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“Around the world, right-wing populist leaders are exploiting the pandemic for their own political benefits . . . In Bolsonaro’s case, the pandemic is providing him with a golden opportunity to remind the public of one of the things that got him elected in the first place: his law-and-order background (he was a parachutist in the Brazilian Army) and affection for the military,” writes Encarnación in Foreign Policy. “Since the crisis erupted, Bolsonaro has brazenly encouraged the militarization of the government by, among other things, expanding the powers of the generals in his administration beyond the confines of military affairs and by amplifying calls for a military takeover at rallies where he has been in attendance.”
 

Bard alumna Emma Kreyche ’02, director of advocacy, outreach, and education for the Worker Justice Center of New York, spoke with the Public News Service about the vulnerability of farm laborers after an undocumented immigrant became the first farm worker in the state known to have died from Covid-19. Although farm laborers are recognized as essential workers, because they are undocumented they have little job security, often live in group settings with limited access to health care, and, when they do get sick, are fearful of seeking medical care. “The Covid pandemic is really underscoring and highlighting the various systems failures that have played upon this community for many, many years,” says Kreyche.

With Covid-19 ravaging economies, Bard College professor Pavlina Tcherneva, and colleagues around the globe, have issued an urgent plea: we need to transform the way we work.

On May 16, more than 4,000 researchers across all five continents signed on to the op-ed “Let’s democratize and decommodify work,” which was published in 41 publications, in 27 languages, in 36 countries around the world. It is an urgent call to policymakers to rewrite the rules of our economic system in the midst of an unprecedented health, climate, and political crisis intensified by Covid-19, and is centered on these three principles: democratize (firms), decommodify (work), and remediate (policies) in order to respect planetary boundaries and make life sustainable for all.

This new initiative, known as Work: Democratize, Decommodify, Remediate, was launched by a core group of eight women, all leading scholars in their fields, including Bard College professor Pavlina Tcherneva; Julie Battilana, Harvard Business School; Helene Landemore, Yale University; Julia Cagé, Sciences Po Paris; Dominique Méda, Université Paris Dauphine; Isabelle Ferreras, University of Louvain; Lisa Herzog, University of Groningen; and Sara Lafuente Hernandez, European Trade Union Institute. A central tenet is the need for a job guarantee in line with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
 

A job guarantee would not only offer each person access to work that allows them to live with dignity, it would also provide a crucial boost to our collective capability to meet the many pressing social and environmental challenges we currently face. Guaranteed employment would allow governments, working through local communities, to provide dignified work while contributing to the immense effort of fighting environmental collapse. Across the globe, as unemployment skyrockets, job guarantee programs can play a crucial role in assuring the social, economic, and environmental stability of our democratic societies.

 “Around the world, you see various forms of large-scale employment programs for the unemployed, but a job guarantee is different,” says Professor Tcherneva. “It is a missing piece of the safety net.” Tcherneva, who studies macroeconomics and full employment, is a longtime advocate of a federal program that ensures a job for anyone who wants one. Her new book The Case for a Job Guarantee, forthcoming from Polity in June, provides a primer.

To learn more about the Democratize, Decommodify, Remediate initiative, visit democratizingwork.org.

Read the full op-ed in the Guardian.
Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work
 

In lockdown and through our screens, we’re reminded of all that’s special and strange about group reading: a solitary, private act made public.

Gal Beckerman's immersion in virtual book gatherings began in March, when he joined the Hannah Arendt Center's Virtual Reading Group. The group has been steadily reading through the works of Arendt online for six years. When the pandemic hit, the center opened the group up to anyone interested, and participation jumped from around 30 to close to 100.

Read an excerpt below of Gal Beckerman's story for the New York Times, and read the full story here.

I’ve looked forward to these online meetings every Friday, when for nearly two hours we discuss one of the chapters in a book that contains essays about thinkers like Karl Jaspers and Rosa Luxemburg, whom Arendt admired for bucking the ideologies of their time. It’s not just that the group is helping me understand Arendt, a philosopher I’ve always wanted to read, but I enjoy seeing everyone sitting at home in front of their bookshelves, some a little too close to the camera, some reclining in big easy chairs, others eating a snack, bringing snippets of their own life and thoughts to the discussion.

When I spoke with Berkowitz [Roger Berkowitz, Bard professor and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center] he paraphrased an evocative metaphor Arendt uses in “The Human Condition” that seemed uniquely apt for our current moment of isolation. “When you have a group of people sitting around a table talking, the table is what makes them a group,” he said. “And if you take the table away, they’re just individuals, they’re not connected.”

Is Zoom our table? Without it we would all just be people reading in our houses alone. With it, we are the people who read books together. Whether this will sustain a public world, as Arendt would surely hope, is hard to tell. We have no choice but to try.

Kevin Barbosa has won a Fulbright Award to Mexico City. The Class of 2018 alumnus was a member of the men’s swim team and speaker of the student government at Bard. He has been selected for a Binational Business Internship, a unique program supported by Fulbright that allows grantees to live and work full time in Mexico City. “I wanted to live in Latin America and use the knowledge I gained in banking and finance to help an organization that was specifically targeting economic issues common in Latin America, and the Binational Business Program in Mexico was the perfect solution,” Barbosa explains. The program is currently delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Barbosa will be interviewing with a group of financial technology companies in the fall. He is also studying for his law school exams.

 “The Legacy of Wynne Godley,” a virtual conference of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Universita’ degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, gathers former colleagues and others on the 10th anniversary of Godley’s passing to provide memories and offer insights on his work. The longtime head of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team, Godley has been considered “the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation.”

“Around the world, you see various forms of large-scale employment programs for the unemployed, but a job guarantee is different,” says Tcherneva. “It is a missing piece of the safety net. When you think about how we provide the safety net for other things—we have a problem with retirement security? Guarantee retirement income. There’s food insecurity? Guarantee food. A problem with shelter? Guarantee shelter.” The Case for a Job Guarantee is forthcoming in July from Polity.