Saturday, December 19, 2020


Amazon Has Turned A Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into A McJob

BLOOMBERG, DECEMBER 18, 2020

Despite a starting wage well above the federal minimum, the company is dragging down pay in the logistics industry and bracing for a fight with unions.

By Matt Day and Spencer Soper for Bloomberg – Amazon.com Inc. job ads are everywhere. Plastered on city buses, displayed on career web sites, slotted between songs on classic rock stations. They promise a quick start, $15 an hour and health insurance. In recent weeks, America’s second-largest employer has rolled out videos featuring happy package handlers wearing masks, a pandemic-era twist on its annual holiday season hiring spree.

Amazon’s object is to persuade potential recruits that there’s no better place to work.

“More than 4,000 Amazon employees are on food stamps in nine states studied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office”

The reality is less rosy. Many Amazon warehouse employees struggle to pay the bills, and more than 4,000 employees are on food stamps in nine states studied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Only Walmart, McDonald’s and two dollar-store chains have more workers requiring such assistance, according to the report, which said 70% of recipients work full-time. As Amazon opens U.S. warehouses at the rate of about one a day, it’s transforming the logistics industry from a career destination with the promise of middle-class wages into entry-level work that’s just a notch above being a burger flipper or convenience store cashier. 

Union workers who make comfortable livelihoods driving delivery trucks and packing boxes consider Amazon an existential threat. While labor tensions have simmered for years, the stakes have risen sharply amid the pandemic, which prompted Amazon to hire more than 250,000 people to keep up with surging demand from home-bound shoppers. Risking infection while toiling in a crowded warehouse for $15 an hour has many Amazon workers asking if they’re getting shortchanged.

A Bloomberg analysis of government labor statistics reveals that in community after community where Amazon sets up shop, warehouse wages tend to fall.  In 68 counties where Amazon has opened one of its largest facilities, average industry compensation slips by more than 6% during the facility’s first two years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In many cases, Amazon quickly becomes the largest logistics player in these counties, so its size and lower pay likely pull down the average. Among economists, there’s a debate about whether the company is creating a kind of monopsony, where there’s only one buyer—or in this case one employer.

While Amazon’s arrival coincides with rising pay in some southern and low-wage precincts, the opposite is true in wealthier parts of the country, including the northeast and Midwest. Six years ago, before the company opened a giant fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, warehouse workers made $24 an hour on average, according to BLS data. Last year the average hourly wage slipped to $17.50.

Wages often tick higher in subsequent years, but don’t reach their pre-Amazon level till five years after a new facility opens—meaning that industry workers, on average, find themselves no better off half a decade after Amazon’s arrival.

“Bloomberg’s conclusion is false—it violates over 50 years of economic thought, and suspends the law of supply and demand,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Hiring more, by paying less, simply does not work. Many of our employees join Amazon from other jobs in retail which tend to be predominantly part-time, reduced benefit jobs with substantially less than our $15 minimum wage. These employees see a big increase in pay per hour, total take-home pay, and overall benefits versus their previous jobs. What surprises us is that we are the focus of a story like this when some of the country’s largest employers, including the largest retailer, have yet to join us in raising the minimum wage to $15.”

Amazon Workers Need Help Buying Food

Companies with the most employees receiving government food vouchers through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

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Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, whose wealth grew about 65% this year as his company posted record sales and profits, has so far managed to keep unions out of his U.S. operations. Now that’s being challenged. In November, representatives of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union quietly filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board, proposing to form a union on behalf of 1,500 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center. On Wednesday, the NLRB gave workers the greenlight to put the proposal to a vote, which promises to be the biggest referendum to date on the retail giant’s fraught relationship with its frontline workers.

“The concern isn’t so much ‘the robots are coming, and they’re going to put everybody out of work,’” says Ben Zipperer, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s more that the jobs being created by extremely profitable companies have either poor pay or poor working conditions, or are not the kind of jobs that you would expect an extremely rich country, and rich company, to be able to provide.”

Breaking down pallets or hauling cartons of lettuce is hardly the stuff of American business mythology. Warehouses, featureless rectangles located in exurbs and commercial districts, are far from the plant-filled orbs and office perks of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. But for many Americans, the logistics industry has long provided a path into the middle class, particularly for those who didn’t attend college.

Warehouses have typically paid less than factories but more than retailers. These haven’t been highly skilled jobs, but do require a certain level of ability—whether managing inventory or driving a forklift without damaging goods and hurting anyone. As recently as the early aughts, municipal officials in southern California looking to replace vanishing aerospace manufacturing jobs settled on the logistics industry, believing it would give lower-skilled workers the opportunity to move up. 

“Logistics really started to change with the rapid acceleration of e-commerce”

Since then, industry wages have come under pressure amid a push to carry less inventory and to subcontract work to lower-cost middlemen. But logistics really started to change with the rapid acceleration of e-commerce. And no company has done more to reshape how products are warehoused, packed and shipped than Amazon, with its strong focus on customer service.

Shipping orders directly to consumers from an inventory of millions of products required redesigning not just the physical buildings but the jobs of the people working inside. After 20 years of trial and error, Amazon has turned its fulfillment centers into finely tuned assembly lines, often grueling workplaces that have been the subject of frequent media reports over the years, including investigations probing injury rates and pay practices


Courtenay Brown at her home in Newark, on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020.
 Brown says she was homeless for a while during her time working for Amazon.
Photographer: Gabriela Bhaskar/Bloomberg

Most of the labor in Amazon’s largest fulfillment centers is divided into simple, repetitive tasks: receiving goods arriving in trucks, placing items into mesh shelving, or retrieving and speeding them along a conveyor belt in yellow plastic bins to be boxed and shipped. Most jobs are marketed to high-school graduates—no resume required, start as soon as next week—who spend 10-hour shifts standing at a single station, cogs in a giant machine built for speed and efficiency. Workers receive about one day of training and are put on the line to see if they have what it takes.

Matt Giannini, who spent five years at a warehouse in New Jersey, says Amazon’s genius lies in simplifying most tasks to the point but where anybody can do it. “They’ve gotten it to such a science,” he says. “Every single process is very simple.” 

But job satisfaction can be elusive when most workers are interchangeable cogs. Quality of life in the warehouse, Giannini says, often breaks along a very simple divide: people who spend their days standing by a computer terminal that tracks their every move, and those with less scrutiny and more freedom.

Amazon’s Arrival Means More Jobs, Lower Pay

Average warehouse industry wages fall at first in counties where Amazon opens new facilities, and only reach their pre-Amazon level five years later.

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Bloomberg interviewed 42 employees in 20 states. Some enjoy the work and say news reports of workplace travails can be overblown. Many joined to get health insurance, a rare perk for entry-level jobs, and came to Amazon from lower-wage employment in retail or logistics. 

