Grime You Can Never Wash Off: Internet Content Moderation and New Frontiers in Labor Exploitation

Scrolling through e-mails and my Facebook news feed one morning last week, I came across two related articles. The first, from Alternet, was about the disproportionate harassment and abuse that women face online. Citing a recent Atlantic exposé on the issue, as well as death threats made to feminist video game critic and “GamerGate” target Anita Sarkeesian, the article underscored the negligence of Facebook, YouTube, and other companies whose content moderators—those employed to flag and delete offensive materials coming across their sites—appeared indifferent to or, perhaps, poorly trained to address the increasing problem of Internet-based violence against women. These moderators, the article mentions, are often “swamped with cases.” But in a tech industry dominated by men at all levels of employment, whether or not a woman is subjected to terrifying forms of online abuse—including, in one case, a Facebook post featuring a woman’s head photoshopped onto a picture of a beaten and chained woman— comes down to “human decision-making” on the part of the people tasked with sifting through the digital garbage.

The second article, from Wired, offered a more detailed look at what Internet content moderation involves. I honestly hadn’t given any thought at all to content moderation as an especially filthy job that, even without the smelly trucks and beeping, is a form of garbage collection. In this case, though, the grime sticks to workers in a way that makes emptying trashcans and dumpsters sound like a dream job by comparison.

Internet content moderation is typical of other outsourced, global forms of labor in that the U.S. relies on poorly paid contract workers from the Philippines to do the vast majority of the work. However, since recognizing what would be offensive requires cross-cultural fluency, most companies have also implemented what Wired reporter Adrian Chen calls a “two-tiered moderation system, [where] more complex screening… is done domestically.” Far better paid than overseas workers—“a moderator for a U.S. tech company can make more in an hour than a veteran Filipino moderator makes in a day”—most U.S. based moderators are culled from the ranks of precariously employed college graduates, many of whom are enticed to take these jobs with suggestions that a more permanent position at Google or Twitter might be on the horizon. In general, however, not only do these better jobs never solidify, but content moderation’s status as labor of the living nightmare variety quickly becomes apparent to employees.

In The Managed Heart, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild begins her discussion of emotional labor, such as the work of flight attendants, care workers, and others in feminized service occupations, by asking whether there may be a fundamental “human cost of becoming an ‘instrument of labor’ at all” (3). This question illuminates the psychological costs faced by those whose jobs require “[inducing] or [suppressing] feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance” that makes consumers of such labor feel properly “cared for.” This “coordination of mind and feeling” can cause the worker to become alienated from an “aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work” (7).

But what if the work demands subjecting oneself to psychological trauma resulting from the continual repetition of horrifying images and sounds? What happens to the “margins of the soul” when a job requires workers to be used in this way?

Chen interviewed a number of former and current Internet content moderators who describe what they experienced on the job, and what they still carry with them. One U.S.-based moderator quit his job at Google when a co-worker exhibited a nonchalant response to a video of a beheading: “I didn’t want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I’m ironic or jokey about it.” Others, subjected to hours of pornography, report feeling desensitized to the point where they “no longer want to be with their spouses” or, on the other hand, leave work with “a supercharged sex drive.” Many companies ostensibly employ counselors to deal with the psychic fallout from this work, which puts laborers at risk of PTSD much like soldiers and members of specialized police forces, though one former worker claimed to not know anyone who had seen a counselor. “But,” Chen emphasizes, “even with the best counseling, staring into the heart of human darkness exacts a toll.” After being made to watch a nearly half-hour video of a woman being raped, “blindfolded, handcuffed, screaming and crying,” one Filipino woman content moderator “began to tremble with sadness and rage” (in Chen’s words). Says the woman, who is still doing content moderation work, “I watched that a long time ago, but it’s like I just watched it yesterday.”

As its own devastating aspect of the “heart of human darkness” run rampant on the Internet, online victimization of women is an urgent problem. Yet after reading Chen’s report, I can’t help but feel that the “human decision-making” involved in content moderation is compromised by the utterly dehumanizing nature of the work. The “aspect of self” that many content moderators become estranged from is their own humanity, unable to plug into and feel things they must figure out a way not to feel in order to simply bear the work.

This is not to say that in the male-dominated tech industry, sexism and misogyny aren’t also at play when moderators make that quick decision to either delete or push through abusive content aimed at women. But read in this context, Hochschild’s work provokes us to think about the ways that gender and psychic health intersect in an occupation that requires exposing oneself to trauma as a primary duty of the job. Counseling isn’t widely advertised or used, and a masculine “deal with it” ethos further contributes to the occupational normalization of violence in an industry that, as Chen puts it, “[relies] on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us.”

