Features » September 12, 2008

No Jobs Make Mean Streets

As urban economies collapse, gun violence rises

By James Thindwa

In urban areas like Chicago, declining job prospects have correlated closely with rising violence.

If cities are to weather the country’s economic storm, politicians must pass reforms. Nowhere is it written that people cannot — or should not — earn enough to enter the middle class.

When Anthony Haydin woke up on June 30, he did not imagine his street would be the scene of one of Chicago’s most deadly shootings. Three people had been shot in an apartment right across the street from his. Police said the victims had been murdered in a “gang-and-drug related shooting.”

On July 13, just hours after guns claimed the lives of three more people in separate incidents, the Rev. Robin Hood, a Chicago community activist, lashed out.

“No one should be surprised by all this shooting going on in Chicago,” he said. “Our schools are crumbling, young people — especially young black people — have no jobs and don’t have any hope. Politicians don’t want to bring good jobs or make businesses pay us a decent wage. What do you expect?”

After a 30 percent decline in the last decade, gun-related violence is again on the rise in many urban centers, with a disproportionate impact on young black males. On July 20, the weekly Chicago Defender reported that gang activity is playing a role in the escalation of gun violence. This summer, the paper noted, “Several teens on the South Side were gunned down, apparently caught in gang crossfire.” The paper described the “makeshift memorials of balloons, stuffed animals, flowers and poster boards with written sentiments” that have become commonplace on South Side streets.

But gun violence, like other ills plaguing urban communities, is a symptom of economic problems that have festered for decades.

In his 1996 book When Work Disappears, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote: “Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods — crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization and so on — are fundamentally a consequence of a disappearance of work.”

Wilson argues that the loss of jobs, and the resulting increase in unemployment, leads to the breakdown of the social and cultural institutions that hold a community together.

After nearly 30 years of conservative discourse that promotes incarceration as the solution, local governments must resuscitate the idea that jobs and economic revival are the antidotes to crime. Such a revival is needed — and possible, given favorable political winds — because a confluence of factors is exacerbating the turmoil in inner cities, with disastrous implications.

Neoliberal cities

As economic prospects worsen, low-income Americans are getting desperate. Unemployment is chronic — 40 percent of black males are jobless — and the federal safety net is vanishing.

America’s big cities have failed to lift their inner-city communities out of poverty.

Jason Hackworth, a professor of geography and urban planning at the University of Toronto, blames neoliberalism, which he defines as “an ideological rejection of egalitarian liberalism.” In The Neoliberal City, a study of Chicago, New York City, Phoenix, Seattle and other cities, Hackworth maintains that neoliberal economic policies — gentrification, spending cuts, corporate tax giveaways, low wages and privatization — have left longtime and low-income residents defenseless in a hostile economic landscape.

Add to this mix a gun industry newly energized by the Supreme Court — whose D.C. v. Heller decision overturned Washington, D.C.’s ban on handgun possession — and urban gun violence becomes an immediate threat.

Desperation and violence

Interest in the reciprocal relationship between violence and economic deprivation is not new. Writing in the American Sociological Review in 1938, famed sociologist Robert King Merton noted that people who are denied access to the legitimate means of achieving “our culturally legitimated goal of financial success” may turn to illegitimate means to reach that goal.

Decades later, not much has changed.

Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in Development as Freedom:

There is plenty of evidence that unemployment has many far-reaching effects other than loss of income, including psychological harm, loss of work motivation, skill and self-confidence, increase in ailments and morbidity (and even mortality rates), disruption of family relations and social life, hardening of social exclusion and accentuation of racial tensions and gender asymmetries.

In other words, what we are seeing in America’s urban centers is desperation being played out in violent activity. And if there is going to be long-term, sustainable solutions, Americans must demand a more honest and comprehensive analysis of gun violence — and crime in general.

City leaders have responded by marshalling law enforcement, calling for better parenting and pushing “personal responsibility.” Politicians have also asked community “partners” — crime prevention and awareness groups such as CeaseFire in Chicago — to mobilize. These groups educate residents about violence prevention, hold rallies to pressure lawmakers and conduct direct intervention through peer counseling and mentoring programs.

In April, after 40 people in Chicago were shot — 12 killed — in one week, Mayor Richard M. Daley convened an emergency summit with police, community leaders and religious leaders, to address gun violence.

At a May 10 press conference, the mayor railed against the gun lobby and lectured parents on taking responsibility for their children: “We live in a society that seems to downplay the importance of parental or adult responsibility.” Based on the location of the shootings, the mayor clearly was addressing African-American parents.

