Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 22 (IPS) – In recent decades, failure to sustain economic progress has been blamed on a supposed middle-income country (MIC) trap. Such blaming obscures as much as it supposedly explains.
The ‘middle-income trap’ fable began as a World Bank story about why upper MICs in Latin America failed to become high-income countries (HICs) after pursuing policies required or prescribed by the Bretton Woods institutions.
Bretton Woods’ Frankenstein
The 1944 Bretton Woods rules-based international monetary system ended in August 1971 when President Richard Nixon unilaterally repudiated US obligations. This happened after the US Treasury had borrowed heavily from the rest of the world from the 1960s.
Jomo Kwame SundaramThe US government’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ of ‘spending well beyond its means’ has continued despite the resulting international monetary ‘non-system’. Continuing acceptance of the US dollar, or ‘greenback’, as the virtual world currency has enabled its Treasury to borrow internationally at low cost.
This has enabled the US to maintain massive trade and current account deficits, and a military presence in much of the world, despite its huge, but still growing fiscal and trade deficits. The US exorbitant privilege seems to have been sustained by its ‘soft power’ and unassailable military superiority.
Facing ‘stagflation’ – economic stagnation with inflation – US Fed chair Paul Volcker raised interest rates sharply from 1980. This soon killed US inflation, but also Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ legacy from the 1930s.
With inflation high, real interest rates seemed low despite high nominal interest rates in the developing world. With growth high in the global South in the 1970s, borrowing to sustain investments, even from abroad, remained attractive.
But US interest rate hikes soon triggered fiscal and sovereign debt crises in many countries: Poland in 1981 was followed by various Latin American, African and other developing economies.
Washington Consensus
Facing rising interest rates, many governments could no longer service accumulated debt, let alone borrow to invest more. Instead, they had to pursue contractionary monetary and fiscal policies domestically, causing economic stagnation.
With Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan demanding such macroeconomic policies, the Washington-based Bretton Woods institutions soon prescribed them, ending the post-Second World War Keynesian ‘Golden Age’.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded contractionary stabilisation policies to qualify for short-term credit facilities. World Bank structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) typically required economic liberalisation and privatisation for longer-term financing.
The Bank also advocated more export-orientation and foreign investment. When paid by Japan’s government, the Bank celebrated its post-war industrial boom as a ‘miracle’, a new model for emulation. But this soon ended with its demise due to the US-demanded overvalued yen and its ill-advised financial ‘Big Bang’.
Latin American conundrum
Latin American and other vulnerable economies lost over a decade from the 1980s while African economies lost a quarter century. Low-interest official Japanese credit initially mainly went to Southeast Asia, while South Asia took on less foreign debt.
Stabilisation and SAP conditionalities undermined Latin America’s modest industrialisation, which also prevented the region from recovering strongly until the new century. But their economies had not been sufficiently liberalised for ‘neoliberals’ despite turning more to foreign trade and investment from the 1980s.
Prosperous economies became more protectionist, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis. But developing countries were told to open up even more despite shrinking export markets.
But with globalisation over, even East Asia can no longer rely on export growth. Also, it is difficult to turn away from export-oriented production, especially as earlier trade deal commitments cannot be unilaterally repudiated.
In many prosperous economies, workers captured some of their productivity gains. But the oft-heard claim that productivity increases lag behind wage rises usually serves employers. In most ‘labour-surplus’ developing countries, wages remain low.
As in South America early this century, progressive redistribution has often accelerated, rather than subverted growth. Common claims that such redistribution is bad for growth must be critically reconsidered. After all, progressive redistribution sustained growth in post-war Europe.
Breaking out of the trap
The ‘middle-income trap’ argument claims MICs cannot sustain rapid economic progress. Supposed reasons vary with policy and ideological biases, as ostensible structural, cultural, political, behavioural or governance causes typically reflect such prejudices.
Recent narratives have proclaimed the need to ‘graduate’ from secondary to tertiary economic activities. Modern services growth is supposedly needed to sustain progress to become HICs.
Another popular argument has been that progressive redistribution has subverted growth. But it is now uncontroversial that progressive redistribution was crucial for sustaining growth in post-war Europe.
Discretionary state powers have undoubtedly been abused for political patronage and self-aggrandisement. Clientelism plagues many societies, undermining needed state interventions. But we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
History suggests the best way to overcome the ‘middle income trap’ would be to implement appropriate investment and technology policies. Selective policies are needed to promote growth, not only of manufacturing, but also of high-end services, as well as safe, nutritious and affordable food supplies.
But all this is not going to happen spontaneously. Reforms need to be deliberately elaborated and sequenced through various interventions as part of well-designed, coherent and sustained initiatives.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Ong Kar Jin (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 15 (IPS) – US President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) is the economic arm of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, aimed at countering China’s influence in the region.
Despite its lofty pronounced goals, IPEF’s shortcomings expose a disconcerting lack of political will, inconsistent trade policies, and US inability to match China’s infrastructure initiatives.
Ong Kar Jin
Bull in a China shop?
Launched in Japan in May 2022, IPEF was widely touted as the Biden administration’s better follow-up to Trump’s withdrawal from Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Many had anticipated a robust reply to China’s growing economic influence in the region, particularly following US depiction of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) as an instrument of Chinese expansion.
China may well stand to benefit most from RCEP by virtue of its size and economic relations with the region. But outside the US echo chamber, RCEP is seen as truly East Asian led. It has involved not only ASEAN leadership, but also Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, all long-term US allies.
In sharp contrast, IPEF has disappointed many. It seems to be little more than a half-hearted economic cooperation appendix to the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
The alternative US infrastructure initiative – coordinated with NATO allies in Europe – is small potatoes compared to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which – unlike most of its allies – the US has attacked from the outset.
Also, the US has no answer to China’s flagship ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – which succeeded ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR) and earlier Chinese Silk Road initiatives. BRI ostensibly focuses on critical transport and communications infrastructure like internet cables, roads, ports and railways.
These projects are seen as directly contributing to economic development, making them highly attractive to developing nations. In contrast, IPEF offerings appear more like diplomatic gestures with little for infrastructure development.
The chasm between IPEF’s lofty rhetoric and its actual content shines light on modest US capacities and commitment. US inability to offer substantial benefits through IPEF not only jeopardizes its standing, but also cedes influence to China.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Domestic quagmires bog down IPEF
The hasty negotiations are seen as catering to the Biden’s re-election campaign. This is a far cry from what US allies were expecting, to signal greater commitment to the region. In its current form, IPEF offers little in tangible benefits.
As a Biden White House initiative without Congressional support, IPEF is dismissed in some circles – especially in the US – as part of Biden’s re-election strategy. It will most certainly be dropped if he does not secure a second term.
The irony is palpable: while there is bipartisan agreement to ‘contain’ China, US politics is so mired in partisan squabbles that it fails to act, even when interests are aligned. This lack of political will is not just a domestic failing; as a result, the international community sees the US as unreliable.
No more trade liberalization?
Despite decades of ‘free trade’ rhetoric from the US, its NATO allies, the Bretton Woods institutions and others, US commitment to trade liberalization has long not been taken seriously, especially since the Trump administration.
Before that, the Obama White House had blocked appointments to the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement panel, effectively rendering the WTO’s most important component dysfunctional.
IPEF’s modest content is largely due to increasingly hostile US public sentiment on trade liberalization. By 2016, most presidential candidates seeking to succeed Obama – from both major parties – opposed the TPP.
While most US voters know nothing about IPEF, ‘outsourcing’ manufactured imports is widely seen as behind the decline of US manufacturing, as well as related ‘good’ jobs and incomes.
While many initially expected a more Obama-like approach from the Biden administration, policy developments so far suggest Trump’s ‘America first’ rhetoric and policies are here to stay.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act denies Hyundai, the Korean industrial conglomerate, as well as other foreign automotive brands, the significant tax credits available to domestic electric vehicle manufacturers.
Outdoing Trump, the Biden administration has broadened technology bans and restrictions, e.g., in its ‘microchip war’ with China. US allies – notably the Netherlands and South Korea – have largely agreed to restrict chip technology exports to Chinese companies.
