Women of colour are almost twice as likely to be on zero-hour contracts as white men and almost one and a half times more likely than white women. About one in six zero-hours contract workers are BAME, though BAME workers make up only one in nine workers overall.

 The Trades Union Congress and the equality organisation Race on the Agenda (Rota) warned that far from providing greater flexibility, zero-hours contracts were trapping women from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds in low pay and insecure work, leaving them struggling to pay bills and plan their lives. The report described zero-hours contracts as “the most egregious example of one-sided flexibility at work”, handing the employer total control over their workers’ hours.

40% of BAME workers on insecure contracts said they faced the threat of losing their shifts if they turned down work, compared with 25% of insecure white workers. The findings “puncture the myth that zero-hours workers like the arrangement”

Half of BAME insecure workers have been allocated a shift at less than a day’s notice, and almost half of BAME insecure workers have had shifts cancelled with less than a day’s notice.

The report warns that this instability means many people’s incomes are subject to the whims of managers, which makes it hard for workers to plan their lives, look after their children and keep medical appointments.

The report reveals significant disparities along the lines of gender and race. For instance, 2.5% of white men were on zero-hours contracts in the last three months of 2020, compared with 4.1% of BME men. The highest proportions were found among BME women, at 4.5%, compared with 3.2% of white women.

Maurice Mcleod, the CEO of Rota, said: “People from marginalised communities are already most likely to find themselves on these types of contracts, and this is further embedding inequality into our society. Ignoring the impact of structural workplace racism on our society will see inequality grow and moves us even further away from the equal, thriving society we all want to live in.”

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “This is what structural racism at work looks like – BAME workers getting trapped in jobs with the worst pay and the worst conditions, struggling to pay the bills and feed their families. Enough is enough. Ministers must challenge the systemic discrimination that holds BME workers back by banning zero-hours contracts and ending the scourge of insecure work. And they must introduce ethnicity pay gap reporting without delay.”

Zero-hours contracts ‘trapping women of colour on low pay‘ | Zero-hours contracts | The Guardian

 A half-century ago, palm oil was just another commodity that thrived in the tropics. Many Western countries relied on their own crops like soybean and corn for cooking, until major retailers discovered the cheap oil from Southeast Asia had almost magical qualities. It had a long shelf life, remained nearly solid at room temperature and didn’t smoke up kitchens, even when used for deep-frying. When warnings that trans fats like those found in margarine posed serious health risks, demand for palm oil soared even higher. Just about every part of the fruit is used in manufacturing, from the outer flesh to the inner kernel, and the versatility of the oil itself and its derivatives seem endless.

Palm oil is virtually impossible to avoid. Often disguised on labels as an ingredient listed by more than 200 names, it can be found in roughly half the products on supermarket shelves and in most cosmetic brands. It’s in paints, plywood, pesticides and pills. It’s also present in animal feed, biofuels and even hand sanitiser. It helps keep oily substances from separating and turns instant noodles into steaming cups of soup, just by adding hot water. It’s used in baby formula, non-dairy creamers and supplements and is listed on the labels of everything from Jif Natural peanut butter to Kit Kat candy bars. Often hidden amid a list of scientific names on labels, it’s equally useful in a host of cleansers and makeup products. It bubbles in shampoo, foams in Colgate toothpaste, moisturizes Dove soap and helps keep lipstick from melting.

Though labour issues have largely been ignored, the punishing effects of palm oil on the environment have been decried for years. Still, giant Western financial institutions like Deutsche Bank, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, HSBC and the Vanguard Group have continued to help fuel a crop that has exploded globally, soaring from just 5 million tons in 1999 to 72 million today, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S. alone has seen a 900 percent spike in demand during that same time.

“This has been the industry’s hidden secret for decades,” said Gemma Tillack of the U.S.-based Rainforest Action Network, which has exposed labor abuses on palm oil plantations. “The buck stops with the banks. It is their funding that makes this system of exploitation possible.”

