Taco Bell apologizes and says that it does not ban employees from wearing Black Lives Matter masks, after a worker was fired for doing so in a viral video
Kate Taylor and Palmer Haasch Jun 18, 2020, 10:06 AM
Taco Bell is facing backlash after a video showing a worker being fired for wearing a Black Lives Matter mask on the job went viral. Taco Bell


A video of an employee who was fired from a Youngstown, Ohio Taco Bell location for wearing a Black Lives Matter mask to work went viral on Thursday. 

Taco Bell told Insider the chain apologized to Denzel Skinner, the worker who was fired, last week and that the chain does not prohibit employees from wearing Black Lives Matter masks. 

#RIPTacoBell was trending in the United States on Twitter on Thursday, with people sharing messages of support for Skinner as well as recipes to recreate Taco Bell favorites at home.

Taco Bell is facing backlash after a video showing a worker being fired for wearing a Black Lives Matter mask went viral.

Denzel Skinner went live on Facebook on June 8, telling viewers that he was losing his job at a Taco Bell location on Belmont Ave. in Youngstown, Ohio, because he was wearing a Black Lives Matter mask.

Skinner told WBKN First News that he had been a shift leader at the location for eight years, and said that the store's air conditioning had broken — which meant the surgical masks provided to employees made it harder to breathe when it was warm.
—elijah daniel (@elijahdaniel) June 18, 2020

He said that he decided to switch to the Black Lives Matter mask because it was easier to breathe through. When a manager asked him to take it off, he told WBKN First News, he refused and walked out of the restaurant. He said that he was told if he walked out, he would lose his job. In the Facebook live video, a female voice, allegedly belonging to the manager, can be heard saying, "You can't bring politics into the building."

"Bro, I'm not bringing politics in," Skinner says in the video. "This is what I'm standing for. How is this considered politics?"

In a statement to Insider, Taco Bell said the chain was "disappointed to learn about the incident," saying that "we believe Black Lives Matter." The chain said it is working closely with the franchisee who operates the Youngstown, Ohio, location to address the issue.

"Our Chief People Officer and Yum!'s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer spoke with Denzel last week to apologize and discuss the situation," a Taco Bell representative said in a statement. "Our goal is to ensure our policies are inclusive and keep our team members and customers safe."

"While our policies at restaurants do not prohibit Team Members from wearing Black Lives Matter masks, we are working to clarify our mask policy so this doesn't happen again," the statement continued.

Skinner did not respond to Insider's request for comment on the incident.

Taco Bell posted a statement to its Twitter page on Thursday evening, saying that it believed the Black Lives Matter movement "is a human rights issue and not a political one."
—Taco Bell (@tacobell) June 18, 2020

"We do not tolerate racism or violence against the Black community and we demand inclusivity," Taco Bell said.

"We will hold yourselves accountable," it pledges.

Companies' responses to Black Lives Matter masks have sparked backlash

After the death of George Floyd, Taco Bell's CEO Mark King released an open letter, saying he and the chain were committed to long-term solutions to fight racism.

"I'm a white male," King wrote. "I grew up in the Midwest and now live in Southern California, where the Black population is a small percentage of the community. I will not pretend to understand the weight of the years of injustice and inequality that our Black friends and colleagues have experienced."

In the letter, King announced that Taco Bell's corporate office held a panel on combatting systematic racism led by the company's chief diversity and inclusion officer. King said that Taco Bell's restaurant workers will have the opportunity to do the same.

Read more: CEOs at fast-food giants including McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, and Starbucks speak out to support protests, as some face internal reckonings and criticism

Starbucks

This is the latest incident in which a company has faced backlash for banning Black Lives Matter face masks on the job.

Last week, Starbucks reversed its policy to allow employees to wear pins or t-shirts that support Black Lives Matter, after facing backlash over its previous policy banning such merchandise. Wawa similarly reversed its policy, allowing workers to wear Black Lives Matter pins after originally banning employees from wearing masks or anything else with Black Lives Matter written on it.

Other companies that have faced backlash on Black Lives Matter masks have yet to announce new policies.

