Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, A Newspaper's Crisis Reveals Unreported Worlds
By Aviva Chomsky
Posted on February 4, 2016, Printed on February 4, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176099/ ;
Is there a category of human beings who, in election 2016, have been the
focus of more negative attention, fear-mongering, or worse press than
immigrants, especially undocumented ones coming from or through Mexico
(those infamous rapists)? I doubt it. Thought of in another way, such
immigrants seem to be the only lobbying group capable of convincing
Republican politicians that our crumbling infrastructure needs to be shored
up -- hence those monster walls to come along the Mexican border.
Immigrants, its now well known, are a shiftless bunch of criminals, or as
Donald Trump put it, If you look at the statistics of people coming, you
look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything coming in illegally
into this country its mind-boggling! And dont forget the terrorist types
supposedly worming their way in among refugees -- another category of
immigrants -- fleeing the chaos the U.S. had such a hand in creating in
Syria and Iraq. Those lost souls looking for asylum here have been a
particular target of Republican candidates and office holders eager to ban
them from coming anywhere near this country or at least their states. Put
it all together and you have a witchs brew when it comes to the land of the
free and home of the... well, whatever.
So imagine the national shock (had anyone been paying attention) that The
Criminalization of Immigration in the United States, a study by researchers
Walter A. Ewing, Daniel E. Martínez, and Rubén G. Rumbaut released last July
through the American Immigration Council, should have caused here. The
three scholars offered truly shocking news. They crunched the latest
numbers and confirmed decades of other studies showing that immigration does
anything but increase U.S. crime rates. Immigrants, legal and otherwise,
are charged with far fewer serious crimes and are jailed far less often
than the native born. To be specific, their study found that 1.6% of
immigrant males age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3% of the
native-born. This disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades,
as evidenced by data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses. In
each of those years, the incarceration rates of the native-born were
anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants. The same,
by the way, holds true for incarceration rates among the young,
less-educated Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men who make up the bulk
of the unauthorized population.
How in the world do such definitive hard numbers fit with the overwrought
sense of fear and alarm, the myth-making about immigrants alive in the
country today? In her second TomDispatch post, Aviva Chomsky offers an
interesting answer: its not that hard to create a nightmare vision of
immigrants when they are almost never seen by the Americans you are scaring
the hell out of. Their invisibility in our world ensures that just about
any picture can be painted of them without fear of contradiction because
theres nothing in most of our lives to which to compare it. So consider
today just one recent case in which, however briefly, that cloak of
invisibility began to be lifted from the remarkably lawful, remarkably
hardworking immigrants who are the target of so much calumny this election
season. Tom
All the News Thats Fit to Print
How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers
By Aviva Chomsky
In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly
transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the
Internet is replacing the real, material world, as theory asks us to
question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to
rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the
physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and
services for the post-industrial information economy.
As it happens, this increasingly invisible, underground economy of muscles
and sweat, blood and effort intersects in the most intimate ways with those
who enjoy the benefits of the virtual world. Of course, our connection to
that virtual world comes through physical devices, and each of them follows
a commodity chain that begins with the mining of rare earth elements and
ends at a toxic disposal or recycling site, usually somewhere in the Third
World.
Closer to home, too, the incontrovertible realities of our physical lives
depend on labor -- often that of undocumented immigrants -- invisible but
far from virtual, that makes apparently endless mundane daily routines
possible.
Even the most ethereal of post-modern cosmopolitans, for instance, eat food.
In twenty-first-century America, as anthropologist Steve Striffler has
pointed out, to find a meal that has not at some point passed through the
hands of Mexican immigrants is a difficult task. Medical anthropologist
Seth Holmes adds, It is likely that the last hands to hold the blueberries,
strawberries, peaches, asparagus, or lettuce before you pick them up in your
local grocery store belong to Latin American migrant laborers.
The same is true of the newspaper. The invisible links between two mutually
incomprehensible worlds were revealed to many in the Boston area at the end
of December when the Boston Globe, the citys major newspaper, made what its
executives apparently believed would be a minor change. They contracted out
its subscriber delivery service to a new company.
