“Shelter from the Storm” presents a panorama of asylum – the protective immigration status many migrants have sought at the U.S. southwest border – from shifting angles of experience, law, demography, economics, history and politics.”

~                   ~                   ~

United Steel Workers members in big march – Credit: Casey Nelson

Demonstrators blocking street – Credit: Casey Nelson

One afternoon during the 1999 Seattle Ministerial of the World Trade Organization, the police and the Black Bloc were mixing it up on Pike [...]]]> Peter Costantini ~ Seattle ~ December 3, 2019

United Steel Workers members in big march – Credit: Casey Nelson

Demonstrators blocking street – Credit: Casey Nelson

One afternoon during the 1999 Seattle Ministerial of the World Trade Organization, the police and the Black Bloc were mixing it up on Pike Street amid clouds of tear gas. As I retreated from the front lines, I heard music and looked up. On a balcony high on a condo tower, someone had cranked up a big sound system, and Jimi Hendrix was shredding “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the suddenly mean streets.

The Wall Street Journal called the event “the Woodstock of antiglobalization”. But the WTO protests were far more than just a counter-cultural jamboree. This time around, it was the WTO organizers, Clinton administration officials, and City of Seattle hosts who must have felt like they had dropped some of the bad acid.

The Battle of Seattle, for which the volunteer DJ provided an ironic sound track, can’t be reduced to a couple of hundred black-clad, masked “anarchists” breaking a few storefront windows, or the police pepper-spraying peaceful demonstrators.

Jimi’s fuzz, feedback, and howling riffs rocked the zeitgeist of a historic inflection point: the implosion of a market-fundamentalist model of globalization pushed by the richest countries and transnational corporations. On the streets and in independent forums, it was represented mainly by a convergence of labor, environmental, public-health and democracy movements from the far corners of the world, many of which rarely had a chance to dialogue in person. Their march of at least 40 thousand people was complemented by artful and effective civil disobedience by thousands more, who managed to non-violently shut down the planned opening of the Ministerial.

What was not apparent outside the Convention Center was that inside, many delegates from developing countries and opposition organizations were inspired by the energy of the streets. They brought to Seattle many long-standing grievances against aspects of the WTO model. But the protests emboldened some to stiffen their resistance to the hosts’ heavy-handed insistence on an expanding agenda of trade orthodoxy.

I covered the festivities as a member of a team of four journalists writing for Inter Press Service, a global non-profit newswire based in Rome. Abid Aslam had been covering international institutions and economics for many years, and was able to buttonhole delegates and observers from developing countries by name and sit down with them for coffee. Danielle Knight was a veteran chronicler of international environmental issues. Casey Nelson, my nephew, was press-ganged into serving as our photographer, and did not flinch as he gamely dodged the stun grenades.

Below you’ll find links to the articles that we sent out on the IPS wire and a few not published there, along with two retrospectives written on the 10^th anniversary in 2009.

The protests against the WTO unleashed flash floods of creativity. The most visible symbolism was probably the two big banners by the Rain Forest Action Network hung from a construction crane, one an arrow labelled “WTO”, the other an arrow labelled “Democracy” and pointing in the opposite direction.

One of my favorite exploits, though, involved 484 pounds of Roquefort cheese. French farmer José Bové, the crusty leader of the Confédération Paysanne (Peasants Confederation), reportedly smuggled it into Seattle and gave it away to passers-by outside a McDonald’s to dramatize what he saw as a particular injustice of the WTO.

Bové had won notoriety in France for driving his tractor into town and using it to pull the roof off of a McDonald’s under construction. His battle cry was “McDo dehors, vive le Roquefort” – “Out with McDonald’s, long live Roquefort cheese”. His WTO action, though, went beyond simple outrage at an affront to French gastronomy.

The European Union had banned beef treated with growth hormones as a threat to consumer health. However, such hormones were approved and commonly used in the U.S. The U.S. government rejected the ban as a trade barrier, brought a complaint against it in the WTO dispute settlement body, and won a judgement that allowed it to slap punitive tariffs on certain European food products, including Roquefort.

Bové was channeling the ire of many European consumers at the use of the WTO to shove down their throats a controversial agribusiness practice that they saw as unhealthy, and the results of which they had democratically decided they did not want to consume. Beyond the immediate issue, this case was emblematic of numerous efforts to use WTO provisions to roll back labor, human rights, environmental, consumer and health regulations in many countries, especially poor ones, in order to protect the profits of powerful exporters and investors and preserve the economic dominance of the wealthiest countries and enterprises.

Criticisms of the WTO at the Ministerial also targeted some tactics used by the WTO leadership and the biggest members to strongarm small, developing counties into accepting agreements expanding the scope of the trade organization.

“Green room meetings” were relatively small closed meetings of representatives of certain member countries hand-picked by the WTO leadership, tasked with reaching a preliminary agreement before taking it to the full membership. Many of the poorer countries saw them as a ploy to circumvent their participation in democratic decision-making on controversial issues.

On the final day of the Ministerial, I was sitting with Abid in the press room when someone came in and whispered something to one of the other journalists. The word quickly circulated that Director General Michael Moore and U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky had convened a secret last-gasp green room meeting, inviting only selected U.S. allies, in hopes of approving a closing statement that they had drafted. We suspected that this might announce agreement on launching the new round of trade negotiations they were promoting.

A stampede of ink-stained wretches, the two of us included, thundered towards the conference room on another floor of the Convention Center where the meeting was going on. The organizers refused to let us in, and called security to hold us at bay. Testy scriveners banged on doors and walls and chanted loudly, bringing a little of the atmosphere of the streets into the suites. Finally, the meeting conveners relented and let us in. They had failed to reach the agreement they sought, and there was nothing left to conceal from us. The high drama of what was billed as an epoch-making conclave ended with a whimper of crestfallen officials and without a new round of trade talks.

The failure in Seattle to reach agreement on the expansion of the WTO through ongoing talks set a precedent. Each following ministerial failed to convince many of the developing countries, and many political forces within the industrialized countries, that the WTO was a fair forum for protecting their economic interests, reducing poverty, and fostering broader development. With the conflicts that flashed over in Seattle simmering unresolved, the next round of WTO negotiations never took place and the WTO was never expanded.

Ten years later, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy acknowledged that “Trade liberalisation has transition costs and not all segments of society reap the benefits of it. … Trade liberalisation creates winners and losers.” Beyond trade per se, the WTO and similar agreements have also drawn widespread criticism for creating incentives for unbridled foreign investment, enabling transnational corporations to strip away national and local safeguards for labor, the environment, and consumer protection. Rather than encouraging trade, these provisions promote outsourcing of jobs and a global race to the bottom on public regulation of corporate abuses.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the WTO’s regional progeny, was widely viewed as an effort to create a trade bloc to woo some Pacific Rim countries away from Chinese economic influence. In the U.S., however, significant forces across the political spectrum rejected the proposed agreement. President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the TPP in 2017, and it is now defunct.

Beyond the TPP, Trump’s use of extortionate tariffs to launch trade wars with U.S. partners has effectively rendered any trade agreement signed by the U.S. a dead letter. He has demonstrated that the most powerful nation can simply ignore a basic premise of all trade treaties – negotiated settlement of disputes – and revert to 18^th Century mercantilism in an effort to beggar its neighbors. So far, this does not bode well for the U.S. or world economies.

