminder of how undervalued their lives and bodies—many also disabled, thanks to occupational segregation—are under capitalism. If we want to make meaningful structural changes, they must be inclusive of all workers.
The brief shift in office culture that emerged during the pandemic invited the possibility of something greater: What if all workplaces had flexible accommodations to support workers? What if these accommodations weren’t hard-fought, but simply part of how the workplace operates? What if we valued all labor, and laborers, in the same way we protected the lives of people working remotely during the pandemic? Rather than being exceptional, remote work could be one among a number of examples of disability inclusion in the workplace, protecting disabled sanitation workers and booksellers, nurses, and bus drivers, too.
If the pandemic represented a moment when it might be possible to reframe the way we view accommodations and disability in the workplace, the window of opportunity seems to be rapidly closing. The white men are back in the office, and they’ve dragged everyone else with them, in a series of bitter workplace-by-workplace fights that have only further illuminated the need for structural culture change. Office culture is not designed for the benefit of workers: It is for the bosses, and capitalism. The push to get butts back in office seats has again called upon erroneous beliefs about productivity and forming social connections as its supposed driving force, but has also revealed an economy heavily dependent on real estate investment, with offices an industry unto itself that faltered when companies started scaling back.
Instead of reaping the benefits that downsizing their premises might bring, most companies would rather double down on their investments in property than actually invest in the well-being of the people who work there. In the process, workers who still need remote accommodations are now facing escalating resistance that, in some cases, is forcing them out of the workforce altogether, particularly in the case of those who need to continue masking and avoiding public spaces to protect themselves. Allowing this to happen is in itself a form of disablism, because at best, it suggests an inherent distrust of disabled workers and their needs; and at worst, a belief that disabled workers are somehow more disposable than their non-disabled peers. Neither are acceptable, and both are incredibly harmful to all workers, whether or not non-disabled workers realize it; especially when accommodations can potentially benefit an entire workplace—as seen in the case of remote work and offshoots such as hybrid schedules and flex time.
Fighting disablism in the workplace requires going against the politics of disbelief; cultivating cross-community support; and proactively defending disabled workers of all backgrounds and experiences, on-site and off, acknowledging that remote work is only one example of an effective accommodation. Without these support systems, disabled workers will continue to experience the same hostility women like Lafae did—a resentment that some disabled workers say is intensifying again as workplaces roll back remote work benefits. Lafae ultimately turned to freelance work to accommodate her needs, setting her own terms of employment. But she remains a firm believer that no disabled person should be held back at work by their accommodation needs, and that workplaces overall benefit from disability inclusion by fostering an environment where accommodations are rooted in company culture, and, critically, not up for debate.
That culture shift doesn’t have to be hard, and it can have a profound impact on disabled workers that helps them do their best work and lead their best lives, benefiting them and everyone around them.
“When I was forced to work in an office around other people all the time, I tried all kinds of things to counter the incredible drain on my energy and psyche as a whole,” says James, a high-level employee at a large international company who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy. “I'd take really long bathroom breaks, ‘mindfulness breaks,’ ‘prayer breaks,’ lock myself in an open meeting room for a half hour or so, all of that. But it wasn't until I was able to work from home, in a comfortable, quiet, controlled setting, that I realized I was actually good at my job, that the work I did was high-quality and worthy of praise. I had never felt that in a workplace before.”
A culture shift from a disability-hostile working world for chronically ill people, and disabled people more broadly, to one in which disabled workers are treated with dignity and respect, however, also requires reckoning with a poor historical record on chronic illnesses and disablism at large, and all of the attitudes that feed into it. These include devaluing Black women’s pain, attributing many women’s very real physical symptoms to “hysteria” or “neurasthenia,” and insisting that it should be possible for people to bootstrap their way out of disability. And enacting this change necessitates solidarity across different categories of disability, and a more expansive view of disability culture on the part of the left. Without it, all workers will continue to suffer, disabled or not.
[post_title] => Who Do Workplaces Actually Accommodate?
[post_excerpt] => How the rush back to the office hurts disabled workers—and everyone else.
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Since October, over 100 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the IDF. They deserve our endurance—and our diligence.
War rages on in the months since Hamas’ assault against Israel and its ongoing retaliatory punishment of the blockaded Gaza Strip. It has been agonizing to witness. As of May, Israeli military actions are estimated to have killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced from their homes. A quarter of the population—more than half a million people— are at imminent risk of catastrophic famine, a number projected to surpass one million by July. For the average outside observer, myself fully included, it is impossible to track the dizzying onslaught of information emerging from the warzone without feeling some degree of despair, and even harder to do so with reliable accuracy. Social media is awash with falsehoods, mainstream American media demonstrably biased, and foreign press barred from entering Gaza independently. Further preventing vital access to information is the disproportionate number of Palestinian journalists who have been killed during the conflict so far, particularly compared to other instances of conflict reporting: Since October 7, at least 105 Palestinian journalists and media personnel have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), more than any other country at war.
At the moment, Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter—and also one of the most consequential. As this war continues, it only becomes clearer to me that we must do everything in our power to protect these journalists and their work.
Since the war’s beginning, now the deadliest conflict of the 21st century, I’ve been reflecting on the word “indiscriminate,” on what it highlights and hides. It’s the word most reached for when attempting to describe the scale of civilian destruction in Gaza, a blanket term that fails to capture its intentionality in full. If you are well-versed in international human rights law, you know there are rules that distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate military actions, and these rules dictate what makes a death “indiscriminate.” These rules are governed by principles of proportionality: Warfare cannot result in the loss of civilian life excessive to the marginal military advantage it might achieve. Translated for the layperson, warfare is not open season, and a warzone is not a shooting range. Measures must be taken to mitigate civilian casualties. But even casual observers of this war have largely come to an uncomplicated understanding: It is difficult to describe what is happening in Gaza as anything but indiscriminate. Too many children are being killed. Too many civilians. Too many aid workers. Too many medical staff. Simply put, too many protected classes of noncombatants.
In the case of journalists killed, however, the word “indiscriminate” also obscures something alarming. It’s an axiom of conflict reporting that death is an occupational hazard. But what is happening to journalists in Gaza goes beyond the normal range of risk. The watchdog group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has decried the behavior of the IDF, declaring this war “the deadliest conflict for journalists it has recorded since it started collecting data,” with more journalists “killed in the first three months of the war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” The CPJ has also brought charges against the IDF for the alleged killing of journalists’ families as retribution for critical reporting. And although Israel denies deliberately targeting members of the media—a war crime—they have been sharply criticized by the UN for failing to ensure their protection, and for failing to create real or meaningful safety measures to prevent further deaths.
They’ve also openly attacked the media in other ways, and not just in their attempts to ban it. Journalists are noncombatants protected by international law, and their reporting serves a fundamental public interest. They must be able to report freely and without fear of retaliation, not just for the sake of a free press, but more importantly, to provide Gazans access to life-saving information. This work has been made all the more difficult by Israel’s targeted destruction of the infrastructure necessary to disseminate it. We tend to forget that the internet is rooted in the physical, and that direct attacks on journalists aren’t the only way to measure acts of aggression against the media. Cables, cell towers, internet and telecom networks; all these components are necessary for a story to reach the rest of the world. But many have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, causing communications systems to collapse—and what the world cannot see dies in the dark.
With telecommunications compromised, on-the-ground journalists have collectively turned to social media as the primary vehicle for their work. It is, in many ways, their last connection to the outside world, and the outside world’s last connection with Gaza. Using donated eSIMs and shared phone chargers as lifelines, Palestinian journalists have fearlessly persisted in sharing what the Israeli government seemingly does not want us to see. But with such high stakes, I’ve found myself thinking about how we can engage most ethically with their work when our main platform for consuming it—social media—has the power to do as much, if not more, harm as it does good.
Much has been rightly criticized about the pernicious role of social media in disseminating misinformation over the years. Social media is designed to sustain users’ attention in order to maximize advertising revenue, encouraging and rewarding us for sharing whatever posts elicit the most engagement—regardless of accuracy or potential for harm. But over the years, it has also become the internet’s town square; an accessible means of sharing information and finding first person perspectives that fill the gaps mainstream media often leaves behind. It would be reductive to cast social media as simply a peddler of falsehoods, particularly when it comes to what is occurring in Gaza. Social media now plays the role of historical record, collecting and preserving invaluable primary source material from journalists and civilians alike.
As users of these platforms, particularly for Americans, it should be our duty to bear witness responsibly—which, at minimum, means utilizing basic media literacy and being mindful of what we choose to post and share. According to the Pew Research Center, half of U.S. adults get their news from social media at least some of the time; but four in ten of those same adults cite inaccuracy as their biggest concern when doing so. At a time of extreme and unrelenting dehumanization, social media has an outsized influence on the way this conflict has been interpreted abroad, and what we choose to share matters. For the ordinary online user, there is an almost emotional peer-pressure to rapidly engage on social media in the face of tragedy and injustice. Posting, after all, can be a necessary catharsis. We post in spite of and because of our utter helplessness in a world that seems indifferent to large-scale human suffering, railing against the seeming futility of our protests. In this case, Palestinians have also explicitly asked us to do it, to bear witness to their suffering, to not allow them to be forgotten, and to tell their stories of joy and resilience—largely via social media. Journalists, too, have made it clear: Our continual engagement with their work is what motivates them to keep reporting in the face of this incalculable tragedy. But when the abstract act of sharing online has direct consequences on real human lives, it becomes essential that we treat it with care.
To be clear, I’m notadvising you to stop posting, or even to post less. On the contrary, please post, please amplify, please share—so long as it’s done with a critical eye to impact. In moments of crisis, it can become easy to slip into what might be called pathos posting, posting that comes from the gut and not the mind. I see it in my followers and I, too, feel its lure. It’s the instant, unthinking tap to repost when confronted with images of the latest unbearable atrocity. It’s the incredibly human impulse to alchemize all our anguish, grief, and rage into action, however small it might be. Little to no caution is exercised in checking for doctored footage, manipulated video, or false contexts. In fact, the emotional weight behind these posts leads to an unwillingness to entertain the possibility of error or your own complicity in the potential spread of misinformation. Cries of caution are met with accusations of disloyalty. This unforgiving attitude siphons nuance and compassion from the public discourse, and further silences attempts at honest reporting. It also puts the people most affected by this conflict at risk of greater harm. Researchers and watchdog groups warn that in this moment of hair-trigger violence, misinformation will result in greater acts of aggression and potential escalations of violence against innocent civilians. We should be doing everything in our power not to contribute to it.