Isnt newspaper delivery part of the old economy and so consigned to the
dustbin of history by online news access? It turns out that a couple of
hundred thousand people in the Boston area -- and 56% of newspaper readers
nationwide -- still prefer to read their news in what some dismissively call
the dead tree format. In addition, despite major ad shrinkage, much of
the revenue that allows newspapers to offer online content still comes
overwhelmingly from in-print ads.
The Globe presented the change as a clean, technical move, nothing more than
a new contractor providing newspaper delivery for a lower cost. But like so
many other invisible services that grease the wheels of daily life, that
deceptively simple task is in fact provided thanks to grueling, exploited
labor performed by some of societys most marginalized workers, many of them
immigrants and undocumented.
In this respect, newspaper delivery shares characteristics with other forms
of labor that link the privileged with the exploited. This is especially
true in Boston, recently named the most unequal city in the country. Some
of the most dangerous, insecure, and unpleasant jobs with the lowest pay and
a general lack of benefits provide key goods and services for citizens who
undoubtedly believe that they never interact with immigrants or receive any
benefits from them.
In fact, immigrant workers harvest, process, and prepare food; they provide
home health care; they manicure hands and lawns. In other words, the system
connects some of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives with workers
whose very existence is then erased or demonized in the public sphere. And
all of this happens because these workers are regularly rendered silent and
invisible.
Reporters Heroically Deliver the Paper
To get that dead tree item from the printer to your doorstep requires
hundreds of human workers willing to leave home in the middle of the night,
365 days a year, regardless of the weather and the driving conditions (a
serious issue in New England). They must drive to a distribution center to
receive, fold, and package the papers, load them in their own car, and spend
several hours racing through dark streets to finish their route before dawn.
Although they pay for their own gas, insurance, and car maintenance, the low
piece rate that these independent contractors receive per-paper-delivered
barely allows them to reach the minimum wage. Many of them are immigrants.
The Globes workers remained invisible to much of the public until December
28th when the paper replaced its long-time delivery contractor with Long
Beach-based ACI Media Group. Droves of workers were laid off from the
previous company when it lost its Globe contract, and ACI promised to cut
costs for delivery by paying its newly hired workers less and making them
work more under significantly worse conditions. As a result, ACI had
trouble attracting workers and those they did hire began to quit en masse
when confronted with the degrading new working conditions. Thousands of
papers went undelivered, day after day. When subscriber complaints flooded
in, the media began to take notice. But most of the journalists covering
the developing story preferred to look everywhere except at the workers
themselves in trying to explain what happened.
Subscribers may be aware of their paper carriers because they catch a
glimpse of them or hear them in the early morning, or they may take
seriously those envelopes that the carriers regularly leave, hoping for tips
to bolster their meager income. Apparently, however, the Globes own
reporters never thought to consider how the newspaper arrived at
subscribers homes until the system went into crisis.
A week into the quagmire, the Globe mobilized its reporters and other staff
to help deliver the Sunday paper. If anyone outside the Boston area heard
about the issue, it was undoubtedly because of this unprecedented action.
Under the headline Boston Globe Employees Help Deliver Papers on Sunday,
for instance, the New York Times noted that 200 of them stayed up all
night, having brought their own flashlight and a GPS, and that they
assembled and bagged thousands of newspapers and stacked them in their
cars. On NPR, Renee Montagne chimed in, reporting that before dawn on
Sunday morning, dozens of the Globe's reporters and editors fanned out and
delivered the papers themselves. They carried flashlights and GPS.
As one of those reporters told the Times, Youre following instructions
about whether people want it directly on their porch or hidden somewhere, so
you have to walk up to the house and drop it where they wanted it. CNN
Money explained that first, the volunteers had to bag the papers, and
provided a photograph to prove that such a remarkable act had indeed
happened. All of this coverage tacitly offered up the same message:
reporters had heroically crossed the lines of race, status, and class! How
amazing!
