The largest municipal workers’ strike in decades in the city of Philadelphia has ended after 9,000 members of AFSCME District Council 33, who are primarily sanitation workers, walked off the job a week ago. Growing piles of trash on the streets of Philadelphia brought the strike into clear view for city residents. Labor historian Francis Ryan says the workers won “the hearts of a lot of Philadelphians” with a popular social media campaign. “What I saw on the picket lines last week was a spark of social justice unionism,” says Ryan. The average sanitation worker salary in Philadelphia is currently $46,000 a year, which the union has argued is not a living wage for workers required to live within the city limits.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Cambodia’s Ministry of Information said that starting at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, authorities along the border with Thailand closed gates to block the import of Thai agricultural products.

Prime Minister Hun Manet declared Tuesday that Cambodia will only allow the Thai imports if the Thai military reopens all border checkpoints and resumes normal operations. He also set that as a condition for discussing reductions in troops numbers at the border.

Tensions and military deployments have spiked since Thai forces shot dead a Cambodian soldier on May 28. Thailand says Cambodian forces dug a trench on the Thai side of the border.

“Thailand must first show genuine goodwill and comply with our basic condition, which is to reopen the border crossings on both sides to the way they were. Only then will we talk about troop matters,” Hun Manet said Tuesday.

Since June 7, Thailand has restricted border openings to 8am to 4pm. Usually they are open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The commander of Thailand’s Second Army Region says that Thailand plans to propose a reduction in troop deployments along the border during a Thailand-Cambodia Regional Border Committee meeting scheduled for June 27-28.

On Tuesday, the Thai military banned Thais from crossing the border to work at casinos and entertainment venues in Poipet, which lies on the Cambodian side of the main land border crossing point between the two countries, opposite the eastern Thai town of Aranyaprathet.

Casinos are not legal in Thailand, so gambling establishments proliferate near at key border crossings in neighboring countries like Cambodia.

The Bangkok Post newspaper reported that the order took effect on Tuesday at 8 a.m. and is in place until further notice. It is aimed at guaranteeing the safety of Thai people, the report said.

Police Col. Napatrapong Supaporn, immigration police chief in Sa Kaeo province, was quoted as saying that Thais who are still in Poipet should return home for their own safety.

Meanwhile, authorities in the Cambodian border provinces including Pursat and Preah Vihear announced on Facebook that hundreds of families had been evacuated from frontline areas to safer locations.

(msnina via Flickr)

This week, Cambodia submitted a request for the International Court of Justice in The Hague to rule on the demarcation of four locations at the border, including near the scene of last month’s clash.

The border dispute has historical roots and the two sides differ over which maps to use in demarcating territory. The last time there was a serious and bloody flare-up in tensions was between 2008 and 2011, over a disputed 11th century temple at Preah Vihear. The International Criminal Court has granted sovereignty over the temple to Cambodia.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Khmer.

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

They are lines in the payroll ledger of a Cambodian baby clothing factory, invisible lives near the bottom of the global economy.

There is Phan Oem, 53, who says she clocked up to 76 hours a week producing clothing for Nike and other American brands, sometimes forced to work seven days a week. She says she feared being fired if she didn’t work through lunch breaks, on holidays and occasionally overnight. After 12 years spent packaging clothes, her base pay was the minimum wage: $204 a month.

There is Vat Vannak, 40, who at six months pregnant traveled by bus to join hundreds of workers who protested in the streets last year after Nike pulled out and the factory went bankrupt, leaving them unpaid. The authoritarian Cambodian government warned them to stop.

And there is the medical worker who said she saw one or two factory employees a month being sent to the hospital after falling unconscious. She said they were among eight to 10 workers a month who became too weak to work. Three other former employees said they sometimes saw two to three people go to the clinic for these issues in a single day. The reason, the medical worker said, was that they didn’t sleep much, didn’t eat enough and worked long hours.

Nike’s manufacturing apparatus in Southeast Asia has been shaken in recent weeks by news about President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Cambodia and Vietnam, mainstays of Nike’s supply chain, have faced import taxes of 49% and 46%, among the highest of any nation. Nike shares have been hammered.

The stories of workers at Cambodia’s Y&W Garment illuminate the longer-term legacy of Nike’s push into the region more than two decades ago, when labor abuses led co-founder Phil Knight to acknowledge that Nike products had become synonymous with “slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” The former employees’ recent experiences cast doubt on the company’s commitment to reform.

Unless tariffs force Nike to return manufacturing to the United States, labor advocates say, the company will have to offset the higher import taxes either by raising prices on its apparel or by pressuring its foreign factories for greater productivity, squeezing workers and their wages.

Nike has prided itself on the story of its reinvention since the 1990s sweatshop scandal. “We’ve gone from a target of reformers to a dominant player in the factory reform movement,” Knight wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Shoe Dog.”

The company has worked to convince consumers that it is improving the lives of its factory workers, not exploiting them. It became the first major apparel brand to disclose the names and locations of its suppliers. It established a written code that requires its suppliers to create a safe, healthy workplace, prohibit forced overtime and honor workers’ right to form unions. The company reports annually about its progress. In Nike’s marketing materials, contract factory workers are often smiling.

A key tentpole of Nike’s claims is that its suppliers pay competitive wages. Nike says contract factory workers for whom it has data now earn an average of 1.9 times their local minimum wage, without counting overtime.

Scrutinizing that claim is extraordinarily difficult. Nike acknowledges that the analysis omits more than a third of the 1.1 million people who make its sneakers and apparel worldwide. Nike says its focus in collecting wage data has been on its biggest suppliers. It hasn’t said which of its 37 producing countries are included.

ProPublica obtained a rare view of wages paid to the factory workers who produce Nike clothing: a highly detailed payroll list for 3,720 employees at Cambodia’s Y&W Garment. Covering earnings from longtime managers down to freshly hired 18-year-old sewing machine operators, the spreadsheet shows the workforce falling far short of the amount Nike says its factory workers typically earn.

Just 41 people, or 1% of the Y&W workforce, earned 1.9 times the local minimum wage of about $1 per hour — even when counting bonuses and incentives. These higher-paid employees included accountants, supervisors and a human resources manager.

Nike didn’t answer specific questions about ProPublica’s findings, including whether it dropped Y&W as a supplier because of any violations of its code of conduct.

In a statement, Nike said its code sets clear expectations for suppliers and that it “is committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing.”

“We build long-term relationships with our contract manufacturing suppliers,” the statement said, “because we know having trust and mutual respect supports our ability to create product more responsibly, accelerate innovation and better serve consumers.”

Nike added that it expects its suppliers “to continue making progress on fair compensation for a regular work week.”

Representatives of Y&W Garment and its Hong-Kong-based parent, Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to emails, text messages or phone calls seeking comment, and Wing Luen’s website is defunct. New York-based Haddad Brands, which Y&W workers said was an intermediary for Nike at the factory, did not respond to emailed questions about conditions at the factory and hung up on a reporter who called. Its website says it makes children’s clothing for Nike and that it enforces Nike’s code of conduct.

ProPublica interviewed 13 former Y&W workers in the Cambodian capital and surrounding villages, plus another one by phone, during two weeks in January.

In spare concrete homes and earthen courtyards that smelled of burbling fish sauce, they described workplace abuses that Nike promised to eradicate long ago. In addition to low wages, fainting workers and forced overtime, they spoke of bosses who mocked them if they underperformed and a life of debts that kept piling up.

They told ProPublica that what they made in Cambodia’s standard 48-hour, six-day week wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Some feared being fired or angering their supervisors if they refused extra hours. Others said they needed to work overtime simply to keep up. Still, many said they wished the factory hadn’t shut down.

Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, a Cambodian legal aid group also known as CENTRAL, said his country’s garment workers — including those at Y&W — do what circumstances require.

“When you ask them, ‘Do you want to have the weekend off with your family, your kids?’ yes, they do,” he said. “But how can they afford that? They’re stuck. There’s no choice.”

Nike’s arrival inside the corrugated metal walls at Y&W Garment was a big deal.

It was December 2021, workers said, when the company began trial production runs inside the expansive factory complex in southern Phnom Penh, about two miles from one of the notorious killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s 1970s genocide.

Supervisors told ProPublica that the owner, a man they called “thaw kae” — the big boss — gave them a message to deliver to line workers: Nike was coming. Money and benefits would follow. And they wouldn’t have to work extra hours.

Workers were happy. Earning more would let them save, pay off debts and stop borrowing from friends to make it to the next month. They said they felt secure knowing that it was Nike, a company they had heard respected labor laws.

But the promise of the big American brand was never realized, according to the workers who spoke to ProPublica. “After Nike came, nothing has changed,” one worker said.

The former Y&W employees said neither their working conditions nor their pay improved while Nike goods were made at the factory. They instead described problems that would violate Nike’s code of conduct, which prohibits forced overtime and verbal abuse.

Three workers said they faced intense pressure to meet production targets. Two said workers were blamed if they missed their goals. Managers would yell at team leaders when that happened, one of them said; “If you can’t do it, just go back home,” the former worker recalled employees being told. If workers hit their targets, he said, managers set higher ones. If employees refused to work the extra hours needed to get there, two workers said, then managers would tell them their contracts wouldn’t be renewed or that they should resign.

Y&W’s payroll sheet covers March 2024, when the factory’s total employment was down from a previous high of about 4,500 people. The spreadsheet shows that even with bonuses and incentives, more than three-quarters of workers made close to Cambodia’s minimum wage — at most, 15% above it.

Workers with seniority earned only a little more. Of the 183 workers who’d been at Y&W a decade or longer, more than three-quarters had base pay, bonuses and incentives that put them, at most, 25% ahead of minimum wage.

It’s hard to know if wages at Y&W are an outlier or emblematic of Nike’s Southeast Asia supply chain; comprehensive pay records aren’t readily available for other factories. But 18 paystubs ProPublica collected at three of Nike’s other 25 Cambodian suppliers also show workers at or slightly above the minimum wage. Separately, a 2023 survey by labor advocates found similar results at two factories that supplied Nike.

The average pay at Y&W, without overtime but with bonuses and incentives included, is slightly below the $250 to $260 a month that Ken Loo, secretary general of the Textile, Apparel, Footwear and Travel Goods Association in Cambodia, estimated is standard for the industry.

Loo said wage increases must be balanced against productivity “because it will impact our competitiveness” with other garment-producing countries.

In December 2023, two years after Nike arrived at Y&W, workers said Nike pulled out. They said they were told to destroy any remaining Nike labels, a standard demand to prevent counterfeit or unauthorized products from being created. Hundreds of workers were let go.

In early 2024, around the time of the Lunar New Year, workers said, the factory owner left Phnom Penh for what many thought was a new year’s trip home to China. He didn’t return. Factory suppliers began calling in their debts, hauling away hundreds of rented sewing machines. The factory fell silent.

Workers slept in front of the factory’s locked gates to prevent the buildings from being cleared out. Hundreds marched in the streets, hoping to get the attention of the government and the brands for whom they’d produced.

Nike, in its statement, did not explain why it left Y&W. It said its suppliers have an obligation to pay severance, social security or other separation benefits. “In the event of any closure or divest, Nike works closely with the supplier to conduct a responsible exit,” the statement said.

A California-based brand that shipping records show also did business with Y&W before its closure, True Classic, did not respond to written questions.

Workers said they never heard from the brands. They said they did hear from the government, which was unhappy about their protests. Labor ministry officials called and told them to stop inciting their co-workers, threatening arrest. In March 2024, Cambodian news reports said the government seized the factory’s assets and distributed the proceeds to workers. But workers told ProPublica they received far less than they were owed.

The garment workers said they took what they could get.

It might be hard to understand how far a dollar stretches in Cambodia’s economy. The country’s current $208 monthly minimum wage — a $4 increase from last year — doesn’t sound like much to Americans. ProPublica heard from workers about why it isn’t enough for Cambodians, either.

Two women who worked at Y&W Garment and recently gave birth said they each spend $120 a month on powdered infant formula — four cans a month at $30 apiece.

Sar Kunthea, 34, who packaged clothing at Y&W, pays $282.70 a month on $12,000 she borrowed to make drainage improvements that would keep out floodwaters, which rose halfway up her home’s doors during the rainy season.

Vat Vannak, who added metal buttons to clothing, said she typically earned about $250 a month by tacking on two hours at the end of her regular, six-day-a-week 7 a.m.-to-4 p.m. shifts. The overtime pushed her workweek close to 60 hours. Her husband also brings home a paycheck from construction. But their monthly household costs included $109 for a motorbike, $50 for a room near the factory, $60 for food and about $40 for school expenses. She said she’d saved nothing.

Labor advocates have long pushed brands like Nike to pay what’s known as a living wage, calling it a basic human right. Although methods for estimating it vary, a living wage usually includes enough for food, water, housing, education, transportation, health care, energy, clothing, a phone and unforeseen expenses.

Nike does not explicitly require its factories to pay a living wage, but it says that every worker “has a right to compensation for a regular work week that is sufficient to meet workers’ basic needs and provide some discretionary income.” Nike reports that two-thirds of its key suppliers for which it was able to collect data paid above living wage benchmarks for their countries.

Estimates from the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, which represents labor unions based in Asia, put that benchmark for Cambodia at $659 a month. The WageIndicator Foundation, an independent Dutch nonprofit, puts it at $276 to $360 a month.

But Nike’s preferred estimate is just $232, based on research by the Anker Research Institute, which is part of the Global Living Wage Coalition. Nike has sponsored the institute’s work.

In a statement, the institute’s founders and one member of the wage coalition told ProPublica: “Our estimates are always fully independent. Companies have no influence over the methodology or estimates.”

Regardless of what researchers say, Ngin Nearadei says what she earned at Y&W was not enough.

Ngin, 26, worked in quality control and found herself with hefty debt payments because, like other workers, recent flooding required her to raise the floor of her house. How much would she need to earn monthly to forgo overtime? About $400, she said, maybe $500. That’s up to 30% more than what Nike says its contract workforce earns, on average, compared to the minimum wage.

Speaking in her home, Ngin disappeared for a moment and returned with two creased paystubs. One, covering roughly two weeks, showed just how much she had to work to get close to what she said she needs.

She was scheduled to work 104 hours as part of a regular schedule that runs eight hours a day, Monday through Saturday. On top of that, she added 64 hours of overtime, including eight hours on Sunday, the paystub shows.

Her total work time for the period was 168 hours, an average of roughly 11 to 12 hours a day if she worked every day. (Paychecks came twice a month; the exact pay period covered was not printed on Ngin’s document.)

When combined with her other paycheck for the month, she earned $341.65.

The workers who make Nike’s products have helped Knight, the cofounder, become one of the richest people on earth. Nike’s market capitalization was $13 billion in 1998, when Knight delivered his mea culpa about “slave wages.” Although its stock has been trading far below its 2021 peak, Nike was still worth about $80 billion as of April 21, 2025.

The company has been a cash machine. In just its last two fiscal years, Nike has returned $13.9 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.

According to Dennis Arnold, an associate professor of human geography at the University of Amsterdam who’s studied the Cambodian garment industry, unless Nike and others choose lower profit margins for the sake of higher pay, little is likely to change for factory workers.

Governments like Cambodia’s fear that raising the minimum wage dramatically will drive away manufacturing, he said, because companies that benefit from Cambodia’s low wages must also wait longer and pay more to get garments to Western markets due to shipping costs and the country’s poor infrastructure.

“All said, it’s not the most appealing place in the world, and the government is not taking much initiative to try to change the situation for the better,” Arnold said.

So far, no brand has guaranteed its factory workers a living wage, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign, a Dutch advocacy group. H&M, the Swedish retailer, was quoted by numerous news outlets in 2013 promising that its top suppliers would pay a “fair living wage” by 2018. An analysis by the Clean Clothes Campaign in 2019 concluded that the promise was not fulfilled. (H&M did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

Recently, H&M and 11 other brands made a smaller commitment in an agreement with a global labor union, IndustriALL: to guarantee production volumes when Cambodian unions sign bargaining agreements that include higher wages, and to pay for the resulting higher labor costs.

Nike is not a signatory.

European and U.S. regulators could take measures to increase accountability for wages. Jason Judd, executive director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University, said they could require publicly traded companies like Nike to consistently disclose what factory workers earn when producing their goods.

H&M currently reports what its foreign suppliers pay workers on a country-by-country basis, for example. Puma did too, until stopping this year. Nike did it once — in 2001.

“Companies have enormous leeway in what they report,” Judd said. “It’s enormously difficult to compare within firms across years. Between firms, impossible. Companies are able to pick and choose how they tell their story.”

Knight, who did not respond to requests for comment, wrote in his 2016 memoir that the question of wages for Nike’s factory workers would always remain.

“The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand,” wrote Knight, whose net worth Forbes put at $28.5 billion as of April 21. “Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can’t simply pay whatever we wish to pay.”

Knight recounted a story, one that’s hard to verify. When Nike tried to raise wages in an unnamed country, “we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.”

At Y&W Garment, payroll data shows, line workers were nowhere close to making that much.

On average, they earned $236.25 a month with incentives.

The factory doctor made $581.

The Y&W Garment payroll ledger that ProPublica obtained was for March 2024, around the time the factory shut down. The data shows workers’ monthly base pay and how much they earned from bonuses and incentives, which are also paid on a monthly basis. More than a dozen former workers verified details about their own pay shown in the spreadsheet. To estimate total earnings for each worker, we included base salary, incentives and bonuses for transportation, seniority and attendance, but we excluded overtime pay — as Nike does in its calculations of average wages — and a meal incentive related to overtime. We assumed every worker got a $10 attendance bonus that Cambodian law requires. Although the spreadsheet did not indicate that $10 transportation bonuses were universal, we assigned this amount to every worker.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Rob Davis, photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Last June, months before her release date, Paula Drake remembers getting called to fight the Gorman Fire in Los Angeles County, California. She was part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Malibu Conservation Camp #13, which is jointly operated by CDCR and the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACFD).

When her crew arrived at the fire, she remembers, it covered about 500 acres, but by the next day, it had spread to 15,000 acres. Drake knew how to hike through the mountains with a 40-pound bag on her back and run a chainsaw through the rugged terrain — skills that made it possible to help contain the fire. Out of that experience, she felt pride and camaraderie with her crew. 

Drake remembers “just feeling like you’re a part of something bigger and being able to give back to a community that has deemed us unredeemable, and being able to be like a productive member of society.” She returned home in November and is pursuing a career in firefighting.

“The experience there was absolutely amazing,” she said. “It was amazing enough to where I decided, coming home, that this is something that I would like to do with my life, and be able to grow in the firefighter industry, and hopefully make it a career.”

Incarcerated firefighters make up 30% of California’s firefighting crews, and those who participate in the program are able to live at one of the many conservation camps or fire stations outside of prison, where they are given training and work alongside the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL Fire) or the LACFD. Drake said that, while it is still a prison program, the fire camps allowed her to have more freedom.

“Society has deemed us these dangerous criminals that shouldn’t be allowed to have their freedom, yet, here we are running chainsaws and given these tools that are highly dangerous, so is it really even necessary for people like us to be somewhere where we’re stripped of our freedom?” Drake said. “I just think that people don’t realize what an impact it has on us and the community.”

While versions of the CDCR firefighting program have been around in California for over a century, they became the subject of headlines earlier this year when several fires broke out across California and over 1,100 incarcerated firefighters were deployed to fight the Eaton Fire, Hughes Fire, and Palisades Fire in Los Angeles County, which destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses. These firefighters were out for days at a time, and had no contact with their families. However, many reported a sense of pride that they were helping the community.

Even though they put their lives at risk and do the same jobs as any other fire crew, those who are incarcerated get paid between five to ten dollars a day by CDCR, plus an extra dollar an hour by CAL Fire when they are deployed to an active fire. As she worked second saw—a position where she helped clear the terrain with a chainsaw—in the fire crew, Drake said she would make about six dollars a day, and an additional dollar per hour she was working a fire. A seasonal CAL Fire firefighter gets paid a salary of more than $50,000 a year.

“You’ve got paid crew members working right next to you, doing the same exact job, but getting paid a hell of a lot more, and we interact with these crews, we cut lines with them,” Drake said. “We’re putting ourselves at risk. The compensation doesn’t really match up with the job that we’re doing.  

In many cases, incarcerated firefighters are saving lives. Eduardo Herrera, who was a firefighter while incarcerated, remembers being called to a traffic collision in Los Angeles County. He was assigned what the LACFD calls “landing zone coordination” to arrange for a helicopter to pick up victims. At that time, while awaiting transport, a victim went unconscious, so Herrera had to perform CPR. He later found out that the individual that he was performing CPR on was a deputy sheriff of 27 years on his way to work. 

“I was an incarcerated municipal firefighter, so not only was I serving the community, I actually helped save lives of our law enforcement, which is a very unique situation,” Herrera said.

He remembers other police officers and military members thanking him for his work and shaking his hand.

Herrera described his experience as “something that most of the public are not aware of. I think that that’s just another story of the capacity of change and what we’re capable of doing in spite of our circumstances.”

During the two years he worked in this program, Herrera, who was released in 2020, resided at a fire station in Mule Creek. He remembers being deployed to residential structure fires, rescues, traffic collisions, medical calls, and vegetation and wildlife fires. He said that participating in the program reduced his sentence by just under three years.

Hererra said that he is glad that the public is becoming more aware of the important work of firefighters who are incarcerated—people who “have maybe made a mistake in their lives, but they’re no longer defined by that mistake and wanting to pay it forward and make a difference.” He said it is important the public know what change looks like and what it can be and what it can mean for their communities. 

“I’m glad that now we’re having this dialogue, and the narrative is starting to be changed in regards to seeing the capacity that we have to serve the community,” Herrera said. “It gives people hope. I believe the public wants to hear stories of hope and redemption.”

Herrera is now a firefighter with CAL Fire in the Riverside unit. He said that while he was incarcerated, he did not make as much as he makes now.

“The discussion about pay is always going to be a discussion, because we definitely didn’t make what your normal firefighter that’s out here makes,” Herrera said. “At the end of the day, we’re the hard workers, we work two times harder, if not more, than anybody else, because we had more to prove, and there was a sense of pride that went with it.”

Last month, Assembly Member Isaac Bryan introduced a bill, AB 247, which would ensure incarcerated firefighters are paid an hourly wage equal to the lowest nonincarcerated firefighter in the state for the time that they are actively fighting a fire. 

“Incarcerated firefighters are on the frontlines saving lives,” Bryan said in an email. “They are heroes just like everybody else on the frontlines and they deserve to be paid like it.”

Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition—which helped write and introduce AB 247—said that incarcerated firefighters have returned to their fire camps and have been in good spirits about the job they did. He said that the ARC, who owns the Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp for incarcerated youth, provided more microwaves, an air conditioning unit, new boots, and sporting equipment for the youth who returned from fighting fires. Through donations, they were also able to give all of them hygiene packages that include new toothbrushes, lotion, deodorant, nice soap—things he said they might not normally be able to get while incarcerated.

In the time that passed since the fire, Lewis said six youth at the camp who were fighting the fires have been released and received a $2,500 scholarship as they transition out of incarceration into training to become full-fledged firefighters. Lewis said the work they are doing to save homes and lives is important, and that they should be paid the same as the lowest paid firefighters on any other crew. 

“The fact that they get paid basically $10 is not equitable, it’s not fair,” Lewis said. “They’re putting their lives on the line too. Why wouldn’t they be paid for something that they’re providing that’s needed, desperately needing in the state of California? So it was a simple question of equity.”

Lewis said that people who are incarcerated often want to demonstrate that they’ve changed and be able to give back to their communities, and participating in the program has been a way for people to transform their lives.

“Sometimes people end up in jails or prisons with the belief that they don’t have value, and it’s clear that every human being has value once you find out what your purpose is,” Lewis said. “In many instances, people who have an opportunity to go to these fire camps find that their purpose is to be of service to their communities in this way, and so it’s a way of them being able to demonstrate their commitment to their communities, but also to find their pathway to redemption.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Victoria Valenzuela.

Today, the point that Marx made in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men’s Association is largely lost on the trade unions and even with many self-styled Marxists. The distinction between the goal of “a fair day’s wage” and the goal of eliminating exploitation– the wage system embedded in capitalism– is lost before a common, but unfocused revulsion to the exploding growth of inequality. It is one thing to deplore the growth of inequality, it is quite another to establish what would replace the logic of unfettered accumulation.

Marx offered no guidelines for a “fair wage”. Indeed, his analysis of capitalism made no significant use of the concept of fairness. Instead, he made the concept of exploitation central to his political economy. He used the concept in two ways: First, he employed “exploitation” in the popular sense of “taking advantage of” — the sense that the capitalist takes advantage of the worker. “Exploitation of man by man” was a nascent concept, arriving in discourse with the expansion of mass industrial employment and borrowed from an earlier, morally-neutral usage regarding the exploitation of non-humans. Its etymology, in that sense, arises in the late eighteenth century.

Marx also uses the word in a more rigorous sense: as a description of the interaction of the worker and the capitalist in the process of commodity production. Even more rigorously, it appears in political economic tracts like Capital as a ratio between the axiomatic concepts of surplus value and variable capital.

As a worker-friendly concept, exploitation is most readily grasped by workers in the basic industries, especially in extractive and raw-material industries. Historically, an early twentieth century coal miner– bringing the tools of extraction with him, responsible for his own safety while risking a more likely death than a war-time soldier, and accepting the “privilege” of going into a cold, damp hole to dig coal for someone else’s profit– intuitively understood exploitation. A reflective miner would recoil from the fact that ownership of a property could somehow– apart from any other consideration– confer to someone the right to profit from a commodity that someone else had faced mortal danger to extract from the earth. What is a “fair day’s wage” in such a circumstance?

Organically, from its intuitive understanding by workers, and theoretically, from class-partisan intellectuals like Marx and Engels, as well as their rivals like Bakunin, exploitation became the central idea behind anti-capitalism and socialism.

Today, most workers’ connection to the exploitation relation appears far removed from the direct relation of a coal miner to the coal face and to the owner of the coal mine. The immediacy of labor and labor’s product in extraction is often of many removes in service-sector or white-collar jobs. Moreover, the division of labor blurs the contribution of the individual’s efforts to the final product.

Well into the twentieth century, “labor exploitation” fell out of the lexicon of the left, especially in the more advanced capitalist countries, where Marx thought that it would be of most use. Left thinkers, as well as Marxists, rightly attended to the colonial question, focusing on the struggle for independence and sovereignty; they were discouraged by the tendency for class-collaboration in many leading working-class organizations; Communist Parties correctly felt a primary duty to defend the gains of the socialist and socialist-oriented countries; and the fight for peace was always a paramount concern.

Exploitation was attacked from the academy. The Humanist “Marxist” school trivialized the exploitation nexus to a species of the broad, amorphous concept of alienation. The Analytical “Marxist” school congratulated itself by proving that given an inequality of assets, a community of exchange-oriented actors would produce and reproduce inequality of assets, a proof altogether irrelevant to the concept of exploitation, which the school promised to clarify. Both schools influenced a retreat from Marxism in the university, followed by a stampede after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Liberal and social-democratic theory revisits the “fair day’s wage” with the explosion of income inequality and wealth inequality of the last decades of the twentieth century that was too impossible to ignore. But what is a “fair wage”? What level of income or wealth distribution is just, fair, socially responsible, or socially beneficial? The questions are largely unanswerable, if not incoherent.

Thanks to the empirical, long-term study of inequality shared in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, we learn that capitalism’s historical tendency has been to always produce and reproduce income and wealth inequality, a conclusion sobering to those who hope to refashion capitalism into an egalitarian system and making a “fair wage” even more elusive. Piketty’s work offers no clue to what could constitute a “fair wage.”

Others point to the productivity-pay gap that emerged in the 1970s, where wage growth and productivity took entirely different courses at the expense of wage gains. Researchers who perceptively point to this gap as contributing to the growth of inequality often harken back to the immediate postwar era, when productivity growth and wage growth were somewhat in step, when the gains of productivity were “shared” between capital and labor. But what is magical about sharing? Why shouldn’t labor get 75% or 85% of the gain? Or all of the gain? Is maintaining existing inequalities the optimal social goal for the working class?

Where the concept of a “fair wage” offers more questions than answers, Marx’s concept of exploitation suggests a uniquely coherent and direct answer to the persistent and intensifying growth of income and wealth: eliminate labor exploitation! Abolish the wage system!

Thus, the return to the discussion of exploitation is urgent. And that is why a serious and clarifying account of exploitation today is so welcome.

*****

Jack Rasmus takes a step toward that end in a carefully argued, important paper, “Labor Exploitation in the Era of the Neoliberal Policy Regime.” I have followed Rasmus’s work for many years, especially admiring his respect for the tool of historical inquiry and his scrupulous research, interpretation, and careful use of “official” data. On the other hand, I thought that his work failed to fully consider the Marxist tradition, unduly drawn to engaging with the pettifoggery of academic “Marxists.”

However, his new work proves that assessment to be mistaken. Indeed, his latest work reflects an admirable reading of Marx’s political economy and offers an important tool in the struggle to end the wage system.

Rasmus understands that we are in a distinct era of capitalism, forced by the failure of the prior “policy regime” and typified by several features: intensified global penetration of capital and trade expansion (“globalization”), a massively growing role for financial innovation and notional profits (“financialization”), and most significantly, the restoration and expansion of the rate of profit (“the intensification of labor exploitation in both Absolute and Relative value terms that has occurred from the 1980s to the present”).

It should be noted that Rasmus does not discuss why a new “policy regime” became necessary in the 1970s. Both the stagflation that proved intractable to the reigning Keynesian paradigm and the attack on the US profit rate by foreign competition (see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, NLR, 229) necessitated a sea change in the direction of capitalism.

I might add that while so-called globalization was an important feature of “the neoliberal policy regime,” the 2007-2009 economic crisis has diminished the growth of global trade. Indeed, its decline has fostered the rise of economic nationalism, the latest wrinkle on the “neoliberal policy regime.”

Rasmus carefully and methodically documents and explicates the intensification of labor exploitation in commodity production (what he calls “primary exploitation”) over the last fifty years. He recognizes the important and growing role of the state in enabling this intensification. This is, of course, the process that Lenin foresaw with the fusing of the state and monopoly capitalism– a process associated in Marxist-Leninist theory with the rise of state-monopoly capitalism. Today’s advanced capitalist states fully embrace the goal of defending and advancing the profitability (‘health’) of monopoly corporations (‘a rising tide lifts all boats’), including intensifying labor exploitation.

Just how that intensification is accomplished is the subject of Rasmus’s paper.

*****

Rasmus is aware that Marx expressed the exploitation nexus in terms of labor value. He avoids the scholasticism that side-tracks academically trained economists who obsess over the price/value relationship — the so-called transformation problem. Value– specifically a labor theory of value —  is central to Marx because it explains how commodities can command different, non-arbitrary exchange values and how the different proportionalities between the exchange values of commodities are determined. That is the problem Marx sets forth in the first pages of Capital, and value — as embodied labor — is the answer that he gives.

Using labor value as his theoretical primitive enables Rasmus to discuss exploitation in Marx’s framework of absolute and relative surplus value– exploitation by extending the working day or intensifying the production process. While Rasmus offers a persuasive argument that his use of “official” data couched in prices can legitimately be translated into values, it is unnecessary for his thesis. The relations are preserved because the proportionalities are, in general, preserved. It is a reasonable and adequate assumption that prices and values run in parallel, though a weaker claim than that prices can be derived from values.

Methodological considerations aside, Rasmus sets out to show — and succeeds in showing — that exploitation has accelerated in the “neoliberal” era in terms of both relative and absolute surplus value:

Capitalism’s Neoliberal era has witnessed a significant intensification and expansion of total exploitation compared to the pre-Neoliberal era. Under Neoliberal Capitalism both the workday (Absolute Surplus Value extraction) has been extended while, at the same time, the productivity of labor has greatly increased (Relative Surplus Value extraction) in terms of both the intensity and the mass of relative surplus value extracted.

Regarding Absolute Surplus Value, he demonstrates:

[I]t is true the work day was reduced during the first two thirds of the 20th century—by strong unions, union contract terms, and to some extent from government disincentives to extend the work day as a result of the passage of wages and hours legislation. But that trend and scenario toward a shorter work day was halted and rolled back starting in the late 1970s and the neoliberal era. The length of the Work Day has risen—not continued to decline—for full time workers under the Neoliberal Economic Regime.

Through a careful combing and analysis of government data, as well as original arguments, Rasmus shows how capital has succeeded in extending the workday. His discussion of changes in mandatory overtime, in temporary employment, in involuntary part-time employment, in paid leave, in changing work culture, in job classifications, in work from home, internships, and other practices form a persuasive argument for the existence of a trend of the lengthening of the average workday.

Similarly, Relative Labor Exploitation has accelerated in the “Neoliberal” era, according to Rasmus:

Rising productivity is a key marker for growing exploitation of Labor. If real wages have not risen since the late 1970s but productivity has—and has risen at an even faster rate in recent decades—then the value reflected in business revenues and profits of the increased output from that productivity has accrued almost totally to Capital.

In this regard, the numbers are widely recognized and non-controversial. Labor productivity has grown significantly, while wages have essentially stagnated. Rasmus tells us that it is even worse than it looks:

So, wages have risen only about one-sixth of the productivity increase.  But perhaps only half of that total 13% real hourly wage increase went to the top 5% of the production & nonsupervisory worker group, according to EPI 10 (Economic Policy Institute, February 2020). That means for the median wage production worker, the share of productivity gain was likely 10% or less. The median wage and below production worker consequently received a very small share in wages from productivity over the forty years since 1979. It virtually all accrued to Capital…

According to the US Labor Department, there were 106 million production & nonsupervisory workers at year end 2019—out of the approximately 150 million total nonfarm labor force at that time. Had they entered the labor force around 1982-84, they would have experienced no real wage increase over the four decades.

Rasmus notes that the US maintained the same share of global manufacturing production through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but doing it with six million fewer workers. This, of course, meant a rising rate of exploitation and a greater share of surplus value for the capitalists. Though the job losses struck especially hard at an important section of the manufacturing working class relegated to unemployment, the remaining workers lost further from concessionary bargaining promoted by a business-union leadership. Thus, they were unable to secure any of the gains accrued by rising productivity. They experienced a higher rate of exploitation.

*****

Demonstrating that labor exploitation has increased in the last 45-50 years in terms of absolute and relative surplus value does not, according to Rasmus, close the book on labor exploitation. Drawing on a suggestive quote in Volume III of Capital, he develops an original theory of “secondary exploitation.” Marx writes:

That the working-class is also swindled in this form [usury, commerce], and to an enormous extent, is self-evident… This is secondary exploitation, which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself. Capital, Volume III, p. 609

Rasmus explains secondary exploitation this way: “Secondary Exploitation (SE) is not a question of value being created in exchange relations. It’s about capitalists reclaiming part of what they paid initially in wages. It’s about how capitalists maximize Total Exploitation by manipulating exchange relations as well as production relations.”

To be clear, Marx is not using the technical sense of “exploitation” here, but the popular sense. However, the fact that the worker has “earned” a measure of value and that capitalists can wrest some of it away in various ways is exploitation and important and worthy of study.

Here, however, Rasmus digresses, reverting back to the price form in his explanation of secondary exploitation. He seems to assume, without elaboration, that systemic “taking advantage of workers” outside of the production process must be explained in terms of prices and not values. He also seems to believe that all means of secondary exploitation must be within the exchange nexus. And he seems to believe that all secondary exploitation must be systemic. It is not clear why these assumptions should be made.

These methodological questions, however, bear little relevance to his fresh and original insights on secondary exploitation. Rasmus presents five mechanisms for capital to “claw back” from the working people the variable capital captured by the class in the value-producing process: credit, monopolistic price gouging, wage theft, deferred or social wages, and taxes. Importantly, Rasmus connects much of this exploitation to the active intervention of the state on behalf of capital.

Credit: Allowing workers to acquire commodities through deferred payment is not a sympathetic act by the capitalist, but a method of furthering accumulation in an environment where demand is restricted by the inequalities of income and wealth. The capitalist extracts additional value from the worker through interest charges. Additional value is “swindled” from the worker through the credit mechanism. Rasmus points out that interest-bearing loans to working people have expanded from $10 trillion-plus in 2013 to $17 trillion-plus in 2024, with dramatically higher interest rates in the last few years.

Monopolistic price gouging: Rasmus is fully aware that when prices go up, they are the result of decisions by capitalists to secure more revenue– that action is not to benefit society, not to help the workers, but to secure more for investors. Insofar as they succeed, their gains are at the expense of workers– a form of secondary exploitation.

Our current run of inflation is the result of a cycle of price increases to capture more of the consumers’ (in the end, the workers’) value and to catch up with competitors. But the impression must not be left unchallenged that this price gouging is painlessly left to the capitalist at his or her whim or that it is without risk. The impression must not be left, as it was in the 1960s with Sweezy/Baran, Gillman, and others, that monopoly concentration meant a sharp decline in the power of competition to retard and even thwart monopoly power to do as it liked. That lesson was sharply brought home in the 1970s with humbling of the US big three automakers and the US electronics industry. Monopoly and competition play a dialectical role in disciplining price behavior around labor values.

Wage theft: While theft is not exploitation, when it is common, frequent, and rarely sanctioned, it resembles exploitation more than theft! Rasmus provides an impressible list of common ruses:

The methods [of wage theft] have included capitalists not paying the required minimum wage; not paying overtime wage rates as provided in Federal and state laws; not paying workers for the actual hours they work; paying them by the day or job instead of by the hour; forcing workers to pay their managers for a job; supervisors stealing workers’ cash tips; making illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks; deducting their pay for breaks they didn’t take or for damages to company goods; supervisors arranging pay ‘kickbacks’ for themselves from workers’ pay; firing workers and not paying them for their last day worked; failing to give proper 60-day notice of a plant closing and then not paying workers as required by law; denying workers access to guaranteed benefits like workers’ compensation when injured; refusing to make contributions to pension and health plans on behalf of workers and then pocketing the savings; and, not least, general payroll fraud.

Deferred or Social wages: Rasmus shows how the government mechanisms that are meant to socially meet needs are skewed to draw more from workers proportionally while benefiting them less proportionally. He has in mind retirement, health care, and welfare programs that politicians persistently demand more sacrifices from working people to fund, while restricting their ability to draw the benefits through various tests of eligibility.

Taxes: Rasmus reminds us that the dominant political forces espousing the “Neoliberal policy regime” have dramatically increased the tax burden on workers:

Since the advent of Neoliberalism, the total tax burden has shifted from capitalists, their corporations, businesses, and investors to working class families.

In the post-World War II era the payroll tax has more than doubled as a share of total federal tax revenues, to around 45% by 2020. During the same period, the share of taxes paid by corporations has fallen from more than 20% to less than 10%. The federal individual income tax as a percent of total federal government revenues has remained around 40-45%. However, within that 40-45%, another shift in the burden has been occurring—from capital incomes to earned wage incomes…

Not just Trump, but every president since 2001 the US capitalist State has been engaged in a massive tax cutting program mostly benefiting capital incomes. The total tax cuts have amounted to at least $17 trillion since 2001: Starting with George W. Bush’s 2001-03 tax cuts which cut taxes $3.8 trillion (80% of which accrued to Capital incomes), through Obama’s 2009 tax cuts and his extension of Bush’s cuts in 2008 for another two years and again for another 10 years in 2013 (all of which cost another $6 trillion), through Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts that cost $4.5 trillion, and Biden’s 2021-22 tax legislation that added another $2 trillion at minimum—the US Capitalist state has reduced taxes by at least $17 trillion!

Reducing capital’s taxes, as a proportion of tax revenue, increases future national obligations– national debt– that will ultimately be paid by working-class taxes. Or, if that proves unfeasible, it will be met by a reduction of social spending, which reduces social benefits for workers. Either way, the working class faces secondary exploitation through ruling-class tax policy.

Interestingly, Rasmus acknowledges that the state plays a big role in what he deems “secondary exploitation.” Yet, he also suggests that the proper province of secondary exploitation is in the bounds of exchange relations. This seeming anomaly can be avoided if we understand the increasing role of the state in engaging, broadly speaking, in the arena of exchange, as well as regulation. It is precisely this profound and broad engagement that many twentieth-century Marxists explained as state-monopoly capitalism.

*****

Jack Rasmus’s contribution is most welcome because it argues that returning to the fundamentals– the concept of exploitation– can be a fruitful way of looking at contemporary capitalism. It establishes a firm material base for an anti-capitalist politics that addresses the interests of working people as a class, the broadest of classes.

Further, the theory of exploitation unites people as workers, but allows for the various ways and degrees of their exploitation. And it links the material interests of the protagonists in the class struggle to the many forms of social oppression and their contradictory interests in promoting or ending those oppressions: the capitalist sows oppressive divisions to gain exploitative advantage; the worker disavows oppressive divisions to achieve the unity necessary to defeat exploitation. That is, exploitation motivates the capitalist to divide people around nationality, race, sex, culture, social practices, and language. Ending exploitation motivates the worker to refuse these divisions.

In an age where capitalism owns a decided, powerful advantage because of the splintering of the left into numerous causes and where capitalism elevates individual identity to a place superseding class, the common goal of eliminating exploitation is a powerful unifying force.

Today’s left has too often interpreted anti-imperialism as simply the struggle for national sovereignty, rather than through the lens of exploitation. Consequently, the dynamics of class struggle within national borders is often missed.

Of course, for Lenin and his followers, an advanced stage of capitalism — monopoly capitalism — was the life form of imperialism. And its beating heart was exploitation.

The vital tool that Marx, Engels, and Lenin brought to the struggle for workers’ emancipation was the theory of exploitation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Though initially confused at the sudden influx of English speakers, long-dwelling app users quickly connected the dots and were quick to poke fun at the US government’s accusations of China spying on your typical American citizen.

The app “Xiaohongshu” directly translates to ‘Little Red Book,” but it has been dubbed RedNote in the United States. Many are quick to think of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong’s famous Little Red Book, though app officials say it isn’t a direct reference. Still, the comedic composition is something to celebrate.

The Tiktok ban is quite evidently backfiring on the US government. As users snub the ban and move to a real Chinese social media app, spontaneous interactions between US and Chinese citizens are naturally sorting through years and years of anti-China propaganda.

WAIT! The social credit thing isn’t real??? One user commented, after locals revealed that there is no such thing as a social credit score in China — just one of the many stories the media has falsely fed us.

The app has ushered in a new wave of cross-cultural learning. Americans have been posting questions like, “How does China feel about Palestine?” and “What does the US government tell us about China that isn’t true?” There’s been comparisons between the US and China health systems (of which China’s is undoubtedly superior) and tours of China’s incredible EVs. The vast number of Americans agree: the US has fallen way behind.

Not only that, but American citizens cite a new appreciation for China, and the number of people learning Mandarin has grown. Duolingo has already seen a 216% spike. While Chinese citizens have taken it upon themselves to start teaching newcomers common Chinese phrases, Americans simultaneously help local users with their English homework.

