The American Prospect

Immigration and Urban Revival

Robert J. Sampson

Virtual Reality Gets Real Fred Turner

liberal intelligence

Urban Policing: Who Does It Right?

Nathalie Baptiste

Religious Conscience Versus LGBT Civil Rights

Douglas NeJaime & Reva Siegel

Summer 2015

Boosting Low Pay Organizing From the Bottom Up Rachel Cohen Justin Miller Heather Rogers

The LowWage South

Harold Meyerson

Robots & work Jeffrey Sachs

The Trade Fiasco David Dayen

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contents

volume 26, number 3 Summer 2015

Page 14

Page 30

Page 62

Page 93

5 prospects Cultures of Impunity by Paul Starr 96 Comment An embarrassment of Riches by Robert Kuttner

notebook 9 Betrayers of the Dream by Mark Huelsman 14 World Cup Corruption: The Bigger Scandal by Seema Rajouria 18 We Don’t Need “Modern Asylums” by Harold Pollack & Samuel Bagenstos

Features 20 Immigration and America’s Urban Revival by Robert J. Sampson 25 The Politics of Virtual Reality by Fred Turner 30 cover Package Boosting Low Pay 32 How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy by Harold Meyerson 37 How To Live Happily with Robots by Jeffrey Sachs 40 When Charter schools Go Union by Rachel M. Cohen 46 When Adjunct profs Go Union by Justin Miller 52 A Decent Living for Home Caregivers—And their Clients by Heather Rogers 56 Fast Track to the Corporate Wish List by David Dayen 62 Urban Policing without Brutality by Nathalie Baptiste 70 Conscience and the Culture Wars by Douglas NeJaime & Reva Siegel 74 Bringing Labor Rights to Bangladesh by Robert J.S. Ross

culture 81 Why Mothers and Daughters Tangle Over Hair by Deborah Tannen 84 Get Out of Jail Free by Jesse Eisinger 87 Should Liberals Back Public Employee Unions? by Sam Rosenfeld & Jake Rosenfeld 90 The French Disconnection by Arthur Goldhammer 93 The Sometime Liberal by Roger Lowenstein Cover photo by David Goldman / AP Images

1

contributors

Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, is America’s leading authority on language in everyday conversation in families, at work, and in the public arena. Here, as an essayist, she takes up the tangled subject of hair in mother-daughter relationships.

Fred Turner is has long studied associate prothe interaction fessor of comof technology, munication development, at Stanford and distribution. University. His He discusses most recent how society can book is The reap the rewards Democratic of smart maSurround. chines. “I’m “When I look at convinced we virtual reality can all be winenvironments,” ners in the he says, “I’m coming age surprised by of robots,” he how much the says, “but only challenges of if we act collec20th-century tively to share media worlds the potential are still with us.” benefits.

Jeffrey Sachs

Heather Rogers, journalist and author, explores the low pay of home-care aides. “Caring work, so often allocated to women, is so undervalued in our society,” she says. “Drawing attention to how that takes place—what the mechanisms are that allow it to continue—is an important project for me.”

Robert J. Sampson is a Har-

vard professor of social sciences. “Part of my fascination with urban change stems from witnessing the decline of Utica during my youth, contrasted with unexpected immigration from countries like Bosnia, Vietnam, and Somalia that brought new life to the city.”

Seema Rajouria

Douglas NeJaime

has worked as a journalist and for NGOs in Nepal, and writes about exploitation of Nepali migrants in Qatar building facilities for the 2022 World Cup. “I always feel bad whenever I see so many people leave Nepal to work in foreign countries for a few hundred dollars.”

is a law professor at UCLA and faculty director of the Williams Institute, which addresses sexual orientation and gender identity.

He and co-author Reva Siegel , a professor at Yale Law School, explore limitations of religious-freedom argument used by anti-abortion conservatives and gay-marriage opponents.

Justin Miller is

a writing fellow at the Prospect, and looks at the organizing efforts of adjunct professors, a low-pay contingent position that’s become widespread in higher education.

“It was fascinating to learn the history of this movement, and how it has truly grown from the grass roots.”

co-editors Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr co-founder Robert B. Reich editor-at-large Harold Meyerson art director Mary Parsons managing editor Amanda Teuscher associate Editor Sam Ross-Brown Writing Fellows Nathalie Baptiste, Rachel M. Cohen, Justin Miller proofreader susanna Beiser editorial interns Daniel Block, Lauren Gurley, Katherine Riley, Saahil Desai, Cooper Hewell contributing editors Marcia Angell, Gabriel Arana, Jamelle Bouie, Alan Brinkley, Jonathan Cohn, Ann Crittenden, Garrett Epps, Jeff Faux, Michelle Goldberg, Gershom Gorenberg, E.J. Graff, Bob Herbert, Arlie Hochschild, Christopher Jencks, Randall Kennedy, Bob Moser, Karen Paget, Sarah Posner, Jedediah Purdy, Robert D. Putnam, Richard Rothstein, Deborah A. Stone, Michael Tomasky, Paul Waldman, William Julius Wilson, Matthew Yglesias Director of Business Operations Ed Connors Development Manager Joseph A. Gallant Jr. board of directors Michael Stern (Chair), Sarah Fitzrandolph Brown, Lindsey Franklin, Jacob Hacker, Stephen Heintz, Randall Kennedy, Robert Kuttner, Mario Lugay, Miles Rapoport, Janet Shenk, Adele Simmons, William Spriggs, Paul Starr Fulfillment Palm Coast Data subscription customer service 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) subscription rates $19.95 (U.S.), $29.95 (Canada), and $34.95 (other International) reprints permissions@prospect.org

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Prospects

Cultures of Impunity

by Paul Starr

I

t is sometimes hard for us to recognize problems in our own society that we can readily identify abroad. International human rights and anti-corruption reformers talk about “cultures of impunity” in Third World countries where murder, the looting of economic resources, and other crimes by the powerful regularly go unpunished. The police, high government officials, and their cronies in the private sector not only abuse their power; they do so knowing that they will never be held to account and that their victims know that, too. In such situations, establishing the rule of law involves far more than instituting formal legal procedures. It requires transforming everyday expectations about equality and demonstrating in practice that the powerful can and will be brought to justice.

One of the themes running through our own recent history is that cultures of impunity are also an American problem. Crimes in the financial and corporate worlds with devastating economic repercussions have been met with slaps on the wrist. The police have not been held to account for unjustified killings in minority communities. From churches and the military to college campuses, sexual assault has long been hushed up. Often it’s not just the original crimes but the cover-ups that raise questions about the institutions and implicate their leadership.

In the past, we probably would not have known about many of the episodes that have recently exploded into scandals thanks in some cases to new technology (phones

with video), to courageous victims of abuse willing to step forward, and to communities no longer willing to suffer in silence. The disclosures and protests are a positive sign. But we have a long way to go in ending impunity and assuring that the law applies to everyone.

Changing settled expectations about exemptions from legal accountability is no simple matter.

In all these areas, there is a tension between justice for individuals and reform of the institutions.

On the one hand, when individuals violate criminal laws, we expect them to be held accountable. Individual punishment has a singular value as a deterrent. It also serves as a public statement that the lives and liberties of the victims count in the eyes of the government and that they enjoy the same dignity and respect accorded their fellow citizens.

On the other hand, it is sometimes all too easy to focus on a few bad actors and avoid the larger institutional implications of longstanding patterns of abuse. A culture of impunity is likely to develop only if the leaders of organizations have turned a blind eye to malfeasance or actively concealed it. The top leadership may, in fact, find it convenient to pin responsibility on a few lower-level employees. Punishing individuals may not solve anything in the long run if there is no organizational change.

From the public’s perspective, this should not be an either/ or choice. The public has a right to both individual and institutional accountability. But how to get that accountability as well as

sustained institutional change is extremely difficult.

There is always a seemingly higher

rationale for failing to prosecute crimes by the powerful or by subordinates who enjoy their protection: The collateral damage to the community, the nation, or the world would be too great. When the offenses are those of the big banks and corporations, the higher interest is economic stability. “I

and the public peace and safety. In cases of sexual assault, religious, military, and university leaders may believe that they are serving a higher purpose by preventing their institutions from being tarnished, their subordinates or students from being disgraced at a young age, and their communities from being subjected to ugly public proceedings.

The biases in this kind of moral calculus are obvious once they are

Whether it’s corporate crime, police homicide, or sexual assault, the issue is the same: Does the law apply to everyone? am concerned,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013, “that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute—if we do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” Holder later sought to walk back this statement, but his words were clear enough.

Officials in other institutions fear the repercussions of even acknowledging that crimes have taken place. Police superintendents, prosecutors, and mayors can tell themselves that by squelching inquiries into police homicides they are acting in the best interests of law enforcement

challenged in the public arena.

The calculus doesn’t include the deep effects of a culture of impunity on either the victims or the perpetrators. Those who suffer abuse suffer again when their voices are not heard. Those who commit abuse come to believe in their own privilege and entitlement. In other contexts, elite leaders would have no trouble recognizing that a failure to punish crimes has dangerous effects on incentives—what economists call “moral hazard.” The lack of prosecutions of corporate crime, police misconduct, and sexual assault encourages continued violations of the law. The failure of authorities to bring charges when people take the risk of reporting malfeasance discourages members of those communities from coming

summer 2015 The American Prospect 5

Prospects

forward again in similar circumstances. Yes, there are collateral damages from prosecutions.

There are also collateral damages from failing to prosecute, and they rarely get adequate weight.

Collateral damage as the rationale for not pursuing corruption comes up in a surprising way in an episode that Sarah Chayes recounts in her superb recent book, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security.

After the September 11 attack, Chayes went into Afghanistan as a reporter for National Public Radio and decided to stay in Kandahar to work in a nongovernmental aid effort, an experience that convinced her that corruption in the Afghan government was fueling the insurgency. In 2008, hoping to shift U.S. policy, she joined the staff of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and later became special assistant to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The stunning episode in the book takes place in 2010, when Chayes was working as Mullen’s assistant but remained in Afghanistan to help develop an anti-corruption effort for General David Petraeus. The strategy was going to focus not on isolated cases or petty corruption, but on “structured networks” of corruption reaching the highest levels of the government of President Hamid Karzai. The test case was the arrest on July 25, 2010, of an administrative assistant at the Afghan National Security Council, Muhammad Zia Salehi, whom investigators had identified as a key intermediary in influencepeddling. But before the day was over, Karzai—who had supposedly pre-approved the arrest—ordered Salehi’s release, and charges were eventually dropped. Chayes and her Defense Department colleagues only learned later that Salehi was the bagman for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was paying Karzai millions of dollars in cash. The whole anti-corruption effort was aborted. The U.S. government was too deeply enmeshed

6 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

in the Afghan kleptocracy to do anything about it.

The specter of collateral damage and the protection of the powerful are a big part, but only part, of the story behind cultures of impunity. Another reason for failures to prosecute lies in public deference to authority and what might be thought of as motivated blindness.

Many people simply do not want to see officials they respect and depend on as being responsible for crimes. They are especially disinclined to accept testimony about such crimes from members of minority groups whom they distrust. If doubt exists or can be plausibly manufactured, those in authority get the benefit of it.

Knowing how juries will react, even prosecutors who are sympathetic to victims are unwilling to bring charges unless the crimes are egregious and the evidence is overwhelming. And knowing how unlikely they are to prevail and what the costs to themselves might be, most victims never come forward.

These patterns have deep historical roots. African Americans long had no legal recourse when subject to criminal assaults by whites. The same was true for many women, gays and lesbians, and others for whom the law offered no protection when they were criminally attacked.

Motivated blindness is why video—being forced to see—has been so important in changing public attitudes about police killings. Take the case of Eric Garner, the black man who kept pleading for help and saying, “I can’t breathe” on July 17, 2014, when police in Staten Island, New York, put him in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes illegally. According to The New York Times, the initial police report on the death did not mention the chokehold.

“Without video of his final struggle,” the Times concluded, “Mr. Garner’s death may have attracted little notice or uproar.” The same is true of the murder in April of another black man, Walter Scott,

by a police officer in South Carolina who stopped Scott for a broken taillight. If not for a bystander’s video showing Scott being shot in the back eight times, the officer’s phony story would likely have been accepted.

Only a small number of police killings—fewer than 2 percent, according to a study by a criminologist at Bowling Green State University—ever result in charges. The Garner and Scott cases suggest that if we had video of more such killings, we’d also find that more were unjustified. Of course, with routine video of police work, as many have called for, there might be fewer such killings to begin with.

Although DNA evidence has sometimes served a parallel function in sexual assault cases, it doesn’t resolve crucial questions of consent. Sexual assault is another area where the law falters; only a small fraction of assaults—according to a survey of sexual violence against women, just 5 percent of rapes—are ever prosecuted.

With such formidable barriers to prosecution, the best hope for change probably lies in shaming institutions into internal reforms—changes in their practices and procedures to prevent violence, to make it less difficult for victims to come forward, and ultimately to turn a culture of impunity into a culture of accountability.

Unfortunately, the recent efforts to bring about institutional change of this kind in the corporate world are not greatly encouraging. In his important recent book, Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (reviewed in this issue by Jesse Eisinger), Brandon Garrett explains how federal prosecutors have taken a procedure originally used for juvenile offenders—“deferred prosecution agreements”—and applied it to corporate crime. Under these agreements, a company pays a fine, agrees to reform its internal procedures, and accepts a monitor

of its activities in order to avoid a criminal conviction. Usually, no individual executive is prosecuted, even though the same offenses might earn a long prison sentence if committed outside a big corporation. Corporations, we are told, are people—except apparently when it comes to criminal liability.

If the compliance programs were effective, the failure to prosecute individuals might be more defensible. But all too often the reforms are cosmetic, and the companies don’t change. In 2002, in a case involving illegal marketing practices, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer entered into a deferred prosecution agreement—and then did so in a second case in 2004, and in a third case in 2007, and in a fourth case in 2009. No executives were ever prosecuted. Recounting this history in The New York Review of Books, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wondered “whether the impact of sending a few guilty executives to prison for orchestrating corporate crimes might have a far greater effect than any compliance program in discouraging misconduct, at far less expense and without the unwanted collateral consequences of punishing innocent employees and shareholders.” To deal with corporate recidivism, Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a simple two-strikes-and-you’re-out rule: “No firm should be allowed to enter into a deferred prosecution or nonprosecution agreement if it is already operating under such an agreement—period.”

Although some people may see this proposal as evidence of Warren’s outrageous anti-corporate views, the underlying issue is nothing more than equality before the law, a principle rooted in our oldest traditions. This year, 2015, is the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta, in which the king pledged, “We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.”

In a system of laws descended from that pledge, it is never too radical an idea to try to fulfill it.

“America doesn’t need more cautious half-measures. We need a presidential candidate with a bold and comprehensive Raising Wages agenda.

“That is the standard. We will not settle for less.”

—Richard L. Trumka

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notebook Corinthian Colleges shut down its Everest College campuses last April, displacing thousands of students.

Betrayers of the Dream How sleazy for-profit colleges disproportionately targeted black students

by Ma r k Huel sman

i l lu s t r at i o n b y j o h n r i t t e r ; s o u r c e photo: christine armario / ap images

O

n April 26, an institution of higher education that as recently as 2010 employed more than 6,000 faculty members and another 4,000 in support staff announced that it would close its doors. Corinthian Colleges had enrolled more students than the Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin combined. For the giant forprofit chain founded just 20 years ago, the fall from grace was aided by lawsuits from several state attorneys general and the federal government, and investigations by the SEC. These found a broad

pattern of deception in recruiting students, bogus reporting of job placement data, and a strategy of combining high tuitions and debt levels with a substandard educational product.

Corinthian’s story is a microcosm of the for-profit college sector over a period of three decades, a story dotted by aggressive corporate expansion and creative evasion of federal oversight. On June 8, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced debt relief for some 40,000 former Corinthian students, who collectively owed more than half a billion dollars,

and a relief application process for as many as 300,000 more. “You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for these students,” said Duncan. “This has to be a wake-up call to Congress.”

In the publicity about the government’s belated crackdown on the for-profit education industry, one key fact has not gotten sufficient attention: The students targeted and affected most by fraudulent operators are disproportionately black. The story of predatory for-profit colleges is not unlike that of subprime lending or the proliferation of payday loans.

Wider economic unease was used by the cynical to bring further distress to people of color.

What made possible the forprofit higher education business model was the pot of federal financial aid, including Pell Grants, student loans, and G.I. Bill benefits—combined with inadequate federal oversight. The for-profit sector saw enrollment increase by 225 percent between 1998 and 2008, compared to a 31 percent increase in the total college-going population. This enrollment growth included a massive targeting of students of color.

The University of Phoenix, for example, was spending as much as $400,000 a day on advertising. Ads for these colleges were ubiquitous in communities of color, on commercials for daytime television programs, at bus

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 9

stops and subways, and in other places where black and brown people congregated. They enlisted leaders in the black community to advertise on their behalf, as comedian and television host Steve Harvey has for Strayer University, or as Al Sharpton did when devoting glowing television coverage to the University of Phoenix in a special that was sponsored by the forprofit behemoth.

A 2012 Senate investigation revealed many for-profit recruiting practices that were little more than racial dog whistles. One presentation for recruiters at Vatterott College, a St. Louis– area for-profit, advised recruiters to target the “welfare mom with kids” and “pregnant ladies,” as well as those with records of “recent incarceration” and “drug rehabilitation.” Other colleges had recruiters drop off information at Section 8 housing and unemployment offices, where high numbers of potential low-income and minority students could be found.

The appeal was often vocational.

For-profit colleges issue nearly half (45 percent) of all certificates—short-term credentials that ostensibly provide the opportunity to learn a trade quickly. In the case of many associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs, the appeal resided in the flexibility of class schedules, or

10 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

the ability to go to school from home.

Stefanie DeLuca, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University who has spent years researching and tracking the fortunes of young adults in Baltimore, explains the attraction of for-profits in communities of color.

DeLuca sees “a generation of kids struggling to find out what they want to be,” she says. “They’re not moving to four-year schools in dorms. [But] they have a lot of information and mixed signals coming at them. These kids see these commercials, for the ITTs or the cosmetology schools. They see pictures of people doing things and think ‘I can do that.’” These are students often without the benefit of college counselors, making what appear to be logical decisions based on the signals and available information.

Far too often, the result is a low-value debt bomb, backed nearly entirely by government funding. The average student debt for graduates at for-profit four-year colleges (like many Corinthian campuses) has reached nearly $40,000, nearly $15,000 more than graduates at public four-year colleges, and over $6,000 more than graduates at historically black colleges and universities.

The differences for those seeking two-year degrees are even more

California Attorney General Kamala Harris sued Corinthian, charging that the for-profit company misrepresented job placement rates and its own programs.

stark. Tuition at community colleges nationally is $3,347. At a for-profit, it’s $15,230. Average cumulative debt for black graduates at two-year for-profit programs is nearly $26,000, and 93 percent of students must borrow. At community colleges, which are often competing for the same low-income, adult, or first-generation students, far fewer students borrow and debt levels are nearly $10,000 lower. On average, a black student takes on more debt for a two-year degree at a for-profit college than a white student does for a bachelor’s degree at a public college.

An even larger problem—particularly acute for black and Latino students—is the dropout rate. Only about one in five black students complete a program at four-year for-profit colleges, twice the dropout rate at public and private nonprofit four-year programs. At legitimate community colleges, completion rates are also low, but students at public colleges don’t have to contend with tens of thousands of dollars in debt heaped on them by for-profits. And dropouts are far more likely to become delinquent or default on their loan.

A full 53 percent of student loan borrowers at four-year for-profit programs drop out, including 65 percent and 67 percent of black and Latino borrowers.

Compare this to about one in five borrowers at public four-year colleges and one in three borrowers at community colleges, and you quickly begin to realize that even if for-profits could claim to offer a similar product, it’s one that comes with far greater risk.

And that’s before value is factored in. Estimating the returns on for-­profit degrees—or any college degree—is difficult, given that students enter college at very different levels of financial well-being and academic potential. But Harvard University’s David Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz found that for-profit institutions produced lower earnings for students and far less student satisfaction than other colleges, even after adjusting for the type of students who attend. Another study from George Washington University’s Stephanie Cellini and Latika Chaudhary found that for-profit colleges produced an extremely modest

eric risberg / ap images

notebook

notebook

earnings boost compared to high school graduates, one that’s unlikely to make up for the tens of thousands of dollars in debt taken on by students.

This explains why for-profit colleges enroll about one in ten American college students, but make up around half of all student loan defaults. This also helps explain why the default rate on student loans for black students is nearly six times higher than that of white students.

According to the 2012 Senate

report, the 15 publicly traded for-profit colleges received 86 percent of their funding from federal financial aid in 2011. Given racial wealth disparities, black students are far more likely to be low-income and thus be eligible for Pell Grants, and are also far more likely to need to borrow, and thus be eligible for student loans.

Insatiable demand for higher education in the late 20th century, combined with a lax regulatory environment, garnered Wall Street’s attention in a hurry. Several for-profit parent companies, including DeVry in 1991 and the University of Phoenix in 1994, issued IPOs and immediately became boom stocks. The cash infusion allowed enrollment to soar; Phoenix was enrolling 100,000 students within five years of going public, and grew by more than 25 percent annually.

The enrollment allowed for a form of mission creep. Rather than sticking to a centuries-old objective of offering flexible, short-term degrees or certificates in trades—something that some for-profits often did (and still do) well, many began to offer more two- and four-year programs, trying to emulate their public and private nonprofit counterparts. Between 2000 and 2012, there was a 469 percent enrollment increase in for-profit programs offering bachelor’s and graduate degrees. The result has been far greater debt with little sign of an increase in quality.

The other great impact of Wall Street money was the influence it garnered. Despite warning signs and industry whistleblowers (including those from the University of Phoenix) coming forward during the Bush administration, both the White House and Congress eased restrictions on

At two-year for-profit colleges,

93

percent of African American students borrow, and their average debt is $26,000.

the ability of online colleges to access federal aid funds, as well as rules that attempted to prevent the abuse of incentive compensation for enrolling large numbers of students. The ideological support for the private sector was reinforced by campaign contributions. Between 2002 and 2006, then–Majority Leader John Boehner and the Republican chairs of the House and Senate education committees took in nearly one in five dollars donated by the for-profit college industry. Phoenix alone contributed $11 million to candidates in the 2008 election cycle. The industry’s representatives in the late 2000s resembled a who’s who of influential Republicans and Democrats, including former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, all of whom helped at least prevent any real regulatory or Congressional scrutiny—again, to an industry that received the vast majority of its funding from federal aid. The for-profits became yet another case study in crony capitalism.

These companies even remained profitable during the financial collapse and the recession, thanks in part to a perverse brand of Keynesian countercyclical stimulus: The economy might be on the ropes, but the federally guaranteed student loans kept coming, as students who faced poor employment prospects looked to higher education. Part of the cushion stemmed from the ability to milk the parents of

At for-profits, more students drop out with debt Percentage of student loan borrowers dropping out, 2009 70% 60% 50% 40%

■ white ■ black ■ latino ■ low-income (200% of poverty)

30% 20% 10% 0

Public 4-year

Private 4-year

For-Profit 4-year

Public 2-year

For-Profit less than 4-year

undergraduates. Even though the federal government has set limits on how much undergraduates can borrow, the feds still provide high-interest loans to the parents of undergraduates (called Parent PLUS loans), and a disproportionate amount of these loans flow to for-profit colleges. So colleges found a way to not only maximize the amount that low-income students and students of color could borrow, but they started targeting parental wealth as well. The result, as Suzanne Mettler details in her book Degrees of Inequality, is that ITT and Strayer achieved higher profit margins than both Apple and CocaCola in 2010, with the Apollo Group (which owns Phoenix) and Corinthian not far behind. of these colleges usually boils down to two claims: They enroll the students who are not attending prestigious public or private colleges, and their success rate is reflective of the preparation of the students to whom they cater. The issue has divided the civil rights community—including the NAACP and the National Urban League—as well as members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Some have bought the line that without for-profit colleges, students would be turned away from community colleges already at capacity, and surely wouldn’t be able to attend more selective public or private institutions. It’s a clever defense, and one that might be persuasive—if those students were provided a decent education in return instead of an infusion of debt, often without a degree.

While the for-profits exist in a market of few barriers, they are also a response to the unwillingness of states or the federal government to meet the demand for education with a supply of affordable public colleges.

Starting in the late 1970s, states began to slash higher education funding, to a point where 2012 saw the lowest per-student state spending on higher education in 25 years. Even postrecession, states are funding higher education below pre–financial crisis levels, leaving tuition to carry most of the load. Worse, community colleges—the institutions that offer the best low-cost alternatives to for-profit The core defense

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 11

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programs—receive comparatively less funding from a dwindling state pie.

Consider how this drama has played out in one locale in the news recently because of racial tensions: Ferguson, Missouri. Less than ten miles away from Ferguson sits the most prestigious university in the region: Washington University in St. Louis.

At Wash U., only 10 percent of students are black or Hispanic, and only 6 percent of students are low-income enough to receive a Pell Grant, the lowest percentage in the country. In Missouri overall, students have far less access to opportunities like Advanced Placement courses or extracurricular activities than do their national counterparts—opportunities that could lead to greater participation at schools like Wash U., or at public flagships.

Meanwhile, Corinthian set up three campuses across the state (now all closed), and for-profit colleges operating in the state enrolled nearly 36,000 students in 2013 (down from over 45,000 in 2011)—about the same number as those who attend the flagship University of Missouri, and more than the student populations of Wash U. and St. Louis University combined. And remember Vatterott College, the St. Louis for-profit targeting the “welfare moms” and the “recently incarcerated”?

The Senate found that the cost of a certificate in “Information Systems Security” at Vatterott was $24,500, compared to $4,383 for a similar credential at St. Louis Community College.

d av i d m c n e w / g e t t y i m a g e s

What does the future hold for the

for-profits? After years of growth in both profit and enrollment, nearly the entire sector has seen sharp declines.

Beyond Corinthian’s collapse, enrollment among the major for-profit institutions has drastically fallen across the board. Phoenix alone saw its oncestaggering enrollment of 470,000 reduced to a still-staggering, if much lower, 214,000 students this year.

There are plenty of reasons for the massive retrenchment, but perhaps the most important has been the belated attention on the part of the Obama administration, a handful of Democrats, and even state regulatory officials. For its part, the administration has repeatedly proposed regulations

attempting to link the ability of colleges to utilize federal aid with their students’ ability to pay off loans and maintain student debt in line with their income, and while these rules have been stymied in court, the sector has taken a public-relations beating. Other regulatory arms have also stepped up oversight, including the Federal Trade Commission. In 2013, the FTC released strict guidelines on marketing practices in vocational programs, which make up the vast majority of certificate and even two-year programs.

In addition, the aforementioned Senate report, spearheaded by Tom Harkin, the now-retired chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, pulled back the curtain on an array of recruiting abuses, shoddy academic offerings, and low graduation rates. This, combined with extremely high executive compensation (averaging about $10.5 million) and the fact that almost all of this was coming from federal taxpayers, helped spark the downfall.

Most of the increased attention, though, has taken the form of consumer protection and not civil rights. Unlike the case of subprime lending, which saw a wave of civil rights suits targeted at lenders who willingly misled and targeted communities of color with predatory

Corinthian’s abuses highlighted student indebtedness and triggered protests.

loans, the scrutiny of for-profit colleges has been relatively color-blind.

An additional problem, of course, is that all of this may be relatively temporary. Regulatory attention is only as good as the administration in power, and while we can thank the Obama administration for simply asking Corinthian to make good on its reporting requirements—and withholding the college’s allowance until it did so, leading to its demise—there’s no guarantee that future administrations will be willing to walk that regulatory beat.

In the interim, this whole era requires some reflection on why we placed the delivery of upward economic mobility in the hands of an industry funded generously out of the public coffers, while not demanding that they make good on their promise. Surely, if Congress passed a law banning these colleges tomorrow, it would not erase the inadequate provision of public services, the underfunding of public education, the lack of wage growth, or the unemployment that has plagued so many communities. In the wake of the largest college closure in our history, how many times must this story be told before we say no more?

Mark Huelsman is a senior policy analyst at De¯mos.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 13

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I am a former journalist in

World Cup Corruption: The Bigger Scandal In the shadow of Qatar’s new soccer stadium, Nepali migrant workers face exploitation, injury, and death.

by S e e m a R a j o u r i a

G

anesh Bishwakarma left for Qatar in 2013 to join the thousands of migrant workers hired to work on construction projects for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. He had a dream of earning enough to build a comfortable life for himself and his impoverished family in the Dang District of Nepal. Six weeks later, he was back home, in a coffin. The 16-yearold had died of cardiac arrest, leaving his grief-stricken family with a lost son, in deeper poverty than before.

His dream had taken him on a journey of exploitation and deceit, involving a fake passport, extortionate recruitment fees, and huge debt—typical of what faces Nepali migrant workers.

Two recent events briefly focused the world’s attention on the plight of Nepali workers in Persian Gulf states, mainly Qatar. First were the terrible earthquakes that rocked Nepal on April 25 and May 12, killing more than 8,000 people and razing many villages that are a source of migrant labor. Many such workers were barred from returning home to help in the devastation and perform the last rites for their loved ones because of their terms of employment, which leave them at the mercy of employers who take away their passports and often withhold wages owed. The working conditions are grim, frequently 12 hours a day.

According to Tek Bahadur Gurung, Nepal’s labor minister, his government formally asked construction companies in Qatar to permit Nepali workers to return home after the April 25 earthquake, and to contribute airfare. But workers on World Cup sites were not permitted to go. The Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, the body overseeing World Cup projects in Qatar, reported that more than 500 Nepali workers were given temporary leave—out of more

14 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

than 400,000 Nepalese working on the project.

Qatar, like other Gulf states, applies what’s known as the kafala system of indentured servitude, which limits the rights of movement for foreign workers. This has led to widespread exploitation, with workers’ passports being seized when they reach their destination. The system ties them to their employers for a set period, and they cannot change their job without permission.

The second attention-grabbing event that briefly focused attention on migrant workers in the Gulf was the construction of the stadiums that Qatar is building for the 2022 World Cup. The prosecution of senior FIFA officials for taking bribes raised the question of how the world football federation could have possibly awarded the 2022 soccer tournament to Qatar, a despotic nation with horrific summer heat.

The construction of the stadiums has attracted thousands of Nepali migrant workers to Qatar. All told, some 1.4 million migrants, mostly Nepalese and other South Asians, are working on a $200 billion construction spree. The Nepalese, the largest single national group, typically travel to Doha after borrowing money from family and friends, and often after paying corrupt recruiters. When they arrive, they typically find that the wages and working conditions are far from what was offered. Instead, they are in a status akin to indentured servitude. The Guardian conducted an undercover investigation and found out that Nepali migrant workers are dying at a rate of one person every two days. They are mostly young men who suffer heart attacks or heart failures, or die from workplace incidents or from working in temperatures that are higher than 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).

When the earthquake struck Nepal, migrant workers in the role of indentured servants were not permitted to return home.

Nepal. I’ve worked for donors and civil-society organizations working in human rights and economic development. Filling out the departure form at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport, I was approached by a hesitant middle-aged man from the Terai region of Nepal, asking for help in filling out his own form. The man could hardly read and could not write. He was going as a migrant laborer to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), he said, to work in “some” factory, doing “something.” He did not know the details.

I asked him why he was leaving the comforts of home to go to a strange country for a couple of thousand Nepali rupees. “To make the lives of my family better,” he said. This is the standard answer of almost all the young and middle-aged men and the few women who leave their country every day. The National Population and Housing Census of 2011 places the absentee population of Nepal at more than 1.9 million, nearly 7 percent of Nepal’s total population of about 30 million. Most of these Nepalese are migrant laborers, and some 300,000 leave their homeland to seek work every year. Emigration from Nepal has increased by 37 percent in the past two years.

Nepal underwent a decade-long civil war that ended in 2006, and is still grappling to find an economic and political foothold. The biggest challenge has been creating enough jobs for its ever-increasing youth population. The exact unemployment rate in the country is debatable, but the figure is estimated to be around 46 percent.

And 25.2 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

The combination of poverty and unemployment is why the only international airport in the country is full of people like the weary and lost man who approached me. This was not the first time someone had approached me, and it would not be the last, either. Another time a few years ago at the New Delhi airport, I met a young boy who had been turned away from immigration in Qatar and was totally bewildered, with not a cent in his pocket. When he got into the airport in Qatar, the most common destination for Nepali migrant workers, the immigration

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officials did not let him through because his papers were not legal.

The overseas recruitment company to which he had paid more than 100,000 Nepali rupees (about $1,000) in order to get a job in Qatar had apparently duped him. He was stuck in New Delhi with no money to fly back to Nepal. I often wonder what became of him. He was handed fake contract papers by the recruitment agency that exploited his poverty and innocence, very likely putting him into significant debt. (The labor agreement between Nepal and Qatar forbids recruitment fees, but recruitment agencies charge up to $1,500 per person.)

Qatar is an attractive destination because of the promise of higher wages and potentially skilled work.

The government of Nepal tries to set minimum wages for Nepalese migrant laborers based on skill levels.

It seeks to persuade the government of Qatar to enforce these wage standards, but they are routinely violated.

Even so, the promised wages are generally higher than anything on offer on Nepal; they act as a magnet. Direct flights from Kathmandu to Doha also make it an easily accessible destination for Nepali workers. Now there are multiple flights every day that take migrant workers to Doha.

Labor migration to the Persian Gulf, Korea, India, and other nations has changed Nepal from a mostly farming economy to one in which the fastest-growing sector is remittances.

On the one hand, the workers are horribly exploited, and in some respects remittances substitute for genuine economic development. On the other hand, this money flow, almost 30 percent of Nepal’s gross domestic product—as much as 40 percent according to some estimates—is a mixed blessing. According to Central Bureau of Statistics, fully 58.8 percent of households received remittances in 2010 and 2011. That represented an increase from 31.9 percent in 2003– 2004, and 23.4 percent in 1995–1996.

TVs and mobile phones have become common. People are betterfed and better-dressed than before.

Many have access to health facilities.

Brick homes are displacing mud huts,

and private schools have proliferated. Thanks in part to remittances, the extreme poverty rate (officially defined as less than a dollar a day) dropped from 33.5 percent in 1990 to 16.4 percent in 2013.

With husbands gone, women are both more empowered and more responsible for family affairs. As women are thrust to the top of the family hierarchy, many are unprepared to take on the responsibility of family, home, and day-to-day survival all by themselves. While migration has offered new income opportunities, it also exposes women to trafficking. Reports indicate that 10,000 to 15,000 persons (mostly women and children) are trafficked every year for commercial sex and forced labor.

Many of these girls find themselves

Nepali workers queue up for a chance to work overseas—for a pittance.

infected with HIV. Seasonal labor migration to India has also emerged as a major factor driving the localized HIV epidemic in Nepal.

A 2011 World Bank report warned that “no country has ever succeeded in sustaining growth and job creation on remittance alone.” In many respects, the reliance on remittances is a reflection of the collapse of Nepal’s own economy. Nepali economists warn of a potential “Dutch disease” of overreliance on one sector. Nepal’s dependence on remittances means that an economic downturn in the overseas destination countries and a return of migrants could leave Nepal’s economy vulnerable to events it can’t control.

With a large number of its people working abroad, Nepal has also lost a lot of productive labor.

The root cause of the migrant labor problem lies in Nepal, where there is too little domestic economic activity— and too few jobs. For the migrants, it is better to face the horrible working conditions in the Persian Gulf and be able to send money to their families so their children can go to decent schools, elderly parents can eat well, and their wives can wear good clothes than to face being unemployed and poor in Nepal.

There are many villages in Nepal where labor migration has become central to the culture of the community. Relatives, friends, and neighbors who work abroad become role models.

Those who do succeed overseas gain status when they return home. Korea, Malaysia, and the Persian Gulf are preferred destinations, as well as neighboring India, which is easy to get to.

On paper, the government of

Nepal has significantly strengthened the labor migration framework since granting permission for migrants to work in foreign countries, beginning in the early 1990s. Three progressively stronger laws regulating the terms of foreign employment, passed in 2007, 2008, and 2012, have offered outward migrants legal protection. The Foreign Employment Act of 2007 provides for fines and even imprisonment in cases where recruitment agencies break the law. But enforcement is spotty and penalties for the most

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 15

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common violations are relatively low.

For recruiting agencies, an occasional fine is just a cost of doing business.

And there is a great deal of extralegal recruitment activity as well.

Though the act does not allow unregistered individual agents to recruit for foreign employment, it does not penalize recruitment agencies that use unregistered agents. As a result, efforts to register agents with recruitment agencies have largely failed, and agencies are rarely held accountable for the actions of the agents on whom they rely. This invites rampant extortion of the poor, unsuspecting young men desperate to leave the country for employment.

Individual recruitment agents are substantially beyond the control of the authorities. These agents function outside the legal framework. Undocumented workers, especially women, often go to India, an easy access point for migrants who lack formal documentation; they can easily fly on to other countries from there. Agents in India and Bangladesh facilitate the process, using fake passports and false contract papers, as well as forged tourist visas.

Migrants themselves, often women working as domestic servants, are drawn to the illegal sector because it provides faster documentation

and looser monitoring than the official process. Because these domestic workers are undocumented, they cannot turn to either the home government or the host government for help when they are abused. One such worker was Shanti Maya Dong, who slipped through India to work in Kuwait as domestic help. After five years on the job, she jumped from the fifth floor of a building and was sent home paralyzed and in a coma after spending four years in a hospital in Kuwait. After four years at home, she died in her bed. The family did not get any compensation, as Dong was an illegal worker. But the family is so mired in poverty that in spite of this tragedy, two of her brothers went for work abroad.

The deeper problem is that the government of Nepal has almost no effective leverage over the government of Qatar. Despite International Labour Organization conventions against migrant labor abuses, those norms are seldom enforced. Nepal itself has yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the ILO Domestic Workers Convention, or the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. More powerful

What migrants encounter in Qatar: Worker accommodations are shared with old paint cans and other toxic waste.

Annesty International found “an alarming level of exploitation.”

Remittances from migrant workers abroad can improve living standards at home, but at the expense of true economic development.

governments, like the U.S. and the EU, which might press Qatar to improve its labor standards, have bigger fish to fry, including oil access and national security concerns. Nepal’s own embassy in Qatar is understaffed and overwhelmed with complaints.

Thus, Nepali migrants to the Gulf are left with no real protection.

If the Nepal government is not in a position to create jobs for the legions of men and women leaving the country, it should reform the legislative and judicial system as well as find a greater political will to implement and enforce existing laws. It should also strengthen and strictly enforce rules for recruitment agencies so that prospective workers know their rights and don’t get duped.

In 2014, Qatar promised to replace the kafala system of indentured servitude with new legislation, but according to the Qatari Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, it still hasn’t done so.

The Nepal government must pursue this with Qatar to guarantee the safety and human rights of Nepali workers.

It must also ensure that its embassies in countries like Qatar are fully equipped, with trained staff and adequate resources to protect its citizens.

This past April, Qatar’s labor minister, Abdullah bin Saleh al-Khulaifi, visited Kathmandu, promising reforms. Yet he also said that his nation would be recruiting even more Nepali workers to work on World Cup stadiums and related infrastructure projects.

Though this is seemingly good news for Nepal, which needs as much resources as it can get to rebuild the country after the two earthquakes, the question is: At what cost? The most important thing Nepal could do for its citizens is to ensure a stable government that creates conducive infrastructure for jobs, so that the youth of Nepal do not have to leave their country and subject themselves to brutal exploitation in order to survive.

