Hiking for free!

So I'm at work at the hiking store the other day and I finally get my tax paperwork and such in and ask: so when is pay day?  It's every two weeks, 1st and 15th is the response.  BUT, due to a warm winter with no snow and the growing/planning pains of a new store, they didn't do much business over the winter and struggled to stay afloat.  So they are right now only going to be paying for February!  ........  yes, a moment to digest....  Now, I can only assume that means that on this 15th they will pay February, and then the 1st will be March and then the next 15th finally to April when I should get some cash.  What?!?!  So I was hired in mid April and won't get paid until mid June?!?  Sigh....

Now yeah, anyone reading this blog regularly is going to understand that I am certainly not in a position to have to wait so long to get paid.  There are also a few people that know me going back that know that this isn't the first time that this has happened to me.  When I was in Prague I was working in a much different situation and position, but under similar compensatory circumstances.  I was a big part of a small company there (working pretty much as the chief operating officer) and was going to be getting a small percentage for all my work and sacrifice.  As we looked for an investor I was not paid much of anything for months and was owed thousands of dollars.  I was trapped then.  They had stalled my visa process so I couldn't get a different job and they owed me money.  I couldn't either justify or actually leave with so much invested.  Not to mention that I had a lot of me personally invested in this company trying to bring medical evacuation services to Iraq and Afghanistan.

This situation here is different.  I am trying to take New Yorkers with disposable income hiking in the Hudson Valley and I have no personal stake in the company other than the energy I bring to work that day.  I am just a laborer, working for the man, and I should be paid by the man.  Yeah, that may sound a bit mercenaryesque, but isn't that the problem of it all?  We take for grated in so many ways the rights of management and ownership.  Ownership takes it for granted that they can ask us to wait to get paid.  There are only so many jobs out there, so they hold a certain amount of power and control over us.  I don't know how much cash the company has or how much the owner is taking for himself.  But few people today think to look at that company itself and shame them for having the audacity to ask their workers to make such sacrifices.  If I don't just acquiesce my loyalty comes under question.  Will I continue to get hours?  to have my job?  How many people immediately question the employers "loyalty" to their employees and to society?  In a hierarchical work structure, it is always about being "loyal" to the boss, the owner, whatever.  If we were all truly seen as equal, no one would be asked to be loyal to anyone over the other.

I am sure the owner is paying his rent.  And all told, he did offer to give me something as an advance if I was really hurting, but who is he to "offer" such a thing?  Where does he assume his power to do that comes from?  As if his situation or business is somehow presumptively more important than whatever it is that I have going on?  Like we are a team or something with equal shares in victory?  I wish we were a team - all equally working towards one goal, but we are not.  We are laborers working to make him money, to make his company grow, his ownership and capital expand.  Yes, we get our wages but hold no stake in the ownership of the means of this production.  That is the system we live in.  We are the tools he will use to hopefully get rich.  So why should we, or how can he ask us, to make sacrifices not commensurate with our relationship with this entity? 

I mean, I don't really hold anything against him personally.  I definitely like him.  He's a good guy just trying to keep his business a float.  But I've been in that position before at another retail store in New Paltz, NY as well.  I worked and worked and worked for them on the floor, making them money, probably holding their store together for a time.  I tried to offer marketing and industry specific advice (I'd worked in other successful stores in that industry), but it went unheeded and the company went out of business a few months after I stopped working there.  So it is tough to see familiar things and have little power to change them, yet still be asked to make sacrifices as if I had power to change something within the company.  I think at minimum he should have mentioned it to me when I was hired.  At least then I could have factored it into my decision making and/or planning/budgeting.  But he didn't, he just left it unsaid.  There is certainly little integrity in that.  

That however is perhaps why he didn't.  He needs people to work for him to help his company move forward.  He can't do it all on his own and he is apparently losing two people that have been with him for a while.  I don't know why, but it is easy to speculate regarding a lack of both payment and even probably work.  I was also just informed, that while I was originally told that I was being hired for both retail sales and as a guide, that I really wouldn't be doing much retail work.  And as I see the demand for the tours, it looks like I am really just a standby guide depending on the number of people on the tours (i.e. the company and his ability to market - the same downfall faced in New Paltz). 

