uawchild
uawchild's JournalSix million workers paid 'less than the living wage'
Source: BBC
Almost six million workers in the UK are paid less than the living wage, a study suggests.
The data showed a "worrying trend" of part-time, female and young workers being most likely to earn below the figure, researchers found.
The living wage, promoted by the Living Wage Foundation, is currently £7.85 an hour and £9.15 in London. It is not compulsory for employers to pay it.
The government said it was "determined to move to a higher wage economy". The accountancy firm KPMG said its research showed that the proportion of workers earning less than the living wage had risen for three years in a row.
Mike Kelly, of KPMG, said: "With the cost of living still high, the squeeze on household finances remains acute, meaning the reality for many is that they are forced to live hand-to-mouth.
"The figures show there is still more to be done if we are to eradicate in-work poverty. For some time it was easy for businesses to hide behind the argument that increased wages hit their bottom line, but there is ample evidence to suggest the opposite, in the shape of higher retention and higher productivity.
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34691404
Non-living wages are a form of corporate welfare, with society picking up the tab to meet underpaid workers' social needs.
There used to be dignity in labor, the idea of putting in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay -- now its all about cutting hours to cut benefits in a race to the bottom. Throw in the effects of under regulated globalization and its no wonder why at least 40% of Americans have seen their economic situation stagnate, at best, since the 1970s.
The Next Wave: Afghans Flee To Europe in Droves
By Susanne Koelbl, Der Speigel
"As the situation in Afghanistan becomes ever more chaotic, an increasing number of Afghans are heading towards Europe. But as one family's story shows, the trip often ends in tragedy.
...
Convergence of Crises
Many Afghans dream of a better life in Europe. About 80,000 applied for asylum in Europe in the first half of 2015 alone, with most of them going to Germany. They are the second-largest group of refugees and migrants in Germany after Syrians.
At the moment, people are flooding into Herat Province from all over Afghanistan. From there, they drive across the border to Iran or travel farther south to cross into Iran along a less well-guarded section of the border. About 3,000 Afghans are now coming into Iran every day illegally. From there, they continue to Turkey, where they board boats to the Greek islands of Lesbos or Kos and then cross the Balkans to Northern Europe.
This sudden rise in the number of refugees raises fundamental questions for the West, about the success of the almost 14 years of military intervention and reconstruction in Afghanistan, about Western mistakes and about how many schools, hospitals, universities and police academies are needed for the country to be stabilized and made livable for its people. These are painful subjects, especially in light of the billions of euros that were spent on Afghanistan, and the thousands of Western soldiers who died for the freedom of the Afghan people."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/crisis-in-aghanistan-leads-wave-of-migrants-to-head-to-europe-a-1059919.html
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Ok, what's our, meaning the US, excuse for this? Afghanistan is OUR baby, lock, stock and barrel. Can't blame this one on Russia now, can we? No we can not. Military "solutions" to religious and ethnic civil conflict never ever works.
Opening Soon: Germans Race to Capture the Iranian Market
"Ahead of the planned lifting of Western sanctions against Iran, businessmen from around the world are visiting the country, and as one group from Germany discovered, there is no shortage of opportunities.
Early one morning at the beginning of October, Alfons Diekmann is standing at Tehran's Imam Khomeini Airport. He is wearing his comfortable travel pants and carrying a shoulder bag filled with only the essentials. "And what if they shoot you down?" his wife had asked.
But Diekmann decided to make the trip anyway, from Vechta, an administrative district in northern Germany, to Iran. His two egg-laying farms in Damme, in the southern Oldenburg region of northwestern Germany, produce 310,000 eggs a day. "When I started going to school, I couldn't even speak High German," he says, referring to the standard form of German spoken in Germany. Like other country boys, he says, he only spoke Low German, a dialect used in some parts of the northern end of the country. Diekmann was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was 10. "That made me strong. I wanted to succeed."
And that's why Diekmann, of Alfons Diekmann GmbH, is standing at check-in counter 40 at Imam Khomeini Airport early in the morning, together with 98 other representatives of small and medium-sized companies from Lower Saxony. They include logistics and waste disposal experts, leading manufacturers of turbofans, plaster products, port cranes, special paints and pumping equipment, dump trucks and reel slitters, and now, at 2:30 a.m., they want the same thing: to get into Iran, at last.
