The forgotten Egyptians who helped to find Tutankhamun

A new exhibition is bringing to life the workers without whom the boy king's tomb might never have been discovered

APRIL 15,2022

In the year that Egypt secured its independence, the discovery of the 3,000-year-old tomb of one of its ancient rulers, the boy king Tutankhamun, was portrayed as a triumph for the colonial old guard.

The uncovering of remarkable treasures in 1922 was the culmination of a five-year hunt funded by a British aristocrat and led by an obstinate English excavator who were propelled to international stardom by the find.

The efforts of dozens of Egyptians who were central to the greatest event in archaeological history were largely sidelined in the official record. But a new examination of photos and documents from the archive of the leader of the expedition, Howard Carter, has cast new light on the role of the Egyptian foreman and dozens of workers whose efforts were crucial to its success.

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“The excavation was not achieved by a solitary heroic English archaeologist, but by the modern Egyptian team members, who have so often been overlooked and written out of the story,” said Richard Bruce Parkinson, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford.

Carter’s own diary and documents fail to shed light on how the hidden steps to the vault were revealed. His own diary records a scribbled single line on November 4 1922: “First steps of tomb found.”

Carter’s non-academic background and love of a far-fetched yarn has led to various theories — few of them backed by the official records.

Researchers say it was likely to have been a team effort — the melding of local knowledge and Carter’s own obsessive hunt for a missing tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

The discoveries it yielded were remarkable. The tomb was small and hastily repurposed for a king of minor historical importance who died before his time, aged about 19, but remains the only royal burial from ancient Egypt to survive largely intact.

It took a decade to remove the 5,000 objects inside, a process recorded by the celebrated Harry Burton, who was known as the “Pharaohs’ Photographer” for his work recording expeditions in Egypt.

These photos and Carter’s papers provide an insight into the work of local labourers in discovering and collecting the treasures.

Carter names, and thanks, four Egyptians in his papers, but Burton’s pictures show how many more were involved.

“Even today, absolutely nothing would work without the Egyptians and Egyptian team members,” said Dr Daniela Rosenow, the co-curator of a new exhibition Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive. “We can see in his images, he employed about 50 additional local workmen and dozens of children, which was standard practice in those days.

“The European archaeologists wrote their diaries and journals, but most of the Egyptians probably couldn't read or write.

“What they did was go home in the evening and tell their families what they had seen. At least with the photographs, we can assess their contribution and see what really, really vital role they played in the excavation.”

Carter, the son of an artist, had no formal archaeological training, and relied on the Egyptian workforce to understand the landscape and spot where a rock had been cut by ancient hand as he hunted for the lost tomb.

Compared with many of his upper-class colleagues of the time, he was a staunch defender of his Egyptian staff. He was fired from a previous job for defending Egyptian guards during a dispute with a group of western tourists who wanted access to a restricted site, said Prof Parkinson.

Among those he thanks in his papers is his foreman Ahmed Gerigar, who organised the dozens of workmen. But archivists have been unable to put his name to a photo in the archive and little is known about him or his fellow workers.

Their place in the archaeological pecking order is starkly illustrated in a photograph taken by Lord Carnarvon, the backer of the project, at a lunch of experts brought in to examine the preserve the finds.

The seven men seated around a table are all white and western. Two Egyptians were present, but they were waiters plucked from a luxury hotel in Luxor to serve the men their lunch.

Lunch in the tomb of Ramses XI. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford

Other photographs showed the reality for many of the local Egyptian workers, who were hired for the hardest tasks such as moving the packaged treasures from the Valley of the Kings on the first stage of the 400-mile journey by barge to Cairo.

In May 1923, that involved 50 workmen working for 18 hours over two days moving 34 crates five miles to the nearest river in temperatures that reached over 38ºC in the shade. They laid short stretches of track and pushed the loaded trucks before starting the whole process again.

Moving crates from the Valley of the Kings by rail. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford

But the archive also shows Egyptians inside the tomb working alongside Carter as trusted and essential members of the team, even if they do not get the recognition that they deserve.

“I think the archive shows how important they were for all of the work that was done excavating in Egypt. But it also reveals the inequalities,” said Prof Parkinson.

“We have photographs of them working together, but we can't match the names to the photographs.

“So while there was respect, it was very much within a very colonial context. But seeing faces and knowing their names were not recorded … I think that is really heartbreaking.

“It's going to be very difficult to reclaim those lost histories, there's so little written evidence. And I think that's where the photographs really come into their own because they can imply a whole world of information. It's just the names, we don't have the names.”

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, England, is a picture of an Egyptian boy wearing a necklace recovered from the tomb.

Photograph of an Egyptian boy wearing a heavy jewelled necklace from the tomb. Photo: Griffith Institute/University of Oxford

It is one of the rare photographs of a member of the Egyptian team centre-frame taken by the colonial adventurers within the portfolio. Others mainly capture Egyptians working alongside or helping with the project — but usually in the shadow of the English archaeologists.

“Our archive was created by the English excavators. And it only tells one part of the story,” said Dr Rosenow. “If you have a look into the boy's face, you can clearly see a much more complex human reaction. You can feel that he is literally feeling the weight, the physical weight of this necklace, but also the weight of the past on his shoulders.”

His identity remains unknown even though a number of people have since come forward to claim the young man was a relative.

Despite the apparent inequalities between the English and local workers on the dig, newly-independent Egypt, which had been occupied since 1914 as a British protectorate, was at least able to keep the treasures on its soil.

Attitudes were changing after the widespread looting of antiquities by British forces during the previous century. The papers show that Carnarvon envisaged seeing recovered artefacts on display in England.

In a letter in the same month as the initial discovery, he wrote to a fellow Egyptologist in the UK about the discoveries.

“There is enough stuff to fill the whole Egyptian section upstairs of the B.M. [British Museum],” he wrote. “I imagine it is the greatest find ever made.”

But a pre-independence agreement he signed meant that anything recovered by the team from an intact tomb remained the property of Egypt.

The discovery just months after Egypt became independent meant that Tutankhamun became an icon of that campaign. The stunning gold funerary mask that was laid on the face of the mummified body was celebrated as the face of a nation with roots 3,000 years in the past.

Visits to the site — and photographs of the work in progress during the decade of work — were jealously guarded by the British-led team and Egyptians accused Carnarvon of exploiting the site for his own commercial gain. Carnarvon’s death a few months later from an infected mosquito bite was seized on by a hostile local press with sensational stories that he had been struck down by an ancient curse for breaking into the tomb.

The raw politics of the dig halted the work for almost a year in a dispute over access to the site. The photos also show significantly more local officials present during the highly-sensitive autopsy of the body carried out by the Egyptian, Dr Saleh Bey Hamdi, the head of the government school of medicine in Cairo.

The official committee observing the first incision. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford

During the course of the tomb’s clearance, the newly-independent government ensured that the treasures would go on display at a museum in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Most have been moved to the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which could open to coincide with the centenary of the discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb in November to bolster the vital tourism industry of the country.

“Egyptian independence happened just a few months before the discovery of the tomb,” said Dr Rosenow. “It massively shaped this new nationalist idea and they were very proud of Tutankhamun.

“His face, his funerary mask, become the icon of this newfound nation and they were extremely proud of him.”

Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford runs until February 2023

Kazakhstan: Labor unrest troubles another Chinese project

Kazakh officials know they cannot be seen siding with a Chinese company.

Apr 15, 2022

Chinese investors have hit a bumpy stretch of road. 

(David Trilling/Eurasianet file photo)

Earlier this week, almost 100 workers building a road between two settlements in Kazakhstan’s southern Zhambyl region downed their tools.

