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No relief: Denial of bathroom breaks in the poultry industry

Submitted by x332349 on Wed, 06/01/2016 - 18:45

By staff - OxFam, 2016

As poultry workers are routinely denied adequate bathroom breaks, they face dangers to their health and blows to their dignity.

While the poultry industry today enjoys record profits and pumps out billions of chickens, the reality of life inside the processing plant remains grim and dangerous. Workers earn low wages, suffer elevated rates of injury and illness, toil in difficult conditions, and have little voice in the workplace.

Despite all that, though, workers say the thing that offends their dignity most is simple: lack of adequate bathroom breaks, and the suffering that entails, especially for women.

Routinely, poultry workers say, they are denied breaks to use the bathroom. Supervisors mock their needs and ignore their requests; they threaten punishment or firing. Workers wait inordinately long times (an hour or more), then race to accomplish the task within a certain timeframe (e.g., ten minutes) or risk discipline.

Workers struggle to cope with this denial of a basic human need. They urinate and defecate while standing on the line; they wear diapers to work; they restrict intake of liquids and fluids to dangerous degrees; they endure pain and discomfort while they worry about their health and job security. And it’s not just their dignity that suffers: they are in danger of serious health problems.

The situation strikes women particularly hard. They face biological realities such as menstruation, pregnancy, and higher vulnerability to infections; and they struggle to maintain their dignity and privacy when requesting breaks.

Supervisors deny requests to use the bathroom because they are under pressure to maintain the speed of the processing line, and to keep up production. Once a poultry plant roars to a start at the beginning of the day, it doesn’t stop until all the chickens are processed. Workers are reduced to pieces of the machine, little more than the body parts that hang, cut, trim, and load—rapidly and relentlessly.By its nature, it is demanding and exhausting work.

But it does not have to be dehumanizing, and it does not have to rob people of their dignity and health.

Read the report (Link).

Tags: 
food
health and safety
Oxfam
capital blight
class struggle
sacrifice zones
slaughterhouses
women
jobs
labor and environment
slaughterhouse workers
publications
reports

From Uniformity to Diversty: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems

Submitted by x332349 on Wed, 06/01/2016 - 00:00

By Emile A. Frison - International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems - June 2016

Today’s food and farming systems have succeeded in supplying large volumes of foods to global markets, but are generating negative outcomes on multiple fronts: widespread degradation of land, water and ecosystems; high GHG emissions; biodiversity losses; persistent hunger and micro-nutrient deficiencies alongside the rapid rise of obesity and diet-related diseases; and livelihood stresses for farmers around the world.

Many of these problems are linked specifically to ‘industrial agriculture’: the input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots that now dominate farming landscapes. The uniformity at the heart of these systems, and their reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preventive use of antibiotics, leads systematically to negative outcomes and vulnerabilities.

Industrial agriculture and the ‘industrial food systems’ that have developed around it are locked in place by a series of vicious cycles. For example, the way food systems are currently structured allows value to accrue to a limited number of actors, reinforcing their economic and political power, and thus their ability to influence the governance of food systems.

Tweaking practices can improve some of the specific outcomes of industrial agriculture, but will not provide long-term solutions to the multiple problems it generates.

What is required is a fundamentally different model of agriculture based on diversifying farms and farming landscapes, replacing chemical inputs, optimizing biodiversity and stimulating interactions between different species, as part of holistic strategies to build long-term fertility, healthy agro-ecosystems and secure livelihoods, i.e. ‘diversified agroecological systems’.

There is growing evidence that these systems keep carbon in the ground, support biodiversity, rebuild soil fertility and sustain yields over time, providing a basis for secure farm livelihoods.

Data shows that these systems can compete with industrial agriculture in terms of total outputs, performing particularly strongly under environmental stress, and delivering production increases in the places where additional food is desperately needed. Diversified agroecological systems can also pave the way for diverse diets and improved health.

Change is already happening. Industrial food systems are being challenged on multiple fronts, from new forms of cooperation and knowledge-creation to the development of new market relationships that bypass conventional retail circuits.

Political incentives must be shifted in order for these alternatives to emerge beyond the margins. A series of modest steps can collectively shift the centre of gravity in food systems.

Read the report (PDF).

