Then and Now: Migrant Labor Edition

On the left is one of photographer and muckraker Jacob Riis' most famous photos, "Five Cents a Spot," taken with newly-developed flash photography technology in 1888. At the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, immigration to the US spiked, and millions of laborers from Russia, Germany, Italy, and Ireland arrived to take jobs in New York City's expanding manufacturing sector.

On the right is a photo from yesterday’s New York Times, showing migrant workers who built New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus. According to the Times, many of the workers, who come from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, must surrender their passports, and a year’s wages as a “recruitment fee,” to the contractors who employ them. The laborers work 6-7 days a week, 11-12 hours a day, for about $3,000 a year. Instead of the right to protest their working conditions and negotiate higher wages, they face harassment, beatings and deportation from Abu Dhabi’s police force. Regarding NYU's involvement, the Times reported:

Facing criticism for venturing into a country where dissent is not tolerated and labor can resemble indentured servitude, N.Y.U. in 2009 issued a “statement of labor values” that it said would guarantee fair treatment of workers. But interviews by The New York Times with dozens of workers who built N.Y.U.’s recently completed campus found that conditions on the project were often starkly different from the ideal. … Told of the laborers’ complaints, officials said they could not vouch for the treatment of individual construction workers, since they are not employees of the university but rather of companies that work as contractors or subcontractors for the government agency overseeing the project. Those companies are contractually obligated to follow the statement of labor values.

When Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives came out in 1890, its frank depictions of poverty in the midst of New York City shocked middle class Americans. Riis—an immigrant himself—believed that exposing the harsh working and living conditions of the newest and poorest New Yorkers would help push along the Progressive movement for safer workplaces and workers' rights. Luckily for many subsequent generations of New Yorkers, he was right.

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Collage Photo Credits: Left: Jacob A. Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York; Right: Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times.

Are the Aid Donors Un-Developing Ethiopia?

Samuel Lowenberg has an article in the Lancet:

The World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) have consistently failed to act on allegations of human rights abuses in Ethiopia, including ones that are tied to their aid programmes, according to new reports...

The reports raise troubling questions over alleged abuses—including beatings, rape, and murder—connected to the government's villagisation programme...

The report by the Oakland Institute documents how officials from USAID and DFID, who were investigating claims of abuse, heard first-hand accounts from villagers recounting brutal treatment by Ethiopian authorities under the villagisation programme. But even after these reports the two agencies failed to act.

One renegade former World Bank economist comments:

In view of the long-running problems documented in Ethiopia, “the impunity of the donors astonishes me”.... Human rights are essential to development, so when a foreign donor finances a government that represses these rights, it does not help a country develop, it sets it back, he says.

Please read the whole article, it is essential reading for anyone who cares about development.

More Governance in Government’s Governing

By William Easterly The new World Bank blog People, Spaces, Deliberation has already achieved one milestone: it covers exhaustively the field of “governance” with little or no usage of words that have historically been prominent in such discussions (see chart).

We were inspired by the new blog to translate one historical document that is now badly out of date and frame it as a practical roadmap for further engaging civil society:

Original	Translation
We hold these truths to be self-evident	The mainstream consensus among experts is
that all men are created equal,	All efforts should be inclusive,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,	Development as a Multi-Stakeholder Initiative must be Broad-based and Community-driven,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.	Including Social Sector Goals, Participation, and the pursuit of Capacity-Building.

No Aid for Repressive Tyrants

We … call on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and America’s Western allies to publicly repudiate Ethiopia’s efforts to use terrorism laws to silence political dissent. We also urge the U.S. to ensure that our more than $600 million in aid to Ethiopia is not used to foster repression.

This is the call to action from a letter published in the New York Review of Books this month.

We at DRI are inspired by the courage of Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist, newspaper publisher, and dissident arrested on September 14th after writing a blog post demanding freedom of expression and an end to torture in Ethiopian prisons. Despite previous arrests, both Eskinder and his wife, Serkalem Fasil, have chosen to remain in Ethiopia and continue their work.

While we don't want to meddle in other countries' politics, we do want to speak out against aid that supports rights-violating regimes, in solidarity with Ethiopian citizens who are simply asking to exercise their own civil liberties.

From 2005, when Eskinder Nega was first imprisoned in the aftermath of Ethiopia’s parliamentary elections marred with rigging and violence, to the present, international aid to Ethiopia has more than doubled to well over $4 billion. The three largest donors are the World Bank, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Although they acknowledge “concerns” about governance and the protection of basic human rights, aid agencies continue to increase aid flows, praising the Ethiopian regime for high national growth rates and improvements on some health and poverty metrics. Even if not entirely reliable, these figures allow Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles to capitalize on The Myth of the Benevolent Autocrat, under which a “strong leader” (in the tradition to Lee-Kwan Yew, Deng Xiaoping, and even Paul Kagame) is given undue credit for a period of high growth, and excused for whatever human rights abuses and press freedom repression was deemed necessary in the pursuit of economic growth. Unfortunately for Meles, recent DRI research has found that there is no empirical basis for a belief that unconstrained autocratic leaders outperform democratic leaders.

The Ethiopian predicament raises tough questions for people concerned with both poverty alleviation and human rights. The Ethiopian government uses aid to build schools, vaccinate children, and provide social safety nets for the poor. But a Human Rights Watch report found that the government also systematically uses aid as a political weapon to discriminate against non-party members and punish dissenters. The report found widespread evidence of village leaders withholding seeds, fertilizer, and loans from farmers not in the ruling party, and local officials denying emergency food aid to women, children and the elderly as punishment for refusing to join the party.

In Ethiopia, aid agencies should do all they can to make sure aid helps Ethiopians rather than their rulers. One (albeit imperfect) measure of this is “channel of delivery” – data collected by the OECD on whether country aid agencies route funds through the public sector, NGOs, private-public partnerships, or multilateral organizations. These two graphs show available data for the US and the UK.

Like the UK, the World Bank has long given its aid through direct budget support either to the central or local governments, insisting that social accountability mechanisms are in place to prevent misuse. But many observers and journalists tell a different story: that such mechanisms are either not present, or are not working because independent, third-party observers upon which such accountability measures depend are more often ruling party-affiliated NGOs.  Even a study commissioned by the donors found that two of the programs for Ethiopia’s most needy “face important challenges in their accountability systems” and “significant weakness” in safeguards and monitoring processes intended to detect distortion and produce evidence about whether or not the program works.

While it is logical to believe that the way donors deliver aid can strengthen or weaken the compact between rulers and their people in democratic countries, aid cannot create this compact where it does not exist. Empirical evidence does not support the idea that aid can cause dictatorships to become democracies, and in fact a new DRI working paper suggests that aid is more likely to push countries further down their existing path—so that aid to dictatorships makes them more dictatorial, not less.

Bad news for Eskinder Nega and other dissidents and journalists wrongfully persecuted and imprisoned, as aid agencies continue to empower the regime at the expense of the Ethiopian people.