South Asia Citizens Web

We are academics and independent scholars from India and abroad, writing to express solidarity with, and to endorse the sentiments expressed by, forty-nine retired civil servants in their open letter to you of April 16th 2018

The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex near Dhaka in April 2013—killing 1,132 souls and injuring nearly 2,000 more—is unquestionably the most horrific human tragedy in garment industry world history. Whether this enormous loss of life will be balanced by a new era of social reform remains an open question. But it seems just possible that Rana Plaza may well represent the same sort of moral and political shock to an exploitative and dysfunctional production system as did the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, which ushered in a generation of social reform and labor rights.

A state-owned farm near the central town of Vrede was leased to a little-known company, Estina Pty Ltd., in 2012 under a free 99-year contract and the regional government agreed to help develop it, ostensibly to set up a dairy project that would create 200 jobs. Prosecutors say most of the 220 million rand in public funds transferred to the company ended up in the hands of the Guptas.
read more at:
Guptas: From R9k to R34m in a day (…)

The share of workers belonging to unions has declined in many countries, and new patterns of employment, such as the rise of the so called ‘gig economy’, are making unorganised labour the norm in a large number of industries. For Pranab Bardhan, this weakening of labour organisations has been a factor in enabling the growth of inequality and the rise of right-wing populism. He outlines some suggested steps for reversing this trend.

When Raqqa fell in 2017, after a long siege by the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), it was generally thought that ISIS was defeated, save for some mopping up. But in January of this year, Turkey invaded Afrin—one of three cantons in Rojava, also called the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. This meant that scores of SDF fighters had to leave the battle against ISIS in order to defend their homes, families, and neighbors in Afrin.