Is Poland Protecting Women?

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Poland is to withdraw from a European treaty aimed at preventing violence against women. 



The country’s justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro said the document, known as the Istanbul Convention, was “harmful” because it required schools to teach children about gender. He argued that the convention violated the rights of parents and “contains elements of an ideological nature”.



The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and its coalition partners are closely aligned to the Catholic Church, and the government has promised to promote traditional family values.



President Duda was re-elected earlier this month following a campaign in which he described the promotion of LGBT rights as an “ideology” more destructive than communism.



Thousands of women have protested at the move in cities across Poland.



“The aim is to legalise domestic violence,” Marta Lempart, an organiser of a march in the city, told Reuters 

Cosmetics and Skin Lighteners

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Following decades of pervasive advertising promoting the power of lighter skin, a re-branding is hitting shelves globally. But it’s unlikely that fresh marketing by the world’s biggest brands in beauty will reverse deeply rooted prejudices around “colorism,” the idea that fair skin is better than dark skin.



  Cosmetics companies have been selling a fairy tale that goes  like this: If your partner has lost interest in you, if your colleagues dismiss you at work, if your talents are ignored, whiten your skin to turn your love life around, boost your career and command center stage.

Unilever’s Fair & Lovely brand sells millions of tubes of skin lightening cream annually for as little as $2 a piece in India and earns the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate more than $500 million in yearly revenue in India alone.
Kavitha Emmanuel founded the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign in India more than a decade ago to counter perceptions that lighter skin is more beautiful than naturally darker skin. She said multinational companies like Unilever did not initiate skin tone bias, but have capitalized on it.
Unilever said it is removing words like “fair”, “white” and “light” from its marketing and packaging, explaining the decision as a move toward “a more inclusive vision of beauty.” Unilever’s Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Unilever Limited, said the Fair & Lovely brand will instead be known as “Glow & Lovely.” Unilever said in its announcement that it recognizes “the use of the words ‘fair’, ‘white’ and ‘light’ suggest a singular ideal of beauty that we don’t think is right.” Instead, the statement referred to products that deliver “glow, even tone, skin clarity and radiance.” French giant L’Oreal followed suit, saying it too would remove similar wording from its products. Johnson & Johnson said it will stop selling Neutrogena’s fairness and skin-whitening lines altogether. The U.S.-based Proctor & Gamble, which sells Olay brands “Natural White” and “White Radiance”, declined to comment when asked whether it had plans to re-brand globally.
The makeover is happening in the wake of mass protests against racial injustice following the death of George Floyd. It’s the latest in a series of changes as companies rethink their policies amid Black Lives Matter protests, which have spread around the world and reignited conversations about race.
For women raised on these fixed standards of beauty, the market is awash in products and services that can both brighten pigmentation from skin damage and outright lighten skin.
At the Skin and Body International beauty clinic in South Africa, owner Tabby Kara said she sees a lot of people inquiring about going one or two shades lighter. Throughout Africa and Asia, darker skin has been associated with poor laborers who work in the sun.
“It’s a general demand in Africa,” she said. “People do want to be a bit fairer simply because society expects or is more interested in the fairness of a person.”
India’s cultural fixation with lighter skin is embedded in daily matrimonial ads, which frequently note the skin tone of brides and grooms as “fair” or “wheatish” alongside their height, age and education.
The ancient Hindu caste system has helped uphold some of the bias, with darker-skinned people often seen as “untouchables” and relegated to the dirtiest jobs. The power of whiter, fairer skin in many countries was further reinforced by European rule, and Bollywood film stars who’ve featured in skin lightening ads.
In Japan, pale translucent skin has been coveted since at least the 11th Century. So-called “bihaku” products, based on the Japanese characters for “beauty” and “white,” remain popular today among major brands.
The high-end Tokyo-based skin care brand Shiseido says none of its “bihaku” products contain ingredients that bleach skin, but do reduce melanin that can lead to blemishes. The company says it has no plans to change its product names, including the “White Lucent” line, simply because other global companies have done so.
In South Korea, the words “whitening” or “mibaek” have been used in about 1,200 kinds of cosmetics products since 2001, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. About $283 million worth of “mibaek” products were manufactured last year in South Korea, the ministry has said.