But most say there’s little opportunity to move up in a highly automated environment where a handful of people per shift oversee an entire facility. One worker in the Midwest was hoping to rise quickly because he had previous management experience. “It’s the greatest company in the world right now,” he recalls thinking. “I’m going to be able to get in there and move up.” Three years later he’s still at the entry level, picking items.

Amazon touts a training program for promising workers and says it issued more than 35,000 promotions in its logistics operation this year. Ron Delosreyes, who joined Amazon in 2018, says the first step up added responsibility and no raise. But today he’s a salaried supervisor at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse.  “I’d like to stay and keep advancing my career,” he says. “Up and up.”

“The last thing we want to do is lose our job because we’ll go back to being homeless and have nothing.”

While 35,000 promotions sounds like a lot, it represents 3.5% of the more than 1 million people who worked in Amazon’s logistics group this year. That’s well below the 9% promotion rate for the industry, as calculated by the payroll processing firm ADP. 

Many Amazon workers quit or are fired for safety and productivity infractions within a year or two of starting—a high rate of turnover even in an industry where people change jobs frequently. Studies have shown worker churn rises when Amazon moves to town. And workers say the company does little to encourage long tenure.

The relative few who do last more than a year or two often struggle economically.

Courtenay Brown was hired at an Amazon grocery distribution hub in Avenel, New Jersey, three years ago. For several months after joining Amazon, she and her sister, who also works there, were homeless, bouncing from one motel to anotherwhile trying to save a deposit for an apartment. They found places they could afford, but landlords denied their applications because they didn’t make enough, she says. With motel rooms eating up about $600 a week, the sisters missed meals and slurped down free coffee and cocoa at work. Eventually, a charity paid their first month’s rent and security to get them established in their current apartment. Brown, 30, was excited to have a washing machine to rid her clothes of the cigarette smell that often permeated the motels.

About half of her take-home pay covers her share of the rent. The balance mostly covers food, utilities and the cost of commuting, which includes frequent $50 Uber rides when she has to work late and misses the final van shuttle home. Brown pays about $200 a month for the van shuttle. She usually arrives at work at 5:30 am and works until close to 6 pm. She spends her vacation time doing errands or resting at home in her pajamas because she can’t afford to go anywhere.

Brown finally got the promotion she’d been hoping for in the fall and a $2 hourly raise, but it will last only through the holiday season while she helps train new workers and open facilities. She’ll find out in January if she goes back to her old job and previous pay rate of about $17 per hour or if Amazon has a permanent promotion for her.

“Amazon comes to places when people are desperate.” 

“Me and my sister, the last thing we want to do is lose our job because we’ll go back to being homeless and having nothing,” says Brown, who joined community groups advocating for Amazon workers despite colleagues’ warnings she could be fired for speaking out.  “We’re in a tough situation, and this is all we can find that’s stable. Amazon comes to places when people are desperate.” 

Similar jobs at unionized logistics companies typically pay twice as much—enough for workers to pay the bills and save. 



Joey Alvarado at his home in Moreno Valley, California.
Photographer: Elisa Ferrari/Bloomberg

Joey Alvarado, 42, makes almost $30 an hour moving boxes filled with pet food, shampoo, canned goods and other items sold by Stater Bros. Markets, a southern California supermarket chain. His wife stays home with their three children, and the family eats out twice a week, has a boat called Penny Lane and a travel trailer. They vacation on Lake Havasu and the Colorado River. They’re buying a 2,000-square-foot home on half an acre about 30 minutes from the San Bernardino warehouse where he works. Down the street is an Amazon warehouse where people earn far less. “I don’t see how a big company like Amazon can be so greedy,” he says. “The CEO is already a billionaire. What does he want to be a trillionaire? It’s just greed.”

Alvarado belongs to the Teamsters Local 63, which he sees as the difference between what he is paid and what Amazon workers are paid.  He has been on the job 19 years and plans to remain. He doesn’t pay any premiums for medical benefits for himself and his family members and has a pension. “This job, you bust your butt, but you get paid,” he says. “No one leaves. You’d be stupid to leave.”

Jeff Fretz, 49, was working part time for United Parcel Service Inc. and attending community college to pursue a career in law enforcement. A full-time UPS truck driving job opened up, and he picked that over becoming a cop. Now he spends his days maneuvering trailers around a UPS warehouse in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania, and looks forward to retiring and moving south in seven or eight years with a Teamster’s pension. The job gave him a stable income and good life. He owns a home in Easton and took vacations with his wife and son in Cape May.

Fretz gets disgusted hearing about working conditions at Amazon because UPS pays its workers so much more and is still a profitable company. “A human body is not a machine,” he says. “I can’t do now what I did when I was 25. Working in a union shop protects you for a career.”

“I thought Amazon was more like a Google. 

But nah, it didn’t go like that.”

Now the unions fear that Amazon will do to the delivery business what it did with warehousing. The number of Americans employed as delivery drivers and couriers, outside of U.S. Postal Service work, has surged by 22% in the last two years, driven partly by the expansion of Amazon’s nationwide network of contract delivery firms and partly by the advent of new grocery delivery services. Wages in the industry fell last year by half a percentage point, the biggest decline in more than 20 years, according to BLS data.

Amazon, which has long sought to reduce its dependence on UPS, Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service, now ships most of its own customer orders. Many of those deliveries are handled by Amazon’s network of delivery service partners, contract firms that work exclusively for Amazon and lease the trademark blue delivery vans. Driver salaries average $16 an hour, according to recruiting sites, a couple bucks an hour less than the national average for frontline delivery service workers, and roughly half the pay package of an experienced UPS driver.  

Amazon also borrowed the gig-economy tactics pioneered by Uber with Flex, a service that relies on people making deliveries in their own vehicles. The idea was to boost delivery capacity without having to buy thousands of vehicles and hire people. Drivers download the Amazon Flex app and can accept assignments that typically pay about $50 for three hours. Once they factor in the cost of a vehicle and fuel, drivers say, the pay is closer to minimum wage.

UPS started a similar service for seasonal work a year after Amazon. But the drivers are employees, get 57 cents per mile, a $5 daily smartphone stipend and belong to the Teamsters union. One driver says he can easily earn $1,800 a month working part-time, about 80% more than he ever made doing Flex routes. He can also count on regular work rather than competing against other Flex drivers, who spend hours watching their phones in the hopes of getting work that sometimes never materializes. The seasonal UPS job is a step up for Amazon Flex drivers. UPS’s full-time drivers see it as a step-down, depriving them of overtime and potentially undermining their wages.

Amazon’s growth in the logistics industry is undermining union clout. 

They have reason to be worried. Amazon’s growth in the logistics industry is undermining union clout. Union membership in transportation and warehousing dropped to 16.1% in 2019 from 21.3% a decade earlier, by far the biggest decline of any industry, according to BLS data. The slide was driven by the rapid growth of non-union jobs at places like Amazon, not a loss of union work.

