a problem with a hero: the antisemitism of george orwell

I've written many times about my views on the practice of shunning certain art or entertainment based on the morals or habits of the creator. In short, I don't do it. I want to experience all the creativity the world has to offer. I only wish I could experience more of it. I don't filter my likes and dislikes through a screen of moral judgement.

Of course there are actions so heinous that knowledge of them could spoil any potential enjoyment, especially if the art isn't all that interesting in the first place. I'm not interested in oil paintings by Herr Hitler. I seldom enjoy stand-up comedy, so if a comedian's work is racist or sexist, it's incredibly easy for me to avoid it. But how Picasso or Woody Allen treated the women in their lives is irrelevant to me. Art and artist are not the same thing.

Imagine how this attitude was put to the test when I discovered that one of my writing heroes was antisemitic!

George Orwell and antisemitism

One of my life goals is to read everything published by my top three writing heroes: Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell. Steinbeck: done. Dickens: three or four novels to go. Orwell is the easiest, since he died young, and didn't produce 1,000-page tomes.

Recently I decided to move this project forward a bit. In Powell's, I found the three Orwells I had left to read: Down and Out in Paris and London, Coming Up For Air, and A Clergyman's Daughter. I started with Down and Out, the literary and political godparent of Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant exposé of labour and poverty, Nickel and Dimed.

Imagine my surprise in finding the book laden with antisemitism! Yikes! Hideous caricatures, disgusting descriptions, all completely gratuitous. DAOIPAL was published in 1933. In those times, it was very common to identify people by their ethnicity. "A little Hindu man was...," "the Pole was...". Today, that reads as lazy and shallow, but those types of references in DAOIPAL are not especially offensive. Except for Jews. And wow, is it ever a big exception. 

As far as I know, this is found only in DAOIPAL, Orwell's first book, written when he was 30. Later in life, he had many close friends who were Jewish, he worked with Jewish editors and publishers, and more importantly, pressed the British government to give refuge to all Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. He was vocally opposed to the Third Reich's antisemitic policies, long before revelations of the death camps. So that's all good.

However, I've read that Orwell's letters -- which I plan to read -- are also laced with his private antisemitism. Ian Bloom, writing in The Jewish Chronicle considers "The Ever-Present Antisemitism of George Orwell":

Admirers of Orwell (among whom I count myself) have long been troubled by the strain of casual and perhaps not-so-casual antisemitism found in his published work, diary entries and private letters, especially in the 1930s. The almost schizophrenic contrast between his authorial hostility to these anonymous, nameless “Jews”, identified only by their religion, and his long friendships with individual Jewish publishers (Victor Gollancz and Fred Warburg) and writers (Arthur Koestler, T.R. (Tosco) Fyvel, Julian Symons, Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson and others) remains puzzling.

Bloom offers some cultural and literary perspective, reminding readers that antisemitism was rampant in British culture and common among its writers.

Literary antisemitism was the norm in England until relatively recently. If they mention Jews at all, most major 19th-century English novelists described unattractive stereotypes. Perhaps George Eliot is the shining exception, as is EM Forster in the next century. But Graham Greene, JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell are all “guilty”, while HG Wells, Saki, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are positively odious. As for the poets, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are simply vile. This then was the context, the prevailing milieu, when Orwell was serving both his literary and political apprenticeship in the 1930s. There was a prevailing hostility towards Jews in both spheres. If, like me, you expected better, even then, from the young Orwell, you’d be disappointed.

Unfortunately, on Bloom's list of examples, he includes Orwell's views on Zionism: that it is nationalist and colonialist, and that Zionists are the equivalent of white settler colonists. In other words, Orwell understood Zionism for what it is. If Bloom considers this view antisemitic, then I'm not sure how much I trust his thoughts on this topic. Was Orwell's antisemitism "ever present", or did he outgrow it?

Orwell: antisemitism as an irrational neurosis

Researching this post, I discovered that Orwell was actually concerned with antisemitism as a social evil, and tried to understand its ubiquity and its causes.

In "Orwell and Antisemitism: Towards 1984," Melvyn New writes:

In 1943 Orwell was deeply concerned with antisemitism as a social problem in England; in 1944-45 he seems as much concerned with its abstract nature. An "As I Please" column (11 February 1944), for example, begins with the statement that his review of two books on the persecution of the Jews had brought the "usual wad of antisemitic letters," which, he says, "left me thinking for the thousandth time that this problem is being evaded even by the people whom it concerns most directly". Orwell begins with his earlier insight into the problem: that the objective existence of "disagreeable Jews" is hardly the true cause of the prejudice.

Obviously the charges made against Jews are not true. They cannot be true, partly because they cancel out, partly because no one people could have such a monopoly of wickedness. . . . The official left-wing view of antisemitism is that it is some thing "got up" by the ruling classes in order to divert attention away from the real evils of society. The Jews, in fact, are scapegoats.

The problem is, however, that pointing out this fact does not do away with the problem, "one does not dispose of a belief by showing that it is irrational." To argue in this way or to remind people of Nazi persecutions is to no avail: "If a man has the slightest disposition towards antisemitism, such things bounce off his consciousness like peas off a steel helmet."

Orwell, the pragmatic observer, calls for a "detailed enquiry into the causes of antisemitism," why Jews rather than another minority are "picked on," and what Jews are the scapegoat for. Significantly, he denies an economic cause, or that "sensible" people are immune, and concludes: "Clearly the neurosis lies very deep, and just what it is that people hate when they say that they hate a non-existent entity called 'the Jews' is still uncertain. And it is partly the fear of finding out how widespread antisemitism is that prevents it from being seriously investigated". In a very real sense, Orwell is raising the question he will raise again in 1984: "I understand how; I do not understand why?" [Quotes are from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.]

Although it pained me to see the antisemitism in DAOIPAL, I appreciated seeing this even more. Every human, every one of us, has bigotry. Not everyone admits it, examines it, and rejects it.

The little matter of the list

Discovering antisemitism in DAOIPAL wasn't the first time I had to grapple with some disturbing facts about George Orwell. In 2003, The Guardian published what is now referred to as "Orwell's List". Orwell "named names": he cooperated with British authorities by producing a list of people that he felt were security risks because of their ties to the Soviet state.

This news elicited a wide spectrum of reaction among progressive thinkers and writers, from Alexander Cockburn denouncing Orwell as despicable and no longer worth reading, to Christopher Hitchens brushing it off as trivial. The Wikipedia article "Orwell's list" includes a round-up of reaction. 

It must be noted that the people whose names Orwell supplied to the British secret intelligence force weren't blacklisted. They weren't fired from positions, their careers ruined. The list comprised people deemed unsuitable to be part of a counterintelligence operation because of their close ties to the Soviet state. That's an important distinction.

The writer Bernard Crick writes that Orwell "did it because he thought the Communist Party was a totalitarian menace. He wasn't denouncing these people as subversives. He was denouncing them as unsuitable for a counter-intelligence operation."

Historian John Newsinger called Orwell's List "a terrible mistake on his part, deriving in equal measure from his hostility to Stalinism and his illusions in the Labour government. What it certainly does not amount to, however, is an abandonment of the socialist cause or transformation into a footsoldier in the Cold War. Indeed, Orwell made clear on a number of occasions his opposition to any British McCarthyism, to any bans and proscriptions on Communist Party members (they certainly did not reciprocate this) and any notion of a preventive war. If he had lived long enough to realise what the IRD was actually about there can be no doubt that he would have broken with it." (Given that the IRD produced propaganda, Newsinger's assumption is undoubtedly correct.)

I tend to agree with Crick and Newsinger. How much of that is rationalization, I cannot say. One could say I'm rationalizing all of it. Orwell was once antisemitic, but later repudiated it. Orwell named names, but he thought he was doing the right thing at the time, and the people on his list weren't blacklisted or ruined. It's rationalization -- and it's also true.

Why I read

So, knowing this, how could Orwell still be one of my greatest writing heroes? The answer is simple. I deeply love his work, and he was human. 

George Orwell used his writing to fight totalitarianism, to denounce the hypocrisy of the ruling class, to champion workers, to champion socialism, to make us think more critically about capitalism. He cared deeply about justice. Like Woody Guthrie's guitar, Orwell's typewriter killed fascists. His writing is elegant, evocative, sparse, vivid. For me, his writing style is perfection. He was one of history's greatest essayists. 1984 is one of the greatest and most enduring books in the English language. The man who wrote that book was not perfect. He was human.

how new york city is like a polar bear, or what i'm reading: three books about the death murder of north american cities

I knew these books would break my heart. 

