The Kenyan women crushing stone and stereotypes at the same time


Tom Matoke
Tue, June 22, 2021, 

THE INDEPENDENT

The group of women from Tindiret Sub-county in Kenya’s Nandi County who crush stones (predominantly men’s work) to raise school fees for their children (Tom Matoke | Nation Media Group)

It is 8am in the rural Kenyan village of Sarwat, and 15 women are each sitting on a heap of gravel brandishing a heavy hammer. They are smashing stones, making such a loud noise that it can be heard from a distance. With each swing of the hammer, they disturb the peace of the surrounding cattle, which are ready to get their fill of food for the day.

Untroubled, the women, aged between 23 and 65, hit the rocks harder and harder, crushing them into smaller pieces to make gravel that will later be used for construction.

It is here, in a site they have rented themselves, in the rocky hills of the Tinderet constituency of the Western Nandi County that these women earn their daily bread. Tirelessly, they crush one stone after another to meet the ever-increasing demand for gravel in the surrounding villages and beyond.


They do it, they say, so they can earn an income and tend to the needs of their children. Some have to bring their children along, because they have no one else to look out for them while they work.

These women are part of the Chepkemel community’s women’s self-help group, and have been working as stone crushers to empower each other economically for the past 12 years.

Women’s self-help groups, which carry out grassroots self-improvement initiatives such as this one, have been booming in Kenya in recent decades, particularly in rural areas. In the 1970s, there were approximately 3,000 active groups in the country. By 1990, the number had seen a tenfold increase — and it has kept on growing until today, studies show. And while some remain part of the informal sector, many are now legally registered and able to get funding or loans.

Such initiatives are all the more relevant in this African country, which ranks 95 out of the 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, and where significant inequalities between men and women remain, namely regarding access to education, healthcare services, representation and economic participation in the job market.

(Spark News)

In the past decade, legislative efforts have been made to ensure gender equality across all sectors, particularly thanks to a new, more progressive constitution introduced in 2010. But women are still disproportionately vulnerable to poverty, mainly due to gender roles’ stereotypes.

They also have fewer controls over land and resources than men, which limits their full participation in the country’s economy. According to UN Women, while over 80% of Kenyan women work in small farms, for instance, only 1 per cent own land of their own. They access less than 10 per cent of available credit, and less than 1 per cent of agriculture credit.

Ruth Soi, a 65-year-old mother of seven, is the oldest woman in the group. She knows just how much hard work the group has put in to fend for their families in a tough environment.

“Through the work of our hands, we have taken our children through college and sometimes even universities while taking care of the younger ones at home,” she says. “Some of the women have young children who are still breastfeeding; this all-women space allows them to bring their babies along so we can all watch over them as we work.”

Alongside stones, these women are crushing the stereotype that such laborious jobs only belong to men. And with each pay, they settle one more bill.

“We crush the stones until darkness falls when we return home, exhausted but happy that we have fulfilled every parent’s God-given duty - to provide for their children,” says Ms Soi.

Everlyne Chirchir, another member of the group, says it takes them at least three days to turn stones into a tonne of gravel, the unit of measure used in the construction sector.

We crush the stones until darkness falls when we return home, exhausted but happy that we have fulfilled every parent’s God-given duty - to provide for their children
Ruth Soi

The group’s clients include neighbouring schools and other construction projects that have previously ordered the gravel, often from distant counties like Kisumu, Kakamega and Uasin Gishu.

If the group’s activities have helped the women get by for many years, now most of their clients are looking into buying machine-processed gravel instead —which is more refined in texture. Some even use this option as leverage to lower their prices, says Ms. Chirchir.

“Before we could earn up to 1,200 [Kenyan] shillings ($11) per tonne of gravel. Now we make as little as 700 shillings per tonne,” she adds.“There are times when we go an entire month without recording a single sale. But we keep hoping for better days ahead.”.

These women live on tiny and rocky parcels of land, unsuitable for commercial crop farming activities, hence, they have very few alternatives other than crushing stones to make a living. They practise subsistence farming intercropping of vegetables, maize and beans to feed themselves and their families.

This painstaking process of breaking and stacking stones has left them with scars all over their bodies. But despite both that and the dwindling market for their gravel, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, the women are not about to give up.

Fortunately, Ms. Soi says they have recently received confirmation that some local schools will buy some of their gravel, boosting their much-needed income.

This article is published within the framework of "Towards Equality", a collaborative journalism operation gathering 15 news media from all over the world highlighting the challenges and solutions to achieve gender equality.

(Towards Equality)

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US Medicaid enrollment swells during the pandemic, reaching an all time high


UNITED STATES - April 15: Chiquita Brooks-LaSure testifies before the Senate Finance Committee during her nomination hearing to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in Washington on Thursday, April 15, 2021. (Photo by Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)More

Amy Goldstein
Mon, June 21, 2021, 3:31 PM·6 min read

The number of Americans relying on Medicaid swelled to an apparent all-time high during the coronavirus pandemic with nearly 74 million Americans covered through the safety-net health insurance, new federal figures show.

From February 2020 through January, Medicaid enrollment climbed nationwide by 9.7 million, according to a report based on the most recent available data and expected to be released Monday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Some people signed up last year as the pandemic's economic fallout took away their jobs, income and health benefits. But according to federal health officials and other Medicaid experts, much of the increase is because of a rule change that was part of the first coronavirus relief law adopted by Congress last year.

