1/31/2022

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, January 31, 2022

             



International Webinar — February 1, 2022

Register: https://bit.ly/iwa-2022


1:00pm SF, 4:00pm NYC, 6:00pm Rio de Janeiro, 9:00pm London, 11:00pm Johannesburg, 6:00am Tokyo


Recent Organizational Endorsers Include: 

Alameda Labor Council, UNITE (UK), Alameda County Council Green Party, Democracia Socialista de Puerto Rico, National Alumni Association of the Black Panther Party, Oscar Grant Committee against Police Brutality and State Repression, San Francisco Bay Area IWW General Membership Branch

 

https://www.facebook.com/IWAFAPP/


InternationalWorkersAction@gmail.com


Endorse: https://forms.gle/ijBocFw5zBx6AP28A


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Register here:

 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/viva-la-educacion-supporting-education-resisting-the-blockade-tickets-251164318237?aff=odeccpebemailcampaigns&utm_source=eventbrite&utm_medium=ebcampaigns&utm_campaign=2214769&utm_term=ctabutton&mipa=ABIdvVuQ5rOO0VL1BnSKpc8iKj3aHbZP2WeYnn6MK7A_rLh1sZsElEfuphMl9rpTAwuFi0qARX028-Mw9ihkpQEaEyfQwpMpBaoDQHUQxoVnvch_oIkXoJOlbtNM7FgB8nww7aa6uEKpzdQXCNcg7hephVHc04NYSupcpMhH41nmMzPq8yRmPLoJRcKC_xznQoND_eAF0DolS_V9a6E7Hv5PRJ6f7hxuGRIMaw3wSKLEpr7Gzj5pflBnI4pFPKQP8HtmpEvP-aFh2jYJ_V8-rh4i1TeBwHmAvw#tickets

 

Viva La Educación – educational appeal launch

 

Dear Friend,

 

Join us on Tuesday 1 February for the online launch of a major new appeal to raise money for essential classroom and teaching equipment to be shipped to Cuban schools.

 

‘Viva La Educación’ – is a joint appeal by the National Education Union(NEU) and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign(CSC) Music Fund for Cuba, and Cuba’s education union  (SNTECD). Cuba has some of the best education indicators in Latin America. Its achievements in literacy and further education compare well with others in the region. However Cuban students and teachers often have to make do without many of the basic necessities that we take for granted.

 

Join us on Tuesday  to find out how you can get involved in 'Viva La Educación' and support students and teachers in Cuba.

 

with guest speakers

 

·      Daniel Kebede, President NEU;

 

·      Isora Enriquez O’Frarrill, Cuban teacher;

 

·      Rob Miller, Director CSC;

 

·      Dawn Taylor, Vice Chair International Committee, NEU;

 

·      Members of NEU Cuba delegations 2015-2019

 

Yours in solidarity,

 

Cuba Solidarity Campaign Team

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US/NATO Aggression at the Russian Border

A conversation between US, Russian and Ukrainian Peace activists

Webinar, Sunday, February 6, 

12 noon Eastern (US/Canada)

Click here to register:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_984zj4TsQ8er6Ja5z3F9vg

 

Speakers will include:

 

Ajamu Baraka, National Organizer, Black Alliance for Peace

 

Larissa Shessler, Chair, Union of Political Emigrants & Political prisoners of Ukraine

 

Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

 

Joe Lombardo, Coordinator, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC)

 

Vladimir Kozin, Correspondent member, Russian Academy of Science

 

Leonid Ilderkin, Coordinating Council of the Union of Political Emigrants and Political Prisoners of Ukraine.

 

Corporate media in the US has been warning about a possible invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This, Russia denies. But this propaganda has been used by the Biden Administration to whip up sentiment for war. Billions of dollars of US arms have been sent to Ukraine, Ukraine has massed an estimated 145,000 troops on the Russian border with US “advisors” supporting their effort. For years the US and its Western allies have moved NATO into Eastern European and former Soviet States in violation of agreements made with Russia. They have installed missiles at the Russian border and conducted “war games” at the Russian border. Today’s threat is a threat against a major nuclear power that puts the entire world in danger. Join us for this important webinar with voices for peace from Russia, Ukraine and the US.

 

Click here for UNAC's statement on the situation on the Russian border: https://nepajac.org/USrussia.htm

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United in Action to STOP KILLER DRONES:   

 

SHUT DOWN CREECH!  


Spring Action, 2022

 

March 26 - April 2—Saturday to Saturday

 

 Co-sponsored by CODEPINK and Veterans For Peace

 

www.ShutDownCreech.blogspot.com


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Screenshot of Kevin Cooper's artwork from the teaser.

 

 “In His Defense” The People vs. Kevin Cooper

A film by Kenneth A. Carlson 

Teaser is now streaming at:

https://www.carlsonfilms.com

 

Posted by: Death Penalty Focus Blog, January 10, 2022

https://deathpenalty.org/teaser-for-a-kevin-cooper-documentary-is-now-streaming/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1c7299ab-018c-4780-9e9d-54cab2541fa0

 

“In his Defense,” a documentary on the Kevin Cooper case, is in the works right now, and California filmmaker Kenneth Carlson has released a teaser for it on CarlsonFilms.com

 

Just over seven months ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an independent investigation of Cooper’s death penalty case. At the time, he explained that, “In cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined.”

 

That investigation is ongoing, with no word from any of the parties involved on its progress.

 

Cooper has been on death row since 1985 for the murder of four people in San Bernardino County in June 1983. Prosecutors said Cooper, who had escaped from a minimum-security prison and had been hiding out near the scene of the murder, killed Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 10-year-old Chris Hughes, a friend who was spending the night at the Ryen’s. The lone survivor of the attack, eight-year-old Josh Ryen, was severely injured but survived.

 

For over 36 years, Cooper has insisted he is innocent, and there are serious questions about evidence that was missing, tampered with, destroyed, possibly planted, or hidden from the defense. There were multiple murder weapons, raising questions about how one man could use all of them, killing four people and seriously wounding one, in the amount of time the coroner estimated the murders took place.

 

The teaser alone gives a good overview of the case, and helps explain why so many believe Cooper was wrongfully convicted.


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To: U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives

End Legal Slavery in U.S. Prisons

Sign Petition at:

https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/end-legal-slavery-in-u-s-prisons

JM

 


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https://thetricontinental.org/let-cuba-live-exhibition/

Español  Português

On the anniversary of the 26th of July Movement’s founding, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches the online exhibition, Let Cuba Live. 80 artists from 19 countries – including notable cartoonists and designers from Cuba – submitted over 100 works in defense of the Cuban Revolution. Together, the exhibition is a visual call for the end to the decades-long US-imposed blockade, whose effects have only deepened during the pandemic. The intentional blocking of remittances and Cuba’s use of global financial institutions have prevented essential food and medicine from entering the country. Together, the images in this exhibition demand: #UnblockCuba #LetCubaLive

Please contact art@thetricontinental.org if you are interested in organising a local exhibition of the exhibition.

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Kevin Rashid Johnson is Back in Virginia!

    


Rashid just called with the news that he has been moved back to Virginia. His property is already there, and he will get to claim the most important items tomorrow. He is at a "medium security" level and is in general population. Basically, good news.

 

He asked me to convey his appreciation to everyone who wrote or called in his support during the time he was in Ohio.

 

His new address is:

 

Kevin Rashid Johnson #1007485

Nottoway Correctional Center

2892 Schutt Road

Burkeville, VA 23922

www.rashidmod.com


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Freedom for Major Tillery! End his Life Imprisonment!

Major Tillery and his family have set up a new Change.org petition to submit to the Board of Pardons in support his petition to commutation of his sentence to parole while maintaining his legal fight for exoneration and overturning of his conviction.
Major's commutation petition focuses on both his factual innocence as well as his decades of advocacy for other prisoners while serving almost 40 years as a lifer, over 20 of those years in solitary.

Please circulate and support the petition:



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Kevin Cooper: Important CBS news new report today, and article January 31, 2022

https://apple.news/Akh0syPTGRTO5TgYtwQGDKw

Great news for Kevin Cooper, an innocent man 

on San Quentin's death row:
 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

 

Contact: Governor's Press Office

 

Friday, May 28, 2021

 

(916) 445-4571

 

Governor Newsom Announces Clemency Actions, Signs Executive Order for Independent Investigation of Kevin Cooper Case


SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today announced that he has granted 14 pardons, 13 commutations and 8 medical reprieves. In addition, the Governor signed an executive order to launch an independent investigation of death row inmate Kevin Cooper’s case as part of the evaluation of Cooper’s application for clemency.