Ceding regional hegemony
While initially welcomed despite qualms, IPEF has not been attractive to the region, especially to developing countries, including India. It does not even offer US market access, a staple of earlier free trade agreements. Instead, it mainly seeks to impose new standards associated with the new US protectionism.
IPEF’s lack of tangible benefits is unlikely to be of much interest to member governments and prospective members, let alone their publics. Worse for the US, IPEF’s modest offer may unwittingly strengthen longer term concerns about US hegemony and leadership, instead of restoring confidence in it.
The largely cool and ambivalent reception to IPEF reflects a divide. On one side, the US and its allies seek to strengthen their hegemony in the region. On the other are the mixed interests and ambivalent attitudes of others, mainly developing countries, coping with US-China rivalry.
IPEF’s fate is compounded by domestic political constraints on US foreign policy, which have reduced its room for manoeuvre. To be attractive to the region, IPEF needs to offer more tangible benefits to current and prospective members, especially developing countries.
Thus far, it has appealed to fears of Chinese expansionism and its alleged ‘debt traps’. For all but the staunchest US allies, however, concerns about privacy, surveillance or sovereignty are secondary to the need for finance and economic development.
China understands this, often sweetening its infrastructure deals, and making them more attractive to developing countries. Without a more generous response, it will be difficult to overcome IPEF’s current reputation as a low-cost means to enhance US dominance of the region.
Currently, the US is imposing itself on, rather than trying to be supportive of the region. Hence, the IPS and IPEF run the risk of simply being the latest in a series of US hegemonic initiatives from the first Cold War’s Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) in the 1950s to Obama’s TPP.
Ong Kar Jin is an independent researcher and writer focusing on the socio-political dimensions of technology.
The Indonesian Migrant Workers Union (SBMI), with Greenpeace, Indonesia, conducted a peaceful action in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta to encourage the President to immediately ratify the Government Regulation draft on the Protection of Indonesian migrant fishers. Credit: Adhi Wicaksono / Greenpeace
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Nov 15 (IPS) – It is a terrifying life experience, cut off from the world and trapped in forced labour aboard fishing vessels, often in high seas or seas beyond the territorial waters of any state. The fishers are isolated under hazardous and horrific working conditions under limited regulatory oversight. More than 128,000 fishers were trapped in forced labour aboard fishing vessels in 2021 alone.
A new report by the Financial Transparency Coalition – a group of 11 NGOs from across the world, including Transparency International and Tax Justice Network has taken a deep dive into distant waters, exposing a web of ruthless players behind fisheries labour abuses in total disregard of labour and human rights. One in four fishing vessels accused of forced labour is owned by European companies, a quarter of them flagged to China, while one-fifth carried flags of convenience with lax controls, financial secrecy, and low or non-existent taxes.
“Forced labor aboard commercial fishing vessels is a human rights crisis, affecting more than 100,000 fishers every year, leading to horrific abuses and even deaths among fishers who mainly come from global South regions like south-east Asia and Africa. Yet those owning these vessels mostly hide behind complex, cross-jurisdictional corporate structures ranging from shell companies to opaque joint ventures,” says Matti Kohonen, executive director of the Financial Transparency Coalition.
Titled Dark webs: uncovering those behind forced labour on fishing fleets – the report is the most extensive analysis of forced labour abuses in commercial fishing vessels to date. It found companies from just five countries – China, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and Spain – own almost two-thirds of accused vessels for which legal ownership data is available.
An estimated 22.5 percent of industrial and semi-industrial fishing vessels accused of forced labour were owned by European companies, topped by Spain, Russia, and UK firms. The report warns that beneficial ownership information is rarely if ever, requested by most countries when registering vessels or requesting fishing licenses, meaning that those ultimately responsible for the abuses are not detected and punished.
“Forced abuse in commercial fishing vessels is widespread and is often linked to other violations such as illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which generates more than USD 11.4 billion a year in illicit financial flows from Africa alone every year. Yet financial secrecy still surrounds the fishing sector, and there’s little political will to improve financial transparency that’s needed to target those ultimately responsible for these crimes,” says Alfonso Daniels, the lead author of the report.
The report’s highlights include revelations that more than 40 percent of commercial vessels accused of forced labour operated in Asia, followed by Africa with 21 percent, 14 percent in Europe and 11 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Additionally, 475 commercial vessels accused of being involved in labour and human rights violations between January 2010 and May 2023 were identified. The geographical location of these vessels where they operated was identified for 63 percent of the cases, totalling 298 vessels.
Of these, 42.28 percent or 128 vessels for which location data for the offences is available, were found in Asia, followed by Africa with 63 vessels or 21.14 percent of the total, and Europe has 13.76 percent of the total or 41 vessels. LAC has 11.07 percent or 33 vessels, and Oceania has 7.72 percent or 23 vessels, with additional vessels identified in other regions such as the United States.
Overall, the top 10 companies own one in nine vessels accused of forced labour. Of these, seven are from China – some partly owned by the Chinese government, two from South Korea and one from Russia. Indonesia emerged as the global hotspot for forced labour cases, with nearly one-fourth of detected vessels operating in its waters. In addition, 45 percent of accused vessels operated or were detected in just five countries: Indonesia, Ireland, Uruguay, Somalia, and Thailand.
“Forced labour is a serious concern for fishers around the world who frequently suffer abuse and exploitation. European companies and consumers aren’t immune from this, as global seafood supply chains being long and opaque. We call on all companies to conduct proper and meaningful human rights due diligence. The EU Commission current proposal to ban products of forced labour from entering the European market also needs to be urgently approved and put into practice,” says Rossen Karavatchev, Fisheries Coordinator of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), which supported this report.
Against this backdrop, the Financial Transparency Coalition calls for five key measures to protect fishers and enhance transparency in the sector, including an urgent need to improve publicly available vessel information. Stressing that, before awarding a fishing license or authorisation, flag and coastal States should require information on the managers, operators and beneficial owners of the vessel. In addition, unified and publicly available lists of vessels accused of forced labour and IUU fishing should be created.
Further highlighting the need to “create publicly accessible beneficial ownership registries: Unless there is publicly available beneficial ownership information, states will only end up sanctioning or fining the vessel’s captain, crew or the vessel itself, without being able to pursue the legal and beneficial owners who are profiting from these crimes.”
Additionally, identify forced labour and IUU fishing as predicate offences for money laundering purposes and that fisheries-related crimes should also be considered “predicate offences” for money laundering as it is an illegal activity that generates proceeds of crime that are then laundered and therefore treated as illicit financial flows.
Importantly, the Coalition emphasizes that States should ratify key international fisheries treaties and conventions to prevent forced labour and IUU fishing. This includes the International Labor Organization (ILO) Work in Fishing Convention of 2007, whose objective is to ensure that fishers have decent conditions of work on board fishing vessels and has only been ratified by 21 countries, and the Cape Town Agreement of 2012.
Further calling for the expansion of extractive industry reporting to include fisheries so that fisheries are included as an extractive industry in key initiatives, including the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) and other global as well as regional initiatives concerning regulation and transparency of extractive industries.
ACAPULCO, Mexico, Nov 02 (IPS) – Acapulco is a paradise. A port of golden sunsets, toasted sand, and deep blue sea. Its dream beaches captivated the hearts of Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. US President John F. Kennedy chose its shores to spend his honeymoon with Jackie Kennedy. Its luxury hotels and the untamed sea made it the most famous tourist destination in Mexico.
Rosi OrozcoToday, Acapulco is devastated. A Category 5 hurricane—the deadliest possible rating—called “Otis” hit the beach on October 25 with incomparable force. No one anticipated it. Hours before it made landfall, it was just an inconvenient storm. Suddenly it became a deadly cyclone. Most of the hotels are destroyed, the sea swallowed people, houses were blown away, and dozens of people are dead.
