U.S. Cracks Down on Farmers Who Hire Children

From the New York Times:

U.S. Cracks Down on Farmers Who Hire Children

WHITE LAKE, N.C. — The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators.A flurry of fines and mounting public pressure on blueberry farmers is only the opening salvo, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. Ms. Solis, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, said she was making enforcement of farm-labor rules a priority. At the same time, Congress is considering whether to rewrite the law that still allows 12-year-olds to work on farms during the summer with almost no limits.

The blueberry crop has been drawing workers to eastern North Carolina for decades, but as the harvest got under way in late May, growers stung by bad publicity and federal fines were scrambling to clean up their act, even going beyond the current law to keep all children off the fields. The growers were also ensuring that the workers, mainly Hispanic immigrants, would make at least the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

“I picked blueberries last year, and my 4-year-old brother tried to, but he got stuck in the mud,” said Miguel, a 12-year-old child of migrants. “The inspectors fined the farmers, and this year no kids are allowed.”

Child and rights advocates said they were encouraged by these signs of federal resolve, but they were also waiting to see how wide and lasting the changes would be. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction.

“The news from North Carolina shows the value of strong enforcement,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch and the report’s author. “We also need to change the law to make sure this isn’t a flash in the pan.”

Unannounced visits to several fields here by a reporter and by migrant aid groups, and interviews with workers from more than a dozen blueberry farms, indicate that the changes — for this crop and this region — are real.

Soon after dawn, the vans stream through the roads here, ferrying migrant workers from trailer camps to blueberry farms, where they pluck the fragile fruits for 10 hours or more.

“Last year, the fields were filled with children, so this is encouraging,” said Emily Drakage, North Carolina regional coordinator of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a national network of state and private agencies.

Beyond barring children from the fields, growers here also spruced up migrants’ trailers and barracks and adopted scanners to record the buckets of berries collected by each worker.

A federal law adopted in 1938 exempts agriculture from child-labor rules that apply to other industries. It permits children 12 and up to work without limits outside of school hours, exposing them, critics say, to pesticides that may pose a special threat to growing bodies and robbing too many of childhood itself.

After years of what rights groups said was lax attention, the Labor Department this week announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000.

On May 24, the department fined a labor contractor and a farmer in Arizona more than $30,000 for employing 10- and 11-year-old children, underpaying workers and other violations.

In an interview, Ms. Solis said she had added more than 250 workplace investigators, bringing the department’s total to near 1,000, and started a campaign to educate workers about their rights. Acknowledging that officials had sometimes ignored child farm violations in the past, she added, “I am totally changing the direction of this department.”

But to make deep inroads, Congress would first have to change the law. A proposal to ban the hiring of 12- and 13-year-olds, cap working hours by 14- and 15-year-olds and keep teenagers out of hazardous jobs is gaining support in Congress. Some 91 representatives have co-sponsored the Care Act, put forth by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he planned to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. The American Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm lobbying organization, has opposed it, saying it could imperil the tradition of children working in farm communities.

This spring’s restrictions on teenagers in North Carolina were unsettling for some parents who said they counted on their earnings, and for teenage migrants, some traveling on their own.

“I need to help pay our own way,” said Edgar, 15, who has helped support two younger siblings since his mother rushed back to Mexico in 2009 for a family emergency. Last spring, he often skipped school to spend 10-hour days picking blueberries, he said. He was disappointed to be turned away by a farm on a recent Saturday and hoped that growers would let him work after the school year ended.

Migrant farm workers, many of them Mexicans who are in the country illegally, remain desperately poor, traveling across the country for sporadic stretches of backbreaking work, vulnerable to gouging by contractors and afraid to complain. Although a federal program tries to aid migrant children with their education, few finish high school.

The Migrant Head Start program aims to give parents an alternative to taking infants and toddlers into the fields. Here in Bladen County, a new Head Start center opened in 2008. It provides free day care to 138 children but still falls short of the need.

In nearby Wayne County, Celidania Diaz, who has worked there for nine years, planned to start picking when Head Start’s free bus service began in her area the following week.

“With the kids, the farms are very strict now,” she said. “It was better before, because if you didn’t have someone to take care of the kids, you could take them along.”

Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.

Blueberry farmers here, like George Mote Jr., insist that they have never wanted children in their fields but that parents would sneak them in; rights groups say the farmers often looked the other way.