Now, the RWDSU, an activist unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, is campaigning to organize the Alabama facility, which opened in March. A website for the union drive says employees are seeking safer working conditions and protections from arbitrary dismissal, among other things. “I thought Amazon was more like a Google,” one employee says in a video posted to the site. “The bigger the company, the more benefits, the more loyalty to the worker. But nah, it didn’t go like that.”

Now that the federal labor regulator has approved the union’s proposal, a vote is likely some time next year. 


Romania’s Rising Far Right Spies Golden Opportunity

Bogdan Nedea
Bucharest
BIRN December 14, 2020

The shock entry of the right-wing AUR – “gold” – party into parliament puts paid to the fond but unreal notion that Romania could forever escape the far-right trends transforming politics across Europe.

Romania’s latest parliamentary election managed to break two records in the country’s politics: it was one of the most uneventful and unengaging campaigns ever, and the turnout of 32 per cent was the lowest in its 31 years of democratic history.


Despite this, the outcome was nevertheless surprising. Some of the most “traditional” parties, like former President’s Basescu Popular Movement Party and former PM Victor Ponta’s Pro Romania did not even cross the threshold into parliament.


Despite the importance of the vote last Sunday, which threatened the cycle of Social Democrat domination in parliament, the electorate proved tired after three elections – presidential, local and parliamentary – in under a year.

Moreover, although the COVID situation raised concerns, it appears that the main deterrent for voters was the unappealing political offer that envisaged few or unclear reforms and no obvious solutions to pressing economic and health-related issues.

Another major deterrent was that polling day was held on the same day as one of the most popular religious holidays in the country, the feast of St Nicholas, when many Romanians celebrate their name-day.


Despite the claims of President Klaus Iohannis that there was no clear winner of the election, there were, in fact, only losers and just one big winner.

The first major loser was the Social Democrats, PSD, who after losing two elections in the last year decided to go under the radar and for once not stir up voters against it right before elections.

But, even though it eliminated some of its most controversial members from the lists and refrained from the old dirty political attacks, its support fell from 45 per cent in the last parliamentary elections to just 29 per cent today.

After losing a lot of city halls in late October, with a divided leadership and with health restrictions preventing much direct interaction with the voters, the party found it hard to rally support. Even after winning more votes than any other party, the Social Democrats are likely to remain in opposition.

The runner-up, the ruling National Liberals, PNL, with 25 per cent, received far less votes than expected, an obvious electoral slap in the face for its handling of the pandemic.

Both President Iohannis and PNL Prime Minister Ludovic Orban pushed for these elections in early April, before the pandemic restrictions could erode their public support and while the electorate seemed eager to vote against the PSD.

During the campaign, President Iohannis was vocal about his desire to diminish the Social Democrats’ sway in parliament, and was accused of de facto campaigning for the Liberals, which was also the conclusion of the observation mission of the OSCE.

One day after the vote, Orban presented his resignation as PM and named Minister of Economy Florin Catu as his interim until new majority negotiations are complete.

Catu was nominated for this position once before, in early March but declined in order to make room for his party boss, Orban.

The third biggest loser was the Save Romania Union, USR. It won an unexpected number of votes in the October local elections but failed to convey a coherent message for the parliamentary elections.

Along with the PNL, USR is still expected to be part of the next parliamentary coalition, however, even though their demands may prove hard to implement within a coalition government.

One is eliminating convicted political figures from public office, eliminating special pensions for the MPs and cutting the number of MPs from 509 to 300 in deference to the result of a referendum in 2009.

All of these policies would displease some of the more established members of the PNL who stand to lose from their implementation.

New party but with old roots




George Simion during a campaign event at a Romanian market.
 
Photo: George Simion/Facebook

The great winner of the elections is a newcomer with old roots in Romanian politics – the Alliance for the Union of Romanians – AUR  – which means “gold” in Romanian.

Virtually unknown until the publishing of the exit polls last Sunday, the party identifies with conservative nationalist doctrines, while its members’ rhetoric would place it in the far-right section.

Founded in 2019 and having gained only between 0.29 and 0.43 in the local elections, AUR won a surprising 9 per cent of the votes in the elections to parliament,  becoming the country’s fourth biggest party overnight.

Its stark ascent on the scene is explained by a concert of circumstances: while Romania’s politics seemed to escape the grip of extremist parties, it did not. In the past 20 years, multiple parties attempted to coagulate a nationalist, conservative, Orthodox Christian and anti-immigration electorate, and failed mostly because of political inaction.

As these parties slowly left the political scene, the PSD became the main caterer to extremist interests, especially under its former chairman, Liviu Dragnea.

After Dragnea was sentenced to prison in 2019, the PSD, in an attempt to shed the legacy of its former leader, abandoned the extremist discourse and that part of the electorate.

Meanwhile, the pandemic and the restrictions that have followed have reactivated the extremist, nationalistic part of the electorate, fueling it with conspiracy theories. AUR members that endorse those conspiracies, at least at a statement level, have used this to their advantage.

A third element that comes into play and unequivocally cemented the victory of AUR is the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Due to differences over the pandemic restrictions, the political elite and the Church, traditionally good if unofficial allies, split apart in 2020. Under public pressure, and in a looming electoral year where no mistakes could be afforded, the government gave no ground to the Church on the matter of church services.

In turn, the Church, an established political player, refused to obey most governmental restrictions and endorsed world-wide conspiracies that the pandemic was being used against it.

Summoned to services and gatherings by priests, and then fined by police for not respecting restrictions, part of the population was radicalized against the mainstream political parties. The outlet for this dissatisfaction was the AUR, which not only used that dissatisfaction but, with the help of the Church, managed to run a traditional campaign, especially amongst worshipers.

The Romanian Orthodox Church is a well-known player in politics having unofficially campaigned for trending political parties before.

This year brought multiple changes in that respect: the sudden shift between Social Democrats and Liberals with the addition of the pandemic resulted in no political backing and, more importantly, no financing for the Patriarchate. That is why the Church most likely threw its weight behind the AUR.

The main difference between the AUR and other far-right parties is not just the support of the Church but also the way its members and two presidents present themselves to their electorate.

George Simion, one of the two chairmen, is a former football fan leader, arrested and fined for hooliganism in the past. He first came to public attention in 2012 when he started a radical movement that backed joining Romania and Moldova – which was part of Romania between the two world wars.

Banned from Moldova on grounds of extremism, in 2019 he ran for Romania’s parliament as an independent. The other co-chairman, Claudiu Tarziu, is a writer who disregards women and describes today’s society as based on a neo-Marxist ideology.

The fact that AUR has stormed into parliament is no surprise; the fact that it managed to fit all the various extremist ideologies under its umbrella is a real feat.

In the end, the trends that promoted far-right parties across Europe were bound to hit Romania, and the fact that AUR managed to get into parliament on the first try can only be positive.

