“This is my first full-time interaction with little bitty ones, and having two is much more tiring than having just one,” he says. 

Juanita Mason, who lives in the same rural North Carolina county as Grimm, at 61 is caring for three children with health challenges resulting from their mother’s drug addiction. What started as a temporary arrangement to take over while her daughter was incarcerated has drastically altered her life plan. Instead of “sittin’ on the porch sipping coffee,” as she says, she spends her days dealing with courts and meeting with social workers in two different counties to complete paperwork and other requirements that will eventually allow her to adopt the children. This past year, she spent three months driving to a specialist more than 200 miles away so that one of them, six-year-old Makinley, could participate in a clinical trial that would get her the medication she needed. “I’m not 20 years old myself anymore,” she says. “I mean, it’s a blessing, but it’s also a shuffle. A shuffle every day.” 

Like millions of other baby boomers, Grimm and Mason celebrated Grandparents Day in September as they do every day: by providing the regular child care that enables the millennial generation to go to work. With the Oct. 1, 2023, cutoff of the American Rescue Plan funding that stabilized the child care sector in 2021—what has been deemed “the child care cliff”—even more families are now likely to turn to grandparents, or other family, friends, or neighbors (“FFNs” in child care parlance) for child care. More than 70,000 child care programs have been projected to close in the year following the cutoff, leaving millions of working parents in the lurch. 

What’s more, there’s clear evidence that the reduction in the child tax credit for 2022 has already tipped about 3 million children back into poverty. A recent report from The Century Foundation estimates that lost productivity and taxes resulting from the demise of federal funding for child care will result in more than $10.6 billion dollars in lost state revenue as parents leave the workforce or cut back their hours to stay home with their kids, and because early educators lose their jobs due to program closures. 

Grandparents are likely going to pick up much of the slack for this lapse in public investment and federal support of the hidden economy supporting America’s worker-parents. And today’s grandparents already feel exhausted, stressed, out of the early education loop, and out of practice. 

Already, grandparents and other FFNs represent the most common form of care for infants and toddlers, according to the National Survey of Early Care and Education, especially among immigrant families, dual-language families, and families with low-income backgrounds. Many grandparents, like Grimm and Mason, volunteer to take on the lion’s share of child care duties to prop up their adult children’s household finances, or stand in for parents struggling with addiction, mental health crises, incarceration, and poverty, or who just have unreliable transportation. Even in difficult circumstances, kinship care often protects children from further trauma and stokes their resilience with a sense of belonging. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” concedes Mason, “but I sure could use more help.” 

Mason’s statement reveals what’s deeply flawed at the heart of America’s broken child care policy. Families are expected to bear the full cost of care and early childhood education, but that cost is out of reach for many. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said, “It does not work for the caregivers. It does not work for the parents. It does not work for the kids. And because it does not work for them, it does not work for the country.” 

“Child care is not just a private family problem,” says Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative that works with home-based child care providers around the country. “We must recognize it as a public good, care that nurtures young children’s development, enables parents to work and go to school, and that supports local employers and the community as a whole. And we should fund it as a public good, through programs that strengthen the infrastructure for child care, including subsidies and supports for grandparents who are taking care of their children’s children.”

Federal Investment Could Change the Calculus of Child Care 

Grimm’s son-in-law works for a wholesale greenhouse, and his daughter works for The Family Place, a hub that provides information and support groups for parents and families. Together the two make enough to pay their monthly bills, but not enough to also pay Grimm for the time and effort he puts into caring for his grandchildren. 

Grimm’s wife also still works full time as a high school principal. For elders without ample retirement income or good health, and for working parents without nearby family, the child care problem is even more fraught. The cost of child care averages more than 20% of family income in the United States, and there simply aren’t enough affordable child care centers available to serve today’s working parents. 

Transylvania County, North Carolina, where both Grimm and Mason live, sprawls across 381 square miles, with a population of about 35,000. There are only two licensed home-based child care providers in the county, plus a handful of part-time, church-based programs, and four full-day child care centers for children age 5 and under. These programs typically have long waiting lists for few openings. When the American Rescue Plan funding ends, the number of child care centers is likely to drop precipitously and parents and grandparents will be left to foot the bill through their labor or their pocketbooks.

Moreover, grandparents often take on the duty of care for grandchildren in the midst of their own financial, health, or other challenges. Mason used to work full time at a local grocery store. “I was planning to work until 65,” she explains, “but I had to quit because the day care shut down during COVID and there was no one to care for the youngest.” 

Since losing her health care benefits and income, Mason has scrambled to get herself and the kids back on Medicaid and food stamps. With no child support from the children’s biological parents, she’s grateful for the gift certificates she gets as an incentive for participating in a network of FFNs facilitated by Smart Start Transylvania, money she puts toward modest Christmas gifts for the kids. Meanwhile, she rides a roller coaster of daily child care demands. 

“The day care [center] isn’t open on Friday,” she says. “I have to enroll the toddler to get some days and keep him eligible for summer care, but the hours are not really enough. I pick up the older one from school, then go get the toddler, then wrestle the youngest one’s booster seat into the car, and sometimes I have to take all three to the doctor’s office and then wait an hour and a half. It’s hard!”

Mason shares her story with other parents, plus more than a handful of grandmas and grandpas, gathered in a circle of plastic chairs at The Family Place. Networks like this one provide crucial moral support for caregivers. “Taking care of children can be a thankless task,” says Chelsea Stewart, who facilitates the group. “We want [caregivers] to feel seen and valued and empowered, because they are nurturing human beings, preparing children to be successful at school and eventually in our community. That’s an important contribution not just to their own families but also to society.” 

But recognition and appreciation don’t go far enough. What’s really needed is support and compensation for home-based child care. The care grandparents and other FFNs provide enables millions of earners to power the economic engine of our economy. Those who provide care without pay save their grandchildren’s families more than $10,000 per year, and many sacrifice their health, finances, and social networks in the bargain. Broad-based federal programs like the Child Tax Credit, which in 2021 provided up to $3,600 per child that could be used to pay for child care and other expenses, had a demonstrated positive impact on child and family well-being, reducing the child poverty rate to its lowest level in 50 years. 

Reinstating, expanding, or establishing new programs to buttress the child care sector promises similar gains, says Renew. Some states have taken measures to find a path along, but not over, the cliff. Fourteen states have passed some form of an expanded (and sometimes refundable) child tax credit. Some states choose to use federal child care funds to compensate grandparents and other relative caregivers; New York’s Child Care Assistance Program subsidizes legally exempt home-based caregivers, including grandparents. Colorado’s philanthropically funded pilot of the Thriving Providers Project gives FFNs a no-strings-attached income boost for up to 18 months. New Mexico’s recent early childhood education constitutional amendment paves the way for families of all backgrounds to afford child care, including care provided by grandparents or other FFNs. Private employers are also stepping up, extending parental leave to grandparents who take time off to care for grandchildren. 

Still, these private- and state-level initiatives are no substitute for federal action and relief for FFNs of all incomes and in all zip codes, Renew says. Advocates are asking Congress to allocate $16 billion for emergency child care funding; along with these funds, they want the Biden Administration to clarify to states that these funds can and should be used to support relative and neighbor child care providers, including grandparents. Proposed legislation like the American Family Act would permanently reinstate the refundable Child Tax Credit established in 2021, giving families more flexible funding to support their informal child care arrangements. Strengthening the infrastructure for home-based child care by sustaining the grandparents who are already bringing up baby gives families more viable and affordable choices. It’s the break—and the paycheck—grandparents who are raising young children have earned.

Support for this project was provided by Better Life Lab at New America.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 8:05 a.m. PDT on Oct. 3, 2023 to correct the ages of William Grimm’s grandchildren. Read our corrections policy here.

Barrett is also a grassroots leader at We Dream in Black, a project of National Domestic Workers Alliance and the political home of Black domestic workers in the U.S., and the Miami Workers Center. “When hurricanes hit, we leave our homes and families behind and are asked to shelter in place with our clients,” Barrett says. “Home care workers are often the first responders in a climate emergency, and yet, we rarely get the recognition or resources we deserve for our labor and efforts. As we experienced this past year with COVID, it is care workers who hold up the economy in a crisis.” 

Invisible Drivers of the Care Economy 

Nearly 2.3 million home care workers provide lifesaving personal assistance and health care support to the elderly and people with disabilities. This indispensable and often invisible labor is powered overwhelmingly by immigrant women of color—Black, Latinx and Asian—who struggle to make a dignified living wage, some making as little as $7 per hour. As a result, almost 1 in 5 care workers live in poverty. 

Alma Santana empathizes with the angst of millions of America’s workers. As a Mexican domestic worker living in California, Santana has experienced the multiple crises facing many of the workers in the U.S.: immigration and gender vulnerabilities, racism, and economic inequities. Santana is a member of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a Latina immigrant women-led grassroots group with a mission for personal transformation and building community power for gender and economic justice. 

“As a domestic worker, I have not been given the respect or the care I have shown to my employers,” Santana says. “I have taken care of your children, elders, and homes, and it’s now time to fight for my rights.”

Santana is among thousands of domestic and care workers in California who have worked through raging wildfires and smoke, commuting long distances, often without adequate public transit access during disasters. “In California with all the wildfires, I am seeing my colleagues struggle with asthma. We risk our lives with lung infections due to all the smoke and ash,” she says. 

On July 13, Santana and Barrett joined a delegation of care and domestic workers in Washington, D.C., for the “Care is Essential” national day of action, demanding Congress recognize what they believe to be an indisputable fact: care workers are on the front line of crises caused by climate change. “Together we are sending a message that care is essential work, and bold investments from Congress will make us all resilient in the face of climate change, which is here to stay,” Barrett says.

Care Jobs are Green Jobs 

“Put some respect on our checks!” care workers chanted at the march in Washington. This national action was organized by the Service Employees International Union and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who believe that home care jobs are central to a healthy future for all. 

Margaret Kwateng, the National Green New Deal Organizer at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, emphasizes that care jobs are green jobs. “Care jobs are local jobs with a small carbon footprint, like home health care and child care,” she says. “Investing in these jobs supports thousands of families and provides opportunities for workers transitioning out of fossil fuel industries to more equitably access jobs in the green economy.”

Kwateng also underscores that the movement of care workers is led by Black, Latinx, and Asian and Pacific Islander women workers, who have visionary solutions for people and the planet. “We must create a culture of collective care for our workers as well,” she says. “Building a healthy economy includes visibilizing and investing in women workers who play such a critical role in the well-being and stability of all our families and communities.” 

Rewriting the Future of America

This feminist movement of care workers has won the hearts of some congressional leaders who are exhorting Congress to invest boldly on climate and green jobs. U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, gave a fiery speech on July 20 at a “Go Bigger on Climate, Care, and Justice” event, in support of big investments for care, climate, and jobs at a rally organized by the Green New Deal Network. Jayapal passionately advocated for strengthening the care economy and investing in Medicaid, home, and community-based services. “It means creating home care jobs. It means establishing paid leave and making child care universal. That is the care economy that we need to invest in. … This is the beginning of a fight to rewrite the future of America,” she said. Jayapal also noted that it’s time for “corporations and the ultra-rich to pay their fair share” of taxes.   

“Even though we are essential, we don’t have dignified jobs, and we are struggling financially,” Martha Herrera, a member of Mujeres Unidas y Activas said at the July 13 domestic workers’ action in D.C.  “I am demanding protection for my health and the health of my community as we face climate disasters. We can’t keep risking the lives of workers.” As Republicans launched concerted attacks for budget cuts in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the last resort for meaningful investments for climate, care, and green jobs now remains in a unique process called budget reconciliation. It’s now a race against time for care workers and Green New Deal Network members, like Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and the Indigenous Environmental Network, who are demanding passage of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill, including $400 billion set aside for the care economy. 

In late August, there was a glimmer of hope: House Democrats passed the budget resolution bill, ending a stalemate between House Speaker Pelosi and centrists in her own party. Now that the House and Senate Democrats have both passed their resolutions, Congress must quickly draft and pass the full budget reconciliation bill.

After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August released a damning report citing human activity as being responsible for the unprecedented rate of climate change, many front-line groups expressed disappointment that their alarms were ignored for years. “For front-line communities, our care workers and Indigenous communities, facing generations of environmental and climate injustice, we and our loved ones have been living with climate disaster,” says Adrien Salazar, policy director of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. “We know firsthand that the climate crisis is here and accelerating.” Salazar believes this Congressional budget could be historic. “This budget package that Congress is negotiating comes at a critical crossroads. This could be a transformative investment in climate solutions, the care economy, and racial justice. We have the opportunity to take a big step towards shifting our economy away from extraction and suffering, towards stewardship and care, and build a society in which we all thrive.”

But reproductive health isn’t just about abortions, despite all the attention the procedures get. It’s also about access to family planning services, contraception, sex education and much else—all of which have also been under threat in recent years.

Such access lets women control the timing and size of their families so they have children when they are financially secure and emotionally ready and can finish their education and advance in the workplace. After all, having children is expensive, typically costing almost $15,000 a year for a middle-class family. For low-income working families, child care costs alone can eat up over a third of earnings.

And that’s why providing Americans with a full range of reproductive health options is good for the economy and simultaneously essential to the financial security of women and their families. As a law professor who represents people experiencing poverty, I believe doing the opposite threatens not only the physical health of women but their economic well-being too.

The Economics of Contraception

A Supreme Court majority acknowledged as much in 1992, stating in its Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey decision:

“The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

But in recent years, the right to control their reproductive health has become increasingly illusory for many women, particularly the poor. Given their focus on limiting access to abortion, you might assume that conservative politicians would support policies that help women avoid unintended pregnancies. But conservative attacks on birth control are escalating, even though 99% of sexually active women of reproductive age have used some form of it, such as an IUD, patch, or pill, at least once.

In addition to its widely recognized health and autonomy benefits for women, contraception directly boosts the economy. In fact, research shows access to the pill is responsible for one-third of women’s wage gains since the 1960s. And this benefit extends to their kids. Children born to mothers with access to family planning benefit from a 20% to 30% increase in their own incomes over their lifetimes, as well as boosting college completion rates.

Not surprisingly, in a 2016 survey, 80% of women said birth control had a positive effect on their lives, including 62% reporting that it reduces stress and 56% saying it helps them to keep working.

Disparities in Access

Still, there is a class divide in contraception access, as evidenced by disparities in the 2011 rate of unintended pregnancies—the latest data available. While the overall rate fell to 45% that year from 51% in 2008, the figure for women living at or below the poverty line, although also decreasing, was five times that of women at the highest income level.

One reason for this disparity is the cost of birth control, particularly for the most effective, longest-lasting forms. For instance, it typically costs women over $1,000 for an IUD and the procedure to insert it, amounting to about one month’s full-time pay for a minimum-wage worker lacking insurance coverage.

These costs are significant, given that the average American woman will have about two children and will thus need contraception for at least three decades of her life. Unfortunately, publicly funded family planning meets only 54% of the need, and these funding streams are under constant attack by conservatives.

Not surprisingly, health insurance makes a difference, and women with coverage are much more likely to use contraceptive care. And yet about 6.2 million women who need contraception lack insurance coverage. Further, this coverage can be denied to millions of employees and their dependents who work for employers claiming a religious or moral objection under a Supreme Court ruling in 2020.

Sex Education and the Economic Ladder

Another key to reproductive health—and one that isn’t discussed enough—is sexual education for teenagers.

For years, the public has spent up to $110 million a year on abstinence-only programs, which not only fail to reduce teen birth rates but also reinforce gender stereotypes and are rife with misinformation. Low-income minority teens are particularly subject to these programs. Teens without knowledge about their sexual health are more likely to get pregnant and less likely to work, spiraling them to the bottom of the economic ladder.

Access to Abortion

Then there’s the issue of abortion. Let’s start with the cost.

Half of women who obtain an abortion pay more than one-third of their monthly income for the procedure. The longer a woman must wait—either because state law requires it or she needs to save up the money, or both—costs rise significantly. Studies show that women who cannot access abortion are three times as likely to fall into poverty than women who obtained abortions.

In addition to the financial burden, many states are enacting laws designed to limit abortion access. These laws hit low-income women particularly hard. Since Roe was decided, states have enacted 1,320 restrictions on abortion, including waiting periods, mandatory counseling sessions, and onerous restrictions on clinics. In 2021 alone, states passed 90 such laws.

Hyde and Health

Another way in which U.S. policy on abortions exacerbates economic inequality, especially for women of color, is through the ban on federal funding. It has been so since the 1976 enactment of the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal Medicaid funds from being used for abortions except in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.

Denying poor women coverage for abortion under Medicaid contributes to the unintended birth rates that are seven times as high for poor women as for high-income women.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court, poor women would be affected the most. Women who are denied abortions are more likely to end up in poverty, be unemployed, and turn to public assistance.

By contrast, economists have established that the legalization of abortion led to improved educational, employment, and earnings outcomes for women, as well as for their children.

Politicians cannot promise to grow the economy and simultaneously limit access to abortion, birth control, and sexual education. America’s economic health and women’s reproductive health are linked.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 27, 2016.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. It has been lightly edited for YES! Media.

Led by the Illinois Labor History Society, Chicago’s Labor History Tours offer a “people’s history” of the Windy City and an alternative to the more traditional guided walking or bus tours chock-full of nationalist monuments, displays of institutional or monarchical power, and squares and statues named for White men. A growing number of tours like this one have emerged in cities across the globe in recent years, uncovering local labor histories, Black histories, or other stories of the historical actors often left out of our standard textbooks and tourist experiences. 

The term “people’s history” was popularized by historian Howard Zinn in his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present, which revisits U.S. history from the perspective of Indigenous Americans, enslaved Africans, and the working classes from the arrival of Columbus to the 20th century. Zinn calls people’s history “a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance,” and his text and those that have followed in its tradition tell stories of groups that are underrepresented in curricula, pop culture, and tourist experiences, like city and museum tours. 

These histories include working-class histories and the histories of marginalized groups, like migrants, the queer community, and people of color—and all the ways these groups overlap. In the United States and Europe, LGBTQ+-inclusive histories have begun to be introduced to some school curricula. But inclusion is often met with pushback, and anti-LGBTQ+ curriculum laws persist in some states. Meanwhile, people of color are under-represented at every level of classroom education, from the children’s books to the Advanced Placement U.S. history curriculum. 

Representation is also uneven in the tourism sector. In 2020, the Black Travel Alliance reported that “Black people are under-represented at all levels within the travel industry,” including destination management organizations, travel-related retail and financial services brands, and travel press. According to data from Zippia, more than three-quarters of travel journalists are White, meaning the stories that we read about travel are also filtered through a White lens.

Organizations that offer tourist experiences rooted in people’s histories seek to disrupt these narratives. “The story of the labor movement, and especially the thousands of events that have built this middle class, are usually not taught well or taught at all,” says Larry Spivack. As president of the Illinois Labor History Society, Spivack says his organization’s mission has been to reclaim the narrative and “tell the story of the profound significance of labor history in the Illinois region.”

Its Labor History Tours are part of this work. The tours are made-to-order for local community groups, union conventions, visiting researchers, or tourists interested in learning more about Chicago’s workers movements, and can be led as walking or bus tours. Spivack, who has been leading tours since the ’90s, long before he became president of the organization in 2006, says everyone who joins him learns something new.

“When people find out that the benefits inured to them in workplaces are from people’s history, organizing, collective action—they’re shocked,” he says. The experience also reminds visitors that everyday people like themselves are historical actors with the power to shape the future. Spivack says visitors often leave the tour wanting to get engaged in their union or organization after hearing the stories of Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons, Chicago-based labor organizers who Spivack says “were part of this historical collective action that gave us a much better society.”

“People are interested in the idea that history is created by people, and that we can be part of that,” says Kathryn Lloyd, senior director of programs and interpretation at the Tenement Museum in New York City. Like the Illinois Labor History Society, the Tenement Museum is committed to introducing visitors to understudied histories. Its guided tours through preserved tenement apartments and neighborhoods on the Lower East Side center on the waves of working-class European, Jewish, and Black migrants who lived in tenement buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

“It’s this idea of looking at the stories of people who weren’t considered important in their time, and really lifting up those stories to see them as essential stories for understanding U.S. history,” says Lloyd of the Tenement Museum’s guiding mission. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people developed a heightened sense of living through history, which has driven visitors to the Tenement Museum since it resumed programming following pandemic closures. “We really hope to have people come away with the sense that they are also part of history, and we can all be active participants in shaping the future,” says Lloyd.

By encouraging visitors to see themselves as historical actors and raising tough questions about who has been left out of commonly told histories, these organizations also tie their work to current discussions about social justice in tourism, the classroom, and out on the street. “The work that we’re doing is all about the history of resistance against racism, anti-imperialism, Black Power, activism,” says Tony Warner, founder of Black History Walks, an organization offering tours, educational talks, and films about Black histories in London. 

Warner founded Black History Walks in 2007 after taking several walking tours around London, where Black histories were conspicuously absent. “I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous. There must be some Black history here,’” recalls Warner. Based on research in historical sources and oral history interviews conducted with family and neighborhood sources, Warner developed a tour through the St. Paul’s/Bank area, one of London’s oldest neighborhoods, highlighting the heretofore hidden history of African people, influences, and resources that led to British colonial wealth. “It was things that I’d seen, things that my family experienced, and also things like reading books,” he says. “Then you bring it to life [on the tour].”

What was meant to be a single event has grown beyond Warner’s wildest dreams. “I had two people on the very first walk,” he says. “I was going to call it a day after that. But they liked it so much. They said I should do it again.” Black History Walks now offers 12 walking tours through different London neighborhoods, a bus tour, and even a Thames River cruise. Its bus tours accommodate up to 72 people at a time, and the river cruise often sells out at 150.

Warner says his organization’s programming has grown more popular with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and particularly in the wake of the George Floyd protests that rocked the United States and rippled across the globe in the summer of 2020. “When BLM came along, [that momentum] just kind of melded into what we’re doing already.”

The Tenement Museum has also been ramping up programming around Black history. Its Reclaiming Black Spaces initiative started by developing a new neighborhood walking tour in spring 2019 that highlights Black history on the Lower East Side going as far back as the mid-17th century. 

“One of the common misconceptions is that Black New Yorkers or African Americans came [to New York City] during the Great Migration,” the project’s lead researcher Lauren O’Brien said in a radio interview on WNYC. But a tour through the Lower East Side shows that “Black New Yorkers have been a part of the city since its founding.”

For these organizations, part of their work is challenging the standard sources used to write histories and working with and giving back to local communities, descendants, or folks otherwise affected by their work in both history-telling and tourism. The Tenement Museum exemplifies this approach in its recent work on Black histories, partnering with descendants of Black tenement residents; Black history institutions, like the African Burial Ground National Monument; and Black artists, like Rashidah Ismaili, to develop museum programming.

In London, Black History Walks pursues similar partnerships, offers free programming, and keeps tour prices as low as possible—at least one-third less expensive than the average city tour, according to Warner—to ensure its work remains accessible. The organization also installs plaques to mark famous Black people and spaces around London, like one commemorating Black British Civil Rights leader Darcus Howe, unveiled at the site of a former Race Today Collective office in south London earlier this year. 

Similarly, in Chicago, the Illinois Labor History Society is overseeing the restoration of a mural honoring the city’s packinghouse workers, which the society initially commissioned in 1974. These initiatives make Black and working-class history more visible.

In his text, Zinn embraces this type of engagement and activist scholarship, writing that people’s histories “lean in a certain direction,” opposite dominant historiographies. With commemorative plaques, murals, and people’s history tours, locals and visitors are invited to see destinations in new ways, disrupt historically exclusionary narratives, and become active participants in shaping a more just future. 

Many other organizations do similar work, including the Los Angeles Explorers Club, San Francisco-based Cruisin’ the Castro, and Seattle-based Salish Sea Tours, which offer tours on Chicanx, queer, and Indigenous histories, respectively. Published guidebooks, like Revolutionary Berlin: A Walking Guide and Revolutionary Dublin 1912–1923: A Walking Guide also support self-guided treks steeped in radical history. 

“We see a lot of tourists that come to us because this feels like history that you can’t get in textbooks, and I think that’s happening all over the world,” says Lloyd. “We have this sense that we can get deeper histories by thinking about our own stories, what is represented, what is not, and why.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:25 a.m. PDT on June 7, 2022 to correct the photo credits. Read our corrections policy here.

With a new union boom and wave of strike actions sweeping the nation, organizers are beginning to engage these collections and think about preserving their work today to help write the labor histories of tomorrow. 

“As people become more engaged in social movements, I think they start to look around for examples of what came before,” says Tobias Higbie, professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This was true for museum workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), who voted to unionize in affiliation with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 47 (AFSCME DC 47) in August 2020. After two years of failed negotiations, union members voted to authorize a strike, which began this September. 

Juliet Vinegra, project manager of the museum’s library and archives, says seeing images of former activists, artists, and museum workers involved in labor action was meaningful, even emotional, during the union’s strike. “It shows generations have been doing this work,” she says.

The strike lasted three weeks, until the union reached a contract agreement with the museum administration in mid-October. During that time, Vinegra and her colleagues began thinking about preserving their own history-making action. 

“After hearing many union members comment on the value of documenting and saving these moments in a sort of archive, Tim Tiebout [a museum photographer] suggested we start one and gather a committee to make it happen,” says Vinegra. 

Within a week of the contract agreement, the union’s executive board voted to create an archives committee to preserve the history of the union and the strike. Vinegra co-chairs the committee of eight with Emily Rice, a collections assistant in the European Painting and Sculpture department.

At its first meeting, the archives committee tackled practical questions: Where will the archive be held? Who will access it, and how? What is the committee going to collect and preserve?

Organizing a union and going on strike generates a lot of documents, social media content, photographs, and other material items, like signs, stencils, and buttons, which archivists call “ephemera.” Deciding what to preserve and how to store it is essential to developing a valuable and accessible collection. 

Daniel Goldener, the archivist responsible for the American Federation of Teachers collection at the Reuther Library, says archivists make these difficult decisions in accordance with legal guidelines and by determining the historical value of items. “What we’re looking for is [items that show] how the union grew or didn’t grow, where it failed in organizing, or its accomplishments in organizing,” he says. 

Documents like press releases, planning documents, minutes of meetings, and collective bargaining agreements are preserved because they contain critical details about the inner workings of the union or organization. On the other hand, documents that serve an administrative purpose that wanes over time, like most financial records, are not usually preserved beyond their utility. 

The PMA Union archive, whose physical items will be stored at the headquarters of AFSCME DC 47 in Philadelphia, will hold the usual documents and unique ephemera collected during the historic strike. Vinegra says some of her favorite items are a collection of what she calls “love letters,” uplifting notes written by supporters on brightly colored index cards and distributed during the strike. Each morning, she would photograph one of the cards and send it around to strike captains. 

Rice says the archives committee has also discussed collecting oral histories, meaning recorded interviews with strike captains or other union members, which will detail their personal experiences of the events. “I think that those have the potential to be very interesting and important documentation, and I think we’ll learn a lot from them,” she says. 

In the short term, the PMA Union Archives Committee hopes its archive will be useful to other organizers. “This could help other people get started on unionizing,” says Vinegra. The committee is keeping this in mind as it decides how to organize its materials. “We want to do it in phases, almost like providing materials for a toolkit for people to use.”

Aliqae Geraci, director of the Reuther Library, says usefulness and accessibility are always priorities when processing an archival collection. There are several ways archivists make a collection legible to researchers, including adding labels and item descriptions, populating items in a searchable catalog, and developing a “finding aid,” a document that describes the collection and helps users navigate it.

But accessibility goes beyond just making a collection coherent to researchers. History can be inaccessible to those outside the historical profession, because most people don’t know where or how to look for it. Geraci says archives can also be intimidating. “That’s where the human touch and the role of the archivist in mediating access is so important,” she says.

The Reuther Library makes great efforts to engage with communities outside the historical profession and the boundaries of the university. The team tables at local events, including labor-related events, heritage festivals, summer fairs, and Motor City Pride.

The Reuther Library archivists also offer customized information sessions or courses for interested groups, host workshops for the general public, and lead personalized tours for union members interested in learning about their own union’s collection. “When we give tours, we tell them, ‘This is your history. We care for it, and we’re so proud to do that. But this belongs to you,’” says Geraci.

Because the Reuther Library team makes collections as accessible as possible, they get a diverse group of researchers, including organizers and activists, in the reading room. “The lessons of yesterday inform the campaigns of today,” says Geraci. “Whether it’s learning about techniques … or utilizing some of the records to build excitement, fervor, inspiration over the course of a campaign—there’s definitely a worker education element to maintaining historical records.”

Besides providing a toolkit and inspiration for today’s organizers, labor-related archival collections provide critical historical context about the labor movement. They help us understand and narrate stories about what the labor movement looked like at certain points in history, where it is now, and where it might be going. 

Higbie says archivists today cannot tailor collections for future historians, because there’s no way to know what future historians will be looking for and writing about. But archivists can help shape history by ensuring collections are diverse and reflect workers’ voices.

“There’s an old adage that the winners write the history,” says Higbie. “One of the reasons why the victors write the history is because they collect the archives.” 

Sometimes, documents with historical value simply haven’t been preserved and may never be recovered. “Many of the participants in the grassroots movements of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t have the resources to preserve their own personal papers, and so the nuance of the archive is not necessarily collected,” explains Higbie.

Other times, labor historians can use unexpected collections to piece together labor histories. They often use corporate archives, for example. But the experiences of workers represented in those collections are limited, because corporate archives reflect the interests of the corporation. “As you can imagine, the employer doesn’t necessarily want to know, might not care, or might want to get rid of evidence of independent working-class organizing,” explains Higbie. 

To find the labor movement in these collections, historians must read against the grain, looking past dominant narratives about the growth or evolution of the corporation and instead scrutinizing silences or contradictions in the documents to reveal alternative histories. 

When organizers come together to preserve their documents and ephemera, they are doing what they can to give future historians a more nuanced view of the labor movement at this point in time. They are doing people’s history, and they know it. “This is necessary,” reads the PMA union’s statement on the creation of its Archives Committee. “We’ve seen how easily the wealthy and powerful rewrite history, glorify themselves and erase working people.”

Those working on archives, such as the one the PMA Union is building or those held at the Reuther Library, believe that, from these collections, today’s workers can learn practical organizing strategies and draw inspiration, and tomorrow’s historians can tell more nuanced, detailed, and diverse stories. 

Higbie says these collections and the stories they hold also have significant implications for the evolution of today’s re-emerging labor movement, as they help workers see themselves as historical actors and parts of a collective. “Having these archives, telling these stories, on the one hand, just preserves something that was important from the past, a voice from the past that otherwise would be lost and deprive us of the richness of our society,” he says. “But it is also a resource for people to see themselves in the story of the past, present, and future.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 8:260 a.m. PST on Dec. 21, 2022 to correct the main photo caption, which misidentified the date and location of the image. Read our corrections policy here.

Unfortunately, right now 90% of these laborers fighting for union recognition will fail when faced with employer resistance. For the past half-century, union opponents have steadily chipped away at the rules protecting workers’ rights—in courts, in laws, and in our American culture. We’ve reached the point where there are many barriers to winning a union election. Even though the National Labor Relations Board changed a landmark rule to protect union rights in August 2023, organizing rights are not fully protected and can be changed on the whim of the administration in power. 

Rest assured, there’s a better way. It’s time for progressives to launch a push for something called card check elections. 

To understand both the problem and the solution, we first need a little union history. After the great age of union agitation in the 1920s and 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal reforms, passed two urgently needed laws: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which protected workers to a degree never previously seen. Among other safeguards, these laws outlined the rules for unionizing and bargaining with employers without fear of retaliation. These acts helped usher in a golden age of American unions. 

However, over the last 80 years, conservative movements like the Tea Party and groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have—bit by bit, regulation by regulation, and court case by court case—managed to weaken or dismantle many of these protections.

That’s not to say collective bargaining doesn’t exist. It does, as we’ve seen with the recently announced labor deal with the United Auto Workers, which established substantial pay increases and improved working conditions. But as the right-leaning federal government (yes, even Democratic administrations have been less-than-friendly to unions for decades now) scorches our current path to unionizing, it is becoming easier for employers to legally block workers’ attempts to protect their rights. 

The $340 million anti-union industry is stomping all over our forgotten laborers. (Don’t forget that someone cut down the trees that provided shade for striking SAG-AFTRA workers in last summer’s heat.) According to MIT professor Thomas Kochan, less than 10% of workers’ efforts to unionize succeed when employers resist. 

In addition to the union process being extremely friendly to business, it is long and arduous. Right now, union organizers must get the support of 30% of a business’s employees just to file a petition asking to hold an election to unionize. Once that’s filed, the employer is notified and has the option to accept the union flat out, without waiting for the vote. (Once in a blue moon that does happen, such as in the case of Major League Baseball.) 

In most cases, the employer declines. If they make it to the voting stage, union organizers and employers negotiate to establish the rules of the union election—covering logistics such as the time and place of the election. Then, union organizers must persuade a majority of eligible workers to vote in favor of a union. To block unions, employers deploy aggressive tools like anti-union propaganda, threats of termination, increased employee monitoring, and reduced hours to remove benefits eligibility. All this makes it nearly impossible for workers to fight for and win unions—and often leaves employees in the crappy position they were in before.

But there’s another way. 

In 2008, Senator Ted Kennedy introduced the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have allowed the NLRB to certify a union without employer approval and an official election. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party did not make that bill a priority at the time. But it offers an opportunity we can organize around and pressure lawmakers into passing now: “card check” unionizing. 

The two-step card check process is simple and efficient, making it vastly easier for workers to unionize. First, more than 50% of employees would need to sign “authorization cards” in favor of a union. Once that happens, union organizers could file paperwork to establish the union. 

It’s that simple. No employer recognition would be required, and there would be less time and money spent on campaigning for the union, not to mention less red tape. This process would help everyone, from the Starbucks barista to the Amazon warehouse employee to the overworked graduate student. And that’s important. Workers don’t organize a union for fun; they know they’re risking their jobs and security, and do so only when they really need one—because of unsafe working conditions, unfair labor practices, and low wages and benefits. Card check would make organizing collectively far more achievable, and on a schedule that could actually deliver timely relief. 

It’s true, though, that with the card check method, employees’ votes would be public, which some worry would lead to more employer coercion and retaliation. It’s also possible that without highly regulated federal processes where the government facilitates the election, the burden of organizing will be placed on the employees—especially in large companies.

These are the kinds of objections that organizers and policymakers can figure out solutions to as they go. We needn’t remove the current union organizing process, which has worked for some groups. But if we want to empower all workers in all companies, the card check method is one new tool we can use to get past the conservative dismantling of employee protections. Indeed, the card check method is effective in promoting unionizing efforts across levels of government, both federally (as we see in Sweden) and at local levels (such as in Quebec and British Columbia). 

The card check method has made its way around the U.S. legislative branch, having been introduced in five different Congressional sessions. We can urge our representatives to re-introduce the bill in Congress and work with AFL-CIO to make the card check method a suitable reality for our laborers. 

So let’s learn from strikers; let’s organize. Progressives have forced the Democrats to champion such issues as student loan debt cancellation and universal health care. We can further organize around protecting the long-term health of our employees that looks beyond 2024. Let’s bring our union rates back up. Let’s protect employees. Let’s take the power back from corporate greed and show lawmakers who have the real power in this country: the everyday worker.

Vasquez, 17, is the youngest of three siblings in a household of four. Her mother, the family’s sole provider, works as a hotel housekeeper, but even with her income and access to dry goods from the local church pantry and food bank, it’s still hard to keep food in the fridge. Vasquez says her mother had to take out payday loans with super-high interest rates just to buy essentials like milk and water, and when they shop, they’d catch the bus to the least expensive grocery store and load up on what seemed like a lifetime supply of instant ramen noodle soup. Even though her family depends on ramen, Vasquez says the soups do more harm than good, especially since her mom and sister are diabetic.

“It’s like 50 cents for one cup of Ramen, but it’s like 300 calories in one cup,” Vasquez says. “We learn in school you need to have your veggies, your proteins, your meat, but [ramen noodles] have no source of vegetables, no source of protein, no source of healthy fats, or anything like that.”

Not knowing where her next healthy meal would come from each day had taken a toll on her, both socially and mentally. At school, she was too embarrassed to chat with friends about food, and she found herself battling to stay focused in the classroom, which was problematic, because she has ambitions to attend college after graduation.

In the waiting room at St. John’s, a worker with Stop the Spread, an organization that helped local institutions like the St. John’s clinic support underserved neighborhoods hit hard by the pandemic, offered to enroll Vasquez’s family in Bento, a pilot health-intervention program that uses text messages to connect food-insecure people and families to prepaid groceries and full-balance meals. (Stop the Spread fulfilled its charter in December 2021 and ceased operations.)

According to Pew Research Center, 97% of all Americans now own a cell phone of some kind, and federal government assistance programs provide eligible low-income individuals with free phones and unlimited texting plans.

In addition, 38.3 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while Feeding America, a hunger-relief organization, projected that number would jump to 42 million the following year (the final data for 2021 have not been released yet) as a result of the pandemic.

Research has also shown correlations between food insecurity and cardiometabolic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes, and a 2019 study funded by the National Institutes of Health estimated that these diseases drive $50 billion a year in health care costs.

The first test market for what became Bento was in Texas in March 2020, when it was used to help the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston with the growing number of families and children in need of food due to pandemic-related job losses and school closures.

Now spun off into its own for-profit company, Bento sees eliminating food insecurity as a component of preventive health care.

“And if we’re dealing with a low-income population, that part of the health care system are Medicaid members, which is a taxpayer-supported program,” says company co-founder Adam Dole. “So, at the end of the day, this is a taxpayer issue that has never been thought of as a taxpayer issue.”

The Bento Model

Bento’s text messaging software is integrated with other online ordering platforms, such as Postmates, allowing clients to order meals and groceries tailored to their dietary needs. That data is gathered, logged, and automated during enrollment in the program.

Bento plans to eventually sell its intervention program to the health care industry—especially health insurance companies—because they have the scale needed to improve the health of low-income, food-insecure populations as a whole, Dole says. As the service rolls out in test markets, Dole says the company will be analyzing the health outcomes of Bento participants to gather more data. They expect to find that focusing on preventive health care results in lower costs for taxpayers and insurance plans that depend on public funding.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that we have to be a nonprofit to address food insecurity,” Dole says. “We support nonprofits. We want them to exist, but we recognize that that alone isn’t going to solve the problem. There are not enough donations in our country to solve food insecurity.”

Establishing relationships and secure contracts with the health care industry takes a long time, Dole says, so Bento pitched its initial rollout to smaller community organizations that serve food-insecure individuals and families.

Stop the Spread was one of the first organizations to contract with Bento. English isn’t Vasquez’s mother’s native language, so the family enrolled in Bento using Vasquez’s cell phone. For six months, the duration of the program, Vasquez says she received a text message from Bento every morning with a list of food options from about a dozen grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance of her home. She’d text back to order dinner for her family.

At the end of the school day, she’d throw on her headphones and zone out to Kim Petras and Lady Gaga as she strolled to the restaurant. The restaurant staff would only see her as a regular customer; the app doesn’t reveal its participants to be part of a food-insecure program in order to maintain their dignity among Bento’s participants. 

In contrast to the instant ramen, Vasquez says the dinners—which have included salads, green power smoothies, submarine sandwiches on wheat bread, chicken, raw and steamed vegetables, and brown rice—were fully balanced and met her family’s dietary needs. Not only did she feel healthier and more focused in the classroom, but she also felt less insecure around her friends, and, most important, she enjoyed spending more quality time with her family.

“I don’t know if this may be cheesy or something, but I noticed me and my family got to sit down and enjoy food together,” she says. “It just feels good knowing that you’re around family and you don’t have to be stressing out over food.”

Bento also works with other organizations to connect clients to additional resources. For example, Bento and Stop the Spread helped Vasquez’s family apply for support from the local public utility to pay their electricity bill.

Foster Nation, a nonprofit that helps California youth aging out of foster care transition into adulthood, contracted with Bento to launch its Meal Nation program, says Chloe Kinman, the organization’s program director. Meal Nation started as an emergency crisis program to support foster youth college students and their dependents who were food- and housing-insecure when campuses closed at the start of the pandemic. The program works with colleges across California to enroll students in Bento. A survey of Meal Nation recipients showed that 86% of the participating students said it helped them stay motivated and keep up with schoolwork.

In its own preliminary survey, Bento found that all its participants wanted to sign up for the program again. The company was named one of Time magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2021,” finalists Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas 2021,” and placed on Fortune’s “Impact 20.”

Who Gets Meals? How Many, and for How Long?

To date, Bento has served about 200,000 meals to 4,000 families in 10 cites through a couple dozen local social services organizations. However, Bento meals must be picked up at the restaurant or store. Foster Nation has had to contract with a delivery company to serve students who live in rural areas or food deserts.

According to hunger-relief organization Feeding America, Native Americans, senior citizens, and those living in rural areas comprise a significant portion of the food-insecure population. Bento doesn’t target organizations that serve these communities right now, because the additional delivery costs would make Bento less affordable for the smaller nonprofits that serve those communities.

However, Bento is about to launch a pilot with the Detroit Area Agency on Aging, a nonprofit that serves older people, adults with disabilities, and caregivers. In this program, the caregivers will deliver the meals for their clients, says Susan Schaffler, Bento’s director of strategic communications.

Vasquez says that even though her mother recently started working six days a week and is earning more money now, the time the family was enrolled in Bento gave her a little breathing room to save more, as the interest on those payday loans was continuing to compound.

Vasquez says there are good weeks and there are weeks where her family still survives off potatoes wrapped in fried tortilla shells and potato soup, which she says are stigmatized as “poor people’s food.”

“And now I’m back to ramen noodles,” she says. “I just think ramen is something that will always be a part of my life.”

At the height of the pandemic, Foster Nation provided its college students one meal a day for 90 days, but it has since scaled back to 30 days, using Bento as a short-term bridge to longer-term resources, such as CalFresh (California’s name for the federal SNAP program), which usually takes a month for approval.

Kinman says Foster Nation has paid about $100,000 to Bento since March 2020 to provide 13,500 meals to students in 57 different colleges and universities, which the organization funded through grants and crowdsourcing campaigns.

Foster Nation’s work is to help foster youth become self-sufficient, Kinman says. “[Bento] is a capital-intensive program, but we have been able to leverage and get foster youth way more resources, like mentorship and career readiness and life skills, because of this program. So, we see Bento as a program that’s worth it in the long run.”

Meanwhile, Vasquez is now preparing her college applications. Her first choice is California State University, Los Angeles, because of its criminal justice program, where she wants to study to become either a homicide detective or a forensic scientist. She is applying for scholarships to help her cover not only tuition, but also food costs.

“I wish I could have Bento with me in college,” she says.

Bento is working to develop its own partnerships with colleges, because not only college students coming out of foster care battle with food security, Schaffler says.

And the company is now branching out to work through health insurers, which would allow for longer-term support and reach more families. Bento plans to launch a pilot with Medicaid enrollees in Pennsylvania by late March.

“Those pilots [with the community organizations] have validated the product and given us the kind of data and evidence that allows us to achieve the kind of outcomes the health care systems are looking for,” Dole says.

At the time, my mom was living in Bellingham, Washington, two years into providing unpaid live-in care for her father-in-law (my step-grandfather, who I reluctantly call “Grandpa,” despite not having much of a relationship with him). He was suffering from debilitating cancer and heart disease. But providing home care to him came at a price to my mom’s health, safety, financial security, and family. The job was all-consuming: She quit painting and gardening, which she loved, and she grew isolated from her own children and grandkids during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

My mom’s experience is not unique. She is among the roughly one in five Americans who provides care to an adult or child with special needs. Of the estimated 48 million people caring for adults, about 41.8 million provide unpaid care, just like my mother. While the work of unpaid caregivers is deeply undervalued, paid home care workers struggle too. Roughly 2 million people make up the home care workforce, which is 86% women, 60% people of color, and 14% immigrants. According to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, nearly 20% of these workers live in poverty, with an average hourly wage of $12.12 and annual earnings of $17,200. 

In 2019, Grandpa had asked for my mother’s help in exchange for room and board. The offer came just when she was on the brink of homelessness. But keeping up with the demands of caring for Grandpa meant she put her own health needs last. She hadn’t seen a dentist in years, and her jaw pain traced back to an abscessed tooth that eventually would have to be pulled, along with three others. It was the first in a series of health issues that would eventually land her in the hospital.

In addition, the home environment began to feel unsafe for my mother. Shady visitors would show up at the house to do odd jobs and steal stuff. Grandpa also hoarded newspapers, and my mother worried about the potential fire hazard the stacks could create.

My mom’s needs—for her health, finances, and personal happiness—have always taken a back seat. Raised in a strict Catholic family, she grew up believing women were supposed to care for others, whether blood relatives or not, and not pursue careers or dreams. When doctors found a tumor in my father’s brain, my mom, then in her early 20s, set up a hospital bed in our dining room and tended to him for five years until he died. She later remarried, but her second husband stole her life insurance payouts, used them for drugs, and turned abusive. She got a restraining order, which he repeatedly broke. After selling our house, we spent three years moving around—living with family, in hotels and rentals, and in a tent—until my stepdad died and my mom felt safe enough to settle down and purchase a home. 

In her 40s, she returned to unpaid caregiving, first for her father, who had a heart attack and died six months later, and then for the last four years of her mother’s life, and her mother had Alzheimer’s. Then, my mom’s then-boyfriend revealed he had cancer, so she cared for him until he, too, died. By her 50s, my mom was living below the federal poverty line, had lost her house, and had begun staying with relatives. She cared for grandkids and worked short stints as a housekeeper at hotels and nursing homes. She survived on a minimal government annuity check, the bulk of which went toward credit card debt and storage unit fees. In 2019, when relatives could no longer house her, she thought about living in her car, until she lost that too. That’s when her late husband’s father called.

My mom overheard Grandpa tell people he rescued her from homelessness by offering her room and board. While taking her in was a kind gesture, my mother was providing him with round-the-clock care—a job that paid caregivers in the state of Washington receive a living wage for. According to ZipRecruiter, paid live-in caregivers in Washington make more than the national average, which is about $17–$18 an hour, $35,360–$37,440 annually, and that the room provided is required to be clean and habitable. Every night, my mom tripped through the sea of clutter just to reach her bed. She kept her belongings in plastic storage bins in the bathtub. 

The cost of caregiving can be devastating, especially for those with fewer resources. According to a 2021 study, 42% of unpaid caregivers have experienced job loss or reduced hours. In June 2020, when Colorado nursing student April Kimbrough learned her 23-year-old son Da’Corey was diagnosed with a rare kidney cancer and had six months to live, she faced a terrible choice: Keep her job at a hospice call center or accompany her son to his treatments.

No mother should have to ask herself, “Do I go to work, or do I sit by my son’s side?” Kimbrough said. Her employer didn’t offer paid family leave and denied her requests to work remotely when her son needed chemotherapy. Ultimately, she lost her job and ended up living in her car. Kimbrough shared her story as part of the campaign to pass Proposition 118, which, starting in January 2023, will mandate paid family and medical leave in Colorado. But it’s a benefit that came too late for Kimbrough. In May 2022, her son died. 

“The system we currently rely on is built on the backs of the unpaid support of family caregivers. … [They are] the invisible workforce that the government has just relied on,” says Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a caregiver advocacy group. Caregivers contributed an estimated $470 billion in economic value in 2017 but face rising financial strain. The 2020 AARP study found that of the 1,392 unpaid caregivers sampled, 28% had stopped saving, 3% filed for bankruptcy, and 2% were evicted or had their homes foreclosed upon.

Meanwhile, only a small portion of caregivers qualify for public support through the recipient’s health insurance program. Medicaid programs offer Home and Community Based Services, which provide home health care, medical equipment, and physical therapy, as well as case management, home meal deliveries, transportation, and adult day care—necessary services that help people stay out of nursing homes. If an elderly recipient qualifies for these services, their benefits can be allocated toward compensation for their caregiver. While other non-Medicaid programs offer limited and short-term home care services, Medicaid is the largest funder and the principal way family caregivers can get paid.

But the national average wage for these caregivers is $12 an hour. Eligibility for Medicaid services varies state to state, is income-based, and has income caps so low—$841 month in some states—they hover under the national poverty level. If over 41.8 million people are unpaid adult family caregivers, and only 3.7 million elderly recipients receive HCBS through Medicaid, there’s a good chance many people are not getting the benefits they qualify for, either because they aren’t aware that financial help exists, because the process is too daunting, or because there’s a national waitlist that averages more than three years long. 

Barriers to care like these mean many family members step in, receiving no compensation in return. In my mother’s case, Grandpa didn’t qualify for Medicaid, which by default meant she didn’t qualify for payment as his caregiver, because his income was too high. He received a pension and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, and had assets, including a house and three cars. She also didn’t qualify to become his caregiver through the VA, because his medical conditions were not a direct result of his time in the service. Lastly, she missed out on accruing Social Security benefits that would have been available to her at age 62 had she been working an on-the-books job. 

Meanwhile, my mother grew increasingly scared of the people loitering in and around the house. She installed a lock on her bedroom door to protect her belongings. A paid worker would likely have had somewhere to turn, an agency supervisor, possibly a social worker, but my mother had no advocate, and even a visiting social worker never pulled her aside, out of Grandpa’s earshot, to see if she was OK, because she wasn’t the patient or the client. 

Christina Irving, client services director at the Family Caregiver Alliance, says caregivers aren’t on the radar of social workers and case managers, but they should be. “If caregivers aren’t given a voice in care planning or conversations about health, then we’re missing a lot,” she says. 

Today, caregivers are able to obtain support through organizations such as the Family Caregiver Alliance, the National Family Caregiver Support Program, and online support groups, such as The Caregiver Space, which has a 7,900-member Facebook group. Jorwic notes that when caregivers share experiences, momentum builds, and legislators are forced to listen. Unpaid family caregivers start to see the work they do as worthy of payment. In cases where the care recipient doesn’t qualify for Medicaid, Irving suggests that families draft Personal Care Agreements so family caregivers’ financial health and well-being are better maintained. 

For years, advocacy groups have been fighting systemic injustices within what’s called the “care infrastructure.” Organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Caring Across Generations, and MomsRising want to see lasting and substantial changes: expanding Medicaid Home and Community Based Services, Paid Family and Medical Leave, affordable and quality child care, and wage increases for paid care workers, who are often also providing unpaid care for their own families. A robust movement has been forming around the #CareCantWait coalition.

Recently, California lawmakers moved to nearly eliminate monthly income and asset limits by July 1, 2022, which means more people will qualify for home- and community-based care. “Eliminating restrictive financial requirements,” Jorwic says, will prevent older adults and people with disabilities from having to “spend down all of their personal assets before they can get the services they need, or remain in a state of poverty to keep them.” Jorwic adds that this is something advocates will be pushing for on a federal level. “Everyone will need these supports, or will know someone who does.” 

In December 2021, I received a text from my sister that my mother had been admitted to the hospital. She had difficulty breathing and acute anemia from stomach ulcers. The doctor told her that had her blood cell count been much lower, she could have had a heart attack or a stroke, both of which are considered growing risk factors among family caregivers during the pandemic. 

She told her father-in-law’s extended family that she was no longer able to take care of him and moved into my younger brother’s one-bedroom cabin in the woods to recover after her hospitalization, which was hours away from her doctors and other necessary services.

The change of scenery helped, however. Living in a wooded area with deer, coyotes, and foxes inspired her to return to landscape painting, the dark circles under her eyes have faded, and she’s paying more attention to her own health. 

She now says she will never return to caregiving, however, and her housing situation remains precarious. 

I teased her over FaceTime that maybe she should start online dating now that she had access to Wi-Fi, and maybe even fall in love (but only with someone in supremely good health). She shook her head no. She told me that all she wants to do is paint and garden and, for the first time in her life, think about her own needs.

“I’m happy where I’m at,” she said, smiling. “I’m ready to fall in love with myself.” 

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Legal experts speculate that, in practice, it will be much harder for the Trump administration to actually pull back funding. But the IRA doesn’t just tackle climate; it represents a wide-reaching grab bag of progressive policies addressing everything from carbon emissions and health care to tax codes and the economy. (It’s worth noting that the link to the comprehensive overview of the IRA that I used for my reporting back in December has since been removed from whitehouse.gov.)

Often considered a landmark achievement of the Biden administration, the IRA includes, among other policies, an ambitious set of initiatives for clean energy jobs, funding for climate resiliency infrastructure and disaster relief, and more aggressive taxation for large corporations. But perhaps one of the most important, if under discussed, aspects of the IRA is its impact on prescription medication costs.

At a time when nearly 40 percent of Americans have opted to forgo prescription medication due to the expense, the IRA gave the government the ability to curb rising drug costs through a variety of strategies. Most notably, the law gave Medicare the power to negotiate prescription prices directly with drug companies for the first time, which could have a cumulative, long-term impact on drug prices. 

“[The IRA] has given the government for the first time the ability and also the tools through which it can negotiate drug prices” says Richard G. Frank, director of the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. This ability ramps up over time, allowing a set number of additional drugs to be negotiated each year. “That really changes the ball game in an important way—not so much today or even tomorrow, but over time, you’ve equipped the government with a whole bunch of new opportunities to keep prices in check.” 

As far as immediate price reductions, the IRA also guarantees that many Medicare beneficiaries will pay no more than $35 out-of-pocket for insulin. This price cap is not only a practical win for people on Medicare, but a symbolic victory for many activists who have long lobbied to make predatory insulin and drug pricing a national concern for politicians.

In recent years, insulin has become a poster child for the broken health care system. By manipulating patent law and squashing competitors, a mere three pharmaceutical companies control an estimated 90 percent of the global insulin market—and this monopoly has given them free reign to crank up the price of insulin over the past few decades.

A recent study from the Health Care Cost Institute found that from 2012 to 2021, the price of a 30-day supply of insulin nearly doubled from $271 to $499. The estimated cost of manufacturing a vial of insulin, meanwhile, is only $2 to $4. When compared to international prices, insulin in the United States is eight times more expensive, per a 2020 report published by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. For many, these discrepancies are particularly outrageous; without insulin, people with diabetes can die within days.

It’s unclear exactly how Trump’s executive order will affect the IRA’s climate initiatives, let alone how or if it could have any effect on other aspects of the law, such as insulin price caps. But just a few years after Biden signed the IRA into law, it is clear that its benefits are under threat. Project 2025—a harrowing, authoritarian “wish list” published by the Heritage Foundation and meant to guide the next Republican presidency—calls for the repeal of the IRA. Republicans, too, are already pushing for a complete repeal of the IRA and its so-called “woke agenda,” including its climate provisions and tax increases for corporations. (Republicans’ continued distaste for the IRA is not surprising, however, as every single Republican in Congress voted against the bill. But that partisanship does not extend beyond the halls of Congress: The majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support government-negotiated drug prices.) 

The main goal of Project 2025’s repeal is to strip Medicare of its power to negotiate with corporations, according to Andrea Ducas, vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute. “To achieve that goal they’re willing to undo progress and throw prescription drug affordability into jeopardy for everyone in Medicare,” Ducas says. “By and large [Project 2025], this mandate for leadership, is grounded in a worldview that prioritizes profits, corporations, and business over people—full stop.”

In short, Project 2025’s IRA repeal would throw the baby out with the bathwater. In order to maintain corporate monopolies and profits, Americans would lose out on insulin price caps, health care savings, climate initiatives, clean energy jobs, and a whole lot more.

Yet even with the IRA currently in place—and a general consensus from voters that health care and insulin prices are simply overwhelming for most Americans—people with diabetes still struggle to afford their insulin on a day-to-day basis. In 2021 alone, more than one million Americans were forced to ration their life-saving insulin, with Black Americans, the uninsured, and those too young to qualify for Medicare being the most vulnerable to rationing. 

Clearly, the IRA represents only one step on a much longer journey toward equitable health care access. But health advocates, grassroots organizers, and people living with diabetes continue to lead the way in advocating for a future where accessible insulin is a reality for all.

Insulin Policies for All

While the IRA is an achievement, it’s important to understand its limits. The IRA grants a co-pay price cap for certain Medicare beneficiaries—not a holistic price cap. This difference is an important one, according to Shaina Kasper, executive director of T1 International, a grassroots nonprofit run for and by people with diabetes. 

The $35 co-pay limits monthly out-of-pocket expenses for certain people with Medicare, but it does nothing to regulate the actual list price of insulin, the initial price of a drug set by pharmaceutical manufacturers before any rebates, discounts, negotiations, or insurance kicks in. As a result, Kasper says people without Medicare, premium insurance plans, or any health care coverage are still left in the lurch. (It should be noted that the IRA initially did include a $35 co-pay cap for those with private insurance, not just Medicare recipients, but it was shot down by Republican lawmakers.)

“Our goal is an absolute price cap [and] lowering that list price of insulin to make sure that it’s affordable and accessible to all,” says Kasper. Together, Kasper says, lowered list prices and co-pay caps would impact the full spectrum of people in need, including those with private insurance, those without insurance, and those with Medicare benefits. (Even without a full price cap, however, the IRA did play an important role in pressuring all three insulin giants to announce their own price caps or reduced list prices for some insulin products—an important, if incomplete, step toward affordability.)

But affordability and accessibility aren’t always the same thing when it comes to medications. The fact that insulin and diabetes supplies need to be prescribed also means added barriers. Tracy Ramey, leader of the Ohio Insulin for All chapter and T1 International organizer, has recently helped pass an updated version of Kevin’s Law in her state, which grants pharmacists the ability to dispense an emergency supply of a chronic maintenance drug without a prescription. The law was named after 36-year-old Kevin Houdeshell, who died during the holidays in 2014 after being turned away from a pharmacy and unable to contact his doctor for an insulin refill.

The impact of Kevin’s Law is immediate—even for Ramey’s own daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes. While Ramey was between jobs and waiting for Medicaid to kick in, her daughter was still able to get her supplies, even after a prescription had run out. “I’m very proud that my daughter was able to benefit from that as well,” Ramey adds. 

Since 2016, 26 states have passed some version of Kevin’s Law, but Kasper says expanding the law is an important way to ensure equitable access to health care across the country. Taken together, these policies—universal price caps, lower list prices, and an expanded scope of practice for pharmacists—would add much-needed guardrails for people struggling to afford and access their medications.

Insulin Access on the Ground

However well crafted or impactful a potential policy may be, people urgently need insulin access here and now. To fill in the gaps, communities across the country are creating their own mutual aid networks.

“We can’t sit and wait forever for someone else to save us. It’s just not going to happen,” says Brandon Lopez, founder of the Embrace Foundation, a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization in Arizona that sends free diabetic supplies to people who need it. “Who knows, maybe a policy will pass or something will change where health care will be free, but until then it’s our job as a community to take care of each other.” 

The Embrace Foundation has its roots in Lopez’s own health care experiences. In 2017, Lopez was working full time, living without health insurance, and struggling to afford his insulin. 

“With bills, rent, cost of living, I had no money for diabetic supplies, [which] added up to almost $1,000 a month. I simply couldn’t afford it,” says Lopez, who has Type 1 diabetes. “For months I didn’t test my blood sugar once. I couldn’t afford the strips. I took insulin when I felt high and ate something when I felt low, completely in the dark. I spread out what insulin I had, skipped meals, took half doses, and reused the same bag of dull pen needles I had over and over, completely unsanitary and unsafe.”

To get by, Lopez described how he sold whatever possessions he could and spent days going from hospital to hospital, “practically begging for insulin.” Eventually, Lopez landed a better job that provided health insurance. But he continued building an ad-hoc insulin-supply-sharing network on social media, where he connected people experiencing insulin insecurity to a growing inventory of donated supplies.

In 2018, Lopez formally launched the Embrace Foundation, and nearly seven years later, says it has expanded to 19 volunteers, three storage units of supplies, and more than 2,500 people served across the country. According to Lopez, the majority of supply requests come from people who don’t qualify for insurance, college students who may have aged out of their parents’ insurance, and people who are out of work. But plenty of people with insurance still can’t afford their supplies.

“It’s either have insurance [with] a co-pay or pay [more than] $600 to live,” says Lopez. “This month we had a woman reach out that was a single mother with three children and was rationing her supplies so she could keep the power on and feed her family. We’ve set her up to where she will receive a package from us every month so that she can [have] one less thing to worry about.”

Lopez says the Embrace Foundation is meant to continue the legacy of Frederick Banting, the Canadian researcher and doctor who discovered insulin in the early 1920s. “Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1 … saying, ‘Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” Lopez says. “We will always stay true to that.”

From 1962 to 1993, more than 2,200 people—all ages, all walks of life, and from all parts of North America—signed up as full-time volunteers to help Cesar Chavez and his farmworker movement. Tens of thousands of part-time volunteers in U.S. and Canadian cities participated in Chavez’s grape boycott by picketing supermarkets that sold California grapes, attending marches and demonstrations to publicize the boycott, raising funds to support his movement, and most importantly not purchasing California table grapes.

What kind of person, what kind of cause, could be so compelling as to attract thousands of volunteers and boycott supporters?

After I met Cesar Chavez in 1963, I became one of those full-time volunteers, who walked away from a religious vocation and an eight-year high school teaching career, left my place of residence, and relocated to Delano, California, to join Chavez and his farmworker movement.

The Cause

By the 1960s, the plight of California farmworkers had been well-documented: there was Carey McWilliams’s book Factories in the Fields (1939), Dorothea Lange’s work as a photojournalist during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration (1935–1940), and John Steinbeck’s best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), followed by director John Ford’s Academy Award–winning movie based on Steinbeck’s novel that starred Henry Fonda (1940). Moreover, Edward R. Murrow’s Peabody Award-winning national television documentary Harvest of Shame (1960) about the plight of U.S. farmworkers was viewed by millions of Americans, and Dr. Ernesto Galarza published his comprehensive study Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (1964) about the U.S. emergency wartime use of 4.6 million Mexican citizens to provide cheap field labor to U.S. agribusiness from 1942 to 1964.

Much was known about the plight and suffering of farmworkers—pitifully low wages, a cruel piece-rate wage system designed to push and maximize worker production, hours of nonstop back-breaking stoop labor, no access to drinking water or toilets, no paid work breaks, the financial necessity of having to bring children to work in the fields to earn additional money for the family, and living six months of the year as migrant workers as they worked their way north following the crop harvest seasons. They lived in farm labor camps in one-room shacks with no running water, one electric outlet in the ceiling for a light bulb, a gas line hookup for a two-burner stove, a few water spigots located in the camp for fresh water, and a dozen stall showers and outhouses to serve the toilet needs for several hundred people.

With such god-awful working conditions and pitiful wages provided to so many millions of farmworkers for more than half a century, why could not something more humane have been done to “better” their wages and working conditions? What most Americans, like myself, did not know in the 1960s was that, indeed, “something had been done” to ensure that farmworkers could not “better” themselves.

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act—federal legislation that guaranteed the right of U.S. workers to organize into unions and bargain collectively with their employers about wages and working conditions. After signing the National Labor Relations Act, President Franklin Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union!”

The shocking irony of President Roosevelt’s pro-union statement was that this new federal law he had just signed specifically excluded millions of farmworkers (read: Filipinos, Mexican Americans, and African Americans) and domestic workers (read: Filipinos, Mexican Americans, and African Americans). With a stroke of Roosevelt’s pen, the nation’s farmworkers were relegated to second-class citizenship and became forever an underclass of cheap and exploited immigrant labor. Farmworkers were powerless to negotiate with their agribusiness employers and their employment status was reduced to little more than that of a tool for the agricultural industry to use or dispose of as they saw fit. Farmworkers in the United States were barely a cut above slaves or indentured workers. They were powerless.

Powerless, that is, until Cesar Chavez arrived on the scene in 1962 and began his National Farm Workers Association in Delano, California, at 102 Albany Street, which was located on the last southwest corner of Delano in a small converted church building.

Failed Union Attempts to Organize

Despite being excluded from federal legislation that protected the rights of U.S. workers to organize into unions, there were many attempts in the 1950s and early ’60s by organized labor to unionize California farmworkers. The primary catalyst for these organizing efforts was the use of harvest-time strikes to increase wages and establish a union, but each and every organizing effort was systematically crushed by agribusiness that used its powerful influence in the rural communities where its farms were located.

The police and sheriff departments were quick to arrest strikers and union organizers for any alleged violations of the law, corporate lawyers petitioned the local courts to grant injunctions against picketing and other strike activities, district attorneys were quick to file charges with the court about alleged violations of these highly restrictive and probably unconstitutional injunctions, and judges wasted little time making their rulings—guilty as charged—and sentencing the violators to jail. Likewise, the local community newspaper fanned the fears of violence and civil disorder by raising the specter of the presence of “outside agitators” and “communists” as the cause of the labor unrest in the community. If the police and the courts were not enough to break the farmworkers’ strike, the corporate growers would bus in strikebreakers from as far away as the Mexican border to work the harvest. This was the final blow. Yet another chapter was written in the agonizing history of failed attempts to organize farmworkers into a union.

The Community Organizer

In 1962, when Cesar Chavez arrived in Delano to begin his crusade to organize farmworkers, he came with a plan. First of all, he did not believe farmworkers were powerless; they just had a different kind of power than their employers. He often said: “There are two kinds of currencies: time and money. The growers have the money but they do not have the time. Farmworkers have the time but they do not have the money. Each side uses its own currency.”

One time during my early years working with Chavez, I asked, “Cesar, how long do you think it will be before we win a contract in the table grapes?” He was silent for a minute, then said, “I had planned on it being about twenty years.” I never again asked him that question. We did not have the money but we had the time.

Chavez came to Delano not to organize workers to call a strike at harvest time with the hope of securing a union contract, but rather to organize farmworkers and their families into a community organization, which he called the National Farm Workers Association. “LeRoy,” he would say, “if I called the NFWA a union, the growers would run me out of town. We are a service agency to help farmworkers with their day-to-day problems—getting a driver’s license, a meeting with the social worker at the welfare department, filling out and filing their annual tax forms, translating and explaining letters received from a government agency and writing an answer back for them, helping them to mediate a student issue with a school administrator, or any other issue they needed assistance with.”

In addition to his NFWA Service Center, his wife, Helen Chavez, administered the state-approved farmworker credit union she and Cesar had organized. Members of the NFWA also received a $500 death-benefit insurance policy to ensure that a family member could be given a proper funeral and burial service. But to receive these services and other benefits of the NFWA, farmworkers had to be members in good standing, which meant their dues of $3.50 a month needed to be paid up. The NFWA created by Chavez was a membership organization for farmworkers, not a charity. This fledgling farmworker community organization became the base to build enough power to challenge their agribusiness employers, to demand they recognize their union, and to bargain collectively about wages and working conditions. Yes, it meant the grower employers would have to share their power. A tall order, and a mountain to climb, but this was the goal set by Cesar Estrada Chavez, and he would commit his life to achieve it.

Excerpt from To Serve the People: My Life Organizing with Cesar Chavez and the Poor by LeRoy Chatfield with Jorge Mariscal appears by permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2019 University of New Mexico Press.

Bates started working as a stower at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center in May 2020, after spending the past decade working at U.S. Pipe, an iron foundry less than 10 minutes from Amazon’s warehouse.

As a stower, Bates was part of the assembly of humans, robots, and equipment that make up the Amazon production line. Her job was to scan products then place them into bins so the next person, a picker, can grab the items from those bins to fulfill individual customer orders.

