I work as a personal concierge at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. The title that I hold—the first of its kind in the hotel industry and one that required special training—does not fully explain my job responsibilities.

Unlike a typical concierge, I perform a wide range of tasks, including check-ins and check-outs but not limited to accounting, making special reservations and suggesting points of interest, helping guests with luggage, assisting with package and food deliveries, setting up room decor to celebrate special occasions, answering phones, and fulfilling all kinds of guest requests. Despite the different duties and training of the job, I was still compensated as a regular front desk agent.

The pandemic burdened me with additional duties as the hotel was severely understaffed and extremely busy. The personal concierge team I joined in 2022 had once consisted of 29 members but due to steady turnover, by the time I got the job, there were only six, including me. My colleagues were disappointed and worn out. I knew something needed to change. But what? My personal answer to that question is a long one.

I was raised in Forest Hills, New York by ambitious parents from Mexico City who were studying to become physicians. I had to take on the responsibility of caring for my two younger siblings while my parents were busy with study, work, and dealing with our difficult financial situation. That struggle taught me invaluable lessons about the value of education, of striving for excellence, and of never accepting injustices. My parents taught me to speak up and advocate for the most vulnerable, who tend to be preyed on by the corrupt.

Inspired by my parents, I decided to seek our union’s help in making my job and the jobs of my colleagues more sustainable. I must confess that when I first discovered that the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills was a union property, I thought, wrongly, that the union, Unite Here Local 11, controlled workers and our jobs. But then I studied the union’s rules and our contract and met with union leaders, and soon realized that we workers were the union. We could engage with the union and one another to bring positive changes to our workplace.

Our union contract with the hotel expired on June 30, 2023. With negotiations failing and management handling meetings with bad faith, it was apparent that a strike was inevitable not just in our hotel but in hotels all over the city.

Unity was going to be key to our success. So while the hotel was providing conflicting misinformation and trying to convince us to resign our union memberships, I started a group chat for all Waldorf Astoria team members and union reps. The chat was crucial in allowing us to receive news and updates in real-time, and post images and videos. This information-sharing inspired much of our staff to become fired up and join the citywide union actions that became the largest hotel strike in modern U.S. history. From the beginning, we also had broad support among hotel workers and the public because our demands were based on “five pillars” of change that most people could agree on: a living wage increase, healthcare, humane staffing levels, pension increases, and union growth.

Going on my first strike was scary, empowering, sad, and beautiful. It was a shocking and jarring experience at first—we hadn’t planned to escalate things to this level, which meant risking retaliation. However, as time went on, I began to feel truly empowered and determined to win the fight for justice. The strike made me aware of the realities of my fellow Californians who work in hotels. Thousands of them suffer from homelessness, evictions, serious and expensive health issues, and other precarious financial circumstances.

Throughout the summer and into the fall, hundreds of hotel workers in Los Angeles went on strike in different locations at random times and for a random number of days. We went on strike twice at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, for a total of seven days. Our actions took place outside the hotel and in the lobby; it was impossible for guests to avoid us.

Workers striking at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills. Courtesy of author.

We garnered an incredible amount of support from the public, including hotel regulars, clergy members, UPS workers, culinary workers, and people driving by and honking for us. Support also came from political and civil rights leaders—among them Tom Morello, former West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne, Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler, State Senator Maria Elena Durazo (our former union leader), and most recently President Joe Biden in Nevada.

We also had to contend with extreme temperatures on the picket lines as well as verbal abuse from some angry patrons and local residents. Hotel managers installed hedges, fencing, and even cages to keep us further from the premises, and hired new security workers to intimidate us in the name of “safety.” Using an app called Instawork, they hired unqualified staff to replace us. At one point they deactivated our digital keyed access. We were lucky; other hotels were more punitive and resorted to violence.

Solidarity was clearly the path to victory. It was disappointing to see a few colleagues at hotels turn their backs on us, out of fear. It was also frustrating to ask for support from major public figures—like U.S. Representative Katie Porter, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Taylor Swift, who toured L.A. during the strike—and not get it.

But most importantly, the overwhelming majority of the union held, in no small part because of the women who represented a majority of the union in our ranks and our leadership. They never took “no” for an answer, and they lifted the rest of us up when we got tired or discouraged. And we kept achieving victories as hotels and the union began reaching agreements in the early fall.

Finally, in the early afternoon on Friday, December 8, I received a message from the director of Unite Here Local 11, Lorena Lopez, requesting a phone call with all the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills union leaders. We were about to begin our third strike at the Waldorf Astoria in advance of the Golden Globes Award nomination announcements at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on December 11. But when I got to the meeting, the feeling was of something bigger and more hopeful. I heard our director declare over speaker phone, “I have some important news to share with you. I want to let you know that I am so proud of you. You worked so hard, and your efforts paid off! Congratulations! The Waldorf has agreed to our five pillars. Congratulations, you won!”

We used our group chat to request every union member meet us at the famous Waldorf Ballroom. Once gathered, I was honored to deliver the good news to everyone as I held back tears of joy: “Thank you guys for being here. As you know, I’m Alaink, and we have been fighting to win a fair contract. We were already planning to go on strike Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. However, new developments have happened, and I am very happy to announce that we have WON!”

Suddenly, the entire ballroom was filled with cheers and applause and faces of relief, bringing many to tears. The strike is over at our hotel, but I feel profoundly changed and renewed. Striking was hard work. It brought unbearable stress and forced me to neglect the rest of my life—including my incredibly supportive husband. But the payoff was worth it.

We won a historic contract of a lifetime that will transform the entire hotel industry and uplift hard-working brown and Black men and women and other marginalized people who will finally get a chance to join the middle class. Housekeeping team members, cooks, and other non-tipped workers will receive wage hikes of $10 an hour over the term of the contract—a 40–50% increase in pay, half of which will come this year. Housekeeping workers at most hotels will earn $35 an hour by July 2027, and top cooks will earn $41 an hour. Tipped workers will see improvements like double-time pay for holidays, vacation, sick days, and increased shares of service charges. Automatic 20% gratuities at full-service restaurants will be 100% shared by staff. Our contract maintains health insurance in which workers pay no more than $20 per month for full family coverage.

We have bigger plans, too, including a new deal for the Olympics that includes family-sustaining jobs and affordable housing. I hope our success will embolden hotel workers around the country—and anyone who is facing injustices in the workplace. Remember to be courageous, to organize, to think big, and to lead with love, dignity, and conviction. The path to victory is only sure to those who do not give up, give in, or stay silent.