One Publix worker quit due to the company's policy banning all "non-Publix messaging" — including writing Black Lives Matter — on masks, The Tampa Bay Times reports. The Concord Monitor reports that two Whole Foods workers were sent home from work for wearing Black Lives Matter masks.
After Skinner's video crossed over to Twitter, #RIPTacoBell started trending in the United States

In the morning of June 18, Elijah Daniel, a social media personality and music artist, reposted a cut of Denzel Skinner's video that was originally uploaded to Twitter by @tyrone_brother. Shortly before reposting the video, he quoted the statement that Taco Bell had posted on Twitter on June 2, saying "nahhhhhh sorry we sad about it but y'all goin too" and using the #RIPTacoBell hashtag.

—elijah daniel (@elijahdaniel) June 18, 2020

Daniel reposted the cut of Skinner's video shortly after with the caption, "Taco Bell manager firing an employee for supporting BLM :/ #RIPTacoBell." The video quickly began to gain traction on Twitter and has amassed over 1 million views; Elijah's tweet stands at nearly 30,000 likes as of midday on Thursday.

Daniel told Insider that since he started urging people to use the hashtag #BLUEFALL to document instances of police brutality amid ongoing protests, people have been sending him videos to signal boost (he has over 715,000 followers on Twitter).

Daniel has a history with Taco Bell itself — he has a Taco Bell tattoo and said that he's been involved with the company for over eight years — but said that when someone sent him the video he posted it because "f-ck Taco Bell, you can't claim to be the millennial brand and then just not be on the right part of this."

Since Daniel reposted the video and started the #RIPTacoBell hashtag, people have been flooding it with support for Denzel Skinner while also dunking on Taco Bell's food and posting recipes to recreate classics. One TikTok showing people how to make a Crunchwrap Supreme has amassed hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter.

—Kano :-)) (@webbgangang) June 18, 2020

Daniel told Insider that his extremely active fan base helped to get the #RIPTacoBell hashtag off of the ground. "I'll put something out there and they're like, alright, we're trending this right now," he said. "We don't stand for this. Everybody has very similar beliefs, or we're accepting of each others' beliefs because they're not radical, I think."

When asked about Taco Bell's statement and apology to Skinner, Daniel said, Taco Bell "posted two weeks ago that they were 'going mute for a week' to make changes, sort of the opposite of what any brand should be doing, and still have yet to do anything publicly. Whether they're doing things privately, that's fine, but this isn't a time to be private. It's great that they apologized, but what is being done about his firing? The manager?"

Daniel thinks that the incident is a testament to the power of social media, pointing to the amount of time it took for Skinner's video to truly surface online as well as how social media criticism has led to outcomes like Aunt Jemima changing its name and losing its mascot.

"This was a Black man pleading for people to share this video and get him help because this was a place that was hiding what they were doing," he said. "I think the main point is to keep spreading it."

How police departments can identify and oust killer cops

Protesters march on June 6, 2020, in New York. Demonstrations continue across the United States in protest of racism and police brutality, sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Ragan Clark)

Temitope Oriola, University of Alberta
The global condemnation of the death of George Floyd, one of the latest in a constellation of officer-involved deaths of unarmed civilians, has grown into a worldwide social movement for disbanding or defunding police.
At the far end of the debate, there are those calling for abolishing the police altogether. On the other hand, there are those wishing to defund the police. This means shifting significant material resources from police departments to social services for issues such as mental health.
In cases of mental distress or welfare checks, for example, social service providers intervene rather than police, who have proven ill-equipped to deal with people in mental distress.

Protesters demonstrate against police brutality in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 8, 2020. The protest against police brutality in Kenya was in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

There is growing acknowledgment that the attitude of officers towards the human rights of suspects needs to change, as do the numbers of police-involved killings. The research on excessive use of force by police and the sociological context and psychological characteristics of killer cops point to useful policy measures.

Psychological traits and screening

Killer cops and those who routinely mistreat civilians tend to be action-oriented. Research suggests that they are prone to boredom and suffer from major personality disorders. These include mood swings, impulsivity, lack of empathy, narcissism and anti-social personal disorder. Many of these traits begin early in life.

