"I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless." - Sissela Bok, Swedish philosopher, 1982
"The overarching purpose of access to information legislation ... is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry." - Gerard LaForest, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, in Dagg vs. Canada (1997)
"For the most part, officials love secrecy because it is a tool of power and control, not because the information they hold is particularly sensitive by nature." - John Reid, 1999
DANCING NEBULA
When the gods dance...
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Cave Art Reveals Ancient View of Cosmos
|
The image drawn in this black charcoal pictograph found in
a Tennessee cave is also found on prehistoric, religious artifacts.CREDIT: Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood / Antiquity Publications LTD. |
A team of scientists has uncovered a series of engravings and drawings strategically placed in open air and within caves by prehistoric groups of Native American settlers that depict their cosmological understanding of the world around them.
"The subject matter of this artwork, what they were drawing pictures of, we knew all along was mythological, cosmological," Jan Simek, an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee said. "They draw pictures of bird men that are important characters in their origin stories and in their hero legends, and so we knew it was a religious thing and because of that, we knew that it potentially referred to this multitiered universe that was the foundation of their cosmology." [See Photos of the Drawings and Engravings]
Simek and his team studied art from 44 open-air locations and 50 cave sites. The earliest depiction of this kind of cosmological stratification dates to around 6,000 years ago, but most of the art is more recent, from around the 11th to 17th centuries.
The researchers noticed that certain kinds of drawings and engravings only appear in specific areas of the plateau. For instance, open-air spots in high elevations touched by the sun feature "upper world" artistic renderings that include depictions of weather forces, heavenly bodies and characters that can exert influence on humans.
"Lower world" drawings and engravings are found in dark areas like caves that are hidden from the sun. Usually, this layer of the world is associated with death, darkness and danger.
These scorpions give archaeologists a glimpse into the "lower world" in the cosmology of the native peoples.
CREDIT: Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood / Antiquity Publications LTD.
CREDIT: Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood / Antiquity Publications LTD.
"This layered universe was a stage for a variety of actors that included heroes, monsters and creatures that could cross between the levels," Simek said in a statement.
Although depictions of many of the actors were found in low, high and middle elevations, color relates the overall cosmological structure of the universe, Simek said. Characters drawn in red — the color of life — are found in higher elevation sites, while black was used to draw figures found in the lower world.
"The dominant things we see all together are human images, what we call anthropomorphs," Simek told LiveScience. "They're not all human; some of them are clearly mythological people or people who blend animal and human characteristics."
These depictions of the universe can also help inform an understanding of the modern world.
"It's a very common human conception that there are different levels of being and different levels of cognition and different levels of connectivity with the human condition," Simek said. "I think all people at one level or another do that."
Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miriam interned at Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Oak Ridge
National Laboratory before coming to SPACE.com. She graduated with her
degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee after working with
the microbiology and anthropology departments. She received her
master's in science, health and environmental reporting from New York
University. To find out what her latest project is, you can follow
Miriam on Google+.
The Expendables
How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed
Rosa Ramirez
waits to be called for a job at the temp agency Staffing Network in
Hanover Park, Ill., on Jan. 21, 2013. (Sally Ryan for ProPublica)
It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next
to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling
up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the
past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue
plastic chairs that fill the office. Over the next three hours,
dispatchers will bark out the names of who will work today. Rosa waits,
wondering if she will make her rent.
In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.
In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.
The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.
Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.
Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.
In June, the Labor Department reported that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association, the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.
The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole – a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to the staffing association.
The Rise of Blue-Collar Temp Jobs
1993
2012Source: ProPublica analysis of Occupational Employment Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
2012Source: ProPublica analysis of Occupational Employment Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Several temp agencies, such as Adecco and Manpower, are now among the largest employers in the United States. One list put Kelly Services as second only to Walmart.
“We’re seeing just more and more industries using business models that attempt to change the employment relationship or obscure the employment relationship,” said Mary Beth Maxwell, a top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. “While it’s certainly not a new phenomenon, it’s rapidly escalating. In the last 10 to 15 years, there’s just a big shift to this for a lot more workers – which makes them a lot more vulnerable.”
The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage.
The rise of the blue-collar permatemp helps explain one of the most troubling aspects of the phlegmatic recovery. Despite a soaring stock market and steady economic growth, many workers are returning to temporary or part-time jobs. This trend is intensifying America’s decades-long rise in income inequality, in which low- and middle-income workers have seen their real wages stagnate or decline. On average, temps earn 25 percent less than permanent workers.
Many economists predict the growth of temp work will continue beyond the recession, in part because of health-care reform, which some economists say will lead employers to hire temps to avoid the costs of covering full-time workers.
The Rise of ‘Temp Towns’
Rosa, a 49-year-old Mexican immigrant with thin glasses and a curly bob of brown hair, has been a temp worker for the better part of 12 years. She has packed free samples for Walmart, put together displays for Sony, printed ads for Marlboro, made air filters for the Navy and boxed textbooks for elite colleges and universities. None of the work led to a full-time job.Even though some assignments last months, such as her recent job packaging razors for Philips Norelco, every day is a crapshoot for Rosa. She must first check in at the temp agency in Hanover Park, Ill., by 4:30 a.m. and wait. If she is lucky enough to be called, she must then take a van or bus to the worksite. And even though the agency, Staffing Network, is her legal employer, she is not paid until she gets to the assembly line at 6 a.m.
