They need to care about our humanity’: death of Tongan LGBTQ+ activist sparks calls for reform

After the alleged murder of Polikalepo Kefu, Pacific LGBTQI groups are calling for change, including revoking sodomy laws

Phylesha Brown-Acton, a fakafifine woman from Tonga, is calling for legislators in the Pacific nation to revoke queerphobic laws and protect LGBTIQ+ people. Photograph: Supplied

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Leni Ma'ia'i
Sat 8 May 2021 06.28 BS

The large hall of the basilica in the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa, hasn’t seen many crowds since Covid restrictions were introduced a year ago.

But on Thursday night, people from across all parts of society packed every inch of available space in the venue, clad mostly in black and the traditional woven ta’ovala dress.

Tongan authorities have granted an exemption to the 50-person cap on indoor gatherings, so that people from across the Pacific country can come together for a candlelight vigil in memory of LGBTQ+ and humanitarian activist Polikalepo “Poli” Kefu.


Outpouring of grief after alleged murder of leading Tongan LGBTQI activist

Kefu, 41, a beloved leader in Tonga, was killed on Saturday on a beach near his home in Lapaha. Police have charged a 27-year-old man with his murder. The death has sent shock waves through the small country and through its LGBTQI+ community, who hope that it will spur action to tackle homophobic attitudes and to repeal thediscriminatory laws in the country.

Among those who have come to pay tribute is a member of the country’s royal family, Princess Frederica Tuita, who struggles through tears as she speaks about her close friend of nearly 20 years.

“Being Tongan means living as Poli did, embodying our society’s values of love, humility, respect, and loyalty,” said Tuita.

Princess Frederica Tuita speaks at a candlelight vigil held in Tonga for Polikalepo Kefu. Photograph: Broadcom fm Broadcasting

As diplomatically as she can, considering her high-profile position, Princess Tuita proceeds with an indictment on Tonga for allowing Kefu’s death to happen.

“Our society has yet to take command of the responsibility required to truly commit to those [Tongan] values, and implement them where it counts.”

Where it counts, Tuita implies, is in the greater protections of leitī people against the threat of hate crime.

The Tongan word leitī is one of the many descriptors across the Pacific region to recognise the diverse sexual and gender expressions in their populations.

“It’s more of a comfort word for the LGBTQ+ community. We just call everybody leitī, whether you are trans, a lesbian, or however you identify,” says Joey Joleen Mataele, founder of the Tonga Leitīs Association, who passed down her presidency to Kefu in 2018.

A man handed himself in to police on Monday and has been charged with Kefu’s murder. Tongan Police have not commented on whether they believe Kefu was the vitim of a hate crime, or not.

The hashtag #JusticeForPoli has stayed trending as communities from around the South Pacific gather to host their own vigils. Specifically, the justice the Pacific LGBTQ+ groups are calling for is sweeping law reform, including the repeal of Tonga’s Criminal Offences Act, which makes sodomy punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

President of Tonga Leitis Association Polikalepo Kefu who was killed in Tonga. Photograph: Twitter

These legal issues are not unique to Tonga. In popular tourist destinations like Samoa and Cook Islands, homosexual sex acts are punishable by a prison sentence.

Samoa, which has hosted fa’afafine – understood in western terms as the third, non-binary gender – beauty pageants since the 1970s, only repealed laws criminalising the “impersonation” of females in 2013.

According to Phylesha Brown-Acton, a fakafifine (a Niuean gender identity designation) woman and executive director of F’ine Pasifika, these discriminatory laws empower some members of the community to feel comfortable acting in hateful ways toward leitī people.

“It gives people the permission to further treat leitī worse than dogs. I’m sorry to say, but in Tonga, Tonga has a Dog Act. Dogs have vets and doctors that look after them. There’s absolutely nothing for the leitī, we’re seen as a lower class of animals such as a dog,” said Brown-Acton.

Ymania Brown, the co-secretary of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World), works hand-in-hand with LGBTQ+ groups in the Pacific to help lobby for law reform.

“There are many, many variables to successfully change laws and some of those variables include the cultural attitudes of different countries, which are different between Pacific nations. To know what’s right for Papua New Guinea, is not right for the Solomon Islands, or for Tonga, or Samoa,” said Brown.

‘The police told me it was my fault’

Police in most Pacific nations do not specifically record incidents of hate crime, so getting conclusive data on how frequently these cases occur is difficult, but Brown-Acton has her own harrowing story of how bad it can be.

She says in 2007 she was the victim of an attempted gang-rape by a group of about 10 men.

She says they pinned her down and tried to tear her pants off, but she was able to get free and run for help. Brown-Acton immediately went to the police to file a charge, but says her complaints were met with ambivalence.

“Basically the police were just like, ‘this is your fault, you should never have been there.’ Nothing eventuated. Nobody was held accountable,” said Brown-Acton. She believes she was attacked because she is queer and that police did not take her seriously for the same reason.

“I’m not isolated to being the only person that has had experienced this, leitī endure and experience violence, day after day”

Tongan Police deputy commissioner, Tevita Vailea said he wasn’t aware of this particular case but invited Brown-Acton to come forward to provide more information about the incident.

“Tongan police have come a long way in trying to develop our capacity and development of Tonga police,” said Vailea. “And part of that you see, is treating people in our society in a more fair and equitable way. So we are doing our best to encourage all victims of crime to come forward and report to us.”
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By all accounts, police work into Poli’s death has been thorough and efficient. The accused murderer is remanded in custody and is due to appear at the magistrates court on 19 May. Investigations into the death are ongoing.

‘We must win our battle before the church’

Beyond policing, Brown-Acton says the fraught relationships between Pacific Island nations and their LGBTQ+ communities largely stems from the introduction of Christianity into the South Pacific from the 18th century.

Before missionaries arrived in the Pacific, all Pacific cultures were known to have wide acceptance of leitīs, fa’afafine, and the many other sexual identities that make up the Pacific.

For religious institutions, which are a fundamental cornerstone of life in the Pacific Islands, the road to accepting these cultural practices has been long and complicated.

