Tag: poverty

Volatile Times for Brazil’s Human Rights

by Eyal Weinberg

15 FEB 2018

The decision of Porto Alegre’s appeals court to uphold the corruption conviction of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks ago (1/24/2018) threw Brazil into turmoil. The former Brazilian president (2003-2010) is the last to be targeted in the grandiose “Car Wash” investigation, a major probe into the rampant corruption in Brazil’s political and economic systems. The ruling was not the first to remove a powerful figure from Brazil’s political landscape; since 2014, special prosecution task forces have secured the imprisonment of various influential politicians and business moguls. But Lula’s conviction overshadows all previous spectacular moments of the Car Wash investigation.  A study by the Getulio Vargas Foundation has already concluded that the ruling was the leading political event on social media in Brazil in the past two years, counting 1.2 million online references in less than 24 hours.

The implications of the ruling exceed the realms of social media, of course. Last July, the court found Lula guilty of receiving a beachside apartment from a construction company in exchange for lucrative contracts in state projects. Now, the appellate court not only unanimously declined Lula’s appeal, but also voted to increase his sentence from nine to twelve years in prison. More than sending one of the most popular presidents in Brazilian history to jail, the sentence makes Lula ineligible to run for the coming October presidential elections (under Brazil’s Clean Slate law). The former union leader-turned president still has a few more routes of appeal left—he has denied any wrongdoing and already reaffirmed his presidential nomination—but the prospects are far from rosy.

Public opinion is very much divided over the recent court’s decision. Opponents of Lula celebrated the ruling and the ousting of whom they consider the “head of a crime organization.” The Brazilian stock exchange closed on a record high (up 3.72 percent) on the day of the verdict, indicating how badly investors wanted Lula out. Demonstrating the judiciary’s mistrust in the former president, a federal judge ordered the seizure of Lula’s passport the following day. Lula’s supporters, however, are confident in his innocence and maintain that the Car Wash investigation has deteriorated into a political witch-hunt against him and the Workers’ Party. They point to irregularities in the tribunal’s proceedings and see its ruling as a direct continuation of the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (Lula’s successor in the Workers’ Party). Even some conservative commentators criticized the judicial process. Indeed, the hastiness of the appellate court in considering Lula’s appeal—typical cases wait in line for over a year before getting a hearing—and the fact that his charges were far less severe than those of other politicians who stole millions but were never indicted cast the court’s decision in a suspicious light, at best.

For now, however, Lula leads the polls, earning over 36 percent of the potential votes in the coming October election. What is the reason for his enduring strong appeal? Lula’s magnetic charisma, and the Workers Party’s sophisticated political mechanism that cultivates support across Brazil’s poor northeast are key factors. It is also true that none of the other presidential hopefuls have yet been able to offer a compelling platform, and voters tend to stick with what they remember to have worked. But this is only half the story. Perhaps it is worthwhile to revisit some of the advancements Lula and his successor Rousseff have implemented during their terms, particularly in regards to human rights.

The biggest success of Lula’s government was the transformative and internationally-celebrated bolsa família program, which lifted 20 million Brazilians above poverty level. The plan, part of Lula’s Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) policy, was accompanied by various other programs that expanded access to postsecondary education (ProUni), increased rural credit to poor farmers (PRONAF), and reduced food insecurity (PAA). The administration also raised the minimum wage and advanced policy change in regards to housing, health, and land rights for various populations (among them quilombo communities). Many of these programs were further expanded under Dilma Rousseff’s Brasil Sem Miseria (Brazil Without Extreme Poverty) policy. Lula’s government also promoted racial equality and encouraged affirmative action mechanisms in the education system (through REUNI and SINAPIR). Rousseff later enacted the latter, passing the pioneering Quotas Law that requires federal universities to reserve up to 50% of their admission spots to students of low-income families and African or indigenous descent. Of course, Rousseff’s centerpiece of human rights policy was the formation of Brazil’s National Truth Commission (2012-2014), which examined human right violations taking place under the country’s military dictatorship (1964-1985).