It is more than just cultural exchange, however. This is an unprecedented people-to-people moment, allowing two communities to come together and realize they are more alike than not. Such a realization is desperately needed, and undercuts a rapidly escalating war climate between the US and China.

Recently, the US approved a $2 billion arms sale to Taiwan, citing potential war with China. In response, China sanctioned numerous US weapons companies for violating the one-China principle and destabilizing the region. War talk isn’t new — the US government has been pushing and planning for it ever since China rose to power in the early 2000s. A natural threat to US global hegemony, our politicians have been plotting the fall of China for decades, spending billions and billions of dollars to militarize the region around China and pushing a narrative of hatred and fear in the media.

Just this week, China hawk Marco Rubio underwent his Secretary of State confirmation hearing. Due to his push for war against China, he has been travel-sanctioned by the Chinese government for years. Our nation’s top “diplomat” is going to have some trouble conducting diplomacy when he’s unable to even travel to the nation where we need it most. Not that anything Rubio does could ever be considered diplomacy.

But despite the constant anti-China rhetoric plaguing our politicians and media, new RedNote users appear to be taking a different path:

The internet is a modern tool not previously available to the people during the great power wars of previous decades. It provides a fresh avenue that can circumvent the weaponization of the media and allow people to easily connect from different sides of the globe.

Perhaps an app like RedNote is exactly what we need to continue diffusing all the anti-China propaganda attempting to manufacture consent for the next great war. It’s about time the people decide for themselves who they should and shouldn’t be calling “enemy” rather than adhering to the whims of a war-obsessed government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Megan Russell.

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”

In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.

Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.

Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”

Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”

In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).

Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)

The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).

As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.

The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?

And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?

The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?

That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”

The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

• President Joe Biden, in his first presidential visit to Indian Country, formally apologizes to Native Americans for federal boarding school abuses, calling it a “blot on American history.”
• California workers could see wage increases if Proposition 32 passes in November, with labor groups supporting the measure and business groups warning of economic impacts.
• Downtown San Jose residents launch recall campaign against Councilmember Omar Torres, citing lack of representation.

The post California workers could see wage increases if Proposition 32 passes in November – October 25, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Documented. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In the lobby of its midtown Manhattan headquarters, Fedcap Rehabilitation Services has a large wall display that pays homage to its near 90-year history of leading “the fight for equity and opportunity” for the disabled community.

The nonprofit is known in New York as having pioneered the field of vocational rehabilitation, a service that helps find jobs for people with disabilities.

Fedcap has received dozens of contracts worth more than $110 million from 10 New York City and state agencies since 2018.

That’s despite the fact that the company has committed millions of dollars in wage theft against hundreds of its workers in recent years.

Under New York City and state procurement laws, contracting agencies are required to check vendors’ backgrounds, including for labor law violations, and award contracts only to those deemed “responsible.”

But who is a “responsible vendor” is vaguely defined. And New York state’s contracting rules are more lenient than some other places when it comes to approving wage theft violators for contracts. Advocates and officials in those places say tighter rules have been an effective deterrent against wage theft.

In New York, a company is only banned from receiving contracts if it committed multiple “willful” violations of wage laws, and that ban only applies to public construction projects and building service work, such as janitorial and security services. Many wage theft cases, including Fedcap’s, are not deemed willful, meaning that the federal Department of Labor did not determine that it knowingly broke the law.

As a result, city and state agencies repeatedly award contracts to companies even after the vetting process flagged histories of wage theft, an investigation by Documented and ProPublica has found. Joseph Brill, a spokesperson for the state Office of General Services, which oversees many centralized contracts for the state, said in a statement that “we are not aware of any vendor that has been deemed non-responsible solely because of a failure to pay appropriate wages.”

At least 25 companies and organizations, including Fedcap, have received a New York City or state government contract within three years of federal and state investigators finding that they had owed at least $100,000 in back wages to their workers, according to an analysis of nearly six years of contract records beginning in 2018, as well as wage-theft databases obtained from the U.S. and New York Labor departments.

Between January 2018 and September 2023, those employers received about 160 contracts collectively worth more than $500 million from dozens of city and state agencies — all within three years of committing wage theft, according to the analysis. The contracted work included catering, career assistance, nursing, security services, and highway and subway construction.

With Fedcap, its history of wage theft was hardly hidden. A 2018 investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor found that Fedcap had failed to pay required retirement benefits for over one year, then subsequently failed to pay the correct amount for workers at a New York City location. The agency expanded its investigation to 18 other federal offices and facilities served by Fedcap, and it also found that the company illegally deducted third-party administrative fees from its workers’ wages. The company agreed to pay $2.8 million to more than 400 workers to resolve the violations.

“When employers receive federal funds to provide services to the government, they must comply with all applicable laws to ensure that their employees receive legally required pay and benefits,” said David An, Wage and Hour Division District Director in New York City, in a press release about the case issued by the agency.

Then, in 2021, a worker for Fedcap’s job placement program filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of herself and co-workers, alleging that the company committed wage theft against them.

In court documents, the lead plaintiff, Brickzaida Aponte, alleged that she regularly worked long hours — sometimes 100 hours a week — but was denied full wages. Aponte, who worked for the company for eight months ending in January 2019, also alleged that Fedcap made her work through unpaid breaks and required her to work double shifts that involved commuting to other locations without compensating her for the travel time.

Fedcap denied wrongdoing but settled the case last year, agreeing to put $850,000 into a settlement fund for approximately 4,000 workers, as well as attorney’s fees and other expenses.

Among the 25 contractors, Fedcap committed the highest amount of wage theft, according to our analysis of state and federal wage theft databases. Within three years of the 2018 Labor Department investigation, the company received 25 city and state contracts worth nearly $100 million. Since then, it has also received at least five additional contracts worth $18 million. (One of those was initiated within months after settling the class-action lawsuit last year.) The contracted work included providing rehabilitation services for mentally ill and formerly incarcerated people, as well as job placement programs.

In an email to Documented and ProPublica, Fedcap spokesperson Josh Vlasto defended the company, noting that some of the problems with payments occurred during a “change in systems” and that once it became aware of the issue, Fedcap “immediately corrected the error and paid the required funds with interest.” Vlasto also said that other than determining that back wages were owed, the Labor Department didn’t issue “any fines, penalties, or other punitive assessments.” The law that Fedcap violated — which sets wage and benefit standards for employees working on government contracts — does not authorize penalties or fines, according to the Department of Labor.

Vlasto added that his company had been willing to “vigorously contest” the class-action lawsuit but decided to settle the case “not because of any admission or finding of fault but because as a nonprofit we could not afford a lengthy litigation.”

Aponte, the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, declined to comment.

Worker advocates said New York’s current rules are too vague and loose to be effective.

“The system is broken,” Elizabeth Joynes Jordan, co-legal director at Make the Road New York, an immigrant-rights organization that has advocated for workers in labor disputes, wrote in an email. “The city and state must do more to ensure that they are not awarding major contracts to wage thieves.”

The ability of wage-theft violators to receive government contracts in New York stands in contrast to Washington state and a number of cities across the country — such as Houston, Philadelphia and two Ohio cities, Cleveland and Columbus — that have much tighter restrictions.

In Washington, for instance, companies and organizations are banned from bidding on all government contracts after a single willful wage-theft violation. In Cleveland and Columbus, companies are banned from bidding on government contracts after they’re found to have committed any amount of wage theft, whether intentional or not. The ban stays in place for three years in Washington, Cleveland and Columbus — regardless of whether they pay back wages to their workers.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement that his state’s ban is based on a premise that “taxpayer-funded government contracts should only go to those who play by the rules and pay their workers the wages and benefits they’ve earned.”

Others, including New Jersey and cities like Philadelphia and Somerville, Massachusetts, have gone even further, passing laws that allow them to strip wage-theft violators of their business licenses.

In New York, however, recent efforts by state lawmakers to ban the awarding of government contracts to companies that commit any amount of wage theft have failed in the face of opposition from industry groups, such as the Business Council of New York State, which represents more than 3,000 companies and chambers of commerce.

In 2021, for instance, then-state Sen. Brian Barnwell, a Democrat from Queens, proposed legislation to bar wage-theft violators from bidding on government contracts in cities with a population of 1 million or more in the state — which would have covered only New York City. But his bill failed to gain traction and died without getting a single committee hearing.

Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, who represents several neighborhoods in Brooklyn, told Documented and ProPublica that she’s determined to keep trying. She said she believes wage theft “should be disqualifying” for any vendor bidding on government contracts; without such a provision, “the state is subsidizing wage theft.”

In order to receive each of its government contracts, Fedcap had to undergo what’s known as a “vendor responsibility” determination, a two-step vetting process required by both city and state rules.

First, the company had to disclose to contracting agencies information about itself that could be considered “unfavorable” or “negative” — such as whether its business license had ever been suspended or whether the company or its officials had come under a government investigation of any kind during the past five years.

Next, the agencies had to conduct their own vetting of Fedcap’s background by examining a number of factors, including the company’s performance on previous government contracts, financial capacity and record of “integrity.”

Under the city’s rule, the agencies were specifically required to check whether the company had committed labor law violations. The state asks in its vendor responsibility questionnaire if the vendor was found to have committed any willful violations of labor law in the past five years. According to Brill at the state Office of General Services, a wage theft violation “doesn’t automatically make a vendor non-responsible.” He explains that a finding of non-responsibility “depends on multiple factors, such as the nature of the violation, the vendor’s role, whether the vendor has cured the problem, whether they have paid their restitution, etc.”

Based on what was flagged during the vetting process, each agency then had to determine whether Fedcap should be deemed a responsible vendor.

Documented and ProPublica reached out to the 10 city and state agencies that awarded contracts to Fedcap within three years of the 2018 Labor Department investigation. The news organizations wanted to find out whether the company’s wage-theft history had been flagged during the vetting process and, if so, how they still decided to award contracts.

The agencies included the city Department of Social Services, which gave nine contracts worth $65 million to the company to provide career assistance; the state Education Department, which gave two contracts worth $11 million for vocational rehabilitation services; and the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which gave three contracts worth $9 million for rehabilitation for people with mental illness and other services.

Of the five agencies that responded to our inquiries, three — the city Department of Correction, the state Education Department and the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — confirmed that they had flagged Fedcap’s wage-theft history in their own vendor responsibility reviews. The other two told Documented and ProPublica that they followed the required vetting process but did not say more about the decision to award contracts to the company.

Five other agencies, including the Social Services Department, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Spokespeople for two agencies — the Education Department and the Health and Mental Hygiene Department — explained that they had decided to offer contracts because the company had repaid back wages.

Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat whose district in Manhattan runs from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side, said in a statement that he believed New York should adhere to a policy like those in some other locations and not do business with companies that have committed wage theft, regardless of whether they paid back wages.

“I’m glad that, in the case of Fedcap Rehabilitation, back wages were repaid,” Hoylman-Sigal said. “But without any additional fines, and new government contracts coming in, there is nothing to stop places like Fedcap from continuing to exploit their workers in the future.”

Documented and ProPublica also found that the vetting process doesn’t always catch cases of wage theft. Since 2018, two state agencies awarded five contracts worth more than $2 million to All Metro Health Care, a Valley Stream-based home health care services company, which committed wage theft against the highest number of workers among the 25 companies and organizations we examined.

Neither of those agencies flagged the wage theft during their reviews, even though federal and state investigators had documented or open cases of wage theft before the contracts were awarded.

From 2015 to 2022, federal and state investigators found that the company had committed 31 separate cases of wage theft, totaling more than $650,000 in back wages for 3,400 workers.

All Metro’s parent company, Modivcare, did not respond to questions about the company’s wage-theft violations. In a statement it said the company “is dedicated to ensuring fair wages for all its teammates, with stringent policies in place to prevent wage theft.” And it said that since it acquired All Metro Health Care in November 2020, it has “been vigilant in ensuring that it aligns with Modivcare’s high standards.”

In addition, in 2017, two former All Metro workers filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status against the company.

In court documents, the two plaintiffs accused the company of “systemic wage abuse,” including the violations of the minimum wage and overtime rules. One plaintiff, home health aide Chereda Ivory, alleged that she worked multiple 24-hour shifts a week but was paid the wages for only 13 hours per shift. The other plaintiff, support services aide Jacqueline Sistrunk, alleged that she was denied an extra hour of pay that she was entitled to under the “spread of hours” regulation for days she worked for more than 10 hours.

In December 2022, the court approved the lawsuit’s class-action status, which covers approximately 23,000 workers, and the case is ongoing. In court papers, the company denies the allegations and states that “Plaintiffs and the purported class members have been fully and properly paid for all hours and all time which they are entitled to compensation for.”

Jennifer O’Sullivan, spokesperson for the state Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, which awarded four contracts to All Metro, told Documented and ProPublica that “our vetting process did not identify any instances that would disqualify the vendor.” She also noted that the agency awarded contracts “through a strict and competitive procurement process, which includes due diligence of a vendor’s business practices.”

O’Sullivan added that her agency doesn’t have “access to information about investigations by the Department of Labor.” Details of federal investigations are publicly available, and the state Labor Department also keeps a database of substantiated wage theft cases; although it is not public, the state DOL shares data with “enforcement partners” and other entities with which it has established data sharing agreements, a spokesperson for the agency wrote in an email. Spokespersons for both the DOL and the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities did not respond to follow-up questions about whether they have a data-sharing agreement.

Danielle De Souza, a spokesperson for the state Health Department, wrote in an email that her agency awarded one contract after conducting “a full review of all information provided by the vendor and through additional research efforts.” But a review of the agency’s contracting documents obtained through records requests shows that All Metro’s wage theft history was not flagged during the vetting process.

Jennifer Freeman, spokesperson for the Office of the New York State Comptroller, wrote in an email that a vendor’s failure to disclose all required information “may be the basis for a finding of non-responsibility.” But she noted: “It is the responsibility of the state contracting entity to follow up as appropriate and reassess its responsibility determination in light [of] any relevant new information brought to its attention.” The Office for People With Developmental Disabilities did not respond to this assertion.

Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat who represents the Upper West Side and the Clinton neighborhood in Manhattan, said checking vendors’ wage-theft history with the Labor departments should always be part of the vetting process.

If the agencies aren’t checking, she said, they are “cutting corners” and inadvertently encouraging “more of the bad behavior” by wage theft violators who would find it “easy to escape scrutiny.”

This year, New York lawmakers are trying once again to pass bills that would make it difficult for wage-theft violators to do business in the state.

In February, Sen. Jessica Ramos, a Democrat who chairs the Senate’s Labor Committee, introduced a package of three bills related to wage theft. While Ramos’ measures don’t call for a ban on the awarding of state contracts to wage-theft violators, they would allow the state to place a stop-work order or suspend liquor and business licenses if a company owes more than $1,000 in back wages to workers.

But Frank Kerbein, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Business Council of New York State, said stricter measures are “unnecessary,” pointing out that there’s already a vetting process for vendors. If wage-theft violators are still receiving government contracts, he said, “they’re not vetting correctly.” Kerbein added that the Business Council supports requiring each vendor’s wage-theft history to be checked during the vetting process.

Without stricter measures, worker advocates said, companies that adhere to the law are at a competitive disadvantage against unscrupulous companies that can underbid on government contracts.

Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, said that’s what his state’s ban has been able to prevent. “We believe this law has deterred wage theft and helped level the playing field for companies that play by the rules,” he said in a statement. “I hope this law serves as a model for other jurisdictions across the country.”

In Columbus, Rob Dorans, a city councilmember, said his city used the same argument to counter business groups that initially opposed its 2021 ordinance that bans the awarding of city contracts to wage-theft violators.

“We’re just asking everyone to follow the law,” said Dorans, explaining that he sees the ordinance as a way to “disincentivize” companies from committing wage theft. “Why should one company be competing against another company for a city contract and one of them their business model is predicated on stealing from working people and the other folks are doing things the right way?”

Identifying wage-theft violators that have received government contracts required us to gather data from a variety of sources: wage-theft data from the U.S. and New York Labor departments, and contract data from the New York state and New York City comptroller’s offices.

In order to focus on recent events, we looked at all contracts from 2018 until September 2023, when we downloaded the contract data. Each contract listed both a start date and a date when it passed through the state or city comptroller’s office, which can occur before or after the contract has started. Our goal was to include contracts from the earliest known moment that they were on the agency’s radar, so for our analysis we used whichever of those two dates came first.

With our timeframe in place, we set out to look for companies that had received contracts within three years of a wage-theft case with either the federal or state Labor Department. We found hundreds of initial matches spanning 2015 to 2022 in federal and state wage-theft databases that we obtained in 2023. That was too many to vet, so we decided to look for the biggest violators, which we verified by cross-referencing the business addresses associated with the wage-theft cases and contracts. Ultimately we identified 25 companies and organizations that had owed a total of at least $100,000 in back wages within three years of receiving contracts.

Because wage-theft cases can span many months — from the date of the violations to when an investigation was opened to when it was finally resolved — we had to rely on the dates each regulator made available to us. The state wage-theft database only indicated the date when the case was first opened. The federal data did not include a date when the case was opened, but we used the nearest equivalent available, which was the last date that violations occurred. For the federal database, we only included wage-theft cases that listed a business address in New York state.

While this wasn’t perfect, we felt this approach gave us a fair window into the intersection of wage theft violations and contracts. Our analysis is very possibly an undercount, since we may have missed some additional companies due to use of subsidiaries or variations in how a company name appears across the databases.

Ultimately, we found these 25 companies and organizations had received more than $500 million in contracts from New York state and New York City. Not all that money has been paid out, sometimes because the contract is ongoing or because the services weren’t fully utilized. And three of the companies — including All Metro — had contracts for which the state did not pay them directly; instead, the contract value represented the estimated amount that would be paid by customers through the state’s home health care marketplace program.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Marcus Baram, Documented, with data analysis by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica.

Thailand’s minimum wage has been boosted twice this year and could be raised again but many employers simply don’t pass on raises to their migrant-worker staff and some industry leaders even say the minimum wage shouldn’t apply to migrants as they only send it home.

Although the minimum wage differs in Thailand depending on the location and type of job, it is now up to about 370 baht (US$10) a day, according to the Ministry of Labor.

For the estimated two million Myanmar workers in Thailand, or about 75% of Thailand’s total migrant labor force, that’s a wage they would be lucky to get back home where bloody turmoil following a 2021 military coup has devastated the economy.

Myanmar citizen Zin Nwe Oo, 29, works as a seamstress in a Thai factory making bags and is resigned to not getting the minimum but is still determined to help her family back home.

In the town of Mae Sot on Thailand’s western border with Myanmar, she says she’s made below Thailand’s minimum wage for a decade. 

The most Zin Nwe Oo has made is 200 baht a day and now she worries that even that is being eroded by Myanmar’s rampant inflation.

“We’re struggling to make ends meet … Even if the government increases the basic salary we won’t benefit if commodity prices keep rising,” she said, referring to Myanmar, where she sends her remittances. “I want to support my parents. If my siblings don’t get a good education, they’ll end up as laborers. That’s why I’ve sacrificed myself.”

A dollar a day

Labor activists say many Myanmar workers in Thailand aren’t getting the minimum wage although data is hard to come by given the huge numbers of undocumented workers.

“Enforcement, that’s a big problem,” said Migrant Working Group project coordinator Koreeyor Manuchae, referring to the prospect of workers in some areas seeing any minimum wage increase in their pockets

Undocumented workers can feel powerless to complain, fearing that approaching authorities to report unfair treatment could result in them being sent home.

The problem is particularly acute along the border, in places like Mae Sot, where garment factories and plantations take advantage of the abundant cheap labor from Myanmar.

Some informal sectors, like agriculture, can pay as little as 36 baht, or one dollar, a day. 

But even workers with the proper paperwork know that a complaint to labor protection organizations will set off a long process of inquiry. Inevitably, they fear they could lose their jobs, or face intimidation by employers.

Some workers have complained and even taken their cases to court but are still waiting, years later, for a resolution.

“Workers don't want to go to the court. It can take six months, or a year, or maybe more than a year to complete the case,” Koreeyor said.

Thailand’s minimum wage was increased by a national average of 2.4% in January and in April lawmakers announced another increase, for staff in certain tourist areas, meaning a daily wage of 400 baht in four-star hotels with more than 50 employees.

In early May, the civilian government that came to power after elections in May last year announced that 400 baht a day would become the national minimum.

But the decision needs agreement on a tripartite wage committee, made up of employers, workers and labor officials. Migrant workers have no voice in the debate as they have no right to form unions.

‘Lowest standards’

Employer and industry associations warn of the burden of a higher minimum wage, in particular on small and medium-sized enterprises, while some argue that the benefits of increasing the minimum wage are wasted if the extra cash is going to migrant workers who send it home.

“There is no reason to raise it,” said Chaiyan Charoenchokethavee, director general of the Employers Confederation of Thai Business.

An increase would hurt businesses while being of little benefit to the economy, he said.

“It will largely benefit foreign workers … [they] will receive full benefits and transfer the money back home without it circulating in the Thai economy. That’s opposite government policy.”    

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In June, the Federation of Thai Industries, or FTI, called for any minimum wage increase to be limited to specific skilled workers in “old industries” such as the auto parts, electronics and telecommunications sectors. 

Wiwat Hemmondharop, vice-chairman of the FTI, said raising the minimum wage for everyone would not benefit Thailand.

"Migrant workers tend to spend only half their wage here and send the rest to their families. This means a higher wage would support the GDP of neighboring countries," Wiwat told the Bangkok Post in May.

Labor campaigners are dismayed by such talk.

“The minimum wage is the lowest standard, the basic standard to guarantee that people survive, we shouldn’t be against that,” said Koreeyor.

“As the owner or company or factory, if you could not take responsibility to pay the minimum wage, you should not run your business.”

Edited by RFA staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kiana Duncan and Pimuk Rakkanam for RFA.

Image by Jeff Kingma.

Joe Biden has long had a problem with PEACE – as in “ceasefires,” “serious peace negotiations,” and conditioning the transfer or sale of major weapons systems as required by five U.S. criminal statutes. From one side of his mouth, Biden urges futilely Israeli compliance with international law while on the other side he supports the daily shipment of weapons of mass destruction to the Israeli government. These weapons are being used in the genocidal killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

A majority in Congress is even more hawkish and lets Biden do whatever he wants in making war abroad. The cornerstone of our Constitution – the separation of powers – has been demolished in area after area. (See, our open letter of November 28, 2023, to the members of the U.S. Congress).

By contrast, American public opinion has turned against U.S. arms shipments to Israel and the annihilation of Palestinian civilians from infants to the elderly. Whole extended families are being wiped out by American-made bombs and missiles. The homeless survivors are injured, starving and suffering from untold illnesses.

The Israeli state terror is producing a Palestinian Holocaust. Netanyahu’s violent anti-semitism against the Arabs of Palestine is out of control. Many courageous Israeli human rights groups protest, to no avail, (See, the December 13, 2023, open letter to Biden that appeared in the New York Times) as Netanyahu and his extremist coalition reveal their long-time objective of driving millions of Palestinians out of what is left of their Palestine.

As for the Hamas raid on October 7th, and the total collapse of the highly touted Israeli border security, a World War II Holocaust survivor told the New York Times, “It should never have happened…” Yet, Netanyahu has blocked an official investigation of this unexplained multi-tiered technological and human intelligence debacle.

Meanwhile, public dissatisfaction with the dictatorial decision-making by the White House and the absence of Congressional action is growing rapidly. More and more labor unions are now opposing Biden’s bombings, Jewish Americans working with Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now are brilliantly organizing demonstrations. Veterans for Peace’s 27 chapters around the country are in the streets peacefully demanding a ceasefire, cessation of weapons shipments and major increases in humanitarian aid. They are mostly ignored by the corporate media, NPR and PBS.

Religious groups are beseechingly calling for peace. This week in the latest public letter, 140 Global Christian Leaders, organized by Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) called on President Biden “…to have the moral courage to end U.S. complicity in the ongoing violence and, instead, do everything in [his] power to…” stop the “death and destruction” in Palestine.

The CMEP receives little or no coverage by the mainstream media even though this organization represents millions of people.

But then look who is not taking a pro-peace stand, staying silent or actively backing the Israeli war machine. The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars are on the sidelines. The AFL-CIO Labor Federation finally came out tepidly for a ceasefire but has exerted very little of its muscle on Capitol Hill.

AIPAC, the “pro-Israeli government can do no wrong lobby” has been cultivating relationships with these U.S. organizations and others like them for decades.

The worst abdications have come from the legal profession in the form of State Bar Associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) – the largest organization of lawyers in the world. These lawyers are all “officers of the court” instructed to stand for the rule of law. Except for a brief time in 2005-2006 (https://nader.org/2013/04/19/aba-white-papers/ ) the ABA has idled while Presidents regularly have violated our Constitution and all kinds of laws – domestic and international – with impunity, facilitated by a supine Congress.

Bruce Fein and I have asked 50 State Bar Associations to be first responders in challenging the ongoing breakdown of the rule of law due to their professional duties and knowledge. None have responded.

As for the healthcare professionals watching Israel raining death and destruction directly on Gaza’s hospitals and health clinics, inundated with desperate patients, their endangered physicians and assistants without the means to devote their care, the response is overwhelmingly silent. The American Public Health Association and the American Medical Student Association are among the few to have condemned Israel’s atrocities.

Yet, the desperate pleas by their wounded professional colleagues have failed to register with the likes of the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and many others. (See the letter of March 1, 2024, which has gone unanswered).

What can turn our country around? An organized citizenry of less than one percent of the voters in Congressional Districts, giving voice to the voiceless majority, can free Congress from its captivity imposed by the forces of greed, power and violent Empire, draining resources from our dire domestic needs.

As I wrote in the Capitol Hill Citizen (February/March 2024 issue), Congress has become a weapon of mass destruction with multiple warheads. Only the people can recover their sovereign power, under the Constitution, now delegated to a Congress that sells out to the highest corporatist bidders.

On the Israeli slaughter of Gaza’s people, a small but growing number of Democrats in Congress are standing tall. They need your active backing to expand their numbers. (See, Ceasefire Tracker: https://workingfamilies.org/ceasefire-tracker/).

As for the cruel, vicious, genocidal, maniacal Republicans, they remain disgraced in their full-throttled support for Netanyahu, who is fighting for his job, trying to escape Israeli prosecutors and is hugely unpopular in Israel.

The GOP position was expressed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton – a lawyer no less – who said last October, for posterity’s eternal damnation: “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.” This is exactly what the massacring Israeli juggernauts have done with the weapons, taxpayers’ money and diplomatic cover enabled by corrupt outlaws like Tom Cotton.

The post Bomber Biden Doesn’t Wage Peace, Save Civilians or Listen to American Antiwar Crimes Advocates appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

The network is a key element of Tehran's strategy of deterrence against perceived threats from the United States, regional rivals, and primarily Israel.

Active in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the axis gives Iran the ability to hit its enemies outside its own borders while allowing it to maintain a position of plausible deniability, experts say.

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has played a key role in establishing some of the groups in the axis. Other members have been co-opted by Tehran over the years.

Iran has maintained that around dozen separate groups that comprise the axis act independently.

Tehran's level of influence over each member varies. But the goals pursued by each group broadly align with Iran's own strategic aims, which makes direct control unnecessary, according to experts.

Lebanon's Hizballah

Hizballah was established in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion that year of Lebanon, which was embroiled in a devastating civil war.

The Shi'ite political and military organization was created by the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the country's armed forces.

Danny Citrinowicz, a research fellow at the Iran Program at the Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies, said Tehran's aim was to unite Lebanon's various Shi'ite political organizations and militias under one organization.

Since it was formed, Hizballah has received significant financial and political assistance from Iran, a Shi'a-majority country. That backing has made the group a major political and military force in Lebanon.

"Iran sees the organization as the main factor that will deter Israel or the U.S. from going to war against Iran and works tirelessly to build the organization's power," Citrinowicz said.

Hizballah has around 40,000 fighters, according to the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. The State Department said Iran has armed and trained Hizballah fighters and injected hundreds of millions of dollars in the group.

The State Department in 2010 described Hizballah as "the most technically capable terrorist group in the world."

Citrinowicz said Iran may not dictate orders to the organization but Tehran "profoundly influences" its decision-making process.

He described Hizballah, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, not as a proxy but "an Iranian partner managing Tehran's Middle East strategy."

Led by Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah has developed close ties with other Iranian proxies and Tehran-backed militant groups, helping to train and arm their fighters.

Citrinowicz said Tehran "almost depends" on the Lebanese group to oversee its relations with other groups in the axis of resistance.

Hamas

Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, has had a complex relationship with Iran.

Founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, Hamas is an offshoot of the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political organization established in Egypt in the 1920s.

Hamas's political chief is Ismail Haniyeh, who lives in Qatar. Its military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is commanded by Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to be based in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is estimated to have around 20,000 fighters.

For years, Iran provided limited material support to Hamas, a Sunni militant group. Tehran ramped up its financial and military support to the Palestinian group after it gained power in the Gaza Strip in 2007.

But Tehran reduced its support to Hamas after a major disagreement over the civil war in Syria. When the conflict broke out in 2011, Iran backed the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Hamas, however, supported the rebels seeking to oust Assad.

Nevertheless, experts said the sides overcame their differences because, ultimately, they seek the same goal: Israel's destruction.

"[But] this does not mean that Iran is deeply aware of all the actions of Hamas," Citrinowicz said.

After Hamas militants launched a multipronged attack on Israel in October that killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, Iran denied it was involved in planning the assault. U.S. intelligence has indicated that Iranian leaders were surprised by Hamas's attack.

Seyed Ali Alavi, a lecturer in Middle Eastern and Iranian Studies at SOAS University of London, said Iran's support to Hamas is largely "confined to rhetorical and moral support and limited financial aid." He said Qatar and Turkey, Hamas's "organic" allies, have provided significantly more financial help to the Palestinian group.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad

With around 1,000 members, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is the smaller of the two main militant groups based in the Gaza Strip and the closest to Iran.

Founded in 1981, the Sunni militant group's creation was inspired by Iran's Islamic Revolution two years earlier. Given Tehran's ambition of establishing a foothold in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Iran has provided the group with substantial financial backing and arms, experts say.

The PIJ, led by Ziyad al-Nakhalah, is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

"Today, there is no Palestinian terrorist organization that is closer to Iran than this organization," Citrinowicz said. "In fact, it relies mainly on Iran."

Citrinowicz said there is no doubt that Tehran's "ability to influence [the PIJ] is very significant."

Iraqi Shi'ite Militias

Iran supports a host of Shi'ite militias in neighboring Iraq, some of which were founded by the IRGC and "defer to Iranian instructions," said Gregory Brew, a U.S.-based Iran analyst with the Eurasia Group.

But Tehran's influence over the militias has waned since the U.S. assassination in 2020 of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, who was seen as the architect of the axis of resistance and held great influence over its members.

"The dynamic within these militias, particularly regarding their relationship with Iran, underwent a notable shift following the assassination of Qassem Soleimani," said Hamidreza Azizi, a fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

The U.S. drone strike that targeted Soleimani also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization of mostly Shi'ite Iran-backed armed groups that has been a part of the Iraqi Army since 2016.

Muhandis was also the leader of Kata'ib Hizballah, which was established in 2007 and is one of the most powerful members of the PMF. Other prominent groups in the umbrella include Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Harakat al-Nujaba, Kata'ib Seyyed al-Shuhada, and the Badr Organization. Kata'ib Hizballah has been designated as a terrorist entity by the United States.

Following the deaths of Soleimani and al-Muhandis, Kata'ib Hizballah and other militias "began to assert more autonomy, at times acting in ways that could potentially compromise Iran's interests," said Azizi.

Many of the Iran-backed groups that form the PMF are also part of the so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which rose to prominence in November 2023. The group has been responsible for launching scores of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza.

"It's important to note that while several militias within the PMF operate as Iran's proxies, this is not a universal trait across the board," Azizi said.

Azizi said the extent of Iran's control over the PMF can fluctuate based on the political conditions in Iraq and the individual dynamics within each militia.

The strength of each group within the PMF varies widely, with some containing as few as 100 members and others, such as Kata'ib Hizballah, boasting around 10,000 fighters.

Syrian State And Pro-Government Militias

Besides Iran, Syria is the only state that is a member of the axis of resistance.

"The relationship between Iran and the Assad regime in Syria is a strategic alliance where Iran's influence is substantial but not absolute, indicating a balance between dependency and partnership," said Azizi.

The decades-long alliance stems from Damascus's support for Tehran during the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

When Assad's rule was challenged during the Syrian civil war, the IRGC entered the fray in 2013 to ensure he held on to power.

Hundreds of IRGC commander and officers, who Iran refers to as "military advisers," are believed to be present in Syria. Tehran has also built up a large network of militias, consisting mostly of Afghans and Pakistanis, in Syria.

Azizi said these militias have given Iran "a profound influence on the country's affairs," although not outright control over Syria.

"The Assad regime maintains its strategic independence, making decisions that serve its national interests and those of its allies," he said.

The Fatemiyun Brigade, comprised of Afghan fighters, and the Zainabiyun Brigade, which is made up of Pakistani fighters, make up the bulk of Iran's proxies in Syria.

"They are essentially units in the IRGC, under direct control," said Brew.

The Afghan and Pakistani militias played a key role in fighting rebel groups opposed to Assad during the civil war. There have been reports that Iran has not only granted citizenship to Afghan fighters and their families but also facilitated Syrian citizenship for them.

The Fatemiyun Brigade, the larger of the two, is believed to have several thousand fighters in Syria. The Zainabiyun Brigade is estimated to have less than 1,000 fighters.

Yemen's Huthi Rebels

The Huthis first emerged as a movement in the 1980s in response to the growing religious influence of neighboring Saudi Arabia, a Sunni kingdom.

In 2015, the Shi'ite militia toppled the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government of Yemen. That triggered a brutal, yearslong Saudi-led war against the rebels.

With an estimated 200,000 fighters, the Huthis control most of the northwest of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, and are in charge of much of the Red Sea coast.

The Huthis' disdain for Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional foe, and Israel made it a natural ally of Tehran, experts say. But it was only around 2015 that Iran began providing the group with training through the Quds Force and Hizballah. Tehran has also supplied weapons to the group, though shipments are regularly intercepted by the United States.

"The Huthis…appear to have considerable autonomy and Tehran exercises only limited control, though there does appear to be [a] clear alignment of interests," said Brew.

Since Israel launched its war in Gaza, the Huthis have attacked international commercial vessels in the Red Sea and fired ballistic missiles at several U.S. warships.

In response, the United States and its allies have launched air strikes against the Huthis' military infrastructure. Washington has also re-designated the Huthis as a terrorist organization.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Documented. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

New York lawmakers proposed three new bills last week that would make it difficult for wage theft violators to conduct business in the state.

The legislation would bolster the power of state agencies to crack down on wage theft by stripping violators of their liquor licenses or business licenses, as well as issuing stop-work orders against them.

The legislation was prompted by reports of rampant wage theft against New York workers, including two investigations published by Documented and ProPublica. The stories revealed that more than 127,000 New Yorkers have been victims of wage theft during a recent five-year period, but that the New York State Department of Labor was unable to recover $79 million in back wages owed to the workers.

The stories were based on an analysis of two databases of wage theft violations obtained from the U.S. and New York Labor departments. The databases provided previously unreported details on how much money had been stolen from workers and also shed light on which businesses had committed wage theft.

“We knew from our conversations with labor and from our constituent service caseload that wage theft is a chronic problem,” said Sen. Jessica Ramos, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation. “We did not have the data to understand the scale of the issue in New York state until the ProPublica and Documented series came out last year. Having this reporting as a tool set us up to put this package together and focused our attention on” the capacity of the Department of Labor.

The legislation — dubbed the “wage theft deterrence package” by lawmakers — includes three bills, which are co-sponsored in the State Assembly by Assemblymembers Kenny Burgos, Harvey Epstein and Linda Rosenthal.

The first, S8451, would empower the New York State Liquor Authority to suspend liquor licenses for bars and restaurants that the Department of Labor has determined owe more than $1,000 in back wages to their workers. According to Documented and ProPublica’s analysis, more than $52 million has been stolen from people working in restaurants in New York, more than in any other industry. The amount of back wages accounted for more than 25% of all reported wage theft in the state. Similar measures have been successful in other parts of the country, including Santa Clara County in California, which has recovered $110,000 for workers since 2019.

The second bill, S8452, would enable the Department of Labor to place a stop-work order on any business that has a wage theft claim of at least $1,000. This approach has proven successful in other states, such as New Jersey, which temporarily shut down 27 Boston Market restaurants and eventually recovered more than $630,000 in back wages for 314 workers. Boston Market did not respond to a request for comment.

The third bill, S8453, allows the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to suspend a business’s certificate of authority — which allows it to collect sales tax and conduct business — in cases where wage theft exceeds $1,000.

The three bills include a provision that allows employers to avoid the punishments if they resolve their wage theft claims within 15 days.

Ramos’ office told Documented and ProPublica that it’s too early to gauge the level of support among other lawmakers for the bills, which were introduced Wednesday. But Ramos and Rosenthal, a Democrat who represents the Upper West Side and the Clinton neighborhood in Manhattan, wield considerable clout in the Legislature, as they chair powerful committees — the Labor and Housing committees, respectively. And the bills have the support from the state Department of Labor, according to Ramos’ office.

“Each year, more than $1 billion is stolen from the pockets of hardworking New Yorkers by unscrupulous employers, often targeting the workers with the fewest resources to fight back,” Rosenthal said. “If businesses refuse to do the right thing and pay their workers what they are owed, New York State should hold them to account.”

The bills were praised by worker advocates and urban studies academics, including James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. “These bills are needed to put more teeth into New York’s enforcement efforts,” Parrott said. “We owe it to hard-working low-wage workers and law-abiding employers.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Marcus Baram, Documented.

What’s scarier than a shark attack? An increase in the minimum wage.

At least that’s what many corporate media outlets seem to want you to believe, given the apocalyptic tone of much of the coverage of California’s recent decision to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour, starting this April, a bump from the current level of $16.

CBS‘s headline (12/27/23) frames California’s minimum wage raise as an act of aggression, against which fast-food companies have to “fight back.”

While outlets like the New York Times (10/23/23), the Associated Press (9/28/23), CalMatters (12/21/23, 9/28/23) and the Sacramento Bee (9/29/23, 9/15/23, 9/11/23) have responsibly covered the policy change, highlighting the large positive effects that it will likely have on workers, others are obsessively accentuating the negatives.

Consider the following sampling of articles, by no means exhaustive, all of which link the minimum wage increase to higher prices or harm to workers:

• “Pizza Hut Franchisees Lay Off More Than 1,200 Delivery Drivers in California as Restaurants Brace for $20 Fast-Food Wages” (Business Insider, 12/22/23)
• “I’m a California Restaurant Operator Preparing for the $20-an-Hour Fast-Food Wage by Trimming Hours, Eliminating Employee Vacation and Raising Menu Prices” (Business Insider, 1/16/24)
• “As New Minimum Wages Are Ushered In, Companies Fight Back With Fees and Layoffs” (CBS, 12/27/23)
• “California Pizza Huts Lay Off All Delivery Drivers Ahead of Minimum Wage Increase” (USA Today, 12/26/23)
• “Fatburger Owner to Raise Prices, Trim Hours as California Hikes Minimum Wage” (New York Post, 1/16/24)
• “California Pizza Hut Franchises Announce Layoffs of Delivery Drivers Before New $20 Minimum Wage: Report” (New York Post, 12/27/23)

Anecdotes instead of evidence

“The money has to come from somewhere,” a fast-food franchise owner tells Business Insider (1/16/24)—which doesn’t mention that such franchises typically have a profit margin of 6–9%, higher than full-service restaurants (Restaurant365, 2/25/20).

Extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors has repeatedly found that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment. The catch, of course, is that most of the hikes analyzed have been relatively modest, given the US’s stinginess towards workers. But a recent study looking at the effects of large jumps in the minimum wage on the fast-food industry in California and New York found the result was actually higher employment, not mass layoffs. Is any of that research cited in these pieces? No.

Instead, the articles elevate anecdotes about what individual companies have done and say they plan to do in response to the minimum wage boost. The second Business Insider piece (1/16/24), for instance, quotes the owner of four Fatburger franchises as saying, “I feel that there will be a lot of pain to workers as franchise owners are forced to take drastic measures.” Scary!

It’s worth emphasizing that these anecdotes about layoffs are entirely compatible with a story of the minimum wage hike having a negligible or even positive effect on employment. That’s because, when assessing the effect on overall employment, what matters is not whether there are individual companies that are laying off workers, but whether the net effect across all companies in the industry is positive or negative.

Consider that, as of late, a typical month has seen layoffs in the range of 160,000 in California. If you want to spin a story about how horrible the economy is, just run endless headlines on these layoffs—and ignore the fact that the state’s monthly hires have been averaging nearly 600,000.

Similarly, if you want to spin a story about how evil a rise in the minimum wage is, run endless headlines linking the minimum wage to layoffs, because layoffs will happen even if employment stays the same or increases overall. As Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, a classic text in the minimum wage literature, put it:

A hike in the minimum wage could lead to an increase in employment in some firms, and to a decrease at others. As a result, it is always possible to find examples of employers who claim that they will go out of business if the minimum wage increases, or who state that they closed because of a minimum-wage increase.

Despite this reality, the authors found that “on average…employment remains unchanged, or sometimes rises slightly, as a result of increases in the minimum wage.”

‘Fears of skyrocketing prices’

Yahoo (1/4/24) claims the report of a Connecticut McDonald’s “charging $18 for a Big Mac combo meal…is not isolated”—failing to mention that the average price of a Big Mac combo meal in Connecticut is $10.79.

A worrying number of media outlets are allergic to this level of nuance. And perhaps none so much as Yahoo Finance. Tying fearmongering over minimum wage hikes to inflation hysteria, Yahoo (1/4/24) ran this mess of a headline at the start of the month:

McDonald’s $18 Big Mac Meal Goes Viral Again as Fast-Food Minimum Wage Hike to $20 Triggers Fears of Skyrocketing Prices and Layoffs, Leaving People Questioning: ‘Maybe This Went Up Way Too Fast.’

The grain of truth here is that prices have risen substantially at fast-food restaurants lately, and especially at McDonald’s. Moreover, part of this increase can be attributed to strong wage growth. As Vox (1/9/24) has reported:

According to [the economist Michael] Reich, for every percentage point increase in a fast-food firm’s labor costs, one might expect to see a bit less than a 0.333 percentage point increase in menu prices. This is a rough estimate, but it’s a decent rule of thumb. And it would imply that rising wages have nudged fast-food prices up by more than 9% since the pandemic’s onset.