Joey, the founder of the Tonga leitīs Association, and a trans woman, remembers the shock on the faces of the congregation when in the late 1970s, she plucked up the courage to wear a dress to a busy Sunday mass. As far as she knows, she was the first first leitī to ever do it in Tonga.

“It was an electric blue pleated dress and I remember walking in that I turned a lot of heads, I was the biggest show of the day,” said Joey. “I don’t know if I was trying to make a statement, but I was just wanting to be me.”

Today, leitī in Tonga can mostly feel free to dress as they please in church, and they’re seeing acknowledgment by some religious institutions.

At Kefu’s vigil, Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Tonga, spoke of the community that “mourn together with the leitīs’ association.”

Ymania Brown, from ILGA World, says that while there may be some progress, there’s a long way to go.

“We need to win the battle in front of the church before we can win in front of the law reformers, because if we win it in front of the clergy, they will stand in front of us. They will actually argue for us, for our inclusion,” said Brown.

In the meantime, the Tongan Leitīs’ Association and various other LGBTQ+ groups are looking to push reform urgently in the legal system.

“It’s hard for me to say, yes, Poli’s death is going to result in wide sweeping changes, because a lot of it depends not on us, because we’re ready, it depends on legislators and parliamentarians in the Pacific to stand up and develop a backbone. They need to care enough about humanity to say, yes, this is a group of people that need protection and then we can have changes,” said Brown.

In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

Revealed: 46m displaced people excluded from Covid jab programmes

WHO review finds many national vaccination plans exclude asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and IDPs

Among those excluded are 5.6 million Colombians internally displaced by six decades of civil war. Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

Michael Safi
@safimichael
Fri 7 May 2021

THE GUARDIAN

Tens of millions of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees and internally displaced people around the world have been excluded from national Covid-19 vaccination programmes, according to World Health Organization research seen by the Guardian.

The gaps mean that a scattered group numbering at least 46 million people, about the size of the population of Spain, may struggle to get vaccinated even if a global shortage of doses eases.

Among the excluded are 5.6 million people internally displaced by six decades of civil war in Colombia, hundreds of thousands of refugees in Kenya and Syria and nearly 5 million migrants in Ukraine.

India, Nigeria and Indonesia are among several large countries whose vaccination programmes exclude displaced people, according to the WHO’s review, which was conducted in March. Others, such as Pakistan, appear in the list but have since amended their plans to make them more inclusive.

International health groups have been considering the problem of excluded populations for months, and the groups behind the vaccine-sharing facility Covax approved the establishment in March of a channel of doses reserved as a source of last resort for the most vulnerable people in communities with no other pathway to a jab.


The channel, called the “humanitarian buffer”, will draw on 5% of the doses allocated to poor and lower-middle income countries through Covax, redirecting them toward the most vulnerable 20% in excluded communities, to be administered by NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières.
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Covax has estimated a maximum of about 33 million people would be eligible for vaccines from the buffer, accounting for the most at risk within these groups – health workers, older people and those with risky co-morbidities. It is unclear when, if ever, others in these excluded communities will be vaccinated and from what source.

Humanitarian groups have said that even if all migrants, refugees and other vulnerable populations were included in national plans, there would still be between 60 and 80 million people living in rebel-held territories around the world who would be out of reach.

The WHO research illustrates the scale of the gaps within government schemes. More than 70% of the 104 vaccination plans reviewed excluded migrants, leaving out more than 30 million around the world, including 4.9 million people in India and 2.6 million in the Ivory Coast.

Nor did the majority of plans studied include refugees and asylum seekers, stranding nearly 5 million people without a shot, including 1.8 million in Colombia, 590,000 in Syria and 489,000 in Kenya.

About 11.8 million internally displaced people were also omitted from most plans, leaving out 2.7 million Nigerians and more than a million Indians, according to the research.

Public health experts have argued that exclusionary vaccine plans are ultimately self-defeating, leaving large pockets of the population unprotected and still able to contract and transmit the virus, including variants that may have the potential to evade the immunity granted by vaccines.

“As we learned from the outset of Covid-19 and all the restrictions put in place, availability of testing and access to healthcare for coronavirus, no one is safe until everyone is safe, and that is absolutely the same for vaccination programmes,” said Nadia Hardman, a researcher in refugee and migrant rights at Human Rights Watch.

“What we’re seeing in India now, and what we saw in the UK, is the development of variants which rely and depend on a community not being immune, and the extent to which vaccinations are rolled out to all in a territory is critical for the containment of the virus and containment of threatening variants.”

Vaccine distribution tends to illuminate a state’s blind spots, and even some governments that putatively included refugees in their plans were doing too little to make sure they were actually vaccinated, Hardman said.

She gave the example of Lebanon, which has included the 1.5 million refugees who make up a third of its population in its national plan, “but what we’ve seen is extremely low take-up rates and an unwillingness by authorities to put forward the kinds of promises and assurances and mechanisms to get refugees and vulnerable groups to vaccination centres”, she said.

Countries can also apply to access Covax’s humanitarian buffer in extraordinary circumstances, such as the inflow of a large population of refugees.

There is also a separate “contingency provision”, drawing from the same emergency stockpile, which allows countries to apply for an immediate surge of extra doses through Covax in case of an extraordinary outbreak, potentially such as that which India has experienced over past weeks.

A spokesperson for the WHO did not comment on how many of countries named in the research had subsequently addressed the gaps in their vaccination programmes, but said: “Experience shows that despite best efforts, at-risk populations in humanitarian settings are often left behind and are at risk of being missed by government-led vaccination activities.”

COMMENTARY: How Uber contributed to the fate of taxi drivers

globalnewsdigital 8/5/2021

Countries around the world are wrestling with whether to classify Uber drivers and other gig economy workers as independent contractors or employees.

© Pixabay Taxi cabs on a street.

But when Uber first came on the scene, the primary subject of debate was whether its drivers were, in fact, taxi drivers. Why was this ride-sharing or ride-hailing app run by a tech firm also applying to be a taxi company? Was Uber truly “the same as a taxi, but different?”


