Oscar at Work

No one was surprised to see Avatar and Up in the Air nominated for Oscars.    What is surprising, perhaps, is that these two films offer unusually direct commentaries on the current political economy.

Avatar, at first glance, is a classic tale of colonial invasion.  A white hero, a Marine named Jake Sully (one-time bricklayer, the Australian actor Sam Worthington) who lost the use of his legs in combat, agrees to be part of a “Blackwater” type military operation on the planet Pandora.  Pandora, a place of fantastical, tropical beauty, is peopled by a race of gorgeous ten foot blue human-like aliens with long braids, called the Na’vi.  A rapacious military operation is destroying their planet in pursuit of a priceless rock called “unobtainium.”

Sully joins the science mission on Pandora, which allows him to inhabit an avatar body and live among the Na’vi people.  A beautiful young princess, Neytiri (African American actress, Zoey Saldana), teaches Sully to hunt, speak, and ride giant dragons.  They fall in love, and the film climaxes in an epic battle between the literally tree-hugging Navi people and the metal-bound, corporate thugs who want to destroy them for profit.

Is Avatar a bizarro mashup of all things politically correct? Avatar has riled up conservatives across the globe.  The  Chinese government recently halted the showing of the 2D version of Avatar, where popular Chinese bloggers pointed out the connection between the displacement of the Na’vi by humans and the displacement of the Chinese people by the Chinese government and real estate developers.

The Weekly Standard attacked the film for “its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe ….its hatred of the military….and the notion that to be human is just way uncool.”  The Vatican slammed the film for promoting the worship of nature (as opposed to God).

But beneath the colonial exploitation and the eco-worship, however, lies Cameron’s critique of the American government’s failure to provide adequate healthcare for veterans.  Jake Sully, who is paralyzed from the waist down after a military tour of duty in Venezuela, joins the Pandora mission in large part because he wants a new pair of legs.  Back on earth doctors have the technology to make him walk again, but Sully can’t afford the procedure.  Sully’s mission commander promises him that if he betrays the Na’vi people and helps the mission get the unobtainium that he finally get his legs.

At the end of the day Avatar is not particularly radical, but it is surprisingly political for a blockbuster of such magnitude. Cameron makes a broad  plea for economic as well as ecological justice.  In addition, with the crudely drawn but still sympathetic Jake Sully, Cameron hints that our recent wars in the Middle East are class wars, in which working-class soldiers trade their limbs, and, sometimes, their lives, for financial security.  It hardly seems fair—not in 2026, and not now.

Up in the Air is Jason Reitman’s recessionary romantic comedy about a people who spend a lot of time breathing in the recycled air on jumbo jets. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is more at home in first class at 30,000 feet than he is in his barren apartment in Oklahoma.  Bingham works for a company that fires people for a living.  He spends a good portion of the film sitting across from nicely dressed, white-collar workers, telling them to see their layoff as a chance to finally pursue their dreams.  It’s a hollow message, but Bingham insists that if people have to be fired, he might as well do it with dignity.

Bingham also flirts with dignity, as he pursues Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman who similarly spends her life on the road.  Bingham also develops a mentor relationship with a young co-worker, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick).  A know-it-all fresh out of Cornell’s business school, Keener wants to turn Bingham’s job into a virtual one.  She thinks that people can be fired just as easily with a video conferencing system.  Bingham sees his air born freedom under attack, and he takes her up in the air to show her the importance of firing people face to face.

And here’s where the movie made me cry—for real.  When Bingham and Keener sit across the table from about-to-be-laid-off workers, the human suffering of the recessionary economy comes to the surface.  Reitman used real-life laid-off workers to play these roles; he put classified ads in newspapers in St. Louis and Detroit and invited recently laid off workers to participate in a documentary.  He asked them to “re-enact” their firings, and he selected some of them to act in the film.  Their reward?  About $800 (the daily minimum for an actor set by the Screen Actors Guild) and the privilege of getting fired by George Clooney.

Cozy Bailey, a laid-off Styrofoam technician from Missouri, said that it “sucks to get fired, it doesn’t matter by who.”  But she also confessed that the whole experience was “cathartic.”  Another laid-off worker in the film, Kevin Pilla, was pleased that he was able to say the sorts of things on camera that he hadn’t thought to say in the moment because he was in “such shock.”

For Reitman, talking to these workers was an education. “The astonishing thing is,” Reitman said, “if you had asked me before I made this film, ‘What’s the hardest part about being fired?’ I would have probably said the loss of income…. But what I came to realize, at least when it came to the people, and I talked to a lot of people, it was the loss of purpose. The reason to get out of bed in the morning. The thing they would say that scared me the most was ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.’”
Reitman has come under fire for what some see as cynical choice to use real laid-off workers.  Dana Stevens at Slate magazine complains that “there’s something instrumentalizing about the way these interviews are shoehorned in for dramatic effect, especially when Reitman seamlessly cuts from the faces of out-of-work Americans to the familiar comic mugs of J.K. Simmons or Zach Galifianakis, playing out-of-work fictional characters.” Rob Humanick at The Projection Booth makes a similar charge, arguing that these “sequences never accrue a sense of purpose beyond mere lip service to social trends.”

Reitman can fairly be accused of mixing high and low, reality with slick unreality, and economic heartbreak with romantic fairy tale.  But the film ultimately sides with the laid-off workers and not with the company that has made a business out of routinizing termination. Up in the Air is about the value of human connection and the ways in which our closest relationships give us purpose.  The simple truth that the workplace can become a legitimate source for those relationships is not lost on the people losing their jobs, or on the audience.

We’ve been hearing a lot of numbers talk about the recession, but relatively little narrative.  The nightly news might focus on an individual family here or there or show some footage of foreclosed homes with yellow tape around them, but where do we go for the real stories?  We certainly wouldn’t expect to find some of the most moving and persuasive tales about the recession in Hollywood, but anyone who can afford to plunk down $10.00 to see Avatar or Up in the Air might, indeed, get more of an economic education that they were bargaining for.  Neither of these movies will encourage anyone to organize a rally or go on strike, but if it is becoming a “social trend” in Hollywood to put a human face on this devastating economy, I’m all for it.  And it seems that Oscar is, too.