Locations of Temp Workers
These counties had high concentrations of
temporary help service workers for counties with more than 100,000
workers in 2011. Overall, 2.1 percent of private-sector workers were
temps in 2011.
| County | Concentration |
|---|---|
| Greenville County, S.C. | 8.6% |
| Kane County, Ill. | 6.1% |
| Kent County, Mich. | 6% |
| Middlesex County, N.J. | 5.8% |
| Shelby County, Tenn. | 5.3% |
| San Bernardino County, Calif. | 5.1% |
| Lehigh County, Pa. | 4.6% |
| Camden County, N.J. | 4.3% |
| Winnebago County, Ill. | 4.2% |
| Ramsey County, Minn. | 4% |
| Burlington County, N.J. | 4% |
Source: ProPublica analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data
In temp towns, it is not uncommon to find warehouses with virtually no employees of their own. Many temp workers say they have worked in the same factory day in and day out for years. José Miguel Rojo, for example, packed frozen pizzas for a Walmart supplier every day for eight years as a temp until he was injured last summer and lost his job. (Walmart said Rojo wasn’t its employee and that it wants its suppliers to treat their workers well.)
Occupations of Temp Workers
These occupations had high concentrations of their workers in the employment services industry in 2012.
Source: ProPublica analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics data
To be sure, many temp assignments serve a legitimate and beneficial purpose. Temp agencies help companies weather sudden or seasonal upswings and provide flexibility for uncertain times. Employees try out jobs, gain skills and transition to full-time work.
“I think our industry has been good for North America, as far as keeping people working,” said Randall Hatcher, president of MAU Workforce Solutions, which supplies temps to BMW. “I get laid off by Employer A and go over here to Employer B, and maybe they have a job for me. People get a lot of different experiences. An employee can work at four to five different companies and then maybe decide this is what I want to do.”
Companies like the “flexibility,” he added. “To be able to call someone and say, ‘I need 100 people’ is very powerful. It allows them to meet orders that they might not otherwise.”
But over the years, many companies have upended that model and stretched the definition of “temporary work.”
At least 840,000 temp workers are like Rosa: working blue-collar jobs and earning less than $25,000 a year, a ProPublica analysis of federal labor data found. Only about 30 percent of industrial temp jobs will become permanent, according to a survey by Staffing Industry Analysts.
By 4:52 a.m., the chairs at Rosa’s temp agency are filled, and workers line the walls, clutching plastic bags that contain their lunches. From behind the tall white counter, the voice of an unseen dispatcher booms like a game-show host, calling out the first batch of workers: ___ Mendoza, ___ Rosales, ___ Centeno, ___ Martinez, ...
It is a practice that George Gonos, a sociologist at SUNY-Potsdam who has spent his career studying the temp industry, calls the modern version of the “shape-up” – a practice in which longshoremen would line up in front of a boss, who would pick them one by one for work on the docks.
The day after Thanksgiving 1960, Edward R. Murrow broadcast a report called “Harvest of Shame,” documenting the plight of migrant farmworkers. Temp workers today face many similar conditions in how they get hired, how they get to work, how they live and what they can afford to eat. Adjusted for inflation, those farmworkers earned roughly the same 50 years ago as many of today’s temp workers, including Rosa. In fact, some of the same farm towns featured in Murrow’s report have now been built up with warehouses filled with temps.
As before, the products change by the season. But now, instead of picking strawberries, tomatoes and corn, the temp workers pack chocolates for Valentine’s Day, barbecue grills for Memorial Day, turkey pans for Thanksgiving, clothing and toys for Christmas.
African-Americans make up 11 percent of the overall workforce but more than 20 percent of temp workers. Willie Pearson, who is African-American, has been a full-time worker at BMW's South Carolina plant for 14 years. But since at least 2005, he said, he hasn't seen anyone who’s “been hired straight on. It’s all been through temporary agencies.” The company says “after six months they can hire them,” he said, “but I’d say it’s only one out of five” who actually lands a full-time job.
BMW did not return calls for this story.
Latinos make up about 20 percent of all temp workers. In many temp towns, agencies have flocked to neighborhoods full of undocumented immigrants, finding labor that is kept cheap in part by these workers’ legal vulnerability: They cannot complain without risking deportation.
Labor Sharks and Kelly Girls
Many people believe that the use of temp workers simply grew organically, filling a niche that companies demanded in an ever-changing global economy. But decades before “outsourcing” was even a word, the temp industry campaigned to persuade corporate America that permanent workers were a burden.
White
Glove Girl, a Manpower game made in 1966. The object of the game is to
be the first to earn money to afford four goals: children's college
education, a vacation, home remodeling and a new wardrobe. (Krista
Kjellman Schmidt /ProPublica)
A Kelly Girl advertisement for 'The Never-Never Girl.' (Source: The Office, January 1971, p. 19 via Erin Hatton) | Larger version
Never takes a vacation or holiday. Never asks for a raise. Never costs
you a dime for slack time. (When the workload drops, you drop her.)
Never has a cold, slipped disc or loose tooth. (Not on your time
anyway!) Never costs you for unemployment taxes and social security
payments. (None of the paperwork, either!) Never costs you for fringe
benefits. (They add up to 30% of every payroll dollar.) Never fails to
please. (If our Kelly Girl employee doesn’t work out, you don’t pay.
We’re that sure of all our girls.)
Carl Camden, the current chief executive of Kelly Services, said the
anachronistic language was a response to the chauvinistic attitude of
the time. “It wasn’t typical to see women working,” he said. “So you had
that work often positioned as not real work. The way the media could
sell it as sociologically acceptable was making money for Christmas,
something you were doing on the side for your family.” (Manpower didn’t
return calls for this story.)
