I WOULD PAY TEN TIMES AS MUCH FOR CHOCOLATE IF IT MEANT REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF SLAVES IN THE WORLD? HOW IS THIS ANY KIND OF PROBLEM.
good news, you can! the company’s called Tony’s Chocolonely and their entire purpose is to make slave-free chocolate and reform the chocolate industry.
Whole Foods carries it. If you don’t want to support an Amazon-owned company, World Market carries it. You can also buy it directly from the company.
It’s the best chocolate I’ve ever had and it’s 100% slave free. Tony’s Chocolonely works really hard to push for transparency within the chocolate industry and actually has and is following an action plan to eliminate slavery within cocoa production. They’re good people who make good chocolate.
I was reflecting on my time in service, one of the last asks I answered, and the reports from earlier this year regarding Amazon employees and their access to restrooms during working hours. Workers reported that the only accessible bathrooms were a long walk both ways, and when your productivity is being monitored by the second, even a five minute bathroom break can jeopardize your job. Thus, it was reported, some workers peed in water bottles to avoid leaving their station. Others simply didn’t drink for their twelve hour shifts.
There are a few things I’d like to talk about regarding the military and our Pee Time.
I’ve read through a few articles on this now, and there’s a fact that I think needs addressing when we talk about workers peeing in bottles on the job: the workers that do this are almost exclusively cis male. They have to be; it is hard if not impossible for a cis woman to pee in a water bottle.
When you consider this, an additional fact becomes apparent: women who work in Amazon warehouses have no choice but to take the time penalty and walk to a bathroom. This, combined with the general consensus that women take longer to complete their business, is probably affecting how Amazon hires, fires, and treats its female workers.
I reach this conclusion based on how female soldiers are treated for the same reasons. When I was enlisted, it was a well-known fact that sometimes, soldiers peed in bottles. They just do. Sometimes they do it even if they don’t have to. Like, literally, in their barracks rooms. When deployed, it seems easier than the long hot walk to the bathroom.
So you can imagine soldiers aren’t so shy about doing this on the job either, especially in my branch: in an ADA unit we were locked in small confined boxes for twelve hour shifts and discouraged from leaving. During deployment we sometimes worked 48 hour shifts, with our meals brought to us and with no sleep. This was all for the purpose of training, of course; there was never an actual threat or a reason we couldn’t leave our stations, we just Couldn’t.
So units with female soldiers must consign themselves to the fact that their soldiers will demand bathroom breaks, and they will demand actual toilets to take them in. Furthermore, because male soldiers can’t pee in a bottle in front of a female, they too must take bathroom breaks. This develops into a similar culture you see in schools, where asking to go to the restroom is thought of as an excuse to get out of work, especially if you’ve gone too recently. It’s worse for lower-enlisted, who already have very little autonomy. Sexual assault is so bad that we mandate new recruits to go to the bathroom in “battle buddy” pairs, like kindergartners. An especially ornery NCO might make you run there, “’cause if you gotta go that bad you had better run!” and time you, which can be a very different experience for men and women.
Males can easily go in their full battle gear: unbutton, do the business, rebutton, head out. Cis women can’t do this, meaning you have to add time for taking all of your gear off/putting it on. I watched this in real time in the army when waiting in line for portable toilets: female goes in one, and while you hear her fighting and thumping around with her battle gear, four or five males pass through the other by the time she comes out again. Male soldiers will just leave the line until she emerges. Our gear and uniforms are built for cis men to pee with, and we know this, but as is our culture we often blame the female soldier for that.
It’s easy to neglect these sorts of problems when considering how equitous the army is, but it’s even easier to get lost in the sauce about small-time solutions instead of looking at the big picture. For example, the FUDD, or Female Urinary Diversion Device, researched by the U.S. Army in 2009 but gained traction in 2014 when female soldiers were starting to get accepted to combat units. It’s a device that female soldiers must buy, carry, and maintain in order to adapt to the harsh conditions of the field, including the necessity to urinate with men nearby.
This is ludicrous. Why is the army profiting off of the inhumane conditions that it’s forcing its own soldiers to endure? These are grown men and women, many of whom came from poor working-class families, who are sometimes mandated to wear (and thus purchase) adult diapers and then remain in them, soiled, for hours at a time for the purpose of “training.” It has complete control over the suffering, but it merely sells us products that soften the suffering. Or they have us shit and piss in the bush around our worksite, biohazards be damned.
