Detroit’s water company announced in March that it would be shutting off the taps of over 3000 residents who are behind on their bills. The shutoffs are part of a new iniative to crack down on customers in arrears. Community activists have appealed to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation for help. They argue that the city is gouging its poorest residents and violating their human rights in the process: 

“What we see is a violation of the human right to water,” said Meera Karunananthan, an international campaigner with the Blue Planet Project. “The U.S. has international obligations in terms of people’s right to water, and this is a blatant violation of that right. We’re hoping the U.N. will put pressure on the federal government and the state of Michigan to do something about it.”

The groups accuse DWSD of charging unaffordable rates to Detroit citizens, and placing the burden of the city’s fleeing tax base on its poorest residents. They say DWSD is trying to rid itself of low-income customers in a bid to make the utility more attractive for a private takeover. DWSD denies the charge. But the city has acknowledged that at least a partial privatization of DWSD is being considered as Detroit attempts to shed some of its $18 billion in debt. DWSD accounts for $5 billion of that sum. [Al Jazeera America]

The water company says it’s not being malicious. Half of its 323,000 accounts are reportedly in arrears and the company is owed $175 million dollars in unpaid water bills. Officials tried to ease the strain on the company by integrating it with the water systems of some wealthier communities, but the deal fell through. There is talk of privatizing Detroit’s water system. 

[Photo credit: “Detroit River Days 2012,” by JoyVanBuhler, Creative Commons.]

The Best of the Week’s News

• Total Recall: WI Gov. Scott Walker fought off recall with an elaborate and illegal fundraising network, prosecutors allege.

• Anthropologists are sifting through mass graves in South Texas to identify migrants who died attempting to cross the border.

• Is it illegal to threaten to kill your wife (or an FBI agent) if you do it with bad Facebook poetry? The Supreme Court will decide.

• Unions question the legality of lobbying by the Tennessee Charter Schools Center, the state’s leading pro-charter group.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Kum Gang San, a popular Korean restaurant in New York City, is accused of blackmailing employees into unpaid labor with threats of deportation, Sukjong Hong reports for Gothamist:

Servers and bussers at a popular Korean restaurant say they were forced to work 18-hour shifts without overtime, attend church before work on Sundays, and “volunteer” their time picking vegetables at a farm outside the city. According to a federal lawsuit they filed against the management of the restaurant, any refusal to heed the owner’s extraordinary demands resulted in humiliation, termination, and threats of blacklisting and deportation.

Former employees report that if they declined the “invitation” spend their days off as unpaid farmworkers gathering kimchi ingredients, they were expected to drop to their knees and beg their boss’s forgiveness. 

In addition to being forced to attend 90-minute unpaid church services before work on Sundays, former employees say they were expected to take turns paying $150 out-of-pocket for catering after the sermon! 

The former employees aired their grievances in federal court during a civil trial that concluded on Monday. 

[Photo credit: Word to Table, Creative Commons.]

Beth Schwartzapfel wins this month’s Sidney Award for her expose of the United States’ huge and exploited prison workforce. Some 870,000 prisoners work full time, a workforce equal to those of Vermont and Rhode Island combined. The average wage in state prison is 20 cents an hour and inmates have virtually no rights at work.  They aren’t eligible for disability, OSHA doesn’t protect them as carefully as workers on the outside, and they don’t pay into Social Security.

We tend to think of prison jobs as rehabilitation, but Schwartzapfel found that job training programs are few and far between. The vast majority of working inmates are assigned menial jobs to keep their own facilities running. The image, above, is digitally stylized treatment of a CAD drawing by an inmate named Joshua, who works in a rare prison job program. In his spare time, Joshua designs and builds grandfather clocks, like the one partially pictured in the illustration. 

[Image credit: Illustration based on a CAD drawing by “Joshua,” an inmate-worker, who in his downtime at work at the Brown Creek Metals Plant in Polkton, NC designs and builds grandfather clocks.]