Interview on Occupy’s Meaning and Future

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A Call to Center Poverty in the Occupy Movement Discourse

~ An Interview with Professor David Van Arsdale

Professor David Van Arsdale shares his thoughts on the Occupy Movement with interviewer Erik LaFavor, a student at the State University of New York, Tompkins Cortland Community College.  In the end, he encourages the movement to focus its discourse on ending poverty.

 

Erik: How would you describe the movement’s organization?  Is it more centralized or spontaneous?

David: It’s neither centralized nor spontaneous.  Certainly the coming together of momentum from the student youth movement in Europe, to widespread Arab democratic movements, to a fight back against the hijacking of democracy and collective bargaining in the workplace here in the US, especially in Wisconsin, helped fuel the success of Occupy Wall Street and subsequent occupations.  That corporations continue to achieve record profits in the face of recession and widespread unemployment and unstable low-paid work, has also helped motivate occupiers.    Yes, it is true that the Ad Buster’s announcement for occupation deserves credit, but it is the times in which we live that has allowed the call to transform into a movement.  The youth have especially awoken.  They’ve awoke to the incredible economic inequities of these times.  They’ve awoke to the anomie in their lives, particularly that created by the false promise that corporations and their goods can satisfy our deepest desires.  They’ve awoke to the fact that owning the “right” commodities, for example, doesn’t make up for not being able to afford education, or for the loss of time and energy experienced when working two or three part-time jobs.  They’ve awoke to the fact that without a say in how much they work and by what conditions, they will face a life of financial struggle and precarious employment.  I think it’s one of the under-spoken motivators of the occupy movement: the thievery of the workday from ordinary citizens.  Few workers these days have a say in negotiating their work-time or status.  We just can’t continue to work two and three part-time or temporary jobs.  Particularly when the corporations we work for make record profits from our temporary and part-time work statuses.

No Erik, I would stress that the movement is not spontaneous.  A lot of ground work has gone into teaching young people about the issues.  And the youth are studying political-economy with a fervor I’ve not witnessed in a decade of teaching.  For example, many in the labor movement, including the President of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka, and countless scholars, I was one of them, got together in the spring of 2011 to do a Nation-wide teach-in on the state of the economy, globalization, and workplace democracy.  Colleges across the country participated.  The result was that many of the student participants created their own occupations or joined other occupation or labor movements.  Here in Syracuse, for example, the students from the three area colleges that participated in the teach-in joined forces at the Syracuse occupation site and solidarity movements beyond.  I would therefore argue, Erik, that what is now called the “Occupation Movement” has been the coming together of many groups who are rightfully disgruntled with the incredible inequities being generated by the current state of global capitalism.  The movement has, furthermore, been incredibly successful at helping all occupiers adopt a governing framework of daily assemblies where decisions are made via consensus.  This has allowed for a general democratic framework at encampments across the globe and has helped groups remain tethered both to local interests and the larger movement.  To conclude, I think it’s important to see the movement as a many-headed one, and framed around one major issue: an unbearable inequality of wealth on a global scale, caused by contemporary global financial and corporate capitalism.  The many-headed is important — it means that it’s highly organized.  Not a march has taken place without massive organization.  That said, there are many lessons to take in at this point, both in terms of successes and failures.

Erik:  Perhaps we should get to some of those issues.  Critics have argued that the Occupy movement is disorganized, based on your participation how would you respond to these criticisms?

David: Whoever says that the occupation movement is disorganized doesn’t know what in the world they are talking about.  The amount of organization and democratic processes that have taken place in the movement, and at almost every encampment, is mind-blowing.  I would encourage you to think critically about the importance of online communication in conjuring-up and organizing the movement.  How many volumes of email exchanges, facebooking, blogging, videos, conferencing, text messaging, debating, etc. have gone into making this movement successful, and global, I might add.  Has the planet ever seen such a girth of information in such a short period of time from the insiders of a movement as it has with occupation?  Perhaps not.  At the same time, the movement often looks unorganized to onlookers because it unfolds much like the Arab spring — via momentum building that often takes place through online media by many varied people and groups.  The rapid exchange of information, like a police brutality incident for example, can often ignite a march.  But still, I believe we must realize that often many actors in the movement are spreading images and discourse online in order to build it.  Information doesn’t travel through the web all by itself.  There are people behind tweets, the Youtube videos, and the Facebook messages.  This is organization and people are making decisions about sharing this information and how to share it.  And I believe that by in large actors in the movement are sharing the information because they want to curb a system generating the greatest amount of inequality the world has ever known.  It is from that place — a place of consciousness, of values, of policy needs, that discourse and images become sparks that unite marches and grow the movement.  The result is the largest ever youth movement, in terms of scope, the world has known.  I believe there are now occupations in nearly 200 countries.  The movement, therefore, Erik, all of its actions and all of its successes, has to do strategic decisions.  Decisions made by real people.  A lot of real people.

Erik: How open is the movement to different ideas?

David: Open.  For the most part, an attempt is made to make decisions at encampments through consensus.  This is partly why the movement has generated historic volumes of ideas on how to organize and reorganize society.  The movement has no shortage of ideas.  And the thing about consensus government is that it takes time.  We are dealing with a global economy here.  The movement needs to be sure that its approach to solving historic inequities is poignant and can be lasting.  Indeed, consensus takes a long time.  Every idea has to be debated, and therefore, it’s a lengthy process.  I’d also like to think it’s a process that tends to work well at weeding-out “bad ideas,” but there are a lot of reports out there citing the corruption of consensus at particular encampments.  Certainly the charismatic power of an individual and other forms of authority can corrupt consensus, as it can with democracy, as we know many times over from history.  This is why it’s important to remain steadfast with commitment to consensus decision-making.  If people get discouraged by idiots who push their agenda and leave the process, the process is doomed to fail.  For the most part, I believe that consensus governing has worked well at encampments.  Furthermore, it seems there is strong anecdotal evidence suggesting that when encampments remained tied (virtually or otherwise) to other encampments, and the movement at large, the authority of the movement often triumphed over corrupt individual or brut power.  These questions are very important to study: 1) the relationship of the effectiveness of consensus to scale, geography and geo-ideology and 2) whether forms of consensus government are more or less effective at trumping corrupt charismatic individuals and their ideology than forms of democratic government.  That said, for now I believe that movement needs to continue to engage debate, but the debate needs to move from an issues debate to a tactics debate. Which I’m hoping we can discuss shortly.