Despite these setbacks, the immense juggernaut of corporate-led globalization rumbles on, with or without trade agreements. A new effort to bring the digital economy – and particularly data, the new e-gold – under transnational corporate control has been proposed as a new “e-commerce” treaty within the WTO framework. NAFTA 2.0, a revision of the North American regional treaty, has been inked and is being debated in Congress. Nevertheless, efforts to use trade treaties to universally institutionalize some of neoliberalism’s worst abuses have not fared well in this millennium.

Twenty years later, it looks like the Seattle Ministerial will be remembered less as the WTO’s Woodstock than as its Waterloo.

IPS coverage

The Tear Gas Ministerial – December 1999

“The Tear Gas Ministerial: Introduction”. Peter Costantini, The Tear Gas Ministerial. November 1999 – January 2000.
http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wto/wtoint.htm

“Free trade truck grinds theoretical gears”. Peter Costantini, The Tear Gas Ministerial. November 23, 1999.
http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wto/theory.htm
(A shorter version ran on IPS as “TRADE: Free Trade Theory Takes a Beating”.
http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/11/wto-seattle-preview-following-is-another-in-a-series-of-special-ips-features-on-the-major-issues-at-the-wto-ministerial-conference-seattle-nov-30-dec-3-trade-free-trade-theory-takes-a-beating)

“Temblors shake World Trade Organization in Seattle”. Peter Costantini with Abid Aslam & Danielle Knight, The Tear Gas Ministerial. December 1, 1999.
http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wto/temblors.htm
(A shorter version ran on IPS as “TRADE: WTO Talks Resume in Face of Protests.” http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/12/trade-wto-talks-resume-in-face-of-protests)

“HEALTH-TRADE: WTO Urged to Address Access to Medicine”. Danielle Knight, Inter Press Service. December 2, 1999.
http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/12/health-trade-wto-urged-to-address-access-to-medicine

“TRADE: Third World Tastes the Carrot and the Stick”. Abid Aslam, Inter Press Service. December 2, 1999.
http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/12/trade-third-world-tastes-the-carrot-and-the-stick

“TRADE: Developing Countries Assail WTO “Dictatorship’”. Abid Aslam, Inter Press Service. December 3, 1999.
http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/12/trade-developing-countries-assail-wto-dictatorship

‘”ENVIRONMENT: WTO Attacked for Ignoring ‘Precautionary Principle’”. Danielle Knight, Inter Press Service. December 3, 1999.
http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/12/environment-wto-attacked-for-ignoring-precautionary-principle

“Beardless in Seattle: Cuban delegation backs developing countries in WTO”. Peter Costantini, The Tear Gas Ministerial. December 3, 1999.
http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wto/cuba.htm

“ENVIRONMENT-TRADE: Anti-WTO Protests Begin in Seattle”. Danielle Knight, Inter Press Service. December 4, 1999.
http://www.ipsnews.net/1999/12/environment-trade-anti-wto-protests-begin-in-seattle

“Trade talks without tear gas”. Peter Costantini, The Tear Gas Ministerial. January 17, 2000.
http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wto/oped.htm

A skeptic’s roadmap of the WTO – November 2001

“What’s wrong with the WTO? A guide to where the mines are buried”. Peter Costantini. November 2001.
http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wtow/index.htm
A reference site on the WTO treaties and issues surrounding them

The Tear Gas Ministerial Ten Years Later – December 2009

“TRADE: A Lost Decade for the WTO?” Peter Costantini, Inter Press Service. December 7, 2009.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/12/trade-a-lost-decade-for-the-wto

“Winners and losers: the human costs of ‘free’ trade.” Peter Costantini, Huffington Post. December 14, 2009.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/winners-and-losers-the-hub_390651

Greece and the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the EU, and the European Central Bank) are in a dangerous game of chicken. The Greeks have been threatened with a “Cyprus-Style prolonged bank holiday” if they “vote wrong.” But they have been bullied for too long and are saying “no more.”

A return [...]]]> By Ellen Brown

Greece and the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the EU, and the European Central Bank) are in a dangerous game of chicken. The Greeks have been threatened with a “Cyprus-Style prolonged bank holiday” if they “vote wrong.” But they have been bullied for too long and are saying “no more.”

A return to the polls was triggered in December, when the Parliament rejected Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ pro-austerity candidate for president. In a general election, now set for January 25th, the EU-skeptic, anti-austerity, leftist Syriza party is likely to prevail. Syriza captured a 3% lead in the polls following mass public discontent over the harsh austerity measures Athens was forced to accept in return for a €240 billion bailout.

Austerity has plunged the economy into conditions worse than in the Great Depression. As Professor Bill Black observes, the question is not why the Greek people are rising up to reject the barbarous measures but what took them so long.

Ireland was similarly forced into an EU bailout with painful austerity measures attached. A series of letters has recently come to light showing that the Irish government was effectively blackmailed into it, with the threat that the ECB would otherwise cut off liquidity funding to Ireland’s banks. The same sort of threat has been leveled at the Greeks, but this time they are not taking the bait.

Squeezed by the Squid

The veiled threat to the Greek Parliament was in a December memo from investment bank Goldman Sachs – the same bank that was earlier blamed for inducing the Greek crisis. Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi wrote colorfully of it:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Goldman has spawned an unusual number of EU and US officials with dictatorial power to promote and protect big-bank interests. They include US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who brokered the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000; Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who presided over the 2008 Wall Street bailout; Mario Draghi, current head of the European Central Bank; Mario Monti, who led a government of technocrats as Italian prime minister; and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, chair of the Financial Stability Board that sets financial regulations for the G20 countries.

Goldman’s role in the Greek crisis goes back to 2001. The vampire squid, smelling money in Greece’s debt problems, jabbed its blood funnel into Greek fiscal management, sucking out high fees to hide the extent of Greece’s debt in complicated derivatives. The squid then hedged its bets by shorting Greek debt. Bearish bets on Greek debt launched by heavyweight hedge funds in late 2009 put selling pressure on the euro, forcing Greece into the bailout and austerity measures that have since destroyed its economy.

Before the December 2014 parliamentary vote that brought down the Greek government, Goldman repeated the power play that has long held the eurozone in thrall to an unelected banking elite. In a note titled “From GRecovery to GRelapse,” reprinted on Zerohedge, it warned that “the room for Greece to meaningfully backtrack from the reforms that have already been implemented is very limited.”

Why? Because bank “liquidity” could be cut in the event of “a severe clash between Greece and international lenders.” The central bank could cut liquidity or not, at its whim; and without it, the banks would be insolvent.

As the late Murray Rothbard pointed out, all banks are technically insolvent. They all lend money they don’t have. They rely on being able to borrow from other banks, the money market, or the central bank as needed to balance their books. The central bank, which has the power to print money, is the ultimate backstop in this sleight of hand and is therefore in the driver’s seat. If that source of liquidity dries up, the banks go down.

The Goldman memo warned:

The Biggest Risk is an Interruption of the Funding of Greek Banks by The ECB.

Pressing as the government refinancing schedule may look on the surface, it is unlikely to become a real issue as long as the ECB stands behind the Greek banking system. . . .

But herein lies the main risk for Greece. The economy needs the only lender of last resort to the banking system to maintain ample provision of liquidity. And this is not just because banks may require resources to help reduce future refinancing risks for the sovereign. But also because banks are already reliant on government issued or government guaranteed securities to maintain the current levels of liquidity constant. . . .

In the event of a severe Greek government clash with international lenders, interruption of liquidity provision to Greek banks by the ECB could potentially even lead to a Cyprus-style prolonged “bank holiday”. And market fears for potential Euro-exit risks could rise at that point. [Emphasis added.]

