Unionized Farmworkers

 #Julia Lurie, "Everyone Is Tired of Always Staying 'Silent' ", Mother Jones, January + February, 2021. - "As the Country went into lockdown in March, President Donald Trump declared that essential workers, 'have a special responsibility to maintain normal work hours.' "The federal government estimated that half of farmworkers are undocumented." So begins a potentially deadly feedback loop: The fear of lost wages and deportation breeds silence, which in turn increases the risk of transmitting covid."

"Less than 2 percent of farmworkers are unionized. So lawmakers made a devastating concession: Packers, canners and other 'mechanical' food workers were covered by the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), but farmworkers and domestic workers were not, effectively excluding two-thirds of the Black workplace from its benefits."

"Free trade agreements, so-called right-to-work laws, and a host of Supreme Court decisions have made it even harder for farmworkers (and all workers) to form and join unions." "Today, there are roughly 1 million hired farmworkers across the country: the VFW represents just 7,500 of them." "Only  five states entitle farmworkers to overtime pay. In New York, overtime for farmworkers is defined as more than 60 hours a week."

#Alexis Okeowo, "Tainted Earth," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "In Loundes County, Alabama at least forty per cent [of the people] have an inadequate septic system or none at all. In Alabama, not having a functioning septic system is a criminal misdemeanor. Residents can be fined as much as five hundred dollars per citation, evicted, and even arrested." "In some parts of rural Alaska, where installing a single septic system can cost more than a hundred thousand dollars, people rely on outhouses and 'honey buckets' -- pails lined with garbage bags."

"According to a report by the N.A.A.C.P. and the Clean Air Task Force, Black people are seventy-five per cent more likely than the average American to live near industrial plants and service facilities, including those that handle hazardous waste." "Most of the world's global health threats are in the G-20 nations, paradoxically." "In places that think of themselves as rich, it's easy to ignore problems of poverty. It's the poor living among the wealthy that now account for most of the world's leprosy, and tuberculosis --and the list goes on."

For most of the past thirty years,  Loundes County has had only one practicing doctor. He and a nurse assistant serve a population of nearly ten thousand. In the evenings, he works at another center in Montgomery. "At least a tenth of Alabama residents are uninsured."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Waiting Game," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's threaten to become superspreader events. Biden will have to deal with a crisis that may still be escalating. As a result, his coronavirus mission must have an economic, epidemiological, and moral dimension."

"He [Trump] spent the final weeks of his campaign telling mostly maskless crowds at his rallies that there was a 'cure' for COVID-19. which he would make sure they all got free of charge; if that fails to happen, it is Biden who will have to deal with the resulting anger and distrust." "Trump also suggested that he might limit vaccine access to states, such as New York, that he does not regard as friendly."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Getting Through," The New Yorker, December 14, 2020. - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there must be one more "energetic push" which will require three  things of her fellow citizens: "patience, solidarity, discipline." The state of Kansas doesn't expect what Merkel does of her fellow citizens: Kansas has a mask mandate that counties can opt out of; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study in November, which reported that, in the counties that kept the mandate, cases fell by six per cent over the summer. In those that didn't, the cases doubled.

#Charles Duhigg, "The Enablers," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - The venture capitalist industry has grown expansively since Tom Perkins became a major player in venture capitalist's heyday, but it has also become increasingly avaricious and cynical. "It is now dominated by few dozen firms, which collectively, control hundreds of billions of dollars." "Critics of the venture capitalist industry have observed that lately, it has given one dubious startup after a another gigantic infusions of money." Increasingly, the industry has "become fixated on creating 'unicorns': startups exceeding a billion dollars." 

"WeWorks's dominant position in the co-working industry wasn't a result of operational prowess in a superior product. Instead, WeWork had beaten its rivals because it had access to a near-limitless supply of funds." "WeWork's implosion was different -- the company was undone by incompetence, rather than by fraud -- but the debacle has similarly scared investors away from other co-working enterprises."