Blaming BAME

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Some see BAME, an acronym to describe Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, as a means of articulating that feeling of commonality that “black” once denoted. It’s not. It’s an administrative, not a political, term.
People belong to many categories and categories overlap. African Caribbeans and Bangladeshis in Britain, for instance, are disproportionately working class, compared not just with white people but with other minority groups, such as Indians, Chinese and black Africans. But while discussion of the white population routinely takes class into account, discussions of minorities rarely do.
In France, the nation’s universalist ethos means that ethnic and religious data is rarely collected. The resolve to treat everyone as citizens, not as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, is valuable. In practice, though, many people are denied equal treatment and racism is deep seated, but the lack of data makes it difficult to gauge discriminatory practices.
In Britain, there has been much debate about the unequal impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities. Not so in France, largely because there’s little information in which to root a debate. But if lack of statistics is a problem, possessing data is no panacea. Decisions on what data to collect and how to interpret it may themselves mislead.
Take the question of street violence. Twenty years ago, the major issue of concern was not knife crime but street robbery. Then, as now, black people were over-represented in the statistics, leading to the claim that there is something about black culture leading to criminality.
The criminologists Marian FitzGerald, Jan Stockdale and Chris Hale analysed the data. They showed that street crime was much more likely in areas with a high population turnover and a combination of young people living in poverty alongside others who were both more affluent and trendy enough to own gadgets such as mobile phones. Young black people lived disproportionately in such areas. But where such areas included large numbers of poor white people, they, too, were involved in robberies.
The category “lives in an area of high population turnover with a mixture of poor people and affluent trendies” is not politically salient. “Black” is. So street robbery became associated with black people. The result is what FitzGerald calls “statistical racism”.
 Black pupils are disproportionately excluded from school. Look more closely and you see the problem is in particular with those of Caribbean descent. Pupils of black African descent are less likely to be excluded than their white peers. Figures also show that pupils claiming free school meals (FSM) – a proxy for poverty – are three times more likely to be excluded than the average pupil; 40% of all school exclusions are of FSM pupils. School exclusion, then, is a major issue facing white working-class pupils, too, and class as well as race may play a role in the disproportionate exclusion of black pupils. But to say so is to invite the accusation that one is downplaying the significance of racism. And so, more nuanced accounts of discrimination are often ignored.

Our Declining Populations

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The global number of people is going to start shrinking within a century, and not for reasons of disease or disaster. The key driver is women. Female empowerment gave women greater opportunity to work and have fewer children if they wished. 


 Christopher Murray, the director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and the lead author of the Lancet study, explained, “We’ve realised there’s something different about our species, namely that women can control their fertility,” he says. “And as they get more educated and have access to jobs and careers they choose to have fewer children than replacement requires.”


As educational opportunities for women have grown and contraceptives have improved in quality and become more easily available, the same trend has been observed from the suburbs of America to the cities of Iran and villages of India. “I have always believed education is the best contraceptive pill,” says Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Delhi-based Population Foundation of India. “It is the magic contraceptive pill for fertility rates going down.” She points out “If you look at the body language of young people in the villages, and especially girls who have gone to school, they look more confident; when you talk to them they have more determination, and many of them are convincing their families not to get them married early, to allow them to study.” Too much Indian birth control happens through sterilisation or unsafe abortions, she says, and the termination of female foetuses is still a scourge. But people are also absorbing messages to use contraception, space out pregnancies and delay marriage until adulthood. “There are still young girls who have no control over their lives: they get married early, go through violence,” she adds. “But I am looking at girls who are stepping out. And also young boys who relate more to the values of their peers and not necessarily the family values of tradition and patriarchy.”


The populations of Japan, Thailand, Spain and 19 other countries will have declined by 50% or more; there will be nearly half as many Chinese citizens as the present day. India’s population could peak at 1.6 billion in less than two decades.


It will be a significantly older world, the study says. Working-age populations will have declined by several hundred million in India and China.


Murray observes, “Who pays taxes? How do we afford health insurance and social security? Who’s respected in society? When there’s tons of people over 80 and very few under 30, everything gets totally scrambled and I think nobody’s really coming to grips just how different societies will be within an inverted age structure.”


Derek Hoff, an associate professor of University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, who has written a book on the US population debate, says “The argument is that if you don’t have steadily rising populations you can’t have economic growth, and there there is this crisis for social support systems of too many old people and not enough young people to pay for them,” he says. Hoff does not deny that ageing population throws up challenges, “but I don’t think it’s as big a crisis as is being suggested”, he says. “Look at Japan. Everyone say it’s in a demographic downward spiral. But it’s a very rich society and continues to get richer.”


