Menstrual inequity is not unique to developing nations. It affects all low-income girls and women.
What if someone’s circumstances forced them to experience their period without access to sanitary napkins or tampons? Would they go to school or to work worrying every minute about blood soaking through their underwear, whether the makeshift pad they made with a fistful of toilet paper, a dirty rag, or even cow dung or leaves stayed in place, whether it increased their risk of bacterial infection?
Would you?
Millions of young girls and women experience their monthly periods under these undignified and unhygienic circumstances. They miss school, they miss work, and as a result their earning potential and opportunities for social and financial advancement in their lives are irrevocably affected. In some extreme situations, young women even exchange sex for money to buy menstrual supplies. This is referred to as period poverty.
Period poverty creates poverty
“Imagine not being able to sit through class,” says Jessica Williams, Chief Communications Officer for Days for Girls, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that aims to improve educational and livelihood outcomes for women and girls by “turning periods into pathways.”
“You can’t work, you end up staying home, all these missed opportunities to contribute and make money. Period poverty literally creates poverty.”
The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear. Half the world’s population in developing and poor countries lacks the fundamental necessities a woman needs to deal safely and with dignity with a bodily function that recurs monthly for 40 years of their lives.
Operating in over 144 countries in six continents, Days for Girls creates washable and reusable menstrual health products and kits that include carry pouches, underwear, soap and washcloths, and a menstrual cup alternative. These products are manufactured and sold locally by women, providing them with a dependable stream of revenue.
Period inequity is our problem, too
While menstrual inequity is far more pervasive in developing nations, it is not unique to far-away countries. Low-income girls and women, women in Indigenous communities, and women experiencing homelessness in western countries—where supermarket and pharmacy aisles are brimming with all brands, colours, sizes, and shapes of sanitary products—are still not able to afford basic menstrual products.
Many countries are now having long-overdue conversations about making sanitary products free or at the very least tax-free and affordable—finally seeing them as medical necessities women don’t have a choice about purchasing. Scotland was the first country in the world to make period products free. It’s perhaps no accident the bill was first introduced by a woman and passed by a government that has a woman at the helm. Countries like Canada and Australia have removed the GST from period products, New Zealand and a handful of U.S. States have already mandated free period products in schools. Recent U.S. studies have shown that about a quarter of menstruating students struggle to access period products, with both anxiety, stigma, and educational barriers cited as the direct result.
Breaking the stigma
Period poverty goes beyond a lack of access to period products. It also refers to taboos attached to menstruation.
“In some cultures, women on their period are considered unclean,” says Williams. “Our job is to help people overcome this, educate them on the subject, teach young boys, their brothers, fathers, husbands, about female bodies so they can be more understanding and supportive of what is essentially a basic human right.”
Nepali schoolgirls holding bags of washable menstrual products.
In Nepal, one of the countries Days for Girls operates in, menstruating women are considered bad luck. The stigma forces them into isolated menstruating huts every month, which makes them vulnerable to rape, animal attacks, and bad weather. Many young girls have died while alone. Aside from the physical dangers involved in forced isolation, superstitions like these also degrade women and position them as inferior in a society that should see them as equals.
The scent of solidarity
Barb Stegemann, founder and CEO of The 7 Virtues, a perfume company, decided to help the Nepali women who are shunted into menstruating huts.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, she’s launching Lotus Pear, a scent that uses sustainably sourced geranium from Egypt, with part of the proceeds helping to advance menstrual equity for 700 young women in Nepal.
“It’s about women and power, the loss of it, and getting it back,” Stegemann says. “Each of us is a potential agent of change.” The entrepreneur says she prefers empowerment over charity because it creates self-sufficiency and confidence in one’s abilities. As a young teenager, she saw first-hand how poverty can undermine one’s potential and self-esteem.
“We fell on hard times when I was a young,” she says. “My mom started having health issues and all of sudden… record scratch. We’re living in a trailer on welfare and mom is in the hospital all the time.”
Stegemann says she knows what period poverty feels like.
“Not to get gross,” she says, “but we were poor, I would often use toilet paper.”
Period kits that Day for Girls distributes.
Women lifting other women
Women helping empower other women is a running theme through Stegemann’s career and overall philosophy. When she launched her business 12 years ago, she worked out of her garage and bankrolled the venture with her credit card. She aspired to support families in war-torn nations by flexing women’s buying power to reverse issues of war and poverty.
Her fragrance collection is made with natural essential oils purchased and often manufactured in countries rebuilding after war or strife, from Haiti to Afghanistan and Rwanda, what Stegemann refers to as “retail activism.”
Impact partners like her are essential to the work non-profits like Days for Girls do.
“Without impact partners like The 7 Virtues, we wouldn’t be able to do our work because they essentially fund the work that we do,” says Williams.
Like Stegemann, the founder of Days for Girls is also a woman whose actions have been shaped by difficult personal experiences.
Celeste Mergens was born in Oklahoma, to a family that faced poverty, spent time living in a car and often went without food. At the age of seven she was raped. When she heard that some North American men were travelling to poor countries with suitcases full of menstrual products these women needed just so they could sexually assault them, she knew she had to do something. Since 2008, her organization’s two-pronged approach to period poverty—the sale and manufacture of menstrual pads and the education to eliminate taboos—has changed countless of lives.
“I was told over 400 women immediately came forward for the program in Nepal,” says Stegemann. “The organization has invested for so long in the community there’s now trust, and I think that’s what’s so exciting, it’s a movement.”
The invisible problem
The global pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges women and girls face. A recent report indicates almost 10 million children worldwide might never return to school. It predicts girls will have a harder time than boys, because many will be forced into early marriage or the labor market as families struggle with extreme poverty. With these obstacles in mind, efforts to tackle period poverty and the limitations it imposes on women worldwide can only be encouraged.
“I think the issue of period poverty should be part of everyone’s political platform,” says Stegemann. “It would be refreshing to hear a candidate say, ‘These are the things that advance a community,’ and find a way for companies to provide them for free.”
Stegemann says she was shocked to learn that a lack of sanitary products in the north of Canada, where a box of tampons can run from $16 to more than $45, remains a huge problem among Indigenous communities.
“Was I living around a rock?” she asks. “Why don’t more people know about these things?”
[post_title] => Why period poverty is everyone's problem
[post_excerpt] => The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear.
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The isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the pandemic have caused a sharp spike in demand for mental health care, but the system is not providing the help people need.
Chelsea, a 33-year-old part-time CrossFit coach, managed her lifelong anxiety by keeping herself busy and physically active, but the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing measures deprived her of those essential coping mechanisms. Suddenly she found herself alone at home and her anxiety, which had been acting up since 2018, became a serious problem. A resident of Edmonton, Canada, Chelsea tried to find a therapist within the public health-care system who could see her for free or on a sliding scale. But the waiting lists were long, and she was unable to afford a private therapist. She tried BetterHelp, a company that provides web-based therapy, but stopped when she realized she had to pay extra to speak with a therapist via video camera. She also tried a free phone service through the Edmonton municipality, but she needed long-term therapy—not a one-time chat.
Chelsea was on two separate wait lists for over two years but did not receive any updates so, to her frustration, she had no idea when her turn would be. Recently, thanks to a new job with improved benefits, she was finally able to find a therapist in the private system.
Canada’s national health-care system, which, for the most part, is publicly available and funded through contributions from the federal and provincial governments, has been stretched to its limits by the pandemic. But even in better times, before COVID, mental health care was difficult to obtain. The national health-care system places a priority on physical health, with a particular focus on critical and emergency medicine. But now, after two years of extreme stress caused by isolation, unemployment, uncertainty, loss, and increased family responsibilities, the demand for mental health care has spiked.
A recent survey by the Canadian Mental Health Association found that the number of Ontario residents currently seeking mental health care has risen to 24 percent, up from 9 percent in 2020. According to another survey conducted in the fall, about one in five Canadians rated their mental health as “poor,” while half the respondents said they were worried about a lack of access to care.
Dr. Simon Sherry, a clinical psychologist and professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said his waiting list has risen from 150 pre-pandemic to about 450 people today. “In Nova Scotia, poor mental health has become statistically normal,” he said, adding that people with pre-existing conditions are having “an especially rough time.” The pandemic has left them with physical and psychological scars.Dr. Karen Hetherington, a faculty lecturer at McGill’s School of Social Work, agreed with Dr. Sherry, pointing out that “it’s no surprise” to see a decline in the mental health of a person who might have spent months in lockdown in a small apartment during Montreal’s long, dark, frigid winter.
