On July 11, a group of men overran a polling station in Ablekuma North constituency and assaulted a candidate, forcing voting to be temporarily suspended.

Kwabena Agyekum Banahene, a reporter with GHOne TV, told CPJ that amid the turmoil, a police officer asked him to leave the area and slapped and pushed him. Banahene’s mouth was injured, according to GhanaWeb.

At the same polling station, ATV Ghana reporter Vida Wiafe was hit with pepper spray deployed by police, according to a video posted by Metro TV Ghana. CPJ could not confirm whether the journalist was deliberately targeted. 

In a third incident at the polling station, a partially masked man struck with his hand and shoved Joy News reporter Sally Martey from behind, a video posted by the outlet showed.

“The July 11 assaults on journalists Kwabena Agyekum Banahene and Sally Martey, as well as the tear-gassing of reporter Vida Wiafe, are just the latest examples of the threats regularly faced by journalists in Ghana,” said CPJ Regional Director Angela Quintal. “There has not been enough accountability for attacks on the press — it should be a top priority for authorities.”

In a July 12 statement, police promised to arrest anyone found to have engaged in acts of violence during the Ablekuma North elections. Banahene told CPJ that he reported his attack to the police and the officer involved was suspended and charged. 

In April, CPJ wrote to President John Dramani Mahama — on his 100^th day in office— to call for swift investigations into cases of attacks against the press.

CPJ’s calls and text messages seeking comment from police spokesperson Grace Ansah-Akrofi received no response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Janine Jackson interviewed the National Employment Law Project’s Sally Dworak-Fisher about delivery workers for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Less than four months after it came into effect, Seattle is looking to “adjust”—as it’s being described—the app-based worker minimum-payment ordinance calling on companies like Uber and DoorDash to improve labor conditions for employees.

Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson described the ordinance’s impact on the local economy as “catastrophic.” The Seattle Times reports that the “whiplash reversal comes as both drivers and businesses complained about the added cost of delivery, largely in the form of service charges added by the companies in the wake of the new law”—”in the wake of” being the load-bearing language here.

Common Dreams (3/28/24)

The story of a recent piece by our next guest is in its headline: “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It.” So here to help us break down what’s going on is Sally Dworak-Fisher, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. She joins us now by phone from Baltimore City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sally Dworak-Fisher.

Sally Dworak-Fisher: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Though more and more people are taking on gig work—for reasons largely to do with the conditions of non-gig work—I think it’s still safe to say that more mainstream news media consumers use app-based delivery systems than work for them. And reporters know what they’re doing when they explain this story by saying, for instance, “Companies like DoorDash have implemented regulatory fees in response to the new law, causing the cost of orders to go up.” What’s being skipped over in that formulation, or that explanation, of what’s happening here, that there was a new law and now costs have gone up? What’s missing there?

SD: Sure. Well, it’s not a surprise that companies might choose to pass on some percentage of new costs to consumers, but they’re by no means required to, and compliance with bedrock pay standards, or any workplace law or social safety net, is part of running a business. If you need to charge a certain amount so you can pay your employee a minimum wage, you don’t normally issue a receipt that says, this is due to the minimum wage law. The practice of specifically pointing the finger at some new law seems really designed to make customers angry at the law, and pit them against the workers. It’s a business choice, it’s not a requirement.

And businesses could choose to, for instance, not pass on the entire cost of the law, or not pass on any of it, if they can afford to do that within their profit margin. So this particular situation, where customers are getting receipts that, in effect, blame the law, seems like a play to pit workers and consumers against one another.

JJ: Absolutely. In your piece that I saw in Common Dreams, you note that charging new service fees is an effort to “tank consumer demand and available work.” What are you getting at there? Why would a company want to draw down consumer demand, and then, more specifically, why would they want to lessen available work?