These numbers imply that a minimum wage hike would result in higher prices, which is in line with what academic research has found. The thing is, at least to this point, these price increases have been quite modest. The same recent analysis of large minimum wage hikes in California and New York that found a positive employment effect also found that a “roughly 50% increase in the minimum wage resulted in an approximately 3% increase in prices.” The new minimum wage increase in California would be closer to a 30% jump (relative to where the wage was when the legislation was passed in the fall). There’s no firm basis to suggest that such a rise would send prices “skyrocketing.”

‘Blaming whoever wrote that law’

Did a laid-off pizza deliverer really know the name of the Pasadena assembly member who wrote the minimum wage law? Regardless, the right-wing California Globe (1/2/24) was able to get its defense of business owners in the voice of a low-wage worker distributed widely through Yahoo (1/4/24).

But Yahoo doesn’t need a firm basis for its narrative; all it needs is some good old right-wing propaganda. So it turns to reporting from the California Globe. As the Sacramento Bee  (10/29/20) detailed in a 2020 expose of California news sites backed by conservative political operatives:

The California Globe, founded by an associate of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, describes itself as “pro-growth and pro-business, nonpartisan and objective”—but serves up a steady diet of conservative news and opinion. The Globe boasted that its stories racked up 1.1 million page views in July, which it described as a landmark achievement for the two-year-old site.

Unsurprisingly, under the headline “The Number of Victims Is Growing of New $20 Fast-Food Minimum Wage Law,” the Globe (1/2/24) was able to cobble together some horror stories about the effects of the new minimum wage legislation. The piece centers around the testimony of two workers who were victims of the recent layoffs at Pizza Hut. The core takeaway is basically the following quote, attributed to an anonymous Pizza Hut worker:

I, as well as pretty much everyone else here, is blaming whoever wrote that law or bill or whatever. There are a few who are saying that Pizza Hut is doing this out of greed or that they could have cut costs elsewhere, but most are like, maybe this went up way too fast. Some workers benefit, others are now out of a job. So the guy who wrote it, [Assemblyman] Chris Holden [D-Pasadena], as well as anyone else who thought this was a good idea. Great job. We hate you forever now.

Again, as unfortunate as what happened to these two workers is, the fact that they were laid off tells us very little about what the overall impact of the new minimum wage law will be. But that won’t stop media outlets from cynically elevating such stories to demonize a policy that is set to raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers. Yahoo borrows parts of this quote, as well as others from the article, to fill out its piece, giving the Globe a further boost beyond its already substantial circulation.

Defying ‘economics and common sense’

The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) states that when the government raises wages above what the market determines, “jobs simply disappear”—an ideological assertion contradicted by decades of research (CEPR, 2/13).

National conservative media have likewise been promoting the propaganda line that the minimum wage increase will inevitably lead to job loss (with the benefit of increased wages to hundreds of thousands of workers conveniently ignored). At the end of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial (12/28/23) headlined “California’s Fast-Food Casualties,” which opened:

California’s $20 an hour minimum wage for fast-food workers doesn’t take effect until April, but the casualties are already piling up. Pizza Hut franchises this week told more than 1,200 delivery drivers that they’ll lose their jobs before the higher wage kicks in. Gov. Gavin Newsom no doubt sends condolences, though what he should send is an apology.

It continued by arguing that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But does it? Or is skepticism of the idea that the law will lead to net job loss warranted, given the existing evidence base? The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.

But maybe this time will be different. The California law breaks with the standard approach towards wage floors in the US, where a floor is set across all industries in a particular region. Instead, the law sets a floor for a particular sector, and it establishes a wage council that will oversee wage increases from 2025 to 2029, something novel in American labor law. The layoffs that we’re seeing could have something to do with this unique setup.

Because the law sets a minimum standard solely for the fast-food industry, it leaves a loophole for fast-food companies to exploit. Rather than keeping delivery services in-house, they can dump those workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations. Because these companies can pay the workers less, the most sensible decision may now be for fast-food companies to scrap their delivery teams and outsource to outside delivery services.

This is a totally plausible story about what’s going on, though not the only plausible story. But even if it does fit with reality, it just looks like these delivery jobs are being transferred out of the fast-food sector, with the economy-wide net effect on employment unclear. So to cite these layoffs as evidence that the minimum wage hike will have a negative overall effect on employment is at best premature.

All of this focus on the possibilities of layoffs, moreover, totally distracts from the far-reaching benefits that the policy change is likely to have. California has over half a million fast-food workers, who, as of 2022, earned a median wage of a bit over $16. Raising the minimum wage to $20 would directly affect the vast majority of those in the fast-food industry—even the 90th percentile worker made less than $20 in 2022. If there is in fact some rise in unemployment, which is not entirely out of the question, it would have to be pretty substantial in order to cancel out the positive effects of the wage boost.

Broadening the discussion

It’s the media’s role to inform the public about reality, not to run sensational headlines about good intentions bringing disastrous consequences, as effective as that may be at attracting eyeballs. A solid start on the way to fulfilling this role would be for media outlets to consistently bring in experts to talk about the decades’ worth of research on the effects of minimum wage hikes. Some outlets already do this. Others, not so much.

Even better would be for the media to more frequently broaden the discussion beyond the minimum wage to other policy changes that would complement the minimum wage or fill in its gaps, policies like expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income. The narrow focus on sensational events does little other than distort the picture. Taking a wider view would bring things into focus.

At the moment, however, it might be best just to ask media outlets to stop trotting out propaganda lines that should have died a long time ago.

The post Reporting on California’s Fast-Food Minimum Wage Raise Comes With Side Order of Fear appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

Janine Jackson interviewed EPI’s Sebastian Martinez Hickey about the minimum wage for the January 12, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Chart: Wikipedia

Janine Jackson: It is partly due to corporate news media’s misleading, invidious presentation of the minimum wage as about individuals—“Who’s working these jobs, why don’t they get skills to move up to something better?”—that we have trouble seeing and asking societal questions instead.

Like, why should a country have jobs whose full-time workers don’t earn enough to not be impoverished? Why is a company whose waged employees require public assistance to keep their heads above water deemed a “successful” company? Why is it a fight to get wages higher than they were generations ago, when profits are not likewise constrained?

The story today is that despite the misinformation, many people do know what the minimum wage means—to individuals and families, certainly, but also to society as a whole. And they’re fighting through that often-skewed public debate to get, most recently, a raise in the minimum wage in some 22 states.

Sebastian Martinez Hickey has been tracking wage issues as a researcher for the Economic Analysis and Research Network team at the Economic Policy Institute. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sebastian Martinez Hickey.

Sebastian Martinez Hickey: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure being here.

EPI (12/21/23)

JJ: Let’s start with the news that you just wrote about, on the minimum wage increases that went into effect January 1. For those asleep under rocks since the 1950s, that might sound like it means some fast food workers will get more pocket change to take home to mom. But that’s not an accurate or useful picture of who minimum wage workers are, or what the effects of a lift in that wage might mean.

So tell us about the scope of these new increases—who do they reach?—and then what does your analysis suggest that the various impacts of this could be?

SMH: As you mentioned, 22 states increased their minimum wage in January, in addition to 38 cities and counties that increased their minimum wages above and beyond their state minimum wages. And these increases are happening all over the country. It’s happening in big urban coastal states like New York and California, but also rural states like Nebraska and South Dakota.

According to our analysis, these increases are going to reach almost 10 million workers, and in total these workers are going to gain almost $7 billion in wages over the course of the next year.

You asked about who these workers are. We’re not just talking about workers that work at the federal minimum wage, which is still stuck at $7.25. We’re really talking about low-wage workers as a group.

So if you think about workers that are earning, for example, less than $15 an hour, there’s more than 17 million of those workers in the United States. More than 60% of those workers are older than 24, so most of these people are adults. They are most likely the primary breadwinners in their households. There’s also a misconception that these low-wage workers are just part-time workers, when in fact most of these workers are full-time workers.

In addition, in other ways, low-wage workers just represent ordinary working-class people in the United States. They tend to disproportionately be women. They also tend to disproportionately be Black and Hispanic workers, which means that when minimum wages are increased, it’s a force for gender and racial equity. They are also parents; more than a quarter of the people who are getting raises from the minimum-wage increases are parents, which means that their wages obviously have to cover the needs of their children as well.

People who are closer or below the poverty line; almost two-fifths of the people who are receiving increases are at 200% or less of the federal poverty line. And I use that benchmark because that includes people who are officially poor, but also a lot of people who we know are struggling to make ends meet, even if they are not technically poor.

JJ: Right. Maybe they don’t qualify as poor this month, but that’s because they’re short-changing their healthcare or something else.

SMH: Exactly.

JJ: I appreciate your pointing out that we’re not talking about the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour. So it isn’t a blanket lift. It varies a lot, as you’ve said, from place to place. So, in other words, it’s not corporations saying, “Hey, we’re making profits, and so we’re going to lift all our wages.” It’s really a matter of local and state level political action and organizing that has got us to these raises.

Politico (5/29/23)

SMH: Yeah, in the last couple of years, low-wage workers have experienced historic wage growth compared to what has been the normal trend over the course of the last 50 years. And that’s a good thing. But it means it’s also really important that states and localities take action to increase their minimum wages, so that it locks in the benefit that workers are experiencing, I would argue, temporarily.

JJ: As I said, I think the presentation of the minimum wage as a thing that just faces some workers actively detracts from our understanding of society-wide impacts. And I guess I’d like to ask you, how is it good for me, even if I don’t work a minimum-wage job, how is it good for me to see the minimum wage lifted in states and communities? There’s a broader impact.

SMH: Yeah, there definitely is. I’ll make a couple points. One is that, what empirical research shows is that the minimum wage doesn’t just lift wages for people that are below the new minimum-wage threshold. It also has some spillover effects for workers who are above the new threshold. So this happens because employers are trying to keep their wage ladders consistent, as the entire wage distribution moves up a little bit. And it usually impacts people around 15% above the new threshold. So that isn’t affecting everyone, but it is an additional benefit that comes from the minimum wage.

But in terms of society at large and the economy at large, we know that low-wage workers spend a lot more of their money in their local economies compared to high-income earners. So when you put money in the pockets of low-wage workers through a minimum-wage increase, you get this beneficial effect where people are spending more money in the economy.

Critics of the minimum wage will say that when you increase the minimum wage, it’s going to either force businesses out of business or make them lay off lots of workers. And we don’t see that in the most high-end research that has been done on this topic, and it’s been studied a lot in economics. And one of the reasons is that there are channels like these by which the economy can adjust to becoming more equitable through a minimum-wage increase.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to that, but I just wanted to take a little step here to say that listeners will know that we often hear about the importance of pegging wages to inflation. What’s important about that? What’s the role that inflation is playing here in relation to this wage increase?

SMH: Yes. So most of the states that have increases this year are doing so because their minimum-wage policies automatically make adjustments to price increases over the course of the last year. This is a really important step, because it keeps the minimum wage from eroding in terms of its purchasing power.

It’s particularly a good thing if you think that the alternative is simply allowing the minimum wage to stagnate indefinitely, which is basically what we’ve done with the federal minimum wage. The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009, and because of price increases over the intervening period, that means that the federal minimum wage is worth more than 30% less than it was in 2009.

CounterSpin (11/27/15)

JJ: Listeners are going to hear today some of the years-ago but lamentably still-relevant conversation that I had with Saru Jayaraman on tipped wages, and I know that you think about that as well, but you recognize, in other words, these increases in the minimum wage come in a context. They’re not a golden ticket to an equitable economy, that there are other things that need to happen. So, broadly, how do you contextualize— it’s important, lives are going to change, but it’s not the end of the road.

SMH: Yeah, of course not. And you mentioned the tipped minimum wage, which at the federal level still sits at $2.13 an hour, which is insanely low. And we know that we can compare, for example, bartenders—a stereotypical tipped position—we can compare bartenders who live in states that use the federal tipped minimum to states that have gotten rid of the tipped minimum. And we know that the workers that have the lower tipped minimum wage experience more poverty. So it is a policy with very real consequences for working people.

But in terms of other important tools for creating a more equitable economy, I would mention paid sick leave. So universal paid sick leave, clearly a really important priority for making working people healthy and safe in their jobs.

We see advocates combining the minimum wage and paid sick leave in ballot measures in a couple of states. So this year, there are ballot measures in Alaska and Missouri which are combining minimum-wage increases and paid sick-leave access, because they know that these are two issues that are so important to working people.

The other really important thing I would raise is making sure that there is adequate enforcement of wage theft and other labor violations. Because even with a strong minimum-wage policy, if there are too many loopholes where employers can take money, exploit their workers, without fear of penalties or adequate enforcement, then it really undermines the success of a strong minimum-wage policy.

And related to that, it’s also really important to continue to pursue meaningful labor law reform, making sure that every worker has access to a union if they want it. It is a really important tool for making sure that our labor standards are enforced adequately.

JJ: One final question. I do blame news media, not just because it’s my job, but actually from my heart, because we are so relentlessly sold this idea of an economy and a society of “makers and takers,” and it’s such corrosive nonsense. But I know that when some folks hear the idea that “we” are going to give some workers a raise, that is going to lead pundits, whether they’re on TV or at your dinner table, to say, “Well, who are we taking it from? Someone must be getting less if some people are getting more.”

And I wonder sort of broadly how you, as an economist, grapple with or redirect that kind of framing. But then, also, are there things that you think that news reporters could do differently, that might make these issues more accessible and understandable to folks, around minimum wage?

Sebastian Martinez Hickey: “Where you don’t see progress on the minimum wage, it’s because our politics or our institutions hold back the popular will.”

SMH: Yes, that’s a great question. A couple of things to raise, as I mentioned earlier, what the economic research shows is that there are many channels by which a minimum-wage increase can benefit the whole economy, without being the zero-sum game that it is often depicted as being. It’s not simply a battle between small businesses and greedy workers on the two sides.

What economic research shows is that there are channels, in terms of small price increases, decreased profits for businesses, as well as productivity increases that come from when workers are paid more—they tend to have less turnover, they tend to be more invested in their job. And these are all things that, in total, have [been] shown to not have the negative consequences that are sometimes attributed to minimum-wage increases.

Another point I would like to make is that minimum wages continue to be a really popular policy throughout the country. I mentioned earlier how the increases this year are occurring in wealthy urban states, they’re happening in very rural states; it’s happening throughout the country. Basically, when ordinary people are given the chance to have their opinion on the minimum wage, they’re broadly supportive of it.

The places where you don’t see progress on the minimum wage, it’s because our politics or our institutions hold back the popular will of ordinary people. And, obviously, you see that most clearly in Congress, and the hold-up in terms of the federal minimum wage.

But another way that this is really important is in terms of states that preempt cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage. There are so many examples of cities and counties in the South and in the Midwest, mostly, that have tried to set their minimum wage to an adequate level, because they know that that’s what they want for their communities;  that’s what’s good for their economies. And then they’re preempted from doing so by state legislatures that don’t actually represent the communities that want the minimum-wage increase. So I think that talking about this issue in terms of who has the ability to set their own minimum wages is also really important.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher with EARN, the Economic Analysis and Research Network, at the Economic Policy Institute. They’re online at EPI.org. Sebastian Martinez Hickey, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SMH: Thank you, Janine.

The post  ‘A Minimum-Wage Increase Can Benefit the Whole Economy’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Yahoo (1/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage—which has not yet gone into effect. Spoiler: We never hear about any other “parts” “attributed.”  Businesses like McDonald’s, the story goes, “have already raised their prices in anticipation of the wage hike.”

Were there any other responses available to them? Don’t ask! We’re moving on—to how it isn’t just that poor working Joes will have to pay more for a Big Mac, but also there will be layoffs…of fast-food employees. We meet Jose and Jim, who say they thought higher wages would be good, “considering the decline in tipping and increasing living costs.” Alas no, Yahoo explains: “The reality was harsher. The wage increase, while beneficial for some, has resulted in job losses for others, leading to a complex mix of gratitude and resentment among affected workers.” The takeaway: “The debate over the appropriate balance between fair wages and sustainable business practices remains unresolved.”

The piece does go on to lament the mental stress associated with economic uncertainty—not for owners, evidently—and the wise counsel that those troubled might consider “establishing a substantial savings account and making smart investments.”

Elite reporters seem so far removed from the daily reality of the bulk of the country that this doesn’t even ring weird to them. A raise in wages for fast food employees means fast food employees have to lose their jobs—that’s just, you know, “economics.” Union, what? Profiteering, who? The only operative question is, which low-wage workers need to suffer more?

We get a different view on raising the minimum wage from Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher for the EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network) team at the Economic Policy Institute.

Tipped worker (cc photo: Daveblog)

Also on the show: A largely unspoken part of media’s wage conversation is the whole sector of workers whose pay rates are based in…enslavement. Yeah. In 2015, CounterSpin learned about tipped wages from Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We hear part of that relevant conversation this week.

The post Sebastian Martinez Hickey on Minimum Wage, Saru Jayaraman on History of Tipping appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Justicia Lab’s Rodrigo Camarena about wage theft for the October 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Retail Dive (9/27/23)

Janine Jackson: Investigation by the National Retail Federation found that the effect of store theft by shoplifters and by employees is largely on par with historical trends. But mere data don’t stand a chance against corporate media’s energetic interest in the smash-and-grab phenomenon, which they confidently explain is the reason that Target, for instance, is closing stores in what one news account called “a series of liberal cities.”

News media can make something a crisis, a thing you should worry about, when they want to. Video can be found; harmed people can be interviewed.

But what if there’s no CCTV? What if the harm isn’t being done erratically, sporadically, caught on camera—but every day, in documents, in tax filings, in one-on-one unrecorded conversations between employees who need their job, and bosses who want their profit rate?

News media interested in crime—its impact on human beings, on society, its cost to the economy—would be interested in wage theft, the more than $50 billion a year stolen from workers in this country. But when is the last time your nightly local news talked about that, or encouraged you to be outraged and concerned and moved to action about that? There are efforts to address this ongoing, mundane thievery, but so far it seems to be under the radar of news outlets that, in every other way, suggest they care very much about crime, all the time.

NonProfit Quarterly (9/6/23)

Rodrigo Camarena is director of Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is also co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rodrigo Camarena.

Rodrigo Camarena: Hi, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I don’t think it’s crazy to say that many people truly don’t know what wage theft is, how it happens, what it is. What would you have us know about, first of all, the scale and the impact of wage theft? What does it look like?

RC: Sure. Wage theft is so common and so ubiquitous that we don’t really consider it in our day-to-day lives. But, like you mentioned, it’s this huge problem. It’s actually the largest form of theft, when you compare it to burglaries, armed robberies, motor vehicle thefts combined. And it happens whenever a worker is deprived of the wages that they’re owed lawfully. So that could mean not being paid a minimum wage, not being paid overtime, having deductions from someone’s paycheck made, or just not paying someone; they show up at the job one day and the person that hired them isn’t there anymore. Failing to honor sick leave or other benefits is another form of wage theft.

So it’s very common. It’s a term that we use as advocates to underline what is happening here, which is that you’re being deprived of what you’re owed and it’s being taken from you, but it’s not a legal term per se.

JJ: Yeah, I always think of the older sibling that holds your hand and makes you hit yourself, and says, “Why are you hitting yourself?” It’s like, something is going on, but you’re not allowed to complain about it, because somehow it’s your fault. Somehow you didn’t take that pay stub home and say, oh wait, I’m owed this and I didn’t get this. It seems like it’s a very invisible kind of crime.

Rodrigo Camarena: “In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage.”

RC: That’s right. It’s something that happens on a daily basis, actually, and in some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage. And it’s a problem that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, women and immigrants, and in particular undocumented immigrants, who often don’t feel like they can stand up for themselves, or request what they’re owed lawfully, because of their status.

So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about your rights as a worker that might prevent people from standing up for themselves and defending these rights, but this is part of the challenge in addressing this problem.

JJ: I wanted to ask you, there does seem to be a particular impact on immigrants here, and it’s not to say that it doesn’t affect low-wage workers across the board, but immigrants are in a particularly precarious situation.

RC: That’s right. And in the state of New York, where I am, and I think this is probably the case in many other states, it’s twice as likely for you to experience wage theft if you’re foreign-born than if you’re native-born.

This makes complete sense, when you think about immigrant labor in this country. It’s often some of the toughest jobs, that a lot of people don’t want to do, but that immigrants are willing to do because they need income; they’re here to work and contribute. And that puts them in a precarious position, because it allows the employer to not only pay them very little, in many cases less than they’re lawfully owed, but also exposes them to other forms of exploitation and harassment.

We can talk about sexual harassment, we can talk about discrimination because of language, of country of origin, gender or sex, and these are overlapping issues that really do a lot of harm to people that we depend on for some of the most critical industries in our country.

JJ: And I know that victims often don’t even understand that they were supposed to be paid for overtime, or they were supposed to get sick leave. There’s an absence of education from the jump, so that workers don’t even know what they’re entitled to.

RC: That’s right. Very few people will tell you what the minimum wage is, both federally or at the state level. It’s difficult to know sometimes that there’s been a change to sick leave laws in the state, or wages. And so much of the problem is really about getting this information out there more proactively.

In the state of New York, again, where I am, it’s actually required that an employer communicate what your wage is and if that wage has changed, and they can be fined for not doing so. But this is not the case across the country, and it’s often not the case even when it is mandated by law.

Albany Times Union (9/12/23)

JJ: Well, that’s the thing. I mean, I’ve read about efforts to combat wage theft, and there is legislation in the works, and I hope to talk about it. Kathy Hochul, here in New York, is saying wage theft is now larceny under New York penal law, which means that prosecutors can seek stronger penalties.

But what are your thoughts in general, in terms of the legal—this is a crime, theft is a crime, but what are your thoughts on the state of the legal response to this problem?

RC: Absolutely. Theft is a crime, and I think we need to understand it. It’s not just a crime that impacts workers who have been victims of wage theft, but it’s a crime that impacts all of us.

Wage theft contributes to poverty; the Department of Labor study of California and New York, showed this a couple of years back. It contributes to people’s need to use public benefits or welfare, and it steals from city and state tax revenues.

So it’s a crime that doesn’t just hurt the most vulnerable amongst us, but it’s a crime that impacts all of us indirectly. We need to treat it as a societal crime. We need to treat it as the severe act of injustice that it is. And I think raising the cost for employers is certainly one approach. In some municipalities, businesses can lose their licenses if they are found to be repeat offenders. So there’s a lot of policy solutions.

But I think part of what we need to understand is that there’s also a cultural expectation at this point that if you are either a low-wage worker, a new worker, someone who has been marginalized by society, that you shouldn’t expect more than what you might be paid by an employer. And I think that’s wrong.

CBS News (6/30/23)

JJ: And I want to just pull you back, in terms of the problem, that sometimes folks will say, “Oh, they won this case,” but sometimes even when you win, workers don’t collect. I just wanted to just bring you back to the reality of it, that the law may say, yes, wage theft happened here, and it still might not be possible to make workers whole.

RC: That’s right. In many cases, even when an employer is found guilty of having committed wage theft, they might then declare bankruptcy, and in some cases start a new company where they go ahead and repeat these same offenses. There are some efforts to try to hold assets accountable and put them on liens, in the event that a business has declared bankruptcy.

But, you’re right, the problem is also structural. We punish businesses after the fact. There isn’t a lot of prevention that’s happening during the event of wage theft, right? Many folks report after they’ve had their wages stolen, or they’ve been fired by their employer.

So I think there needs to be a lot of work at the local and state level to encourage people to report wage theft, to encourage people to know and understand their rights, and find solutions while they’re being victimized.

JJ: Right, and then I want to ask: Why do workers, who are already so vulnerable, who already have their whole life hanging by the thread of this job, why do they have to be the one to bring the complaints? I know that that brings us back to how Justicia Lab worked with Make the Road New York to develop this ¡Reclamo! tool. And I want to ask you to talk about the need that you saw for that, and then talk a little bit about this ¡Reclamo! tool and what it does.

Center for Public Integrity (5/4/21)

RC: Sure. So the ¡Reclamo! app was a collaborative effort between us at Justicia Lab, which is a program of Pro Bono Net, and Make the Road New York, a worker center here in New York City and New York state.

And I think the need we saw was twofold. One, in the short term, there aren’t enough lawyers to help address every wage theft claim, or enough investigators at the state level to investigate these claims. So we said, how can we use technology that, one, helps someone identify if they’ve been a victim of wage theft and, two, file a wage theft claim in New York State, but also perform strategies that we know are effective at recovering stolen wages, like writing a demand letter, which is typically written by an attorney, or just calling the employer and having a structured conversation around how they can settle this matter.

So ¡Reclamo! does all those three things. It files a complaint with the state of New York. It produces a demand letter, which is something a lawyer might make, and it helps you have a conversation with an employer around what wages you’re owed and how they can settle the matter.

And I think in the long term, what we’re really trying to do with this tool is empower non-lawyers to feel comfortable navigating this very convoluted process, and also give advocates data that they can use to tackle the structural problem here, to inform enforcement.

In some cases, advocates like Make the Road have approached the Department of Labor and said: “Hey, we see a problem in the car wash industry. Can we approach this problem together, enforce this problem together?” And that’s been effective as a strategy as well.

So there’s a number of solutions that we’re trying to put forward with this initiative, and we’re very excited about the response so far.

Axios Boston (1/12/23)

JJ: Do you see any role at the federal level for this? I mean, it seems such an across-the-board problem, and I read about Maura Healey, I read about people, and it sounds like people are saying, “We’re going to pass some legislation to make crime illegal”—wage theft should already be illegal, and so is it a matter of enforcement? And do you see any role at all at the federal level here?

RC: Definitely. I mean, the federal government can do a lot. One, they can start by raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 for decades, but they can invest more in enforcement. They can invest more in public education. They can increase the cost to employers that might commit wage theft, repeat offenders.

And they can help advocates by sharing data proactively, both federal data and state-level data around this problem. There’s a lot of information that we still don’t have about the scale of this problem, and I think if there’s better collaboration between advocates and government, we can really make a dent on this issue.

JJ: I can’t really see a more compelling story for news media. They’re reporting every day about people’s difficulties, and the idea that somehow they would not include the fact that their employers are systematically keeping their wages, while they’re out of the other side of their mouth fighting to make those wages lower, that they’re keeping some of the wages that these people have actually earned.

I don’t understand why that is not a meaningful story. It’s a story about crime and violence, frankly. People’s lives are being affected here. And so I just wanted to, finally, ask you, what do you make of media coverage of wage theft, but also just of the conditions around it that allow it, that support it? Is there anything that you would change about the way reporters approach the issue?

RC: I think we have to recognize that wage theft and worker exploitation is, in many cases, built into the business models of many industries. Our food is relatively inexpensive, given the amount of labor it takes to grow and pick it. Our restaurants and other services, domestic work, it’s severely undercompensated, and that’s by design, in many cases. But it’s also something that we don’t talk about.

We don’t talk about immigrant labor being the backbone of a number of industries; what we do talk about, I guess on the right, is immigrants stealing jobs and incurring more costs for society. But we don’t talk about the subsidy that they provide to many businesses and many industries.

We don’t talk about our dependence on low-wage work. And I think that’s the reality that many Americans and policymakers don’t want to address, because it’s complicated, and it forces a conversation around comprehensive immigration reform and workers’ rights more broadly, which I know is something that in many cases is just not popular to talk about.

JJ: Who would reporters talk to that might change the story that they tell?

RC: I think talking to large agricultural producers, talking to restaurant groups, talking to construction companies that, in many cases, employ immigrant workers to get the job done at a certain cost, I think would be valuable. We don’t scrutinize the cost of labor in many of these industries.

Even as consumers, we don’t want to know that our food was grown and picked by someone that was making $8 an hour, or was being paid by each piece of crop that they harvested. We don’t want to know that someone that is in the service industry isn’t getting paid an hourly minimum wage, or getting paid on tips, or not being paid at all in many cases, because they’re maybe earning their ability to one day perform that job.

So I think there’s a lot of different approaches that we can take to understanding this problem, but it does require understanding how businesses have built this into their business model, as well as the societal impact at large when it comes to how families are affected, and also how states are undercut when it comes to the collection of tax revenue.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s director of Justicia Lab online at JusticiaLab.org, and you can learn about that ¡Reclamo! tool that we’re talking about at MakeTheRoadNY.org. Thank you so much, Rodrigo Camarena, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RC: Thanks so much, Janine. Happy to be here.

The post ‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The establishment survey showed an increase of 336k jobs in September. The prior two months’ numbers were also revised sharply higher, bringing the average for the last three months to 266k. In spite of the strong job growth, wage growth actually slowed somewhat, with the average hourly wage rising at just a 3.4 percent annual rate over the last three months. This is well below the average for 2018-2019, when inflation was under the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.

Despite the strong job growth, unemployment remained unchanged at 3.8 percent. After the huge 736k jump in the size of the labor force reported for August, the September increase was a much more modest 90k. These huge fluctuations in monthly changes are largely the result of measurement errors. Over the last year, the labor force has increased by 3,310k, an average of 276k a month.

Job Growth Strongest in Sectors Still Hit by Pandemic

Job gains were widely spread across sectors, but the largest gains were in the sectors that took the biggest hit from the pandemic. The category of leisure and hospitality added 96k jobs, accounting for almost 30 percent of the month’s job gains. Employment in this category is still down by 184k (1.1 percent) from its pre-pandemic peak.

Within this category, restaurants added 60.7k jobs, putting employment above its pre-pandemic peak for the first time. The arts, entertainment, and recreation sector added 19.3k jobs, which also put it above its pre-pandemic peak. The hotel sector added 15.6k jobs, but employment is still 217k (10.3 percent) below its pre-pandemic peak. This is likely due to the huge growth in Airbnb and other vacation rentals over the last four years.

State governments added 29k jobs, while local governments added 38k. Employment in state governments is still down by 21k (0.4 percent) from pre-pandemic levels, while employment by local governments is down by 85k (0.6 percent) from pre-pandemic levels. There will likely be some more catchup in these sectors, but a drop in relative pay and deterioration in working conditions, notably in teaching, has made public sector jobs less attractive.

Job Growth in Cyclically Sensitive Construction and Manufacturing Still Solid

Since construction and manufacturing have always been the hardest hit sectors in a downturn, those expecting a recession always look to employment trends in these two sectors. Both are still adding jobs at a respectable pace. Construction added 11k jobs in September, while manufacturing added 17k. Even housing construction added 12.6k jobs.

The one cyclical sector that has shown job loss is credit intermediation, which has been hit by the decline in home purchases and the crash of the mortgage refinancing boom. This sector lost 7.5k jobs last month. Employment is now down 61.6k (2.3 percent) from its peak in April of 2021.

Job Surge in Health Care Slows

The healthcare sector added 40.9k jobs, after adding an average of 68.6k jobs over the prior three months. This is still more than twice as fast as the average growth in the years before the pandemic. Nursing homes added just 2.4k jobs, while childcare centers added 1.1k jobs. Employment in these two sectors is down by 154.2k (9.7 percent) and 39.4 (3.8 percent), respectively, from pre-pandemic levels.

Index of Aggregate Hours Rises 0.2 Percent

Hours growth had been lagging employment growth somewhat, as the length of the average workweek had been getting shorter. These are roughly in line for September, with the index of aggregate hours rising at a 1.5 percent annual rate in the third quarter.  With GDP growth likely to be over 3.0 percent for the quarter, this would imply another quarter of strong productivity growth, although a sharp rise in self-employment (mostly incorporated self-employed) will dampen reported growth in the quarter.

Women Again Account for More than Half of Payroll Job Growth

The growth in payroll employment for women was 185k in September, putting them at 49.8 percent of total payroll employment. It will likely be several more months until they hit their peak share, which was just over 50.0 percent in some months before the pandemic.

Unemployment Rate Unchanged at 3.8 Percent

The extraordinary jump in the size of the labor force reported for August raised the possibility that the 0.3 percentage point jump was an anomaly. With the September survey showing the same number, it appears that the rise is real. This rise does seem difficult to reconcile with the extraordinary pace of job growth reported in the establishment survey.

While the overall labor force participation rate (LFPR) was unchanged, the labor force participation rate for prime-age men (25-54) rose to 89.6 percent, tying its pre-recession peak. It was unchanged for prime-age women.

There was an increase of 0.1 pp in the unemployment rate for men over age 20 to 3.8 percent, coupled with a decline of 0.1 pp to 3.1 percent for women. This is the largest gap between men’s and women’s unemployment rates since September 2013. (There were much larger gaps the other way, with women’s rate exceeding men’s rate, at the peak of the pandemic.)

Unemployment Due to Quits Edges Lower

The share of voluntary job leavers in the unemployed edged down to 12.7 percent. This is well below the peak of 15.7 percent hit earlier in the recovery. It is also below peaks above 15.0 percent reached in 2019 and 2000.

The duration measures of unemployment also increased in September, with the median duration of unemployment spells rising 0.5 weeks to 9.2 weeks, and the average duration up 1.1 weeks to 21.5 weeks. The number of people working part-time involuntarily fell by 156k, reversing most of the jump in August, however, the figure is still above lows hit last fall.

Mixed Story in September Jobs Report

The job growth reported for September was far above virtually all predictions. The prior two months’ numbers were also revised up by 119k. This goes against the general perception that job growth is slowing.

However, the slower wage growth reported in recent months is certainly not consistent with an overly tight labor market. Also, there is nothing in the household survey that would suggest the labor market is continuing to tighten. The unemployment rate, while still very low by historic standards, is 0.4 pp above its low hit in the spring. The lengthening of the duration of unemployment spells also is not consistent with a tightening of the labor market, nor is the fall in the share of voluntary job leavers among the unemployed. It would be unfortunate if the Fed overreacted to this report with further rate hikes.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

The establishment survey showed an increase of 336k jobs in September. The prior two months’ numbers were also revised sharply higher, bringing the average for the last three months to 266k. In spite of the strong job growth, wage growth actually slowed somewhat, with the average hourly wage rising at just a 3.4 percent annual rate over the last three months. This is well below the average for 2018-2019, when inflation was under the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.

In spite of the strong job growth, unemployment remained unchanged at 3.8 percent. After the huge 736k jump in the size of the labor force reported for August, the September increase was a much more modest 90k. These huge fluctuations in monthly changes are largely the result of measurement error. Over the last year, the labor force has increased by 3,310k, an average of 276k a month.

Job Growth Strongest in Sectors Still Hit by Pandemic

Job gains were widely spread across sectors, but the largest gains were in the sectors that took the biggest hit from the pandemic. The category of leisure and hospitality added 96k jobs, accounting for almost 30 percent of the month’s job gains. Employment in this category is still down by 184k (1.1 percent) from its pre-pandemic peak.

Within this category, restaurants added 60.7k jobs, putting employment above its pre-pandemic peak for the first time. The arts, entertainment, and recreation sector added 19.3k jobs, which also put it above its pre-pandemic peak. The hotel sector added 15.6k jobs, but employment is still 217k (10.3 percent) below its pre-pandemic peak. This is likely due to the huge growth in Airbnb and other vacation rentals over the last four years.

State governments added 29k jobs, while local governments added 38k. Employment in state governments is still down by 21k (0.4 percent) from pre-pandemic levels, while employment by local governments is down by 85k (0.6 percent) from pre-pandemic levels. There will likely be some more catchup in these sectors, but a drop in relative pay and deterioration in working conditions, notably in teaching, has made public sector jobs less attractive.

Job Growth in Cyclically Sensitive Construction and Manufacturing Still Solid

Since construction and manufacturing have always been the hardest hit sectors in a downturn, those expecting a recession always look to employment trends in these two sectors. Both are still adding jobs at a respectable pace. Construction added 11k jobs in September, while manufacturing added 17k. Even housing construction added 12.6k jobs.

The one cyclical sector that has shown job loss is credit intermediation, which has been hit by the decline in home purchases and crash of the mortgage refinancing boom. This sector lost 7.5k jobs last month. Employment is now down 61.6k (2.3 percent) from its peak in April of 2021.

Job Surge in Health Care Slows

The health care sector added 40.9k jobs, after adding an average of 68.6k jobs over the prior three months. This is still more than twice as fast as the average growth in the years before the pandemic. Nursing homes added just 2.4k jobs, while child care centers added 1.1k jobs. Employment in these two sectors is down by 154.2k (9.7 percent) and 39.4 (3.8 percent), respectively, from pre-pandemic levels.

Index of Aggregate Hours Rises 0.2 Percent

Hours growth had been lagging employment growth somewhat, as the length of the average workweek had been getting shorter. These are roughly in line for September, with the index of aggregate hours rising at a 1.5 percent annual rate in the third quarter. With GDP growth likely to be over 3.0 percent for the quarter, this would imply another quarter of strong productivity growth, although a sharp rise in self-employment (mostly incorporated self-employed) will dampen reported growth in the quarter.

Women Again Account for More than Half of Payroll Job Growth

The growth in payroll employment for women was 185k in September, putting them at 49.8 percent of total payroll employment. It will likely be several more months until they hit their peak share, which was just over 50.0 percent in some months before the pandemic.

Unemployment Rate Unchanged at 3.8 Percent

The extraordinary jump in the size of the labor force reported for August raised the possibility that the 0.3 percentage point jump was an anomaly. With the September survey showing the same number, it appears that the rise is real. This rise does seem difficult to reconcile with the extraordinary pace of job growth reported in the establishment survey.

While the overall labor force participation rate (LFPR) was unchanged, the labor force participation rate for prime-age men (25-54) rose to 89.6 percent, tying its pre-recession peak. It was unchanged for prime age women.

There was an increase of 0.1 pp in the unemployment rate for men over age 20 to 3.8 percent, coupled with a decline of 0.1 pp to 3.1 percent for women. This is the largest gap between men’s and women’s unemployment rates since September of 2013. (There were much larger gaps the other way, with women’s rate exceeding men’s rate, at the peak of the pandemic.)

Unemployment Due to Quits Edges Lower

The share of voluntary job leavers in the unemployed edged down to 12.7 percent. This is well below the peak of 15.7 percent hit earlier in the recovery. It is also below peaks above 15.0 percent reached in 2019 and 2000.

The duration measures of unemployment also increased in September, with the median duration of unemployment spells rising 0.5 weeks to 9.2 weeks, and the average duration up 1.1 weeks to 21.5 weeks. The number of people working part-time involuntarily fell by 156k, reversing most of the jump in August, however, the figure is still above lows hit last fall.

Mixed Story in September Jobs Report

The job growth reported for September was far above virtually all predictions. The prior two months’ numbers were also revised up by 119k. This goes against the general perception that job growth is slowing.

However, the slower wage growth reported in recent months is certainly not consistent with an overly tight labor market. Also, there is nothing in the household survey that would suggest the labor market is continuing to tighten. The unemployment rate, while still very low by historic standards, is 0.4 pp above its low hit in the spring. The lengthening of the duration of unemployment spells also is not consistent with a tightening of the labor market, nor is the fall in the share of voluntary job leavers among the unemployed. It would be unfortunate if the Fed overreacted to this report with further rate hikes.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.”

There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them.

We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests.

The post Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The 2 percent raise is about enough for a worker to buy breakfast and lunch at a Cambodian street stall. A typical month’s rent for a small apartment in the capital Phnom Penh starts at about $100.

The government’s 51-member Minimum Wage Council voted Thursday to lift the wage by just $2, but newly appointed Prime Minister Hun Manet added another US$2, bringing the total raise to $4, according to Labor Minister Heng Sour. The change will take effect on Jan. 1, 2024.

Still, the raise fell far short of what unions had asked for amid accelerating inflation. In August, they asked the Ministry of Labor to approve an increase to US$220, saying that rent, electricity and food costs have continued their COVID-19-era upward trend.

“It is not fair for the workers,” said Sok Sreyroth, a worker at Zhen Tai Garment Cambodia Ltd. in Phnom Penh. “More people will migrate back to the countryside because our economy is getting worse.” 

The garment sector employed 750,000 people in 2022 and makes up about one-third of Cambodia’s GDP. But more than 50,000 garment workers have been laid off over the last few years amid a downturn in the sector that began with the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Additionally, Cambodia has lost some of its preferential trade advantages with the European Union due to human rights concerns, which has meant higher tariffs on exports.

The government clearly sided with factory owners in its decision, said Pav Sina, president of the Collective Union of Movement of Workers.

But the ministry said that with benefits such as free meals and transportation and opportunities for overtime pay and bonuses, workers could earn between US$221 and US$232 per month next year.

Like father

Hun Manet’s addition to the committee’s raise is something his father, Hun Sen, did on several occasions during his decades-long tenure as the country’s leader.

Last year, amid 5 percent inflation, the committee decided to raise the wage from US$194 to US$198. Then-Prime Minister Hun Sen then added another $2, making it an even US$200.

Phuong Ratha, a garment worker at Nyan Kids Cambodia Ltd. in Phnom Penh, noted that the 2024 increase is less than the US$6 increase workers received for 2023.

“We are disappointed because of the high inflation,” she told Radio Free Asia. “I wonder what happened?”

Hun Sen stepped down as Cambodia’s prime minister last month, officially handing the position to his eldest son on Aug. 22. The changeover followed a July election sweep by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, which faced no serious competition in the national vote.

The minimum wage issue had been a main source of support for the opposition Candlelight Party, which attracted supporters in recent years with a policy platform centered around improving social welfare benefits. 

In May, the party was ruled ineligible for the election in a decision criticized as politically motivated. 

In late August – just a week after taking office – Hun Manet spoke to thousands of garment workers and promised a wage increase, although he didn’t mention a specific dollar amount.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

The Green Party, if elected in the Aotearoa New Zealand general election next month, is promising to up workers’ minimum annual leave entitlements from four to five weeks a year.

“Everyone should be able to spend quality time with their whānau and friends, but right now Aoteroa is not working for all working people,” party co-leader Marama Davidson said today at the E Tū election launch event.

“Tens of thousands of people are working two, sometimes three jobs just to make ends meet. This leaves hardly any time in the day for people to rest and enjoy time with the people they love.”

• READ MORE: NZ election 2023: Growing Pasifika population equals greater electoral power
• Other NZ elections 2023 reports

The current four-week minimum entitlement has been in place since 2007. Before that it was three weeks, and prior to 1974, just two weeks.

“We will provide organisations plenty of notice, and ensure the full five weeks is available for everyone by the end of 2025,” said Davidson.

Speaking to RNZ, Davidson said it was “disproportionately Māori and Pacific people in paid employment who are working two, sometimes three jobs, and what little time that leaves them for their family”.

“So it’s about prioritising the well-being of working families, but also the essential importance of having leave and spending more time with family.”

National leader opposed
National Party leader Christopher Luxon told media an extra week’s leave was unfeasible.

“We need to get this country growing, we need to get people working, we need to get this country moving.”

That did not impress Davidson.

“Such rubbish. In particularly Europe, where there are five-week annual leave entitlements — five weeks’ leave has not diminished productivity one bit,” Davidson said.

“It just shows Luxon again wanting to trample all over workers.”

Davidson backed Labour’s promise to scrap the training and starting-out wages, which allow employers to pay below-minimum wage rates in some circumstances.

“We’ve got some really well-aligned workers’ rights visions and policies. We would absolutely support scrapping that trainer wage,” she said.