They were dissatisfied with salaries paid out by the Chinese subcontractor: between $130 and $260 per month for 10-hour workdays, they said.

They also accused the company, a subsidiary of China Xinxing Construction & Development Co., of failing to provide them with appropriate work clothes.

The company has so far refused to meet their demands.

In an April 12 interview with the Atameken business channel, the Chinese chief engineer for the project said that the company could not raise wages as the costs of materials had soared in recent years, turning the project into a loss-maker. He added that he expected the problem related to clothing to be solved in the coming days.

Atameken’s report on the standoff indicated that local authorities had sided with the workers and that a failure to improve working conditions could see labor inspectors get involved.

Worker unrest has been rippling across Kazakhstan in recent months, the latest cause for Chinese investors to reconsider ventures in the country.

The coronavirus choked cross-border trade and slowed or scuppered several pre-agreed projects. January brought the biggest and bloodiest bout of political instability in Kazakhstan’s modern history. Popular opposition to Chinese investments has fomented several political protests since 2016, and bubbled under the surface of many others.

The road through Kyzylorda is part of the $9 billion Nurly Zhol infrastructure program that Kazakhstan rolled out in 2014 and which was supposed to dovetail with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), unveiled in the Kazakh capital the year before.

Vast Kazakhstan’s road and rail networks needed to be upgraded and expanded anyhow.

But the promise of potentially billions of dollars in Chinese industrial investments after the two countries agreed to formally align their visions offered a clear incentive for Nur-Sultan to ramp up connectivity.

In 2016, the two countries struck deals for over 50 joint projects, as Kazakhstan promoted itself as the “buckle” in the BRI.

Only a few have come to fruition.

A Eurasianet review of ongoing investment projects listed on the websites of Kazakhstan’s 14 provincial administrations found that only 24 out of 542 projects at various stages of completion involved Chinese investors.

The business portal LSM.kz meanwhile has tracked several Chinese pull-outs.

This month LSM cited the Aktobe regional administration, in Kazakhstan’s oil-rich west, as saying that a Chinese firm had backed out of a $35 million project to produce carbon black, a sooty crude oil derivative used in a number of industrial settings, including tire manufacturing.

In 2020, LSM reported that Chinese firms had withdrawn from a $1.4 billion fertilizer production project in the same region, a tungsten development project worth nearly $1 billion in the central Karaganda region, and a deal to build a silicon plant worth $115 million in the northern region of Pavlodar.

One project delayed by the coronavirus but apparently still on the table is a float glass factory in Kyzylorda, which is expected to enter full production soon. Yet the factory has not been without scandal. Former economy minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev was convicted of embezzling more than $3 million from the project, which is being overseen by China Triumph International, a subsidiary of China National Building Material.

These are the kind of costs China has been prepared to live with in its Central Asia ventures. Indeed, it has often been perceived by local populations as facilitating precisely this sort of graft.

But the political turbulence that left more than 200 people dead in January, and appeared to hasten the exit from politics of Kazakhstan’s founding leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, may be a bigger consideration for Beijing, according to Central Asia-China-watcher Raffaello Pantucci.

While Kazakhstan’s regime is still as keen as ever for Chinese investment, the socioeconomic fragility that helped spark the nationwide protests may force the government to be more responsive to local concerns going forward, Pantucci wrote recently for the Straits Times.

“All of which is likely to mean China is going to find that Kazakhstan is not the entirely secure and predictable neighbor that it was,” he concluded.

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Big Everything

“Shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done,” the senator told Recode.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

LONG READ


By Sara Morrison 

VOX

 Apr 5, 2022, 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren loves talking about antitrust. In fact, she says, she can’t think of anything more fun to talk about.

Antitrust is not a topic most people associate with “fun,” but the Massachusetts Democrat’s passion for it is entirely believable. It’s not just the excitement and earnestness with which she talks about competition laws and how to change them; it’s also the fact that she has been talking about it for years. Longer, in fact, than many of the politicians who talk about it now.

She’s also why many of them are talking about it now. Warren took antitrust reform and anti-monopoly power out of relatively small academic and advocacy circles and thrust it into the national conversation. Then she ran for president and brought the phrase “break up Big Tech” — and the concept — into the mainstream. Now there’s an administration and a Congress in place that might actually do some of the things she’s been pushing for. And Warren is still talking, because she still has a lot of work to do.

“Getting everybody lined up to push back against a powerful, well-financed industry is tough,” Warren told Recode. “But the fact that it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s okay not to do the work. It just means shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done.”

She’s referring to a package of bipartisan, Big Tech-targeted antitrust bills. Some of those would change things a lot; they could, indeed, break up Big Tech. Those bills are also going nowhere in Congress. The bills that are much more likely to pass — but whose progress has been slow — give a few massive companies new rules about how they can run their digital platforms and services.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign billboard 

made her intentions very clear.

 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

If you’ve only been paying attention to the Big Tech antitrust reform movement for the last, say, year and a half, you may not realize how instrumental Warren has been in building it. She ceded much of that Break Up Big Tech spotlight to the prominent Big Tech critics heading up the two federal agencies that enforce antitrust laws — the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and the lawmakers heading up those antitrust bills. Warren isn’t on the Judiciary Committee that those bills came out of, and her name isn’t on any of them.

But now Warren has an even more ambitious project: Her new bill, the Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act, doesn’t just break up Big Tech: It breaks up Big Everything, and it prevents companies from getting too big in the future. It would also fundamentally change how agencies evaluate and block proposed mergers, a process that currently gives companies a lot of power and agencies relatively little. Warren says the bill crystallizes her vision for how the government can stop industry consolidation that has broken America’s markets, hurt its economy, and threatened its democracy.

The bill comes at a time when the auspicious beginnings of the Biden administration’s pro-competition, anti-monopoly agenda have given way to the reality of how difficult it is to actually get things done. With midterms approaching, however, things appear to be picking back up. Congress is poised to pass some of those antitrust bills and confirm Alvaro Bedoya, the Democratic commissioner the FTC needs to fully carry out its chair’s vision. Warren says she “gives props” for Biden’s pro-competition executive order, which is making progress. But Biden was also slow to officially support those antitrust bills, and his administration has pushed back on the European Union’s attempts to regulate Big Tech.

Elizabeth Warren has a few things to say about all that.

Mergers don’t just affect consumers — sometimes workers bear the impact

Why introduce a big new antitrust bill when Congress is close to passing a few other antitrust laws? The answer lies in chicken sandwiches.

The Big Tech antitrust bills address one industry, and only a few players in it. But many other industries have become hugely consolidated over the last several decades. Chicken, for example. That consolidation has been blamed for everything from the high prices you pay for that chicken to the low prices farmers are forced to sell their chickens for to the few poultry-producing giants out there. But the harm isn’t just in the prices, Warren says. It’s also in who makes sandwiches out of that chicken.
“When markets get very concentrated, we need to look at what we’ve lost”

“Think about two fast food chains in a region,” she said. “One of them does hamburgers almost exclusively, and the other one does chicken sandwiches almost exclusively.” They can merge, and keep their prices and products the same. As far as the consumer is concerned, nothing has changed for their wallet or their taste buds. Antitrust agencies, which typically only look at consumer welfare when reviewing mergers, will likely approve it. But mergers don’t just affect consumers: “The world has changed for those workers,” Warren said.

The two chains no longer have to compete with each other for employees by offering superior wages, benefits, and working conditions — so, Warren says, they don’t offer those things. Studies have shown that as markets become more concentrated, wages stagnate. And that means you might have less money to spend on that chicken sandwich. It’s more expensive, even if its price stays the same.

“If we want the benefits of competition, then it means when markets get very concentrated, we need to look at what we’ve lost,” Warren said. “Not just in terms of consumer choice. It’s very important, but it’s not the only thing.”

