Lowering burdens: Overdraft fees in US, plastic packaging in France

In addition to actions by corporations and governments that improve lives, we highlight a crowdsourced way to preserve more languages around the world, and that Pakistan’s first female Supreme Court justice has long been a champion of gender equality. 

1. United States

Banks are canceling or lowering overdraft fees, which disproportionately affect poor Americans. Overdraft fees hit spenders when their bank accounts run dry, generally adding around $35 to any transaction for which there aren’t enough funds. When these charges multiply, the overall financial burden can mushroom, too – hence the fee’s reputation as a “penalty for being poor.” Capital One and Wells Fargo decided to cut overdraft fees entirely, while Bank of America reduced charges to $10 and JPMorgan Chase is eliminating fees for customers who overdraw by small amounts up to $50.

Each year, U.S. banks make around $15 billion from overdraft and nonsufficient funds fees, according to data from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which planned to take a tougher stance on these charges. Eighty percent of that money comes from only 9% of consumers. “These are people who have low balances or are struggling paycheck to paycheck,” said Lauren Saunders from the National Consumer Law Center. “The overdraft fees fall most heavily on the most vulnerable consumers.” Capital One says it will forgo around $150 million per year by cutting the charges to help people live “healthy financial lives.”
NPR

2. Brazil

One of Brazil’s largest retailers is helping hundreds of employees escape abusive relationships. Cases of domestic violence are not normally the terrain of employers, but Magazine Luiza, or Magalu, sees things differently. High levels of gender-based violence have long persisted in Brazil, despite efforts to protect women. Magalu first set up a domestic violence hotline, Canal Mulher (Women’s Channel), in 2017 after a store manager was killed by her husband.  

Since then, Magalu’s rapid response team has grown to include specialists such as psychologists and social workers who offer mental health services alongside the company’s legal and financial support. Of its 25,000 female employees, Magalu has helped nearly 700 leave abusive relationships and has paid to relocate 100 of these women away from those who abused them. “Once [my ex-husband] knew Magalu was intervening, he knew he was no match for a big company like that, and that played a big role in him stepping back,” said one employee whom Magalu helped extricate from a violent marriage. “For the first time I felt I wasn’t by myself.”
Reasons to Be Cheerful, Brazil Institute

3. France

France has banned the use of plastic packaging for most fresh produce. Apples, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers are among the 30-odd fruits and vegetables that must be sold without plastic under a law that went into effect at the start of 2022. For packages over 1.5 kilograms and more delicate products like berries, peaches, and mushrooms, plastic is still allowed, but France will eliminate single-use plastics by 2040. Later this year, magazines and other publications will need to avoid plastic in their shipments, and fast-food chains will no longer be allowed to hand out plastic toys.

With 37% of France’s fresh produce previously wrapped in plastic, the government estimates the measure will prevent the waste of 1 billion pieces of plastic each year. Some in the packaging industry worry about increased costs and businesses not having enough time to adapt, but a 2019 poll found that 85% of France’s population supported banning single-use plastic. Some European Union countries are following suit, and neighboring Spain has announced plans to implement a similar law in 2023.

BBC

4. Africa

Across Africa, people are donating their voices in support of local languages. The three bestselling voice-activated assistants – Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant – stay mute when approached in any of the over 1,000 native languages spoken throughout Africa. Companies that collect voice data, including vocabulary, intonation, accent, and patterns of speech, normally keep the information private to train their own machine-learning algorithms. In recent years, there’s been a push to democratize that data and expand the technology’s linguistic reach.

Common Voice, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is a crowdsourced platform where users record snippets of their own voices as well as check the validity of other submissions. The anonymous voice samples are available to researchers, startups, large companies, and any average person to use. Only a handful of the some 90 languages collected so far are Indigenous African languages. But the non-English language with the most recorded hours of speech (2,260 in total) is Kinyarwanda, native to around 10 million people in Rwanda, eastern Congo, and some parts of Uganda. The hope is that the initiative can avoid the problems of gender and regional bias pervasive in voice technology.
Reasons to Be Cheerful

5. Pakistan

Ayesha Malik is the first woman on Pakistan’s Supreme Court. Justice Malik, a former high court judge known for championing gender equality, joins 16 male justices. Until now, Pakistan was the only nation in South Asia to never have had a female Supreme Court justice, according to Human Rights Watch, and women account for only 4% of Pakistan’s high court judges. “In a country where crimes of gender-based violence are a constant reality, [this] can hopefully have a domino effect,” said lawyer and activist Nighat Dad. “It opens up endless possibilities for other women in the legal field.”

Justice Malik’s path to the Supreme Court proved divisive. Some lawyers and judges vehemently criticized the nomination, arguing that she cut the line in front of three more senior jurists. After her nomination was rejected by the same commission last year, Justice Malik earned her spot this January by a 5-4 vote. “I tell my children, work hard, keep at it. One day it will make a difference,” Justice Malik told a United Nations agency before her nomination. “The gender issue is all about community. ... Don’t just open the door for yourself. ... You must keep it open for others.”
The Indian Express, BBC