Lyla* is a mental health-care specialist in a Montreal hospital’s outpatient clinic, working with patients suffering from schizophrenia. She has seen many cases of people with severe pre-existing issues experiencing a complete breakdown during the pandemic. “I know some patients that just couldn’t function anymore because everything they had in terms of socialization was taken away from them,” she said.
A global calamity of this scale is a natural vector for a mental health crisis, but those who have worked in mental health care for years are grimly unsurprised that the system failed to respond to the sharp increase in demand. They have been asking for extra support for years, but felt as though they were screaming into a void.
“It’s simply been the case that both the health-care field and public health have focused overwhelmingly on physical health,” said Dr. Nicholas King, a professor at McGill University who is an expert in public health ethics and policy. “So, when you have a major, large-scale event that has a huge impact on mental health, that system for dealing with mental health is obviously going to come under strain.”
Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist and Chair and Chief of Psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Previously, he lived and worked for a decade in Ontario. Dr. Sukhera trained in New York State, which, he believes “has a pretty decent” mental health care system. “Where I trained, if a young person needs support, regardless of whether they were poor or not, they usually got fairly timely intervention,” he said. In Canada, by contrast, he encountered “huge obstacles in accessing basic evidence-based psychotherapies” for his patients.
Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care. In fact, Dr. Sukhera said, “There are many jurisdictions in the U.S. where access to basic evidence-based mental health support is way better than in many parts of Canada. And that’s a difficult piece of truth to recognize and reconcile for Canadians who idealize our system. But my lived experience would say that’s the truth.”
Like health workers more broadly, mental health-care providers have burnt out during the pandemic, with many choosing to quit. Lyla cited a combination of overwork, low pay, and a lack of acknowledgment as the factors driving the resignation among her colleagues in mental health. Now, newly vacant positions are going to inexperienced recent graduates. Lyla said that mental health-care jobs were once desirable and difficult to obtain. But these days she and her colleagues are constantly begging for extra support and left feeling that “the benefits [of staying in the profession] don’t outweigh the risks.”
Noelle* works in youth mental health care at a public clinic in Montreal. She, too, has seen many of her colleagues choosing to leave. The vacant positions are going unfilled, which increases the strain on those who stay, which in turn leads to more burnout and more departures. The problem with the public sector, she said, is the way it’s structured. In the type of clinic in which she works, psychologists are told they have “four months to help the patient and then you have to close the file and move on to somebody else,” she said, adding: “In a private setting, you don’t get that.” The government, she says, “treats people like numbers, like employees. Like the way overtime was mandatory for nurses for a long time. How is someone with children supposed to be working 18 hours in a row?”
Although everyone I spoke with agreed that additional funding for the public system was much needed, Noelle also recommends more funding go into community organizations, such as AMI-Quebec, a non-profit that helps the families of those with mental illness, or Cyprès, which provides direct mental health services to individuals in their community. Dr. Hetherington agrees. In her view, the culture in the public sector is simply too “top down. It has no understanding of the real needs of the population, the clientele. It’s so bureaucratic.”
She also does not believe the public sector can be adequately transformed to meet the needs of those suffering. “You can’t change a culture when it’s such an elephant. Then you need to build new structures that integrate a different culture,” she said. She’d like to see the Quebec government fund new non-profit mental health centers with public money. These centers could then contract directly with community organizations. She hopes that this would allow a new culture to flourish in mental health care.
When we last spoke, however, Dr. Hetherington was feeling newly optimistic about mental health care in Quebec, with the provincial government having recently announced that it would invest $1.2 billion in mental health services. “This is the first time the money is attached to a vision,” she said, with funding for both school and refugee mental health. The plan is also focused on bringing mental health services into the community and sensitizing the community. She confirmed that the pandemic “was a facilitator.”
“What we need,” said Dr. Sherry, “is a fundamental kind of courage from decision-makers and government to actually center people who are suffering when making decisions because they’re politically convenient or politically popular.” Many are still waiting for a public system that is failing to provide care for them. Private therapy “is really not affordable unless you’re making a lot of money,” said Chelsea. Without her new job, she’d still be waiting—along with thousands of others.
*Names have been changed upon request.
[post_title] => A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada's health care system
[post_excerpt] => Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care.
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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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After two years of living under stringent pandemic protocols, Canadians are fed up. They might not agree with the freedom convoy's politics, but they understand their feeling of resentment.
“You’re taking the swastika out of context!”
I sat there wondering if someone had dosed my coffee with LSD.
“Excuse me?”
I could feel her seething on the other end of the telephone as she prepared to walk me through the ins and outs of Nazi iconography etiquette. Annette is a patient woman. She runs a private daycare in the suburbs north of Montreal — the kind of place that teaches toddlers to use sign language so they can tell their parents when they’re thirsty or need a fresh diaper.
But the swastika thing is testing her limits.
Two weeks ago, when a group calling itself the “Freedom Convoy” flooded downtown Ottawa with tractor trailers and an estimated 8,000 protesters, people were seen flying a Canadian flag with swastikas etched into it. There were a few, actually.
When I mentioned this to Annette, asking her why a protest about ending vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions seemed like such an inviting place for extremists, she took a deep breath. Annette, who supports the convoy, told me the symbol of the Third Reich on Parliament Hill wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
“It’s not a Nazi swastika, well it is but it’s not a pro-Nazi swastika. Okay, that sounds bad. It’s a comment on how Canada has become a fascist state with all these COVID restrictions.”
“So it’s an ironic swastika?” I replied.
“Yes,” she said, sounding relieved.
“But what about the actual Nazi flag?”
I swear I heard Annette’s palm hit her forehead. We agreed to change subjects.
The problem with Canada’s Freedom Convoy isn’t people like Annette. Well, it is and it isn’t.
Annette is triple vaccinated. She respects all of the COVID protocols and even voted for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government three times. But after two years of living with the ebbs and flows of a virus and restrictions that can feel improvised at the best of times, Annette is fed up. Which is understandable.
In Quebec—which has the most stringent COVID protocols of any province—an estimated two million people have contracted the Omicron variant since it arrived last fall. That’s roughly a quarter of my home province’s population. Of course, this is just an estimate since the latest wave wiped out Quebec’s testing capacity.
Annette’s frustration is perfectly normal. Where things get more complicated is that while the Freedom Convoy is supported by a small but sizeable minority of Canadians from all walks of life, it’s being led by a coalition with ties to American extremists like the Three Percenters militia, QAnon and even one former Trump staffer who’s helping with strategy on the frontlines.
But there are distinctly Canadian elements to the convoy as well. Alberta’s ultra-conservative “WEXIT” secessionists and Quebec’s Europe-inspired far right are both flying their colours on Parliament Hill. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention sightings of a few Proud Boys at the rally two weeks ago. Founded by Canadian Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys were recently designated a terrorist group by Trudeau’s government because of their penchant for insurrection and political violence.
The convoy’s logistics and messaging is handled by a group called Canada Unity, which is a mishmash of classic Canadian grievances — the Liberal government has never had a strong presence in Conservative strongholds like the prairies and rural Ontario, which only fuels a sense of mutual resentment — the French populist gilets jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement and American-style alt-right tactics.
Far-right activist Pat King is a major figure in the WEXIT campaign, which advocates for Alberta to secede from Canada; many in the oil-producing province resent their tax dollars going to the federal government’s coffers. Western alienation has been a central theme of Canadian politics since Trudeau’s father Pierre Elliot Trudeau was prime minister in the 1970s.
What’s different from past western protest movements is that Albertans are finding common ground with Quebec conservatives. Traditionally, these two groups aren’t even on speaking terms—partly because they speak different languages, but also because each sees the other as taking up too much space in the national conversation. But they appear to be finding common ground over their shared resentment of Trudeau and his multiculturalist view of Canada.
King also organized attacks on anti-racist demonstrators last year in northern Alberta, referring to his roughneck crew as “Patriots” — which certainly rings a bell to American ears. He says Muslim immigration will lead to the “depopulation of the caucasian race” which is a common theme for both the American and European far right. James Bauder, a leader of the far-right movement Canada Unity (in which King is also active), authored a “Memorandum of Understanding” that would force Canada’s unelected head of state, Governor General Mary Simon, and its unelected senate to negotiate with protesters and ultimately force Canada’s elected government to “resign their lawful positions” if they don’t meet the convoy’s demands.
A constitutional lawyer friend who looked through the document called it “somewhere between political witchcraft and January 6 fan fiction.”
Here, too, Canadians feel the influence of their southern neighbours, where far right activists and conspiracy theorists justified their attempt to overturn the presidential election on January 6, 2021 with an archaic and inconsistent reading of the U.S. Constitution.