Social media has the potential to bring out the best of our online selves, but so often instead summons our worst, most tribal, unreflective, and hardened. To honor the Palestinian journalists that are risking life and limb to report (only to not even be honored by name), I believe that we can and must push ourselves to engage with their work in ways that are principled, empathetic, and judicious. We achieve this by holding ourselves to account, and asking simple, but difficult, questions: Why are we sharing this? Is it from a reliable source? If the post contains misinformation, could someone believing it result in harm to someone else?
Right now, caution can feel impotent and vastly unequal to the scale of the human tragedy unfolding. It feels right to post totalizing messages of condemnation and rage without a second thought. But this online posturing is myopic and counter-productive: Civilians, including journalists, are not served by misinformation that foments further aggression. I know that it can be tiring to constantly separate fact from fiction, but as the Palestinian-American activist Hala Alyan put it, we owe Gaza endurance. When language and rhetoric pose existential threats to the safety and security of Palestinians and Israelis alike, there is a moral obligation to do better. To not engage indiscriminately. The duty of the journalist is to clarify the stakes; the duty of the reader is to respect them. But when journalists are literally putting their lives on the line to report from Gaza, we owe them more than our respect. It can be challenging to thread the needle of engaging with emotionally charged content while remaining discerning. It can be hard to treat posts with intelligence and sensitivity; and impossible to sniff out bad faith actors among the good. All these are tasks easier described than accomplished, but this doesn’t mean we should cease our efforts to achieve them. We have to try for the journalists risking their lives to report, and the over 100 journalists who have died doing the same. We owe all of them our endurance.
[post_title] => What We Owe Gaza's Journalists
[post_excerpt] => Since October, over 100 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the IDF. They deserve our endurance—and our diligence.
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In hiring a babysitter of my own, have I become the mother I used to nanny for?
When the young woman appeared at my door, braless, pink-haired, and smelling faintly of cigarettes, the only thing I could think about were my shoes.
My daughter had recently gone from being a baby to a toddler, and for the first time in her short life, I’d landed a dream job that would require me to return to the office after a year off. As preparation, I’d spent hours looking for a specific pair of clog boots, the exact shoes I believed I needed to walk into my new office as a new(ish) mom, newly 40, finally in her power era. They had to be either Swedish Hasbeens or from the No. 6 Store—the ones with the shearling on the inside that came to the top of the ankle. Even though I couldn’t really justify spending $400 on a pair of shoes, I was obsessed. Something deep inside me told me these boots would complete a vision of myself that I had been fantasizing about for over a decade: practical but stylish, sophisticated but understated. I felt a primal need to have them.
Then, this manic pixie dream babysitter, complete with the prerequisite tattoos and dyed hair that changed color every week, knocked on my door, and showed me all at once where my girl boss fantasy had come from. I hadn’t put it together until that moment, but my new shoes were the exact same clogs that belonged to the mother I used to nanny for when I was my sitter’s age. Instantly I was transported back to the long oak table in their dining room, the one where I’d linger after my duties for the day were completed. For years, I’d watched this mom strut around Brooklyn in those clogs, living the life I’d desperately wanted. And somewhere in my subconscious, the boots had buried themselves as a symbol—of adulthood, of success, of stability. All the things that seemed so far away from me in my early twenties, when I first started working for her.
And in a way, they were. Fresh out of drama school in London, I had moved to New York at 23 with hopes of becoming a working actress, but instead had become what I call a “professional auditioner.” On average, I would go to something like four auditions a week, but nothing ever stuck. I was terrified of failure, terrified of everything—but more than anything else, paralyzed by what I would do if I actually got any of the parts I went in for.
Like most struggling actors, I was also broke. To make rent, I worked as a babysitter for a family in Brooklyn Heights, watching their two boys over the course of three years. Really, I was their nanny, but that word was verboten in the wealthy creative enclave that I worked under. The title would have legitimized my work, and no one—not the parents who paid me under the table, not the children I watched, and especially not me—wanted to admit that it was an actual job.
To be honest, the kids and I were never a great match; they were devoted to sports, obsessed with talking about soccer and basketball, while my athletic acumen was limited to a two hour yoga class. This didn’t seem to matter much, and the kids didn’t seem to mind, either. I would shepherd them from whatever practice they’d begged to sign up for to whatever music lesson they were being forced to take, make them dinner, give them their bath, kiss their scraped knees—and the whole time, I’d wait for her to come home.
Whenever I babysat, whether I was making broomsticks for a quidditch match in the park or listening to the same joke for the hundredth time, I was mentally elsewhere; rehearsing lines, begging my agent to get me an audition, texting some boy. But the moment Mom walked through the door, I was present; and suddenly, I never wanted to leave. At seven each night, she would swoop in from her job as a commercial producer, dressed in clothes that were always subtle but expensive, on trend but never tacky. She’d kiss the tops of her boys’ heads, take her coat off, and start telling me about her day.
Her stories about office life, about school meetings, her gossip about other parents, left me enraptured. I would study her with a mix of curiosity and fear; I wanted a version of her life, and at the time, it felt painfully unattainable.
When she was at work and the boys preoccupied, I’d spend my days gazing at the awards on her shelves, the artwork on her walls, the beautiful crown molding in her apartment. But it was more than that. As she showed me the secret corners of an adult woman’s existence, I in turn revealed my own desires, not only to her, but to myself. She listened to my ideas with respect and responded to my opinions with interest, allowing me the space to begin to think I might have some big potential I hadn’t yet realized. That maybe I, too, was in possession of the same exceptionality that I saw in all the parents at pick up at her children’s fancy alternative elementary school: the playwrights, the performance artists, the Pulitzer winners. I wanted to make something that mattered to the world—because I wanted to matter, and felt like I didn’t.
It was in those thrilling ten minutes that I spent with her each night, trying to soak up everything, that I felt like my life could finally have direction. In those brief interludes between her taking off her coat and me putting on mine, she was a confidante, a mentor, a hopeful oracle giving a glimpse of my future—and, I realize now, a mother to me, as well, in a time where I needed it.
Even so, I found myself battling a dark depression for about a year, flailing and miserable, grappling with the fact that my career wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually, it began bleeding into my work. There was a devastating moment when the nine-year-old, home sick with a stomach bug, caught me crying over yet another rejection. I thought he’d been asleep, and when he walked in on me, it seemed so taboo, I told him I was only practicing for an audition. I felt guilty, like I might have introduced something dark and scary into his perfect childhood—but truthfully, I was humiliated. I could have been so many things, and in that moment, I was a failed actress who wasn’t even allowed to call herself a nanny.
Eventually, I decided to go back to school, to change course. I gave up on acting at the same time I stopped working for the family. Leaving was fine, healthy even, for all of us. The kids, their parents—especially Mom and me—had quickly discovered that we had outgrown the need for each other.
Still, she left her mark. Eleven years later, I’d walk into my new job as a TV producer, in a secondhand version of her clog boots; in a way, a secondhand version of the woman I believed I was supposed to become. I’d amassed my own awards, my own crown molding—but it hadn’t really hit me how much I’d replicated my former boss’ life until my own babysitter showed up, a mirror image of my younger self, now reflecting back who I’d become on the other side.
I was working from home when our sitter first started with us, and watching her sleepy, wrinkle free eyes gaze upon my child was jarring. Not only because it’s always strange to watch someone else mother your baby, but also because I’d only ever played the babysitter’s part, and now, I’d been cast in the titular role, the one I’d always wanted. I suddenly found myself performing a kind of character, speaking a little too loudly when I was on a work call, hoping to impress the 22-year-old rocking my daughter to sleep in the next room.
Each night, before she left, I began to ask her about her life. How long had she been with her boyfriend: Several years, and they planned to get married. What did she want in the future: To work with kids in a small town away from the city. She told me she couldn’t wait to live without roommates and asked my opinion on her next tattoo. Once she gave me a handmade bracelet made of special crystals she had sourced herself. They’d help me through my next big pitch meeting, she said. I almost cried at the thoughtfulness. (She never gave my husband anything.) Was I becoming to this young woman what my former boss was to me, I wondered? Did I even want that?
While I mostly feel grateful towards my previous employer, I still harbor some resentment towards her, too. It was clear to me that while she’d likely had her own salaried caretaker when she was little, the mother I’d worked for had never taken on that job herself. She hadn’t needed to. As such, she’d never given a second thought to the intricacies of my well-being once I stepped foot outside of her apartment, and hadn’t ever really cared for me beyond those ten minutes she gave me each night. I made $20,000 a year working for her, and never had health insurance the entire time. She never offered it to me, and I couldn’t afford it. She trusted me with her children’s safety, with their lives—and yet there was no one I could trust with mine, no one to cover my urgent care bill when I got the flu, no one I could turn to when I needed someone to take care of me.
Of course, my relationship with my sitter is imperfect in its own ways. Like all 20-somethings, she’s subjected to her own hardships; friends let her down, great apartments pass her by, she works a second job catering while her peers all seem to get full time jobs with benefits. Sometimes she arrives at our home with a cloud of sadness that I know too well. Once settled, however, the fog disappears, replaced with a supernatural ability to be present with our baby; then, the next week, she’ll be wishy-washy, often canceling right before she’s supposed to come over.
Recently, she flaked on us again during a stressful moment when she was very much needed. My mother in law told me that there was always something a little off, something a little “unreliable about the kinds of girls drawn to these jobs.” Even though in part, I agreed with her, I was also offended—not only on her behalf, but on behalf of my younger self, too. I knew intimately how precarious this time in a young person’s life could be; how, for me, being “the babysitter” was fun and easy at first, then slowly became a twisted reflection of the life I didn’t have, the life that felt so far away, no matter how hard I tried to get to it.
So I try to extend some grace to the girl who has come to look after my child. Whenever she’s late, I remind myself that this is not what she felt put on this earth to do, that for all of us, this is temporary. While I can’t give her the opportunities she’s chasing, the life she’s running towards, I hope to give her the same ten minutes a day that, with enough accumulation, might make their own kind of guidance, draw their own kind of map, like the one that had been given to me. Sometimes I wonder if one day she might go through the same thing I’m experiencing now, and hire a babysitter of her own, continuing this cycle of nannies and mothers, mothers and nannies.