The bill would require antitrust agencies to take factors like impact on the labor market into account in addition to the impact on consumers. The bill isn’t limited to Big Tech (or chicken sandwiches), but Big Tech companies won’t be thrilled if the criteria for evaluating mergers expand — especially the ones that haven’t had to worry about consumer welfare standards because their products are free. That’s also assuming their proposed merger isn’t prohibited outright. Under Warren’s new bill, mergers over a certain size or that consolidate the market too much are forbidden. And consummated mergers that have harmed competition, workers, consumers, or competitors can be broken up.

The Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act also fundamentally changes the agencies’ merger review process and power. Right now, if companies want to merge, it’s on the FTC or the DOJ to make the case for why they shouldn’t, and they have to sue the companies to block them. The onus is entirely on the agencies, which oversee thousands of mergers a year. With relatively little in resources, they can only challenge a few of those mergers. Doing so may mean a long court battle that’s difficult to win.

“Getting everybody lined up to push back against a powerful, well-financed industry is tough,” Warren told Recode. “But the fact that it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s okay not to do the work. It just means shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done.” 

Ken Cedeno/Getty Images

With Warren’s bill, it’s the companies that have to do the work. They have to show that their proposed merger won’t harm competition, consumers, and the labor market. If they can’t, the agencies have to reject it. The companies have to sue if they still want to merge. Ideally, companies will try to merge less, and the mergers they do try won’t be harmful.

“It’s going to change how mergers are even conceived of by the companies,” Alex Harman, director of government affairs, antimonopoly, and competition policy at Economic Security Project Action, said. “Because then it’s not like the game of Monopoly where it’s just collecting assets. It’s now going to be like, ‘Oh, I actually need to make a case for this,’ that there’s a lack of harm, and that there’s a benefit.”

It’s a seemingly complicated bill that tries to make things simpler. Instead of adding regulations to one industry that its most powerful players can figure out how to work around, she just wants to break them apart.

“Structural change, where possible, minimizes regulation and maximizes the benefits of a functioning market,” Warren said.

Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at nonprofit Public Knowledge, says she likes what the bill is trying to do and sees the need for it. But she’d like more antitrust experts to weigh in before the bill becomes law, because it’s such a big change: “to make sure that we’re getting the details right.”

And William Kovacic, a competition law professor at George Washington University and former Republican FTC chair, said the bill left him with too many questions on how it would actually work in practice. For example, he said, there’s a list of general things agencies have to consider when deciding to approve a merger, but not much detail or guidance beyond that. So it’s left to the agencies to create the definition of harms to competition, workers, and small and minority-owned businesses.

“And where you have lots of discretion, here come the political influencers from Congress, from the executive departments from the White House, the lobbyists all come parading into my office and tell me what to do,” Kovacic said. “If I’m going to have to do this, I just want to know how ... [Congress] can’t just drop this into my lap. You figure it out.”

How Warren went from taking on Big Banks to breaking up Big Tech

Warren’s political career has been defined by advocating for consumers, laborers, and small businesses against the big, powerful companies that make a lot of money at their expense. First, it was big banks in the wake of the financial crisis. Then she went broader: When she gave the keynote speech at New America’s Open Markets conference in 2016, she was one of the first nationally recognizable politicians in decades to talk about comprehensively addressing monopoly power. A week later, antitrust was on the Democratic party platform for the first time since 1988. A year later, it was a major part of its agenda.

“She fought hard behind the scenes to bring that back onto the platform,” Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), an anti-monopoly, small business advocacy group, told Recode.

It was a major part of Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign platform, and her call to break up Big Tech was one of the best-known parts of it. Her plan for that: reversing mergers like Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and prohibiting companies like Amazon from owning platforms while offering their own products on them. And although Warren was one of the first and most prominent figures to recognize the threat of Big Tech’s power and demand that it be reined in, she wouldn’t be the last.

In the years since, we’ve seen a massive House investigation into competition in digital markets and the bipartisan antitrust bills, some of which are quite similar to Warren’s campaign proposals. Her allies and so-called “acolytes” have key, influential positions in the Biden administration. That sweeping executive order promoting competition was partially written by former Warren aide Bharat Ramamurti, who is now a deputy director of the National Economic Council. And Warren strongly advocated for Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter to head up the FTC and the DOJ’s antitrust division, respectively.

“Personnel is policy,” Warren said.

“With an FTC that is divided two-two, we’re not getting the work done over at the FTC that we need”

Personnel also isn’t perfect. Biden’s commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, criticized the European Union’s efforts to rein in Big Tech at an event for pro-business lobbying group the Chamber of Commerce, saying they disproportionately targeted American businesses. That’s a message the Biden administration seemed to echo in its endorsement of America’s antitrust bills. Warren has sent two letters to Raimondo since (neither answered) asking who she’s talking to in Big Tech and their lobbying groups.

“It is not the job of the Secretary of Commerce to echo the lobbyists’ talking points on behalf of Big Tech,” Warren said.

Other appointments don’t have the tools they need to do the job they want to do. Khan has a clear vision for how to approach antitrust in Big Tech (and beyond), and how to re-shape the FTC to carry it out. But she’s only had a few months in her tenure with the majority Democratic votes. Commissioner Rohit Chopra (another big Warren ally) left the FTC to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last fall. Republicans have held up his replacement’s confirmation for seven months — and counting.

“We are entirely committed to getting the FTC commissioner through,” Warren said. “And I understand the urgency of the moment on that. With an FTC that is divided two-two, we’re not getting the work done over at the FTC that we need.”

Even a gridlocked FTC has been able to do some things. Lockheed Martin and Nvidia abandoned their acquisition plans when the FTC sued to block them. Khan and Kanter announced they would be rethinking merger guidelines over the next year. When Chopra was still on the commission, it was able to successfully re-file its lawsuit against Meta. But the FTC didn’t challenge Amazon’s merger with MGM. Microsoft and Google have announced huge mergers of their own. They don’t seem too worried that Khan’s FTC will be able to stop them. And while the DOJ is believed to be preparing to go after Google’s ad tech business, it also recently approved Discovery’s $43 billion merger with WarnerMedia. The Microsoft, Google, and Discovery acquisitions, by the way, would all be prohibited under Warren’s bill.

But Warren’s legislation isn’t what we’re likely to get. Those would be the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. The first bill would force Apple and Google to open their devices up to alternate app stores and payment systems. The second would forbid Big Tech companies from preferencing their own products on their platforms. Amazon wouldn’t be able to give its Basics line special placement on its Marketplace and Google wouldn’t be able to give its restaurant rankings special placement on its search page.

While we wait for Democratic leaders in the House and Senate to give those antitrust bills a floor vote, Big Tech companies are doing everything they can to defeat them. They’ve spent record amounts of money on lobbying and tried to take their case against the bills to small businesses and the American people. They’ve bankrolled their own advocacy groups. Sen. Ted Cruz said that Apple CEO Tim Cook personally called him about the Open App Markets Act the night before it was voted out of the Judiciary committee (Cruz voted for the bill to advance). Some moderate Democrats, especially California’s lawmakers, are openly opposed to the bills, making cooperation (and votes) from Republicans especially important.

Sen. Warren’s political career has been defined by advocating for consumers, laborers, and small businesses against the big, powerful companies that make a lot of money at their expense. 

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Warren says Congress had a lot of essential issues on its plate to tackle, and that’s caused some of the delay. But she’s still frustrated that Congress hasn’t taken up antitrust as quickly as it could. Not just this session, either.

“Much of this work should have been done 15 years ago, before the concentration was as bad as it is,” she said.

