Pomona College Workers for Justice
photo credit: www.workersforjustice.org
Parents weekend just wrapped up here in Claremont. Normally, this doesn’t get in my way too much, but on Saturday I found myself interacting with a mom and dad at Frank dining hall, which derailed the remainder weekend.
A fellow student and I broached the unionization efforts of Pomona dining hall workers, to which the couple said they didn’t believe in unions. I was curious to know their reasoning, and they politely explained that they felt unions might have served a purpose in the past but that today “the marketplace solves those problems.”
Okay. I am not exaggerating when I say that at first I thought they were just joking around. Pretty much any rationale would have made more sense to me; even if they had coldly said they didn’t care about the worker’s concerns. But the thing is we hadn’t even gotten to bring up what those concerns were. So, “problems” was an abstraction thatliterally could have been anything. And the marketplace was there to solve it…whatever it was.
I don’t think its necessary to get into their logic. I mean, it would be nice if the marketplace were solving the “problems” of Pomona dining hall workers, or the protestors in Egypt or Wisconsin; if it watched over us while we slept and woke us up gently in the morning, etc. But I think most people aren’t so naïve as to actually believe it works like that. Nor is this the place to speculate as to why unions are (probably even more) important now (Paul Krugman did that yesterday in the New York Times).
Nope, I want to talk about why the interaction was so jarring (yep, I just want to talk about myself). Firstly, although economics sits atop my pile of things-that-make-me nauseous (also in the pile: the show Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, and the “cookie” Fig Newtons), I can generally appreciate its importance. Sometimes, I will even talk about economics (in small doses and almost exclusively with one particular person who knows his stuff but also knows I will call him out when things don’t sit right). But, these parents brought to life and reminded me just what I dread most about economics—that its theories can lead to startlingly blind absolutism.
Second, just the day before I’d been studying an article by Henry A. Giroux entitled “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class and the Biopolitics of Disposability.” In his conclusion he says, “We need torecognize the dark times in which we live and offer up a vision of hope that creates the conditions for multiple collective and global struggles thatrefuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as the measure of democracy. Making human beings superfluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and democracy is the antidote in urgent need of being reclaimed.”
And that’s exactly what I felt when they cheerfully said “the marketplace solves those problems”—a sense that we were all superfluous. Not only did their statement negate the real concerns of employees, it stopped the conversation before it could really begin, robbing everyone of any agency or responsibility, and gifting it to an all-powerful Marketplace. In my last blog I wrote about the paralytic effects of indecision, but holy balls, lets smear on the myth that the marketplace solves our problems and that is the most paralytic sandwich I’ve ever seen.
So, in honor of the end (is it over yet?) of parents weekend I want to make an oath: That when I have reached that age of parents (middle?) I will not have lost touch with reality. That I will have found a way-of-life and spirituality more empowering than any market (or religious) fundamentalism. That I will still believe individuals can be problem-solvers, decision-makers, creators and storytellers.
And, if I am ever at the point where I not only don’t try to challenge the structure we live in, but I’m actually kneeling to pray before it, then I don’t know… Just lock me in a room with an economics textbook, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and nothing but fig newtons.