Clearly, this foray into the world of immigrant labor proved startling for
those reporters. Columnist Marcela García called it an unbelievably
eye-opening experience. Columnist Shirley Leung wrote, We have an old
saying in newsrooms: Putting out the paper is a daily miracle. I used to
think that was just about filing your story on deadline, but Ive come to
appreciate how its the whole package from keyboard to doorstep.
Columnist Joan Vennochi, after spending the night delivering papers,
lamented the suffering of the victims of the Globes decision -- by which,
of course, she meant the subscribers. After a humorous description of his
own amateur attempt to follow a morning delivery route, reporter Kevin
Cullen concluded casually that whatever they pay the delivery people, its
not enough, and its more than a little depressing to think this debacle has
been brought about by a desire to pay them even less.
Whatever they pay the delivery people... Curiously, in the first two
weeks of reporting on the crisis, no news source seemed able to find out how
much the new company was actually paying. The Columbia Journalism Review
reported widespread speculation that the labor shortage stems from ACI
offering lower pay rates than other carriers. But ACI and Globe management
have both denied that claim. Apparently it never occurred to CJR reporter
David Uberti to ask a worker!
Press coverage made it clear that newspapers live in, and speak to, a world
of privilege. It was assumed, for instance, that readers shared the utter
ignorance of reporters when it came to the work (and the workers) involved
in physically transporting newspapers to their doorsteps. They were, in
other words, to enjoy unlimited access to information about the world that
matters -- and complete ignorance when it came to the mundane details that
lay behind that access.
Only one of the journalists who participated in that Sunday delivery
extravaganza, columnist Marcela García, who frequently covers immigrant and
Latino issues, even thought to focus her attention on the workers who
actually did the same job every day. Reporters delivering their own work
-- thats a story, she wrote. But off camera, and working side by side
with us as we assembled the Sunday paper, were the people who are there
every night, making not much more than minimum wage... Part of the subtext
of the crisis the Globe has faced for the past week is that our new delivery
vendor cant seem to find enough people willing and able to do the grueling
work.
At her blog, García recorded one of her colleagues saying, Wow, I cant
believe something like this had to happen for us to learn about these
workers and their conditions. She was evidently one of the few reporters
willing to talk with some of the actual workers that Sunday morning when the
Globe staff mobilized to help with the delivery. Or perhaps she was one of
the few able to. While 35% of Bostons inhabitants speak a language other
than English and the city is now majority minority, the papers
journalists, unlike its delivery workers, remain overwhelmingly white and
English speaking.
The Vanishing Workers
That Tuesday, January 5th, publisher John Henry offered a public apology --
to subscribers, of course, not to the workers with the old carrier who,
because of his actions, had lost their jobs, or the ones with the new
carrier who had seen their working conditions and pay undermined. Henry did
emphasize that a major reason for switching carriers was ACIs promise of
substantially cheaper service. Clearly, he felt it unnecessary to mention
that these savings would be realized on the backs of the delivery workers.
Until Globe staffers embarked on an effort to save more than 20,000
subscribers from missing their Sunday paper, Henry wrote, we had
underestimated what it would take to make this change. He then offered a
post-modern, post-material explanation for the problem: the new companys
routing software had proven insufficient for the job!
On January 9th, almost two weeks after the delivery crisis began, an exposé
by reporter Michael Levenson finally brought the issue of long hours,
little pay, no vacation for delivery drivers out of the shadows. He
described the grueling nocturnal marathon for low-income workers who toil
almost invisibly on the edge of the economy. The next day, when 15 workers
delivered a letter of protest to the new carrier and walked off the job,
reporter Dan Adams explained their demands and actually quoted Lynn Worker
Center organizer Julio Ruiz.
On January 13th, the Globe published a lead editorial challenging management
and bringing labor issues to the fore in a significant way. It recognized
that drivers get no vacation, and lack worker protections. Thats despite
the fact that packaging papers into plastic bags, in the middle of the
night, can be grueling work. The editorial called on the state attorney
general and federal authorities to investigate the delivery business,
including implicitly the accusation leveled by workers that their employers
misclassify them as independent contractors in order to avoid paying the
wages or offering the labor protections they deserve.
