Exploitation

Journalist Who Took Job At Amazon: We Got 18 Minutes Total Break Time For 11.5 Hour Shift

July 27, 2019 Sahid Fawaz, Labor411.org Educate! Amazon, Exploitation, Jeff Bezos, New Economy, Workers

“I took a job in an Amazon fulfillment center in Indiana over a few weeks–along with a call center in North Carolina and a McDonald’s in San Francisco–to investigate the experience of low-wage work. I wasn’t prepared for how exhausting working at Amazon would be. It took my body two weeks to adjust to the agony of walking 15 miles a day and doing hundreds of squats. But as the physical stress got more manageable, the mental stress of being held to the productivity standards of a robot became an even bigger problem.

Who Controls Our Time?

May 12, 2019 Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel, Labornotes.org Educate! Class Struggle, Exploitation, Labor Rights, Workers

As the bumper sticker has it, unions are “the folks who brought you the weekend.” Unions fought for the 10-hour day, and then the eight-hour day… and then our fight stopped. We never got to a six-hour-day fight. Instead we started to backslide. We not only lost the weekend; we lost control over our time. This slippage mirrors the decline in real wages over the last generation—both signs that organized labor has gotten weaker. In 1960 the paid work hours for U.S. workers were roughly comparable to those in Europe.

Disaster Capitalism In Brazil: Mining Greed Produces A Horrific Death Toll

February 6, 2019 By Vijay Prashad, Independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter Educate! Brazil, Capitalism, Exploitation, Mining

On January 25, 2019, a dam burst in the town of Brumadinho, north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The dam was built by the iron-ore company Vale to store residue after the iron ore had been extracted. Once the dam began to crumble, it did not take long for its 13 million cubic meters of iron waste to sweep down onto the workers and into their town. Approximately 300 people have been killed in this disaster. Many more have been injured. Within four hours of the breach, the sludge had swept down into the Paraopeba River, threatening to pollute the entire region’s water.

New Slave Labor: California Prisoners Fight Fires For Less Than $2 An Hour

November 14, 2018 By Naomi LaChance, Truthdig.com Educate! California, Exploitation, Prison Labor, Slave labor

The nearly 4,000 incarcerated workers who are trained to fight deadly fires across California often make less than $2 an hour and are not eligible to be hired as professional firefighters after they are released from prison. The work is physically strenuous and, in some cases, fatal. As forest fires ravage California, the state has become increasingly reliant on the program as a cost-saving measure. In July, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation tweeted that 2,000 incarcerated people, including 58 “youth offenders,” were working to fight fires. Bill Sessa, an information officer at the department, said that “all of the juvenile offenders [used to fight fires] have committed serious or violent felonies.” Adult incarcerated firefighters are often low-level, nonviolent offenders.

Amazon Must Address Safety Concerns, Says National COSH

October 10, 2018 Staff, Nationalcosh.org Educate! Amazon, Capitalism, Exploitation

BOSTON – Amazon, the retail giant which announced this week an across-the-board wage increase to $15 an hour for all employees, must also pay “urgent attention” to workplace safety issues, says the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH). “Amazon workers desperately need a real pay increase,” said Marcy Goldstein Gelb, co-executive director of National COSH, nationwide training and advocacy organization for workers and families. “But a pay increase is worth a lot more if you come home in one piece at the end of your shift.” In April 2018, Amazon was identified as a “Dirty Dozen” company in a widely-cited National COSH report, which documented seven deaths at the company’s warehouses since 2013.

Nicola Sturgeon Tells Amazon To Ditch Slave Wages Or Lose Millions In Handouts Freeze

September 22, 2018 By John Ferguson, Dailyrecord.co.uk Create! Amazon, Exploitation, New Economy, Slave labor, Workers Rights and Jobs

The First Minister has lost patience with the web giants after their failure to bring in fair working standards and pay staff the Living Wage. Nicola Sturgeon has pulled the plug on multi-million pound grants for Amazon until they pay Scottish workers the Living Wage. The Sunday Mail can reveal the First Minister has introduced new criteria for state handouts that will exclude low-wage employers. She appears to have lost patience with Amazon – owned by the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos – after he consistently refused to pay workers the £8.75 an hour rate recommended by the Living Wage Foundation to guarantee basic living standards for staff. Scottish Government ministers have met with senior managers on a number of occasions, but failed to convince them to adopt the standard at plants in Dunfermline, Fife, and Gourock, Inverclyde.

