The story of how I couldn’t really hack it as a labor activist was part of the larger story of how gentrification was turning New York City into a spiritual wasteland.
Back in 2008, I graduated from college and wanted to work in public policy. A professor warned me: “Don’t send out your résumé.” Instead, he said, “go to events.”
So, I took a Greyhound up to Albany to attend a conference.
On the bus, I noticed a young woman with a Sharpie, who was writing “FOOD POLICY” across the top of a brand new, yellow legal pad. During the bus ride, I struggled to come up with the courage to strike up a convo. And evidently, this stranger struggled to come up with ideas for what to write on her new pad (which remained blank for the whole trip).
Moriah Kinberg evidently needed some writing help, and she hired me to work with her at UFCW.
UFCW represented supermarket clerks. In New York City, these workers were mostly Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican. Of course, many supermarket bosses have tried to undermine their workers, by installing self-check-out robots. And often in New York, unscrupulous employers have hired people without papers, and paid them less than the legal minimum wage. But throughout my time at UFCW, the union—in collaboration with the Department of Labor—repeatedly won large settlements against fancy, gourmet grocery stores that had violated labor laws.
Through college, I had worked at Trader Joe’s. I pretended to believe that it was “very Zen” to stock shelves. But for supermarket workers who are unionized, the job means a living wage with decent benefits. Unions are crucial for protecting workers, economically and culturally. With deunionization, the working-class is dissolved, precariatized. Being a unionized worker means being able to retain the jobs, habits, and affects that are characteristic of the working-class.
Mo, whose father had been a Reconstructionist rabbi, told me that a union was kind of like a church or a synagogue: you need to pay dues and attend services; and, in return, you get both the material and spiritual benefits of community. A union keeps alive a spirit. And unionization brings about the self-awareness (the class-consciousness) that’s part of any thriving tradition. The de-unionization of New York City has majorly contributed to the city’s gentrification, its loss of a collectivist ethics of interpenetrating Catholic faith and left-wing radicalism.
Culturally, at the union, I hardly fit in. Despite my own roots in the working-class of Appalachia, I had been exiled from my family, and I had graduated from a private university. Moreover, I showed up to the union hall wearing my public-policy uniform of Levi’s and a white-collared shirt. My vocabulary, meanwhile, was full of jargon. I thought about struggle in terms of policy, benchmarks, cost/benefit analysis. And I had a limp wrist.
The union hall was profoundly ambivalent about queer identity. Privately, one staffer indicated to me that he was gay and that no one else on staff knew. Another organizer never came out, but I saw him masturbating in the Bloomingdale’s restroom. Once, a rep was screaming on the phone, “cocksucker” and “faggot”; but Mo asked him to stop, and he sincerely apologized to me. A few weeks later, I came to the office early and found him butt-naked in his cubicle with a secretary. Despite the closety atmosphere, the union always marched in the Pride Parade and sponsored queer-friendly legislation.
My director was Pat Purcell, a vulgar, Irish-American worker, 400-pounds overweight in a supermarket polo. Through Pat’s lobbying, the union favored the red-headed lesbian City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn, in the mayoral elections (mostly as a matter of Irish-American solidarity). When we met at City Hall with a bunch of priss-and-prim policy planners, Pat screamed at them: “You tell that cocksucker mayor that he can pass my bill, or I’m gonna rip him a new asshole!” All of the Yalies wilted.
When, later, all of us in the union marched in the Labor Day Parade, down Fifth Avenue—passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral—this same crude bastard then used those same, filthy lips to humbly bow before the Cardinal and kiss his Excellency’s ruby ring.
Pat straddled the overlapping cultures of Catholicism and organized labor, interlocking agents of social justice that, for centuries, had protected the dignity of New York’s workers against unregulated capitalism. At the union, the foul-mouthed language was just the ungentrified speech of New York’s radical Jews and Italian, Irish, and Puerto Rican Catholics. Cursing, they advocated for the same policies that had been put forth more elegantly in the Latin of Papal encyclicals.
The Church has repeatedly taken a stance against unregulated capitalism. In the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII proposed that labor “is not a mere commodity” because the “worker’s human dignity in [labor] must be recognized.” Labor, therefore, “cannot be bought and sold like a commodity.” Workers have a natural right to a living wage and to form unions. Also, the Church has cautioned against allowing the nation-state to monopolize political power. Against the liberal-puritanism that would erect an over-arching nation-state to regulate life by law, the Church proposes, instead, an anarchic subsidiarity. This is the doctrine that people flourish when, from the bottom-up, they take decisions locally. The Church proposes that people should participate in self-regulating collectives—as in the Middle Ages, before the capitalist nation-state, when politics was a hodge-podge of overlapping structures (autonomous universities, self-regulating workers’ guilds, itinerant orders). In the 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno, Pope Pius XI proposed a return to this medievalist anarchy, whereby people governed themselves without state interference. Opposing liberal-capitalism, fascism, and communism, the Church has advocated for communication and cooperativism. Just a few blocks south from where Joey and I lived, on East 1st Street, the offices of the Catholic Worker were still open—a relic, testifying to Dorothy Day’s faith in Catholic anarchism.
