In workfare organizing
Glenn, David
AFEW YEARS ago, it was revealed that the Southern Baptist Convention had compiled elaborate demographic maps of the United States. The maps displayed painstakingly calculated estimates of the...
...I know people who sit around all day doing nothing," said one woman...
...everyone would spend their evenings reading and debating modernist fiction...
...it's the land of jury duty and the Department of Motor Vehicles...
...I'm sure that if it had occurred to me to create a statistical map of the saved and the damned in each Lexington neighborhood, I would have slaved over it for weeks...
...instead my mind kept wandering to where does Bertha get her energy...
...No more temptations to squander the day reading the New York Observer...
...Maybe next time, I thought...
...I thought for a moment about the earnest 112 DISSENT / Winter 1998 things I'd say to them about the project— about how a city program that employs forty thousand people at subminimum wage hurts all workers' interests, and so on...
...But I didn't take satisfaction (at least not consciously) at the thought of my neighbors consumed by hellfire...
...Some of these yearnings were about my own life, and the strength and discipline I could attain as an ACORN soldier...
...Randy Carlson and his cousin would stop tripping and kicking me at recess...
...Two of the organizers on Willoughby Street complained to me that District Council 37 is still half-hearted about the effort—partly, it's said, for fear of angering Giuliani...
...The virtue of good political organizers is that they have the strength to embrace these kinds of ambivalence, complexity, and irony— to get up every day prepared to be mildly disappointed by coalition partners, elected officials, humanity at large...
...And when I thought I was being pretty aggressive about accosting passersby, Bertha showed me how to walk into the check-cashing office and work the people waiting in line...
...I pictured everyone in town spontaneously gathering on Main Street carrying Bibles and flowers...
...I spend weekends poring over Critical Review and diagramming arguments among Hayekians, communitarians, and democratic socialists...
...I've always feigned disapproval when I've heard these stories, but that kind of life—it won't surprise you to learn— holds a secret appeal...
...so many fewer decisions to make...
...She went through the drill with us: how to hold our clipboards, how to approach people, how to reassure them that their supervisors won't find out that they've signed...
...Five years later, in Ohio, I was part of a high school students' anti-apartheid coalition...
...THE EVERYDAY frustrations of the WEP workers campaign are pretty serious...
...by the week's end, over half the WEP workers in the city had voted in the election, and the overwhelming majority of them checked "yes...
...The environment of Willoughby Street didn't sharpen my fighting spirit: downtown Brooklyn is, on the surface, a living vindication of Jack Kemp's worldview...
...And what about the mountains outside of town...
...I would no longer be too lazy to finish my math homework...
...But when I saw them again they were at a pay phone making an uncivil call ("You tell her this is fucking Patrick, all right...
...After that day, my friend Martin would stop using swear words...
...The city's Work Experience Program (WEP) now requires more than forty thousand welfare recipients, many of them parents of small children, to work for their benefits by performing menial tasks in city hospitals and parks...
...At the corner of Fulton and Jay Streets I passed a team of Jehovah's Witnesses handing out leaflets about the end of the world...
...The world would be ethically and aesthetically cleansed...
...The survivors of this apocalypse, I imagined, would never dream of shirking their obligations to the dispossessed, or of watching Monday Night Football...
...As it happened, it didn't matter very much whether I concentrated on my clipboard-holding technique...
...across the street from them was a Nation of Islam table...
...And they hardly speak with one mind and voice against welfare reform...
...But the non-statist sector of downtown is astoundingly vibrant: there isn't a vacant storefront to be seen, and there are hundreds of sidewalk vendors, almost all of them immigrants from West Africa, the West Indies, or South Asia...
...And they were all angry...
...On every block is at least one forbidding gray courthouse or social service agency...
...We need child care and we need the minimum wage...
...But I wasn't paying very close attention to these lessons...
...I can recite Isaiah Berlin's anti-utopian arguments about the incompatibility of human goods...
...ACORN is famous on the left, and often disparaged, for its extreme work ethic: organizers working twenty hours a day for tiny salaries, knocking on doors in poor neighborhoods late into the evening...
...I'm not sure why this shtick seems funny—because it mocks radical jargon...
...For she wasn't just instructing the two of us: she was running back and forth across three blocks of Willoughby, setting up six different election sites and instructing ten different volunteers...
...DAVID GLENN is associate editor of Dissent...
...And even today, I have a running joke with certain friends...
...When I was ten years old and actively attending two Presbyterian churches, I would wander the streets of Lexington, Virginia, studying the progress of the Christian project...
...several WEP workers volunteered to me that some people deserve to be forced into jobs programs...
...But walking through downtown Brooklyn that morning I wondered if my own political energies didn't draw on— and in some sense require—the opposite quality: a perfectionist rage and impatience...
...And the dream of becoming a rock-ribbed twenty-hour-a-day community organizer is (at least in my case) a yearning to escape political complexity and everyday frustration...
...this may ultimately require a lawsuit, but the shortterm hope is that the city council can be pressured into overruling Giuliani...
...The ballots asked workfare workers whether they would like to join a union, and specifically whether they would like to join a union— specifically a District Council 37/ACORN bargaining unit...
...And so, when I could have been honing a few mundane but crucial political skills, I spent most of the morning in a cloud, having fantasies about becoming an ACORN organizer...
...that every bond trader in the city would fight for a steeply progressive income tax...
...And then there were the two guys in Teamsters jackets (with "Hoffa '96" and American flag patches) who delivered a soda machine to the building where I was assigned...
...As I walked down Montague Street I reviewed the morning's millenarian daydreams...
