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.