That law created a trade-off: It gave states extra federal money to help cover what were anticipated to be ballooning Medicaid costs. In exchange, states needed to promise they would not remove anyone from their Medicaid rolls until the federal government ended the coronavirus public health emergency.

The 15% spike means the size of the public insurance program for low-income Americans now significantly eclipses the nearly 63 million older Americans covered last year through Medicare. Both health insurance programs date to the mid-1960s and were pillars of Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" anti-poverty strategies.

"We've really seen how important Medicaid is to ensuring the overall health of our country and have seen this through the pandemic," said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who became CMS administrator late last month.

"We are seeing what a lifeline the Medicaid program is to so, so many Americans," she said in an interview Monday.

The Biden administration's championing of Medicaid is a contrast to the policies of the Trump era. Brooks-LaSure's predecessor at CMS under President Donald Trump, Seema Verma, encouraged states to require some people on Medicaid to work or prepare for a job in exchange for the insurance. Federal courts struck down the policy, ruling that it was incompatible with the Medicaid law's main purpose of providing low-income people with coverage.

President Joe Biden and his top health officials are working to extend insurance, focused on a dozen states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while advocating other means to reduce the cadre of roughly 30 million Americans who are uninsured.

Unlike the Medicare program, Medicaid is a shared responsibility of the federal government and states, with the federal government paying part of the cost, depending on a state's wealth, and setting some basic coverage rules. States decide the rest.

The report does not parse what share of the increased enrollment reflects people newly joining the Medicaid program as opposed to people not leaving the rolls as would ordinarily happen.

Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said his group's members in several states have been telling him much of the enrollment spike "is the gathering up of all the people who otherwise would be cycling or rotating off the program."

Before the pandemic, Medicaid experienced considerable churn, with people cycling on and off as their incomes fluctuated. Under the rules adopted during the pandemic, states suspended periodic checks of whether participants remained eligible.

The Biden administration has said previously that the coronavirus public health emergency will continue at least through the end of this year - meaning the halt in eligibility checks will continue, too. Brooks-LaSure echoed that Monday.

Salo said the resumption of normal rules is likely to place burdens on states and Medicaid's beneficiaries alike.

"If you have a large number of people going from coverage to no coverage . . . that's a really bad situation for a lot of low-income folks. You definitely don't want to flick a switch and have some huge number - 10 million? 15 million? - people go off the program," Salo said. "It's jarring . . . you want to minimize the mass disruption."

Brooks-LaSure said CMS is working to ensure that state Medicaid officials handle eligibility reviews properly. Under the Trump administration, some states made it more difficult for people to verify whether they qualified to remain on the program.

"We are very focused on making sure we don't lose our gains in coverage through unnecessary hoops," she said.

Brooks-LaSure also said some people whose incomes have risen too high to stay on Medicaid would become eligible for private health plans sold through ACA insurance marketplaces. In the past, she said, "a lot of people are lost between that transition" from the public insurance to ACA health plans. "We should be getting whatever coverage they're eligible for."

The administration created an unprecedented special enrollment period that runs through August. For the last few years, the regular ACA enrollment time has run for six weeks, ending in mid-December.

Federal health officials said they did not have figures on how much the extra enrollment has cost the federal government or states. However, one individual familiar with the program, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the cost runs into the billions.

The new report shows that Medicaid's sharp increase contrasts with relatively flat enrollment during the pandemic in the Children's Health Insurance Program, another type of public insurance created in the late 1990s to help working-class families. Unlike with Medicaid, states have not been required to keep everyone on the children's insurance program through the country's public health emergency.

The two programs have a combined enrollment of 80.5 million.

January's Medicaid enrollment of 73.8 million is the highest since CMS began keeping enrollment data in its current form in 2013. As a result, the report does not compare the current swollen rolls with the last time the United States went through severe economic strain - the Great Recession, officially from late 2007 to mid-2009, and the few years afterward.

Salo said, however, that the latest enrollment is doubtless higher than then because the earlier recession was before the Affordable Care Act allowed states to expand their Medicaid programs starting in 2014 to people with slightly higher incomes. The expansion allows people, including single adults, to join if they have incomes up to 138% of the poverty line - today, nearly $18,000 for a single person or almost $37,000 for a family of four.

As of the end of last year, states' expansion of Medicaid had resulted in an additional 14.8 million people in the program who previously would not have been eligible, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy organization.

The Biden administration is eager to persuade the dozen states that have refrained from expanding their programs to change their minds. They are conservative states, primarily in the South, in which politicians have antipathy for the ACA.

The American Rescue Plan, the most recent coronavirus aid package that became law in March, includes a new, generous incentive for holdout states to broaden their safety net. The incentive would add extra federal aid for each person in the traditional part of a state's Medicaid program, a larger group than the number of people likely to come in through an expansion.

There has been little public sign the offer is motivating those states to rethink their position.

Brooks-LaSure said Monday that she is in conversation with "a couple of states about how they want to move forward." She did not identify them.

She said it takes time at the state level for Medicaid advocates to try to persuade governors and state legislators. "I wouldn't be surprised if more states come in," she said.