But the violence has grown only worse. According to the Chicago Tribune, for the first seven months of 2008, murders rose 18 percent over the same period in 2007 — from 246 deaths to 291. Murders rose 9 percent — or up from 266 deaths — over the same period in 2006. In July 2008 alone, the death toll was 62.

Daley’s response was notable for what it lacked — any acknowledgment that many black families are caught in a low-wage economy, and that the nation’s most violent neighborhoods also suffer the highest unemployment.

In his 2002 study of world gangs, Missouri State University criminologist and social researcher Michael Carlie wrote that gang-dominated neighborhoods in the United States “may be characterized as having a disproportionate number of residents who are unemployable, unemployed or underemployed.” Such neighborhoods, he noted, “are characterized by a lack of economic opportunities, poverty, inadequate city services, struggling school systems and are home to a significant segment of the city’s minority populations.”

According to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, black unemployment in Chicago stands at 10.9 percent, five times that of whites and one of the highest in the country. The national unemployment rate is 6.1 percent.

A national pattern

In 2007, when Baltimore achieved the status of second deadliest city in the nation, government and civic leaders mobilized.

Mayor Sheila Dixon formed a task force on illegal guns and installed a system that tracks guns that have been used in crimes. Her crime-fighting strategy centered on four basic steps: report a crime, prevent a crime, track crime, speak out. Dixon’s “prevention,” however, involves programs such as “operation crime watch” and “start-a-citizens-on patrol,” but no mention of good jobs.

Like Chicago, Baltimore is embroiled in a protracted debate about the economic direction of the city. Labor and community groups oppose development policies that favor big business and ignore community interests. Business groups want to direct city resources into the downtown area for development projects, such as parking garages, luxury housing, retail and conversion of abandoned factories into high-tech office space.

Led by UNITE HERE!, a coalition called Baltimoreans’ Forum on Responsible Development emerged to challenge the city’s use of public funds to finance private development. On July 29, the group held its first meeting. “The community response has been great” Jessica Turner, a union research analyst who helped to organize the meeting, told the Baltimore Sun. “We had more than 100 community members, and I think four city council members.”

Residents testified in opposition to city subsidies for a redevelopment project planned for Westport, a working-class neighborhood in South Baltimore. They also attacked plans for City Center — a $750 million downtown hotel, condo and retail complex slated for completion in 2012.

Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a national nonprofit research group that promotes “smart growth” and “accountable development,” decried the city council for not “linking these big downtown developments to tangible benefits in the neighborhoods.”

In its study of Baltimore’s development strategy, Good Jobs First noted that “the city has neglected to enact standards to ensure that the new tourism jobs are of high quality” and that most of the new jobs are low wage, part-time and “pay less than the federal poverty line for a family of four.”

In Philadelphia, the situation is not much different. Although the city’s aggressive law enforcement has helped reduce gun deaths — from 417 between August 2006 and July 2007, to 334 between August 2007 to July 2008 — community activists say that poverty and joblessness, complicated by a flood of guns, threaten the progress Philadelphia has made in reducing violence.

Fabricio Rodriguez, who heads Philadelphia Jobs With Justice, a national workers’ rights organization, says law enforcement and community intervention strategies do make a difference, but “they don’t deal with structural problems that impede change.” [Disclosure: I am the executive director of the Chicago chapter of Jobs With Justice.]

Rodriguez says that the city focuses too much on individualized job training programs. “These are useful,” he says, but “collective solutions that involve organized workers are both empowering and create lasting change.”

“We have to turn these service-sector jobs into good-paying jobs, and one way is to organize those workers. People should be able to enter the middle class working at Wal-Mart.”

Nowhere is the failure of urban politicians more evident than in their complicity in the false narrative — carefully orchestrated by corporate leaders — that service-sector jobs are inherently low wage. This claim is contrived to make it “unrealistic” for local communities to demand decent wages or persuade corporations to make community investments.

Indeed, the “low wage” narrative is increasingly difficult to make, especially in the era of obscene wealth and income gaps. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, two nonprofit groups, showed that the average CEO of a large U.S. company made $10.8 million last year. That’s 364 times what the average worker made. Target Corporation Chairman and CEO Robert Ulrich alone made $20 million.

Same playbook

In the early 1900s, factory jobs — those now referred to as “good paying” manufacturing jobs — were the jobs of the poor. They were dangerous and dirty. But with unionization and changes in public policy, they became middle-class jobs.

Today, if cities are going to weather the economic storms engulfing the country, urban politicians must follow the same playbook. Nowhere is it written that people who work service-sector jobs cannot, or should not, earn enough to enter the middle class.

