Les #Balkans, une #zone_tampon pour l’Union
Les pays des Balkans fournissent au #libéralisme_économique européen une #main-d’œuvre bon marché et servent de zone tampon, contrôlant les flux migratoires. Un double rôle dont les politiques locaux ont su tirer parti.
▻https://www.revue-projet.com/articles/2019-04-derens-les-balkans-une-zone-tampon-pour-l-union/10217
#migrations #asile #réfugiés #exploitation #travail #capitalisme
BALLAST | Françoise Vergès : « La lutte décoloniale élargit les analyses » (1/2)
▻https://www.revue-ballast.fr/francoise-verges-la-lutte-decoloniale
C’est une bonne image ! Le Sud, ce n’est pas un espace purement géographique, mais politique. C’est le produit d’une longue fabrication par le Nord et par le système capitaliste, qui en a fait un espace de vulnérabilité, à piller et à exploiter. Ce qu’on a appelé le « #Tiers_monde » et qu’on appelle maintenant le « Sud global », c’est cette constante division de l’humanité et de la planète en deux espaces, avec des frontières mouvantes qui distinguent d’un côté les gens qui ont droit à une vie décente, qui ont accès à de l’eau ou de l’air propre, et de l’autre ceux qui n’y ont pas droit. Dans le même temps, on trouve dans ce qu’on appelle le « Nord » (y compris en Europe) des espaces construits comme des Suds. Une géographie urbaine en enclaves se développe, et partout les classes moyennes et riches se protègent en construisant des « gated communities ». Leurs membres passent d’une enclave à l’autre, de leur maison climatisée au centre commercial climatisé — autant d’espaces entretenus par des femmes et des hommes racisés (mais surtout des #femmes), surexploités puis rejetés dans des quartiers excentrés où l’eau et l’air sont pollués. Le confort de quelques-uns est construit sur l’#invisibilisation et l’#exploitation de plusieurs. Et cette construction en enclaves sécurisées, surveillées, interdites aux pauvres, est visible y compris dans les villes du Sud. Il faut constamment affiner les cartographies que construisent des États autoritaires, le #néolibéralisme et l’#impérialisme, mais aussi intégrer le fait d’un monde multipolaire.
#colonialisme #racisme #esclavage #capitalisme #consommation
Elle est venue en conf ya deux semaines pour la Semaine des Afriques, et c’était super intéressant !
Et… normalement Raffut a tout filmé, une vidéo devrait arriver sous peu.
#Françoise_Vergès
Cap-Vert : les forçats du sable - ARTE Reportage | ARTE
▻https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/087316-000-A/cap-vert-les-forcats-du-sable
/apios/Img_data/cache-buster-1554396714/20/087316-000-A_2713741.jpg)
Isolé, à 700 kilomètres au large des côtes sénégalaises, l’île du Cap-Vert ne dispose d’aucune ressource naturelle. Une personne sur quatre vit avec moins de deux euros par jour.
Les voleuses de sable sont souvent issues de familles monoparentales. Exploiter le sable reste le seul moyen de nourrir leurs enfants ou de leur permettre d’étudier. Elles vendent leur butin pour un salaire de misère à des constructeurs peu scrupuleux qui s’en servent pour fabriquer des parpaings.
Aujourd’hui, certaines plages sont complètement détruites. Le sable noir a disparu. Seuls restent les galets. Les conséquences environnementales sont désastreuses : érosion accélérée de la côte, appauvrissement de la ressource halieutique et pollution par le sel des nappes phréatiques et des champs avoisinants.
Cette exploitation sauvage est officiellement illégale depuis 2010. Mais, malgré la surveillance militaire et policière, les femmes continuent de courber l’échine sur les plages cap verdiennes.
Emy ou l’histoire d’une esclave ivoirienne en Tunisie
Découvrez l’histoire d’Emy, une Ivoirienne réduite en esclavage en Tunisie. Ses passeurs avaient promis de l’emmener en Europe, ils la vendront finalement à une riche famille de Tunis. Elle nous a raconté son histoire.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCT1kmW54-Q&feature=youtu.be
Traite sous néons rouges
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/panik-sur-la-ville/traite-sous-neons-rouges
La rédaction de Radio Panik reçoit Éric Walravens, journaliste de #médor, pour son enquête-récit autour de l’exploitation sexuelle des Nigérianes à Bruxelles.
Sommaire du nouveau numéro de Médor, le #14.
Sélection musicale, tirée de cette page :
Irewolede Denge : « Orin Asape Eko » Fatai Rolling Dollar : « To Ba Fa Mo Dollar »
Photo : Marche silencieuse en mémoire d’Eunice le 14 juin 2018, Christophe Licoppe, Photo News
#prostitution #exploitation_sexuelle #nigéria #réseau #prostitution,médor,exploitation_sexuelle,nigéria,réseau
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/panik-sur-la-ville/traite-sous-neons-rouges_06357__1.mp3
‘Colony of Hell’: 911 Calls From Inside Amazon Warehouses
▻https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-from-inside-its-warehouses
11. March 2019 - 189 calls were made from 46 sites, raising new questions about working conditions. One ex-employee said ‘breakdowns [are] a regular occurrence’ at Amazon.
by Max Zahn, Sharif Paget
Operator: Lebanon Police and Fire, where’s your emergency?
Caller: Hi, I’m at 500 Duke Drive in Lebanon, so it’s the Amazon building. I’ve got an associate threatening suicide, she has very specific plans and has shown scratches more than anything on her arms but she’s trying to leave the building. She needs medical help, we can’t keep her here.
********
Operator: Police dispatch
Caller: Yes, hi, I wanted to see if we could get an officer out to the Amazon facility. I have an associate who had written a suicide letter to her children that was discovered on her today.
********
Caller: Hey this is Chris, loss prevention Amazon, how you doing?
Operator: Good how are you?
Caller: Not too bad, I need EMS to start our way please. I have a suicidal employee in one of our offices, he attempted to cut himself three or four times tonight. And he is willing to go with EMS.
Operator: OK, what did he attempt to cut himself with?
Caller: One of our safety box cutters.
********
Dozens and dozens of times over five years, calls were made from Amazon warehouses to 911 dispatchers about men and women on the brink.
There was the suicidal employee in Hebron, Kentucky, who police said “is pregnant and threatening the baby” in December 2016. The 22-year-old woman in Joliet, Illinois, who said she wanted to “stab herself in the stomach” that same month. And the young man who threatened to “jump from [the] second floor” of the warehouse in Chester, Virginia, in January 2015.
Between October 2013 and October 2018, emergency workers were summoned to Amazon warehouses at least 189 times for suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts, and other mental health episodes, according to 911 call logs, ambulance and police reports reviewed and analyzed by The Daily Beast.
The reports came from 46 warehouses in 17 states—roughly a quarter of the sorting and fulfillment centers that comprise the company’s U.S. network. Jurisdictions for other Amazon warehouses either did not have any suicide reports or declined requests for similar logs.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Amazon, founded by the now-richest man in the world, has long faced criticism about working conditions at its warehouses: the high-pressure pace, the stultifying boredom, the timed bathroom breaks, and the digital surveillance that monitors performance.
The 911 calls and police reports collected through open record requests are not evidence that Amazon staffers experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or out of a warehouse—but they do offer a visceral, real-time glimpse of employees on the edge.
• In Jacksonville, Florida, in December 2017, an older woman said “she was going to go home and kill herself” because she was being fired, according to a sheriff’s report. A supervisor saw her crying and hitting her head against a wall a couple times because she was being dismissed, and “did not have anything to live for.” She told a sheriff’s officer that she planned to cut her wrist with a butter knife, and previously had suicidal thoughts.
• In June 2018, police officers were sent to a warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, to help with a suicidal employee. The officers found the woman crying in the first aid office where she admitted that she wanted to kill herself, the police report says. “She mentioned wanting to use box cutters,” police wrote.
• At a warehouse in Etna, Ohio, in July 2018, a young man said, “With all the demands his employer has placed on him and things he’s dealing with in life [sic] is becoming too much and considering hurting himself,” a sheriff’s report says. The worker has been “with Amazon for over a year and is frustrated with his employment because he felt he was lied to by Amazon at his orientation. He keeps saying the company told him they valued his employment and would be treated as if he mattered and not just a number,” the report adds.
Inside the Secret Facebook War For Mormon Hearts and Minds
“It’s this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence,” said Jace Crouch, a former employee at a warehouse in Lakeland, Florida, who had an emotional crisis on the job. It’s “mentally taxing to do the same task super fast for 10-hour shifts, four or five days a week.”