It means that the party will avoid electoral frustration and further radicalization and its future undertakings will have to be made as part of the democratic system instead of in the shadows.

The fact that only 2.1 per cent of the AUR vote came from the elderly is more worrying. That means their electorate is young or middle-aged.

At the end of the day Romania’s democratic system, built on the skeleton of the communist one, has the capability to absorb this social extremity and even engulf it without risking further radicalization.

After four years of AUR in parliament, four years where its main sparring partners will be the Hungarian minority UDMR party, the PSD will have room to reinvent itself for far-right voters, and regain the votes it lost to AUR.

The motto that things can always get worse is a mantra for Romanian voters generally. Always, they seem to find themselves choosing between bad and worse.

Bogdan Nedea is an independent foreign policy analyst and an expert on the former Soviet Union countries. During the past decade he has published and co-authored several works on energy security, religious radicalisation and conflict analysis.

The opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.




Irish Dream Turns to ‘Nightmare’ for Eastern European Seasonal Workers


Illustration. Noteworthy
Maria Chereseva, Marcel Gascón Barberá and Niall Sargent
Bucharest, Dublin, Sofia
BIRN December 17, 2020

Workers hired to pick fruit and mushrooms in Ireland say that they faced long hours, low pay and difficult relations with supervisors, according to a four-month investigation by BIRN and Noteworthy.

Three years in a row, up to 2019, Elena [not her real name] flew from her hometown of Sofia in Bulgaria to Ireland at harvest time to pick strawberries and other soft fruits for Keelings, the almost century-old Irish food giant north of Dublin.

She was paid much more than what she could expect to earn doing the same job in Bulgaria, but the work was sometimes a “nightmare”, she said.

In an interview with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and Noteworthy, Elena, who asked that her real name not be published for fear of hurting her chances of future employment, recalled overcrowded cabins provided for workers to take breaks in the farm fields and long workdays.

Sometimes, they would work 13 or 14 hours a day, meaning some workers would only get back to their accommodation at 9 p.m. since there was only one bus to shuttle them back and forth, she said.

“They would go back, eat and go to bed,” Elena said. “Everybody does it for the money.”

Though the horticulture sector takes up less than one per cent of Irish agricultural land, it packs a significant economic punch, worth 476 million euros last year and directly employing 6,600 people.

But the current government is pushing for it to grow, targeting a 60 per cent increase in primary production and the creation of 23,000 jobs along the supply chain under a 10-year strategy.

In May 2017, then Agriculture Minister Michael Creed said investment in people would be “crucial” to the strategy’s success.

But a four-month investigation by BIRN and Noteworthy, an Irish investigative media platform, shows some people – the migrant workers big producers depend on at harvest time – are being let down. We can reveal:

The experience of a number of workers from the Eastern European states in the mushroom and soft fruit industry who spoke to BIRN and Noteworthy.

Concerns about labour practices in the mushroom industry in the border area, according to findings shared with BIRN and Noteworthy by a two-year cross-border project, members of which spoke to BIRN and Noteworthy about their findings.

A 2018 survey by Teagasc, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority, and released to BIRN and Noteworthy through a Freedom of Information, FOI, request indicates the horticulture industry faces difficulty in retaining staff due in part to low wages, poor working conditions, lack of suitable accommodation and poor recruitment skills.

An analysis of Workplace Relations Commission data released through an FOI request shows that it uncovered almost 185,000 euros in unpaid wages since 2017, affecting over 3,300 employees in the soft fruit and mushroom sectors.

Keelings defended the working and living conditions facing seasonal workers picking its fruit. CEO Caroline Keeling told BIRN/Noteworthy that the company had increased the number of cabins for staff breaks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and that workers, before coming to Ireland, were fully informed about “above average weekly hours” to make sure particular crops are picked during peak harvesting seasons.

Following the money

Illustration. Photo: EPA/JAIPAL SINGH

Bulgaria is not just the poorest country in the European Union but also has one of the fastest shrinking populations in the world, projected to contract by just under a quarter between 2019 and 2050.

The decline is not only a result of low fertility rates, typical across the European continent, but also of a high mortality rate and mass emigration
.

Data analyst Boyan Yurukov and economist Georgi Angelov of the Sofia-based Institute of Market Economy estimate that around 1.3 million Bulgarians live abroad, mostly in Europe. Bulgaria has a population of seven million.

Roughly 30 per cent of those working in Europe are seasonal workers in the agricultural sector, according to a 2018 estimate by the Bulgarian Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Agriculture.

And they are a mainstay of the Bulgarian economy, with remittances – some 920 million euros in the first nine months of 2019 – exceeding foreign direct investment in recent years.

Likewise, at 3.3 per cent of economic output, neighbouring Romania ranked third alongside Latvia among EU states in 2019 in terms of reliance on remittances, behind Croatia [6.6 per cent of GDP] in first place and Bulgaria [3.4 per cent] in second

. It’s no surprise that so many seek work in the farming fields of Western Europe, with Bulgarian workers saying they earn on average 1,200 euros per month before tax in the Irish horticulture sector compared to an estimated average in the Bulgarian agricultural sector of roughly 900 leva, or 450 euros.

It’s a similar story in Romania, resulting in severe labour shortages in the domestic agricultural sector.

“I can tell you that right now in the [Romanian] countryside it is harder to find a day labourer in agriculture than a CEO for a multinational company,” said Florin Constantin, founder of AGXecutive, which specialises in recruitment and training in agribusiness.

Madlen Nikolova, a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield in the UK, said the UK and Ireland are the preferred destinations of Bulgarian workers, rather than the likes of Greece, Spain and Italy where conditions can be much worse.

“Many of these people actually are employed in Bulgaria but the wages are so humiliatingly low that, for example, in the tailoring factories people would take unpaid leave to work additionally on the fields of Greece, Spain or the UK in order to be able to afford heating for one season,” said Nikolova, who has examined labour exploitation in the garment, security and call centre sectors in Bulgaria.


Money Transferred Home in the EU

Highest Inbound Personal Remittances (% of GDP)


Source: Eurostat • Data not available for Denmark, Spain, Norway and Switzerland


‘Busted’ by work and living conditions

But exploitation occurs abroad too.

A pan-European Europol investigation in 2020 identified 44 people suspected of involvement in human trafficking for labour exploitation and over 300 victims, many from Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania.

In October 2016, Romanian national Ioan Lacatus was sentenced to 30 months in prison for trafficking people for unlicensed labour on fruit farms in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, forcing his victims to work 70 hours a week and accommodating 15 in a single house with one toilet, one shower and limited cold food.

While no such cases have been recorded in the Republic of Ireland, migrant workers particularly in mushroom picking – the biggest horticulture industry in Ireland – face significant labour rights issues, according to migrant rights experts and academics.