The condition of the Greek banks was not the issue. The gun being held to the banks’ heads was the threat that the central bank’s critical credit line could be cut unless financial “reforms” were complied with. Indeed, any country that resists going along with the program could find that its banks have been cut off from that critical liquidity.

That is actually what happened in Cyprus in 2013. The banks declared insolvent had passed the latest round of ECB stress tests and were no less salvageable than many other banks – until the troika demanded an additional €600 billion to maintain the central bank’s credit line.

That was the threat leveled at the Irish government before it agreed to a bailout with strings attached, and it was the threat aimed in December at Greece. Greek Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis stated in an interview:

The key to . . . our economy’s future in 2015 and later is held by the European Central Bank. . . . This key can easily and abruptly be used to block funding to banks and therefore strangle the Greek economy in no time at all.

Europe’s Lehman Moment?

That was the threat, but as noted on Zerohedge, the ECB’s hands may be tied in this case:

[S]hould Greece decide to default it would mean those several hundred billion Greek bonds currently held in official accounts would go from par to worthless overnight, leading to massive unaccounted for impairments on Europe’s pristine balance sheets, which also confirms that Greece once again has all the negotiating leverage.

Despite that risk, on January 3rd Der Spiegel reported that the German government believes the Eurozone would now be able to cope with a Greek exit from the euro. The risk of “contagion” is now limited because major banks are protected by the new European Banking Union.

The banks are protected but the depositors may not be. Under the new “bail-in” rules imposed by the Financial Stability Board, confirmed in the European Banking Union agreed to last spring, any EU government bailout must be preceded by the bail-in (confiscation) of creditor funds, including depositor funds. As in Cyprus, it could be the depositors, not the banks, picking up the tab.

What about deposit insurance? That was supposed to be the third pillar of the Banking Union, but a eurozone-wide insurance scheme was never agreed to. That means depositors will be left to the resources of their bankrupt local government, which are liable to be sparse.

What the bail-in protocol does guarantee are the derivatives bets of Goldman and other international megabanks. In a May 2013 article in Forbes titled “The Cyprus Bank ‘Bail-In’ Is Another Crony Bankster Scam,” Nathan Lewis laid the scheme bare:

At first glance, the “bail-in” resembles the normal capitalist process of liabilities restructuring that should occur when a bank becomes insolvent. . . .

The difference with the “bail-in” is that the order of creditor seniority is changed. In the end, it amounts to the cronies (other banks and government) and non-cronies. The cronies get 100% or more; the non-cronies, including non-interest-bearing depositors who should be super-senior, get a kick in the guts instead. . . .

In principle, depositors are the most senior creditors in a bank. However, that was changed in the 2005 bankruptcy law, which made derivatives liabilities most senior. In other words, derivatives liabilities get paid before all other creditors — certainly before non-crony creditors like depositors. Considering the extreme levels of derivatives liabilities that many large banks have, and the opportunity to stuff any bank with derivatives liabilities in the last moment, other creditors could easily find there is nothing left for them at all.

Even in the worst of the Great Depression bank bankruptcies, said Lewis, creditors eventually recovered nearly all of their money. He concluded:

When super-senior depositors have huge losses of 50% or more, after a “bail-in” restructuring, you know that a crime was committed.

Goodbye Euro?

Greece can regain its sovereignty by defaulting on its debt, abandoning the ECB and the euro, and issuing its own national currency (the drachma) through its own central bank. But that would destabilize the eurozone and might end in its breakup.

Will the troika take that risk? 2015 is shaping up to be an interesting year.

The book “Preparing For The Day After” is a photojournalistic treatise, a veritable treat for the newshound published on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Asian Tsunami as an E Book on Google Play. Taking off on a critique on the role of the media on [...]]]> A book review by Mamtha Rajesh

The book “Preparing For The Day After” is a photojournalistic treatise, a veritable treat for the newshound published on the eve of the 10^th anniversary of the Asian Tsunami as an E Book on Google Play. Taking off on a critique on the role of the media on the day of the tsunami, the author substantiates media’s ignorance and paralysis with official U.N. reports.

Preparing for the Day After: A Picture E Book on Disaster Management
Malini Shankar

The E book is an authoritative analysis and compendium of the evolution of disaster management, the concept of disaster risk reduction, which evolved as a post script to humanity’s biggest recorded disaster – the Asian tsunami.

Issues such as culture sensitive food security, administrative coordination, mass mortality management, impact of calamities on agriculture, livelihood, fisheries, bio diversity etc. have been authenticated with news reports, interviews, official reports, scientific perspective and pictures to make this work a credible, aesthetic, authoritative and attractive literature in a current affairs perspective.

What makes it so attractive as a Picture Handbook online is its endless repertoire of referenced links to official U.N. and country reports, news media articles and visualisation with never before seen pictures and Street view graphics from Google Earth, Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, Global Volcanism Programme of Smithsonian Institutions, NOAA, USGS, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, Swiss Avalanche Forecasting Establishment, Agencia Brazil etc.

There is a credible attempt at exposing what may be either corruption, missing links, dereliction of duty or nepotism in implementing actionable inputs of early warning. Lacunae in standard operating procedures of early warning in South Asia have been exposed.

The author has also articulated a geological perspective of climate change which often escapes the attention of the mainstream media. That is a very fresh breathe of air… for as the book title suggests it is not at all a doomsday prophecy rather it is a positive learning experience with vigorous illustrated documentation. In all, the book makes a veritable storehouse of well researched data on natural calamities.

Evolution of best practises can have far reaching consequences on diplomacy in South Asia. A south Asian version of meals on wheels to mitigate starvation with the cultural diversity of Asiatic cuisine has an unimaginable amount of goodwill, economic and diplomatic scope.

Indeed it can be a game changer. Convergence of economic and military might on the high seas for humanitarian mission? Is it naïveté or brilliance? I was unable to decide. But the compelling logic makes it a gripping read in lucid yet powerful text.

Some first person accounts take the reader effortlessly to the forlorn locales like the high seas on Campbell Bay or Sunda Straits. Reading those accounts are enigmatic and addictive, the kind of books ideal during travel for lay persons and serious library referencing for trainee administrators, NGOs and disaster managers in any part of the globe, I can assure you!

Besides the fund of information housed in this literature, another aspect which appeals is the rich narratives of human triumph and tragedy. Most lay persons only remember seeing visuals on TV showing the damage done by the monster waves of the Asian tsunami. Few people are able to get an inside view of the survivor’s mind, body and psyche of a tsunami survivor.

The author through her interactions and interviews with a range of brave hearts who survived the trauma, has sensitively brought home the awareness of just what all entails being a survivor of a disaster of this magnitude; and the ramifications of such a disaster on human souls, which unfolds over years. There is a picture of a cat hiding from scare of a seismic event… there is a picture of a dead cow entangled in the roots of a mangrove forest.

The book also serves as an awareness manual to the common man to get a sense of how delicate the balance in nature is… And just how ruthless and ferocious Mother Nature can be.

A downside is the size of the E book. At 1332 pages it doesn’t make for a quick read, all of which is encapsulated in two words! – “Go Green”. But the author explained that this is because it is an E Book. Once designed for a hard copy printed edition, it should be far less, but of encyclopaedic proportions I am sure!

Also the author could have treated climate change with a lot more of serious attention it calls for; although it is touched up as sub text in various chapters. Said Shankar, in an exclusive discussion with this writer “Even U.N. reports like SREX cannot be a complete and exhaustive compilation of extreme weather events; how then can one unfunded author put it together? Hence I created an online Survey seeking best practices on mitigating hydrometeorological disasters”.

