Jobs

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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. 


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How a traditional microsavings system enabled Nigerian women to save their businesses during the pandemic

by Nelly Kalu

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    [post_content] => 

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 the Huffington 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 a blog 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.


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Republicans want to solve the labor shortage problem by putting children to work

by Indigo Olivier

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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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‘Bees are like my family’: A female beekeeper is reviving honey production in Kashmir

by Aliya Bashir

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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 several reports 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 The Guardian 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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Striketober: America’s workers are rising up

by Indigo Olivier

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    [post_date] => 2021-09-01 05:29:48
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-09-01 05:29:48
    [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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‘This used to be a blessed craft for women’: in Kashmir, artisanal pashmina weaving is disappearing

by Shoaib Mir

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    [post_date] => 2021-06-30 23:56:29
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    [post_content] => New York's limousine liberals seem to care more about preserving the value of their homes than the lives of the homeless.

No one wants to talk about this, but it’s true: A lot of Americans had a fantastic year in 2020. According to Forbes, we can reliably place that number around 43 million, since 14 percent of American families are directly invested in the stock market. And, wow did it perform! As the financial capital of the world, New York City has a good many denizens riding high. But for the 20 percent of New Yorkers who live below the federal poverty line, most of whom are Black and Latino, the pandemic year was a catastrophe. At the beginning of 2020, before COVID-19 hit, New York already had a jaw-dropping wealth gap that saw the top one percent of the city’s residents living on an income 113 times that of the bottom 99 percent. The pandemic hit New York particularly hard, but it was Black and Latino people who suffered the most: They were four times as likely as their white neighbors to lose their job or die from COVID-19.

As New York emerges from the pandemic and is poised to elect a new mayor, we have a prime opportunity to address the chasm between the city’s purported values and the money that floods its economy, money that isn’t reaching enough people. I know this chasm well. Throughout the pandemic, I stayed in my apartment in Chelsea, a neighborhood that is home to the world’s most expensive art galleries — and to extensive low-income housing projects. I had a front-row seat to this divide—and how my neighbors behaved around it over the turbulent past year. In March 2020, I contracted a relatively mild case of COVID-19 and recovered within 10 days. Getting sick and recovering so early on put me in a state of enormous cognitive dissonance—in which I have remained suspended ever since.

In May, a mobile morgue sprang up a few blocks from my apartment in a long, white trailer; my 52-year-old cousin died from Covid alone in a Long Island hospital; and the police broke up a crowd of would-be diners lining up for $70 veal parm take-out at Carbone, an exclusive Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. As they used to say on Sesame Street: One of those things was not like the other! (NB: The incident at Carbone was, as far as I can recall, the first and last time the NYPD molested a crowd of wealthy white people during the pandemic.)

Next came the civic education of June, the rage and the protests. I made my protest sign, and I did my share of marching. Right-wing pundits sneered that this was a pastime for the unemployed; left-wing memes countered that capitalism is what keeps you down, too preoccupied with paying rent to raise a fuss. I would argue both had a point. After my own building was looted one night, I returned from the protests the following day to find the lobby under private armed guard.

So, I did what any tightly-wound, concerned New Yorker would do at such a juncture: I joined my block association. What happened next was the closest thing to a political awakening I’ve had in my extremely coddled existence. Not long after police wielding nightsticks broke up 2020 Pride, we had a meeting with the 10th Precinct. Naturally, idiotically, naively, I assumed my neighbors were a little concerned about police violence. Most of the block association’s members are a generation older than I am. This meant they had lived through another plague: AIDS. They had fought for their rights and watched their friends die. Surely, they would be on the side of these protestors!

Well, it turns out property ownership changes things a little. Apparently, they were terrified. Yes, the building had been looted, but even Captain Kevin J. Coleman, the commanding officer of the 10th Precinct, assured my neighbors that the culprits were from Upstate New York and had nothing to do with the protests: They were opportunists from out of town. This explanation didn’t land. The captain apologized profusely, repeatedly. This, mind you, was the same police force that had kettled me at a protest weeks earlier, a mere 12 blocks away; but on our block association’s Zoom call, they were basically my valet service.

