Where's it all going?

It looks like NO711 is headed towards a racially divided face-off. NO711 is 100% white and mostly middle-class. Store employees are neither. 

Two months ago, when the opening seemed inevitable, I asked 7-Eleven Corp if they'd be willing to give back to the community. Their public relations consultant agreed. I suggested engaging with youth services, men's shelters, services for abused spouses and healthy food services. Together we began looking for options. But, as one local social service director explained to me, the social service organizations here depend on the good will of the local community, so it is unlikely that any service will collaborate with 7-Eleven as long as a local group like NO711 opposes it. 

Meanwhile, the 7-Eleven store opened despite a stop work order. Apparently 7-Eleven feels that their illegally placed refrigerator units and industrial fans are the building owner Jared Kushner's problem, not theirs. That's a low blow for 7-Eleven, but they've got a high commercial rent to pay, and with the rent Kushner's getting from them, it's even lower of Kushner not to resolve the stop work order immediately. But what does he care?

The store will, following standard procedure, give its outdated foods to a church soup kitchen, in this case the church on Avenue B.

So the store is here, so is NO711, an ugly race confrontation is imminent, and no community give-back beyond the pro forma. 

At a meeting with the NO711 group in June, I let the group know that I didn't want to be involved beyond cutting the checks for the grant that I got for them as the block association treasurer. I support NO711 as neighbors, but years ago I recognized that the neighborhood as it is today is nothing that I beleive strongly enough about to work to preserve.  It's a gentrified neighborhood, belonging moslty to youth of privilege. I accept that reality. I stay here only because I have an affordable apartment a block away from a park and a pleasant library I enjoy, and within walking distance of Chinatown and the East River, and I know this place and many of its people of whom I am fond. 

In September, the 11th Street ABC Block Association board asked 7-Eleven to meet with the block. They wanted to meet with our board alone (presumably to gain the credibility of having met with the block association) but would not commit to meeting with the block (presumably because it would be a public meeting and many of the explanations of their business model might not look good to the press). When we insisted on an open block meeting, they asked to meet with me alone, not as a representative of the Block Association or NO711. I agreed. That's when we got started on a community give-back. I wish it would go further. 

Lately my feelings have been all over the place. Would a zoning restriction on chain stores save the local butcher? Probably not. It would save New York for upscale restaurants. That'd be great for tourists who look to NY for a change from suburbia, but I don't feel that as something worth fighting for. I don't feel proud of washing my hands of all this, and I wish 7-Eleven had backed out long ago, but I don't see the situation now going towards good for anyone. The corporation appears to be still willing to give back to the community. But the residents around the store are unhappy and you can't blame them. 

Hope in organizing?

The panels I attended at the Left Forum on Saturday (mostly analysis) were depressing, Sunday (engaged activism), optimistic.

It's a public forum, so I shouldn't expect any revelations, but still, familiar boilerplate analysis is tired. Even the solutions were depressing since there was no hint of how to get the world to implement them.

Cathy O'Neil, from Occupy's Alt Bank group, provided the only positive suggestion I heard all Saturday: a people's lobby. She thinks office holders are completely in the dark (she seems to ignore their aids some of whom ought to know something) about the complexity of the financial system. All their information comes from corporate lobbyists with a biased slant that serves the immediate corporate interests' grasping. Electeds hear no one from the general public looking out for the overall health of the economy. Office holders, she maintains, need education in the dangers that those narrow corporate interests pose to the overall economy.

There's a big 'if' here: electeds will respond to knowledge if they are not already bought by the corporate interests. If they are bought, then the lobbying is really just providing electeds with their corporate-friendly talking points.

Money is not the only leverage on electeds. Voting is the counterbalance to corporate campaign money, but the voters also need education.

Sunday was more optimistic. Occupy held a round table about current local Occupy efforts including Occupy Astoria/LIC, Occupy Kensington and Occupy Sunset Park. These folks are engaged and getting somewhere. Occupy Kensington is focused on a labor struggle with a specific store, Golden Farm, but they've also become a hub of community discussion. That's also true of the Astoria/Long Island City and Sunset Park groups.

No tired analyses in this room, the discussion was about how to be more effective: how to connect with each other, how useful is the Occupy horizontal organizing, how to sustain momentum, how to get more people off their asses and make a difference, how to take advantage of not-in-my-back-yard & pocketbook issues to expand them into larger social justice activism.