Erik:  How has the movement responded to groups wanting to claim Occupy as their own?

David: Get lost!  That’s an inadequate answer, Erik.  But as we have said, on local-scales there have been those actors that have tried to take-over encampments, sometimes pushing their own issues, and other times pushing their need for power.  It’s been a bit more difficult to claim ownership of the movement on a larger scale.  It’s just so big now that no one can rightfully claim that it’s success doesn’t isn’t about the incredible and blatant inequities between the owners of global capitalism, corporations and banks, and ordinary citizens.

Erik: Okay then, so what about Occupy’s weaknesses at this point?

David:  The movement needs to become more focused on poverty.  I often feel like I’m on an island with this criticism.  I strongly believe that the discourse of the movement needs to focus more on contemporary poverty and the state of working people.  We have record poverty in the US — 46.2 million poor people according to our own government.  Given the government-backed hegemonic war against private sector unions and workplace democracies, workers have lost control of negotiating their value and work-time.  Temporary work status, now over half of all US workers, is more popular than full-time work status for the first time since the end of slavery.  Temporary employment agencies act like worker “auction blocks,” workers are literally sold off by agencies, and often purchased because of their workers status, ethnicity, age, gender, etc.  Indeed, unemployed and underemployed workers are sold freely at temporary agencies to companies that want to take advantage of their flexible work status, meaning their inability to have a say in their value as workers or work-time.  Many temporary firms that supply workers are some of the largest employers across the globe — Trublue and Kelly Services, for example.  They have helped create and sustain an incredible thirst for temporary workers among employers.  Workers have been the losers: their wages have decreased significantly and it’s incredibly difficult to organize workers when everyone is a temp desperate to be dispatched to a job in order to sustain life.  Certainly the result has been an incredible proliferation of poverty.  The occupation movement needs to center these struggles and the struggles of poor people.  We need to center poverty, and that which causes it, in our discourse.  Attacking unemployment without understanding the state of employment doesn’t do us much good.

What does an unemployment rate of 9% mean in a world where employment means one works 10 or 20 hours a week often at minimum or near minimum wage?  We are using the unemployment rate to understand whether our economy is healthy while understanding what has happened to employment would help us more.  Poverty has increased steadily in the last two decades, even with so-called “job growth.”  That’s because, as stated, the jobs we are growing render poverty wages.  I live in a City, for example, with a median household income of $25,000, down considerably, in real dollars, from where it was two decades ago.  Furthermore, Syracuse has two urban tracks with average annual family incomes under $10,000 a year.  Why?  Syracuse lost a half dozen large companies that employed tens of thousands of workers who earned middle-class incomes.  At the same time, the overall unemployment rate remained in check, as workers transitioned to part-time and temporary work.  It is a surprise that many of the kids from neighborhoods who overwhelming depend on temporary and part-time work don’t make it through high school?  Is that really a surprise?  Three-quarters of their household income goes to rent and housing costs.  Try living on $2,500 a year for everything else a family needs and see how it goes.  Anyhow, so far, the Occupation Movement has mostly focused on critiquing the wealthy and their tactics of accumulation of wealth.  After all, their tactics are so obviously unfair it’s difficult to not focus on them.  For example, sub-prime mortgage rates and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, allowing big banks, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to consolidate and invest all holdings on Wall Street and other global markets.

How can Occupy become a movement of and for poor and working people?  Until the movement realizes that the future of equality, and the future of building a strong middle class, rests in ending poverty, and the current epidemic of low-wage part-time and temporary work, I believe we’ll have a difficult time making real, substantial structural change.  In other words, until we are all clear that poverty — both here and abroad given the global state of capitalism — is the reason d’être of the accumulation of wealth among the rich, we cannot successfully change the system.  Ending poverty will do more to build a strong middle-class than attacking the rich or getting the rich to pay more taxes.  I do worry that we may settle for new taxes on the rich, restrictions of corporate power and banks, etc., as opposed to the changes most working and poor people are desperate for: an end to the incredible stress and discomfort that wrecks havoc in our lives — unstable work, income, housing, schooling, family time, leisure, etc.

Indeed, the movement has to begin to change the Occupy discourse from an attack on the rich to an attack on the proliferation of poverty.  It’s hard to win a war against the rich, whether ideological or otherwise, in a country and world obsessed with wealth.  It goes against generations of training that has stressed the values of capitalism and individuality.  Wealth is viewed, especially by the poor in the US, as the answer to poverty.  This is why so many poor and working people in the US vote against their self-interest when they vote for an anti-union, small-government republican party.  The poor believe in one’s ability to be rich.  It’s our answer to poverty.  It’s why, I suppose, we play the lotto so religiously.  Wealth is a sign of success, perhaps even, as Max Weber showed us in the Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, a measure of one’s worth in some fantastical grander way.  I believe therefore that the movement needs to center its discourse and policy on ending poverty.  Without poverty, with free and affordable liberating education, we will regain dignity and the energy to take on some of our globe’s other major questions: global environmental health and sustainability and how to create a world where wage-labor no longer dictates one’s quality of life.  Certainly given rapid technological advances in production, this world is coming.  A world with far less wage-labor is coming.  And I’m not sure we should resist it.  But we will need to be assured a solid quality of life and status by other means.  I suggest, perhaps, art and intellect.  And by art I mean in the most broadest since, from brick laying to oil on canvas to music to the healing and medicinal arts.  There is much we can become when wage-labor no longer dictates our well-beings and statuses.

At any rate, poor and working class folk need to join the occupation movement.  I believe this will happen if the movement can center a discourse against poverty and its growth.  The movement desperately needs poor and working class people in order to help it make more than superficial policy shifts like an increased tax on the rich.  The movement desperately needs them to turn their anger and alienation into action and solidarity with the Occupation so that structural shifts ending poverty and the high cost of quality education can be accomplished.

