Random Variable

Immigration officials rounded up outsourced cleaners working at the School of Oriental and African Studies on Friday without any recourse to representation by a union or lawyers, and nine staff have been put into fast-track deportation, with three already deported by Sunday.

From Solomon’s Mindfield:

by Sadie Robinson

Students and workers at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) have organised an emergency protest for 8.30am on Monday 15 June to defend cleaners at the site who are facing imminent threat of deportation.

Cleaners at Soas were rounded up by immigration officials at an early morning meeting last Friday.

The raid follows campaigns by the cleaners to win union recognition and the London Living Wage.

Nine of the cleaners were subsequently held, including one woman who is six months pregnant. Their Unison union rep, Sandy Nicoll, said he was prevented from having any contact with them.

By Sunday three had already been deported. Others may be deported on Monday morning.

There is widespread anger and shock at the raid and at the speed with which the workers are being removed from Britain, with no opportunity to challenge the rulings or get legal advice. Many people saw the raid as the “kidnapping” of their fellow workers.

Some 200 students and workers protested outside Soas on Friday evening. “I’m so ashamed of this institution today,” said Sandy. “It’s not an accident that immigration raids are taking place in workplaces where cleaners have been organising to win better pay and conditions.

“London can’t run without low-paid migrant workers to do work like cleaning – but if they try and fight for rights then they’re out.”

“Our union met today and unanimously passed a motion to back whatever campaign there is to stop the deportations of these cleaners. The cleaners are an important part of the union.”

Graham Dyer, the UCU union president at Soas, was also at the protest. “I came in this morning to take part in a demonstration to support Stalin (a former worker at Soas who has been victimised by management after organising campaigns to improve workers’ rights), only to find that the cleaning staff had been taken by immigration officials.

“The UCU is outraged. It’s clear that management have been complicit in allowing immigration officials to come onto our campus.”

Sam, a student at Soas, spoke poignantly to the crowd about the raid. “Just imagine what it’s like,” he said. “You get up and go to work expecting to come home later and empty the washing that you’ve left in the machine, pick up your kids, etc. But no. Instead you get taken away to be deported.

“I’m almost speechless at management’s behaviour.”

The message is clear. Rather than being the standard bearers of a progressive vision of our society, universities are now the sites of the most oppressive apparatuses of our society.

Follow http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com/ closely.

Everything that needs to be said about the EU elections has already been said elsewhere.

But the Iranian elections?

I’ve taken a particular interest in Iran ever since being approached by the “former terrorist” group and possible recipient of US Black Ops funding, Mujahadin-E-Khalq outside UCL Waterstones last April, so I was keen to see what was going to happen in this election.

Seriously, a 4 year old could cover up the fraud better than that. See Juan Cole’s post.

I’m willing to acede that Ahmedinijad could have won the general election in a runoff, but with no substantial vote differences across regions and between cities and rural areas, there’s no way he gained a majority of the votes with 4 candidates, and an extremely strong challenger.

The MSM needs to get its act together. The Iranian neocons have rolled back the reforms of the Rafanjani and Khatami period, and the supreme guardians don’t care too much for reformers, since reform means curbing state largesse,which challenges their resource base. Obama effect?!? And you’re focus on youth in cities ignores what’s happening elsewhere. Not that you perform any differently when looking at US domestic politics, hey?

And to state-owned English language PressTV: you’re not AlJazeera, so f**k off. That includes Gilligan and Galloway. Twats.

Lijphart’s basic argument is that there are two major types of democracies – majoritarian democracies, based upon the Westminster model, and consensus democracies, to be found in Europe. He claims that consensus democracies provide better outcomes for people on a variety of indicators. I decided to try our one indicator, not mentioned in Patterns of Democracy [1] – poverty reduction.

Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study [2], and plotting the executive-parties dimension of democracies from Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy produces the following graph:

My poor grasp of statistical tests tells me that scoring higher on Lijphart’s first dimension is positively correlated with effective poverty reduction at the 5% level, and that’s with the United States as a huge outlier.

* Relative effectiveness of income redistribution systems in poverty reduction around 1990, where poverty threshold = 60 per cent of median equivalent disposable income.

Make of that what you will.

[1]  Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 1999).

[2]  J. Fritzell and V. M. Ritakallio, “Societal shifts and changed patterns of poverty,” Luxembourg Income Study working paper 393 (2004).

Update: Replaced Excel graphs with plots from R.

The Guardian reports that The Gallup Coexist Index 2009 finds that exactly 0% of British Muslims tolerate homosexuals, compared with 19% of German Muslims and 35% of French Muslims.

Now, before everyone goes all Geert Wilders, some problems.

Given that migrants to France, Germany and the UK come from specific ethnic groups, are we missing some correlation between ethnicity and religion? Have we got some true control variables, rather than just asking non-Muslims.

Also, seems like British Muslims are doing pretty badly economically, with the second lowest unemployment, and very low expectations of social mobility:

I wonder how well non-Muslim groups in a similarly dire economic position would fare on moral questions.