The investigation will review trial and appellate records in the case, the facts underlying the conviction and all available evidence, including the results of the recently conducted DNA tests previously ordered by the Governor to examine additional evidence in the case using the latest, most scientifically reliable forensic testing.

The text of the Governor’s executive order can be found here:

https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/5.28.21-EO-N-06-21.pdf

The California Constitution gives the Governor the authority to grant executive clemency in the form of a pardon, commutation or reprieve. These clemency grants recognize the applicants’ subsequent efforts in self-development or the existence of a medical exigency. They do not forgive or minimize the harm caused.

The Governor regards clemency as an important part of the criminal justice system that can incentivize accountability and rehabilitation, increase public safety by removing counterproductive barriers to successful reentry, correct unjust results in the legal system and address the health needs of incarcerated people with high medical risks.

A pardon may remove counterproductive barriers to employment and public service, restore civic rights and responsibilities and prevent unjust collateral consequences of conviction, such as deportation and permanent family separation. A pardon does not expunge or erase a conviction.

 

A commutation modifies a sentence, making an incarcerated person eligible for an earlier release or allowing them to go before the Board of Parole Hearings for a hearing at which Parole Commissioners determine whether the individual is suitable for release.

A reprieve allows individuals classified by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation as high medical risk to serve their sentences in appropriate alternative placements in the community consistent with public health and public safety.

The Governor weighs numerous factors in his review of clemency applications, including an applicant’s self-development and conduct since the offense, whether the grant is consistent with public safety and in the interest of justice, and the impact of a grant on the community, including crime victims and survivors.

While in office, Governor Newsom has granted a total of 86 pardons, 92 commutations and 28 reprieves.

The Governor’s Office encourages victims, survivors, and witnesses to register with CDCR’s Office of Victims and Survivors Rights and Services to receive information about an incarcerated person’s status. For general Information about victim services, to learn about victim-offender dialogues, or to register or update a registration confidentially, please visit:

 www.cdcr.ca.gov/Victim_Services/ or call 1-877-256-6877 (toll free).

Copies of the gubernatorial clemency certificates announced today can be found here:

https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/5.28.21-Clemency-certs.pdf

Additional information on executive clemency can be found here:

https://www.gov.ca.gov/clemency/

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New Legal Filing in Mumia’s Case

By Johanna Fernández

The following statement was issued January 4, 2022, regarding new legal filings by attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Campaign to Bring Mumia Home

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.”

With continued pressure from below, 2022 will be the year that forces the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and the Philly Police Department to answer questions about why they framed imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal’s attorneys have filed a Pennsylvania Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition focused entirely on the six boxes of case files that were found in a storage room of the DA’s office in late December 2018, after the case being heard before Judge Leon Tucker in the Court of Common Pleas concluded. (tinyurl.com/zkyva464)

The new evidence contained in the boxes is damning, and we need to expose it. It reveals a pattern of misconduct and abuse of authority by the prosecution, including bribery of the state’s two key witnesses, as well as racist exclusion in jury selection—a violation of the landmark Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky. The remedy for each or any of the claims in the petition is a new trial. The court may order a hearing on factual issues raised in the claims. If so, we won’t know for at least a month. 

The new evidence includes a handwritten letter penned by Robert Chobert, the prosecution’s star witness. In it, Chobert demands to be paid money promised him by then-Prosecutor Joseph McGill. Other evidence includes notes written by McGill, prominently tracking the race of potential jurors for the purposes of excluding Black people from the jury, and letters and memoranda which reveal that the DA’s office sought to monitor, direct, and intervene in the outstanding prostitution charges against its other key witness Cynthia White.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed and convicted 40 years ago in 1982, during one of the most corrupt and racist periods in Philadelphia’s history—the era of cop-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo. It was a moment when the city’s police department, which worked intimately with the DA’s office, routinely engaged in homicidal violence against Black and Latinx detainees, corruption, bribery and tampering with evidence to obtain convictions. 

In 1979, under pressure from civil rights activists, the Department of Justice filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the Philadelphia police department and detailed a culture of racist violence, widespread corruption and intimidation that targeted outspoken people like Mumia. Despite concurrent investigations by the FBI and Pennsylvania’s Attorney General and dozens of police convictions, the power and influence of the country’s largest police association, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) prevailed. 

Now, more than 40 years later, we’re still living with the failure to uproot these abuses. Philadelphia continues to fear the powerful FOP, even though it endorses cruelty, racism, and multiple injustices. A culture of fear permeates the “city of brotherly love.”

The contents of these boxes shine light on decades of white supremacy and rampant lawlessness in U.S. courts and prisons. They also hold enormous promise for Mumia’s freedom and challenge us to choose Love, Not PHEAR. (lovenotphear.com/) Stay tuned.

Workers World, January 4, 2022

https://www.workers.org/2022/01/60925/


Pa. Supreme Court denies widow’s appeal to remove Philly DA from Abu-Jamal case

 

Abu Jamal was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder of Faulkner in 1982. Over the past four decades, five of his appeals have been quashed.

 

In 1989, the state’s highest court affirmed Abu-Jamal’s death penalty conviction, and in 2012, he was re-sentenced to life in prison.

 

Abu-Jamal, 66, remains in prison. He can appeal to the state Supreme Court, or he can file a new appeal.

 

KYW Newsradio reached out to Abu-Jamal’s attorneys for comment. They shared this statement in full:

 

“Today, the Superior Court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to consider issues raised by Mr. Abu-Jamal in prior appeals. Two years ago, the Court of Common Pleas ordered reconsideration of these appeals finding evidence of an appearance of judicial bias when the appeals were first decided. We are disappointed in the Superior Court’s decision and are considering our next steps.

 

“While this case was pending in the Superior Court, the Commonwealth revealed, for the first time, previously undisclosed evidence related to Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case. That evidence includes a letter indicating that the Commonwealth promised its principal witness against Mr. Abu-Jamal money in connection with his testimony. In today’s decision, the Superior Court made clear that it was not adjudicating the issues raised by this new evidence. This new evidence is critical to any fair determination of the issues raised in this case, and we look forward to presenting it in court.”

 

https://www.audacy.com/kywnewsradio/news/local/pennsylvania-superior-court-rejects-mumia-abu-jamal-appeal-ron-castille


Demand Mumia's Freedom:

Governor Tom Wolf -1(717) 787-2500  Fax 1 (717) 772-8284
Office of the Governor
508 Main Capitol Building
HarrisburgPA  17120    
 
After calling the governor, send an online communication about our concerns.   https://www.governor.pa.gov/contact/#PhoneNumber
 
Let us know what there response was, Thank you.  Mobilization4Mumia@gmail.com
 
ONA MOVE
 

 

Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org



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This beautiful and powerful exhibit is ongoing 

and can be viewed online at:



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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Screen shot from video.


Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603


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Bury My Heart with Leonard Peltier

How long will he still be with us? How long will the genocide continue?

By Michael Moore

—VIA Email: michaelmoore@substack.com

























LEONARD PELTIER, Native American hero. An innocent man, he’s spent 44 years as a political prisoner. The prosecutor who put him behind bars now says Peltier is innocent. President Biden, go to Mass today, and then stop this torture. (Sipa/Shutterstock)


American Indian Movement leader, Leonard Peltier, at 77 years of age, came down with Covid-19 this weekend. Upon hearing this, I broke down and cried. An innocent man, locked up behind bars for 44 years, Peltier is now America’s longest-held political prisoner. He suffers in prison tonight even though James Reynolds, one of the key federal prosecutors who sent Peltier off to life in prison in 1977, has written to President Biden and confessed to his role in the lies, deceit, racism and fake evidence that together resulted in locking up our country’s most well-known Native American civil rights leader. Just as South Africa imprisoned for more than 27 years its leading voice for freedom, Nelson Mandela, so too have we done the same to a leading voice and freedom fighter for the indigenous people of America. That’s not just me saying this. That’s Amnesty International saying it. They placed him on their political prisoner list years ago and continue to demand his release.

 

And it’s not just Amnesty leading the way. It’s the Pope who has demanded Leonard Peltier’s release. It’s the Dalai Lama, Jesse Jackson, and the President Pro-Tempore of the US Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy. Before their deaths, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Bishop Desmond Tutu pleaded with the United States to free Leonard Peltier. A worldwide movement of millions have seen their demands fall on deaf ears. 

 

And now the calls for Peltier to be granted clemency in DC have grown on Capitol Hill. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), the head of the Senate committee who oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has also demanded Peltier be given his freedom. Numerous House Democrats have also written to Biden. 