Warren’s bills don’t have to pass to create change

Warren’s bill has been introduced in the Senate, with a companion version in the House. It’s got several cosponsors, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Richard Blumenthal, and Reps. Katie Porter (a former Warren student), Mondaire Jones, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But none of them are Republicans, who balk at both the prospect of giving government agencies any authority and appearing to agree with Warren on anything. The incremental and targeted approach of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who headed up the antitrust bills in the Senate, is different from Warren’s. It’s also the approach that will get the bipartisan support needed to pass anything now.

So will the Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act become law in this Congress? No, but that’s probably not the point. The bill is a look at what could be, and maybe sooner than you think. When Warren first started talking about antitrust reform back in 2016, any change at all seemed far away at best. It’s very close now. Don’t be too surprised if we see bills influenced by Warren’s vision become law in the future, or in the FTC’s and DOJ’s revised merger guidelines.

“She continues to be a major leader in articulating how we should think about concentrated market power and what we should do about it,” Mitchell, of the ILSR, said. “She’s continuing to lay out policy architecture that I’m certain will be influential.”

How influential does Warren think she’s been? Her initial answer was a rare (for her), “I don’t know.” But here’s what she does know: “These are good ideas and I’m willing to get out there and fight for them.”

“I’m willing to challenge both people in government and the big companies,” Warren said. “The status quo is letting giant companies rake off billions and billions of dollars in profits that, in competitive markets, would have stayed in the hands of consumers, employees, and small businesses. Today, they’re just getting shut out.”

Severance’s workplace brutality isn’t sci-fi. Neither is its worker power.

The Apple TV+ show is a road map of worker organizing.

By Caitlin PenzeyMoog

VOX

Apr 9, 2022, 

Mark and Helly, plotting. Apple TV+


You may not have heard, but people don’t like their jobs.

Americans are quitting in droves. Companies paying poverty wages are having a hard time finding and retaining workers. Highly paid digital workers don’t want to return to the office. The pandemic stripped the padding that made white-collar jobs bearable — lunches with coworkers, Starbucks runs, breaks in fresh air — leaving only the rotten core of actual work behind.

Setting aside generalities, consider your own work. Does it suck? Is it exhausting? Is it meaningful? Or does it detract from the parts of your life that bring meaning? Do you have a good job, or is it only good compared to the worse jobs you could be forced into?

Enter Severance, a show on Apple TV+ starring Adam Scott as Mark. Mark has voluntarily undergone a procedure known as severance, which means he has chosen not to remember what happens during his workday. It’s an intoxicating premise. If you were paid handsomely to do it, why wouldn’t you?

Mark works at Lumon, a powerful corporation with mysterious intent and one of the most ghoulish dystopian settings on the small screen. Lumon offers the most in-demand perk of all: work-life balance. His job self, his “innie,” spends his days sorting and filing numbers in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Division, for no reason that he knows of. His “outtie” is blissfully unaware of the pointlessness of his innie’s days, though the complete removal from work hasn’t exactly translated into happiness for Mark. (Spoilers follow for Severance.)

THAT’S WHAT MAKES WORK PALATABLE: YOUR COWORKERS BECOME YOUR FRIENDS AND, GIVEN ENOUGH TRAUMA BONDING, YOUR COMRADES

Mark and his severed coworkers make an ideal workforce to be exploited. With no personal memories and no context of the outside world, attempts to understand their jobs and surroundings are childlike and naive. But Lumon can’t stop coworkers from caring about each other: Mark empathizes with new hire Helly (Britt Lower); Irving (John Turturro) falls in love with Burt (Christopher Walken) from Optics and Design, abandoning his zealotry for the Handbook in the process; Dylan (Zach Cherry) accidentally discovers his outtie’s fatherhood, radicalizing him to help his coworkers escape instead of working late to win chintzy prizes.

Severance is a sneaky paean to worker solidarity, and the heart of the show is a metaphor for how workers come together in the face of oppression. Mark’s compliance is first shaken by the expulsion of his work bestie, Petey (Yul Vazquez). The loss awakens a quiet recalcitrance because that’s what makes work palatable: Your coworkers become your friends and, given enough trauma bonding, your comrades.

While the workplace sitcom has been a staple of TV for decades, no show about work has captured quite so accurately how damaging work can be in real life. You don’t work at the Cheers bar, and you don’t work for Leslie Knope. You are not Jim Halpert; most likely, you are Stanley Hudson, painfully aware of the stupidity of your labor.

Lumon may represent a particularly hellish version of the office, but it doesn’t have to stray far from reality to depict the cruelty of work. The workplace is already dystopian. Entire sectors of the economy are based on a large pool of low-wage workers, aided by state governments run in large part by business owners. In America, 44 percent of workers — 53 million people — work in low-wage jobs that are physically exhausting and arduous. Semi-employed gig workers live precariously while their employers fight tooth and nail so they won’t be classified as their employees. Better-off white-collar workers face their own set of harms. Like the members of the Macrodata Refinement Division, we’re all dealing with hardship, some of which is the direct result of our jobs.

Because as we know in our bones and Severance makes clear, we are our jobs, every shitty minute. We speak of “work-life balance” because we know work is opposed to life. When Mark tells Helly he just hopes he has things he cares about outside of Lumon, it’s because he knows his job is not one of those things. For all the fantastical elements in Severance, the only real science fiction is the consciousness-searing technology facilitating ever-greater worker compliance. The suffering at work, and the characters’ futile attempts to separate work from everything else, is the lived reality of millions of us in the real world.

Lumon employees, caught commiserating. Apple TV+

The pandemic only highlighted the brutality of our jobs in the current extractive labor setup we call a capitalist democracy. We learned that we’re either essential or not. Unless you’re a doctor, “essential” mostly means people working in low-wage, dangerous, punishing jobs necessary to keep the economy going, like farmworkers, bus drivers, and cashiers. There seems to be a direct correlation between how necessary your job is and how low you are paid and indecently you are treated.

On the flip side are those working inessential jobs, or what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger,” Graeber writes in his essay. Macrodata Refinement is a perfect example of a job that doesn’t really need to be done, and one brought about by Severance creator, writer, and showrunner Dan Erickson’s real-life temp job entering data.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Erickson was able to make a show out of the “profound psychological violence” (Graeber’s words) of a meaningless job, or that that show could double as an ingenious depiction of workplace organizing. TV workers are part of a formidable union with a history of militancy that brings strong protections. (TV writers are represented by the Writers Guild of America West; as an editorial employee of Vox, I’m represented by their sibling, Writers Guild of America East.) There’s a reason the saying “an injury to one is an injury to all” has stuck around in the labor world, and Hollywood writers are especially good at using their collective power to secure better conditions for everyone in their industry.

In an interview with Inverse, Erickson states the themes of his show bluntly: “It’s about workers reclaiming power, which is obviously a brutal, ongoing human struggle. Workers are extremely powerful, but I think solidarity is one of the biggest challenges in that, especially when those in power try to divide in the ranks.” The best that can be said of the vast majority of jobs is that you may come to prioritize the value of your coworkers over the circumstances that brought you together, i.e., the meaninglessness of your shared toil. Severance is a road map of organizing, a revolution in progress, and it begins and ends with caring about your fellow worker, who in turn cares about you.

In Severance, Helly, newly severed and rebellious, represents the audience surrogate and an unadulterated reaction to all this, and perhaps what everyone’s reaction should be to spending their days doing pointless tasks for the profit of others: rage, repulsion, and determination to escape. Those are the seeds of worker organizing. People know their jobs are bad; it takes someone like Helly, or organizers who won the recent union drive at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York warehouse, to light a fire under their immiserated coworkers in order to do something about it.