And then there’s the question of who’s funding this thing. Political parties in Canada don’t raise money at nearly the rate of their American counterparts. Elections are almost entirely funded by the state and overseen by a robust arms-length entity, Elections Canada. For context, the Conservative Party of Canada raised $13 million in the second half of 2020 — more than any other party in the country during that period.
In the U.S. that kind of cash barely finances a down ballot congressional race.
So how is it that Canadians, who are notoriously thrifty when it comes to politics, put together a $10 million war chest for the Freedom Convoy in under two weeks? Most of that money, raised on the American GoFundMe platform, was frozen by the company because there was no way of tracking how it would be spent.
The federal government has since called on GoFundMe executives to testify before Parliament as to the source of this cash.
Determined not be thwarted by financial oversight, the Freedom convoy turned to GiveSendGo — the Christian platform that collected millions in donations for Kyle Rittenhouse — to keep their movement alive. It didn’t take long for millions more in donations to pour into the Convoy’s cause. This isn’t typical of Canadian politics.
QAnon slogans like “Free the Children” and “WWG1WWA” are scattered throughout the Ottawa site, alongside signs calling for Trudeau to be jailed and tried for treason, which bring some real “lock her up” vibes.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Freedom Convoy is the ease with which journalists are harassed, attacked and threatened by supporters. In Alberta—where satellite protests are being staged—a reporter from CTV News tweeted a picture of himself removing the station’s logo from its TV truck to avoid being targeted by mob violence.
“It’s just not safe right now,” CTV reporter Justin Thompson wrote.
In Ontario, supporters of the convoy smashed the windows of a van belonging to Radio Canada, the French-language national broadcaster. The Quebec-based TVA Nouvelles started sending security guards alongside its reporters when covering the convoy’s Ottawa encampment. Meanwhile, the Canadian Association of Journalists reports that members covering the protest have been spat on and shoved, and have received countless death threats since the outset of the movement.
Last week, during a “press conference” organized by the convoy’s leaders, CTV News was barred from the event because organizers wanted to “(teach) the fake news industry what news is.” Again, this must sound familiar to Americans.
For the residents of Canada’s notoriously boring capital city, life has been upended. A friend of mine, who works as an interpreter on Parliament Hill, told me she doesn’t feel safe at night walking past the encampment. But she also says she’s been so angry that she flips them off on her way to work every morning and struggles to suppress the urge to instigate a fight with them.
“I’m just looking for an excuse to throw a punch,” she said.
Here’s something an American audience might not realize. Canadians are perfectly capable of committing political violence independently of any outside influence. Though we may not have the American appetite for revolution, this country’s wealth is derived from stolen Indigenous land and ongoing colonial violence. But I digress.
Which brings me back to Annette.
We grew up in the same small town, where a huge percentage of our parents worked in the machine shops building airplanes for Bombardier, an aeronautics giant based out of Quebec. That changed after 9/11, when Canada’s aeronautics industry collapsed. Thousands of workers were laid off and while unemployment approached historic lows ahead of the pandemic, the years of a steady, well-paid job and access to home ownership feel like something that’s dying with our parents’ generation.
So a lot of people — like Annette’s machinist husband — are living through an endless cycle of being laid off, hired again and then tossed back to the wilderness when the economy takes a dip. Meanwhile, companies like Bombardier get giant government bailouts even though they fail to meet benchmarks, continue laying off workers and rewarding their inept executives with millions in bonuses.
Add two years of COVID-19 to that and it seems only to have accelerated the frustration in Annette’s household.
“It’s time for this to end, I don’t recognize life in this country anymore,” she said. “We’re told to put our lives on hold and then start again and then put them back on hold. We have a set of rules that are constantly changing. Some of us have been vaccinated three times. What’s the end game here? Why are we being treated like idiots?
“I’m not a violent person, I am against the violence in the Freedom Convoy but I’m also angrier than I’ve ever been.”
U.S. influence among supporters of the Freedom Convoy is obvious but much of the anger fueling these protests has elements of western-Canadian alienation, resentment for a Liberal government that’s been in power 21 of the last 30 years and anxiety over a rapidly changing Canadian economy. Some of the far right elements of the movement have an American feel to them but there’s an anti-immigrant, Islamophobic segment of the protest that mirrors European conservative movements like Brexit, Front National or Éric Zémmour’s ultra nationalist Reconquête party.
The most worrisome aspect of the protest is how rapidly it was embraced by American conservatives with deep pockets, access to weapons and a wealth of knowledge about attacking democratic institutions.
Perhaps it’s just the LSD in my coffee making me paranoid but that seems like a dangerous combination. After all, we share the world’s longest international border.
[post_title] => The Freedom Convoy's politics are fringe, but the average Canadian's frustration is real
[post_excerpt] => Here’s something an American audience might not realize. Canadians are perfectly capable of committing political violence independently of any outside influence.
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Canadians tend to see the extremism expressed by the truckers and their supporters as a fringe movement imported from the U.S., but that is a gross oversimplification.
The so-called “Freedom Convoy,” a highly disruptive protest organized and led by Canadian truckers who oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions, is now entering its third week. Protesting truckers drove their rigs into downtown Ottawa and set up camp, blowing their horns at eardrum-shattering decibels for hours each day and holding tailgate parties, making the downtown area of Canada’s usually placid small capital city unlivable. City residents are incensed by the noise and disruption, while the chief of police has resigned under fire for his failure to disperse the demonstrators.
The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act, which gives law enforcement expanded powers to arrest protesters and break up demonstrations.
The angry, anti-vax truckers have harassed residents to the point that older people are afraid to leave their homes; they have committed multiple acts of vandalism and violence, some targeting journalists; and in one egregious incident were spotted lighting a fire in the lobby of a residential apartment building. They have blockaded roads, and not only in Ottawa. The freedom convoy participants have also shut down multiple border crossings as the protest has spread west, with particularly large presences elsewhere in Ontario and in Alberta, an oil-rich province known for cattle ranching and the prevalence of strong right-wing views, including secessionism—a combination that often elicits comparisons with Texas.
On Sunday police cleared and reopened the Ambassador Bridge, where protesters had for a week choked off a critical commercial route that connects Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario. But the authorities have not yet found the stomach to forcibly break up the protest in Ottawa. As the siege drags on, journalists, pundits, and the public have been digging into the ideological motivations, funding sources, and cross-border networks of the protesters.
Protesters have displayed swastikas, Canadian flags, Confederate flags, Gadsen flags, Trump flags, U.S. flags, and QAnon messaging. Observers have also reported conservative Christian messaging and symbols that were likewise present at the U.S. protests against the 2020 election results that culminated in the January 6 insurrection. The elements clearly inspired by American right-wing Christians include “Jericho marches” around the parliamentary precinct in Ottawa, in a symbolic reenactment of the Hebrew Bible tale about God causing the city of Jericho’s walls to collapse after the Israelites marched while blowing ram’s horns, or shofars. Right-wing Christians have in recent years appropriated these Jewish ritual instruments, blowing them during church services and at “Jericho marches” in both the U.S. and Canada. The organizer of the Canadian “Jericho marches” is Benita Pedersen, an Albertan.
As Jorge Barrera reports for the CBC, “Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows like an undercurrent through the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.” But how much of this represents the direct influence of the American Christian Right, as opposed to an expression of homegrown, if fringe, Canadian extremism and majoritarian grievance?
Catherine Porter, the New York Times’s Canada bureau chief, observed that “many believe the unrest is essentially a U.S. import,” but this is an oversimplification. The discourse reminds me of how, when I first began researching networks involving U.S. Christian Right actors and right-wing, pro-Putin Russians (many associated with the Russian Orthodox Church) in 2013, the spread of illiberal, socially conservative policies in the global South, Eastern Europe, and Russia was often framed in terms of the exportation of America’s culture wars. A few years later, when the connections between Donald Trump’s campaign for president and various Russian actors became apparent, many liberals embraced the simplistic and frankly absurd notion that the U.S.’s right-wing extremism and deep social and political divisions had been essentially manufactured by Russian disinformation. The reality is that Russian influence operations managed to exploit and exacerbate problems that already existed.
Throughout those years, while monitoring the various networks and connections between American, western European, and Russian right-wing extremists, eventually in my capacity as a senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts project based at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, I stressed agency among actors from all factions and rejected temptations to view the efforts of organizations like the World Congress of Families (now known as the International Organization for the Family) as sites of unidirectional influence.
