John (a false name) stands at the street corner that I pass by every morning in Oakland, when I walk my dog. An elder black man in his late sixties, John wears the same brown jacket each day, through summer heat and fall chill, and a weathered baseball hat. He shuffles up to cars that line up to caravan over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco and asks, “Do you have fifty cents?” John is also a mobile storefront for “loosies”—or, individually sold cigarettes—hawking them to neighborhood residents for a quarter a piece. On a good day, John pockets $20, a helpful supplement to his monthly Social Security payments, which he says are his only source of income otherwise.

Robert Neuwirth, author of the new book “The Stealth of Nations,” would say that John is a member of System D, an informal economy involving 1.8 billion people (that’s half of the workers in the world) who make their money doing jobs “that fly under the radar, that don’t get registered, incorporated, or licensed, that are not paying taxes (or may be paying less than they should), and are somehow camouflaging their operations.” Neuwirth stresses that his definition “rules out criminal enterprises—those businesses that commit a crime, regarding what they do, and not how they do it.” Excluding activities like drug smuggling, for example, from the informal economy, it still accounts for $10 trillion in global trade annually.

In this country, Neuwirth told me, the informal economy makes up a deceptively small slice of our gross domestic product, 8 to 9 percent, but that translates into $1 trillion in economic activity. And that number is growing. “[There’s] no question that in hard times, when people are desperate for extra income, moonlighting and other forms of cash-only work become important survival mechanisms,” explained Neuwirth.

This can take the form of a teacher, who lost her job and is now running a childcare center out of her home. Or, my friend Marites (also a false name), an Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties who quit her white-collar job only to find reemployment difficult. She survives on the cash tips she earns when volunteering for an LGBT jitney service. These sorts of off-the-books hustles are keeping many families afloat these days, because not much else is forthcoming from the public or private sector.

President Obama’s $447 billion jobs pitch has fizzled in the Senate, even as Majority Leader Harry Reid tries to revive pieces of it (like a $60 billion measure to strengthen transportation infrastructure), a Sisyphean task. The House, on the other hand, agreed to pass a tax measure, with both parties celebrating this transcendence over party politics. But as Jennifer Steinhauer notes for the New York Times, legislators merely repealed a tax measure that hadn’t even been implemented yet. That’s what passes for job creation these days. And as an employer, the government shed 34,000 workers in September, the bulk due to austerity measures in cities and counties.

Meanwhile, in September, the private sector created about 100,000 new jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a mere 7 percent of jobs needed to meaningfully reduce the 14 million people now unemployed, or 4 percent if you count the 25 million unemployed and underemployed. A recent new National Employment Law Project report, “Filling the Good Jobs Deficit,” estimated that we’re running an 11 million-job deficit, when you count both the jobs we lost in the Great Recession and those needed to keep up with population growth. The report goes on to say that any growth in employment that we have experienced has been in bad jobs, paying lower wages.

What score would the informal economy earn, I wonder? Neuwirth agreed with me that informal economies may offer more opportunities at present for people of color and Native Americans than the formal sector. “[Poor] people and people of color have historically been ignored and redlined by financial institutions. At the same time, governments are also hard-up, so they are raising the costs of licenses and inspections,” he expalined. “This double-bind makes it impossible for people to start businesses through approved channels.”

Opportunities created in the informal sector also stay within the communities where they’re launched, Neuwirth added. “A local vendor who is your neighbor tends to spend money in the neighborhood. This means that the money he or she earns circulates in the community and doesn’t leave the area to feed corporate profits. Street vendors buy in small quantities, so they also tend to buy from other local merchants. So the informal economy is actually an important tool for community economic empowerment and autonomous development.”

Perhaps a better frame for thinking about exchanges outside of state intervention and capitalism is the community economy, also known as solidarity economy, where members of the community collectively own and operate the means of production, so to speak. This is a better catch-all term because it’s not defined by what it’s not—the formal capitalist economy—but by what it’s for—the needs of the community. (Anthropologist Keith Hart, credited with coining the term informal economy in the 1970s, has similar issues with it.) A community economy collectivizes the struggle we all share to sustain ourselves during this endless recession; that’s unlike the informal economy, in which each individual hustles to get by.

