colored queer waters

First homemade meal since graduating from Hampshire. Lentils seasoned with cayenne, curry powder, and garlic alongside kale and chard.

(Source: paxamericana)

satanic-capitalist:

84 Percent of NYC Fast Food Workers Report Wage Theft in a New Survey

Friday, 17 May 2013 00:00By Josh Eidelson, The Nation | Report

At an 11 am press conference yesterday outside a Brooklyn KFC restaurant, fast food workers and activists released a new report alleging rampant wage theft in their industry, one of the fastest-growing in the United States. The report includes results from an Anzalone Liszt Grove research survey of 500 of the city’s fast food workers, in which 84 percent reported that their employer had committed some form of wage theft over the previous year.

Yesterday’s press conference follows strikes by fast food workers in five major cities within six weeks, all demanding raises to $15 an hour and the chance to form unions without intimidation. The report, “New York’s Hidden Crime Wave: Wage Theft and NYC’s Fast Food Workers,” is being published by Fast Food Forward, the campaign behind the strikes in New York. It lands on the same day as a New York Times article reporting that New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman “is investigating whether the owners of several fast-food restaurants and a fast-food parent corporation have cheated their workers out of wages, according to a person familiar with the cases.”

Reached by e-mail, a spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association told The Nation, “We fully support compliance with all state and federal wage and employment laws.” The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Wage theft” is a term popularized by activists and advocates over the past decade to describe a wide range of ways in which companies fail to pay employees the wages they’re legally owed. The Fast Food Forward report identifies several types of violations as prevalent in the city’s fast food industry: employees working, without pay, before or after their shift; employees working overtime without being paid time-and-a-half; employees working during their breaks or not receiving breaks; and delivery employees not being reimbursed for expenses like gasoline or safety equipment.

The report quotes McDonald’s worker Elizabeth Rene, who says she loses up to $75 a month because she isn’t paid for the time she spends counting the register before and after her shift: “I feel cheated and used and like I’m not appreciated for my hard work.”A 2008 study by the National Employment Law Project estimated that the average low-wage worker loses 15 percent of his or her annual income to wage theft.

Asked about wage theft allegations, a Domino’s spokesperson told The New York Times’s Julie Turkewitz, “If anybody is paying below minimum wage or using the tipped wage credit, that would probably be independent franchisees in our system. And I can’t really speak to that.” The authors of today’s report reject such arguments. “Because the corporations design, maintain, monitor and profit from the fast food delivery system,” they write, “they should be the focus of regulatory and political action to eradicate wage theft up and down the fast food chain.”

As I’ve reported, recent years have seen a rise in labor activism around wage theft, often backed by unions or “alt-labor” groups organizing non-union workers in the workplace and in local politics. In 2010, New York passed a statewide anti–wage theft law that the Progressive States Network described as the strongest in the country. In January, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed an ordinance that threatens offending companies with the loss of their business licenses. In other cases, forcing unwanted legal, political or media scrutiny on alleged wage theft by a company has proven a potent weapon in labor groups’ “comprehensive campaigns” to force concessions from management. The release of yesterday’s report could represent an additional front in campaigns by Fast Food Forward, and parallel groups elsewhere, to transform jobs that are increasingly representative of work in the modern United States.

(12:15 pm Thursday): The New York Attorney General’s office has confirmed to The Nation that it issued subpoenas to a fast food parent corporation, and is investigating several New York State franchisees (the AG’s office declined to name the corporation). Schneiderman’s office is exploring potential legal violations including sub-minimum wage pay, unpaid work, false payroll records, overtime without time-and-a-half pay, work expenses that weren’t fully reimbursed and paychecks that bounced.

In an e-mailed statement, Schneiderman spokesperson Damien LaVera called the Fast Food Forward report’s findings “deeply troubling,” and said they “shed light on potentially broad labor violations by the fast food industry.” “We take the allegations seriously,” said LaVera, “which is why our office is investigating fast food franchisees. New Yorkers expect companies doing business in our state to follow laws set up to protect working families.” LaVera urged workers who have experienced wage theft by fast food companies to contact the attorney general’s office.