Read more: Uber Canada proposes changes to labour laws to provide workers with some benefits

We’ve studied how Uber and taxi drivers have been affected by Uber’s categorization as a technology company. As organizational and management researchers at business schools from across Canada studying stigma, marginalization and inequality as well as entrepreneurship, innovation and technology, we became very interested in Uber’s entry into the taxi industry as we watched it unfold.

In Toronto, Uber was eventually legalized in 2016 after “months of protest and turmoil” and years of debate while it operated illegally.

But when we began studying Uber’s entry into Toronto, we noticed something concerning. There was increasing praise in the media for Uber and Uber drivers, but criticism and near-contempt for taxis and taxi drivers.

Kam Phung summarizes the study in his Top 25 Finalists’ video in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s 2020 Storytellers challenge.

How were two groups of people doing the same work every day — driving other people to their desired destinations — being perceived so differently? As one Uber driver told us in an interview: “I don’t see the difference. … There is no difference between each other.” But it seemed the media and Uber disagreed.

Toronto is home to the largest taxi driver population in the country with more than 10,000 drivers, over 80 per cent of them immigrants. Unfortunately, taxi drivers in Toronto have historically faced racism, classism and stigma. More broadly, taxi driving has also been called “dirty work.”

© Provided by Global News A downtown Toronto intersectionThe intersection of Yonge Street and Queen Street West in downtown Toronto. (Kayla Speid/Unsplash)

The work of late Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman and subsequent research have shown that stigma transfers by association. This would suggest that Uber drivers would become stigmatized by virtue of entering the field of driving, just as taxi drivers are. But we didn’t see this happen for Uber drivers.

To make sense of this, we conducted an in-depth case study of Uber’s entry and expansion into Toronto from 2013 to 2016. We analyzed 976 media articles and conducted 55 interviews after walking the streets of Toronto and ordering Ubers to find real drivers.

We also conducted observations at protests, panel discussions and city hall meetings to better understand what was happening on the ground.

Based on this data, we wrote and published an open-access article in the Journal of Management Studies, where we argue that new entrants to a stigmatized occupation can actually deflect stigma. But how does this happen?

Uber’s perceived categorical ambiguity — as seen in the surge of debates over how to label Uber and its drivers — paved a path to differentiate Uber drivers from taxi drivers through two activities.

First, Uber spokespeople, public officials and media created a categorical distinction by pointing to technology to explain why “Uber is not a taxi company.”

Second, they highlighted differences between the perceived identities of Uber drivers and taxi drivers, often emphasizing that Uber drivers were driving short-term and part-time. Yet, this didn’t necessarily reflect reality. As one Uber driver told us in an interview:


“I start at 7 a.m. and I finish at 7 p.m. Twelve hours. I try to work Monday to Friday because I have family and I have one daughter. … I want to enjoy the summer, but sometimes I work on Saturday at night.”

These categorical distinctions and perceived differences in identities helped Uber drivers deflect the stigma of taxi driving, despite many Uber drivers even acknowledging they did the same thing as their taxi counterparts.

Video: Ride-sharing services may soon be regulated in Kingston, Ont.

Meanwhile, the stigma facing taxi drivers got worse. As distinctions and differences circulated in the media, they were accompanied by remarks anchored in prejudice tied to the social, moral and physical characteristics of taxi drivers.

These remarks degraded taxi drivers to the benefit of Uber drivers, often emphasizing and juxtaposing the immigrant status, languages, hygiene and working conditions of taxi drivers compared to Uber drivers. Media coverage also often emphasized taxi industry features that were mandated and regulated by the city, and not taxi drivers themselves.

The media reported on the convenience of the new Uber app and its automatic credit card payment process, even though Uber was operating illegally — and as several taxi companies launched their own apps to “help riders commute hassle-free.”

By the time Uber was legalized as a “private transportation company” and the distinctions between Uber drivers and taxi drivers were formalized, it wasn’t just that taxi drivers faced economic hardships. They also argued there was a “two-tier system,” and Uber drivers and taxi drivers became polarized in the media.

“It’s really severely marginalizing my existence," one driver told us.

"I feel like I’m coming to the bitter end. I feel like that guy in the orange jumpsuit who is on his knees and a guy from ISIS is standing over me, except the guy in the black suit there is an Uber guy with a machete in his hand.”

Read more: Supreme Court clears way for Uber drivers in Canada to be seen as employees

Uber’s entry into Toronto divided an occupation and exacerbated the social and economic hardships of taxi drivers. And it all started with how Uber and Uber drivers were categorized.

It’s encouraging that Uber drivers didn’t face the same stigma as taxi drivers. However, it’s disheartening that it avoided that fate at the cost of taxi drivers.

Kam Phung, PhD Candidate in Organization Studies, York University, Canada; Luciana Turchick Hakak, Assistant Professor, Organizational Behaviour, University of The Fraser Valley; Madeline Toubiana, Assistant Professor, Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management, University of Alberta; Sean Buchanan, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, University of Manitoba, and Trish Ruebottom, Associate Professor of HR and Management, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Google's childcare workers are furious about the company ordering them back into the office without paying their transportation costs

tsonnemaker@insider.com (Tyler Sonnemaker)
7/5/2021

© Courtesy of Comparably 

Google childcare workers want the company to cover their transportation costs until its shuttle service resumes.

Google told the workers to return to the office Monday, even as it grants more flexibility to corporate employees.

They slammed Google for making educators - who they said make $20 per hour - cover new transportation costs.

The workers who educate and take care of Google corporate employees' children during the day are furious over being hit with additional transportation costs as the company requires them to return to in-person work.

Google has told its 148 San Francisco Bay Area childcare workers to return to the office starting Monday, despite the company's shuttle services remaining shut down and many corporate employees being allowed to keep working remotely, according to a statement from the Alphabet Workers Union.

As a result, Google is forcing the childcare workers, who AWU said earn an average of $20 per hour, to find alternative ways to get to work. That could be costly, especially for the many workers who live far from Google's campuses due to the high cost of living in the Bay Area, AWU said.