In other words, the organizing and protesting of the workers -- and the
experiences of the reporters as one-day delivery people -- helped briefly
open a window between the world of those who write and read the news and the
world of the exploited labor that transports it from the former to the
latter.
Yet the window didnt last long. A Globe postmortem by Mark Arsenault on
January 16th returned to a purely technological explanation of the problem
in summing up the three-week debacle. The root of the delivery mayhem, he
wrote, lies in something so simple that nobody gave it much thought until
it was too late: sensible paper routes. Once again, software and routing
lay at the heart of the matter, while workers and working conditions
conveniently vanished.
If newspaper writers and readers are effectively isolated from the world of
the workers who deliver the paper, that divide goes both ways. One
immigrant worker who spoke to García -- in Spanish -- was a Guatemalan who
had taken on a second paper route during the crisis. He worked from one at
night to eight in the morning and requested to be identified by a pseudonym.
I asked him if he ever reads the Globe, García reported. He looked up
and stared back at me as if I was saying something crazy. And he just
laughed.
Our infatuation with virtual modernity should not blind us to the
exploitative systems of labor that undergird our world from our front
doorsteps to distant parts of the planet. As the Globes delivery crisis
made clear, the present system relies on ignorance and on the invisibility
of the labor of mostly immigrant, often undocumented workers. The Globes
delivery breakdown offered a brief look at just one way in which the worlds
of business, journalism, and readers rely on such workers. And the local
and national coverage revealed just how unusual it is for those who own,
manage, write, and read newspapers to see this underside of our information
economy.
So when you next pick up your paper and read the latest blast by Donald
Trump against undocumented immigrants, remember: the odds are you can only
do so because an undocumented worker brought it to your doorstep.
Aviva Chomskys most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became
Illegal. She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American
studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Aviva Chomsky
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176099
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, A Newspaper's Crisis Reveals Unreported Worlds
By Aviva Chomsky
Posted on February 4, 2016, Printed on February 4, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176099/ ;
Is there a category of human beings who, in election 2016, have been the
focus of more negative attention, fear-mongering, or worse press than
immigrants, especially undocumented ones coming from or through Mexico
(those infamous rapists)? I doubt it. Thought of in another way, such
immigrants seem to be the only lobbying group capable of convincing
Republican politicians that our crumbling infrastructure needs to be shored
up -- hence those monster walls to come along the Mexican border.
Immigrants, its now well known, are a shiftless bunch of criminals, or as
Donald Trump put it, If you look at the statistics of people coming, you
look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything coming in illegally
into this country its mind-boggling! And dont forget the terrorist types
supposedly worming their way in among refugees -- another category of
immigrants -- fleeing the chaos the U.S. had such a hand in creating in
Syria and Iraq. Those lost souls looking for asylum here have been a
particular target of Republican candidates and office holders eager to ban
them from coming anywhere near this country or at least their states. Put it
all together and you have a witchs brew when it comes to the land of the
free and home of the... well, whatever.
So imagine the national shock (had anyone been paying attention) that The
Criminalization of Immigration in the United States, a study by researchers
Walter A. Ewing, Daniel E. Martínez, and Rubén G. Rumbaut released last July
through the American Immigration Council, should have caused here. The three
scholars offered truly shocking news. They crunched the latest numbers and
confirmed decades of other studies showing that immigration does anything
but increase U.S. crime rates. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, are charged
with far fewer serious crimes and are jailed far less often than the
native born. To be specific, their study found that 1.6% of immigrant males
age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3% of the native-born. This
disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades, as evidenced by
data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses. In each of those
years, the incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to
five times higher than that of immigrants. The same, by the way, holds true
for incarceration rates among the young, less-educated Mexican, Salvadoran,
and Guatemalan men who make up the bulk of the unauthorized population.