The fact is that these conditions are not rare. The Amazon warehouse is just one small example of how workers’ rights are being restricted under threat of violence. It is not exaggeration to call them human rights violations. If you can’t eat, drink, or go to the bathroom 50-80 hours a week at the risk of losing your job, and thus your livelihood, you’re not a worker: you’re a wage-slave.
Many other workers have started coming forward about being forced to relieve themselves in undignified ways to spare their jobs. I’m asking everyone to take a moment to reconsider the unwritten rules in your job, and in what other ways your rights are being infringed upon.
There is nothing fundamentally low-wage about migrant work. Migrant workers are paid less because they are more politically vulnerable. Even in spite of that vulnerability, migrant workers will struggle to raise their wages and working conditions. End the state’s facilitation of migrants’ specific vulnerability to employers, and the things Nagle is really complaining about — the erosion of workers’ rights and economic power — will be fixed. What socialists should target is the capitalist state’s constitution of migrants as a vulnerable population. Instead, Nagle calls for greater state targeting of migrants themselves.
Nate H. and Marianne Garneau, “Attacking Migrants Does Not Help Labor: A reply to Nagle,” Organizing Work (x)
As California is being ravaged by deadly fires, let’s remember that over a third of California’s firefighters are incarcerated.
They’re out there now risking their lives, making 1% or less of nonincarcerated firefighters’ salaries, and then they can’t even serve as firefighters when they get out because of their past convictions.
Friendly reminder that firefighting positions for inmates are entirely voluntary, often the best paid jobs available to them, and often coveted because it comes with a higher level of freedom.
Also, it’s a lie that they’re unable to become firefighters. There is no federal or state rule anywhere in the US that prohibits felons from becoming firefighters. It’s up to each individual jurisdiction, and the most common statues dictate only certain related crimes (like arson) being barred from firefighting or a certain amount of time that has passed since the last crime on record (like 10 years).
That’s not exactly right – in California, for example, the state requires that firefighters be certified as emergency medical technicians (EMTs). But because occupational licensing laws bar people with felony convictions from EMT licenses, they can’t serve as firefighters when they get out because of their past convictions, like I said.
Also, sure, firefighting positions are often the best paid jobs available, but that’s not saying much: it’s only one dollar per hour, plus two dollars per day.
It’s also worth noting that incarcerated people themselves describe these jobs as slavery. Deirdre Wilson (a formerly incarcerated volunteer firefighter) for example described her experience as a “cruel joke” and said “You’re not really volunteering. …The system evolved out of a system of slavery where we commodify human bodies and function off their labor.” There was recently a nationwide strike about this: people in prisons are demanding, among other things, an immediate end to prison slavery.
If work requirements don’t consistently usher low-income workers into work — let alone work that pays a living wage — then what’s the point?
The point is labor exploitation, enforcing racist and patriarchal social norms, and trying to kill those poor people who can’t be easily used for exploitable labor or to use their conditions as a threat to others.
In the spring of 1932, in Compton, California, an unemployed World War I veteran walked out to the farms that still ringed Los Angeles. He offered his labor in return for a sack of vegetables, and that evening he returned with more than his family needed. The next day a neighbor went out with him to the fields. Within two months 500 families were members of the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization.
White collar worker and executives: “Hurray, it’s labor day weekend! 3 full days off! We are so fortunate to live in a Great Country that Cares about it’s Workers!”
Service industry workers who know labor day weekend is one of the busiest 3 days of the year which means double or triple shifts and not seeing family all while being forced to be not only polite but cheerful:
While also knowing that Labor Day was intended as a holiday for them and they still have to put up with this shit
Labor Day in the US exists to supplant the actual international Worker’s Day of May 1st (May Day, which originally started in the US) in which all laborers were entitled to a day off.
Capitalist bosses called “Communism” and tried to ban before giving a “patriotic American” version. Now May 1st in America is called “Loyalty Day” to “for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.” (Dwight Eisenhower oversaw that proclamation, in the midst of a red scare, in 1921.)
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
>The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
Uh-huh.