SD: My point there was just that, in so doing, they can also again create an outcry, a backlash, with workers themselves also saying, “Hey, the law isn’t working as intended. We need to change it.” But, really, it’s a manufactured crisis, and it’s not the law that’s to blame there. It’s really the policy of the business that’s to blame.

JJ: And we don’t see media, at least that I’ve seen, digging into that kind of elision, that kind of skip.

Seattle Times (4/26/24)

SD: Another interesting thing to note would be, so they add a $5 fee that’s purportedly because of the new legal requirements. But it’ll be interesting to know how much of that fee from all those people is really going through the compliance, versus how much is going to profit. And their data is not easily shared.

JJ: And I wanted to ask you about that data. Companies are saying these new service charges are a necessary counterbalance to increased labor costs. Though according to, at least, the Seattle Times, they have declined to release internal data. So we’re being asked to trust the very companies that fought tooth and nail against this ordinance, against paying workers more. We’re just supposed to trust their explanation of what the impact of that ordinance has been. That is, as you say, an information deficit there.

SD: Yes, and I think that they closely guard their information, and don’t turn it over to policymakers. It’s sort of shadow-boxing, in a way, because they have all the information. So I would hope that policymakers would make them show their work, in effect.

JJ: Or at least make a point of the fact that they’re not; that they’re making assertions based on something that they’re not proving or illustrating. We can call that out.

SD: And that was part of our point, is that this law has only gone into effect two months ago. Just be cognizant of the fact that this is a choice that the companies are making to raise these service fees. And before you go about rushing to judgment on anything, demand the data, and see what’s going on.

CounterSpin (4/3/20)

JJ: When I spoke with Bama Athreya, who hosts the podcast the Gig, she was saying that there’s a glaring need for a bridge between labor rights advocates and digital rights advocates. Because these companies, they’re not making toasters. Their business model is crucial here, and part of that involves, in fact, data, and that, beyond our regular understanding of workers’ rights, there needs to be a bigger-picture understanding of this new way of doing business.

SD: That dovetails with something that we talk about frequently here, which is the algorithmic control and the gamification of the work. These corporations are really well-versed in touting flexibility, but the day-to-day job of an app-based worker is highly mediated, monitored, controlled by algorithms that detail how much they’ll be paid, when they’ll be paid, when they can work. There’s a whole lot of algorithms and tech that come into play here. But I do just want to say, it doesn’t make them special. These are just new ways of misclassifying workers as independent contractors.

JJ: It’s just a new shine on an old practice.

Another thing that Bama Athreya pointed out was that it’s often presented to us as, “Well, I guess you’re going to have to pay $26 for a cup of coffee, because the workers want to get paid more.” And that’s the pitting workers versus consumers angle that a lot of elite media take.

Intercept (1/7/22)

But also, if we look at other countries, companies like Uber say, “Well golly, if you make us improve our labor practices, I guess we’ll have to”—and then they kick rocks and look sad—“I guess we’ll just have to go out of business.” And then a government says, “Well, yeah, OK, but you still have to follow the law.” And then they say, “Oh, all right, we’ll just follow it.” They can do it.

SD: And I think they’ve admitted that. I believe that the Uber CEO, after California passed AB 5, which is a law regarding who’s an employee and who’s an independent contractor in that state, Uber, I’m pretty sure, was on record saying, “Well, we can comply with any law.”

And, honestly, I think that really gets into, what do we as a society want in terms of our policies? Do we want just any business? Don’t we have minimum wage laws for a reason? If you can’t make it work while still paying a living wage, then consumers aren’t in the business of subsidizing that. I’m sorry, but not every business is entitled to run on the lowest wage possible.

JJ: And I wish a lot of the folks were not saying, out of the same mouth, that capitalism is this wonderful thing where if you build a better mousetrap, then you succeed, and if you don’t, well, you don’t. And that’s why they have to be rewarded, because of the risk they take. When then, at the same time, we’re saying, oh, but if you want to fall afoul of certain basic human rights laws, we’ll subsidize that, and make sure you get to exist anyway. It’s a confusing picture.