Rights group: Facebook amplified Myanmar military propaganda




Facebook-MyanmarFILE- In this March 29, 2018, file photo, the logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square. Facebook's recommendation algorithm amplifies military propaganda and other material that breaches the company's own policies in Myanmar even though the social media giant says it’s treating the situation there as an emergency following February's military coup, a new report by the rights group Global Witness has found. A month after the military seized power in Myanmar and imprisoned elected leaders, Facebook's algorithms were still prompting users to view and “like” pro-military pages with posts that incited and threatened violence, pushed misinformation that could lead to physical harm, praised the military and glorified its abuses, Global Witness said in the report, published late Tuesday, June 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)More

BARBARA ORTUTAY
Tue, June 22, 2021

Facebook's recommendation algorithm amplifies military propaganda and other material that breaches the company's own policies in Myanmar following a military takeover in February, a new report by the rights group Global Witness says.

A month after the military seized power in Myanmar and imprisoned elected leaders, Facebook's algorithms were still prompting users to view and “like” pro-military pages with posts that incited and threatened violence, pushed misinformation that could lead to physical harm, praised the military and glorified its abuses, Global Witness said in the report, published late Tuesday.

That's even though the social media giant vowed to remove such content following the coup, announcing it would remove Myanmar military and military-controlled pages from its site and from Instagram, which it also owns. It has since enacted other measures intended to reduce offline harm in the country.

Facebook said Tuesday its teams “continue to closely monitor the situation in Myanmar in real-time and take action on any posts, Pages or Groups that break our rules.”

Days after the Feb. 1 coup, the military temporarily blocked access to Facebook because it was being used to share anti-coup comments and organize protests. Access was later restored. In the following weeks, Facebook continued to tighten its policies against the military, banning all military entities from its platforms and saying it would remove praise or support for violence against citizens and their arrest.

“Once again, Facebook shows that it’s good at making broad sweeping announcements and bad at actually enforcing them. They’ve had years to improve their work in Myanmar but once again they are still failing,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist and whistleblower who found evidence of political manipulation in countries such as Honduras and Azerbaijan while she worked there.

The struggle between the military regime that deposed Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government and those opposing it has sharpened in recent months.

Soldiers and police have killed hundreds of protesters. Last week, the United Nations’ office in Myanmar expressed concern about escalating human rights abuses after reports that a group opposed to the junta may have executed 25 civilians it captured and allegations that troops had burned down a village.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, had over 22.3 million Facebook users in January 2020, more than 40% of its population, according to social media management platform NapoleonCat.

“What happens on Facebook matters everywhere, but in Myanmar that is doubly true," the report says. As in many countries outside the Western Hemisphere, mobile phones in Myanmar often come pre-loaded with Facebook and many businesses do not have a website, only a Facebook page. For many people in the country, Facebook effectively is the internet.

On March 23, just before the peak of military violence against civilians, Global Witness said it set up a new, clean Facebook account with no history of liking or following specific topics and searched for “Tatmadaw”, the Burmese name for the armed forces. It filtered the search results to show pages, and selected the top result — a military fan page whose name translates as “a gathering of military lovers.”

Older posts on this page showed sympathy for Myanmar's soldiers and at least two advertised for young people to join the military — but none of the newer posts since the coup violated Facebook's policies. However, when Global Witness's account “liked" the page, Facebook began recommending related pages with material inciting violence, false claims of interference in last year's election and support of violence against civilians.

A March 1 post, for instance, includes a death threat against protesters who vandalize surveillance cameras.

“Those who threaten female police officers from the traffic control office and violently destroy the glass and destroy CCTV, those who cut the cables, those who vandalize with color sprays, (we) have been given an order to shoot to kill them on the spot,” reads part of the post in translation, according to the report. “Saying this before Tatmadaw starts doing this. If you don’t believe and continue to do this, go ahead. If you are not afraid to die, keep going.”

Facebook said its ban of the Tatmadaw and other measures have “made it harder for people to misuse our services to spread harm. This is a highly adversarial issue and we continue to take action on content that violates our policies to help keep people safe.”

Global Witness said its findings show that Facebook fails to uphold the “very basics" of its own guidelines.

“The platform operates too much like a walled garden, its algorithms are designed, trained, and tweaked without adequate oversight or regulation," said Naomi Hirst, head of the digital threats campaign at Global Witness. “This secrecy has to end, Facebook must be made accountable.”

Nordic fund KLP divests from Adani Ports over links to Myanmar military


FILE PHOTO: Anti-coup night protest in Yangon

Gwladys Fouche
Tue, June 22, 2021, 

OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian pension fund KLP is divesting from Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited on the grounds the company's links with the Myanmar military breach the fund's responsible investment policy, KLP said on Tuesday.

Adani Ports, India's largest port operator, has been under scrutiny from international investors over its project to build a container terminal in the city of Yangon on land leased from a Myanmar military-owned conglomerate.

A military coup in Myanmar on Feb. 1 and an ensuing crackdown on mass protests in which hundreds have been killed has drawn international condemnation and sanctions on military figures and military-controlled entities.

"Adani's operations in Myanmar and its business partnership with that country's armed forces constitutes an unacceptable risk of contributing to the violation of KLP's guidelines for responsible investment," KLP said in a statement to Reuters.

A spokesperson for the Myanmar military did not answer calls from Reuters seeking comment.

KLP, Norway's largest pension fund, had an investment worth nine million crowns ($1.05 million) in Adani Ports at the time of its decision, it told Reuters.

It was divesting because the container terminal is being built on land owned by the Myanmar military and that there is an "imminent danger" the armed forces could use the port to import weapons and equipment, or as a naval base.

"In this way, the port could be used by the army to continue its violations of human rights," KLP said.