Many nations will only keep the size of their workforces stable only by keeping anti-migrant politics in check. Many of those new arrivals would come from Sub-Saharan Africa, whose population will have tripled in size. Nigeria’s population is projected to be 791 million.
Far from a future of governments failing to feed their populations, as some feared, such projections are driving many to find ways to persuade their citizens to procreate. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, promised last year that women who had four or more children would never pay income tax again. Iran’s state hospitals and clinics are no longer performing vasectomies or handing out contraceptives.


Nevertheless, the erosion of the welfare state and stagnating wages in many countries, have reduced the opportunity to choose to spend more time at home and raise a large family. The expected deep recessions caused by the coronavirus lockdown may lead to even fewer children born in the years ahead. Sweden is one of the few countries that used a package of policies including childcare, flexible working conditions and generous maternity and paternity leave packages. But the increase to the fertility rate was marginal – just 0.2 children per woman, he says – and the same policy suite failed to nudge birthrates upwards when applied in countries such as Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. UN research say other pro-family policies such as cash payments or subsidised access to IVF appear to be less effective.


From

Modern Slavery in the UK

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 A human rights barrister and world-leading expert on human trafficking, Parosha Chandran,  said she is not surprised that a study this month calculated there are 100,000 victims of modern slavery in Britain. “The thing about slavery is that it’s a vastly hidden crime,” she says. “There are control mechanisms that are used very effectively by enslavers and traffickers to keep people quiet and to make victims fear going forward to the authorities to ask for help.”



 Garment and food factories in Leicester, where as many as 10,000 mostly immigrant workers are reportedly paid as little as £3 an hour in some cases and have been forced to work with no protective equipment, have contributed to a spike in Covid-19 cases and the second lockdown in the city. “I think this is an example of the type of exploitation that has been going on up and down the country during Covid,” she says.  “If that’s the estimate of what’s happening in Leicester, then what’s happening in Birmingham? Or Nottinghamshire? Or Manchester? Or London? Modern slavery is not just confined to one place in the Midlands. It’s going on everywhere, therefore there needs to be a robust response to it…”



 She says victims are often made to wrongly believe they had a hand in their own fate. “In legal terms, consent is irrelevant where a person was deceived, forced, threatened or coerced, but of course victims don’t know that, so it’s really critical that there are trained officials who are able to identify victims, wherever they may be found.” 



 That could be an immigration raid, a workplace inspection, detection by the police or even cases where a GP has a patient who they suspect might be a victim of exploitation. 



 Despite it being a criminal offence to use someone for forced labour, “the police have not been mobilised quickly enough in these cases,” Chandran says. “By the time inspectors go in – if there’s a lapse of time – all of the workers will have been threatened not to say anything to anyone coming in. What needs to happen is a swift response.”



 Chandran has worked tirelessly to ensure that both the law and police understand the vulnerability of exploited individuals who are sometimes forced to commit crimes.



 Uganda has “the first modern slavery bill in the world that directly criminalises labour recruitment companies for human trafficking and forced labour,” she says. In comparison, she says, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 in the UK was written with an eye on criminalising the acts not of companies or corporations but rather individuals.



 Chandran believes the Black Lives Matter movement offers an important opportunity to educate young people about modern slavery in Britain, and she wants to create a programme on modern slavery for schools that can highlight the dangers and increase social awareness.



 “The education of children is extremely important, so they can be aware of what is going on with modern slavery in Britain and can be aware of the risks, including who they might turn to if they or a friend get into a situation of difficulty. With trafficking and modern slavery, particularly of children, we always need to be one step ahead of the abusers, so we need to continuously and carefully understand how they abuse, who they abuse and then cut off the supply.”



 https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/jul/22/parosha-chandran-modern-slavery-uk-is-not-confined-to-midlands-leicester-covid-19