SD: I mean, should we bring back child labor?

JJ: Yeah. Hmm. You thought that would be a less interesting question than it turns out that it is.

Let me just ask you, finally, what should we be looking for to happen from public advocates, which we would hope elected officials would be public advocates, and also reporters we would hope would be public advocates. What should they be calling for, and what should they notice if it doesn’t happen? What’s the right move right now?

Sally Dworak-Fisher: “Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor.”

SD: I think whatever can be done to support the movement. There’s movements across states of app-based workers demanding accountability, and really trying to shine a light on what’s really going on here. I think the more reporting on that, and exposing—you know, every worker should have flexibility and a good job, but the flexibility that’s offered app-based workers is not necessarily the flexibility that a regular reader might assume.

In 2018, NELP issued a report with another organization, called Uber State Interference, and we really identified these ways that Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor. And now, coming out of the pandemic, as workers are successfully organizing again, like they’ve been doing in Seattle and New York City and Minneapolis, the companies are orchestrating a backlash. So understanding the context of what’s going on, and exposing it, would go a long way in solidarity with the workers.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sally Dworak-Fisher from the National Employment Law Project; they’re online at NELP.org. And her piece, “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It,” can be found at CommonDreams.org. Thank you so much, Sally Dworak-Fisher, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.

SD: A pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.

The post ‘This Is a Choice Companies Are Making to Raise Fees’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Sally Dworak-Fisher on delivery workers appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew)

This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (emphasis added) canceling their valedictorian’s commencement speech out of professed concerns for “safety.” A Vanderbilt student is on TikTok noting that their chancellor has run away from offers to engage them, despite his claim to the New York Times that it’s protestors who are “not interested in dialogue”—and Columbia University students have set up an encampment seen around the world, holding steady as we record April 25, despite the college siccing the NYPD on them.

Campuses across the country—Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on—are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians, and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We’ll hear from Sam from National SJP about unfolding events.

(CC photo: Edenpictures)

Also on the show: App-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees, and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media, happy to typey-type about the worry of more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy…bicycle deliverers. We asked Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban.

The post Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine, Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The last poem came maybe two months ago. It really depends on what I’m working on at the moment. If I’m working on exclusively poems, I can try to write a poem a day for 30 days, and come out with maybe three poems at the end of the month. I find myself working better when I have a vision going into the poem. Not every poet is like that, but I’m like that.

What do you do to attain buoyancy in your routine?

Connecting with other people in my community is something that gives me buoyancy, because talking to other artists gets me excited, and it also makes me braver. Whenever I have conversations with myself about a project or an idea there’s always that non-buoyant voice, that heavy voice that says, “You’re crazy.” Or, “You can’t do it.” But whenever I’m in a space where I can talk to my friends, who also have a creative practice, that creates a certain lightness and buoyancy.

Besides your friends, what else is an integral part of your creative practice?

I have a lot of ideas, and it’s hard to juggle them all at once. Sometimes it’s just that decision to just do it. That’s always been the best thing that I’ve done as an artist, poet, writer, is to just do it, because ideas can stew for years in my brain until they become stale. That happens all the time, but once I actually make the decision to do it, once I commit to it, then that gives me life.

Besides buoyancy, the opposite of buoyancy drives my work a lot. It’s rage. It’s the feeling of being powerless. It’s the need to validate a feeling or an experience that has been erased by all the violence that surrounds us. I love that you use the word buoyancy, because I don’t actually characterize my work as all that buoyant. I find myself thinking of buoyancy as this thing that pretty white girls can have, but not someone like me.

You wrote Inauguration Poem including words Trump used in his inaugural speech that a President hadn’t used in that context before. When did that idea occur to you?