Lastly, in terms of criticisms, while the movement is widespread, at this point, I think we do need to realize that our power beyond discourse is in question.  I have come to see from where the logic of the criticism comes.  In many ways, we need to understand that the movement has been rather successfully contained by police and state apparatus. This could certainly change this spring and summer (2012).  But it won’t change unless the movement studies and resolves the question of whether the current containment of the movement – both in its action and political forms – has to do with its chosen tactics of protest.  It’s another important question to contemplate and resolve.

Manifesto for Economic Democracy and Ecological Sanity

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By the “Economic Democracy Manifesto Group:” Michael McCabe, Costas Panayotakis, Jan Rehmann, Sohnya Sayres, David Van Arsdale & Richard D. Wolff

Published in Truth-out.org amongst other presses:  http://www.truth-out.org/manifesto-economic-democracy-and-ecological-sanity/1328822232

In Spanish: http://www.rdwolff.com/content/manifiesto-de-la-economia-democratica

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Economic-Democracy-Manifesto/137414313037228

A new historical vista is opening before us in this time of change. Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our society is not delivering the results people need and deserve. We do not have the lives we want and our children’s future is threatened because of social conditions that can and should be changed. One key cause for this intolerable state of affairs is the lack of genuine democracy in our economy as well as in our politics. One key solution is thus the institution of genuine economic democracy as the basis for a genuine political democracy as well. That means transforming the workplace in our society as we propose in what follows.

We are encouraged by The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement spreading across the United States and beyond. Not only does OWS express a widespread popular rejection of our system’s social injustice and lack of democracy. OWS is also a movement for goals that include economic democracy. We welcome, support, and seek to build OWS as the urgently needed, broad movement to reorganize our society, to make our institutions accountable to the public will, and to establish both economic democracy and ecological sanity.

Capitalism and “delivering the goods”

Capitalism today abuses the people, environment, politics and culture in equal measures. It has fostered new extremes of wealth and poverty inside most countries, and such extremes always undermine or prevent democratic politics. Capitalist production for profit likewise endangers us by its global warming, widening pollution, and looming energy crisis. And now capitalism’s recurrent instability (what others call the “business cycle”) has plunged the world into the second massive global economic crisis in the last 75 years.

Yet both Republican and Democratic governments have failed to bring a recovery to the great mass of the American people. We continue to face high unemployment and home foreclosures alongside shrinking real wages, benefits and job security. Thus, increasing personal debt is required to secure basic needs. The government uses our taxes to bring recovery from the economic crisis to banks, stock markets, and major corporations. We have waited for bailouts of the corporate rich to trickle down to the rest of us; it never happened. To pay for their recovery we are told now to submit to cuts in public services, public employment, and even our social security and Medicare benefits. The budget deficits and national debts incurred to save capitalism from its own fundamental flaws are now used to justify shifting the cost of their recovery onto everyone else. We should not pay for capitalism’s crisis and for the government’s unjust and failed response to that crisis. It is time to take a different path, to make long-overdue economic, social and political changes.

We begin by drawing lessons from previous efforts to go beyond capitalism. Traditional socialism – as in the USSR – emphasized public instead of private ownership of means of production and government economic planning instead of markets. But that concentrated too much power in the government and thereby corrupted the socialist project. Yet the recent reversions back to capitalism neither overcame nor rectified the failures of Soviet-style socialism.

We have also learned from the last great capitalist crisis in the US during the1930s. Then an unprecedented upsurge of union organizing by the CIO and political mobilizations by Socialist and Communist parties won major reforms: establishing Social Security and unemployment insurance, creating and filling 11 million federal jobs. Very expensive reforms in the middle of a depression were paid for in part by heavily taxing corporations and the rich (who were also then heavily regulated). However, New Deal reforms were evaded, weakened or abolished in the decades after 1945. To increase their profits, major corporate shareholders and their boards of directors had every incentive to dismantle reforms. They used their profits to undo the New Deal. Reforms won will always remain insecure until workers who benefit from the reforms are in the position of receiving the profits of their enterprises and using them to extend, not undermine, those reforms.

The task facing us, therefore, goes well beyond choosing between private and public ownership and between markets and planning. Nor can we be content to re-enact reforms that capitalist enterprises can and will undermine. These are not our only alternatives. The strategy we propose is to establish a genuinely democratic basis – by means of reorganizing our productive enterprises – to support those reforms and that combination of property ownership and distribution of resources and products that best serve our social, cultural and ecological needs.

Economic Democracy at the Workplace and in Society

The change we propose – as a new and major addition to the agenda for social change – is to occur inside production: inside the enterprises and other institutions (households, the state, schools, and so on) that produce and distribute the goods and services upon which society depends. Wherever production occurs, the workers must become collectively their own bosses, their own board of directors. Everyone’s job description would change: in addition to your specific task, you would be required to participate fully in designing and running the enterprise. Decisions once made by private corporate boards of directors or state officials – what, how and where to produce and how to use the revenues received – would instead be made collectively and democratically by the workers themselves. Education would be redesigned to train all persons in the leadership and control functions now reserved for elites.

Such a reorganization of production would finally and genuinely subordinate the state to the people. The state’s revenues (taxes, etc.) would depend on what the workers gave the state out of the revenues of the workers’ enterprises. Instead of capitalists, a small minority, funding and thereby controlling the state, the majority – workers – would finally gain that crucial social position.

Of course, workplace democracy must intertwine with community democracy in the residential locations that are mutually interactive and interdependent with work locations. Economic and political democracy need and would reinforce one another. Self-directed workers and self-directed community residents must democratically share decision-making at both locations. Local, regional and national state institutions will henceforth incorporate shared democratic decision-making between workplace and residence based communities. Such institutions would draw upon the lessons of past capitalist and socialist experiences.

