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And there’s plainly a rationale for capitalizing black in order to head off ambiguity (what am I referring to when I refer to “black hair”?). For many advocates of the uppercase, though, the stakes are far greater. “Black with a capital ‘B’ refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces,” Lori L. Tharps, who teaches journalism at Temple University, wrote in 2015. “When a copyeditor deletes the capital ‘B,’ they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Or as Anne Price, the president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, put it last year: “capitalizing Black is about claiming power.” When W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned, back in the 1920s, for Negro, rather than negro, he remarked, mordantly: “Eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” According to the diversity committee of USA Today, which decided last week to capitalize the B-word, the change reflected “understanding and respect.”

What complicates things is that, as a rule, capitalizing a word doesn’t convey elevation: We don’t rank Masonite over mahogany. Written languages are not highly consistent, to be sure, so we generalize at some peril. But in English, the long-standing convention is to capitalize proper nouns and proper names, which are terms that refer to what philosophers call “particulars” or “individuals”—a specific person, place, or thing. We routinely name and capitalize entities (the Middle Ages, January, the Pacific Ocean, Copenhagen) that reflect human interests or actions. On the other hand, we tend not to capitalize “natural kinds”—that is, categories that track with inherent features of the world, independent of our interests or doings. Einstein, the physicist, is capitalized; einsteinium, the element, is not.

Informality is among the most seriously misunderstood of all economic issues. Informal companies evade fiscal and regulatory obligations, including value-added taxes, income taxes, labor market obligations (such as social security taxes and minimum-wage requirements), and product market regulations (including quality standards, copyrights, and intellectual-property laws). Evasion varies by sector and by the nature of the business: informal retailers tend to avoid paying value-added taxes, informal food processors to ignore product quality and health regulations, and informal construction firms to underreport the number of employees and hours worked. For many people, the informal economy means street vendors and tiny businesses, and it is true that informality is pervasive among small, traditional concerns with low levels of technology, scale, and standardization. But it is hardly unknown among larger, modern enterprises in developing countries (Exhibit 1), where MGI has found informal supermarket chains, auto parts suppliers, consumer electronics assemblers, and even large-scale industrial operations. The extent of informality varies from industry to industry. It is greatest in service businesses such as retailing and construction (Exhibit 2), in which companies are often small in scale and geographically dispersed, making it easier to avoid detection. Revenues come from individual consumers and are difficult for auditors to verify. Labor costs are a significant share of total expenses, so companies are tempted to underreport employment. In one country, MGI found that construction workers ran away from sites when government inspectors appeared. For similar reasons, informality in manufacturing industries is more prevalent in labor-intensive sectors such as apparel and food processing than in capital-intensive ones such as automotive assembly, cement, oil, steel, and telecommunications. Even so, some very large industrial and manufacturing companies operate informally. In India and Russia, for instance, local governments force local power companies to provide free energy to some businesses; subsidies such as these allow informal businesses to continue operating.

Providing pensions and other forms of social insurance to people requires keeping track of large numbers of individuals over long periods of time. There is little margin for error. Allocating contributions of one individual to the pension of another not only affects individual fates. It also risks undermining the trust in the entire system and without trust social insurance cannot work. In the formal economy with contractual employer-employee relationships, the identification of an individual over a long period can (at least partially) be outsourced to the employer. Afterall, an employer should be able to confirm her employee’s identity. Informal sector workers, who work in 89.2% of all jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa, however, cannot rely on their employers to take on this role. They tend to lack defined employment relationships, frequently change employer, are self-employed, or tend to be highly mobile. Extending social insurance to the informal sector therefore critically depends on the social insurance system’s ability to identify individuals without relying on an employer to do so. Existing identification systems such as national IDs become crucial. However, coverage of existing ID systems remains spotty, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where almost a third of the population aged 15 and above does not possess any form of ID (Figure 1). Coverage tends to be significantly lower among vulnerable groups. This is in part due to the fact that the population in many cases has to purchase identity credentials at costs that are prohibitive for many. High transaction costs, for example from displacements to issuing authorities or the costs of required documents, further constrain access. Those living in rural areas, women, and individuals with lower levels of education . Coincidentally, these attributes are also closely correlated with informality. Lower educational attainment tends to be associated with higher levels of informality. In West Africa, informal employment furthermore . This relationship between low ID coverage and high levels of informality appears to hold at the national level as well as Figure 2 shows. Given the weaknesses of identification systems and the exclusion of large proportions of the population, particularly vulnerable groups and often equally vulnerable informal sector workers, extending social insurance to the informal sector is currently critically constrained. To enable informal sector workers to save for retirement, bridge periods of unemployment and to sustain savings despite the inability to work altogether, investments in identification systems will be crucial. Extending social insurance to the informal sector therefore adds yet another reason to the many existing ones for . Due to the importance of identification for service provision to the poor and vulnerable such as the millions of informal sector workers in Africa, the World Bank is increasingly investing in countries’ ID systems. The , for example, to everyone physically in the territories of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, and Togo to improve access to wide variety of services. The World Bank thereby contributes to Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 of providing legal identity for all and aligns with regional and continental initiatives, for example in the context of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.