In response, the workers, with the support of AWU, launched a petition Friday asking Google to provide a $1,500 monthly transportation stipend until the company's shuttle services resume. As of Friday evening, the petition had gathered more than 250 signatures from workers at Google and other subsidiaries of its parent company, Alphabet.

"We welcome feedback and will continue to work with any educator who has concerns as we start to reopen and return regular services," a Google spokesperson told Insider in a statement.

"Transportation isn't just a nice-to-have for us, it's fundamental if we want to do our job," Denise Belardes, a Google educator and AWU member, said in a statement to Insider via AWU.

"Options that cost money are not real options. We're not the ones making hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. We do not have the option to work from home as other Googlers. We need this stipend," Belardes added.

The workers also pointed to recent Alphabet regulatory filings that said the company saved $268 million last quarter - which would amount to more than $1 billion annually - on "advertising and promotional as well as travel and entertainment expenses... primarily as a result of COVID-19" as employees work remotely.

"The corporation has been investing some of [its] record profits in the wellbeing of the return to office plan for some of its workforce, including creating specialized privacy robots, and new technology to help with the transition," the petition said. "Clearly, Google can be an extraordinary problem solver, but is choosing not to solve this problem for its childcare workers."

Google has been more responsive to its corporate employees, however.

After some employees expressed frustration over the company's plans to return to the office by September under a "hybrid" plan, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said this week that the company would take a more flexible approach with roughly 20% of employees remaining fully remote.

But when Google childcare workers raised the transportation issue to the company, its response, according to the petition, was: "transportation is just a perk, not a benefit."

Manufacturers push to give workers with criminal records a second chance

Kate Rogers 
CNBC

7/5/2021

Citing a worker shortage, the manufacturing industry is eager to increase the talent pool.

The manufacturing sector has 500,000 jobs open currently and expects to fill another 4 million jobs over the next 10 years.

With the right support, people with criminal backgrounds have proven successful in filling the gap.

Second-chance hiring for ex-convicts

At the age of 56, Franklin Comer is proudly working at his first job.

Comer is approaching his one-year anniversary at Nehemiah Manufacturing in Cincinnati, after serving more than 33 years in prison for aggravated robbery and murder.

"Throughout the whole incarceration, one of the first things that was most important to me, I had to take an inventory of self … and identify the issues that sent me to prison and allowed me to make the decisions that led me to commit a crime," Comer said. "I knew I made a mistake. And so, when I went to prison, I tried to redeem myself into becoming a better person."

"You know, it took me a while," he said. "I accomplished it."

Comer received help to reenter society from Cincinnati Works, a job readiness organization in Ohio. The program helped Comer get his driver's license, fill out job applications and find his way to Nehemiah. Today, he works as a warehouse associate — and his story isn't unique. Out of Nehemiah's 180 employees, nearly 80% are "second chance" hires, part of a greater push for inclusive capitalism the company first embraced a decade ago.

"There's a cohesion here of people that you would never know what their background is, if they didn't tell you. And to me that's important," Comer said. "They don't care about the past, [there's a] degree of compassion and understanding that they have here."

Companies like Nehemiah have embraced second chance hiring of workers with criminal records, out of compassion and, more frequently, out of necessity. The manufacturing sector has 500,000 jobs open today — a number that will swell to 4 million over the course of the next decade. Finding workers to fill those jobs is a challenge.

To help bridge the gap, The Manufacturing Institute, the workforce development and education partner of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), recently announced a new partnership with the Charles Koch Institute to expand so-called second chance hiring opportunities in the industry, following the model Nehemiah has been working on for 11 years.

© Provided by CNBC Nehemiah Manufacturing's vision is to build brands, create jobs and change lives.

One in 3 Americans have a criminal record, and the partnership and accompanying grant will allow NAM to help educate and provide resources for manufacturing employers to attract and retain new talent, said Carolyn Lee, executive director of The Manufacturing Institute. Lee said 2.1 million jobs could go unfilled in manufacturing in the next 10 years if workers are not recruited. That could hit the U.S. economy by as much as $1 trillion in lost gross domestic product by 2030, according to a recent study from The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte.

"There are high rates of retention for the second chance population. It can be a great platform and a pathway to a successful career with the manufacturer," Lee said. "For some folks, they haven't had a job in quite some time but are eager to start a new life. … We want to build these coalitions and help companies know where to begin and where to go to make them successful."

'Good for business and good for society'

Nehemiah Manufacturing was founded with the goal of bringing light-duty manufacturing jobs to Cincinnati, which evolved into providing opportunities for workers like Comer.

"It's good for business and good for society," Eric Wellinghoff, Nehemiah's chief marketing officer, said. The company takes a special approach to human resources issues, has a social services team on-site, and even a family home it furnishes and provides for some employees. Comer said he participated in the company's "Wheels Program," which provided him a car, free of charge, to get to and from work.

In an industry where turnover is historically high, Wellinghoff said Nehemiah's average tenure is 5½ years.

"We have built a family here. People who love working here — they love doing their job, they love getting better at their job, and ultimately that drives down to our bottom line," he said.

Manufacturing skills gap continues to grow

The Manufacturing Institute is working to change the perception that manufacturing jobs are dead-end by telling potential candidates at every level, from the second chance community to younger students and even parents, that modern-day manufacturing jobs are high tech, clean and high paying. Workers earn an average of $84,000 a year, with benefits. Starting pay for entry-level positions is above $15 an hour, Lee said.

The second chance hiring initiative goes beyond NAM's efforts. Nehemiah Manufacturing founded the Beacon of Hope Business Alliance in 2016, which is now operated by Cincinnati Works and partners with dozens of companies including Kroger, JBM Packaging, JTM Food Group, Castellini and Graeter's. Large companies like Walmart, Starbucks and Home Depot also have inclusive hiring practices for those with criminal records. The federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit also offers incentives to employers of qualifying ex-felons.

Comer is hopeful other companies will look at Nehemiah's model and give workers like himself a shot.

"When a man has truly become successful is because somebody believed in him and gave him a chance," he said. "So for those companies that, that are not second chance companies, you know, that's all guys like me want, is for somebody to believe in them and give them a chance.

