Saturday, August 30, 2014

Seniors Fighting to Survive in RVs

ECONOMY

AlterNet / By Lynn Stuart Parramore

Shocking Picture of What Life Will Look Like When

You Can't Afford to Retire

Will you be ready for the life of a nomad, permanently in search of temporary work?August 25, 2014 |

In a must-read article in the current issue of Harper's magazine, journalist Jessica Bruder, adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, adds a new phrase to America's vocabulary: "Elderly migrant worker." She documents a growing trend of older Americans for whom the reality of unaffordable housing and scarcity of work has driven them from their homes and onto the road in search of seasonal and temporary employment across the country. Packed into RVs, detached from their communities, these "Okies" of the Great Recession put in time at Amazon warehouses, farms and amusement parks, popping free over-the-counter pain reliever to mask the agony of strained muscles and sore backs. And when they can't hold up any longer?

The RV sometimes becomes a coffin.

Since the financial crisis ripped the security out from under millions of people, the bulk of our politicians, including President Obama, actually tried to reduce, rather than increase, Social Security. The absence of pensions, along with the inadequacy of 401(k)s, skyrocketing healthcare and job insecurity and unemployment, are sending more and more people scrambling to figure out a way to keep body and soul together. Even grandparents are joining the ranks of those for whom life has become a game of Survivor. In an email interview, I asked Bruder about this alarming trend and what it means for the country, now and in the future.

Lynn Parramore: In your recent article in Harper’s, you describe a trend of downwardly mobile elderly folks traveling the country in RVs in search of temporary and seasonal work. How many people are we talking about? How fast has this trend been emerging?

Jessica Bruder: Though no one keeps an official tally of how many older Americans are doing this kind of work, their ranks appear to be growing rapidly in the wake of the housing bust and market crashes.

Amazon first hired a handful of migrant full-time RVers in 2008 through a program the company later named “CamperForce.” As of 2014, it had expanded to employ some 2,000 workers, according to a recruiter I met in Quartzsite, Arizona. The American Crystal Sugar Company taps the same labor pool each fall to staff its annual sugar beet harvest, and their recruitment numbers are up, too. This year, they’re hoping to recruit 600 "workampers," up from 450 the year before.

LP: What’s the gender breakdown among these traveling workers? What kinds of work are men and women doing?

JB: I was impressed by how many older, single women I met among the working nomads, from a tarot reader living in a former convict labor van she’d transformed into a roving gypsy boudoir, to an ex-medical technician who managed to fit her whole life—along with a Shih-Tzu, a lovebird and a loquacious African Grey parrot—into a 10.5-foot Carson Kalispell sport trailer.

The gender breakdown was roughly even. Employers don’t discriminate when doling out hard or dirty work, whether it’s scrubbing campsite toilets or walking 15 miles a day on a concrete warehouse floor to pack Amazon’s holiday orders.

LP: Amazon’s ads for CamperForce Associates sound so upbeat about the opportunities for older workers: recruiting “flexible and enthusiastic RV’ers with a positive, can-do attitude to join us in our warehouses,” with an emphasis on “fun” stuff like prizes and “community activities.”

What’s the reality of the actual work experience, based on your investigation?

JB: The ads are surreal. They sound like an invitation to summer camp, and not just the ones for Amazon jobs. “Feel like a kid again!” and “Hey workamper, it’s time for fun!” are a couple slogans used by recruiters for Adventureland, a theme park in Altoona, Iowa where migrant workers run the rides, games and concessions for $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. Recruitment materials for the beet harvest, with 12-hour overnight shifts in subzero temperatures, refer to the work as “an unBEETable experience!”

This stuff is propaganda, pure and simple. It panders to the illusion that older Americans are free to retire, working only for fun, rather than acknowledging the reality that many folks need to keep bringing in money to survive.