“Some workers in the cross-border mushroom industry continue to experience poor working conditions, low pay rates, inadequate terms and conditions of employment, and less than optimum employment practices,” said Dr Stephen Bloomer of Ulster University, referring to the results of research conducted between mid-2018 and late 2020 involving 51 mushroom pickers from Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Ukraine and Lithuania.

Concerns over labour in the sector first surfaced in Ireland in the mid-2000s, when the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union, SIPTU, and the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, MRCI, raised concerns over conditions facing workers in the industry, particularly with regards to long working hours and low pay.

MRCI set up a support group in 2006 for almost 450 mushroom workers, carrying out mediation on their behalf that led to the recovery of an estimated 250,000 euros in back wages from around 20 farms.

This was followed up by academic research in 2014 from universities in the North into the mushroom industry in Northern Ireland, including interviews with workers, that highlighted similar concerns.

Conditions described by mushroom pickers today are “consistent with our research over the years,” said Edel McGinley, director of the MRCI, which is involved in the project called Crossing Borders, Breaking Boundaries examining labour conditions for migrant workers.

Bloomer said that while some workers do earn “decent wages”, many are left physically “busted” from the long hours and working conditions, including kidney problems from the low temperatures in mushroom houses and eye problems from poor lighting.

Neck and back pain, as well as skin allergies and respiratory issues, are also common among the workers, according to research last year by Ulster University.

Polina Malcheva, a Bulgarian liaison officer at the Community Intercultural Programme in Northern Ireland, said that workplace injuries, particularly back and wrist pain, are “very typical of the Bulgarian community”.

In 99 per cent of cases, Malcheva said, the workers wait to return to Bulgaria to get treatment. “Medical care is expensive [in Ireland] and, on top of everything, you have to translate all your documents. It’s just too much and that is why [cases of workplace injuries are] often undiscovered.”

One female migrant worker, who spoke to BIRN/Noteworthy on condition of anonymity, described coming down with a “really bad flu” in Ireland a few years ago and being unable to find a local doctor who would take her on as a new patient. She eventually found an Eastern European doctor in another Irish county but, with only three weeks permitted sick leave, she had to return to work even though she was not feeling well.

Support to New Employees Offered by Companies

Teagasc Horticulture Labour Survey 2018




Fear of speaking out 

Despite the hardship, the concerns of workers often go unreported, experts say, due to fear of the repercussions meted out by supervisors who often come from the same country as the dominant nationality in a workforce or at least speak a common language such as Russian.

When asked by BIRN/Noteworthy if any issues have been raised by members in relation to issues between supervisors and workers, Commercial Mushrooms Producers, CMP, an industry body representing 90 per cent of Irish mushroom production and growers, did not provide a specific response. CMP said that its members “operate to the highest standards” and are independently audited by Bord Bia and Sedex, an ethical trade membership organisation.

“Our Members are compliant with the Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit, which is the most widely used social audits in the world,” it said.

But McGinley of the MCRI said that, for many migrant workers, seasonal work in Ireland is “a lifeline for their families back home.”

“If you want to put food in the mouths of your children and family, fear of losing your job means that often people think they have to put up with poor conditions of employment,” McGinley told BIRN/Noteworthy. “People don’t want to rock the boat.”

According to an industry labour survey carried out by the Irish agri-research body Teagasc in 2018 and released to BIRN/Noteworthy, the wider horticulture sector has reported difficulties in recruiting staff due in part to “low wage rates, poor working conditions, [and] a lack of suitable accommodation for staff.”

According to the report – based on responses from 20 companies, including some in the mushroom and soft fruit sectors – many growers said that they were “unable to raise wage rates and improve working conditions that could better enable them to attract and compete for staff”.


Inspections by the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, an independent body that monitors compliance with employment rights legislation, also suggest the issues are more widespread than just the mushroom sector.

In some cases, it’s not just low pay that’s the problem but a failure to pay altogether.

Data from inspections carried out in the soft fruit and mushroom sectors since 2017 indicate that the WRC uncovered 184,466 euros in unpaid wages affecting over 3,300 employees.

A report released to BIRN/Noteworthy from a WRC inspection in 2019 at an unnamed mushroom farm in Cavan found that some employees were “permitted to work more than an average of 48 hours in each period of seven days” in contravention of the Organisation of Working Time Act. The contravention was rectified, according to the report.

In October 2019, the Labour Court ruled in favour of a Romanian worker who claimed that she worked 81 hours per week at another mushroom farm in Co Tipperary.

The court said that it was satisfied, on the basis of evidence presented, that a working week of at least 80 hours was the regular reality for the Complainant and she was compensated accordingly.

Fourteen other WRC and Labour Court decisions since 2015 in relation to mushroom farms have been decided fully or partly in favour of workers, according to records in the WRC’s online database, over concerns with pay, redundancy payment and working hours. Four cases were decided in favour of the employer during this period.

In general, from an analysis of 77 cases linked to horticultural companies in the WRC’s online database from 1988 to present, around 30 cases were clearly decided in favour of the employer.

In many cases, workers had claimed that they were unfairly dismissed. Other concerns raised related to claims of discrimination, disputes over payments, rates of pay, break times and unpaid wages.

Lack of union access



Milko Pagurov. Photo: Noteworthy/Niall Sargent

Experts agree that the lack of union representation for season workers is a major obstacle.
Mick Brown, organiser for the agriculture, ingredients, food and drink sector of SIPTU said the union had experienced great difficulty in contacting migrant workers, who are “afraid to talk to anybody that’s going to put their income in jeopardy”.

“They’re scared to talk to you, never mind trying to unionise,” said Browne.

Rhona McCord, community coordinator at Unite, the largest trade union in the UK, described meeting Bulgarian workers in the backroom of a pub, well away from their place of accommodation, because they feared their supervisors finding out.

“They’re there for economic reasons, they absolutely need to survive and they’re afraid of losing those jobs,” McCord said. “It is very, very difficult to break into.”

“You’ve no support system, you might not be entitled to any social welfare, you probably have no family here. So if you lose a job, it can be devastating. So people take more pressure.”

Alexander Homits, a workers’ rights activist who speaks Russian, accompanied Unite representatives and Bulgarian activists to speak to workers at accommodation in Dublin and Louth for Keelings this summer where, he told us, they had a hostile reception.

“Supervisors stood at the doors of the accommodation and as workers were coming in, they would specifically instruct them to not engage with us… All we had was a leaflet with a basic outline of your rights,” Homits said.

In a statement, Caroline Keeling, the CEO of Keelings, told BIRN/Noteworthy that it “respects the constitutional right of all employees to join a trade union of their choice”, while staff can take advantage of the services of a Bulgarian seasonal worker liaison officer, a Bulgarian HR manager and a confidential 24/7 whistleblowing hotline.

She added that during the period in question, COVID-19 regulations prohibited “visitors to any accommodation and all seasonal workers would have been very aware of this”.