Benefits of Workplace Democracy

When workforce and residential communities decide together how the economy evolves, the results will differ sharply from the results of capitalism. Workplace democracy would not, for example, move production to other countries as capitalist corporations have done. Workers’ self-directed enterprises would not pay a few top managers huge salaries and bonuses while most workers’ paychecks and benefits stagnate. Worker-run enterprises sharing democratic decision-making with surrounding communities would not install toxic and dangerous technologies as capitalist enterprises often do to earn more profits. They would, however, be far more likely to provide daycare, elder care and other supportive services. For the first time in human history, societies could democratically rethink and re-organize the time they devote to work, play, relationships, and cultural activities. Instead of complaining that we lack time for the most meaningful parts of our lives, we could together decide to reduce labor time, to concentrate on the consumer goods we really need, and thereby to allow more time for the important relationships in our lives. We might thereby overcome the divisions and tensions (often defined in racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and other terms) that capitalism imposes on populations by splitting them into fully employed, partly employed, and contingent laborers, and those excluded from the labor market.

A new society can be built on the basis of democratically reorganizing our workplaces, where adults spend most of their lifetimes. Over recent centuries, the human community dispensed with kings, emperors, and czars in favor of representative (and partly democratic) parliaments and congresses. The fears and warnings of disaster by those opposed to that social change were proved wrong by history. The change we advocate today takes democracy another necessary and logical step: into the workplace. Those who fear (and threaten) that it will not work will likewise be proven wrong.

An Immediate and Realistic Project

There are practical and popular steps we can take now toward realizing economic democracy. Against massive, wasteful and cruel unemployment and poverty, we propose a new kind of public works program. It would differ from the federal employment programs of the New Deal (when FDR hired millions of the unemployed) in two ways. First, it would focus on a “green” and support service agenda. By “green” we mean massively improving the sustainability of workplace and residential communities by, for example, building energy-saving mass transportation systems, restoring waterways, forests, etc., weatherizing residential and workplace structures, and establishing systematic anti-pollution programs. By “support service” we mean new programs of children’s day-care and elder-care to help all families coping with the conditions of work and demographics in the US today.

However, the new kind of public works program we propose would differ even more dramatically from all past public works projects. Instead of paying a weekly dole to the unemployed, our public works program would emphasize providing the unemployed with the funds to begin and build their own cooperative, self-directed democratic enterprises.

The gains from this project are many. The ecological benefits alone would make this the most massive environmental program in US history. Economic benefits would be huge as millions of citizens restore self-esteem damaged by unemployment and earn incomes enabling them to keep their homes and, by their purchases, provide jobs to others. Public employment at decent pay for all would go a long way toward lessening the gender, racial, and other job discriminations now dividing our people.

A special benefit would be a new freedom of choice for Americans. As a people, we could see, examine and evaluate the benefits of working inside enterprises where every worker is both employee and employer, where decisions are debated and decided democratically. For the first time in US history, we will begin to enjoy this freedom of choice: working in a top-down, hierarchically organized capitalist corporation or working in a cooperative, democratic workplace. The future of our society will then depend on how Americans make that choice, and that is how the future of a democratic society should be determined.

The Rich Roots Sustaining this Project

Americans have been interested in and built various kinds of cooperative enterprises – more or less non-capitalist enterprises – throughout our history. The idea of building a “cooperative commonwealth” has repeatedly attracted many. Today, an estimated 13.7 million Americans work in 11,400 Employee Stock Ownership Plan companies (ESOPs), in which employees own part or all of those companies. So-called “not-for-profit” enterprises abound across the US in many different fields. Some alternative, non-capitalist enterprises are inspired by the example of Mondragon, a federation of over 250 democratically-run worker cooperatives employing 100,000 based in Spain’s Basque region. Since their wages are determined by the worker-owners themselves, the ratio between the wages of those with mostly executive functions and others average 5:1 as compared to the 475:1 in contemporary capitalist multinational corporations.

The US cooperative movement stretches today from the Arizmendi Association (San Francisco Bay) to the Vida Verde Cleaning Cooperative (Massachusetts) to Black Star Collective Pub and Brewery (Austin, Texas), to name just a few. The largest conglomerate of worker owned co-operatives in the U.S. is the “Evergreen Cooperative Model” (or “Cleveland Model”), consisting e.g. of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL), the Ohio Cooperative Solar (OCS), and the Green City Growers. These cooperatives share a) common ownership and democracy at the workplace; b) ecological commitments to produce sustainable goods and services and create “green jobs”, and c) new kinds of communal economic planning, mediated by “anchor institutions” (e.g. universities, non-profit hospitals), community foundations, development funds, state-owned banks or employee ownership banks etc. Such cooperatives are generating new concepts and kinds of economic development.

These examples’ varying kinds and degrees of democracy in the workplace all attest to an immense social basis of interest in and commitment to non-capitalist forms of work. Contrary to much popular mythology, there is a solid popular base for a movement to expand and diversify the options for organizing production. Workplace democracy responds to deep needs and desires.

If you are interested in getting further information about this proposal, in joining the discussion it engages, or in participating in activities to achieve its realization, please find us on Facebook at Economic Democracy Manifesto or email manifesto@rdwolff.com


Community Ownership Model, Solution to Urban Poverty

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Saving Our City: A New Development Paradigm for the Common Council

As published in the Syracuse Post Standard, November 18, 2011

David G. Van Arsdale

The exodus of middle-class industrial jobs from Central New York and the subsequent growth of low-pay, part-time and temporary work has devastated economic progress for ordinary citizens. Urban working-class communities have been especially hard hit, as those with resources fled for brighter skies, concentrating poverty, or at the very least its impact, among those who stayed. Syracuse is now home to some of the most concentrated urban poverty in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Our city is at a critical crossroads and has to make a decision. If it wants to build strong schools and communities, it has to find a development model that can reverse the plight of poverty with good-paying, secure jobs. The Destiny model certainly failed on a number of fronts, highlighted by the fact that most dollars spent there get sucked out of the region by its multinational tenants. The development by education and medicine paradigm has better served the region and needs to continue, although most new employees in those sectors are highly educated newcomers to the region, not Syracuse’s working-class communities. Furthermore, many of those employees select to protect their assets by living in “better” neighborhoods outside the city, which obviously does not help the city’s tax base.