Prisoner Strike Exposes An Age Old American Reliance On Forced Labor

September 4, 2018 By Calvin Schermerhorn, Theconversation.com Resist! Exploitation, Labor, Prison Labor, Prison Strike, Prisons

Prisoners in 17 states and several Canadian provinces are on strike in protest of prison labor conditions. Their demonstrations are compelling Americans to understand that some everyday foods are produced behind bars, for cents on the hour, in a system many call “modern slavery.” Prisoners in the U.S. harvest and process eggs, orange juice, ground beef and fish. They also staff call centers, fight wildfires and make sugar. For this work, they receive, on average, 86 cents a day, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group. Some formerly incarcerated people disagree with the comparison of prison work to slavery, saying that prison jobs teach real skills that may reduce recidivism. But the prisoners’ strike, underway since Aug. 21, shines a light on a troubling American habit of consuming, often thoughtlessly, the products of forced labor.

Land Of Extraction: How The Carceral Institution Settled In Central Appalachia

September 4, 2018 Stephen T. Young and Brian Pitman, Truthout.org Educate! Appalachia, Exploitation, Land, Mining

Driving the roads of any small coal town settled within the central Appalachian Mountains, it is easy to see the beauty of the landscape. However, this beauty is concealed by lasting embodiments of capitalist ideals, including rusting coal tipples or large swaths of mountains destroyed by mountain top removal mining, built on the bodies of the region’s inhabitants who have been continually abandoned and exploited. Well documented is the level of destruction and exploitation residents continue to face following over a century of reliance on the coal industry. Less evident is the alarming shift in the idea of “extraction” taking place. As mining operations in the area continue to fade, prisons now fill the void. This expansion furthers a level of labor exploitation documented since the earliest days of colonial practices in the United States.

Heat Wave Safety: 130 Groups Call For Protections For Farm, Construction Workers

July 19, 2018 Georgina Gustin, Insideclimatenews.org Resist! Climate Change, Exploitation, Farm Workers, Workers Rights and Jobs

Parts of the country are expecting another round of searing, potentially record-shattering heat in the coming days, and many farm and construction workers will be out in it—with no federal heat stress standards directing their employers to offer them water, rest or shade. Despite recommendations going back more than 40 years, the federal government has repeatedly failed to set a heat stress standard for American workers. On Tuesday, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, along with United Farm Workers Foundation and Farmworker Justice, joined more than 130 public health and environmental groups in submitting a petition to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration calling for the agency to require employers to protect their workers from heat by imposing mandatory rest breaks, hydration and access to shade or cooled spaces, among other measures.

Walmart Hopes To Track Employees’ Every Move With New Checkstand Surveillance Tech

July 17, 2018 By Elliott Gabriel, Mintpressnews.com Educate! Exploitation, Surveillance, Walmart, Workers Rights and Jobs

Walmart’s move is just the latest in the rolling-out of surveillance technology across workplaces in the United States, which merges the use of technology for generating metrics with spying technology that further creeps into the lives of already hard-pressed, cash-strapped workers. Big-box retailing behemoth Walmart, which employs one of the United States’ largest workforces, has never been known for being a friendly corporation to employees. With its anti-worker environment, hard-nosed opposition to unions, and reputation for destroying small business in markets it grows to dominate, the company has become synonymous with the heartless, calculating reputation of corporate culture and its total disregard for people’s dignity.