The post How We Won a Historic Contract for Hotel Workers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the name of beer sales and taco Tuesday nights, Cinco de Mayo has morphed from a symbol of anti-imperialist struggle into a lucrative marketing opportunity for corporate America. Cinco de Mayo’s fight night—a stage for high-profile fights and staggering paydays, with renowned headliners like Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr., generating millions in revenue—has, too, become a cash grab for the boxing industry.

This Cinco de Mayo weekend, Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, this era’s top earner, is scheduled to take on Jaime Munguía and defend his super middleweight world titles. Canelo, who is heavily favored to win, will earn a guaranteed purse of an estimated $35 million. Munguía will come away with a pretty payday, too.

But another class of boxers goes unnoticed: opponents, the unsung heroes of the boxing world whose job it is to battle it out to prop up superstar fighters.

Boxing employs opponents to build up the winning records of the fighters known as prospects, who sit below contenders and world champions within the hierarchy of the sport. The industry considers prospects, who have promising futures, investments to protect. Prospects often enjoy support from major promoters, including safeguards such as careful placement in matches meant to assure their success.

Opponents, in contrast, are used as fodder, expected to lose while receiving very little pay—all to facilitate the ascent of the very tiny sliver of fighters who hit it big. There are 24,612 male and 2,192 female registered professional boxers worldwide. With 17 weight classes, each with four world championship titles, there are only 136 world championship slots. Less than 1% of males and only about 3% of females reach these lofty heights.

People toil for little pay with success unlikely in many pursuits: acting, music, electoral politics. But the sting is especially harsh for boxers, who face constant physical peril in a business uniquely primed to exploit. In this winner-take-all industry, fighters lose through literal defeats in the ring and through material setbacks in the economy. As one boxer described it to me, opponents are workhorses sent to the slaughterhouse.

Weigh-in for a 2023 Osaka event, at the offices of the Japan Boxing Commission. Courtesy of author.

California usually regulates the most boxing matches of any U.S. state and has made strides to protect fighters, but pay disparity for opponents persists. In a forthcoming report from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, Abel Valenzuela Jr., José Hernández, and I analyzed compensation data from the California State Athletic Commission.

In 2021, over half of the 526 regulated boxing matches in California were four- and six-rounders, the prospect-developing bouts in which opponents are most likely to fight. The California State Athletic Commission requires a minimum compensation of $100 per round for professional boxers, who might train four to eight weeks for a bout. A minimum wage worker in California, earning $16 per hour, grosses around $2,773 for a month of work. But in 2021, the median compensation for a four-round fight was just $1,500.

Opponents face further precarity due to their classification as independent contractors, which makes them ineligible for work benefits, and the protections of federal, state, and local labor standards. What’s more, fighters are expected to pay their managers between a tenth and a third of their gross earnings, and their trainers a tenth as well. A four- to eight-week training camp can cost fighters anywhere from $200 to $2,000. Some opponents actually lose money on a fight.

Though they are expected to lose, boxing opponents have their reasons for fighting. Some are driven by a passion and love for the sport, and their sense of belonging within the boxing community. For others, being a boxer brings them status, visibility, and recognition. Opponents supplement their income with other jobs. One boxer told me it’s better to be a McDonald’s worker and be a boxer than to just work at McDonald’s. The status of being a prizefighter, regardless of their success in the ring, affords opponents with dignity, pride, and purpose.

In 2022, I interviewed Derrick*, an opponent from northern California with a winning percentage of 19%, in 26 fights. Derrick recounted fighting three times in a single year, earning just under $5,000. In the third of those bouts, he fought with an injured eye, resulting in a detached retina that sidelined him for over a year.

Despite the limitations of his peripheral vision after eye surgery, Derrick continues to fight. Knowing that he’s expected to lose only fuels his determination to fight harder, and aim for unexpected victories. “I’m not just going to stand there and just get hit,” he told me. “I’m someone who will go out there and give it to you. Someone who will go out there and fight you and not just take an easy loss.” This mindset embodies resilience and a refusal to be defeated easily.

The pursuit of dignity, pride, and purpose is inspirational. But it should not get in the way of recognizing the exploitation that persists in the brutal world of boxing.

This weekend’s cash cow, Canelo, became a world champion by beating underpaid opponents in his early career—foes carefully chosen because they were fighters he could easily beat, and thus build up his experience and record. In his first eight fights, Canelo won seven matches and tied another; collectively, the eight fighters he faced had a losing record of nine wins, 16 losses, and one draw. (Miguel Vazquez, whom Canelo defeated twice, is the exception; he eventually became a world champion.) Canelo’s career was built on their labor.

I don’t single out Canelo to place blame, but rather to illuminate systemic issues within boxing. Most boxing fans are content with knowing only a handful of celebrity boxers like Canelo, Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, and Ryan Garcia. But it takes tens of thousands of underpaid fighters to maintain the ecosystem that allows the stars to thrive, and the rest of us to enjoy mega-fight spectacles. As consumers of the sport, we must remember them on big match weekends and work to improve their working conditions.  

The post The Unsung Heroes of the Boxing World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the U.S., there is a chasm between what the labor laws say and what workers experience as their everyday realities. That’s because employment here is based on private contractual law, or agreements between two parties—and the deeply misguided assumption that those two parties have equal bargaining power.

We need to bridge that chasm. Doing so will require stronger unions; more aggressive legislation by Congress; more resources for, and enforcement by, local and federal agencies; and changes in our courts, which have been hostile to labor enforcement and unions.

Until all that happens, the best model we have for enforcing labor laws is in California.

You could call it the California Model of Co-Enforcement. Or you might call it the San Francisco Model, because that’s where it started. Whatever you call it, the idea is this: Since governments lack the capacity to enforce the laws by themselves, they must work in tandem with entities that have long histories of efforts to empower workers, like S.F.’s Chinese Progressive Association and Filipino Community Center.

Through co-enforcement, government agencies enable the worker centers to pursue the pay, rights, and fair treatment workers are entitled to under the law, but that they don’t always get in employer-friendly legal systems.

The co-enforcement model did not appear overnight. It took years of workers organizing, building, and winning to create it. Co-enforcement supplemented the state’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), passed in 2003, that “gives workers a fighting chance in court” to confront their employers’ wrongdoing, according to a UCLA Labor Center report.

Now, the model is threatened. Business groups have bankrolled a ballot initiative that would all but eliminate workers’ rights under PAGA. If the initiative were to pass, it would deaden the state labor agency’s ability to contract with non-governmental entities or attorneys to enforce worker protections against violating employers. And that would not only threaten the progress workers have made under PAGA—it would threaten the co-enforcement model itself.

The story of the California Model starts at the turn of the 21st century, with the closure of San Francisco garment factories. Community organizations that had focused on organizing these factories, especially the Chinese Progressive Association, began reaching out to workers in other low-wage job sectors. Realizing the common struggles across trades, the city’s worker centers banded together and fomented a movement that led San Francisco voters to approve a local minimum wage law in 2003.