Some employees told The Daily Beast that they struggled with mental health issues before they began working for Amazon. But they believed the exacting work environment made them worse. And in some cases, after they were put on leave, they said they struggled to obtain promised compensation, received counseling they found insufficient or unaffordable, or were even fired.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Amazon said it values the health of its employees and suggested that the number of calls is an “overgeneralization” that “doesn’t take into account the total of our associate population, hours worked, or our growing network.”
“The physical and mental well-being of our associates is our top priority, and we are proud of both our efforts and overall success in this area,” the statement said.
“We provide comprehensive medical care starting on day one so employees have access to the care when they need it most, 24-hour a day free and confidential counseling services, and various leave and medical accommodation options covering both mental and physical health concerns.”
“Crack the whip, crack the whip”
The bins came one after another.
It was Nick Veasley’s job to count the items in each one and check the tally against a computer screen to make sure it matched Amazon’s inventory. As soon as he was done, a robot would place another bin in front him—and that’s how it went all night at the warehouse in Etna, Ohio.
Sometimes Veasley, 41, had to hop up a stepstool to count; sometimes he had to bend over, aggravating his knees and back. Either way, he had to count fast—hundreds of pieces an hour—or a manager tracking his progress in real time would prod him to hurry up. He only occasionally talked to coworkers, knowing a supervisor could track the impromptu break, and the warehouse was nearly silent, aside from the shuffling feet of coworkers and the sliding of bins.
The work was at once stressful and boring, so Veasley’s mind wandered: to the water and electric bills he couldn’t pay, the rent checks he owed, to the fiancée and daughter who depended on him. On Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018, his thoughts took a dark turn: Killing himself might be a way out, from his problems and what he saw as the relentless pressure of his job.
It wasn’t the first time Veasley had thought about suicide. On his way to work that night, according to a police report, he’d wanted to drive his car off a cliff.
When Veasley started working at Amazon in December 2016, he said, he was thrilled to land the $14.50-an-hour job. “The job was a big deal,” he said. “It was good money, good benefits.”
But standing on his feet all day took a toll. His ankle started to hurt—badly. In February 2017 he went on medical leave for surgery, Amazon said. A snafu with the third party handling his paperwork cost him thousands in income, he said, and he fell behind on his bills. (Amazon disputes this, saying he was paid for his leave.)
“They were wanting money and things started getting shut off,” he said. “I was getting three-day notices on my door and my landlord saying pay this or get out.”
That’s when Veasley first began having suicidal thoughts. After he returned to Amazon in August 2017, it only got worse. The isolation, boredom, stress, and effort to recover leave pay plunged him deeper into depression, he said.
“I had so much on my mind that the quietness of standing in one spot and doing my job, would just let my mind run,” he said.
When Veasley spoke to human resources about how he was feeling, they seemed compassionate, he said. He was allowed to take a two-month leave, which came with a reduction in pay.
His second return to work, that winter, was no easier. “The quota, the boringness, everything,” he said. Managers, he said, acted as enforcers. “Do that, do this, do this,” he said. “Crack the whip, crack the whip, crack the whip.”
Another pressure point: Veasley suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and an intestinal disease called diverticulitis, which he said forced him to take frequent bathroom breaks to relieve pain.
He received two write-ups and was told that another violation could result in suspension or termination, he said. (Amazon called his account “highly unlikely,” saying managers work with HR to have a thorough conversation about “barriers” that lead associates to “accrue time off task.”) “Usually I can get myself out of a problem but I couldn’t do it working at Amazon,” Veasley said. “I felt like I had a thousand pounds wrapped around my ankle and it kept dragging me down and down and down, and there was no way out.”
After he told a guard about wanting to drive his car off a cliff, police were called and Veasley was taken to nearby Licking Memorial Hospital and then psychiatric ward, where he spent three days, he said. He blames Amazon for the ordeal.
“That place screwed me up so much it put me into a depression where I was actually on a 72-hour hold in a psych ward,” he said.
Amazon said it was “unfortunate” that Veasley feels that way. “Many employees will tell you they love their jobs and working in fulfillment centers,” it said in a statement.
It said performance goals are standard in the industry and that “we support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve.”
“As we would with any associate in need, we supported and attempted to help Nick get the treatment and support he needed and requested. We accommodated his requests, directly engaged with him to understand his needs, provided resources, including outside and emergent crisis intervention help to him. Even though in the end it did not work out for Nick at Amazon, we hope he has found success in his pursuits,” Amazon added.
“They treat us like robots”
Caller: Hi this is Greg, Loss Prevention Specialist with Amazon, calling to report that we have a suicidal person...
Operator: Ok what’s he said that’s made him suicidal?
Caller: His initial utterance is that he’d had thoughts of killing himself, he’s expressed two different plans that crossed his mind. One would be to go to a second or third story and throw himself off a balcony and he has also attempted and or thought of a plan of cutting his wrists.
********
The Daily Beast spoke to six current or former Amazon employees who had mental health crises that required emergency assistance at the warehouse. They said much of their at-work stress stemmed from the performance quota.
A former employee in Etna, Ohio, said that it was sometimes physically impossible to stay on pace. “Even if it isn’t your fault, they ignore any explanation that you could give.”
He was constantly fearful that he would receive citations for falling short. “Once you have enough write-ups, you’re out the door,” he said. “There goes your livelihood.”
“There was a constant sense of, ‘did I screw that up, did I screw that up, did I screw that up?” he said. “[It] stays with you and almost becomes a permanent anxiety.”
“They treat us like robots,” said another employee who was on leave after making a threat of suicide at a warehouse in Lebanon, Tennessee.
Some workers cited a stringent break policy. Managers flagged any lull in performance longer than a handful of minutes, Veasley said. Former employees who worked 12-hour shifts said they received two 30-minute breaks and a 15-minute break. But just walking across the massive warehouse ate up chunks of free time.
Crouch said he has struggled with depression for much of his life, which continued at Amazon. “It made it really hard for me to deal with that dehumanization at work,” he said. “I would come home, not talk to anyone, sit in bed, and cry.”
To be sure, not all the incidents at Amazon facilities were triggered by work-related issues.
A young woman who worked at the Jacksonville warehouse told a co-worker in February 2018 that she was suicidal over the loss of a friend.
An employee who had “multiple thoughts of killing himself throughout the day,” according to an August 2015 police report in Lakeland, told The Daily Beast that “nothing about Amazon was stressing me out.”
In some cases, emergency workers were called to Amazon facilities for people who were not workers. In September 2016, police went to a warehouse in Bellevue, Washington, to assist with an employee’s suicidal fiancée, who had used a saw to cut her leg, according to police.
“They need to interact to feel human”
The details in the emergency calls and police reports follow a long series of reports about conditions in Amazon warehouses that can only be described as hellish.
A British journalist who went undercover described a clock-watching culture so extreme that some employees urinated in bottles rather than trek to restrooms and risk being marked AWOL.
Amazon retrofit some warehouses with air conditioning after a Pennsylvania newspaper reported in 2011 that temperatures at one facility would reach 100 degrees and that paramedics were stationed outside during heat waves.
The company’s anti-theft and security screening procedures mean long lines before some workers can clock in. A lawsuit over the unpaid waiting time ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with Amazon.
There are myriad reports of workers being injured on the job. Two dozen employees were hospitalized last year when a robot punctured a can of bear repellent, releasing toxic fumes; it was at least the third such incident in three years.
Scholars and researchers who study the effect of work on mental health declined to discuss Amazon’s employment practices. But many of the conditions cited by Amazon workers with suicide incidents were mentioned by the experts, who said a pressure cooker environment and mental illness can be dangerously toxic combination.
“High levels of workplace stressors can be bad for pre-existing mental health conditions and can exacerbate them,” said Naomi Swanson, a lead researcher at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, adding that research in the area was scarce.
A workplace that asks a lot from employees but does not offer leeway in how they complete their tasks can be unhealthy.
“If you’re doing something that is just too hard for you, you can’t do it worried about your performance. That would be stressful, leading to mood disorders and anxiety disorders,” said William Eaton, a professor at the Johns Hopkins’ school of public health.
Working in social isolation is another red flag. People need social contact, said Ron Goetzel, another Johns Hopkins professor. “They need to interact to feel human.”
But researchers also agree that mental health disorders and suicidal behavior are complex.