An
Olsten Services advertisement warning executives that a few more people
on the payroll could cut into profits even in good times. (Source:
Personnel Journal, September 1968, inside front cover via Erin Hatton) |
Larger version
More recently, temp firms have successfully lobbied to change laws or regulatory interpretations in 31 states, so that workers who lose their assignments and are out of work cannot get unemployment benefits unless they check back in with the temp firm for another assignment.
'You Are Not Driving Goats'
Rosa
sits on the mattress in the room she rents with her boyfriend. The trap
she sets for rats is visible on the floor near the door frame. (Sally
Ryan for ProPublica)
By the time she arrived in Cullman, Rosa recalled, her shoes were so full of holes that her first mission was to go to a strip mall and dig through a clothing donation bin for a new pair.
“I worked in a poultry plant and a restaurant at the same time so I could get enough money to send back to Mexico,” she said. Like Rosa, many undocumented immigrants who spoke for this story landed full-time jobs when they first arrived in the 1990s. But many of them lost their jobs when factories closed during the recent recession and have since found only temp work.
Another temp worker, Judith Iturralde, traced the shift back even earlier, to the immigration crackdowns after 9/11. She said that after she returned to work from surgery in 2002, the compact-disc warehouse she worked at told her it could no longer employ her because she didn’t have papers. They directed her to a temp firm, she said, and a few years later, she returned to the same warehouse, still undocumented.
After raising enough money, Rosa returned to Mexico and brought her two teenage sons across the desert and back to Alabama, where they worked full-time at a lumberyard. After her son got hurt on the job, they moved to Chicago, hoping for a better life.
But the only work Rosa was able to find was at temp agencies.
It is now 5:03 a.m. at Staffing Network, and the first batch of workers waits outside to board the school bus for Norelco. The agency said it offers complimentary transportation for its employees’ benefit. But worker advocates say vans help the temp agencies by ensuring they provide their corporate clients with the right number of workers at the right time.
Many metro areas don’t have adequate transportation from the working-class neighborhoods to the former farmland where warehouses have sprouted over the past 15 years. So a system of temp vans has popped up, often contracted by the agencies. Workers in several cities said they feel pressured to get on the vans or lose the job. They usually pay $7 to $8 a day for the round trip.
Vicente
Ramos with his children in their home in New Brunswick, N.J., in March.
Ramos recounted how he had to walk for three hours one night when the
temp agency van didn't show. (Melanie Burford for ProPublica)
Several workers said the temp agency had left them stranded at times. Vicente Ramos, a father of six who lives in New Jersey, recalled how several years ago he and other workers walked for three hours one night after the van failed to show up.
“We were getting hungry and thirsty, and we could barely walk, and our feet were hurting,” Ramos said. “They still charged us for the ride.”
A New Temp Ecosystem
It is now 5:20 a.m., and a second batch of workers has been called for Norelco. Dispatchers are starting to tap workers for Start Sampling, which provides free samples of items like shampoos, coffee and cat food on behalf of retailers and consumer product companies.The dispatchers have called several other workers named Rosa. Each time, her ears perk up, but it is always another last name. She goes to the counter and asks the dispatchers if they think there will be work today. They tell her there’s not much but to wait a little longer in case a company calls to say they need more bodies.
Rosa
Ramirez, flanked by members of Chicago Workers Collaborative, reads her
speech at Staffing Network in November 2012. (Screenshot from video
courtesy of Chicago Workers Collaborative)
“Stop forcing workers to wait without pay before the work shift,” Rosa said, standing in the center of the room and reading from a paper she had brought.
“Allow workers to go directly to the worksite, because some people have children, and they can’t find care that early.”
The workers sitting in the bucket chairs looked down nervously, not sure what would happen next.
Rosa read on. “Don’t force employees to wait outside of the office until transportation arrives during the winter months.”
“We don’t want to be loaded into trucks or vans,” Rosa said. “Because they carry us like sardines.”
Looking back on that day, Rosa said she feels empowered at times but at other times defeated.
“I no longer could stand the abuses,” Rosa said. “I see people accepting them, and so I thought by standing up and speaking, I was hoping that people would join me and would agree and would stand up for themselves. But unfortunately, the majority of the people did not.”
Staffing Network said in a statement that workers weren’t required to come to the branch office. Many workers, it said, get hired by calling about job opportunities and then go directly to their worksites.
“Our track record of being a fair and lawful employer is evidenced by the fact that more than 65 percent of the temporary employees we hire and place have worked with Staffing Network for one year or more,” the company wrote. “We provide all employees opportunities to voice any questions or concerns about any aspects of their jobs — without any retaliation.”
Unions, on the ropes nationwide, have historically done little for temp workers. The temp industry initially won union backing by promising never to cross picket lines. But in 1985, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that the trade association could not force its members to honor that pledge; so they didn’t.
“Unions have had two souls when it comes to temp workers,” said Harley Shaiken, a longtime labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. One is to try to include them, he said, but “the other is circle the wagons, protect the full-time workers that are there.”
Will Collette, who led an AFL-CIO campaign against the temp firm Labor Ready in the early 2000s, said it was nearly impossible to organize workers with such a high turnover.
And recent rulings have tied union hands. A 2004 order by the National Labor Relations Board barred temp workers from joining with permanent workers for collective bargaining unless both the temp agency and the host company agree to the arrangement.
Some temp firms have even promoted themselves as experts at maintaining a union-free workplace. In a proposal for the off-road vehicle maker Polaris, the temp agency Westaff, a division of the Select Family of Staffing Companies, said its team was specially trained to spot early warning signs of union activity, such as “groups of workers huddling, then quieting when managers appear.”