Shaken by fines imposed last August on 9 blueberry farms and 17 labor contractors in North Carolina, owners this spring played it safe by going beyond the law to bar anyone under 16 from the fields. But some farmers said that when school ended this month, they would allow younger teenagers to work, as the law allows.

Rafaela, 35, who lives in a three-bedroom trailer with her two children and six men placed there temporarily by a labor contractor, said not all parents supported strong controls on work by teenagers. “In the summertime when there’s no school, I think it’s O.K.,” said Rafaela, who did not provide her last name because she feared scrutiny by immigration officials. “But to take them out of school, that’s not right.”

Muslim liquor store owners get help with moral dilemma

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-muslim-liquor-store-20100619,0,300227.story

Muslim liquor store owners get help with moral dilemma

Prescribed by his Islamic faith to pray five times a day, Mazen Materieh often prostrates himself on one of the prayer rugs in the basement of his corner store. When he is done, he returns to his perch behind the counter, where he sells liquor, lottery tickets and pork skins — all forbidden by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad.

"I'm not justifying what I'm doing. I know it's wrong," said Materieh, 52, of Orland Park. "I'm an honest person. I don't like to be a man of two faces."

Materieh's conflict is common in corner stores across Chicago's South Side. On one hand, store owners cannot make ends meet without selling what customers demand. On the other, consuming or profiting from products forbidden by their faith is considered sinful. What's more, neighbors blame the stores for perpetuating violence, addiction and obesity in low-income neighborhoods.

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Now, a coalition of Arab and African-American Muslims is offering Muslim merchants an opportunity to improve their reputations and renew their religious principles by selling fresh produce and healthy foods, especially in neighborhoods without major groceries. Along the way, they hope, store owners will think twice about selling forbidden products. The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago has provided a grant that will serve as seed money for pioneers in the campaign.

"These stores became associated with a lot of the most negative and oppressive characteristics you would want to be associated with," said Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Inner City Muslim Action Network, which is working with stores to turn neighborhoods around. "It's not necessarily a model they developed. It's something they inherited and found themselves operating, of course, with great contradiction and tension because it's antithetical to their religious convictions."

Nashashibi and other activists are backing a bill to create an Illinois Fresh Food Fund, a proposed grant or loan program that would support grocers in neighborhoods that lack easy access to healthy foods. According to the bill, more than half a million Chicagoans — mostly African-American — live in underserved neighborhoods when it comes to proper nutrition.

The campaign offers a solution for a problem that has unfolded in urban neighborhoods across the country for years. Arab Muslims in Chicago are only the latest wave of immigrants to break into business by acquiring affordable real estate and liquor licenses, sometimes leading to tensions in the neighborhoods. For the same reason, Korean merchants in Los Angeles became the target of their black neighbors during the Los Angeles riot in 1992.

Materieh and a partner opened Sharif Food & Liquor at 5659 S. Racine Ave. after arthritis prevented him from working in construction and a halal restaurant venture didn't work out. "Sharif" is an Arabic word for "honorable."

He doesn't allow his children to help in the store, and he regularly argues with his wife, who doesn't understand how he can rationalize selling alcohol. He admits a sense of shame came over him after taking religious education classes at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, where his family worshipped.

"In our religion, God loves believers and repenters," Materieh said. "If I have good trust in God, I should go and do the right thing and not feed my kids with this money. But we are human beings, and we are weak. I pray to God to get me out of it."

Sheikh Kifah Moustapha, imam and associate director of the Bridgeview mosque, preaches against haram (forbidden) business practices regularly. He bases his sermons on a verse in the Quran that implores the faithful to avoid intoxicating temptations.

"Believers, wine and gambling, idols and divining arrows are abominations from the work of Satan," the Quran instructs.

Though many Muslims defend their business practices by arguing that scripture forbids only consumption, not the sale, they are wrong, Moustapha said.

But he is not quick to condemn, as he knows the dilemma firsthand. When he first came to Chicago, Moustapha opened a halal store at 79th and Racine. Customers stopped coming as soon as they figured out liquor and lottery tickets weren't available.

"I'm not saying this to excuse or legitimize an act considered prohibited in my faith," Moustapha said. "We need to have some suggestions available on the table for those people so our advice and our sermons would make more sense."

Falah Farhoudeh, owner of Pay Less Grocery, near 69th Street and Ashland Avenue, is one of those trailblazers. Farhoudeh has never sold liquor or lottery tickets. The sandwich shop he runs out of the back of his store doesn't serve pork. But he prominently displays pork skins and soda pop at the front of his store instead of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Next month, with the grant money, he expects to install a bin for fresh produce and meats, excluding pork.