“You’ve got individuals who experience stress from a variety of sources,” said Yeates Conwell, a professor at the University of Rochester Center for Study and Prevention of Suicide. “The workplace may be one in which those things come together and get expressed as stress, mental illness, suicidal ideation behavior.”
“He started going into a dark place”
Like Nick Veasley, Jonathan Forrest was elated when Amazon offered him a job in the same warehouse. “Half nervous but mostly excited to start a new journey in life!” Forrest, then 36, posted on Facebook in the fall of 2016.
He was a picker, charged with putting items in bins.
“The board at Amazon showed the top 10 pickers of my shift and of well over 100 pickers, I ranked #8,” he wrote on Facebook a few weeks after he began. “At least there’s 1 thing to make me feel proud of myself.”
At $17.50 per hour, Forrest was making more money than he ever did before, and was paying down $7,000 in veterinary school debt, his father Butch Forrest said. But a few months in, he began to sour on his job and the company.
“I would like to thank one of the worlds [sic] richest men, multi billionaire Jeff Bezos, for the opportunity to win this overly generous $1 vending machine coupon to use in the Amazon cafeteria as a reward for my hard work today,” Forrest posted in late-January of 2017. “I’m confident that the free snickers bar I consume tomorrow will help further compel me to keep being the best picker that I can be!”
In April, he posted: “After this next week is over, I will have worked 280 hours in 5 weeks...I am ready to stop, take some time to enjoy myself and not work so much, what does my work do????? Mandatory fucking overtime! Seriously???? I am so pissed off right now.” It ended with this plea: “Leave me alone Amazon.”
“He started going into a dark place,” said Donnie Sanford, a close friend.
That summer, Forrest mentioned having suicidal thoughts to a coworker at Amazon and qualified for medical leave, his father said. Forrest saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and prescribed medication, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Beast.
Forrest returned to work after about a month, his father said, but on Oct. 28, he made another suicidal comment at work. This time an Amazon employee called the police. “Jonathan stated that he has had thoughts of suicide or self harm for several years and that the thoughts have been escalating in recent weeks,” a police report said. “Jonathan stated that he has attempted suicide in the past and that if he ever did commit suicide, it would be a ‘spur of the moment’ event,” the report added. (Butch Forrest and Sanford confirmed that Jonathan had attempted suicide before).
Forrest was taken to the hospital for evaluation, and Amazon allowed him to return to work.
In the last weeks of 2017, Forrest’s mental health deteriorated again. “It seemed like the spark died out in him,” Sanford said. “He didn’t do much toward the end except work. It was pretty much all he had to talk about.”
On Jan. 2, 2018, Sanford received a text message from Forrest: “Just remember I love you.” Around the same time, while sitting down to brunch at a diner, Butch and Jane Forrest received a call from their son, Brian, who told them Jonathan had just posted a suicide note on Facebook. It said: “Sorry y’all. It was inevitably going to happen anyways. I just fired a pistol through the back of my head. Love you all.”
Butch Forrest says his son was struggling on many levels, but he believes his work at Amazon was a major factor in his suicide. “When it came to holidays it would be five days in a row,” he said. “It killed him.”
In a statement, Amazon said Forrest’s death “was a very sad situation and shocking for the team, who very much wanted to see Johnathan [sic] get better.”
“It’s always sad when we lose a member of our team for any reason and our thoughts continue to go out to Johnathan’s family. We encourage anyone who is having suicidal thoughts to call the national suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255. Amazon employees should know we have resources available as well,” the company said.
“I didn’t have the money to go to the doctor”
Of the six current or former Amazon workers who spoke to The Daily Beast, five were put on leave from work. They said they struggled to obtain promised compensation, found counseling was insufficient or unaffordable, and in some cases were fired.
After being removed from Amazon by emergency responders—a situation some found humiliating—workers were often put on short-term medical or disability leave, entitling them to 60 percent of their pay and a return to their job after psychiatric clearance.
While on leave, some workers used the company’s employee assistance program, which includes three phone conversations with a counselor, and also sought outside psychiatric help. Even with Amazon-provided health insurance, the costs were often a financial strain.
“The frustrating part was I didn’t have the money to go to the doctor to get the paperwork they need,” said Crouch, the Lakeland, Florida, employee.
Veasley said he attempted to keep his job after leaving the psych ward but was told he had been fired for exceeding the maximum unpaid time off. He said he used many of those hours to go to therapy or doctor’s appointments.
Amazon said in a statement that it could not verify that Veasley used the time off for medical reasons. “Nicholas provided miscellaneous and inconsistent reasons for missing work and was often not able to provide the appropriate medical information needed for a fair excusal,” it said.
“Our teams work diligently to be fair to all employees and time excusal is provided often for employees during times of hardship when they have demonstrated regular attendance and reliability. Because we care about Nicholas, we wanted to help him but could not.”
But Veasley, who now works as a cook, is still angry about how he was treated.
“Amazon—don’t get me wrong—they throw up a lot of sparkly stuff in front of your eyes. Ooh, benefits, great pay, job security, this that and other, ” he said.
“But if you don’t read the fine print down at the bottom of this contract, you’re screwed.”
#Revolut insiders reveal the human cost of a fintech unicorn’s wild rise
▻https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-fintech-politics-storonsky
Applicants asked to work for free, rudeness, and high staff turnover tarnish the fintech startup’s success story
Three Theses on Neoliberal Migration and Social Reproduction
Today there are more than 1 billion regional and international migrants, and the number continues to rise: within 40 years, it might double because of climate change. While many of these migrants might not cross a regional or international border, people change residences and jobs more often, while commuting longer and farther to work. This increase in human mobility and expulsion affects us all. It should be recognized as a defining feature of our epoch: The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant.
The argument of this paper is that the migrant is also a defining figure of neoliberal social reproduction. This argument is composed of three interlocking theses on what I am calling the “neoliberal migrant.”
Thesis 1 : The first thesis argues that the migrant is foremost a socially constitutive figure. That is, we should not think of the migrant as a derivative or socially exceptional figure who merely travels between pre- constituted states. The movement and circulation of migrants has always played an important historical role in the social and kinetic production and reproduction of society itself.1
Thesis 2 : The second thesis therefore argues that social reproduction itself is a fundamentally kinetic or mobile process. The fact that a historically record number of human beings are now migrating and commuting between countries, cities, rural and urban areas, multiple part time precarious jobs, means that humans are now spending a world historical record amount of unpaid labor-time just moving around. This mobility is itself a form of social reproduction.
Thesis 3 : The third thesis is that neoliberalism functions as a migration regime of social reproduction. Under neoliberalism, the burden of social reproduction has been increasingly displaced from the state to the population itself (health care, child care, transportation, and other traditionally social services). At the same time, workers now have less time than ever before to do this labor because of increasing reproductive mobility regimes (thesis two). This leads then to a massively expanded global market for surplus reproductive laborers who can mow lawns, clean houses, and care for children so first world laborers can commute longer and more frequently. Neoliberalism completes the cycle by providing a new “surplus reproductive labor army” in the form of displaced migrants from the global South.
We turn now to a defense of these theses.
Thesis 1 : The Migrant is Socially Constitutive
This is the case, in short, because societies are themselves defined by a continual movement of circulation, expansion, and expulsion that relies on the mobility of migrants to accommodate its social expansions and contractions.
The migrant is the political figure who is socially expelled or dispossessed, to some degree as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. We are not all migrants, but most of us are becoming migrants. At the turn of the twenty- first century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history—a fact that political theory has yet to take seriously.2
If we are going to take the figure of the migrant seriously as a constitutive, and not derivative, figure of Western politics, we have to change the starting point of political theory. Instead of starting with a set of pre-existing citizens, we should begin with the flows of migrants and the ways they have circulated or sedimented into citizens and states in the first place—as well as emphasizing how migrants have constituted a counterpower and alternative to state structures.
This requires first of all that we take seriously the constitutive role played by migrants before the 19th century, and give up the arbitrary starting point of the nation-state. In this way we will be able to see how the nation-state itself was not the origin but the product of migration and bordering techniques that existed long before it came on the scene.3
Second of all, and based on this, we need to rethink the idea of political inclusion as a fundamentally kinetic process of circulation, not just as a formal legal, economic, or other kind of status. In other words, instead of a formal political distinction between inclusion/exclusion or a formal economic distinc- tion between productive/unproductive, we need a material one of circulation/ recirculation showing how social activity is defined by lived cycles of socially reproductive motions.