This concise list indicates the level of commitment to social and human rights policy under the Workers’ Party rule. This is in addition to a momentous reform in environmental policy, which among other things drove deforestation of the Amazon down by over 80% (through the PPCDAm plan). Notwithstanding various criticisms levelled against some of the above programs, Lula and Rousseff’s agenda had a dramatic, typically positive effect on the lives of Brazilians, particularly low-income citizens. It is perhaps no surprise that Lula still captures the hearts of millions of voters. President Michel Temer, who took office after Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016, had already scaled down many of Lula’s initiated programs. The long-time supporter of the soy and cattle rancher oligarchy had also promoted concessions to mining in national protected areas, launched a massive privatization plan, curbed public spending, and is set to pass more austerity measures—among them a substantial cut in pension benefits. Just last month President of the Lower House Rodrigo Maia had publicly said that the Bolsa Família program “enslaves people.”

To be sure, the current alternatives for the presidency pale in comparison to the now convicted-former president Lula. Temer is perhaps the least favorite president since the end of military rule. His approval ratings are in the single digit range, and in recent poll, 90% of Brazilians said they would not vote for any candidate aligned with the current government’s platform. More alarming is the fact that the leadership vacuum invites reactionary, threatening waves. Currently second in the polls for the 2018 Presidential election is federal congressman Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer who aspires to be Brazil’s next Trump—or perhaps Rodrigo Duterte. Promising to uproot corruption for good, Bolsonaro has already expressed his support of torture and extrajudicial killing of criminals. Various times he spoke about the military dictatorship with nostalgia, reminiscing of the regime’s “law and order.” And he suggested that beating your children can prevent them from becoming gay.

Bolsonaro’s controversial homophobic, racist, and hateful statements find sympathetic ears with those despaired of the ongoing economic recession, political stagnation, and peaking crime rate. Many of them have lost faith in the democratic institutions, and are slowly moving towards acceptance of authoritarianism. A recent survey concluded that 43% of the population would support a “temporary military intervention,” and another poll showed that 23% of Brazilians would back either a military regime or a “strong leader.” As the notion of a military coup is no longer taboo in public debate, and with Lula’s political future uncertain, Brazilians—and especially human rights advocates—should brace themselves for an intense, explosive year.

Eyal Weinberg is a PhD candidate in the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin, and he is a member of the 2017-2018 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee. His area of focus is twentieth-century Brazil.

Child Labor and the Mountain that Eats Men

by Sofia Bonilla

12 JAN 2018

The town of Potosí in Bolivia rests at the bottom of a soaring, 15,800-foot mountain called Cerro Rico. The mountain provides the primary, and nearly only, source of income for the town of 240,000 inhabitants. During their 16th-century conquest of Latin America, the Spanish enslaved the indigenous people there, imported African slaves from overseas, and forced both groups to mine silver from the mountain. At the time, Cerro Rico held one of the richest silver deposits in Bolivia and the world and was a source of abundant wealth for the Spanish Empire. Eventually, the slaves nearly hollowed out the mountain—although there remains a residual supply of silver, Bolivian miners mainly extract tin and zinc.[1]

As a result of years of mining activities, modern-day Cerro Rico is riddled with caverns, shafts, sinkholes, and precarious tunnels, so much so that engineer Nestor Rene Espinoza describes it as “a slab of Swiss cheese.”[2] The risks associated with mining this mountain are not new. Historians estimate that over eight million miners have died since extraction began at Cerro Rico in the mid-1500s.[3] However, these are not the only reasons it is called “The Mountain That Eats Men.” Miners, a majority of whom are of indigenous descent, still use equipment introduced in the nineteenth century: headlamps powered by fire, manual hammers and pickaxes, and outdated drills. Even more startling is the prevalence of child miners, some of whom start mining at age twelve. These children work in oxygen-scarce conditions, risk falling down mine shafts hundreds of feet long, and face being blown to pieces by a surprise detonation. Despite these treacherous conditions, the most common killer is silicosis—a lung disease caused by breathing in rock particles that reduces one’s lifespan to just forty years—locally known as “black lung.”[4] Miners wear face masks for protection, but the thin paper layer does little to stave off the disease.

