via Huff Post article “Majoring in Debt“

There have been three things on my mind this week. The first is the labor of graduate students and adjuncts. The second is student debt. The third is the Facebook IPO and who makes money off of what. Yup, it’s going to be one of those kinds of posts.

Yesterday, I mentioned the amount of labor that is going into teaching and she sat me down and she told me that her momma saw the amount of work she was doing as an instructor and student and said “Honey, you are an indentured servant”.

Breathe.

She went on to tell me, yes #allcity you need to teach and you Love it, but you are here to leave with a finished product. Your work is brilliant, write and keep writing, find a finished product by someone in your field and decide how much attention your teaching will receive. Learn what the unstated rules are and proceed accordingly. #jesusbeaFenceforBlackgirls.

I was both relieved by her words because I did plan on writing all day, even though I have a slight temperature. I tend to have some of the best ideas about writing when I have a temp. I was also bummed out by her words, because I thought, what if she were not there to say these things to me. But she is, and I am grateful.

I know that the US graduates more law students than there are lawyer jobs, and I would imagine that there are more undergraduate students graduated than their are entry-level jobs. The fact that there are more trained people than their are jobs allows for employers to pick the employee who is willing to accept the lowest pay. How is this humane?

Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article up earlier this week titled “Among the Majority” by Michael Bérubé about the state of academia and how 70% of jobs are taught by people who have part-time contracts.

The article has several nuggets.

The first is that,

Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities.

40 years ago, 80 percent of America’s college teachers enjoyed the protection of tenure, whereas now only 54 percent do.

 colleges promote themselves, especially to first-generation students, as a pathway to the middle class — but, increasingly, colleges do not pay middle-class wages to their own faculty members. The contradiction is deepest at the lowest tiers of the academic hierarchy, where, Rhoades said, underpaid adjunct faculty members are effectively “modeling what is acceptable as an employment practice.”

Which brings me to the Facebook IPO. As a scholar I do political economy, so I am always paying attention to how money moves. I had several questions after having seen the $100B IPO numbers.

How is it possible for company to be “valued” at 100 billion dollars when it doesn’t make a material product?

What does it produce? I will wait. #SmoothesSkirt. It doesn’t produce anything material, you do. It is your personal information, or the personal information of the nearly 800 million users.

If a corporation’s primary duty is  to it’s shareholders what is to stop them from compromising user data for profit?

David Rushkoff states that,

the more money Facebook takes on, the more like money it will become. In other words, when a social media company is a social media upstart, it will have vastly different motives than the motives it has when it’s responsible for acting in the best interest of its shareholder — a requirement for being a publicly traded company.

I am not sure what to make of all of this, however I do know that it isn’t sustainable.

1 million of the 1.5 million college instructors are teaching on a contract as temporary employees, student debt is higher than credit card debt and Facebook just IPO’d with a 1 billion dollar valuation.

Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Musing on War Money and Art Money In the University
2. Facebook + Twitter + Your Privacy
3. Sometimes the Intern Game Reminds me of the Crack Game

Peace to Janel for staying on me to write about class. Peace to Latoya Peterson for reminding me to think about how cities are similar, different and the reasons why DC, with it’s 25 miles,  is special to me.

I once said that the city was like chitlin’s. Moving from the deep South to DC, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Ohio, New York, and Philadelphia during the great migration Black folks had to figure out how to make something horrible into something livable, or in the case of Chitlins- edible.

For many, chitlin’s, like the city is a delicacy now for some.

After WWII, there was huge resistance to African Americans living in decent housing in the city.

In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. went to Chicago to protest the housing conditions of African Americans. The Eyes on the Prize Documentary speaks captures some of this time period.

Shoot, African Americans were not allowed to live in East Oakland before the 1950′s.

My homie, Janel, has consistently stated that conversations about gentrification fail to take into consideration that brown bodies, regardless of the employment status reduce the property value. (*noted: Janel please correct me if my reading is off.)

At first, I disagreed with her hard. However, I am now coming to believe that there is some merit to her argument.

For example, if I am a professor, and Goldy is an lobbyist and we move into a condo on a mixed race but largely white street with owner occupied houses in Columbia Heights, with combined wages of approximately- lets say, $150k, the fact that we are high income earners does not mitigate the fact that we are both brown bodies.