This last observation begs a version of Hochschild’s initial question: if the job of content moderator requires workers to absorb our collective human trauma in order to “protect the rest of us” from the ravages of the Internet, should a job like this exist at all? Should “must expose oneself to violence repeatedly, for days and weeks on end” be an accepted part of any job description? Chen estimates that content moderators “comprise as much as half of the total workforce for social media sites.” Indeed, moderation work is especially insidious in that, unlike labor more typically associated with trauma—sex work comes to mind—it is hidden within an industry stereotyped as the benign realm of particle-board cubicles and sleepy systems administrators.

When we walk down the street, we see waste management workers laboring to present us with a convincing façade of civilized cleanliness. The more thoughtful among us recognize this as the dangerous lie that it is: this waste is never really “disposed” of, only moved out of sight of the privileged. The existence of content moderation work demands that we consider the human costs of maintaining the web’s garbage-free front. If the Internet requires turning human workers into psychic dumpsters for brutalities the rest of us would rather not have cluttering our Facebook and Instagram feeds, then what kind of virtual world are we living in, grime and all?

Sara Appel

Sara Appel is a Dietrich School Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

The Value(s) of Working-Class Jobs

When I was a kid growing up I looked up to my cousin. Ronald was twenty years my senior, and in his mid-twenties he decided to become a bus driver on London Transport. Whenever I saw him, I would be enthralled by his tales of the road, the ordinary stories of depot life, his work mates and his passengers. To a young kid, Ronald’s job made sense to me.  He did something tangibly worthwhile. My family didn’t own a car, so all our journeys involved some form of public transport, either by train or more usually by bus. In my universe, bus drivers had status. Their work was more intelligible than the labor of the Ford worker next door or the TV repairman across the street. These images of working-class work were reinforced in popular culture, and one of the most popular TV sitcoms of the decade was On the Buses,a series still being rerun somewhere in the further reaches of the UK TV schedule.  In the 1960s and 70s, we regularly saw representations of blue-collar work on our screens.

I was thinking about Ronald the other week as I read a biographical piece about the newly appointed Conservative government minister for the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport, Sajid Javid MP. By anyone’s measure, the 44 year old Javid has had a stellar career as an investment banker with Deutsche Bank, eventually becoming a board member with a reputed £3 million annual income and a luxury lifestyle including private schooling for his children.

By contrast, Javid’s father arrived in the UK in 1961 from Pakistan with only a pound in his pocket, and he worked various jobs including driving buses in Bristol. That personal history is now a central part of the political biography of the son. Bus driving and similar jobs seem significant for politicians and journalists these days, and, they presumably assume, for their audiences.

We can read this ‘son of a bus driver’ narrative in various ways. The first would be the ‘look how far he’s come’ school of thought, which highlights the son’s battles against the odds to get to university and then on to a thoroughly middle-class trajectory. The second version uses the story to define the son as ‘a Conservative Party MP with roots in the working-class community’. Both positions at once use and discard working-class identity as the credibility it affords recedes into the background. What is notable is that being able to claim to be the son of a working-class bus driver still has traction, perhaps especially in a party seen as elitist and out of touch, led by a privately educated cadre of bluebloods.

But there’s a third way of reading this narrative of upward mobility: noting the dominant middle-class perspective it reveals. While class background is noteworthy, it is also safely tucked away a generation before. That means we don’t have to address questions of class or structural inequality directly. Rather than asking why don’t we recruit MPs from the ranks of bus drivers – or care workers, cleaners, and shop assistants – this dominant middle-class narrative naturalizes the idea that we should, and perhaps have to, draw our political class from people from who are already part of an elite privileged middle class. If being from a working-class background has not harmed Jarid’s political capital, I suspect an actual bus driver applying to stand as an MP for any of the mainstream parties would find that capital has little currency for contemporary selection panels.

This all leads me to worry about what will happen in the future, since all the mainstream UK political parties are increasingly recruiting potential members from an ever narrower band socially, economically, and educationally. Will a next generation of politicians find some kind of status and kudos from claiming a grandparental working-class background?

This distance between political elites and average people found expression in debates last year about MPs salaries. The task of determining MPs remuneration has been stripped from them – yes, they used to decide their own pay – and given instead to an independent parliamentary body.  It recommended in December 2013 that members should get an 11% rise, taking their pay from £66,000 to £77,000. The average salary in the UK is £26,500. The debate around this proposal shows that many politicians have come to see their elite peers, who earn about three times the average salary, as typical and representative of British society. This is further reinforced by the fact that many of the current cabinet, 23 out of 29, are millionaires. Even the opposition Labour Party’s shadow cabinet can claim seven millionaires. The result is that working-class jobs and the people who do them are outside the circle of experience of most senior politicians.