 

The time has come for our President to act; the same President who appointed the first-ever Native American cabinet member last year and who halted the building of the Keystone pipeline across Native lands. Surely Mr. Biden is capable of an urgent act of compassion for Leonard Peltier — especially considering that the prosecutor who put him away in 1977 now says Peltier is innocent, and that his US Attorney’s office corrupted the evidence to make sure Peltier didn’t get a fair trial. Why is this victim of our judicial system still in prison? And now he is sick with Covid.

 

For months Peltier has begged to get a Covid booster shot. Prison officials refused. The fact that he now has COVID-19 is a form of torture. A shame hangs over all of us. Should he now die, are we all not complicit in taking his life? 

 

President Biden, let Leonard Peltier go. This is a gross injustice. You can end it. Reach deep into your Catholic faith, read what the Pope has begged you to do, and then do the right thing. 

 

For those of you reading this, will you join me right now in appealing to President Biden to free Leonard Peltier? His health is in deep decline, he is the voice of his people — a people we owe so much to for massacring and imprisoning them for hundreds of years. 

 

The way we do mass incarceration in the US is abominable. And Leonard Peltier is not the only political prisoner we have locked up. We have millions of Black and brown and poor people tonight in prison or on parole and probation — in large part because they are Black and brown and poor. THAT is a political act on our part. Corporate criminals and Trump run free. The damage they have done to so many Americans and people around the world must be dealt with. 

 

This larger issue is one we MUST take on. For today, please join me in contacting the following to show them how many millions of us demand that Leonard Peltier has suffered enough and should be free:

 

President Joe Biden

 

Phone: 202-456-1111

E-mail: At this link

https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

 

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

 

Phone: 202-208-3100

E-mail: feedback@ios.doi.gov

 

Attorney General Merrick Garland

 

Phone: 202-514-2000

E-mail: At this link

https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice

 

I’ll end with the final verse from the epic poem “American Names” by Stephen Vincent Benet: 

 

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.

I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,

You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

 

 

PS. Also — watch the brilliant 1992 documentary by Michael Apted and Robert Redford about the framing of Leonard Peltier— “Incident at Oglala”



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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression


Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

Know Your Rights Materials

The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides. 

WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office

We also recommend the following resources: 

Center for Constitutional Rights

Civil Liberties Defense Center

Grand Jury Resistance Project

Katya Komisaruk

Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources

Tilted Scales Collective


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Articles

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Dawn Kelly, right, used an $11,220 loan from the Paycheck Protection Program to compensate her employees at the Nourish Spot in Queens.
Dawn Kelly, right, used an $11,220 loan from the Paycheck Protection Program to compensate her employees at the Nourish Spot in Queens. Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times

Hanging over the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program, one of the government’s most expensive pandemic relief efforts, is a simple question.

 

Did it work?

 

New research, drawing on millions of wage and payroll records, suggests a complicated answer: Yes, but at an extraordinarily high cost.

 

One new analysis found that only about a quarter of the money spent by the program paid wages that would have otherwise been lost, partly because the government steadily loosened the rules for how businesses could use the money as the pandemic dragged on. And because many businesses remained healthy enough to survive without the program, another analysis found, the looser rules meant the Paycheck Protection Program ended up subsidizing business owners more than their workers.

 

“Jobs and businesses are two separate things,” said David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led a 10-member team that studied the program. “We tried to figure out, ‘Where did the money go?’ — and it turns out it didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs. It went to business owners and their shareholders and their creditors.”

 

Questions about the success of the program have gained urgency as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus disrupts the country’s economic upswing, intensifying calls from hard-hit industries like restaurants for a new round of federal aid.

 

Congress rushed to create the Paycheck Protection Program in the pandemic’s early days, trying to prevent struggling small companies from gutting their work forces and adding to the staggering unemployment rate. The program offered business owners low-interest loans of up to $10 million to cover roughly two months of payroll and a few additional expenses. The loans would be forgiven as long as the money went to permitted costs.

 

Nearly every company in America with 500 or fewer workers (and some larger ones) qualified: law firms, construction companies and restaurant chains as well as Uber drivers, freelancers and the bars, boutiques, grocery stores and hair salons that are the backbone of many Main Streets.

 

Early studies of the program — which generally focused on the largest small companies — were not flattering, finding it had little effect on preserving jobs. But Michael Dalton, a research economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics who drew on extensive wage records collected by the government that other researchers did not have access to, said it had performed better than he expected.

 

Within one month of being approved, companies that got loans had an average head count 8 percent higher than comparable businesses that didn’t. After seven months, their work forces were still 4 percent larger, maintaining a lead even as hiring nationwide began to bounce back.

 

And some ventures that would have been forced out of business stayed alive. Businesses that received a loan from the program were 5.8 percent less likely to be closed one month after receiving the money, and 3.5 percent less likely to be shut down after seven months, Dr. Dalton found.

 

The effects were strongest for the smallest businesses and for those in areas with higher poverty rates. “There are long-term impacts to businesses closing, on local communities and the local economies in those areas,” Dr. Dalton said.

 

Dawn Kelly isn’t sure the Nourish Spot, a juice bar and sandwich shop in the Jamaica section of Queens, would have survived without an $11,220 Paycheck Protection Program loan and other aid.

 

Ms. Kelly opened the store five years ago in what she calls a “food swamp,” an urban neighborhood where shops with fresh produce are scarce. During the first two years, she mostly staffed the shop on her own 11 hours a day, six days a week, and struggled to turn a profit. But her sales grew, and she brought on interns from youth job programs, hiring the best as part-time workers. At the end of 2019, she had about 10 employees and was finally breaking even.

 

But the pandemic wiped out foot traffic and sit-down dining. Ms. Kelly’s smoothies and snacks adapted well to a takeout model, but the fees charged by delivery apps had a steep financial toll.

 

“It took everything for me to apply for the P.P.P. loan, because I was scared of loans, especially during Covid,” said Ms. Kelly, who started the business after she was laid off from a 30-year career in corporate communications.

 

The loan helped stabilize the shop. She cut her hours — but not her staff — and new opportunities, like a contract last summer for concessions space at Forest Hills Stadium, have helped her keep eight employees on the job.

 

The Nourish Spot’s loan worked exactly as lawmakers first intended: a relatively modest amount that supported workers long enough for the business to recover organically.

 

But overall, the Paycheck Protection Program was extremely inefficient. For every $1 in wages that it prevented from being lost, it handed out $3.13 that went somewhere else, Dr. Dalton found. The analysis by Dr. Autor’s group, circulated for comment last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, put the cost of saving a job for a year at $169,300 — far more than the $58,200 average compensation for those jobs, according to the group’s calculations.

 

So where did the rest of the money go? Into deeper pockets.

 

Seventy-two percent of the program’s relief money ended up in the hands of those whose household income is in America’s top 20 percent, Dr. Autor’s group found. That’s because the relief effort’s shifting goals ultimately put less of a premium on worker pay.

 

When lawmakers created the program in March 2020, they anticipated a short period of intense disruption. Covering employers’ payrolls for eight weeks, they figured, would be enough to get them through the worst of the Covid-19 crisis.

 

They guessed wrong. As the pandemic dragged on and businesses’ woes deepened, lawmakers softened the program’s rules and refashioned it into a more general small-business support effort.

 

Most notably, they gutted the requirement that borrowers who wanted their loans forgiven maintain their prepandemic head counts. And they reduced the percentage of the loan that borrowers seeking forgiveness had to spend on payroll, to 60 percent from 75 percent.

 

That allowed business owners to spend more of the money on rent, utilities and other expenses. (Some of those payments, in turn, propped up other industries: An analysis last year found that Paycheck Protection Program money reduced commercial mortgage delinquencies.)

 

Out of the roughly $510 billion the program lent in 2020, a maximum of $175 billion — about 34 percent — went to paying workers who would have lost their jobs, Dr. Autor’s team found. Money that didn’t specifically preserve jobs was effectively a windfall for business owners — on the whole a wealthy group.

 

“This program was highly, highly regressive,” Dr. Autor said, using the economic term for policies that favor the richest.

 

Lawmakers in both parties have backed the Paycheck Protection Program — it was created during the Trump administration and distributed an additional round of funding after President Biden took office — in part because every congressional district is filled with entrepreneurs like Ms. Kelly.

 

Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, speaks glowingly of Island Grove Wine, a winery and wedding site that the pandemic turned into “a money pit,” in the words of its owner. Representative Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia, a Democrat, praised the program for giving local mainstays like the Aurora Theater, an arts venue, “the resources they need to get back on their feet.”

