Asda shop workers have won the latest key stage in their fight for equal pay in a ruling that could lead to a £500m compensation claim.

The supreme court has backed a 2016 employment tribunal decision that the supermarket’s retail staff, who are mostly women, can compare their work to those in warehouse distribution centres.

More than 44,000 shop workers say they should be paid the same as the predominantly male staff who work in the chain’s depots, and who receive£1.50-£3 an hour more in pay than the shop workers.

The GMB union called the supreme court ruling a “massive victory”.

Susan Harris, the GMB legal director, said: “Asda has wasted money on lawyers’ bills chasing a lost cause, losing appeal after appeal, while tens of thousands of retail workers remain out of pocket.

“We now call on Asda to sit down with us to reach agreement on the back pay owed to our members.”

The outcome of the landmark case – the biggest-ever equal pay claim in the UK private sector – will have repercussions for about 8,000 workers at other supermarkets, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Co-op and Morrisons, who are also engaged in equal pay disputes with their employers.

Supreme court rules against Asda in workers’ equal pay case | Asda | The Guardian

 Poorer nations have contributed the least to the climate crisis yet stand to bear the brunt of its impacts, says Prof Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability scientist from Lund University in Sweden.

Climate inequality also exists within rich countries, she says, with poorer and minority communities often facing the largest climate impacts despite causing fewer emissions. 

Research by Oxfam which found that the poorest 50 per cent of US households produce around eight tonnes of CO2 per person each year, while the richest 10 per cent emit an average of 50 tonnes.

The richest 1 per cent of people in the UK produce 11 times the amount of carbon emissions as those in the poorest half of society, according to a new report.

Wealthy must acknowledge their ‘climate privilege’, says scientist | The Independent

Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the US, is shutting down grocery stores in Los Angeles and laying off of employees in response to local hazard pay rules for essential workers even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage.

“Why are they punishing us?” said Maria Hernandez. “If it weren’t for us they couldn’t run the stores. As a person we have value. As workers we have value. They don’t seem to care about you as a human being. They don’t care.”

In response to a local ordinance passed by the Los Angeles city council on 3 March to grant frontline workers at large employers a $5-an-hour hazard pay increase for 120 days, Kroger announced plans to shut down three grocery stores in the city, eliminating more than 250 jobs.

Tina Jones said, “It’s retaliation.” She continued, “…these executives at Kroger…they’re sitting in their nice houses in the hills or wherever they live, and telling us we don’t deserve an extra $5 an hour.”

As demand for groceries soared due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kroger reported an operating profit of $2.8bn in 2020, an increase from $2.25bn in 2019. Kroger’s sales have continued to outperform 2019, with more than a 10% sales increase in the last fourth quarter of 2020. Kroger’s CEO, Rodney McMullen, received more than $21m in total compensation in 2019, a 789 to 1 ratio compared to the median wage for Kroger employees. In September 2020, Kroger announced a $1bn stock buyback program. Kroger spent $1.32bn on stock buybacks in 2020, and increased dividends to shareholders totaling a $534m payout, providing nearly $1.9bn to shareholders, more than double Kroger’s return to shareholders in 2019 of $951m.

In Long Beach Kroger shut down two grocery stores in Long Beach after the $4-an-hour hazard pay ordinance passed. In February 2021, Kroger also shut down two grocery stores in Seattle after a $4-an-hour local hazard pay ordinance for grocery workers was passed by the Seattle city council.

When the pandemic began, Kroger enacted a $2-an-hour hazard pay along with several other large retailers and grocery chains, but ended it in May 2020 after buying nationwide television ads thanking their essential employees.

“It’s punishing the workers and communities for deciding what our communities look like and how workers should be compensated,” said John Grant, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 in Los Angeles. “They are, as best we can tell, the only grocery chain that is acting punitively and trying to punish workers in the community. Nobody else is shutting down stores.”

‘They don’t care’: US supermarket chain shutters stores after hazard pay rules | California | The Guardian

 The militarisation of Europe’s borders has been increasing steadily since 2015. The EU has invested in fortifying its borders. Drones, thermal-vision cameras and devices that can detect a heartbeat are among the new technological tools being increasingly used by to stop migrants from crossing borders, or to push them back when they do.