My cousin Ronald retired after working on the buses in east London for four decades last year. When he joined London Transport in the 1970s his job had some real measure of status.  Indeed, London busmen in the 1950s (and they were all men then) were described as radical aristocrats due to their pay and conditions of service. Gradually through his career my cousin’s job dropped in status, becoming less desirable as the decades went by. He had to move depots several times as a result of corporate reorganisation and was made redundant at least once as the now privatized company he worked for lost the contract for the routes he drove. Nonetheless he retired on a company pension from a still heavily unionised job. Ronald has two children now in their twenties I know they don’t work on the buses, but perhaps they could try out as politicians? After all, their dad was a bus driver.

Tim Strangleman

Better Jobs Drive Better Business

Good jobs are hard to find.  Hard jobs – entailing bone-tiring work, low wages, and limited or no advancement opportunities — are all too plentiful.  And in our country that’s been a big and growing problem dating back at least three decades.

Since the early 1980s, job growth — and especially job quality – wilted in the face of intersecting economic, political, and demographic forces.  As usual, the short end of the stick is found in the hands of the working class and lower middle-income households.  Earnings stagnated for these groups as poverty jumped and un- and underemployment took and continues to extract heavy tolls.

These aren’t just statistics for me.  They are also my family story.  My father and two siblings worked for most of their lives in manufacturing.  I made it to college by working a few summers in a local plant.  I took away both a withdrawal card from the Machinists Union and many lessons about work and life.  But my career trajectory changed, and I went to work for a series of state and federal elected officials. This was an “up close and personal” viewpoint on how government – at the state, federal, and local levels – can expand opportunities for good jobs and stronger, more resilient communities.  But lately, I’ve grown pessimistic about the prospects for political or policy changes that might make a real difference.  Gridlock and paralysis spread – perhaps an expected result of a “conservative” governance apparatus.  Politics can be a noble calling and sometimes produces courageous heroes.  But recently, we’ve seen too much ignobility and too little spine.

That’s part of why I left the public sector.  Now I work in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, as a program officer in a foundation. Much of my work and that of my colleagues at The Hitachi Foundation focuses on how foundations can use their tools and resources to address challenges and expand opportunities for low wealth individuals, families, and communities.

Most philanthropy targets social, educational, or support services, while others promote policy changes.  A third category aims at organizing or direct action at the worker, community, city, or even national level.  Each has its merits, and the sector makes almost $50 billion in grants annually. But only a fraction of that, about $14 billion, is targeted to the “economically disadvantaged.”  If you divided that into equal shares and only consider the 46 million people living in poverty in the U.S., it would only deliver $303 per person each year.  That’s not much of a supplement.

So philanthropy in general and our foundation in particular must focus our efforts.  The Hitachi Foundation is working on the role that good businesses can play in creating many more good jobs and improving opportunities for lower-wage workers to gain earnings and advance.  Many philanthropists, like many in working-class studies, are skeptical of the business world.  But our experience suggests that business leaders are not monolithic in their viewpoints.  If we provide evidence that “good jobs” can generate growth, profits, and happy customers, many more businesses can be spurred to take action that will benefit lower-wage and frontline workers.

Over the past five years, we’ve amassed compelling evidence that some businesses create social value even as they pursue a profitable and sustainable bottom-line.  Before we did the research, we expected that specific HR and training practices would be the generator behind significant gains in earning and career acceleration for frontline workers.  That was true in part.  But we were surprised to see that workers and employers made the largest gains when companies innovated in the products or services they offered, in the methods for producing or delivering good and services, and in HR practices and training programs.  In retrospect, of course, these strategies are interrelated. With new products or services and/or innovation in methods for producing them, there’s a premium on engaging and retaining workers with skills and experience.  And on top of that, the talent and skills grown by workers who are already in the business are often the best and most valuable fit.  All that can yield a larger overall pie that can be shared with workers.  Mutual Gain Bargaining has a history of pursuing similar ends in the context of a labor agreement.  Whether a plant is organized or not, gains aren’t always shared.  But where they are not, the workers’ incentives are poorly aligned with business goals.  Good workers with skills will be more inclined to look for other options and leave when they find them.