At the last panel the last presenter, Nabil Kamel, gave us the most optimistic history: two instances in which rebuilding from a natural disaster became an opportunity for community groups to improve their circumstances, rather than yet another opportunity for capital to displace the disempowered and rebuild for the revenue-creating rich. Kamel finds that community successes are facilitated by 1) the existence of a prior community organization (e.g., Black Panthers in Oakland, where, decades after their creation, they managed to redirect the rebuilding of a bridge, eventually getting the municipality to train and employ and pay the community to build it themselves), 2) a network of organizations, 3) focus on a single site and 4) 'carving out' of capital interests to gain assistance.

On the downside, any local improvement tends to gentrify the neighborhood. So the Marxist analysis may have the last word if capital turns every reform to its benefit. Chomsky offered a bit of light observing the leftward turn in Latin America. It was fitting that the closing speech was given by the Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera. He made this point that local struggles must be placed in the largest context. Good advice.

Beware capitalist tools

Robert Reich, Clinton's Labor Secretary, posted Monday on his blog a piece arguing limiting access to giant corporations:

If global corporations obeyed all national laws — the spirit of the laws as well as the letter of them – and didn’t use their inordinate power to dictate the laws in the first place by otherwise threatening to take their jobs and investments elsewhere, there’d be no issue.
It’s the fact of their power to manipulate laws by playing nations off against one another – determining how much they pay in taxes, as well as how much they get in corporate welfare subsidies, how much regulation they’re subject to, and so on – that raises the question of how citizens can countermand this power.
Consumer benefits may sometimes exceed such costs. But, as we’ve painfully learned over the years (the Wall Street meltdown, the BP oil spill in the Gulf, consumer injuries and deaths from unsafe products, worker injuries and deaths from unsafe working conditions, climate change brought on by carbon dioxide emissions, and, yes, manipulation of the tax laws – need I go on?), the social costs may also exceed consumer benefits....

...Comparative advantage is nice in theory, but in a world where powerful global corporations are using every strategy imaginable to maximize their profits and powerful governments are strategically employing market access to develop their economies, it’s just theory. 

 Wouldn't it be great if NO711's zoning proposal were the beginning of a wide-spread resistance against global corporate access at the ground level? Instead of relying on our failed political system to defend us from global capital, start with community self-determination growing from a grassroots movement? Could this be the second wave for Occupy -- occupy our own community?

Call to action!

Constructing in an occupied building has become one of the most aggressive means of harassing tenants. Shaoul used it often, and Kushner, who recently bought nearly 30 parcels in our neighborhood, informed the community board last month that he intends to construct building expansions wherever he can. 

The case of 515 East 5th Street may become the precedent for all future expansion harassment. Please come to the Board of Standards and Appeals and spread the word. From GOLES:

GOOD OLD LOWER EAST SIDE, INC



TENANT ALERT!

FIGHT ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF ADDITIONAL FLOOR AND PENTHOUSE ON 515 EAST 5TH STREET!

DATE: TUESDAY, MAY 21ST, 2013

TIME: 10:00 AM SHARP!

PLACE: BOARD OF STANDARDS AND APPEALS (BSA)

22 READE STREET, SPECTOR HALL

NEW YORK, NY 10007

(ONE BLOCK FROM CITY HALL)

COME TO THIS IMPORTANT HEARING AND SHOW YOUR OPPOSITION TO LANDLORD’S APPLICATION TO LEGALIZE THE ADDITIONAL FLOOR AND PENTHOUSE WHICH HE BUILT. THIS CONSTRUCTION WAS FOUND ILLEGAL IN BSA DECISIONS IN 2007 AND 2008. NOW THE LANDLORD IS SEEKING TO REVERSE THEM. IF LANDLORD IS ALLOWED TO KEEP THIS ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTION IT WILL SET A PRECEDENT FOR OTHER LANDLORDS TO DO THE SAME LEADING TO DANGEROUS CONSTRUCTION THAT CAN CAUSE DAMAGE TO STRUCTURE OF SUCH OLD TENEMENT BUILDINGS.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL GOLES 212-533-2541

NO 7-Eleven city-wide petition on line!

NO 7-Eleven: resist chains and corporate control has a city-wide petition on line. Take a look at the great comments along with the signatures. 

To the New York City Planning Commission and City Council: Allow community self-determination to resist chain stores.