Adani said it condemned the violence in Myanmar and the violations of the fundamental rights of its people and that, at the time the deal was concluded in 2019, its counterparties were entities of the democratically-elected government.

It reiterated it could abandon the project and write down the investment if it is found to be in violation of sanctions imposed by the United States.

"The write down will not materially affect the balance sheet as it is equivalent to about 1.3% of...total assets," it said in a statement to Reuters.

KLP said it had been in a dialogue with Adani Ports since March this year and held a meeting with the company's management in April.

Adani told KLP "it takes human rights seriously, and that it has a human rights policy", KLP said.

At the same time, "Adani said it had made no due diligence assessments relating to human rights before the agreement it concluded with the Myanmar military", KLP said.

Adani did not reply to a question about KLP's statement.

An activist group welcomed KLP's decision to divest from Adani Ports.

"We call on other pension funds to follow suit and divest from Adani Ports and other business partners of the Myanmar military," Yadanar Maung, a spokesperson for Justice for Myanmar, said.

($1 = 8.6 Norwegian crowns)

(Additional reporting by John Geddie and Sudarshan Varadhan, Editing by Robert Birsel and Angus MacSwan)

Armed rebels have declared war on the Myanmar junta, and the country is gearing up for all-out urban warfare

Cheryl Teh

Tue, June 22, 2021, 

A man holds a torch as he stands behind a barricade during a protest against the military coup, in Yangon, Myanmar March 28, 2021. Stringer/Reuters

• A Myanmar militia declared war on the military junta, pushing the country closer to war.

• Firefights between junta soldiers and the People's Defense Force broke out on the streets of Mandalay.

• This is the first time gunfights between rebels and troops broke out in Myanmar's cities since the February 1 coup.

• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

A formal declaration of war has been made on Myanmar's military junta by an armed militia group.

On the same day that gunfights between rebels and the country's security forces broke out on the streets of Mandalay, Myanmar's second-largest city, a group of resistance fighters called the People's Defense Force made a public statement.

"We've declared war. The day we've been waiting for is finally here," said Bo Tun Tauk Naing, a spokesman for the People's Defense Force in Mandalay on Tuesday, per a report from local news organization Myanmar Now.

According to Myanmar Now, this is the first time that guerilla groups have exchanged fire with the country's armed forces in a city environment.

CNN reported that clashes erupted around an apartment building between a group of rebels and soldiers patrolling the city, which the junta alleges was a guerilla base camp.

The country has seen an unending onslaught of violence since the military junta swept to power in an early morning coup that happened on February 1 this year, rounding up top Myanmar politicians, including civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and then-President Win Myint.

Aung San is currently on trial for several charges, and the country's junta-backed election commission resolved to dissolve her National League for Democracy Party, branding them traitors.

Peaceful protests and mass civilian demonstrations in the city quickly turned deadly in the weeks following the coup. The violence was thought to have reached a crescendo in March during a particularly bloody day of protests that coincided with the country's Armed Forces Day.

But the fresh clashes on Tuesday, and the declaration of war that followed, signal a new shift in the kind of violence that Myanmar's major cities should brace for.

According to a report by ANI News, guerilla groups before Tuesday focused most of their attacks on remote areas in Myanmar's frontier regions. But more young activists are being trained by insurgents in the remote mountainous regions of Myanmar, wrote the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and they may soon return to their towns and cities armed and ready for urban conflict. These fighters may also resort to insurgency tactics to take on the overwhelming force of Myanmar's army, which claims it has half a million soldiers, per The New York Times.

The violence could also see a swift escalation in the weeks to come; Nikkei reported on the use of Russian-made rocket launchers by army troops against People's Defense Force fighters on Tuesday afternoon.

Read the original article on Insider

UK staff shortages drive pub and restaurant wages up 14%


LaToya Harding
·Contributor
Mon, June 21, 2021,

Weekend workers are seeing the biggest benefits, with those shifts typically paying 9% more than pre-pandemic levels. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A shortage in the hospitality sector has driven up the average wage of pub and restaurant workers by as much as 14%, new research has revealed.

According to data from Indeed Flex, an online marketplace for flexible workers, the hiring crisis is causing businesses in the industry to turn to temporary staff to keep up with demand.

Weekend workers are seeing the biggest benefits, with those shifts typically paying 9% more than pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile weekday pay rates have risen by an average of 5% across the UK, far exceeding the 1.8% rise in the minimum wage between 2019 and 2021.

Pay increases vary around the country, with Greater Manchester and Cheshire experiencing the biggest pay hikes, Indeed Flex said. Hourly rates for temporary workers in those areas have risen by 11.15% for weekday hospitality staff, and by 13.87% for weekend workers compared to May 2019.

Pay growth has been weakest in Merseyside, where hourly rates increased by just 0.84% on average, and in London, where they notched up by only 3.73%.

Average pay increase by region: Chart: Indeed Flex

According to official employment data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the food services and accommodation sector recorded the biggest spike in vacancies, up 265.5%, of any industry in March as lockdown restrictions first began to ease.

Some companies have resorted to incentives to help tackle the shortage. Examples include bonuses or gift vouchers for staff who recommend friends for jobs.

“The combination of booming demand from customers and the table service-only rule means thousands of pubs and restaurants need more staff - and fast,” Jack Beaman, CEO and co-founder of Indeed Flex, said. “But with bottlenecks holding up the supply of workers, forward-thinking businesses are increasingly turning to temporary staff to fill shifts, and raising wages to woo the best people.”