There is yet another model, however, that could bring back middle-class job growth in our city. The model is experiencing success in other post-industrial cities like Syracuse. It’s the community-ownership model.

This model rests on the pillar that community-owned enterprises remain committed to the overall health of their communities. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers are often cited as a successful example of the model. With shares of the team sold as non-appreciating investments in a community corporation, the Packers can never leave Green Bay, a city of only 100,000.

Other community-owned enterprises exist in a variety of work sectors, for example, the Vida Verde Cleaning Cooperative of Massachusetts, the worker-owned Home Health Care Cooperative of Brooklyn and the Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland, offering employment in agriculture, laundry and solar energy. Workers in these enterprises earn middle-class incomes and their jobs are quite stable, given that they decide democratically how to compete and remain local.

The community-owned model also includes small ownership groups who sign on to public charters, and community-based banks and investment firms. While Syracuse might need some time to manifest a community-owned national sports team (I vote bringing back the Nationals), three decisions that the Common Council could manifest immediately include: 1) making illegal the selling of underemployed workers in the city through employment agencies like Labor Ready and Kelly Services, and replacing such for-profit labor brokers with worker-owned hiring halls; 2) creating a resolution supporting the transfer and development of vacant factory space into community-owned enterprises; and 3) endorsing the creation of a municipal development bank — the sort of bank that could fund community-owned enterprise such as the return of the Syracuse Nationals.

Sure, other things can and should be done to make our urban neighborhoods more livable: 81 can come down and noise and pollution barriers should go up along 690. But nothing can improve the quality of life in our urban neighborhoods more, more quickly and more evenly, than creating good-paying, sustainable jobs for the residents of the neighborhoods. This is how you build a real city budget with the power to improve the lives of all residents. The community-owned paradigm is a model that can save our city.

David Van Arsdale, of Syracuse, teaches sociology at Onondaga Community College. His book, “Waiting for Work: Temporary Labor and the Production of Poverty,” will be published next year by Brill Press.

Record Poverty in U.S. Remains Ignored

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Why the Political Mainstream Ignores Poverty

By David  G. Van Arsdale

Published in Peace Newsletter, November, 2011: http://www.peacecouncil.net/pnl/index.htm

The Census Bureau reported in September that poverty climbed to 46.2 million – the largest number of poor people on record in the US. Still, while over 15% of US households live in poverty, the mantra of unemployment is the preferred Republican and Democratic discourse. Poverty remains ignored. Here’s why:

To begin with, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts as employed “all persons who did any work for pay or profit during the survey week.” This includes part-time and temporary workers, who may have worked just 2 of 7 days, and therefore regularly fall below the poverty line. With the largest employers in the US, like Wal-Mart and Target, hiring primarily part-time workers, it’s more politically optimistic to focus on “unemployment.”

The BLS counts 15 million workers as unemployed. Another 36 million are counted as working part-time or temporary. The unemployment rate would nearly triple if we counted these workers unemployed.

The poverty rate is a stronger indicator of the true employment situation. However, Democrats and Republicans will continue to shun poverty as an indicator of the health of the economy. To admit that we are a country with too much poverty and growing poorer would be to admit that the kinds of jobs currently sustaining our country are not adequate.

If Democrats and Republicans admitted this, they would have to side with the anger of workers like Tashawna Green, a 21-year-old who was recently fired from Target for supporting a union campaign at her Long Island store. Ms. Green was looking to solve the problem of her job producing a life of poverty for her and her child, while her employer earned a record $704 million in profits in the second quarter.

The down economy has been good to our suppliers of affordable goods. After all, the poorer we become the more we depend on them. And the poorer we become and the wealthier our suppliers of cheap goods become, the more our government turns to them for economic and political support.

 

On Occupation Wall St.

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Occupation 101: Lessons from Wall Street Occupiers

By David G. Van Arsdale

Published in Peace Newsletter, November, 2011 http://www.peacecouncil.net/pnl/index.htm

I’m a professor in the Social Science Department at Onondaga Community College.  I spend a lot of time constructing lessons that intend to inspire interest in social, political, and economic issues.  Over the course of this semester, student’s interest in the relationship of politics and economics to their social lives and well-being has exploded.  While I’d like to take some credit for this evolution, it seems Occupation Wall Street, and subsequent occupation movements now sweeping the globe, deserve their fair share of recognition.

Intrigued as to how the Occupation was inspiring students, I decided to inquire.

On September 30th, I arrived at Zuccotti Park to find a small, crowded space, just a block southeast of the World Trade Center site.  People were standing shoulder to shoulder, listening to speakers articulate their reasons for occupation and potential solutions to the current economic crisis.  The occupiers were broadcasting the event live, blogging about critical issues at the park’s media center, feeding participants in the park’s food-line, organizing a library, educational forums, sleeping quarters, entertainment venues, and dividing labor tasks in order to maintain a functional democratic space.

On the following day, in mid-afternoon, we began the march that led to the now famous mass arrest of 700 protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge.  I was not arrested, but was contained with thousands of others while hundreds were handcuffed and carted away.  While a cold rain soaked our bodies, we remained non-violent, discussing and contemplating the causes and potential cures of historic economic inequities, corporate power, and unemployment.  We chanted, intermittently, “Whose bridge?  Our bridge!”  “Whose police?  Our police!”  “Whose City?  Our City!”

Unable to leave, surrounded by armed police officers, I turned to a young woman sitting next to me, a junior in college, and asked in  a teacher-like tone, “who do you think is winning the occupation?”

“We are!” she said emphatically.

“But we are contained and others amongst us are being arrested,” I responded.

“But we are here learning about our rights, about history, social movements, and participatory democracy.  I am winning,” she said. “And I’m not hurting anyone with my victory.”

The rest of the night, as we finally moved from the Brooklyn Bridge to a march in front of City Hall and then back to Zuccotti Park for discussion, I considered what I had learned about the Occupation and why it was inspiring my students.