Tags: 
agriculture
agricultural workers and peasants
agribusiness
food
factory farms
organic food
genetically modified organisms (GMO)
agroecology
third nature
permaculture
metabolic rift
climate change
supply chains
herbicides
pesticides
capital blight
International Labour Organisation (ILO)
La Via Campesina
publications
reports
food sovereignty movement

Capital Blight News #106

Submitted by x344543 on Mon, 05/30/2016 - 19:04

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, May 31, 2016

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

The Man Behind the Curtain:

Green is the New Red:

Tags: 
capital blight
Eco Unionist News
greenwashing
whistleblowers
climate change
Berta Cáceres
global warming
privatization
Shell
British Petroleum (BP)
disaster capitalism

Capital Blight News #105

Submitted by x344543 on Tue, 05/24/2016 - 18:54

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, May 25, 2016

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

The Man Behind the Curtain:

Greenwashers:

Tags: 
Eco Unionist News
capital blight
greenwashing
climate change
global warming
privatization
disaster capitalism

Capital Blight News #104

Submitted by x344543 on Mon, 05/16/2016 - 18:38

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, May 17, 2016

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

The Man Behind the Curtain:

Tags: 
Eco Unionist News
capital blight
greenwashing
climate change
global warming
privatization
disaster capitalism

Incarceration, Justice and the Planet

Submitted by x344543 on Tue, 05/10/2016 - 16:43

By Panagioti Tsolkas - Earth First! Journal, May 5, 2016

Author’s Note: This is a follow-up to another recent article entitled “What Does It Look Like to Be An Environmentalists in Prison” both of which are aimed at generating interest in the upcoming Convergence Against Toxic Prisons June 11- 13, 2016 in D.C.

Prisons inspire little in terms of natural wonder. It might be a weed rises through a crack and blooms for a moment. It might be a prisoner notices. But prisoners, one could assume, must have little concern for the flowers or for otherwise pressing environmental issues. With all the social quandaries present in their lives—walls of solitude, the loss of basic human rights—pollution, climate change and healthy ecosystems must seem so distantly important: an issue for the free. In actuality, prisoners are on the frontlines of the environmental movement, one which intersects with social justice.

Prisoner Jonathan Jones-Thomas found himself unexpectedly in the middle of a scandal exposing massive sewage spills into Washington State’s Skykomish River by the Monroe Correctional Complex. Prisoner Bryant Arroyo ended up rallying hundreds of prisoners to join environmental groups on the outside in fighting plans for a coal gasification plant next to where he was confined. Prisoner Robert Gamez chose to speak out in the midst of an unfolding environmental justice disaster in the Arizona desert, where military waste, Superfund sites and proposed toxic copper mine waste injections ringed the solitary confinement cell he was forced to call home.

And they weren’t alone. When the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), a prisoner-led advocacy group with 25 years under its belt, announced that they were starting a “prison ecology project,” letters began rolling in from incarcerated people around the country. These prisoners were witnessing the sort of conditions that many Americans who’d fall into the category of environmentalists don’t expect to hear about in their own country: factory labor far below minimum wage and no safety gear; black mold infestations, contaminated water, hazardous waste, and sewage overflows; deadly risks of floods, extreme heat; and a whole host of illnesses related to living in overcrowded toxic facilities.

Regulatory Black Holes

According to HRDC’s director Paul Wright, a former Washington State prisoner himself, many prisons actually do operate more like maquiladora sweatshops south of the U.S. border, where both labor standards and environmental regulations take a back seat to other interests.

Wright is not a stranger to the border. Though he grew up in Lake Worth, Florida, his mother’s side of the family is from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Wright was arrested at age 21 and sentences to 17 years, stemming from a gun fight which resulted from a murder charge, while stationed in the Seattle area during a stint in the military. Prior to that he had spent summers visiting relatives in Mexico, and lived there for a period in his youth.

He is also quite familiar with prison factory conditions. As a prisoner, he co-founded the magazine Prison Legal News (PLN) in 1990 which made what he calls “prison slave labor” one of its central themes, seeking to expose corporate contractors who took advantage of the nominal wages and blind eye to labor conditions. Wright still pays attention to injustice stemming from prison industries, but he has also turned his eye to what he sees as another problematic, and underexplored, aspect of prison.

“There are serious environmental impacts happening there, out of sight from the general public, similar to the case with sweatshops the behind border wall,” Wright says. In the case of prisons, operations occur literally behind tightly closed and well-armored doors. “They’re like black holes of government regulation.”

But there are some key distinctions between prisons and sweatshops. Namely, in sweatshops the workers tend to go to some form of their own home at the end of the day. But prisons operate as full time warehouses for people, often piled in by the thousands. That in itself, he says, has serious environmental implications.