Typically, stowers work a 10-hour shift with two 30-minute lunch breaks to rest from the bending, lifting, and walking the position demands. Bates took a nearly $5-an-hour pay cut to pursue this new opportunity in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bates is Black, like most of the nearly 6,000 employees at the sprawling 855,000-square-foot warehouse known as BHM1. She’s also become active in the unionization drive at the work site, seeking to address a litany of issues including below-market pay and grueling production quotas.

As part of the company’s aggressive pushback against the unionization drive, it has said that its starting income at the warehouse is $15.50 an hour for most employees, well above the minimum wage. However, that is still $3 an hour less than the median income for the greater Birmingham area.

March 29 marked the end of a nearly two-month mail-in voting period for the employees at BHM1 to decide whether they wanted to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), a national organization that represents 100,000 workers throughout the United States across several industries including grocery stores, poultry processing, bakeries, and even crossing guards.

This unionization push at one of America’s largest employers comes amid the stream of growing activism and Black political movements that have swept the nation as of late. The possible formation of a union among a mostly Black workforce at a corporate giant like Amazon has materialized as the latest case study in conversations with labor organizers and civil rights advocates about the role of racial politics in the decision to unionize and the correlation between racial justice and economic justice.

Union president Stuart Appelbaum echoed the statement previously made by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, in highlighting the stakes of the Amazon drive: “Bessemer is the new Selma.”

Eric Hall, co-founder of the Birmingham chapter of Black Lives Matter, noted that while workplace conditions are driving the union campaign, Amazon has never been more successful, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The employees go to Amazon every day to fulfill the mission of Jeff Bezos and all the corporate elites that of course make up the Amazon organization, but if it was not for those partners who go to the facility every day, Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have had an economic boost or increase of $80-plus million dollars during the pandemic, while paying the majority Black and Brown people $15 an hour for going to that facility,” Hall said.

The National Labor Relations Board’s Birmingham office began the counting process on March 30. On April 9, it was announced that the unionization drive had failed. A majority vote of “yes” would have officially created the first union at an Amazon warehouse in the United States.

Activism as a Birthright

Grasping the full scope of the unionization efforts at Amazon requires an understanding of the political, social, and racial landscape of Bessemer.

Founded in 1887 by coal magnate Henry DeBardeleben, Bessemer is a 20-minute drive down I-20 from Birmingham, a place that once held the reputation as the United States’ most segregated city.

By the 1930s, Black people around Birmingham had largely found work in the area’s coal and iron mines and started joining unions such as The United Mine Workers of America to advocate for better working conditions and fair wages.

This relationship between Black workers and unions in the South continued growing into the 1950s and ’60s as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction. Labor groups like the retail workers’ union were involved with the planning and participation in pivotal events of the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 came while he was in Tennessee to support the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.

“Dr. King used to talk about what good is having a seat at the lunch counter if you can’t afford to order anything,” Appelbaum said. “You need economic dignity in order to be able to experience your civil rights as well.”

Leslie Wilson, a professor of history and the associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State University, said there is a clear connection between the historical reasons Black workers joined unions and current driving factors.

“This ties in to the Amazon story in the sense that it’s about an adequate salary, but it’s also about protection,” Wilson said. “This story is part of a continuum of what comes out of the Reconstruction era and worked its way up, and it’s also about the transformation of the community and how that community needs to find a find a new source of labor for the people who live in that community so that city continues to thrive.”

He called warehouse jobs like Amazon and the growing gig industry “the new economy of the South.”

Rough Working Conditions

Jennifer Bates knew by her third day at work at Amazon that the warehouse had serious problems. The long hours, excessive walking, and stair climbing had taken their toll on the then-48-year old’s legs and feet, leaving her in excruciating pain and using copious amounts of ibuprofen to find some relief.

Bates recalled one of her two sisters, both of whom also worked at the warehouse, listening to her complaints of pain and responding, “It gets worse.”

Nearly a year later, Bates has come to better understand the full extent of her sister’s dire warning.

Despite the challenging working conditions Bates described, she managed to perform her job well.

By late summer 2020, she earned a promotion to become a learning ambassador. In her new role, Bates was responsible for conducting employee engagement and audits to help fellow employees perform their job more quickly and “get their numbers up.”

Although this new position came with more responsibilities and the promise of an opportunity to learn more about company operations, it did not come with additional pay.

Bates said she was told if she did not accept this unpaid promotion, she would not be considered for any other leadership positions with the company. She also pointed to a number of other workplace complaints.

Grievances included break times that fail to account for the time and distance it takes to leave a workstation and locate a breakroom that is not packed to capacity; workers’ lack of direct access to human resources staff outside of an employee app; and the company’s failure to grant employees the opportunity to appeal work infractions.

Bates also noted the contentious issue of the facility’s elevators.

Bates was told early on that all but one elevator was designed to only carry merchandise. Signs posted next to the elevators’ doors reiterated this. The one small elevator in the building that was designed for human use was reserved for upper management. Lower-level employees were instructed to take the stairs in the four-story warehouse.

In her time at the facility, Bates said she observed one colleague have a heart attack on the job and others rolled out in wheelchairs during their shifts.

She also said employees working as quality control overseers would walk the floors, surveying workers’ feelings about their jobs in a public setting.

“It makes me think it was designed to tear down the human body and mind,” said Bates. “We’re being pushed to the limit, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

While Amazon employees were offered a $2-an-hour hazard pay bump during the early days of the pandemic, that was eliminated in June 2020.

Appelbaum viewed the pay cut as corporate greed.

“What does [Bezos] need the money for? He can’t even spend it on Earth. He talks about going into space. He can’t spend his money on Earth this way and you look at the suffering of people, people who work at his facilities are still living in poverty. People who work at his facilities still need to go and apply for government assistance in order to survive,” said Appelbaum.

A 2020 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that in 11 states, Amazon and other companies such Walmart and Target were among the list of companies with the highest number of employees receiving Medicaid and food stamps. Alabama was not included in this sample.

However, a 2020 report from Alabama Possible, a nonprofit that studies economics and educational attainment, found 14% percent of Jefferson County, where Bessemer is located, receives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Race as a Business Decision

Throughout the history of the U.S., Alabama has remained a place where the entanglement of race and economics is ever-present. 

The state, whose government is dominated by the Republican Party, is one of five states without a state minimum wage and one of 28 with a “right-to-work” law that discourages union membership by making the payment of union dues optional for nonunionized workers at unionized workplaces, yet still allowing those workers to retain the benefits negotiated by the union. Alabama also offers tax breaks to large corporations like Amazon looking to establish facilities in the state.

In recent years, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has voiced his support for the Black Lives Matter movement in addition to donating millions to organizations supporting justice and equity, such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and the United Negro College Fund.

Yet when Amazon announced in 2019 that its new facility would open in Bessemer, a city with a population that is roughly 72% Black, many saw the move as yet another attempt to exploit Black labor.

“Amazon chose to open in a location where the workforce would be overwhelmingly Black, and they did that looking for people who they’d be able to subject to the working conditions they provide in their plants,” Appelbaum said. “When 80 to 85% of the workforce is Black and you’re treating everybody poorly, I think that’s pretty racist.”

“It is so hypocritical, let me put it that way,” said Tonny Algood, executive director at United Methodist Inner City Mission in Mobile, Alabama, and one of three state leaders of the Alabama chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign. “The way the employees are treated is awful.”

Both the mission and Black Lives Matter have been heavily involved with supporting the unionization drive.

For Algood, Amazon’s alleged behavior is expected in a state that “always puts the profits before the people.”

“Alabama is still very much a racist state,” said Algood. “We see this [fight with Amazon] as the same as the things [the Poor People’s Campaign is] addressing when we address systemic poverty; systemic racism; environmental devastation; the war economy.”

From Jennifer Bates’ perspective, some of the blame for becoming victims of predatory companies also lies within the Black community itself.

“I believe [Bezos] chooses those communities because us as Black people sometimes don’t expect to get anything more than we already have,” said Bates. “We don’t understand how important and valuable that we are, that people will continue to walk over us,” she said.

Bates said the rap music played in the Bessemer facility, and offerings of insignificant trinkets like candy and T-shirts instead of higher wages and seats at negotiating tables, are offensive attempts to pacify Black workers.

“Most of us understand what you’re doing,” Bates said, in reference to company management as a whole. “You’re giving us candy and a hot Gatorade every now and then as a gift, or a T-shirt, and then give us a coupon for Thanksgiving and Christmas for up to $10 an hour. That’s playing on our integrity as not just a human race but the Black race.”

Several emails seeking comment for this story were sent over four days to members of the Amazon media relations team. Company spokeswoman Heather Knox asked for a list of the reporter’s questions, but as of April 2, Knox had not offered any further response.

A Team Effort

As the unionization drive at the warehouse gathered momentum, a number of celebrities, politicians, and advocacy groups have supported the drive, including Fair Fight’s Stacey Abrams, rapper and entrepreneur Killer Mike, actor Danny Glover, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution, and Black Voters Matter.

“These employees need to understand that the community has their back and best interests at heart,” said Hall of Black Lives Matter. “All these organizations are literally fighting for the advancement of Black life and the quality of Black life to improve not necessarily just in this state but across this country. We’re definitely fighting like hell in this state.”

Their collective efforts are representative of culture shift that is no longer asking but demanding to be heard.

“There’s a shift taking place in the South to where voices in the South, particularly Black voices, are rising up against injustice and speaking out and demanding more,” Hall said.

Regardless of the vote’s outcome, Appelbaum was hopeful that Bessemer would be the catalyst needed to inspire unionization at other Amazon warehouses.  

“We have proven that even though you’re going up against the wealthiest man in the world, one of the most powerful corporations in the world, you can stand up and you can take them on. And I think that message is going to resonate with working people throughout the country,” he said.

This story was updated April 9 to include the result of the union vote.

In April, the workers in Alabama voted against forming a union with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and then also lost in a revote in March 2022 after the National Labor Relations Board found Amazon had improperly interfered in the first election.

Despite those losses, Littrell was inspired to take action in Campbellsville. He is now leading an effort to get his union to become the second workplace to unionize with the independent Amazon Labor Union following the historic union election. 

“Amazon just doesn’t treat people right,” Littrell says. 

Littrell’s story is representative of the stories of many workers of his age who are flocking to unionize at chains like Apple, REI, and Starbucks, which has seen more than 300 of its stores file to unionize since December 2021. According to the NLRB, union elections across all industries have increased by more than 56% since then. 

These massive organizing efforts follow an unprecedented wave of strikes that saw workers walk off the job in more than 2,000 workplaces since March 2020, according to Payday Report’s Strike Tracker. 

“There is a sense of momentum here,” Littrell says. “People really want change.” 

Littrell’s journey is a tale of a moment that has seen unprecedented organizing, and of a struggle to overcome barriers to unionization both in labor law and that big businesses set up to thwart workers. 

At first, Littrell liked working at Amazon, but right away, he began to notice problems at the plant. He tried to get involved in a plant-wide safety committee but noticed that management wasn’t responsive to its feedback. 

“I would still see people getting injured over some of these things. I would still see people getting written up for getting injured when it really wasn’t their fault,” Littrell says. 

The failed Bessemer unionization drive opened his eyes to more possibilities. 

“I was just a working-class guy before that—just working to pay bills,” Littrell says. “It was my own personal looking into what they were doing down there in Alabama and I saw that, hey, there’s some real potential here to actually force management to do some things.” 

Littrell slowly began talking to some of his own co-workers about organizing. In September, the employees launched their SDF1 Action Committee, which they named after the Amazon warehouse where they work.

The SDF1 Action Committee slowly grew in 2021 to a few dozen members. Then, in April, Amazon Labor Union workers in the company’s Staten Island warehouse became the first in the country to unionize. The victory kicked Littrell’s organizing into high gear.

“That was very motivating,” Littrell says. “That’s when most of our momentum actually picked up. That’s when I was emboldened to go out and start talking to people more and more.”

The Staten Island drive lit a huge spark across the country, with the Amazon Labor Union quickly receiving calls from hundreds of Amazon workers across the country seeking to unionize their workplaces. Littrell was one of those workers who called the Amazon Labor Union.

“It filled me with hope and optimism,” Littrell says. “And just really, you know, there’s times when you’re organizing that you’re gonna get kind of discouraged when you’re a small thing, right? And that really provided me some reassurance.” 

Not only did the Staten Island workers win, but their victories also called into question established labor union practices, such as relying on professional union organizers, who lack shop floor experience, instead of the rank-and-file workers to lead campaigns.

“When we took our organization efforts on, we just decided that, you know, Amazon workers need to organize other Amazon workers,” Amazon Labor Union Vice President Derrick Palmer told NPR. “We knew we had to have an unorthodox approach.”

Now, the Amazon Labor Union is attempting to unionize two more Amazon warehouses in Campbellsville and Albany, New York. Littrell says the independent union model appeals to many workers. 

“With an independent union, people really feel like they run the union, because they are the ones forming it,” Littrell says. 

However, being an independent union doesn’t mean unions are going to automatically win elections. When the Amazon Labor Union attempted to unionize a second warehouse on Staten Island, the company ran an aggressive anti-union drive. Ultimately, the Amazon Labor Union lost the vote by a 2-to-1 margin. 

In Campbellsville, the anti-union pressure from the company is getting intense. Littrell says he has been written up multiple times and he fears he could get fired any day as the union drive intensifies. 

“Surprised they haven’t gotten rid of me yet. The clock has been ticking for a while,” Littrell says. 

Even if the workers do win, their employer could drag out the process of recognizing the union and bargaining a contract for years. 

“An employer is always in a position where it can say, ‘No, no, we’re not going to bargain with them,’” says St. Louis University labor law professor Michael Duff. “And the NLRB, the administrative agency has no authority to command anybody to do anything.”

It’s unclear if independent unions will be able to muster the resources for long multiyear union struggles. 

“With an independent union, we will have to do so much fundraising on our own and all this other stuff. And, you know, the fundraising so far hasn’t really been all that great,” Littrell says. “Independent unions have a lot of struggling to do.” 

To prepare for long-term battles, the Amazon Labor Union has already begun courting larger unions and has begun a financial partnership with the Teamsters, a massive union with 1.2 million members and one of the largest strike funds in the United States, which could become a crucial advantage in upcoming negotiations.

To win contracts, unions will likely have to engage in large-scale strikes at multiple Amazon warehouses across the country, Duff says. 

“If an employer thinks that a union can engage in a work stoppage and can hold out for months, a period of months, then that may inflict real economic pain on their employment,” Duff says. “If on the other hand, the employer believes that at the end of the day, the union really can’t and won’t do anything like that, it really doesn’t have that level of support, then the employer, if it’s a rational actor, is not going to bargain.” 

Duff says that if unions are to take advantage of this moment, they will need to prepare for long, tough battles ahead. 

“I think labor has to have a long game,” says Duff. “What’s essential is for labor consciousness, to return to workers to understand the situation. We are in an incredible moment right now, but we need to take a five-to-10-year view.”

In Campbellsville, the workers are preparing for a long fight. They have already begun to win changes, including to a company policy that required workers to buy expensive shoes from an Amazon-owned company, Zappos. Now, workers are free to buy less expensive shoes from other companies. 

Workers also have begun studying groups like Amazonians Unite, a nationwide network of Amazon workers fighting for change on the shop floor without union support. Littrell says workers in Campbellsville are preparing for the possibility of having to fight on the shop floor for years with or without a union contract. 

“The long-term vision is that maybe one of these days we’ll get a union. And we’ll certainly keep organizing under the pretext of getting a union,” Littrell says. “But we have to focus on short-term goals, medium-term goals, and the overall purpose is to achieve that solidarity, and to fight.” 

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 3:10 p.m. PDT on July 24, 2022 to correct the location of an Amazon work site. It is in Albany, New York, not Albany, Kentucky. Read our corrections policy here.

Stronger labor laws protecting workers could effectively tackle this exploitation, says Ditmore. But she finds that most lawmakers seem satisfied with lip service around ending human trafficking, while the policies they support maintain the status quo.

How the U.S. Economy is Built on Trafficked Labor from Rising Up With Sonali on Vimeo.

The issue of human trafficking began entering mainstream discourse just over a decade ago. In 2011, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to declare January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention month. President Joe Biden has continued the practice, publishing a recent proclamation that contends “agencies across the Federal Government are working to combat human trafficking.”

But Ditmore argues that this public focus is often too limited in scope, since “most coverage of human trafficking focuses on the sex industry and sexual servitude, or sex trafficking.”

“There was nothing looking at forced labor, uncompensated labor, forms of human trafficking through American history,” she says. “I wanted to fill that gap.” So she wrote Unbroken Chains.

In her book, Ditmore, who has worked as a consultant on trafficking for the United Nations, makes a direct link between historical forms of human trafficking—such as chattel slavery and forced Chinese contract labor—and contemporary forms of trafficked labor that presidents and pundits focus on today. She says the form of exploitation most prevalent in the present day is “indentured servitude in which people sign on, in some cases, to work to guarantee their future labor.”

But then, “sometimes people think they’ve got a good job and a good job offer and then they get somewhere and they realize the conditions are very different,” she explains.

Ditmore finds that domestic and agricultural workers are among the most likely to fall victim to this sort of bait and switch and end up in situations that can be defined as human trafficking. She profiled several trafficking survivors in her book, including Nena Ruiz, a Filipino domestic worker who accused her employer of abusing her and won a $825,000 settlement.

Women like Ruiz, especially from the Global South, often arrive in the U.S. for domestic work with a well-defined job description in mind. But then, Ditmore says, they find that “their jobs expanded to include every waking moment,” and sometimes beyond, with employers demanding that workers perform job duties in the middle of the night, or far outside agreed-upon working hours.

But modern human trafficking is not limited to women. Ditmore points to the example of immigrant laborers brought in to clean up the damage from Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region. Those workers, predominantly South Asian men, were highly educated and skilled. “They were kept in segregated camps, segregated by national origin,” says Ditmore. “They were not fed enough, they were expected to work very long days in dangerous conditions without the protective gear.” Additionally, the lifting of regulations in 2005 allowed the private corporations hiring these workers to pay less than the average local wages. So in 2007, the workers marched to Washington, D.C., to call attention to their exploitation—only to find that the local trafficking task force “was concerned that they had not met the definition of trafficking,” as Ditmore describes.

Ditmore suggests that current political attention on human trafficking is performative rather than practical. In Unbroken Chains, she returns repeatedly to the fact that federal legislation specific to human trafficking has not actually helped victims of human trafficking. “We had laws against every aspect of trafficking before the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed in 2000,” she says. “There are laws against kidnapping. There are labor laws. There are laws against harming people. There are laws against threatening people.”

What is inadequate are the labor laws and regulations protecting people in agricultural and domestic work specifically, Ditmore says. Political will to change those labor laws also appears to be inadequate, as Ditmore discovered when she was working as part of a team advocating to strengthen such laws in Washington, D.C. When she met with legislators’ aides, she says she realized lawmakers were “not actually going to back anything to promote workers’ rights. But they were very eager to get their names on a bill about sex trafficking.”

“I found it very frustrating, but also a very good education,” says Ditmore. It was a reminder that “the exploitation of labor, and trying to get more than you have paid for … has always been part of business in the United States.”

Ditmore thinks a stronger labor movement can best address the trafficked labor on which the U.S. economy relies. She is encouraged by the growing strength and prevalence of worker-led unions in recent years. “The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida does a great job with agricultural workers, and they’re expanding around the country,” says Ditmore.

Ultimately, Ditmore believes “a stronger labor movement in the United States would lead to less exploitation overall—including less of the worst situations that we see, which meet the definition of trafficking.”

On May 18, 2023, the National Labor Relations Board announced that balloted employees at the topless bar had voted 17-0 in favor of joining the Actors’ Equity Association.

It makes Star Garden the first unionized strip club since the now-defunct Lusty Lady in San Francisco and Seattle. That 1996 union campaign was later the subject of the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite. 

Lusty Lady shut its doors in Seattle in 2010, and three years later in San Francisco, making Star Garden if not the first then at present the only unionized strip club. But given the high-profile nature of the campaign—and the impact of union drives among young staff elsewhere—I believe that there is a high chance that Star Garden won’t be the last strip joint to unionize.

Rusty Nails and Broken Glass

Star Garden is the latest in a string of organizing breakthroughs. In 2022, 2,510 petitions for union representation were filed with National Labor Relations Board elections—a 53% increase from 2021 and the highest number since 2016. And petitions for union elections have continued to increase in 2023. 

Just as at Star Garden, many of the recent union victories have occurred in workplaces that previously seemed resistant to labor drives. Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple retail stores, REI, Ben & Jerry’s, Chipotle, and Barnes & Noble are among the big-name companies that have seen staff unionize for the first time since workers voted to unionize at Starbucks in Buffalo in December 2021. And evidence suggests that a successful union drive leads to more. Workers at over 300 Starbucks stores have now voted to unionize, and their efforts have inspired young workers throughout the low-wage service sector. 

But in other crucial ways their campaign chimes with that of the other new union drives than have occurred recently in the United States. Star Garden employs the same kind of young, self-assured workers that have contributed to the dynamism of union campaigns at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and others. Most of the dancers are in their 20s and 30s, and they have proved assured spokespeople for the union during the campaign’s extensive coverage in traditional and social media.

Youth-driven Campaigns

In contrast to past generations of union drives, it is young employees that are spearheading the new push for unions. And they are doing so independently, with less outside mobilizing from established union leaders. The Star Garden workers self-organized and repeatedly pressured management to act on their concerns before deciding to petition for a union election with Actors’ Equity Union.

Moreover, the issues cited by Star Garden workers as evidence of a need for union protection—sexual harassment by customers, unresponsive management, and an unsafe working environment—are in many respects just more extreme versions of the problems that have driven many retail and food-service-sector workers to mobilize.

Anti-union Tactics

In common with workers at Starbucks, REI, and Trader Joe’s, the Star Garden dancers concluded that having a union and collective bargaining was the surest way to remedy such problems. 

And like many of those other workforces, the Star Garden strippers faced a long battle against management to achieve that goal.

The organizing campaign lasted for 15 months as a result of company’s efforts to fight worker organizing and then prevent a union vote. 

Workers voted in a National Labor Relations Board election in November 2022, but management opposition prevented the labor board from counting the ballots until last week. Among other tactics, the owners of Star Garden are alleged to have retaliated against workers for protesting an unsafe working environment, and claimed that the workers were independent contractors, not employees. Employers also filed for bankruptcy—an act that can void a union contract.

But the anti-union tactics failed. When the ballots were eventually counted, they showed that workers had voted unanimously for union recognition. In common with campaigns at Starbucks and elsewhere, the success at Star Garden suggests that traditional anti-union tactics may be less effective with today’s younger workers. 

There is another common theme in the rash of union breakthroughs in recent years: They have generated headlines.

Star Garden may not have the big-name appeal to media outlets of, say, Starbucks or Amazon. But the nature of the business involved lends itself to widespread media and social coverage. In short, “strippers’ unionize” makes for great headlines.

The high profile of this and other drives is an important part of the story. Widespread social media and traditional news coverage can raise awareness of the potential to unionize among other young workforces. It conveys to employees that organizing is something they can do, not just something they read about.

Time for a New Corporate Strategy?

There is also a takeaway from union drives by Star Garden strippers and other workers for corporations: The public may be tiring of old-style anti-union tactics, and it may be in their interests to work with employees seeking to unionize.

As Lilith, one of the Star Garden dancers, told the BBC: “A union strip club is going to be a novelty in the United States. It will have customers from all over. … I think if both parties come to negotiate in good faith, we can create a really successful business together.”

From my perspective, it does prompt the question of whether it is time for company bosses to embrace unions. With over 70% of the public approving of unions—and a much higher proportion of young workers—companies like Star Garden, Starbucks, and REI could potentially benefit from marketing themselves as “good employers” who respect their workers’ right to choose a union. 

Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s is one such company seemingly taking that approach. In January, it became the first major national employer to sign the Starbucks Workers United-initiated “Fair Election Principles,” which would guarantee workers a free and fair choice to unionize. The union recognition process at Ben & Jerry’s is scheduled for the Monday of Memorial Day weekend. 

Star Garden may be the country’s only unionized topless bar. But it is part of a wider trend that is influencing attitudes toward mobilizing in young workforces across the country—from servers to ice-cream scoopers and now strippers.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been republished here with permission.

There are numerous lessons to be learned from what has transpired between the Teamsters and UPS during this year’s #HotLaborSummer.

First, and most important: Unions work, and not just for the workers being represented, but for all workers. Despite the UPS Teamsters’ checkered history under Jimmy Hoffa’s leadership, UPS’s delivery drivers today have significantly higher wages than their counterparts at competitors like FedEx and Amazon. This is consistent with what unions in general do for wages. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “non-union workers earn just 85 percent of what unionized workers earn.” Additionally, “when more workers have unions, wages rise for union and non-union workers.” There is an upward pressure on wages for all when groups of unionized workers win wage benefits for themselves.

Second, one of the most powerful responses to corporate monopolies is large unions. UPS is the world’s largest package delivery service and is the most dominant delivery company in the U.S., handling one out of four deliveries in a nation increasingly dependent on mail-order service. The majority of its workers are represented by a single union. This means that if the UPS Teamsters go on strike, it can utterly cripple the company. Indeed, media coverage has focused on this fact, as well as the damage to the entire U.S. economy in the event of a strike.

That kind of power is rare in our splintered labor movement. Take the entertainment industry. Film, television, and theater production intersects with many unions, among them DGA, IATSE Local 80, ICG Local 600, Actors’ Equity, and the two currently on strike: WGA and SAG-AFTRA. In late 2021, film and television crew workers agreed to a flawed contract and decided not to strike. Earlier this year, unionized Hollywood directors reached an agreement with the major production studios and signed a contract, at the same time writers whose scripts they bring to life were striking. Then, actors also went on strike.

Now, a significant number of Hollywood workers remain on strike while others are working. The major studios are hoping to simply wait out the striking workers until their resolve withers. Meanwhile, workers creating unscripted television—known colloquially as reality TV—are not unionized and are “torn” about continuing to work while their colleagues are on strike.

While the workers are fractured, their bosses are united. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a single entity representing all the major studios such as Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Disney. This single powerful entity boasts on its website that it “negotiates 58 industry-wide collective bargaining agreements.” If the majority of Hollywood’s workers were organized into a single union, they would have the kind of power that UPS Teamsters wields.

A third lesson from the UPS agreement is that labor militancy works. In September 2022, I pointed out that the UPS Teamsters launched a major public campaign for a fair contract a full year before their existing contract was set to expire, highlighting the dangerous summer conditions under which many UPS drivers were forced to work. The Teamsters’ new president, Sean O’Brien, did not mince words when he threatened, “We’re not going to be afraid to pull that trigger [on a strike] if necessary.”

Then, this summer the union enacted “practice pickets,” saying, “The most powerful tool we have as Teamsters to win a historic contract at UPS is a credible strike threat.” This clever approach had an equally clever tagline: “Just practicing for a just contract.” The display of power was an intimidation tactic and a turning of the tables against corporate America, which has relied on armies of union-busting lawyers to quash labor movements.

A fourth lesson is that solidarity is critical. Although UPS accepted a majority of what the Teamsters demanded by early July 2023, the company held out on increasing wages for those part-time workers who had been hired a few years ago at lower starting salaries. Instead of giving in, UPS Teamsters walked away and began their practice strikes, likely betting that the company would cave. The company soon issued a statement saying, “We are prepared to increase our industry-leading pay and benefits, but need to work quickly to finalize a fair deal that provides certainty for our customers, our employees[,] and businesses across the country.” Instead of throwing their part-timers under the bus, the union held out for a better deal and won a starting pay of $21 an hour, up from $16.20 an hour.

A fifth lesson is that although unions help to boost wages and working conditions, they are not yet strong enough to undo the damage of unfettered capitalism. Wages continue to lag behind inflation. As worker productivity has risen, wages have fallen. The UPS Teamsters had initially demanded a starting salary of $25 an hour for its part-time workers, who are nearly half of all the company’s workers. Although $21 an hour is progress, some workers are unhappy. One UPS warehouse worker told The Washington Post, “Working this job, it feels like the good parts of life—like going out to dinner and taking a vacation—aren’t meant for us.”

He added, “I’m prepared to vote no,” and who could blame him? Throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, UPS delivery drivers risked their lives to bring us essential products. They braved heat waves, long hours, and heavy loads.

Today, they are continuing to offer a public service: showing the rest of the U.S. workforce how workers can find power in numbers, be militant, stand up for one another, stare down corporate greed, and demand our full suite of labor rights.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. It is reprinted here with permission.

The strike will force General Motors, Ford and Stellantis—the global company that builds Chrysler, Jeep, Ram and Dodge vehicles in North America—to halt some of their operations. “Tonight for the first time in our history we will strike all three of the Big Three at once,” UAW President Shawn Fain announced about two hours before the negotiation deadline passed without a contract. The union is seeking higher pay, better benefits and assurances that large numbers of its members will work in the automakers’ growing number of electric-vehicle factories.

The Conversation U.S. asked Joshua Murray, a sociologist who studies the automotive industry and its workers, to discuss the UAW’s strategy and explain why this strike is significant.

1. How important is it that this strike is affecting all three Detroit automakers?

Until now, the UAW had always gone on strike against one of the companies at a time. And in recent years, all workers employed by that automaker had walked off the job. That’s what happened in the previous UAW strike. In 2019, 48,000 General Motors autoworkers refused to work for 40 days. The UAW used this same tactic in strikes against GM in 2007 and 1970.

While holding a strike against a few key plants breaks with recent UAW practices, it’s a strategy deeply rooted in the union’s history. UAW President Shawn Fain has invoked the 1936-37 action known as the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, when workers targeted what they referred to as General Motors’ “mother plants.”

Workers took over the plants by sitting down at their work stations at the end of the day and refusing to leave. By the time the strike was over, GM had agreed to sign a contract for the first time with the UAW. The union gained hundreds of thousands of new members, and autoworker pay grew sharply in the months that followed.

The Flint strike demonstrated that strategically targeting a few factories can maximize the pressure put on companies, while minimizing both the number of workers affected and length of time affected workers must remain idle.

The UAW’s use of a similar approach now will reduce the risk of the union exhausting its $825 million strike fund, from which it must pay $500 per week to every UAW member who walks off the job.

Fain is calling the new approach a “stand-up strike.”

“This strategy will keep the companies guessing,” he said in livestreamed remarks shortly before the strike officially began. “It will give our national negotiators maximum leverage and flexibility in bargaining.”

Although the strike is starting at just a few plants, the union may halt all production later on. “If we need to go all out, we will,” Fain said. “Everything is on the table.”

About 13,000 UAW workers at three sites—a GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, and a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan—are the first to participate in this strike.

2. How would you define success or failure for the UAW’s new strategy?

To understand why the union chose this strategy over a full-out work stoppage, it’s important to understand the nature of strikes and what makes them successful.

In the book Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete, sociologist Michael Schwartz and I analyzed the history of labor relations and production systems in the U.S. and Japanese auto industries to better understand the decline of Detroit’s Big Three automakers. In the process, we learned what determined the level of success of previous auto strikes.

A strike is essentially a game of chicken between workers and management. Workers threaten the company’s viability by withholding their labor, going without paychecks to halt production. Companies protect themselves from strikes by stockpiling inventory so they can keep sales going. Workers protect themselves via their strike funds.

Generally, strikes succeed when they hurt a company’s bottom line so much that executives decide it makes financial sense to give in to the workers’ demands.

Strikes fail when workers can’t create enough disruption to pressure the company to give in before strike funds run out. They also fail when workers give in before securing a contract in line with their demands, potentially ending up worse off than if they had never walked off the job.

Fain, who was elected UAW president in March 2023, and the rest of his new leadership team seem to recognize the importance of surprising management and picking strategic targets in a way that many of the union’s previous leaders did not. I believe that the UAW is likely to ultimately have more success with this strike than it has had in decades.

3. Is this strike likely to be historically significant?

No doubt about it. No Ford workers had gone on strike in the U.S. since 1978. Chrysler workers, who are now employed by Stellantis, last went on strike in 2007. And U.S. autoworkers are targeting GM, Ford and Stellantis simultaneously for the first time in the union’s 88-year history.

But it’s not yet clear how historically significant it will be.

If the UAW’s “stand-up” strike strategy succeeds, I think it’s likely that other labor organizers will embrace it too—potentially improving the leverage other workers have in their contract negotiations and strikes.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been published here under a Creative Commons license.

The upcoming presidential election will be critical for these growing unions and their workers. The candidates offer contrasting approaches to engaging with organized labor and regulating the world of work. While former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have tried to fashion themselves as champions of working people, experts, including those leading some of the nation’s largest unions, call this rhetoric bogus.

“[We’ve] seen what a prior Trump administration did for workers, like replacing an Obama overtime rule with a less protective version, trying to make it easier for employers to take workers’ tips, and making it easier to misclassify employees as independent contractors—taking away their rights to minimum wage and overtime,” says Rajesh Nayak, a fellow at the Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Economy. “Those policies can undermine organizing by making workers feel like the laws are stacked against them.”

Nayak says he expects more of the same anti-worker policies from Trump if he were reelected this November. “You can see it in Project 2025, which promises to undo many of the pro-organizing positions taken by the Biden National Labor Relations Board [NLRB],” he says.

Project 2025, the presidential playbook drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, to which at least 140 of Trump’s former staffers contributed, promises to disrupt labor agencies, including the NLRB, a low-profile but high-impact government office tasked with enforcing labor laws in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. 

President Joe Biden made pro-union appointments at several federal agencies, including the NLRB. Under Biden, the board has issued rulings that make unionizing easier for workers, including widening the scope of protected organizing activities and implementing a more protective threshold for determining whether employees have been misclassified as independent contractors and are being denied their rights. 

A second Trump administration is expected to reverse this momentum. Project 2025 calls on Trump to fire the NLRB’s Biden-appointed general counsel after taking office, despite precedent that the general counsel serve the remainder of their four-year term even under a new administration. (Biden was actually the first to break this long-held precedent when he fired Trump appointee Peter Robb in January 2021, 10 months before Robb’s term would have ended, to replace him with a candidate who would be less hostile to unions.)

Project 2025 also calls for cutting budgets at labor agencies “to the low end of the historical average.” While the NLRB has been stronger under Biden than it was during Trump’s first term, it still lacks the funding it needs to fulfill its mission. Additional cost-cutting could weaken its enforcement powers further and heighten barriers for workers and unions to seek recourse for unfair labor practices or access other essential support. 

Nayak also expects a second Trump administration to bury unions in paperwork, for example, by reinstating duplicative reporting rules that the Biden administration rescinded in 2021. “Project 2025 threatens to repeat a long-running anti-union playbook of layering more and more reporting requirements on unions that go well beyond transparency and just serve to slow them down,” he says. 

It’s not only Project 2025 that promises a hostile approach to workers and unions. Trump offered a grim preview of his labor policies during his first term in office, appointing anti-union officials to labor agencies, rolling back basic workplace protections, and selecting the conservative Supreme Court justices who would go on to rule that the nation’s entire public sector is “right to work.” That decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees made a significant dent in the member-fees-based revenue of public sector unions. (Though it should be noted that the ruling has not reduced membership as much as the anti-union firm that argued the case might have hoped.)

If he were reelected, Trump is expected to take aim again at unionized public sector workers. Project 2025 urges the administration to “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place” and promises to revive a trio of executive orders targeting federal employees that Trump was unable to force through in his first term. The orders would shorten the timeline for unions and agencies to negotiate contracts, reduce the time workers would be allowed to improve their performance before being terminated, and reduce the hours that union representatives are allowed to spend doing union-related activities on government time.

Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents tens of thousands of federal workers across 35 departments and agencies, says these executive orders “were designed to decimate federal employee bargaining rights and the ability of unions to represent them.”

The highest-profile threat that a second Trump administration poses to federal workers is an executive order called Schedule F. If passed, it would remove civil service protections for many federal employees and reclassify them as at-will appointees who can be fired for any reason. This policy would allow candidates in critical government positions to be hired and fired based on their partisan leanings and willingness to follow orders rather than their qualifications and skill sets.

“The policy makes it easier for politicians to push bureaucrats to act in ways that allow them to violate the law and undermine the public interest,” explains Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “Civil servants take an oath to serve the Constitution, but Schedule F would force them to choose between serving that oath and serving whoever occupies the White House,” he continues.

Trump tried implementing Schedule F at the end of his first term in 2020, but it was never fully realized. “If Schedule F had been fully implemented in 2020, thousands of employees could have lost their civil service protections, been fired at will, and replaced with partisan loyalists,” warns Greenwald. 

The policy could have wide-ranging effects far beyond the federal workforce. Many people would experience this in the breakdown of vital government functions that are often taken for granted, such as enforcing food or workplace safety regulations. If qualified experts are forced out of regulating agencies in favor of appointees who are politically aligned with the administration, those agencies will become less competent and less able to deliver results.

Moynihan says Schedule F is a dangerous policy under any administration—Democrat or Republican. However, under Trump, it carries unique risks. “That is because Trump has shown himself to embrace authoritarian positions, ignoring the rule of law and wanting to use state power to suppress dissent and attack his enemies. With Schedule F, he would be able to do what authoritarians in other countries have done to consolidate his power—purge the bureaucracy of anyone who opposes democratic backsliding.”

To refuse the hostile anti-worker and anti-democracy policies of a second Trump term, many of the nation’s largest unions are backing Kamala Harris for president. As soon as she announced her candidacy, Harris gave the keynote address at the American Federation of Teachers convention. That union and almost every other major union nationwide has endorsed the current vice president. 

The groups aren’t just opposing Trump, they are also bracing for a potential second Trump term. In July, Gwen Mills, president of Unite Here, which represents workers in the hotel and food service industries, told HuffPost that she expects her union to be forced to “play defense” if Trump is elected. 

For Greenwald of NTEU, the best defense is a good offense. To help protect employees against future implementation of Schedule F, NTEU proposed a new rule reaffirming that employees keep their rights even if they are involuntarily reclassified. The Office of Personnel Management affirmed and issued that rule earlier this year. 

NTEU is also renegotiating contracts now to avoid having to do so under a possible Trump administration. “Our experience from President Trump’s first term is that his administration did not negotiate in good faith when contracts came open,” Greenwald says. “It only makes sense that employees would fare better if there are fully and fairly negotiated contracts in place and not subject to renegotiation during a second possible Trump term.”

Nayak urges other federal employee unions to do the same. He also suggests that all unions and other labor organizations be informed about what the candidates’ platforms offer to help their members understand the possible outcomes and make informed decisions at the ballot box.

He offers one silver lining: “If President Trump wins this November, he’s not going to automatically reverse the very real momentum that unions have had in this country. We’ve seen it both in public opinion surveys and on-the-ground organizing activity, and it’s not going away that easily.” Greenwald agrees, saying union leaders are “prepared to fight” if the next administration is anti-labor.

For most of us, it certainly doesn’t feel that way, with millions of people behind on rent, more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. student loan debt outstanding, and by some estimates as much as $12 trillion still owed in reparations to descendants of enslaved Black people in the United States.

Where would $12 trillion even come from? It’s a fair question. But as it happens, in just one month—April 2020 to be exact—the U.S. financial system conjured up precisely $12 trillion out of thin air, on top of the $4 trillion already floating around the economy.

Where did all those new dollars go? For one thing, a flood of cheap credit fueled a homebuying spree, pushing home prices up 14% nationally in 2020. The stock market had a record year in 2021, boosting fortunes for the Bezos-Buffett-Gates-Zuckerberg class, whose net worth is primarily in stocks. And, as The New York Times wrote in June 2021, “Even in a gilded age for executive pay, 2020 was a blowout year.”

Redistributing wealth or income isn’t a new idea, but what if redistribution wasn’t necessary at all?

Last year’s bonanza of money creation was a combination of the Federal Reserve buying up a variety of assets (such as municipal bonds and other securities) and Congress spending unprecedented amounts of money into existence, all in response to the COVID-19 pandemic precipitating a temporary shutdown of the economy. All that money floating around somewhere has added urgency to calls for new wealth taxes. Taxing wealth, supporters say, could allow for government to pay for the housing, the education, or the health care that is everyone’s right. That revenue could also help pay for investments in climate change mitigation or resiliency. And now there is more wealth to tax than ever before.

But that huge increase in wealth clearly wasn’t distributed in a way that met the needs of most nonwealthy people. And the relative ease of creating money puts even more urgency on the question of why we can’t ensure everyone has enough.

Redistributing wealth or income isn’t a new idea, but what if redistribution wasn’t necessary at all? What if the system that created money did it in a way that was more fair or more responsive to everyone up front?

Commerce Without Money

For Thomas Greco, the rest of us lost the money game from the very start, or close to the start, when elected officials decided there would be only one form of money, and that access to it would be mostly controlled by a relatively small group of powerful institutions: banks.

Greco says he first realized this in the late 1970s, when he was a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, teaching business, economics, finance, and statistics. At the time, the business and economics worlds were consumed by an obsession with money and monetary systems because of the “Great Inflation,” a period of accelerating inflation rates from 1965-1982. The causes are still debated; some blamed the Federal Reserve for mismanaging the money supply, while others blamed high government spending tied to the Vietnam War, or repeated oil shocks and food shocks that rippled across the globe.

Greco came to view the Federal Reserve and the banking industry as effectively a cartel that unjustly and unnecessarily charges interest for the right to access money in the form of credit.

“That’s the fundamental flaw in the system, having a centralized banking cartel that is able to control money as credit,” Greco says.

About 97% of the dollars circulating in the U.S. economy today are created in the form of interest-bearing debt issued by banks. Banks get permission to issue money as debt from governments, who charter those banks and back the money that they issue. Most of that money isn’t even printed, it’s simply recorded as entries in bank ledgers.

But it does say “Federal Reserve Note” on paper bills, and underneath that it says “The United States of America,” even though there is a very good chance it was a major bank like JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo that “created” the money in the first place, in the form of a loan to you, your employer, or to somebody who paid your employer who eventually paid you.

We want moneyless exchange to go viral.

Greco is hardly alone in his opinion that the banks have never been very good at deciding who should get access to money in the form of credit, and therefore access to most of the money that exists. Racial justice and fair housing advocates continue to fight against de facto redlining, the continued discrimination in bank lending against Black, Latino, and other communities of color, which was once reinforced by federal policy that began shortly after the Great Depression. Environmental justice advocates continue to call for banks to divest from fossil fuels, given the continued harm they cause to the planet.

Some who share goals around racial justice or meaningfully responding to climate change believe in new ways of creating money, or in reigniting the political debate around how society creates money. What Greco envisions is breaking up the effective monopoly that the banking system has on credit.

As Greco realized, it’s already common for businesses to issue credit to each other. When a grocer or other retailer orders from wholesale suppliers, the goods get delivered and the supplier sends the retailer an invoice that requires payment in 30, 60 or 90 days. The suppliers are effectively providing short-term, interest-free loans to vendors for the length of the invoice.

“There’s no reason why we can’t extend that business-to-business process on a multilateral exchange, like barter exchanges, bringing together a few hundred or a few thousand businesses to participate in this credit clearing process,” says Greco.

Greco envisions a network of regional systems in which businesses buy and sell services to and from each other, they invoice each other, and regional systems act as a clearinghouse for invoices—he calls it a network of “mutual credit clearing mechanisms” or “commercial trade exchanges.” At the end of each day, each mechanism tallies up members’ invoices to and from each other—called “reconciling” in financial terms—so that at the end of every day, instead of a business paying the invoices it owes and taking payment for invoices it has issued, the system compares each businesses’ total amount owed versus issued, and each corresponding account rises or falls in value based on the daily difference.

For example, if a business issues 1,000 credits in invoices for the day, and it owes 800 credits on invoices for the day, then that day it adds 200 credits to its account. The next day it might issue 800 and owe 1,000, so 200 credits get deducted from its account. The key is that the business keeps producing goods or services to keep adding value into the system, allowing it to invoice others, which allows it to cover for the invoices it owes.

“What I foresee is commercial trade exchanges being cooperatively owned, organized as cooperative businesses or mutual companies where the members have the ultimate ownership and control,” Greco says.

While no system quite like this has ever existed in the U.S., something similar does in at least one place, and it helped inspire Greco’s vision—it’s known today as the WIR Bank system in Switzerland. It emerged during the Great Depression, when there was hardly any money floating around most economies in the world. Today the system has around 50,000 member businesses, in hospitality, construction, manufacturing, retail, and professional services. But they’re concentrated in Switzerland.

“A problem with cooperatives or mutual companies is when they get too big, they’re harder for members to control, and boards start to operate for their own benefit as opposed to members,” he adds. “It happens with credit unions.”

Greco envisions a highly evolved, regional, “multilateral barter system,” that doesn’t depend on a buyer and seller each needing to have something the other wants to exchange to conduct a transaction. That’s because the multitude of credit exchanges with other parties would allow for everyone’s accounts to reconcile at the end of the day without having to actually exchange money.

“We want moneyless exchange to go viral,” Greco says.

A Real Use For Cryptocurrency

From another perspective, maybe the problem isn’t just that there is only one acceptable form of money, but that there should be many more forms of money.

For around two decades, Ferananda Ibarra has been one of the leading thinkers and strategists around holochain—a less energy-intensive, mobile-device friendly alternative to blockchain, the software that undergirds cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

There are lots of technical ways of describing the differences, but one to keep in mind is this: with “traditional” blockchain, there must exist a network of servers capable of storing, searching, and updating a copy of the database of every transaction ever made within the network—which becomes a very energy-intensive undertaking. With holochain, each user keeps a record of only their own transactions, which they own and nobody else can duplicate.

“Anything you create with blockchain you can create with holochain, except [holochain is] truly distributed,” Ibarra says, meaning that there is no centralized database of all transactions that must be stored and continually updated, sucking up wasteful energy and also creating a hidden privilege for those who have access to the upfront capital to acquire enough computing capacity to host blockchain networks.

Holochain software provides a way to build the kinds of currencies and exchange mechanisms that Ibarra sees as essential to moving beyond today’s flawed and severely limited currencies.

Markets are very good at producing, but very bad at choosing what to produce and why to produce it.

Today’s currency or money systems are poorly designed, in Ibarra’s view. They’re not able to account properly for the true costs and true benefits to people or to the planet, and, because of that, people and businesses aren’t able to make properly informed decisions about how to spend their time or effort.

“In our work at the MetaCurrency Project, currency is also defined as ‘current-see’—to be able to make a flow visible,” Ibarra says. “In nature, if I observe the flow, I observe the interdependence, I observe the relationship, I observe what flows create life and what flows destroy life.”

In Ibarra’s ideal future, many currencies would get distributed not based on bank underwriting standards, but rather on real value added to community or to the planet.

“Anything you can have a unit of account for, you can have a currency for,” Ibarra says.

The idea is not so far off. Millions of property owners and investors around the country already receive credits for installing or financing the installation of solar panel. What if those credits instead simply accrued as some form of cryptocurrency that could be exchanged via holochain for something other than a discount on an electric bill? Ibarra says the Red Grid project is already working toward this model for cryptocurrency creation and exchange.

Or in a different scenario, what if a renowned artist’s reputation—verified via holochain records—could gain them access to housing, food, and drink in a given community that inspires them to create art by and for that community while the artist is there? In effect, the art created, whether for the public or private sphere, would be a means of exchange. And so communities also could be incentivized to produce housing, food, or drink in the same way the artist is incentivized to produce art. Those communities wouldn’t necessarily need to exchange currencies in the traditional sense. And we already talk about reputation as currency, for instance, when major cultural figures endear themselves to a community so deeply that “their money isn’t good” there any longer.

“Economic incentives are not the only incentives,” Ibarra says. “Markets are very good at producing, but very bad at choosing what to produce and why to produce it.”

A world of many ways to earn and exchange currency is not to be confused with simply replacing the dollar with Bitcoin, however. The idea would be to tie the creation of currency to things that add value to society, though it could be anything from farming to art.

The System Has Never Been Static

On the other hand, creating, recognizing, or exchanging many more kinds of currency, or moneyless exchange, may never leave the realm of think tanks and white papers or fringe experiments on the edges of society. Some goals may be achievable with significant rewiring of a financial system that is still based on the U.S. dollar.

Like many of her law school classmates, Mehrsa Baradaran remembers being told that money and the economy were the exclusive purview of the free market and the private sector. But after law school she went to work on Wall Street, and, ironically, that’s where she learned that nothing could be further from the truth.

During the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve first started expanding the money supply in ways it never had before—making emergency loans to help save some of the bankrupt financial firms that helped precipitate the crisis, even as others, such as Lehman Brothers, were allowed to fail. Then, as the economy plunged into the Great Recession, the Fed embarked on “quantitative easing,” also known as QE. That program involved the government buying up U.S. Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities on the open market, which the Fed said would stabilize and rejuvenate the financial sector.

While economists continue to debate its ultimate impact, the combined effect of QE and the Fed’s post-crisis emergency lending programs was to create more dollars than anyone previously thought would ever be reasonable to create. Over the course of a year, the Fed created more than $1 trillion, an unprecedented amount at the time that nevertheless would be swamped by what the Fed created in 2020 through its pandemic recovery plans.

For Baradaran, who is now a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, the Fed’s actions in 2008 revealed how the banking sector really was always primarily a public sector operation. In her eyes, the problem wasn’t that Fed could create a trillion or more dollars in such a short time whenever it wanted. The problem was that it chose to create those dollars in a way that guaranteed the benefits would accrue almost entirely to the banks and other financial firms that precipitated the crisis in the first place.

If these are just policy decisions—and they are—then we can make different policy decisions with different outcomes and different benefits.

“A lot of us on the [political] left said, ‘Oh, wait a second, if this power exists, why not just use it for the things we want to see as a society?’” Baradaran says. “The Fed or Congress could have chosen instead to [have the Federal Reserve] buy and forgive all these predatory mortgages to homeowners, and it would have had the same effect of creating trillions of dollars out of thin air.”

Rather than eschewing the money-creating power of banks and the Federal Reserve, or suggesting that some new currencies start to filter in alongside existing currency, Baradaran argues for restoring the role of politics in determining banking policies and regulations—harkening back to the Progressive Era when presidential candidates such as Williams Jennings Bryan ran on platforms that centered on monetary policy.

“Even going back to Hamilton and Jefferson, monetary policy and banking was central to the constitutional project,” Baradaran says. “It was very much a political decision, not just the realm of technocrats and experts. I think that’s one of the moves of the neoliberal era, to make [monetary policy] just a matter of data and expertise as opposed to democracy.”

In her 2015 book, How the Other Half Banks, Baradaran details much of the long political back-and-forth around money and banking in the U.S. And last year for the Washington University Law Review, she authored “Banking On Democracy,” updating and refocusing her argument on the Federal Reserve. The journal article argues for restructuring emergency relief programs or even creating ongoing programs for the Federal Reserve to lend directly to businesses or other entities, instead of only lending to banks as it has throughout most of its history. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the Fed for the first time offered to make loans to local governments. The terms weren’t very friendly, however, so only four such loans were issued: two of them to the Illinois state government and two to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City’s public transit agency.

But above all, Baradaran emphasizes that redirecting the money-creation power of the Fed or the banks it regulates would require reigniting the political battle over money.

“If these are just policy decisions—and they are—then we can make different policy decisions with different outcomes and different benefits, and different beneficiaries who are not only the banks,” Baradaran says.

Some, like Greco or Ibarra, don’t put any stock in state-backed money creation as a path forward. Baradaran maintains that history has shown state-backed money is the only kind of money that has ever had any lasting and substantial reach and impact. The time has come instead, she says, to reclaim democratic power over the people’s money. In her vision, the creation of money should more closely if not very closely approximate the wishes of voters—from racial justice to environmental justice.

“Money is a state project,” Baradaran says. “I’m not saying whether it should be, but it is. Theoretically we could have a money system that is not tied into state policy, but we’ve never in the history of the world ever had that. The origins of money have always been a state creation.”

People’s movements aren’t taking this lying down. They’re organizing in creative ways to pressure the government to put people over profits. They’re resisting this one-sided class war by making it two-sided. More than 300 organizations are calling for an end to fossil fuel bailouts while demanding alternatives such as rent cancellation, worker protections, and a people’s bailout.

If there’s a silver lining that has emerged from this crisis, it is the new mood of defiance in social movements and the willingness to articulate and fight for bold, visionary demands.  

Rent Relief

Many factors are behind the oil market collapse, and the two the oil industry wants you to hear—the coronavirus-induced drop in demand for oil and the Saudi Arabia-Russia price war—are both partly true. But another major factor was the global oil glut driven by the rapid increase in U.S. oil and gas production, much of it fueled by debt. Even as financial analysts cautioned that the massive debt-fueled expansion of oil and gas was a bubble, the industry went on borrowing, drilling, fracking—and making a few people a lot richer.

Now, fossil fuel companies want the public to bail them out for their own irresponsibility, first by seeking “royalty relief.” By way of background, oil and gas producers lease federal lands and waters for their operations, in exchange of royalties paid to the government. Government finance watchdogs and environmental advocates warn that the royalties paid by the industry are too low. But now the industry wants to pay even less.

To put the industry’s desire for royalty relief in perspective, millions of jobless workers—and many more who work in the informal “gig economy,” or who are undocumented—will be unable to make rental and mortgage payments. A wave of evictions and foreclosures could follow.

People are organizing for rent cancellation, pressuring local or state governments to put a freeze on rent and mortgage payments, and on evictions and foreclosures. Some of them are also organizing rent strikes, where tenants band together to collectively refuse to pay rent. Rent cancellation demands and rent strikes are gathering momentum nationally and in cities and states, and federal legislation is being proposed for rent and mortgage cancellation as well.

Any royalty relief for the oil and gas industry—effectively a reduction in rent charged for using public property for private gain—should be out of the question until after rental and mortgage relief that not only ensures that people can stay in their homes now, but also protects people from accumulated payments becoming due immediately after the crisis.

Worker Protections

Another potential source of government assistance for the oil and gas industry is direct government funds. Warped priorities are on display here, especially considering that a shortage of basic protective equipment for front-line workers and the fact that millions are unemployed or facing homelessness.

Trump first announced on Twitter that he was directing the Treasury and Energy Departments to provide assistance to the oil and gas industry, saying that he wanted “these very important companies and jobs” to be “secured long into the future.”

Trump calls oil and gas “important” companies—as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that are hurting right now—because the oil and gas industry is a top source of support for Trump and other elected officials. And if the oil and gas industry is “secured long into the future,” suffice it to say that the fate of humanity and of Earth’s ecosystems is sealed.

This rhetoric is also divisive. Obviously, oil and gas workers are hurting, with 51,000 jobs lost in March and more to come. These workers should not have to bear the consequences of their employers’ recklessness. They deserve federal support.

But all jobs and all workers deserve protection. That includes hotel and restaurant workers (disproportionately people of color) facing layoffs. And it includes bus drivers and grocery workers forced to risk their lives by going to work. To put one group of workers on a pedestal while ignoring most workers’ critical need for protection and government support is shameless political pandering.

Social movements are demanding that front-line workers are protected first, before any handouts to corporations. There’s a broad call for protecting all essential workers, as well as a specific call to protect essential workers who operate public transit or use transit to get to work. (Full disclosure, I’m one of the key organizers of the transit petition.)

Worker action, too, has gone beyond articulating demands. Front-line retail, distribution, and delivery workers at companies such as Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary have staged walkouts and strikes demanding protection and hazard pay. And this is in spite of the country’s lopsided, anti-worker labor laws that make organizing extremely difficult.

As governments display a reckless disregard for human lives and serve corporate profits instead, movements are creating structures for communities to take care of themselves. Mutual aid organizations premised on collective care are springing up in communities across the country and worldwide.

A Bailout for People

The final means by which the fossil fuel industry is seeking a public bailout is through the buyout of distressed corporate debt by the Federal Reserve.

At a time when state and local governments are struggling to keep up with rising human needs and constrained resources, social movements are calling for a people’s bailout. Such a response to the coronavirus crisis centers people, especially the Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-wealth people who are most affected by this crisis—and all crises.

The demand for a people’s bailout sees the response to the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity, not to merely restore the status quo, but to build a better and more just world. It is based on five core principles, worth quoting in their entirety:

• Health is the top priority, for all people, with no exceptions.

• Economic relief must be provided directly to the people.

• Rescue workers and communities, not corporate executives.

• Make a down payment on a regenerative economy while preventing future crises.

• Protect our democratic process while protecting each other.

Supporters are clear that “returning to normal” would be woefully inadequate. They say it’s unacceptable to return to the profoundly unjust and unequal status quo that has resulted in the crisis being so horrific to begin with.

Only a recovery based on principles such as those of the people’s bailout would be able to create a more just society out of the ashes of the coronavirus crisis.

When it comes to risk, we do know some things, but many remain uncertain. We can change some things, and some we’re stuck with. It’s now common knowledge that age is the most important factor driving the risk of worse outcomes from COVID. Being male, living with obesity, being from a non-White ethnic group and having long-term conditions—such as diabetes and heart disease—also increase risk.

The increased risk with age is striking—people 80 and older are estimated to be 70 times more likely to die than those under 40. In the United Kingdom, being aged 70 or older classes people as clinically vulnerable, or moderately at risk. In the U.S., eight out of every 10 deaths attributed to COVID have been of people 65 and older.

By contrast, obesity is estimated to increase risk of death from COVID by almost 50%, and type 2 diabetes is estimated to double the risk.

These are only the headline factors—different medications may affect risk, as may a host of other factors that will vary from person to person and include things such as viral load, meaning how much of the virus a person is exposed to in the first place.

Linked to many of these risk factors is also the key, but complex, issue of socioeconomic status—with people from less-advantaged groups suffering a disproportionate burden of COVID disease and death.

Some of the above risk factors are non-modifiable, which means, essentially, we’re stuck with them. You can’t change how old you are. The good news, however, is that action can be taken to address some of the others. Raised body weight, for example, is driven by a complex system of socioeconomic, commercial, environmental, and genetic factors, but governments can roll out policies to help address some of these. There are also evidence-based methods available to support healthy weight loss.

Being Wealthy Is Healthy

When covering Trump’s risk factors, one is less spoken of but weighs heavily in his favor—his socioeconomic status. People from less-advantaged groups are at greater risk from COVID.

If one teases this out, the health benefits of higher socioeconomic status turn out to be down to a number of factors, including a lower risk of contracting the disease in the first place (often linked to socioeconomic factors such as occupation or where you live). Other factors at play include the presence and treatment of underlying health conditions, the relative risk of exposure to air pollution and other environmental threats to health—and, crucially, access to health care.

For people with the most severe forms of COVID, treatment with the drug dexamethasone can reduce risk of death by up to one-third. Socioeconomic status is one of the factors determining who gets the best treatment for COVID, particularly in countries with no universal health care—including the U.S.

When the U.K.’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, contracted COVID this year, it was described as a wake-up call, particularly in regards to obesity. The prime minister himself has raised body weight as an issue, and attributes his severe infection to that risk factor.

It remains to be seen how Trump reacts, both physically and politically, to his infection. There is no doubt that, because of his position, he will be receiving every aspect of health care he could wish for. By contrast, millions of Americans cannot access basic care, including access to essential medications such as insulin for type 1 diabetes (Trump recently asserted insulin is priced as cheaply as water, which unfortunately is far from true), let alone intensive care during the acute phase of a pandemic.

While the media focuses on the risk factors that may put Trump at greater risk of severe infection, we should not forget those modifiable and strikingly inequitably distributed factors that work in his favor. Focus should be not only on treating the virus, but on mending the broken system that has allowed it to claim the lives of 207,000 Americans and counting.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation. It has been edited for YES! Media.

Shawn tried his best to help at home as a so-called “brother-father” to his younger sibling. This included taking her to get free lunches for school-age kids at McDonald’s. “To climb out of poverty is probably a really hard struggle,” Shawn says in the course of the documentary, but he remains hopeful about his future. Shawn is one of the many children in the U.S. living in poverty, which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

The Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is a complex legislative prescription for the economic hardship COVID-19 has inflicted on families like Shawn’s. The plan aims to affect a massive economic recovery by putting more money into the hands of more Americans in need. It provides:

• A one-time, $1,400 per person/$2,800 per couple economic impact payment (with an added $1,400 for each dependent)

• A 25-week extension of the enhanced unemployment benefits, providing an added $300/week

• An expanded tax credit worth up to $3,600 for every child under age 6, and $3,000 for children between 6 and 17, to be paid out over the course of 2021

• Increases in both SNAP and WIC benefits to enable more household food purchases

• Greater ease in accessing EBT funds for school-age children during public health emergencies

These legislative provisions could have a profound impact on the landscape of American poverty, particularly child poverty, after more than a year of an unprecedented health crisis.

The Center on Social Policy at Columbia University has estimated that the American Rescue Plan will cut the child poverty rate by as much as 56% this year, which would affect children of all races. The poverty rate for Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous children, who are disproportionately affected by both poverty and COVID-19, would decline by 52%, 45% and 61% percent, respectively. However, as the Children’s Defense Fund’s Director of Poverty Policy, Emma Mehrabi, cautions, “Th[is] data will only live up to its projections if families—especially the hardest to reach—know about the benefits [offered through the plan] and can easily access them. So we need to make sure that families and communities on the ground are aware of this program, and we need to work aggressively to get them signed up.”

Payments in support of children have appreciably reduced child poverty in real time, but have also produced more benefits.

The plan’s newly liberalized child tax credit (CTC), which is a cash transfer that can be spent as parents and caregivers determine, has been receiving a lot of media coverage because of its transformational potential. The plan’s CTC is fully refundable, such that it will benefit 93% of the parents of American children, or 69 million people. Before the legislation, the poorest 10% of children did not receive any benefit from the CTC and about 25% received only a partial benefit. Many of the children whose families were excluded from the original CTC were the children of single parents, Black and Hispanic children, and children who live in rural areas.

Effectively, parents who receive the CTC under the Rescue Plan are getting a small taste of what it would be like to have a guaranteed minimum income to support their children. According to a recent UNICEF report, at least 23 countries guarantee a minimum income for families with children. Canada, for example, provides a scaled yearly benefit to any Canadian residents primarily responsible for the care and upbringing of a child under its Canada Child Benefit program. The current iteration of these payments has its roots in “Family Allowances” that were introduced in the country after World War II. Germany also offers families a monthly stipend (kindergeld) paid from birth through at least age 18—and extended through age 25 should a child pursue higher education or vocational training.

Payments in support of children have appreciably reduced child poverty in real time, but have also produced more benefits. For instance, in Canada, research has shown that children with a guaranteed income improved their performance in school, had better health outcomes, and earned more income as adults. Likewise, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, which provided $500 a month, no strings attached, to 125 low-income families for two years, demonstrated that regular payments to families can significantly reduce income volatility, and lead to improved physical and mental health and more full-time employment opportunities.

While extending cash aid to more American families in need has its benefits, it has not been without controversy in the past. The United States federal government largely moved away from cash assistance after the New Deal and the burgeoning prosperity of post-World War II. President Lyndon Johnson, invoking the idea of the Great Society for the first time, articulated a war on child poverty in his 1964 speech at Ohio University. He envisioned “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” However, LBJ’s top economic adviser, Walter Heller, advised against implementing a minimum family income as part of the administration’s ensuing War on Poverty. As Joshua Zeitz explains in Politico, Heller believed that such a strategy was not only cost-prohibitive, but that it would “leave the roots of poverty untouched and deal only with the symptoms.”

Moral and ethical obligations aside, child poverty is expensive.

Accordingly, the Johnson administration opted for a combination of educational, workforce training, medical care, and food assistance programming. This was how the Food Stamp program (now SNAP), Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start were launched, as well as an expansion of the already-existing Social Security. Woven together, these programs created a social safety net in this country for our most vulnerable. Initially, Zeitz notes, these programs had a marked impact on the national poverty rate, which decreased by 42% between 1964 and 1973, and they remain important today. But ultimately, the decline in the poverty rate began to level off.

Compounding this deceleration of the poverty decline, subsequent presidential administrations invoked the idea of deserving versus undeserving poor. Ronald Reagan condemned “welfare queens” and “con artists” who enriched themselves on the back of the federal government. President Bill Clinton enacted the 1996 “welfare reform” supported by then-U.S. Sen. Biden. “Personal responsibility” became more than a catchphrase; it became the rationale for withholding government benefits to many children and adults living in poverty in America. Unfortunately, the legacy of this welfare reform bill was that it increased poverty and further marginalized the unemployed. And instead of viewing poverty as a societal indictment, many Americans still view it more as an individual moral failing. 

In 2021, the detrimental and far-reaching economic impact of the pandemic has created an opportunity for the federal government to reconsider its traditional responses to poverty and joblessness. American businesses were devastated, whole industries were endangered, and many individuals were left struggling to pick up the pieces, save their homes, and put food on the table. In response, the government’s outlook on poverty may be beginning to shift, such that socioeconomic forces and not individual initiative are highlighted as the root cause. “We need to be very clear here that the systemic issues with poverty—the racial disparities and the racial wealth gap—didn’t just create themselves. Lawmakers have divested in communities of color and put up barriers to [their] well-being,” said Mehrabi.

While the American Rescue Plan is a vital first step, it will not by itself lift children in America out of poverty. The first important obstacle to the plan’s efficacy is its temporary nature: the extra assistance offered now expires after this year unless Congress acts. Without an extension of the CTC, child poverty is projected to double in 2022. The Biden administration has recently backed away from pursuing permanency, and is instead opting to push an extension of the CTC—a path it feels is more realistic given Senate gridlock.

Second, the cash transfers in combination with more poverty-alleviating measures would have an even more aggressive impact on ending child poverty. For instance, Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy studied the impact that refundable tax credits would have alongside an expansion of the Housing 8 Voucher Choice Program. Other key poverty-alleviating measures that would complement the CTC include free school meals for all children, baby bonds, and building and preserving affordable homes through investment in the National Housing Trust Fund. The USDA has just taken another crucial step in the right direction by extending free universal school lunch until the end of the 2022 school year.

Third, current gaps in the assistance are extended through the American Rescue Plan. For example, the 2017 Trump tax law rendered 1 million undocumented children from low-income working families ineligible for the CTC because they lack SSNs. Reversing this restriction would broaden the measure’s impact so that all children with ITINs may benefit.

Moral and ethical obligations aside, child poverty is expensive: an estimated $800 billion to $1.1 trillion annually in health expenditures, lost productivity, and higher crime. Why not spend that money investing in children such as Shawn?

That’s probably too generous for a man remembered for sniffing women’s hair and giving a pass to allegations of sexual harassment by a Supreme Court nominee. But there is a big difference between how most observers thought Biden would govern, and what he’s actually done during his first 100 days as the nation’s chief executive.

President Biden’s first address to Congress was notable for several reasons. Most obviously, his address was notable for the lack of vindictiveness, racism, outright lies, and bizarre utterances completely divorced from reality that characterized his predecessor.

Right out of the gate, Biden gave a big hint at where his policy proposals were going, when he opened his speech by addressing the two women flanking him: “Madam Vice President, Madam Speaker—No president has ever said those words from this podium. No president has ever said those words, and it’s about time!”

But on substance, too, Biden’s speech was chock-full of policy proposals that seemed to originate from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, especially the nearly 40% of that Congressional caucus who are women and have long sought a renewed focus on the social safety net.

Not that there wasn’t anything to quibble with in Biden’s address. A lot of the “America is back” messaging had a nationalistic tinge that we should be moving beyond, especially after the past four years of escalating White supremacy. But overall, what we heard was a cohesive agenda that made the case for a massive spending program on social programs that have for too long been neglected.