He added: “We’ve also seen an influx of people opting for temporary work as a post-lockdown lifestyle choice - as it gives them a variety and a work-life balance that a permanent job cannot.

“Temporary workers offer hospitality businesses vital flexibility in the current uncertain trading environment in which customer demand is strong but margins are squeezed.”

Read more: UK restaurants struggle to recruit after Brexit and COVID double whammy

UK pubs and restaurants have blamed both the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit for staff shortages across the industry. The industry has urged the government to relax immigration rules to allow low-skilled workers from abroad to work in bars and restaurants across the country.

Before Britain left the EU, more than 30% of hospitality workers across the UK were European. In London, the proportion was more than half. Brexit and the pandemic have meant many of those workers have returned to their home countries.

It comes after a decision to postpone the full reopening of the UK economy on 21 June which put extra pressure on the hospitality industry.

Boris Johnson announced last week that ‘Freedom Day’ in England would be pushed back to at least 19 July as the Delta variant, which was first detected in India, continues to spread across the country.

Venues across the country are still having to social distance and provide table service only, requiring extra staff, as well as limiting the number of customers they can serve.

The hospitality industry is also likely to come under further pressure when the business rates holiday ends on 30 June.

\

Factory work used to pay far better that fast-food jobs - but thanks to the labor shortage, the gap is quickly closing, and manufacturers are losing staff

Grace Dean

Tue, June 22, 2021,

Fast-food chains like McDonald's have offered lucrative staff perks as they scramble to find new hires as the economy reopens and customers return. Mikhail Metzel\TASS via Getty Images

• Factories are struggling to raise wages as quickly as fast-food chains during the labor shortage, the WSJ reported.

• Restaurants can offer perks to attract new workers, but manufacturers say it's more difficult for them.

• "Everybody is fighting for the same people," one expert said.

• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Fast-food chains are pushing up wages amid the current labor shortage - and factories are struggling to raise theirs as quickly, which is one of the reasons a stream of workers is leaving the manufacturing industry, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Factories have historically offered better wages than restaurants and retail companies. They still pay workers much higher wages on average, The Journal reported, but fast-food chains are now raising their wages at a much faster rate.

Factories are now struggling to find enough workers to meet the booming demand for furniture and other goods, manufacturing experts told the paper.

"There is just more opportunity to work somewhere else than there was in the past if you are looking for a living-wage job," Julie Davis, head of workforce development for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, told The Journal.

"Everybody is fighting for the same people," Daniel Quintanilla, director of talent acquisition at Michigan automotive supplier Gentex, told The Journal.

Hourly factory workers made an average of $23.41 an hour in April, or 56% more than restaurant and fast-food workers, according to the Journal's analysis of federal data. This was down from 83% 10 years ago.

Read more: How Starbucks is defying the labor shortage crisis with transformative perks, not cash teasers like McDonald's

Grocery stores, restaurants, and hotels are offering perks from higher wages and education benefits to cash bonuses and even free iPhones as they scramble to find new hires as the economy reopens and customers return.

Manufacturing executives told The Journal that as well as struggling to find workers, they're also being hit by higher prices of raw materials including fuel, lumber, and packaging amid the current shipping crisis, making it harder for them to afford new staff perks.

Some restaurants have been hiking up prices to offset the higher wages. But Paul Isely, a business professor at Michigan's Grand Valley State University, told The Journal that it's harder for manufacturers to raise prices because they have to compete with factories around the world, not just nearby restaurants.

Lawrence Mishel, an economist at left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute, told the publication that global competition, outsourcing and contractors, and lower unionization rates were also causing manufacturing jobs to lose their wage premium.

As a result of all these changes, the proportion of US workers employed in the manufacturing industries was shrinking. Less than 9% of US workers are currently employed by manufacturers, The Journal reported. In the early 1980s this was more than 20%.

One manufacturer told the Dallas Fed for June's Beige Book that even with a starting hourly wage of $14, the company was unable to fill more than 20 open positions. Texas uses the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

The Federal Reserve said that the tight labor market could last months, but Bank of America expects the job market to recover by early 2022.

Hotel workers keep switching jobs for 'minor salary bumps' during the US labor shortage, a hotel owner said. Some don't even show up for their first shift.
Grace Dean
Tue, June 22, 2021, 

Karen Stamand, a housekeeper at Nonantum Resort, cleans a room. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Some workers are getting jobs at hotels but not turning up to first shifts, a NYC hotel owner said.


He told Fox Business that some staff had left the company for minor salary bumps, too.


The industry is offering perks like free accommodation and fitness machines amid the labor shortage.


Hotel workers are quitting their jobs for better pay during the US labor shortage, making recruitment a huge challenge, the owner of a New York City told Fox Business.

"Hiring has been incredibly challenging," Michael Achenbaum, founder and president of Gansevoort Hotel Group, which owns a 186-room room in NYC's Meatpacking district, told the publication.

He added that some employees weren't showing up for their first ship. He didn't elaborate.

"Not only is finding qualified candidates difficult but there is a consistent acceptance of offers and then no-shows on the first day," Achenbaum.

Read more: How Starbucks is defying the labor shortage crisis with transformative perks, not cash teasers like McDonald's

Achenbaum said that some staff were leaving the Gansevoort Hotel Group to work at other hotels "for minor salary bumps."