I chose three books from my List, all on the same topic: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, by P. E. Moskowitz, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman, and Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss. 

With my heart duly broken, in mourning for New York City and all it means, I've been trying to write this post for weeks. I hardly know where to begin.

Gentrification doesn't begin to describe

The phenomenon described in these books is usually called gentrification, but that process -- how it is commonly conceived -- does not convey the sinister, soul-crushing shift that has erased the lifeblood of major cities all over North America, and apparently, the world.

The two cities most emblematic of this change are New York and San Francisco. This makes sense, as historically both have been the chosen homes of creative and nonconformist people from all over the US, and both possess some of the most valuable real estate in the country. But no North American city has been immune to this, from Toronto to Austin, from Detroit to Atlanta, from Portland, Oregon to Burlington, Vermont.

Gentrification is too mild a word. Call it hyper-gentrification, homogenization, suburbanization. Disneyfication. The authors of these three books use those words -- and those were the words we, too, were using in 1990s New York.

I felt the trend of deadly homogenization keenly through the 1990s and in the early 2000s. The progress of that shift was part of what propelled me to leave New York in 2005 -- and if we had a viable plan, we might have left several years earlier. In a sense, this is the same sensitivity that had us feeling the rightward shift in the US, and the encroaching end of reproductive rights, before the mainstream seemed to catch on.

In 2004, as I was just beginning this blog, I wrote: 

I've been ready to leave New York for a while. The incessant homogenization is really getting me down: all the chain stores, theme restaurants, the Upper West Side looking like Chelsea looking like Park Slope. It's something I've been complaining about since the late 80s, and it's only gotten worse and worse. NYC has lost so much uniqueness, so much character; it feels too much like anyplace USA. I find it very sad. A friend called it soul-destroying, and that's precisely right.

Although we were highly sensitized to this shift, I now realize we ourselves were among the earliest wave of gentrification -- the creative "pioneer" phase -- in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of upper Manhattan. I now hear those words in a different light: P. E. Moskowitz notes how the language of gentrification mimics the language of colonization, and how fitting that is, as both displace people and cultures.

Not to be confused with nostalgia

This is not simple nostalgia. It's not "things were better back in my day". It's a fundamental shift in the city's character, and it's driven principally by two things: a lack of affordable housing, and the absence of commercial rent control. These two factors are themselves caused by a web of root causes from the banking industry, real estate developers (and the governments that protect both), and one of the most egregious of all: rezoning.

Thousands -- tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands -- of working-class people can no longer afford to live in the cities. They are forced into the suburbs or exurbs, where they are have longer and more expensive commutes, where they are isolated, where they lose their communities, lose services.

The ethnic communities that have formed organically in response to waves of immigration are replaced by people who can afford the out-sized rents, and whose expectations and demands align with privilege and luxury.

Creatives can no longer afford to live in cities. Music, art, theatre, acting, and all manner of creative thinking -- typically supported by having free time outside of one's "day job" or "survival job," because of relatively inexpensive living situations -- becomes impossible for all but the highly privileged. The very reason that so many millions have flocked to cities -- to create, to be themselves, to create themselves -- becomes impossible. 

Exorbitant rents plus the shuttering of locally-owned neighbourhood businesses, replaced with national chains (the only companies that can afford the spaces) kills communities, and with it, the character of the city. 

The city loses the very thing that made it itself. 

This is not the natural order of things

New York City, to be sure, was always a playground for the rich. Ultra-expensive restaurants, luxury ticket prices, fundraising galas for the elite who support expensive arts and culture -- this has always been an integral part of the city. But parallel to that world were countless others -- cheap eats, theatre of every price and for every taste, poetry slams, underground art scenes, cheap clothing stores, used bookstores, dive bars. Lots and lots of free or cheap stuff. Gone, gone, gone. Distinct neighbourhoods with distinct personalities. Gone. gone. gone.

What makes a city vibrant and interesting, what gives it character, what leaves it open to discovery, depends on the diversity and the creativity of the populace, and a city where they can carve out an area to do so.

Finding pockets of affordable housing (often by living with a large number of roommates), inexpensive food, spaces where creative people can congregate -- be they tiny off-off-Broadway theatres, open-mic comedy nights, neighbourhood restaurants, food trucks, free museum nights, and a menu of options for supporting oneself -- waiting tables, tending bar, office "temping"  -- this is why creatives flock to cities. This is why people without huge amounts of discretionary income can thrive in them, giving cities character, making them more interesting -- which in turn bolster the city's economy. 

Without anything resembling affordable housing, none of this can happen.

Three books in brief

Of these three books, Sarah Schulman offers the most original concept and the most challenging read. Schulman offers a unique and fascinating thesis about the AIDS epidemic being an agent of gentrification, permanently altering New York's queer community, and decimating activism among low-income people. 

From the introduction to The Gentrification of the Mind.

On the way home, these images were reeling in my mind. The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize oneself as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change.

What is this process? What is this thing that homogenizes complexity, difference, dynamic dialogic action for change and replaces it with sameness? With a kind of institutionalization of culture? With a lack of demand on the powers that be? With containment?

My answer to that question, always came back to the same concept: gentrification.

. . . To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomena: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of  culture and relationship, and this destruction has profound consequences of the future lives of cities.

But in the case of my particular question, while literal gentrification was very important to what I was observing, there was also a spiritual gentrification that was affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their condition. There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.

P. E. Moskowitz looks at four cities -- Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York -- and illustrates how hyper-gentrification has altered each city -- and how it happened. He digs down to reveal root causes, making visible a process that is thought to be inevitable, but is actually intentionally created by humans, for their own power and profit.

From How to Kill a City.

The Michael Bloomberg administration rezoned large swaths of the city, mostly from industrial and commercial to high density residential. Developers were given free rein in these newly zoned areas. Most buildings were not required to provide any affordable housing, and in those that were, their percentages were low enough, and the definition of "affordable" loose enough, that they made virtually no impact.

And so multimillion dollar condos fronted by twisted blue and green frosted glass have sprouted in Chelsea, in Midtown, and along every other corridor where the city has allowed height limits to be raised and zoning to be changed. Given the height of these buildings you'd think street life in West Chelsea would be busy, but the neighborhood is still largely a dead zone. And that's because these buildings, like many in New York nowadays, are not so much places to live as places for capital to grow.

Entire neighborhoods are becoming stash pads for the global elite who see real estate as a safer investment than the stock market. Often very few people are really living in these buildings, except for maybe a month or two out of the year. Chelsea is not even the worst: a New York Times investigation found that on a single three-block stretch in Midtown, 57 percent of apartments are vacant for at least 10 months each year. Absentee home ownership has grown by 70 percent in Manhattan since 2000. Even if you believe that attracting billionaires to New York is a good idea, it's hard to understand why these apartments are assessed at rates of one one-hundredth of what they are worth. Because of New York's tax code, a $100 million apartment in one of these new, super-tall glass buildings is usually only taxed as if it were worth $3 million or $4 million. Even mayor Bloomberg's more progressive successor, Bill de Blasio, has done little to change this status quo. . . . 

I walk along tree-lined 11th Street (one of the prettiest streets in New York, if you ask me me), past Magnolia Bakery, where dozens of tourists perpetually stand outside to partake in their own personal recreations of a Sex and the City episode that aired nearly 20 years ago. I hit 7th Avenue and in front of me is Saint Vincent's, or what used to be Saint Vincent's -- the neighborhood hospital that everyone in my family made use of at least once. It closed down to make room for a condo development that now takes up the entire block and where apartments go for $20 million. Down the block was a good vegetarian Chinese restaurant that recently closed when its rent was raised from $5,000 to $25,000 a month.

Continuing on 11th Street, I hit Sixth Avenue and then Union Square. One of the only open, European-style plazas in the entire city, Union Square was well on its way to being gentrified when I was growing up, but now it is essentially a shopping mall. If you've never been there, imagine a big town square like a piazza in Italy, but instead of government buildings and stately architecture flanking each side, there are stores: DSW and Walgreen's and Nordstrom Rack and Best Buy, to name a few. It's a hyper-capitalist's version of a stately plaza. This area did not naturally evolve to become an outdoor shopping mall. It took concerted effort. 

During the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Union Square was a site for protest and a gathering spot for New York's art scene. Andy Warhol's Factory was nearby, as were famous nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City. But after New York City went bankrupt in the 1970s, a consortium of business leaders, including the Chairman of the Board of Con Edison (New York's main electric company), proposed redeveloping Union Square as an essentially private enterprise. A Business Improvement District, or BID, took over Union Square, replacing city control. 

