Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

NY Fast Food Workers Shut Down 42nd St. In Bid for Living Wage

Hillman Prize-winning journalist Steven Greenhouse reports on today’s fast food worker demonstrations in New York City, and across the country: 

Twenty-one workers demanding a $15-an-hour wage were arrested while conducting a sit-in outside a McDonald’s in Times Square on Thursday morning as the fast-food movement for the first time embraced widespread civil disobedience to escalate its fight.

Organizers said several hundred fast-food workers planned to sit in at restaurants in dozens of cities on Thursday. Organizers said the police arrested more than 50 workers in Detroit for such action on Thursday morning. The civil disobedience is intended to draw more attention to the “Fight for Fifteen” movement and to step up pressure on the nation’s fast-food chains. [NYT]

The living wage advocacy website Low Pay Is Not Okay has a large gallery of images from today’s protest in Times square, which it says resulted in the temporary shutdown of 42nd St.

 

[Photo credit: Low Pay Is Not Okay.]

The Fight Against Slavery in Mauritiana Continues

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.]

#Sidney's Picks: Teacher Tenure, Mail-Order Abortions, and Mutant Ebola

The Best of the Week’s News: Labor Day Edition

  • The Ebola virus is rapidly mutating as it spreads within Africa, according to a new study.
  • A settlement has finally been reached in the Market Basket standoff in Massachusetts.

 

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

How Exactly Did We Drive Off This Cliff?

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. 

How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops

Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky explains how the Supreme Court made it virtually impossible to reign in police officers who use excessive force against citizens. 

 

[Photo credit: Dan Backman, Creative Commons.]

Hillman Event: Your Shirt Off Their Backs, Sept 11 at SEIU 32BJ HQ

Reminder: Seats are still available for our upcoming panel discussion on the struggles of Bangladeshi and Cambodian garment workers, but space is limited. RSVP to alex(at)hillmanfoundation(dot)org

Join us on Thursday, Sept 11 at 6pm at SEIU 32BJ (25 W. 18th St, Manhattan) for a public forum on sweat shop labor, global supply chains, and what we can do to improve the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

The panel will feature New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Bangladeshi labor leader Kalpona Akter, SEIU global strategies director Jeff Hermanson, and Judy Gearhart of the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF). Anna Burger, former SEIU Secretary Treasurer, will moderate the panel. 

This event is sponsored by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, Balcony NY, and the ILRF

[Photo credit: SETCa BBTK, Creative Commons.] 

#Sidney's Picks: South Carolina's Spousal Murder Crisis; A Town of Guinea Pigs; Elephant Poaching on the Rise

 

The Best of the Week’s News 

  • Till Death Do Us Part: A South Carolina paper publishes a sweeping multi-media report on the state’s spousal murder crisis.
  • Sidney-winner Jina Moore interviews the brave Liberians who are protecting the living by burying the highly contagious remains of patients who succumb to the Ebola virus.
  • Elephant poaching is increasing dramatically, thanks to rising demand for ivory in China, a new study reveals.

 

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Hillman Event, Sept 11: Your Shirt Off Their Backs

Join us on Thursday, Sept 11 at 6pm at SEIU 32BJ (25 W. 18th St, Manhattan) for a public forum on sweat shop labor, global supply chains, and what we can do to improve the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

The panel will feature New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Bangladeshi labor leader Kalpona Akter, SEIU global strategies director Jeff Hermanson, and Judy Gearhart of the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF). Anna Burger, former SEIU Secretary Treasurer, will moderate the panel. 

This event is sponsored by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, Balcony NY, and the ILRF

Space is limited. RSVP to alex(at)hillmanfoundation(dot)org

No Justice, No Peace in Ferguson

Protests and heavy-handed policing, are still the order of the day in Ferguson, Missouri, over a week after 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was shot to death by a police officer. In the New Republic, Hillman Prize-winner Jon Cohn argues that two things must happen to restore calm in Ferguson. Cohn argues that two things have to happen before the residents of Ferguson will be prepared to stand down.

First, Cohn says, the investigation must reach some kind of concrete result. The police have been very stingy with real information, but gratuitous about leaking potentially prejudicial information against Brown, such as a video that purports to show him shoving a convenience store clerk in the course of stealing a handful of cigars, and the news that Brown had marijuana in his system when he was shot. Second, police procedures in Ferguson need to change to reduce the chances of police brutality and racist policing in the future. 

[Photo credit: Light Brigading, Creative Commons.]

For Low-Wage Workers, Unpredictable Hours Throw Family Life Into Chaos

Unpredictable hours create chaos in the lives of low-wage workers. Today, Jodi Kantor of the New York Times shines a spotlight on the tyranny of unpredictable hours, which affects countless working people, but which typically receives scant attention from the elite media.

Jannette Navarro is a 22-year-old Starbucks barista raising a son on her own and working towards a college degree, but her unpredictable hours are wreaking havoc on her ability to build a stable life and advance in her career:

But Ms. Navarro’s fluctuating hours, combined with her limited resources, had also turned their lives into a chronic crisis over the clock. She rarely learned her schedule more than three days before the start of a workweek, plunging her into urgent logistical puzzles over who would watch the boy. Months after starting the job she moved out of her aunt’s home, in part because of mounting friction over the erratic schedule, which the aunt felt was also holding her family captive. Ms. Navarro’s degree was on indefinite pause because her shifting hours left her unable to commit to classes. She needed to work all she could, sometimes counting on dimes from the tip jar to make the bus fare home. If she dared ask for more stable hours, she feared, she would get fewer work hours over all.

Companies use high-tech computer scheduling to wring extra profit out of their operations by minimizing downtime, at the expense of the freedom and quality of life of their workforce. Workers are often expected to be available with little or no notice. These expectations make it difficult to schedule childcare and transportation, get an education, or plan any activity more than three days in advance.

Low-wage workers are gaining unprecedented visibility thanks to the efforts of groups like Fast Food Forward. As low-wage workers gain a stronger voice in the workplace, scheduling is sure to be a major issue.

Update: Starbucks has resolved to reform its scheduling policies in the wake of the New York Times story.  

[Photo credit: Bernard Polet, Creative Commons.]

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