The minimum wage catalyzed San Francisco’s development into the site of the broadest range of worker protection laws of any municipality in the United States. Among the city’s worker mandates are paid sick days, a health care coverage mandate, protections for formerly incarcerated workers, secure scheduling, paid parental leave, pay equity, and time and space for lactation.

To enforce these new laws, San Francisco extended investigative and enforcement powers to its Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, known as OLSE. But even with a staff that had grown to two dozen, OLSE couldn’t investigate and enforce every violation of these labor standards. So, in 2006, the city established its novel model of co-enforcement, a series of formal collaborations with community partners that had a history of supporting workers, such as the Chinese Progressive Association.

The idea behind co-enforcement was simple. Community partners already served as important anchors for marginalized workers. Now, they could build on that past work and train those workers to identify, report, and fight back against wage theft and other violations. OLSE had a particular interest in empowering low-wage, immigrant, and limited-English-proficiency workers to target their efforts in communities where wage theft is most likely to occur.

As OLSE created and boosted funding for these contracts with community partners, the initiative became known as the “community collaborative.” I was once involved in overseeing these contracts and the network of partnerships. The partners included the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Dolores Street Community Services (which had a long history of assisting refugees, homeless people, AIDS patients and LGBT people), Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, Young Workers United, La Raza Centro Legal (a half-century old advocate for the Bay Area’s Latinos), and the Filipino Community Center, which had been founded in 2004 to support Filipino airport screeners who had been laid off.

One of the victories that emerged from San Francisco’s co-enforcement model was a $4.25 million settlement with the popular dim sum restaurant Yank Sing, which was forcing workers to work 10-plus hour days without breaks, stealing tips from workers, and belittling an otherwise vulnerable workforce almost every day. With help from the Chinese Progressive Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and UNITE HERE Local 2, which assisted with strategic research, the workers not only won unpaid wages but also achieved a workplace transformation for the restaurant’s nearly 300 employees.

The changes included meal and rest breaks, paid sick days, wages higher than the local minimum (including a 5% raise for non-tipped workers), non-mandated holiday pay and vacation pay, full health coverage with no deductibles, and the right to take up to four weeks of approved time off without risking their jobs—something many workers needed in order to visit families in China. The settlement even included an apology.

Since then, San Francisco’s co-enforcement approach has spawned imitators. Beginning in 2013, several other cities (among them New York City, Seattle, Oakland, San Jose, and Emeryville) developed offices similar to OLSE, and seeded co-enforcement partnerships with local community organizations.

In 2016, the state got in on the co-enforcement action. The California Labor Commissioner’s Office—then led by the pioneering labor lawyer Julie Su, who is today the acting U.S. labor secretary—formed the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership. Rather than wait for the long and often futile process of filing complaints, and conducting hearings and trying to collect judgments for unpaid wages, the state began using co-enforcement to target wage theft in six low-wage industries: agriculture, car washes, construction, janitorial, residential home care, and restaurants.

The state partnered with the National Employment Law Project and 14 workers’ rights and legal advocacy organizations. Among the initiative’s most publicized successes were enforcement actions for harsh treatment and illegally low pay at the Los Angeles-area car washes.

This new model of workers’ rights enforcement has made California a labor enforcement laboratory, and at the right time. As other major California cities have followed San Francisco’s lead—passing minimum wage laws and other worker protections and supporting enforcement—they have empowered workers, influenced industry practices, and found ways to build a more sustainable enforcement system throughout the state.

Co-enforcement is necessary because of weak federal labor laws, and dangerously low rates of unionization. (One study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that less than 2% of the nearly $50 billion in wages stolen annually is ever recovered by workers.) The co-enforcement models have inspired other vehicles for worker empowerment.

When the pandemic hit, it was the S.F. co-enforcement model that inspired the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA) to partner with 61 community organizations throughout the state and create the COVID-19 Workplace Outreach Project (CWOP). This government-community partnership deployed “trusted messengers” to those frontline workers, to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of all citizens. Similarly, the Domestic Worker Rights Education and Outreach Program (DWEOP) ensures that housekeepers and nannies—workers who unfortunately do not enjoy the right to unionize—nevertheless can be educated about and trained in their labor rights and their employers’ responsibilities.

The co-enforcement model has some challenges. Building relationships between workers and the officials of government agencies—both of whom are busy working, and not in the same places—can be hard. Government procedures that require confidentiality can be difficult to square with the community’s desire for transparency. But the deeper the co-enforcement model has taken root, the better the outcomes that have emerged—for business, consumers, the agency, and for workers themselves.

There have been many promising lessons. One is that such collaborations render government officials more knowledgeable about labor violations, and sophisticated in their approach to enforcement. The second is that the state agency can only fulfill its mission with the support of community partners (which is why the November 2024 ballot initiative to gut the Private Attorneys General Act is such a threat). The most important aspect of a co-enforcement model is that it enables an organized and informed workforce to demand and attain compliance with the labor standards to which they are entitled under law.

Co-enforcement provides direct connection, funding, and legitimacy that can be game-changing for empowering workers. It also provides enforcement agencies with a trove of new education and connections to the underground economy. Co-enforcement is a win-win-win for workers, for community organizations, and for government agencies seeking effective and efficient ways to enforce laws in the low-wage sectors.

We need this California model of win-win-win to go national.

The post How San Francisco Became a Labor Enforcement Laboratory appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was October 5, 1945. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a union representing craft laborers in Los Angeles, including painters, carpenters, set designers, cartoonists, and others, was seven months into a major strike that was causing Hollywood studio moguls to panic. Although major studios, including Columbia, RKO, and Universal, had over 100 unreleased films in the can, ready to be released, the CSU’s strike actions, as well as movie theater boycotts, were an effective blow against the post-war studio system.

Now, the strikers gathered at the Warner Bros. employee entrance to protest.

The violent standoff that followed, in which strikebreakers, armed with chains, hammers, pipes, and other weapons, descended upon the workers, with county police forces closely behind, would become known in Hollywood as “Black Friday.”

With moguls, Los Angeles Police, private police forces, and organized crime on one side and striking trade unionists on the other, the episode fanned the flames of anti-communism in Hollywood, and led directly to the union’s downfall the following year. In the years to come, the strike would be used as a cudgel against progressive trade unionism inside and outside of the film industry, leading to the blunting of it in Hollywood—and in the United States, more generally.

The strike of 1945 started after the CSU became embroiled in a dispute with a rival union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The conflict centered on 77 set decorators who had broken away from IATSE, and established their own group, the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators, in 1937. The CSU initially represented these breakaway set decorators during their independent contract negotiations with some studios. Eventually, IATSE began to dispute CSU’s jurisdiction, and after studio producers sided with IATSE—contradicting an arbiter appointed by the War Labor Board—the CSU went on strike.