Lesson 1: Recent bureaucratic protests have failed  

The largest anti-war protests in the history of the world predated the invasion of Iraq and yet the war-march continued uninterrupted, through Iraq and into Afghanistan.  Pro-worker and workplace democracy protests erupted across the US in solidarity with Wisconsin and yet the nationwide attack on public service workers and collective bargaining increased.  Protestors in the US have in the past few decades abided by the rules of protest – securing permits, police escorts, maintaining time limits, etc.  Generally speaking, this has assured a start and finish to protest, interrupting solidarity and momentum building, and the possibility of collectively negotiating solutions and demands.  The occupation of Tahrir Square, and subsequent Arab urban occupations, taught the value of non-bureaucratic occupation.  Students and many others have learned that leaderless protest through occupation coupled with democratic consensus has the potential to build new, more equitable societies.

Lesson 2: Nonhierarchical occupation is an effective agent of participatory democracy

The police and mainstream media, who have grown used to institutionally organized bureaucratic protest in the US, went looking for the leaders at Zuccotti Park.  Time and time again they were told, “we are the leaders,” and all decisions take place in general assembly through consensus.  A movement based upon ideas that are democratically formed through consensus night after night is an entirely new paradigm for most of us.  The police and media were confused.  There were no scapegoats, no blemished pasts, and so they retreated to a naïve conclusion: this is an aimless movement of mostly young idealistic anarchists, offering no plausible platform of demands or solutions.  Meanwhile, the occupiers continued their assemblies, discussing their causes, voting on how to proceed, and collectively deciding what their demands and solutions should be, etc..  The Occupiers have learned, and are teaching the world, that true democracy takes space and time.

Lesson 3: Non-violent occupation is an effective agent of participatory education

The occupiers have chosen to be non-violent.  In the midst of being pepper-sprayed, kettled, and beaten, the occupiers have remained calm.  It is this calm that allows for and promotes perhaps one of the most determined forms of participatory democracy the world has ever witnessed.  It is their calm, in the face of containment, that allows occupiers to share ideas openly, to learn each other’s needs and history, and to teach each other song, dance, language, art, and culture along the way.  It is their calm, therefore, that has allowed for what will probably be one of the greatest educations of their lives.  And perhaps for all of our lives, if only we could learn to listen and participate, through democratic consensus in occupied space, as they do.

On Migrant Work

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Three Days in the Life of a Migrant Factory Laborer

Published in Peace Newsletter, Aug. & Sept., 2011

Part 1:

Editor’s Note: Labor has been under assault from all sides. Sadly, this has created a false dichotomy between the rights of migrant workers (be they documented or otherwise) and those of US workers. In this investigative piece, David Van Arsdale reveals an economy increasingly dependant on flexible labor, which seems to threaten the security of work for us all. In sharing this experience, we hope to spark a fruitful debate on the potential of solidarity of workers across national boundaries.

A collage of employment agency signs in Queens, New York. Photo: David Van Arsdale

Here in Upstate and Central New York the general public is aware that employers are increasingly dependent on immigrant workforces. We see and hear that headline regularly. We are less aware, however, of how migrant workers get jobs and the function of the work they do at workplaces. In a two part series for the Peace Newsletter, I am sharing my experiences working “undercover” with immigrant Latino workers through staffing agencies that specialize in dispatching them to employers in New York and sometimes neighboring states. I invite you to follow my experiences.

DAY 1: PIMPING MIGRANTS

A temporary worker should never oversleep. This was my thought as I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock two or three times. By the time I awoke, it was half past seven in the morning—far too late, I thought to myself, to find a construction or factory job through the staffing agency in Harlem through which I was working. I decided to try anyhow. I arrived to discover a mostly-vacant waiting room. There were only two other workers waiting and both of them informed me that most of the jobs were dispatched before seven, as I had suspected. Juan, a twenty-four-year-old Nicaraguan who lives in the housing projects across the street from the agency, asked me if I knew of any other agencies offering work. I asked if he wanted to come with me to try the agencies in Queens, in the Latino neighborhoods. Juan and I became quick friends, we jumped on the subway and headed for Queens.

As Juan and I walked down a major street in our construction clothes, solicitors approached us from many directions, handing us flyers with directions to their respective Agencias de Empleo, employment agencies. The flyers promised work in construction, restaurants, cleaning, factories, delivery, offices, and housekeeping. Juan and I made our way from one agency to the next. One told us that we could deliver Chinese food for five dollars an hour. Another told us that we could lay bricks for ten dollars an hour. Still, another offered us a painting job for seven dollars an hour. All of these agencies told us there was a charge for their services. The latter two said that the charge was one hundred dollars, and the agency offering the Chinese food delivery job was only going to charge us fifty dollars. Neither Juan nor I wanted to pay this much or go in debt to the agencies, which is also an option. Therefore, we decided to try our luck someplace else.

From the back of the van – on our way to the food factory. The picture is blurry so as to obscure the identity of workers in this underground economy. Photo: David Van Arsdale

We walked outside and spotted a roundup of people getting into two large cargo vans. We approached the workers and asked them if they were going to work. They directed us to the agency dispatching the jobs. A woman behind a desk at the agency explained that the vans were headed to a food factory in Upstate New York, and that we were welcome to work if we wanted the job. The shift was from 4 pm to 12 am. The job paid eight dollars an hour. The only charge to us was for transportation to and from the factory, which was ten dollars apiece. We gave the woman our names and proceeded to jam our bodies into the already packed vans.

I took a seat in the back. There were four of us on each of the bench seats made for three, and two others sat on the floor. In the hour that it took to get to the factory, I learned that most of the workers in the van were recent immigrants from Mexico. There were also a couple of workers from Puerto Rico and Ecuador. A woman sitting to my right was from Peru. Their ages appeared to range from around sixteen to sixty-five. Juan, two others, and I, were the only men in the van. One of those men, Pedro, sitting to my left, had worked at the food factory on prior occasions and coached Juan and I on what to expect and how to behave.