Demonstrators march on Toronto Police Headquarters to protest the death of Sammy Yatim in Toronto in August 2013. Yatim was shot by police during a confrontation on a streetcar a month earlier. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Diversity workshops, training or cultural sensitivity have limited utility to help such officers. The primary solution is to not hire them in the first place. This speaks to the need for greater psychological screening by police organizations.
A 2014 report by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, submitted to Toronto Police Service following the death of Sammy Yatim in July 2013, calls for “screening out psychopathology and screening in for desirable traits such as emotional intelligence, empathy, tolerance of diversity, and patience.”

Hire more women

Women are less likely to support use of force than men. My collaborative research in Alberta shows that women are less likely to support use of so-called less-than-lethal force options like conducted energy weapons.
The evidence in support of reducing deadly force by hiring more women in police departments is overwhelming. Female officers are less likely to use (excessive) force as they deploy de-escalation techniques and engage verbally.

Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields, left, is seen speaking during a news conference in January 2018. Shields has been lauded for wading into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters and listening to them, and for swiftly terminating police officers who assaulted demonstrators. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Police departments with a reasonable number of women tend to record lower levels of officer-involved killings. However, the number of women is important. Female officers in male-dominated police departments may exhibit hyper-masculine traits in an attempt to fit in. They may be just as brutal as men.
There is no agreement on what constitutes a reasonable number. A gender-balanced police service should be ultimate priority. I suggest a minimum threshold of 40 per cent female officers.

University graduate-only officers

Officers without university degrees populate the ranks of killer cops. Officers with university degrees are more likely to request mental health support for suspects and demonstrate a higher appreciation for the complexity of social life, individual problems and subtleties of working in an increasingly diverse environment.
Officers with university degrees exhibit stronger verbal skills, effective communication and empathy. The Iacobucci report recommends recruiting officers from “specific educational programs” such as nursing and social work in order to foster “a compassionate response to people in crisis.”

Ethno-racial diversity

Evidence from the United States is less settled regarding racial characteristics of killer cops. However, most studies find that white, non-Hispanic officers are more likely to shoot or kill civilians. A few studies suggest Black officers are more likely to shoot and kill civilians. These have been criticized for poor methodology.
In Canada, most killer cops appear to be white men. An ethno-racially diverse police service is integral for building public trust and inclusivity.

Training

Much of the current training for many police organizations focuses on deployment of lethal force or marksmanship. That’s a waste of time and sets up officers for frustration given today’s realities. Once out of training, officers realize that people get meaninglessly drunk, abusers beat their spouses and citizens experience psychotic episodes.
Somehow, the police are required to respond to all these matters. These are in fact some of the most common issues brought to police attention. These scenarios may be frustrating for action-oriented officers. Action-oriented officers may see only moral failing in each case and respond with disdain and unnecessary force.

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Read more: Rise of the SWAT team: Routine police work in Canada is now militarized

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The professional officer will see “clients” in need of bureaucratic assistance and attempt to de-escalate.
There is a need to overhaul officer training and extend it to at least one full year of rigorous classroom engagement with human rights, mental health issues and diversity, among others.

Accountability

The main officer involved in George Floyd’s death had 17 complaints in his file. Three of those involved shootings, with one death. This is a poor disciplinary record.

This May 31, 2020 photo provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff shows former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was arrested in the death of George Floyd. (Hennepin County Sheriff via AP)

Such officers make policing more difficult and dangerous. The Minneapolis Police Department bears responsibility for keeping such a person in service.
Undesirable people may sometimes enter into police service but must be promptly removed once their engagement with colleagues, superiors and the public begins to reflect certain troubling patterns.
The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) charged two officers in June 2020. They were the first charges brought forward against officers by ASIRT since its establishment in 2008. This is mind-boggling given incidents of excessive use of force in Alberta. Tolerating errant cops is dangerous for public trust.