Much of the work is hard and physically taxing. Several people I met dropped out of the Amazon program after a few weeks because their bodies just couldn’t take it. Others suffered from “trigger finger,” a tendon condition that can be caused by repetitive movements like UPC scanner use. Many RVs I visited looked like mobile apothecaries, stocked with Icy Hot pain-relief gel, foot-soaking tubs with Epsom salts, and bottles of Aleve and Advil.

LP: What kinds of social services are these people able to get when they’re moving around? How do they get Social Security checks, or state-based Medicaid, or Obamacare?

JB: Many traveling workers establish permanent addresses in states like Texas and South Dakota, where residency requirements are lax and taxes are low, so they’re still eligible for many social services and can get their mail forwarded to wherever they’re stationed.

But there are challenges. For example, states often require Medicaid recipients to visit local doctors, which doesn’t work when you’re on the road. And I met folks who simply couldn’t afford to have an extra $100 deducted each month from their social security to get Medicare coverage. Many rely on the cheap medical services they can get in places like Los Algodones, Mexico, known for cut-rate dentists and eye doctors.

LP: What happens to these people when they are too sick to work?

JB: They get by the best they can, relying on each other or their families. I met a lot of parents and grandparents who hated the idea of leaning on the next generation, but would do it in an emergency. For some, there’s no good answer to this question. I heard a couple harrowing stories of older migrants who died in their RVs.

LP: What does this trend reveal about the changing nature of work in America, and the direction in which many of us are headed?

The social contract is falling apart. With the death of pensions and the increase of short-term, temporary jobs bearing no benefits, we’re moving toward a winner-take-all economy with no safety net to help people weather hard times.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU. She is the director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

Friday, August 29, 2014

Fight for Unions to Grow Stronger

Why Fight For Unions? So We Can Fight An Economy Rigged Against Us

BY DAVE JOHNSON

DAVE JOHNSON

The other day I wrote about how FedEx has been pretending that their employees are not employees, which gets around labor standards for things like overtime, family leave and the rest.

This misclassification game is just one way that big companies have been rigging the rules to give themselves an edge, getting around what We the People set down for our democracy.

The result, of course, is even more people paid even less with even worse working conditions. And the bad players get an advantage that drives out the good ones.

Like misclassification, this game-rigging, cheating, edge-seeking, rule-bypassing stuff is everywhere you look. (Rigged trade deals, corporate tax “deferral” and inversions, corporate campaign donations, too-big-to-fail banks, Congressional obstruction, etc. and etc…) This rigging of the game in favor of the ultra-wealthy gets worse and worse.

Why is this so? Because the rules set down by our democracy can’t be enforced unless We the People can organize to be powerful enough to overcome the great wealth and power of a few ultra-billionaires and their corporations. Without the ability to organize, we are on our own as individuals against great wealth and power.

This is where labor unions come in. Working people organizing into a group so they are not fighting this power alone as individuals gives them a chance to demand a slice of the pie.

Campaign for America’s Future has released a report, “Inequality: Rebuilding the Middle Class Requires Reviving Strong Unions.” The introduction explains that, “Government policy helped strengthen the hand of workers and build the middle class coming out of World War II, and today government must once more become an ally of working people. The effort to make that happen will meet fierce resistance, but the report shows that the first steps have begun.”

CAF’s Bob Borosage writes about this in, “Inequality: A Broad Middle Class Requires Empowering Workers“:

Working family incomes haven’t gone up in the 21st century. Inequality reaches new extremes. Corporate profits are reaping a record portion of the nation’s income, while worker wages wallow at record lows. Three-fourths of Americans fear their children will fare less well than they have.

This Labor Day, we should do more than celebrate workers – we should understand how vital reviving worker unions is to rebuilding a broad middle class.

The raging debate on inequality and its remedies often omits discussion of unions. Inequality is blamed on globalization and technology that have transformed our workforce. Remedies focus on better education and more training, with liberals supporting fair taxes to help pay the cost.

[. . .] The decline of unions is indisputably at the center of America’s growing inequality and hallowed-out middle class. But what is also clear is that reviving shared prosperity and rebuilding the middle class isn’t likely to occur without reviving the ability of workers to organize and bargain collectively.

