Pakistan’s Sweat-Shop

Hungry and afraid: life for factory workers meeting UK demand for cheap clothes | Global development | The Guardian

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The fast fashion brand Boohoo is selling clothes made by Pakistani factory workers who say they face appalling conditions and earn as little as 29p an hour.

In the industrial city of Faisalabad, workers at two factories claimed they were paid 10,000 Rupees (£47) a month, well below the legal monthly minimum wage for unskilled labour of 17,500 Rupees, while making clothes to be sold by Boohoo. In the rush to produce clothes for the western market, workers would sometimes do 24-hour shifts.

“I know we are exploited and paid less than the legal minimum, but we can’t do anything … if I leave the job another person will be ready to replace me.” explained one worker.

Workers in two factories based in the Samanabad area of Faisalabad allege that:

While some are paid the legal minimum wage, others say they earn far less and receive no receipt or payslip to record their income.

At Madina Gloves, which manufactures a range of clothes, workers are often ordered to work unreasonably long shifts without full overtime pay, stretching to 24 hours straight before major deadlines.

Accommodation provided by Madina Gloves is squalid and one worker said they went without running water there for days at a time.

As long as the demand for the clothes is there, workers like Ahmed see little hope of change. “If I don’t work in these conditions,” he says, “someone else will.”

Mohammed Hafeez, says, “I know we are exploited and paid less than the legal minimum, but we can’t do anything,” he says. “If I leave the job, another person will be ready to replace me.”

Of the 1.3 million people who come to Faisalabad to work, many are from rural parts of south Punjab and more than half work in the textiles industry. While some are formally employed, others are all but invisible, hired on an ad-hoc basis and not registered with the labour department.

“It is a nexus of industrialists, politicians and bureaucrats who deny basic rights to the workers,” says Aslam Wafa, a labour leader and general secretary at the Faisalabad Labour Federation, sitting in an office piled with files that reach the ceiling. “As soon as some workers file a request to the labour department for establishing a union in a factory, the owner gets the news, and he fires them.”

Rent Arrears

840,000 private tenants in England and Wales could be behind on rent | Money | The Guardian

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840,000 private tenants in England and Wales could be behind on their rent, with young people and the self-employed most likely to have missed payments.

The average arrears were between £251 and £500, some tenants reported that they owed their landlord more than £1,000.

Renters aged between 18 and 24 were twice as likely to have fallen behind as the general population of tenants, and the self-employed were most likely to be struggling, with 17% saying they had built up debts to their landlord. These groups have been hard hit by the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis. Young people have suffered disproportionately from job cuts, while many self-employed people have been unable to access government job support schemes and have seen their incomes fall dramatically as a result.

Rationing Health-care in Hospitals

California hospitals discuss rationing care as virus surges (apnews.com)

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The richest state in the richest nation in a wealthy world is drawing up emergency plans in case they have to limit how many people receive life-saving care.

The number of people hospitalized across California with confirmed COVID-19 infections is forecasted to hit 75,000 patients by mid-January.

Rationing care is not in place yet, but they need to be established because “the worst is yet to come,” said Los Angeles County’s health services director, Dr. Christina Ghaly. Four hospitals run by Los Angeles County are weighing what to do if they cannot treat everyone because of a shortage of beds or staffers. Many hospitals in California already have implemented emergency procedures to stretch staff and space. Corona Regional Medical Center southeast of Los Angeles has converted an old emergency room to handle nearly double te usual number of ICU patients. It’s also using two disaster tents to triage ER patients. Overall, the state’s ICU capacity was just 2.1% on Sunday. Some hospitals have canceled non-essential elective surgeries

A document recently circulated among doctors at the four hospitals proposed that instead of trying to save every life, their goal could shift to saving as many patients as possible — meaning those less likely to survive would not get the same kind of care.

“Some compromise of standard of care is unavoidable; it is not that an entity, system or locale chooses to limit resources, it is that the resources are clearly not available to provide care in a regular manner,” said the document.