“People just deserve to be paid for what they are doing for our communities — we would hope to get support for the five weeks’ annual leave as well.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins, also at the E Tū event, said now was not the right time to talk about extending the statutory minimum entitlement for annual leave.

He said Labour had done a lot by increasing sick leave entitlements and creating an extra public holiday — Matariki.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The current minimum wage is US$200 – set by then-Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government last September. But with rising inflation, independent unions have asked the Ministry of Labor to approve an increase to US$220 for 2024. 

“We are paying attention to the workers’ salary,” Hun Manet told workers in Kandal province, just south of Phnom Penh. “We are working to negotiate. We are committed to increasing the minimum wage based on our ability.”

The newly appointed prime minister made similar remarks to about 20,000 garment workers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh on Tuesday. 

“We will welcome the government, whether they increase a little or much,” Ath Thun of the Cambodian Labour Confederation told Radio Free Asia. “But if there is a small increase, it is not a gift for the workers. We need an appropriate increase or the workers will face a lower living standard.”

Top issue for opposition party

The minimum wage issue was a main source of support for the opposition Candlelight Party, which has attracted members in recent years with a policy platform centered around improving social welfare benefits. 

In May, the party was ruled ineligible for the general elections in a decision criticized as politically motivated. 

In June, Hun Sen urged thousands of garment workers to speak out against the Candlelight Party, saying that its efforts could bring international sanctions against the country’s garment industry.

More than 50,000 Cambodian garment workers have been laid off over the last few years amid a downturn in the sector that began with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Additionally, Cambodia has lost some of its preferential trade advantages with the European Union due to human rights concerns, which has meant higher tariffs on exports.

The ruling Cambodian People’s Party swept the tightly controlled July 23 parliamentary vote. Last month, Hun Manet – Hun Sen’s eldest son – was named the country’s new prime minister.

‘Appointments will be removed’

On Friday, Hun Manet said he is reconsidering the number of recent appointments of government officials and advisers. 

The size of his cabinet – which includes 10 deputy prime ministers, 21 senior ministers and 30 ministers – has brought criticism about wasteful spending as well as conflict and confusion within the government.

Some advisers and aides have positions equal to minister or secretary of state, even though their titles indicate they are low level government officials. Other officials hold high-level government positions as well as the title of senior adviser, Hun Manet said.

The dual titles and numerous advisers were originally intended as a way to encourage people, but under an upcoming royal decree, ministers and advisers must choose just one title, he said.

“For government officials, police and military who were also appointed as advisers or as aides, those appointments will be removed,” he said. “I will choose a win-win choice so they can continue their work in the government.”

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

The five-year deal bumps up hourly wages for all employees, ends a two-tier wage system that allowed UPS to pay new drivers less, and eliminates mandatory overtime on drivers’ days off. UPS has also agreed to equip vehicles purchased after January 2024 with air conditioning and to retrofit existing cars with fans, vents, and exhaust heat shields. Leaders at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union representing UPS workers, have called the contract “the most lucrative agreement the Teamsters have ever negotiated at UPS.”

“This contract will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers,” said Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union. “This is the template for how workers should be paid and protected nationwide, and nonunion companies like Amazon better pay attention.”

The deal was approved by 86.3 percent of unionized workers at UPS. Teamsters said that it received the highest number of votes ever seen for a Teamsters contract at UPS. 

The new agreement highlights how extreme heat has raised the stakes for labor organizing this summer. Relentless heat and humidity in the South, a heat dome stifling the central U.S., and the hottest June and July recorded in world history have created especially dangerous conditions for workers. Heat-related health risks heighten exponentially for people who have to work outdoors or without air conditioning. In the past few months, workers from Greece to Texas have responded by staging walkouts, going on strike, and demanding greater heat protections for workers.  

UPS drivers and warehouse workers say that record-breaking heat waves have rendered the company’s 12-hour workdays and unrealistic productivity benchmarks downright deadly. UPS previously refused to install air conditioning in delivery trucks, claiming that it wouldn’t be feasible due to their frequent stops. “When you open the bulkhead door to go to the back to look for packages, it’s like running into a brick wall — it’s so hot,” said Rick Johnson, a driver who has worked at UPS for 28 years, in a Teamsters video. “You can’t stay back there with the doors closed or you’ll pass out.”

In June 2022, a 24-year old UPS driver named Esteban Chavez died of heat-related heart failure while delivering packages in California. In August 2021, another driver named José Cruz Rodriguez died of heat-related illness on his delivery route in Texas. UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2015. 

Union workers praised the contract for finally including vital protections for drivers working in sweltering conditions. “The A/C in the trucks is something I never thought I would see,” said Keith Short, a UPS worker who participated in the Teamsters strike at UPS in 1997, in a Teamsters video.

A tentative agreement reached between UPS and the Teamsters union last month averted what would have been the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history. UPS workers transport about $3.8 billion worth of goods each day, equal to about 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

In addition to protecting workers from heat, the contract immediately bumps up all wages by $2.75 per hour, with total wage increases adding up to an additional $7.50 per hour over the next five years. All existing and new part-time employees will receive minimum wages of $21 per hour. The deal also guarantees union members will receive Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a full holiday for the first time, and creates thousands of new jobs during the length of the contract.

UPS called the contract a “win-win-win agreement” when the Teamsters first announced the tentative agreement last month. “This agreement continues to reward UPS’s full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers and keep our business strong,” the company said in a statement at the time. 

The contract will go into effect as soon as one outstanding supplemental agreement for a local Teamsters chapter in Florida is renegotiated and ratified. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UPS workers win wage increases, AC in new union contract on Aug 23, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

The office of Lao Prime Minister Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone issued an official notice on Aug. 6, announcing the approval of a 300,000 kip (US$15) increase to 1.6 million kip (US$82) a month beginning in October. 

But the new minimum level doesn’t apply to state workers’ salaries.

The inflation rate remained at a still-high 28% in July after hitting a peak of more than 41% in February. That combined with a devaluation of the kip has made Laotians complain that they can’t eke out a living given the rising costs of gasoline, food and daily necessities. 

A labor official from Sekong province told Radio Free Asia that private companies can implement the pay raise immediately without waiting until October.

“They posted [the notice] on Facebook to begin reinforcing right away, but we did not ask them when it must be reinforced at the district level,” he said.

Lao workers welcomed the move but said the monthly minimum wage should be higher.

One worker from Xayabury province said the salaries that he and others receive are only enough to pay for gasoline, forcing them to take on side jobs such as raising chickens and growing vegetables, or to go abroad for jobs where salaries are higher than they are in Laos.

“South Korea pays workers over 1 million kip per day, while Thailand pays about 100-200 Thai baht (US$3-6) per day,” he said.

The new increase will not be enough to persuade Laotians to work for domestic companies, said a small business owner in Bokeo province, who like other sources in the report requested anonymity to speak openly without retribution.

Laotians may seek employment with foreign companies investing in Laos because they pay higher wages, though many are still interested in landing jobs abroad because of higher pay, he said.

“They might work with foreign companies such as companies from the United States, Australia, China or Thailand that invest in Laos and pay higher wages,” said the business owner.

But many Laotians are fearful that the economy will collapse in the near future, he said.

The Lao government has long been unable to solve the problem of lower labor costs in the country, even though officials previously said they would set up a committee to address it but did not follow through, a Lao economy expert said.

Instead, the government has allowed inflation, the devaluation of the kip and the cost of living to get out of hand, creating hardship for low-income workers, he said.

These problems have left Lao workers with no choice but to seek employment in foreign countries legally or illegally, resulting in some falling prey to human traffickers or ending up in the sex trade, the expert said.

Others have become indebted to banks from which they borrowed money to pay for the legal documents and plane tickets to go abroad, or they have disappeared after falling into the wrong hands in the fishing industry in countries like Thailand.

Lawmakers have issued previous calls for the government to raise the monthly minimum wage ever higher that 1.3 million kip.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya for RFA Lao. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

Photograph Source: eddiedangerous – CC BY 2.0

For 75 years, Israel has been waging an ideological war to manufacture a legitimacy it does not have.  Fissures, however, are now visible in Israel’s carefully crafted and managed narrative.

Since its establishment, Tel Aviv has relied on propaganda to maintain its hold on and to expand its control over Palestine.  It has constructed an elaborate state-run public relations industry to market an image acceptable to Western audiences.  

Consequently, compelling but fictitious tales of an empty land, agrarian miracles in the desert, and of a small, yet brave democratic state, defending itself against hostile neighbors and terrorists, have become firmly entrenched. 

The positive image Tel Aviv had successfully mainstreamed was, however, challenged in 1982 and again in 2009.  Israel’s leaders were shaken by the international criticism the country received after the deadly 1982 military attack on Lebanon and massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Shabra and Shatila in Beirut  

A year later, to counter the criticism, Israel birthed the Hasbara (explaining in Hebrew) Project to push its agenda and influence how the world, but especially Americans, would think about the country.  Today, Israel labels hasbara propaganda “public diplomacy.”

In December 2008 and January 2009, Israel’s image came under scrutiny once again after its massive 22-day bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip, which killed 1,398 Palestinians. 

Shortly thereafter, The Israel Project (TIP), a Washington-based group, hired Frank Luntz, a Republican operative and political strategist, to shore up its image.   Luntz conducted an extensive study to determine how to integrate Israel’s narrative into mainstream media.  His findings were reported in a document titled, “The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary.”  

Luntz’s “language dictionary” became a guide on how best to talk about the Zionist state.  Language from his primer, with its scripted discourse for Israeli supporters, has seeped into the thinking, vocabulary and comments of American, Israeli and European politicians, academics and mainstream media. 

The prefatory statement by TIP founder and president, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, is most revealing.  She wrote: “On behalf of our board and team, we offer this guide to visionary leaders who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel.  We want you to succeed in winning the hearts and minds of the public.”

Mizrahi’s statement raises the question of why a “democratic state,” which Israel claims to be, would require a media war to win over the public.  

In his primer, Luntz coaches Israeli supporters on how to tailor answers for different audiences, outlines what Americans want to hear, what words and phrases to use and those to be avoided.  It provides guidance on how to challenge statements from Palestinian supporters and to feign compassion for them.  

In his 18-Chapter report, Luntz advises to always emphasize Israel’s desire for peace, although he initially states that Israel’s leaders do not really want a peaceful solution.  He writes, “Its our job to ‘wear white hats in public’—to remind Americans that Israel is a team for whom they can feel good about cheering.”

Israeli supporters are enjoined to give the false impression that the so-called “cycle of violence” has been going on for thousands of years, that both sides are equally at fault and that the Palestine-Israel catastrophe is beyond their understanding. 

Advocates are urged to stress Israel’s need for security and its identification with America’s “global war on terrorism.”  Americans, the study notes, will respond favorably if Israeli civilians are portrayed as the innocent victims of Palestinian “terrorism.”

Luntz instructs Israeli advocates to paint Hamas and Hezbollah as irrational terrorist threats.  He emphasizes that when told Iran supports these groups, Americans will be more inclined to support Israel.  Therefore, when talking about them, to repeatedly say “Iran-backed Hamas and Iran-backed Hezbollah.” 

Number four of Luntz’s “25 rules for effective communication is especially at odds with reality.  To counter and deflect charges of Israeli brutality against Palestinians, he recommends saying, “…civilized people do not target innocent women and children for death.” 

According to Defense for Children International Palestine, from January 2000 to July 2023, the Israeli military and Jewish “settler-colonizers” have killed 2,276  Palestinian children in Occupied Palestine.  To date, 36 Palestinian children have been killed.  In its most recent military attack (July 3 and 4, 2023) on the Jenin refugee camp, Israeli soldiers killed 13 Palestinians, four of them children.  

On the rare occasions when the mainstream media reports on Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza, it conforms to the official lexicon outlined in Luntz’s dictionary.  Israel’s army of occupation, for example, is referred to as “defense” or “security” forces.  Illegal Jewish colonizers on Palestinian land are termed “settlers.”  Zionist colonies are deemed “settlements” or “neighborhoods.”  Occupied Palestine is called “disputed territory,” and the theft of Palestinian homes by the Israeli state is described as “evictions.” 

News coverage of the military invasion of Jenin by the Israeli occupation forces in July 2023 was just the latest example of the mainstream media’s wariness when it comes to reporting on Palestine-Israel.  

Jenin, home to over 23,000 Palestinians, was described in headlines as a “militant stronghold” or a “hotbed of terrorism.”  The two-day attack by as many as 2,000 Israeli soldiers, using drones, armored vehicles, rockets and helicopter gunships on unarmed civilians, on their homes, businesses and infrastructure was minimized with benign descriptions of the invasion as a “military operation,” “raid” or “incursion.”

Years of unexamined language that has painted Israel in a positive light have allowed its ongoing colonization of Palestine to be characterized as a “conflict,” and Palestinians resisting Israeli colonization and oppression—which is the legitimate right of the colonized—to be labeled “militants” and “terrorists.”

What is taking place in Occupied Palestine is clearly not a “conflict,” a word which implies a fight between two people with equal political and military resources and equal claims.  And while the media perfunctorily describes Israel as a “democratic state,” they avoid using the more accurate “apartheid state” description. 

In light of the open racism of Israel’s extremist government, and the unrestrained violence of Jewish “settler-colonists,” the country is finding it increasingly difficult to whitewash its entrenched apartheid system in occupied Palestine.  Israel’s hasbara industry in Tel Aviv and the United States, however, remains undaunted. 

Although TIP folded in 2019, the Democratic Majority for Israel and other pro-Israel organizations continue their mission of attempting to make the apocryphal real and the fraudulent legal, to normalize the abnormal in Palestine.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nathaniel St. Clair.

The post Why US Autoworkers May Wage a Historic Strike Against Detroit’s Three Biggest Automakers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marick Masters.

“The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of those social lies against which an independent, intelligent man must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk or the stupid? I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord!—you can never pretend that it is right that the stupid folk should govern the clever ones! [the crowd cries out] Oh yes—you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side-unfortunately; but right it has not. I am in the right—I and a few other scattered individuals. The minority is always in the right.”

— Dr Stockman speaks in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Shortly after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, the state Supreme Court threatened to dissolve the Florida Bar Association if it didn’t get rid of its diversity programs.

The court had taken a sharp right turn after DeSantis selected three new justices with the help of Federalist Society board co-chair Leonard Leo. Leo led a secret panel of advisers that vetted DeSantis’s judicial nominees before he took office.

The revelation came on the heels of a slew of news stories on conservative donors buying influence on the U.S. Supreme Court — where Leo, again, was among the conservative legal activists who helped to install a conservative majority. The top federal court has since made landmark rulings against abortion rights and in favor of business interests. And Leo isn’t done yet: He funnels money to a network of right-wing organizations orchestrating key Supreme Court cases on red-meat conservative issues.

In Florida, Leo was working to overturn a 40-year status quo of judiciary balance and restraint. The state Supreme Court had fostered an image of independence after corruption scandals that forced two justices to resign in the early 1970s. When DeSantis took office, concerns about improprieties disappeared. The governor has a long history with the Federalist Society — he was a member at Harvard Law School — and his judicial nominees are backed by the group.

The ideological project DeSantis is pushing Florida is no secret. He unabashedly appoints political allies to posts across the state. Such picks have shown up in the judiciary, nonpartisan election offices, and state boards that oversee public schools and colleges, medical practices, business, and real estate.

DeSantis’s appointments, budget decisions, and fundraising tactics have come under heightened scrutiny since he announced a presidential run last month. None of the appointments, however, eclipse the lasting change of his state Supreme Court takeover. DeSantis has named five of the court’s seven members, all of whom are members of the Federalist Society.

“I don’t think he’s appointing chumps, but he’s clearly put a more ideological litmus test on his justices than others have,” said Neil Skene, who published an official history of the court. Vetting justices by patronage was common starting under President George Bush in the early 2000s, Skene said, but DeSantis is at the vanguard of making purely ideological appointments.

Leonard Leo speaks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2019.

Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images

He is not the first to award contracts to donors or administrative posts to political operatives, but DeSantis does it at an unprecedented scale. The thoroughness of his cronyism has had a chilling effect in Florida: There is a perception among politicians and residents alike that nothing can get done if you’re seen a DeSantis foe, said Barbara Petersen, executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Petersen said. Public servants are dismayed at what’s happening to their state, she said: “People are afraid of him.”

No Diversity Policies

After the scandals in the 1970s, successive Florida governors sought to improve the diversity of viewpoints on the state Supreme Court.

“The idea behind all of that, of course, is to make sure that all of Florida is represented on its highest court,” said Craig Waters, who worked at the court for 35 years and was its communications director until he retired last year. “It makes sure that a state Supreme Court does not become an echo chamber, but a true debate society. If you have members of a state Supreme Court that are careful of each other and watching each other, it prevents anything happening that might lend itself to a lack of public trust and confidence. It’s very important that the justices police each other.”

That stopped under DeSantis.

“What I see today is a court that lacks diversity and that lacks that internal policing mechanism that has served it so well in the past.”

“What I see today,” Waters said, “is a court that lacks diversity and that lacks that internal policing mechanism that has served it so well in the past.”

Shortly after DeSantis made his first appointments, the court started chipping away at its diversity programs.

In 1949, the state Supreme Court founded the Florida Bar, an association that regulates attorneys. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the bar sought to diversify the judiciary along ideological, ethnic, and gender lines and to address judicial discrimination. The association convened a diversity symposium in 2004 and issued areport with recommendations to help improve diversity and strengthen its independence. In 2010, the Florida Bar created a committee to address diversity and inclusion.

When DeSantis’s allies arrived on the court, threats began coming down: The bar would be dissolved if it didn’t get rid of its diversity initiatives. Soon enough, the attacks proved effective. In 2021, the state Supreme Court ordered that the bar association amend its continuing legal education, or CLE, policy and eliminate a requirement for diversity among speakers and panelists in its continuing educational programs. The fight even made its way to the American Bar Association, which changed its own policies in April 2022 to bring the group into compliance with the rules imposed on the Florida Bar.

Florida Bar spokesperson Jennifer Krell Davis told The Intercept that the association had not changed its diversity programs, but that it adhered with the court’s order to eliminate diversity requirements in CLE programs. She declined to comment on a question about the court’s alleged threat to dissolve the association. “Our Leadership Academy, Path to Unity and Diversity grant programs (and others) continue to thrive under our Diversity and Inclusion committee,” Krell Davis said.

In February, the state Supreme Court went so far to dissolve the court system’s Standing Committee on Fairness and Diversity and eliminate its fairness and diversity training for judges.

The court’s public information Director Paul Flemming said the court’s opinion was self-explanatory. “The opinions of the Florida Supreme Court speak for themselves,” Flemming said. “I would refer you to what is written there: ‘Quotas based on characteristics like the ones in this policy are antithetical to basic American principles of nondiscrimination.’”

DeSantis Court Picks

How the state Supreme Court arrived here is the story of DeSantis’s picks. The court’s current chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, took an unusual path to the bench. He had previously been a Republican political operative and worked in the Trump administration as general counsel to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Muñiz was deputy attorney general and chief of staff to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy chief of staff and general counsel to the former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and deputy general counsel to former Gov. Jeb Bush.

When DeSantis took office, Alan Lawson, a conservative and the most senior judge on the bench, was in line to be the next chief justice of the court. Court staff had been preparing for his ascension and budgeting for his administration when Lawson abruptly announced in April 2022 that he would retire. Lawson went to work as a partner at anew law firm in Tallahassee run by Republican political operatives who had broken off from one of the state’s top GOP law firms, Shutts & Bowen. Lawson told the Washington Post his decision to leave court was purely personal.

That July, less than four years after he was appointed to the state Supreme Court, Muñiz became its chief. Lawson was the first justice to be passed over for chief despite his seniority since 1976, said Skene, the expert on Florida courts. “He was not of the solidly Federalist Society group and Muñiz was,” he said. “Muñiz had a much more political job before that.”

Another DeSantis pick, Renatha Francis, worked at Shutts & Bowen before she was appointed to the court in 2020. Her original nomination was nullified because she hadn’t been a member of the bar for 10 years, as required by the state constitution. She was nominated again in 2022.

The web of allies and appointments DeSantis has woven across the state overlaps with and influences the court. In May, after another justice abruptly stepped down to take a job at a DeSantis-linked insurance company, the governor appointed Meredith Sasso to the state Supreme Court. Several months before, DeSantis had appointed her husband, Mike Sasso, to the board of the former Reedy Creek Improvement District, where the governor has been embroiled in abattle with Disney. DeSantis appointed Sasso andfour other Republicans to the board in February, including a majorGOP donor and a co-founder of the far-right group Moms for Liberty who is married to the chair of Florida’s GOP.

Four days after Meredith Sasso joined the bench, her husband resigned from the improvement district board. Had Sasso remained on, it would have raised questions about his wife’s ability to participate in court decisions related to Disney without presenting a conflict of interest.

Similar questions may soon face Charles Canady, another justice who was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Charlie Crist. Canady’s wife Jennifer was elected last year to the Florida state House and quickly co-sponsored a bill that would ban abortion beyond six weeks. DeSantis signed the six-week ban into law in April, but its implementation is pending an ongoing court challenge to the state’s current 15-week ban. Jennifer Canady has been floated as the state’s next speaker of the House with DeSantis’s blessing.

“That poses a really difficult kind of situation for Canady because basically every law that gets passed and might be up for court review will come through the House of Representatives,” Skene said. “It certainly creates this interesting proposition where husband and wife might be at the head of two different branches of government.”

Cronies Everywhere

What makes DeSantis different from his predecessors is that his actions are overtly political, said Ben Wilcox, research director and co-founder of Integrity Florida, a government watchdog. DeSantis has reshaped Florida politics far beyond the judiciary, from the boards of public schools to boards of medicine.

“Because DeSantis has such an aggressive agenda, that’s why you’re seeing all these appointments to school boards, universities,” Wilcox said. “He’s really trying to push his agenda in pretty much every chance he has.”

The governor, for instance, overhauled the board of trustees at the New College of Florida and installed conservative activists. One pick to the board was the architect of the war on critical race theory. The new board quickly fired the college president and replaced her with the former Republican speaker of the Florida House. He, in turn, tapped a GOP lawmaker — whom his office had previously suspended from a county position after he was charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer — to become the next president of South Florida State College.

“He’s really trying to push his agenda in pretty much every chance he has.”

The lawmaker, state Rep. Fred Hawkins, had no higher education experience, and the school lowered the education requirements for the position just three days before he submitted his application. Three finalist candidates withdrew their applications after the governor’s office contacted members of the board, the Herald Advocate reported. Hawkins got the job.

Hawkins would prove to be yet another loop in the tangle of DeSantis cronies. Before arriving at South Florida State, Hawkins sponsored a bill that gave DeSantis power to appoint the board for the Reedy Creek Improvement District, where Disney is based. The move came just under a year after DeSantis signed a bill torevoke Disney’s special tax status after the entertainment giant publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disneysued DeSantis in April, claiming the governor weaponized the state government to retaliate against it for making First Amendment-protected speech.

DeSantis also stacked the state’s two medical boards, including an appointment for a real estate broker whose wife DeSantis had installed in a real estate appraisal board. Both medical boards voted last year to ban gender-affirming health care for trans youth.

Lobbyists

DeSantis repeatedly leveraged his position to bully Florida political figures — from elected officials to lobbyists in the state — into supporting his ambitions and pet causes.

“What he is doing, and what is now being reported, is his shakedown of lobbyists,” said Petersen, of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

DeSantis’s chief of staff organized government officials to solicit campaign contributions from lobbyists, NBCreported earlier this month.

“Shaking down legislators, you know: ‘Give me your endorsement, I haven’t signed the budget yet,’” Petersen said. “And damned if he did not retaliate against those people. You can see it in the vetoes. It’s stunning.”

“What he’s doing, he’s doing for the sole purpose of his political ambition — and to the detriment of Floridians. We’ve got real problems in Florida.”

The governor’s allies have also gone on to enrich themselves. In September 2020, shortly after former Florida Republican House Majority Leader Dane Eagle lost in the Republican congressional primary for a U.S. House seat, DeSantis gave him a new job. Eagle, a commercial real estate broker, was appointed as the executive director of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. In January, less than two and a half years into the job, Eagle announced that he would join the government affairs team at Ballard Partners, one of Florida’s biggest international lobbying firms, with extensive ties to Donald Trump.

“DeSantis continues to use his political position as Governor to feed the grift of his allies, by gifting them positions their unqualified for, allowing contracts to be diverted towards friendly vendors and pleasing donors with bills that he signs into law,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who represents parts of Orlando, in a text message. “It’s unethical and feeds into people’s distrust of the Governor.”

With DeSantis’s budget for 2023 to 2024, critics saw a governor intent on funding his top causes at the expense of Floridians’ real concerns. DeSantis cut funding for projects to protect public lands and prevent flooding that were pushed by Democrats and Republican lawmakers who resisted his requests for endorsements in the presidential primary.

“It’s becoming more and more clear as all of this information is coming out that what he’s doing, he’s doing for the sole purpose of his political ambition — and to the detriment of Floridians,” said Petersen. “We’ve got real problems in Florida.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

But Jayapal responded that "we did not elect Joe Biden of 1986."

"We elected Joe Biden of 2020," she added.

In exchange for any agreement to lift the debt ceiling and avert a catastrophic default, House Republicans are demanding stricter work requirements for SNAP, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which supplanted the more generous Aid to Families With Dependent Children program under the Clinton-era welfare reform law that Biden voted for.

Citing two unnamed Republicans and two Republicans and three other people familiar with the fluid talks, Politicoreported Monday that Democrats "are floating a rough proposal within their ranks that includes potential new restrictions" on TANF.

"But House Republicans, who are aware of the movement, are still demanding further concessions on work requirements for food assistance and believe they have the leverage to force them, possibly before Biden leaves for the G-7 meeting in Japan Wednesday," the outlet added.

Research has consistently shown that work requirements are effective at kicking struggling individuals and families off federal aid programs and leaving people poorer, but not at boosting employment.

As the Center for Public Integrity's Alexia Fernández Campbell wrote earlier this month, "A major study published in February from researchers at the University of Rochester, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Maryland found that SNAP work requirements did not boost employment or income in Virginia."

"On the contrary," Campbell wrote, "they led more than half of adults in the program to lose food aid."

In a letter to Biden late last week, members of the House Democratic Caucus Poverty Task Force stressed that "decades of research and real-world experience show that taking basic assistance away from people who do not meet rigid work-reporting requirements does not improve employment."

"These GOP proposals would have devastating impacts in our communities," the lawmakers wrote.

"I didn't come here to take food away from hungry kids, and that's exactly what this proposal would do."

Prominent Democratic senators have also spoken out against any agreement that weakens safety net programs and harms vulnerable families, adding to the outrage that House Democrats and progressive advocates have expressed over the GOP's work requirement proposals and the White House's apparent willingness to entertain them.

"I didn't come here to take food away from hungry kids, and that's exactly what this proposal would do; a proposal that would make Scrooge blush," Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said in a statement Monday.

"I've never met a SNAP recipient who aspires to stay on SNAP for life," Fetterman added. "Let's end the games, pay our bills, and get on with the important work people sent us here to do."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for her part, said Monday that she is "very concerned about any efforts to just tangle aid recipients in red tape in the hope that they will be choked to death rather than get the help they need."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that House Republicans' work requirement proposals could slash federal nutrition assistance for millions of children, compounding the nation's worsening hunger crisis. In recent weeks, food banks across the U.S. have seen a surge in demand following the recent expiration of pandemic relief.

With Biden set to meet congressional leaders at the White House again on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journalreported that recent staff-level talks have "centered on several subjects on which Democrats and Republicans may be able to find agreement," a list that apparently includes "clawing back unspent Covid-19 funds, speeding up the permitting process for energy projects, capping spending, and imposing stricter work requirements on some government programs."

According toThe Washington Post, the White House "recently gave Republican congressional leadership a list of proposals to reduce the deficit by closing tax loopholes"—proposals that Republican negotiators rejected.

"If the White House's position on the budget is that closing tax loopholes on the wealthy and corporations is preferable to kicking a bunch of families in the teeth with work requirements, sure seems like now would be a great time to let the public know that," Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, wrote in response to the Post's story.

On Monday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters that he "doesn't see any real movement on anything" and reiterated that work requirements for key federal aid programs must be part of any debt ceiling deal.

Progressives are urging Biden to stick to his earlier pledge to only accept a clean debt ceiling increase, arguing that any spending concessions would reward House Republicans for taking the global economy hostage.

"I don't think we should normalize such destructive tactics," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) toldAxios on Monday, adding that Biden can "expect pushback on nearly any significant concession."

"It's profoundly destructive and it also threatens to weaken the president," the New York Democrat added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Decrying the "national disgrace" of poverty wages in the world's richest country, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over a period of five years.

Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, lamented that Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage in more than a decade, leaving tens of millions of workers with what the senator described as "starvation wages."

"Now is the time to raise the minimum wage," Sanders (I-Vt.) said at a Capitol Hill press conference alongside union leaders and service workers. "Let's be clear: This is not a radical idea. The overwhelming majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage to a living wage."

"It is not acceptable today that nearly 35 million American workers earn less than $17 an hour," the senator added.

Sanders pledged to push his legislation "as quickly and as hard" as possible in the Senate, where the bill faces long odds given likely opposition from several members of the chamber's Democratic caucus and every Republican. The Senate HELP Committee will hold a mark-up hearing for the new legislation on June 14, Sanders announced Thursday.

The full text of the bill is not yet available.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said during Thursday's press conference that "we are going to be watching any congressperson—senator or in the House—that dares to say that they are not going to vote yes for Senator Sanders' bill."

"They need to be held accountable at the ballot box," said Henry.

More than a decade has passed since Congress last raised the federal minimum wage, and efforts in recent years to enact a $15-an-hour wage floor nationally have fallen short amid opposition from the GOP, corporate-friendly Democrats, and the business lobby.

While some lawmakers are sure to balk at the idea of more than doubling the federal minimum wage, a working paper released this week showed that counties that have enacted large minimum wage increases have seen higher employment, higher earnings for workers, and lower inequality.

"Nobody in this country can survive on $7.25 an hour," Sanders said Thursday. "Maybe some of my colleagues in Congress might want to live for a month on seven-and-a-quarter an hour and see what that's like."

As Congress has failed to act, many states, cities, and counties across the U.S. have raised their minimum wages substantially, with progress continuing this year. According to a recent report by the National Employment Law Project, a record 86 U.S. jurisdictions are set to raise their minimum wages in 2023.

But 15 states have their minimum wages set at the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute's Minimum Wage Tracker, and five other states have no minimum wage laws—meaning the federal minimum applies.

"As it becomes more and more expensive to get by in America, $15 is no longer an adequate goal. We need to go higher to reflect what it actually costs to live in America."

In an analysis earlier this year, EPI estimated that "a worker in one of the 20 states with a $7.25 minimum wage is 46% more likely to make less than $15 an hour than a worker in the other 30 states or District of Columbia with higher minimum wages."

"There is no part of this country where even a single adult without children can achieve an adequate standard of living with a wage of less than $15 an hour," EPI noted. "With the lack of congressional action, the federal minimum wage has lost more than a third of its value since its inflation-adjusted high point of 1968."

Sanders said Thursday that with living costs rising across the country, a $15 minimum wage would still be insufficient—a point that supporters of the new legislation echoed.

"As it becomes more and more expensive to get by in America, $15 is no longer an adequate goal," Stephen Prince, vice chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. "We need to go higher to reflect what it actually costs to live in America. Sanders is right to revise his minimum wage push to $17 an hour to save workers across the country from further suffocation."

"On a larger scale, raising the minimum wage would give millions of people more money to buy more products and services from businesses around the country, which is good for our bottom lines," said Prince. "From a business standpoint, 60% of the country living paycheck to paycheck is unsustainable and precarious. Sanders' $17 minimum wage will change this reality and I’m all for it."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Citing newly released data from the New York State Comptroller, IPS noted that the average Wall Street bonus has increased by 1,165% since 1985, not adjusted for inflation.

Last year, the average cash bonus paid to Wall Street employees was $176,700—75% higher than in 2008 but slightly lower than the 2021 level of $240,400.

The federal minimum wage, meanwhile, has been completely stagnant since 2009, when it was bumped up to $7.25 from $5.15. While many states and localities have approved substantial pay increases in recent years, 20 states have kept their hourly wage floors at the federal minimum.

Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS and the author of the new analysis, wrote Thursday that "average weekly earnings for all U.S. private sector workers increased by only 54.4%" between 2008 and 2022—a significantly slower pace than inequality-fueling Wall Street bonuses.

"The total bonus pool for 190,800 New York City-based Wall Street employees in 2022 was $33.7 billion—enough to pay for 771,520 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year," Anderson observed. "Wall Street bonuses come on top of base salaries, which averaged $516,560 for New York securities industry employees in 2021."

Anderson argued that there are a number of straightforward steps lawmakers and regulators can take to curb exorbitant Wall Street compensation and bonuses.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed several provisions aimed at reining in bankers' compensation as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

But as The American Prospect's David Dayen pointed out last week, "bank regulators hip-pocketed one of those rules that Congress mandated in 2010—the one that would prohibit banker compensation that is specifically tied to taking inappropriate risks."

"The last time there was even a proposed rule on this was nearly seven years ago," Dayen continued. "And in 2018, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked whether he would abide by Congress' wishes and finish the rule, he blandly replied, 'We tried for many years' and 'we were not able to achieve consensus'—just thumbing his nose at a congressional mandate."

Anderson urged the Biden administration's financial regulators to stop deferring to Wall Street lobbyists and "swiftly—and rigorously—enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street pay restrictions that were supposed to have been enacted by May 2011."

Any new regulation, Anderson wrote, can and should include "a ban on stock options at Wall Street banks" and mandates requiring Wall Street executives to "set aside significant compensation for 10 years to pay potential misconduct fines."

"If such a regulation had been in place before the [Silicon Valley Bank] collapse," Anderson noted, "top executives would've automatically forfeited this deferred pay to help cover the cost of their recklessness."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Workers' rights advocates in Michigan on Friday applauded as Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of the state's so-called "right-to-work" law and restored the prevailing wage standard for state-funded construction projects.

The new laws make Michigan the first state to roll back anti-union right-to-work laws, which bar unions from requiring that all workers in unionized jobs pay dues, in nearly six decades.

"It feels great to be a Michigander today," said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan. "Any day that the corporate interests and lobbyists in Lansing fail is a day that deserves special recognition. It's refreshing to see workers get the recognition and rights they deserve after years of Republicans doing everything they could to undermine unions and the ability to organize in the workplace."

In a statement, Whitmer's office pointed to research from the Economic Policy Institute that showed people living in states without right-to-work laws are paid $1,600 more per year on average and have higher rates of insurance coverage than workers in states with anti-union rules. States without the anti-worker laws also have lower rates of workplace deaths.

"Today, we are coming together to restore workers' rights, protect Michiganders on the job, and grow Michigan's middle class," saidWhitmer. "Michigan workers are the most talented and hard-working in the world and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."

The passage of Michigan's right-to-work law in 2012 provoked outcry and drew labor advocates from across the county to Lansing to rally against the law.

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, many of the workers and supporters who protested over a decade ago were at the state Capitol when lawmakers passed the legislation repealing the law and restoring the prevailing wage, which requires that construction contractors pay union wages and benefits.

"After decades of anti-worker attacks, Michigan has restored the balance of power for working people by passing laws to protect their freedom to bargain for the good wages, good benefits, and safe workplaces they deserve," said Ron Bieber, president of the MIchigan AFL-CIO. "Ten years ago, Gov. Whitmer was standing side by side with well over 10,000 working people who showed up in Lansing to protest the devastating attack on their rights. Today, she has demonstrated yet again her unwavering commitment to putting working families first."

"After decades of attacks on working people," he added, "it's a new day in Michigan, and the future is bright."

Twenty-six other states have right-to-work laws in place, threatening unions' ability to operate as they limit the membership dues they can collect from the workers they represent.

“Now that workers' rights have been restored," said Janella James, executive director of the Michigan Nurses Association, "Michigan is once again leading the way for the country in showing what is possible when working families are put first."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

By contrast, the Producer Price Index came in somewhat better than expected, with the overall finished goods index declining 0.1 percent, driven by drops in food and energy prices. The core index rose a modest 0.2 percent. Most of the indices at earlier stages of production also showed a good picture. For example, the intermediate index for processed goods fell 0.4 percent in February and is now up just 2.1 percent over the last year.

The picture for import prices in February was also encouraging. The overall index for imports fell 0.1 percent in the month. Excluding fuels, the index rose 0.4 percent in February, but is still up just 0.2 percent over the last year.

The consumer price index does not closely track the indexes showing the price of items at earlier stages of production, but it is difficult to envision sustained divergences. For example, the CPI new vehicle component rose 5.8 percent last year. The index for imported vehicles, parts, and engines rose 2.5 percent. These categories are not identical, but it is difficult to imagine that we would go a decade with domestic vehicle price inflation outpacing the price increases of imports by 3.3 percentage points a year.

These two indices had tracked fairly closely prior to the pandemic. For those keeping score at home, the consumer price new vehicle index has risen by 20.3 percent since the start of the pandemic. The index for imported vehicles, parts, and engines has risen by 6.8 percent, which might suggest that we can anticipate some decline in vehicle prices going forward.

The import price and producer price indices would seem to indicate that the battle with inflation has been largely won, but that is not the picture with the CPI and probably not the story in the Personal Consumption Expenditure Deflator (PCE) that we will get later this month. Fortunately, we can use wage data to get another vantage point on inflation.

Wage Growth Is Moderating

If recent months’ CPI data have given us grounds to question whether inflation is still slowing, that is not true with the most recent wage data. The annualized rate of wage growth over the last three months in the average hourly earnings series is just 3.6 percent. This is down from a peak of 6.4 percent at start of the year, as can be seen in the graph.[1]

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author’s calculations.

Furthermore, the current 3.6 percent rate is roughly consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target. There were several points in the two years prior to the pandemic when the pace of wage growth was this fast or higher, yet the core PCE deflator averaged less than 2.0 percent for this two-year period.

It is worth mentioning that the Employment Cost Index (ECI) shows a somewhat higher rate of wage growth, with the annualized rate for the fourth quarter coming in at 4.0 percent (actually 3.95 percent, if we want to go to a second decimal). This may be slightly more rapid than would be consistent with 2.0 percent inflation, but it’s still not clear this would be a problem.

First, there is no ambiguity about the direction of change. The ECI was rising at a 5.8 percent annual rate at the start of the year. And, by construction, there are no composition effects in the ECI, so the changing employment patterns associated with the reopening would not affect the pace of wage growth reported in this index.

The second reason why a pace of wage growth that might be slightly faster than would be consistent with 2.0 percent inflation should not be a problem, is that the Fed has quite explicitly said that 2.0 percent is an average, not a ceiling. In the decade prior to the pandemic, the rate of inflation in the core PCE averaged 1.6 percent, 0.4 percentage points below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. While the Fed presumably would have liked to see a rate of inflation that was somewhat faster, being below 2.0 percent was not viewed as a major failing of Fed policy.

In the same vein, if the rate of inflation falls to a pace close to 2.0 percent, but still somewhat higher, say 2.4 percent, this could still be seen as consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. The key points are both that the rate of inflation is close to 2.0 percent, and that there not be a tendency for it to rise. While the definition of “close” can be debated, there is zero doubt from the wage data that the direction is downward, not upward.

This means that if price inflation follows wage inflation, we should expect inflation to be moving towards the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. The questions are how rapidly will inflation drop and will it fall close enough to 2.0 percent for the Fed to declare victory.

Does Inflation Track Wage Growth?

Over any short period, we can see substantial divergences between the rate of inflation and the rate of wage growth. For example, inflation substantially outpaced wage growth in 2021 and the start of 2022. However, a sustained divergence would imply a continuing shift in income shares.

The gap between inflation and wage growth at the start of the pandemic was associated with a substantial increase in the profit share of national income. The before-tax profit share of national income rose from 13.1 percent in 2019 to 14.0 percent in 2021.[2] It edged back slightly to 13.9 percent in 2022.

If we have a view of inflation where we expect it to outpace wage growth on a sustained basis, it would imply a larger and continuing shift from wages to profits. This sort of sustained redistribution would be an extraordinary macroeconomic event. Furthermore, it is not clear that higher interest rates, designed to raise unemployment and slow wage growth, would be the best tool to reduce inflation in this context. Clearly, excessive wage growth is not the problem in this story.

Of course, the wage growth data are erratic and also subject to revision. We may be looking at a different picture when we get the March data on wages and the first quarter ECI, but based on the data we have to date, wages are growing at a pace consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target. This would provide a very good argument for the Fed to pause on further interest rate hikes, even if it did not have concerns about financial instability stemming from the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank.

Notes.

[1] The maximum and minimum were set to cut off wage growth peaks and troughs driven by changing workforce composition at the beginning and end of the pandemic shutdown period. The tighter range makes it easier to see the path of wage growth over this six-year period.

[2] These data are take from the Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Accounts of the United States, Table F.3, Line 7 divided by Line 1.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Kateryna Semchuk.

The post Strong Job Growth in February, but Hours Drop, and Wage Growth Slows appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

A National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) report claims that “wage theft has shamefully become an endemic part of universities’ business models” while Australia’s biggest public universities record massive surpluses and their vice-chancellors earn more than A$1 million a year in wages.

The union report, released late last month and titled Wage Theft, exposes a staggering amount in wages that has allegedly been stolen from casual academic staff.

An analysis of 34 cases conservatively estimates that a collective amount of A$83.4 million is owed to staff across the higher education sector. More than A$80 million has been uncovered since 2020 across public universities.

• READ MORE: Other Australian university reports

Thousands of casual academic staff were laid off during covid-19 pandemic closures starting from March 2020 when revenue from foreign students fell dramatically.

NTEU argues that this should not be an excuse for some of Australia’s wealthy universities not to pay proper wages to hard-working staff who are integral to teaching and research which “generates revenue and delivers immeasurable public good”.

Bigger problem than anticipated
“It’s deeply disappointing but not at all surprising that the staggering wage theft figure is even higher than the NTEU first calculated,” Dr Alison Barnes, national president of NTEU, said in a media statement.

“Even more sadly, the true figure will rise well beyond AU$107.8 million once ongoing cases are settled. Systemic wage theft is endemic in our public universities. This is simply unacceptable,” she added.

Barnes told University World News it was also “unacceptable” that A$107.8 million “has been stolen from higher education staff while universities post huge surpluses and vice-chancellors collect million-dollar salaries”.

At fault are some of Australia’s top universities which also attract huge numbers of foreign students.

The University of Melbourne topped the list with an estimated “wage theft” bill of A$31.6 million, while the University of Sydney came second with A$12.75 million and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) third with A$10 million.

Higher education wage theft comes in many forms, according to the NTEU report.

It includes being paid for fewer hours than the work takes, piece rates for marking instead of the actual time worked, and sham contracting to undercut award and agreement entitlements.