Competing interests in Hollywood, from studio moguls like Cecil B. DeMille, to mobsters like John Roselli, saw the unions’ dispute as a threat. It wasn’t just about disrupting the flow of capital in and out of the film industry. They also understood that cinema served—and still serves—a vital role in shaping and massaging mass consciousness. Which is why, for moguls and organized crime organizations alike, combating the perceived infiltration of Moscow-backed Reds in Hollywood was as important as any financial concern.

Studio moguls widely alleged the strike of 1945 to be Communist-led—though the Communist Party was initially opposed to the strike. CSU president Herbert Sorrell personally faced accusations by Walt Disney, IATSE leadership, and others of being a Communist dupe. (Though when he was dragged before the California Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities a year later, there was scant evidence linking him to the Communist Party—his militant trade unionism was homegrown.)

Regardless of the facts, the anti-communist hysteria of studio moguls and state and federal investigators ultimately spelled the downfall of the CSU. The congressional investigations into the alleged infiltration of communism in Hollywood and trade unions like those in which Sorrell was interrogated, resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which sought to purge not only communists, but also class-conscious workers, from union leadership roles. The law severely limited the power of unions: It required union leadership to sign non-communist affidavits and outlawed jurisdictional strikes like the one enacted by the CSU.

Following on the heels of Taft-Hartley came the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which culminated in the well-known Hollywood blacklist and the eventual jailing of the “Hollywood Ten,” film industry members who refused to testify. The notorious Smith Act trials between 1949 and 1958 saw the jailing and deportation of Communist leadership, including Benjamin Davis Jr. and Claudia Jones, across the United States. The rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy saw the persecution of the gay and lesbian community under the Lavender Scare as well as the continued attack on Black radicalism. From the ashes of the destruction of the CSU also came the ascendency of former B-movie actor Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan, who had formerly served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, would go on to administer a mighty blow against unions. In 1981, as U.S. president, he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, locking them out of federal employment for life, employing strikebreaking tactics he may have rehearsed during his anti-communist tenure in Hollywood. The knock-on effects from the Red Scare in Hollywood would resonate for decades to come, setting back progressive trade unionism in the United States for generations of workers.

Today, we are witnessing a similar parallel: In tandem with the labor actions in Hollywood and elsewhere across the country, there is a new Red Scare heralding a burgeoning neo-fascism in the United States. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” campaign, the banning of critical race theory in Florida, Arkansas, and elsewhere, the persecution of the African People’s Socialist Party, Rick Scott’s “travel ban” for socialists traveling to Florida, bipartisan hysteria over the economic rise of China and the BRICS nations, as well as antisemitic tropes like the threat of “cultural Marxism” all point in this direction.

In Hollywood, specifically, we can look to right-wing hysteria over so-called “woke” films such as Barbie and other “culture war” trends perpetrated by pundits who flirt with, if not outright endorse, anti-Blackness, anti-trans ideology, and antisemitism—often in the same breath. The perceived threat of “wokeism” and “identity politics” bear a striking resemblance to the Red Scare tactics of the 1940s and 1950s, insofar as they function as coded attempts to discredit individuals and collectives alike by coding progressive politics as adjacent with Marxism or communism—only today, instead of Moscow, Beijing has become the primary boogeyman.

But this time, the tables may be turning. When Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher gave a rip-roaring speech dripping with the authority of class struggle this summer, nobody accused her of being a communist for speaking out against labor conditions. Likewise, Bryan Cranston, who portrayed Trumbo in a biopic of the same name, wasn’t labeled a “Communist dupe” when he delivered a fiery, pro-union speech in July.

And in a year of unprecedented labor actions throughout the nation, the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) months-long strike, which secured better contracts for writers in a radical victory for labor last month, and the tentative agreement the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) just reached after 118 days on the picket lines, have highlighted the efforts of the working-class members of the film industry.

The efforts go far beyond the entertainment studios, too. In August, thousands of Los Angeles city workers engaged in a one-day strike to put pressure on Mayor Karen Bass. In recent months there have also been a hotel workers strike and job actions by Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. That’s why to talk about those struggling against the citadel of capital, disproportionately cited in Southern California, it’s important to understand that what is happening in Hollywood is part of a broader labor movement.

That’s why, though some onlookers, even on the political left, have not taken the Hollywood strikes seriously, to be dismissive of the gravity of the labor movement in Hollywood is to commit a fundamental political blunder. Tinseltown has a rich, though too often unacknowledged, history of class struggle that is intimately connected with the kickoff of Red Scare politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The CSU strike provides a sober reminder of how the violent proliferation of Red Scare hysteria and anti-labor sentiment in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century were connected, and of how far the capitalist class is willing to take its moral panics.

As we heed the lessons of this previous era, it allows us to understand why the labor actions this time around—Hollywood culture workers, United Auto Workers, the 75,000 striking Kaiser employees, graduate students, contingent faculty, and other teachers across the country, and the others too numerous to mention—portend good signs to come for labor in the United States.

The post How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Boxing has big pictures (Raging Bull, Creed), big personalities (Muhammad Ali, the original G.O.A.T.), and big spectacles (pay-per-view fights adorned with flashing lights, raucous crowds, and stylized ring entrances). You might be forgiven for thinking that being a professional fighter translates into making big money.

But the challenges contemporary boxers face are not only physical and mental, but overwhelmingly financial. This begs the question: What does boxing owe its champions? This was the title of last night’s Zócalo program, presented in partnership with UCLA College, Division of Social Sciences and ASU Global Sport Institute. It all came down to, as moderator Rudy Mondragón put it, “centering the boxer as the worker.”

Mondragón, a scholar of ethnic and sports studies at UCLA, was joined on stage at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles by California State Athletic Commission executive director Andy Foster, former middleweight champ and DAZN host Sergio “the Latin Snake” Mora, and professional boxer and actress Kali “KO” Mequinonoag Reis.

Before diving in, Mondragón noted that boxers are independent contractors with no employee-employer relationships, as in other professional sports leagues. This usually means no collective healthcare, minimum salary, workers compensation, or pension. The lack of security hits harder because boxing is such “high risk work”: many professional boxers wind up physically unwell and penniless in their later lives. Any story of progress for boxing will require “igniting conversations and potential future action that will require collective effort among all boxing stakeholders,” Mondragón added later. 

“I believe that fighters have distinct stories,” he said. Turning first to Reis, he asked her to tell hers.

Raised in East Providence, Rhode Island, Reis is a member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe and is the first Indigenous woman to become a World Champion fighter. She is the baby in a family of five and described her upbringing as artistic, musically-inclined, and focused on playing sports.