Biden Breaks Pledge to Migrants

From “Day One” to We Will “Need Time,” Team Biden Walks Back Vow to End Trump Attack on Asylum Seekers | Common Dreams News

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As we all know promises made in an election campaign are seldom kept.

Almost a year ago Biden pledged “On day one, I will eliminate President Trump’s decision to limit asylum and end the MPP program ”

Now two of his appointees, say the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), will not be immediately suspended and that Biden will “need time” to undo Trump’s immigration policies.

Incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Spanish wire service EFE that policies including “Remain in Mexico,” will not be immediately suspended.

“…putting the new policy into practice will take time,” he stated, qualifying Biden’s previous pledge that the program will end “early in his administration.”

More than 66,000 asylum-seekers have been turned away at the U.S.-Mexico border and forced to live in tent cities without access to sufficient medical care, suitable shelter, or legal aid has led to a humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico as people wait for their asylum claims to be processed in U.S. courts.

Susan Rice, Biden’s new domestic policy adviser placed the reason for the delay upon the pandemic. She said Trump’s policy will continue for an unspecified period of time under the Biden administration.

However, on Monday public health experts issued a statement urging the incoming Biden administration to use “effective, evidence-based public health measures” to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 at the southern border—not “bans, expulsions, and asylum denials.”

“The Trump administration has misused public health authority as a ploy to attempt to justify expulsions that endanger human lives,” said Monette Zard, associate professor and director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “The Biden administration should end this abuse of public health authority, ensure public health decisions are made by public health officials without pressure to advance migration policy or other political objectives and use public health measures to safely process the cases of families, adults and children seeking protection at our borders.”

Back in May, the campaigners Human Rights First accused Trump of using the “pandemic as pretext” in order to carry out “its long-held ambition to eliminate humanitarian protections for asylum-seekers.”

In July, the International Rescue Committee issued its own report saying the administration was using the pandemic as an excuse to turn away asylum seekers, and wrote that the U.S. government is capable of meeting its humanitarian obligations while mitigating the risk of spreading Covid-19.

Rice indicated that the Biden administration may focus on changing immigration policy through legislative steps rather than executive authority. If so, then that will be a very protracted process.

Benefit Cap Drives People into Poverty

Scrap benefit cap to lift 150,000 children out of poverty, says charity | Poverty | The Guardian

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About 150,000 children in the UK could be lifted out of severe poverty practically overnight.

Estimates by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) charity show that 35,000 jobless households will be capped this month, drastically limiting the amount of social security benefits they can receive, and plunging many into – or deeper into – poverty.

A further 41,000 households will be capped between January and March next year, it predicts, meaning that with 170,000 already capped – numbers have more than doubled since the pandemic started – about 250,000 households will soon face deep hardship as a result of the policy. That rapidly expanding number of capped families on universal credit will have to cope with average income losses of £62 a week, with some in high rental areas like London losing up to £200 a week. The cap restricts total benefit awards including housing rental costs to £20,000 a year for families outside of London and £23,000 a year for those in the capital, regardless of the family’s needs. Benefit cap rules mean claimants who have worked full-time solidly for 12 months prior to unemployment have a nine-month “grace period” before the cap is imposed. Many of those to be capped this month will have signed on to universal credit in March after losing their job at the start of the pandemic. Although claimants can escape the cap by finding a job of more 16 hours a week at the minimum wage, or by moving to cheaper housing, CPAG says the scarcity of jobs means most will have had no chance to find work or increase hours. The benefits cap was introduced in 2013 as an “incentive” to push claimants into work, though research for the DWP found cutting people’s welfare payments was more likely to leave them further from the job market.

Alison Garnham, CPAG’s chief executive, said the cap would be a “nasty surprise” for households who would lose crucial social security support despite in most cases having no realistic prospect of earning more to become exempt from the cap. She said: “The cap is increasing child poverty and in the context of a coronavirus recession is transparently nonsensical and wrong. At a minimum it should be suspended immediately to prevent the most vulnerable families from being pulled further into poverty.”

