At ICE facilities like Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde, work programmes, which ICE says are voluntary, pay detained people $1 per day for tasks like sanitation, laundry duty and maintenance.

Michael Childers, a professor of labour education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, testified that the company saved about $26.7m from 2011 to 2019 by using detained immigrants as labourers instead of hiring outside workers, whom they would have had to compensate with higher wages.

Andrew Free, a former immigration lawyer, told Al Jazeera that an “atmosphere of deprivation” is common in the company’s facilities, creating conditions where detainees feel pressured to work.

He explained, “If your daily meals don’t have enough nutrition or are of very poor quality, you have to buy food from the commissary to have a full diet,” he said. “The choice to work for $1 a day or face deprivation of basic necessities is not truly voluntary.”

The use of jailed workers to perform tasks such as maintenance and sanitation is common throughout the US criminal justice system, and social justice advocates have portrayed the practice as exploitative. Law enforcement organisations argue that imprisoned labourers are an economic boon to the state.

“Until I drop.” That’s how long 22-year-old Cruz Martinez says he is committed to carrying out his hunger strike against the conditions at immigration detention centres in the United States. “GEO is a billion-dollar company, and they’re paying us $1 a day,” he said. “They’re getting rich off of us.”

‘Slavery wages’ prompt hunger strike at ICE detention facilities | Prison News | Al Jazeera

 India is projected to become the most populous country in the world. India’s population has grown by a billion in the past 70 years

India’s fertility rate has dropped from an average of six children per woman in 1964 to 2.1 children per woman in 2020, according to UN data. That’s marginally below the replacement rate of 2.2 — i.e., the required number of births per woman to maintain a population. Improvements in health care and increasing life expectancy are likely to continue the momentum of population rise for a few more decades, according to experts.

It is predicted that India’s population will slowly grow to 1.7 billion by 2064 but then fall drastically. The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has predicted that India’s population could fall back to around 1 billion by the end of the century.

Indian developmental economist Jean Dreze told DW, “What I’m saying is that I don’t see a population crisis. India has been a large country all this time and nevertheless, the economy is growing, and it is able to improve people’s living conditions, albeit slowly. And population growth is not going to continue much longer.”

The economist pointed out that the dependency ratio of children and elderly who don’t earn on those who do, had dropped drastically over the past decades.

“Having a large population is one thing but for that to be advantageous, we need to focus on the quality of the population,” Dreze said.

However, the majority of India’s population growth comes from rural and underprivileged areas around the Ganges basin, while the rise in income comes from the urban population. Inequality is on the rise. Moreover, a significant chunk of India is malnourished, unskilled and marginalized — and hence unable to meaningfully contribute to the nation’s development. The employment rate has been steadily declining since 2005. Per capita income — while rising — is still among the lowest in all of G20 countries.

Over 70% of India’s population cannot afford a healthy diet as of 2020 despite the fact that the cost of food remains relatively low by comparison to other countries.

How healthy are India’s 1.4 billion people? – DW – 03/04/2023

 Age UK said it was “deeply concerned” about the plight of elderly people whose needs are not being met. Thousands of older people have died without getting the care they needed. Millions of older people in England awaiting care were “struggling to go to the toilet, eat, get dressed or wash because they can’t do these things unaided”.

 28,890 requests for people aged 65 and over to be given support in 2021-22 were recorded as them having died without any services being provided. The numbers equated to more than 550 deaths a week – or 79 a day.

Age UK’s director, Caroline Abrahams, said: “There isn’t enough social care to go round and so some older people are waiting endlessly for help they badly need. It is heartbreaking that on the latest figures, more than 500 older people a week are going to their graves without ever receiving the care and support to which they were entitled. Nor can the blame for this parlous situation be placed on the pandemic, for while it certainly didn’t help, social care services were struggling to secure enough staff and funding in the years preceding it.” She added, “Since then, all the evidence is that the position has not got any better and, on most measures, has continued to get worse.”

Abrahams said long waits for social care caused “huge distress to older people” and placed “intolerable pressure on their families…We fear there are many tragedies playing out silently behind closed doors.”

Growing old is inevitable but the way we get old is not. 