Why America's economic recovery is stumbling as experts badly misjudge the labor market

bwinck@businessinsider.com (Ben Winck) 

 A BevMo store on April 2 in Larkspur, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

April's jobs report was a big miss, suggesting the hiring rebound many anticipated was an illusion.

Virus fears, childcare pressures, and unemployment benefits all likely drove the weak payrolls read.

Biden has proposed massive packages focused on jobs, but they likely face months of negotiation.

The Democratic political advisor James Carville became famous in the 1990s for his phrase, "It's the economy, stupid."

After April's shockingly disappointing jobs report, it looks more like: "It's not the economy, stupid. It's the virus."

March's strong jobs data - along with widespread projections of a coming economic boom - had raised optimism among economists for a continued recovery in the labor force. It prompted Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to deem March an "inflection point" for the reopening of the economy, and experts saw it kicking off a season of outsize payroll increases. But the drop in April makes clear the virus continues to bite.

Economists had expected payroll gains to reach 1 million, but the country added just 266,000 jobs last month. It was the smallest monthly increase since January and the biggest miss of payroll forecasts in more than two decades. The unemployment rate rose to 6.1%, female employment declined, and while hard-hit sectors like leisure and hospitality had healthy gains, most others posted either meager growth or shed jobs entirely.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Friday release underscores just how much the labor market still has to recover, and that the climb won't be as easy as most economists anticipated. Even if April stands out as a gloomy outlier, the average pace of payroll growth suggests it may take years to fully recoup the millions of jobs lost to the pandemic.

What went wrong?

The jobs report was such a shock that it's hard to find a single explanation at first glance. It also highlights just how inadequate forecasting tools are for measuring this unique economic moment.

Economists typically use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to estimate growth. Indicators like weekly jobless claims and hours worked join anecdotal evidence and broad surveys to create forecasting models. Economists' calculations, when tallied together and averaged, usually come close to guessing monthly payroll additions.

The April data serves as a wake-up call for the many forecasters who didn't even come close to guessing correctly. Whether models overlooked details like COVID-19 fears, or bullish biases tarnished forecasts, economists need to reconcile how they were so wrong.

The disappointment was likely fueled by several factors instead of one solvable hurdle. Despite President Joe Biden's overdelivering on vaccinations, the country is far from placing the coronavirus pandemic behind it. Daily case counts still averaged about 50,000 at the end of last month, and highly contagious strains continue to spread across the US.

The coronavirus pandemic has also been notable for the "she-cession," hurting female employment much more than men. The absence of affordable childcare and lack of in-person schooling around the country likely kept some Americans home instead of working, as seen in the April report, which showed women - who disproportionately take on childcare responsibilities - losing jobs through the month.
How big is the labor shortage?

Last month, several businesses across the manufacturing and service sectors reported difficulties in finding workers. The jury is still out on how widespread worker shortages might be, as about 10 million Americans remain unemployed. On one hand, some economists suggested boosted unemployment benefits cut into the incentive to find work. Strong wage growth in the leisure and hospitality sector also signals businesses may need to lift compensation to attract workers.

"The benefits are due to expire in September, but perhaps people think jobs will be just as easy to find then as they are now, so why take a job today?" Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said. "If people continue to resist taking the jobs on offer at the pay on offer, then wages will have to rise more quickly."

The Chamber of Commerce called on lawmakers to withdraw the federal benefit to unemployment insurance following the April report. The supplement results in 25% of recipients earning more from unemployment benefits than by working, Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer at the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.

"We need a comprehensive approach to dealing with our workforce issues and the very real threat unfilled positions pose to our economic recovery from the pandemic," he added.

The April data does not quite agree with the chamber's argument, showing labor demand overshadowing anecdotes of a supply shortage. April job gains were strongest in lower-wage industries and in sectors with in-person jobs. The composition of last month's job additions "doesn't scream supply constraints as the problem," Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed, wrote on Twitter.

Separately, the number of Americans temporarily laid off ticked slightly higher in April. That also signals labor demand wasn't as robust as businesses' anecdotes suggested.

In other labor-market data, the steady decline in weekly jobless claims now looks much less encouraging for the recovery. The April uptick in unemployment comes as filings for unemployment benefits fell throughout the month to numerous pandemic-era lows. The drops initially seemed to signal that more Americans were returning to work, but BLS's report suggests the downtrend has more to do with Americans dropping out of assistance programs than finding employment.

It could take months for the government to lend a hand

Much of the past few months' promising job gains were linked to massive stimulus packages. The CARES Act helped a sharp hiring rebound after initial COVID-19 lockdowns in March 2020. And Biden's $1.9 trillion plan in March spurred stronger economic activity last month.

The president has since rolled out two new spending proposals, the larger of which would spend $2.3 trillion on job creation. The American Jobs Plan would create millions of jobs by funding traditional infrastructure projects, clean-energy initiatives, and nationwide broadband, Biden said in a speech Thursday. Biden's administration has at other times cited a Moody's Analytics projection of 2.7 million new jobs from the American Jobs Plan.

The smaller package, named the American Families Plan, could support hiring in its own right by overhauling the care economy, as it seeks to provide paid family and medical leave and childcare support.

But such support is likely months away. Republicans have balked at both plans, criticizing their hefty price tags and the tax hikes proposed to offset them. Democrats seem to face a challenge in passing the package on a party-line vote via reconciliation, as some moderates in their party have yet to throw their full support behind the follow-up packages as they exist.

To be sure, the April report represents just one month of hiring. May numbers could show a healthy rebound and revive the positive trend. The economy is not even fully reopened from virus-safety considerations yet, so rebounds are likely.

But with additional fiscal support far on the horizon and economists highlighting a number of obstacles hindering job growth, the resurgent spring recovery for jobs that many economists were predicting is gone.

With 8 million Americans out of work, why are more companies not filling jobs?

By Ann Saphir and Lucia Mutikani

© Reuters/EILEEN MESLAR FILE PHOTO: Matt Arnold, CEO of Look Trailers, tours the company's utility trailer manufacturing facility in Middlebury

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the economy revs up to meet the rapacious demand of tens of millions of newly vaccinated Americans, employers say they cannot fill their yawning need for labor.