Why, my neighbors whined over and over during this call, were there so many homeless people—“unhoused,” the captain was quick to correct—and why did they have to come here? (I would like to add that some block association members were good enough liberals to learn the first names of the people living on the sidewalks.) When someone asked about the much-publicized summer spike in gun violence, the captain assured the block association that there had only been one local shooting and no deaths in the area; that is, if you excluded the housing projects on Ninth Avenue—i.e., our other neighbors, the ones not in the block association. (Lest you think I am exaggerating; I do have a recording of this meeting in my possession.)

The members of my block association were not alone in failing to live according to their purported values. The shameful evictions at the Lucerne Hotel soon followed: Tony Upper West Siders forced homeless men out of their temporary housing at a pandemic-emptied hotel, throwing them back into the vicious cycle of uncertainty with which the unhoused must contend. I’d bet good money that most of those uptown locals who lobbied for the eviction voted for Biden in November. And, hey, I’m grateful they did! But this realization, and the nail biting, gut-wrenching stress of the presidential election, made me realize that there was a very clear division of labor between local and federal government—especially as a New Yorker.

After the events of 2020, it’s clear we will not get anywhere if we frame progressivism as a national project. The Democratic Party defeated Trump and that’s a wonderful thing. But, pretending it has anything to offer in terms of the politics of wealth, policing, and public health in New York City is absurd. On a basic level, what can a party that simply takes our state’s electoral votes for granted offer us? (The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo wrote an insightful column that describes similar feelings about California, where he lives.)

In other words, the Democratic Party is merely a bulwark against fascism—nothing more, and nothing less. It’s utterly inept at helping anyone on the ground. I am completely cynical about the federal government, yet bone-weary of false equivalency. I’ve come to accept that the United States will continue to fight its abhorrent wars abroad, no matter who is in office, and that my federal taxes will be used to fund them. I see this as a mere tithe. But what happens in my city is of desperate and deep importance to me.

Right now, as millions of New Yorkers suffer from illness and poverty caused or exacerbated by the pandemic, the municipal government must help the poor. The rich in New York are extremely wealthy. They can literally afford to fight City Hall. If, on a national level, I’m fine shaking hands with a centrist or even a never-Trump Republican, I am basically a Marxist on a local level—especially in primary season. Right now, the subways don’t work, the school system is in chaos, and housing insecurity is endemic. Since the federal government will not step in, the local government must—even if doing so means an adversarial relationship with the wealthy. I’m confident that anyone who thrived financially during the crisis can figure out how to eke out a living during the recovery. Surely, the rich have bootstraps to spare. They shouldn’t be the concern of New York City’s mayor.

In another context, I might use this conclusion to tell you why New York is the greatest city in the world. If you disagreed or complained, I’d muster enough local color to tell you to keep it moving. Instead, I’ll say this: I believe progressivism lives or dies in the details. Those details inherently vary from place to place. We can cooperate as a nation while understanding our needs to be substantively different at the local level. Perhaps we can find more unity on the Left as a country if we are able to give one another more breathing room on a municipal level. So, allow me to take the space in this conclusion I’d reserved for my civic pride and instead ask you to write this piece about your own city or town or village. I’d love to read it! After all, as Tip O’Neill liked to say, all politics is local.
    [post_title] => Thoughts on New York's re-opened NIMBY economy
    [post_excerpt] => The city is full of wealthy Democrats who voted for Biden but are more worried about protecting their property than caring for the homeless.
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Thoughts on New York’s re-opened NIMBY economy

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_date] => 2021-06-04 03:39:59
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    [post_content] => Changing attitudes and mentorship programs are nurturing an emerging generation of young women. 