Seema Rajouria has worked as a journalist and for several civil society organizations in Nepal, as well as the U.N. and the Asian Development Bank. She is currently a graduate student at the Heller School at Brandeis University.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 17

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We Don’t Need “Modern Asylums” We need to make deinstitutionalization work for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

By H a r o l d P o l l a c k a n d S a m u e l B a g e n s t o s

A

move is afoot to undo one of the great social policy successes of the past half-century—the commitment to serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in their homes and communities, rather than in institutions. Although those who propose to “bring back the asylum” point to real gaps in our current community services, their proposed solutions are misdirected. Instead of returning to the flawed models of the past, we need to strengthen community-based services that promote independence and integration, even for those with very significant disabilities.

Fifty years ago, parents of children with intellectual or developmental disabilities were often advised to institutionalize those children for life. In the absence of community supports and basic services, institutionalization often seemed to be the only alternative.

In theory, institutions provided care and protection. In practice, many were unsafe, unsanitary, and marked by abuse and neglect. The Willowbrook State School on Staten Island in New York City became infamous in a 1972 Geraldo Rivera broadcast that showed ill-clothed and underfed residents, crowded in shadowy rooms with nothing to do all day. Lawsuits and journalistic exposés uncovered similar institutional abuses across the country.

And even institutions that were not so marked by neglect denied their residents basic day-to-day freedoms that many of us take for granted, such as the opportunity to choose what, when, and with whom to eat a meal, or even when to turn out the light at night.

Thanks to profound changes in policy and standards of care, the vast majority of Americans living with intellectual or developmental disabilities now live in their own homes, with family members, or in small-scale group homes. Particularly among young

18 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

people, the effects have been dramatic.

In 1977, an estimated 54,000 children and youth diagnosed with intellectual or developmental disabilities lived in large institutions. Families and policy-makers were understandably concerned that many of these young people, who often had serious accompanying physical or psychiatric disabilities, required services that could only be provided at large public institutions.

Yet, by 2008, in large part because of inclusive educational services, better medical care, and improved family supports, the number of institutionalized young people declined by roughly 97 percent, to 1,869.

Those changes resulted from hard work by concerned parents and professionals, policy-makers and public interest lawyers—and not least by people with disabilities themselves, who organized self-advocacy groups that pushed for opportunities to live full lives in the community. We should be proud of their achievements. They have helped hundreds of thousands of Americans live safer, happier, more independent lives.

Consider two examples, drawn from our own personal and professional lives. Harold’s brother-in-law Vincent lives with significant intellectual disability as a result of fragile X syndrome.

Fifty years ago, his parents bravely resisted medical advice to have Vincent placed into institutional care. He now lives in a small group home, participates in a broad range of community activities, and leads a life that was all but inconceivable when he was born.

In 2011, while Samuel was serving as principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, the United States Department of Justice issued a report on Virginia’s still heavily populated institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The Justice Department

In theory, institutions provided care and protection. In practice, many were unsafe, unsanitary, and marked by abuse and neglect. Even institutions that were not so marked by neglect denied their residents basic day-today freedoms.

found, among other things, that those institutions exposed residents to “repeated accidents and injuries” and that staff physically restrained residents “as an intervention of first, rather than last, resort.”

In January 2012, Virginia entered into a comprehensive settlement with the Justice Department, which will ensure that Virginians with intellectual and developmental disabilities receive services in their homes and communities. Many people who left Virginia’s institutions have benefited enormously. Doug, a 41-year-old man with Down syndrome who moved into a community setting during the federal investigation, exemplifies the best possibilities. As a report produced by the Justice Department details, Doug has significant cognitive disabilities and relies on supports to help him with basic needs.

His parents feared that his disability would make it impossible for him to live in the community. Yet after 20 years of living in an institution, Doug blossomed. He began to walk after many years of using a wheelchair and began to eat solid foods. He now visits stores, restaurants, and the local bowling alley with his friends.

Doug’s story exemplifies—in unusually dramatic form—how thousands of people have benefited from these and similar policies.

Those who work in human services know a lot about how to support people with mental disabilities in their own homes and communities.

Unfortunately, our politics and governance have often failed to support the required services, sometimes with tragic results. Katherine Flannery Dering’s recent harrowing family memoir, Shot in the Head: A Sister’s Memoir, a Brother’s Struggle, recounts the repeated failure of communitybased mental health services to serve her late brother, Paul Flannery, who lived with schizophrenia.

And now, a troubling development is brewing. Some respected ethicists and commentators suggest that our country went too far in the great waves of deinstitutionalization.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, bioethicists Dominic Sisti, Andrea Segal, and

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Ezekiel Emanuel issued a frank call to “bring back the asylum” in long-term psychiatric care. Psychiatrist Christine Montross took to The New York Times to espouse the creation of a “modern asylum” for individuals living with autism and other intellectual or developmental disabilities.

We sympathize with these concerns. Both articles note that many individuals with disabilities did not really experience deinstitutionalization. Rather, they left the state asylums only to find themselves in other institutions: nursing homes, board-and-care or “adult homes,” even jails and prisons. In these facilities, people with disabilities remain set apart from the community, and they do not receive the services and supports they need to live full, independent lives. “Trans-institutionalization” is not what deinstitutionalization was intended to be.

Community services also face new challenges, some of which arise from our very success in improving the wellbeing and longevity of individuals with disabilities. More than 800,000 individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities now live with caregivers older than age 60. Their situation poses a huge set of challenges.

In 2012, an estimated 110,000 individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities were on formal state waiting lists for residential services. Many other difficulties are readily documented in our current systems.

These complaints are genuine and serious. But they do not argue for a return to institutional care. Rather, they underscore the need to provide the necessary resources and monitoring to develop and improve homeand community-based services. As Montross notes: “Group homes have undergone devastating budget cuts. …

With fewer staff members to provide care, outbursts escalate.”

Community-based services require

proper funding to hire, train, and support sufficient numbers of direct-care workers. From the beginning, state and local governments have resisted providing sufficient resources to these areas. In 1974, Sharland Trotter and Robert Kuttner warned of this problem in a Washington Post article, “The Mentally Ill: From Back Wards to Back Alleys,” which summarized the darker possibilities that all too often came to pass. Although advocates fought in the ensuing decades to ensure sufficient funding, the Great Recession has brought painful cuts.

These settings particularly require decent pay to reduce turnover and to maintain employee morale. In 2014, average wages were less than $12 an hour for direct-care workers serving the intellectually and developmentally impaired in residential or community settings. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Harris v. Quinn worsened that pay problem, by hindering direct-care workers’ efforts to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.

In litigation and lobbying during the past decade, advocates of deinstitutionalization have focused on expanding and defending precisely these important investments in community services. Of course, we

Scenes like this one at the Willowbrook State School in New York in 1972 sparked the turn toward treating people with disabilities in their homes and communities.

shouldn’t kid ourselves.

Some people are difficult to serve well in a community setting. It’s hardly surprising that those dissatisfied with community care turn back to the idea of a public institution where, one can hope, loved ones will at least be safe and taken care of.

But let’s also not kid ourselves in imagining that “the modern asylum” would be immune to the clinical, political, financial, and administrative challenges that bedevil our current communitybased efforts. Many of the worst problems would surely persist.

Only this time, these problems would arise in the back wards, blighting lives out of public view.

Advocates of returning to the asylum claim that things will be different this time. Maybe, but the institutional pressures that affect all human-services delivery cannot be avoided simply by placing people with disabilities behind institutional walls.

Recent or ongoing Department of Justice investigations in Virginia, Florida, and Georgia underscore that this is no hypothetical concern. The Center for Investigative Reporting just released an 841-page report recounting abuses at California’s Porterville Developmental Center and related facilities. The headline of The Daily Beast’s accompanying coverage, “Beatings, Murder, Rape in California Asylums” conveys what you will find in these pages.

Despite inadequate resources and other limitations, the deinstitutionalization of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities has been a quiet triumph. Our challenge is to make that system work, not to walk it back.

Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration and Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago. Sam Bagenstos is the Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 19

Immigration and America’s Urban Revival The evidence favors a hypothesis many Americans reject: Immigration has helped reduce crime and revitalize city economies.

B y Ro b e rt J. S am pso n

A

mysterious thing happened on the way to the widely projected meltdown of American cities in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Instead of collapsing, many of our largest and hardest-hit cities have rebounded and flourished, confounding critics and social scientists alike. Why did these cities experience renaissance rather than ruin? Or, to paraphrase the late University of Pennsylvania historian Michael Katz, “Why didn’t American cities burn?” More broadly, what accounts for the remarkable decline of violent crime in the United States and the return of urban vibrancy?

Although certainly not the only factor, immigration deserves attention as part of the

20 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

answer for the nation’s crime decline and urban revitalization. Immigrants have gravitated to many of the urban areas that were most distressed 40 years ago and have contributed to their economic revival. Contrary to widespread beliefs, high concentrations of immigrants are also associated with lower crime rates. The evidence for the positive impact of immigration has been growing, but before I get to that evidence, let’s remember what urban life was like 40 years ago and how far we have come.

The City Roller Coaster

By the mid-1970s, America was experiencing an undeniable urban crisis. Cities were thought to be dying—especially older cities in the East

and Midwest Rust Belt. Although the crisis had deep roots stretching back decades, analysts pointed to a variety of immediate causes: the scars of 1960s rioting, population decline, job losses, high crime, fiscal collapse, and widespread housing vacancies. Things seemed to come to a head in 1975 when President Gerald Ford allegedly told New York City to “drop dead” rather than expect a federal bailout, according to a famous headline in the New York Daily News.

The crisis continued unabated into the 1980s. William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged illuminated the socioeconomic processes behind the unraveling of the “inner city,” while James Q. Wilson and

m b b i r dy / i s t o c k

First in a series

George L. Kelling captured the zeitgeist with their argument that even small signs of urban decay—symbolized by unrepaired “broken windows”—led to a spiral of decline. Although the debate was largely about Eastern and Midwestern industrial cities, the South and West were not immune either. At the beginning of the 1980s, Miami suffered one of the nation’s worst race riots since the civil rights era. Los Angeles witnessed rising racial tensions even before the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Spike Lee’s movie Summer of Sam, about a serial murderer on the prowl in 1977, captured the fear of New Yorkers in that era. Death Wish, a deeply disturbing series of movies starring the actor Charles Bronson, fulfilled the apparent

wishes of would-be vigilantes. It was Bernhard Goetz, however, who became a real folk hero to many New Yorkers after shooting four black men on a subway in 1984 during what he described as an attempted robbery. Both the Son of Sam and Goetz cases received intense publicity, locally and nationally. At the end of the 1980s, the crack cocaine epidemic put what seemed to be the final nail in the city coffin. Violence spiraled again and New York City hit its peak in 1990, topping out at more than 2,200 murders.

The urban decay and violence of that period was a fact of life. Living in New York in the 1970s and again in the 1980s, I was the victim of three thefts and witnessed a knife-wielding junkie attempt to hold up a bodega on Broadway near

125th Street. When I moved to the University of Chicago in 1991, the first advice I received was to carry loose $20 bills for holdups—“robbing money.” Personal anecdotes, of course, are not definitive evidence of social trends, but the data tell the same story. Episodes of the kind I experienced firsthand were the subject of everyday conversation and consequently affected widely shared attitudes toward cities.

But then the world changed. Rather than the predicted or seemingly inevitable collapse, violence began to plummet, and formerly hemorrhaging cities began to grow. Today, some of the old national symbols of urban decline have become the envy of the suburbs, defying earlier predictions. Experts were caught off guard,

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 21

Violent Crime’s Rise and Fall Homicides per 100,000 people per year in the United States, 1960–2013 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

just as they were by the fall of the Soviet Union and the Great Recession.

The magnitude of the turnaround and the scope of urban renaissance are remarkable. In 2014, for example, New York logged fewer than 330 murders despite a population larger than in 1990—the lowest count since comparable records have been kept. Across the country, violence trended down instead of culminating in a wave of violent “superpredators,” as William Bennett, John DiIulio, and John P. Walters confidently predicted in the 1996 book Body Count.

The pattern for the last half-century for our most reliable measure of violence—murder— has been an “inverted U,” as shown in the figure above. We are now back to the early 1960s (and in fact the tranquil 1950s) in rates of murder.

It was not just crime that fell. Today, the Big Apple is thriving and as exciting as ever, as are Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco. Chicago and Miami also appear to be back from the brink. These and other central cities are magnets not only for the young but also for empty nesters and families with children.

Construction cranes are seemingly everywhere in the race to meet the demand for city living.

Teenage pregnancy came down too, as did mortality rates, especially among the most disadvantaged groups. For example, from 1990 to 2010, life expectancy increased 7.3 years for black males, compared to 3.8 years for white males. Teen pregnancy declined 56 percent for

22 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

blacks, 45 percent for whites. While poverty is typically associated with inner cities, poverty rates actually increased faster in the suburbs from 2000 to 2010. Indeed, the foreclosure crisis of the Great Recession hit suburbs harder.

Meanwhile, gentrification, population, and housing prices in coastal cities have pushed upward.

To be sure, the urban renaissance has not unfolded evenly. While creativity, diversity, lower crime, and bustling streets define cities on the move, the picture is far different elsewhere. Detroit and St. Louis, for example, continue to struggle, and Baltimore has recently witnessed considerable turmoil. Meanwhile, smaller cities like Stockton, California, are the new face of today’s urban fiscal crisis.

Explaining the New Social Transformation

What explains the trajectory of metropolitan revitalization—both the winners and the losers? There is no single answer. As of about ten years ago, law enforcement officials, politicians, and social scientists had advanced various explanations for the unexpected drop in crime rates. The primary suspects were a decline in crack use, aggressive policing, increased incarceration, a relatively strong economy in the late 1990s, aging of the population, and the availability of legalized abortion beginning in the 1970s. (Declining childhood lead exposure from the 1970s on may also have

1960

1970

1980

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had a lagged impact on crime.) While each of these had probably played some role, I thought the discussion was missing a critical factor.

Immigration was notably absent from the discussion ten years ago. That omission seemed odd to me because the transformed vitality of cities was most visible in the places that had seen the greatest increases in immigration. New York, a leading magnet for immigration, had for a decade already ranked as one of America’s safest major cities. Violent crime in Los Angeles dropped considerably in the late 1990s (more than 45 percent for homicides), as it did in other cities with large Hispanic populations such as San Jose, Dallas, Chicago, and Phoenix. The same can be said for cities along the border, such as El Paso and San Diego, which have ranked as low-crime areas for some time.

Moreover, in the 1990s alone, foreign immigration had increased more than 50 percent, so the changes were very large and affected much of the country. The United States had become more ethnically diverse not only in our nation’s cities but in suburban and rural areas as well.

Based on these changes, and given a long line of criminological research showing that first-generation immigrants were less crimeprone than their second- and third- generation counterparts, I advanced the hypothesis that increased immigration contributed to falling crime rates.

I naïvely thought that this was a plausible

t i m s lo a n / a f p / g e t t y i m a g e s

Latinos tend to do better on various indicators of well-being than do other socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.

and largely uncontroversial hypothesis, one that might have been overlooked but that was nonetheless rooted in firm logic and prior evidence.

The spew of hate mail I received suggested otherwise. It included not just the anger and bile that is typical online, but also assertions that the idea was crazy—“lunacy,” as one response put it. Yet in the ensuing years, the thesis that immigration has led to lower rates of violent crime has become increasingly debated, and a number of empirical tests have emerged. The change in reception is refreshing and is supported on several fronts, to which I now turn.

for immigrant status, Mexican Americans no longer had lower rates of violence than blacks and whites. Immigrant status thus appears to result in lower levels of violence among all groups—blacks, whites, and Latinos—but many more Latinos are foreign born.

Third, we showed that living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration was associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of correlated factors, including poverty and an individual’s immigrant status).

Rather than generating crime, high concentrations of immigrants appear to reduce it. An average male is almost 25 percent more likely

Immigration and Crime Rates

Immigration may affect crime rates, first of all, because of who chooses to immigrate—a factor that social scientists refer to as “selection bias.”

Although there are exceptions, it is widely recognized that most immigrants, Mexicans in particular, selectively migrate to the United States based on characteristics that predispose them to low crime, such as motivation to work and ambition. First-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) may also be more law-abiding because of their interest in not being deported. The population of the United States now includes more than 40 million foreign-born people. If they are, as the evidence suggests, predisposed to lower crime, they increase the denominator of the crime rate while rarely appearing in the numerator.

Second, the composition of the immigrant population may also be a critical determinant of community welfare and public health. Latinos tend to do better on various indicators of well-being than do other socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. In Chicago, my colleagues and I found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican Americans compared to blacks and whites. Moreover, first-generation immigrants were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than third-generation Americans, adjusting for individual, family, and neighborhood background. Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation. This pattern held true for non-Hispanic whites and blacks as well, and took into account poverty and other relevant social characteristics such as income, marital status, and even individual “IQ.” And when we controlled

Increases in immigration are correlated with less violence, and first-generation immigrants tend to be less violent than those born in America. to engage in violence if he lives in a high-risk neighborhood without many immigrants than if he lives in a high-risk immigrant neighborhood.

These findings are broadly consistent with other research in criminology and provide a potential explanation of the sweeping crime drop. As foreign immigration to the United States, especially from Mexico, rose sharply in the 1990s, the proportion of first-generation immigrants increased, and that change helped reduce overall crime and improve well-being.

The pattern of immigration and lower crime nonetheless goes against popular stereotypes, which may explain the angry initial reaction to the idea. Among the public, policy-makers, and many academics, a common expectation is that the concentration of immigrants and the influx of foreigners drive up disorder and crime because of the assumed propensities of these groups to commit crimes and settle in poor, presumably disorganized communities. This belief

is so pervasive that the concentration of Latinos in a neighborhood strongly predicts perceptions of disorder, regardless of the neighborhood’s actual amount of disorder or the rate of reported violence. Nonetheless, whatever people think, increases in immigration are correlated with less violence, and first-generation immigrants tend to be less violent than those born in America, particularly when they live in neighborhoods with high numbers of other immigrants.

This conflict between perceptions of immigrants and objective evidence about them is not entirely new. In the early 20th century, many Americans believed that immigration and greater ethnic diversity increased crime, although first-generation immigrants did not, in fact, bear out stereotypes popular at the time that linked immigration to higher crime rates.

Today’s immigrants come from different parts of the world, but the gap between perception and reality is much the same as it was a century ago.

Urban Revitalization Writ Large

The immigration thesis becomes more interesting when we broaden the discussion to include aspects of urban life beyond crime.

As Jacob Vigdor has recently shown, immigration to New York City is linked to population growth, lower rates of vacant and abandoned buildings, and economic revitalization. Elsewhere in the country, many cities gained population in the 1990s because of an influx of immigrants who brought new vitality to previously decaying inner-city neighborhoods. In Chicago, the West 26th Street corridor in Little Village, a large immigrant enclave, is one of the most economically dynamic areas of the city.

Immigrants aren’t the only beneficiaries of these economic and demographic changes: Native-born blacks, whites, and other groups have also gained from the improved economic and civic health of central cities. In New York City, the income of blacks in Queens surpasses that of whites, with the surge in the black middle class driven largely by the successes of black immigrants from the West Indies. From Bushwick in Brooklyn to Downtown Miami, to large swaths of South Central Los Angeles and the rural South, to pockets of the north and south sides of Chicago, immigrants are revitalizing areas that once seemed unlikely ever to emerge from poverty.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 23

Correlation does not prove causation, and much of the data I have discussed so far is only correlational. Yet some recent evidence is consistent with the notion that immigration has a causal impact on community welfare. In Chicago, for example, I found that increases in immigration and language diversity over the decade of the 1990s predicted decreases in neighborhood homicide rates in the late 1990s and up to 2006, adjusting for a host of internal characteristics. In Los Angeles, John MacDonald and colleagues report that Los Angeles neighborhoods where immigrants were most likely to settle had significant reductions in crime. Using data for all U.S. metropolitan areas over the 1994–2004 period, Jacob Stowell and colleagues examined the impact of changes in immigration on changes in violent crime rates. After adjusting for confounding factors, their research indicated that violent crime rates tended to decrease as metropolitan areas experienced gains in concentration of immigrants. These results support the hypothesis that the broad reductions in violent crime during recent years are partially attributable to increases in immigration.

One way immigration may spur revitalization is through the reduction of housing vacancies. According to the “broken windows” thesis, abandoned buildings are a signal of urban disorder and decline. Vacant or boarded-up housing sends a strong message to prospective or current residents about a neighborhood’s viability. Immigration may have contributed to America’s urban turnaround, therefore, partly by filling up housing left vacant in the urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.

The evidence I have gathered supports this analysis. Increases in immigration from 2000 to 2010 are directly linked to decreases in housing vacancies in that decade across the more than 70,000 neighborhoods, or census tracts, in the United States. This pattern holds in the nation’s three largest cities—New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The changes over two decades, from 1990 to 2010, also indicate that rising immigration helped cut vacancies. For example, tracts that were on an upward trajectory of immigration in the 1990s saw reductions in vacancies in the next decade, net of both prior and concurrent changes in racial composition, poverty, homeowner-

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ship, and education (a proxy for gentrifiers).

For a 2012 issue on immigration of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, MacDonald and I commissioned some of the most meticulous research to date about the effects of immigration on a cross section of American communities— urban, suburban, and rural. Not all the work found positive effects of immigration, but the scholars who participated were in agreement that while new immigrants are poorer than the general population and face considerable hardship, there is no evidence that they have reshaped the social fabric in harmful ways. A

If I am right about the evidence, the rise in immigration has had net positive effects on a wide swath of urban social life. subsequent study by Aaron Chalfin estimating the effect of Mexican immigration on U.S. crime rates finds no effect one way or the other.

At a minimum, therefore, immigration appears to have a benign impact on the social fabric. The bulk of the evidence, however, favors the hypothesis that immigration leads to significant reductions in violence in neighborhoods and cities and at the national level.

Recent immigrants—whether white, black, or Latino—have been less violent than nativeborn Americans. Concentrations of immigrants also appear to have a “neighborhood effect” on the overall level of violent crime in an area. Taken together, my findings in Chicago and the research of scholars such as Vigdor and MacDonald suggest that the large influx of first-generation immigrants has had spillover effects on local communities, such as economic renewal in formerly poor areas, reduction in vacancies, population growth, and possi-

bly the diffusion of nonviolent social mores.

If I am right about the evidence, the rise in immigration has had net positive effects on a wide swath of urban social life. Reduced violence, in particular, has helped turn around urban areas long characterized by deep poverty.

But not all changes from immigration are necessarily positive. I have shown that residents perceive more disorder when there are more immigrants, and according to sobering research by Robert Putnam, neighbors are also less trusting the more diverse their neighborhoods. Internationally, governments tend to cut social welfare provision as societies become more diverse; in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries, political conflict has risen in response to immigration and increased diversity. Moreover, there is considerable heterogeneity among immigrant groups—refugees from war-torn countries leave their homeland for very different reasons than economically motivated immigrants. These patterns urge caution about drawing strong conclusions about the role of immigration in the revival of American cities.

Social and demographic changes are also turning cities inside out, calling into question long-held models of urban society. For example, poverty is moving to the suburbs, wealth is increasingly concentrating in the center cities, and gentrification is reshaping many formerly working-class and poor areas—often with considerable conflict, as in San Francisco’s Mission District recently. The conception of “inner city” as a ghetto no longer applies. American cities are becoming more like many European cities, where low-income and marginalized groups have been pushed to the periphery. On balance, however, the evidence suggests that immigration has improved urban life and is responsible, at least in part, for the remarkable turnaround of the American metropolis.

Robert J. Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University, director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, and author of Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. This article is based on a longer paper that will appear in Thomas Sugrue and Domenic Vitiello, eds., Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization (University of Pennsylvania Press).

An Oculus headset demonstration at the Facebook F8 Developer Conference in March 2015

The Politics of Virtual Reality With inexpensive immersive media about to hit the market, we need to ask: How will they affect us? And can they be put to good use?

By F re d T u rne r

eric risberg / ap images

I

n March 2014, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg paid $2 billion to acquire a tiny, two-yearold Silicon Valley start-up called Oculus.

The company has one major product: the Rift, a virtual reality headset the size of a pair of ski goggles. Like all such headsets, the Rift covers the eyes and, with the aid of earphones, generates sounds and images that users perceive as three-dimensional and concrete, as if they were reality. What makes the Rift special is its size. Earlier headsets were as big as brass diving helmets. They had to be worn in special rooms where they could be tethered by heavy cables to banks of computers. The Rift, which is about to enter the mass market, promises to

be the equivalent of an individual scuba tank.

Wearing it, users should soon be able to swim freely through formerly two-dimensional media in the comfort of their own homes.

Readers of a certain age could be forgiven for thinking that Oculus has simply been hawking the latest in 3D glasses. But the Zuckerbergs of America’s media industries are betting that a new medium is coming into being. In the year since Facebook bought Oculus, Silicon Valley and Hollywood have become obsessed with the potential of virtual reality and its sibling, augmented reality. Samsung and Sony are developing their own virtual reality systems, each designed to fully immerse users

in a digitally generated media environment.

Google has sought to help users augment their experience of the web by promulgating design specs for something called Google Cardboard, a cluster of lenses, magnets, and digital tags that can be mounted on a sheet of cardboard and laid over a cell phone to produce an illusion of three-dimensional imagery. And Microsoft is seeking to help users augment their everyday reality by promoting the company’s new HoloLens, a wearable computer that allows you to see the world and at the same time, to see and work with computer-generated holograms that appear to exist within it.

These new devices have triggered a quiet

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 25

gold rush among media makers. In southern California, as well as New York and London, a slew of design shops, film studios, and advertising agencies are scrambling to figure out how to take advantage of these new devices. How, they wonder, can they script stories in media that audiences experience with all their senses simultaneously? Can they repurpose expressive techniques honed for generations in the cinema, the press, or even classroom teaching?

Or do they need to invent something new? And how can they profit from the ability of immersive media to cut viewers’ senses off from the rest of the world, if only temporarily?

No one has quite figured out the answers to these questions, but most everyone seems to agree with Dave Smith, a reporter for Business Insider: “Virtual reality is going to be huge. Monumental. It’s going to change the way we live.”

and augmented reality do much more than simply send pictures. In the case of virtual reality, they promise to build whole worlds. In the case of augmented reality, they aim to integrate our encounters with mediated and material objects into a single experience. As the marketers of Microsoft’s HoloLens optimistically explain, “Holograms mixed with your real world will unlock all-new ways to create, communicate, work, and play.” As advertisers and a handful of academics already know, and as political leaders may soon find out, they will also unlock new ways to persuade.

As the Oculus Rift and other devices come to market, we need to ask what it might mean to not simply see pictures in our heads, but to feel them, to live with and within them, moment by moment. Some of the more predictable answers have already begun to emerge. The military is

If the VR hype is even a little bit right, we’re going to need to find some new ways to think about how media and politics interact.

If Smith is even a little bit right, we’re going to need to find some new ways to think about how media and politics interact. To date, most approaches to the issue derive from the century-old insights of Walter Lippmann. In 1922, reacting in part to the role of the media in World War I propaganda, Lippmann had become increasingly afraid for American democracy.

Media, wrote Lippmann, put “pictures in our heads.” These pictures become all we know of the world beyond what we see in person, with our own eyes, or touch with our own fingers.

They provide the grounds on which we decide whom to vote for, and more generally, what kinds of issues and people we see as important. In Lippmann’s view, those who have the power to paint and circulate the pictures, and to exclude alternative worldviews, also have an unlegislated power to shape our politics.

Lippmann built his critique around oneto-many broadcast media such as radio and two-dimensional representational media such as newspapers and film. In that technological context, his emphasis on the transmission of pictures into our heads made sense. But virtual

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busily simulating combat; the NFL has begun modeling gameplay; and many people are surely developing immersive pornography. But these particular uses still leave us with a general question: What will become of our abilities to know the world beyond the enclosures of immersive media? And how might the ways we interact with these new media technologies change the way we imagine and practice democracy?

Back to the Future

Some might argue that we already live in a world so suffused with electronic media that putting on a headset and immersing ourselves in virtual reality will make little difference to our civic imaginations. But an influential and long-forgotten generation of anthropologists, psychologists, and artists would almost certainly disagree. For all the claims to epochal novelty that surround virtual reality today, Americans have wrestled with the fear of immersive media before. At the start of World War II, many of America’s leading thinkers believed that mass media had the ability to submerge individual minds in a collective fan-

tasy and so had helped pave the way for fascism. Together with a small group of refugee Bauhaus artists, some went on to design alternative, multimedia environments explicitly aimed at instilling a democratic sensibility in their audiences. Those “democratic surrounds,” as I’ve called them in a recent book, ultimately shaped both America’s Cold War propaganda efforts and the efflorescence of “happenings” and “be-ins” in the 1960s. Today, as we rush headlong toward digital immersion, the debates that shaped those surrounds remind us of the political stakes not only of the pictures our media show us, but of the ways our eyes and ears and bodies encounter them.

To see how, we need to wind back the clock to a moment just before the fighting in Europe began in 1939. To American intellectuals who had long admired German high culture, the rise of Adolf Hitler posed a problem: How was it that one of the most intellectually and culturally sophisticated nations in Europe had fallen under the sway of a short, mustachioed former clerk? From our own time, it might seem easy to see how the chaos of the Weimar Republic could have generated a craving for order, or how the Treaty of Versailles could have sparked cries for national revenge. But in the 1930s, many Americans pinned Hitler’s success on his mastery of the mass media. As a writer for The New York Times put it in 1933, German citizens had lost their ability to think for themselves: “With coordinated newspaper headlines overpowering him, with radio voices beseeching him, with news reels and feature pictures arousing him … the individual German has been unable to salvage his identity and has been engulfed in a brown wave.”

For many critics, it was the one-to-many nature of the media technologies in use that drowned the individual. Such technologies enabled a leader such as Hitler to broadcast a single message to all the members of German society and control the pictures in their heads.

Mass media also seemed to have a distinct psychological effect, subverting the reason and stirring up the recently discovered Freudian unconscious. In short, mass media threatened to erase the ability to think for oneself on which democracy depends.

As the fighting in Europe got under way, the power of mass media presented American intel-

ap images

lectuals and policy-makers with a challenge. German morale seemed extraordinarily high, thanks in large part to mass propaganda that had turned the Germans into unthinking, goose-stepping automata. How could Americans help build American morale without turning their fellow citizens into fascists at the same time?

In the summer of 1940, 60 of America’s leading social scientists came together in New York as the Committee for National Morale in order to answer this question. Their members included anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson, psychologists Gordon Allport and Kurt Lewin, and then-prominent journalists Edmund Taylor and Ladislas Farago. Though largely forgotten today, the committee was extremely influential in the first years of the war. Between 1940 and 1942, committee members advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt on questions of morale, published reports on German propaganda strategy, and wrote widely on related issues for the popular press.

Two ideas drove the committee’s work. The anthropologists Benedict and Mead believed that individual personalities reflected the cultures in which they came of age and that every culture had a modal personality type. Allport, Lewin, and the other psychologists emphasized that individual personalities could and did change over time through the influence of the family in childhood and other interactions and institutions over a lifetime. Though commonplace today, their view stood in stark contrast to Nazi race theory (and for that matter, American racism), which stressed the inability of individuals to escape their biological inheritance.

On the committee, psychological and anthropological approaches to personality and culture came together to produce a plan for a new media genre, the democratic surround.

If America was to remain a free, democratic nation, its citizens would need to have free, democratic personalities. They would need to be psychologically whole, able to move and reason freely, and able to collaborate voluntarily. To figures such as Allport and Mead, the one-to-many structures of mass media were uniquely well-suited to producing the authoritarian personality that seemed to have emerged in Germany. To build morale appropriate to a democracy, they reasoned, America would

need forms of media that promoted individual choice, tolerance of diversity, psychological independence, and at the same time an appreciation for the unity of American society.

For Mead and her colleagues, museums could be ideal venues for such work. In the movies and listening to the radio, spectators spend time “learning passivity,” wrote Mead. But in a museum, they could take charge of their own interactions with the images and sounds around them.

Poet Carl Sandburg (left) confers with Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sandburg wrote the text accompanying the photos in the “Road to Victory” exhibition.

In 1941, the committee urged the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create an exhibition to promote democratic morale. Though MOMA never followed through on the committee’s proposal, it did mount such a show a year later, with one of the most successful propaganda exhibitions of the war, “Road to Victory.”

Designed by photographer Edward Steichen and Bauhaus refugee Herbert Bayer, “Road to Victory” presented visitors with a pathway that wound through a series of images—of the American landscape, of ordinary citizens, of the attack on Pearl Harbor—until at the end they arrived at a wall-sized mural of marching

American troops punctuated by large, pull-out portraits of individual citizens. Although the pictures were not new, the design of the show was. In a traditional exhibition, viewers would likely have entered an open, square room, to find identically sized photographs mounted in sequence at eye level. In “Road to Victory,” they found images towering over their heads, tucked down by their feet, colliding with one another at strange angles. There was no whitewalled gallery to be seen, only a twisting pathway through a world of pictures.

Ten thousand people a week made their way down that path across the summer of 1942.

According to newspaper reviewers, what excited them most was the show’s design. As they moved from image to image, looking high, looking low, clustering for a moment where two images met, pausing in a gap between pictures, audiences could experience themselves as independent individuals, choosing where to put their attention, making meaning of the world around them in their own terms. As one critic put it, the exhibition did not “mold” visitors’ opinions, “for that word smacks of the Fascist concept of dominating men’s minds.”

The show’s design felt so liberating to artists and designers of that era that it went on to become a model for some of the most influential exhibitions and performances of the next several decades. In 1955, Steichen borrowed many of its key features for “The Family of Man,” an exhibition of 500 images aimed at revealing the commonality of human experience that almost certainly remains the most widely seen photography exhibition of all time.

In the 1960s, Bayer and Steichen’s design principles also set the stage for happenings and beins, immersive performances and gatherings that defined the 1960s counterculture.

Yet “Road to Victory” was hardly a wide-open aesthetic space. Steichen had carefully selected every image in the show. Visitors could surround themselves with that reality and they could feel as though they were in charge of their experiences—but were they?

The Politics of Immersion Today

This question hints at some new ways we might think about immersive media today. Though no self-respecting contemporary scholar would still argue that a single personality type defines

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 27

At top is the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, the site of Chris Milk’s virtual reality documentary “Clouds over Sidra.”

Below is a Dos Equis virtual party with The Most Interesting Man in the World.

American culture, few would disagree that media shape our lives and our ability to act as democratic citizens. Lippmann is still right: The media do put pictures in our heads and we still make political decisions based on those pictures. And as Mead and her circle intuited, our interactions with media as audiences influence our interactions with each other as citizens.

If we wanted to ascertain the democratic potential of today’s immersive media, we might ask something like this: What patterns of interaction—with images and sounds, and with other people—do they promote? In virtual reality, the answer would certainly frighten Margaret Mead. In its contemporary configuration, the Oculus Rift creates a completely closed semiotic environment. It is a rollercoaster ride, a completely consuming eye-earmind-body experience. For the moment, it is also one that viewers generally have alone.

Zuckerberg and his team at Facebook believe

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that virtual reality technologies will soon make it possible for many people to enter a single virtual reality space and interact. And so they might. But for now, Rift users find themselves isolated in private worlds. So far at least, in virtual reality it remains impossible to be wholly individuated and at the same time, wholly collaborative with others.

Even after collaboration becomes possible, virtual reality worlds may suffer from a degree of closure that the designers of mid-century democratic surrounds would have abjured.

Surrealists, Russian Constructivists, and fascists all designed multimedia environments that aimed to melt away the individuality of viewers. To that end, their multimedia environments tended to stress continuous, uninterrupted imagery, often of faceless crowds or abstract forms. In contrast, for Bayer and Steichen and those who took up the democratic surround thereafter, it was up to the audience

to put the different pieces of the expressive puzzle together. By doing so, they could put themselves together, and experience a kind of democratic self-realization in the process.

Today, however, immersive media makers who want to promote a democratic sensibility are embracing the all-encompassing nature of the new technologies. Where analysts of the 1940s feared mass media’s ability to overpower reason, an emerging generation of scholars, journalists, and technologists are working to turn that power toward the creation of empathy. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor at Stanford University (and my colleague), began exploring this issue a decade ago in his Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory. Over the years, he has enabled viewers to look into virtual mirrors and to see themselves reflected as members of races, ages, and physical abilities other than their own. In each case, his work has shown that virtual reality’s power to surround and trick the senses allows users to identify with others unlike themselves strongly enough to change their beliefs and behavior, at least in the short run and potentially longer.

In 2012, journalist Nonny de la Peña put that same principle to work in an early and widely acclaimed example of immersive journalism called “Hunger in Los Angeles.” First, she recorded the sounds of impoverished Angelenos waiting on a sidewalk to be admitted to a food bank. Then, she married that soundtrack to a virtual reality simulation of the scene and invited viewers to experience both together. Not long after, Bailenson teamed up with journalist Barbara Allen to build a virtual reality simulation of Hurricane Katrina in which users found themselves on a rooftop while the wind howled and the floodwaters rose around them. Recently, the United Nations worked with filmmaker Chris Milk to take this process one step further. In September 2014, Milk and his team traveled to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, where they met a 12-year-old girl named Sidra and filmed her on her daily rounds with a 360-degree camera system. The result is an affecting piece of three-dimensional storytelling in which the viewer is surrounded not by digital avatars, but by photographic images of people—the kinds of pictures and people we’re used to seeing on the TV news and so already recognize as “real.”

Milk has called virtual reality an “empathy machine,” and he may be right. Such claims have been made before at the birth of other media, especially documentary photography, and they have rarely panned out. Even so, if Milk is right, immersive media may become tools for re-humanizing the media landscape.

New Bottles, Old Thirsts

Immersive media may also dramatically amplify the power of corporations and their brands. In mid-century America, anti-authoritarian surrounds encouraged audiences to become democratic individuals in terms that were consonant with American expansionism and the rise of consumer culture. Today, digital technologies and international conglomerates work together at a global scale that mid-century social scientists could hardly have imagined.

As media scholar Henry Jenkins has pointed out, ours is an era of multi-platform storytelling. For that reason, media conglomerates tend not to think of immersive media as sites of stand-alone experience.

Many firms are already working to integrate immersion into multi-platform media strategies and so to tighten the ties between immersion and consumption. The French advertising giant Havas, for instance, has developed a multi-platform advertising campaign for the beer brand Dos Equis. In 2007, they created a tongue-in-cheek character called “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” a silver-haired, globetrotting Don Juan, to promote their beer to young males. They told stories about The Man online, created the usual 30-second TV spots, and every year, around Halloween, staged a massive party at which invited customers could meet an actor playing The Man in his native environment. In January of this year, Havas brought 21 early Oculus Rift headsets to bars around America. From there, individual drinkers of Dos Equis could enter a fantastic party hosted by The Most Interesting Man and peopled by acrobats, medicine men, and a variety of other characters. Among all of these playful beings, and thanks to the Oculus Rift and the graciousness of The Man himself, the Dos Equis drinkers were the guests of honor.

In the Dos Equis case, the virtual environment is not only all-encompassing and so, in mid-century terms at least, potentially anti-

democratic. It is also a sort of one-way mirror. At the party, the visitor sees his own, aggrandized reflection amid other guests. But behind the images, only partially visible to him, the executives of Dos Equis and Havas are struggling mightily to monitor and monetize his desires.

In the world of commercial multi-platform storytelling, and for that matter, in for-profit social media, return on investment is king.

Here we’ve arrived at a problem that neither the makers of mid-century surrounds nor the marketers of virtual and augmented reality have ever acknowledged. Media that offer no respite between images and no access to the world beyond the images, however temporarily, may encourage audiences to submit themselves to an overwhelming experience.

And such submission in and of itself is rarely good for democracy, as Mead and the Commit-

Sherry Turkle’s potent phrase. Zuckerberg and many others are betting that we will soon enter shared spaces in virtual reality. If we do, perhaps immersion will promote a democratic sensibility in a way that Mead and her colleagues might have recognized.