Often I find myself surprised by the largeness of these maternal feelings—how far they can extend out from my daughter towards everyone around me, how they extend to her, too. Once, I came home and found the babysitter asleep on our bed, the baby tucked against her, both of them breathing peacefully, their eyes flickering back and forth beneath their lids. I was almost dizzy looking at her, a vision from my past come to sleep in her future self’s bed. All these versions of who I was, who I am, and who I have yet to become, were suddenly in the room with me, asking me to take off my clogs before finding a way to nestle against these tender bodies. But of course, I did not do that. Instead, I covered them both with a blanket, closed the door gently behind me, and let them sleep.
[post_title] => The Babysitters Club
[post_excerpt] => In hiring a babysitter of my own, have I become the mother I used to nanny for?
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Meet the women creating new life from arid land in India.
It was a day of joy and relief for Kamla: Her daughter was getting married—and the night before, it had rained.
Far from a bad omen, the downpour had been ever welcome. Kamla is a farmer, whose livelihood is directly dependent on the land she cultivates, the land that gives her and her family a variety of vegetable crops to eat and to sell, like beetroots, tomatoes, beans, and chilis. For much of the year, however, the weather works against her: She and her family live in Khajraha Khurd, a village in the Jhansi district of Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh—an otherwise drought-prone region in India’s most populous state.
In Kamla's home that morning, preparations were being made for the wedding. Women were singing folk songs and cleaning the freshly picked vegetables from her farm to prepare meals for their guests. Young girls were making roti on the earthen stove burning with a wood fire. Other children were jumping in muddy puddles as cows grazed in a nearby pasture. The entire scene resembled a Satyajit Ray film, portraying their small, Indian village as a mosaic of intertwining agrarian lives.
Kamla was overjoyed. Because of the savings she’d earned through farming, she would be able to gift her daughter two heavy, embroidered sarees with matching glass bangles, heels, and bindis as a wedding gift. She wouldn’t have been able to afford them otherwise. “When I got married, nobody asked me about my choices,” she says. “But today, at my daughter’s wedding, I have made sure her choices are taken care of.”
Farming is a path that has opened many new doors for Kamla, one she first chose to walk in 2020, when the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the imposition of a country-wide lockdown. In cities across India, migrants who worked as daily wagers—Kamla included—suffered the most, as their jobs were eliminated overnight. Their very livelihoods came to a complete standstill, and few to none could meet their personal needs, let alone those of their families.
At the time, Kamla was working as a construction worker on a site in New Delhi. After the lockdown was announced, she stuffed her things into a sack and started the journey back to Bundelkhand—where she was born and raised—along with her three children and husband. Without employment, the couple had to exhaust all their savings simply to return home.
Once in Bundelkhand, Kamla was desperate for work. She was not alone: During the pandemic, Uttar Pradesh experienced one of the largest reverse migrations in India. More than 3 million workers returned to their villages from the cities, many of them living below the poverty line—and for women freshly out of work like Kamla, their options were especially limited.
Even before the pandemic, women had been at a disadvantage. According to the dozens of people that I spoke to for this piece, women in India often work more than men, keeping households and raising children in addition to some form of employment outside of their homes—all while being paid less than their male counterparts. In cities, women frequently worked as concrete mixers, diggers, stone breakers, and brick haulers; climbed unstable scaffolding carrying bricks; and were exposed to pollution at their work sites—as were their children, who they often brought to work because there was no one at home to provide childcare. Despite these women doing equal (if not more) work, the people I spoke to estimated that a male laborer usually makes up to 500 Indian rupees (US$7) a day at a construction site, while a woman only makes up to 300 (US$4).
This disparity in pay and promotions, along with regular sexual harassment, a lack of maternity leave, and the absence of toilets, are all an everyday reality for most working women in the informal and unorganized labor market in India. These factors are predominantly driven by patriarchal norms, as well as social, economic, and cultural restrictions, and often feel impossible to avoid. Overworked and underpaid—and now facing a global pandemic—many women didn’t want to migrate to new cities where they would again be forced to compromise on the health, hygiene, and education of their children, or to continue living without community support. With a pandemic at their doorstep, there had to be another option.
Luckily, at home in Bundelkhand, women like Kamla had access to a resource they did not have in the cities: land. Many of their husbands were in possession of inherited land once ripe for farming, but long abandoned in the past due to drought.
Historically, farming in the region had been a challenge. For the past several decades, Bundelkhand has faced a crisis due to uncertain rainfall patterns, causing severe crop damage and sometimes total crop failure. If they could revive this land, however, it could be a tremendous opportunity for financial security. Putting their heads together, these women regularly met three or four times a week to share their household and financial troubles, brainstorm ways to address their issues, and identify how to achieve their financial goals. Farming quickly became one of them.
Kamla expressed an early interest in farming for two reasons: She wanted a sustainable source of food for her family, and she wanted a fair way to earn a livelihood. This is why, in 2022, she decided to join the Basant Mahila Farmer Producer Organisation, a collective of about 3,000 women entrepreneurs across forty villages in the Jhansi, Mahoba, and Lalitpur districts in Bundelkhand. The program was founded in 2020 by ActionAid India through Work4Progress India to create and promote more livelihood opportunities for women, especially those pushed to migration due to the effects of climate change.
The majority of farming-related policies and programs in Uttar Pradesh are not women-friendly, but Basant aimed (and aims) to change that. Rajendra Nigam, a district coordinator at Basant, tells me, “We trained women like Kamla to produce organic seeds, and they successfully produced seeds of wheat, groundnut, pea, and urad (black gram), which are always in high demand in the region.” Through Basant, Kamla learned how to grow her own organic vegetables and fruits, how to prepare cow manure as organic fertilizer, and how to grow multiple crops on the same land in a year. Soon after completing her training, Kamla also received about eleven types of vegetable seeds and some farming tools, spray machines, drums with which to prepare fertilizers, and material for farm fencing to continue farming independently.
“I came back from Delhi tired and empty handed,” says Kamla, who in the past often hid her face in front of local village elders as a mark of modesty and respect when in the presence of men. Now, she fearlessly calls herself “an organic woman” who has successfully and continuously grown vegetables and grains on her 1.5 acres of land since 2022.
It wouldn’t be the only skillset that Kamla gained from Basant. The program isn’t just about teaching women the skills necessary to begin farming, but also to give them the financial literacy and independence necessary to make financial decisions of their own—in India, a realm traditionally dominated by men. To that end, Basant has worked as an intermediary between the government and farmers to educate the latter on various insurance protection plans and credit opportunities specific to their work. These local solutions, according to Khalid Chaudhry, an associate director at ActionAid India, contribute to helping women reach financial independence, some for the first time. And Kamla is just one of many women benefiting from it.
Deva. Photo courtesy of Aliya Bashir.
“I didn’t know how to grow home-grown food. It felt like a dream,” says Deva, a mother of three sons, who recently began farming a “nutrition garden” on her 1.5 acres of land. She decided to join Basant after she’d seen some women in her community benefit from it, and was particularly interested in learning about the cultivation of various vegetables and fruits, what plants to grow in what season, how to prepare manure and a compost pit, and how to save her produce from pests. Before long, she could do all of this herself.
“Now, I teach women to prepare organic manure, pesticides, and fertilizers at a very low cost by using the material usually available on our farms,” she says.
Prior to returning to Bundelkhand in 2020, Deva worked for three years in the brick kilns of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Now, she grows organic beetroot, bottle gourd, tomato, fenugreek, cucumber, brinjal, and other vegetables, and is able to sell them at fair prices compared to commercial farming. In addition, she hopes to begin selling her organic manure in the market to better maintain the soil health of other local farms.
Equipped with so much new agricultural knowledge, Deva has become an advocate for nutritious food in her village, and takes great care with her family’s diet, always feeding them a variety of fruits and vegetables. In 2022, she was also able to purchase six chicks and four goats from her earnings.
“Earlier, we would always have less availability of food. But now, we are not only having chemical-free food, but also eggs and chicken and dairy at home,” she says.
Her care has proven profitable: In a recent harvest, Deva earned a profit of 66,600 Indian rupees (~US$800) by cultivating a wide variety of vegetables and fruits in her garden. When she was working as a manual laborer, she wasn’t able to save anything—but now, she hopes to give her grandchildren the good education she couldn’t afford to give to her children before them.
Kamla has similar hopes and dreams. Although she couldn’t afford her elder daughters’ education due to limited financial resources, she is determined to pay for her youngest daughter’s schooling, and farming has allowed her to save more money than she could have ever imagined when she was working in construction. “In Delhi, we would work for almost ten hours a day and would earn 20,000 Indian rupees (~US$240) per month,” Kamla says. “The place is very costly to live in—around 15,000 (~US$180) would go into rent and other expenses. Saving a few thousand rupees was difficult.” In comparison, in the past three months, Kamla has sold 30,000 Indian rupees (~US$365) worth of eggplants alone; the cost for cultivation for which was just 5,000 rupees (~US$60).
“We are expecting the eggplant production to increase three times in this season,” she adds.
Over the last few months, Kamla has sold 80,000 Indian rupees (~US$965) worth of produce through multiple vegetable cultivation, growing high yield vegetables like beetroot, bottle gourd, chickpeas, and cucumber simultaneously. The overall expenses were 13,000 Indian rupees (~US$155), which meant a profit of 67,000 Indian rupees (~US$810), much of which she has been able to put into savings.
“I grew up with the thought that a woman can’t have big dreams,” she says—but still, she’d always refused to give up on them. Customs and tradition taught her that only men have the capability to manage food security in a rural Indian family, and she’s already proven this doesn’t need to be the case. “My family is very happy with my farming work,” she says. “When I am busy on the farm, my husband not only takes care of the children, but also helps in preparing meals.”
This domestic bliss feels prescient. One of the founding members of the Balant program, Laxmi Devi, chose its fitting name upon its founding: In Hindi, basant means happiness and prosperity. With their new skillset, Kamla—and Deva, and so many other women—seem to have found just that.
[post_title] => A Farm of One's Own
[post_excerpt] => Meet the women creating new life from arid land in India.
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Nothing bristles against whorephobia and class shame like a bunch of fierce strippers unionizing a strip club and then becoming a union collective.
"You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History."