“The solo aspect of boxing was intriguing,” she said. “In boxing, you have to be self-accountable.” When she asked people to help her learn the sport, they repeatedly told her that she should probably “do girl things” instead. But Reis persisted, eventually convinced a fighter in her community to teach her, and joined a gym at the age of 14. “It was love at first punch.”

Mora, who was born and raised in East Los Angeles, shared three influences that led him down the boxing-as-a-career trajectory. The first was knocking out his friends when they sparred at community BBQs—what he calls the East L.A. version of The Little Rascals—through which he learned that he was a good fighter. Second was needing high school credit and, thus, enrolling in a program that included boxing as a sport credit. And third, a police officer mentor reassured Mora that no matter what happened with fighting, he would always have other career options, including becoming a police officer himself. This mentor encouraged him to at least give the sport a real shot.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

But it was being selected for the reality television show The Contender that launched Mora’s financial success. The show featured professional boxers as contestants and, in true reality TV fashion, they lived under one roof and they sparred. Mora won the first season. The prize: a million dollars.

When he joined The Contender, Mora was in the red (“I had minus $150,” he said) and his highest paycheck from a fight had been $11,000 (“I thought I was rich!”). But that was by no means good enough to carve out and sustain a living. “A reality show saved me,” Mora later stated, more pointedly.

Mora’s and Reis’s stories, though distinct, coalesced and intersected throughout the evening’s conversation. They described hustling, moving in and out of various gigs and jobs, and struggling through poverty. “I just did whatever I could do,” Reis said. She braided hair, fixed motorcycles, was a waitress, personal trainer, club security guard, and a residential counselor at a group home for girls. It got so bad, she said, that she had to file as homeless to receive an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card.

Mora cut his friends’ hair for $3 a pop. “I never really had a job. I never applied for a job,” he said.

Both fighters described moving up from the “B side.” Foster jumped in to explain.

“I’m concerned with the B side. Those people don’t have anybody,” he said. Promoters who have signed boxers typically set up matches that allow their boxers to win. The B side boxer is the other guy: the “underdog” or “underside” of the match ticket—somebody with no manager and no promoter, the person they “bring in to lose.” The B side boxer has to be competitive enough for the Commission to approve the fight, but shouldn’t be good enough to win, Foster said. In the past, B siders often received just $1 to fight.

Mondragón highlighted some progress on this front: Under Foster’s leadership, in 2016, a regulation passed that outlawed the $1 contract.

The panelists discussed other promising solutions to make the industry of boxing more fair and stable, especially in California. Since there is no centralized governance of boxing, states regulate boxing differently. California regulates the most boxing events in the country and is home to the largest share of the over 23,000 registered professional boxers (3,300 males, 150 females). In 1982, Foster said, the state launched a pension program for boxers funded by ticket sales (not taxes).

When a boxer turns 50 they can access those funds, but many boxers don’t know about this. Mora himself has a pension, having fought in California, and found out about it only three weeks ago after talking to Mondragón about this event. As a remedy, Foster’s commission has hired investigators to look for these fighters, and has worked with the Mexican Consulate since many fighters with “lost” pensions are Mexican nationals.

Beside getting access to the pension, Foster, Reis, and Mora all advocated securing health insurance for fighters—perhaps through unionization—and acknowledged a need for better financial literacy. “Financial education is the main thing I would want fighters to be a part of,” Mora said.

As Mondragón wrapped up the discussion, online audience questions poured in. One asked the boxers: What is one thing you’d want to tell your younger self as a key piece of advice for those that look up to you now?

Mora didn’t hesitate: “There’s a great lesson in getting your butt kicked. Every kid needs to get their butt kicked. It teaches you humility, it teaches you respect for another person, it teaches you that you’re fallible, it teaches you that you need to work hard.”

The post Boxing Isn’t Only a Labor of Love—It’s Work appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rahimullah waits. In order to get picked for a day’s work, it’s best to get started early. He’s said his morning prayers. Had breakfast. Eggs, bread, and tea. He’s walked for 40 minutes to find a good spot on one of the busiest roads in the city. Rahimullah will likely be picked for a day’s work to fix plants on the sidewalk of a suburban housing area. Peshawar, a city of 4 million people in the northwest of Pakistan, seems sleepy right now, but that will soon change.

Cities, they say, have souls. They emit a mythology from their buildings and infrastructure, from their layers of history and anonymous crowds. But it is also the people who make its soul. Pakistan’s daily wage laborers, including Afghan nationals such as Rahimullah, are makers of Peshawar and other cities across Pakistan.

Rahimullah has, literally, transformed Peshawar with his own hands. Roads, sewage lines, buildings, planting flowers, planting crops—you name them, he’s worked them all. Within his neighborhood, a small informal housing area—or slums, as they’re often called—he’s built homes, made footpaths, bridges, and more.

Then you have women like Qayinat, also Afghan. Her hands are hardened from detergent and water and covered in calluses. Every day she walks from her informal house on the outskirts of the city to get to upper-middle-class homes where she washes clothes and cleans for a day’s pay of around 550 Pakistani rupees (around 2.50 U.S. dollars).

You won’t hear much about Rahimullah or Qayinat though. Daily wage laborers are not venerated in the official and, increasingly, even popular, imagination. Refugees and undocumented migrants are often reduced to tropes and discussed only through the prism of geopolitics, situated outside of the discourse on cities or mentioned only in passing, assumed simply to be waiting to return home.

The Afghans in urban Pakistan that I spoke to for my book project claimed the city as their own, not because they saw themselves as “contributors to the economy,” but because they knew their labor underpinned its very functioning.

Pakistan has the fastest rate of urbanization in South Asia. For years, policymakers have boasted they are building “world-class” cities. Much of their inspiration (and funding) comes from their modernization crush, the Gulf Arab states (read: gated communities, securitized high-rises, shopping malls, and Sunni mosques).

Yet, as the late, great Mike Davis told us, urbanization in the Global South is riddled with inequalities, driven by colonial legacies of spatial segregation, the rampant restructuring of postcolonial economies by international financial institutions, and the middle-class domination over the state.

The same is true in Pakistan. There’s no oil-rich economy as in the Gulf Arab countries, industrialization is non-existent, the country’s main exports are textiles and agricultural produce, and the dependency on IMF loans and World Bank projects are debilitating.

Urbanization in Pakistan is driven by forced migration from internal and regional wars, climate disaster, and botched development projects. Alongside Afghans, you also have Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, Sri Lankans, Yemenis, and more. Yet Pakistan’s Afghans are the labor that allows capitalist development projects and aspirations to middle-class urbanism.