Numana Bhat, 34, is a postdoctoral researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, where she focuses on understanding the biology that underlies the immune response to vaccines. Her husband, Raiees Andrabi, is Institute Investigator at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, a prestigious non-profit medical research center. Both are from Kashmir, the India-administered Muslim majority territory that has been convulsed by political violence for decades.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, which is claimed by both countries. Meanwhile, the Indian military has put down popular insurgencies, which began in the late 1980s, with tactics that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described as human rights abuses. Since 1989, more than 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed during these government crackdowns, while more than 8,000 have disappeared. Thousands of people have been detained without charge under the draconian Public Safety Act.

On August 5, 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government unilaterally revoked the constitutionally guaranteed autonomous status of the region, further dividing it into two federally governed union territories. The military imposed an unprecedented lockdown, blocking internet access and phone lines and intimidating journalists. As a result, seven million people were cut off from the outside world for several months.

Given the obstacles created by the political turmoil and violence in Kashmir, Dr. Bhat’s academic success is remarkable. And she is not alone; a notable number of Kashmiri women have become prominent scientists, despite periodic and unpredictable outbreaks of militarized violence, a lack of resources, and the pressure of traditional expectations.

After completing her B.A. and Master’s degrees in Kashmir, Dr. Bhat earned a PhD in biomedical sciences from Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, a non-profit medical research center in La Jolla, California. There she discovered that “a fascinating molecule called Regnase-1 acts as molecular brakes in antibody producing cells and prevents autoimmunity.”

[caption id="attachment_2698" align="alignnone" width="300"] Numana Bhat in her laboratory.[/caption]

She credits her mother and a dedicated high school biology teacher for endowing her with the tools and curiosity to pursue a career in biomedical science. But other gifted young women are not as fortunate: opportunities and resources for higher education in scientific research are scarce in Kashmir, “although the people themselves, both students and mentors at the university level, are capable of doing great things,” she said.

She added that she had heard about “people in mentoring positions” who made “discouraging remarks” to female students— including explicit pressure to channel their energy into getting married and having children rather than into post-graduate studies.

Nevertheless, Dr. Bhat said, she has noticed an increasing number of young Kashmiri women pursuing graduate studies and careers in scientific research both in India and abroad. She added that younger people were going outside the sciences to choose careers in humanities, journalism and the arts, “which is also quite refreshing to see.”

More challenges for women

Masrat Maswal, 33, is an assistant professor in chemistry at a government college in central Kashmir’s Budgam district.

She grew up middle class in an extended family where attention and money were scarce. Her parents paid more attention to her in high school, where she excelled academically and won praise from her teachers. But she said that Kashmiri society does not make it easy for young women who want to pursue post graduate work and demanding research positions in the sciences. “From the day you are born as a girl in a family in Kashmir, they start to prepare for your marriage; so choosing a career—particularly in science, which needs patience, persistence, hard work, sacrifices and an ample amount of time—is really hard,” she said.

[caption id="attachment_2704" align="alignnone" width="300"] Masrat Maswal at home in Kashmir.[/caption]

Her female students are often deterred from pursuing graduate work in the sciences by social pressures to marry and settle down when they are in their twenties. “We are losing a lot of talent,” she said, “Due to the prevailing socio-cultural norms of our society.”

The lack of proper infrastructure and lab facilities in Kashmir’s colleges also undermines the enthusiasm of both students and teachers, she added.

Family support matters

Amreen Naqash, 31, moved to New Zealand in 2019 to study for a doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Otago. In her spare times she mentors students in her native Kashmir who want to pursue graduate studies either in India or abroad. Women, she observed, are showing more interest in looking for fellowships and pursuing graduate work in the sciences at universities outside India.

[caption id="attachment_2702" align="alignnone" width="200"] Amreen Naqash in her lab.[/caption]

“I’m in touch with some promising female undergrads from Kashmir, which makes me so glad,” she said. “It is such a wonderful feeling to guide them as they are in their prime career stage.”

Omera Matoo, 38, has a PhD in marine biology. She is an assistant professor in evolutionary genetics and physiology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where her research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Born and raised in Kashmir, Dr. Matoo earned her B.A. and Master’s degrees at Bangalore University, where she became friends with two classmates from different parts of India, both of whom came from families of scientists.