Take away billionaires and you just put millions or possibly billions of people out of work.
Glad to know you hate the working class.
That’s literally the opposite of how reality works but keep going
Do you know how many people work for Walmart?
Get rid of Walmart and you have millions of students and the elderly who needed that paycheque suddenly out of the job.
What about construction workers? Who depend on rich businessmen a lot to get good contracts with good pay.
People have the right to accumulate money and the moment you say they can’t or that there’s a limit that is an issue. The idea that billionaires are exploiting the people they give money to. Is a completely idiotic idea.
The vast majority of the working class is indirectly working for and paid by person or people richer than them. Because you kind of need to be rich to hire thousands of workers.
The rich are an important part of how the economy works. Don’t beleive me? As the Soviets they figured that out the hard way.
Ooooooor maybe Walmart should pay all those students and elderly people a fair wage, and their CEOs can just be fabulously wealthy and not disgustingly wealthy.
Like, this isnt a question of “should ANY amount of wealth inequality exist.” Its specifically about BILLIONAIRES. Not even millionaires. BILLIONAIRES.
Presumably Walmart employees agreed on their terms of payment or they wouldn’t be working there.
Sounds like a fair wage to me.
Not if it forces them onto food stamps to avoid starvation. Without the ability to negotiate for wages on equal footing (through collective action) and without a strong social safety net that ensures temporary unemployment won’t lead to homelessness, then no. Just agreeing to a wage doesnt inherently make it fair.
You act as if people are incapable of collective action. Bad companies lose employees, good companies keep them. A company can ignore this if they like but they’ll suffer for it.
The employee is free to go to another company or become independent if they so choose. they may not get the wages that they want but just because I’m not able to sell something for astronomically more than it’s worth doesn’t make my agreement to the sale price any less legitimate.
The free market is what assures fairness not government action.
I think reality has proven that an unregulated or poorly regulated free market does NOT guarantee fairness in the absence of collective bargaining and strong social safety nets.
If employees can only choose between starvation level wages or potential homelessness then they aren’t REALLY free to quit in search of greener pastures.
As I have said, you premise that there is no collective bargaining is flawed collective action is taken all the time without even mentioning unions.
As a matter of fact collective bargaining, both formal and informal is a part of the free market.
Likewise your premise that people’s only choices are homelessness and starvation wages is also flawed; it’s actually an either or fallacy.
People have potentially limitless option in a market economy and they also have the option of becoming independent. And if people really can’t survive in a situation with so many options they can still leave whichever free market economy that they’re a part of and go to a country with your preferred system.
Your argument is that if a person is worried that quitting their minimum wage job will leave them homeless due to a lack of social safety nets during unemployment, they should MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY?
Because emigrating is sooooooooooo cheap and easy, right?
Hello, real world calling.
That’s oversimplification to the point of childishness but yes.
I will remind you that you’re saying that if a person is doesn’t like their pay they should wait for a revolution to steal money from other people instead of improving themselves or just finding a different job.
At least my extreme option gives people agency which you seem to forget that they have.
But that’s the point isn’t it? If people were really on starvation wages then it would be cheaper in the long run to emigrate with their meager possessions now rather than wait and hope someone will give you stollen money.
Even if you’re right and the poor are in oppressive system that’s keeping them poor if they’re not willing to do something as simple as leave, then they may be beyond help.
People can’t emigrate to Sweden if they are living paycheck to paycheck working at Walmart. “If people arent willing and able to flee the country, they deserve to starve” is a bold take.
And no one is saying ~wait for the revolution ~ I’m saying we need legal reforms to the entire system, rather than expect individuals to try and parlay with mega corporations one on one.
Funnily enough this is exactly the way the US worked in the 1950′s. And you can say a lot of terrible things about the 50′s and the conformity and the way anyone who wasn’t a straight white man was treated, but you can’t say American business wasn’t prosperous, and you can’t say American employees weren’t either.
These guys talk like this is a pie in the sky ideal that no one has ever tried, rather than business as usual between the 1940′s and the 1970′s. Even the terrible recession of the 1970′s didn’t leave people in as dire straits as they’re in routinely nowadays.
Those who don’t study history are not only doomed to repeat it, sometimes they’re doomed to believing it wasn’t possible.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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