The way forward

I propose a two-pronged policy — a “kill-and-go” policy and “three strikes policy” — for police accountability.
Kill-and-go means any officer who kills an unarmed civilian or a suspect who had a weapon but did not deploy it against an officer is dismissed from service and prosecuted.
The three strikes proposal is similar to the disused California anti-crime law of the same name. Any officer involved in three excessive use-of-force incidents in which a civilian is mistreated and sustains injuries is automatically dismissed from service and prosecuted. There should be no expiry to each strike across an officer’s career.
Policing is also a well-paying occupation relative to entry qualifications and length of training, at least in Canada and many parts of the U.S.
The RCMP notes that the annual salary of a newly sworn-in officer is $53,144 and increases to $86,110 within 36 months of service. There are postdoctoral fellows working on life-saving biomedical research who make less than $50,000 a year, despite possessing hard-earned PhDs. The government and public should get value for the money spent on police by selecting appropriate people.
Temitope Oriola, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Alberta
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Animals that can do math understand more language than we think

In experiments, African grey parrots have shown an ability with numbers. (Shutterstock)

Erik Nelson, Dalhousie University
It is often thought that humans are different from other animals in some fundamental way that makes us unique, or even more advanced than other species. These claims of human superiority are sometimes used to justify the ways we treat other animals, in the home, the lab or the factory farm.
So, what is it that makes us so different from other animals? Many philosophers, both past and present, have pointed to our linguistic abilities. These philosophers argue that language not only allows us to communicate with each other, but also makes our mental lives more sophisticated than those that lack language. Some philosophers have gone so far as to argue that creatures that lack a language are not capable of being rational, making inferences, grasping concepts or even having beliefs or thoughts.

An illustration of a sulky chimpanzee from Charles Darwin’s 1872 book, ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.’ (Wellcome Collection)

Even if we are willing to accept these claims, what should we think of animals who are capable of speech? Many types of birds, most famously parrots, are able to make noises that at least sound linguistic, and gorillas and chimpanzees have been taught to communicate using sign language. Do these vocalizations or communications indicate that, like humans, these animals are also capable of sophisticated mental processes?

The philosophy of animal language

Philosophers have generally answered this question by denying that talking parrots and signing gorillas are demonstrating anything more than clever mimicry. Robert Brandom, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh, has argued that if a parrot says “red” when shown red objects and “blue” when presented with blue ones, it has not actually demonstrated that it understands the meaning of those words. According to Brandom — and many other philosophers — understanding the meaning of a word requires understanding both the meaning of many other words and the connections that exist between those words.

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Read more: Can we really know what animals are thinking?

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Imagine that you bring your toddler niece to a petting zoo for the first time, and ask her if she is able to point to the rabbits. If she successfully does, this might seem like a good indication that she understands what a rabbit is. However, you now ask her to point to the animals. If she points to some rocks on the ground instead of pointing to the rabbits or the goats, does she actually understand what the word “rabbit” means? Understanding “rabbit” involves understanding “animal,” as well as the connection between these two things.
So if a parrot is able to tell us the colour of different objects, that does not necessarily show that the parrot understands the meanings of those words. To do that, a parrot would need to demonstrate that it also understands that red and blue fall underneath the category of colour, or that if something is red all over, it cannot, at the same time, be blue all over.
What sort of behaviour would demonstrate that a parrot or a chimpanzee did understand the words it was using? As a philosopher who focuses on the study of animal cognition, I examine both empirical and theoretical work to answer these types of questions.
In recent research, I argue that testing an animal’s arithmetical capabilities can provide insight into just how much they are capable of understanding. In order to see why, we need to take a brief detour through the philosophy of mathematics.

Counting animals

In the late 1800s, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege tried to demonstrate that arithmetic is an objective science. Many philosophers and mathematicians at the time thought that arithmetic was merely an artifact of human psychology. Frege worried that such an understanding would make arithmetic entirely subjective, placing it on no firmer ground than the latest fashion trends.

The title page of Gottlob Frege’s ‘Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik’ (The Foundations of Arithmetic), published in 1884.