In addition, perhaps British immigrant groups are secularising faster than their continental counterparts, especially if they are actually LGBT.

If I had the data, it’d be interesting to see if you could run it through some sort of multivariate analysis and see if other variables correlate higher on moral issues than others.

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Martin Robbins has a post on a more smeary opinion poll about Muslims eeking out of the ironically titled Centre for Social Cohesion.

Everything you need to know about the future careers of the NUS executive:

A couple of months ago, Peter Levine asked just how representative the NUS (UK National Union of Students) actually is. The answer, is not very much.

Having spent a day compositing in the Drafting Commissions, it has become clear to me that the NUS is run by careerists from a bunch of factions – mainly in line with New Labour or to its right.

Very few members of the National Executive Committee seem to understand that they have been elected, and paid, to represent students, not their ideological position, or their ladder up political party leadership.

Birkbeck lost the right to speak on most of its motions, either having them shoved to the end of the zones where they wont get discussed, or having our motions radically altered by partisan members of the NEC.

In addition, the NEC refuses to have genuine debates on topics of interest, instead keeping trivial, consensual motions high on the agenda in order to preserve the status quo, and make it look like they’ve been doing actual work this year. Some of the NEC’s motions have more research going into them than the amount they’ve conducted all year.

The tactics used by the partisan members of the NEC in Labour Students and Organised Independents bordered on outright bullying. They do not seem to understand that we reach the final motions through consensus, not through swinging all our partisan proxies around.

We were told that we don’t need the NUS to help us since we have the University of London Union (which has a zero campaigning budget), and we have not been invited to take part in the Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning, despite Birkbeck College being one of the country’s largest lifelong learning institutions. When NUS president Wes Streeting was speaking at a government select committee in February, the chair turned to our representative and said “this is a full-time debate, isn’t it? We’re not talking about part-time students.” Afterwards, an MP quietly asked us if we were members of the NUS, to which we informed them we were founding members. With the lack of action from NUS on Equivalent and Lower Qualification (ELQ) cuts, we’re left wondering whether or not there’s been a tacit agreement with the government not to discuss the disastrous funding cuts for mature students.

So why does Birkbeck actually pay £11,000 a year (going up to £17,000 from this year), when we will have even less representation on conference floor from next year.

For now, roll on Annual Conference.

On Wednesday 18 March, the governors of Birkbeck College, University of London unanimously agreed to adopt the full GLA London Living Wage for all contracted staff. This ends a long campaign by Unison, joined by the Students Union, UCU and Unite.

Our campaign was supported by John McDonnell MP, sci-fi author China Mieville,  and director Ken Loach.

By March 2009, it was untenable that the college could continue not to adopt the Living Wage, and the debate turned to which form. Birkbeck’s Finance and General Purposes Committee decided to recommend the lower 2006 IPPR rate of £6.50. This is despite the fact that the IPPR itself pays its cleaning staff the Living Wage. A counter-proposal, developed by Unison, Unite, UCU and the Student Union outlined the necessity of paying a living wage.

This victory marks the triumph of an alliance of unions striving to create a better workplace for all.

In addition, the Students Union, recently reformed as a charity, abolishing the position of a president, and electing five sabbatical trustees, improving representation and campaign efforts were key in this victory. Rob Park and Tami Peterson, student governors were instrumental in Wednesday’s result. Our student union is a reminder to other student unions that the current round of governance reviews, that threaten to strip the voice of students is harmful to the life of universities.

However, Birkbeck cannot yet claim to be a Living Wage campus. The University of London Union (ULU) manage the George Birkbeck Bar on behalf of the college and SU, and have not yet adopted the Living Wage. This will be the next key battleground for the Birkbeck Living Wage Campaign.

ULU should be a central hub for the ongoing success of the campaign across all London colleges, and Birkbeck intends to lead the way. We call on all Student Unions to adopt Living Wage as a first step to seeing our colleges become ethical employers.

In my last post, I said that governments wont open up the free trade of food because domestic prices would increase, leading to discontent. But perhaps, I should make the point a bit stronger. Domestic consumers will starve.

Here’s Bryan Caplan, from his book The Myth of the Rational Voter:

“Maybe the rich are less protectionist because they are more rational; or perhaps income is a proxy for education or intelligence, and these make people more rational.”

Umm…maybe the rich are less protectionist because they’re the least likely to starve.

Final word from Daniel Davies (again), from the comments on Tyler’s response to Dani Rodrik:

[Just what is it that "we know reasonably well" that would indicate that a freer market in rice would raise its real price? Did you not agree in your own posting that freer trade would increase global supplies? How does this lead to a higher real price?]

Barkley, the World Bank estimates that Dani references are the best empirical work we have on this (rather important) question and they look pretty sound.