Elena, the Bulgarian woman who described the conditions at Keelings, and her compatriot Milko Pagurov, from Plovdiv, who also worked for Keelings in 2018, were both generally happy with their experience with the Irish company.

However, they raised concerns about supervisors, saying they favoured some workers.

Pagurov, 37, said that he and his girlfriend were both dismissed at the end of the second month of the three-month contracts but received no support when they went to their supervisors to ask why and what their rights were.

“Instead of helping you, they would stand in your way,” Pagurov said. “And I did not want anything more from them than to do their job. I felt that we were used.”

Both he and Elena also cited other cases of workers being dismissed early.

According to the Polish recruitment agency used by Keelings and which has a branch in Bulgaria, such a situation is rare. Workers are usually offered alternative horticultural work for the same pay with another employer in the UK, it said.

Pagurov confirmed that both he and his girlfriend were offered work at another farm in Scotland but that they refused as they would have to spend more money to move and did not know what conditions would be like there.

Keeling said that “there is a standard eight-week probationary period to protect the rights of both the employer and the employee” and that 95 per cent of all seasonal workers completed their contracts in the three-year period 2017–2019.

‘Agency fee’, paid in cash


Pagurov and Elena both said they had each paid fees of between 250 and 530 lev, roughly 125-270 euros, to the agent who hired them in Bulgaria, despite the fact that by law any costs must be covered by the employer.

Elena said she paid 530 lev in 2017, followed by around 470 lev for each of the following two years of work.

Pagurov said that, while the agency had been up front about the working conditions involved, he considered it odd that he had to pay an agency fee of 250 lev in cash.

According to the Polish recruitment agency, the payment was in fact an optional fee for translation services.

“The fee is getting lower every year for the worker and from 2021 Keelings will be covering most of it, the owner of the agency, Richard Sobiechowski, said in an email. “In 2021 workers will only be paying a total fee of 85 euros covering [translation] services.”

According to Sobiechowski, workers are informed before departure about the conditions awaiting them.

“[Workers] should remember that this is agricultural work with no guarantee of the number of weekly hours and that employment dates may change during their contract because of poor weather conditions or failure of crops,” Sobiechowski wrote.

Keeling said that Keelings hires seasonal workers using “reputable recruitment agencies” who advertise, interview and manage the recruitment process and administration requirements.

Before departure from Bulgaria, she told BIRN/Noteworthy, recruited seasonal workers have the option of certain services involving administration fees related to document translation services as well transportation services for flights from Bulgaria to Dublin.

“At all times, seasonal workers are informed in detail about the services, the purpose of these services, their associated fees and the fact that they are free to organise and pay for these services directly themselves,” Keeling said.

Despite their experiences, Elena and Pagurov both still hankered for Ireland.

Within a month of being let go by Keelings in 2018, Pagurov and his girlfriend were back in Ireland after finding new jobs in tourism through a Facebook group for the Bulgarian community in Dublin.

At the time of publication, Elena was living and working in Bulgaria but dreaming of moving back to Ireland with her two children.

“I really want to go back to Ireland,” she said. “It is calm, so calm.”


The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund. The International Press Institute (IPI), the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and any other partners in the IJ4EU fund are not responsible for the content published and any use made out of it.
















Bosnia prosecutors to investigate origin of icon gifted to Russia's Lavrov

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnian prosecutors said on Friday they would investigate whether a 300-year-old icon presented as a gift by the Bosnian Serb leader to Russia’s visiting foreign minister may have been illegally smuggled out of war-torn eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s embassy in Sarajevo has raised concerns over the artefact after the Bosnian Serb news agency Srna published a photograph of the icon and its seal of authenticity, which suggest it may originate in the city of Lugansk, where pro-Russian separatists have been battling Kiev’s forces.

Dozens of Bosnian Serbs have fought alongside the rebels in the war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014. Serbia and Bosnia’s Serbs have close ties with Russia, with which they share the Eastern Orthodox faith.

Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb representative in Bosnia’s three-member presidency, gave the gilded icon to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during his visit to Sarajevo this week.

The Croatian and Bosniak presidency members refused to meet Lavrov over what they labelled his “disrespect” for Bosnia’s state symbols and institutions.

Dodik has so far declined to comment on the matter.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry confirmed on Friday that its embassy in Sarajevo had asked Bosnian authorities to provide “clarification and full information on the circumstances of this case”, and said it would hold talks on the issue in coming days.

In a letter published by Bosnian media, Ukraine’s embassy said failure to provide information about the icon would be viewed as indicating support for “the aggressive policies and military actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine”.

The embassy declined to provide a copy of the letter or further details to Reuters on Friday.


Bosnian Serb Leader Angers Ukraine, Donating Icon to Lavrov


Danijel Kovacevic
Banja Luka
BIRN December 17, 2020

The Ukrainian embassy in Sarajevo is demanding to know how Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik got hold of an ancient Orthdox icon that he presented to Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, on Monday.



Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister (L) attends a press conference with Milorad Dodik, Chairman of the Bosnian Presidency, Photo: EPA/Fehim Demir

Ukraine’s embassy in Sarajevo has asked Bosnia’s Foreign Ministry for detailded information about an icon that it says is part of Ukrainian heritage, which the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik on Monday presented to Russia’s Foreign Minister.

The embassy claims the 300-year-old gilded icon originates from Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia in the disputed, separatist-held Donbas region.

It wants to know how the icon ended up in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the hands of the Serbian member of the Bosnian Presidency.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov paid a two-day visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina earlier this week, marked by an incident in which the two other members of the Bosnian presidency, Komsic and Bosniak member Sefik Dzaferovic, refused to meet him.

Lugansk is currently capital and administrative centre of the Lugansk People’s Republic, an unrecognised breakaway state established in 2014 by pro-Russian separatists.

The Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA published a photo of the icon and a stamp confirming its authenticity, which clearly shows that its origin was in Ukraine.

The Ukrainians say if they do not get the information they seek, they will see that as a show of support for Russia’s aggressive military actions in Ukraine.

The Foreign Ministry has forwarded the note to the presidency, from which it expects answers, Bisera Turkovic, the Foreign Minister, told the media, adding that she expects the state prosecutor’s office to be involved.

“It would be normal to have a very urgent reaction because it is a very serious inquiry, not to say an accusation. Enormous damage is done to Bosnia when a high-ranking official is accused of donating something that has been stolen and is someone’s cultural treasure,” Turkovic said.

Dodik has not commented yet on the allegations but his counterpart, Zeljko Komsic, Croatian member of the presidency, on Thursday said that if Ukraine’s allegations were proven, someone should go to jail.

“Dodik must say where he got it from, who gave it to him or who planted it on him. This can’t be over without any results because it’s international theft … This must end up in court, someone must answer for this,” Komsic said.

