This is the story of Somalatha, who is from Sri Lanka. That's not her real name -- and you're about to find out why.
It's a story most people won't believe could occur in modern-day Britain. Sadly, it is true. It happened very recently.
Somalatha arrived in Britain when she was 29 with a family for whom she had been working in Jordan. Her job was to be a maid. She had to work 16 to 18 hours a day, for which she was paid about $450 Cdn a month. In the first two years, she was not given one day off.
She was not allowed to eat with the family and had to wait for leftovers. If there were none, she was advised to eat onions and potatoes.
If any food was missing, she was automatically blamed for it, or even punished.
Somalatha had to sleep on a sofa-bed in the sitting room, where she was disturbed by anyone who came in late.
Friday nights were especially difficult since the teenage children would come home late at night and bring their friends, which would prevent her from sleeping.
Her employer deliberately let Somalatha's visa expire. Since she was without a visa, she could not run away. She kept asking for a letter from her employer so she could apply to renew her visa but this was refused.
Under current British law, women like Somalatha have a way out. But the government is about to close her escape route. Earlier this year, it proposed changes to the law that divides migrants into five tiers according to their perceived skills and the economic benefit they will bring to Britain.
This system makes no mention of women like Somalatha. But immigration officials have told Anti-Slavery International that domestic workers like Somalatha will henceforth be tied to the employers with whom they entered the United Kingdom, with no right to change employers -- no matter how abusive their treatment.
Being a wage slave under capitalism doesn't just kill it is also depressing......
About half a million Canadian workers experience depression, and most say it interferes with their ability to manage their jobs, Statistics Canada reported Friday.
Data from 2002 showed almost four per cent of workers between the ages of 25 and 64 reported being depressed in the previous 12 months before the surveyJob-related factors associated with depression included:
- Night shifts.
- Non-regular hours.
- Work stress.
- Occupation.
The prevalence of depression was relatively high among workers who spent fewer than 30 hours on the job. It was lower among those who worked more than 40 hours.
Which may explain why so many bosses are criminal capitalists.You may already suspect that your boss's smooth, charming exterior masks a sadistic control freak with a penchant for violence.
Professor Hare estimates that 1% of the general population in North America are psychopaths.
The professor believes that psychopath's cold-blooded ability to manipulate others without remorse, coupled with a veneer of charm and high energy can make them extremely successful in many walks of life.
They could be perfectly qualified for top posts in the military, politics or in huge multi-national companies as history has already shown in one notorious case.
Former Daily Mirror tycoon Robert Maxwell, who made off with the newspaper's pension fund, was named as a classic example of a man in a powerful position who might very well have displayed psychopathic traits.
"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped." Martin Luther King
Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor's needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth. Martin Luther King
In their effort to lay claim to King, much as generations of politicians strove to “get right with Lincoln,” conservatives have presented an ahistorical portrait of him as an absolutist on the question of race and public policy. By their estimation, King’s “I have a dream” speech should be taken literally: He espoused a civic order where governments made no distinctions between citizens based on race. Hence he would have opposed compensatory set-asides, quotas, or timelines and targets aimed at redistributing jobs and economic resources.
The problem with this version of history is that it ignores much of what King said. In his book Why We Can’t Wait, he wrote that “no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. . . . The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. . . . I am proposing, therefore, that, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.”
Critically, he envisioned these broad-based, public-sector compensatory programs as targeting both African-Americans and poor whites, whom he labeled the “derivative victims” of slavery and Jim Crow. In this regard he leaned on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously observed that poor and working-class whites gained nothing from Jim Crow but the psychological “wages of whiteness.” In return for the psychological boost that “whiteness” gave them, poor whites—millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age—surrendered political and economic power to their elite counterparts. King might well have been thinking of the radical white writer Lillian Smith’s 1943 parable, “Two Men and a Bargain,” in which “Once a time, down South, Mr. Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. . . . You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money.” According to Smith, they “segregated southern money from Mr. Poor White and they . . . segregated the Negro from everything.”
Smith’s reasoning—and King’s—was well-founded. Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It’s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the satisfaction that they weren’t black.
See:
House prices will climb 15%For many, condos now only affordable option
Goatcher predicted that rents, after rising 10 per cent in 2006, will climb another 12 per cent in 2007 because of low vacancies. "It's pretty disappointing. The number of starts has dropped off because of costs. Pratt pointed out that "increases in price have made housing unaffordable to a large group of people."This problem has been compounded by redevelopment, she said.
"In some cases the value of the land under rooming houses and slum housing has increased to the point where the owner can redevelop," she said.
"This removes housing stock for the socially disadvantaged and chronically poor portion of our population."
A homeless man who was given a $287 ticket for trespassing after using a shopping centre's restroom after hours wants to know what he should have done instead.
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