Between 2005 and 2016, Frontex’s budget grew from €6.3m to €238.7m, and it now stands at €420.6m. 

The EU has ear-marked €34.9bn (£30bn) in funding for border and migration management for the 2021-27 budget, while sidelining the creation of safe passages and fair asylum processes.

Between 2014 and 2017, with EU funding, Croatia bought 13 thermal-imaging devices for €117,338 that can detect people more than a mile away and vehicles from two miles away. In 2019,  Croatia acquired four eRIS-III long-range drones for €2.3m. They identify people up to six miles away in daylight and just under two miles in darkness, they fly at 80mph and climb to an altitude of 3,500 metres (11,400ft), while transmitting real-time data. Croatia has infrared cameras that can detect people at up to six miles away and equipment that picks up heartbeats.

Romania now has heartbeat detection devices, alongside 117 thermo-vision cameras. Last spring, it added 24 vehicles with thermo-vision capabilities to its border security force at a cost of more than €13m.

Petra Molnar, associate director of Refugee Law Lab, believes the over-emphasis on technologies can alienate and dehumanise migrants.

“There’s this alluring solution to really complex problems,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to sell a bunch of drones or a lot of automated technology, instead of dealing with the drivers that force people to migrate … or making the process more humane.”

A 2021 report by  Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) claims that enhanced border control technologies have led to increased violence as police in the Balkans weaponise new equipment against people on the move. Technology used in pushing back migrants has “contributed to the ease with which racist and repressive procedures are carried out”, the report says. The often violent removal of migrants without giving them the opportunity to apply for asylum is illegal under EU law, which obliges authorities to process asylum requests whether or not migrants possess identification documents or entered the country legally. BVMN’s website archives hundreds of reports of violence. 

‘They can see us in the dark’: migrants grapple with hi-tech fortress EU | Migration | The Guardian

 About 14% of food produced globally — and 20% of fruits and vegetables — goes bad between harvest and retail, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. 

In Sub-Saharan Africa, small farmers lose up to one-third of their stored grain to insects and mold.

 In the half century since Bangladesh gained its independence, the capital, Dhaka, has grown from  a small city of a million to a megacity of 20 million people who now live there, with 400,000 arriving each year. Dhaka could become the world’s fourth most populous megacity by 2030, according to the UN.

Residential buildings keep getting higher with no regard for planning laws. There is little space between buildings, electricity cables are slung low in a tangled mess and the sewage system, which is still cleaned manually, is routinely overloaded by heavy rains.

Dhaka’s air quality routinely ranks among the worst in the world and the roads are so congested that traffic has slowed to almost walking speeds of 4 mph, down from 13 mph a decade ago

Once described as a “basket case” economy in 1971 by Henry Kissinger, who had opposed its creation. Half a century later, the country’s leaders often take pride in pointing out that they have proved him wrong. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted in October the country’s economic growth would still hit 4.4% in 2021 despite the coronavirus pandemic halving the previous year’s growth.  

Dhaka-based industries that have spawned a rapidly-growing class of super-rich, who live in leafy neighbourhoods, dine out on international cuisine and shop in gleaming malls or abroad. While industry has thrived, there is been a lack of comprehensive strategy to support the city’s residents. Corruption has made things worse, leaving the powerful able to exploit laws or, in the case of the Keraniganj suburbs, buy up land for affordable housing projects then sell them at prices beyond the reach of ordinary workers. 

These industries feed on a constant flow of migrants fleeing deprivation or climate disasters, who move to places like the Kallyanpur and Korail slums, or the suburbs between Dhaka and satellite towns built for garment factories.

 Parveen Begum, 45, whose home in the coastal Bhola district was engulfed when the river flooded.

“There are problems here. There is also work here. As the crisis in our village increased, I came to Dhaka to find a living.” Parveen and her husband pay 2,000 taka (£16) a month to rent a single room, in which they must keep the light on permanently because there is no natural light. Outside, the drains regularly clog with sewage. “It’s not that I’m good here but there are more job opportunities than in the village,” she says. “We don’t want to live in this dirty slum, we’re always wishing we could go back.”  She believes that unless there is investment in rural Bangladesh the higher wages will compel many more people to leave their villages for the city.

