I am (almost) the 1%

Note: As sometimes happens when privileged white people try to write about class issues, it’s entirely possible I’m offending people here. If so, I apologize sincerely. If you take issue with anything I’ve written here, I’d appreciate knowing what and why so I can correct it in future discussions and thoughts that I have.

On a political level, I’m 100% behind Occupy Wall Street. I flip back and forth between being an anarchist depending on the day, but even old liberal me knows that the level of class inequality and lack of opportunity in this country have gotten absurd. I’m angry at Wall Street, especially the few on it who consciously steered us in this direction knowing they’d be bailed out if their gambles didn’t pay off (looking at you, Goldman Sachs). I’m angry at our government for not doing anything to stop them (not that I expected better). I’m angry at the absurdity of the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts. I’m angry because of the number of good, intelligent, hardworking people I know who are stuck working dead-end jobs for next to nothing just to pay the bills.

On a personal level, it’s harder for me to pin down my feelings about Occupy Wall Street. As the movement has encouraged people to come forward and share stories under the theme “We Are the 99%”, I’ve taken a look at my own circumstances in life. Technically, I am part of the 99%. My family doesn’t rake in millions of dollars a year, I don’t have a trust fund, and I will have to work a real job in the real world to support myself once I get out of college. But that’s where my similarities with most of the 99% end. I will graduate from a good, private university next year with no debt and no student loans. That simple fact sets me apart from so many of the protest signs I’ve seen, from people who graduated with thousands in debt and nothing to show for it. It sets me even further apart from those who never had the means or the opportunity to go to college. And I’m just talking in the US. If you want to go global, in a world where a billion people survive on a dollar a day or less, I am the 1%.

The fact that my life has been extraordinarily privileged doesn’t stop me from worrying about the economy. After my dad told me and my brother that it would be a good idea to invest our life savings in the stock market in April of 2007, part of me was terrified to watch my money evaporate into thin air as bank after bank failed or got restructured. Another part of me knew that if seventeen-year-old me had $3000 to invest in the stock market, with reasonable certainty that I wouldn’t need to touch that money for ten or so years, I had nothing to worry about.

This pattern intensified once I got to college. Freshman year, I worked 15-20 hour weeks at Safeway for much of spring semester, while I had two smaller jobs back on campus. I’m still not exactly sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it was equal parts terror and guilt. Watching capitalism nearly collapse when I was coming of age made a powerful impression on me, and I’m guessing the effects of the financial crash will be with me my whole life. I saw gas prices rising, friends’ parents being laid off and my wages staying flat. More than anything, I saw that doing everything right—having a college degree, acquiring useful skills, building a career—didn’t guarantee you stability, much less prosperity. I saw how thin the line between success and destitution can be. And I saw that in spite of my family’s fortunate circumstances, I couldn’t count on their success to carry me through life. I’d always wanted to make my own way in the world, but for the first time, I felt that the safety net provided by my family might be more illusory than I’d ever thought possible. So I resolved to work as much as I could to save money in case I needed it.

The guilt part fed off of this. I would talk to friends at college, and so many of them would mention their financial aid packages, the loans they had to take out, the work-study jobs they had to have. I didn’t. I not only had parents who could afford to foot the bill, but almost half of my tuition covered by merit scholarships (which I’ve become increasingly convinced are not too far from a form of upward wealth redistribution). And while making money was certainly my main motivation for working so much, part of me wanted to know what it’s like to try to go to college full time while having an actual job, not one of the cushy campus ones where you water the plants in the science building.