One way to think about the constitutive role played by migrants is as a kinetic radicalization of Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.
Primitive Accumulation
Marx develops this concept from a passage in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: “The accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour.”4 In other words, before humans can be divided into owners and workers, there must have already been an accu- mulation such that those in power could enforce the division in the first place. The superior peoples of history naturally accumulate power and stock and then wield it to perpetuate the subordination of their inferiors. For Smith, this process is simply a natural phenomenon: Powerful people always already have accumulated stock, as if from nowhere.
For Marx, however, this quote is perfectly emblematic of the historical obfuscation of political economists regarding the violence and expulsion required for those in power to maintain and expand their stock. Instead of acknowledging this violence, political economy mythologizes and naturalizes it just like the citizen-centric nation state does politically. For Marx the concept of primitive accumulation has a material history. It is the precapitalist condition for capitalist production. In particular, Marx identifies this process with the expulsion of peasants and indigenous peoples from their land through enclosure, colonialism, and anti-vagabond laws in sixteenth-century England. Marx’s thesis is that the condition of the social expansion of capitalism is the prior expulsion of people from their land and from their legal status under customary law. Without the expulsion of these people, there is no expansion of private property and thus no capitalism.
While some scholars argue that primitive accumulation was merely a single historical event in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, others argue that it plays a recurring logical function within capitalism itself: In order to expand, capitalism today still relies on non-capitalist methods of social expulsion and violence.5
The idea of expansion by expulsion broadens the idea of primitive accumulation in two ways. First, the process of dispossessing people of their social status (expulsion) in order to further develop or advance a given form of social motion (expansion) is not at all unique to the capitalist regime of social motion. We see the same social process in early human societies whose progressive cultivation of land and animals (territorial expansion) with the material technology of fencing also expelled (territorial dispossession) a part of the human population. This includes hunter-gatherers whose territory was transformed into agricultural land, as well as surplus agriculturalists for whom there was no more arable land left to cultivate at a certain point. Thus social expulsion is the condition of social expansion in two ways: It is an internal condition that allows for the removal of part of the population when certain internal limits have been reached (carrying capacity of a given territory, for example) and it is an external condition that allows for the removal of part of the population outside these limits when the territory is able to expand outward into the lands of other groups (hunter gatherers). In this case, territorial expansion was only possible on the condition that part of the population was expelled in the form of migratory nomads, forced into the surrounding mountains and deserts.
We later see the same logic in the ancient world, whose dominant polit- ical form, the state, would not have been possible without the material tech- nology of the border wall that both fended off as enemies and held captive as slaves a large body of barbarians (through political dispossession) from the mountains of the Middle East and Mediterranean. The social conditions for the expansion of a growing political order, including warfare, colonialism, and massive public works, were precisely the expulsion of a population of barbarians who had to be walled out and walled in by political power. This technique occurs again and again throughout history, as I have tried to show in my work.
The second difference between previous theories of primitive accumulation and the more expansive one offered here is that this process of prior expulsion or social deprivation Marx noted is not only territorial or juridical, and its expansion is not only economic.6 Expulsion does not simply mean forcing people off their land, although in many cases it may include this. It also means depriving people of their political rights by walling off the city, criminalizing types of persons by the cellular techniques of enclosure and incarceration, or restricting their access to work by identification and checkpoint techniques.
Expulsion is the degree to which a political subject is deprived or dispossessed of a certain status in the social order. Accordingly, societies also expand and reproduce their power in several major ways: through territorial accumulation, political power, juridical order, and economic
profit. What is similar between the theory of primitive accumulation and the kinetic theory of expansion by expulsion is that most major expan- sions of social kinetic power also require a prior or primitive violence of kinetic social expulsion. The border is the material technology and social regime that directly enacts this expulsion. The concept of primitive accu- mulation is merely one historical instance of a more general kinopolitical logic at work in the emergence and reproduction of previous societies.
Marx even makes several general statements in Capital that justify this kind of interpretive extension. For Marx, the social motion of production in general strives to reproduce itself. He calls this “periodicity”: “Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity.”7 According to Marx, every society, not just capitalist ones, engages in some form of social production. Like the movements of the planets, society expands and contracts itself according to a certain logic, which strives to reproduce and expand the conditions that brought it about in the first place. Its effects in turn become causes in a feedback loop of social circulation. For Marx, social production is thus fundamentally a social motion of circulation or reproduction.
In short, the material-kinetic conditions for the expansion of societies re- quires the use of borders (fences, walls, cells, checkpoints) to produce a system of marginalized territorial, political, legal, and economic migrants that can be more easily recirculated elsewhere as needed. Just as the vagabond migrant is dispossessed by enclosures and transformed into the economic proletariat, so each dominant social system has its own structure of expansion by expulsion and reproduction as well.
Expansion by Expulsion
Expulsion is therefore a social movement that drives out and entails a deprivation of social status.8 Social expulsion is not simply the deprivation of territorial status (i.e., removal from the land); it includes three other major types of social deprivation: political, juridical, and economic. This is not a spatial or temporal concept but a fundamentally kinetic concept insofar as we understand movement extensively and intensively, that is, quantitatively and qualitatively. Social expulsion is the qualitative transformation of deprivation in status, resulting in or as a result of extensive movement in spacetime.
The social expulsion of migrants, for example, is not always free or forced. In certain cases, some migrants may decide to move, but they are not free to determine the social or qualitative conditions of their movement or the degree to which they may be expelled from certain social orders. Therefore, even in this case, expulsion is still a driving-out insofar as its conditions are not freely or individually chosen but socially instituted and compelled. Expulsion is a fundamentally social and collective process because it is the loss of a socially determined status, even if only temporarily and to a small degree.9
Expansion, on the other hand, is the process of opening up that allows something to pass through. This opening-up also entails a simultaneous extension or spreading out. Expansion is thus an enlargement or exten- sion through a selective opening. Like the process of social expulsion, the process of social expansion is not strictly territorial or primarily spatial; it is also an intensive or qualitative growth in territorial, political, juridical, and economic kinopower. It is both an intensive and extensive increase in the conjunction of new social flows and a broadening of social circulation. Colonialism is a good example of an expansion which is clearly territorial as well as political, juridical, and economic.
Kinopower is thus defined by a constitutive circulation, but this circulation functions according to a dual logic of reproduction. At one end, social circulation is a motion that drives flows outside its circulatory system: expulsion. This is accomplished by redirecting and driving out certain flows through exile, slavery, criminalization, or unemployment. At the other end of circulation there is an opening out and passing in of newly conjoined flows through a growth of territorial, political, juridical, and economic power. Expansion by expulsion is the social logic by which some members of society are dispossessed of their status as migrants so that social power can be expanded elsewhere. Power is not only a question of repression; it is a question of mobilization and kinetic reproduction.
For circulation to open up to more flows and become more powerful than it was, it has historically relied on the disjunction or expulsion of mi- grant flows. In other words, the expansion of power has historically relied on a socially constitutive migrant population.
Thesis 2: Mobility is a form of Social Reproduction
People today continually move greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history. Even when people are not moving across a regional or international border, they tend to have more jobs, change jobs more often, commute longer and farther to their places of work,10 change their residences repeatedly, and tour internationally more often.11
Some of these phenomena are directly related to recent events, such as the impoverishment of middle classes in certain rich countries after the financial crisis of 2008, neoliberal austerity cuts to social-welfare programs, and rising unemployment. The subprime-mortgage crisis, for example, led to the expul- sion of millions of people from their homes worldwide (9 million in the United States alone). Globally, foreign investors and governments have acquired 540 million acres since 2006, resulting in the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries, and mining practices have become increasingly destructive around the world—including hydraulic fracturing and tar sands.
In 2006, the world crossed a monumental historical threshold, with more than half of the world’s population living in urban centers, compared with just fifteen percent a hundred years ago. This number is now expected to rise above seventy-five percent by 2050, with more than two billion more people moving to cities.12 The term “global urbanization,” as Saskia Sassen rightly observes, is only another way of politely describing large-scale human migration and displacement from rural areas, often caused by corporate land grabs.13 What this means is not only that more people are migrating to cities but now within cities and between suburban and urban areas for work. This general increase in human mobility and expulsion is now widely recognized as a defining feature of the twenty-first century so far.14
Accordingly, this situation is having and will continue to have major social consequences for social relations in the twenty-first century. It there- fore demands the attention of critical theory. In particular, it should call our attention to the fact that this epic increase in human mobility and migration around the world is not just a minor or one-time “inconvenience” or “eco- nomic risk” that migrants make and then join the ranks of other “settled” urban workers. It is a continuous, ongoing, and nearly universal massive ex- traction of unpaid reproductive labor.
