Review of West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State

West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
by Mark Arax
Public Affairs: 350 pp., $26.95

It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst.

“Democracy,” Leonard Cohen

As America is to the world, so is California to America. If you’re looking for the greatest opportunities and the biggest dreams – along with the biggest absurdities and the greatest atrocities – well, you go to the U.S. of A. And if you’re already there, in one of the other forty-nine states, why then, you go west. Or, more precisely, as author Mark Arax notes, you go west of the West which is where Teddy Roosevelt said he felt he was when he was in California. You might say that California is America to the next degree – America squared.

Much of the rest of the country’s knowledge of the Golden State is limited to the Pacific Coast from San Francisco down to Los Angeles or maybe San Diego. Not that this doesn’t encompass a lot – this 550 mile stretch includes the country’s largest county, Los Angeles (whose nearly ten million population almost doubles that of runner-up Cook County, Illinois) along with four of America’s thirteen most populous cities. Arax wrote for the Los Angeles Times for twenty-seven years, so his new collection of essays, “West of the West” does cover this well known California, but ultimately he is not of it and his writing on it is not his best work.

“Eyre of the Storm,” for instance, is a bit of stereotyped mockery of the “far out” Bay Area that covers “Naked Day” in Berkeley, a convention of conspiracy theorists, and an old family friend in Berkeley who is “a believer in UFOs and past lives,” including her own past life as Mary Magdalene. Arax ends the piece lamenting the decline of meaningful political activism and “[t]he social transformation of San Francisco and Berkeley, its iconic foot bath and organic tampon self-absorption, [and] the inexhaustible consumption made possible by the ascent of the silicon chip.”

Unfortunately he appears not to have examined much past his preconceptions, otherwise he would have found a left wing majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actively involved in creating programs like a municipal minimum wage, maintaining rent control, and generally grappling with the problem of ensuring that the city’s working class and poor population is not swept away by the waves of wealth washing up from Silicon Valley. And quality aromatherapy is not high on their agenda.

Arax himself originally hails from Fresno, whose population of nearly half a million makes it California’s largest city not bordering on the Pacific Ocean — in other words, California’s largest unknown city. “If you want to see concentrated poverty,” he writes, “unlike any other city – Fresno number one, New Orleans number two – or witness the nation’s highest per capita IV drug use, come to our inner city.”
And it is in his reporting on the unknown California that Arax shines. As the state’s banks repossessed $100 billion worth of houses over a two-year period – 1,300 houses emptying each business day – he tells us that no area was hit harder than the Central Valley where Kern County had become so pro-growth that it abolished its planning commission, helping to make “Bakersfield, the most sprawled city in the West.”

Leading up to the crash, “[f]or every dollar the boom was generating,” he writes, “cities were spending roughly two dollars to provide streets and sewers and cops to serve the new suburbs. … When the city’s [Fresno’s] own economic impact studies began showing that each housing tract was putting Fresno deeper in the red, Mayor Jim Patterson stepped in. The city, he said, could no longer afford to do economic analysis.”

But the best parts of “West of the West” concern California agriculture – and its amazing extremes. “The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman” is a story of migrant farmworkers. Now, most of America thinks it already knows that one; after all, United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez has even had his own postage stamp. But these are not Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers. Today one out of every five farmworkers in the Valley – 75,000 – are Mixtec Indians who have left behind villages in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla now largely depleted of working-age men. Their children often struggle in California schools not just because they don’t speak English, but because they don’t speak Spanish either, but rather Mixtec languages such as Triqui.

Arax rides a farmworker bus headed to the raisin fields filled with speakers of six indigenous languages. “They had left villages of slash-and-burn farming for the most technologically advanced agriculture in the world,” he writes, and yet “the work could not have been more primitive.” He found the fastest pickers earning between $10 and $12 an hour; they might make $10,000-12,000 in a summer. The slowest “were not even making $30 a day – somewhere between $2 and $3 an hour.” He concludes that “[w]e are more than happy to buy a bag of plums for the same $5 we paid in the 1990s but give no thought as to how that trickles down to the farmer and his field hand.”

“Highlands of Humboldt” covers the other end of California agriculture – geographically and economically. Arax visits a plot where no one earns “less than $40 an hour, likely the highest piece rate in all of American agriculture.” These farmworkers harvest marijuana, “the biggest single cash crop in all of California, dwarfing the $10 billion a year agricultural bounty of Fresno and Kern – the number one and two farm counties in the country.” In the geographic top of California – 7,081 square miles, 215,000 people, 85 percent of them white – “nearly every standing thing in a two-hundred-mile stretch from Ukiah to McKinleyville … was almost wholly reliant on the unfettered cultivation of marijuana.”

