#meanwhile millions of us can’t afford to eat or pay bills | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

Text

How the IMF loan-sharks the global south

When you take out a loan or get a credit card, the headline figure is the “APR” — the annual percentage rate of interest. But anyone who’s ever borrowed because they were poor and needed money has learned the hard way that APRs are pure fiction.

To get the true APR (what economists politely call the “effective” APR) you have to factor in the fees, penalties and other gotchas that turn reasonable seeming interest rates into perennial, inescapable debt-traps.

Take student debt. During the 2020 presidential campaign, we had a debate about student debt forgiveness, whose opponents frequently cited the “unfairness” of allowing people to “escape their responsibilities.”

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

In their telling, student debt forgiveness would reward fecklessness, allowing people who got the benefit of an expensive education to duck the costs.

Now, even if you ignore the farcical inflation in university tuition and expenses (for example, the 1000%+ hike in textbooks driven by ed-tech monopolists), that’s still a highly selective account of how student debt works.

Student debt is negotiated from a position of weakness and naiveté, which allows lenders to attack the poorest grads with incredible fees and penalties. “Chris” took out $79k in student loans in 1982. He’s paid back $190k. He still owes $236k.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/student-loan-horror-stories-borrowed

That’s not the magic of compound interest. It’s the magic of loan-sharking. If you’ve ever used a payday lender (aka a “fintech startup” AKA a “loan shark”), none of this will be the least bit surprising. This form of usury is as old as Christ casting out the money-changers.

The payday lending industry didn’t invent these tactics, but they refined, automated and industrialized them, then they spent millions at Trump hotels and (in a stunning coincidence) all those tactics were blessed by the US finance regulators.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-payday-lenders-spent-1-million-at-a-trump-resort-and-cashed-in

The normalization of loan-sharking sent the entire finance sector into a race to the bottom. America’s largest banks saw their profits soar during the pandemic due to record overdraft and other fees — in other words, collecting fines for being poor.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

The sums are jaw-dropping. In 2020, Jpmorganchase made $1.5b on overdraft fees, Bank of America made $1.1b and Wells Fargo made $1.3b. The biggest rake came from the worst months of the pandemic.

https://prospect.org/economy/big-banks-charged-billions-in-overdraft-fees-during-pandemic/

78.3% of all overdraft fees come from just 9.2% of bank customers. At $35 a pop, these fees turn the banks’ overdraft facilities into loans with an “effective APR” of 3,500%.

Three thousand.

Five hundred.

Percent.

These are the cold, bloodless numbers of the debt trap. They conceal a vicious cycle in which those with the least pay the most, a cycled that can’t even be outrun in death.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

Take a moment to (re)read Molly McGhee’s Paris Review essay from May 2021, “America’s Dead Souls,” about her mother’s death. McGhee’s mom made less than $10k/year and suffered “debilitating depression while caring for aging parents.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

Her mother was haunted by two warring clans of ghouls: debt collectors who harassed her through legal and illegal means, and con artists who located her through databases of struggling debtors and tried to sell her predatory consolidation loans.

48 hours after her mother’s death, these blood-suckers switched to harassing McGhee, as she grieved her loss. Unlike her mother, McGhee had the resiliency and wherewithal (a credit card) to hire a lawyer, whose boilerplate letter reduced the debt by 90%, over $250k, poof.

If you can afford a lawyer, your parents’ debts don’t become yours. If you can’t, you enter a cycle of intergenerational poverty, with each generation sinking deeper into debt.

When you have nothing and owe everything, debt collectors know that they have to terrorize you into putting their bills ahead of the others. The cruelty is literally the point — without it, you might pay your rent ahead of your mother’s old credit-card bills.

To quote Umair Haque, “America is the the world’s first poor rich country.” an “advanced economy” where a sizable portion of the population lives in conditions typical of the global south.

https://eand.co/the-worlds-first-poor-rich-country-c411afc68539

Not for nothing. The same tactics that impoverish the vast American underclass also work to keep the world’s poorest countries — rich in resources and talent — poor. The loan shark here is far more powerful than a payday lender or even JP Morgan — it’s the IMF.

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research dissects the way the IMF uses fees and penalties to trap the poorest countries in the world in unbreakable cycles of debt — fees that drive up the IMF’s notional APR to dizzying, usurious heights.

https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IMF-Surcharge-Report-2.pdf

Like any predatory loan, these “surcharges” are levied against the countries that have the least ability to repay. They target countries whose debt:GDP ratio passes an arbitrary line. For the poorest IMF debtors, surcharges account for 45% of all non-principle repayment.

These numbers add up. In Egypt, surcharges gobbled up $1.8b between 2019–24 — triple the cost of fully vaccinating the whole country. Small wonder that the world’s 64 poorest countries spend more on external debt payment than they do on their own health care.

In its defense, the IMF offers the same tissue-thin responses that any arm-breaker offers. The claim that penalties and fees are a way to “incentivize” debtor nations not to overborrow, and to seek their credit from the private finance sector.

But these countries are borrowing to pay off their debts — often debts that date back to colonial times, in which the rich (white) world mercilessly looted their resources and fomented destabilizing political divisions.

This undermined domestic resistance to imperialism and allowed kleptocratic, corrupt leaders to thrive — leaders who borrowed heavily to finance vanity projects, corrupt enrichment of domestic elites, and militarized suppression of opposition movements.

All of that was funded by debts, often from the IMF, who tied lending to the dismantling and sell-off of state enterprises, from power to water to sanitation — which is how the world’s poorest get gouged by the world’s richest to drink their own water.

These countries don’t borrow because they want to live outside their means — they borrow because they want to live. They don’t borrow from the IMF because they’re too lazy to ask a multinational bank for credit — they borrow because they can’t get credit elsewhere.

But the IMF has another excuse for this: they claim that the fees they extract allow them to originate more loans, creating a virtuous cycle. But as the report makes clear, this is absurd on its face.

The IMF went into the pandemic boasting about $1 trillion in “firepower” (that’s creepy-cutesey IMFspeak for “cash reserves”). Meanwhile, the annual revenues from these fees is $1b — that’s three orders of magnitude less than that “firepower.”

That means that the IMF could simply give up on these punitive fees, levied against the poorest people in the world, at an annual cost of 0.01% of its reserves. Literally, the cruelty is the point.

The point of all of this? The victims of usury are all in the same boat — in the USA and around the world. The same tactics, the same excuses, the same misery, from Cairo to the Caribbean to Cleveland.