AT THE FOOD FACTORY

We arrived at the factory ten minutes before the start of the second shift. Juan and I followed Pedro into the mens’ locker room, where Pedro told us to take off our hats and jackets. We then followed him into the dressing room, where we put on white lab jackets and proceeded to walk onto the factory floor. There were three rather official-looking men waiting to greet us, each wearing a blue jacket like our white jackets, only theirs had their names and the company name printed on them. There was also a man from the Food and Drug Administration wearing an official “FDA” hard-hat and jacket. The company men welcomed us and asked if we understood English. We nodded yes. One of the men asked us, “Have you ever worked in this factory before?” We shook our heads as he went onto explain that there was really nothing to it. “Just a few rules,” he said. “No jewelry, no chewing gum, no cell phones. Hair and beard nets are required in the factory, and always wash your hands every time you walk into the factory.” He showed us how to put on the hair and beard nets, took Juan to one end of the factory, and had another manager take me to the opposite end where I was to work alongside a thirty-foot conveyor belt. “This is what you are going to do,” the manager explained, and he showed me how to spread butter on one half of a thinly sliced piece of dough about twelve inches long as it quickly passed by me on the belt. After the dough was buttered, a woman to my right positioned a piece of cheese in raspberry glaze on the unbuttered half. Then, women to her right folded the dough into rugelach (a type of pastry). Other workers at the end of the line packaged the rugelach into plastic containers and then stacked the containers on the skid at the end of the line.

“This seems easy enough,” was my first thought. My brush went from the large pan that held the hot butter on my right to the conveyor belt where I buttered the half pieces of dough. But the strips of dough came one right after another. I buttered about two pieces of dough every three seconds. After thirty minutes of buttering, my right hand began to cramp. In an attempt to switch to my left hand I got backed up, which caused the women further down the line to discipline me a bit. There was a line on each side of the conveyor belt, both performing the same duties. The woman applying butter to dough across from me looked at me and smiled. “You’ll learn to use your left hand,” she said. “You’ll need to keep your right hand from cramping.” This woman, Rosa, was nineteen years old. She was relatively new to New York City and talked about her dream of going to community college to become a nurse. She told me that she was going to get her GED next year after her English improved, and then apply to college. I told her that it was a good plan and explained she did not need a GED to go to community college, information that instantly seemed to make her my friend.

As Rosa and I buttered the dough that rushed by, she taught me some useful survival techniques that helped me keep pace with the belt. “You hear the rhythm of the factory?” she asked, referring to the thumping noise made by the dough-making machine on the other side of the factory. “You can brush to that rhythm and when that gets boring,” she explained, “you can sing a song to the rhythm or just dance a little.” Rosa was right. Keeping pace with the rhythm helped the time pass and helped me stay on pace with the conveyor belt. The hardest time to keep the rhythm, however, was in the moments when my eyes wandered to the clock overlooking the factory floor. Of course, one’s eyes go there for answers to questions like, “how long till the next break?” Or, “how much time has passed since I last peaked at the clock?” Breaks at the factory happen twice in an eight-hour shift, and each break is fifteen minutes long.

The assembly-line workers in the factory come from agencies all over the New York metropolitan area. The factory does not know the names, ages, or any personal information about the workers, nor does it care to. It calls the agencies to get whatever number of workers it needs. For the factory, there are many benefits to working with the agencies, perhaps the greatest of which is being able to flexibly employ a dedicated workforce. When demand is strong, the company calls the agencies and they provide the workforce. When the freezers are full, a sign that demand has decreased, there’s no need for the call. This way the company’s payroll corresponds to the ebbs and flow of production. Of course for the workers, when demand is slow, so too is their opportunity for work and pay.

Three Days in the Life of a Migrant Laborer: Part II


In the July/August edition of the Peace Newsletter, I described my first day of finding work in Upstate New York with Latino migrant workers from New York City. Here, in this second part of the series, I describe two more days of work in factories run with migrant workers supplied by employment agencies (“agencias de empleo”) in New York City

Maria’s boxes, Food for the People. Photo: David Van Arsdale

DAY 2:  THE FOOD FACTORY
The workers in the food factory abide by an unofficial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Don’t ask anything personal about other workers and don’t tell anything personal about oneself. Not only is this policy upheld by the workers, it is also upheld, for different reasons, by the owners and managers of the factory.

I realized the depth of this policy on my second day working undercover as a migrant worker. On that day, I asked a very young-looking woman (Maria) her age. Her job was to fold boxes at the front of the conveyor belt. I was in charge of supplying her with the boxes and supplying the women next to her with frozen hot dogs, which they would place into the boxes. The pace was intense and the women worked fast and hard.

The speed of the line depended greatly on how fast Maria could fold boxes and place them on the conveyor belt. I learned later that Maria had been chosen for this job by her co-workers because her hands were quick and agile. Maria and I learned to communicate without using words. Every ten minutes or so she would slip me a look that indicated it was time for me to fetch a new package of boxes. Roughly three-quarters of the way through our eight-hour shift, I noticed Maria’s hands were raw and beginning to bleed. As I continued to deliver hot dogs to the women on the conveyor belt, I glanced at her sympathetically, and she returned my look with a firm shake of the head, as if to say, “Please don’t say anything.” Maria was wearing high heels to appear taller and older and was embarrassed when I asked how old she was. She stood tall and said, hesitating a bit, “dieciocho”(18). The older women next to her were uncomfortable with my question. It was clear that they did not want the manager to hear, and they may have become a bit suspicious of me. “We work hard, no questions,” one of them said. I apologized and continued to work at the requisite fast pace.

Pedro and I had shared food with each other during our shift break. Over lunch we spoke about our work in the factories and the agencies who dispatched us. Pedro had been a day laborer for the past ten years and appreciated my interest in his profession. When I asked him if he liked working for the agencies, he responded: “Depending on agencies to sell me for a day or two at a time to some factory that doesn’t even know my name, who would like that?”