After years of talks, the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program was signed in Vienna on July 14, 2015, paving the way for an end to the embargo against Iran. The country is expected to begin dismantling nuclear facilities by the first quarter of 2016. Then, on what has been dubbed Implementation Day, most of the economic sanctions will be lifted.
These are relatively vague prospects. Nevertheless, when the business owners from Lower Saxony go to breakfast the next morning, they quickly realize that they are not alone. The lobby of the Parsian Azadi Hotel is abuzz with delegations, Frenchmen, Croats on a "fact-finding" mission, Dutch, Italian and British businesspeople. Every day, there are reports in the Tehran Times on the arrival of "groups of high-ranking visitors," "amicable talks" and the exchange of opinions and memoranda. It is literally a run on Tehran.
The various delegations seem to be sizing each other up, eager to determine which competitors are there, who has already established relationships with Iranians and who has quietly taken up positions. Businessmen discreetly peek at the nametags of their fellow passengers in elevators, and everyone behaves as if they weren't there - as if they were in an indecent place.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/german-businessmen-travel-to-iran-before-sanctions-disappear-a-1059840.html
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Integrating countries like Iran back into the world community is a faster way to effect change than attempts to isolate and "contain" them. Shiite-Sunni tensions are not going away anytime soon, neither are the theocrats that run Iran, but trade often is a precursor to peace and social change.
Refugees in Jordan’s Zaatari camp have few hopes
By: Marina Jimenez Foreign Affairs Writer, Toronto Star
"ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP, JORDAN—It’s a bustling Saturday on “Champs- Elysées,” the dusty corridor that serves as the main thoroughfare in one of the world’s largest refugee camps.
...
The camp sprang to life in 2012, to accommodate the thousands a day who were fleeing the civil war in neighbouring Syria, crossing over into Jordan. In the beginning, the camp was a hotbed of protest, as mafia-like groups tried to seize control.
But slowly, the troublemakers moved on, the camp residents accepted their fate, and conditions improved. Tents have been replaced by small caravans with holes in the ground for bathrooms. There is free electricity, two field hospitals and monthly food rations that can be redeemed at the supermarkets.
But slowly, the troublemakers moved on, the camp residents accepted their fate, and conditions improved. Tents have been replaced by small caravans with holes in the ground for bathrooms. There is free electricity, two field hospitals and monthly food rations that can be redeemed at the supermarkets.
But the refugees, who can obtain permits to leave the camp to visit relatives or for medical appointments, complain of boredom and a sense of hopelessness for the future. “The sewage smells; there is no electricity during the day. There is a lot of jealousy among the women and a lot of busybodies,” says Isra Mitoali, a 20-year-old who married a man she met in the camp a year ago, and then divorced him six months later. “I want to go anywhere else.”
The chances are slim. Just 1 per cent of Jordan’s total 630,000 Syrian refugees will be resettled in the West. And the UNHCR doesn’t select refugees from the camps except in exceptional cases of torture, spousal abuse or danger. Private resettlement groups don’t either, reasoning that urban refugees are in greater need because they cannot work. And, unlike those in the camp, they must pay for food, rent, electricity, water and health care.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/11/01/refugees-in-jordans-zaatari-camp-have-few-hopes.html
Here's how you get your student debt erased
By Alexander Holt
"At the Republican debate Wednesday, John Kasich proved himself to be the true Jon Huntsman of this cycle when he brought up federal student loan debt and said, "For those that have these big high costs, I think we can seriously look at an idea of where you can do ... legitimate public service and begin to pay off some of that debt through the public service that you do."
Actually, that idea is already law, it's called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, or PSLF, in which borrowers pay an affordable percentage of their income every month, and after 10 years any remaining debt is forgiven.
It's a flawed program. Defining "legitimate public service" turns out to be difficult. Right now, anyone working for any level of government or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit qualifies. That means many lawyers and doctors, even those earning high incomes in their 10th year of repayment (say, over $100,000) still potentially have the ability to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars forgiven from the expensive degrees they received from elite institutions.
And lately, people who think they are doing a public service, but don't work for a nonprofit, think they ought to qualify as well.
he most recent group who deem themselves worthy of qualification are farmers. Take Emily Best, a 32-year-old Pennsylvania farmer with debt from graduate school, as reported by MartketWatch. She's doing the public a tremendous service by growing the food we eat, so why shouldn't she get PSLF? The difficulty of answering the question demonstrates why it's so tricky trying to define whatever Kasich, or anyone else, means by "legitimate public service."
