The UK’s largest building control organisation was warned 18 months before the Grenfell Tower fire that “any number of buildings” could go up in flames because they were fitted with combustible panels that did not meet building regulations.

But the body did not check whether it had given approval to any such blocks.

The warning, from a facade manufacturer, came at a construction safety conference in January 2016 addressed by Steve Evans, head of technical operations at the National House Building Council (NHBC). It prompted the event chair to ask if “we are sitting on … a timebomb”.

 In a question-and-answer session at the industry conference Nick Jenkins, a senior technician from Booth Muirie, which manufactures cladding systems, said: “You could have an exact repeat of the Dubai fire in any number of buildings that we supply product to in London.”

Jenkins said he felt “real concern” because over the last 15 years his firm had only supplied limited combustibility cladding on two projects in the UK. The rest, he implied, was combustible.

Another similar warning of “grave concern” was sent by the same manufacturer to the government’s senior civil servant with responsibility for fire regulations, Brian Martin. He replied that such panels should be tested but “if the designer and building control body choose to do something else then that’s up to them”.

Housebuilders council was warned of risk before Grenfell fire, inquiry hears | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

 Coal power is on track to hit a new global record this year after an economic rebound that could drive worldwide coal demand to an all-time high in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

The amount of electricity generated from coal power plants has soared by 9% this year after a surge in fossil fuel demand to fuel the recovery from Covid lockdowns, a report by the watchdog says.

Coal power fell by 4% in 2020 as the pandemic caused a global economic slowdown, but the IEA found that demand for electricity this year had outpaced the growth in low-carbon sources, leading many wealthy economies to rely more heavily on fossil fuel power plants. 

A global gas supply crunch, which has caused record-high prices worldwide, has also helped reignite demand for coal, the IEA report says.

Fatih Birol, the IEA executive director, said: “Coal is the single largest source of global carbon emissions, and this year’s historically high level of coal power generation is a worrying sign of how far off track the world is in its efforts to put emissions into decline towards net zero. Without strong and immediate actions by governments to tackle coal emissions – in a way that is fair, affordable and secure for those affected – we will have little chance, if any at all, of limiting global warming to 1.5C.”

The IEA report found India was on track to grow its coal-fired electricity generation by 12% this year, while China’s use of coal plants was forecast to increase by up to 9% despite a sharp slowdown in recent months. This would mark an all-time high in both countries, despite an “impressive” rollout of solar and wind power projects, the IEA said. In the US and the EU, coal power generation is expected to rise by 20%, from low levels in 2020. In the UK, where coal power has been in steady decline in recent years, the owners of the last remaining coal power stations were paid record sums to help keep the lights on this year as electricity prices reached new highs after record gas market prices and one of the least windy summers since 1961.

Global demand for coal could hit all-time high in 2022 | Business | The Guardian

 I expect you’ve heard of the Sioux. Other ‘warlike’ tribes as well — Cheyenne, Apache. You may know something of the Seminoles of Florida, the Cherokees’ ‘trail of tears,’ the League of the Iroquois. Two American states take their name from the Dakota. But can you name even one of the indigenous groups who used to live in California? You may not even have realized that anyone did live there before Europeans arrived. 

In fact, California was home to an estimated 150,000 indigenous people. But they were too weak and too peaceable to put up much resistance to the hordes of armed European invaders. They were easily wiped out and – except by a few experts — easily forgotten.  

In 1848 California became the property of the United States – a spoil of victory in its war with Mexico. Gold was first discovered in California the same year. In 1850 California became a state. 

The Gold Rush led to the death of 80% of California’s native people. Some 100,000 perished in the first two years alone. By 1873 only 30,000 remained. Though some died of hunger after their land was seized or of diseases caught from settlers, between 9,000 and 16,000 were murdered in cold blood — victims of a policy of genocide pursued by the State of California and eagerly assisted by its new citizens. 

The Act for the Governance and Protection of Indians was passed in 1850. This sounds benign, but it was malign in the extreme. The Act allowed Native Americans to be enslaved even though California was admitted to the Union as a free state and was to back the North in the Civil War. It was illegal to enslave black people, but native men, women, and children were openly bought and sold in city streets throughout the 1850s. 