Looking at the alphabetical listing of hydrometeorological disasters in “Preparing For The Day After”, it is obviously a challenge to compile all HM disasters with research reports, field anecdotes, quotes, best practices, pictures, dissertation etc on a global scale in one picture handbook that too without funding by one author.

With photographs sourced from Government of India, Government of Switzerland Government of Brazil, U.N. Photo Library, and another 8 photographers, the illustration is a very rich kaleidoscope of Disaster Management issues. The graphic images of mass graves, mass mortalities have been handled with sensitivity and cannot be called sensational. The book’s photojournalistic value comes out perfectly synchronous to the copious text. Illustration and text both justify the portraiture of disaster management issues.

All in all, an informative and interesting read, needs editing though if it needs to reach the unconverted clichéd “illiterate vulnerable communities”. However the critical significance of the book justifies multilingual editions for a global reach.  It’s a shame that a work of this genre lacked funding and had to compromise on research or printing costs. Google Play Books has universal reach no doubt but its technical accessibility can be challenging, denying the critical reach of the work to the ones to whom it matters the most.

The E Book is available only on Google Play App on smartphones on this link: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=EbzkBQAAQBAJ

Author credits:
Researched, compiled, interviewed photographed and written by Malini Shankar
Photo Editor: Walter Keller.

The director of a newspaper in Beira, Mozambique’s second largest city, told me that he wanted health stories on all topics except HIV.

“We’ve done enough, our readers don’t want anymore, and besides, AIDS is not a problem anymore. [...]]]> Three years ago I was doing a needs assessment on health reporting among Mozambican media.

The director of a newspaper in Beira, Mozambique’s second largest city, told me that he wanted health stories on all topics except HIV.

“We’ve done enough, our readers don’t want anymore, and besides, AIDS is not a problem anymore. There is treatment now, so it’s a matter of personal responsibility not to get infected,” he said.

Is there something new to say about AIDS? The editor of Countdown to Zero reflects on 15 months of reporting on HIV and AIDS in Africa. Credit: M. Sayagues

I understood where he was coming from. He, his reporters and their readers had had enough of the standard AIDS stories:
• provincial and national press releases with numbers of people newly diagnosed or on treatment
• portraits extolling the heroic grannies and the poor orphans
• feature stories blaming the sex workers and truckers along the Beira corridor and the Mozambican miners bringing back hard-earned monies and the virus from South Africa.

So, when in September 2013 IPS asked me to be the editor of Countdown to Zero, I said yes to the chance to tell different AIDS stories.

We had many assets to help us in this journey: The IPS network of African correspondents in hard-hit countries, the help of our partners, UNICEF, UNAIDS and UNFPA, to connect reporters with experts across the continent and to prod the experts to be interviewed, and tips from experts about cutting-edge issues, news and angles.

And so we sailed, originally for one year, extended to 15 months. More than 30 stories and 30 blogs later, I can reflect on my experience as editor.

I train journalists across Africa on health and gender reporting, so I enjoyed Countdown’s on-the-job training component.

Since few of our journalists are specialized health reporters, this meant guiding them along the maze of statistics and jargon, without drowning in facts and keeping the structure of the stories tight and clear.

Open hearts

The most rewarding, though also the hardest, was managing the blog.

These amazing bloggers opened their hearts and their lives to me, beyond what was published.

None was a professional writer but they all had things to say, and it was through our collaborative effort that it was well said.

Yesterday I heard Oliver Mtukudzi sing, under the shadow of Cape Town’s Table Mountain: “It’s not about what we have achieved but what we have overcome.”

I thought about our bloggers’ dramatic stories and how they had overcome adversity and stigma to become beacons of hope and role models to others.

Thank you, Countdown bloggers, for allowing me and my nosy questions into your lives and for sharing your journey with our readers.

New website

I monitored the reprints in Portuguese in Mozambique. The results were impressive; we reached a varied readership. The popular free weekly Verdade(readership 100,000) gave full pages to many of our stories.

Women in Law in Southern Africa/Mozambique reposted in its Portuguese and English websites our stories on cervical cancer and on young women’s shockingly high rates of HIV infection across Africa. The network of NGOs for sexual and reproductive rights and health circulated our Mozambican stories.

In the last three months we went for multimedia, producing packages with infographics, audio soundslides and videos. This was the best part. We developed a spiffy new website to host our packages and they look awesome. Check it out here.

We did a series of stories on the daily struggles of children and youth living with HIV, the forgotten contraceptive needs of women with HIV, and the tragedy of AIDS becoming the leading cause of deaths among African teenagers.

We covered the scaling-up of Option B+, the demand for cheap and fast viral load testing, teenage pregnancy and HIV, how ideas of manhood impact on men’s behaviour around HIV, male circumcision, AIDS in South Sudan and Nigeria, and the complexities of breastfeeding and marriage for Swazi women living with HIV, and more!

So, if I were to talk today to the newspaper director, I would show him the Countdown collection of stories and say:

“Yes, we can write fresh stories on plenty of new topics around HIV and AIDS, and they are as relevant today as during the sad days before treatment. HIV is a central part of Africa’s health challenges and Countdown has been at the frontline of reporting for 15 months.”

Over 22 years in Africa,
Mercedes Sayagues has survived stepping barefoot on a scorpion in the Kalahari, being taken hostage by Unita during Angola’s civil war, and expulsion from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe for reporting human rights abuses. See her recent work as a journalist, editor and media trainer on health and gender at: http://msayagues.wix.com/mywork

Seattle, December 18, 2014

Since his college days, John Schmitt says, he’s been “very interested in questions of economic justice, economic inequality.”  He served a nuts-and-bolts apprenticeship [...]]]> Economist John Schmitt interviewed by Peter Costantini

John Schmitt. Credit: Dean Manis

Third article in a series on minimum wages. This is an expanded version of the interview published by Inter Press Service.

Seattle, December 18, 2014

Since his college days, John Schmitt says, he’s been “very interested in questions of economic justice, economic inequality.”  He served a nuts-and-bolts apprenticeship in the engine room of the labor movement, doing research for several unions in support of organizing campaigns, negotiations and collective bargaining agreements. Now a broad-ranging theoretician with degrees from Princeton and the London School of Economics, his work continues to privilege
the needs and aspirations of working people.  He’s an influential proponent of new approaches to research on low-wage work that have reoriented how much of the “dismal profession” and many policy-makers understand the issue.

Currently, Schmitt is a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.  He also serves as visiting professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and was a Fulbright scholar at the Universidad Centroamericana "Jose Simeon Cañas" in San Salvador, El Salvador.

Inter Press Service interviewed him by telephone and e-mail between August and December 2014.

Minimum wages

IPS: Among policy prescriptions for reducing income inequality and lifting the floor of the labor market, where do you see minimum wages fitting in?

JS: I think the minimum wage is very important.  It concretely raises wages for a lot of low and middle-income workers, but it also establishes the principle that we as a society can demand that the economy be responsive to social needs.

And that belief is really important.  It’s just a legal, almost palpable statement that we have the right to demand of the economy that it serve us and not that we serve the economy.

So I think it’s very useful.  It’s not the solution, in and of itself, to economic inequality.  But it’s an important first step.

And it’s an easy first step.  It’s something that we’ve had in this country since the 1930s.  It’s something that has broad political support.  It regularly polls way above 50 percent, even among Republicans.  And in the population as a whole, the minimum wage is the kind of issue that 65 to 75 percent of voters support.

Of the last 3 increases in the [Federal] minimum wage, in 1990 – 91, in 1996 – 97, and then 2007 – 9, two were signed by Republican presidents, President Bush the First and President Bush the Second, with substantial support in all cases among Republicans in the House and Senate.  So it’s a very American institution that has had a long history of bipartisan support.