Summary:

America’s broad middle class was built when Unions were strong, representing over one-third of the private workforce. Strong Unions helped workers win better wages and benefits at the workplace, and championed vital reforms in the political arena — raising the minimum wage, creating Medicare, raising Social Security benefits, workplace safety and more – that helped build the broad middle class.
During those years, workers shared in the increased productivity and profits that they helped to create. Incomes on the bottom actually grew faster than top-end incomes. America grew together.
Then furious corporate campaigns succeeded in weakening Unions. Laws banned powerful Union-organizing tactics. Multinationals wrote trade rules that facilitated moving jobs abroad, enabling companies to threaten workers seeking better wages. Corporations perfected anti-Union strategies. And with the election of Ronald Reagan as President, all gloves were off.
Unions now represent less than 7 percent of the private workforce. As Unions declined, wages no longer rose with productivity. CEOs and investors captured ever higher portions of corporate income. The minimum wage lost value. Corporations gutted pensions and health care plans.
Incomes on the top soared, while those on the bottom sunk. America grew apart.

Economist Stiglitz: 1% Rich Stole 95% Wealth 2009-2012

PERSPECTIVES

Joseph E. Stiglitz: The People Who Break the Rules Have Raked in Huge Profits and Wealth and It’s Sickening Our Politics

May 29, 2014

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

A replica of the iconic Wall Street bull is lifted as a symbol of greed during a protest rally to support low-wage workers as part of National Day of Action in New York City on Tuesday, July 24, 2012. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

This post originally appeared at AlterNet.

I’m an economist — I study how economies work and don’t work. It’s been clear to me that our economy has been sick for a long time. One of the reasons it’s been so sick is inequality and I decided to write an article and a book about it.

Two years ago, I wrote an article for Vanity Fair called, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” which really got to the gist of it. For too long, the hardworking and rule-abiding had seen their paychecks shrink or stay the same, while the rule-breakers raked in huge profits and wealth. It made our economy sick and our politics sick, too.

You all know the facts: while the productivity of America’s workers has soared, wages have stagnated. You’ve worked hard — since 1979, your output per hour has increased 40 percent, but pay has barely increased. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent take home more than 20 percent of the national income.

We have become the advanced country with the highest level of inequality, with the greatest divide between the rich and the poor. We use to pride ourselves — we were the country in which everyone was middle class. Now that middle class is shrinking and suffering.

The Great Recession made things worse. Some say that the recession ended in 2009. But for most Americans, that’s simply wrong: 95 percent of the gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the upper 1 percent. The rest — the 99 percent — never really recovered.

More than 20 million Americans who would like a full time job still can’t get one, incomes are still lower than they were a decade and a half ago, wealth in the middle is back to where it was two decades ago. Young Americans face a mountain of student debt and dismal job prospects.

We have become the advanced country with the highest level of inequality, with the greatest divide between the rich and the poor. We use to pride ourselves — we were the country in which everyone was middle class. Now that middle class is shrinking and suffering.

The central message of my book, The Price of Inequality, is that all of us, rich and poor, are footing the bill for this yawning gap. And that this inequality is not inevitable. It is not, as Rich said yesterday, like the weather, something that just happens to us. It is not the result of the laws of nature or the laws of economics. Rather, it is something that we create, by our policies, by what we do.

We created this inequality — chose it, really — with laws that weakened unions, that eroded our minimum wage to the lowest level, in real terms, since the 1950s, with laws that allowed CEOs to take a bigger slice of the corporate pie, bankruptcy laws that put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers. We made it nearly impossible for student debt to be forgiven. We under-invested in education. We taxed gamblers in the stock market at lower rates than workers and encouraged investment overseas rather than at home.

Let us be clear: our economy is not working the way a well working economy should. We have vast unmet needs, but idle workers and machines. We have bridges that need repair, roads and schools that need to be built. We have students that need a 21st century education, but we are laying off teachers. We have empty homes and homeless people. We have rich banks that are not lending to our small businesses, but are instead using their wealth and ingenuity to manipulate markets and exploit working people with predatory lending.

