I'm a bit confused about something from my friends on the left. Yes, once again I am having to take stock of the nature of this so-called friendship for what me and mine are getting out of it. It's not just my anarchism but also just plain, good sense that any relationship be constantly assessed and re-assessed for its ... qualities. Yes, I almost wrote "utility" instead of qualities, but this might have been misconstrued ideologically by these same friends I'm questioning.
A study by the Restaurant Opportunites Center United reveals that more than one-third of the fast-food workers in the city of Oakland, CA, cannot afford food because of the poverty wages they must subsist on. Food insecurity is the polite way of saying that people are going hungry, they may be starving, they are certainly snowballing a host of health issues for which the state will simply let them die.
So the results of this study, though not surprising, should be an urgent concern. I just don't understand why the left is concerned.
Just the other day, I heard Russell Brand, whom I have more in common with ideologically and would never kick out of my bed, utter the line that many use as a justification for immigration [read: immigration from Latin America]. Brand noted without any irony that without allowing these men and women to cross the border, our food costs would escalate.
Brand is not the only person making this argument. I think the argument is at least as old as I am because I have heard it all my life
And it is a sorry argument that says something to me about those on the left willing to use it.
Because if you look at the argument that without immigration [from Latin America! They do not expect Germans to come here and do agricultural work] our food costs will go up, what it is saying is we need these immigrants [from Latin America] to work at below-subsistence wages and without any labor or health protections. This is what the argument is saying.
So it should strike us radicals a bit odd that fast-food workers wages are a concern because they cannot live on them, but the wages of immigrant labor is not a concern because we need cheap food..
It should also strike us that when we speak about immigration from Latin America we are talking about indigenous people who were already at the economic bottoms of these Euro finance-centered economies, like the Mexican economy, which is run and headed by wealthy white Mexicans, while thankfully many of the indigenous are not trying to assimilate into this culture but have rebelled in Chiapas as an example to us all.
I'll say the same thing about agriculture that I've already said about the fast-food or any industry: if a business cannot exist without giving a living wage to its workers that business has no right to exist, period. To say otherwise is to accept the argument of the antebellum slave owner, who was probably correct that he could not be competitive in the marketplace - particularly selling textiles to Great Britain at low cost - if he had to pay wages to his plantation workers [another immigrated workforce].
Granted, private ownership of businesses is antithetical to community interests. Read that again. The labor fight of our times should be no different than the labor fight of a hundred years ago: that workers collectively own and self-manage the factories they work in. This should be the standard.
But the system we have is the system we have for today. So the bar should be reasonably placed that if you must pay your workers wages on which they cannot live and must beg, plea, borrow, or steal to make ends meet your business license should be nullified and you, the business owner, sentenced to long hours of community service.
So already, with the plantation example in mind it's clear I am calling less these friendships but more an entire economic system into question. It is fundamentally no different than the antebellum South in its labor relations. And it is indistinguishable from a system that seems on the one hand to create vast wealth [for the plantation owners] and fathomless poverty. This system cannot be improved with a few reforms or some regulations, any more than forcing farm owners to provide bathrooms and water to poorly paid farm workers is an improvement. It is not. Just so, if poorly paid, hungry fast-food workers is intolerable then so too is our reliance on cheap food from cheap farm workers [from Latin America]. This should spark a revolution in how we feed ourselves, how we organize our lives, our towns, our cities, our strip malls: if we are to have any of these things at all.
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