In The Foundations of Arithmetic, Frege begins by logically analyzing what sorts of things numbers are. He thinks that the key to this investigation is figuring out what it takes to answer the question “how many?”
If I hand you a deck of cards and ask, “How many?” without specifying what I want counted, it would be difficult to even figure out what sort of answer I am looking for. Am I asking you how many decks of cards, how many cards all together, how many suits or any of the other number of ways of dividing up the deck? If I ask, “How many suits?” and you respond “four,” you are demonstrating not just that you can count, but that you understand what suits are.
Frege thought that the application of number labels depends on being able to grasp the connection between what is being counted and how many of them there are. Replying “four” to the question “How many?” might seem like a disconnected act, like parrots merely calling red objects “red.” However, it is more like your niece pointing to the rabbits while also understanding that rabbits are animals. So, if animals are able to reliably respond correctly to the question “How many?” this demonstrates that they understand the connection between the numerical amount and the objects they are being asked about.

Animal mathematical literacy

One example of non-human animals demonstrating a wide range of arithmetical capabilities is the work that Irene Pepperberg did with African grey parrots, most famously her subjects Alex and Griffin.

Alex, a grey African parrot, was able to demonstrate an ability with numbers.

In order to test Alex’s arithmetic capabilities, Pepperberg would show him a set of objects on a tray, and would ask, “How many?” for each of the objects. For example, she would show him a tray with differently shaped objects on it and ask, “How many four-corner?” (Alex’s word for squares.) Alex was able to reliably provide the answer for amounts up to six.
Alex was also able to provide the name for the object if asked to look for a number of those objects. For example, if a tray had different quantities of coloured objects on it including five red objects, and Alex was asked, “What colour is five?” Alex was able to correctly respond by saying “red.”
Pepperberg’s investigations into the ability to learn and understand basic arithmetic provide examples that show that Alex was able to do more than simply mimic human sounds. Providing the right word when asked, “How many?” required him to understand the connections between the numerical amount and the objects being asked about.

Animal mathematical skills

While Pepperberg’s results are impressive, they are far from unique. Numerical abilities have been identified in many different species, most prominently chimpanzees. Some of these capabilities demonstrate that the animals understand the underlying connections between different words and labels. They are therefore doing something more than just mimicking the sounds and actions of the humans around them.
Animals that can do basic arithmetic show us that some really are capable of understanding the terms they use and the connections between them. However, it is still an open question whether their understanding of these connections is a result of learning linguistic expressions, or if their linguistic expressions simply help demonstrate underlying capabilities.
Either way, claims that humans are uniquely able to understand the meanings of words are a bit worse for wear.
Erik Nelson, Phd Student, Philosophy, Dalhousie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Remote work: Employers are taking over our living spaces and passing on costs

COVID-19 has required many employees to work from home and set up home offices, incurring costs and bringing their employer into their private space. (Pixabay)

Richard Shearmur, McGill University
As many office workers adapt to remote work, cities may undergo fundamental change if offices remain under-utilized. Who will benefit if working from home becomes the post-pandemic norm?
Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers.
Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of what urban theorist Andy Merrifield calls parasitic capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public — and now personal — realm, rather than on generating new value.

The allure of remote work to employers

After three months of remote work, some companies are moving towards permanent home-based work: Shopify, for instance, has announced that its employees will continue to work from home after the pandemic.
Indeed, pre-coronavirus estimates suggest savings (for the employer) of about US$10,000 per year for each employee who works from home.
Though employers are backed by a chorus of remote work proselytizers, others note the loneliness, reduced productivity and inefficiencies of prolonged remote work.

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Read more: How remote working can increase stress and reduce well-being

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Whatever the personal and productivity impacts of remote work, the savings of US$10,000 per year are the employer’s. In effect, this represents an offloading of costs onto employees — a new type of enclosure.
In 16th-century Britain, powerful landowners expropriated common land from communities, often for the purpose of running lucrative sheep farms. Today, businesses like Shopify appear to be expropriating their employee’s private living space.