Although the marijuana-growing “Emerald Triangle” pre-existed it, the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, the state’s medical marijuana law, took the industry to a whole other level as it made it quasi-legal. That is to say, legal – with certain restrictions – under state law, but still illegal under federal law. And about once a decade the feds will attempt to assert themselves as they did on June 24, 2008 “when residents awoke to a convoy of 450 federal, state, and local police – cars, trucks, all-terrain vehicles, three-wheelers, a mobile communications center, portable toilets – roaring up the hillside” to raid the fields and grow houses.

Meanwhile, the Emerald Triangle has become home to a cultural divide that few outsiders would conceive of. Arax attends a community meeting, complete with a professional facilitator, called to discuss the problems of “diesel dope” in the Humboldt County town of Garberville. As a grower from Mendocino County to the south had told him, “Weed is a spiritual experience here. We grow it in a sustainable way. We grow it in the backyards using the sun. [In Humboldt t]hey build these huge indoor grow houses and use diesel generators to keep the lights burning.” With the estimated seventy-five gallons of fuel needed to produce one pound of indoor pot being about what an average car burns in a trip from California to Texas, bumper stickers have begun to appear that read: “Diesel Dope: Pollution Pot.”

The Humboldt “rasta rednecks,” as Arax dubs them, are “hill people, the sons and daughters of the old lumbermen and fishermen” whose industries have died out. And he notes that some chapters of the county’s history are of the sort that the nation prefers to speed read through; In 1854, four years after California’s admission to the Union, the Sinkyone, Yurok, and Karok Indians of Humboldt had not seen a white man; ten years later their societies had been destroyed by them. An early edition of the Humboldt Times describes “the red-skin scourge that has long been preying upon their [the colonists’] lives and property.” Arax describes a massacre of three hundred natives, driven by “the calculus that for every white man killed by an Indian, 150 Indians needed to die in return.” (A cynic might note a similarity to the nation’s post-9/11 policy in regard to Muslim nations.)

Where California goes from here is an ever-fascinating question. Just the other day a University of Southern California study reported that for the first time in its history, a majority of the state’s residents were born and raised there. Meanwhile, renewed efforts to cover farmworkers under federal labor law and to legalize and tax marijuana for general use have surfaced. For now, if you want to catch up on a few developments in the state that so often seems home to what is best and what is worst in America, Arax’s book is a good place to start.

I Changed My Mind on Employee Free Choice

Berkeley is filled with bumper-stickered cars. One of a Berkeleyite’s favorite hobbies is telling everyone what his socio-political opinions are by declaring them on the bumper of his car. That car is most likely either a Toyota Prius (with its increased gas mileage, it saves the planet) or the Subaru Outback (which not only gets good mileage, but every model has all-wheel drive: great for the Berkeleyite’s frequent trips out to nature).

One of my favorite bumper stickers is: “Unions: The folks who brought you the weekend.” And it’s true. In this country, we can thank labor unions for a lot of the things we take for granted today in our jobs. Before labor unions, there was no redress for employees who were working long days in unsafe conditions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle was supposed to be about the horrible working conditions that slaughterhouse employees had to endure, but as Sinclair famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit its stomach.” The Jungle is famous not for its exposure of deplorable working conditions, but for its graphic depiction of unsafe food preparation.

It wasn’t until 1935 that Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which affirmed government support of unions, collective bargaining, and placing restrictions on what employers could do. At the turn of the century, businesses viewed unions with a combination of suspicion and disgust. Unionizing was socialism, and socialism was antithetical to the United States and its tradition of capitalism. Eventually, though, the country grew up and realized that the employer-employee relationship was hideously skewed in favor of the employer. In an industrialized economy — that is, an economy where people work for others instead of themselves — employers have tremendous power to enhance or destroy the lives of employees by hiring or firing them. And because an employee is a single person, he has little recourse when faced with the considerable power of an entire company.

Enter the union, the job of which is to leverage the power of all the workers in a firm against the firm, should it become necessary. Unions today enter into legally-binding agreements with firms. These agreements specify things like benefits and wage rates. When a union agreement is about to expire, it needs to be renewed. At this time, the union and the management each tries to re-negotiate the contract to get the best deal. If the two sides don’t come to an agreement by the time the contract expires, then the union members go on strike. They will refuse to work without a contract specifying exactly what their benefits will be.

But you’ve got to have a union first. According to Robert Reich, formerly Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, 1/3 of working Americans belonged to a union in 1955. In 2009, only 8% of workers belong to a union. Part of this trend has to do with the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. But even this doesn’t entirely explain the decline in unionization: Toyota, the most profitable auto manufacturer in the world, is a non-union shop. Its workers are not unionized, but they have good wages and benefits. Toyota is a benevolent employer. Wal-Mart is quite the opposite. Its workers make a little above minimum wage and they largely have no benefits. Wal-Mart is famously and virulently opposed to unions, engaging in practices that, if pursued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), would probably be prosecutable in court. Wal-Mart has closed entire stores rather than suffer the possibility of unionization. We cannot always rely on the benevolency of employers in order to get good wages and benefits — hence the existence of unions and a national framework that supports them.