Hotels are scrambling to both recruit and retain employees amid the US labor shortage hitting industries from healthcare to hospitality and ride-hailing apps. The lack of workers is causing some businesses to cut operating hours, slash production, and raise prices, and the US Chamber of Commerce said it could hold back the country's economic recovery from the pandemic.

The Labor Department said that about 4 million workers in the US quit their jobs in April - a 20-year record.

Insider's Áine Cain reported that long hours, unruly customers, and low pay have caused minimum-wage workers to quit their jobs in droves during the pandemic. Other reports suggest that unemployment benefits, COVID-19 health concerns, and caring responsibilities also played a role.

Grocery stores and restaurants have been offering perks from higher wages and education benefits to cash bonuses and even free iPhones to attract new hires as the economy reopens and customers return. Some hotels have been offering free accommodation to staff, while Achenbaum told Fox Business that his hotel, the Gansevoort Meatpacking Hotel, gave senior staffers a $1,345 connected-fitness machine when they returned to the hotel after working virtually for eight months.


Teenage fast-food workers are landing $50,000-a-year manager jobs at a Texas chicken restaurant thanks to the labor shortage
Anna Cooban
Mon, June 21, 2021

A restaurant chain in Texas has promoted young workers to manager roles amid a labor shortage. Getty Images

Layne's Chicken Fingers promoted some workers in their late teens to managers, The WSJ reported.

CEO Garrett Reed said the fast-food chain was losing staff to Walmart and McDonald's.


Some of these younger workers were now earning more than $50,000 a year, he said.

A Texas chicken-restaurant chain has promoted workers in their late teens and early 20s to managerial positions that pay more than $50,000 per year because of a staff shortage, its CEO told The Wall Street Journal.

Garrett Reed, the CEO of Layne's Chicken Fingers, a fast-food chain with six restaurants across the state, told The Wall Street Journal he was training 16- and 17-year-olds to run new stores because he was so short on staff.

Layne's was struggling to hire and had lost employees to larger employers such as Walmart and McDonald's, Reed told The Journal.

"We're so thin at leadership that we can't stretch anymore to open more locations," he told the Journal. "I've got a good crop of 16- and 17-year-olds, but I need another year or two to get them seasoned to run stores."

The hospitality industry is facing a severe labor shortage. Job openings in the accommodation and food-services industry rose by 349,000 in April, the highest of any industry that month, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed, and some restaurants have hiked wages to attract workers.

Reed said in an interview with the Dallas publication D Magazine in May that he hoped to open between 100 and 120 franchise locations in Texas by 2028. The company recently opened applications for new franchises on its website.

But Reed had delayed signing leases for four new restaurants in Dallas because he couldn't find enough workers, particularly managers, he told The Journal.

"The biggest challenge for small companies to grow right now is your labor force," Reed said. "We'd be growing at twice the rate if we had more people."

"There's only so much I can pay and remain profitable without raising prices too much," Reed told The Journal.

Layne's did not immediately respond to Insider for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

WHITE SUPREMACY
‘Redneck Rave’ Descends Into Throat Slashing, Impalements, and Mass Arrests


Blake Montgomery

DAILY BEAST
Tue, June 22, 2021

Screenshot/YouTube

A massive country music festival in Kentucky this past weekend started off on rocky footing: Police found meth, marijuana, and an open bottle of alcohol in the first vehicle they stopped at a traffic checkpoint. One of the people in the car had two active warrants out for their arrest.

“We were like, ‘Well, this doesn’t bode well for the weekend,’” Edmonson County Sheriff Shane Doyle told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

By the end of the five-day bash, dubbed the “Redneck Rave,” one man had been impaled, one woman had been strangled to the point of unconsciousness, and one throat had been slit. In all, Edmonson authorities arrested 14 people, and charged four dozen people from five states.

The event, organized by country rapper Justin Time, took place in Blue Holler Offroad Park and drew a crowd of tens of thousands, doubling the population of the unincorporated town of Ollie, which is so small it does not have a stoplight. Redneck Rave promoters bragged that they had sold more than 20,000 tickets. The lengthy getdown, advertised as the “biggest country party you’ll ever go to,” boasted a demolition derby, goldfish racing, and a full-scale football game as well as a series of concerts.

The details of the Redneck Rave’s incidents are grisly. One person slit a friend’s throat and remains at large, a 29-year-old man had allegedly strangled a woman until she passed out, one person lost the better part of a finger, and another was impaled when he drove a side-by-side over a 2-3 inch log that broke through the bottom of the recreational vehicle. Paramedics left the log inside him as they airlifted him to a hospital.

Justin Time, whose legal name is Justin Stowers, wrote on Facebook, “This was the biggest event we’ve ever done and with as many people and random things that popped up unexpectedly I feel like we all handled it very well.”

Doyle told the Herald-Leader last year’s Redneck Raves—there were two—“overwhelmed” his staff. He ordered all his deputies to work mandatory overtime this year and requested assistance from the Kentucky State Police. At least one person died at the event last year. Another Redneck Rave is scheduled for October of this year.

“There were so many intoxicated people, we just decided, ‘If dispatch sends an ambulance in, we’re sending a deputy in with them,’” said Doyle.

Six of the festival-goers face felony charges, and the sheriff’s office filed roughly 30 charges stemming from drug and alcohol violations.

World’s No. 1 Stock Owner Grapples With Child Labor Dilemma






Lars Erik Taraldsen and Leanne de Bassompierre
Mon, June 21, 2021,\

(Bloomberg) --

In Oslo, where the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund decides how to allocate $1.4 trillion, a huge contradiction lurks.