So the gist of all this here is that I am caught in another powerless dilemma that illustrates how little control most workers have over their lives.  What play do I have here?  I can say I'm not going to work anymore until I'm paid, but then I'm causing "a problem" and then if he wanted he could just cut my hours/not schedule me.  That would actually be the prudent business decision if he couldn't afford to move that expense forward a few weeks.  I would also become the guy that isn't "loyal" or isn't a "team player."  After all, he holds the power, it is his opinion of me that matters as to whether I work for him.  If I do keep working, he gets me more and more by the balls, the more and more that he owes me as the less apt I am to leave him and run the risk of losing everything I'm owed.  This is what happened in Prague.  I knew that if I left the company, we would never get any investment and I would never get paid what I was owed for the months I had worked.

What we all don't realize is that this is the intended dilemma of capitalism.  There has to be the "excess labor pool" of willing but unemployed workers that owners can always go to to replace "bad" or "uncooperative" employees.  They can thus act in their own interests as employees are mostly dispensable.  If I want to keep this job, and maintain any chance of my getting paid as a business priority or even in general, then I have to do what he tells me.  For if I stop working there he is certainly going to pay other bills and workers before employees no long with the company.  I am powerless.  I have to have a job, and I want to get paid for the time I've already worked.  So I can't leave and I can't really cause any commotion.  One person told me I should start picketing out front of the store and that I'd be paid by the end of the day!  Yeah, and then that would be my last day.

The point of all of this is, that this system as it exists today is not functional.  Why should a worker have so little power?  Because they "didn't take a risk?"  Maybe they didn't have the same opportunity to take a risk, or the same capacity to be able to take risks, or education on how to create a niche and plan through taking on both the risks and the business.  The fact is, that without average everyday workers, laborers, businesses can not and would not function.  Our system requires both managers and the managed to do their tasks for businesses to succeed.  Why then should one side of that equation be so powerless?  Why should it be so unbalanced?  I go to work, I do my job, and I get paid.  That is one of the general principles of capitalist production that little to no one would argue over.  So why then am I not getting paid?  And why am I so powerless to do anything about it?

A system with such disparities of power is not sustainable for one reason: because intrinsically we all are equal and thus all have the same amount of power.  Any system that alters that and skews it so blatantly in one direction or the other is unsustainable, and can only be viewed as temporary.  The question we face is just how long are we going to allow ourselves to be so powerless?  To be subjugated.

Occupying

So I feel like it is time for this blog to actually get used again.  But the Africa stuff has been going so slowly that I think it is time to just jump in and do some writing about life, its peculiarities, and revolution.  During the last five months I have been Occupying.  Frankly, this post is not where I really want to get into the whole of the last five months.  Rather I'm thinking I'll pick up as life is today, and fill in the holes as it all goes.

I'll pick up where I sit right now.  I am in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant.  I just had an incredibly interesting evening chatting with a slightly staggered African American gentleman I met at the liquor store.  He was talking to the shop keeper about love, how it existed and why he had it for all people.  This is of course a conversation I had no trouble running headlong into!!  Got my cheap bottle of rum and took the conversation outside - stop and frisk, race relations, whatever.  I love the neighborhood.  I'm not really living there per say.  My girlfriend does.  I'm still wholly about occupation it seems, and I occupy three different places at any given day of the week.  Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, Glenwood Queens, or the West Village in Manhattan.  The park is gone, no more sleeping there for me.  Now its about surviving in whatever way we can on our own.

I've just started a job.  This is where I've decided I really needed to start writing here again.  I am working for a relatively obscure political party that focuses on progressive issues and campaigns topush legislation through on these issues (raising the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, over turning corporate personhood, anti-fracking, etc).  The shock and awe of life back in the "real world" has been amazing.  But not how you'd think it would be.  One of the beauties of Occupy has been its horizontal structure.  Everyone has an equal voice.  Conversation is dignified and egalitarian (for the most part).  People wait their turn, use non verbal communication to engage in the conversation while still not being intrusive.  On the whole, everyone is equal.

Now though, I work in the "real world", where corporate structures and hierarchical forms of doing things reign.  It is truly eye opening.  To think that this was the way that things seemed normal to me 6 months ago.   To have a boss, a chain of command, a pecking order, egos fixated on seniority, and a staff of "arms lengths" type.  I feel like I'm in a reverse culture shock like when I came back to the US for the first time after living in Prague for two years.  It's like everything that seemed so innately normal has suddenly been flipped upside down.  That world seems so ridiculous now.  To think that we have these structures in society that completely and purposely segregate us.  Completely make some voices so much more important than others.  We sit there and act as if this is about merit, about hard work; but there are so many factors - history, education, socio-economics, etc - that dictate these relationships in a way that occupy has completely flipped on its head.  I mean, why is it that everyone does not have an equal voice in a corporate structure?  Why is it that I - even as a white male - feel even more emboldened to speak i this setting?  I don't so much at Occupy, where I feel less emboldened to speak as I try to "step back" at times, in an effort for every gender, ethnicity, race, creed, socio-economic and education level to have more of a voice.  In the context of this conversation though, and having more voices involved and heard, I feel like more people should be speaking, more voices heard.   