At $150K this would put us in the upper middle class or the rich, depending on whose theory you use.

I had always thought that our social class power and education would make our race moot, when living in middle class and affluent neighborhoods.

Our brown bodies are read as reducing the neighborhood property values of our White affluent neighbors.

According to Janel, our neighbors property values would be reduced because we are “brown bodies.” I hope that she writes more about this in the future. #nudge.

Which brings me to the somewhat unique situation of Washington, DC.

Having lived in Oakland, Brooklyn and DC, I have seen patterns of similarities and differences in terms of how the city is changing demographically.

Because of the government and higher educational institutions, DC is a transient space. As people come here and leave for work for short periods, year around. A friend of mind, Mr. Miami, would routinely rent out an his extra room in his row house, for a handsome sum, for short two or three month periods twice a year in order boost his vacation savings.

Also, the district and the federal government employs a substantial number of African Americans. In fact, Prince Georges county is the seat of African American high income earners in the country.

There is a reason why Black folks, young and old joke about a “good gubmet job.”

I never really knew how Black DC government was until I went to get finger printed for a teaching job last summer. Nearly all of the employees were Black. In fact the woman, an African American woman, with a big old gun- was telling me about how much overtime she worked last week so she could take time off to be with her daughter for a summer camp performance.

The purpose of this post isn’t to go to be a five volume series on the differences of gentrification and global capitalism in three US cities, but what I am interested in is “Who Has A Right to the City?”

I am invested in asking questions about the  economic power of the people who make a city work- teachers, bus drivers, subway drivers, trash collectors, maids, nannies, police officers, fire fighters and cab drivers.

What’s interesting to me about DC is the juxtaposition of Black owner occupied houses and condo’s especially near Georgia Petworth and the lack of political will to ensure that Black home owners can remain in the city.

Wouldn’t it logically follow that Black politicians in the district have a vested interest in insuring that these residents, their base, remain here, if they want to be re-elected? I am not saying that Black people automatically vote for other Black folks, some do some don’t. I am asking where is the conversation? What explains the lack of political will?

What I am saying is that the lack of a vision and a willingness to address the strong possibility that African Americans will be taxed out of their homes needs to be interrogated.

Lot’s of conversations about gentrification are ahistorical. That is because most journalist are not historians.

Think about it this way. When I was in undergrad at the New School, right up on 14th and 1st  was Stuyvesant Town.

Stuyvesant Town has 8,757 apartments in 35 residential buildings stretching from 1st to Avenue C between 14th and 23rd street. African Americans were barred from Stuyvesant Town, for the record.

As a student I was unaware of what kind of housing it was. They looked like nice projects to me.

As I got older, I learned that Stuyvesant Town was built by New York City and Metropolitan life to house WWII veterans and their families after the war.

The apartments were rented at below market rates.

This is a massive complex.

I remember reading in the paper while living in NYC in 2005, at the height of the real estate bubble that Stuyvestant town was for sale. In 2006, MetLife agreed to sell Stuyvesant Town—Peter Cooper Village to Tishman Speyer Properties and the real estate arm of BlackRock for $5.4 billion.

Because of financing issues and lawsuits Stuyvesant town ended up with creditors.

Today, Stuyvesant town is luxury apartments.

I have questions. Many questions.

Why did New York City have the political will to build Stuyvesant Town?

Given that fact that enslaved African American’s have been property historically, what does it mean that they may be taxed out of there homes in DC? Who will move in?

Should there be political will in DC to ensure that African American home owners can remain in their homes? Why? Why not?

Should people be able to afford to live in the neighborhoods where they grew up? Where they spent their 20′s?

Have African Americans earned a right to the city? If not, who does?

Are the only people who have a right to the city the ones who can afford to pay the financial price?

Related posts:

1. Race, Class and Prostitution in the City: Washington DC’s Black Madam- Odessa Madre
2. Gentrification has Nothing to do with White Hipsters
3. Jay Z + Gentrification: A Force of Capitalism

On the train a couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I was tripping off of the notion of the student intern, and how that socializes young people to accept working for free.

@RafiKam and I have had several conversations on twitter about who is an artist, who should get paid to be an artist, etc.

So on the train I came to the conclusion that like mommas and interns, artists are expected to work happily for free.