In the Good Companies @ Work program, we’ve collected stories of just under 100 firms that attribute their success to their frontline workers. These companies outperform their peers while providing quality jobs and pathways to the middle-class.  For example, Marlin Steel made a dramatic transition from old technology, a product in declining demand, and outmoded methods to become an innovative leader.  This Baltimore firm made baskets for bagel bakeries and stores.  But demand declined sharply according to the company because the rise of low-carb diets. Marlin quite literally “reinvented” their business and that made it possible to shift from making bagel baskets to supplying Boeing.  Today, Marlin has a more flexible approach to manufacturing a different set of products.  In part, they use some advanced technologies such as robotics and laser cutters.  The company did not make a wholesale change in their workforce.  Their core group of workers was with the company before, during, and now after the transition.  The company and the workers did invest in training, and that expanded their ability to manufacture higher quality products with less time from the initial order through design and manufacturing and on to delivery.  Another innovation at the company directly ties  wages of production floor workers to skills.  The more machines and processes they are capable of operating, the higher their hourly rate.  The firm also has a production bonus system that shares profits with workers, who can earn as much as 40% above their hourly earnings by meeting weekly team goals.

Good companies are more likely to generate good jobs.  But we’re not naïve.  Many – maybe even most – corporate or business directors are driven by short-term profit maximization.  But many are not. They bring their personal values beyond the plant gate or office door.  And those values help interest them in offering opportunities to improve wages and working conditions.  But values and motivation take business owners only so far.  We find good evidence that for many businesses, doing the right thing for and with frontline workers is not just consistent with the imperative for businesses to survive and thrive.  In many cases, it is essential to staying profitable and positioning the company for the future.

We will continue and deepen our efforts to help businesses make that connection in the years ahead.  And we’ll share what we’re learning, because we see communication as key to altering the dominant paradigm that profit margins require companies to put the maximum squeeze on labor costs.

Why focus on business to expand opportunity for low wealth, lower-wage people?  Because we believe that it works.  We’ve seen sustainable, profitable models in action. Equally important, business has more resources to create more and better jobs than either philanthropy or government.

Our goals include supporting and fomenting changes inside the plant gate, or with patient care teams, or in other settings. If we can do so that will create progress that is not dependent on the next grant or election cycle.  Neither the public sector nor the foundation world has a good track record for sustained focus and effort.  Causes rise and fall with the next crisis or new opportunity.  But strategies that yield real benefits to the bottom line and the front line, generating economic gains for companies and workers, have the potential to stick, expand, and spread.

Mark Popovich

Mark Popovich is a senior program officer at The Hitachi Foundation.  Following two decades focused on public policy as a staffer, researcher and advocate, he’s spent the last fourteen years working at the intersection of philanthropy and business.

Advertising Work

I’m always interested in popular images of working-class life, but like most people, I barely see TV commercials anymore, so it took me a while to notice a recent trio of ads that use work as a marketing theme.  Advertisers use images to sell things, of course, and that’s part of what makes these ads so problematic – and so interesting.

The first ad, promoting Cadillac’s electric car, features actor Neal McDonough talking about how people in other countries think Americans are crazy for working so hard.  He begins outside an upscale home, standing hear a very nice pool, asking “Why do we work so hard?  For what? For this? For stuff?” People in other countries “stop by the café” as they “stroll home. They take August off.”  “We,” on the other hand – presumably not only white wealthy folks like the narrator but most of us – are “crazy, driven, hard-workin’ believers.”  That’s what made it possible for us to go to the moon, and that’s why “we’re the only ones going back there.”  Americans are better, the ad suggests, because of the American dream: “It’s pretty simple: you work hard, you create your own luck, and you’ve gotta believe anything is possible.”

While Cadillac rehearses the old myth that anyone can succeed, economists are reporting that few Americans actually live that Horatio Alger storyline.  Upward mobility hasn’t declined, a recent paper showed; it’s been low for decades.  But as the ad makes clear, the myth of the self-made man still has resonance, both for those who might think the ad describes them but even more, I fear, for those who desperately want to believe that “anything is possible.”  If anyone can create their own luck, then the only reason anyone might struggle is that they didn’t try hard enough.  To promote this narrative while economic inequality is growing is cynical, arrogant, and mean-spirited.

The Cadillac ad is easy to criticize, since its message is so clearly problematic.  Two other ads offer more positive images of work and workers, which make them at once appealing and appalling.  Chrysler’s latest “Made in Detroit” Super Bowl ad features yet another white male pop culture icon: Bob Dylan.  In this year’s ad, Dylan touts American creativity and pride, and he encourages us to let Germany make beer, Switzerland make watches, and Asia make cell phones. “We will build your car,” he says, leaning down over a barroom pool table.  The ad features images of cowboys, cheerleaders, James Dean, Rosie the Riveter, old-style diners, and the American highway system, as well as images of auto plants and of Detroit today.  Here, the call to creativity isn’t illustrated by technical innovators but by someone getting a tattoo, by graffiti on a stone bridge, and by Dylan, turning a guitar in his hand, a move that is echoed in a clip from an old industrial film, showing a turning piece of machinery.  Like Cadillac, Chrysler is appealing to American arrogance, but with a more working-class approach.