How in the world do such definitive hard numbers fit with the overwrought
sense of fear and alarm, the myth-making about immigrants alive in the
country today? In her second TomDispatch post, Aviva Chomsky offers an
interesting answer: its not that hard to create a nightmare vision of
immigrants when they are almost never seen by the Americans you are scaring
the hell out of. Their invisibility in our world ensures that just about any
picture can be painted of them without fear of contradiction because theres
nothing in most of our lives to which to compare it. So consider today just
one recent case in which, however briefly, that cloak of invisibility began
to be lifted from the remarkably lawful, remarkably hardworking immigrants
who are the target of so much calumny this election season. Tom
All the News Thats Fit to Print
How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers
By Aviva Chomsky
In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly
transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the
Internet is replacing the real, material world, as theory asks us to
question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to
rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the
physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and
services for the post-industrial information economy.
As it happens, this increasingly invisible, underground economy of muscles
and sweat, blood and effort intersects in the most intimate ways with those
who enjoy the benefits of the virtual world. Of course, our connection to
that virtual world comes through physical devices, and each of them follows
a commodity chain that begins with the mining of rare earth elements and
ends at a toxic disposal or recycling site, usually somewhere in the Third
World.
Closer to home, too, the incontrovertible realities of our physical lives
depend on labor -- often that of undocumented immigrants -- invisible but
far from virtual, that makes apparently endless mundane daily routines
possible.
Even the most ethereal of post-modern cosmopolitans, for instance, eat food.
In twenty-first-century America, as anthropologist Steve Striffler has
pointed out, to find a meal that has not at some point passed through the
hands of Mexican immigrants is a difficult task. Medical anthropologist
Seth Holmes adds, It is likely that the last hands to hold the blueberries,
strawberries, peaches, asparagus, or lettuce before you pick them up in your
local grocery store belong to Latin American migrant laborers.
The same is true of the newspaper. The invisible links between two mutually
incomprehensible worlds were revealed to many in the Boston area at the end
of December when the Boston Globe, the citys major newspaper, made what its
executives apparently believed would be a minor change. They contracted out
its subscriber delivery service to a new company.
Isnt newspaper delivery part of the old economy and so consigned to the
dustbin of history by online news access? It turns out that a couple of
hundred thousand people in the Boston area -- and 56% of newspaper readers
nationwide -- still prefer to read their news in what some dismissively call
the dead tree format. In addition, despite major ad shrinkage, much of the
revenue that allows newspapers to offer online content still comes
overwhelmingly from in-print ads.
The Globe presented the change as a clean, technical move, nothing more than
a new contractor providing newspaper delivery for a lower cost. But like so
many other invisible services that grease the wheels of daily life, that
deceptively simple task is in fact provided thanks to grueling, exploited
labor performed by some of societys most marginalized workers, many of them
immigrants and undocumented.
In this respect, newspaper delivery shares characteristics with other forms
of labor that link the privileged with the exploited. This is especially
true in Boston, recently named the most unequal city in the country. Some of
the most dangerous, insecure, and unpleasant jobs with the lowest pay and a
general lack of benefits provide key goods and services for citizens who
undoubtedly believe that they never interact with immigrants or receive any
benefits from them.
In fact, immigrant workers harvest, process, and prepare food; they provide
home health care; they manicure hands and lawns. In other words, the system
connects some of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives with workers
whose very existence is then erased or demonized in the public sphere. And
all of this happens because these workers are regularly rendered silent and
invisible.
Reporters Heroically Deliver the Paper
To get that dead tree item from the printer to your doorstep requires
hundreds of human workers willing to leave home in the middle of the night,
365 days a year, regardless of the weather and the driving conditions (a
serious issue in New England). They must drive to a distribution center to
receive, fold, and package the papers, load them in their own car, and spend
several hours racing through dark streets to finish their route before dawn.
Although they pay for their own gas, insurance, and car maintenance, the low
piece rate that these independent contractors receive per-paper-delivered
barely allows them to reach the minimum wage. Many of them are immigrants.