(Merriam Webster, “increase”, , No specific date included)//KP

Definition of increase

(Rojer Wollman, Circuit Judge, “US Court of Appeals – 8th Circuit, Kansas City Power & Light Company, a Missouri corporation, Appellee, v. Ford Motor Credit Company, a Delaware corporation; McDonnell Douglas Finance Corporation, a Delaware corporation; HEI Investment Corp., a Hawaii corporation, Appellants”, 995 F.2d 1422; 1993 U.S. App.)//KP

Instruction No. 10 was not given in isolation, however. The district court's instructions also contained a definition of "substantial." Instruction No. 11 defined "substantial" as meaning "true, real or likely to materialize" and as not meaning "imaginary or unlikely to materialize." This instruction properly limited the potential bases for the jury's decision, which is the essential function of jury instructions. When combined with the contract and the verdict-directing instructions, [*1432] which tracked the operative language of the contract, Instruction No. 11 required the jury to find that KCPL had determined a real risk, not some imaginary hypothetical risk premised solely on a reduction in the DRD. Because the contract provided only one means of creating a risk of making an indemnity payment--a demand notice from an Investor--the jury's discretion was properly channelled into deciding whether KCPL had sufficiently studied and honestly considered the likelihood of receiving such a demand notice. That determination is all that the contract required.

Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”

Successful examples of the extension of social security coverage to workers in the informal economy have focused on two broad policy approaches. In many countries, the extension of social security to larger groups of the population has followed an approach that could be described as “extend social protection through formalization”, focusing mainly on existing social protection mechanisms (typically social insurance, to some extent also mutual funds (mutuelles) and other community-based microinsurance). This approach tends to prioritize specific groups of workers who are already close to the formal economy and have some contributory capacity, and may therefore be relatively easily covered by employment-based social protection mechanisms. In many cases, the extension strategy includes not only a change in legislation but also the adoption of measures to remove administrative obstacles to contributions by facilitating administrative processes and adapting contribution rates and benefit packages. Some examples are the inclusion of domestic workers in maternity and unemployment insurance (South Africa); occupation-/sector-based mutual funds or mutuelles (Senegal); facilitating registration and the collection of taxes and contribution collection through monotax mechanisms (Argentina, Uruguay); and the inclusion of self-employed workers in social insurance schemes (Algeria). In other countries, the extension of social security to larger groups of the population has been pursued through a large-scale extension of non-contributory social protection mechanisms to previously uncovered groups, independently of their employment status and largely financed through government revenue derived from taxation, mineral resource revenue or external grants. This approach could be described as “extend social protection independently of status”, based on the expectation that investing in people through social protection helps workers to facilitate their access to health and education and enhance their income security and enable them to take greater risks, thereby enhancing productivity and facilitating the formalization of employment in the medium and long terms. Some examples are the introduction and expansion of cash transfer programmes for children and families (Brazil, Mexico, Mongolia), persons with disabilities (South Africa) and older persons (social pensions in Lesotho, Mauritius, Namibia, Nepal, Timor Leste, South Africa), as well as national health services.

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World financial leaders gathered recently in Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But missing from their agenda was one of the biggest and most misunderstood barriers to economic growth: The vast agglomeration of businesses that evade taxes and ignore regulations, often referred to as the "informal economy." The informal economy is not just the unregistered street vendors and tiny businesses that form the backbone of marketplaces in Asia and other emerging markets. It includes many established companies, often employing hundreds of people, in industries as diverse as retail, construction, consumer electronics, software, pharmaceuticals and even steel production. In India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines, as much as 70 percent of the non-agricultural workforce is employed in informal businesses. Despite the prevalence of the informal economy, Asian policymakers show surprisingly little concern. Some governments argue that it helps relieve urban employment tensions and will recede naturally as the formal economy develops. Development experts contend that informal companies themselves will grow, modernize, and become law-abiding if given some help. And most policymakers implicitly assume that the informal economy does no harm. But there is little evidence to support these beliefs. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that informal economies are not only growing larger in many developing countries, but are also undermining enterprise-level productivity and hindering economic development. The reasons why informal economies grow—and keep growing—are not hard to uncover: High corporate tax rates and the enormous cost of doing business legally. It takes 89 days to register a business in India, compared with eight days in Singapore. It takes 33 days to register a property in the Philippines, compared with 12 in the US. It takes five and a half years to close an insolvent business in Vietnam. All in all, emerging-market businesses face administrative costs three times as high as their counterparts in developed economies. No wonder so many choose to operate in the gray. The costs imposed by the informal economy are not limited to the hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone tax receipts; more damaging is its pernicious effect on economic growth and productivity. The unearned cost advantage informal businesses enjoy from ignoring taxes and regulatory obligations allows them to undercut prices of more productive competitors and stay in business, despite very low productivity. Informal software companies in India appropriate innovations and copyrights without paying for them, reducing the industry's productivity and profitability by up to 90 percent. Informal apparel makers in India gain a 25 percent cost advantage over their law-abiding competitors by not paying taxes. Informal businesses thus disrupt the natural economic evolution whereby more productive companies replace less productive ones. This discourages investment and slows economic growth. Even worse, it creates a vicious cycle in which governments increase corporate tax rates to raise revenue, which prompts more companies to evade taxes, thus causing the informal economy to grow still further. The notion that informal companies might grow and become more productive is unfounded. They can't borrow from banks or rely on the legal system to enforce contracts or resolve disputes, and they structure relationships with informal suppliers in ways that make it difficult to come clean. In fact, informal companies often shun opportunities to grow and modernize precisely so they can continue to avoid detection. As a result, informal businesses remain a persistent drag on national productivity and living standards. Governments are often unaware of the huge economic gains that result from reducing informality, and of what they can and must do to address its causes: high taxes, complex tax systems and onerous regulations, weak enforcement, and social norms that see noncompliance as legitimate. Addressing these problems is essential in reducing informality. Reducing the tax burden on businesses is perhaps the most critical step to reducing informality, since high taxes increase the incentives for companies to operate informally. For many Asian governments, one path to lower taxes is through broadening the tax net: collecting taxes from more companies can enable governments to cut tax rates without reducing tax revenue, while simultaneously breaking the tax-evasion cycle. Many Asian countries also have large governments and generous social programs similar to those in rich countries, and this poses a heavy burden on business. The Indian government, for instance, spends over 30 percent of the country's GDP, about the same as the Japanese government. But in the early 1950s, when Japan had the same level of per-capita income as India does today, Japanese government consumption accounted for only 20-22 percent of GDP. When the US had the same level of per-capita income, in the early 1900s, its government spent just 7 percent of GDP. Another key to reducing the extent of the informal economy is to streamline regulatory procedures. Registering a new business is often an onerous process. But when businesses fail to register, collecting taxes from them and enforcing regulations is nearly impossible. Tax codes are often overly complicated as well. Spain increased the amount of taxes collected from small and mid-sized businesses by 75 percent after giving small businesses the option of calculating taxes based on physical characteristics, such as a store's square footage, rather than reported revenue, which is difficult to verify. Governments have the power to reduce informality, and can reap sizable economic gains in the process. The political challenges are considerable. But policymakers must remember that any short-term disruption is far outweighed by the longer-term boost to productivity and economic growth.