The last ad appeals even more directly to working-class viewers, in part by focusing on  deindustrialization and manufacturing jobs.   It opens with images of an abandoned factory, as TV host Mike Rowe intones in a voice over, “At one time, I made things, and I took pride in the things I made.”  Then, “the gears stopped turning.”  But, the voice continues, “I’m still here” (ironically, this echoes a song by Si Kahn, “We’re Still Here,” written for a 1983 documentary about Youngstown steelworkers’ efforts to buy and run the mills that corporations had recently shut down – a connection the ad’s authors almost certainly didn’t know about).  As the images shift to someone sweeping an empty factory floor and then to laughing groups of workers, the narrator predicts that “we will rise again, and we will build things, and build families, and build dreams.  It’s time to get back to what America does best. Because work is a beautiful thing.”   It’s an appealing message, one that reflects some core values of working-class studies.  We believe in the power of work, we know what was lost in deindustrialization, and we want to see a return of good jobs that they offer a decent paycheck and a chance to feel proud of one’s work.

Then we see the closing title, showing that the ad is for Wal-Mart, promising to invest in new manufacturing jobs in the U.S.  This is just one of several ads Wal-Mart has put out that at least indirectly respond to widespread critiques of its poor treatment of workers.  In others, Wal-Mart workers talk about getting promoted, health insurance, and support for education, leaving out other “benefits,” like advice on signing up for public assistance.  Critics of the Wal-Mart business model and advocates for low-wage workers have viewed these ads with skepticism, but this latest one elicited an even stronger response, probably because Rowe is known for talking about jobs that are dirty, unusual, and traditionally working-class.  He has also formed a foundation to encourage people to pursue skilled trades rather than higher education.  Without talking about class directly, Rowe’s website suggests that working-class jobs can be good jobs, and that’s an important message, especially at a time when so many working-class jobs are so bad.  You can see how some might have expected Rowe to refuse to speak for the company most strongly identified with bad working-class jobs.

In response to the ad, Jobs with Justice (JwJ), a non-profit that aims to make the bad working-class jobs a little better, targeted Rowe in a letter-writing campaign. Thousands of people have written to encourage him to meet with Wal-Mart workers and challenging him to rescind what they see as his endorsement of the company. Rowe has posted a series of responses on his facebook page, accusing JwJ of misunderstanding his role – he insists he’s not a spokesman for Wal-Mart – and criticizing JwJ’s tactics.  If you care so much about workers, he asks at one point, why disrupt my Foundation’s efforts to help young working-class people find good jobs – jobs that are, he points out, significantly better than the ones held by the workers JwJ advocates for? Rowe also challenges JwJ: “But even if Wal-Mart falls short, don’t discount the power of a positive message in the mainstream media. We need more good messages around American manufacturing and hard work. . . . Why not encourage more messages around a topic that can actually help your mission and the people you represent?”

Good question. The message that we need more manufacturing jobs is, indeed, a good one – even though today’s manufacturing jobs don’t offer anything like the pay and benefits of the ones people lost when those factories originally shut down.  And yes, we do need more messages that make clear how good jobs improve people’s lives. We also want those images to be used in ways that really do promote workers’ interests.  The problem with the Wal-Mart ad isn’t the way it represents work and workers.  It’s that it uses those images to promote a company that we know contributes to the problems workers face.

Advertising works in part by creating illusions and by manipulating viewers, so we shouldn’t be surprised that advertisers are responding to economic inequality by capitalizing on the longing many Americans feel for economic hope. They know we’re nostalgic for a time when American made things and when hard work seemed to ensure a better life.  They know that we want to believe what the guy in the Cadillac promises – “anything is possible” if only we work hard enough. And they know what we would like to forget: that ads like this work.

Sherry Linkon

“Soiled by the mud of the street:” Pope Francis and the Working Class

A simple “letter” can cement a tradition, forge alliances, defend the voiceless. Indeed, Catholic Social Teaching began with one. James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, hand-delivered a letter to Pope Leo XIII in 1887,  protesting the Archbishop of Quebec’s earlier condemnation of the newly formed Knights of Labor.  In that letter, Gibbons positions himself and the Church as defenders of the working classes, writing that presenting the Church as “the friend of the powerful rich and the enemy of the helpless poor” would not only harm its image.  It would be a reversal of its “whole history.”  He continued, “The one body in the world which had been the protector of the poor and the weak for nearly 1800 years, could not possibly desert these same classes in their hour of need.”   Several years later, in  “On the Condition of the Working Classes” (Rerum Novarum), Pope Leo XIII corrected this “reversal” to establish “modern Catholic social thought” in line with the Christian Tradition as a voice of and for the poor.   He defended labor unions and offered ethical critiques of both capitalist and Marxist political economies.