 

And Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican, brought Dr. Rich Coleman, owner of Four Paws Animal Hospital, to a House hearing. Dr. Coleman testified that the program had allowed his 34 employees “to go home every night knowing that they could pay their rent, feed their family and, more importantly, feed the massive amounts of pets that they own.”

 

The Paycheck Protection Program ran dry and closed down in May, and Mr. Biden and Congress have shown little interest in reviving it. But some small-business owners — particularly in the restaurant industry — are hoping for additional aid as Omicron heightens the pressures they feel from high inflation and a tight labor market.

 

In a recent survey of business owners participating in a Goldman Sachs training program, 71 percent said Omicron had taken a toll on their sales. More than a third said they had to close temporarily or scale back operations because of rising Covid case counts.

 

Ms. Kelly is prepared to white-knuckle her way through the uncertainty. When the Paycheck Protection Program offered a second round of loans last year, she didn’t apply.

 

“I didn’t need it,” she said. “We’re doing OK.”


1) Political Prisoner Aafia Siddiqui Disavows Hostage Taking
Reprinted from Turning The Tide

Aafia Siddiqui


Many Muslim groups in the U.S. not particularly radical in their orientation consider Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani former neuroscientist who had studied at Brandeis University and MIT, an innocent woman framed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a political prisoner. The Council on American-Islamic Relations held a press conference in Texas to support her and call for her release last November. In statements, on a November 11, 2021 panel that was streamed live on YouTube by the Council on American-Islamic Relations Texas (CAIR-TX), titled “Injustice: Dr. Aafia [Siddiqui] and the 20-Year Legacy of America’s Wars,” Aafia Siddiqui’s attorney, Marwa Elbially, said that the U.S. government lies on a large scale. She gave the example of the “fabricated” rescue of U.S. soldier Jessica Lynch, who was taken hostage by Iraqi forces in 2003. She also said that the fact that Aafia Siddiqui has not been made into a “household name” as an example of a terrorist woman is proof that the government never really believed that she was an Al-Qaeda operative. Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, the Executive Director of Mpower Change, called Aafia Siddiqui a “political prisoner” like Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formally known as H. Rap Brown), who is serving a life sentence for the frame-up conviction for the 2000 murder of two law enforcement officers, or like Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement, who is serving a life sentence for involvement in the murder of two FBI agents. 

Separately, Mauri Saalakhan of the Peace Through Justice Foundation has said: “I wish to thank The Justice For Aafia Coalition (JFAC) for the phenomenal work they have been doing, on a consistent basis, to help lead the global campaign for our sister’s release and repatriation and I pray that they receive consistent communal support commensurate with their noble efforts.” There is a human rights foundation named for her and supporting her release at: https://aafia.org/

According to her lawyer, Aafia had nothing to do with the Dallas incident. “She does not want any violence perpetrated against any human being, especially in her name,” Attorney Marwa Elbially told CNN. “It obviously has nothing to do with Dr. Siddiqui or her family.”

Faizan Syed, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the group considers Siddiqui to have been “caught in the war on terror” as well as a political prisoner who was wrongly accused through flawed evidence. He nonetheless strongly condemned the hostage-taking, calling it wrong, heinous and “something that is completely undermining our efforts to get Dr. Aaifa released.”

ABC News and the AP report that Siddiqui, who has been mostly in solitary confinement for 12 years and was being held in federal prison in Fort Worth TX, was attacked in July by another inmate at the facility and suffered serious injuries, according to court documents. In a lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, Siddiqui’s lawyers said another inmate “smashed a coffee mug filled with scaling hot liquid” into her face. When Siddiqui curled herself into a fetal position, the other woman began to punch and kick her, leaving her with injuries so severe that she needed to be taken by wheelchair to the prison’s medical unit, the suit says.

Siddiqui was left with burns around her eyes and a three-inch scar near her left eye, the lawsuit says. She also suffered bruises on her arms and legs and an injury to her cheek. The attack prompted protests by human rights activists and religious groups and calls for improved prison conditions. The activists have also called on the Pakistani government to fight for her release from U.S. custody.


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2) Joni Mitchell Plans to Follow Neil Young Off Spotify, Citing ‘Lies’

“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” she wrote after the site was accused of spreading vaccine misinformation.

By Ben Sisario, Published Jan. 28, 2022, Updated Jan. 29, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/arts/music/joni-mitchell-neil-young-spotify.html
Joni Mitchell was honored by the Kennedy Center last year.

Joni Mitchell was honored by the Kennedy Center last year. Credit...Pool photo by Ron Sachs/EPA, via Shutterstock


Joni Mitchell said Friday that she would remove her music from Spotify, joining Neil Young in his protest against the streaming service over its role in giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.

 

Mitchell, an esteemed singer-songwriter of songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” and whose landmark album “Blue” just had its 50th anniversary, posted a brief statement on her website Friday saying that she would remove her music from the streaming service. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” she wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

 

Her statement adds fuel to a small but growing revolt over Spotify, with few major artists speaking out but fans commenting widely on social media. The debate has also brought into relief questions about how much power artists wield to control distribution of their work, and the perennially thorny issue of free speech online.

 

Spotify took Young’s music down on Wednesday, two days after he posted an open letter calling for its removal as a protest against “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Spotify’s most popular podcast, which has been criticized for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.

 

He did so after a group of hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts had asked Spotify to take down an episode of Rogan’s show from Dec. 31 that had featured Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease expert. The scientists wrote in a public letter that the program promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines.”

 

Mitchell is the first major artist to follow Young, after a couple of days of speculation and rumors on social media.

 

Young and Mitchell have a deep history together. Both are Canadians who helped lead the singer-songwriter revolution in Southern California in the late 1960s and 1970s.

 

On Spotify, Mitchell is listed as having 3.7 million monthly listeners, with two of her songs — “Big Yellow Taxi” and “A Case of You” — getting over 100 million streams.

 

While few other major artists have spoken out so far, Young’s stance has resonated widely with fans. Twitter was dotted with the announcements of listeners saying they were canceling their subscriptions, and screenshots from Spotify’s app showed a message from its customer support team saying that it was “getting a lot of contacts so may be slow to respond.” Spotify has not said how many customers canceled their subscriptions.

 

Tech rivals have also pounced on the controversy, with SiriusXM restarting a Neil Young channel and Apple Music calling itself “the home of Neil Young.”

 

In a statement on his website on Friday, Young reiterated his objections to Rogan’s podcast and took a swipe at Spotify’s sound quality. He also said he supported free speech.

 

“I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship,” it said. “Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information.”


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3) Bury My Heart with Leonard Peltier

How long will he still be with us? How long will the genocide continue?

By Michael Moore

—VIA Email: michaelmoore@substack.com

























LEONARD PELTIER, Native American hero. An innocent man, he’s spent 44 years as a political prisoner. The prosecutor who put him behind bars now says Peltier is innocent. President Biden, go to Mass today, and then stop this torture. (Sipa/Shutterstock)


American Indian Movement leader, Leonard Peltier, at 77 years of age, came down with Covid-19 this weekend. Upon hearing this, I broke down and cried. An innocent man, locked up behind bars for 44 years, Peltier is now America’s longest-held political prisoner. He suffers in prison tonight even though James Reynolds, one of the key federal prosecutors who sent Peltier off to life in prison in 1977, has written to President Biden and confessed to his role in the lies, deceit, racism and fake evidence that together resulted in locking up our country’s most well-known Native American civil rights leader. Just as South Africa imprisoned for more than 27 years its leading voice for freedom, Nelson Mandela, so too have we done the same to a leading voice and freedom fighter for the indigenous people of America. That’s not just me saying this. That’s Amnesty International saying it. They placed him on their political prisoner list years ago and continue to demand his release.

 

And it’s not just Amnesty leading the way. It’s the Pope who has demanded Leonard Peltier’s release. It’s the Dalai Lama, Jesse Jackson, and the President Pro-Tempore of the US Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy. Before their deaths, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Bishop Desmond Tutu pleaded with the United States to free Leonard Peltier. A worldwide movement of millions have seen their demands fall on deaf ears. 

 

And now the calls for Peltier to be granted clemency in DC have grown on Capitol Hill. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), the head of the Senate committee who oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has also demanded Peltier be given his freedom. Numerous House Democrats have also written to Biden. 

 

The time has come for our President to act; the same President who appointed the first-ever Native American cabinet member last year and who halted the building of the Keystone pipeline across Native lands. Surely Mr. Biden is capable of an urgent act of compassion for Leonard Peltier — especially considering that the prosecutor who put him away in 1977 now says Peltier is innocent, and that his US Attorney’s office corrupted the evidence to make sure Peltier didn’t get a fair trial. Why is this victim of our judicial system still in prison? And now he is sick with Covid.

