Cancer Thrivers Network for Jewish Women
presents

Fr om Oy
To Joy

passover

continued from page 56

Help us turn the OY of drug costs into the
JOY of fair pricing for oral chemo drugs.

Dave Almeida

Jews as
slaves in
Egypt

Featuring

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Knollwood Country Club
5050 W. Maple Road, West Bloomfield,MI

Registration & Brunch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10:30 am
Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11:00 am

This event is free and open to the community thanks to a generous
grant from the Sandra and Alfred Sherman Women’s Health Fund.

Foreigners from the Orient. Don’t
worry, it is not for your daughters.
Who is buying? Tractor-trailer drivers.
Don’t worry, it is not for your husband
or boyfriend.
“So, the billboard says to drivers:
‘You don’t have to care. Other people
selling people to other people; none of
your concern.’
“Try to imagine putting up a giant
billboard for some other illegal activ-
ity; say, drugs: ‘Score cocaine at this
address, open day and night hours.’
We would not allow that. But we allow
billboards to advertise coerced work.
We do the traffickers’ work for the
trafficker by normalizing exploitive
work.”

LABOR LAW ENFORCEMENT?

RSVP to Tracy Agranove at 248.592.2267
or tagranove@jfsdetroit.org

Dave Almeida serves as the Regional Director of Government
Affairs in the Midwest for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS).
Using his extensive experience in both non-profit and corporate
sectors of state government, Dave is guiding the coalition to
make Michigan the 44th state to enact drug cost containment
laws. He is coordinating ADVOCACY efforts of stakeholder
organizations to make cancer treatment more accessible and
affordable to Michigan residents.

The heart of a

STRONGER COMMUNITY

For 90 years

58

March 29 • 2018

jn

Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay
rules, workplace safety regulations
and other enactments protect the
rights of workers throughout the
United States. Marianne LeVine con-
ducted an investigation of labor law
enforcement for Politico magazine
in February. In nearly every state,
budgets for labor law enforcement
have been cut in the past decade.
Six states have no mechanism for
enforcing labor law at all. The federal
Department of Labor has slightly
fewer investigators than it had in 1948,
while the U.S. labor force includes
seven times as many workers.
“We have federal and state laws
protecting workers,” LeVine writes,
“but advocates for low-income work-
ers across the country say employers
routinely violate these laws with little
fear of getting caught. And, even in
states with comparatively robust labor
departments, enforcement is lax.”

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

The 13th Amendment bans all “slavery
and involuntary servitude except as
a punishment for crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted.”
Inmates of prisons, for example, can
be compelled to work in slave-like
conditions. They even volunteer for
such work.
An inmate in a Michigan
Correctional Facility wrote me (Louis
Finkelman) about working while
imprisoned. His favorite job, as pris-

oner, was teaching world history to
young offenders as part of a program
to encourage them not to continue
their criminal careers. He qualified
for this teaching by graduating from
college and earning a post-graduate
degree — by correspondence, of
course, because he could not attend
classes.
“I was asked by Warden G to volun-
teer due to my degree; but later, when
the pay was taken away, I continued to
prepare and teach these pseudo-col-
lege classes … I did youthful offender
orientation for nearly four years and
all because one of the officers I liked
asked me to do him a favor.”
Most prisoners work at lower
prestige jobs: “We do custodian and
grounds maintenance, everything in
the kitchen, tutoring in school, ensure
that the library operates smoothly,
and work in various state-run facto-
ries,” he writes.
Inmates get paid considerably less
than minimum wage.
“Wages haven’t changed since at
least 1987,” he writes. “For instance, a
clerk can make $1.77 a day, but most
jobs are between $0.74 and $1.31.
Certain jobs, like tutors and aides, can
make up to $3.34 a day, based on edu-
cational level.”
Inmates volunteer for work, even at
these artificially low wages.
“Now, a person can choose not to
work,” the inmate writes, “but if he
has a recommendation to work and
doesn’t, he can be denied parole. Also,
if a man is offered a job and declines,
he can be confined to his room from 8
a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.”
These inmates have some of the
features of classical slavery or invol-
untary servitude. They get paid an
unusually low salary; they can get
punished for failing to volunteer for
work; they cannot run away from
their jobs. When for-profit companies,
such as Corrections Corporation of
America, operate the prisons, then we
can invest in these corporations and
become part-owners of involuntary
servants.
At the seder, when we remember
slavery in Egypt thousands of years
ago, let us also think of modern work-
ers who live in slave-like conditions. •