If we could ensure that everyone who wanted a job and was willing to work hard could get one, we could have an economy and a society that is both more equal and more prosperous.

It is plain that the only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity. If we could ensure that everyone who wanted a job and was willing to work hard could get one, we could have an economy and a society that is both more equal and more prosperous.

To achieve that we need to grow our economy. But we can’t do that when paychecks are not growing and while insecurity is growing, with looming cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

If we have regulators or a Fed chief who protect the bankers’ jobs and bonuses rather than jobs and rights for all Americans, we won’t achieve it.

We won’t achieve it through mindless cutbacks in public spending, whether in schools, hospitals, police or firemen. These are ways to keep our economy sick. And an economy in which 95 percent of the growth goes to the top 1 percent can only be called that: sick.

What we do need is investment in our future — in education, technology and infrastructure.

And our problems are deeper than weak growth. We are losing the ability to call ourselves the land of opportunity. It used to be that what an American could achieve in life was a result of how hard she or he worked. Today, it depends a lot more on the family we are born into – their income and educational attainment. And it’s worse in America than in almost any other advanced country. We are losing the American dream.

If we became the land of opportunity again, we could find our way to being more equal, more dynamic, more prosperous and fairer.

But to achieve this we need markets to work like they are supposed to. We can’t let monopolists and the 1 percent use their power to siphon off more of the country’s income — away from ordinary Americans.

Our democracy is in peril. With economic inequality comes political inequality. We have a Supreme Court that declares that corporations are people and should have unchecked rights to spend money to influence politics. Our unions are being curbed. Rather than a people’s government, we are becoming a government of the 1 percent.

On paper, we may still uphold equality and the principle of one person-one vote. In reality, some voices are heard more loudly — much more loudly — than others. As a result, we have heard far too much from Wall Street, not enough from Main Street and America’s workers.

Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.

One hundred and sixty five years ago, Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” We have become a house divided against itself – divided between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, between the workers and those who would exploit them. We have to reunite the house, but it won’t happen on its own.

It will only happen if workers come together. If they organize. If they unite to fight for what they know is right, in each and every workplace, in each and every community and in each and every state capital and in Washington. We have to restore not only democracy to Washington, but to the workplace.

It will only happen when workers realize that they own much of our country’s capital, through the pension funds, but that we have allowed this capital to be managed in ways that exploit workers and consumers alike.

We academics can describe what is going on in statistics — but it is you who know what is going on by what you see and experience every day.

The challenge facing you has seldom been greater. You are still a small fraction of America. But you are the largest group representing the vast majority of Americans who work hard and play by the rules.

You must get others to join you, to work with you, to organize with you, to fight with you. It is only you who can raise the voice of ordinary Americans and demand what you have worked so hard for. Together, we can grow our economy, strengthen our communities, restore the American dream and re-establish our democracy — a government not of the 1 percent, for the 1 percent and by the 1 percent, but a government of all Americans, for all Americans and by all Americans.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Latino Activist Killed by Salinas Police

Rally in Salinas Demands Justice for Frank Alvarado,

Killed by Salinas Police

Published on July 14, 2014 in Police, Race

Natalie Mendoza, Frank Alvarado’s niece: “Stop Police Brutality. Justice for my uncle!”

Update (7/15/14): Information on Donations to Frank’s Family

On July 10, 2014 at around 5 AM, officers with the Salinas Police Department reportedly shot and killed Frank Alvarado at a private home in East Salinas.

Frank was a member of Santa Cruz-based Sin Barras and spoke out against prison expansion at a rally in Santa Cruz on May 14. His killing was at least the fourth murder by Salinas Police Department cops since March 21, 2014. All four police killings have been of Latino men, and all have occurred in East Salinas.

