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Articles by Maria Hengeveld
The United States is not a country
I’m not referring to the electoral reality of red states versus blue states, or to the split between a radicalized Republican Party and those of us who hope that an inclusive democratic vision of the nation might eventually prevail. Nor am I speaking here of racial or ethnic divisions, however defined. Rather, what I mean is that the US, where countless corrupt billionaires and dictators have stashed their loot, is not a single tax haven, but many separate tax havens.
When Lean-In Feminism Reaches the Factory Floor
Garment workers in India don’t need life-skills training. They need higher wages. By Maria HengeveldTwitter May 12, 2021 fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark May 12, 2021 Textile workers making clothing in Bangalore. Many of the workers emigrate from poor regions of the country, making clothes to be sold in the United States. (Jodi Hilton / NurPhoto via Getty Images) Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week.
Blood on the Tea Leaves: Kenyan Workers Demand Reparations From Unilever
At least four men armed with machetes and clubs broke into Anne Johnson’s home. They forced her husband and 11-year-old son into the bedroom and kept Anne and her teenage daughters in a separate room. To this day, she doesn’t know for certain if the men who raped her, her husband, and her daughters were her coworkers.
Kenyan Tea Workers Demand Reparations From Unilever For Failing to Protect Them From Attacks
At least four men armed with machetes and clubs broke into Anne Johnson’s home. They forced her husband and 11-year-old son into the bedroom and kept Anne and her teenage daughters in a separate room. To this day, she doesn’t know for certain if the men who raped her, her husband, and her daughters were her coworkers.
Blood on the Tea Leaves: Kenyan Workers Demand Reparations From Unilever
Tea pluckers say the household-goods giant failed to protect them from brutal and foreseeable attacks. By Maria HengeveldTwitter January 27, 2021 fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark January 27, 2021 (De Agostini / Getty Images) Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week.
The Corporate Parent
This article was originally published on December 15, 2020. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a patriarch as a “powerful and usually older man in charge of a family” or as a “male leader of a society in which men hold power.” Patriarchs are a diverse bunch; they all look, sound, and speak in their own peculiar ways, and they hold different visions of how to rule their households, ranging from the tyrannical to the compassionate.
Nike Wants to Empower Young Women. Why Do the Ones in Its Factories Say They’re Treated So Badly?
The Grind While the young women who make its products in Vietnam are intimidated, belittled, and underpaid. Rolands Lakis/Flickr This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. It wouldn’t be the Olympics without the biennial onslaught of Swooshes, and 2016 was no different.
Is violence against women too common, too ordinary to qualify as interesting?
Back in February gender-based violence dominated media and public talk when South Africans declared themselves woken up, disgusted, outraged and horrified after the rape and murder of working class, black Anene Booysen and the murder of middle class, white Reeva Steenkamp (both by their boyfriends; though Reeva more than Anene). Yet, by the time International Women’s Day announced itself on March 8th, the media seemed to have pretty much moved on.
The Factory Oversight Industry Protects Profits, Not People
An investigation into the dangerously irresponsible business of “ethical factory” audits. By Maria HengeveldTwitter April 23, 2020 fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark When Kishore Sharfudeen—a soft-spoken father of two from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu—joined the hosiery manufacturer SNQS International Socks as a personnel manager in 2001, a new world opened up to him.
The Factory Oversight Industry Protects Profits, Not People
Kishore was an exception: While seeking to obtain a certification for the sock factory in 2006, he decided to skip the consultant and go straight to RINA, an Italian inspection company authorized by SAI to hand out SA8000s that had an office near his factory.
The UN Goes to Davos
Corporate influence over the humanitarian sector has a long and compromised history. Call it UN, Inc. By Maria HengeveldTwitter Today 6:00 am fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary general attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, 2017. (Reuters / Ruben Sprich) Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
Nigeria’s first lesbian documentary
I first watched Under the Rainbow, a visual memoir by Pamela Adie, the day after Binyavanga Wainaina died. This was not intentional. I was preparing for an upcoming research trip to Lagos and had been in touch with Adie about her film. She was kind enough to send me a screener so that I could watch it before our interview.
Working Girls
Women’s empowerment sells. You-go-girl messages have been used to push everything from shoes to body wash to cars, and it certainly sells in the sports world. In February, Nike released its “Dream Crazier” commercial, featuring female athletes like Simone Biles, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe, and an inspirational voiceover: “…a woman running a marathon was crazy. … A woman boxing was crazy. A woman dunking? Crazy. Coaching an NBA team. Crazy.
Plough Quarterly No. 21: Beyond Capitalism
Home Subscribe Plough Quarterly Plough Quarterly No. 21: Beyond Capitalism Summer 2019 Subscribe From the Editor The Economics of Love There is a common life that overcomes economic exploitation, a life that is both thoroughly practical and independent of the state. Essays The McDonald's Test Don’t fetishize poverty. But be a little bit more willing to go into the neighborhood people told you not to go into. What Lies Beyond Capitalism?
The ‘New’ Neoliberal Uganda
For the last three decades, Uganda has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Globally praised as an “African success story” and heavily backed by international financial institutions, development agencies and bilateral donors, the country has become an exemplar of economic and political reform for those who espouse a neoliberal model of development.
