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The issues of potential criminality are highlighted in the damning ‘progress update’ into the insolvency of Midland Livings CIC, a company responsible for housing and supporting an estimated 1,000 vulnerable tenants across Birmingham.
According to police reports, the suspect is alleged to have unlawfully appropriated a total of approximately 5.3 million dinars in this manner, thus causing a loss of 3.3 million dinars to social assistance recipients and about 2 million dinars to the budget of Serbia.
It’s been shown that the systems display significant bias against certain groups, but even before the rights groups can grapple with this problem, they must deal with a lack of transparency about whether the systems are being used at all by the government. Likewise in the United States, human rights groups have fought to extract detail about the use and operations of AI sentencing software, which have also been shown to be biased.
So what is stopping us? Corporations and wealthy individuals who deploy their de facto unlimited ability to fund campaigns and lobby lawmakers to crush economic support programs. Part of their motivation is to preserve and expand the benefits of some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world. But the wealthy’s main goal in opposing economic support programs is something else altogether: maintaining a steady supply of people desperate enough to accept work at sub-poverty wages.
These initiatives rising out of sex worker organizing from across the globe demonstrate how the people we were meant to view as trafficked, as victims of pimps and imperialism, and as lacking any agency are in fact the ones speaking up the loudest and advocating for themselves. They are also the ones working hardest to ensure workers aren’t being exploited or trafficked.