Even then, however, the democratic potential of immersive media will still face a threat from the same forces that threaten mass and social media today: large corporations, militarized states, and the needs of the technology firms that increasingly serve them. In many cases, to enter virtual reality will no doubt soon be to enter something closer to a mall than an agora. And who will provide the holograms that will augment our daily lives? Content providers are already racing to find out.

What’s perhaps worse is the fact that like all digital technologies, virtual and augmented

The same technology that we might use to fight racism can just as easily help a beer company fight global thirst. tee for National Morale well knew. But at the same time, the political and economic context of immersion matters enormously. The same technology that we might use to fight racism can just as easily help a beer company fight global thirst. And it can potentially undertake both missions more effectively thanks to corporate integration, media interlinking, and multi-platform storytelling.

What, then, might make an immersive medium democratic? For the mid-century designers of democratic surrounds, the answer lay in creating an open, interactive framework within which to stage our encounters with media and each other. In their view, no medium should so suffuse the senses as to disable the individual reason. Audiences should always be free to move their bodies, to gather and disperse, to identify with or ignore whatever images they saw.

By these criteria, we should celebrate augmented reality and hope virtual reality improves. For all its portability, the Oculus Rift does not so much let us be individuals together as it lets us be “alone together,” in

reality generate reams of data—in fact, they have to track your movements minutely in order to provide the illusion of immersion.

The data they generate will be as personal as the way we sit and walk, as intimate and local as our living rooms. States and corporations will certainly pay dearly for that information.

The question of whether or not immersion itself models anti-democratic ways of interaction remains open. But the campaign to use immersive media to make us feel more at home in closely monitored, thoroughly commercialized environments is already under way. If immersive media are to truly serve democratic ends, we will need to confront not only the new psychological power of virtual environments, but the persistent political and economic powers of the world outside the headset.

Fred Turner, associate professor of communication at Stanford University, is the author most recently of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 29

Boosting

30 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

Low Pay

Widening inequality in America has its roots in several trends but is driven primarily by unequal earnings. In this package of articles, five authors address the pressure on middle- and working-class income—and strategies for reversing the trend.

In a highly original essay, Harold Meyerson assesses the chilling parallels between the role played by the slave South in both the 19th-century global economy and the U.S. political economy—and the similar, wage-depressing influence of the South today.

Robots are one more threat to jobs and pay levels. As economist Jeffrey Sachs explains, automation in a laissez-faire economy indeed produces that result. However, with the right public policies, robots can relieve a lot of human toil and spread wealth and leisure.

brian ker sey / upi / l andov

Three companion pieces focus on organizing. They explore the rise of unions in three key sectors, two of them long considered middleclass bastions but now vulnerable to the same pressures to depress earnings. Rachel Cohen tells how labor organizing is coming to charter schools. Justin Miller recounts unionization among university adjunct professors. And Heather Rogers completes the package with an examination of depressed wages among home-care workers. Taken together, these pieces shed light on the dynamics of low-wage America, and the necessary blend of labor organizing, politics, and policy to achieve greater earnings equality.

Elsewhere in this issue, three other articles demonstrate the drag of Third World exploitation—in the global garment industry (page 74), in migrant labor abuses (page 14), and in trade deals designed for corporations, not workers (page 56). —Robert Kuttner

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 31

How The American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy B y H a r o l d M e ye r s o n

S

antayana had it wrong: Even if we remember the past, we may be condemned to repeat it.

Indeed, the more we learn about the conflict between the North and South that led to the Civil War, the more it becomes apparent that we are reliving that conflict today. The South’s current drive to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rights—through the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Party—resembles nothing so much as the efforts of antebellum Southern political leaders to blunt the North’s opposition to the slave labor system. Correspondingly, in the recent actions of West Coast and Northeastern cities and states to raise labor standards and protect minority rights, there are echoes of the pre–Civil War frustrations that many Northerners felt at the failure of the federal government to defend and promote a free labor system, frustrations that— ironically—led them to found the Republican Party.

It’s the resilience of the Southern order and the similarities between the Old South and the New that are most surprising—at least, until we disenthrall ourselves from a sanitized understanding of that Old South. It’s taken nearly 100 years for the prevailing image of the pre–Civil War South to become less subject to the racist falsifications that long had shaped it. The malign fantasies of 1915’s The Birth of a Nation and the Golden Age hooey of 1939’s Gone with the Wind have given way to the grim realism of 12 Years A Slave. Through all its incarnations, however, the antebellum South has retained its status as a world apart from the rest of America, whether (as D.W. Griffith would have it) for its chivalry or (as the historical record shows) its savagery.

Southern exceptionalism has also extended to the views of the South’s place in—or more precisely, its purported absence from—the development of the modern American economy. The slavery-saddled South was often considered the quasi-feudal outlier in the early—and presumably Northern—development of 19th-century American capitalism. While finance and factories rose north of the Mason–Dixon Line and railroads spanned the Northern states, the South was an island—with just a sprinkling of

32 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

banks and rails and virtually no factories at all—largely detached from industrial capitalism’s rise.

In just the past year, however, a spate of revisionist histories has made significant additions to the historical literature that persuasively dispels this image. To be sure, the South was short on factories, trains, and banks, but its brutally productive slave economy spurred the development of the first factories of the industrial age, the textile mills of Massachusetts and Manchester, England, and the railroads that moved their goods. It was also key to the creation of modern finance and such pioneering industrial financiers as the Baring Brothers in Britain and the Brown Brothers in New York. Empire of Cotton by Harvard University historian Sven Beckert, which won this year’s Bancroft Prize, and The Half Has Never Been Told by Cornell University historian Edward Baptist, which won this year’s Hillman Prize, both document how the industrial and financial capitalism of the 19th century arose as a direct result of the conquests, expulsions (of Native Americans), and enslavements that turned the Deep South into a vast slave-labor camp that generated unprecedented profits for manufacturers and bankers who lived hundreds or thousands of miles from the Mississippi Delta.

The American South before the Civil War was the lowwage—actually, the no-wage—anchor of the first global production chain.

Today, as the auto and aerospace manufacturers of Europe and East Asia open low-wage assembly plants in Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi, the South has assumed a comparable role once more. Indeed, the South today shares more features with its antebellum ancestor than it has in a very long time. Now as then, white Southern elites and their powerful allies among nonSouthern business interests seek to expand to the rest of the nation the South’s subjugation of workers and its suppression of the voting rights of those who might oppose their policies. In fact, now more than then, the South’s efforts to spread its values across America are advancing, as Northern Republicans adopt their Southern counterparts’ antipathy to unions and support for voter suppression, and as workers’ earnings in the North fall toward Southern levels. And now as then, a sectional backlash against Southern norms has emerged that, when combined with the Southern surge, is again creating two nations within one.

In the spring of 2011, the Boston Consulting Group made a bold prediction: Manufacturing, which had been fleeing American shores for years, particularly to China, was going to come back. “China’s rising manufacturing costs will significantly erode [the] savings” that U.S. companies had realized by having their products assembled there, three of the firm’s partners wrote in a widely publicized study. The advantages of offshoring would

j.h. l akin / libr ary of congress

Boosting Low Pay

wane, and American manufacturing would rise again.

The numbers that the authors adduced certainly made their claim seem plausible. As their wages continued to increase, Chinese factory workers, whose pay, adjusted for the productivity differences between China and the United States, came to just 23 percent of their American counterparts’ in 2000, had already seen that figure grow to 31 percent in 2010, and it would likely increase to 44 percent in 2015. More revealing still, however, was the authors’ comparison between factory workers in one particular region of China and one particular region of the U.S. In 2000, they showed, factory workers in and around Shanghai already made 36 percent of the productivity-adjusted pay of workers in Mississippi—a figure that rose to 48 percent in 2010 and that they projected to grow to 69 percent in 2015.

By contrast to the more rigid European economies, with their safeguards of workers’ rights, America’s was perfectly positioned to take advantage of China’s growing labor costs. “America is so robust and so flexible compared to all economies but China,” said Harold Sirkin, BCG senior partner and the study’s primary author, when I interviewed him at the time of his study’s release. “Getting the work rules right, getting the wage scales right—the [U.S.] economy can flex in ways that people wouldn’t believe!”

The study’s readers might be forgiven, though, if their reaction to its revelations was less effusive than the study’s authors. The basis for their comparison was Mississippi? The key to an American manufacturing renaissance was, as the study put it, “an increasingly flexible workforce”? “Flexible” has a distinct economic meaning: being paid less than what had been the standard for American manufacturing workers. It had a distinct geographic meaning, too: Southern.

“We made a mistake by picking Mississippi,” Sirkin admitted when I suggested that most Americans’ view of a rosy national future probably didn’t include having wage levels reduced to those of the country’s poorest state.

Indeed, when BCG produced a fuller version of its study a few months later, all mention of Mississippi had vanished.

But BCG’s focus merely crossed some state lines. “When all costs are taken into account,” the authors wrote, “certain U.S. states, such as South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee, will turn out to be among the least expensive production sites in the industrialized world.”

It’s been four years since BCG made its predictions, and they’ve proved lamentably accurate. The American economy has “flexed” just as the study’s authors said it would: Manufacturing has continued to move to the South, and factory workers’ wages have gone south as well. Between 1980 and 2013, The Wall Street Journal has reported, the number of auto industry jobs in the Midwest fell by 33 percent, while those in the South increased by 52 percent.

Alabama saw a rise in manufacturing jobs of 196 percent,

South Carolina of 121 percent, and Tennessee of 103 percent; while Ohio saw a decline of 36 percent, Wisconsin of 43 percent, and Michigan of 49 percent.

Even as auto factories were opening all across the South, however, autoworkers’ earnings were falling. From 2001 to 2013, workers at auto-parts plants in Alabama—the state with the highest growth rate—saw their earnings decline by 24 percent, and those in Mississippi by 13.6 percent. The newer the hire, the bleaker the picture, even though by 2013 the industry was recovering, and in the South, booming.

New hires’ pay was 24 percent lower than all auto-parts workers in South Carolina and 17 percent lower in Alabama.

One reason wages continued to fall throughout the Deep South, despite the influx of jobs, is the region’s distinctive absence of legislation and institutions that protect workers’ interests. The five states that have no minimum-wage laws are Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Georgia is one of the two states (the other is Wyoming) that have set minimum wages below the level of the federal standard. (In all these states, of course, employers are required to pay the federal minimum wage.)

Likewise, the rates of unionization of Southern states’ workforces are among the lowest in the land: 4.3 percent in Georgia, 3.7 percent in Mississippi, 2.2 percent in South Carolina, 1.9 percent in North Carolina. The extensive use of workers employed by temporary staffing agencies in Southern factories—one former Nissan official has said such workers constitute more than half the workers in Nissan’s Southern plants—has lowered workers’ incomes even more, and created one more obstacle to unionization.

The No-Wage Economy: Slaves picking cotton in the antebellum South

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 33

The South’s aversion to both minimum-wage standards and unions is rooted deep within the DNA of white Southern elites, whose primary impulse has always been to keep African Americans down. To those elites, the prospect of biracial unions threatened not just their profits but the legitimacy of their social order. To counter the biracial Southern populist movement that emerged in the 1890s, those elites created Jim Crow laws that legitimated and promoted white racism, and it was largely by manipulating that racism that they were able to thwart almost all the Southern organizing campaigns that unions have waged since the 1930s.

Ironically, most of the largest factories that have arisen in the South in recent years belong to European and Asian firms that, in their home countries, pay high wages and are entirely and harmoniously unionized. In going to the South, however, they go native, paying wages and providing benefits well beneath those that such firms as General Motors and Ford offer their employees, and blocking workers’ attempts to unionize. (The one exception to this rule is Volkswagen, whose corporate board—controlled by worker representatives and public officials—has not opposed the unionization of its Chattanooga plant. In that city, state and local public officials have led anti-union campaigns.)

Nissan has plants in Tennessee and Mississippi; Mercedes has one in Alabama and will open one next year in South Carolina; BMW has one in South Carolina, where Volvo recently decided to build a new plant; Airbus plans to open one in Alabama. They come to sell to the American market and they come because the labor is cheap.

“Airbus is a global manufacturer,” Jürgen Bühl, who heads the treasurer’s office of IG Metall, the German metal-workers union, and is the primary staffer for the union’s

34 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

The slave economy of the South dominated the antebellum American—and indeed, much of the European—economy. The Industrial Revolution, which first emerged in the cotton mills of Manchester, depended almost entirely on the product of the slave South. Indeed, the two economies—industrial and slave—rose in tandem.

The invention of the cotton gin in this nation and the creation of water- and then steam-powered mills in the English Midlands provided the technological wherewithal for the breakthrough, but no less important were the forced exile of Native Americans from the lands that were to become Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; the sale and forced migration of more than 800,000 slaves from the Mid-Atlantic states to the cotton states; and the routine use of physical abuse to compel those slaves to become steadily more productive in their planting and picking of cotton. Even as more land was uprooted to make way for expanding cotton fields, Baptist shows that the productivity of the pickers—that is, the number of pounds they individually harvested—more than doubled between 1830 and 1860. Given the complete absence of any technological progress in cotton-picking during this time, and the

r o g e l i o v. s o l i s / a p i m a g e s

The Low-Wage Economy: Nissan auto assemblers in Canton, Mississippi

representative on Airbus’s board of directors, told me in April. “When we go abroad, we have the high-value work, the research and development, done in Germany. We [workers in German factories] supply the high-value parts. The workers who assemble the parts in the Airbus factory in Tianjin, China, produce 3 to 5 percent of the total value. But given the 6-to-1 productivity advantage that the United States has over China, it’s cheaper to do the final assembly in the U.S.” And a lot cheaper than in high-value-added Germany, where the average hourly compensation for manufacturing workers in 2011 (the last time the Bureau of Labor Statistics performed an international comparison) was a third higher than their U.S. counterparts’ ($47.38 there; $35.53 here).

For global manufacturers, the United States—more precisely, the American South—has become the low-wage alternative to China. For American manufacturers, too: In 2012, General Electric re-shored its production of refrigerators and water heaters from Mexico and China to its Appliance Park factories in Kentucky, nearly doubling the park’s workforce in the process. Unlike the vast majority of Southern factories, Appliance Park was unionized, but in recent years, the union there was compelled to agree to a two-tier contract, in which the lower tier of workers (70 percent of them) make far less than the more senior workers: Their starting hourly pay is just over $13.50, almost $8 less than what new workers at Appliance Park used to receive.

In the 21st century, the American South has become the low-wage anchor of a global production process—just as it was before the Civil War.

Boosting Low Pay

statements of numerous former slaves testifying to the increased brutality of their overseers during this period to compel them to work faster, Baptist concludes that this was a productivity revolution driven by torture.

Between 1790 and 1860, America’s yearly production of cotton grew from 1.5 million pounds to more than 2.2 billion pounds, from less than 1 percent of the world’s cotton production to two-thirds of all the cotton produced.

The lion’s share of that crop was shipped to Britain. By the eve of the Civil War, cotton constituted 61 percent of all U.S. exports, and the U.S. was producing 88 percent of all the cotton that Britain imported. As cotton production expanded, so did the mills; by 1830, one out of six British employees worked in cotton factories.

The non-Southern supporters of the Southern slave economy included not only industrialists, but also many of the leading bankers in the U.S. and the U.K. Since harvests are seasonal, farmers invariably need credit, for which they need to put up collateral. The collateral that Southern cotton growers put up was most commonly their slaves: 88 percent of the loans to growers in Louisiana and 82 percent in South Carolina, Beckert shows, were secured by their enslaved workers. When growers couldn’t meet their obligations, as thousands could not after the financial panic of 1837, banks ended up owning slaves and even entire plantations.

Brown Brothers, on its way to becoming one of Wall Street’s leading investment banks, owned 13 plantations and many hundreds of slaves after the 1837 collapse. Major banks, such as Baring Brothers, even securitized slaves, much as banks in our time securitize home mortgages: They sold bonds to investors based on bundles of loans that slaveholders had taken out. Whenever the economy went bad, or the price of cotton dropped, owners would sell their slaves, irrevocably sundering thousands of African American families.

The Southern slave economy was simply too big and profitable for Northern and British banks to shun. In 1831 and 1832, even the Bank of the United States—the Philadelphiabased national bank that epitomized Northeastern elites, and which, largely for that reason, Andrew Jackson later abolished—made loans so large to a single firm whose sole business was slave trading that they constituted 5 percent of all the bank’s credit during those years. The ties between Northern bankers and Southern slavers were so strong that as the South seceded in 1860 and 1861, New York Mayor Fernando Wood urged his city—then as now the center of American finance—to secede as well. New York’s British counterpart was Liverpool, the port city to which Southern cotton was shipped en route to Manchester. Liverpudlian bankers were major investors in the slave economy, and during the Civil War they not only extended credit to the Confederacy, but also funded the manufacture of arms bound for the South and the construction of Confederate warships.

The conflict between the North and the South in the decades before the Civil War centered on the question of whose labor system would prevail. The steady expansion of the United States westward provided a frequent flashpoint, posing the question of whether new states would be free or slave. The prospective admission of Missouri, in 1819 and 1820, provoked the first such sectional battle. Though the abolitionist movement was in its infancy, Southern leaders such as South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun were ever wary that the admission of new non-slave states would bring more anti-slavery senators and representatives to Congress, eventually threatening slavery’s continued existence. Until the outbreak of the Civil War, however, the South retained enough congressional, executive, and judicial support to eliminate the line dividing future slave states from free states in the Western territories, and to criminalize assistance to escaped slaves in the Northern states. While the political power of the South didn’t significantly affect the earnings of Northern workers and farmers, the persistent growth of that power and the threat it ultimately posed to the Northern economy—and to the North’s increasingly democratic values—led to the formation of a distinctly Northern Republican Party and, in time, to civil war.

Today, by other means, that conflict continues.

There’s nothing new about Northern manufacturers moving south to lower their labor costs. Textile factories, which had been located chiefly in New England, began to pop up in the South as early as the 1880s. In 1922, the average hourly wage in Massachusetts mills was 41 cents while in Alabama, it was 21 cents. Over the next six years, 40 percent of the Massachusetts factories shuttered their gates, and by the mid-1960s, the Southern textile industry was outproducing its Northern counterpart by a 24-to-1 margin.

But the shift of higher-value manufacturing to the South since the 1960s, once the South was air-conditioned and its Jim Crow laws nullified, has had a more profound effect on the American economy. Workers at the unionized auto, steel, aerospace, and other durable-goods factories in the Northern and Western states during the three decades following World War II attained a standard of living and of employment stability all but unknown to earlier generations of workers. Since the 1970s, however, that standard—and with it, the American middle class—has been eroded by the emergence of lower-wage competition from both the Global South and the domestic South.

Confronted not only with the financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, but also with the double whammy of the two Souths, the median wage of all U.S. manufacturing workers fell by 4.4 percent between 2003 and 2013. Facing the possible collapse of the unionized auto industry, the United Auto Workers was compelled to insti-

For global manufacturers, the South has become the

low-wage

alternative

to China.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 35

Never before have GOPcontrolled Northern states so emulated the South’s Racial suppression

and anti-

working-class

economics.

tute two-tier contracts, bringing their less-senior members’ pay down to the levels that workers in the non-union Southern plants make. Newer hires at General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are paid roughly half ($14 to $19 an hour) of what more senior workers make, and can’t make more no matter how long they work there. (Now that the industry has recovered, removing that ceiling from those workers’ pay has become, not surprisingly, a UAW priority.)

The decline of Northern wages to Southern levels hasn’t been confined to manufacturing. The expansion of Walmart from its Southern base into the North and West has had a profound effect on the incomes of retail workers and of workers all along its supply chain. Ferociously anti-union (when butchers at one Texas Walmart sought to unionize, company executives responded by eliminating the meat departments from every store in Texas and six neighboring states), Walmart directs its managers to keep payroll expenses between 5.5 percent and 8 percent of sales, though the norm in retail marketing is between 8 percent and 12 percent. Wages in counties where a Walmart has been operating for eight years, economist David Neumark has found, are 2.5 percent to 4.8 percent lower than those in comparable counties with no Walmart outlets.

But Walmart—America’s largest private-sector employer, with 1.4 million U.S. employees—is in lots of counties.

In tandem with Southern manufacturers and with the spread of Southern economic norms, it has brought Northern wages closer to Southern levels. In 2008, the wage gap between states of the industrial Midwest and those of the South—for all workers, not just those in manufacturing— was nearly $7, according to Moody’s Analytics. By the end of 2011, it had fallen to $3.34.

The spread of Southern earning levels northward has been accompanied and abetted by the concomitant spread of Southern values. Just as Northern bankers and textile mill owners such as Massachusetts’s Abbott Lawrence profited from and supported the antebellum South, today’s business and financial leaders from all parts of the nation profit from the low-wage production of the global and domestic souths, and support the suppression of unions in the North as well as the South. What’s new is the spread of historically white Southern values to Northern Republican politicians—the latest development in the 50-year Southernization (and nearly complete racial whitening) of the Republican Party.

In the last three years, the Republican governors and legislatures of such onetime union bastions as Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin have joined the South in enacting “right to work” laws intended to reduce union membership.

Since these laws cover only private-sector unions, and thus have no effect on the labor costs of government employees,

36 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

the Republicans’ initial motivation was almost entirely political: Diminishing unions weakened institutions that generally campaigned for Democrats. But in recent months, bills to lower wages for construction workers on public projects have been moving through the legislatures in those three states, and the Michigan legislature has passed a bill forbidding cities from setting their own minimum-wage standards—all measures designed to hit workers’ pocketbooks. Moreover, laws designed to depress minority, millennial, and Democratic voting by requiring voters to present particular kinds of photo identification have been enacted not only by eight of the eleven once-Confederate states, but by Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin as well.

Like the pre-1861 slaveholding elites, today’s Republicans appear increasingly dedicated to Southernizing the North.

White racism is the great hardy perennial of American life and politics, and it has never been confined to the South.

But never before have Northern-state governments (all of them Republican) sought so successfully to emulate policies of racial suppression and anti-working-class economics that the South originated. Four decades of declining economic prospects, overlapping with a demographic revolution that has transformed a predominantly white nation into a profoundly multiracial one, has heightened racist anxieties among many within both the Northern and Southern white working classes—anxieties that Republicans, both Northern and Southern, have skillfully exploited. And as globalization weakened the power of unions in the once-industrial Midwest, Republicans in those states who long had wished to make unions as inconsequential as they are in the South had a golden opportunity—and took it.

With divided government at the federal level blocking such measures as a minimum-wage hike, and with Southern congressional resistance to strengthening workers’ rights blocking labor-law reform even when Democrats have controlled Congress, the federal government in recent decades has done little to obstruct the nationalization of the white South’s racist and anti-worker norms. Since 2013, however, at the very same time that Northern Republicans have moved right, states and cities where multiracial liberal coalitions govern have taken it upon themselves to enact their own minimum-wage increases, paid sick-day legislation, and statutes making it easier to vote. But there are too few such states to offset the malign influence of the South on broader wage trends.

Barack Obama came to national prominence in 2004 hoping to bridge the divisions between blue states and red. Instead, these gulfs have deepened. Federal remedy is stymied; the public policies of the red and blue states are racing apart; and the fundamental divisions that turned one nation into two in 1861 loom larger today than they have in a very long time.

Boosting Low Pay

How to Live Happily with Robots B y J e ff r e y S a chs

M

achines do indeed eliminate jobs. And on the whole, we should be grateful. In the biblical telling, humanity was condemned to hard labor following the expulsion from Eden: “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.” Yet machines have offered us some respite, easing our burdens and raising living standards. The armies of robots and other smart machines now on the horizon can ease those burdens further, if we humans are smart enough to act so that the benefits of these technologies are widely shared.

Market forces alone won’t do the job. Smart machines may raise productivity and output on average, but market forces will tend to concentrate the gains among a fraction of the population—those with high skills and wealth—and leave behind the rest, notably the young, the poor, and the workers displaced by the machines. Government policies are needed to ensure that the gains to society are broadly distributed.

Consider the stunning historical benefits of machines in reducing the overall burden of work, but also their adverse distributional consequences. In 1900, the U.S. economy was one of endless toil. Half the population lived on farms, engaging in heavy farm labor and household chores for 12 hours per day, six days per week. The other half lived off the farm, typically with workweeks of 60 hours or more, and home chores as well. We can therefore surmise that the average American adult (age 15 and above) spent at least ten hours a day in toil, much of it heavy physical labor. Of course, farm children under the age of 15 also put in heavy labor.

By 2013, according to recent time-use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the combined time at work and household chores of Americans age 15 and above has declined by roughly half, to an average of around five hours per day, composed of around 3 and a half hours of work and commuting, and around 1 hour and 47 minutes of housework and related activities. Machines have dramatically eased the toil of most Americans and extended our lives, in stark contrast to the hard, long toil and lower life expectancies that continue for hundreds of millions of people around

the world who are still trapped in subsistence agriculture.

The idea that American adults average just five hours per day at work and housework may seem surprising, since we also assume that the typical workday is still around eight hours. Yet only around 40 percent of Americans age 15 and above are actually at work at any time. The highly productive U.S. economy supports the other 60 percent or so who are in school, retirement, full-time leisure, part-time work, or involuntary unemployment. All in all, it is an amazing triumph of technological advancement that Americans enjoy an average national income above $50,000 per person while working less than three and a half hours per day.

Yet machines did not automatically make winners of everybody. Machines such as mechanized cotton pickers threw millions of small farmers, and notably millions of African American sharecroppers, off the farms and into a desperate search for jobs in cities. Some found work; others descended into unemployment, incarceration, or poverty, or perhaps a cycle of disaster among the three. A century earlier, England’s newly mechanized looms and spinning jennies had displaced millions of pre-industrial home weavers and spinners around the world, forcing many of those in England into the “Satanic Mills” of early industrialization.

The same process is being repeated today, as production, clerical, and sales workers are replaced by machines, and face the prospect of lower wages or unemployment.

At the most general level, machines increase the pie while creating new inequalities as to how it is divided among classes and occupations. It has been the government—through measures such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare—that has enabled those on the losing end of the market forces to remain on their feet, and even to enjoy rising living standards alongside the rest of society. John F. Kennedy famously declared of the economy that a rising tide lifts all boats.

The government’s role is to ensure that everybody at least has a lifeboat so that nobody drowns in the rising waters.

As machines have improved over time, they have increasingly displaced heavy and routinized labor while creating new occupations to work the improved machines. In economic jargon, machines have been substitutes for brawn and routinized work and complements for specialized skills. To keep ahead of the machine, therefore, the key for individuals has been to keep gaining marketable skills. While many older unskilled workers have not been able to keep pace, younger workers have sought more schooling and training.

Society as a whole has recognized the case for added skills by establishing the expectation that almost all young people would earn at least a high school diploma. Now, more than 90 percent of young people earn a high school diploma or equivalent. And while around 70 percent of high school graduates now go directly to college, only around one-third

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 37

It takes extensive government intervention to assure that gains of automation are broadly shared.

end up with a four-year bachelor’s degree by ages 25 through 29. The fact that two-thirds do not earn a bachelor’s degree is significant, because in the era of ever-smarter machines, a bachelor’s degree is probably the minimum threshold for a reasonable shot at stable, middle-class employability.

For workers who haven’t been able to get the skills needed to keep up with the machines, decent work has proved increasingly elusive. Consider this stunning fact: The federal minimum wage per hour in 1950 was 75 cents, equal to around $7.35 at today’s cost of living. This is actually slightly higher than the current minimum wage of $7.25, even though the inflation-adjusted national income per person has risen by almost four times as much. In essence, the purchasing power of the minimum wage hasn’t budged in 65 years! It is skilled workers and capital owners who have walked away with the growing national economic pie.

The race with the machines is getting harder to run. Machines keep getting smarter in the digital age.

Machines are increasingly able to displace a wide swath of jobs, including assembly line workers (replaced by robots); clerical workers (replaced by computerized business processing); sales workers (displaced by e-commerce); maintenance workers (displaced by smart systems that can be monitored remotely or may be self-correcting); and surveillance workers (replaced by remote monitoring). Many more occupations will be displaced in the near future.

The implications are clear in the labor market. Those workers whose top educational attainment is a high school diploma or less have suffered an absolute decline in living standards, although we can have some doubt as to whether all of the benefits of the information age (free music and online entertainment, instant connectivity with friends and social networks, e-commerce) are properly captured in the data. Without question, those with limited education and training have fallen out of the middle class.

While the new smarter machines and systems have displaced an expanding swath of routinized work, they have all demanded new skills to manage the smarter systems.

As a result, the earnings of highly skilled technical, professional, and managerial workers have continued to rise, as has their share in the overall labor force. On the whole, though, more and more workers are being left behind.

With a growing pie, the winners in the new machine age—including capital owners of the new machines plus the skilled workers—could readily compensate the losers and still leave everybody ahead (a bargain that economists call a Pareto improvement relative to the situation without the new machines). Yet our political system, now drenched in special-interest campaign financing and the lobbying of self-interested billionaires, has increasingly rejected the idea of redistribution. Today’s mega-winners tell the losers, “Tough luck, that’s just progress.” It is no surprise

38 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

that the congressional Republicans have overwhelmingly rejected even modest outlays for trade adjustment assistance, a financial mechanism to share the gains of trade with those hard-hit by the world economy.

The implications of the coming wave of smart systems for income distribution will be more complex than a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down for low-skilled or highskilled workers. In the coming wave of smart machines, at least some categories of high-skilled workers will also find themselves displaced. Some advanced medical tasks—for example, reading biopsies, CAT scans, MRIs, and X-rays— are already being shifted from doctors to technicians managing expert machine systems. Similar developments are taking place in the legal profession, logistics, mass media, and even computer programming (which can be replaced by machine learning in some circumstances).

When smarter machines displace low-skilled workers, the low-skilled workers are the ones who suffer while highskilled workers benefit twice: both from lower consumer prices and from the rising demand for skilled workers whose skills complement the machines. When high-wage workers are displaced, the situation is potentially reversed: Lower-skilled workers can enjoy the benefits of lower consumer costs (e.g., for medical services) without incurring lower wages.

Therefore, if new information technology affects workers across a wide range of occupations, as seems likely, the adverse wage impact on any particular category of occupations is likely to be muted, and all workers benefit as consumers of lower-priced goods. Still, capital owners are likely to benefit more than workers, as the share of national income going to capital will increase at the expense of labor. The downward trend in the labor share of national income is now widely observed across the world’s high-income countries.

Since smart machines tend to shift the distribution of income from labor to capital, as well as from unskilled labor to skilled labor, the economy could potentially spiral downward in reaction to a boost of machine productivity.

This paradoxical outcome would occur if the wage declines hit the young especially hard, and thereby reduce their lifetime savings. Falling wages of the young could then be followed by falling national savings and reduced national capital in the future.

The shift in income distribution against the young— and particularly against the young without bachelor’s degrees—seems to be occurring in many countries. The youth unemployment rate is generally much higher than the overall unemployment rate across Europe and in the U.S. This means that young people not only lose jobs and incomes, but also cease to provide significant savings for their own retirement and for national economic growth.

Germany is a notable exception regarding youth employ-

s h i z u o k a m b aya s h i / a p i m a g e s

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ment; there, active labor-market policies, including training and apprenticeships, help young workers make an effective transition from school to work.

A downward economic spiral of high unemployment and falling incomes is completely avoidableâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if we try. What will be required is government-led redistribution and active labor-market policies. Rather than leaving the capital owners and highly skilled workers with their mega-gains at the expense of the rest of the workforce, the government can and should ensure that the new productivity windfall is broadly shared. Taxes on windfall wealth and high incomes, returned in the form of educational outlays, technical training, apprenticeship programs, and family support, can do the job.

More government-supported education and training should be offered for the occupations of the future. The economy will need millions of additional workers trained in designing and operating smart systems in manufacturing, e-commerce, e-education, e-health care, transport and logistics, renewable energy, and e-governance. Millions more will be needed to provide nursing and personal support services for the rapidly aging population. And in an era of increased leisure time, the entertainment, travel, fitness, and other leisure industries are very likely to expand. Government policies are also needed to ensure that workers have the rights and opportunities for flexible time away from work, such as paid parental leave, vacation

time, and sick leave, all routinely guaranteed in northern Europe but not in the United States. The right set of policies can promote not only more job opportunities at decent earnings, but also more leisure timeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an outcome long predicted and advocated by economists as a positive outcome of smarter machines.

There are many added things that can and should be done to spread the benefits of advancing technology. Profitsharing within companies should redistribute some of the capital windfalls back to the workers. A return to higher rates of unionization would help redress the runaway powers of American CEOs, including their outlandish leeway to pay themselves outlandish salaries. Patent laws should be rewritten to stop the unconscionable price-gouging of new drugs. And the monopoly-pricing in the health sector should be stopped.

In short, in an increasingly productive economy, middleclass prosperity can be shared by all, but only if the rules of the game operate to spread the benefits and limit the exploitation of the losers at the hands of the winners. The techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists are therefore both right. Living happily with the robots is a matter of social choice and fairness, not a matter of the technology, per se. One process that cannot be automated is the sharing of benefits across the society. Retaking democracy from the plutocrats will be the first step.

The Robot Will See You Now: (And she never goes on break.) An automated receptionist at a department store in Japan

Jeffrey Sachs is the director of The Earth Institute and a professor of health policy at Columbia University. An adviser to the U.N., his most recent book is The Age of Sustainable Development.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 39

When Charter Schools Go Union B y R a c h e l M . C o hen

T

he April sun had not yet risen in Los Angeles when teachers from the city’s largest charter network—the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools—gathered outside for a press conference to discuss their new union drive. Joined by local labor leaders, politicians, student alumni, and parents, the importance of the educators’ effort was not lost on the crowd. If teachers were to prevail in winning collective bargaining rights at Alliance’s 26 schools, the audience recognized, then L.A.’s education reform landscape would fundamentally change. For years, after all, many of the most powerful charter backers had proclaimed that the key to helping students succeed was union-free schools.

One month earlier, nearly 70 Alliance teachers and counselors had sent a letter to the administration announcing their intent to join United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the local teachers union that represents the 35,000 educators who work in L.A.’s public schools. The letter asked Alliance for a “fair and neutral process”—one that would allow teachers to organize without fear of retaliation. The administration offered no such reassurance. Indeed, April’s press conference was called to highlight a newly discovered internal memo circulating among Alliance administrators that offered tips on how to best discourage staff from forming a union. It also made clear that Alliance would oppose any union, not just UTLA . “To continue providing what is best for our schools and our students, the goal is no unionization, not which union,” the memo said.

The labor struggle happening in Los Angeles mirrors a growing number of efforts taking place at charter schools around the country, where most teachers work with no job security on year-to-year contracts. For teachers, unions, and charter school advocates, the moment is fraught with challenges. Traditional unions are grappling with how they can both organize charter teachers and still work politically to curb charter expansion. Charter school backers and funders are trying to figure out how to hold an anti-union line, while continuing to market charters as vehicles for social justice.

Though 68 percent of K-12 public school teachers are unionized, just 7 percent of charter school teachers are, according to a 2012 study from the Center for Education

40 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

Reform. (And of those, half are unionized only because state law stipulates that they follow their district’s collective bargaining agreement.) However, the momentum both to open new charter schools and to organize charter staff is growing fast.

Ironically, the first major proposal to establish charter schools came from the nation’s most famous teacher union leader. At the National Press Club in 1988, Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gave a speech outlining a “new type of school.” Shanker envisioned publicly funded but independently managed schools, which would be given the space to try out new educational approaches and would continue to receive public dollars so long as their approaches proved to be effective. These schools would act as educational laboratories, testing grounds of new and better practices that could then be adopted by traditional public schools. A few months after his speech, Shanker dubbed his idea “charter schools,” in a reference to explorers who received charters to seek new land and resources. Later that year, the 3,000 delegates at the national AFT convention endorsed Shanker’s charter idea.

At its conception, then, unions were integral to the charter movement. The thinking was that without job security and elevated teacher voice, which unions help ensure, how else would charter teachers feel comfortable enough to take educational risks in their classrooms? In Shanker’s original vision, as Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter trace in their book A Smarter Charter, not only were charter teachers to be unionized, but union representatives were to sit on charter authorizing boards—the entities tasked with overseeing charter accountability—and all charter school proposals were to include “a plan for faculty decision-making.” In return, certain union regulations would be relaxed in order to facilitate greater experimentation.

The charter movement has grown from a single Minnesota school, which opened in 1992, to more than 6,700 schools spread across 42 states and the District of Columbia.

Today, charters educate more than 2.5 million children— more than 5 percent of all public school students. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), charter enrollment has increased by 70 percent over the past five years. Public support is growing, too: A 2014 PDK/Gallup survey revealed that 70 percent of Americans support charter schools, up from 42 percent in 2000.

Somewhere along the way, however, charter proponents—conservative and liberal alike—decided that having no unions was an important ingredient for charter school success. By making it easier for principals to hire and fire staff, the proponents argued, schools could better ensure that only high-quality teachers would be working in the classrooms. The blame for the widening achievement gap

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between black and white students, the proponents believed, rested with underperforming teachers and the unions that defended them. Over time, advocates came to see charters not as institutions designed for collaboration with public schools, but as institutions that could compete against them, perhaps even replacing public schools entirely.

As the charter movement developed a more adversarial bent—one that no longer spoke of productive partnerships with public schools, and one that championed union-free workplaces—traditional teachers unions grew understandably defensive. The AFT and the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s two largest teachers unions, moved to openly oppose charter schools. Only in the past few years has their stance toward charters begun to soften.

Beginning in 2007 and 2008, the AFT set up a national charter-organizing division, and today has organizers in seven cities: L.A., Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City, and Philadelphia. Secky Fascione, the NEA’s director of organizing, says that as more charter teachers began approaching her union, the NEA started to see them as educators who should be treated no differently from anyone else. Both unions also recognized that such new national initiatives as the Common Core standards and President Obama’s Race for the Top meant that teachers at charter and traditional public schools faced similar challenges that the unions could help them address.

But organizing charter school teachers while opposing the establishment of more charter schools is no simple balancing act. “How could I support a union that for the last ten years spent a good portion of their time attacking our right to exist?” asks Craig Winchell, an Alliance high school teacher who turned out in opposition to April’s press conference. “They’ve spent the last ten years both supporting anti-charter school board members and fighting in Sacramento against what we do.” Especially when opening a new charter is paired with closing down a traditional school, unions are typically found rallying in protest. Critics argue that unions’ newfound interest in charter teachers, then, is just a ploy to collect more membership dues.

Having abandoned their outright opposition to charters, many of the AFT and NEA’s recent efforts have been focused on shutting down low-performing charter schools, especially within rapidly expanding for-profit chains, and pushing for a set of national charter accountability standards. While the thought of national guidelines for charter schools makes many charter advocates squirm, the public overwhelmingly supports the idea. According to a survey conducted this year by In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy, 89 percent of Americans favor requiring charter management organizations to hold open board meetings with the public, as well as requiring all teachers who work in charter schools to meet the same level

of training and qualifications as those in traditional public schools. Eighty-six percent favor requiring greater transparency over charters’ annual taxpayer-funded contracts and budgets, and 88 percent favor requiring state officials to conduct regular audits of charter schools’ finances.

In 2014, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University released a report that documented a host of charter school problems, ranging from uneven academic performance to funding schemes that destabilized neighboring schools. The report laid out national policy recommendations designed to promote increased accountability, transparency, and equity.

The AFT and NEA came out strongly in support of the Annenberg standards, and have been working to promote them to state legislatures and school boards around the country. Leaders in the charter world, however, were less than pleased. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), an organization that seeks to influence the policies and practices of state authorizers, called the standards “incomplete, judgmental, and not based on research or data.” Michael Brickman, then the national policy director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, said the Annenberg standards would stifle charters’ innovation by “bludgeoning them with regulation.” He accused the authors of “standing in the way of progress” with their “overzealous statutory recommendations.” (The president and CEO of NAPCS, Nina Rees, told me she actually likes the Annenberg standards, but doesn’t know if they should be adopted across the board.)

