[NJFAC] Bloomberg:Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor

Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor

Inmates do billions of dollars of work for companies and governments each year. A landmark lawsuit alleges many are being kept in prison because the business is just too good. By Josh Eidelson May 11, 2024

Lakiera Walker was lying in her bunk bed a year ago, sick with flu and too weak to stand, when a prison supervisor came in to chastise her for missing the afternoon van to work. Walker's job was on an assembly line at Southeastern Meats Inc., a supermarket supplier. The 12-hour shifts on her feet in 30-some-degree cold made her body ache and turned her fingers a deep red. Southeastern Meats paid about $13 an hour for Walker's work packaging its frozen peas and corn, but the state pocketed most of that, including two-fifths for the Alabama Department of Corrections to "assist in defraying the cost" of her incarceration.

That afternoon, a fellow inmate would need to carry Walker to a medical ward. But when the ADOC officer found her in her room, she says, her health wasn't his concern.

"I am so sick," she told him.

"Get up and go make us our 40%," he replied.

"It made me feel," Walker recalls, "like he was a pimp."

Now Walker, a 37-year-old recently paroled after 15 years in prison, has teamed up with nine still-incarcerated fellow plaintiffs, as well as some prominent labor lawyers and unions, to file a class action. They're suing Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, the state's attorney general, the prisons commissioner, parole board leaders, and a slew of cities, along with companies they claim rely on forced labor, including Hyundai supplier Ju-Young, beer distributor Bama Budweiser of Montgomery, and franchisees of KFC, McDonald's, and Wendy's. The workers suing are all Black. Their class action accuses the defendants of human trafficking, racketeering and violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, which targets conspiracies to deprive people of their constitutional rights. They argue that the government officials colluded to keep Black people imprisoned and available as cheap labor and that the companies conspired to profit from the coerced work. The suit, filed right before Christmas, says it seeks "to abolish a modern-day form of slavery." ....

There are 800,000 incarcerated workers in the US, and they do roughly $10 billion worth of work a year, more than $2 billion of it for clients outside the prison system, according to a 2022 study by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago.....

--

June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

--
This list is only for announcements, so you may not post. To contact the list manager, write to junez [at] njfac.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "goodjobs" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to goodjobsforall+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goodjobsforall/CAPV%3DhmCyZm-_dn7zQgpHHqLz6uOEE2ZFymS2oDq8qy1WzpGX0Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[NJFAC] US Billionaires Pay Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class for First Time

'Absurd!': US Billionaires Pay Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class for First Time "It's time to tax the billionaires," economist Gabriel Zucman argues in a new analysis. Jake Johnson Common Dreams, May 03, 2024

An analysis published Friday by the renowned economist Gabriel Zucman shows that in 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history, a data point that sparked a new flurry of calls for bold levies on the ultra-rich.....

To begin reversing the decades-long trend of surging inequality that has weakened democratic institutions and undermined critical programs such as Social Security, Zucman made the case for a minimum tax on billionaires in the U.S. and around the world.

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."....

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."

Responding to those who claim a minimum tax would be impractical because "wealth is difficult to value," Zucman wrote that "this fear is overblown."...

The last 2 paragraphs seem inconsistent--a tax on wealth is not a min. tax on income.  However, from the Times article: "There is a way to make tax dodging less attractive: a global minimum tax. In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to apply a minimum tax rate of 15 percent on the profits of large multinational companies. So no matter where a company parks its profits, it still has to pay at least a baseline amount of tax under the agreement.... ....another coordinated minimum tax — this one not on corporations, but on billionaires. The idea is simple. Let's agree that billionaires should pay income taxes equivalent to a small portion — say, 2 percent — of their wealth each year. Someone like Bernard Arnault, who is worth about $210 billion, would have to pay an additional tax equal to roughly $4.2 billion if he pays no income tax. In total, the proposal would allow countries to collect an estimated $250 billion in additional tax revenue per year, which is even more than what the global minimum tax on corporations is expected to add."

--

June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

--
This list is only for announcements, so you may not post. To contact the list manager, write to junez [at] njfac.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "goodjobs" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to goodjobsforall+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goodjobsforall/CAPV%3DhmCX2Vz73Wus3cZqVLTqMLyv6Xqtj9%2Bn_1sTdKiTjA4p-Q%40mail.gmail.com.