[caption id="attachment_2703" align="alignnone" width="300"] Omera Matoo in her lab.[/caption]

“Looking back, I realize that played a very big role in my career,” she said. All three of them decided to pursue doctorates in the sciences.

Limited opportunities

When Dr. Matoo applied in 2007 for a doctoral program at a university in the United States, she had to travel to New Delhi and Bangalore to take her GRE and TOEFL exams; at the time, there wasn’t a single coaching or test center in Kashmir.

The situation for prospective graduate students has since improved. Thanks to the internet, they can take standardized tests online. Mentoring initiatives like JKScientists have been established, with volunteers offering would-be graduate students help and advice.

“And then there are other Kashmiri scientists across the world who struggled along similar paths before making a mark in their chosen fields; and now they are giving back to their society by mentoring and guiding young students and aspiring researchers.”

Role models and social support structures, said Dr. Matoo, provide positive feedback for young people; this is especially true for female university students in Kashmir, who benefit from having their academic interests nurtured.

Dr Seemin Rubab, a professor of physics at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar, is regularly approached by young girls from Kashmir for career guidance and counseling.

“Many times I’ve had to counsel their fathers and brothers to let them pursue their academic careers and avail themselves of opportunities outside Kashmir and India,” said Dr. Rubab.

Professor Nilofer Khan, acting Vice Chancellor at the University of Kashmir who has also served as Dean of Student Welfare and founder coordinator of Women’s Studies Centre, confirmed that for years a lack of family support has been a serious obstacle for women who wished to pursue doctoral studies, particularly when they were married with children.

“Very few females used to go for research studies in science subjects,” she said, adding that times were changing and female students were “proving their mettle” in the sciences.

The frequent government-imposed internet shutdowns are a serious problem for students facing application deadlines, said Dr. Matoo. Delayed exams and the lack of access to resources—“all these limiting things have a scale up effect, not to mention the consequences for mental health,” she said. But somehow these obstacles have not undermined the enthusiasm and academic focus of the young women from Kashmir who regularly reach out to her for guidance on making a career in science.

“I am constantly impressed and humbled by their resolve to make a bright future for themselves against all odds,” said Omera. “That gives me a lot of hope and in a way keeps me grounded.”
    [post_title] => Kashmiri women defy patriarchy & politics to pursue careers in the sciences
    [post_excerpt] => A notable number of Kashmiri women have become prominent scientists, despite periodic and unpredictable outbreaks of militarized violence, a lack of resources, and the pressure of traditional expectations.
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Kashmiri women defy patriarchy & politics to pursue careers in the sciences

by Majid Maqbool

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    [post_content] => With environmentally conscious, humane butchery, Hannah Miller stakes a position between factory farming and veganism.

Picture a butcher and what do you see?

Perhaps a burly mustachioed man swinging a meat cleaver into a carcass. Hacking away, smeared in blood, working in a quick and inelegant fashion. Heaving body parts up onto his thick shoulder and then slamming them down onto a cutting table.

That out of date image persists but at a New Zealand company, aptly named “A Lady Butcher,” owner Hannah Miller does things quite differently. First of all, there’s no music blaring and no loud power tools or machinery running. In fact, it’s rather quiet—Zen-like, even. 

Miller, originally from Portland, Oregon, practices a type of butchery called seam cutting. It’s careful, precise work where every part of the animal is used. Miller describes this nose to tail work as “mindful” and finds it peaceful.

“When it's just you and a knife you have to pay attention to what you're doing. The seams and the muscles tell you what to do, it's very obvious where to cut. You can't be joking around and having a laugh and singing to music because you'll miss it, you'll miss the intricacies and the detail of that style of butchery, it's that mindful practice, I call it the Zen of butchery,” she says.

Before learning to butcher in London, Miller was a culinary student in New York. After a lecture delivered by world-famous chefs Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson, she was inspired to make the move to the United Kingdom and found that butchery and cooking go hand in hand.

“They're completely intertwined, I don't think you can have one without the other,” she says.

