Originally posted at In These Times

Also see Tom Thumb’s post

NPR, This American Life

A dramatic investigation aired this week by This American Life raised concerns about federal disability insurance with its portrayal of the system as dysfunctional, financially unsustainable and ballooning out of control.

But experts say the program omitted key evidence that the doubling of workers on disability insurance since 1995 has been driven by genuine need.

Originally posted at In These Times

Last Monday, in what became a heated exchange with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Mee Moua, executive director of the Asian American Justice Center, defended programs allowing families to immigrate together to the U.S. (Courtesy of the DOL)

The politics of immigration touch upon major faultlines in American society: not just the legal boundary between citizen and foreigner, but also lines of race, class, nationality, culture and, increasingly, gender. Women, who make up about half of the U.S. immigrant population and an estimated 40 percent of undocumented adults, face unique challenges as migrants. However, gender issues have gone almost entirely unremarked in official immigration-reform talks–that is, until a Senate hearing last Monday, when Mee Moua, head of the Asian American Justice Center, seized an opportunity to call out the invisibility of women in the debate.

The opening came when Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) asked bluntly which immigrant would be a better candidate for legal status: an applicant for a family reunification visa or a skilled professional from overseas? Although family visas are the channel by which generations of migrants have brought family members to the U.S., Sessions’ rhetorical question suggested that skilled professionals make more desirable Americans.

Moua countered that Sessions’ hypothetical reflected deep gender imbalances in the immigration system. The “less desirable” migrant, she argued, would likely be “female, would not have been permitted to get an education and if we would create a system where there would be some kind of preference given to say education, or some other kind of metrics, I think that it would truly disadvantage specifically women and their opportunity to come into this country.”

The tense exchange marked one of the first moments in the current round of reform talks that Congress members have been asked to confront the gender biases inherent in our immigration policies. Such biases have a long history: Male-centered guestworker schemes date all the way back to the Chinese Exclusion Act era of the late 19th century, when blatantly xenophobic laws brought in masses of Chinese male laborers while shutting out their family members in an attempt to deter the workers from settling in the United States.

Today, despite the strides women have made in high-skill fields (most professional workers are now women), they are still heavily underrepresented in “guestworker” programs for professional immigrant workers, which skew heavily toward the vaunted, notoriously male-dominated science and tech (STEM) fields. For example, the controversial H1B visa program for professional temp workers, long touted as a spigot for STEM talent, brought in about 350,000 immigrant men but fewer than 140,000 women in 2011. Meanwhile, lawmakers are weighing proposals to sharply limit family-based visa programs–which make up about 65 percent of authorized permanent immigration–alongside plans for expanding the prized professional visas. As Pramila Jayapal points out at Colorlines.com, men tend to hold professional visas, intended to anchor household “breadwinners,” while women are overrepresented among family visas, which can chain their legal status to an authorized (male) worker.

These biases are no political accident, but a symptom of the privileging of corporate demands over community needs. Immigrant women’s labor, whether it’s in the household, off the books, or on payroll, is fueling the economy. But because it doesn’t seem to directly contribute as much to corporate bottom lines, it’s overlooked.

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Originally posted at In These Times

Juan (not his real name) was instructed to get back to work after falling while lifting an 80-pound box of chicken. X-rays later showed two fractured vertebrae. He was fired, and the employer has not paid any of his medical bills.

Walk through any supermarket poultry section and you can marvel at the wonders of the modern food processing industry: antiseptic aisles packed with gleaming, plump shrink-wrapped chickens, sold at bargain prices under the labels of trusted agribusiness brands like Tyson and Pilgrim’s. But all that quality meat doesn’t come cheap: it’s paid for dearly by factory workers who brave injury, abuse and coercion every day on assembly lines running at increasingly deadly speeds.

According to newly published research on Alabama poultry workers by the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the business model of the sector has sacrificed health and safety on the factory floor for the Tayloristic efficiency demanded by American appetites.

The supersized industry, which churns out about 50 pounds of chicken per American stomach annually, dominates many struggling towns in Alabama, a mostly non-union state, supporting about 10 percent of the local economy and some 75,000 jobs. But according to the SPLC’s researchers, the production line is butchering workers’ health:

Nearly three-quarters of the poultry workers interviewed for this report described suffering some type of significant work-related injury or illness. In spite of many factors that lead to undercounting of injuries in poultry plants, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reported an injury rate of 5.9 percent for poultry processing workers in 2010, a rate that is more than 50 percent higher than the 3.8 percent injury rate for all U.S. workers.

Alabama workers interviewed by the SPLC reported being routinely subjected to unsafe working conditions that led to severe health threats, from repetitive stress injuries to respiratory issues to chemical burns. Adding insult to injury, employers often ignored workers’ debilitating problems or punished them for asserting their rights. Evoking images reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s century-old expose on the meat-packing industry The Jungle, workers reported that problems like crippling hand pain would be diverted to the company nurse, rather than more intensive care by an outside doctor. Others were fired before they could become more of a liability.

