Investigative reporter Anne Elizabeth Moore explains that NGOs that puport to “rescue” women from prostitution in Cambodia actually channel them into garment industry sweatshops, under the smiling approval factory owners and international observers: 

Listen: I spent seven years researching and doing work in Cambodia, made concerted efforts to learn the language, developed a strong stomach and reliable sources, and honed my skills in investigative reporting before I could even understand what, really, anti-human trafficking NGOs do. What they do is normalize existent labor opportunities for women, however low the pay, dangerous the conditions, or abusive an environment they may be. And they shame women who reject such jobs. [Salon]

It’s debateable whether these new jobs constitute rescue at all, and the tactics that some NGOs use to move workers from one sector to another can be coercive. 

[Photo credit: Garment workers in Cambodia on their way to work. World Bank, Creative Commons.]

For nearly a decade, Candice Anderson assumed she was to blame for the 2004 crash that killed her boyfriend. She was driving when the accident occurred and, because she had a trace of Xanax in her bloodstream, she even faced a manslaughter charge in connection with the accident.

Last week, Ms. Anderson learned that the crash had nothing to do with her driving. She lost control of her car because the vehicle had a defective ignition, a defect that the manufacturer, General Motors, did not disclose. Ms. Anderson’s boyfriend was one of 13 people who were killed because of this defect, the New York Times reports.

[Image Credit: Vintage GM ad, Alden Jewell, Creative Commons.]

Hillman Judge Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the case for reparations in a cover story at the Atlantic. The piece begins: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

It’s an important conversation and one that’s long overdue. We at Hillman are biased, but we can’t think of a better person to put forward the moral and historical case for reparations than Mr. Coates. 

When NYU announced a plan to build a campus in Abu Dhabi, a city in the UAE with notoriously lax labor laws, the university pledged to respect the rights of workers. But former workers on the site said their jobs broke virtually every promise NYU made about wages, hours, working conditions, and living standards.

Amongst other complaints, former workers on the site of NYU’s future Abu Dhabi campus say they were beaten by police and deported for striking and that they were forced to live in squalor, work involuntary overtime, and pay huge recruiting fees to get their jobs. 

[Photo credit: Yuwen Memon, Creative Commons.]