In 2007, Brian Harris started working as a special education teacher at the Chicago International Charter School’s Northtown Academy. “I’d just got out of grad school and was happy to have a job,” Harris says. “It didn’t bother me that it was non-union because it wasn’t something I paid attention to.” In May of 2008, the company’s CEO announced that in the following school years, teachers would have to teach a sixth class in lieu of supervising an academic lab (which is similar to study hall). Teachers were surprised and upset at what amounted to a significant change in working conditions. Those who didn’t like the new arrangement, the administration told them, could find someplace else to work.

It was an eye-opening moment for Harris, and he realized that this is what it meant to have a workplace without an organized staff. “We didn’t know [this CEO], we didn’t have a lot of connections with management, and people were unsure what the line of authority was,” Harris says.

So with the help of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ACTS), a union connected to the AFT and its Illinois affiliate, Harris and his colleagues launched a 13-month organizing drive. Yet even when presented

Unions are grappling with how they can

organize

charter teachers and

Oppose charter schools.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 41

More than

Five percent

of public school students now attend charter schools.

with union affiliation cards from 75 percent of the faculty, administrators refused to recognize their union; they insisted that the teachers would have to petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election. The teachers did just that, won the election, and Northtown became the first unionized charter school in Chicago.

Today, Harris serves as president for Chicago ACTS, which has grown to represent 32 charter schools and nearly 1,000 teachers. Chicago ACTS ’s relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), an AFT local known for its militant opposition to school privatization and charter school expansion, has also evolved substantially over the years.

CTU was initially ambivalent, even suspicious, of these new unionized charter teachers. But Chris Baehrend, an English teacher at Chicago’s Latino Youth High School and vice president of Chicago ACTS, says this wariness was not reciprocated—indeed, ACTS was inspired by CTU and looked to it as a model. In the spring of 2012, as CTU was gearing up for its successful, eight-day strike against Chicago’s school district, ACTS teachers began to discuss how they could best offer CTU support. They decided to put forth a strongly worded resolution at the AFT ’s national convention that summer. In it, the charter teachers called for a moratorium on new charter schools and an end to school closings and turnarounds “until their system-wide impact on educational outcomes can be properly assessed.”

Baehrend and Harris worked with CTU leaders to finalize the resolution’s language, which was approved, though not adopted as official AFT policy.

The resolution was the first joint action that Chicago ACTS took with CTU. Since then, the two unions have convened for joint delegate trainings, workshops, and even parties. “We’re making conscious efforts to make connections and to encourage charter and traditional public school teachers to be joined in solidarity,” says Jesse Sharkey, the vice president of CTU. Sharkey himself turned out to a press conference in February to publicly support two Chicago charters in the midst of organizing.

On April 30, educators at North Philadelphia’s Olney Charter High School voted to form a union. The vote came after a long three-year battle with their employer, ASPIRA . With a final tally of 104–38 in favor of unionization, Olney became one of the largest unionized charter schools on the East Coast.

When the Olney campaign first went public, as Jake Blumgart reported for The American Prospect back in 2013, teachers went to deliver their union petition, signed by 65 percent of the staff. “[The principal] not only refused to accept it, but chased them down the hallway to give it back,” Blumgart wrote. That was just the start of a full-bore, antiunion campaign: Administrators held closed-door, one-on-

42 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

one meetings with teachers and staff, threatened teachers with layoffs and benefit cuts, put anti-union literature in teachers’ mailboxes, required teachers to attend mandatory meetings with anti-union consultants, and announced that teachers could be fired or disciplined for remarks they made about ASPIRA on social media.

When I asked Sarah Apt, an ESL teacher at Olney, if she ever tried to talk to management about workplace issues before going the union route, she laughed. “We’ve had a million committees and conversations,” Apt says. “You can have a conversation with them now! But without your co-workers standing behind you, the [outcome of] the conversation depends entirely on the whims of the administration.”

Apt says she and her co-workers want to build a union that will agitate for themselves and their students, in collaboration with parents and the community. “Chicago [where striking teachers won high levels of community and parental support] has set a new standard for what can be done with a teachers union in the United States,” she says.

Parents have been standing behind the Olney organizing effort, from showing up to support teachers at school board meetings to making calls to the administration on their behalf. More than 40 local businesses also signed a petition backing the teachers’ campaign.

Though regional characteristics and local politics shape each charter school’s distinct organizing drive, the general hopes, challenges, and frustrations expressed by charter teachers I spoke with were strikingly similar.

Greg Swanson, an English teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School, the top-performing charter school in Louisiana, echoes Apt’s frustrations about the power dynamics that can inhibit teachers from effecting change in a nonunionized school. (New Orleans has the highest charter density in the country, claiming roughly 90 percent of the city’s public school students.) Before Ben Franklin High’s teachers decided to unionize, Swanson says, they tried different ways to increase teacher voice, such as forming a committee to

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j a k e b lu m g a r t

Talking Union: Teachers and staff from Olney Charter High School at ASPIRA’s last board meeting of 2013

advocate for teacher and student issues, including better teacher course loads, increased curriculum coordination, and more academic supports for incoming students. “When we brought [our ideas] to the attention of the administration, we were just told that they can deal with some things and not others,” Swanson recalls. “Without the pressure of the union, [our voices are] not heard in the same way.”

In March, after 85 percent of his Ben Franklin colleagues backed a petition in support of unionization, Swanson and his co-workers signed the first collective bargaining agreement for New Orleans teachers since Hurricane Katrina. Teachers not only won greater pay-scale transparency in their contract but also the right to have department chairs elected by their colleagues rather than appointed by their CEO. They won increased time within the school day to prepare lesson plans, greater job security, and a fairer teacher evaluation system.

Ben Franklin has long been regarded as an educational leader in Louisiana, and Swanson’s team understood that their organizing had consequence for the broader political landscape. “We were looking to improve things in our school, but we were also very much aware of the larger implications of this for New Orleans, which is the testing ground for going full-charter,” said Swanson. With this in mind, they worked to develop a contract that they hope can become a model for charter teachers across the city.

Teachers at another local charter, Morris Jeff Community School, followed their lead, and are currently negotiating their own contract.

Many New Orleans charter advocates are wary of the turn toward unionization, but some leaders are urging the community to stay calm. Andre Perry, an education policy expert, wrote in The Hechinger Report that New Orleans reformers should be open to unions given the Crescent City’s high rate of teacher turnover. Ten years after Katrina, he wrote, “we’re not going to fire our way to educational success.”

Every year, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools publishes a rating system that evaluates each state’s charter law. While charters with collective bargaining agreements are still considered welcome within the charter school family, state laws receive a higher NAPCS score when they allow administrators to hire and fire teachers free from the constraints of a collective bargaining agreement. Nina Rees, the NAPCS president, says her organization places a premium on this because charters should have the freedom not only to hire and fire, but also to expand the school day and workload “without having to constantly negotiate with a centralized bureaucracy.”

Terry Moe, a Stanford political scientist and author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, thinks that while “teacher voice” is a necessary component to any functioning organization, teachers unions use their power in ways that are not in the best interests of students. Moe and Rees both take the position that in the modern world, unions are not necessary in charter schools, either because there are already sufficient employee protections in place in our legal system, or just because the incentives within the charter world are such that there’s not really all that much to worry about.

“I’m in a nonprofit space,” Rees says. “Why is it that teachers need to have the right [to be in a union]? Why is it that teachers need these protections immediately when they enter the organization?” If one wants some of the protections and benefits that unions offer, she points out, there are other resources available to teachers. The Association of American Educators (AAE), for instance, is a non-unionized professional educators’ organization that offers a “modern approach to teacher representation and educational advocacy.” Membership in AAE can bring you things like liability insurance, supplementary insurance, legal protection, and employment rights coverage. It cannot, however, bring you leverage with your employer.

In A Smarter Charter, Potter and Kahlenberg recommend

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 43

Research suggests that charter unionization

has little effect

on student achievement.

giving teachers an opportunity to vote on whether or not to form a union when a charter school first opens, rather than having non-union environments be the default option.

Where a school has no union, they suggest reserving seats for teachers on charter school boards. But Rees is no fan of these ideas either. “If you start off with the premise that management is against the employee before you even start the enterprise,” she says, “I think it sets the wrong tone.”

The generally small size of charters, Moe adds, also obviates the need for unions. “In small schools, where everyone knows one another and they can talk about their issues … you’re really not likely to get the same dissatisfaction that would drive people to unionize in the great number of charter schools,” he says.

Leading charter advocates echo Moe and Rees’s sentiments. Chester Finn, a conservative policy analyst, declared, “The single most important form of freedom for charter schools is to hire and fire employees as they like and pay them as they see fit.” Geoffrey Canada, a charter founder hailed as a pioneer by Obama, said that union contracts “kill innovation; [unionization] stops anything from changing.”

Greg Richmond, the president and CEO of NACSA , doesn’t buy the argument that unions are structurally incompatible with charters. “There are people who politically don’t want unions or don’t want charters to be unionized, but [allowing workers to choose] is the law of the land.” The key question, he argues, is whether unionization ends up helping or hurting student achievement—a question that will be resolved empirically. “If teachers want to organize and negotiate for certain things, go ahead,” he says, because in the end, the charter school has to work for students or else its charter will be revoked.

So are unions compatible with fulfilling the promise of charter schools?

I sat down with Juan Salgado, the president and CEO of Instituto Del Progreso Latino, a nonprofit educational organization in Pilsen, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago, to learn what it’s been like for him to oversee two charters that have unionized with AFT. Salgado believes that unions have been tremendous assets for his schools, particularly around some of the more fraught questions of wages and benefits. Can such issues be resolved “without a union?” he asks. “Yeah. But can we move forward to actually run a school? Probably not.”

The mutual buy-in at the end of the negotiating process, Salgado said, created a better spirit at his schools.

Though Salgado was explicit that he disapproved of the way the union conducted its first organizing campaign— the organizers caricatured him as an evil boss, he says, solely to advance their strategy—he still feels the resulting unions, full of organized, passionate people, are no hindrance to excellence. “Unions ask a lot of questions! And

44 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

that’s OK,” he says. “Critical questioning causes reflection and makes sure you have very good answers. And they demand transparency, and transparency is important. It’s a value that we should all have.”

To date, the best existing research suggests that charter unionization has very little impact on student achievement.

Labor economist Aaron Sojourner and education policy researcher Cassandra Hart looked at California charters several years before unionization and then several years after; they found no significant difference in student performance over time, though there was a temporary dip during the initial unionization year, which tends to be a more disruptive period.

Moreover, as Potter and Kahlenberg document in A Smarter Charter, other research on unions and traditional public school performance suggests that unionization either has small positive effects or no measurable effects at all on the achievement of most students. “The research does not paint a picture of unions as an enemy to student achievement,” Kahlenberg and Potter conclude.

That said, there are other ways to think about the way a union might impact a school. Higher teacher salaries, more transparent pay scales, and greater control over working conditions may help attract more qualified candidates to teach. Research does show that increased teacher voice helps decrease teacher turnover, and it also shows that high teacher turnover costs schools millions of dollars, disrupts student learning, and weakens institutional capacity. Many objectives that teachers hope to achieve through unionization are grounded in a desire for greater stability. “We want to stick around, we want to see our freshmen graduate, we want to see their siblings and cousins come, we want to make this our home,” says Apt, whose Olney Charter High School has had high teacher turnover from year to year.

In recent years, as growing numbers of charter school teachers have sought to unionize, both the AFT and the NEA have stepped up their efforts to organize them.

Since 2009, the AFT has been flying teacher activists from across the country to meet one another, share stories, and strategize national campaigns. The most recent gathering—they usually last three days—took place in Washington, D.C., in April, and Swanson, Apt, and Baehrend were among the 40 teachers in attendance. “The fights are very similar, so what we see one employer do in Detroit, we wind up seeing in other parts of the country too,” says Shaun Richman, AFT ’s deputy director of organizing. “Teachers get the opportunity to support each other, and to learn how to deal with circumstances that may arise at their schools later.”

Also in April, for the first time ever, the California Teachers Association (CTA), an NEA state affiliate, convened 65 charter educators from across the state. One California

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teacher in attendance was Jen Shilen, who teaches U.S. history, economics, and government at California Virtual Academies (CAVA), a network of 11 virtual charter schools for grades K-12. Shilen and others have been fighting for a CAVA union since December 2013. When their workload began to change rapidly and inexplicably, and their many attempts to raise concerns with management went nowhere, Shilen said, they reached out to CTA . CAVA declined to comment.

“Going to CTA’s conference was the first time I’ve gotten to meet other charter educators organizing and it was a major morale boost,” says Shilen, who rarely even sees her own co-workers, since virtual charter teachers work from home.

Teachers organizing at L.A.’s Alliance schools were also there, as were union members from Green Dot, another rapidly expanding charter chain in Los Angeles. Green Dot schools occupy a unique place in the charter world, since their original founder was interested in establishing a unionized workplace from the outset. In 2006, Green Dot management approached United Teachers Los Angeles about their teachers joining their union, but UTLA , then fully opposed to charter schools, rejected the offer. As a result, Green Dot educators unionized with CTA, and their union, the Asociación de Maestros Unidos (AMU), had a relatively unfriendly relationship with UTLA for the next several years.

This too is changing. Alex Caputo-Pearl, the UTLA president elected in April 2014, said that his union is now actively pursuing better relations with AMU. AMU in turn, has come out in strong public support not only for CAVA’s organizing drive (which would be with CTA) but also for Alliance’s. Salina Joiner, AMU’s president, says that her organization’s leadership is all “in support and we’ll do whatever we need to do,” adding that she would never work at a non-union charter school.

Real tensions remain surrounding AFT and NEA’s desire both to organize charter teachers and to politically rein in charter schools. Not all charter teachers who’d be interested in a union would support the Chicago ACTS resolution calling for a moratorium on new charter schools. And not all would agree with teachers like Shilen, who lobbied this year at the State Capitol in Sacramento on behalf of California’s “Annenberg Package”—four bills to promote greater charter transparency and accountability.

Joiner feels that union political activity that attempts to limit charter schools’ funding or expansion is “disrespectful to our educators that teach at that school” and “an injustice to parents that want school choice.” Joiner attended the CTA’s gathering of California charter teachers in April, and said that at least the union is now starting to ask them for their input on charter legislation. To CTA’s credit, she thinks the conversation is “moving in a positive direction from what it was before,” but that charter union members “still have a lot to do around the NEA and AFT.”

As more charter schools continue to unionize, CTU Vice President Sharkey expects some charter enthusiasts will walk away. “At some point, charter school teachers will work with the same conditions and pay as all the other schools, and at that point it’s not clear that charters will be as exciting to the entrepreneurs and businessmen promoting them now,” he says.

Unionized charters are not a panacea. The UFT Charter School, which opened in Brooklyn in 2005, was a widely publicized K-12 charter experiment to be run by the New York City teachers union. The results of its elementary and middle schools were mostly abysmal, and they closed down in 2015. (The high school performed better and stayed open.) The Wall Street Journal editorial board triumphantly declared that this episode shows the failure of “union dominance” over American public education. However, they conspicuously made no mention of UFT ’s other charter school, University Prep, which has been ranked among NYC’s best.

The Wall Street Journal would never write about University Prep because it “disrupts their narrative” about unions, says Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT. “Look, there is not one silver bullet but what unionization does is it gives teachers a choice and a voice.”

Asharg Molla has been working at the Alliance GertzRessler High School ever since she started as a Los Angeles Teach For America corps member in 2009. She likes working for a charter organization, and believes in its mission of creating a small collaborative community where teachers, board members, and parents can all work together.

“But that’s just not what it’s been,” she says sadly. While she speaks highly of her school, colleagues, and principals, she joined with the Alliance cohort organizing for a union because, she says, she recognizes there are limits to what even a good principal can do within a big, fast-growing organization. She knows too many Alliance teachers who are afraid to speak up, lest they rock the boat and lose their job.

The campaign in Los Angeles is gaining steam. Since Molla and her colleagues went public in March, the number of teachers who have pledged support has more than doubled—146 teachers (out of the roughly 600 who work at Alliance schools) have now signed the public petition.

But Alliance administrators and their allies are doubling down on their efforts to thwart unionization. Beginning in late May, the California Charter Schools Association started to pay Alliance alumni to call parents at home, in an effort to drum up opposition to a union.

“I don’t want to work for a machine that just cares about the growth and expansion of the organization,” says Molla.

“Although [fighting for a union] is not an easy process, and can be exhausting, it really just shows these large organizations that we are the ones who make up this organization and that there needs to be that balance of power.”

While 68 percent of public school teachers are unionized,

Just seven percent

of charter school teachers are.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 45

When Adjunct Profs Go Union B y J u s ti n M i l l e r

B

y now, Tiffany Kraft imagined she would be fully immersed in academia, putting her Ph.D. and passion for British literature to use on an annotated version of Irish novelist George Moore’s Mike Fletcher.

But her path to academia has not been as straightforward as she had hoped. She got her master’s when President George W. Bush was finishing his first term; her doctorate during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Yet still, she finds herself in the purgatory of academia in which she’s been stuck since 2004: adjunct instruction.

“Adjuncting wasn’t great but there were no tenure-track jobs available,” Kraft says. “So I just thought I’d ride it out till the kids got through high school and I could move. Then after a period of time you’re sort of branded an adjunct if you don’t matriculate immediately—people wonder what’s wrong with you.” As an instructor of English and writing composition in Portland, Oregon, she’s cobbled together employment at four different higher education institutions in the metro area.

In a typical fall term, Kraft can secure up to six fivecredit courses between three different campuses, ranging anywhere from $2,700 to $3,500 per course. In winter and spring terms, she usually can pull in three courses. For a single mother of two, these are not ideal circumstances. “I’m on fumes this term; it’s tight,” she said during the winter term.

She used to be able to find courses to teach in the summer as well. But now she says she’s seeing fewer summer opportunities at the colleges she works for, especially since many full-time faculty—who get hiring preference—are picking up extra courses.

“I just got a letter from my director and she said there is no summer employment for adjuncts. There were four slots, and they got filled,” she says.

Summer now holds a special anxiety for Kraft. She’s been forced to file for unemployment through the summer months. “Last summer was the first time I had to do that, and it scared me to death. I managed to get by but it wasn’t easy.”

The Affordable Care Act hasn’t made things any easier for her. University human resources departments are now hypersensitive to making sure that part-time instructors

46 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

don’t work enough hours to require the universities to provide them with health insurance. Kraft’s previously stable course load at Portland State University was cut because of that. “HR red-flagged everyone that was above hours,” she explains. “That was a huge slam.”

Kraft’s tenuous situation is far from unique; in fact, it’s pretty much par for course.

Part-time. Contingent. Non–tenure track. Casual.

Adjunct. Non-standard. Peripheral. External. Ad hoc.

Limited contract. New model. Occasional. Sessional. Call them what you will, but these professors have now become the majority of college and university faculty. Their jobs are defined by low pay, limited instructional resources, tenuous employment security, and a complete lack of institutional support for their own research and writing. Contingent faculty has become a subset of the new working poor—the subset with Ph.D.s.

Kraft is just one of more than one million contingent instructors in the United States. Today, part-time and adjunct instructors comprise more than half of all faculty (not including those at for-profit institutions); another 20 percent are full-time without tenure. Just 30 percent are traditional tenured or tenure-track appointments. And the future is not looking better as tenure-track hiring continues to plummet, currently around one in four.

Since she began teaching in 2002, Kraft has been trying to better the lot of contingent faculty, reaching out to fellow adjuncts and her department chairs. Her efforts, however, amounted to just “banging my head against the wall,” she says. Her colleagues and bosses weren’t ready to have a conversation in which the problems of adjuncts, and solutions for those problems, were seen as collective.

In 2012, she wrote an article airing her grievances, and in 2014, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) invited her to speak at a town hall event at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She was joined by now-retired California Representative George Miller, then the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee, whose staff had recently released a report on the “just-in-time” nature of higher education faculty. The town hall was a platform for the SEIU to announce a highly ambitious long-term plan to organize one million adjunct faculty members nationwide. Adjunct Action Network, as it was dubbed, was launched in direct response to an increasingly vibrant grassroots movement of precarious faculty demanding change.

These organizing efforts, of which SEIU’s is just one, are a response to the collective failure of administrations— from community colleges all the way to the Ivy League— to fully integrate their main source of instructional labor into their full-time, permanent faculty system. As tuition continues to rise, the budgetary share that goes to instruc-

Boosting Low Pay

tional costs, including faculty salaries, has either flat-lined or decreased. The starkest shift has come at community colleges, where the instructional budget share fell by 3 percentage points between 1987 and 2009, according to the Delta Cost Project. Administrations have effectively entrenched a two-tiered system of faculty in higher education—one that has the support and security of the academy, and one that is utterly detached and disenfranchised.

“The evil genius of the multitier system was that it enticed the tenured faculty with short-term benefits and lured contingent faculty with what seemed a reasonable expectation—that they would gain valuable experience in a highly competitive job market,” writes Richard Moser in Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the TwoTier System. Contingents are realizing this is a false hope, and the movement is finally finding a voice through both grassroots and netroots organizing. If they get their way, higher education will change for the better.

With the mobilization of a grassroots movement of adjuncts has come a windfall of resources from national labor unions—both those that have traditionally focused on higher education faculty, such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and those that are new to the sector, such as SEIU. In a labor market where union organizing in most sectors has been rendered all but impossible, these unions have found a new front full of long-exploited faculty members who are eager to band together.

Higher education faculty in the years after World War II was still largely made up of upper-middleclass white men. Tenure was the expectation, and most got it—in 1969, only about 3.3 percent of faculty appointments were off the tenure track. Back then, part-time adjunct faculty were mostly a novelty, with outside professionals teaching a course or two each year.

Throughout the 1970s, a number of factors contributed to a massive shift in the academic workforce. As the economy sank into a stagflation crisis, states started cutting funding to higher education. Endowments tanked.

These economic reverses coincided with a rapidly changing higher education landscape—increasing demand for college education was coming from a more diverse cohort than before. “It was no longer just the majority of 18-year-olds straight out of high school going full-time,” says Joe Berry, a contingent faculty member, activist, and labor historian by trade. Older women and men coming back into the workforce, veterans, and immigrants were making up a larger portion of the student body. These people had busy lives and wanted to attend part-time. The number of students “became much harder to predict,” Berry says. “You couldn’t just look at your area high schools and predict how many 18-year-olds were coming out” and count on those numbers

to determine how many course sections would be needed.

Administrations turned to the more flexible—and cheaper—labor of contingent faculty, even as the era’s protests for racial and gender equality helped create a more diverse pool of faculty candidates. “Politically, it was much easier to casualize and degrade the job of college teaching now that it wasn’t just a white man’s job,” Berry says. At the time, however, “nobody among us realized the depth of that strategic change that was taking place. Initially, the administrations weren’t consciously setting out to change the faculty makeup. They got addicted to the cheap, flexible labor to solve all their problems.” But in time, he continues, “it came to be strategic, not tactical answers to their problem.”

In a sense, the traditional tenured-faculty bubble was bursting. Requirements for tenure were heightened at the same time that tenure-track hiring screeched to a halt.

What was previously the next career step was now an inaccessible dream to many pursuing a career in academia.

Higher education scholar Gary Rhoades says these trends point toward what he calls “academic capitalism”: increased managerial control of the work and the employees. “It’s easier to control employees who have less job security and whose working conditions are such that you can easily nonrenew them,” Rhoades says. “You don’t have to worry about layoffs when you have large numbers of contingent faculty.”

This “casualization” of faculty first began emerging in community colleges and state universities—the non-elite institutions. It was there that contingent faculty unionization campaigns began. The California Part-Time Faculty Association was likely the first explicitly contingent faculty association in the United States. By the mid-1970s, contingents in the California State University (CSU) system had formed lecturers’ committees in the statewide unions of both the United Professors of California—an American Federation of Teachers local affiliate—and the California Teachers Association.

The 1970s were a time of disconnected and decentralized efforts to unionize. Coming out of the ferment of the 1960s, the new academics were disproportionately leftleaning, and a surge in faculty unionization soon followed.

In 1967 and 1968, state labor boards started granting collective bargaining rights to faculty at public universities and colleges. The State University of New York and City University of New York systems were among the first public faculty groups to gain certified union representation.

The National Labor Relations Board had no jurisdiction over private institutions until 1970. Prior to that, private-school faculty’s only hope to unionize was through an administration’s voluntary recognition. By 1976, there were 38 private colleges and 180 public colleges under union contracts in 29 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam. Berry argues that the administrations’ creation of

Adjuncts have become a subset of the new working poor— the subset

with

Doctorates.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 47

a two-tiered structure—tenure-track and the rest—soon became an effort to frustrate the burgeoning unionization movements on many campuses.

Then a Supreme Court decision curtailed the scope of faculty organizing.

In the ’70s, academics who emerged from the

’60s Left

led a surge in faculty unionization.

In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v.

Yeshiva University that full-time, tenure-track faculty in private colleges and universities were “managerial,” and thus ineligible to organize under the National Labor Relations Act. The decision had no impact on contingents’ ability to organize, and it didn’t pertain to faculty at public colleges and universities, who, like all public employees, aren’t covered by the National Labor Relations Act, and whose right to bargain collectively is left to the discretion of the states.

Traditional higher education unions like the AFT, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the National Education Association had been organizing contingent faculty for decades—mostly, however, through comprehensive faculty unionization efforts, not by specifically targeting contingents. AFT ’s higher education strategy had mainly consisted of building joint “wall-towall” bargaining units in which all faculty—from tenured professors to adjunct instructors—are represented.

Yeshiva scrambled those unions’ strategies. The AFT continued to focus on organizing broad units that included both tenure-track and non–tenure track faculty, but at public colleges and universities only. By contrast, nontraditional education unions like SEIU, which have come onto the scene in recent years, have largely organized contingent-only units at private schools where wall-to-wall units are forbidden.

“Some of the best contracts in terms of working conditions for adjunct faculty are in those joint units; some of the worst contracts are as well,” says Rhoades, who was formerly the general secretary of AAUP. If there’s a strong sense of solidarity between the two tiers, the ability of joint units to win strong contracts could mean big gains for contingent working conditions. However, joint units could just as easily mean captivity for contingents if their concerns fail to register in contract negotiations.

Some see this insistence on maintaining a wall-to-wall strategy as a failure to adapt organizing strategies to the rapidly expanding legions of contingent faculty who are struggling to improve their working conditions. AFT President Randi Weingarten contends, however, that her union’s wall-to-wall strategy was the best response to the Yeshiva decision. “The Supreme Court basically pulled the rug out from university organizing,” says Weingarten.

“The organizing strategy we deployed was one that tried to lift all boats, and not let the boss of a university pit tenured faculty against non-tenure faculty or adjuncts.” In the post-Yeshiva world, she says, that strategy “has made

48 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

us the largest higher education union in the country.”

The AFT represents about 215,000 members in higher education—about 100,000 are full-time, tenure-track; 90,000 are contingent, including full-time, non–tenure track as well as part-timers, graduate employees, and postdocs. “We help facilitate bargaining committees [with representatives from both groups] and have it done from the bottom up,” Weingarten says. “That’s part of the beauty of organizing everyone. You deal with each other’s needs.

From a bargaining position, we’re aligned.”

With many university administrations openly antagonistic to organizing efforts among contingents, the AFT ’s wall-towall approach has served to enlist a powerful group—tenured faculty—in the contingents’ cause. But contingents are an uncommonly unionizable workforce even without tenured allies, which is a lure for unions with a range of organizing strategies. “There are [unions] who even though they are not in the education space see contingent workers—exploited workers—and want to get into that space,” Weingarten says.

“Frankly, there’s enough work for everyone in this space because there’s lots of exploited adjuncts.”

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry agrees. “It’s incumbent upon all of us to do whatever it takes to make sure that working people have a chance to come together and bargain,” Henry says. As the most prominent face in the crowd of nontraditional higher education unions, SEIU has employed a distinctly different strategy than AFT ’s.

It’s a highly publicized and aggressive campaign with aspirational goals of organizing one million adjuncts and establishing a base pay of $15,000 per course. While the union’s national campaign is in its infancy, it has roots in Washington, D.C., that go back nearly a decade.

Kip Lornell has been teaching since the early 1990s, mostly at George Washington University in D.C. His field is American music and ethnomusicology, on which he’s published 14 books, and he even won a Grammy in 1997 for his work on a folk music anthology project. As a music academic, he’s about as experienced as they come. But to the GW administration, he’s merely an Adjunct Professor of Music. Given his expertise, GW offered him a regular part-time position in 1999, which offers slightly more job security, benefits, and a higher salary. Lornell inquired what higher salary GW had in mind and was told $15,000 a year. “They said, ‘We pay all regular part-timers [in the college of arts and sciences] that,’” he recalls. “I didn’t believe that for a second.”

He asked around among other part-time faculty in the college, and as it turned out, he was right. “There were people getting paid two and a half times more than that.

The folks who were offering me [the position] were either badly misinformed or absolutely lying.”

jim ruymen / upi / l andov

Boosting Low Pay

The experience radicalized Lornell. After he got in contact with other part-timers, they started having regular meetings and eventually decided that they wanted to form a union. They had heard about the work the United Auto Workers (UAW) was doing at New York University and the New School, and by 2001 the group had grown enough to reach out to the union and make a pitch. The UAW sent down some organizers, but after more than a year with little results to show for their efforts, it became clear that the partnership wasn’t working. “They were stretched too thin,” Lornell says. They mutually decided to part ways and find a local union. Lornell then reached out to AFT, but GW is a private university and didn’t seem to mesh well with the union’s organizing strategy.

Finally, the GW part-timers met with SEIU Local 500, which covers the D.C. and Maryland area. The local took up the cause. Within six months, the group completed a card drive and presented it to the NLRB. “That’s when the fun began,” Lornell says. “The university was not very happy, and they became even less happy when we won a very closely contested election.”

For the next year and a half, GW tried to contest the election results at various levels of the NLRB. Eventually the school brought their case to the district appeals court, which very quickly issued a clear message to GW: You’ve lost this, now sit down and bargain. It took a year to negotiate the first contract, but when it was done, the faculty had made real strides. Minimum compensation for a course went up from $2,700 to around $3,400. The contract also restricted the university’s ability to deny reappointment, a boon for job security. Ultimately, the first GW contract became a beacon of encouragement for part-timers at other campuses and a template for their efforts. (The GW administration confined its comments on this history to noting that it “was the first university in the District of Columbia to agree to terms with a union to represent part-time faculty” and that it has since “maintained good relations” with the union.)

“GW unquestionably paved the way for adjunct organizing in D.C.,” Lornell says. One by one, faculty at other campuses in the Washington area, both public and private, joined Local 500. First came Montgomery College in Maryland. Then American University. Then Georgetown.

Then Howard University. Then the University of D.C. Then Trinity Washington University.

SEIU Local 500 Executive Director David Rodich explains the thinking behind the local’s organizing strategy: “The secret to making this work is to understand that the movement is bigger than any one individual school.

No one school is broken; the system as a whole is broken.”

Rodich estimates that the union has organized 3,000 faculty members—about 80 percent union density in the

metropolitan D.C. adjunct market. Local 500 hopes its adjuncts will be able to achieve such high membership that they could transcend campus-level contracts and collectively bargain at a metro-area level. This “metro organizing strategy,” as the union terms it, would give contingent faculty unprecedented leverage. The union could centralize retirement plans and create an adjunct job bank reminiscent of the old union hiring halls.

“That’s the way building trades organized 130 years ago—not by individual employer, but by those practicing the craft in that immediate area and then they made all employers have the same standards,” says Joe Berry, whom many credit with crafting this strategy for contingent faculty. “Entertainers—the musicians, the actors—organized on that basis. There’s a lot of precedent. … It’s the workplace-appropriate strategy for organizing this sector.”

Perhaps recognizing the need to make its contingent organizing more nimble and adaptable, AFT has even integrated the metro organizing strategy into one half of a two-pronged approach. In Philadelphia higher education, the union is attempting to organize a high density of contingents. It still remains invested in the power of the wall-to-wall unit, but in metro areas with a number of higher education institutions,

In The Shadow Of Tommy Trojan: A Fight-for-15 demonstration at USC demands higher wages for the university’s fast-food and child-care workers—and its contingent faculty.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 49

The AFT

organizes

all the faculty

at public universities; SEIU focuses solely on contingent faculty.

where contingents often work at multiple schools, the metro organizing strategy just makes more sense. It’s a matter of pinpointing which strategy fits. “The real issue becomes, what creates a power for workers to have a voice and a decent shot at earning a living wage and the professional conditions they need?” says Weingarten. “So you try both.”

Indeed, where wall-to-wall organizing isn’t feasible, AFT seems now to have fully embraced the contingent reality. The union’s higher education director, Alyssa Picard, comes out of the contingent faculty and grad student movements. This change in strategy, argues Berry, is the result of the growing tumult and militancy of contingent faculty.

“It’s pressure from below,” he says. “The national unions had to get on board because the train was on the tracks.”

The SEIU announcement of its Adjunct Action Network campaign in 2014 was a calculated attempt to build on the early successes that its locals in D.C. and Boston had with adjunct organizing in urban areas. The union had been monitoring the organizing in D.C. and announced the campaign less than a year after Georgetown adjuncts had voted to unionize. The Adjunct Action initiative, later renamed Faculty Forward, has rapidly scaled up efforts in 18 states or metropolitan areas, from Los Angeles and San Francisco to St. Louis and the Twin Cities. About 8,000 adjuncts have been brought under the Faculty Forward banner so far, and the union says thousands more are in the organizing pipeline.

While many in the adjunct movement community commend SEIU for expanding aggressively, some are skeptical of the long-term efficacy of a campaign that seeks to model a national effort on two locals’ successes, and that perhaps puts a premium on the speed, rather than the depth, of organizing. Others wonder whether SEIU, which has taken a financial hit from a Supreme Court decision undermining its home-care locals and is devoting major resources to its Fight for 15 campaign, can deliver resources adequate to its ambitions for organizing contingents. On the surface, though, SEIU appears to be steaming ahead, not pulling back. It recently announced its Faculty Forward initiative that calls for a minimum of $15,000 per course, benefits included. It’s a bold, flashy move and one that is admittedly aspirational. However, the move has been widely applauded for bringing greater visibility to the adjunct movement, largely by tapping into both the rhetoric and the action of the Fight for 15 movement among low-wage workers.

Despite the growing prevalence of contingent faculty, it took a long time for a national contingent organizing strategy to emerge. Until the turn of the century, most efforts were isolated into campus, city, or state silos.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s, with the advent of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL)—independent but supportive of particular union efforts—that the move-

50 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

ment began to develop a national strategy and vision, particularly through its advocacy events like Campus Equity Week. In 2009, aided by the rise of social media, the New Faculty Majority (NFM) formed as an organization intent on connecting the various moving parts necessary to stem the tide of increasing adjunctification—unions, nonprofits, activists, legislators, students. “We see ourselves very much as a page in the evolution of the movement,” says NFM President Maria Maisto. “We try to be both a hub that connects the various spokes of the wheel and also to identify the issues that need to be addressed.”

The group has worked with unions and the Department of Labor to try to fix unemployment denials for adjuncts over the summer as well as addressing wage and hour violations that have occurred because of the Affordable Care Act. Maisto believes that legislative reform would be one of the most effective ways to advance contingents’ interests.

With the Republicans’ control of Congress likely blocking any pro-labor legislation, Democrats have begun to use their power to outline the problems and propose solutions that future Congresses might enact.

Following up on the House Democrats’ 2014 investigation into working conditions, Virginia Congressman Robert Scott, who succeeded Miller as the senior Democrat on the House Education Committee, has expressed interest in continuing the committee’s work in support of adjuncts.

In the Senate, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Al Franken of Minnesota have sponsored a bill that would extend loan forgiveness to adjuncts.

The Internet has broken down the silos of geography and discipline that historically divided contingent faculty.

Facebook and Twitter especially have catalyzed the conversation surrounding contingent working conditions, seen most recently through the promotion of National Adjunct Walkout Day in late February.

As the adjunct movement gains traction, one big obstacle remains lack of student awareness of who is even providing them with their education. “Most students, when they hear [who is teaching them], are shocked,” says Troy Neves, a third-year student at Northeastern University in Boston. “A lot of people don’t even know what an adjunct professor is.”

Neves is a regional organizer with United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a social justice advocacy group. As part of its Campus Worker Justice Campaign, the organization has made adjunct equality a major focus.

Northeastern University contingents successfully unionized with SEIU and are currently in contract negotiations.

The USAS chapter was a vocal supporter of their efforts.

“One of the main ways we support our adjuncts is by making sure that while in the bargaining room, our university knows that students are watching [and] are going to hold them accountable for treating their workers fairly,” Neves says.

Boosting Low Pay

Higher education administrations have varied greatly in their responses to adjunct organizing efforts.

Some have declared themselves neutral. Some have waged blatantly anti-union campaigns. Most land somewhere in the middle. “Our official position was that it was within their rights to decide for themselves,” says Jim Glaser, the dean of Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences. “But our perspective was that there would be real costs, both in dollars and bureaucratically, to unionization.”

In Tufts’s School of Arts and Sciences, more than half of the instructors are not in the tenure stream. In September 2013, part-time lecturers voted to form a union. The administration prepared for contract negotiations with a clear sense of what their bottom line would be, with a vision of what they hoped to come out of it. “Tufts, like many other [universities], has resources. But they are constrained— we live within a tight budget,” Glaser says. Its main goals were to stay within that budget while developing a “simple structure that was easy to follow and administer.”

About a year after the unionization vote, the administration and the union settled on a contract that’s since become a model for SEIU’s Faculty Forward campaign. It offers, at a minimum, year-long contracts for all adjuncts and up to three-year contracts for those with more experience. The part-time lecturers also get first notice and a guaranteed interview for full-time openings. Increased compensation was, of course, a key part of the contract, with as much as a 40 percent pay bump for those teaching Romance languages. By 2016, all part-timers will make at least $7,300 per course; those with eight years of service will earn a minimum of $8,760. And work done outside the classroom will be compensated.

A common point of agreement between the union and the administration was the need for a better evaluation system for part-time faculty. Adjuncts wanted feedback on their performance, says Glaser; the school wanted more accountability. “I think [the evaluations] were one of the good byproducts of unionization,” Glaser says. “We are going to have better accountability and better communication and recognition of high-quality work.” Adhering to the new contract, he acknowledges, will require a big adjustment on behalf of the administration. “The university is taking on more costs and we have less flexibility as a result. But we also feel the outcome is contributing to more fairness and to, we hope, better pedagogy and to more satisfied faculty.”

Tufts provides a case study in what a successful negotiation between union and administration can look like.

However, as Glaser notes, Tufts is a wealthy university with a lot of resources. As are Boston University, Northeastern University, and Washington University in St. Louis—all schools with adjuncts who have voted to unionize with

SEIU. A key question for SEIU’s campaign is what kind of concessions unions can get outside the bubble of elite universities that educate a small slice of U.S. college students.

To date, although SEIU has organized some community colleges, its campaign is almost exclusively focused on private universities—mostly because of Yeshiva, it’s easier to organize adjunct-only units at private colleges.

But SEIU can’t come anywhere close to unionizing even a fraction of those one million adjuncts without figuring out how to organize in the public universities and community colleges where the vast majority of contingents are employed. These are the institutions that have seen their state funding gutted over the years and have responded by embedding just-in-time instructional labor into their operational models. Can such colleges afford what the adjunct movement is calling for?

John Barnshaw, the senior higher education researcher for the American Association of University Professors, took an informal stab at answering that question. Using Ohio State University and its nearly 60,000 students as an example, he tried to come up with a rough figure of just how much it would cost to put its entire part-time faculty onto the tenure track. The university is actually less dependent on contingent faculty than the average institution. Of its 5,000-person instructional staff, less than a quarter are part-time.