Pockets of community economies are flourishing across the nation, as people decide to take their economic resilience into their own hands. Alliance to Develop Power, for instance, in western Massachusetts, is an example I’ve written about previously. They own and operate a community economy worth over $80 million, diversified in tenant housing cooperatives and a worker-owned contracting firm, creating 60 jobs for its members. Similar projects are afoot in New York City, some showcased in a series of film shorts called “Portraits of the Solidarity Economy.” The film will premiere Nov. 12 in New York, details here.

Gwai Boonkeut suffers from severe heart disease.  He doesn’t smoke, has no family history of diabetes or heart problems, and he’s in his mid 50s — about 10 years younger than the average age for men who suffer from their first heart attack.  A doctor told Boonkeut that his heart operated at a third of the capacity of a normal heart.  Boonkeut, who supports his family by working as a school janitor, had to cut back his hours because of his health.

Boonkeut moved his family to Richmond, California in 1980 from Laos to escape the violence of the Vietnam War, where he lost his mother, two brothers, and a niece.  However, life in Richmond wasn’t any better.  In 2004, his 15-year-old daughter Chan was mistakenly targeted by gang members and killed at the family’s front door. Boonkeut’s older son was caught up drug use.

The city is dominated by the Chevron corporation, which operates massive oil refineries, spewing hazardous toxins in the air. Boonkeut is a member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), a community based group advocating for the health and livelihoods of members such as Boonkeut.

Richmond’s residents, mostly black, Latino, and South Asian, suffer from higher rates of death from heart disease and cancer than surrounding communities, according to the documentary ”Unnatural Causes“ by the California Newsreel.  Children are hospitalized for asthma at twice the rate than surrounding counties.

Now, residents are teaming up with community groups like APEN to paint their own vision of a healthy, sustainable future.

In March 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tenn. to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers who toiled for poverty wages in horrendous working conditions. Following King’s assassination there on April 4, the workers won legal recognition for their union.

Their victory was a landmark in the struggle of Blacks to reap the economic benefits of the civil rights movement. However, the modest gains that followed in the ensuing decades for some middle and working-class Blacks have been dramatically eroded in the past decade by a wave of home foreclosures and an official unemployment rate of 16.7 percent — a trend made worse by recent attacks on public sector workers and the services they provide.

Such is the case in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council reached a budget deal in June that included layoffs of a thousand city workers. Most belong to District Council 37 whose membership is majority Black and Latino. The layoffs of school aides, parent coordinators and other non-teaching personnel, some of whom earn as little as $11,000 a year, are slated to begin Oct. 7.

The hardest-hit schools will be in poor, predominantly people-of-color neighborhoods like Washington Heights, Harlem, East New York and East Flatbush while middle class neighborhoods in South Brooklyn and Staten Island will be barely affected, according to a report by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News.

Similar developments have unfolded across the country as politicians and the media blame teachers, nurses, bus drivers, letter carriers, social workers and other public servants earning living wages and pensions for budget shortfalls.

The undertone of this slash-and-burn approach is racialized. As my colleague at Colorlines.com, Kai Wright, wrote earlier this year, the widespread images of public employees as lazy and overpaid have “the faint outline of familiar caricatures — welfare queens, Cadillacs in the projects, Mexican freeloaders.”

Of course, not all 21 million public employees are equal. The United States has a vast repressive apparatus composed of hundreds of thousands of federal, state, county and local police and prison guards, most of whom are white and male. They have endured far fewer layoffs and have not been vilified like public workers who provide social services. This is because the right opposes downward redistribution of wealth and power but sees the repressive work of the police as a vital legitimate public function.

Equal Opportunities

The public sector has historically bolstered families of color, in particular Black workers, both through social services and as a source of employment. UC Berkeley labor policy analyst Steven Pitts found in a recent study that the public sector was “the single most important source of employment” for Blacks, who were 30 percent more likely to be employed as a government worker than any other race. Black workers in the public sector also earn wages comparable to what white workers earn, reducing the racial wage gap that plagues most occupations.