The stakes are high for workers. While Jeff Bezos’s wealth is greater than the GDPs of more than half the world’s countries, employment at his company is so precarious and difficult that the high turnover rate is a feature of employment; routine injuries are a feature of employment; peeing in bottles is a feature of employment. “You’re not a person” — the message Helly’s outtie tells her innie — brutally epitomizes the loss of dignity and humanity we endure in the workplace.

A union cannot solve every problem workers face, but it wins us a seat at the table to determine at least some of the conditions of our working lives. I know this because I’ve organized a workplace. It was the single most meaningful thing I’ve done in my life because it led me to understand my power when working collectively with my coworkers, and because it materially improved the lives of many of us.

Media isn’t the only white-collar industry where unions are booming: Workers at nonprofits, museums, and even Big Tech are revolting against the norms that use their own drives against them. It’s much easier to get people to work long hours if you teach them they’re choosing to do it.

EVEN DEVOID OF THE CONTEXT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND THEIR PERSONAL HISTORIES, EVEN WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT A UNION IS, THE WORKERS STILL REBEL

Similarly, Lumon gets workers to exploit themselves. They choose to undergo severance — if they don’t like it, they can quit! If there’s a lesson here, it’s that owners will do everything they possibly can to extract as much surplus value from workers as possible — especially under the guise of technological advances — and it’s up to the workers to stop it. The severance procedure is a funhouse mirror version of the ways real executives use technology to make work ever more dehumanizing in pursuit of ever-greater profits. At least on the severed floor, there’s hope, because even devoid of the context of the outside world and their personal histories, even without knowing what a union is, the workers still rebel.

We cannot ignore what happens to us at work, even if we’d like to, and even if our overseers do their best to facilitate the idea that our work lives are separate from the rest of our lives. “No one should be as invested in their boss’s bottom line as they are in their own life or happiness,” showrunner Erickson said in the Inverse interview. “But there are certain things we learn as humans, like empathy and self-worth, that I think we’re often discouraged from bringing to the workplace, to our own detriment. The less of ourselves we bring to work, the easier we are to exploit, or roped into immoral practices. But also we need that separation in order not to lose ourselves entirely.”

The benefit of exploring a topic like workplace organizing in a sci-fi story like Severance is that its outlandish premise allows its viewers some remove from the cultural baggage we see as entrenched and unchangeable. It’s a narrative that puts the brutality of work front and center, and through stories, we can learn that what seems impossible is not. Even in the most dystopian version of corpocratic America imaginable, workplace empathy and uniting in our common struggle triumphs.

Congrats! You formed a union. Now comes the hard part.

The boring, crucial work that happens now that Starbucks and Amazon have unionized.

Public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965

By Rani Molla@ranimolla 

VOX

 Apr 12, 2022,

Amazon Labor Union workers celebrate their election win on April 1. The next battle is getting a contract.

 Andrea Renault/AFP via Getty Images

Union membership in the US has been in decline for decades, but there’s recently been a potential shift. Seventeen corporate Starbucks locations in the US have voted to form a union since the end of last year, and another 170 or so are slated to vote in the coming weeks and months — all in an industry where unionizing is rare. And in early April, workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse also voted for a union, making them the first to organize in a company known for quashing organizing. These successful votes are historic, and they’re an optimistic sign for unions in America.

But while the hard-won union votes might be the most cinematic part, it’s not the end of the story. The lengthy and difficult process of negotiating a contract that benefits workers has only just begun — and its conclusion is far from certain.

To move forward, the union must write a contract with the company, the union and the company must agree on it, and then union members vote on whether they also agree. The process can take anywhere from six months to a few years — and some don’t end with a contract at all. Some 30 percent of unions don’t establish a contract within three years.

The unions representing Starbucks and Amazon workers are off to a good start because, for the most part, their goals are clear. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) has said its main objectives are to raise wages to $30 an hour, give workers longer breaks, and mostly eliminate mandatory overtime. The first Starbucks Workers United union, at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo, New York, has been in contract negotiations since January 31; it has so far proposed “just cause” firing, better health and safety protocols, and giving customers the option to tip on credit cards. Future proposals include better wages and benefits.

The harder part, experts say, will be getting Amazon and Starbucks to agree on contracts. That’s not for lack of trying on the unions’ part. Rather, unions often face uphill battles with uncooperative companies and toothless labor laws.

Companies can find any number of ways to stall. Amazon is already objecting to the historic Staten Island vote, accusing the union of threatening voters to vote for the union, among other complaints. Starbucks has filed appeals that have delayed union votes but has said it will respect the bargaining process for the stores that have voted to unionize.

Companies are supposed to bargain in good faith, but there’s no timeline on when that should happen, nor are they compelled to agree to the contract. “Our law has no mechanism to force management,” Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University’s labor relations school, told Recode. If the NLRB, the federal body charged with enforcing labor law, finds that they’re stalling unnecessarily, there’s not much it can do.

It’s clear why many companies stall: It can make unions lose momentum. If years pass without a contract, workers might wonder what the point of the union is at all. Additionally, both Amazon and Starbucks are in industries with high turnover, where the people who were so keen on unionizing might not be in that job long enough to see the contract through, which could potentially stunt the union drive.

The trick for the unions will be leveraging collective action like strikes, as well as public and political pressure, to try to get these employers to agree to a contract.

The Amazon Labor Union, which was created to organize the Staten Island warehouse, is not affiliated with an older union, so it doesn’t have the infrastructure — or cash — from unions that have been collecting dues for years. That means the union, which has so far been funded by crowdsourced money and pro bono help, will have to figure out on its own the labyrinthine processes of writing, negotiating, and enforcing a contract. Most importantly, its lack of affiliation might stymie workers’ ability to strike. Unlike established unions, the ALU doesn’t have a fund to help workers — many of whom make a low hourly wage and might not have cash reserves — get through a protracted strike in which they would forgo their pay.

However, a strike at an 8,000-person warehouse in New York City wouldn’t take that long to be effective, according to Rebecca Givan, a professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Studies. “It’s possible that fairly modest actions can cause significant disruption,” she said, saying that one-hour or one-day strikes might be enough to push management to agree. It would be very difficult for Amazon to quickly replace striking workers at such a large warehouse.

It’s also possible that the Amazon Labor Union could accept formal or informal help from an existing union, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is affiliated with the Starbucks parent union. Mary Kay Henry, international president of the SEIU, told Recode in a statement her union would “offer whatever support we can to help workers at Amazon who are fighting for a voice on the job to bargain a better future.” The Teamsters, a union that represents warehouse and distribution workers, may also get involved: On Thursday, ALU leaders Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer met with Sean M. O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president. They discussed resources and assistance the Teamsters could provide to help them get their first contract with Amazon, according to a Teamsters spokesperson. Amazon Labor Union did not respond to requests for comment.

Growing union membership across the US, even if it’s not for their own union, is in unions’ best interest, according to Givan. “Amazon is a huge threat to the quality of jobs in the shipping and logistics sector, many of which are Teamsters jobs,” she said.

Part of what has made the Starbucks and Amazon unions successful is their worker-led structure, which has allowed them to largely avoided the criticism that they are outsiders. Starbucks workers themselves are negotiating their contracts — not union lawyers. That will most likely be the case with the Amazon union as well, which is formed entirely of Amazon workers.

The Starbucks union, however, is part of a larger, established union called Workers United. That means it has a lot more resources to guide them through writing and negotiating a contract. That union could also help it with a strike fund if it chose to do so. However, Starbucks stores are a lot smaller than an Amazon warehouse, so a strike at just one of its 9,000 stores would have less of an impact. It would also be relatively easier to replace 20 or so striking baristas.

Something that could work in the unions’ favor is that both Amazon and Starbucks are widely known, customer-facing companies, making it potentially easier for workers to attract political and public boosters.