The more butchers understand about the restaurant industry the better they can respond to operational matters like creating workarounds to offer little-used cuts of meat to prevent waste. For instance, when a trend for lamb rumps meant that restaurants might require dozens of lambs a week but were only using one part of the animal for their signature dish.

Practically sharing information and skills also means that butchers can better educate customers on the cuts of meat they need to create the recipe they have in mind. Miller says she would challenge butchers to go home and cook a particular cut and then have them share their experience with the crew the next day.

Before settling in New Zealand, Miller had traveled all over the world always finding that butchers were in short supply. When she landed in New Zealand at dawn, she had her first interview and had secured a job by lunchtime. 

Despite New Zealand traditionally having a meat-heavy diet, with dinner often called “meat and three veg,” Miller was surprised to discover that the majority of cured meats in New Zealand were imported.

A Lady Butcher began to provide homegrown Pancetta, Prosciutto, and Bresaola using grass-fed lamb, local free-range pork, and wagyu, from First Light Farms.  

Sharing meat education continues to be one of the most important parts of Miller’s business philosophy. She gives workshops to chefs in restaurants in Auckland, teaching them how to prepare different cuts to serve in order to use the animal economically. This is a better way for the restaurant to maximize profits and introduce customers to new cuts, but it also serves to reinforce her commitment to less wasteful meat production.

“We've chosen to take an animal for our own nourishment, so absolutely nothing can go to waste. I make sure the bones are perfectly clean, that everything's trimmed properly, part of the whole process is being in the moment, but also ultimately it's about respecting the animal,” she says.

She has also spread that message of education by offering workshops to chefs and in April when her new restaurant, Churly’s Brew Pub & Eatery, opens members of the public will be able to sign up for butchery classes too. This new venture will be a leader in nose to tail restaurants, changing the menu up regularly, sometimes even during service, to ensure all meat cuts are utilized and that nothing goes to waste.

From a 90-kilo animal, Miller says only about 150g should be thrown away. But she says to do this you really need to focus. “You can use absolutely everything, but you need to pay attention. When I teach butchery, I set out the rules and, safety is first, second is nothing, absolutely nothing goes in the bin unless I put it there.”

She says that the skill of the butcher determines much of the waste. Trimming fat from muscles meticulously results in a much higher yield of usable meat. She then renders down all the fat and bones for broths and even dehydrates sinew to make dog treats. Lately, she has also been giving away bones and skulls for people to decorate.

Her message of sustainability may at first glance seem to be at odds with her job. After all, veganism is often touted as the cure for much of the earth’s problems. I asked her if she ever thinks about the impact of meat production on the planet and she said it’s something that she considers daily. 

“It's not really so much about eating meat or not eating meat, it's about eating local, and seasonally. You don't need to eat a tomato in December, if you live in the northern hemisphere,” she says.

 Her remedy is that we all need to eat better quality meat from farmers that we know and trust, returning to a time before supermarkets and discount stores disrupted the relationship consumers had with the people who produced their food.

“Eat meat, but eat less of it, eat a better-quality meat. My husband and I eat meat most days. This week we had beautiful sausages, on the barbecue, I know the farm it came from and we had one sausage and then the rest of the plate was full of cauliflower salad and beautiful guac because right now we have tons of avocados.  We should first be eating local, and secondly, eating better but less.”

Developing a relationship with your local farm is an important step in becoming a more conscious food consumer, as I discovered when I first met Miller at the Taurapa Station in Napier, on New Zealand’s North Island. She gave a butchery demonstration using lamb from Atkins Ranch, who raise 100 percent grass-fed animals that wander and graze over beautiful pasture lands; it’s about as idyllic as farming can be.

In that way, New Zealand which is often described as 18 hours ahead and 20 years behind the rest of the world, really is a pioneer. Miller explained to me that the resurgence of interest in local foods and the proliferation of trendy farmers’ markets seen in the United States has always been part of the food culture in New Zealand.

Sustainability goes further for Miller though, it’s an entire way of life where she aims for balance. “We say regeneration instead of sustainability. Because regeneration is the idea of giving back. So, you're not just taking you actually make sure that this circle is completed. Think about it as a circle, instead of an A-Z,” she says.