Walmart's
warehouse complex southwest of Chicago is managed by Schneider
Logistics. Walmart, along with many other American companies, benefits
from temp labor, both for its flexibility and for the protection it
provides from complaints from workers and regulators. (Sally Ryan for
ProPublica)
Asked if the layers of subcontracting allow Walmart to escape blame, spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said, “Absolutely not.”
“We work very hard to abide by the law,” she said, “and we expect all the businesses that we do business with and that they do business with to comply with the law.”
Schneider treats its associates with “dignity and respect,” spokeswoman Janet Bonkowski wrote in an email. “Our suppliers are independent,” she said. “When we utilize third-party vendors, we contractually require full compliance with all required laws and that all parties conduct business ethically.”
As work is downsourced through a cascade of subcontractors, some workers have been paid wages below the legal minimum or seen their incomes decline over the years.
Berto Gutierrez, who has worked several stints at the Walmart warehouse in Elwood, Ill., provided ProPublica with a copy of a 2011 paycheck from subcontractor Eclipse Advantage. The check shows he was paid only $57.81 for 12.5 hours of work, or $4.62 an hour. Neither Eclipse, Schneider nor Walmart provided an explanation for Gutierrez’s paycheck.
In 2007, Leticia Rodriguez was hired directly by Simos, the logistics contractor running the online part of Walmart’s Elwood warehouse. She said she worked as a supervisor on an annual contract for $49,500 a year, with health insurance. In 2009, when she declined to come in on what she described as a long-awaited day off, she was fired.
Rodriguez returned to the warehouse six months later, this time starting at the bottom, loading trucks for one of Schneider’s staffing companies. She said she was paid $15 an hour, but within a year the staffing company lost the contract.
Eclipse Advantage took over, and Rodriguez went to work for that company. There, she said, she got paid piece-rate, averaging about $9.50 an hour. But six months later, Eclipse left, and she and all the other workers lost their jobs. Rodriguez has since interned at the union-backed campaign Warehouse Workers for Justice, earning $12,000.
Eclipse’s president, David Simono, declined to comment. Simos didn’t return calls. Walmart said it couldn’t comment on the specifics of a subcontractor’s employee but said it provides all its workers opportunities for growth.
‘We’ve Seen Just Ghastly Situations’
Temp workers line up at Custom Staffing near Chicago in the early morning hours of Jan. 18, 2013. (Sally Ryan for ProPublica)
With the major provisions of health-care reform set to take effect in 2014, there’s growing evidence that 2013 is becoming a boom year for temping out. TempWorks, which sells software that keeps track of payroll and worker orders, says sales to staffing agencies have been going through the roof and that temp firms tell them the uptick is because of Obamacare.
Unlike the way it monitors nearly every other industry, the government does not keep statistics on injuries among temp workers. But a study of workers compensation data in Washington state found that temp workers in construction and manufacturing were twice as likely to be injured as regular staff doing the same work.
In April, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced an initiative to get better information on temp-worker safety. “Employers, we think, do not have the same commitment to providing a safe workplace, to providing the proper training, to a worker who they may only be paying for a few weeks.” OSHA director David Michaels said in an interview. “I mean, we’ve seen just ghastly situations.”
In December 2011, a Chicago temp worker died after he was scalded by a citric acid solution. The skin cream and shampoo factory he was assigned to failed to call 911 even as his skin was peeling from his body. In August 2012, a Jacksonville temp was crushed to death on his first day of work at a bottling plant when a supervisor told him to clean glass from underneath a machine that stacks goods onto pallets — a job that OSHA said he wasn’t trained to do. And in January, a temp was killed at a paper mill outside Charlotte, N.C., when he was overcome by toxic fumes while cleaning the inside of a chemical tank.
“There’s something going on here that needs direct intervention,” Michaels said.
A Temp Worker Bill of Rights
Members of Congress have introduced a handful of bills protecting temp workers in the past two decades. None have made it out of committee. Efforts on the state level have met similar resistance.
Community
organizer Jasiela Chaves talks to temp worker Lorne Casey of Lawrence,
Mass., inside a Labor Ready office about the state's Temporary Workers
Right to Know Law that went into effect on Jan. 31, 2013. (Matthew
Healey for ProPublica)
Similar state bills have passed in New Jersey and Illinois in the past few years. But while the American Staffing Association has a code of ethics containing similar guidelines, it has fought against such laws and blocked them in California and New York. “All laws that apply to every other employee apply to temporary workers,” said Stephen Dwyer, the group’s general counsel. “We thought that heaping new laws on top of existing laws would not be effective.”
Even in states that have them, the laws are honored mostly in the breach. For example, Illinois prohibits temp agencies from charging for transportation. But many have gotten around the law by using so-called raiteros, who act as neighborhood labor brokers for the agencies and charge for transportation. The law also requires an employment notice stating the name of the host company, the hourly wage and any equipment needed. Out of more than 50 Chicago-area workers interviewed for this story, only a handful had ever received one.
Passing through Chicago’s working-class suburbs recently, Rosa pointed out the car window to a row of small redbrick homes.
“I’ve always dreamed of having a little house, a really small, little house,” she said.
Asked if she thought she’d ever be able to buy one, Rosa laughed.
“Earning $8.25 an hour?” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that.”
Back at the temp agency, Rosa continues to wait with about 50 other people.
Around 6 a.m., she again inquires if there will be any work. The dispatcher tells her to give it 15 more minutes.
Then he breaks the news: There is no work today.