Kathy M. Newman

Kathy M. Newman is professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.  She was involved in the effort to unionize Teaching Assistants at Yale University in the 1990s and she is currently finishing a book, Blacklisted and Bluecollared: How Americans Saw Class in the 1950s.

Beyond Precious: Real Change for the Urban Poor

Last month, I received an email inviting me to vote for films nominated to receive an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) image award. The email stated the film Precious had been nominated for a NAACP image award in several categories, including best picture, best actress, best supporting actress, and best director. “Image, advancement of a people; advancement, image; image, advancement,” I thought.

Like many, I have questions about the film.  Does Precious further the advancement of “colored” people–or better yet—the advancement of all people, regardless of color? Or does the film merely shock viewers, while leaving existing social, economic, and political arrangements unquestioned, unchallenged, and thus intact? What images of a past, present, or future does the film present that might inspire people to work for social changes that will advance not just “colored” people,” not just poor people, but all of us?

Through their endorsement of the film, the film’s producers—billionaire talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and multi-millionaire actor, writer, producer Tyler Perry—imply that the film enlightens and thus uplifts many.  But I am not fully convinced of this. Indeed, I am troubled by many of the images projected in the film:

• Images of Precious (a 16 –year- old girl living in poverty-stricken Harlem in the 1980s) being brutally attacked by her mother, repeatedly raped by her father, and impregnated twice by him

• Images of Precious giving birth to her daughter, who is actually her half-sister, on her mother’s apartment floor— a child whom Precious calls “Mongo,” which is short for Mongoloid or someone with Downs’ Syndrome

• The image of Precious stealing and then eating a bucket of chicken all at one time, without sufficient exploration of  how feelings of desperation and deprivation generated by poverty and others’ indifference to its effects would drive some people to gorge food to the point of making themselves sick

• Precious’s deferred dreams seem to “just sag like a heavy load,” as Langston Hughes wrote,   even as she receives an “A-” in English when she can barely recite the alphabet – a story line that gestures toward but doesn’t fully explore how the school has arguably perpetuated Precious’s illiteracy.

Most troubling for me is the film’s underlying message of “individualism,” which is conveyed through the omission of certain historical events, such as the loss of manufacturing jobs in poor urban communities in the 1970 s and 1980s. How could a film covering life in poverty- stricken Harlem in the 1980s fail to cover such things? The loss of manufacturing jobs under de-industrialization had a devastating effect on employment, family structure, neighborhood resources, and neighborhood cohesion within these communities, as William Julius Wilson has documented so well. Without this historical information, viewers are left with only Precious’s individual characteristics to focus on —her abuse, illiteracy, obesity, family dysfunction, self-loathing, self-isolation, and personal blame and guilt. These conditions, devastating as they are, reflect social problems, not just personal ones.

My fear is that such intense individualism will encourage the idea that the best thing others can do to help  people like Precious is to leave them alone to resolve their personal problems on their own. Such beliefs uphold the status quo and overlook systemic factors that continue to limit the life chances of the urban poor. Consider how our understanding of Precious’s story would be different if the film acknowledged these systemic factors:

• Substandard housing and a lack of jobs, which have been linked to increased student transiency, disrupted student learning, and lower student achievement.

• The loss of supermarkets, which has been linked to the urban poor’s declining health
• Transportation constraints that make it difficult for the urban poor to travel to and from school, the doctor’s office, and to jobs located in suburban or rural areas.

To move beyond the shock and discomfort that many said they felt when viewing Precious, to feel empowered and provide empowerment, we must eliminate these and other systemic constraints within America’s poor urban communities.  And then, in subsequent years, we may collectively receive an award for best performance, and maybe one for best image. But awards that come at the expense of the dignity and advancement of America’s urban poor do not represent a fair or ethical trade and should be seen as what they are: empty platitudes.

Denise Narcisse, Center for Working-Class Studies

Missed Opportunities: On Limbaugh, Bush, and Obama

In light of GOP tea bagger Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race—a victory that cost Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, doomed substantive health insurance reform (the White House long ago stopped calling it health care reform), and made it virtually impossible for President Obama to propose or pass anything that even slightly resembles a pro-worker, progressive agenda for the foreseeable future– my first blog of 2010 begins with a tip of the hat to two people with whom I usually disagree: Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush.

Let’s start with Limbaugh. There are few people more willing to bend the truth to gain political advantage than he.

And that’s why it pains me so to agree with his take on Brown’s victory.  Bloviating from Florida, the great prevaricator said that 2010 is “1994 on steroids.”  Unfortunately for the scores of Democrat political activists who are whistling past the graveyard by willfully misidentifying the cause and minimizing the effect of the GOP win in Massachusetts, “Mr. All Drug Addicts Should Be Jailed Except Me” is exactly right.

That’s because he understands that what Democrats and their working class supporters just lost is much more valuable than what Bill Clinton kicked away in 1993—94.  Back then the party merely forfeited its Congressional majorities.

This year it lost the opportunity to change America and the world.  With 60 votes—the Dems only had 56 when Clinton gagged on health care in ’93—a principled, popular president can do just about anything he wants.  Reform health care.  Re-regulate the financial industry.  Reinvigorate the union movement.  Dedicate billions to job-creating infrastructure and green energy projects.  Change the rules that govern foreign trade.  Appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Pass real campaign finance reform.  Protect the environment.  Implement a rational, compassionate solution to the immigration dilemma. .

As Limbaugh’s remarks about the consequences of Brown’s victory demonstrate, he understands this better than many of the Democrats who have shrugged off the loss of the seat Ted Kennedy held in the U.S. Senate for 49 years as an anomaly or minor setback attributable to “tactical errors” and/or a poorly run campaign.  Limbaugh knows that by losing the opportunity to enact meaningful health care reform the Democrats have squandered the chance to prove that big government fueled by progressive ideas can solve the problems that beset America in the 21^st Century. Truth be told, Limbaugh and his cohorts weren’t afraid that health care reform would pass, they were afraid it would work.