The centerpiece of Biden’s speech was the American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion proposal that focuses on supporting children and families through a variety of universal entitlement programs and tax benefits, all paid for with increased taxes and enforcement on the wealthiest Americans.

The Families Plan follows on Biden’s other big proposal, the American Jobs Plan (with a $2.3 trillion price tag, also paid for mostly by reorienting the tax code to weigh on the rich).

Together they constitute a drastic redefinition not just of the word “infrastructure,” but of the role of government in American society. The proposals would also be one of the largest investments in the public welfare ever. (The New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt cost $41.7 billion at the time, or $653 billion in 2009 dollars. Many Great Society programs are still running after almost 60 years, and as such they’ve become embedded into the fabric of the modern U.S. government.)

But the important thing the Families Plan does is shine a light on an area where the U.S. has been woefully lacking for decades: social programs, especially those that would ease the financial and emotional burdens placed on women both in and out of the workforce: high-quality child and elder care, universal preschool, wage equity, affordable college education, support for teacher preparation and retention, and much more, including a national paid family leave program.

The U.S. is the only wealthy nation (and one of only eight countries worldwide) that doesn’t have a national paid parental leave program. Offering two years of universal preschool will be a huge benefit for young families with low and moderate incomes, who have been forced into a Sophie’s choice between leaving work to care for children (and lose income) or shelling out most of the income they make from working for day care—assuming they could even find affordable, accessible child care.

This last point has been acutely felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, when, as businesses retrenched or reduced operations and schooling moved into the home, many women—more than 2.3 million as of early 2021—just left the workforce entirely.

Whether the Biden administration realizes or not, his proposal offers a more holistic view of the economy, something that has been desperately needed as we watch wealth inequality spiral out of control, and as the conflict between the haves and have-nots provides fuel for a fire threatening to burn down democracy around the world.

It represents a complete repudiation of the neoliberal thinking that has dominated the U.S. and other industrial democracies since 1980. Biden acknowledged as much in his speech to Congress: “Trickle-down economics has never worked, and it’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and the middle out.”

Focusing heavily on the social safety net also brings into focus the vast amount of unpaid labor that women perform that never gets accounted for by mainstream economists.

Kate Raworth, author of the highly influential Doughnut Economics, made exactly this point in her book, writing, “mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades.”

One of the earliest of those feminist economists is Hazel Henderson, whom Raworth credits for the inspiration of representing the economic system with an easily graspable image. Henderson depicted the economy as a layer cake, in which nature and this unpaid labor sector (what she calls the “love economy”) comprise the bottom half of the global industrial economy, on top of which rests the layers of the cash-based economy, including underground economy, public sector spending, and the “icing” of the private sector. Commonplace economic measures like the Gross Domestic Product do not account for half of all economic activity, Henderson’s model shows.

Another example of articulating this discrepancy in our economic thinking was a paper by Anna Coote of the New Economics Foundation and Neva Goodwin of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, in which they argue that a “great transition” from a market economy with rampant wealth inequality, to one that prioritizes well-being, depends on the “core economy,” which are the people and resources that “comprise and sustain social life”:

“They are ‘core’ because they are central and essential to society. They underpin the market economy by raising children, caring for people who are ill, frail, and disabled, feeding families, maintaining households, and building and sustaining intimacies, friendships, social networks, and civil society. They have a key role, too, in safeguarding the natural economy, since everyday human behaviours and lifestyles strongly influence the way we use environmental resources. If we get it right, a thriving core economy will provide essential resources for a well-being system that is fit for the future.”

This new re-envisioning of economic activity seeks to capture not just the value of monetary transactions, but the value of all labor, of all resources, and of all kinds of capital, including social capital.

How much of a difference that expanded definition of economic activity may make remains unknown, precisely because we have only recently begun to try to measure it. But one 2019 Salary.com survey of U.S. mothers found that, if they were paid the going hourly rate for their daily roles as housekeeper, day care teacher, and van driver (among many others), they’d make nearly $180,000 a year.

We don’t often hear about that wage gap.

The current U.S. Congress comprises 142 women representatives and senators, 26.5% of the total membership and the highest number it’s ever been. That still places the United States pretty low down on the list of countries with women representation in their legislatures. And up until now, women’s influence over policymaking at the federal level has been sporadic at best, and nearly nonexistent before the 1980s.

In putting forth an ambitious plan to invest in the country’s social safety net, it looks like Biden’s administration, if not the president himself, has recognized the need to redress this historic snubbing of more than half the U.S. population.

For one thing, it’s good for the economy, because if 40 years of unfettered market capitalism have taught us anything, it’s that we’re doing it wrong.

But for another, as the U.S. continues to wake up to its many failures to embody the principles for which it purports to stand, we can look at the American Families Plan as a significant step toward a fairer and more just nation. After all, it’s about time.

The Olympics is that rare moment when the country takes their eyes off the NFL, NBA, and MLB, and focuses instead on the USFA, USAG, and USA Swimming, among others. 

That’s good news for niche sports programs around the country that are trying to lift up underserved communities. Nzingha Prescod, the first Black woman to win a Senior World Champion medal in fencing and a two-time Olympian, is one of those.

Prescod announced her retirement because of health issues in 2020, in the run-up to the (eventually postponed) Tokyo Games. But later that year, she started paying forward her own good fortune through a new program, Fencing in the Park.

“I had a mission to give back to my people and the kids in my neighborhood, because it was just such an important part of my development,” Prescod said. 

Prescod, a native of the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, New York, started fencing at a young age. In 2001, however, she had limited access to sports like fencing in her neighborhood. As a child, she joined the club at the nonprofit Peter Westbrook Foundation, whose mission is to enrich the lives of underprivileged youth through fencing, a sport historically more associated with upper-class White athletes. 

At Westbrook, Prescod had access to world-class coaches and training facilities that helped propel her career within the sport. She later attended Columbia University on the school’s fencing team and was on the U.S. Olympic team in 2012 and 2016.

Fencing In The Park offers four free programs for kids from underrepresented communities. Right now the organization’s core program is called the summer series, which helps expose under-represented communities of Brooklyn to the sport. From there, offerings expand to school programs (in which the organization partners with public, charter, and independent schools) as well as programs to fence recreationally at a local fencing club. And if kids are really into it, they can participate in a high-performance program that trains for competition. 

The need for programs like Fencing in the Park is growing, and it’s daunting. According to a pre-pandemic report from Aspen Institute, the household income disparity between children who play sports and those who don’t is staggering. In 2018, kids from households with annual incomes below $25,000 were 21% less likely to play sports than children from households with income above $100,000. 

Part of that problem can be attributed to the cost of sports. According to the survey, the average family spends almost $700 on sports per child per year. But in some equipment-heavy sports such as fencing, that can add up quickly to thousands of dollars for club membership fees, lessons and classes, gear, and competition-related expenses. Even starter kits can run hundreds of dollars. Without programs like Fencing In The Park, even exposure to the sport would be unobtainable for many low-income kids. 

There is similar momentum in the sport of gymnastics to provide more equitable opportunities. Hall of Fame gymnast Wendy Hilliard, the first Black rhythmic gymnast on the U.S. national team, now leads the Wendy Hilliard Gymnastics Foundation. Since 1996, the foundation has provided low-cost gymnastics classes to underprivileged youth in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.

“When you go down the list of college sports, the nontraditional sports definitely is an easier path because there are fewer students doing them. But on the other side of that, there are fewer opportunities to learn and train,” Hilliard said.

Like fencing, gymnastics has more built-in costs that some more popular sports don’t have because of the specialized facilities needed. They’re not as commonplace, nor as cheap (or even free), the way neighborhood basketball or tennis courts may be. That presents more significant barriers to entry.

Hilliard has been dismantling those hurdles in gymnastics, lifting up kids who wouldn’t otherwise have access to the national stage, including some who qualified for the U.S. national team. Her foundation has served more than 20,000 kids so far, and in 2016, opened a second center in her former home of Detroit. 

This past spring, Hilliard and Prescod both joined other New York City sports leaders to lobby for the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Sports, Wellness, and Recreation. Effective August 21, the office would be responsible for both building and supporting youth sport programs throughout the city, and expanding access to disadvantaged communities across the five boroughs.

This isn’t just happening in New York. Many schools and universities offer crew rowing programs, for example, to meet their Title IX requirements, which mandates an equal amount of athletic offerings for women and men. 

In part, that’s why Steve Perry, head coach and program director at Dallas United Crew, launched Row Dallas, a program to draw in middle school-age athletes who would otherwise find the sport inaccessible because of the financial and geographical constraints that come with it.

It is game-changing for teens who otherwise wouldn’t be college bound. 

“The sport that has so many open ends for their future,” Perry said. “A huge number of women end up getting scholarships.” The Connecticut Post has reported that nearly half of all collegiate women rowers receive an athletic scholarship.

Perry knows the college landscape. He formerly coached rowing teams at the U.S. Naval Academy, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University. He now works alongside the Dallas Independent School District to offer Row Dallas programming for free to students, and even arranges transportation for children from school to the boathouse. Following in the footsteps of programs like it, such as STEM to Stern, a program that serves under-represented youth in Milwaukee, Row Dallas also provides tutoring in math and language arts. 

There is a direct correlation between athletic involvement and social mobility. A study from the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy found that upper-middle-class students are more likely to take part in extracurriculars than their lower-income counterparts. By targeting wealthier students, programs have been able to ramp up the costs associated with joining a team, which creates even more significant barriers to entry, limiting yet another avenue for social mobility. 

For that reason, more sports organizations are taking a holistic approach by including academic programming alongside physical education. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Mulatto Meadows is helping bring equestrian to children in disenfranchised communities of the East Bay. The program includes basic horseback riding lessons, but the long-term riding program also requires students to maintain a 3.0 GPA and be involved in community service. 

The program teaches both foundations of horseback riding and also provides options for more long-term riding opportunities, which the organization’s program director, Bri Noble, asserts is therapeutic for the communities she serves. 

“Many of our families, because of the location we’re in, experience so much trauma and death around them,” Noble said, adding, “We bring in the horses to help assist in the therapy process that’s going on.”

Noble’s focus is more on therapeutic riding than on preparing for college, but nonetheless is providing a needed service in these communities. “We use horses as a medium to inspire positivity in our communities, and that really just means so many different things,” she said.

The hope is that through programs like these introducing niche sports to children who might not otherwise have access to them, inspiration is carried forward by future generations of youth athletes. And if the U.S. Olympic team in Tokyo is any example, some of those athletes can go far in life. 

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:05 p.m. Aug. 11, 2021, to correct the number of children served by the Wendy Hilliard Gymnastics Foundation. Read our corrections policy here.

Yet even knowing this, the Pandora Papers exposé by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is still jaw-dropping. Journalists from 150 news organizations around the world obtained the offshore financial records of more than 330 public officials, including 130 people on Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires, in more than 90 countries and territories.

The reporting was based on 11.9 million financial records that reveal a yet-unknown amount of hidden wealth that could reach into the trillions. Globally, anywhere from $5.3 trillion—about 6.25% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product—to as much as $32 trillion has been thought to be held in offshore tax havens.

And the real shocker is that these records were held by just 14 financial services firms. This is barely scratching the surface of a vast invisible economy of, by, and for the ultra-rich.

Indeed, as The Washington Post pointed out, some well-known Americans like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffet do not appear in the leaked documents. Even Donald Trump is only tangentially mentioned.

That doesn’t mean America’s wealthiest people aren’t making use of offshore accounts. But it’s also true that many Americans don’t have accounts in those places, as they’re often attractive primarily to wealthy people in countries with less-robust financial sectors, and where graft and corruption are commonplace.

And as other investigations have revealed, America’s billionaires already pay such a low effective tax rate that they don’t necessarily need to hide their money overseas.

But where there’s a need, there will be a market, if not for Jeff Bezos, then for the thousands of other billionaires around the world.

A widespread vehicle the ultra-rich use to hide their wealth is trusts—accounts that hold someone’s wealth, but are managed by third parties, providing a legal gray area as to who legally owns the capital. And one of the U.S. jurisdictions that has been most aggressive in drawing in the trust industry is South Dakota, which is home to 103 trust companies holding about $367 billion in assets, the most of any state.

“States have been putting legal frameworks together to attract global capital since the 1980s and 1990s,” says Chuck Collins, the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.

South Dakota was an early adopter in that regard, repealing its usury laws that capped the amount of interest banks could charge in 1980. Financial firms took note of the newly deregulated state, and Citibank’s credit card division was the first to decamp for the lucrative pastures of Sioux Falls. The bank, then and now the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S., had lost hundreds of millions of dollars because the inflation rate was higher than New York’s cap on interest that could be charged on debt.

“That’s why they can charge 27% interest on your late credit card,” Collins says.

Since then, South Dakota has continued to make itself attractive to financial services, including offshore trust providers, joining a race to the bottom of jurisdictions competing for lucrative tax offshoring.

That’s similar to policies enacted by some other states, such as Delaware’s notoriously permissive tax code, which has made it attractive to people and corporations setting up anonymous limited liability companies.

It is possible that, outside of a sense of moral indignation that the wealthy play by a different set of rules, a person of low to average income would not notice any direct impacts from wealth hoarding on their own standard of living. There are, however, four harms the practice of hiding wealth does to civil society, Collins explains:

1. When rich people don’t pay taxes, everyone else gets stuck with the bill for a nation’s expenses, everything from pandemic recovery funding to veterans’ health care, military expenditures, retirement programs such as Social Security, and so forth.

2. The hidden wealth system is how the wealthy Global North extracts value from the poorer Global South, continuing the harms of colonialism to those people who are most vulnerable to them.

3. Wealth offshoring enhances the power of kleptocrats around the world engaged in looting their nations for personal gain.

4. Finally, the practice fuels the extreme wealth inequality that creates dynasties of unearned inherited wealth and power, perpetuating the other three harms down through generations.

Plus, the offshoring system has consequences for the U.S. in its dealings with other nations.

“The U.S. can’t go around the world complaining of corruption when we’ve become a tax haven,” Collins says.

In 2016, the Panama Papers investigation was based on the largest leak of documentation that revealed a tiny slice of the vast amount of private wealth squirreled away in offshore accounts. That investigation, based on leaks from a single Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, had many real-world aftereffects, including the resignation of Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson of Iceland and the removal and later sentencing of Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif to 10 years in prison.

The Panama release also precipitated changes to beneficial ownership laws in many countries to reveal who owns what, and a treaty between the U.S. and Switzerland to prevent Swiss bank accounts from avoiding oversight by U.S. tax authorities.

But it wasn’t enough. For example, the U.S. doesn’t have a reciprocal agreement with Switzerland to subject bank accounts to Swiss scrutiny, Collins says. And the release of the Pandora Papers this year has exposed just how little transparency is still out there, even in the U.S.

“We’re like the deadbeats, the laggards, and that’s what these global billionaires are taking advantage of,” Collins says.

Europe’s reaction to the Panama Papers exposé provides a way forward. “It mostly shamed Europe into changing their practices,” Collins says.

In response to the exposure, European governments strengthened multilateral conventions amongst themselves to allow joint tax investigations, and have since recovered hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of new probes. Even Panama signed a convention with multiple countries to share foreign taxpayers’ information, and the founders of the law firm at the center of that scandal now face arrest if they ever return to the European Union.

The U.S. needs to follow Europe’s example, Collins says, and then some. The Corporate Transparency Act, which Congress passed Jan. 1, 2021 as part of the annual defense authorization act, requires all businesses operating in the U.S. to file ownership information with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is part of the Treasury Department. That law, enacted over Trump’s veto, closed a significant loophole, one which former president Trump (among many others) exploited to create hundreds of anonymous shell companies to hold his and his clients’ assets.

But it’s not the only loophole or harmful law that needs addressing, as the release of the Pandora Papers demonstrates. At the very least, the U.S. should put its own house in order and end the use of tax shelters within its borders. That, for starters, would give the country the moral authority to hold others to account.

Many young people today are breaking the trance and challenging the system—supporting positive alternatives, like worker cooperatives, public ownership of water and electricity, B Corporations, impact investments, community loan funds, co-housing, community land trusts, and other models of a democratic economy. 

Despite the growing movement for such alternatives, the depressing fact is we’re losing ground faster than we’re gaining it. We can see this in the ways in which the “gig economy” is replacing the once-stable employee relationship; in the high cost of living that is miring families in debt as they try to pay for housing, college, and retirement; and in our crumbling health care system, which is increasingly becoming a tool for private equity to suck wealth out of the the hands of ordinary people and into those of the already wealthy.

The economy is simply not working for the majority. A May 2023 Harris poll found, half of Americans—across generations and races—believe capitalism is headed in the wrong direction. This suggests we are at an important moment, one where capitalism’s legitimacy is beginning to be open for debate. 

This moment provides an important opportunity to challenge our economic system, one that goes beyond building alternatives that capitalism promptly absorbs or marginalizes. We need to help each other recognize how our own mindset helps hold the system in place, and thus how a change of our collective mind could itself be the foundation of deep change. My point is this: We begin to change the system when we change our minds. How can this be?

We Can Change the System by Denying Its Legitimacy

First, consider the fact that we will never win against extractive capitalism if it’s a matter of raw power. But we the people wield a more subtle power—in the end, the ultimate power—which is legitimacy. When we withdraw legitimacy, we fatally weaken the system, turning its cultural foundation to sand. Why did apartheid fall? Because it lost moral legitimacy when people around the world denounced it as white supremacist, illegitimately favoring white people over people of color.

Second, recall the admonition of systems theorist Donella Meadows, who advised that the single most effective place to intervene in any system is at the level of mindset: the mind out of which the system arises, in other words, the paradigm. 

What constitutes a paradigm, wrote Meadows, is society’s deepest set of beliefs about how the world works, the shared idea in our minds: “the great big unstated assumptions—unstated because [they are] unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them.”

We often point to “corporate power,” “inequality,” and “greed” as the problem. But pointing these out doesn’t help us get to the root of the system’s dysfunction. We need to challenge the system paradigm, which I call wealth supremacy—the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth for the wealthy, even as it means stagnation or losses for the rest of us. Personal greed is certainly operating. But the system problem is how greed is mandated, rewarded, normalized, and institutionalized in the practices and institutions of the system. 

It’s mandated in how investments are managed, how corporations are governed; the aim of both is maximum income to capital. In operation, wealth supremacy takes the form of capital bias—the way only capital votes in corporations, for example, while workers are disenfranchised and dispossessed. We see it in how a rising stock market is equated with a successful economy, even as the rising profits that drive stock prices often come from mass layoffs that feed the bottom line. This in turn drives a disaffected working class into the arms of the hard right, damaging democracy. 

We see wealth supremacy and capital bias in the way that property rights are considered sacred and untouchable, while worker rights and environmental protections are constantly contested. We see it in the way Exxon Mobil’s stock price climbed 80 percent in 2022, as it followed the accepted norms of corporate governance (maximize gains to shareholders), even as those norms led to forests burning and cities flooding.

The very heart and soul of the system is the idea that our economy exists to serve the wealthy, to allow them to extract limitless, maximum amounts from the rest of us, and from the planet. Protecting and growing their financial wealth—called “capital”—is the aim of the whole system. As such, it is contrary to our democratic values. It means in a democratic society founded on the truth that all persons are created equal, we have permitted an economic system based on a directly contrary principle: that the wealthy matter more than the rest of us. 

Paradigms may seem harder to change than practices or processes in the physical world, Meadows wrote. “But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change,” she continued. “In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.” 

A paradigm shift for our economy begins when we name and see the bias that lies at the heart of the capital-centric system. It begins when we see wealth supremacy clearly, in the same way that we’ve learned to name and see white supremacy and male supremacy. When we do so, we undercut capitalism’s legitimacy and challenge its standing as an acceptable cultural norm. 

Many grassroots organizations are already practicing such paradigmatic changes, educating their communities, naming the harms of extraction, and building alternatives: the Highlander Research and Education Center’s populist community education programs in Appalachia, Boston’s Ujima Project, Downtown Crenshaw in Los Angeles, and Cooperation Jackson of Mississippi, to name just a few.

Wealth Grows Through Extracting From the Rest of Us

The need to infinitely increase wealth is what is leading the system to its most destructive behavior, which is the extreme financial extraction we experience today. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 was triggered by bankers trying to squeeze as much as possible from families with the fewest resources. Today, the homes foreclosed a decade ago are being bought up by private equity companies who raise rents and skimp on maintenance to advance earnings for shareholders. As a result, housing is increasingly unaffordable and more and more families find themselves houseless. 

The bias of capital is built into the economic system at every level, yet its destructive force is hidden by language. We valorize so-called investing and the way it “creates wealth,” as if wealth can be created out of nothing. But much “investing” is really extraction; it’s a form of taking that undermines the resilience of families and communities. 

This is obscured by the way in which portfolio gains are reported, depicted as pure numbers rising, as though these gains just fall from the sky, pristine and unblemished. It’s rarely explained to us how these gains come from squeezing ordinary Americans: private equity bankrupting companies, polluted air and water undermining health, stagnant wages and lost jobs, families losing equity in their homes, students accumulating crushing debt. 

We’re not connecting the dots yet. When big tech firms’ share prices are lofty, we don’t conclude that this is linked to a post-truth society or the corruption of democracy. When we hear about the rising number of billionaires, we don’t think about the opioid crisis or local firms shut out by chains. We could, because these outcomes are the result of root causes found in the structures and practices of our capital-centric economy and in the power that this system creates for a wealthy elite.

This squeezing of ordinary people is what economists call “financialization.” It means financial wealth is so overblown, it’s come to dominate our economy, our culture, the natural world, even our ostensibly democratic politics. For decades, economists have been ringing alarm bells, telling us that financialization is destabilizing society. We need to see that the problem of too much financial wealth in too few hands is as much of an emergency as the climate crisis. Indeed, it is linked to the climate crisis.

Where Do We Begin?

Financialization is the logical, inevitable result of a system built on wealth supremacy. But it remains invisible. It’s time to start talking about it—about what it is, how it functions, how it’s driving or exacerbating the catastrophes people are experiencing in their daily lives: unrelenting storms, heat waves, and wildfires; insecure work; out-of-control health care costs; unaffordable housing.

When I was a kid in the 1950s, financial assets (stocks, bonds, debts of all kinds) were roughly equal to the national gross domestic product (GDP), which is the flow of income and spending in the real economy. Today, financial assets are five times the GDP. Yet the economic system’s goal is eternal growth of those assets. 

To continue operating our economy based on maximum growth of capital is madness. In addition to talking about the rising number of billionaires, let’s also talk about the underlying rules and structures that create that obscene wealth. Let’s help each other understand that financialization is more than a collection of obscure charts in academic papers. It’s a force in our society—an extractive force of unprecedented power and unimaginable size, creating devastating effects: precarity, monopolies, and the capture of democracy.  

Financialization and Wealth Supremacy Are Real

Deep change—that is, system change—can begin in earnest when society understands the problem of financialization and wealth supremacy and how it’s impacting our world. It is not an ideological shouting match. It’s a reality we need to face. Recognizing this is a prelude to the great task ahead: transferring wealth and power from the hands of the few to the control of the many, creating a democratic economy designed not to maximize financial wealth but to keep life flourishing.

To continue its dominance, capital extraction requires that we accept its normality, its technical necessity, its inevitability. 

Where we begin to transform this system is in our own minds. This is where we stop accepting it as legitimate. This is where the system begins to lose its grip. This is where we begin to win.

Adapted from Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (Berrett-Koehler, 2023). 

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 3:23 p.m. PT on May 22, 2023, to correct a misstatement of Mark Fisher’s quote in the opening line of the piece. Fisher wrote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Read our corrections policy here.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of our most potent and visionary grassroots social movements has emerged out of the fight for housing justice. The current pandemic and economic crisis reveals in new ways just how cruel the private housing market can be. In April, one third of all renters could not pay rent—and 20 million more people have filed for unemployment since then. Research by the Eviction Lab shows how damaging eviction has always been to families and communities – evictions during COVID-19 might effectively amount to a death sentence for some people.     

These ideas haven’t been acceptable in U.S. politics for many decades. Even among progressive social movements, such scale seemed beyond our capacity to dream until recently. Last March, 30 Bay Area leaders imagined a radically beautiful 100-year vision for land justice in the Bay Area. Our vision included fully socialized housing…but not until 2040. All of a sudden, that vision is a real political possibility in 2020 thanks to bold grassroots demands to #CancelRent and guarantee housing for all. Both demands are now supported by elected officials, including U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (read her Homes for All Act and Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (read the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act). 

How did we get here? We have increasingly become a “renter nation” since real estate lenders and financial institutions crashed the global economy in 2008. Ten million foreclosures later, more than one-third of American families are now renters. Eighteen million families pay more than 50% of their income on housing. How many of those people now have no income at all? And this precarity hits some communities worse than others. The Black homeownership rate recently reached its lowest percentage since before the civil rights movement—proportionally, there were more Black homeowners when segregation was legal than there are now.  

For 400 years, American capitalism has thrived on racial exclusion and resource extraction, first through the theft of Indigenous land and Black labor, and more recently, through what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has called “predatory inclusion”: financial policies and practices designed to siphon wealth out of Black and brown communities through predatory loans, targeted disinvestment, and financial deregulation. The private housing market now simultaneously “includes” people of color while continuing to enforce segregation through new forms of redlining and displacement.

Nowhere is this intersection between racism and an economy built on plunder more evident today than in the housing market. Decades of racist policy and market practices have created a massive racial wealth gap, one that could take nearly as long to close as it took to abolish slavery. And it’s not really going in the right direction: By some accounts, the subprime mortgage crisis produced the greatest loss of Black wealth in modern history, while the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans has grown by an average of 736% over the past several decades.

While private homeownership has been an engine of middle-class wealth creation for White America, the last 10 years have made it clear that it’s primarily been an engine of wealth extraction for communities of color and poor communities (read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”). This isn’t new: In addition to violent dispossession, one of the primary ways that White settler-colonists took control of Indigenous land throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was through the “allotment system,” the forced conversion of communally held tribal land to privately owned plots that could then be purchased, often under false pretenses.   

The housing market will never provide housing for all. Housing under capitalism produces inequality, houselessness, and chronic displacement on a grand scale. It also makes strangers of those who remain in place. According to the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, Oakland’s Black population has declined by 27% since 2000 in a kind of reverse migration back into racially segregated rural and suburban communities.

Noni Session, executive director of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, grew up in the West Oakland flats, a third generation West Oaklander. “When I came back from grad school and research in 2011, I saw a city that I didn’t recognize,” she told Oakland Magazine. Social scientists have recently coined a new term to describe the sense of “homelessness without leaving home” that frontline communities around the world are experiencing as a result of climate disruption, ecological collapse, and mass migration: solastalgia, the pain of staying put. Whereas nostalgia describes a longing for a lost past, solastalgia describes a lost present and grief for an unlivable future.

In 2018, Sustainable Economies Law Center worked with Session and other community members to launch the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative: a Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led “movement cooperative” designed to stabilize communities facing rapid and racialized displacement. By removing housing from the speculative market and asserting permanent community control through cooperative ownership, EB PREC:

• Creates housing sovereignty and community wealth now by purchasing multiunit buildings to prevent eviction of working class tenants, turning renters into stewards of community land and housing.

• Develops community capacity for governance of land and housing through EB PREC’s unique multistakeholder cooperative structure, where neighbors are empowered to come together to purchase buildings and cooperatively govern a community-owned enterprise.

• Builds new community-controlled institutions positioned to demand and receive an influx of private and public capital, as bold new policies, such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Homes For All Act, call for billions in public money to flow into communities for affordable housing.

The alternative to a profit-driven housing system is community-controlled social housing. House by house, block by block, community land trusts and cooperatives have been attempting to democratize and decolonize their relationships to land, housing, and community. Now, nearly 300 community land trusts exist across the country. These grassroots organizations are exercising their right to the city by meeting fundamental needs for housing and contesting for public resources.

And neither is this new: I recently visited the South Carolina Sea Islands, one of the few places where “40 acres and a mule” was a brief but actual program of land reform after the Civil War. For the Black leaders who met with Gen. Sherman in 1865, emancipation from slavery was not enough on its own to liberate people. They recognized that collective liberation required a self-determined relationship to land and control over the means of production (read Ed Whitfield’s “What must we do to be free? On the building of Liberated Zones”). A hundred years later, the vision remained the same. The modern community land trust movement traces its roots to rural Georgia, when civil rights organizers Shirley and Charles Sherrod created New Communities Inc. as a sanctuary and radical experiment in mutual aid in response to violent White backlash from local landlords and farmers.

Tenant- and community-owned housing still only meets a tiny fraction of our housing needs, though. Looking to international examples from Austria to Sweden to Uruguay, as well as our own New Deal past, the housing justice movement now has a detailed program to deliver homes for all (read People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee). The formula for today’s freedom call is a massive reinvestment in green public housing construction; plus a major increase in support for community-owned housing; backed by tenant protections and anti-displacement measures. The right to housing is a precondition for any kind of just transition, and collective control of land and housing is an assertion of those rights. Even with a massive program of publicly owned and financed social housing, the right to housing will still be asserted through local institutions that are accountable to and led by the most affected communities. Projects such as EB PREC are building “powerful places” in opposition to the “placeless power” of multinational financial institutions and hedge funds.   

A just and livable future demands a radically democratic present. There’s no more strategic or morally imperative place to practice that future than our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities. We can decarbonize a significant swath of the economy while democratizing development and building community power from the ground up. A livable future is also about decolonizing and decommodifying our relationship to place, disrupting the logic that drives both the extraction of resources from the earth and the extraction of profits from renters, poor people, and communities of color. Land is a living, breathing, wild, teeming community of life. When we treat it as a site of loving, meaning, and belonging rather than a site of extraction and exclusion, “homes for all” becomes not just a political slogan, but a statement of interconnection with all life. 

A version of this article was originally published by Sustainable Economies Law Center. It has been updated and published here with permission.

San Sebastian Rio Hondo, a Zapotec highland village like many others, has traditionally supplemented its agrarian way of life through the wool industry. Long famous for its rich tradition of Indigenous handwoven textiles, Oaxaca has nevertheless fallen on hard times, along with most of rural Mexico, partly because of policies promoting urbanization and undermining the traditional rural way of life.

In San Sebastian, the hardship has been severe: as of the 2010 census, 55% of the population lived in extreme poverty, more than a third had not completed primary school, and more than two-thirds did not have a high school education. Unemployment continues to be high, compelling a high rate of migration out of the state and out of Mexico. Among the women, job opportunities were practically nonexistent.

This was the context that Eliseo “Cheo” Ramírez was born into. In his parents’ and grandparents’ time, villagers grazed sheep and helped cover expenses by making woolen textiles. In the 1970s and ’80s, however, the Mexican government initiated a program to plant pine trees for lumber, and the pastures and native forests began to shrink. The industrial clothing industry began producing cheap synthetic yarns. Spinning and weaving, once a staple in every home, fell by the wayside. The children of weavers and farmers began making their way north to work in the U.S. as meatpackers and migrant farmworkers.

Ramírez’ prospects for employment were so grim that he set off from home in 2006 at age 16 for the U.S., crossing the Sonoran Desert and nearly dying of thirst. The experience proved so traumatic that he never made the attempt again. Now 32, he has good reason to remain home: he’s the chief operating officer and head of sales and part of the core team of Khadi Oaxaca, a farm-to-garment nonprofit textile enterprise aiming to regenerate the village way of life in a sustainable way. He no longer harbors illusions of an American Dream; his dream nowadays is to help generate opportunities that keep more of his people at home with their families.

Khadi Oaxaca follows what is known as the Gandhian economic model in three ways: It focuses on producing gainful employment for many instead of big profits for a few; it strives to build local autonomy and resilience at the village level, building in a cash supplement that supports the traditional agrarian life; and it follows the Gandhian strategy of making clothing from scratch, with workers spinning their own thread from organically grown cotton. And now, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic causing jobs to dry up everywhere, this handspun thread has become a lifeline for the local economy.

Khadi Oaxaca is the brainchild of the Mexico-educated son of a U.S. industrialist, Mark “Marcos” Brown, and with his wife, Kalindi Attar. Brown had traveled to San Sebastian as a teenager in 1974 and developed a lifelong relationship with the village. He later spent time in India, where he learned about khadi, a handspun cloth that became a cornerstone of the Indian independence movement. He lived for two years in Gandhi’s ashram, studying under one of the Mahatma’s last living disciples, and learned about how Gandhi’s satyagraha movement used khadi as a sign of Indian national pride and resistance to the exploitative practices of the British clothing industry.

As Brown studied Gandhi’s movement, the connections to the wasteful global “fast fashion” industry quickly became apparent, in the ways it has contaminated the planet and degraded the lives of millions of sweatshop workers. He vowed to live his values, learning to spin and to weave, making his own clothing, and thinking of ways in which khadi might serve the poverty-stricken people of the Oaxaca countryside that he’d come to love.

So when Brown returned to San Sebastian in 2010, he brought with him a charkha, or Gandhian spinning wheel, and a plan. Less than 1% of the thread market was handspun at that time—a dramatic contrast to his first visit in the 1970s, when many families spun their own woolen thread. In 2010, a kilogram of thread, the quantity per month that average households can spin in their spare moments, sold for just 400 pesos—about USD $18, nowhere near enough to incentivize the practice of spinning.

“Gandhi would say, you have to create a thread standard—like the gold standard used to be,” Brown said. “The idea of a standard is that a woman can spin and actually survive on that spinning; she can make enough for her family to live on and meet their basic needs. Can you imagine that, spinning, where the standard can meet your basic needs of survival, where it takes you out of hunger? And that gives you a sense of security and well-being?”

Brown put the village carpenter to work duplicating the charkha. He found a supply of organic cotton, and he set about teaching the young Ramírez and his wife, Felipa, how to spin. Brown then put Ramírez in charge, and soon a team of 20 women—mostly grandmothers—were spinning, a loose affiliation of home-based businesses now seeing their labor turned into a variety of textiles and sold across Mexico and the United States. The revenue flows back to the spinners, weavers, embroiderers, and other artisans working in the village, and to the cotton growers they purchase from on the coast.

Remigio Mestas, a Zapotec textile artist, entrepreneur and cultural promoter in Oaxaca working to revive the Indigenous textile traditions, agreed to buy all the thread the women produced, which he supplied to weavers who sell through his stores. That was the beginning of a business that now, a decade later, helps to sustain nearly 500 people in the village, including cotton growers, spinners, clothing designers, and marketers.

“It’s a very interesting and laudable project,” Mestas said. “It could be an example for many; if it were to spread, it could address our problems of unemployment and hunger in the countryside.”

Mestas also connected the group with Margaret MacSems, who co-founded a project with Mixtec farmers on the coast working to revive native coyuchi cotton production. MacSems would eventually join the Khadi Oaxaca team, becoming director of sustainability, thus connecting the enterprise with coyuchi farmers. Mestas also put Brown in touch with teachers who trained Ramírez and others how to weave with the upright pedal loom, and how to work with natural dyes.

The team has been able to raise the pay rate from 400 pesos per kilo of handspun thread to 1,500 pesos, or nearly $70 in today’s dollars—a standard that makes a meaningful difference in a village economy. The thread has become the foundation of a cottage industry, now employing 350 spinners.

In the past few years, Khadi Oaxaca had seen an exponential growth in sales. Attar, as head designer, and Ramírez attended fashion expos, where she was struck by the way people would react to their displays. “They’d walk right past top designers and stop at our little stand,” Attar said. “It’s been amazing to me the way people have responded. It seems that doing every part of the process by hand is such an attractive quality for people.”

“As (Gandhi) would always say, when we talk about village economics, if it comes from a place of nonviolence, of a truly sacred economics, then you don’t need any commercialism; you don’t need to market that which has its essence and its beginning in goodness,” Brown said.

Now, however, the pandemic has shut down not only the expos but the entire Mexican tourism industry, which is what drew shoppers to the tourist-destination boutiques across Mexico that featured Khadi Oaxaca’s unique products. That’s put the group’s model to the test. Less fabric is being woven, and Khadi isn’t stocking finished garments, is reducing work for the sewers, stitchers, and embroiderers, and the group’s core staff took a pay cut to reduce the economic impact on the artisans. Only the spinning hasn’t been cut back; rather, Khadi has expanded its roster of spinners by 100 people.

The company quickly started expanding its online presence. Ramírez began posting photos of the existing stock on an already lively Instagram account, and orders began to flow in from the United States. Online sales jumped from an average of $1,300 USD per month before the pandemic to $6,500 in May. And international sales shot up from 5% of the total before the outbreak to 60% now, mostly from the U.S., MacSems said.

That growth has all come about through Khadi’s Instagram account, which isn’t a sales portal. The next projects are an online catalog and a shopping cart on the company website, and working to expand their presence on other social media.

Despite the cutbacks, 20 families are supporting themselves weaving cloth with upright pedal looms—fathers such as Juvenal García, who used to spend his days cutting down the pine forests in the region for lumber, and Carlos Vargas, who used to travel to the U.S. for seasonal landscaping work. Even if they had wanted to leave home, the pandemic shut down those options; but both said they much prefer to stay home and work with their families.

The largest part of the operation, however, is still the spinning. The network of spinners now extends far beyond San Sebastian into the rancherías, the tiny rural settlements where families still live in the traditional agrarian way. For Eugemia Velázquez, a 38-year-old mother of six, Khadi has provided a degree of dignity and comfort that were previously unthinkable. Before she started spinning for Khadi, Velázquez was a wool artisan like her mother and grandmother; she knitted little hats, dolls, and tortilla warmers, and every two weeks would leave them with the street vendors in the next town, who would pay her a small advance and then pay the rest later if the pieces were sold. But sometimes, none of them did, making her family’s economic situation precarious.

These days, Velázquez has been content knowing that she can deliver a pound of thread every two weeks and earn enough to buy her children school supplies and other items she can’t make or grow herself. 

Sales doubled at Khadi from 2018 to 2019, and that was without even concentrating on online sales. This has been possible, Brown said, in part because people are willing to pay the actual cost to produce ethically and regeneratively fabricated products, and also because Khadi Oaxaca has been able to receive grants from private foundations in the U.S.

Based on the growth in sales before the outbreak of COVID-19, the business was on track to be independent of grant funding by mid-2022; now that’s less certain, MacSems said. Overall sales have plummeted 56% since February. But she said she’s optimistic, given the potential of online sales and the burgeoning interest in this kind of project. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, thread production has doubled, with some families saying it’s their only source of income. Grant funding has allowed Khadi Oaxaca to continue buying the thread that has become a mainstay for local families.

“What we’ve found is that it is possible to care for each aspect of the supply chain, be ecologically mindful, empower local communities and create unbelievably beautiful textiles,” Attar said. “COVID is painfully helping us globally to wake up to the fact that our Earth is indeed suffering; we are all interdependent. Our goal is to be a model and live the change we want to see in the world. May we look toward great souls like Mahatma Gandhi for guidance.”

On the surface, the issue pits the flexibility that comes with being independent against the higher incomes and benefits that employees tend to get. Uber, DoorDash and others say the proposition they put on the ballot in California splits the difference by keeping them contractors—“with benefits.”

I’ve been studying gig labor for nearly a decade. Since 2013, I’ve led teams that have interviewed more than 200 workers on platforms such as TaskRabbit, Postmates, Uber, and other apps to learn about their experiences, earning patterns, desires and constraints.

I believe there is a better way to marry flexibility with a livable wage.

What Workers Want

It’s true that gig workers want flexibility, autonomy, and life without a boss. But my team and I also found that the lack of benefits and available work mean it’s almost impossible to earn a reliable primary income on these platforms.

Those who tried to earn a full-time living on the platforms typically made less than the official poverty line, even when their hourly wages were decent. A separate 2020 San Francisco study found that ride-hail drivers were earning $360 per week, after expenses. That’s $9 an hour for a 40-hour workweek—and even less for the majority who work more than that. Almost half of the ride-hail and delivery workers in that study could not cover a $400 expense without borrowing.

These poor conditions support our conclusion that succeeding on these platforms generally requires having at least one other job, often a conventional one that includes some benefits. In other words, the platforms seem to be free-riding on the backs of conventional employers.

But we also saw how good this kind of work could be—under the right circumstances.

Reluctant Employees

To protect gig workers, California enacted a law last year that properly reclassified them from independent contractors to employees. It went into effect in January 2020.

Employment status makes the job more remunerative and less precarious by guaranteeing a minimum wage and numerous benefits. But the gig companies warn that it will eliminate the flexibility that workers like about gig work. Legal scholar Veena Dubal found that many workers came to support this reclassification as employees reluctantly, and only because conditions had become so dire.

In response, Uber and Lyft threatened to leave the state unless voters enacted Proposition 22. The proposition exempts ride-hail and delivery workers from the California gig economy law but also offers some benefits. It claims to guarantee pay equal to 120% of the California minimum wage, which is now $13 an hour.

But independent researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have calculated that Proposition 22 would likely guarantee a wage of only $5.64 an hour, and many workers would be excluded from the various insurance benefits the proposition would provide.

Worker Cooperatives

My own research points to a different approach that retains worker flexibility but also gives workers a say in how the business operates—not to mention a real financial stake in its success: the platform cooperative.

Like any cooperative, a platform co-op is an enterprise jointly owned and controlled by its workers. Platform means the workers use an app or website to connect with one another and organize services for users.

Sociology doctoral student Samantha Eddy and I conducted a study of a platform cooperative in Canada called Stocksy United. It’s a stock photography company in which the contributing photographers are considered independent contractors but also own shares in the cooperative. There’s a small management team, but major decisions are voted on by the artists.

Members told us they are far happier than when they worked for the “Uber” of their industry, Getty Images, and earn much more for each photo sold. One reason for their satisfaction is that, like many platforms, Stocksy hosts a range of collaboration styles, from hobbyists who contribute the occasional photograph to professionals who invest large sums in shoots. This gives members the freedom that many seek from platform work.

All members get a say in the company’s governance, though in practice only a few hundred of its roughly 1,000 members are active in the company’s forums, where issues are discussed and voted on.

A key component of Stocksy’s success is that its founders already had extensive industry experience and knew the platform model and its technology. Another element was that it began with a $1.3 million loan from the founders. Lack of financing is a chronic impediment to the establishment of cooperatives, whatever the industry.

Another chronic problem in the gig economy is that too many workers chase too little work, a phenomenon that has been particularly acute among ride-hailing services. It arises in part because most platforms allow almost anyone to join. Our ongoing but unpublished interviews with gig shoppers and delivery workers find that this imbalance has intensified during the pandemic.

To avoid this problem, many co-ops, especially in driving, delivery, and cleaning, limit membership and only expand with the market. That’s a major boon for workers who depend on their app-based incomes for rent, food, and other basic expenses.

Platform cooperatives are a bit younger than the gig economy, which began around 2009. So there aren’t many yet. But there are examples in bicycle delivery, ride-hail services, cleaning, and health care.

There’s no reason to expect the likes of Uber and Lyft to ever convert to a worker cooperative. But if they were to go that route, our interviews suggest workers would be better off.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation. It has been edited for YES! Magazine, and was updated on Nov. 5 at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time to reflect the results of California’s Proposition 22, which voters approved in the general election on Nov. 3.

Posso harvests the fruits by hand, cracks them open with a machete, and collects the grape-sized seeds, which are covered in a white, squishy casing. Then he places the seeds in a wooden box where the casing undergoes a process of fermentation. Finally, Posso spreads out the seeds on a flat surface to dry in the sun. After eight days of drying, they will be ready to become chocolate.

This might seem a common agronomic practice, no different from the one conducted by other cacao growers worldwide, yet it carries a greater significance in this northwestern corner of Colombia.

Posso belongs to the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, a conglomerate of villages scattered in Urabá of Antioquia, one of Colombia’s deadliest areas. For more than five decades, from 1964 to 2016, a bloody internal war between the Colombian army, right-wing paramilitary groups, and FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) killed more than 200,000 people. In this war dictated by drug-traffickers’ interests (both FARC and right-wing paramilitary groups financed their fight by growing coca and trafficking cocaine), farmers were among those who paid the highest toll. Over the past half-century, the United Nations estimates, more than 7 million Colombians—in a country of 49 million—were displaced by the war.

However, resisting the relocation trend, in 1997 the San José de Aparadó farmers declared themselves a peaceful community, neutral to the conflict, and chose to stay in their territory. Their decision carried violent consequences for the community: threats, sexual assault, kidnappings, torture, forced disappearances, assassinations, and massacres. Posso himself suffered the killing of 13 family members, and in 2017, he said, he survived a murder attempt.

Two decades after its declaration of neutrality, the community still carries on its peace crusade. Despite many difficulties, they are hanging on to their collective work thanks to the precious cacao cultivation.

“This is a life project,” Posso says. “We’re not doing this only for ourselves, but also for the new generation.”

The Risks of Existence

In the ’70s, cacao production expanded around San José de Apartadó, adding to the corn and beans that were cultivated for subsistence there, and quickly became the area’s principal cash crop. In 1985, a group of farmers, supported by the leftist party Unión Patriótica, founded Balsamar Cooperative, seeking better terms for the sale of their product.

They built facilities and bought trucks, paying higher prices for the cacao from the area because they could cut out intermediaries and sell the cacao directly to Luker, a Colombian chocolate company. The farmers of San José, seeing the profit, started planting more cacao trees.

The land on which the cacao trees grew didn’t just interest farmers but also paramilitary groups, the FARC, drug-traffickers, landowners, and the army. The fertile soil was great for illicit coca cultivations, and proximity to Panama made it a natural smuggling corridor to North America. In the early ’90s, the various groups started taking hold of the area and threatened social groups such as the Balsamar Cooperative.

In 1996, all of the local leaders of the Balsamar Cooperative and other social groups were either assassinated or fled for their lives. Just being in the territory was a danger: If an armed force set up a base camp close by, the opponents would often accuse the farmer who happened to live there of supporting the other group and murder them. A large proportion of the 7,000 residents of San José de Apartadó fled, which quickly reduced the community to 500. 

On March 23, 1997, Brígida Gonzáles, 69, along with the others who decided to stay, founded the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó. This “Peace Community” declared itself neutral in the conflict, pledging not to get involved in any way—from acting as informants to cultivating illicit crops—and asked to be left in peace. Anybody who was willing to comply with those rules was allowed to be part of the community.

“We had already suffered more than 300 deaths, forced disappearances, and displacements,” says Gonzáles, who today is one of the community leaders. Like the rest of her community, her personal losses are many: She lost 17 relatives to the war, including two sons and three siblings, some of whom were militarized by the FARC.

The new neutrality status did not last long. A week after the declaration, members of the community were forced out by the conflict. The cacao trees were abandoned, and the forest took them back.

But San José farmers had been subsisting on that agriculture and their cacao sales: Staying away from the fields meant economic ruin. After a few years of abandonment, the community decided to go back to their land slowly.

Tending to the fields alone was too dangerous because a disappearance could easily go unnoticed, so they organized daily trips to the Peace Community in groups of 50 or 100 to take care of the cacao trees and harvest their fruits. That was the beginning of the peaceful communal effort to regain their territory. What started as protection mechanisms soon became part of a broader philosophy of life.

Building Peace Together

Gwen Burnyeat, a political anthropologist at the University of Oxford, in England, who has studied the Peace Community, says that the concept of community is a reaffirmation of how they live, work, survive, and build peace together.

“You have a really interesting solidarity economics model in which you have individual economics interacting with a kind of collective economics,” says Burnyeat, who published a book in 2018 called Chocolate, Politics and Peace-building and produced Chocolate of Peace, a documentary about the role of cacao in the Peace Community. Members of the Peace Community have some individual land, but most of the 150 hectares of cacao trees grow in collectively owned plots. Members gather in small groups to tend the different plots, and every Thursday they do any work the community might need, from repairing a roof to planting more cacao trees. All of the produce from the community-owned crops goes into a collective pot, and then the community decides together how to distribute the funds.

“To them, this is actually a very profound act of transcending traditional capitalist society models and building something together,” Burnyeat says.

The Peace Community is known internationally thanks to the support of nonprofit organizations such as Peace Brigades International and Operazione Colomba. And because of the outside support, the community was able to enter the Fair Trade network and sell their cacao abroad for higher prices. According to Posso, the community sells about 50 tonnes of organic cacao a year to Lush, a British cosmetic company that makes soaps and other products with their cocoa.

But according to Burnyeat, the visibility brought by the nonprofits is an advantage that few other communities have, and she believes it provides a protection mechanism that is unsustainable in the long term. Plus it’s a double-edged sword: The community openly denounces the crimes against humanity on their official website, but this visibility also increases the risk of reprisals, like in 2005, when eight community members, three of them children, were slaughtered by a group of paramilitary and army soldiers. Since then, the community has ended any interaction with the Colombian government.

Fruits of Hope

In 2016, FARC, the revolutionary paramilitary group that had carried out the bloody war against the state for decades, signed a long-awaited peace accord with the government of former President Juan Manuel Santos. The agreement deeply polarized the country but marked a historic moment for Colombia.

However, four years later, the peace is shaky, failing those it pledged to protect: According to a 2019 report of Colombia’s Institute of Studies for Peace and Development, 700 community leaders have been murdered since 2016.

The Peace Community, in addition to suffering this new wave of violence, is also under the threat of losing their communal land from a state project of agrarian reform, according to Germán Romero, a lawyer with dhColombia, a nonprofit organization in charge of representing the community in court to seek justice for the violence they have experienced.

“We’re trying to keep the integrity of the territory,” Romero says. He says the community has survived physical extermination but might not survive the state’s project of redistribution of land. Local politicians and entrepreneurs who are against the community accuse them of having stolen the lands they cultivate, a claim Romero dismisses.

Losing the land that gives them the fruits of hope might mean the community’s end. But by continuing to harvest cacao, the community is stating, season after season, their right to live in the place they call home.

“The world is tired of war,” says Gonzáles, the community’s founder. “Why don’t they leave us in peace?”

Correction: This story’s headline was updated at 12:30 pm on January 15, 2021 to reflect that this Colombian community is a conglomeration of villages. Read our editorial corrections policy here.

Robinson lives in North Richmond, a 1.5 square-mile unincorporated area of Contra Costa County, California, at the northern end of the Bay Area, nearly surrounded by the city of Richmond proper. Predominantly Black and Hispanic, in normal economic times North Richmond’s unemployment rate stubbornly hovers around 22%, with a median income of about $26,000. Located just west of—and therefore downwind from—a major Chevron oil refinery, North Richmond has long suffered from higher child asthma rates and other chronic health issues related to air pollution than other parts of Contra Costa county.

But as they do in neighborhoods like these in cities across the country, people find a way. “I know so many people that are hustling in my community but they’re not legal,” Robinson says. “Those were my businesses growing up here.”

Coming up among that hustle fed the entrepreneurial bug in Robinson. For years, she wanted to start her own record label. She even went to business school to learn how. But after graduating in 2019, she found her true calling—incubating and investing in cooperatively owned businesses, as a project officer at Cooperation Richmond.

“I’m not just opening up a restaurant or food truck, I’m helping someone open up a food truck or a restaurant and someone else open up a grocery store,” says Robinson. “I get experience in all these different sectors, and I’m just like ‘Oh my God, this is my dream job and I never knew it existed.’”

This is about using our collective power to create a new financial institution.

Robinson recently ushered through her first investment to the finish line—a Black-family-owned food business. Unfortunately, for pandemic-related reasons, it had to delay its launch, but it was a big moment for Robinson nonetheless. It took about a year to get there. And now she’s already got three more possible investments in the pipeline.

“Going through the process for the first time ever it was frustrating at times because of all the back and forth, but it was great for me because now I know what it takes and next time it’ll go easier and faster,” Robinson says. “I wouldn’t have had this opportunity anywhere else. That’s just being real. I wasn’t qualified, I wasn’t experienced.”

Because of their unorthodox ownership structures and management practices, cooperatively owned businesses don’t fit neatly into most lenders’ and incubators’ boxes. But Cooperation Richmond is a member of Seed Commons, a nationwide network of loan funds and incubators that specialize in supporting and investing in cooperative businesses. Working as a group, they collectively share the burden of everything from fundraising to support their work to vetting possible investments. It’s a network built largely by and mostly for worker-owned cooperatives.

“This is about using our collective power to create a new financial institution,” says Kate Khatib, co-director of Seed Commons and a worker-owner at Red Emma’s, a cooperative restaurant and bookstore in Baltimore. “We’re fundraising collectively, raising the investment capital collectively and figuring out how to deploy that capital most effectively in our individual communities.”

Since inception in 2016, Seed Commons has enabled its members to make more than 100 loans so far, adding up to more than $10 million. The first loan made through the network was to Baltimore ice cream maker Taharka Brothers, which recently celebrated the completion of its conversion from a nonprofit social enterprise to a fully fledged worker-owned cooperative.

Seed Commons has roots in the frustrations that Red Emma’s went through several years ago, when the co-op needed financing for a move to a new location. Already an established business with deposits held at several banks, Red Emma’s went to all of them, and none was willing to finance on terms that worked for the co-op.

For example, all of Red Emma’s banks wanted at least one person from the co-op to sign a personal guarantee. It’s a document that banks say they need to reduce the risk of making a small business loan, but it means that if the business fails and the loan goes into default, the bank can repossess the owner’s house or car or other assets that the bank can sell off to recoup at least some of the debt. But for worker cooperatives, the whole point is for the workers to share ownership equally and reduce the risk of business ownership to each worker, so it doesn’t make much sense to put one or two people on that potential hook.

And the worker-owners may not have any assets that would satisfy a bank anyway—especially if they are Black folks from North Richmond or Baltimore. As a legacy of historical racism, White households today have a median net worth eight times higher than Black households and five times higher than Hispanic households, according to the Federal Reserve.

Red Emma’s tried asking each of their banks for a smaller loan, reducing the risk for each bank. But a small loan requires the same transaction costs for a bank as a large loan, so banks have less incentive to make smaller loans. None of Red Emma’s banks were interested in making a smaller loan.

Searching for a solution, Red Emma’s reached out to The Working World, a loan fund that incubates and invests in worker-owned cooperatives. Based in New York City, the loan fund had made some loans nationally but was finding its intense incubation model hard to extend to other cities.

But Red Emma’s didn’t need incubation, in fact it was already looking to help others start their own worker-owned cooperatives in Baltimore, through the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, a local coalition of worker cooperatives and cooperative business advisers. So they hatched a plan instead to create what they eventually named Seed Commons, bringing together worker co-op incubators and loan funds in cities across the country.

“Creating your own loan fund, all of the compliance issues, all of the fundraising, all of the challenges, we couldn’t believe how much it would take,” says Kristen Barker, executive director of Co-op Cincy, a Seed Commons member in Cincinnati. “We were founded in 2011 and we wanted to start making loans to worker co-ops ourselves, but we just put it on the back burner until the opportunity to join Seed Commons.”

Co-op Cincy to date has made 13 loans totaling nearly $300,000 to worker-owned cooperatives and their members in Cincinnati. The largest was a $130,000 loan to Our Harvest, a worker-owned urban farm cooperative just across the river in Newport, Kentucky.

Most Seed Commons network loans are small, a few thousand dollars in working capital here or maybe $15,000 or $20,000 to build out a food truck there. It’s strategic—insulating the cooperatives from larger debt until they are up and running or until they have more experience operating and managing themselves. As the co-ops grow and repay earlier loans, second or third loans tend to be larger amounts.

Rich City Rides, a worker-owned cooperative bike shop in Richmond, has seen a spike in demand as the pandemic has more Bay Area residents spending time outdoors. The bike shop cooperative has already repaid two loans since Cooperation Richmond helped it launch five years ago. Robinson says they’re now considering making another loan to capitalize on the spike in business.

“When I’ve been taking my kids for walks in parks and trails, it’s all packed,” Robinson says. “Rich City Rides also does a lot of community building around cycling, doing organized bike rides with 50 to a 100 people at a time.”

The Seed Commons network supported its first $1 million loan in 2020, to Obran Cooperative, a worker-owned industrial conglomerate in Baltimore. The loan helped finance Obran’s acquisition of a property management company and two residential properties.

The Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, which originated the $1 million loan to Obran Cooperative, would not have been able to make that loan were it not for the liquidity made available through Seed Commons. Each local member group has the option to raise funding on their own to make loans, but doing so takes a lot of relationship building and cultivating of local investors, which isn’t impossible but it almost never matches up with the timing of when a worker cooperative needs capital. Seed Commons is always on standby to provide liquidity for loans when network members need it.

The Seed Commons network also helps vet potential loans and advise co-ops, which is particularly helpful when the local loan fund officer isn’t familiar with certain industries. Khatib often spends extra time helping peers across the country vet food businesses. Barker says it was also helpful as part of the incubation process to connect a child care co-op in Cincinnati to other child care co-ops that Seed Commons has supported in other cities.

When local groups come to Seed Commons for liquidity to advance a loan, the network’s sustainability committee also provides another layer of advising and approval. Robinson’s initial request was to finance a food truck for her first business, but working with the sustainability committee, that was pared down to a smaller working capital loan to get the businesses started as delivery-only until the worker-owners get some experience running a business together. They plan to come back later for a food truck loan after they build up a revenue base.

“Going through that process with the members, we realized ‘OK, let’s go back to the drawing board and start off small and work our way up,’” says Robinson.

The Seed Commons network also makes its loans using royalty-based financing—which it likes to call “non-extractive financing.” It means that the borrowers make payments as a percentage of monthly profits—if there’s no profit in a given month, they don’t need to make a loan payment. Not only is it extremely friendly for the underlying borrower, it also means the local loan funds are strongly incentivized to provide adequate incubation and other support to ensure the success of the underlying co-ops.

Around half of the Seed Commons members also get at least 75% of their operating budget through the network, according to Khatib. In an annual process, the network members collectively allocate available operating funds from grants and donors.

Some of the same individuals and foundations who fund operations for the Seed Commons network are also committed to lend money to the network when it’s needed to advance loans through local members.

“We’re really only going to take in capital that works,” says Khatib. “We’ve been fortunate to find funders and investors who’ve been willing to work with us in very favorable ways to build a structure that we believe in, that people feel comfortable investing in but keeps the control in the hands of the people in the network.”

The only thing Seed Commons doesn’t have is what local loan officers like Robinson has in spades—relationships with potential co-op members and an intimate knowledge of their target markets.

“You could have bad credit, you could have [criminal records] on your background, that’s another reason a lot of people feel like they can’t go to banks,” says Robinson. “We don’t dismiss anybody. You come in here looking for help with your credit—I am you. I need help, too. I’m in the same boat. I didn’t know anything about credit ratings till I was 27. That’s what makes coming to Cooperation Richmond more comfortable because the project officers are people from the community.”

This story was originally published by NextCity. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

This story is part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Lapenna was part of the Co-op Cred program, which matched individuals with work placements at the co-op and nearby community gardens. Instead of dollars, wages were paid in “cred” that could be redeemed for groceries at the store. Like Lapenna, most participants had low incomes and faced barriers to employment, so the program served a dual purpose: it offered meaningful work and facilitated access to healthy food.

While a nonprofit food co-op might alleviate environmental and health problems associated with the food system, its organic products were too expensive for many community members. Wanting the store to be more inclusive, the co-op’s founders and organizational partners hit on the idea of Co-op Cred, a complementary currency rooted in cooperative principles of volunteer labor.

Complementary currencies are currencies that circulate alongside official legal tender. While national currencies are bound up in the inequities of the global financial system, complementary currencies have social goals, such as supporting local businesses or increasing economic inclusion for those without access to traditional capital. Complementary currencies also link “underutilized resources with unmet needs,” as Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Bernard Lietaer explain in their 2011 book Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies With Local Currencies, by creating the infrastructure for people to engage in trade even when money is scarce.

Established in 2013, Co-op Cred was structured as a complementary currency in part to help those receiving social assistance avoid higher deductions taken on their income. By providing compensation in cred, the program permitted participants to maintain their benefits payments.

Unfortunately, Co-op Cred petered out shortly after the West End Food Co-op closed in 2018. The store’s landlord, a community health center, needed the space for its own expansion, and the co-op was unable to secure another affordable location.

“I wish it was still there,” Lapenna says. “I miss working there.”

Some participants continue to work in the community gardens run by Greenest City, a Co-op Cred partner organization. Instead of cred, they now compensated with gift cards to other grocery stores.

While in the end, the co-op was a casualty of Toronto’s booming real estate market, Co-op Cred also lives on in the lessons it holds for other complementary currency projects.

A promotional video for the program is packed with testimonials: Co-op Cred is “life-altering,” one participant says. “I can go shopping for what I want, when I want.” “My confidence is really building,” adds another. For Lapenna, earning her food handler certification was an important accomplishment, as was sharing her experience and what she learned in presentations delivered to university students.

Susanna Redekop, the co-op’s communications coordinator, recalls a participant’s pride at having grown hundreds of pounds of vegetables at his community garden placement—produce that was then donated to the food bank he himself used to frequent. “Having that kind of empowerment was incredible,” Redekop says.

“The currency was a tool that allowed for other things to happen,” says Ayal Dinner, who helped to establish the West End Food Co-op.

The BerkShares Example

Complementary currencies can be difficult to grasp—how can people create money out of thin air?—but they are not entirely different from the system of national currencies to which we are accustomed. Money is based on trust. It maintains its worth because we all, collectively, trust that others will continue to behave as though it has value.

Complementary currencies also offer something national currencies do not, proponents argue, by keeping money in the community. BerkShares, the most widely known example of a local currency, are accepted by more than 400 retailers, service providers, and manufacturers in the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts. Individuals receive a 5% discount at those retailers when converting dollars to BerkShares—a small incentive to promote the use of the currency. While businesses can redeem BerkShares for dollars, they can also spend them at other vendors in the network to bolster the local economy even further.

The currency’s success is partly because of strong partnerships with local banks and business groups, according to Rachel Moriarty, director of operations at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which helped launch BerkShares in its current form in 2006 and continues to provide research and development support to the program.

“When we launched the program, there were about 100 businesses that we pulled in from a partnership with the local Chamber of Commerce, which is a great place to start for anybody looking to initiate a program in their own community,” Moriarty says.

For some, however, a key question remains: What is the benefit of complementary currencies over other efforts to strengthen local economies?

Moriarty, for one, believes BerkShares fosters important conversations around the value of place-based economies. “At the end of the day,” she adds, “BerkShares are a tool—an educational tool—to encourage people to shop locally.”

But in areas with less access to cash and financial institutions, complementary currencies can play a more fundamental role. Money should be considered public infrastructure, says Will Ruddick, founder of Grassroots Economics, a nonprofit organization responsible for the thriving Sarafu currency network in Kenya.

Here, Ruddick is referring to the function of money as a catalyst of economic activity. When national currency is unavailable, complementary currencies can unlock latent capacity.

“A medium of exchange is important, period, full stop,” Ruddick says. Sarafu, with more than 55,000 users in cash-poor communities, stimulates local trade while allowing people to save their Kenyan shillings for imports and investments.

The impetus behind these alternative systems isn’t new. “Low-income people help each other out all the time,” says Adriana Beemans of the Metcalf Foundation, which provided support to the Co-op Cred program. Initiatives like time banks, premised on tokenizing the exchange of labor and skills, risk commodifying forms of mutual aid already occurring on a grassroots level, she says.

There are valid concerns around some of these systems. The suggestion that complementary currencies can address complex issues like poverty and unemployment by connecting “underutilized resources” to “unmet needs” can come across as utopian.

But the counterargument is that local economies should not be subject to periodic devastation by the fluctuations of the global financial system. And indeed, complementary currencies have often emerged in response to economic downturns.

In 1932, Michael Unterguggenberger, mayor of the Austrian town of Wörgl, introduced an alternative currency to address unemployment precipitated by the Great Depression. The town printed paper notes, using them to pay residents to repair roads, install outdoor lighting, and even construct a ski jumping platform as part of a public works program.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Sardex was founded to support businesses across the Italian island of Sardinia. By 2018, the Sardex system had more than 3,000 members and a transaction volume equivalent to 43 million Euros. Like Kenya’s Sarafu, Sardex enables members to purchase goods and services on credit from other participating businesses. That credit can then circulate as a complementary currency, which businesses promise to accept as payment for their own products.

The fallout from COVID-19 has renewed conversations about the potential of universal basic income and complementary currencies to ensure people can afford to meet their needs. The municipality of Maricá in Brazil is already making strides here, having provided some of its residents with a basic income for several years, denominated in a digital currency called Mumbuca. When the pandemic exacerbated economic insecurity, Maricá already had the infrastructure in place to scale up the program.

Sardex and Sarafu are aimed at facilitating “loops” of economic activity, to increase the currency’s circulation within the community so participants can cover as many of their expenses as possible without spending national currency. Success is dependent on achieving a network effect—the more individuals and businesses willing to accept it, the more useful it becomes.

This was a challenge for Co-op Cred. Organizers ultimately hoped to expand the currency to more businesses, but until then, the West End Food Co-op could not afford to exchange groceries for cred because it had to pay suppliers in Canadian dollars. Instead, it had to raise money for a reserve pool to reimburse the co-op for products purchased by Co-op Cred participants.

Long-Lasting Impacts

The history of complementary currencies is filled with ups and downs. Many projects have dissolved, citing lack of use or heavy administrative burdens on volunteer coordinators. According to a study of 82 complementary currencies developed in the United States since 1991, only 17 were still active by 2004.

The Totnes Pound, based in Devon, England, and modeled on BerkShares, was discontinued in 2019. Its decline was partly because of the transition to “an increasingly cashless economy,” said John Elford of the currency’s steering group in a BBC article. Digital options are growing, but many currencies still rely on paper notes. BerkShares is looking to introduce a digital platform, though Moriarty thinks the program will likely keep the physical notes in circulation as well. “They’re beautiful,” she says. “The colors on them, the pictures—they really have come to symbolize a sense of place for the region.” Some currencies, like Sarafu, are adopting blockchain technology to enable mobile payments and real-time transaction records.

Meanwhile, Co-op Cred’s closure amid climbing Toronto rents touches on a challenge facing complementary currencies in many urban centers, which struggle to address economic insecurity as costs of living rise. Until such currencies can be used to pay rent and taxes, their capacity to provide substantive assistance is somewhat limited.

Even as Co-op Cred folded, the concept sowed seeds elsewhere. “We were being asked all the time to tell people about the model, people were really excited about it,” says Sally Miller, former coordinator of the West End Food Co-op.

She warns that the co-op’s dissolution should not be construed as a failure.

“They made an incredible impact on people’s lives,” Miller says. “And that in itself is an achievement.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:44 a.m. July 12 to correct the number of Sarafu users and provide an up-to-date link. Read our corrections policy here.

But the convenience of these apps masks an inherently predatory nature, with crippling fees and dubious business practices that afflict restaurants and delivery drivers. Commission fees can account for about 15% to 30% of an order’s sales, and major companies including Grubhub have been sued for alleged sneaky practices to ramp up fees. Delivery drivers—who are considered independent contractors—often earn low wages for minimal protections from the companies. Reports have revealed creatively devised schemes, like Grubhub building fake restaurant websites, or DoorDash delivering knockoff food from ghost kitchens. 

In this fraught environment, some restaurants are fighting back.

Owners and workers across the country, from Ohio to Nebraska to Washington, D.C., are now pooling their resources to launch alternative delivery models in their own communities that could potentially compete with the large apps. Many have emerged as cooperatives, where the eateries pay membership fees to fund operating costs and driver and dispatcher salaries. They in turn receive ownership responsibilities and a yearly share of profits. 