 The AP investigation is the most comprehensive dive into labor abuses industrywide. Associated Press found many in Malaysia and neighbouring Indonesia – an invisible workforce consisting of millions of labourers from some of the poorest corners of Asia, enduring various forms of exploitation, with the most serious abuses including child labour, outright slavery and allegations of rape. Together, the two countries produce about 85% of the world’s estimated $65 billion palm oil supply.

For workers, harvesting the fruit can be brutal. The uneven jungle terrain is rough and sometimes flooded. The palms themselves serve as a wind barrier, creating sauna-like conditions, and harvesters need incredible strength to hoist long poles with sickles into the towering trees. Each day, they must balance the tool while carefully slicing down spiky fruit bunches heavy enough to maim or kill, tending hundreds of trees over expanses that can stretch beyond 10 football fields. Those who fail to meet impossibly high quotas can see their wages reduced, sometimes forcing entire families into the fields to make the daily number.

AP interviewed current and former workers from two dozen palm oil companies who came from eight countries and laboured on plantations across wide swaths of Malaysia and Indonesia. Almost all had complaints about their treatment, with some saying they were cheated, threatened, held against their will or forced to work off unsurmountable debts. Others said they were regularly harassed by authorities, swept up in raids and detained in government facilities. Reporters witnessed some abuses firsthand and reviewed police reports, complaints made to labour unions, videos and photos smuggled out of plantations and local media stories to corroborate accounts wherever possible. In some cases, reporters tracked down people who helped enslaved workers escape. More than a hundred rights advocates, academics, clergy members, activists and government officials also were interviewed.

AP used the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers of the world’s most-consumed vegetable oil, as well as U.S. Customs records, to link the labourers’ palm oil and its derivatives from the mills that process it to the supply chains of top Western companies like the makers of Oreo cookies, Lysol cleaners and Hershey’s chocolate treats.

Sometimes they invest directly but, increasingly, third parties are used like Malaysia-based Maybank, one of the world’s biggest palm oil financiers, which not only provides capital to growers but, in some cases, processes the plantations’ payrolls. Financial crime experts say that in an industry rife with a history of problems, banks should flag arbitrary and inconsistent wage deductions as potential indicators of forced labour.

As global demand for palm oil surges, plantations are struggling to find enough labourers, frequently relying on brokers who prey on the most at-risk people. Many foreign workers end up fleeced by a syndicate of recruiters and corrupt officials and often are unable to speak the local language, rendering them especially susceptible to trafficking and other abuses. They sometimes pay up to $5,000 just to get their jobs, an amount that could take years to earn in their home countries, often showing up for work already crushed by debt. Many have their passports seized by company officials to keep them from running away, which the United Nations recognizes as a potential flag of forced labour. Countless others remain off the books and are especially scared of speaking out. They include migrants working without documentation and children who AP reporters witnessed squatting in the fields like crabs, picking up loose fruit alongside their parents. Many women also work for free or on a day-to-day basis, earning the equivalent of as little as $2 a day, sometimes for decades. AP talked to some female workers from other companies who said they were sexually harassed and even raped in the fields, including some minors.

Workers also complained about a lack of access to medical care or clean water, sometimes collecting rain runoff to wash the residue from their bodies after spraying dangerous pesticides or scattering fertilizer.

“We work until we are dying,” said a worker.

Palm oil labor abuses linked to world’s top brands, banks (apnews.com)

 The alliance between the US and the UK should be known as the “indestructible relationship”, agreeing to a new Atlantic Charter to give the world “a more peaceful and prosperous future”,  Boris Johnson told the BBC. 

The original Atlantic Charter, now 80 years ago, was an alliance signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt during the Second World War, promising all manner of good things for future times when the USA and UK divided up the spoils between themselves once the war was ended.

 Britain’s Boris and Biden make similar optimistic noises of a better world for the future with their revived Atlantic Charter when the pandemic is over.

The Socialist Party will treat their supposedly good intentions with exactly the same scepticism that we held for the original Atlantic Treaty. 