“…you cannot simply have a decent city life, even if you have a nice apartment,” says Dr Shahadat Hossain, an urban planning expert at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. “You cannot see any park developments, children go to school and come home and stay inside … social infrastructure is absolutely missing,” he says. “Your relation with the city is with your apartment, your workplace and the school your child goes to, but you have no relationship with anything in between because the roads, the community you live in, is foreign to you.”

Asaduzzaman Asad preceded most in his migration to the capital, arriving from the western district of Jhenaidah in 1966, when Dhaka was still the capital of East Pakistan, .

“This town was very small. The number of three-storey buildings were few and you mostly just saw tin-roofed homes. There were ponds and canals and very few people. It was peaceful,” says Asad.  But he is now worried the city is becoming an intolerable place to live. “We need decentralisation, we need good medical treatment in villages, good education and alternative livelihoods,” he says. “We can easily predict the future of Dhaka. If this unplanned development continues, this city will become uninhabitable.”

The making of a megacity: how Dhaka transformed in 50 years of Bangladesh | Global development | The Guardian

 The UK likes to play lip-service to the cause of human rights. Recently it earned kudos for imposing sanctions upon the Burmese generals and their businesses.

 However,  in a call to thousands of civil servants  on Tuesday, Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, had a very different message. 

“I squarely believe we ought to be trading liberally around the world. If we restrict it to countries with European convention on human rights-level standards of human rights, we’re not going to do many trade deals with the growth markets of the future.”

The UK has imposed no sanctions on any Chinese official even though it has said three times that China is in breach of the Sino-British declaration on Hong Kong by introducing repressive security laws. Nor has it supported sanctions against China over the persecution of the Uyghurs. 

Civil servants rebuked for leak of Raab remarks on trade and human rights | Dominic Raab | The Guardian

The highlights from the last 12 months of billionaire wealth growth:

– The combined wealth of the nation’s 657 billionaires increased more than $1.3 trillion, or 44.6 percent, since the pandemic lockdowns began. Over those same 12 months, more than 29 million Americans contracted the virus and more than 535,000 died from it. As billionaire wealth soared over, almost 80 million lost work between March 21, 2020, and Feb. 20, 2021, and 18 million were collecting unemployment on Feb. 27, 2021

– There are 43 newly minted billionaires since the beginning of the pandemic, when there were 614. A number of new billionaires joined the list after initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock in companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash, and Snowflake.

– The increase in the combined wealth of the 15 billionaires with the greatest growth in absolute wealth was $563 billion or 82 percent. The wealth growth of just these 15 represents over 40 percent of the wealth growth among all billionaires. Topping the list are Elon Musk ($137.5 billion richer, 559 percent), Jeff Bezos ($65 billion, 58 percent) and Mark Zuckerberg ($47 billion, 86 percent).

 Pandemic

A long pandemic of capitalism

Infects the world. Credit cards, bitcoin, cash

Are the viruses causing the rash

Of hopes dashed, the often deadly schism

Between abundance and falling wages,

Between the multi-billionaire

And all with more than a fair share of despair:

The contagion of capital rages.

Worker’s lives are made precarious

By profit trumping well-being and health,

Common weal succumbing to private wealth.

While political quacks prescribe various

Palliatives, there’s but one vaccine for all

The world, the working class taking control.

D. A.

 Players for Norway’s national team will not be penalised by Fifa for championing human rights in Qatar  when they wore T-shirts that read “Human rights On and off the pitch”.

Laws of the game prevent players from using equipment that bears “any political, religious or personal slogans”, but on Thursday Fifa said they would be taking no action regarding the protest.

“Fifa believes in the freedom of speech and in the power of football as a force for good,” a spokesperson for the governing body said. “No disciplinary proceedings in relation to this matter will be opened by Fifa.”

The Dutch FA said it would not boycott the tournament, in line with Amnesty’s recommendations, but would “use the current spotlight on the World Cup and make our own contribution to efforts to improve the plight of migrant workers in Qatar”.

On Thursday the English FA issued a statement saying it intended to engage with the tournament in a “socially responsible” manner and that there was “still much more to be done” on human rights in the country.

 A Guardian report said that more than 6,500 migrant workers have died in the country over the past decade. 

Fifa takes no action over Norway protest as FA voices Qatar concerns | World Cup 2022 | The Guardian