Teaching misclassification is among the most common forms of wage theft in universities.

According to Barnes, two-thirds of all Australian university staff are employed insecurely. With high rates of casualisation among university academic staff, casually employed workers are more vulnerable to wage theft than those who have secure employment, argues the NTEU report.

“Many workers are reluctant to raise complaints over underpayment, or to ask for compensation for hours worked for free when they require contract renewals every teaching period,” it notes.

Fresh revelations and claims
New revelations from the University of Melbourne have taken its underpayment tally beyond A$45 million, cementing it as the leading culprit. Monash University admitted to A$8.6 million in wage theft in 2021.

The management is now fighting tooth and nail against new claims, going to the Fair Work Commission in an attempt to change its enterprise agreement so it is no longer liable to pay staff the money the union alleges is owed.

Bill Logan (not his real name) has worked as a casual for many years at Melbourne University and lately at RMIT. Speaking to University World News on condition of anonymity out of fear that his casual contracts may be denied in the next round, he said that as a casual you have job security for only three months at a time.

Casual lecturers, even though they do the same work as full-time lecturers — preparing tutorials, marking and student administration — are not considered for full-time academic appointments.

After reading the NTEU report, he said: “I still can’t figure out how it has happened as universities pay via software and it is approved by a few people at the top before payments.”

He said it was ironic that universities underpay staff “while teaching students how to practise good governance”.

Logan admits that having job flexibility is a highlight of doing casual teaching.

However, he points out disadvantages: “Until the pre-semester preparation, we didn’t know whether we would be able to do tutoring for the semester, because it depends on the number of students [enrolled for the course].”

“Casuals are not paid for administrative tasks such as writing recommendation letters for internships or further studies [for students],” he added.

Personal sacrifices
Speaking on ABC TV’s 7.30 Report, Natalia Chulio, who has worked as a casual sociology lecturer at the University of Sydney for the past decade, said that to do such work she had had to make a lot of sacrifices in her personal life.

“I can’t have children because I don’t have a guaranteed income … You are always doing work that you are not paid for. For example, I am paid for 28 hours of face-to-face work per week, but I work for more than 45 hours a week.

“I’m underpaid when it comes to marking.”

Logan said: “Even though casual tutors are paid at a higher rate [in academia] than in other sectors, there is no consistency in payments. [Thus] casuals are discriminated against [for example] when you apply for bank loans.”

According to the Wage Theft report, the University of Melbourne admitted in November 2022 that it had started back-paying more than 15,000 staff who were owed A$22 million. That revelation came a little over a year after Melbourne repaid A$9.5 million to 1000 casual academics.

It posted a A$584 million surplus in 2022.

When interviewed on the 7.30 Report, Professor Nicola Phillips, provost of the University of Melbourne, admitted that the system needed an overall. “This is not a sustainable model for us and it is not a desirable one for the future,” she said. “We are looking at dramatically reducing our number of casual contracts as a way of employing staff.”

Logan agreed that institutions like Melbourne University should employ permanent part-time staff rather than casuals.

“Permanent part-time tutors could be hired who could teach a variety of similar subjects,” he argued, pointing out that casuals “teach different but similar subjects” every semester.

‘Tackle insecure work’ plea
“We’re calling on the federal government to address wage theft through tackling its chief cause — insecure work,” said NTEU’s Barnes. “Wage theft in higher education is a deep crisis. We need urgent action to create the better universities that Australia deserves.”

Barnes called on the Australian government to pass laws that make wage theft a crime.

“That needs to happen alongside a mechanism for staff to quickly recover money stolen from them,” she said.

She also encouraged all university staff to become union members.

“The NTEU has pursued enterprise agreements which include secure jobs guarantees, like at Western Sydney University, to increase permanent roles,” she said.

• The full NTEU Wage Theft report

Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lanka-born journalist, radio broadcaster, television documentary maker and a media and international communications analyst. He was head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) in Singapore from 2005-2012.This article was originally published by University World News and has been republished here with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Finance Minister Grant Robertson have announced a $50 million support package to provide immediate relief for businesses hit by Cyclone Gabrielle, as well as the extension of the national state of emergency, a new cyclone recovery taskforce and related ministerial role.

The full extent of the cyclone damage is becoming clearer as transport, power and telecommunications connections are re-established.

“Ministers will finalise the distribution of this funding in the coming week, but this will include support to businesses to meet immediate costs and further assist with clean-up,” Robertson said today.

• READ MORE: Cyclone Gabrielle: Lives ‘turned upside down . . . destroyed’, says PM
• RNZ photo essay: Cyclone Gabrielle damage becomes increasingly clear
• Cyclone Gabrielle: Death toll rises to 11, Civil Defence targets isolated communities
• Cyclone Gabrielle: Pasifika songs of gratitude ring out across Hawke’s Bay
• Follow RNZ live updates

“We will coordinate the allocation of this funding with local business groups, iwi and local government in the affected regions.

“The government recognises the weather events are having an impact on people and businesses meeting their tax obligations, so we are taking a range of tax relief measures as well.”

Tens of millions of dollars have already been put into cyclone recovery and support, including into Mayoral Relief Funds, Civil Defence payments, and a package for NGOs and community support groups, he said.

“I want to be very clear, this is an interim package and more support will follow as we get a better picture of the scale, cost and needs in the wake of this disaster,” Hipkins said.

Rolling maul approach
“I would note that in responding to previous major disasters a rolling maul approach has had to be taken and this situation is no different.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A trio of progressive U.S. senators on Wednesday pressed the CEO of Kroger to answer longtime worker allegations of rampant wage theft, accusations that continue as the supermarket giant pursues a contentious megamerger with erstwhile competitor Albertsons.

"We are writing today regarding alarming new reports of Kroger's involvement in the mistreatment of workers and consumers through widespread and unresolved wage theft," Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a letter to Kroger Company chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen. "These reports indicate that 'systemic and widespread errors' by Kroger resulted in thousands of your employees experiencing delays and missing wages in their paychecks in late 2022."

Warren explained on Twitter that "Kroger stiffed its own workers while pushing a merger deal with Albertsons that could harm both consumers and workers," and that the senators "are calling them out for lining their pockets at the expense of their employees."

Kroger workers say a big part of the problem is MyTime, a new payroll system rolled out last year that McMullen claimed would "simplify day-to-day work" but instead has resulted in problems including missing pay and incomplete checks.

"I'm tired of having to beg for pay that's due to me," one Kroger employee toldPopular Information last month.

In January, hundreds of Kroger employees, most of them members of the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400 Union, filed a class-action lawsuit alleging widespread wage theft.

The senators' letter states that "given your company's record of anti-worker policies, and your ongoing attempt to push through a merger that would harm both consumers and workers, we are writing to request a full explanation of how your workers will be compensated for any lost or delayed wages, and how you will prevent future wage theft."

The lawmakers asked McMullen to answer questions including:

• How many missing or incorrect paychecks were reported to the company in 2022, and how many of these reports were related to the MyTime system?
• What was the total amount of wages owed to workers that Kroger failed to pay in 2022?
• How much back pay has Kroger issued to date for missing or incorrect paychecks in 2022?
• Is Kroger continuing to use the MyTime payroll system, despite significant accuracy issues, and if so, what steps has the company put in place to prevent further wage theft?
• Have any company executives had pay, bonuses, or other compensation withheld or clawed back as a result of the systemic problems affecting workers' pay in 2022?
• Will you commit to fully redressing all workers affected by missing or late pay prior to taking any additional steps to move forward with the Albertsons merger?

Warren, Sanders, and Wyden are among the many progressive and labor voices urging the federal government to reject Kroger's proposed merger with Albertsons. Together, the two supermarkets and their subsidiaries employ more than 710,000 workers at around 5,000 stores in 48 states and Washington, D.C. and rake in $208 billion in annual revenue, second only to Walmart.

In a bid to fend off antitrust challenges to the proposed merger, Kroger and Albertsons announced earlier this week that they would sell off as many as 300 stores, mostly in areas where the two chains overlap, GlobeStreported.

"This merger would exacerbate corporate consolidation in the grocery sector, and likely result in the shuttering of some stores across the country and the firing of workers from both Kroger and Albertsons."

"Even as your company was failing to address concerns about systemic wage theft, you have been pushing through a $24.6 billion merger with Albertsons Companies, Inc. that further threatens workers' wages and jobs and hurts consumers by reducing competition among grocers," the lawmakers' letter asserts. "This merger would exacerbate corporate consolidation in the grocery sector, and likely result in the shuttering of some stores across the country and the firing of workers from both Kroger and Albertsons."

According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, more than $3 billion in stolen wages were recovered for U.S. workers between 2017 and 2020—a fraction of the $50 billion EPI says is stolen by employers each year. By contrast, the FBI said the total value of all 267,988 reported U.S. robberies in 2019 was around $482 million.

The lawmakers' letter came as Communications Workers of America and the National Employment Law Project published a study in which 9 in 10 surveyed workers at independent authorized retailers of telecom titans AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon in 43 states said they've experienced wage theft.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Vaccination Bandwagon gone rogue

How will I be able to tie in what I have expressed in THAT piece into something around the issues, say, confronting the County where I live giving students-parents until Wednesday to prove their kiddos are up-to-date on vaccinations, or some sort of exception? While the Covid Crack Shots are not mandatory, anymore, that is, but really, it’s the bandwagon effect that makes them “mandatory” (why now have your children NOT gotten that life affirming, life saving mRNA?). Imagine what sorts of shots these kids have received outside of the mRNA madness, and to be honest, most kids have been double boosted.

Oregon requires immunization against 11 vaccine-preventable diseases. They are given in many iterations, many boosters, and, well, go to the CDC here: Birth to 15 Months and then scroll two inches to here: 18 Months to 18 Years

• Tetanus
• Pertussis (whooping cough)
• Polio
• Varicella (chickenpox)
• Measles
• Mumps
• Rubella
• Hepatitis B
• Hepatitis A
• Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type B) – only for children under five years old

Those listed above are only a fraction of what the CDC lists. It is absolutely scary. You do not need RFK, Jr., to tell you why so many jabs mixed in with other jabs at birth and during the first 6 years of life are bad news bears. (Oh, man, the anti-RFK, Jr., bandwagon is huge!)  And it’s not just about a perservative:

I covered a new documentary, in French w/ English subtitles, over at Hormones Matter: “Injecting Aluminum: Documentary Questions Vaccine Safety“:

A new film airing in May, Injecting Aluminum, looks at a specific aspect of the vaccine “debate” through what easily is the one giant Gordian knot metaphor of the entire vaccine injury and death history – the adjuvant aluminum hydroxide developed in the 1920s as the “best” optimizer of the immune response when injecting the disease.

The subtitle of 90-minute film by director Marie-Ange Poyet, How Toxic are Vaccines?, really takes the air out of the sails of the pro-vaccine-and-never-question-the-vaccinologist zealots. In fact, it’s the Gordian knot we can cut away: disentangling an impossible knot but cutting that damned thing, or finding a loophole through creative and robust outside the box thinking:

Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter

— Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47

Any critical thinking around what goes into a hypodermic needle and injected into baby’s body, that then is the new Labelling Questioners as Anti-Science Bandwagon!

Covid19 (SARS or MERS, anyone) Bandwagon

Source: The COVID-19 Global Pandemic

Get into the weeds to understand this SARS-MERS thing, the Covid 19 thing, those bio-tech untested mRNA jabs: “When ‘Mutated Lab Made Viruses’ Are Used on Captive Monkeys…

Don’t judge! Science is hard. Sasha Latypova

Less humorous explanation of the monkey business: the C-19 potions are designed, financed, and made by DARPA/DOD/BARDA and related clown agencies via consortia of defense contractors including Pfizer who are paid huge sums of money, are not in control of the entire supply chain and product, and are promised protection by the government. The paperwork Pfizer submitted to the FDA reflects this fact: it is a prop in a play called “vaccine development and approval” and that’s why it looks so unprofessional, full of gaping holes and obvious fraud. The FDA is of course fully complicit in this and continues to pretend to “authorize” these military biowarfare agents as pharmaceuticals.

*****

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

— Ludwig Feuerbach (Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)

Even Hegel understood the problems engendered by Capitalism. And in the sixties Debord tracked the direction of western capitalism and sketched with remarkable clarity the history and also created a sense of aesthetics that felt innately radical and subversive. Seeing the fundamental sickness of the Capitalist system was not new. Today, nothing is left of that radical quality, certainly not in the arts or academia. Increasingly there is a rote reflexive hatred of Marx, Freud, Communism, Mao, Stalin, and Fidel. The Frankfurt School is attacked, more from the left than the right, and self identifying left publications embrace the most reactionary of positions (Jacobin comes to mind, of course) on the pandemic protocols. And capitalism is viewed as if it is Nature, a god created fact. — John Steppling

Pre-employment Google Check Bandwagon & the All-Female Band?

But, in the end, this latest job rejection, what is it all about, Haeder, many ask? Do they Google you and find THESE anti-this, anti-that, pro-this, pro-that articles and then see you/ME are/is not part of their band wagon?

I have been interviewed more than a dozen times here in Lincoln County (Pop. 50,000) the last 24 months. Every interview “team” has been comprised of 100 percent female (she, her, hers) about 90 percent of the time, and then other times, six out of seven, she-her-hers.

I grew up with strong women — my mom had to divorce her first husband because he had Vancouver, BC mafia after him for gambling debts. She was an amazing force in Paris when we were kids over there, and amazing in Tucson, when she ended up there after divorcing my father, US Military. She had to bury her daughter at 23 after she was struck on her motorcycle in Kamloops. My grandmother Kirk, another strong Scottish woman, who ended up in Canada working her tail off. Aunt who opened a fancy restaurant with two other strong women. Aunts that were midwives, and aunt who was a nurse who managed her husband’s surgical and general medicine practice. Strong women left and right. My wife is an incredibly strong woman on many levels, not just because she puts up with me, but her entire life has been struggle and trauma and success!

Ahh, but now, in my world, with so many not-so-strong women in my midst interviewing me, which is a form of critical judgement, and to be truthful, the fix is in when it comes to me, one lone guy, now older, applying for case managers and non-profit this or that position, and the team that interviews me and for which would be working with the new hire are all women.

Band Wagons, man. Circle those wagons from whichever self-righteous perch you and your clan find yourself in.

Again, this is all speculation, but you gotta be me to know speculation is also reality! Even when it comes to vaccinations and what the band wagon effect does to society (today, 2/12, that big band wagon event — Love it, or Leave us Star Spangled Banner, F-18 Super Bowl Flyover).

But, here I am, working with mostly women, as a special Olympics basketball coach. And, while I get turned down for a four-county kick-ass job I am more than passionate about and qualified for, I am on the Special Needs bus to learn how to drive that bus and get to know the routes and students.

So, this essay shifts to the band wagons within the female persuasion clan.

Now now, there are many parents coming out to support these teams, and while there are two-gender homes, many of the special youth have been growing up with moms, aunts, grandmothers.

Facts: The unfortunate correlation between a child with special needs and a marriage, though, is that the amount of participation from each parent can vary based upon how they are handling the issue emotionally. Tragically, there is a high rate of men who simply focus on work while leaving a mother to raise the child at home, creating a distance. This is not true for all fathers. However, far too often we receive phone calls from mothers who find themselves addressing their child’s needs on their own, either due to divorce or simple emotional distance.

Not all men are the ones who cave and leave, that’s for sure. But I am seeing over several states a majority of women caregivers, parental figures, and social services providers, aides, teachers, and such.

I wouldn’t exchange all the rewarding work I have done with both youth and adults with developmental disabilities for this kick-ass job I just got “railroaded out of.” You see, the job I applied for was compliance worker for Fair Housing Coalition of Oregon. That was Oct. 2022. No word until two weeks ago, 2/2/2023. Asking me if I’d put my resume and cover letter into the ring for this outreach specialists since the person writing me thought I was definitely qualified to do the job.

WAR Bandwagon (Crocodile Tears When They Strike up the Band, Super Bowl Sunday!)

Oh that web so many people have woven in their personal and work lives. Tangled when we practice to deceive is what Walter Scott had as one famous lines in Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. My entire life has been that complicated web, but not because I have gone out to deceive, but because I have not set forth deception, and I have been true to myself, honest with others, and forthright in a world where more and more people are “acting” and playing roles with a modicum of heart in their work if it involves social work. There are great people in social services, don’t get me wrong. But more and more the world of that arena is all about acting, Thespian crap, show and tell, bells and whistles, and now “Your Zoom Presence — How to Make Yourself into a Star” is what rules.

I could go on and on, but this is a minor speed bump in my road called life. Pissed off? Sort of, but not really, though angry at the systems of repression and oppression and how the world I sort of run in is now made up of the ghosting and cancelling and intolerance of this modern end game of confirmation bias and only listening to what one bandwagon is blasting on its Propaganda Speakers.

Until I am still working as a school bus trainee in progress. With old people with their biases and backward thinking, and me, again, not on their bandwagon. Imagine, old guys telling me they hate Russia and Russians. No, they are not from Russia, nor did they have anyone from Russia or who fought in the Great Patriotic War. They just hate people they have never met, rendezvoused with or broke bread with. All those horrific propaganda movies, all that Russia Gate lunacy (Bandwagon), and yet, these 77-year-old truckers who are now school busing, hate a people and country they never knew or will never know.

Oh,my,  they are equal opportunity racists, because they hate China and Chinese equally. That is one earth-killing nuclear war bandwagon!

And theses bus drivers hate their $19 an hour part-time bus driving gig, with precious K12 cargo, and hate the three cameras in the buses and the smart tablet that tracks acceleration, idling, route, stops, hard stops, but they will never begrudge a dollar to the obscene pimps of war: This is America’s Biggest band playing in that Bandwagon called MIC:

All that money going to new nuclear missiles, strategic bombers (the newly revealed B-21), submarines and so on, which in total will cost $1.7 trillion, according to congressional numbers—all in all an impressive escalation. So, $1 billion for each bomber made by Northrop Grumman (the Air Force began planning for the B-21 in 2011 and awarded the major development contract in 2015. The B-21 is expected to make its first flight in 2023 and enter service by 2027) is no big deal. Imagine that, one guy has to pay for hearing aids, at age 77, to the tune of $7000 or $9000 for a pair. Imagine the cognitive dissonance and retrograde thinking and imploding critical analyses skills with that two plus two equals three equation.

So it goes, sisters and brothers. You get older, you get more radical with each day, you get tired of lies, fakes, faux concepts, marketing, and merchandizing death and co-option, and then you, or I, become not jaded or cynical, but emancipated. Or even more decoupled from the fraudulent nature of almost every angle and every silo this sad sack of a country has propped up to destroy the world.

You realize you have never been on any bandwagon, so, as James Howard Kunstler states, we are in a Cluster Fuck Nation Bandwagon.

Final Run of that Big Bandwagon — DoD!

This is 24 years behind the times: “A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” by William Blum, June 1999. And I know several of the parents today wondered why I left my cap on, turned away from the American flag, bowed my head, and looked sad when the stupid Star Spangled Banner came on the speakers at the beginning of the tourney. I was already standing in the bleachers, but I usually sit, bow my head, and leave my hat or cap on.

One of Blum’s last points in 2017: “The Anti-Empire Report #153: Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid”

The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”⁶

Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”

And there this rambling essay ends. Stupidity and cancel culture and ingrained hatred of Russia and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua and Iran and Chine and North Korea, those are the drools coming from a half-brained rabid society. The spiritual rabies crosses all political boundaries, all camps, all silos.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

― W.E.B. DuBois

It’s liberty or death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. …. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.

— Malcom X

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Peerzada Taha Siddiqui of Furfura Sharif mazaar, #Bengal, exhorts Ms to prepare their children for war against Hs. pic.twitter.com/nHffOKcDTM

— Abhijit Majumder (@abhijitmajumder) February 1, 2023

The tweet soon went viral and has received close to 1,500 retweets and over 1.6 lakh views.

The next day, Twitter user Sourish Mukherjee, who describes himself as the media in-charge of VHP Bengal tweeted the same clip and wrote that Pirzada Taha Siddiqui of Furfura Sharif had urged his community to prepare their children for war against Hindus. ‘Provocative hate speeches targeting Hindus are increasing by the day, but how long will these go unnoticed!!,’ he wondered. (Archive)

The person in the video is none other than Peerzada Taha Siddiqui of Furfura Sharif, Hooghly..

He urged his community to prepare their children for war against Hindus.

Provocative hate speeches targeting Hindus are increasing by the day, but how long will these go unnoticed!! pic.twitter.com/Zodfo8yOlv

— Sourish Mukherjee (@me_sourish_) February 2, 2023

Another Twitter handle, @RashtraJyoti, which describes itself as a ‘Gems of Bollywood initiative’, and is run by Sanjeev Newar and Swarajya Journalist Swati Goel Sharma as per the bio, shared the clip of Taha Siddiqui’s speech on February 2 and wrote that the cleric was ‘asking Muslims to prepare their children for a war against Hindus.’ (Archive)

#HateSpeech

Watch Peerzada Taha Siddiqui from Bengal asking Muslims to prepare their children for a war against Hindus.

Siddiqui is a cleric at Mazar Furfura Sharif: pic.twitter.com/biabZa7a8b

— Rashtra Jyoti (Gems of Bollywood initiative) (@RashtraJyoti) February 2, 2023

Quote-tweeting Majumder’s post, senior adviser, ministry of information & broadcasting, Government of India, Kanchan Gupta wrote, “Years ago I wrote an article headlined ‘How green is my Bengal?’ which fetched the usual cacophony of #LeftLiberal protest and snark. Sadly Bengali ‘intellectuals’ are collaborators in this hate project. Useful Idiots don’t realise the mob will devour them first.”

The same video and the same claim were also amplified by users such as Debjani Bhattacharyya, Rakesh Singh, Hindu Genocide Watch, among others.

Fact Check

On doing a keyword search on Twitter, we came across a video of the same speech posted by journalist Tamal Saha. This clip — running for 2.11 minutes — is longer than the viral one.

Fact: On Jan 27 Furfura Sharif Pirzada said :Muslims wake up, parents teach your children to fight. Get ready, #Muslim children have to fight a war against #Hindu & #Christian. But that war should not be fought with swords, arms or lathis. That war should be over EDUCATION ..1/2 pic.twitter.com/rerzL1BRT6

— Tamal Saha (@Tamal0401) February 3, 2023

In this clip, addressing a large gathering Siddiqui says in a high pitch, “O Muslims, wake up! teach your sons and daughters to fight. Be prepared. Fathers and mothers, prepare your children. We have to fight against the Hindus.” After saying so far, he says in an undertone apparently referring to another occasion, “When I said this, I noticed that the faces of the ministers seated on the dais had shrunk.. everybody was flummoxed.. they started wondering if I had gone there to spread the fire of communalism.”

Then he switches back to the high pitch and resumes, “I am saying this again. Muslims, be prepared and prepare your children. Teach them to fight against the Hindus and the Christians. But that fight should not be fought with swords, guns or sticks. That fight will be fought over education.” Then again he says in an undertone, “The moment I said this, everybody started laughing.”

Siddiqui then continues, “In Bengal, Hindu and Muslim boys and girls will compete with each other over education and go forward. One day, Hindu and Muslims boys and girls of Bengal will make so much progress that they will together fight against other states over education.”

So, it is clear that the cleric from Furfura Sharif in Hooghly district of Bengal was not talking about Muslims waging a war against Hindus, but batting for competition among the communities over education, and calling for progress of all.

To understand the context of his reference to ‘ministers on the dais’ in between his exhortation, we looked for the full video and found it on a YouTube channel, Waz Mahfil 21.

The YouTube video starts with clipped parts from Siddiqui’s speech but has the entire speech afterward.

At the 14.43-minute mark onward, he starts talking about the need for higher education. Then he says that he had recently gone to Rajarhat (a locality in the northern fringes of Kolkata) and addressed a few thousand Hindu and Muslim students who were to take the secondary and higher secondary examinations. He says that he had said the same things (Hindus and Muslim youths competing/fighting with each other over education) on that day. His words first shocked the audience and the ministers on stage, but then everybody appreciated his comments when they realized he was talking about education.

The relevant part can be heard from the 15.34-minute mark in the video.

To sum up, several Twitter users shared a clipped part of Furfura Sharif Pirzada Taha Siddiqui’s speech to falsely claim that he was asking Muslims to prepare their children to wage a war against Hindus. In reality, he was referring to children of all faiths competing among themselves over education.

The post Clipped video viral; Bengal cleric Taha Siddiqui didn’t ask Muslims to wage war against Hindus appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

The post Unemployment Falls Back to Half-Century Low, But Wage Growth Slows appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

The drops in both new jobs and wage growth contained in a Department of Labor report released on Friday elicited cheers from financial world insiders.

“This is a really terrific jobs report in lots of subtle ways,” tweeted Neil Irwin, Axios’s chief economic correspondent. He said, “Job growth is soft-landingish” — polite econ-speak for saying growth is decreasing steadily.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

The U.S. Labor Department released data Friday showing that wage and job growth slowed in December as the Fed explicitly targets the labor market and worker pay in its push to tamp down inflation, which has been cooling in recent months.

According to the new figures, wages grew at a slower-than-expected rate of 0.3% last month, and November's hourly earnings number was revised down from 0.6% to 0.4%—a trend that one observer called "bad news for workers."

Pointing to the "huge downward revision to November wage growth," Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote, "Hold the rate hikes please."

"Hold the rate hikes please." —Dean Baker, CEPR

While CEO pay has continued to surge, many ordinary workers across the U.S. have seen their wages lag behind inflation as living costs have risen sharply over the past two years.

Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said slowing wage growth is critical for Fed policymakers to consider as they mull additional interest rate hikes, which risk unnecessarily hurling the economy into recession.

"Wage growth decelerated in December no matter how it's measured," Gould noted. "Annualized wage growth between November and December was 3.4%. It is decidedly not driving inflation."

Gould's EPI colleague Heidi Shierholz agreed, describing recent wage growth as "completely non-inflationary."

"By this measure, the Fed's work is done," she wrote on Twitter.

Job growth, meanwhile, remained strong in December even as it cooled compared to the torrid pace of early 2022. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the U.S. added a better-than-anticipated 223,000 jobs in the last month of 2022, the fifth consecutive month of slowing growth.

The new jobs data comes days after the Fed released the minutes of its mid-December meeting, after which the central bank raised interest rates to their highest level in 15 years despite growing warnings from a range of experts about the potential for a damaging recession and mass layoffs.

According to the minutes, Fed officials are not yet satisfied with evidence showing that inflation is slowing significantly and intend to stay the course with higher rates. Central bankers also suggested they believe the labor market is still too tight and wage growth is too strong, reiterating their goal of "bringing down" the latter even as they admitted there are "few signs of adverse wage-price dynamics."

"You know the Fed's priorities are warped when they suggest too many Americans have jobs," Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power program at the watchdog group Accountable.US, said Friday. "It seems the more Americans find work, the more the Fed embraces job-killing interest rate hikes that disproportionately hurt low-income workers and struggling mom-and-pop shops. And for what?"

"The Fed's single-minded strategy has done little to blunt the real driver of inflation—corporate greed," Zelnick added. "Across industries, corporations continue to mark up prices on working families despite posting record profits and rewarding wealthy investors with billions in giveaways. Raising interest rates only hurts American families in the long run by pushing the economy toward a cliff. Recession is not inevitable, but that depends largely on deliberate decisions made by the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell."

Michael Mitchell, director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, echoed that warning ahead of Friday's jobs report, cautioning that "as workers and families are struggling with higher prices, Chair Powell is hell-bent on bringing down wages and pushing more people out of work with his aggressive interest rate hikes."

"If the Fed continues with its dangerous interest rate hikes," Mitchell said, "we should brace ourselves for more hardship for working people and an unnecessarily painful recession."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The U.S. Labor Department released data Friday showing that wage and job growth slowed in December as the Fed explicitly targets the labor market and worker pay in its push to tamp down inflation, which has been cooling in recent months.

According to the new figures, wages grew at a slower-than-expected rate of 0.3% last month, and November's hourly earnings number was revised down from 0.6% to 0.4%—a trend that one observer called "bad news for workers."

Pointing to the "huge downward revision to November wage growth," Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote, "Hold the rate hikes please."

"Hold the rate hikes please." —Dean Baker, CEPR

While CEO pay has continued to surge, many ordinary workers across the U.S. have seen their wages lag behind inflation as living costs have risen sharply over the past two years.

Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said slowing wage growth is critical for Fed policymakers to consider as they mull additional interest rate hikes, which risk unnecessarily hurling the economy into recession.

"Wage growth decelerated in December no matter how it's measured," Gould noted. "Annualized wage growth between November and December was 3.4%. It is decidedly not driving inflation."

Gould's EPI colleague Heidi Shierholz agreed, describing recent wage growth as "completely non-inflationary."

"By this measure, the Fed's work is done," she wrote on Twitter.

\u201cWhen Wall Street is betting against workers, it's even more proof that the stock market is absolutely not the economy. #WeAreTheEconomy\u201d

— Groundwork Collaborative (@Groundwork Collaborative) 1673018030

Job growth, meanwhile, remained strong in December even as it cooled compared to the torrid pace of early 2022. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the U.S. added a better-than-anticipated 223,000 jobs in the last month of 2022, the fifth consecutive month of slowing growth.

The new jobs data comes days after the Fed released the minutes of its mid-December meeting, after which the central bank raised interest rates to their highest level in 15 years despite growing warnings from a range of experts about the potential for a damaging recession and mass layoffs.

According to the minutes, Fed officials are not yet satisfied with evidence showing that inflation is slowing significantly and intend to stay the course with higher rates. Central bankers also suggested they believe the labor market is still too tight and wage growth is too strong, reiterating their goal of "bringing down" the latter even as they admitted there are "few signs of adverse wage-price dynamics."

"You know the Fed's priorities are warped when they suggest too many Americans have jobs," Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power program at the watchdog group Accountable.US, said Friday. "It seems the more Americans find work, the more the Fed embraces job-killing interest rate hikes that disproportionately hurt low-income workers and struggling mom-and-pop shops. And for what?"

"The Fed's single-minded strategy has done little to blunt the real driver of inflation—corporate greed," Zelnick added. "Across industries, corporations continue to mark up prices on working families despite posting record profits and rewarding wealthy investors with billions in giveaways. Raising interest rates only hurts American families in the long run by pushing the economy toward a cliff. Recession is not inevitable, but that depends largely on deliberate decisions made by the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell."

Michael Mitchell, director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, echoed that warning ahead of Friday's jobs report, cautioning that "as workers and families are struggling with higher prices, Chair Powell is hell-bent on bringing down wages and pushing more people out of work with his aggressive interest rate hikes."

"If the Fed continues with its dangerous interest rate hikes," Mitchell said, "we should brace ourselves for more hardship for working people and an unnecessarily painful recession."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ray Suarez.

After a decade since the launch of the Fight for $15 movement in New York City, a record number of U.S. states and communities are set to raise the minimum wage in the new year.

From New Year's Eve to New Year's Day, the minimum wage will increase in 23 states and 41 cities and counties, according to a report released Thursday by the National Employment Law Project (NELP). In 40 of those 64 jurisdictions, it will hit or exceed $15 an hour for at least some workers.

"The raises we are seeing are a true testament to the power of organizing."

By the end of 2023, additional increases are planned in five states and 22 localities—with 21 reaching or topping $15 an hour—bringing the total for next year to 86: 27 states and 59 cities and counties, says the report, Raises From Coast to Coast in 2023. The totals take into account that multiple increases are planned in Michigan and four local jurisdictions.

"The raises we are seeing are a true testament to the power of organizing," said Yannet Lathrop, senior researcher and policy analyst at NELP, in a statement. "These raises were achieved in a variety of ways, from ballot initiatives to statehouses to workers making their demands to employers directly."

"As these wins continue and we see the real-world impact of higher pay—from growing unionization to narrowing racial wealth gaps—we encourage lawmakers to go further and raise pay broadly across our economy," Lathrop added.

\u201cA record 86 cities, counties, & states are raising wages sometime in 2023. (5 jurisdictions are raising\nwages 2x in 2023 & are only counted once in our report.) These raises are a necessary advancement towards a sustaining #MinimumWage \u270a\u201d

— NELP (@NELP) 1671722150

As the report details:

In the 10 years since fast food workers walked out of their jobs demanding a $15 minimum wage and a union, the Fight for $15 worker movement has won minimum wage increases in 28 states and nearly five dozen cities and counties. These victories have led to an estimated $150 billion in additional annual pay for 26 million workers and to the narrowing of the racial wealth gap.
The movement has also put pressure on employers to raise their pay scales, leading… hundreds of businesses, large and small, to raise wages to $15 or more. Among them are corporate giants employing hundreds of thousands of workers from coast to coast, including Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Barclays, Best Buy, Charter Communications, Chobani, Chipotle, CVS, Ikea, JP Morgan Chase, LabCorp, Macy's, MetLife PNC, Sam's Club, Southwest Airlines, Synchrony Financial, T- Mobile, Target, Under Armour, USAA, Verizon, Walgreen's, Walmart, and Wells Fargo.

"The monumental impact of the Fight for $15 is clearly visible in this year's record wage increases as well as those in years past," said NELP executive director Rebecca Dixon. "But in those same 10 years, congressional action to expand worker rights has been limited."

"While it is encouraging to see boosts to the minimum wage in cities and states across the country, we need federal policy to address the mounting crises brought about by record increases in the cost of living and pandemic recovery," she stressed. "We must pass a higher federal minimum wage—at least $15 an hour—that accounts for rising costs of living and ensures that workers have the ability to support themselves and their families."

In March 2021, eight members of the Democratic caucus, joined all 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate to kill legislation that would have established a $15 federal minimum wage, lifting millions of people out of poverty. Among those Democrats was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who officially declared herself an Independent in recent weeks.

State-wide polling conducted shortly before that vote last year showed a majority of Arizonans across the political spectrum in favor of increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour. In November 2021, the people of Sinema's hometown of Tucson approved a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Arizona's second-largest city.

NELP's new report notes that Tucson residents are on track to see a $15 hourly wage by 2025. The city's current rate is $13, but it is set to increase to $13.85 on January 1, with a $10.85 tipped wage—both in line with the state's floor.

Worker wins from 2022 highlighted in the report include campaigns in Foster City and San Mateo County, California; Hawaii; Nebraska; Tukwila, Washington; and Washington, D.C.

\u201cPlus, in the South, underpaid workers are demanding higher wages & stronger labor standards. @RaiseUptheSouth is organizing workers in the service sector throughout the region #OrganizeTheSouth #UnionsForAll\u201d

— NELP (@NELP) 1671722150

"In 2023 and 2024, the campaigns to watch include an $18 ballot measure in California and possible ballot measures in Arizona, Ohio, and Michigan," the publication points out.

"On the legislative front, there may be one fair wage campaigns in Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland," the report adds, "as well as efforts to raise the minimum wage in Maryland (to speed up the state's implementation of a $15 minimum wage), Massachusetts (where the minimum will reach $15 in 2023 and there are no inflation adjustments planned for following years), and New York (where the demand is $21.25 by 2026-2027)."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II wrote an open letter Sunday imploring Senate Democrats to pass legislation that would protect voting rights, raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, and enshrine reproductive freedom—all bills that have already been approved by House Democrats this session—before Republicans take control of the lower chamber in a few short weeks.

Sen. Raphael Warnock's (D-Ga.) recent reelection victory "was not the result of ending voter suppression," wrote Barber. Instead, it provided "evidence of the exceptional efforts of the people despite voter suppression—especially poor and low-wage voters of different backgrounds who joined neighbors who oppose extremism to give you an expanded majority."

"This coalition wants to see bills that have passed the House and are sitting on [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer's [D-N.Y.] desk become law before this Congress comes to an end," Barber noted.

"We know that voting rights protections, a $15 minimum wage, and protections for women's rights have stalled because two Democrats have not been willing to unite around plans to carve out the filibuster and overcome the united obstruction of 50 Republicans," he continued, referring to Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), who officially switched her party registration to Independent in the wake of Warnock's win.

But given how "the midterms have unfolded for the Senate, you have a mandate from the voters now," Barber added. "And you have a narrow window in which your party can unite to make a real difference for the people. Now is the time to act."

Once House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) "takes over the House," Barber warned, "you will have no chance of passing any of these policies for the next two years."

On social media, Barber pointed out that there has been no shortage of proposals for how to circumvent Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) obstructionism, from reforming the filibuster to outright abolishing the anti-democratic 60-vote requirement.

The bottom line, he stressed, is that "you can't say the rules keep you from doing something when you have the power to change the rules."

In his open letter, Barber told Senate Democrats that "you cannot afford to let history record that over a two-year period you did not use every method at your disposal to pass the For the People Act, Voting Rights Act Restoration, $15 dollar minimum wage, and protection of a woman's right to choose—measures that already passed in the House, but have been blocked by the Senate's filibuster."

"Warnock won because poor and low-wage voters showed up, young people showed up, women showed up, and people who might not have supported a Democrat before showed up to say that they want to see these things happen," Barber emphasized. "Why don't you confound the common sense about lame-duck sessions and show the people who worked tirelessly to keep you in power that you are ready to go to work for them?"

"It has been more than nine years since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and 13 years since the federal minimum wage has increased," he added. "You would not have won the majority you now enjoy without the support of people targeted by voter suppression and low-wage workers. In this moment, you have the opportunity to vote for them. Now is the time to call the votes."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Rejimon Kuttappan.

Wage theft includes a range of illegal practices, such as paying less than minimum wage, withholding tips, not paying overtime, or requiring workers to work through breaks or off the clock. It impacts service workers, low-income workers, immigrant and guest workers, and communities of color the most, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s “Cheated at Work” series, published from May 2021 to March 2022. An Economic Policy Institute study from 2017 found that just one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations—costs US workers an estimated $15 billion annually and impacts an estimated 17 percent of low-wage workers.

Based on their independent analysis of fifteen years of reports from the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, Campbell and Yerardi concluded that companies engaging in wage theft “have little incentive to follow the law.” In 2019 alone, the Department of Labor cited more than 8,500 employers for stealing approximately $287 million from workers. Major US corporations—including Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle K Stores—are among “the worst offenders,” Campbell and Yerardi reported.

The labor department’s Wage and Hour Division, which is charged with investigating federal wage-theft complaints, “rarely penalizes repeat offenders,” Campbell and Yerardi explained. Between October 2005 and September 2020, the agency fined “only about one in four repeat offenders.” In just 14 percent of the documented cases, companies were ordered to pay workers cash damages, and since 2005, the agency has allowed more than 16,000 employers to avoid paying more than $20 million owed in back wages.

Lack of resources at the federal level is blamed for lax enforcement. As of February 2021, the Wage and Hour Division employed only 787 investigators, a proportion of just one investigator per 182,000 workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, Campbell and Yerardi noted. For comparison, in 1948 the division employed one investigator per 22,600 workers, or eight times the current proportion. Insufficient federal enforcement is “especially problematic” for workers in states that lack their own enforcement agencies: some fourteen states “lack the capacity to investigate wage theft claims or lack the ability to file lawsuits on behalf of victims,” according to the 2017 Economic Policy Institute report.

Strong state and local laws can help to protect workers and could offset weak federal enforcement. Campbell and Yerardi’s report mentioned local successes in Chicago (2013), Philadelphia (2016), and Minneapolis (2019), for example. But, as the reporters also noted, workers’ rights advocates continue to seek federal reforms, appealing to Congress to allocate funding to double the number of federal investigators. Terri Gerstein observed in May 2021, writing for the Economic Policy Institute, that in lieu of federal enforcement, and in response to “widespread, entrenched, and often egregious violations of workplace laws, an increasing number of district attorneys and state attorneys general have been bringing criminal prosecutions against law-breaking employers.”

Nonetheless, wage theft appears to be on the rise. A September 2021 study by One Fair Wage and the University of California, Berkeley, Food Labor Research Center found that 34 percent of workers in the service sector reported experiencing more violations of their rights—including wage theft—in 2021, compared to 2020. Some 35 percent of surveyed service workers reported that tips plus additional wages did not bring them up to their state’s minimum wage, and 46 percent reported that employers did not compensate “time and a half” for working overtime.

Since May 2021, a handful of corporate news outlets, including CBS News, covered or republished the Center for Public Integrity’s report on wage theft. Corporate coverage tends to focus on specific instances involving individual employers, but otherwise pays little attention to wage theft as a systemic social problem or to anemic federal enforcement. For example, a September 2021 NBC News report framed wage theft cases as “disputes” involving “dueling claims that are difficult to verify.” Verifying systemic wage theft has become easier, however, thanks to the Center for Public Integrity’s March 2022 decision to make the data and code used in their yearlong “Cheated at Work” investigation available to the public.

The story may gain more traction now that Congress is starting to pay attention. In May 2022, US House lawmakers introduced H.R. 3712, known as the “Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act of 2022,” which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to protect workers from wage theft, according to Ariana Figueroa of the Virginia Mercury. Minnesota congressperson Ilhan Omar said, “It is clear more DOL [Department of Labor] funding and additional federal reforms are needed in our localities in order to protect our most vulnerable workers.”

Alexia Fernández Campbell and Joe Yerardi, “Ripping off Workers without Consequences,” Center for Public Integrity, May 4, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Advisor: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

The post #2 Wage Theft: US Businesses Suffer Few Consequences for Stealing Millions from Workers Every Year appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Nebraskans voted Tuesday to incrementally raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026 as corporate price hikes continue to eat into workers' paychecks and the federal wage floor remains stuck at a paltry $7.25.

The ballot measure, known as Initiative 433, succeeded by a vote of 58.2% to 41.8% despite opposition from influential corporate lobbying groups in the state, including the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce.

Starting in 2023, Nebraska's current $9 minimum wage will rise to $10.50 and increase by $1.50 every year until it reaches $15 an hour in 2026. Thereafter, the wage will be adjusted for inflation, which is currently at a four-decade high.

"We know from experience that fair pay drives hiring, employee retention, and the excellent service our customers count on."

While some Nebraska business organizations campaigned against Initiative 433—trotting out the well-worn and debunked argument that a minimum wage hike would come at the expense of jobs—more than 300 small business owners in the state publicly endorsed the ballot measure.

"Voters did the right thing for workers and businesses in passing Initiative 433," said Steph Terry, director of operations, Morrow Collision Center in Lincoln. "We know from experience that fair pay drives hiring, employee retention, and the excellent service our customers count on. Raising the minimum wage will help our state build a stronger workforce and economy."

Holly Sklar, CEO of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, said in a statement Wednesday that "minimum wage increases don't stay in workers' pockets."

"They go right back into communities as workers and their families have more to spend at local businesses," said Sklar. "Now Congress needs to get the message and raise the abysmal $7.25 federal minimum wage."

Since the national Fight for $15 movement began a decade ago, states, cities, and localities across the country have raised their minimum wages, delivering pay increases to tens of millions of workers amid continued federal inaction. The federal minimum wage has been stagnant for 13 years, keeping the wage floor low in a number of states.