And it’s effective in doing what it’s supposed to do, which is raise wages of workers at the bottom.  One reason why it’s so heavily supported is because it does exactly what a lot of people think our social policy should do, which is reward people who work.

I think our social policy should go further than that. But almost everybody agrees that if you’re working hard, you should get paid a decent amount of money for that.  And I think that’s why it enjoys such heavy support among Republicans as well.

Also, it doesn’t involve any government bureaucracy other than a relatively minor enforcement mechanism. Because everybody knows what the minimum wage is.  There’s a social norm and a social expectation that people who work should get at least the minimum wage.

Therefore, it’s not quite self-enforcing, we definitely need enforcement and there are employers who violate the law.  But it’s one of the easier social policies to enforce and to make sure it’s happening uniformly across the country.

Employment

IPS: One of main objections raised by opponents of minimum wage increases is that they reduce employment among low-wage workers. But beginning in the early 1990s, a new approach surfaced that challenged that contention.

JS: I was in graduate school then, right at beginning of what’s called the New Minimum Wage research. Basically, a lot of economists at the time were looking at the experience of states that had increased the minimum wage and were finding that state increases seemed to have little or no effect on employment.

Which ran in the face of both economic theory at the time, but also of some of the earlier empirical economic research that was not, I think, at the same standard of quality as subsequent research.

It caused a lot of controversy, and controversy is still raging.  I think the profession has moved a lot towards the belief that moderate increases in the minimum wage, like the ones that we historically have done, have little or no impact on employment.

There was a big poll by the University of Chicago Business School in 2013 of 40 top economists who are regularly asked to comment on economic policy matters.  They were asked about the minimum wage, and it was really striking to me.

They asked them two questions: one, would raising the wage to $9 an hour [which the President had recently proposed] significantly reduce the chances of less skilled workers and young people finding work?  About a third of the respondents said they agreed, that it would reduce their chances of finding work, a third said they disagreed, and the rest had no opinion or weren’t sure.  If you had done the same poll with the lead economists 30 years before, it probably would have been 2 to 1 saying that it would have a negative effect, or even more potentially.

But even more interesting was the second question: Given whatever you think about the employment effects, do you still think it would be a good idea to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour?   And there it was something like 5 to 1 in favor of increasing the minimum wage.

So I think that there’s a recognition within the economics profession that, even if there are job losses associated with moderate increases in the minimum wage, that they’re very small relative to the wage increases for the vast majority of people who will keep their jobs.  I think that’s increasingly the standard view within the profession.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the bulk of the economics profession thinks that the minimum wage should be $15 an hour or $25 an hour. But it does suggest that even the economics profession is seeing this issue in I think a more realistic way.

The textbook model for how the labor market works is just a vast oversimplification.  It can be useful in some contexts, but it’s just not useful to understand a pretty complicated thing, which is what happens when the minimum wage goes up.

Data and models

IPS: Is this mainly a new economic model replacing old ones, or is it just looking more accurately at the actual statistics from what’s happened.

JS: I think it’s some sort of combination of both things.

I think the first thing is that what most economists are persuaded by is just that the empirical evidence is not that supportive of large job losses. And whatever the theoretical explanation, we can put that aside for a second.  There’s just a lot of good research out there that consistently finds little or no negative employment effects. And when that just happens again and again in the research, I think that wears away economists’ views about a particular result, in the textbook competitive model.

We have 25 years of people who have very high standing in the profession, who have PhD’s from prestigious programs and they teach at prestigious places and publish in prestigious journals.  And they’re consistently finding with very good research, very little effect [on employment].  I think that changes the way people think about this issue.

And then the question is: Why is that?  And there has been a lot of research and thinking about the labor market and the way it works that is consistent with the results they’re finding.

For example, a recent Nobel Prize was given for 3 economists who had worked heavily in an area called “search models” of the labor market.

And one of the fundamental issues of search models is that, unlike the competitive model, where firms and employers and workers can very easily match and find each other, that in fact, search is costly, that it’s hard for firms, even when labor markets are working fairly well, to find employees, it’s hard for employees to find the right match, that people receive offers and reject them and that things go back and forth.  Firms have workers that could work for them, but they don’t hire them for whatever reason.

So that’s one set of issues.  The other area that has also been recognized with Nobel Prizes has to do with information problems within markets.  That employers don’t know exactly how an employee is going to perform until they hire them, how well their skills match their resume.  They don’t know their work attitude.  And employees have information that employers don’t know about how hard they’re willing to work.  And it can be hard to persuade people until you actually show up that you really are going to work as hard as you say.

So that’s another issue with information, it’s a crucial part of the whole rethinking of the labor market. And that’s a key issue within what’s happening with the minimum wage.

Not all workers or potential workers know of every job they can see that’s in the area, and not all employers know of every single person that’s looking for a job.  So the matching can be slow and painful and costly. And one of the key insights [is] that employers aren’t operating in a competitive labor market nor are employees.

But I think within the mainstream economics profession there are a lot of other potential explanations that also fit.  There’s the possibility that employers make adjustments in other dimensions besides laying workers off: they raise their prices somewhat, or they cut back on hours but don’t lay off workers.

And from a worker’s point of view, if they raise your salary by 20 percent and they cut your hours by 5 or 10 percent you’re still better off, right? Because you’re getting paid more money and you’re working fewer hours.

That might not be the employers’ favorite thing to do, but it certainly works well for workers.  So there are a lot of ways that firms can adjust to minimum wage increases other than laying people off.

Turnover

IPS: So from a worker’s point of view, even if there were a reduction in hours or more unemployment, I still come out ahead. Low-income work is already very unstable. Hours are variable and often part-time, and there are a lot of layoffs, firings and quitting.

JS: Some of the best research is on the simple question of turnover – which is an important ingredient here, labor turnover. There’s a new paper by Arin Dube, Bill Lester and Michael Reich [three U.S. economists]. Basically, they look very carefully at what happens to labor turnover rates before and after minimum wage increases, and find substantial declines in turnover for different kinds of workers.

One concrete example from a different study: there was a living wage law that was passed at the San Francisco airport a few years back, and they did an analysis of what happened to the workers that were affected. And they found something like an 80 percent decline in turnover of the baggage handlers after the minimum wage went up, the living wage.  And there were substantial increases in wages for those workers.

I think that’s probably on the high end of what you could expect.  But even reductions of 20, 25, 30 percent in a high-turnover industry, it makes a big difference.

Something that I think people who don’t work in business don’t fully appreciate is that turnover is extremely expensive, even for low-wage workers. Filling a vacancy for a low-wage job can be 15, up to 20 percent, of the annual cost of that job. That sounds a little bit high, but if you stop to think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

One issue is that when you have a vacancy, the people who have to fill it are managers. So they have to use their time, which bills much more expensively than low-wage workers, to fill that.  They need to post an ad, they need to review the resumes that are handed in, then they need to interview people, then they need to spend time training that person and integrating them into the company. That can take weeks of time to do, and it’s weeks of time at a manager’s billing rate, not at the low-wage worker’s billing rate.

And meanwhile, while the vacancy is there, you’re losing customers, because people come in and they see that there’s a long line, so they go next door.

And then the other thing is once you have a new worker, even if it’s a fast food worker that has experience working at McDonald’s, now they’re working at a Burger King, and they do the systems differently.  You have to learn the new way to do that. Even if you’re at a slightly differentMcDonald’s, the one you worked at was a suburban McDonald’s that had a drive-through, now you’re working at a downtown McDonald’s and they have a different way of doing things.  You’re not going to be as efficient, you’re not going to be as integrated into the team for a while.