Take Alex Washut. In January he mapped out hiring plans for his two breakfast and lunch eateries in western Massachusetts and figured he'd need to hire 20 new cooks, servers, dishwashers and other staff by May. He has doubled wages in some cases but has managed to hire only five; most of the time, he said, job candidates never even show for their interviews.

At the same time, the U.S. economy is down more than 8 million jobs since before the pandemic, and Federal Reserve officials say the true unemployment rate is closer to 10% than the 5.8% a government report is expected to show on Friday.

Analysts estimate U.S. employers added nearly a million new jobs last month, but the question is not why U.S. employers hired so many, but why they did not hire more?

What gives? It's a long list, but here are some of the highlights:

* Parents - particularly mothers - cannot work because closures or shortened hours at schools and daycare keep them home to watch their kids.

* Would-be workers remain concerned about health risks amid a pandemic still claiming about 700 American lives daily.

* Stock market gains have given some older workers the cushion to retire.

* Some younger workers are finding jobs in new fields, shrinking the labor pool for the industries they left behind.

* Many employers need to fill jobs requiring skills that sidelined workers may not have.

* Employers complain that enhanced unemployment benefits and other government aid are keeping workers on the sidelines, content to collect a check rather than work for a living. Data released by the Labor Department on Thursday showed more than 16 million people are still receiving some form of unemployment benefit, now more than a year into the pandemic.

"We recognize that the labor supply has been affected by the pandemic... (but) are seeing little evidence though that enhanced unemployment benefits are currently affecting Americans' willingness to work," Whitehouse spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday.

What's that all add up to? In a nutshell, this: A National Federation of Independent Business survey showed a record 42% of small businesses had job openings they could not fill in March.

Economists say that if employers need workers so badly, they would raise pay. So far, that's not happening. U.S. compensation rose more quickly than expected in the first quarter, but the boost came mostly from one-time bonuses to financial sector workers, and was not broadly shared.

"The full sentence is 'I can't find workers at the wage I am willing to offer.' Full stop," said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson. "You can find workers."

Graphic: The jobs hole facing Biden - 

https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/JOBS/xlbpgygrnpq/chart.png

EYES ON SEPTEMBER

Over the next several months analysts will watch intently to see how the labor market adapts to the biggest changes since after World War Two, when millions of soldiers returned home and wartime assembly lines shut down. It may be the end of summer before there is any real clarity.

"Ultimately as we get into September and we see schools reopening and some decline in unemployment insurance benefits we do expect for a lot of these labor scarcity issues to be alleviated," Deutsche Bank economist Matthew Luzzetti said.

Or, as Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester put it on Wednesday, as vaccinations rise and more schools return to in-person learning, "We'll get to that better equilibrium in the labor market between supply and demand."

It is not unusual for it to take time for labor markets upended by a recession to work out kinks.

After the last downturn, Fed surveys showed employers grousing about worker shortages in 2012, when the unemployment rate was above 8%. When compensation began to rise in earnest several years later, workers flooded back to the labor market.

"What we saw was that labor supply generally showed up," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last month. "In other words, if you were worried about running out of workers, it seemed like we never did."

This time, with the economy projected to grow at its fastest pace since 1984, the rebalancing may be quicker. The Fed will be watching what happens with wages, and prices.



Graphic: Jobs and job openings -

 https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/JOBS/azgvogmkmvd/chart.png

BACK TO THE KITCHEN? NOPE

Some workers in industries hard hit by job losses, such as restaurants and retail, have moved sectors entirely, said Bill Spriggs, chief economist with the AFL-CIO and a professor at Howard University.

Some people who had low-paying jobs before the pandemic were struggling to cover their bills even before the crisis and may be searching for more financial security, he said.

Richard Bunce, 33, was working as an executive chef in South Philadelphia when the pandemic hit. His eatery shut for six weeks, reopened for takeout, and then shut again.

Laid off, Bunce said he "decided I needed to do something different." He went to coding school, graduated in December and had a job offer two weeks later. He has since had a couple of offers to get back into the restaurant business. "I don't plan on doing that," he said.

Bunce's gain is the restaurant industry's loss. Washington-based restaurant operator Knead Hospitality is so desperate for workers it is offering hiring bonuses of up to $1,000 for servers, line cooks and bartenders.

Washut, the Massachusetts restaurateur, said he figures that to entice people collecting unemployment benefits he would have to set starting hourly pay at $19, up from $15 now. That would mean bumping wages even higher for existing staff or risk them feeling short-changed. To pay for all those raises, he would have to jack up prices on his $12 plates of Caribbean jerk chicken hash and eggs. "And who will pay $20 for an order of hash?"

Jimmy Nigg, who runs the Monkey Barrel Bar in Denver, is in a similar boat. He often finds himself in the kitchen making $5.95 cheeseburgers or behind the bar serving $6 craft beer because he can't find staff, though he now offers line cooks nearly $19 an hour.

Still, he's betting the upward wage pressure is temporary.

By September, he said, people will be willing to take "$15 or $16 because they are so desperate."

Graphic: Jobs in real time -

 https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/REOPENING/azgvoaggdvd/chart.png

(Additional reporting by Howard Schneider, David Brunnstrom and Merdie Nzanga in Washington and Jonnelle Marte in New York; Editing by Dan Burns and Dan Grebler)

REVISIONIST REPUBLICANS

Lawmaker's ridiculous explanation for the three-fifths compromise on slavery (opinion)

Opinion by Kate Masur 

Speaking to the Tennessee House of Representatives on Tuesday, State Representative Justin Lafferty became the latest politician to reveal how little many Americans, including those in positions of power, know about this country's history.

© Tennessee House of Representatives

The Constitution's "three-fifths compromise," he said, was designed "to ensure that southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country," and he asserted that the framers adopted this clause "for the purpose of ending slavery."

The three-fifths compromise, also known as the three-fifths clause, was not created to constrain the population of slave states nor was it intended to help end slavery. The clause was a compromise between contending visions of freedom and power in the new nation. It helped secure the influence of slaveholders and their allies in the federal government for decades to come, without doing a thing to curb or end the abhorrent practice of slavery.