CPAG estimates dropping the policy would lift 150,000 children out of very deep poverty (meaning their family income is less than 40% of the median UK income) at a cost of £500m, less than the cost of the “eat out to help out” subsidy scheme.

There are about 750,000 children in deep poverty in the UK, a household income after housing costs of less than £235 a week for a couple with two children.

In the UK, 2 million families, including a million children, likely to struggle to afford to feed themselves, stay warm, or keep clean as the recession gets worse, according to recent estimates by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The Pandemic and the care of the young

Babies and children ‘forgotten and failed’ in Covid response, say health workers | World news | The Guardian

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The Institute of Health Visiting said their findings have laid bare the damage the pandemic had done to families, with the youngest and most vulnerable suffering most.

61% of health visitors in England reported an increase in cases of child neglect. Four out of five reported a rise in domestic violence and abuse, and perinatal mental illness. 65% of health visitors had caseloads of more than 300 children under five, 29% had caseloads of more than 500 and 12% caseloads of more than 700. One health visitor reported a caseload of 3,000 children.

The institute said the optimum maximum caseload for effective practice was 250 children, and fewer in areas of high vulnerability.

Covid-19 had affected babies and young children in disadvantaged families disproportionately as a result of factors such as overcrowded housing with lack of outdoor space, the impact of poverty and parental stress and anxiety, it said.

The institute also said cuts in public health budgets meant health visiting was already in a “depleted state” before the pandemic, with a 31% reduction in health visitors since 2015. This left many services “ill-prepared to meet the rapidly rising levels of need” since the early weeks of the first lockdown and many vulnerable babies and young children without the support that they needed, it said.

Public Sector Pay Freeze

Public-sector pay freeze will hit those earning less than private counterparts – report | Society | The Guardian

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The UK government’s partial public-sector pay freeze will hit workers who are already paid less than their counterparts in private companies, according to new research by the Resolution Foundation. It suggests that the pay squeeze by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, may not achieve his aim of narrowing the gap between government and private workers.

2.6 million public sector workers whose pay will be frozen, including teachers and police, earn 7.9% less than their private sector counterparts once differences such as experience and location are taken into account, according to the analysis.

Unions said the pay freeze was a “kick in the teeth”, especially for key workers who had played a vital role in fighting the pandemic.

Sunak said that pay rises for public sector workers – apart from NHS workers and the lowest-paid – could not be justified at a time when average earnings in the private sector were falling. “Coronavirus has deepened the disparity between public and private sector wages,” he said.

The government’s austerity pay freezes after the 2008 financial crisis have meant the “pay premium” for the public sector has fallen to zero once factors such as education and age are taken into account, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Hannah Slaughter, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “The government has justified the coming public sector pay freeze on the basis of the pay premium these workers will experience as a result of the pandemic. But this is a very poor description of the impact of the policy, with the freeze largely falling on those already experiencing pay penalties relative to the private sector. Ministers must be mindful that while public and private sector pay do move in line with each other over the longer term, there are risks in making that adjustment next April, when the economic challenges of the pandemic will still be immense, and consumer confidence needs supporting.”

Losing Connections

Millions in UK struggling to pay internet and phone bills, says Ofcom | Money | The Guardian

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The coronavirus crisis has prompted a surge in usage of services such as broadband and mobile phones, as millions of people shifted to home working and lockdown restrictions shut down high streets across the country.

Almost a fifth of UK households have struggled to pay their TV, internet and phone bills this year, with some resorting to cutting spend on food and clothes to make payments, according to research from Ofcom.

4.7m homes had experienced difficulty paying their telecoms bills in 2020. Of those, more than one million have cut back spending on items such as food or clothes.

“Lockdown has laid bare our dependence on a reliable internet connection,” said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s network and communications group director. “So it’s important that affordable options are available so everyone can stay connected, particularly those who have fallen on hard times.”

Alistair Cromwell, the acting chief executive at Citizens Advice, said: “Since the March lockdown began, internet access has been vital to home working, running small businesses, accessing essential services like healthcare and continuing education. It is crucial that those who are struggling financially are not locked out.”

Japan Boosts Its Military