More recently, in Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel, November 24, 2013), Pope Francis presents a similar clear image of his concern about the modern world: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”   Francis continues his challenge, noting that “the great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. . . . There is no longer room for others, no place for the poor.”

Francis immerses himself in the two thousand year history of the Church, from the Patristic era through the medieval theologians to contemporary social theologians and papal documents, by remaining steadfast in his defense of the many who are working class, poor, and extremely poor (making less that $2 a day): “we have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor.  May we never abandon them.” It sounds as though he re-read Cardinal Gibbons’s 1887 letter about the nature of the Church and its option for the poor; he insists on rejecting any reversal.

Francis makes a point in Evangelii Gaudium to root his exhortations in the words and deeds of his predecessors, namely Paul VI (see Populorum Progressio ), John Paul II (see Laborem Exercens), and Benedict XVI (see Deus Caritas Est) to point to the Church’s long and continuing commitment to the poor and workers.  Francis is not making any new “news” in this Apostolic Exhortation.  Rather he reminds us that the Church commits itself to work for an economy and society built on the values of truth, freedom, justice, and love, and the principles of human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity (see Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church).  Francis humbly invites all others who share a concern for justice and peace to work with him to overcome new idols that strangle peoples and communities in structural poverty and inequality.

In this ethical analysis of the current political economy, Francis directly connects the commandment “thou shall not kill” to “an economy of exclusion and inequality.  Such an economy kills.” This connection between the defense of life and a just economic ethics reveals two prisms that he and the Church’s Tradition employ in critique of systems or structures: namely the focus on the dignity of the human person and the positive role of the State in securing the common good.   Francis’s focus on the human person prompts this comment about the nature of the current capitalistic, hyper-individualized political economy:

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.  We have created a ‘throw away’ culture which is now spreading.  It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.  Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised — they are no longer even part of it.  The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers.’

This exclusion must end.

He minces no words, either, in his critique of current political and economic models:

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

Francis rejects a “spirituality of well-being” and a “theology of prosperity” that detaches persons and communities from their responsibilities to care for each other and defend human life and provide for the common good.  He highlights his fear: that we have created again new idols with our unquestioned ideology of the primacy of money over the human person.  He notes with conviction and a heightened acclamation point: “money must serve, not rule!”  This new idol worship leads to a “socioeconomic system” of exclusion that “is unjust at its root.” It is wrong.  The Church will stand by those who are excluded through its constant teachings and institutional actions.  Workers and the poor must be defended.  The alliance between the Church and those who are excluded continues.

Francis’s critique of postindustrial capitalism shakes all of us to our own core.  We are made uncomfortable by being reminded that oftentimes we have not sufficiently promoted the rights of workers to organize, bargain, and secure a living wage for themselves and their families, even as a  recent report notes that “the 10 job categories expected to add the most jobs during the current decade boasted a collective median wage of $32,386 in 2010, roughly $15 per hour and far below the United States median of $51,892 at the time. Seven of the 10 categories pay below this average.” We are oftentimes paralyzed by the global reality that almost half the world, nearly three billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. Francis’s “letter” calls us to break out of intellectual and organizational perspectives that define these realities as the workings of the “laws of nature.”  We must shake off our complicity and organize a just reality at home and around the world.

These choices require us to make a reversal.  Poverty, inequality, and injustice are not “natural.”  We can change course.   Economic, political, and societal arrangements are human, collective choices.  Francis calls us to re-imagine a local and global community based in an ethics that prioritizes the person and the common good.  We need to keep workers and those without work — and particularly those without any sure way out of poverty — front and center in our common imagination and communal priorities.   We need to see the recent cuts to food stamps and extended unemployment assistance as choices that require a reversal in heart and policy.  Individually and collectively, we need to make different choices, to value labor over capital, persons over things.

Francis is calling for a wider struggle in the defense of the poor and working classes.  He writes:  “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”   The Church “always does what good it can, even if in the process, its shoes get soiled by the mud of the street.”  Francis’s personal and corporate witness attests to that ongoing commitment.  In this “letter,” he welcomes everyone to the table of struggle, to work together to create a world of mercy, love, and peace.  Francis invites us to forge alliances that promote and empower those who have been “excluded.”  The table is abundantly arrayed.  Join in.