Equal employment opportunity guidelines and affirmative action mandates ensure that government employers seek out qualified people of color for the public sector. This offers a level of accountability not possible in the private sector. When the public sector swelled under programs created during the New Deal and the Great Society, so did employment of workers of color. By the 1960s unions recognized the demographic change in the public sector and embraced Blacks as members, ensuring that they earned living wages and supporting benefits.

With an unionization rate that hovered just above 35 percent, the public sector continued to be a source of good, union jobs in the last few decades even as manufacturing jobs moved abroad and union density in the private sector fell below 10 percent by 1997. Now, that is changing. In 2010, state and local governments slashed over 230,000 jobs. Expect more in 2011 and 2012.

War on the Poor

This is a far cry from Dr. King’s vision of bringing “colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect.” In fact, negotiations over the next decade of budgeting amount to a war on people of color. The congressional debt ceiling “crisis” that was resolved in August was a manufactured affair that allowed both parties to justify almost $1 trillion in spending cuts in the next 10 years. This will devastate millions dependent on a tattered social safety net. The budget deal also created a bipartisan super committee tasked with reaching a so-called “grand bargain” that could exact trillions more dollars in cuts to social spending during the next decade.

The often mystifying numbers tossed around in the deficit reduction debate become clearer when translated in terms of the people who will be impacted. This year, the Coalition on Human Needs estimated the cuts would result in:

• 290,000 low-income families losing rental vouchers
• 300,000 to 450,000 low-income mothers and children losing Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food subsidies
• 3.5 million low-income households
losing assistance for heating their homes
• 1.4 million students won’t receive Pell grants.

Census data shows that the past 10 years have been a “lost decade” in terms of livelihood and gains for working families. More than 46 million families live in poverty in this country now, a disproportionate number of them Black. Black families in poverty increased to almost 30 percent and over one-third of Black and Latino children are impoverished. We are further than ever from the “promised land” King spoke of on the last night of his life. But, we have the means to do something about it.

The percentage of taxes paid by corporations and the super-rich are at their lowest in decades while income inequality has soared to levels not seen since the 1920s. That hoarded wealth should be taxed in order to rebuild the public sector and create a 21st century equivalent of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps to give work to millions who need it. Even the International Monetary Fund now acknowledges that austerity measures exacerbate the recession while government spending provides stimulus.

Redistribution of wealth is the starting point for any real solution to the recession and for bridging the racial economic divide that grows more extreme each day.

Yvonne Yen Liu is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center and a contributing writer at Colorlines.com.

Nationally, the need is perhaps more dire now than ever as safety net hospitals close down across the country. These hospitals are often places of last resort for care for the uninsured and for undocumented immigrants—populations that are disproportionately comprised of low-income people of color. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 44.4 percent of Latinos lack insurance, as well as 28.5 percent of black people and 21.2 percent of Asian Americans. In contrast, 16.5 percent of whites don’t have coverage.

Vermont takes one bold step towards reversing these disparities by extending coverage to the thousands of undocumented workers who toil in obscurity, hidden by the state’s rural isolation. That victory comes after a two-year, people-led movement to fight for single-payer care, under the banner of Healthcare is a Human Right—an effort that included a heroic, last-ditch campaign by the Vermont Workers Center to repeal an amendment that would have excluded undocumented workers.

Workers like Jose Obeth Santiz Cruz, who traveled a long way to toil without rights on Vermont’s farms. Santiz Cruz’s relatives and friends told him of opportunities to work in dairy farms—it would be hard work and a lonely life, but he could save money to send back to the village of San Isidro, in the Chiapas mountains, where he supported his parents and two siblings. So in early 2009, Santiz Cruz made the trek of over 3,000 miles, stopped at the Mexican border for 20 days before heading North.