And now they’re rejoicing over the fact that Americans will never know.

That brings me to Mr. Bush.  Despite his many failings, viewed in the context of the health care reform meltdown, he deserves grudging applause for demonstrating moral certitude and the willingness to act upon it.  As delusional as he may have been, apparently the 43rd President believed that going to war in Iraq and hanging Saddam Hussein by his neck until dead were essential and righteous acts.

That explains why his resolve never wavered even as his stated rationale for going to war changed repeatedly.  Whether based on Iraq’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks (not true), on the rogue nation’s development and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction (not true), or on the contention that Hussein was simply a bad guy (true, but certainly not reason enough for the U.S. to waste the billions of dollars and expend the thousands of lives required to depose him) Bush remained steadfast in his conviction that destroying Iraq in order to save it was both justified and necessary.  It also explains why he was initially able to convince the public, the media, and Congress that he was right.  Doubters withered in the face of his dogged belief.

President Obama could and should have learned a few things from Mr. Bush.  Had he approached the effort to reform health care with the same moral certitude that characterized his predecessor’s rush to war, a substantive bill would have passed six months ago because the American people would have accepted nothing less.

Yet, after declaring reform the top priority of his administration, Mr. Obama relinquished control of the issue to Congress and stepped off the stage.  Predictably, as House and Senate Democrats engaged in internecine warfare, support for reform waned, especially when the Administration was forced to buy the Democratic votes needed to pass a watered-down bill in the Senate member by reluctant member, interest group by interest group.  Clearly this unseemly public display of legislative sausage-making at its worst set the stage for Scott Brown’s victory and all the bad things that will flow from it.

If Mr. Obama had simply embraced the Bush model and relentlessly and spiritedly fought for what he supposedly believed in, no one would have forgotten that both the AARP and the AMA endorsed the Senate bill.  No one would have forgotten that groups as disparate as organized labor and the health insurance industry supported reform.  No one would have paid attention to Limbaugh’s rants.  No one would have voted for Scott Brown.

Instead, Democrats now find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun held by members of a disenchanted electorate who are currently demonstrating a clear proclivity to vote for the party of no ideas—the GOP–over the party of badly executed ones.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.

Leo Jennings III

Welcome to the Working Class

As the financial industry celebrates its recovery from the Great Recession with huge bonuses, attention has turned increasingly to jobs.  But that’s not a new concern: over the past three decades first the working class and then the middle class faced unemployment caused by economic restructuring and globalization.  Back in the 70s and 80s, when working-class people were losing thousands of blue collar manufacturing jobs that paid middle-class wages, many economists brushed the problem aside, insisting that new forms of work would soon replace disappearing blue-collar jobs.  Industrial workers and their unions knew better 30 years ago.  They’ve long warned that economic restructuring, globalization, and unfair trade laws would result in the loss of the middle class.  Today we’re learning that they were right.

With the jobless recovery of the early 2000s and the ongoing unemployment crisis of today’s recession, the middle class is discovering that sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb were accurate when they suggested that what it means to be middle class is to be just one job away from poverty.  In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich explored the impact of this decline on individual consciousness.  But it is only within the last decade that people who thought they were safely middle class have come to understand the episodic, anxiety-ridden, contingent, low-wage-and-benefit life of many in the working class.

And that experience seems likely to become permanent reality for many.  Unlike in past business cycles, the middle class has not been able to recover so far, despite increases in productivity and stock prices. In “America Without a Middle Class,” Elizabeth Warren documents how the de facto unemployment rate, credit debt, “underwater” mortgages, increased use of food stamps, personal bankruptcies, and the loss of pensions and health care have all dramatically increased.  Middle-class households have depleted their savings and are increasingly accruing debt to pay for college, health care, and other expenses.

The situation continues to worsen.  The latest monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Report shows an additional 85,000 jobs lost. As the U.S. population grows, the need for jobs increases.  The economy would need 100,000 new jobs just to keep up. In other words, the net effect puts us 185,000 jobs behind where we need to be to stay even with current misery.  To make matters worse, 600,000 gave up looking for work and so were not even counted in the official unemployment rate.  Over the last decade, the data shows no net creation of new jobs.

Some experts believe that the decline in jobs will only continue. For example, Alexandra Levit predicts significant losses in a number of key industries between 2008 and 2018:  semiconductor manufacturing(33.7%), motor vehicle parts manufacturing (18.6%), printing and related jobs (16%), apparel manufacturing (57%), newspaper publishers (24,8%), mining support jobs (76,000 or 23,2%), and the postal service (13%). Corporations are moving many of these jobs offshore or replacing them with technology rather than paying middle class wages and benefits. The economists are right that new jobs are being created in place of these.  But as Jack Metzgar discussed last week, most of the new jobs offer even lower wages and benefits and require less education.

Since private sector jobs cannot or will not be replaced in significant numbers, working people will have to rely on government spending to fill the gap.  The first Obama stimulus, while important (see The Stimulus at Work), has clearly proven insufficient. The limits of this approach can be seen in California, Illinois, and New York.  No wonder business leaders like Warren Buffet, economists like Paul Krugman, and others are calling for second stimulus directed more at creating new jobs.

While many approaches have been offered, the Economic Policy Institute has outlined a simple plan to create jobs and stem the unemployment crisis. It contains five major themes: strengthening the social safety net (including unemployment compensation, COBRA health coverage, and nutrition assistance); providing additional fiscal relief to state and local governments; making renewed investments in infrastructure including transportation and schools; supporting direct creation of public service jobs; and establishing a new tax credit to employers who create new jobs.