BIDs aren't unique to New York but they wield a lot of power here. Business Improvement Districts in New York often do the work that a robust city government would do on its own, planning streetscapes, cleaning up trash, and policing the area. But a BID's employees are nonunion workers and get paid low wages, and BID have no special laws governing them, meaning they cannot be held accountable to voters/citizens in the same way that a government agency theoretically could be. The BIDs are accountable to no one except the neighborhood businesses that provide 100% of their funding. Member voting rights in a BID are assigned to each business based on that businesses land value. 

Today, Union Square is often blocked off by BID sponsored barricades, it's grassy areas protected with BID-approved netting, its security and clean-up paid for by the BID. Sure, thanks to the BID, Union Square is less dirty than it once was, but it's also no longer a public square in any true sense. "We're constantly trying to attract a specific demographic: young, moneyed consumers who know New York City from New York magazine... and who watch 'Friends'," a spokesperson for Union Square BID once said. "We can train these young consumers to think of urban living on Union Square." 

Harlem's 125th Street "revitalization" has a similar story: a cabal of development-friendly nonprofits has worked to bring in chain stores and luxury housing. Meanwhile, the media report on the "new" Harlem as if its progression to luxury and whiteness is somehow natural.

The best and most painful of the these books is Vanishing New York, by Jeremiah Moss, a pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury. As Moss, Hansbury wrote the long-running blog "Jeremiah's Vanishing New York", which became a hub for the rage and sadness that so many New Yorkers feel at the destruction of our city. Of course that includes former New Yorkers -- because once you are, you are. 

I loved Moss' introduction to Vanishing New York. I tried to get his permission to reprint it, but never heard back, so I'm restraining myself in sharing only a portion.

Reports of New York's death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city's undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you'll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep into denial, point to any trace of the Old Town and say, "There is New York." Yes, there it is. But it's only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing. Maybe it's that dive bar with the Ramones on the jukebox, or that bookshop with a cat lounging atop stacks, or the rare sighting of a transgender outlaw walking some West Village street in platform heels. It's like finding a polar bear, sweating on her melting chunk of iceberg, and then denying that the world is cooked because, hey, there's a polar bear. 

Others quote from the long history of doomsayers, the many writers who declared the city dead. "The complaint that the real soul of Manhattan has already expired is a long-standing one -- perhaps as old as 19th century Knickerbockers pining for a mythological Dutch past," writes Bryan Waterman in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. That's true. But has the complaint ever been made by so many, so relentlessly, and with such passionate certainty as it is today -- and with so much evidence to back it up?

Novelist Caleb Carr called the massive change to the 21st Century city a "regrettable, soul-sucking transformation." Patti Smith told us to "find a new city" because "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling." David Byrne wrote an essay on the cultural death of New York saying, "Most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich." Essayist David Rakoff observed how "the town's vibrancy and authenticity" have been "replaced by a culture-free, high-end retail clusterfuck of luxury condo buildings." 

Responding to all this, the counter argument goes: but it's safer! The streets are clean! And we have great restaurants! In the New Yorker Adam Gopnik summed it up: "New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a facelift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. . . . For the first time in Manhattan's history, it has no bohemian frontier." 

I could go on with pages of similar quotes, all from the past decade or so, a chorus of voices from literature, art, new media, journalism, all making the same argument: at the beginning of the 21st Century, the city changed in what felt like an instant, and the change wasn't good. In short, New York has lost its soul. The place is dead. OK, "dead" might be hyperbolic. Is "dying" a better word? How about "comatose," awaiting a miraculous revival? Maybe this shift is just another phase in the city's long and ever-changing evolution. But who ever thought New York would have a soulless period?

If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: hyper-gentrification and its free market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just urban change. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the weather, I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed. 

How did such a catastrophe befall the greatest city on earth? It didn't happen all at once. After decades of scheming on the part of urban elites -- the real estate magnates, financiers, planners, and politicians -- who worked tirelessly to take the city from those they considered "undesirables," mayor Ed Koch really got the ball rolling in the 1980s. Rudy Giuliani brought the muscle in the 1990s. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 played a pivotal role. And then after the turn of the millennium, Mike Bloomberg dealt the death blow, a stunning coup de grace. Gentrification morphed into hyper-gentrification. Mainstream young people flooded in from the suburbs where their white-flighty grandparents had fled years ago. They came in droves, many of them (not all) armed with a sense of manifest destiny, helping to turn New York into a sanitized vertical suburbia. They carry a share of blame, the new arrivals who say they love New York, yet celebrate the city's makeover into an image of their Maple Valleys and Prairievilles, their Springfields and Massapequas, complete with hundreds upon hundreds of chains: Starbucks and 7-Elevens, Applebee's and Olive Gardens, Home Depots, Targets, IHOPs, Dunkin' Donuts and -- God help us -- Denny's. While it's true you can still find a pulse, here and there, along the thickly settled stretch of Manhattan, and that the city's soul still haunts pockets of the outer pockets of the outer boroughs, this book is not a Baedeker to those pockets. . . . 

This is not unique to New York. Hyper-gentrification, the term I use for the force that drives the city's undoing -- gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism -- is a global pandemic, a seemingly unstoppable virus attacking much of the world. San Francisco is dying, maybe even faster than New York. You see it in Portland and Seattle. Austin and Boston. Paris, London, Barcelona, and Berlin have all been infected. The virus has spread as far as Tel Aviv, Beirut, Seoul, and Shanghai. And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture. While I speak to the global issues in this book, New York is my case study. It may be chauvinistic to say New York is the world's capital city, but New Yorkers are chauvinistic. 

 This is also from the introduction, out of order, but a very fitting conclusion.

We all have our own lost city. If we stick around long enough, we lose the city of our youth, our dreams and foiled ambitions. Joseph Mitchell, great chronicler of Gotham, wrote, "I used to feel very much at home in New York City. I wasn't born here, I wasn't a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here. Several years ago, however, I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn't belong here anymore." I could say the same today, but this book isn't about how we all lose our personal city. It's about how the city has been taken from us. It's not just the story of a death; it's the story of a murder.

another insidious bit of the digital divide: access to customer service for smartphones only

We need another word for it.

The digital divide -- the gap between those with access to modern information and communication technologies and those without -- has been recognized since at least the 1990s. Attempts to narrow this gap are usually publicly funded, always operating from scarcity, or small concessions eked out of corporations. Either way, the bridges are tiny, flimsy, and often temporary. Untold numbers of people have been left behind.

Over time the digital divide has widened and deepened. The words digital divide are grossly inadequate, almost quaint. Digital canyon? Digital chasm? Right now it feels like a digital abyss.

Better living through apps -- or not

I recently stumbled on a bit of this gaping divide. I knew about this vaguely, in some abstract way, but now understand it more clearly: improved access to customer service for smartphone users. Sometimes, access to customer service only for people with smartphones.

I wasn't an early adopter of the smartphone. I like to add technology as I need it, not simply because it exists. I prefer not to fork over any more of my income to mega-corporations unless there's a demonstrable benefit in doing so. New technology should save me time or effort, or bring me joy, or why should I bother? So I do use a smartphone, but I apply this to the use of apps as well.

There are apps that simplify processes, so they're worth using. There are apps that make our lives easier. But many apps appear to be more for a company's access to me, rather than the reverse. For example, when I shop online, I prefer sitting at a computer, using full websites. It's easier to see products, read reviews, compare one company's offerings against another. Which of course is why companies want to drive us to their apps: once we're there, we're captive.

Customer service of privilege

Which brings me to what I recently learned. Perhaps I'm the last person on the haves side of the digital divide to discover this, but I've been astonished to learn what improved customer service I receive through apps.

I had a problem with a credit card, and needed to speak with someone. I called the phone number on the card and on the website. I navigated my way through the menu, went down the wrong path, and was cut off -- more than once. 

When I finally found the correct pathway, I was on hold for 50 minutes. Of course I had the call on speaker, and was doing other things while I waited, but still, I had to listen to the hold "music," and I was limited in what else I could do. 

When at last I spoke with a human, it turned out I would need another phone call to a different department. I asked the customer service rep for a more direct number, and was told: call through the app, you'll get through immediately. Now that is a reason to download and use an app. So I did. I called the bank through the app, and was speaking with a human in less than five minutes.

Some months later, I had a question about Aeroplan miles, which means calling Air Canada. Air Canada is renowned for poor customer service. The company has shred their workforce to the bone, so getting anyone to help you with anything is a nightmare. 