Not all debt is created equal, of course. If you’re Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, you can get sweetheart loans and roll overs that let you avoid almost all taxation through the fiction that you earn no income, even as you amass hundreds of billions.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich

And of course, if you’re a government with debts denominated in the currency you issue, it’s not really “debt” at all — the only way the US government can run out of dollars is by ordering its employees not to type more dollars into existence in a central bank spreadsheet.

Indeed, you couldn’t ask for a starker example of the difference between monetarily sovereign nations and postcolonial countries that owe debts in the currencies of their former conquerors. Venezuela can’t spend its way out of US dollar debt by creating bolivars.

Like McGhee’s mother, whose debts turned out to be fictions that disappeared as soon as a professional with credentials and access to the levers of power printed out a boilerplate letter, these countries’ debts are cruel fictions.

The powerful and wealthy can indulge these fictions or ignore them, as they choose. For example, finance-friendly politicians can insist that the “debt ceiling” must not be raised, for political purposes.

When the US declines to do the trivial data-entry that would make the money to pay its sovereign “debts,” the consumption that the money would have funded still takes place — financed not by the democratic state, but rather by a loan-shark.

National financial “prudence” interrupts the normal and benign process of sovereign money-creation, opening space for usury — private borrowing from the vampires and ghouls whose 3,500% APRs are redeemed through terror.

The cruelty is the point.

Image: Sbw01f (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Developed_and_developing_countries.PNG

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Image: А. Н. Миронов https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%98%D0%B7%D0%B3%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B3%D1%83%D1%8E%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%85_%D0%B8%D0%B7_%D1%85%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0._XXI_%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BA.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

44 notes · View notes

austinpanda · 3 years

Text

Dad Letter 091921

19 September, 2021

Dear Dad--

Maine is doing a good job of looking like Maine this morning! It’s cool and gray outside, like it wants to snow, although it’s way too warm for that. I’m coming to the end of my weekend, and tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll be back at the casino doing my audits. My problems with depression, which had been quite the bugaboo, which is one of my favorite words, had been bad, then improved, and then got bad again. Basically I realized just how little money I’m making at the casino, how it’s causing me to have to quit smoking, which has become too costly, and how I grow concerned over my financial future. I can’t exactly budget my way out of poverty, I can only prioritize shit and do without the rest.

So allow me to apologize in advance if half of this letter is a bit of a bummer, but I’m going to take the opportunity to vent for a minute about how The Man is fucking with my peace o’ mind. I’m making $14 an hour at the casino, plus they’re taking out $30 per check for my gaming license, and another $40-something per check for 4 checks for a fuckup on their end with my health insurance. I’m taking home less than $700 every two weeks. That’s $18,200 a year take-home pay, and I’m thinking, A, I really set the world on fire, and B, dangit, I’m right back where I was in Austin. I don’t have enough to cover all my bills, and I can’t use my dental coverage to get my mouth fixed because I can’t afford the copays. Hope no health or car emergencies crop up between now and next paycheck. It’s a regrettable way of existing, and the dreams of a vacation out of state, or a new used Hyundai are merely the first things that must be given up as unrealistic.

Now, the good news is that smoking was costing me maybe a couple hundred a month, and now I’ll have that money to spend on non-tobacco expenses. And at some point they’ll stop taking chunks out of my paycheck. And the impact of spending no money on cigarettes should be noticeable in my increased ability to pay for other things. Oh, and perhaps, by giving up cigarettes, I might live a bit longer, too! I’m trying to keep my eyes on the prize, here: not dying is very important. The really tough part about quitting smoking is this: cigarettes were, far and away, my most relied-upon method of dealing with stress, which makes me need them more than ever, now that I’ve decided to stop using them. Oh, nicotine addiction, you are cunning and baffling and powerful! Smoking was like visiting flavor country, and now I can’t go back, and I’ll never again see my friends in flavor country.

I will make it through this period of unpleasantness; I’ve no doubt. In order to make the most of the last day of my weekend, I’ve started some slow cooker Mongolian beef, which will be amazing in about eight hours, at which point Zach will make some fragrant jasmine rice and we’ll have it all for dinner. All things being equal, if I weren’t going to have that for dinner, but I heard that someone else was, I’d be jealous of them, and I’d wish to assault them, so that I could steal their Mongolian beef and fragrant jasmine rice, and eat it for myself, but I don’t have to, because I’m the one making it! Making lemonade out of life’s lemons, dangit. Also I’m still enjoying my Sept/Oct scary movie marathon, and today’s feature is Day of the Triffids, because plants that can eat you are totally scary. It’s another favorite childhood classic, and the whole movie is watchable on YouTube. In case you’re not familiar, it really is plants that amble about and kill humans, and the humans are all blind because of a meteor shower. I do believe it was turned into a broadway musical at one point. I just love it.

Another one I’m watching today is Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. It is a very bad movie, but it had special effects by the king of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen. He did all the stop motion shit you saw in the 60s and 70s with all those Sinbad movies, and eventually Clash of the Titans. Zach got me a four-pack of Harryhausen classics for (probably) Christmas one year, and now they’re all part of my 60-day scary movie marathon. They are:

Earth vs. The Flying Saucers - 1956 - Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor. Pretty much what it sounds like, us on the earth vs. all the evil aliens in their stop-motion flying saucers. Aren’t movies like this supposed to symbolize our anxiety about communism, anyway?

20 Million Miles to Earth - 1957 - William Hopper and, wouldn’t you know it, Joan Taylor. This is about an alien egg that falls out of a rocket in Italy and washes ashore, where it’s stolen by an adorably offensive Italian street waif. The egg hatches, and a stop-motion monster emerges, which grows bigger, and hilarity ensues.

It Came From Beneath the Sea - 1955 - Faith Domergue and Kenneth Tobey - this one is pretty much Earth vs. the stop-motion giant octopus. The main WASP/male protagonist is the same guy who played the main WASP/male protagonist in The Thing from Another World. Some of the main characters did drugs and watched this movie on TV in the movie The Big Chill.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad - 1958 - Kerwin Mathews and Kathryn Crosby - all of these films feature a white guy lead and a white female backup. I know brown people existed in the 50s...did they simply not register on film? This movie, meanwhile, has a nice stop-motion giant cyclops that torments the main characters, along with a nice stop-motion giant two-headed vulture bird thing.