The raise that Nebraska's minimum wage workers will see in 2023 will be the first since 2016, when the state minimum wage rose from $8 an hour to $9.

"Local businesses like mine depend on local spending," said Cinnamon Dokken, the owner of A Novel Idea Bookstore in Lincoln. "The last time Nebraska increased the minimum wage, our revenues grew and we raised our wages. We look forward to that again with the passage of Initiative 433. Raising the minimum wage will put more money in workers' pockets and foster the better job performance that is vital for small business competitiveness."

The minimum wage was also on the ballot elsewhere in the U.S. on Tuesday. In Washington, D.C., voters approved a ballot initiative that calls for raising the minimum wage for tipped workers from $5.35 per hour to $16.10 per hour by 2027.

A ballot measure in Portland, Maine that proposed raising the city's minimum wage to $18 an hour and eliminating the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers was rejected by voters, a defeat campaigners attributed to an aggressive corporate misinformation effort.

"The National Restaurant Association, Uber, and DoorDash poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread misinformation and lies, confusing workers and voters," Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, said in a statement Wednesday. "We will keep fighting to get One Fair Wage in Maine, especially now with inflation making it hard for people to survive."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post What’s the Problem with 3.9 Percent Annual Wage Growth? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Job Growth Led by Health Care and Manufacturing

Job growth was strong across sectors, but it was especially strong in health care and manufacturing. Health care added 52,600 workers in October, and it has added 298,800 workers since May. This is largely catch-up since the sector’s employment had lagged earlier in the recovery. It is now 0.5 percent above the pre-pandemic level.

Manufacturing added 32,000 jobs in October, and employment in the sector is now 1.1 percent above the pre-pandemic level. Manufacturing is usually hit hard in a recession, but to date does not seem to have been much affected by the Fed’s rate hikes.

Construction Employment Edges Up, Jobs Related to Mortgage Financing Fall

Higher interest rates have certainly taken a toll on construction, as is most evident in the plunge in housing starts. Nonetheless, employment in the sector increased by 1,000 in October, with residential construction showing a small gain. Employment is now 1.3 percent above pre-pandemic levels. Workers are still needed to finish the many homes that are still under construction.

The impact on the credit intermediation sectors that are involved in mortgage issuance is easier to see. The number of people working in these sectors fell by 4,400 in October and is now down 36,600 from its April peak.

Airlines Add Jobs, Internet Retailers Lose Jobs

The airline industry added 4,200 jobs in October. Employment is now 10.6 percent above its pre-pandemic level, even though air travel is still below pre-pandemic levels. Employment at Internet retailers fell by 300 in October, as people are switching back to in-store shopping and also buying fewer goods. It is now down 0.6 percent from its peak last November, but still 10.6 percent above the pre-pandemic level.

Sectors Having Trouble Hiring Are Now Adding Jobs

Nursing homes added 4,100 jobs in October, while childcare centers added 4,900. Employment in the sectors is still down by 13.7 percent and 8.4 percent, respectively. The low pay in these sectors have made it difficult to get workers.

Local governments added 29,000 jobs in October, while state governments lost 7,000. They are now 3.3 percent and 1.1 percent below pre-pandemic employment levels, respectively.

Restaurants added just 6,000 jobs in October, but this followed an increase of 69,000 in September. This is likely just an error in the data rather than a sharp plunge in job growth. Employment is still 4.6 percent below the pre-pandemic level. Hotels added 19,900 jobs in October, but employment is still 17.1 percent below its pre-pandemic level.

Women Accounted for 66.1 Percent of Payroll Employment Growth in October

Women again accounted for the bulk of payroll job growth in October. They have accounted for 59.3 percent of job growth since May. They now are 49.91 percent of payroll employment. There were some months before the pandemic when women held more than 50.0 percent of payroll jobs.

Weekly Hours Stable in October

Average weekly hours were stable at 34.5 in October. This is down from a peak of 35.0 earlier in the recovery. This is another sign of the labor market normalizing. It suggests employers are not making workers put in more hours due to an inability to hire new workers.

Wage Growth Nears Noninflationary Pace

The annual rate of wage growth over the last three months is just 3.9 percent. This rate is very close to being consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 inflation target. (It is somewhat higher at 4.4 percent, using my preferred measure of taking the average wage for the last three months, compared to the average of the prior three months.)

Hourly wage growth was 3.4 percent in 2019, when inflation was comfortably below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. By this measure, the Fed’s work is largely done.

Labor Force Participation Edges Down, Prime Age Participation Drops 0.2 Percentage Points

The overall labor force participation rate edged down 0.1 percent to 62.2. The participation rate for prime age workers fell 0.2 percentage points to 82.5 percent. This is 0.6 percentage points below the pre-pandemic peak, but equal to the average for 2019.

Share of Unemployment Due to Voluntary Quits Falls

The percentage of unemployment due to voluntary quits fell sharply in October to 14.6 percent. This number is erratic, but the October figure is consistent with a strong, but normal labor market.

Employment Rate for Workers with Disabilities Hits a New Record High

The employment rate for people with disabilities rose to 22.0 percent in October. This is a new record high. This is likely due to a combination of a strong labor market and a huge expansion in opportunities for work from home.

Average Duration of Unemployment Spells Rises

For the first time since April, both the average duration of unemployment spells and the share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) rose. The average duration rose from 20.2 weeks to 20.8 weeks, while the share of long-term unemployed rose from 18.5 percent to 19.5 percent. This is consistent with the modest rise in recent weeks in the number of people receiving unemployment benefits.

Strong Jobs Report with Inflationary Pressures Waning

On the whole, this is a very positive report. The job growth is somewhat higher than can be sustained over the long term, but not hugely so. Most importantly from an inflation perspective, wage growth is now very close to being at a noninflationary pace. Other items in this report, such as the drop in the share of unemployment due to voluntary quits and the stabilization of average weekly hours at pre-pandemic levels, are also consistent with a strong, but normal labor market.

We should never make too much of a single month’s data, but as the rate of wage growth falls back near  a noninflationary pace, there is a reasonable case for the Fed pausing rate hikes to get a better picture of their impact to date.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has endorsed what he calls an "important" citizen-initiated referendum in nearby Portland, Maine, telling supporters in an email Thursday that the city "has the potential to pass the most progressive, inclusive minimum wage initiative in the history of the United States."

"A 'Yes' on Question D would raise the minimum wage for all workers to a living wage of $18 an hour—including tipped workers, workers with disabilities, youth, gig workers, and incarcerated workers," Sanders wrote. "As you might expect, opposition from the billionaire class and the ultra-wealthy to Question D has been fierce."

"Lobbyists like the National Restaurant Association, large corporations like Uber and Doordash, and real estate developers have collectively poured more than $600,000 into Portland on mailers, advertising, and misinformation campaigns," Sanders continued, "all so they can continue to pay restaurant workers and gig workers subminimum wages."

"As a result of their efforts, polling shows a very tight race," he added. "And with only a few days to go until the vote is decided, it's up to our progressive movement in Maine to stand together and fight to pass Question D."

The Portland Press Herald reported that the proposal "was put on the ballot by the Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America's Livable Portland campaign, which has said it's expected to raise wages for about 22,000 workers across the city."

"Sanders is the latest in a flurry of last-minute endorsements secured by One Fair Wage, a national group focused on eliminating subminimum wages that allow certain workers, such as restaurant servers, to earn less than the standard minimum wage," the newspaper noted. "Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, said the senator has been working with that organization for years on minimum wage issues."

Sanders urged voters to sign a petition in support of the ballot measure. Those who do so are redirected to the Maine voter information lookup service, where they can confirm their polling location.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has remained stagnant since 2009 and provides only a fraction of what a full-time worker needs to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home in the United States. The federal subminimum wage of $2.13 per hour for tipped workers has not been raised since 1991.

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, a full-time worker would need to make $17.74 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Maine, meaning the statewide minimum of $12.75 ($6.38 for tipped workers) and Portland's current minimum of $13 ($6.50 for tipped workers) are inadequate. If Portland voters approve Question D during the November 8 midterms, the city would have an $18 hourly wage floor.

"At a time when half of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and millions of people earn starvation wages and struggle to put food on the table, the wealthy and powerful have never had it so good," wrote Sanders.

The Vermont progressive expanded on that point Friday in a Fox News op-ed modeling the kind of anti-corporate profiteering and pro-working class messaging he would like to see prioritized by the Democratic Party, with which he caucuses.

"What we are seeing all across the country and in every sector of our economy is that working people are standing up in the face of corporate greed, demanding fairer wages, better working conditions, and the dignity and respect on the job that they deserve," Sanders wrote in his Thursday email.

"Our greatest weapon in this fight is solidarity," he concluded. "The people of Portland, Maine have an incredible opportunity this Tuesday to continue our movement's collective struggle by voting 'Yes' on Question D."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Pennsylvania's Democratic U.S. Senate nominee John Fetterman released a video Friday highlighting the refusal of his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, to say whether he would vote to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour.

During Tuesday night's televised debate between the two candidates, Oz was asked three times if he supports lifting the nation's hourly wage floor, which has remained stagnant since 2009 and provides only a third of what a full-time worker needs to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home in the United States.

The super-wealthy celebrity television doctor failed to answer each time, baselessly claiming that "market forces have already driven up the minimum wage" even as roughly 650,000 Pennsylvanians are currently struggling to survive below, at, or near the minimum wage.

"It's clear that Oz does not give a shit about the working people of Pennsylvania," Fetterman campaign spokesperson Joe Calvello said in a statement. "If Oz does not believe that we need a higher minimum wage, then he should move out of his ten mansions and live on $7.25 an hour to show us how it's done."

Fetterman has previously drawn attention to how Oz, whom he calls an "out of touch" multimillionaire, exploited a tax break intended to help struggling Pennsylvania farmers when he purchased 34 acres of rural land in Montgomery County for $3.1 million late last year.

Oz, who is backed by former President Donald Trump and long resided in a New Jersey mansion he still owns, acquired the Pennsylvania farmstead—one of his many properties around the globe—weeks after he launched his Senate campaign. He used the address of a Pennsylvania house owned by his in-laws to switch his voter registration in 2020, when Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) announced his impending retirement.

Oz "wears suits and shoes that cost more than some people make in a year," Calvello said Friday, "and yet he does not believe workers deserve dignity in their paycheck."

By contrast, Fetterman is an unequivocal supporter of congressional legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Fetterman is currently leading Oz in the polls by one percentage point, down from 10.2 percentage points last month. The outcome of this pivotal battleground state race will help determine which party controls the Senate.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

The post Russia and NATO Tried to Wage War on the Cheap in Ukraine, But Could Now be Heading for Total War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

The Minimum Wage Council decided on next year’s salary in a meeting held Wednesday. Cambodia’s unions asked for a minimum wage ranging from $206 to $213, but employers and government officials agreed to increase it to $198, according to a statement from the Ministry of Labor. 

The country’s leader, Hun Sen, decided then to round the figure up to $200, the statement said. When state benefits are included, the minimum income for Cambodians now comes to between $217 and $228, the statement said.

Cambodia’s Minister of Labor Ith Sam Heng told reporters the new wage will help workers, but union leaders and workers told RFA’s Khmer Service they were disappointed with the raise.

“I am sad because the government must play a vital role in defining the new minimum wage, and they know about inflation,” Yang Sophorn, the president of Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions (CATU), told RFA. 

“Inflation is 5 percent. The government only added $6 to the current minimum wage of $194,” she said.

The Cambodian Labor Federation was unhappy with the decision, its president, Ath Thun, told RFA.

“We don’t like the results, but it has been done. The union will continue to work with workers and listen to their reactions,” Ath Thun said. “We will ask the government to reduce utility bills and fight against inflation, especially in gasoline and food prices.”

Yorn Yoert, a worker, told RFA that she has begun cutting back on food to save money.

“I eat food not for enjoying its taste, but just to survive, because I have reduced spending,” she said. “Before I had three meals daily but now I skip breakfast.” She also criticized the wage increase as insufficient.

Exploitation abroad

Many Cambodian workers reject the kow pay and seek opportunities in neighboring countries like Thailand. But migrants told RFA that they face exploitation by their employers and risk imprisonment if caught by authorities without proper documentation. 

Thai employers sometimes force Cambodian migrants to work overtime without pay, Ling Sophon, project coordinator for the Phnom Penh-based Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights NGO, told RFA. 

Workers report that the documents that they need to legally work in Thailand are more expensive, and there are not many job opportunities right now, he said. 

Migrants are also unfamiliar with immigration laws and Cambodian officials often don’t help them if they get arrested, Ling Sophon said. Over the last three months, migrants have complained about their difficulties renewing their passports, work permits and other documents, she said. 

The husband of Cambodian migrant Chey Mom was recently arrested by Thai police and sentenced to 18 months in jail, she told RFA. The couple had been living in Thailand for the past seven years.

She said that since the arrest it has become harder to support her two children, who are of school age. She also asked Cambodia’s government for help.

Another migrant, Cheng Nai, told RFA she is continuing to work in Thailand even though she risks arrest after she lost her legal documents when COVID-19 pandemic hit the country. 

The pandemic has also decreased job opportunities as tourism dried up. But she won’t go back to Cambodia, she says, because the pay is much lower and there are even fewer jobs.

“Here it is easier to find a job, I am 41 years old now, I am afraid in Cambodia they will stop taking [older workers],” Cheng Nai said. “In Thailand they accept me for jobs even though I don’t have a passport. I want to work in Thailand.”

 Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Karl Patrick Suyat, 19, has no personal experience of the tyrannical rule of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. But memories of the atrocities and human rights violations committed during those dark moments have transcended time.

The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law. But this year also saw the return of the Marcoses to power — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is now the President of the republic and spoke yesterday at the UN General Assembly.

Despite efforts of Martial Law survivors, human rights groups, and even academics to remind the Filipino people of the abuses of the Marcos family, Marcos Jr was still able to clinch the country’s top post.

• READ MORE: Networked propaganda: How the Marcoses are using social media to reclaim Malacañang
• Networked Propaganda: How the Marcoses are rewriting history
• Martial law brutality in ‘educational’ musical drama Katips touches raw nerve in NZ – David Robie
• Martial Law Day in the Philippines

Fueled by outrage and anguish, Suyat thought of a way to channel his energy and still fight back despite the Marcoses’ victory — he founded “Project Gunita” (remember) along with Josiah Quising and Sarah Gomez.

Project Gunita is a network of volunteers and members of various civil society organisations that aim to defend historical truth. They particularly push back against historical denialism and protect truths about the Martial Law years.

Through the project, the three founders and their members created a digital archive of all materials that contain information about Marcos’ Martial Law to preserve them.

Archiving is not new since other government offices and groups like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation and the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, under the Commission on Human Rights, have made efforts to preserve Martial Law materials.

But Project Gunita is born out of the spirit of volunteerism and nationalism among young Filipinos.

From old newspapers, magazines, and books — Project Gunita members seek and buy materials, and then scan them to be preserved in the archives. The project’s archiving started right after Marcos Jr’s victory.

“Having read through the history of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini to Adolf Hitler to Ferdinand Marcos himself, lagi’t-laging ang unang hinahabol, ang unang-unang tinatarget ng mga diktador ay ‘yong mga silid-aklatan, libraries, at ‘yong mga arkibo – the archives (always, the ones being targeted first by dictators are libraries and archives),” Suyat told Rappler.

Suyat believes that the Marcoses won’t be content with just distorting and whitewashing the atrocities of the Marcos administration. They would eventually go after the archives to erase the truth, Suyat added.

“The only question is when, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And I don’t want to wait until that time happens before we start to scramble around to save the archives.

“Habang may panahon pa (while we still have time), while we can still do it, ‘di ba? (right?) Bakit hindi natin gagawin? (Why don’t we do it?).”

Even before Marcos Jr’s victory, journalists have pointed out that his family not only revises history, but also introduces an alternative history that favours them. The Marcoses also rode on various disinformation networks to disseminate falsehoods.

A two-part investigative story by Rappler showed how the Marcoses used social media to reclaim power and rewrite history to hide their wrongdoings.

Passing the torch
The personal experiences of Project Gunita founders fanned their desire to continue the fight of the generation who came before them. Suyat, who grew up in a family of Martial Law survivors, feels it is his responsibility to protect their stories.

“I cannot allow their stories, as well as the stories of people I had gotten acquainted with later in life who are Martial Law survivors to be erased by historical denialism, that we all know is being perpetrated by the Marcos family,” Suyat told Rappler in a mix of English and Filipino.

Josiah Quising, a co-founder of Project Gunita and a lawyer, believes that these stories should be preserved because true justice for Martial Law victims has yet to be attained.

“It’s very frustrating ‘yong justice system sa Pilipinas and how, for decades, ay wala pa ring totoong hustisya sa mga nangyari during the Martial Law era,” Quising told Rappler. (It’s very frustrating, the justice system in the Philippines, and how, for decades, there has been no true justice for everything that happened during the Martial Law era.)

On the inauguration of Marcos Jr, Martial Law survivors led by playwright Boni Ilagan pledged to continue guarding against tyranny.

In the same event, they had a ceremonial passing of the torch, which symbolized the passing of hope and responsibility from Martial Law survivors to the younger generation.

Suyat and Quising believe that their generation is equally responsible for guarding the country’s freedom — at least in their own way. They strongly believe that since the government is now being led by the dictator’s son, they cannot expect it to preserve the memories of Martial Law, so they have to step in.

Preserving truths from generation to generation

“Wala ka namang naririnig.
‘Di ka naman nakikinig
Parang kuliling sa pandinig
Kayong nagtataka
Ha? Inosente lang ang nagtataka,”
Inosente lang ang nagtataka by Bobby Balingit

(You hear nothing. But you are not listening. Like a chime to the ear. You who wonder. What? Only the innocent wonder.)

This song comes to Kris Lanot Lacaba’s mind whenever he hears people deny the atrocities of Martial Law. His father, Pete Lacaba, a poet and journalist, was tortured and arrested under the Marcos regime.

As a son of a Martial Law survivor, Lacaba has heard stories of torture and violence straight from the victims themselves. He recalled that it was on the pavements of Camp Crame, where his father was imprisoned, that he learned how to walk.

Even though decades have passed since those dark periods, he still vividly remembers how his father became a victim of Marcos’ oppressive rule.

“Ang ginagawa ro’n, may dalawang kama tapos pinapahiga ‘yong tatay ko, ‘yong ulo niya sa isang kama, ‘yong paa niya sa isang kama. At ‘pag nahulog ‘yong kama niya ro’n eh gugulpihin pa siya lalo (What they did to my father was, there were two beds and they would tell my father to lie down, his head on one bed, and the other, on the other bed. If he fell, he would be beaten further),” Lacaba told Rappler.

Aside from his father, his uncles Eman Lacaba and Leo Alto were both killed during Martial Law. It is extremely hard for Lacaba to respond to people who deny that human rights violations happened under Martial Law.

Now that he has his own children, Lacaba passes on the stories of Martial Law to them so the memories would be preserved.

“Mahirap eh, bilang magulang. Paano ba natin ikukuwento ito? Pa’no ba natin ipapamahagi ‘yong karanasan ng magulang nila at ng mga lolo’t lola nila?” Lacaba said. (It’s hard as a parent. How do we tell this story to the kids? How do we tell the kids about the experiences of their parents and grandparents?)

He even thinks of ways to make the stories appropriate to his children.

“So kinukuwento namin sa mga bata, ‘no? Hinahanapan namin ng paraan na maging appropriate sa age din nila ‘yong mga kuwento.” (So we tell the stories to my children. We find ways to make the stories appropriate to their age.)

Aside from his kids, Lacaba says he would always accept invitations by schools and universities to share the Martial Law story of his family. He believes that in this way, he will not only share the truths he learned from his father, but get to listen to other stories, too.

After all, Lacaba believes, conversation about Martial Law should reach everyone.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Low-wage workers and campaigners across Nebraska celebrated Secretary of State Bob Evnen's Tuesday announcement that a measure to raise the hourly minimum wage from $9 to $15 by 2026 will be on the ballot in November.

"The cost of groceries, housing, and basics have gone up for years, and the minimum wage hasn't kept up."

The campaign for the minimum wage ballot measure turned in 97,245 verified signatures and hit the 5% threshold in 44 counties—or over 10,000 signatures and six countries more than the numbers required by the state constitution, Evnen revealed.

"Working Nebraskans are long overdue for a livable wage. We're excited to share this milestone with Raise the Wage Nebraska and everyone involved in this campaign," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a group that backs progressive ballot measures.

"We have repeatedly seen how ballot measures are an essential tool for voters to create urgently needed change when Washington fails to act," Hall added. "Time and time again, when commonsense policies to ensure basic economic fairness are placed on the ballot, voters choose progress."

Raise the Wage Nebraska—a coalition of over two dozen groups and a few local lawmakers—welcomed the development on Twitter, declaring that "60,000 Nebraskans are working full-time jobs at minimum wage" and "it's time to make sure they're paid fairly."

"This is great news for Nebraska workers and families," Nancy Williams, president and CEO of coalition member No More Empty Pots, told WOWT. "One in five workers who will benefit is a parent supporting children and trying to make ends meet. The reality is that the cost of groceries, housing, and basics have gone up for years, and the minimum wage hasn't kept up."

As WOWT detailed:

The first increase would be in January 2023 to $10.50 per hour. Minimum wage workers would see their biweekly pay rise from roughly $720 to $840—an increase of $3,120 per year.

Further increases would happen annually until 2026 when the minimum wage reaches $15 per hour or $31,200 annually.

While celebrating the minimum wage progress, the ACLU of Nebraska, another coalition member, highlighted that a voter identification constitutional amendment will also be on the ballot for this year's general election.

"We will keep reminding Nebraskans that voter ID is voter suppression," the group tweeted. "Make sure your voice is heard this election and vote like your rights depend on it."

According to Evnen, the voter ID amendment effort submitted 136,458 valid signatures and hit the 5% threshold in 76 of Nebraska's 93 counties.

"For tens of thousands of Nebraska voters, voter ID would be a hindrance and impediment to casting their ballot," warned the group Civic Nebraska. "This is a hasty constitutional rewrite to extinguish voter protections and reduce the ability and opportunity to vote."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ruby Lott-Lavigna.

Texas and Arizona have begun busing refugees at their border—at a cost of millions—up to a couple liberal Northern cities . . . let's see how they like it!

Texas, according to Gov. Greg Abbott, "has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe"—you know, from the hordes of rapists or whatever storming across America's insecure border, which of course is 100 percent the fault of President Joe Biden.

I also note a certain politically transcendent brilliance to the busing scheme (however inadvertent it may be): giving the whole country a chance to play a role in helping refugees.

The threat to America! Hungry, desperate people...children...yearning for safety, yearning for security and acceptance. What choice does the governor have but to do what he can, what he must, to make this nuisance go away—and in the process turn the refugees into pawns in a snarky game of political back-and-forth across the Mason-Dixon line?

A year ago I wrote: "We pretend to have enemies, but mostly what we 'have' are people whose lives simply don't matter. And then we kill them, either directly—via airstrikes or other war games, turning them into collateral damage—or indirectly...by simply failing to care that they exist.

"The moral idiocy of this transcends cruelty and indifference. We're also killing ourselves. The idea that humanity—that life itself—is 'all one' isn't just a nice thought, an outreach of kindness, but the cornerstone of survival."

In other words, what if . . . ?

What if we as a nation saw the "threat" posed by desperate refugees at the Southern border to be the military and social upheaval that drove them out of their homelands—much of it, of course, the result of U.S. policy—and our national instinct was to respond with empathy to their needs: to welcome them, to help them, to value them? I don't say this simplistically. This is an extraordinarily costly idea—free healthcare, free salvation, for the whole damn planet?

But this is the irony. We spend enormous amounts of money simply having enemies. Texas, for instance, has reportedly run up a bill of about $7 million busing multi-thousand "illegals" up to Washington, D.C., and New York City. What if this money were spent actually helping them instead?

However, I also note a certain politically transcendent brilliance to the busing scheme (however inadvertent it may be): giving the whole country a chance to play a role in helping refugees. All of which brings up what is perhaps the largest question in the political universe: Why do we spend trillions of dollars preparing for and waging war and, in comparison, pennies on the creation of peace—on the outreach and empathy that emerge from our knowledge that we are all one? Let me put it even more simply: Why do we take war for granted?

I mean, so much for granted that our investment in it is not only limitless but without the least bit of awareness—awareness that wars are never won and never end. And so last month, the U.S. House passed next year's defense budget, adding $37 billion to Biden's proposal and pushing it well over $800 billion.

Jared Golden, the Democratic rep who initially proposed pushing the military budget beyond the Biden proposal, justified the budget this way: "We need only look to world events in Ukraine, read reports regarding China's plans and actions in the South China Sea, or simply read the latest headlines about Iranian nuclear ambitions and North Korean missile tests, as well as ongoing terrorist threats, in order to see why this additional funding is necessary to meet the security challenges of our time."

So let's toss in a few billion more dollars! That'll keep us safe. But almost none of that money will be spent attempting to heal the consequences of the wars we wage. Migrants who flow across the border are called "unauthorized" and they overwhelm the communities they enter, be those communities on the Texas and Arizona borders or in New York and Washington. These communities are overwhelmed, of course, because they lack the resources to deal with this inflow. But what if immigrants were simply seen as fellow humans, and helping them were an obvious priority—indeed, a significant factor in national (and global) security?

Yeah, I know, that's absurd. What matters, as a Forbes article points out, is whether we have "the capabilities and capacity to deter and if necessary, defeat, challenges from major-power rivals China and Russia, as well as deal with those posed by Iran, North Korea, and global terrorism."

A hungry child at our border? Forget it!

The Forbes story breaks down the amount of money the new budget proposal allots to each branch of the military, casually noting that 3.2 percent—this is approximately $25 billion—would go to...fasten your seatbelts!...the Space Force.

"Space is vital to U.S. national security and integral to modern warfare," the White House declared in a budget summary document. "The budget maintains America's advantage by improving the resilience of U.S. space architectures to bolster deterrence and increase survivability during hostilities."

There's not even a national debate about this. Basic human needs go barely addressed or, at worst, utterly unfulfilled at every level of the national and global social structure, and most politicians, most of the media, most people in power, meet it with a shrug. Sorry, the money isn't there! But us-vs.-them still revs the engines of official thought, and they've just allotted $25 billion to fund a new version of Star Wars.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

There's a lot to feel pessimistic about these days.

The past few years have been marked by successive crises—a raging pandemic, a planet on fire, and a Supreme Court bent on rescinding fundamental rights.

For many in our country, the American experiment is failing. But California has stood strong, thanks to the courage and action of progressive leaders who have pushed ambitious legislation to protect us.

"We've done the hard work—our measure qualified for 2024. But this measure wasn't designed to help working people two years from now."

As families across the nation braced for the end of free school lunch programs, California moved quickly to make free meals permanent for all public school students, regardless of their family's income.

On the heels of the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres, our elected leaders passed bold gun control laws to restrict access to weapons and create an avenue for private citizens to sue the industry.

Two days after the dangerous Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe V. Wade, our lawmakers agreed to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot this year that would enshrine the right to abortion in our state constitution.

It’s clear that we have the political will to make meaningful, material change in the lives of Californians.

Now it’s time to turn to our poverty crisis.

Working families in the Golden State are suffocating. Gas prices are at an all-time high, grocery bills are breaking the bank, and a single medical emergency is enough to send someone into a lifetime of debt.

Just last week, it was reported that consumer prices rose 8.5% in July. We do not have an economy that works for everyone when, for millions of workers, a trip to the grocery store costs as much as a week’s wage.

So we wrote the Living Wage Act—a common-sense initiative to steadily and predictably raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 (with additional time for small businesses). It would boost the income of 5 million Californians, including nearly 200,000 workers in Fresno County, and lift 3.5 million hardworking people out of poverty.

Support for it is overwhelming—recent surveys show two-thirds of voters would support raising the minimum wage.

Workers need relief now and we submitted more than one million signatures to get on the November ballot. Unfortunately we were blocked by a Trump-nominated judge.

But we're not going to let that stand in the way of getting workers the raise they deserve.

We're taking a new approach: working with our elected partners in the California state legislature to get the job done. After all, this is a wildly popular measure among voters.

We've done the hard work—our measure qualified for 2024. But this measure wasn't designed to help working people two years from now.

Headlines are focusing on new legislation passed in Washington, D.C. to invest in clean energy, lower drug prices, and reduce the debt. Those are all worthwhile goals but we can never forget that low-wage workers are struggling right now. Once again, it’s up to California to lead the way.

California has become a bulwark for meaningful progressive change in a country that seems hell-bent on going backward.

But our sterling reputation won't hold up if we stand idly by as working Californians skip meals and ration medication to keep the lights on.

We need action now. Let's show the rest of the nation that when it comes to ending poverty, we won't take no for an answer.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Joe Sanberg.

Photo by Kayle Kaupanger on Unsplash

Identity politics got a bad name in recent years. This happened because the Democratic party abandoned its base of ordinary working people for Wall Street, and as it did so, made a big fuss about its progressive cred by appointing token women, Blacks, gay and trans people to various high perches. But not surprisingly, working people of all colors and genders concluded the Dems didn’t care about them anymore and either abandoned voting, or masochistically defected to the GOP, which meanwhile started having a field day treating Dem tokenism as proof of the Great Replacement in action.

So everyone got riled up about identity politics, while the one identity never mentioned, and possibly the most important, though assiduously elided in the public sphere, is class identity. Both political parties ignored working people’s economic concerns, to the delight of their mega-corporate donors. The public’s desire for single-payer health care, increased minimum wage, affordable higher education, decent infrastructure, an end to foreign military adventures and other such social benefits couldn’t be ditched fast enough by Dems and a GOP both utterly beholden to Big Money.

The role of identity politics in any sane attempt to fight back against the power of obscene wealth is discussed in Elite Capture, a new book by Olufemi Taiwo. It asks at the outset, what is identity politics? It is, according to Dominic Gustavo at the World Socialist Web Site and quoted by Taiwo, “an essential tool utilized by the bourgeoisie to maintain its class domination over the working class by keeping workers divided along racial and gender lines.” Hard to argue with that. But then alternatively, Taiwo asks, is identity politics “as embodied in critical race theory, a dangerous ideology and threat to the established order that the powers that be aim to stamp out?”

Possibly it is both. But personally, I fail to perceive how this ideology menaces an established order that its identity-activists have unctuously and sedulously wooed. Worse, identity politics weakens worker solidarity, because it never mentions class. And class very much divides the population. There’s even a class war, being waged by a vast clan of financial titans against the rest of us hoi polio. Class consciousness usually leads to class war, but identity politics is a different animal, a chameleon happy on either side of the class divide, and quite noticeably eager to seduce the rulers of swankier realms. It pays to keep a watchful eye on this slippery ideology.

At the same time, however, one might leave the door open and say that identity politics could conceivably threaten the status quo. Conceivably. And it has certainly helped win critical rights, from the female vote to affirmative action to gay marriage and more. But in recent years, overall, in practice it rarely menaces the established order and, as far as anyone can tell, has been pretty much co-opted by our rulers. So overall, the World Socialist Web Site seems to hit closer to the truth. Identity politics splintered the working class, and it’s hard to see how to undo the damage.

What does elite capture of identity politics mean in practice? Well, Taiwo writes, “when elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best.” So feminists supporting Hillary Clinton might fret about glass ceilings, while female home health aides just worry about making the rent. When these two cohorts join in politics, the concerns of women high up on the career ladder dominate. “At worst,” Taiwo continues, “elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.” Again, to use the HRC example, at worst women might find their feminism pressed into support of, say, U.S. imperialism, toppling foreign governments that are too left-wing (Manuel Zelaya’s Honduran presidency) and advocating the murder of leaders disliked by their feminist icons in Washington – think Libya’s Gaddafi.

Or say a young progressive congresswoman like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez goes to Washington, having campaigned on Medicare For All and a Green New Deal. But well, there’s House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the new congresswoman soon learns that it’s “my way or the highway” with centrist Dems. And so, before too long, she’s voting for billions of dollars for military aid to Ukraine, which also happens to enrich puissant defense contractors. And then maybe she yammers about freedom in Taiwan, as the military industrial complex expects her to do, while subsidized health care and the climate catastrophe slip ever further into the shadows. So what’s left? She stays passionate when it comes to bathrooms and the latest me-too tumult, but really, look at the priorities here. They seem to be that she can continue to flaunt her leftwing bona fides while ignoring other issues that just so happen to be life and death matters. And not just ignoring. In the case of Washington’s potentially globally lethal proxy war in Ukraine, she chooses the side of mass death over screaming for peace negotiations, which was, after all, the sort of thing she was elected for.

Thus goes subordination to the elites. But Taiwo’s new book, at times elliptical, highlights other oddities of identity politics. It makes clear that leftists spend far too much energy virtue signaling and not enough out there, organizing. This distracts from constructive politics. As Taiwo observes, when Flint, Michigan residents noticed that their water smelled and was yellowish brown, “in that moment what they needed was not for their oppression to be ‘celebrated,’ ‘centered’ or narrated in the newest academic parlance…What Flint residents really needed, above all, was to get the lead out of their water.” Celebrating and centering amount to deference politics. While they may have their time and place, clearly that’s not when there’s a crisis. Constructive politics, Taiwo argues, deals with the problem: it gets the lead out of the water.

It’s ridiculous that this even needs to be spelled out. But so many leftists waste so much time with well-intentioned virtue signaling that it’s no wonder so little gets done. And that’s a problem. Because there are mammoth issues out in the world that people need to address, like, to repeat that which cannot be repeated enough, the class war, and why several billion ordinary people are losing that class war.

After all, ours is a world in which “1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water.” Taiwo also cites an example from Africa, where “82 million Nigerians…live on less than a dollar a day.” These people’s carbon footprints are negligible. Yet they’re the ones climate change, caused by rich countries, will kill first – with famine due to drought, or drowning in floods, or expiring from heat stroke. The only way to change this is to organize, not to quarrel over pronouns.

So yes, continue with identity politics and virtue signal if you feel so compelled. But try to keep the outcomes of politics in mind. Of course currently raging right-wing persecution of trans people is horrible and should be opposed, and of course trans rights are human rights, but the right to an abortion is a woman’s right, as is a female prisoner’s right not to be raped by her trans-woman cellmate, and if we spend all our time fidgeting and hedging over such matters, whose truth is obvious, and fighting about them, we’re doing the enemy’s work for him. Because as I’ve heard labor leaders holler at union meetings – “The enemy is strong!” Carping at feminists for using the word “woman” just makes the enemy stronger. And so does pretending that the first Black president was anything other than a tool of the billionaire oligarchy. The elites have “a big [slightly diverse] club,” as comedian George Carlin said, “and you ain’t in it!” And you ain’t in it for one main, rock-solid reason: you belong to the wrong class.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

Photo by Kayle Kaupanger on Unsplash

Identity politics got a bad name in recent years. This happened because the Democratic party abandoned its base of ordinary working people for Wall Street, and as it did so, made a big fuss about its progressive cred by appointing token women, Blacks, gay and trans people to various high perches. But not surprisingly, working people of all colors and genders concluded the Dems didn’t care about them anymore and either abandoned voting, or masochistically defected to the GOP, which meanwhile started having a field day treating Dem tokenism as proof of the Great Replacement in action.

So everyone got riled up about identity politics, while the one identity never mentioned, and possibly the most important, though assiduously elided in the public sphere, is class identity. Both political parties ignored working people’s economic concerns, to the delight of their mega-corporate donors. The public’s desire for single-payer health care, increased minimum wage, affordable higher education, decent infrastructure, an end to foreign military adventures and other such social benefits couldn’t be ditched fast enough by Dems and a GOP both utterly beholden to Big Money.

The role of identity politics in any sane attempt to fight back against the power of obscene wealth is discussed in Elite Capture, a new book by Olufemi Taiwo. It asks at the outset, what is identity politics? It is, according to Dominic Gustavo at the World Socialist Web Site and quoted by Taiwo, “an essential tool utilized by the bourgeoisie to maintain its class domination over the working class by keeping workers divided along racial and gender lines.” Hard to argue with that. But then alternatively, Taiwo asks, is identity politics “as embodied in critical race theory, a dangerous ideology and threat to the established order that the powers that be aim to stamp out?”

Possibly it is both. But personally, I fail to perceive how this ideology menaces an established order that its identity-activists have unctuously and sedulously wooed. Worse, identity politics weakens worker solidarity, because it never mentions class. And class very much divides the population. There’s even a class war, being waged by a vast clan of financial titans against the rest of us hoi polio. Class consciousness usually leads to class war, but identity politics is a different animal, a chameleon happy on either side of the class divide, and quite noticeably eager to seduce the rulers of swankier realms. It pays to keep a watchful eye on this slippery ideology.

At the same time, however, one might leave the door open and say that identity politics could conceivably threaten the status quo. Conceivably. And it has certainly helped win critical rights, from the female vote to affirmative action to gay marriage and more. But in recent years, overall, in practice it rarely menaces the established order and, as far as anyone can tell, has been pretty much co-opted by our rulers. So overall, the World Socialist Web Site seems to hit closer to the truth. Identity politics splintered the working class, and it’s hard to see how to undo the damage.

What does elite capture of identity politics mean in practice? Well, Taiwo writes, “when elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best.” So feminists supporting Hillary Clinton might fret about glass ceilings, while female home health aides just worry about making the rent. When these two cohorts join in politics, the concerns of women high up on the career ladder dominate. “At worst,” Taiwo continues, “elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.” Again, to use the HRC example, at worst women might find their feminism pressed into support of, say, U.S. imperialism, toppling foreign governments that are too left-wing (Manuel Zelaya’s Honduran presidency) and advocating the murder of leaders disliked by their feminist icons in Washington – think Libya’s Gaddafi.

Or say a young progressive congresswoman like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez goes to Washington, having campaigned on Medicare For All and a Green New Deal. But well, there’s House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the new congresswoman soon learns that it’s “my way or the highway” with centrist Dems. And so, before too long, she’s voting for billions of dollars for military aid to Ukraine, which also happens to enrich puissant defense contractors. And then maybe she yammers about freedom in Taiwan, as the military industrial complex expects her to do, while subsidized health care and the climate catastrophe slip ever further into the shadows. So what’s left? She stays passionate when it comes to bathrooms and the latest me-too tumult, but really, look at the priorities here. They seem to be that she can continue to flaunt her leftwing bona fides while ignoring other issues that just so happen to be life and death matters. And not just ignoring. In the case of Washington’s potentially globally lethal proxy war in Ukraine, she chooses the side of mass death over screaming for peace negotiations, which was, after all, the sort of thing she was elected for.

Thus goes subordination to the elites. But Taiwo’s new book, at times elliptical, highlights other oddities of identity politics. It makes clear that leftists spend far too much energy virtue signaling and not enough out there, organizing. This distracts from constructive politics. As Taiwo observes, when Flint, Michigan residents noticed that their water smelled and was yellowish brown, “in that moment what they needed was not for their oppression to be ‘celebrated,’ ‘centered’ or narrated in the newest academic parlance…What Flint residents really needed, above all, was to get the lead out of their water.” Celebrating and centering amount to deference politics. While they may have their time and place, clearly that’s not when there’s a crisis. Constructive politics, Taiwo argues, deals with the problem: it gets the lead out of the water.

It’s ridiculous that this even needs to be spelled out. But so many leftists waste so much time with well-intentioned virtue signaling that it’s no wonder so little gets done. And that’s a problem. Because there are mammoth issues out in the world that people need to address, like, to repeat that which cannot be repeated enough, the class war, and why several billion ordinary people are losing that class war.

After all, ours is a world in which “1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water.” Taiwo also cites an example from Africa, where “82 million Nigerians…live on less than a dollar a day.” These people’s carbon footprints are negligible. Yet they’re the ones climate change, caused by rich countries, will kill first – with famine due to drought, or drowning in floods, or expiring from heat stroke. The only way to change this is to organize, not to quarrel over pronouns.

So yes, continue with identity politics and virtue signal if you feel so compelled. But try to keep the outcomes of politics in mind. Of course currently raging right-wing persecution of trans people is horrible and should be opposed, and of course trans rights are human rights, but the right to an abortion is a woman’s right, as is a female prisoner’s right not to be raped by her trans-woman cellmate, and if we spend all our time fidgeting and hedging over such matters, whose truth is obvious, and fighting about them, we’re doing the enemy’s work for him. Because as I’ve heard labor leaders holler at union meetings – “The enemy is strong!” Carping at feminists for using the word “woman” just makes the enemy stronger. And so does pretending that the first Black president was anything other than a tool of the billionaire oligarchy. The elites have “a big [slightly diverse] club,” as comedian George Carlin said, “and you ain’t in it!” And you ain’t in it for one main, rock-solid reason: you belong to the wrong class.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

Californians may have gotten temporary relief recently when gas prices finally fell to about $6 a gallon this month, down from as high as $8 per gallon in June in Los Angeles County. Inflation has rocked the economy, soaring 9.1% from a year ago in June.

It's time to give workers a dignified wage—one that affords them adequate food, housing, and transportation.

But even before inflation spiked, Californians were already weathering an affordability crisis. California has some of the nation's highest housing expenses, the most expensive gas and the third highest overall cost of living. A single adult in California needs to earn at least $21.82 an hour to make ends meet, according to a living wage calculator by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If you're a single parent with one child, that figure rises to $44 and nearly $55 if you have two kids. It's no surprise nearly half of residents surveyed earlier this year were considering ditching the state altogether.

California's low-wage workers need a minimum wage hike. The Legislature should make it happen.

Californians almost got a chance to vote to raise the minimum wage this year. In December, entrepreneur and anti-poverty advocate Joe Sanberg launched the campaign to put the California Living Wage Act of 2022 on the November ballot. The initiative aimed to gradually raise the state's minimum wage to $18 by 2025. But it failed to qualify for the upcoming election because counties were unable to verify enough signatures in time. Sanberg sued to force Secretary of State Shirley Weber to place the measure on this year's ballot, but a judge last week found that Weber had acted properly and ruled against the campaign for missing a key deadline to get the measure on this year's ballot. The measure has instead qualified for the 2024 ballot.

If voters want a minimum wage bump sooner, it will likely need to come from the Legislature.

Lawmakers could introduce a bill to raise the minimum wage one dollar each year until it reaches $18 an hour in 2025, similar to the California Living Wage Act.

California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon's office told me he hasn't weighed in on the lawsuit but that "he's always supportive of efforts to raise the minimum wage." Good. Then why wait for voters to decide in 2024? The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom could act sooner to lift up low-wage earners.

In 2016, the Legislature passed a $15 minimum wage, with polling suggesting most voters supported the policy. Now there may be concerns that raising the minimum wage will fuel inflation by increasing the costs of goods and labor. But that shouldn't be a serious worry. A policy brief by Michael Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley, found that if implemented, the California Living Wage Act would raise prices by just .042% over three years, debunking possible fears that higher wages will stoke inflation.