No doubt, we need stronger government leadership in creating the jobs that will expand the so-called recovery from the financial sector to the jobs sector.  But making real, lasting change requires something more:  a reexamination of the neoliberal ideology that has been responsible for current economic crisis that is moving so many from the middle class to the working class.  As a recent Special Report in The American Prospect suggests, nothing short of an complete overhaul involving industrial, trade, and foreign policy will do, especially involving the revival of American manufacturing.

Why manufacturing? As Richard McCormack has found, the loss of a single manufacturing job in a single large manufacturing plant, such as the GM Moraine Assembly in Dayton, can result in the loss of 15 additional jobs in the local community and through supply chains – job losses that affect both working- and middle-class workers.  But it’s not just that lost manufacturing jobs have wide-ranging effects.  It’s also that manufacturing jobs, unlike the low-wage service jobs Metzgar wrote about last week, are more likely to pay a liveable wage and provide decent benefits.  Manufacturing jobs can be good working-class jobs, working-class jobs that can in turn help rebuild the middle class.

With a new stimulus package and a revitalized manufacturing sector, the Great Recession may – like the Great Depression before – provide the ideological stimulus to create a more humane economy that is supportive of the working class.  We need such a shift now, especially as the working class increasingly includes thousands who once thought they were solidly middle class.

John Russo

America’s Low-Wage Future

British historian E.H. Carr once said something to the effect that while no serious scholar makes up the facts, they all choose which facts “to put on stage.”  The problem of cultural bias is that there are way too many facts to give them all their proper due, and in choosing what we think is most significant among them, we are guided by our own focus and general sense of significance – that is, by our values, our hopes and fears, and our everyday sense of how the world works.

Every two years the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) makes detailed projections of how many jobs there will be in which occupations ten years from now.  The latest one came out late last year, and among a dizzying array of facts and figures, here’s what they headlined in italics at the top of their report:

Professional and related occupations and service occupations are expected to create more new jobs than all other occupational groups from 2008 to 2018; in addition, growth will be faster among occupations for which postsecondary education is the most significant form of education or training. . . . .

This was duly reported by The New York Times under the headline “Where the Jobs Will Be,” with the same emphasis on “professional and related occupations” and “postsecondary education.”   The message is that our society is going to need many more college graduates than it has now, which is true.  The impression most often left, however, is that we are rapidly becoming a society of “professionals” and “knowledge workers,” and that the key to our future is making sure that almost everybody gets a college education.  This impression is not only false, but spectacularly so.

Disguised in the text, but present in the BLS tables is another set of facts: Only 21% of jobs now require a bachelor’s degree, and despite faster growth among these credentialed occupations, that isn’t going to change much.  By 2018, according to the BLS, only 22% of jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or more.  Of the 51 million “job openings due to [both] growth and replacement needs” in the next ten years, fewer than 12 million will require a bachelor’s degree.

At the heart of what the BLS and The New York Times choose to put on stage is a confusion between the fastest growing jobs and the jobs with the largest job growth.  Though the BLS tables report both the fast and the large in detail, the headline and the text emphasizes speed over size.  For example, the fastest growing occupation in the next ten years will be biomedical engineers; these jobs will increase by a whopping 72% from 16,000 to nearly 28,000, a net increase of 12,000 jobs.  Meanwhile, retail salespersons will see job growth of a meager 8.4%, but since there are now more than 4 million of them, that’s an increase of 375,000 jobs.

A second confusion involves the word “service,” which in other contexts is used to indicate all work that does not involve making or building things, as in “service economy.”  This usage conjures images of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and management consultants – all of them growing occupations and highly paid.  But that’s not what the BLS means by “service occupations.”  The BLS service jobs with the largest projected growth are home health and personal aides; food service workers (including fast food); nursing aides; landscaping and groundskeeping workers; medical assistants; security guards, and child care workers – all of them already very large and all of them paying “low” or “very low” wages.

Of the 30 fastest growing occupations, 14 require at least a bachelor’s degree and another five will require an associate’s degree; all 19 of these fast-growing jobs pay “very high” or “high” wages by BLS standards.  That is good news.  But among the 30 with the largest growth, only seven require a bachelor’s and one more requires an associate’s.  And, unlike the fast, of the top 30 for size, the majority of new jobs are either “low wage” or “very low wage.”   Here’s my tabulation of the largest 30 by how well they pay:

Top 30 occupations with largest projected job growth, 2008-2018

2008 median annual earnings by quartiles (# of occupations)	# of new jobs projected	% of top 30 jobs
Very High: $51,540 & above  (7)	1,771,100	24%
High: $32,390 to $51,530  (8)	1,523,100	21%
Low: $21,590 to $32,380  (9)	2,131,400	29%
Very Low: Less than $21,590 (6)	1,899,400	26%

These top 30 occupations account for about one half of the net new jobs the BLS projects, and other data show that the wage composition of these 30 is not unrepresentative of the job structure as a whole, now and in 2018.  If these were the facts the BLS chose to put on stage, the headline might be: Majority of American workers projected to remain poorly paid and in need of a living wage.

We might then realize that we cannot close the widening gap between the earnings of high school graduates and college graduates simply by producing more college graduates.  There simply are not and will not be enough jobs requiring a college education. With a different set of facts on stage, we would understand that we need to do something to increase the majority’s wages and incomes directly.

What’s more, as a nation we know how to do this because we’ve done it before, in the three decades after World War II.  Though each has its limits, we need some combination of greater unionization, steadily improving minimum wage laws, and enhancements in the social wage, now called “work supports.”  Democrats, for all their other faults, have committed to advancing on all three of these fronts, and in the last three years have advanced a little on each of them.  College professors (called “postsecondary teachers” and #10 on the BLS largest list) could lend a hand simply by putting some of these “other” facts on our stages.  The BLS largest list is a richly complex document that reveals contradictory tendencies in what some 150 million of us do and will do to earn a living.   My arrangement of that list by educational requirements and pay simplifies it some by separating out those countertendencies.  No facts are made up, but by reorganizing the stage, the same facts make a decidedly different impression.