Millions of Afghans have lived in Pakistan over the past 40 years—at least 8 million persons at its peak and around 3 million today. The Pakistani establishment, and international actors—states, NGOs, and liberal commentators—like to celebrate the country’s “hospitality” toward Afghan refugees.

This is disingenuous.

Most of Pakistan’s Afghans have come from low-income backgrounds. The majority have been unable to become citizens. While constitutionally anyone born in the country is eligible for citizenship, successive governments have blocked this.

In recent years millions of Afghans have been coerced to leave Pakistan, often with the complicity of the international humanitarian regime. Since the mid-2000s, millions of Afghans have left Pakistan. Some returned to Afghanistan, but since war never stopped in the country, many moved elsewhere—Europe, Iran, Turkey—lived transnational lives, or, simply, stayed in Pakistan.

When, in 2021 the Taliban recaptured power in Afghanistan and Afghan nationals sought refuge, medical treatment, transit, or reunification with family already in Pakistan, they found land borders difficult to cross, beatings and extortion rampant, and visas nearly impossible to get. Pakistan’s hostile borders have been emboldened by the violent, racist, and exclusionary border regimes of richer nations that have consistently been hostile to Afghans.

The Pakistani state also shoulders sizeable responsibility for the protracted conflicts in Afghanistan, especially from the 1990s onward, when it has contributed to elongating conflict in Afghanistan, most notably through its support of the Taliban. It also supported the disastrous U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, marked by massive civilian casualties.

The nation is jingoistic and exclusionary. Anti-poor urban planning, the shuttering of refugee camps, and displaced persons being told to “move on” from relief camps means many can’t get access to the basics (housing, electricity, sanitation), so they find other ways to do so. Despite the increasingly hostile attitudes of those in power at the national level, the city accommodates different ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, and classes within a single space—albeit subject to hierarchical, uneven divisions. Afghans and Pakistanis live and work side by side with each other in shared daily struggles, forming community and companionship as they do so.

They literally expand the city—not through the skyline of malls, mosques, and high-rises policymakers would have you believe, but, through the katchi abadi, the informal housing area, which is the true and more complex face of urbanity in the country.

In sympathetic policy circles or polite middle-class living room conversation, when it comes to Pakistan’s low-income Afghans, you might hear how they are economically useful, They’ve contributed a lot to our economy. At other times its, Afghans know how to manage hardship, or, They’re so resilient.

But should one’s humanity be contingent on economic productivity? “Love us… when we’re wretched, suicidal, naked, contributing nothing,” British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan teaches us.

Tropes of resilience distract from the more insidious reasons as to why people need to be resilient in the first place—and not everyone can be.

Most of the people I interviewed were unequivocal: Their lives are hard because of failings of the state, elites, international humanitarian agencies, and repeated military interventions in Afghanistan—including Pakistan’s own repeated interference in its neighboring country and those of imperialist persuasions (Soviet, American, European). Perhaps, then, as anthropologist Anila Daulatzai, urges us, we should be thinking about the reparations Pakistan owes Afghan people, which must include Pakistan’s own Afghan population.

So, if we choose to reflect, as you pass through Pakistan’s cities, Bertolt Brecht’s compassionate recognition of workers across civilizations will echo in your ears. So too will the region’s own Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ode to those who live in the broken roads of slum dwellings. Stop in Hayatabad, a township celebrated as Peshawar’s architectural jewel-in-the-crown, and ask any local, Afghan or Pakistani, and they’ll tell you: It was Afghan laborers who built it.

The post Afghans Built This City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After the latest banking crisis, an old question has resurfaced: What should corporate executives care about, people or profits?

Hard-right Republicans contend that it was “woke” investment strategies of liberal executives—who cared about the “ESG” (Environmental, Social, and Governance) credentials of target companies—that led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Their position harkens to a 1970 doctrine of Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, who chastised proponents of “social responsibility” in corporate management for “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.” He famously advised CEOs to scrap high-minded attempts to improve the world through business and return to their primary goal of increasing profits for their shareholders.

A worthy target for Friedman might have included the enigmatic businessman, Eli M. Black.

In that same year, 1970, Black, a former rabbi, became the new “banana king” when he acquired the hemisphere’s most notorious food company, United Fruit, known as “el pulpo” (the octopus) for its invasive business practices across Latin America.

Black saw value in United Fruit’s famous brand, “Chiquita,” and embraced the opportunity to associate it with good causes, including the humane treatment of farm workers. As he wrote soon after acquiring United Fruit, “Socially conscious programs, designed to improve the quality of living of employees, are indeed the legitimate concern of business.” United Fruit’s business included Inter Harvest, which produced lettuce in California, where Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers had just scored a significant victory by signing contracts with grape growers after five years of protest.

Black’s first act as CEO signaled a rejection of Friedman’s doctrine. At Inter Harvest, he went against fellow growers and the advice of his executive team by signing contracts with the United Farm Workers. Black chose this course to avoid a boycott of his “Chiquita” bananas but also to work with Chavez, whom he regarded as a potential business partner. Both men believed that a conscientious public, now aware of the exploitation of farm workers, would choose Chiquita brand lettuce carrying the union’s black eagle label over competitors that did not. In time, the CEO came to see Chavez as a friend. Black invited the labor leader to private Passover seders at his home in Westport, Connecticut, and business conferences at Harvard University.

Black doubled down on his strategy of “social responsibility” in his remaking of United Fruit in Honduras, where the company was the country’s largest employer. There, he collaborated with Oscar Gale Varela, the venerable leader of the banana workers union, SITRATERCO.

Gale had survived corrupt dictators and the manipulation of the Honduran labor movement by the CIA and the AFL-CIO to forge one of the most powerful unions in Latin America. The U.S. State Department privately remarked that Gale’s movement was “five times the size of the armed forces and 10 times more than the total number of university students.” The American government regarded him as “the conscience of the nation” and treated him as such, affording Gale protection whenever he challenged the authority of general Oswaldo López Arellano who had seized the presidency in coups d’etat twice during the 1960s and 1970s.

For Black, Gale kept labor unrest at bay and state corruption in check. Black rewarded Gale and SITRATERCO with the most generous wages and benefits for farm workers in Latin America. He honored Gale’s request to abandon piece-rate compensation for banana workers by adopting a set salary based on a 44-hour work week. Black also made significant investments in the schools and hospitals used by workers, replaced U.S. employees with Hondurans, and added 10 paid vacation days per year.

Skeptical journalists came to Honduras in 1972 to confirm this transformation. Several left convinced, one writing that Black’s new United Fruit “may well be the most socially conscious American company in the hemisphere.” A contented Gale told the New York Times, “The company respects us and we respect the company.”

So, why don’t we remember Black as a paragon of virtue, and his management of United Fruit as a notable counter to Friedman’s doctrine? The easy answer is that Eli Black’s adventures in social responsibility ended tragically.

