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Update from ACORN Honduras
Short Video of Work in Honduras
FDI Watch in National News
E-commerce: Cash-on-delivery deals not authorised, says RBI Economic Times
Cash-on-delivery deals by e-commerce firms not authorised, says RBI
‘Cash on Delivery’ पर RBI का सबसे बड़ा खुलासा, खतरे में ई-कॉमर्स कारोबार!
RBI के जवाब से मुश्किल में आ सकता है ई-कॉमर्स कारोबार, कैश ऑन डिलीवरी को बताया गैरकानूनी
E-commerce: Cash-on-delivery deals not authorised, says RBI My News Cart
PHOTOS TAKEN DURING THE ENVIROMENTAL CAMPAIGN IN KOROGOCHO ON 7th JULY 2018
Mr. Kairu Chairman of ACORN with NCC leaders
A group of community members waiting to go
One of the community mobilize carrying a horn
Community members in clean up exercise
Clean up in gear
some members receiving milk after the exercise
News coverage of the Govt reply to Dharmendra Kumar’s RTI in Economic Times, नव भारत टाइम्स and enrackr
1. https://entrackr.com/…/dipps-rti-no-information-on-e-comme…/
2. how many marketplaces are there in the country, dipp does not know, देश में कितने मार्केटप्लेस हैं, DIPP को नहीं मालूम मूवी रिव्यू : डिपार्टमेंट ऑफ इंडस्ट्रियल पॉलिसी ऐंड प्रमोशन (डीआ…– Navbharat Times https://navbharattimes.indiatimes.com/…/movie…/64874541.cms… … via @NavbharatTimes
3. Has no info on firms running e-comm sites in India, says DIPP in a RTI reply #ETRetail
FDI in Retail: Implication for Livelihood
On 21st June, 2018 India FDI Watch and National Hawker Federation jointly organized a meeting at Press Club, Mumbai on the topic “FDI in Retail: Implication for Livelihood”. Speakers Include Mr. Mohan Gurnani, President, Chamber of Maharashtra Industry and Trade, Mr. Afsar Jafri of Focus on the Global South, Mr. Dharmendra Kumar of India FDI Watch and Mr. Kishore Khariwal, National Secretary, Bhartiya Udyog Vyapar Mandal.
WALMART-FLIPKART DEAL: CONTINUING ATTACK ON RETAILERS, PRODUCERS, FARMERS & LABOUR, AND ON INDIA’S DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY
Public Statement
May 28th, 2018
WALMART-FLIPKART DEAL: CONTINUING ATTACK ON RETAILERS, PRODUCERS, FARMERS & LABOUR, AND ON INDIA’S DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY
The US based Multinational Corporation (MNC) Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihood of millions in India. If the $ 16 billion deal goes through, two US companies (the other being Amazon) will dominate India’s e-retail sector. They will also own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them our digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.
The acquisition of the largest e-commerce firm promoted by Indian entrepreneurs is the latest step in a series of developments aimed at circumventing the existing cap on FDI in multi-brand retail by permitting foreign-owned online retail in India, and developing a digital stranglehold by foreign companies over India’s consumer goods value chains.
This process saw the gradual take-over of majority stake in the formerly Indian-owned Flipkart, the entry of the world’s largest e-retailer Amazon, and now the take-over of Flipkart by Walmart. Jack Ma, head of China’s Alibaba, says all e-commerce companies now have integrated online and offline strategies, consolidating operations towards one ‘new retail’. This is also evidenced by recent moves in the US by Walmart to enter e-retail and by Amazon to move into brick-and-mortar retail. It should therefore be clear to everyone that allowing FDI in e-retail in India is but a back-door entry of foreign players into multi-brand retail. Ironically, the same political party, which a decade ago strongly opposed the entry of Walmart into India, is now happy to welcome its far more powerful, digitally-enabled avatar.
India’s domestic digital retail industry will of course suffer by the domination of these two US MNCs. But worst affected will be small brick-and-mortar retail stores accounting for over 90% of the Indian retail sector, SME manufacturers, small delivery companies and suppliers of goods including farmers whose margins will be ruthlessly squeezed, with their behaviour digitally-controlled. Walmart is well-known for its global supply chain, especially of cheap goods from China, which means local manufacturers and suppliers will suffer deep hits.