Get Involved: Is this happening in your community? What should be done about it? Join our discussion by tweeting us your questions and comments with #TempLand, or send us a tip.
First Person: Save a Language, Save a Culture
Grassroots initiative seeks to revive threatened languages of Bangladesh.
The grassroots
initiative hopes to revive threatened indigenous languages throughout
Bangladesh, like the language of this Marma ginger farmer.
Photograph by Alex Treadway, National Geographic
Tim Brookes at work. Photograph courtesy Tim Brookes
Published June 28, 2013
Part of our First Person series, where we invite writers to share personal stories.
For Maung, a culturally relevant curriculum must be taught in the
language the child speaks at home—the language the child is already
learning and is using to find out about the world.
In June 2012 Maung and I set up a partnership to create and publish
his schoolbooks and, we hope, to help save the languages that sustain
the cultures of the Hill Tracts.
Of the world's 6,000-plus languages, half are expected to be extinct by the end of the century.
I knew nothing about this linguistic catastrophe until four
years ago, when more or less by accident I began carving the alphabets
of endangered languages.
I'd spent my life as a nonfiction writer, with no
pretensions to be a visual artist, when one Christmas I decided to make
gifts for my family by carving their names in boards of Vermont maple,
with the bark still on and a beautiful ripple in the grain.
These came out surprisingly well, and in casting around for something else to carve, I stumbled on Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of the world's hundred or more writing systems.
Their range and variety were amazing. Some were alphabets
with symbols to represent all the vowels and consonants. Some were
syllabaries, in which each symbol represented a syllable, and some were
abjads, consisting mostly or entirely of consonants.
Some were astonishingly graceful and fluid (the Balinese script looks like a flock of birds), while others were minimal, ornate, or downright exotic: The Dongba script used by the Naxi people in China includes baffling pictograms that look like folding chairs and jellyfish.
My most striking and disturbing discovery, though, was that fully a third are in danger of extinction.
I decided to carve some of the scripts to draw attention to
the problem of language loss and cultural erosion. The carvings have
since been exhibited in schools, libraries, and universities across the
United States and Europe.
Working with a set of gouges and a paintbrush, I created
several dozen pieces depicting words, phrases, sentences, or poems in
vanishing alphabets from all over the world, including three scripts of
indigenous peoples in Bangladesh: the Mro, Marma, and Chakma.
At the time I had no idea I would meet a member of the
Marma people, a remarkable man named Maung Nyeu, and that we would
collaborate on a preservation project that may become a model of how to
reverse linguistic decline and the cultural collapse that goes with it.
Why Do Scripts Matter?
"Scripts are a hugely important aspect of culture," write Martin Raymond and Lorna Evans of ScriptSource, the world's leading authority.
Writing is intimately associated with cultural identity.
Each writing system tells the tale of its culture's history, its
evolving technology, even its deeply embedded values.
In sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than a dozen scripts have been formulated for indigenous languages since 1900.
"The N'Ko script," Raymond and Evans note, "was originally
created in 1949 for Bambara, one of the Manding languages of Mali,
which, at that time, was written using the Latin script.
"N'Ko script was adopted by other Manding language groups
because, unlike Latin, it was seen as a script of their culture. N'Ko
has become one of the most widely used indigenous African scripts, and
it has strengthened the Manding cultural identity."
A carving of the N’Ko script.
Photograph courtesy Tim Brookes
If scripts are vital to a society, why do they die?
For the same reason languages die. One culture is dominated
by another (economically, militarily, politically, and/or
technologically), sometimes with extreme consequences: Shong Lue Yang was assassinated by Laotian troops for creating a script for the Hmong.
Suppression of indigenous peoples is happening right now in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh's Imperiled Cultures
I must confess that when I started my project, my interest
in carving and exhibiting scripts was a little theoretical—after all, I
couldn't actually read or write what I was carving, and I had never seen
language or script endangerment up close.
All that changed in June 2012, when I first met Maung Nyeu, in Boston.
He had stumbled on my website
and seen, to his amazement, that someone not only knew about the
threatened languages of the Hill Tracts but had actually carved them.
The Hill Tracts, a forested upland area in southeastern
Bangladesh, are home to more than a dozen indigenous peoples who are
distinct from the majority Bengali population in language, culture, and
religion.
Over the past two decades, the region has become
increasingly militarized, and traditional farmlands have been given to
Bengali settlers.
According to Amnesty International, the Bangladeshi
government's failure to address legal rights to traditional lands in the
eastern Chittagong Hill Tracts has left tens of thousands landless.
Local people are trapped in a cycle of violent clashes with Bengali settlers.
Villages and temples have been burned, and indigenous women
and girls have been abducted to be sold into the sex trade. Massacres
have been documented.
Lack of education and language collapse are pernicious
threats: More than half of the indigenous people of the Hill Tracts have
no formal schooling.
For those who start school, fewer than 8 percent complete primary education, and only 2 percent secondary.
This isn't surprising, because instruction is in Bangla, which most Hill Tracts children don't understand.
Adding injury to insult, indigenous children are often
abused by teachers and students from the country's largest ethnic group,
Bengalis. Maung himself suffered mistreatment.
In a single generation, Maung said, he has seen his people
go from living as self-sufficient farmers on ancestral lands to being
vagrant day laborers scattered across Bangladesh and into India and
Myanmar.
Language Nurturer
Remarkably, Maung flouted the norm, earning a degree in
engineering at the University of Hawaii, then an MBA from the University
of Southern California.
He returned to the Hill Tracts to build the Padamu Residential Education Center, a school on the grounds of a Buddhist temple, so the children of the Hill Tracts could be educated in their own languages.