Grand Theft Paycheck

June 26, 2018 Phil Mattera, Dirtdiggersdigest.org Educate! Exploitation, New Economy, Wages, Walmart

For the past two decades, Walmart has repeatedly been accused of compelling workers to perform certain tasks off the clock and has paid numerous fines for those practices. It is often suggested that the retailer is an anomaly, acting more like a fly-by-night sweatshop than a corporate giant. I recently completed a research project showing that, on the contrary, off-the-clock work, denial of overtime pay through misclassification and other forms of wage theft are pervasive in American big business. After digging through court records for much of the past year, I found more than 1,200 successful wage and hour lawsuits against hundreds of the country’s largest employers. These collective action suits have yielded some $8.8 billion in settlements and verdicts in the period since 2000. The same group of corporations have paid around $400 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The More Valuable Your Work Is To Society, The Less You’ll Be Paid For It

June 6, 2018 By David Graeber, Linkedin.com Educate! Exploitation, Labor, Workers

One of the most frequently heard complaints from supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement—particularly the ones working too much to spend much time in the camps, but who could only show up for marches or to express support on the Web—ran along the lines of: “I wanted to do something useful with my life; work that had a positive effect on other people or, at the very least, wasn’t hurting anyone. But the way this economy works, if you spend your working life caring for others, you’ll end up so underpaid and so deeply in debt you won’t be able to care for your own family.” There was a deep and abiding sense of rage at the injustice of such arrangements. I began to refer to it, mostly to myself, as the “revolt of the caring classes.”

Sarbanand: A “Dirty Dozen” Corporation Contesting Being Fined In District Court For Working A Farmworker To Death In Whatcom County

May 23, 2018 Edgar Franks, Foodjustice.org Resist! Class Struggle, Exploitation, Farmworkers, Labor

On Wednesday May 23rd at 9:00am Sarbanand Farms is scheduled to appear in the Whatcom County District Court to appeal a fine that was imposed on them by the WA State Dept of Labor and Industries after the death of a worker on August 6, 2017. This is happening in a courtroom that normally handles driving citations. This is the level of disrespect we are receiving for a farmworker’s death in Whatcom County. We believe the WA State Dept of Labor and Industries has given permission to agricultural corporations and the courts to normalize the deaths of farmworkers by exploitation. This past February, Sarbanand was fined over $150,000 for not allowing workers to take their rest breaks and lunches.

Ethiopian Unions Pitch For Minimum Wage In Garment Sector

May 18, 2018 Umer Beigh, Thedawn-news.org Organize! Ethiopia, Exploitation, Garment Factories, Labor, Minimum Wage, Workers

Unions in Ethiopia are attempting to mobilize textile and garment workers, who are facing a massive wage crisis – most of the workers are forced to work under twenty Ethiopian Birr (ETB) per day, which is less than one dollar. The 600 or so ETB, which a large section of the country’s workers earns monthly, are hardly enough to meet their minimum needs. The condition of the workers has worsened since the political crisis of 2017, when hundreds of people were killed during protests that rocked the country, leading to a state of emergency for the past 10 months. Regional businesses and the transportation sector have been immensely affected during this period, further adding to the misery of these workers, who live on the margins of society.

Billions For Bitter Coffee, Bloody Chocolate

May 9, 2018 Eleanor Goldfield, Artkillingapathy.com Educate! Exploitation, Nestle, Starbucks

On Monday May 7th, business and economics sites were abuzz with the latest news that Nestle and Starbucks are striking a $7.15 billion coffee licensing deal. The cash deal would grant Nestle exclusive rights to sell Starbucks coffee and tea around the world giving Starbucks a powerful global boost and giving Nestle a premium brand to peddle. The deal would help reinforce Nestle’s number one coffee company position and would fortify Starbucks from the dip they’ve experienced in the U.S. due to the proliferation of high-end coffee chains selling $10 lattes complete with milk art and icy stares from suspendered baristas. The angle that’s missing, however, from the business and economic news sites is what deals like this mean for both people and planet. What kind of companies are getting these billion-dollar boosts? Who benefits?

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