Across the country, domestic workers are left unprotected from labor law. Read what you can do to help.

This story originally appeared in The Nation. 
Copyright © 2012 The Nation 2013 distributed by Agence Global.

i’m going to be honest in saying this is not my area of expertise 

i can recommend some good books about food justice that might discuss food co-ops as part of their praxis. but the intimate economic workings of co-ops i know nothing about except for occasionally shopping at a book co-op near Hampshire 

• Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (Food, Health, and the Environment)

• Food Justice (Food, Health, and the Environment) 
• Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation (i just found this on amazon and i’m a little excite d to get my hands on it and read it)
• Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems
• Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply

crackerhell:

Asking the PoC working in a restaurant if the food is white people spicy or like…actually spicy.

the struggle is SOO REAL

like what do those little peppers next to each listed dish REALLY mean

am i going to be tearing up with delicious joy or just flat out disappointed 

delicateheresy:

PLEASE REPOST

Please email and call these spaces and let them know that you are unhappy that they are allowing Rachel Ivey of Deep Green Resistance to speak at their space as part of the Resistance Rewritten speaking tour. Rachel Ivey considers trans women to be men;…

seetobe:

mothballwombat:

navigatethestream:

mothballwombat:

megachiropteran:

mothballwombat:

warblingbear:

navigatethestream:

its the notion of boycotts

you wanna know why the bus boycotts of the civil rights movement were so successful?

because an alternative black run transportation system was created for those who couldn’t walk to work or whatever they had to go

they…

So would you argue that there is no value in avoiding making unethical choices even when others cannot? Or to do that in conjunction with other work that aids progress?

I am not saying that no one should try to make ethical choices when they can, but to recognize that a boycott alone of unethical foods will not bring change to the way food is produced in this world. If people feel the need to do everything individually that they can to ‘reduce their impact’ on the planet, they have every right to. I got a problem with it when people start saying that “the world & all the animals will totally be saved if just EVERYONE went vegan/didn’t buy Monsanto/banned GMO foods/only ate locally or organically!” Because that sentence has a premise, and its premise is that it is currently possible for 100% of people to be vegan. Even in a perfect world of accessibility, there would be a significant amount of people who cannot do a vegan diet — there are plenty of chronic illnesses (which are *not* rare, despite people’s assertion that they are) that would be in need of animal products in their diet. Are we to just let them die?

I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. I don’t have them. The answer to stopping our global industrial food system and replacing it with someone else is a huge, daunting problem and it involves more than just our food issues, but water issues and waste issues and transport issues and a whole slew of other things. I’m one person. I care about these issues but I can’t kid myself into thinking that any individual action I take is going to change this very large and scary machine that makes us dependent on choosing between a myriad of unethical choices in order to survive. I do what I can within the realm of my possibilities, and when I’m physically and mentally able to, I’ll continue to work on these issues in a more direct action format via legislation lobbying, education, and accessibility support. But I’m never going to claim that anything I do is going to fix the whole problem. It’s going to take community organizing, community accountability, and an understanding that there isn’t One Solution. There are many solutions that need to be tailored to each community. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of effort and understanding of other cultures, other people, and their own struggles.

You can’t fix this thing with just a boycott. It’s a small tool in the toolbox and we have to use all of them if we even want to make a dent in this thing.

I generally agree with you but disagree with arguments that make it seem that it is irrelevant to curb harmful behavior when possible. I am vegan because I can be and it would be bizarre of me to accept that food practices that utilize animals are painful and unethical to the animals, destructive to the environment, create additional health and safety risks to food workers that already deal with horrible conditions, etc. and to do otherwise. Most of the people I have met since going vegan seem to operate similarly and I think understandably expect other people to come to the same conclusion when and if they are able. I was not vegan my entire life because I didn’t have the knowledge available to me that I needed to understand the pros and cons of my food choices and I don’t blame myself for that just as I don’t blame people that are currently in that situation or are in some other situation that affects their ability to make choices about their food.