The lowest-paid tenure position at OSU for the 2014– 2015 academic year was assistant professor at $85,200, with an average benefits package bumping up total compensation to more than $100,000. To promote just half the part-timers to tenured positions would cost roughly $67 million in salaries and benefits. That’s not an insignificant number, especially at a public school heavily reliant on public funding. “It’s not without its costs,” Barnshaw says, but to put that in perspective, OSU spends a total of $1.8 billion in salaries and benefits.

Paving the way for a new reality in academia will likely require a multi-pronged approach—through unionizing drives, coalition-building, legislation, and ultimately innovative new employment models that don’t demoralize faculty.

“I don’t think people understand how oppressive it is to work without job security, to work on a terminal, sometimes ten-week basis, without knowing you’ll be employed,” Tiffany Kraft says. “It wears on you psychologically, physically. ... Not only are you underpaid, there’s absolutely no respect. Over time, that hurts. It just hurts.”

What this adjunct movement could mean for Kraft, and legions of other disenfranchised faculty members, is simple: not just fair pay and stability, but a chance to engage in academia. “I would have a lot less stress in my life,” Kraft says.

“I wouldn’t constantly be panicking and looking for jobs on Craigslist. I’d have time to publish and research more. I’d have time to just be academic, really.”

With State

funding gutted, can public colleges raise adjuncts’ pay?

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 51

A Decent Living for Home Caregivers — and their Clients B y H e ath e r R o g e rs

L

addie Read, a 69-year-old with cerebral palsy, can’t get up without help. When he awoke one morning last April expecting to find his homecare aide and instead saw a complete stranger at the foot of his bed, Read was terrified. “I had no idea who was there,” he recalls. “If you were bedridden and somebody just walked into your house,” he says, “how would you feel?”

Read requires help to move from room to room, get into his wheelchair, use the bathroom, dress, and bathe.

He can’t cook, shop, or clean the house. To assist with all these tasks, the Portland, Oregon, resident relies on home-care aides seven days a week. It turned out that the stranger was a replacement. His usual aide couldn’t come in—but no one bothered to tell Read. While abruptly losing caregivers isn’t uncommon in Read’s decades of using the service, it was no less upsetting. The new aide couldn’t understand what Read was saying—his caregivers must be trained to understand his severely impaired speech—and had no clear idea of how to perform the job. “It felt like hell,” Read said, speaking through an interpreter. “When this happens, my whole world stops.”

Thousands of people dependent on home-care workers face similar disruptions every day. Turnover in the industry is extreme. In 2014, the median rate topped 60 percent, as documented in an industry study—that’s six out of ten caregivers leaving the job every year. It’s not surprising that so many workers flee the profession, which has intense physical and emotional demands—and poverty wages. The median earnings are less than $21,000 a year. That’s well below the annual median across all occupations, which is almost $35,000, and just above the federal poverty line for a family of three. Earnings are so low that about half of all at-home caregivers are on some form of means-tested public assistance, including Medicaid and food stamps, according to the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, a research organization.

Why is pay so bad for these workers? One explanation is that home-care aides comprise several traditionally marginalized groups. About 90 percent of home-care

52 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

workers are women; almost half are of color. And since the job doesn’t require a high school diploma, most have low education levels. America’s chronic devaluing of care work, be it for children, the ill, disabled, or aging, reinforces a vicious cycle of low status and low pay.

So entrenched is the discriminatory view of caregiving that the country’s most important labor law deliberately shuts these workers out. When the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed in 1938, it transformed the lives of American workers by setting the eight-hour day and establishing other basic protections, including extra pay for overtime. However, the law excluded domestic caregivers. Astonishingly, it still does. As a result, home-care aides do not even have the right to receive minimum wage and overtime pay.

At-home caregivers have a range of titles, including personal care assistants, home-care aides, home health aides, homemakers, and companions. As defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are two basic types of home-care workers, “personal care aides” and “home health aides.” Both help with daily tasks like dressing, bathing, and cooking, but home health aides also perform basic medical duties, such as giving medication and taking vital signs. The country’s 875,000 home health aides most often work with clients short-term, in the days after they’ve returned from the hospital after treatment for an acute condition. Personal care aides, of which there are 1.2 million, are the helpers who stay with clients for the long haul, sometimes for decades.

Under federal law, personal care assistants do not need any licensing or training but home health aides must have 75 hours of instruction to carry out their medically oriented duties. While home health aides must have this extra training, their median earnings are not even a dollar an hour more than those of personal care assistants.

Instead of deficient wages and high turnover, these workers could enjoy proper compensation and be rewarded with raises and promotions for receiving ongoing training and honing their skills, which rarely, if ever, happens today. There are pathways to achieve these ends, which include granting home-care workers overtime and the minimum wage, allowing them to unionize, shifting the industry to a direct public employee model to remove the profit motive and, most vitally, increasing government reimbursement rates.

The government doesn’t keep good statistics on how home care is financed. Funds come from multiple sources, the biggest being Medicaid and Medicare, according to estimates by Candace Howes, an economist at Connecticut College who chairs both the economics and the gender and women’s studies departments. In determining these numbers for the Department of Labor, Howes’s modeling shows that public money pays for 83 percent of wages for

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Boosting Low Pay

both home health and personal care aides. Medicare is a federal program; Medicaid dollars come from both federal and state coffers and it is administered differently by each state. The remaining funding that pays for at-home care comes through other federal programs, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as private health insurance and out-of-pocket payments by the consumer.

Low reimbursement rates are at the heart of the problem. Based on a sampling of 15 states conducted by Health Management Associates, a consulting firm, the average Medicaid allocation in 2012 was $17.70 an hour. Even when workers win wage increases thanks to unionization drives, they will soon max out their earning potential.

And if reimbursement rates don’t grow, then workers can only advance so far. The increased commercialization of the sector also plays a role, by diverting funds that might otherwise flow directly to caregivers.

Commercial Caregiving Meets a Devalued Profession There are two broad categories of employers of home-care workers—private agencies and public registries. Both entities match people seeking help with qualified caregivers

and oversee management and payroll. In contrast to the state-affiliated registries, most private agencies operate as for-profit businesses.

Among the private agencies there is a range of models, including for-profit companies, franchises, nonprofits, and a handful of worker-owned cooperatives. Due to the absence of monitoring and data collection, there’s no comprehensive picture of how much of the market each type of agency commands. However, piecing together what data there are can shed some light on the money flows.

The burgeoning franchise home-care companies are the fastest-growing piece of the industry. They include such national chains as Comfort Keepers and Homewatch CareGivers. An exact breakdown of how many workers are employed by chains compared to other types of agencies isn’t clear. It is obvious, though, that much of the revenue at the chains goes straight to the top. Their gross profits range between 30 and 40 percent, as reported by Franchise Business Review. Gross profit represents the portion of money left over after subtracting from revenues the direct costs of providing the service. In this case, these expenses primarily include employee pay. CEO compensation at the four publicly traded national home health care chains, adjusted for

Caring For The Caretakers: Can poor pay coexist with good care?

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 53

Collective bargaining produces both higher wages and

political pressure

for better reimbursement rates.

inflation, has increased more than 150 percent since 2004, a report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) finds. In sharp contrast, when adjusted for inflation, the report says average hourly wages for home-care workers over that same time have declined by nearly 6 percent.

Even good providers run up against insufficient reimbursement resources. For example, Cooperative Care is a worker-owned company based in central Wisconsin that was established in 2001. Its 60 home-care aides provide services for about 150 clients. The agency is for-profit, but because its mission includes maintaining good working conditions, its profit margins are considerably slimmer than the chains’.

According to the company’s board president, Tracy Dudzinski, the current Medicaid reimbursement rates Cooperative Care receives via a regional managed care organization (in other locations, the state dispenses funding) range from $20 to $15 an hour. The typical reimbursement is $17 an hour, she says.

From this sum, the co-op pays its overhead, including rent and insurance, as well as employees’ hourly wages.

And, anomalous in the industry, the co-op also uses its reimbursements to cover overtime, travel time (some aides visit multiple clients a day), holiday pay, and paid time off, including sick days and vacation time. In addition to this, the company foots the bill for ongoing training to build its aides’ skills.

An aide with no experience would start at $9 an hour and could work up to earning $11.10, according to Dudzinski. While that’s only slightly above the national median, Dudzinski says, these workers take home far more than that hourly rate. To illustrate the point, she gave an example of the income of a representative full-time employee.

This caregiver earned about $30,500 in 2014, including more than $3,000 in overtime, another $3,000 in mileage, and a profit-sharing payout of $600. This annual income is almost 50 percent higher than the industry median.

After previously working at a private agency and having put in 11 years at the co-op, Dudzinski, who is also a caregiver and the agency’s administrative coordinator, says she now sees how much money owners can skim off the top. “They don’t pay their workers well because they want to line their own pocket,” she says.

Indeed, overtime alone adds up to a tidy sum, according to the industry’s own numbers. A report commissioned by the International Franchise Association found that among agencies in states without overtime protections (in the absence of federal requirements, some states have adopted their own), 89 percent of caregivers routinely worked overtime. Among the agencies surveyed for the report, workers averaged about eight overtime hours per week. At the median hourly rate of $9.83 for personal care aides, a company with 300 workers that refused to pay

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extra compensation would retain more than $520,000 a year. Conversely, a worker making $10 an hour and compensated for eight overtime hours weekly would keep an additional $2,000 a year.

In response to worker advocates’ demands for laborlaw protections, in 2013 the Department of Labor (DOL) at last promulgated a rule allowing caregivers minimum wage and overtime under the FLSA . The rule was set to take effect at the start of 2015, but private agency owners have been fiercely defending their turf. Trade groups, including the Home Care Association of America, opposed the rule, claiming agencies can’t afford to pay $7.25 an hour, let alone overtime. These groups say that if private care agencies must follow standard labor protections, they’ll be forced to raise prices beyond what the ill and disabled could manage. And they have succeeded in holding up the new regulation’s implementation with a legal challenge. Last January, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington, D.C., vacated the DOL’s rule, saying it contravened the language of the FLSA . The DOL is currently appealing this decision.

Although industry groups claim that paying home-care workers according to normal wage and hour rules would break the bank, Cooperative Care demonstrates this is a fallacy. Another way to ratchet up compensation is with a direct-employee model operated through the state. These caregivers are matched with clients through registries operated by states and counties. The state government determines wages, issues paychecks, and handles administrative work. Similar to the cooperative model, this does away with the middleman and thus far has more readily lent itself to unionization, which in turn has raised wages in some states, most notably Oregon.

The Oregon Example In the summer of 2013 in a hotel in Portland, about two dozen home-care workers and a few staff from their union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 503, huddled in a conference room. They had been negotiating their most recent contract with the state for the previous seven months. About 20,000 caregivers who work through the state registry are represented by SEIU. Everyone in the conference room was tired, including Andrew Boeger, a researcher with the union. He’d been hunched over a laptop running numbers on spreadsheets for hours. Then two workers and the union’s chief negotiator stepped into the room. They’d struck a deal to raise their hourly base wage from $10.40 to $13.75. “There were women who were crying,” Boeger says. “One woman said, ‘Now I can afford to fix my car,’” he recalls. “People were literally weeping.”

The keys to getting higher pay in Oregon were the ability

Boosting Low Pay

nick ut / ap images

to bargain collectively and to maximize Medicaid funds through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansion. To this end, first the union worked with state lawmakers to ensure more federal money would be in Oregon’s purse. Since Medicaid is administered by the states, each sets its own reimbursement rates for at-home caregivers. The Medicaid budget comes from each state’s contribution, coupled with federal matching funds for which states must apply.

SEIU lobbyists toiled with sympathetic state lawmakers to take full advantage of the Medicaid higher spending under the ACA . They crafted Oregon’s Medicaid policies so that the state secured almost two-thirds of its Medicaid money from federal coffers, according to Heather Conroy, executive director of Local 503. This put Oregon among the top half of federal Medicaid recipients in the country.

Crucially, the union negotiated a bigger slice of that additional revenue for home-care aide pay.

This win was significant. Non-union at-home caregivers in Oregon perform the same tasks as those employed by private agencies, yet are paid considerably less. Joy’e Willman, who works for a private agency and has been one of Laddie Read’s caregivers for more than 20 years, was earning just $9.90 an hour with no overtime and no benefits. She just got her first raise in six years—a mere 35 cents an hour more.

Many low-wage labor advocates argue that unionization is key to improving conditions. To that end, SEIU is currently leading a high-profile national campaign called the Fight for $15—an effort to raise the floor on earnings.

Low-wage workers, mostly in the fast-food industry, have been grabbing headlines—and raises—through picketing and walkouts. And as of last fall, increasing numbers of home-care aides have signed on.

A Federal Fix? The raise Oregon’s caregivers secured may seem momentous, but it falls short of a living wage. At-home aides in other states have made some strides in establishing unions and shifting to direct public employment with similar outcomes. Among these states are California, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts, which have median hourly rates ranging from $10.34 to $12.86. Even when workers hold the purse strings, as they do in co-ops, they face a fundamental barrier to higher pay—the reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid are insufficient. After all, $17 an hour can only go so far. Squeezing out waste and firing the middleman aren’t enough to get home-care pay up to a level commensurate with the demands of the work and the needs of workers.

Another problem is that not only are the wins limited, they are also fleeting. Within the current system, the sums available to fund at-home caregiving can fluctuate with

every state budget cycle and political changeover. Governors and legislators friendly to publicly funded programs might work hard to get Medicaid dollars and may set acceptable reimbursement rates for workers. But new leaders with a divergent agenda could easily roll back those victories in the next budget. Consequently, some caregiver advocates contend that, ultimately, the answer lies in hiking federal Medicare and Medicaid funding rather than just pushing state lawmakers to give more.

According to Irene Tung, senior policy researcher at NELP, increasing federal reimbursement rates for caregivers would go a long way toward fixing the wage problem and the threat of inadequate home care. “The federal government needs to kick in greater resources and those need to be tied to specific wage standards,” she says. Those standards would require that a certain percentage of public dollars go directly to worker pay and benefits. “I think, collectively as a nation, if we’re going to meet the challenges of this growing workforce, federally we have to pay more for Medicaid—it can’t just happen piecemeal, state by state.”

Research by Howes, the economist, has shown that what most effectively reduces turnover among the larger caregiving workforce is higher wages. That means these workers will remain on the job longer, gaining more expertise to deliver higher-quality care. “That’s how we meet the need for more people who want to age at home”—as do the majority of boomers—says Howes.

Dudzinski agrees. “The federal government needs to increase the Medicaid reimbursement rate so you can pay your workers what they’re worth,” she says. “If this is what they choose for a career, let them make a living at it instead of leaving them to live in poverty.”

Fighting For Fifteen: Homecare workers join the broad movement for decent wages.

Heather Rogers is a journalist and author. Her most recent book, Green Gone Wrong, explores the contradictions of green consumerism. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 55

Fast Track to the Corporate Wish List

The Trans-Pacific Partnership displays a deep rift in the Democratic Party.

B y Dav i d Daye n

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, principal architect and salesman of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

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A

s we go to press, a deal between President Obama and the Republican leadership has kept the TransPacific Partnership alive—just barely. With negotiating authority headed to the president’s desk, the trade deal itself still has to be approved. All the parliamentary maneuvering has only increased skepticism among most House and Senate Democrats and their allies in the labor, environmental, and consumer movements. One question on the minds of many Democrats: Why has Obama been more vigorous in fighting for the TPP, in league with Republicans and corporate America, than in seeking, say, a public option for health insurance, or stiffer regulations on financial institutions, or a larger economic stimulus package?

The administration entered office promising to renegotiate unbalanced trade agreements, which critics believe have cost millions of manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. But TPP, a pact with 11 other Pacific Rim nations, mostly adheres to the template of corporate favors masquerading as free-trade deals. Of the 29 TPP chapters, only five include traditional trade measures like reducing tariffs and opening markets. Based on leaks and media reports—the full text remains a well-guarded secret and is still in flux—the rest appears to be mainly special-interest legislation.

Pharmaceutical companies, software makers, and Hollywood conglomerates get expanded intellectual property enforcement, protecting patents and profits at the expense of competition and consumers. Firms get improved access to poor countries with nonexistent labor protections, like Vietnam or Brunei, to manufacture their goods. TPP provides assurances that regulations, from food safety to financial services, will be “harmonized” across borders, creating a virtual regulatory ceiling. In one of the most contested provisions, corporations can enforce the agreement themselves through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, appealing to extrajudicial tribunals that bypass courts and usual forms of due process to seek monetary damages equaling “expected future profits.”

How did we reach this point, where trade deals are less about trade and more about corporate wish lists, and where all recent presidents, Democrat or Republican, pay fealty to

this model? This formula partly reflects the power of corporate campaign finance, which in turn reinforces the dominance of free-market ideology. One little-explored aspect is in the political transfer of power, away from Congress and into a potent but relatively obscure executive branch office: the United States Trade Representative (USTR).

As the lead agency for negotiating trade deals, USTR has become a way station for hundreds of officials who casually rotate between big business and the government. Currently, Michael Froman, former Citigroup executive and chief of staff to Robert Rubin, runs USTR, and his actions have lived up to the agency’s legacy as the white-shoe law firm for multinational corporations. Under Froman’s leadership, more ex-lobbyists have funneled through USTR, practically no enforcement of prior trade violations has taken place, and new agreements like TPP are dubiously sold as progressive achievements, laced with condescension for anyone who disagrees. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch puts it this way: “The good name of free trade got hijacked for every retrograde, mortifying policy you can think of.”

We have Richard Nixon to thank for the

modern trade agreement structure, a break with the preferences of the Founding Fathers.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gave Congress exclusive authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” and “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” But only the executive branch could negotiate international treaties. This led to an uneasy check and balance, where chief executives played a role in international commerce, but could not pursue their own trade preferences without approval of the elected representatives of the people. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Papers No. 75 that it would be unwise to “commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind,” like trade, “to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.”

Congress defined tariff rates unilaterally for more than a century. However, in 1934, after a period of tariff wars, Franklin Roosevelt’s Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act gave increased power to the president, but within strict limits. Congress specified a narrow range

for tariff reductions. Within that range, the president could negotiate reciprocal tariff cuts with other nations.

But Lyndon Johnson challenged the trade consensus in the 1967 round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), negotiating two sets of non-tariff alterations, one changing the method of pricing certain goods at the U.S. border, and the other an adjustment to “anti-dumping” laws, which prevent countries from flooding foreign markets with products below their domestic cost. Congress, seeing their authority usurped, refused to implement the non-tariff changes through legislation, even after Johnson signed the agreement. The trade agenda was stalemated.

Nixon then renewed the push for more presidential power. Tariffs had already been lowered in successive GATT rounds. Non-tariff barriers, the Nixon administration said, were now the “major impediment to fair competition and the free flow of goods in international trade.”

That term referred to protectionist measures in other nations, such as quotas, government subsidies, and industrial cartels closed to American exporters. From that relatively innocent beginning aimed at promoting U.S. exports, “non-tariff barrier” became a euphemism for ordinary health, safety, environmental, and financial regulations that U.S. corporations wanted to weaken both at home and abroad.

And trade deals, relying on expanded presidential power, became the vehicle.

The Trade Act of 1974, passed after Nixon resigned, initiated what is now known as trade promotion authority, or “fast track,” circumventing the normal legislative process. The president got to pick trade partners, launch negotiations, sign agreements, and get an upor-down vote in Congress within 90 days, with no committee markups, no amendments or filibusters, and strictly limited debate. Congress could suggest “negotiating objectives,” but the executive branch could ignore them and still get trade agreements fast-tracked. And instead of only negotiating tariffs, the executive branch could make broad policy changes, as long as they constituted a “non-tariff trade barrier.”

This meant that practically anything could get into a trade deal. Policies that might have failed under the normal legislative process could get new life, and then return to Congress

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 57

58 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

The Washington Post, of 566 cleared advisers on trade agreements, 480 of them represent private industry or trade groups. If the dominant voices in the ear of trade negotiators come from big business, it’s not surprising that the finished product reflects their priorities.

Since the Clinton administration, Democratic presidents have been inclined to give business what it wants on trade policy—and on regulatory weakening that can be characterized as free trade. Institutionally, USTR reinforces that predisposition. Here again, Froman’s career is emblematic.

Froman entered government under the Clinton administration, after helping edit the Harvard Law Review with a colleague named Barack Obama. He worked on international trade issues at the National Economic Council under Robert Rubin from 1993 to 1995, and played a supporting role in the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first trade deal incorporating a country in the developing world: Mexico.

NAFTA made it easier for American capital to access Mexico, and for Mexican goods to enter U.S. markets. The deal gave Mexico a free pass on its terrible labor conditions and less-stringent laws on health and the environment.

NAFTA threw this pool of cheap labor into direct competition with U.S. workers. The deal also put limits on food safety and financial regulations, cracked down on intellectual property theft, and included a chapter protecting corporate investments abroad through ISDS. “Most of the analysis leaves all that stuff out, and just looks at the textbook benefits of lowering tariffs,” says Jared Bernstein, former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden, now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The problem is that’s not really what these creatures are like anymore.”

Partially resulting from NAFTA-style trade deals, the last 14 U.S. trade deficits have been among the largest in U.S. history, an average of $500 billion every year. While some government reports show that NAFTA had a minor impact on the U.S. economy, others point to the wipeout of manufacturing jobs. The Eco-

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under expedited rules for passage. For example, Republicans alike cash in on their association. the 1995 Uruguay Round of GATT, which insti- Carla Hills, who headed USTR under George tuted the World Trade Organization (WTO), H.W. Bush, is CEO of Hills & Company, which altered meat and poultry inspection standards, advises companies on global trade. She also changed “Buy American” government procure- sits on the boards of Gilead Sciences, a biotech ment laws, gave pharmaceutical interests 20 firm, and mega-bank JPMorgan Chase. Mickey years of patent protections for medicines, and Kantor, Bill Clinton’s first trade representative, weakened the Marine Mammal Protection Act, was a top fundraiser for the Clinton-Gore camwhich forbade the sale of tuna caught by nets paign, and is now a partner at the high-powered that also captured dolphins. law firm Mayer Brown, specializing in internaInstead of appealing to Congress, lobbyists tional corporate transactions. He has served on wanting to affect trade policy could pursue the boards of chemical giant Monsanto and the one-stop shopping with the U.S. Trade Rep- U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and advises the resentative, which was established in 1962 as a minor office, strengthened in the 1974 Trade Act, and elevated to cabinet level in 1979. USTR is housed in the Executive Office of the President, where there are no formal “revolving-door” statutes to prevent agency personnel from subsequently working for industries with a vested interest in trade policy. “Three kinds of people work at USTR ,” says Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat.

“People who were corporate lobbyists, people who want to become lobbyists, and people who were lobbyists and want to become lobbyists again.”

Michael Froman’s USTR tenure represents the apotheosis of this tendency. The assistant trade representative for agricultural affairs, Sharon Bomer Lauritsen, previously lobbied for the The USTR under Froman works mainly with corporate advisers.

Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Christopher Wilson also represented Council for Biotechnology and the investment BIO as part of the trade consulting group C&M bank Morgan Stanley. All of these firms have a International, before becoming the U.S. depu- major stake in trade policy, through liberalizing ty chief of mission to the WTO. Deputy Trade regulations or extending patents.

Representative Robert Holleyman worked for The structure of USTR throws top officials the Business Software Alliance, representing in close contact with industry. Congress creMicrosoft, Apple, and IBM, among others. Fro- ated a trade advisory committee system, where man himself came to USTR from Citigroup, experts with security clearances review trade the nation’s largest bailout recipient, where he negotiations and offer ideas. But this attemptran an Alternative Investments division that ed check on the power of USTR has just become managed $49 billion in capital. The nominee a giant lobbying opportunity. The chairman of for U.S. permanent representative to the WTO, the advisory committee on aerospace equipMarisa Lago, also came from Citigroup. ment runs commercial trade policy for Boeing; Overall, the Center for Responsive Politics the chairwoman of the committee on energy identifies 144 former trade office officials who and energy services is the head lobbyist for the went on to lobby the government. Party iden- Electric Power Research Institute, the utility tification scarcely matters, as Democrats and industry’s leading trade group. According to

nomic Policy Institute estimates nearly one million net jobs lost from NAFTA , and another 2.7 million lost since permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) were established with China. The Clinton administration said PNTR “would only increase the trade deficit by $1 billion,” claimed Democratic Representative Brad Sherman of California. “The proponents were off by 30,000 percent.”

In 1995, Froman moved to the Treasury Department, where he would eventually become chief of staff to Rubin, whose brand of Wall Street–friendly policies broke from the Democratic Party’s past. The Treasury Department controlled financial regulation in Clinton’s White House, which became increasingly intermingled with trade. For example, the World Trade Organization’s “General Agreement on Trade in Services” bound member nations to limit financial regulations. By 1999, the GrammLeach-Bliley Act had repealed Glass-Steagall, as specifically promised by the Clinton administration in their WTO commitments, with Rubin and Froman driving the policy change.

With Glass-Steagall repealed, Rubin decamped to the bank that benefited most from it—Citigroup. Froman followed him in 1999, and spent a decade there as a counselor and managing director. In 2004, Froman introduced State Senator Barack Obama to Rubin and Larry Summers, according to Noam Scheiber’s book The Escape Artists. Froman was a key fundraiser in the 2008 presidential campaign.

When Obama won the presidency, Froman got a plum assignment as a member of the transition’s advisory board, effectively becoming the hiring manager for the president’s entire economic team, despite still being employed at Citigroup. Froman’s assistant in staffing the administration was Jamie Rubin, Robert’s son. While Citi received hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money, their man in Washington helped select key members of Obama’s staff, including Summers and Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who while at the New York Federal Reserve helped engineer the Citi bailout.

Froman initially took a position as both deputy national security adviser and international trade adviser at the National Economic Council, joining several Citigroup colleagues.

The grateful mega-bank gave Froman a year-

The United States already has freetrade agreements with six of the eleven countries in TPP—and tariffs are all but nonexistent. end bonus of $2.25 million in 2008, which Obama had to personally ask Froman to give up, according to Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise. The bonus was specifically tied to Froman joining the administration. When the Pacific trade deal became a top corporate and White House priority, Froman moved over to direct USTR and the legislative push for negotiating authority.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about

tariffs, despite Froman’s suggestions to that effect. The United States already has freetrade agreements with six of the eleven countries in TPP—Canada, Mexico, Australia, Peru, Chile, and Singapore—and tariffs on nearly all goods between the U.S. and those countries are nonexistent. Outside of Japan, the remaining countries represent 3 percent of all exports to TPP members. And Japan’s average tariff rate is a skinny 1.2 percent.

According to leaked texts, the core of the deal concerns regulatory changes sought by powerful industries—using the back door of trade to win changes that Congress would be unlikely to approve in transparent separate legislation.

For pharmaceutical companies, the agreement limits regulations that drive down drug prices, and restricts the use of generic drugs in partner countries. It extends patents on lucrative biologic treatments to 12 years, far longer than current law in member countries like Australia.

For software developers and the entertainment

industry, draft TPP text from last May extends copyright terms, instructs Internet service providers to remove user-generated copyrighted content without a court order, and could criminalize the leaking of information through digital means to journalists.

For the energy industry, TPP allows for dramatic expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, obtained through practices like fracking, with automatic approval of all export permits to TPP countries without environmental review. For the food industry, TPP requires food imports to enter the U.S. as long as the exporter alleges that their safety laws are “equivalent.” And for the financial industry, TPP would weaken member country restrictions on capital flows across their borders, freeing foreign investments but increasing risk in more insulated economies like Malaysia or Chile.

The rules amount to a trans-Pacific regulatory cap. “It creates a subsidy for our firms to locate in TPP member countries and export back to us,” says Damon Silvers, policy director for the AFL-CIO. “This is not something you would be concerned about if you wanted to create jobs in the United States.”

This is enforced in part by investor-state dispute settlement, whereby corporations can sue for damages in a separate court system, over trade violations they claim cut into their profits. TPP even removes the “essential security” exemption, so foreign investors can file ISDS challenges on what governments claim to be national-security decisions. ISDS creates an insurance policy for large firms to move operations abroad, robbing the United States of its one competitive advantage over low-wage countries: a well-developed rule of law. Froman has staunchly defended ISDS, telling the Washington Ideas Forum last October, “It’s hard to imagine a high-standard agreement … that doesn’t have a high standard of investment protections as well.”

Past dispute settlement arrangements have had serious consequences. The Obama administration insists that trade agreements cannot change U.S. laws, but in May WTO ruled against U.S. “country-of-origin labeling” for meat, prompting Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to say that Congress would have to repeal the statute; the House passed the repeal in June. In addition, the Canadian finance

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 59

minister recently alleged that the Volcker Rule, a key Dodd-Frank measure restricting risky proprietary trading, violates NAFTA . ISDS would allow corporations rather than national governments to assert these challenges and win monetary damages.

Since USTR opened TPP negotiations in 2009, labor, environmental, and consumer groups, along with interested members of Congress, have tried to offer input. The AFL-CIO alone made more than 100 specific suggestions about negotiating language. “We had every reason to want a TPP that we could live with and perhaps endorse,” says Silvers, policy director of the labor federation. “[Those conversations] were exhaustive, and they got nowhere.”

This included entreaties to prevent TPP members from artificially manipulating their currency to lower the cost of their exports, which have a bigger impact on trade deficits than tariffs. Five years into negotiations, Froman admitted in congressional testimony that they had not brought up currency manipulation, which would raise costs for corporations with factories abroad. “The system seems much too impervious to input,” says former White House official Jared Bernstein, who has raised the currency issue numerous times with ex-colleagues. “I’ve worked this pretty hard, and I haven’t been able to get much traction.”

Advisers and lawmakers describe meetings with USTR as occurring at a “10,000-foot level,” without deep substantive engagement.

Even when advisory committees represent non-business voices, like those on labor or the environment, all they provide is advice, which USTR can take or ignore. And there’s strong evidence that Froman takes his cues from big business. In written congressional testimony in 2013, for example, Froman took the side of domestic oil refiners trying to eliminate European Union fuel standards.

Under advisory committee charters, groups cannot call their own meetings, or discuss the text of any trade deals with non-advisers. They issue reports on all completed trade agreements, but not until the fast-track process has triggered. One cleared adviser described their work as the sound of one hand clapping. “They will tell you they had consultation,” said Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro. “They sit, pretend to listen and then do nothing about it.”

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The White House was unprepared for the ferocity of opposition to their trade agenda from Democrats in the House and Senate.

TPP partners include countries like Vietnam, where factory workers make as little as 50 cents an hour, and Malaysia, which has earned the lowest rating in the State Department’s annual report on human trafficking.

The administration calls TPP “the most progressive trade deal in history,” arguing that stronger labor and environmental standards fix NAFTA and level the playing field between American workers and their counterparts. But while the enforcement measures that serve corporate goals, such as ISDS, have real teeth, the ones on labor and the environment are weak or nonexistent.

According to a report from the office of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, 10 of our 20 post-NAFTA free-trade agreement partners worldwide still use forced or child labor, and 17 routinely commit human rights violations linked to labor rights. In 2014, Peru rewrote its environmental laws in direct contravention of a bilateral agreement, and USTR did nothing to stop them. In the case of formal complaints against Honduras and Guatemala, years have passed with no resolution. USTR responded to statistics showing that trade unionists are murdered in Colombia every other week by arguing that the situation was slightly better than before.

Unlike ISDS, where corporations can directly appeal over trade violations, labor groups must ask their governments to enforce the standards. “We said, why not do it like the corporations do?” says Shane Larson, legisla-

tive director for the Communications Workers of America. “If Vietnam is not living up to the terms, why not let the AFL-CIO bring up charges? USTR said you don’t understand how the system works.”

The White House was unprepared for the ferocity of opposition to their trade agenda from members of their own coalition. Froman proved inept at selling the deal to congressional Democrats. “People don’t believe [Froman] because he’s often not telling the truth,” Representative Grayson says. He recalls one instance where Froman discussed legal standards on investor-state dispute settlement. “I practiced before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for 25 years,” Grayson says. “I know the whole case law about claims against the government. I was appalled by what I was hearing him say.

He was seriously misrepresenting the legal standards that apply.”

Members of Congress describe Froman’s behavior in briefings as a combination of arrogant and slippery, challenging opponents’ grasp on the facts while personally making inconsistent or even misleading claims. He often leaves out key parts of the analysis, like focusing solely on the benefits of exports and ignoring the impact of increased imports. He refuses to admit any downsides for U.S. workers from global trade, even claiming that the U.S. would not lose manufacturing jobs from the Pacific trade deal, alleges Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat. “It’s not credible,” Pocan says. “Honestly, I think the more meetings he does, he convinces more people to go our way.”

USTR does have an upper hand in the deal, a knowledge gap they’ve exploited by keeping the TPP text a closely guarded secret. Most of what the public knows about the agreement comes from releases on Wikileaks, which have raised concerns that USTR is painting too sunny a picture about the outcome. Even cleared advisers have complained that they haven’t seen updated text for years, relying on USTR to learn about changes, without the specific language. Members of Congress, after years of complaints, received access to the text, but only in a secure room, after handing over their cell phones, without inviting staff experts or taking notes. Once they leave the secure

e va n v u c c i / a p i m a g e s

room, members cannot discuss the contents Congress managed to enact negotiating ognized the role of modern trade agreements publicly. Opponents of TPP see the secrecy as authority, the biggest enemy to actually getting as an end run around the democratic prodeliberate, designed to deceive the public and TPP passed is the calendar, combined with the cess. Trade became a proxy fight for the future prevent informed opposition to the policies. harsh sunlight of eventual transparency. Under of the Democratic Party: whether it will be The text itself is difficult to decipher for non- fast track, after negotiations are completed, controlled by monied elites on behalf of big experts, with overlapping sets of each country’s USTR must release the text of any trade deal business, or by progressive representatives on offers, negotiating outcomes in brackets along online at least 60 days before signing. Then the behalf of ordinary people. the side, and constant references to previous House has 60 legislative days to act, and the Inside the White House, the elites still reign. agreements that members may not have a work- Senate an additional 30.

“The few remaining unreconstructed NAFTA That means the earliest that any TPP vote lovers in the Democratic Party are in with the ing understanding of. “Unless you’re a trade could take place, if everything ran smoothly, president,” said Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, lawyer, the text doesn’t provide a lot of informawould be this winter, at the height of presi- putting Michael Froman and his allies in that tion,” says Pocan, who adds that USTR is slow to dential campaign season. Additional slippage category. But Congress has only granted fast respond to specific questions about individual track for five of the last 21 years, sugprovisions. “They treat Congress like gesting reluctance to accede to the children at the kid’s table. And we’re executive power grab. The Obama the ones with constitutional authority.” administration only had the opportuAmid the legislative maneuvering of nity to kick-start their trade agenda the fast-track debate, the administrawhen Republicans gained full control tion all but abandoned the economic of Congress; the president’s own party rationale for TPP, stressing instead a geopolitical imperative to assist allies wouldn’t give him that chance, a reality in Asia and provide regional counterthat Democratic candidates to succeed balance to China. And they accented Obama are likely to heed. this by spinning dark consequences of Though the word “protectionist” gets lost prestige and irreparable harm from lobbed at opponents of fast track, their complaint is more nuanced: that the Congress’s failure to pass the agreement. still-to-be-proven benefits of opening “Repudiation of the TPP … would reinnew markets to domestic goods and force concerns that the vicissitudes of services are overwhelmed by two sets domestic politics are rendering the U.S. of costs—the political cost of corpoa less reliable ally,” intoned Larry Sumrate hegemony and the economic cost mers days after a setback in the House of policies that keep battering down of Representatives. “It would signal a wages. The old mantra that elevates lack of U.S. commitment to Asia at a time when China is flexing its muscles.” “free trade” as an automatic public good AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has emerged as Froman’s nemesis on TPP. doesn’t work when the deals mainly would push the timeline further. “[Former benefit the executive suites.

Since 1974, fast-track legislation has been The TPP debate has provided an airing of linked to enactment of trade adjustment assis- Senator] Trent Lott used to say that you can’t pass a fair trade deal in an even-numbered tance, modest retraining and support for workthe deeper issues, and has allowed the progresers who lose their jobs because of trade deals. year,” says Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, sive wing of the Democratic Party to demonDemocrats like the program because they can an opponent of TPP. The implication is that strate that it is fed up with bargains like this say they secured help for ordinary Americans, members of Congress don’t want to record one. That reckoning is long overdue. Without even though studies find it ineffective, like their support for unpopular trade agreements the constitutional hijacking of trade policy, throwing money in a tip jar for someone who when voters might be paying attention. And and without a trade office captured by special loses their house. At press time, Republican unlike with fast track, once the deal’s details interests, America might build a new economic leaders de-linked the two bills, because their are unveiled, everyone involved will actually paradigm rooted in shared prosperity and a rank and file oppose trade adjustment assis- know the contents of what they’re voting on. more equitable society. tance. Democrats who can provide the margin That said, there are no examples of trade deals, of victory on fast track were asked to take a once negotiated, failing to advance through a David Dayen is a contributing writer to leap of faith, advancing fast track first while fast-tracked process.

Salon.com and a weekly columnist for The hoping Republicans will allow trade adjustRegardless of outcome, the trade debate Fiscal Times. His forthcoming book about forement assistance to pass later. has reawakened a broad economic-justice closures will be published next spring by The Even if Obama and the Republican-held coalition on the political left, which has rec- New Press.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 61

Urban Policing Without Brutality

Cincinnati has emerged as a role model of policing reform— but even the best-in-show has a long way to go.

By Nat halie Bap t is t e

O

n August 5, 2014, just four days before Michael Brown was shot and killed by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, Cincinnati police killed Donyale Rowe after a traffic stop in the Walnut Hills neighborhood. Officers Mark Bode and Thomas Weigand pulled over the vehicle, driven by Jonathan Johnson. Rowe, who was on parole, tried to make a run for it.

The fight took place on the right side of the police car, out of view from the dash cam. In the video, one can hear scuffling, an officer shouting, “He’s got a gun! Shoot him! Shoot him!” and finally gunshots ringing through the air. Rowe was armed and allegedly held his gun to the cheek of one of the officers.

Unlike the Ferguson killing, the shooting of Donyale Rowe didn’t make national headlines.

Instead, the very next day, Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell held a press conference and released the personnel files of the officers involved in the shooting. Both Weigand and Bode were placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation; there were no allegations of a cover-up, and no protests.

Between 1995 and 2001, members of the Cincinnati Police Department killed 15 black males. But since the city began cleaning up its act in 2001, Cincinnati has demonstrated what

62 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

can be achieved when local officials get serious about reform. In May 2015, newly minted United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch visited Cincinnati and declared the city a nationwide model for policing.

Death at the hands of police is, of course, a grimly familiar phenomenon for the black community. But thanks to technology, social media, and tireless organizing by activists across the country, the killing in Ferguson of unarmed 18-year-old Brown by white police officer Wilson set off a shockwave and started a movement to rival the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Cincinnati in 2001, like Ferguson today, was nobody’s candidate for a policing role model.

The southern Ohio city of just under 300,000 has a population that is about 49 percent white and 45 percent black, with gentrifying neighborhoods intersecting impoverished ones. Of the 15 males killed by police during that sixyear period, one was a 12-year-old boy and another was mentally ill—yet only one police officer received even a reprimand.

Lorenzo Collins had been in and out of the Hamilton County mental health system six times in the last three months of his life. On February 23, 1997, wielding a brick, he told the 15 police officers surrounding him to shoot

him. It took police officers 60 seconds to do just that. He died five days later at the age of 25.

Around two o’clock in the morning on April 7, 2001, white officer Stephen Roach shot 19-yearold Timothy Thomas in the historic neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine. Roach’s gunshot ended a police chase—and Thomas’s life. Police had attempted to arrest the teenager for a litany of misdemeanors, most of them traffic violations.