Urban workers have become increasingly unsettled and mobile.The world average commuting time is now 40 minutes, one-way.15 This unpaid transport time is not a form of simply unproductive or unpaid labor. It is actually the material and kinetic conditions for the reproduction of the worker herself to arrive at work ready for labor. Not only this, but unpaid transport labor also continuously reproduces the spatial architecture of capitalist urban centers and suburban peripheries.16 The increasing neoliberal privatization of roadway construction and tollways is yet another way in which unpaid transport labor is not “unproductive” at all but rather continues to reproduce a massive new private transport market.This goes hand in hand with the neoliberal decline of affordable public transportation, especially in the US.
Unfortunately, transport mobility has not traditionally been considered a form of social reproductive activity, but as global commute times and traffic increase, it is now becoming extremely obvious how important and constitu- tive this migratory labor actually is to the functioning of capital. If we define social reproduction as including all the conditions for the worker to arrive at work, then surely mobility is one of these necessary conditions. Perhaps one of the reasons it has not been recognized as such is because transport is an activity that looks least like an activity, since the worker is typically just sitting in a vehicle. Or perhaps the historical identification of vehicles and migration as sites of freedom (especially in America) has covered over the oppressive and increasingly obligatory unpaid labor time they often entail.
The consequences of this new situation appeared at first as merely tempo- ral inconveniences for first-world commuters or what we might call BMWs (bourgeoise migrant workers).This burden initially fell and still falls dispropor- tionally on women who are called on to make up for the lost reproductive labor of their traveling spouses (even if they themselves also commute). Increasingly, however, as more women have begun to commute farther and more often this apparently or merely reproductive neoliberal transport labor has actually pro- duced a growing new market demand for a “surplus reproductive labor army” to take up these domestic and care labors. This brings us to our third thesis.
Thesis: 3: Neoliberal Migration is a Regime of Social Reproduction
The third thesis is that neoliberalism functions as a migration regime of social reproduction. This is the case insofar as neoliberalism expands itself in the form of a newly enlarged reproductive labor market, accomplished through the relative expulsion of the workers from their homes (and into
vehicles) and the absolute expulsion of a migrant labor force from the global south to fill this new market.
Migration therefore has and continues to function as a constitutive form of social reproduction (thesis one). This is a crucial thesis because it stresses the active role migrants play in the production and reproduction of society, but it is not a new phenomenon. Marx was of course one of the first to identify this process with respect to the capitalist mode of production. The proletariat is always already a migrant proletariat. At any moment an employed worker could be unemployed and forced to relocate according to the demands of capitalist valorization. In fact, the worker’s mobility is the condition of modern industry’s whole form of motion. Without the migration of a surplus population to new markets, from the rural to the city, from city to city, from country to country (what Marx calls the “floating population”) capitalist accumulation would not be possible at all. “Modern industry’s whole form of motion,” Marx claims, “therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands.’”17 As capitalist markets expand, contract, and multiply “by fits and starts,” Marx says, capital requires the possibility of suddenly adding and subtracting “great masses of men into decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production. The surplus population supplies these masses.”18
What is historically new about the neoliberal migration regime is not merely that it simply expels a portion of the population in order to put it into waged labor elsewhere. What is new is that late-capitalist neoliberalism has now expelled one portion of the workers from a portion of their ownun-waged reproductive activity in order open up a new market for the waged activity of an as yet unexploited productive population of migrants from the global South. In other words reproductive labor itself has become a site of capitalist expansion. Wherever objects and activities have not yet been commodified, there we will find the next frontier of capitalist valorization.
The consequence of this is a dramatic double expulsion. On the one hand, the bourgeois migrant worker is expelled from her home in the form of unpaid reproductive transport labor so that on the other hand the proletarian migrant worker can be expelled from her home as an international migrant and then expelled from her home again as a commuting worker to do someone else’s reproductive activity. The burden of social reproduction then falls disproportionately on the last link in the chain: the unpaid reproductive labor that sustains the domestic and social life of the migrant family. This is what must be ultimately expelled to expand the market of social reproduction at another level. This expulsion falls disproportionally on migrant women from the global south who must somehow reproduce their family’s social conditions, commute, and then reproduce someone else’s family’s conditions well.19
Neoliberalism thus works on both fronts at the same time. On one side it increasingly withdraws and/or privatizes state social services that aid in social reproductive activities (child care, health care, public transit, and so on) while at the same increasing transport and commute times making a portion of those activities increasingly difficult for workers. On the other side it introduces the same structural adjustment policies (curtailed state and increased privatization) into the global South with the effect of mass economic migration to Northern countries where migrants can become waged producers in what was previously an “unproductive” (with respect to capital) sector of human activity: social reproduction itself.
Conclusion
This is the sense in which migrants play a constitutive role in the kinopolitics of social reproduction and neoliberal expansion. In other words, neoliberal migration has made possible a new level of commodification of social reproduction itself. Waged domestic labor is not new, of course, but what is new is the newly expanded nature of this sector of labor and its entanglement with a global regime of neoliberal expulsion and forced migration.
One of the features that defines the uniquely neoliberal form of social reproduction today is the degree to which capitalism has relied directly on economically liberal trade policies and politically liberal international governments in order to redistribute record-breaking numbers of “surplus migrant reproductive labor” into Western countries. Global migration is therefore not the side-effect of neoliberal globalization; it is the main effect. Neoliberalism should thus be understood as a migration regime for expanding Western power through the expulsion and accumulation of migrant reproductive labor.
▻https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2019/02/28/three-theses-on-neoliberal-migration-and-social-reproducti
#migrations #exploitation #néolibéralisme #mobilité #travail #main_d'oeuvre #reproduction_sociale #philosophie
Mise en exergue d’une citation (fin de l’article) :
Global migration is therefore not the side-effect of neoliberal globalization; it is the main effect. Neoliberalism should thus be understood as a migration regime for expanding Western power through the expulsion and accumulation of migrant reproductive labor.
Article publié ici :
#ACME - numéro spécial sur « Border Imperialism »
Situating Border Imperialism
Levi Gahman, Elise Hjalmarson, Amy Cohen, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, Enrica Rigo, Sarah Launius, Geoffrey Boyce, Adam Aguirre, Elsa Noterman, Eli Meyerhoff, Amílcar Sanatan
Border Imperialism, Racial Capitalism, and Geographies of Deracination
Levi Gahman, Elise Hjalmarson
“Slavery hasn’t ended, it has just become modernized”: Border Imperialism and the Lived Realities of Migrant Farmworkers in #British_Columbia, #Canada
Amy Cohen
Borders re/make Bodies and Bodies are Made to Make Borders: Storying Migrant Trajectories
Sutapa Chattopadhyay
Re-gendering the Border: Chronicles of Women’s Resistance and Unexpected Alliances from the Mediterranean Border
Enrica Rigo
Drawing the Line: Spatial Strategies of Community and Resistance in Post-SB1070 #Arizona
Geoffrey A Boyce, Sarah Launius, Adam O Aguirre
Revolutionary Scholarship by Any Speed Necessary: Slow or Fast but for the End of This World
Eli Meyerhoff, Elsa Noterman
Borders and Marxist Politics in the Caribbean: An Interview with #Earl_Bousquet on the Workers Revolutionary Movement in St. Lucia
Earl Bousquet, Interviewed by: Amílcar Sanatan
#revue #frontières #impérialisme #déracinement #esclavagisme #capitalisme_racial #déracinement #Caraïbes #femmes #genre #résistance_féminine #USA #Etats-Unis #corps #agriculture #exploitation
Quand l’#Inde s’urbanise. Entretien avec #Marie-Hélène_Zerah
Selon Marie-Hélène Zérah, le développement des #villes indiennes se caractérise par une dynamique de #privatisation_informelle et créative. Par-delà le paradigme réducteur de la « #ville_néolibérale », elle brosse le portrait d’un #urbanisme bricolé et fondé sur l’#exploitation des #migrants et des basses #castes.