I tried finding the answer to my question online. Fruitless. 

Dreading the next step, I called the Aeroplan number and was on hold for two hours and never got through. I am not exaggerating: I am looking at my call history as I type this: 1 hour, 58 minutes. I gave up.

I then downloaded the Aeroplan app and had my answer in under five minutes. I didn't have to speak with anyone: the information I needed was available through the app, but not through the website.

This is terrible customer service. But beyond that, it's customer service as privilege. What happens to customers who don't have smartphones, who can't afford them, who don't know how to download an app? One would think that companies would still want those people's money, but apparently the savings in labour force outweighs the benefits of reaching potential customers.

It's disgusting. It's wrong. And it's only going to get worse. 

pacific northwest labor history association conference: the young organizers

Without a doubt, the most engaging talk I attended at the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association Conference was "Young Workers Rising," a panel of young organizers interviewed by another young organizer. I won't try to reproduce it here, as I could never do it justice, but I can share some bits that I found interesting and exciting.

First of all, there is -- and I quote -- "an unprecendented wave" of union organizing going on right now, throughout North America.

Some are campaigns you've likely heard of, like the burgeoning Starbucks Workers Union and Amazon Labor Union. Most of the efforts, however, take place under the radar of the mainstream media. Owners of those outlets would just as soon not expose their poorly-paid and badly-treated staff to successful union organizers! I learn about strikes, lockouts, organizing, and other labour news through a few different mailing lists and websites -- and most of what I see, I only see there. For the rest of you: be assured that organizing is happening everywhere. Workers are demanding more, and they are succeeding.

On the panel in May were: a former stage manager now organizing tech workers; an archivist organizing in the GLAM sector (galleries, archives, libraries, and museums); an organizer with Starbucks Workers United; and someone organizing food service workers in a local cafe chain. 

These folks are doing everything right. 

They are diverse, inclusive, and affirming. Historically, a few unions were way ahead of the curve on inclusion, equality, and diversity. But for most, it took a very long time to break down barriers of racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, Islamophobia. But these kids are on it, right out of the gate.

They are building worker power, organizing internally, steered by leaders who rise organically from the workplace.

They are identifying and training other organizers.

They are fearless.

And they are having fun, approaching their work with determination and joy.

Here are some tidbits from my notes.

* The librarians, archivists and museum workers union drive began with one union librarian sharing the details of her contract. That is a powerful detail. When I was an office worker, the temp agency always said, "Don't discuss your rate." There's a reason for that. The takeaway: always discuss! Information is power, so we should always be sharing.

* One panelist's labour activism "grew out of the liberation struggles of 2020". After marching and demonstrating and attending meetings, they needed to find more meaningful work, and recognized union organizing as both a direct path to improving lives and to helping people find tools to improve their own lives.

* The food-service industry is a segregated workplace, and segregated mostly by class -- middle-class workers front-of-house, and mostly undocumented, poor, immigrant workers in the warehouse, cooking, and catering. The employer, of course, tries to pit them against each other.

And even when that doesn't fly, when there is empathy, the segregation is a huge obstacle. It's difficult to organize people for issues that don't impact them. Front-of-house workers, for the most part, live with their parents; they have health care and they don't pay rent. The warehouse and catering workers have very little, but speaking up is risking deportation.

One of the great successes of our library workers strike in 2016 was that full-time workers walked out mainly for part-time workers. Full-timers had issues, but the strike was mainly on behalf of the part-timers, who had grown over the years from 25% to 65% of our membership -- and who got essentially nothing from the contract. Needless to say, they were utterly disillusioned with full-time bargaining committees who negotiated only for themselves. It was a delicate balancing act, and it worked.

If you're lucky and have good full-time allies and good leadership, you can get away with that -- once. A steady diet of it will not work. As one panelist said, "We can organize along class lines, with an immigrant population, but they can't do it alone. We need men who will fight against sexual harassment. We need white workers who will fight for people of colour. We need comfortable workers to fight to raise others up." This is a challenge!

* Many people don't realize that there are low-paid tech workers without benefits or any job protections. Tech workers who earn salaries of $150K often subcontract much of their repetitive work (such as coding) to people who are paid $16/hour. 

* Mandated return-to-office rules after covid was radicalizing for many tech workers. 

* The Seattle Labor Council was the labor council to boot the police union from the organization. This is a bold move that other labour councils have followed. (More about this: "Local unions defy AFL-CIO in push to oust police unions" from Politico, and It's time to kick police unions out of the labor movement. They aren't allies, opinion piece in The Guardian, both from 2020.)

* The food-service organizer referred to the different marketing and branding of their employer's products -- the same products in different packages, one looking like a supermarket brand, the other branded with organic and sustainability -- "but it's all the same shit".  

* The panelists emphasized the importance of "defining your own wins". They told us about 1,200 casino workers who struck at the Atlantic City Taj Mahal. Billionaire owner Carl Icahn closed the casino rather than negotiate in good faith. The workers held strong. And when the casino re-opened, it was "fully union from day one", and they got most of what they had asked for. "Defining your own wins" is an important life lessons in so many respects.

* The organizers all followed the Jane McAlevey organizing methods, adjusted to their own context. Some high-level critiques have been written about McAlevey's work lately, which is inevitable as ideas spread widely. Nothing is without flaws, and no arena should be exempt from critical thinking. But workers' struggles can't wait for purity and perfection. Let the theorists theorize. Building worker power works. 

To stay in touch with labour news, I recommend PressProgress' Shift Work newsletter. There are many good sites and email lists. Be aware that "LabourWatch", run by the Canadian LabourWatch Association, is an anti-union website.

what i'm reading: madame restell (nonfiction version) (corrected and updated)

In March, I wrote about My Notorious Life, historical fiction by Kate Manning, based on the life Ann Trow Lohman, who was known as Madame Restell. I loved the book. 

Then, by beautiful coincidence, I stumbled on this book while in Powell's City of Books in Portland: Madame Restell: the Life, Death and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Independent Abortionist, by Jennifer Wright.

Madame Restell was a larger-than-life figure, a fiercely independent woman who grew fabulously wealthy by performing abortions -- at a time when being an independent -- and independently wealthy -- woman was as socially unacceptable as being an abortionist. 

It was also a time when abortion services were in very high demand. Reliable contraception was practically nonexistent, and what did exist was illegal. Rape was only considered a crime under certain, very narrow circumstances; wealthy men considered themselves entitled to their servants in every way. When said servants became pregnant, they were dismissed. Work available to women was limited to a few other poorly-paid grinds and sex work. A huge number of women supported themselves and their children through sex work, which of course led to many pregnancies, and many orphans. Childbirth was -- and still is -- much more dangerous than termination. 

This was also a time when male "doctors" were actively pushing midwives and other women practicing folk medicine out of business, by spreading lies about them, having them arrested, and whatever other means they could devise. I write "doctors" in quotes because these were men with virtually no training. Anyone who could afford it could pay a fee, attend a course, and become a doctor, without ever having touched a patient.

Germ theory was in its infancy, and American "doctors" discredited it. Midwives had learned that fewer women died in childbirth if the attending midwife washed her hands before delivering the baby. Doctors would not practice such "superstition": they would work on a cadaver, then stick their unwashed hands into a pregnant woman. Women were infinitely safer in the hands of midwives than of doctors, and doctors were determined to squash the competition.

Add to this that great enemy of women and self-appointed guardian of purity Anthony Comstock, after whom the Comstock Laws are named. Comstock was Madame Restell's nemesis. He resorted to trickery and entrapment, playing on her desire to help, in order to have her arrested. Comstock's treachery wasn't the first time Madame Restell was arrested, but it was the last.

Madame Restell is an engaging portrait of a renegade, and Wright uses Restell's life as a lens through which to see late nineteenth century New York. It was a time of extreme income inequality, misogyny, anti-immigrant bigotry and ignorance. In other words, a time much like our own -- but so much worse. Wright makes the parallels and connections very explicit. 

Then, as now, I was infuriated by the rampant hypocrisy among Restell's haters and critics. She was constantly denounced and shamed by the public, yet became fabulously wealth supplying that same public with contraception and abortions. Wright calls Restell's Fifth Avenue mansion "a middle finger to the establishment that wanted to pretend her profession didn't exist".

A few were brave enough to defend her. Wright quotes a Reverend Charles McCarthy as publicly denouncing Comstock, noting that abortion was an accepted fact among the elite, and plenty of male doctors provided them. He was especially vocal about the subterfuge, fraud, and entrapment that led to Restell's arrest. [Reading The Story of Jane: the Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, by Laura Kaplan, I am again reminded of the key role that progressive clergy have played in the struggle for reproductive justice.]