Food Insecurity

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According to a new United Nations report, global rates of hunger and malnutrition are on the rise. The report estimates that in 2019, 690 million people – 8.9 per cent of the world’s population – were undernourished. It predicts that this number will exceed 840 million by 2030.
If you also include the number of people who the UN describes as food insecure, meaning that they have trouble getting access to food, over 2 billion people worldwide suffer. This includes people in wealthy, middle-income and low-income countries.
The report further confirms that women are more likely to face moderate to severe food insecurity than men, and that little progress has been achieved on this front in the past several years. 
Overall, its findings warn that eradicating hunger by 2030 – one of the UN’s main “Sustainable Development Goals” – looks increasingly unlikely.
Covid-19 has only made matters worse: the report estimates that the unfolding pandemic and its accompanying economic recession will push an additional 83 million to 132 million people into undernourishment. But based on independent experts to the UN on hunger, access to food and malnutrition it’s clear that the virus is only accelerating existing trends. It is not driving the rising numbers of hungry and food-insecure people. People who live at the current global poverty level of $1.90 per day cannot feasibly secure access to a healthy diet, even under the most optimistic scenarios.
One thing everyone agrees on is that a plant-heavy diet is best for human health and the planet. But if prices for fruits and vegetables are too low, then farmers can’t make a living, and will grow something more lucrative or quit farming altogether. And costs eventually go up for consumers as the supply dwindles. Conversely, if the price is too high, then most people can’t afford healthy food and will resort to eating whatever they can afford – often, cheap processed foods.
As research has shown, today and in the past, people’s access to food is usually determined by how much power is concentrated in the hands of the few. One current example is meatpacking plants. To keep prices low, people work shoulder-to-shoulder processing meat at an incredible speed. 

Workers Power

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Under American law, employers are required to listen to their workers only when they have a labor union, but just 11.6% of American workers are represented by unions. As for the other 88.4% of workers, employers don’t have to listen to their views on anything – not safety, not pay, not anything else.  The whole notion of “worker voice” is rarely discussed.



 A 2018 MIT study shows that American workers very much want a voice on the job. Ninety three per cent want a say on job safety, with 50.8% wanting “a lot of say” and 23.5% “unlimited say” on safety. A hefty majority also wants a lot of say on job security, being treated with respect, and anti-discrimination and harassment policies. The MIT study also found that 50% of non-union, non-managerial workers said they wished they had a union.



 There is huge focus on America’s income and wealth inequality, a phenomenon that has hurt Black Americans especially, but there is not nearly enough focus on how the weakened voice of workers has contributed to that inequality. It is no coincidence that the US has the weakest worker voice of any industrial nation, and also the greatest income inequality.  A stronger voice for workers reduces inequality by pushing for higher pay, more generous social security and pension benefits, higher taxes on the rich and greater restraints on executive pay. 



 Two IMF economists have argued that “the decline in unionization” (and the accompanying decline in worker voice and bargaining power) “explains about half of the rise in incomes for the richest 10%” in advanced industrial nations and about half the increase in those nations’ main measure of income inequality.



 Weak worker voice fuels not just economic inequality, but also political inequality. “The views of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution” receive “no weight at all in the voting decisions of their senators”, according to research by the political scientist Larry Bartels.



 By 80% to 17%, Americans want Congress to enact nationwide paid parental leave, yet the US remains the only wealthy country that doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave to all workers.



 A big reason workers are largely ignored in Washington: corporations donated $2.8bn in the 2017-18 election cycle, sixteen times as much as the $171m contributed by labor. Moreover, business spent $3bn on lobbying in Washington last year, 60 times as much as the $49m spent by labor.



 In May, workers at a McDonald’s in San Francisco said that when they asked their employer for masks, they were told to use coffee filters instead. In April, at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, a workers’ representative saw only two hand sanitizers for the facility’s 5,000 employees. A Walmart worker in New Orleans said in April that several cashiers were sent home without pay for refusing managers’ orders to stop wearing masks, after some shoppers interpreted it as a sign they had Covid-19. Some financially stretched retail workers say they were all but forced to go to work sick because their companies didn’t give paid sick leave for Covid-19 unless they first had a test showing they had contracted the virus, and in many places it was extremely hard to get tested. Alarmed about the spread of Covid-19, health officials in Colorado criticized the JBS meatpacking company for having a “work while sick” culture. At a Mom’s Organic Market in Philadelphia, workers voiced alarm that their store was experiencing abnormally high sales volume, but little was being done to limit the crowding.



 If companies paid more attention to their workers’ concerns about safety, would a staggering 890 workers at the Tyson pork plant in Logansport, Indiana, have contracted Covid-19? Would more than 780 workers at the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Would eight workers have died at JBS’s beef-processing plant in Greeley, Colorado?



 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/24/covid-19-workers-dangers-unions

When is a relief break a real break?

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Warehouse workers at Sports Direct, the retail chain controlled by the billionaire Mike Ashley, appear to be receiving pay below the national minimum wage, according to expert analysis by the Guardian.