Restaurant veterans in Lexington, Kentucky, for example, established a subscription-based model in summer 2020 with Delivery Co-op. Now, eight restaurants pay $300 per month to participate, while around 400 customers pay $25 a month to use the delivery service with no extra fees. Those funds go toward operating costs and over $20 per hour for drivers, who are full-time employees of the company. After three months on the job, drivers are eligible for medical insurance, and after one year, they qualify for profit-sharing options. 

That model ensured that line cook Allen Pingay could pay his bills after being let go from his job at a Lexington steakhouse when COVID-19 hit. During peak delivery times at the height of winter, Pingay worked about 35 hours a week driving for Delivery Co-op. 

“That really boosted me. I was able to get back on my feet, and actually see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. Since spring rolled around, Pingay now drives part time while exploring new cooking opportunities.

The customer subscription price tag may seem tough to swallow, especially with fewer than 10 restaurants now on the books, said Delivery Co-op director Aaron Withers, a former anthropologist and cook whose plans to open his own Lexington restaurant were dashed after COVID-19. But the average DoorDash user can pay $25 in fees over just two or three orders, and with Delivery Co-Op, they know that 100% of their order purchase goes back to the restaurant, he noted. 

As of mid-April, the company completed over 2,000 deliveries worth about $105,000, and plans to work with up to 50 restaurants and potentially 11,000 customers in Lexington alone, Withers said. Long-term, Delivery Co-op could also provide its business model and platform design to restaurant communities in Louisville, New York City, and Washington, D.C. 

Last November, restaurateurs in Dayton, Ohio, formed 937 Delivers, a locally run and operated cooperative named for the city’s main area code, with startup funds from the nonprofit Co-op Dayton. 

As of April, 937 Delivers includes 20 restaurants that contribute $300 a month, plus $2 per delivery. Customers living in a 6-mile radius of downtown Dayton can pick a participating restaurant on the co-op’s website, and pay a flat $6.50 fee per delivery. As of mid-March, 937 Delivers said it completed over 5,500 sales worth over $185,000—all of which has stayed within the community.

Restaurant owners partnering with 937 Delivers said their co-op fees come out to between 8% and 14% of monthly sales. Compare that to their DoorDash fees, which can top 30% of sales, thanks to monthly tablet rental fees and error and printer fees.  

This past February, LoCoOmaha launched as a delivery cooperative servicing Omaha, Nebraska, with nearly 30 restaurants participating and another 30 to 40 in the wings. These businesses pay a membership fee, elect a board of directors, and receive profit-sharing options. Drivers also participate in meetings and offer input. 

Co-founder Brian O’Malley, a lifelong restaurateur, said the founders took inspiration from a co-op-like, Iowa-based delivery service called CHOMP, and from “old-school farmer cooperatives Nebraska helped pioneer 100 years ago.”

For most of these locally driven companies, the goal is less to scale nationally, but rather to serve their own communities, and to even the playing field for restaurants that can’t break even with the large delivery apps. Even scaling service areas out a few extra miles can mean tweaking dispatch and delivery systems, troubleshooting software update glitches, and ensuring sufficient driver availability.

Last spring, service industry veterans in Washington, D.C., launched DC To-GoGo as a localized ordering and delivery platform. While not technically a cooperative, DC to-GoGo’s mission was similar in that it keeps money within the local economy and supports independent restaurants, said Adam Fry, company co-founder and co-owner of Ivy and Coney, a cozy sports bar in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood.

Fry doesn’t see his company expanding past the D.C.-Virginia-Maryland area. “We are D.C. locals. We are not the people who should be starting this in Chicago [or] Boston,” he said. “We would love to partner with those people, so that other cities can benefit from a delivery business that isn’t built around vulturing profits from restaurants.”

Representatives for the top three delivery apps—DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub—all defended their commission fee structures. In statements, they asserted that those funds cover platform operating fees and fair wages for drivers. Meanwhile, reports have revealed how most DoorDash contract workers actually earn less than $2 per order, after expenses.

Since early 2020, all three have invested millions of dollars and developed new products for restaurants to process and accept online orders through their own websites, or use their own delivery drivers. The companies also waived or lowered commission fees through part of 2021, spokespeople said. 

But even a 15% fee is much greater than a normal restaurant profit margin on a typical meal, said James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at The New School in New York City.

“What we have here is a handful of technology-based companies that have a particular business model… [that] provides convenience for consumers,” said Parrott. “But it doesn’t work for restaurants. It’s not a good form of employment for workers.”

Considering the sky-high commission fees, “It’s not surprising that workers and allies are trying to organize [via cooperatives], or to respond through public policy requirements,” Parrott added.

Communities have welcomed these alternative delivery services with open arms and wallets. Liz Grauel, a Dayton resident, had reluctantly ordered delivery from major apps at the start of the pandemic to support her favorite restaurants. 

“I know how steep the cost is to restaurants, and how poor the experience of drivers can be, so it wasn’t a regular option for me,” she said. She was thrilled to learn about 937 Delivers from a friend’s Facebook post last fall, and has since ordered nearly a dozen times.

“It’s not surprising that workers and allies are trying to organize [via cooperatives], or to respond through public policy requirements.”

Grauel said she loves how quickly she receives her 937 Delivers orders, the responsive customer service, “And that I know the drivers have ownership in the company, and are being paid and treated more fairly than drivers for DoorDash and Grubhub.” She now exclusively orders from the co-op for food delivery.

These upstarts, being overall DIY operations, haven’t been without struggles. In late April, DC to-GoGo decided to temporarily halt their delivery operations as “capital is beginning to run very tight,” Fry said. But the company plans to return online, and wants to use the interim time to consider an expansion from just food delivery, to an “Etsy-like” delivery service for all sorts of D.C.-based products. “Since we weren’t going to be able to continue operating the way we were for a whole lot longer, we decided to put a halt to things, slow things down and rejigger it from the back end,” he said.

Many of these companies require customers to order through their own website versus the restaurant’s. Some are developing standalone marketplace apps, which can quickly become a daunting challenge, both financially and technically. Withers said he took programming courses before bringing Delivery Co-op to life.

Spreading the word can also be tough. These businesses produce and organize most, if not all of their marketing and advertising in-house, while DoorDash and UberEats hire the Sesame Street crew and Cardi B to hawk their services during the Super Bowl. O’Malley at LoCoOmaha said strong local media coverage helped to spread awareness of their new company, as did the reviews customers shared “through the grapevine.” These co-ops also don’t require exclusivity from their members, who are free to list their restaurants on Seamless and Grubhub along with their local outfit. 

The initial ordering website for 937 Delivers was buggy, and it took time for restaurants to incorporate the new service into point of sales systems, said Emily Mendenhall, co-owner of Lily’s Dayton, a neighborhood eatery beloved for its New Orleans-style brunch beignets, and an initial co-op restaurant partner. 

But there wasn’t time for the technology to be perfected before launch, she said. “We were going to do this, and hope there is some graciousness on the customer side to work out the kinks.”

Lily’s remains listed on DoorDash and Uber Eats, and will do so until 937 Delivers can incorporate alcohol sales, Mendenhall said. Meanwhile, the co-op-dispatched orders have been crucial to keep her kitchen staff working almost full time, she noted.

The Grubhub model isn’t going away. Diners love the convenience and the ability to support their favorite restaurants, even from home. The name recognition, venture capital, and scaling ability that fuel major delivery apps will be difficult for any indie operation to unseat, even though DoorDash and its counterparts are far from profitable themselves. But cooperative-run, alternative platforms might be the local solution that ensures independent eateries and drivers can weather any coming storm.

Mendenhall sees one silver lining from COVID-19: It induced desperately needed change in the service industry, from diversified revenue streams, to updating technology and investing in living wages for drivers.

“The old model really wasn’t working for a lot of people,” she said. “The goal is for [937 Delivers] to be a lifeline, because in the long term, dining is not going to look like it did March 1 of 2020—for a very long time, if ever.”

This story originally appeared in The Counter and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

The Midtown Farm in Tucson, Arizona, is an offshoot of the Flowers & Bullets Collective in the Barrio Centro neighborhood. Tito Romero and Jacob Robles, friends since childhood now in their early 30s, launched the organization in 2012 to provide healthy food alternatives, to improve their neighborhood, and to share their Latino and Indigenous cultures. “The idea of growing food, being sustainable, has been a trend for some time in predominantly White, middle-class communities,” Robles says. “For communities in the barrio, communities of color, those trends don’t reach us as easily.”

The friends spent about five years planting gardens and installing rainwater harvesting systems in people’s backyards before they and other members of the collective began leasing a 4-acre portion of their closed former elementary school to grow crops and build a sense of community. Where the friends, as youngsters, used to kick around a soccer ball and dangle from monkey bars, they now harvest fruits and vegetables, raise goats and chickens, and put on gardening workshops for their neighbors.

Although urban agriculture has a long history, Barrio Centro is part of a more recent movement to increase food security in underserved, largely ethnic communities while retaining or reclaiming cultural traditions and values that people can share and express through those spaces. In West Sacramento, California, the We Grow Urban Farm sits across from an elementary school in the low-income neighborhood of Broderick, where it serves local residents and seeks “to empower the next generation of farmers of color.” And in Chicago, the Urban Growers Collective, a Black- and women-led nonprofit, cultivates eight urban farms mostly on the South Side, where more than 76% of residents are Black.

Barrio Centro sprawls next to a highway and sits directly beneath the flight path of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Aircraft noise led to the closure of Julia Keen Elementary in 2004, depriving residents of not just a school, but a vibrant neighborhood hub. “This school was extremely important for this community,” says Romero. “It was two meals a day for kids, it was after-school programming, it was youth sports, it was employment. It was a safe space.”

The farm is a way of restoring some of the lost community space, Romero says, adding that the goal is to someday buy more or all of the 9.5-acre campus to accommodate growth. He spends many mornings at the farm doing various chores. Like most of the collective’s dozen core members, he is a volunteer; Robles is one of three full-time employees. On a recent summer day, Romero was in the greenhouse spraying a natural pest repellent on dozens of plant seedlings that would later be transplanted into the ground. “We have some kale, some chard, some mustards, lettuce, broccoli,” he says, his voice trailing as the thunderous roar of a jet invades the greenhouse.

Long before the first seeds were planted, Romero says, he and his friends would often wonder at the possibility of developing their enterprise on the campus. “For years, we would drive by the school and say, ‘Damn, everything that we’re doing in the community, imagine that we could do it there.’”

What they were doing was selling T-shirts with culturally relevant artistic imagery, a venture that later would finance the first seeds of what would become the agriculture component of Flowers & Bullets. “We started with $500 and some T-shirts, meetings at the park, potlucks at each other’s homes,” Romero says. In time, one backyard garden led to another and another.

Favorable neighborhood reception to their projects motivated the group to organize around the need for a green space that residents could call their own, Robles says. They’d begun looking at their neighborhood through a different lens since taking an ethnic studies program in high school that encouraged activism and critical thinking from a Mexican-American perspective on such topics as socio-economic inequality. While the program stoked controversy and legal battles, it taught Romero and Robles that they could effect change within their own community.

“There’s a lot of families here, generational families, and people take a lot of pride in this community,” Robles says. “And there’s a lot of beauty in those things, but if I’m being completely real, there’s also a lot of struggle.” That duality is embodied in the name of the collective. “We like to say that flowers are the art, the beauty, the culture—and the bullets are kind of the struggle, the things we had to face in our community growing up, and the resistance to those things, like gang influence and drug abuse.”

Most of Barrio Centro’s residents are Latinos, many low-income. Their neighborhood isn’t blessed with the abundance of farmers markets or green spaces found in more affluent neighborhoods, but the collective set out to change that. In 2017, after submitting a project proposal for the farm concept to the Tucson Unified School District, the Flowers & Bullets Collective got the keys to the vacant school property.

By then, Dora Martinez, a member of the collective, had joined the nonprofit. Her previous work as a farm manager was crucial in developing the group’s sustainable agriculture program. In April 2018, the group received a $600,000 three-year grant from the University of Arizona’s Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice. It was a big boost for a project that sought not just to feed residents, but also to become a neighborhood resource that could offer educational workshops, jobs, and a sense of empowerment.

Existing programs at the farm and others being developed in concert with the community aim to get even more people involved and connected in the neighborhood. Although activities slowed when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, the farm became a drive-through destination where residents could obtain masks, hand sanitizer, and free seeds.

Now, the collective is gradually reactivating programs. After a recent harvest of native corn, Robles and the group’s project manager, Silvia Valdillez, led a small workshop for residents on how to grind it into masa, or dough, for tortillas, using ancient methods dating to Mesoamerican culture.

“For us, these foodways are a part of our identity,” Robles says. “They are a connection to the land, the seasonal cycles and how to maintain our health and our ceremonies. It’s also important not to lose these practices that our ancestors maintained and died for.”

Another program, the subscription-based “barrio supported agriculture,” offers people a bagful of freshly-picked produce for $10-$20 each. People can stop by the farm to pick it up, or they can donate it to someone else.

On a recent Tuesday, local resident and farm supporter Susana Valdez left with a bag loaded with about 20 pounds of produce, including green beans, eggplant, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and Armenian cucumbers. “You get different things, whatever’s in season,” she says. “The bell peppers and the carrots may not be as pretty as the ones you see in the store, but they taste amazing.”

In fact, Valdez says, knowing those who put the time and effort into growing crops for the community—without pesticides—makes her appreciate their produce even more. “I often hang out there with my child and I get to support them,” she says. “They let you feed the goats, they let you feed the chickens, and children can pick vegetables. It’s beautiful, it’s bringing people together.”

The farm is a critical piece of the neighborhood transformation that Flowers & Bullets seeks, but its work extends beyond the two acres of rows of peppers, squash, basil and other crops that tint green the arid landscape. The collective has planted some 300 desert willows, mesquites, and other native trees throughout the neighborhood and successfully petitioned the city to install additional street lightning and speed bumps. And it covered the initial expense of rainwater harvesting systems so residents could take advantage of a government rebate program. This summer, Flowers & Bullets is tapping residents for ideas to revitalize a vacant lot in the neighborhood.

The farm also serves as an outlet for people required to do community service after a brush with the law, or as they adapt to life after incarceration. Tim Deisering, 25, completed his community service at the farm in 2019, after being cited for trespassing on private property. He picked vegetables, dug holes with a backhoe tractor, and fed brewer’s grain to the goats, among other chores.

“I never had a green thumb before I went there, or even really an interest in it to be honest,” he says. “Working over there at Flowers & Bullets definitely changed my outlook on that. I learned how to grow my own food, I learned how to harvest my own food.”

Although he no longer has to do it, Deisering still stops by the farm to help out. He’s one of a wider group of volunteers who lend a hand when time and responsibilities allow. “The other day we were covering plants from the sun so they don’t get too beat up,” he says. “There’s always something to do at the farm.”

Six-year-old Aden Alexander likes to catch pesky animals before they munch on crops. One day, the boy and his father, farm employee Brandon Alexander, placed a rabbit trap near a shady hackberry tree on an edge of the farm. “He really likes to hang out here,” says the father, who grew up in the neighborhood. “My nana and my tata came here a long time ago and I still live here.”

Alexander, who along with Robles tends the farm all day, says he enjoys working at a place that offers nutritious food to his family and his neighbors. And, while the farm addresses a real need to ensure equitable access to healthy food, Romero points out, it’s also an effective conduit for residents to share successes and challenges. “It’s healing, to be able to not just create a community but also have a space to gather in.”

There was no easy answer—and for workers at Red Emma’s in Baltimore, no boss to make the decision. Since opening in 2004, the restaurant and radical bookshop has been cooperatively owned by its workers, who vote on the issues, big and small, that shape the way their business operates. And, for an hour and a half on a June afternoon, each worker-owner got to speak up about the kitchen’s future—one tied up with their own. 

For years, Red Emma’s has drawn crowds for its crispy falafel sandwiches and vegan mac and cheese as much as for its wide selection of literature, ranging from prison abolition to queer feminist theory. Yet, like so many small independent businesses, the store has limped along during the pandemic. A patchwork of sidewalk book sales and disaster loans, together with takeout, delivery, and grants, couldn’t stop the store from hemorrhaging cash. That could all change, though, if the cooperative voted to rent out its kitchen on weekdays to the Mera Kitchen Collective, helping both groups strengthen their bottom lines.

“What I say actually means something for the future of the business,” said Tre’ Ford, a worker-owner and newly trained line cook at Red Emma’s. “That’s empowering.” 

During the pandemic, the restaurant industry has engaged in great soul-searching as it struggles to keep afloat. Many businesses have adopted takeout and delivery models, while others have trimmed menus or added a market component. And a small but growing handful has decided to upend the business model and run a restaurant as a worker-owned cooperative, where profits go not to investors but to employees, who have a voice in determining their companies’ future.

Interest in cooperative business models tends to swell in the wake of social revolutions and financial crises. The Great Depression and New Deal era gave rise to democratically run bartering systems like the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization. The countercultural attitudes of the mid-20th-century civil rights and anti-war movements birthed worker-run auto repair shops as well as natural and gourmet food stores like The Cheese Board Collective in San Francisco, whose two original owners, inspired by their time spent on an Israeli kibbutz, decided in 1971 to sell their business to their six employees to create a worker-owned cooperative. In the decade following the Great Recession, the number of verified worker-owned cooperatives in the United States swelled between 2013 and 2019, from around 350 to at least 465, according to the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI) and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC). Mo Manklang, policy director for the USFWC, said that there are 39 verified cooperatives that are restaurants, breweries, cafes, bars, or bakeries.

There’s been a similar response to the pandemic, as it exacerbates income inequality and lays bare workplace disparities. Attendance at monthly webinars hosted by the USFWC has more than doubled to an average of 65 people per month, according to Manklang. And over the past 19 months, a handful of businesses in the food service sector alone have started up or transitioned to worker-owned cooperatives. Among them is the vegan Sri Lankan restaurant Mirisata in Portland, Oregon, as well as Phoenix Coffee Company, a Cleveland-based regional chain with five locations and a roastery. 

“I have experienced recessions, a pandemic, erosion of the social safety net, watching the boomers extract value left and right,” said Christopher Feran, a worker-owner and co-general manager of Phoenix Coffee, who was previously a minority partner at the company. “I do not subscribe to the way capitalism was practiced in the U.S. for the last 50, 60, 70 years. And I think that has a lot to do with it.” 

Other worker-owned cooperatives have a more traditional structure. At Democracy Brewing in Boston, Miguel Zambrano, the head chef and a worker-owner, is in charge of directing the menu and the kitchen staff, while Tom Edes, the general manager and a worker-owner, is responsible for overseeing daily operations of the restaurant and for hiring. Even so, worker-owners on the lower end of the hierarchy are assured their say through elected representatives who sit on the board of directors, which oversees management. 

“What a cooperative does is replicate that bottom at the top” through the board of directors, said Kate Khatib, a co-founder and worker-owner at Red Emma’s. “If you have a manager who is abusive or you have a manager who is just not doing a good job, is not listening to the workers, the workers have the power to have that person recalled and take that person out of a position of power, and they can participate in choosing who is going to fill that role.” 

Khatib noted that traditionally marginalized workers are among those who benefit the most from the worker-owned model, both in terms of the redistribution of power as well as the path toward owning a business. According a recent report by DAWI and USFWC, nearly 60 percent of people employed at worker co-ops identify as people of color, and more than 64 percent as women or nonbinary. Co-ops often involve worker-owners in decisions about distributing profits or setting up health care benefits and sick leave, two issues that have proven vital to restaurant workers throughout the pandemic. And many provide opportunities for professional growth and development, like lessons on deciphering financial statements and cross-training on different stations in the front-of-house or back-of-house. 

“What cooperatives do is provide an opportunity for people who don’t have access to all that financial, social, and political power because of their identity,” Khatib said. “It provides a way for those workers to actually move into a position of ownership, and that is really transformative.”

Ford, a worker-owner at Red Emma’s, came to the store in 2019, following years of working as a security guard. Although his hospitality experience was limited to a brief stint as a Starbucks barista in college, he quickly picked up how to prepare drink orders as a barista and bartender. Now, with the kitchen short-staffed due to the pandemic, Ford has been working the line, learning proper cooking techniques from more experienced colleagues. 

He often begins his back-of-house shifts at the prep station, briefly chopping pounds of tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers for the cucumber and mint salad, before jumping on the grill and fryers to prepare Beyond Meat burger patties or crisp up slabs of bacon tempeh for a “TLT.” He already envisions the day when he makes his first contribution to the menu. 

“There are certain specials that will come up in the meeting and then they’ll be implemented for brunch or throughout the week,” Ford said. “If I can come up with something cool that we could serve people for an extended period, that would be great. I’d love to have a sandwich named after me or something.”

Part of the motivation behind all this knowledge-sharing in cooperatives is to reduce dependency on any one individual. Most businesses across America are typically built around a single person, particularly restaurants, where the celebrity-chef model has defined the industry since the 1990s. But Feran, the co-general manager of Phoenix Coffee, explained that a successful cooperative will be one that puts out a consistent product, regardless of who’s at work on a given day.

“Looking at the inevitability or the eventuality that I won’t be at the company anymore at some point, I need to do everything I can to ensure that my other members, who are my equals and make a contribution, are set up to survive that incident,” Feran said. Although Phoenix Coffee is only in its first year as a worker-owned enterprise, Feran is already looking ahead at how he can best document and share his knowledge of coffee buying and roasting or retail store development. “Not everyone has equal skill or interest or capacity, but if you make the resources available to engage in those conversations, you can find out who does have acuity in those areas.”

If there’s a right time for a more democratic structure in food service, now might be it, as the cultural fixation with celebrity chefs declines, said Paul Freedman, author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America and a professor of medieval history at Yale. According to Freedman, the pandemic, along with movements like #metoo and Black Lives Matter, has “undermined the post-Top Chef model” in restaurants. People’s demands for “democratic tendencies, inclusive tendencies, and a dislike of the macho image,” he noted, “has reduced the importance of celebrity chefs.” 

Still, Freedman doubts that a completely egalitarian approach is a workable alternative. “You can’t have a Quaker decision-making consensus and still have an army,” he said. 

But the pandemic has brought into sharp relief food service’s vast inequalities and grueling work conditions, driving more owners and workers to explore ways to make their industry more just and humane. Clark Wolf, a veteran restaurant consultant, predicts the result of this reckoning will be a heightened focus on “cooperation and consideration” in restaurants, including collective ownership, in the near future.   

“I think we’re going to see a lot more experimentation and examination of how best to craft a credible, viable, sustainable restaurant business,” Wolf said, adding that cooperatives, including those owned by their workers, will likely “break out and permutate in many different ways.” While cooperatives like Red Emma’s and The Cheese Board Collective have expanded the scale of their operations and number of worker-owners, the business model isn’t for everyone. At the now-shuttered New York City cooperative restaurant Colors, founded in 2006 by former employees of the World Trade Center restaurant Windows on the World, the decision-making process and perpetual meetings hampered business, and its workers pivoted from the cooperative structure within three years. And the idea of being your own boss can be a frightening—if not somewhat annoying—challenge for anyone who has spent decades executing the visions of a head chef or owner. All of a sudden, they are expected to share opinions about the restaurant with their colleagues, and make decisions that could, worst-case scenario, tank their business.

Miguel Rubio, one of 14 worker-owners among 28 staffers overall at the Bay Area pizzeria A Slice of New York (ASONY), was one of those terrified by the responsibility that accompanied his new ownership role. For years, before the two-unit pizzeria went co-op in 2017, Rubio spent his days largely shaping the dough, baking the pizzas and calzones, and handling the register. But when he returned to the company to become a worker-owner this past June, he faced decisions well beyond whether his pizzas were done cooking. “I’m expected to have an opinion, have a say, in everything,” Rubio said. “In our food ordering, in our recipes, in the food quality, in everything.” 

For the store’s 15th anniversary event this past September, Rubio brainstormed with colleagues not only on how much pizza slices should cost and how many people they’d need for the event but also on marketing ideas for driving future revenue—including a dough-cutting ceremony with local elected officials, and whether handing out free cannoli would draw new customers. He regularly texts fellow worker-owners at all hours, and has been conducting recipe research for biweekly meetings that go well beyond determining the proper way to cut peppers, or the right amount of sauce for a stromboli. “If you’re just making pizzas, all you have to worry about is stretching out your dough,” Rubio said. “You’re not thinking about food costs. You’re not thinking about labor. You’re not thinking about the rent. You’re not thinking about advertising or marketing or stuff like that. But being an owner, you have to think about all that.”

The worker-owners at ASONY have plenty more to learn—and, in some cases, unlearn—as the leaders of their pizzeria. They need to become comfortable doling out constructive criticism, and stepping up in situations their former employers would have handled in the past, like when an employee recently needed help as they lost their cool with a difficult customer. Still, Rubio recognized that owning and running a business was the next step in his career, which made joining a worker cooperative, particularly one whose logo he already had inked on his arm, all too perfect.   

“You’re essentially jumping on a moving train. Like, the business is established, the recipes have been established, you’re not buying thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment to start your own company,” Rubio said. “Believing in A Slice of New York and everything that it means and wanting to be an owner of that, I think that’s exactly what I wanted.”

External issues can be even more daunting: One of the greatest challenges cooperatives face is access to capital. Equity financing presents a fundamental conflict, because cooperatives are geared toward workers’ profit and ownership, not investors’. And traditional banking and lending systems aren’t used to dealing with a group of 20 owners applying for a loan. “What they will do is suggest that you choose the three people who have the best credit or the most assets, and apply for the loan in their name,” Khatib said, recalling a problem that Red Emma’s faced when it sought a $150,000 expansion loan in 2013. “That introduces a really nasty disparity into your cooperative, because suddenly some people have more on the line than others.” 

Dozens of new loan sources have cropped up to fill the void. Red Emma’s eventually secured capital from lenders and foundations, including The Working World and Research Associates Foundation, which allowed the co-op to circumvent having to ask just a handful of worker-owners to risk their credit. The experience was so difficult, though, that it motivated Khatib to co-found Seed Commons, a national network of local loan funds geared toward investing in co-ops. Since its inception in 2015, the organization has provided more than $15 million “non-extractive loans,” where the “returns to the lender … can never be greater to the borrower than the benefits of the loan to the borrower.” 

This past September, Project Equity, which consults with companies on converting to employee ownership, also started its own loan fund, with a partial aim of inviting more traditional lenders into the process to familiarize them with the cooperative landscape. And over the past decade, cities like New York and Boston have launched their own initiatives to ensure co-ops in their communities have access to resources and support. 

By giving cooperatives the support they need to thrive, these groups and initiatives hope to convince other lenders to take a chance. “We need enough deal flow in our space to make it worth it for a small business lender to stop and learn and think about rejiggering their systems and processes to enable this,” said Alison Lingane, co-founder of Project Equity, referring to cooperative conversions of existing businesses. 

After exhausting back-and-forth discussions, Red Emma’s worker-owners decided not to rent out their kitchen, even if that meant working harder to reduce their financial losses. That day’s conversation—and decision—in June resulted in dozens more: on revamping the menu, which had become limited during the pandemic’s delivery and takeout phase; on adjusting hours to plan events that would bring in more traffic and sales, and on what those events might look like; and on staffing the restaurant and bar for the new schedules. 

By early September, their collective decision-making resulted in a boom in sales. An open-mic night drew a crowd of 40 that lingered over drinks late into the night, and that same week, groups of people packed the bar and patio area for a happy hour event, ordering rounds of fries, cocktails, and tequila shots. The store had been losing money, typically bringing in around $8,000 in weekly sales, but that week, Red Emma’s cleared $14,000, turning a profit for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

“Being able to hash it out with a lot of people, you think of things that you wouldn’t think of if you were just doing it by yourself,” said Ino Aksentiev, a worker-owner, bartender, and bookseller at Red Emma’s. “Also, it means that you make a decision together, and you’re all invested in going forth with that decision.” 

This story originally appeared in The Counter and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Can enterprises be designed for something besides providing maximum gains to their owners and investors? Can we even imagine enterprises designed to keep the planet thriving?

Patagonia’s answer is just one alternative to the fate many well-meaning CEO-founders have faced when they sold to multinationals or took firms public, only to see their creations gutted and transformed. Among these are Smith & Hawken, Odwalla, Ben & Jerry’s, and many others.

Here’s the disturbing truth: Virtually all successful businesses end up in the maw of finance. The system design permits virtually no alternatives.

No founder lives forever. Once a founder retires or dies, most small businesses close. Only about one in seven pass their businesses on to family, and of those enterprises, a vanishingly small number make it to third-generation ownership. The rest are sold—often to competitors or private equity firms. The businesses become assets, often sold over and over, until the original life is snuffed out. Whatever impulse for human betterment motivated that founder, profit-maximizing devours it.

In the face of this, founders transitioning ownership in alternative ways are key architects of the next system. Here’s one story even more inspiring, and replicable, than Patagonia’s.

Coming to Our Senses

In 2005, Mandy Cabot, founder of Dansko shoe company, was on the verge of selling the company to Timberland for $100 million, but she stepped back at the last minute. She later turned the enterprise into a B Corporation and sold the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. But that was just the start.

Cabot was born to a wealthy family, and she still made money on the sale of Dansko. But she remarked on how inefficient it was to amass wealth over a lifetime, and then give some of it away at the end. She wondered: Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use a business to do good?

In 2018, the Democracy Collaborative began a project on what we call the “next-generation enterprise.” We identified 50-plus companies that were, like Dansko, employee-owned benefit corporations—firms like Eileen Fisher, Clif Bar, King Arthur Flour, and Cooperative Home Care Associates. Cabot showed up at the April 2019 event we hosted for these firms. I’d known her from the days I’d been publisher of Business Ethics magazine, and when I asked what she was doing, she said with a laugh, “I bought a rainforest.”

Later, I reached out for an interview, finding Cabot at her current home in Belize. Cabot, now in her late 60s, and her husband, Peter Kjellerup, who was in his 70s, were looking for impact investments after the sale of Dansko. They were thinking of buying a little farm in the mountains of Belize, when a broker told them of a rainforest on the verge of being sold to a developer. “You better sit down, because it’s a big one,” the broker said.

The rainforest property turned out to be 27,500 acres, bordering three preserved areas, including a jaguar preserve. The parcel included an abandoned farm with a factory for making coconut oil. They fell in love. “It’s the mother of all impact investments,” Cabot said. They began rehabilitating the 10% of the land that had been previously farmed, using permaculture and regenerative agriculture. Much of the rest of the land they turned into the new Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve—a nonprofit that today owns 30% of the farm and factory, and one day will own it all.

Cabot’s aim is to make the farm and factory profitable enough to sustain the preserve in perpetuity. The boards of the preserve and the company will be controlled by Belizeans, and Cabot is insisting a majority be women. Together, that system could one day sustain about 200 good-paying jobs.

“We’re designing it all so it’s scalable,” Cabot said. She didn’t mean “scalable” as maximizing financial wealth, but as living depth and breadth: leaving the soil healthier, building biodiversity, supporting pollinators.

Cabot recalled meeting with Will Raap, founder of Gardener’s Supply, another employee-owned benefit corporation, who told her, “Young lady, I have one word for you: biochar. It really will save mankind.” Biochar is the result of a process that turns biowaste, such as coconut shells, citrus peels, and avocado pits, into briquets that sequester carbon for thousands of years and serve as beneficial soil amendments. Now, Cabot and Kjellerup are bringing biochar to their farm.

“There’s so much circularity in all this,” Cabot told me. “This really is the grand finale we’re so lucky to have.”

If Dansko, as both a B Corporation and an employee-owned firm, is an example of using business as a force for good, Silk Grass is a far more ambitious project. There, investment, profit, trust ownership, regenerative agriculture, and local governance are all working together as a system to create flourishing, ongoing, living wealth. Cabot is investing capital to feed the wealth of the rainforest.

Other entrepreneurs would say Cabot is leaving money on the table. “What would you say to them?” I asked. She replied, “How much more do you need than enough? Enough is enough.” She and Kjellerup left their children an inheritance. They have enough to live comfortably. But they’re sinking loads into Silk Grass—including years of their lives—building something they won’t own or profit from.

What she and her husband care about, she said, is “what gives you the deepest sense of joy in your life.” I saw a piece of that, as Cabot shared on Facebook a video of the dozens of baby sea turtles she’d worked with others to nurture, being released to the sea.

Like Yvon Chouinard, Cabot is building an alternative to the conveyor belt that feeds small companies into the jaws of big corporate finance. And since she didn’t give away all the wealth of Dansko, she’s modeling a more replicable approach for other founders.

Then, Cabot went on to something bigger. At Silk Grass (also a B Corporation, and the first one in Belize), ownership will be handed to a trust fed by the farm’s profits and governed by Belizeans. Investment is occurring. A business is making a profit. But capital and corporation are in service to life, not the other way around.

This microsystem helps us visualize the great task ahead—transferring wealth and power from the hands of the few to the control of the many. Creating systems to keep life flourishing, as their first aim.

Our culture may look back one day to find that the mania for maximizing profits was a mass delusion that ultimately lost its hold. Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds famously observed that people think in herds, and they go mad in herds, “while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.”

Cabot and Yvon Chouinard have both left loads of money on the table. But a better way of putting it is, they put that money to the best possible use.

This is an excerpt from Wealth Supremacy, a new book forthcoming in September 2023 from Berrett-Koehler Publishers. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:05 a.m. PDT on Oct. 28, 2022 to correctly identify Silk Grass’ governance structure—the board and company will be run by local Belizeans of many ethnicities, not solely Indigenous Belizeans. Read our corrections policy here.

Imagine a pirate. The image that comes immediately to mind is a man, disabled in various ways, with a peg leg, a hook for a hand, a patch over one eye, and a parrot on his shoulder. He is rough, coarse, sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Hollywood films, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, this image of the pirate has for centuries now suffused an American, and increasingly global, popular culture.

The image is a myth, but it is no less powerful for that. Like all myths, it contains a small but essential element of truth. Pirates of the “Golden Age,” who marauded on the high seas from 1660 to 1730, were almost all common working sailors, poor men from the lowest social class, who crossed the line into illegal activity, most of them bearing the scars of a dangerous line of work. Naval warfare of the era featured cannonballs blowing up wooden ships, sending an explosion of splinters and chunks of wood that blinded and severed the arms and legs of mariners. Sailors fell from the rigging, suffered hernias while lifting heavy cargo, caught malaria and other debilitating diseases, and lost fingers to rolling casks. Many died, their bodies dumped into that vast gray-green graveyard called the Atlantic Ocean. Crippled mariners made up the majority of beggars to be found in the port cities of the Atlantic world.

The ravaged body of the pirate is a key to understanding the real history of those who sailed “under the banner of King Death,” the infamous black flag, the pirates’ Jolly Roger. Trapped in a deadly machine called the deep-sea sailing ship, sailors who turned pirate fought a furious battle for survival. Routinely maimed in the course of their work, bilked of their wages, fed rotten provisions, and beaten around the deck by captains with tyrannical powers, these seafaring men (and a few women) built a radically different life on a pirate ship.

A favorite phrase among pirates was “A merry life and a short one,” or, as one man put it, “Let us live while we can,” with freedom, dignity, and abundance, all of which had been denied to the common sailor. The merry life invented on the pirate ship enabled sailors to elect their captain and other officers, and this at a time when poor people had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. The merry life also involved a redistribution of resources—and life chances—that was stunningly egalitarian compared to the hierarchical practices of the merchant shipping industry or the royal navy. Pirates even created a rudimentary social welfare system by giving shares of booty to those unable to work because of poor health or injury.

The alternative social order of the pirate ship was all the more impressive because it had been created by the “villains of all nations,” workers of many races and ethnicities who, according to conventional wisdom, in their own day and in ours, were not supposed to cooperate. Any given pirate ship might have English, Irish, Greek, Dutch, French, or Native American crew members. African and African American seamen played an especially prominent role as they freely and subversively sailed Caribbean and North American waters near the coastal slave plantations from which many of them had escaped. The Atlantic maritime labor market and the experience of sailors had long been transnational. The social composition of the pirate ship proved the point, as did the parrot on the pirate’s shoulder. He had sailed with the motley crew to the exotic ends of the earth.

These outlaws knew that the gallows awaited them, but they were already risking their necks and dying young in their daily work. They made this clear through the Jolly Roger, which used the “death’s head,” a symbol of mortality, to strike fear into the captains of prize vessels and to encourage their quick surrender. (Most captains got the message and complied.) Yet the flag also bespoke the pirates’ own fear of being preyed upon in turn. They took the symbol of death from the captain, who drew it in his logbook when a sailor died. They frequently added to their flag a weapon piercing a human heart and an hourglass, emblems of violence and limited time, terrible truths about their own lives. They also sent a coded message to the rich, who knew that the verb “to roger” meant to copulate. The pirate flag said “Fuck you.” Rage and humor were key elements that characterized these outlaws of the seas: burning anger against the powerful, and the humor of men who chose freedom over servitude at any cost. 

Some will be disappointed that the pages of Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel contain no hunts for buried treasure, no ghost ships, no wronged aristocrats driven to sea, and no pirates in love with the governor’s beautiful daughter. But as it happens, the actual history of piracy is much more profound than the Hollywood myth. This is a story about the real common sailors who raised the black flag and created a system of democracy in action on the high seas, a traveling brotherhood of men doomed to a violent end, who wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In adapting my book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, David Lester has depicted the pirates’ “history from below” with great subtlety and visual power, illuminating in human terms the real reasons—the working conditions, the lash, the premature death—why people chose to become outlaws and what kind of society they built for themselves beyond the reach of the law. David brings these pirates to life, not only as workers who powered and then challenged global capitalism, but as thinkers and doers who saw that another world was possible. Perhaps most importantly, David shows us why we will always love pirates, as long as there are powerful people to be resisted and causes of social justice to be fought for.

This excerpt from Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel (Beacon Press, 2023) by David Lester (author and illustrator), Marcus Rediker (author), and Paul Buhle (editor) appears with permission of the publisher.

Many in the hardest-hit region of Lee County continue to bear that cost, not just from the physical damage, but at the hands of property owners and developers.

One of those affected is Lorna Washington, a former Fort Myers resident who lived in her 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom rental for two years before she was forced to leave.

“After the storm, since there wasn’t any damage to the property, the owner decided he was going to put it up for sale because of the shortage of housing units from the storm,” she says. “He listed it at a very high price, feeling that people would be desperate and pay that price.”

The house, which she lived in with her two children and two grandchildren and was renting for $2,200, was purchased in 2014 for only $187,000. When it was put on the market in 2023, the asking price was $550,000, despite the fact that no repairs or upgrades had been made in years. The owner, Washington says, lived in New Jersey.

“First he told us we could stay until he sold it, then he changed his mind and told us we had to leave in four days,” she says. “That was the first time in my entire life that I had ever been without a place to stay, and I didn’t know where I was going to lay my head—not just me, but my family, my kids, and my grandkids.”

Rental rates were already on the rise before the storm, she says. According to a 2022 Shimberg Center for Housing Studies report, 28% of Lee County renters are low-income or paying at least 40% of their income on rent. Compounding that is the pandemic bump: From July 2020 to July 2022, 221,000 residents moved to Florida from other states, the largest gain of residents from within the U.S. since 2005. For many, arriving from notoriously expensive states like California or New York, more affordable homes were the driving factor.

“When they came here and saw these lower prices, they gobbled up the real estate and drove the prices up,” Washington says. “To them it’s a bargain, but to locals, we were priced out of the market. We were not accustomed to these prices.”

After the storm, rental rates skyrocketed even further. Though she had been approved for a smaller 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom rental, the landlord wanted $2,700 a month. Just two years prior, a similar property she rented cost only $1,300. After spending a week living between a hotel and an Airbnb, Washington finally found a rental home for $1,800 in Cape Coral.

Hers is one of many stories of how development is reshaping the Lee County landscape. My own parents, whose home in Cape Coral was flooded by record storm surge during the storm, were forced to relocate to St. Petersburg while they cleaned out their house and eventually put it on the market as-is. It sold to buyers from Miami whose primary residence is a 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom house worth over $1 million. Because of high interest rates, most buyers fit this profile: investors looking to flip for a profit.

For coastal areas that were totally wiped out, like Fort Myers Beach, developers are seizing the opportunity to drive up prices even further. Most of the post-Ian properties will cost $1 million or more, according to sources quoted by Business Observer; meanwhile, fewer than a third of the low- or middle-income residents who used to live there have been able to return.

If this sounds familiar, it is. After the fires in Maui that destroyed nearly 1,900 homes, developers started reaching out to residents and offering to buy their land, hoping they’d be desperate enough to sell after the long wait for government assistance and insurance payouts. According to residents interviewed by USA Today, many are holding their ground, resisting contributing to the affordable housing crisis the island had already been facing due to a rise in short-term rentals and vacation homes.

In Lee County, faced with similar pressure, locals are finding ways to fight back. Washington is a member of Mt. Hermon Church in Fort Myers, one of the founding members of Lee Interfaith for Empowerment (LIFE), an organization made up of 14 congregations across the county who hold public officials accountable for creating policies that address the community’s needs. For three years, LIFE fought to get the city of Fort Myers, where most of their members are located, to implement an affordable housing trust fund. In January of 2022, they finally won.

Though it took many subsequent months of follow-up to see movement with the trust fund, that accountability is starting to pay off. As of August 1, the fund had a balance of just over $3.7 million. About $520,000 of the total has been spent on developments, including units set aside for low- to moderate-income families. And, as of February 2023, $400,000 of the affordable housing trust fund is being set aside for a rental assistance program.

“Prior to the storm we had some pushback, and then after the hurricane we had less pushback because now the homelessness and the housing shortage is staring everybody in the face,” Washington says.

Families or individuals who apply can receive up to $600 in monthly assistance, depending on where their income falls, with the property owner or manager receiving a subsidy as incentive to participate in the program. But Washington feels it’s not enough.

While operating her cleaning and repair business that services rental properties, she’s heard a lot of stories of people who received the rental vouchers, but found that there were no rentals available or that landlords—knowing they could still ask for above-market rents—weren’t accepting the vouchers. Further, the requirements to rent even with a voucher are steep; would-be renters still need to make three times the rent and pay three-months’ rent up front—an often impossible ask for people needing assistance with rent to begin with.

“What we have been pushing for the city to do is to get the land and the developers to actually build those types of units, and that will alleviate some of the issues—to build more units that will take these types of renters,” Washington says.

In September 2023 LIFE showed up to a Fort Myers city council meeting to make their voice heard in a debate over the fate of a building that once housed the News-Press newspaper. Rather than sell the building to developers hoping to use the property to build luxury condos, the city chose Miami-based company Tre Bel Housing, whose proposal promised rent-restricted housing for essential workers.

Over 40 members from LIFE showed up to that meeting, with several speaking publicly to remind the council of the housing crisis. Councilwoman Teresa Watkins Brown, when declaring that she was going to vote for the affordable housing, said, “I’m listening to my community.”

Other organizations are taking matters into their own hands, rather than waiting on the government to do it. The Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance (IFHA) was formed to address the housing needs of farmworkers in Immokalee, an agricultural community in neighboring Collier County. The alliance is building 128 hurricane-resistant affordable rental units for farmworkers and low-income families, many of whom currently pay up to 70% of their income to live in 50-year-old trailers with limited access to toilets and infested with mice and mold. After Hurricane Irma in 2017, many of those trailers became uninhabitable due to severe wind damage.

According to Carleton Cleveland, board member of the IFHA, the groups who came together to form the coalition after Irma did so in order to create something longer lasting than disaster relief could provide. In addition to the rental units, IFHA is building a community center, athletic fields, and a community garden.

“For the most vulnerable communities, like ours here in Immokalee, we have to look for solutions together to protect against the effects of climate change,” says Lupe Gonzalo, a former farmworker and current staff member for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a member organization of the IFHA.

After Hurricane Ian, because the Immokalee community wasn’t as hard-hit as nearby Lee County, the CIW stepped in and became a resource distribution hub, also using their radio station to provide information to the community both during and after the hurricane.

“We have a history of organizing not only with workers but also with consumers and the public,” Gonzalo says. “We’ve created a really good connection to the community and a sense of trust in the community, and that’s what gives us the confidence to communicate with the community in times of crisis.”

The CIW has been organizing Immokalee workers for 30 years, winning protections like mandatory heat breaks to keep workers safe when doing outdoor work.

Housing security is another protection that can keep communities safe during a crisis. For some coastal communities, that might mean seeking government grants to relocate away from the coast. For others, it might mean giving the locals a fighting chance against developers seeking to profit off of devastating loss, like the moratorium on sales of damaged property proposed by the governor of Hawai‘i. Whatever this aid looks like, the problem is too big for one community to solve on its own.

“Humanity has borrowed a large debt from nature for decades of unsustainable exploitation, and the time to pay has come,” Gonzalo says. “At this point, we can’t let communities solve their problems alone, because climate change isn’t only affecting communities like ours, it’s a global problem. It’s a problem that governments should be responding to.”

Allen was devastated by the news that they were losing a job that provided stable employment and a supportive community. The layoffs left them struggling financially—to get unemployment and to keep up with mounting bills. But Common Ground’s workers are a tight-knit group who became even closer as they weathered the challenges of seeing the profitable business through a pandemic. They weren’t ready to give up the shop.

The 20- and 30-something-year-olds relied on each other to endure the sudden job loss, raising thousands of dollars to help each other pay their rent, buy food, and support their families. The staff had already begun working to form a union to fight for better wages and rights in their workplace, and didn’t want another owner taking over. They believed they could reopen Common Ground in a way that gave the workers the power and ownership in the workplace that they felt they deserved.

“‘Making it’ is when we get to a point in our lives where we can take care of our friends,” says 30-year-old Common Ground barista Jacqueline Du.

Two days after the closing was announced, their lives upended, the workers shared that they were exploring the possibility of reopening Common Ground as a worker cooperative—a business owned and democratically operated by its workers. They found support from the loyal customer base built by the business in over 25 years as a fixture in the Hampden neighborhood.

Over the next two-and-a-half months, the former employees worked tirelessly to make the transition happen. Their journey provides lessons for community members who see worker-ownership as a potential tool to preserve and enhance their livelihoods as a flood of small business owners reach retirement age. Some 24 million United States workers could be affected by the coming “silver tsunami,” which refers to business owners of the baby boomer generation retiring without a succession plan for their businesses.

“The minute that I found out about [the closure] was also the minute we started to organize,” says Nic Koski, a Common Ground employee who emerged as a leader in the effort to turn the business into a worker-owned cooperative.

Community Support

Common Ground’s workers fought for a vision of prosperity at odds with the popular definition of success, in which entrepreneurs accumulate vast fortunes through others’ labor. At co-ops, workers decide how to run the business and keep the profits, which is shown to lead to better pay and working conditions, and increased productivity over traditional businesses. But like most working people, baristas typically lack access to the capital needed to buy a business or the resources and training required to manage it.

In response, a growing number of cities are recognizing the benefits of worker cooperatives by investing millions of dollars in their growth. Baltimore, though, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing large corporations, but has yet to invest in supporting worker cooperatives through financing or training.

Instead, Common Ground’s workers found the embrace of Baltimore’s thriving cooperative ecosystem, which had grown significantly in recent years and was prepared to provide the resources the transition would require. For the past decade, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), a local cooperative incubator, along with its national partner Seed Commons, has provided 100 cooperatives with technical assistance. Seed Commons has also loaned out more than $53 million dollars through its revolving loan fund, for which the incubator does not require personal collateral and asks for repayment solely from business profits.

BRED was born from the frustration of worker-owners at Red Emma’s coffee shop and bookstore, and the city’s oldest co-op, when trying to finance its expansion. The incubator has since become well known in Baltimore for growing the city’s worker cooperative ecosystem from a handful of cooperatives a decade ago to more than two dozen today. 

After the acclaimed Joe Squared pizzeria closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic, BRED provided the guidance that allowed the workers to reopen it as a worker co-op. This allowed the worker-owners to collectively make decisions like raising wages, equally distributing pay, and opening only for take-out dining when COVID-19 restrictions were lifted but transmission rates remained high. However, in November 2023, the worker-owners announced they would be closing their doors at the end of the year, citing a drastically altered post-pandemic restaurant landscape, lower turnout, and higher expenses. Co-ops are not fail-proof, but their benefits are real. 

When BRED learned that Common Ground’s workers wanted to buy the business, they quickly moved into action, using the lessons they had learned from previous transitions.

“BRED has been … the driving force behind how we were able to do this,” Du says. “They gave us the education and the resources to be able to achieve our goal.”

One of the first steps was to acquire financing to purchase the businesses assets from the previous owner. This alone can often seem like an insurmountable challenge for workers.

“We’ve literally had owners who wanted to sell to their workers, and the workers refused,” Kate Khatib, a worker-owner at BRED and Red Emma’s, says, “because they were too scared about what it would mean to take on that much debt.”

BRED gave Common Grounds employees access to financing through their revolving loan fund, and supporters donated more than $26,000 to a GoFundMe to support the conversion to worker ownership. The workers also brought critical assets to the table: They shared the trust needed to open a business together, and they were confident in their ability to manage the shop.

“The owner had very, very little involvement in the daily operations of the business,” says 32-year-old barista Shelby Munson, a full-time student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The job provided Munson the flexibility to pursue a math degree with a focus on finance—expertise BRED has helped her to harness at Common Ground. “BRED provided us with the structure for us to not have a boss but still make sure that everything gets done and everyone has a fair vote in the major decisions of the business.”

Examples Elsewhere

Even as Common Ground’s workers have found a path to restart their business as a co-op, the U.S. lags behind many wealthy countries in its number of worker cooperatives.

“I think the biggest challenge I have noticed is really structural obstacles to the transition to worker ownership,” Koski says. 

Small businesses that have been built up over decades have served as anchors in their communities, providing important services and stable employment. Some retiring business owners will sell to their children, but four out of five don’t have a plan for what will happen next.

The silver tsunami has brought renewed urgency to this work, as jurisdictions seek to preserve local businesses that have an outsize impact on local communities and economies. The number of worker cooperatives in the U.S. has increased rapidly in recent years, buoyed by mounting evidence that they can create good paying jobs and support community wealth-building.

Now, when business owners are ready to retire, cities are seeking to incentivize business owners to sell their business to their workers, instead of selling to private equity or simply closing them.

After investing more than $1 million annually to support worker ownership for the better part of a decade, New York City had 91 worker co-ops at the beginning of 2022, and that year reported spending $3.8 million dollars to provide capital and wide-ranging technical assistance to launch or convert nine more worker-owned businesses, with another nine in the pipeline.

New York’s success inspired Madison, Wisconsin, to invest $1 million annually in cooperative businesses, which by 2022 helped launch nine local co-ops, with a dozen more in the process of launching or transitioning to worker ownership.

Local foundations and anchor institutions in Cleveland helped launch Evergreen Cooperatives in 2008. The group now employs 110 worker-owners in traditionally low-wage sectors with the goal of providing wealth-building opportunities in historically excluded communities in the city. They sustain and grow their co-ops by securing major procurement contracts to provide energy solutions, fresh produce, and laundry services for the city’s hospitals and universities. Their Fund for Employee Ownership acquires local businesses, such as the regional coffee shop chain Phoenix Coffee, and transitions them to worker ownership.

These successes in the U.S., though notable, lag far behind Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, which employs 80,000 people across 90 autonomous worker co-ops. Each co-op has an executive whose pay is capped at six times its workers, and major decisions are made democratically. The collective of cooperatives was founded 70 years ago by a Spanish priest as an answer to the region’s extreme levels of poverty and inequality, and lack of social mobility.

Today Mondragon is a North Star for advocates of worker-ownership, who hope to replicate its success to help revitalize postindustrial cities also facing high levels of inequality and a lack of social mobility. In Cincinnati, that movement is laser-focused on raising awareness that it is possible for small business owners to sell to their workers.

“Mondragon has the lowest level of poverty and the lowest level of income inequality in Spain … and we would like to see that here in Cincinnati,” says Kristen Barker, co-founder and co-director of Co-op Cincy—a local cooperative incubator. Seeds Commons has supported Co-op Cincy’s multi-million-dollar Business Legacy Fund, which thus far has provided three business owners with the financing and support to sell to their workers, and supported a fourth business that did not require financing for its transition.

Veteran early childhood educator Trisha Hay had struggled to find a workplace that empowered teachers to address the needs of their students until she began working at Shine Nurture Center. When founder and owner Katie McGoron announced in 2022 that she was exiting the business, Hay was relieved to learn she would sell to the workers, with Co-op Cincy’s help.

Hay says worker-ownership has since strengthened the business. “We really listen to each other’s ideas and can come to each other with problems,” she says. “When you have a sole owner, you don’t have that capability.”

In April 2023, Co-op Cincy organized a trip to Mondragon as part of its plan to expand local worker-ownership by 80,000 people over the next 50 years. Forty people from Southwest Ohio, including 7 worker-owners, toured Mondragon’s large cooperative ecosystem and met with local leaders.

“It was really inspiring to see kind of an economic model that really worked for everyone there,” says Hays, after witnessing how deeply embedded the cooperative ethos was. “Everyone knew what cooperatives were, and it was just a normal part of life and model for their businesses.”

On her return, Hays lobbied local government officials, who she said were excited by the potential benefits of worker-ownership. Representatives from Mondragon then visited Cincinnati for the 2023 Union Co-op Symposium, which took place in Cincinnati in October, to raise awareness of the benefits of worker-ownership and what steps could be taken to increase democratic control of local economies. Attendees said the conference raised awareness of the benefits of expanding worker-ownership in Cincinnati.

“There’s more dialogue happening, especially post-COVID, and we’re talking about worker rights and worker exploitation—that there’s got to be more creative ways of thinking about how to empower the workforce,” says Cincinnati business owner Brandon Z. Hoff, who founded the Black apparel company Heritage Hill in 2019, and received the assistance of the Business Legacy Fund to transition the business into a co-op in 2022.

A Successful Transition

On Sept. 18, 2023, just 11 weeks after Common Ground closed down, dawn was breaking at the coffee shop. Allen and half a dozen co-workers, equal parts nervous and excited, came together and grasped the red handles of an oversize pair of scissors. In unison, they began counting down to open for the first time since the beloved café closed abruptly this summer. 

“Three, two, one, community!” they shouted as they cut a large red ribbon draped across the entrance to the shop, acknowledging that they could not have done it alone. They were met with cheers, hugs, and tears from supporters. A sign outside read, “We’re back baby. Your local fav, now as a co-op. Thank you for all your support!”

Customers lined up to order their favorite food and drinks, and to express gratitude the business reopened as a worker co-op.

“I don’t even drink coffee,” said one customer, who contributed to a GoFundMe to support the conversion to worker-ownership. “I want to support businesses that treat their workers well, and worker-ownership is a great way to do that.”

In the first six weeks of operation since the café’s reopening, Common Ground has raised wages for its 17 worker-owners by as much as 25%, and is seeking to expand its staff to keep up with demand.

To finally reopen as a co-op “was the best feeling in the world,” Allen says, “because we get to see our customers, we get to spend time with one another, and when we see issues, we can fix them the way we see fit.”

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the YES! series “Redefining Prosperity.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. View our editorial independence policies here.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:30 a.m. on December 8, 2023, to include Kate Khatib’s full name and title. Read our corrections policy here.

These street vendors, who call themselves tiangui sellers (street marketers), bazareñas, or mercaditas, are mostly women and nonbinary people. They fill their tiny street shops with drapes, small tables, or suitcases and display their secondhand or handmade products without official permission from local authorities.

In 2021, the National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relations found more than 16% of girls and women over the age of 15 had experienced economic, patrimonial, or labor violence in Mexico City in 2020, while 20.8% were victims of workplace violence and 9.8% received less than pay their colleagues doing the same job.

As Carla Carpio, sociologist and investigator in the gender research center at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), explains, mercaditas aren’t interested in getting approval from the government for street vending because they’ve experienced so much discrimination and exploitation.

“The mercaditas’ protest is uncomfortable [for institutions] because it questions the patriarchal and neoliberal system,” Carpio explains. “With their activity, these women prove they can be free. … As mercaditas, they run their own business independently. No family members administer their wages and they collaborate among women.”

Typically, street vendors are charged 13 pesos per day or 390 pesos per month ($23) if their stand takes up less than 1.2 meter (or 3.94 feet) of space, and between 1,140 and 2,220 pesos per month if they’re operating a daily stand. But for mercaditas, informal sales are a form of mutual support, a protest against gender-based economic violence, and a network of solidarity.

From the University to the Streets

At the onset of the pandemic, a group of tiangui sellers started Mercadita Vassincelos, a self-managed market at Mexico City’s Buenavista Metro station. Flores, a 25-year-old student who sells secondhand clothes and glasses, says the market was created to make a “safe, separatist, and dissident point” that “formal jobs do not respect women and nonbinary people’s rights.”

Street selling is a risky activity in Mexico City, especially for women and nonbinary people. Beyond the potential for exploitation, several mercaditas told YES! they have experienced physical and verbal aggression from potential customers. However, these sellers have banded together to create solidarity networks that allow them to work safely. 

“In 2023, after the sexual assault on a student, dozens of university street sellers organized months of protests and strikes,” says María Azucena Feregrino Basurto, a postdoctoral fellow in social studies at UAM. “Thanks to these protests, the university authorities accepted street sale activities in the garden as long as it is done only by students.”

Now, street vendors at UAM typically sell goods on weekdays and they are able to manage themselves. “At the beginning, to feel safer, a group of our colleagues was in charge of the surveillance, but now we do not need it anymore,” says Meneses, an economics student at UAM who sells stationery and crocheted homemade flowers. “There is extensive communication between us; we support each other.”

Bernal agrees, adding that selling at UAM has been essential to ensuring her safety. “Selling here is fundamental for us because carrying out the activity outside the university means a waste of studying time and puts us in danger, since attacks on street vendors are a very widespread phenomenon,” she says.

UAM street sellers organize through Facebook groups, some of which have more than 5,000 members. “I sell biscuits and sweets with a friend,” says Perla Lima, a biology student at UAM. “When I’m attending a lesson, she is in charge of selling, and I do the same for her.” Lima has been a street vendor since she was 8, selling goods to help her family. Now, as a student, she is able to afford her meals, some bills, and the transportation needed to travel to and from her college every day.

This commitment to fighting against repression is a hallmark of the mercaditas’ movement. “The mercaditas’ objective intersects moral and ethics through the reappropriation of public space and an explicit breaking of the stigma linked to informal jobs,” explains Basurto. “All those factors are combined with feminism and creation of solidarity networks.”

For Teresa Bernal, a 22-year-old UAM student majoring in Spanish literature, community is essential to her ability to sell goods. “I prepare everything that’s needed for my vegan café the previous evening, then I get up at 5 a.m.,” she says. “It takes me 45 minutes to arrive at the university and set up my stand. I have to do this with the help of my friend because I have a physical disability, and then I have to get to class on time.”

Ana Patricia Serrano Herrera, a literature student at UAM, sells K-Pop products, including photos, stickers, and posters. “I live with some roommates, and I pay 2,200 pesos per month [around $130],” she says. “My family helps me, but they cannot afford all the expenses. I don’t earn a lot with my business, but it’s a flexible job, which gives me time to study and follow the lessons.”

Collective Prosperity

Outside of UAM, street sellers work in different universities, the metro station, and public squares, and they are informally organized. In Mexico City, there are five collectives with between 30 and 40 women and nonbinary sellers. These collectives go beyond organizing sellers around safety.

“In some cases, the groups of mercaditas not only deal with selling, but organize workshops and training courses on reproductive health, solidarity economy, self-handling,” explains Carpio. “On certain occasions they organize events, photographic or artistic exhibitions. The bazaars become places with a cultural and political [purpose].”

Many of these sellers dream of opening a shop of their own. For Plumita, selling handmade punk collars and feather earrings is crucial to caring for her three children. “My income goes from a minimum of 1,500 to a maximum of 10,000 pesos per day [$89 to $596],” she says. “My dream would be to have my own shop where I’ll be free and not exploited or discriminated against.”

Elizabeth Torres Barranco, an anthropology student, sells secondhand clothes online, in the neighborhood she lives on the outskirts of Mexico City, and at the Chabacano metro station, a famous delivery point for online sellers.

Torres dreams of converting her experience as a bazareña into a thesis for her anthropology degree thesis. She wants to share the stories of women like her, who use street sales to create bridges of solidarity, balance care work, and fight economic violence.

Some of the mercaditas hope that organizing through collectives will make street selling more appealing to women and nonbinary people in Mexico City looking to earn income for themselves. “For me, selling here is liberating,” Torres says. “We are organized; we have a group on social media with [more than] 4,000 participants. I feel safe here, and I have also made some friends. That’s the reason why I would like to involve more women in this type of work. I feel that our actions have a strong feminist component because we collaborate and show solidarity among women sellers.”

At Louder Than Ten, the project management training company that I co-founded more than 13 years ago, we’ve seen this firsthand. In the more than 13 years that we’ve been working with digital product studios, agencies, and other creative teams, we’ve noticed a pattern. The more companies involve their workers, the healthier their operations are.

In 2021, we decided to put this theory to the test and make the ultimate commitment to workplace democracy. We became a worker-owned cooperative.

Why Become a Worker-Owned Cooperative?

As a society, we fight for democracy in government but settle for dictatorships in our workplaces, the place where we spend 70%–80% of our waking hours. Companies shamelessly monitor their team’s movements and actions in the name of “productivity.” They use time-scheduling software that dates back to a slave-owning family. They deny workers bathroom breaks. They make health care professionals work through a global pandemic without paid sick days.

In short, many workplaces treat people more like economic units than human beings. Even “cushy” jobs embrace toxic hustle culture and lay people off the second things go south in the company.

At Louder Than Ten, we know that worker-owned cooperatives are scientifically proven to be more sustainable, more productive, and longer-lasting. Our conversion to a co-op was the next logical step in our belief and commitment to an equal power structure—and it just makes practical business sense.

What’s a Worker-Owned Cooperative?

In a cooperative, workers own and manage the company. Unlike a traditional structure, where decision-making is at the top level, every worker has one equal vote on all company matters.

Co-ops live by the Rochdale Principles, and most co-ops do open-book management. This means worker-owners determine how profits are generated, used, and distributed. Unlike traditional companies, where CEOs make 2,202% more than the average worker, co-ops experience small wage gaps.

Co-ops aren’t necessarily anti-profit. It’s just that they’re controlled by the workers. They grow sustainably and ethically, providing a living wage for their members and giving back to their communities when they can. Co-ops reject the idea that people are labor. They know that people own labor.

How to Become a Worker-Owned Co-Op

Heads up: Every journey will look a bit different. These steps just worked for (and keep working for) us at Louder Than Ten when we converted to a co-op:

1. Get educated.

The first step on your co-op journey requires educating yourself and all company members about worker cooperatives. Cooperatives either are built from the ground up or are conversions of other kinds of businesses.

Louder Than Ten maintains a list of helpful resources about co-ops. If you’re starting a new co-op or converting an existing business, we’d suggest working with a professional co-op developer who can help develop the structure and bylaws, strategize the conversion process, and provide facilitation and training.

2. Find the right partners.

You can’t do this alone.

One of the seven cooperative principles identified by the International Cooperative Alliance is cooperation between cooperatives. Finding the right partners and professionals who understand and advocate for co-ops can be hard, so it’s critical to lean on the co-op community for support. Louder Than Ten is based in Vancouver, Canada, so we worked with a local co-op association, the BC Co-op Association, which provided training as well as access to key connections to co-op developers, cooperative-friendly accountants, lawyers, credit unions, and other cooperatives.

3. Write the rules.

Every co-op has a set of bylaws or rules that define how the organization is run that need to be developed before incorporation. These rules should be collectively decided and must benefit the community, the environment, and the workers.

Your rules will cover things like membership eligibility and requirements, governance procedures, share structures, and other core policies. Every set of rules is different and is a reflection of the values and interests of the cooperative. This was our most daunting task in the entire process and required the founding members’ full cooperation, alignment, and vision for the future.

4. Prepare for operation.

This should include discussions about your financial setup and transition plan (if applicable). You’ll also need to form your board of directors, and undertake a number of operational tasks:

• Set up bank accounts.
• Write the business plan (especially if you need financing).
• Form the board.
• Issue the initial shares.
• Design governance systems, like a corporate minute book used to record board meeting notes and a share ledger to track equity holdings.
• Raise money and apply for grants.

This step has a waterfall effect on your business operation. Expect to change your business name and address on everything and anything. Forming a co-op is a layered process, but at the end of it, you’ll be ready to begin operating under the new structure.

5. Convert.

If you’re converting into a coop, you’ll need to valuate the company, then sell it to the workers. This can be a complicated process depending on a ton of factors (especially if the current owners will continue on as employees of the new cooperative). So you will need to urge everyone, including your lawyer, accountant, and the workers, to make a fair conversion plan for everyone. The Sustainable Economies Law Center’s “Legal Guide to Cooperative Conversions” is a great place to start.

6. Operate (and enjoy your new co-op existence).

Once you’ve completed the conversion, you can begin operating as the fully democratic organization you have been dreaming of. More importantly, you’ve officially become a part of the cooperative movement and the larger solidarity economy. Your workplace is no longer paying lip service to its employees. It is a truly democratic institution that gives more material power to your people than a lifetime of electoral votes ever will.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:50 a.m. PDT on May 12, 2022 to correct the number of stated principles of cooperatives identified by the International Cooperative Alliance. Read our corrections policy here.

As cooperatives, St. James and Southbridge are peopled by their owners, families with shares in the company that holds title to the buildings and the land they sit on, those shares entitling owners to apartments and a say in governance. As limited-equity co-ops, the price of those shares—the cost of buying a home—is kept affordable to middle- and lower-income families by restricting their resale value.

These share prices don’t follow the jagged rise and fall of a stock market; they largely track with inflation, ensuring that families can leave with the value they put in, plus all the years of a solid, stable, safe affordable home. That limit on resale maintains the same opportunity for the next family in their wake. This is social housing: kept outside the market, decommodified, permanently affordable, and controlled by its residents. 

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A programmatic change meant to spur more rental development under the Mitchell-Lama program early in its existence had unintended consequences for these co-ops. The controversial loophole allows for cooperators to collectively vote whether to leave the program—or “privatize”—once the building’s mortgage is paid to its public lenders.

Leave the program, and cooperators can sell their share for whatever they can fetch in the market—no small amount in the rabid real estate market of New York. But leaving also means the loss of affordability for the next generation of owners, and the threat of rising costs at home for those who don’t wish to sell out. This is the choice put before the residents of St. James and Southbridge in my book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.

Turbo-charged by potential profit and cut through with the ethics of consuming the public goods that support us, the stories of the fraught privatization fights within these co-ops—seen at eye-level from the perspective of the residents—reveal themselves to be deeper than simple morality tales of profiteering vs. altruism, more complex than a battle between selfish privateers and idealistic defenders of the public realm. Rather, the sides that cooperators take in these community-shredding debates, how they construct their arguments—how they justify their positions to themselves and the pitches they make to sway others—all hold key information on the fervent contest over space across the country.

The human perspectives of Southbridge and St. James serve as a prism through which to better distinguish the consequences of how we govern, the language we use, and the rights we feel entitled to—and what they mean for our ability to create and sustain cities that approach the ideal of equity, which, though increasingly invoked, remains painfully out of reach. 

The fights within these co-ops, and the paths their residents ultimately choose, diverge in key ways. We pick up, here, in the aftermath. 

Right around the time that St. James cooperators voted down privatization, David Madden and Peter Marcuse, two scholars of urban studies and sociology, published the book In Defense of Housing, which lay bare the contemporary politics of the places we call home. The authors take issue with the dominant narrative of “a system in crisis” that took hold after the crash of 2008. “We need to be careful with this usage of the concept of crisis. The idea of crisis implies that inadequate or unaffordable housing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning standard.”