Back in October 1941, the editorial of the Socialist Standard declared:

 “…Capitalism cannot be made to work satisfactorily. It must be abolished. Those who think differently, and this includes all those who have hastened to applaud the sentiments of the Atlantic Charter, should at least face up to these problems and decide where they stand.”

The article explained:

 “All the emphasis in the Atlantic Charter is laid on the relations between nations, but what about the great capitalist combines at home? The Atlantic Charter sees the need to protect the small nations against dominance by the larger ones if they are to trade and have access to raw materials on equal terms. But if capitalism is to continue, as Roosevelt and Churchill take for granted that it will, how is this to be done? How will they deal with the great capitalist concerns like Unilever, Imperial Chemical Industries and similar concerns in other lands? Who is going to slay these giant international semi-monopolies which are the real dominators of world trade?”

The names of the corporations which now direct the global economy may be different but the very same threat exists to social harmony and economic progress from them.

Nothing much changes

 Gil Arias Fernández, former deputy director at Frontex,  said he was deeply worried about the agency’s decision to arm officers.

“Weapons are not needed for Frontex operations,” he said. “They are more of a problem than a help…Operations have always been conducted unarmed and there have never been any problems. In operations where Libyan tribal clans smuggling migrants shot in the air to frighten the patrols, even there it was not considered appropriate to carry weapons. 

He said decisions made by one of the EU’s most powerful agencies had led to complicity in human rights violations.

“I do not believe that the agency has proactively violated the rights of migrants, but there are reasons to believe that it has turned a blind eye.”

Arias Fernández pointed to the dearth of human rights training for Frontex officers.

He said that immigration was vitally important for the survival of all European states. Arias Fernández said the lack of migrants being allowed into Europe would have a severe economic impact amid an ageing workforce: “Who will pay the pensions of the growing number of pensioners?”

“I come to this conclusion because there are studies that show that if we do not resort to immigration and other incentives, the EU will have serious problems and the welfare state will be a chimera. We should learn these lessons. In the first half of the pandemic, migrants saved our bacon. “In Europe, movements that use populism are growing at an alarming rate, and the fight against immigrants is one of those arguments. States are excessively prudent in not touching this issue. The commission presented the new pact on migration and asylum, which contains no proposals for channelling migration through legal channels. They tried to satisfy all the blocs, Visegrád [Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia], southern states, northern states, and I fear that in the end it satisfies no one.”

He explained that “There is no filter in the recruitment system. You cannot prevent people with extremist ideas from entering, unless they clearly express their position in favour of hate crimes, xenophobia and racism.”

Frontex turning ‘blind eye’ to human rights violations, says former deputy | Global development | The Guardian

 G7

Capos of capital are gathering,

Exclusive of common lives,

Beyond a ring of steel drawn round St. Ives

Wherein they can begin their blathering.

There’ll be solemn pledges and pious pleas,

Promises to end hunger, give foreign aid,

While lowering global warming by degrees,

Although nothing that might restrict free trade.

The don of dons from the USA,

Bringing the power of his mob in play,

Will invite everyone to have their say,

But then expect to have his own way.

Whatever is agreed or rescinded,

Pursuit of profits must remain unhindered. 

D. A. 

 Following up earlier posts on Big Business and dodging taxes,  55 U.S. corporations that paid no federal corporate income tax last year have spent a combined $450 million on political campaign contributions and lobbying—including for lower taxes—according to a report. 

‘The Price of Zero’, cites figures showing that at least 55 U.S. corporations avoided paying any corporate income tax in 2020 on a combined pretax income of $40.5 billion.

“Had these companies paid a tax rate of 21%—the current federal rate—they would have owed the federal government $8.5 billion,” the report notes. “Not only did these companies not pay taxes, but nearly all also got money back from the government, receiving $3.5 billion in tax rebates, bringing the total 2020 tax giveaways for these 55 companies to $12 billion.”