While capitalism is often defended for its wealth creation or its promotion of freedom, it is not often seen as specifically promoting women’s material well-being or freedom. The most important ways that women’s material wellbeing is promoted by capitalism is through innovations in technology that most improve the quality and length of their lives: maternal and infant health that increases life expectancy, birth control, and the technology that reduces women’s domestic labor. Capitalism’s most important form of freedom creation for women comes from its tendency to destroy or fundamentally transform traditional culture. By traditional culture I mean a culture in which social roles and relationships are determined by traditional rules and norms, and a person’s place is determined by these rules according to their status at birth, and not by merit, desert, or personal preference. Tradition can be defined as the set of beliefs and values, rituals, and practices, formal and informal, explicit and implicit, which are held by and constitute a culture. Because tradition constitutes social meaning, though, it is the vehicle by which oppressive beliefs and desires are formed. Our beliefs about value come largely given to us by our culture. We learn them as children from our parents and other significant adults, who in turn learned them from their parents and others. Traditional cultures habituate people to evaluate each other according to their given status. We rarely have reason to question the values we are given, and traditional cultures often enforce them on pain of ostracism or violence. The background beliefs we have are the shared meanings of our culture, and they allow us to formulate the beliefs and desires against which some of the beliefs and desires can be understood and questioned.

CONTINUE

In our recent book, I argued that capitalism does not initially create oppressive conditions for race, gender, or caste groups, but that it can be seen as creating inequalities of wealth and income given the longstanding background conditions of oppression for those groups. What I meant by that is that capitalism exploits and then exaggerates existing inequalities. Absent those oppressive conditions, however, capitalism would still create inequality of wealth and income, and whatever moral or social inequality that follows from that. The inequality objection to capitalism is that the inequalities created by capitalism are inevitable and morally unacceptable. To examine this objection, the first point to address is the degree to which capitalism inevitably promotes or creates inequality, while the second is the question of what constitutes morally unacceptable inequality. Inequality is a relation between two subjects and with respect to some good. While a social system may reduce inequality with respect to some goods, or between certain groups or individuals, it may increase it with respect to other goods, and between some groups or individuals. The inequality objection to capitalism is that it increases inequalities of wealth and income between rich and poor countries and between individuals. This is not uncontroversial; the degree of inequality one finds depends on which countries one looks at and what time periods one considers. The matter of how one measures inequality of wealth and income is also the subject of controversy. Bob Sutcliffe and David Dollar are economists who argue on different sides of the inequality objection, but they agree on the following basic characterizations of economic inequality at present in the world. 1. Global inequality (among individuals throughout the world) has risen steadily over the past two centuries, but since 1980 has declined modestly; 2. Inter-country rather than intra-country inequality is the largest contributor to global economic inequality; 3. The growth of the Chinese economy since 1980 is one of the main explanations for 1 and 2. (Sutcliffe 2007; Dollar 2007) However, most of the growth of economic inequality is of the “flying top” form, that is, it is because of the increase in wealth and income of the better off, rather than a lowering of the wealth and income of the worse off. Secondly, those countries that have fared the worst over this timespan are the ones that have failed to develop a global capitalist economy. (Dollar 2007) Thus, capitalism creates economic inequalities, but mainly through its positive, wealth creating effects on countries that engage in global trade, and not by absolutely impoverishing individual citizens of capitalist countries. 6 But what constitutes morally unacceptable inequality? Goods that can be distributed unequally can be either rival or non-rival. A good is rival if it’s being enjoyed by one person precludes its enjoyment by another person. Status, political power and influence, and toothbrushes are all rivals to some degree. It is perhaps arguable that any good that is both essential to well-being and rival ought, morally, to be distributed equally or at least in accordance with the difference principle.3 But wealth and income are not necessarily rival; they are not rival if the total wealth is rising. Therefore, increasing the wealth of some does not necessarily decrease that of others. So if capitalism simply raises some persons’ wealth or income, while not decreasing that of others, then that inequality is not in itself morally problematic. If inequality comes about unfairly, then that too is a reason for it to be morally unacceptable. Capitalism essentially creates economic inequalities because it distributes goods in markets, where trade takes place because of differing levels of demand for goods and services. Those who bring highly demanded or relatively scarce commodities or skills to the market are highly rewarded, while those who do not possess those commodities or skills will not gain equal rewards in a system where people are free to make trades that satisfy their needs and desires.4 This is a morally acceptable reason for inequality to be created, all other things equal. When inequalities are created by force or fraud, these are not justified inequalities. It is up to a society’s government to determine through its laws and enforcement of those laws what constitutes force and fraud. Critics of capitalism often conflate inequality and poverty, objecting to the inequalities that capitalism creates while citing statistics about the poverty of the global poor. Most proponents of capitalism will agree that severe poverty is not morally acceptable, although they disagree about how to address the problem. However, most will argue that capitalism is the best means to address poverty because it is the best means for creating wealth. As we said before, capitalism creates inequalities through the differential demands for goods and services that create the very possibility of trade. Capitalism also promotes innovation as people compete to generate demand for their goods and services, and innovation increases the total wealth in the world. Since inequality is part of the explanation for innovation, inequality is even more morally acceptable.