The inaccuracies and misstatements of Lafferty and other Republicans, who are now seeking to prevent schools from teaching the fact-based history of slavery and racism in the United States, are "Exhibit A" for why we urgently need that history in our classrooms.

In 1787, the delegates who assembled in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution confronted complex questions of how to structure a national legislature and whether to ground representation in an enumeration of the population. They also debated whether, if a population count were used, enslaved people would be given the same weight as free people.

When the convention met, a number of northern states had already begun the process of abolishing slavery. But delegates to the convention, almost half of whom were slaveholders themselves, were overall too invested in slavery and too committed to limiting the power of the federal government to set the nation on a direct course toward abolition.

About 700,000 enslaved people lived in the country at the time, mostly in the southern states. Under sanction of state law, enslavers forced Black people to labor without pay, held them captive on farms and plantations and bought, sold and mortgaged them without regard for their humanity.

Yet during the convention's contentious debates about structuring Congress, some southerners insisted that if the House of Representatives was going to be based on a count of the population, then enslaved people must be treated as full "persons" in that count. This, of course, would maximize slave states' representation in Congress.

On the other side, some northern delegates claimed that enslaved people should not be counted at all for purposes of representation. They argued that southerners couldn't both insist on holding human beings as property and claim them as people when it suited their interests. Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania, pointed up the hypocrisy: "Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included?"

Ironically, then, leaders who were invested in slavery wanted the enslaved to be considered full persons, while those who stood mostly for freedom wanted them not counted at all. As historian Patrick Rael has written, "Each section's interest demanded that it argue against its own principles."

The convention finally arrived at the compromise position that enslaved people would count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining representation in the House, a formula that was later incorporated into the structure of the Electoral College. The three-fifths ratio itself did not originate in 1787; it had also been adopted as a basis for taxation at a 1783 meeting of the Continental Congress, but did not go into effect because it wasn't ratified by the states.

The Constitution's three-fifths clause helped slaveholders advance their interests on the national stage, at least in the short term, giving them more power than they would have had if the enslaved were not counted at all. It put enslavers in a strong position to garner crucial patronage appointments. It also gave them and their allies the edge in close contests, including the election of 1800, in which slaveholder Thomas Jefferson ultimately won the presidency, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided for the deportation of Native peoples across the southern states.

Yet the compromise was not powerful enough to guarantee permanent southern dominance, especially in the face of demographic change. In the decades following the nation's founding, slaveholders' grip on federal power was imperiled by larger population growth in the North, and they grew to rely on their strength in the Senate to block legislation that might diminish the protections that slavery enjoyed.

For many White southerners, Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 was the breaking point. Elected almost exclusively by voters in the free states, Lincoln and the Republicans had pledged to stop slavery's spread. Southern separatists, faced with the possibility that slaveholding interests might never again prevail in the US government, broke with the Constitution and tried to form a separate nation, dedicated to preserving slavery and White supremacy.

In their veneration for the founding, Lafferty and other Republicans are reluctant to grapple with this nation's history as it actually unfolded. Neither the three-fifths clause nor any other constitutional measure led inevitably to slavery's abolition. Powerful White Americans persisted in defending the right to own Black people as property. It was, finally, a civil war in which more than 700,000 people perished that forced White southerners to give up those claims.

All this is not a matter of opinion or of politics. It's a matter of historical fact.

Officeholders should not fear that American children will learn these truths. To the contrary they should fund and support history teaching that tells the whole story, in all its difficulty and drama, to give future generations the tools they need to confront the challenges of their own times.

Prospects dim for passage of LGBTQ rights bill in Senate

WASHINGTON — Controlling Congress and the White House for the first time in a decade, Democrats were hopeful that this would be the year they finally secured civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Then came a new debate over women’s and girls sports.

Legislation that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is running aground in the Senate, partly knocked off course by the nationwide conservative push against transgender participation in girls and women’s athletics that has swept state legislatures and now spilled into the halls of Congress.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the House-passed legislation would “in effect repeal Title IX” by making it easier for transgender women to play on girls teams. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., said that allowing “male-bodied athletes” to compete against females would “totally undermine” girls basketball. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., said the bill would “decimate” female athletic competition.

Democrats are frustrated by the shift in the debate, saying there’s ample evidence that the Republican claims are false and overblown.

The International Olympic Committee has allowed transgender athletes to compete for years under specific parameters, and, to date, there have been no known transgender women compete in the Olympics. Only one known transgender woman has competed at the Division I level in the NCAA. And though legislators in around 30 states have introduced legislation to ban or limit transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender identity, few lawmakers have been able to cite specific cases in their home states where it became an issue.

“We are waiting for this avalanche of problems,” said the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, characterizing the Republicans’ argument. “They haven’t really surfaced.”

But Republicans are unyielding in their opposition to the legislation, spurred on by conservative groups who are pushing anti-transgender laws nationwide. With no Republicans signed on, for now, Democrats are unlikely to win the 60 votes needed to pass the Equality Act, potentially putting the issue in limbo indefinitely.

“It’s very discouraging, but in many ways not surprising, that Republicans are so focused on the trans community to build up opposition,” said Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I. He called the GOP arguments over sports a solution in search of a problem.

Sports are just the latest front in the decadeslong GOP culture war over LGBTQ rights that has focused increasingly on transgender Americans since 2015, when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. Conservative groups including The Heritage Foundation, Family Policy Alliance and the Christian legal network Alliance Defending Freedom have been engaged for much of the past two decades in advocacy against the LGBTQ rights movement. An earlier push by those groups to enact laws requiring transgender people to use public bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate sputtered amid backlash.

Republicans contend the Equality Act would open the floodgates for transgender girls and women to play on female sports teams and hurt others’ chances to compete. While the bill does not explicitly mention sports or touch Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination, they say extending the protections to gender identity would eliminate “private spaces” for cisgender women, including sports teams.

They have repeatedly pointed to one example in Connecticut, where two transgender high school runners in Connecticut won several championships. A lawsuit filed by the runners’ teammates was recently thrown out.