In the last century, its beauty attracted the world’s most influential celebrities. Its tranquil mornings and lively nightlife attracted actresses, singers, politicians, aristocratic musicians, and families who wanted to spend their summers by the sea. I myself spent my youth at the family timeshare apartment in Acapulco, and it was there that I met my husband Alejandro, with whom I’ve been married for 40 years. My life is permanently connected to Acapulco.
Luxury businessmen, millionaire athletes, and Michelin-starred chefs arrived. Also drug dealers, money launderers, and men looking for girls and boys to rape in exchange for food or a few dollars for their parents who lived in the city’s poor areas.
Because there are two Acapulcos. They both share an airport and roads, so all roads lead to that pair of versions of the same city. There is a “diamond Acapulco” where the rich vacation with all the amenities at their disposal. And there is a “traditional Acapulco,” where the poor live who work for wealthy tourists.
The people who inhabit “diamond Acapulco” and “traditional Acapulco” do not usually cross paths. They live in the same city, but they are separated by golf courses and exclusive shopping malls. Only rich foreigners and wealthy nationals cross to the poor side when they feel a repugnant urge: to make their plans for child sex tourism a reality with girls and boys as young as 3 years old.
Acapulco is one of the most unequal tourist destinations in the world. In Mexico, it is the most unequal municipality of all: more than 60% of its 900,000 inhabitants live in extreme poverty, which means they do not know what they will eat today or tomorrow. They are the workers who serve plates of fresh seafood, who sweep marble floors, who fill the wine glasses of tourists.
For years, journalists and human rights organizations have told horrific stories that combine poverty, inequality, and sex tourism: a 6-year-old boy rented out to be photographed naked in exchange for milk and eggs; a 9-year-old girl sold to a Canadian tourist to be his wife for a month; homeless teenagers invited to sex parties on lavish yachts in exchange for food; parents and mothers waiting outside hotels for their children to be raped for a price paid in dollars per hour.
Those pedophiles and child molesters turned Acapulco into the country’s primary destination for child sexual tourism. They also led Mexico to the disgraceful second position in the production of child pornography, only surpassed by Thailand, according to data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Today, Acapulco is a different place. Little remains of the port that enchanted singers Agustín Lara and Luis Miguel. There are thousands of poor families without homes, hundreds of workers who lost their jobs, and dozens of fishermen without boats to go out to sea to find sustenance. The destruction is so extensive that complete economic recovery is estimated to take decades, not years.
Under these conditions, childhood is at very high risk. Many families have lost so much that their bodies are the only currency they have left. And in the dirty business of forced prostitution, child bodies are the most sought after.
Amid this unprecedented crisis in Mexico, the Chamber of Deputies approved amendments to the general law against human trafficking. These changes aim to broaden the scope of the law enacted in 2012 and update it to address new technologies that traffickers and organized crime engaged in sexual exploitation can use. The wording has some issues that we are still analyzing, but it also includes positive aspects.
For example, it introduces new protections for individuals with injuries, intellectual disabilities, and Afro-Mexican towns and communities. The latter represent 6.5% of the total population in Guerrero and 4% of the residents in Acapulco, according to the National Population Council.
Civil society organizations are monitoring these changes and hope that the deputies will honor their commitment to protecting the victims.
Meanwhile, it is the responsibility of all, not just in Mexico, to help Acapulco back on its feet, a place that has given so much to both nationals and foreigners. It won’t be easy or quick, but every day we delay puts the vulnerable children at risk due to the magnitude of sexual tourism in that beautiful port.
After Hurricane Otis, Acapulco will be different. Its reconstruction is an opportunity to build a new city on the ruins of depravity, one with values and respect for human dignity. I long for the day to see it standing and for its coastline, beach, and air to remain a paradise, especially for children like me who grew up happily by the sea.
LONDON, Oct 20 (IPS) – It’s a rapid reversal for New Zealand’s Labour Party, in power for six years. At the last election in 2020 it won an outright majority, the first party to do so under the current voting system. But three years on, it’s finished a distant second in the election held on 14 October. The result speaks to a broader pattern seen amid economic strife in many countries – of intense political volatility and the rejection of incumbents.
Jacindamania fades
Former Labour leader Jacinda Ardern captured the public imagination when she took the helm of her party in August 2017. Labour had been floundering but went on to gain seats at the election the following month, unexpectedly forming a coalition government.
Aged 37, Ardern was her country’s youngest-ever prime minister by some margin, and the world’s youngest female government leader. Many saw her as a breath of fresh air, offering an approachable and empathetic brand of politics. Ardern enjoyed an international profile unprecedented for a New Zealand prime minister.
The 2020 election saw Ardern and her party rewarded for what was widely seen as an effective pandemic response, credited with saving around 20,000 lives. The opportunity seemed on to pursue an ambitious agenda. The government could point to progress in decriminalising abortion, tightening gun control laws and introducing stronger workplace rights. But many saw the government as having an overcrowded legislative agenda, failing to make headway on headline policies such as child poverty, while voters increasingly became preoccupied with high inflation.
Ardern announced her resignation in January 2023. Her popularity and that of her party had declined amid the soaring cost of living, which some blamed on long pandemic lockdowns.
Ardern had been the target of a bombardment of online abuse, much of it vilely misogynist in nature. Last year New Zealand police reported that threats against Ardern had almost tripled over two years, as anti-vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories accumulated extremist adherents. In 2022, anti-vaccine protesters camped for weeks outside parliament. The protests, which ended in violence, were a magnet for far-right extremists. Levels of vitriol previously unseen in New Zealand were again present during the election campaign, in which women and M?ori candidates in particular were subjected to intimidation and instances of violence.
Ardern’s replacement as prime minister, Chris Hipkins, promised to focus on bread-and-butter issues. He cut many progressive policies and pitched squarely for the centre. But his strategy failed. Labour was the only major party to shed votes. It lost support to the centre-right National Party – New Zealand’s other party of government – along with the right-wing Act and the nationalist and populist NZ First. But it also shed more progressive voters, with the Green party and Te P?ti M?ori, which advocates for Indigenous rights, picking up support.
Fractious coalition ahead
Quite what government will form isn’t yet clear. Results are provisional and won’t be finalised until 3 November, with over half a million ‘special votes’ still to be counted – many from New Zealanders living overseas. Due to the death of a candidate a by-election will also be held.
The National party has 50 seats in the 121-seat single-chamber parliament; the workings of the electoral system mean parliament will expand to 122 seats once all votes are counted. This total means it’s clear the National party will head a coalition government, with Christopher Luxon as prime minister. But a National-Act alliance might not be enough to command a majority. NZ First may need to be part of the coalition too.
NZ First is the creation of maverick opportunist Winston Peters. Over the course of a long career, Peters has pulled off the trick of positioning as anti-establishment while working with both main parties in coalition governments, including Ardern’s first administration, and serving as deputy prime minister twice. This time he was able to capitalise on anti-government sentiment developed under the pandemic, including by opposing vaccine mandates.
Among his campaign targets were M?ori rights, with Peters – himself M?ori – pledging to withdraw support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Another focus was trans rights, tapping into the same currents of manufactured outrage seen in Europe and North America, with a law proposed to restrict access to toilets for transgender people.
The numbers may mean that the National party finds it easier to govern with Peters than without, even though the three parties disagree on key policies, including on the economy and housing. It could be a rocky road ahead.
Advances reversed?
For New Zealand’s civil society, the question could now become how best to defend gains made and keep on the agenda vital issues such as climate change. The climate crisis was barely mentioned during the campaign even though the country is experiencing extreme weather along with the rest of Oceania. Hipkins scrapped a series of transport reforms intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Act, certain to be part of government, wants to get rid of New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission and Zero Carbon Act, which mandates an emissions reduction plan and cap.
The last government’s experiments in ‘co-governance’ – essentially collaborative management, mostly of environmental resources, between government and M?ori representatives, based in New Zealand’s foundational Treaty of Waitangi – seem sure to end. All parties likely to be involved in the new government attacked these moves with a flurry of hyperbolic claims. Act and NZ First characterise efforts to challenge the exclusion of M?ori people as privileging them over other population groups. The danger is that those strongly opposed to M?ori rights will feel emboldened, signalling increasing division and polarisation ahead.