Another reason fears of inflation are likely unwarranted: The proposal isn't a large step up in wages. Jacobs estimates that the $1,349 average income boost represents a roughly 5% increase in workers' wages. "The thing that really struck us is how this is a very modest proposal," Jacobs said. "The costs are extraordinarily small for very meaningful benefits for the families who gain higher wages."

That doesn't mean such a measure would have no effect on businesses and consumer prices. Studies find that minimum wage laws result in a modest rise in prices and a minimal increase in unemployment rates in some sectors, such as manufacturing. The policy brief reports that minimum wage workers are concentrated in just a few industries. Two of them—restaurants and retail—employ 31% of California's minimum wage workers and would shoulder the costs associated with an $18 minimum wage by raising prices for consumers. But the brief notes the price increases are not expected to be large enough to significantly drive down consumer demand in those industries.

Still, some businesses, especially those with few employees and thin profit margins, could suffer as a result of raising the minimum wage, and their costs could very well increase, even if the overall burden on the economy is slight.

"Call small businesses and ask them when the minimum wage goes up if they will eat it or if they will pass the cost on to their customer. I bet if you called 50, all 50 would tell you, 'Yes, we will pass the cost of the increased expense on to our customers,'" Clint Olivier, CEO of Business Federation of the Central Valley and a former Fresno City Council member, told me.

This is the heart of policymaking: accepting necessary tradeoffs. In this case, the need for poverty relief should be our top priority. The merits and established benefits of a higher minimum wage outweigh the risks to some businesses and industries.

With a minimum wage roughly twice of the $7.25 federal mandate, California is sometimes perceived as a state of progress and prosperity. But for many the reality is one of crummy wages and a cycle of poverty; the state's average per capita income was still a meager $38,576 in 2020, according to the Census Bureau, with the highest poverty rate in the country when the cost of living is factored in.

If the Legislature doesn't act now, workers could lose the crucial gains of this measure. Though 37 localities have their own higher wage standards and inflation adjustments, some of which could reach close to $18 by 2025, many others do not. The UC Berkeley policy brief notes that two-thirds of California's private sector workers live outside such counties, meaning they would only receive the state's automatic minimum wage increase. That figure is set to reach $16.50 by 2025.

It's time to give workers a dignified wage—one that affords them adequate food, housing, and transportation. Let's give California's workers the pay they deserve.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Isaac Lozano.

Marking the 13-year anniversary of the last federal minimum wage increase in the U.S.—a meager boost from $5.15 to $7.25 in 2009—progressive campaigners on Sunday urged congressional Democrats to make another push to raise the national pay floor as inflation continues to diminish workers' purchasing power.

"Congress must act to raise wages for the tens of millions of workers who are struggling just to get by."

"Today is a sad anniversary in the United States," said Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that advocates progressive economic policy. "For 13 years now, Congress has failed to act to raise the $7.25 hourly federal minimum wage. Lawmakers have turned their backs on America's tens of millions of low-wage workers and revealed themselves to be beholden to the short-sighted interests of some of their ultra-rich donors."

According to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the real value of the federal minimum wage is currently at its lowest point in nearly seven decades amid record-high inflation, which spurred a decrease in real average hourly earnings between June 2021 and June 2022 as corporate profits soared.

"Last July marked the longest period without a minimum wage increase since Congress established the federal minimum wage in 1938," EPI noted, "and continued inaction on the federal minimum wage over the past year has only further eroded the minimum wage's value."

In 2021, Senate Democrats stripped a proposed $15 federal minimum wage from their coronavirus relief package on the advice of the chamber's parliamentarian, an unelected official tasked with offering non-binding opinions on whether legislation complies with Senate rules.

Eight Senate Democrats joined Republicans in voting down Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) last-ditch attempt to reinclude the provision, which was approved by the House.

Amid more than a decade of federal inaction, states and localities across the U.S. have raised their hourly wage floors in response to pressure from the grassroots Fight for $15 movement.

But $7.25 an hour remains the prevailing minimum wage in 20 states. The tipped subminimum wage is still $3 an hour or lower in 22 states.

Had the federal minimum wage risen at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses, it would now be $61.75 an hour instead of $7.25. If the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity since 1968, it would have been around $23 an hour last year.

"Regressive politicians across this country have kept our wages down for years," Fight for $15 wrote in a Twitter post. "That's why it's important that we get at least $15/hour federal minimum wage. That way no one gets left behind."

Morris of the Patriotic Millionaires said Sunday that "$7.25 was already inadequate back in 2009 when the minimum wage was last raised, but now it is downright deplorable."

"Since 2009, workers have endured the Great Recession, a worldwide pandemic, historic inflation, and massive changes in the cost of living," Pearl added. "And what have they gotten in return? A minimum wage that is worth 27% less than its 2009 value, one that now isn't enough to afford even a single-bedroom apartment in 93% of the country."

"In the face of rapidly rising costs for American families, Congress must act to raise wages for the tens of millions of workers who are struggling just to get by. They must immediately raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. Our country cannot afford to reach a 14th anniversary of $7.25."

And if congressional Democrats can't muster "the political will" to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour—a move that would boost the incomes of more than 30 million people across the country—"then the president must act," said Pearl.

"When President Biden came into office, he raised the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors to $15," he pointed out. "Given the rising cost of living, he should now raise the minimum wage for federal contractors even higher, to no less than $20 an hour. This move will benefit hundreds of thousands of workers, prove to voters that Democrats care about working people, and provide a strong example to spur Congressional Democrats to action."

"The president," Pearl added, "is supposed to be the leader of our country—it's time for Biden to lead on this critical issue.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

A Sacramento judge ruled Friday that an initiative to raise California's minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 cannot appear on the state's ballot this coming November, even though the campaign behind the proposal obtained more than enough signatures.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James Arguelles' ruling stems from a dispute between the Living Wage Act campaign and the office of California's Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who said county officials didn't verify a sufficient number of signatures in time.

"The conservative tilt of one courtroom will not stop us from doing what is right for Californians. The people are on our side."

As Cal Matters reported Friday, "The minimum wage campaign argued that Weber's office confused county election officials because she told them they had until July 13 to finish the count, based on the requirement that counties get 30 working days for signature verification after campaigns turn in their petitions."

"Proponents collected 1 million signatures, but didn't turn in signatures until May, Weber’s office said, making them late to start the clock," the outlet explained. "By the June 30 deadline to qualify for this November's ballot, several counties had not finished verifying signatures and the campaign fell short."

The Living Wage Act campaign—whose lead backer, investor and anti-poverty activist Joe Sanberg, has characterized Weber's decision as "an honest mistake"—opted to sue the secretary of state in a last-ditch bid to get the initiative on the ballot in November.

But Arguelles ultimately sided with Weber's office and barred the popular proposal from the 2022 ballot after the California Restaurant Association and the California Business Roundtable—leading corporate lobbying groups in the state—pleaded with the judge to rule against the minimum wage proposition.

Campaigners pointed out Friday that Arguelles is the same judge who granted a months-long signature-gathering extension to proponents of a failed effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year.

In June 2020, former President Donald Trump selected Arguelles to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, but the Senate never advanced his nomination.

"Though he saw fit to offer right-wing extremists a three-month extension to recall our governor, he declined to give voters an opportunity to pass a measure that would lift working people out of poverty," Sanberg, U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), and UNITE HERE Local 11 co-president Ada Briceño said in a joint statement Friday.

"This gross double standard is wildly unethical," they added. "But the conservative tilt of one courtroom will not stop us from doing what is right for Californians. The people are on our side. Raising the minimum wage is not a partisan issue—it is wildly popular among voters. Recent polling shows that more than two-thirds of voters support an $18 minimum wage."

The ballot initiative proposed incrementally lifting California's minimum wage to $18 an hour, starting with an increase to $16 next year.

California's minimum wage is currently $14 an hour for businesses with 25 or fewer employees and $15 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees. MIT's Living Wage Calculator estimates that an adult with one child would have to make at least $44.18 an hour working full-time to meet essential needs in the state, where housing costs and other expenses are high and rising.

"Increasing the state's minimum wage to $18 would eliminate poverty among all the 3.53 million non-elderly Californians in poor working households."

According to an analysis by Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, the Living Wage Act of 2022 (LWA) would have raised pay for roughly 4.8 million California workers by 2025 while having a "minimal effect on the number of jobs."

"The LWA would also restore inflation-generated losses in worker purchasing power caused by gaps in current laws, while increasing overall prices about 0.014 percent per year for three years," Reich found. "Equally important, increasing the state's minimum wage to $18 would eliminate poverty among all the 3.53 million non-elderly Californians in poor working households."

In their statement on Friday, Sanberg, Barragán, and Briceño lamented that "today, a Trump-nominated judge ruled against 5 million Californians."

While the initiative has formally qualified for the November 2024 ballot, the campaigners argued that "workers cannot wait another two years for a raise."

"They are barely earning enough to afford next month's rent," said Sanberg, Barragán, and Briceño. "As the cost of living in the Golden State continues to skyrocket, it is vitally important that our state leaders step up to the plate and fight for those Californians living on the bleeding edge of poverty."

"We move forward in the fight for a state where one job is enough to get by," they continued. "Tomorrow, we will begin pursuing alternative, legislative paths to pursue this essential increase to California's minimum wage. We encourage longtime supporters of working people, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, to join us as we accelerate our work to deliver on this moral imperative."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The Lao National Labor Committee announced the raise on July 8, which boosts the minimum wage by 100,000 kip (about U.S. $6.70) per month. 

Business owners told RFA that they are still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, which sharply reduced their revenue.

“I was not informed of this, and I have not made any increase for my workers,” the owner of a water and ice business in the capital Vientiane told RFA’s Lao Service. “I see that the Lao economy is not going well, and business operators will have a hard time if they have to increase minimum wage at this time.”

A garment worker in Vientiane agreed that businesses need more time.

“Some companies are seeing losses or they are not earning any profits right now,” the garment worker said. “For example, the company I am working for is facing losses and the company owner is still keeping the business running, but has to cut costs here and there to survive. … I only survive month-to-month with this wage.”

The wage increase is designed to help Laotians cope with rampant inflation in the country. But it isn’t clear how extensively the new pay minimum will be applied.

The government cannot force business owners to increase wages if they have reached an agreement with their workers on pay and other benefits, an official from the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare’s Department of Labor Management told RFA.

“If they mutually agreed that the business operators provide food and accommodation to the workers, the business operators and workers can keep wages the same,” the official said. 

“We cannot force the business operators to increase the minimum wage because companies or business operators have their own conditions and policies with their hired workers. If there is any case of taking advantage of the workers, we, as a government body, can go to workplaces and investigate problems,” the official said.

An official from the Lao Federation of Trade Unions told RFA that the union will encourage workers to add clauses to their employment contracts that would force businesses to adhere to minimum wages as set by the government.

“The government has suggested to all business operators to increase the minimum wage.

However, it depends on each company or business’s decision to increase to this suggested minimum wage. Each company and business operator has its own policy and conditions,” the trade union official said.

Even with the increase, the minimum wage is not enough to keep up with the cost of living, several Lao workers told RFA. A worker from Vientiane told RFA that the government should mandate an even higher increase and also do more to moderate food prices.

Fuel shortages and an overreliance on imports have sharply raised the cost of living in Laos. Foreign currency reserves have grown scarcer, leading to a devaluation of the kip, which in turn adds pressure on prices. 

“They will add around $6.50 to the current minimum wage per month to about $79 per month,”  the worker said. “This will not help very much. Even though I earn over 1.3 million kip, or about $85 per month, I still find it very hard to survive.”

After the Aug. 1 increase to 1.2 million kip, the minimum wage should increase to 1.3 million kip by May 1, 2023 according to the National Labor Committee.

The increases are targeted at workers in the manufacturing and service sectors working a minimum of 26 eight-hour days per month, or six days per week.

The minimum wage does not apply to overtime pay. Business owners have to pay an extra 15 percent of minimum wage to workers performing duties that are hazardous.

The move to 1.2 million kip minimum wage comes after Phonesane Vilaymeng, vice president of the Lao Federation of Trade Unions, told state media on May 1 that the current wage of 1.1 million was no longer viable considering the higher cost of living.

An official of the organization also told state media that the country would lose more workers to neighboring Thailand if it kept the minimum wage so low. The Lao Federation of Trade Unions in March proposed that the minimum wage be raised to at least 1.5 million kip, or about $99 per month, by May 1,  International Labor Day.

Translated by Phouvong. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

Wage Growth Moderates Further

Perhaps the best news in this report is further evidence of moderating wage growth. The annualized rate of wage growth, comparing the last three months (April, May, June) with the prior three months (January, February, March), was 4.3 percent. That is down from an annualized rate of 6.1 percent, comparing the winter (November, December, January) to the fall (August, September, October).

This is a huge deal because the Fed’s plans for aggressive rate hikes was based on a concern for a 1970s-type wage-price spiral. It is impossible to have a wage-price spiral when wage growth is slowing. As it is, the 4.3 percent annualized rate of wage growth is only a 0.9 percentage point higher than the 3.4 percent rate in 2019 when inflation was comfortably below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.

Construction Again Adds Jobs, Manufacturing Employment Above Pre-Pandemic Levels

Construction added 13,000 jobs in June, with gains elsewhere offsetting a small decline in residential building. Overall employment in the sector is now 0.6 percent above pre-pandemic level. Lower housing starts will be a drag on employment in the sector, although this will be at least partially offset by easing supply chain problems, which is allowing for more completions. Manufacturing added 29,000 jobs, pushing employment in the sector slightly above its pre-pandemic level.

Air Transportation and Retail Add Jobs

Air transportation added 7,500 jobs in June. Employment in the sector is now 7.9 percent above the pre-pandemic level. The retail sector added 15,400 jobs, putting employment now 1.2 percent above the pre-pandemic level.

Healthy, but More Normal Job Growth in Hotels and Restaurants

Hotels added 14,800 jobs in June, while restaurants added 40,800 jobs. These are strong numbers but not out of line with what might be expected in a normal month with good job growth. These sectors were among the hardest hit by the pandemic.

Employment in hotels is still down 18.0 percent from its pre-pandemic level. Restaurant employment is 5.9 percent lower. It is likely that with a permanent decline in business travel, hotels will not recover their pre-pandemic employment levels. The same is likely the case with restaurants, where real sales are already well above pre-pandemic levels.

Nursing Homes and Childcare Centers Add Jobs, but Employment Still Far Below Pre-Pandemic Levels

Both nursing homes and childcare sectors have had difficulty adding jobs in the recovery as low pay and difficult working conditions make these jobs relatively unattractive. Nursing homes and childcare added 5,400 and 10,600 jobs in June, respectively. This leaves employment in the sectors 14.4 percent and 9.6 percent below pre-pandemic levels.

Local Government Adds 5,000 Workers, Employment Still Down 599,000 from Pre-Pandemic Level

Like nursing homes and childcare centers, state and local governments have had difficulty attracting workers in the recovery. Employment in local government is still down by 4.1 percent from pre-pandemic levels. More than half the drop is in local government education. State government employment is down by 57,000, or 1.1 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

U-6 Measure of Labor Market Slack Hits Record Low

While the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.6 percent in June, a sharp drop in the number of people involuntarily working part-time lowered the U-6 measure of labor market slack to 6.7 percent, the lowest level on record.

Drop in Labor Force Participation Rates

The overall labor force participation rate (LFPR) fell by 0.1 percentage point to 62.2 percent. The LFPR for prime age (25 to 54) men dropped by 0.3 percentage point, while it fell 0.2 percentage point for prime age women. The June LFPR for men was 0.8 percentage point below its pre-pandemic peak, while it was 0.5 percentage point lower for women.

Length of Average Workweek Stable

The length of the average workweek was unchanged at 34.5 hours in June. For production and nonsupervisory workers, it was 34.0 hours, down from 34.3 hours last June. Employers that can’t find workers often increase workweeks. This does not seem to be a problem now.

Share of Unemployment Due to Voluntary Quits Rises, but Still Below Peaks

The percent of unemployment due to voluntary quits rose to 14.0 percent, still well below peaks of more than 15.0 percent hit in February of this year and peaks hit in 2000 and 2019. This is consistent with a strong, but healthy labor market.

Another Really Great Jobs Report

The June report showed considerably stronger job growth than was generally expected. It also showed a labor market that is looking more normal, although still very strong. We continue to see moderation in wage growth, which should alleviate concerns about a 1970s wage-price spiral. The unemployment rate remains near a 50-year low and the U-6 measure of labor market slack is the lowest on record. If the economy stays on this path, the second half of 2022 should look very good, as the supply chain issues get largely resolved and prices fall back to more normal levels in many areas.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

New figures published Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that wage growth continued to decelerate last month, prompting economists to redouble their warnings that additional large interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve could undermine the solid job market and hurl the country into recession.

Average hourly wages in the U.S. rose 0.3% in June, according to the Labor Department data, which showed that hiring remained strong last month and the official unemployment rate held steady at a historically low 3.6%.

"If they go too far too fast, the shining achievement of a rapid recovery from a horrendous economic shock could be squandered."

Over the past year through June, average hourly earnings are up 5.1%, a slight decrease from the past 12 months through May, a period in which wages rose 5.1%.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted in an analysis of the government numbers that "the annualized rate of wage growth, comparing the last three months (April, May, June) with the prior three months (January, February, March), was 4.3%."

"That is down from an annualized rate of 6.1%, comparing the winter (November, December, January) to the fall (August, September, October)," Baker observed. "This is a huge deal because the Fed's plans for aggressive rate hikes were based on a concern for a 1970s-type wage-price spiral. It is impossible to have a wage-price spiral when wage growth is slowing."

The Economic Policy Institute's (EPI) Heidi Shierholz reacted similarly to the fresh report, writing that nominal wage growth is "clearly decelerating, which is enormously consequential for Fed policy."

"Make no mistake, we want positive real wage growth for workers," Shierholz continued, alluding to the fact that wage gains have been eroded significantly by inflation. "But—and this is hugely important—this decelerating wage growth means the Fed doesn't need more interest rate increases to contain inflation."

The new economic data comes just under three weeks before the central bank's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is set to convene and decide its next steps in its bid to tame sky-high inflation. Analysts expect the Fed to implement another major rate hike—potentially 75 basis points, the same as last month—despite warnings that doing so risks unnecessarily choking off investment and throwing millions out of work.

While Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said that "wages are not principally responsible for the inflation that we're seeing," he has also voiced a desire to "get wages down" as part of the effort to rein in prices, which have been pushed to historic highs by factors that—by Powell's own admission—are largely out of the central bank's control.

It's unclear whether the recent deceleration in wage growth will be sufficient for Fed officials to reverse course on rate hikes. During last month's meeting, according to FOMC minutes, the nation's central bankers cited "elevated nominal wage growth" and "persistent wage pressures" as cause for concern, even as economists noted at the time that wage growth was cooling substantially.

Amid increasingly vocal warnings from experts and progressive lawmakers about the dangers posed by the Fed's approach to inflation, President Joe Biden has declined publicly to criticize it.

Ahead of Friday's data release, EPI director of research Josh Bivens wrote in a blog post that "the entire case for raising rates is to slow economy-wide spending and engineer higher unemployment so that growth in labor incomes can be reined in, which will dampen both potential cost-drivers of inflation (wages) and reduce household demand for goods and services."

But if wage growth is already slowing, Bivens cautioned, "the implications are startling: there really is no need for any further tightening from the Fed."

"And if they go too far too fast," he added, "the shining achievement of a rapid recovery from a horrendous economic shock could be squandered."

Dr. Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Friday that "while the labor market has experienced robust job growth in recent months, we must reject calls to push the economy into a recession and put millions out of work in the name of combating inflation."

"Doing so would be especially catastrophic for Black workers, who face nearly double the unemployment rate of white workers even in the best of times," said Mabud. "Rather than condemning millions to joblessness, we must make the critical, long-overdue investments in care, climate, and housing that will bring down costs and strengthen our economy as a whole."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Will Moderating Wage Growth Ease Inflation Fears? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Small teams of U.S. Special Operations forces are involved in a low-profile proxy war program on a far greater scale than previously known, according to exclusive documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials.

While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the Pentagon’s use of the secretive 127e authority in multiple African countries, a new document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act offers the first official confirmation that at least 14 127e programs were also active in the greater Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as recently as 2020. In total, between 2017 and 2020, U.S. commandos conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world.

Separately, Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, confirmed the existence of previously unrevealed 127e “counterterrorism” efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

“If someone were to call a 127-echo program a proxy operation, it would be hard to argue with them.”

Source: Pentagon documents and former officials.Graphics: Soohee Cho for The Intercept

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A U.S. Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha team soldier, likely on a 127e mission, according to journalist Wes Morgan, is seen along with Nigerien counterparts at a Nigerien Army range on Sept. 11, 2017.

Photo: Richard Bumgardner, SOCFWD-NWA Public Affairs

General Joseph L. Votel, U.S. Central Command Commander, meets members of the Lebanese Armed Forces during his visit to the Amchit military base August 23, 2016.

Photo: U.S. Embassy Beirut

A heavily redacted memorandum on the 127e program obtained via FOIA.

Screenshot: The Intercept

“There are legitimate issues with the U.S. partnering with some units of the Egyptian military.”

U.S. Army Gen. Richard D. Clarke, center, takes command of the U.S. Special Operations Command from U.S. Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, right, during a ceremony in Tampa, Fla., on March 29, 2019.

Photo: Lisa Ferdinando/DoD

“DOD views this as a small, tiny program that doesn’t have foreign policy implications, so, ‘Let’s just do it. The less people get in our way, the easier.’”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The post How Do We Get a Wage-Price Spiral When Wage Growth Is Slowing? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by James Meadway.

The economy added 390,000 jobs in May, while the unemployment remained unchanged at 3.6 percent for the third consecutive month. The May report showed clear evidence that the labor market is normalizing with wage growth continuing to slow.

The annualized rate of wage growth comparing the last three months (March, April, and May) with the prior three months (December, January, and February) was 4.3 percent, down from the 5.2 percent year-over-year increase. This is only moderately higher than the peak 3.6 percent year-over-year rate hit in February 2019. This means that if we are concerned about underlying inflation rather than supply shocks, most of the Fed’s work has been done.

Share of Unemployment Due to Voluntary Quits Edges Downward

The share of unemployment due to voluntary quits edged down to 12.8 percent. This is a sign that workers perceive they have less bargaining power. It peaked at 15.1 percent in February. It also reached levels above 15.0 percent just before the pandemic and in 2000. This is not a labor market in which workers feel totally comfortable quitting their jobs.

Hours are Also Stable

Earlier in the recovery, employers increased the length of the average workweek to a peak of 35 hours in January 2021 from a year-round average of 34.4 hours in 2019. This presumably was because of the difficulty in hiring workers. The average workweek has been at 34.6 hours for the last three months. This is consistent with a story where most employers are no longer experiencing much difficulty hiring workers.

The Slowdown in Wage Growth is Widespread

The fastest wage growth in the recovery has been at the lower end of the labor market, but the slowdown is showing up here as well. The annual rate for production and nonsupervisory workers was 5.1 percent, BUT was down from 6.5 percent year-over-year when comparing wage growth over the last three months with the prior three months. In hotels and restaurants it was 9.5 percent, down from 11.8 percent year-over-year.

Private Sector Nearly Back to Pre-Pandemic Employment Level

The private sector added 333,000 jobs in May, leaving it down by just 207,000 from its pre-pandemic level. It will likely cross this threshold in June.

Job Gains Widely Spread Across Sectors

Construction added 36,000 jobs in May, putting its employment 40,000 above the pre-pandemic level.

Manufacturing added 18,000 jobs in May, leaving its employment just 17,000 below the pre-pandemic level. Air transportation and trucking added 5,700 jobs and 13,300 jobs, respectively, in May, leaving employment in the sectors 6.3 percent and 4.3 percent above the pre-pandemic level.

Low Paying Nursing Homes and Childcare Centers Still Struggle to Find Workers

Nursing homes added 1,300 jobs in May, while childcare centers added 1,500 jobs. Employment in both sectors is still down more than 10 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

Leisure and Hospitality Sector Adds 84,000 Jobs

The leisure and hospitality sector was hardest hit by the pandemic closings. It is adding jobs at a rapid pace, but employment is still far below pre-pandemic levels. The arts and entertainment sector added 16,200 jobs, now down 211,000 jobs from the pre-pandemic level. Hotels and restaurants added 21,400 and 46,100 jobs, respectively. Employment in the sectors is now down by 383,000 and 751,000 jobs, respectively from pre-pandemic levels. It is worth noting that, despite the drop in employment, real restaurant sales are well above the pre-pandemic level.

State and Local Government Education Has Largest Job Gain in a Year

State and local government education added a total of 50,700 jobs in May. This is the largest gain since July 2021. Employment in public education is still 280,500 below its pre-pandemic level, as schools have had trouble attracting workers. The May jump is a big step towards reversing this shortfall.

Retail Sector Shows Big Job Losses in May

The retail sector lost 60,700 jobs in May, 32,700 of this loss was in general merchandise stores. This is consistent with reports of falling demand by Target, Amazon, and other major chains. With these chains reporting a glut of merchandise and loss of pricing power, we may soon see lower prices for many items.

Labor Force Participation Up for Prime Age Workers

The overall labor force participation rate edged up 0.1 percentage point to 62.3 percent, but the participation rate for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54) rose 0.2 percentage point to 82.6 percent, 0.5 percentage points below the pre-pandemic peak but above the 2019 average. The rise was due to a 0.4 percentage point increase for prime-age women (the rate for men was unchanged) to 76.6 percent, a 0.3 percentage point below the pre-pandemic peak. Clearly, there has been no “great resignation.”

Self-Employment Rises in May

The number of both the incorporated and unincorporated self-employed rose in May. It now stands more than 1.1 million above its pre-pandemic level. Earlier in the recovery, it was plausible that many workers turned to self-employment because they were unable to get regular payroll employment; with the unemployment well under 4.0 percent, this is no longer the case. This jump in self-employment is by choice.

Another Very Positive Employment Report

The May employment report was just about as good as could have been hoped for. It continued to show strong job growth, but also a normalizing of the labor market that should allay concerns about the economy overheating and a wage-price spiral. Wage growth is clearly slowing, not accelerating as the wage-price spiral story would have it.

At the same time, most of the data look very similar to the strong pre-pandemic period. Most measures of employment and labor force participation rates are near pre-pandemic peaks and above 2019 averages. While payroll employment is still below the pre-pandemic level, it is important to remember that if we add in self-employment, current levels are considerably higher.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

A blitzkrieg Russian invasion of Ukraine it was not. Marshall Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s famed tank general, must be rolling in his grave. Had Stalin still been in the Kremlin, Russia’s generals and defense minister would have by now been shot. At that time, the Red Army and its 50,000 tanks were believed able to burst through Germany’s Fulda Gap and central Austria and reach the key US supply base at Rotterdam in a week.

After three months of desultory fighting, the Russian army has managed to occupy some border areas in Ukraine and the key communications hub of Mariupol, cutting off Ukraine from its access to the Black Sea. Ukraine’s very important exports of grains have been blocked, undermining its economy but not proving a decisive move to end the war between self-proclaimed independent Ukraine and its western allies on one side and Russia and neighboring Belarus on the other. The proposed joining of Finland and Sweden to NATO is a political backfire for the Kremlin, but means little from a military viewpoint since both nations have long been covert NATO allies. ‘Neutral’ Switzerland has also been another not-so-secret member of the alliance.

But in fact, the US and its NATO allies have been locked in a nasty, covert war against Russia that threatens to erupt at any time into a conventional, then nuclear conflict. This quasi-war is the result of the refusal by the US and NATO to exclude their alliance from formerly Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe and pushing it to Russia’s very borders. The conflict has re-awakened dangerous problems that date back to the end of World War I when the victorious British and French, along with the credulous Americans, sought to alter Europe’s map. Vast swathes of territory were torn away from Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia leaving dangerous disputes active to this day.

What’s wrong today with Russia’s current army, once the terror of Europe? First, it’s too small. Early on, President Vlad Putin ordered serious reductions in the size of Russia’s then huge armed forces. China did the same. That was fine for peace-time, but not for waging war. Russia sent only 100,000 men to occupy and subjugate Ukraine, a vast territory the size of Western Europe. I suspect that Putin’s goal was to annex key border regions, then leave independence-minded Ukraine isolated and in grave economic distress. The expected western economic war against Russia would be partially mitigated by the economic/financial distress caused to the west and its vassal states like Egypt.

A Russian airborne attack on capital Kiev failed miserably due to Western special forces and a new supply of top-attack anti-tank weapons. Usually reliable Russian military intelligence was ignored. Civilian intelligence was allowed to design the military campaign which as we have seen turned into a stalemate. It is no coincidence that Putin was a civilian KGB intelligence officer and his powerful defense minister Sergei Shoigu was never a military officer. Russia’s forces also suffered from logistical problems. This was surprising since during WWII Soviet forces became masters of fast-moving supply support. This was a fascinating subject that I studied in depth while serving in the US Army – where I also taught military strategy and history. War is too important to be left to civilians.

What about air power, vaunted as the Queen of Battle? It’s not been much in evidence in Ukraine. NATO dares not openly intervene in Ukraine for the very good reason that Russia will likely riposte with tactical missiles against NATO air bases and major arms depots. Welcome WWIII. Convoys of tanks, armored vehicles, supply trucks, fuel and soldiers are legitimate targets for Russia’s tactical missiles, notably the accurate Iskander missiles. Cash-strapped Russia has kept its air strikes to a modest level for fear of losing valuable warplanes that it cannot afford to replace, a problem I also witnessed in Afghanistan where the deadly US Stinger missile held the Red Air Force at bay.

We have so far been very lucky that a full-scale clash has not yet occurred between the US and Russia over Ukraine, a land of no importance at all to the United States but of fundamental importance to Russia. Amid the blizzard of anti-Russian propaganda, it’s easy to forget that in 1990 Ukraine was still an integral part of the Soviet Union. Or that the US staged a coup d’état in Ukraine that brought a pro-US regime to power that shakes its fist today at Moscow. But US intelligence agencies and NATO had moved uncommonly fast to arm Ukraine with state the art anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons as well as huge amounts of ammunition. US military and economic aid to Ukraine alone exceeded $40 billion.

There’s no doubt that Russia has lost the information war in Ukraine. The massed western media has been acting as an amen chorus for the Kiev regime. Ukraine has become another ‘brave, little Belgium’ of World War I renown. Biden just ordered $40 billion more US military and economic aid on top of the $25 billion or so spent by Washington to prop up the government in Kiev. Billions more will without doubt be needed.

Meanwhile, US, British and Canadian TV are accusing Russia of massive war crimes in Ukraine. There was little such reporting when the US invaded and destroyed important parts of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen or Somalia. Afghanistan was ravaged for nearly 20 years, with B-52 heavy bombers used to raze villages and towns. All wars are a crime against mankind. There are no ‘good’ wars.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Eric Margolis.

Advocates pushing to raise California's minimum wage to $18 an hour heralded a key development Thursday as they began submitting more than one million signatures to get the Living Wage Act on the November ballot, easily surpassing the roughly 623,000 required.

"We're going to set a new bar for working people all over the country."

"California Voters have been clear: people working full time should be able to afford life's basic needs," said anti-poverty activist Joe Sanberg, who filed the ballot initiative, in a statement.

The state's current minimum wage for employers, $15 an hour, was implemented just this year, though the wage drops to $14 an hour for companies with fewer than 26 employees.

Sanberg says the wage floor is clearly insufficient.

"Californians simply cannot afford to support a family on the current minimum wage—which amounts to just $32,000 a year for someone working full-time," he said. "Raising the minimum wage in the Gold State is a moral imperative."

If the Living Wage Act passes in November, it would increase the minimum wage incrementally, boosting it $1 per year until reaching $18 on January 1, 2025 for employers with 26 or more workers. Employers with fewer workers have an additional year to hit that minimum wage.

Thereafter, the minimum wage for all employees would also increase over time to keep pace with inflation and the cost of living.

Sanberg estimates that wage increase could mean an additional $6,420 per year for more than 5 million workers.

Beyond organizational backers like the California Faculty Association, Unite Here Local 11, and SEIU Local 87, the proposal appears to have strong public support.

Supporters of the ballot initiative point to a survey conducted last month of 1,200 likely voters in the state showing 76% in favor of raising the wage.

"Raising the minimum wage," said California Labor Federation executive secretary-treasurer Art Pulaski, "is one of the strongest anti-poverty measures we have as a state."

"For low-wage workers, a higher minimum wage is life-changing," he said. "Better wages for workers also means they have more to spend at local businesses in our communities. If we're serious about combating poverty and reducing inequality, raising the minimum wage is an absolute necessity."

According to Sanberg, successful passage of the initiative could reverberate nationwide.

"Not only are we going to give 6M+ California workers a raise," he tweeted Thursday, "we're going to set a new bar for working people all over the country."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Andrea Germanos.

Starbucks' billionaire CEO Howard Schultz announced during a quarterly earnings call on Tuesday that the coffee giant will soon be raising wages and improving benefits for employees across the United States—except for the workers at dozens of stores who have voted to unionize or filed for a union election in recent months.

"We do not have the same freedom to make these improvements at locations that have a union or where union organizing is underway," Schultz told Starbucks shareholders Tuesday, noting that management must bargain with unionized locations over wage and benefit changes.

"This is an extension of other threats that Howard Schultz and their management team have been making."

Under the new company policy, which is set to take effect on August 1, Starbucks employees will get a 3% raise or a wage bump to $15 an hour, whichever results in the highest wage. More experienced hourly workers will receive larger pay increases.

The corporate practice of discussing benefits and wage hikes that would not automatically apply to organized workers is a common union-busting tactic, and labor law experts said Schultz's new plans may very well be illegal.

According to Matthew Bodie, a former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) attorney who now teaches law at St. Louis University, companies are not allowed to suggest that employees will receive superior compensation if they decide not to unionize.

"If Starbucks said, 'Drop the union campaign and you'll get this wage increase and better benefits,' that'd clearly be illegal," Bodie told the New York Times on Tuesday. "Hard to see how this is that much different in practice."

Longtime labor journalist Steven Greenhouse argued that the Starbucks CEO's announcement "smells like illegal discrimination against union members for having dared to defy Howard Schultz and unionize."

"I predict the NLRB will move quickly to find this a nationwide violation of federal law and will order Starbucks to give unionized baristas the same wage increases," Greenhouse added. "Under Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, it is 'Unlawful to discourage union activities or sympathies'... 'by discrimination in regard... to any term or condition of employment to... discourage membership in any labor organization.'"

Starbucks Workers United, an employee-led group that is spearheading the national organizing drive, wrote on Twitter Tuesday that "our campaign has pressured Howard Schultz and Starbucks to announce many of the benefits that we've been pushing for since day one and we’ve proposed at the bargaining table in Buffalo," where workers voted in December to form the company's first-ever union in the U.S.

Since the December victory, more than 50 Starbucks locations across the country have voted to unionize, defying a Schultz-led union-busting campaign that has included intimidation and firing of organizers, sweeping cuts to work hours, and more. The union has been victorious in roughly 85% of elections so far.

"We have filed charges against Howard Schultz's threats that union stores won't receive these benefits," Starbucks Workers United noted Tuesday. "That's not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it."

In a letter to the NLRB earlier this week, the counsel at Starbucks Workers United argued that Schultz's recent comments about excluding unionized workers from new benefits have had an "immediate and profound chilling effect on organizing campaigns nationwide."

Starbucks Workers United told CNBC in a statement Monday that Schultz's remarks amount to "just another desperate attempt to prevent Starbucks partners from exercising our right to have a union and the right to collective bargaining."

"This is an extension of other threats that Howard Schultz and their management team have been making," the group said. "Hopefully at some point Howard recognizes you cannot have a 'progressive company' and be the poster child for union-busting."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Strong Job Growth in March, But Some Evidence of Slowing Wage Growth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Sanitation workers clear an encampment of unhoused people in Los Angeles, Calif., on March 17, 2022.

Photo: Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Mayor Eric Adams holds a press conference regarding homelessness in New York City on March 29, 2022.

John Nacion/STAR MAX/via AP

Activists, supporters, and members of the unhoused community attend a protest calling for greater access to housing and better conditions at homeless shelters, outside City Hall in New York City on March 18, 2022.

Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

There is more than ample evidence that “broken windows” policing, of which encampment sweeps are a part, entrench rather than counter poverty.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

The post Wage Theft: American Businesses Steal Millions from Workers Every Year appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

I thought maybe that had changed in the years since we had a small farm, but apparently it hasn’t. I recently spoke with a young farm wife and mother who stopped by to pick up some tomato starts on her way home from her office job. She named several women from neighboring farms who were also in the workforce, even though they’d rather be home weeding vegetables in preparation for the weekend farmers’ markets and being with their kids.

If you farm in the West, where heat and drought are growing worse every year, you may have foregone planting the usual vegetable crops, culled your animals, and stripped your fruit trees. That’s because most of California is under drought emergency, which is not expected to improve.

So where will our food come from if the West Coast farmers are forced to give up? The large corporate farms typically grow one crop, and this lack of diversity also means a lack of food security. We rely most heavily on Western states for the bulk of our US-grown vegetables and fruits. Farms in other regions, including here in New England, are often smaller, more diverse, and run by a couple, one of whom earns that “less than $13 an hour.” Drought and temps are increasing here too.

One of California’s main crops is almonds. We raise and export most of the nuts grown on a million acres in this $10 billion market. One almond requires one gallon of water to grow to maturity. That’s a lot of water. Raising beef requires a lot of water too—for the corn to feed them. We also export beef and other meat products. The companies who make the big bucks benefit from big government subsidies. Remember that small farmer who sells through a CSA or at the farm markets? The only subsidy she gets is maybe a “thank you” from someone who knows the hard work that went into that lovely tomato or beautiful squash, which she probably picked before you even had your first cup of coffee that morning.

If ever there were a subsidy that should be created, it would be one for the small farmers, because they deserve to make a living and because eventually you may have to look to them for much of your family’s food. Part of our trade deficit with China is made up of imported food products that include 90 percent of the vitamin C consumed by Americans, 78 percent of the tilapia, 70 percent of the apple juice, 50 percent of the cod, 43 percent of the processed mushrooms and 23 percent of the garlic. Right, that apple juice you give your kids probably didn’t come from New England or the Northwest, nor did the cod come from coastal Maine. I won’t even go into the health and safety concerns surrounding so many imports, nor will I elaborate on the geo-political risks associated with our food security or lack thereof. And if small farmers decide to switch professions so they can actually “feed” their own families, well . . . Use your imagination.

Why must we use our resources (water) to export more than $4 billion worth of almonds, for example, when we could be helping farmers and orchardists produce safe, locally grown food for us? Why did we import $10 billion worth of vegetables in 2020, equal to a third of the quantity available to US consumers? We rely on California for most of our US-produced produce, with Mexico being the secondary source.

Getting back to climate change, or what it was known as before the term frightened too many media progressives, climate catastrophe. What happens when California can no longer supply our food, if China shuts down exports, if there is political upheaval south of the border, if hackers shut down our transportation systems? So many possibilities. How friendly are you with the lady next door who grows vegetables in her little raised bed garden? Maybe you should get to know her better—and ask her for tips on growing some of your own.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sheila Velazquez.

The post Defeat of Minimum Wage Increase Leaves People with Disabilities Behind appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Many of you in the middle class are opposed to socialism. You still think there is some chance for you under capitalism and you fear that the socialists will take what little you have and divide it among the shiftless and thriftless. You need not have the slightest fear. The socialist has no use for your small capital; it would do (them) not the least good. (They are) after the earth, the trusts, and the machinery of production. Besides, soon you will have nothing to divide. When the big capitalists get through with you, you will be ready for us. You may not be ready yet, but you are ripening very rapidly. When you have been stripped of what you have, when you have become proletarians, when you have become expropriated, you will be ready to join us in expropriating the expropriators.

— Speech by Eugene Debs over 100 years ago in Chicago about the middle-class fear of socialism

Orientation

Almost five years ago I wrote an article in Counterpunch: “Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party.” In that article I challenged the blithe interchangeability of the words “liberal” and “democrat”. I tracked eight historical changes of liberalism from left-liberal, to centrist-liberal to right-center liberals (neoliberals). I also argued that the words liberal and democracy are used interchangeably by liberals, even though it wasn’t until the 20th century that liberals were clearly for democracy (translated as universal suffrage for white males).

The problem with my article as I see it today is that I lumped upper middle-class left liberals with middle-class liberals. Two years later I wrote another article called “The Greater of Two Evils: Why the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for 85% of the U.S. Population.” In that article, I outlined how, since the 2008 crash, the social classes whose wealth grew were the ruling class, the upper-class and the upper-middle-class, constituting about 15% of all social classes. Everyone else was doing worse, including the middle-class.

In my first article I slurred the differences between the upper-middle-class and the middle-class, advocating for both classes to get out of the Democratic Party. I have since come to see (as I will get into later) that the upper-middle-class has done very well under the umbrella of the Democrats and it is not in their material interests to leave. This is no longer true of the middle-class. Historically, the material interests of the middle-class and the upper-middle-class has more in common with each other than the working-class. In other words, the difference between news anchors, lawyers, senior managers on the one hand and high school teachers, librarians and supervisors on the other hand are more differences of degree than kind. After all, they all did mental work, as opposed to the physical work of the working-class. However, in the last 50 years middle-class life has gotten far worse than the life of the upper middle-class. It has gotten bad enough to be able to say it is closer to the working-class. Whether they realize it or not, for middle-class left liberals, the Democratic Party has left the building 40 years ago.

My claim in this article is that:

1. Middle-class FDR liberals need to leave the democrats and be part of building a new party
2. Middle-class left liberals need to form alliances with the working-class and the poor, not the upper middle-class
3. The new party should advocate for socialism

What follows is why this should be so.

Difference Between FDR Liberals and Neoliberals

Left liberal values

Left liberals are broadly for the following. They are pro-science as well as for investing in scientific research and development as well as investing in infrastructure. They are for the separation of church and state as well as for the use of reason in problem-solving, such as raising children through what is called “authoritative parenting”. They support the matriarchal state: universal health care, unemployment, pensions, food stamps and a minimum wage automatically raised to keep up with inflation. They expect the state to intervene in the economy to soften the hard edges of capitalism, following a Keynesian economic policy. They are committed to gradual change and a lessening of race and gender stratification. Left liberals support an expansion of unions. This left liberalism has been present in the United States for roughly 40 years, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s.  Since then, Democratic Party has slid further and further right to the point that their platform today is a center-right neoliberal party which embodies none of these values. The problem is the collective denial left liberals have in ignoring this fact.