Others are eager to follow suit, including Ida Rihan, 48, owner of Delta Foods, 1158 W. 51st St., who has not yet received a grant. Rihan declines to sell alcohol or pork. Her husband was shot 10 years ago by an intoxicated gunman who stole $65. Sitting on a stool behind bulletproof glass, with a mosque prayer schedule taped next to the cash register, she cheerily greets her customers, many of whom call her Mom.

Two doors down on 51st Street, Nasheet Salah, 29, owner of K&K Foods, advertises discounts on vodka, cognac and beer. "That's a living. You've got to do it to prepare the table," he said.

Rihan doesn't judge her neighbor. She said people must decide how to balance belief with business.

She would prefer to offer fresh meat and produce regularly, but it's a choice she can't afford. She said she would welcome a grant that would enable her to upgrade her merchandise.

"It's a hard neighborhood here," she said. "I have a lot of respect for everybody, and everyone has respect for me. You have to do what you believe is right."

mbrachear@tribune.com

Sainsbury joins supermarket slowdown and reports sharp drop in sales

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7833532/Sainsbury-joins-supermarket-slowdown-and-reports-sharp-drop-in-sales.html

J Sainsbury joined UK supermarket rivals Tesco and WM Morrison in reporting a sharp slowdown in sales in the second quarter amid an absence of food price inflation and higher fuel prices hitting consumer confidenc

ustin King, Sainsbury's chief executive, said he expects "low to no growth supported by low to no food price inflation" over the next two quarters.

The supermarket chain has not seen a "step on" in consumer spending since the depths of the recession at the start of 2009, he said. Shoppers are watching their spending as carefully now because of the jump in energy prices as they were when food prices were high and the economic outlook was bleak."There's been no further acceleration but nor has there been a reversal," he said.

Sainsbury's like-for-like sales rose 1.1pc excluding fuel in the three months to June 12, and climbed around 0.3pc after taking out VAT. Tesco's sales excluding VAT and fuel rose 0.1pc in the three months to the end of June, and Morrisons sales on that basis climbed 0.8pc in the first quarter.

Sainsbury's total sales rose 7.6pc in the quarter, with a 3.3pc contribution from new stores which performed better than expected. The retailer will add 1.5m square feet of new space this year, with new supermarkets, convenience stores and extensions to existing sites.

Mr King was more reserved than Tesco about the possible VAT rise in next week's emergency Budget, saying the Government must give companies at least three months notice ahead of any increase and give clear guidance on where VAT levels are likely to be in the future. The VAT cut in December 2008 was implemented with immediate effect and was "unbelievably disruptive and costly," he said.

Sainsbury shares rose 2.8 to 327.2p.

The group said it had scored a World Cup goal by ordering vuvuzela horns in advance of the competition, and expects to sell out of the 75,000 it bought this week.

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Tesco sees sales growth after tough first quarter

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-15/tesco-sees-u-k-sales-growth-reviving-after-tough-first-quarter.html

June 15 (Bloomberg) -- Tesco Plc, the U.K.’s largest supermarket chain, said a lack of domestic revenue growth in the first quarter won’t stop it meeting full-year forecasts.

Sales at U.K. stores open at least a year will still gain 3 percent, excluding gasoline and value-added tax, after rising 0.1 percent in the 13 weeks ended May 30, Finance Director Laurie McIlwee told reporters on a conference call today. An acceleration of food-price inflation and reduced concern among consumers about the British budget and new coalition government will help sales as the year progresses, he said.

U.K. food inflation slowed to 1.4 percent in the three months through May 16, having reached 9 percent in February 2009, according to Kantar Worldpanel. That eroded sales growth at Britain’s supermarkets, which are also contending with weaker consumer spending. Tesco’s same-store sales growth slowed from 2.7 percent in the second half of the previous year.

“The U.K. performance was expected and should be the low point of the year,” Chris Hogbin, an analyst at Bernstein Research said. “We also expect international performance to accelerate.” Hogbin has an “outperform” rating on the shares.

Tesco rose 8.25 pence, or 2.1 percent, to 399.9 pence at 1:42 p.m. in London trading, reversing earlier losses. The stock has declined 6.6 percent this year, compared with smaller competitor J Sainsbury Plc’s 0.1 percent gain.