Igor Crnadak, a former foreign minister, also said the affair should be clarified as soon as possible.

“This is a very ugly event that leaves a stain on our institutions. What needs to happen as soon as possible is for … the Serbian member of the Presidency to provide clear information about the origin of the gift and all other details related to it,” Crnadak told media.

Komsic and Dzaferovic boycotted Lavrov saying he had expressed disrespect for Bosnia and also first met with Bosnian Serb officials in Istocno Sarajevo, on Monday, where no Bosnian state flag could seen on display.
Breakingviews -
 Big Pharma’s vaccine immunity will be fleeting

By Aimee Donnellan
BREAKINGVIEWS CORONAVIRUS
DECEMBER 18, 2020




LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Big Pharma’s vaccine victory lap may be cut short. The industry’s triumph in dispensing inoculations less than a year after the discovery of the deadly coronavirus has partially vindicated the business models of groups like Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. But as governments took on much of the risk, pharma groups’ pricing will remain a target after the pandemic.

Riding to the world’s rescue is a welcome corrective for the battered pharmaceutical industry. In recent years the sector has grappled with bribery scandals and accusations of aggressive pricing, exemplified by Mylan’s decision to hike the price of anti-allergy injection EpiPen by 400%.

Drug firms have long defended their prices as the necessary reward for funding expensive and risky research. The value of global scale, meanwhile, was evident in their ability to quickly test vaccines and manufacture enough doses to inoculate a third of the world’s population next year. The promise by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to sell their treatments at cost price for the duration of the pandemic further enhances their claims to benefit society. The warm feelings extended to the stock market, where share prices of vaccine makers Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Pfizer have outperformed the MSCI World Pharma index by an average of 5% since the beginning of the year. Moderna shares are up nearly 700% in the same period.

However, the vaccines are more than just an endorsement of Big Pharma. Academic centres like the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute and small firms such as Germany’s BioNTech played a critical role in pioneering the medical breakthroughs, helped by a mixture of public and private funding. Governments, meanwhile, helped to finance the cost of testing and manufacturing, and pre-ordered hundreds of millions of doses without knowing whether the vaccines would be effective.

Such public support has emboldened campaigners who argue governments should take a greater slice of pharma companies’ earnings, perhaps by claiming a share of new drug patents. The glow of their vaccine triumph may allow Big Pharma companies to shrug off such demands for a while. But U.S. drug prices rose 60% in the 10 years to 2018, according to the American Medical Association. Pressure to bring them down will soon return.

BREAKINGVIEWS

Reuters Breakingviews is the world's leading source of agenda-setting financial insight. As the Reuters brand for financial commentary, we dissect the big business and economic stories as they break around the world every day. A global team of about 30 correspondents in New York, London, Hong Kong and other major cities provides expert analysis in real time.

Sign up for a free trial of our full service at https://www.breakingviews.com/trial and follow us on Twitter @Breakingviews and at www.breakingviews.com. All opinions expressed are those of the authors.



 ESG AMELIORATING CAPITALISM

Putting the green in greenback? 
#ESG investors target corporate accounts

ON THE ROAD TO SOCIALISM

By Simon Jessop, Matthew Green
DECEMBER 17, 2020

LONDON (Reuters) - Five years ago, many investors and executives would have politely told 
Jill Atkins to buzz off.



Professor Jill Atkins of the University of Sheffield poses 
in her garden in Brecon, Wales, Britain December 14, 2020. 
REUTERS/Rebecca Naden

Now they listen keenly when the British academic presents her work, known as “extinction accounting”, which shows how companies are contributing to the demise of honeybees, as well as other species - and how that could come back to sting them.

“I think people are beginning to get it now,” Atkins, chair in financial management at the University of Sheffield, told Reuters. “The capital markets have contributed to this mess, and they have a responsibility for sorting it out.”

But Atkins is appealing to wallets, not consciences. Her method is one of a series of projects seeking ways to assess a company’s impact on climate change and the natural world in financial and accounting terms, and thus better price risk for the likes of pension funds, banks and insurers.

These initiatives differ widely in methods and scope. But they share a common goal: giving the growing numbers of investors pledging to rebalance their portfolios the insight they need to sort the most sustainable companies from the most destructive.

While groups such as MSCI or Sustainalytics already offer to guide investors by creating ratings systems to rank companies’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials, these approaches take a different tack: aiming to change the way companies report to their shareholders.

Options range from Atkins’ research to encourage companies to provide scientific assessments of their impact on plants and animals, to publishing a “carbon-adjusted earnings per share” figure or putting a monetary value on impacts so misdeeds like plastic pollution can directly affect a company’s valuation.

Given the scale of today’s environmental crisis, some investors and campaigners compare the depth of change needed in corporate reporting with the kind of fundamental reform of accounting seen in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash.

“In 1929 there was no transparency on profit; companies could pick their own accounting principles and there were no auditors to verify the numbers,” said Ronald Cohen, co-founder of London-based Bridges Fund Management and chairman of the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment advocacy group.

“Today, you could argue we’re at a similar crossroads.”

Change won’t be easy. With so many ideas and tools in play, it will take time for investors, companies and the bodies that set accounting standards to settle on consistent global rules.

And if companies do begin to introduce more sophisticated metrics to assess their impact on nature and society, some investors fear these new numbers will simply present opportunities to game the system in whole new ways.

‘CHANGE THE PLUMBING’


Atkins, who is collaborating with academics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, believes that requiring companies to introduce “extinction accounting” into annual reports could trigger rapid change.

Companies would have to assess the populations of threatened species living near their operations; work out whether their business puts them at risk; come up with plans to protect them; and explain them to investors.

“This would give investors an entirely new level of insight into the connections between corporate profitability and risks to the natural world,” said Martina Macpherson, president of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets.

Other projects take a different approach, helping investors build new models to assess companies’ environmental and social footprints.

A team at Harvard Business School, for example, aims to generate a dollar value for companies’ positive and negative impacts across a range of domains to enable easy comparison.

“We have to change the plumbing of the system,” said George Serafeim, a lead researcher. “It’s not a sufficient condition to change corporate behaviour and resource allocation, but it’s a necessary condition.”


Professor Jill Atkins of the University of Sheffield 
Brecon, Wales, Britain December 14, 2020. 
REUTERS/Rebecca Naden

This year, for example, the team published an analysis of two companies selling consumer packaged goods, aiming to calculate the value or cost of their impacts in areas from nutrition to greenhouse gas emissions and plastic waste.

The study drew on datasets that would not normally figure in a corporate annual report, including consumer-purchase data from 40,000 U.S. households and nutritional information from the Department of Agriculture.

New York-based BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, joined a pilot in October to test the evolving system, known as the “Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative”, researchers said. BlackRock declined to comment.

Other participants include Calvert Research and Management, a Washington-based ethical investment firm and part of Eaton Vance, which manages $26 billion.