The companies invested a combined $408 million in lobbying and $42 million in campaign contributions over the past three election cycles. FedEx spent the most of any of the 55 companies—$71 million on lobbying and campaign contributions—between 2015 and 2020. Charter Communications ($64 million), American Electric Power ($42 million), Duke Energy ($37 million), and Textron ($22 million) round out the top five spenders.

Forty-seven of the 55 companies analyzed in the paper reported spending on lobbying at some point during the five-year period. Thirty-five of those firms acknowledged lobbying specifically on taxation issues. Twenty-two of the companies lobbied for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), Republican legislation signed into law by Trump. The TCJA lowered the federal corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, enabled companies to write off certain capital investments for five years, and made it easier for U.S. corporations to avoid paying taxes on foreign income. The TCJA gave more than 80% of tax cuts to the nation’s richest 1% while raising taxes on over 90 million middle-class families and encouraging the outsourcing of U.S.-based jobs.

“The lobbying, campaign contributions, and tax avoidance by these 55 companies is a never-ending cycle in which the companies spend to win tax breaks, then use the money saved from those breaks to try to get more,” the report concludes.

55 corporations paying no federal tax last year spent $450 million on lobbying and campaigns: report – Alternet.org

The wealth gap in China is stark.

 Stopping short of accusing the Chinese government of committing genocide due to the lack of full information of what is going on, Amnesty International has published further evidence of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region of China, which it says has become a “dystopian hellscape” for hundreds of thousands of  Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities subjected to mass internment and torture. Amnesty said counter-terrorism could not reasonably account for mass detention, and that the Chinese government’s actions showed a “clear intent to target parts of Xinjiang’s population collectively on the basis of religion and ethnicity and to use severe violence and intimidation to root out Islamic religious beliefs and Turkic Muslim ethno-cultural practices”.

Those taken to the network of camps in Xinjiang were “subjected to a ceaseless indoctrination campaign as well as physical and psychological torture”. In the internment camps, they are not allowed to practise Islam, forbidden from using their mother tongue and forced to attend classes where they studied Mandarin and Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Torture methods, according to the report, included “beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, the unlawful use of restraints including being locked in a tiger chair, (a steel chairs with leg irons and handcuffs that restrain the body in painful positions ), sleep deprivation, being hung from a wall, being subjected to extremely cold temperatures, and solitary confinement”.

Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said, “It should shock the conscience of humanity that massive numbers of people have been subjected to brainwashing, torture and other degrading treatment in internment camps, while millions more live in fear amid a vast surveillance apparatus.” She also accused UN Secretary General António Guterres of “failing to act according to his mandate”, explaining that Guterres “has not denounced the situation, he has not called for an international investigation”,  Callamard told the BBC. “It is incumbent on him to protect the values upon which the United Nations has been founded, and certainly not to stay silent in front of crimes against humanity.”

The author of the Amnesty report, Jonathan Loeb, stated that the organisation’s research “did not reveal that all the evidence of the crime of genocide had occurred” but that it had so far “only scratched the surface”.

China has created a ‘dystopian hellscape’ in Xinjiang, Amnesty report says – BBC News

“We are losing ground in the fight to end child labour,” UNICEF chief Henrietta Fore told reporters 

The world has marked the first rise in child labour in two decades and the coronavirus crisis threatens to push millions of more youngsters toward the same fate, the United Nations said.

The International Labour Organization and the UN children’s agency UNICEF said the number in child labour stood at 160 million at the start of 2020 — an increase of 8.4 million in four years. Children aged between five and 11 accounted for over half of the global figure.

Boys were significantly more likely to be affected, accounting for 97 of the 160 million children toiling in child labour at the start of 2020. But the gender gap narrows by half when household chores performed for at least 21 hours per week are counted, the report said. Particularly concerning, perhaps, was the significant increase seen in children between the ages of five and 17 who are doing so-called hazardous work, which is deemed to affect a child’s development, education or health. This can include toiling in dangerous industries, like mining or with heavy machinery, and working for more than 43 hours a week, which makes schooling next to impossible.