This is similar to what would happen with FDI in brick-and-mortar multi-brand retail. It will, in fact, be worse, as digitally-enabled ‘new retail’ becomes omnipresent and omnipotent. The concentration of economic power with the two US MNCs, now constituting a potential duopoly in India, will render them too powerful to be meaningfully regulated. In the US, the trail of destruction of small stores, local businesses, small manufacturers and countless workers left behind by Walmart and other giant retailers is well documented, and the EU has also witnessed the same. ‘New retail’ seeks to own and control key data of all trading activity across sectors resulting in unassailable power. National policy or regulatory remits over them would then be as ineffective as they currently are over Google or Facebook. Manufacturers, suppliers and traders, producers and service providers, all become enslaved to digitally controlled platforms, working as per their parameters, but denied any rights or benefits. In this context, it is critical that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) examine the issue of monopolistic trade practices vis-a-vis this deal.
It is argued that Walmart and other retail giants will generate employment, but of what kind? Walmart has a long history of busting trade unions, violating the right to collective bargaining, paying poverty wages and disregarding social security laws. In e-commerce, work will also be outsourced to couriers and other service providers, making it a long stretch to prove that they are workers. Further, even if Walmart and Amazon employ a few thousand more, they are unlikely to neutralise the massive employment loss associated with the collapse of both the formal and informal retail sector. In this business model, whether in retail or in so-called ‘aggregators’ such as Uber, the giant corporations provide temporary benefits to consumers, and hence appearing to be on their side, by squeezing everybody in between including small producers and the vast majority of workers in the supply chain.
Digitalisation will soon be central to a wide range of economic activities, many of these being controlled by MNCs. A sovereign nation must be able to regulate e-commerce companies, making them comply with policies that uphold public interest, and ensuring that all economic actors get their fair share. This will be next to impossible with giant corporations operating from abroad and storing all their data overseas. There is an urgent need to reverse the entry of foreign e-commerce companies and their take-over of Indian entities, and to evolve effective regulations to govern the operations of domestic entities and protect the interests of the different players involved.
Digital companies such as Google and Facebook frequently refuse government or court orders for content take-down asserting that their data, algorithms and platforms operate from the US, and are subject to the latter’s laws. It will not be very different for data and Artificial Intelligence powering e-commerce platforms. This is what makes it extremely difficult to nationally regulate global digital companies, including e-commerce ones, and the reason that digital platforms in key sectors, including on-line retail, should be domestically owned.
After trailing behind India in software technologies till a decade back, China is now a global leader in digital technologies. China has been able to leverage its growing software capability because it has incubated domestically-owned digital e-commerce systems such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, which also store their data locally.
The Government is seemingly blind to, or does not care about, the extra-ordinary dangers that the country would face if India’s e-commerce ecosystems are foreign-owned and controlled. Not just China, but the US and EU have also begun to disallow foreign takeovers of digital companies considered of strategic or economic importance. If the growing tendency of foreign control of digital platforms in key sectors is not resisted and reversed, India runs the danger of what has been called digital colonization.
Citizens of India should be deeply concerned about the ongoing developments in the e-commerce and especially the online retail space, the latest of which is the Walmart-Flipkart deal. We the undersigned, call for an urgent national debate on this important issue of economic independence and digital sovereignty, affecting the interests of many millions of Indians in different walks of life from workers to farmers, small shopkeepers and suppliers, manufacturers and traders, and a host of service providers, apart from potentially compromising consumption data of hundreds of millions of Indians.
Pending a national debate involving all the affected constituencies, and an informed collective decision based on it, we further demand that the Government of India halts Walmart’s takeover of Flipkart, upholds the policy of restricting FDI in multi-brand retail, and draws up a policy in consonance with this for online retail. We also seek a comprehensive policy on leveraging the strategic value of India’s data for the interest of India and her people, and on domestic ownership and regulation of digital platforms in key sectors.