New Zealand offers a lesson on the political consequences of the impacts of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis intensified by Russia’s war on Ukraine. In just three years, overwhelming political support evaporated. Progress may be temporary and subject to rapid reversal. Civil society must be able to switch strategies just as quickly, from advocating for more to defending gains already made.
BONN, Germany, Oct 04 (IPS) – Once a year, on October 5, we celebrate World Teachers’ Day. Why is it so important to have a closer look on the teaching profession? What is so special about being a teacher nowadays?
World Teachers’ Day is an international day which was established to attract public attention on the work of teachers. The day was established in 1994, in commemora-tion the signing of the “ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers” in 1966, which focused on “appreciating, assessing and improving the ed-ucators of the world” and on providing a global opportunity to consider issues related to teachers and teaching (see Wikipedia, The Free Encycopledia, World Teachers’ Day).
With benchmarks regarding teacher’s rights and responsibilities, standards for their preparation when starting the profession as well as their ongoing training and em-ployment their profession got international attention. This is due to the fact that teaching and learning conditions are most important for the development of pupils and students everywhere.
Dr. Heike KuhnEducation is also at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with a stand-alone goal: SDG 4 demands inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. With a special target, SDG focuses on teachers, stating that by 2030, there is a need to substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in develop-ing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing states (SDG 4c). The 2030 Agenda was signed in 2015 in New York, but was has happened up to now in order to reach this goal?
Special attention was given to teachers during the UN Transforming Education Summit on September 19, 2022, with relevant recommendations stating that teaching should be an attractive and recognised profession, taking into account that teachers need autonomy, decent working conditions, support and lifelong learning opportunities.
However, a year later, reality is quite disillusioning as we can see from the theme for World Teachers’ Day 2023: “The teachers we need for the education we want: The global imperative to reverse the teacher shortage”.
How come that this profession has suffered from attrition? For decades, the educa-tion sector has been chronically underfunded. Already in 2016, data analysis from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) estimated that in order to meet the targets of the SDGs by 2030, nearly 69 million more teachers were needed. Most recent estimates by UNESCO and the Teacher Task Force (TTF) confirm this number today, revealing that in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia alone, an additional 24 million teachers are required.
So what are the root causes and what should be done? Starting with the most im-portant reasons: The COVID 19 pandemic and its long school closures have even worsened an already dire situation. Becoming a teacher is simply no longer attrac-tive: teaching many pupils, put together in crowded classes in not adequately main-tained buildings and not being reasonably paid for the often exhaustive pedagogic work does not come along with incentives for this ambitious profession.
Credit: Education Cannot Wait
Disillusioned by these working conditions, teachers leave their countries for better paid teaching jobs in other regions (e.g. Caribbean teachers move to the US) or – even worse – quit being teachers in order to pursue other jobs.
With children dropping out of schools due to wars, conflicts or the ongoing climate crisis, teachers face new challenges all the time, their mental health is as endan-gered as the mental health of their pupils. And how can a child traumatized by war and escape, living in overcrowded refugee camps concentrate on school subjects? And what a challenge for teachers who might have made similar experiences but nonetheless try to convey hope and structure as well as a bit or normal life to the children in their lessons.
So what is teaching all about? It is about learning and changing your mind-set. Teachers can empower children of all sexes, can open perspectives for lives and therefore ignite change in millions of young pupils. Female teachers are often role models for girls, conveying self-esteem, questioning harmful gender norms. Teachers can educate green skills needed so much nowadays when we are taking the first steps, sometimes stumbling on our way to a green economy, no longer exploiting our planet.
Let me ask you: Do you remember when a teacher empowered you, believing in you? Hopefully you do and hopefully you could experience the power and the impact on your life.
This is exactly why we need qualified teachers so urgently, everywhere. Education is a human right that shall no longer be a privilege for few people, but an opportunity for all – including the possibilities of digitization and AI. All children and learners deserve it. And we need teachers to inspire all human beings, letting them thrive in order to restore and save the planet.
In my country, Germany, there is a saying: A teacher is much more important than two books. I firmly believe this is true.
Dr. Heike Kuhn is Head of Division, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Bonn, Germany
Co-Chair of the Teacher Task Force (with South Africa), https://teachertaskforce.org/
Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of ECW (with Norway), https://educationcannotwait.org/
Miriam Poma stands in the electromechanical workshop for high-end vehicles that she co-owns in the city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz, Bolivia. In the past, she had several jobs in the informal sector and also had to overcome a lot of resistance to working as an automotive mechanic. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
by Franz Chavez (la paz)
Inter Press Service
LA PAZ, Sep 21 (IPS) – In Bolivia, more and more women have gone from being homemakers or street vendors to joining the noisy world of engines, their hands now covered in grease after learning that special touch to make a car work. But they frequently have to put up with machismo or sexism, injustice and mistrust of their skills with tools.
Automotive mechanics is traditionally associated with masculine men wearing oil-stained coveralls. In La Paz and other Bolivian cities over the years many auto repair shops have upgraded from precarious workshops on the street to modern facilities with high-tech equipment.
Vehicles have also transitioned from human-operated nut-and-gear systems to cars governed by electronics.
But openness to women has not evolved in the same way in the profession, as it is unusual to find female mechanics.
And auto repair shops do not appear in studies on informal employment in Latin America by the International Labor Organization (ILO), although mechanic shops are very much present in the informal sector.
“At the age of five I learned about fractions through tears. My father would ask me for a fork wrench (middle wrench, in Bolivia), but since I didn’t know which one it was, he would throw it at my head,” Miriam Poma Cabezas, a senior electromechanical technician, now 50 and divorced, told IPS.
Since that incident, a mixture of anecdote and forced apprenticeship, 45 years have passed, most of them dedicated to the profession of mechanics specializing in engines and now in the electronics of high-end vehicles, in a workshop of which she is co-owner in the city of El Alto, next to La Paz, the country’s political capital.
On a busy street in the La Paz neighborhood of Sopocachi, Ana Castillo uses complex techniques to dismantle rubber tires, identify the damage, and clean and apply chemicals to fix them. At 56, she is an expert in the trade.
She charges about a dollar and a half for each repaired tire, which involves exerting vigorous effort to loosen rusted lug nuts, in order to find the puncture in worn tires amidst the fine black dust that has darkened her hands for 20 years.
“God put me here and I love it because you have to use your strength. I would go crazy sitting still,” Castillo, who completed law school, though she never practiced law, tells IPS as she quickly operates a wrench that creaks as it loosens one of the nuts, stuck hard and moldy from water and dirt.
But she does not only repair tires. She is also a specialist in rebuilding classic cars, an activity for which she is becoming very well-known.
Ana Castillo checks one of the rims she has on the sidewalk of her workshop on a busy street of the Sopocachi neighborhood in the Bolivian city of La Paz. Automotive mechanics holds no mysteries for Castillo, who is also a specialist in rebuilding antique cars. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
With a great deal of effort, Poma managed to set up her own high-level electromechanical repair shop, but before that she had spent years working as an informal self-employed worker, not only in automotive mechanics.
For her part, Castillo complained about the municipal seizure of a piece of land where she wanted to build the mechanic shop of her dreams, together with her husband Mario Cardona. A court ruling granted them the right to use the land and a city council resolution upheld it, but they still have not been given back the land.
A case like so many others
The automotive mechanics sector is just one example of those in which the participation of Bolivian women is particularly difficult, because they are seen as traditionally male professions and there is strong resistance to women breaking into the field, whether out of necessity or a sense of vocation.
The 2018 Annual Report of the UN Women agency, based on figures from the National Institute of Statistics, states that seven out of 10 women in Bolivia are economically active, work in informal conditions and lack labor rights, which makes it difficult to specifically identify how many work as mechanics.
UN Women highlights that Bolivia “is the third country in the world, after Rwanda and Cuba, with the highest political participation of women”: 51 percent in the Chamber of Deputies and 44 percent in the Senate.