As the service sector grows, municipal officials must reevaluate their relationship with these employers, who are, in many respects, captive to the city. The service industry, which includes retail stores, hotels, parking garages and restaurants, is dependent upon the purchasing power of American consumers. Cities can — and must — require these employers to pay higher wages and recognize the right of workers to organize. That must be a cornerstone to any long-term crime-prevention strategy.

An outraged citizenry has the right to demand that elected officials do more than attend the funerals of their loved ones or send condolence cards. They must act aggressively to rebuild the employment infrastructure of abandoned neighborhoods, so as to prevent the lure of gangs and the lure of guns.

Jobs save lives.

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• Reader Comments

  I like the thrust of the article. I disagree with the overall tone that government has an obligation to force business into a mandated mold however.

  The very bottom line is that kids will reflect how they are raised. If Mom and Dad are not setting a proper example, the child is more at risk than if they were. A child whose parent or parents do not teach and practice fundamental right and wrong is easy prey for those elements that lead to crime and entrapment in the ghettos.

  A child taught personal responsibility, and held to a moral standard by parents who obviously love him or her is less at risk. He or she will still question why studying in school is needed when the local drug dealer is paying cash for an Escalade.

  Governments role in this is to make it possible for business to enter, establish itself, and prosper. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about Wendy, or Ford Motor Company. Capitalism is a proven means to escape a bad situation if applied by a person with an honest work ethic as well as a family that is sustaining.

  With a nod to those who truly only want the best for the poor I cannot support the notion that government involvement is the answer. If I were to open a business in a poor section of town, I would hope that the bureaucrats would leave me alone to prosper. I would hope that they would understand that mandates, or excess regulation, would only drive me out and negate their final desired result of less poverty and more employment.

  All in all I laud the goal and hope we can continue to discuss the process to achieve it.

  Phil

  Posted by Phillip on Sep 14, 2008 at 7:04 PM

  Thank you Phil for responding to my article. 

  No one I know objects to the idea of “personal responsibility.” In fact that admonition is routinely given at places of worship in the black community. It is a message that African American political and religious leaders have preached throughout history. The problem is it runs up against limits.
  You suggest that government has no obligation “to force business into a mandated mold.” By implication, left to their own devices, businesses will act in the best interest of workers and communities.  Taken to its logical conclusion this world view posits that we do not need a minimum wage, OSHA to enforce workplace safety, the 8-hour day or mandated overtime pay. The free market will take of everything. Come on now Phil!

  Setting aside the absurdity of such an argument, let me explain why companies like Wal-Mart should be forced to pay a living wage. There are two ways workers could get a pay raise. They can unionize, or work hard and hope the employer rewards them.

  Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million workers are prevented from unionizing, period. Hard work is no guarantee—ask any of the 1.6 million female workers who have filed a class-action gender discrimination suit against the company. The women say Wal-Mart underpaid them because they of their gender. A federal just found probable cause to believe they were discriminated against. 

  Today’‘s CEO’s are under enormous pressure to please stockholders. Their policies are driven by the quarterly Wal-Street cycle. In that environment, the needs of workers are increasingly sidelined.

  So, if the workers cannot join a union, and cannot count on their hard work to earn a promotion, what are their options? The legislative mandates you decry are the only recourse for workers. Companies cannot simultaneously deny workers the right to organize and prevent them from seeking legislative remedies. They simply can’t have it both ways.

  The corporations you defend, Phil have a real problem. These days, the average CEO, as I pointed out in my article, makes 364 times what the workers makes. Wal-Mart’s CEO H. Lee Scott makes $35 million per year—that’s $16,000 per hour (!!), while he denies his workers a living wage by blocking unionization and lobbying against living wage mandates. The Economic Policy Institute has found that Wal-Mart could pay $13 per hour to its workers, and the impact on its bottom line would be negligible.

  Overwhelming majorities of Americans believe every worker who wants to join a union should do so freely. And, most importantly, they believe people who get up every day to go to work should not be poor. Conservatives—and some liberals—championed welfare reform. But after lecturing to the poor about the dignity of labor, a GOP-dominated congress refused to raise the minimum wage for 10 YEARS, from 1997 to 2007. It was a new Democratic congress that changed that in 2007. How are poor people supposed to make the transition out of poverty? Yet it is conservatives who are quick to denounce “social pathologies” in the inner cities—with no sense of irony whatsoever. 

  Another damning issue for Wal-Mart and other big retailers is that they receive billions of dollars in public subsidies, and their workers receive federal aid through Medicaid, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Programs (LIHEAP), Section 8 housing subsidies and so on. All these benefits for employed workers amount to a huge tax-payer funded subsidy for these corporations. What happened to the free market, Phil? 