The Act made it easier to remove natives from their traditional lands, separating a whole generation from their families, languages, and cultures (1850–1865). It provided for ‘apprenticing’ or indenturing Indian children and adults to Whites and punished ‘vagrant’ Indians by hiring them out to the highest bidder at a public auction if the Indian could not provide sufficient bond or bail. White settlers and the state government enslaved native people and forced them to labor for ranchers through at least the mid-1860s. They were then forced onto reservations and their children compelled to attend ‘Indian assimilation schools.’ 

The Act permitted ownership of Indian children (Section 3. Any person … obtaining a minor Indian … and wishing to keep it,) In 1860 this provision was expanded to enable ownership of Indian children to extend into adulthood.  Indians were denied equal standing under the law (Section 6. In no case shall a white man be convicted of any offence upon the testimony of an Indian).

The first governor of California, Peter Hardeman Burnett, declared on January 6, 1851 that

a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct. 

He proceeded to set aside funds to equip local militias to be used against Native Americans, raiding tribal villages and shooting and scalping Native Americans. Local settlers set about doing the killing, while the authorities placed bounties on Native Americans. At one point the prize was about $25 for a male body part, whether it was a scalp, a hand, or the whole body; and $5 for a child or a woman. 

Only in 1900, after the Act for the Governance and Protection of Indians was repealed, did many Californians learn that it had still been legal to kill Native Americans. 

Genocide and enslavement do not exonerate the preceding Spanish and then Mexican rule with their forced conversions, brutal corporal punishment, slave labor, deadly disease outbreaks, and widespread rape and abuse. However,the intent of the Catholic clerics and the soldiers who accompanied them was to subjugate the indigenous people – not exterminate them.

The story is told of a white settler found with a small ‘Indian’ child. 

 ‘What are you doing with this child?’ someone asked him.

‘I’m rearing him. He’s an orphan.’ 

‘How do you know he’s an orphan?’

‘I killed his parents.’ 

Apocryphal

Slavery and genocide in California | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org) 

 Karnataka is one of India’s garment-industry heartlands, with thousands of factories and hundreds of thousands of workers producing clothing for international brands including Puma, Nike, Zara, Tesco, C&A, Gap, Marks & Spencer and H&M.

Garment workers making clothes for international brands in Karnataka, a major clothing production hub in India, say their children are going hungry as factories refuse to pay the legal minimum wage in what is claimed to be the biggest wage theft to ever hit the fashion industry.

More than 400,000 garment workers in Karnataka have not been paid the state’s legal minimum wage since April 2020, according to an international labour rights organisation that monitors working conditions in factories.

The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) estimates the total amount of unpaid wages so far to be more than £41m.

Scott Nova, executive director of the WRC, said: “In terms of number of workers affected and total money stolen, this is the most egregious act of wage theft we’ve ever seen. The children of garment workers are going hungry so brands can make a buck.” Nova said the “indifference and inaction” of all the brands sourcing clothing from the region about the situation facing its mostly poor, female workforce was “shameful and cruel”. 

For the past two years, western brands had either refused to intervene or had not acted to ensure that workers making their clothes were paid in line with Indian law.

“Payment of minimum wage is pretty much the lowest bar on a brand’s responsibility towards its workforce. If they won’t even insist on this being paid then they are letting a human rights violation on a huge scale continue with impunity.”

One worker said she only earned about half of what she needed to cover basic living costs, such as food and rent.

“If we had got the wage increase last year, we could have at least eaten vegetables a few times a month. Throughout this year I have only fed my family rice and chutney sauce,” she said. “I tried to talk to the factory management about it,” she added, “but they said, ‘this is what we pay to work here. If you don’t like it, you can leave.’”

The annual cost of living increase to the minimum wage, the “variable dearness allowance” (VDA), was increased to 417 Indian rupees (£4.10) a month in April 2020. The WRC said that as this supplement for low-paid workers, which amounts to 16p a day, had gone unpaid for 20 months, each employee had been underpaid by R8,351 (£83).

‘Worst fashion wage theft’: workers go hungry as Indian suppliers to top UK brands refuse to pay minimum wage | Garment workers | The Guardian

 The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in the USA was 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. 

