New audio uploads for SUMMER SCHOOL 2021 – AFTER THE REVOLUTION: Life in a Socialist World held at Fircroft College, Birmingham, 6th-8th August 2021.
01 ‘Socialist Recipes’, Richard Field, 6th August 2021
02 ‘New News From Nowhere’, Glenn Morris, 7th August 2021
03 ‘Do Utopias and Works Of Sci-Fi Offer Appealing Visions of a Socialist World?’, Leon Rozanov, 7th August 2021
04 ‘Socialist Decision Making and the Rule Of Three’, Paddy Shannon, 8th August 2021
Thousands of garment workers in Los Angeles, USA, who make pants, shirts, blouses and other clothing for a variety of well-known fashion labels are paid less than minimum wage through a piece-rate payment system that compensates workers just a few cents per article of clothing. The majority of the more than 46,000 workers in the Los Angeles garment industry are undocumented immigrant women from Latin America and Asia who work long hours for very low wages with few or no breaks
They typically work from 7am to 6pm Monday through Friday, and an additional five hours on Saturday – about 60 hours a week with no overtime pay, which results in overall wages at $5 an hour or less, far below California’s statewide minimum wage of $14 an hour for companies with more than 26 employees.
“We work non-stop. We don’t take any breaks, but make anywhere from $250 to $300 per week,” said one worker.
“It’s very sad to live off of a salary that is $250 to $300 a week. It’s not enough to survive on. I have a mom, dad, and daughters in Guatemala, and I’m here paying rent with these wages. I can’t afford shoes or choose to move anywhere else,” the worker added.
A second garment factory worker explained that workers have to spend their brief meal breaks eating in a kitchen infested with rats and cockroaches, and when workers get injured they are expected to take care of themselves.
“Something that happens very commonly is the sewing needle will actually break through and impale one of your fingers, and many factories don’t even have a first aid kit,” said the worker.
“There’s not even a Band-Aid for you, so it’s up to you to pull the needle out of your finger. And there’s no health insurance for us. It’s really up to us to fix ourselves.”
During the pandemic, factories in the garment industry continued operating without enforcing Covid safety protocols, moving sewing machines into a windowless basement to hide production from regulatory authorities.
One factory – operated by Los Angeles Apparel – was ordered to shut down in July last year after a Covid-19 outbreak among workers resulted in more than 300 positive cases and the deaths of four workers. During the pandemic, many workers were laid off and not recalled to work until they were vaccinated several months ago, but because they are undocumented, they received no unemployment or stimulus benefits while out of work.
Though most clothing brands rely on outsourced garment workers abroad, part of the market is based in Los Angeles, so brands can quickly turn around immediate orders and tout their clothing as “Made in America”.
In 2016, the US Department of Labor conducted an investigation of the garment industry in Los Angeles, finding labor violations in 85% of the 77 factories randomly inspected during the investigation. More than 80% of garment workers in Los Angeles have experienced wage theft.
Ayesha Barenblat, chief and founder of the nonprofit ethical fashion advocacy group Remake said: “Because the fashion industry has long pandered and catered to fast fashion and discount brands, one of the focuses of the industry has been to keep prices really low. And that means … that manufacturing employers find ways to reduce the take-home pay of garment workers…The rock bottom prices brands pay result in factories cutting corners and essentially passing on all the risk to workers in terms of wages,” Barenblat said.
Elizabeth Cline, advocacy and policy director at Remake and author of Overdressed and The Conscious Closet, explained that big brands at the top of clothing supply chains have hundreds of manufacturing factories competing for attention through a race to the bottom for who can offer the lowest prices.
“It’s concentrated brand power combined with the lack of any sort of real accountability for workers’ rights, and it just keeps driving wages down in factories and causing these sweatshop conditions.” She added, “In a $2.5tn global industry that is the most profitable sector in retail, don’t tell me that brands can’t afford to be more accountable to the people in their supply chain.”
As politicians exchange recriminations about the chaos caused by the US withdrawal there is another story not being highlighted in the media.
U.N. agencies warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan as tens of thousands of people flee from their homes amid spreading hunger.
“We fear the worst is yet to come and the larger tide of hunger is fast approaching… The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe,” the World Food Programme’s Thomson Phiri explained.
More than 250,000 people have been forced from their homes since May, 80 percent of them women and children, the U.N. refugee agency’s Shabia Mantoo said.
Other UN officials reported even more dire data.
The U.N. resident coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, told The Associated Press on Monday that the recent fighting had displaced some 600,000 people, and that because of the fluidity of the situation, humanitarian teams are not able to help everywhere.
“They are sleeping in the open, in parks and public spaces,” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “A major concern right now is simply finding shelter for them.”
A World Health Organization official expressed concerns about shortages of medical supplies.
Afghanistan on brink of ‘humanitarian catastrophe’: U.N. (trust.org)
Canada faces a federal election with 20th September as the day our Canadian fellow workers cast their vote.
Sadly, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) will not be able to contest any seats but hopefully, its members will still make their presence known and be able to express the socialist cause in the heightened political atmosphere.
The SPC is unique among political parties for not advancing a platform of reforms to entice votes. If the electorate is satisfied with capitalism and its insecurity and misery then it doesn’t want your support. But if you wish to see an end to this exploitative social system, your support must come to us.
Our political goal is simply to place the productive apparatus of the earth into the hands of all society.
We don’t mean government ownership where the wealth produced by the workers will still belong to the capitalists. Nothing is basically changed. Capitalists merely exchange shares for interest-bearing government bonds.
We mean social equality, a condition in which people are not divided into owners and producers, but where there are no classes and production is organized to provide for the needs of all at all times.
This is not an idle dream. It is the logical and necessary outcome of society’s evolution.