Miller knows her customers care about where their meat comes from and how it was raised. At her new restaurant and pub, Churly’s, opening in Auckland, she’ll continue this education.

The restaurant takes its name from a popular kiwi expression. “Chur” can mean thank you, cool, OK, and a range of other expressions. It’s also the name of the mascot at her husband, Andrew Child’s, brewery Behemoth Brewing Company, which is a big part of the new brand.

To help with her increased workload, Miller has just taken on an assistant, another lady butcher, who sent her a message on Instagram asking to be mentored.

“I love that the people approaching me to come work for me and to learn and to invest their time are women. These women that I’ve  worked with have said how empowered they feel, they're just so excited and they have that feeling that they can take on the world and it just fills me with so much pride. I will definitely teach anyone and have a great time with it but there's something special about being a lady butcher,” she says.

 

 

 
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Nose to tail with a lady butcher

by Fiona Tapp

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    [post_content] => The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there's something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,"(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

Just half an hour flipping through my contacts produced half a dozen friends and acquaintances who didn’t require a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion to see what was wrong with big tech or the ways governments abuse it. Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women's rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech.

Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”

Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.

One hundred thousand people work for Google/Alphabet; some of them have much more power than others. The point isn’t whether Lajeunesse is or isn’t culpable for the many acts of the enormous company he represented—as its chief lobbyist in Asia for several years—it’s that of all the people who spent the decade of 2010-20 working thanklessly to expose and reduce the firm’s monopolistic abuse and assault on global privacy, it’s the ex-lobbyist who gets our attention now.

We all need second chances. Even if we don’t need those fresh starts ourselves, we want to live in a world where people have a reason to do better. But the prodigal tech bro’s redemption arc is so quick and smooth it’s barely a road bump. That’s because we keep skipping the most important part of the prodigal son story—where he hits rock bottom. In the original parable, the prodigal son wakes up in a pig sty, starving, and realizes his father’s servants now live better than he does. He resolves to go home to the people and place he did not value or respect before. He will beg to be one of his father’s servants. He accepts his complete loss of status. But instead of chastising and punishing his prodigal son, the rejoicing father greets him joyfully and heads off the apology with a huge party. It’s a great metaphor for how to run a religion, but a lousy way to run everything else.

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny, and why so many of the comments on Lajeunesse’s train wreck post on Medium were critical. The journey feels fake. These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED talk’ accounts typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too.

So, if you’re a prodigal tech bro, do us all a favour and, as Rebecca Solnit says, help “turn down the volume a little on the people who always got heard”:

    
 	
  • Do the reading and do the work. Familiarize yourself with the research and what we’ve already tried, on your own time. Go join the digital rights and inequality-focused organizations that have been working to limit the harms of your previous employers and – this is key – sit quietly at the back and listen.
    • 
 	
  • Use your privilege and status and the 80 percent of your network that’s still talking to you to big up activists who have been in the trenches for years already—especially women and people of colour. Say ‘thanks but no thanks’ to that invitation and pass it along to someone who’s done the work and paid the price.
    • 
 	
  • Understand that if you are doing this for the next phase of your career, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing this to explain away the increasingly toxic names on your resumé, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing it because you want to ‘give back,’ you are doing it wrong.
    • 


Do this only because you recognize and can say out loud that you are not ‘giving back’, you are making amends for having already taken far, far too much.

 
    [post_title] => The Prodigal Techbro
    [post_excerpt] => Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  
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The Prodigal Techbro

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => Liberal politicians are taking up a grassroots challenge to raise the minimum wage, for both humanitarian and pragmatic reasons

This week, four New Hampshire politicians have accepted the Minimum Wage Challenge (on Twitter: #MinimumWageChallenge or #LivetheWage). They will attempt to live on the $290 that a full-time employee earning minimum wage takes home at the end of the week. The four politicians, all Democrats, are promoting a bill to raise the state minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2022. The Concord Monitor reports that while Republican Governor Chris Sununu hasn’t weighed in on this bill specifically, he has raised the old claim that raising the minimum wage will hurt businesses.

