Boston's Blue Bottle stores are now unionized!

Most of the time I, like the majority of all bloggers in the world, keep a blog because I have things to say about things that affect me. Rarely, it's to make sure that something is memorialized because no one else is touching it.

Such is the case with Blue Bottle's Independent Union, and it's bizarre.

I talked about the work my daughter and her colleagues were doing to unionize last month here and here. I'm really proud of her because I think this is essential work, and I'm not just saying that because she's my daughter. It has been well known since I had jobs in food service (and most other parts of retail) that you can't afford to live off of that salary--excuse me, wages. The only way to survive--and that is literally how people put it--is to be in management. That is easier said than done in many businesses, and it's still a hustle, even if you can now afford your rent and your meals.

Once you don't have to live in that, it's quickly obvious how ridiculous that is. If food service--if retail--can't offer sustainable employment, then it is not a sustainable business, period. Asking for a livable wage is not unreasonable or unrealistic, especially when the product you're serving is premium priced. And the fact that people are starting to assert their rights to organized labor is a very big deal, and it should be a bigger story.

Last month the Blue Bottle stores in Boston filed their papers with the National Labor Relations Board, but in order to be fully unionized--i.e., they could begin negotiating with management--they needed to have an election, which they did last week. This wasn't a foregone conclusion, and up until the last minute the management was trying to dissuade employees from voting to unionize. Yes, they were successful, as the title of this post indicates, but *that wasn't a foregone conclusion*.

Why, then, when I did a search for the story just now, three days after the election, is there no news of it? Someone in my family suggested that the BBIU should have sent out a press release, but sorry, why isn't the press covering this on their own? This is an important story--no, it's an important VICTORY.

Well, to hell with the establishment media. If you're reading this, now you know. So go tell everyone, and celebrate with coffee from a union shop. There may not be that many now, but soon there will be.

Deb in the City

How much stupid *is* in the economy?

I have a confession: much as I consider myself a numbers person and follow business, economic, and finance news, there is a lot that I still don't "get". I realized this week that most of it comes down to my extremely conservative nature when it comes to money. If I were going to invest in stocks, I would do it because I had researched the intrinsic value of the company and had good reason to believe that it would do well in the future. If I were going to invest in bonds -- which I had always been told before this month were so safe that they were boring and should be avoided for that reason alone -- I would do so because I believed in the strength of the entity selling it and hold it until it matured; hell, I would probably reinvest the funds after. It took me a while to remember that most people do not see their investments that way; they do not look at the long-term, and many don't even look at the medium-term. They are super-sensitive to every hiccup and will bail if they see enough people doing so, just as they will invest in something if they see enough people doing so. I have always been distrustful of the crowd, which is why I remain hesitant to trust this very emotional bunch with my financial security.

This obsession with short-term thinking, apparently, blinds people to the consequences of obvious phenomenon right in front of them...say, a decade or so of extremely low interest rates. 

I suffered through the last recession. I have complained at length about it, so I don't want to go on more about it here. I was also a conscious human being in 1987, 1990, and 2001, so I knew that another recession would come, no matter what the Treasury or Fed did to soften the impact. That is why I worked very hard to stabilize my financial circumstances. (I am not wagging my finger at anyone who wasn't able to do so; I appreciate that my family enjoyed some privileges that many others don't, and while my choices may have created some opportunities, it mostly amplified what advantages I already had.) That is also why I had a savings account and noticed that, while my accounts were modestly growing, they weren't growing as much as they might if, say, interest rates weren't consistently low.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let's agree that the world economy shouldn't pivot on my needs alone...but I somehow doubt that I was the only person in my position who had a little bit of money that I was trying to grow but didn't want to "risk". But that isn't what made the low rates so galling. They were, as far as I could see, the most durable measure that was taken after the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession, and they outlived their usefulness.

What was the point of low-interest rates? To make money more available to spend...but how? By encouraging people to borrow money. That money financed (or refinanced) mortgages, cars, educations, and businesses. Some of that might have been great -- but what about opportunities to build wealth that you didn't first have to borrow for? What about raising the minimum wage so it could be a livable wage, so that if a family had two wage- or salary-earners, they could save money? What about lowering the cost of education so that families didn't have to bet everyone's futures so one person could get a Bachelors degree? What about making it easier for people with high school diplomas or Associates degrees to get good paying jobs? What about subsidizing the cost of childcare so more parents who wanted to work could be a part of the workforce and generate more income? What about not making high end residential developments so easy to build -- with that cheap and easy money -- and driving up the cost of housing for everyone in the process?

Yeah, I guess keeping interest rates low was much easier than attacking those problems. A shame no one reminded people who worked with money for a living as well as the vast majority of our elected representatives about long-term consequences.

Here we are, and there's nothing we can do to change it except move forward. Here's hoping everyone remembers that nothing lasts forever and plans accordingly, especially those we trust to plan for us. (One last thing I'll say: cryptocurrency really shouldn't be your backup plan.)

Deb in the City

Staring at the Abyss

I'm in the midst of drafting my series -- almost done with installment fifteen, and then we're onto the finale (wait, what?). I will still, of course, be editing for a while (no, trust me...), so still being in "research mode" isn't inappropriate.

I've read a lot of history, politics, science writing, as well as sci-fi and fantasy, but lately my reading has delved into what we might term the dystopian side of things -- and I refer to the non-fiction. Is there anything more dystopian than chattel slavery? I mean, other than settler-colonialism?

Perhaps modernity itself.

I picked up Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste in January, and it was only a coincidence that I finished it in February aka Black History Month. It was without a doubt the most difficult book I have ever read. I've whined at length about how hard it was to get through Edward Said's Orientalism, and no small part of that was the sometimes obtuse academic language, and the liberal use of French passages...which I don't speak. That book was easier to read than Slavery and the Culture of Taste. (Stamped from the Beginning was easier to read.) 

 

Not for the faint of heart, but everyone should read it

As I've gotten older, reading about slavery and what it really was has gotten more difficult. It's an increase in empathy in general, but it's also -- and this is a good thing -- other Brown and Black people getting more concerted media attention when they talk about historical experiences and the continuing ramifications. A couple of authors have made oblique references here and there that have stopped me cold, but I could go on trying to understand the shape of history. (And they have shown up in the most unexpected places; take a look at Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene.) Not with this book.

I have never read anything that so completely described the psychological and psychic displacement that wasn't just attendant to slavery but that made slavery possible. African bodies needed to be transformed from people into objects for the benefit of the slave holders, who, like everyone everywhere, told themselves stories about how good they were, but even though slaves miraculously held onto their sense of themselves as selves and not things, the processes of being displaced, stripped, packed into small spaces as if they were animals, being deprived of privacy, being branded, being regularly, sadistically abused, losing their names, losing their sense of time, and being subject to losing their communities and families at any point traumatized them. As they would anybody. I cried several times while reading the descriptions of these processes, and the only thing that kept me reading was the feeling that I could not do anything to right those wrongs unless I understood it. That is perhaps the most earnest thing I've ever written in this space, and I mean it.

What terrified me was Gikandi's explanation of how the affected psychological and sociological processes work, and how easy it would be to break anyone from anywhere if you did those things to them. I wasn't under any delusions that there was something particularly vulnerable about African captives, but looking out at the world and seeing a planet filled with people that could be as easily broken if as sadistically treated -- and knowing that I was one of them...isn't that part of the horror of dystopian fiction?

(It strikes me how much the dominant community has suffered for ignoring the plight of the people they oppressed. The psychic displacement that African slaves suffered from is not substantially unrelated to what we have seen in other totalitarian civilizations, whether it's the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Communist China. We can't, probably, expect most people to assert their previous identities in the same ways when Big Brother is watching with increasingly sophisticated surveillance, but those of us who aren't being tormented should be a little less surprised that simply changing governments and material conditions doesn't magically undo years of psychological and sociological damage.)

Spoiler alert, in case you needed one: miraculously, slaves did not by and large break. They not only established relationships and communities, they kept their senses of self, even if they had to redefine that in a hostile setting. They were hyper-aware that they were the negative by which their "owners" and those communities defined themselves -- much as, per Said, Europe couldn't exist without The Oriental Other -- but their psyches stayed intact by asserting their own history (or remembered fragments of it) in whatever spaces were available, whether it was as dance, art, and ritual or in the provision grounds they used to feed themselves. As time went on, many communities also explicitly thumbed their noses not at the stereotypes they were subjected to but the "manners" their owners pretended to. They used performance to mock performance and thereby establish their own identities.

If I'm honest, I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "taste", which is coming up more in other books I've read (Culture and Imperialism, Fearing the Black Body, Women in the Picture). I was not disappointed by Gikandi's insights. Intertwined with Taste is Performance, and modern civilization would not exist without it. Before modernity, what many European cultures needed to perform was Goodness, for God and for our communities, but modernity required the performance of Happiness. Keeping in mind the maxim that the medium is the message and eventually comes to alter it, I would say happiness is more suited to performance than goodness, and for that reason has stuck with us for so long. 