Best is actually already eligible for and using a generous provision that anyone with a federal student loan can benefit from called Income-Based Repayment, in which she pays a percentage of her income. In fact, for people who make less than $17,655 a year, the monthly payment is zero. That would include Best, who makes $1,600 a month (though her room and board is covered by her employer), and if she fails to pay off her loan it will be forgiven after 20 or 25 years (there are a number of variations).
So Best's payment is already zero, but she's arguing for PSLF, a separate program (that can be used in conjunction with Income-Based Repayment,) that forgives all debt after 10 years of working for the government or a nonprofit. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, about 25% of all workers in the economy work for a government entity or a nonprofit. But not Best, because her farm is for-profit."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/30/opinions/holt-student-loan-forgiveness/index.html
Shot in the Heart When Yitzhak Rabin was killed, did the prospects for peace perish, too?
BY DEXTER FILKINS
"Aassination is an unpredictable act. Historically speaking, high-profile political killings have been as likely to produce backlashes and unintended consequences as they have been to achieve the assassin’s goal, if he had one. When Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, the result was an outpouring of national soul-searching, which Lyndon Johnson took advantage of to push civil-rights and Great Society legislation through Congress. When Syrians conspired to murder Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese President, in 2005, the result was not continued Syrian domination of Lebanon but a national uprising followed by a humiliating evacuation of Assad’s forces.
Yet the killing of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, in 1995, by Yigal Amir, an Israeli extremist, bids to be one of history’s most effective political murders. Two years earlier, Rabin, setting aside a lifetime of enmity, appeared on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a former terrorist, to agree to a framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories; the next year, somewhat less painfully, he returned to the White House, with Jordan’s King Hussein, to officially end a forty-six-year state of war. Within months of Rabin’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu was the new Prime Minister and the prospects for a wider-ranging peace in the Middle East, which had seemed in Rabin’s grasp, were dead, too. Twenty years later, Netanyahu is into his fourth term, and the kind of peace that Rabin envisaged seems more distant than ever.
The story of Rabin’s assassination, told in “Killing a King” (Norton), by the journalist Dan Ephron, inevitably raises the question of what might have been. At the time of his death, Rabin showed every intention of trying to forge a broader peace that would have included ceding most of the occupied territories to the Palestinians, and probably would have resulted in the establishment of an independent state.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/26/shot-in-the-heart
In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs
"NEWTON, N.H. — When Courtney Griffin was using heroin, she lied, disappeared, and stole from her parents to support her $400-a-day habit. Her family paid her debts, never filed a police report and kept her addiction secret — until she was found dead last year of an overdose.
At Courtney’s funeral, they decided to acknowledge the reality that redefined their lives: Their bright, beautiful daughter, just 20, who played the French horn in high school and dreamed of living in Hawaii, had been kicked out of the Marines for drugs. Eventually, she overdosed at her boyfriend’s grandmother’s house, where she died alone.
“When I was a kid, junkies were the worst,” Doug Griffin, 63, Courtney’s father, recalled in their comfortable home here in southeastern New Hampshire. “I used to have an office in New York City. I saw them.”
Noting that “junkies” is a word he would never use now, he said that these days, “they’re working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom — they are my daughter.”
When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/us/heroin-war-on-drugs-parents.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
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This represents progress on our views on drug addiction, which is a good thing, but will it be applied equitably across racial lines?
The Uber-economy f**ks us all: How “permalancers” and “sharer” gigs gut the middle class
The "sharing" economy sounds groovy: politically neutral, anti-consumerist. Wait until it comes for your job
by STEVEN HILL
"A significant factor in the decline of the quality of jobs in the United States has been employers’ increasing reliance on “non-regular” employees — a growing army of freelancers, temps, contractors, part-timers, day laborers, micro-entrepreneurs, gig-preneurs, solo-preneurs, contingent labor, perma-lancers and perma-temps. It’s practically a new taxonomy for a workforce that has become segmented into a dizzying assortment of labor categories. Even many full-time, professional jobs and occupations are experiencing this precarious shift.
This practice has given rise to the term “1099 economy,” since these employees don’t file W-2 income tax forms like any regular, permanent employee; instead, they file the 1099-MISC form for an IRS classification known as “independent contractor.” The advantage for a business of using 1099 workers over W-2 wage-earners is obvious: an employer usually can lower its labor costs dramatically, often by 30 percent or more, since it is not responsible for a 1099 worker’s health benefits, retirement, unemployment or injured workers compensation, lunch breaks, overtime, disability, paid sick, holiday or vacation leave and more. In addition, contract workers are paid only for the specific number of hours they spend providing labor, which increasingly is being reduced to shorter and shorter “micro-gigs.”