Thomas took off on foot and was shot by Roach in an alley. Thomas was unarmed.

Fed up with the violence inflicted on their community at the hands of police, protesters took to the streets two days later. Hundreds converged in front of Cincinnati City Hall demanding answers. Later that evening, protesters headed down to the Cincinnati police headquarters in District 1.

The crowd of people threw rocks and bottles while police used tear gas, beanbags, and rubber bullets. In what would become an iconic moment, protesters took down the flag outside the building and turned it upside down. This would mark the beginning of four days of rioting. The Cincinnati riots cost the city millions of dollars and further strained the relationship between police and the black community.

In September 2001, Officer Roach was tried for negligent homicide—and acquitted. But

tom uhlman / ap images

Protests after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man turned into four days of violent rioting in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of downtown Cincinnati in April 2001.

then, Mayor Charles Luken asked the Department of Justice for help. A 1994 law grants the department authority to investigate abusive police practices and initiate remedies that may be voluntary or court-ordered.

DOJ began with an investigation of the use of force in Cincinnati. Its experts spoke with police officers, city officials, civil rights activists, and community members. They reviewed all firearm investigations between 1995 and June 2001, as well as excessive-force complaints against the police department between January 1998 and June 2001, and reviewed all uses of force from June 2000 to June 2001. The investigation ended in a Memorandum of Agree-

ment that required drastic changes in police practices. The DOJ also sent in an independent monitor to assess progress being made.

The police department was required to create a team of specially trained police officers to respond to all incidents that involved mentally ill persons. The DOJ also required development of a foot pursuit policy, including alternatives to foot pursuit, such as surveillance or calling for reinforcements. The agreement with the DOJ also prohibited the chokehold. Police officers were instructed to limit their use of chemical spray, and the department was required to improve its canine operations, including tracking dog bites.

The memorandum revised permissible usage of police weapons intended to stun, such as beanbag shotguns and high-powered 40-millimeter foam rounds, only to be deployed to subdue or incapacitate someone in danger of inflicting imminent physical harm to police or other people. The department was required to extensively document uses of force and critical firearm discharges.

Police in Cincinnati were required to develop a program to inform the public on how to file a complaint against a police officer, which would then be followed by a thorough investigation of the complaint. The department created a new computerized database for

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 63

supervision and management of the agreement.

Six years after the riots, in April 2007, the agreement was terminated, with the Cincinnati Police Department being in full compliance with 93 percent of the terms and conditions. Policecommunity relations dramatically improved.

Chief Jeffrey Blackwell, who joined the department in September 2013 after serving with distinction for 26 years in Columbus, is candid on the subject of race. A black man, he blames police violence on the reluctance of police officers to own up to their history. “Throughout slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, to today,” explains Blackwell, “police officers have been right in the middle of a lot of the bad things that have been happening in our country.”

The history of police brutality has left generations of black communities wary of police.

Blackwell says he tells his officers, “Don’t take it personally when you get met with aggression

“Throughout slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, to today,” says Chief Blackwell, “police officers have been right in the middle of a lot of bad things.” and mistrust. It’s not personal. It’s generational.” In short, generations of blacks have come to expect the worst—and this apprehension will change only slowly as police conduct changes.

At the time of the Department of Justice’s investigation, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio had partnered with the Cincinnati Black United Front to file a parallel lawsuit with the DOJ against the Cincinnati Police Department. This lawsuit resulted in the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement, which complemented the Department of Justice’s Memorandum. The city is formally no longer subject to DOJ monitoring, but the Cincinnati Police Department still adheres to the rest of the agreement that settled the ACLU/Black United Front lawsuit.

“I always talk about community engagement being the most important thing in police work,” Blackwell tells me as we sit in the conference room at department headquarters. The agreement between police and the community outlines five goals, with police officers

64 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

and citizens becoming proactive partners in problem-solving.

A key goal is to build “relationships of respect, cooperation, and trust within and between” the police and local communities. To this end, Blackwell created the Quality of Life Enhancement Team. This unit patrols neighborhoods and talks to residents, with the hope that its presence will reduce crime. In the past, police officers would come into neighborhoods with heavy-handed tactics—even if the residents were the ones who asked for their help.

Blackwell rejects the zero-tolerance approach to crime-riddled neighborhoods. “Anyone jaywalks, anyone spits on the sidewalk, or ride your bikes on the sidewalk—we’re just going to write everybody a ticket. That’s how some agencies do it. That’s not good policing.”

A number of programs promoting education and community relations make the Cincinnati Police Department stand out. Blackwell stresses service as an integral part of policing.

After police officers get their badge for the first

time, he has the new officers participate in a weeklong service immersion program. “They are going to remember what’s most important, and that is to serve people, to worry about not just crime and criminality, but life and livability,” he says. As part of service immersion, new cops feed the homeless, and volunteer in schools, soup kitchens, and nursing homes.

“Hoops Heart Hope,” or H3, is a leadership and basketball program for Cincinnati youth ages 10 to 19. They meet at designated recreational centers throughout the city every Friday night. First the attendees are fed a meal, attend a character and integrity workshop, and then play basketball with one another and police officers.

Another program Blackwell touts is called Get the Groceries. “I grew up in a single-parent home, in the projects, very poor,” he says, so as a poor-child-turned-police-chief, he knows what it’s like to go without proper food during the holidays. Over winter school break, the police department awards kids with $100 gift cards to Kroger grocery stores. Blackwell plans to expand the program in the coming years. “This year we have 200, next year we’re going to do 500 kids.”

To fund this program, Blackwell explains that his department uses asset seizures. “I’m one of those chiefs that believes money that we

al behrman / ap images

In the aftermath of the riots, police stepped up walking patrols, talking with Over-the-Rhine residents (above) in July 2001. Chief Jeffrey Blackwell has continued to encourage this kind of community engagement. The day after the police killing of Donyale Rowe last August, Chief Blackwell held a press conference (opposite page) to inform the public.

take from criminals should be invested back in our young people,” he says. “Not that we should buy helicopters or bullets.”

Another goal of the collaborative agreement stresses education improvement. The department has a full-time educational liaison officer, who works with third graders in elementary schools across the city. The Ohio Department of Education’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee stipulates that any third grader who does not pass the comprehensive exam at the end of the year will not be promoted to fourth grade. Police officers in the schools tutor children alongside students from the University of Cincinnati.

“After one year at one of our inner-city schools, we took the third-grade reading level from 56 percent to 77 percent,” Blackwell says.

“And every kid passed except one.” This is a big improvement from the prior year, when about 30 students did not pass.

Blackwell believes that police officers and members of the community actually want the same thing—justice and respect. “You can’t arrest your way out of crime,” he says pointedly.

The Department of Justice didn’t always

have the authority to investigate rogue police departments. Ironically, the department got that power in the context of a tough-on-crime bill that many politicians have come to regret.

In 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton was determined to overcome Republican charges that Democrats were soft on crime.

He signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which included long prison terms for low-level drug offenders. But as part of the bill, liberals in Congress demanded and got inclusion of a measure called the Law Enforcement Misconduct Statute, which originated in public revulsion to the Rodney King case.

After the 1991 video of King’s beating made national news, the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights convened hearings to discuss police brutality, and subcommittee chair Representative Don Edwards, along with several prominent black members of Congress, sponsored the Police Accountability Act of 1991. A Republican filibuster

thwarted this first attempt at police reform, but in 1994, Democratic legislators managed to get the first two sections of the act into the crime bill. The statute allows the DOJ to review the practices of law enforcement agencies that may be violating people’s constitutional rights.

If the law enforcement agency in question receives federal funding, the DOJ may also invoke the antidiscrimination provisions of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act; both of these laws forbid discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin by agencies that receive federal funding.

Typically, when the DOJ opens an investigation against a police department, they speak to police officers and members of the community; police practice experts are hired to help review incidents, documents, and the policies and practices of the agencies in question, and to recommend remedies.

The law enforcement agency in question and the DOJ can enter into a memorandum of agreement, which calls for an independent

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 65

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monitor to step in and analyze and oversee policing practices for a set period of time.

Another option is the consent decree, which can be enforced by law, unlike the memorandum. The consent decree allows DOJ monitoring for a minimum of five years. The DOJ also has the option of issuing a technical assistance letter, with recommendations that do not have the force of law. Some investigations are closed without any type of agreement.

In the last 21 years, the DOJ has investigated approximately 55 police departments. Because of its own limited resources, it must focus on the worst cases. In late 2000, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Justice approved a consent decree, requiring federal oversight of police reforms in the city.

Under the agreement, the LAPD was required to create a database with information on police officers, including lethal and non-lethal use of force, all officer-involved shootings and firearm discharges, incidents in which a complaint has been filed against a police officer, and all arrest reports and citations made by the officer.

The L.A. database includes information on the race, ethnicity, gender, and age of people stopped by police. Supervisors were required to review the information in the database periodically, to assess whether any officers were engaging in at-risk behavior. After increasing the diversity in their police force and decreasing the number of police-involved shootings, police reforms in the LAPD have been heralded as a success.

While these agreements have worked in some cities, not every police department cooperates. In December 2014, the DOJ released findings of their investigation into the Cleveland Police Department, which detailed use of excessive and deadly force. The problem: DOJ had already investigated the Cleveland police in 2004 and had issued the department a technical assistance letter, which evidently had little impact.

“One of the big pushbacks is that they cost a lot of money,” says Simone Weichselbaum of the Marshall Project. The city usually has to foot the bill for independent monitors and any of the required reforms. “If the consent decree requires body cams or dash cams or new training, these are all things that cities have to pay for,” Weichselbaum explains.

Although on paper the Justice Department has ample power, in practice it depends on the collaboration of police departments. The DOJ does not have subpoena power to enforce its investigations. “If they want to investigate a police department, it’s easier for them to have full cooperation,” Weichselbaum says. “If they don’t [receive full cooperation], until there is a lawsuit, they can’t get records or do ride-alongs or do interviews.”

As Stephen Rushin writes in the Fordham Law Review, the DOJ lacks the resources to formally investigate every case of apparent systemic abuse at the hands of police. The high price tag of a lengthy investigation means that the DOJ can only investigate a minuscule number of police departments in the country.

Out of 17,985 state and local police agencies in the United States, the fact that only 55 have been investigated since 1994 means that the DOJ has investigated about three depart-

al investigators and a full-time director with staff. Complaints are assigned for investigation by the CCA office or referred to the Citizen Complaint Resolution Process, which is under the Cincinnati Police Department.

The CCA’s mission is to “investigate serious interventions by police officers including, but not limited to discharging of firearms, deaths in custody, use of excessive force, improper pointing of firearms, improper search and seizures, and to resolve all citizen complaints in a fair and efficient manner.”

The same year the CCA was established, police were again embroiled in a brutality case.

On November 30, 2003, 41-year-old Nathaniel Jones was stumbling around a fast-food restaurant and behaving bizarrely. Police were called.

Video shows Jones lunging at police officers and his subsequent beating. Jones later died at the hospital and the coroner ruled his death a homicide. His death “must be regarded as a

After four days of protests in April 2001, Cincinnati embraced a program of farreaching police reform. Even so, three black men died in police shootings in 2014. ments each year and only has the resources to investigate less than 0.02 percent of all departments each year. For example, Rushin notes, if patterns of abuse exist in only one out of every hundred law enforcement agencies, then the DOJ will only be able to investigate less than 2 percent of them every year.

The DOJ’s enforcement of the law varies by presidential administration. Under the George W. Bush administration, no consent decrees were issued. Between 2004 and 2009, throughout Bush’s second term, not one single negotiation was settled between the DOJ and a police department. That number dramatically increased to eight during Barack Obama’s first term.

In 2003, as a result of the Memorandum of Agreement and Collaborative Agreement, Cincinnati established the Citizen Complaint Authority. The CCA is composed of a board of six citizens appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council, with profession-

direct and immediate consequence, in part, of the struggle, plus his obesity, heart disease, and drug intoxication,” said Dr. Carl Parrott.

“Absent the struggle, however, Mr. Jones would not have died at that precise moment of time.” In March 2004, the county prosecutor declined to indict the six officers involved in Jones’s death.

The CCA issues a status report every year.

In 2014, there were 320 complaints. Allegations included 8 attributed to discharge of a firearm; 65 claiming excessive use of force; 22 asserting discrimination; 5 objecting to improper pointing of a firearm; and 17 allegations of improper searches, seizures, or entries.

Since 2009, the annual number of complaints has fluctuated between 285 and 348. On their face, the CCA statistics do not show dramatic improvement. But the existence of a transparent complaint and investigation process has contributed to an improved climate of police and community relations.

The Citizen Complaint Authority also keeps track of police officers with repeat complaints.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 67

The criterion is any police officer with ten or more complaints against him or her in a threeyear period. That number decreased from ten in 2013 to just four in 2014. A substantial majority of the complaints—65 percent—lodged against police in 2014 were from black residents.

At the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers

Center, “Know Your Rights” is just one of the many trainings they offer to immigrant workers living in the city. With this training, the organization aims to teach immigrants what to do when and if they are stopped by police at work, at home, while driving, and while walking in public. To Manuel Perez, the membership coordinator at the worker center, the relationship between the police and the Latino immigrant community is slowly improving. “I think that the relationship has been getting better, little by little,” he says.

Pam Dixon, who is white, has worked and

Dixon also had praise for Lieutenant John Cordova of the police department. He was “absolutely wonderful,” she says. “He was very sincere and really cared about the Latino people.” Cordova made regular visits to the Autumn Woods apartments where many of the Latino residents are poor. He would ask residents about any crimes they had suffered; as a result, according to Dixon, his presence brought down the crime rate.

While some communities of color feel that the Cincinnati Police Department has improved its relationship with them, that sentiment is not universal, especially among activists. The Black Lives Matter protest movement was started by three black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, as a response to the violence inflicted upon black people at the hands of police. The movement has expanded to include many communities of color and LGBT people, and as it has grown

The Justice Department has ample authority to pursue police abuses, but limited resources.

As a consequence, its reform process depends on the collaboration of police departments. lived with the Latino community for years in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Price Hill. In 2012, after a neighbor told Dixon that she had been violently assaulted, Dixon took the opportunity to talk to her neighbors about their experiences. Many of them told her that they had been mugged, robbed, or assaulted, and she realized that something needed to change.

Dixon organized a group of leaders from various churches and from different apartment complexes and started holding meetings with Captain Mike Neville, who at the time was the captain of District 3, which Dixon says is the “the busiest and most dangerous” district in Cincinnati. According to Dixon, the relationship forged between Neville and the community also improved the overall relationship with the police department. The Cincinnati Police Department also works within Price Hill by holding a “clean-up” event, where community members as well as police officers pick up litter throughout the neighborhood. Afterward, both groups attend a picnic together.

68 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

and gained traction, dozens of cities organized local counterparts. Cincinnati is no exception.

Despite police reforms that have been more successful than those in Cleveland, Cincinnati is not completely free of police shootings or citizen complaints. In 2014, police officers shot and killed three people—all black males. And in June of 2015, two blacks were killed by police in Cincinnati—the first two such deaths this year.

On June 19, there was a police-involved shooting in Cincinnati, but this one left both the responding officer and the suspect dead. Trepierre Hummons, 21, called 911 to report a black man being threatening with a gun. When Officer Sonny Kim arrived, Hummons began firing at Kim, 48, who later died. When other officers arrived at the scene, Hummons began firing at them as well, and was killed in the gunfight. In a news conference about the shooting that same day, Blackwell did not identify who fired the shot that killed Hummons, but he did reveal that Hummons had called 911 on himself, indicating that he had planned to commit suicide by cop.

Less than two weeks earlier, the Black Lives Matter Cincinnati group held a rally after 22-year-old QuanDavier Hicks was shot and killed by Officer Doris Scott on June 9. Scott and another officer (unnamed as of print time) were answering a complaint call when Hicks allegedly pointed a rifle at them. Witnesses dispute the account given by Blackwell at the subsequent news conference, and demanded more answers.

Brian Taylor organizes Black Lives Matter Cincinnati protests and is a spokesman for the local group. In his view, the Cincinnati Police Department still has work to do. “I don’t believe policing has strategically changed much at all,” he says. “I think tactically, as a result of an uprising in the city and mass discontent, the city moved to soften the face of the police force.”

Taylor recently canvassed more than 500 houses in Bond Hill, a predominantly black community. “The overwhelming majority was very distrusting of the police,” he says. The residents to whom Taylor talked didn’t have confidence in their safety in the presence of police. Many said they knew of someone who had a recent negative run-in with the Cincinnati police.

“I think the changes made, but even more so the media propaganda about Cincinnati being a model for policing, have convinced a small layer of blacks, and perhaps a wider segment of others, that the police are better than they were in 2001,” says Taylor.

Like most cities, Cincinnati has seen a number of protests against police violence. “Our rallies are organized in a disciplined way, designed to maximize participation and comfortability so families can raise their voices,” says Taylor.

There haven’t been any reports of excessive force used by police at rallies in Cincinnati.

“Police here—for now—have made a tactical decision to limit aggression towards protests,” Taylor says. “These tactics can change overnight as numbers swell, or as the severity of an injustice and the public response is calculated.”

Taylor describes being routinely profiled by police. “I get followed by cops regularly as I ride through some of the better-off neighborhoods surrounding mine.”

“Because I have no prior offenses and my license is clean, often I just get an escort in and out of those areas with no siren.” Taylor believes he’s just one outstanding ticket or broken taillight away from a siren going off. For

Boarded-up storefronts, shown above left in 2003, have given way to upscale shops and eateries on Vine St. in Cincinnati’s rapidly gentrifying Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.

this resident, “Cincy is not the shining example it’s portrayed to be.”

l e f t : d av i d ko h l / a p i m a g e s ; r i g h t : p e g g y turbet t / the pl ain dealer / l andov

Recent police killings in Cincinnati, the

city touted as a national model of police reform, suggest just how hard it will be to make durable progress, even when local leadership is sincerely committed to reform. Police violence is part of a much more intractable pattern of institutional racism, and reform of one aspect of the system does not by itself alter the broader reality. Police can only do so much when a young black man, in despair, calls 911 on himself intending to commit “suicide by cop.”

Reliable data for police killings are still brand new; MappingPoliceViolence.org, launched in 2015, offers statistics on people killed by police in 2014. The Guardian’s “The Counted” project also provides valuable data about those killed by police. The data from both these projects are unsurprising, but sobering. Police killed 101 unarmed black people in 2014. The three black

men killed by police in Cincinnati is a small decrease from the police violence that took place from 1995 to 2001 and sparked the 2001 riots.

The Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was the epicenter of the riots and was home to a number of blacks and poor residents. Today, it’s a center of gentrification. The neighborhood is dotted with hip boutiques, restaurants geared toward millennials, and bars with craft cocktails serving young working professionals who fill the sidewalk cafes during the week. It’s a far cry from the poverty and violence-ridden neighborhood it was in 2001.

As Blackwell mentions, the vast majority of police departments have fewer than 50 officers and little diversity, little training, and little incentive to change, spelling bad news for black people and other people of color who are forced to move.

To Brian Taylor, the rapid gentrification of Cincinnati plays a large role in how the black community and poor whites and Latinos are

policed. “If you don’t look like you belong on Vine Street,” a major thoroughfare that runs through Over-the-Rhine and Cincinnati’s business district, “and do anything that can be seen as a disturbance, it is highly possible that you will face harassment.” To police, it’s clear who belongs and who doesn’t, Taylor adds. “It is made abundantly clear you are not welcome, even if you live a block away.”

Thanks to social media, better data, and advanced technology, a new light has been shed on the brutality of police violence. While some police departments can be branded as worse than others with a higher rate of policeinvolved shootings and other forms of violence, it is clear that most, if not all, have work to do to ensure equitable treatment of communities across America. The Cincinnati Police Department is not yet what ideal policing should look like, but their steps toward community engagement, transparency, and diversity are goals that all police departments should work toward.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 69

Conscience Conservatives say marriage equality and health-care laws threaten their religious freedom.

Should they be exempt?

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hese days, conservatives seem to own “conscience.” Consider the current objection to marriage equality.

“Some citizens may conclude that they cannot in good conscience participate in a same-sex ceremony, from priests and pastors to bakers and florists,” argues the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson. “The government should not force them to choose between their religious beliefs and their livelihood.” Serving same-sex couples, business owners assert, would make them complicit in relationships they deem sinful, and so they claim religious exemptions from state and local antidiscrimination laws.

Conscience is also the rallying cry of conservatives opposed to the Affordable Care Act. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, decided by the Supreme Court in June 2014, employers challenged the ACA’s required coverage of contraception on the grounds that it would make them complicit in their employees’ use of drugs that the employers believe cause abortion. The Court ruled 5–4 in favor of the employers’ conscience objections.

Religious liberty challenges to the ACA arise under a law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which allows people to claim exemptions from federal laws that

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“substantially burden” their religious practice.

Opponents of same-sex marriage are moving to enact or to strengthen state laws mirroring the federal RFRA , as high-profile conflicts in Arizona, Indiana, and Arkansas have illustrated.

Partisan divides over religious conscience claims are not surprising in light of today’s culture wars. But from a historical perspective, the partisan divide is remarkable. Liberals have long respected conscientious objection to military service and advocated that the government accommodate the beliefs and practices of religious minorities.

The new conservative campaign for religious exemptions follows a well-established pattern.

When advocates suffer defeat and their arguments lose legitimacy, they look for new ways to frame their views, often borrowing from their opponents. Initially, for example, critics objected to affirmative action in the name of “innocent” whites, but when that argument proved insufficient, they reframed their case in the language of civil rights. In 1978 in University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell said many of the groups that made up the white majority were also minorities that had faced discrimination, and he appealed to ideals of color-blindness to justify restricting race-con-

scious efforts to integrate public universities.

Conscience is the new color-blindness. In the debate over same-sex marriage, the opponents at first defended traditional marriage by appealing to moral disapproval of homosexuality. When these arguments began to lose credibility, opponents emphasized the importance of preserving sex-differentiated procreation and parenting. Today many have reframed the defense of traditional marriage as necessary to preserve religious liberty, to promote pluralism, and to avoid discrimination against religious conservatives. Again, conservatives are speaking in the language of civil rights. As Jeb Bush has put it, “People that act on their conscience shouldn’t be discriminated against, for sure.”

This is how RFRA has been drawn into the culture wars. After failing to prohibit abortion and same-sex marriage, conservatives have sought to create religious exemptions from laws that protect the right to abortion or same-sex marriage.

Without change in numbers or belief, religious conservatives have shifted from speaking as a majority seeking to enforce traditional morality to speaking as a minority seeking exemptions from laws that depart from traditional morality.

If unable to protect traditional sexual morality through laws of general application, conserva-

l e f t : m i c h a e l c o n r oy ; r i g h t : d o u g m c s c h o o l e r / a p i m a g e s

B y Dougla s NeJaime and Reva Siege l

and the Culture Wars Franciscan Brothers speaking in support of Indiana’s religious freedom bill in February 2015; opponents of the bill rallying in April

tives can protect traditional values through liberal frames—by asserting claims to religious exemption and by appealing to secular commitments to pluralism and nondiscrimination.

Conservatives’ claims of conscience in conflicts over abortion and same-sex marriage put liberals on the defensive. After all, don’t liberals still support the free exercise of religion? And if liberals do support religious liberty, shouldn’t they accept the logic of the conservative case?

Current controversies seem to confront liberals with two unhappy choices: accept the new claims for religious accommodation or compromise longstanding commitments to conscience and religious liberty. But there is a way out of this thicket. The new claims being made by conservatives today are fundamentally different from the claims of religious liberty that led to the passage of RFRA . These differences are crucial to judging whether and how to accommodate the demands for religious exemption.

The Roots of RFRA RFRA has not always provoked partisan con-

flict. More than two decades ago, Congress enacted the law with near unanimous bipartisan support. The immediate stimulus was a Supreme Court decision in a case involving

Native Americans who were denied unemployment benefits after being fired for their use of peyote during religious rituals. Many people across the ideological spectrum thought that the Constitution protected claims of this kind under the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to “free exercise” of religion. After all, in the famous case of Sherbert v. Verner, the Warren Court had provided free-exercise protection to a Seventh-day Adventist who had been denied unemployment compensation when she refused to accept a job because of her Sabbath observance. But in the case involving the use of peyote in Native American religious ceremonies, the Court interpreted guarantees of free exercise more narrowly, as prohibiting only state action singling out the faithful for discriminatory treatment. Justice Antonin Scalia, a recent Reagan appointee, wrote the Court’s opinion.

As Scalia’s position indicated, conservatives have not always supported expansive judicial protections for the free exercise of religion.

Some conservatives in the Reagan administration favored limiting judicial enforcement of free-exercise rights as part of their general effort to contain the role of the courts in matters of religion. Nevertheless, the Court’s decision denying claims for religious exemption

in the peyote case alienated Republicans and Democrats alike, and in 1993, Congress rallied to restore protection for religious liberty through RFRA . Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the statute commands that the government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless doing so is “the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.”

But in enacting RFRA , Congress did not contemplate religious liberty cases of the kind we are now seeing. The statute itself names three free-exercise cases, all of them involving members of minority religions who sought exemptions based on unconventional beliefs generally not considered by lawmakers when they adopted the challenged laws. Few imagined that opponents of abortion would assert claims under RFRA . In fact, Catholics wanted to make RFRA abortion-neutral, fearful that advocates for choice might assert consciencebased claims for exemptions from abortion bans if the Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Conscience Claims in Health Care

Conscience-based claims against abortion developed from a different body of law—not RFRA , but laws that allow medical personnel

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 71

to refuse to provide health-care services on religious grounds. In the wake of Roe, newly enacted federal and state laws authorized doctors with religious or moral objections to refuse to perform abortions or sterilizations. After the Court narrowed but upheld Roe in 1992, abortion opponents invoked religious liberty to expand health-care refusal laws, authorizing many more individuals and institutions to deny health-care services they deemed sinful—abortion prominently, but also increasingly contraception.

The latest wave of health-care refusal legislation uses concepts of complicity to authorize conscience objections in broadly defined circumstances. Mississippi, for example, allows health-care providers to assert conscience objections to providing “any phase of patient medical care, treatment or procedure, including, but not limited to, the following: patient referral, counseling, therapy, testing, diagnosis or prognosis, research, instruction, prescribing, dispensing or administering any device, drug, or medication, surgery, or any other care or treatment rendered by health care providers or health care institutions.” The Mississippi law also defines “health care provider” as expansively as possible. Like laws adopted in some other states, the one in Mississippi is based on a model statute promulgated by the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.

Laws authorizing health-care providers to refuse patient care illustrate how conservatives are now using the ideas of conscience and religious liberty. States like Mississippi could accommodate the conscience objections of health-care providers while ensuring alternative care for patients. But health-care refusal laws rarely require institutions to provide alternative care; many even authorize providers to refuse to inform patients that they are being denied services that they may want. Expansive health-care refusal laws of the kind Mississippi has enacted thereby serve to restrict access to abortion.

For decades, constrained by constitutional rulings, conservatives have used claims on conscience to restrict access to abortion. Now, as laws recognizing same-sex marriage spread, religious conservatives have begun to look to health-care refusals as an inspiration and a model for restraining another development they could not entirely block. As Ryan Ander-

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son writes in the National Review, “Whatever the Court does will cause less damage if we … highlight the importance of religious liberty.

Even if the Court were to one day redefine marriage, governmental recognition of same-sex relationships as marriages need not and should not require any third party to recognize a samesex relationship as a marriage.” Positioning himself for a run for the White House, Jeb Bush warned that if the Supreme Court recognizes marriage equality, “that automatically then shifts the focus to people of conscience.”

Conscience is now a rallying cry for a cross-

denominational coalition opposing abortion and same-sex marriage and supporting religious liberty. For example, the “Manhattan Declaration”—a 2009 manifesto of conservative Christian principles endorsed by Catholic and evangelical Protestant leaders as well as conservative political activists—is subtitled “A Call of Christian Conscience.” The declaration asks Christians to unite across denominational lines in support of three central principles: “the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion.” Alongside planks opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, the statement offers support for claims of conscientious refusal to be complicit in either one.

Similarly, the Family Research Council—a self-declared “Christian public policy ministry” that has worked to pass laws banning same-sex marriage and abortion—seeks religious exemptions for business owners whose “consciences prevent them from participating in” a same-sex marriage and “health care professionals and organizations who have conscientious objections” to abortion and contraception.

As Jeb Bush’s comments suggest, the crossdenominational coalition asserting conscience claims in health care and marriage has the backing of the Republican Party, which invokes conscience to decry a so-called “war on religion.”

The 2012 Republican Party platform declared, “The most offensive instance of this war on religion has been the current Administration’s attempt to compel faith-related institutions, as well as believing individuals, to contravene their deeply held religious, moral, or ethical beliefs regarding health services, traditional marriage, or abortion.” In announcing his 2016 presiden-

tial run, Ted Cruz supported religious liberty exemptions from laws that contravene traditional sexual morality, while at the same time advocating laws codifying traditional values.

At least two background conditions incline conservatives to refashion their defense of traditional sexual morality into claims for religious exemptions. For many years, conservatives have promoted “religion in the public square” and denounced objections to officially sponsored prayer and other forms of religious expression under government auspices as a “war on religion.” Conservatives are also now much more willing to use courts to assert the role of religion in public life. While attacking liberal judicial decisions as “judicial activism,” conservatives sought control of the courts, and, after decades of Republican judicial appointments, confidently use the courts—whether to strike down affirmative action, campaign finance regulation, and the ACA , or to vindicate religious liberty. Just as conservatives have turned color-blindness on its head, so too they now deride the “bogeyman of judicial activism” and praise “judicial engagement.”

Why Complicity Claims Are Different

Now that conservatives have turned the Warren Court’s activism and religious-liberty precedents to their own purposes, what are liberals to do? Some would limit protections of religious liberty to cases of invidious discrimination and consequently reject exemptions from general laws on grounds of conscience. But one can challenge the Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby and reject the conscience claims of bakers and florists without abandoning support for all religious exemptions.

Today’s conflicts over marriage and health care feature a special kind of conscience claim—claims about complicity. The employers in Hobby Lobby objected that the ACA forced them to provide “insurance coverage for items that risk killing an embryo [and thereby] makes them complicit in abortion.” Similarly, businesses in the wedding industry object to “facilitating” same-sex weddings. These complicity claims concern the conduct of third parties, other citizens who do not share the objector’s beliefs, and so differ in fundamental ways from many other religious-liberty claims. For instance, in the recently decided Holt v. Hobbs

case, a prisoner sought a religious exemption from the prison’s general prohibition on beards; he was not seeking to avoid complicity in what he believed were someone else’s sinful acts.

To be sure, complicity claims are bona fide faith claims. For example, Catholic principles of “cooperation” and “scandal” warn the faithful against complicity in the sins of others.

Further, there should be no doubt that RFRA’s broad language covers complicity claims. But unlike the claims that concerned Congress when it enacted RFRA , the accommodation of complicity claims is more likely to result in harm to third parties, such as women seeking access to contraception and abortion or samesex couples going about their everyday lives.

In the free-exercise cases that Congress invoked in passing RFRA , religious minorities sought exemptions based on unconventional beliefs or practices generally not considered by lawmakers when they adopted the challenged laws. The costs of accommodating their claims were minimal and widely shared. For instance, granting exemptions from the drug laws to Native Americans who use peyote in ritual ceremonies only modestly detracts from the public interest in health and safety.

Complicity-based conscience claims differ from these other claims. Because complicity claims single out other citizens as sinners, their accommodation can inf lict targeted harm.

Complicity claims are increasingly entangled in culture-war politics as a means of mobilizing the faithful against the practices of people who depart from traditional morality. For these reasons, accommodation of the claims is fraught with significance not only for the claimants but also for those whose conduct the claimants condemn. These third-party effects need to be taken into account in weighing whether and how the government should accommodate complicity-based claims of conscience.

Why Hobby Lobby May Help

Supreme Court decisions have often limited the accommodation of religious liberty out of a concern about third-party harm. In the initial outcry over the Court’s expansive interpretation of RFRA in Hobby Lobby, few paused to notice the language of limitation in the decision. The dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t the only one to invoke third-party

harm as a limiting principle on accommodating claims of conscience. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito and the concurring opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy also did so.

In fact, concern about third-party harm structured the majority’s decision. The Court did not hold that religious liberty trumped the government’s interest in women’s health.

Instead, it recognized the claim for accommodation on the narrower ground that the

Complicity-based conscience claims differ from other claims of religious conscience.

Because they single out other citizens as sinners, accommodating them can harm those citizens. government could promote women’s access to contraception by means that did not burden the plaintiffs’ religious liberty. In fact, the majority opinion emphasized that the government could accommodate the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs with “precisely zero” effect on their female employees because the government could in theory provide contraception without involving the employer.

The Court’s reasoning in Hobby Lobby shows that the courts must take third-party harm into account in applying RFRA . Under the law, whenever the government “substantially burdens” a person’s exercise of religion, it must demonstrate two things: the burden furthers a “compelling governmental interest” and is the “least restrictive means” of doing so.

These considerations are directly relevant to third-party harm. For example, if granting a

religious accommodation would inflict harm on people protected by an antidiscrimination law or undermine societal values and goals the law promotes, unencumbered enforcement of the law is the least restrictive means of achieving the government’s compelling ends. If, however, the government can accommodate the religious claimant in ways that do not impair pursuit of the compelling interests in banning discrimination, RFRA requires the accommodation.

This interpretation of the law does not dictate the outcome of a specific case, but it suggests that any accommodation of religious exercise must minimize, to the extent feasible, adverse effects on third parties.

Why adopt this approach to religious exemptions rather than refuse to accommodate conscience claims altogether? As a practical matter, more than 20 states now have RFRA-equivalent statutes and numerous other states have bills under consideration that adopt language similar to the federal statute. A large body of federal and state law authorizes wideranging religious exemption claims, and many judges have responded sympathetically to broad interpretations of these laws.

There also remain good reasons to respect claims of religious conscience. Laws of general application can inflict significant injury on religious groups, even if the laws do not single out those groups in invidious ways. At the same time, we need principled limits on the accommodation of a particular subset of conscience claims—complicity-based conscience claims.

One group of citizens should not be singled out to bear significant costs of another’s religious practice. The government may have to limit complicity-based conscience claims to avoid harming third parties who do not share the claimants’ beliefs. This approach respects claims to religious freedom and the rights of other citizens—standing by conscience while recognizing its new role in culture-war conflicts.

Douglas NeJaime is professor of law at UCLA School of Law and faculty director of the Williams Institute. Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Their article, “Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics,” on which this essay is based, was recently published in the Yale Law Journal.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 73

Bringing labor rights to Bangladesh After a horrific factory collapse in 2013, pressure from global unions, human rights groups, and reputational damage to big fashion brands led to a groundbreaking accord to improve labor conditions. What has it achieved?

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wo years after the April 24, 2013, collapse of the Rana Plaza building, Bangladesh has become a laboratory to test whether pressure from worldwide labor unions and NGOs in support of local unions and labor activists can improve life in the world’s sweatshops. The Rana Plaza disaster capped a series of fires and other fatal collapses in Bangladesh garment factories. Its death toll was at least 1,130. Another 2,500 workers or more were injured, many crippled for life and deeply traumatized. The survivors’ terrible stories include on-site amputations and workers being trapped underground for days. Some can no longer enter tall buildings without uncontrollable trembling and crying. One woman described attempting to go to work on 19 occasions but failing each time to overcome her anxiety. Thousands of livelihoods have been crushed.

Implicated in these deaths and injuries were 31 Western fashion brands, buyers of products from the local factory owners renting space in Rana Plaza. These included Benetton, Bonmarché, Carrefour, El Corte Inglés, Inditex, J.C. Penney, Loblaw, Mango, Primark, The Children’s Place, and Walmart. These firms all had voluntary codes of conduct pledging that they and their suppliers would provide safe and healthy working conditions.

The collapse produced worldwide headlines and brought shame and reputational damage upon these companies, which specify every detail of the garment but manage to duck responsibility for the workers who produce it. The global rag trade is organized to allow fashion brands to

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source production globally, seeking the lowest possible cost consistent with the quality that the brand demands. The brands don’t own the factories but rely on a supply chain of logistics companies, contractors, and subcontractors.

With millions of people unemployed or underemployed and national governments such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and of course China viewing garment production as a rung on the manufacturing ladder, the effect is to batter down wages as well as disperse accountability.

Throughout Asia and the developing world, vast numbers of underemployed rural workers flock to cities and compose a reserve of labor whose very number drives down wages.

The brands and retailers are attracted to factories that can access this low-wage workforce. World per-unit cost of garments dropped 40 percent between 2000 and 2014.

Bangladeshi workers endured a generation of escalating worker deaths and injuries from fires and collapses, but exports from Bangladesh doubled as a fraction of total world exports, from 2.5 percent to more than 5 percent.

Bangladesh became an attractive production platform for all the reasons that together make its garment workers so vulnerable. Their wages are among the lowest in the world.

They were at the very bottom before 2013, but to placate outraged workers and indignant Western governments, the minimum wage was substantially increased after the Rana Plaza collapse, from 3,000 taka a month ($38) to 5,300 taka ($68)—still grievously short of living wages.

In the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster, union organizers and anti-sweatshop activists persuaded the big

a p h r o d i t e 74 / i s t o c k

By Ro b e rt J.S. Ro ss

r e x f e at u r e s v i a a p i m a g e s

European brands to sign an Accord to police safety conditions and allow access to trade unionists. The Accord, with company and union representatives on its board, and a representative of the International Labour Organization as board chair and tiebreaker, proved too much for most American fashion brands. Leading U.S. companies, led

by Walmart and Gap, created a rival “Alliance,” entirely voluntary and with no enforceable commitments.

Even so, these agreements represent a modest step forward. After decades of mostly useless codes of conduct, these deals at least shine a spotlight on one of the world’s most exploitive industries, and have provided more inspections, more transparency, and the promise of moderately safer working conditions. For the first time, the big brands have taken at least some responsibility for the realities in the factories that produce their goods—despite two or three removes of contractors and subcontractors that in the past had distanced the companies from accountability.

Two years later, one can see the limits as well as the slender hopes offered by this model. I was in Bangladesh in April, as part of a delegation to explore in detail what has occurred since the collapse. There are actually three important safety initiatives in Bangladesh. While all of them originated in horrible events prior to Rana Plaza, their implementation owes everything to that moment.

The Rana Plaza collapse, like the Triangle Factory Fire in New York in 1911, galvanized unavoidable change.

After the February 2010 Garib & Garib Sweater Factory fire that killed 21, the global and local labor movements had

put forward a set of safety proposals. These developed into guidelines proposed by anti-sweatshop groups including the Amsterdam-based Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN), and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

They were released in April 2010 on the fifth anniversary of the Spectrum building collapse that had killed 62. The guidelines proposed binding agreements for independent inspections, public access to the reports, and worker involvement in factory safety and governance of the arrangements.

These discussions proceeded without broad agreement— until 2012, when yet another fire stimulated action. In November of that year, the Tazreen factory fire killed 112— the greatest loss of life in the Bangladesh garment industry until then. Tazreen underscored the weakness of voluntary, proprietary, confidential “social audits.” As Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Tazreen Fashions was visited repeatedly by inspectors representing Walmart, but these inspectors never identified nor corrected the grave safety flaws, including the lack of viable emergency exits, that ultimately took the lives of 112 workers.”

The labor and NGO activists initially reached an agreement with PVH, the U.S. company that owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands. This deal became the outline of what would become, after Rana Plaza, the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety.

A meeting had been scheduled for April 29, 2013, to add other brands to the earlier agreement. The collapse on

Marching For Justice: On the anniversary of the collapse, Bangladeshi workers demonstrate for better conditions.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 75

April 24 lent unprecedented urgency to the discussions.

The breakthrough occurred when the Swedish giant H&M, the largest purchaser of garments from Bangladesh, agreed to it. Almost immediately, 40 other European firms signed on. Now there are more than 200, making the Accord the largest of the new initiatives.