Brian R. Corbin

Brian R. Corbin is Director of Social Action for the Diocese of Youngstown and former Chairperson of the National Advisory Council of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

What about the Workers?

During the mid-1980s I was a member of the UK Labour Party. One of the most memorable branch meetings I went to – OK there isn’t a lot of competition – was after I had finished an early shift on the London Underground where I worked as a signalman at the time. I made my way back from London to my home town outside the capital and went straight to the meeting still in my work uniform. I still remember the look when other members of the branch saw me and another friend who also worked on the railways enter the room.  I should explain, like many Labour Party branches mine was filled with teachers and other middle class occupations, including fairly senior executives of state-owned companies. Their collective reaction wasn’t contempt, and I wouldn’t want to claim that.  Rather, it betrayed a sense that people in uniform didn’t quite fit. What gave me the confidence to stay in that room was a working-class pride instilled in me in large part by the politics and culture of my workplace, which taught me not to be ashamed of my blue collar.

I have been reminded of this incident over the last couple of weeks as class in the Labour Party and more widely in British politics has come to the surface. The most recent manifestation is over the increasingly troubled relationship between the trade union movement and the Labour Party under its leader Ed Miliband. After the electoral defeat of 2010, it was widely understood Miliband’s success was largely due to the support of the trade union vote rather than the other blocks within the Party’s Electoral College – MPs and ordinary members. The conservative media instantly labelled Miliband ‘Red Ed’ and suggested that he was now a creature of the union movement. While this mood music has played out over the last three years, the volume has recently increased due to the selection process for a safe Labour seat of Falkirk in Scotland. Local party members have alleged that the Unite union, one of the biggest unions in the UK and one of the largest donors to the Labour Party, has been attempting to fix the election by packing out the membership of the local party with union members. I will spare readers the gruesome details of the battle, but essentially Miliband called foul and asked the local police to investigate the process.

The rights and wrongs of Falkirk are complex, but the case has shone a spotlight on the class demographics of the Labour Party. Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, has sought to portray his organization’s actions as a strategy for ensuring that a working-class candidate is selected rather than a middle class political wonk, what he would see as the equivalent of a Washington insider. However, as the sitting MP for the constituency, Eric Joyce,  recently wrote in the Guardian newspaper, while  McCluskey has suggested that ‘middle class’ people like “shouldn’t be parachuted in,” his union’s candidate worked in an MP’s office.   Joyce also pointed out that McCluskey earns a middle-class salary of £122,000.

No doubt, shifts in the economy and especially the deindustrialization of many of the traditional areas of Labour support have wrought inevitable changes in the make-up of the Parliamentary Labour Party.  While Labour now has more female MPs and ethnic minority representation, however, the base of candidates from the working class has eroded. In the last Labour Government (1997-2010), three of the most high profile cabinet members claimed working-class origins – Jack Straw (Foreign Secretary), John Prescott (Deputy Prime Minster) and Alan Johnson (Home Secretary). And while Straw cut his teeth in student politics, Prescott and Johnson emerged through workplace unionism. Prescott was a seaman and worked as a waiter on board ships. In Parliament, he was often ridiculed for his working-class accent, with Tory MPs from more elite backgrounds shouting requests for cocktails during his speeches in the House of Commons. Alan Johnson has just written a well-received memoir of his early life growing up poor in London in a single parent family.  But these high profile Labour Cabinet members from working class backgrounds are part of an aging and disappearing cohort – Prescott is 75, Straw 67, and Johnson 63 – nearing or at the end of their active political life. The ladder that enabled them to enter national politics is either no longer there or much diminished. The typical Labour MP now is far more likely to come to frontline politics through higher education, often with a spell as a political intern. Over time, working-class communities have fewer politically active role models as class politics in the workplace and neighborhoods have been hollowed out. Politics has become something done to working-class people rather than something they or their peers actively engage in.

What difference does it make who represents voters in Parliament? A working-class perspective on life roots one in daily concerns, and it makes elected representatives think twice before they make assumptions about what ordinary people think and do. I wrote in a previous blog about the new group Blue Collar Conservatism, and recently another group called Renewal launched.  Its leader recently suggested that if the Tories are to win in 2015 they need to be nothing less than “the new workers’ party,” with policies appealing to black and ethnic minority voters as well as trade unions and public sector workers. Many of the people around these Conservative groups are unafraid to self-identify as working class.

It was thirty years ago this summer that I left school, began work on the railway, and joined both the union and the Labour Party. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be if a sixteen year old turned up at a local Labour branch today — perhaps not in an ill-fitting grey railway worker’s uniform but in one from a shop or a fast-food outlet. I hope they would be welcomed. But given the lack of the working-class pride and working-class political role models that drew me into the Labour Party, I wonder whether a young person today would even bother to show up.