Think about it. People expect artist to create websites, write articles, DJ and do God knows what else for them for free. And I understand that there always times that we do things for people on the strength, however I am talking about the assumption that because you are creative then you are happy to be exploited.

Creative people need MORE dough. We are eccentric as shit, so that tends to mean that we like nice and or absurd things. AND, all this creativity requires food and vices. Okay, not vices but defiantly food, lol. I have two empty plates of food, an empty soda can, and a half glass of coffee on my table right now. Brain cells burn twice as much energy as ALL THE other cells in the body.

More exposure for my work does not pay the cell phone bill.

When folks want cheap or free labor, where do they turn? To students. The assumption is that there are so many of them, why not pay them chump change to do entry level work?

Now Maria Mies helped me to put this all into perspective. I have had this book out, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, since September 2010 and so I am happy that I am able to write this post.

She writes

“by defining women as housewives, a process which I then call housewifization, not only did womens unpaid work in the household become invisible, unrecorded in the GDP…but her wage work was  considered to be only supplementary to that of her husband, the so called bread-winner and thus devalued.”

We have to remember that before mass industrialization, the entire family worked to keep a house hold going. Making soap, making food, making clothes, heating lamps, building fires, all this shit took ALL DAY and a squad.

She goes on to say that there is a connection between the work that women do in the home and the ability for men to earn the cake they earn and for corporations to earn the profits they earn. She writes,

It became clear that women’s unpaid caring and nurturing work in the household was subsidizing  not only the male wage but also capital accumulation.

Which brings me to the wages that men earn and the labor situation in Wisconsin. Mies goes on to argue that what has been occurring is that men’s labor is being housewiferized. She writes,

…demonstrated that not just that housework and housewifization were models for womens labor, but that transnational capital, in its effort to break the dominance of the trade unions, and to flexiblize labor, would eventually housewifize male labor:  that is to say, men would be forced to accept labor relations which so far had been typical for women only. This means labor relations outside of the protection of labor laws, not covered by trade unions and collective bargaining, not based on a proper contract – more or less invisible, part of the ‘shadow economy.

Treating working men like women regarding wages and negotiation? How in the hell is any of this sustainable? Removing the right to collectively bargain? Treating men’s labor outside of the home, the way that women’s labor in the home is treated?

This is profound B.

Had you ever thought of the origins of the idea of the housewife?

Are you a momma, artist or intern whom people always expect to work for free?

How do you navigate or negotiate?

Related posts:

1. #myadviserISogoingtoKickmyass
2. What Women Have to Do With It: A Response to Chrystia Freeland’s Rise of the New Global Elite.
3. Black Women and Resistance: I was Free

Renina Jarmon: How do you expect for constructive capitalism to survive
in a system where profits at all costs have been the mandate
since the late 70′s when corporations mutated into multinationals?

Renina Jarmon: We are in fact moving towards an automated society.
My thinking about this comes out of a reading of James Bogg’s The
American Revolution, pages from a Negro Workers Notebook. The
book, was written in 1963. His general contention is that based on
advances in technology, our society will become one in which automation
will force us to think about how to organize society based on our needs
instead of our wants. I wrote about his book in a blog post last month
titled, The Coming Jobless Society.

The notion of an automated society is a hard one to swallow, however
it is coming. For every place that you see a machine replacing a
human a job has been eliminated. The further technology advances,
the more automated our society will become, the fewer jobs will be
available. Every time you use a computer, instead of working with a human,
a process has been automated and job has been lost. For instance,
in Detroit, the assembly line was automated in the ’50′s. Our current wars are
becoming automated via unmanned land and aerial vehicles.

For the most part email has eliminated both the need for receptionists
and the USPS. Garbage trucks are automated. Pay kiosks at
businesses, such as AT&T, the grocery store, the airport and Target,
have eliminated the need for customer service agents. Where there
was once 4 human employees you only need 2, or 1.

Taking all this into consideration, I come away from this Q & A with,
in many ways trying to reconcile the world that Boggs is talking about
with the world that Umair is advocating for.

Related posts:

1. If You Believe in Creative Capitalism I Have a Bridge and Some Crack to Sell You
2. I Got 99 Problems, but a B-tch Ain’t One: The Money Over B-tches Ethos in Global Capitalism and Hip Hop
3. Future Global Gated Communites