Saturday, August 30, 2014

the top lives off the yield of the bottom...,


ozy |  The organization Soni directs, the National Guestworker Alliance, focuses on immigrants with temporary work visas. Hundreds of thousands come to the United States each year. Despite their numbers, they’re difficult to organize: transient, for starters; vulnerable and risk averse, besides. Guest workers don’t come here to make trouble. Because their visas bind them to one employer, quitting means deportation, or worse. 

Soni has led guest workers to some of the ballsiest collective actions in recent history — the welders, for instance, ended up marching all the way to Washington, D.C., going on a hunger strike and catalyzing an uproar in India and the White House. A strike by Mexican crawfish-peelers — who’d been forced to work 16- to 24-hour shifts and threatened with bodily harm — changed corporate policy at Wal-Mart. Striking student guest workers at a Hershey packing plant led the State Department to rewrite certain visa policies. 

More remarkable than all this, maybe, is what Soni thinks the guest workers represent: you.

“The guest workers and low-wage workers that I organize hold a crystal ball into the changing nature of work,” he argues. It’s part of a theory about the future of work that he’s elucidated in lectures at Harvard Law School, Soros-funded forums, on television and, soon probably, in a book. “What’s happening to low-wage workers is not just happening to low-wage workers,” he says

What’s happening is the rise of contingent labor — temporary, part-time, gig-to-gig — and the lengthening of labor supply chains, like independent contractors and sub-subcontractors. In their wake, even American-born professionals have lost leverage. At universities, adjunct professors are paid per class, hired per semester. Lawyers who used to work at firms now contract for them. Sixty-four thousand Silicon Valley engineers just won a settlement against four tech giants who’d agreed not to solicit one another’s employees. To Soni, their plights all resemble guest workers’.

8 comments:

Ed Dunn said...

Singapore had a riot last year with the Indian migrant worker community. I believe there was another flare-up in Vietnam with Chinese migrant workers and Saudi Arabia cutting off heads of Nepalese migrant workers left and right. And we can go into the South African mining industry and the contention with migrant workers. And then we even got the one flare up in Ghangzhou China with the African community.

But yet, no one seem to complain about cheap labor

Vic78 said...

Because I felt like talking about the people that turned on the Doctor. And it was relevant to the post. You have to accept that people aren't going to do what you think they ought. Everyone here has their own perceptions.

umbrarchist said...

Economic power games depend on there being people who can be taken advantage of.

So curious that economists world wide never suggest mandatory accounting in the schools for EVERYBODY. Maybe their job is "rationalizing" the power games and pretending it is for the best.

But then we don't have the poor suggesting to each other the accounting be mandatory. Everyone is supposed to believe in the Darwinian competition.

What did Darwin and Marx say about Planned Obsolescence? Never trust old dead guys with beards.

makheru bradley said...

[Why do you stop at assigning "hollowness" to Prof West?] I was responding to the information presented in the post.

[If I follow the meme from various "Black Studies" courses or "Afro-Centric" community discussion forums - THIS PERIOD marks the first time that a group of Black people APLAUDED or stayed silent as the machine of their LONG TIME WHITE SUPREMACIST OPPRESSOR defeated a military power in Africa.]

Bro. Feed, based on the way you’ve constructed this sentence, you are implying that “Black Studies” and “Afrocentric” people are the group who applauded or remained silent regarding Obama’s war of aggression against the Libyan Jamahiriya. The truth is these people and their white allies were the only people criticizing Obama and the North Atlantic Tribal Organization during that war of aggression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6kC1MzvVXY

http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2011/04/barack-obama-murders-gadhafis-youngest.html

http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/search?q=libya+war

Vic78 said...

Some of that energy could've been used taking advantage of a Black President's presence. Cats trying to keep that I'm too real posture are losing their relevancy. That's a positive in my book.

Doc West sees the curtain coming down on him and lashed out as best he could. Because West couldn't or wouldn't evolve, people aren't as interested in hearing him as they were in the past. A lot of Black folks are turning their backs on the worthless black identity types. Then we got a first row seat to how powerless the self proclaimed "progressives" really are. We also got to see the two parties acting a damn fool for the world to see. More Americans hate their fake news media. The troglodytes are putting their hoods on in public. It's been a great presidency.

Now would be a good time to learn how to maneuver that imperial equity. There are some opportunities available right now. Just have to put in some work. The kufi shit's a dead end; it's past time to move on.

Constructive_Feedback said...

Vic

There are ABUNDANT opportunities being taken advantage of tody with Obama in the White House. unfortunately it is the Black Progressive Fundamentalist Elite Harvard Class that is maintaining a relationship of opportunism with the "Black Grieving Class" as represented by Sharpton, Jackson, Dream Keepers, Rev (fool from Baltimore?), Harris Perry

Instead of repudiating them they form. Coalition, the grieving and the elite and the governing establishment over the empire (Obama, Holder and the Homeland Security black guy and Perez in Labor) all agreeing to hold their nose from the stench of their anal relationship as they focus on the fighting Republican/Tea Party White Supremacy as the US government continues White supremacy internationally and Black underdevelopment domestically in conjunction with the corrupt Black Racial Services Machine

The Americanized Negro Will Never be the same after being exposed so thoroughly to those of us who are monitoring how easy it is for him to sell his soul

CNu said...

It wouldn't be you if there wasn't some superfluous grit in the dish, marring its texture and muddling its presentation. That said, you managed to state 99% of your oeuvre in a single sentencethey focus on the fighting Republican/Tea Party White Supremacy as the
US government continues White supremacy internationally and Black
underdevelopment domestically in conjunction with the corrupt Black
Racial Services MachineYou've crystallized the essence of your whole and entire case, while simultaneously molesting the afro-saxon community consciousness nucleus. What if what you described the Hon.Bro.Preznit Double-0 and his cabal as doing, is the most prudent thing for them to do? What if his purpose is to further integrate the unaggrieved and unabashed afro-saxon into the 4th Reich whose whole and entire modus operandi is to finalize the global hegemony of the enlish-language cultural community complex? What if they're just not doing a very apt job because they're strapped for ideas unfamiliar as they are with cultures of competence?

What if all that's required to revitalize the American community consciousness nucleus is a widespread and distinctively American flowering of interlocked cultures of competence under the American aegis, bound not by who they are, no regard for their racial/ethnic composition, instead, bound together by the shared pursuit of objective and meritocratic excellence in their common fields of endeavor? Instead of by continuing inequity, decadence, and dysfunction, the American commons was suddenly gripped by an onslaught of cultural excellence from multiple nodes of cultural production?

Constructive_Feedback said...

That wasnt bad for a stress filled layover in a Caribbean islans, typing on an iPhone, pissed because they just announced a 3 hour flight delay

By the way the Harvard crew is Oglestree, Gates, Obama and the second tier players Dyson, Dr Earl Ofari Hutinson (Adviser to Sharptons radio show), Dr Ron Daniels and George Franklin (? The mulatto guy who always says "Yes I am Black) the two of them conspired to get contracts in Libya as Gadaffi's body was entombed

I cant understand why people who point to corrupt regimes internationally that exploit people cant bring themselves to see what is going on right in front of their eyes

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...