Much of the country was tired of Comstock and his morality police, but that didn't deter him. This was a man who bragged about how many people had killed themselves after he launched campaigns against them.

As it happens, I've been reading a lot about this period of time in New York City, so the material was a little redundant for me -- but in no way is that a fault of the book. Wright writing style is breezy and chatty, sprinkled liberally with sarcasm, dark humour, and references to the present time: nonfiction for the internet age.  

I loved Wright's handling of the mystery surrounding Madame Restell's death. This also made me appreciate and love the final chapters of My Notorious Life even more.

In an epilogue, Wright summarizes the current climate for people experiencing unwanted pregnancies -- or wanted pregnancies that have become lethal time bombs -- in the United States today. I know this well, but reading it was still nauseating and horribying. She writes:

If this frightens you -- if it fills you with dread, as it does for me, that your daughters will grow up with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had, and that the use of their bodies will be dictated by legislators who have never met htem -- then, please remind them of history.

By and large, Americans don't like learning history. They like learning propaganda. They enjoy stories that are exclusively about how America is great and always has been. Do not let your children believe in a fictitious, rosy version so the past where every woman was happily a mother. Tell them the true hsitory of this country, where abortion has always been commonly practiced. 

And tell them your own history.

My greatest fear is not that abortion rights will be taken away in America. That is horrible. But that is already a reality for many people and has been for some time. It's that we will stop being angry about it. I am frightend that my daughter will grow up thinking her position as a second-class citizen, whose health and goals are less important to people in power than her capacity to breed, is normal and right. That she will think that this is just how things are. 

I have only one complaint about Madame Restell. It saddens me that a writer who supports full reproductive justice, including the human right to safe and legal abortion, felt the need to walve the flag of her own motherhood. It seems like Wright (or perhaps her publishers) felt that she needed to qualify her support for abortion rights by telling readers how much she loves her daughter. 

The two are in no way incompatible: the majority of women who have abortions are already mothers, and another big chunk want to be mothers in the future (stats, stats, stats). We should not have to -- we do not have to -- concede this ground to the lies and propaganda of the anti-abortion-rights/anti-woman/anti-human-rights fascists.

However, this is a political disagreement. Madame Restell: the Life, Death and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Independent Abortionist is a very good and worthwhile read.

what i'm reading: my notorious life by kate manning (madame restell, fictional version, nonfiction to follow)

I read this book last year, and have been recommending it nonstop, so it's about time to commit it to wmtc.

My Notorious Life was an obvious book for me to love -- or to hate. 

Much historical fiction feels contrived to me. An author takes a period of history, writes a piece of fiction, often a romance or family saga, and grafts the two together. I often see the scaffolding too much. 

I'm particularly sensitive to this when the subject matter is important to me. This book qualified on so many levels -- women, abortion, New York City. If anything had felt inauthentic to me, I couldn't have read it. 

I am happy to report that I loved it. 

Kate Manning seamlessly blends a dramatic story with historical people and events. Based on the life of a woman  who was known as Madame Restell, My Notorious Life tells the story of a child of extreme poverty who rises to fame and fortune, and who may be thrown back into poverty, and into prison -- not without several twists and turns, the outcome of which is never certain. Manning's Madame Restell is a very compelling hero -- daring and courageous, and also deeply principled and compassionate. 

Manning brings the reader into late 19th Century New York City, a world of extreme income inequality, where women have little control over their reproductive lives. In other words, a world with all too many parallels to our own. But there are striking differences, too. We can see the progress our society has made -- and the consequences of that progress being reversed and undone. When women are unable to control their reproduction, they suffer, children suffer, and society suffers.

Manning also manages to pull off something that must be incredibly difficult, given how rarely it is achieved. She weaves all the issues -- poverty, class, the treatment of children, women's autonomy, pregnancy, childbirth, abortion -- into a dramatic story with a great plot and several subplots. There are no soapboxes, no billboards. The lessons are gleaned through story.

On our recent trip to Powell's City of Books in Portland, I stumbled on* a title that practically leapt out at me: Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright. I immediately put a copy in my basket, wondering how I had not heard of it before -- not realizing that it was published only last month. I will be reading it and writing about it soon.

* I was hunting for Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences (2010) by Cordelia Fine. I found that book, Madame Restell, and The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (1995) by Laura Kaplan. I hope to read all three this year.

things i heard at the library: an occasional series: # 37

I have an update on R, the customer who was the subject of the previous two TIHATL posts: #35, a customer who refuses to be helped, and #36, a customer who needs so much more than a library can provide. As a friend said on Facebook, librarians, like teachers, are left to deal with the results of failed social and economic policies.

Staff and I were all worried about R. The December holiday season was days away, which meant social services and health care would be more difficult to access. Many people living marginal existences die during that time of year. 

I visited an agency in town, one that serves as an umbrella organization for many services. They were very sympathetic and supportive, and directed me to the general mental health services for our region.

The mental health worker gave me two important suggestions. 

One, I learned that the local mental health centre has a two-hour drop-in time every day. They said the slots fill up quickly, so folks are advised to get there early. I confirmed the (unmarked) location and noted the times. 

Two, I learned that we can call the RCMP (i.e. the local police) and request an assessment. They will escort the person to the hospital, and speak to hospital staff to ensure that an appropriate assessment is done.

I don't know why I wasn't already aware of these options, but I was happy to add these new tools to my toolkit. My staff were so relieved, they were in tears. We agreed that one of us would walk R to mental health services (it's very nearby) and we would explain about the RCMP call.

I also learned that a doctor's prescription is required for the hospital or another agency to provide free adult diapers. One of our staff happened to have some that were purchased for a relative, but the wrong size, and they were happy to donate them. We put the package in a plain brown bag and determined that we would give it to R the next time we saw him.

Then we didn't see R again. 

Days and then weeks passed, and he didn't come in. We speculated that the workers in the Salvation Army, who runs the overnight shelter, connected R with help. But we couldn't know, and we couldn't ask (confidentiality). So we kept an eye out for him, and we worried.

Then, in mid-February, R appeared. He was clean, clean-shaven, and had gained some weight. He told us he had spent a month in the hospital in the neighbouring town. One of our staff discreetly gave him the brown bag containing the adult diapers and he was grateful and appreciative. 

Another customer brought in a warm winter jacket that he found in the thrift shop to give to R. 

R is still without housing. He still lacks a hearing aid. He is still frustrated and upset by technology. But he's alive. He's eating, he's bathing, he has medication. He says hello to us, and to other people he knows who are also in the library. I think he has hope.

things i heard (and smelled) at the library: an occasional series: # 36

The subject of this TIHATL is R, the same man I wrote about in the previous TIHATL post. Things have gone from bad to worse. He is pale, unshaven, and unsteady on his feet. And he is incontinent. When he stands up, the seat he's been sitting on is soaked. Yesterday the whole library smelled of urine. Other customers commented on it and left.

I need to speak with R. But it's complicated: how do you have a private conversation on an extremely sensitive topic with someone who is severely hearing impaired, and doesn't use a hearing aid? To speak with him, you have to shout. Clearly I can't shout about this.

Further complicating the situation, it is very cold here, and many people are coming into the library to keep warm. We've heard R tell other customers that he lost all his belongings in a fire. So clearly he is experiencing homelessness.

I collected some tips from other library managers. I didn't learn anything too surprising, but their experiences and support helped me feel capable of doing what needs to be done. My staff have watched all the relevant training videos, especially the ones created by Ryan Dowd. Dowd is a social worker-turned-educator who has made a name for himself on this topic. 

Yesterday I sat down facing R and asked how he is doing. He said he has been to the hospital but was not admitted. I asked if anyone is working with him, like a caseworker. I looked directly at him, in case he can lip-read. But I didn't shout, as there were other customers in the branch. I don't know whether he understood me or not.

R said, "Last night I nearly froze to death," and wanted to wait in the library until the shelter opens. At least the shelter is opening two hours early, at 3:00 pm, because of the frigid weather. We called a taxi for R and made sure he got in. 

Then staff and I put on gloves, found some disinfectant and odor neutralizer in the janitor's closet, and got to work. (Then, predictably, I had a coughing fit, triggered by the cleaning spray.) We also left a note for the janitor to disinfect all seating surfaces.