But because I have nice BluRay copies of these movies, however, I have subtitles, and I can really just enjoy how much time they had to spend on the special effects back in the days of giant stop-motion octopuses. If I decide I can’t handle black and white, I can switch the movie to color. I’m never going to do that, because it was made in black and white, so I’m gonna goddamn watch it in black and white, but if I ever have to watch the movie with some weirdo who can’t enjoy movies unless they’re in color, I can turn on the fake color. I believe each film also has a commentary track featuring Ray Harryhausen himself! As I recall, this makes for some interesting commentary tracks, because he’s now about 140 years old, and I think some of the stop-motion monster memories are starting to blend together a bit, across different movies. Still, it’s always fun to watch his work. Where else can you see a giant octopus destroy the Golden Gate Bridge?

More updates next week. I’m going to continue not smoking, despite the universe’s clear preference that I remain a smoker. (Sniff my farts, universe. You’re not the boss of me!) I hope you two are having a decent beginning of football season. All my love to you both!

0 notes

stephenmccull · 4 years

Text

As Drug Prices Keep Rising, State Lawmakers Propose Tough New Bills to Curb Them

Use Our Content

It can be republished for free.

Fed up with a lack of federal action to lower prescription drug costs, state legislators around the country are pushing bills to penalize drugmakers for unjustified price hikes and to cap payment at much-lower Canadian levels.

These bills, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats in a half-dozen states, are a response to consumers’ intensified demand for action on drug prices as prospects for solutions from Congress remain highly uncertain.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans favor federal action to lower drug prices, making it the public’s second-highest policy priority, according to a survey released by Politico and Harvard University last month. That concern is propelled by the toll of out-of-pocket costs on Medicare beneficiaries, many of whom pay thousands of dollars a year. Studies show many patients don’t take needed drugs because of the cost.

“States will keep a careful eye on Congress, but they can’t wait,” said Trish Riley, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), which has drafted two model bills on curbing prices that some state lawmakers are using.

Several reports released last month heightened the pressure for action. The Rand Corp. said average list prices in the U.S. for prescription drugs in 2018 were 2.56 times higher than the prices in 32 other developed countries, while brand-name drug prices averaged 3.44 times higher.

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review found that drugmakers raised the list prices for seven widely used, expensive drugs in 2019 despite the lack of evidence of substantial clinical improvements. ICER, an independent drug research group, estimated that just those price increases cost U.S. consumers $1.2 billion a year more.

Democratic legislators in Hawaii, Maine and Washington recently introduced bills, based on one of NASHP’s models, that would impose an 80% tax on the drug price increases that ICER determines in its annual report are not supported by evidence of improved clinical value.

Under this model, after getting the list of drugs from ICER, states would require the manufacturers of those medicines to report total in-state sales of their drugs and the price difference since the previous year. Then the state would assess the tax on the manufacturer. The revenue generated by the tax would be used to fund programs that help consumers afford their medications.

“I’m not looking to gather more tax dollars,” said Democratic Sen. Ned Claxton, the sponsor of the bill in Maine and a retired family physician. “The best outcome would be to have drug companies just sell at a lower price.”

Similarly, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, proposed a penalty on price hikes for a broader range of drugs as part of his new budget proposal, projecting it would haul in $70 million in its first year.

Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Hawaii, Maine, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Rhode Island have filed bills that would set the rates paid by state-run and commercial health plans — excluding Medicaid — for up to 250 of the costliest drugs to rates paid by the four most populous Canadian provinces. That could reduce prices by an average of 75%, according to NASHP.

Legislators in other states plan to file similar bills, Riley said.

Drugmakers, which have formidable lobbying power in Washington, D.C., and the states, fiercely oppose these efforts. “The outcomes of these policies would only make it harder for people to get the medicines they need and would threaten the crucial innovation necessary to get us out of a global pandemic,” the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry’s trade group, said in a written statement.

Colorado, Florida and several New England states previously passed laws allowing importation of cheaper drugs from Canada, an effort strongly promoted by former President Donald Trump. But those programs are still being developed and each would need a federal green light.

Bipartisan bills in Congress that would have penalized drugmakers for raising prices above inflation rates and capped out-of-pocket drug costs for enrollees in Medicare Part D drug plans died last year.

“If we waited for Congress, we’d have moss on our backs,” said Washington state Sen. Karen Keiser, a Democrat who sponsored the state’s bill to tax drug price hikes.

Based on ICER data, two of the drugs that could be targeted for tax penalties under the legislation are Enbrel and Humira — blockbuster products used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune conditions.

Since acquiring Enbrel in 2002, Amgen has raised the price 457% to $72,240 for a year’s treatment, according to a report last fall from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

In a written statement, Amgen denied that Enbrel’s list price increase is unsupported by clinical evidence and said the company ensures that every patient who needs its medicines has “meaningful access” to them.

The price for Humira, the world’s best-selling drug, with $20 billion in global sales in 2019, has gone up 470% since it was introduced to the market in 2003, according to AnalySource, a drug price database.

In contrast, AbbVie slashed Humira’s price in Europe by 80% in 2018 to match the price of biosimilar products available there. AbbVie patents block those biosimilar drugs in the U.S.

AbbVie did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Manufacturers say the list price of a drug is irrelevant because insurers and patients pay a significantly lower net price, after getting rebates and other discounts.

But many people, especially those who are uninsured, are on Medicare or have high-deductible plans, pay some or all the cost based on the list price.

Katherine Pepper of Bellingham, Washington, has felt the bite of Humira’s list price. Several years ago, she retired from her job as a management analyst to go on Social Security disability and Medicare because of her psoriatic arthritis, diabetes and gastrointestinal issues.

When she enrolled in a Medicare Part D drug plan, she was shocked by her share of the cost. Since Pepper pays 5% of the Humira list price after reaching Medicare’s catastrophic cost threshold, she spent roughly $15,000 for the drug last year.

Medicare doesn’t allow drugmakers to cover beneficiaries’ copay costs because of concerns that it could prompt more beneficiaries and their doctors to choose high-cost drugs and increase federal spending.

Many patients with rheumatoid and other forms of arthritis are forced to switch from Enbrel or Humira, which they can inject at home themselves, to different drugs that are infused in a doctor’s office when they go on Medicare. Infusion drugs are covered almost entirely by the Medicare Part B program for outpatient care. But switching can complicate a patient’s care.

“Very few Part D patients can afford the [injectable drugs] because the copay can be so steep,” said Dr. Marcus Snow, an Omaha, Nebraska, rheumatologist and spokesperson for the American College of Rheumatology. “The math gets very ugly very quickly.”