Classes began in 2008. Change was immediately apparent:
Children who had seemed destined to be domestics or day laborers
announced their intention to be doctors and teachers.
But most of the students could no longer speak their own ethnic language.
So Maung came back to the U.S., to the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, to learn how to create a culturally relevant
curriculum that would revive the dying languages of the Hill Tracts.
At the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he sought out the advice of the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky.
"He was very kind and very attentive," Maung said. "His
recommendation was that it is possible to preserve a language, but it
needs to start with the children, preferably as part of their
curriculum."
Also, the material being taught must be familiar. Maung
remembered that at school he had to learn by heart William Wordsworth's
poem "Daffodils."
"I had never seen a daffodil!" he laughed. "I had no idea
what it looked like. We have all sorts of plants and flowers, but I
never saw a daffodil until I came to the United States!"
Maung has collected more than 40 stories passed down in the
villages of the Hill Tracts. The stories involve mountains and trees
and animals the children already know—tales they may have heard from
their parents and grandparents.
He is beginning the process of having them translated into
Mro, Marma, and Chakma, writing them out, getting them illustrated in a
visual idiom familiar to the children, and getting them published.
He faces an additional challenge. Most people in these
groups still speak their traditional languages, but very few can now
read and write their unique scripts.
That's where I came in.
I recruited a calligrapher at Louisiana State University to
take the handwritten forms of the scripts and turn them into works of
art.
I enlisted a typographer from Anglia University in England
to make Mro, Marma, and Chakma fonts so that the books can be digitally
printed.
I hand-carved texts in each of the three languages.
A friend, using a laser, experimented with burning the
scripts into mahogany boards. Some are now on display in community
centers in the Hill Tracts.
One of Maung's fellow Harvard students created illustrations for the first book.
This fall, students of mine from Champlain College, in
Burlington, Vermont, will help write, edit, design, and illustrate the
next books bound for Padamu.
Signs of Revival
Reversing the decline of a language is a Herculean task, and there are no guarantees that Maung will succeed.
But there are signs that the tide of globalism that has been eroding indigenous cultures and their languages may be turning.
Some of the same multinational corporations that are
creating a global online culture recognize that they can play a positive
part.
Apple and Google in particular have shown an interest in
endangered languages. One example: Macs, iPhones, Google, and Gmail now
recognize the Cherokee syllabary.
And in the Philippines, where the pre-Spanish script called Baybayin
was widely believed to be extinct, the government has now adopted
Baybayin symbols on its banknotes as an anti-counterfeiting device.
So there is hope—but there is also urgency.
"In medicine," Maung explained, "there is a window of
time—maybe a few minutes to two hours, called the golden hour—where if
the person can get to the ER, the chance of survival increases. For our
children, their golden hour is between the ages of four or five and
twelve. If we don't get them in school during this time, we won't get
them at all."
Tim Brookes is founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project and author of 13 books, including Endangered Alphabets. His website is www.endangeredalphabets.com.
Brookes and Maung Nyeu will speak about endangered alphabets and the Chittagong Hill Tracts at 1:15 p.m., June 28, at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
How to help: To raise funds for schoolbooks for the children of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Maung founded a nonprofit organization, Our Golden Hour, where donations can be made.Thursday, June 27, 2013
Cuentamelo: An Oral History of Queer Latin Immigrants in San Francisco
For years I've sat next to my adoptive mama eating fried bacalao,
listening as she tells and retells stories of the glamorous, fierce,
sad, immigrant queens, faggots, and weirdos that roamed San Francisco in
the '80s and '90s. Most of these people are now dead, gone at the peak
of the AIDS epidemic. Their stories survive solely in the memories of
those they left behind — stories of leaving hostile homelands for
unknown new ones, of falling down, of building new selves, of living in
two worlds.
Here, four gay and transgender Latin American immigrants tell of
coming to San Francisco in the 1980s and the ways in which they
survived, built, changed (and were changed by) the city. ("Cuéntamelo"
means "Tell me.") This small compilation of oral histories maps Latin
queerness as seen and lived in Spanish: It highlights the changes that
over time have impacted the community: immigration laws, access to
health care, the hormone black market, AIDS funding, and, with it, the
rise and fall of Latino organizations, bars, and community centers. The
stories travel down 16th Street (which Adela Vazquez says at the time was the "mecca of faggotry"), over to the Tenderloin, to bars such as La India Bonita, Los Portales, Esta Noche,
and Finnochio's. Most of these places are now closed, but in their
heyday, in the late '80s, Latin female impersonators, transformistas,
travestis, and, later, drag queens flourished. Also during this time,
and through the work of some of these performers, transgender and gay
Latino communities in San Francisco became visible through programs such
as Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, Instituto Familiar de la Raza, and Aguilas.
All of these interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated. Because the storytellers come from different parts of Latin America, their use of words, especially slang, differs too. The following chart explains a few of the terms and concepts:
Fuerte: Literally, "strong." In English it's better known as "fierce." Someone flamboyant, bold, who does not care what others think.
Latin@: Used by LGBT Latinos/as to indicate all genders.
Loca: General term for all females and males who feel like women in some way or another. Loca can also be used when you don't remember her name. Or "loquita," someone you met on a night out.
Maricón: Literally, "faggot." Used in Spanish with intimates; you call someone a maricón when you know them. Alternatively, "maricón" can be someone who despises the community.
MariconerÃa: Literally, "faggotry." It's a way of carrying oneself. Also a reunion of "maricones" who act very feminine.