Politicians from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to President Joe Biden have shown support for these union efforts. 

Public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965, according to Gallup.

“The whole country is watching and working people everywhere are watching, and they are judging Amazon and Starbucks by their actions,” Givan said.

Public and political union supporters could help pressure the companies to agree to union demands. Perhaps more directly, Starbucks’ own investors have asked the company to remain neutral on unions and quickly come to collective bargaining agreements with stores that unionize.

As to whether the recent spate of successful organizing and current contract negotiations are enough to reverse long-declining union membership, Katz said, “I think it’s going to lead to more [organizing] but I don’t think it’s yet an indication of a massive turnaround.” He added, “We need more Amazons, we need a lot of the Starbucks to get organized. And then we need more signs [of increased unionizing] in the more traditional sectors.”

PREVENTABLE INCIDENTS

Stop calling them “accidents”

From car crashes to environmental spills to workplace injuries, author Jessie Singer encourages us to reconsider the word “accident.”

By Marin Cogan@marincogan

VOX

Apr 12, 2022,

Steve Cicero/Getty Images


From the desk of my home office in Washington, DC, I can see a four-way intersection with stop signs on each corner. About a year ago, I started to notice something alarming: The cars seemed to be going much faster, and they were running stop signs much more frequently than usual.

More than 31,000 people died in car crashes on America’s roads in the first nine months of 2021, a 12 percent increase over the previous year, and the highest percentage increase during the first nine months of a year since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started tracking the numbers. The problem only seems to be getting worse.

When you look at the number of people being killed on our streets, the word “accident” starts to feel really unsatisfying. It almost seems to say “there’s nothing to see here,” when, clearly, something larger is going on. In America, we hear and read about “accidents” every day. Most of us shrug our shoulders: After all, if it’s an accident, there’s nothing much that could have been done to prevent it, right?

In the new book There Are No Accidents, author Jessie Singer argues that basically everything we consider to be an “accident” — be it car accidents or fatal fires or workplace injuries — are in fact not accidents at all. Humans, Singer writes, make mistakes all the time, but it’s the dangerous conditions in our built environments that result in fatal consequences. Larger systemic forces, shaped by corporations and governments, intersect to create vulnerabilities that we don’t all share equally. Anticipating and reducing those opportunities for human error is the key to preventing needless death.

“As a disclaimer, I don’t like to use the word ‘accident,’” Singer told me in the interview. “I don’t normally use the word ‘accident’ but I’m going to use it throughout our conversation, so that you can see when it starts to sound weird to you.”

I spoke with Singer about their book, their critique of how we use the term, and how we can make our communities safer. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you mean when you say there are no accidents?

This is a real tricky thing for us to wrap our heads around because the word “accident” is quite tricky. By definition, it’s a contradiction. It has two definitions: One is a random event, and the other is a harmful event. So an accident is unpredictable, but with a predictable outcome.

From that direct contradiction, we get a lot wrong about what an accident is. What’s important when we talk about accidents, and perhaps the number one thing that we get wrong about accidents, is that we focus on the last person involved when things go wrong. In that viewpoint, accidents seem random, and we miss the layered causality that leads to accidental harm. We miss the stacked, dangerous conditions that lead to people being killed and injured in accidents.

What’s the problem with the term “accident?”

There are a lot of problems with it. Accidents are supposed to be random, right? And unpredictable. If that were true, then accidental death would be randomly distributed across the country, but it’s not. When we look at the data, we see that Black and Indigenous people and people living in poverty die by accident most often.

So we’re told at once that this is random, and then we’re told by example that this is totally not random. When we look at the racial and economic differences in accidental death, we see that this is especially true for accidents where policy and infrastructure make a difference between life and death. The safety of our homes, our roads, of our workplaces — what we see is that policy decisions and an unregulated corporate environment lead to risk unequally distributed across the US. But we’re told to think of it as a matter of personal responsibility.

When we say “it was an accident,” we’re saying it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t their fault. In doing that, we’re almost always focusing on the wrong thing and setting up the same accident to happen again.

Why are Black and Indigenous people more likely to die “by accident” than white Americans, and what are some of those things that we think of as accidental?

When we talk about accidental death, what we’re talking about is unintended, injury-related death, not violence and not disease. There is a huge swath of ways that people die, from choking, to falls, to drowning, to traffic crashes, to fires, to poisoning, to drug overdoses. It is a massive category that includes much more obscure and unlikely ways to die, like freezing to death or starving to death, which of course still do happen.

These are all considered accidents. But there are racialized and economic differences in some accidental deaths — they’re not universal. Indigenous people are more than twice as likely as white people to be killed by a car crossing the street, and Black people are more than twice as likely to die in an accidental house fire than white people. There’s quite a bit of conditional exposure in whether or not a house fire is deadly, whether or not a traffic crash is deadly. It has to do with different layers of exposure, and that layered causality is really important.

If you’re driving an old car, you’re more likely to die in a traffic crash. If someone is driving a much bigger car than you or if you live in a low-income neighborhood where they’re not repairing the roads, you’re also more likely to die. And if you’re in a scenario where all three of those factors are interacting and maybe there are other factors too, like your local hospital recently closed, which means you’re farther away from emergency medical services — all of these layers contribute to whether or not we survive our mistakes. Certain people have less opportunities to survive their mistakes.

When someone is killed in an “accident,” let’s say a car crash, for example, people almost always ask questions like, “Was he in the crosswalk? Was she wearing a helmet? What color clothes were they wearing?” Why is it that we feel compelled to do that?


Questions of blame are really important to us when things get scary. This is especially true with accidents because they seem random, because we’re focused on that last person who made a mistake. It seems like there could have been no other conditions under which that mistake was made.

Seemingly random horrors and tragedies are terrifying. As a result, victim blaming, or even perpetrator blaming, is a comfort because it’s a way of feeling in control of an uncontrollable situation. This is an incredibly strong urge because there are few things more disquieting to us than not having control. In that disquiet, we search for the simplest and quickest and nearest cause, and the simplest and quickest and nearest cause is always the last person who made the mistake. It’s important to point out that victim blaming and perpetrator blaming aren’t that different. Obviously one is especially cruel, but both are useless because they don’t lead us to preventing the problem.

Victims are especially blamed. That’s because they’re dead or they’re hurt, it’s because they can’t speak up. The urge to blame victims is a way to say, “Not me, couldn’t happen to me. I wouldn’t have made those decisions.” It gives us quite a bit of space from this thing that terrifies us.

I know the whole point of your book is that we focus too much on individual responsibility and not on these larger systemic changes that need to be made. But for those of us who don’t want to feel completely helpless, what can we do as individuals to change things?

There are so many ways that we can throw a pillow between us and our mistakes. In terms of the big picture of the federal government, we should be pushing for the re-funding and the reviving of our regulatory agencies, to rein in corporate power and to put a cost on accidental death. Every time someone dies on a corporation’s watch, whether in an unsafe car, on the roads, or in an unsafe workplace, there should be a major cost that makes it no longer feasible for them to continue.

We should also be advocating on the federal level to rebuild the social safety net so people don’t have to make bad decisions. Pay people money to protect themselves, to drive a safer car, to not take the most dangerous job or live in the least-safe place. There’s also so much you can do locally. There are a million ways to prevent accidental death. In your neighborhood, you can advocate for traffic calming and public transit expansions, because if you don’t have to drive a car, you are much safer. If you’re able to take a bus or a train, that makes you more likely to survive your trip from point A to point B.

You can advocate for safe injection sites, and the free distribution of Naloxone and syringes. Simply making them accessible without stigma will not only prevent accidental overdose, but will prevent the accidental transmission of diseases. You can fight for in-your-home and in-your-office ADA accessibility, like ramps and grab bars, so an accidental fall is less likely to end in death.