In California, Cesar Chavez never delivered on his promise to improve the hiring process for farm workers, leading to poor quality and the company’s eventual abandonment of the Chiquita label for California lettuce.

In Honduras, Gale suffered a stroke just as Arellano agreed to honor Gale’s request for peasant land reform in exchange for accepting the dictator’s unconstitutional third term in office. When the oil crisis hit in the fall of 1973, Arellano used his unfettered authority to impose a tariff on bananas. An embattled Black, losing millions of dollars in transport costs, agreed to pay a bribe to Arellano in exchange for reducing the new tax. When the illicit affair became known to rivals within the United Fruit office, Black struggled to maintain his image but to no avail.

On February 3, 1975, he committed suicide by jumping from the 44th floor of the Pan Am (now Met Life) building in midtown Manhattan.

Black’s dramatic end may suggest to some that Milton Friedman had been correct. But, in retrospect, there was little Black could have done to make United Fruit profitable. And, if anything, it was Black’s partial adoption of Friedman’s advice that did him in.

Feeling pressure from dissatisfied shareholders in 1973, Black pursued a legal, but at the time frowned-upon stock buyback scheme—refinancing debt by purchasing existing securities with cash reserves—that temporarily raised the value of United Brands’ shares. The business press that had previously lauded him prior now turned on him, alleging that he deceived the public by creating an illusion of profitability. Forbes called the move a “fiscal fairy tale” and “magic show,” while a noted accounting professor chastised his move as “fiscal masturbation.” Black’s stock buyback halted the abandonment of United Brands by shareholders for a time, but business correspondents and employees questioned whether these funds would have been better spent on modernizing facilities or improving the position of workers.

Sadly, stock buybacks and the never-ending pursuit of higher share values have become the norm on Wall Street since Black’s demise. Black found a loophole in federal law to execute his deal. By 1982, no such trickery was necessary; President Ronald Reagan encouraged the Securities and Exchange Commission to make buybacks legal for all companies. As David Gelles shows in The Man Who Broke Capitalism, former G.E. CEO Jack Welch engaged in the largest stock buyback program in American history, enriching himself and investors, while denying the firm critical funds for research and development, and sacrificing the job security of loyal workers. Ultimately, Welch’s management system–very much in the tradition prescribed by Friedman–eroded the foundation of one of the most respected U.S. companies of the 20th century.

The pursuit of stock value over all other considerations is stealing the future from companies and destroying the foundation of the American capitalist system that many critics of the current bank crisis claim to be defending. Such critics have resisted policies such as an excise tax of 4% on profits from stock buybacks that strive to keep funds invested in research and development and prevent the squirreling away of wealth into bank accounts of people who have done the least to create it.

Ultimately, they ignore what Eli Black, in his best moments, understood: A company’s value is as much a product of its employees’ hard work as the CEO’s business genius.

The post The Banana King Who (Tried to) Put People Over Profits appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post One Fair Wage President Saru Jayaraman appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to descend on Indio, California, this month for the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

The festival is a banner event for Riverside County, with people coming in droves to catch their favorite acts performing live in the desert.

But with all of this tourism money flowing into the local economy, service industry workers, who have helped Coachella become one of the biggest, most influential, and highest-grossing festivals in the world, are not making enough to get by.

At last night’s program, “What Is a Good Tourism Job Now?,” panelists discussed why in Riverside, and across California and the nation, tipped workers are still not earning enough to cover essential expenses like food, housing, or health care, which has caused many to leave the service industry in droves since the start of the pandemic.

The event was the inaugural program in “What Is a Good Job Now?,” a new series supported by The James Irvine Foundation, where over the next year Zócalo will explore what makes a good job for workers in low-wage sectors across California’s economy.

“We wanted to talk about tourism and service in Riverside County because the industry here has grown tremendously in the last couple of decades,” said Zócalo editor-at-large Elizabeth Aguilera, who served as the moderator for the discussion, which took place at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum.

Aguilera asked One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman to begin the conversation by explaining why the service economy runs on tips. “Where and how did this get set up?”

Tipping originated in feudal Europe, said Jayaraman, when aristocrats gave extra money to serfs and vassals on top of their wages. “It’s important to start there because wages are very low in this industry,” she said. “It’s been the lowest-paying employer in the United States dating all the way back to emancipation.” That was the point where tipping “mutated” here in the U.S., she said, “from being an extra or bonus … to being a replacement for wages because restaurants wanted a way to hire newly freed Black people—Black women, in particular—and not pay them anything at all.”

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

The National Restaurant Association (which Jayaraman wrote about for Zócalo earlier this week), a powerful lobby founded in 1919, has “fought against and artificially suppressed wages” for the past century to keep its workers living off tips, but it doesn’t have to be this way, Jayaraman said. She points to Europe, for instance, where the industry recognizes service workers as skilled professionals. Across the continent, EU countries have done away with tipping culture and raised the minimum wage to a livable amount.

Aguilera asked Ralph Prado IV, who has worked in the restaurant industry for the past decade, what makes service and tourism jobs so difficult—and also hard to leave. Prado spoke about dealing with low pay, stress, anxiety, and anger in past positions. Prior to having a child, he said, he was managing to scrape by, but now that he’s a father, the situation has changed for him.

“Getting paid a low wage and suffering anxiety from my job when I wasn’t even in a managerial position was spilling into my home life,” he said. “That just wasn’t working.” He left his last job because of this and has since taken a new position that has allowed him to have better quality time with his son. “Even then,” he said, “I am still considering, is this industry still good for me? Is this sustainable for the future? Do I have to keep working two jobs? Do I have to work a combination of jobs?”

These are among the questions that Lesley Butler, who has been a faculty member at the Collins College of Hospitality Management at Cal Poly Pomona since 1992, has been trying to address. “We train professionals, and we take it very seriously,” she said.

The experience that Prado had at his previous job, she said, was likely exacerbated because of a lack of leadership. “In our industry, there is a lack of experience, lack of leadership experience, and we saw that really in the pandemic because a lot of workers who really were not trained to be in leadership positions lacked training and caused toxic environments for their employees and guests,” she said.

Looking at the landscape, Butler does see reason for optimism. She pointed to big companies like McDonald’s and Chipotle making efforts to help employees advance in the field by offering tuition assistance and reimbursement.

And when it comes to pay, she pointed to AB 257, the landmark California legislation that will raise wages as high as $22 an hour for chains with 100 or more locations across the U.S. “That’s a significant change,” she said.

But can better pay solve California’s current worker shortage? Aguilera noted that restaurants in Riverside paying $20-$30 an hour are still having trouble hiring. “Do folks come back, or have they moved on?” she asked.