His new home, framed by snow-capped Green Mountains to the east and New York’s Adirondacks to the west, was so different from Chiapas. But Santiz Cruz found work at a dairy farm in Franklin County and used his earnings in the initial months to repay the thousands of dollars he owed to the coyotes, as smugglers are called, who helped him cross the border.

One night two years ago, close to Christmas, Santiz Cruz’s coworkers found him dead in the barn. His clothing had gotten caught in a gutter cleaner, a chain-driven motor machine that scrapes out the gutter where cow waste collects. Unable to extricate himself, he was pulled into the motor and strangled to death. Santiz Cruz was only 20 years old.

Santiz Cruz’s death was a wake-up call to local residents that the farmworker community needed support. Migrant farmworkers, most hailing from Mexico or Guatemala, are a relatively new population in Vermont. They began fulfilling the need for labor on small family farms in the state roughly 10 years ago, after children of Vermont farmers chose to not follow the path of their parents into a profession that is increasingly hard to sustain. In 2009, 33 family dairy farms closed down. Those that remain open depend on migrant labor. A third of Vermont’s farmworkers are from Chiapas, many are indigenous Tojolabal, said Brendan O’Neill, cofounder of the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project.

The dairy industry in particular relies heavily on imported labor, with most farms employing one to two workers, the largest with 10 workers. Most of those workers are undocumented, like Santiz Cruz, having traveled north out of economic need; others come through guest worker programs. Farmworkers in Vermont earn anywhere from $5 to $10 an hour, the average is $7, working 12 to 15 hour days. Most stay for under two years, sending remittances home, before returning themselves.

These workers have until now gone without access to health care, without oversight of their working conditions for safety and health violations, and without recourse to other services that our social safety net extends to most of our citizens. (Well, it’s now a fight to preserve those services for anyone in this age of budget cuts). A 2007 report by the Vermont Department of Health found that farmworkers face many barriers to health care, including lack of language translation, transportation to providers, and fear of deportation.

“People live with bad injuries, through sickness; they don’t go to see doctors, because of fear of deportation,” explained O’Neill. “Up at the border, we have a really tense ICE presence: [it’s] pretty common to talk to workers close to the border who literally never leave the farm. [They’ve] been there for two years and never stepped foot off the farm.”

As the migrant labor force continues expanding, the problems caused by their isolation from health care, among other services, is becoming more critical.

“We’re seeing more undocumented workers in different industries. Primarily, up til now, they were in the dairy industry, but now they’re at vegetable farms and doing construction,” said James Haslam of the Vermont Workers Center. “We’ve operated a workers rights hotline since 1998. We occasionally got calls [from undocumented workers] and they’ve increased, despite the fact that up til now all our materials are in English. Still, somehow, people find our number.”

The number of Latino farmworkers in Vermont peaked between 2,000 to 2,500, in 2005, according to Cheryl Mitchell, cofounder of the Addison County Farm Worker Coalition and former deputy secretary for Vermont’s Agency of Human Services. The population has gradually decreased as border control has stepped up efforts. With 3.9 percent of Vermont’s total population being people of color, it’s easy to target anyone not white. “Vermont is such a homogenous state, so the potential for racial profiling is scary,” said Mitchell.

Five years ago, at the first public forum on farmworker solidarity, organized by Mitchell’s Addison County Farm Worker Coalition, the Mexican consulate reported that Vermont at the time had the most number of deportations per capita among all states in New England.

After Santiz Cruz’s death, local Vermonters organized a candlelight vigil in his honor. However, fellow farmworkers were afraid to attend, concerned that the border patrol would be present. O’Neill and other organizers with the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project raised funds to bring Santiz Cruz’s body to his home in Chiapas for burial. They also created a film, “Silenced Voices,” about their journey to San Isidro with Santiz Cruz’s coffin. The village initially subsisted off of growing coffee, but was unable to sustain itself when global coffee prices fell and free trade agreements (like NAFTA) eliminated Mexican-government subsidies.

For now, O’Neill and his colleagues try to establish links between rural Vermont and the mountain villages of Chiapas—lands separated by vast distances, but united by farmers and workers who struggle under the same forces of global capitalism.