In a sense, employers and employees used to be married to each other, and there was a sense of commitment and a joined destiny. Now, employers just want a bunch of one-night stands with their employees, a promiscuousness that promises to be not only fleeting but destabilizing to the broader macroeconomy. Set to replace the crumbling New Deal society is a darker world in which wealthy and powerful economic elite are collaborating with their political cronies to erect the policy edifice that allows them to mold their proprietary workforce into one composed of a disjointed collection of 1099 employees. Employers have called off the marriage with their employees, preferring a series of on-again, off-again affairs.
This is a direct threat to the nation’s future, as well as to what has been lionized around the world as the “American Dream.” "
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/31/the_uber_economy_fks_us_all_how_permalancers_and_sharer_gigs_guts_the_middle_class/
Taiwan urged to prove worth in US ‘rebalancing’
PIVOTAL POLICY:Hudson Institute director of Chinese strategy Michael Pillsbury said that Taiwanese should put forward tangible suggestions regarding the US’ Asia pivot
By Stacy Hsu / Staff reporter, Taipei Times
Taiwan should step up efforts to prove it can be a useful partner in the US’ foreign policy in Asia, but refrain from implementing any radical changes that could unsettle cross-strait relations, Hudson Institute director of Chinese strategy Michael Pillsbury said.
Pillsbury, a former US assistant undersecretary of defense for policy planning, was speaking at a forum titled “Beijing’s Strategy of Unification toward Taiwan and the US Response” at the legislature in Taipei yesterday morning.
The event was organized by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Mark Chen (陳唐山
, who served as foreign minister during former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁 administration. It was attended by several Taiwanese academics and foreign affairs experts.
Speaking in fluent Mandarin, Pillsbury said none of the US’ high-ranking officials have openly revealed whether Taiwan is included in its “rebalancing” toward Asia, but the policy is expected to continue regardless of who is the next US president.
“That is why Taiwanese people, both in the political or academic industries, are urged to put forward tangible rather than vague suggestions regarding the US’ Asia pivot and clearly express their nation’s aspiration to be a part of it,” Pillsbury said.
To address its international and regional exclusion amid growing ties between the US and China, Pillsbury said there are several measures Taiwan can take to undermine Washington-Beijing relations.
“It could change the name designation for Taiwan, issue a different passport, or scrap its current national flag that reminds most people of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s party flag,” Pillsbury said. “However, these actions would inevitably been seen as crossing the red line by China’s People’s Liberation Army ... and I personally do not think Taiwan has to go down that road.”
Alternatively, Pillsbury said Taipei can surrender to Beijing and announce itself a part of the so-called “motherland,” but the move would most likely unnerve the US as it is the least favorable option among its citizens.
That leaves the nation with one last option: That Taiwanese intelligentsia endeavor to work out a way to allow Taipei to be a helpful partner in Washington’s rebalancing policy without aggravating the Chinese government, Pillsbury said.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/10/31/2003631353
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Huh? "That leaves the nation with one last option: That Taiwanese intelligentsia endeavor to work out a way to allow Taipei to be a helpful partner in Washington’s rebalancing policy without aggravating the Chinese government, Pillsbury said."
Ok.... and what does THAT really mean, considering all the options he just ruled out as too aggressive or too submissive in regards to China?
Reports: Israel conducted airstrikes near Damascus
Source: YNet News
Reports: Israel conducted airstrikes near Damascus
A news site linked to Syrian opposition forces claims the IAF bombed Hezbollah and Syrian army positions on Friday night, while Al-Jazeera says Russia conducted strikes in that area at the time.
Israeli Air Force planes launched two strikes on Hezbollah and Syrian army targets overnight Friday, according to social media accounts linked to the Syrian opposition.
According to the reports, which were not confirmed by Israel, the strikes occurred in al-Qalamoun in the suburbs of Damascus, an area that foreign media outlets on previous occasions claimed that Israel has bombed.
Read more: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4718802,00.html
Ok....
If true, why would Israel be bombing Syrian government positions at this time?
If NOT true, why would the Syrian opposition be claiming falsely that Israel is bombing Syrian government positions at this time?
Neither alternative makes any sense to me.
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