To continue taking Humira, Pepper racked up large credit card bills, burning through most of her savings. In 2019, she and her husband, who’s retired and on Medicare, sold their house and moved into a rental apartment. She skimps on her diabetes medications to save money, which has taken a toll on her health, causing skin and vision problems, she said.

She’s also cut back on food spending, with her and her husband often eating only one meal a day.

“I’m now in a situation where I have to do Russian roulette, spin the wheel and figure out what I can do without this month,” said Pepper.

This article is part of a series on the impact of high prescription drug costs on consumers made possible through the 2020 West Health and Families USA Media Fellowship.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

As Drug Prices Keep Rising, State Lawmakers Propose Tough New Bills to Curb Them published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

0 notes

covid19worldnews · 4 years

Text

Proposition 22 Passes, but Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable

On Tuesday night, Californians voted to pass Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by app-based gig companies that exempts them from reclassifying their workers as employees.

Companies including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and more, spent big to convince voters to approve the measure. The company-funded Yes on Proposition 22 campaign spent over $200 million (including millions in donations to the California GOP), deployed a record number of lobbyists, and spread waves of misleading political mailers. At the same time, Uber’s and Lyft’s chief executives undertook a media tour featuring threats to exit the state and repeatedly attempted to exempt themselves in California’s courts. The campaign bought digital, television, radio, and billboard ads, and also sponsored academic research Meanwhile, delivery drivers were forced to use Yes on Proposition 22-branded packaging while the apps themselves told users to vote yes.

On the other side of the issue was a grassroots campaign run by driver advocacy groups and organized labor, which spent just over $20 million.

“We’re disappointed in tonight’s outcome, especially because this campaign’s success is based on lies and fear-mongering. Companies shouldn’t be able to buy elections,” Gig Workers Rising, a California-based driver advocacy group said in a press release early Wednesday morning. “But we’re still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight. Gig work is real work, and gigi workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”

As news of the results broke, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to show his excitement and shared a tweet from early Uber investor Jason Calacanis calling Assemblywoman Lorena S Gonzalez, the author of AB5, a “grifter” who “failed to hand gig workers over to big-money unions”.

After some time, Khosrowshahi reversed the retweet and instead emailed drivers a more subdued message celebrating that the “future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up and made your voice heard—and voters across the state listened.”

This is undoubtedly a victory for capital over labor, and one that will likely allow the unprofitable gig economy to continue limping along at the expense of workers. It does not, however, change the reality that the “gig” business model is doomed in the long-term.

For years, gig companies have misclassified employees as independent contractors—a legal distinction that has allowed unprofitable enterprises to avoid expensive labor costs such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and safe working conditions, among other benefits of employment. Proposition 22 was cooked up to undo Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that codified an “ABC test” to determine if a worker was independently contracted or employed by a company and which went into effect in January.

After AB5 went into effect, attorneys for some of California’s largest cities, along with the state’s attorney general, then filed suits demanding an end to app-based gig company worker misclassification. Uber and Lyft have waged the main legal battle, but lost the case and every appeal since, making Proposition 22 a make-or-break measure.

“Prop 22 means I get no workers’ compensation, no disability, no sick pay, it would be touch and go for me,” Mekela Edwards, an Oakland-based Uber driver who hasn’t worked since March because COVID-19 poses a high health risk to her. “I have to ask how long my unemployment will last, how long I’ll have before I’m forced to go back out there and work. I don’t want to imagine it, I can’t imagine being forced to choose between my health and making a living.”

Hundreds of thousands of people work for the gig companies behind Proposition 22 and many have been devastated by the COVID-19 recession. Still, this has not stopped the gig companies from threatening to take drastic measures if they’re not allowed to have their way. Over the past few months, Uber and Lyft in particular have threatened to radically downsize where service is offered, fire most of their drivers, radically restructure into a franchise model, or leave the state entirely, if Proposition 22 fails.

California voting Yes on Prop 22—which includes fine print that any changes to it must be passed with a seven-eighths majority in the state’s legislature—is a huge setback for labor. It will trap hundreds of thousands of workers under a permanent misclassification scheme that rewards a racist business model that disproportionately hurts Black and brown workers. Despite all this, Proposition 22 is not the final say on this matter in the U.S. or internationally.

AB5 clones are being considered in New York and New Jersey, while Massachusetts’ Attorney General has already sued Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers in the state. Despite objections from Uber’s and Lyft’s impressive lobbying operations, the PRO Act—which would grant gig workers the right to collectively bargain, as part of a massive overhaul of labor law—has passed in the House.

“This is really a story about the kind of cities we are building,” Katie Wells, a researcher at Georgetown University told Motherboard. “The kind of cities—the kind of world we’ve built—it has allowed these entities to come in and build up a workforce through an extractive and predatory system. Regulators have to keep that in mind.”

Outside of the U.S., the global 2019 strike on the day of Uber’s public offering has been followed by successive waves. Over the summer, thousands of delivery workers organized militant strikes and protests in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Ecuador targeting Uber Eats and other exploitative food delivery apps. These have been joined by even more strikes and protests in Nigeria, France, and India. At the same time, Uber is losing legal challenges in France, Britain, Canada, Italy, where high courts have either outright ruled Uber drivers are employees or have opened the door to lawsuits reclassifying them as such.

Governments across the world are also beginning to push Uber to pay billions in taxes that it has evaded over the past decade. In Britain, Uber will have to pay £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) in unpaid value-added taxes it avoided by exploiting a legal loophole. In the U.S., Uber has dodged billions in taxes and wage claims through misclassification: in New Jersey it owes over $650 million in taxes, while in California drivers have filed $1.3 billion in wage claims against Uber and Lyft.

Since Uber’s only hope for survival lies in misclassifying workers and labor law, though, it won’t give up the billions to be made both domestically and globally (even if at a loss) without a fight.

“There’s a lesson here for workers of all sectors, beyond classification: companies are willing to spend massive amounts of money to take away their rights,” said Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver and organizer with Mobile Workers Alliance. “It’s incredibly important for workers to organize to protect themselves, to protect upward mobility, a minimum wage, sick leave, healthcare—to roll back a century of basic protections that try and keep Americans out of poverty.”

Proposition 22’s victory, however, can’t obscure the fact that these companies are doomed. Even with a wage guarantee that effectively pays $5.64 an hour, the companies are no closer to sustainably achieving profitability than they were yesterday. Overcrowded markets for ride-hailing and food delivery, along with vicious price wars and poor unit economics meant there was never any real hope of achieving a monopoly, erecting barriers to market entry, and raising prices to levels that, for many of these companies, would yield their first ever profits.