By the same token, the international ties between Canada’s right-wing extremists and those from other countries, primarily the U.S., must be seen in terms of multidirectional influence and feedback loops. The U.S. Christian Right does have ties to Canadian extremist groups, and at least a diffuse connection to the convoy wreaking havoc in Ottawa. Whereas transatlantic connections are usually limited to elite, higher-level actors, Canada and the U.S. share the world’s longest undefended border, making it easy for less well-funded, less sophisticated, less easily monitored actors to connect with one another—people who are ready to engage in street violence, or ideologues and agitators who are happy to appear alongside street brawlers.
Proud Boys Canada may have officially dissolved itself after Ottawa declared it a terrorist organization last spring, but the organization was founded by a Canadian. And, while the Proud Boys have become mainly an American group, some Canadians have been involved in violent right-wing protests on the U.S. side of the border. These include the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C., where at least one Canadian flag was spotted, and where a group of Proud Boys knelt in an unmistakably evangelical prayer that was captured on video before playing a prominent role in the violence. Canadian actors have also been present at right-wing protests and incidents of street violence in Portland, Oregon—a city frequently targeted by the Proud Boys and similar far-right group Patriot Prayer.
The most well-known Canadian who has frequented Oregon is the notorious Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-born evangelical pastor based in Calgary, Alberta, who has led raucous protests and direct actions against public health mandates in Canada throughout the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that public health protections violate his “religious freedom.” In one such protest, Pawlowski and other participants carried tiki torches in a clear nod to the August, 2017 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pawlowski was recently arrested in Coutts, Alberta, in connection with his support for the protesters blockading the border crossing there.
As for the American Christian Right’s connections to the trucker protest in Canada, major figures such as Franklin Graham—world-famous evangelist Billy Graham’s son and head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—have spoken out in support of it. Although they are not household names, prominent “prophets” and “apostles” associated with the radical charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation—the kind of Christianity espoused by former Trump spiritual advisor Paula White—are also broadcasting their support, as researcher Bruce Wilson, who has published numerous articles documenting Christian Right and NAR activities and networks, confirmed when asked for comment.
The man holding the sign told 'The Catholic Register' that Pope Francis is a heretic and that the government is forcing people to take vaccines.
But perhaps the most significant U.S. Christian Right connection to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” is represented by the explicitly Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, which has become infamous in recent years for funding white supremacist causes, including the legal defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down supporters of Black Lives Matter at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Crowdfunding has allowed massive amounts of dark money to flow to the Canadian extremists behind the protest at a rate that dwarfs typical Canadian political fundraising, a worrisome development that could continue to undermine the country's civil society and democracy after the current protests are over.
Last week hackers broke into GiveSendGo’s network, releasing donor names, email addresses, and other information to journalists and researchers. One scholar looking into where the money originates is Dr. Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University. Lecaque posted a Twitter thread of messages from donors (without disclosing their names or other personally identifying information), as well as the countries (and in some cases states/provinces and cities) they come from. Eight of these messages “explicitly discuss Jericho,” Lecaque tweeted. The donations referenced in his thread mostly stemmed from the United States and Canada, but one came from the UK and another from France.
Lecaque told The Conversationalist that while the donors came from a broad geographic range, a high proportion were from the U.S. His keyword search of the messages donors posted brought up “a lot of religious themed entries, some more extreme than others.” Most of them were of the anodyne “God bless” variety, but there were some violent ones as well, with “themes of spiritual warfare or QAnon.” Lecaque acknowledged that explicitly religious messages were in the minority, but their presence nevertheless stood out.
The mostly white, racially aggrieved, conspiracy-theory believing crowd in the U.S. and Canada espouse unpopular views and support unpopular policies, but by using technology to connect and crowdfund internationally, they have managed to punch politically above their weight. Both countries have homegrown extremists and their own respective racist and colonialist realities to confront, but right-wingers from either side of the border are also influencing each other, probably more through media (including social media) than through direct cross-border interactions.
But what is it exactly that facilitates the mutual admiration and networking? That factor seems to be affiliation with conservative Christianity—especially, although not exclusively, evangelical Protestantism. This tracks with what I’ve observed in my own research both with respect to the domestic Christian Right and international right-wing networks. We are living through a moment of surging right-wing populism in North America, Europe, Australia, and some other parts of the world—a massive backlash against civil rights gains and the rise of multicultural democracy by the heirs of European colonialism and genocide.
A sense that they are outnumbered has contributed both to these individuals’ radicalization, and to the easing of traditional theological, cultural, and geopolitical enmities between various Christian and ethnic groups, paving the way for aggrieved (and mostly white) hardline Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Orthodox Christians to band together in attempts to assert dominance through the promotion of a “traditional values” agenda—whether in the European Court of Human Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the streets of Portland and Ottawa. While most American, Canadian, and European Christians are not right-wing extremists, most American, Canadian, and European right-wing extremists identify with Christianity, and find in it a justification for their bigotry and anti-social, anti-government, and anti-democratic actions. For democracy to prevail, we must find more effective ways to counter the diffuse international threat of Christian extremism.
[post_title] => Conservative Christianity's influence on the 'Freedom Convoy' indicates global spread of authoritarianism
[post_excerpt] => The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city.
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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] => The historic election marks the final stage in the transition away from Pinochet's dictatorship.
Hundreds of thousands of people flocked onto the streets of Chile’s cities on Sunday night to celebrate a history-making presidential election. The sounds of cheers and honking car horns were everywhere as, with 97 percent of the votes counted, Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student leader who headed the leftist coalition Frente Amplio, became the country’s youngest president. The final polls heading into the election predicted a very close result, with the far-right Jose Antonio Kast, 55, slightly ahead of the much younger, progressive Boric. But the final tally was not even close: Boric won with 55.9 percent of the vote—12 percentage points ahead of Kast, who called Boric to concede at 7.10 p.m., after only 30 percent of the ballots had been counted.
[caption id="attachment_3644" align="aligncenter" width="740"] Jubilant Boric supporters poured onto the streets of Santiago on December 19, 2021.[/caption]
On Election Day I was in Concepcion, in south-central Chile, feeling anxious but also hopeful that the Chilean people would elect Gabriel Boric, the humane, democratic and environmentally conscious candidate. I was at a polling station as ballot counting began, watching as the numbers showed a consistent advantage for Boric. When the announcement was made that Gabriel Boric had been elected, becoming Chile's youngest president, I was euphoric.
"I will be a president who cares for democracy and does not risk it," Gabriel Boric said after he was elected to be the youngest president in Chile's history. The 35-year-old is the most liberal since President Salvador Allende in the early 70s. https://t.co/DEW4g8aNabpic.twitter.com/bijxRztHoZ
The two candidates campaigned on polarized visions for their country.
Kast, a conservative Catholic with nine children, is a Pinochet supporter. He ran a right-wing populist campaign that promoted a continuation of neoliberal economic policies and climate change denial. He vociferously opposed gender equality and abortion rights and incited against impoverished Venezuelans and Haitians who sought a better life in Chile.
Boric is a former leader of the 2011-13 student movement, which sought better and more affordable education for all; as a young politician, he was one of the architects of the 2019 Agreement for Social Peace, which led to the 2020 referendum for a new, more equitable constitution to replace the Pinochet-era one. His platform calls for an overhaul of the economy, ending the neoliberal policies that have made the country deeply unequal; Boric campaigned on making Chile a more unified society—one fully transitioned away from the legacy of the Pinochet regime.
The campaign
Sunday’s election marked the end of a long process that began with the July primaries. Boric surprised everyone by winning the leadership of the leftist coalition over the Communist candidate, Daniel Jadue. The polls had projected a win for Jadue, but he made some serious missteps with various gaffes, including antisemitic statements; Boric, meanwhile, came off as inclusive, charismatic, and knowledgeable during the debates. With his moderate yet innovative positions, like the importance of finding a balance between economic growth and a response to the climate crisis, he attracted the millennial voters who played a decisive role in his becoming the leftist coalition's candidate. A high turnout for the primaries, with more than 1.7 million voters casting a ballot, created a solid electoral base for the first round of the presidential election.
Kast, on the other hand, did not participate in the right-wing party’s primary elections; nor was he a favorite in the polls at the beginning of the election campaign. His candidacy emerged from a political pact between conservative Christians and the new far-right Republican Party; he then went on to perform well during the first debates against Sebastian Sichel, his rival for leadership of the right-wing coalition. Sichel positioned himself as a center-right candidate, a move that proved to be a mistake: He pushed right-wing voters toward Kast, whom they saw as an “authentic” right-wing candidate. For the far-right, who supported the Pinochet dictatorship and opposed a new constitution, Kast represented both their natural political home, and the man who was more likely to bring a right-wing government to power. The center-right moved toward Kast because they saw him as the man most likely to be elected and they wanted a right-wing government at all costs, even if that meant tacitly supporting xenophobic proposals such as the construction of ditches in Chile’s north to prevent impoverished and desperate Venezuelan migrants from entering the country.