In the history that I am telling, I already mentioned to you that, after World War II, a racist real-estate market enforced segregation and impoverished New York, sending whites out to the suburbs while the inner city was left to burn. And now, here’s how my work at UFCW plays into that history. With post-war white-flight, many supermarkets fled the city, too. Grocery-store execs calculated that suburbanites had more cash to spare, and that, outside the city, they could build more profitable stores. Many city neighborhoods were left without access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Urban people of color suffer from catastrophic rates of obesity and diabetes, because of public policies that had disincentivized healthy food access.
Advocacy groups began to lobby the City Council. They demanded policies to promote supermarket development, in order to improve city diets. These incentives came as a package bill, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (“FRESH”). At UFCW, I worked as a lobbyist and community organizer. With the union, we argued that government aid should only support supermarkets that paid living wages to workers, who were hired from the local community. Our concern was that public assistance should not subsidize expensive gourmet stores that served the rich and abused the poor. Already, snooty, non-union shops were popping up around Gotham. Without labor protections, the FRESH subsidies would exacerbate inequality.
I should have told you about the union hall, how it spatially reflected the dwindling power of labor. Inside, the hall was a dreary maze of beige cubicles and fluorescent lighting, air-conditioned like a meat freezer and blaring Muzak. Outside, the hall was hardly in New York City at all. The union’s offices were housed in a personality-free “corporate center” at the extreme end of Queens, one block from Long Island. Most of the reps lived out in the burbs, driving gas-guzzling SUVs leased with union dues. The union’s power base tilted towards the suburbs, and supporting FRESH was a last-ditch initiative in the city.
I coordinated with community groups and met with politicians and bureaucrats. Throughout the legislative process, I wrote up and repeated talking-points about good jobs being part of the FRESH program. Meanwhile, I observed the contradictions within the city’s gentrifying culture: municipal government was a mash-up of the old and the new New Yorks—a clash between the New York that is a bunch of working-class, immigrant neighborhoods, and the New York that is a globalized capitalist metropolis.
Mayor Bloomberg was a Harvard M.B.A. billionaire with a brain for bureaucracy and biopolitics. The City Council was made up of Huckleberries in cheap suits, who maybe had attended Baruch or the College of Staten Island, and—in the middle of a meeting—they would yawn and ask if me and Mo didn’t want to just go get some cheeseburgers? The big-wigs at the union bragged about having these council members “in their pockets.”
Council members and community groups immediately supported labor projections. The professional planners, however, demurred. And the mayor’s staff flatly objected. Interfering in the market with subsidies was fine as long as it benefited capital.
I could identify with Bloomberg: we were both short, Napoleonic, and convinced of our intellectual superiority. But by the grace of God, I was not filthy rich. Bloomberg, corrupted by power, used his cash to control. When his dream of becoming president was thwarted by Obama, Bloomberg undemocratically overturned the city’s term-limit law. A backroom deal allowed him to finagle a third consecutive stint in office. Bloomberg accomplished this dastardly feat by buying out the opposition—spending $245 million of his own money. Bloomberg’s secret strategy—not reported by the press, but gossiped about by activists—was to offer huge salaries to opposition leaders, so that they would join Bloomberg’s staff.
The corruption ran deep. As FRESH moved through the legislative process, the mayor tried to coopt our community coalition, marginalize the union’s demands, and gut the program of labor protections. And the union was all too willing to be coopted. One day when I came into the office, Mo was crying.
Breaking down, Mo told me that she had received, that morning, an urgent phone call from the leader of an African-American environmental organization based in Harlem (WE ACT). Apparently, the mayor’s staff had let slip to WE ACT that our boss at the union had made a backroom deal. Our foul-mouthed, ring-kissing, Irish-American good-ol’-boy director had visited City Hall. Without consulting anyone, he had intimated that he and the union would permit the bill to pass—would instruct the City Council to vote yes—even if the bill contained no labor protections. As a quid pro quo, the mayor would arrange for the union to informally participate, later, in the process of doling out subsidies. The members of WE ACT—our friends and allies—were outraged—especially that white men had colluded, lied, and cut people of color out of the democratic process. Mo and I took the day off and ate pupusas.
In 2009, when the FRESH bill became law, the new incentive program unwittingly promoted what activists now call “food gentrification.” FRESH incentivized 27 new supermarkets throughout New York City. And, through the union’s machinations, subsidies mostly went to unionized stores. But, afterwards, disparities in healthy food consumption increased. The gentrifying food retailers brought higher prices, as well as product selections and store-branding that excluded long-term community members.
The days of the good ol’ boy, Catholic cocksuckers were coming to an end.
A.W. Strouse, Ph.D., is the author of Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision (Fordham University Press) and Gender Trouble Couplets (punctum). Strouse is currently writing a book about the LBGTQ+ history of Mexico City’s subway system. www.awstrouse.com @putotitlan
Photo taken by Leslie Granados @lgfilm