 

For months Peltier has begged to get a Covid booster shot. Prison officials refused. The fact that he now has COVID-19 is a form of torture. A shame hangs over all of us. Should he now die, are we all not complicit in taking his life? 

 

President Biden, let Leonard Peltier go. This is a gross injustice. You can end it. Reach deep into your Catholic faith, read what the Pope has begged you to do, and then do the right thing. 

 

For those of you reading this, will you join me right now in appealing to President Biden to free Leonard Peltier? His health is in deep decline, he is the voice of his people — a people we owe so much to for massacring and imprisoning them for hundreds of years. 

 

The way we do mass incarceration in the US is abominable. And Leonard Peltier is not the only political prisoner we have locked up. We have millions of Black and brown and poor people tonight in prison or on parole and probation — in large part because they are Black and brown and poor. THAT is a political act on our part. Corporate criminals and Trump run free. The damage they have done to so many Americans and people around the world must be dealt with. 

 

This larger issue is one we MUST take on. For today, please join me in contacting the following to show them how many millions of us demand that Leonard Peltier has suffered enough and should be free:

 

President Joe Biden

 

Phone: 202-456-1111

E-mail: At this link

https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

 

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

 

Phone: 202-208-3100

E-mail: feedback@ios.doi.gov

 

Attorney General Merrick Garland

 

Phone: 202-514-2000

E-mail: At this link

https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice

 

I’ll end with the final verse from the epic poem “American Names” by Stephen Vincent Benet: 

 

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.

I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,

You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

 

 

PS. Also — watch the brilliant 1992 documentary by Michael Apted and Robert Redford about the framing of Leonard Peltier— “Incident at Oglala”



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4) Is the U.S. Provoking War with Russia?

By Margaret Kimberley

—LA Progressive, January 29, 2022

https://www.laprogressive.com/is-the-u-s-provoking-war-with-russia/
Is the U.S. Provoking War with Russia
Arlington National Cemetery

The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.

 

Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win.

 

In 2014 a U.S. backed coup put a far-right clique in power. The people of the Donbass region in the east, largely ethnic Russians, wanted no part of the new anti-Russian government and sought autonomy. The resulting war has killed some 30,000 people.

 

Now the Biden team who publicly insulted the Chinese government and withdrew from Afghanistan without even being able to secure a major airport, have moved on to opening the proverbial can of whoopass with the world’s other major nuclear power. They are using Ukraine in an ill-advised effort to instigate what could lead to disaster.

 

The 2014 coup against an elected Ukrainian president took place in part because the Russians underestimated the extent of U.S. and NATO determination. They roused themselves quickly however and Crimeans, who are mostly of Russian origin, voted to rejoin the nation they had been a part of until 1954. The U.S./NATO regime change effort came at a steep price for Ukraine. Thanks to Atlanticist meddling it is now the poorest country in Europe that won’t get the NATO and EU membership it was promised. It remains a pawn between two powerful countries.

 

The U.S. is pulling all the hybrid warfare schemes out of the tool box. For months they claimed that Russian troops were massed on the border, are ready to invade. They have engaged in diplomacy but only to try and get their way. Russia has held firm on a guarantee of no further NATO encroachment and the removal of missiles from their border. The French and Germans are feckless and do what Washington wants. They should be pressuring Ukraine to live up to the Minsk II Agreement which requires talks with the breakaway Donbass region.

 

None of this information is conveyed to the American people who live in ignorance orchestrated by republicans, democrats, and their friends in corporate media. Republican senators who want to run for president outdo one another with nonsense about stopping the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that Germany, a U.S. ally, asked the Russians to build. Winter is coming, quite literally, and Europe needs Russia’s gas. But unless they stop following Uncle Sam’s bullying they will end up with nothing.

 

Now Washington is pulling the same ploy they attempted in Ethiopia. They have declared that the Russians are coming and have even announced an evacuation of embassy personnel families from the capital city of Kyiv. Vassal states Australia and the United Kingdom have followed suit, but a European Union official demurred , “We are not going to do the same thing because we don’t know any specific reasons.” The Ukrainian government, a de facto U.S. colony, wasn’t happy and called the evacuations “premature.”

 

If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, then one can only conclude that big lies are being told. The U.S. has been hoisted on its own petard and now has little more than dangerous bluster to get its own allies in line.

 

Biden himself is a part of this problem of his own making. In a recent press conference he declared that Russia was on the verge of invading but then said a little invasion wouldn’t be so bad after all. It isn’t clear if he was speaking from his usual state of confusion or if he really meant what he said.

 

The Russians certainly mean what they say. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken rushes from Moscow to Berlin to London to Moscow, seemingly making things up as he goes along, the Russians dig in their heels and make clear that their days of being pushovers are in the past.

 

The most committed puppet states like the U.K. go along with whatever Washington wants. They can be counted on to repeat an unsourced story of a Russian plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government or something else equally nonsensical. The people most likely to use a false flag event to justify going to war, instead claim that the other side will do so. The result is a situation that could go badly over the slightest provocation or even a perceived provocation.

 

The American people should just say no. The Biden administration is sorely mistaken if they think the public are in a mood for war with another nuclear power. They can call ammunition “lethal aid” if they want, but when the match is lit they can expect no support. Then again, the ginned-up conflict may be taking place for that very reason. Biden has failed in almost every respect and is facing electoral defeat for his party in November. Perhaps he thinks that he would be supported by people who have no faith in his ability or willingness to do anything on their behalf.

 

If hostilities are averted it will be because of forces outside of the U.S. Biden’s team of blood thirsty incompetents spent most of last year predicting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It isn’t clear if they grew bored or saw an easier opening in Ukraine.

 

No one should be fooled by these people. Russia and China are very close, “better than allies ,” as Xi Jinping said. Why shouldn’t they be? Both countries want to protect themselves from American aggression. People in this country had better hope for Russian and Chinese wisdom and experience. If the U.S. is allowed to do what it wants then the whole world is at risk. That statement is not hyperbole. The U.S. has withdrawn from decades old nuclear weapons agreements and now pushes the world toward the precipice.

 

The New York Times and Washington Post will play the role they did in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. They will repeat what spokespeople tell them to say and be a party to warfare. If ever there was a moment to break free from media disinformation this is it. They have nothing to offer except war propaganda and possibly war itself.

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5) ‘Everyone’s Looking for Plastic.’ As Waste Rises, So Does Recycling.

Plagued by plastic pollution, Senegal wants to replace pickers at the garbage dump with a formal recycling system that takes advantage of the new market for plastics.

By Ruth MacleanPhotographs by Finbarr O’Reilly, Jan. 31, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/world/africa/senegal-plastic-waste-recycling.html
Adja Mame Seyni Diop, 34, began picking waste at age 11. She still does this work and is also a spokeswoman for an association of waste-pickers at the Mbeubeuss dump.
Adja Mame Seyni Diop, 34, began picking waste at age 11. She still does this work and is also a spokeswoman for an association of waste-pickers at the Mbeubeuss dump.

Ms. Diop was hardly recognizable in the gear she wears to protect herself from the trash particles blowing around. She used a mosquito net to wrap up a giant bale of her wares.
Ms. Diop was hardly recognizable in the gear she wears to protect herself from the trash particles blowing around. She used a mosquito net to wrap up a giant bale of her wares.

DAKAR, Senegal — A crowd of people holding curved metal spikes jumped on trash spilling out of a dump truck in Senegal’s biggest landfill, hacking at the garbage to find valuable plastic.

 

Nearby, sleeves rolled up, suds up to their elbows, women washed plastic jerrycans in rainbow colors, cut into pieces. Around them, piles of broken toys, plastic mayonnaise jars and hundreds of discarded synthetic wigs stretched as far as the eye could see, all ready to be sold and recycled.

 

Plastic waste is exploding in Senegal, as in many countries, as populations and incomes grow and with them, demand for packaged, mass-produced products.

 

This has given rise to a growing industry built around recycling plastic waste, by businesses and citizens alike. From Chinese traders to furniture makers and avant-garde fashion designers, many in Senegal make use of the constant stream of plastic waste.

 

Mbeubeuss — the dump site serving Senegal’s seaside capital of Dakar — is where it all begins. More than 2,000 trash pickers, as well as scrubbers, choppers, haulers on horse-drawn carts, middlemen and wholesalers make a living by finding, preparing and transporting the waste for recycling. It adds up to a huge informal economy that supports thousands of families.