That isn’t what is happening, say Madden and Marcuse. They add: “Housing crisis is a predictable, consistent outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: Housing is not produced and distributed for the purposes of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended.”

In short, the very causes of the crisis are one and the same with the central ideology of homeownership. When that ownership carries a perceived right to profit from housing, without any responsibility for the collateral damage, crisis will be perpetual. Housing becomes a commodity, but one that has no rivals in its importance for organizing our lives and our politics. That is distinct from the role of housing that needs defending: housing as home.

Structuring housing as a limited-equity co-op, as the Mitchell-Lama program did, is a defense of home. The program sought a path to sheltering middle-income folks that was different from the exclusive suburbs supercharged by government-backed mortgages—subsidies immediately privatized and transmogrified into morally deserved earnings. The permanence of this defense can, however, never be guaranteed. At the program’s outset, co-op privatization wasn’t a possibility, but then laws and politics changed. The bulwarks against commodification need to be continually maintained, rebuilt, occupied, and augmented. 

A total of 194 St. James cooperators, with their votes on Feb. 23, 2017, managed to preserve their collectively owned social housing. Southbridge’s defenders were unable to do the same. That fortress against commodification in Lower Manhattan was transformed into a pillar of the housing system it had once stood against. How, exactly, did the Concerned Shareholders of St. James, with so many prevailing winds blowing against them, achieve their victory?

There is no exact formula or single answer. But we can learn lessons from how the battles at St. James and Southbridge diverged and in their different qualities as places and communities. These are applicable to how we might preserve other social housing in the future. As Madden and Marcuse point out, housing can be “a vehicle for imagining alternative social orders. Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form or another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.” The lessons of Mitchell-Lama extend beyond the housing sphere. Any attempt at realizing a truer, deeper form of our commonwealth must heed them.

Where Southbridge’s defenders spoke solely of the financial side of privatization—countering its alluring rewards with the specter of its risks—St. James’s concerned shareholders broadened the frame. They stressed that privatization wasn’t just a financial decision but a moral one: a statement about who the city was for, what recipients of public support owed to future generations, and how their own lives and choices intersected with those around them. They coupled this altruistic message with information that showed how privatization presented a financial risk—not only to the wider community but to the cooperators themselves.

They activated three different forms of unselfishness: empathic unselfishness through identification with future beneficiaries, communitarian unselfishness through identification with their neighbors who feared maintenance increases, and moralistic unselfishness through arguing that privatization was, in a sense, theft. In doing so, they triggered a key causal mechanism of collective action: a shared narrative, with which defection (privatization) was incompatible.

St. James’s predominately Black cooperative body, situated in a neighborhood where gentrification and displacement had transformed the streets for all to see, was particularly well primed to hear these messages. Many of the cooperators had themselves experienced discrimination in the housing market. Even among those who hadn’t, most knew the history of Bed-Stuy and could see where its future seemed to be heading if action wasn’t taken. Moreover, that future was not abstract but proximate, already right outside their doors.

The prospect of big money through privatization came with an asterisk: They would still be Black in a real estate system that had racism baked into its core. They’d internalized the need for social housing. At Southbridge, Lower Manhattan’s luxury turn didn’t have the same effect on the residents. The already-insular community remained at a remove from the rest of the neighborhood. As the prices on everything from groceries to movie tickets shot up with the glossy skyscrapers catering to capital, they felt under siege.

Privatization beckoned as a bulwark against those high prices. If you can’t beat them, the pro-privatizers seemed to say, join them. This call simply did not appeal to the residents of St. James in the same way. Because they had connections to their wider neighborhood, joining “them”—the monied companies and individuals snapping up buildings for passive profits—would have meant selling out their very sense of community.

Just as St. James’ defenders didn’t see their privatization decision as only about their individual well-being, they also didn’t go it alone in the debates. Where Southbridge’s pro–Mitchell-Lama residents considered it too risky to bring in outsiders, their counterparts at St. James heard those critiques and pushed through anyway, calling on the solidarity of citywide advocacy group Cooperators United for Mitchell-Lama (CU4ML) and local officials. In doing so, they gained access to crucial resources while also broadening the debate. CU4ML brought tactics, expertise, and the kind of political education that both Southbridge and St. James were internally starved of.

Public Advocate Tish James and her coterie of other officials packed up their bully pulpits and stationed them onsite, driving home the need for cooperators to consider a “we” beyond their own building. They connected the struggle at St. James to other struggles, and the strugglers to one another, activating another causal mechanism for collective action—what sociologist Charles Tilly calls “straightforward coercion by outsiders.”

Southbridge’s privateers had been able to keep most politicians out of their debates by wielding the sheer heft of their voting bloc. That complex is roughly 4.5 times as populous as St. James. It was thus much more difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the St. James privatizers to drown out the local politicians speaking to the clear public interest of preserving social housing amid a housing crisis that they had been elected to address. Southbridge board president Harvey Marshall, looking on from his now-privatized home across the East River, considered the politicians’ involvement at St. James to have been instrumental in defeating privatization there.

One can’t say what the outcome of the final Southbridge vote would have been if the anti-privatizers there had recruited nonresidents to their fight or if they had added moral, normative arguments to their rhetoric. But if Daniel Brampton can wring his hands over the additional flyers that his Venice vacation left unwritten, it’s also valid to speculate that those approaches may have closed the paltry 11-vote difference by which Southbridge’s privatization passed. Then again, it’s worth recalling that Southbridge had thwarted an earlier attempt at privatizing their co-op years before. At any Mitchell-Lama co-op, voting down privatization is never a permanent solution. Within a year, the whole process could start again. St. James remains an island of social housing, destined to be eroded if its floodwalls aren’t maintained.

For that reason, Madden and Marcuse endorse some skepticism around housing models like Mitchell-Lama that both oppose and exist within a larger system of commodification. “Human relationships cannot be confined to the boundaries of a housing estate. It is not possible to insulate a small group from what goes on in society as a whole; any such group is likely to be shaped by broader patterns of oppressive relationships. And islands of residential liberation will have limited impact in a sea of housing oppression and commodification,” they write.

Islands are good locations for lighthouses, though. They continue: “But experimental dwellings and emancipatory movements have wider significance as living demonstrations of housing’s potential. They should be seen as beacons pointing towards a broader possibility: that housing might support non-oppressive social relations, not in some utopian realm but in everyday life.”

That is one of the beauties of social housing: The models exist, and they work, even here in the capitalist United States. Activists like Graham Hales, Tia Ward, and Wenna Redfern have managed to keep the light on at St. James. And across the country, interest has grown in establishing new limited-equity co-ops, community land trusts, rent control, and public housing at a level that, less than a decade ago, seemed politically untenable. But as with all infrastructure, just building these refuges in a sea of commodification is not enough.

Our public goods need to be maintained, and central to the maintenance of social housing is a wholesale transformation of the prevailing American conception of homeownership. We must abolish the notion that ownership includes a right to profit. The defenders of St. James and Southbridge point the way toward an ethic to install in its place. Those who claim that ownership endows one with absolute control over some definable thing—a piece of land, a house, an instrument, a toy—are preachers of isolation.

As I took in the stories of Southbridge and St. James, I was struck by how pro-privatizers willingly curtailed their perception of the spheres of their influence and concern. They didn’t consider their neighbors or even friends with whom they’d built a community over decades. They denied any ties between their own decisions and the well-being of their fellow New Yorkers, save for the hypothetical rich family who would now have another housing option at their disposal, possibly at a slightly lower price.

Their sense of entitlement to profit overpowered any sense of connection to a public program that had provided them a most fundamental need: a safe, stable, affordable home. They were under the sway of what Rebecca Solnit calls the ideology of isolation. “If you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone,” she writes, but “we are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.”

Those who fought the privatizers largely bought into an ethos of connection. Their definition of ownership, of course, was still not entirely devoid of rights and entitlements. Just as James Szal could decide to paint his walls a screaming shade of red to complement his shoe-shaped furnishings, he could also tell you to get the hell out should you find his aesthetic, or the barking of his senior shih tzu, to be too much. But he and his allies also saw the layers of responsibility that came with owning something.

As residents of social housing, they knew this entailed more than just paying their share of collective costs or ensuring that their leaking toilet was fixed before the apartment below suffered a collapsed ceiling. They recognized their responsibility to steward the public good they’d been given control of, even if that meant declining a major influx of personal wealth. They operated on a different spatial and temporal scale. In doing so, they fulfilled their responsibility as stewards of not just a building but a neighborhood, a city, and, crucially, the future inheritors of their homes, be they a family member or a stranger pulled from a list.

For the pro-privatizers, their right to profit came first, and their responsibility to care for their asset—to “conduct your business well,” as Lester Goodyear put it—came in service of realizing that right. For those who believed in social housing, ownership was bundled up with a responsibility to steward. This understanding is similar to the idea of reciprocity in gift economies that predominate in Indigenous societies. As Potawatomi writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes it, “Responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.”

A safe, stable, affordable home is a gift, just as land and life are, and residents’ fulfillment of their responsibility to steward that gift is what made their ownership real. When pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators stood up for their co-op as a public good, they affirmed their ownership of their homes, their communities. “True ownership,” to borrow a phrase from an exasperated Goodyear, isn’t achieved when the possession can be sold off at any price. True ownership is consummated with care, maintenance, and preservation—with faithful stewardship.

Pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators weren’t the only stewards in those communities. Folks like Lester Goodyear had also done their part, serving in service organizations and advocating for what they thought was right. Goodyear and other pro-privatizers worked to keep St. James a great place to live despite the tumult outside its doors. This was its own kind of stewardship, even if these residents eventually wanted to transform it into undue profits. Casting a narrative of heroes vs. villains is easy. Less so is highlighting the gray areas—all the folks who struggled with this decision and all the reasons why supporting privatization is understandable though unjustified.

Those personal decisions are indicative of the wider difficulty of maintaining commons, but this hardship doesn’t alone stem from the prevailing commodification of place and home across the United States. It’s also born of narrative, held up by ideology, supported in policy, and fueled with the scraps of a collapsing safety net. Buying and selling a home for profit is held up as the American Dream. It’s positioned as the way to attain full citizenship and a voice.

Home equity is the only tool many Americans have to attain economic, educational, and aspirational family goals at a time when wages aren’t what they should be, work security is nonexistent beyond unions, and higher education is dependent on increasingly large sums of cash in its own commodified hellscape. Equity in a place one calls home is the backstop for disaster, for the unexpected or inevitable. 

Excerpted from Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons by Jonathan Tarleton. Copyright 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

“Nine out of 10 times I call the landlord, HavenBrook Homes, for a repair, they don’t come,” said Anderson, who lives with her fiancé and children in a single-family house in North Minneapolis. “I’ve learned how to fix things myself watching YouTube videos. When they do send someone, it’s some Craigslist contractor that does a half-baked job.”

In North Minneapolis, the corporate landlord HavenBrook Homes owns 215 single-family homes, scattered over dozens of residential blocks. Altogether, HavenBrook owns 265 homes in Hennepin County and more than 500 homes across Minnesota, with the highest concentration in a couple of Twin City neighborhoods.

“We found there were four or five HavenBrook rental homes on a single block, but the neighbors didn’t know they had the same landlord,” said Chloe Jackson, a veteran organizer with Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia/United Renters for Justice. “One of the first things we did was map HavenBrook’s ownership and connect tenants to one another.”

Through Inquilinxs’ organizing, neighbors discovered they had many of the same challenges with an unresponsive corporate landlord at a company owned by remote investors. They came together to press the owners and local officials to ensure maintenance gets done. Organizing tenants of an absentee corporate landlord during a pandemic has its challenges, but Jackson and her co-workers are undeterred.

“Thanks to United Renters, I met my neighbors who also had HavenBrook as their landlord,” said Anderson, who has been a HavenBrook tenant since October 2014, but hadn’t met many of her neighbors. “During the pandemic we’ve exchanged phone numbers, had Zoom meetings two times a month, and talked together with state and city officials.” 

“Getting people together so they can hear each other’s stories was our first step,” Jackson explained. “So many people feel alone facing their housing challenges. Our role was to help educate these tenants about their legal rights and remind them that they have power together.”

Organizers went door-to-door, talking to more than 150 North Minneapolis tenants and finding that more than 35% of residents reported issues with water leaks, plumbing, and damage; nearly a quarter reported pest infestation; and one in 10 have problems with black mold or mildew.

“There are so many things wrong with this house,” said Anderson, texting the authors shocking pictures of black mold and cracked ceilings. “I have a son with asthma, so the mold problem is a big problem, along with leaking ceiling, insect infestations, nails coming through floors, and missing insulation. And it is cold in the Minnesota winter!”

“The place badly needs an electrical upgrade and I’m terrified we might have an electrical fire,” she said. “Sometimes I leave for a doctor’s visit and the older kids, one who is 18, are watching the younger ones—they can’t come to the doctor’s during the pandemic. Every time, I remind them of what to do in a fire. But it is nerve-racking.”

Billionaire Landlords Consolidate Ownership as Eviction Crisis Looms

In 2018, HavenBrook Homes was purchased by Front Yard Residential, an investor group based in the Virgin Islands. Then, in 2020, Front Yard was acquired for $2.5 billion by Pretium Partners and Ares Management. Ares is a group of private equity investors co-founded by billionaire Anthony Ressler, who also is the brother-in-law of Leon Black of Apollo Capital.

The founder and CEO of Pretium Partners is Don Mullen Jr., who attained global notoriety as the subject of the book and film, The Big Short. Mullen, when he was head of mortgage and credit investments at Goldman Sachs, made substantial bets that the housing market would burst, even as the firm urged customers to continue fueling the housing bubble. Mullen was credited with organizing other Goldman Sachs’ colleagues to short the market—what became known as “the big short”—exhorting them in a 2007 email that they “will make some serious money.” Now Mullen is betting that millions of people, many of whom lost their homes in the 2008-2009 economic meltdown, will be permanently stuck in rental housing.

This example of consolidation is part of a larger trend, as ownership of rental properties shifts from local owners to national corporate giants—who have expanded into the single-family home rental market. Private equity conglomerates ranging from Blackstone to Apollo Capital believe there is money to be made by snatching up single-family homes, often in foreclosure, and renting to the growing segment of the population that is locked out of homeownership. Managing and maintaining these properties—and dealing with the fact that there are real human beings living in them as homes—is just another cost to be squeezed.

As a national tenant eviction moratorium imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to expire on March 31, 2021, the role of billionaire landlords is getting dramatic attention. A new report, “Cashing in on Our Homes: Billionaire Landlords Profit as Millions Face Eviction,” focused on 20 billionaire landlords and real estate investors—including the owners of HavenBrook Homes—whose wealth totals $194 billion, with their wealth increasing $21.2 billion over the year of the pandemic. According to the report, which was co-authored by Bargaining For the Common Good, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, these 20 corporate landlords control nearly 2 million units of rental housing, roughly 4% of the nation’s rental housing stock.  

These billionaire landlords—many of whose companies have received federal government assistance in the form of low-cost financing to buy or build developments—are receiving financial support from the coronavirus relief package, sometimes while continuing to file eviction notices against their tenants. According to the report, the 20 companies profiled have pursued at least 3,152 evictions in just 29 counties in eight states where the data is easily accessible—even during the pandemic eviction moratorium. The number nationwide is likely to be many-fold higher. The report includes data showing that nearly one in 10 Black and Latinx renter households face imminent eviction, twice as high as White renter families.

These 20 corporate landlords are also poised to further consolidate their ownership with an estimated $245 billion in “cash on hand”—what the private equity barons call “dry powder”—to expand their rental property ownership during the coming years. As the report observes, “Leaders and owners of corporate landlords are openly delighting in plans to profit once millions of Americans are evicted, seeing housing as an ‘opportunity sector’ where they can extract more wealth for investors and themselves. They are poised to profit from the pandemic economic downturn much as they capitalized on the 2008 financial crisis and mortgage meltdown, with plans to buy up more real estate and increase their stranglehold over the residential housing market.”

The report echoes solutions put forward by housing groups around the country. Lawmakers should continue eviction moratoriums while putting in place a more comprehensive housing policy to protect low-income tenants and transition more of the nation’s rental stock to nonprofit ownership. Some recommendations are focused on the discouraging large-scale corporate ownership, such as what tenants are experiencing at HavenBrook Homes.

One innovative proposal is to create an excise tax on large corporate landlords, modeled after the Homes for Families and Corporate Monopoly Transparency Excise Tax legislation currently under consideration in California legislature. Companies “have the responsibility—and more than enough resources—to protect our communities during this pandemic. They need to put our health and safety before their greed,” the “Cashing In” report says. Policymakers “must start to rebuild housing systems in this country using innovative strategies that center families of color and make clear that housing is the human right that this pandemic has made clear it should be.”

Absentee Landlords: MIA

For tenants in HavenBrook Homes, one challenge is “who do you call when there is a possum living in your wall?” Or worse, when your pipes freeze or your electricity goes out.

“Tenants call or visit the office and it feels like each week there is someone new there. During COVID-19 there is no one there, so they might be told to call an 800 number for Front Yard, with someone answering the phone in Atlanta,” said organizer Chloe Jackson. “It’s not like a local landlord, where you show up at their house and demand action. There is no local face of the owner.”

“When it comes to repairs, HavenBrook is often missing in action,” said Jackson. “One tenant had no water for a week and another went weeks without heat. Another had a giant hole open up in their ceiling. Another’s stove caught fire. These are emergency situations, yet HavenBrook wouldn’t make repairs.”

“HavenBrook is only reachable when the rent is due, but not when repairs are needed,” said Shanika Henderson, who has been a tenant in a HavenBrook single-family home for seven years. “I can’t get a hold of anyone. I’ve got vents that kick up dust when they run and stifling heat in the summer.”

“Sometimes I feel helpless and hopeless,” Henderson said. Through United Renters for Justice she met neighbors on her block who are in the same boat. She has joined conference calls with city councilors. “Everyone deserves a right to proper housing, no matter what your family situation is.”

Tenants, with support from Inquilinxs Unidxs, have documented the problems, called the city, filed complaints, and testified before city councilors to enlist their support. City records show that FYR/HavenBrook Homes has received more than 200 citations for violating city laws in North Minneapolis since 2018.

Tenants reported that in some cases the company has taken up to a year to complete needed repairs that pose a threat to both residents and the property. These delinquent upkeep issues have included holes in roofs and ceilings, broken outdoor and indoor stairways that have caused injuries, lead paint—including where children are present—flooding that has caused substantial water damage to properties, and pest infestations such as spiders, ants, and mice.

“Another ridiculous HavenBrook thing is you have to pay money to pay your rent,” said Jackson. “They direct you to pay your rent through an online portal where a vendor charges you $10 to $30 each time you process your rent payment. These are the kind of fees we are organizing to get HavenBrook to eliminate.”

“We get all these weird fees,” echoed tenant Adrianna Anderson. “$10 administration fee. $17 processing fee. And a new $12 ‘HAP’ fee—we don’t even know what that is!”

For billionaire landlords and their private equity firms, buying and selling these real estate companies is like playing a game of three-dimensional chess. Tenant organizations that are building power, like Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia, are changing the game.

CORRECTION: This article was amended at 3:20 p.m., March 17, 2021, to include the names of two co-authors of the “Cashing In” report. An earlier version omitted their names. Read our corrections policy here.

But amid the self-congratulations coming from the nation’s capital over Congress doing its job, it’s easy to overlook the fact that we recently and narrowly averted two major crises.

The national eviction moratorium, first enacted at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, expired July 31. More than 11 million renters are behind on the rent, and an estimated 3.6 million faced eviction within months. After a bit of political hot potato between Congressional Democrats and President Biden over who should do what, Biden went ahead and extended the moratorium until Oct. 3.

(That moratorium only slowed the rate of evictions; Eviction Lab has tracked nearly a half-million eviction lawsuits that were filed by landlords during the pandemic so far.)

At the same time, the administration extended the federal student loan forbearance program, which was set to expire Sept. 30, until Jan. 31, 2022. Nearly 45 million people in the U.S. have $1.7 trillion in accumulated student debt to pay.

These are not just young people. Borrowers 50 and older owe an average of $41,059 each, The Washington Post has reported, either for their own or their children’s education, compared with an average debt of $33,090 held by younger borrowers.

While there was some justifiable relief that these two moratoriums were extended, especially as the next wave of COVID-19 is surging among unvaccinated populations, the victories are ringing a bit hollow. So much more could have been done, and still can be.

Both programs are lifelines for millions of Americans. Renters who lost work during the pandemic and had no other income sources were at risk of losing their homes. Students who defaulted on their loans faced a mountain of financial penalties on top of their already too-expensive debts. These are big structural problems in our economy.

In response, the administration took the path of least resistance and kicked the can down the road. Those crises are still waiting to strike again once the new moratoria run out. Possible solutions are out there, but right now they don’t seem to have the political support to get through Congress, even on a good day when the Senate is doing its job.

Right now, several organized campaigns are working to cancel rent entirely. And that’s because the moratorium on evictions didn’t stop the back rent from mounting up. Once the moratorium expires, all that accumulated back rent will come due. It’s a safe bet that very few unemployed renters who had to stop payments during the pandemic have been able to save up a year or more of back rent in that time.

On the other hand, many landlords are not the super-rich corporate villains they’re made out to be, but small-business owners dependent on rental income to pay their mortgages. Nearly half of the 48.2 million rental housing units are in buildings comprising one to four units. Three-quarters of those units are owned by individuals, and 7.9 million of those owners have a mortgage or some other kind of debt (42% of all rental properties are financed by mortgages or other debts). Some landlords have the means to ride out the pandemic without income, but others are twisting into financial knots keeping foreclosure or predatory acquisitions at bay.

Setting aside the legal gray area we’d enter if the federal government started invalidating leases across the country, solving this problem boils down to putting cash into the hands of people who need it so that the bills—rents, mortgages, necessary renovation loans—get paid. Even proponents of canceling rent, such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who drafted a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, acknowledge that many property owners also need help.

To be fair, putting cash in people’s pockets for housing is what the government tried to do. And it largely failed.

The first installment of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, passed in December 2020, allocated up to $25 billion to state, territorial and tribal governments to support renters. The American Rescue Plan passed by Congress in March 2021 allocated an added $21.5 billion.

In our federal system, federal rental assistance is distributed through local government, and not all those institutions are equally capable of distributing the money efficiently, fairly, or at all. And state-level efforts to enact their own protections on top of the federal response also vary widely. On Aug. 12, the Supreme Court cut the heart out of New York state’s eviction moratorium, potentially exposing thousands of renters to eviction.

While landlords also have been eligible to apply for federal rental assistance, it’s not clear how many have. What is clear is that less than 7% of the total allocation has reached either renters or landlords—just $3 billion dispersed out of $46.5 billion allocated.

It’s impossible to understand how we got here without acknowledging the extremely stingy approach the United States took in providing direct financial support to individuals during the pandemic, compared with other wealthy industrialized nations. Under the Trump administration, individuals received a maximum of $1,800 in direct support (plus $1,100 per child) spread out over two rounds of direct payments. The American Rescue Plan added $1,400 per adult and child to the total, paid in a single installment.

That grand total of $3,200, plus whatever rental assistance people could obtain, plus an added 13 weeks of unemployment assistance to a total of 26 weeks—which allowed states to expand who qualified for unemployment without necessarily raising the amount of money paid out—was supposed to keep us all housed and fed during the pandemic.

With the average monthly rent in the U.S. being $1,062, direct support amounts to three months of rent, and quite a bit less in many cities. And that doesn’t include expenses for food, transportation, or anything else.

By contrast, many other industrialized nations provided much more generous packages. The United Kingdom paid out 80% of the salaries of employees temporarily laid off, and also enacted a mortgage holiday for homeowners. Japan paid up to 90% in wage subsidies to businesses on condition they retain their employees during the shutdown. Germany enacted a similar program (at 60%), and also included a broad palette of other aid, such as loan guarantees and equity investments to significantly affected companies.

It goes without saying that many of those other countries also have universal health care systems, so a public health crisis didn’t also turn into a financial crisis for those who became ill.

In the U.S.’s decentralized economy, it may be that the best intentions of the feds are just too easily handicapped by bureaucratic snafus (or incompetence) at the local level. Certainly, having a governor and legislature who take the pandemic seriously is going to yield better public health results than those who insist on politicizing it. (I’m looking at you, Florida.)

And yet it’s also possible that direct cash payments to individual taxpayers through the IRS may have been the most efficient way of providing aid, even if many recipients have already spent the money, are still unemployed, and live in fear of eviction once the rent moratorium expires again.

The only way we’re going to get ahead of the problem will be if politicians get over their aversion to spending money on the people. The economic canard that only the free market can solve problems, and that the government never can, has been refuted. But significant numbers of Democrats (and almost all Republicans) still abide by it, preferring to tinker with marginal tax rates to see if one of the second- or third-order effects will be that businesses hire more people and pay them more. (Spoiler: They don’t.)

Student loans are another story. That’s because the student loan program is centralized; the federal government is the holder of 92% of all student debt, and in theory, it could change the number in the budget and declare the debts forgiven. (The government can literally create money out of nothing—every issued loan, treasury bill, or disbursement to regional banks is new money that keeps the economy running.)

A growing chorus in Washington is urging Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt per borrower. Some naysayers, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have said the president can’t just do that unilaterally, but the truth is, we won’t know until he tries it and someone else tries to stop him.

And putting an extra $400 each month into the pockets of formerly indebted borrowers will likely give the economy a big boost.

In both examples—either direct income support to avoid eviction, or student loan forgiveness—the key is that money winds up in the hands of the people, and they in turn pay their bills, so landlords can pay their mortgages, and everyone pays their taxes.

That’s the theory, in any event. In practice, far too many grifters have their hands in the cookie jar, so to speak, and the tax code has long been exploited by the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

The pandemic showed us with stark clarity where our economy’s weak points were. The whole point of the “Build Back Better” slogan Biden campaigned on should have been to address the deep systemic issues we face, including with inequitable housing, the perennial crises of the unhoused, skyrocketing costs, student debt, lack of national health care, and many, many more.

These particular twin crises of unpaid rent and unpaid student debt are going to come back to bite us soon. It would be nice to have a better plan in place than to just kick the can down the road again.

Here’s a thought: President Biden has an ambitious plan to enlarge the social safety net—the biggest increase in social services since the 1960s. The Senate also just cleared a key vote to pack a lot of things into a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that can be approved by a simple majority—no Republicans necessary!

It would be useful if, in addition to creating a bunch of new programs that we need, we also invest in fixing some of our older long-standing problems. Highway bills are fine, but if we really want to build back better, we need to recognize that the market can only begin to work its “magic” when money is put into the hands of the people.

If that means the government needs to step in to write a check, so be it. We certainly have the money for it, now that we’re ending our 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and 18-year occupation of Iraq.

But even if that weren’t the case, the government can create the money it needs if it wants to. It just has to decide it wants to.

“They rounded us all up and took us to hotels,” Velu said of city officials and caseworkers. “We were all tested, and I tested positive, so I couldn’t leave my room. But once I got better, they let me out.”

Velu, 70, went back on the streets, where he’s lived for more than 20 years, but he found that survival has been harder than it’s ever been. Shelters are always full because they’ve had to reduce capacity to accommodate social distancing guidelines, he said, and the streets are getting crowded.

“Every day, someone new arrives,” he said this week while sitting on a bench at Akard Plaza, just outside city hall. “I’d say most lost their jobs or got sick, but they’ve never been out here before. It’s getting pretty bad.”

Since the start of the pandemic, states and localities across the country have received billions in federal aid to help reduce homelessness. But most areas have been slow to get the money to those in need, like Velu, in large part because the huge influx of dollars has overwhelmed agencies’ capacities. Still, some have seen progress: In the Dallas area, more than a dozen nonprofits and government agencies joined forces last summer to launch a new program using the federal aid, aiming for successes that other localities could replicate.

The goal of the new Dallas R.E.A.L. Time Rapid Rehousing initiative is to place 2,762 people and families experiencing homelessness in permanent housing by September 2023. An estimated 4,570 people were without homes in the region as of March 2021, up 3% from 2020. Rapid rehousing is a federally funded national program designed to reduce the amount of time a person is homeless by providing housing before other social services.

“This is the most ambitious plan to curb homelessness that Dallas has seen,” said Sarah Kahn, chief program officer at Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, which leads the initiative and is the region’s largest nonprofit organization providing homeless services. “I mean, this is a historic level of new resources and new dollars coming into our community that’s used to running on a scarcity model and often fighting for scraps. We have a very, very large infusion of resources that we need to move quickly.”

States and localities received more than $5 billion in federal stimulus money in the form of Emergency Housing Vouchers and Emergency Solutions Grants to help people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. Agencies and housing advocates nationwide are using the influx of funds to create new long-term solutions to homelessness, but relatively little of the money has gone out so far.

As of Jan. 6, less than a third of the $4 billion in Emergency Solutions Grants had been spent nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And only 11.6%—or 8,110 of 69,810—of Emergency Housing Vouchers had been accepted by landlords nationwide as of Jan. 18, according to HUD. States have until September of this year to spend the emergency grants and until September of next year to use their housing vouchers.

Challenges Elsewhere

California, which has the country’s largest homeless population, illustrates the difficulties.

A report by the state auditor found that California’s Department of Housing and Community Development did not give its partners access to the first round of federal Emergency Solutions Grants until December 2020, seven months after the federal government announced the funding. That’s mostly because the department lacked the capacity to manage the grants and failed for a full year to hire a contractor to run the program, the report said.

That $316 million was 25 times the department’s typical yearly allocation, noted Geoffrey Ross, the deputy director of federal financial assistance. The department’s private partners struggled to expand housing capacity while meeting pandemic safety guidelines, he said.

The Dallas area likewise lagged in getting money out, but the new initiative has helped.

The city of Dallas received $19 million in Emergency Solutions Grants through the CARES Act and 490 Emergency Housing Vouchers through the American Rescue Plan Act, worth some $8 million, HUD data shows. The city has used 26 vouchers, and as of last week, it has spent roughly $10 million of its funds and allocated the remaining $9 million, according to Christine Crossley, director of the city’s Office of Homelessness Solutions. 

“I think most cities and most organizations have this issue where it’s amazing to have this money, and it’s needed, but there’s also only so many contracts and programs anybody can hold in a year,” she said. “And you can hire more staff, but it’s also COVID, and there’s a shortage of people, so it’s kind of, well, we can spend it, but we might not be able to spend all of it simply because it’s just so much money to spend in so little time.”

The initiative’s total budget is $72 million, including $50 million from federal relief funds; $12 million in emergency vouchers allocated to Dallas, Mesquite, and Plano; and $10 million in funds from private donors, including the Meadows Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, and Lyda Hill Philanthropies. (Lyda Hill Philanthropies has also donated money to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which funds Stateline.)

Private donations are being used for landlord incentives, including extra rent, deposits, or money for repairs, according to Crossley.

One of the main problems nationwide is that landlords don’t want to lease to people using housing vouchers, because they often lose money while they wait for the housing authorities to inspect their rental units and process the lease, according to Myriam Igoufe, vice president of policy development and research at Dallas Housing Authority.

On behalf of the initiative, Igoufe and her team were tasked with creating computer software to coordinate all the agencies’ efforts while streamlining the application and housing process. They spent more than a month last summer working 13-hour days to program content management software that could seamlessly coordinate 15 agencies and some 100 caseworkers.

“We knew we were designing something from scratch that other people were going to look at and say, ‘Look, it could be done,’ or, ‘See, we shouldn’t be trying to do this, we should use our money for something else.’”

Before this new system, it took weeks or months to get emergency voucher recipients into a rental property. But now, it takes only a few days.

“Without this investment in technology and automation, this would not be possible, not at this pace,” Igoufe said about the initiative.

‘A Safe Place to Sleep’

On Monday, near the corner of Cadiz and South St. Paul streets, a large crowd of homeless people began setting up camp as the sun began to set. Joel Martinez Gregorio, 60, leaned against a building while weaving a belt out of neon-colored shoelaces.

He said he’s been living outside since he was hospitalized for three weeks with COVID-19 in September and lost his job. It’s the first time in his life that he’s been homeless.

“It’s been rough,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find work, but it’s hard, because I don’t sleep and I spend a lot of time just trying to find something to eat.”

He said people on the street have been talking about a new program that pays people’s rent for a year.

“That would be a godsend,” he said. “If I had a safe place to sleep and to leave my belongings, I know I could get back on my feet.”

This story originally appeared in Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

When you get home, boil water for noodles and add some barbecue sauce to the pot, for flavor. Fry your chicken. 

Pour the noodles into a bowl. Add chicken. Add spaghetti sauce. 

Voila! Joseph “J.W.” Harris Jr.’s special recipe for Southern-style barbecue chicken spaghetti. It’s one of the many dishes he’s been crafting since moving into his home in The Studios. The low-income housing apartment complex in Wichita, Kansas, is run by HumanKind Ministries for people transitioning out of homelessness. The ability to make his own meals is one of the best parts about his new apartment, Harris said.

“You can cook your own stuff,” he said. “You’re more independent here.” 

Harris, 46, moved into The Studios last fall using an emergency housing voucher. These provide rental assistance funded by the federal government for people experiencing homelessness or fleeing domestic violence. But the vouchers, which were meant to provide relief during the pandemic, are vastly underutilized. As of March 15, only 20% nationwide are being used to lease apartments. 

Challenges, including a tight housing market and skyrocketing rents, have made it difficult for those who receive vouchers to find housing. Plus, the emergency voucher program has “added complexity,” according to Brian Handshy, regional public affairs officer for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s because it requires close collaboration between government and nongovernmental organizations, like nonprofits. 

Wichita, though, stands out with its success in the voucher program. About 70% of the 142 emergency vouchers Wichita received are currently used to help residents rent apartments, according to federal data as of March 15. This gives Wichita the second-highest utilization rate among the 50 largest cities nationwide at using emergency housing vouchers. 

The Solution

Hurricane Katrina hit Harris’ hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, in 2005. 

The storm’s path of destruction left him homeless. His work in the oil fields dried up in its aftermath.

“After Hurricane Katrina hit, a lot of Mississippi people and Louisiana people, a lot of people from down there, started moving up this way,” Harris said. 

He came to Kansas in 2010, knowing no one. Since then, Harris has been in and out of permanent housing, co-workers’ homes, and shelters. Last summer, he reached the 30-day limit of a shelter where he was staying. He moved downtown and stayed at The Inn, a shelter run by HumanKind Ministries. 

Around the same time, the Wichita Housing Authority was preparing to distribute its emergency housing vouchers, which became available on July 1, 2021. The agency wanted to distribute them as quickly as possible—and the housing authority had two tricks up its sleeve, according to Sally Stang, director of Wichita’s Housing and Community Services Department.

The first one?

“We were two years ahead,” Stang said.

The emergency housing voucher program requires agencies that work with people experiencing homelessness or fleeing domestic violence, like HumanKind, to refer potential voucher recipients to the housing authority, which then approves that person for an emergency voucher.

The initiative requires coordination between nonprofits and the housing authority—something Wichita had in place prior to the emergency voucher program. In 2020, the Wichita Housing Authority established the homeless preference program. This allows homeless service providers to refer homeless people to the city’s already-existing housing choice voucher program and be popped to the top of the list. The city receives 3,047 housing vouchers that are separate from the emergency housing vouchers.

When the Wichita Housing Authority received the emergency vouchers in 2021, nonprofits already had infrastructure in place to communicate with the city about who was homeless and in need.

“I kind of laugh about it, because we set up what we call our homeless preference program, and it works very similar” to the emergency voucher program, Stang said. 

Then, there was The Studios, where Harris lives now. This project filled in a major part of the puzzle—once someone gets a voucher, where do they go?

“For us, it wasn’t a challenge, because the facility [The Studios] was right there, literally ready and waiting for people,” said Emily Lohfink, marketing and communications manager with HumanKind.

The city decided in December 2020 to use nearly $4 million of federal COVID relief funds to buy a former hotel and renovate the facility into permanent housing, now known as The Studios. The apartment complex on North Topeka Avenue specifically targets helping those experiencing homelessness. Rents don’t exceed $550.

The Studios opened on Oct. 4, 2021. Harris moved in the same day. Twenty-seven of the 54 units are filled with residents using emergency housing vouchers, Stang said. 

“You have to keep all your meetings. You have to do the right thing. You really got to want this for yourself,” Harris said. “It comes down to that, as a homeless person. You really gotta want to do it.” 

“Private Landlords Kind of Shy Away”

When Harris learned in late August that he was getting an emergency housing voucher, he spent time calling apartment complexes that he heard might be a fit. 

But outside of The Studios, he had no success. One complex he called wouldn’t accept his emergency voucher. 

“That kind of put a turn on me,” Harris said. “You only got a certain amount of days.”

The emergency housing voucher comes with a deadline—if you don’t find housing within 120 days of receiving it, you lose it. Agencies that worked with clients who received the vouchers said it was a challenge to find landlords who would accept them.

“Early on, a lot of landlords and apartment complexes didn’t really know what this was,” said Keri McGregor, program director at Harbor House, which works with domestic violence survivors. “And I think they were hesitant to accept something when the participant isn’t able to pay for it on their own. I think private landlords kind of shy away from that.”

Stang said building The Studios was one part of the solution to this problem. So is an incentive program that provides landlords with support when leasing to tenants who experienced homelessness. 

Even though finding housing could be a challenge, McGregor said she didn’t know of anyone whose voucher expired because they couldn’t find housing. Neither did Tracey Gay, director of client services for the Wichita Family Crisis Center.

This success may have been helped by Wichita’s housing market. Average rent in Wichita is less than half the national average as of October 2021. And according to iPropertyManagement, Wichita’s rental vacancy rate is 9.7%—about 62% higher than the national vacancy rate. This vacancy rate is higher than what’s considered healthy, according to Kirk McClure, a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas who studies housing.

What Lies Ahead

After years of rotating between living situations, Harris said he plans to stay at The Studios for the foreseeable future.

The emergency housing vouchers allow this, Stang said. Tenants can use them through 2030.

“We’ve had discussions about—what do we do in 2030?” Stang said.

But for the time being, Harris has a lot of goals he is working toward. And he’s starting with teaching cooking classes at The Studios. He wants to share how he makes meals with just a microwave, toaster oven, and electric skillet.

Southern-style barbecue chicken spaghetti is just the beginning.

This story was originally published in the Wichita Beacon and is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Graham, a former real estate developer who launched the faith-based social outreach ministry Mobile Loaves & Fishes (MLF) in 1998 to serve Austin’s homeless community, conceived of the neighborhood as a way to help people transition from chronic homelessness.

“I started developing pretty deep relationships with men and women out on the streets,” Graham says of his work. “In 2003, I started spending the night out on the streets. I’ve personally spent about 250 nights there.”

In that time, he learned about the work ethic of people living out on the streets, negating the stereotypes about laziness and homelessness that people harbor. The greatest cause of homelessness, he believes, is “a profound, catastrophic loss of family”—sometimes through suffering unthinkable abuses, including forced drug use and sex trafficking while living with parents and other so-called caretakers.

“I learned that the greatest yet most ineffective entrepreneurs on the planet are the panhandlers standing on the street corners, relegated to doing the only thing that we allow them to do now, which is the First Amendment free speech right to beg,” Graham says.

Nearly 350 individuals formerly experiencing homelessness reside in the village, which provides permanent housing and sits just outside Austin’s city limits (in Texas, MLF notes, there is no discretionary land use authority outside municipal boundaries, meaning the village faced no zoning issues). As of March, the village’s retention rate for residents is about 88%. Through a series of new investments, Community First plans to soon triple its footprint.

Graham started the village by helping set up one homeless man with an RV to live in. Then, he did the same for several others. By 2012, he secured 27 acres of land to build what became the neighborhood’s initial phase. It’s since grown to a community of about 350 occupied units, mostly single-occupancy, though there are some couples among the formerly homeless residents. About 50 people drawn to missionary work have also moved in and are volunteering in the neighborhood they’ve joined.

MLF bills Community First! Village as “the country’s only master-planned development designed specifically for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness,” but Graham and his wife call it something else: home.

They live in a modest Community First home among their formerly homeless neighbors—a stark contrast from the Westlake neighborhood where they lived for 34 years while Graham worked in real estate. Graham declares Community First to be the best neighborhood he’s ever lived in.

Community First launched as a primarily private venture, with Graham lining up angel investors to seed the vision and partnering with companies to create houses and provide needed materials for maintenance and upkeep.

A $36.6 million grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, announced last December, will anchor MLF’s plans to create an additional 1,400 homes for the homeless through a $150 million capital campaign, calling it “a significant next step in delivering upon our broader Ten Year Plan to Mitigate Homelessness in Austin.”

The city of Austin is now stepping in with fee waivers totaling more than $4 million for the planned next phases of MLF’s community-building work, but even today, the upcoming phases will be largely donation-driven.

The community itself generated $1.2 million last year through the various micro-businesses MLF has established in the village, employing a number of its residents in the process.

Community First has an art studio—including two kilns for firing pottery and a jewelry-making station leading to a collaboration with famed Austin jewelry magnate Kendra Scott—that creates revenue for MLF and provides artists in the community a creative outlet.

The village also has what is essentially a tiny home hotel created near its entrance, serving as vacation rentals for people visiting Austin, with residents serving a range of roles to help operate it. There’s even an auto shop on-site where people can bring their cars in to be repaired or get annual state inspections required for vehicle registration.

Residents are expected to pay their way, though rent and utilities are scaled to enable homeless people to transition into life at Community First! Village—once they get through the three-step process to be admitted.

First, a prospective applicant goes through a coordinated assessment with one of several Austin-based homeless-serving agencies that MLF partners with, determining that the applicant is chronically homeless and living in Travis County for at least one year.

Community First residents average nine years on the streets before getting into their homes, and according to Graham’s estimate, anywhere from 70% to 80% are receiving either federal disability, social security, or veterans benefits. Community First doesn’t require residents to abstain from drugs and alcohol; Graham reasons that “the United States government, having spent trillions of dollars, can’t figure that deal out.”

Step two involves the prospective applicant touring the neighborhood to determine if they want to live there. Finally, if the person wants to apply, they fill out an application and join the waiting list. Each new house is furnished and is even decorated with the resident’s preferred color palette and tastes. And once a resident is in, that person can stay as long as they can maintain their rent and utility payments and live civilly among their new neighbors.

A manufactured tiny home, which would take an applicant about a year to get into, will cost a resident $440 a month; a micro-home, taking just a few months to become available, runs about $380 with utilities. Each micro-home has a bed, fridge, and microwave but not a kitchen or a bathroom; those residents use communal outdoor kitchens, as well as bathrooms and showers that individually lock, located in hubs near the micro-homes.

Graham advises those who are living in micro-homes to conceive of those as just the bedrooms of a larger house expanding out into those communal areas. With a health clinic and a small food store in the neighborhood, a new gathering space called The Living Room about to open, and a weekly farmers market where food grown in the neighborhood is distributed to residents, MLF is aiming to be as complete as it can for its residents.

Through a partnership with Austin’s famed Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, the village also boasts an outdoor amphitheater where residents and the general public can take in movie screenings (with concessions run by village residents).

Some even make Community First their eternal resting place. There’s a columbarium on-site where 24 residents were interred after their passing, and additional columbaria will be added to the memorial site soon.

“We’re instilling and putting back the basic building blocks of one being able to live,” says Thomas Aitchison, MLF’s director of communications, “so they are afforded the same access to essential and basic functions in life.”

And those building blocks include human relationships, enabled by the volunteers that come to the neighborhood to keep it functioning. Though the pandemic required a temporary stop to volunteers coming to Community First, they’re back now and giving the neighborhood additional vitality.

“We’ve created a destination for people to serve,” Graham says. “Prior to Community First! Village, if you have a heart for serving, if you have a heart for the homeless, your options are quite limited. We provide a destination, so it’s here now, and people come to us as they find out about it; it’s that proverbial snowball going down the hill. … We get to contrast between hopelessness and hopefulness.”

This story originally appeared in Backyard, a newsletter published by NextCity, which explores scalable solutions to make housing fairer. It is republished here as part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

On a sunny morning in March 2014, Yenni Rivera picked up her infant and stepped outside her Long Beach home. She would not be going back. With the help of family members and her best friend, she loaded a few cardboard boxes into the back of her parents’ car. Inside the boxes was everything she now owned. In her arms was her reason for leaving and her hope for the future.

Luke Rivera was 1 year old. And he and Yenni Rivera were now homeless.

But homeless was better than captive in an abusive, violent home. Rivera knew it was the right decision—and a life-or-death decision—to leave. What she didn’t know was how long it would take to find a home again.

While their names lingered on waitlists for shelter and child care, Rivera and Luke slept on her parents’ couch. Five years passed. No affordable housing opened.

“I know that my son suffered,” Rivera said. “I was having PTSD and anxiety, and as I was feeling that, I started seeing the signs” that Luke was negatively impacted too, she added.

According to experts on child homelessness, almost all children who experience housing insecurity also experience trauma because of the stress and instability of their situation. California and the federal government recognize this and require schools to provide these children with additional support, such as free transportation, help remaining enrolled in the same school they’re accustomed to, tutoring, school supplies, and referrals to social services. But experts believe tens of thousands of California children experiencing homelessness fall through the cracks in the system and receive little to no additional help from their schools.

Some schools don’t do enough to help these students because staff are stretched thin, they lack funding to provide students with what they need, or they’re not aware that students are entitled to these resources. Because a disproportionate number of these students are children of color, this failure is likely perpetuating and even exacerbating academic achievement gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups.

“It’s cumulative disadvantage playing out in different ways,” said Joseph Bishop, director for the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, explaining the disproportionate number of homeless students who are Black and Latino. “(Access to) jobs, health care, all these factors are fueling these issues. It’s structural, systemic racism playing out in different ways, and it manifests itself in the homelessness crisis.”

Advocates who work with children experiencing homelessness say there are a number of steps California can take to better help these families. For one, school administrators and county offices of education can better train teachers and staff to recognize signs that students may be homeless and to communicate sensitively with families, letting them know that the information they share is confidential. Schools should also reach out to their communities to make families aware of the resources available to students experiencing homelessness and create partnerships with social services, shelters, and community organizations to reach families in need and link them to additional support. And the federal and state governments should provide more dedicated funding to help schools assist students experiencing homelessness.

Families Squeezed by California’s Cost of Living

Research shows that children experiencing homelessness are twice as likely as their peers to get sick, have a learning disability, and go hungry, and three times as likely to suffer emotional and behavioral problems. They’re also more likely to drop out of school, repeat a grade, and not graduate from high school. In addition to the trauma of homelessness, many of these children have experienced other difficult life events, such as abuse, neglect, domestic violence, extreme poverty, or exposure to a family member with addiction or mental health problems. As a result, these children often need a variety of supports to help them succeed in school.

Yet according to research by the Center for Public Integrity, many school districts in California and across the nation are failing to identify all the students experiencing homelessness in their care. Experts on child homelessness say the percentage of children experiencing homelessness in any given school or district will typically amount to between 5% and 10% of children who qualify for free and reduced lunches—an indication of economic disadvantage. Yet in California, more than 400 school districts reported lower homeless enrollment than even the 5% benchmark during the 2018 to 2019 school year. That’s about two of every five districts in the state, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center for Public Integrity.

A state audit of five school districts and one charter school released in 2019, meanwhile, found that four of the six had only identified 3% of economically disadvantaged students as homeless, and that none was adequately training staff on how to identify students experiencing homelessness or on schools’ legal requirements to assist them. The auditor concluded that the districts “could do more to identify and support these youth, and that [the California Department of Education] has provided inadequate oversight of the State’s homeless education program.”

The situation does not appear to have improved since then. California Department of Education numbers show that the number of students experiencing homelessness in public and charter schools in the state dropped by around 36,000 students during the first two years of the pandemic. Scott Roark, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, said some of this decline may reflect a drop in school enrollment in California overall between 2019 and 2022. But he and other experts agree the drop is likely also the result of greater difficulties schools had identifying and tracking students experiencing homelessness as families moved or lost housing and schools shifted to online learning.

“I don’t think anybody thinks homelessness actually decreased for students during the pandemic,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a homeless advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. “And, of course, things now are very, very concerning, particularly in California, in terms of cost of living and housing costs and all the things that go along with that, and other issues—domestic violence, for example, natural disasters, wildfires … immigration.”

School officials and advocates for homeless children said they are hopeful that a new California law requiring all districts to survey families to identify those experiencing homelessness using a standardized questionnaire will increase the rate of identification in the state. A historic influx of $100 million to California from the 2021 American Rescue Plan that’s now starting to reach school districts is also expected to significantly boost their ability to identify, enroll, and support the participation of children and youth experiencing homelessness. However, advocates worry this one-time funding won’t be enough to sustain improvements over the long term, and argue that policymakers, school officials, and local stakeholders must do more to ensure all students experiencing homelessness are identified and receive the help they need.

Undercounted, Underserved

California has the highest homeless population in the country. Almost one out of every five children experiencing homelessness in the United States resides in California. Students experiencing homelessness made up almost 4% of California’s kindergarten through 12th grade students during the 2020 to 2021 school year—more than 183,000 students total, according to the California Department of Education. Most experts believe that’s a significant undercount.

Latino and African American students are disproportionately represented among students experiencing homelessness, making up 74% and 7% of homeless students, respectively, compared with 55% and 5% of the general kindergarten through 12th grade population. White and Asian students are underrepresented. Researchers believe these differences in child homelessness rates reflect long-standing discrimination and inequalities in housing, criminal justice, child welfare, and education. 

A federal law, known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, defines homelessness among school-age children more broadly than the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which counts homelessness in the general population. Under McKinney-Vento, children and youth are considered homeless if they sleep in a homeless shelter, motel or hotel, car, public space, abandoned building, or any other type of impermanent or substandard accommodation, and also if they are sharing housing with other people due to loss of housing or economic hardship. In California, most students experiencing homelessness fall into this last category. According to the most recent data, 85% live doubled up with other families or relatives.

For Luke and Yenni Rivera, living this way was traumatic. They slept on a couch in the living room of Rivera’s parents’ home, which meant they had no privacy or space of their own. It was cramped and uncomfortable, Rivera said. Luke grew up feeling different from other kids because he didn’t have his own home, bed, or room. Living in such close quarters also made it hard for Yenni Rivera to shield him from the emotional challenges she was facing.

“I was broken for a long time,” she said. “He would see a parent that would go to sleep crying.”

In preschool and kindergarten, Luke’s teachers noticed that he would become anxious in large groups. He wouldn’t answer questions or participate in classroom activities. At first, the teachers thought the problem might be a learning disability. But after an evaluation at his preschool, school officials determined that Luke had an anxiety disorder called selective mutism, which his pediatrician determined was most likely caused by the trauma he’d endured from experiencing homelessness and witnessing domestic violence.

Chynna Lloyd, 23, lived in a domestic violence shelter with her mother between the ages of 9 and 11 in Los Angeles. She said she had to move schools several times, which put her behind, and she felt left out around other children because she couldn’t tell anyone where her family lived for safety reasons and wasn’t allowed to have friends over to play. She also felt embarrassed because her family depended on hand-me-downs and her clothes and shoes didn’t fit her properly.

“It affected me a lot,” she said of experiencing homelessness. “It’s not a comfortable feeling.”

McKinney-Vento requires school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education to keep track of the number of students experiencing homelessness in their school or district and remove barriers that prevent these students from attending and succeeding in school. The supports can include providing free transportation to and from where the student is staying, allowing them to stay enrolled in the school they were at before they became homeless, providing tutoring and a safe place to do homework, offering school supplies, and referring families to outside services, such as counseling and housing assistance.

Even when students are identified as experiencing homelessness, some schools aren’t doing enough to help them, because staff in charge of coordinating services for them don’t have enough funding, time, or community connections to provide them with what they need, advocates said.

Overwhelmed Liaisons, Reticent Families

Before a school district can help a student experiencing homelessness, they need to know about them. Finding out can be challenging, said Duffield with SchoolHouse Connection. Some families and children don’t want to tell the school about their situation because of stigma, or because they fear it could lead to child protective services or immigration authorities getting involved. Others, such as those living with relatives or other families, may not realize they qualify as homeless or that their child has the right to receive support.

Duffield said it’s critical for schools to be discreet when asking families and students about homelessness and make it clear they are asking in order to offer services and support, not to report them to outside authorities. Federal law prohibits schools from asking students or their parents about immigration status, and even if a school does know that a student or parent is undocumented, they can only share that information with authorities under exceptional circumstances, such as a court order. Homelessness is also not considered, in and of itself, abuse and neglect, and therefore is not grounds for reporting a student or parent to CPS or law enforcement, Duffield said. 

Meanwhile, every public school district, county office of education, and charter school in California is required to have a homeless liaison, a person responsible for identifying students experiencing homelessness and coordinating support for them. But these liaisons frequently have many other responsibilities as well, such as supporting foster, migrant, and special-needs children, leaving them stretched thin, Duffield said.

Sinéad Chilton, chief development and marketing officer with School on Wheels, a nonprofit organization that trains volunteers to provide homework help to homeless children in Southern California, said another problem she’s encountered is that homeless liaisons as well as teachers often don’t speak Spanish, even in districts with large Spanish-speaking populations. That makes it hard for volunteers and the families they work with to communicate with school personnel and advocate for their children, she said.

Even when students are identified as homeless, many schools lack the resources needed to support them, Duffield said. Until recently, only about 100 local education agencies in the state received federal McKinney-Vento funds to identify and support students experiencing homelessness. An influx of funding under the American Rescue Plan will now provide 1,181 local education agencies with the funding. In the 2019 to 2020 fiscal year, California received $11.3 million in federal funds for this purpose. Under the American Rescue Plan, it’s set to receive almost $99 million.

Yenni Rivera said she told her son’s preschool and kindergarten that she and Luke were homeless. A school counselor worked with her to get him some extra support at school, but there were no standards for helping children with learning challenges related to homelessness, so they had to get creative. Luke was classified as an English learner so he would receive small-group instruction, which he found less intimidating, even though English is his first language. And a teacher aide recommended he repeat kindergarten so he could build his confidence, and because he wasn’t passing a standardized test. His mother found him a therapist herself through a local domestic violence crisis center.

Rivera said she’s frustrated that she had to do much of the legwork to make sure her son got the support he needed at school, even though she was dealing with trauma herself. She said she wishes schools had clear, standardized guidelines on how to support students experiencing homelessness, and that all teachers were trained to recognize signs of trauma.

“I’m thankful that I’m educated, that I saw those signs and I was able to push for treatment for my child,” she said. “But many families are not even aware they need that help.”

Language is also a barrier for many families, given that the largest population of students experiencing homelessness are Latino, yet school liaisons and teachers don’t always speak Spanish. A significant proportion of California’s Latino population also speaks Indigenous languages, which are even less likely to be spoken by school personnel.

Changes Rolling Out

In January, California began requiring school districts and county offices of education to distribute a standardized housing questionnaire annually to all families. Some districts previously did this, but it wasn’t mandated. The form asks families to identify the type of housing situation they are in, and informs them that the information will only be shared with relevant school staff and that students who are homeless have certain rights.

Susie Terry, coordinator of homeless education services at the San Diego Office of Education, said the change is already increasing the identification of students experiencing homelessness among the 43 school districts and over 100 charter schools that she supports.

Meanwhile, the American Rescue Plan funds have allowed her to expand outreach and support to students experiencing homelessness and their families. She was able to hire a project specialist to visit homeless and domestic violence shelters around the county and meet with the families of students to inform them of their rights and answer questions. She’s also established a hotel voucher program to help homeless families in need get a place to stay while they wait to secure more stable housing. Families are referred to the program daily, she said.

“This is money that we always needed, even before the pandemic,” she said. “Homeless education programs are underfunded in general. Having this funding has allowed me to expand my reach and my work in ways I’ve wanted to for a very long time.” She said she and other liaisons across the state are hoping that Congress will renew the funding after the American Rescue Plan dollars run out in 2025. 

Bishop at UCLA said liaisons can’t be expected to do all the work, however. All school staff could be trained to recognize signs that a student may be experiencing homelessness and understand the definition of homelessness for students, as could other government, health, and community officials who interact with families and children.

“The onus for [dealing with] this crisis cannot fall on one person,” he said, referring to homeless liaisons. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Schools should face greater consequences if they don’t adequately report homelessness numbers, Bishop added. Currently, the California Department of Education—which is supposed to ensure schools properly report homelessness numbers—can face compliance findings from the federal government for failing to adhere to McKinney-Vento Act provisions, which could put it at risk of losing federal funds. Additionally, families and youth can, and have, sued school districts for failing to identify them as experiencing homelessness.

For Luke Rivera, now 9, things are looking up. He and his mother now have their own apartment in South Los Angeles. Luke has his own bed and a desk where he can do his homework. He’s become more confident and less anxious. He’s no longer afraid to speak up in class. Recently, his mother learned from the school that her once painfully shy son stood up for himself against another student who was bullying him. It gave her hope, both for him and for other children who’ve experienced similar challenges.

“It took four or five years … but it’s such a change from the child I had to go defend to the child who defends himself,” she said. “It’s all connected to him having his own bed, his own space, building the confidence, having the extra support at school over the years.”

Yenni Rivera now advocates for other families experiencing homelessness in her role as a family system coordinator for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. She worries about other students experiencing homelessness like she and Luke did, but whose parents don’t have the ability to find help and push for interventions. That’s especially a concern as homelessness increases in Los Angeles County and in other parts of the state in the wake of the pandemic and the end of the county’s eviction moratorium looms at the end of this year. The City of Los Angeles recently voted to end its eviction freeze starting Feb. 1, 2023. A statewide eviction moratorium ended in July.

“We’re going to see a huge jump in those children who had a home, who didn’t know what [homelessness] felt like, suddenly now feeling that,” she said. “Schools need to think ahead.”

Resources

Students and their families who are experiencing homelessness can contact their local school district or county homeless liaison coordinator (teachers and staff members should know who this person is, and the contact person is often listed on district and county office of education websites).

The Democrats seemed to get this. From the moment vice presidential candidate Tim Walz stepped into the public spotlight, he centered the importance of policies that honor care. It was a refreshing twist to hear from a man with the trappings of traditional masculinity—football, guns, and camo—who really gets why parental leave and childcare are central to a thriving country.

And, of course, his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, put housing at the center of her economic platform, which included detailed plans to spur new construction and reduce costs for renters and homebuyers, largely through tax incentives. “We will end America’s housing shortage,” she promised point-blank in her speech at the Democratic National Convention. She also spoke widely and enthusiastically about her intention to create a Medicare at Home benefit, which would have unlocked billions of federal dollars for in-home health aides and other indispensable sources of care for our elders.

By contrast, the Republican agenda, which is now confirmed to be outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 tome, will not only privatize Medicare and defund Medicaid—crucial care support for elders—but also intends to eradicate the Department of Education, gut the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and retreat from fair lending policies and other recent reforms within the real estate industry intended to cut down on racial discrimination.

It’s easy to be discouraged, and even downright fearful, of these shifts; for some of us, they are life-threatening. But we can’t let our fear keep us from dreaming about a longer-term shift that would honor the universal labor of care in all of our lives. For too long, we have thought about housing and care in separate circles, when in fact, they are overlapping spheres. Where and how we live—the structures of our homes, the density of our neighborhoods, the division of public and private spaces—influences everything about how we show up for one another in times of need.

Despite the narrative being put forward by conservative forces right now—namely, that all care needs can be met by unpaid labor within nuclear families—the reality is far more complex. We start as largely helpless little beings, needing round-the-clock care, and while we don’t like to think about it, we sometimes end life like that, too. In between, there is illness (acute and chronic), disability (which is also inevitable, though many of us struggle to acknowledge that reality until we’re forced to reckon with it personally), and the run-of-the-mill cooking, cleaning, nurturing, calendaring, wiping of butts, listening over tea, processing of feelings, and so much more along the way.

All of this—all of it—happens under the roof of a home—something too many in this country still struggle to access and hold on to. How we care for our people, how we share the care labor, who we even define as our people, is drawn into the subtext of every blueprint and regional planning drawing. Historically, women of color have borne the brunt of caregiving in this country, often invisibilized and underpaid—a fact powerfully surfaced by the dignifying movement led by domestic workers and their allies in recent years. Most of the time, the dynamism between our built environment and our care labor is still largely unintentional. But among a growing number of wise and thoughtful advocates, it is becoming the text, not the subtext. 

Take Washington-based Frolic Communities, an innovative new response to the issue of gentrification. Frolic works with single-family homeowners to co-develop multifamily housing on their properties, which they live in, alongside their children, and other friends and community members. Homes in these projects—unlike so many cooperative models—can be purchased with low down payments and are affordable to middle-income families, and importantly, are designed with care in mind. Multiple generations can live, cook, eat, play, and support one another through the typical struggles of daily life. More and more urban areas are adjusting zoning policy to create more density. Co-founder Josh Morrison believes, as he told me, that the “process can be more graceful and kind” by utilizing new financing models and care-conscious design. Frolic has three sizeable projects under its belt already, one of which is fully built and thriving.

But, of course, dealing with zoning, financing, and creating functional communities is a heavy and sometimes burdensome lift. Another example of innovation at the intersection of care and housing is the ADU, or accessory dwelling unit. An ADU is a secondary housing unit on a single-family residential lot, sometimes called a “granny flat.” California, where more than 100,000 ADUs have been permitted so far, is on the cutting edge of this remarkably flexible and widely accessible solution, and many other states are modeling their approach on what’s happening there.

Casita Coalition, a California-based nonprofit, is teaching other states how to get the right reforms in place to unlock this decidedly middle-income solution to create room for adult children to care for their aging parents, grandparents to care for their grandchildren, and so many more creative combinations. The magic of ADUs is that they offer both privacy and proximity, and often at the right price.

There are so many big questions for us to be asking right now at the intersection of care and housing: What if we had real, scalable examples of housing that honored the centrality of care all over the country? We can’t build what we can’t see; so many people in this country are hungry for more care-conscious housing options, like cohousing communities, but they have never been to Denmark to check one out.

What if we reimagine the financing structures to help people of all different economic classes access care-focused housing? This could look any number of ways: from updating appraisal practices to finding entirely new sources of housing financing from the health care sector. Housing, after all, has a profound impact on the health and wellness of people.

What if zoning policy followed the logic not of the market alone, but also the logic of love? This could look like the loosening of single-family zoning, minimum lot size, and/or parking requirements in order to make way for more affordable, dense, and multigenerational lots. We can’t be creative about how we live and how we care when there is so much red tape obscuring our imaginations.

What if politicians didn’t just talk a big game during election season but became obsessive about governance that actually met people where they are? So many people are trying to afford homes and meet a wide variety of needs for their families (of all shapes), communities, and futures. What if government housing policy supported these myriad family configurations across a lifespan, with a combination of vulnerabilities and loving commitments to care?

What if we, the people, started to apply this mindset—that care and housing are intertwined—to our own lives, choosing not to wait on the powers that be to catch up to our vision of a more caring future? What if we reached out to neighbors and audited their care needs and capacities, created ad-hoc cohousing by tearing down fences, and created more communal rituals—shared meals, cooperative childcare, and other mutual aid interventions—in our communities?  

Sometimes a problem is actually best solved when we understand that it’s not one problem but multiple problems intertwined. That is the case with care and housing in this country right now, which is so desperate for new systems and structures that reflect our deep and challenged commitment to our families, both by blood and choice. We will keep fighting for policies that reflect our intersectional values, and in the meantime, we will live into them in creative, communal ways.

Recently, dragon fruit burst into the global market. In Ecuador, this has created a boom that is changing the economic fortunes of many Indigenous Amazonians. Like Chamik, hundreds of Shuar individuals—the country’s second-largest Indigenous group—have increasingly turned to the exotic fruit as a means of subsistence.

Now, as Chamik and other growers prepare for their first harvest, Shuar people wonder: Can dragon fruit help trigger something grander? In the Shuar Association of Bomboiza, a land reserve of 10,000 hectares (nearly 25,000 acres) and 27 communities in Gualaquiza county, in southeast Ecuador, they certainly think so.

Sovereignty Through Seeds

The idea started two years ago when an old, beat-up truck rumbled into Gualaquiza with 9,000 pitahaya seeds, worth an estimated U.S. $9,000. The seeds were a donation, intended to boost economic well being and self-reliance among Indigenous communities.

The project was not run by the state or an NGO, but by the Shuar themselves. “We want to expand local harvests to increase our export capacity,” I was told by Germán Tsamarenda, president of Etsa, a neighboring Shuar reserve, at the heart of the pitahaya boom.

Tsamarenda, a young man wearing a traditional red and yellow toucan feather crown, was personally delivering the seeds. In a political rally organized for the event, he proudly told a crowd in Bomboiza how they were already exporting the fruit to the United States, Canada, China, and Russia. “We achieved all that,” he said, “without forgetting our sovereignty, our customs, and tradition.”

He also encouraged the audience to work hard and with ethnic solidarity during the first challenging two years: Pruning and nourishing the spiky plant until the first harvest is no easy task. “Until then,” Tsamarenda added, “I urge you all to push elected officials to develop our rural infrastructure. It is their moral obligation, and we have the right to demand it.”

Tsamarenda’s words were timely and strongly resonated with the audience. Mauricio Pujupat, or Kunki, by his Shuar name, is president of the Bomboiza Shuar Association. He welcomed the donation and, nodding, outlined a political road map for the future. Kunki was the person responsible for pumping up hope in the exotic fruit. But behind all the entrepreneurial aims of the day stood more profound, ambitious objectives.

Kunki wanted the world to know what they are doing in Bomboiza, so I, as a videographer, recorded the event and much of the work that has followed. We have since been working together to set up a website for the association to showcase their ongoing efforts.

Could dragon fruit help change the future of the Shuar people of Gualaquiza? Could it help support a broader platform to help overcome colonial inequality and strengthen Shuar political autonomy and territorial sovereignty?

Ongoing Colonization

Historically, Shuar people were mostly known—and feared—as fierce Amazonian warriors. The practice of taking the heads of their enemies as war trophies and shrinking them to seize their opponent’s vital power captured the imagination of European travelers and ethnographers. Their infamous love of liberty, radical egalitarianism, and staunch resistance to being governed by powerful outsiders granted them some celebrity across colonial sources. In fact, for almost 300 years past the European invasion of the Americas, Shuar were able to live independently.

Since the 1800s, however, colonial expansion and missionization has systematically encroached on Shuar lands in Gualaquiza. A Roman Catholic mission run by the Jesuits was established in 1815, but after a smallpox epidemic, Shuar attacked and burned down this mission and the Jesuits left by 1872. Salesians established themselves in the region in 1893, and this proved to be a more lasting and impactful endeavor.

Settler colonialism slowly eroded Shuar control of Gualaquiza, carving itself into the land with the help of epidemics, trade, and boarding schools. Over time, Salesian intrusion, brutal at first, moved away from repressive evangelization to support land demarcation, Indigenous self-rule, and cultural revival. Shuar people today remain bitterly divided on how to perceive the mission’s legacy and historic influence.

Earlier this year, I taught a graduate course on Amazonian anthropology and invited a group of young students from Bomboiza. This is how one of my students explained Salesian tutelage: “First, they told us we shouldn’t speak our language, and they used to hit the old people with sticks when they did. Later, they encouraged us to keep speaking our language and preserve our traditional dances.” 

“And there are so many things we have kept quiet,” another student added.