When an article was published with all the words side by side. As a poet, I just couldn’t resist taking all those words, and putting them in a new formation. An inauguration speech is the definition of manipulating language to serve the interest of power. As poets and writers, we can really use that language to disrupt existing power structures. I’ve been thinking about so many other poets who have been using someone’s words against them; using someone’s words to disagree with them; using someone’s words to defy them. I find that a lot of poets of my generation have been doing things like that. I’m thinking about Solmaz Sharif, who dismantles the terminology of the Department of Defense dictionary. I’m thinking about Layli Long Soldier, who recontextualizes the apology that Barack Obama made to the Lakota Tribe, and the ways that we can really disrupt these modes of language, that epitomize power and violence, and all the ways that our government fails us on this systematic level.

What words do you think about when you think about the future?

Water. I think about water. I think about what it means to move toward extinction. I think about magic. I think about space. I think about movement. I don’t know what the future holds, but I hope the future will hold us, even though that might be a sentimental thought.

Your work involves a lot of travel. How does geography make its way into the poems?

I’ve traveled a lot in my life, and I think I’ve always been a very restless person. I love the feeling of walking in a new city, without a real plan and wandering, having kind of a vague destination, but going the slow route. I have one poem in Oculus that’s based on a trip I took to Lijiang, China in 2012, and that was a very special trip to me, because it was the first time I went to China by myself, without being accompanied by family. I was wide open to adventure, and I made a lot of amazing friends. I pretended it was my birthday in June, and had a birthday party with my new friends in China. I rode on the back of a motorbike. I hitchhiked for the first time. I made friends with Triad members. I sang karaoke with the Triad.

I guess I just want to capture the strangeness of being both intimate and a stranger. That’s the feeling you get when you’re traveling, that there’s a certain intimacy that’s very natural when you’re on the road. You’re having conversations with people who are also on the road, or people who are transient. I remembered during this trip by myself, I showed up at a hostel that advertised that it would offer a free stay if you were an artist or a musician. I showed up and asked them, “Hey, are you looking for artists? Can I stay for free?” They said to me, “Yeah, you can stay for free, as long as you paint pictures of rainbow trout, because our restaurant’s name is Rainbow Trout.” And I said, “Of course, I will definitely paint pictures of rainbow trout, and narwhals, and killer whales.”

I spent three days at this hostel where they’d housed artists and bad musicians, and built kind of this strange, transient community with the people who worked at that hostel, the guests, and the other musicians and artists. We would go out together at 11:00pm and eat barbecue skewers on the street. I remembered talking the most to the guy who was working the reception table, because he could speak English. He was just telling me his story of literally burning all of his possessions, and riding his bike across China with no identity.

I asked him, “Well, doesn’t that technically make you a missing person?” And he said, “Yes.” I asked him, “Aren’t your parents worried about you?” And he said, “Probably, but I have to escape all the expectations.” Then he told me, “Do you know what it’s like to sleep next to the highway in the rain?” And I said, “No, because I’ve never done that.” I tried to imagine it. I think there’s this level of intimacy that you crave in your daily life, that you find so naturally when you’re traveling, but at the same time you’re a complete stranger, and you’ll never see or speak to this person again. That’s something that I think is beautiful and magical, but at the same time so sad. I want to find this intimacy, but in a context that is not so transient. I think that’s much harder.

Can you talk to me about the function of alterity in your work?

Alterity is another way to describe otherness, and that’s something that I think about a lot in general, and how to negotiate otherness, because I think any writer of color, any artist, when you belong to a group that doesn’t really belong, you tend to see yourself in the eyes of others all the time. In that sense, your identity is compromised. You’re no longer an, “I” but a, “She” or a, “They” or an, “It.” I’ve had to navigate that a lot. I began to write lyric essays on this subject, and it’s an idea that I’m still trying to grasp. It’s an idea that I haven’t fully explored in depth, but one of my working arguments is that alterity creates or generates a failure of intimacy, and for people who are other, intimacy and connection are not givens. They have to do whatever it takes to be seen as worthy.