Older people in England dying without the care they need, says Age UK | Older people | The Guardian

 Women have been harder hit by the cost of living crisis because they tend to earn less.

More than 2 million women are paid below the real living wage, the Living Wage Foundation said, representing 14% of all working women, compared with 1.4 million (9%) men. Overall, 60% of all jobs that pay below the real living wage are held by women.

Katherine Chapman, director of the Living Wage Foundation, said the research “demonstrates the reality that millions of women in the UK – often cleaners, catering staff and care workers – are more likely to be trapped in low-paying, insecure and precarious jobs.”

The level of the real living wage is calculated annually by the foundation, based on the costs of the basics required for a decent standard of living. The rate is currently £10.90 an hour across the UK, and £11.95 in London.

The charity found that women are more likely to be on zero-hours work contracts, representing 13% of female and 9% of male workers.

Women are also less likely to be paid for a shift when it is cancelled. More than quarter of women on such contracts said they were not paid anything for a cancelled shift, compared with 17% of men.

The survey also highlighted the impact of low pay on female workers during the cost of living crisis, where three-quarters of women felt that their pay increased their anxiety levels, compared with 65% of men, while more women than men said their pay reduced their quality of life.

Women in UK ‘more likely than men to be on low pay and struggling’ | Living wage | The Guardian

The East Palestine derailment has prompted a wave of scrutiny into the railroad industry’s record of deregulation and blocking safety rules.

Train-brake rules were rolled back under the Trump administration and have not been restored; hazardous material regulations were watered down at the behest of the railroad industry; and railroad workers have been decrying the safety impacts incited by years of staffing cuts, poor working conditions and neglect by railroad corporations in favor of Wall Street investors.

Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman, explains, “Most railroad workers are fighting against an entire system that only exists as a money-making apparatus to the wealthy. Those trains run through our towns, but they do not run next to rich folks’ homes, nor next to our politicians’ homes. This is a top-down problem.”

 “The railroads have opposed any government regulation on train length; they have sought waivers to eliminate having trained inspectors monitor railcars; and they have pushed back on the train crew staffing rule,” said Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (Blet) national president Eddie Hall in a statement after the NTSB preliminary report on the East Palestine derailment.

“The railroads and their trade association the Association of American Railroads (AAR) employ armies of lobbyists on Capitol Hill who are there not to promote safety regulations but to slow the implementation of federal safety regulations – or attempt to eliminate them altogether.”

Edward Wytkind, who served as president of the Transportation Trades Department (TTD) at the AFL-CIO, which represents the unions in the railroad industry, said that throughout his 25 years at the TTD, the railroad industry blocked all attempts to pass legislation or advance regulation on safety.

“From attempts to address worker fatigue, lack of coherent mandatory safety plans, increasing transparency to the public and first responders about what trains are carrying, the dangers of such long trains, or establishing floors for minimum train crew, the railroads blocked everything,” said Wytkind.

Jeff Kurtz, a retired locomotive engineer of 40 years in Iowa, said the railroad industry talking points on safety in response to the East Palestine derailment have been misleading, as the industry has trended toward adding several more railcars to trains, making them much longer, which can make derailments more damaging when they do occur. Despite safety concerns, this trend has been pursued to further cut costs and increase efficiency. The size of the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio was 150 cars, more than twice the average length of trains operated by major railroads from 2008 to 2017. There is currently no limit imposed by the Federal Railroad Administration on train length.

Leaked audio reveals US rail workers were told to skip inspections as Ohio crash prompts scrutiny to industry | Ohio train derailment | The Guardian

 In 2021, Amazon warehouses had a rate of 7.7 injuries per 100 workers, compared with 4.0 injuries for every 100 workers at all other warehouses. 

Amazon’s serious injury rate was 6.8 per 100 workers, compared with 3.3 for every 100 workers at all other warehouses.

Amazon’s ALB1 warehouse in Castleton, New York had the highest injury rate of any Amazon warehouse in 2021, with 19.8 serious injuries per 100 workers.

Michael Verrastro, who worked at Amazon’s ALB1, commented, “It’s sort of hypocritical for Amazon to claim that safety’s their number one issue. It’s a fallacy that they like to put forth that they’re more concerned about safety, when they clearly are not. They’re more concerned about profit.”