Still, some Shuar are appreciative of the education they received from the Salesians, especially for what it helped achieve when mediating relations with the state. Shuar people overwhelmingly recognize the joint efforts made by some missionaries and their elders to demarcate and acquire land titles in their territory. This process led to the creation of the Shuar Federation in 1964—a powerful grassroots organization that spearheaded Indigenous rights in Latin America and delivered world recognition for Shuar identity politics. “Without the Federation,” the same students ventured, “we may have disappeared.”

In contemporary Ecuador, many ethnic tensions remain fundamentally unchanged. Shuar people know that despite the efforts advanced by the Shuar Federation, Indigenous land was stolen, allowing settler colonists to grow wealthy and benefit from a racialized political system.  

This is seldom, if ever, discussed in the Ecuadorian media, education system, public policy, or public debate. Yet, unequivocally, in the everyday life experience of Shuar people, the inequity is ongoing. I’ve been told so many times doing ethnographic fieldwork in Bomboiza that “colonization is not over.”

“It is no coincidence,” Kunki tells me, “that our province has one of the higher rates of poverty in the country. The scheme of things keeps us Shuar impoverished.”

Real Indigenous Representation

Today, Gualaquiza county is still ruled by the homonymous city left by the missions and colonization, with cobbled roads, old houses with balconies, and a viewpoint to the surrounding forest. But increasingly, Shuar people are refusing to allow the status quo to go on.

Here’s where Shuar politics meets entrepreneurialism. Kunki and other young political activists in Bomboiza are trying to build a material platform for their people that they expect will better serve their ethnic interests in the long term. What they really aim for is to govern the county themselves, from the city of Gualaquiza.

“It’s the only way forward,” Kunki says. “For years, we have experienced apaach management”—management from non-Shuar Ecuadorians—“and even with Pachakutik [Ecuador’s Indigenous party] governing, our needs and demands have not been met.”

For more than a decade, Pachakutik has been very successful among large Indigenous constituencies, and the current mayor in Gualaquiza got into office by aligning with the Indigenous party. Although he is not Shuar, he was elected by most people in Bomboiza. But support waned when a WhatsApp video circulated that showed the mayor drunk, calling a Shuar group “savages” and other racist slurs when they demanded he fulfill his campaign promises. “It was a disgrace,” the outraged people in Bomboiza protested. “They simply use us for our votes.” 

Since then, the idea of a Shuar mayor in the city has taken root.

But electoral politics are expensive, and even the most humble of campaigns can amount to several thousand dollars. This is an important reason why, even in an Indigenous party, non-Indigenous politicians have historically been more successful.

By growing dragon fruit in the jungle, the people in Bomboiza aim to create an economic boost to help Shuar people better fund their own forays into national politics. 

Hope for Indigenous Futures

Shuar leadership is not unprecedented; there are already several regional offices in the same province under Shuar administration. But it has never been achieved in Gualaquiza before and, crucially, it has never been achieved through Shuar self-funding.

In the past, external funding has opened the doors to political co-option, corruption, and mismanagement. Now, despite the great pride Shuar have for the historic achievements of the Shuar Federation and their electoral aims with Pachakutik, for many, the current situation is nothing short of heart-breaking. Following years of mismanagement, the Shuar Federation is but a shadow of its former glory. Pachakutik is not faring much better either. 

For two decades, the large-scale development of industrial mining in Shuar lands has severely compromised Shuar political autonomy. In April of 2023, the president of the Shuar Federation was violently ousted after it was discovered he had traveled to Toronto, at the invitation of Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining corporation interested in exploiting a copper deposit in Shuar territory. He was rumored to have been paid to rewrite the Federation’s statutes to allow mining activities in common land, which he did.

Despite years of Shuar resistance against resource extraction, Chinese and North American companies are now major employers in the region. And there are troubling rumors that Mexican cartels may be behind smaller gold mining operations inside Shuar territory.

“Young people have been left no choice but to work in mining or risk their lives migrating abroad,” Kunki notes. Indeed, in Gualaquiza alone, hundreds of Shuar people, along with other Ecuadorians, are increasingly choosing to trek across Central America in the hope of reaching a better life in the U.S. 

People in Bomboiza hope that by growing dragon fruit and tapping into its export market, they will provide an answer to some of these local economic woes. At the same time, they are wary of their production morphing into monocultures and so are working on a project to harness women’s ecological knowledge and the incredible diversity of traditional gardens. 

They also believe that, in the colonial context reigning in the region, they need to develop a larger political project. The new president of the Shuar Federation, who is also from Bomboiza, is one of the leading Indigenous activists against mining in Ecuador, so there are reasons to be hopeful. 

“If mining undermines our territorial sovereignty, and we’re doing it out of necessity, or if we’re leaving abroad,” Kunki says, “then we need to provide our people with an alternative.” 

“But,” he says, “we won’t be able to develop economic opportunities if we don’t maintain our political strength.”

“I just prayed that whoever got the house wouldn’t kick me out.”

So in the fall of 2015, when real estate agents began knocking on the door and posting pictures of her house online, Travick begged God to let her stay.

The previous year, her daughter had found something strange in the front yard: a yellow notice in a plastic bag, stapled to a wooden stake. Travick, overwhelmed by a series of health problems, had fallen behind on her property taxes, and the county treasurer was foreclosing on her house.

“I wanted to die, but I just kept thinking you’re here for a reason. It’s nothing bad that’s going to happen to you,” she recalls. “I just prayed that whoever got the house wouldn’t kick me out.”

Travick’s was one of 60,000 properties—nearly one out of every six in Detroit—to face tax foreclosure in 2015. Under Michigan’s tax law, each county must foreclose any property that is behind on taxes for at least three years. Many of these properties are then sold at a public auction.

There are several reasons why Detroit faces such high rates of tax foreclosure. Detroit buildings have been overassessed using outdated property values, resulting in excessively high tax bills. In addition, though the city offers a poverty exemption based on income, many are unaware of the tax break or have difficulty obtaining it. Furthermore, with some properties selling for as little as $1,000, the Detroit housing market attracts unscrupulous investors who purchase homes, milk tenants for rent, then simply walk away from their properties.

There have been various efforts to respond to this crisis, with groups like the United Community Housing Coalition buying some houses and deeding them back to the original families. The city has also begun to reassess property values, an effort that is helping to lower the foreclosure rate. But last year a coalition of local activists came up with a new strategy to keep Detroiters in their homes and foster economic development at the same time: conveying the properties to a community land trust, or CLT.

From 2000 to 2011, the number of CLTs grew from 90 to 242. 

The CLT is a model of land ownership that is becoming increasingly popular across the country in response to unbridled speculation in urban real estate. As a democratically governed nonprofit, a CLT acquires land and ensures it is used for the benefit of the community. It also aims to keep buildings—whether rental housing, owner-occupied homes, or businesses—permanently affordable.

Travick learned the value of a CLT as she was about to lose her home to public auction. At that point, she received a phone call: A nonprofit called Storehouse of Hope was starting a CLT in Detroit and invited her to be its first member. When the organization promised to bid on the house and let her stay there, she eagerly agreed. And that’s how Travick became a founding member of the Storehouse of Hope Community Land Trust—a CLT with a unique origin story and a powerful significance for the residents of Detroit.

With incomes stagnant, homeownership increasingly out of reach, and rents skyrocketing throughout the nation, communities in nearly every state are turning to the community land trust. From 2000 to 2011, the number of CLTs grew from 90 to 242. Just in 2015, the Right to the City Alliance’s Homes for All Campaign, which works to fight displacement in cities throughout the country, worked with 12 organizations developing CLTs in 10 cities, including Detroit.

Detroit’s community land trust movement emerged out of a series of meetings convened by the nonprofit Building Movement Project to determine a path toward equitable policy and planning for the city. At a convention in 2013, community groups and neighborhood leaders ratified five “platform issues” of importance to Detroiters: food justice, transit justice, good jobs, good governance, and land justice (a sixth issue, poverty and inequality, was added the following year). They identified community land trusts as a key tool to achieve “land justice.”

With property values still so low in some parts of the city, activists believe Detroit’s weak market is what makes a CLT so necessary. They point to New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of public housing drove out 100,000 Black residents, resulting in the whitening of the city, virtually overnight. And they say they have faced their own, slow-moving Katrina—the result of decades of disinvestment, the recession, and the tax-foreclosure crisis. These factors have displaced hundreds of thousands of Black Detroiters—and with the mayor’s efforts to spur development downtown and attract educated millennials, activists say, the city’s remaining low-income residents could use the protection of a CLT to ensure long-term affordability. They also imagine a CLT as a hospitable landlord for community-based job-development projects like worker cooperatives.

Detroit’s weak market is what makes a CLT so necessary. 

After several years of frustrated attempts to get land from other channels, in fall 2015 a coalition of Detroit activists decided to address two problems at once: assist families about to lose their homes to foreclosure and launch Detroit’s first CLT. They threw themselves into the tax-foreclosure auctions, buying 15 homes not concentrated within a single neighborhood, as in a traditional CLT, but spread across the entire city.

“We’re sort of doing it backwards,” notes Aaron Handelsman of the Detroit People’s Platform, one of the organizers of the CLT. He says that in a more ideal situation, they would have been working with several families over many years before launching the land trust.

“But it was a situation where either they were going to lose their homes and get evicted, or give permission to Storehouse of Hope [to acquire their homes].”

Why Detroit needs a new vision of land ownership

In the first half of the 20th century, no city epitomized the American dream of homeownership better than Detroit. The birth of the auto industry transformed it into the fourth most populous city in the country by 1940, and by 1950 it was home to almost 1.85 million residing in sprawling, car-centric neighborhoods of single-family homes.

Yet Black families migrating from the South were barred from that American dream of homeownership. Vigilante violence and discriminatory practices forced Black residents of all classes into dilapidated tenements. When African Americans, after hard-fought legal battles, finally began to integrate Detroit’s neighborhoods, the federal government’s red-lining policies encouraged developers to invest in the creation of all-White suburbs and to disinvest in Detroit’s changing neighborhoods. Over time, much of both the White and Black middle class deserted Detroit. Although today’s Black residents can proudly claim a homeownership rate on par with the national White homeownership rate, many Black Detroiters continue to experience housing insecurity due to predatory lending and poverty.

Detroiters know firsthand the power of free-market competition to provide—and deprive—a city of its wealth, and they have been pioneers in imagining a new relationship to land. Detroiters have converted vacant, abandoned lots into urban farms and community spaces, and today the city is home to at least 1,400 community gardens.

Detroit “cannot create value until we create scarcity.”

“Dysfunction and abandonment by capital allows for the emergence of ‘use value,’ rather than ‘exchange value,’” says Shea Howell, a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center, which continues the mission of the social activists for whom the center is named. In other words, when a city loses the attention of investors, its residents can begin to craft an alternative vision for how to put their resources to use, focusing on people’s needs rather than profit. “It creates a completely different set of relationships about how people work together,” Howell says.

In recent years, however, the return of capital to Detroit has threatened this newfound relationship to land. Many activists point to 2009 as a turning point: In that year, billionaire investor John Hantz proposed that the city sell him 10,000 acres of vacant land to build an urban farm. Hantz’s ultimate goal wasn’t the farm, though; he believed Detroit “cannot create value until we create scarcity.” He hoped that by removing a large chunk of land from the market he could address the imbalance between supply and demand and drive up real estate prices. Community members demanded that the city reject the proposal and instead preserve the land in a community land trust. In the end, although the public outcry forced Hantz to scale back the proposal to 140 acres, the City Council sold the land to him for $540,000 in 2013.

The disappointing results of the Hantz proposal infused energy into the call for community land trusts, and they became a central strategy discussed at the Building Movement Project’s meetings. The alliance known as the Detroit People’s Platform evolved out of this work, and formed a working group called the Detroit Community Land Trust Coalition to study the potential for CLTs in Detroit.

The Rev. Joan Ross, a member of the coalition and director of Storehouse of Hope, unsuccessfully attempted to acquire vacant land from the city and to obtain support from larger nonprofits and foundations. Then Aaron Handelsman, the working group’s organizer, came up with an idea: Why not launch a crowdfunding page to buy homes at the Wayne County Tax Foreclosure auction? It was, in many ways, a crazy proposal. The coalition had no resources, and if it bought homes at the auction, it would face the challenge of managing properties throughout the 142-square-mile city, some in complete disrepair. Nonetheless, the group launched a gofundme.com page, raising more than $108,000 in 10 days from nearly 400 donors. With an additional $30,000 from other funders, they purchased 15 houses, and had some funds left for repairs.

Activists see the CLT not only as a tool to ensure housing stability; they also see it as the backbone of a plan to create quality jobs. 

The CLT works like this: For one to three years, families will pay rent equal to one-third of their incomes, while Storehouse of Hope assumes the costs of repairs, property taxes, insurance, and water bills. Storehouse of Hope will help members interested in repurchasing their homes develop stronger credit so they can obtain mortgages. The organization also plans to help those residents facing economic hardship to get back on their feet; the nonprofit has already hired one resident as an “outreach coordinator.”

There is, of course, a tradeoff for these benefits: If homeowners decide to resell their property, they must abide by sales caps. By placing limits on the amount of home equity that one family can acquire, a CLT can keep its buildings affordable in perpetuity.

A CLT’s governance structure is designed to ensure its policies accurately reflect the community’s vision. Typically governed by a board elected by the community with a “tripartite” structure—one-third of the seats are filled by members of the community, one-third by residents living on the land trust, and one-third by stakeholders invested in the CLT’s mission—a CLT allows a city’s populace to control vital decisions about land use.

And Detroit’s activists see the CLT not only as tool to ensure housing stability; they also see it as the backbone of a plan to create quality jobs.

Why Detroit needs a new economic vision

While the media is celebrating the recent transformation of Detroit, posting headlines like “Is Detroit the Next Brooklyn?” and “Detroit’s revival template for struggling U.S. cities,” some Detroiters are concerned that the city’s revitalization is failing to create economic opportunities for low-income communities of color. The state and city lured the investment firm Quicken Loans with more than $50 million in state tax breaks, and are subsidizing the development of a new hockey stadium with $300 million in bonds backed by property tax revenue.

Robert Rossbach, a spokesperson for the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, defended the equitability of the city’s economic development strategy, pointing to the city’s workforce development programs and its Motor City Match program, which finances small business development. He also championed the city’s practice of attracting large companies.

“Since Detroit lost over half its population over the last sixty years, it has to adopt strategies for attracting new residents as well as serving those who are already here,” Rossbach said in an email.

But Richard Feldman, a board member of the Boggs Center, says the city’s economic strategy is fundamentally flawed. He argues that as the United States has shifted from an industrial to a high-tech economy, computers have replaced the majority of the workforce. In the new economy, only a few—the highly educated—can prosper, while the rest of the labor force is excluded from opportunities to produce, becoming a class of permanent “others”—the unemployed and incarcerated.

“It has to adopt strategies for attracting new residents as well as serving those who are already here.”

“There are sections that are being rebuilt based on a myth of economic development, versus the reality that we need community creation,” he says. The 21st century necessitates new relationships to work and land, he argues—one provided by the concept of the community land trust.

The Rev. Ross envisions the Storehouse of Hope CLT becoming not only a landlord of affordable housing, but also a host for locally owned social enterprises. She seeks to acquire land in the North End, a gentrifying neighborhood, to provide a permanent home for Storehouse of Hope’s food pantry and worker-owned businesses. Ross also has been installing solar-powered streetlamps in the North End and hopes to one day employ local residents in the construction of solar panels and other solar-powered devices.

A CLT, supporters say, is the perfect tool to ensure that development meets the priorities of a neighborhood’s existing residents.

“Community control of land over time creates a really important check and balance against the kind of speculative and extractive development that’s happening in Detroit right now,” says Handelsman.

The struggle to scale up

While in other parts of the country, governments have embraced the idea of community land trusts, Detroit’s leaders have yet to be sold on the idea. The city has a land bank, currently under investigation by the FBI , which is supposed to hold abandoned properties and return them to productive use, but critics question its accountability to existing communities. The Detroit People’s Platform has long advocated for the land bank to transfer its properties to a community land trust, but the city agency that could make this decision, the Planning and Development Department, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did several City Council members.

One, however, said that while he recognized displacement as a problem, he is skeptical about the feasibility of CLTs.

“This would be a great time to lock up property if you want to make sure there’s affordable housing in the future. But how do you do it? Who finances it?” Councilmember Scott Benson says. He believes that it would be easier to rely on the private sector to produce affordable housing by requiring developers to use public subsidies to build income-restricted units.

Meanwhile, Detroit’s CLT activists are expanding their movement. In the spring, Storehouse of Hope and the Detroit People’s Platform began promoting their work to the larger Detroit community and inviting groups to participate in webinars funded by the Community Land Trust Network. The Detroit Community Land Trust Coalition is growing, with representatives from dozens of organizations gathering to explore community land trusts and create a central CLT organization that can provide services to smaller, budding CLTs throughout the city. Activists are also pressing the land bank to put its land in the control of local community organizations—all to fulfill the mission of creating thriving communities that are inclusive of residents who have withstood Detroit’s hardest times.

“If you look at the history of Detroit and the old communities and the neighborhoods….You have that sense of what community must have been like 40 years ago or 50 years ago before the freeways went in,” says Ross. “It makes perfect sense that we go back to our beginning, go back to our roots, and reclaim our equity … and reclaim the fact that community has to [be] first.”

Ruth is recovering from knee surgery and feels isolated and fatigued. Olga is restless and exhausted by the war in Ukraine, where she has family connections. Our go-to coping strategies—Ruth’s walks in nature, Olga’s bicycle rides—became less restorative and started to feel like obligatory tasks to perform. So we decided to do nothing.

There are countless books and articles about silence, doing nothing, or simplifying your life. Among wellness trends from outside the U.S. were the Danish tradition of hygge (chosen for the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year shortlist in 2016) and the Japanese ikigai (which can be understood as “finding your purpose”). Recently, we have encountered the Dutch term niksen, and one of us even wrote a book about it. 

Niksen, a Dutch verb meaning “to do nothing,” is a practice of just being, and can be understood as one way to get some rest. It is watching clouds pass by, not scrolling through Facebook. It is letting your mind wander, instead of reading emails or even making plans for the future. Purposelessness is an important aspect of niksen. Niksen, therefore, is doing nothing despite the health, productivity, and creativity benefits of rest and leisure—not because of them. 

Admittedly, this definition is somewhat nebulous and deceptively simple. It does not prescribe a specific activity or method, only purposelessness—and when does doing nothing become doing something, anyway? It also does not speak to the myriad interconnected personal, cultural, economic, and political factors that determine the extent to which people can “niks.”

In many modern societies, every minute has to be accounted for, spent in productive pursuits. Even leisure has turned into effortful—and expensive—self-care. The simplest of pleasures have been subsumed into quantifiable goals. We no longer eat food because it tastes delicious, we do it because it’s healthy. We no longer go for walks simply because it feels good, deep inside our bodies. We do it because we want to cross 10,000 steps off our to-do lists.

Why, then, do we feel like we have to be productive at all times? If rest is so important, why is it so elusive?

Even in the Netherlands, a country with a generous social support system, people have been complaining of burnout and overwork. During the pandemic, schools and daycares were closed for weeks, making this crucial part of Dutch society hard to access. Olga is a mother, and homeschooling three children with different abilities was incredibly hard. Even then, Olga managed to carve out time to do nothing. Because her husband also worked from home, she has found that in many cases, she actually had more freedom than she had before the pandemic when her husband worked long hours at the office and Olga had to be home to welcome the children when they came back from school.

Leisure as a Human Right

Article 24 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” Rest and leisure aren’t actually defined in the UDHR, but time off work helps create more space for both, as well as doing nothing. 

Yet too many people see these rights—and, consequently, niksen—as privileges that some people just have, some work for and earn, and still others should not be allowed to enjoy. According to the Protestant work ethic prevalent in North America and parts of Europe, hard work and productivity are the basis of being a good, moral person. Research shows that these societies also tend to be more individualistic than collectivist and have a more rigid relationship with time than other cultures, which also has implications for who is able to niks.

These racial and socioeconomic distinctions of who is “worthy” or “allowed” to do nothing are a global phenomenon. Ingrained stereotypes, media messaging, and government and workplace policies illuminate and reproduce this hierarchy.

First, there is a big difference between how men’s and women’s leisure time is perceived. Research confirms that women around the world spend two to 10 times as much time as men do performing unpaid work, including caring for children. They also have less leisure time compared with their male counterparts, and constantly felt stressed out and rushed because they also more often multitasked. 

Even positive stereotypes make it harder to do nothing, particularly for people with intersecting marginalized identities. Second-wave feminists and millennial “girlbosses” have perpetuated the idea that women “can have it all”—career, family, and a smokin’ hot sex life. Studies show that the pressure to be a “Strong Black Woman,” naturally strong, resilient, and self-sacrificing, increases stress and decreases mental health for Black women. The “model minority”myth of relentlessly hardworking and high-achieving Asian Americans presents similar mental health risks for this demographic, according to a study partially funded by the Asian American Health Initiative. Doing nothing is not only antithetical to the attitudes and values inherent to these gendered and racialized stereotypes; the expectations of those stereotypes also rob people trying to embody them of time they could use to niks.

Even White immigrants within Europe are not immune to stereotypes. In 2018, Dutch media reported on the so-called “Polish fraud,” accusing the Eastern European agricultural workers of living off Dutch unemployment benefits, even though the real scandal was that temporary job agencies were taking advantage of this underpaid and overexploited population.

The United States’ lack of a robust social safety net makes niksen a pipe dream for most workers there. As Anne Helen Petersen, author of the Culture Study newsletter on Substack, wrote, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” It’s the only developed country without mandated parental leave, and no federal law requires employers to offer paid sick days, both of which disproportionately affect women and people of color.

A study by UN Women found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, American women spent around 31 hours per week on child care (compared with around three hours per week for men). But all women did less paid work, focusing more on unpaid, invisible labor, such as cooking or taking care of the house—making some researchers call it a “shecession,” or a recession that disproportionately impacted women because of existing distribution of child care.

The Benefits of Doing Nothing

Despite the many obstacles to niksen, people all over the world have a term for it. In Olga’s native Polish, it’s “lying down with your belly up,” while the Germans call it “letting your soul dangle.” The romantic French flaneur wanders around aimlessly, the British enjoy “idling,”and even Americans sometimes enjoy a “lazy Sunday afternoon.” In Swahili, starehe means being “comfortably contented,” like basking in the sun doing nothing, and the Chinese tradition of wuwei can be translated as “non-action.” 

The Bible may uphold the virtue of hard work, but it also prescribes a day of rest. In fact, the Polish word for Sunday, niedziela, literally means “the day when no work is done.” For Jewish communities, that day is Sabbath, which starts on Friday night and ends on Saturday evening. During that time, all work, even cooking, is forbidden. While not all Jews adhere to these strictures, many do reserve the day as a time for slowing down.

Whatever you call it, niksen has benefits for the human body and mind. It wasn’t easy to find anything on the benefits of doing nothing in particular, so we had to look at similar concepts, such as boredom. In 2014, the British researcher Sandi Mann found that being bored could increase creativity, and, as she told Olga in an interview for her book, this could extend to doing nothing.

As it turns out, the brain’s default mode network, the specific parts of the brain that light up only when we’re not engaged in a specific task, could offer a neural explanation for why we tend to get our best ideas in those unfocused moments in the shower or while on a walk, and not when we’re actively trying to solve a problem. Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has found that when people were focused on a task, overall brain activity actually decreased, but this only meant that the “energy” was diverted to the parts of the brain actually needed for the task. The default mode network is a more elaborate system, connecting different parts of the brain, which might explain why it’s associated with creativity.

Paradoxically, doing nothing could also improve productivity because it allows for a better clarity of mind. Happiness and productivity expert Gretchen Rubin advocates doing nothing as a way to fight procrastination. And last but not least, the Dutch sociologist Ap Dijksterhuis has found that people made much better, more intuitive decisions when they didn’t focus on identifying the positive or negative sides of each option but instead did something completely unrelated to the task at hand.

While this isn’t exactly about niksen, it shows that the ways we think about working, focusing, and creativity might be a little off. There’s a reason why your best ideas and solutions emerge during slow and unfocused moments. These sparks of inspiration come to us in droves when we let our thoughts run free.

The Time Is Now

But increased productivity, creativity, and overall well-being are not why governments and employers should encourage protections and policies to allow more people to do more nothing. 

Wellness is an industry that in 2021 was worth $1.5 trillion, and these days, wellness treatments include diets, retreats, apps, and more. According to this philosophy, which has its roots in the 1950s, it’s no longer enough for you to have a clean bill of health. By contrast, wellness is an active pursuit—a constant striving for self-improvement. The problem, however, isn’t just that many of these prescriptions aren’t scientifically valid, but also that they put the responsibility on the individuals to care for themselves, leaving us exhausted and, even worse, blaming ourselves when our health isn’t perfect. This is in line with the rampant individualism many Western societies are expecting today, which is affecting the way we see our fellow human beings by encouraging competition and weakening social ties.

Moreover, there is an insidious connection between wellness and right-wing politics and conspiracy theories. As such, wellness culture isn’t just misleading or wrong, but can actually be harmful and toxic. Not only do many “self-care” regimens feel like additional tasks, they are also insufficient to dismantle structures and policies that privilege White male knowledge workers over women, people of color, and blue-collar workers. 

But rest and leisure should be a human right upheld by policymakers and employers, whether or not it can be used to generate profits for companies. The Great Resignation has demonstrated that the way we work is broken, and it underlines the need for more support for vulnerable and oppressed groups. 

That support can vary for different people. For Olga, it meant her husband working from home, but most importantly, it meant having access to daycare for her children when she was a new mother. For others, support might take the form of financial security of caring for children at home. But no matter what the individual’s solution may be, we need to discharge the faux empathy of requiring people to care for themselves and their families without support, and instead create systems and spaces that allow people to do nothing.

We need to stop treating rest, niksen, dolce far niente, woolgathering, whatever you want to call it, as something we have to earn and start thinking of it as something we deserve—something we’re already worthy of. And we have to do it soon.

The increase in student loan debt should come as no surprise given the increasing cost of college.

In conversations among politicians, college administrators, educators, parents and students, college affordability seems to be seen as a purely financial issue—it’s all about money.

My research into the historical cost of college shows that the roots of the current student debt crisis are neither economic nor financial in origin, but predominantly social. Tuition fees and student loans became an essential part of the equation only as Americans came to believe in an entirely different purpose for higher education.

Cost of a college degree today

For many students, graduation means debt. In 2012, more than 44 million Americans (14 percent of the population) were still paying off student loans. And the average graduate in 2016 left college with more than $37,000 in student loan debt.

Student loan debt has become the second-largest type of personal debt among Americans. Besides leading to depression and anxiety, student loan debt slows economic growth: It prevents young Americans from buying houses and cars and starting families. Economist Alvaro Mezza, among others, has shown a negative correlation between increasing student loan debt and homeownership.

These loans can influence students’ decisions about which majors to pick and whether to pursue graduate studies.

The increase in student loan debt should come as no surprise given the increasing cost of college and the share that students are asked to shoulder. Decreasing state support for colleges over the last two decades caused colleges to raise tuition fees significantly. From 1995 to 2015, tuition and fees at 310 national universities ranked by U.S. News rose considerably, increasing by nearly 180 percent at private schools and more than 225 percent at public schools.

Whatever the reason, tuition has gone up. And students are paying that higher tuition with student loans. These loans can influence students’ decisions about which majors to pick and whether to pursue graduate studies.

Early higher education: A public good

During the 19th century, college education in the United States was offered largely for free. Colleges trained students from middle-class backgrounds as high school teachers, ministers and community leaders who, after graduation, were to serve public needs.

This free tuition model had to do with perceptions about the role of higher education: College education was considered a public good. Students who received such an education would put it to use in the betterment of society. Everyone benefited when people chose to go to college. And because it was considered a public good, society was willing to pay for it—either by offering college education free of charge or by providing tuition scholarships to individual students.

Stanford University, which was founded on the premise of offering college education free of charge to California residents, was an example of the former. Stanford charged no tuition for almost three decades from its opening in 1891 until 1920.

The cost for educating students rose significantly in the second half of the 19th century.

Other colleges, such as the College of William and Mary, offered comprehensive tuition scholarship programs, which covered tuition in exchange for a pledge of the student to engage in some kind of service after graduation. Beginning in 1888, William and Mary provided full tuition scholarships to about a third of its students. In exchange, students receiving this scholarship pledged to teach for two years at a Virginia public school.

And even though the cost for educating students rose significantly in the second half of the 19th century, college administrators such as Harvard President Charles W. Eliot insisted that these costs should not be passed on to students. In a letter to Charles Francis Adams dated June 9, 1904, Eliot wrote, “I want to have the College open equally to men with much money, little money, or no money, provided they all have brains.”

College education becomes a private pursuit

The perception of higher education changed dramatically around 1910. Private colleges began to attract more students from upper-class families—students who went to college for the social experience and not necessarily for learning.

This social and cultural change led to a fundamental shift in the purpose of a college education. What was once a public good designed to advance the welfare of society was becoming a private pursuit for self-aggrandizement. Young people entering college were no longer seen as doing so for the betterment of society, but rather as pursuing personal goals: in particular, enjoying the social setting of private colleges and obtaining a respected professional position upon graduation.

The shift in attitude regarding college has also become commonly accepted.

In 1927, John D. Rockefeller began campaigning for charging students the full cost it took to educate them. Further, he suggested that students could shoulder such costs through student loans. Rockefeller and like-minded donors (in particular, William E. Harmon, a wealthy real estate magnate) were quite successful in their campaign. They convinced donors, educators and college administrators that students should pay for their own education because going to college was considered a deeply personal affair. Tuition—and student loans—thus became commonly accepted aspects of the economics of higher education.

The shift in attitude regarding college has also become commonly accepted. Altruistic notions about the advancement of society have generally been pushed aside in favor of the image of college as a vehicle for individual enrichment.

A new social contract

If the United States is looking for alternatives to what some would call a failing funding model for college affordability, the solution may lie in looking further back than the current system, which has been in place since the 1930s.

Tuition-free education can only be realized if college education is again reframed as a public good.

In the 19th century, communities and the state would foot the bill for college tuition because students were contributing to society. They served the common good by teaching high school for a certain number of years or by taking leadership positions within local communities. A few marginal programs with similar missions (ROTC and Teach for America) still exist, but students participating in these programs are very much in the minority.

Instead, higher education today seems to be about what college can do for you. It’s not about what college students can do for society.

I believe that tuition-free education can only be realized if college education is again reframed as a public good. For this, students, communities, donors and politicians would have to enter into a new social contract that exchanges tuition-free education for public services.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

Williams wouldn’t be getting unemployment benefits, the agent said. Family members paid by the state’s In-Home Supportive Services program to care for children with disabilities, spouses caring for spouses, and children younger than 18 caring for parents didn’t get unemployment benefits if the person they cared for died, the agent explained. 

Williams, a single mother, couldn’t believe what she was hearing. For almost a decade, she’d relied on the full-time, minimum wage from the In-Home program to care for her son, Caleb, who had a rare birth defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome and needed round-the-clock attention. How was she going to immediately find a job while dealing with the loss of her child?

“I was floored, devastated,” says Williams, whose son died of complications from influenza in 2016, at age 9. “I thought, in the midst of your grief, you shouldn’t have to worry about how you’re financially going to take care of yourself.”

Williams did find a job five months after Caleb died, and was able to stabilize her finances. But the desperation she felt in the wake of his death after realizing she had no unemployment safety net to fall back on, set her on a quest to prevent other family caregivers in the In-Home program from suffering the same fate. This week that quest appeared to be nearing an end, as a bill to extend unemployment compensation to family caregivers enrolled in the In-Home program and a similar one called Waiver Personal Care Services, headed to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. 

“I feel very hopeful,” says Williams, who has worked tirelessly to advocate for the bill, called Assembly Bill 1993. 

Given the high rate of unemployment amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the bill is needed more than ever, she explains.

“It’s going to be catastrophic for these parents” if the bill doesn’t pass, she adds. “With (more than) a million people on unemployment and no jobs to really be found, how are we going to take care of them? What are they going to do?”  

If signed into law, AB-1993 is expected to extend unemployment eligibility to more than 119,000 family caregivers, who are primarily low-income women of color, according to the home care workers union United Domestic Workers of America/AFSCME Local 3930. Supporters say that’s only fair, given that people employed as in-home caregivers who are not family members do receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job. 

According to Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager (D-Los Angeles), who introduced the bill, the current policy of excluding family caregivers from receiving benefits is the product of outdated, discriminatory attitudes toward women.

“Most parent and spouse in-home supportive service providers are wives and mothers,” Kamlager writes, in a statement. “They’re excluded from receiving unemployment because domestic labor has always been seen as ‘less than’ because mostly women do it. As we rebuild California’s post-pandemic economy, we need to eliminate sexism and racism from the fabric of our society and guarantee equity to all workers.”

The estimated cost to the state of extending eligibility is about $14 million annually, according to an analysis of the bill from the state legislature. The final bill garnered unanimous support in the state Assembly, and Senate. Gov. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign it. 

Backers of the bill, including the home care workers union United Domestic Workers of America/AFSCME Local 3930, say it will help stabilize the in-home caregiver workforce, which is heavily reliant on family members because of a shortage of other workers available to do the job. The goal of the In-Home program is also to keep low-income children with disabilities and the elderly in their homes, generally a more comfortable choice for families, and less costly to the state than paying for a residential care facility.

Mirna Ruiz, a Rialto single mother of two children with disabilities, says she thinks the bill is overdue. Ruiz has relied on the In-Home program for 12 years, after being forced to quit her job as an insurance writer to care for her now 24-year-old son with a heart condition, seizure disorder, and mild cerebral palsy. She also has an 18-year-old daughter who is deaf and required surgery and auditory verbal therapy as a child. 

Even with the In-Home payments, Ruiz, 48, says she had to move in with her mother to make ends meet. If she were to lose that support, she wouldn’t be able to afford basic necessities, she explains.

She and other caregivers “literally dedicate our lives to our kids,” she says, and adds that to not have a financial cushion after the loss of a child would be devastating.

Williams knows that feeling. She now runs her own nonprofit, helping provide support and guidance to families of children with disabilities. She’s heard from many parents over the years that have felt the financial impact after their child died and they stopped receiving In-Home support. Some lost houses, cars, and other possessions as a result. 

Grieving is “all you should have to worry about when your baby dies,” Williams says.

This story was produced in partnership with the California Health Report.

Polling from the National Parents Union (NPU) has found that heading into the election, economic issues are top of mind for many parents of school-aged children. “Times are tough, and parents are walking an economic tightrope every single day,” wrote Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the NPU, about the poll results.

While the U.S. boasts one of the largest economies in the world, it leads high-income countries in the proportion of kids living in poverty at over 16%. 

The good news is that these issues can be addressed through government policies. Past policies and policies pursued in different countries offer an evidence-based blueprint for doing so. 

A recent example of an intervention that lifted kids out of poverty in the U.S. is the 2021 American Rescue Plan’s Child Tax Credit, which provided monthly checks to families earning less than $150,000 per year with young children. The program delivered dramatic results, cutting child poverty almost in half and narrowing the racial child-poverty gap. However, Congress allowed the program to lapse after just one year, and child poverty predictably shot up again.

Canada also saw striking results when it implemented the Canada Child Benefit in 2016, providing monthly, nontaxable payments to low- and middle-income families with kids between the ages of 6 and 17. That program cut child poverty, supported families’ food security, and boosted the economy. Similarly, some European countries have reduced the proportion of children at risk of poverty by as much as 16% through universal programs supporting families with children with cash assistance.

Similar programs exist in the U.S., but they are patchwork, and many are still in the testing phases. At the state and local levels, more than 150 guaranteed-income initiatives have been launched nationwide since 2017, showing positive effects on kids and families. In Jackson, Mississippi, participants in the fourth cohort of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust Program, which gives $1,000 per month for 12 months to Black mothers, reported that the funds helped them purchase needed shoes and clothes for their children, allowed their kids to participate in more field trips and cultural activities than before, and improved their relationships with their children. 

Beyond direct cash support, universal preschool and childcare programs in some European countries have been shown to support childhood development, especially among kids from marginalized communities. Currently, childcare is one of the biggest expenses for families of young children in the U.S., often rivaling rent. Government spending on early childcare programs can help address poverty, reduce gender disparities in the workforce, and support women who pursue careers alongside parenting.

“The research is pretty clear and universal,” explains Michelle Bezark, a senior researcher at the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity at Northern Illinois University. “Early childhood programs that are well funded have immense long-term benefits for children, families, and society at large.”

The bad news is that if Donald Trump is re-elected, he is not expected to pursue the interventions needed to address the dire issues facing the nation’s children, such as poverty. Rather, he’s likely to do the opposite, judging by the presidential playbook drawn up by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. At least 140 of his former staffers are involved in the project, whose mandate lists protecting children as one of its main goals. Yet Project 2025 promises to reorganize or even eliminate lifelines for families, including subsidized housing, cash assistance, school meals, and Head Start programs. 

“It would be a disaster,” says Timothy Smeeding, the Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and former director of the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty. “Some of these programs are really important, and they would be cut by Project 2025.”

If Trump were elected and Project 2025’s proposals pursued, experts anticipate that children and families could face worsening impoverishment, hunger, and homelessness. Households with marginalized members, including immigrants, disabled people, and people of color, are the most at-risk under the proposals for families and kids.

Child poverty often manifests as homelessness. More than a million school-age children face homelessness each year nationwide, and tens of millions of kids live in households that teeter on the brink of eviction. Despite the urgent need to address homelessness among children, the proportion of families benefiting from Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing programs has declined in recent years as the number of families in need rises, the number of affordable housing units falls, and federal housing assistance remains underfunded.

Rather than bolstering subsidized housing programs to keep kids housed, Project 2025 proposes new restrictions on access to these programs. Proposals in Project 2025 would also bar mixed-status households from accessing federal housing subsidies, making families whose members include people with different citizenship or immigration statuses ineligible to receive support. Trump floated the idea of implementing restrictions on mixed-status households during his first term in 2019, and analysts estimated that children would make up more than half of the population to lose housing under such a rule. 

Food insecurity and hunger are also manifestations of childhood poverty. Today, more than 17% of households with children are food insecure. The authors of Project 2025 propose gutting programs that help keep kids fed, including the Community Eligibility Program (CEP), Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT), and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). CEP and Summer EBT, also called Sun Bucks, support school-age kids. The former allows low-income schools and school districts to provide free meals to all students. When the school year ends and children no longer receive free or reduced-price school meals, Sun Bucks helps fill the gap. 

Meanwhile, SNAP provides EBT to low-income individuals. While the proposals in Project 2025 would not eliminate SNAP, they would implement stricter work requirements and provide fewer exceptions, threatening access for many families.

Both SNAP and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, another program on Project 2025’s chopping block, have existing work requirements for recipients. These requirements were already broadened last year in response to a demand by House Republicans as a condition of raising the debt ceiling. Work requirements are rooted in racist and sexist tropes, such as the so-called “welfare queen” and “con artist” that Ronald Reagan popularized in the 1980s as a way to target government assistance. 

Research has shown that work requirements do not improve employment outcomes, and for parents, the requirements can mean having less time to spend with their kids. 

The proposals in Project 2025 go beyond threatening the housing, financial, and food security of families and kids, and take aim at the government’s Head Start programs, which offer early childhood education, health, and social services to children from birth to age 5 and their families. Bezark says this would have ripple effects across every area of childhood development. 

“It would mean a lot of kids would not get the developmental support they need,” says Bezark. “That means early intervention services and screening for developmental delays would not happen; kids would not get needed pediatric checkups and immunizations and dental checks, and all of the other wraparound services that Head Start provides.”

Eliminating Head Start programs would hit rural areas, disabled kids, and communities of color the hardest. Latine families are more likely to live in childcare deserts and need the services of Head Start. Head Start programs include Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start, which serve agricultural and tribal communities, respectively. Children in foster care and those experiencing homelessness are automatically eligible for Head Start, while disabled kids must fill at least 10% of enrollment slots. Currently, over 787,000 children nationwide participate in Head Start programs.

Rather than gut Head Start programs, the Democratic Party platform promises to expand them. In fact, since entering the presidential race, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has made childcare a tenet of her campaign. She has also promised to increase the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which Smeeding argues should be a central part of a new tax plan to support the nation’s kids and families. The CDCTC would help working families with children offset the cost of childcare. Alongside it, Smeeding suggests increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and reinstating a Child Tax Credit to ensure “no one falls through the cracks.” 

Supporting kids and families with solutions like these is popular with voters, too—Democrats and Republicans alike. When polled by the NPU, more than 80% of parents with school-age children supported reinstating the Child Tax Credit, including 84% of registered Democrats, 81% of Independents, and 75% of Republicans. Another poll from the First Five Years Fund found that 86% of voters believe improving the quality of childcare and early learning programs, and making them more affordable for families is a good investment of taxpayer money. 

Bezark agrees: “Laying that foundation is crucial to long-term child outcomes and societal outcomes.”

In 2023, Austin City Council Member Leslie Pool introduced the Home Options for Mobility and Equity Initiative (HOME), a land development code change that allows three units on lots that were originally zoned for single-family dwellings. Pointing to research by the libertarian, Koch-funded Mercatus Institute, Pool claims that increasing supply will provide housing for middle-income families and resolve Austin’s housing crisis.

“When I started on Council in January 2015, Austin was still a place for working families,” Pool said during a December 2023 press conference. “After all, the median home price was $238,000, and there were a lot of options in almost every neighborhood.” Now, Pool claimed, the “median home price in Austin is $540,000—well beyond the reach of a middle-income earner whose price point is limited to $350,000.”

From Pool’s perspective, HOME is supposed to change that, making Austin, once again, a place for “young people who came for college or for work and wanted to stay” able to do so.

There was an immediate uproar: More than 40 grassroots organizations, including the NAACP, Austin Mutual Aid, PODER, VOCAL-TX, and Indigenous Movement Crew, led an organizing effort against HOME.

As Rich Heyman, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, notes in a 2023 report commissioned by the City’s Equity Office, upzoning policies lead to market-rate/luxury housing being built in working-class communities of color, where land is cheaper. Then, the increase in property taxes, demolition of existing affordable housing, and other displacement pressure eventually leads to those communities being pushed out.

“Everybody knows that affordability is a big problem in Austin,” Heyman told the Austin Monitor after the December press conference. “And I think that everybody who was at the podium today has all the best intentions, but I think that they are mistaken about what the impact of this initiative is going to be.”

Supporters of HOME and similar policies say they will transform Austin into a more modern, dense, walkable, and sustainable city, but who can afford this version of the city, and who is excluded from this vision?

False Solutions

Housing costs are rising across the U.S., with investors buying up properties to turn them into short-term rentals and renters often being stuck between large rent increases and the elusive dream of ownership.

In particular, as community member Cynthia Vasquez shares, for many urban Black and Brown communities, “The homeowner–to–renter–to–being unhoused pipeline is a lived reality. We are seeing developers make record profits as our communities suffer from displacement.”

In Austin, these issues have deep roots: Like all major U.S. cities, Austin was deeply shaped by systemic racism and redlining. In 1928, the Master Plan, a land development code, pushed Black American and Mexican American communities to East Austin. Since then, East Austin has experienced systemic disinvestment in infrastructure, housing, social services, and environmental protection, leading to land being relatively cheaper compared to central and west Austin.

When activists began kicking polluting industries out of East Austin in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the tides turned. Suddenly, the area became a desired development zone while West Austin became the watershed protection zone, where development was limited in order to protect the water ecosystem. As a result of the increase in market-rate/luxury development, East Austin zip code 78721 is now the fourth-most gentrified neighborhood in the U.S.

For example, the 700-acre award-winning Mueller community, located in central east Austin, is touted for its “sustainable,” “transit-orientated,” “new-urbanist” design. Those residents, however, are whiter and wealthier than surrounding neighborhoods, and among the East Austin community, Mueller is known as just another example of a gentrifying project.

“The Mueller development plays a role in gentrification and the reproduction of social inequalities in Austin,” writes sociologist Sergio A. Cabrera in a 2019 study published in Sociological Spectrum. A 2023 study published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity documents a rise in racist experiences in East Austin as a result of the Mueller project.

These false solutions aren’t unique to Austin; other cities across the U.S. are also pushing for similar policies. Research based on Minneapolis and New York City demonstrates how upzoning has led to gentrification and displacement. Council Member Mary Black shares that in Raleigh, North Carolina, upzoning has led to a surge in luxury housing. In 2021, rent in Raleigh spiked by 21%, displacing and replacing once-thriving communities of color. “My background is in climate and environmental advocacy, so I know the importance of building dense, walkable cities to act on the climate crisis […] but this means little if low-income communities of color that rely on public transportation are displaced,” Black says.

Community Solutions

The term green gentrification, first coined by professors Alessandro Rigolon and Tim Collin in a 2023 study, describes how projects that may seem to increase sustainability efforts, particularly introducing or renovating parks, can be drivers of gentrification and displacement, thus hurting low-income communities of color.

“By targeting neighborhoods that are already gentrifying, these projects may primarily benefit recently arriving affluent residents, developers, and other business interests,” Collins said in a recent press release. “At the same time, these projects may displace disadvantaged longtime residents, including lower-income renters, who are often [people of color] in cities like [Los Angeles] and Chicago. If these projects displace residents, then this approach ultimately won’t address the health and economic challenges faced in low-income urban communities.”

Rigolon agreed, noting in the press release, “A lot of research frames gentrification as an unintended consequence of a well-intended effort. We argue instead that in many cases, green gentrification is by design.”

In the face of green gentrification, grassroots groups are promoting sustainable development that prioritizes affordability, inclusivity, and the preservation of cultural heritage.

Community Powered ATX, Causa Justa :: Just Cause, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and other organizations have been developing solutions to the housing affordability crisis that center communities directly impacted, including protecting tenants and public processes, building deeply affordable housing at 30% and 50% median family income, investing in community development corporations, building community land trusts, and using overlays and historic districts to protect Black and Brown neighborhoods.

“We need community-led policies, intentional development of deeply affordable housing, and nonprofit housing models such as land trusts and community development corporations, which have proven to be effective in other cities,” says Misael Ramos, president of the Blackland Community Development Corporation.

By treating housing as a human right instead of an opportunity to profit, we can prioritize the needs of vulnerable communities. In effect, planning and zoning processes must be driven by communities of color who are directly impacted by the affordability crisis and gentrification.

HOME Phase I passed on Dec. 7, 2023, and Phase II, alongside other upzoning policies such as compatibility changes, passed in May 2024. It is history repeating itself: Wealthy, predominantly white investors are taking land from working- and middle-class communities of color. “I feel tremendous pain in my heart walking on my ancestral and contemporary homelands and seeing displacement continue,” says Chiara Do’wal Sehi, a Karankawa artist and educator.

But it’s not too late; in Austin and across the U.S., we can build sustainable and affordable cities without displacing working-class communities of color. Our efforts will only be fruitful if we stop prioritizing investors’ and developers’ interests and begin listening to working-class communities of color.

Cambridge Recurring Income for Success (RISE) was an 18-month guaranteed-income program that offered 130 single caregivers $500 cash payments from September 2021 to February 2023. Participants—96% of whom were women and 62% of whom were African American—had to have an income below 80% of the area’s median income to be eligible. Cambridge is just outside of Boston and home to Harvard University. 

Participants’ ability to cover $400 emergencies increased from 33.8% at the start of the program to 41.5% six months after the program, though it declined to 30% by the program’s ending. Savings improved for participants between the 12- and 18-month marks, though most said their savings were stable throughout the program.

Mean housing cost burden, or the percentage of one’s income that goes towards housing needs, decreased for the RISE recipients from 50.5% to 41.8% by the end of the program. Full-time employment for participants increased from 36% at the baseline to 40% by the 12-month mark. 

The pilot’s success validates supporters’ belief that guaranteed-income programs help families and don’t encourage people to rely solely on the payments.

“Quite consistently, we see across all of these programs that people spend the money to support their families. No one’s going to quit working for $500 a month,” said Stacia West, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work and the director and co-founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.

“I think one of the major highlights out of Cambridge is this ability to save. Having $500 in your bank account can mean the difference between being able to get that tire fixed or not being able to make it to work, and that’s huge for so many American families,” West said.

Another important assessment of the program was on guaranteed income’s impact on participants’ sense of self, she said.

“When we introduce a guaranteed income, does that free up a little bit of mental space, or emotional, or even spiritual space that you can actualize as a human and not have all of your time completely spent on day-to-day survival?” West said. “Whenever you’re on the margins, and you’re dealing and negotiating a lower income, you just have less time and space to think about yourself and your own dreams and your own goals and your own agency.”

Results from Cambridge RISE show the extra money created time and space that participants spent with their children, and the children of RISE recipients had higher grades than their peers whose parents and caregivers were in a control group that did not receive funding, the report said.

At the start of the program, 59% of participants reported being able to help their children with hands-on learning activities such as building projects. That figure peaked at 78% by the program’s six-month mark and concluded at 71%. Fifty-two percent reported being able to do arts and crafts with their kids. That figure peaked at 74% by the program’s six-month mark and held steady at 64% for the 12- and 18-month marks. 

This freed-up time allowed one recipient, identified in the study only as Veronica, to make arts and crafts and have Sunday dinner with her daughter.

“If I was not in my situation [with RISE], any way of trying to get extra money, I would be most likely working, which would then take my time away from my daughter and myself,” Veronica said. “This is not just benefiting me, it’s benefiting my daughter. … I get to show her things and that betters her.” 

The results showing increased time and space for parenting stood out to former Cambridge mayor and current City Council member Sumbul Siddiqui, who initiated Cambridge RISE during her time as mayor.

“I just think about my mom and dad [who] were just constantly working multiple jobs and how hard that was,” Siddiqui said. “Quality time is so important.”

Siddiqui, who became the first Muslim mayor in Massachusetts when elected in January 2020, looked deeper into direct cash payments once she saw how much Cambridge residents remained in need even after she launched the city’s over-$5 million COVID-19 disaster relief fund.

That’s when she learned about the network organization Mayors for Guaranteed Income and their $500,000 grant for mayors to launch these programs in their cities if they could match the donation. Siddiqui, in partnership with Cambridge Community Foundation, Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, Cambridge Housing Authority, and community organizations Just-A-Start and Up Together, raised $1.6 million to launch Cambridge RISE. It’s been rewarding, she said, to see the impact the program has had on people and the way they view government officials.

“I was walking down the street the other day, and literally, at a cross section, a woman got out of her car just to say, ‘Thank you for everything. The RISE program has helped me so much.’ And literally the light was about to turn green, but she quickly did that. That was so meaningful to me,” Siddiqui recalled. “They just really appreciate that City Hall is looking out for them in this way. And I think it’s pretty gratifying to kind of see how people are viewing government as a result.”

Mayors for Guaranteed Income, a network of local leaders, was founded in 2020 by Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California. Tubbs launched the country’s first mayor-led guaranteed-income program. The organization has grown to nearly 150 mayors, expanded to Counties for Guaranteed Income with about 40 elected county leaders and launched a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization called United for a Guaranteed Action. The group has also launched over 60 pilots, including Cambridge RISE, Director Sukhi Samra said.

“In addition to funding, we also provided robust technical assistance in terms of pilot design and also in terms of communications,” said Samra. She said her team helped the Cambridge RISE group “communicate about your pilot in a way that’s responsive to your community, in a way that meets your community’s needs.” 

Samra said their work has been able to shift public opinion to be more favorable towards $500 to $1,000 monthly guaranteed income, but there is still some pushback. 

“We’ve gone from the radical to the mainstream, but I think a lot of the opposition that we’re experiencing is still the same. It’s really rooted in these racist and sexist tropes about what poor people do when they’re given money, who is poor, and why they’re poor in the first place,” Samra said.

Opponents of guaranteed-income programs worry giving people cash payments with no strings attached will discourage them from working. West said studies prove otherwise. Still, guaranteed-income programs have been outlawed in Arkansas and Iowa, and similar legislation has been proposed in Arizona and South Dakota. 

In spite of this, experts say the movement for guaranteed income is still picking up steam across the country. California was the first to launch state-funded guaranteed-income programs in November, and recently proposed legislation seeks to establish a council to study guaranteed-income programs. Legislation is advancing through the Minnesota state House that would give residents living below 300% of the federal poverty level $500 per month.

Harris County, Texas, is launching its first guaranteed-income pilot this spring. And, last fall, Cambridge was able to expand its pilot to create the Cambridge Rise Up Program using American Rescue Plan funds. The new program is offering $500 per month for 18 months to all families who have children and income under 250% of the federal poverty level. It’s the first guaranteed-income program with no lottery system and currently has nearly 2,000 participating households. 

“I think that municipalities and states are seeing the benefits and the return on investment that it may have and are ready to scale it up at the state level and make some investments,” West said.

This story was originally published by The 19th and is republished here with permission.

“This was really a godsend for me,” she says from her apartment in Harlem, speaking in hushed tones while Garrett naps.

Guaranteed income projects are distinct from presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s idea of a universal basic income, which is premised on cash payments to everyone, not just the most vulnerable. A prominent example of a guaranteed income project is the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, which put $500 a month into the hands of 125 low-income residents of Stockton, California, for 24 months. Data gathered from the SEED project found that the cash significantly helped recipients stabilize their finances, acquire jobs, and improve their mental health, compared with a control group.

Can Guaranteed Incomes Benefit Low-Income Women and Children of Color?

Buoyed by the success of the Stockton experiment, guaranteed income projects, like the one Gardner is part of, are cropping up in major cities around the country. With the understanding that systemic economic racism results in disproportionate poverty within Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, many projects are specifically targeting low-income people of color, and primarily women and mothers.

Megha Agarwal, the executive director of The Bridge Project and of The Monarch Foundation, which funds the program, explains that it “was formed out of our desire to support the babies and mothers in New York and beyond who are suffering devastating effects from poverty.” According to Agarwal, of the 100 mothers currently enrolled in the program, 74% identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 40% identify as Black; 20% are undocumented. “Guaranteed income has long been on the list of demands to receive racial and economic liberation,” she says.

A similar program, run by the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund, also focuses on women of color—specifically Black women—in Atlanta. Hope Wollensack, the executive director of the GRO Fund and co-director of the In Her Hands Guaranteed Income Initiative based in Atlanta’s Old 4th Ward, says it is “the largest program focusing on Black women in the country.”

“Centering Black women is really important,” Wollensack explains, because “they are one of the groups experiencing the most acute and sharpest impacts of economic insecurity that exists.”

Over the brief six-month duration of the child tax credit program, the modest monthly payments of a few hundred dollars cut child poverty by almost 30%. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 90% of low-income families receiving the payments used the money “for the most basic household expenses—food, clothing, shelter, and utilities—or education.”

“Our national social safety net is predicated on the idea that poverty is a personal choice and not structural or a policy choice,” says Moran.

In reality, Agarwal says the choice to maintain poverty is an external one—made by our government. Through the child tax credit, “We were able to alleviate poverty at massive scales.” In letting the program expire, she adds, “We’ve said it’s OK to let those people fall back into poverty.”

For women like Gardner, a modest amount of available cash is making a world of difference. “I don’t know what I would be doing if I didn’t have it,” she says.

My previous column called for a major restructuring of both governmental and corporate institutions to strengthen democracy and subordinate corporate power and the pursuit of corporate profits to the power and interests of living people and communities.

I was a youth during the brief historical anomaly that occurred after World War II. Most major corporations that conducted business in the United States were still headquartered here, paid their taxes here, and provided secure long-term employment with good pay and benefits. Unions were strong and there was a recognized social contract between corporations and workers.

As described in my previous column, I witnessed the process of corporations walking away from this contract to advance a systematic process of colonizing the world’s peoples and resources under corporate rule. For more than 20 years, I have been pointing out that to have a world that works for living people, the interests of living communities must take priority over maximizing corporate profits. That means corporations must be accountable to governments and governments must be accountable to people — real people.

The purely private-purpose corporation is an illegitimate entity. This is the Elephant in the Room that no politician dare mention.

As a private person, I am free to do business as a sole proprietorship or partnership in pursuit of purely private interests and free to engage in politics for so long as I observe the law. A corporation, however, is different. It is a creation of government.

Government is a public entity bound to serve the public interest. It seems logical that any entity created by government is properly considered a public entity accountable for serving a public purpose, obeying the law — and obliged as a public entity to stay out of electoral politics.

As was the case in the early United States, every corporation should have a public purpose stated in its charter and be accountable to the government authority that issued its charter for being true to that purpose.

The lack of corporate accountability is amplified when a corporation sheds its allegiance to any place, person, or public interest.

The lack of corporate accountability is amplified when a corporation sheds its allegiance to any place, person, or public interest. It may be chartered in the United States, park its profits in Bermuda to avoid taxes, contract with sweatshops in Bangladesh, sell its products in France, and be a subsidiary of a parent corporation headquartered in Brazil. In effect, it is stateless and operates as a power unto itself, and has no concern for the interests of any people or place.

The idea that a corporation chartered in one country has an automatic right to do business in another is odd indeed. As a private citizen, I don’t have a right to visit another country without its express permission, much less to locate a business facility there. I’m also obligated to pay taxes and obey the law wherever I am. A corporation, as an artificial legal entity, is surely entitled to no greater rights or lesser obligations than a flesh and blood person.

Every corporation needs both a public purpose and a national identity. This need is obscured by the common practice of referring to transnational corporations as multinationals — implying they are national everywhere. Similarly, referring to any corporation that sells its share in a public exchange as a “public” corporation implies it has a public purpose even though we may recognize on reflection that it is purely profit-driven.

By the fundamental premise of democracy, it is the sovereign right — and obligation — of We the People to demand that stateless corporations be broken up and the pieces restructured as national public-purpose legal entities prohibited from engaging in electoral politics and each owned by and accountable to living people who are citizens of the country in which it is chartered to do business.

We might then have a global economy organized by and for living communities rather than by and for incorporated pools of financial assets. Freed from subservience to corporate interests, these communities would be free to cooperate for the common good rather than forced to compete for corporate favor.

In my next column, I will look at what this would mean for relationships among national economies in a living Earth global economy.

“The labor movement has to bring ownership and equity into the picture.”

Uber built its $40 billion business around a mobile-based application that connects drivers with riders. Hailed by some for shaking up a stagnant taxi industry, others criticize the company for how it treats drivers, who pay for their own cars, gas, and maintenance. It’s also been criticized for dictating  rates and for deactivating drivers’ accounts, essentially firing them, without warning.

The ride-hailing app company may be innovative from the perspective of its customers—and its owners—but for the driver the experience is very similar to that of a traditional taxi driver, as Gebremariam can attest.

After he moved to Denver from Ethiopia in 2006, he worked minimum-wage jobs at the baggage claim in the Denver International Airport, and then at a nursing home. Though he enjoyed working with seniors, he wanted to go back to school and study pharmacy. The flexibility of driving a cab seemed like the right way to go. “I could work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday driving,” he says. “Then, I [could] go to school full time.”

That’s how he thought it would work, anyway. But the reality turned out to be more difficult. In 2012, he spent six months driving for a company called Metro Taxi, with a lease that required him to pay $800 per week for the use of the vehicle, dispatch, and other services. The need to earn that much every week, in addition to what he needed to live, pushed him to drive 10- or 12-hour days, seven days a week.

Gebremariam wasn’t finding the flexibility he was looking for, and turned to Uber instead. But, after driving for the company for a few months, Gebremariam says it was more of the same. “They are taking like 20 percent of our income,” he says. “We have to be on the road all the time.”

Gebremariam isn’t just complaining about it. Instead, he and 644 other drivers are on a mission to form a new taxi company that will be both worker-owned and unionized. The new co-op, Green Taxi, will have a fleet of hybrid or high-efficiency vehicles, and will offer a ride-hailing app.

The drivers aren’t going it alone. The Communications Workers of America Local 7777 union is playing a key role in helping them break into Denver’s heavily regulated taxi industry.

The new cooperative faces many legal barriers before they can get taxis on the road. For example, the Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the industry, requires potential new companies to prove that they have a viable business plan, that more drivers are needed, and that the new company won’t put existing ones out of businesses. This is just one hoop a new transportation company must jump through, and one that, Gebremariam points out, Uber never had to attempt. But the CWA, with its lobbying experience, will be there to help Green Taxi.

The partnership between the co-op and the union could show one potential way forward for workers in the app-driven economy.

The (unionized) future of sharing

Taxi and Uber drivers are independent contractors, not employees. As such, they are not guaranteed a minimum wage or other labor protections, nor can they unionize.

Uber drivers provide most of the capital needed for the business and all of the labor.

In California, two groups of drivers for Uber and Lyft (a competing ride-hailing company) are taking steps to change that. In separate court cases, they are seeking to be recognized as employees. The companies would then be required to pay drivers minimum wage, and reimburse expenses that drivers are covering now, like gas and car maintenance. It would also allow the drivers to unionize.

Gebremariam and 1,000 more drivers took a different approach in Denver toward improving their working conditions. They joined the CWA as affiliate members in October of last year. Because they weren’t employees, these new members couldn’t sign collective bargaining agreements—documents that authorize the union to negotiate with the cab companies to improve working conditions on the drivers’ behalf. But the union can still lobby for driver-friendly regulation or fight for recourse with the local government if companies treat their drivers poorly.

And, with the support of the CWA, Gebremariam and 644 other drivers made a $500 commitment each to bond and insure their new cooperative. Instead of fighting for recognition as employees of a company owned by faraway shareholders, they are attempting to build and own their own company.

Companies like Uber represent unique potential for this kind of thinking. Mike Konzcal and Byrce Covert at The Nation made the argument back in December that the company is in a perfect position to transition to a worker-owned cooperative. Uber has contributed the innovation of its mobile app, but drivers now provide most of the capital needed for the business (the car, gas, maintenance, etc.) and all of the labor.

Big upfront capital costs are usually a challenge for startup cooperatives, but as the drivers already provide most of the equipment, worker-ownership could be a logical next step. Jeff Spross at The Week echoed this idea when covering another new taxi cooperative, Transunion Car Service, based in Newark, New Jersey.

What makes Transunion Car Service and Green Taxi unique is that they are both union-backed cooperatives. The union-backed cooperatives combine the solutions of classifying Uber drivers as employees and of socializing the company’s ownership.

It’s not the first time a labor union has helped a worker-owned co-op get on its feet, and some observers see major potential in this type of partnership for the labor movement. Michael Peck is the U.S. representative for the Spanish cooperative Mondragon and co-founder of 1worker1vote.org, a nonprofit organization that promotes and supports unionized cooperatives. He believes that the Green Taxi drivers’ strategy has a value that goes far beyond Denver city limits.

“The labor movement has to bring ownership and equity into the picture,” Peck says, “because otherwise we’re going to be reduced to fighting for less and less.”

Partnerships like the one around Green Taxi could help it do that. If unions create worker-owned, union-backed cooperatives like Green Taxi, Peck argues that this would strengthen the co-op model and breathe new life into a labor movement that has seen a steady decline in membership. The resulting co-ops would provide alternatives to the Uber-like companies proliferating into other services, like Urban Sitter for child care or Washio for laundry service.

Further, the partnerships give unions more choices. They offer an alternative to the uphill battle for important yet limited issues like living wages, job security, and safe working conditions. Supporting worker-ownership presents an opportunity for unions to help create situations where workers define their own labor conditions.

But what is so powerful about being a unionized worker-owner?

Why co-ops go union

Traditionally, unions fight for fair treatment of workers and better wages by negotiating collective bargaining agreements with a company’s management and owners. But in a worker-owned cooperative, the workers are the owners. They set their own wages and working conditions, but also make business decisions like whether to invest in a new building or offer a new product.

Those two types of decisions are often in conflict.

New cooperative owners might not have experience in negotiating wages or benefit plans.

“A lot of times, people form a cooperative,” Peck says, “and think, ‘We’ve got this really great democratic structure—it’s going to be perfect.’ And they end up spending the first few years figuring out where all the stop signs are, when what they really should be doing is focusing on the business.” In other words, new cooperative owners might not have experience in negotiating wages or benefit plans.

One way to manage this tension is for worker-owners to also be union members, he argues. That way, the union negotiates with the cooperative’s management or board of directors when it comes to concerns like pension plans or safety and training programs—areas in which unions traditionally have a lot of experience.

What it boils down to is ensuring an equal emphasis on the “worker” and “owner” of being a worker-owner.

“When people talk about disruptive innovation, it’s always on behalf of the consumer,” Peck says. “But who’s thinking about the worker? When you have a model that can do both, that’s a much better way to go.”

Being able to hail a taxi, or find a baby sitter or order groceries, from your phone is innovative and exciting. Green Taxi could show that we can have this convenience while supporting secure, worker-owned jobs.

Erin McCarley contributed reporting for this story.

For far too long, we have followed the policy guidance of unfettered capitalism—an economics devoted to growing the fortunes of billionaires without regard for the consequences for the living Earth and most of Earth’s inhabitants. Focused on maximizing individual financial return, contemporary economics is more accurately known as ego-nomics. Featuring the Latin word for “I,” the teaching of ego-nomics is best confined to history courses reviewing the devastating consequences of the human embrace of this flawed theory as settled science.

Finding our way to a viable human future will require the guidance of a true eco-nomics. “Eco” comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household. Grounded in biology and ecology rather than finance, the new eco-nomics will guide us to an ecological civilization devoted to caring for the living Earth’s household and all its living beings.

Of course, navigating the essential transition to an ecological civilization presents daunting challenges. There will be no winners on a dead Earth. Consequently, we have a shared interest in joining in common cause to create the alternative future now within our means.

The environmental and social failures of modern society highlight two foundational self-evident truths that conventional ego-nomics ignores. First, Earth is our common home and the source of our existence and well-being. Second, money has no meaning or utility beyond the human mind. Indeed, most modern money is only invisible electronic traces stored on computer memory chips.

Ignoring these truths, ego-nomics has guided us to a world that confines the vast majority of the planet’s people to servitude to the already rich, whose defining purpose is growing their personal financial assets. The resulting growth in inequality is beyond obscene.

In January 2023, the World Economic Forum reported that the financial assets of the world’s super-rich were growing by $2.7 billion a day. The average billionaire was gaining roughly $1.7 million in new financial assets for every $1 in pay received by a person in the bottom 90%.

Earth is distinctive among the planets we have so far observed in its ability to sustain life. And we humans are distinctive among Earth’s beings in our ability to choose and create our future together. This gives us special privileges—and special essential responsibilities consistent with what science now identifies as our distinctive human nature. As science affirms, mentally healthy humans get deep satisfaction from caring for others.

We also now know that a small minority of people, deprived of proper care in their earliest years, find pleasure in demonstrating their power over others by inflicting harm. They suffer from a grandiose sense of superiority and self-entitlement known as narcissistic personality disorder. Such individuals have a disproportionate presence among society’s wealthy.

The flawed and selfish promises of ego-nomics promoted by these individuals have so misled us that we have allowed money to replace mutual care in mediating our relationships with other people and the living Earth. This love for money now so dominates our consciousness that we have come to idolize financial predators.

The challenge of our time is to fulfill our true and largely unrealized human potential by learning to live as beloved communities rooted in mutual caring and service to one another, and to the natural and human commons consistent with our true nature.

The new eco-nomics calls us to:

1. Replace GDP with valid indicators of beneficial economic performance.
2. Confront and dispel the illusion that money is wealth and that growing money benefits us all.
3. Embrace biology and ecology as the disciplines most foundational to eco-nomics for an ecological civilization.

We currently debate a choice between socialism (an economy ruled by politicians and public officials) and capitalism (an economy ruled by private financiers). Many of us are fearful of the potential melding of the two into fascism.