In a recent book (Cudd and Holmstrom 2011), I argued that capitalism has brought about great changes in the quality and length of human life in the twentieth century: the income takeoff (the vast increase of per capita income of developed nations), the health transition (raising the life expectancy by upwards of fifty years), and the fertility transition (from an average of 6 children per woman to around 2). In this paper I delve further into the question of whether capitalism is good for women. A major problem with capitalism is that it increases inequality, which is especially harmful to women and other vulnerable groups. Capitalism increases economic inequality in the first instance, but this in turn tends to create political and social inequalities. Inequality, I agree, needs to be controlled if capitalism is to be progressive and defensible. I defend such a controlled capitalism in two ways that are particularly relevant to feminism as a progressive social movement for human freedom. First, capitalism promotes innovation: it promotes technical innovation that tends to improve quality and length of life for everyone, but particularly for women. But more importantly for the feminist defense of capitalism, it promotes social innovation, in particular the destruction of harmful, patriarchal traditions. Thus, the second defense I will make of capitalism is that it opposes tradition fetishism and reduces the oppression of traditional societies that impose hierarchies of gender and caste. Capitalism is a system in which there are non-discriminatory, legal protections of decentralized, private ownership of resources, cooperative, social production for all citizens, and free and open, competitive markets for exchange of goods, labor, services, and material and financial capital. The first thing to note about this definition is that it implies the socially and governmentally sanctioned nature of the system. Laissez-faire capitalism is an unrealizable ideal that could never actually obtain in fact because for capitalism to even exist, let alone prosper, property rights need to be defined by a legislative body and protected by a police force. Markets require trust and security, such as can only be supplied by a relatively complex social system of rights, trust, and protection. (Anderson 2004) Social, cooperative interaction is at the heart of the system, in both the creation of the social, legal infrastructure that frames economic production and exchange, and in production and exchange themselves. The second thing to note about this definition is that it emphasizes the competitive character of the system. Capitalism is a form of cooperative competition, a set of socially accepted rules within which players seek their best advantage, as they see it. Its normative value as a social system will depend upon both the rules that delimit the game and the values by which its players define their best advantage. Finally, the third thing to note is that this definition does not specify how capitalism relates to the distribution of resources, since government or private charity can redistribute the outcome of production and exchange – but only to a point. Redistribution of goods that removes the ability or incentive for people to create firms and produce for exchange makes the system something other than and opposed to capitalism. My view is that capitalism can be progressive toward feminist ends. This is a controversial view. I defend it by addressing two critical questions about capitalism. First, does capitalism bring about less oppression of women (and other groups) over time? This question can be asked looking backward and looking forward. Since I think that the answer is very clear looking backward that oppression of gender groups, racial groups, castes, and other groups is less now than before the advent of capitalism in the industrial revolution, I will concentrate on two forward looking questions: (1) does capitalism better eliminate current oppression than any alternative economic system? (2) does the apparent increase of inequality under capitalism imply that it is a regressive social institution? To this second question I now turn. In our recent book, I argued that capitalism does not initially create oppressive conditions for race, gender, or caste groups, but that it can be seen as creating inequalities of wealth and income given the longstanding background conditions of oppression for those groups. What I meant by that is that capitalism exploits and then exaggerates existing inequalities. Absent those oppressive conditions, however, capitalism would still create inequality of wealth and income, and whatever moral or social inequality that follows from that. The inequality objection to capitalism is that the inequalities created by capitalism are inevitable and morally unacceptable.