This even extends to much less-common causes of accidental death, like fighting for fire safety requirements like sprinklers and self-closing doors in apartment buildings in the city you live in. It means that when someone makes the mistake of lighting something on fire, it’s less likely to kill people. As long as we can stop focusing on the last person who made a mistake, as long as we can accept that mistakes are inevitable but premature death is not, we can do so much to protect each other.

Old-school homophobia is back

Why anti-LGBTQ laws and accusations of “grooming” children seem to be everywhere now.

By Christian Paz@realcpaz 

VOX

 Apr 13, 2022,

Students in Walpole, Massachusetts, protest anti-LGBT proposals in Florida and Texas. Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The past month hasn’t been great for queer and trans Americans.

In March, after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill restricting the kind of discussions and instruction public school teachers can have that involve “sexual orientation or gender identity,” copycat proposals popped up in at least three Republican-run states. Conservative proponents of these bills then launched new broadsides against LGBTQ people, accusing teachers of “grooming” school-age kids and queer allies of enabling pedophilia in their criticism of the bills and the chilling effects on school discussions.

In the span of what seemed like a week, old-school bigotry felt mainstreamed. Sitting members of Congress, cable news hosts, and conservative intellectuals coalesced around “ok, groomer” discourse as a new way to attack LGBTQ Americans — not just the teachers these bills are targeting. Their attacks come in a country that is more accepting of queer Americans than at any other time in history; about eight in 10 Americans back nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people. But suddenly, it seemed, 20th-century homophobia acquired a modern, QAnon-esque edge.

“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted at the beginning of March. On his talk radio show last week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk tied same-sex marriage and the acceptance of LGBTQ Americans to corrupting children: “We’re talking about gay stuff more than any other time. Why? Because they are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”

The feedback loop of anti-LGBTQ legislation and “grooming” discourse reveals new dimensions to the conservative movement’s efforts to stymie the progress of recent years: Some members of the political right see opportunities to wield their advantages in the nation’s increasingly conservative courts against LGBTQ people — and opportunities to claw back the ground they’ve lost in the culture war as Americans’ opposition to discrimination grows.
What “Don’t Say Gay” and its conservative backers hope to win

Florida’s education law is couched in the language of parental rights and uses vague language to implicitly threaten LGBTQ teachers and allies with lawsuits. Though supporters had said the law bans inappropriate conversations about sexual activity with young students, the text never explicitly references discussions of sex — only explicitly forbidding conversations about “sexual orientation or gender identity.” The ban applies from kindergarten through third grade but leaves an opening for “age-appropriate” restrictions beyond those grades, while also not defining what “age-appropriate” means.

The legislation never uses the words “gay” or “trans,” but advocates argue that queer and trans Americans would be the primary targets of lawsuits by parents and officials behind the restrictions. Echoing the model of Texas’s abortion ban, Florida’s law deputizes parents as watchdogs, providing a path through the courts to punish schools and staff that violate the statute.

Legislatures in Alabama, Ohio, and Louisiana have since advanced similar proposals; Texas’s lieutenant governor is looking at introducing a bill when its next legislative session starts, and lawmakers in six other states, mostly in the South, have supported iterations of restrictions on LGBTQ identity in schools.

Some of these proposals are more explicit than Florida’s — Tennessee’s proposal seeks to ban books or material that support or promote LGBTQ “issues or lifestyle” altogether — but all offer a window into how social conservatives see opportunities to roll back protections for queer and trans people: score victories in the courts and make the cultural fight more extreme.

Their path to win legal fights looks more promising, with Republican majorities in these statehouses passing these bills on to Republican governors, expecting fights in lower courts, and biding time until a conservative majority on the Supreme Court reviews the challenges, Carl Charles, a senior attorney with the civil rights organization Lambda Legal, said.

Drawing on pandemic-era anger over school closures, mask-wearing, and the specter of critical race theory, state Republicans see an opportunity to rile up their most conservative constituents ahead of primaries, general elections, and a new Supreme Court term.

But what these bills communicate coyly, its supporters in media and politics have been saying out loud for quite some time: The way to win back lost ground in the culture war over LGBTQ people is to cast them as morally corrupt villains — and use schools as a starting point for a bigger cultural shift.
The extreme right’s “grooming” line reveals a note of desperation

Radical right-wing activists and commentators in recent weeks have been making literal accusations of pedophilia (in a callback to a trope from the 1970s and earlier) and grooming (which in its true sense means to “gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught,” according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network). But they’ve also been increasingly using “grooming” as a casual insult to try to create a vague link between all LGBTQ people and cases of child abuse.

What started on the fringes, with conservative activists riding the coattails of last year’s anti-critical race theory moral panic, crossed over into mainstream media during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last month. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned the future justice’s thinking on gender, child abuse, and race. As Georgetown professor Don Moynihan wrote about Hawley’s line of attack, the point was “to create an association between Jackson and this broader trope” of child predators running rampant in public institutions. That spawned a universe of outrage in conservative media, further buoying the legislative action underway in Republican states.

Historical examples abound for how these kinds of moral panics bolstered discriminatory action against LGBTQ people since the 1970s. In that decade, California conservatives rallied against gay and lesbian people to prevent them from working in public schools and anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant led an effort to repeal anti-discrimination protections in Florida with her “Save Our Children” campaign.

Today’s “anti-grooming” line bears a resemblance to these old activist efforts, but it is becoming prevalent at a time when conservatives have lost many of the cultural and legal battles over gay rights and anti-discrimination protections, Cathryn Oakley, a senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, told me. Support for same-sex marriage has broad bipartisan support; a large majority of the country believes gay and lesbian people are “morally acceptable.” And those numbers have grown year over year.


“It’s very frustrating to see that we are having the same fight over and over again … but I believe that these folks are desperate. They have lost every fight they have picked on LGBT issues. They lost on trying to criminalize sodomy, they lost on marriage equality, they lost on bathroom bills, they lost on wedding services refusal — and we’re at 75 to 80 percent support for nondiscrimination laws,” she said.

Some of the loudest supporters of this effort have admitted this: “The alternative to the culture war is a culture surrender. There is no neutral option,” one reads. “The right needs to go scorched earth with ‘groomer,’” says another. “We are building a new model of conservative activism” with the grooming messaging, argues Christopher Rufo, a leading anti-critical race theory activist.

The rhetoric complements the institutional work that conservative think tanks are doing in pushing these bills. Lawmakers in these states have consulted organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and American Principles Project in crafting proposals, Vice reported. (The Alliance Defending Freedom confirmed its involvement in a statement to Vox.) The progressive advocates I spoke with told me they see this feedback loop among radical activists, lawmakers, and think tanks as part of a more desperate ploy to use transgender people as a wedge issue to open the door to more mainstream attacks on trans and queer people in public life.

“We’re at this all-time high with people who are saying, ‘I don’t like anti-LGBT discrimination, I’m pro-nondiscrimination, this is my deal.’ And [conservatives] are losing their foothold,” Oakley said. “Where do they go from here? They pick on trans kids in the first place, because there are lots of well-meaning people who don’t totally understand what it means to be trans.”

This tension between well-meaning or naive Americans and their uneasiness with newer understandings of gender identity comes through in polling, which shows Americans remain a divided public on acceptance of trans people. Even a recent survey asking about Florida’s law shows one in four Democrats supports the policy. That gap worries advocates like Brandon Wolf, an activist with the group Equality Florida, who told me these bills are meant to exploit the general public’s lack of knowledge on trans people and create an opening for further attacks on queer and trans rights. So far, the scorched-earth strategy is working, but its staying power is being tested.