Endorsed by:
Organisations/ Networks
- All India Bank Officers Confederation (AIBOC)
- All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS)
- All India Online Vendors Associations
- All India Public Sector and Central Government Officers Confederation
- Centre for Financial Accountability ( CFA)
- Chamber of Associations of Maharashtra Industry and Trade (CAMIT)
- Delhi Science Forum
- Environment Support Group (ESG)
- Federation of Traders Organisations of West Bengal
- Focus on the Global South
- Forum against Free Trade Agreements (FTAs)
- Free Software Movement of India (FSMI)
- Hawkers Joint Action Committee
- India FDI Watch
- Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF)
- IT For Change
- Knowledge Commons
- National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM)
- National Fishworkers Forum (NFF)
- National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO (NWGPL)
- New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI)
- Small Business Congress
Individuals:
- Prabir Purkayastha, Chief Editor, Newsclick
- Prof. Biswajit Dhar, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi
- Prof. CP Chandrasekhar, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi
- Prof. Dinesh Abrol, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), Delhi
- Prof. Jayati Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)New Delhi
ACORN Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Clausura de evento coordinado por líderes ACORN
Preparación de campaña de concientización “La inclusión es Justicia”
Do you live in shoddy housing that costs a fortune? Time to join the renters’ union
Copy of Article from the Guardian available here.
Photograph: James Arthur Allen for the Guardian It is a warm, sunny Saturday lunchtime in the centre of Bristol. Somewhere else in the country a royal wedding is about to take place, but here a group of two dozen demonstrators in red T-shirts are heading into TSB, armed with a list of demands. “Private renting isn’t fun,” they sing, “when you’re paying for a slum. Stop it happening to you, better join the Acorn crew. Housing is a human right, won’t give up without a fight”.
The organisation behind the good-natured protest is a trade union for renters called Acorn, first set up in Bristol four years ago. Since then, as frustration and anger about the housing market – and particularly the conditions for private renters – has grown, the group has gradually spread around the country, with branches springing up in cities including Brighton and Sheffield. Anny Cullum, an activist and NHS administrator, says that until she got involved in Acorn, “there didn’t seem to be anything similar in the community. The way to ensure you have your right to a proper, decent and dignified way of living is for ordinary people to band together.”
Acorn frequently works through direct action: members organise protests in their spare time, taking photos on their mobile phones and sharing them on social media with the aim of embarrassing their targets into agreeing to their demands – forcing landlords to repair mouldy properties or stopping evictions they consider unjust. They have targeted TSB because the bank has clauses in its buy-to-let mortgages that forbid landlords from renting to people on benefits, to asylum seekers, and in some circumstances to students. But on the night before the protest, having notified the bank of their intention to demonstrate, TSB relents; an email is sent to Acorn indicating the bank will change its terms and conditions so that buy-to-let mortgage holders can rent to people on benefits.
“This is a massive win,” Cullum says, using a megaphone to address the assembled protesters. “If we weren’t here today, we wouldn’t be finding out about this, this wouldn’t be happening.” (Although the group is quick to argue that the other prohibitions ought to change too.) For its part, TSB confirms the policy change in an email; the bank says it has been reviewing this “for some time”, but the timing of its concession does not seem coincidental.
In April, a group of Acorn protesters in Bristol prevented a court-appointed bailiff from evicting Sally Andrews and her three children from a property owned by Ernest Arathoon, a former director of Bristol City. Andrews complained about the property’s disrepair after moving in a year ago – there were problems with the gas and damp. Arathoon said she was behind on her rent, and the property had only fallen into disrepair after she moved in. Acorn argued that the eviction was illegal anyway, because the tenant had not received the documents she should have done when she moved in, including gas safety and energy performance certificates. The landlord said Acorn had got its facts wrong.
“A lot of us showed up – about 30 of us,” says Ajmal Miah, an Acorn activist and student at the University of the West of England. “There was a community of people standing up for this tenant.”
Acorn wasn’t initially set up to focus on housing issues. Nick Ballard, one of the group’s founders, was trained as an organiser as part of David Cameron’s Big Society initiative. “We wanted to start a union in the community,” he says, and when he and other founders set up a public meeting to establish what Acorn should focus on, “housing and tenants’ rights were clearly the number one issues”. Bristol council’s own research, published in 2017, shows that private rented housing is becoming more and more common, accounting for 29% of all housing in the city, up from 24% in 2011 and 12% in 2001. At the same time, very little council housing is being built and there is a council waiting list of 11,000.
