Join us tonight, Thursday the 11th, in Manhattan for “Your Shirt Off Their Backs,” a public forum on sweatshops, the labor movement, and the struggles of workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia. 

 The Best of the Week’s News

• Living wage advocates turn up the heat on the fast food industry with civil disobedience in cities across the country.

• How construction companies are dodging taxes and cheating workers by misclassifying them as contractors.

• The Justice Department will pursue a broad civil rights inquiry into the Ferguson Police Department, not just a limited probe of the Brown shooting.

• Missouri swore it wouldn’t use a controversial drug linked to botched executions, but it did.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Alexis Okeowo tells the story of Biram Dah Abeid and his crusade to abolish slavery in his home country of Mauritiana. Abeid is the founder of the country’s largest anti-slavery organization, and he will stop at nothing to get slave owners arrested:

Finally, the police took the slaves to the station, and Abeid and the others followed. For a moment, the activists—schoolteachers, civil servants, the unemployed—remained in a standoff with the police there, a force of some sixty officers. Abeid walked toward a policeman. When the policeman grabbed Abeid’s shirt, Abeid butted him twice with his head. “I wanted to go to jail,” he said. “When people ask why I am in jail, they will have to know there were two slave girls, and the government refused to put the slave owner in jail.” As the activists and the police clashed, Abeid lunged at the police again, and he was arrested. He was jailed for three months; the slave owner was released after nine days. But it was a seminal victory for IRA: the first time that police had imprisoned a slave owner. The organization has since helped to put about twenty others in jail, though often for brief terms. As owners heard about the arrests, they started releasing their slaves, in a ripple of fear. Working through a network of nine thousand activists, IRA has freed thousands of slaves around the country. Haratin often refer to the former slaves as Biram Frees. [New Yorker]

In 1981, Mauritiana became the last country on earth to outlaw slavery, but the country still has the highest incidence of slavery in the world. The practice is sustained by tradition, economic necessity, and idiosyncratic local interpretation of Islam that Abeid is risking his life to discredit. 

[Photo credit: Nouakchott, the largest city in Mauritiana, by Manuel M. Almeida, Creative Commons.]

As Labor Day approaches, Hillman Judge Harold Meyerson asks where it all went wrong for the global economy…

Labor Day — that mocking reminder that this nation once honored workers — is upon us again, posing the nagging question of why the economy ceased to reward work. Was globalization the culprit? Technological change? Anyone seeking a more fundamental answer should pick up the September issue of the Harvard Business Review and check out William Lazonick’s seminal essay on U.S. corporations, “Profits Without Prosperity.”

The short answer is that corporations are paying out almost all their profits to shareholders. Lazonick’s research shows that this wasn’t always the case. From the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, big companies reinvested the lion’s share of their profits to hire more workers, raise wages, research new technologies, and generally grow their businesses–with positive effects for the larger economy. These days, large corporations spend most of their profits paying returns to shareholders and buying back their own stock. Companies started buying back a lot more of their own stock after restrictions on the practice were lifted during the Reagan Era. CEOs who are paid in stock options have a vested interest in buy-backs because they increase the value of the company’s stock. 

These days, 91% of corporate profits of S&P 500 companies go to shareholders, leaving just 9% for pay raises, R&D, or any other purpose. 

Corporations are systematically redistributing wealth from workers to investors, and if we don’t implement the reforms to curb this trend, the problem is only going to get worse.