 

Over more than 50 years at the dump, Pape Ndiaye, the doyen of waste pickers, has watched the community that lives off the dump grow, and seen them turn to plastic — a material that 20 years ago the pickers considered worthless.

 

“We’re the people protecting the environment,” said Mr. Ndiaye, 76, looking out at the plastic scattered over Gouye Gui, his corner of the dump. “Everything that pollutes it, we take to industries, and they transform it.”

 

Despite all of the efforts to recycle, much of Senegal’s waste never makes it to landfills, instead littering the landscape. Knockoff Adidas sandals and containers that once held a local version of Nutella block drains. Thin plastic bags that once contained drinking water meander back and forth in the Senegalese surf, like jellyfish. Plastic shopping bags burn in residential neighborhoods, sending clouds of chemical-smelling smoke into the hazy air.

 

Senegal is just one of many countries trying to clean up, formalize the waste disposal system and embrace recycling on a bigger scale. By 2023, the African Union says, the goal is that 50 percent of the waste used in African cities should be recycled.

 

But this means that Senegal also has to grapple with the informal system that has grown up over decades, of which the grand dump at Mbeubeuss (pronounced Mm-beh-BEHSE) is a major part.

 

The recycled plastic makes it to enterprises of all stripes across Senegal, which has one of the most robust economies in West Africa.

 

At a factory in Thies, an inland city known for its tapestry industry to the east of Dakar, recycled plastic pellets are spun out into long skeins, which are then woven into the colorful plastic mats used in almost every Senegalese household.

 

Custom-made mats from this factory lined the catwalk at Dakar Fashion Week in December, focused this time on sustainability and held in a baobab forest. Signs were constructed out of old water bottles. Tables and chairs were made of melted down plastic.

 

The trend has changed the focus of the waste pickers who have worked the dump for decades, gleaning anything of value.

 

“Now everyone’s looking for plastic,” said Mouhamadou Wade, 50, smiling broadly as he brewed a pot of sweet, minty tea outside his sorting shack in Mbeubeuss, where he has been a waste picker for over 20 years.

 

Adja Seyni Diop, sitting on a wooden bench by the shack in the kind of long, elegant dress favored by Senegalese women, agreed.

 

When she first began waste picking, at age 11 in 1998, nobody was interested in buying plastic, she said, so she left it in the trash heap, collecting only scrap metal. But these days, plastic is by far the easiest thing to sell to middlemen and traders. She supports her family on the income she makes there, between $25 and $35 a week.

 

Mr. Wade and Ms. Diop work together at Bokk Jom, a kind of informal union representing over half of Mbeubeuss’s waste pickers. And most of them spend their days searching for plastic.

 

A few days later, I bumped into Ms. Diop in her workplace — a towering platform made entirely of rancid waste that is so hostile an environment that it is known as “Yemen.” I almost didn’t recognize her, with her face obscured by bandannas, two hats and sunglasses, to protect her against the particles of trash blowing in every direction.

 

Around us, herds of white, long-horned cattle munched on garbage as dozens of pickers descended on each dump truck emptying its load. Some young men even hung from the tops of trucks to catch precious plastic as it spilled out of the trucks, before bulldozers came to sweep what remained to the edge of the trash mountain.

 

Most of the pickers who target plastic, like Ms. Diop, sell it, at about 13 cents a kilogram, to two Chinese plastic merchants who have depots on the landfill site. The merchants process it into pellets and ship it to China to be made into new goods, said Abdou Dieng, the manager of Mbeubeuss, who works for Senegal’s growing waste management agency and has brought a little order to the chaos of the landfill.

 

Senegal is flooded with other countries’ plastic waste as well as its own.

 

China stopped accepting the world’s unprocessed plastic waste in 2018. Casting around for new countries to export it to, the U.S. began to ship plastic to other countries, including Senegal.

 

But that is beginning to change, too, as the Senegalese government appears to be cracking down on plastic waste coming from abroad. Last year, a German company was fined $3.4 million when one of its ships was caught trying to smuggle 25 tons of plastic waste into Senegal.

 

In the past two years, the number of trucks coming to Mbeubeuss daily has increased from 300 to 500.

 

But the government says that in a few years, the giant landfill will close, replaced by much smaller sorting and composting centers as part of a joint project with the World Bank.

 

Then, most of the money made from plastic waste will go into government coffers. The waste pickers worry about their livelihoods.

 

Mr. Ndiaye, the last of the original waste pickers who came to Mbeubeuss in 1970, surveyed what has been his workplace for the past half-century. He remembered the large baobab under which he used to take tea breaks, now long dead, replaced by piles of plastic.

 

“They know there’s money in it,” he said, about the government. “And they want to control it.”

 

But Mr. Dieng, the government dump manager, insisted that the pickers would either be given jobs at the new sorting centers, “or we help them find a job that will allow them to live better than before.”

 

That doesn’t reassure everyone.

 

“There are many changes,” said Maguette Diop, a project officer at WIEGO, a nonprofit organization focused on the working poor worldwide, “and the place of the waste pickers in these changes is not clear.”

 

For now, though, hundreds of waste pickers have to keep on picking.

 

Dodging bulldozers, piles of animal guts and cattle, with curved metal spikes and trash bags in their hands, they head back into the fray.

 

Mady Camara contributed reporting.


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6) Little of the Paycheck Protection Program’s $800 Billion Protected Paychecks

Only about a quarter of the funding went to jobs that would have been lost, new research found. A big chunk lined bosses’ pockets.

By Stacy Cowley, Feb. 1, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/business/paycheck-protection-program-costs.html

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7) Federal Judge Rejects Hate Crime Plea Deals in Ahmaud Arbery Killing

The victim’s mother had denounced the deals made with two of the men convicted of murder, saying she did not want them transferred to federal custody instead of state prison.

By Richard Fausset, Jan. 31, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/ahmaud-arbery-hate-crime-plea-deal.html
Ahmaud Arbery’s sister, Jasmine Arbery, wiped a tear while listening to her mother’s impact statement during the sentencing of her brother’s killers.
Ahmaud Arbery’s sister, Jasmine Arbery, wiped a tear while listening to her mother’s impact statement during the sentencing of her brother’s killers. Credit...Pool photo by Stephen B. Morton

ATLANTA — A federal judge on Monday rejected plea agreements with the Justice Department for two of the three white men facing hate crime charges in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery after his family expressed fierce opposition to the deal.

 

It was a surprising and extraordinary twist in a case in which a 25-year-old Black man was chased through a southern Georgia neighborhood by three white men and then shot to death. The plea deals would have been the first time that any of the men had admitted that Mr. Arbery’s killing was racially motivated.

 

All three men had been convicted of murder in state court in November. Mr. Arbery’s family angrily objected to the federal plea agreement because it would have sent at least two of them immediately to federal prison instead of state prison for up to 30 years. Federal prison is generally considered safer than state prison.

 

The decision by Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of U.S. District Court to reject identical plea deals hammered out between the Justice Department and the two men, Travis McMichael, 36, and his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, means that the McMichaels could now see their federal case go before a jury as early as next week.

 

The third man involved in the chase, William Bryan, 52, was sentenced in state court to life with the possibility of parole. As of Monday evening, there was no indication that he had reached a plea deal with the Justice Department.

 

Prosecutors had hoped that the plea deals for the McMichaels would guarantee that the men would face serious prison time for the death of Mr. Arbery, even in the unlikely possibility that their state murder convictions were overturned on appeal. Their federal sentence would have run concurrently with their state sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

 

The deal would have also barred the men from appealing their federal guilty pleas.

 

For members of Mr. Arbery’s family, it was not enough. In a courtroom in Brunswick, Ga., close to the site of the killing, they spoke to Judge Wood of the ongoing trauma of losing Mr. Arbery, who was unarmed as he fled on foot from his pursuers. And they argued passionately that the men should not be allowed to choose what they considered a less-unpleasant prison option.

 

“I’m asking on the behalf of his family, on behalf of his memory, and on behalf of fairness that you do not grant this plea in order to allow these men to transfer out of Georgia state custody into the federal prisons, where they prefer to be,” said Wanda Cooper-Jones, referring to Mr. Arbery, her son.

 

Tara M. Lyons, an assistant U.S. attorney, argued that the plea agreement included a public admission from Travis McMichael that the killing was racially motivated. “Travis McMichael is admitting an important aspect which we believe will allow some healing to begin,” she said.

 

But Judge Wood noted that the deal was a special kind that would force her to agree to its exact terms. “And having considered all that was said today, and looking back at the law that governs these agreements, it is my decision to reject the plea agreement,” she said.