Pedro went on to explain that the agencies allow the factory to “be free from taking care of the workers and to be free from worker problems.” Not only do the agencies free factories from the responsibility of providing health insurance, but they free them from dealing with the daily problems of human existence, such as sickness, child care, and mental health crises. When workers experience these kinds of problems, they simply don’t show up at the agency. And, if a worker experiences say, a mental health crisis while working at the factory, the factory will simply send him or her back to the agency.

The agencies also serve to protect the companies from the legal responsibilities of employment. The food factory owners and managers don’t need to care about the legal status or age of the workers. If Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) inquires about the status of workers in the plant, the company explains that the workers belong to the agencies and that all employment responsibilities rest with them. Given the proliferation and success f third-party employment providers in the US like Manpower, Labor Ready and Kelly Services, three of the largest employers in the US, employment agencies have gained legitimate status, freeing employers from human resource responsibilities.

“What about the agency?” I asked. “Does the agency care about your personal crises?” Pedro laughed sarcastically and then explained that “the agency consists of a boss and a few workers who sell your labor. Try telling them you have a headache and can’t work and see what they do for you.” Pedro then said that he is “pimped by the agency and the factory. They may say that they care about you, but neither of them will take responsibility for the problems they create in your life.”

DAY 3: THE PLASTICS FACTORY

When I showed up at the agency on the third day the dispatchers announced that the food factory would not need workers for a couple of days. The food factory’s storage freezers were apparently full, so they would not need workers for production until more of the product was sold. The job dispatcher was surrounded by a swarm of perhaps 65 people waiting for work. Juan, Maria, Pedro, and Rosa, migrant workers that I had befriended my first two days of working, were among them. The woman in charge of selecting workers told me that they did not need too many men, so I waited patiently to see if I’d get chosen. In the meantime, the workers who did get picked moved quickly into the vans waiting to transport them to the factory.

My name was called and I promptly entered one of the vans, where there was a seat left in the back row.  Pedro also made it into the van and warned me that the factory we were going to was not as nice as the food factory. We drove onto one of the many industrial strips off Highway 80, ten miles from the George Washington Bridge. Our three vans pulled up to the work site at 3:30 pm, followed by more than a dozen other vans, bringing workers from other agency sites. We funneled out of the vans and into the factory, where an office registered new workers. The office is yet another employment service subcontracted by the factory to manage its human resources. I learned that the agency would be responsible for paying us and that they pay a flat rate per worker to the other temporary agencies that delivered us. In exchange for my name, the woman handed me a number. She then walked me and other new workers over to a machine on the wall which digitally registered our fingerprints. Reluctant to give our fingerprints, the agency explained that it had nothing to do with “legally tracking us,” but it was rather to keep track of “their workforce” and to “prevent the workers from sharing their tickets/jobs with other workers.”

Mariana preparing men’s cologne. Photo: David Van Arsdale

This plant was roughly the size of a football field. Every worker in the plant, with the exception of management, security guards, maintenance, and forklift operators, was an agency worker—a ratio of about ten full-time workers to 150 agency workers. After registering my fingerprints I walked through a gate toward the assembly lines. Inside the gate, there was a 15-foot razor-wire fence which a security guard told me exists to “prevent workers from stealing goods out of the factory.” The factory produces many shapes and sizes of plastic moldings used to package various products: batteries, toys, electronics, cosmetics, etc. My work for the day involved packaging men’s cologne, which I later saw on sale in a Target store. In the plastics division of the factory, workers feed machines with plastic wrapping that is melted and molded into hard, plastic shapes. The smell of melting plastic permeates the air and workers could probably benefit from ventilation masks. After the moldings are shaped, they are ready to enter one of the factory’s two large packaging divisions. In these areas, workers perform the tasks that allow the goods to move down conveyor belts and into pressing machines that seal products into the plastic moldings. I worked on the other side of a pressing machine, removing nicely packaged men’s cologne from castings and placing it onto a conveyor belt headed for boxing. As the cologne moved toward boxing, colleagues checked for imperfections in the moldings and placed various advertisement stickers on the packages. There are nearly 20 production lines like this in the factory, packaging various kinds of goods.

Mariana was working close to me on the conveyor belt and recognized me from the food factory. She is 33 years old, married, from Peru, and has two children. When I asked her how she thinks factories come to use certain agencies, she explained that she had met workers from many agencies. But, from what she could tell, factories use “different agencies until they find an agency that supplies a workforce that they are happy with.”

“It is clear to me,” I said, “that the factories that we have worked at this week like to use agencies supplying mostly Latino workers.” Mariana agreed. “We work hard,” she said proudly, “and for probably less money than they have to pay agencies supplying American workers.” Although I was paid for my work by the agency at the plastics factory ($7.40 an hour), I received the money under a different Social Security number than I had reported. Furthermore, eight dollars was taken out of my check for “other deductions,” which I was told were for transportation. This lowered my actual pay to $6.40 an hour, before taxes.

FLEXIBILITY & MIGRANT WORKERS

The migrant workers at the factories work hard and abide by a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy largely because they need to continue working. They are young and old, documented and undocumented, and in this study, mostly women. Had it been a study of Latino construction workers sent out by employment agencies, most of the workers would have been men. The agencies are simultaneously “pimp and lord.” They are able to communicate with the factories and open up work opportunities for the immigrants within their communities. They are also in business to make a profit, and therefore, sell their workers to factories at the highest price possible. Some agencies are more benevolent than others, to be sure, but regardless of their profit formulas they find themselves in the position of selling workforces to employers like lords of the land. This results in a hierarchy within immigrant communities, with the newest and poorest immigrants relying most heavily on the agencies.
Ultimately, however, this hierarchy is an extension of the logic of neoliberal  labor policies, which have endorsed third-party contingent workforces freeing companies from the legal responsibilities of employment. Today, US companies demand access to flexible workforces, so to better compete in the global economy. Companies have discovered that agencies in immigrant communities supply inexpensive labor pools of workers who work hard. Factories are hungry for such work pools, and if they cannot access them here in the US, they might search for them in other countries. The workers, unfortunately, are left looking to the factory as their lord. “Don’t leave us,” they say. “We will work for less.”