...The symbolic October election was conducted by a committee chaired by former mayor David Dinkins and former Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union president Jack Sheinkman...
...My political commitments are democratic and reformist, but I'm not sure whether I'd take these commitments seriously if I didn't have, somewhere buried inside me, a little tyrant, waving around maps of the saved and the damned...
...This was the easiest political organizing I'd ever done...
...DISSENT / Winter 1998 113...
...When Kate and I dithered for a moment in posting a "JOBS WITH JUSTICE/WEP WORKERS DISSENT / Winter 1998 111 VOTE HERE" sign, Bertha reached in with a roll of masking tape and had the thing up in about six seconds...
...I'd quarrel about rhetoric and tactics with the Trotskyist and Maoist kids...
...New York's labor movement, my grandiose fantasies to the contrary, has committed few resources to it so far...
...because it mocks our weakness...
...But at demonstrations, or even just driving home through the Cleveland ghetto on gray Saturday afternoons, I'd have hopeful visions of insurrection that must have been at least as romantic and bloody as any of my friends...
...When the morning ended we turned in our clipboards and headed for our day jobs—Kate in one direction and I in another...
...Many of the WEP workers in the area were well aware of the elections, because of ACORN's advance telephone and door-to-door canvassing...
...And a fellow committee member from Democratic Socialists of America had just been arrested by the FBI and charged with spying for the East German police state from 1973 until its demise...
...They were mighty foolish, for reasons that we can all recite: A politics that expects citizens magically to become virtuous is no politics at all...
...But I also brought these callow hopes to bear on the movement in toto...
...It would be like joining the Marines, I thought, or becoming a Jesuit...
...The goal is to force the city to recognize WEP workers' bargaining rights...
...Cleveland would 110 DISSENT / Winter 1998 be a multiracial Stockholm...
...Further west, in the yuppie precincts of Brooklyn Heights, there were no more zealots to be seen—only comfortable Benthamites who looked like they spend a lot of time at their health clubs...
...At meetings of this group I was the sober, New Republic-reading goody-goody...
...And Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insists that they don't count as employees under federal and state law, and therefore have no right to bargain collectively over wages and working conditions...
...In real life, my politics are—at least I hope—not so fatuous...
...When the conversation turns to the villainy of, say, Nike or McDonald's, one of us will smile knowingly and say, "Of course, someday McDonald's will be a socialist-feminist collective...
...The maps displayed painstakingly calculated estimates of the number of citizens in each state who had been saved (46.1 percent in Alabama, for example) and also the number who would burn eternally in a lake of fire...
...The campaign to reform WEP has been led by an uneasy coalition of New York's public employees union, District Council 37, and the radical neighborhood organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now...
...This was in the middle of the early wave of Teamstersscandal revelations...
...Most of the WEP workers I talked to, for all their eagerness to sign, seemed deeply skeptical of the campaign's prospects...
...Every one of the city's physical features—the rotting steel mills, the weedgrown lots on the East Side, the strip malls on Lorain Avenue—promised social cataclysm...
...At least ten times I heard some variation of "We're never gonna win a damn thing as long as Giuliani is in there...
...Its hard to imagine a more ludicrous press release, or a more offensive one— and yet something about the Baptists' exercise struck a chord in me...
...Kate and I reported to work at 7:30 on a cold Monday morning...
...We were met at our station by Bertha Lewis, the director of New York City ACORN...
...They scoped out my WELFARE WORKERS VOTE HERE sign with unmistakable hostility...
...On this particular Monday morning, I wasn't feeling too cheerful about the project of the left...
...THIS PAST October, my friend Kate and I volunteered to help conduct a symbolic election among workfare participants in New York City...
...And yet my gut is still drawn toward a puerile eschatology: I want history to have a direction, and I want human society to change thoroughly and magically...
...But the thing about this joke is: in a certain corner of my mind, I actually believe it...
...Several women explained to me that the WEP program has yanked them out of continuing-education and high-school-equivalency programs, and forced them into menial jobs that don't teach any particular skills...
...These women's stories were urgent and moving...
...Did the decrepit church up by the middle school save any souls...
...But here, too, I wasn't really paying full attention...
...The older boys smoking in the 76 station lot: had they committed more sins today than yesterday, or fewer...
...Needless to say, this is not the great public works program that liberals have dreamed of: WEP workers "earn," in effect, far less than the minimum wage...
...My religious belief didn't survive the sixth grade, but certain habits of mind have lingered...
...Our voting station was outside a check-cashing store on Willoughby Street in downtown Brooklyn...
...it was just becoming clear that the affair might paralyze the AFL-CIO's entire new progressive leadership...
...she harvested fifteen signatures in the time in took me to do my usual rap...
...Of course God intended their beauty to impart some kind of ethical message—but what...
...But people who are trying to improve themselves need better respect...
...I took about 120 signatures that morning...
...Instead of focusing on the WEP workers' concrete sufferings and their shortterm campaign to improve their situation, I kept having flashes of my usual perfectionist yearnings...
...that every real-estate lawyer would volunteer twenty hours a week in the public school system...
...On the contrary: my walks around town were filled with optimistic daydreams of mass conversions...
...She's gonna talk to me now...
...I can tell you about Richard Rorty's case against progressivism and teleological thought...
...As in my Lexington religious life, I kept daydreaming that the ACORN campaign would be miraculously successful: that New York trade unions would suddenly recover their 1930s role as radical social movements...
...During the course of the day I heard at least two dozen stories about how—since the city has failed to fund new child-card programs for the children of WEP workers— women have had to foist their children on aunts, grandmothers, boyfriends...
Vol. 45 • January 1998 • No. 1