—Robert Penn Warren
I stripped in nude clubs before I could legally drink. It was the early nineties, in San Francisco, and my friends were unkempt, chain-smoking queer punks who wore beat-to-shit ripped slips that looked like they were stolen from some grandma’s dumpster. I wasn’t chic grunge like Courtney Love, who stripped on Hollywood Boulevard at Jumbo’s Clown room back then. I was broke. I was undone. I worked at a used clothing store on Haight Street for minimum wage, which, in 1992, was $4.25 an hour. I spent my lunch break selling T-shirts I found in trash piles on put-out night, hoping to make enough for a burrito next door. If I lucked out, I scored a burrito and bus fare. When I couldn’t afford bus fare, I walked straight to the Century, a grubby nude club where drugs were plentiful and twenty-dollar bills were rare.
Some of the strippers at the Century gave grand performances, with boas and whips and choreographed moves like in Fame. I merely darted to the dressing room before my stage set to put on something I could take off. The dressing room was down many narrow steps and through a low door, a smoker’s basement with a dirt floor that we called “the Crypt.” Luscious, Micky, Destiny, and I ashed our cigarettes on loose planks of wood. I was addicted to meth, but heroin was big then. My coworkers slid in the dark theater from lap to lap, or nodded off, or went to law school.
The Century was where I fell for stripping. Stripping is a hard, taxing job. It entails waiting, hustling, and negotiating personal physical boundaries in a place where strangers assume access to your body. As an art form, stripping is joyful, magical, and adrenaline-inducing. But it was also emotionally and politically confusing. Stripping contained that tension for me and has held me in its grip for twenty-nine years.
On the one hand, stripping was a public-facing revolt against demure femininity and heterosexual norms. Monetizing straight desire and performing as patriarchy’s plaything was fun and lucrative; lap dancing was fast money earned in the dark. At the time, feminist performance artists like Karen Finley, Laurie Anderson, Diamanda Galás, and Lydia Lunch challenged second-wave feminist ideals by performing desire and rage as a poetic disruption. They used their bodies as a site of protest against sexual shame, misogyny, and homophobia.
Stripping felt powerful back then, but not every second was an empowering feminist orgy. The job was not something I advertised to my friends or family. Deeply puritanical ideas about sex and class informed our cultural lives and affected dancers’ feminist visions of ourselves as deviants, artists, or societal failures. Among my peers, my life as a queer stripper was considered sleazy, even if it was rebellious. Dykes I dated were skeptical or downright disapproving of the sex industry, and they let me know it. Deep down, they believed the patriarchal party line that sex work was intrinsically wrong, even if they refused to admit it. One of my girlfriends threatened to break up with me if I continued full-contact lap dancing; she preferred my tenure in the live peep show behind glass at the Lusty Lady. She followed through with that promise eventually—but not before I joined a group of startlingly intelligent live nude girls who began unionizing the Lusty Lady in 1996 and eventually became the Exotic Dancers’ Alliance.
Stripping is a working-class grind.
Over the next decade, my customers became regulars, which turned me into a professional stripper who had the audacity to keep a schedule. I stripped on holidays, on weekends, and during sports events. I squirreled away cash in envelopes under my bed. My lust for financial security and love for travel led to many road trips on the search for gold mines; I stripped in Las Vegas, Hawaii, and New Orleans with only the tips and tricks of other stripper friends to guide me. This was five years before Facebook and nine years before the creation of the iPhone, which granted every sex worker the ability to screen a client in the palm of their hand.
I learned everything I know about where and how to strip by talking to seasoned strippers I befriended on the job. Strippers know where to find the money clubs and which shifts are the best ones there. They know how the fees and fines work and which managers to avoid. They know which clients to talk to and who is a time waster. I highly recommend talking to veterans in person, at work, about what they’ve learned. They are a part of my history, just as I am a part of yours.
Not only did we not text back then, but we also communicated without apps, websites, email, or the terminology strippers now use to accurately discuss the complexity of client relationships that progress outside the strip club. The fact was that I simply trusted certain clients to take me shopping or out to dinner. I indulged some of my clients in their fantasy that I was their girlfriend, their human vacation. And I charged as much as I could while maintaining a straight face.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2004, I searched the vast whorescape that is the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood for a strip club to call my home—to no avail. Clubs in Los Angeles County were miserable, empty places with no use for a chubby, tattooed thirty-four-year-old with a women’s studies degree from Mills College. I did strip briefly at Cheetahs, Pleasures, Knockouts, and Nicholas, but the hustle baffled me; Los Angeles clients were cheap, unreliable, and awful. Unlike in San Francisco or New Orleans, where strippers are culturally relevant VIPs, Los Angeles treats non-famous strippers like the least favorite gum grabbed on the way out of the gas station. Perhaps this is due to the cultural prevalence of the porn industry that dominates the field here, rendering strippers an afterthought.
That same year, my mother was diagnosed with aggressive bile duct cancer. I was panicked and stressed, untethered by her illness. I constantly drove back and forth from LA to where my mother was hospitalized in my hometown. I switched from stripping to other types of sex work that required less of me, timewise and commitment-wise, where I could snatch as much cash as possible and still answer my phone in case my mother called.
Stripping outside the club entailed risks that were hard to anticipate, like depending on strangers to pay when they say they will and having no security whatsoever from violence. One night I stripped as “Ginger” at a Gilligan’s Island–themed fortieth birthday party. Shit-faced party guests grabbed my friend, a petite, impeccable “Maryanne,” and threw her in the pool, despite her frantic, screaming pleas that she couldn’t swim. I jumped in the pool after her, carried her out fully clothed, and scolded the organizer. I told them the least they could do was pay for her lost contact lenses and vintage clothing. A woman wrote me a check, and we left. But what if my friend had drowned? I had assumed the gig would be an easy one-off. No one knew where I was that night.
The next day, the check was canceled.
~
In 2007, at the age of sixty-two, my mother died. That same week, I attended my first class in an MFA program she had encouraged me to apply to before her illness. “Get that degree,” she said. I was heartbroken, and I was alone, but I got my MFA.
Around this time, the club in Pasadena where I stripped shut down. I was out of options and broke as fuck. My friend Kara told me about her lucrative “massage” hustle. She showed me how to put up photos and ads on sites like Backpage and Eros and—lickety-split—I was a hand job whore. At first, we mostly saw her regulars, like CJ, a chipper guy in his sixties. He’d eat her pussy while I jerked him off, and he always said the same shit: “What exemplary customer service.” Eventually, he gave Kara trichomoniasis. I had to convince her to get tested, which was not easy, because she believed she was in a constant state of orgasm—sex cult stuff she said she learned from OneTaste, an orgasmic meditation retreat up in San Raphael. It was also not easy to tell my ex, whom I was still fucking, that we had been exposed to trich. Soon after that incident, I saw CJ at Trader Joe’s piling lunch meat into a shopping cart. “Hey, CJ,” I said, before I could catch myself or think twice.
Kara had faith in her ability to stack cash safely. I did not, but I didn’t care. Blind faith, dumb luck, good timing, and magical thinking are markers of the sex trade. Similar to gamblers or stand-up comics, sometimes we lucked out. Sometimes we were on fire, sometimes we tanked. Unlike gamblers or stand-up comics, though, sometimes we got arrested. Sometimes we got STIs from our coworkers. Sometimes we got robbed or thrown in a pool. Sometimes we went missing. Sometimes we were murdered.
Class shame and whorephobia are rampant in our culture. Institutions, banks, and media platforms are denied to sex workers as punishment for trying to survive late capitalism in resourceful, clever ways. Sex workers and strippers themselves are not immune to whorephobia, in the same way that Black folks are not immune to anti-Black racism. I want to communicate the specific ethos of the deeply abusive landscape of strip clubs in order to unlearn it and to stop it.
Some commonalities in every strip club that I’ve witnessed and/or have experienced directly: the business model of theft, wage theft specifically; tip stealing; the acute lack of safety from violence inside the club; racism; anti-trans antagonism; whorephobia; anti-worker hostility; extortion; coercion; the negligence of any bookkeeping by employers; sexual assault; blame casting; misclassification; drugging of workers; unfair termination; racist hiring and firing policies; harassment. Nothing bristles against whorephobia and class shame like a bunch of fierce strippers unionizing a strip club and then becoming a union collective. The tide changed in 1996, but the labor war has dragged on since we won that battle.
I haven’t stripped inside a club since 2020; I’ve stepped away due to Covid-19 and the fact that I’m in a PhD program for literature that fills my time and pays me to show up. Clients and friends sometimes ask if I’ve retired, as if I long to quit the one job that has supported my life for nearly thirty years.
I miss stripping. Not just pole tricks and sliding from lap to lap, but being good at a thing and getting paid well to do it. Watching dancers twirl and fly on the pole like muscular ribbons. Ripping on clients and talking shit. Making money hand over fist, mid-shift. Counting dances and money under my breath while strippers pull customers from their chairs with a yank. Locking eyes with other dancers while they grind and guessing how long they will last on certain laps. I miss the grubby red theater chairs with gum residue, the zigzag carpet. I don’t miss the migraines, the wage theft, or the tired two-hour drive home.
Since April 30, 2018, I’ve been trying to organize strippers, sex workers, and allies from California to New Zealand to fight for safer and more humane working conditions. I will continue to fight for this cause because I answer to my community. My coworkers over the past twenty-nine years are a collection of intersectional, dynamic people, and my life is better for knowing them and their stories.
I was still in high school when my friend and mentor Lizzie Borden premiered Working Girls, a fictional film that shows the complex relational field sex workers navigate while also exploring class differences and queer relation ships within the industry. When I met Lizzie, in 2015, she mentioned an anthology of memoir pieces she was collecting that centered on strippers. I was delighted that she chose strippers as the group to focus on, because strippers are usually depicted as mere background, as invalids awaiting rescue, or as sociopaths. I think the best stories and films are ones where strippers/sex workers try to do right by one another, which has not happened much since Pretty Woman.
The essays and interviews Lizzie Borden has curated and collected here were written with a burning desire to share honestly about the landscape of stripping, the camaraderie and artfulness, without delighting in our demise; to celebrate our small and large triumphs, our rage, our sadness, our hope, and our love for stripping. We are living in the truth of our shared experiences together as strippers. We share that truth, and so we share our stories here. When we share our stories, we build our collective archive. When we share our collective history, we articulate our presence. And when we articulate and assert our presence, we can attempt to change our lives for the better and change the future we create. This is my history, which is part of yours. This is our history.
As if the gig economy wasn’t exploitative enough, it’s now filling a gap in another exploitative industry that values profits over human lives—both the lives of those needing the service and the lives of those providing it.