  The fact is everyone knows if corporations are not pressured to treat workers with dignity and respect and pay a decent wage, they will not do it. Ask a Wal-Mart worker.
  James Thindwa

  Posted by monomotapa on Sep 15, 2008 at 10:08 PM

  James, thanks for the response and more importantly; A civil response.

  I am not conservative, nor liberal. I am independent. Not “an independent” since that implies I am merely a member of another political faction. Instead I prefer to consider myself to be open minded and reasonable.

  My son, 22, worked for Wal-Mart for two years. It is an entry level, low responsibility position. As a cashier his decisions had no effect on the state of business. His diligence merely required him to scan the item and request the customer to pay. Any issue other than that required him to notify an immediate CS Manager. These so-called managers had little to no supervisory authority, and very little measurable responsibility. The question the board of directors and shareholders have to ask is; How much value do those functions add to the profit margin?

  The bottom line is that some jobs are simply not worth as much as some would call a living wage. When your major skill is asking, “Do you want fries with that?” you cannot expect to get rich.

  To the best of my knowlege there is no legal way you can prevent your workers from organising. I could be wrong. I will also concede that there are ways to “influence” the process as well.

  I am not a union guy. I believe that at one time they were needed. I also believe that they are corrupt and do not benefit the worker nearly as well as they raise money for the politician of the week. If you wish to organize, go for it. I don’t believe in forced unionism, such as the “closed shop” anymore than I believe in forbidding unions. Envision a place where you get hired. You are given the option of joining the union or dealing directly with management on your own. Each side makes its’ case, and you make a choice. The freedom for each person to choose their own destiny and manner of seizing it is what America is all about right?

  I don’t believe that OSHA and other agencies are bad. But, I believe it should be a local agency. One size fits all regs rarely do. And, the most efficient and responsive .gov tends to be the one closest to the people. So, unless it is in the enumerated powers I think Congress should butt out. And, if it is enumerated, it should be sparingly applied.

  Take your example of a minimum wage. I oppose the fed mandating it because I believe in a small central government. But, I have no problem if Illinois wishes to mandate a state-wide minimum. I have no problem if Chicago wishes to expand on that with a city wide minimum. Of the big three (local, state, fed) who would know down to the penny what the requirements of a living wage were for Mr. Jones living at 123 MainStreet USA?

  Finally, I do believe that a genuinely free market would deal well with the things we are discussing. The abuse of workers led to the rise of unions. Logically, the unions should fade away as conditions improve. Instead they are artificially kept in place. In a free market you will prosper or wither and in neither case will the government support you. Obviously we don’t have a free market. It would be best, in my own opinion, to get as close to one as we can. The first step is to decentralize the regulating authorities down to the local level so that only needful regulations are put into place. The second step is to cease and desist federal dollars being pumped into the business sector. What the states and localities do is their own business and they can deal with the voters.

  I’ve rambled a bit and do apologize. If I were a professional writer I am sure I could make my points stronger and more concisely. I appreciate your patience.

  Take care,
  Phil

  Posted by Phillip on Sep 15, 2008 at 11:48 PM

  Your correlation between joblessness and gun violence is spurious at best. Chicago has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, and needless to say the old pro-gun argument that criminals don’t obey gun laws is absolute truth. I’d wager a precious weeks wages that not a single weapon used in any of those crimes was legally obtained, and therein lies all the difference.

  I live in the most economically-depressed state in the union, my career was downsized and I had to start a completely new job path from scratch at half the pay I was making, yet at no time did I ever consider joining a gang nor victimizing my fellow man for an easy buck.

  The gang mentality is cultural and the problems far deeper than economic opportunity. I would agree that the economy sucks, no one knows it more than I, but that is never an excuse to turn to crime and violence and to lay the blame thusly absolves these miscreants of the responsibility that is theirs alone to bear.

  As soon as every citizen stops looking to Uncle Sugar to “solve their problems” the better off they, and everyone else, will be. The nanny state breeds dependance and lack of personal responsibility.

  As the old saying goes: “Free your mind, the rest will follow.”

  Posted by mattthegreat on Sep 16, 2008 at 8:34 AM

  Wow.  This is almost humorous.  Almost.  So now we are going to have “collective work gangs?”  Government lackies keep proposing the same stupid solutions and when those fail, they insist on more of the same.

    More government, more government more government.  How much is too much? What is the principle?  On that note, I actually liked the old schools socialist better. They were at least operating on some kind of principles, wrong though they were.

    Modern socialist propose the same stupid ideas, but base it on little more than fatuous sentimentality (e.g. “Nowhere is it written that people cannot — or should not — earn enough to enter the middle class.”)

    -Ken
  http://www.LaserGuidedLoogie.com

  Posted by Ken-LGL on Sep 16, 2008 at 10:35 AM

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