The victory to include undocumented farmworkers in universal health care is a temporary one. Haslam, of the Vermont Workers Center, anticipates more fights ahead. “What we’re doing in Vermont is going on the offensive for human rights,” he said, “building a proactive movement, not just defending what we have, but pushing for and really turning things around.”

Mariano Lucas Domingo traveled north from his home in Guatemala in search of work to support his sick parent. He landed in Immokalee, Florida, the tomato capital of the United States, where he found work harvesting tomatoes. He expected to earn about $200 a week.  Then Lucas met two brothers who offered him room and board at their family house, in exchange for a cut of his pay. This didn’t seem like a bad deal to Lucas who had no family or friends nearby, and also because the brothers offered to extend credit even when work was sparse.

Lucas spent the next two-and-a-half years living as a captive with other workers in a truck with no water or electricity.1 The workers were forced to relieve themselves in a corner of the truck and wash with a garden hose in the backyard. The brothers locked them in the truck every night, forced them to work even when they were sick or tired, and took away their paychecks. Lucas and his colleagues finally escaped from the truck one night by punching a hole through the roof.2 The two brothers were subsequently arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

This story, unfortunately, is not unusual among the workers who produce our food.  While Lucas’ experience of being enslaved is certainly a horrific extreme, the 20 million workers employed in the food system earn low wages, work in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, and are unable to collectively organize to demand rights at work. Half of all workers in the food system earned just $21,692 a year or $11.05 per hour in 2008.3 That is well below what a family needs to make in order to sustain two children, according to the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington.4 In a metropolitan area like San Francisco, a family needs to earn around $26.97 per hour just to meet basic needs. In Cleveland, that figure is $20.21 per hour and in Atlanta, it’s $18.37 per hour. Close to one quarter of all food system workers live at the federally defined poverty threshold—earning less than $21,200 for a family of four—as per data gathered in 2008.5

A recent report from the Applied Research Center mapping out the race, gender, and class of the food system shows some sad but not surprising trends:

(1) People of color earn lower wages than whites in comparable occupations within the food system. Half of all white workers made $25,024 a year in 2008, whereas workers of color earned $19,349, or $5675 less. Calculated by the hour, food workers of color earned almost $2.50 less than their white counterparts. The income gap—or race penalty, as it is commonly called—was greater in certain sectors, particularly in food processing ($6.04 less per hour) and distribution ($5.35 less per hour).

Additionally, it appears that women are subject to a gender penalty as well. White women, for example, earned just 63 cents for every dollar made by a white male—the highest paid worker in the food system. Black women fared worse with 53 cents for every dollar and Latinas fared worse still with just 50 cents for every dollar earned by white men.

(2) People of color are overrepresented in food system occupations. Thirty-four percent of the general population in 2008 identified as people of color, but more than 42 percent of the workers in the food system were people of color. Whites, who comprised over 65 percent of the general population, only made up 57 percent of food system workers. But Latinos, who represented just 15 percent of the general population in 2008, were disproportionately represented in the food system—making up over 25 percent of the work force.

(3) Few people of color hold management positions in the food system. Whites are clearly the majority in management positions within the food system. They constitute 74 percent of the managers and 85 percent of the chief executives. Within management, perhaps not surprisingly, half were white men and less than 10 percent were women of color.

In terms of money, managers earned the most with a median income of $40,544, which is double that of a rank-and-file worker in the food system. Even in management, whites made more than people of color. Additionally, half of all white chief executives made six figure incomes, nearly $40,000 more than their black or brown counterparts.