Yet we rarely mention the people-power alternative, rooted in democratically self-managed communities and markets foundational to an ecological civilization. Realizing this alternative will require that financial assets are equitably distributed to assure that re­sponsibilities for making significant decisions are truly shared. Predatory, monopolistic, profit-maximizing corporations will need to be converted into worker/community cooperatives responsible for serving the needs of all their stakeholders.

We need to minimize reliance on money as a substitute for caring relationships. The private banking system that currently operates beyond accountability to national governments and interests must be replaced by a global system of community banks cooperatively owned and operated by the communities in which they do business.

We are not dealing with a broken system in need of repair. We are dealing with a failed system in need of replacement. We will achieve this transformation to an ecological civilization only through a people-powered meta-movement in which the world’s people come together, guided by a valid eco-nomics, in a unifying commitment to creating a world that works for all life on Earth.

Capitalism values cheapness above all else.

But reform won’t happen unless we understand capitalism’s appeal and historical rise, says Patel, a food justice activist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s remarkably resilient and can be traced to a process he calls “cheapness.”

Together with Binghamton University professor Jason W. Moore, he has written The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017), which aims to put it all together for us. The seven “things” of the title aren’t physical objects as much as they are a hidden social, ecological and economic infrastructure: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. The point being that cheapness is a process of responding to economic crises by devaluing each of those forces so that capitalism can continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the already-wealthy. In that sense, “cheap nature” refers to the way in which land and its resources are systematically given away to businesses for exploitation, “cheap work” refers to slavery and other anti-worker tactics that keep wages low, and so on.

Capitalism values cheapness above all else. And through this lens, Patel and Moore explore the evolution of capitalism from its roots in the late medieval period with the collapse of feudalism in Western Europe caused by climate change and the Black Death to—now.

Raj Patel spoke with YES! Magazine senior editor Chris Winters in Seattle. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Winters: If I were to take a single important concept away from this book, what should it be?

Patel: The idea would be that we are made by capitalism, and that capitalism can’t last forever. The reason we wrote the book is so we could help broker conversations between the different areas of social movement activism and social transformation. We’re hoping that these ideas of seven cheap things can help social movements identify their shared points of solidarity with other movements. When movements begin, they always start with living politics and real struggles.

Capitalism can’t last forever.

Obviously, people start the work of change and resistance where they are. You always start with the politics the way you find them, you can’t start from any ideal position. But understanding that, for example, the struggles of activism in Black Lives Matter are linked to the struggles of activism in 350.org, which is linked in turn to the struggles of activism in certain parts of Slow Food, is I think the contribution that we wanted to make.

And if you think systemically, we can figure out ways of fighting them all at once, which is what we have to do.

Winters: You identify toward the end of the book some promising signs where organizations are in fact taking on causes transcending their traditional political boundaries: the Movement for Black Lives taking on fossil fuels, for example. La Via Campesina talking about disability rights. Are you seeing the future of activism moving in that direction, toward taking that broader view?

Patel: I do. I know that there are still parts of, for example, the environmental movement that don’t particularly care about people as much as they care about pandas, and that their environmentalists can sometimes be misanthropic. But in general, even the Sierra Club has started to melt its traditional antipathy towards immigration and is taking race more seriously than it has in the past. The Sierra Club is a fairly large environmental movement, and its transformations have been made possible by the ceaseless activism of people who are in the environmental justice community. La Via Campesina starts off as an organization that’s about fighting the World Trade Organization and ends up as an organization that is transforming human relationships with nature, that takes feminism incredibly seriously, that tackles issues of gender violence. And that’s because they have to. It’s not because someone in a Politburo meeting decides, “Oh, this is probably what we ought to tackle next.” It’s because the way that La Via Campesina has built their politics around food sovereignty encourages and demands this kind of spread of mission, because actually in order to be food sovereign as La Via Campesina wants to be, they have to attend to issues of gender equality.

Winters: I read this book as an upending of the traditional historical narrative in the sense that you’re taking a look at the significant events of the past 700 years and looking at them not as what they meant at the time, but how they laid the groundwork for what we are experiencing in right now. When you were researching the book, were you intending to look at the historical underpinnings of our current system and how it got there, or were you working backwards from the present?

Patel: I think, in a sense, it was a bit of both. And that’s because we knew that the sorts of intervention we wanted to make, and in particular we wanted to bring history to some of the debate and some of the activism. But we also discovered new historical connections based on the kinds of questions we’re asking of our present moment.

We wanted to bring history to some of the debate and some of the activism.

Early on that we knew that Christopher Columbus was going to be an interesting figure, for example, in the stories that we were telling. So we dug deeper and deeper and deeper and found much more about him than either of us had known. For instance, since we’re interested in how finance works today, we wanted to find out more about what Columbus did. The structure of the finance that made Christopher Columbus’ journeys possible, I think, is very interesting, based on a web of promises of future colonization, and financiers made rich through war looking for a high return. It’s very modern. His attitudes toward women and his attitudes toward work … and what he thought of nature. What we found was that by coming at the history of capitalism with a clear analytical agenda and then doing the deep sort of archival work, we were then able to sort of spin it back to the present.

For instance: here we are in Seattle. Jeff Bezos is one of the kings of the hill in this town. And in many ways, the things that Columbus says and the way he talks investors into giving him money, through which he always manages to get paid and his investors have to wait a long time for their money to come, the ways that he offers new frontiers in which entrepreneurship and civilization will be brought back—that’s almost exactly the kind of language that Jeff Bezos is using right now to talk about going into space and colonizing the moon.

If you look at the finances, the kinds of promises that (Columbus) offers his bankers, the structure of financing through which that money comes, the way that he swindles his workers out of full payment and relies on slaves, it all looks very contemporary. This is not to say Jeff Bezos is a slaver, but it certainly does say that the kinds of minerals that allow Alexa to order things for you in the shower come from the systems that require modern day slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are 40 million slaves in the world today. The persistence of slavery and its compatibility with high finance and with people being paid wage labor, that’s old. You don’t need to be conspiratorial, and one doesn’t need to bend history at all to observe that slaves, alongside wage workers, alongside entrepreneurs, alongside bankers, alongside people offering new things from the frontier, is happening in the 21st century as much as it was in Columbus’ day.

Winters: You define cheapness as a system that the capitalist system has used to overcome its periodic crises. There’s a quote in here: “We’re arguing that the modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at the frontier, crises that resulted from human and extrahuman life inserting itself into the calculus. The modern world happened because externalities struck back.” Is there a lower limit to cheapness within the capitalist world structure, or a finite number of frontiers that we’re going to run up against?

Patel: One oughtn’t bet against the imagination of capitalism to be able to open up new frontiers. The frontier of genetic material is one that continues to be profitably mined. The fact that (Tesla founder Elon) Musk and Bezos are off into space, that The Financial Times recently had a supplement on space mining, is, I think, very telling.

Systems change happens when business as usual can no longer continue.

At the end of the day, when we talk about externalities striking back, it’s not just about a climatic or geological shift. This is also about the ways that humans have rebelled against certain kinds of order being put on them, whether it’s about slavery or about domestic work or it’s about racism. … Whether it’s about workers going on strike or about slave rebellions, or about certain ideas of a nation coming back to bite the colonists on the ass, that’s what we’re getting at with the idea of externalities striking back. There always comes a point at which societies undergo a state shift. Now looks like one of those times.

The reason we look to the plague, the Black Death, and the end of the Medieval Warming Period is because, they may be augurs of change. It’s a sad commonplace to hear a lament that, in order for things to get better, they need to get worse. “Oh we just have to get to a point when so many people are suffering, and then there’ll be a change.” But how bad does it have to be? We’ve already had a billion people going hungry. Systems change happens when business as usual can no longer continue. Business as usual is entirely compatible with a billion people going hungry on the Earth today.

So you have to ask, “Well, what is it that’s going to create that phase shift?” Historically in Europe, the answer lay in a mixture of disease, climate (change), and a strong hand being given for the peasantry and the exploited. And the number of exploited in the world today is fairly large. We are in a time of particular climate tumult, and the possibility of old orders being transformed or resurrected or remixed is one that a lot of groups are interested in looking at.

Winters: The concept of capitalism as something to name and define and study, it only goes back to the 19th century or so. What we’re describing here is, especially in the medieval period, is human greed as the driving force. Is there a point where it became meta-capitalism, the capitalists became capitalistic about the capitalist system, and it wasn’t just about trying to line their own bank accounts?

Patel: Banking and the modern banking system that emerges from Italian city-states, I think, constitute a very important moment in how that greed gets facilitated and channeled. … That’s why again Christopher Columbus gets to be such an important figure. What he embodies is not just a greed for money, but an attitude that can look on the world and automatically appraise its value—the retail profit in slaves, nature, and so on.

I don’t think that you need money in order to be able to make social change happen.

So is there a moment where capitalists become meta-capitalists? No, but I think that when you see the confluence of seven cheap things coming together, I do think the “long 15th century,” to use Fernand Braudel’s term, is sort of the beginning of capitalism. If you want to give it a birthdate, the first Columbus Day is as good as any.

Winters: When we start talking about the solutions at the end of the book, the broader steps to build or at least lay the groundwork for something that would come after capitalism, one of them is the idea of re-imagination. You’ve made this abstract distinction between nature and society as these two things that were separated arbitrarily in the beginning, and that this abstraction has allowed this classification system that we call capitalism today. Re-imagination, as you define it, is a psychological shift, presumably that would allow us to go back to this original abstraction and repair that split, or would allow something to be created that would be something other than just yet another thing that is embedded within the capitalist worldview.

Patel: Well, I’m glad you seized on that. The bumper sticker problem that a number of people notice is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. When you ask folks to imagine what they want instead of this world? Blank stares all around.

Yet, not far from here, you have Coast Salish communities that have profoundly interesting relationships with nature, relationships that can point the way to what a different world might be like. So let’s look at the salmon festival. It begins with the celebration of the first salmon caught swimming upstream. The festival runs for 10 days, during which no fishing is allowed. While the first salmon is prepared and eaten, all the other salmon go upstream and they spawn. And then you start fishing for salmon. But for 10 days, you don’t, and instead you celebrate the treaty that your people have with the salmon people.

These transformations have to be collective and social.

It’s not open season. It’s the result of a treaty. To enter into a treaty with extra-human life rather than simply possess it involves a deep psychological reorientation. It’s an individual transformation of a relationship in the world and with nature, but also it’s a social one. If an individual asserted, “I’ve signed a treaty with salmon,” that’d be bonkers. … These transformations have to be collective and social.

Winters: Can you fight capital without capital?

Patel: That’s the only way it’s ever been fought. There’s a very good book called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Duke University Press, 2017). And particularly in a town like Seattle, the home of the Gates Foundation, that’s important to bear in mind.

Obviously movements need money for buses and childcare and organizing materials and salaries. But the idea that it’s only through having vast scads of cash that the big transformation’s going to happen—I think that’s misguided. I mean, look at the white supremacists who seem to have something of a foothold in this town. Their ideology is spreading without having massive infusions of money, it’s spreading through viral means and through getting people to do things and turning up at events and participating in what they understand to be a movement. And they’re doing that for free.

So I don’t think that you need money in order to be able to make social change happen. I mean, it helps, but it shouldn’t substitute for the hard grassroots organizing. … The movements that I’ve seen around the world that have been able to organize successfully, they’ve done it on a shoestring.

That was the case for Duke Dalke. After spending six months behind bars, he tried to return to his previous line of work as a leader in the beverage industry in the greater Chicago area.

“After being released from prison I could not find a job,” Dalke says. “When it got to a background check, or just being honest and disclosing my history, they would close up the folder and say, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’” Dalke says. 

According to a 2023 report in the Journal of Labor and Employment Law, 60% of employers said they would not hire someone with a criminal record. According to the report, 87% of all employers said they do background checks prior to employment across all sectors. For clerical, service, and sales jobs it’s even higher, at 90%. As a result, 60 to 75% of people who were formerly incarcerated remain unemployed a year after leaving prison. 

Those circumstances are what brought Dalke to I Have a Bean—a coffee roaster in Wheaton, Illinois, just outside of Chicago—at the recommendation of someone else who was incarcerated. The roastery helps people like them in the uphill battle to find gainful employment. Dalke has been with I Have a Bean for eight years now and has since transitioned into a leadership role. He even interviews potential new employees—passing the baton of social mobility to candidates who were formerly incarcerated. 

Dalke is one of many around the country who have gotten a second chance at life with the help of the coffee business, be it in roasting, brewing, or being a barista.

Individual and Collective Success

In Washington state, Underground Ministries—an organization that helps the formerly incarcerated get re-acclimated to daily life outside of prison, has a similar program. Executive director Chris Hoke says the coffee business was born in 2016 because the ministry had a direct trade relationship with a farm in Honduras. 

“We started on our own, bringing big bags of coffee up,” he says.  

Underground Ministries then partnered with Fidalgo, a regional coffee brand. They launched Underground Coffee, which aims to help the previously incarcerated get gainful employment and build up a solid record that could help them progress in a new career path. 

Fidalgo Coffee CEO Darryl Miller says that in the eight years since the company launched, some of his best employees have been formerly incarcerated, including a current delivery driver. 

When people ask what the purpose of a business is, some people say it’s to turn a profit, Miller says. “For us it’s about making a difference in society.”

Burgeoning Baristas

New York City’s Department of Corrections teamed up with Procreate Coffee—a Brooklyn-based organization that offers a number of barista-training programs for the general public—to launch a training program for inmates. Procreate, which operates a brick and mortar location in Brooklyn, now has a training facility on Rikers Island—where the prison is located. The collaborative first launched the barista-training initiative at Rikers Island in 2017 and has expanded several times since then to be open to more inmates. They’re set to grow even more in the months to come.

The move comes despite massive budget cuts across New York City, which has led to Sunday closures of the New York Public Library, a 40% reduction in sidewalk trash collection from the Department of Sanitation, and even a reduction in other classes and programs at the Rikers Island prison. The barista program at Rikers, however, was spared. 

The program gives inmates who’ve been infraction-free for at least 30 days a crash course on everything from coffee roasting to latté creation to customer service.

The program stands out within the city’s criminal justice system, which has been plagued with a number of massive systemic problems. 

Rikers is historically one of the most overcrowded jails in the country. The jail faced numerous allegations of misconduct over the years, including the case of Kalif Browder, who spent three years in jail, despite never being convicted of a crime, before he ultimately took his own life. 

Now the Department of Corrections is also in the hot seat amid newly surfaced images that show inmates locked up in caged showers. 

The barista program is making a difference at Rikers.

Brew the Change

Starbucks, the world’s biggest coffee shop chain, endorsed the “Ban the Box” movement on its job applications in 2015 by omitting the mandatory criminal history box. The Seattle-based coffee shop chain joined other large retailers like Target and Walmart in doing so. 

The move largely proved to be successful. According to a report published in Iowa Law Review, by removing the box, people who were formerly incarcerated were 27% more likely to receive a callback than before the initiative took effect. 

There are dozens of independent coffee shops around the country that are specifically designed to help the formerly incarcerated get back to work, including The Fringe Coffee House in Hamilton, Ohio—about 20 miles north of Cincinnati. 

“My wife and I are both ex-felons. We both have been to prison, so for us this is a lived experience. When we came home there were not a lot of opportunities,” says co-owner Patrick Davis.

“We figured there’s got to be a better way. People deserve a second chance, and no one is going to hire us, so we created our own business,” Davis says.

Now in business for five years, The Fringe Coffee House employs 15 people.

“We started a business that, rather than discriminating against someone with a criminal record, we made that a requirement—kind of flipping it on its head,” says Davis.

But if you walk 30 minutes, to the very end of Mauá Square, the Museum of Tomorrow, a science museum that was built in an attempt to revitalize the Port Zone, sits like a spaceship, and to its left, the Rio Museum of Art (MAR) towers over the sidewalk that leads visitors deeper into the city. These three buildings, as well as the installation of a tram system in the area, are part of an urbanization project that has ebbed and flowed since 2009—gaining steam when Rio hosted the Olympics in 2016 and the World Cup in 2018—to make the area into the city of the future.

Amid these investments, the Port Zone is filled with Black activists, researchers, and curators who are passionate about reckoning with the city’s past. The Port Zone, which spans the neighborhoods of Saúde, Gamboa, Santo Cristo, and Caju, was the biggest slave port in the Americas from the last few decades of the 18th century up until 1830, receiving an estimated 700,000 enslaved Africans, with some sources estimating the real number being closer to 1 million. After the abolition of slavery, free Black people used the area to build communities designed to preserve African religions and cultures within a society that increasingly wanted to erase any memory of slavery. 

Walking inland, past the graffitied warehouses and toward the neighborhood of Gamboa, the historical landmark of Cais do Valongo can be seen, protected by a few metal barriers. The site, where historians estimate at least one million enslaved people arrived in the 20 years it functioned in the 19th century, was nearly erased twice in Brazilian history: In 1843, it was remodeled to remove evidence that enslaved people were chained to be sold there, and in 1911, it was landfilled to build a square. 

Though Black researchers had known for decades that the site was hidden under the ground, it wasn’t officially rediscovered until 2011 when the city began doing construction for the 2016 Olympics. “This rediscovery marked a new era of Black memory in the city of Rio,” says Thais Matos, a Black geographer and researcher at Universidade Federal Fluminense. “It signified that Rio is an undeniably Black city, even though there are attempts at erasing this history.” Matos says Black activists and researchers, who’d already been working to preserve the territory, strategically used the Port Zone urbanization plans to argue for the preservation of the site, highlighting the violent history of slavery in the area and also emphasizing how the urbanization project was removing residents from the area. “The universities in the city would never have enough money to do this excavation.” 

But this strategic use came with a price. “The city understood that it wasn’t in the city’s interest to continue to erase that history anymore,” Matos explains. “They thought this history [could] be appealing for tourists coming to our city.” Hoping to capitalize on this discovery and not lose the momentum of construction, the city agreed to preserve the site, and UNESCO declared Cais do Valongo a World Heritage Site in 2017. 

White-Owned Opportunism

For community activist and photographer Maurício Hora, who has lived in Morro da Providência, the favela (working-class neighborhood) that towers over Gamboa, his whole life, the city’s begrudging preservation of Cais do Valongo wasn’t an attempt to honor Afro-Brazilian culture. Instead, it was about profit, allowing white-owned businesses to move into the area and edge out Black residents. As Tara Nelson details in a 2019 story for RioOnWatch, these white-owned businesses, including YouTube, have moved into the area. 

Hora mentions Largo da Prainha, a spot recently highlighted as one of the best spots in the city in a New York Times package about Rio. “Nothing on that square belongs to us. We don’t have animosity with anybody there,” he says. “The problem is that that area became a money-making space because of our culture. Our intentions in the area were never commercial.” 

In his studio in Gamboa, where large photos of his community are displayed on the wall, Hora says that the city’s projects in the Port Zone have brought opportunistic entrepreneurs to the area who haven’t hesitated to capitalize on his neighborhood’s Black history. “I call it afro-opportunism. This is an area that will stop being Black because of businesses that push Black people out.”

This money-making machinery came to a head in March 2022, after business owners in Largo São Francisco da Prainha—a historical square where Black women used to host and feed people who escaped slavery—had a disagreement with a local all-women samba band, Moça Prosa, that had been holding monthly shows in the public square for nearly 10 years. Newly opened bars in the areas disputed Moça Prosa’s right to perform in the square because the band sold their own drinks to cover the costs of their performance. While bar owners argued that this could cut into their profits, Moça Prosa refused to perform for free. 

After a number of meetings, the parties couldn’t reach a consensus, so Moça Prosa decided to move to a nearby property that was given to them by the city. YES! reached out to the city of Rio for comment, but received no response.

“We aren’t new here, we aren’t opportunistic,” Moça Prosa producer Ana Priscila da Silva told O Globo at the time. “We just want to come back to where we used to play after we were forced out because of the pandemic.”

Practically, Hora also says the projects have disrupted public transport in the area, particularly because of the tram system that was implemented to connect Rio’s city center to the Port Zone. Hora and other sources interviewed for this article say the system works well for people who come from the outside of the Port Zone, but the buses the local population depended on to reach other neighborhoods were removed to make space for the tram. “I used to be able to go anywhere in the city from here because of the buses,” Hora says. “Now we only have the tram.” 

Preserving Buried History

In 1996, civilians doing construction work in their home about 10 minutes away from Cais do Valongo discovered a cemetery where newly arrived Africans who died right after arriving in the port were buried. Merced Guimarães dos Anjos and Petruccio dos Anjos alerted the authorities about their discovery, but the state didn’t offer resources to preserve the site at the time. 

In 2005, the New Blacks Institute of Research and Memory (IPN) was founded, with private resources and funding. Today, the institution survives on ticket costs, private partnerships, grants, and a postgraduate degree offered by the institute’s educational branch. Upon the discovery of the cemetery, the state promised to research the findings, but Guimarães dos Anjos says that never happened, and she had to take preservation efforts into her own hands. In 2017, IPN almost closed due to lack of funding. 

“For 27 years, since the archeological discovery, the Institute never had effective help from public authorities,” says Alexandre Nadai, spokesperson for IPN. “We have to charge entry to the museum because we don’t have a sustainable way to keep the doors open otherwise.” While the Museum of Tomorrow receives financial support from the state that maintains its free entry, IPN has to charge entry to keep itself above water, receiving 41,000 visitors in 2022 alone. “We are educating people on racism, but we never have the guarantee that we will have enough money to be functioning tomorrow,” Nadai says.

The Port Zone is full of places like IPN, where residents and activists took it upon themselves to preserve Black history—places Black researchers know are significant but haven’t been deemed historically significant by the city. 

If you walk five minutes from IPN, you’ll come across a house where the belongings of Tia Ciata, one of the foremothers of samba itself, are shoved into a tiny, rectangular space that Matos says used to be a public bathroom. The space is managed by Ciata’s living descendants, but they don’t receive public funding for their work. The Morro da Providência, which Hora says is the first favela in the world, is not marked as such. In the old neighborhood of Santa Rita, another cemetery for enslaved people lies beneath the tracks of the tram system, but there isn’t a single plaque marking the significance of the location. The afroxé group Filhos de Gandhy, founded by port workers in 1951, is currently struggling to raise money for maintenance works in their venue.

“We have to preserve this memory, so [slavery] never happens again,” Nadai says. “But in a structurally racist country, things in Rio are only given value when someone will benefit from it financially. No political party fights for Black people, for the Black cause effectively. There aren’t many Black people in the government, and every 23 minutes, a young Black person is killed in Brazil.” 

For Hora, who co-wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in 2012 about the construction being done in the Port Zone at the time, the city’s interest in revitalizing the area doesn’t include the people who already live there. “They don’t think about the people who are from here,” Hora says. “That’s the big problem when a place is set to be transformed by public authorities.” 

When approached for comment, the city of Rio said there is a concern for preservation of Afro-Brazilian history in the Port Zone but did not provide a response to questions about the impacts of gentrification in the area. “The city has created the African Heritage Circuit in the Little Africa region, which includes Cais do Valongo, [and] coordinated the process to make it into a World Heritage Site by UNESCO,” the statement said. On the inclusivity of the Porto Maravalley project, the city said the hub will have diversity and inclusion policies “for Black people and LGBTQIA+ populations,” and that their education branch, Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, will have 100% of students funded by scholarships.

Bringing the Past Into the Future

In March 2023, Brazil’s first lady, Janja Silva, and the new Minister for Racial Equality, Anielle Franco, visited IPN. Nadai hopes the incoming federal administration, which has reestablished the Cais do Valongo management committee, will be favorable to the institute’s concerns and needs. However, the Port Zone has three branches of government that exercise their authority—municipal, city hall, and federal—which can complicate juridical processes of preservation.

“We understand that our cause is supra partisan,” Nadai says. “We have a good relationship with many branches of the government, and we use that dialogue to not let people from the outside of the neighborhood profit off Black culture.” Nadai and the staff at IPN hope that one day, governmental policies will enable the institute to stop charging, making their work more accessible to all. “Our wish is that there’s a state policy that gives us better sustainability and longevity,” Nadai says. Despite Porto Maravalley’s promise of inclusive policies, it’s difficult to understand why state funding isn’t directed to the institutions that already exist in the Port Zone of Rio. 

Until then, the people who live in and love the Port Zone of Rio will continue to do the preservation work that keeps Afro-Brazilian memory alive.

This colonial, white supremacist definition of prosperity has been framed as an inherently individual pursuit; we are in competition to have more than those around us, and winning, we are led to believe, will bring us happiness. But as rampant inequality in wealth, health, education, and nearly every other measure of well-being is amplified by the climate crisis (itself a result of the ecological devastation wrought by runaway capitalism), there is a growing movement to question this conception of prosperity. 

Communities historically excluded from this limited definition of prosperity have long known there are other ways to build prosperity. Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income communities around the country have proven time and time again that shared prosperity is not only more effective at building communal wealth and well-being, but also at building resilient, responsive systems that can adapt to ever-changing environments, be they physical, social, political, or economic. 

In this four-part reported series, YES! explores the ways that individuals, movements, and communities are redefining prosperity—shifting from a narrow focus on economic growth to a more holistic approach that considers social, environmental, and cultural factors in achieving well-being for individuals and communities. 

By highlighting both innovations and longstanding models of shared prosperity, this series explores how we arrived at this narrow, exclusionary, and exploitative understanding of prosperity—and also illuminates a path toward a future where the well-being of the people, the planet, and our societies drives our collective action.

A People’s Prosperity

Capitalism’s endless economic growth prioritizes the individual over community and creates extreme inequality. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
By Anoa Changa & Ericka Taylor

Cooperative Ways to Weather the Silver Tsunami

As baby boomer business owners retire, their employees are taking ownership of their own futures.

By Jaisal Noor

Soil Builds Prosperity From the Ground Up

Respecting the humanity and history of soil can help us grow a more resilient future for all.

By Breanna Draxler

The Rainbow Connection

Intergenerational housing for LGBTQ elders and youth can relieve isolation and housing instability for both groups.

By Greg Hernandez

This series is underwritten by a grant from the Kendeda Fund’s People, Place, and Planet program. While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial policies and standards here.

New Economy Week will have plenty going on offline as well.

The answer, it turns out, is up for debate. Even among the thinkers and organizers most invested in the term “new economy”—Gar Alperovitz and Chuck Collins come to mind—vigorous debates and conversations are going on all the time about what it is, where it should focus, and how to make it spread.

To focus that discussion, the New Economy Coalition, a nonprofit organization that supports more than 100 member groups, has set next week aside as the second annual “New Economy Week.”

Monday through Friday, the days will be packed with online panels, local events, and writings. The coalition has picked five juicy questions about new economy issues and sent them to its members to see what they think. We’ll be curating their responses each day from Monday to Friday. You can find links to all five days here (we’ll be updating the page with articles and links daily).

And New Economy Week will have plenty going on offline as well. The activities range from multi-day conferences such as “Who Owns Vermont?”—which will explore alternative ownership models in that state—to more intimate gatherings like happy hours celebrating October—our “national cooperative month”—in San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, several hundred inventors, entrepreneurs, activists, and organizers will gather in Detroit for the “New Work New Culture” conference to discuss topics like the financing of community-owned projects, the way cooperatives are portrayed in the media, and the role of local food production.

“We’re hoping that people will become inspired and empowered,” said Mike Sandmel, the New Economy Coalition’s manager of coalition engagement, “not just to oppose our unjust and unsustainable economy, but to take part in building something better.”

Owned by the for-profit education company Corinthian Colleges, Inc., Everest commercials are known to target low-income people, promising a flexible education and, through it, jobs that earn more than minimum wage. They’re often aggressive, the actors calling viewers out for being lazy and then daring them to live up to their full potential. Hornes was an easy target.

“The first commercial I saw was the girl and she’s like ‘Oh, you’ve got to get off the couch,’” he said. “You can go to work, go to school, everything like that.”

Hornes, who had dropped out of high school to pursue a career in music, had just turned 20 and thought getting a degree sounded like a good idea. Plus, the woman in the ad promised, he could work around his current gigs. So he called Everest.

After that first informational call, Hornes said Everest representatives phoned him constantly, sometimes up to four times a day. They told him he needed to enroll for classes in order to graduate as soon as possible. They promised that a “network of employers” would be waiting after he graduated, and they would help him find a job. So Hornes signed up for a degree in business management, and at Everest’s suggestion he took out loans to pay for it.

“I used to always tell people I went to Everest,” he said of the early days, when he was proud of being a college student. But now, he said, “I don’t even like telling people I went to this school.”

At the time he enrolled, Hornes didn’t know how to evaluate a school’s accreditation or what to expect from college classes. Sometimes teachers didn’t even show up, and much of what they did teach felt like common sense. He said he didn’t even really have homework.

When he started to look for work after graduation, Hornes quickly realized his options were not as abundant as Everest had led him to believe. Job leads from the career center were sometimes forwarded from Craigslist. He hadn’t realized that many other colleges and employers don’t take degrees from for-profit colleges seriously.

“Employers find it laughable,” he said. “I’ve literally taken it off my resume. That’s how embarrassing it is.”

Now 24, Hornes shares a Los Angeles studio apartment with his aunt. He often works 16 hours a day at two part-time jobs, one of them at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant in the airport.

And that degree from Everest? He owes $56,000 for it.

A Rolling Jubilee for student debt

The abysmal quality of Hornes’ academic experience may be extreme, but the debt—and the way it will constrain his life, possibly for decades—is not. Hornes and millions of other former students and their families are part of a student debt crisis of tremendous proportions: Americans—some of them senior citizens—together owe more than $1 trillion in student loan debt, the figure steadily rising as states and the federal government cut funding for higher eduction. Even credit card debt is not as large.

That’s why Strike Debt, an organization that emerged out of Occupy Wall Street to protect debtors’ rights, announced today it has purchased—and abolished—more than $4 million in student debt. It’s a first for the organization, which until now has only canceled medical debt.

The organization’s Rolling Jubilee project used $100,000 of raised capital to buy the privately owned debt of more than 2,700 Everest College students. They did this by purchasing private student loans from secondary markets for pennies on the dollar—just the way collection agencies do. And then, they simply canceled it.

The idea arose from conversations three years ago at Occupy Wall Street. There, and at smaller gatherings focused specifically on the issue of debt, people who held student loans or medical debts often stood in a circle and encouraged each other to shake off their feelings of guilt. Sometimes they brought their bills or other paperwork and set them on fire. Meanwhile, members were constantly studying the mechanisms through which banks, collection agencies, and other organizations traded and profited from debt.

They took what they learned and turned it into Rolling Jubilee.

The project kicked off in November 2012—on the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’s eviction from New York’s Zuccotti Park—and organizers raised more than $250,000. Because Strike Debt was paying only about $5 for $100 of debt, that amount allowed them to purchase millions of dollars worth of other peoples’ unpaid medical obligations.

In the nearly two years since then, organizers this week told YES! that Rolling Jubilee has canceled more than $15 million in medical debt.

But unlike hospital bills, federal student loans are guaranteed by the government and are mostly unavailable for purchase on secondary markets. This is where debt collectors usually hunt for it. However, because Everest College encourages students to privately borrow a percentage of their tuition to supplement money available through federal student loans, this for-profit school created a unique pool of student debt ripe for the raiding.

“We started with medical debt because there is a clear moral argument,” said Laura Hanna, a Strike Debt organizer. “People shouldn’t be forced into debt because they get sick.”

Hanna said education was a natural next step, from an ethical point of view: “With education, people are trying to work to improve their lives. To make something better for themselves. Instead, most people fall into a debt trap. And there is no escape … not even through bankruptcy.”

Predatory Lending U

Yesterday, the national Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., for defrauding tens of thousands of students. The CFPB accused Corinthian of running a “predatory lending scheme,” enrolling students in an overpriced education that would never help them get a job.

Corinthian is charged with lying to prospective students about job placement statistics. Ben Lopez, a former Everest student, told us he was hired as a librarian’s assistant in January when he finished his program, but after his graduation ceremony a few months later, he was laid off. Part of the company’s schtick is to hire recent grads to inflate career placement numbers, classifying one or two days’ employment as a career.

When 20-year-old Hornes first talked to Everest on the phone, the numbers they fed him were based on this and similar practices.

According to the suit, from July 2011 to March 2014, Corinthian issued 130,000 private loans to pay its own exorbitant fees. The outstanding loans total more than $568 million.

And what kinds of students did they target? The CFPB claims that according to Corinthian’s own internal documents, they sought out people with “low self-esteem” and “[f]ew people in their lives who care about them”; “isolated” people who felt “stuck, unable to see and plan well for future.” They intentionally marketed to people with little-to-no financial literacy or credit history.

Everest recruits through daytime television advertisements like this one, which Hornes says he saw.

Moreover, the school misled students to believe it had no financial interest in the private loans they were pushing, known as “Genesis” loans. But because the law prevented Everest schools from receiving all of their funding from federal loans, they were incentivized to convince students to take private ones, which then allowed the school to receive more public money. As the Bureau put it, “Every Genesis loan dollar that Corinthian induced its students to borrow, in effect, allowed Corinthian to receive up to an additional nine dollars in Title IV aid.”

Corinthian has been under fire for a long time. It’s been accused of fraud by more than one federal agency and is on the verge of collapse. (For more on Corinthian’s sad backstory, check out John Oliver below).

If won, the CFPB’s case will secure more than $500 million, which will be used to cancel existing private student loans. That would be great for former students like Hornes. But it could also take years, while many who owe the company money slog away at minimum wage, trying to pay down their Genesis loan.

When asked whether he might consider going to college somewhere else in the meantime, Hornes says he is interested, but wary. Going to school almost anywhere else would, for him, mean more debt.

A debtors union

As effective as Rolling Jubilee has been in calling attention to debt issues, $4 million hardly makes a dent in a trillion-dollar picture—not to mention the billions of dollars tied up in medical and other debts.

“Rolling Jubilee is a fantastic way to punch through the illusion that you actually owe what the 1 percent thinks you owe,” said Thomas Gokey, a Rolling Jubilee co-founder who’s eager to take things to the next level. “It’s not going to be possible to buy all the debt out there and get rid of it, so we’re going to need other tactics to win … it’s going to be a coordinated, large-scale effort.”

Alongside today’s $4 million abolition announcement, Strike Debt is also unveiling plans for a new project: Debt Collective. Gokey, who’s forthright about his personal investment in the effort (“My student debt today is significantly more than the last time I talked to YES!” he told us—and that was just two years ago), calls Debt Collective an “on ramp” to bigger changes and more aggressive tactics when it comes to abolishing debt. “There’s never been something like a debtors union before.”

Gokey envisions a movement where debtors are empowered to “renegotiate, resist, and refuse unfair debts” in the same way labor unions collectively leverage better pay, safer work environments, and time off. And to beat down the enormous pile of debt in general, they’ll advocate for free education and universal health care.

Hanna compares Debt Collective to “the factory floor of the past,” when labor organizers, gathered in the same physical space, came up with tactics like slowdowns, walkouts, and strikes. As debtors, Hanna said, “We might engage in collective bargaining or more robust refusal campaigns down the line … with an aim to transform the way we fund and access social goods.”

As for this round of jubilee, Strike Debt has been sending letters to the thousands of debtors from Everest, delivering the news of a lifetime. Unfortunately, Hornes will not be one of them (debts are purchased anonymously, and Strike Debt only finds out debtors’ identities afterward). Still, he’s not giving in to the prospect of a lifetime of interest payments while working minimum wage jobs.

Back in Los Angeles, Hornes is now a key organizer with the Everest Avengers, a group of nearly 200 current and former Everest College students who feel they were duped into believing they were paying for a good education and are now burdened with crippling debt because of it. And within the Avengers, the Corinthian Collective was formed.

Made up of about 40 former students from the for-profit school system, the Corinthian Collective has been working directly with Strike Debt to strategize around freeing students from unfair and fraudulent loans. On the table, Hornes hopes, will be options like legal action and working to convince the Department of Education to discharge outstanding debts for Everest students across the country.

He may have missed out on the high-quality education in business management he aspired to. Instead, though, Hornes has gotten a crash course in leadership and organizing. Today, he’ll be facilitating national conversations uniting Everest students, publicizing the facts behind his fraudulent debt, and fielding questions from the media.

Finishing up his short shift break before heading back to Carl’s Jr. last night, he said he now sees himself as a “buffer” who helps demoralized classmates understand that the education they received at Everest College will likely never lead to the jobs they were promised. Instead, it has brought them together.

Post offices are built like banks.

And that’s just one reason why postal banking, a hot idea in economic policy debates, is viable. Physical and operational structures already exist that could help USPS offer basic financial services: prepaid debit cards, mobile transactions, new check cashing services, savings accounts, and even simple, small-dollar loans.

“There’s a post office every five blocks in Manhattan—there’s accessibility in every zip code,” explained Frankie Wright, 32, a USPS Supervisor of Customer Services in East Harlem. “On an operational level, we’re already capable.”

The idea, popularized by journalist David Dayen and law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, would create a public option for credit and help insulate Main Street in the likely event of another financial crisis.

For example, a borrower without access to a commercial bank might typically accept a small loan at an unreasonably high interest rate from a payday lender. If a postal banking system were in place, that customer could instead walk into the local USPS branch and take out a simple loan as a government-provided public service. Due to the restricted nature of postal banking, customers’ access to funds would be comparatively safe from vultures and the whirlwinds of the broader, deeper financial system.

Although the idea seems new here and now, a successful U.S. Postal Saving System already existed from 1911-1967, and similar schemes operate overseas today, including in Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK.

Though the proposal is not without its critics, there are surprisingly few legal and political hurdles to implementation. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently penned a U.S. News op-ed in earnest support, and just three weeks ago, she joined the Pew Charitable Trusts for a conference in Washington, D.C., where speakers debated common concerns: Postal banking advocates deplored the struggles of the financially insecure, while opponents expressed skepticism regarding the operational capacity of USPS to offer financial services, and questioned the effects of those new services on the federal budget.

It’s expensive to be poor

In the U.S, 38 percent of the population—88 million people—either have no bank accounts (the “unbanked”) or are at least partially dependent upon high-cost services like payday lending (the “underbanked”). These households pay dearly for basics.

In 2012, the income for the average underbanked household was about $25,500, but it spent an average of nearly $2,500 solely on interest and fees for alternative financial services (AFS) like payday lending. That’s almost 10 percent of their annual income—about as much as they spent on food.

Unbanked and underbanked people are a mix of working and middle-class families, students, the unemployed, and others living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet financial exclusion is disproportionately rampant among people of color and immigrants, and especially women within those groups. According to the last comprehensive government study, published in September 2012, more than half of African-American households were either unbanked or underbanked, with similar numbers for Hispanic and unmarried, female-led households.

There are many reasons for this maldistribution—most of them structural and based in discrimination. Regardless, the disparate impact of financial insecurity is unacceptable. Former Harlem resident and public banking advocate Alexander Hamilton did not envision such an exclusive system. Providing broad access to money and credit is why the government charters, insures, and regulates financial institutions in the first place.

The brick-and-mortar network

“People have faith in the post office,” said Wright. “USPS is a structured, silent organization. We operate discreetly. Every stamp, every dollar is accounted for. People know this.”

Wright, who started as a letter carrier at 20 and now works in management, has expertise in distribution, delivery, and labor relations—and he’s overwhelmingly supportive of postal banking and confident USPS can make the transition. “We’ve handled the invention of email and the shift from letters to parcels. We can handle this.”

USPS is the country’s most most well-liked federal agency and one of the most trusted institutions of any kind when it comes to privacy. As Wright mentioned, much of USPS management, as well as its lawyers and regulators, insist the country’s second-largest employer can and should provide basic financial services.

Indeed, the USPS Inspector General has written a white paper detailing steps for implementation. The American Postal Workers Union (AFL-CIO) is also supportive. At the Pew conference, representative Phil Tabbita argued USPS is well-suited to the task. USPS employees are already trained to handle simple financial transactions in the form of money orders and remittances. Conservatives like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) might suggest that the workforce—a quarter of whom are military veterans—will suddenly become utterly incompetent if saddled with an expanded job description. But these cries often stem from a poorly disguised—and poorly informed—anti-labor ideology.

Deficit hysteria

There is rampant misunderstanding regarding the laws and accounting that would govern postal banking. Opponents claim that new financial services would financially tank USPS and subsequently create an unsustainable fiscal burden for the federal government.

But these concerns don’t add up. First of all, the post office is not directly funded by tax revenues. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 has legally forced USPS to become self-sufficient, to generate its revenue from its own services, whatever draconian cuts Congress has since imposed. Furthermore, the analysis by the Inspector General suggests USPS itself is likely to turn a profit off of new financial services through modest fees and interest.

If preventing Main Street from falling into the flames along with Wall Street is indeed a national concern, then a stable postal banking system could be our best defense.

Even so, regardless of the post office’s own financial situation, the federal government’s balance sheet does not include USPS assets and liabilities. Indeed, the separation is so complete that there’s a uniquely foolish law mandating USPS set aside money today for all future retiree health benefits—without subsidy from the Treasury. This unique burden, which is not imposed upon any other government enterprise, is the chief cause of USPS’ financial woes.

Even if USPS finances were included in the broader federal budget—as they arguably should be—Deficit Hawk policies like the pre-funding requirement would make even less sense. As Deficit Owls, like former Deputy Treasury Secretary Frank Newman, assert, asking a federal agency directly funded by the U.S. government to save for a far distant future, is like forcing us to wear sweaters in July so we can store warmth for January. Uncle Sam can always create money out of thin air, subject only to inflationary constraints; setting aside dollars for 2058, instead of using them for growth now, is foolish.

Of all the services USPS could offer, small-dollar loans have come under the most scrutiny. Yet they deserve the least concern from the perspective of U.S. government fiscal sustainability. Opponents like Issa have whipped up public skepticism by conjuring an image of hard-working taxpayers “subsidizing” lending for the poor. In this scenario, postal goblins would hoard tax revenues in a vault and dish it out to poor people, who would presumably never pay it back, sending the country hurtling toward the apocalypse.

Issa’s statements at the Pew conference reveal ignorance about how bank lending works in the modern era. When you go to a bank and ask for a loan, the banker does not check the bank’s deposits or reserves before she lends you money.

As some economists have observed for decades and the Bank of England recently detailed, financial institutions do not lend pre-existing funds at all, but instead create “money” out of thin air as they lend. When you receive a loan, the bank also places your funds in an account, simultaneously expanding both the asset and liability sides of its own balance sheet. That’s how banking works.

As such, as long as postal banks are granted the same legal license as private banks—notably access to the federal discount window and interbank lending—the financial stability of postal lending would not depend on some hoarded Scrooge McDuck vault of taxpayer money.

The fire next time

When the next financial crisis hits, a postal bank might need a bailout—but it’s less horrifying than your typical private bank bailout.

During the last crisis, arguments were made that Wall Street firms had to be rescued in order to save Main Street. If preventing Main Street from falling into the flames along with Wall Street is indeed a national concern, then a stable postal banking system—a safe place for most people’s money—could be our best defense.

Although some advocate for a public-private partnership with existing commercial banks, postal banks could instead become an integral piece of a new financial architecture insulating the public and Main Street businesses from the storms of high finance.

For example, imagine the economy busts and people start to lose their jobs. The Federal Reserve could directly credit post office accounts, either with flat transfers, or preferably wages for federally funded jobs. This policy would inject money into Main Street and stabilize prices and wages.

And if you don’t like that idea, as even conservative commentator Reihan Salam at The National Review has recognized, a strong postal banking system could eliminate the need for federal deposit insurance and create more room for the private financial sector to innovate as it pleases. As a corollary, if trauma to Main Street could be avoided via the postal banking system, the case for bailing out Wall Street would lose steam.

To put it bluntly, there’s a strong case for the more affluent clients of commercial banks and the broader public to go their separate ways.

Fighting for basic security

Some progressives and populists might prefer a policy more cooperative or decentralized, but this is the immediately viable alternative to the status quo. The U.S. Conference of Mayors just endorsed the idea and Rep. Cedric Richmond (D–La.) just introduced legislation in the House of Representatives. Although Postmaster General Donahoe is against postal banking, many of his workers, managers, union leaders, regulators, and lawyers support it.

And soon the Postmaster’s endorsement won’t matter. President Obama is filling vacancies on the USPS Board of Governors: There are now 4 Democrats and 4 Republicans and the remaining seat will likely go to a Democrat—at which point the Board can override the Postmaster General.

There might be a confrontation in the courts, but under the Supreme Court ruling in Chevron v. NRDC, agencies are granted wide latitude to interpret their governing statutes. So USPS would likely survive a challenge to providing basic financial services.

Postal banking should be part of every social justice rallying cry. According to the Pew survey results, 31 percent of the unbanked said they would open an account at their local branch. Eighty-one percent of the underbanked said they would use USPS to cash checks, 79 percent percent to pay bills, and 71 percent would choose postal loans over payday loans. That’s 71 percent who could pay for food, childcare, and transportation instead of exorbitant fees on small loans.

These numbers are monumental and they reveal a widespread desire for a public option for basic financial services.

USPS has a duty of public service and can at least be held more accountable than potential servicers like WalMart, which has been moving into the AFS market. Instead of bringing megastores and megabanks to communities lacking credit, we could be asking the federal government to do its job and provide economic security and opportunity.

It’s time to push the envelope.

An ad-hoc campaign to save the townhomes brought together a diverse coalition, including the housing justice group Philadelphia Housing Action and local chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and ACT UP, among others. Thanks to their work, the Philadelphia City Council placed an initial demolition moratorium on the townhomes in March 2022. After a brief legal fight, in April 2023, the property’s owners and developers agreed to transfer 20% of the lot to the City of Philadelphia to be developed as 74 units of affordable housing. Residents forced to leave also received $50,000 each in compensation out of the settlement. Some of those residents have said they plan to return and live in the new affordable units once they are built. 

The struggle to save the UC Townhomes revealed to many something marginalized urbanites already know too well—today, cities are being planned and developed to serve the interests of elites and big corporations rather than the communities that call them home.

“Planners are, ideally, meant to serve the public and the public good,” says Anna Kramer, a professor of urban planning at McGill University in Montreal. “But, in reality, planning is incredibly compromised. It’s subject to neoliberal pressures to increase profits and continue capital accumulation, and planners struggle with these contradictions in practice.”

There was nothing in Philadelphia’s zoning ordinance to prevent the transformation of the UC Townhomes from an island haven of affordable housing for Black families into a high-end housing development or a new research complex. Quite the opposite, the move is just the latest in a long series that has remade a historically Black neighborhood once known as Black Bottom into today’s University City—a gentrified zone known for its moneyed academic and medical institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the University City Science Center.

These institutions spurred the redevelopment of Black Bottom in the mid-20th century as part of a nationwide government-backed process dubbed “urban renewal.” Beginning with the Housing Act of 1949, the federal government provided funds for cities to raze “blighted” or “slum” neighborhoods. While the ostensible goal was improving housing (and the Housing Act provided funds for constructing new low-rent public housing, too), local governments and planning agencies in many cities seized properties through eminent domain, cleared existing homes, and then handed over the lots to private developers to stimulate commercial and industrial growth.

In 1960s Philadelphia, over 800 families were displaced to make way for University City redevelopment projects; about two-thirds of those uprooted were families of color. Officials of the City Planning Council argued redevelopment would create needed jobs and raise living standards. Reporters for The Daily Pennsylvanian captured a different feeling among residents in a January 1967 article: “To … the soon-to-be-displaced families, urban renewal means that giant, impersonal institutions like the University of Pennsylvania are devouring small homeowners, spreading segregation and prolonging social inequities.” During this period, the writer James Baldwin helped popularize the phrase “Negro removal” to describe urban renewal schemes. More recently, ongoing for-profit development in University City has earned itself another telling nickname—“Penn-trification.”

The fact that the adverse outcomes of planning and design decisions are shouldered disproportionately by already marginalized groups, including poor communities and communities of color, is not an unintended side effect, says Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, a professor of planning history and theory at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain. “This is not the dark side of planning,” he says. “This is planning. This is how planning has been practiced for a long, long time.” 

When Sevilla-Buitrago says this has been happening for a long time, he means for more than two centuries, which is how far back his book, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning, traces the phenomenon of profit-driven planning meant to disrupt marginalized and working-class communities. Sevilla-Buitrago writes that those communities are not just points on a map but also spaces that produce and foster unique cultural practices, knowledge, and social values that help them sustain themselves. When authorities plan in ways that are hostile to the development or maintenance of working-class spaces, they disrupt those powerful grassroots social relations.

Since the era of slum clearance and urban renewal schemes, urban planning and design have developed subtler tactics to disrupt communities and the relationships fostered in shared spaces. One example is “defensive urban design,” a practice that uses elements of the built environment to guide the behavior of people using the space. Cara Chellew, a researcher at McGill University, founded #defensiveTO to map defensive design elements across Toronto. Typical examples include benches with armrests in the middle that make lying on them impossible and ledges with embedded spikes to prevent loitering or skateboarding. Other times, defensive design means eliminating amenities, like removing greenery, shade structures, or picnic tables from a park to prevent people from gathering.

Defensive design, part of what’s known as the “crime prevention through environmental design” philosophy, is supposed to make cities safer. But as with earlier planning interventions, it has a hard time shaking accusations of anti-Blackness or other discrimination. “It targets people who use public space the most … and anyone who is a nonconsuming member of the public,” says Chellew. This includes unhoused folks, young people, and those with disabilities—or gig workers, like rideshare drivers, who are more likely to need access to amenities like seating or bathrooms when in public. Ultimately, Chellew says, “making spaces more hostile or more unpleasant for some groups makes public space more hostile for all.” 

While urban design and planning have long histories of targeting vulnerable groups and exacerbating social inequalities to serve the interests of those at the top, Sevilla-Buitrago argues there’s another way forward for the planning profession and the people it is meant to serve. “We should not think of planning as an institution that is petrified and not going to change,” he says. “It is a battlefield, urbanization is a battlefield—it’s a crucial site of struggle because a lot of important resources for the organization of everyday life revolve around space.” 

Campaigns like the one to save the UC Townhomes in West Philadelphia are hard-fought but offer a glimpse into an alternative world where cities are planned to serve those who inhabit them. An earlier campaign of self-organized housing takeovers and encampment protests in Philadelphia also resulted in a 2020 agreement that the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) would relinquish dozens of vacant homes to the Philadelphia Community Land Trust (PCLT), founded for the purpose. Jennifer Bennetch, who led the Occupy PHA campaign and founded PCLT, framed it as a tool to “stabilize our communities and combat the displacement caused by market rate development and gentrification.” Families moved into the first PCLT homes in December 2021. 

Organizers in Oakland had a similar win in 2020 when a campaign led by Moms 4 Housing succeeded in forcing a real estate firm to sell an empty home to the Oakland Community Land Trust after four moms and their kids illegally occupied it and deputies from the county sheriff’s office violently evicted them. The real estate firm also agreed to give the land trust first right to purchase future Oakland properties the firm buys, creating a pipeline to new homes for the trust, whose mission is to expand and preserve housing and economic development opportunities for communities of color.

In Philadelphia, Sterling Johnson, an organizer with Philadelphia Housing Action, says the PLCT will be led in part by “people who have experienced housing insecurity and homelessness or have experienced violence.” Both Johnson and Sevilla-Buitrago emphasize these communities have intrinsic knowledge needed to plan their cities. “They are planners,” says Sevilla-Buitrago. “They may lack the technical knowledge, but they have the most important knowledge and the capacity to make their communities flourish.”

“Especially when it comes to mothers and children,” says Johnson, “they are constantly thinking about things like ‘How far away are we from the nearest places to get food or meet with other families? Where is a cool place for hot days, and where is a warm place for cool days? Where is the school, and is everybody getting along at school? Where are kids supposed to play together so they stay out of trouble?’ These things are all theories around public space—they’re urban planning decisions.”

Professional planners still have a vital role to play in reorienting urban space to better serve the people. “There is a lot of scope within the job to connect to populations that are marginalized, bring their voices into planning, bring their demands, keep pressing the city to be accountable to everyone, and resist the pressure of developers, landowners, and homeowners who are trying to control how cities are planned,” says Kramer.

Johnson says these are the connections and momentum they are building in Philadelphia. “With disruptions like ours, we always hope that they are inspirational for others to start their own,” they say. “Thinking long-term, it’s about building infrastructure.”

The holiday’s founders in the late 1800s envisioned something very different from what the day has become. The founders were looking for two things: a means of unifying union workers and a reduction in work time.

History of Labor Day

The first Labor Day occurred in 1882 in New York City under the direction of that city’s Central Labor Union.

In the 1800s, unions covered only a small fraction of workers and were balkanized and relatively weak. The goal of organizations like the Central Labor Union and more modern-day counterparts like the AFL-CIO was to bring many small unions together to achieve a critical mass and power. The organizers of the first Labor Day were interested in creating an event that brought different types of workers together to meet each other and recognize their common interests.

However, the organizers had a large problem: No government or company recognized the first Monday in September as a day off of work. The issue was solved temporarily by declaring a one-day strike in the city. All striking workers were expected to march in a parade and then eat and drink at a giant picnic afterwards.

The New-York Tribune’s reporter covering the event felt the entire day was like one long political barbecue, with “rather dull speeches.”

Why Was Labor Day Invented?

Labor Day came about because workers felt they were spending too many hours and days on the job.

In the 1830s, manufacturing workers were putting in 70-hour weeks on average. Sixty years later, in 1890, hours of work had dropped, although the average manufacturing worker still toiled in a factory 60 hours a week.

These long working hours caused many union organizers to focus on winning a shorter eight-hour workday. They also focused on getting workers more days off, such as the Labor Day holiday, and reducing the workweek to just six days.

These early organizers clearly won since the most recent data show that the average person working in manufacturing is employed for a bit over 40 hours a week and most people work only five days a week.

Surprisingly, many politicians and business owners were actually in favor of giving workers more time off. That’s because workers who had no free time were not able to spend their wages on traveling, entertainment, or dining out.

As the U.S. economy expanded beyond farming and basic manufacturing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it became important for businesses to find consumers interested in buying the products and services being produced in ever greater amounts. Shortening the workweek was one way of turning the working class into the consuming class.

Common Misconceptions

The common misconception is that since Labor Day is a national holiday, everyone gets the day off. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While the first Labor Day was created by striking, the idea of a special holiday for workers was easy for politicians to support. It was easy because proclaiming a holiday, like Mother’s Day, costs legislators nothing and benefits them by currying favor with voters. In 1887, Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey all declared a special legal holiday in September to celebrate workers.

Within 12 years, half the states in the country recognized Labor Day as a holiday. It became a national holiday in June 1894 when President Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day bill into law. While most people interpreted this as recognizing the day as a national vacation, Congress’ proclamation covers only federal employees. It is up to each state to declare its own legal holidays.

Moreover, proclaiming any day an official holiday means little, as an official holiday does not require private employers and even some government agencies to give their workers the day off. Many stores are open on Labor Day. Essential government services in protection and transportation continue to function, and even less essential programs like national parks are open. Because not everyone is given time off on Labor Day, union workers as recently as the 1930s were being urged to stage one-day strikes if their employer refused to give them the day off.

In the president’s annual Labor Day declaration last year, Obama encouraged Americans “to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the contributions and resilience of working Americans.”

The proclamation, however, does not officially declare that anyone gets time off.

Controversy: Militants and Founders

Today most people in the U.S. think of Labor Day as a noncontroversial holiday.

There are no family dramas like at Thanksgiving, no religious issues like at Christmas. However, 100 years ago there was controversy.

The first controversy that people fought over was how militant workers should act on a day designed to honor workers. Communist, Marxist, and socialist members of the trade union movement supported May 1 as an international day of demonstrations, street protests, and even violence, which continues even today.

More moderate trade union members, however, advocated for a September Labor Day of parades and picnics. In the U.S., picnics, instead of street protests, won the day.

There is also a dispute over who suggested the idea. The earliest history from the mid-1930s credits Peter J. McGuire, who founded the New York City Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners in 1881, with suggesting a date that would fall “nearly midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving” that “would publicly show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.”

Later scholarship from the early 1970s makes an excellent case that Matthew Maguire, a representative from the Machinists Union, actually was the founder of Labor Day. However, because Matthew Maguire was seen as too radical, the more moderate Peter McGuire was given the credit.

Who actually came up with the idea will likely never be known, but you can vote online here to express your view.

Have We Lost the Spirit of Labor Day?

Today Labor Day is no longer about trade unionists marching down the street with banners and their tools of trade. Instead, it is a confused holiday with no associated rituals.

The original holiday was meant to handle a problem of long working hours and no time off. Although the battle over these issues would seem to have been won long ago, this issue is starting to come back with a vengeance, not for manufacturing workers but for highly skilled white-collar workers, many of whom are constantly connected to work.

If you work all the time and never really take a vacation, start a new ritual that honors the original spirit of Labor Day. Give yourself the day off. Don’t go in to work. Shut off your phone, computer, and other electronic devices connecting you to your daily grind. Then go to a barbecue, like the original participants did over a century ago, and celebrate having at least one day off from work during the year!

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

At the heart of the unions’ conflict with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents all the major entertainment media corporations, are the issues of royalty payments—known as residuals—and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The former is an urgent matter of financial sustainability for artists between projects. The latter is an existential matter involving the dystopian prospect of robot-generated scripts in place of writers and digital replicas in place of actors. 

I joined actors and writers on a picket line outside Disney’s headquarters on July 26, to hear directly from those striking what they believe they’re fighting for. “We’re here to get fair pay, and respect for what we do,” says TV star Adina Porter, holding a picket sign as she marches alongside other actors and writers. “I never thought I’d have to say this, but I’m an actual human being.”

Many writers and actors feel they’ve been pushed too far and are fighting for the survival of their careers and craft, and have taken to social media to rant against their corporate overlords—and I am here for this display of narrative power. The question is, how far will they go?

Well-known actor John Cusack posted a lengthy tweet on July 14, the first day of the SAG-AFTRA strike, saying there was “one set of rules for elites—and another for workers,” which he said effectively means “socialism for the .oooo1 %” and “savage predatory capitalism for everyone else.” As of this writing, Cusack’s tweet has been viewed by more than 4.6 million people. 

Others are skewering Disney CEO Bob Iger, who complained that the union members are making demands that are “just not realistic” and that “they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Saverio Guerra tweeted a photo of Iger sunbathing with the caption, “Oh look, it’s Bob Iger being unrealistic and disruptive on his yacht!”

Indeed, many industry creatives are seeing their plight through the lens of a predatory capitalist system. According to actor Lily Knight, who picketed outside Disney, “The 1% is just getting fatter and fatter while the rest of us do not thrive.”

“I think it’s no accident that all of this is coming when it’s the dawn of television for people of color, for underrepresented communities,” says Marita de Lara, an actor picketing Disney’s headquarters. “It’s a tale as old as time: Let’s underpay these Black and Brown people, these LGBTQ [people].” It’s a strong accusation and constitutes just one part of the collective wrath aimed at the industry’s greed, which is exerting downward pressure on worker compensation at the same time that Hollywood’s doors are finally being pushed open to greater racial diversity. 

People of color like de Lara are disproportionately more familiar with capitalism’s cruelty than whites. Black, Indigenous, and Latino workers, on average, earn much less than white workers—whether in Hollywood or beyond. Now, the increasingly diverse, yet still white-dominated fields of filmmaking and television are collectively experiencing the brutality of the corporate bottom line. While the highest-profile actors and writers make bank, the majority of such workers don’t. 

Will this nascent intimacy with corporate greed influence Hollywood’s future storylines?

As I pointed out recently in an op-ed about the hit television show Succession, the industry has had a fraught relationship with on-screen wealth. And although there are increasingly more projects that are critical of capitalism, many still tend to play it safe. Writing in The Face, culture writer Patrick Sproull critiqued many of the “eat the rich” tropes that have started to emerge on-screen, calling them “performative and shallow in their criticisms.” 

Boots Riley’s new series for Amazon, I’m a Virgo, is an excellent illustration of how Hollywood’s creators can push the envelope in critiquing the crushing economic system under which we all live. Lucy Mangan’s review of the series in The Guardian calls it “not just a sweet coming-of-age story for the isolated boy-man [Cootie, played by Jharrel Jerome], but interrogations of race relations, capitalism, and the cracks rapidly opening into abysses between the haves and have-nots.”

Riley, who doesn’t shy away from being intentional in his on-screen projects—his first foray into Hollywood was the exceptional anti-capitalist satire Sorry to Bother You—explained to the Hollywood Reporter, “The contradictions of capitalism—how it works—are going to echo through almost everything we do.”

Hollywood’s rank and file are striking at the height of 2023’s #HotLaborSummer, a phenomenon that includes thousands of striking hotel workers in Southern California. Writers and actors find themselves literally shoulder to shoulder with unions like UNITE HERE Local 11, experiencing firsthand the power of labor solidarity across industries and gathering fodder (we can only hope) for future plotlines focused on the hand-to-mouth struggles of ordinary Americans. 

“We’ve become less and less of a union country over the last 40 to 50 years, and that has weakened our rights as individuals and as workers so significantly,” says Alex Manugian, who has both written scripts and acted in various television shows. “It’s, to me, working exactly the way the businesses want it to work.”

Given this insight, would Manugian incorporate this critique of American capitalism into future scripts? “I think we should do everything we possibly can for that,” he replies. “The trick is to do it in a way that’s still, hopefully, super entertaining.” Hollywood’s greatest power is its ability to normalize ideas, infusing our culture with tropes that we internalize over time. It has done so for ill, as in the case of white supremacy, and for good, as with LGBTQ people. As rank-and-file creative workers dig their heels in for a protracted fight for their survival, it would benefit all workers if the rage they are feeling makes a direct leap from their pithy Twitter posts into the pages of their screenplays.

Director Cashmere Jasmine (Oreo, Project CC for Disney’s Launchpad Collection) was disappointed, especially to see Davis walk away without any awards. “There was both relief and a deep, deep sadness when I heard Viola Davis speaking on The Breakfast Club [podcast] about just getting people to do hair and makeup, and that it was always going to be a fight, and that you’ll always have to push, no matter who you are or how high you go.” 

Jasmine was one of many panelists in a recent webinar featuring Black disabled filmmakers. The event was organized by RespectAbility, a group focused on fighting stigmas and providing guidance for creators with disabilities in the entertainment industry, policymaking, leadership positions, and faith communities. Jasmine is a Black woman who is disabled, and she says the barriers to entry in the entertainment industry are real, and they become apparent early in the process—even at the point of pitching a film. 

Those barriers are formidable: More than a quarter of the U.S. population lives with disabilities, including about 5.5 million Black Americans. Furthermore, the disabled and Black communities have been proven to flock to films made for, by, and featuring people representative of the community. However, an overwhelming 95% of characters on-screen are not disabled. That majority is still overwhelmingly white and male. Only 4.1% of the programs on-screen feature disability themes. 

Jasmine says the studios and executives don’t trust someone who looks like her when she walks in the door. “They have a formula that they know has quote-unquote ‘worked for them,’ and it’s often somewhat exclusionary, or often may be overly conservative.” She explains that the struggle is to compromise enough to make the studio executives see the vision without losing that “lightning in the bottle” uniqueness that makes the story hers. Just to get her project green-lit, she has to prove “this was not only beautiful and profitable, but unique, and really reached not just the audience you’re used to reaching, but an audience that’s even broader than that.”

Hers is a real story about the barriers a disabled Black woman has to break in order to get her film project considered by a company like Disney. Being disabled actually adds further complication to the barriers Blackness brings to filmmakers trying to break into the industry. 

Barrier Busting

RespectAbility, the organization that hosted the webinar, is in the business of telling the industry how to step up for creatives with disabilities. In fact, each of the panelists on its most recent webinar was an alumnus of RespectAbility’s Entertainment Lab.

Lauren Appelbaum, RespectAbility’s senior vice president of communications, says the original target of the organization’s mission was politics, but the entertainment industry has become a large focus. Appelbaum has worked to build a community where both the creatives and the people seeking to employ them can connect and educate themselves on the needs of the disabled.

Writer Diane J. Wright, who moderated the Black Excellence webinar, asked the panelists about their inspiration to join the industry. Immediately, the conversation turned to representation—the connection between seeing themselves represented in the industry and having actual access.

Writer and director Juliet Romeo offers a different perspective on the representation conversation. “What the industry can do is—could have done [is]—to help us create representation,” she said. “Because I feel like if I saw myself or I saw that there were writers and directors growing up that looked like me, then I would have believed it. I would have been, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’” Instead, Romeo describes a very circuitous route to her current filmmaking career. And she wasn’t alone.

Actor, writer, and producer Erika Ellis also didn’t see Black women filmmakers like herself and thought the only way into Hollywood was to buy her way in by financing her own film. “I had it in my head that [if] I get into finance, then I can finance films, and then I can put myself in a film. But I didn’t know a direct route. … I found my way, the long way, I should say.”

Ellis went on to describe how the lack of representation translated into barriers to access to the industry for her. “But growing up, I still didn’t know how to get there. And I think when I finally did, I got in through another, you know, organization, a diversity hire, basically, in a program.” 

Romeo adds that the barriers to access for aspiring creatives are only compounded when you are a first-generation immigrant, Black, and disabled.

Romeo says her family was supportive of her desire to become a filmmaker, but they never saw what she did as work. She comes from a Caribbean family who believes success was only found in manual labor or the professions, and definitely not in creative fields. “The safe jobs are, you know, in the medical field. So become a nurse. Become a doctor, right?” Romeo became a nurse, and only later began making her first documentary about a friend’s health journey.

Representation also provides a model for disabled creatives to follow after they begin working in the industry. Entertainment Lab alumnus Angel Williams, currently producer and writer for Truce Media, says the Lab workshops taught her how to speak up for herself and her needs as a creative with non-apparent disabilities.

During her own workshop in September 2022, alumni of previous Entertainment Labs talked about advocating for themselves in the industry.

Williams says she loved to hear the former students “telling their stories of how they learn to advocate for themselves and to request the accommodations they need.” She explains “listening to how they talk about pushing forward, advocacy for the self and others around them.” Williams says that now she is working on advocating for her own work breaks (which she needs for her disability, fibromyalgia, a condition that causes chronic fatigue and chronic pain) and accommodations. She is also open at Truce Media about being disabled. 

Industry Rising to Meet “Us”

Wright’s second request to the panel started another important conversation within the inclusion debate. She asked the panel of Black women creatives about “some of the specific ways the industry could have risen to meet us.”

“We’re always asked about our identities and barriers and how we overcome them, right? As if who we are is the hurdle.”

This is the question we asked the other part of the RespectAbility community—the executive partners who employ the Entertainment Lab alumni and consultants. They were eager to share the ways in which RespectAbility has pushed industry executives and their companies to do better.

Stacie de Armas, the vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at Nielsen, the media ratings and research company, says the RespectAbility relationship with her company began with a desire to “do better.”

De Armas explains that a few years before, she wanted to make a contribution using a budgetary surplus. “I said we want to make a contribution to your work. And then we’d love to also chat about your work and see how we can work together,” she says. Today, Nielsen hires alumni of the Entertainment Labs, and it regularly engages RespectAbility consultants to help inform projects where the company is measuring demographics for its new metrics systems, like GraceNote. 

But de Armas and Nielsen also learned about “the work” aspect early on when she brought RespectAbility in to measure inclusion in the industry. They were looking for a metric to look at disability inclusion on-screen and off-screen. But, according to de Armas, “that’s not how RespectAbility works.” The RespectAbility team explained to her that there were several aspects of disability to be considered, and commenced giving a master class in disabilities to the Nielsen team.