The race
In the weeks before Election Day on December 19, polls consistently showed Kast just slightly ahead of Boric in a very tight race. International legacy media outlets painted a picture of Chilean society polarized between two extremist candidates, although Boric’s views are hardly extreme—they would put him somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In Chile, the influential right-wing media outlets played an outsized role in promoting Kast’s campaign with fake news that incited against Boric. Kast, for example, claimed several times that the bearded, tattooed leader of the leftist coalition used illicit drugs, a baseless lie that the right-wing media amplified until it gained such wide credence that Boric felt compelled to respond. During the December 13 debate against Kast he released lab results that proved he had no cannabis, amphetamines, or cocaine in his bloodstream.
Besides creating a divisive and polarized atmosphere during the campaign, the far right’s aggressive rhetoric and fake news also disseminated fear of Boric’s purportedly “socialist” agenda. For example, Kast claimed that the Communist Party’s support for Boric was indicative of a dangerous, far-left agenda; evoking Venezuela’s socialist bogeyman, he said that Boric, if elected, would drag Chile into chaos. In fact, Boric is very much a moderate who has attracted broad support with a political platform that advocates policies similar to those of European social democratic parties.
Voter turnout in Chile hovers at 50 percent, which increased this time in the second round. Some analysts predicted that Boric would inspire a surge in the youth vote, propelled by their concerns about the climate crisis and rising authoritarianism. While there is no data yet about age groups, overall voter participation did increase by more than one million over the first round. This election saw the highest electoral turnout in Chilean history, with Gabriel Boric receiving more votes than any presidential candidate in previous elections.
A historic election
Kast’s extreme views on women’s rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights inspired a diverse political movement in support of Boric’s candidacy. One of his proposals, for example, was to allow police to detain suspects for five days in undefined “confinement centers.” The far-right candidate thus galvanized significant sectors of voters to find common cause in combating the threat of far-right populism. The close relationship between the far right and religious fundamentalists alarmed feminists and other progressive movements, mobilizing them to organize and get out the vote.
But Chileans remain divided about the causes and outcomes of the 2019 social movement that sparked nationwide protests, which in turn led to a political agreement for the establishment of a constitutional process. The far-right opposes any structural change to Pinochet’s system. Boric and his broad coalition represent Chile’s majority, who aspire to a stable social and political transformation. They support the constitutional process and want a more equitable economic system that will replace Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy with a welfare state and sound environmental policies. Boric’s administration will seek to introduce an ecological approach to governing, and to implement transformative policies to pensions and healthcare, two of the pillars of the unequal and segregated Chilean system. Boric represents hope for a nation that wants more dignity, a fact that puts positive pressure on the future government: it needs to be humane, fair, and efficient. I believe the newly elected President Boric is more than ready to take on this immense challenge.
[post_title] => Gabriel Boric becomes Chile's youngest president on a progressive mandate
[post_excerpt] => The historic election marks the final stage in the transition away from Pinochet's dictatorship.
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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_content] => The dominant religion of Russian officials is money. There are many ways to exploit that, starting with a long list of individually targeted sanctions.Russia appears to be preparing for a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Satellite images show the Kremlin has been moving military materiel to the border since October, while intelligence analysis posits that as many as 175,000 troops are headed for border-region Russian army bases. These developments have alarmed both Europe and the United States, with President Biden warning President Putin on Tuesday of “strong economic and other measures” during a two-hour video summit between the two leaders. The ongoing conflict began more than seven years ago, after the November 2013 Euromaidan Uprising that led to the popular ousting of Viktor Yanukovich, a fantastically corrupt president who had largely been Putin’s ally. The Russian president responded in March 2014 by invading and annexing Crimea, and destabilizing parts of the Ukrainian east. Now, a simmering conflict is poised to get much worse. How should Western powers respond, particularly given that Ukraine is not a member of the EU or NATO?First, we must dispense with the idea that we can and should do nothing. As someone originally from Ukraine I am a biased observer; but even when I set aside my desire to prevent Putin from killing my relatives, I can see dire consequences for ostensibly disinterested parties. Western states would prefer to pretend that the headache called Vladimir Putin didn’t exist, given all the other headaches they have to deal with — like the global pandemic and rising inflation — but deal with him they must.A Russian invasion of Ukraine would cause instability throughout Europe and beyond, including a gas pipeline disruption and the loss of a buffer zone between NATO and an ever-belligerent Russia. Adventurism by leaders of other countries—such as Iran, for example—who would see the distraction and the dismay as an opportunity, would likely increase in scope. The current refugee crisis would grow exponentially, with disastrous repercussions. Markets would suffer, as would businesses and aviation. Russia’s other neighbors — including Central Asian regimes — could become increasingly unstable. Putin is using extreme measures in an attempt to bully Western powers into keeping Ukraine out of NATO; his fear is the prospect of seeing the Western alliance’s military forces right on his border, but this fear holds risks for the entire region. As long as there are no consequences to his actions, Putin will not stop. The Russian view of Ukraine, which was part of the czarist empire and the Soviet Union, is distorted by imperialist propaganda that describes it as both a nation of buffoons and a threat that Russia must pacify. Russia also sees Ukraine as the stage for another grievance—that of Western triumphalism following the end of the Cold War, which the United States described as a “victory.” To put the matter in crude but simple terms, America insulted Russia and Putin, the former KGB officer, wants revenge.Putin seems to believe that demoralizing the United States, which has provided aid to Ukraine since it became independent in 1992, would be a major win for Russia. Ukraine is poised to fight, even if their military is destined to lose an all-out war against Russia's, but images of carnage and violence don’t deter Putin easily. We must understand that the Russian president would be initially unmoved by the sight of Russian soldiers coming home in body bags. “Who the hell do Ukrainians think they are?” was something I often heard in elite Moscow circles— among businessmen, television personalities, politicians—after the ousting of Yanukovych and the launch of the 2014 war. Russia’s ruling elite disliked the idea of Ukrainians possibly enjoying a functioning democracy and a better standard of living than they had. Moscow sees a stable, prosperous Ukraine as hostile simply because its existence might cause ordinary Russians to ask questions about why they were comparatively worse off. Because Russia is an extremely unequal society, its elite sees ordinary citizens as less than human and thus not entitled to ask uncomfortable questions, which might lead to popular discontent. In order to maintain their position, the leadership is most likely to choose divide-and-conquer: Incite a bunch of ordinary Russians against Ukrainians, dial up anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda, and keep everyone distracted with a war. What’s to be done to prevent this looming nightmare that will involve both bloodshed and wider instability? First, the Western nations must stop behaving as though they are powerless. Putin sees Western consternation as a sign of weakness.It’s important, furthermore, to understand that Putin is not an ideologue. He uses ideology as an effective shield, but in practice he’s just another kleptocrat—albeit one with nuclear weapons. Russia’s new elite is composed of his close friends and important functionaries, all of whom benefit financially from their relationship with the president; normal people loathe Putin’s friends because they are so overtly corrupt. That very justifiable hatred is one of Russia’s greatest vulnerabilities, and one of the saddest elements of modern Russian life, which is dominated by stress and suspicion. Putin is the single leadership figure that Russians look to today, but he cannot fix all their problems. Meanwhile, brewing discontent is ripe for exploitation.Western powers must also draw clear red lines by naming consequences and then acting upon them if Putin refuses to back down. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)—the international system that allows banks to carry out trans-border transactions—should absolutely be on the table. This would rattle the Russian economy and have an immediate impact on Russian citizens. Notice how you can’t send money to an Iranian bank from the United States? That’s because Iran has been cut off from SWIFT; this affects everyone in Iran, from the leadership to ordinary people on the street. A move to cut Russia off from SWIFT would also, of course, impact U.S. banks and German banks, which use it to communicate with Russia. But these banks are more insulated from financial pain because their economies are far more robust and integrated than Russia’s.The Russian elite loves opulence. It stashes its assets (and, frequently, its children) abroad — popular spots include London and Paris, Manhattan and Miami, the Cayman Islands, and Cyprus. The dominant religion of Russian officials is money. There are many ways to exploit that, starting with a potentially very long list of individually targeted sanctions, such as those already levelled at dangerous Kremlin lackeys like businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been indicted in the U.S. for the role he played in meddling in the 2016 election; and propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, the notorious state TV presenter who is Russia’s own Tucker Carlson, only virtually unopposed.Another factor to consider is Moscow’s fragile relationship with Beijing, with the Kremlin particularly worried about China expanding its influence in Russia’s Far East, where there are real tensions between the local leadership and Putin’s central government. When you want to know what bothers the Russian government, look at what it is restricting or monitoring. The FSB, for example, controls the Russian census in order to cover up resentment of Moscow in different parts of Russia. I was in Moscow when the 2010 census was conducted, and saw how researchers noted that the number of people identifying as “Siberian” as opposed to “Russian” had spiked. Today, writing about these issues in Russia can easily land you on a watchlist. All of this demonstrates that Moscow is worried about Russian territorial integrity. Russian propagandists tend to yell at me when I make these observations; they are defensive because they know I am telling the truth. Moscow is wary of China’s ambitions in the Far East and elsewhere, how they might affect Russia’s position in areas ranging from the Arctic to outer space, and how an already resentful Russian society might react to their country’s declining position. Washington can leverage that fear in many ways, most saliently by playing up the fact that Moscow today is nothing but Beijing’s uneasy sidekick. Russia is poorer and more vulnerable than China. Its population is declining. In its desire for great power status, it is decidedly outmatched by Beijing. These facts already don’t sit well with Putin, but are particularly infuriating to Russia’s citizens. Engaging Russia directly would merely serve to create another vortex of violent instability. But Russian private military companies (PMCs) have their fingers in many pies — in countries like the Central African Republic and Venezuela, where they are interested in both resource extraction and political influence. Signaling that all of these ventures are fair game for hostile action might not have an immediate effect—Putin likes PMCs precisely because they are expendable—but many of the Russian leader’s friends have significant amounts of money tied up in these ventures; inflicting pain on them makes him vulnerable. Most importantly, we must not mythologize Putin. Nor should we adopt the approach of the notorious Fox TV commentator, Tucker Carlson, who claims that Putin is massing troops and materiel because he needs to “secure” his border with Ukraine. This is a cynical political move: Carlson’s ratings go up every time he trashes President Joe Biden. If Biden is opposed to Putin, Carlson will side with Putin, even at the cost of global stability and the international standing of the United States. If Putin came out and claimed he needed his “Lebensraum” now, Tucker would probably cheer him on, and that’s all you need to know about that. Instead of being like Tucker, we should simply see the depressing system Putin created in all of its stark, granular detail — and understand that it won’t stop after it devours Ukraine. The time to oppose it is now.
[post_title] => To stop Putin, grab him by his wallet
[post_excerpt] => Western leaders are conducting their foreign policy as though nothing can be done to stop Putin. This is a mistake: he's weaker and more vulnerable than he appears.
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[post_content] => For long-suffering low-and-minimum wage workers, the pandemic was the last straw.
Workers across the United States are finally saying they’ve had enough. Nineteen months into the pandemic, 24,000 of them are exercising the strongest tool they have: the power to withhold their labor. With the country already facing severe supply chain disruptions, these strikes have put added pressure on employers to improve wages and working conditions.
At the John Deere factories in Iowa, Kansas, and Illinois, 10,000 employees represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike after rejecting a proposed contract that included wage increases below inflation levels and the elimination of pensions for new employees. Other strikes include 2,000 healthcare workers at Buffalo’s Mercy Hospital; 1,800 telecom workers at California’s Frontier Communications; and 1,400 production workers at several Kellogg’s cereal plants.
Thousands of additional workers have authorized strike votes. Earlier this month, an overwhelming majority of workers in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents over 60,000 people in the film and TV industry, voted in favor of a strike. A few days later, 24,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Oregon followed suit. Harvard’s graduate student union, with roughly 2,000 members, also authorized a strike with a 92 percent vote.
“Workers are fed up working through the pandemic under the conditions they've been working in,” says Joe Burns, a former union president and author of “Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today.” The strike wave “also reflects that there's a tight labor market.”
“We’ve noticed a considerable uptick in the month of October,” says Johnnie Kallas, a PhD student at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) and Project Director for the ILR Labor Action Tracker. The ILR has tracked 189 strikes this year. Of those, 42 are ongoing in October while 26 were initiated this month
Kallas and his team have been collecting data on strikes and labor protests since late 2020; they officially launched the Labor Action Tracker on May Day of this year. “There’s a lack of adequate strike data across the United States, says Kallas. “We thought this was a really important gap to fill.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), he explains, only keeps track of work stoppages involving 1,000 employees or more, and which last an entire shift. “As you can imagine, this leaves out the vast majority of labor activity,” Kallas says.
Workers are demanding higher wages, adequate benefits like healthcare and pensions, improved safety and working conditions, especially concerning COVID-19, and reasonable working hours. The ILR Tracker has also been keeping tabs on “labor protests” —i.e., “collective action by a group of people as workers but without withdrawing their labor” —which aren’t recorded by BLS at all.
The federal minimum wage has been stagnant at $7.25 an hour since 2009, even as inflation has increased by 28 percent since then. Meanwhile, over the past year consumers have seen a sharp increase in the cost of everyday goods such as bacon, gasoline, eggs, and toilet paper due to the pandemic. This means workers’ wages aren’t going nearly as far as they used to.
For months, the media has been reporting on a “labor shortage” that has purportedly left employers unable to fill jobs. Fast food restaurants have posted signs that read: “We are short-staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore.” Small business owners and corporate CEOs alike have gone on cable news to complain about the hundreds of thousands of people who prefer to live on government assistance rather than find a job. But the truth, said Kallas, is that there’s no shortage of labor. Rather, employers can’t find people to work for the wages they’re offering.
Saturation coverage of the labor shortage has come at the expense of amplifying the human cost of the government’s having cut unemployment benefits for 7.5 million workers on Labor Day, while an additional three million lost their weekly $300 pandemic unemployment assistance. Time magazine called it the “largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history.” Just two weeks earlier, a flurry of newly published studies showed that states that chose to withdraw earlier from federal benefits did not succeed in pushing people back to work. Instead, they hurt their own economies as households cut their spending to compensate for the lost benefits.
In Wisconsin, instead of increasing benefits or raising the minimum wage, state legislators have decided to address the labor shortage by putting children to work. Last week, the state senate approved a bill that would allow 15 and 16-year-olds to work as late as 9 p.m. on school nights and 11 p.m. on days that aren’t followed by a school day. The only state legislator to speak out against the bill was Senator Bob Wirch, who said that “kids should be doing their homework, being in school, instead of working more hours.”
Despite these setbacks, the tight labor market has given workers considerable leverage. “Workers are more confident that they can strike and not be replaced,” says Burns. In places where non-union labor, or “scabs,” have been brought in to replace striking workers, there have been several incidents that underscore the importance of a union in creating a safe work environment.
Jonah Furman, a labor activist who has been covering the John Deere strike closely, reported that poorly trained replacement workers brought in to a company facility were involved in a serious tractor accident on the morning of their first day.
A higher profile and more deadly incident occurred last week when the actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun that was supposed to contain only blank rounds. According to severalreports on the incident, the union camera crew quit their jobs and walked off the set earlier that day to protest abysmal safety standards—and were immediately replaced with inexperienced, non-union labor. “Corners were being cut — and they brought in nonunion people so they could continue shooting,” one crew member told the LA Times.
Kallas says the incident “clearly demonstrates the importance of workplace safety and the significance of capturing both strikes and labor protests” when collecting data. “What's becoming increasingly common are these walkouts and mass resignations,” he says. He mentioned a Burger King in Nebraska where the entire staff walked out to protest poor working conditions that included a broken air conditioner in 90° F temperatures and staff shortages. They left a note on the door that said, “We all quit. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
In another non-strike labor action, dozens of non-union school bus drivers in Charles County, Maryland called in sick to protest their low wages and lack of benefits. Over 160 bus routes were affected by the action. Meanwhile, adjacent school districts that are critically short of bus drivers find themselves unable to attract new candidates because of the perceived risk associated with driving a bus crowded with children during the pandemic.
In an Opinion piece for TheGuardian US, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich suggested that the United States was in the grips of an unofficial general strike, with workers quitting their jobs “at the highest rate on record.” Why? Because they were “burned out,” fed up with “back-breaking or mind-numbing low-wage shit jobs.” The pandemic, asserted Reich, was “the last straw.” In July, an anonymous group called for a general strike on October 15, but the day came and went without much fanfare.