The child miners earn less than two dollars and fifty cents (US) per day on the precarious mountain, sometimes less, depending on how much silver, tin, and other precious minerals they can extract. Many of these young miners have nowhere else to turn. Cerro Rico is their only option for work. Without their labor to supplement—or even provide—the family income, their families will starve. A majority of the child miners and their families live on the side of the mountain in huts powered by a single light bulb. They perform this extremely dangerous work in the early hours of the morning so they are able to attend school during the day.[5]

Though the many dangers of Cerro Rico loom over Potosí, “[n]either the labor ministry nor COMIBOL—the national mining agency that leases concessions to more than 30 mining cooperatives grouping together some 15,000 miners on Cerro Rico—even attempt to enforce health and safety laws.”[6] Oscar Cáceres, a COMIBOL geologic engineer, explains that the state is not responsible for deaths or accidents on or within the mountain, leaving miners of all ages to their own devices upon entry.[7] The child labor laws in Bolivia allow children as young as ten years old to work legally,[8] while the International Labor Organization sets the general minimum employment age at fifteen years and the minimum age for hazardous work at eighteen.[9] The Bolivian law was created in an effort to make child labor a safer, more regulated practice,[10] but work environments such as Cerro Rico suggest that the law has failed in this respect.

Rather than lowering the legal age of work, governments can create social insurance programs so that children are not expected to supplement household incomes. These programs, such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), can help poor families—the main demographic that practices child labor—by awarding a monthly salary in exchange for their children attending school. This tactic was successfully implemented through Brazil’s state-funded Bolsa Família program which both prohibits child labor and “provid[es] financial incentives [of twelve USD per month] to poor families that ensure that their children attend school regularly and receive vaccinations.”[11] The World Bank testifies to Bolsa Família’s success, citing it as “one of the key factors behind the positive social outcomes achieved by Brazil in recent years.”[12]

The Bolivian government introduced its own national CCT program in 2006,[13] aimed at alleviating the pressure on children and enabling them to focus on school. The program, called the Bono Juancito Pinto, awards an annual two hundred Bolivianos (twenty-eight USD) to families whose children attend at least eighty percent of the school year. In 2012, President Morales announced that the CCT program had reduced the dropout rate from “6.1 percent in 2006 to 2.0 percent in 2012.”[14] Although UNICEF confirms the program’s positive impact on Bolivia, [15] research by James W. McGuire reveals that Bono Juancito Pinto mainly improved drop-out rates of preschool, first- and second-graders—not secondary school students, who are the main participants in child labor.[16] Even after the program was later extended to include secondary school students, McGuire found that the Bono Juancito Pinto had virtually no effect on child labor “given that the school day in Bolivia is only 4 hours long, and is, therefore, compatible with the average workday length of child laborers, which is about 5.5 hours.”[17] Despite these shortcomings, the program is still in use and is expected to assist 179,068 students in Potosí[18] as of October 2017.

The silver extracted and shipped internationally from Cerro Rico carries with it centuries of hazardous labor practices and millions of deaths. This phenomenon is not unique to Potosí. There are “218 million children between 5 and 17 years” working worldwide, with “almost half of them, 73 million, work[ing] in hazardous child labour.”[19] Children around the world are risking their safety in order to maintain their family’s livelihood in the face of poverty, violence, labor exploitation, and ineffective governmental regulation. Governments, in turn, must continue searching for impactful methods to aid poor families and end the dangerous cycle child labor produces. Programs like Bono Juancito Pinto and other financial plans serve as helpful starting points, but cannot alone resolve this problem. Without deliberate and effective action, the global economy will continue to place the lives of children at risk.

Work Cited

[1] Simeon Tegel, “Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” Public Radio International. March 20, 2013. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-03-20/cerro-rico-mountain-eats-men.

[2] Juan Forero, “Bolivia’s Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” NPR. September 25, 2012. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men.

[3] Dan Collyns, “’Bolivia’s Cerro Rico mines killed my husband. Now they want my son.’” The Guardian. June 24, 2014. Accessed February 7, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jun/24/bolivia-cerro-rico-mine-mountain-collapse-miners.

[4] See supra note1.