The Guardian placed an undercover reporter inside the same Shirebrook, Derbyshire, warehouse during two weeks in late June and early July, where an estimated 3,000-4,000 workers distribute goods for Frasers Group, the holding company that also includes retailers such as Flannels, Jack Wills and USC.
The reporter recorded how warehouse staff at the group were unable to leave the building during their 30-minute unpaid breaks – a practice some employment law experts say should count as paid working time and, if correct, would push Shirebrook’s effective hourly wage rates below the legal minimum of £8.72 to about £8.20. 
The Guardian’s undercover reporter asked three separate direct supervisors if he could leave the warehouse during his daily break. All three said this was impossible and that the break should be spent in a staff canteen or on the smoking terrace.
One said: “It’s not possible. Only in an emergency. There is no security to search you at the door to allow you out. Think about it, if all 2,000 on a shift left we might not get them back.”
The law says workers are entitled to spend rest breaks away from their workstation if they have one, and breaks do not generally count as working time and therefore do not have to be paid under national minimum wage law. However, legal experts say that is only the case if a worker is able to spend the break how he or she wishes.
Zoe Lagadec, principal at Mulberry’s employment law solicitors, said: “If the workers are not able to use their unpaid rest break freely and for their own purposes, then this time should be deemed working time and should be paid. These workers cannot be said to have taken rest away from their place of work if they are prohibited from leaving the warehouse during their only break during the working day. Given that the workers are paid only three pence above the national minimum wage, this unpaid period of working time would breach the NMW regulations as the rate would fall below it for the whole relevant period.”
Another minimum wage expert, who has experience of HM Revenue & Customs investigations, said: “I have been involved in many inquiries where HMRC’s interpretation is that if you are not free to do what and go where you wish during your break then it will be counted as working time. In your example at Sports Direct a daily 30-minute unpaid break would result in a minimum wage breach.”

The Pandemic and Pregnancy

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Rates of unplanned pregnancies have fallen around the world, according to new data published by health research organisation the Guttmacher Institute and the UN Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) on Wednesday. Global rates of unintended pregnancies have fallen from 79 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49 in 1990 to 64 in 2019.
There are concerns that decades of progress in reducing the numbers risk being undone by Covid-19, as lockdown restrictions hamper health services.
Zara Ahmed, a senior policy manager at Guttmacher, warned : “Covid-19 could reverse those declines due to challenges with the supply chain, diversion of providers to the response and lack of access to health facilities during lockdown.”
In April, Guttmacher predicted that just a 10% decline in services in poorer countries as a result of coronavirus restrictions could result in 15 million more unplanned pregnancies, 168,000 more newborn deaths, 28,000 more maternal deaths, and 3 million more unsafe abortions.
Guttmacher and HRP’s latest research, published in Lancet Global Health, found that women in the poorest countries were nearly three times as likely to have an unplanned pregnancy as women in the wealthiest countries – 93 per 1,000 women in low-income countries compared with 34 in wealthy states.
Europe and North America had the lowest number of unplanned pregnancies (35 per 1,000 women), while sub-Saharan Africa had the highest (91). Women in sub-Saharan Africa are among the least likely to have access to family planning.
The research also revealed that 61% of unplanned pregnancies globally in 2015–19 resulted in an abortion, up from 51% in 1990. Despite a slight fall in abortion rates in the early 2000s, rates had increased over the past 15 years. Researchers said the trend could reflect increased access to abortion or “a stronger motivation to avoid unintended births”.
The majority of terminations occurred in countries where abortion is banned or restricted, researchers found, which meant they were more likely to be conducted unsafely. At least 22,800 women are estimated to die from an unsafe abortion each year.
Ahmed said even where it was legal some countries had deemed abortion not to be an essential service during the pandemic and had restricted services. “These service gaps could result in some individuals not being able to access abortion care at all, while others are forced to seek unsafe abortions,” she said.
The World Health Organization estimates that 270 million women who want modern contraceptives have no access to them. 

The Inequality of COVID-19

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The poorest areas of England have suffered more than twice as many deaths from coronavirus as the richest, a new analysis shows.
The mortality rate was 139.6 per 100,000 in England’s most deprived parts – compared with 63.4 deaths in the most prosperous, the Office for National Statistics found.
The pattern was similar in Wales, at 119.1 deaths per 100,000 people in the poorest areas, against 63.5 in the richest.
The figures also reveal that London has been hit by far the hardest, with 141.8 deaths involving Covid-19 per 100,000 residents – 30 per cent higher than the next worst region, the North West.
Nine of the ten local authorities with the highest death rates are in the capital, led by Brent (216.6 deaths per 100,000), Newham (201.6) and Haringey (185.1).

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