Niña!: Literally, "girl." Used to say, "What up!" "Bitch!" "Sister!"
Transformista: Original term used by urban locas. In Havana, Cuba, for instance, the term signifies boys who dress as women generally as art.
Travesti: Same as "transformista." Generally used in South America and Spain.
Vestida: Literally, "dressed." Dressed as a woman; drag queen.
Nelson D'Alerta
Isla de Pino, Cuba
Year of Arrival: 1983
Call me Catherine White.
I'm from a small island, Isla de Pino. I lived there until I was 10 years old, then I moved to La Habana. When we first arrived in La Habana my grandfather took me to the opera to see Aida. He held my hand tight, saying: This is going to be your home, you are going to come back here many times. I was shocked, oh my god. Because theater has truly been my life. Dressed in a gown, as a woman, never as a man. My grandfather was Italian, from Florence; he was a painter, a fencer. My family is a family of artists. I remember thereafter dancing ballet in front of my grandfather one day and him saying I was fantastic, that I needed to straighten my fingers a little more. He said: ballet is totally your thing.
I never had a closet because my mom always said to me, "You are a fag." My mom took me to see a psychiatrist during the '60s because I have a picture as a kid wearing high heels. I'd steal my mother's clothes and rehearse. I'd go out into the streets in women's garments, and in 1970 I was sent to jail and taken to court — dressed as a woman in court. And hell went down in La Habana!
In high school I used to dye my hair. I'd wear truly scandalous outfits, big sunglasses, I'd sew in the bus, my face all painted weirdly like a woman. I'd wear bras and panties. Tell the boys on the bus: I'm wearing a bra, wanna see it? They'd go crazy. They didn't know what to do! I mean this was the '70s in Cuba. My first gay friend was Marquesa. We used to perform in the middle of the bushes, in the midst of passing goats and animals, the space filled with faggotry. Ah, so wonderful. With a boom box. I'm crazy to do something like that again.
To be a faggot in Cuba during the '70s was the worst thing you could be. The government even went all over the world looking for ways to end homosexuality in Cuba. They opened a concentration camp called UMA in Camaguey. When you signed up for the military draft they picked out everyone who was an outcast, not only homosexuals but anyone who could be related to this group and sent them to the UMA. You couldn't wear shorts, or a certain kind of sandal, you couldn't have long hair. If that wasn't a concentration camp, I don't know what is!
CONTINUED:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | All | Next Page >>
Nelson D’Alerta as Catherine White.
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All of these interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated. Because the storytellers come from different parts of Latin America, their use of words, especially slang, differs too. The following chart explains a few of the terms and concepts:
Fuerte: Literally, "strong." In English it's better known as "fierce." Someone flamboyant, bold, who does not care what others think.
Latin@: Used by LGBT Latinos/as to indicate all genders.
Loca: General term for all females and males who feel like women in some way or another. Loca can also be used when you don't remember her name. Or "loquita," someone you met on a night out.
Maricón: Literally, "faggot." Used in Spanish with intimates; you call someone a maricón when you know them. Alternatively, "maricón" can be someone who despises the community.
MariconerÃa: Literally, "faggotry." It's a way of carrying oneself. Also a reunion of "maricones" who act very feminine.
Niña!: Literally, "girl." Used to say, "What up!" "Bitch!" "Sister!"
Transformista: Original term used by urban locas. In Havana, Cuba, for instance, the term signifies boys who dress as women generally as art.
Travesti: Same as "transformista." Generally used in South America and Spain.
Vestida: Literally, "dressed." Dressed as a woman; drag queen.
Nelson D'Alerta
Isla de Pino, Cuba
Year of Arrival: 1983
Call me Catherine White.
I'm from a small island, Isla de Pino. I lived there until I was 10 years old, then I moved to La Habana. When we first arrived in La Habana my grandfather took me to the opera to see Aida. He held my hand tight, saying: This is going to be your home, you are going to come back here many times. I was shocked, oh my god. Because theater has truly been my life. Dressed in a gown, as a woman, never as a man. My grandfather was Italian, from Florence; he was a painter, a fencer. My family is a family of artists. I remember thereafter dancing ballet in front of my grandfather one day and him saying I was fantastic, that I needed to straighten my fingers a little more. He said: ballet is totally your thing.
I never had a closet because my mom always said to me, "You are a fag." My mom took me to see a psychiatrist during the '60s because I have a picture as a kid wearing high heels. I'd steal my mother's clothes and rehearse. I'd go out into the streets in women's garments, and in 1970 I was sent to jail and taken to court — dressed as a woman in court. And hell went down in La Habana!
In high school I used to dye my hair. I'd wear truly scandalous outfits, big sunglasses, I'd sew in the bus, my face all painted weirdly like a woman. I'd wear bras and panties. Tell the boys on the bus: I'm wearing a bra, wanna see it? They'd go crazy. They didn't know what to do! I mean this was the '70s in Cuba. My first gay friend was Marquesa. We used to perform in the middle of the bushes, in the midst of passing goats and animals, the space filled with faggotry. Ah, so wonderful. With a boom box. I'm crazy to do something like that again.
To be a faggot in Cuba during the '70s was the worst thing you could be. The government even went all over the world looking for ways to end homosexuality in Cuba. They opened a concentration camp called UMA in Camaguey. When you signed up for the military draft they picked out everyone who was an outcast, not only homosexuals but anyone who could be related to this group and sent them to the UMA. You couldn't wear shorts, or a certain kind of sandal, you couldn't have long hair. If that wasn't a concentration camp, I don't know what is!