Though imperfect, free market capitalism has been an incredibly powerful force for good in the world. The combination of liberal democracy and free market economics has lifted billions of people out of poverty and offered more hope to the hopeless than any other economic system in the world. No other economic system even comes close. This reality begins with a simple idea: The function of our government isn’t to ensure that all men are economically equal. Only theft and compulsion can guarantee equal outcomes. The purpose of our government is to ensure that all men are equally free. Free to choose. Free to succeed or, as we all do occasionally, to fail. Free to grow rich, free to live a life of humble service, free to learn, free to make our own decisions and then to live with the consequences of what we decide. Yet, inexplicably, many of our younger generation seem to be ashamed of the economic system their forebears fought to preserve. The socialist Bernie Sanders craze demonstrates the power of this trend. Voters flocked to a candidate who extolled the evils of capitalism, seemingly unaware of the pampered conditions under which most of us live, even though it is directly attributable to the power of our economic system. Since the first Pilgrims arrived on our shores, millions of people came here to find a new life, hoping to take advantage of opportunities not available to them in the nations they were leaving. Because of this, the U.S. grew from a ragged group of colonies to the world’s richest superpower. Yet there’s an old adage that when you are starving you only have one problem, but when your belly is full you have hundreds. For seven thousand years of human existence, survival, food and shelter were our ancestors’ primary concern. That might explain some of the modern distaste for American capitalism. We spend so little time worrying about simple survival that we now have the luxury of focusing on the flaws in the economic system that gave us our freedom and prosperity. The fruits of capitalism are many. It has increased access to education, driven up the value of labor over time and allowed for an unprecedented level of economic mobility. The average modern person works fewer hours—in far better conditions—than their counterparts from earlier centuries and still enjoys a far better standard of living. American capitalism has led to innovations in health care, technology and industry that have literally changed the world. These innovations have reduced infant mortality rates and increased life expectancy by decades. Rapid advances in technology during the Industrial Revolution and Digital Revolution have produced a standard of living that far exceeds that of our great grandparents—with the opportunity for even further improvement. Capitalism—unlike socialism, Marxism or authoritarianism—rewards individual innovation and work ethic. Anyone can improve their station in life by hard work or coming up with a new idea. That has rarely been the case throughout human history and is still not true in many countries in the world. Capitalism and free trade have allowed resource-poor countries like Hong Kong to become rich, while socialism has caused resource-rich countries like Venezuela to become poor. The biggest recent gains in the fight against poverty have occurred in countries that have opened up their markets, such as China and India. When we see people around the world living in extreme poverty, they almost always have one thing in common: denied access to free markets. These noncapitalist states may be caused by government corruption, war, political instability or other structural problems preventing power from being placed into the markets and operating efficiently, but history has proven that the most effective thing a nation can do to lift their people out of poverty is to embrace free market capitalism. As I stated earlier, capitalism isn’t perfect, which allows many critics to focus on the unequal outcomes produced by capitalism. But those inequalities can be minimized through good policy without destroying the system that produces prosperity. And they do not serve as proof that our economic system needs to be uprooted and destroyed. Those who suggest that we should tear down our economic model and start over are both ignorant of economic history and unappreciative of the great blessings that are offered to us every day.

We have learned under principles of quantum physics not to see reality as separated “things” walled off from one another by boundaries. Subatomic activity arises from the interaction of fluid potentials, not from hard particles bouncing into each other. Whatever there is both matter and energy. Whether it is one or the other depends on how we humans conceptualize it. Reality can look like matter and yet act like energy. As these subatomic chameleons interact with one another in our bubble chambers, they appear temporarily in our scientific instruments as up to 12 different particles. But are they really 12 different Newtonian and Cartesian “things”? As Margaret J. Wheatley writes: “There is no need to decide between two things, pretending they are separate. What is critical is the relationship created between two or more elements.” Similarly, at the level of the human ,both virtue and self-interest can inhere in the same action. Which human potential prevails—either virtue as a check on self-interest or self-interest as a deviation from virtue—depends on the actors, the energy fields surrounding them, and the issues of the moment. To say that an action is either pure virtue or crass self-interest reflects intellectual poverty, conceptualizing only the two polar extremes, while ignoring the zone of overlap where self-interest is “considered upon the whole.” Looking at the effects of time gives another perspective on the overlap of self-interest and virtue. Decisions made for our short-term advantage often bring negative long-term consequences that can far outweigh in their effects any advantages we have initially gained. Thus, in business, the results of fraud are short-term profit but, once discovery of our deceit occurs, our fraud brings about long-term and possibly permanent corruption of our ability to get what we want from others. Whenever we focus on the short term, we tend to minimize our goals, falling victim to the tyranny of the “Or” and forgetting the genius of the “And.”