Sierra Leone : heurts mortels autour des plantations Socfin
▻http://www.lequotidien.lu/a-la-une/sierra-leone-deux-morts-et-des-milliers-de-deplaces-autour-des-plantatio
Deux morts, des villageois battus par les forces de l’ordre et des milliers d’autres fuyant leurs domiciles dans le chefferie de Sahn Malen, dans le sud-est de la #Sierra_Leone : ces événements d’une extrême gravité se sont déroulés le lundi 21 janvier dans les villages riverains d’une plantation de #palmiers_à_huile exploitée par SAC, une filiale de la multinationale luxembourgeoise Socfin dont les deux principaux actionnaires sont l’homme d’affaires belge Hubert #Fabri (50,2% du capital) et le groupe français Bolloré (38,7%), contrôlé par le milliardaire Vincent #Bolloré. Outre l’huile de palme, un marché en pleine expansion, Socfin est également spécialisée dans la culture de l’#hévéa dont est extrait le caoutchouc naturel.
Selon une vingtaine d’organisations de la société civile, la répression à Sahn Malen est intervenue après le déclenchement d’une grève pour protester contre les mauvaises #conditions_de_travail et les faibles rémunérations des employés de SAC. Ce mouvement s’inscrit dans un conflit plus large sur l’occupation des terres, soit plus de 18 000 hectares, dont Maloa, une association de défense des riverains, juge qu’elles ont été accaparées par la multinationale. « Avant, nous avions de quoi cultiver et nous pouvions nourrir nos familles, ça allait plutôt bien. Maintenant, nos villages sont dans la #plantation, Socfin a pris nos terres, nous ne pouvons plus cultiver, nous n’avons plus de nourriture. Nous dépendons entièrement de Socfin pour le travail », témoignait en octobre dernier une représentante des riverains, invitée au Luxembourg par un collectif d’ONG (lire ci-dessous). L’élection du président Julius Maada Bio, en mars 2018, leur avait pourtant fait espérer une résolution du conflit foncier.
Cantine fermée sur le chantier Google à Baudour : « un foutoir social » selon l’auditeur du travail
▻https://www.rtbf.be/info/regions/detail_baudour-nouvelle-infraction-surle-chantier-fermeture-de-la-cantine?id=10
Troisième descente en quelques mois sur le chantier Google de Baudour pour les services d’inspection du travail. Et troisième découverte d’une infraction sociale. Vendredi, l’auditorat du travail du Hainaut a découvert une fraude du côté de la cantine du chantier. Neuf travailleurs y étaient déclarés 3 à 4 heures par jour via une société d’intérim alors qu’ils prestaient entre 8 et 10 heures par jour.
Une nouvelle infraction sociale sur le chantier Google à Baudour. A la cantine, le travail au noir était la règle (photo prétexte). - © DR « Le responsable de la cantine a tout de suite reconnu l’infraction », a indiqué l’auditeur du travail, Charles-Eric Clesse. « Le salaire afférent aux heures non déclarées était payé en noir à partir de la caisse de la cantine ». En attendant la remise en ordre et le paiement d’une amende, les scellés ont été placés sur la cantine et les badges des travailleurs ont été bloqués. La cantine est donc fermée et un millier d’ouvriers est privé de repas. Ils devront prévoir leur pique-nique, car "le sous-traitant en charge de cette cantine ne peut faire appel à un autre personnel, il doit absolument régulariser les salaires des travailleurs en place et payer la régularisation".
Plus de trois millions pour les anciennes infractions
Plusieurs infractions ont été découvertes depuis novembre 2018 par l’auditorat du travail sur le chantier Google à Baudour. Le géant américain de l’informatique y construit actuellement un nouveau centre de données. Selon l’auditeur du travail, entre 570 et 600 badges d’accès de travailleurs en situation sociale illégale ont été supprimés depuis novembre. Ces travailleurs non-déclarés et opérant pour des sociétés sous-traitantes étaient d’origine notamment roumaine, bulgare, hongroise ou encore britannique.
La société Google avait réagi début décembre après la découverte des infractions sociales et avait demandé que les problèmes rencontrés soient réglés le plus rapidement possible. L’auditeur du travail a indiqué lundi que les amendes et régularisations ont été payées ou en passe de l’être, soit environ 1,5 million d’euros en amendes pénales et plus de 1,5 millions d’euros en régularisations.
Face à ces infractions à répétition, l’auditorat du travail du Hainaut commence à s’impatienter. « Ça devient très problématique. Ce chantier est un foutoir social », estime Charles-Eric Clesse. « À un moment où un autre, mon office mettra les scellés sur l’ensemble du chantier. Et on ne le rouvrira que lorsque l’entreprise ISG, qui en est responsable, nous donnera les garanties que tout se qui se passe sur le site est légal ».
#google #fraude #esclavage #Belgique #travailleurs_détachés #travail #intérim #dumping_social #exploitation #UE #union_européenne #gafa Baudour, en Belgique c’est à quelques Km du Shape, #OTAN #NATO
Baudour : de nombreuses infractions en matière de dumping social à nouveau constatées sur le chantier Google
►https://seenthis.net/messages/737761
Nouvelle descente sur le chantier de Google à Baudour : 227 travailleurs illégaux découverts
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/741914
#Courchevel : quel statut pour les #travailleurs_saisonniers ?
Les victimes du drame de Courchevel étaient des travailleurs saisonniers, parfois logés dans des conditions insalubres.
« Féminisme et antispécisme ne doivent pas être perçus comme deux luttes séparées mais comme des mouvements solidaires qui se battent contre des formes de domination liées par un agenda largement commun. Les féministes, et plus généralement les militant·e·s progressistes, ne peuvent faire l’impasse d’une remise en question de la violence envers les autres animaux : ne pas remettre en question le spécisme revient à contribuer aux mêmes schémas de violence, d’arbitraire et d’injustice que ceux qui fondent le patriarcat, la suprématie blanche et le capacitisme. »
#féminisme #antispécisme #CauseAnimale #végétarisme #vegan #veganisme #AnimalLiberation #écoféminisme #animal #femme #éthique #oppression #patriarcat #SuprématismeHumain #exploitation #domination
Home in body bags - calls for action as Bangladesh migrant deaths spike
At least 3,793 Bangladeshis have died while working abroad last year, the highest annual toll since 2005
▻http://news.trust.org/item/20190121163026-wkfyx
#travailleurs_étrangers #travail #migrations #migrants_bangladais #Bangladesh #décès #morts #statistiques #exploitation #esclavage_moderne #chiffres
ping @reka
L’étrange
Récit polyphonique brillant et captivant, L’étrange nous fait percevoir le destin dramatique d’un étranger clandestin, en même temps qu’il met en lumière une douloureuse question d’actualité. Avec des animaux pour personnages, dans un pays qui n’est jamais cité, cette histoire revêt une dimension universelle et se lit comme une fable. La fable d’une épopée moderne dont personne n’est étranger.
#BD #bande_dessinée #sans-papiers #migrations #jungle #détention_administrative #rétention #campement #livre #Jérôme_Ruillier #langue #sans-abri #logement #hébergement #SDF #exploitation #travail #régularisation
Je pense que c’est une très bonne #ressources_pédagogiques...
Bricked in by poverty, Cambodia’s farmers fight debt bondage
Bopha should be in school but instead toils seven days a week in a searing brick kiln on the outskirts of Phnom Penh — a 14-year-old trapped in debt bondage in a boom industry preying on the poverty of Cambodia’s farmers.
Unpredictable weather linked to climate change is laying waste to Cambodian fields.
Saddled with debt from failed harvests, tens of thousands of farmers are turning to brick factories, where owners pay off their bills in exchange for labour.
The factories feed a surging construction sector, with high-rises cropping up around the capital Phnom Penh and beyond as money — much of it from China — pours in.
But for the farmers who shape and bake the clay bricks, Cambodia’s newfound urban prosperity has passed them by.
“I’m not going to school, I’m trying to help pay back the $4,000 that we owe, even if it will take years,” Bopha told AFP, as she loaded clay blocks on to a cart.
“For 10,000 bricks transported, we receive $7.50.”
Cambodian labour law prohibits those aged 12-15 from working if the job is hazardous or interferes with their education.
Yet Bopha works all week with her family.
They were driven into the industry two years ago after drought ruined their rice harvest, leaving them with no way of paying back money they borrowed to plant crops.
A factory owner took over the debt and they went to work in the kilns about an hour’s drive from the capital.
There, a dirt road leading to the sprawling facility is lined with hundreds of kilns resembling small pyramids.
Bopha and her family are likely to be trapped for years as they try to clear their debts, in what campaigners warn amounts to modern-day slavery.
Like most workers interviewed for this article they asked that their full names not be used for fear of losing their jobs.