Today I'm going to the social service agency to see if anyone can connect with R and get him some help. He needs a shower, some clean clothes, and adult diapers. He needs a place to live, but that's probably out of the question. But like so many of our customers, he needs so much more than the library can give him. 

things i heard at the library: an occasional series: #35

This TIHATL is a hybrid of two well-trod library tropes: The Customer Who Refuses To Be Helped and Left Behind By Technology. It makes for sad, frustrating interactions and irate customers.

R needs to do something on the internet. He hates the library's computers. He hates Windows 10. He is convinced that our public computers and Windows 10 are the causes of his problems.

He marches triumphantly into the library with a used laptop that he purchased, announcing that, at last, he has a copy of Windows XP. He also has a newly purchased ethernet cable. And he's convinced that this combination -- both, unbeknownst to him, outdated -- will solve his problems.

I explain that we have no way to use the cable, that we can only connect to the internet wirelessly. This infuriates him. "Why not? What kind of crap operation are you running here? What is wrong with this library?"

I try everything I know to get his laptop to pick up the library's free wifi, but it will not. This also infuriates him. Fortunately -- and a bit surprisingly -- he does not blame me. 

After a while I convince him to move to one of our public computers. This also involves getting him to pack up his laptop, his jacket, and all the papers he has strewn across the table. It's like dealing with a 5-year-old, with none of the cute factor.

He sits at the computer for about five seconds before he starts complaining. "Where's the search box on this crappy thing?"

Incidentally, R is hearing-impaired, so we're both shouting. He also has very bad body odour, and I am highly sensitive to smells. He looks disheveled and unkempt. 

I show him how to open a browser and find Google. He tells me what he's looking for, and waits for me. I explain that I won't be doing this for him. He angrily types in his search, bashing the keyboard, then clicks on the first link without looking at it. "What am I supposed to do now? These damn computers! Windows 10 garbage! What kind of library is this, anyway? Why can't I use my laptop! What kind of garbage is this!" and so on.

At one point in his rant R says, "I ran my own business for 40 years! I never had these problems!". This gives some insight into what he may be experiencing. Presumably, he's been competent and independent in the past, and now finds himself helpless and frustrated in a world that has left him behind. Unfortunately, my empathy for him cannot help him. I also wonder if this is actually true.

Also while ranting, R says he wants to buy a typewriter and use Canada Post. He has said this several times at the library. It must be an expression of frustration and a longing for something simpler. He hasn't actually tried to buy a typewriter, or asked us how he might go about that.

When I last saw R, he was using Google and writing down whatever he found, with pen and paper. His handwriting is illegible and his grasp of written English is marginal.

Based on his searches, I think he may be sending some kind of promo or advertising to various companies -- which is even sadder, as I can't imagine what this would look like. 

I really want to help this man. But he is so invested in being right, and so frustrated that he cannot navigate the world, which now feels so foreign to him, that he refuses to be helped. Instead, he wastes money on an outdated laptop, and ends up feeling more aggrieved than when he started.

* * * *

Before writing this post, I checked the things i heard at the library label, to see when I last wrote about this issue. I came up with this similar story, written in March 2020. 

hard times: we are ruled by banks, corporations, and the governments that enable them. it doesn't have to be this way.

In Canada this year, food bank usage hit an all-time high. In March 2022, there were almost 1.5 million visits to food banks -- 15% more than there were one year ago, and a whopping 35% more visits than in March 2019, pre-pandemic.

Food prices have ballooned at the highest rate in four decades. The Consumer Price Index, which approximates a cost of living barometer, has risen 6.9% since this time last year, which was already 5.9% higher than the previous year. At times over this past year, food prices had gone up more than 10%.

The price of gasoline is 13.2% higher than it was the previous year -- down from an eye-popping 22% increase a few months earlier. Most Canadians must drive in order to work; in most areas of the country, public transit is minimal. In urban areas, 17% of Canadians take public transit to work. In non-urban areas, a scant 2% do so. 

This is usually attributed to Russia's war on Ukraine, and supply chain interruption. Why would a faraway war impact the price of food in North America? Because everything, including basic survival, is subject to the irrational, mysterious ways of the market. The good old invisible hand of capitalism, causing good times and bad. And supposedly there's nothing we can do about it. Too bad, so sad. 

But there is something we can do. We can build a better system -- a rational system that privileges the needs of many over profits for a few.

It doesn't have to be this way

But in response to this crippling inflation, the Bank of Canada has raised interest rates, which harms people, and benefits banks. Raising interest rates to combat inflation has been shown to fail 100% of the time. 

That's worth repeating. The Bank of Canada is following a policy with a zero percent success rate. Unless your goal is helping banks, in which case it's spectacularly successful.

As Economist David MacDonald puts it:

History tells us that the Bank of Canada has a 0% success rate in fighting inflation by quickly raising interest rates. If a pilot told me that they'd only ever attempted a particular landing three times in the past 60 years with a 0% success rate, that's not a plane I'd want to be on. Unfortunately, that looks like the plane all Canadians are on now.

Free-market rationale says that rising interest rates will discourage borrowing and encourage savings. This seems little more than fantasy.

(1), mortgages are already borrowed, we can't un-borrow them, so increasing interest just increases the housing costs of real people. (2), the price of food and fuel continues to climb, so therefore, (3), ordinary people have even less money to save, if indeed they ever had any.

These rising interest rates and higher mortgage payments occur are occuring in a country where housing has become increasingly unaffordable. Rising interest rates are bad news for everyone -- except banks.

Meanwhile:

Exxon Mobil and Chevron raked in a mountain of profit this year. The net income for the world's oil and natural gas producers is set to double in 2022 from 2021, to a new high of $4 trillion. World Energy Outlook calls it "an unprecedented windfall for producers".

Loblaw, the corporate food giant, tried to package a routine holiday practice -- freezing prices on their store brand for a few months -- as noblesse oblige. Who do they think they're fooling? In the first quarter of this year, Loblaw enjoyed a 40% increase in profits compared with the previous year. 

Meanwhile:

Nearly a quarter of Canadians have been forced to cut back on purchasing food.

Whose government is this?

The Liberal Government defends interest rate hikes, even though this has squeezed many Canadians in a fight for survival, and pushes many into food insecurity or outright hunger. 

The Conservative Party criticizes the rate hikes, but that's just partisanship. History is quite clear on this point: if the Conservatives were in power, they would also support the Bank's moves, too.

Only Jagmeet Singh and the New Democrat Party speak out against this insanity.

But there's little enough that any party can do, as our laws are written to support big business and minimize government input. The NDP can call for investigations and strategies, but the fact is, a remedy would require an entire re-thinking of government's role in business. 

It would require a government that protects people from predatory businesses, rather than enabling their voracious greed.

All this could change. Laws are not found in nature. They are written by people. 

If the government governed for us, there would be laws against price gouging, there would be a "Robin Hood" tax, there would be caps on profits for essential goods. There would be a human right to food and shelter, and laws that supported those rights. 

Instead, the laws of the land are designed to maximize the profits of the few, not the needs of the many.

We must ask, who does the Government represent? If Trudeau's Liberals support policies that are killing Canadians, how can they credibly say they are representing the people who elected them?  

I am fed up

I am fed up -- I am way beyond fed up -- with governments that represent Loblaw, Suncor, and RBC. For the millions of Canadians who will only vote Liberal or Conservative, I ask, How's that been working out for you? 

In the US, there is no viable third option. That has enabled the march to the extreme right. In Canada, where there is a developed third party, the majority are afraid to vote for it -- even those who claim to support its platforms. Supposedly progressive people routinely advise and pressure others to not vote NDP. 

Obviously voting NDP will not magically fix these problems. But it would be a start. With Liberals and Conservatives, things will continue along the current path, which will only lead to greater wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer people. Then Canada will be well positioned for the desperation that allows fearmongers to incite scapegoating, violence, and all manner of repression. 

I have no illusions about the NDP. They are a political party, and therefore subject to the same pitfalls as any other. But if all the partisan politics are equal, only the NDP speaks for ordinary Canadians. 

Isn't it time to try something different? 

Further reading

David Macdonald, quoted above, is the senior economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think tank that I am proud to support. You can read Macdonald's analysis here. 

Paul Krugman is also a good read on this topic. See his "wonking out" columns.

Here are three good stories on food insecurity in Canada -- all published pre-pandemic. Since that, it has gotten so much worse.

Wealth is health: The Reality of Food Insecurity in Canada

People Across Canada Are Struggling with Food Insecurity

More Canadians are food insecure than ever before – and the problem is only getting worse

Imagine something different.

What Would a Socialist Food Industry Look Like?