“Part of the strategy of the extremist right is to make so much noise that there isn’t space to have a really deep conversation about who people are,” he said. “We’re so busy trying to fight for the basic dignity and humanity of people that it becomes difficult to find the bandwidth or the spaces to share people’s stories. But that’s our challenge. That’s our job right now.”

The secrets hidden in sewage

Wastewater can help us monitor Covid-19. 

What else can it tell us?

By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Apr 13, 2022, 

The potential for human waste to tell us about what is happening with our community’s health extends far beyond Covid-19. Getty Images/EyeEm

The first signs of the most recent Covid-19 waves have often been detected in our sewers instead of nasal swabs.

But in the future, the potential for human waste to tell us about what is happening with our community’s health could extend far beyond the novel coronavirus.

“This has been its coming-out party. We’ve realized the power in this pandemic,” John Dennehy, a biologist at the City University of New York who has been assisting with NYC’s wastewater surveillance program, told me. “Now there’s great interest in developing an infrastructure to sustain this capability beyond the pandemic.”

Sewage surveillance is becoming more valuable right now as conventional testing is becoming less transparent. More people have been using rapid at-home tests and might not report results to a public health agency. That means the number of positive cases being reported by official sources might not actually provide a full picture of what’s happening with the pandemic.

But no matter how or if they’re testing, infected people — whether they have symptoms or not — flush out the virus when they go to the bathroom, leaving viral RNA that can be detected in wastewater samples. It requires careful collection and testing, but sewage can provide a less biased look at the viral trends in a given community.

Science has not yet reached the point where we can say that X amount of viral load in a community’s sewage means Y number of people are infected in that community. But still, knowing which way viral loads are trending is useful. If they are going up, even before the number of positive tests starts increasing, it could in theory allow public health authorities and the local health system to start preparing for a surge. If they are going down, public health officials (and the general public) can be confident that any waning in official case numbers is real and not the byproduct of, say, less testing.

So far, health authorities have not been using wastewater levels to trigger a public health response — ordering people to mask up again once viral loads hit a certain level, for example. But experts say a more direct link between sewage surveillance and public health policies might be established in some places in the coming year.
Covid-19 has shown the value of public health sewage surveillance

The pandemic has revealed the potential for wastewater surveillance — and the shortcomings in the current US infrastructure.

Dennehy told me that his team in NYC had noticed an unusual iteration of the virus back in November, but it wasn’t until South Africa announced the presence of the omicron variant in people there a month later that they realized they had been seeing the mutations that would soon start a new wave of infections worldwide.

South Africa has been commended for its genomic surveillance system, which is what allowed it to be the first to identify omicron as a threat, even though, as the New York example shows, the variant was likely already present in other parts of the world. The US, on the other hand, lagged behind other countries for much of the pandemic in that work, and integrating sewage into that surveillance system remains a work in progress.

Before the pandemic, using wastewater for disease surveillance was not unheard of, but it was generally limited to monitoring for diseases like polio, where the appearance of any amount of virus would be cause for alarm.

Covid-19 has shown that wastewater can provide an even more nuanced and varied picture of a community’s health. Since researchers showed the ability to detect the coronavirus in sewage in early 2020, wastewater surveillance has spread across the globe. More than 470 sites in the US and nearly 3,400 sites worldwide are reporting the amount of virus they are detecting in the waste we flush.

Wastewater has its limitations, including challenges with proper collection and adjusting for the concentration of human waste in the sewage. Some rural areas don’t have a community wastewater system, relying instead on individual homes’ septic tanks, which makes broad monitoring impossible. Across Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska, only two wastewater sites are reporting their coronavirus levels to the CDC.

Setting up a strong wastewater monitoring program also requires political support and coordination between public health departments, environmental agencies, and local water authorities, which may not be accustomed to working together.

In spite of those obstacles, sewage monitoring has become more integrated into the global pandemic response over time. And experts don’t expect it to stop there. They are already imagining how else we might use all the information that can be gleaned from our waste to get ahead of future outbreaks and target public health interventions.

“Most people believe wastewater testing is not going away,” Marc Johnson, a University of Missouri virologist who has helped lead that state’s wastewater monitoring program, told me. “It’s too nice of a tool. It can give us an unbiased readout of a community’s health, without having to worry about individual patient confidentiality.”
All the ways wastewater surveillance could help us improve public health

For the foreseeable future, sewage surveillance could help the country keep ahead of Covid-19. Not only can the general trends — an increasing or decreasing amount of virus being found — give a warning about emerging or fading waves, but wastewater can also provide scientists clues about new variants that may soon appear.

After wastewater is collected and taken to a laboratory, scientists run the same kind of test that is conducted for an individual diagnostic PCR test. Beyond identifying whether or not the virus is present, the lab can also determine how much of it there is depending on how many testing cycles they need to run to detect it. (Fewer cycles means more virus.)

Then scientists can also take the sample and analyze the genetic make-up of the virus found therein. If it’s different from the most common variant at the time, that may be a signal that another variant is lurking out there with the potential to take over. Johnson said that, in Missouri, his team has seen Covid-19 variants that have not been detected in humans yet. They may have found their way into the wastewater system from animals, he told me, and we know that animal-to-human transmission is one way for new variants to emerge.

US scientists are also starting to use wastewater in more targeted ways to combat Covid-19. Dennehy said an NYC hospital had asked his team if they could start analyzing the sewage coming out of their facility specifically so they could get an early warning if the virus was appearing more frequently in their patients and staff. Continuous diagnostic testing would be expensive to maintain, and this population-level surveillance would allow the hospital to institute more rigorous testing only when the viral load in the wastewater suggests that it’s necessary.

That kind of creative approach can be applied to other public health problems as well.

Johnson described a similar proposal in Missouri prisons that want to monitor for tuberculosis outbreaks. They have asked for their sewage to be regularly tested for TB, which they could use to determine when to conduct individual diagnostic tests, which are both costly and logistically cumbersome.

“They don’t have to waste money on testing when they know there is nothing there,” he said.

Surveillance programs could watch for other pathogens, too, such as influenza, hepatitis, and norovirus for early warnings of emerging outbreaks. Julianne Nassif, an expert on wastewater surveillance with the Association of Public Health Labs, said we could also monitor for bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that are resistant to current treatments. Public health officials could try to get ahead of an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a nursing home, for example, with the information gleaned from downstream sewage.

Johnson envisioned communities monitoring for narcotics, to better tailor their public health campaigns. Wastewater could be tested to determine whether cocaine or opioid use is rising in a given sewage shed. It could even determine what kind of opioids are being used, which could be helpful to health departments. Widespread heroin use might require a different intervention than diverted prescription opioids or black-market fentanyl.

The possibilities sound almost endless, extending to research that could help us better understand human health. Dennehy described to me one hypothetical experiment that could be run with sewage monitoring, looking for the viral markers associated with colon cancer. By comparing the results from one community with, say, a nearby nuclear power plant and another community somewhere else, we could get a better understanding of how the surrounding environment affects people’s health.

But for all of this potential to be realized, these efforts would require sustained support. The CDC bet on the wastewater boom, launching a national Covid-19 surveillance system in the fall of 2020. But dedicated investments in infrastructure and a workforce would be necessary if the country were to begin conducting wastewater surveillance on a more permanent basis.

In general, the US has not appeared willing to make big investments in public health. Scientists working on these programs hope that the same may not be true of wastewater surveillance, given the opportunities it presents.

“We learned a lot of hard-won lessons with the Covid pandemic. We got caught with our pants down at the beginning. A lot of things that we did were too late,” Dennehy told me. “The hope is we can remember these lessons for the next time this comes around, which may not be that long.”