The global supply of rice is limited in the short term to the crop. Over the course of more than one growing season (a period of time during which it’s entirely possible to starve to death), freer trade in rice would tend to increase the supply. However, it is entirely possible for the following three states of affairs to hold simultaneously:

1) A larger global rice crop
2) A lower global price of rice in PPP terms.
3) In rice-producing countries, a higher relative cost of rice in terms of average wages.

(3) is clearly the problem, because it will lead to states of affairs where workers can’t afford to buy enough rice to eat. Which is what we call a “food crisis”, which was the whole motivating point.

Dani’s point is very clear here and quite obviously correct. An increase in the supply of rice doesn’t guarantee an increase in the ability of poor people to buy it. If rice is more expensive on the world market than it is in India, then if India opens up trade in rice, then the price of rice in India is going to go up. If Indonesia bans trade in rice, then the local price of rice is lower than it would be if Indonesian rice-growers were able to sell to Japanese rice-eaters instead of local peasants.

We might all, as Dani says, “want there to be free trade in rice”, but you pick your year for this sort of liberalisation, and you don’t pick a year in which the “adjustment issues” could involve hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation.

Tyler Cowen writes in his latest column:

Lately, it’s become fashionable to assert that, in this time of financial market turmoil, the market-oriented teachings of Milton Friedman belong more to the past than to the future. The sadder truth is that when it comes to food production — arguably the most important of all human activities — Mr. Friedman’s free-trade ideas still haven’t seen the light of day.

…

The more telling figure is that over the next year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3 percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt.

However, even if we were to free up trade, this would likely irritate urban domestic consumers. Governments that want to stay in power are not likely to annoy this demographic. This is the opposite problem to Europe, where democratic governments have had to rely on the rural vote to stay in power throughout the 20th Century, although we only refer to the former as populism, despite the justifiability of domestic consumers’ grievances. As Dani Rodrik points out:

Freer trade would reduce prices of food (relative to other prices) only in countries that are food importers.  Food exporters would experience a rise in the relative price of food, and there is simply no way of escaping that reality.

These dynamics played themselves out in the Pakistani elections. Shaukat Aziz paid off the trade deficits with agricultural primary commodity exports, the result of which was huge hikes in the price of rice (can’t find a reference for the moment).

Daniel Davies, forcefully makes the argument against Tyler’s:

As Raj Patel correctly notes on the Guardian blog, we are shaping up for a fairly substantial risk of a free market democide. . There was certainly no shortage of people pointing out at the time that removing fertiliser subsidies and dismantling strategic grain reserves was a hell of a risky thing to do, but the neoliberals pushed it anyway, under the assumption that deregulated food markets would encourage investment and improve productivity. Which, given a very long run of good weather indeed, might have worked, but that was hardly the way to bet, and it really does not appear to be the case that anyone did a huge amount of detailed research into how this green revolution might have been carried out and financed. Beware, always beware, of long term solutions to short term problems.

…

It really is hard to see what qualitative difference one might draw between the way in which the World Bank and IMF have fucked around with the food security systems of third world countries in the name of “free markets”, and the way in which Stalin and Mao did more or less the same thing in the name of “collectivisation”. Peter Griffiths’ article and book refer. The great thing about the market mechanism, of course, is that when it kills a million people, it doesn’t leave fingerprints.

It’s time we went back to studying political economy, and ask more questions rather than proposing ideological solutions. Here’s your starter for ten: As far as agriculture goes, democracy and free trade is not an easy fit. Does anyone have reasonable solutions to this, which aren’t of the “let’s remove economics from democratic participation” variety?

PS: I mentioned in the comments an article, which suggested that the end of EU subsidies on dairy exports played a role in Japan’s butter crisis. Aaron Schiff points out however that there’s a 802% import tariff on butter imports. However, I don’t think this completely undermines the major point, but adds yet another complexity.

From a recent post:

The physicist told me not to worry at all–and not to worry about trying to be environmentally cautious. It’s already too late. Over a decade ago he worked with a Nobel prize winner who at that point said the situation was hopeless–and his estimates were more conservative than the optimistic ones today.

I don’t have any sources, so you’ll just have to take my blind assertion for it – but the “it’s too late” meme is one I’ve seen quite a lot in the run up to the publication of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report. This is odd, because the synthesis report says nothing new – it is a summary of the 3000-odd pages that make up the three working group reports of “Climate Change 2007″. Also, claiming it’s too late already buys into the rhetoric of the denialists. Maybe we will see a change in strategy as the nobel-prize winning IPCC makes it harder and harder to deny basic physics.

…the only way to cope adequately with climate change is a collectivist, statist, approach that installs strict regulations on corporations, moves the US away from cars and oil, caps salaries and bonuses, and undertakes large scale planning.

I hope that means collectivist in only a Polanyiesque sense. That said, I have a strange feeling that we will enter a new age of capitalism (yet another realisation of its self-revolutionary potential) – one that has extremely low time discounts, i.e. “sustainable capitalism”.

Nevertheless, calling for caps on bonuses undermines the impact of ordinary consumers.

Now isn’t the time to give up.