That still doesn’t mean that there are any good reasons to discourage people from making ethical choices when they can just because other people cannot, or (and this is really what I feel is being communicated and what makes me uncomfortable) devaluing and dismissing ethical choices others have made because others cannot or because it does not entirely solve a complicated issue. I find this especially strange because I like to think that, especially for people that have limited abilities to contribute to causes and movements that they find important, every small contribution against a harmful practice is valuable.

“That still doesn’t mean that there are any good reasons to discourage people from making ethical choices when they can just because other people cannot, or (and this is really what I feel is being communicated and what makes me uncomfortable) devaluing and dismissing ethical choices others have made because others cannot or because it does not entirely solve a complicated issue.” 

and this is where reading comprehension is a hell of a thing. 

nowhere am i discouraging people from making “better choices” if they are able. please point to the paragraph or sentence where you managed to arrive at that conclusion. 

i am saying “ethical” is relative to a person’s ability to survive

and the notion of “ethical consumption/abstinence from unethical consumption” isn’t a holistic tool of social change considering most people are going to put their need to survive over adhering to a person’s notion of “ethical” who is probably not in their socio-economic situation let alone cultural context.  

you mention being vegan because you find the practice of eating meat and the ways in which meat production causes harm to people/the environment/animals objectionable 

let me ask some critical questions:

does your veganism work to end food deserts by bringing healthy and fresh foods into places where access to such things are limited or non-existent?

does your veganism work to expand food stamps and federally funded food assistance programs so that per month budgets for food are way larger than they currently are across the board and participants are given incentives to buy healthier food? 

does your veganism seek to decolonize itself and locate itself in an anti-racist praxis through the way you engage with recipes, ingredients, alternative healing methods, alternative skin care/beauty methods from the global diaspora of color? meaning if you’re buying recipe books, “health books”, whatever, where white authors have appropriated these elements from cultures of color and subsequently are profiting off them. more so than a person of color would. then you’re choices aren’t as ethical as you’d make them out to be 

because if not your choices are not necessarily more “ethical” than others. they’re really just located in an individualist “ethic” where you prioritize certain things over others, and there is still room to poke holes in your notion of ethical consumption. 

i’m not out here to stroke the egos of people who think of themselves as “ethical consumers”. i’m out here to interrogate an individualist politic that is classicist and by and large racist and is being used as a rhetorical device of change. 

instead of “discouraging people” from making unethical choices, provide them with more affordable, economically sustainable, and culturally relevant choices. 

do that work and then i can pretend to give a damn about your “ethical choices”

I think you are misunderstanding me (and I was responding to megachiropteran actually, sorry for any confusion). I’m not claiming and never have claimed that veganism solves all of these issues and I’m confused by that accusation. My veganism is a choice I made within a wider context of choices and behaviors I try to engage in that pit the choices I am able to make in my life against one another and in which I choose the one that causes the least amount of harm. I recognize and would love to support in any capacity any movements that attempt to solve any of the issues that you’ve brought up because I completely agree with you and these are issues that I feel I have an obligation to research. But again I feel like I need to point out that even individual choices like veganism are still valuable. I would be much more comfortable with a statement that rather than characterize a choice like veganism as ignorant of these issues instead chose to appeal to the sensibility that I think often encourages vegans to be vegan to begin with and made them aware of other things they can do to combat harmful food practices in general.

I think you are misunderstanding the entire conversation which started as discussing why boycotting is only one tool that certain groups tend to bring out over and over again, constant calls to boycott X or Y, without any replacement ethical and affordable product/service to replace it with  (history shows that pretty much the only way a boycott is successful is with a better replacement) or any recognition or the socio-economic, physical, and the wide range of other reasons a person can’t take part. Too many groups make it all about not buying X and then feel smug when nothing has happened and no one has been helped. 