So there’s a lot of cost of turnover.  And if the minimum wage reduces turnover, which there seems to be an increasing amount of evidence that that’s the case, then it can go a long way towards explaining why we see so little employment impact of minimum wage increases.  And I think that’s what’s going on.

Mitigation

IPS: What other factors mitigate the employment effects of minimum wage increases in different localities?

JS: It’s hard to compare.  It’s not just the size of the increase; it’s how many workers are affected by that increase, and how much is average increase is relative to how much they’re getting paid right now.

So at the Federal level, when the minimum wage goes up by say 15 percent in a year, the average wage increase for workers who are affected by that is much less than 15 percent.  It’s half of that. And for some increases it could be even less than that, because not everyone gets the full increase.  It also depends on where the starting wage is.

And keep in mind also, every single business that’s operating in Seattle, or Santa Fe, or the State of California, or wherever they’re going to do an increase, is operating under same rules.

And for the most part, businesses that are involved heavily in the low-wage labor market and are affected by the minimum wage are ones that are competing very much at a local level.  It’s retail, it’s fast-food restaurants, it’s full-service restaurants, dry cleaners, and the low-wage service sector, that’s really what we’re talking about here.  So you’re not putting any company at any competitive disadvantage relative to the vast majority of their competitors.

Part of what‘s going to happen is that there will be efficiency gains.  The best companies, the best managed companies, the ones who know how to operate effectively with higher wages, are going to take over the market share.

So it might be that some business goes out of business, but the people who eat sandwiches there are now going to be buying sandwiches from the same shop under a different name, or they’re going to be buying from the shop next door where the manager knows how to get workers to be productive and effective at the new wage, relative to the other manager who wasn’t able to do that.

Velocity

IPS: What about the velocity of adjustment?

JS: A lot of initial studies, especially the early studies from the New Minimum Wage Research, looked at relatively short periods of time, 6 months or a year after the minimum wage. And so they were criticized for not looking long enough.  And now I’d say most their research looks for a year, and then two and even three years.

My view is that to the extent that these are going to have impacts on prices or employment, you’re going to see them pretty quickly.  And the reason why you’d see them quickly in employment is because it’s a very high turnover area.

So say you have a fast food restaurant and you have 30 employees, 30 openings where you have workers. In the course of a year, you might have 60 workers who fill those 30 slots.  And imagine that the critics of the minimum wage are right, and instead of having 30 employees, now because of the minimum wage increase now you’re only going to have 28.

Well, basically, in a month, two people are going to leave and you’re just not going to fill those slots.  So it’s just going to come up very quickly.  If you really can’t afford to pay 30 workers, two of them are going to leave because they go to college, because one of them has a baby and decides to stay home, because their spouse moved to another state and they’re following their spouse.  Any number of things happen.  They hate the job so they quit.  And it’s very much more likely to happen in low-wage jobs.

So you immediately adjust at 28, assuming that that’s correct.

Similarly, it’s not that hard to change prices.  If this means you’re going to have to raise your prices by 3 percent or 4 percent, you change the prices. It’s not like it takes 6 months to change a price.  I mean, you basically change your menu and then you’re done.  It just doesn’t take too long for the adjustments to take place.

Teenagers

IPS: Some of the earlier minimum-wage research seems to have focused mainly on teenagers. But teenagers are 12% now of the total low-wage workers. And even in 1979 they were only 26%.

JS: I think that there’s a longstanding focus on teenagers that goes back 50, 60 years, possibly longer, in research on the minimum wage.

And the reason is because economists want to see if they can find negative results.  You want to look for the canary in the coal mine; you want to look for the most sensitive group that you can identify.  And if you find negative results there, you can say “Look, we found negative results.  And we have reason to believe that the same kind of dynamic, less intensely, is going to be operating on slightly older workers and on adult workers.”

The flip side of it is, if you look at teenagers and you don’t find any employment loss among teenagers, who ought to be the most sensitive to rate increases in the minimum wage, it seems very unlikely that you’re going to find them anywhere else.

And then of course another area where people look a lot is not at workers themselves, but at employment in other industries such as fast food and retail where there are a lot of low-wage workers.

I think we now have a lot of evidence, looking at a lot of ways to cut the data, that all point towards little to no employment losses for moderate increases.

The thing about it is, even though most of the workers who earn at or near the minimum wage are not teenagers, you’re looking for a group that is very heavily concentrated in the low-wage sector. So it’s just easier to find an effect.

From my point of view, I’m fine with the framing of looking at teenagers or looking at fast food. Because what consistently is the case is that they’re not finding any negative results even there.

So if it were the case that they were finding employment losses for teenagers, then I think we could have an argument about whether or not that was generalizable to the rest of the population. But I think at this point we’re not having even that argument particularly strongly.

The thing that’s interesting to me is that it’s often framed that, “This is going to hurt African-American and Latino kids, young teenagers.”  And what’s striking to me is that the implied impacts on African-American and Latino teenagers, even if you belief the harshest critics of the minimum wage, are tiny compared with the permanent gaps in employment between African-American and Latino teenagers on the one hand and white teenagers on the other hand.

And yet, when we’re not talking about the minimum wage, the same people who are crying tears about black teens are doing absolutely nothing to address the permanent long-term gap in employment between black teens and white teens, whenever the minimum wage isn’t on the table.  It’s always there and it’s not related to the minimum wage in any way.  And there’s no concern about “Let’s address this tragedy”, except in the context of preventing the minimum wage from going up.

Earned Income Tax Credit

IPS: What about the Earned Income-Tax Credit?  [A provision of the U.S. income tax code that subsidizes lower-income working families according to the number of their children]  It seems that some mainly conservative commentators have opposed that to the minimum wage.

JS: The Earned Income Tax Credit and the minimum wage I think are strongly complementary policies. And to suggest that one is a substitute for the other is to miss the way that they both work.

I am always concerned when I hear conservatives criticizing the min wage, and offering the EITC instead. Because that’s used to beat down the minimum wage.  But when the tough vote then comes to increase the EITC, because that’s what we should be doing, they’re suddenly concerned that, well, this is a tax increase, it increases the size and role of the federal government in the economy, and therefore we shouldn’t do it.  So all of these other ideological reasons to oppose the EITC come to the fore when the minimum wage isn’t on the table.

But basically, the way the EITC is structured, it lowers wages for employers, and in fact what that means is that they capture some important part of the tax dollars that are used to expand the EITC.

Which is not the intention: the intention is that the money go to low-wage workers themselves, not their employers. And because of the way the EITC is structured, it lowers wages and the employers actually capture an important part of the benefits.

There’s a very good study by an economist at Berkeley, Jesse Rothstein, who estimates that about 27 cents of every dollar that we spend on the EITC actually goes to benefit employers rather than the workers who are supposed to be getting it.

Because basically, the EITC raises the after-EITC wage of many workers who get it, but that increases the supply of workers to the labor market.  And that in turn reduces the market wage of workers, because there are more workers out there.

If you get the EITC, you’re still coming out ahead.  But the point is the market wage has fallen, which from the employers’ point of view means they’re paying less for the workers that they get.  And they actually therefore capture a part of the increase, and it’s not a small part, it’s about a fourth of the total expenditure.

Now what the minimum wage can do is it can limit the ability of employers to capture that because it puts a floor on the wage. And it prevents the wage from falling too low and it prevents employers from capturing the EITC in the form of lower wages.  So they work well together as policies.