It’s such an exhausting dance. I think of alterity as a state of permanent exile and disorientation. I guess my constant questions is: “How do you reorient yourself to that kind of disorientation?” I think exile extends beyond place. It has to do with just moving in space. It has to do with your movement. It has to do with your body, and when you feel that kind of isolation, and alienation, and lack of belonging, how do you forge home? How do you forge your own healing? How do you take root? How do you grow? How do you plant your seed? I feel like this is something I’m constantly grappling with, in both my creative process and my lived experience.

Is there any particular subject that you won’t write about?

There was a subject that I refused to write about and that is love, or was love. I’ve been thinking a lot about the reasons why I never wanted to write about love, or the reasons why I’ve never written a love poem. I’ve only written aubades, elegies. An aubade is a parting song, so there might be elements of romance in it, but there’s that inevitable parting in the morning, at dawn. The reason why I didn’t ever want to write about love is because I think my biggest wound is love. That is a painful thing, you know? I resolved to write about my biggest wound, which is love, because if love or its absence is unbearable, then I can dress the wounds with words I carve into the space where it could fit into my life, and into me.

Your last book, Mad Honey Symposium, has a series of poems about honey badgers. Is your forthcoming 2019 book, Oculus, similarly scanning the terrain of virtual reality?

I am a poet that functions on my obsessions. I think that there’s always some kind of kernel that drives me, a kind of kernel that starts and blossoms into things that are surprising. I don’t know what kind of seed it is that I’m planting, but I’m planting it here, and it becomes this poison ivy, or it becomes this orchid, and then I’m surprised that the orchid has lived this long. I’m surprised that I can eat its petals and not be poisoned to death. I guess that’s a weird metaphor for writing a book, but it is like that for me. Planting a single kernel and recognizing that from that single kernel so many different living things can grow.

I guess the kernel of Mad Honey Symposium was the honey badger, but it definitely transcended that animal. The honey badger is a magnificent animal, but it’s not just the honey badger. It’s the honey badger’s relationship to human ideas of dominance and vulnerability, and its merciless consumption of dangerous things, is on par with what humans do to themselves. My first book examines the wild. It was raised in the wilderness, raised by honey badgers, and people who consumed a lot of mad honey that went crazy. That was my first book.

My second book was definitely born and raised in the city. It’s obsessed with smartphones, and webcams, and this kind of gaze. It’s obsessed with spectacle and being looked at, but it also is aware of all the violence that comes with being looked at. I think Oculus has a completely different set of obsession, but I still use the same process. If I plant this kernel, what can it grow into? A tree full of webcams.

What is your relationship to social media like?

Social media is kind of a carnival. What is my relationship with social media? It can be flat sometimes. I think one of the tropes that I try to explore in Oculus is spectacle. In the poem Oculus, I wrote about a girl who had an Instagram account, and the day that she died she uploaded a picture of her burning bed and the ledge. She essentially uploaded her own suicide onto Instagram. I remembered one night, I was just scrolling through pictures and pictures and pictures of this girl’s, this stranger’s Instagram, and how lurid it is. How obsessed we are with beauty, and the inviolability of other people’s lives. I saw that burning bed and that ledge, and up until those posts is just this beautiful girl with this enviable life. I thought about all the ways that we try to create this spectacle. It’s so much harder to document how we feel. I find that, for me, my Twitter is mostly angry. My Facebook is mostly author news. My Instagram is mostly me trying to pretend to be a mermaid. I think they all serve different purposes. In the end, I find that it helps document that I’m alive. I’m not one of those people who is allergic to social media. I’m also not one of those people who’s an expert, or totally obsessed with it either.

Do you consider success in the arts part of your ripple?

I don’t know. I don’t think success really matters. I think it’s how honest you are. I think it’s how you tell the truth, and it’s how that truth impacts the people who matter to you, even if you don’t know they matter to you.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Thora Siemsen.