Going on about how your awesome vegan choice is totally making things better and doing the least harm (with no information to back you up and completely ignoring the many problems in modern Western veganism) is completely derailing the point of the conversation. If you want information, you have the internet. Look up food deserts, look up food programmes you can help with or areas that need help and start your own, look up the whitewashing and profitteering of popular tradition foods to the point that people are now growing popular vegan crops because of Western vegan demands to the point they can’t eat their own food (see Quinoa) that they’ve been eating for centuries and was once mocked as poor food by White people until it turned out they were amazing healthy for us.  The Western vegan focus on that crop is responsible for it and it’s such a big issue, the UN has made 2013 the year of Quinoa to try to find a way to stop those growing the food from starving. And that’s just one crop, most of the crops grown for the Western appetite has a human problem behind it is being ignored and boycotting isn’t going to help. Look up workers conditions. See all the work already being done to fight for those people who are being oppressed and exploited to put food on your table. The entire system needs a change, lobbying and action needs to be done beyond not buying X or Y. 

Information is out there, action can be taken, though it’s highly unlikely to be prepackaged to suit your sensibilities. Being vegan isn’t the only way to be ethical (nor do all vegans come to it by the same way, as a former vegan I’m pretty sure I came by it differently than you did), and it’s an ethic that a lot of holes can be poked particularly when it isn’t backed up by action or placing itself on a pedestal. 

iinventedeverything:

this is our reality today. there is no olive oil in olive oil, there is no honey in honey, there is no chicken in chicken broth, there is no milk in ranch dressing—but we have an “obesity crisis” NOT a “food crisis.”

the whole WORLD is quickly moving to “food desert” status cuz NOBODY is eating actual FOOD anymore—but we all like to think if we just get little godless urban kids to grow a garden or get those mean old blood mouths to go vegan, things will be fucking OK! 

BUY THE RIGHT THINGS! THAT WILL STOP INJUSTICE.

but want to avoid talking about the racism, classicism, and ableism that drives the mainstream movement

i gotta laugh really really hard

you want cookies for choosing a carrot over a cow 

but you don’t want to include an analysis of intersecting oppression in your lived praxis 

and then expect me, the black woman, to give a fuck 

i always hear the tired ass line (or something like it) “well those things are important. and i acknowledge those problems within the movement and maybe one day when global warming has taken complete hold of the earth i’d like to get involved in such things. but again its really important not to hurt animals and make the choice not to”

congrats you just failed anti-racism 101 

mothballwombat:

megachiropteran:

mothballwombat:

warblingbear:

navigatethestream:

its the notion of boycotts

you wanna know why the bus boycotts of the civil rights movement were so successful?

because an alternative black run transportation system was created for those who couldn’t walk to work or whatever they had to go

they…

So would you argue that there is no value in avoiding making unethical choices even when others cannot? Or to do that in conjunction with other work that aids progress?

I am not saying that no one should try to make ethical choices when they can, but to recognize that a boycott alone of unethical foods will not bring change to the way food is produced in this world. If people feel the need to do everything individually that they can to ‘reduce their impact’ on the planet, they have every right to. I got a problem with it when people start saying that “the world & all the animals will totally be saved if just EVERYONE went vegan/didn’t buy Monsanto/banned GMO foods/only ate locally or organically!” Because that sentence has a premise, and its premise is that it is currently possible for 100% of people to be vegan. Even in a perfect world of accessibility, there would be a significant amount of people who cannot do a vegan diet — there are plenty of chronic illnesses (which are *not* rare, despite people’s assertion that they are) that would be in need of animal products in their diet. Are we to just let them die?