Democracy

IPS: What about Santa Fe?  [A city in New Mexico that raised its minimum wage 65% in 2004, the biggest recent local increase] You’ve done a study on it.

JS: I would not want to make too much of any one case, whether it’s New Jersey versus Pennsylvania back in the early 90s that led to the David Card and Alan Krueger study [that began the New Minimum Wage research], or a specific issue of Santa Fe or
Albuquerque more recently or San Francisco.

No two cities are exactly alike. But I think the evidence is mounting up that a lot of different cities or states in a lot of different contexts raise the minimum wage and we don’t see big effects.

When Santa Fe decided to raise the minimum wage, it was a very big increase.  But I have a lot of faith in the democratic process.  So when you have a city that’s focused on where should we set the wage, a lot of people weigh in: business people in the community weigh in, workers in the community, unions in the community, community organizations dealing with social service questions. and low wage workers who are struggling to make ends meet, academics from local universities who know the economy and the social situation well.

There’s a city-wide or a state-wide conversation.  And that process – and I think this is one reason why we consistently don’t see big employment effects – usually arrives at some wage that is a vast improvement over what we currently have and within the realm of what the local economy can afford.

An important reason why we don’t see job losses is because the people who have the biggest voice in this are business. They understand politically that they have to get in, but they’re going to push back as hard as they can. I think we probably consistently err on the side of caution rather than on the side of going too far.

So what’s interesting about Santa Fe – or we just passed a minimum wage bill here in the City Council in Washington, DC – is that a lot of people weighed in.  I was one of well over 100 people who testified before the City Council with their opinion.  There were people from National Restaurant Association and the Chamber of Commerce, unions, small business organizations, academics, policy people.

And the City Council heard, and they were choosing between a bunch of different proposals, and they hammered out a proposal that worked.

It sounds like in Seattle there was a very similar process. It was shooting towards 15 dollars, but then there was a consideration of how we get there exactly, how fast we get there, who gets there how fast, are there any exemptions. I have a lot of confidence that what happened in Seattle will work well, because so many factors were taken into consideration in the process of setting those wages.

Labor

IPS: How do you see the 15Now movement, the fast-food workers movement, changing the labor movement?

JS: I think it’s very encouraging.  There’s a lot of dynamism behind the fast food and 15 folks and what’s happening in Seattle, a lot of city and state campaigns to increase the minimum wage.  They’re putting a lot of focus on wages and wage inequality, and the need to reward people for working hard.

They’re also focusing attention on a couple of other issues that are going to be really important in the future, I think they’re going to be increasingly a part of the public debate: for example, around scheduling questions. One of the recurring problems for fast-food workers and retail workers is not just that their wages are so low, but also that they have little or no control over their schedules. And that’s an issue that goes way above people who are making $7.25 or $10 or $15 an hour.

And in particular, in the absence of private sector unions that can help protect workers against scheduling problems, that’s going to be an increasing concern to have legislation, but also to have some kind of worker voice on the job that can help address those things.

I think any time you have people agitating for economic and social justice and getting national attention while they’re doing that, it’s encouraging for the possibility of turning around 3 going on 4 decades of rising economic inequality.

I’m encouraged by the moment that we’re living right now on this front. The single most important thing is to keep some oxygen flowing here so that this conversation can continue to happen: the media cover it, people talk about it when they’re having a beer with their friends, or when they’re walking around downtown at noon and they see a bunch of McDonald’s workers out making noise.  That’s not something we’ve seen a lot of in the last 35 years.

[Edited for length and clarity. See newswire article on Inter Press Service – link]

More on John Schmitt

Publications

 “Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2013. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf

“The Minimum Wage Is Too Damn Low”. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 2012. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage1-2012-03.pdf

With Janelle Jones. “The Wage and Employment Impact of Minimum-Wage Laws in Three Cities”. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 2011. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2011-03.pdf

With David Rosnick. “Low-wage Workers Are Older and Better Educated than Ever”. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 2012. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage3-2012-04.pdf

Full list: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/clips/john-schmitts-publications

Biography

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/experts/biographies/john-schmitt

Related articles in minimum wage series

Peter Costantini. “Low-Wage Workers Butt Heads with 21st Century Capital”. Seattle, WA: Inter Press Service, June 3, 2014. http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/06/low-wage-workers-butt-heads-with-21st-century-capital/
Expanded version on blog. http://www.ips.org/blog/ips/low-wage-workers-butt-heads-with-21st-century-capital

Peter Costantini. “Minimum Wage, Minimum Cost”. Seattle, WA: Inter Press Service, August 11, 2014. http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/08/minimum-wage-minimum-cost
Expanded version on blog. http://www.ips.org/blog/ips/minimum-wage-minimum-cost

My first story for Countdown to Zero, back in 2013, was on paediatric HIV and I felt up to the task.

In fact, I was ready to file the story that same day. After all, this was not my first story on HIV, I had done many before. And no one had [...]]]> By Joyce Chimbi

My first story for Countdown to Zero, back in 2013, was on paediatric HIV and I felt up to the task.

In fact, I was ready to file the story that same day. After all, this was not my first story on HIV, I had done many before. And no one had ever burnt my effigy.

But I had not worked with Mercedes Sayagues, the Countdown editor. She wanted me to think outside the box. Very difficult.

As Countdown to Zero winds down, Nairobi-based journalist Joyce Chimbi reflects on what 15 months of reporting on HIV and AIDS have meant for her. Credit: M. Sayagues/IPS

After 30 years of HIV/AIDS reporting in Africa, what could I tell that hadn’t been told before?

I did not know then that this story would set me up on a journey of ten stories, and in each one of them, I would be surprised at how little I knew about the new developments in HIV.

I was even more surprised at the attention that the stories were receiving from readers as well as other media outlets that reprinted and rerun my stories.

There is a perception that the media and the public are saturated with HIV/AIDS information, possibly because there is too much focus on what has gone wrong.

The failed vaccines. The startling new infections. The need for viral load testing. The deaths.

But there is much more than that. Stories of people who are rising above the challenge. Countries adopting new and better HIV guidelines. Cutting-edge technologies.

Each story was unique and close to my heart because in each you could hear the voice of many Kenyans and many Africans affected or infected with HIV. And you could also see their faces.

Researching and writing

I researched extensively on every story and got a lot of help along the way. Zenawit Melesse, of UNAIDS, linked me up with experts across the region who were eager to talk to me.

Researching was hard work but rewarding. I loved researching on young women bearing the brunt of HIV, and on viral load testing as the gold standard in treatment.

As a reporter, I had attended many support groups for people living with HIV, who were always happy to share their CD4 count – the higher, the better.

Yet many were still sickly. They had been on drugs for years but had never had a viral load test, which catches people who are failing on treatment before they develop drug resistance.

Countdown introduced new angles but that was half of it. New angles demanded a new style of writing. The stories had to be punchy.

Yet I still told them the same way I had told them before, same narrative, same flow, same structure, because I didn’t know any better. The editor worked tirelessly with me and, with time, I caught on.

Mercedes is well informed on HIV/AIDS, and strict with accuracy. I could not sneak in an ambiguous sentence without her demanding that I either attribute it or back with statistics. That was hard. She doesn’t compromise on statistics or quality.

Working with Countdown pushed me to do much more than I thought I had the capacity to, and while at it, I have learnt to clarify, attribute and qualify every statement in the story.

You know how people say that there are more women than men on treatment, but you have no idea when or where that conclusion was arrived at or what it implies?

It happened to me several times with Countdown stories, until I learnt to first find out who came up with the statistics, how credible they are and to seek the most recent statistics. At times, it was very frustrating.