SWAN Vancouver (SWAN) promotes the rights of migrant and immigrant (hereinafter im/migrant) sex workers through front-line service provision and systemic advocacy. In 2019, SWAN began to consider a constitutional challenge against Canadian immigration law, which currently prohibits temporary residents and migrant workers from engaging in sex work. This litigation is designed to at least partially counteract the harmful effects of recent anti-trafficking policies. Mounting a constitutional challenge is a difficult exercise for a small organisation like SWAN, but we have decided that it is nonetheless the most effective pathway for exposing how ‘crimmigration’1 enables both labour abuses of migrant sex workers and manufactures vulnerability to human trafficking. Since 2002, SWAN has advocated for immigrant sex workers, who are primarily from Asia, in the areas of health promotion, legal rights, and criminal justice access. SWAN’s front-line work has deeply informed our systemic advocacy with policymakers. For many years now, we have been trying our best to get Canadian law enforcement and multiple levels of government to adopt evidence-based anti-trafficking strategies that address root causes and increase labour protections for im/migrant sex workers. These efforts have included contributions to numerous human trafficking roundtables, providing input and critical responses to policy briefs and legislation, and attempting to raise awareness of both the design and distribution of anti-trafficking funding. Working with law enforcement, SWAN has trained front-line officers and attempted to inform policy from a sex worker rights perspective. It has also proved necessary to challenge ill-informed anti-trafficking raids which target im/ migrant sex workers under the guise of protection. None of these efforts have been particularly successful. Attempts to inform anti-trafficking policy and law did not translate into meaningful changes in practices. There is significant overlap between anti-trafficking and prostitution law, and they work together to legislate victimhood, which in turn justifies crude attempts at ‘rescue’. Attempts to educate police about the differences between human trafficking and im/migrant sex work were unsuccessful. Police continue to enforce laws based upon a rudimentary understanding of human trafficking hinged on victims, villains, and heroes. SWAN has increasingly withdrawn from government-sponsored and community-based human trafficking forums and roundtables. We realised there is limited space for perspectives that challenge anti-trafficking rhetoric by centring im/migrant sex workers’ voices around migration and labour in a global economy. The human trafficking discourse in Canada is used as a cover to legislate, limit and curtail the activities of sex workers.2 It also informs an antisex work crusade, which rehashes misinformation about the sex industry in order to justify ever-increasing anti-trafficking resources. SWAN realised that working within the anti-trafficking framework was not going to lead to the protection of migrant sex workers’ rights. Hence, SWAN’s proposed constitutional challenge at least partly stems from a lack of faith in the value of working within existing structures. There is no other recourse SWAN could ethically undertake to advance the labour and migration needs of the women we serve. Moreover, recent changes to immigration policy, which increase labour protections for some migrant workers, continue to exclude migrant sex workers, since they do not hold employer-specific work permits.4 The constitutional challenge has been carefully designed to strategically target three specific regulations in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (IRPR), which make it impossible for temporary residents to provide paid sexual services in Canada. We will argue that these regulations violate the rights of migrant sex workers under sections 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by exposing migrant sex workers to unnecessary harms and discriminating against them on the basis of sex, race, and national or ethnic origin. We will seek to have the three regulations held unconstitutional, and declared to be of no force and effect under section 52, paragraph 1, of the Constitution Act, 1982. This would prevent these particular regulations from being used against migrant sex workers in the future. SWAN intends to act as a public interest litigant alongside individual plaintiffs who have directly experienced the harms associated with immigration prohibitions on sex work in Canada. Public interest litigants are individuals and organisations who do not directly bear the brunt of the constitutional infringement, but are nevertheless well-placed to bring forward the perspectives of those who risk much in doing so. There is a practical disincentive for migrant sex workers in Canada to sign on as litigants in this case, since it could result in their removal from Canada or victimisation by law enforcement. The design of immigration law creates barriers to criminal justice responses The design of immigration law creates barriers to criminal justice responses to the labour abuses experienced by migrant sex workers. Under the current regime, anyone with temporary immigration status in Canada is prohibited from engaging ‘with an employer who, on a regular basis, offers striptease, erotic dance, escort services or erotic massages.’5 Individuals who enter Canada on a work permit, study permit, or visitor’s visa have temporary immigration status. If they engage in sex work, they violate immigration regulations. Consequently, immigration law effectively bars migrant sex workers from reporting violence and thus contributes to under-reporting. Any contact with law enforcement, even as victim of a crime, carries the very real risk of detention and deportation. As a consequence, unscrupulous individuals use the threat of detention and deportation to exploit sex workers. Immigration law enables perpetrators of violence to act with impunity, thereby protecting them from prosecution instead of protecting migrant sex workers from labour exploitation. The government’s unwillingness to consider how border control and immigration policy contribute to an environment ripe for labour exploitation and trafficking has resulted in an impenetrable policy arena. Within the anti-trafficking framework, it is impossible for a small community organisation like SWAN to be on a level playing field with powerful stakeholders such as government, law enforcement, and well-funded anti-trafficking organisations. Taking a politically combative stance by way of litigation compels government and other key stakeholders to look beyond awareness campaigns and the prosecution of individual traffickers as primary strategies. By using the legal system, SWAN aims to force a much-needed dialogue about international migration, the global economy, labour protections—or the lack thereof—for migrant workers, and the racialised assumptions about migrant women that led to the creation of the immigration prohibition on sex work and its subsequent enforcement. We also seek to highlight the government’s complicity in creating systems that exacerbate systemic vulnerability to human trafficking. It was not possible to place these issues on centre stage within the anti-trafficking framework.