Germany is forecast to record its biggest rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 this year as the economy rebounds from the pandemic-related downturn, according to a report by an environmental thinktank.
The increase means Germany’s emissions will be about 37% lower than in 1990. It had aimed to cut emissions by 40% by 2020, and met the target last year but only due to the economic downturn.
It also shows a significant increase in consumption of fossil fuels across the building, industrial and transport sectors.
As many as nine million British households are on green tariffs, with more than half of all new deals launched by energy providers now claimed to come with environmental benefits.
However, firms are currently able to advertise their tariffs as “green” even if some of the energy they supply comes from fossil fuels, which industry figures have warned risks misleading consumers.
Suppliers can use several ways to achieve green status under the current rules, including committing to use 100% of the income from their customers to invest in developing renewable energy or by striking a deal with an existing wind farm or solar array to buy the electricity they produce.
Under a government scheme, energy firms buy certificates known as Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin, which are designed to show consumers how much of the electricity they sell has been acquired from clean sources.
When a supplier claims that its 100% renewable energy tariff is backed in this way, it means it will match each megawatt of electricity its customers use with certificates representing the same amount of renewable energy.
However, experts have warned the system is open loopholes that risk “double counting” the UK’s renewable energy supply use or even claiming foreign renewables as its own.
The company Good Energy is one of those that has been a vocal critic of greenwash tariffs. In April this year it said energy suppliers had for some time been able to “mislead” customers who were trying to do the right thing in choosing green.
Richard Neudegg, the head of regulation at Uswitch.com, the comparison service, said: “More and more people are purchasing green tariffs but it’s been difficult for bill payers to know exactly what’s under the hood of these deals.”
Approximately $25 billion to provide vaccines to these countries by “scaling-up production in the United States and in regional manufacturing centers around the world.” This could vaccinate billions of people, many of whom live in countries with current vaccination rates as low as 2 or 3 percent.
$25 billion is 1/280th—or roughly one-third of one percent—of the estimated $7 trillion we’ve spent on lethal and counterproductive wars that have killed more than a million innocent civilians.
A Harvard study estimates the USA is on track to spend $2 trillion on the Afghanistan war alone.
$25 billion could be used to save lives instead of taking them around the world.
The current US defense budget is $753 billion. That’s 30 times more expensive than the $25 billion proposed pandemic plan.
Fewer than a quarter of UK companies struggling to hire staff after the easing of pandemic restrictions intend to increase the wages they offer to lure new recruits, according to a report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
When employers with hard-to-fill vacancies, which are most common in sectors such as hospitality and healthcare, were asked how they would deal with the gaps, however, as few as 23% said they would raise wages.
The CIPD’s survey indicated that employers’ pay intentions were little different from pre-pandemic plans. It showed the median employers’ expectation of basic pay settlements remained at the 2%reached last quarter, after four consecutive quarters at 1%.
81% of employers planned a pay review between now and June 2022. Among them, 33% expected a pay increase, 12% a freeze and 1% a decrease. Thirty-seven per cent said it was “hard to tell” and 17% that they did not know.
Few UK firms facing staff shortages plan to raise pay, survey finds | Work & careers | The Guardian
A Spanish power company drained two reservoirs during a heatwave and drought in order to profit from exceptionally high electricity prices.
Both reservoirs are now a desert, according to Javier Aguado, the mayor of San Cebrián de Castro. In another, San Pedro de la Nave-Almendra, the water level is so low the pumps that extract drinking water have become clogged with mud and the filters have to be cleaned twice a day.
Iberdrola, the country’s second-biggest producer, drained the dams in Zamora and Cáceres provinces in western Spain over a period of a few weeks to produce cheap hydroelectricity while the price to consumers is at a record high.
Electricity prices in Spain are fixed on a daily basis through what is effectively an auction as power generators bid for their slice of the market based on expected demand. A base price is set by the cost of nuclear power and renewables such as wind and solar because they are the cheapest, and then the rest – hydro and fossil fuel generators – make their bid. The net effect is that the higher the demand, the higher the price, with fluctuations making it almost impossible for consumers to budget for their electricity bills.
Spain remains in the grip of a heatwave and recorded its highest ever temperature on Saturday, 47.2C (117F), in Córdoba in Andalucía. Air conditioners and fans are running flat out. With the heatwave expected to continue for several more days, most of the country faces temperatures ranging from 30 to 44 degrees.
The minister for ecological transition, Teresa Ribera, described Iberdrola’s actions as scandalous and said, “Water is a scarce resource which is just as important for the wellbeing of families and the economy as it is for generating electricity.” Ribera said Iberdrola’s actions as irresponsible, but that they were not illegal because the company was allowed to use a fixed quantity of water a year whenever it wished and regardless of climatic conditions.
Spain launches inquiry after dams drained for profit during drought | Spain | The Guardian
Covid working from home has caused an “epidemic of hidden overtime” and it is particularly affecting women, according to a report from Autonomy thinktank.
Unpaid labour is a growing problem at a time of increased home working, with women at a greater risk of negative health impacts and mental distress. The study found that women are 43% more likely to have increased their hours beyond a standard working week than men, and for those with children this was even more clearly associated with mental distress.
The report proposes legislation that would create a “right to disconnect”, based on French law, which stipulates employees do not have to take calls or read emails related to work during their time off. It proposes an employer should “not require a worker employed by him to monitor or respond to any work-related communications, or to carry out any work, outside the worker’s agreed working hours” or subject the worker to any detriment for failing to do so. There would be proposed exemptions for industries where that is not feasible and where the employer has made all reasonable steps to minimise working outside agreed hours.
Will Stronge, the director of research at Autonomy, said the Covid pandemic has “accelerated the need to create much clearer boundaries between work-life and home-life”.
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