Today it’s 351-to-1. 

Talk about “inflation.”

 The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in the USA was 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. 

Today it’s 351-to-1. 

Talk about “inflation.”

 While absolute poverty, narrowly defined, may have been abolished, some 600 million Chinese are struggling to get by on a daily basis on a monthly income of less than Rmb1,000 or about $US155, while the country is now home to more dollar billionaires than the United States.

China has drawn the line for absolute poverty at $2.30 a day adjusted for inflation and claims to have lifted the income of 100 million rural residents above that level since Xi came to office in 2012. The World Bank, however, sets a higher poverty line of $5.50 a day for upper-middle-income countries like China. On this basis, a quarter of China’s population is in poverty.

The focus on rural poverty highlights the gulf between urban and rural areas where some 40 percent of China’s population reside. Figures published in the Australian Financial Review in September show that by 1997, urban household incomes were on average 83 percent higher than those of rural households. This rose to 167 percent in 2009, declining to 132 percent in 2019—still more than double the rural average.

China’s official Gini coefficient has risen sharply since Deng’s “opening up” in 1978 from about 0.31 to 0.4 in 1997 and a high of 0.49 in 2008 before falling slightly to 0.47 in 2020. Any figure over 0.4 is regarded by the United Nations as indicating large inequality, while China’s leaders have themselves declared that level is potentially destabilising.

[The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of social inequality that ranges from 0, which represents absolute equality or all people earning exactly the same income, to 1, which represents absolute inequality or one person having all the income and everyone else had none.]

According to the World Bank, in 1978, the top 10 percent of earners in China and the bottom 50 percent each accounted for about a quarter of the country’s total income. By 2018, the top 10 percent took more than 40 percent of total income, while the bottom half of earners received less than 15 percent.

In terms of wealth rather than income, the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals owned nearly 31 percent of China’s wealth in 2020, up from around 21 percent in 2000. In the US for instance, the share of wealth of the top 1 percent reached 35 percent in 2020. According to the Hurun Global Rich list, the number of dollar billionaires in China hit 1,058 last year, as compared to 696 in the US.

An article earlier this year by Branko Milanovic, a London School of Economic professor, explained that a person on the median urban income in China is in the 70th global percentile—in other words, richer than 70 percent of the world’s population, whereas a person with the median rural income is in the 52nd global percentile.

 “Differently put, the average urban person in China is as rich as the average person in Hungary, whereas the average rural person in China is as poor as the average person in Vietnam,” it stated.

The rural-urban divide is also manifested in the cities and major manufacturing centre where nearly 300 million internal migrant workers from rural China constitute a large proportion of the working class. Not only are they generally on lower wages and conditions and suffer discrimination but the overwhelming majority do not have an urban hukou, an official residency document that provide full access to local public services such as schools and hospitals. It is a system designed to provide cheap, easily exploitable labour to industry and services in the huge manufacturing hubs in the eastern coastal areas of China.

Social inequality is also perpetuated in education where entrance to China’s elite universities and thus well-paid jobs in the government apparatus or private enterprise is determined by college entrance results. According to the article, “Average families in some top-tier cities have spent one-quarter of their take-home pay on tutoring… About 22 percent of students enrolled in China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in 1990 were from rural China, but by 2016, that percentage was 10.2 percent.” Urbanisation may account for some, but certainly not all of this huge change.

Milanovic led a study into the changing social composition of what he termed China’s “elite” – the top 5 percent of the population—over the period 1988 to 2013. 

Whereas in 1988 three quarters of the elite were government-employed, 25 years later half were either capitalists or professionals. Moreover, that social divide was perpetuated within the CCP. When the study examined “rich members” of the CCP, “about half belonged to the private-sector-oriented classes.”

Behind Chinese President Xi’s populism, mounting social inequality – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

A new report shows that higher unionization rates are also associated with improved conditions outside of the workplace, including better access to healthcare, paid leave, and the ballot box.

“Unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions,” said Asha Banerjee, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and co-author of the report. “But the benefits of unions extend far beyond the workplace. The data suggest that unions also give workers a voice in shaping their communities and political representation.”