The Globes workers remained invisible to much of the public until December
28th when the paper replaced its long-time delivery contractor with Long
Beach-based ACI Media Group. Droves of workers were laid off from the
previous company when it lost its Globe contract, and ACI promised to cut
costs for delivery by paying its newly hired workers less and making them
work more under significantly worse conditions. As a result, ACI had trouble
attracting workers and those they did hire began to quit en masse when
confronted with the degrading new working conditions. Thousands of papers
went undelivered, day after day. When subscriber complaints flooded in, the
media began to take notice. But most of the journalists covering the
developing story preferred to look everywhere except at the workers
themselves in trying to explain what happened.
Subscribers may be aware of their paper carriers because they catch a
glimpse of them or hear them in the early morning, or they may take
seriously those envelopes that the carriers regularly leave, hoping for tips
to bolster their meager income. Apparently, however, the Globes own
reporters never thought to consider how the newspaper arrived at
subscribers homes until the system went into crisis.
A week into the quagmire, the Globe mobilized its reporters and other staff
to help deliver the Sunday paper. If anyone outside the Boston area heard
about the issue, it was undoubtedly because of this unprecedented action.
Under the headline Boston Globe Employees Help Deliver Papers on Sunday,
for instance, the New York Times noted that 200 of them stayed up all
night, having brought their own flashlight and a GPS, and that they
assembled and bagged thousands of newspapers and stacked them in their
cars. On NPR, Renee Montagne chimed in, reporting that before dawn on
Sunday morning, dozens of the Globe's reporters and editors fanned out and
delivered the papers themselves. They carried flashlights and GPS.
As one of those reporters told the Times, Youre following instructions
about whether people want it directly on their porch or hidden somewhere, so
you have to walk up to the house and drop it where they wanted it. CNN
Money explained that first, the volunteers had to bag the papers, and
provided a photograph to prove that such a remarkable act had indeed
happened. All of this coverage tacitly offered up the same message:
reporters had heroically crossed the lines of race, status, and class! How
amazing!
Clearly, this foray into the world of immigrant labor proved startling for
those reporters. Columnist Marcela García called it an unbelievably
eye-opening experience. Columnist Shirley Leung wrote, We have an old
saying in newsrooms: Putting out the paper is a daily miracle. I used to
think that was just about filing your story on deadline, but Ive come to
appreciate how its the whole package from keyboard to doorstep.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0807001678/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0807001678/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Columnist
Joan Vennochi, after spending the night delivering papers, lamented the
suffering of the victims of the Globes decision -- by which, of course,
she meant the subscribers. After a humorous description of his own amateur
attempt to follow a morning delivery route, reporter Kevin Cullen concluded
casually that whatever they pay the delivery people, its not enough, and
its more than a little depressing to think this debacle has been brought
about by a desire to pay them even less.
Whatever they pay the delivery people... Curiously, in the first two weeks
of reporting on the crisis, no news source seemed able to find out how much
the new company was actually paying. The Columbia Journalism Review reported
widespread speculation that the labor shortage stems from ACI offering
lower pay rates than other carriers. But ACI and Globe management have both
denied that claim. Apparently it never occurred to CJR reporter David
Uberti to ask a worker!
Press coverage made it clear that newspapers live in, and speak to, a world
of privilege. It was assumed, for instance, that readers shared the utter
ignorance of reporters when it came to the work (and the workers) involved
in physically transporting newspapers to their doorsteps. They were, in
other words, to enjoy unlimited access to information about the world that
matters -- and complete ignorance when it came to the mundane details that
lay behind that access.
Only one of the journalists who participated in that Sunday delivery
extravaganza, columnist Marcela García, who frequently covers immigrant and
Latino issues, even thought to focus her attention on the workers who
actually did the same job every day. Reporters delivering their own work --
thats a story, she wrote. But off camera, and working side by side with
us as we assembled the Sunday paper, were the people who are there every
night, making not much more than minimum wage... Part of the subtext of the
crisis the Globe has faced for the past week is that our new delivery vendor
cant seem to find enough people willing and able to do the grueling work.