“I have to say, as the father of two young girls, that girls sports has had a profound impact in their lives,” Cruz said at a hearing on the bill.

“The discipline, the teamwork, the camaraderie, the competitiveness, that girls sports teaches, is effectively destroyed from this bill.”

Christiana Holcomb, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, contends that the Equality Act would supersede Title IX “and force vulnerable girls to share intimate spaces with men who identify as female.”

AGAIN WHY NOT TALK ABOUT TRANS BOYS IN SPORTS OR BATHROOMS

GOP opposition to the bill goes beyond sports, however. Republicans have stalled earlier iterations of the legislation while making different arguments, including that it would infringe on religious freedom.

Democrats say that none of those objections hold weight and that it’s long past time to make clear that the nation’s civil rights laws explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identification. Passage of the law would outlaw discrimination in employment, housing, loan applications, education, public accommodations and other areas, as it did for women and racial minorities in an earlier era.

President Joe Biden pushed for the bill in his address to Congress last month, speaking directly to transgender Americans “watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave. I want you to know, your president has your back.”

The lead sponsors of the bill, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Cicilline, say they know they have work to do. Merkley says he is working with Republicans and civil rights organizations “to find a path forward that will bring senators together behind a vision of full equality for LGBTQ Americans.”

The legislation has support from the Women’s Sports Foundation, a group that has advocated for women’s and girls sports for more than 40 years. The group says the GOP narrative on transgender athletes is a distraction from more important issues, including pay inequity and the harassment and abuse of female athletes.

“Let us be clear, there are many real threats to girls' and women’s access and opportunity in sports,” the group said. “However, transgender inclusion is not one of them.”

Many of the state legislators who have pushed the bills to ban transgender girls from competing on girls sports teams couldn’t cite any local examples, according to a review by The Associated Press in March. The AP reached out to two dozen state lawmakers sponsoring such measures as well as the conservative groups supporting them and found only a few times it’s been an issue among the hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who play high school sports.

Stella Keating, a 16-year-old transgender girl from Washington state, testified to the Senate that she wanted to join her school’s bowling team because her friends were on it.

“I can tell you that the majority of transgender people who join sports just want to hang out with their friends,” Keating said. “And that’s basically it.”

___

Crary reported from New York. Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City and Anne Peterson in Portland, Ore., contributed to this report.

Mary Clare Jalonick And David Crary, The Associated Press

Vatican conference features Fauci, Francis - and Aerosmith

ROME — The CEOs of vaccine-makers Pfizer and Moderna joined cardinals, academics and the lead guitarist of Aerosmith in opening a unique Vatican conference on COVID-19, other global health threats and how science, solidarity and spirituality can address them.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The three-day online conference, which began Thursday and ends Saturday with a virtual audience with Pope Francis, was planned well before the pandemic erupted last year.

Organizers said the event has only taken on more relevance amid a growing appreciation of the need for global access to health care, new advances in vaccine technology and greater understanding of the mental health cost of loneliness.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who leads the U.S. pandemic response, opened the meeting by saying the pandemic had confirmed to him that faith and science are constantly evolving — and that scientists in particular must humbly admit they don’t have all the answers all the time.

One answer the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said he did have was that the key to overcoming current vaccine hesitancy is pairing the right medical message with the right messenger.

“You have someone who’s a deeply religious person who will listen to their clergy. That’s different than me with a suit going into an area telling people to do something,” he said.

Fauci was referring to the religiously inspired resistance to taking COVID-19 vaccines that were indirectly developed using lines of cells derived from aborted fetuses. The Vatican has declared that all COVID-19 vaccines are not only morally licit, but that people have a moral responsibility to get the jabs to protect others.

The multidisciplinary conference was originally scheduled to take place at the Vatican in May 2020 but was postponed a year and eventually put online due to the pandemic.

The virtual format, however, has allowed for an even greater variety of participants.

A Harvard neuroscientist is leading a conversation about brain health and rock stars with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. Soprano Rene Fleming is participating in a panel discussion on the role of music in treating cardiac patients. Supermodel Cindy Crawford has a slot to talk about “beauty from the inside out,” and Chelsea Clinton is teaming up with an Italian public health official to promote equal access to health care.

Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla told the conference in recorded remarks that the race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine had created unprecedented examples of collaboration and efficiency. He recalled that Pfizer didn’t have a final commercial agreement signed with its development partner, German firm BioNTech, until January - after Pfizer-BioNTech jabs were already going into arms.

Bourla recalled he and BioNTech’s chief executive, Dr. Ugur Sahin, did a virtual handshake “through the Zoom camera” and got to work.

“They shared their intellectual property with us, we shared our intellectual property with them,” he said. “Agreements that will gather billions of dollars were just put on hold just to make sure that we are all focusing on making the vaccine happen.”

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, for his part, said the Trump administration’s vaccine development drive, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, allowed Moderna to not only clear regulatory hurdles faster than usual but to take business risks it normally wouldn’t have because it had government funding.

The fact that mRNA vaccines have now been approved for use by federal regulators will only spur more development in the new technology, Bancel said.

“Today, we know that we can get an mRNA vaccine authorized by the regulator. And in business, (the difference) between believing and knowing is a huge difference in your willingness to take the risk,” he said.

The conference, which featured prominent U.S. journalists as moderators and academics in a variety of fields, also had a religious component. Rabbis, cardinals, imams and representatives of Christian denominations are discussing the role of religion and spirituality in health.

It’s the fifth time the Vatican’s culture ministry has teamed up with the Cura Foundation to mount a conference that aims to pair advances in science and technology with ideas about how to deliver them effectively, efficiently and at a lower cost.

“People are very focused on the pandemic. It’s changed our lives in many, many ways. But there are also other areas of our health that are impacted,” said Dr. Robin Smith, the Cura Foundation's founder and president.

The goal of the conference, she said, is to put aside political, religious and ideological differences and focus on improving health care around the globe.

“We really want to sort of check all that at the door and say, ‘How can you make a difference? How can we help?'"

Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press

AND FOR ALL THOSE CURIA IN THEIR CASSOCKS