From the story:
What would you say to people who are concerned about essential places like grocery stores or pharmacies being attacked in those communities?"It's actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that's actually a right-wing myth."
"When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses.
This is hardly a defense of the looting of a small business.
8th and H Streets NE, 1968. Photo: Matthew Lewis, Washington Post.
There is no defense of looting. I understand anger and frustration and why people get violent. But that doesn't mean I can find it justifiable.
Especially because while it might make legislators more willing to pass supports and for businesses and institutions to change a little bit, it destroys communities.
In the best of circumstances, it takes many decades for a community to recover, especially its commercial district. Places not so well resourced take even longer and likely never recover.
E.g., the H Street NE neighborhood I lived in in DC, well located--about 1 mile from Capitol Hill and less than 2 miles from Downtown--took not quite 40 years to recover.
The heart of Detroit, which experienced rioting in 1967, is still bombed out. Newark.. Etc.
Asking the right questions about small business and worker supports. That being said, the "not likely to provide worker protections" is asking the wrong question.
Of course, small businesses, especially retail, aren't likely to provide "worker protections."
Even in the best of circumstances, they can be marginal businesses. Great for the owners, especially in terms of personal wealth building, but not big enough to be able to provide the package of benefits typically offered by larger firms. (Sometimes associations that a business might join offer insurance and other programs that a business can adopt, but couldn't support on their own.
And it's not like chain retail businesses (Starbucks is an exception) provide a great package of benefits, unless they are unionized, and even then, benefits have been whittled away considerably in response to companies changing wage and benefits packages in response to competition from large nonunionized companies like Walmart.
The question should be, "why is it very difficult for small businesses to offer worker protections and benefits?"
The answer is: because they are microbusinesses without scale. The follow up question should be: "what do we need to do to make it possible for workers at these microbusinesses to receive protections and benefits?"
In Europe, this is less of an issue because the social welfare safety net operates independently of the workplace.
I would argue that we want workers/people to have access to a social welfare safety net, we should create one that works independently of the workplace.
Definitely the need for such became clear because it response to the pandemic and the layoff of millions, people lost not only their paychecks but their insurance (Employment, Income, and Unemployment Insurance during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Urban Institute).
PPP was an attempt, not very elegantly, to use the workplace payroll system to deliver wage support that otherwise would come from a beleaguered unemployment insurance system.
Small businesses and local support. The other thing is that most economic studies find that small businesses spend money locally and have a greater multiplier effect on the local economy in fostering additional business, while chain businesses do not, because they usually purchase goods and services from vendors not located locally.
As someone said on an e-list, when do you see Walmart or Home Depot sponsor a local kids sports team?
Studies on the economic impact of locally owned businesses have been done for a number of communities and various retail sectors, when it comes to the economic value of chain stores versus locally owned businesses. The consulting firm Civic Economics has performed these studies around the country.
The National Hardware Retailing Association, the American Booksellers Association, and the American Independent Business Association have commissioned such studies as well.
-- The Multiplier Effect of Local Independent Businesses, AMIBA
-- Study: Shopping Local vs. Amazon Makes Powerful Impact, National Retail Hardware Association
-- Local First and Economic Impact Studies, American Booksellers Association
Opposition to large tax credits for businesses, like FoxConn in Wisconsin, have to do with this kind of analysis too, over how much of the business activity further generates local economic activity.
Years ago, Aaron Renn wrote about how once Anheuser Busch was acquired by a non-US company, they eventually stopped hiring advertising firms based in St. Louis ("St. Louis and the Consequences of Consolidation," New Geography). This process happens in many places associated with business consolidation of banks, department stores and other retail businesses, etc.
Looting as social reparations. Again, I haven't read the book, but the argument is that looting has an element of redress for discrimination and structural racism. Again, I understand this belief, which has been frequently expressed both in the past and currently, in response to looting associated with George Floyd protests. But I don't agree.
Redress is supposed to be societal and such contributions are supposed to be structural and systematic, not an individual taking from someone/a business on their own volition, idiosyncratically.
Although, years ago I wrote a piece making the point that people in poor communities have an anthropological way of thinking about community and business participation and a belief that to locate in the community, they have to pay in. I never took anthro so I don't have the language to describe what I mean completely. Basically that to be part of the community, if you are an itinerant member through a business etc. you have to pay in, a kind of duty/dowry, in order to belong.
So looting can be seen as a kind of redress for the failure to pay in.