One worker, a black woman in her 30s, recounted in an interview being pressured to shield her company from responsibility for her injury:

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Cambodian garment workers celebrate winning a settlement of as much as $200,000. (Photo from Community Legal Education Center)

Cross-posted at In These Times

After workers across the U.S. staged mini-strikes at Wal-Marts this winter, a small crowd of Cambodian garment workers caused a stir by camping in front of a shuttered Wal-Mart supplier in Phnom Penh. The workers were protesting a sudden closure of the Kingsland apparel factory, which robbed them of both their jobs and tens of thousands in wages. They staged creative direct actions, including attempts to physically block the removal of sewing equipment.

Now, the Cambodians’ efforts to hold their former bosses accountable have paid off–in both money and political impact. Some two hundred Kingsland workers who produced clothing for H&M and Wal-Mart-affiliated brands for about $60 a month have won a settlement of an estimated $200,000.

The workers won the surprise victory against the global manufacturing Goliaths thanks in large part to savvy support from Cambodian and international labor groups. These allies helped spread the word globally by broadcasting the protestors’ video testimonials and marching to present a letter to Rajan Kamalanathan, Walmart’s Vice President of Ethical Sourcing.

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Originally published at In These Times

President Obama called for a modest raise in the federal minimum wage to $9 in his State of the Union Address, and several Democratic legislators have upped his bid with a proposed increase to $10.10.

But an insidious effort to lower the wage floor is already underway much closer to the ground—in the state legislatures where right-wing lobbyists have been greasing the skids for years for an onslaught of anti-worker policies.

An extensive analysis recently published by labor advocacy organization the National Employment Law Project tracks more than 100 bills introduced in 31 states since January 2011 that “aim to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the state or local level.” Each bears the fingerprint of notorious super-lobbying organization the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which acts as a forum for “private sector leaders” to advise public officials. Most of the anti-worker bills were proposed by lawmakers directly linked to ALEC and include language that echoes that of “model legislation” developed by ALEC. Among the proposals are measures to undercut minimum wages for teenage workers, restrict overtime pay and repeal or ban local laws to improve working conditions.

ALEC has been called out by activists for pushing legislation that advances a classic right-wing agenda, from school privatization to rolling back healthcare reform. But the “wage suppression” tactics are a particularly callous attempt by ALEC-affiliated legislators to feed corporate profits by starving workers. Read the rest of this entry →

(Flickr, Creative Commons)

Originally posted at In These Times

Looking to hire someone for a little landscaping work or a construction job? There might be a local agency that can offer free security services to ensure that workers will work as hard as possible for as little as you’re willing to pay: the local police department.

Across the country, the undocumented day laborers who build, paint and pave many communities are locked into a low-wage regime that is de facto enforced by state power, which can threaten to round them up just for trying to work–in the name of protecting “public safety.”

Arizona was once a model for this form of anti-worker bullying. But a federal court has just struck down one of the harshest provisions of the infamous anti-immigrant law known as SB 1070, which enabled police to arrest people for soliciting work in public.

The law, enacted in 2010, targeted workers who could be characterized as obstructing traffic as they seek work. The underlying logic was that such restrictions make immigrants’ lives so unbearable they will ultimately “self deport” (a notion that ignores the myriad social factors and family commitments that compel migrants to stay at all costs).

A product of Arizona’s ferocious xenophobia and an inspiration for other states’ anti-immigrant policies, SB 1070 is best known for its “papers, please” provisions, which explicitly encouraged police to profile Latinos suspected of being undocumented. (Last year the Supreme Court upheld that provision while striking down others in the law as overly broad.) But in some ways the more obscure provisions on day laborers are more nefarious because they directly attack workers’ rights to pursue a livelihood.

So following a challenge led by civil rights groups, a Phoenix federal district court called the law what it was: not a traffic safety measure but a backhanded assault on constitutional rights.

Upholding the lower court ruling against the provision based on free-speech grounds, a three-judge appeals court panel wrote that “an injunction is in the public interest because the day labor provisions, if enforced, would infringe the First Amendment rights of many persons who are not parties to this lawsuit.”

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(afagen via flickr / creative commons)

Originally posted at In These Times

Under the reign of New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has issued millions of dollars in business development subsidies to beleaguered urban neighborhoods, meant to create new jobs and promote entrepreneurial spirit. Now the NYCEDC is teaming up with Wall Street to give loans to local food manufacturers, but activists who have examined the city’s development track record smell something fishy.