There’s good news for investors, however, who will finally begin to see returns on investments that have long been underwater thanks to massively inflated valuations that have tumbled in public markets. Indeed, share prices for Uber and Lyft soared in premarket trading on Wednesday morning.

For workers, though, things will be bad. It is hard to imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers earning wages just under half of the minimum wage will be able to feed themselves, maintain housing, afford medical care, or otherwise make ends meet, especially under the boot of a pandemic and with no hope of government aid until next year.

Localities, cities, states, and countries will have to begin cooperating if they’re to have any hope of weathering the storm. They’ll need to start being aggressive, experimenting with ways they can outright take over the platforms or prohibit companies from providing the service to begin with—all while figuring out ways to expand mass transit so that not only they’re not only meeting the needs of people who need transportation, both those who worked for app-based ride-hail companies previously.

For the sake of maintaining an illusion that they’ll one day be profitable, gig companies have waged war in California at great expense to their workers, the public, and employees in other industries whose employers may grow emboldened this moment. The fight is far from over, and there is hope for labor in the continuing coordination of driver advocates, regulators, and legislators around the world, but it will get messy as likely to harken a period of unprecedented social unrest among increasingly immiserated gig workers.

“Beyond California, we need to strike early and strike quickly to ensure swift defeat to this idea that you can change the basic nature of employment and deny benefits to your employees,” Gage told Motherboard. “I ask people not involved to try and understand the labor movement in your area. Reach out to unions and ask how you can help volunteers…Get involved with and spread the world—[money] can buy misinformation and it can deceive, but it can’t beat the solidarity between two workers or between human beings.”

https://www.covid19snews.com/2020/11/04/proposition-22-passes-but-uber-and-lyft-are-only-delaying-the-inevitable/

#covid19

0 notes

shirlleycoyle · 4 years

Text

Proposition 22 Passes, But Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable

On Tuesday night, Californians voted to pass Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by app-based gig companies that exempts them from reclassifying their workers as employees.

On the other side of the issue was a grassroots campaign run by driver advocacy groups and organized labor, which spent just over $20 million.

“We're disappointed in tonight's outcome, especially because this campaign's success is based on lies and fear-mongering. Companies shouldn't be able to buy elections,” Gig Workers Rising, a California-based driver advocacy group said in a press release early Wednesday morning. “But we're still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight. Gig work is real work, and gigi workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”

As news of the results broke, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to show his excitement and shared a tweet from early Uber investor Jason Calacanis calling Assemblywoman Lorena S Gonzalez, the author of AB5, a "grifter" who "failed to hand gig workers over to big-money unions".

After some time, Khosrowshahi reversed the retweet and instead emailed drivers a more subdued message celebrating that the "future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up and made your voice heard—and voters across the state listened."

For years, gig companies have misclassified employees as independent contractors—a legal distinction that has allowed unprofitable enterprises to avoid expensive labor costs such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and safe working conditions, among other benefits of employment. Proposition 22 was cooked up to undo Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that codified an "ABC test" to determine if a worker was independently contracted or employed by a company and which went into effect in January.

"Prop 22 means I get no workers' compensation, no disability, no sick pay, it would be touch and go for me," Mekela Edwards, an Oakland-based Uber driver who hasn't worked since March because COVID-19 poses a high health risk to her. "I have to ask how long my unemployment will last, how long I'll have before I'm forced to go back out there and work. I don't want to imagine it, I can't imagine being forced to choose between my health and making a living."

“This is really a story about the kind of cities we are building,” Katie Wells, a researcher at Georgetown University told Motherboard. “The kind of cities—the kind of world we've built—it has allowed these entities to come in and build up a workforce through an extractive and predatory system. Regulators have to keep that in mind.”

"There's a lesson here for workers of all sectors, beyond classification: companies are willing to spend massive amounts of money to take away their rights," said Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver and organizer with Mobile Workers Alliance. "It's incredibly important for workers to organize to protect themselves, to protect upward mobility, a minimum wage, sick leave, healthcare—to roll back a century of basic protections that try and keep Americans out of poverty."

"Beyond California, we need to strike early and strike quickly to ensure swift defeat to this idea that you can change the basic nature of employment and deny benefits to your employees,” Gage told Motherboard. “I ask people not involved to try and understand the labor movement in your area. Reach out to unions and ask how you can help volunteers…Get involved with and spread the world—[money] can buy misinformation and it can deceive, but it can't beat the solidarity between two workers or between human beings.”

Proposition 22 Passes, But Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes

dwestfieldblog · 4 years

Text

DIFFERENT SCENES FOR DIFFERENT GENES

I scry with my third eye. Something beginning with...V...Police patrolling the parks for people in numbers of more than two. Partners in masks, holding hands in gloves and everyone suddenly vulnerable, unable to gather in packs and gain vicarious strength. Droplets on breath, float and melt into eyes and everybody keeping their distance now paranoia is no longer irrational but sensible. Hello, hope you are doing okay.

This crisis will bring out ALL the best and the worst in people, in both selfless and panic based behaviour. The imminence of a possible bad death or infecting one you love can focus the mind wonderfully on what truly matters to the individual. Adults and children are dying independent of age and previous health status or racial characteristics, remorseless and random. The chaos plague in action and it is mutating. So let's have some lively imature comedy before we get deadly serious.

There are many who will use this situation for political ends and many rabid Endtimers of apocalypse who will be rejoicing somehow that Christ will soon return and save his flock of sheep. Two recent quotes direct from Trump's twitter; 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord' (Matthew 21:1) Well...'Oh God!' is what millions cry in orgasm. 'But the Lord watches over those who fear Him, those who rely on His unfailing love'. (Psalm 33) Really? How many God fearing Christians have died so far and in all the previous plagues? As one American (or maybe hacked by Russia) site says; 'You can't hold hands with God when you are masturbating'. In other words Donald, if you are a wanker you will not get into Heaven. But I digress...

And other fundamentalists who have yet to notice that the virus is killing everyone from all groups, not just those who disagree with them. Kick them hard between the legs if they say this within earshot of you. Hard enough to stop them breeding. (Sidenote... nice to hear that many more pregnancies than normal have been logged over the last few weeks...folk staying at home with nothing better to do and subconsciously wanting to keep the population up. Arf. It is already up. 66.44 million people in the UK (of which England is 56 million)and the UK annual deathrate has been 9382 for the last five years.) Coming and going in the name of the Lord, hallelujah and pass the holy blood...