Tesco, which announced last week that Phil Clarke will replace Terry Leahy as chief executive officer, foresees a “steady consumer recovery” in the U.K., McIlwee said.

Finest Range

The first-quarter performance was “slightly off the group’s growth rates, but still solid,” he said.

The retailer singled out increased sales of its higher- priced Finest range and non-food products as evidence of a recovery. Sales of high-end televisions have more than doubled, fuelled by soccer’s World Cup, McIlwee said.

International same-store sales were little changed in the quarter, with some declines in Asia offset by gains in Europe.

Business in Poland was affected as the country mourned the death of its president in an air crash, McIlwee said. In Thailand, sales were hurt by political unrest, though have “bounced back well” in the two weeks since the country lifted a curfew imposed on about one third of the population, he said. Tesco has sold about 700,000 World Cup t-shirts in South Korea.

Market Share

Tesco is extending non-food space and rewarding customers with double Clubcard loyalty points in an effort to fuel growth, and held its 30.6 percent share of the U.K. grocery market in the three months through May 16, according to Kantar data.

Total sales rose 8.2 percent in the first quarter, or 6.9 percent excluding gasoline.

“This is a solid statement and ought to reassure,” Gillian Hilditch, an analyst at JPMorgan Cazenove, said in a report. She has a “neutral” recommendation on the stock.

--Editors: Paul Jarvis, Tim Farrand.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Shannon in London at sshannon4@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor respo

Georgetown's 'Social Safeway' is a monument to changing supermarket architecture

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061800210.html

Georgetown's 'Social Safeway' is a monument to changing supermarket architecture

The recently rebuilt "Social Safeway" on Wisconsin Avenue NW, at the northern edge of Georgetown, is not just another remodeled supermarket. It represents a positive evolution in thinking about merchandising strategy and about being a good citizen through pedestrian-friendly architecture and urban design.

This new supermarket follows a completely different set of rules than its predecessor. Safeway and other supermarket chains traditionally have adhered dogmatically to rules about selection of sites for stores and, in particular, rules about how such sites should be developed. And one of the primary rules was: Cars rule.

For decades, supermarket thinking was driven by one dominant premise. Motorists approaching a shopping destination absolutely had to see -- and expected to see -- a parking lot with plenty of spaces directly in front of the supermarket. Otherwise, it was assumed, they would drive elsewhere to shop. Further, part of the gospel was the belief that setting back a supermarket from the road gives drivers more time to see the store and read its signage.

Most supermarket patrons are weekly shoppers who purchase multiple bags of groceries. Those bags must be transported back home in an automobile. Thus, successful supermarket design means ensuring that shoppers can conveniently push a grocery cart from the checkout register to their cars.

Not surprisingly, this formulaic approach yielded thousands of very similar supermarkets. Whether free-standing or anchoring one end of a neighborhood shopping center, most supermarkets are set back from public streets with the requisite parking lot directly in front and sometimes extending around one or more sides of the store.

Another formulaic premise was that a supermarket could and should be housed as cheaply as possible, typically in a one-story, horizontally proportioned box. Stores didn't need windows, and they didn't need to win architectural awards.

A notable exception to the formula is the typical downtown grocery store occupying the ground floor of large commercial or residential buildings. Some customers patronizing downtown stores walk and thus shop more frequently than suburban customers.

But even a center-city supermarket depends on access to an adjacent parking garage for many of its patrons. The Georgetown Safeway property is not downtown, nor is it out in the suburbs. Rather, it is in a low-density, mixed-use urban setting.

Yet the former store had been a free-standing building consistent with formulaic thinking, as if it were in suburbia. The conventionally configured store sat near the rear of the site, set well back from Wisconsin Avenue and separated from the avenue by a large parking lot.

Now, in its place is a two-story building directly abutting the Wisconsin Avenue right of way and sidewalk. Parking within and behind the new building is not visible from the street.

Opened last month, this unique Safeway was designed by Silver Spring-based architects Torti Gallas and Partners to be green and eligible for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. At just more than 71,000 square feet and open 24 hours a day, it is the District's largest supermarket. Amazingly, the project was completed only 376 days after the old store was closed.

Along the avenue at sidewalk level are retail shop spaces for lease, with the Safeway supermarket level a story above. And unlike nearly any other supermarket you have seen, the building's facades are far from plain. Clearly, Safeway's architects thought a lot about creating architecture and not just a box.