As people work from home, employers are saving money while moving into the private spaces of their workers. (Piqsels)

The employee’s perspective

If working from home becomes permanent, employees will have to dedicate part of their private space to work. This requires purchasing desks, ergonomic chairs and office equipment.
It also means having private space dedicated to work: the space must be heated, cleaned, maintained and paid for. Permanent remote work cannot take place at the corner of a kitchen table peering into a laptop while perched on a stool.
How much will this cost employees?
That depends on many things, but for purposes of illustration, I have run some estimates for Montréal. The exercise is simple but important, since it brings these costs out of the realm of speculation into the realm of meaningful discussion.

Rental costs in Montréal and Westmount

Taking as a starting point 2019 rental values published by Canada’s Mortgage and Housing Corp., I estimate what it would cost to rent an apartment with one extra room in the city of Montréal and in its upmarket suburb, Westmount. Here’s the data:

CMHC rental values for three-bedroom plus apartments in 2019 in Montréal and Westmount. CMHC, Author provided

The CMHC does not report rental values for three-bedroom apartments; it only reports the average rental value for apartments of three bedrooms and more.
Obviously, the average rent for apartments with three bedrooms is less than the average rent for apartments with three bedrooms and more. I assume that if an employee moves from a two-bedroom to a three-bedroom apartment, the increase in rent is 66 per cent of the increase in rent between a two-bedroom and a three-bedroom-plus apartment.
The extra costs (and savings) an employee would incur working from home, and adding an extra room for work purposes, are presented below.
Transportation savings are modest — half the value of a monthly pass, because it’s assumed employees will still need to move around the city for some work purposes even while working from home.

Extra costs to employees of remote work. CMHC, Author provided

I made some assumptions here of a monthly cleaning service at $100 a month, $50 to $65 a month in extra utilities, the aforementioned public transit savings of 50 per cent of a monthly pass, and $1,000 a year in office and other equipment.
The total annual costs in the above figures come out of employees’ after-tax income. In Québec, the marginal tax rate for earnings of $50,000 and $150,000 a year are 40.5 per cent and 54.8 per cent respectively.
Given the costs presented in the above graph, in order to fully compensate employees for setting up and maintaining office space at home, the employer would need to raise employees’ pay by between $5,871 and $16,285. The lower number corresponds to a move from a one- to two-bedroom apartment in Montréal for an employee earning $50,000 — in other words, a net of $3,493 when taking into account the higher apartment rent.
The higher number corresponds to the same move in Westmount for an employee earning $150,000, or a $7,369 net. An alternative would be for the employer to cover the total costs directly as expenses, and the employee could require a lower increase in income if they obtain some tax rebates for expenses related to their jobs.
These rough calculations show that the savings made by employers when their staff works from home are of similar magnitude to the compensation workers should receive for setting up offices at home.

What does this mean for offices in cities?

One of two things may happen:

1. Employers offload these costs onto employees. This would be a form of expropriation, with employees absorbing production costs that have traditionally been paid by the employer. This represents a considerable transfer of value from employees to employers.
2. Employees will be properly compensated. In this case, employer real estate savings will be modest.

If savings are modest, then the many advantages of working in offices — such as conviviality, rapidity of communication, team-building and acclimatization of new employees — will encourage employers to shelve the idea of remote work and, like Yahoo in 2013, encourage employees to work (most of the time) from corporate office space.
Richard Shearmur, Professor, McGill School of Urban Planning, McGill University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The day is dawning on a four-day work week

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream — and that includes a four-day work week. (Simon Abrams/Unsplash)

Karen Foster, Dalhousie University
Like any crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to rethink how we do things.
As we near the 100-day mark since the pandemic was declared, one area getting a significant attention is the workplace, where a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream.
For example, when millions more Canadians started working from home, many businesses were forced to experiment with telecommuting. Interestingly, many now say they’ll continue after the pandemic passes, because it benefits employers and employees alike.
Another idea, less widely tested than telecommuting, is generating buzz: the four-day work week. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the possibility of a shortened work week as a way to divvy up jobs, encourage local tourism, help with work-life balance and increase productivity.
As a sociologist who teaches about work and wrote a book about productivity, I believe she’s right.