In recent decades opponents of a rise in the minimum wage claimed it would “kill jobs” as companies and “American small businesses” cut staff or turned to automation to keep costs down. New research, however, tells a different story — as The Washington Post reports. Some of the benefits of higher minimum wage include: fewer suicides; reduced recidivism; higher worker productivity; more consumer spending; and falling poverty rates.

As for the assertion that increasing the minimum wage kills jobs: A study published this May in The Quarterly Journal of Economics finds that the number of low-wage jobs has remained “essentially unchanged” in the five years following a minimum wage increase. Unfortunately, the Congressional Budget Office, in analyzing the impact of raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, has used outdated research and arrived at overly pessimistic conclusions.

Last year, Disneyland workers set an example for the world by rallying to protest wage disparity between a CEO raking in more than $100 million a year and the rock-bottom wages of park workers, three-quarters of whom report that they don’t make enough to cover their basic expenses each month.

“What these workers are doing, standing up against the greed of one of the most powerful and profitable corporations in America, takes an enormous amount of courage,” Bernie Sanders writes in a 2018 op-ed for The Guardian. He continues:

"If they are able to win a livable wage with good benefits from Disney, it will be a shot heard around the world. It will give other low-wage workers at profitable corporations throughout the country the strength they need to demand a living wage with good benefits."

The workers won an agreement to bump wages to $15/hour in 2019. Jeff Bezos caved under similar pressure and agreed to raise wages for Amazon workers to $15/hour. but even so, critics say that the increase still fails to keep pace with the cost of living in places like Orange County, where a Disney park and resort are located.

Still, every win is worth celebrating, and the wins add up: According to a study by the National Employment Law Center, the Fight for $15 movement has won a $68 billion raise for 22 million low-wage workers in cities across America.

 
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Once a left wing issue, the struggle for a livable minimum wage has become mainstream

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => Technology is a seemingly overwhelming force in our personal lives and society, but as these stories show, people are working to check Big Tech’s power at every turn, whether by resisting expansion to new American cities or by introducing legislation to force companies into implementing more user-friendly design.

[caption id="attachment_847" align="alignnone" width="4608"]Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash[/caption]

America’s love affair with Big Tech is finally over, asserts Micah Sifry in his review of three books that look at surveillance of capitalism. But now that we are re-evaluating our relationship with Facebook, Amazon, and other social media apps that have traded convenience for our money and our attention, will we insist on real change? Perhaps. But only if we put some effort into understanding, describing, and analyzing the impact it has had on our lives. Read the review here.

Here is a fun, not entirely unrelated thought experiment: Could we blow up the internet? As we consider its ubiquitousness in our lives and how to mediate and improve the internet’s influence, perhaps it’s important to recognize that no, actually just blowing it up (probably) isn’t an option. Read more here.

Regulating Big Tech is a more likely scenario than blowing it up and starting over. Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) have introduced a bill that is meant to outlaw some of the most manipulative design tricks employed by technology companies to get users to hand over more of the data or personal information than they might otherwise choose to, if they understood that they had a choice. Learn more about the bill here.

The U.K. is also taking steps to limit the worst features of technology companies, particularly as it relates to users under the age of 18. The Information Commissioner's Office also wants internet companies to make privacy settings high by default, to turn location tracking off when the app is not in use and make it clear when it’s on, and explain how personal data is used, among other proposed changes. Learn more here.

Opposition to tech companies can actually have a unifying effect on groups that otherwise espouse ideologically opposed worldviews. That is what is happening in Nashville, where free-market libertarians and union-backed activists are both working to oppose a deal in which Nashville will give public money to Amazon in exchange for jobs. Activists are pressuring Amazon to prove to the public that they have followed through on their promises to the city. Read more here.
    [post_title] => The People v Big Tech
    [post_excerpt] => 				Blind love for Big Tech is over as people re-assess the high price they pay for convenience 		
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Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

The People v Big Tech

by Jessica McKenzie

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