[5] Viktorija Mickute, “Mineritos: Bolivia’s Child Miners.” Global Journalist.org. September 4, 2014. Accessed February 8, 2018. http://globaljournalist.org/2014/09/mineritos-bolivias-child-miners/.

[6] See supra note 1.

[7] Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, “Mined to Death: Why Bolivia’s Cerro Rico Mountain Is Collapsing.” TIME Inc. June 16, 2011. Accessed November 14, 2017. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2077641,00.html.

[8] NPR staff, “Bolivia Makes Child Labor Legal, In An Attempt To Make It Safer.” NPR. July 30, 2014. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.npr.org/2014/07/30/336361778/bolivia-makes-child-labor-legal-in-an-attempt-to-make-it-safer.

[9] International Labor Organization, Minimum Age Convention, 1973, (No.138). The convention does provide for the possibility of initially setting the general minimum age at 14 (12 for light work) where the economy and educational facilities in a given country are insufficiently developed.

[10] See supra note 6.

[11] Council On Hemispheric Affairs, “Made in Brazil: Confronting Child Labor.” COHA. November 16, 2010. Accessed November 14, 2017. http://www.coha.org/made-in-brazil-confronting-child-labor/.

[12] World Bank staff, “Bolsa Família: Changing the Lives of Millions in Brazil.” World Bank. August 22, 2007. Accessed February 8, 2018. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2007/08/22/bolsa-familia-changing-the-lives-of-millions-in-brazil.

[13] James McGuire, Conditional Cash Transfers in Bolivia: Origins, Impact, and Universality. (Wesleyan University, 2013).

[14] See supra note 9.

[15] Mariana Perez, “UNICEF Destaca El Pago de Los Bonos Sociales Para Los Niños.” Cambio. November 4, 2017. Accessed December 8, 2017. http://www.cambio.bo/?q=node/24663.

[16] See supra note 10.

[17] See supra note 10.

[18] Rocío Ruiz,. “El bono Juancito Pinto beneficia a 179.068 estudiantes en Potosí.” El Potosí. October 23, 2017. Accessed December 8, 2017. http://elpotosi.net/local/20171023_el-bono-juancito-pinto-beneficia-a-179068-estudiantes-en-potosi.html.

[19] International Labor Organization. “Child Labour.” ILO. September 2017. Accessed November 14, 2017. http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/child-labour/lang–en/index.htm.

Sofia Bonilla is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin majoring in Plan II Honors, International Relations & Global Studies, and Iberian & Latin American Literatures & Cultures. She is an Undergraduate Intern at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.

Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism

by Megan Tobias Neely

21 NOV 2015

This commentary is a response to Maria Hengeveld’s paper, “Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject.”

In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create future workers and stimulate economic growth. For those who associate the Nike brand with anti-sweatshop movement protests over labor standards the Girl Effect may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Nike moved to eliminate child labor in its factories only fifteen years ago, and the poor working conditions at Nike factories remain a concern for activists today.

Activists here at UT-Austin have taken up this issue. Our chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops demands the university to rethink its $250 million dollar contract with Nike. Last April, former Nike worker and worker’s rights activist Noi Supalai spoke on campus. She described how in Thailand—where women constitute a majority of garment workers—workers face unrealistic expectations for production, round-the-clock schedules, months of back wages, and little time to care for their families. Supalai led a worker’s union to negotiate improved conditions; however, Nike never responded to their requests.

Nike’s track record on worker’s rights raises the question as to whether the Girl Effect is a “brand-led movement” or a movement to re-brand Nike. In the winning paper for the 2015 Audre Rapoport Prize, Maria Hengeveld astutely argues that the Girl Effect only serves to legitimize Nike’s reputation and image by obscuring its own role in creating poverty while it rebrands itself as a proponent of human rights and gender equality. Hengeveld calls attention to how the campaign suggests simplistic solutions to alleviate poverty in the Global South that fail to consider how companies like Nike contribute to creating a global economy that exacerbates poverty among women and girls. By blaming gender inequality on the girl’s communities and placing the burden of alleviating inequality on the girls themselves, Nike does not offer viable solutions to patriarchy, explains Hengeveld.