I have written before about the current process of unionization, as have other Demockracy writers, and I will not go into it here. Again, we come around to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would augment the current system of union creation. Again, I have before explained how it would work. In my previous pieces, I came out against EFCA because it does not have a secret ballot. How, I said, can we get an accurate assessment of whether or not people want to unionize without a secret ballot? I neglected another factor: employer pressure between the initial petition and the actual election. During this period, which usually lasts between 30 and 60 days, employers dramatically increase pressure on employers not to form a union. This pressure can vary from the benign (”workshops” in which union-busters explain to employees why unions are actually bad for them) to the criminal (openly threatening employees with termination if they join unions). Starbucks was found guility of the latter when it fired some employees at a Manhattan store who tried to unionize.

It is this pressure period that causes the disparity we see between the numbers in the initial petitions and the actual elections. An apocryphal 1989 AFL-CIO organizing document declares that, according to its statistics, 75% of employees at a firm need to sign the intitial petition in order to get 51% in the final election. There has not been a study (that I have access to!) that examines the causality of this phenomenon. It could be attributed to peer pressure; that is, when employees’ names are visible, employees will say they want to unionize, even when they don’t. In the privacy of the secret ballot, they are free to vote against the union. But there is another possibility: that employees really do want to unionize, but after two months of propaganda and open threats, employees decide that they don’t want to unionize, after all, due to the possibility of losing their jobs. We have no way of knowing what employees truly want, since there is no test we have that is free from bias, whether from the employer or other employees.

Even though it’s illegal for an employer to fire — or even threaten to fire — an employee for unionizing, it happens routinely. As is pointed out in this sourcebook on EFCA from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, employers treat NLRB fines (the punishment for violating labor law) as just another operating cost. They will gladly fire employees and then pay the fines, since, in the long-term, paying the fines is cheaper than dealing with a union. Fortunately, one of EFCA’s provisions is to increase the penalties for violating labor law, but even then, the fines are still not so large that the world’s large anti-union companies — Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Whole Foods among them — cannot write those fines off as operating costs and call it a day.

The only way to forestall those threats is to allow union creation immediately, which is the point of EFCA. It assumes that the initial petition is the gold standard for union desirability and declares that, if a majority of employees state on the petition that they want to unionize, then a union is immediately formed. This way, employer interference in the unionizing process is minimized.

Contrary to anti-EFCA propaganda, the legislation does not “eliminate” the secret ballot. If a union petition garners greater than 30% but less than 50% of employees’ approval, then the secret ballot process is initiated. EFCA does only what makes sense: namely, if at least half of the employees in a firm support a union, then the union is created. The in-between time is often useful only for anti-union employers, who will use the time either to persuade or to threaten.

So, I’ve totally changed my opinion of EFCA. All else equal, making union formation easier is not a bad thing.

Treasury Secretary Candidates

As President-Elect Obama begins to piece together his administration, the most prominent post will likely be his choice for Treasury Secretary. Given the importance of the Secretary in shaping the course of the Economic Stabilization Act funds ($450 billion left if you are counting), we wanted to run down the most likely candidates:

Larry Summers

A leading Harvard economist, Summer won the John Bates Clark Medal for his research and served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary as well as heading up Harvard during a five year tenure. As a close Obama advisor well respected in academia and the financial sector, Summers is a strong candidate. Drawbacks include the “gender science” controversy that led him to resign from his administrative post at Harvard, as well as his close ties to hedge fund DE Shaw.

Timothy Geithner

Header of the New York Fed as well as Vice Chair of the Federal Open Market Committee which sets interest rates, Geitner has a background in international affairs, earning a graduate degree from SAIS and serving in a variety of positions from Under Secretary at the State Department to the Council of Foreign Relations and the IMF, as well as playing a crucial role in helping to orchestrate recent financial market interventions.

Paul Volker

Part of the “old guard”, Volker is seen as a stable pick who served as Federal Reserve Chairman in the 1980s under Presidents Carter and Reagan, where he helped “tame” inflation and earned respect on both sides of the aisle.

Robert Rubin

Currently a Director at Citigroup, Rubin served as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration and is credited with helping shape “Rubinomics” policies that fostered economic growth and balanced deregulation.

Laura Tyson

A Berkeley economist, Tyson served as Chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Academic Advisers as well as Dean of the London Business School and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jon Corzine

Currently serving as Governor of New Jersey, Corzine has a deep background in financial markets stemming from his work as a partner at Goldman Sachs.