Capitalism and food: Hunger amidst plenty

Socialism for the bankers, capitalism for the rest of us -- so it goes

so many left behind: the ever-widening digital divide

Last year, while attempting to get a parking pass during our vacation -- without a phone, my phone having been fried by an update -- I got caught in circuitous and frustrating encounter with information and technology gaps.

About a year later, navigating the brave new world of do-it-yourself airport screening, I used quite a few resources -- skills, devices, time, and patience -- to find, navigate, and complete the covid requirements for both US and Canada cross-border travel.

I deal with technology every day, and I'm about as confident a tech user as you will find. Yet each of these experiences was complicated, time-consuming, and frustrating.

The digital divide is an abyss

How do people without digital skills get by? What happens to folks who can't navigate these mazes?

There are some analog workarounds, required by accessibility laws, but can you find them? How do you find them if you aren't online?

There are people you can hire to expedite these steps for you. But if you're not digitally literate, you probably can't find them and you almost certainly can't afford them.

There may be someone in your life who can ask for help. But what if everyone in your life is from a similar background and social standing, and also lack these skills?

If you're lucky, someone will suggest you go to the public library. You can try that, and hope that resources haven't been slashed to such an extent that no one has the time and focus to help you. (Remember the scene in "I, Daniel Blake", where other library users help Daniel get online?)

These not-really-options don't factor in the shame and embarrassment that, for so many people, comes with asking for help, and they certainly don't factor in anxiety, mental confusion, and the exhaustion of poverty.

The digital divide is not about age

In library school, we talked a lot about the "digital divide" -- the gap between those who have access to technology and those who don't. As time goes on, this gap has become a canyon, and it's getting wider and deeper all the time.

There's a mistaken impression that the digital divide is one of age, with seniors on the have-not side. This is an ageist assumption that should have been retired a long time ago. Baby boomers are in their late 60s and 70s now!

Research (in a US context) shows the percentage of tech users over 65 is still slightly lower than that of other age groups, but the gap is shrinking all the time. In Canada, the percentage of people over the age of 65 using the internet doubled between 2007 and 2016. Stats Can notes (emphasis mine):

The findings suggest that age is a primary determinant of Internet use among seniors, but that differences in educational attainment and other demographic characteristics are also important. . . .

Among young seniors with more advantaged characteristics, Internet use is presently at near-saturation levels and is comparatively high among their counterparts in older age groups as well. Among disadvantaged seniors, Internet use is far lower among younger seniors and sharply declines among older groups.

There's also an assumption that "young people" are somehow born knowing how to use technology. This assumption is even less valid than the one about seniors. Ask anyone who teaches in a low-income area.

Knowing how to use a smartphone and check Facebook does not constitute digital literacy.

None of us are born with skills. If you grow up in a home without internet access and computers -- or you don't even have a home to grow up in -- how would you become digitally literate?

The American Library Association defines digital literacy as "the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills." This includes:

How to type on a keyboard

How to use a basic word-processing program

How to save a document and how to find it later

How to search the internet – not Facebook. Indeed, understanding the difference between the internet and Facebook requires digital literacy. Facebook has capitalized on the general lack of digital skills by creating an environment that requires skills to leave

It's all the same divide

The digital divide is the same divide that plagues all aspects of our capitalist society. It all comes down to money.

For a time I worked in a library in one of the lowest-income areas of Ontario. Families would rush to the library after work -- because the children's homework was only available online.

Every day, I would watch in horror and frustration as children and teens would lose their work because they didn't know how to save a document, or didn't remember that their work wouldn't be saved on a public computer. Of course library staff tried to help, but there are many customers, not many staff.

Analog shouldn't be dead, but it is

Obviously, services of every kind have moved online. This has many positive impacts, as the internet has expanded our reach in ways unimaginable only decades earlier. But at the same time, analog options have disappeared, and this trend continues to accelerate and expand. Some more recent developments include:

Two-step verification, requiring internet access and a mobile phone. These are both expensive propositions, out of reach of many.

Needing an email address to open an email account. What do first-time emailers do? Librarians have collected some solutions, but most people don't have that information.

In Canada, printed tax forms are no longer available publicly. They are available by special request only.

To enter Canada from another country (including if you are Canadian), you must use an app. Not can use an app; you must use it. Using the app requires a truckload of embedded competencies: you have to scan your passport and upload your covid passport, among other things. Like most apps, there are recursive pieces, opaque bits, decisions to be made -- and frustration, including for the most adept users.

The analog tax: making a flight reservation or booking a rental car by phone costs more than booking it yourself online.

Pay-for-tech-help. Have you bought a TV lately? You can't just plug it in and watch TV. You need an app, an account, and -- if you're not careful and savvy -- you are giving a tech giant access to all your data. Without digital skills, chances are you can't even navigate the landing page, and think you have access only through the tech company's portal.

And of course, covid. As public schools went online, what happened to students without home internet access? Mostly, they disappeared.

This is a safety issue, as people without digital skills are infinitely more vulnerable to phishing and other fraud.

This is a poverty issue, as children from less advantaged families will fall ever-farther behind, until the gap is simply insurmountable to all but the extremely gifted. This is the creation of a new kind of underclass.

This is a labour issue, as companies find ever more ways to hire fewer people and force consumers to do unpaid work. You may be so accustomed to this that you don't even realize it's happened.

People used to answer the phone and ask "How may I direct your call?".

Self-checkout would have been unthinkable. Who wants to work as an unpaid cashier?

But more than anything, this is an issue of social exclusion. Those without digital skills are increasingly confined to a smaller range of options, and that sphere only continues to shrink.

I am not anti technology. I'm anti exclusion and anti poverty.

Those of us who use computers as part of our jobs, and are privileged to have leisure time, have picked up our digital skills over time, often barely registering that it was happening.

People who don't encounter computer skills on a regular basis, and whose use is limited to time in a public library -- or not all -- don't get the sustained, daily repetition that builds solid competencies. These may be tradespeople, people who work outdoors, or people who grew up in homes where parents did not use technology.

In a society that valued all people equally, it would not be difficult to change this. It would be complex and multifaceted, but we could significantly shrink the gap.

We would need:

Public-utility internet access. In 2016, the United Nations declared that access to the internet is a human right. In North America, this could be more closely achieved if internet access was a public utility, rather than a for-profit commercial concern.

Double or triple or quadruple funding for the public library, and use most of it for high-speed internet and public-use computers.

Require governments and companies to always retain analog options, and provide disincentives to do otherwise.

Require businesses to maintain minimum staffing levels at touchpoints that currently assume that everyone is DIY.

As a librarian, I am aware of many programs, funded by sources such as the United Way or directly from the province, that address these issues. They are excellent and important programs, but they are short-term, and very limited in scope and reach. They are a tiny drop in an ocean of need.

labour day 2021: workers want to work less and live more

Lying Flat

We're told there is a labour shortage. Businesses can't find workers. No one wants to work.

Why the shortage exists and what should be done about it are the subjects of much debate, and no small amount of disinformation.

Within this shortage, there are two different streams: one a shortage of workers wanted to perform part-time, low-wage, repetitive jobs, and the other, unfilled positions that come with higher earnings and benefits packages. 

These are different issues, with different causes and consequences -- but they share a root cause: the capitalist work ethic.

Work vs benefits: a baseless claim

There is an idea out there that young people -- so-called millennials -- don't want to work. 

We are told millennials are lazy divas who think work is beneath them. They are immature and irresponsible, so they can't find and keep a job. (This myth also provides an opportunity to blame everyone's favourite scapegoat: mothers.) And of course, the favourite hobbyhorse of the right wing: government aid. People are supposedly living the good life collecting covid benefits. Why work when you can live it up on the gravy train?

No evidence is given for this claim. It never is among people who despise governments that help people, rather than those that strictly to corporate welfare. But in fact, the evidence suggests much the opposite. Economist Paul Krugman asks: 

But have unemployment benefits actually had a major adverse effect on employment? No. State-level job numbers released Friday reinforced the conclusions of earlier studies that found at most a small negative effect.

This time, Republicans inadvertently provided the data needed to refute their own claims. Many red states rushed to cancel enhanced unemployment benefits earlier than their scheduled September expiration. If these benefits were a major force holding back job creation, these states should have seen noticeably faster employment growth than blue states that kept benefits in place. They didn’t.

In reality, much evidence shows that Americans have struggled to access assistance during the pandemic. From The Guardian: 

Workers across America faced long delays in receiving unemployment benefits as state systems were quickly overwhelmed with the mass influx of applications that caused months-long backlogs. Meanwhile, workers who made errors on their applications, had missing records or had their claims flagged had their benefits stopped – and often had difficulty restarting them once problems were resolved.