But this high female presence in politics in this South American country of 12.3 million inhabitants does not translate into a boost for women in other areas, particularly business and formal employment.
The president of the Chamber of Businesswomen of Bolivia (Camebol), Silvia Quevedo, told IPS that there is no “state incentive (for women’s participation) in any particular job” and encourages “women themselves to forge their own way, based on the quality of their work.”
Camebol emerged in the department of Santa Cruz, the most economically developed in the country, and has since spread to six of Bolivia’s nine regions. It has a thousand members and its purpose, together with strengthening its institutional framework, is to influence public policies to promote equal opportunities in business.
A study conducted by the ILO on Bolivian self-employed women workers in the informal sector shows that the department of La Paz accounts for 31.8 percent of this segment, with an average age of 45 years and eight years of schooling, below the 12 years of compulsory basic education.
In the city of La Paz, 75 percent of self-employed women work in commerce, 15 percent in manufacturing and eight percent in community services. In the other two largest cities in the country, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, the proportions are similar, according to the report.
Electromechanics specialist Miriam Poma checks on a screen the problems of a high-end vehicle in her specialized workshop in the Bolivian city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
Experienced hands
Miriam Poma told IPS that she began to create her own source of employment at the age of 16, on the bustling commercial Huyustus Street in La Paz, where thousands of vendors sell all kinds of merchandise. She sold shoes and handbags.
But soon after, she decided to devote herself full time to repairing Volkswagen vehicles, and ended up as head mechanical assistant to her father, Marcelino Poma, who competed in rally races until he was 70 years old.
Creativity to adapt at a young age to the opportunities of street commerce led Ana Castillo to sell pork sandwiches. She was 14 years old at the time, forced by the responsibility of caring for her two younger brothers after they had all been abandoned by their mother.
“I know how to make everything: sausages, pickles, sauces; I’m not afraid to start from scratch,” Castillo, who helped her two younger brothers earn degrees in business administration and social communication, told IPS enthusiastically.
In the formal economy, “foreign trade has a woman’s face,” said Quevedo, the president of Camebol, based on surveys of the participation of its members in export companies.
Quevedo is an economist with extensive knowledge in agriculture who specializes in exports.
In 2022, international sales of non-traditional products amounted to 9.7 billion dollars, according to the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade (IBCE), in a country with a GDP of 41 billion dollars.
But there are still prejudices about women’s efficiency in men’s jobs, as the two women mechanics noted.
Poma said the customers in her father’s repair shop initially did not trust her to tune their engines, and tried to keep her from working on their vehicles.
Her brother, Julio Poma, would say he had done the work, and only after the client expressed complete satisfaction would he reveal that the work was actually done by his sister.
Recently, Poma tried to pass on her knowledge to men in the field of motor electronics, but no one was interested in a female instructor who was also a racing driver in 2006. In order to attract students, she had to hire a foreign expert.
A study carried out by the Women’s Institute of La Paz, belonging to the city government, indicated the level of interest in learning gastronomy, computer technology, cell phone use and education in small business finances.
Among the non-conventional trades, the respondents called for training in masonry, plumbing and electricity, a spokesperson for the Institute told IPS. The Institute conducts training workshops for 1,450 low-income women heads of households between the ages of 25 and 70.
Mushroom workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini
by Peter Costantini (seattle, usa)
Inter Press Service
SEATTLE, USA, Aug 31 (IPS) – The Yakima River runs southeast from the Cascade Mountains through central Washington state to merge with the Columbia a little north of Oregon. From the small city of Yakima on down, its course broadens from a winding canyon into a wide valley bounded by austere low ridges of gray-green sagebrush and tawny grasses. In mid-April, the new leaves of the willows and cottonwoods light up the riverbanks with luminous chartreuse.
The valley beyond the river bottom was once mostly semi-arid rangeland punctuated by basalt cliffs. But as irrigation systems spread across it in the early 20th Century, it morphed into rich farmlands. Expanses of vineyards stretch across the valley and climb the hills. One part of the Yakima Valley Highway has been renamed “Wine Country Road”, and at intersections, signs point to wineries and tasting rooms.
Tall frameworks of wood and wire stand waiting for hop vines to grow up them. The Yakima Valley produces more than three-quarters of the hops grown in the United States. Apple and pear orchards are beginning to bloom. In fields of corn and beans, the first green shoots are just poking up.
The town of Sunnyside drapes over a hill about 30 miles southeast of Yakima city. The town’s 16 thousand residents are 86 percent Hispanic, and Yakima County is over 52 percent, in a country where the Hispanic population is approaching one-fifth of the total and growing.
Yearly per capita income in Sunnyside is $15,570 and the poverty rate is 18.6 percent, compared with $43,817 and 9.9 percent for the state of Washington. That means that average yearly income here is a bit more than one-third that of the state, and poverty is almost twice as high.
Sign at mushroom workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini
At the south end of town, across Interstate 82, Midvale Road is lined with industrial processing and service facilities: warehouses, pipelines, silos, and tanks for dairy, candy, feed, fertilizer and equipment. At the end of this agribusiness stronghold, rows of long white structures looking like opaque greenhouses are identified by a sign: “Windmill Farms”. Inside, on multi-level bins in windowless, climate-controlled rooms, mushrooms are growing. The delivery trucks parked outside the farm still have “Ostrom Farms”, the name of the previous owners, painted on their sides.
Along the road outside the mushroom farm one April afternoon, workers, their families, and their supporters walk a picket line. Crimson flags bearing a black Aztec eagle on a white circle flutter in a stiff wind. Red, white, blue and green undulate as well: a young boy hoists an American flag as an older man waves the Mexican tricolor. Homemade signs say “We Feed You” and “La Union Es La Fuerza” (“The union is strength”), and “Queremos unión – Protesta (“We want a union – Protest).
From a portable sound system, the Mexican ranchera (country) music of Joan Sebastian and Los Tigres del Norte lends an upbeat accordion and guitar cadence to the proceedings.
These mushroom workers are picketing Windmill Farms to demand that it right some flagrant wrongs that Ostrom Farms, the former owner, inflicted on them before selling the farm. The new owners, they say, have not remedied the problems.
Over a year ago, Ostrom workers began to raise complaints about working conditions, wages, and management, working with organizers from the United Farm Workers union. Getting no response, they voted overwhelmingly to form a union to bargain with the company. Ostrom responded by laying off all its workers and selling the farm to Windmill Farms, which is controlled by an investment firm. Windmill told the former workers that they could reapply to work there, but would have to accept restrictions on their workplace rights.
Before the sale, Ostrom had replaced most of its workers, who were predominantly Hispanic women living in the area, with male “guest workers” brought in from Mexico on H-2A temporary agricultural visas. They have limited labor rights and can easily be fired and deported. A few of the original workers were hired back, but some not at their old jobs.
The demonstrators are demanding that Windmill rehire workers who were fired, address their grievances, recognize their union and bargain a contract with it. Members of other unions have come from around the state to show solidarity.
The president of the United Farm Workers, Teresa Romero, has come up from California. She addresses the crowd in Spanish:
“We’re here today fighting for all of you. But we can’t do this without the leadership, that you’ve demonstrated. It’s not easy. Many of you have been fired for demanding your rights. But we’re going to keep fighting for the workers who are still inside and who are afraid. And the fear they feel is very justified because many of you were fired. … Here we are and we’re not leaving! Thanks to all who are supporting us from outside of the farm workers movement, but who realize how hard it is for workers in the fields to organize.”
She ends her speech with “¡Sí, se puede!” (“Yes we can!”), the traditional farm workers grito. And the crowd continues cheering, “¡Sí, se puede!”.
Next, an animated man with a goatee and sunglasses smiles at the assembly. José Martínez is one of the leaders in forming the union. He was fired by Ostrom, but then rehired by Windmill. His Spanish is hoarse and passionate:
“I want to send a very clear message to the company: we don’t want to destroy you. The only thing we want is that you treat us with dignity, equality and respect as human beings. And to have a union, that’s what we’re fighting for. Thanks to all of you who have come from different places to support our cause. We won’t leave until we reach this goal. ¡Viva la causa!¡Viva César Chávez!¡Viva la unión!¡Siempre pa’adelante!” (“Long live the cause! Long live Cesar Chavez! Long live the Union! Always forward!”)