There were some people at the start of this, a doctor, a couple of journalists who started to warn about Covid 19 in December/January. They were quickly removed by the communists. The world could have had an extra five weeks to prepare and take measures. Hopefully many countries, if unable to actually sue the Chinese government for being totalitarian swine (and why not - Loss of earnings, cause of mass death, covering up facts and lying to health organisations) then the least we can all do is to stop buying ANYTHING from China. Check the labels first. The West has been outrageous in its kow-towing to a regime that machine gunned its own children from tanks, uses unwilling organ donors, transportse ethnicities of Tibetans and Muslim communities to ‘re-education’ camps. WE should have been ashamed. Now we should be angry. BOYCOTT CHINESE GOODS FOR ONE YEAR, GET THE COMMUNISTS OUT.

Speaking of which, the ‘British’ deal with Huawei...giving even the crack of a possibility that a nation with such serious issues with ‘freedom’ and murder of its own citizens should be in charge of Britain’s infrastructure for information and hospitals and surveillance and....Well...it seems...how to put this...f..ing stupid. Done only in order to ensure more investment by China in our shrinking economy. ‘When China sneezes, the world catches a cold’...the markets certainly are. But sellers of respiratory face masks made in guess where are doing well. Well you know everything is made in China...

Globally, right now, we seem to have the worst possible leaders in charge for this crisis. The weakest, craziest and the most despotic (very often all in one). China, with mass interests in Africa and South America has sold the media line that the virus is an American creation to protect their newest client base. And every single damn time Trump opens his mouth, he just makes everybody on the planet who did not vote for him, all the less likely to believe a word. Or even that he exists.

Horrible to see Michael Gove praising the medical staff in Britain for working their hearts out during this crises. He was one of the Tory MPs who voted against giving nurses a small pay rise in 2017. All but one did so, and when the vote was 'won' , the Conservatives let out a loud cheer. They cheered. Cheering now boys and girls? Many thousands of Labour supporters voted Tory in December simply because Corbyn is pointless as pointless can be and the Stalinist Momentum group trying to take over the party are bloody dangerous. I will never be a Socialist but I would truly like to hear why the posh rich boys thought it unnecessary to give a little bonus to nurses and why the bastards cheered. Unforgivable.

Boris taking cold revenge on the BBC for having had the temerity to ask him impertinent, salient questions in December...by decriminalising not paying the license fee. Succumbs to the virus after having taken three days to even organise a COBRA meeting of the highest and then shilly shallying for several weeks longer before acting to lock down the city. Enough time for the shops to be emptied in fear because Britain chose to be self isolating before Covid 19 was even known about. Anti bacterial soap stolen from hospitals. How many readers saw the photographs of the London underground the Friday after its Lord Mayor begged the public to stay home? Packed. Five percent in masks. Hoards of idiots at weekends getting drunk in London and the USA. ‘It’s only the old and weak who die’. No it isn’t. By no means are all those dying are old and previously ill.

This is what happens in various (if not most) countries, when the masses are not educated to cogitate for themselves. Governments neither need nor want the majority to be clever and ask questions at any point. They need basic workers, such as the ESSENTIAL WORKERS these days...easy to spot, they are the ones being paid the least amount of money) The masses are disallowed genuine opportunites to make money and keep it without being taxed at every turn. These two things result in vast populations who have been educated to be less than intelligent and millions who cannot afford to stop work and self isolate for a couple of months. They don’t have private health schemes, stocks and shares, a rich daddy or friends, family jewellery , a second car to sell or gold bullion in Switzerland. They have what they do daily, to make them money and pay bills and rent. Many of the poorest in numerous countries, live with their parents and grandparents. No real alternative but to work, mix and bring the virus home.

What would be wonderful would be if the landlords, big bosses and bankers (who, well...appear to have quite a lot of moolah) would say, ‘okay...you know what...no need to pay rent for two or three months and perhaps there is no work to be done but I won’t lay anyone off or count this as sick leave’. How f..ing likely is that to happen? There will be a few who will do the right thing. The rest will remain as the bastards as they always were. May the Devil take them.

And as for the hackers blackmailing hospitals...when they are caught, strip them, parade and flog them till bloody, and then put them away for Life without parole. At the very least. I would turn them loose in a crowd of those they had caused pain to. The same goes for any leader who had given them orders.

And ooh, ahh...the deadly serious internet conspiracy...apparently Bill Gates is acting like Thanos or a James Bond villain but without the charm and sense of humour. If this virus had been created by Man deliberately, there would already have been a vaccine somewhere. Perhaps there is. If you really are a nut, then watch where the cure seems to originate from and trace it backwards. And which of the ' Elite' refuse to have the jab. Interesting to think how long the Chinese (or anyone for that matter) have been eating bats and only now does this spring up. Yum yum. Yab Yab.

To quote from the master again..’Conspiracy is contagious and so is worrying about it. At such time, theories about totally imaginary conspiracies also escalate, because (a) times of transition make people nervous and uncertain, (b) nervous and uncertain people tend to become at least a little bit paranoid, (c) most people most of the time follow their own prejudices and anxieties much more than any technique for ascertaining objective facts, and (d) most people have no knowledge of the techniques or self –disciplines necessary to the search for objective facts.Robert Anton Wilson, Right Where you are Sitting Now. (Ronin Publishing)

Meanwhile...John von Neumann’s game theory continues to be used in global warfare scenarios...they are still attempting to overcome the odds against negative outcomes...More satellites fired upwards, planning to use EMP to disable the enemy’s networks before they do the same. Peace and goodwill to all, Amen...AI Terminators building the Matrix etc.

But I remember some time in 1997 after five years of various daily practices in England and Czech Republic, a sudden moment in the countryside walking down a small valley...having an absolute instinct that humans would never be strong enough to destroy this world. Simultaneously there was a sure and clear feeling that I no longer lived in the time stream of a world which would be annihilated by nuclear war. Through my baby steps towards tiny pulses of enlightenment, I had stepped across to a parallel world. Breaching a strange loop in a 'quantum-jump to a different order of coherence.' (Identical, but not one in which such insanity would happen...)