When I was in college, I worked with California’s In-Home Support Services (IHSS) as an aide in the homes of disabled people. My job was to support people in completing activities of daily living (ADLs): I swept and mopped, did dishes and laundry, dusted blinds, decluttered bedrooms, grocery shopped, picked up medication, gave rides to doctor’s appointments. I was proud of my work; I made it possible for people to stay in their homes, rather than having to enter long-term care. I liked my work. I was also paid low wages for my work.
But even at minimum wage, the people I worked for would never have been able to afford to pay me, relying instead on state assistance. Today, ten hours of “homemaker” services like those I provided would be around $1,127 a month. The average monthly disability payment—for those who manage to qualify—is $1,234. Not all disabled people qualify for Social Security disability programs or for state programs like IHSS, however, and those that do often do are often not assigned enough hours to meet their needs, if they can even find workers. People do not like the pay, the hours, the conditions; it’s hard work.
Because society does not provide disabled people with the support they need to live independently and safely, many people have been forced to fill the gaps for themselves via services that weren’t designed for them, but have become a lifeline. As a result, gig economy workers, such as rideshare drivers and shoppers, are now inadvertently assisting with ADLs and entering the care and support workforce. An Instacart driver is buying supplies someone can’t access because they’re bedbound, can’t go to the store, and don't have a support worker or a social network to help. A Taskrabbit worker is putting a mobility device together because it wasn’t delivered assembled, and the client can’t do it independently, even if she could get it up the two flights of stairs to her apartment. A Lyft driver takes someone to the doctor because there’s no public transit, and no paratransit service.
Technology has already profoundly destabilized labor. It’s changed the way we eat, access medical care, interact, and lead our daily lives. But nowhere is this destabilization more striking than in the form of an army of gig workers across the globe meeting our every conceivable need, including, inevitably, care for elders, children, and disabled people. The gig economy has been a tremendous boon for the disability community, opening pathways of connection, communication, resources, and employment to people who are more at risk of being socially, economically, and medically isolated. But while the rise of the gig economy has expanded access to society for disabled people, it has become a double-edged sword: that access has been at the expense of gig workers, some of whom are disabled themselves. As if the gig industry wasn’t exploitative enough, it’s now filling a gap in another exploitative industry that values profits over human lives—both the lives of those needing the service and the lives of those providing it.
For the time being, it is necessary to recognize that among its many functions, and in the midst of an inherently exploitative and harmful business model, the gig economy can assist some people with ADLs in a way that is not currently replicated by any other usable option. In some cases, the gig economy itself has problematically replaced those other options, such as stores relying on Instacart instead of staff to shop for customers, or Uber and Lyft pushing out the taxi industry, including legally required accessible cabs—often claiming this will result in lower costs for consumers while actually increasing pricing via surge metrics or simple rate increases once they choke out the competition. We must engage with this understanding in order to effectively criticize the gig economy and the way people use it: If a disabled person orders groceries from an app, taking advantage of a discount to make them affordable, telling them to “order directly from the store” is useless if the store no longer offers delivery, or doesn’t take SNAP for delivery orders, or has additional charges that make the groceries too expensive. The question is not “why are you ordering via app when you know it’s bad” but “what are the barriers to alternatives, and can we solve them.”
Conversation about the gig economy’s role in the disability community often ends up highly individualistic, targeting people rather than the system and implying that disabled people are uniquely exploitative or unwilling to look for alternatives. But talking about app-based end issues (e.g., Uber exploits people) rather than the problem that needs to be solved (e.g., people need to be able to get around) elides the option of discussing whether better solutions exist, and if they do not, whether it is possible to make them happen as a community, acknowledging a collective social responsibility rather than blaming individuals for forced choices.
These conversations also notoriously sour very quickly, and tend to skirt the larger implications of what it means to become part of the care economy, one designed to generate profits for a few at the expense of many, and one where disregard for disabled and elder lives makes that profit possible. The collapse of one exploitative industry into another should be decried, but the problem is not the people who need these services. Some disabled people need support to lead full lives, and that support requires workers who deserve justice and respect.
According to a 2021 Pew poll, nine percent of workers in the U.S. were current or recent gig workers, and while not all were involved in care, a not insignificant portion were, or were using their gig jobs to support unpaid care work. These workers join 3.6 million health and personal care aides as well as other care professionals, a number that is projected to grow with an aging population. Among them are many disabled people taking advantage of the “convenience” of gig work—flexible days, hours, and tasks that come, of course, with the same exploitation, including harsh ratings and penalty systems, abuse from customers, and being forced to use their own equipment for work.
Both traditional and gig care workers are underpaid, expected to work long hours, provided with minimal benefits, and not offered protections from workplace hazards such as harassment or abuse. On-the-job injuries are very common in traditional care work and a serious risk for gig workers, as well. These workers lack access to health insurance, disability insurance, paid leave, sick leave, and other benefits that might help them manage existing or work-acquired disabilities, unless they are unionized, which is rare. They are treated as disposable. The gig economy’s entry into this field is a feature, not a bug, for shareholders and executives, another source of throwaway labor they can charge a premium for.
This exploitation is also bound up in racism; Black people, Southeast Asians, and Latinx workers are more likely to be employed in these economies, where they are paid less and treated worse than their white colleagues, viewed again as a source of cheap, easy come/easy go workers. Wage theft is rampant across the care industry, even as gig apps constantly change payment policies to cheat workers. In New York State, for example, more than 100 care workers won a historic $450,000 wage theft judgment in 2021, after working 24-hour shifts that could extend over as many as five days at a time. Poor working conditions, abuse, and low pay are also driving a home health worker shortage.
This is an entire economy of capitalist abuse, enabled because society does not view disabled people as worthy of dignity, and therefore does not respect the workers who support them. This includes workers who are indirect care workers and who would not necessarily describe themselves as such if asked.
Historically, there has been a resistance within the disability community to talking about exploitation in this context. Even as workers organize and some disabled clients support them, there’s a lingering hesitancy and fear to engage with an unavoidable tension: If you agree that gig workers, home health providers, and others who assist with ADLs are being exploited, and you use these services, you are admitting that you contribute to that exploitation. That’s a sobering and uncomfortable statement to make, but it is a necessary one to engage with when considering solutions to this problem—especially since worker exploitation does not begin or end with disability services, illustrating a broader social issue that requires a response from everyone.
This issue is also largely not within the control of disabled people themselves. Unless disabled people are independently wealthy, the hours and wages of people such as in-home care providers are generally set by the state or an agency, if they are available at all—forcing disabled people to choose between accepting exploited help, or accepting no help at all, and potentially going into a long-term care facility, where workers are notably not treated well, either. All of this—lack of access to formalized care workers, poverty that constrains options, and few available resources—is pushing people toward the gig economy.
Sometimes, there is no good choice, because of decisions society has made about whose life has value and should be accommodated. This is a no-win exploitation situation, and it’s one many disabled people who need these services find profoundly unjust. Some people like to evoke “no ethical consumption under capitalism” here, misusing the phrase to suggest there’s nothing to be done and we should all throw up our hands. But perhaps people who commonly opine on how we are collectively trapped in capitalist systems that we can only escape through collaboration should acknowledge that when they are targeting disabled people for being trapped in, and relying upon, those systems. The focus specifically on disabled people who use these services rather than other clients is also…striking. Especially when the move instead should be to discuss what collective action one could embark upon to secure independence for disabled people AND justice for workers.
People who benefit from these services are not powerless to change care workers’ circumstances when they work collectively. Disability mobilizations in solidarity with home care workers and aides calling for better pay, benefits, hours, and working conditions have proven effective. Caring Across Generations, for example, has modeled a collaborative approach to fighting exploitation in caregiving settings. Similarly, disabled service users can and have mobilized to support gig workers, as when Instacart shoppers called for an app boycott in 2021. Many are eager to live in a world where their liberation is not dependent upon others’ oppression, but they can’t get there by themselves.
All workers deserve fair pay, safe working conditions, and dignity, and that should be a common goal that unites all of us. The notion that there is inherent opposition between disabled people and the workers (many likely to be disabled themselves) who provide them with the services that they need to survive is predicated on the incorrect belief that these two groups aren’t on the same side, and it is a deep distraction from the real enemies: Capitalism, disablism, and racism, and their relentless consumption of humanity for profit.
While working with IHSS, many of my clients didn’t like having to ask for help, especially those who were newly disabled; our intake conversation was often one of push and pull, what’s available, what’s imaginable, and what the two of us could improvise together regardless of what the state said was possible. The act of helping my clients was not exploitative, and their desire to get that help was not wrong. A just world for workers requires an end to capitalism, not disabled people: My state-determined wages and hours were the real enemy, and ultimately exploited us both.
Disabled people are worthy. The people who help them are not automatons. Disabled people collaborating to meet their needs will lift everyone up, but they also need to be listened to and respected when they express their needs and ask for sustainable and just help with meeting them. When those needs are unfamiliar, rather than pushing back, it’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and collaborate—with both sides equally valued. Neither care workers nor disabled people are at fault for the system they are trapped in, and they are better served by fighting that system together than they are apart.
[post_title] => When Gig Workers Inadvertently Become Care Workers
[post_excerpt] => As if the gig industry wasn’t exploitative enough, it’s now filling a gap in another exploitative industry that values profits over human lives.
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Meet Cole Bush, the shepherdess battling fire season with goats and sheep.
One morning last summer,Cole Bush was high up on a ridge in North Los Angeles County, shepherding her “flerd”—a mixed flock of sheep and herd of goat—from one paddock to another. Normally, this maneuver was routine; but something was wrong. When she turned around, in the distance far below, she spotted a hundred of her goats and sheep: They had slipped off into a high school parking lot and were eating the median. People were already gathering around them. Bush and her team ran down the steep hillside as quickly as they could and found a football coach surveying the scene. She began to explain what was going on: Her animals, now munching away on tufts of grass, weren’t just a prank gone awry. They were there to protect them from fire.
This answer likely surprised him, but Bush—who goes by BCB—explained that the animals were on the clock. Based out of Ojai Valley, in Ventura County, California, Bush’s business, Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co., is a for-hire grazing outfit that focuses on fire prevention and vegetation management. The work they do is tantamount to creating protective force fields; shepherding the flerd to eat brush, weeds, invasive plants—would-be fuel—so that fires won’t move as quickly or get as hot. The grazing is not to eradicate fires, but to ensure they’ll be smaller, more manageable, and to create defensible space.