It can, said Jayaraman, but only if it’s a government-mandated guarantee of a living wage.

In a recent One Fair Wage worker survey 60% of respondents reported they were leaving the restaurant industry for a wide range of sectors. The universal tagline, she said, was, “Honestly, I will do anything other than this because I can’t afford to do it anymore.” Eighty percent reported they would return with the guarantee of a sustainable wage—but only one that was authorized by the state, so they were not dependent on the whims of individual restaurant owners, who might turn around and lower wages again down the line.

The discussion ended on a hopeful note from Prado. He spoke about how rewarding working with his teammates over the years has been—despite being in jobs that many look down upon. “I can’t imagine the kind of citizens we would have,” he said, “if we had people that were getting paid well doing this rewarding work, and [off the clock they] had time to do all sorts of great stuff.”

The post We Can Solve California’s Service Worker Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Work is boring.

I expect many of you will disagree. You’ll offer your job as a counterexample. Or, if yours isn’t much to brag about, you’ll come up with hypothetical scenarios that show that work isn’t always boring. Spectacular as they may be, mental gymnastics of this sort prove nothing of consequence. I rule out the possibility of some exotic work that’s meaningful, enjoyable, stimulating, and not boring for a simple reason: It doesn’t exist.

Work—all of it—is boring.

Work is enforced labor, required by our needs and demanded by others. To work is to do what one does not wish to do. Or more carefully stated: Work involves doing things that we wouldn’t have otherwise chosen to do. What we do at work (and, importantly, how we do it) isn’t what we would have done if we didn’t have to work. Work is a sacrifice, the forced choice to give up the pursuit of our possibilities.

Decades ago, the Existentialists tried to convince us that life is a perpetual project of reinventing oneself. To live is to be free, and our existence is an ongoing, personal project of growth and self-discovery. What was uttered by lips holding cigarettes in Parisian cafés was eerily similar to popular articulations of the American dream today. We’re told that existence is ours for the taking. We’re asked to believe that life is a tree that continuously grows—each branch, twig, and leaf a choice that we can in principle make.

But such a conception of human existence proves no match for the harsh realities of capitalism. The necessity of work that’s born out of the global system paints a much grimmer picture. Because of our material needs, work forces us to give up our freedoms. Our life is no more—if it ever were—a flourishing tree of possibilities. Work is destitute, the death of choice. Thus, if life is choice, as many seem to think, then “working life” is an oxymoron. The more we work, the less we get to live. This is the real reason why work is harmful. Even if isn’t physically or mentally taxing, work hurts us existentially. It restricts our freedom to be anything but bored.

Boredom is the emotional realization that we are not properly cognitively engaged. Boredom, in other words, is what we experience when we wish to, but are unable to, find satisfactory engagement. Lack of proper cognitive engagement could occur when we have absolutely nothing to do. But such poverty of stimulus is rare. Most of the time, we have things to do. In fact, it’s in the midst of those doings that boredom most commonly arises. There are requirements and deadlines. There are objectives and quotas. There are commutes, emails, and Zoom meetings. There are bosses and colleagues. There’s extra work and unpaid labor. We push boxes, make lists, serve people, answer phones, send emails, and drive around. All while wishing that we were doing something else.

When U.S. adults are asked by researchers about their emotional experiences, they report that they commonly experience boredom during work. Survey after survey corroborates this conclusion: disengagement, dissatisfaction, and ultimately boredom are basic constituents of our working life. For instance, a Gallup survey dedicated to understanding and improving employee engagement found that 85% of employees worldwide are either not engaged or are actively disengaged at work. Another survey conducted in 2018 by Korn Ferry, a global consulting firm, found that boredom is, in fact, the top reason why employees seek a new job.

If you need further proof of boredom’s reach in the workplace, just visit the infamous r/antiwork subreddit— an active online community of more than 2 million users dedicated to exposing and undermining the exploitative and hierarchical relationships that define contemporary labor.

All of this demonstrates a clear pattern between work and boredom: the former curbs our freedom; the latter is our emotional reaction to our inability to pursue our freedom. Work is thus thoroughly characterized by the presence of an unfulfilled desire. While working, we crave something other than what is available to us. Our tasks and activities don’t cognitively engage us. They aren’t meaningful to us. They don’t capture our attention. In short, they aren’t what we want them to be. And so, we are bored.

But though boredom is a fact of working life, boredom with work is often, if not almost always, misunderstood. We are made to feel that boredom with (or during) work is our fault—the workers’ fault. “You’re just not doing enough.” “You’re not doing it the right way.” “You’re not being creative.” “You’re not thinking like a leader.” “You’re lazy.” We are told everything but the truth. The problem isn’t us; it’s work. Boredom isn’t a sign of laziness or apathy; it’s what it feels like to emotionally reject a situation that constrains our ability to be free.

So, what are our options when faced with the inescapable boredom of work?

We can submissively accept it. The need to work isn’t going away and not everybody can afford to quit their job or reach FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Work is many things. It is tiring, stressful, depressing, painful, and even dangerous. So what if it is also boring?

Or we can try to make work less boring. We can take breaks, change our routines, spice things up, or gamify our tasks. We can even demand distractions, entertainment, or a Google-like workspace with pool tables, bowling alleys, and other perks. Even if we can’t get rid of boredom altogether, we could at least try to experience it sparingly and between activities that are fun.

But there’s a third option—the most radical of them all—to actively accept that work is undeniably and unacceptably boring. This plan begins with a willingness to wallow, at least temporarily, in our boredom and allow it to wash us over. We don’t avert our gaze. We focus on it and acknowledge it. We experience it. We allow it to inform us that our opportunities for meaningful and satisfactory engagement are being blocked. We let it impress on us that we are currently incapable of actively and effectively pursuing our freedom.

The lack of satisfaction that is endemic to boredom is its greatest tool. We are pained by boredom and precisely because of that, we are pushed to undo its cause. Boredom, in other words, is a powerful motivator. It’s a catalyst for change: an emotional force that propels us to pursue projects that could eventually relieve us from the absence of satisfactory cognitive engagement and the suffocating constraints that work imposes on us. This is no small feat, of course. It demands tremendous effort, both at the individual and collective levels. Collective and often disruptive action is key. Better and fair pay, reduction of working hours, and better working conditions are the victories of hard-won battles that involved coordinated action, pain, and sacrifice.

A revolt against work requires that we recognize work for what it really is: an exploitative social structure that harms us existentially, psychologically, and physically. The revolution demands that we accept that work is not the origin of self-worth, value, and meaning. To systemically transform work and to protect ourselves from its harms, we must first undo its false allure. What better way to do that than by acknowledging that work is profoundly and inherently boring?

The post Work Is Boring—Use It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.