The problem with Nike’s approach to girls’ empowerment, according to Hengeveld, stems from its neoliberal ideology that places the market as the appropriate avenue for promoting liberty, opportunity, and equality. Although the Girl Effect may have positive outcomes for individual girls, Hengeveld demonstrates how campaigns like Nike’s do little to alleviate poverty among women, because the employment available to them is low-paid and insecure.

Scholars like Radhika Balakrishnan and Jason Hickel, who spoke at the Rapoport Center’s recent Inequality & Human Rights conference, echo Hengeveld’s concerns. Balakrishnan has argued that women’s empowerment in the workforce cannot be achieved without improving conditions for laborers generally. Hickel (2014) too has examined the contradictions of the Girl Effect in which “women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for boot-strapping themselves out of poverty that is caused in part by the very institutions that purport to save them” (p. 1355).

Indeed, Hengeveld explains how Nike’s corporate agenda contributes to a neoliberal system that exacerbates poverty and inequality worldwide, with disastrous consequences for both women and men. An in-depth investigation of these consequences is the next step in Hengeveld’s research: Earlier this year, she interviewed 25 women who work for Nike in Vietnam about the factory and living conditions they face.

The solution to improving these conditions, according to Hengeveld, does not lie in resolving inequality between men and women workers in the Global South but in changing a neoliberal system that rests upon the disenfranchisement of the poor. As Hengeveld contends, “in practice, equalizing the labor standards, market access and wages of women in Nike’s factories with their male counterparts will hardly be emancipatory or liberating if male workers are not protected by decent job protections, collective bargaining rights and living wages” (p. 12).

While I agree with Hengeveld, I fear that campaigns to improve labor standards overall will not necessarily empower women unless addressing gender inequality is a central goal. Garment work is devalued precisely because it has been deemed “women’s work,” which is crucial to understanding the shortcomings of Nike’s gender campaign. Moreover, as Joan Acker (2004) argues, “gender is embedded in the structuring and ongoing practices of globalizing capitalism” (p. 23). Thus, finding a solution requires an analysis of how gender structures the exploitation of these workers in the first place. In particular, an intersectional lens can shed light on how garment work is gendered, racialized, and nationalized.

For example, in 2013, the deplorable conditions of garment workers came to the world’s attention when a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 workers and injuring 2,500 others. Yet mainstream media coverage of the disaster paid little attention to the fact that women comprise 80 percent of Bangladeshi garment workers, who face precarious working conditions and unsustainably low pay.

In fact, women compose a majority of garment workers throughout the Global South and are at the frontlines demanding change. Ethnographers Leslie Salzinger (2003) and Melissa Wright (2006) demonstrate how corporations portray these women’s labor as pliable, temporary, and surplus to devalue it in the pursuit of capitalist profit. Thus, gender, race, and poverty are deeply connected in global capitalism.

Yet, liberal feminists maintain that employment will liberate women by providing them with more bargaining power in their families and communities. Nike’s Girl Effect is part of a resurgence of neoliberal feminism (also called transnational business feminism), which contends that the best avenue for women’s empowerment is through the private sector. This movement has gone global through campaigns led by U.N. Women, the World Bank, and the IMF to promote economic opportunities for women.

Socialist and women of color feminists, however, have long contended that greater participation in paid employment does not liberate women, because capitalism has been contingent on the exploitation of women of color and low-income white women (see Hartman, Hooks, Davis, and Nakano Glenn). Transnational feminist scholars like Esther Chow and Aihwa Ong pioneered intersectional scholarship on global capitalism, identifying how it constructs hierarchies according to nationality, race, class, and gender that perpetuate inequality.

While paid labor may, to an extent, improve some women’s status in society, it may also subject them to precarious and risky working conditions inextricably tied to their position as women of color in the Global South. Moreover, it is the devaluation of women’s labor that makes the profits of corporations like Nike possible. How might recognizing this lead to more effective campaigns to empower women in this neoliberal era?

Megan Tobias Neely is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the WPS Editorial Committee. Her current research is on gender and work in the financial services industry.