Daniela Barajas was fired by Ostrom but found a job with a different company. She tells the crowd in Spanish:
“We’ve just begun to fight. Although I haven’t worked in the mushroom farm more than a year – I was one of those who was fired – I continue supporting the people who are there those who don’t have jobs to feed their families. They have a right to better treatment at work. And we’re not going away until they recognize a union there..”
Her speech is echoed by chants of: “¿Que queremos? ¡Unión!” (“What do we want? Union!”).
The union’s Secretary of Civic Action, Juanito Marcial, drove over with some other workers from the Seattle area to offer solidarity to the mushroom workers. The Chateau Sainte Michelle winery there, where he works, is the site of the United Farm Workers’ first contract in the state. Workers won it in 1995 after an eight-year struggle, and it remains in force. Most of the UFW’s membership, however, is in California where the union began.
Marcial recalls that history in Spanish: “We’re here, the comrades who work at Sainte Michelle under a union contract. And I want to tell you that we now have an average of 27 years, the only agricultural site that has a contract , and that we’re enjoying various benefits for workers. We’re saying to you, comrades, that this is just the first step, we can’t weaken. Hasta la victoria siempre! (Until victory always!)”
The UFW regional director, Victoria Ruddy, closes the rally by thanking the workers for a year of struggle. “As don José says, ‘¡No vamos a parar hasta ganar unión!’” (‘We won’t stop until we win a union!’) And the crowd ambles over to a nearby park for a picnic.
“Yes, we can! The union is strength!” UFW rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini
New bosses, but still no union
“Yes, we can! The union is strength!” UFW rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Photo: Peter Costantini
Sign at mushroom workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Photo: Peter Costantini
The road that led the mushroom workers to their April 18 rally outside of Windmill Farms was riddled with corporate switchbacks and legal potholes.
In 2019, Ostrom Mushrooms closed a mushroom farm in western Washington state, laid off more than 200 workers, and moved its operations to Sunnyside. The firm received generous public subsidies from different levels of government for construction of a new $60 million plant.
In Sunnyside, Ostrom hired a new workforce varying between 200 and 300 workers. Most were local Hispanic women. At that time, CEO Travis Wood complained of a shortage of labor despite the advantages of year-round work and controlled-climate conditions inside the facility.
“In mid-2021,” The Washington State Attorney General found, “Ostrom hired new management to improve its production. believed Ostrom needed to replace its largely female workforce because had childcare obligations and could not work late hours or weekends. … anagement decided to replace its domestic workforce with workers from the H-2A guest worker program.”
Consequently, Ostrom employees elected a leadership committee to raise issues about wages and working conditions with management. They began to consult with United Farm Workers organizers and the non-profit Columbia Legal Services.
In June 2022, the workers submitted a petition to Ostrom calling for “fair pay, safe working conditions, and respect”. It alleged that managers had threatened and bullied workers, instituted mandatory overtime shifts and raised production quotas to excessive levels. Workers were overworked and undervalued, said Ostrom worker Joceline Castillo. But Ostrom stonewalled the petition.
Meanwhile, in August 2022, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a civil complaint against Ostrom under state laws. Ferguson accused Ostrom of discrimination and unfair employment practices based on employees’ sex, citizenship, or immigration status, and of retaliating against employees who opposed these violations. Ostrom had gone ahead and replaced most of its local female workers with male “guest” workers brought in from Mexico, whose H-2A temporary visas give them fewer labor protections. However, the H-2A program requires that the employer first demonstrate that it cannot hire enough workers from the local workforce, which was evidently not the case.
The complaint also charged Ostrom with “engaging in unfair and deceptive practices … by misleading actual and prospective domestic pickers with regard to job eligibility requirements, wages, and availability of employment.”
However, Ferguson was unable to directly address retaliation against union organizing or the use of H-2A workers to replace resident workers. These issues fall under federal law, while the state attorney general can enforce only state laws.
The National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 federal statute that regulates union organizing and collective bargaining, excludes farm workers and domestic workers from its coverage. So the Ostrom workers were not able to go through formal legal procedures for union recognition or to invoke the law’s protection against retaliation for union organizing.
Nevertheless, in September 2022 the workers announced their vote, held under UFW auspices: 70 percent chose to form a union. They asked management to sit down and bargain on wages and working conditions. Ostrom refused.
The Ostrom workers and UFW organizers upped the ante in their campaign by marshalling community support. They organized periodic informational pickets at the Ostrom farm in Sunnyside. And in a reprise of the farm worker boycotts of the 1960s and 1970s, they began in November to picket outside of a supermarket in Seattle. They asked consumers not to buy Ostrom mushrooms, but instead to seek out mushrooms from two unionized farms in California.
In November, the State Department of Labor & Industries responded to a complaint and found working conditions at Ostrom that could cause injuries to workers. The agency fined the grower only $4,000, but also investigated another complaint.
Then on February 14, the campaign hit a roadblock. According to the UFW, Ostrom Mushroom Farms management held a company-wide meeting to tell all its workers that they were fired immediately. As of that midnight, Ostrom’s facility would be sold to Greenwood Mushroom Sunnyside IA, LLC, a new entity owned by Windmill Farms. Based in Ashburn, Ontario, Canada, Windmill also uses the Greenwood Mushrooms label at farms in Ontario and Pennsylvania. In turn, Windmill is owned by Instar Asset Management, a Toronto-based private equity firm.
The fired Ostrom workers were told they could reapply for jobs under the new management. But they would have to fill out new applications, possibly accept different jobs, and sign arbitration agreements that forbade suing the employer or unionizing.
The Windmill and former Ostrom workers, including those now unemployed, pushed ahead with their campaign. Some of the original workers who were rehired complained that they ended up in worse jobs with lower pay.
Under Windmill Farms management, working conditions were still “pretty bad”, according to workers committee leader José Martínez, who had worked at Ostrom for three years. “They want you to go fast” to meet an hourly quota of picking 50 pounds of mushrooms, he told me. “They put you on probation for 90 days. If you don’t make they’re gonna let you go.” The biggest problem, though, is that “there’s no communication with them. Sometimes one supervisor comes and tells you one thing, and then another one comes after and changes the whole thing.” If the company recognizes the union, he said, “everything is gonna be fine.”
Shortly after the rally, though, Martínez was fired by Windmill, which claimed he wasn’t meeting production demands. But he suspected he may have been fired because of his pro-union activism.
Finally on May 16, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office announced that Ostrom and Greenwood had signed a consent decree. Ostrom agreed to pay $3.4 million into a fund to compensate workers who suffered discrimination or retaliation for reporting it – over 170 may be eligible. In the agreement, Greenwood agreed to discontinue the “unfair and discriminatory employment practices” identified under Ostrom, and established a framework for compliance training and monitoring to prevent future violations.
“Ostrom’s systematic discrimination was calculated to force out female and Washington-based employees,” Ferguson said in a statement. “I want to thank the workers who spoke out against this discrimination in the face of so much danger and stood up for their rights. My team fought for them and today we secured an important victory.”
Beyond substantial compensation for the workers, the settlement avoided a drawn-out court battle. But because it was based on state law, it could not compel recognition of the union or rehiring by Windmill of the fired workers, nor could it address the prohibited use of H-2A temporary workers to replace resident workers.
A worker still employed by Windmill, Isela Cabrera, commented: “I am very happy for my coworkers who experienced humiliations and retaliations by Ostrom management.” She said that she hoped the consent decree would help begin to improve conditions, “as this new management continues to commit favoritism and retaliation. We want our fired friends to get their jobs back and for Windmill Farms to recognize our union.”
UFW President Romero explained to me that one focus of the union campaign will be on persuading Instar’s investors, some of which may be union pension funds, to pressure Windmill Farms to recognize the union.