Jack Metzgar

Working-Class Journalism: A Model for Teaching

Among seemingly endless reports, studies and speculations that have almost unanimously heralded the death of the newspaper, the Columbia Journalism Review’s recent study stands out as both incisive and constructive for its detailed summation of the conditions that have caused our current media “crisis,” and also for its outlining of possible solutions.

In the report, aptly titled “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson, endorse a claim that we have made in previous blogs, that while some of the implications for the future of American journalism in the current financial and technological storm are downright scary, emerging energies and fresh ideas about news and news practice offer significant hope. As Downie and Schudson find,

Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers, but freelancers, university faculty members, students, and citizens. Financial support for reporting now comes not only from advertisers and subscribers, but also from foundations, individual philanthropists, academic and government budgets, special interests, and voluntary contributions from readers and viewers. There is increased competition among the different kinds of news gatherers, but there also is more cooperation, a willingness to share resources and reporting with former competitors. That increases the value and impact of the news they produce, and creates new identities for reporting while keeping old, familiar ones alive.

Around the same time that we began contributing to this blog, we were beginning a project here at Youngstown State centered on a collaborative news gathering model, a news service that partnered a public “working-class” university and its journalism students with a commercial newspaper and a public radio station.

Our goals for the project are ambitious:

* To provide students guided practical experience with reporting and producing news stories

* To provide students who might not be able to afford non-paid internships a chance to earn internship-level experience

* To help media organizations acquire content that they would not ordinarily be compelled to obtain and to act as an intermediary resource for collaboration amongst competing media

* To produce research to study media collaboration and content decisions.

We started with the idea that journalism students need both theory and guided practice.  Unlike traditional internships where students often leave their communities, our students gain hands-on experience in the local area.  Because they becme immersed in the urban community that surrounds the university—a relationship that is rarely cultivated by our largely suburban commuter student population—student reporters learned that the plight of the city so often reviled by suburbanites and slighted by the profit-driven media is an inextricable part of the region they call home.

Media professionals from our two partner organizations, The Vindicator and WYSU-FM, joined us in the classrooms frequently during the semester and worked one-on-one with students. In class sessions in The Vindicator newsroom, news service students presented their work, talking with us and newspaper editors about possible story directions and generally immersing themselves in the newsroom and city culture. A WYSU-FM manager spent several hours each week working with students in the radio production lab, helping them to produce their stories and gain a deeper understanding of what makes good public radio.  With one semester completed, it is still too soon to judge the overall success of the endeavor, but based on what we’ve seen so far, we think the news service model has merit.

Most of the stories that our students are reporting deal with issues of importance to those who live in or precariously close to urban poverty — the scarcity of fresh, healthy food in most neighborhood stores,  or the challenges of public transportation in a city where many of the most basic goods and services have migrated beyond the walkable core neighborhoods into the sprawling suburbs.

Many of these issues have been slighted by the local mainstream media as they increasingly cater content toward their suburban clientele, and we believe that this news project, while small in scope, may yield results that will be of interest to media managers who make content decisions. Our operating premise is that traditional media may actually benefit by running such stories, which may attract new readers, and that with collaboration comes a unique opportunity to inform, enlighten, and ultimately encourage social responsibility.

In addition, our students are learning how to draw upon one another’s strengths. For example, by working with a grandmother with deep roots in the city community, a young male student who commutes from the suburbs gained access to people and resources that might otherwise have remained untapped and under-represented; two other students got  clearer perspectives on the complexities of school funding and performance by visiting and comparing a drastically under-achieving city school with a high performing suburban one located only a few miles away, while still another pair of students chronicled a neighborhood’s efforts to reverse the crime and economic despair that has been plaguing it for decades.  These stories address important issues and trends in the community that entrenched local media, suffering from the same economic challenges plaguing all traditional media, might not have covered.

Even when the story “hook” is not specifically about a problem or an issue, we are encouraging students to be curious about and attuned to the lives and stories of the members of our predominantly working-class community. For example, a recent radio report builds on our earlier Worker Portraits project with a profile of a man who has spent most of his working life as a gravedigger.

We are excited about the long-range possibilities of the news service, because it strengthens our students’ reporting abilities, helps bolster local media, and most of all, gives all of us a chance to experiment with media collaboration and different types of content. These values are essential to the mission of a strong university journalism program, and they encourage the local media be more responsive to the information needs of those who are not well-served by traditional media, including the working class.

Tim Francisco and Alyssa Lenhoff

War, the Working Class, and the Media

The holidays are traditionally a time for reflection — looking back at the year nearly passed and forward to the one about to begin.  I’ve been doing a lot reflecting as 2009 draws, mercifully, to a close and 2010 looms menacingly near. I’m sharing my pain because, as that sage philosopher Ellen Griswold says in the heartwarming seasonal epic Christmas Vacation, “It’s the holidays and we’re all in misery.”

For starters, I’d like each of you to watch the “In Excelsis Deo” episode from the first season of the West Wing.  In it Toby Ziegler arranges a full military funeral for a homeless veteran who dies of exposure while wearing a coat that he had donated to the Salvation Army. You have to watch the entire episode, not just the two minute clip on You Tube. When you do you will be uplifted.  You will be touched.  Tears will well in your eyes and pour down your cheeks.  You will sob audibly.

When you are done crying—and you will whether you are watching for the first or the 100^th time–you will be outraged by the sheer believability of the episode. Writer Aaron Sorkin didn’t have to make it up.  We all know there are homeless veterans living under bridges and in shelters in Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, L.A., and a hundred other cities large and small.

There’s no real reason why these men and women –many of whom come from working class families and served in the military either because they were unable to dodge the draft like Dick Cheney or because it was the best job they could find in post-industrial America — should have to live this way in the richest nation in the world.  But they do and they will and that’s wrong.  We should all be ashamed.

When your vision clears, take a moment and read two columns by Bob Herbert of the NY Times.  The first, “A Tragic Mistake,” begins thus:  “I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”  He also said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

I guess we will never learn.