 

In a prepared statement, Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general, said on Monday evening that lawyers for the victim’s family had told the Justice Department that the family “was not opposed” to the plea deals.

 

“The Justice Department takes seriously its obligation to confer with the Arbery family and their lawyers both pursuant to the Crime Victim Rights Act and out of respect for the victim,” she said.

 

S. Lee Merritt, lead lawyer for Mr. Arbery’s estate, said on Monday that the Justice Department did not communicate to the family or its lawyers that the deal would include a transfer to federal custody.

 

The Justice Department, he said, was “well aware” that the family “was opposed to such a condition.”

 

Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor and former federal prosecutor, said that it was uncommon for a victim’s family to convince a federal judge to reject a plea deal once it had been agreed upon.

 

In general, Mr. Butler said, such deals are viewed positively by both federal judges and prosecutors. “The judge typically views an agreed-upon plea deal as efficient and fair,” he said, “and to the extent that most plea bargaining includes an agreement from defendants not to appeal, it also protects the verdict, which is seen as helpful to both the prosecution and court — because there’s no chance of the verdict being overturned.”

 

Judge Wood gave the two men until Friday to decide whether they now wish to enter guilty pleas.

 

Page Pate, a veteran Georgia trial lawyer, said that by entering guilty pleas, the men could hope that the judge would sentence them to something less than life, which is the maximum they could receive for the hate crimes charge.

 

But Mr. Pate noted that the family was facing some risk by lobbying for a trial. It may prove difficult to convince a jury that the men were motivated by hate, even if prosecutors are able to show that they had exhibited racist behavior in the past. In court on Monday, prosecutors noted that the truck that Travis McMichael used to chase Mr. Arbery was adorned with a Confederate symbol, and an F.B.I. agent said that Travis McMichael’s cellphone contained racist messages referring to Black people as “monkeys” and other slurs.

 

Prosecutors also said that while Travis McMichael did not set out to harm a Black person the morning he fatally shot Mr. Arbery, he made dangerous assumptions about him being a criminal based on the fact that he was Black.

 

If the case goes to trial, the men also face an attempted kidnapping charge, and Travis McMichael faces a weapons charge.

 

These charges would have been dropped under the plea deal. And prosecutors noted that under the deal, the defendants would have been “admitting publicly, in front of the nation, that this offense was racially motivated.”

 

The case has been widely viewed as an act of racial violence. But in the state trial, prosecutors treaded lightly on the racial dimensions as they presented their arguments to a nearly all-white jury.

 

During the murder trial, the McMichaels said they had suspected Mr. Arbery of committing property crimes in their Satilla Shores neighborhood, outside of Brunswick. In video footage of the encounter, Mr. Arbery could be seen running as his pursuers chased him in two pickup trucks.

 

The chase ended when Mr. Arbery and the younger Mr. McMichael met in a violent clash. Mr. Bryan captured the violence on a video clip that was widely disseminated on the internet, leading to a national outcry and allegations that the killing had amounted to a modern-day lynching.

 

Lawyers for Travis McMichael — who fired his shotgun at Mr. Arbery three times at close range — have said that he had fired in self-defense.

 

A Georgia state investigator has said that Mr. Bryan told the authorities that he heard Travis McMichael use a racist slur shortly after shooting Mr. Arbery. Mr. McMichael’s lawyers in the state case disputed that claim.

 

On Sunday night, Ms. Cooper-Jones had said she opposed a plea deal in part because she wanted to put to rest the self-defense argument and to firmly establish that the men had been motivated by racism.

 

Katie Benner contributed reporting.


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8) Israeli Commanders Disciplined in Death of Palestinian-American Man

Three Israeli military commanders have been reprimanded and reassigned after an investigation into the death of a 78-year-old man after he was detained.

By Raja Abdulrahim, Feb. 1, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/world/middleeast/israel-commanders-palestinian-man.html
A poster with a picture of Omar Abdelmajed Assad in his West Bank village of Jiljilya, in January.
A poster with a picture of Omar Abdelmajed Assad in his West Bank village of Jiljilya, in January. Credit...Mohamad Torokman/Reuters

JERUSALEM — Three Israeli military commanders have been disciplined after an investigation into the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian-American man who was detained, gagged and handcuffed by Israeli soldiers in a night raid on his village last month.

 

An autopsy showed that the man, Omar Abdelmajed Assad, died from a stress-induced heart attack brought on by injuries sustained while he was detained for about an hour on Jan. 12 by dozens of Israeli soldiers.

 

The commander of the Netzah Yehuda, the Jewish ultra-Orthodox battalion which conducted the raid on the village, will be reprimanded and the platoon and company commanders will both be removed from their positions. They will not serve in commanding roles for two years, according to the military.

 

“The incident showed a clear lapse of moral judgment,” the Israeli military’s chief of general staff said in a statement released late Monday that summed up the conclusions of an investigation by the military’s central command. “The investigation concluded that the incident was a grave and unfortunate event, resulting from a moral failure and poor decision-making on the part of the soldiers.”

 

The statement, in which Mr. Assad’s full name was rendered incorrectly, said the Israeli military deeply regretted his death, but stopped short of apologizing for it.

 

Mr. Assad’s family and human rights groups said the punishments were too light and fit a pattern of impunity for Israelis who kill Palestinians.

 

“It’s not enough,” said Mohanad Assad, Mr. Assad’s 39-year-old cousin. “They need to be tried in international courts.”

 

The Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, has long dismissed Israeli military investigations into the killings of Palestinians as whitewashing.

 

But the Israeli military has called those allegations “ridiculous” and said it has proved repeatedly that its investigations are independent and professional.

 

One example of an investigation that critics say reflects a pattern of impunity was linked to the 2014 war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza, when an airstrike killed four boys playing on a beach, prompting international condemnation. An Israeli military investigation resulted in no criminal charges or disciplinary actions against those involved in airstrikes during that war, including the two that killed the boys.

 

Mr. Assad was driving home around 3 a.m. after a night playing cards and drinking coffee at a relative’s house when he was detained near his home in the village of Jiljilya in the occupied West Bank. Immediately after soldiers left the scene, he was found face down and unresponsive with a blindfold still on, according to witnesses and his doctor, who said he died while in Israeli custody.

 

Initially, the Israeli military said Mr. Assad had been alive when he was released.

 

The soldiers did not identify signs of distress or see anything of concern regarding Mr. Assad’s health before they left, according to the investigation, saying they believed he was sleeping. But the investigation found that the “soldiers failed in their obligations by leaving Assad lying on the floor without the required treatment and without reporting the incident back to their commanders.”

 

His death brought renewed scrutiny on Israel from its closest ally, the United States, which called for a thorough investigation. Mr. Assad was a U.S. citizen with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren living in the United States. His family and several members of Congress have demanded that the United States conduct its own independent investigation.

 

In addition to the central command’s investigation, a separate criminal investigation by the Israeli military police is still ongoing.

 

Mr. Assad’s autopsy was conducted by the coroner for the Palestinian Authority, which is also conducting its own investigation into Mr. Assad’s death. The authority administers parts of the West Bank but even in Palestinian villages like Jiljilya, Israeli forces regularly carry out raids and operations aimed at thwarting attacks.

 

Mr. Assad’s life and death mirrored the daily perils faced by Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, including the fear of being detained in nighttime raids or arrested at home.

 

According to the investigation, soldiers were in Jiljilya that morning to thwart terrorist activities and seize weapons and as part of that operation, they stopped Mr. Assad’s vehicle. Mr. Assad refused to cooperate with their security check.

 

In response, he was detained with his hands bound and his mouth gagged for a short time, according to the investigation.

 

Dr. Islam Abu Zaher, who attempted to resuscitate Mr. Assad after the Israeli soldiers hurriedly left the village, said his face was blue and had been cut off from oxygen for 15 to 20 minutes.

 

The central command investigation found that soldiers did not use violence against Mr. Assad “apart from when Assad was apprehended after refusing to cooperate.”

 

These findings contradict a preliminary conclusion from the Palestinian investigation, which determined that he had been “severely beaten” and “subjected to harsh treatment and violence.”

 

The autopsy found that Mr. Assad had bruises on his head as a result of traumatic brain injuries, without concluding what may have caused those injuries. There was also internal bleeding in his eyelids from being blindfolded tightly as well as other bruises on his arms and red welts on his wrists from zip ties.

 

Another man who was detained by the same soldiers said that as soon as they left, he went to Mr. Assad and found him unresponsive. Dr. Abu Zaher was immediately called and tried to revive him with CPR and a defibrillator.