The state branch of the AFL-CIO, the main national labor confederation, announced the formation of a solidarity committee. Its president, April Sims, emphasized: “All workers deserve fair treatment at work and the freedom to join together to negotiate for better wages and working conditions. Workers at Windmill Farms are getting neither of those things. We stand in solidarity with these brave mushroom workers and we will fight side-by-side until we win a union contract at Windmill Farms.”
On August 10, the U.S. Department of Labor announced fines totaling some $74,000 and awards of unpaid wages amounting to over $59,000 to compensate 62 H-2A temporary workers at Ostrom who had been underpaid and misled about housing and meals. But did not announce any action against Ostrom for claiming that they could not find enough local workers, as the H-2A program requires, while simultaneously firing large numbers of them.
Windmill Farms, Sunnyside, Washington, April 14, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini
Catching a national wave of union organizing
The Ostrom / Windmill campaign joins a nascent national upswelling of union organizing across many industries. These initiatives, however, are swimming against half a century of anti-labor riptides.
Union membership in the U.S. in 2022 was 10.1 percent of wage and salary workers, with only 6.0 percent in the private sector, a post-WWII nadir. In 1955, 33.2 percent were unionized, more than three times as many. Union activists are frequently though illegally fired for organizing, and bargaining requirements for employers are often poorly enforced.
Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from national labor protection laws in the 1930s, a relic of Jim Crow segregation that has never been remedied. The low-wage workers in those two fields at the time were mostly Black, Mexican or Filipino. Today they are mainly Hispanic, and among those most in need of strong labor protections.
If the former Ostrom workers had been in an industry other than agriculture or domestic work, they would have been covered by a federal law that protects worker efforts to unionize and forbids retaliation. And if rules had been enforced requiring businesses to show a dearth of local workers before hiring H-2A “guest” workers, the resident Ostrom workers could not have been legally replaced.
Despite these obstacles, a labor resurgence seems to be gaining momentum nationally. Mainly in low-wage service industries, most visibly at major employers like Starbucks and Amazon, organizing drives are making headlines. A 2022 Gallup opinion poll found that 71 percent of the U.S. public approve of labor unions, up from 48 percent in 2010 and 64 percent before the pandemic.
The Ostrom / Windmill campaign is also a protagonist in the renewed activism among agricultural workers. The United Farm Workers, founded in the early 1960s in California, reached a zenith in the later 1960s and 1970s, when it won numerous contracts and improved conditions in the fields. Its boycotts of grapes, lettuce and wine focused national attention on the widespread exploitation and abuse of farmworkers.
On the political front, the UFW spearheaded major improvements in labor laws, mainly in California. In 1975, a union campaign won the state’s approval of the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which recognized farm workers’ right to organize.
Over the next two decades the UFW’s organizing waned and membership shrank. But in this century, membership has reportedly doubled and the union has spearheaded new campaigns for farm worker rights and against wage theft and sexual harassment.
Recently, Washington state’s Democratic government passed legislation guaranteeing farm workers at least the state minimum wage, which is currently $15.74 per hour, and time-and-a-half overtime pay for more than 40 hours weekly beginning January 1, 2024.
The 1995 UFW contract won by workers at the Chateau Sainte Michelle winery is still in force today. And the Sunnyside workers are urging consumers to buy mushrooms grown on two unionized California farms. According to the UFW, over three-quarters of the fresh mushroom industry in California is unionized, as are thousands of workers on vegetable, berry, winery, tomato, and dairy farms.
That black Aztec eagle in a white circle on a crimson flag may have to soar long and high outside of Windmill Farms and its owners’ offices to win a contract there. And many unions may have to walk picket lines outside of other farms, stores, and warehouses – and also city halls, statehouses and Congress – to ensure safe work environments and a decent living for all human beings who do “essential” work.
Yet despite the barriers erected against them, agricultural laborers are pursuing new strategies with old-fashioned grit to defend their workplace rights and build collective power.
LONDON, Aug 18 (IPS) – Civic space is deteriorating in Senegal ahead of next February’s presidential election. Recent protests have been met with lethal violence and internet and social media restrictions. Senegal’s democracy will soon face a key test, and whether it passes will depend largely on whether civic space is respected.
Political conflict
Recent protests have revolved around the populist opposition politician Ousmane Sonko. Sonko came third in the 2019 presidential election and has grown to be the biggest thorn in President Macky Sall’s side. He’s won support from many young people who see the political elite as corrupt, out of touch and unwilling to tackle major social and economic problems such as the country’s high youth unemployment. He’s also been the subject of a recent criminal conviction that his supporters insist is politically motivated.
On 1 June, Sonko was sentenced to two years in jail for ‘corrupting youth’. This resulted from his arrest on rape charges in March 2021. Although he was cleared of the most serious charges – something women’s rights advocates have expressed concern about – his conviction likely makes him ineligible to stand in the next presidential election.
Sonko’s arrest in March 2021 triggered protests in which 14 people died. His conviction set off a second wave of protests. Sonko was arrested again on 28 July on protest-related charges, including insurrection. A few days later, the government dissolved his party, Pastef. It’s the first such ban since Senegal achieved independence in 1960.
All of this gave fresh impetus to Sonko’s supporters, who accuse the government of instrumentalising the judiciary and criminal justice system to stop a credible political threat.
Repressive reaction
The latest wave of protests saw instances of violence, including stone-throwing, tyre burning and looting. The state responded with lethal force. According to civil society estimates, since March 2021 over 30 people have been killed, more than 600 injured and over 700 detained.
In response to the recent protests, the army was deployed in the capital, Dakar. Live ammunition was used and armed people dressed in civilian clothes, evidently embedded with security forces, violently attacked protesters.
Journalists were harassed and arrested while covering protests. Recent years have seen a rise in verbal and physical attacks on journalists, along with legal action to try to silence them. Several journalists were arrested in relation to their reporting on Sonko’s prosecution. Investigative journalist Pape Alé Niang has been jailed three times in less than one year.
The government also limited internet access and TV coverage. TV station Walf TV was suspended over its protest coverage. On 1 June, social media access was restricted and on 4 June mobile internet was shut down for several days. In August, TikTok access was blocked. Restrictions harmed both freedom of expression and livelihoods, since many small traders rely on mobile data for transactions.
?? Confirmed: Metrics show the restriction of social media and messaging platforms including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube in #Senegal; the incident comes amid protests over the sentencing of opposition figure Ousmane Sonko
A major driver of protests and Sonko’s campaign was speculation that Sall might be tempted to seek a third presidential term. The constitution appeared to be clear on the two-term limit, but Sall’s supporters claimed constitutional amendments in 2016 had reset the count. Thousands mobilised in Dakar on 12 May, organised by a coalition of over 170 civil society groups and opposition parties, to demand that Sall respect the two-term limit.
On 3 July, Sall finally announced that he wasn’t running again. But it hasn’t ended suspicion that the ruling Alliance for the Republic (APR) party will go to any lengths stay in power, including using the state’s levers to weaken the opposition.
There’s precedent here: ahead of the Sall’s re-election in 2019, two prominent opposition politicians who might have presented a serious challenge were excluded. In both cases, barely weeks before the election the Constitutional Council ruled them ineligible due to prior convictions on corruption charges that were widely believed to have been politically motivated.
That Sonko and Pastef might have stood a chance in 2024 was suggested by the results of votes in 2022. In local elections, the APR lost control of Dakar and Sonko was elected mayor of Ziguinchor city. And then in parliamentary elections, the APR lost 43 of its 125 seats and Pastef finished second, claiming 56 seats, leaving no party with a majority.
Reputation on the line
Senegal long enjoyed an international reputation for being a relatively stable and democratic country in a region that’s experienced numerous democratic setbacks. With West African countries such as Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and now Niger under military control, and others like Togo holding deeply flawed elections, Senegal stood out. It’s held several free elections with changes of power.