Mr. Herbert asserts that committing an additional 30,000 troops to the Afghan war was the “easier option” for President Obama and says, “It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.”

He’s right, it would have taken real courage to stand up and say “no” to the military establishment and the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Cheney, and the other conservative compulsive liars who have hijacked patriotism and distorted its meaning.  In fact, it would have taken the same type of courage to refuse to commit more troops to a losing cause that it would take to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize that hadn’t been earned.  But as anyone who has been watching over the past year has seen, courage and conviction seem to be in short supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In the second column on my suggested reading list, “A Fearful Price,” Mr. Herbert bluntly and accurately identifies why Mr. Obama did not have to fear public revulsion over his misguided decision to waste more human and financial capital on a conflict that history teaches cannot be won:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

In that passage, he’s clearly placed his finger on something those of us who study and write about the working class have known for decades: as long as the people marching off to war are coming from working-class enclaves like Youngstown, East Chicago, Detroit,  Gary, and Compton rather than East Hampton, Beacon Hill, Georgetown, or Beverly Hills, the nation’s powerbrokers simply won’t give a damn.  They’ll just continue to invest in the stocks of defense-related industries because war is damn good for business.

Now that I’ve suggested a TV show to watch and two columns to read, I’ like to recommend a movie: Charlie Wilson’s War. This Academy Award-nominated film depicts how a bunch of nomadic goat herders and opium growers chased the Russian Army out of their mountainous, pre-historic country with the help of the CIA.  It also points out that these brave and brazen heroin producing shepherds have beat back everyone who has ever attempted to conquer their land—you can’t really call it a nation–from Alexander the Great, to Genghis Kahn, to the British Empire.

The country?  Well, it’s Afghanistan, of course.

Obviously, Generals McChrystal and Patreus, President Obama, and Secretaries Gates and Clinton missed this great flick when it was in town.  I’ve got an idea.  Let’s give it to them for Christmas.  It would make a great stocking stuffer.  Hell, we’ll even throw in some microwave popcorn.  They can dim the lights in the White House theatre and chuckle at the zany antics of the turban wearing Taliban who emerged from caves to blow the living daylights out of the Ruskies until those dirty commies turned tail and ran back to Moscow.

By the way, as the lights in the theatre come up they should consider this: the crazy guys from the Taliban are using the same Stinger missiles the U.S. gave them to blow up working-class kids from Minsk in the 80’s to blow up working-class kids from Cleveland today.

That’ll dampen the ho, ho, hos.

Leo Jennings

Jobs, Ideology, and Policy: Putting Workers First

During the 1980s recession, as steel mills closed and auto plants began downsizing around the country, neoconservative economists insisted that the jobs lost to deindustrialization would soon be replaced by new jobs.  In Youngstown then, we knew better.  And as we wrote seven years ago in Steeltown U.S.A., Youngstown’s story in the late 70s and early 80s has not only persisted here, where unemployment is among the highest in the state and the poverty rate hovers around 30%, but has become America’s story today.

Youngstown learned then how real economic shifts could be exacerbated by ideology: the idea that businesses and investments matter more than ordinary human beings and the notion that we should just get used to economic patterns that create long-term hardship for those with the least power and resources.  Youngstown learned more than 30 years ago how damaging such ideas can be.  Once again, the rest of America is learning that lesson today.

The gap between the Wall Street recovery and the continuing jobs recession was highlighted by Friday’s jobs summit.  Communities around the country understand that we are in another jobless recovery that leaves hundreds of thousands of American families vulnerable.  While markets have stabilized for the moment and investors are feeling more confident, the economy isn’t improving for most Americans.

So is the current situation just like the earlier recession? No. It is worse. As Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich note in Sunday’s Washington Post, the current economic crisis reveals the glaring problems left behind by the welfare reform of the 1990s, a policy change that reflected the long-standing assumption that poverty is a “voluntary condition” and that every able-bodied adult should simply find a job – “even when there are obviously no jobs available.”  When we removed the safety net because of conservative and neoliberal worries about “fostering dependency,” we created the economic conditions that left 17.1 million Americans living in extreme poverty in 2008 – and no doubt even more today. As we learned last year, we’re willing to bail out corporations but not working people.

The current recession is also worse because it isn’t just a matter of jobs.  It’s a matter of ideology.  Blaming the victim and normalizing long-term economic struggle were part of the discourse at the jobs summit, during which Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at Goldman Sachs, acknowledged that unemployment will likely remain high for a long time.  She suggested that we may just have to get used to it.  Why?  Because those who have been unemployed for a long time are losing their skills and their work habits.  No doubt, long-term unemployment affects people, but the idea that unemployment will last a long time because workers won’t be prepared to return to work represents the most absurd, cruel version of blaming the victim.

On the other hand, Hatzius is not wrong that we’re in for long-term unemployment and underemployment– problems which are far worse than the official unemployment rate suggests. No doubt, business takes the cautious path during economic downturns, often by adding hours to workers’ schedules rather than by hiring additional workers. But as we learned in Youngstown, the reality is that those jobs may never come back as businesses, especially manufacturers, continue to disinvest in the United States.

At the same time, as we have argued before, we’re also witnessing long-term shifts in the nature of the jobs available.  Promises about a new “creative worker” economy or green jobs that will someday provide some former steelworkers and autoworkers with new versions of manufacturing jobs fall short when we remember the latest predictions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:  that the job categories predicted to grow most over the next few decades involve primarily low-wage, low-education service positions.  Many of these jobs pay less than $21,000 a year.  That means that poverty is going to be a long-term problem for American workers.

What we need, in other words, is not a single jobs summit. We need long-range policy planning aimed at creating a better system of supports for the working poor and unemployed.  We need to recognize that as much as education matters, it won’t necessarily overcome long-term employment trends and growing income inequality.  We need economic policies that focus on the poor and working class and that treat them with respect, rather than blame.