The University of London said in an October study that brick factories in Cambodia were creating a “multi-generational workforce of adults and children trapped in debt bondage -– one of the most prevalent forms of modern slavery in the world”.
And the link between climate change and debt bondage is stark, explains Naly Pilorge, head of Cambodian rights NGO Licadho.
“Many industries around the world employ climate refugees,” she said. “But what is unique in the brick factories in Cambodia is that the vast majority of workers are imprisoned in debt bondage.”
Compensation is not enough to pay off debts quickly, and the workers become virtual prisoners of owners who do not let them leave until they pay what they owe — with some living there indefinitely.
– ’They ignore their rights’ -
Sov will soon be able to take a two-day holiday to return to her village in Stung Treng province in the north. But her husband and children must stay at the factory.
“The boss is afraid we will run away without paying,” she said, standing in a maze of bricks.
She started working at the factory two decades ago with a debt of $2,500. Now, at 57, she owes double that due to medical treatments and the cost of raising her children.
“I will have to leave this debt to my children,” she said.
Many workers have persistent health problems because of the smokey kilns, where men and women graft without gloves and masks. Complaints about respiratory or skin diseases, headaches and nosebleeds are common.
Dim Phally, 31, works in Thmey village with her husband. They have two kids.
When they went to borrow money, they were told by the brick factory owner to sign a document and pose for a photo holding the funds.
The contract says they have to pay back double if they try to escape. She still owes $1,500.
“I hope I can repay the owner and leave this place,” she said.
Kiln workers have little recourse if abuses occur.
Sok Kin, president of the Building and Wood Workers Trade Union of Cambodia, said bosses can be violent, but he cannot recall a case where any were prosecuted.
As for the workers, “they don’t understand their rights and are afraid of losing their jobs”.
He called for a minimum wage to be established and a nationwide campaign to raise awareness among the workers of their rights.
The government has repeatedly said it will investigate the situation. The Ministry of Labour did not respond to a request for comment.
Owners of multiple brick factories declined to speak with AFP.
Many workers do not see things changing soon.
“If we can repay the debt, we leave,” said Phan Heng, 33, while taking a break.
“And if we cannot repay it, we stay and work until our kids grow up and can help us.”
Et une vidéo sur le compte twitter de Al Jazeera :
▻https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1084563237406945282
ll #decreto_salvini e i nuovi schiavi nella baraccopoli di #San_Ferdinando
Il direttore della Caritas di Oppido: ’Oltre 3000 persone ’registrate’ a dicembre. Sono 600 in più dell’anno scorso a vivere in questo inferno"
▻https://www.corrieredellacalabria.it/regione/reggio-calabria/item/170235-il-decreto-salvini-e-i-nuovi-schiavi-nella-baraccopoli-
#agriculture #exploitation #travail #Calabre #Italie #clandestinisation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #bidonville
L’apprentissage en cuisine pour une fille « c’est comme un viol » - Témoignage d’une rescapée d’un univers machiste et impitoyable - Food & Sens
▻http://foodandsens.com/non-classe/lapprentissage-en-cuisine-pour-une-fille-cest-comme-un-viol-temoignage-
Dans ce huis clos de mecs, les « mains au cul » sont légion et les remarques machistes fusent : « Tu suces, toi ? », « tu as un joli petit cul, on doit être bien dedans ». Quand elle se plaint, la bande de muscles dédramatise : « Le prends pas comme ça, c’est pour rigoler. » Elle s’accroche mais finit par ne plus pouvoir retenir ses larmes. Quand elle ose enfin parler du problème à ses formateurs, elle se prend le boomerang. « Cela n’est pas la première fois que cela t’arrive, il faut te remettre en question », s’entend-elle dire. Coupable. Pas victime. Elle s’accroche à son rêve, bataille pour changer de stage. Le directeur finit par appeler le cuisinier harceleur. « Mais les deux se marrent au téléphone. Je les entends. Celui qui était en train de me sauver de cet enfer était dans le déni de ma situation. Je me sentais totalement illégitime dans ma requête », raconte la jeune femme qui tait tout et sombre alors dans une profonde dépression. Au fond du trou, Laetitia, fille de parents mélomanes, n’a plus pour perspective que le chant triste du désespoir.
#travail #formation #exploitation #violence #patriarcat #domination
Appli « Pile de CV » : Quand Pôle Emploi fait de la discrimination par l’argent | Le Club de Mediapart
▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-yves-mignet/blog/030119/appli-pile-de-cv-quand-pole-emploi-fait-de-la-discrimination-par-l-a
Mais le comble de l’ignominie est atteint lorsque l’on descend un petit peu plus bas dans l’application. Une petite ligne « Booster mon CV » (voir capture) apparaît. Et là, tout un manège se dévoile : on peut gagner 500 points d’XP en partageant son profil, mais également en regardant une vidéo promotionnelle, et, tenez-vous bien… en payant ! On peut donc lire « Ajoute 10 000 XP à ton profil pour une durée limitée : 5 jours, 16,99€ ! ». Surréaliste. Pôle Emploi, via son service « La Pile de CV », fait payer les demandeurs d’emploi pour les pistonner et leur permettre d’être contactés par des recruteurs. On est dans la stratosphère.
La mine de #charbon est toujours au centre d’#enjeux_économiques et d’#enjeux_environnementaux majeurs. Retour historique sur les manières de concilier (ou pas) les deux.
►https://sms.hypotheses.org/12873
#charbon, #mine, #histoire, #minier, #environnement, #environnemental, #exploitation, #écologie, #écologique, #géologie, #droit, #loi, #charbonnage, #ressource, #dégradation
Versailles : un ouvrier fait une chute mortelle à la préfecture BFM - 3 Janvier 2019
▻https://www.bfmtv.com/police-justice/versailles-un-ouvrier-fait-une-chute-mortelle-a-la-prefecture-1603582.html
Un homme de 68 ans qui nettoyait les gouttières sur le toit de la préfecture des Yvelines à Versailles a fait une chute mortelle ce jeudi après-midi, a-t-on appris auprès de la préfecture.
L’ouvrier, qui se trouvait sur le toit, a chuté de trois étages vers 17 heures et a succombé à ses blessures malgré l’intervention des secours. Il s’agissait d’un « autoentrepreneur, sous-traitant de l’entreprise » qui réalise ces travaux d’entretien sur le bâtiment public.
Une enquête a été confiée au commissariat de Versailles et le corps du défunt transporté à l’institut médico-légal de Garches (Hauts-de-Seine).
#auto-entrepreneur #auto-entrepreneurs #auto_entrepreneur #autoentrepreneur #autoentrepreneurs #esclavage #exploitation #travail #emploi #Versailles
Quand même ! Non, non, rien n’a changé, 1971 !
(sinon, un flash back temporel sur le look des années 70, :-)
Mon beauf enfant en était, j’ai suivi de loin les histoires de procès qui les opposaient aux producteurs où au final aucun des chanteurs n’a perçu de pourcentage sur les ventes faramineuses des albums. (parfois au delà des ventes des albums des Beatles)
#exploitation #show_business #enfance #Universal #rien_n'a_changé
▻https://www.20minutes.fr/culture/386938-20100224-poppys-perdent-proces-contre-universal
#Penan Community Mapping: Putting the Penan on the map
#vidéo reçue via la mailing-list du Bruno Manser Fonds (26.12.2018):
Chères amies, chers amis du Bruno Manser Fonds,
Que diriez-vous d’une brève pause durant les fêtes ? Alors prenez-vous 12 minutes et apprenez comment les Penan sauvent la forêt pluviale avec des cartes topographiques.
Avec la publication de 23 #cartes_topographiques de la forêt pluviale par le Bruno Manser Fonds, soudainement les Penan prennent vie sur la carte. Sur les documents du gouvernement, les rivières dans la zone penane n’ont pas de nom et les arbres utilisés par les Penan pour récolter le poison à flèches ou pour fabriquer des sarbacanes ne sont même pas signalés. Pour le gouvernement, les Penan ne disposent d’aucun droit sur leur forêt traditionnelle. C’est là qu’interviennent les cartes que nous avons publiées : elles démontrent les #droits_territoriaux des Penan et constituent un précieux instrument dans la lutte contre les sociétés forestières, qui défrichent illégalement la #forêt.
Apprenez dans le bref #documentaire comment ces cartes servent la #forêt_pluviale et les autochtones ! Nous vous souhaitons beaucoup de plaisir à visionner la vidéo !