At Occupy, everyone in theory (and even in attempt I feel), is on the same footing: the millionaire and the homeless, the black and the white, the male and the female, the employer and the employee.  Now granted, it does not always work smoothly.  People still feel innately ostracized at times, but at least at Occupy it is more about history and the effects of growing up in our current society, rather than the current day's fixed institutionalized structures and social patterns that reinforce those same old power dynamics so daily.

This is the work world we live in, fully hierarchical, wholly marginalizing, completely disheartening.  I miss Occupy already.  Not that I am gone, but at even the first taste of that "real world", I am still yearning for that other life.  A new occupation.  What an amazing culture shock.  I wish everyone could feel the empowerment of actually having a voice, only to have it suppressed again.

Ideology

Obviously, non-profits come with the presumption of being ideologically driven.  Unfortunately, this scenario we are setting out upon is driven by an ideology.  But I suppose this can be said about anything.  Everyone and everything has an underlying meaning or purpose, a reason for doing.

The basic principle that I (not we) are moving into this with is completely altruistic.  I have some very divergent views from the mainstream.  Yet this does not absolve me from living and working in the real world as it exists today.  There is ideology and reality - life is about balancing the two, as is this project.

The ideology that I, and hopefully a soon to be incorporated non-profit, will be approaching development and redevelopment work is to try to minimize ideology, especially our own.  I view this as one of the biggest detractors and obstacles towards sustainable global development.  When most organizations, companies, governments, individuals, whatever, go into an area with an aim to make something 'better' they are starting from a point of judgment.  For most people in the West it is about making the lives of people 'better'.  This is obviously a very subjective terminology.  I would prefer to think of lives on a linear level, they are equally different, not hierarchically ranked.  All these 'things' we have in the 'developed' West, yet happiness still seems to elude most of us.

The goal of this specific endeavor is to try not to go into any event or project driven by a specific ideology or template.  Every place in the world is different, every person different, every culture wanting different things and motivated by different things.  Agendas.  The world is full of them, yet the only one that should matter is those of the people that will most directly be affected by whatever scenario is to happen.

What this means is that this prospective organization will not be pushing any specific ideologies as the 'solution' to someone's or some place's 'issues'.  Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Civil Liberties, whatever, the specific pathway is, they do not always solve issues on their own.  Unregulated free markets can truly hinder an overarching community's development, just as a planned economic system can allow for much less initiative and reward than may truly stimulate advances.  Dictatorships throughout humanity have been mostly rigid and oppressive, and while democracy gives everyone their say it is slow, inefficient, and inherently compromising.  On there own and as we understand them they bring about presumptions and judgments, but these judgments are of peoples interpretaitons of the past, not the future or even the present.

We need new thinking that is not afraid to work outside existing ideology and presumption.  Would the world really be such a terrible place if it was run by Gandhi in a dictatorial position?  A communist Soviet Union was the fastest country ever to industrialize, what can we learn from this?  Free Markets and industrial incetive have made the US the worlds superpower, and a strong social safety net has lead Europe's people to high levels of statistical 'happiness' and security.

What can we learn from all of this?  That there is no one way, no one best, but that different things work in different places.  The ultimate aim of any scenario is to try to make local people happy.  Try to empower both local communities and local individuals without empowerment of one coming at the expense of the other.  Thus, our project will be about each individual situation and trying to use knowledge and human experience to empower localities and individuals within them alike.

All projects will be looked at in terms of a balance of both individual and community good.  If you bring in a factory and there are rich owners but poor workers, have you helped the community?  If you set up a fully equal communal work scenario, how is the individual rewarded for greater effort?  Balances must be found.  Balances with humanity, with the environment, with ourselves, with our communities, etc.  Localized solutions for localized cultures.

This is the main ideological premise that I'd like our organization to be based upon - ideology without ideology.  We want to make a difference for the people where we do work, not for ourselves or our own goals and principles in life.