About 9 million Americans are estimated to have lost work due to the pandemic but received no unemployment benefits.

Sharon Corpening, 60, a freelance writer in Roswell, Georgia, lost all her work contracts when the pandemic shutdowns occurred throughout the US in March last year.

As a gig worker, Corpening’s initial unemployment application was denied by the Georgia department of labor, until the Cares Act provided pandemic unemployment assistance for gig workers a few weeks later. She spent weeks trying to process her application and encountered issues with the unemployment website, and would sit on the phone for hours daily failing to reach a service representative.

Like thousands of Americans having trouble with their unemployment applications, Corpening joined a Facebook group and got involved in helping others through the unemployment process, advocating for systemic reforms and countering narratives that try to portray unemployed workers as “lazy” and “not wanting to work”.

. . . The impacts were detrimental to workers around the US, who fell behind on rent or mortgage or car payments, experienced utility shutoffs and relied on food banks and assistance programs to feed themselves and their families.

The story above mentions a family that was forced to put their special-needs child in a group home -- putting her health in jeopardy -- because they could no longer afford to care for her at home. It mentions a single mother who lost both her jobs through covid but was unable to access benefits from the state of Florida -- a system that Governor Ron DeSantis admitted was purposely designed to be difficult to access. There must be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of stories like these all over North America.

Low-wage work sucks... but if it paid better, it would suck a lot less

I'm willing to concede that some low-wage earners might live better on government assistance than on their crappy jobs. If that's true, the problem is not the benefits. It's the jobs.

I can't possibly say this any better than "Canadian writer Lori Fox in her recent essay in the Globe and Mail: I’m one of the service workers who left the restaurant industry during the pandemic. Serve yourself". Fox's essay is well worth reading in its entirety, but here's a teaser.

I was a server for 15 years. When the pandemic struck a year-and-a-half ago, I was one of millions of food service workers – cooks, bussers, hosts and servers – who were furloughed as the world shut down. I’m also among those who chose not to return to the industry when things began to open back up. I’m one of your missing service workers.

Let me shed some light on the “mystery” of this labour shortage: With an abysmally low rate of pay, bad (often erratic) hours, no sick days and near-constant sexual harassment, racism, sexism and queerphobia, working in service sucks.

And yet that hasn’t stopped pundits, and even some restaurateurs, from decrying our lack of good ol’ fashioned work ethic and blaming the government dole for keeping us from returning to our rightful place: tableside, making them money and waiting on our betters.

What has been said about us – that CERB has kept us from re-entering the work force, that we are lazy and unambitious, that we simply don’t want to work – is ridiculous.

It’s also indicative of the way much of society thinks about working-class bodies: as expendable, interchangeable, replaceable parts of a capitalist machine over which it has ownership. Some people not only feel entitled to our labour, but to pay as little for it as possible.

Let’s be clear, then. It’s not that we don’t want to work – it’s just that we don’t want to work a physically demanding job in substandard conditions without benefits for minimum wage. And we especially don’t want to do that during the rising fourth wave of a pandemic. A study published earlier this year found the risk of death during the pandemic increased 40 per cent for food and agricultural workers in California.

Some of your “missing” workers are not missing. They’re dead.

And Fox is writing in a Canadian context, where the average minimum wage is one-third higher -- and in some cases, double -- that in most US states. And Canadian workers have their health care covered. 

Is it any wonder that workers don't want dead-end, repetitive, poorly-paid jobs, where they are treated like crap, their wages stolen regularly, with no benefits and with no possibility of advancement?

Who would want these jobs? Would you?

Being married to your career also sucks, but in different ways

The other labour shortage involves thousands of vacant positions for people with formal education and work experience. 

Our society abounds with fields where professionals -- never called workers, but if you work for a living, you are a worker! -- are expected to put in horrendously long hours, never or rarely take time off, and often when they do, to be on-call. Lawyers, doctors, and all manner of professionals are expected to "pay their dues" by prioritizing their careers over all else. For many, that's a "choice" never ends.

Then there are the workers who are expected to subsidize their employers with unpaid labour -- educators expected to grade papers at home, social workers whose caseloads are a physical impossibility, health practitioners rushed off their feet and worn out, all day, every day. 

All manner of support staff and public servants fall into this category because of chronic understaffing. Staffing needs are constantly sacrificed to the bottom line, whether that is controlled by profit or by the constant pressure to maintain ever-shrinking budgets in an austerity economic climate. 

In so many fields, workers are expected to sacrifice their personal lives, their family lives, and their mental health, because work is always expected to come first.

Lying flat

Writer Cassady Rosenblum was a producer of a major NPR show; she quit her job, left the city of Boston, and now lives with her parents in rural West Virginia. Obviously, a move like that requires a great deal of privilege. But if we care about the needs of all workers -- indeed, of all people -- that includes people who are well-paid, but over-stressed. 

Rosenblum writes:

As of June, there were more than 10 million job openings in the United States, according to the most recent figures from the Labor Department — the highest number since the government began tracking the data two decades ago. While conservatives blame juiced-up pandemic unemployment benefits, liberals counter that people do want to work, just not for the paltry wages they were making before the pandemic.

Both might be true. But if low wages were all that’s at play, we would expect to see reluctant workers at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and content workers at the top. Instead, there are murmurs of dissent at every rung, including from the inner sanctums of Goldman Sachs, where salaries for investment bankers start at $150,000. According to a leaked internal survey, entry-level analysts at the investment bank report they’re facing “inhumane” conditions, working an average of 98 hours a week, forgoing showers and sleep. “I’ve been through foster care,” said one respondent. “This is arguably worse.”

In China, young people choosing to work less and live simply has taken the form of a movement: tangping: Lying Flat.

A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.

They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.

Mr. Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future.

“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,” Mr. Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”

To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people.

It's what the ruling class has asked of us for centuries. 

Meaningful work can be a great source of satisfaction and fulfilment. But those of us lucky enough to derive challenge, joy, and fulfilment through paid employment know that even the best work can destroy our lives. The human-resources buzzword "work-life balance" makes it very plain: work is not life. Work is a part of our lives but isn't all of our lives.

And for most workers, work is something that, if we're lucky, pays the bills. 

It's time for a four-day workweek

It's no wonder the movement for a four-day workweek is popping up all over the internet -- not just among us lazy socialists but in the business media.

Think of how much more balanced our lives would be with four days of work and three days for ourselves and our families. Think of how much more productive we'd be if we weren't running down the clock every Friday.

Once upon a time, there was no workweek. There was only work. Workers who wanted to spend their sabbath day resting were told "If you don't come in on Sunday, don't come in on Monday" -- meaning if they took a day off, they would be fired. We owe the five-day week -- a once-radical idea that is now enshrined in labour codes the world over -- to labour activism.

It's time to take it one step further.

We toil in a world that does not support us

There are other reasons for the labour shortage: neither American nor Canadian society offers the supports needed to make working possible.

Child care, a basic need of millions of workers, is either nonexistent or unaffordable. 

Public transit is a disgrace, and many workers cannot afford the costs of auto insurance and maintenance. They spend hours transferring from one overcrowded bus to another. Others who can afford cars spend those hours locked in traffic.

Millions of women still face "double duty" -- working full-time plus bearing all family responsibilities. Although this has changed in past decades, it should have gone the way of the rotary phone. But it is still far too common.

And if it weren't for the ridiculously high cost of housing -- the strange fact that the most basic human need is subject to the for-profit system -- I have no doubt that the labour shortage would be exponentially worse. 

Capitalism, internalized

If the idea of a four-day workweek seems foreign and radical, you are experiencing a symptom of a different pandemic: internalized capitalism. Much as we absorb stereotyped gender norms, we have been absorbing capitalist values throughout our lives.

I've been seeing and enjoying this meme in many places.

[By "feeling lazy," we can assume @therapywithlee means believing we are lazy when we need time off from work -- not "feeling lazy" in a pleasant and cozy sense.]

Labour shortage or learning curve?

Ten minutes into the global pandemic, all the cracks in the capitalist system were exposed. The cracks turned into an earthquake. Now we're surveying the wreckage.

The global pandemic has taught us many lessons. Taken together, the lessons have led to one big conclusion: the system doesn't work.  

What will be done with this knowledge is unknown. And it won't happen by accident. 

The ruling class will line up in force to resurrect and maintain the old order. Workers -- working people, all of us -- could prevent that, but only if we are organized and intentional.

Will we use our covid learning to build a better future? One that values our physical and mental well-being over productivity?

It's Labour Day. Demand More.