Big Business Has a New Scam: The ‘Purpose Paradigm’
Multinational corporations are luring millennial workers with empty promises and self-serving slogans. By Maria HengeveldTwitter January 4, 2019 fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Unilever CEO Paul Polman gives a speech at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2017. (AP Photo / Matt Dunham, Pool) Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism.
Girls to the Rescue
Fashion has long had a love/hate relationship with youth. As consumers, the kids are alright — influencers, even — but as laborers in textile factories, they’ve been known to reduce Kathy Lee Gifford to tears on national television.
Public funds for private gain
This week in New York, on the margins of the UN General Assembly, discussions will take place about mobilizing resources to support the provision of education by “non-state” actors. One proposal, the Education Outcomes Fund, is intended to apply to several countries in Africa and the Middle East.
It’s only business - how private education companies Ruin Education in Kenya
Low-fee schooling is privately-provided education run by a range of actors, from small entrepreneurs to large multinational education corporations like Bridge International Academies, and other education profiteers that promise to help the poor but do the opposite. Many of these schools are for-profit operations. In addition to charging fees, they may also receive funding from multi-national education businesses, philanthropy, government funding/concessions and international development aid.
The Other Stories We Were Told (in 2017) about Platforms
Even though every article I write in this series is incredibly long, I always have to leave something out.
No Education Crisis Wasted: Billionaires Seek to Make Education in Africa Profitable
No Education Crisis Wasted: Billionaires Seek to Make Education in Africa Profitable Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are betting big on an effort to turn African education into a for-profit venture. But investigations show that children and their teachers are getting a raw deal. The dream is wonderful:Â provide a good education to millions of children growing up in poverty.
No education crisis wasted: On Bridge’s “business model” in Africa
The dream is wonderful: provide a good education to millions of children growing up in poverty. That’s why Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the World Bank and the Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs are pouring millions into a company that aims to turn that dream into reality. Investigations show, however, that both the children and their teachers get a raw deal. Shannon May is clearly emotional when she walks onto the stage in early February 2017.
Education in Africa profits billionaire bleeding hearts
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who both double as billionaire philanthropists, have had their eyes on African schools for a while. “We live in a world where talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not,” Zuckerberg wrote on his timeline a month or two ago.
Corporate tax is a feminist matter
CitiGroup, Coca Cola, ExxonMobil, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Microsoft; of all the things these multinational corporations (MNCs) agree on, two things stand out: a proclaimed devotion to the feminist agenda and a penchant for tax dodging.
Nike’s supply chain doesn’t live up to the ideals of its “Girl Effect” campaign.
During my first week in Vietnam, I met a 26-year-old woman whom I’ll call Lan, along with her mother and two older sisters. (All the women I met asked that I protect their identities because they feared termination or reprisal by their employers.) All four women make Nike shoes, at two factories owned by different firms —Pou Chen and Tae Kwang Vina—about 20 miles east of Ho Chi Minh City.
The Investigative Fund
Nike Says It Empowers Women Around the World It wouldn't be the Olympics without the biennial onslaught of Swooshes, and 2016 was no different. Nike, its logo, and its sponsored athletes were ubiquitous at the Rio Games, as were its inspiring ads, like the heavily broadcast "Da Da Ding" spot featuring female athletes of color. Just as Nike has worked hard in recent years to elevate the status of women on the field and court, it's been successful doing the same in the world of global philanthropy.
Africa’s austerity apocalypse
For the IMF to publicly wonder whether neoliberalism may have been oversold is like the egg-industry admitting that it may not have always been perfectly clear whether their practices of caging hens in batteries placed the well-being of animals first. As we all know by now, last month the IMF admitted that it may have overestimated the virtue of structural adjustment measures in promoting economic development.
South Africa’s Domestic Workers: Invisible labor in plain sight
For South Africa watchers, two sets of statistics from a new comparative study of domestic workers in India and South Africa, A New Form of Bonded Labor makes for sobering reading. The first is that around 1.1 million South Africans are domestic workers. With a total population exceeding 52 million people, that’s a lot. The second is that 54,000 of those workers are under the age of fifteen.* Basically child labor.
What would a Hillary Clinton win mean for Africa?
When it comes to matters of international justice, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State during his first term and 2016 presidential candidate, has gathered inspiration and insights from a diverse bunch of sources the past few decades. One of them, apparently, is former US security advisor (’69-’75) and secretary of state (‘73-‘77) Henry Kissinger. Guided by similar ideas on the role of US global leadership, Henry offered counsel to Hillary during her term as Secretary of State.
Dutch author: ‘If only Africans would complain a bit more’
In a recent interview, Pepijn Vloemans, a regular commentator in Dutch mainstream press and the author of the book ‘Wat hebben we weer genoten’ (What a joy we had), described how his drive for adventure and experimental urge to test himself in a low-comfort environment led him to Africa. We’ve lifted and translated some highlights from the interview: Vloemans: In the Netherlands I lead my comfortable life, while so many things are going on in the world, of which I have no knowledge at all.
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