 

Mr. Assad had open-heart surgery and several stents implanted about four years ago, according to Dr. Abu Zaher. He was also being treated for obstructive pulmonary disease in recent months.


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9) Despite Labor Shortages, Workers See Few Gains in Economic Security

The pandemic has supposedly given service workers leverage. But many still have unstable hours and incomes because employers like the flexibility.

By Noam Scheiber, Feb. 1, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/business/economy/part-time-work.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Business
Limited work hours are not unusual at Chipotle, which has a largely part-time work force.
Limited work hours are not unusual at Chipotle, which has a largely part-time work force. Credit...Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Workers picketing during a strike at King Soopers in Denver. A key issue was the lack of full-time employment.
Workers picketing during a strike at King Soopers in Denver. A key issue was the lack of full-time employment. Credit...Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Over the past two months, Brenda Garcia, who works at a Chipotle in Queens, has struggled to land more than 20 hours per week, making it difficult to keep up with her expenses. When she confronts her manager, he vows to try to find her more work, but the problem invariably persists. In one recent week, the store scheduled her for a single 6.25-hour shift.

 

“It’s not enough for me — they’re not giving me a stable job,” said Ms. Garcia, whose work involves chopping vegetables and other tasks before burritos are assembled. “They’re not giving me the hours and the days I’m supposed to be getting.”

 

Ms. Garcia’s limited hours are not unusual at Chipotle, which has a largely part-time work force. A weekly schedule at her store from early January showed at least a dozen workers with fewer than 20 hours and several with fewer than 15.

 

With workers nationwide quitting at high rates and companies complaining that they can’t fill jobs, employers might be expected to rethink their dependence on part-time scheduling. While some employees prefer the flexibility, many say it leaves them with too few hours, too little income or erratic hours.

 

But that rethinking does not appear to have happened. Government data show that in retail businesses, the portion of workers on part-time schedules last year stood about where it was just before the pandemic, and that it increased somewhat in hospitality industries like restaurants and hotels.

 

In a twice-yearly survey by Daniel Schneider, a Harvard sociologist, and Kristen Harknett, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, one-quarter of workers at large retailers and restaurant chains said they were scheduled 35 hours a week or less and wanted more hours. That was down from about one-third in 2019, but the change was driven by a decline in the number of workers wanting more hours, most likely because of pandemic health risks and work-life conflicts, not because employers were providing more hours.

 

Even as employers complain of having to scramble to fill vacancies, there is little evidence that service workers are winning any meaningful, long-term gains. While businesses have raised wages, those increases can be easily eroded by inflation, if they haven’t been already. The overall national rate of membership in unions — which can obtain wage increases for workers even absent labor shortages — matched its lowest level on record last year.

 

And the unpredictable schedules that arise when employers constantly adjust staffing in response to customer demand, something that is common among part-timers, are roughly as prevalent as before the pandemic. The survey by Dr. Schneider and Dr. Harknett found that about two-thirds of workers continue to receive less than two weeks’ notice of their schedules.

 

“Companies are doing all they can not to bake in any gains that are difficult to claw back,” Dr. Schneider said. “Workers’ labor market power is so far not yielding durable dividends.”

 

The changes that make work lower paying, less stable and generally more precarious date back to the 1960s and ’70s, when the labor market evolved in two key ways. First, companies began pushing more work outside the firm — relying increasingly on contractors, temps and franchisees, a practice known as “fissuring.”

 

Second, many businesses that continued to employ workers directly began hiring them to part-time positions, rather than full-time roles, particularly in the retail and hospitality industries.

 

According to the scholars Chris Tilly of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Françoise Carré of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the initial impetus for the shift to part-time work was the mass entry of women into the work force, including many who preferred part-time positions so they could be home when children returned from school.

 

Before long, however, employers saw an advantage in hiring part-timers and deliberately added more. “A light bulb went on one day,” Dr. Tilly said. “‘If we’re expanding part-time schedules, we don’t have to offer benefits, we can offer a lower wage rate.’”

 

By the late 1980s, employers had begun using scheduling software to forecast customer demand and staffed accordingly. Having a large portion of part-time workers, who could be given more hours when stores got busy and fewer hours when business slowed, helped enable this practice, known as just-in-time scheduling.

 

But the arrangement subjected workers to fluctuating schedules and unreliable hours, disrupting their personal lives, their sleep, even their children’s brain development.

 

Nonetheless, the model continued to spread, and the shift to a heavily part-time work force was largely complete across retail by the mid-1990s.

 

A recent study commissioned by Kroger found that about 70 percent of the supermarket company’s nearly 85,000 store employees in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington State were part time. A survey of more than 10,000 Kroger workers on behalf of four union locals by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group, found widespread evidence of just-in-time scheduling, with more than half of workers reporting that their schedules changed at least weekly.

 

Kroger, one of the nation’s largest employers, said in a statement that many of its employees sought part-time jobs for their flexibility and for health care benefits that competitors didn’t offer, as well as for opportunities for upward mobility. “We provide hundreds of thousands of people with first jobs (think baggers, cashiers, stockers, etc.), second chances, retirement employment, college gigs,” the statement said.

 

The company added that locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union had negotiated and agreed to the relevant provisions of its labor contracts for decades.

 

A spokeswoman for Chipotle, where Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ is helping workers organize, likewise said that managers and employees mutually agreed on hours and that the company enabled employees to pick up additional shifts at other New York City stores when they were available.

 

But the practices remain contentious. In mid-January, more than 8,000 Denver-area workers at King Soopers, a supermarket chain owned by Kroger, went on strike, citing the lack of full-time employment as a key issue.

 

Renae Vigil, who works in the meat department at a King Soopers in Denver and serves as a union steward, said many of her colleagues would like to work full time so that “they wouldn’t be worried about how to pay bills, how to get this or that paid, but at King’s, it’s like winning a lotto.”

 

The frustrations suggest a relatively straightforward way for employers to reduce labor shortages: Offer more full-time positions.

 

But Kim Cordova, president of U.F.C.W. Local 7, which represents the King Soopers workers, said employers like Kroger were rarely moved by this logic. “They’ve told us they think the market is going to correct itself, this is temporary and they don’t want to lock themselves into changing permanently,” she said. The food workers union estimated that King Soopers had 2,400 unfilled Denver-area jobs early this year.

 

While the strike ended last month, after the company committed to raise pay, contribute more to health benefits and add at least 500 full-time positions, a majority of King Soopers workers are likely to remain on part-time schedules. Most retail and restaurant workers, who lack a union to organize a strike and provide strike pay, may have a harder time winning such changes.

 

Susan Lambert, a social work scholar at the University of Chicago who studies employers’ scheduling practices, said she and a colleague had recently interviewed store managers in Seattle and Chicago and found that some had, in fact, sought to provide more consistent schedules during the pandemic.

 

The change was driven by a combination of data, showing that more humane scheduling practices need not undermine profitability, and a desire by some employers to retain workers amid labor shortages, Dr. Lambert said. But she conceded that the changes were mostly at the margins.

 

“There are not major investments in changing major systems,” she said.

 

Data collected by the Labor Department indicate that the amount of part-time work in the retail and hospitality industries remains far above where it stood in the early 1970s. The same appears to be true of companies’ reliance on contractors and temps, which scholars say has helped weaken wage growth over the past several decades.

 

Employers who outsource work to contractors or temps do not appear to have rethought those arrangements as a result of the pandemic, said Susan Houseman, a labor economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. She pointed to the temporary help industry’s return to close to its prepandemic share of employment and an increase in self-employment during the past two years.

 

Gig companies whose apps allow people to find work as independent contractors say they have had an increase in workers over the last year or two. According to Uber, the number of drivers and couriers working through its service in a given month grew roughly 70 percent from January to October last year, or nearly 640,000.

 

DoorDash said the number of people working through its delivery app as of the fall quarter had more than doubled during the pandemic, to over three million, and Instacart said the number of full-service shoppers on its service — those who shop for and deliver groceries — had increased by more than two and a half times, to over 500,000.

 

The companies say that workers who use their apps value the flexibility of gig work, and that it helps sustain people during fallow periods or in places where work can be hard to find, such as rural communities. But gig jobs typically lack a variety of benefits and protections, like a minimum wage, and can reinforce economic insecurity.

 

To Dr. Schneider, the Harvard sociologist, the insecurity that service workers continue to face during the pandemic, supposedly a period of unusual leverage, shows how resistant their industries are to changing.

 

“I think it exposes something about how attached employers are to this just-in-time model,” he said. “This is something that goes to the heart of their business models.”


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