Tim Strangleman

The Last Good Blue-Collar Job?

A journalist from a Scottish newspaper contacted me last month wanting my reaction to the announcement that 2,300 people had applied for eighteen trainee driver posts to service a soon to be reopened rail line in the Scottish Boarders running to the south of Edinburgh. With nearly 128 applicants for each of these jobs, the reporter was keen to discover what was behind this headlong rush. Well, to be precise, what I think she was after were some conditioned clichés about working on the railway, the romance of the iron road, and how it is (still) every little boy’s wish to be a train driver.

She seemed a little crestfallen when I suggested some alternative reasons why these new posts might be so valued.  First, the trainee’s starting salary was $33,230, about average in the UK before you take in to account the rise to $58,400 when fully qualified. I also suggested that recruits could expect a good pension, reduced travel prices, and, above all, the kind of security that many workers can only dream of. This is all in the context of a double dip recession and high unemployment levels. By this time, I could sense that young journalist’s imagined simple story of boyhood romance was morphing into something far more complex and probably less exciting.

She tried one last tack with me. ‘But why’ she asked, ‘were these jobs so good’? My answer was straightforward; railway work in the UK remains one of the strongest bastions of working-class unionisation. When the industry was privatised, or denationalised, two decades ago, conservative politicians made little attempt to hide that their goals included smashing the unions, reducing levels of pay, and eroding conditions of service. Contrary to the conservatives’ hopes, some railway workers have seen their real pay rates increase considerably, and this is especially true of the drivers.

Hot on the heels of the story about the new railway jobs came a similar story from the English Midlands about 1,701 people applying for three full-time and five part-time barista posts with coffee chain Costa Coffee. In other words, these more mundane, less obviously ‘romantic’ vacancies attracted more applicants per position – roughly 212 applicants for each job — than did the train driver openings. Among the biggest differences between the two jobs is the pay rate.  An article in the Guardian pointed out that no barista in London, let alone in the more economically deprived Midlands, gets within ten grand of the national average wage of £26,500.  Another key difference is that driving a train requires a year or more of theoretical and practical training while – and no offence to baristas anywhere – serving coffee does not involve a lengthy apprenticeship, much as some of us may want to fetishize its production. The relatively greater interest in the barista jobs may reflect many things, but it is fundamentally a function of the poorly performing economy and the dire labor market in the UK.

Underlying both stories is a common question that must confuse the presumably middle-class newspaper readership: why would so many people want to do blue-collar work? One answer to this question might lie in reflections being made about working- and middle-class aspiration on both sides of the Atlantic, reflections that reassess the value of blue-collar work.  The most prominent example comes from US writer Matthew B. Crawford’s bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft, subtitled An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Crawford’s basic thesis is that the middle-class obsession with getting the ‘good job’ often ends in a cubicle.  It may be a very nice cubicle, in which one may be able to exercise all sorts of autonomy over the type of posters and humorous postcards placed on its walls, but it’s still a cubicle. Crawford contrasts life slumped in front of a screen between cardboard dividers with the freedom and autonomy still enjoyed by many working-class jobs.  He makes much of his own chosen career in motorcycle maintenance, in which he enjoys endless problem solving mixed with extensive banter with other motorcycle aficionados. While Crawford enters this world from a background of relative educational and financial privilege, he does tap into something about the too often hidden rewards of working-class working life, namely the culture of workplaces shaped by ordinary men and women.

Similar revelations can be found in other accounts of middle-class forays into working-class culture, such as Don J. Snyder’s The Cliff Walk: A Job Lost and a Life Found. Snyder recounts how he lost a tenure-track college post and descended down the class ladder. In a fascinating story, he relates how he found redemption through labor with a set of working-class builders who overlooked his technical incompetence because they could see he needed the job. Snyder contrasts the basic humanitarian gesture involved in helping out someone in need with his experience of the middle-class world he had fallen from where many former friends and colleagues had simply turned their backs on him.

In my current job, I am occasionally contacted by the media about the current state of work, and not just about railways. Much like my students, journalists seem to assume that manual labor or blue-collar work is to be avoided at all costs. I always make a point of asking the often young journalist or assistant researchers about their own work and the conditions they enjoy. Usually, they describe a long-hours culture, working on temporary contracts, switching between employers who contract to bigger media players. To these younger media workers, the working-class world of blue-collar work must seem a strangely alien one, where workers more often co-operate than compete and place emphasis on the importance of dignity and respect for a job well done. No wonder they want to produce stories about this type of old-fashioned work.

Tim Strangleman