(4) The food system has some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs. Farmworkers are exposed to toxic pesticides daily and an estimated 300,000 suffer from pesticide poisonings every year.6 Even access to some basic necessities is lacking for many working in the fields. A survey conducted among farmworkers in North Carolina found that only four percent had access to fresh drinking water, hand washing facilities, and toilets.7

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in food processing suffered some of the highest rates of injury and illness in 2008.8 Much of the labor in food processing involves repetitive, physically demanding movements using dangerous tools and machinery for which workers often receive inadequate training. Juan Baten, a young father from Guatemala, was crushed to death one night by a dough-mixing machine while working the third shift at a tortilla factory.9 In the opinion of Daniel Gross, executive director of Brandworkers International, Baten’s death could have been avoided if the tortilla factory had been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.10

(5) Food system workers are excluded from the right to organize.11 Farmworkers are exempt from the nation’s labor laws, such as the minimum wage and the right to organize into a union, crafted during the New Deal of the 1930s.12 Historically, workers in the fields have been people of color, whether they were descendants of African slaves who worked on Southern plantations or undocumented workers from Latin America. And the architects of federal labor laws, no doubt, found it politically expedient to exclude farmworkers in order to curry favor with white Southern racists.13

This racialized exclusion of workers from basic labor protections now extends from farmworkers to workers dependent on tips and to those formerly incarcerated. The minimum wage for tip-earners, such as restaurant workers, has been stuck at $2.13 an hour for 20 years. A study of low-wage workers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago found that 30 percent of those who receive tips were not even paid $2.13 an hour. When workers complained or tried to form a union, 43 percent were subjected to retaliation, such as firing, suspension, or threats to call immigration authorities.

Organized Food Workers Build Momentum
In July 2009, worker-based organizations whose members plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell food came together to form the Food Chain Workers Alliance.14 Their mission is to build a more sustainable food system that respects workers’ rights, is based on the principles of social, environmental, and racial justice, and in which everyone has access to healthy and affordable food. The Alliance is currently engaged in building solidarity among food system workers with the idea of identifying shared worker concerns and goals.

Members of the Alliance gathered in early March in Florida, close to the tomato fields where farmworker Mariano Lucas Domingo was enslaved for two-and–a-half years. They came to lend their support to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign, Do the Right Thing, which targets the Publix supermarket chain for refusing to pay a penny more for a pound of tomatoes.15 Workers from Alliance member groups, like the Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center and Chicago’s Warehouse Workers for Justice, joined the picket line outside a Publix store and marched with thousands of farmworkers and their allies for living wages for everybody.

Endnotes
1.    Estabrook, Barry. “Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes.” Gourmet Magazine. March 2009. www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/
politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes
2.    Lydersen, Kari. “Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum Hits the Road.” In These Times. March 7, 2010. www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5658/ florida_modern_day_slavery_museum_hits_the_road/
3.    Liu, Yvonne Yen and Apollon, Dominique. “The Color of Food.”
Applied Research Center. February 2011. www.arc.org/foodjustice
4.    “The Self-Sufficiency Standard.” Center for Women’s Welfare.
www.selfsufficiencystandard.org
5.    2008 Federal Poverty Guidelines.  U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/08poverty.shtml
6.    “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture.” An Oxfam America Report. March 2004.
www.oxfamamerica.org/files/like-machines-in-the-fields.pdf
7.    Ibid.
8.    Workplace Injuries and Illnesses—2008. Bureau of Labor Statistics. News Release: October 29, 2009. www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ osh_10292009.pdf
9.    Liu, Yvonne Yen. “America’s Food Sweatshops.” Colorlines. February 17, 2011. http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/02/americas_food_sweatshops_and_the_workers_of_color_who_feed_us.html
10.    Gross, Daniel. “Death in a New York Food Sweatshop.” Counterpunch.
February 2, 2011. www.counterpunch.org/gross02032011.html
11.    “Expanding the Right to Organize to Win Human Rights at Work.” Unity for  Dignity: Excluded Workers Report. December 2010.
www.excludedworkerscongress.org/report
12.    “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture.” An Oxfam America Report. March 2004.
13.    Ibid.
14.    Food Chain Workers Alliance. http://foodchainworkers.org/?page_id=41
15.    Food Chain Workers Alliance. March 2011 Workers Exchange.

http://foodchainworkers.org/?page_id=955

Yvonne Yen Liu is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center (ARC) and a frequent contributor to ARC’s Colorlines.com.