The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh

includes a mandatory commitment to transparent and independent inspections. Workers’ representatives have a full share in the management of its operations. The next year will see the Accord sponsor and organize workers’ elections to safety committees in the factories with which its members do business. The Accord’s brands engage with more than 1,500 factories that employ more than 50 percent of the Bangladeshi garment workers engaged in the export sector.

The rival Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety is composed of 26 North American firms (most notably Walmart and Gap), which source from about 650 Bangladesh factories. Unions have no set-aside seats on its board. The Alliance includes no mandatory enforcement of safety remediation or rights to refuse unsafe work, and no recourse to courts of law except for the corporate members.

The Alliance, however, did agree to a common inspection form with the Accord—important because some factories sell to members of both groups. A third safety initiative, the Bangladesh government’s National Tripartite Plan of Action, includes the factories (about a third of the total) that do not do direct business with any of the brands related to the other two initiatives.

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An important effect of these international agree-

ments has been to supplement weak national law. Building codes and labor laws, like much of Bangladeshi law, are somewhere between aspirational and deceitful. Building owners regularly build floors beyond permits. Fires are endemic. Seventy percent of the fires are caused by electrical failures, which are in turn caused by overloading or other illegal practices.

An hour of traffic in central Dhaka is a metaphor for the observance of labor law. There are painted lanes, but no one uses them. There are traffic lights, but no one obeys them.

a .m. ahad / ap images

Alive But Not Well: Mahamadul Hassan Ridoy, 27, one of 2,500 workers injured in the Rana Plaza collapse. Many will never be able to work again, and compensation is still spotty.

Thanks to these three initiatives, the number of inspectors has increased dramatically and their training has been a foreign aid priority for both the U.S. government and many European governments. Of the roughly 2,050 factories covered by the two Western brand initiatives, about 93 percent have been inspected after two years, and the results of these inspections are available online. Dense and technical, these reports nonetheless are a qualitative advance compared to the situation two years ago. Of these factories, about 1,250, or nearly two-thirds, have received corrective action plans. The Accord alone has recorded more than 54,000 violations of building and safety codes.

The Accord is the preferred project of the Bangladeshi labor movement, its global union supporters (in particular the multi-union global manufacturing federation IndustriAll), and the Western NGOs that campaign on labor rights—notably the Clean Clothes Campaign and its UK affiliate called Labour Behind the Label, the U.S.-based International Labor Rights Forum, and the U.S. studentinitiated WRC. The giant Swedish retailer H&M, the UK’s Primark, Spain’s Inditex (which owns Zara), and the American PVH are the Accord’s industrial leaders.

What is new and important is the willingness to work with unions. The Accord notifies all trade union federations where they will be conducting inspections and asks them if they have any members or union representatives on the premises who should join the inspection proceedings.

The Accord also comes to the defense of workers who suffer retaliation when they organize to address safety issues.

By contrast, the Alliance has a worker hotline, a risky and feeble means of worker empowerment.

When our delegation met with trade union leaders and garment workers, it was apparent that they were aware that in Accord-affiliated factories, they had a right to refuse to enter buildings that are dangerous. They were not aware that there is a similar provision in the amended Alliance agreement. Local union leaders also told us that the Accord informs them of its inspections and reports— a point emphasized as well by Robb Wayss, the executive director of the Accord.

There are dividers between sides of thoroughfares going in opposite directions—but the bicycle rickshaws and scooters with cabs (CNGs) dodge to the oncoming lanes at will.

Factory employers fire workers who join unions, who complain about safety hazards, or who inquire about unpaid overtime. Workers who try to organize unions may be blacklisted, harassed, and sometimes beaten by thugs. Several union leaders have spent time in jail on falsified charges. One organizer, Aminul Islam, was tortured and murdered in 2012. The government is doing little to protect unions and at times appears to support garment manufacturers’ attacks against union leaders.

Recent pressure brought to bear by the U.S. and EU has resulted in some openings and the organizing and registration of a few hundred unions. Many more attempts at formal union registration have been turned down. Even when the infant locals succeed at gaining formal registration, local leaders have emphasized the harassment, firings, and even beatings that they risk when doing so.

Bangladeshi factory owners complain, rightly, that the prices offered by the Western firms allow just pennies in profit. But the pennies add up. Fiercely independent, putting both the British Raj and the Pakistani overlords behind them, the new princes of the Bangladeshi realm are the factory owners. The luxury cars and gated housing tell one story, but another very telling story is told by Wayss, the Accord’s director. Wayss reports that when confronted with corrective action plans for the myriad defects in their buildings, and when assured of loan assistance available from the Accord, nearly all of the factory owners are choosing to self-finance the safety remediation. Despite their complaints, the factory owners are not without means.

And they are not without power.

Thirty of the members (about 10 percent) of the Bangladesh Parliament own garment factories. One leader of a union federation reports that another 146 members of parliament have family members who own garment factories. If this is even approximately accurate, it suggests a decisive governmental bloc that tolerates abusive conditions and resists reforms. And yet the Accord has created some space for reform to bubble up from worker efforts.

On April 25, a major earthquake devastated neigh-

boring Nepal. In Dhaka, 420 miles away from Kathmandu, buildings rocked and people fled them in fear. Meeting with trade union leaders, my companions and I abruptly headed for the dubious safety of the sidewalk. The day after the earthquake, our delegation visited the offices of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) and the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS). We found a large group of workers crowded into the meeting room. A young woman who was a local union

president explained to us that she had argued with her factory manager, urging that they should not work until their building was inspected.

Although they were worried that the neighboring building, which had a crack in it, would fall on them—as had happened at Rana Plaza—the factory manager vehemently rejected their concerns. The union president told us that she then called the BGIWF office, and a somewhat older and more experienced federation staffer came out to help.

Together, they told us, they persuaded the manager to let the workers out at the lunch break and to have the inspectors assess the safety of continued operation. As we sat around the desk of Kalpona Akter, head of BCWS, the president of BGIWF, Babul Akhter, went to the Accord website to confirm the factory was listed as an Accord member facility. Finding that it was would help them, they thought, in asserting the right to refuse dangerous

The international pressure from the U.S. and the EU has forced Bangladesh to recognize a few hundred local unions, but activists still risk harassment, firings, and even beatings. work without fear of being fired. It was listed, and they did. WRC Director Scott Nova observes, “If the workers of Rana Plaza had had a union, they would not have had to go into the building after cracks developed the very day before the building collapsed.”

In order to attract the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN’s labor standards body, to start its Better Work program in Bangladesh, the government (and the powerful Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the BGMEA) agreed to some changes in labor law. These are modest and do not dramatically alter the facts of life on the ground.

There are 300 more union locals registered since Rana Plaza. But 56 percent of registration petitions are denied, compared to 19 percent in 2013. These are signs that postRana legal and cultural changes have encouraged organizing, but employer resistance is still a major fact of life.

However, another subtle indicator of positive change was revealed in one of our factory visits. This particular factory was one of the very few with both a union and a collective bargaining agreement. The building was decrepit, although labor relations were good. Notifications of safety requirements, workers’ rights, and evacuation routes were

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 77

posted in Bengali and English. The manager and the union leader walked us through. The goods were destined for low-level brands and store brands—cheap stuff like sports pants, camo slacks. We were told that the “good brands,” those affiliated with the Accord or the Alliance, were moving their contracts out of shabby factories like this. This owner would soon move to a more modern factory. He was shortly going to Brussels on a sales effort to attract back better brands. The standards of the Accord and the Alliance, in effect, were forcing better building standards.

After Rana Plaza, the constellation of unions and NGOs negotiated with leading brands to create a voluntary

trust fund for victim compensation. The precedents for this went back to 2005, after the Spectrum collapse, when Neil Kearney of the international union federation representing garment workers, meeting with an Inditex social

The Accord has become almost a shadow Ministry of Labor for the Bangladeshi government, with responsibility for fire, electrical, and structural inspections, as well as a complaint process. responsibility executive, worked out a template for worker compensation. It depended on the compensation calculations modeled by the ILO for worker compensation insurance laws—ILO Convention 121. This convention is a rough guide to industrial accident compensation that mandates using the usual wage of a worker, the worker’s age, and the severity of injury (or number of dependents if deceased) as factors in deciding lump sum or annual payments.

In 2005, Kearney and his Inditex counterpart failed to get broad corporate buy-in, but Rana Plaza changed everything. The Rana Plaza Coordination Committee includes the Bangladesh government, the major industry associations, the NGOs, and the unions, with the ILO as the neutral chair. $30 million was targeted to compensate the victims, using the Bangladesh interpretation of ILO Convention 121 as a guideline for calculation.

Over a two-year period, the Western NGOs campaigned hard to get the big brands to “Pay Up” into the fund. They were largely successful; at the brink of the two-year anniversary, after Bangladeshi and U.S. campaigners had sat down and been arrested at the Children’s Place headquarters in New Jersey, the firm produced another $2 million that, along with several other donations, brought the fund

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to more than 90 percent of its quota. Then, in early June, ILRF announced an anonymous donor had contributed enough to complete the $30 million fund. The campaigners still want Benetton, J.C. Penney, Mango, Walmart, and Zara (Inditex) stores to give more.

Interviews with survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse suggest why the $30 million is only part of the story. It is terribly unclear to the workers what has happened to all that money. In a sometimes harrowing session with 28 survivors, our delegation found genuine confusion about the amounts of money being awarded to claimants. From the workers’ point of view, there is little transparency in the process. A website with legal language is not an adequate way to communicate to these factory workers. In papers the survivors showed us, the equivalent of $1,000 was given to workers who had lost an arm or a leg or a family member— hardly adequate as a lifetime income replacement.

A beautifully produced short film about the compensation arrangement was shown at a downtown hotel as part of the second anniversary observance. In it, the Rana Plaza Trust claims, through examples, admirable rehabilitation and training. But none of the workers we met with had received any. A survey of more than 1,400 survivors reported that 61 percent require medical assistance, and 59 percent experience depression and trauma. When we asked the survivors how many “wanted to return to work in the apparel factories,” almost all nodded or raised their hands in assent. But none of that group was able to return.

One woman told us that though she had no remaining physical injuries, she had attempted to go back to factory work 19 times, but only lasted about a week at each place, as her fear and stress caused her to tremble with anxiety.

When we met with a lawyer working on the small staff of the claims administration, he noted that workers can call to get information or reassessment of their claims. But we had been told by workers that they couldn’t get through on the phone. The lawyer shrugged when we told him this and said that there is just one phone line to take calls (there are more than 5,000 claimants), and that there were only three staff members left at the office. He told us they were wrapping up their work and would close sometime this summer.

The Accord has become almost a shadow, parallel Ministry of Labor alongside the Bangladeshi government. It employs almost 50 engineers who perform fire, electrical, and structural surveys. They have another team of safety trainers and complaint handlers. The Alliance utilizes a number of outside firms to conduct assessments. Both use standards agreed to by the Bangladesh government and the ILO. Between them, they have inspected and devised corrective plans for about half of the country’s garment factories and probably a higher proportion of those engaged in export to Europe or America. Neither initiative includes

social audits encompassing internationally recognized labor rights. These are still in the realm of “private,” voluntary action, given that the Bangladesh government does not enforce its own labor laws. In that context, the Rana Plaza Trust is a one-off worker compensation project.

In the real, on-the-ground context of Bangladesh—and much of the developing world—the Accord offers an attractive template: transparent and competent inspection; worker empowerment; binding legal recourse. On paper, labor law goes much further, but the laws are unenforced.

If labor rights and protective government policy (unions, laws, and law enforcement) form the main crucible of decent conditions for workers, alliances with international NGOs and labor unions are the enablers. Policy levers also exist—but Western governments have to be willing to use them. For example, the EU has what is called a Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) written into its trade laws. (The U.S.’s GSP provisions expired in 2013, but are likely to be reauthorized.) These allow duty-free entry of certain goods from low-income nations into the economies of their higher-income trading partners. They are bilateral terms, conditioned, ostensibly, on trade partners observing internationally recognized labor rights.

For example, after the Rana Plaza collapse, the U.S. suspended Bangladesh’s GSP privileges because of its fundamental disrespect for labor rights. But apparel imports are excluded from the GSP. This past year, through April 2015, Bangladesh apparel exports to the U.S. were valued at $4.95 billion. In 2012, Bangladesh imports covered by the GSP provisions were worth $34.7 million. The GSP suspension was symbolic.

However, apparel imports to the multination EU are covered by a single GSP provision. In 2014, they were worth almost $14 billion. At the Second Anniversary Forum sponsored by the ILO at a swank downtown Dhaka hotel, the EU representative to Bangladesh made a clear threat to suspend GSP privileges unless Bangladesh followed through on commitments to protect worker safety and guarantee core labor rights, a duplication in intent of an ILO forum in Brussels two days before. This is a target for European campaigners, particularly the Amsterdambased Clean Clothes Campaign. Whether they are willing to use the threat—which is dire—remains to be seen.

There are other levers for U.S. allies. The federal government is a large buyer of garments, including the post exchange (PX) retail stores where armed forces families buy goods on military bases around the world. They could be required to buy only from Accord members when they source from Bangladesh. They now report on whether they are using Accord factories, and the Marine Corps requires licensees using their logos to source from Accord firms or from factories that meet its requirements.

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”—g.k. chesterton At the ILO two-year symposium in Dhaka, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Marcia Bernicat, gave an impassioned speech on labor rights, the importance of worker voice, and the foot-dragging of the Bangladesh government in protecting those rights. Near the end she said, “The U.S. stands ready to work as a partner with the government, the workers, and the employers to show the world Bangladesh can set new standards for workers’ rights, that no worker need to fear retaliation for speaking out about a cracked wall.” It was memorable, clear, committed. When we met with her later, I said she should send the speech to President Obama and ask him to give it in Wisconsin. She didn’t get the joke.

American workers don’t face conditions as grim as those in Bangladesh, but some are not so different. As American workers lose union protection because of hostile laws, courts, and media, so do they lose their ability to defend safe conditions. At Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia in 2010, 29 miners died: non-union. In the 1991 Hamlet, North Carolina, poultry plant fire where 25 died and the back doors were locked: non-union. On paper, American workers have all the rights they need to organize and join unions. In practice, they risk getting fired.

In Bangladesh, one of the gaps is a decade-long, as yet unsuccessful, attempt to create a workers’ compensation insurance system. Workers’ comp offers a no-fault system—a grand bargain created a century ago, state by state, in the U.S.: Workers don’t sue; employers pay insurance premiums to cover medical costs and long-term income replacement for disability. Oops: Workers’ comp is under attack in the U.S. in state after state, as caps on payments, limits on payment duration, and other restrictions erode yet another part of the social safety net. We learn about what we need by examining the deficits of others.

I left Dhaka before dawn on a weekday. The day before had seen a tri-city election for mayors, rife with tension and police in the streets. But the election place I visited was joyous. Even with all the cynicism, and we heard plenty of it, they cherished their right to vote freely, which seemed a tonic—there was great pride at the hotel, at the polls, in the streets. We Europeans and Americans were a curiosity, but people were eager to show us the polling place. We recalled the young unionists we met, so brave and committed. The streets were empty as we left, and we could almost imagine an easier Dhaka, a subway perhaps, a functioning democracy, even labor laws that worked.

The pressure from international unions, NGOs, and some corporations can help, but ultimately this struggle will be won or lost in Bangladesh.

Robert J.S. Ross is a research professor of sociology at Clark University, author of Slaves to Fashion, and a board member and vice president of the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 79

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Why Mothers and Daughters Tangle Over Hair

By Deborah Tannen

julia breckenreid

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o you like your hair that long?” my mother asked, soon after I arrived for a visit. I laughed. Looking slightly hurt, she asked why I was laughing. “I’ve been interviewing women for the book I’m writing about mothers and daughters,” I explained, “and so many tell me that their mothers criticize their hair.” “I wasn’t criticizing,” my mother said, and I let it drop.

Later in my visit I asked, “So Mom, what do you think of my hair?”

Without missing a beat, she

replied, “I think it’s a little too long.”

I wasn’t surprised by any of this, because my mother always thought my hair was too long. I’d taken to getting a haircut shortly before visiting my parents, sometimes the very morning before I boarded a plane to Florida. But that never made a difference. I could count on her telling me my hair was too long.

While talking to women for the book You’re Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, I

collected a cornucopia of mothers’ remarks on their daughters’ hair. Many of these comments were more overtly critical than my mother’s, such as “Comb your hair.

The birds will make a nest in it.”

Some were both overt and indirect: “You did that on purpose?”

Sometimes the wolf of criticism came dressed in the sheep’s clothing of a compliment: “I love your hair when it’s pushed back off your face,” said when her daughter’s hair was falling forward onto her face, or “I’m so glad you’re not

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wearing your hair in that frumpy way anymore.”

Sometimes it wasn’t criticism that frustrated women so much as the focus on hair instead of matters the daughters thought more important. During a presidential campaign season, a journalist interviewed both candidates for president. When her mother asked, “How did it go?” she began an enthusiastic account of the interviews. “No,” her mother interrupted, “I mean at the hair salon.

What style did you settle on? Did you put it up or leave it down?”

Another woman told me that after she appeared on television standing behind the president of the United States in a bill-signing ceremony, her mother’s comment

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 81

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was, “I could see you didn’t have time to cut your bangs.”

I came to think of the subjects about which mothers (and daughters) were critical as the big three: hair, clothes, and weight. I always thought of them in that order, because hair was the subject of the largest number of remarks repeated to me, and, it seemed, the most unnerving.

Why? Why so much preoccupation with hair? I first asked myself this question years ago, while taking part in a small academic conference at which each participant—eight men and four women—gave a brief presentation. As I listened to one of the women give her talk, I was distracted by her hair, which seemed intentionally styled to render her half-blind.

When she looked down to read her paper, thanks to a side part and no bangs, a curtain of hair fell clear across her face, completely covering one eye. As she read aloud, she kept reaching up to push the hair off her face, but it immediately fell right back, a result she ensured by stopping short of hooking it behind her ear. She must have believed that pinning her hair behind her ear would spoil its style.

After catching myself concentrating on the speaker’s hair rather than her talk, I scanned the room to check out the other two women’s hairstyles.

One, the youngest among us, had long, frosted blond hair that cascaded over her shoulders—an effect she enhanced by frequently tossing her head. The third woman had dark brown hair in a classic style that, I thought to myself, was a cross between Cleopatra and Plain Jane.

Then I wondered why I was scrutinizing only the women; what about the men? A glance around the room made the answer obvious: Every one of the men had his hair cut short, in no particular style. There could have been a man with a ponytail or a thick wavy mane or long hair falling below his ears. But there wasn’t. All the men had chosen neutral hairstyles. What, I asked myself, would be a comparably neutral hairstyle for a woman? Then I realized: There’s no such thing.

I came to think of this contrast in terms of a concept from linguistics, my academic field: The men’s choices

82 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

were “unmarked,” but any choice a woman makes is “marked”; that is, it says something about her. Here’s how linguistic markedness works. The “unmarked” forms of most verbs in English communicate present tense.

To communicate past tense, a speaker “marks” a verb by adding something.

For example, you can take the verb visit and mark it for past by adding –ed to make visited. Similarly, the unmarked forms of most nouns in English are singular, such as toy.

To make the word plural, you add –s to get toys. Like a present-tense verb or a singular noun, a man can have a hairstyle that is “unmarked”—that is, neutral; it doesn’t tell you anything about him except that he’s male. But any choice a woman makes carries extra meaning: It leads observers to conclude something about the type of person she is. That’s why I titled an essay on this subject “There Is No Unmarked Woman.”

The concept of markedness helps explain many mothers’ seemingly excessive concern with so apparently superficial a topic as their daughters’ hair. They are thinking of how others will interpret their daughters’ character. That concern was explicit in one mother’s warning that no one would take her daughter seriously if she didn’t style her hair more carefully: “If they see someone with loose ends in their hair, they’ll think you have loose ends in your life.”

Mothers aren’t the only ones who are inclined to be critical of women’s hair (as well as their clothes and weight). Because the range of hairstyles from which a woman must choose is so vast, the chances that anyone—especially another woman— will think she made the best choice are pretty slim. How often do you look at a woman and think, She would look better if her hair were … longer, shorter, curlier, straighter, pushed back, pulled forward, colored, not colored, dyed a different color, highlighted or not, more fashionably styled, just differently styled? We think these things, but we don’t say them. A mother, however, often feels she has a right if not an obligation to

say something, because it’s her job to ensure that things go as well as possible for her daughter.

There is yet another layer to all of this: Women’s and girls’ hair (as well as clothes and weight)—indeed, the preoccupation with women’s appearance more generally—is inextricably intertwined with sex. Our very notion of “woman” entails sexuality in a way that our notion of “man” does not. A woman who is not attractive is dismissed, and being deemed attractive requires being sexy—but not too sexy, because that would lead to her being dismissed in a different way. Furthermore, the line between too sexy and not sexy enough is a fine one and is located differently by different observers, so there is no way a woman can be certain of getting it just right. This criterion drives many, if not all, fashion choices: how short or long a skirt or dress should be; how tight-fitting and shape-showing slacks, tops, or dresses should be; how much skin is revealed, what body parts are glimpsed or displayed. And hair is an essential element in this sexual equation.

Hair, in short, is a secondary sex characteristic: Like breasts and the distribution of body fat that gives women a curvy shape, more head hair (and less facial hair) is one of the physical features distinguishing the sexes that begin to appear during puberty, signaling sexual maturity.

Enhancing and drawing attention to secondary sex characteristics can be a way of emphasizing sexual attractiveness. Thus, hair so abundant that it partially covers a woman’s face can be sexy, and more hair can be sexier than less. That is the aesthetic that drives “big hair,” and the anxiety that underlies the concept of a “bad-hair day.”

And that is the reason why many societies require women to cover, hide, or remove their hair. The connection between exposing hair and seeking to attract men is explicit in the Orthodox Jewish tradition by which women cut off their hair when they marry, as my grandmother did in the early 1900s Hasidic Jewish community of Warsaw. (My father was told that when his mother was having her head shaved in preparation for her wedding, her younger sisters, who had abandoned

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orthodoxy, pounded on the door, begging her not to let them do it; she later regretted having acquiesced and let it grow back.)

This tradition came to mind when I asked an Arab woman whether mothers in her country comment on their daughters’ appearance. She replied that a common mother-to-daughter remonstrance would be, “I can see hair”—a way to admonish a daughter to tighten her headscarf. Though the requirement to wear headscarves might seem at first very different from the “freedom” to expose hair, these seemingly opposite customs are really two sides of the same coin, divergent ways of managing men’s responses to this secondary sex characteristic: on one hand, precluding it by hiding hair; on the other, capitalizing on it by displaying hair in as alluring a style as possible.

While I was working on this essay,

my phone rang. It was my cousin Elaine calling. “I’m visiting my mother,” she began. I was concerned, because I knew that her mother had recently been discharged from the hospital after a life-threatening illness. Elaine continued, “What do you think was the first thing she asked me?” Still living in this essay, I offered, half-joking, “Was it about your hair?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “That is what she asked! I had been here maybe ten minutes when she said, ‘Don’t you think you need a haircut?’”

“You won’t believe this,” I said, and then read her the first paragraph of this essay.

After we both laughed at the uncanny similarity, Elaine continued, “I’m trying to assert myself now that I’m 60, so I told her, ‘I just had it cut!’” She explained that she’d made sure to do that because her mother always thinks her hair is too long. At that I read her the second paragraph of this essay.

After more shared laughter, Elaine resumed her account. Her mother kept returning to the topic: “Are you sure you don’t think it would be better shorter?” and “We have to go to my hairdresser.” Elaine capitulated: “I was in her house for less than half an hour before she was whisking me off, walker and all, to her hair salon!”

But Elaine drew the line at cutting her hair; she submitted only to having it blow-dried. Then she questioned her own sanity when, upon hearing her mother say, “Now you’re a pleasure to look at,” she heard herself say: “Maybe it would have been better shorter.”

After we laughed together, our conversation turned serious. Wondering aloud why her mother’s concern with her hair bothered her so much, Elaine said, “It’s a symbol of lack of acceptance.” Without doubt, that’s part of why we all react so strongly to perceived criticism, no matter how subtle, from our mothers—and why many of us are so quick to perceive criticism in any comment or, for that matter, gesture (like reaching out to brush hair off our faces) or facial expression (“I didn’t say anything”; “But you had that look”). There is an exquisite irony—a perfect relationship storm, you might say—between daughters and mothers.

Because girls and women are judged by appearance, mothers want their daughters to look as attractive as possible. But any suggestion for improvement implies criticism. And therein lies the irony: For mothers, the person to whom you most want to offer helpful suggestions is the one most likely to resist and resent them; for daughters, the person you most want to think you’re perfect is the one most likely to see your flaws—and tell you about them.

My cousin then told me something I hadn’t known: Her mother hated her own hair, because her mother had told her it was ugly. Indeed, Elaine’s mother had gone to medical school to ensure she’d be able to support herself, because her mother had led her to believe she was too unattractive to count on getting married. How, Elaine wondered, could her mother not see that she was doing to her daughter just what her own mother had done to her?

There are many ways to answer that question. One is that Elaine’s mother wanted to make sure her daughter didn’t suffer the same fate, by making sure she was attractive. Another is that she was doing what many women do: Both mothers and daughters often regard each other as reflections of themselves and consequently look at each other with a level of scrutiny

A man can have a hairstyle that is “unmarked.”

It doesn’t tell you anything about him except that he’s male. But any choice a woman makes carries extra meaning.

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that they otherwise reserve for themselves. For mothers, especially, that isn’t entirely irrational: They are held responsible for their daughters in a way that fathers are not. Someone who disapproves of a girl’s appearance will often think, Why did her mother let her go out looking like that?

Maybe it doesn’t matter what mothers’ motives are. The challenge for daughters is deciding how to respond. I always chuckle when recalling the woman who told me she silenced her mother by saying, “My lifetime interest in the topic of my hair has been exhausted.”

Or perhaps more important than figuring out what to say in response to perceived criticism is how to stop feeling bad about it. Women tell me it helps to realize that criticizing and caring are expressed in the same words. That way, a daughter can shift her focus from the criticizing to the caring. This often happens automatically after our mothers are gone, or when we fear losing them. One woman told me of getting a call that her mother had been hospitalized.

Full of worry and fear, she caught a plane and rushed to the hospital right from the airport. Distressed to see her mother with an IV bag attached to her arm and an oxygen tube in her nose, she approached the bedside and leaned over to give her a kiss. Her mother looked up at her and said, “When’s the last time you did your roots?” Rather than reacting with her usual annoyance, the daughter heaved a sigh of relief: Her mother was OK. As for me, it is now nearly a decade since my mother died. Several years ago, I began getting my hair cut shorter. My mother was right: It does look better this way.

Deborah Tannen is professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.

Among her many books is You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which spent nearly four years on the New York Times best-seller list. “Why Mothers and Daughters Tangle Over Hair” is from Me, My Hair and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, forthcoming from Algonquin Books in September.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 83

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Get Out of Jail Free How prosecutors and courts collude to keep corrupt executives from doing prison time By Jesse Eisinger b

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n these partisan times, here’s an assertion that cuts across party lines: The United States faces a problem of “overcriminalization,” an explosion of statutes that give the government extraordinary powers to make felons of us all.

In 2013, the House Judiciary Committee formed a special task force to address this problem, with Democrats and Republicans signing on. The right-leaning Heritage Foundation has made it one of its signature issues.

The Supreme Court has referred to it.

But while Democrats and progressives mainly have in mind the excesses of mass incarceration, the right more often has a different concern: that business is drowning in regulatory rules that transform everyday business decisions into transgressions. Further, the argument goes, these transgressions are being punished with greater fervor than ever before. Last year, I attended a securities law conference where the chairman of Paul, Weiss—one of the most respected white-collar defense law firms in the country—decried regulators and prosecutors competing to outdo each other with the most “draconian” punishments conceivable.

There is something wrong here.

While it’s true that the United States is throwing many people in prison— disproportionately African American males for nonviolent offenses—corporate criminals are getting away with their crimes. There may be plenty of laws on the books, but they aren’t being put to effect for the one percent.

Almost everyone knows that no top executive from a major financial firm went to prison in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But it goes beyond that.

No officials at the highest levels from BP were convicted in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In June, a jury acquitted a BP executive for lying about the spill.

Two new books explore what is happening with white-collar justice in America, how we got here, and

84 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

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what might be done about it. Instead of prosecuting top individuals and indicting corporations, the Department of Justice has perfected the art of settling with corporations. It is this development that Brandon L. Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor, explores in his new book, Too Big To Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations.

Prosecutors don’t call them settlements. Instead, they are known either as a “deferred prosecution agreement” (DPA) or its poor cousin, the “non-­ prosecution agreement” (NPA). Instead of being indicted, these companies reach an agreement, offering payment of a fine and some pledges to behave better. Big companies, especially, enter into these settlements. Since 2001, more than 250 federal prosecutions have involved large corporations. These include some of the biggest names in corporate America, among them AIG, Google, JPMorgan, and Pfizer.

In her book Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, Rena Steinzor, a law professor at University of Maryland, goes further. She lays out a case for using existing laws to criminally prosecute top corporate officers—or to push for statutes that would expand prosecutors’ powers.

Garrett’s is the more scholarly of the two. A civil rights specialist, Garrett noticed prosecutors had become preoccupied with changing the cultures of corporations, often at the expense of punishing them. How did prosecutors become interested in changing institutions? Is this their role? And are they successful, even on their own terms?

His book is the first systematic accounting of how many corporate prosecutions and settlements there have been in the last decade and how they work, powered by a proprietary data project that is available online. Thankfully, given the data-heavy nature of his work, Garrett writes lucidly and with

Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction

By Rena Steinzor

Cambridge University Press

Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations

By Brandon L. Garrett

Belknap Press

passion. His account is devastating.

Ever since a 1909 Supreme Court ruling, New York Central & Hudson River Railroad Co. v. United States, prosecutors have had the power to prosecute a corporation if a single employee is found guilty of committing a crime in the course of his or her job duties. What this means in practice has evolved.

Prosecutors have long been caught between two competing notions. The first is that they should focus on going after individuals, rather than institutions. Human beings commit crimes, after all, not corporations. Corporations are merely a legal concept, and have “no body to kick, no soul to damn,” a paraphrase of the famous quote from Edward, First Baron Thurlow. And you can’t throw a concept in jail.

On the other hand, corporations can become rotten. The culture can corrupt otherwise law-abiding employees. So it may not be enough to simply go after individuals, but to focus on the institution as a whole.

Still, laws are broken by executives, not fictitious persons.

Garrett finds this Justice Department push is not working well. “Prosecutions should hold individuals and corporations accountable for serious crimes. Far too often, both are let off the hook,” he writes.

He convincingly demonstrates that the Justice Department is scared to indict the biggest companies in America. One major reason for this is the Arthur Andersen case. The Justice Department of the George W. Bush administration indicted Andersen, then one of the top accounting firms, in 2002 for destroying documents relating to its audit of the books of Enron, the notorious energy fraud.

Andersen, plainly, had been an enabler of Enron’s deceptions. A jury found Andersen guilty of obstruction of justice and it went out of business, throwing tens of thousands of people out of work. A unanimous Supreme Court threw out the conviction a few years later on the grounds that the jury instructions were faulty.

Prosecutors have since been so concerned with the “collateral consequences” of putting companies out of business that they have largely avoided even trying in the years since. And

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there’s a second problem. In 2013, then–Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that he was concerned some financial firms had become so large that it makes it “difficult for us to prosecute them.” This tacit admission of Justice Department policy and inequity was met with universal outrage. Holder quickly rowed his comments back. But the problem persists.

Andersen had to die so that other giant corporations could continue living, even when committing the baldest and most egregious crimes.

Instead of trying to indict and convict companies or the individuals responsible for criminal corporate wrongdoing, prosecutors fine the companies. Fines for corporate misbehavior are skyrocketing, but usually these are paid by shareholders and have little effect on corporate executives. Garrett contends that these penalties are often too lenient. Nearly half of the agreements Garrett studied didn’t have a criminal fine at all.

While prosecutors had reached the occasional deferred prosecution in the past with corporations, in the wake of Arthur Andersen they started turning to them in force. Nothing about such agreements precludes prosecutions of individual executives, but the reality is that prosecutors don’t follow through with many such investigations. Usually with a DPA , no one goes to prison.

Garrett’s data show that in two-thirds of cases involving deferred or nonprosecutions of public corporations between 2001 and 2012, the company was punished but no employees were prosecuted.

Of the 31 publicly listed firms that were convicted in that same time period, Garrett crunched the numbers on individuals at those companies’ top echelons who went to prison. Here goes (I hope you are sitting down): four CEOs, one chairman, one president, and one CFO. I have termed this the rise of corporate impunity. The reasons for this development are debated. Perhaps there were fewer crimes by top executives, though it strains credulity that there were none in the run-up to the financial crisis. After the accounting scandals of the early 2000s, boards of directors for corporations in crisis ordered

up sweeping internal investigations.

There were fewer such internal investigations after the financial crisis.

Prosecutors often turn to such probes to build cases against individuals.

And in addition to the Arthur Andersen case, there were other debacles. During the case against the accounting firm KPMG, prosecutors overreached, pushing the company to cut off the legal fees for indicted executives. A judge harshly slapped the government down and threw out most of the indictments. After that, prosecutors were less able to press companies to turn over evidence that might implicate their executives. The financial crisis stands in lamentable contrast with previous eras. After the accounting scandals of the late 1990s and early 2000s, top executives from Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and Adelphia all went to prison.

After the savings-and-loan scandals of the late 1980s, 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks.

Instead of trying to put away executives, prosecutors have turned to efforts to reform business cultures.

Many of the Justice Department agreements make the corporation promise to stay straight. Garrett finds these are largely not enforced—and little attempt is made to do so.

The Department of Justice isn’t set up to monitor compliance, but it can appoint someone to oversee the agreement. A quarter of DPA s and NPA s called for a corporate monitor. Garrett rightly asks, Why not the other threequarters? But corporate monitors are no panacea. Prosecutors sometimes hire their buddies—former prosecutors—to do the monitoring, opening them up to charges of cronyism.

Little of the work the monitors do is made public. Sometimes these agreements are even kept secret, though the reasons for secrecy aren’t clear.

As Garrett points out, the deterrent effect is lost when such a punishment is kept from the public eye.

Moreover, the Justice Department is quick to move on. The average time of probation for these corporate agreements is just over two years. This isn’t enough time to change something as entrenched as a rotten culture. If the company is merged into another or

Instead of seeking to indict and convict executives, prosecutors increasingly fine corporations.

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somehow has a successor or assignee of its assets, as is often the case, the prosecution disappears.

And what rotten cultures there are.

“Over 50 percent of the most serious fraud and larceny culprits were recidivists,” Garrett writes, a rate “about the same as robbery and firearms offenders and far higher than drug traffickers.”

The list is shocking. There’s BP, which before the Deepwater Horizon accident had the Texas City refinery disaster.

ExxonMobil has been convicted four times since 2001 of environmental crimes. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical behemoth, has scored a pu-pu platter of non-prosecutions. Pfizer and subsidiaries have had two convictions, two deferred prosecution agreements, and a non-prosecution agreement. What’s a company gotta do around here to face some actual consequences?

Oddly, Garrett rejects some intuitively obvious explanations for this problem. He says “there is no evidence corporations have ‘captured’ or influenced prosecutions.” But his book has laid out clearly and definitively how corporations have influenced their own punishments and how inadequate they are. If that’s not capture, what is it?

He also dismisses revolving-door concerns, making a common argument echoed by every prosecutor in the land: Prosecutors have incentives to show how tough they are so they can get those plum white-collar defense jobs. Here, again, Garrett’s own book cuts against this conclusion. If these settlements aren’t tough and lack transparency, if we also don’t have basic information on which cases prosecutors never take up in the first place, then how do we know how tough they are really? Yet prosecutors are managing to score those lavishly salaried white-collar jobs anyway.

Since the book was published, some things have shifted ever so slightly.

Prosecutors, responding to criticism from Garrett, the media, lawmakers, and activists, have moved to make companies admit wrongdoing and plead guilty. Monitors seem more frequently assigned; the practice is now almost de rigueur. But this is really a semantic change. Prosecutors have bent over backwards to make sure the regulatory consequences to

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 85

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any guilty plea are minimized. So the guilty pleas really only have symbolic, semantic value.

Garrett ends with a series of recommendations that would go further.

Corporations should be convicted more often and there should be fewer of these DPA s. Judges should oversee these agreements. There should be “carefully audited compliance and structural reforms.” Fines should be “more serious.” And there should be greater transparency and public information about corporate prosecutions.

That’s all well and good, but what about throwing bad corporate executives in prison? Garrett’s book doesn’t address what can be done to solve that problem.

This, however, is the issue Steinzor takes up in Why Not Jail? Yes, throw the bums in prison. But how? Steinzor has an activist and political background. She has just stepped down as president of the Center for Progressive Reform, which describes itself as a think tank of academics who write on public health and worker and consumer safety issues. The CPR serves as the main scholarly research group pushing for stronger regulation. Steinzor also worked on Capitol Hill.

Her book is a series of case studies, many familiar from press coverage, attached to an argument that prosecutors should be less timid about bringing criminal charges, especially when it comes to public health and environmental and workplace safety.

Steinzor begins by arguing that federal regulators are no longer up to the task of overseeing their industries.

Companies and the right decry the proliferation of rules and how bureaucracy stifles free enterprise, but it’s hard to discern these effects in what has come to be called the reality-based world.

For one, regulatory resources have been curtailed. Food and Drug Administration inspectors were only able to visit 6 percent of domestic food producers and 0.4 percent of foreign ones in 2011. The FDA estimates that to do what it views as necessary to protect the country’s food supply, it would need a quadrupling of its $1 billion food safety budget. Steinzor points out the shocking statistic that neither the Environmental Protection Agency nor

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The courts have made it harder to charge and convict securities manipulators of insider trading.

the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have had a significant budget increase since the mid-1980s, measured in constant dollars. This is not because their duties have lessened.

She contends, convincingly, that regulators have been hampered by political harassment and legal assaults by corporations. OSHA did not produce a single new rule during the first four years of the Obama administration.

Her answer is for prosecutors to fill the gap, to police the worst offenders. She calls for “an unprecedented expansion of the criminal law to cover the conduct that results from institutional failure when it becomes acute enough to cause death, injury, and severe environmental degradation.”

In one of her greater understatements, Steinzor terms this a “heavy lift.”

Steinzor would like prosecutors to charge corporate officers with crimes when their products hurt people or their facilities hurt their workers. The problem is that it’s difficult to make the law cooperate. To establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for a criminal charge, a prosecutor has to prove mens rea, meaning they must show a “guilty mind.” That can take a variety of forms, but generally it means showing that the executive both knew about the crime and that it was, in fact, criminal. Often, it’s no easy task to tie a mine collapse that killed workers to the CEO, even if the CEO is a reckless greed-head who has relished thumbing his nose at safety regulations for years.

A good portion of Steinzor’s book is taken up with a description of various statutes that aggressive and imaginative prosecutors could use to criminally charge executives. She argues that prosecutors could turn to various forms of negligence and recklessness.

But sometimes prosecutors have been aggressive in charging whitecollar malefactors. U.S. Attorneys made creative use of a 1989 statute, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act, both in the savings-and-loan prosecutions of the early 1990s and in the mortgage fraud charges against banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Those were civil charges, not criminal, and therefore came with a lower burden of proof.

In other areas, creativity and aggressiveness have burned federal prosecutors. Prosecutors transferred a charge generally used against corrupt public officials, charging Jeffrey Skilling, the head of Enron, with having deprived his shareholders of his “honest services.” The Supreme Court overturned that portion of the sentence, forcing the Department of Justice to drop other prosecutions of corporate officers that were using that charge. Most recently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected one of the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s aggressive insider-trading cases. The result is that the law surrounding insider trading has been thrown into chaos.