The fund is trying to reconcile a sustainable-investing mantra with the billions it owns in companies that source cocoa from regions where children pick beans that feed the world’s craving for chocolate. So far, it has chosen to stay involved rather than sell so it can push for positive change.

“We expect companies to work against child labor, but at the same time we recognize that child labor in supply chains and agriculture has complex underlying causes,” said Line Aaltvedt, a spokeswoman for the fund.

In a global financial world increasingly obsessed with ethical matters, the world’s biggest investors -- from BlackRock Inc. to Fidelity Investments -- are navigating gray areas and trying to figure out the best way to engage. While the Norwegian fund’s actions are primarily financial, as was the case when it sold $6 billion worth of companies that purely focus on oil exploration and production last year, ethical considerations increasingly play a part.

The stakes aren’t insignificant for Norway’s wealth fund, which according to its most recent filings owns shares valued at more than $16 billion in some of the world’s largest chocolate makers and confectioners, including Nestle SA, Hershey Co. and Barry Callebaut AG. The companies all acknowledge child labor exists in their supply chain, have explicit policies forbidding the practice and programs in place to mitigate the problem.

It’s the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, and the United Nations held its World Day Against Child Labor a week ago. Still, the practice remains hard to eradicate in the world’s cocoa farming regions. Just ask Nouffo.

He was rescued as part of a police operation to clamp down on child labor in Soubre, the heart of the Ivory Coast cocoa belt in early May. Nouffo said he was brought to the country from neighboring Burkina Faso by his father when he was 13 years old. He was left to work on his uncle’s plantation, where he was found splitting open cocoa pods with a machete.

“Two Ramadans have passed since I’ve been here,” said Nouffo in his limited French. That makes him 15 now.

Nouffo, who spoke while being held in a center in Soubre, said he worked seven days a week splitting open cocoa pods gathered by adult workers, drying them and then transporting them by motorcycle to buying centers. School was out of the question.

His uncle was among 24 people arrested as part of the two-day police raid in partnership with the National Committee for the Monitoring of Actions to Combat Child Trafficking, Exploitation and Labor, which is led by First Lady Dominique Ouattara.

Five of those arrested were sentenced to 20 years in prison for child trafficking, including Nouffo’s uncle, said Luc Zaka, the police commissioner in charge of the raid. Seventeen others were handed five years behind bars and two were released.

As supply chains in the cocoa market are difficult to track, it could not be established whether any of the world’s large chocolate makers were supplied by the farm Nouffo worked on.

Demanding Action

”We must increase the pressure on companies to force them to take responsibility, also for what happens further down the value chain,” Freddy André Ovstegard, a member of parliament for the Socialist Left Party who sits on the Standing Committee on Scrutiny and Constitutional Affairs, said in an email. He said he lodged a request Monday with the “Minister of Finance to explain how these concerns have been followed up.”

Last year, the Norwegian fund conducted about 3,000 meetings with portfolio companies to discuss how ESG targets were being met. Children’s rights were the topic of 17 such meetings. In 2019, it initiated talks with nine companies in the cocoa business on the subject.

“Typically, the chocolate producers are in the fund, while the cocoa producers are private farms in West Africa,” said Eli-Ane Lund, a spokeswoman for the ethics council that makes recommendations to guide the fund.

The debate usually revolves around how patient investors should be with transition assets – those with a self-improvement plan – and when it’s time to punish companies through exclusion. When it comes to child labor, mostly in the cocoa business but also in the coffee, tea, cotton, seeds and palm oil trade, the Norwegian fund has often decided to stay involved.

Take Barry Callebaut, the Swiss chocolate maker that says it will probably continue to have child labor in its supply chain until 2025. It counted Norway’s wealth fund among its biggest shareholders, with a 1.4% stake, the latest filings show.

The fund, which also meets with non-governmental organizations as part of its environmental, social and governance investing strategy, is putting pressure on firms like Barry Callebaut to improve, Carine Smith Ihenacho, chief corporate governance officer at the Oslo-based fund, said in an interview.

In another example, Norges Bank’s executive board asked the fund in 2018 to address the risk of child labor at UPL Ltd., an Indian agro-chemicals maker, and its Advanta Seeds unit.

“In our dialogue with the company, we have, among other things, addressed the need to prevent child labor in the supply chain and the company’s approach to monitoring the supply chain,” fund spokeswoman Aaltvedt said.

That led to Advanta recently updating its agreements with farmers and further developing procedures for monitoring the supply chain to uncover possible child labor. It also has information activities aimed at farmers, suppliers and local authorities to prevent child labor.

“Child labor in the production of hybrid cotton seeds and other seed varieties was among the very first issues considered by the Council on Ethics, and this was an issue that the council worked on for many years,” said Eli-Ane Lund, a spokeswoman for the council.

The ethics panel, an independent body, has made three recommendations for observation or exclusion of companies on child labor grounds: Monsanto Co. in 2006, Zuari Agro Chemicals Ltd. in 2013 and UPL in 2018. Of the three, only Zuari Agro Chemicals was actually excluded.

Global Footprint

With so much money to invest, Norges Bank Investment Management’s footprint spans the globe, and it owns close to 1.5% of all listed companies, making it the biggest stock owner in the world.

Other companies exposed to child labor that counted the fund as a shareholder as of the end of 2020 included Nestle, Hershey, Mondelez International Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., Starbucks Corp. and Lindt & Spruengli AG. The fund’s investments in those companies, including Barry Callebaut, amounted to more than $16 billion.