Not a compressed schedule

A four-day work week must not be confused with a compressed schedule that has workers squeeze 37.5 to 40 hours of work into four days instead of five. For reasons that should be clearer below, that won’t help us now.
A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40. There are many reasons why this is appealing today: families are struggling to cover child care in the absence of daycares and schools; workplaces are trying to reduce the number of employees congregating in offices each day; and millions of people have lost their jobs.
A shorter work week could allow parents to cobble together child care, allow workplaces to stagger attendance and, theoretically, allow the available work to be divided among more people who need employment.

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Read more: A four-day working week could be the shot in the arm post-coronavirus tourism needs

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The most progressive shorter work week entails no salary reductions. This sounds crazy, but it rests on peer-reviewed research into shorter work weeks, which finds workers can be as productive in 30 hours as they are in 40, because they waste less time and are better-rested.

Most employees probably wouldn’t mind spending their own money on essentials provided at the office in exchange for a four-day work week. (Jasmin Sessler/Unsplash)

Shorter work weeks reduce the number of sick days taken, and on their extra day off, employees don’t use the office’s toilet paper or utilities, reducing their employer’s costs. Therefore, while it is counter-intuitive, it’s possible for people to work less at the same salary while improving their employer’s bottom line. That people might have to spend more of their own money on toilet paper is a concession most workers would probably accept.
The same body of research also has more predictable findings: people like working less.

Entrenched morality of work

If it makes this much sense, why don’t we have a four-day week already? It turns out this question is more than 150 years old.
Some of the answer pertains to the logistics involved in transforming our whole system of work, that’s not the entire answer. After all, the work week has been reduced before, so it can technically be done again.
The rest of the reason is rooted in capitalism and class struggle.
Thinkers from Paul Lafargue (“The Right to Be Lazy,” first published in 1883) to Bertrand Russell (“In Praise of Idleness,” from 1932) and Kathi Weeks (“The Problem with Work,” from 2012) have concluded we resist worktime reductions in the face of supportive evidence — and our own desires for more leisure — because of the entrenched morality of work and the resistance on the part of “the rich” to “the idea that the poor should have leisure,” in Russell’s words.
We are extremely attached to the idea that hard work is virtuous, idle hands are dangerous and people with more free time can’t be trusted.

Four-day work weeks floated in the 1930s

Nobody is suggesting evil governments conspire with evil bosses to keep powerless people busy. As historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has shown, there was significant interest in shorter work hours in the 1920s and 30s, when the 30-hour week was touted as a way to “share” the work among the Great Depression’s unemployed and underemployed citizens.

Henry Ford is seen in this 1919 photo. United States Library of Congress, CC BY

Even industrialists W. K. Kellogg and Henry Ford supported a six-hour day because they believed more rest would make for more productive workers. But Hunnicutt’s research in Work Without End reveals that some employers cut wages when they cut work hours, and when employees fought back, they dropped their demands for shorter work hours and focused instead on wage increases.
In the complex push and pull of capitalism, eventually even the New Deal, which influenced policy and discourse in Canada, shifted away from its early demands for more leisure toward demands for more work.
It’s quite possible we will do the same in our COVID-19 moment, and beg to be put back to work five days a week when this is all over.
But we have new reasons for considering shorter work weeks, and they might be more widely persuasive. It is also possible that we have finally given up on the false promise that working longer will translate into better lives. The four-day work week could be another wild idea that makes it through the pandemic’s open policy window.
Karen Foster, Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada, Dalhousie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

100 days of coronavirus has sent shock waves through the food system

The 100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of our food system, including the treatment of migrant labourers. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Evan Fraser, University of Guelph
The COVID-19 lockdown has exposed a large number of problems in the food system.
Whether it was the panic buying or workers in meat-packing plants testing positive for the virus, serious concerns have been raised about the resilience of the processes we depend upon for our daily bread.
At the same time, the people who process our food, keep our grocery store shelves stocked and run our farms have, to a large extent, managed to adapt to the greatest disruption in our generation.