A full 79 million children were considered to be doing such hazardous work at the start of 2020, up 6.5 million from four years earlier, the report showed. 

The study revealed that most child labour is concentrated in the agriculture sector, which accounts for 70 percent of the global total, or 112 million children. Some 20 percent of child labour meanwhile happens in the service sector and around 10 percent in industry, it found.

The increase began before the pandemic hit and marks a dramatic reversal of a downward trend that had seen child labour numbers shrink by 94 million between the year 2000 and 2016. Just as the Covid-19 crisis was beginning to pick up steam, nearly one in 10 children globally were stuck in child labour, with sub-Saharan Africa the worst affected. While the percentage of children in child labour remained the same as in 2016, population growth meant that the numbers rose significantly.

The pandemic risks worsening the situation significantly, the agencies said. They warned that unless urgent action is taken to help ballooning numbers of families plunging into poverty, nearly 50 million more kids could be forced into child labour over the next two years. If the latest projections of poverty increases due to the pandemic materialise, another nine million children will be pushed into child labour by the end of 2022.

But that number could potentially be more than five times higher, according to UNICEF statistics specialist Claudia Cappa. 

“If social protection coverage slips from the current levels… as a result of austerity measures and other factors, the number of children falling into child labour can go up (an additional) 46 million” by the end of next year, she explained.

 UNICEF chief Henrietta Fore stressed that “the Covid-19 crisis is making a bad situation even worse. Now, well into a second year of global lockdowns, school closures, economic disruptions, and shrinking national budgets, families are forced to make heart-breaking choices.”

The greatest increase in child labour was seen in sub-Saharan Africa, where population growth, recurrent crises, extreme poverty and inadequate social protection measures pushed an additional 16.6 million children into child labour since 2016, the report found. Nearly a quarter of children aged five to 17 years old in sub-Saharan Africa are already in child labour, compared to 2.3 percent in Europe and North America.

Child labour swells for first time in two decades: UN – France 24

The U.K. has banned the sale of “lethal” military equipment to China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. However, U.K. government has authorized the sale of £2.6-billion worth of military and civilian equipment with potential military use to China in the past three years, government figures show.

Last year saw a tripling in exports to China of “dual use” items defined as “civilian goods with a military purpose.” Some £1.6-billion worth were authorised in 2020, compared to £526-million in 2019, despite China being identified by the British government as “an increasing risk to U.K. interests” and “the biggest state-based threat to the U.K.’s economic security.” The U.K. military identifies China as posing a particular challenge in the South China Sea, where Beijing is building bases on disputed atolls in the Spratly and Paracel Islands, which are also claimed by other states in the region.  In March, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said China was a “threat” in the contested sea.

Most British exports were for “dual-use” equipment but £53-million worth classified purely as “military” went to China over the three years 2018-20, including components for combat aircraft and military support aircraft. Other items licensed for use by China included military communications equipment and technology for air defense systems. 

Britain is also aiding China’s naval capacity. Ministers approved two export licences in 2019 for components for combat naval vessels that were identified as being for “end use by the [military] Navy.” 

The previous year, approvals were given to sell components for combat naval vessels and for military radars where China’s navy was also stated to be the end user. Other British exports likely to benefit the Chinese navy have included technology for combat naval vessels and for “military patrol/assault craft.”

In addition to supporting the navy and air force, hundreds of licences have been approved by U.K. ministers for the sale of “information security equipment” and “imaging cameras” to China. It is not clear if such exports could aid the Chinese state’s domestic surveillance capabilities since the items are not specified in government documents. The U.K. ’s partial arms embargo on China forbids the export of equipment “which might be used for internal repression”.

Sam Walton, the chief executive of the Free Tibet campaign, said: “We have seen fine words from this government condemning the repression in Tibet, the Uyghur genocide and the destruction on democracy in Hong Kong. But their actions once again show their words to be worthless. Britain cannot condemn China’s jackboot whilst heeling that same boot.”

UK Hypes China ‘Threat’ While Selling Country Billions in Military-Related Equipment – Consortiumnews