De Armas and her team at Nielsen were impressed. “We knew at that point, too, we’ve got the right partner here because they’re challenging us. They want more than we even think we’re capable of, and they’re explaining to us why. And so with their support, we actually did do all of that.” Nielsen released data in a December 2022 report, “Seen on screen: the importance of disability representation.”

Grace Moss, vice president of DEI at Warner Discovery, also says that over the past few years, she has worked with RespectAbility to discover the barriers her company still maintains to disability inclusion, through consulting on scripts and helping ensure the sets of new shows are inclusive to not only the actors, but also the crew, creators, and anyone who visits a set. Companies learn that making sets wheelchair-accessible is more than adding ramps. Inclusive sets include quiet spaces for the neurodivergent, for example.

Moss even shared how a RespectAbility Lab alum helped her team realize that video submissions are much easier for people with disabilities connected to writing difficulty. This includes neurodivergent creators who express themselves better with visual tools. Moss says, “Now, the application to our Directors Lab is open, and they have a video submission option.” That component is available on the application to the Warner Discovery Inclusion program, called Warner Bros Discovery Access.

Shifting the Burden

Applebaum and her team are moving the heavy lifting of inclusion and access onto the broad shoulders of companies like Nielsen and Warner Bros Discovery. As they do so, one of the biggest barriers to inclusion—representation—is being lifted. 

As a result, RespectAbility is seeding the industry with disabled people, especially Black creators with disabilities who are creating content for the screen and beyond. This includes policymakers, measurers (working with companies like Nielsen), and even journalists. Williams reiterates the importance of seeing other disabled people who work in the industry advocate for themselves and remain in their jobs. “It’s just how hard they go for making sure that we’re all included,” Williams says. “I’ve never had an issue where it’s like, ‘Hey, I need help with something!’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we just can’t help you. We don’t even know where to tell you to go.’ Even if it’s something that they don’t do, they know what organization they partner with to ask.” Williams says RespectAbility empowers her to advocate and educate at Truce Media.

So, while the Oscars are still struggling to show the representation of people with disabilities, especially disabled Black women like those on the Black Excellence panel, RespectAbility and its alumni are seeding the industry with information, access, and representation needed to ensure that diversity and inclusion continues to grow. Ensuring that the next Wright, Romeo, and Ellis see themselves in front of and behind a camera. And that they have access to the direct route to those careers.

“It is very concerning,” says Reid Maki, director of child labor issues and coordinator at the Child Labor Coalition (CLC). Having worked on child labor protections for decades, Maki says he has seen the negative impacts of labor on childhood health and development, academic success, and socialization. “There are so many reasons that kids should not be allowed to work,” he says.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines child labor as work that deprives children of their childhood, potential, and dignity; is harmful to their physical and mental development; and interferes with their schooling. Using similar definitions, organizations including the CLC and Human Rights Watch, have condemned the prevalence of child labor in the U.S. and called on Congress to strengthen protections. Instead, the issue is intensifying. The U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division recorded a 37% increase in the number of minors employed in violation of federal law from 2021 to 2022. 

Current restrictions on child labor in the U.S. are outlined in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which contains significant loopholes allowing children as young as 10 years old to be hired as farmworkers, even on commercial farms. This means that in addition to children laboring in violation of federal law, hundreds of thousands more work legally in jobs that experts say are detrimental to their health and development. Unlike the ILO, the U.S. labor department defines child labor in strictly legal terms as “work below the minimum age for work, as established in national legislation,” thus shifting the focus away from child well-being and excluding child farmworkers in the U.S. According to various estimates, there are anywhere between 300,000 and 800,000 minor farmworkers in the U.S. today, including an unknown number employed in violation of the law.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing problems. One ongoing study based on interviews with Latinx farmworker families in North Carolina has found that many children worked more during the pandemic to support their families, or even because they felt disengaged from school or bored and isolated at home. Several children have reported experiencing periods during which their families could not afford groceries, which increased the pressure they felt to work. “The pandemic made things worse for these families that already experienced many challenges,” says Taylor Arnold, a Ph.D. candidate studying public health education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the lead researcher on the study. The pandemic has had other widespread effects on the U.S. workforce, and claims of labor shortages are driving young people to work in growing numbers.

Rather than supporting families and protecting children from being forced onto the labor market, the recent Republican-led push would weaken protections in several states. According to the Minnesota Reformer, lawmakers in 11 states have either passed or introduced laws to roll back child labor protections.

Arnold says that interventions to combat this assault on child labor protections should focus on the root causes of child labor, including structural vulnerability and low wages. He also says that funding programs to support vulnerable populations, such as the Migrant Education Program, could mitigate some of the harms that child workers face. 

While there aren’t exact numbers, experts agree that the vast majority of children employed in the U.S. are migrants or from migrant families. A recent exposé from The New York Times revealed a “shadow work force” of migrant children working across industries in every state, many in hours-long shifts, sometimes overnight, with hazardous equipment and potent chemicals.

“These children are vulnerable to exploitation because they are on the margins, their families are on the margins, and they have very little access to public benefits or protections—legally or sustenance-wise,” says Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy and legislative affairs at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. 

Miller Flowers says ensuring respect for the best interests of migrant children begins with keeping families together. “That starts at the border with our immigration policy, because whenever you exclude adults from seeking protection, you further vulnerabilize their children,” she says. The Young Center also supports expanding community-based and peer-led newcomer or cultural navigator programs that help migrant children and families access economic, social, and civic support without increasing surveillance or placing additional administrative burdens on families.

Ultimately, though, researchers, advocates, and other experts agree that bolstering federal legislation on child labor is the best way to prevent children from being forced into the workforce. It is also the surest way to protect kids in the face of Republican-led efforts to weaken restrictions on child labor in some states, because employers nationwide must follow federal employment law. 

A bill that would amend the FLSA to close loopholes allowing children employed in agriculture to work longer hours, at younger ages, and in more hazardous conditions than those in other industries has already been introduced in Congress multiple times, but each time has failed to reach a floor vote. The bill is called the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act, and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, has introduced it 10 times during her two-decade career.

Maki says the bill has failed to move forward because child labor is a stubborn partisan issue. “It is popular with progressive legislators, but it is not bipartisan.” Of the 10 bills’ cumulative 365 co-sponsors, only one has been a Republican. The bill garnered the most co-sponsors in 2009, during the first year of the Obama administration. In 2011, the administration also proposed new rules that would have required children under age 16 to take a training course before operating most power-driven farm equipment, and would have banned those under 18 from working in feedlots, grain bins, and stockyards. But the proposal faced staunch opposition from right-wing lawmakers and agricultural lobbyists, and the administration withdrew the bill in the lead-up to the 2012 election. 

“Part of the challenge is that farmers have always had a wholesome image,” says Maki. “But the reality is that these are dangerous work environments.” According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, agribusiness leads all industries for work-related child fatalities. From 2003 to 2016, 52 percent of work-related deaths recorded among minors in the U.S. occurred in agriculture.

Sara Quandt and Thomas Arcury, professors of family and community medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, have been researching child workers for years. Arcury says the image of the small all-American family farm is little more than a myth. Most farmworkers labor on commercial farms. The pair have also studied children working on local-producer farms that sell directly to consumers. “There is a lot of risk for them, and the injuries are notable,” says Quandt. 

Nonetheless, the idea of the wholesome family farm is potent and shapes federal legislation. Historian Betsy Wood, author of Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism, says the family farm has been coming up in debates about child labor in the U.S. for more than a century. Beginning in the 1920s, while Northern reformers were intent on amending the Constitution to allow Congress to regulate child labor, Southern opponents were able to gain allies who were more concerned about government interference in family life. 

“The new battle broke down largely along urban-rural lines,” says Wood, as farm families across the rural U.S. bought into the fear that the planned amendment “was a surreptitious effort to interfere with parental rights.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the issue continues to break down along similar lines today, and opposition figures employ similar rhetoric. For example, recent legislation passed in Arkansas eliminating requirements for children to secure work permits before employment promises to “restore decision-making to parents concerning their children.” 

To push the nation toward policy change, many organizations raise awareness within communities where these talking points hold sway. Julie Taylor is the executive director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, a faith-based organization that supports farmworker organizing. One aspect of the group’s work is outreach, and Taylor says the issue of parental rights often arises. When talking about restrictions on child labor, she finds that many imagine children working a few hours after school in a safe environment rather than performing grueling agricultural labor. “We challenge those ideas and illustrate the realities that we hear through our farmworker partners,” she explains.

While current debates about child labor rehash century-old talking points, Wood says she also recognizes an alarming new trend. “Instead of just trying to prevent new regulations, these efforts are going on the offense to overturn existing protections,” she says. “It indicates a new confidence and ambition in deregulation efforts that we haven’t seen in many years.”

Those working to improve child labor protections agree the current situation is worrying, but they also hope that renewed attention to the issue could push the needle toward change. “We’re hoping that all of this attention will focus enough energy into the area that we will be able to enact protections,” says Maki. “There has been very little positive change in the last 20 years, and it’s long past time for protections to be enacted.”

Many climate justice activists are refusing to be limited by the “jobs or the environment” dichotomy.

“I grew up traveling 20 miles to gather water,” Alex continues. “That’s not fair, that my community is being sacrificed to power the valley here.”

In 1970, the Peabody Coal Company began mining on the reservation. Although tribal members were initially enthusiastic about the jobs the mine would provide, over time the relationship grew rocky. The company built a coal slurry pipeline that cut straight through the reservation and pumped billions of gallons of water from the Navajo Aquifer. Peabody mixed the water with coal and pumped the fluid mixture to a power plant in Nevada where the coal was burned to generate electricity for the nearby cities of Phoenix and Tucson, as well as other parts of the Southwest. But local people like Alex were left without access to water.

It’s a story echoed around the country: From the East Bay in California to the mountains of Appalachia, fossil fuel companies have drilled, burned, and mined their way into towns, cities, and rural areas—especially communities of color, as well as indigenous and low-income ones—disrupting the lives of people and damaging the environment.

But local residents have fought back. In 2001, Navajo and Hopi youth created the Black Mesa Water Coalition to stop the depletion of the Navajo Aquifer. They educated their peers and neighbors about the problem, and eventually persuaded the Navajo Tribal Council to cut off Peabody Coal’s access to the aquifer. That work, combined with a lawsuit that charged Peabody with violation of the Clean Air Act, helped to force the shutdown of the Black Mesa coal mine in 2005.

The problem with that outcome was that it left many residents of the reservation without jobs. About 300 Navajo and Hopi people had worked for Peabody, according to the advocacy group Cultural Survival . Efforts by the Black Mesa Water Coalition and its allies to create green jobs through traditional livelihoods, like wool-making and farming, have made only a small dent in the unemployment rate, which hovers around 50 percent. Furthermore, the land where the coal mine had been is not suitable for living or farming.

“Our economic system is fundamentally opposed to a livable future.”

The story of Black Mesa illustrates a realization that is sweeping through the network of organizations, individuals, and coalitions working to fight global warming: While the burning of fossil fuels causes climate change, simply shutting down these industries leaves workers and their families behind, and often result in a familiar conflict over “jobs versus the environment.” That in turn prevents many workers and low-income groups from joining the fight against climate change—something movement leaders say they cannot afford.

The late Tony Mazzocchi, a labor leader with roots in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, advocated the rejection of this dichotomy and called on environmentalists to lobby for what he deemed a “just transition” in situations when environmental policies eliminate jobs. As the Institute for Policy Studies’ Chuck Collins recently wrote in YES!, a just transition “would offer benefits far beyond the pitiful job retraining programs included in trade agreements like NAFTA.”

Now, many climate justice activists are picking up on Mazzocchi’s idea and refusing to be limited by the “jobs or the environment” dichotomy. Among them is Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, co-director of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project and co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. The alliance is a network of 35 organizations working at the intersection of job creation and environmental protection in places like Black Mesa, where residents have been resisting oil rigs, gas wells, and coal plants, in some cases for decades. These organizations create projects that provide stable livelihoods, protect fragile environments, and, ultimately, help speed the transition away from fossil fuels.

“The central solutions to address the climate crisis are not actually going to come from looking up and counting carbon in the atmosphere,” Mascarenhas-Swan said. “They are going to come from remaking the economy, which is the root of this struggle.”

“We need an economy that restores the health of our people and the health of our land.”

Few have thought more about just how to go about doing that than the 130 member organizations in the New Economy Coalition, which are a part of some would call the “new economy movement.” For many years, these groups have been buildingworker-owned cooperatives, land trusts, and community financial institutions, all designed to keep wealth local and provide good jobs. Eli Feghali, the coalition’s director of communications and online organizing, says that his members are starting to converge on the same vision as climate justice organizers.

“Folks have been imagining alternatives to capitalism for centuries,” Feghali said. “But a new context is emerging, the center of which is the climate crisis. Our economic system is fundamentally opposed to a livable future.”

Feghali says new economy groups can contribute to the push for a just transition by helping groups like the Black Mesa Water Coalition start worker-owned cooperatives and by lobbying for policies that support cooperative economies.

The new economy movement has some work to do in the way of diversity and representation of people of color and those from low-income areas, Feghali acknowledges. But, he says, “the good news is that these groups are already building alternatives and providing leadership.”

That leadership can been seen back in Arizona, where the Black Mesa Water Coalition is moving forward on a 1- to 5-megawatt solar power plant proposed for the site of the abandoned coal mine. And here’s where new economy ideas come in: The coalition hopes the facility will be owned and controlled by the Navajo people and will provide reliable jobs.

“We were once the battery for the Southwest [with our coal production],” said Roberto Nutlouis, the Black Mesa Water Coalition’s green economy coordinator. “Why not convert these reclaimed lands into something more sustainable and healthy for our community?”

The proposed project would use the money made from the utility-scale solar plant to create local reinvestment funds that would then support wool production and food sovereignty projects, whereas Peabody’s profits mostly benefitted faraway shareholders.

“There’s a deeper way of valuing things, beyond a capitalist way,” Nutlouis said. “We need an economy that restores the health of our people and the health of our land.”

If efforts like this work in Black Mesa, they could help to blaze a trail out of the climate crisis that workers can get behind.

Why don’t we have better images to tell the story of the new economy?

Both of our organizations tell stories about the new economy all the time. But key movement concepts like localism, shared wealth, and cooperation are hard to visualize. We found ourselves falling back on images of windmills, farmers markets, and community gardens.

Beautiful as those images can be—and as important as it is to tell those stories in their own right—none of them captured the incredible diversity of people and activities gathered under the umbrella of the new economy: Californians collaborating to take back their energy grids from corporate monopolies, employees becoming owners of the companies they work for, racial justice organizers building power to make #BlackLivesMatter in city budgets, and so much more.

We felt that the new economy deserved better art. It needed the color, characters, and style that have enriched grassroots struggles from Occupy to the immigrant-rights movement. Someone needed to pull out a pen brush (or stylus and mouse) and bring the new economy to life on paper or in pixels.

So in the lead-up to last fall’s “New Economy Week 2015: From Austerity to Prosperity,” we asked NEC’s members, YES! readers, and anyone else who was interested to describe in words what the new economy movement looked like to them. More than 80 ideas arrived, written by everyone from self-described “birth activists” to biofuels entrepreneurs.

To translate the words into images, we enlisted two artists. YES! Lead Designer Jennifer Luxton had already blazed a trail in illustrating the new economy with her art for Keith Harrington’s “Checkerboard Revolutionaries” series. And we’d both wanted for years to collaborate with Bay Area-based artist and cultural organizer Favianna Rodriguez after seeing her work illustrate and energize some of the 21st century’s most important movements.

After sifting through your concepts, here’s what we came up with:

Download the PDF (2.4 MB)

Jennifer Luxton’s “Together We Thrive” combines two concepts. One came from self-described “cancer survivor, creative, and contextual learner” Karen Tomlonson, who riffed on the idea that “We are all one; what hurts or damages one hurts and damages all.” The other came from Deyanira Del Rio, co-director of the New York City-based New Economy Project. Del Rio wanted an image “conveying that the new economy is not about ‘projects’ existing alongside the current unjust system—but about working toward transformative change for all.”

Download the PDF (2.1 MB)

Favianna Rodriguez illustrated seminary student and radical librarian Pamela Kittredge’s vision of “caring for one another by sharing—ourselves [and] our resources.” Rodriguez worked from the prompt using images inspired by indigenous Latin American and African art. The tools, money, and musical instruments carried by the main character represent the new economy idea of opportunity for all.

“I like the puzzle-solving and being able to look back at the end of the day and see the physical result of your hard work,” she says.

This made it easier to bear some of the indignities—“subtle challenges,” she calls them—of working in an overwhelmingly male field. “Little stuff, like people walking by you to find the boss on the job”—not realizing she was the boss—or having tools and ladders taken out of her hands by pushy colleagues. “I call it roostering,” she says. 

Saxton, who now works at the California nonprofit GRID Alternatives, thinks she had it pretty easy compared to other women in her field. She’s heard horror stories about threatening notes left in lockers, tools being stolen and destroyed—“even people getting their hard hats peed in,” she says.

The trades in general and electrical work specifically are overwhelmingly male. Only 2% of electricians are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It’s also a sector facing a massive labor shortage as the country looks to transition away from fossil fuels and toward electrifying cars and buildings. 

According to Rewiring America, an electrification nonprofit, the United States will need one million more electricians to make updates like installing solar panels, heat pumps, and electric-vehicle charging stations to help the country meet its climate goals. 

Getting more women working as electricians would help resolve a crucial labor shortage, but it could also help close the gender wage gap.

That is a lot of job opportunities for something so badly needed. As author and journalist Bill McKibben put it in an interview with the New York Times: “If you know a young person who wants to do something that’s going to help the world and wants to make a good living at the same time, tell them to go become an electrician.”

Getting more women working as electricians would help resolve a crucial labor shortage, but it could also help close the gender wage gap. In 2021 the median annual pay for an electrician was just over $60,000, compared to around $45,000 for all occupations, according to the BLS. But some master electricians earn six-figure salaries.

“There are 80,000 openings for electricians each year on average over the next decade just to replace workers who either retire or transition to different jobs,” says Sam Calisch, Rewiring America’s head of research. “That is all before the IRA”—the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill, which is expected to increase demand for electricians by creating incentives for Americans to electrify their homes and buy electric vehicles. 

Experts point to a lack of investment in technical schools and a culture that emphasizes four-year college degrees as the main path to a successful career as a couple of reasons there aren’t enough electricians to meet demand. “We don’t do a good job marketing ourselves as an industry in general, but particularly with women,” says Allie Perez, a plumber and founder of Texas Women in Trades.

Perez, who has an eight-year-old daughter, founded Texas Women in Trades in 2013 because she was tired of being the only “young, Brown woman” in most professional settings. She also wanted to help connect more young women like herself with well-paid jobs that they might not have envisioned for themselves. “We don’t share [enough] stories of women in the trades to show that they are also moms, daughters, friends, and cousins and that they are able to support their families on this kind of work.”

Barriers to more women in the industry include widespread harassment and abuse, lack of visibility, exclusionary unions, childcare, and a lack of support for caregivers.

“That relationship-based, white male network—hiring, retaining and training people and keeping people on the core crew from project to project—is the culture at most construction companies,” says Connie Ashbrook, a retired construction worker and co-chair of the National Taskforce on Tradeswomen’s Issues. “If you’re not friends with the boss, or if you’re not friends with significant numbers of your co-workers, then you don’t get to hear about the jobs.”

In 2009, Ashbrook was part of a successful effort to convince state officials to invest $2 million in diversifying its highway-construction workforce. Funds went toward pre-apprenticeship programs and supportive services, like childcare and human resources. Though gains in hiring more women were modest, a 2022 report on the initiative found it significantly improved retention rates. 

“This is the highest-paid blue-collar work you can get without a college degree,” Ashbrook says. “Not having access to these careers keeps women in poverty.”

Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), an organization in New York that trains and places women, transgender, and nonbinary people in the skilled construction, utility, and maintenance trades, offers wraparound services as a way to retain recruits.

“Most childcare is set up to be very nine-to-five supportive,” says Kate Krug, the organization’s executive vice president “If you have to be out the door by 5 a.m., you have to pay someone to sit with your kids until it’s time to go to school.”

At NEW, students have program managers who make sure, among other things, they’re ready for job interviews. “[That means asking], do you have childcare? Do you need childcare? Do you have a backup to your childcare? Do you have backup to the backup of your childcare?” she says.

Tonya Hicks, who grew up in public housing in Mississippi, had to overcome discrimination on the basis of her gender and race—she is Black—in her quest to become an electrician. (Only about 7% of electricians are Black, according to BLS data). 

“Women and minorities have been systematically kept out of the unions,” she says. “It began as racism, and then just as time goes on, you know, people hire who they know.” 

As an apprentice, Hicks was often relegated to cleaning the on-site office trailers. When she struggled to find work locally, she drove from her home in Meridian, Mississippi, to sites in Jackson and Birmingham, leaving her young son with her mother for stretches at a time.

Her endurance paid off: In 2000, at age 28, she started her own firm, Power Solutions, in Atlanta. Today she has a staff of nine that specialize in renewable energy projects and home retrofits, and starting last year began manufacturing electric vehicle chargers. She also runs Women Do Everything, a networking group for women in the STEM fields and blue-collar, male-dominated industries like hers.

GRID Alternatives, where Saxton works, recruits women volunteers and trainees for solar installations and offers women-only trainings. “That may encourage people who would otherwise perhaps be intimidated or just scared to try it,” Saxton says. “At the same time, we need men to be mentors and to support women.”

The Biden administration has expressed a commitment to getting more women into the trades; in November, plans were announced to double the number of women working in the construction industry over the next 10 years. 

The IRA climate legislation offers tax incentives for contractors to hire apprentices—something experts say could help reduce women’s higher dropout rates from apprenticeship programs—and Biden administration officials have “signaled that projects that include efforts to provide good jobs to workers, diversify their workforces, and provide training will score higher in evaluations,” making it more likely that they will be awarded contracts, says Marina Zhavoronkova, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

“As government agencies, you have strings, you can pull it in a way that you don’t when it’s a fully private-sector project,” Zhavoronkova says.

In February, the program office connected to the CHIPS and Science Act—legislation designed to boost the semiconductor industry in the U.S.—released its first funding opportunity, which stipulates that all applicants hoping to receive more than $150 million dollars must submit a plan to provide access to childcare for workers.

Hicks, the founder of Power Solutions, compared the task of transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels to the labor shortages during World War II, when millions of women took jobs in factories. Of course, after the war, many women returned to their homes. “The only difference now is that we’re not going back,” she says.

This story originally appeared in Nexus Media News, an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow @NexusMediaNews.

Six years ago, the global economy nearly collapsed. Now big corporations and the wealthy are recovering well. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of Americans: according to calculations by author Les Leopold, the richest 7 percent gained $5.6 trillion net assets from 2009 to 2011, while the remaining 93 percent lost a combined total of $669 billion.

Americans are not content with this state of affairs. According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center (pdf), 62 percent believe the dominant economic system favors the powerful, while 78 percent believe too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.

This enormous economic divide is just one reason people are losing patience with the corporate economy—and why many are turning to initiatives that build a new economy. Grassroots groups, local entrepreneurs and broad-based coalitions are building the foundations of an economy that distributes economic benefits widely and minimizes damage to the environment.

Here are six big shifts:

1. Local food grows everywhere

Local food, once a tiny niche market, has gone mainstream. The growing, processing, and marketing of local foods is booming—not just on the crunchy west coast, but also in Appalachia in the eastern U.S.; in abandoned neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan; and towns and cities throughout the country.

Via farmers markets and direct purchases from growers, the food travels quickly from farm to table, keeping it fresh and nutritious.

Avoiding red meat and dairy may be a more important way to avoid contributing to the climate crisis than eating local, and local food isn’t always greener. Still, a local diet does reduce emissions from food transportation, support local jobs, and connect people to their neighbors and local environment.

2. More workers own their jobs

Worker-owned co-ops have been spreading, particularly since the recession. While they, like all businesses, can struggle, they also can help keep good jobs stable and keep money in the community.

In the Bronx in New York City, the 2,300 employees who work at Cooperative Home Health Care Associates get better pay, more job security, and more training for career advancement than their counterparts at competing firms. More than 1,000 of them are owners in the company, and 90 percent are women of color.

In Chicago, workers at a manufacturing plant who were laid off when the plant was shut down bought out the factory and now operate it as New Era Window and Doors.

The most famous example of worker ownership, however, is the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, which has more than 70,000 worker-owners in more than 200 enterprises. Labor unions and community activists in the United States are beginning to emulate Mondragon’s success, especially in hard-hit rust belt regions.

3. The economy goes DIY

Maker, DIY, and sharing culture is blossoming. Young people especially are repurposing old clothes into fashionable art, making art bicycles, building tiny houses and writing open source software.

While some peer-to-peer platforms, such as Uber and Airbnb, have raised controversy, some people are truly sharing—not for money. Online platforms like Couchsurfing let people share their homes with travelers. Others have started “pay-it-forward” restaurants where you pay not for your own meal, but for the person behind you in the line.

An ethic of reuse and no waste, a bias for local and small-scale, and a preference for generosity make this a particularly creative space in the emerging new economy.

4. Money grows more responsible

Shortly after the recession, millions of people shifted their accounts from too-big-to-fail banks to community banks and credit unions. Now some are going further. Campaigners in 22 states aim to open government-owned banks at the state, county or municipal level to finance local economies and keep profits nearby.

The latest trend, in light of the threat of climate disruption, is to divest from holdings in coal, oil, and gas companies. To date, more than 800 global investors have pledged to divest over $50 billion. Redirecting assets from big corporations and Wall Street to sustainable local enterprises is providing investment capital needed to fuel the new economy.

5. Some homes stay affordable

In the wake of the financial meltdown and the collapse of the housing bubble, millions of Americans lost their number-one asset: their homes. Low-income people and communities of color were particularly hard hit.

But the small percentage of people living in community land trust homes had a very different experience. Their homes are affordable by design and foreclosure rates were one-tenth of the national level. This success is causing cities and advocates for the poor elsewhere to look at this as a model of permanently affordable housing.

Keeping basic necessities, like our homes, out of the speculative market helps stabilize the economy and averts the disruption and impoverishment that results from predatory real estate and lending practices.

6. Innovation emerges to protect our resources

Some of our society’s most precious resources belong to all of us. These common assets include fresh water, the Internet, green spaces in our cities, and the storehouse of knowledge we inherit from previous generations.

The new economy draws on the wealth of these and other commons, but does so in a way that neither depletes them nor excludes others. That means protecting water quality, keeping the Internet open, protecting the stability of the climate, and ensuring access to a good education—for ourselves and for those not yet born.

The new economy emerging from these initiatives is not a new ideology or a utopian mirage. It’s built on grassroots-led, pragmatic actions that people around the U.S. and around the world are taking to create widely shared, sustainable prosperity.

Television has been experiencing a boom in the United States, the likes of which has never been seen before. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there were 532 scripted TV shows that were broadcast or streamed the year before—an all-time high. In 2022, there were 599. In fact, according to FX Network Research, since 2012 there has been a steady increase in the number of scripted shows, except for a small dip due to the lockdown-related production halt in 2020.

These new heights in television production can be attributed largely to streaming services such as Netflix—a company that has been offering tantalizing on-screen fiction for the past decade, since House of Cards first debuted as an exclusively streaming show on the platform. But the primacy of streaming is also the reason why TV writers are now threatening to go on strike. For years, streaming services have slashed residual payments, which writers rely on, prompting the Writers Guild of America to vote to strike.

The turnout for the WGA vote strike, which took place on April 17, broke records, with nearly 80% of the union’s members casting ballots. Of that number, nearly 98% voted to strike. These numbers are significantly higher than in 2007, the last time WGA members voted to strike and actually carried out their threat (a 2017 strike was narrowly averted). The union, which represents more than 11,000 writers, has the potential to bring the TV industry to a screeching halt if negotiations with media companies, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), break down by May 1, the last day of WGA’s current contract.

Three major unions dominate Hollywood’s television industry, representing writers, directors, and actors: the WGA, the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), respectively. Both DGA and SAG-AFTRA will also start negotiations shortly with the AMPTP, ahead of their contracts ending on June 30. There is potential for multiple overlapping strikes in the coming months, leaving Hollywood’s television industry on edge, even as most of the nation enjoys the fruits of its work, blissfully unaware of the tensions brewing between creators and corporate producers.

The stakes are high. Already Netflix is boasting that it can rely on foreign labor to weather a potential WGA strike. The company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said a day after the strike authorization vote that if writers went on strike, Netflix had “a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” adding, “We could probably serve our members better than most.” Networks are also stockpiling scripts in preparation for a potential writers’ strike.

TV producers hold massive financial power in an industry whose cultural influence sweeps across the world. While writers, directors, and actors are the ones whose creativity powers the direction of new, innovative content, their bosses—executives at Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney—have driven down the costs of labor to maximize profits.

Residuals, which are extra payments made to creative workers each time their shows re-air, used to provide stable incomes for TV workers in between jobs. Streaming services negotiated minuscule residuals years ago when they were minor players within the TV landscape. Now, although they dominate the scene, streaming producers are continuing to pay their workers insultingly low residuals. Worse, many creators are finding that platforms will disappear their projects altogether in order to get a tax write-off and avoid having to pay them.

TV producers are also cutting costs by canceling shows abruptly—a move that could disproportionately impact diversity on-screen. Television is one of the world’s most powerful narrative-setting industries, influencing culture in ways that can determine day-to-day policies. According to GLAAD, “For many Americans, it was television shows that gave them their first images of same-sex couples, and a chance to recognize the commonalities with their own lives.” This in turn helped lay the foundation for the legalization of same-sex marriage within years.

Television has the potential to do the same for racial justice issues. According to the latest Hollywood Diversity Report, “people of color have made tremendous advances among broadcast, cable, and digital leads in recent years,” and “Black and multiracial persons exceeded proportionate representation among leads in 2020–21 for cable and digital scripted shows.” Still, the report concludes that there is not enough parity overall.

Now, in search of profits, TV producers are cutting costs by canceling already greenlighted projects. “[T]he streaming explosion has lost steam,” declared MarketWatch. TV networks and streaming platforms ordered nearly a quarter fewer shows in the second half of last year compared to the year before. John Landgraf, chairman of FX Networks, who is credited with coining the term “Peak TV,” worries that cost cutting will impact the representation of racially diverse communities.

It appears as though, in addition to using foreign-sourced projects and stockpiling scripts as leverage, TV’s corporate executives plan to approach union negotiations by touting the notion that television output is peaking, and therefore costs such as baseline pay and residuals cannot be increased.

Yet media companies have enough money to buy one another, spending billions on mergers and acquisitions. A year ago, Amazon acquired MGM Studios for $8.5 billion; and Warner Brothers, which owned HBO Max, merged with Discovery to the tune of $43 billion. Earlier this year, Showtime announced a merger with Paramount+. Predictably, these companies are announcing cuts to their workforce to pay for such consolidations.

But workers still have leverage. David Slack, a WGA union member and a writer and consulting producer on Magnum P.I., told the Washington Post, “The power to withhold our labor is the only tool we have to get the studios to pay us what’s fair.” He added, “Our products are the foundation for all the billions of dollars of revenue that these entertainment companies generate, and we need to be compensated for that.” Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara distilled the dynamic succinctly: “If studios and platforms want to be in the original scripted content business, they need to make that business work for the people writing those scripts. It’s that simple.”

The last time TV writers went on strike, it lasted a whopping 100 days and cost the economy of Los Angeles more than $2 billion. If writers go on a prolonged strike, there will be a ripple effect, putting actors and directors out of work as well. There can be no scripted television if no one is writing the scripts.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.Categories

We’re putting forward five pressing challenges that stand between us and tomorrow’s economy and inviting New Economy Coalition member organizations, community leaders, researchers—and you!—to respond to them.

Each day, we’ll publish original content—from interviews and stories in traditional publications to Twitter chats and live YouTube panels. Find some of it here, and more at neweconomyweek.org. We’ll also bring you online events that grapple with these issues and highlight work being done to build the new economy in communities across the world.

Day 1: Good Work and Opportunity for All

Our work is a fundamental part of who we are and what we hope to achieve. Whether performed for a wage, for a salary, as a small business, or in direct support of loved ones, work takes up a majority of our adult lives. However, corporate power, austerity, and other factors have made well-paid work difficult to come by and left many unemployed or in unstable jobs with less control over their own lives.

Working people have fought back in a wide variety of ways—from the #FightFor15 to global campaigns for a universal basic income—but they still face a deteriorating situation.

 On this day we ask: “What are the strategies and policies to create an economy that guarantees good work and meaningful opportunity for all?”

What If We Owned the Internet Together? It’s Time to Bring the Co-op Revolution to the Web
The flourishing of farmers markets and credit unions demonstrates a longing for business that serves the common good. Can it infiltrate the Amazon-dominated, Uberized Internet? 

Day 2: Building an Economy Where #BlackLivesMatter

The economy we know today is founded on the theft of indigenous lands and lives, slavery, and colonialism.

This legacy lives with us in many ways including an entrenched racial wealth gap that leaves black and brown communities without basic economic security and a growing prison economy that profits off the misery of those same communities. In this moment of visionary leadership and resistance from communities of color, we ask:

“What are the economic tools and strategies that will dismantle systemic racism and move us closer to collective liberation?”

Baltimore After the Uprising: 3 Trends Building a Fairer, Safer, Stronger Economy
Because structural problems need structural solutions.

What Would Reparations for African-Americans Actually Look Like?

Ta-Nehisi Coates focused national attention on the reparations debate, but the discussion has since focused largely on police violence. Organizer Ed Whitfield on what comes next.

After Ferguson Uprising, Should St. Louis Spend $1 Billion on a Football Stadium?

Just a year and a half after the St. Louis area became internationally known for racism, the city is considering building a billion-dollar stadium. If justice was our priority, says organizer Julia Ho, those tax dollars would be spent very differently.

Day 3: Democracy Versus the 1% 

A recent study from Princeton University confirms what most of us in the US already knew: Congress overwhelmingly makes decisions with no regard for the preferences of the American People, especially when those preferences clash with the interests of wealthy elites.

The financial crisis of 2008 exposed this failure of leadership on a global scale, and led many into the streets to reclaim their democratic voice. In recent years we’ve seen waves of popular uprisings from Wisconsin and Wall Street to Greece, Spain, and beyond.

These revolts are increasingly impossible to ignore–even by the 1 percent and the politicians they bankroll. The resurgence of populist politics, calls for electoral reform, the growth of worker-owned cooperatives, and other efforts at bottom-up democracy are all changing the face of politics in 2015.

On this day we ask: “How can we advance democracy and self-determination on the issues that impact our lives?”

7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification
The plan to build better, more connected, flourishing communities is here—and it won’t require putting a Starbucks on every block.

Borrow, Save, Share: 3 Ways Seeds Can Democratize Our Food System
Just six companies control 63 percent of the commercial seed market. But seed libraries offer us an opportunity to reclaim the seed commons and create our own community food systems.

Acts of Collective Imagination: Notes From the Chief Policy Wonk at America’s Department of Arts and Culture

What if we gave everyone a universal basic income, and studied the adverse impacts of development before razing neighborhoods? The policy agenda of a national network you didn’t know existed.

Day 4: A People’s Climate Agenda

Over the past several decades, it has become increasingly clear that our grow-or-die, corporate economy is a root cause of the climate crisis.

While our political leaders delay taking meaningful action on climate, people’s movements have sprung up around the world. Many have promoted community-led solutions and rallied around demands for climate justice, based on the understanding that climate change is disproportionately caused by elites and disproportionately threatens those of us who are already economically vulnerable.

On this day we ask, “What are the policies, campaigns, and grassroots initiatives that can address the magnitude of the climate crisis while building shared prosperity?”

3 Ways the TPP Will Hurt the Climate—If We Let It Pass

The next big trade deal is poised for a congressional vote in 2016. Here’s what that means for the planet.

Energy Democracy: Inside Californians’ Game-Changing Plan for Community-Owned Power

Large utility companies control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California. A hybrid between a public agency and private utility, the new Community Choice program is a model for communities that want greener, cheaper energy.

Day 5: Enough to Go Around

Health care, access to education, (healthy) food, water, a stable and safe home, time to spend with our families and friends—these are some of the basic needs that we all share, and that are increasingly falling out of reach for the majority of working people.

While organized elites try to convince us that we’re broke and that privatization is the only solution, we know better. We know that even on our finite planet there’s more than enough to go around if we change our priorities and demand a different economy for ourselves and our children.

On this day we ask “How can we claim access and control over what we need to live full and prosperous lives?”

After Decades in a Food Desert, These Neighbors Are Building a $2 Million Co-op—And They Own It

For 20 years, the residents of this mostly African-American Greensboro community had nowhere to shop for food. They tried to attract a big-box grocery store; when that didn’t work, they started their own.

]]> 9892 https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2016/09/01/how-americans-build-wealth-in-10-charts Thu, 01 Sep 2016 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.yesmagazine.org/article/new-economy-how-americans-build-wealth-in-10-charts-20160901/

This infographic is part of a special report. Banking on Justice: The Bankers Doing Civil Rights Work in the Mississippi Delta.

His experimentation made it to the menu.

And like his burgers, Lontoc is the first of a kind in a different sense. Thank Que Grill is one of the inaugural vendors at the Ashland Market and Cafe, a community-based, 2,100-square-foot food hall in the San Francisco Bay Area that had its grand opening in March 2019.

“I’ve been waiting for this for four years,” Lontoc said, as he moved patties from the fire onto a rack inside the grill.

Lontoc had the idea for his business after he was injured on the job while working as an instructor for the American Red Cross. He couldn’t return to work but he “started thinking on ‘how am I going to provide for my family?’ and this came about.”

He used recipes from his late grandmother as foundation for his menu and enlisted help from his aunts, who’d learned to cook from their mother. Before being chosen as a vendor at the Ashland Market and Cafe, he catered for events at a local university and cooked out of a commercial kitchen down the street from Thank Que Grill’s new home.

The market-cafe hybrid, at the intersection of East 14th Street and 164th Avenue, is an effort to build both health and monetary wealth in Ashland, an unincorporated section of Alameda County. In Ashland, the median household income from 2013 to 2017 was $50,966 and the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent, according to Census data. Fresh produce and other healthy food options also are harder to obtain than they are in wealthier neighborhoods.

“I just want to be a strong provider for the community,” said Latoya Bryant, co-owner of Jacquelynn’s Heart and Soul, another vendor in the new market. “In this community in Ashland, we’re in need of a lot of things, such as good food that you don’t have to go far out for.”

The food hall doubles as an incubator for the businesses. The current vendors have one-year leases with the option to extend, but the hope is that each one is “so successful that they need their own brick and mortar, that the kiosk spaces are not big enough for what they’re wanting to do,” said Mariela Cedeño, interim executive director at Mandela Partners, a nonprofit that was pivotal in bringing the market to fruition.

There were plans to open the market back in 2017, but construction and budget delays pushed back the date. Cedeño said this gave Mandela Partners and its partner organizations such as Resources for Community Development, an affordable housing developer, and the Alameda County Economic Development Agency time to get more input from Ashland residents about the market’s eventual form.

Originally, the space was going to be more like a grocery store, but once local residents voiced concerns over competition with an existing grocer across the street, plans changed. People wanted more access to healthy food, and they also wanted economic opportunity. The idea for a food business incubator garnered the most interest and support.

From there, a 12-member community advisory committee, made up of Ashland residents, started choosing the vendors. There were 13 initial vendor candidates presenting their plans to the group. The committee chose four.

Between then and the grand opening, the newly selected vendors attended workshops on business planning and menu development, and received one-on-one advising from Mandela Partners. The vendors also tested and refined their products at locations across the Bay Area, such as the Oakland Jack London Square Farmer’s Market, which is run by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.

The Ashland Market and Cafe was the dream of Dana Harvey, Mandela Partners’ founder, who died just days before the grand opening. A framed photo of her hangs on a wall in the new market.

Mandela Partners has incubated successful businesses before. Down the street from the nonprofit’s office, there’s Mandela Grocery, which started a decade ago and is now a fully independent worker-owner store that is planning to launch its own food incubator this year.

Like the worker-owners at Mandela Grocery, each of the Ashland vendors were already embedded in the community. At the grand opening, Bryant pointed behind her.

“I live about three blocks from here,” she said. “I live very close. Very, very close.”

And fellow vendor LaShawn Raybon, owner of the anchor I AM Cafe, lives about 3 miles away. Raybon first sold her food at the Bay Area Black Market and eventually started to cater under the company name Cakes by the Pound.

She says when we first learned about the opportunity with the Ashland Market and Cafe, she put her hat in the ring because someone encouraged her to, but she wasn’t sure if anything would come of it.

Now, Raybon has the largest space in the market. She says that she eventually wants to extend this opportunity by hiring other community members, namely mothers who are returning home after being incarcerated.

And she’s working hard to achieve that goal—and others—a reality without taking out any loans for the business, instead working two other jobs to fund her space, tools, and ingredients. Before the grand opening, she worked a graveyard shift.

“I’m working hard now so I can play hard later,” she said.

Updated April 22, 2019: The name of the Oakland Jack London Square Farmer’s Market was corrected.

“I wasn’t able to show up as my complete self,” Fenall said, referring to her struggle to integrate into the workforce. “And I made an assumption that other people were probably encountering the same thing, of having all of these different identities that make up a whole person but not being able to show up as that whole person because of embarrassment or judgment.”

Fenall realized she had the potential to become a business owner and to hire others struggling to secure steady work. But she lacked the capital necessary to get started. The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest cost of living of all large metropolitan areas in the U.S. The median price of a single-family home in San Francisco sits at nearly $1.6 million, while the median monthly rent is $3,500—the highest in the world.

But this year, Fenall launched her delivery service, Piikup, with the assistance of a loan from the Runway Project Oakland, a nonprofit incubator that provides funding and a support network for Black entrepreneurs looking to launch and sustain successful businesses.

The Runway Project offers small business owners five-year, collateral-free loans of up to $25,000. For the first 18 to 24 months, depending on the size of the loan, repayments are interest-only at 4 percent. This is so that borrowers can build a steady stream of revenue during the initial startup period. Payments increase to include the principal afterward, when a company would be generating more revenue. There are no penalties for paying off loans early.

Runway Project founder Jessica Norwood describes the initiative as a response to generations of racist policies, such as redlining and housing discrimination, that has deprived Black communities of the wealth collectively maintained by White people.

In the 2017 report “The Road to Zero Wealth,” researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies predicted that if the racial wealth divide remains unaddressed, Black household wealth—defined as the sum of one’s financial assets rather than income—will fall to zero by 2053, while White household wealth is projected to rise to $137,000 by that same year. The current median net worth of White families is more than 12 times higher than that of Black families, and that disparity widens by nearly 69 times when durable goods such as electronics, cars, and furniture are removed from the picture.

“When you see those numbers, you realize in short order that [Black people] don’t have the kind of friends and family that can put capital into their businesses,” Norwood said. “It starts to create this narrative that Black businesses aren’t as strong competitively as other businesses and that the entrepreneurs aren’t prepared enough.”

Business owners typically lean on a network of family and friends for startup capital.

One essential detail often left out of the entrepreneurial narrative, Norwood says, is that business owners typically lean on a network of family and friends for startup capital. That financial support system isn’t as readily available to Black entrepreneurs as it is to groups with more collective wealth.

The Runway Project, which was founded in 2016, has now loaned to a dozen business owners—ranging from chefs to web designers—for its pilot program. The project spent its first year raising philanthropic donations and investments, many of which were made in the form of $500-minimum certificates of deposit opened with Self-Help Federal Credit Union, a community development financial institution.

CDFIs are private financial institutions that provide affordable lending to underserved and low-wealth communities. Self-Help’s client base is 75 percent people of color with a significant portion living below the poverty line, according to investment associate Annie McShiras. CDs for the Runway Project mature after five years, earning between 1.8 and 2.6 percent interest. The deposits’ principal goes toward the Runway Project’s loans for business owners.

Though the lending protocol for the Runway Project outwardly mirrors that of applying for a standard bank loan, borrowers’ credit ratings have no bearing on their eligibility for a loan. Defaulted loans are not reported to the credit bureaus and all losses are recovered from Runway’s collateral fund. This way, Runway’s borrowers don’t have to put up their own assets as collateral.

“That allows for an entrepreneur to be the great entrepreneur that they can be without that being involved in all of this,” Norwood explained. “There’s already a lot of trauma inside of not being able to repay something in general, and it isn’t the way we’d like to be in community with folks.”

About 80 percent of Black business owners reported a lack of financial resources as the number one challenge to successfully launching and operating a business.

Kate Poole, a 31-year-old investment adviser and early Runway Project donor, got into local investing work a decade ago after inheriting wealth. She, along with a larger movement of other rich millennials, is aiming to redistribute the top 1 percent of wealth by putting capital into organizations working toward economic justice.

“At first, I was just divesting from mining companies or Exxon and these other extractive industries,” she said. “I thought I had it figured out that I was going to move my money off of Wall Street and onto Main Street.” But then, after she attended a Resource Generation conference, Poole said, she “started thinking about the history of wealth accumulation with a reparations lens and what might be owed to communities that wealth has been extracted from.”

Poole and her business partner recently opened Chordata Capital, an investment advisory firm that works with people who want to explicitly invest in racially and economically conscious enterprises. The enthusiasm to start such investment portfolios exists, Poole said, but many wealthy people need guidance regarding how and where to make the biggest impact. For her, supporting initiatives that place capital directly into the hands of those who need it is pivotal.

About 80 percent of Black business owners surveyed by Guidant Financial in 2017 reported a lack of financial resources as the No. 1 challenge to successfully launching and operating a business. Runway Project organizers are looking to expand the program into four more markets within the next year, while continuing to fund Oakland: Chicago, the Washington, D.C., metro area, Atlanta, and Memphis.

After being denied loans by four banks, Ariana Marbley, 33, almost gave up on her dream of opening Esscents of Flowers, a mobile floral retailer.

“It felt like the business was going to fail,” Marbley said. “I got into a little bit of a funk and just felt like maybe it’s not meant to work.”

“The fact that I’m Black and doing business in a predominately White neighborhood, I feel that. It’s just a part of being there.”

Before the Runway Project, Marbley and several other Runway participants worked on business plans and marketing strategies with Uptima Business Bootcamp, an Oakland based mentorship network for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Though it was clear that she had a good shot at finally getting the support she needed, the prospect of actually becoming a business owner was intimidating.

“It took me until the deadline of the application to turn it in because I was afraid that it could actually work—like this could actually become a thing,” Marbley said. “As an entrepreneur, you feel like you’re alone a lot of times. You’re faced with making all of the big decisions with your business, and they’re just there to remind you that you don’t have to do it by yourself.”

But while the Runway Project has cultivated a strong sense of camaraderie and support within its network, entrepreneur and Runway Project borrower Vicktor Stevenson says there are still some outside challenges. Mere days after opening his craft lemonade stand Gourmonade in San Francisco in the summer of 2018, Stevenson was confronted by police as he tended to the store’s security system. Someone in the neighborhood had erroneously reported a burglary.

“The fact that I’m Black and doing business in a predominately White neighborhood, I feel that. It’s just a part of being there,” Stevenson said. “There are a ton of people that don’t like the fact that I’m there but that’s just going to have to be their problem.”

He also added that he knows other Black entrepreneurs who avoid publicly associating themselves with their businesses, lest they alienate clients. Furthermore, Stevenson frequently contends with purportedly would-be customers criticizing his prices.

“The same people that walk on by my $8 lemonade stand will go down the street and pay $20 for a salad,” Stevenson said. “So the money’s not the issue—it’s whatever they believe in.”

But notwithstanding the naysayers, Stevenson has remained focused on building Gourmonade up to its full potential. Now that the logistics to getting started are out of the way, he’s looking into ways to maximize the business’s social impact on the surrounding community.

“You know how people are like, ‘Oh, let’s raise money for the dolphins?’ I want to raise money for kids in the neighborhood. Especially the children of families that have been affected by police brutality.”

Mabry, the city’s historic preservation officer from 2007 to 2017, saw urban sprawl take over the city in the first 20 years he lived in Tucson. In the last 10 years, however, that trend has slowed down, and the focus has shifted to the revitalization of the city’s downtown rather than the expansion of its suburban areas.

Tucson used to be a casualty of those midcentury trends of downtown abandonment and blight. Vacant storefronts and shabby buildings lined Congress Street, the hub for most of the city’s downtown activity. There were only a few restaurants and bars, and those buildings in active use consisted predominately of offices.

“At 5 o’clock when all the office workers went home, our downtown became a ghost town,” Mabry said.

The real transformation of downtown Tucson began with the development of a modern streetcar, the Sun Link, in 2014. The 3 1/2 mile route connects the downtown area to the University of Arizona, a crucial element of Tucson’s urban fabric, Mabry said.

The Sun Link sparked a movement to redevelop downtown buildings and helped bridge the physical divide created by Interstate 10 in the 1960s, which split the city in half.

What used to be a ghost town come the end of the workday has now turned into a bustling entertainment hub for Tucson residents. Restored historic theaters bookend Congress Street, and the downtown has become an epicenter for Tucson’s food scene. Mabry said there are more than 60 restaurants downtown, two-thirds of which are locally owned. In 2015 it was designated as the first U.S. “Creative City of Gastronomy” by UNESCO.

Downtown Tucson’s revitalization is part of a larger movement the National Trust for Historic Preservation defines as “reurbanism.” Proponents of reurbanism advocate for the redevelopment of old buildings not only to create a more economically and environmentally sustainable city, but to establish a strong sense of community for its residents.

“If you visit a city where all of the buildings are built within a short frame of time fairly recently, you don’t get the sense that the community has deep roots,” Mabry said.

Cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix have embraced reurbanism in the form of adaptive reuse programs, initiatives that make it easier for the developers or business owners to repurpose old spaces.

Mabry was an integral figure in getting the information that convinced Tucson to adopt an adaptive reuse program of their own.

The National Trust’s Research & Policy Lab (formerly the Preservation Green Lab) published their initial report on reurbanism, “Older, Smaller, Better,” in 2014. When Mabry attended a presentation on the study held by Mike Powe, head researcher at Preservation Green Lab, Mabry was inspired.

The initial report focused on Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. It found that cities that had a mix of older and smaller buildings had strong local economies, provided more affordable places for startups, housed a more diverse mix of age groups, and were more walkable than cities mostly composed of newer, larger buildings.

The Research & Policy Lab released its report on the redevelopment of Tucson in 2016, which found many similarities with the cities in the original study.

“A lot of cities are growing rapidly. We should have ways of including new development alongside the old in a way that leans on the strength of buildings and affords additional housing supply,” Powe said.

In the early 20th century, cities consisted mostly of local businesses and small buildings, Powe said. The development of the interstate highway system prompted a reimagining of the idea of the city—one that included high-rises, convention centers, and sports stadiums.

Reurbanism takes new and old iterations of city life and aims to make them work cohesively. It’s about “trying to make the old fabric integrate with the new development in a way that functions well for 21st-century cities,” Powe said.

This means building mass transit so that a city is less reliant on the automobile and parking-dependent development.

Adaptive reuse programs put these ideas of reurbanism into action.

In 1999, Los Angeles adopted its Adaptive Reuse Ordinance as to repurpose old buildings into residences. The ordinance expedited the approval process and ensured that the buildings wouldn’t be subject to the same zoning and code requirements as new developments.

Phoenix’s adaptive reuse pilot program launched in April 2008 to ease the financial burden on developers and small businesses by providing financial incentives to repurpose older buildings. The city sets aside money to cover costs like permitting or architectural fees.

In Tucson, the adaptive reuse of existing buildings provided an economic lifeline to the construction industry during the Great Recession. The projects created more jobs because more technical expertise was required.

The Research & Policy Lab’s study of Tucson found that new commercial development costs about $92 per square foot, compared to $37 per square foot when rehabilitating an older building.

With numbers like these, historic preservation often gets branded as “anti-new development,” Powe said. However, at the end of the day, preserving historic buildings means focusing more on the roots of the community itself.

“Historic preservation is more focused on the people that use those spaces, the uses of the spaces themselves, the culture and the identity of the city,” Powe said.

James Rojas, an urban planner from Los Angeles, believes this attention to community is the most important part in developing a city.

Rojas founded Place It!, an organization that offers workshops for urban planners, architects, or municipal staff that encourages them to look at urban planning through emotional and physical connections to places.

“[People] build a community through social connections,” Rojas said. “I want people to understand how they belong to places.”

Rojas believes adaptive reuse programs preserve “a diverse building stock and with it are the narratives of place that created them.” He said that planning codes and regulations often take a one-size-fits-all approach, which doesn’t consider the connections people make through their communities.

“As humans, we all belong somewhere,” Rojas said.

However, it’s a balancing act between preserving the culture associated with old buildings and leaving room for new development as more people move into town.

If done poorly, reurbanism can exacerbate gentrification, Powe said. If new development doesn’t accompany the old, then those historic buildings get more expensive, eventually forcing residents to move to more affordable housing farther outside the urban core.

A lot of it has to do with the way a building is used, he said. Historical preservation has focused on affordability explicitly rather than just using old buildings for new luxury development.

However, when the balance is struck, Mabry said, civic engagement goes up and more people want to engage with their community and help make it better.

“If you can repurpose an existing older building and give it new life, then that helps sustain this sense of place—this visual continuity of a community,” Mabry said.

The article was funded in part by a grant from the Surdna Foundation. 

The debt overhang crippling economies

The “bank money” composing most of the money in circulation is created only when someone borrows, and today businesses and consumers are burdened with debts that are higher than ever before. In 2018, credit card debt alone exceeded $1 trillion, student debt exceeded $1.5 trillion, auto loan debt exceeded $1.1 trillion, and nonfinancial corporate debt hit $5.7 trillion. When businesses and individuals pay down old loans rather than taking out new loans, the money supply shrinks, causing a “balance sheet recession.” In that situation, the central bank, rather than removing money from the economy (as the Fed is doing now), needs to add money to fill the gap between debt and the spendable income available to repay it. Debt always grows faster than the money available to repay it. One problem is the interest, which is not created along with the principal, so more money is always owed back than was created in the original loan. Beyond that, some of the money created as debt is held off the consumer market by “savers” and investors who place it elsewhere, making it unavailable to companies selling their wares and the wage earners they employ. The result is a debt bubble that continues to grow until it is not sustainable and the system collapses, in the familiar death spiral euphemistically called the “business cycle.” As economist Michael Hudson shows in his 2018 book And Forgive Them Their Debts, this inevitable debt overhang was corrected historically with periodic “debt jubilees”—debt forgiveness—something he argues we need to do again today. For governments, a debt jubilee could be effected by allowing the central bank to buy government securities and hold them on its books. For individuals, one way to do it fairly across the board would be with a universal basic income.

Why a universal basic income need not be inflationary

In a 2018 book called The Road to Debt Bondage: How Banks Create Unpayable Debt, political economist Derryl Hermanutz proposes a central-bank-issued basic income of $1,000 per month, credited directly to people’s bank accounts. Assuming this payment went to all U.S. residents over 18, or about 241 million people, the outlay would be close to $3 trillion annually. For people with overdue debt, Hermanutz proposes that it automatically go to pay down those debts. Since money is created as loans and extinguished when they are repaid, that portion of a basic income disbursement would be extinguished along with the debt. People who were current on their debts could choose whether or not to pay them down, but many would also no doubt go for that option. Hermanutz estimates that roughly half of a basic income payout could be extinguished in this way through mandatory and voluntary loan repayments. That money would not increase the money supply or demand. It would just allow debtors to spend on necessities with debt-free money rather than hocking their futures with unrepayable debt. He estimates that another third of a basic income disbursement would go to “savers” who did not need the money for expenditures. This money, too, would not be likely to drive up consumer prices, because it would go into investment and savings vehicles rather than circulating in the consumer economy. That leaves only about a sixth of payouts, or $500 billion, that would actually be competing for goods and services; and that sum could easily be absorbed by the “output gap” between actual and forecasted productivity. According to a July 2017 paper from the Roosevelt Institute called, “What Recovery? The Case for Continued Expansionary Policy at the Fed”: “GDP remains well below both the long-run trend and the level predicted by forecasters a decade ago. In 2016, real per capita GDP was 10 percent below the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) 2006 forecast, and shows no signs of returning to the predicted level.” The report showed that the most likely explanation for this lackluster growth was inadequate demand. Wages have remained stagnant; and before producers will produce, they need customers knocking on their doors. In 2017, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product was $19.4 trillion. If the economy is running at 10 percent below full capacity, $2 trillion could be injected into the economy every year without creating price inflation. It would just generate the demand needed to stimulate an added $2 trillion in GDP. In fact, a basic income might pay for itself, just as the GI Bill produced a sevenfold return from increased productivity after World War II.

The evidence of China

That new money can be injected year after year without triggering price inflation is evident from a look at China. In the last 20 years, its M2 money supply has grown from just over 10 trillion yuan to 80 trillion yuan ($11.6T), a nearly 800 percent increase. Yet the inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index remains a modest 2.2 percent.

Why has all that excess money not driven prices up? The answer is that China’s Gross Domestic Product has grown at the same fast clip as its money supply. When supply (GDP) and demand (money) increase together, prices remain stable.

Whether or not the Chinese government would approve of a universal basic income, it does recognize that to stimulate productivity, the money must get out there first; and since the government owns 80 percent of China’s banks, it is in a position to borrow money into existence as needed. For “self-funding” loans—those that generate income (fees for rail travel and electricity, rents for real estate)—repayment extinguishes the debt along with the money it created, leaving the net money supply unchanged. When loans are not repaid, the money they created is not extinguished; but if it goes to consumers and businesses that then buy goods and services with it, demand will still stimulate the production of supply, so that supply and demand rise together and prices remain stable. Without demand, producers will not produce and workers will not get hired, leaving them without the funds to generate supply, in a vicious cycle that leads to recession and depression. And that cycle is what our own central bank is triggering now.

The fed tightens the screws

Rather than stimulating the economy with new demand, the Fed has been engaging in “quantitative tightening.” On December 19, 2018, it raised the fed funds rate for the ninth time in three years, despite a “brutal” stock market in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average had already lost 3,000 points in two and a half months. The Fed is still struggling to reach even its modest 2 percent inflation target, and GDP growth is trending down, with estimates at only 2 percent to 2.7 percent for 2019. So why did it again raise rates, over the protests of commentators including the president himself? For its barometer, the Fed looks at whether the economy has hit “full employment,” which it considers to be 4.7 percent unemployment, taking into account the “natural rate of unemployment” of people between jobs or voluntarily out of work. At full employment, workers are expected to demand more wages, causing prices to rise. But unemployment is now officially at 3.7 percent—beyond technical full employment—and neither wages nor consumer prices have shot up. There is obviously something wrong with the theory, as is evident from a look at Japan, where prices have long refused to rise despite a serious lack of workers. The official unemployment figures are actually misleading. Including short-term discouraged workers, the rate of U.S. unemployed or underemployed workers as of May 2018 was 7.6 percent, double the widely reported rate. When long-term discouraged workers are included, the real unemployment figure was 21.5 percent. Beyond that large untapped pool of workers, there is the seemingly endless supply of cheap labor from abroad and the expanding labor potential of robots, computers, and machines. In fact the economy’s ability to generate supply in response to demand is far from reaching full capacity today. Our central bank is driving us into another recession based on bad economic theory. Adding money to the economy for productive, nonspeculative purposes will not drive up prices so long as materials and workers (human or mechanical) are available to create the supply necessary to meet demand; and they are available now. There will always be price increases in particular markets when there are shortages, bottlenecks, monopolies, or patents limiting competition, but these increases are not because of an economy awash with money. Housing, health care, education, and gas have all gone up, but it is not because people have too much money to spend. In fact, it is those necessary expenses that are driving people into unrepayable debt, and it is this massive debt overhang that is preventing economic growth. Without some form of debt jubilee, the debt bubble will continue to grow until it can again no longer be sustained. A basic income can help correct that problem without fear of “overheating” the economy, so long as the new money is limited to filling the gap between real and potential productivity and goes into generating jobs, building infrastructure and providing for the needs of the people, rather than being diverted into the speculative, parasitic economy that feeds off them. This article was originally published on ellenbrown.com. It has been published here with permission.

On January 29, the village officially opened, and its first residents settled in. Each house had cost about $10,000 to build, a fraction of what it would have cost to house the men in a new apartment building.

The project is part of a national movement of tiny-house villages, an alternative approach to housing the homeless that’s beginning to catch the interest of national advocates and government housing officials alike.

“It’s certainly something that we would encourage other communities to take a look at,” says Lee Jones at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For many years, it has been tough to find a way to house the homeless. More than 3.5 million people experience homelessness in the United States each year, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Shortages of low-income housing continue to be a major challenge. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But Second Wind is truly affordable, built by volunteers on seven acres of land donated by Carmen Guidi, the main coordinator of the project and a longtime friend of several of the men who now live there. The retail cost of the materials to build the first six houses was somewhere between $10,000 and $12,000 per house, says Guidi. But many of the building materials were donated, and all of the labor was done in a massive volunteer effort.

“We’ve raised nearly $100,000 in 100 days,” he says, and the number of volunteers has been “in the hundreds, maybe even thousands now.”

The village will ultimately include a common house, garden beds, a chicken coop, and 18 single-unit cottages.

“Camp Quixote” becomes a village

“The typical development for extremely low-income housing is trending up toward $200,000 per unit. That’s a lot of bills,” says Jill Severn, a board member at Panza, a nonprofit organization that sponsors another tiny-house project called Quixote Village. (The organization’s name is a play on Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s sidekick in Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel.)

Quixote Village opened in Olympia, Wash., right before Christmas. But it began in February 2007 as “Camp Quixote,” a protest held in a city-owned parking lot. A group of homeless people assembled there to oppose an Olympia ordinance that made it illegal to sit, lie down, or sell things within six feet of downtown buildings. When police evicted the campers eight days after the protest began, the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation stepped in to help, offering temporary refuge on their land.

For five years, the camp’s location rotated, moving and reassembling every 90 days at one of several different local churches. Panza was formed by a corps of volunteers from the faith communities assisting the camp, and the organization worked with the city council to secure and rezone a parcel of county-owned industrial land near a community college and create a permanent site for the village. In December of 2013, the residents of Quixote Village settled into their new homes there.

Quixote Village has fostered a positive relationship between its residents and local government and police, says Severn. Despite this, the project was held up in court for a year by a local organization of businesses and landowners called the Industrial Zoning Preservation Association, which cited concerns over the potential impact on local businesses in a nearby industrial park.

Panza used the time to fundraise and build an outreach campaign to win over the public. They had the support of legions of volunteers, mostly from local churches, who had staffed the camp.

“Having hundreds of [residents] get to know people that were homeless made a huge difference in the success of getting this off the ground,” says Severn.

Today, the 30 structures that make up Quixote Village are home to 29 disabled adults, almost all of whom qualify as “chronically homeless,” by the standards of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Homelessness in Austin, Texas, costs taxpayers more than $10 million per year.

The residents also have a common space with shared showers, a laundry, garden space, and a kitchen. By sharing these amenities, the community was able to increase the affordability of the project and design a neighborhood they believed would fit their needs and make them more self-sufficient.

The shared space has also helped them create a supportive community. The residents, who are self-governed, have developed a rulebook that prohibits illegal drugs and alcohol on the grounds and requires that each member put in a certain number of service hours per week. They meet twice a week in the evenings to discuss problems or concerns and to share a common meal that they take turns cooking.

The main complaint right now, says Raul Salazar, the village’s program manager and only full-time staff member, is that the postal service still hasn’t started delivering mail.

The cost of units at Quixote Village is significantly higher than at Second Wind—about $88,000 per unit—but that’s still less than half the cost of the average public housing project, according to Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Quixote has had access to state funding and local community grants, as well as private funding from individuals, businesses, and two Native American tribes. The project also received a Community Development Block Grant for $604,000 from the State of Washington Department of Commerce and a $1.5-million grant from the Washington State Legislature.

Two architecture and design firms, MSGS Architects and KMB Design Groups, also contributed design services pro bono, and the Thurston County Commission is leasing the land to Quixote for $1 per year.

Gaining acceptance

Many other tiny-house projects are just beginning to get of the ground, raise money, find land, and gain approval from local officials and members of the public. But the unorthodox nature of the small houses presents unique legal zoning limitations and barriers that limit where tiny houses can be stationed.

In Madison, Wisc., Occupy Madison has been facing this very challenge, as the group forged ahead with plans for a tiny house village.

Each home will be about 99 square feet if you include the porch, and volunteers enjoy the joke: “We are the 99 square feet!”

In the spring of 2011, prior to the launch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a series of protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol—focused on the state’s controversial anti-collective-bargaining bill—prompted additional legislation that prohibited groups from gathering without a permit. When the protests joined forces with Occupy in the fall of 2011, this created a unique opportunity for the voices of the many homeless people in Madison to be heard.

“There were some great moments throughout the Occupy movement where a lot of dialogue was going on between the people without homes and the people with homes,” says Allen Barkoff, one of the board members of Occupy Madison, Inc., a nonprofit formed in December 2012 to address the need for legal places where homeless people in Madison could congregate and stay safe. The organization first looked into buying an apartment building or a shared house for the homeless but ultimately settled on tiny houses as the most flexible and economical way to create homes for people.

In this case, the cost of building the tiny homes comes to around $5,000 each, funded by private donations and an online crowd-funding campaign. The nonprofit also plans to apply for some city grants. Each home will come with a propane heater, a composting toilet, and an 80-watt solar panel array—and will be about 98 square feet in size, 99 if you include the porch. (The volunteers enjoy the joke: “We are the 99 square feet!”)

But the question of where the houses can legally be located is still up in the air. Volunteers are now building houses for six people. Because of a recent ordinance change, the houses are allowed to sit on church property in groups of three. City regulations also permit them to be placed on the side of the road, as long as they are relocated every 48 hours. But Madison’s snowy winter makes the houses hard to move, explains Barkoff.

Now Occupy Madison, Inc., is in the middle of a lengthy process to purchase a parcel of land on the east side of the city to accommodate 11 houses, along with a central building (a converted gas station) that can serve as a workshop for making more homes. This spring, they will continue to hold neighborhood meetings about the project, talk with police, and work with the Madison Planning and Development Department—and, eventually, the city council—to negotiate zoning issues for the village.

The real cost of homelessness

Efforts to break through the red tape and raise money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can’t rival the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year in Austin, for example, as YES! reported in December 2013.

“It’s a very important step in terms of the kinds of services we should be providing to people that need assistance.”

“Chronically homeless people—people who have disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to systems of public care,” explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per person per year, saving taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Government officials and city planners are beginning to see the tiny-house village as one viable solution for addressing homelessness.

“It’s certainly something that we would encourage other communities to take a look at when it comes to creating solutions for housing the chronically homeless,” says Lee Jones, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s a very important step in terms of the kinds of services we should be providing to people that need assistance.”

Currently, the various efforts to house the homeless in tiny-house villages comprise a small and pioneering movement: But each new project helps create lessons and a model for other communities.

For example, Quixote Village, as a recipient of state funding, is considered a “pilot” project: It is required to report its progress to the state legislature in five years. In the meantime, says Severn, the residents will be settling in, putting in garden beds, building a carpentry workshop, searching for jobs, and simply living their lives.

“One of our residents has been homeless for about 25 years,” Severn says. “He told me he’s excited to start a little rose garden. It really touched me to hear that.”