This process has had a great impact on how I report on other topics too. My stories have become more comprehensive and well researched.

Fifteen months of Countdown, and I still feel we have just scratched the surface.

HIV/AIDS is still a serious health challenge for humankind, especially for Africa. There is need for and a lot of room for more stories about how we are tackling it.

Joyce Chimbi is a Kenya-based jack of all trades reporter. HIV/AIDS is her primary focus and, when not reporting on it, she is tracking down economists, climate change experts, educationists, activists, demonstrators ….basically, if you have an opinion on something, she is probably looking for you too!

The intriguingly titled RESPECT study (Rewarding Sexually Transmitted Infection [...]]]> Conditional cash transfers to affect sexual behaviour are increasingly popular in HIV prevention research and rhetoric. This consists in paying mostly young people money if they do not get a sexually transmitted infection (STI), which is a marker for unprotected sex and, therefore, HIV risk.

The intriguingly titled RESPECT study (Rewarding Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention and Control in Tanzania) has been described in a World Bank working paper as creating significant reduction in STIs in one of the intervention groups.

Participants received US$20 every four months if they tested negative for STIs.

Do conditional cash transfers to change sexual behaviour and prevent HIV work, or do they actually commodify sex and health, presuming that young people will not adopt healthy behaviour unless they get an economic reward?
Credit: Mercedes Sayagues

The effects were stronger among lower socioeconomic and “higher risk” groups, that is, those who had an STI at the start of the research. The cash transfer had an equal protective effect for males and females at the end of the study. However, a survey of participants one year later showed a sustained effect among males only.

Some interesting aspects of the findings:

– The researchers wondered if the cash transfers for females worked in the short term not because they changed something intrinsic to the person, but because they protected against transactional sex on an immediate day to day basis
– Self reported changes in sexual behaviour were not consistent with STI prevalence, suggesting self report is unreliable in measuring change
– STI treatment-seeking behaviours did not change, suggesting that money influences some aspects of behaviour but not others.

Complex dynamics at play

All of this starts to paint a complex and interesting picture. The researchers suggest a number of overlapping factors could be at play.

“Price effects” essentially influence a participant to weigh the “price” of risky sex as they could lose cash if they tested STI positive.

But this can itself be affected by the fact that getting an STI from unprotected sex is not automatic; a lot depends on the risk profile of one’s sexual partners. As a result, this “price” calculation is an ongoing balancing act, with unpredictable outcomes.

“Income effects”, a weighing up of benefit as opposed to cost, might account for some females seeing the cash transfers as offsetting monies and goods they might get from transactional sex.

But, since more money could also make males more likely to have sex (money as sexual pulling power), this “income effect” is not inevitable.

The researchers wondered if some participants could make the necessary calculations to weigh up risks and benefits. In some cases, participants overestimated HIV prevalence and possible financial loss, and so their behavioural adjustments were not always congruent with risk.

It seemed that participants were also more likely to consider short term (losing the money) rather than long term (being HIV positive) costs, suggesting perhaps that cash transfers work for some people because they are “present-focused”.

Paying for sex, paying not to have sex

On the other hand, if behaviour change is to be sustained, how do we help people think more long term?

A meta-analysis found that conditional cash transfers suggest promise but context, purpose and population were key to effectiveness. Most of the studies were with young people. This fact, along with the ideas above, raises many interesting questions.

In focusing on sexual risk, STIs and HIV, are we unconsciously reinforcing a bleak and pessimistic view of young people, only seeing them as “risk units”, needing extrinsic reinforcement to be safe, as opposed to helping them develop internally generated – and consistent – agency, which is supported by the context they live in and is “wired” into them for life?

Is it respectful to young people to challenge transactional sex by saying “paying for sex is wrong but we will pay you not to have sex”?

Are we not cynically re-commodifying sex, and what are the unintended consequences of this?

Where is there space in this conversation for ideas around desire, pleasure, intimacy and love? Is this not an excessively instrumental view of human behaviour, devoid of meaning, connection and community?

Or can it be argued that these are irrelevant, or less urgent, in the middle of an epidemic?

I worry that we are “atomising” young people; losing the opportunity, firstly, to ask more interesting and complex questions about networks of positive social and sexual capital; and secondly, to find ways to make sexual and reproductive health a natural and pro-social part of who we are, not just a conditioned response to an external stimulus.

Pierre Brouard, director of the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, is a clinical psychologist interested in sexualities, gender, human rights, and finding just the right word to grace a sentence, convey empathy or complete a crossword.

From Kampala to Kingston; Delhi to Denver; and São Paulo to Santiago, giving children a strong start in life is critical to not only the growth and development of individuals, but also the growth and development of nations.

As the child mortality rate continues to decline, a new interest in the healthy [...]]]> By Joan Lombardi

From Kampala to Kingston; Delhi to Denver; and São Paulo to Santiago, giving children a strong start in life is critical to not only the growth and development of individuals, but also the growth and development of nations.

As the child mortality rate continues to decline, a new interest in the healthy development of young children has become the next frontier in health care, social protection and education. We need to continue to improve the chances that children survive, as we move forward to help all young children thrive.

We are leaving behind the outdated adage that education begins at the school house door, and instead are embracing the reality that learning begins at birth. Through innovative and integrated development programs and policies, we are bringing together all sectors that affect our children and are caring for the whole child and family.

In countries around the world, public awareness about the lasting impact of investing in early childhood is growing; national plans are emerging, evidence is mounting.

At the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in October, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a new set of Grand Challenges, including a focus on both women and girls, and on helping children thrive. President Obama recently announced the White House Summit on Early Education on December 10th, bringing together leaders and stakeholders from across the United States working to help children get off to a strong start.

Experts from around the world recently gathered in Brazil to discuss how to best reach more young children and families with effective programming and investment. The Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally brought together leaders from education, health, social protection and development to identify the best practices across science, policy and financing. In São Paulo, experts explored global and national research as well as innovative solutions to promote healthy development.

Broader understanding of the importance of the first years of life in relation to long-term health, opportunity and well-being is finally “coming of age.”

And yet so much remains to be done. As we work to improve access to education and early childhood development, we must also ensure that a child enters school ready to succeed. When we improve our social protection and economic policies to support parents, reduce domestic violence and ensure a child’s safety, we are helping children thrive not only today but in the future. A lack of access to quality health care diminishes a family’s basic ability to survive. By integrating community health workers and behavior change programs, we work with families to understand their health options, improve access to services and support their parenting.

We’ve seen the impact our actions can have across individual sectors. We have the tools and services to care for the whole family; now is the time to integrate our successes into one global agenda to best serve families and help our children thrive. We must begin here:

· Put a holistic approach to health, education and social protection for young children at the center of post-2015 sustainable development goals;

· Expand public investments and national policies to increase the availability and accessibility of integrated services to those in the greatest need;

· Increase multilateral and bilateral investments in young children, including early education and family support; and

· Work with the private sector to increase their time and investments in communities throughout the world.

We recognize the opportunities to work across generations to improve opportunities not just for children, but for their families. The hope of stemming inequality rests with our willingness to provide opportunity right from the earliest years of life. In a world divided, it is time to come together around a common cause that can unite us, one that can ring in a new era of peace and one that can build on the world’s greatest resource—its children.

Joan Lombardi, Ph.D. is an international expert on child development and social policy. Over the past 40 years she has made significant contributions to the development of early childhood and family support policies as an innovative leader and advisor to national and international organizations and foundations and as a public servant. She currently serves as an advisor to the Bernard van Leer Foundation as well as the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, and as a member of the Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally.