The Working Poor, or my little subset of it, has me exhausted and I don't know what to do.

In my job as an attorney at a federal government agency charged with enforcing one of the various laws that provide some legal protections to working people, we take turns serving a sort of intake role. In this role, we answer questions, provide information, and open new cases for every person who calls the office, sends a letter, or walks in (no appointment required) on our assigned day.  

It is exhausting.

It is exhausting in so many different ways, for so many different reasons, let me just list them, in no particular order.

1.  The Entitled - Many people - especially those who are union members - entirely fail to understand what large unions do and how they work.  They don't understand that the mere fact of being represented by a union doesn't mean that you will never be fired or your supervisors will always be nice to you.  They don't understand that having a union representative assigned to your workplace doesn't mean that this person will always be available to take your calls, or will be successful in defending you against the employer.  This category of people complain that their union representative didn't make certain arguments in a hearing that they would have made, or that the union rep took too long to answer their calls, or proposed a settlement that did not provide all of the relief they wanted.  Today, it was a woman in this category who complained that her union called her "at all hours," 9, 10:00 at night, and wondered if that was ok.  After a long day of this, it was with perhaps too much exasperation that I told her that most people I see complain that they don't receive any calls from their unions; why was she complaining instead that her union rep was working such long days that he called her at late hours?  What is the problem with these people?  Well, part of the frustration for me has to do with the contrast with the next category:

2.  The Don't Know They Have No Rights - These are the people who didn't get the memo that the U.S. decided to be an employment-at-will country, the people who spend years, decades even, in the workforce, and don't know that they have so few rights.  These are the people who complain that their boss is mean, or prefers one of their coworkers to them, or took an overly-harsh adverse action against them because they violated some workplace rule.  These are the people who are shocked when I explain that, in this country, an employer can take an adverse action against them for any reason except a small number of illegal reasons - race, gender, other discrimination, or retaliation for protected, concerted, or  union activity - and there is no legal requirement that your boss be nice or even fair.  These people confuse the evidence of unlawful discrimination with discrimination (i.e., making distinctions among two or more things) itself.  As in, Question: "why does your boss treat your coworker differently?  Was it any of the illegal reasons I just mentioned?" Answer: "No, they are friends and my boss has never liked me."  This person is shocked and upset with me when I tell them about the limited job protections we have in this country, and that unfairness itself has not yet been outlawed.  

So you see why the people who have rights in Category 1 make me crazy in not appreciating how many more rights and benefits they have than this category!

3.  The Emoters - This category of people is having a genuine personal crisis.  They are having an ongoing conflict at work, or they've been fired, or life has just gotten to them.  They come into my office and they might cry, but they might be extremely defensive or unable to have a calm, back-and-forth conversation for some other reason.  I feel for them, usually.  But I am not a trained therapist.  I am not a trained social worker.  I have received no training whatsoever - and I blame my agency for this - on dealing with people in crisis.  When these people complain, sometimes tearfully, that they are having health problems, or too much stress, or might lose their homes, I do not have the proper tools - emotional or practical - to help them.  As I said, I work for a law enforcement agency.  I don't work for a general social services agency.  I am an expert in the enforcement of a single law.  I feel so ill-equipped to help people going through an emotional trauma.  And when I say ill-equipped, there are two problems here.  First, I don't know if I am "successful" in dealing with them - do they feel better or worse after dealing with me?  But even if I do manage to be successful with these people, or I decide that helping them emotionally is not my function, there's a second problem.  The second problem is the toll that this takes on me.  My understanding is that trained therapists receive training in how not to be emotionally destroyed by hearing so many sad and difficult emotional things from their patients.  I have received no training whatsoever on how to deal with another person's emotional trauma without being upset by it myself.  

4.  The Defensive and Aggressive Types - Perhaps a subset of category 3, perhaps not, these folks are instantly on the defensive, or instantly on the attack.  Either way, they are exuding emotions that put me also in an unhealthy mode.  The worst are the aggressors.  These are the people who accuse me of not listening, not understanding, not doing my job properly.  There was one guy in particular like this who brought out the worst in me.  I may realize the first time (or first few times) that he makes such a statement that he's in a troubled emotional state and calmly attempt to reassure him that I would like to help him, but after he makes such accusations multiple times, my patience is worn out and I can't stay calm.  I believe that my goal is to stay above the fray and not engage with the emotional battle he's picking with me.  But there have been times, I'm not proud to admit, that I haven't stayed above the fray.  I have said, with voice shaking and bordering on shouting, that I am trying to help him and if he doesn't want my help and advice that we should end this phone call, and there may have been a time that after making such a statement, I hung up on someone.  When someone is attacking you, it takes a special skill (which I don't possess) not to go on the defensive and feel attacked, to refrain from taking it personally when you are stretching yourself to your max in an attempt to do your job and all of the intellectual and emotional challenges it involves, and be told by someone who is already pushing you to your limit that you are not doing your job.  I don't know what to do in these situations, and I resent my Agency for putting me in a situation where I have to deal with these types of people, and not giving me the tools to deal with it.  The other problem with this kind of scenario is that I feel a range of emotions afterward - I feel guilty for not being the bigger person when I'm dealing with someone who is clearly in a much worse off, distressed position in life than I am, but I also fear that I'm giving too much leeway to someone I should view as, frankly, abusive.  The truth is that I just have no idea how to make sense of these people, or how to deal with them.  And that's not a pleasant place to be.  

4.  General Thoughts - The truth is that with all of these emotional states that a person may be in, I simply don't have the proper resources to know how to deal, in a productive or emotionally healthy way, with any of them.  At the end of these days, there seems to invariably come a time when I am so emotionally maxed out that I am too stern, or inappropriate in some other way, with someone.  Part of the problem is that I don't know what "success" in these situations means, and as an achievement-oriented person, this is a big deal.  Am I successful if I give accurate information about their rights under the law even if I raised my voice or became emotional in the process?  Should I be unphased?  Colleagues have pointed out that perhaps I have too much sympathy for people, and shouldn't be afraid to view these people as overly-entitled, or mean, or abusive, when that's how they are.  I don't know if I need more compassion, or less compassion and more clear-eyed judgment, or more emotional detachment with a focus on the legal information...but after years in this job and many tweaks to my conduct and emotional-posture when dealing with the public, after a day of this I am still exhausted and struggling to find a better way.    

Notes on the future of the labor movement, Part I: Definitions

First, defining terms. The "labor movement": to many, this phrase evokes established labor unions, and refers solely to the fate of these organizations. Teamster truck drivers, building construction workers in hard hats, Laborers picketing next to an inflated rat. Maybe the image includes teachers and municipal employees, maybe nurses and janitors. But what about the Occupy activists demonstrating against elite, corporate power, on behalf of "the 99%"? This movement was concerned with the issues of working people, but is it considered part of the so-called "labor movement"? Does it matter whether this movement concerned itself with actual workplace issues? But there is also a tremendous amount of organizing and activism that directly concerns workplace issues but may not always be considered part of the labor movement, per se. This is the work I want to write about here. In New York, this includes new organizations of domestic workers, taxi drivers, fast food workers, carwash workers, retail sales clerks, freelancers, and day laborers.

It seems to me that many activists shy away from calling themselves part of the "labor movement." This isn't surprising. The terminology of the "labor movement" evokes bad associations for many: corruption, racism, anti-immigrant nativism, and a mission concerned more with contract gains for the few than with broad social improvements for the many. When I spent time in law school working with and studying organizations of Latino immigrants working together for improvements in their workplaces, the group's members were frustrated with their experiences with traditional unions. When I described my interest in this area, I talked about "immigrant workers' rights", or perhaps "workers' rights" when I was feeling more expansive. I don't recall using the term "labor movement" myself at e time, and I don't recall hearing, at least at that time, nearly a decade ago, the folks i encountered in my work talk about being part of the labor movement. (In a future post perhaps I can make a more academic study of this entirely anecdotal hypothesis.) If anything, they appeared to view their work with immigrants and traditionally unorganized workers (domestic workers, day laborers, for example) as challenging the labor movement.

I'm not sure if this language is changing, but I suspect it is and believe it should. As someone doing work connected to the traditional labor movement, what this term evokes for me is the ubiquitous trope, "the labor movement is in serious decline" or "the labor movement is nearly moribund."

But I see hundreds of green shoots in the "labor movement" - so long as we define terms properly. So here's my definition: in my mind, the labor movement refers to the struggle of people who work for a living, people whose livelihood depends on receiving renumeration from others, wage-earners, to improve their conditions both in and out of workplace, to the extent that those outside-the-workplace issues are directly related to the ones within the workplace, like healthcare or childcare.

With that expansive definition of the labor movement in mind, my next posts will discuss some of my observations on the future of that movement.

What happens to the low-skilled workers?

I was fascinated by this project by This American Life and their friends at Planet Money:  "Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America."   Chana Joffe-Walt makes an incredible, thorough study of the increase in people on disability (a part of the Social Security Adminstration) in the country over the past couple of decades.  She makes a compelling point in the final segment that a large driver of this increase was the federal government's Clinton-era shift to move people off of welfare rolls.  Because states had to cover an increasing percentage of the welfare costs, but disability was funded by the feds, these incentives have motivated states to take an active role in helping people submit successful applications for disability benefits. 

But as a labor lawyer, there was another point in the piece that I found particulary fascinating.  First, look at these charts, that show how applications for disability rise and fall with the unemployment rate:





Joffe-Walt argues, "disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills," and quotes an MIT economist who observes that unemployment statistics do not count people on disability:  "'That's a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market,' David Autor, an economist at MIT, told me. 'Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program.'"  On a more anecdotal level, Joffe-Walt talks about a woman with back pain who, it seems, "could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain."  In the radio version (short version and long version) she observes that this reflects a gap between her own world and the world of low-skilled workers:  for Joffe-Walt, and myself, and our coworkers, we are able to work successfully with back problems and knee problems and other physical ailments.  For low-skilled workers, it seems, there may be a mismatch between their job skills and physical abilities (and limitations), on the one hand, and the jobs that are available to them on the other. 

With this fresh in mind, a remark in this Daily Beast article grabbed my attention.  In the provocatively-headlined, "Why a BA is Now a Ticket to a Job in a Coffee Shop", Megan McArdle reviews some recent social science studies suggesting that more and more college graduates are winding up with low-skilled service-sector jobs.  She considers the policy implications of this trend, asking if too many young people are spending too much money on college.  And in the course of this analysis, she observes that as college grads increasingly fill low-wage service jobs, "The workers who can't get those jobs are taking less skilled ones. The lowest-skilled workers are dropping out entirely, many of them probably ending up on disability." This remark certainly seems bourne out by the data in Joffe-Walt's study. 

How can we find a better solution than the sort of jerry-rigged social response of putting people on disability?

[A couple caveats before I move on:  of course there are many folks who so disabled that they can't perform any job.  I'm not talking about them.  Also, there may be some folks who scam the system because they are lazy.  I'm not talking about them either.]

"Unfit for Work" makes clear that while "disability has become a de facto welfare program . . . it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet . . . federal disability programs became our extremely expensive default plan."  The program also fails to serve a welfare-like social purpose because "in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work. Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life."  Not only does disability fail to serve the social purpose of a welfare safety net, but it is an entirely unsustainable safety net, such as it is:  "disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, cost some $260 billion a year. . . . The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016." 

It is clear that we need a new solution.  There are a lot of depressing facts to take away from this.  But I also learned a couple of things from this reporting that I find really valuable and not simply cause for despair:  first, disability is a big part of the answer to the question of what happens to low-skilled (or wrongly-skilled) workers in this dismal economy, and should be borne in mind when considering unemployment statistics; and second, the study makes clear that disability programs serve as a poor stand-in for the welfare, job-retraining, and social safety-net programs we really need.  Now that we see these glaring errors and omissions in our social system, let's get to work at designing better programs that present better solutions to our social and economic problems.  Namely, finding jobs and health care for everyone who is able to contribute to our economy and society. 

Massey Coal, Bloombito, and American freedom of the press

 Bloomberg news today has an article highlighting the plight of a case pending against Massey Coal and its successor, and also providing a good explanation of how the recent Noel Canning decision allows employers a way to delay justice for workers in all sorts of cases.  For a silver lining, I want to add that I think it says something good about America that an article in a plutocrat's eponymous newspaper could have such a forceful headline and message: "Workers Die Awaiting U.S. Justice as Companies Make Limbo".
 

Inequality on the rise, and the Sisyphean task of a labor lawyer

In conenction with posting this incredible chart,

 

 

 

the Maddow Blog concludes,  "I don't imagine Republicans want to hear this, but slashing investments in 'Obamacare,' education, aid to the poor, and foreign aid may advance a far-right vision, but these aren't the policies that are responsible for the existing budget shortfall." The first commenter says that Republicans just don't "get it." Maybe, just maybe, it's no accident, no failure of political comprehension, that certain politicians are promoting policies that "advance a far-right vision" whilst claiming that they serve a different purpose. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think a lot of those folks know exactly what they're doing.  

You see, after watching this viral video, I can't help but look at everything - everything - as part of this larger picture.  (The video is so good I'm embedding it here:)

I  saw a few people, pages, movements post this to Facebook before I finally watched it.  You see, I thought I already knew enough about wealth inequality that this wouldn't show me anything new.  I was wrong.  Somehow, the presentation here blew my mind.  After seeing this, I can't help but see the driving forces behind this increasing inequality in everything.  EVERYTHING.   Congressional budget cuts?   Check. The "far right vision" promoting the cuts described above? Check.  The forces behind those Bush tax cuts?  Bailing out banks but not homeowners? No raise to minimum wage in decades? Student loan debt? Check, check, check. It's all leading to this sorry, shameful, devastating state of affairs.  Even less directly economic things...  Criminal justice system?  Check (privitized jails, prison labor, among others).  War?  Check (See Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex, or Rachel Maddow's Drift.) 

Its not so much a conspiracy theory, exactly.  In my mind, it goes more like this:  of course the wealthy and powerful want to hold onto their wealth and power, it's human nature, greed, something less deliberate than a "conspiracy."  This country used to have certain counter-balances to those forces.  We had government regulations on banks and stock trading, minimum wage laws and labor laws, we had unions that consolidated the power of workers to offset the power of companies.  Now, it seems that so many forces are coming together creating the situation you see in the video.  Laws are being taken off the books, regulators are being defunded, unions are weakening.  Companies are consolidating, too, and these larger companies (say, Walmart) and their power over their enormous supply chains and networks of subcontractors creates even greater power that is more difficult to fight against.  Citizens United.  More and more money in politics, and more need for politicians to fundraise, and more need to listen to lobbyists.  The minimum wage wasn't intended to keep up with inflation, and hasn't been raised in decades.  There are so many forces contributing to where we are now.

So then, the next thing that comes into my mind - as I'm sitting here in front of a computer because I'm supposed to be working, so work is on my mind - is that the the trajectory of my career has been to move from helping the powerful consolidate their power (as a Big Law lawyer) to having a job where I am fighting against this trend.  Co-workers in my federal labor law agency are constantly bemoaning our lack of power, the right's incessant assault on our agency despite that lack of power, the sad fact that our process and remedies so often fail to help the workers we are meant to protect.  I have taken a more optimistic view, but have struggled to articulate it in a way that doesn't sound purely naive in these conversations.  But I think this finally gives me a framework to understand the positives and the limitations of my job.  You see, in putting all my energy into enforcing the remnants of a law meant to protect workers' collective power, I am at least moving the right direction in the Sisyphean task of fighting against rising inequality.  (When I say this, I actually envision a little guy trying to keep a boulder from sliding down a hill, and he exerts all his effort just to hold the boulder in place, but at least it doesn't run over him and go crashing down the hill.) If your goal is provide quick and certain remedies for workers who are wronged by their employer, my agency will disappoint you.  But if you view federal labor law as a lucky anachronism, a law supporting a movement that both should have been erased years ago, but despite all odds, still exist, then your view will be different.  To me, it seems that just doing my job, and doing it well, is a step in the direction of supporting the New Deal-era notions of collective worker power against the increasing consolidation of power among the powerful. 

By looking at my job in these terms, I can take a step back and ask whether there is a place where I can fulfill this goal more effectively, or whether I'm contributing something where I am (or again, whether I'm being naive, or just trying to justify making a comfortable government salary instead of a less comfortable non-profit one). 

My father worked in a steel mill in upstate New York until the once-vibrant steel industry was finally put on its knees. He survived takeovers by Koreans, Spanish, and some other foreign-owned companies I'm forgetting, until he was one of the last employees remaining.  I'm a little afraid that this will be my fate as a labor lawyer: that I'll duke it out as Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce wage war on my little agency, until one day, the whole thing will finally be shut down and I'll go out with it.  And join my fellow 99-percenters, I suppose, who were rendered redundent by the changing forces of our economy.  But until then, there are some workers who need some justice, however delayed, and an employer that needs to answer to me, whatever that's worth, for the war it is waging against its employees. 

What a week (or two) ....

The last ten days have been such an emotional rollercoaster!  I spent the last few days in Florida, but today was the first time in ten days that I came home to an apartment with electricity, heat, water, hot water, cable, and internet.  It was about eleven days ago that Hurricane Sandy hit New York; with it, my apartment, my office, and the rest of lower Manhattan, lost power.  With the loss of electricity came the failure of pumps to send water to higher floors like mine and the loss of steam to provide heat to the building.  The elevators didn't function and the stairwells had no emergency lighting, so I used a flashlight to illuminate the eighteen flights I learned to skip down and trudge up. 

On the first day, my concerns were light: we packed up our fridge, filling three bags with things like frozen wild-caught salmon and the autumn stew I'd cooked the day before (preparing to huddle at home but without thinking through the implications of power-loss), and brought them to a friend's restaurant in midtown.  We had a car, we drove uptown, spent the day with friends, found a hot shower and watched tv; returned home to our dark - yet romantic - apartment.  The next day was similar, only we spent it in Brooklyn instead of uptown.  The day began well; we enjoyed brunch in Fort Greene (on a Wednesday!), but by evening I was in a state of culture shock.  Williamsburg was celebrating Halloween while I worried where to sleep that night.  My husband was leaving that night for a business trip, and we were worried about my safety in our very dark apartment building in our very dark neighborhood.  Would I be safe walking up eighteen flights of a pitch-black stairwell to a pitch-black hallway with many of my neighbors gone?  We decided I'd be safe enough to sleep at home and went for a quick dinner in the closest neighborhood with power, just over the Williamsburg Bridge.  In W'burg, people were dressed in halloween costumes and laughing drunkenly.  They felt very far away.

On the third day of no power, I headed uptown by myself.  My husband had successfully flown out, from a surprisingly-functioning JFK airport, and I braved the city on my own.  Driving uptown was like passing from third-world to first-world country; the analogy that comes to mind - though I can't vouch for its accuracy - is travelling from East Berlin to West Berlin.  Except here, we didn't need passports and there were no border guards; I was freely let into this other part of town that felt a world apart.  Downtown had no traffic lights, and at each intersection I slowed and amicably negotiated with the pedestrians, bikers, and other cars for the right of way, happy to stop and let the pedestrians cross where I saw them.  Our system worked smoothly and I grew comfortable with the opportunities to do favors for others, and felt cooperative with the other cars on the road, and made good time getting uptown.  And then, I passed 39th street and suddenly, there were traffic lights and horns honking and pedestrians carrying shopping bags still in the crosswalk after the light had changed.  The city was back to normal here, but I didn't feel normal and I didn't feel ready to be aggressive and fast and confident.  But here I was, exiled to this place because I couldn't stay in my world.  I hadn't felt this kind of culture-shock since returning home from a semester abroad in Mexico in 1997.  But I spent the day with a good friend and her adorable kids, and though disorienting, it was nice to spend so much time with them.

It was getting colder, and with my husband gone, I was getting lonelier, so I spent the night with friends in Brooklyn.  They'd had to return to work at their offices in midtown, so I picked them up at their offices and then picked up my food I'd left in my friend's walk-in cooler, and happily went to their apartment and had a home-cooked (my home! my cooking!) meal and wine and I felt warm and happy.  I realized that there's something nice - always, but especially after you are married - about needing to rely on people, and about the opportunity to spend time with friends relaxed in their homes.  I've always been a little too independent and self-reliant, and now that I am married, I seem to only rely on my husband and rarely have occasion to seek help and comfort from others. 

The next day I drove them to work, because they needed transportation and I needed to have two other people in my car to be allowed back into Manhattan, thanks to the Mayor's new HOV requirements.  But really I had also discovered how comforting it was to be able to help my friends, especially when they were helping me and we could be there for each other.  That next day, I finally felt settled enough to look outward and try to figure out how to help others who were really suffering in the storm.  I'd been disoriented and unsettled for a few days, but I knew I was incredibly blessed to have a car, and money to eat in restaurants, and friends who had opened their homes to me (and who had homes that they could share), and an apartment that had survived the storm intact, and the strength and health to go up and down 18 flights of stairs.  How absurdly privileged I was that my chief concern on the first day was for my salmon and gourmet ice cream.  So I decided to try to help my neighbors. 

There are lots of elderly people here, most of whom bought apartments here back when the building was limited-equity, affordable housing.  I was prepared to get involved in food distribution efforts by climbing the stairs that they were unable to climb.  My volunteer work took a different turn, however.  I began inquiring about how to help, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a group of National Guardsmen distributing FEMA food (which is apparently the same as military food and looked pretty disgusting) to the hungry and devastated and low-income people in my neighborhood.  When I arrived, there were ten long empty tables set up, a line of people stretching down a long block, and a tape dividing the people from the tables.  Within the tape, next to the tables, were about ten civilian volunteers, about twenty-five National Guardsmen in fatigues, and one Salvation Army Captain in full regalia.  They were waiting for a military truck to arrive with the food, and once it did, the Guardsmen got to work unloading boxes and stacking them on, under, and next to the table.  We made quick work of organizing the boxes on the table and opening them, and then a policeman cut the tape and my neighbors began arriving to eagerly pick up their food. 

In all of this, I somehow discovered a sort of leadership role for myself, not in a "bossy" way (which I always fear), but in a doing-what-needs-to-be-done sort of way.  When I learned that each person would receive three food packets, I helped communicate to the other volunteers down the long tables.  When I learned that each person would get 3 packets for each family members they were picking up for, I communicated that information.  When I saw that many volunteers and Guardsmen hadn't understood this and didn't realize people could take food for more than just themselves (and were refusing to give them food for their family members), I tried to explain to them and then sought out the Salvation Army Captain to suggest that he clarify to everyone.  When the National Guardsmen (they were so young and hard-working and earnest!) had trouble doing the math on how many packets of food per household, I helped them: a whole box! a box plus these three! remove three then give them the rest of the box!  One guy, apparently stressed by this kind of math, said so genuinely, "Boy, I'm so glad you're here!" It wasn't a volunteer-task anyone would ever dare to predict ahead of time, but I'm sure that I helped make the procees run more efficiently.  New volunteers arrived and approached me - me! - to ask how to get involved.  When we were done, I brought one of these new volunteers to the food distribution in my building, and got involved there, similarly helping the process run smoothly.  My involvement never required me to go up and down stairs, as it turned out.  I felt satisfied when it was done; I had found a way to use my skills to be useful to these projects. 

The next day, I flew to Florida, away from the cold and strangeness of storm-hit New York City, to warmth and to the other reality of being just a few days away from the 2012 Presidential election.  I offered my services at the local Obama campaign office, and wondered how that experience would compare to my day of post-Sandy food distribution.  As it turned out, in Florida there was no organizational, leadership role that I needed to search out: the campaign was well-organized, and I was one of the soldiers pounding the pavement.  I got to work canvassing, knocking on doors to people identified by the campaign as Obama supporters but sporadic voters, to "get out the vote" as they say.  I haven't done a lot of canvassing in my life, and learned that it is pain-staking, laborious work.  This was very different than the hour I'd spent handing out FEMA food to hundreds of people.  Here, I could count a handful of apparent, small victories after hours on the road: an older man who intended to vote but didn't know where his polling place was; a few people who seemed to want that additional encouragement to go vote; and going off-list to a house full of Obama yard-signs and stickers to successfully recruit another volunteer.  I felt what they mean when they talk about Obama's ground-game and army of volunteers, because this kind of work requires an army to reach everyone on the extensively-analyzed lists.  Each day I walked with a partner and learned more about these other Obama-supporters - two middle-aged blue-collar women.  I learned more about Central Florida communities (one with mid-size homes and large trees, another with mobile homes and tiny yards) and who the Obama-supporters are in those places: nearly all white, and among the folks who were home when I knocked, many were middle-aged or senior citizens.  My work and time in Florida was spent in counties that voted almost 60% for Romney, and I felt like part of a small club that looked out for its few members.  As I learned, when you wear an Obama button in public in Central Florida, people approach you in restaurants to thank you for supporting the President.  And when the results came in and Obama was re-elected, I felt so gratified to have been a small part of that victory, among the many, many people who put in a few hours or more to help make this happen. 

The next day, this morning, I got on a plane to come back home to my apartment, now with heat and hot water.  I bought a New York Times because it seemed that I ought to have a souvenir of the election results, and an airport employee approached me about it.  In the end, I gave him the special Election section, which he said was excited to read on his lunch break, since I only really wanted the front page.  New York still wasn't back to normal: the A train wasn't running to Manhattan, and another airport employee helped me figure out which subways I could take back to the City.  (In thirteen years, I haven't admitted to needing any help navigating the subways - I can read the map! - so receiving some advice felt both unusual and comforting.) 

And then, my journey nearly over, I stepped off the subway into my neighborhood and collided with the cold rain and wind of today's Nor'easter.  Fortunately, this time I am comfortably secluded in a home with power, heat, and all the comforts of my home back again.  And tomorrow, I'll go back to work for the first time in eleven days, and the President will still be our president, and yet I feel like so much has changed, or happened, or transformed in this time.  In some ways, those changes are out there in the world, and in other ways, it is me who has been changed.  I want to make sure that I remember what this topsy-turvy week felt like, even when New York, and the country, and my life seems to go back to normal.

Nimby is ugly, democracy is messy, but somehow it all works

As I just mentioned on facebook, after an hour or so of community board 3 subcommittee on liquor licensing, I am astounded that anyone ever bothers and manages to open bars and restaurants in new York City, let alone the sheer number that we see. The forces of not in my backyard negativity are astounding. As this issue has emerged concerning our immediate neighborhood, my husband and I have been commenting to each other that we moved to the Lower East Side from the suburbs of Jersey because we wanted the vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood we could only find in Manhattan. We thought it was obvious that all Manhattanites thought like us, but I am seeing just how wrong that assumption is. For example, I am now watching a request for a tiny Japanese restaurant on an East Village side street. Some of the commentators opposes to the license are remarking that there are so many Japanese restaurants in the area, we don't need another. To me, this point is more a threat that this business won't survive than a reason to discourage it in the first place. Why not let the market decide if, in fact, we need another Japanese restaurant? I am embarrassed to note that another concern voiced was that the owner, a Japanese woman, does not speak English very well so who can these people complain to? Is that not flat out nativist? What happened to the American dream, and the beautiful diversity of New York City?

As for the bar application that brought me here in the first place, my neighbors complained that we are a residential neighborhood and should stay that way; they complain that opening a bar will guarantee drunks and criminals; that the noise will disturb them; that it should be denied simply because it is a block away from schools and churches. This is New York City! I had no idea this went on here. The fact is that in our particular few-block radius, there are very few bars and restaurants. This fact is what drives many of the supporters who want more neighborhood nightlife spots. But even more so, this fact makes me impressed that these particular proprietors are willing to take the risk of opening a new business in a neighborhood that does not have a bar-going reputation. I have heard that 1 out of every 3 new restaurants in NYC fails within a year. Given this, I am amazed at the uphill battle people go through to even bother trying.

But the fact is, if you look around the city, it appears that somehow this mix of business and democracy works. People are able to have their say, perhaps even to encourage and persuade business owners to make certain concessions in the way they operate - schedule, offerings, noise control - and businesses are able to open and, with any luck, thrive. I'm just observing for now, but with an eye toward getting more involved in the community governance and institutions soon.
My questions: Just how, and how well, does this balance of democracy and business work? How much of these community reactions are simple inertia and fear of change and how much is legitimate concerns about changes that should not be permitted or concessions that should be made before a business can open? Do these community boards ultimately have any power over the licensing authority? How much influence do they have? If I were to get involved, what would be the purpose really, in terms of what I might hope to accomplish for the community (and for myself of course)?