Of course, the animals have no idea they’re rushing against time to prevent the destruction of property, livelihoods, and a potential great extinction. They’re just animals doing animal things; curious, hungry, and content to roam. They have good days and bad depending on the elements; on a hot day they might move more slowly. If there are interesting landscaped yards—or football fields—nearby, they might wander over to get a taste.
Still, they’re highly effective. As they roam, their hooves aerate the soil, making it healthier. They digest plants and turn them into food for the soil when they shit. “Their bodies know so much,” says Bush. From the womb, their gut biomes are prepared as their mothers introduce them to the local weeds and brush. From birth, they begin learning what they need and how to exist with the land; and when they stray, their shepherdess guides them home.
If it seems like an underreaction to employ goats and sheep to combat an ever-expanding fire season, that’s part of the point of Bush’s project. “We have a culture of fear around fire,” she says, when we need to feel empowered against it. And to feel powerful against an element that turns us into shut-ins, that paints the sky otherworldly colors and sends residents fleeing from their homes every year, Bush says, requires us to first re-examine our relationship to the land it ravages.
“A lot of our work is this idea of bridging, of the translation piece,” she says. “We’re at war with the earth when in fact we need to see that we’re a part of it.”
~
Bush grew up in San Diego, the chaparral region of California, a fire-prone ecosystem. In middle school, her family moved to a house in Elfin Forest, just north of the city, which they could afford because the forest itself had burned down.
In the barn, a young Bush could see the smoke stains on the stucco walls. “We lived in the shadows of the aftermath of fire,” she remembers. Even then she understood on some level, despite the ash and the charred remnants of trees, that fire was not a combative element. “How [the ecosystem] has evolved with fire is so important. But the way that we have not actively stewarded or tended to our landscapes has created the devastation of mega wildfires.”
It would be a long road before Bush would realize her place was among the “flerd.” Raised in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, she knew two things by the time she was 20: that she was queer, and that she had to leave the church. Still, she remembers an idyllic childhood. Her family would cross the border to Rosarito almost every Sunday, driving workers from her dad’s LED business home. In Mexico, they’d join them for community dinners, where Bush remembers not wanting to go back to the suburbs, back to the States, where neighbors lived close, but seemed to be strangers to one another.
As Bush began breaking away from the church, she became increasingly hungry for understanding what made groups—and cultures—cohere and thrive. She thought that built environments were the answer. She’d dropped out of college, but returned to school to take classes on the history of civilizations. “All of them c[a]me down to the same demise,” she learned, “which is lack of resources or depletion of resources.” Pivoting her focus, Bush began to gravitate towards agroecology and environmental studies. It was there that she learned about what would later be called regenerative agriculture. Now it’s a buzzword—a shell for many things, often conflated with sustainability—but for Bush, regeneration was tied to the idea of “ancient futures,” of taking lessons and traditions from the past and adapting them to a future sorely in need of change.
And then she met Becky, a border collie who worked at Star Creek Ranch in Santa Cruz County, California. When Becky’s owner had to leave town, Bush adopted her and started working at the ranch alongside her, taking photos of the goats and sheep Becky herded. She began to see the animals’ personalities emerge. The goats were the “bad kids on the block,” and the sheep did, indeed, prefer to stick together. They were also surprisingly sweet with their young. Bush was hooked. The ranch opened a grazing business, called Star Creek Land Stewards, and when it landed its first big contract in 2012, Bush became the project manager. She was 27, in charge of organizing thousands of acres of prescribed grazing.
When the owner wanted to retire and sell the ranch in 2014, Bush helped track down a family that traced its lineage back to European Basque shepherds to buy and run the business. Through them, Bush was helping to reinvigorate a shepherding tradition that had waned after WWII, when demand for wool and mutton fell, followed by another decline in the '60s, as synthetic fibers continued to gain in popularity. In addition to grazing, she started selling high-end hides—repurposing waste from the lamb industry—and began calling herself “a modern-day urban shepherdess.” She had found her calling.
Soon, she took off for Spain and France, where she studied not just shepherding but also the systems that allow young people to become shepherds. She was following in the footsteps of a tradition that had existed long before her; exploring what makes a shepherd a shepherd, and what might attract more people to the work—questions posed by respected researchers like Fred Provenza and Michel Meuret in books she’d studied. She was now certain that she had “sheep and goat in her blood,” and dreamed of a grazing school in California. She created a curriculum and developed a project called The Grazing School of the West despite having no students yet. Someday, she thought, it would be a place where people could work the land with each other, with a community supporting them as they experimented with a vocation that might end up being a life calling, like it was for her. “This ancient vocation somehow persists in contemporary times and will always be a part of humanity,” explains Bush. “Domesticating animals and agriculture is what allowed us to grow as a species on Earth.”
Now, she hoped those same tools might be used to help the species survive.
~
In 2017, the Thomas Fire raged through Southern California, burning nearly two-hundred and ninety-thousand acres of land over the course of a month. The city of Ojai was surrounded by flames, and though they never fully breached its perimeter, they destroyed more than seven-hundred and fifty homes in nearby Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. At the time, it was the largest fire in California’s history—and for Bush, it served as a wake up call.
Ojai Valley was a place Bush felt close to; she’d visited often and found herself more connected to nature there. She saw, too, that Southern California was in need of a new approach to fire, one that would not perpetuate the tropes of fear and flight, losing and winning, burning and rebuilding. It needed something different, something radical but not experimental, something reliable and time-tested. It needed goats, sheep, and shepherds. So, when she opened up her own prescribed grazing outfit in 2020—Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co.—she did it in Ojai.
At the time, she knew she was choosing to “be a part of this crazy capitalist system, go out and make money and create jobs for people so that I can pay them.” It was a risky path, but the goal was always to use the grazing company not only for fire prevention but also to subsidize training for a new generation of shepherds. Bush thinks that there is a boom coming in the U.S.; a wave of people who will be eager to dedicate themselves to the land. But they won’t have the same social safety nets, like shepherds in Europe, to help them as they learn. They’ll need to get paid. Last year, The Grazing School of the West welcomed its first cohort of eight trainees. This year Bush is training six, paying them a livable wage. She hopes to continue to expand the program to include twelve shepherds each year.
When trainees see the flerd for the first time, there is a high-frequency buzz of excitement in the air. When the first goat or sheep wanders off, they panic, thinking they’ll lose the animal. And at some point, the weight of being responsible for so many lives washes over them and the true nature of the work becomes clear. In her letter preparing interested would-be shepherds for the job, Bush warns that the work “will be the HARDEST work you could possibly imagine.” It’s mostly fence-building in one-hundred-degree heat and practicing patience with people who sometimes don’t know the difference between a sheep and a goat. Since it’s rare to be grazing far from private property, Bush has to invest in liability insurance for her flerd—in case they destroy landscaping or wander into the wrong yard or, in the worst case scenario, onto a highway. Not everyone is cut out for those realities, which Bush admits don’t appear on her social media, and leads to a swath of applicants who have never done manual labor but have done a lot of Instagramming. “I made it look way too beautiful and cool,” she says. “And I'm looking at some applicants, and I'm just like, Oh, no, this is an issue.”
Still, Bush is also turning away applicants who would be good fits. “[Prescribed grazing is] a huge burgeoning industry, and the biggest bottleneck is a skilled and trained workforce,” she says. She doesn’t have the resources to expand her program, and no one else seems to either. In Bush’s experience, young folks do want to become shepherds. But she’s left wondering, “What is the barrier to getting these people trained for more businesses and more hands on the ground?” The David vs. Goliath framing, made so common by climate change, leaving smaller actors feeling impotent, weighs on her. “I would say pretty regularly I am overwhelmed with emotion because I just wish I could do more faster,” she says. Twelve new shepherds a year is not going to solve the chaos that’s already happening. And it’s frustrating when there are plenty more than twelve people who want to and could become shepherds.
Lately, with a team she can trust on the ground, Bush has been taking more time away from the day-to-day operations and focusing on education. Usually, and especially with fire, we wait for a fight to make itself plain and then send out the troops, sparing no expense. But there is another way—and Bush is trying to build bridges to decision makers who can help push structural change. In order to scale ideas, it’s all about getting funds from the state level to specific, grassroots level grazing projects, she says. One of her most radical ideas would be to bring goats into prisons, instead of sending inmates to go out and fight fires, a dangerous and grueling task. “Why don't we train inmates to learn how to manage and work with livestock?” Bush asks. “To do the same work that we're doing and also have such incredible healing components with working with animals?” These are the types of ideas she hopes to bring to the table; to prioritize prevention over fear and connection over combativeness.
The numbers don’t seem to be in Bush’s favor, nor does time, as fire season continues to expand; 2.5 million acres of land in California burned in 2021 alone. But that’s the thing about a calling: Once you answer it you have to find your way forward. If a few meetings with assembly members go well, if a few more shepherds learn quickly, then Bush might be able to shift just a few more people’s perception of fire, of animals, of the land. In turn, the path might open a bit wider for the boom of ecological doctors and modern-day shepherds that she sees coming.
With every successful connection made and bridge built, Bush stays hopeful. In the high school parking lot, as she handed the football coach her card and talked to the observers, she quickly diffused a potentially fraught situation. By the end of the day the onlookers were spreading the word that the “flerd” was in the neighborhood with a purpose, and that if anyone found animals suddenly roaming alongside them, they didn’t have to panic; they were exactly where they needed to be.
In the end, Bush considers herself a herder of humans as well as animals. And if nothing else, humans need to figure out how to give ourselves more time, so we might have more chances to adjust. As she writes in her closing line of the letter she sends to prospective shepherds, “It's a daunting world in society these days and the Earth is throwing out all kinds of loud cries for humanity to get a grip. We can do our part even if small and maybe we can herd on together for some time.”
Additional fact checking by Elizabeth Moss.
~
*The Footnotes
Editor’s Note: At The Conversationalist, we understand that no story exists in a vacuum, and every story is built on the work of others before us, whether in ways big or small. We are likewise dedicated to spotlighting the voices of those who have been or continue to be oppressed, disregarded, and/or otherwise silenced, in an effort to reverse centuries of often intentional erasure. Because of this, we have opted to include “footnotes” on certain stories to give readers additional context and reading material where it feels relevant and beneficial.
Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.