 Union organizer, Brett Daniels, at JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island in New York, said,  “Amazon’s constant disregard for safety is by design. Like many corporations, Amazon prioritizes profit over people.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), delivered alert letters on ergonomic hazards at the Amazon warehouses detailing risk assessments that found numerous jobs at Amazon warehouses exposed workers to “high risk of serious musculoskeletal disorders”.

‘They’re more concerned about profit’: Osha, DoJ take on Amazon’s grueling working conditions | Amazon | The Guardian

 Profits rather than labour costs and taxes have accounted for the lion’s share of domestic price pressures in the eurozone since 2021, according to the European Central Bank.

Europe’s companies are exploiting high inflation to increase their profit margins. Policymakers have repeatedly called for wage restraint but concerns are mounting that a bigger driver of the wave of price rises may be companies using inflation as an excuse to increase profit margins, a trend unions have described as “greedflation”.

A gathering of the ECB council was shown a slide presentation that revealed profit margins had been rising rather than falling – as would normally be expected when the price of raw materials and other business expenses such as transportation and wages rose.

“It’s clear that profit expansion has played a larger role in the European inflation story in the last six months or so,” said Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management.

ECB looking out for price gouging as fears grow over ‘greedflation’ | European Central Bank | The Guardian

 More than 2m households in England fell into fuel poverty last year. 

The number of households in England who spend more than 10% of their income, excluding housing costs, on energy has increased from 4.93m households in 2021 to 7.39m in 2022.

The number of households who have low incomes and live in homes with an energy efficiency rating of band D or below also increased by 100,000, to 3.3m in 2022, figures from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s annual fuel poverty report showed. That figure is expected to increase again to 3.5m this year, official figures showed.

Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said:

 “Today’s data proves that households across England suffered in cold damp homes this winter because the country has failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining and help those most at risk from the energy bills crisis due to poorly insulated homes…”

The data also showed that the government was making little progress in meeting its goal to improve as many fuel-poor homes in England as is “reasonably practicable” to a minimum energy efficiency rating of C by the end of 2030. 

Pressure rises on Hunt as 2m more households fall into fuel poverty | Fuel poverty | The Guardian

Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system, according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab report, published by Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.

The report warns that U.S. lawmakers from both major parties have embraced a “market-based” approach—centered around the buying and selling of so-called “carbon offset” credits generated through minor tweaks to industrial monoculture production—that is likely to tighten Big Ag’s chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise small-scale farmers, all while failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

As the report explains: “The idea begins with granting credits to farmers who adopt certain practices, such as planting more trees and cover crops, that are supposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers then receive compensation for their efforts by selling these credits to other entities, typically large corporations. These corporations, in turn, use their purchases of such credits to justify claims of environmental responsibility.”

Though these corporations “may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have ‘offset’ these emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of asserting that they now have a ‘net-zero’ climate impact,” states the report.

Despite mounting evidence of the ineffective or counterproductive nature of ‘net-zero’ commitments, one-fifth of the world’s biggest corporations have made them, meaning that demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes.

A recent investigation revealed that 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player provided no measurable climate benefits, casting further doubt on the very notions of ‘net-zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ that corporations promote in a bid to maintain or expand their own polluting activities while portraying themselves as green.

“Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions, and corporate greenwashing,” report co-author Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “Such corporate schemes will strengthen the power of the largest agribusinesses, hand over private farm data, and fail to address the climate crisis.”

Report co-author Claire Kelloway, food program director for the Open Markets Institute explained, “Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that’s exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do by locking farmers into their networks, protecting product sales, and stalling meaningful regulation.”

Big Ag Exploiting Carbon Markets to Intensify Grip on Food System: Report (commondreams.org)

Drawing a Line

Draw a line all along the Irish Sea:

On one side the waves are Irish, of course,

Or maybe European, where the source

Of trade remains nominally free.

The other side is where Britannia rules

The waves that lap on her sovereign shore,

Even though sausages in Belfast cost more

Than Westminster’s, where the parliament of fools

Exercises its independence

By braying at each other like asses,

While another act of nonsense passes

In stark contradiction to common sense,

That might well dispense with such disorders,

By choosing to abolish all borders.

D. A.