To: 

The New York City Planning Commission and City Council 

There are over 7,200 chain stores in New York City with more opening every year. 7-Eleven Corp alone is planning to open 100 new stores in Manhattan by 2015. Chain stores raise commercial rents, crowd out our commercial variety, our choices our mom-and-pops and our diversity. They efface our neighborhood character, erase our ethnic roots, erode our community relationships. They leverage wages down and, once cornering their market, leverage prices up. I call on the City Planning Commission and the City Council to amend the city's zoning text to require that no corporate formula store or bank open a new location without approval from the local community board. Such a zoning amendment will not only allow communities to restrict the number and location of chain stores, but also allow community boards to negotiate legally binding stipulations on all elements of chain store character from signage and closing hours to wage scale.

Allow community self-determination on chain stores, franchises and banks.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

http://www.change.org/petitions/to-the-new-york-city-planning-commission-and-city-council-allow-community-self-determination-to-resist-chain-stores?utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition

7-Eleven and labor organizing

A critic of NO711 says that it's easier to organize labor in giant corporate stores than, say, in a bodega, so 7-Eleven would be better for labor than a bodega. 

But labor in a 7-Eleven is exactly as fragmented as any bodega -- two guys in a store with a manager. That's also true of Duane Reade, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, Subway...the list goes on -- all the chain stores that NO711 is trying to resist. 

So this "organizing" argument is irrelevant. It's about big box stores like Walmart. Here's Human Rights Watch: "[Walmart] stands out for the sheer magnitude and aggressiveness of its anti-union apparatus." In other words, the larger they are, the more financial and legal resources to resist unionization.  And the more resilience to strikes. Why do you think labor organizes against Walmart? Because it's really bad for labor. Supporting giant corporations because it's easier to organize in them is like contracting hepatitis C in order to get on medicaid. Only an ideologue would be so stupid.  

One begins to get the impression that critics of NO711 don't have much upstairs. Think, guys. Take your slurpee straw out of your mouth....

7-Eleven and wages

It's important to consider what would replace a 7-Eleven on 11th and Avenue A. Since there are three liquor licenses within 500 feet of the site, it would be difficult for a bar owner to get passed the State Liquor License's constraints on license density. The next likely candidate would be a restaurant, judging by the local commerce in the EV. So how would a restaurant affect labor?

7-Eleven store associate hourly wage can be as low as $7.25/hr; $8.44 average (from Payscale and Glassdoor). 7-Eleven store associates are required to have English fluency: "Must be able to communicate clearly and effectively with customers and coworkers." They are also subjected to background checks -- no undocumented immigrants allowed.

Mean average for a cook's wage, nation-wide, $11.20/hr; median: $10.29/hr; lowest 10%: $8.14/hr (BLS). No language requirement, no background check. 

So replacing a 7-Eleven with a restaurant in NYC would improve the wage prospects generally, and specifically of immigrant workers, documented as well as undocumented. Unless it were a chain restaurant -- a McDonalds cook wage averages, according to Glassdoor, $7.41/hr. That's one reason among many, NO 7-Eleven is trying to curtail all giant chains and franchises. Minimum wage may be fine for a 16-year-old's first summer job, but not a way forward for labor in general. "The majority (66 percent) of low-wage workers are not employed by small businesses, but rather by large corporations." 

Is it easier to organize labor in a giant corporation? Maybe (but maybe not). Giant corps also have greater political clout the larger they are, so there is a danger of promoting corporatocracy. In one way it's the meeting of Stalinism and libertarianism -- "free" market corporatocracy replaces the totalitarian state, the "internal contradiction" of libertarianism, trading one form of control (government) for another (corporate giants). Reminds me of a Maoist friend who voted for Giuliani thinking that his reactionary policies would spark a revolution. Instead we have rampant gentrification.

New blog "Chinatown for Chinatown: a discussion board"

I started a blog about Chinatown planning called "Chinatown for Chinatown"
http://chinatownforchinatown.wordpress.com/

I've avoided blogging about Chinatown while I was involved with a Chinatown planning group. It's not the kiss-and-tell aspect -- I believe in transparency. But journalism gives the writer an unfair advantage within the group. It can bias the process or coerce it. But the Chinatown Working Group has mostly concluded its discussions, now waiting for its planning consultant to come up with recommendations to the group. So I can write as an outside observer.

I've asked several local voices and urban planners to post as regular guest bloggers. I'm hoping to see an open, broad discussion that will be of help to the planning consultants as they dig into the issues and challenges that Chinatown faces.