Too often, economic theory has provided a distraction from the real struggles of real people.  Jan Hatzuis and her colleagues might do well to stop worrying about the work habits of the unemployed and start learning about what it’s like to lose a job after you spent years doing everything right, about the indignities associated with applying for government aid as you struggle to survive job loss, about how limitations of K-12 education, urban transportation, limited access to fair banking, overcrowded housing, persistent hunger, and lack of health care make finding a steady job that pays enough to support a family incredibly difficult.   A little moral education might help as well.

We need to stop thinking about the current crisis as a temporary recession, and we certainly have to stop talking about the economic crisis as part of an inevitable shift we can’t do anything about.  We have to recognize and act on the situation as what it is: a moral crisis.

The Obama administration must take the problem as a moral imperative, acknowledge that the private sector simply won’t solve the problem on its own, and like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, create a jobs-centered stimulus that is environmentally sound, improves the national infrastructure, and provides an economic foundation for working Americans and rebuilding the American economy.

The economy isn’t a game, with winners and losers who deserve what they get, because the players don’t occupy a fair playing field and the rules are biased.  Inequality has long been and is becoming more deeply engrained in the American system.  We cannot continue to view long-term high unemployment rates, minimal public supports for the poor, and a permanent and increasing gap between rich and poor as normal much less acceptable.  We can do better.  “Yes, we can.”  And we must.

John Russo and Sherry Linkon

Fixing the Foreclosure Problem

One of the sad legacies of the housing and mortgage securitization bubble and the subsequent collapse of the economy over the past two years is the virtual devastation of working-class neighborhoods throughout the United States.  Thousands of homes sit vacant and deteriorating after foreclosure or are listed for sale at a price half or less than their value just 18 months ago.

Foreclosures aren’t hitting just the working class, but The New York Times reports that workers in the manufacturing and distribution sectors were keeping up mortgage payments until they found themselves unemployed and unable to pay for their homes, complicating efforts to stem foreclosures.

Even as the Treasury Department appears poised today to announce efforts to force more banks to modify loans, increasing evidence suggests that the federal government’s efforts are floundering.

Rather than focusing their efforts on the complicated Homeowner Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), or on bailing out banks in the hope that they will loan more money to homeowners and small businesses, federal policymakers can accomplish more  for those facing foreclosure, not to mention their neighbors and American taxpayers, by making relatively modest changes to the business practices of the Federal Housing Administration and HUD.

The story of an Ohio worker and homeowner illustrates how the federal government is missing easy opportunities to play a meaningful role in reducing the impact of the foreclosure crisis and the recession on real people.

In 2007, Bob was employed by DHL as a driver earning over $20 per hour. He bought a modest house in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland for a fair market price of $90,000 to live in with his son.  When DHL shut down its U.S. operations in 2008, Bob, along with thousands of others nationally, was laid off.

Meanwhile, back on Bob’s street, for sale signs proliferated and one of six homes in his community is in foreclosure.  As a result, the market value of Bob’s home has dropped to less than half of what he paid for it.

Bob and his son were able to survive on his unemployment benefits but couldn’t pay the monthly mortgage.  Bob recently took a job with FedEx paying less than half of what he earned at DHL and less than his unemployment benefits, because he simply couldn’t stand “not working any more.”

His mortgage, which was insured by the FHA, is being foreclosed. With the costs of foreclosure and 18 months of late fees included, the lender claims to be owed $120,000 on a house optimistically worth $50,000.

Bob requested that his foreclosure case be sent to mediation, and he provided the lender with extensive documentation of his income and expenses and the current value of his home during the course of those negotiations. The loan servicer has refused to agree to a modification of the terms that makes any sense to Bob. They are completely unwilling to consider any modification that reduces the principal balance at all, let alone bring the figure anywhere close to the current value of the home.

Bob does not qualify for the H.A.M.P program, the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s effort to assist homeowners in default and foreclosure, because his loan (like the loans of most people in foreclosure) is more than one year behind. That program actually pays cash to lenders and mortgage services who agree to modify loans.

During the course of the negotiations it became increasingly clear that the lender or loan servicers have no incentive to enter into any kind of meaningful modification.

Why?

Because after foreclosure, FHA stands ready to pay the lender 100 percent of its loss on the loan, including the cost of foreclosure. If the lender were to agree to modify the loan, it would be paid far less.

Here is the outrage. If the lender proceeds to foreclosure, Bob and his son will be thrown out of their home and the lender will be made whole at the cost to FHA — and ultimately the taxpayers — of $80,000 or more.

This scenario is repeating itself in mortgage foreclosure cases throughout the country, putting the solvency of the FHA at risk while throwing thousands of working people out of their homes. The New York Times recently reported that FHA itself might be in need of an infusion of cash.

If FHA were included in the negotiation and would agree to pay lenders some amount –say half of what they are likely to lose, $40,000 — to allow the principal to be reduced, Bob could refinance at competitive interest rates and stay in his home, the federal Ggvernment and ultimately the taxpayers would save $40,000, and the lender would have an interest-paying borrower (who can afford the lower payment) and earn profits from the interest.

Everybody wins under this scenario.

Another problem that could be fixed by a more realistic approach by HUD and the FHA was detailed in a recent Cleveland Plain Dealer Story about problems created by HUD’s failure to demolish or fix homes they own (mostly as a result of FHA insured foreclosures) in greater Cleveland.  Dilapidated houses drive down housing values for entire neighborhoods.  Making it tougher for guys like Bob to sell or refinance their homes and making community problems worse. Local communities are struggling to maintain housing stock in aging neighborhoods, and HUD’s failure as a homeowner has devastating effects on entire communities.

The Federal Government has a chance to raise the bar for responsible homeownership, yet instead they appear to be lowering it. HUD should be a model community citizen, collaborating with local housing officials on neighborhood wide efforts to improve home values.  The agency should hire local consultants or even contract with local governments and empower them to make quick and honest assessments of the likelihood of selling any particular piece of real estate with an eye toward the best community use for the property.  For houses that will not realistically sell in a reasonable timeframe, HUD should require that the houses be demolished within 30 days.