At the May 14, 2014 rally in Santa Cruz, Frank spoke passionately about the need to budget state money for social programs instead of prison expansion. Frank also shared his personal experience of incarceration, and described his release from prison in July of 2013. He cautioned that building more prisons at the sacrifice of schools and parks will lead to devastating results for California. “You will have your hell if you build those prisons,” he said.

In response to the killing of Frank, the Direct Action Monterey Network called for a rally on Saturday, July 12, 2014 at the corner of S Sanborn Rd & Fairview Ave in East Salinas against police violence and to demand justice for Frank Alvarado.

Demonstrators, including friends and family of Frank from Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties, held signs with messages such as “Stop Police Brutality. Justice For My Uncle!,” “SPD Don’t Shoot Me. I’m On My Phone,” “Another Murder Brought To You By The SPD,” and “Stop Giving Cops Paid Vacation For Murder!”

Speakers at the July 12 rally included Frank Alvarado’s sister, Angélica Garza; Frank’s niece, Natalie Mendoza; as well as Courtney Hanson and Tash Nguyen of Sin Barras, a prison abolition group based in Santa Cruz.

Frank’s sister Angélica said she was born in Watsonville and Frank was born in Salinas. Angélica’s statements included, “I want justice for Frankie,” “He had a big heart,” and “I want to thank every single one of you from the bottom of my heart.”

Frank’s niece Natalie was calm, sad, well-spoken, and angry. She righteously proclaimed, “It’s not right. I’ve never had this much hate in my life for anything else. I’m sad, but I’m more angry than anything else because of how he was gunned down. There was no reason for how he was killed; no way to justify their actions. He wasn’t even armed. We just need justice for him, and everybody else, all the other cases that have gone like this. There needs to be justice, and SPD needs to have a taste of their own medicine.”

[Natalie Mendoza, Frank Alvarado’s niece. Video by Alex Darocy. Duration: 5:19]

Tash and Courtney read a bilingual statement by Sin Barras in memory of Frank Alvarado.

As we mourn Frank’s death and send warmth to his loved ones, we are thinking about how to address histories of racism, interpersonal, and state violence in a way that will move us toward a different society, where premature death doesn’t happen. All people, and particularly people who have experienced incarceration, need and deserve support. Because of criminalization, poverty, and tough-on-crime politicians and cops, law enforcement killing people of color has become a long-standing pattern. As an organization, we believe in holding individual people accountable for their actions, and that includes the police. But we see this as a problem that must be addressed collectively and on a systemic level. The police and prisons create cycles of trauma. These cops are not bad apples; they are taught to pull the trigger. If we want to stop the murder, we need to address the fact that police brutality is systemic and ongoing.

For more information, please see:

Police Officers Kill Fourth Person in East Salinas: Frank Alvarado (July 2014)
Peace Police and Counterinsurgency in Salinas (May 2014)
Families, Residents and Statewide Supporters Fight for Justice in Salinas(May 2014)

Updates (7/15/14):

Frank Miguel Alvarado: August 1, 1974 – July 10, 2014

Frank’s family has invited supporters and those who knew and loved Frank to his memorial today and tomorrow in Salinas.

Frank Miguel Alvarado, 39, native and lifelong resident of Salinas, passed away on July 10, 2014 in Salinas. He was born on August 1, 1974.

Frank is survived by his son, parents, sister, brother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, along with numerous aunts, uncles, cousins and other loving family and friends.

He is preceded in death by his maternal grandmother.

Visitation will be held on Tuesday, July 15, 2014 1-9 pm with a Rosary vigil at 7 pm, all at Healey Mortuary 405 N. Sanborn Rd. Salinas, CA 93905.

A Funeral Mass will take place on Wednesday, July 16, 2014 10 am at the St. Mary of the Nativity Church 424 Towt St. Salinas, CA 93905.

Cremation to follow services.

Bradley Allen is a photographer, Indymedia volunteer, and website developer living in Santa Cruz, California. All content is free for non-commercial reuse, on non-commercial websites. For other use, please contact me. Photo credit and a link to this article is appreciated. Support local independent media.