“Traditionally, general strikes happen because workers actually want to go on strike, and not because someone declares it on Facebook or Twitter,” says Burns. Rosa Luxemburg, the German socialist and philosopher who rose to prominence at the beginning of the last century, believed general strikes were the tool to usher in social revolution after developing class consciousness through the patient building of worker organizations, such as unions. “That’s not happening today,” says Burns.
The 24,000 striking workers today pale in comparison to the mass strikes of the early to mid-twentieth century, when workers shut down production by the hundreds of thousands. Some 4.6 million workers went on strike in 1946, accounting for 10 percent of the workforce. Today things aren’t as simple.
In August 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers who went on strike after negotiations between the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. These workers were prohibited from ever working for the federal government again, creating a chilling effect among unions. Reagan’s action set the tone for labor relations for the next four decades, while his administration ushered in a new era of corporate dominance, known as neoliberalism. Today, corporations such as Amazon regularly use threats, intimidation tactics, and surveillance against employees to prevent them from unionizing.
“When workers engage in a true strike wave, politicians want to step in and regulate it and establish some procedures,” says Burns. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed one year after the general strikes of 1946, making wildcat strikes, secondary boycotts, and union donations to federal political campaigns illegal. The act also allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, severely limiting effective union organizing, and required union officers to sign affidavits pledging they were not communists. The Red Scare, initially sparked by the Russian Revolution of 1917, resulted in sustained attacks against organized labor, particularly the leftist Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies.” By the end of the Second World War, with labor militancy intensifying and the power of the Soviet Union growing, the Red Scare had morphed into a reign of terror against an “internal enemy.” Reagan later used language from the Taft-Hartley Act that prohibited workers from striking against the government to declare the air traffic controllers’ strike illegal.
[caption id="attachment_3393" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) demonstration in New York City, 1914.[/caption]
Today, workers face serious legal barriers to organizing under a system of labor law that favors the employer. Over the years, these laws have restricted the scale with which strikes can be organized and the total number of workers who belong to unions. At the peak of organized labor in 1954, 34.8 percent of American wage and salary workers belonged to a union; by 2020, that number was down to 10.8 percent, a trend that has been closely linked to decreased wages over the last few decades.
Against these grim numbers, legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act could make a huge difference to labor organizing. The PRO Act would allow workers to engage in secondary boycotts, restrict right-to-work laws, ban anti-union captive audience meetings and exact financial penalties against companies found to be in violation of the law. The bill is something President Joe Biden campaigned on during the 2020 presidential election and has pushed to include in his Build Back Better agenda.
“I'm skeptical based on actual history that we're gonna see a legislative fix to this problem,” says Burns. “When workers are militant and engaged in activity, legislation will follow. Not the other way around.”
The strike wave we’re witnessing today speaks to a growing militancy against several decades of sustained corporate combat. It’s an uphill battle that no one union can win in isolation. With organized labor depleted and battle weary, the only path forward is to enlist other workers to fight by organizing new unions and activating those that already exist. Only by growing its numbers will labor enact the systemic change necessary to put working people on better footing. As labor activists have long proclaimed, “there’s no such thing as an illegal strike, only an unsuccessful one.”
[post_title] => Striketober: America's workers are rising up
[post_excerpt] => Workers are demanding higher wages, adequate benefits like healthcare and pensions, improved safety and working conditions, especially concerning COVID-19, and reasonable working hours.
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[post_content] => The regional economy is in a free fall due to political unrest, military closures, and the pandemic.
Five minutes’ walk from Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid, the largest mosque in Kashmir, is a modest two-story house. This is where Sakeena, 73, lives—and where she has been spinning pashmina wool by hand for more than a decade. She’s well known for her skill in spinning the finest and most delicate yarn from the region’s world-famous wool.
Zain-ul-Abidin, the fifteenth-century Sultan of Kashmir, introduced the art of pashmina weaving. He brought craftsmen from Persia to teach the local population various skills, which included making the wool shawls that are to this day a sought-after luxury item around the world. Kashmiri women have long been artisans of this heritage craft.
For Sakeena, weaving was a means of achieving economic stability. Her mother taught her and her two sisters to spin when she was an adolescent; when she married, she bought a spinning wheel (called a “yinder” in Kashmiri) for RS24, or about $0.32, and used her income to supplement the earnings of her husband, who was a tailor. “I used to earn RS150 ($2) for working five hours a day,” she said, explaining that “back then, that was enough for two proper meals.”
Until the 1990s pashmina wool was spun and woven at artisanal centers all over Kashmir. But with the rise of the Kashmiri armed struggle and the Indian government's military response, curfews and lockdowns led to a shift: people are now working primarily from home. A few remaining traditional spinners live in pockets of Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. Sakeena is one of them, but she said that now there is “either no work or the wages paid are not enough to pay for one proper meal.”
The long military lockdowns of the past few years precipitated the decline of the pashmina industry by preventing or discouraging buyers from visiting the disputed territory. As a result, the number of female spinners has declined from a high of 100,000 in 2007 to just 15,360 in 2021, according to The Directorate of Handicrafts & Handlooms in Kashmir.
“Foreign tourists used to come to Kashmir to buy the shawls,” said Sakeena. But no longer. “My daughters have three yinders that have been lying unused for the last year in our attic,” she lamented, adding that they will sell them if the current situation continues much longer. “The Indian government promises to empower people, but in Kashmir, they are doing the opposite by making us economically weaker,” she said.
The politically unstable situation, the prolonged military lockdowns, and now the pandemic, have pushed the regional economy into a free fall. According to a 2020 report issued by the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, more than 100,000 private sector jobs were cut after August 2019, when the Modi government precipitated an ongoing political crisis by revoking the Muslim-majority territory's limited autonomy.
Adnan Bashir, who owns a pashmina showroom on the banks of Dal Lake, one of Kashmir’s most renowned natural beauty spots, said that the months-long communications shutdown had severely undermined his business. “Around eight international orders were canceled because I was not able to contact the customer [due to the suspension of internet and mobile connectivity],” he said. One customer from Germany canceled a buying trip due to the military curfews. Bashir described his business’s condition as “critical,” and said he might have to look for another way to make a living.
Fahmeeda, a 67-year-old widow who asked that her real name be withheld, reluctantly sold her yinder last year for financial reasons. It had been a gift from her mother, she said, but she needed the money to buy medicine for her son. “This used to be a blessed craft for women like me,” she said, adding that she had supported her children with the money she made from spinning. “Last year, when Kashmir was under strict lockdown, I went out to purchase raw wool but soldiers chased me away by hitting me with their sticks,'' she wept. She now works as a cleaner in a private school for RS800 (just over $10) a month—compared to RS2600 ($35) before the lockdown that began in August 2019.
A recent shortage of raw pashmina has dealt yet another blow to the industry. Ordinarily the wool is imported from Ladakh, which lies on the disputed and ill-defined border between India and China; but in June long-simmering political tension erupted in a military clash that left 20 Indian soldiers dead and caused the suspension of trade between the two regions.
The introduction of power looms presents yet another threat to the 600-year-old pashmina craft. Merchants and artisans led a protest in late June to demand a ban on these looms, which pose a threat to the livelihoods of thousands of Kashmiris. The 1985 Handloom Protection Act forbids the industrialization of pashmina production, said Muhammad Lateef Salati, an activist from a family long engaged in artisanal pashmina production. The government, however, has failed to enforce the law.
Industrially produced pashmina is often sold falsely as authentic traditionally produced wool—a practice that undermines the value of the brand. By failing to enforce the law against manufacturers of mass-produced pashmina, the government shows that it is “not serious” about protecting the craft, said Salati.
Some Kashmiris are trying to safeguard traditional pashmina production by empowering local artisans.
Murcy, the daughter of a family long engaged in traditional pashmina production who divides her time between New Delhi and Srinagar, recently launched Fair Share Cashmere, a socially conscious online business initiative to sell hand-spun shawls made by local artisans. She said that she pays traditional female spinners the highest rate the market will bear. “We have been successful in bringing eight women back to this craft,” she said, adding with a smile that this “feels like a victory.”
The decline of traditional pashmina production in Kashmir has created a vacuum of employment for women who could once depend on the income they made from spinning wool to ensure that their families were fed. Now they are unemployed and, for the most part, voiceless. Murcy is one of a handful of locals who are trying to preserve the remnants of a once-thriving artisanal craft, despite the enormous political and economic challenges.
[post_title] => 'This used to be a blessed craft for women': in Kashmir, artisanal pashmina weaving is disappearing
[post_excerpt] => For hundreds of years, Kashmiri women could count on the artisanal craft of spinning, handed down from mother to daughter, to feed their families. Then came martial law and a pandemic.