The U.S. maintains a massive prison system—world’s largest, in fact. The political value of tough-on-crime rhetoric and legislation that drove the U.S. prison population to the beat out every other country on the planet was often central to political campaign platforms in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A bloated prison system became accepted as the norm, and on top of that, its growth was accompanied by an increasingly disproportionate representation of Black, Latino and Indigenous people, predominately from low-income communities. The most recent demographic statistics available show this to be the case, not only on a national level, but in each and every state as well.

Today, the nation is four decades into the era of mass incarceration, where the prison population jumped 700 percent since the 1960s. Perhaps it’s high time we start asking: What are the environmental impacts of this racialized practice of justice that has been so extreme as to earn the moniker of “The New Jim Crow”?

In Wright’s opinion, the answers could prove as critical to the future of the environmental movement as carbon emissions and rising sea levels.

Tags: 
Prison Ecology Project
capital blight
privatization
class war prisoners

EcoUnionist News #103

Submitted by x344543 on Sun, 05/08/2016 - 17:15

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, May 9, 2016

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists*:

Lead Stories:

Ongoing Mobilizations:

The Thin Green Line:

Just Transition:

Bread and Roses:

Tags: 
Eco Unionist News
green unionism
Thin Green Line
just transition
agricultural workers and peasants
Berta Cáceres
Green is the New Red
whistleblowers
greenwashing
capital blight
disaster capitalism
privatization
Flint
Breaking Free
Nuit Debout
labor and environment

International Oil Companies: The Death of the Old Business Model

Submitted by x332349 on Thu, 05/05/2016 - 18:28

By Paul Stevens - Energy, Environment and Resources, May 5, 2016

The future of the major international oil companies (IOCs) – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total – is in doubt. The business model that sustained them during the 20th century is no longer fit for purpose. As a result, they are faced with the choice of managing a gentle decline by downsizing or risking a rapid collapse by trying to carry on business as usual.

Most commentary on the IOCs’ problems has focused on the recent fall in oil prices and the growing global commitment to tackle climate change. Important though these are, the source of their predicament is not confined to such recent developments over which they have no control. Their problems are more numerous, run deeper and go back further. The prognosis for the IOCs was already grim before governments became serious about climate change and the oil price collapsed.

Read the report (Link).

Tags: 
carbon bubble
boom and bust
fossil fuel capitalism
decarbonization
energy transition
British Petroleum (BP)
Chevron
ExxonMobil
Shell
Total
capital blight
climate change
publications
reports

Private industry's waste cleaned up by the taxpayer

Submitted by x344543 on Wed, 05/04/2016 - 18:24

By Richard Mellor - Facts for Working People, April 29, 2016

One aspect that’s left out when it comes to the so-called vibrancy and efficiency of capitalist mode of production is the cost of cleaning up the mess created by private industry.  Apart from the human health conditions directly associated with the workplace, the cost of cleaning up the environment after one capitalist venture or another lives and then dies as capital accumulation wanes, is staggering. This cost is born by the workers and the middle class as a public expense.  The entire capitalist system is propped up by public assistance in one way or another.

According to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) * between 1986 and 2008, the Department of Defense (DOD), in other words, the taxpayer, spent $30 billion ”…. across all environmental cleanup and restoration activities at its installations.”.  We all know that private defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman do very well from their government contracts.  Who owns them, who actually pockets the billions in profits accumulated over the years is another matter not so easy to determine.

The DOD In its fiscal year 2014 Agency Financial Report DOD reported “$58.6 billion in total environmental liabilities”, It appears the costly job of spreading peace around the world has some serious environmental costs as well.

Tags: 
capital blight
capitalism
disaster capitalism

Stranded Assets and Thermal Coal in Japan: An analysis of environment-related risk exposure

Submitted by x332349 on Tue, 05/03/2016 - 16:24

By Ben Caldecott, Gerard Dericks, Daniel J. Tulloch, Lucas Kruitwagen, and Irem Kok - Oxford, May 2016

Deploying a ‘bottom up’ asset-level methodology, we analysed the exposure of all of Japan’s current and planned coal-fired power stations to environment-related risk. Planned coal capacity greatly exceeds that required for replacement - by 191%. This may result in overcapacity and combined with competition from other forms of generation capacity with lower marginal costs (e.g. nuclear and renewables), lead to significant asset stranding of coal generation assets. Stranded coal assets in Japan would affect utility returns for investors; impair the ability of utilities to service outstanding debt obligations; and create stranded assets that have to be absorbed by taxpayers and ratepayers.

Read the report (PDF).

Tags: 
coal
mining
fossil fuel capitalism
extractivism
carbon bubble
boom and bust
energy transition
capital blight
capitalism
Japan
jobs versus environment
jobs
labor and environment
just transition
climate justice
climate change
publications
reports

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