The NYCEDC’s new loan fund grew out of a partnership with Goldman Sachs, which is running a glossy nationwide campaign to pump seed money into small businesses in several cities. The initiative seems geared toward incubating foodie-friendly startups, conjuring up images of rooftop-grown honey and specialty cupcakes. No loans have been awarded yet, but the program’s eligibility criteria appears to target small- to medium-scale food manufacturers that have four to 100 workers and annual revenues between $150,000 and $7,000,000, and can demonstrate “difficulty obtaining credit from traditional sources.” The agency’s website spotlights honors for charismatic local entrepreneurs, like boutique kimchee and artisan bagel makers.

Community groups say they welcome efforts to foster small food businesses, but are wary that the program will offer more hype than real development for a city that’s hungry for good, steady jobs. Labor advocates who have been organizing in the local food sector know that many local producers, even if they’re smaller than industry behemoths like General Mills, are not necessarily much kinder to their employees. Read the rest of this entry →

A Pokot woman with her child, tending to an aloe vera crop. Women around the world spend a great deal of time on unpaid care work every day, but such work often remains invisible. (Des Willie/ActionAid)

Originally posted at In These Times

Imagine being asked to work seven days a week, for free, without breaks or even a thank you. Those conditions might seem outrageous in any workplace, yet they are typical in our homes, where women are regularly expected to serve as faithful unpaid caregivers. Our recognition of the first scenario as a serious violation of labor rights, while the second can be brushed off as “tradition,” is a measure of the sexism still embedded in our thinking about economic equity in the U.S. and around the world.

While many of these debates have taken place in a Western context—the post-Feminine Mystique universe of fights over glass ceilings and parental leave policies—a different conversation is beginning in the Global South about how respect for women’s household labor factors into a wider movement for economic justice.

A new analysis by the advocacy group ActionAid looks at case studies of women’s uncompensated work in Nepal, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya as mothers, wives, managers of households and caregivers. The report concludes that women’s unpaid daily tasks amount to a massive amount of time, energy and ingenuity that has been historically exploited and undervalued.

The report defines unpaid care work as home-based tasks like “cooking, cleaning, collecting water and firewood, and caring for the ill, elderly and children,” which are typically woven into interdependent relationships within communities and family structures. Not only is such work essential to maintaining the household; it is deeply interwoven with social development. Stability at home provides a base of security that enables other forms of economic advancement. Care work is of course crucial for children’s development (as well as their future education), but it also enables male family members to engage in wage labor in the mainstream economy. Read the rest of this entry →

To help the recently incarcerated overcome hiring bias, programs such as the Center for Employment Opportunities assemble them into work crews, paid at fair rates. (Center for Employment Opportunities)

Originally posted at In These Times

Thanks to our harsh criminal justice policies and anti-drug laws, an extraordinary number of Americans will spend some part of their lives in the prison system.

As a society, we’re finally starting to rethink the policies driving the explosion in imprisonment: the “tough on crime” measures that have shattered communities and families for over a generation. Some states have sought to cut prison populations to curb the massive cost of incarceration. Yet the economics of prison policy cut deeper than corrections budgets. The plight of those released back into society after doing time reveal the the underlying collateral damage: a gaping economic hole.

No one knows exactly how much mass incarceration has cost communities in social and economic losses, but there’s no doubt it has contributed to the unraveling of economically marginalized communities. Not only does incarceration take people out of the workforce, but for many, the sentence never ends: The prison system places shackles of stigma and discrimination on hundreds of thousands of people it releases each year. According to a 2010 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, incarceration lowers the total earnings of blacks and Latino men more severely compared to white men, and the economic drain is deepened by the forgone wages that may be irrevocably lost during years spent behind bars.

Once people get out of prison, staying out can be all but impossible. Since communities hit hardest by over-imprisonment typically suffer from low social cohesion, poverty and high joblessness, the formerly incarcerated return home to daunting hardships. And when they try to play by the rules and seek jobs, they get slapped by widespread hiring bias from employers. That’s on top of the overall setbacks to employability linked to long periods of incarceration, like a lack of up-to-date job skills and educational credentials.

That’s where the concept of transitional jobs comes in. Community groups in cities across the country are working to absorb formerly incarcerated workers into temporary work programs designed to move them toward permanent work through entry-level temporary jobs, coupled with training and guidance on adapting to the working life “on the outside.”

Research has shown that such programs pay public dividends, too, by playing a key role in reducing recidivism and thereby enhancing public safety and saving states in incarceration costs. A steady paycheck is a crucial connection to the legal economy that can keep people from resorting to crime to make ends meet. Though transitional jobs are by definition temporary, they can prove critical in the first few months post-prison, when people are especially unstable and may need intensive reintegration services.

The National Transitional Jobs Network–a coalition of groups working with the formerly incarcerated and other populations, like the homeless, who face barriers to employment–combines paid work with support services and training as a social intervention. Associate director Melissa Young tells In These Times these programs “are targeted at individuals who would not otherwise be working, and they keep people earning a paycheck to meet their basic needs. And this is especially important in weak labor markets like [the one] we currently have.”