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[post_content] => 'Gold is not a human right. Housing is.'
Between 2012 and 2021, Berlin’s median rent rose by over 70 percent. The cost of housing did not skyrocket because the city suddenly became a better place to live, but because investors looking for a secure place to park their money discovered the German capital. Over the past 30 years, in major cities around the world, corporations have been buying up huge swaths of domestic properties as profitable investments. As a result, habitable and affordable housing has become exponentially more difficult for ordinary people to find and keep.
In “Push,” a 2019 documentary that investigates why and how cities have become prohibitively expensive, Leilani Farha, the former U.N. special rapporteur on adequate housing, says that “unbridled capitalism” has made cities unlivable for all but the rich, with affordable housing now a luxury rather than a necessity. “That’s what differentiates housing as a commodity from gold as a commodity,” Farha says: “Gold is not a human right. Housing is.”
In the film, Farha meets a number of people whose rent has increased so dramatically, essentially overnight, that they have little hope of remaining in their homes. A new management company bought a building in Harlem and raised some residents’ rent by $900 per month, making it impossible for an African-American man to stay in his home of many years unless he could suddenly find a $100,000/year job (around 58 percent of Harlem residents make $60,000 per year or less). Something similar happened to an apartment complex in Uppsala, Sweden, making it extremely difficult for older middle-class residents to stay in their homes without dramatically increasing their incomes—a nearly impossible feat for those unwilling to abandon their communities.
Housing is generally considered affordable when it costs no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. In the United States, nearly 11 million renters spent more than half their income on housing in 2018. That same year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that there are no U.S. counties in which a person working full time for the minimum wage could afford to rent a standard two-bedroom apartment. Some people spend so much of their income on housing that they have little left over for food.
The fact that large companies and investors now see housing as a reliable investment vehicle, rather than an essential element of social infrastructure—a phenomenon known as the “financialization of housing”—has transformed houses across the globe into shelters for money, not people. Thousands of dwellings sit vacant in major metropolises, enhancing the portfolios of the wealthy, while tens of thousands of human beings sleep on the streets.
In Berlin, housing activists are pursuing a radical solution: they want to expropriate domestic properties from Germany’s largest landlords and repurpose them as social housing. If housing is a public good, they say, then the public should control it. Among Berliners, 85 percent of whom are renters, this effort has become increasingly popular, with 56 percent saying they either support (47 percent) a proposal to expropriate the properties of large landlords or are undecided (9 percent).
A common argument against expropriation is that governments should be using their limited resources to build more affordable housing. But that solution has been on offer for decades and has yet to halt, or even significantly slow, the broader crisis. Labor and building material costs are prohibitive in many places. Building and land use regulations also pose significant barriers, especially in metro areas. It remains difficult to find both suitable places to build and communities receptive to large-scale public housing projects. Simply building more units is a flawed and partial solution, especially in the absence of significant and consistent funding.
But the Berlin campaign targets enormous, publicly traded companies that own more than 3,000 apartments, like Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, Germany’s two largest corporate residential landlords. The two companies recently negotiated an €18 billion merger that set a record for Europe’s largest real estate deal, with a combined market valuation of around €47 billion, or $56 billion. They now collectively own around 550,000 apartments throughout Germany.
Article 14 of the German constitution permits expropriation only for the common good and only in exchange for fair compensation. If Berlin’s housing activists succeed, the government won’t simply seize private units; it will transfer them to the public and compensate the owners, albeit at a rate that some shareholders might not consider sufficient (companies have the right to sue if they believe the compensation is inadequate).
According to a 2020 report prepared by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin is home to around two million apartments, about 15 percent of which are owned by financial investors and publicly traded housing companies. Globally, residential real estate accounts for $163 trillion of assets, a portion of which are held by investors and housing companies in Germany. Deutsche Wohnen reported a profit of €1.54 billion (about $1.83 billion) in fiscal year 2020. Organizers in Berlin say the company has profited handsomely from buying up properties and driving up rents, neglecting routine maintenance and dragging its feet on essential repairs until major renovations are needed, then fixing up the apartments in order to justify massive rent hikes.
Berliners are not the only ones trying to take back their city from corporate profiteers. In 2020, the city of Barcelona warned 14 companies that if they failed to rent the 194 vacant apartments they collectively held within one month, the municipality would take possession and convert the units into public housing. Since 2016 Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, has made it legal for municipalities to seize apartments left vacant for over two years and rent them to low-income tenants for four to 10 years before returning them to the owners. Catalans also approved a 2019 measure allowing cities to buy such apartments outright at half the market rate (owners would not have the option of refusing to sell). The law allows the city of Barcelona to take possession only in cases where the owners hold multiple units, while forcible purchase is allowed only when units are left vacant for at least two years.
Expropriation is unlikely to catch on any time soon in the United States, where the rights of property holders are treated as sacrosanct. During the pandemic, tenant organizers in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities pressured the government to cancel rent and mortgage payments for as long as the coronavirus was disrupting the economy, without forcing people to pay it back later. California, New York, and a few other states offered tenants modest relief in the form of temporary eviction moratoriums, in a compromise that fell far short of organizers’ demands.
Those measures in no way matched the actions proposed or taken in Berlin or Barcelona. Nevertheless Alan Beard, managing director of Interlink Capital Strategies, a financial advisory firm, penned an op-ed for The Hill entitled, “How to protect against future U.S. government expropriation,” in which he railed against governments in the U.S. for having “effectively expropriated most of the American economy” by forcing businesses to close for safety reasons and making it harder to evict people during the pandemic.
In many U.S. cities, organizers are fighting for greater control over buildings the public already owns. Last year, Philadelphia organizers obtained limited concessions from the city by setting up encampments, taking over vacant properties in North Philadelphia and on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and demanding that the city transfer the properties to the people living in them. The city eventually agreed to put 50 vacant homes into a community land trust and allow 50 unhoused mothers with children to stay in 15 vacant city-owned houses—a drop in the bucket, given that thousands of Philadelphians still need permanent housing.
In an ideal world, said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All, a New York State-based coalition of housing advocates, “public housing that is democratically run and controlled by its residents” would be the norm everywhere. But in the United States, where there is little trust in government or appetite for funding public services, that can feel like a distant dream. “In order for public housing to be great, we also need to rebuild faith in government as a thing that could compassionately care for all of us,” she said, “not the thing that is killing us and making us sick by defunding our homes.”
Tara Raghuveer, who directs KC Tenants, a tenants’ rights organization in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Homes Guarantee campaign at People's Action, believes one of the biggest obstacles to “a world where everyone has a home and housing is not treated as a commodity” is that “we’ve been so convinced by the profiteers” that there is no other way. “It’s this attitude of impossibility that stops us from doing things that are really quite simple and that we have models for, even in [the U.S.], going back decades,” she added.
Part of expropriation’s appeal is that it allows people to stay where they already live. Thomas McGath, an American ex-pat living in Berlin and a spokesperson for the campaign to expropriate Germany’s largest landlords, said Berliners are beginning to ask themselves, “‘How do I benefit if somebody plops down a thousand apartments in a field somewhere? It doesn’t do anything for me in my neighborhood, where the rents are rising rapidly and/or exorbitantly.’” The idea, he said, is to create a city “that meets the needs of everybody who lives here, and continues to have its unique character defined by those people.”
McGath said he moved to Berlin in 2013 in part to escape the growing unaffordability of U.S. cities. “If we own our own cities and we have more democratic control over the things that we own…it really makes it easier for us to make the city more sustainable, more affordable, more livable,” he said, rather than morphing into a “big playground for investors to build vanity projects that really don’t have a social purpose.”
If housing is a human right, it’s fair to question whether faceless for-profit corporations should be able to determine who gets it, for how long, and on what terms. A home is more than shelter; it’s where people feel a sense of comfort and belonging. Expropriation is one tool advocates are using to help restore housing to its original purpose: sustaining and enriching human life.
[post_title] => To house the people, expropriate the landlords
[post_excerpt] => Housing is generally considered affordable when it costs no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. In the United States, nearly 11 million renters spent more than half their income on housing in 2018.
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Jubilant Boric supporters poured onto the streets of Santiago on December 19, 2021.[/caption]
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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 
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) demonstration in New York City, 1914.[/caption]
Today, workers face serious legal barriers to organizing under a system of labor law that favors the employer. Over the years, these laws have restricted the scale with which strikes can be organized and the total number of workers who belong to unions. At the peak of organized labor in 1954, 