The anti-trafficking movement in the United States has long relied on a narrative of exceptionalism and individualism. The modern movement began with a push to establish a coherent legal framework to address forced labour and allow its victims to seek justice. A few high-profile and egregious cases were the impetus for this advocacy, giving advocates salient stories to tell of individuals harmed by trafficking. The resulting law treats human trafficking as a crime meriting extraordinary punishment and extraordinary remedies. This narrative has proven incredibly powerful and continues to be used to garner attention and concern for the cause. It raises funds and opens hearts. It has created a ‘bubble’ of protection and access for survivors who can convince the state of their victimhood. But it also effectively silences critique. Who, after all, wants to question the number of dollars spent or the possibility of harmful side effects when people are being trafficked and enslaved? 1 Would we not want any and all action to be taken, no matter the cost, if it happened to us or our loved ones? News coverage of human trafficking amplifies this approach. A 2016 review of trafficking-related articles published by US news media found that journalists simplify the issue by focusing on the worst cases.2 They may do so out of a desire to tell an ‘unambiguous’ story, to provoke action and sympathy, but they leave out the complexity needed for real solutions.3 This problem is not confined to the US: a 2019 review of UK print media by the NGO Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX) found that the majority of trafficking-related media articles focus on the criminal prosecution of perpetrators. Very little coverage explored structural drivers like labour market issues, racism, immigration policy, and regulation.4 Yet these are precisely the drivers of trafficking that need to be addressed in order to make progress in the fight against it.5 However well intentioned, focusing exclusively on exceptional stories of trauma and redemption can actually harm survivors and those at risk of trafficking. The 2016 news analysis found that journalists employ a ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ where the ideal victim is ‘weak, vulnerable, and trafficked by a shadowy, dangerous offender.’6 By focusing on the worst cases and telling stories of powerless victims, news stories obscure the complexities of victims’ lives and make it difficult for those who fall short of this standard to come forward. These stories re-affirm a government approach which requires survivors to convince the state that their trauma is extreme enough to merit support and care. This narrative props up vigilante groups who showily ‘rescue’ victims only to later abandon them to fend for themselves.7 If survivors of trafficking are constantly exceptionalised, it can be hard for them to unite with those similarly situated to build power. And there are those who intentionally use these narratives to advance carceral, nationalist, and misogynist policies. Grantees of NEO Philanthropy report that the bubble of protection has burst under the current administration of President Donald Trump, and survivors who are not US citizens now can rarely obtain the remedies to which the law entitles them. Meanwhile, the Trump administration proudly claims to be fighting human trafficking, painting pictures of women being brought captive over our borders by ‘bad hombres’, while restricting abortion access and tearing families apart. The anti-trafficking field has recoiled and pointed out the blatant racism and cynicism in Trump’s policies, yet the public still responds to these images. They lock into a deeply held idea that trafficking is about individual victims suffering exceptional crimes, rather than unjust socio-economic and political systems. And we, as anti-trafficking advocates, are partially responsible for that idea being so deeply held. The individualist narrative in anti-trafficking work is especially ironic in the United States, with our history of chattel slavery. Chattel slavery cannot be understood unless one thinks in terms of systems—economic, legal, racial, and cultural—and their effects. A failure to reckon with the legacies of transatlantic enslavement has produced contemporary inequalities that are evident in patterns of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness amongst Black people. It is also reflected in inequalities in the prison system, and in the way policing, courts, and post-release surveillance play out depending on race. Recognising this has produced a contemporary prison abolitionist movement that refers to incarceration as ‘modern slavery’, not just because today’s prisoners are economically exploited, but because the forms of anti-Blackness found in plantations and prisons are affectively and historically linked. Chattel slavery also spawned scientific racism: the categorising of ethnic groups as biologically inferior, which has affected even non-Black people of colour. For these reasons, when US anti-trafficking activists, some of whom call themselves ‘modern day abolitionists’, push for prosecutors to send more people to prison and fail to acknowledge the role of systems in creating exploitation, they expose their ignorance of the wider dynamics and history of their own field.