In New York, the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) has developed a transition model inspired in part by informal day labor networks. About 30 years ago, the group’s former parent organization, the Vera Institute of Justice observed that when people returned home after prison, they routinely picked up odd jobs on the street. Advocates designed an institution to serve roughly the same function of connecting people to work, while also providing support and guidance to move them toward stable, long-term employment.

As a gateway employer, CEO puts clients in supervised work crews, which might help set up public venues for events or provide supplemental maintenance for city or state agencies. Participants are also coached on social skills that tend to rust in prison. In their personal interactions, CEO’s Executive Director Marta Nelson says, workers struggle to transition out of “all the behavior that’s reinforced inside… keeping your head down, doing as you’re told and not being particularly proactive.” Those behaviors might be an obstacle in regular workplaces where bosses expect job seekers to show “initiative” or project self-confidence. People need space to transition out of the mindset imposed by the prison environment.

Nelson noted that transitional jobs shouldn’t be confused with “make work” welfare jobs. “There’s an organization, be it the courthouse or a college or an event, and they have a need for something to get done by human beings,” she says. “And they pay us to do it, and they expect us to do a good job because they’re paying for it. … Our participants are as smart as anyone out there and they know real work from fake work.”

But advocates for the formerly incarcerated can’t simply aim to train people for entry-level jobs and send them into the labor market; formerly incarcerated workers face structural barriers that can only be overcome through institutional reform. The National HIRE Network advocates for policies to help remove such barriers, such as reforms to prevent employers from screening out people on the basis of a conviction record alone. The group focuses on restricting the use of the familiar obstacle found on many application forms: the check-box that forces people to disclose a prior conviction. Advocates say a checked box is too often seen as an automatic deal-breaker (despite restrictions in some states on blanket discrimination against people with criminal histories).

“Some [human resources] staff see the checked box, and the application is put in pile of ‘not considering,’” says HIRE director Roberta Meyers-Peeples. “Nothing else is looked at, the person’s qualifications and credentials aren’t considered.”  She says that reforming the process to give the candidate a chance to talk directly to an employer about a past record, rather than just being automatically screened out, would “give people a chance to get a foot in the door, to be able to explain what’s on the record. Because typically what’s on paper doesn’t tell that person’s whole story.”

To activists like Meyers-Peeples, people who have served time deserve fair treatment in the labor market not just because they’re entitled to full social inclusion, but because society as a whole suffers when it prevents people from exercising their potential. Many people have obtained advanced degrees or learned trades through prison programs, only to find that once they’re released, their talents stay locked up.

“If they want to put in the work to rehabilitate and develop themselves personally,” Meyers-Peeples says, “it’s our job to make sure the opportunities are there.”

(dierken / Flickr)

Originally posted at In These Times

Since the 1990s, an unprecedented–but sometimes uneasy–alliance of activists and industry has tried to braid together business and humanitarianism under the label of “fair trade,” a system of standards aimed at injecting ethical checks into the sprawling global trade structure. Today, fair-trade branded coffees, skincare products and designer chocolates are hot commodities. But beneath the label lie ideological tensions over what “fair” means.

According to the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), the fair-trade certification system is riddled with loopholes that enable corporations to suppress labor rights and union activism. The ILRF’s new report focuses on the Seattle-based Theo Chocolate and its fair trade certification body, Switzerland-based Institute for Market Ecology (IMO). According to workers interviewed for the report, a campaign to form a union affiliated with the Teamsters in early 2010 at Theo’s Seattle factory was met with discrimination, intimidation and anti-union propaganda.

A campaign to discourage unionization would not be unusual in a typical U.S. workplace, but the ILRF has called out Theo Chocolate for simultaneously deterring unionization in its workplace while publicizing itself as a “fair trade” brand. ILRF also criticizes Theo’s much-touted partnership with the IMO in a certification system designed to ensure compliance with fair trade standards—its Fair for Life certification program. The ILRF’s report grew out of its work with the Teamsters to help Theo workers complain to the IMO about the management’s alleged anti-union actions.

According to the ILRF, in early 2010, a group of Theo workers sought to form a union to address problems they had discussed among themselves, including “safety issues in the factory, short notice shift and furlough changes, untenable workloads, low wages… and suspicion of wage discrimination against non-English speaking workers.” In the end, the report says, 19 out of 30 eligible workers signed cards affirming their approval of union representation. In a company like Theo, with a brand built on a hip, youthful image of global social responsibility, workers might well have expected that such organizing would be welcomed.

Instead, according to the report, Theo’s management fought to keep out the union through tried-and-true pressure strategies, including hiring a consultant to aid with union-deterrence efforts. One psychological tactic described in the report was painting unionization as an act of grave disloyalty:

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