The country’s active and youthful civil society and relatively free media have played a huge part in sustaining democracy. When President Abdoulaye Wade sought an unconstitutional third term in 2012, social movements mobilised. The Y’en a marre (‘I’m fed up’) movement got out the youth vote to oust Wade in favour of Sall. Wade himself rode a similar youth wave in 2000. So Sall and his party are surely aware of the power of social movements and the youth vote.
A small step forward was taken recently when parliament voted to allow the two opposition candidates who’d been blocked in 2019 to stand in 2024. But the government needs to do much more to show its commitment to democratic rules.
Upholding protest rights would be a good start. The repeated use of violence and detention of protesters points to a systemic problem. No one has been held to account for killings and other rights violations. It’s high time for accountability.
Media freedoms need to be respected and people detained for exercising their civic freedoms must be released. For Senegal to live up to its reputation, Sall should strive to enter history as the president who kept democracy alive – not the one who buried it.
Her hands loaded with crates, Susan Quintanilla, a union leader of agro-export workers in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, gets ready to collect different vegetables and fruits for foreign markets. She has witnessed many injustices, saying the companies “made you feel like they were doing you a favor by giving you work, they wanted you to keep your head down.” CREDIT: Courtesy of Susan Quintanilla
by Mariela Jara (lima)
Inter Press Service
LIMA, May 31 (IPS) – Peru’s agro-export industry is growing steadily and reached record levels in 2022. But this has not had a favorable impact on human development in this South American country, where high levels of inequality, poverty, childhood anemia and malnutrition persist, as well as complaints about the poor quality of employment in the sector.
Exports of agricultural products such as blueberries, grapes, tangerines, artichokes and asparagus generated 9.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2022 – 12 percent higher than the 2021 total, as reported in February by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism.
Agricultural exports represent four percent of GDP in this Andean nation, where mining and fishing are the main economic activities.
“The increase in revenue from agricultural exports has not brought human development: anemia and tuberculosis are at worrying levels and now dengue fever is skyrocketing,” Rosario Huallanca, a representative of the non-governmental Ica Human Rights Commission (Codeh Ica), which has worked for 41 years in that department of southwestern Peru, told IPS.
Ica and two other departments along the country’s Pacific coast, La Libertad and Piura, are leaders in the sector, accounting for nearly 50 percent of agricultural exports in this country of 33 million people, which despite this boom remains plagued by inequality, reflected by high levels of poverty and informality and precariousness in employment.
Monetary poverty affected 27.5 percent of the country’s 33 million inhabitants in 2022, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics. This is a seven percentage point increase over the pre-pandemic period. The number of poor people was estimated at 9,184,000 last year, 600,000 more than in 2021.
Ica, which has a total of 850,765 inhabitants, is one of the departments with the lowest monetary poverty rates, five percent, because it has full employment, largely due to the agro-export boom of the last two decades.
Huallanca said the number of agro-export companies is estimated at 320, with a total of 120,000 employees, who come from different parts of the country.
What stands out, she said, is that 70 percent of the total number of workers in the sector are women, who are valued for their fine motor skills in handling fruits and vegetables.
Although a portion of the workers of some companies are in the informal sector, there are no clear numbers, the expert pointed out.
But there are alarming figures available: more than six percent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, and anemia affects 33 percent of children between six and 35 months of age.
“With the type of job we have, we cannot take our children to their growth checkups, we can’t miss work because they don’t pay you if you don’t show up, we cry in silence because of our anxiety,” 42-year-old Yanina Huamán, who has worked in the agro-export sector for 20 years to support her three children, told IPS.
The two oldest are in middle and higher education and her youngest is still in primary school. “I am both mother and father to my children. With my work I am giving them an education and I have manged to secure a home of my own, but it’s precarious, the bedrooms don’t have roofs yet, for example,” she said.
Huamán is secretary for women’s affairs in the union of the company where she works, a position she was appointed to in November 2022. From that post, she hopes to help bring about improvements in access to healthcare for female workers, who either postpone going to the doctor when they need to, or receive poor medical attention in the social security health system “where they only give us pills.”
Ica currently has the highest number of deaths from dengue fever, a viral disease that led the government of Dina Boluarte to declare a 90-day health emergency in 13 of the country’s 24 departments a couple of weeks ago.
Not only that, it has the history of being the department with the highest level of deaths from Covid-19: 901 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, exceeding the national average of 630 per 100,000. “The health system here does not work,” trade unionist Huamán said bluntly.
Yanina Huamán, a worker in the agro-export sector in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, explains at a meeting in Lima the problems that affect labor rights in the sector, particularly for women who make up 70 percent of the workers. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
Working conditions more difficult for women
The lack of quality employment and the deficient recognition of labor rights, exacerbated by the pandemic, prompted a strike in November 2020 that began in Ica and spread to the northern coastal area of ??La Libertad and Piura.
Their demands included a minimum living wage of 70 soles (19 dollars) a day, social benefits such as compensation and raises for length of service, and recognition of the right to form unions.
Grouped together in the recently created Ica Workers’ Union Agro-exports Struggle Committee, which represents casual and seasonal workers, they went to Congress in Lima to demand changes in the current legislation.
Susan Quintanilla, 39, originally from the central Andean department of Ayacucho, is the general secretary of the union. She arrived in Ica in 2014 after separating from her husband. She came with her two children, a girl and a boy, for whom she hoped for a future with better opportunities.
After working as a harvester in the fields, and cleaning and packing fruit at the plant, she decided to work on a piecework basis, because that way she could earn more and save up for times when the companies needed less labor.
“It was incredibly hard,” she told IPS. “I would leave home at 10 in the morning and leave work at three or four in the wee hours of the next morning to be there to get my kids ready for school. I was 29 or 30 years old, I was young, but I saw older women with pain in their bodies, their arms and their feet due to the postures we had at work, but they continued because they had no other option.
“I saw many injustices in the agro-export companies,” she added. “They made you feel that they were doing you a favor by giving you work, they wanted you to keep your head down, they shouted at and humiliated people, they made them feel miserable. I protested, raised my voice, and they didn’t fire me because I was a high performance worker and they needed me. The situation has changed a little because of our struggles, but it hasn’t come for free.”
The late 2020 protests led to the approval on Dec. 31 of that year of Law No. 31110 on agricultural labor and incentives for the agricultural and irrigation sector, aimed at guaranteeing the rights of workers in the agro-export and agroindustrial sectors.
But in Quintanilla’s view, the law discriminates against non-permanent workers who make up the largest part of the workforce in the sector, since the preferential right to hiring established in the fourth article of the law is not respected.
“Nor have they recognized the differentiated payment of our social benefits and they include them in the daily wage that is calculated at 54 soles (a little more than 14 dollars): it’s not fair,” she complained.
At the same time, she stressed that the agro-export work is harder on women because they are the ones responsible for raising their children. “We live in a sexist society that burdens us with all of the care work,” Quintanilla said.
She also explained that because several of the companies are so far away, it takes workers longer to get to work, which means they are away from home for up to twelve hours a day. “We go to work with the anxiety that we are leaving our children at risk of the dangers of life, we cannot be with them as we would like, which damages us emotionally.”
Added to this, she said, are the terrible working conditions, such as the fact that the toilets are far from the areas where they work, as much as three blocks away, or in unsanitary conditions, which leads women to avoid using them, to the detriment of their health.
Workers sort avocados for export in Peru. Agro-exports account for four percent of the country’s GDP, but the prosperity of the sector has not translated into better human development for its workers, and diseases such as anemia and tuberculosis are alarmingly prevalent in agroindustrial areas. CREDIT: Comexperu
Agro-export companies and human rights
Huallanca said that Codeh Ica was promoting the creation of a space of diverse stakeholders so that the National Business and Human Rights Plan, a public policy aimed at ensuring that economic activities improve people’s quality of life, is fulfilled in the department. Five unions from Ica and the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Tourism participate in this initiative.
“We have made an enormous effort and we hope that on Jun. 16 it will be formally created by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the governing body for this policy,” she said.
In the meantime, she added, “we have helped bring together women involved in the agro-export sector, who have developed a rights agenda that has been given shape in this multi-stakeholder space and we hope it will be taken into account.”
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