So what does this discussion of legibility have to do with thinking about workers in the global economy and the politics of labor organizing? Well, what I want to argue here is that struggles over the transparency and/or opacity of the economic landscape can play central roles in clashes between capital and labor. Given the constraints of word limits there is not room to go into too much detail here, but I hope that a few examples will illustrate the point I am trying to make. A central issue with the growth of precarious work is that those workers subject to it are much less visible in the landscape than are workers who enjoy more. Labor History281traditional full-time jobs and who are represented by labor organizations and other such entities within the formal sector. This is because it is much more difficult for those various state actors who might be charged with concern for them, together with labor organizations who might wish to represent them, to monitor their working conditions. When workers are not represented by unions that can, for instance, lay down across large swaths of an industry or region rules and conditions to which employers are forced to abide but are, instead, individualized within the economic landscape, it is much more difficult for them to seek the protection of government regulators of health and safety standards. Likewise, when workers toil in sweatshops that are literally hidden out of view in large cities like New York or Mumbai, or are perhaps employed as subcontracted industrial homeworkers manufacturing components at piece-rates within the walls of their own homes, it is difficult for either unions or state agencies to find them to ensure that they are not being abused and/or exploited. There is, then, a spatial politics of concealment and disclosure in the landscape – Mitchell, for instance, provides the example of how California agricultural interests in the 1930s hid migrant labor camps by locating them off the beaten track and surrounding them with fields of high crops to avoid them being observed from the road, thereby making it more difficult for representatives of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing to check on their conditions. Consequently, part of any strategy to improve precarious workers’ lot might involve making their laboring in the economic landscape more visible. In this regard, it is important to note that one of the principal characteristics of the contemporary global economy has been the geographical lengthening of commodity chains. One of the things that this means is that for those at the end of the commodity chain it is now much more difficult to know much about those workers located at points earlier in the chain. Geographical distance, in other words, is a fundamental element in the fetishization of commodities detailed by Marx.4 Thus, the further away an end-user is in space from the producers of the commodities which s/he consumes, the more difficult is it for him/her to know much about the conditions under which the producers of the commodities labor – were commodities made in worker cooperatives or in factories in Export Processing Zones full ofu ̈ber-exploited migrant laborers? Certainly, humans have long consumed goods that were made by people they never personally met. However, when manufacturing was largely organized regionally or nationally, it was much more likely that consumers could know something about the producers of such commodities. Today, by way of contrast, growing numbers of commodity chains stretch globally, such that their beginning and ending points are often separated not by tens or hundreds of miles but by thousands. Globalization, in other words, has served in many instances to make the planet’s economic landscape much more opaque for consumers who might wish to buy only products made by well-remunerated workers. In response to such conditions, growing numbers of workers and their organizations have sought to develop strategies to make the global economic landscape more transparent. A particularly well-organized example has been the ‘Mapping Supplier Chains’ project. Initiated by the International Research Network on Autowork in the Americas (IRNAA), this project has seen its primary task as that of mapping ‘the changing contours of this supply chain, from vehicle assembly282Symposiumplants, to in-house suppliers of major components including drive trains, to outside suppliers responsible for the manufacture of integrated systems, to commodity suppliers and job shops contracted to deliver parts and small components to other plants in the chain’ (see Babson and Jua ́rez5for more on the IRNAA). Through such activities, labor activists have opened up at least part of the global economic landscape to greater inspection – they have made it more transparent, there by helping to defetishize some of the components used in automobile manufacturing. The issue of transparency and opacity, however, is more complex than the above example of mapping commodity chains might imply. This is because there are actually sometimes instances when workers might prefer to remain invisible. For example, a crucial element in labor organizing is often finding a place where in workers can meet and discuss things beyond the watchful eye of their bosses. Thus, one of the things that has made mining unions strong in most countries is the ability of miners to use underground nooks and crannies as places in which to talk union. The ability to effectively ‘hide’ from the employer’s gaze within the workplace has been much more possible for miners than has been the case in much office work, where work spaces can more easily be physically engineered by employers to make them readily subject to their surveillance (see Herod6for more on the spatial engineering of workplaces for purposes of labor control, as well as on workers’ efforts to subvert such workplace designs). But there are other examples of such opacity in the landscape. For instance, sugar workers and other agricultural laborers have often been able to disappear out of sight of their overseers by going into the fields, where their spatial proximity to one another working in gangs has given them opportunities to talk union.Certainly, I do not wish to imply here that the abilities of workers and their bosses to make the economic landscape either transparent or opaque are equal. But what I do want to suggest is that the power of making something transparent or opaque is contextual and therefore something be to be theorized, rather than assumed. Thus, sometimes employers have the upper hand and sometimes it is workers who do. The key political point in all of this, though, concerns how to ensure that workers, especially those employed in precarious positions, can choose to make their positions either visible (perhaps when they seek the protection of government to ensure they are paid properly) or invisible (perhaps when they seek to avoid government regulators because they wish to remain part of the informal economy for some reason).

-This could be seen as a critique of the affs use of sex work

-Or this could be a direct answer to the prostitution pic as the aff is hopefully trying to talk about the struggles and lives of sex workers but it may be the first one more since it takes a very pessimistic approach to the issue in general

Some of us call ourselves prostitutes, but recognize its negative connotations when outsiders use it. People use the word prostitute in different contexts: to refer to legislation where word prostitute is written into law; to refer to sex work that involves intercourse with clients; to refer to street prostitution; to refer to debasing oneself, not necessarily in a sexual context; and to refer to history when the word prostitute was used with pride. How and when we use these terms will differ depending on our audience. Sex workers’ rejection of the term is often based in how the public perceives prostitutes and prostitution rather than an inherent shame in the word itself.

Some sex workers also embrace the term sex professional. Like sex work, this term highlights and legitimizes the labour context of sex work. Other sex workers find this term alienating because the term professional can imply a level of accreditation that is not afforded to criminalized work. It can also insert a classist element to the work — some workers are seen as professional while others are not. Not all sex workers have access to the mechanisms that professionalize their work, and many work under precarious conditions.

Words matter. So does context. That’s why you need to strike the word “labor” from your lexicon.

It’s easier said than done. If you think adjusting to new pronouns is hard, try telling a businessman to eliminate the word “labor” from his vocabulary.

The scale and persistence of the informal economy in low- and middle-income countries is a concern that has been at the centre of research and development policy debates since the pioneering work by Lewis (1954), which underscores the dual nature of labour markets and economic systems in developing countries. Subsequent work by Fields (1975), Hart (1973), Stiglitz (1976), among others, pinpoint this duality as catalytic of the ‘informal’ economy, which is characterised by low-productivity sectors and tradeable goods and services that are produced at the margin of regulations, and without direct link to tax and social protection systems (N. V. Loayza 2016; Maloney 2004; La Porta and Shleifer 2014). 2 Consequently, workers and firms operating in the informal economy have limited access to social protection benefits, tax credits and financial markets.

Economic considerations such as the burden of taxes and social security contributions, barriers to entry markets as well as discriminatory norms against ethnic and religious minorities, women and other vulnerable groups can exacerbate the dualism of economic systems, making informal work a strategy of last resort for large shares of vulnerable populations (Chen et al. 2006; Gulyani and Talukdar 2010). Institutional factors such as corruption and a weak state capacity may also affect the incentives for workers and firms to participate in the formal economy (Schneider, Buehn, and Montenegro 2010, Perry etal 2007).