Poverty

The myth of rescuing sex workers

Policing, Poverty, Race, Sexuality, Trans matters, Women
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Molly Crabapple on how New York’s special prostitution courts still peddle the same tired myth of needing to “rescue” sex workers and hence put them more at risk:

Police are violent in general, and violent specifically to women they think are sex workers. According to a 2012 study by the Young Women’s Empowerment Project for young people who have sold sex, a third of all reported abuse came at the hands of the police. Sources told me officers had called women “sluts,” groped them during arrests, even made jerking-off motions with their batons in court. In the Brooklyn HTIC, RedUP saw a black woman who claimed to have been beaten so savagely by police that she landed in the hospital.

[…]

According to Kluger, the HTICs are decriminalizing prostitution in the court system, despite the arrests and incarcerations that underpin the courts. Her perception of sex workers comes from the women who have stood before her bench. To her, they seem “comatose,” emotionless, controlled by traffickers and pimps. To validate their emotions, Lee and Kluger both rely on long-discredited statistics that are mantras in the anti-trafficking world: “70 percent of trafficking is sex trafficking”; “the average age of entry into prostitution is 12 to 14 years old.”

And of course it’s mostly white middle class men and women who have the power to decide how to treat the largely black, latina, trans, working class women who the police pick up for their arrest quotas, their agency denied by those who seek to rescue them.

The culture of poverty does not exist

Life under Capitalism, Poverty, Race, US politics
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The importance of the culture-of-poverty approach is that it allows for recognition of the accumulated history of racism and inequality, but posits the ongoing effects of these as mediated through black cultural pathologies. It therefore permits American liberals to identify with opposition to racism while pushing them towards policy solutions geared towards the transformation of black people, and not American society.

With every crisis in Black America the same pathologies the Black community supposedly suffers from — veneration of the criminal lifestyle, lack of proper family structures, abhorrence of education as acting white — are trotted out as an explanation, by conservative commentators as that’s just how those people are, by supposed liberals as the unfortunate end product of Black history in America. There’s just one problem: they’re lies. The culture of poverty does not exist.

How banks rip off their poorest customers

Life under Capitalism, Poverty
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Another great example of how you’re nickled and dimed to death by the banks:

That’s right, an account with fewer features than a normal checking account (without the checks, for example) – and with a core “feature” that is free on every other account – will cost customers $60 a year. That’s not a lot, of course, but consider that the product is designed for low-income customers, who are typically on the knife’s edge with their finances. According to statistics from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the average individual in bankruptcy in 2012 was just $26 a month short on their expenses. So even small amounts count, especially when you’re paying for what should be free services. In essence, customers will give Bank of America $5 a month for the right to not be charged more.

You want unions with that burger?

Activism, Poverty, Unions, US politics
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A new wave of labour militancy has begun in the least organised sectors of the American economy:

Back in June 2012, eight immigrant workers peeling crawfish under sweatshop conditions for C.J.’s Seafood (then a Walmart supplier) went on strike in Louisiana. They stayed out for weeks, demanding an end to forced labor, wage theft, and other unfair labor practices—and they won. Following up on the C.J.’s workers’ successful action, Walmart warehouse workers in California and Illinois walked out in September, calling for improved workplace safety and a fair wage. A month later, Walmart associates walked out at 28 stores in twelve cities. The strikes marked the first time in history that Walmart retail workers had ever gone on strike, and were quickly followed by more strikes and demonstrations on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

Why this, why now? Because increasingly, mcJobs are the future and if that’s the case, workers need to be paid a proper living wage:

Lousy jobs at fast-food joints and retail stores have been around for a long time. Sam Walton (of Walmart) and Ray Kroc (of McDonald’s) designed their business models around underpaying their employees. But experts have always brushed off calls to improve these jobs, arguing that they were stepping-stones—summer jobs for teenagers; flexible, part-time jobs for moms; or extra-cash jobs for retirees. It didn’t matter that the jobs paid low wages and offered little opportunity for advancement because they weren’t designed to support a family or be a career.

But, as good jobs have steadily disappeared over the past three decades, these rationalizations are starting to sound pretty tired. A recent report by Catherine Ruetschlin at the think-tank Demos shows that more than 90% of retail workers are over the age of 20 and that, for the vast majority, this is their full-time, long-term occupation. Labor researchers Stephanie Luce and Naoki Fujita paint a similar picture in a study of New York City-area retail workers. According to their survey, the median age of retail workers in New York is 24 years and the average retail worker has been working in the industry for five years.