There is persistent frustration among Acorn members about private landlords who supply poor quality housing; Ballard recalls an early battle on behalf of a woman who had been living with “extreme levels of damp, fist-sized mushrooms growing on the walls of her bedroom”. Acorn members picketed a letting agency and the landlord’s business. Ultimately, the campaign apparently forced the landlord to pay for thousands of pounds worth of damp proofing at the woman’s house.
In recent years, rents in Bristol have been soaring, fuelled in part by a buoyant local economy, and also by Londoners, priced out of the capital, moving west. Louie Herbert, an Acorn organiser, says that in the five and a half years he has lived in Bristol, rooms that cost around £250 a month, in the Easton area, are now going for £400-500. This inner city neighbourhood was once multicultural and working class, but Herbert says he has had to move out: “I can’t afford to live in that area any more.”
Median Rents have gone up by 43% in the city since 2011, according to Valuation Office data as analysed by the BBC, and bidding wars for rental properties are not unusual. “A shared house that is put on for, say, £750 a month can easily end up going for £800,” says Cullum. Some locals are moving on to nearby towns such as Chippenham, where they can afford a property. Few believe they will ever be able to buy a property without help from their parents. Bristol property specialists JLL says a typical two bedroom apartment costs £280,000, having risen £20,000 during 2017 alone.
Students in the city have their own set of related concerns. Bristol Cut the Rent is a sister group to Acorn, and its members are frustrated by the price and quality of housing in a city with two expanding universities, Bristol and the University of the West of England. Bristol University student numbers were 17,100 in 2004-5; in 2017-18 they were 25,024. Nic Hamer, a second year who studies English, says: “I struggled to pay my rent in my first year and it was £107 per week – pretty much the cheapest you could pay”.
Hamer says students who can afford it are pushed to live in “big towers in the city centre run by companies like Unite” (which provides a significant proportion of the UK’s student accommodation). The cheapest rooms available are £150 a week, and rents can rise by 4–5% a year. Only the wealthiest students can afford to live in these rooms, which Hamer says is “gentrification in its purest form”. What frustrates her in particular is a belief that universities are incentivised to take on ever more students paying £9,000 a year in tuition fees, while ignoring the wider impact on the local renting economy. “They are using students to bankroll their finances,” she says. “Expansion of the university means they can take more units of nine grand in.”
After four years of successful campaigning, Acorn is now recognised by the city council as a voice for private renters. There is wide sympathy in the union for the local authority, particularly since the election of Labour’s Marvin Rees as mayor of Bristol in 2016. While there are repeated complaints that there is not enough social housing, there is also an acceptance that the council’s ability to build is constrained by central government. But that didn’t stop Acorn from opposing a clumsy attempt last year to end a council tax exemption for some of the city’s poorest households. “We were only asking councillors to stick to their manifesto,” says Aidan Cassidy, a former Bristol University student who now works for the local energy supplier, Bristol Energy.
There are two tiers of Acorn backers: there are around 500 paying members in Bristol. There is no specific fee, although people are asked to contribute one hour’s pay per month and the website suggests £8, £10 or £15 as possible sums. On top of that there are around 7,500 supporters: those who sign up for the mailing list and could be willing to turn up if needed. With some external support, it is enough to pay for a handful of organisers, and Acorn hopes to boost its presence around the country.
Ask Acorn members what frustrates them most about the housing market, and they tend to reply that the system seems increasingly rigged against them. There is too much damp, too much hassle, and economic interests are conspiring to ensure rents keep rising. Sasha Sadjady, a civil servant and one of Acorn’s founder members, says she got involved because renting was “incredibly precarious … places are snapped up in 24 hours. Landlords want to know all sorts of information about you. Then, when you are in the house, you only have six months’ security. Such is the precarity, you are never ever able to feel comfortable in what should be your own home.”
Sadjady says what annoys her the most about the housing market is a lack of understanding of the underlying economic forces at work – indicating what sort of longer term politics may emerge from a group like Acorn. “Sometimes it annoys me when you say it amounts to problems with certain landlords. There is always an antagonism there, because they are making a profit out of something that should be your right.”
English