The outdoor markets of Lagos are a noisy clutter of shops and makeshift stalls. The traders are mostly women who call out their wares loudly, with customers clustering in front of the stalls to haggle while the business owner multitasks and chats with them all. The stall owners are friendly but competitive, bantering with one another all day.
In this familiar chaos, the women form sisterhoods and support systems. One of these systems is called “ajo” (or “esusu” in eastern Nigeria). It is an ancient informal cooperative savings culture passed down for generations, with the women contributing a portion of their earnings on a weekly or monthly basis and each receiving the full amount, in turn, to invest in her business.
This is a typical example of how an ajo works:
In a 12-unit rotation for 12,000 naira ($29.01) monthly, each member contributes 1,000 naira ($2.42) per month, choosing a number or month when they would like to receive their due. They give their money to a thrift collector, who is responsible for disbursing the collected money at the end of each agreed-upon period, and for keeping the women’s savings. At the end of the rotation, a member can cancel her contribution or start again. But a unit of 12 does not mean 12 people. It could also mean 12 “hands,” or contributions. Some members might decide to contribute two hands, or double the amount (2,000 naira), to collect double (24,000 naira).
The foundational principles of ajo are trust, familiarity, and an uninterrupted cycle of donation. These might not seem like concrete measures for financial security, but they are remarkably successful—most of the time. The restrictions and privations of the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted this usually reliable traditional micro-savings system. Women make up half of Nigeria’s informal labor force, which is unregulated and often exploited. Whether they are traders, farmers, or domestic workers, these women are often the family’s secret breadwinners (in this conservative patriarchal culture, the man must always be seen as the financial head of the family). The pandemic lockdowns, with income drastically cut due to restrictions that for several months kept market hours reduced to four from the usual 60 per week, made ajo more important than ever.
Surviving the pandemic, despite the prevalence of disinformation
In December 2021 I visited Addo market in Lagos to speak with some of these women. Ify, a single mother in her mid-thirties who sells dried fish, told me she panicked when the government announced a lockdown in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. For several months hardly any customers visited the market; the few who came to shop were limited to one at a time. According to the women, if stallholders neglected to wear masks, the police forced them to buy one from them at exorbitant prices, or even kicked them out of the market. I could not independently verify this, but have no reason to doubt the women given the Nigerian police's well-documented corruption. To save on the expense of buying a new disposable mask to wear each day, Ify bought a reusable face shield.
Ify said she was not worried about catching the virus. She gets her information on COVID-19 from mainstream news outlets, but her opinions reflect the disinformation that circulates on social media. She said that one woman in the area died after she was vaccinated, although she acknowledged never having met her. Ify said she never met anyone who had caught the virus, nor did she believe she would catch it, which is why she did not plan to be vaccinated. She asked why the government was mandating vaccines when they had not done the same for HIV tests or antiretrovirals.
The government is, in fact, not mandating vaccines. As in other countries, vaccine passports are required to enter certain public spaces and in order to travel.
Ronke, a 21-year-old college student who helps at her mother’s vegetable stall during semester breaks, could only sell fresh produce to neighbors for their meals during the lockdown. “I saw no dead bodies or sick people in Nigeria even on social media, me and my family believe COVID-19 is fake and we will not be taking the vaccine,” she said.
Nigeria’s first phase of the vaccine rollout was in March–April 2021; it was limited to essential workers and the elderly, which excluded most of the women who work at the market. Before the lockdown, these women, some of whom have little or no formal education, received health information from the local radio, community workers, and primary healthcare centers. But the pandemic exposed them to unverified sources and misinformation on WhatsApp and Facebook.
Family and friends innocently share viral messages via WhatSapp groups; the messages, in pidgin English and various local languages, recommend homemade cures for the virus, like herbal steaming. Or they contain disinformation, like the claim that Covid vaccines inject magnetic chips into the body. According to this conspiracy theory, the chips attract metals, like spoons, which stick to the skin. According to another conspiracy theory the virus is fake and the pandemic restrictions are just another government ploy to steal public funds. Since people receive these messages from those they trust, like their faith leaders or educated members of their families, they believe they are credible.
How COVID affected the ajo system
Because they made so little money during the lockdowns and were struggling to feed their families on their reduced earnings, neither Ify nor Ronke could keep up their ajo contributions, nor could many other women in their groups. With contributions reduced by 70 percent, their ajo unit could not stay afloat. Contributions stopped, pending the lifting of the lockdown and the full re-opening of the markets. Ronke refers to the semblance of normalcy that followed the 2020 lockdown as the “end of Corona,” a sentiment shared by most women in the market. If they may trade, then “corona” must be over, they say, associating the virus with the period of restrictions and nothing more. These women go about their business without face masks or social distancing. The police no longer compel them to abide by any pandemic restrictions.
A study of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s savings groups carried out by a collaboration of think tanks and researchers, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Africa Center for Systematic Reviews, and Makerere University, found that households with women who are in informal savings groups were less likely to experience food insecurity and more likely to have savings, which was critical in getting through the pandemic. Women’s savings groups showed more potential for resilience and provided women with a platform for leadership and community responsiveness.
Ajo, however, still carries risk. The women in Addo market lost their savings during the pandemic lockdown to a thrift collector who suddenly “disappeared with everything.” In case of death or serious illnesses, no one is liable for the loss. Sometimes, bad loans accumulate from members who misappropriate funds. That is why researchers recommend that financial institutions and governments offer further support for ajo.
Beatrice Joseph is a thrift collector and restaurateur in Yola, Adamawa State, in northeast Nigeria, an area that has been plagued by terrorists and bandits. She manages the contributions of women across five markets in the state, engaging them in financial literacy training, bookkeeping, and loan repayment. During the lockdown, Beatrice lost all her investments when her restaurant was vandalized. She managed to keep her business and that of her members thanks to a partnership with Riby, a digital financial services (DFS) platform that supports financial cooperatives and trade groups in Nigeria. These services act as the central collector while simplifying the banking process by accepting social credit as collateral (the group stands as guarantor), using USSD codes and text messages instead of complicated apps, and securing their savings. This reduces the risk associated with ajo, while providing financial independence for the women by converting their savings to investments.
Ekundayo Kiyesi, general manager of Riby, describes the thrift collector as an individual microfinance bank that provides accountability, accessibility, and security to the ajo for a monthly service charge that is commonly around 25 cents. Platforms like Riby are formalizing the ajo system for larger collectives in markets and cottage industries like the unit Beatrice manages, but among smaller, homogenous groups some believe ajo should remain communal and independent.
Joy Ehonwa, a freelance writer and book editor in Lagos who runs a small ajo group for employed middle-class women, is one of them. Joy created a system of accountability for her group, a record and digitization process that involves registering a next of kin—which, she laughingly assured me, she had never had a reason to use.
Financial insecurity is just as much of an issue for women working in formal business employment, as it is for those whose income is derived from the informal economy. According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), approximately half the Nigerian working population earns less than 700 naira ($1.70) per day, even in formal employment; in cases where income is determined by gender (e.g. in the case of office assistants), women earn even less. With such low income and no collateral, they can neither save money nor afford to take a loan. This is where ajo comes in; it is a saving and interest-free loan system that they can depend on.
Nigerian women have more financial agency today than ever before, but societal and cultural norms are still very conservative. Husbands thus control the family finances due to the widely held belief that a man whose wife is financially independent is emasculated. A lack of education, religious and gender bias, and low trust in financial service providers are also reasons for financial dependence. But when women are empowered to earn and invest, they drive innovation, invest in health and child development and increase productivity and economic growth. The economic strength of a country is directly proportional to the economic strength of its women. Despite the digitization of ajo, it will remain a fluid system driven by community, trust and independence. With some financial education, Nigeria’s hardworking, innovative women will save their country’s declining economy.
[post_title] => How a traditional microsavings system enabled Nigerian women to save their businesses during the pandemic
[post_excerpt] => Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.
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Finding the legal means to put children to work is another attempt to compensate for the 'great resignation,' with four million American adults declining to return to their low-paid jobs after the pandemic lockdown ended.
At the start of 2022, the United States set a global record with over one million Covid-19 cases reported each day—worse than at any time since the start of the pandemic. Just at this catastrophic moment, the government rolled back public assistance, which had become essential for millions of people struggling to deal with unemployment, the death of family members, and soaring food prices. This ongoing crisis has been particularly cruel to children, who have borne a disproportionate burden with the now-dominant Omicron variant.
Recent reports from the American Academy of Pediatrics show 11.4 million children have tested positive for the virus since the beginning of the pandemic, with 3.5 million pediatric cases reported in January alone.
Meanwhile, several Republican-controlled state legislatures want to weaken laws that limit child labor—even as Congressional Republicans oppose a continuation of Biden’s Child Tax Credit, which saw millions of children lifted from poverty virtually overnight. Those federal payments ended in December. As of January low-income parents are already in crisis and millions of children are poised to fall back into poverty.
At the federal level, the Biden administration is weakening child labor protection laws with its recently launched apprenticeship program, which lowers the minimum age for interstate long-haul trucking from 21 to 18, in an effort to ease supply chain backlogs by increasing the number of truckers. This is despite CDC research that shows motor vehicle accidents are highest among 16 to 19-year-olds. The director of the Truck Safety Coalition told theHuffington Post that putting teenagers behind the wheel of long-haul trucks was not safe, adding: “This is putting lipstick on a pig. They’re gaslighting the American people.”
The push to weaken child labor protection laws in an effort to fill what lawmakers call “labor shortages,” and which economists say is a shortage of jobs that pay a living wage, is most pronounced in Wisconsin. State lawmakers pushed a bill through the senate that would have expanded dramatically the number of hours 14 and 15 year-olds were allowed to work, to 11 p.m. on evenings that were not followed by a school day and as late as 9:30 pm on school nights.
This 1911 photo of children working in a Pennsylvania coal mine led Congress to pass child labor protection laws. Now government is rolling those protections back, undoing a century of progress.
The Wisconsin law only applies to businesses that are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and flagship child labor provisions. Adolescents who are 14 and 15 years old may not, for example, work more than 18 hours per week during the school year in a job covered by federal law—i.e., which take in less than $500,000 in revenue and are not engaged in interstate commerce.
Wisconsin State Senator Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma), who introduced the legislation, said in a press release that “The idea for this bill came from a small business owner in town who ran into staffing issues during summer hours due to their young employees not being able to work past 9 p.m.”