To document the correlation between organized labor and various indicators of economic, personal, and democratic well-being, researchers at EPI compared Census Bureau data on minimum wages, median annual incomes, access to unemployment insurance, lack of health insurance, Medicaid expansion, paid sick and family leave laws, and voter suppression laws in states with “high” (13.5% to 24.7%), “medium” (8.3% to 13/3%), and “low” (3.2% to 7.7%) levels of union density. All 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia were sorted into three equally sized categories based on their average level of union density—defined as the percentage of workers in a state who are members of a union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement—from 2015 to 2019. 

“The 17 U.S. states with the highest union densities have state minimum wages that are on average 19% higher than the national average and 40% higher than those in low-union-density states,” says the report.

“Unions,” the authors emphasize, “have played a central role in organizing and mobilizing campaigns to increase state and local minimum wages.” The Service Employees International Union, for instance, “has had a crucial role in the successful national Fight for $15 campaign,” helping to win raises for millions of workers nationwide.

Researchers noted that “Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander women—along with Black and brown workers as a whole, who have long been overrepresented in low-wage service sectors—have benefited disproportionately from these efforts.”

EPI also found that “high-union-density states had an average median income about $6,000 higher than the national average,” while “the low-union-density states had an average median income about $6,500 lower than the national average”—resulting in a gap of more than $12,000 between the two groups of states.

Moreover, “unemployed workers are twice as likely to receive unemployment benefits if they live in high-union-density states than if they live in low-union-density states,” according to EPI.

The report finds that residents of high-union-density states are more likely to have health insurance, with an average uninsured rate of 6.8%, compared with 11.3% in low-union-density states.

All 17 high-union-density states elected to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, just five low-union-density states did so.

EPI tells a similar story with respect to paid sick and family leave policies.

“Building union density is not just a worker or workplace issue, but it is also a mechanism to uplift families and communities,” researchers added. 

Unions Make Life Better at Work and Beyond, New Report Shows (commondreams.org)

 A third of people in the 420-million-strong Arab world do not have enough food to eat, according to the United Nations.

In a report published on Thursday, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also said that between 2019 and 2020, the number of malnourished in the Arab world rose by 4.8 million people to 69 million, nearly 16 percent of the population.

The situation was “triggered by protracted crises, social unrests and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as conflicts, poverty, inequality, climate change, scarce natural resources and the economic repercussions associated with the recent COVID-19 pandemic”, the report said.

“The increase in the levels of undernourishment has occurred across all income levels, in conflict-affected as well as non-conflict countries,” the FAO said. “In addition, nearly 141 million people did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of more than 10 million people since 2019.”

“There may be no visible improvement in the situation this year since hunger’s primary drivers will continue to drag the situation further down the road,” Abdulhakim Elwaer, FAO’s assistant director-general and regional representative for the Near East and North Africa, added.

The FAO said hunger has increased by 91.1 percent in the Arab world over the past 20 years.

One-third of Arab world’s population suffers from hunger: UN | United Nations News | Al Jazeera

 City allotments have the ability to rival the productivity of conventional farms, according to a two-year pilot study by the University of Sussex. 

Growers in Brighton and Hove were able to harvest 1kg of insect-pollinated fruit and vegetables per sq metre in a season – which researchers said put their yields within the range of conventional farms.

Dr Beth Nicholls, who led the study is due to present her findings at Ecology Across Borders conference on Wednesday.

She said: “The growing was surprisingly productive. And some people were harvesting a lot more than that – up to 10kg per sq metre. And this is just in insect-pollinated crops, so it’s an underestimation really.” She said the study demonstrated the value of urban food production and how it could be used to reduce food deserts by growing food “closer to where people are” while also reducing food miles and transportation costs.

“The UK imports approximately £8bn of fruit and vegetables each year, but our results show that green spaces in cities, such as allotments and community gardens, could play an important role in meeting that demand at a local scale.” She explained “In a world of increasing urbanisation in both the developing and developed worlds, producing food in and around cities has the potential to improve both nutritional and health outcomes, alleviate poverty and simultaneously provide habitat for wildlife and create sustainable cities.”

There are 10,435 allotments in the UK, spanning 7,920 hectares.

City allotments could be as productive as conventional farms, research finds | Farming | The Guardian