And why shouldn't we be happy when we have everything...underwritten by the exploitation of others? It's really not a new insight -- people understood even when they didn't want to that their wealth was coming off of slavery -- and it has been haunting modern civilization since the beginning. As much as people tried to get around it by strictly defining "We" and by desperately trying to convince themselves that other people weren't just that, we never entirely lost sight that our system is based on varying degrees of haves and have nots. Just as we needed to perform Goodness to convince everyone that we were destined for heaven, we need to perform Happiness to convince everyone that we are destined for success and therefore trustworthy with opportunity. 

Fear of damnation is still the real driver.

We read history to understand our present moment, and this was no exception. I continue to seek to understand the emptiness and hypocrisy that can characterize our culture. I know I'm not the only one, and I presume other people will understand when I say that sometimes it feels as if the abyss is looking back at me. Perhaps that is why I really wanted to finish this book -- millions of people have climbed out of the abyss after they were shoved into it. If they can survive, so can we. But only if we acknowledge them as Us first.

Deb in the City

No maps in the uncharted territory.

I read up on the economy as much as I can without being obsessive about it. I've been reading about inflation mostly via The Economist, but also through political and social commentators and activists like Gaslit Nation. 

The Economist does good coverage on a lot of issues, but mostly they make me chuckle when I read these pieces. I picture a lot of people scratching their heads, thinking, "All things being equal, raising interest rates really should work, so why are we still stuck?" Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa are not economists, but when it comes up, they are focused on one aspect -- labor -- and frankly I think they've called it: unemployment is so low because the population of people who would have been working before have been disproportionately affected by COVID. In other words, a number of the COVID dead or disabled were those removed from the workforce.

They don't say this, but I do: economists are willfully blind if they're ignoring that fact, and they are bordering on monstrous if they want to suggest that the stimulus money so many governments spent is what's keeping people out of work. For some bizarre reason, my family got those benefits too, even though my husband was able to work the whole time. I have a sense of how much those benefits were worth, and it's laughable to suggest that as rents are going up and the cost of food is going up that somehow people are able to justify staying out of work because of, at most, a couple of thousand dollars they received a year and a half ago. There were some people who were able to pay down debts with that money, and that probably gave them a little breathing room, but we're past that. 

If people aren't applying for jobs, it's because the people aren't there to do so. The fact that we are doubling down on reducing immigration in the midst of that is only going to make the problem worse.

It should also be said that the benefits wage earners are getting now are, frankly, long overdue. The average wage has not kept up with the cost of living for decades, and if people are feeling the pinch of having to make up (some of) the difference now, this is part of what labor activists were warning about.

But let's not pretend that economics is a science. It is at best a description of "the market", and the market is filled with human beings. On average they're making rational decisions, but please define "rationality" when we live through a deadly pandemic, massive political instability on a global scale (January 2021 insurrection in the US, Russia's vicious war of aggression against Ukraine, growing aggression by North Korea, an increasingly unpredictable and genocidal China, an absolutely erratic wannabe dictator in Turkey, a chauvinistic, bigoted populist leader in India, the environmental and humanitarian depredations of former Brazilian strongman Bolsanaro...someone needs to explain to me why Africa gets all of the ink for problems with dictators and corruption), and the continuing state aggression against BIPOC people all over the world. 

It's a lot to expect that people are going to be logical actors making rational decisions if their time scale is surviving the present, unknown moment and tomorrow seems like a luxury. And it shouldn't be a surprise at all that people are going to treat money and goods like the bricks of a protective fortress, either hoarding it so they'll never have to worry about deprivation, or spending it to prove that everything is the Normal they idealized before disaster struck.

Which is all to say: of course economists don't know what the hell is going on and how to end inflation, because we are in uncharted territory. 

I'll echo Kendzior and Chalupa and advise people to be decent to each other -- sharing what we have could mean the difference for someone else's prospects for survival -- and read up on historical analogues. What were they doing during the 1918 Spanish Flu oubreak? How did people survive the initial onslaughts of smallpox? What mistakes were made when the bubonic plague first spread? Discover your history, and learn from it. History isn't a map, but at least it can be a guide.

Deb in the City

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

Breakout Nations is ostensibly an investment guide, but it’s really a snapshot of the world economy, particularly the emerging markets and those that are on the verge of “breaking out” or achieving the next level of income.  (Although the term “emerging market” is used in different ways in different places, for the purposes of this book it refers to nations in which the average annual per capita income is less than $25,000.)

You cannot talk about this class of nations- or the global economy itself- without talking about China.  China itself is an emerging nation and has driven the growth of many of the others, particularly those that are dependent on commodity exports.  While the political posturing around China tends to veer to extremes- “China is eating our lunch!” or “China is about to implode!”- Sharma takes, appropriately, the middle path.  Much of the low-hanging fruit has been grabbed in China, and much of that is dependent on demographics: while China was able to add about 90 million workers between the ages of 35 and 54 to the workforce in the last decade, in this decade they will add closer to 5 million such workers.  The smaller workforce translates into higher wages and thus higher prices, and that will almost undoubtedly lead to a shrinking of demand for their manufactured goods.  In other words, growth rates of 8 percent or more are most likely a thing of the past.  However, Sharma is more bullish on China (at least compared to the bears) in part because while many of the easy gains have been realized, there is still a need to modernize its manufacturing infrastructure, and those are the kinds of investments the Chinese governments have been keen on.  China will most probably cool, but reducing to 6 or 7 percent annual growth is a less dire scenario than reducing to 4.

China’s economy has been driven by manufacturing and it’s increasing output has been dependent on commodities from other countries.  While there were fortunes to be made from commodities, the rule seems to hold that an economy highly dependent on them is more likely to overheat and then eventually crash than one that isn’t.  Russia and Brazil are good examples of a such; they are living large right now but don’t have a cushion to fall back on when demand inevitably recedes.  Of all of the commodity economies Sharma profiles, only Indonesia seems to know how to work the dynamics to its favor, possibly because they were burned by the cycle in The Fifties.

Manufacturing has been considered the smart way to grow an economy from one level to another, but it’s far from a silver bullet.  While Taiwan grew significantly because of its manufacturing output, its weakness is that it never made the transition from a destination for other nation’s factories to a nation that had its own industries.  Against the prevailing wisdom at the time, South Korea did make that transition, fostering corporations that built innovative products (and subsuming those that weren’t competitive in the market).  And while many of the largest South Korean companies are family-owned, they tend to be professionally managed.  Of all of the countries profiled in the book, South Korea is the one Sharma seems to be betting will be the breakout.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sharma is a little more bullish on Europe than most economists although he, like many others, argues that the inherent weakness of a shared currency like the euro is that it leaves individual nations unable to adjust when circumstances demand it.  However, while many nations in Europe are going through a downturn, Poland and the Czech Republic are quiet standouts, in large part because they have paid attention to the fundamentals of a good economy, including putting money away to make strategic public investments.  

One has to wonder how the leaders of the European Union feel about their treatment of Turkey’s entrance application several years ago.  Certainly, the Turkish are probably relieved that they were denied.  The energy released when the Turks lifted their ban on open displays of religious culture corresponded with a vigorous economic revival.  While certainly based on manufacturing, it is more dependent on domestic demand than other similar economies and has gone hand in hand with domestic investment in infrastructure (and education).  However, a potential weakness is that its domestic savings is relatively low- 20 percent compared with 50 percent in China.  Another potential weakness is that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, while a cautious economic steward, has been in power for a decade and has indicated that he would like to remain so, albeit in a different role.  It remains to be seen whether he will be more like a Putin or Wen Jiabao.  Of course, as Sharma notes, the leader who can effectively manage a country’s finances can usually get away with almost anything politically.

If investments are bets, Sharma is hedging on India.  While the large population and cultural dynamism are now seen as strengths, India’s political system, rightly charged with corruption and cronyism, is what is holding it back.  While any student of Indian history is reluctant to give Churchill credit for any insights, he did have a point when he noted that “India” was as desriptive of a political or economic system as “Europe”.  Certainly we are seeing that now as modern Indians seem more engaged in local than national politics.  Also, India, like many of the other countries profiled in the book, has been guilty of believing its own public relations campaign and presuming that it will be the next China.  The extent to which the Indian government can implement policies to make it so- even if it’s at the expense of its traditional clients- will determine the extent to which they can make their advertising a reality.

If there is a problem that the global economy suffers from as a whole, it is an unwillingness to tolerate the kinds of recessions that punctuated our overall trend of growth for the last 150 years.  Indeed, the emerging market miracles are a direct result of the stimulus the United States implemented to smooth out the dotcom bust of 2000 and 2001.  The low interest rates did exactly as intended and increased money available for investment.  Unforeseen, however, was the extent to which that money would flow into foreign markets, which led to the booms in these nations.  Easy money was key to growth for some, but intelligent policies are necessary if those gains are going to be maintained or built upon.  Those well-positioned to do that are the ones who will break out.

While Sharma backed up almost all of his assertions with data and statistics, I was surprised that this didn’t have better footnotes.  In spite of the copious statistics, this was a compelling if not “easy” read.  Recommended for those who have been following current affairs.