I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. I don’t have them. The answer to stopping our global industrial food system and replacing it with someone else is a huge, daunting problem and it involves more than just our food issues, but water issues and waste issues and transport issues and a whole slew of other things. I’m one person. I care about these issues but I can’t kid myself into thinking that any individual action I take is going to change this very large and scary machine that makes us dependent on choosing between a myriad of unethical choices in order to survive. I do what I can within the realm of my possibilities, and when I’m physically and mentally able to, I’ll continue to work on these issues in a more direct action format via legislation lobbying, education, and accessibility support. But I’m never going to claim that anything I do is going to fix the whole problem. It’s going to take community organizing, community accountability, and an understanding that there isn’t One Solution. There are many solutions that need to be tailored to each community. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of effort and understanding of other cultures, other people, and their own struggles.

You can’t fix this thing with just a boycott. It’s a small tool in the toolbox and we have to use all of them if we even want to make a dent in this thing.

I generally agree with you but disagree with arguments that make it seem that it is irrelevant to curb harmful behavior when possible. I am vegan because I can be and it would be bizarre of me to accept that food practices that utilize animals are painful and unethical to the animals, destructive to the environment, create additional health and safety risks to food workers that already deal with horrible conditions, etc. and to do otherwise. Most of the people I have met since going vegan seem to operate similarly and I think understandably expect other people to come to the same conclusion when and if they are able. I was not vegan my entire life because I didn’t have the knowledge available to me that I needed to understand the pros and cons of my food choices and I don’t blame myself for that just as I don’t blame people that are currently in that situation or are in some other situation that affects their ability to make choices about their food.

That still doesn’t mean that there are any good reasons to discourage people from making ethical choices when they can just because other people cannot, or (and this is really what I feel is being communicated and what makes me uncomfortable) devaluing and dismissing ethical choices others have made because others cannot or because it does not entirely solve a complicated issue. I find this especially strange because I like to think that, especially for people that have limited abilities to contribute to causes and movements that they find important, every small contribution against a harmful practice is valuable.

“That still doesn’t mean that there are any good reasons to discourage people from making ethical choices when they can just because other people cannot, or (and this is really what I feel is being communicated and what makes me uncomfortable) devaluing and dismissing ethical choices others have made because others cannot or because it does not entirely solve a complicated issue.” 

and this is where reading comprehension is a hell of a thing. 

nowhere am i discouraging people from making “better choices” if they are able. please point to the paragraph or sentence where you managed to arrive at that conclusion. 

i am saying “ethical” is relative to a person’s ability to survive

and the notion of “ethical consumption/abstinence from unethical consumption” isn’t a holistic tool of social change considering most people are going to put their need to survive over adhering to a person’s notion of “ethical” who is probably not in their socio-economic situation let alone cultural context.  

you mention being vegan because you find the practice of eating meat and the ways in which meat production causes harm to people/the environment/animals objectionable 

let me ask some critical questions:

does your veganism work to end food deserts by bringing healthy and fresh foods into places where access to such things are limited or non-existent?

does your veganism work to expand food stamps and federally funded food assistance programs so that per month budgets for food are way larger than they currently are across the board and participants are given incentives to buy healthier food? 

does your veganism seek to decolonize itself and locate itself in an anti-racist praxis through the way you engage with recipes, ingredients, alternative healing methods, alternative skin care/beauty methods from the global diaspora of color? meaning if you’re buying recipe books, “health books”, whatever, where white authors have appropriated these elements from cultures of color and subsequently are profiting off them. more so than a person of color would. then you’re choices aren’t as ethical as you’d make them out to be 

because if not your choices are not necessarily more “ethical” than others. they’re really just located in an individualist “ethic” where you prioritize certain things over others, and there is still room to poke holes in your notion of ethical consumption. 

i’m not out here to stroke the egos of people who think of themselves as “ethical consumers”. i’m out here to interrogate an individualist politic that is classicist and by and large racist and is being used as a rhetorical device of change. 

instead of “discouraging people” from making unethical choices, provide them with more affordable, economically sustainable, and culturally relevant choices. 

do that work and then i can pretend to give a damn about your “ethical choices”