Twenty three years later after dropping many of the disciplines I had used in the Nineties and getting caught up in the horseshit of trump and such others - and my own failing mental health, I seem to have crossed back over into a world which is worse on many levels. There were flashes back then, revolutions without bloodshed, with dialogue, and agreements (even if based on trade and power sharing) but step by step, what I call the Conspiracy of Counter Evolution (Neophobes) struck back at the possibility that humans could do the right thing. Dragging the masses back into petty squabbles and bloodshed based on the three main (as they like to see themselves) religions and the eternal struggle for resources. Of which there are plenty for quite a few hundred generations yet, as long as we stop eating bats and don't allow the fundamentalists to wipe us out in the name of a merciful God. Nationalism and Religion are the perfect illusions with which to rule and dominate the gullible through fear, unprovable promises and selfish pride. And resources are mace to look limited and endangered in order to drive prices up. Fear, as was said, is big business.

‘Don’t associate with people who have a low view of humanity; it’ll give you a low view of yourself’ Mark Twain. And thus I remain cynically optimystic.

Did you know that 10 hours exposure to low doses of ketamine ‘enhances corticostriatal cross frequency coupling and hippocampal broad band gamma oscillation’...? Useful to know eh? Many things have the same effect without resorting to horse tranquiliser...like focusing on changing brain speed via breathing. He says on Codeine, whisky and Tramadol. And no doubt burning out all the couplings between the trains of thought but only last night. You will ‘be right there’? I will be wrong here.

I recently had a dream where I had set up a solo concert, all equipment ready, tuned strings, prepared gear etc, then on stage an hour before the start, realised I had forgotten to invite anyone...Hmm...Two more quotes...

‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable’. JFK.

‘The only reason a caterpillar ‘knows’ how to become a butterfly...is because genes contain a memory of the future. This is a metaphor, remember, it may be a very useful one, at that.' RAW.

SO, HOLD ON TO YOUR SANITY, RELEASE ALL TENSIONS AS YOU WILL, BUT HARM NO ONE. KEEP A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOUR AND LOVE LIFE, FORM AND FORMLESS. BE AWARE AND SEE YOU LATER...D.

0 notes

easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

Text

How Some School Districts Are Able to Feed More People in Need Than Food Banks

Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

School cafeterias across the country are closed, but have become grab-and-go centers for families and community members to pick up food

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

When the novel coronavirus pandemic led school districts across the country to close in March, questions grew about whether the food-insecure children who depend on school meals to survive would still have access to them. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, initially resisted closing schools in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, citing the fact that so many students rely on school breakfast and lunch for sustenance.

With this concern in mind, last month the COVID-19 Child Nutrition Response Act took effect, which establishes a nationwide waiver to help school districts provide students with nutritious meals while limiting their exposure to the novel coronavirus. Although classes may only be in session online these days, districts have continued feeding students, albeit in smaller numbers than they do when schools are open. And, in some cases, they’re feeding the community at large.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) — with 700,000 students, the nation’s second largest — has served roughly 5 million meals to children and adults alike at 63 grab-and-go food centers set up since it closed schools March 16. New York City Public Schools, the largest district in the U.S., has 400 grab-and-go sites, and news broke April 3 that it had expanded its free meals to include all New Yorkers, students or adults.

LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner announced during a recent press conference that his district is serving more meals daily than any of the nation’s food banks; it handed out more than 432,000 meals on March 31 alone. The district is also providing meals to 13 temporary homeless shelters in Los Angeles.

“We decided that we were going to serve all of those who came and needed help, no questions asked.”

As the coronavirus crisis has led to an unprecedented 10 million Americans filing unemployment claims in the second half of March and predictions that the jobless rate could top 32 percent, families struggle to afford food, rent, and other necessities. But with help from community partners and charitable organizations, school districts are surfacing as a lifeline for needy students — as well as the scores of adults suddenly left unemployed or underemployed.

“Many of the families we serve are just struggling to make ends meet,” Beutner told Civil Eats. “They’re the dishwasher, the bus driver, the hourly worker, who, unfortunately in this calamity, are the first to be laid off. We decided that we were going to serve all of those who came and needed help, no questions asked.”

With help from the Red Cross, World Central Kitchen (WCK), Snap, Inc., and the Teamsters union, LAUSD operates its citywide grab-and-go food centers from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. weekdays (and 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. during its spring break, which began April 6). Patrons receive two meals apiece and are not required to prove they attend LAUSD or have children who do in order to obtain food. Dole Packaged Foods has donated fruit bowls and “fridge packs” to the effort, while Chiquita has donated 44,000 fresh bananas. Toy company Mattel and the charity Baby2Baby have also donated toys, art supplies, blankets, diapers, baby wipes, and baby food at these sites.

On average, two-thirds of the people receiving meals from in LAUSD are students, and one-third are adults, according to Beutner.

“We know that these aren’t normal times, so we’re serving all in need,” he said. “The federal government said that we couldn’t do it, but we said we’re going to do it. We have to figure it out because there’s already adults who are in need, and we know we’re a safety net.”

Feeding the neediest students and their families

Eighty percent of LAUSD students come from low-income households, and the district’s philanthropic partners enable it to serve meals to children and adults alike as schools remain closed during the coronavirus outbreak. On March 19, the superintendent announced the creation of the “LA Students Most in Need” fundraising effort, which pays for meals, snacks, supplies, and technology access for vulnerable youth in the district.

Meanwhile, the rideshare company Uber is giving families who need rides to LAUSD’s grab-and-go centers discounted fares to the sites, where workers wear gloves, have access to masks, and maintain the recommended six feet distance between each other and the people they serve to avoid spreading the coronavirus.

Thousands of LAUSD’s 75,000 employees are volunteering their time to serve meals at the grab-and-go centers. Among them is Luis Anaya, a special education assistant, and a parent of two LAUSD students, who has shown up daily during the pandemic to pass out breakfast and lunch outside Abraham Lincoln High School in L.A.’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood.

“I’ve seen a lot of people who are in desperate need,” he said. “Every day, the numbers have been increasing by the hundreds. We’re getting in regulars — morning workers and elderly adults who don’t speak much English. We’re serving everyone.”

Anaya applauds what he calls a tremendous effort to keep students and community members fed during the pandemic. He and his wife continue to receive salaries, a fact that makes them fortunate when so many Americans have found themselves jobless, he said.

“A lot of these families don’t have that luxury of a two-income household,” he said. “So, I think [the grab-and-go centers] are a great thing. I grew up in one of those families, with a single parent trying to the best she could to feed her kids, so I feel for those families.”

School food provider Revolution Foods has teamed up with WCK, a not-for-profit nongovernmental organization that offers meals following natural disasters and other crises, to distribute federally reimbursable grab-and-go lunches to students in cities including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.

“We have been working around the clock to design and distribute over 2 million healthy meals a week,” said Kristin Groos Richmond, Revolution’s founder and CEO. “We’re designing meals for the at-risk students whose only reliable meals for the day come from school.”