In an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale wrote, “The proposed change is the latest attempt by Wisconsin Republicans to solve the state’s so-called labor shortage on the backs of children.” The AFL-CIO, Wisconsin Education Association Council, and Wisconsin School Social Workers Association have all issued statements condemning the new law, saying it rolls back child labor protection laws.
Governor Tony Evers apparently agreed with the AFL-CIO: on February 4 he vetoed the bill.
Finding the legal means to put children to work is another attempt to compensate for the “great resignation,” with four million Americans declining to return to their low-paid jobs when the pandemic lockdown ended. The Wisconsin law allows businesses to keep wages low and fill job vacancies with adolescent employees—who should be focusing on their studies instead of working late on school nights—rather than increasing wages to attract adult employees. Another incentive for employers is that federal law allows them to pay workers younger than 20 as little as $4.25 an hour for the first 90 consecutive days of employment, which they can describe as a training period. Wisconsin is one of 20 states that have maintained the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour since 2008.
Small businesses have notoriously opposed attempts to raise the minimum wage, arguing that the increased labor costs would put them out of business. But big corporations are also capitalizing on the so-called labor shortage, in an effort to hire younger workers for low wages.
“They would like to see these hours of work change nationwide,” President Bloomingdale, who recently debated the head of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, tells The Conversationalist. “We need to renew our collective efforts to make sure that when people go to work, they have the ability to sustain a family.”
McDonald’s has come under fire in recent months for allowing a franchise owner in Medford, Oregon, to hang a banner outside that read “NOW HIRING 14 & 15 year-olds.” Job postings that advertise positions for 14, 15, and 16-year-olds at McDonald’s are still up online with a reminder that “during the summer months when school is out of session you are actually allowed to work up to 5 days a week and 38 hours a week.” Other fast-food chains have taken similar steps in a desperate attempt to alleviate staffing shortages.
Reid Maki, the Director of the National Consumer League’s Child Labor Coalition, said the government does not keep strong data on child labor. “There’s good reason to fear that the numbers could climb,” he said, adding that rising poverty caused by the pandemic could “drive kids to early work” rather than staying in school.
The Department of Labor warns that “the pandemic and subsequent economic downturns threaten to reverse decades of progress on child labor.” Labor disruptions, the death of family members, and school closures are listed as some of the key factors aggravating the situation. But this data is outward-facing and treats child labor as an international issue among developing nations.
In the U.S., one in seven children lives in poverty. They account for one-third of impoverished Americans, according to data from the Center for American Progress. The U.S. ranks third in child poverty rates among OECD nations, after Israel and Chile.
“The [American] public doesn’t really perceive that child labor is a thing of contemporary times,” Maki says.
Asked about the Wisconsin legislation, Maki said, “One issue is that kids who work a certain number of hours don’t do as well in school.” But he was also concerned about the safety issues that come with working later hours, both on the job and while driving home.
Maki is not opposed to teens working part-time jobs for some pocket money. His concern is for children who are compelled to work because the family needs their income to meet basic expenses. “We need to get to a point where all adults make a living wage and don’t need the income of their kids to help the family get by,” says Maki.
But with soaring inflation and millions newly cut off from unemployment benefits, the risk that children will have to go out and work in order to help their parents put food on the table is now very real.
Under Biden’s Covid relief package, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) provided families with $3,600 per year for each child under the age of six and $3,000 for each child 17 and under, with the funds paid out in monthly checks of up to $300 per child. These payments went furthest among families who typically don’t make enough money in a fiscal year to receive a full CTC under normal circumstances. The December expiration has now cut off a critical source of cash-in-hand for the poorest families.
For Republicans, that seems to be the point. The GOP Ways and Means Committee published ablog post in October 2021 denying that the Child Tax Credit had reduced child poverty by half and claiming that it discourages people from working. They cite a University of Chicago study that claims the CTC would cause 1.5 million workers to exit the labor force.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we believed children were largely “immune” to the virus. Now we know this isn’t the case. Children are contracting Covid, just not at numbers that register at the policy level. Our elected officials have shown that they’re willing to let children be the collateral damage of an ongoing crisis in more ways than one.
[post_title] => Republicans want to solve the labor shortage problem by putting children to work
[post_excerpt] => Weak labor laws combined with poverty and soaring inflation could result in millions of children leaving school to help put food on the family table.
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[post_content] => Famous for its delicious honey, Kashmir has seen a decline in artisanal apiculture due to a confluence of political and environmental factors.
GANDERBAL, KASHMIR –Clusters of beehives dot the sprawling lawns outside the Rizvi family home in the Kashmiri village of Shalhar. Bees swarm the flowers and suck the marrow out of colorful petals. Towseefa Rizvi, 49, clad in protective gear, walks toward her hives; she manages 200 colonies of Apis mellifera, often referred to as the European or western honeybee. This district, located about a half-hour’s drive from Srinagar, boasts diverse flora, sprawling apple orchards, and extensive forests that are the reason Kashmir is famous for its uniquely delicious honey.
“I had never thought of doing something like this,” she says, gently opening a hive. “But this unusual job has both challenged and fascinated me.”
A mother of three, Rizvi has been beekeeping for more than a decade. She taught herself the necessary skills by researching online, watching and consulting with local apiarists, and through trial and error. In addition to running her own honey production busines, she now trains and supports new apiarists, especially women in her community. Beekeeping is a popular enterprise, she explained, because startup costs are low.
The average annual turnover from Rizvi’s 200 colonies is about $10,698 (monthly income in rural Kashmir is between $66 and $133). She retains an income of about $4,012 and puts the difference back into the business.
This part of Kashmir is deeply conservative. Women typically look down while walking outdoors; they do not speak in public or visit the homes of strangers unless accompanied by a male family member. Rizvi’s decision to become the first women in her district to launch her own business, let alone in this traditionally male-dominated occupation, was thus deeply unusual. But her husband, Syed Parvaz, 42, has supported her from the beginning; he is now a production manager in Kashmir Valley Agro Industry, which includes their honey-making business (Jammu and Kashmir is the only place in India that produces a rare variety of wild bush honey, he explained.) The couple are committed to releasing the untapped potential of the honey production industry in their region.
Inspired by Rizvi’s example, an increasing number of women from poor families are starting their own apiaries. They look up to her for showing them an income-earning business that they can run from home, a fact that was particularly relevant during the pandemic lockdown. Rizvi and her husband have registered around 500 beekeepers and have trained thousands of beekeepers in neighboring districts.
“I tell them if I can be an entrepreneur with limited education and skills, why can’t they,” says Rizvi. “I started beekeeping when there were hardly any women in the trade, but now we have so many around and if we cannot inspire and support each other then it would be our collective failure.”
The pandemic provided Rizvi with unexpected opportunities. During the lockdown she launched an online school to teach beekeeping, and then a website to sell a variety of products ranging from honey to herbal tea mixtures. She also renewed her commitment to sustainable farming practices, starting with cultivating her own vegetables to compensate for soaring prices and spotty access to markets. Bees, she pointed out, play “a major role” in sustainable agriculture.
[caption id="attachment_3585" align="aligncenter" width="840"] Towseefa Rizvi and Syed Parvez at their honey production facility.[/caption]
Some hope that, with an infusion of knowledge and skills, beekeeping could help revitalize Kashmir’s economy.
Unemployment in the territory is the highest in India, a fact that has particularly hurt people younger than 35, who are 70 percent of the population, and women—72.6 percent of whom are without work. More than two years of political upheaval, military curfews, the longest internet blackout in history, and then the pandemic lockdown, have had a devastating impact. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries estimates that the regional economy has lost $7bn since 2019.
But the road to expanding beekeeping into a lucrative business is littered with obstacles, explained Sajad Hussain Parey, professor of entomology at Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University. The government provides no social security to beekeepers—i.e, they are not insured—or training in modern methods. Most traditional beekeepers are unaware of critical skills like seasonal hive management and bee pollen collection. As a result, honey production is low; a lack of marketing opportunities further undermines the earning potential of beekeeping. Quality control is also a problem, said Parey, because there is no central institution to monitor and test the honey for purity.
But an infusion of government funding could unleash the potential of Kashmir’s honey industry. What’s needed are training and market access to allow sustainable exploitation of Kashmir’s climate and natural vegetation. With honeybees around the world becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change and the chemicals used in industrial apiaries, training local people in artisanal beekeeping and modern scientific methodology could create significant employment opportunities. A return to sustainable beekeeping methods would also encourage ecological awareness and rural development, promote small village industry, increase biodiversity —and could double farmers’ income from fruit and vegetable cultivation by complementing it with beekeeping.
Since almost everyone in Kashmir has a house and land, they have the space and means to engage in small and medium scale beekeeping at home, with minimal financial investment.
The regional government is working to generate new business opportunities in the production of bee byproducts like beeswax, propolis, bee venom, and royal jelly. In addition, it is attempting to expand the apiculture sector by increasing the number of beekeeping units, obtaining a GI tag for the region’s honey, and helping farmers increase their incomes by introducing modern technological methods.
Parvez and Rizvi have begun working on Integrated Pest Management to train apiarists in protecting their bees from pests and predators.
“A person should be confident to take care of bees,” says Syed, adding that the couple is in constant touch with institutions, research departments, and independent beekeepers across the world. Through their networks they are learning about skill training, trust building measures, and procurement of plants and machinery, as well as how to diversify their honey products and expand their market opportunities. By setting up sales outlets, they are also learning how to improve the income and employment of the beekeepers, assure sustainability and inspire more young unemployed people to take up the craft.
Rizvi explains that her ambition goes beyond just growing her own business. “The participation of more and more women in this field is my dream,” she said, adding that she is working to create “a sustainable revenue opportunity” for local people.
As Rizvi prepares to inspect her hives, which she does during the evenings, when the bees are less aggressive, she puts on her protective cap and coat. “A blooming garden is my office,” says Rizvi as bees buzz and hum in the hive. “And bees are like my family.”
[post_title] => ‘Bees are like my family’: A female beekeeper is reviving honey production in Kashmir
[post_excerpt] => After years of political upheaval, military curfews, months-long communications blockades, and then the devastating pandemic, Kashmir's economy is on its knees. Could beekeeping save it?
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[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26
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Towseefa Rizvi and Syed Parvez at their honey production facility.[/caption]
Some hope that, with an infusion of knowledge and skills, beekeeping could help revitalize Kashmir’s economy.
Unemployment in the territory is the 