At her blog, García recorded one of her colleagues saying, Wow, I cant
believe something like this had to happen for us to learn about these
workers and their conditions. She was evidently one of the few reporters
willing to talk with some of the actual workers that Sunday morning when the
Globe staff mobilized to help with the delivery. Or perhaps she was one of
the few able to. While 35% of Bostons inhabitants speak a language other
than English and the city is now majority minority, the papers
journalists, unlike its delivery workers, remain overwhelmingly white and
English speaking.
The Vanishing Workers
That Tuesday, January 5th, publisher John Henry offered a public apology --
to subscribers, of course, not to the workers with the old carrier who,
because of his actions, had lost their jobs, or the ones with the new
carrier who had seen their working conditions and pay undermined. Henry did
emphasize that a major reason for switching carriers was ACIs promise of
substantially cheaper service. Clearly, he felt it unnecessary to mention
that these savings would be realized on the backs of the delivery workers.
Until Globe staffers embarked on an effort to save more than 20,000
subscribers from missing their Sunday paper, Henry wrote, we had
underestimated what it would take to make this change. He then offered a
post-modern, post-material explanation for the problem: the new companys
routing software had proven insufficient for the job!
On January 9th, almost two weeks after the delivery crisis began, an exposé
by reporter Michael Levenson finally brought the issue of long hours,
little pay, no vacation for delivery drivers out of the shadows. He
described the grueling nocturnal marathon for low-income workers who toil
almost invisibly on the edge of the economy. The next day, when 15 workers
delivered a letter of protest to the new carrier and walked off the job,
reporter Dan Adams explained their demands and actually quoted Lynn Worker
Center organizer Julio Ruiz.
On January 13th, the Globe published a lead editorial challenging management
and bringing labor issues to the fore in a significant way. It recognized
that drivers get no vacation, and lack worker protections. Thats despite
the fact that packaging papers into plastic bags, in the middle of the
night, can be grueling work. The editorial called on the state attorney
general and federal authorities to investigate the delivery business,
including implicitly the accusation leveled by workers that their employers
misclassify them as independent contractors in order to avoid paying the
wages or offering the labor protections they deserve.
In other words, the organizing and protesting of the workers -- and the
experiences of the reporters as one-day delivery people -- helped briefly
open a window between the world of those who write and read the news and the
world of the exploited labor that transports it from the former to the
latter.
Yet the window didnt last long. A Globe postmortem by Mark Arsenault on
January 16th returned to a purely technological explanation of the problem
in summing up the three-week debacle. The root of the delivery mayhem, he
wrote, lies in something so simple that nobody gave it much thought until
it was too late: sensible paper routes. Once again, software and routing
lay at the heart of the matter, while workers and working conditions
conveniently vanished.
If newspaper writers and readers are effectively isolated from the world of
the workers who deliver the paper, that divide goes both ways. One immigrant
worker who spoke to García -- in Spanish -- was a Guatemalan who had taken
on a second paper route during the crisis. He worked from one at night to
eight in the morning and requested to be identified by a pseudonym. I asked
him if he ever reads the Globe, García reported. He looked up and stared
back at me as if I was saying something crazy. And he just laughed.
Our infatuation with virtual modernity should not blind us to the
exploitative systems of labor that undergird our world from our front
doorsteps to distant parts of the planet. As the Globes delivery crisis
made clear, the present system relies on ignorance and on the invisibility
of the labor of mostly immigrant, often undocumented workers. The Globes
delivery breakdown offered a brief look at just one way in which the worlds
of business, journalism, and readers rely on such workers. And the local and
national coverage revealed just how unusual it is for those who own, manage,
write, and read newspapers to see this underside of our information economy.
So when you next pick up your paper and read the latest blast by Donald
Trump against undocumented immigrants, remember: the odds are you can only
do so because an undocumented worker brought it to your doorstep.
Aviva Chomskys most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became
Illegal. She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American
studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Aviva Chomsky
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176099