Increasing evidence suggests that the new programs being created by Congress and the Obama administration are not having a significant impact on the foreclosure problem. Only 1711 homeowners nationally had completed a modification by September 1, 2009 under the HAMP Program.

Bob’s story suggests that a better approach may be to find ways to make the existing machinery of the federal government’s mortgage programs work in the interests of homeowners and taxpayers.

Marc Dann

Marc Dann is a Cleveland lawyer who represents homeowners in foreclosure.

What Working-Class Universities Should Do

Sherry Linkon’s two recent blogs react to a new study that found working-class students (defined by parents’ income and education) are less likely to graduate from a “working-class college or university” than from elite, more selective schools (defined by selectivity).  As someone who took seven years at four different universities to get a bachelor’s degree and who subsequently spent three decades teaching undergraduate working adults at a “working-class university,” this probably doesn’t concern me as much as it should.  The causal weight Sherry gives to what she fears is our “low expectations” of working-class students and a “dumbing down” of the curriculum concerns me more.

Both the study and Sherry have good reasons for this concern, but my fear is that it plays into a larger dialogue that I’m convinced is mostly negative for both students and faculty at colleges and universities with large numbers of students from working-class families.

“Dumbing down” is an ugly phrase, but I’m pretty sure I do it if you compare my teaching to what goes on at elite universities.  For example, many of my students are poor (and slow) readers, so I assign shorter readings and spend more time than I should in breaking readings down into their parts for discussion and, indeed, in requiring students to pay a lot of attention to how the organization of a piece of writing affects its meaning.  This means I do not cover content they should be learning.  Likewise, far too many students can’t work percentages or do other arithmetic that are about equally important to dealing with academic facts and figures as they are in daily life. Teaching arithmetic is not something our (or, so I’m told, any university) math department is willing to do.  So in many of my classes, I take time away from other things to drill students on working percentages.

Likewise, I’m not as interested in “challenging” my students with “more demanding” material as I am in trying to engage and sustain their interest in whatever we’re studying and their commitment to improving their reading, writing, thinking, and communicating skills.  This is based on a pedagogy of taking students where they are and doing what I can to help them improve.  This – merely sustained interest and improvement — is surely a low expectation, but I’m convinced it serves most of my students well.

Sherry’s notion that creating “a stronger atmosphere of achievement” might better serve working-class students could work for the higher-achievers who may find our curriculum not challenging enough to keep them intellectually engaged.  But it could also turn away the vast majority of middling students who already often feel disrespected as well as disabled in college classrooms, while actively pushing out the most poorly prepared who are also the most difficult to teach.

Like most teachers, I suspect, I have always aimed at teaching the middle because it’s the largest group of students, while paying more individual attention to the most poorly prepared.  Though I’ve had unusual circumstances (teaching general education seminars to adults), I have never felt guilty about cheating the high-achievers in my classes.  For one thing, they’re more capable of learning on their own.  For another, they often take a leadership role in class, others look to them for help, and they generally elevate the level of discussion (and learning) regardless of what I do.  As a rule, I need them more than they need me.

For the great middle group, however, I think it is important to clearly understand that our task is different from that of the elite schools.  I reject the notion that “workforce preparation” is not “true education.”  The overwhelming majority of students in my classes are there because they want higher-paying, more secure, less dangerous and/or demeaning jobs.  To get and keep those they’re going to need to greatly improve a whole set of reading, writing, thinking and communicating skills that are characteristically “middle class” in our society, but which are of some universal value as well – even if often overestimated by us highly educated folks.

Raising expectations may be a good idea in many instances, but to foster a “stronger atmosphere of achievement” would be to heighten the already heavily middle-class cultural atmosphere of higher education as a whole.  Because of tenure and other protections for academic freedom (now eroding), university faculty and our middle-class professionalism have an unusual degree of autonomy from ruling-class and managerial oversight.  All universities, partly as a result, tend to be hyper-middle class in our ethos and culture – a culture that, as Sherry says, “emphasizes individual success and competition,” a more meritocratic place than most, and one that values individual achievement above all else.  Indeed, for a working-class student a university is where one is socialized into the values, the ways of thinking and behaving of “the educated middle class.”

Barbara Jensen, Annette Lareau, and others have argued that there is a distinctly different working-class culture, one that is much less achievement-oriented, more bonded to people and places, and one that often sees middle-class ways as lacking in “personal integrity and sincerity and [having] poor interpersonal relations,” as Michele Lamont has found.  If this is true, and I believe it is, then the college experience for working-class students is inevitably a clash of cultures in a way it can never be for middle-class students.  Heightening that clash could be good for some of our students, but it would be bad for more.  What’s more, it would be bad for most faculty, I think, because it would make it harder for us to value and learn from the good things in working-class culture.  It would make our classrooms more adversarial than they are now, and over time it would likely lead to the kind of middle-class self-righteousness I associate with wannabe second-tier universities.

For me, being a “working-class university” is an aspiration.  You shouldn’t get that designation simply by having a large proportion of first-generation college students or by having more faculty and administrators from working-class backgrounds, or even by providing a supportive environment for working-class students.  These are necessary but not sufficient conditions.  To earn that title, a working-class university must be a place where working-class and middle-class cultures meet to feed and water each other, a place where certain middle-class skills are effectively taught along with some manners and mores, but where students are not required to abandon the entirety of their culture (often including their existing network of family and friends) in order to get a better job.  A working-class university should also be one that, both in its classrooms and in its relation with the larger community, should be actively engaged in building solidarity with the two-thirds of American workers who do not now and never will have a bachelor’s degree.  Once that part of the working class has steadily improving standards of living, more secure jobs and incomes, there may be less need for workforce preparation and more room for “true education.”  Until that time, Youngstown State seems to many of us one the few places that is consciously living that aspiration.  My hunch is that creating “a stronger atmosphere of achievement” would undermine that.

Jack Metzgar