Calvert CEO John Streur said the project could radically change how investors calculate value. For example, if the system revealed that an apparently profitable company was causing vast amounts of plastic pollution, its valuation would suffer.

“We think of this as an entirely new chassis, if you will, to really understand value creation or destruction by a management team,” Streur said.

Calvert’s analysts are reviewing the project’s various models with the Harvard team. It will use the findings to immediately engage with company management, and to influence investment decisions within the next two years, Streur said.

‘WOOD FOR THE TREES’


Some are sceptical, though, arguing the quest to boil down vastly different forms of impact into dollar equivalents could obscure the most fundamental questions: if, when and how a company plans to adopt a more sustainable business model.

“If people find it useful, then great. But there’s a risk of being overly precise and not seeing the wood for the trees,” said Paul Fisher, a former Bank of England policymaker now at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

Sudhir Roc-Sennett, head of ESG at Vontobel Asset Management, is concerned about the potential for companies to manipulate the numbers, making comparisons even harder to make.

“The massaging ... is already bad enough, imagine what it would be like if you start adding more layers to the picture.”

Nonetheless, some companies are experimenting.

Some groups, including consultants KPMG and S&P Global Trucost, are already working with individual corporations to value the environmental and social effects of their operations and supply chains.

Arjan de Draaijer, managing partner at KPMG Sustainability Netherlands, said the consultancy was helping hundreds of companies put a value on their impact, although mostly at the project or product level.

One early adopter of company-wide analysis was French luxury goods company Kering, which measures its carbon emissions, water use, water pollution, land use, air pollution and waste, and converts the impact into a monetary value to help measure its progress in becoming more sustainable.

The company’s 2019 annual report estimated its negative environmental impact at 524 million euros ($638 million), stable from the prior year, but falling in relation to group revenue.

French food group Danone, meanwhile, issued a carbon-adjusted earnings per share figure alongside the more traditional number this year, taking into account the cost of emissions.

Based on a carbon cost estimate of $35 a ton, the company said its carbon-adjusted EPS had risen 12% in 2019 from the prior year, compared with 8% for its normal EPS, reflecting its efforts to reduce emissions.

FLYING FOXES


Critics argue that such initiatives may help companies appear greener, but won’t fundamentally change their behaviour until their impact on the environment is factored into their core balance sheets and profit statements.

“So long as the impact does not hit the bottom line, then it’s always going to be secondary,” said Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and political economist at City University in London.

Nevertheless, Atkins of the University of Sheffield argues that investors would leave destructive sectors faster if they had a clearer grasp of how quickly the collapse of ecosystems can sink a seemingly profitable business.

Take the Malayan flying fox, Atkins says. With growing Chinese demand boosting an $18 billion market for the durian fruit, plantations have been expanding into the Malaysian rainforest, endangering the large bat species - the fruit’s chief pollinator.

By revealing the risks posed by such unintended consequences, Atkins hopes “extinction accounting” could help save at least some of the many life forms now on the brink.

“What we are trying to show is the financial markets have an immense potential to save species,” she added.

($1 = 0.8207 euros)


Reporting by Simon Jessop and Matthew Green; Editing by Pravin Char



Exclusive: For years, the Pentagon sits on racial discrimination survey data

By Phil Stewart
DECEMBER 18, 2020

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Army Sergeant Major Das’Chara Champ couldn’t have known that the answer to her question about racial discrimination survey data was sitting in an office somewhere in the vast Defense Department bureaucracy.



Few people do.

"Has there been any kind of survey done on the perceived level of racism or racial discrimination in the Army," Champ, who is Black, asked in a video played at a Pentagon town hall on Sept. 24. here

On the other end of the question were some of the most senior leaders in the U.S. military: Then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Army General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Milley’s senior enlisted advisor, Ramon Colon-Lopez.

Virtual town halls like this have been a way for the Pentagon’s top brass to address concerns in 2020 about racial discrimination in a military - America’s largest employer - which is diverse in lower ranks but largely white and male at the top.

Apparently unbeknownst to Colon-Lopez, who responded only indirectly to Champ, the Defense Department not only carries out granular surveys about discrimination but has been legally-required to do so since the 1990s here. The last survey of the active duty force, conducted every four years, was for fiscal year 2017.

However, the Defense Department denied repeated requests from Reuters to release the 2017 survey data, including through a Freedom of Information Act request. It has also not released a separate report about the 2017 survey data or clearly explained why the data has been withheld for so long.

Maryland Rep. Anthony Brown, a retired Army Reserve colonel and the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus on the House Armed Services Committee, said the failure to release the data was troubling.

“It concerns me tremendously,” Brown said, adding Congress had established a clear reporting requirement and the public had a right to know.

Champ declined to be interviewed for this article, the Army said. Colon-Lopez did not respond for a request for comment.

In its final response to Reuters this month, rejecting the Freedom of Information Act request, the Department of Defense said the survey data constituted “information of a pre-decisional, deliberative nature.”

If released, the Pentagon asserted it could “reasonably be expected to interfere with the government’s deliberative process.”

Still, the data is already so old that the Pentagon is now in the awkward position of having to start planning for another survey in the ongoing 2021 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

MAKES THEM LOOK BAD

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the Defense Department was nearing completion of its report on the fiscal year 2017 survey data and would provide it to Congress in the coming weeks. The spokeswoman did not explain the years-long delay.

Don Christensen, a retired chief prosecutor for the Air Force who leads the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, was skeptical of the Pentagon’s motives when denying requests for the data’s release over a period of months.

“What it really means is that whatever you’re asking makes them look bad. And if it made them look good, they’d release it,” said Christensen, whose research has drawn attention to racial discrimination in the military.

A Reuters investigation this year here found servicemembers are far less likely than civilian Defense Department employees to bring forward their concerns about discrimination through formal channels. Equal Opportunity complaints, current and former servicemembers say, is often a dead end, resulting in little action, or worse, backfiring on the complainant. []

The Pentagon survey, known as the Workplace and Equal Opportunity Survey of Active Duty Members, examines such issues directly.

In the most recent publicly available survey, back in 2013, the data showed that some 16% of minorities in the active duty force experienced harassment, discrimination or both because of their race or ethnicity.

President-elect Joe Biden underscored the importance of diversity at the Pentagon when he announced his pick earlier this month to lead it: retired Army general Lloyd Austin, who would be the first Black U.S. defense secretary, if approved by Congress.

“More than 40% of our active duty forces are people of color. It’s long past time that the department’s leadership reflects that diversity,” Biden said.

Rep. Brown, who strongly supports Biden’s pick of Austin, said he believed that the retired U.S. general would prioritize diversity in the Pentagon - including when addressing the issue to Congress and the public.

“I think with Lloyd Austin, we’re going to get greater transparency than we’ve had in the past,” Brown said.

Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Shri Navaratnam