A timeline

We begin our journey of celebrating these accomplishments, and reflecting on these challenges, in March.
At the start of the shutdown, Canadians were shocked and scared to see grocery store shelves empty as the first wave of panic buying depleted inventories.
In retrospect, this was a relatively short-term problem, and the supply chains worked hard to restock shelves. Government helped in several ways, including by allowing stores to restock 24 hours a day. In addition, front-line food system workers received some hazard pay and there was a rapid expansion in grocery delivery services.
It wasn’t very long after this that the main food-related pandemic story was focused on Canada’s restaurants.
When the hospitality sector shuttered, over a million jobs, and tens of thousands of businesses, were lost. This also threw a wrench into our supply chains since systems that were set up to feed restaurants and cafeterias had to pivot to meet the rising demand from grocery stores.
As families reconnected over home-cooked meals and pondered planting community gardens, we also became aware that what we eat at home is different than what we eat at restaurants.
The demand for home baking supplies soared while potatoes, which mostly are eaten in restaurants as French fries, went to waste.
The industry also struggled with packaging. When restaurants purchase items like eggs or flour, they tend to buy in much larger quantities than when individual families do, so products went to waste as the packaging system worked hard to adapt.

Marginal workers

The next major food story related to temporary foreign workers as international travel bans caused panic among farm groups.
Canadian farmers depend on tens of thousands of foreign workers coming to our country every year. The government responded by expediting visas and providing some money to farmers who suddenly had to retrofit dormitories to allow for quarantining and social distancing.
These workers have arrived in Canada, and some of them have tested positive for the virus after contracting COVID-19 here. At least two have died. Mexico has consequently barred any additional seasonal workers from coming here, at least temporarily.

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Read more: Coronavirus: Canada stigmatizes, jeopardizes essential migrant workers

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Overall, worker health, farm income and Canada’s harvest are all under threat.
Workers in meat-packing plants like Cargill in Alberta also started falling ill, and at least three died. At one point, almost 75 per cent of Canada’s beef-processing capacity was shut down as companies struggled to keep workers safe. Plants reopened after retrofitting to allow for social distancing, but this continues to threaten worker health, has hurt productivity and caused backlogs in the system that reduce farm income. It also led to animals being euthanized.

A mourner places flowers at a memorial for Hiep Bui Nguyen, a Cargill worker who died from COVID-19, in Calgary. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Both the migrant worker and meat-processing plant situations reveal an uncomfortable truth about Canada’s food system. The people we depend on the most to keep us fed are often the lowest paid, the most exposed to hazardous circumstances and have the most precarious employment and immigration status.
These issues should prompt a much-needed national conversation about how we treat labourers in the food system.

Food insecurity

Lastly, one of the most significant COVID-related food stories is the rise of food insecurity in Canada and internationally.
From the beginning of the crisis, food banks witnessed startling increases in the number of people needing assistance. Governments responded by putting money into the emergency food sector in unprecedented amounts.

Volunteers prepare meals for food banks on the floor of the Bell Centre in May 2020 in Montréal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

The United Nations has warned, however, the world faces famines of “biblical proportion” due to both challenges in the supply chains, along with the economic cost of the pandemic.

A national conversation

The pandemic has caused ripple effects in the food system in Canada and around the world. But there are silver linings to this otherwise dark cloud. Despite the challenges, the system has performed remarkably well, and Canadians should be thankful for the ingenuity, selflessness and hard work that has gone into keeping us all fed.
At the same time, the problems revealed over the last 100 days illustrate profound structural vulnerabilities. Society is at a teachable moment, and we should take advantage of the lessons we have learned and establish the policies, programs and technologies to ensure our food system becomes stronger, more resilient and more equitable in the years to come.
This is why the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph has teamed up with the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute — and other stakeholders from across the food system — to launch “Growing Stronger: Aiming for Resilience in our Canadian Food System.” If you would like to provide input, please consider uploading thoughts to our online portal.

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The author would like to thank artist Scott Mooney for the illustrated timeline pictured above.
Evan Fraser, Professor, Director of the Arrell Food Institute and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security, University of Guelph
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.