-- "In lower income neighborhoods, are businesses supposed to be "community organizations" first?," 2012
The Asian owned business question. And this is very much relevant to the discussions over the years about "Asian-owned stores" in black communities (I remember this being a theme in the "Hill Street Blues" tv show in the 1980s).
It came up a number of years ago in comments by DC's own Marion Barry ("D.C.'s Marion Barry widely rebuked for comments about Asian business owners," Washington Post), but also see this old blog entry about similar comments by Andrew Young, when he was working for Wal-mart, "Andy Young, Mel Gibson, maybe it's something about Los Angeles").
A number of years ago, I happened upon a great book about the Korean/Asian/Black urban retail question, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America, but I never wrote about it.
The book by Jennifer Lee, professor at UC Irvine, is definitely worth reading.
"When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections."
ReplyDeleteHold on, I thought this was supposed to be about police overreach, but in typical leftist fashion, it's all "intersectional", so people's livelihoods are fair game, because anything capitalism is bad.
Frankly, burning and looting small businesses is misguided. I'm a centrist, slightly left of center conventional person, but if this is about state oppression, I'd be ok with seeing state power symbols in flames.
I wrote this over the weekend and didn't publish it today. Another person on the list opined the negative attitude towards (small) business over a desire on the part of leftists for everything to be done "by the state."
ReplyDeleteI wrote this...
I'm not sure I agree with this characterization, that people want the state to do everything, which therefore supports criticism of small business.
But I do think that there is an issue with the fact that plenty of small businesspeople are conservative, judging by the major small business advocacy group, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, etc. They fight regulation. Frequently oppose local government issues on the basis of being over-regulatory and restrictive, and generally, not categorically, don't support more progressive candidates. (E.g., in DC business interests frequently put up "small business" candidates up against the most progressive candidates and incumbents. Almost without exception these candidates lose because they are unable to articulate a platform that resonates with the generally progressive electorate.)
Plenty of small business are active opponents of minimum wage and other worker policy positions promoted at the local level. They usually portray this as because the economics aren't supportable. In many cases that's true, it's definitely arguable. I do think the case can be made that there should be a balance with regulation. OTOH, I argue for mandatory design review, and business proprietor consultation with local commercial district planning organizations long before a certificate of occupancy is issued.
And little business likely gets painted by the same brush as big business, in the way that national groups like the US Chamber of Commerce tend to be overwhelmingly Republican, anti regulation, anti consumer protection, etc. especially with the USCOC because it is presumed that local chambers of commerce are members of the national organization.
The better model for the recent round of riots is less about racial or social justice but:
ReplyDelete1) the utter collapse in economic hopes and aspirations of all Americans under 35;
2) The worst employment crisis -- all self made -- in American history; and
3) The growing realization that black votes do not translate into improved outcomes for black people.
Not endorsing this view, although you might be closer:
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/why-centrists-no-longer-understand-the-world
shorter version -- riots are the expected outcome of coronovirus lockdowns.
I think I'm gonna buy a used copy of the Kerner Commission report.
ReplyDeleteYour three points are updating their conclusions for today, but they are pretty similar.
I talked a few times to the person who claims to be the first person to throw rocks at 14th and U Streets NW in the 1968 riots.
My sense, along the same lines as what you wrote, is that with integration, choices expanded for people with means, and in that time period, especially post 1954, a lot of the people who could leave the city did, both black and white (although plenty of Black middle class at that time did stay) and the people who rioted felt abandoned anyway, and that was only accentuated by the assassination of MLK and the feeling, like your point about black votes having no effect, that nothing would change.
(Even though it's all relative. Black votes do matter but not enough to change structural racism. Although this moment may bring about more change.
It'd be a lot worse with people like McConnell and Cotton and Trump in charge. I often think about those people in Philadelphia and Detroit who didn't bother to vote in the 2016 election. Their votes did matter. But sometimes it's hard for people to take solace in that well by voting this way, at least things aren't a lot worse, while accepting that they aren't necessarily much better.)
Thanks for the cite. Will check out.
There's an interview with the author in the New Yorker.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/vicky-osterweils-case-for-looting
Basically, along the lines of the outline of discourse, protest, and challenging the state, from John Friedmann's _Planning in the Public Domain_, I'd call the arguments in the book "revolutionary" in that they challenge the very existence of the state, because of the ongoing reality of institutional, structural racism.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rllayman/293925951/in/photolist-rYrWP