Brick-clad columns and spandrel beams frame large, recessed storefront windows whose glazing is subdivided with elaborate mullion patterns. Projecting out above each recessed window bay are louvered metal sunshades supported by metal brackets, which add another layer of facade detail.

Shoppers can drive into the parking garage, situated behind the street-front shops, on either side of the building. Stairs, escalators and very large elevators ferry shoppers and grocery carts between the garage and supermarket level. And some spaces in the lofty, well lighted garage are reserved for fuel-efficient cars.

The supermarket interior is capacious but more conventionally designed with the usual suspended panel ceiling and many wide, parallel aisles. However, Safeway's planners wisely situated the deli, Starbucks and cafe seating at the front of the supermarket, adjacent to the array of high windows overlooking the avenue below and flooding the area with daylight.

Making a visually porous, animated street-front building has made the Georgetown Social Safeway even more social. This new building may not win design awards, but it deserves recognition for what it has aspired to achieve urbanistically and architecturally.

Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland.

Eating five a day for better health insurance

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100620/NEWS02/306189884/-1/new

Andy Pushchak now goes for walks at lunch instead of sitting at his desk.

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He and his family get their flu shots, and they make sure to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables each day.

As a result, Pushchak saved about $1,750 on his health-insurance premiums this year.

"It's a good deal, especially for someone with a family," said Pushchak, a Greene Township resident who has a wife and three young daughters with a fourth child on the way.

Pushchak, program head for educational leadership at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, is one of 665 university employees who take part in a workplace incentive program.

People who enroll in these voluntary programs and participate in healthy activities, such as getting a flu shot or exercising a certain amount of time each week, earn cash incentives or reductions in their premiums.

It's a growing trend, said Jennifer Grana, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield's director for preventive services. Nearly 400 employers offered Highmark incentive programs in 2009 and about 165,000 people participated in them.

"Probably 10 percent of all of our members offer these programs, but when you look at the employers with 51 employees or more, that percentage increases to 40 to 50 percent," Grana said. "It's becoming more and more popular every year."

Health insurers offer these programs because they reduce medical costs by keeping people healthier. Employers like them because they can reduce monthly premiums.

Edinboro University employees can belong to one of two incentive programs, one offered by Highmark and another offered through the Pennsylvania Employees Benefit Trust Fund.

Pushchak and his family participate in Highmark's Healthy U program. He and his wife, Laura, signed a pledge to be healthy and took a wellness profile that included questions about their height, weight, cholesterol and blood pressure.

In 2009-10, employees were required to earn at least 70 points to qualify for reduced premiums. They earned points by choosing and taking part in certain Highmark-approved activities and programs.

"If they work out, they get points for that," said Linda Harrison, Edinboro University's manager of employee benefits. "They get points for a flu shot or for a preventive medical exam, like a physical."

Pushchak enrolled this spring in "Color Your Plate," a six-week online course that educates families about the importance of eating a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables.

"Our family already does a good job with fruits and vegetables, but this allowed us to get into it even more," Pushchak said. "We tried orange and yellow peppers, and eggplant. The girls liked them."

Pushchak realized how much of an impact the course had on his family when they went out to eat at a local restaurant.

"The waitress asked if my 5-year-old daughter, Ave, wanted french fries with her meal," Pushchak said. "She said she wanted broccoli instead. I asked why and she said, 'We have to color our plates, Dada.'"

Both Pushchak and his wife earned enough points to qualify for the reduced premium. They will pay 15 percent of their monthly premiums in 2010-11 instead of 25 percent, the percentage nonparticipants pay.

Instead of reduced premiums, Meadville city employees can earn cash for participating in their workplace incentive program.

If they pledge to be healthy, do the online profile, take part in at least two Highmark-approved programs and fill out a survey, they earn $125 a year, said Barb Hall, Meadville's human resources manager.

"It's made a difference," Hall said. "Some people have told me that it has helped them lose weight, and others have said they no longer have to take their cholesterol or diabetes medicine."

But some Edinboro University employees consider the voluntary program as simply one more thing they are being forced to do, Harrison said.

"With any change, you're bound to get some negative comments," Harrison said. "But I've heard a lot of positive things about it, too."

Pushchak said Healthy U has helped him and his family pay better attention to their health.

"It's really worked," Pushchak said. "We're more conscious about eating five servings of fruit and vegetables each day, and I feel more health conscious."

DAVID BRUCE can be reached at 870-1736 or by e-mail.