One likely result is that it will become significantly harder to charge people with insider trading in the future.

Steinzor acknowledges all of this by arguing that legislatures will have to expand prosecutorial powers and give them new or expanded statutes.

Is it really likely that Congress will grant new prosecutorial powers if they already resist giving regulators more authority and resources?

So thanks to these two books, we have solutions to the lack of serious enforcement of corporate crime: We need higher fines of corporations, more indictments, and stronger postsettlement enforcement and monitoring. We’ll need more aggressive and imaginative prosecutors who have been granted more tools and powers.

This is all supposed to happen amid a huge backlash against recent prosecutorial efforts, with corporations and conservatives decrying even the modest law enforcement the government has accomplished in recent years.

Oh, and then, perhaps through magic incantations, the courts will have to become less friendly to corporations and their highly paid, brilliant lawyers. OK, then! Problem solved. On to the Middle East and global warming.

All of this is, indeed, a heavy lift.

It has to start with a shift in public consciousness. For that, we can thank these two authors.

Jesse Eisinger is a senior reporter for ProPublica. He is working on a book about white-collar crime and punishment.

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Should Liberals Back Public Employee Unions?

The stakes in the new battle over unions have far-reaching implications. By Sam Rosenfeld and Jake Rosenfeld b

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arlier this year, Wisconsin Governor and GOP presidential aspirant Scott Walker answered a question about how he’d handle the Islamic State with the assurance that “if I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

Many people ridiculed Walker’s equation of Islamist warriors with American supporters of public employees’ collective-bargaining rights. But two days later he confirmed how deadly serious he is about fighting publicsector unions when he declared that “the most significant foreign-policy decision” of his lifetime was Ronald Reagan’s 1981 replacement of striking air traffic controllers.

Like Walker, many on the right believe public-sector unions are an insidious force that should be eliminated. In contrast, liberals have often sounded ambivalent and uneasy about unions representing public employees.

As organized labor’s share of the private sector continues to decline—down to 7 percent in 2014, compared with 36 percent of government workers—the public sector has become ever more central to the labor movement. And with political conflict in coming decades sure to focus on the size and scope of government, liberals need to grapple with questions about labor organization and the modern civil service.

Public-employee unions are also likely to become a subject of constitutional controversy in the next year, when the Supreme Court is expected to take up a case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which could deal the unions a significant setback.

Under existing precedents, unions can collect “fair share” fees for bargaining representation and contract administration from public employees who aren’t union members. The rationale is that non-members could otherwise free-ride on the backs of their fellow workers, who pay the costs of union

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representation. Led by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative majority on the Court may well strike down fair-share fees, creating an incentive for workers to abandon unions.

Two very different books—both by scholars on the center-right—provide the occasion to consider the role of public employees and their unions.

Government Against Itself, by political scientist Daniel DiSalvo of City College and the Manhattan Institute, is an earnestly written, sober, and unrelenting attack on government unionism. Bring Back the Bureaucrats by John DiIulio, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is a brisk, lively polemic that surprisingly calls, on conservative grounds, for an enormous increase in the federal civil service.

DiSalvo’s explicit intent is to win over liberals in the battle against what he sees as noxious public-employee unions as opposed to their worthy and defensible private-sector counterparts. DiSalvo’s own good faith need not be questioned for a liberal reader to chafe a bit at the three-card monte game such an argument conjures up.

Now that four decades of relentless assaults have succeeded in rendering the private-sector labor movement a shrunken husk of its former self, conservatives are free to extoll that movement in the effort to crush public-­employee unions.

At the heart of DiSalvo’s analysis is a contrast between “two worlds of work,” with “cutthroat competition and increasing inequality” defining the private sector and “middle-class security and greater egalitarianism” defining the public sector. Equity, DiSalvo argues, demands that such imbalances be redressed, and his answer is to make public-sector work more like work in the private sector. The same argument can just as easily be applied to workers in the last redoubts of private-sector unionism. Equity serves as

Government against Itself: Public Union Power and its Consequences

By Daniel DiSalvo

Oxford University Press

Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!)

Government

By John J. DiIulio Jr.

Templeton Press

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the rationale for a race to the bottom.

On behalf of this position, DiSalvo makes a series of arguments designed to appeal to liberals. The costs created by public-employee unions, he says, crowd out social spending, and the harms fall primarily on lower-income people, who depend more than other groups on public services. But he can make this case only by ignoring countervailing evidence.

Consider, first, the experience of other countries. Given the logic of DiSalvo’s argument, we should expect to find that wherever public-sector labor unions are strong, governance is poor and economies are weak.

DiSalvo points to France, that familiar punching bag, arguing that strong public-sector unions are a key cause of the “French disease” of economic sclerosis. Readers never hear, however, about sclerosis in Sweden, Finland, and Norway—all nations with levels of public-sector unionization more than twice as high as ours. Three-quarters of Canadian government employees are covered by collective-bargaining agreements. Do these nations’ publicsector unions hamstring their governments’ “ability to address social problems” and “reduce inequality”? The lower levels of poverty and inequality in all of these countries suggest otherwise. These comparisons are not dispositive evidence that public-sector unions always contribute to economic health and social well-being, but they show the limits of DiSalvo’s logic.

Besides looking abroad, DiSalvo might also have dug deeper into the variations in public-employee unionization among states here at home. He has no systematic data to prove that states with low public-sector unionization do better on such metrics as poverty, inequality, or educational attainment. In fact, even a cursory glance at those states suggests the opposite. Mississippi has a public-sector unionization rate of just 3 percent, but it also has the highest poverty rate in the nation and ranks at or near the bottom on most measures of education. Other states with similarly weak public-sector unions include Arkansas and South Carolina, not exactly models for fighting poverty and inequality.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 87

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DiSalvo maintains that unionism in the public sector involves “serious trade-offs” with a commitment to an “active government that shields citizens from the ravages of the market and supports society’s least fortunate.”

Yet public employment itself—and unionized government employment in particular—“shields citizens from the ravages of the market.” The wages and benefits of bottom-rung occupations in the public sector are more generous than in the private sector. Inequality is lower among workers in the public sector. Recent research by the sociologist David Brady and his colleagues has found that the higher a state’s unionization rate and its level of public-­sector employment, the lower is its rate of household poverty.

Public-employee unions also benefit other workers outside government.

With private-sector unions fighting for their lives, it increasingly falls to the comparatively strong public-sector unions to advance workers’ interests in the public arena. Many union locals organize both public- and private-sector workers and use the dues from the former to organize the latter. Increasingly, the labor movement is devoting efforts to improve living standards for nonunion workers too, winning battles to raise the minimum wage and to push low-wage employers such as Walmart to boost pay. Public-sector unions contribute to these broader gains.

The roots of these wider commitments lie in the history of publicemployee unions. DiSalvo provides a useful but incomplete account of the “unseen rights revolution” that brought millions of government workers into the labor movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. What he misses is the historical connection between public-employee organizing and the civil rights movement. Union organizing drew energy from civil rights activism, and the unions’ growth contributed to the emergence of a black middle class of civil servants in increasingly African American–dominated cities.

It’s a testament to the hazy place of public-sector labor in the popular historical imagination that while many people know that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, relatively few recall or ever knew

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what he was doing there: supporting a strike of black sanitation workers from Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. King and the Memphis strike garner only one passing mention in DiSalvo’s book.

The rise of public-employee unions also transformed the labor movement itself, strengthening its left-liberal side against the hawkish, culturally traditionalist “hard-hat” wing. Public- and service-sector unions counted higher percentages of female and minority members than the old-guard unions did, and they brought the labor movement closer to civil rights, feminist, and countercultural groups. Combining economic and cultural liberalism, the new labor movement has sought to defend advances on both of those fronts.

While DiSalvo is aware of these developments, he tends to view them as evidence merely of government unions’ full integration into a partisan patronage machine. But one person’s cynical interest-group politics is another person’s coalition for the common good. A conservative like DiSalvo can’t be expected to support public-sector unions’ contribution to broader liberal political causes. Liberals should feel differently.

In the world DiSalvo imagines,

public-sector unions have virtually unchecked and uncontested power and enjoy incomparable legal protections and insulation from market pressures. In low-turnout elections for municipal and state offices and off-year initiatives and referenda, the unions supposedly run the show merely by dint of showing up. And they use those advantages to “elect their own bosses”—politicians who will do their bidding by killing reforms they oppose and lavishing higher pensions, health care, and salaries on their members.

To view public unions as an unstoppable juggernaut, however, is to blind oneself to central political realities.

Ever since the 1970s, anti-tax sentiment has limited the growth of public-employee wages and has led to persistent failures to fund health and pension benefits adequately. Union demands have no doubt contributed to these problems, but politicians

While many know that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, relatively few recall or ever knew what he was doing there.

have often asked public employees to accept promises of higher retirement benefits instead of immediate wage increases. DiSalvo implicitly takes the limits set by anti-tax politics and chronic austerity as givens; in his eyes, the fault lies entirely with workers for asking too much.

DiSalvo also criticizes unions for opposing the privatization of public services, which he believes increases efficiency. In support of that view, he relies on the academic research that supported the privatization wave of the 1980s and 1990s. But scholars of public administration have since told a less rosy story of government-bycontract, emphasizing diminished accountability, vulnerability to waste and abuse, and corruption.

A useful synthesis of this newer scholarship can be found in DiIulio’s book. Best known for his work on crime and prisons and for his brief tenure as head of faith-based services in the White House of George W. Bush, DiIulio has never been a conventional conservative. (In 1990, he published a critique of prison privatization in The American Prospect.) Instead of endorsing the usual conservative line on government, Bring Back the Bureaucrats highlights the dangers of contracting out as part of a broader argument about the rise of what he terms “leviathan by proxy.” Over the last halfcentury, annual federal spending in constant dollars quintupled while the number of full-time federal civil service workers increased hardly at all.

What explains the gap? The federal government has discharged its evergrowing responsibilities indirectly, through grants-in-aid to states and localities, contract work with for-profit firms, and grants and fees passed on to a vast national nonprofit sector.

And what accounts for this epochal shift toward proxy governance? DiIulio points to a core, long-studied contradiction in American public opinion, famously captured in a 1967 study by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril that found Americans to be “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans hate “big government” in the abstract but like most of the programs the government carries out. Likewise, they hate taxes but hate

j o h n h a r t / w i s c o n s i n s tat e j o u r n a l / a p i m a g e s

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spending cuts, too. The response of elected officials to these contradictory pressures has been to provide systematically inadequate levels of revenue necessary for federal policies and to carry out ever more of those policies through channels that don’t add to the visible ranks of the dreaded bureaucracy. The result, DiIulio argues, is “a debt-financed, proxy-administered, superficially antistatist form of big government.” Only in America.

DiIulio highlights the inadequacies and opacity of proxy government to make a counterintuitively conservative argument for adding a million new full-time civil servants to the federal ranks. The state’s invisibility, he argues, has only encouraged its expansion. He thinks that boosting the numbers and capacity of the visible, accountable government workforce, when combined with such reforms as award caps to federal contractors and a comprehensive restructuring of statefederal responsibilities over jointly financed programs, would actually limit the growth of government overall.

Whatever the plausibility or desirability of that prediction, DiIulio’s analysis meshes well with a growing and

Progressives tend to support public-sector unions’ contribution to broader liberal causes.

pan-ideological scholarly literature on the modern American state that emphasizes its “hidden,” “delegated,” “submerged,” “extended,” and “divided” qualities. Making government and its employees at once more visible and accountable is a reform agenda implicit in much of this work.

But what kind of civil service would we want for this more visible American state? DiIulio’s focus is on federal workers, while DiSalvo’s focus is on state and local government. Unions hardly come up in DiIulio’s analysis.

But the questions his book raises— about state capacity, the political forces that shape it, and the day-to-day administration of government tasks— provide useful context for evaluating DiSalvo’s arguments. While DiSalvo acknowledges the historical connection between organizing efforts and the professionalization of government work, he sees the ongoing justification for public-sector unions as tied to a fundamentally bogus vision of a “dog-eat-dog world where workers need protection from managers.”

The alternative vision he advocates is one in which civil servants work to serve the public good with “little risk

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of exploitation.” But anti-tax and proprivatization sentiments have been central to the decades-long failure to staff the civil service adequately and treat it professionally, and DiSalvo shows little inclination to combat such forces while he internalizes their assumptions.

A visible, accountable state run by a strong and professional civil service is a worthy goal, and one compatible with collective-bargaining rights. To take this view is not to endorse every policy stance and negotiating posture taken by public-sector unions, nor to deny that tension and sometimes conflict between government unions and public officials are both inevitable and necessary. But liberals ought to recognize the good that public-employee unions do and resist the political vision of those who seek to destroy them.

Sam Rosenfeld, a former web editor for the Prospect, is visiting assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, beginning in September.

Jake Rosenfeld is associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the author of What Unions No Longer Do.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 89

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The French Disconnection Can the ideal of a secular Republic accommodate the new cultural pluralism? By ARthur Goldhammer b

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rench politics can be bewildering to outsiders. The state seems all-powerful. The government consumes a larger share of national income than in most other countries, and many large corporations are partly state-owned. Yet as powerful as the French state is, it is periodically brought to its knees by popular protest: In 1995, demonstrators successfully resisted pension reform, and in 2006, young marchers thwarted a minor innovation in the labor code, while voters refused to approve a revision of the European constitutional treaty backed by both major parties. The power of the legislature to check the will of the executive is much weaker in France than in the United States, yet the last three French presidencies—one on the left, two on the right—have failed to produce any major reforms despite a widespread sentiment that change is urgently needed. How can we explain the paradox of a strong state that is unable to enact necessary reforms?

In A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France, Emile Chabal, currently a chancellor’s fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh, proposes that we look beyond the policy arena to the political culture. What he sees there is an opposition between two traditions, one “republican” and statist in orientation, the other “liberal” and focused on civil society. (American readers may be amused, not to say confused, by the association of “republican” with strong central government and “liberal” with society and the market.) Republicans, in Chabal’s telling, insist that citizens must abandon all “particularistic” allegiances (pertaining to religion, ethnicity, and economic interest) when they enter the “universalistic” public arena. For republicans, the state shapes culture and society, especially through the public schools. By contrast, liberals accord primacy to civil society in

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shaping the state. Republicanism, as we will see, is therefore hostile to multiculturalism, whereas liberalism tolerates and even encourages it.

The republican-liberal opposition came into being between 1975 and 1985 in response to three convergent changes: in the economy, the end of Les Trente Glorieuses (the “thirty glorious years” of rapid economic growth that followed the end of World War II); in politics, the “implosion of Gaullism” (which epitomized the tradition of the strong state) and the inability of the left-wing government elected in 1981 to effect radical economic change; and in intellectual life, the abrupt disappearance of once-pervasive neo-Marxist influences. “The grand ideologies which had governed post-war French politics—Gaullism, socialism, and communism—began to fade,” Chabal writes, and what emerged to fill the vacuum was a “neorepublican consensus.”

But exactly how extensive and how republican was this alleged consensus? Much of the book is taken up with showing how elements of the centerleft and radical left coalesced around a certain idea of republicanism after 1968. Former radicals such as Régis Debray, who left France to join Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, and Alain Finkielkraut, who had been an extreme-left militant in the 1960s, ultimately found common ground with older centrists such as the historian Pierre Nora. Differences nevertheless remained.

“The republic,” the statesman Adolphe Thiers once said, “is the regime that divides us the least”—ironically, since Thiers, the scourge of the Paris Commune and the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of Communards who were summarily executed at the Mur des Fédérés in 1871, was one of the most divisive figures in French history, and “republic” was once synonymous with “revolution.”

By the late 1870s, however, the French

A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France

by Emile Chabal

Cambridge University Press

ship of state, launched on the hazardous seas of revolutionary political upheaval in 1789, finally “came into port”—to borrow an image from historian François Furet. The founding of the Third Republic, with Thiers as its first president, marked the point at which nearly everyone in France accepted the idea that a return to monarchy was out of the question and the country would henceforth be governed by a parliamentary democracy.

It would take another 30 years for the French to agree on the separation of church and state and the secularization of public education.

These three principles—parliamentary democracy based on universal male suffrage, strict separation of church and state, and the use of the public schools to propagate “universalistic” Enlightenment values— constituted the original “republican consensus.” What Chabal calls the “neo-republican consensus” is not really a consensus at all but a partisan claim that these century-old principles can provide a blueprint for resolving today’s social conflicts over economics, education, and religion.

The original republican consensus left unresolved the relation of state to market. Hence from the 1880s to the 1980s, the political contest between left and right turned essentially on the extent to which the state should attempt to regulate or dominate private capital. As Chabal sees it, the abortive revolution of May ’68 marked the beginning of the end for leftist hopes that capitalism could be reined in by an assertive state. The election of a Socialist government in 1981 only confirmed the need to recognize explicitly, as Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin would later say, that “the state cannot do everything” and must therefore accept a compromise with private capital. Intellectuals in the 1980s thus imagined a “centrist republic” in which radical economic transformation was no longer a possibility.

The historian Pierre Nora edited a seven-volume magnum opus entitled Les Lieux de Mémoire, which banished revolutionary dreams to the “realm of memory.” Out of this meditation on France’s contentious past came what Chabal portrays as a neo-republican

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model for the country’s future: The neo-republican state would wield reduced power in the economic sphere but retain its cultural supremacy.

For former leftists such as Finkielkraut and Debray, this neorepublican model held an undeniable attraction. They nevertheless retained a critical distance. Although prepared, along with their more centrist colleagues, to enter into an entente cordiale with capitalism, these erstwhile radicals feared an erosion of the cultural basis of the state. Debray, for instance, attacked the “cultural revolution” symbolized by the vast street demonstrations of May ’68 as the precursor to a soul-sapping “hedonistic … consumerist society.” Finkielkraut stressed the importance of the republican school even more than the centrists did. For him, the school was the “sanctuary” where “secularism, positivism, and progress” could be defended against the “perils of post-68 modernity” and corrosive individualism. The universalistic concept of French citizenship depended, in Finkielkraut’s view, on a cultural consensus around Enlightenment values—a consensus threatened by a new and worrisome multiculturalism. The republican school was not only the fortress of French culture and therefore of the very idea of the nation, but also the champion of a value that has come to occupy an increasingly central place in neo-republican discourse, namely, laïcité, which approximately means secularism.

Laïcité is not an easy concept to translate outside the French context.

The strict separation of church and state that laïcité entails was originally defined by a 1905 law that marked an enduring truce in the Hundred Years’ War between the Catholic Church and the first three French republics. The law banished religious teaching orders from the public schools and instituted moral instruction based on strictly secular principles. But the arrival in France of millions of non-Christian immigrants in the postcolonial era reopened the conflict between the state and religion in unexpected ways, with a new adversary—Islam—replacing Catholicism as the focal point of republican anxieties.

The latent tension between Islam

and neo-republicanism erupted in a 1989 controversy over the wearing of headscarves in the public schools.

Neo-republican guardians of the “school as sanctuary” were quick to insist that the 1905 law excluded the expression of student religious affiliations within the walls of the temple of republican culture. In fact, the law insisted only on the neutrality of the state, not on suppressing citizen expression. But this and numerous similar controversies transformed neo-republicanism into a fighting faith. Any illusion of consensus soon disappeared. Indeed, the promotion of laïcité to the rank of central republican value allowed the extreme-right Front National, once considered a party outside the republican orbit, to recast its opposition to immigration as a defense of republican values, on the grounds that Islam is doctrinally opposed to the exclusion of religion from the public sphere and therefore inherently “un-republican.”

The mobilization of neo-republican ideology against minority religious and cultural communities inspired a “liberal” response. In 2002, the French historian of ideas Daniel Lindenberg launched an attack on the neo-republicans, calling them “neo-reactionaries.”

For Lindenberg, if plural subcultures existed in civil society, it was wrong to attempt to suppress them in the schools by enforcing conformity to a single “republican” culture. The republican state would have to adapt to the actually existing pluralistic society it governed rather than vice versa.

Rather than oppose neo-republicanism and liberalism as Chabal does, however, it might be more accurate to describe the liberals as dissidents within the neo-republican camp. Both sides agree, for example, that there are limits to state intervention in markets. Although the liberal tradition in France is usually described as weak, Chabal overstates its weakness when he says that it “appeared irremediably lost in a French political landscape already overpopulated with grand ideologies.” Liberals such as Thierry de Montbrial promoted the teaching of

The National Front has cast its

opposition to

immigration as a core republican value.

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market-friendly neoclassical economics in key republican institutions such as the École Polytechnique. The sharp distinction between neo-republican and liberal discourse also breaks down when we look at where adherents of each camp published their ideas. For example, the journal Le Débat, which Chabal labels “liberal,” was founded by the same Pierre Nora who played a crucial role in the neorepublican revival.

Indeed, as Chabal disarmingly concedes, “the republican and liberal revivals had common intellectual roots.” For example, Pierre Rosanvallon, one of the authors of “the centrist republic” thesis, could equally well be classified as “liberal.” Now a professor at the Collège de France, he began his career as a trade-union strategist, which “helps to explain his interest in … pragmatic reform” by way of civil society institutions. Once an advocate of worker self-management, he has developed a sophisticated critique of the welfare state, emphasizing the need for “intermediary bodies” to bridge the gap between state and citizen and allow for greater adaptability to the variety of individual needs. He has also proposed reforms intended to bring competing ideas and viewpoints within the institutions of the state—a “liberalization” of the Republic itself.

Chabal’s survey of contemporary French political culture is patient and heroically comprehensive. He uncovers the crisscrossing genealogies that underlie the sometimes vociferous surface polemics. In a compendium like this, extreme compression is mandatory, along with a certain schematization that can distort some of the more distinctive voices in the choir. Students of French political thought will nevertheless remain in Chabal’s debt for this careful and thorough work of reconstruction and analysis.

Arthur Goldhammer is a writer, translator, and senior affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard. He has translated more than 125 books from French and writes widely on French politics and culture.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 91

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The Sometime Liberal

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welve years after his death, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is not remembered as an avid liberal.

He renounced the prescriptions of the Great Society, scorned the New Left, blamed the condition of African Americans on family disintegration and, at the United Nations, belittled Third World demands for power and pride. He was an intellectual colleague of many of the founding neoconservatives and when he wrote that government cannot “mandate goodness,” or that “liberals must divest themselves of the notion that the nation … can be run from agencies in Washington,” he sounded more like an editorialist in The Wall Street Journal than a champion of the poor.

And yet, Moynihan was one of the last major politicians in American life who was seriously and persistently devoted to eradicating poverty. Even in the Obama years, as the cry of “inequality” has risen to a first-tier issue, antipoverty has remained, mostly, a horse without a jockey. Moynihan, in his time, proposed what few Democrats today would deign to suggest: transferring government money—lots of money—to people who were poor. He spoke, unblushingly, words that have since been all but banished from the political lexicon—“poverty,” “poor,” and “redistribution.” He insisted that America needed a commitment to guarantee a minimum income for all, especially for its children, and when Bill Clinton eviscerated such commitments in his welfare reform, Moynihan doggedly opposed Clinton.

It is the considerable accomplishment of Greg Weiner, a political scientist at Assumption College, to place these conflicting Moynihans under, if you will, the same hat.

American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a sharply etched précis, dedicated both to reminding us of the range of the late senator’s intellectual contributions and to reconciling

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the seemingly contrary strains in Moynihan’s politics.

American Burke is not a biography—it is an extended essay, eloquent as its subject. This is no mean feat: Moynihan authored or edited 19 books and was a wicked phrasemaker; “defining deviancy down” was his stinging appellation for society’s seeming acceptance of once-intolerable levels of anti-social behavior, including violent crime.

An intellectual in public service, Moynihan wielded more influence than his official resume implied. He was a sometime professor, a prolific contributor to scholarly journals, aide to New York Governor Averell Harriman, assistant secretary of labor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, White House counselor to Nixon, ambassador to India and to the United Nations, card-carrying Democrat, and four-time U.S. senator from New York.

It was 50 years ago that Moynihan asked his staff at the Labor Department to “explore the relationship between unemployment and the state of the African American family.”

Moynihan made a shocking discovery.

Previously, welfare cases had moved in roughly predictable relationship to the jobless rate. Now, the two had become unhinged. In black homes, the breakdown of nuclear families was adding to the welfare rolls, regardless of the usual economic indicators.

Moynihan’s report—“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”—triggered an upheaval, as Weiner relates, both in the study of black society and in Moynihan’s uneasy relationship with liberals.

Mincing no words, his report blamed the divergence between black and white success on a “tangle of [urban] pathology.” However rooted they were in the legacy of slavery and segregation, by the mid-1960s these patterns of family breakdown and welfare dependence had become rooted in the black subculture itself, Moynihan

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declared. Those who saw lingering racism, tolerated and even enforced by the state, faulted Moynihan for blaming the victim. From the vantage of a half-century later, we can appreciate that Moynihan gave public voice to a syndrome that had been verboten for liberals to acknowledge.

An intellectual in public service, Pat Moynihan defied categorization. By Roger Lowenstein b

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American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

by Greg Weiner

University Press of Kansas

As for the implications of his report, Moynihan’s policy recommendations varied. He was admittedly inconsistent and difficult to categorize, but the one label he clung to, Weiner points out, was “liberal.”

However, he was a student of government first and a tactician only second.

Programs, therefore, had to flow from evidence. He was committed to the proposition that government should ameliorate poverty and distress, but also interested in when, and how, it could best work. His expectations for government were both bold and modest; his instincts ran toward expansive but simple programs less likely to become ensnared in bureaucratic red tape and the complexities of urban society. Government was most competent, he concluded, at spending money (a simple task). Social Security, a vehicle for redistribution, was surely the most successful federal program in history. Conversely, LBJ’s Great Society attempted, in part, to transform the underclass via community action agencies; it utterly failed.

Moynihan’s paradigm, an oversimplification, was New Deal = redistribution (simple and good); Great Society = social engineering (utopian and bad). Even when he shocked his liberal friends at Harvard (surely, this delighted him) by going to work for Nixon, Moynihan remained a New Dealer, proposing, and nearly getting enacted, a guaranteed income plan that was a mechanism for redistribution. His hope, Weiner says, was that “an income strategy would help to stabilize families and mitigate” social pathologies. It was also a sign of Moynihan’s modesty. Eschewing the overreach of the Great Society, he reckoned that “material relief” would, at least in the immediate sense, remedy “material privation.” Shoring up the family remained the goal, but one he never solved.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 93

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As Weiner observes, Moynihan entered the Kennedy administration a political idealist; working for Johnson, “something happened.” It was not just that Great Society programs were too intricate; they were more ambitious and more intrusive. The federal presence on the street corner was, he felt, misplaced. Moynihan—here his Catholicism loomed large—was a great proponent of “subsidiarity” of the smaller, private subgroupings—family, church, club, or trade union—that mediate between the individual and government. Subsidiary groups need air to breathe; when LBJ sent cadres of activists to the cities, Moynihan feared that private organizations would be blotted out. What he feared was the whiff of statism. Of course, subsidiary organizations were notably weak in the inner-city neighborhoods in question. Paradoxically, those federal community action dollars underwrote an expansion of local institutions in poor neighborhoods. Some of these became incubators of the first generation of black mayors. (Among the second generation of leaders was a community activist named Barack Obama.) And some of the money was plainly wasted. But the point that Weiner fails to acknowledge is that, often, the Great Society encouraged subsidiarity.

The author employs, as a distant mirror for his subject, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke (hence the book’s title). Moynihan fondly cited Burke’s admonition “to be attached to the subdivisions, to love the little platoon.” No better pitch for subsidiarity exists. Both men detested absolutists (Burke, the Jacobins; Moynihan, Students for a Democratic Society). Each despised the extremism that arises from conformity. Cognizant of human limitations and mistrustful of certitude, Moynihan insisted that political achievement “can never be more than relatively good”; Burke asserted, as if prefiguring, “nothing universal can be rationally affirmed.”

But does the likeness demonstrate that Moynihan was, as Weiner asserts, a Burkean liberal—or does it prove that the senator, however liberal he may have been at various stages in his career, was a temperamental conservative? The author affirms that

As a seeker of common ground, where would a Pat Moynihan find it in today’s polarized politics?

Burke believed in gradual evolution that built upon the past. He wanted to reform, Weiner says, but only as he was “preserving.” And this tendency was fully shared by Moynihan; each man, Weiner notes, resisted the “sudden, jolting, dramatic change.” It is well to say that Moynihan loved the New Deal, but to many adults in the 1930s the New Deal also looked both “sudden” and “jolting.” We cannot know if Moynihan, then barely out of diapers, would have supported the New Deal (my guess is he would have), but it feels a bit too easy to say that Moynihan loved the liberal prescriptions only of an era that was past.

In keeping with his Burkean analogy, Weiner offers Moynihan as a seeker of common ground and asks: Could Moynihan make a difference in the fractured politics of today? “We need a Moynihan in reserve, [especially] in the Senate,” he says in robust assertion of his theme. “American politics would be richer were this shared ground seeded and cultivated.”

Weiner does not say whom Moynihan might share this “ground” with.

Marco Rubio? Ted Cruz? When he quotes the senator’s comment, from the late 1960s, that “the great strength of political conservatives … is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex,” he seems to be speaking of philosophical conservatives of the sort that have wholly disappeared from the modern Republican Party. It is doubtful that Moynihan would find his cherished appreciation for complexity, or for nuance, in the Tea Party. Nor would he find it in the politically correct rhetoric of the left. Moynihan’s refusal to be pigeonholed, or consistently be on anyone’s side, gave rise to the charge that he was a chameleon. Weiner denies that. Perhaps “contrarian” is closer to the mark.

Weiner also rejects, as did Moynihan himself, the scarlet letter of neoconservative. The record supports them. In his U.N. stint, Moynihan cast off America’s post-Vietnam mood of defeatism, but he was never expansionist. He believed in defending American values, but not in military adventurism. He believed, in fact, in international law, a notion wholly foreign

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to the neoconservatives who have hijacked the American right. One of his signal brilliancies, the result of his study of ethnic tribalism, was to predict the breakup of the Soviet Union a decade before it occurred. The intelligence services had failed to do so, he later concluded, because they were too secretive, too often merely recycling their own private communications. He thus proposed that the CIA be disbanded and its functions transferred to the State Department, not exactly an idea propounded by Condoleezza Rice.

Moynihan also rejected an iconic claim of neoconservatives on domestic policy. Though he was consumed with the problem of the black family, he did not blame its woes on Great Society liberalism. He could refute this because, unlike most politicians, he had done his own research and

knew that indicators such as out-ofwedlock births were rising in advance of the Johnson period. It was typical of Moynihan to defend the Great Society against unwarranted attacks even while he disdained its overall approach. This was pragmatism of a high order.

I wish Weiner had put slightly more distance between himself and his subject. When he says, for example, that Moynihan regretted his vote against the Gulf War, it would be nice to hear whether Weiner also finds it at fault.

Also, a little biographical context would have fleshed out the (rich) intellectual portrait. It is tantalizingly too little to be told that Moynihan’s “passion” for fighting poverty was influenced by “his own experience of childhood poverty.” How poor was he, and with what material deprivation?

Moynihan annoyed his liberal friends at Harvard when he went to work for Richard Nixon.

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No matter. Weiner has culled and explicated consistent themes from Moynihan’s long career of cautious reformism, at once unorthodox even as it was—mostly—respectful of liberal traditions. Weiner concludes that we miss him—specifically, his “appeal to both sides … [his] capacity to draw certain strains of the contemporary Right and Left together.” Today, this would be a challenge. Edmund Burke himself, I submit, could not draw the contemporary right and left together. If we miss Pat—and we do—it’s because he courageously and so often justifiably was willing to tell each side when, and how, they were wrong.

Roger Lowenstein’s next book, America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve, will be published

by The Penguin Press in October.

Summer 2015 The American Prospect 95

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An Embarrassment of Riches

by Robert Kuttner

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s we approach 2016, the Republican Party has the biggest field of presidential contenders ever.

This may be due to a bumper crop of potential leaders, but the more plausible explanation is money.

Supreme Court decisions have liberated business moguls to invest in politicians, much as they might invest in racehorses, yacht competitions, sports franchises, and, more recently, charter schools. Given the right patron, a remotely plausible politician can become a contender. Scott Walker, as a swing-state governor who faced down public-employee unions, might well have been a strong candidate in any case, but support from the Koch brothers didn’t hurt. And so on down the line, to Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, et al.—15 at last count, and growing.

In a sense, this is the reductio ad absurdum of money as democracy. Yet it is something more. The Tea Party phenomenon represents a perverse kind of populism.

Bush III is nobody’s idea of a liberal, but the GOP base resents all those establishment connections.

Hence, the free-for-all.

You almost have to admire the sheer narcissism and bravado of third- and fourth-tier Republican candidates. This is uncharacteristic of the GOP. Historically, Democrats display more willingness to field and even nominate long shots.

There is no recent Republican who

vaulted from far back in the field, as Jimmy Carter did in 1976, or even from the middle of the pack, like Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992. On the Republican side, leading candidates Mitt Romney, both Presidents Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Ronald Reagan captured nomination pretty much as expected.

But the liberation of finance has created a bizarre pluralism of plutocrats. Any number can play; all you need is the money. As Steve Martin memorably put it in his epic bit about how to make a million dollars and not pay any taxes, “First, get a million dollars.”

Could this backfire? The trend represents a further weakening of the institutional Republican Party at the expense of freelance political investors. Karl Rove, the modern emblem of this shift, has been overtaken by whomever the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and lesser-known billionaires fancy.

It’s tempting to think that all this will be good for Democrats, in two reinforcing respects.

First, until about a decade ago, the Republican National Committee generally had a better technical operation than the Democrats.

On the Democratic side, campaign technology—the donor lists, the micro-targeting techniques, and the get-out-the-vote software paid for, in part, by the party—has been treated as the property of the candidate or his operatives, leaving the institutional party with the crumbs. Howard Dean, as party

chair after 2004, worked valiantly to build a 50-state Democratic Party with more effective institutional presence. Barack Obama benefited from Dean’s handiwork.

Among both Republicans and Democrats, the emergent politics of donors and super PACs have reinforced the effect of candidate-centered politics in weak-

The liberation of political finance has created a counterfeit pluralism of plutocrats. ening the institutional parties.

If the Koch brothers and other dark-money Republican billionaires operate as free spirits at the expense of the RNC, it might help level the playing field.

Another possible silver lining for Democrats is a donor-driven demolition derby on the Republican side—an enervating contest in which the lead shifts and the winner is not known until well into primary season, leaving a residue of disunity and bad feeling, and consuming vast amounts of money.

A very large field also smokes out awkward schisms in the GOP. In the wake of the ghastly massacre of nine black parishioners at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, Republicans were ducking for cover on the

subject of guns in church and the Confederate battle flag.

At best, the farce of money driving the fragmentation of the Republican field could provoke a citizen backlash and a serious drive for reform, as it did in the Progressive Era and again after Watergate.

But don’t count on any of these outcomes. The Supreme Court shows no sign of remorse. The liberation of money presents a collective action problem for the system. As long as the music is playing and the courts concur, candidates and donors alike get up and dance.

Only citizens are excluded.

The money-drenched Republican primary process should play to the strength of Democrats as the party of regular people.

Unlike the fragmented GOP, the Democratic field has unified early behind Hillary Clinton. Yet there is pent-up frustration on the part of many Democrats, both about some of Clinton’s policy positions and about her own reliance on big money, some of it with the appearance of conflicts of interest. If Democrats might benefit from a candidate who embodies the revulsion against money dominating politics, Clinton is less than ideal.

At best, she will have to do an awkward straddle between the desires of her donors and the mood of the Democratic base. One way out: A President Clinton might appoint Supreme Court justices who would reconsider money-as-speech decisions. For now, the embarrassment of riches is bipartisan.

volume 26, number 3. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1333 H Street NW, Suite 300 East Tower, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2015 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. printed in the u.s.a.

96 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2015

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Cashing in on Students’ Dreams

Photo by Michael Campbell

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

here’s a promise we make to the next generation: Graduate from college and you can get ahead. Indeed, recent studies show that college graduates earn $1 million more than high school graduates over their lifetimes.

Yet, as we make this promise, public higher education institutions across the country are facing a troubling trend of disinvestment. Even with poorly treated adjuncts and other nontenure-track contingent faculty doing the lion’s share of teaching at many colleges, tuition costs keep rising. And even with current federal and state student loans and grants, students have been saddled with crippling debt.

There’s another side of higher education: for-profit colleges. These are defined by putting profit before the public good, earnings over education, shareholders above students. At these schools—such as Corinthian Colleges Inc., which filed for bankruptcy last month, and ITT Tech, which is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for alleged fraud—students are treated as products, faculty are afraid to tell accreditors the truth about where they work, and taxpayers foot the bill for aggressive marketing schemes that prey on first-generation college students, veterans and students of color.

Funded largely by taxpayers, for-profit colleges get close to 90 percent of their funding from federal aid—that’s more than $30 billion annually. The industry feeds on our noble national goal to ensure higher education is a ladder of opportunity for all who want to climb. However, instead of offering an affordable path to a better tomorrow, they leave students with an uncertain future. Seventy-two percent of these for-profit schools produce graduates who earn less, on average, than high school dropouts.

Currently, for-profit schools enroll just 9 percent of all postsecondary students but account for nearly half of all student loan defaults. They allocate about 23 percent of their revenue to recruiting and marketing, 19 percent to profit, and just 17 percent to academic instruction. Compare that with institutions where academics are the priority, such as community colleges, which spend 80 percent or more on instruction.

How did we get to this place where promises are broken, students are held back and for-profits are using our money to fund their schemes?

The simple answer is that the for-profit college industry—through its trade association, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, and other lobbyists—has enormous sway in Washington. It’s used massive public relations campaigns and campaign contributions to keep politicians from both sides of the aisle from policing its institutions.

Still, some of us are fighting back. In Congress, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) led the charge with a groundbreaking congressional investigation in 2012. Right now, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) is pushing for passage of the Protections and Regulations for Our Students (PRO Students) Act, which aims to protect students from deceptive and fraudulent practices in the for-profit college sector. And as the nation’s largest union of higher education faculty and staff, the American Federation of Teachers has joined with courageous students and community organizations to demand justice.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education has been sitting on the sidelines. For instance, even though Corinthian Colleges faces a $30 million fine for falsified job placement rates and a “blatant disregard” for the federal student loan program, the federal government has done little to help the 16,000 students left high and dry.

In fact, the corporation is asking for a taxpayer bailout of its $143.1 million in debts.

The AFT and more than 9,000 AFT activists sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan demanding that he use his authority to discharge the loans of Corinthian’s students and advocate for stricter regulations to prevent other institutions from engaging in this abuse. In addition,

12 state attorneys general joined the call for “meaningful debt relief to all students who were the victims of Corinthian’s fraud,” and told the Department of Education to remove other for-profits under federal or state investigation from its list of transfer options for these students.

Secretary Duncan did respond by offering limited relief, but we need to keep the pressure on, because there are thousands of students who still await the appointment of a “special master” to consider their repayment claims.

Students like Michael Adorno-Miranda, whom I met inMay. Michael enrolled at Corinthian’s Everest College, where admissions personnel assured him that he would be prepared for a successful career in information technology. But instead of the high-quality education he was promised, he received worthless training in obsolete technology and $37,000 in debt. What he thought would launch him toward life as an independent adult “turned out to be a nightmare.”

We can’t be a country that tells Michael and millions of others like him that college is really important but then allows predatory institutions to stick them with crippling debt, worthless degrees and an uncertain future. Students deserve better, and now is the time to act.

The for-profit college industry feeds on our noble national goal to ensure higher education is a ladder of opportunity for all who want to climb.

Photo by Pamela Wolfe

Rep. Takano and Weingarten at a recent press conference on Capitol Hill.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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