Right-wing neoliberal values

Neoliberals are directly opposed to the matriarchal state. They support the economic policies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Von Hayek with minimum state involvement in the economy.  Neoliberals have withdrawn funding from long-term science programs. They have presided over the rise of New Age thinking initiated by Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Aquarian Conspiracy. Neoliberals have become extreme relativists championing the rise of identity politics which began in the early 1970s. Neoliberals have lost hope and have failed to bring the principles of the Enlightenment forward. They have abandoned investment in profits made on manufacturing and instead make their profits on the defense industry, arming the entire world. Under their rein most of the remaining profit is invested in finance capital.

Neoliberals have presided over the destruction of unions over last fifty years.  They have stood by and watched the full-time, well paid secure working-class jobs disappear.  Work hours under neoliberalism have gone from 40 hours per week to at least 50 hours per week for those lucky enough to be employed full-time. In general, the standard of living has declined in the US so that the next generation can expect to make less than their parents. It’s no accident that credit cards became available to the working-class in the early 1970s, so workers didn’t have to directly face the fact that their standard of living had declined. The civil rights movement spoke to what minorities had in common with organized labor, which was low-cost housing and fair wages. Today we have individualist identity politics where being recognized for your identity along with using politically correct language is all that is asked for. In the 1960s, community college was free. In the last 50 years the cost of college education is so high that student debt appears to be debt for life.

Neoliberals have supported the explosion of the prison-industrial complex which has expanded many times over since the 60s despite the rate of crime going down. The police departments have been equipped with military weapons that make the equipment of police prior to the 1970s pale in comparison. They have presided over the growth of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies which now have control over our physical and mental health. The official diagnostic manual was 50 pages in 1950. Today the same manual is well over 1000 pages. Today upper-middle-class parents are no longer authoritative but instead are practicing a form of “permissive parenting”, which easily results in spoiled, narcissistic children, with helicopter parents fretting endlessly over their little darling’s self-esteem. Please see Table A for a comparison.

Differences Between Middle Class and Upper Middle Class

Not everyone is middle-class

In the United States, most people think of themselves as middle-class. Last time I checked 80% of the working-class mistakenly thought they were middle-class. Why? Because in Yankeedom, it’s an embarrassment to be working-class. So too, upper-middle-class people, nervous about being seen as well-to-do, play down their wealth. Nevertheless, there are real parameters around what it means to be middle-class, as I’ll get to. But first the social class composition.

Social class composition

Based on the work of William Domhoff, in his books Who Rules America and The Powers That Be, the ruling-class and the upper-class together compose about 5% of the population. They live off stocks and bonds and don’t have to work. Their investments are principally in oil, mining, the military and banking. They have been characterized as “old money” and are mostly Republicans.

The upper-middle-class is about 10% of the population. They make most of their money off scientific innovations like computers, internet and electronics. They are called “new money” and are mostly Democrats. Upper-middle-class people are also doctors, lawyers, architects, senior managers, scientists and engineers, as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities.

The middle-class consists of about 25% of the population. Occupational examples include high school and grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle managers, self-employed artisans and tiny little mom-and-pop operations. The middle-class is at the bottom rung of the Democratic Party not well-represented at all.

The working-class is about 40% of the population and consists of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. The skilled working-class include carpenters, welders and electricians, wait-staff and store clerks who are likely to vote Democrat. Their interests are not represented by the Democratic Party either. The semi-skilled are bus drivers or train operators and along with unskilled are less likely to vote. The last 10% consist of what Marx called the “lumpenproletariat” who live by their wits as prostitutes, hustlers, gamblers or those on welfare. These folks are not likely to vote either.

Income is not the most important determinant of social class: the nine dimensions of social class

When most Yankees try to understand social class, the first thing they think of is how much income a person has. But this is only one of the nine dimensions of social class, and not the most important one. Most of these dimensions are covered in the work of Marxist Erik Olin Wright as well as some of the followers of Max Weber. The first dimension of social class is technical, and this consists of three parts: a) the proportion of mental and physical work the job requires; b) the amount of independence or interdependence the kind of work involves; and c) the proportion of the work that is mechanical rote work versus creativity. So typically, a good upper-middle-class job will involve mental work, be independent from others and involve creativity. At the other end of the spectrum is unskilled working-class labor which predominantly involves physical labor and working with other people, while the work itself is repetitive. Other social classes have various combinations in between.

The second dimension of social class is political and economic authority relations. This consists of two sub-categories. The first is the degree of power the person has over resources, tools, goods and services. A capitalist has control over all these things. Workers usually have control over none of them, except that skilled workers might own their own tools. The second sub-category has to do with the proportion of order-giving and order-taking involved. The owner of a company gives orders and takes no orders. His workers take orders and don’t give orders. Middle-class people in corporations may give orders to workers but must take orders from senior management. This category is simply – who gets to boss around who and under what conditions.

The third dimension of social class is mobility. How easy is it to move up or down the class hierarchy both within one’s lifetime or across generations? The fourth dimension of social class is resources. Most people think of resources in terms of income. But wealth also includes assets such as inheritance, real estate, stocks, bonds and property. Sometimes upper-class people may work only part time, but it would be deceptive to make sense of their class position by some part-time job when they have an inheritance.

The fifth dimension of social class is education. This consists of the number of years of school completed as well as the quality of the school attended. The sixth dimension of social class is status. This is the degree of prestige in which one’s occupation is held by others. One reason why income is unstable as an indicator of social class is that some workers can make a good deal of money, such as unionized garbage collectors, but have low status. Conversely, an adjunct college instructor can have high status among the Yankee population but make significantly less money than a garbage collector.

The seventh dimension of social class is lifestyle and consumption patterns. This has four sub-categories. The first is health – birth and death rates. As many of you know, working-class people die on average seven years younger than people in the middle and upper-middle-classes. The second sub-category is how people dress, their speech patterns, body mannerisms and manners. The third sub-category is their recreational habits – whether they ski, play baseball or go bowling. The last sub-category is their religious beliefs. Religions are class divided. In the case of the protestants, there are the Unitarians, Episcopalians and Presbyterians near the top and Baptists and fundamentalists at the bottom.

The eighth dimensions of social class is the degree of awareness people have of their social class. Generally, the upper class and the ruling class are extremely class conscious and are very fussy about who is allowed into their circles. The upper-middle-class and the middle-class tend to be less class conscious. In countries other than the United States, the working-class is very class conscious. But here in Yankeedom, workers see themselves as “temporarily indisposed millionaires”. The last social dimension of class is the ability to take collective action. Capitalists at the end of World War II and soon thereafter organized a big campaign to win back the allegiance of workers. The ruling class has exclusive clubs in which they organize class strategy. The World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg group are examples. At the other end of the spectrum, when workers join unions or strike, they are showing class consciousness. No social class fits neatly into each dimension. There are what Wright calls “contradictory class locations” where a person is caught between two classes either between generations or within their lifetime.

Why does class count?

Why have I gone over the dimensions of social class in such detail? One reason is to show that upper middle-class people and middle-class people are not interchangeable. They vary in the technical division of labor, authority relations, class mobility, resources, education, status, lifestyle, degree of class consciousness and their willingness to take collective action. They also differ in their attitudes towards the meaning of work, as well as in their attitudes towards time and eating habits. If we want to suggest that the middle-class should break its alliance with the upper middle-class and get out of the Democratic Party, we have to expand and deepen their differences as I am starting to demonstrate.

Summary: two reasons why middle-class left liberal should get out the Democratic Party

Summarizing, the first thing we needed to do is to establish that the Democratic Party is a center-right neoliberal party which has next to nothing to do with being left-liberal. This is reason A to get out of the Democratic Party. The second reason is that the Democratic Party serves the interests of the upper-middle-class not the middle-class. The most obvious indicator of why the middle-class should no longer align themselves with the upper-middle-class is to understand what has happened since the crash of 2008. Both Thomas Piketty and Richard Wolff argue that the “economic recovery” was very class specific. The rulers, the upper class and the upper middle-class have done considerably better in that “recovery”. All other social classes, including the middle-class, have done worse. The middle-class, economically and in other dimensions, is far closer to the working-class than it has ever been. Reason B to get out of the Democratic Party.

But can these two classes really get along? There is a built-in tension and discomfort about doing mental work and physical work; there are differences in the degree of status in the two classes’ occupations.  If we want to move middle-class people and working-class people closer together, we have to understand their commonalities and where the tension points are in their differences.

Similarities and Differences Between Middle Class and Working Class People

Similarities

The biggest similarity between the two classes is a decline in the standard of living. This includes income, work stability, increase in hours worked and lack of benefits. Another commonality is sports. Working-class people and middle-class people can unite around being fans of baseball, football and basketball professional teams. In terms of music, rock or country rock might bring these two classes together. Another commonality is that both classes have what sociologists have defined as achieved status. Unlike the upper classes, they usually do not come into life with an inheritance. Lastly, both classes see hard work as a virtue.

Differences

One of the major differences between these two classes is that middle-class people make their living primarily by doing mental and/or supervisory work. Working-class people make their living primarily with their hands and their bodies. A second major obstacle to overcome is that middle-class jobs usually have higher status. The third difference is that middle-class people often give orders to working-class people, but the reverse is not the case. This can lead to jealousy and resentment among working-class people. Middle-class people are very individualistic and not likely to organize as a class. There is likely to be tension between the classes when the working-class agitates to start a union or take strike action. There are also differences between the classes around the meaning of work. For working-class people, the meaning of work is less important than the money and material benefits. Some middle-class people might trade off a higher paying job for work that seems socially redeeming to them.

In terms of resources middle-class people today are likely to own their own home and have stocks and bonds. Working-class people’s assets are usually a car and possibly a home. Mostly they do not own stocks. Whatever savings account they have, that is it. There are also differences in their health conditions. Working-class people are likely to have eating, drinking and smoking problems and middle-class people are healthier. Working-class people are more likely to go to gambling casinos and play the lottery. Middle-class people see that as a waste of time and money.

Another tension point is education. Usually, middle-class people will have a bachelor’s or master’s degree, while working-class people will have no degree or an associate degree at best. Middle-class people will dress, speak and have manners that will be different from the working-class, and this will produce class tensions. Middle-class and working-class people will attend different religious denominations. Working-class religious services invite submission, confessions of being a sinner as well as altered states of consciousness like speaking in tongues, singing and dancing in the church aisles. In middle-class religions, there is less pressure to make you feel like you are a sinner. At the same time, sermons are designed to appeal to what is reasonable rather than to force you to have a revelatory experience which alters one’s state of consciousness.

Middle Class People Meet Socialists

Surely you are kidding

Let’s suppose middle-class left liberals have enough doubts about the Democratic Party because they are no longer New Deal liberals, and they’re starting to see that the party no longer looks out for middle-class interests. Let’s assume that economic, political and ecological disasters will continue to plague capitalism, and somehow a third party – a mass party – has emerged founded on socialism and is getting up a head of steam. This party has some working-class support as well as some union support. What would it take for middle-class left liberals to join?

Fears Middle-class Liberals Have About Socialists

Dictatorship and one-party rule

In its propaganda war with socialism, capitalists inevitably point out some of what it perceives to be the dictatorial tendencies of communism – in Russia, China and Cuba – as the archetypal example of socialism. What it does not do is study the conditions under which one-party rule occurred and what the authorities were up against. I am not going to get into pros and cons of this here because this kind of socialism – whether Stalinist or Maoist – is only one type of socialism. There are six types of socialism. Starting from the right and moving leftward there are social democrats and then three kinds of Leninists – Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyists. Continuing leftward, there are left communists or council communists and the anarchists. In my efforts to convince middle-class liberals of the feasibility of socialism I will address as much as I can what most or all of these types are in agreement on. For now, let’s just say that dictatorial rule is not a foundational principle of socialism, even for the Stalinist and Maoist parties that have been called dictatorial by capitalists.

Furthermore, I think it is ludicrous for members of the Democratic Party to complain about the one-party rule of socialists when in Yankeedom there are only two parties. The Democratic Party is hardly democratic when it only serves the interests of the about 10% of the population (Republicans serve the ruling and upper classes) and leaves over 85% with no representation at all. The party I call the “Republicrats”, representing 15% of the population, is one party, the party of capital.

Confusion of personal property with social property

We socialists have a running joke on our Facebook posts, mostly in reaction to over-the-top conservatives who think we want to abolish personal property. We say “yes indeed, we are coming for your tooth brush.” That perceived threat is accompanied by imagining that socialists are all having group sex. But seriously, when we socialists say we want to abolish private property we only mean social property. We want to abolish capitalist control over water, food, energy systems, tools, all the necessities that people need to live. We don’t believe resources that everyone needs in order to live should be privately owned. On the other hand, personal property will remain with the individual as it would under capitalism.

Discouragement of innovation

Capitalism has a very shallow and narrow understanding of human nature. Capitalists imagine that people are lazy at heart and unless the carrot is held in front of people – the prospect of being a millionaire – they will do nothing. Further, they look at the types of “leisure” activities a working-class person enjoys after another 50-hour work week and take those as representing what human nature is really like. For example, on Friday night the worker wants to play cards. On Saturday he watches a ball game and have a few beers and on Sunday he sleeps in. For the capitalist this is lazy. What the capitalist thinks is that if workers did not have to work, then playing cards, watching football, drinking, getting laid and sleeping is all he would ever do. What the capitalist doesn’t understand is that the entire weekend is not leisure at all. Its recovery from the week and preparation for the new week.

Under conditions of socialist work, alienation would be minor – and I am being conservative here. The natural collective creativity on the job will arise. People will work less, perhaps 30 hours a week at first. Because workers will control the workplaces as well as decide what to produce, how to produce it, how much they should work and how they will be compensated, work will be a joy, not a curse as under capitalism. There will be plenty of room for innovation, in fact, much more than under capitalism where most workers are imprisoned in wage labor and told not to be curious and not have their own ideas about how things should be run.

All this collective creativity gives the lie to the ridiculous capitalist notion that people want socialism because they want “free stuff” with no contribution. All socialist plans have a budget and decisions have to be made about what and how the budget will be spent. No one will “get out of working”. What the capitalist cannot imagine is that under socialism people will want to work. The idea of not working would be painful – not liberating.

Equality of poverty

In its heyday, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party was a socialist society which produced great material wealth. The socialist countries that have been showcased by capitalists as poor – the Soviet Union, China and Cuba – were only poor during certain times of their existence. What capitalists fail to inform us of is that before the socialist revolutions, as Michael Parenti points out, those countries were even more poor. What material wealth does exist in capitalist societies has taken hundreds of years to build up. In China today, absolute poverty was eradicated within 40 years.

There will be far more innovation than existed under capitalism because under socialism the workplaces will be controlled by the workers and workers’ activities will be guided by an overall plan. To cite one instance, before Yugoslavia was destroyed by capitalists, Yugoslavian productivity under worker self-management was higher than in any capitalist country. The same was true during the Spanish Revolution under worker self-management in both industry and in agriculture.

People are naturally greedy

Cross-cultural research on happiness has found that there is a direct correlation between money and happiness when people move from poverty to a middle-class life. However, the movement from middle-class to upper-middle-class and beyond is no longer correlated to happiness. In other words, people who are upper class or upper-middle-class are not any more likely to be happy than are middle-class people. This gives the lie to the capitalist notion that people are greedy and that everyone secretly wants to be a millionaire. What is more likely is that people want to be middle-class. They want basics in material security. After that they want other things; creativity on the job, to be able to contribute to society and to be recognized for their work, to mention only a few things.

Socialists will want to abolish religion

I admit that the state socialist attempt to decree the abolition of religion was a big mistake. I also think that doing so was contrary to the principles of materialism Marxists aspire to. While I stand firm in the ontological belief that there are no gods or god, at the same time I understand the degree to which people wish to hold on to religion as an expression of their alienation of social life. As generations pass and prosperous ways of life become normalized, I predict three things will happen. First, more people will become atheists. Secondly, those who continue to believe in religion will notice that the nature of the gods, or god, will change. The gods or god will blend more with the nature we know because social life will be more likely to begin to resemble heaven on earth. Third, the fundamentalist religions that plague many working-class people will disappear because the working-class will no longer consider themselves sinners or need fire and brimstone to make things right.   

Commonalities Between Middle-Class Left Liberals and Socialists

Need for a mass party

We socialists think you’ll agree with us that we badly need a mass party that can speak to the needs of the 25% of us who are middle-class and the 40% percent of us who are working-class. This party will develop a program and a step-by-step plan for implementation of the plan over the next 5, 10 and 15 years. It will be a dues-paying party and we will implement methods for getting input into what the plan will be. The issues will be prioritized, and everyone will have a say in carrying out the plan. Once the plan is set, people will be able to sign up for tasks they agree to carry out over the course of weeks and months. In addition to a thirty-hour work week, approximately five hours per week will be devoted to this “political” work.

Massive support for Unions

We socialists know that you left liberals have supported unions from the 1930s to the early 1970s. However, we also know that it was under liberal presidents that the best organizers of unions, the communists and the socialists, were drummed out of unions in the 1950s. This limited the vision of unions as they turned into “business unions”. We also think you should be very upset with the neoliberals in the Democratic Party who have not supported unions for the last 50 years, causing union representation in Yankeedom to be now less than 10%. We hold neoliberals directly responsible for the fact that wages, working conditions and job security are pretty much last in the industrial capitalist societies. The vision of unions needs to be built back up to the ways of the Industrial Workers of the World who saw unions as workshops for how to run a society, not merely a way to sustain and improve everyday working conditions.

Society can be engineered

Like you, we socialists agree with the great project of the Enlightenment that a better society can be engineered by its members. Unlike conservatives, we do not accept that social organizations should be ruled by kings, aristocrats, priests or any traditional authorities. Neither do we think society is some kind of reform school in preparation for the next life. We also don’t think society is best governed by the automatic preservation of traditional institutions that have been here the longest. Like you, we agree in the notion of progress.

The value of science and technology in producing a society of abundance

Like you we are very disappointed and angry that capitalists have chosen to invest their profits in warfare and in finance capital rather than in scientific research that could make our lives better. We also think you should blame the neoliberals for allowing this to happen over the course of the last 50 years. As socialists we have always felt that the scientific method is the best way to know things and that science is a crucial ingredient in Marx’s call to “develop the productive forces”. For us, the creation of socialism was never any kind of sacrifice or doing with less. Nor are we unrealistic about human nature. We fully understand that the foundation of socialism has to be the production of more than enough wealth to go around. With abundance in place, there is no motivation for stealing or wanting what others have.

The value of the state overview

We socialists are in complete agreement with the value you hold about the importance of the functions of the matriarchically state. We also think it is important that the matriarchal state take over the realm of overall planning. This does not mean that all social production and distribution is centrally planned with no feedback from the local and regional levels. We see the relationship between the three in a dialectical manner. The local and regional levels feed up to the state level what products and services are needed. The state incorporates our feedback but then makes adjustments based on the fact that at the local and regional level we cannot see the whole. Once the state produces an over-all plan, that is then fed down to the local and regional levels. It will no doubt take a number of times for there to be a smooth “cybernetic” rhythm established.

Micro-level – the value of cooperative learning and authoritative parenting

We socialists are well aware that you middle-class left liberals have always supported public schools. Some of the more visionary of you might have had the money to send your children to a Montessori school. Some of you might have heard the name Lev Vygotsky and associated him with cooperative learning, which is used in Montessori education. What you probably were never told was that Vygotsky was a communist and he and his followers, Alexander Luria and Aleksei N Leontiev, founded a whole school of psychology, the “socio-historical school of psychology”. They developed a theory of cooperative learning that has been applied not only in school settings but in the design of social intelligence tests, the development of theories of cognitive development and in working with the deaf. Vygotsky’s work could be massively applied to the fields of social psychology, and possibly to therapy, as one group in New York City is currently doing.

Lastly, we admire the way that many of you have raised your children using authoritative child-rearing methods. You have avoided both extremes in child rearing. On the one hand are the authoritarian methods of conservative child rearing which raises children who are repressed, frightened and lack curiosity. On the other hand, it is the permissive parenting of upper-middle-class neoliberal parents that has turned out a generation of narcissistic, entitled, ungrateful brats who are the product of neoliberal schooling where the focus was on raising self-esteem in every school program. We think the authoritative (as opposed to authoritarian) method with its flexible structure, welcoming of dialogue, appeal to reason, rather than emotion is the best way to raise children. We are on the same page with you.

Deeper Differences between Middle-Class Left Liberals and Socialists

Commitment to an antiwar international policy

We socialists have always been against wars because we know they are usually turf wars between capitalists about resources and that it is the workers and the poor people who do the fighting, not the capitalists. As far as wars go, we know that your class has supported the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. Beyond the 1970s you seem to have treated these wars with less enthusiasm except for perhaps, the war on Iraq. As it stands now, the capitalists in Yankeedom not only make a fortune in military warfare to “protect our borders” but they also arm the entire world. If counties decided to end their wars the capitalists here would be destitute. These wars need to end, not just because of the senseless deaths at home and abroad, but for pragmatic reasons. All this money could go into the trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructural work that is left undone. Suppose the military was employed on these infrastructural projects. Suppose the military was employed to build low-cost housing in every city. Living in a society of abundance requires the reinvestment in the military from wars abroad to infrastructure and natural disaster relief at home.

Anti-imperialist international policy

We socialists are also against imperialist wars where capitalists invade other countries to steal their political or economic resources, land and labor to make a profit. This can be most blatantly seen in Africa. Yankeedom also continues its imperialist ventures in Latin America, regularly attempting to overthrow governments there. Why? For the simple reason that freely elected governments (socialist or not) may have the nerve to set their own economic policy, which might not necessarily be friendly to transnational corporations.

Yankee capitalists want to rule the world and they don’t want any competition.

China, Russia and Iran refuse to tow the line and have formed an alliance. The Chinese represent the best hope of the world now. Why are they such a threat to the United States? Because they are making a profit through building infrastructures, not just in China but in other parts of the world. China, Russia and Iran have also withdrawn from the US dollar as a use of international currency, which costs the western banks in significant loss of profits. Yankee capitalists are slitting their own throats, and ours as well, by acting like big-shot imperialists fifty years after their time has passed and their own territory is falling apart. As middle-class people we think you can see that nothing good can come from this and we need to rebuild our own society.

Dismantling the Deep State

Unfortunately, most middle-class people don’t know any more about the FBI and the CIA and what these organizations do to promote themselves, including what is on television and in movies. The FBI has upended or ruined the lives of socialists for decades. Their role in undermining the New Left has been documented in David Cunningham’s book There’s Something Happening Here. The CIA is in a class by itself, the world’s most powerful terrorist organization. I will limit myself to three books: The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford; The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stoner Saunders and The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot. Funding for these organization should be ended, and the sooner the better.

 Class Dismissed, Where Left Liberals Missed the Boat

For socialists of any stripe, social class has been the foundation for understanding capitalism. The capitalist class makes its profits by exploiting the working-class. As Marx points out, workers produce all the wealth, but they are given only about 40% in the form of wages (the first four hours of their labor) which allows them to support themselves. But the worker works another 6 hours. Who gets the value from that? The employer. The employer uses the rest of the surplus value produced by the worker to pay the middle-class managers, pay landlords for the use of plant and set aside funds to pay the state in taxes. They claim the remainder of the surplus as profit.  Middle-class people have stood structurally between the working-class and the capitalists, giving orders to workers, taking orders from capitalists. There are other social classes as I’ve discussed earlier but the major dynamic is between the capitalist and the worker.

Middle-class people, like most other classes, do not talk about this because class is about political and economic power between groups. It is uncomfortable and middle-class people among others have been afraid to discuss this. Why? Because they feel guilty, that maybe it is their fault they have a better life? Maybe they owe the workers something? Middle-class people need to get over this, because the fact is, you are sliding south, in the same direction as the working-class. In fact, you now have more in common with working-class people than upper middle-class people.

Race relations: Social Movements vs Individualist Identity Politics

Strange as it may seem, middle-class people have been more comfortable talking about race than class. After all, many middle-class people prided themselves as left liberals by supporting the civil rights movement. This was a social movement in which racial minorities joined together to fix objective conditions such as higher pay, better housing, legal rights. I suspect most of you did not know that Martin Luther King, a paradigm of middle-class respectability, was a socialist.

However, since the mid 1970s, but especially from the 1990s on, race relations have turned from a social movement into something different. Identity politics is a psychological spin-off from the civil rights movement with a very different agenda. In the hands of upper middle-class, neoliberals of all colors, including lawyers and university professors, identity politics has been used to win political seats in the Democratic Party. They do this by focusing on the rights of individuals to recognition, the right to be called a certain pronoun and rights to declare being offended by this or that innuendo. Identity politics has crippled the ability of working-class and middle-class people to form alliances by dragging meetings through competitive battles as to who is more offended than whom. When an organization as corrupt as the ruling class Democratic Party starts babbling about “white privilege” it’s time to get off that sinking ship. The mess that race relations are today is made worse by the upper middle-class neoliberals seizing on identity politics. Here is yet another reason to dump the Democratic Party and any alliance with the upper middle-class. A terrific short book that lays out the limitations of identity politics is Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider.

Democracy is economic and participatory more than political representation

Middle-class left liberals in the 20th century have thought of democracy as synonymous with voting. Democracy was having the right to vote for one of the two major parties. For socialists this is a sham. Both parties are ruling class parties and workers have nothing to say about what candidates are running and what they will do after the election. For us, democracy is economic. We think it is ridiculous to imagine we live in a democracy when we go to work to be bossed around from beginning to the end of the day by the employer. For us, democracy begins and ends in the workplace. Workers should have a say in what is produced, how it is produced, where it is distributed, how long we work and how we are compensated. In addition, within socialism democracy is also present by its involvement in city planning. This includes participatory planning councils at the local level, participating in setting agendas and deciding how city revenue should be spent. Under socialism, political parties will still have their place, but they will operate under direct democracy, not representational democracy.

The future of capitalism

All socialists are against capitalism except for some right-wing social democrats who believe in a mixed economy. For us, capitalism is a system plagued by crises and inherently unstable. Various Marxist crisis theorists have developed theories about how and why capitalism will end. Even non-Marxist political economists have theories about how it will end. Please see my article “Name Me One Capitalist Country That Works: A Thirty Year Reckoning” for more sources. Where I think we can agree is that capitalist profits should not be made on wars, or on fictitious capital. It is the neoliberals, not you, who have made profits on fictitious capital and wars over the past 50 years. Rather, capitalist profits should be made on the production of goods and services. We still think that eventually capitalism will fail even if it only produces goods and services, but we can’t convince you of that until we are further down the road.

What is the place of competitive markets? Some of you might feel that having markets is a better mechanism for quickly finding out what people need and how those goods and services have been delivered. As Michael Parenti writes in Black Shirts and Reds, the central planning mechanisms in the USSR were no bargain. At the same time, we know that during the Spanish Revolution, the workers and peasants self-organized in industry and on farms for 3 years, covering millions of people and had better production records than the Spanish government had before the revolution. So, our choices are more than choosing between the state and the market. In the new society perhaps there might be a minor place for markets instead of state planning or worker planning, but the markets should never be among the major players. We can do better than markets.

• Published first in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This article was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2021 at 2:22pm and is filed under Capitalism, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, Deep State, Democracy, Democrats, Disinformation, Economic Inequality, Elections, Employment, Exploitation, Identity Politics, Infrastructure, Karl Marx, Labor, Labor Theory of Value, Neoliberalism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Socialism, The “Left”, Unions, United States, Wage, Working Class.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• President Joe Biden marks 50 millionth COVID-19 vaccine, defends $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
• Senator Bernie Sanders holds $15 minimum wage hearing: “Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?”
• U.S. strikes Syria, targets Iran-backed militia.
• President Joe Biden meets with Saudi Arabia’s King, takes softer tone.
• House passes Equality Act, extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ people.
• San Francisco resolution supports amended state constitution to end prison slavery and involuntary servitude.
• Immigrant rights advocates launch campaign to close 10 ICE detention centers.

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This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• NAACP and Mississippi Democrat, Bennie Thompson, sue Donald Trump for inciting U.S. capitol attack.
• White House announces another increase in coronavirus vaccines to states.
• California Governor Gavin unveils mass vaccination site in Los Angeles.
• California teachers union says not ready to return to school, as Governor to weigh in with a plan soon.
• Nationwide strike for fast food and retail worker protections and $15 minimum wage.
• At least 16 dead from massive storm system spanning from Canada to Mexico.

Photo by Fight for $15

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This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Senate prosecutors layout their case for Donald Trump’s impeachment.
• Lawmakers debate boost in unemployment supplemental and $15 an hour minimum wage.
• South African COVID-19 variant detected in Alameda and Santa Clara Counties.
• World Health Organization investigators say COVID-19 origin likely from animal, unlikely from lab.

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This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• President Joe Biden signs executive orders addressing climate change, calls it “existential threat.”
• New White House coronavirus task force meets, warns 90,000 more deaths in next 4 weeks.
• Civil rights and black health officials wage vaccine public outreach campaign, Keep Hope Alive.
• Democrats hold forum on expanding Affordable Care Act, to provide health care for more people in the U.S.
• Lawmakers introduce legislation to increase minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The post President Joe Biden signs executive orders addressing climate change; New White House coronavirus task force meets, warns 90,000 more deaths in next 4 weeks; Lawmakers introduce legislation to increase minimum wage to $15 an hour appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

NOTE: Margaret Flowers and Askia Muhammad will co-host an inaugural special on Pacifica Radio on Wednesday, January 20 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm Eastern. It can be heard on WBAI and WPFW. The theme will be Dr. King’s triple evils and what Biden’s cabinet picks tell us about what we can expect from this administration. Guests include Dr. Greg Carr, Abby Martin and Danny Sjursen.

Also, on Tuesday, January 26 at 8:00 pm Eastern, Popular Resistance will co-host a webinar, “COVID-19: How Weaponizing Disease and Vaccine Wars are Failing Us.” The webinar will be co-hosted by Margaret Flowers and Sara Flounders and it will feature Vijay Prashad, Max Blumethal, Margaret Kimberley and Lee Siu Hin. All are editors or contributors of the new book “Capitalism on a Ventilator.” Register at bit.ly/WeaponizingCOVID.

This week we celebrate the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and witness the inauguration of our next president, Joe Biden. This inauguration will be unique, first, for being held during a pandemic and, second, for its heightened security in fear of another attack by Trump supporters. Downtown Washington, DC is normally secured during an inauguration and people must pass through checkpoints to get into the Mall and parade route, but this time is different.

There are 25,000 members of the National Guard on duty in the city to protect the President and Members of Congress. But even this does not guarantee security. The FBI is screening every national guard member for ties to right wing militias and groups responsible for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. The ruling class experienced what it is like when those who are supposed to protect you don’t.

This insecurity is another facet of a society in break down. As Dr. King warned us over 50 years ago:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-centered’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Migrants march from Honduras to the United States with the hope of a better reception under a Biden administration (Luis Echeverria)

The pandemic and recession have exposed more widely what many communities have known for a long time, that corporate profits are more important than their lives and that lawmakers serve the wealthy class. During the pandemic, the rich have gotten richer, the Pentagon budget has ballooned with bi-partisan support and the people have not received what they need to survive. Unemployment, loss of health insurance, hunger and poverty are growing while the stock market ended the year with record highs.

Many are hopeful that a Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic President will turn this around, and it is reasonable to expect there will be some positive changes. The Biden administration claims it will take immediate action to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, extend the break on student loan payments, provide a one-time $1,400 payment and invest more in testing and vaccine administration, among other actions.

These actions are welcome, but they are a far cry from what is necessary. A family with two parents working full time for minimum wage will still live in poverty, even at $15/hour. The majority of people in the United States, 65%, support giving $2,000/month to every adult during the pandemic. This is supported by 54% of Republicans polled and 78% of Democrats. People with student loans are calling for them to be cancelled, not delayed. And, as I wrote in Truthout, Biden’s priority for managing the pandemic is on reopening businesses and schools, not on taking the public health measures that are called for such as shutting down with guarantees of housing and economic support and nationalizing the healthcare system, as other countries have done.

What is required is massive public investment in systemic changes that get to the roots of the crises we face. In addition to the triple evils that Dr. King spoke about, racism, capitalism and militarism, we can add the climate crisis. An eco-socialist Green New Deal such as that promoted by Howie Hawkins would get at the roots of each of these crises.

Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute argues that the economy can handle a massive investment of public dollars without fear of negative consequences, such as inflation, because for too long the economy has been starving the public while funneling wealth to the top. It is time for redistribution of that wealth to serve the public good.

In fact, Sam Pizzigati of Inequality.org writes that throughout history, governments have fallen when they fail to address wealth inequality and meet the people’s needs. This is the finding of a recent study called “Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past.” They write that the fall of pre-modern governments “can be traced to a principal leadership that inexplicably abandoned core principles of state-building that were foundational to these polities, while also ignoring their expected roles as effective leaders and moral exemplars.”

From Socialist Alternative

So far, it looks like what we can expect from the Biden Administration is a few tweaks to the system to placate people and relieve some suffering but not the system changes we require. Biden is actively opposed to national improved Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, two proposals that a majority of people, especially Democrats, support. Mark Dunlea explains why the Biden climate plan is inadequate for the dire situation we face.

Biden’s cabinet picks and language make it clear that the United States’ aggressive foreign policy of regime change and wars for resources and domination will continue. Samantha Power, a war hawk, has been chosen to head the USAID, an institution that invests in creating chaos and regime change efforts in other countries. Victoria Nuland, who was a major leader of the US’ successful coup in Ukraine that brought neo-Nazis to power, has been picked for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Biden’s choices for CIA Director, Mike Morell, and Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, are both torture proponents. Abby Martin of Empire Files exposes the dark backgrounds of several other nominees for Biden’s cabinet, including Antony Blinken as Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan as National Security Adviser, Linda Thomas-Greenfield for United Nations Ambassador and Michael Flourney to head the Pentagon.

It also doesn’t appear that Democrats in Congress will show the necessary courage to fight for what the people need. Danny Haiphong of Black Agenda Report writes about the “Obama-fication” of “The Squad” and how they serve to protect the status quo and weaken the progressive movement. It is important to understand how they are the “more effective evil,” or as Gabriel Rockhill explains, they are the arm of liberal democracies that convince people to consent to the neo-liberal capitalism that is destroying our lives and the planet. This is how Western fascism rises within legislative bodies. Already, we are seeing champions of national improved Medicare for All, Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal, back down to a position of lowering the age of Medicare eligibility, which would not solve our healthcare crisis, only delay that solution.

Chris Hedges often warns us that we need to know what we are up against if we are to effectively challenge it. Dr. King warned us that our nation was heading toward spiritual death if we did not get to the roots of the crises, the triple evils. He demonstrated that social movements should not align themselves with capitalist political parties because then the movement becomes subservient to their interests and compromises its own interests. And he told us what we must do. Prior to King’s death, he was organizing an occupation of Washington, DC to demand an end to poverty.

During the Biden administration, many of the progressive forces will work to weaken those of us who make demands for bold changes. They will try to placate us with a diverse cabinet of women and people of color who were chosen because they support capitalism, imperialism and systemic racism despite their identities. Chris Hedges describes this as a form of “colonialism.”

Our tasks are to maintain political independence from the capitalist parties, struggle for systemic changes and embrace a bold agenda that inspires people to take action. Through strategic and intentional action, we can achieve the changes we need. We have a key ingredient for success – widespread support for the changes we need. Now, we only need to mobilize in ways that inspire people and that have an impact – strikes, boycotts, occupations and more that are focused on improving the lives of everyone.

We can turn things around and reduce the suffering that is driving the polarization and trend towards violence in our country. It’s time to embrace our radical Dr. King.

This article was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2021 at 12:03pm and is filed under Capitalism, Colonialism, Debt, Democrats, Joe Biden, Martin Luther King Jr., Militarism, National improved Medicare for all (NIMA), Racism, Republicans, Resistance, Ruling Elite, Social Movements, Student Loans, Surveillance, The Pentagon, Unemployment, US Congress, US Media, Wage.

Why do political science and neoclassical economics go in one ear and out the other?

A human being who has a fully integrated social body understands that economics is about a social system of circulation of goods and services. In other words, provisioning for the population.  Politics is the collective process of evaluating and deciding a) where have we been (our past) and b) where are we going (the future). Politics is about steering.  With this framework, it would be inconceivable to steer or govern without referring to how well the economic system is working. How can you steer without an evaluation of how goods and services are circulating? So too, how can you monitor the economic provisioning process without checking on the decision-making process of the steering of our social direction? In fact, a person with an integrated social body only makes a distinction between economic and political processes for analytical purposes. It would be better to call the whole endeavor “political economy”.

However, if you received an undergraduate college degree you probably never had a class in political economy. What you probably had is at least one class in political science and another class in economics. If you are like most people, you found these classes either boring or incomprehensible. Why? The answer is because both fields are riddled with capitalist propaganda that has little basis in most people’s experience. Sure, there are some people who are convinced that political science and neoclassical economics make sense but which social class is this? Chances are it is members of the upper middle class for whom political and neoclassical economics make sense from their class position. But upper middle-class people are 10% of the Yankee population. Even if we take half of the 30% of the middle class, it is still only a quarter of the population. (I exclude the ruling class and the upper class for whom these courses are not relevant for different reasons).

For the rest of the middle class and lower classes, these courses are likely to produce apathy. There is a reason why Yankee masses hate politics and why they pay no attention to economics. For the elites who control political science and neoclassical economics fields, mass apathy is fine because they don’t want the lower classes asking political and economic questions. Mass apathy doesn’t mean they haven’t internalized the propaganda of political science and/or neoclassical economics. It just means some of these assumptions and images exist in the unconscious of people. For example, most people will say, if asked, “we live in a democracy”. So too they will say economically “there are no free lunches”, right out of neoclassical economics guru Milton Friedman’s playbook.

In the meantime, the social body has now slowly been taken over by two zombies: a political science zombie and a neoclassical economics zombie. This zombification process undergoes at least five processes:

1. Political science and economics are cut off from history, anthropology and sociology.
2. Political science and economics are separated from each other. In a political science class, if you ask an economic question about politics you will be told that is “not their department”. If you ask a political question in an economics class you will be told the same thing.
3. Political science and economics classes become reified because both disciplines are presented as changeless and not subject to scandals, false turns or ideological manipulation. Both fields appear as things, dogmas, idols. In the case of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, these documents have become dogma. George Washington or Thomas Jefferson have become idols that are uncriticizable.
4. Both fields focus on very small micro processes that are relatively inconsequential for the average person’s life. In both fields, this is done because smaller processes lend themselves more easily to scientific measurement. In addition, most neoclassical economics theories are presented in mathematical form which is intimidating for working class and even some middle-class people because they do not have formal training.
5. Scientific method is emphasized over the content in the field. Unless you have some reason for going into each field professionally, knowledge of how they do science is not really relevant. In the case of Trump, if you want to know how someone with no political experience or training could become the president of Yankeedom, you won’t find the answers in your political science or civics courses.

The result is that any zombified Yankee college graduate is filled with self-congratulatory political science propaganda about the nature of democracy as well as self-congratulatory neo-classical economics which is filled with economics propaganda about the wonders of capitalism.

For this article I will draw on the books Tragedy of Political Science by David Ricci and Disenchanted Realists by Raymond Seidelman and Edward Harpham. For the economics section, I’ve drawn on Introduction to Political Economy by Sackrey, Schneider and Knoedler as well as E. K. Hunt’s History of Economic Thought and Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.

FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY TO SPECIALIZATION OF POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

In the beginning of both the study of politics and the study of economics each was understood as being inseparable from history, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. So, in the case of politics, we could never understand a form of rule without understanding the economic property relations through which rulers, and ruled interacted. Nor could we make sense of the rise and fall of dynasties without understanding the social class composition of the society. Lastly, how could we know how the current ruler differs from rulers decades or even centuries ago without including history.

In the case of economics, the interdisciplinary field that preceded it was called political economy. In the work of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, no economic transactions could be understood without understanding the machinations of political rulers or how the newly formed industrial capitalist society differed from the agricultural, slave capitalism that preceded it. This way of looking at things began to change in the last three decades of the 19th century with the marginal utility theorists Menger, Marshall and Walras, who gradually isolated economics from these other fields. This isolation continued into the 20th century with the Austrian school economics in the work of Eugen Ritter Böhm-Bawerk, Von Mises and Von Hayek just before World War II.

In the United States during the depression the work of Keynes was carried on as a political economy point of view because Keynes was interested in macroeconomics and he insisted the state needed to intervene to keep capitalism from going off the rails. The work of neo-classical economists Samuelson and then Milton Friedman in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized the independence of the market from all political influences.

ZOMBIE NUMBER ONE: POLITICAL SCIENCE PROPAGANDA FOR DEMOCRACY

How the political ideology of liberal pluralism gets in the way of research into how democratic Yankeedom actually is

American political theory has always fancied itself a democratic politics well before the end of the 19th century. There was never a time when political theory considered that Yankee politics’ “democracy” was ever something to be proven. It was already always the case.  Political science was not a neutral approach to the study of politics. It dwelt in a national context of liberal democracy. This political ideology operates with the following postulates:

• presumption of human rationality – people are capable of thinking through their situation about what their own interest requires them to do;
• the separation of religious from secular institutions (separation of church and state);
• separation of political powers into legislative, executive and judicial fields;
• the presence of more than one political party to represent factions of citizens who must have their interests checked and balanced by the upper classes (electoral college);
• all that is most profound and enduring about politics was laid down by the Founding Fathers in their documents; and,
• liberal faith in science as the midwife of social progress and enlightenment.

The infrastructure of democracy – political parties, the electoral college, the constitution, the separation of powers – could not be challenged. This is crucial because it puts a damper on the study of power blocks and the behavior of elites. To the extent that it takes inequalities seriously, it farms them out to other social science disciplines such as sociology or political sociology.

What would happen if the results of actual political scientific research continually denied central tenets of democratic ideology that political scientists in the United States believe in?  Supposed research showed that American citizens do not behave much like democratic citizens? Suppose a political scientist has a hypothesis that democratic theory in practice is an illusion. Can you still practice political science if you believe democracy really doesn’t exist? Suppose a scientist insists on studying politics scientifically even though their inquiry cannot insure the health of a democratic society. Hypothetically you should be able to do this research.

What are the chances of a research grant for a hypothesis designed to show how anti-democratic American social institutions are? Of course, political scientists have done this research in these areas and received grants. But the research in political science would be easier if you proposed research that made people hopeful, comfortable or at least neutral, rather than disturbing them. As of around the year 2000 there were two political science textbooks which did not toe the line of what will later be called “political pluralism”. One was Michael Parenti’s Democracy for the Few, which is Marxist. The other is Irony of Democracy by Louis Schubert and Thomas Dye, which are from the Elitist school of political science.

But political scientists work in educational communities and are somewhat dependent on each other. They have political tendencies that are not based on political facts but on political ideologies that inform the facts whether they are conservative, liberal or Marxist. These ideologies inform whether the reception they receive from their work is cool, hostile or enthusiastic. For example, the topic of political disorder is not looked upon favorably by political scientists. It undermines their theories and cracks their time-honored assumptions. This kind of research is far from welcomed, as important a topic as it might be.