CONTINUED:
Listen to Al Bell Presents American Soul Music
Watch Al Bell Presents Soul TV
The three surviving members of Pink Floyd - Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason (right) - this week wrote a scathing op-ed for USA Today, accusing Pandora of attempting to con artists into a massive pay cut. At the heart of the issue is the Internet Radio Fairness Act, which failed to do much in the last Congress, largely because it was introduced too late in the session. But Pandora, which was a strong supporter of the legislation, is planning on introducing the proposed legislation again, objecting to the fact that it has to pay performance royalties when conventional radio broadcasters don't pay anything. Taking umbrage with Pandora's attempt to get artists to support the IRFA, Pink Floyd claimed the measure could result in an 85% pay cut, writing that "a musician could read this 'letter of support' a dozen times and hold it up to a funhouse mirror for good measure without realizing she was signing a call to cut her own royalties to pad Pandora's bottom line.'" In response, Pandora founder Tim Westergren countered in a blog post, "That is a lie manufactured by the Recording Industry Association of America and promoted by their hired guns to mislead and agitate the artist community. We have never, nor would we ever, advocate such a thing. The 85% sound bite preys upon the natural suspicions of the artist community, but it is simply untrue. And although we compete directly with AM/FM radio, which pays zero performance royalties, we have always supported fair compensation to artists." [Full story: Forbes]
Pandora Expects To Be In Over 100 Car Models This Year
Pandora this week announced it has had more than 2.5 million unique activations through its partnerships with 23 car companies. According to Chief Marketing Officer Simon Fleming-Wood, the company's internet radio service will become available in over 100 car models this year, and he projects that about a third of all new cars sold in the U.S. this year will have Pandora installed. Pandora currently has deals with major auto brands including Ford, Toyota, Honda, and various General Motors units, including Buick and Chevrolet, and plans to make its radio service available in Dodge, Infiniti, Jeep, Kia, and Ram brands in the near future. Approximately half of all radio listening takes place in automobiles, and Fleming-Wood referred to vehicles as "the traditional home of radio" - making them "a key battleground in the $15 billion local radio advertising market that Pandora is looking to capitalize on." [Full story: Wall Street Pit]
Microsoft To Launch Web-Based Xbox Music Next Week
As expected, Microsoft announced it is launching a web-based version of its streaming music service/digital store Xbox Music. The rebranded version of Zune, Xbox Music is is a digital music store that allows Windows and Xbox users to buy individual tracks or albums, as well as a streaming music service that offers a premium subscription (for a monthly fee) for on-demand streaming music that's similar to Spotify. Users can access the service from the Xbox Music Windows app, Xbox Live, Windows Phone 8 smartphones, Surface tablets, and now, the web. The web-based launch also will make the platform available on Android and iOS devices, although whether that also results in standalone apps remains to be seen. The Verge reports that the home screen of the Windows 8 app has been tweaked slightly, with "Collection" listed at the top of the sidebar and "Explore" placed directly underneath. It's been designed to reduce the number of clicks needed to dive into the user's existing tracks - those not streamed from Xbox Music itself - and replace any alternative music apps. Microsoft also is poking Pandora and Nokia Music+ in this version by allowing users to launch a new "station" based on a specific artist or music genre. [Full story: Venture Beat]
Lou Reed: MP3s Reduce Music To Lowest Common Denominator
"MP3s [are] a really miserable sounding thing...people don't understand what they are missing." That's the word from legendary rock musician Lou Reed (left), who told an audience at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity that commercial digital music on both aesthetic and financial grounds "sounds like s**t...it's been reduced to the lowest common denominator." Comparing his most recent royalty check of $2.60 to what he was paid playing in a bar at age 14, he said, "I understand young people were brought up on downloading, and Steve Jobs tried to make it into some kind of business which benefits Apple, but you get about a sixteenth of a penny (for each song). You used to make a record but they reduced the size of it and put it in this plastic that breaks immediately ... You realize they are really (messing) with you, so people didn't want to pay for anything. But meanwhile the musician doesn't get paid anything. Now making a record is kind of a promotional thing." [Full story: Spin]
Vadio Turns Radio Station Playlists Into Real-Time Video Feed
In the 34 years since The Buggles released the single "Video Killed The Radio Star," the phrase has become an overworked cliché, but a new company known as Vadio might actually have a platform that could "save" traditional AM/FM radio. The start-up company has developed a way to provide virtually any radio station a feed of music videos, complete with DVR-like catch-up functionality. The idea is quite simple: Vadio is partnering with radio stations to get real-time access to song titles as they air, and the digital player - which is embedded on the station's website or made available through mobile apps - then pulls in the music video for the song from Vevo or YouTube. The result is a curated list of music videos that mirrors what's playing on air (up to a point, since videos aren't necessarily the same length as a record), along with a list of videos that previously aired so users can go back and watch songs that played half an hour ago. The company has deals in place with a number of radio networks, and Virgin Radio signed up just last week. [Full story: Giga Om]
Al Bell Presents American Soul Music ... And American Soul TV
If you're into classic and contemporary Soul, R&B, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Hip-Hop Soul, Rap Soul, and Neo-Soul, we invite you to listen to Al Bell Presents American Soul Music. Former Stax Records owner and Motown Records Group President Al Bell personally has programmed this awesome radio station online, presenting your favorites from the 1960s and '70s [and some '80s], a lot of the best new music that's being released today, and some real gems you haven't heard in a long, long time. Come to www.AlBellPresents.Com and hear it for yourself!
And now...join us for Al Bell Presents American Soul TV here.
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