While some progress is being made, the task remains monumental.

Barry Callebaut says poverty is the root of the problem, and that it works to alleviate it, provide access to education and raise awareness. It has a code of conduct regarding human rights, forced labor and child labor that all employees are obliged to follow.

Working with the International Cocoa Initiative in 2019/20, the company monitored and took remedial action covering 113 farmer groups, including 39,909 farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana. It uncovered 22,965 cases of child labor.

“ESG has moved from a peripheral investment criteria to a central one,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Barry Callebaut welcomes the dialogue with its shareholders on ESG topics.”

Read more: Supreme Court Backs Nestle, Cargill on Child-Slavery Suit

Read more: Switzerland Inc. Sweats as Global Accountability Vote Nears

Cocoa-producing nations in West Africa have come under increased pressure to clean up the industry, with a report last year sponsored by the U.S. government showing that despite chocolate companies pledging to cut child labor, the problem actually got worse in the 10 years prior to the publication of the report.

Lagging ESG Standards

While the EU prepares to introduce stricter laws later this year, Europe remains the leading destination for Ivorian beans, accounting for 67% of its cocoa exports. As fund managers wait for global ESG standards, they’ve created their own methodologies to fill in the perceived gaps.

Norges Bank Investment Management says divestments tied to ESG standards are set to rise as it screens for wrongdoers.

The fund has set seven criteria for sustainable investing, according to Ihenacho. For the S in ESG, it looks at how well companies protect children’s rights and human rights, whether they’re transparent taxpayers, and whether they avoid corruption.

Over the past two decades, the ethics council has successively introduced socially responsible guidelines for the fund manager to follow, ranging from selling stakes in fossil-fuel companies to blacklisting firms that abuse migrant workers or dabble in corrupt practices.

After Walmart Inc. was beset by criticism for human rights violations in 2005, including the risk of child labor, the fund sold out. The retail giant cleaned up its act and was removed from the fund’s exclusion list more than a decade later, in 2019. Norway now owns a stake in Walmart valued at about $2.1 billion.

In a more recent instance, the fund has for two years voted in favor of a proposal at Facebook Inc. “to assess the risk of possible exploitation of children on the company’s platforms,” Aaltvedt said.

Measuring Misconduct

The fund says it’s harder to catch companies guilty of social misconduct than to identify climate sinners.

“It’s quite clear that the S is in many ways harder to quantify and measure” than the E in ESG, Ihenacho said.

Amnesty International in Norway, which follows the wealth fund closely, says the screening can be tightened up.

“It would have been better if the fund could have avoided investing in a company where there’s a high risk of breaching the ethics council’s framework,” said Hanne Sofie Lindahl, political adviser at Amnesty in Oslo. “Preemptive screening in countries where we know that there are widespread abuses of human rights could help strengthen the fund’s ethical framework.”

The fund’s chief executive officer, Nicolai Tangen, says databases with different sustainability targets now used on portfolio companies will be used to improve its screening of companies being considered for addition.

“You have good and bad companies in all countries, really,” Tangen said in a June 2 live-streamed discussion. “The goal is to keep the rotten apples out of the basket.”

(Adds comment from opposition lawmaker in 13th paragraph)


©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Thousands of people flocked to a South African village digging for diamonds, only to find out they were quartz

Ashley Collman
Mon, June 21, 2021




Thousands are seen digging for diamonds in KawHlathi village in South Africa last week. The stones found there have turned out to be only quartz. Phill Magakoe/AFP via Getty


Thousands rushed to a rural South African village last week to dig for diamonds.


But government officials said Sunday that the stones found at the site were actually quartz.


The value of quartz is extremely low, especially compared to diamonds, the officials said.


The quartz found near KwaHlathi village actually has little to no value, officials said.


The hopes of thousands who rushed to a rural South African village last week in search of diamonds have been crushed, after government officials said Sunday that the stones were only quartz, which have little to no value.

According to Reuters, the diamond rush started when a herder found an unidentified stone in a field near the village of KwaHlathi, about 186 miles east of Johannesburg, and tipped off others.

Thousands of people traveled to the village to dig for stones themselves, prompting the government to send experts to take samples for testing, ABC Australia reported.

A boy holds an unidentified stone at KwaHlathi village, South Africa, on June 15, 2021. Phill Magakoe/AFP via GEtty

At a media briefing on Sunday, Ravi Pillay, provincial executive council member for economic development and tourism, said that the stones found there were only quartz.

"The tests conducted conclusively revealed that the stones discovered in the area are not diamonds as some had hoped," he said, according to Reuters.

"The value, if any, of the quartz crystals is yet to be established but it must be mentioned that the value of quartz crystals is very low compared to that of diamonds."

Quartz is second only to feldspar as one of the most abundant minerals on earth, according to the BBC.

A woman uses a pick axe to dig as others search for diamonds in rural South Africa on June 15, 2021. Phill Magakoe/AFP via Getty

Pillay said he counted some 3,000 diggers when he visited the site, and said the diamond rush highlighted some of the socio-economic challenges of the area.

The region the quartz was found in earlier this month is one of the poorest in South Africa, the BBC reported.

South Africa has been dealing with high levels of unemployment for years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened the country's economic situation.

The diggers remaining at the site have been asked to leave, since they are damaging the land and making it dangerous for cattle, according to Reuters.

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