Notre travail de cartographie a éveillé un grand enthousiasme en #Malaisie. D’autres villages de Penan, de même que d’autres groupes ethniques, se sont adressés à nous en nous demandant également de soutenir la cartographie de leur forêt pluviale. Ils souhaitent, au moyen des cartes, faire cesser les défrichages et la mise en place de plantations de #palmiers_à_huile sur leurs terres.
#déforestation #cartographie_participative #huile_de_palme #cartographie_communautaire #résistance #Bornéo #visibilité #Sarawak #Baram #biodiversité #répression #community_mapping #empowerment
–-------------
Quelques citations tirées de la vidéo...
Rainer Weisshaidinger, of the Bruno Manser Fonds:
“When we came to the Penan area, the maps we had were from the British. They were quite good in telling us the topography, but there were no names. It was empty maps. The British cartographers did not have the chance to go to the communities, so very few rivers had names in these maps”
#toponymie #géographie_du_vide #vide #cartographie_coloniale #colonialisme #post-colonialisme #exploitation
“Joining the Federation of Malaysia on 16th of September 1963, Sarawak was granted self-government free from the British colonial administration. However, the government undertook no effort to map the interior areas. This lead to unfair and unsustainable #exploitation of the land and its people”
#terre #terres
Voici un exemple des cartes officielles:
Simon Kaelin, of the Bruno Manser Founds:
“The perspective from the government for this area... It was an empty area, for logging activity, for palm oil activity. Open for concessions and open for making big money”
#extractivisme #concessions #déforestation
Lukas Straumann, of the Bruno Manser Founds:
“If you have a map with every river, having names (...) you see that it has been used for hundered years, it makes a really big difference”
"The Penan started mapping their lands back in the 1990s, when they heard from indigenous people in #Canada that they have been very successful in claiming back their lands from the Canadian government, with maps
Rainer Weisshaidinger, of the Bruno Manser Fonds:
“To understand why these maps are important for the Penan community, it is because there is the Penan knowledge inside these maps”
Bateudah, community mapper:
“Our work is to map the land. This is very important because it makes our community’s boundaries visibile”
Rose Melai, community mapper:
"All that is important in the forest is on the maps.
The Penan worked about 15 years on their map...
Au total, ils ont produit 23 cartes.
Voici le coffret avec les cartes:
Sophie Schwer, of the Bruno Manser Fonds:
When they started, they relied in easy techniques, like skatch mapping and just the compass:
But in the end they used the state-of-the art mapping #drones to present and show where their settlements are, so that they could no longer be neglected by the government.
Le “mapping drone”:
Peter Kallang, indigenous activist:
“Community mapping can help to eliminate or reduce the #corruption, because you have everything there in black and white. It is so transparent. So when the government gives timber licences, when it overlaps with these, we can see from the map”
Rainer Weisshaidinger, of the Bruno Manser Fonds:
“The map of the government, they represent the government’s perspective, which means: nobody is in this area. The Penan map represents the Penan perspective on their own area. If you look at these maps, you will see that the Penan are living in this area. On each of these maps, it’s not only a topographic knowledge, there is a small history specific of this area. Below that, the drone images are very important, because it is very easy to mark one point. In order to give credibility to these maps, it was very important for the Penan to also be able to fly over their own villages to get the images of their villages.”
Un cartographe autochtone:
“With these maps we document our history. Our myths and legends stay alive. The next generation will remember our way of life long after our elders have passed on”.
#mythes #légendes #histoire #mémoire
#ressources_pédagogiques (mais malheureusement la vidéo est disponible uniquement avec des sous-titres en anglais)
#géographie_politique
Et je suis sure que ça intéresse aussi @_kg_
C’est ce que je rêve qu’un jour puisse être fait au #Cambodge, avec #Mony_Hong :
Mony Hong, habité par la forêt
Comment réguler l’exploitation de notre attention ? | InternetActu
▻http://internetactu.blog.lemonde.fr/2018/12/27/comment-reguler-lexploitation-de-notre-attention
Dans Les marchands d’attention (The Attention Merchants, 2017, Atlantic Books, non traduit), le professeur de droit, spécialiste des réseaux et de la régulation des médias, Tim Wu (@superwuster), 10 ans après avoir raconté l’histoire des télécommunications et du développement d’internet dans The Master Switch (où il expliquait la tendance de l’industrie à créer des empires et le risque des industries de la technologie à aller dans le même sens), raconte, sur 400 pages, l’histoire de l’industrialisation des médias américains et de la publicité de la fin du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui. En passant d’une innovation médiatique l’autre, des journaux à la radio, de la télé à l’internet, Wu tisse une très informée histoire du rapport de l’exploitation commerciale de l’information et du divertissement. Une histoire de l’industrialisation des médias américains qui se concentre beaucoup sur leurs innovations et leurs modèles d’affaires, c’est-à-dire qui s’attarde à montrer comment notre #attention a été convertie en revenus, comment nous avons été progressivement cédés à la logique du #commerce – sans qu’on n’y trouve beaucoup à redire d’ailleurs.
La compétition pour notre attention n’a jamais cherché à nous élever, au contraire
Tout le long de cette histoire, Tim Wu insiste particulièrement sur le fait que la #capture_attentionnelle produite par les médias s’est faite par-devers nous. La question attentionnelle est souvent présentée comme le résultat d’une négociation entre l’utilisateur, le spectateur, et le service ou média qu’il utilise… mais aucun d’entre nous n’a jamais consenti à la capture attentionnelle, à l’#extraction de son attention. Il souligne notamment que celle-ci est plus revendue par les médias aux annonceurs, qu’utilisée par les médias eux-mêmes. Il insiste également à montrer que cette #exploitation vise rarement à nous aider à être en contrôle, au contraire. Elle ne nous a jamais apporté rien d’autre que toujours plus de contenus insignifiants. Des premiers journaux à 1 cent au spam publicitaire, l’exploitation attentionnelle a toujours visé nos plus vils instincts. Elle n’a pas cherché à nous élever, à nous aider à grandir, à développer nos connaissances, à créer du bien commun, qu’à activer nos réactions les plus instinctives. Notre exploitation commerciale est allée de pair avec l’évolution des contenus. Les journaux qui ont adopté le modèle publicitaire, ont également inventé des rubriques qui n’existaient pas pour mieux les servir : comme les faits divers, les comptes-rendus de procès, les récits de crimes… La compétition pour notre attention dégrade toujours les contenus, rappelle Tim Wu. Elle nous tourne vers « le plus tapageur, le plus sinistre, le plus choquant, nous propose toujours l’alternative la plus scandaleuse ou extravagante ». Si la publicité a incontestablement contribué à développer l’économie américaine, Wu rappelle qu’elle n’a jamais cherché à présenter une information objective, mais plutôt à déformer nos mécanismes de choix, par tous les moyens possibles, même par le mensonge. L’exploitation attentionnelle est par nature une course contre l’éthique. Elle est et demeure avant tout une forme d’exploitation. Une #traite, comme disait le spécialiste du sujet Yves Citton, en usant volontairement de ce vocabulaire marqué au fer.
Wu souligne que l’industrie des contenus a plus été complice de cette exploitation qu’autre chose. La presse par exemple, n’a pas tant cherché à contenir ou réguler la publicité et les revenus qu’elle générait, qu’à y répondre, qu’à évoluer avec elle, notamment en faisant évoluer ses contenus pour mieux fournir la publicité. Les fournisseurs de contenus, les publicitaires, aidés des premiers spécialistes des études comportementales, ont été les courtiers et les ingénieurs de l’#économie_de_l’attention. Ils ont transformé l’approche intuitive et improvisée des premières publicités en machines industrielles pour capturer massivement l’attention. Wu rappelle par exemple que les dentifrices, qui n’existaient pas vraiment avant les années 20, vont prendre leur essor non pas du fait de la demande, mais bien du fait de l’offensive publicitaire, qui s’est attaquée aux angoisses inconscientes des contemporains. Plus encore que des #ingénieurs de la demande, ces acteurs ont été des fabricants de #comportements, de mœurs…
Elle ne nous a jamais apporté rien d’autre que toujours plus de contenus insignifiants. Des premiers journaux à 1 cent au spam publicitaire, l’exploitation attentionnelle a toujours visé nos plus vils instincts. Elle n’a pas cherché à nous élever, à nous aider à grandir, à développer nos connaissances, à créer du bien commun, qu’à activer nos réactions les plus instinctives.