Richmond noted that the company is emphasizing culturally relevant meals in its work, but is also balancing the need for shelf-stable foods for housing-insecure families that lack access to refrigerators, ovens, or microwaves. Revolution Foods is also including strawberries, carrots, salad, and other produce in its individually packaged meals.

While LAUSD has a robust and collaborative effort in place to serve the community during the COVID-19 crisis, Jennifer Gaddis, author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, acknowledged that other districts may find themselves in different circumstances.

“LAUSD is a leader in the school food world, from being the first district to pass the good food purchasing [program] to rapidly scaling their grab-and-go meal service after schools shut down due to COVID-19,” she told Civil Eats. “However, district policy and logistics vary a lot from place to place, both in terms of how and whether free meals are still being served.”

How smaller school districts are feeding students

With more than 101,000 students, Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, is significantly smaller than LAUSD, but still among the nation’s largest. The staff there has also tried to ensure that needy students don’t go hungry during the pandemic. It offers grab-and-go meals at 45 sites and also has eight mobile grab-and-go operations that make stops throughout the day. Like LAUSD, it does not question the individuals who show up to collect curbside meals, but Jefferson County’s program focuses on feeding needy children and not vulnerable adults.

About 60 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced lunches, according to Dan Ellnor, assistant director of JCPS’s nutrition services center. Since schools closed, however, the district has only been serving a fraction of the meals it normally does, up to 80,000 per week, he said, while the district served 100,000 meals per day before the pandemic. This means the district is only getting about 13 percent of the reimbursement it ordinarily receives from the federal government for serving lunch, which could leave the nutrition program cash-strapped, Ellnor said.

“These workers are putting their own health at risk to feed and care for the nation’s children.”

“What we ask is that the federal government gives us reimbursements based off last year’s numbers to keep operating,” he said.

That’s not the only obstacle the nutrition program faces. JCPS has a central kitchen that allows it to make school meals from scratch that are then distributed to schools districtwide.

“We basically run our own food factory,” Ellnor said. “But on March 13 [when schools closed], we ground to a halt and started doing boxed lunches with pre-packaged items.”

The lunches contain items such as sandwiches, yogurt, string cheese, sunflower seeds, cheese cubes, and prepackaged fruits and vegetables, including carrots, mandarin oranges, strawberry cups, and peach cups. The breakfast meals include milk, and a variety of grains and breakfast bars.

Transitioning from made-from-scratch meals to prepackaged goods has also been an adjustment for Bertrand Weber, director of Minneapolis Public Schools’ (MPS) Culinary and Wellness Services.

“We can’t cook, so we’re getting grab-and-go bags of carrots, fruit, and sandwiches,” he said. “We still want to maintain the quality of the food, but all of our initiatives around scratch cooking and plant-based protein are on hold right now. It’s really emergency meals for families — families who three weeks ago would have never thought they would need emergency meals.”

MPS is partnering with the local child-hunger nonprofit The Sheridan Story to provide grocery bags filled with pantry goods like pasta, tomato sauce, rice, beans, and canned meat to help food-insecure families during the pandemic. But the school district also faces challenges. It is operating with a skeleton crew, with only 25 percent of its 330-member school nutrition staff working regularly, Weber said, as many fear they will contract the coronavirus if they leave their homes.

“K-12 cafeteria workers are some of the lowest-paid and most vulnerable school staff,” Gaddis said. “These workers are putting their own health at risk to feed and care for the nation’s children. We need to make sure that all schools have the financial resources they need to adequately compensate workers and protect their safety during this crisis.”

About 50 advocacy groups, including Pesticide Action Network, Roots of Change, and the Center for Food Safety, wrote a letter April 6 to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to ask for more protections for farm and food workers, such as school food service workers. The letter requested more personal protective equipment and an expansion of paid leave for these workers, among other measures.

With its central kitchen closed and fewer students showing up to grab lunch, a full staff likely isn’t needed at MPS now (and Weber said that those workers who are staying home during the pandemic are still being compensated). The district normally serves 50,000 meals per day, but it has only been handing out 10 percent of that number since Minneapolis schools closed in mid-March. Yet, the district has taken measures to get food to students.

It is operating grab-and-go centers at 50 different sites across the city, allowing families to pick up a full week’s worth of meals at a time. The district has a smaller portion of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch than LAUSD or JCPS does; just under 40 percent of 10 MPS youth fall into this category. The shift from scratch meals to prepackaged lunch and fewer numbers of children picking up school lunch will have long-lasting consequences, Weber predicts.

“The food and beverage supply chain has been completely disrupted,” he said. “We have some produce companies that are shutting down; they don’t have customers.”

On the other hand, producers of staple goods, such as milk, have seen sales soar during the pandemic. Chicago-based market research firm IRI and partner Boston Consulting Group found that U.S. dairy purchases rose by 57.8 percent during mid-March compared to the same period a year earlier. Still, school and restaurant closures have led to a lower demand for milk overall, prompting some dairy farmers to dump their supply, lest it spoil. But panic buying of milk might be one reason Jessica Shelly, director of student dining services at Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS), has been told to expect the price of milk to increase.

Price gouging and a lower federal reimbursement for serving school lunch—Shelly says that CPS is serving just 7 percent of the meals of when school is in session—could cause some financial strain to her department. Yet, CPS is striving to get food to the students who need it most by serving meals at 24 different sites citywide. The district is also working with community partners, including the local food rescue organization La Soupe and the Freestore Foodbank, to provide meals to families rather than students only. The district has received school supplies, such as pencils, paper, crayons, and activity books, to pass out to children as well.

“We have groups who have donated toiletries, soap, and shampoo,” Shelly said. “We have become the one-stop shop” for more than nutrition.

As time passes, more families are dropping by to pick up food, and if the need increases, the district’s community partners will “step in and fill the gaps,” Shelly said. “If we a see a rise in need, they could help us and establish a feeding site close by. I don’t care where these kids get food. I just want them to have some place to go.”

Just as the public has come to respect grocery store and fast food employees as essential workers during the pandemic, Shelly said that school nutrition staffers are getting thanks for their efforts to feed the community during the coronavirus crisis.

“School nutrition programs have been elevated,” she said. “The title of lunch lady is going to be replaced with school nutrition hero. Not all heroes wear capes; some wear aprons.”

• With Schools Closed, Some Districts are Feeding More People than Food Banks [Civil Eats]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39XHwYN https://ift.tt/2JQ7xid