Here’s (shockingly) what I found out: it’s hard. You consider not taking certain classes because they’d interfere with your ability to be available in the evenings for work. You tell your manager that you absolutely cannot work more than 15 hours a week, and you get scheduled for 24 one week and told that there’s nothing else they can do because someone just quit. You try not to let your profs know that you’re working, try not to use it as an excuse. You have to be incredibly on top of all of your homework, because you need to request days off two weeks in advance and if you forget, you end up getting off work at 11pm when you have a test at 8am the next morning that you still need to study for. You skip meals because you work 4-9 shifts, campus dining halls only serve from 5-9, and you don’t want to spend the extra money to buy dinner when you’ve already paid $2600 for a meal plan. You work 9am-6pm shifts and come home so exhausted from standing on your feet all day and so stressed thinking about all the work you didn’t do that you just want to sit on your bed and cry. You choose between working weeknights and worrying about homework you barely have time to finish or working weekends and having to turn down invitations to parties because you work the 6am shift on Saturday morning. And for all of this, you get paid $8.67 an hour, which works out to $8 after taxes. And then you pay union dues ($50 a month). Last semester, I calculated what happens if you’re trying to pay for college. To pay one semester of Whitman tuition with a minimum-wage job (assuming you pay no taxes or union dues), you would have to work 55 40-hour workweeks. In other words, you could work at Safeway full time for a year and still be about a thousand dollars short of one semester of college tuition.

I don’t mean to suggest that my experience was miserable. I was bolstered considerably by having $100-150 in extra spending money per week, and for me, work was more of a sociological experiment than anyone else. I loved talking to people, hearing their life stories, seeing who bought what and why. Mostly, work was a daily reminder of just how privileged I am. I had coworkers dealing with far more absurd schooling situations than me—people going to full time night school at the local community college while regularly putting in 25 and 30 hour weeks. Walla Walla isn’t exactly a wealthy area, and I would estimate about a quarter of my customers were on food stamps. I learned most of what I know about food politics and realistic food choices for people living in poverty during my year and a half standing behind a checkstand, and for that, I am eternally grateful to everyone who came through my line. And during this time, I was constantly hyper-aware of class—my own privilege, my guilt, and the relative and absolute poverty that so many people I interacted with lived in.

Perhaps most interesting were my interactions with other Whitman students. Some would come in chatting with friends about certain classes or profs, and I would often chime in. More often than not, the students would do a double-take, during which I imagine they had to re-program their brain to conceive of the possibility of a Whitman student working a minimum-wage job off campus. I imagine many of them assumed that this was something I had to do to afford college, and perhaps some of them felt uncomfortable being reminded of the fact that not everyone is as fortunate as they are. I had similar experiences when Whitties would come in and pay for their food with food stamps—I had to remind myself that it’s possible to go to a good liberal arts school and not be able to afford to eat. It sounds stupidly obvious now, but there’s a big difference between knowing something intellectually and seeing it right in front of you.

So now people are occupying all over the country, and most of them have personal stories of economic hardship. And when I read their handmade signs explaining why they’re out in the street, it feels like seeing Whitman students pay for their groceries with food stamps. These people are my community, and I agree with them completely. But we live in different worlds. They have student loans. I have $6000 invested in the stock market and no debt. Their houses are in foreclosure. My family owns our house outright, and it’s not exactly a small house.

I would still like to think I have more in common with “average Americans” (whatever that means) than the true 1%, the executives of giant corporations and high-profile Wall Street traders who rake in millions of dollars a year. In spite of all of my privilege, I don’t feel that I have a secure future. I have so little faith that the economy is going to start working for average people, and my post-grad job prospects seem like they’re going to rely on luck and chance as much as my own skills and ambitions. I feel like if anyone should feel secure, it’s me, and I can’t decide if that means that I’m just paranoid and unaware of just how privileged I am, or if it’s a sign of the depth of our economic problems. Neither option is really a good one.

Occupy Wall Street is also giving me a good reminder. Yes, I care about labor issues and economic inequality, but from my position of power, I’m not the best-qualified person to address these issues. Reading about the rules that have evolved around OWS General Assemblies, I was incredibly inspired. I love the idea that people moderate lines and underrepresented groups (women and people of color) get to go to the front because their voices need to be heard. I love the step up/step back idea, which encourages people who generally dominate conversations to give other people a chance to share. I want, more than anything right now, to come home from Ecuador for a few days just to get a chance to see what OWS actually looks like. But being this far away has also made me realize that I’m one of the voices that needs to step back. Rich white liberals have been going on about income inequality for years now, writing articles, citing statistics and doing interviews. It’s time to cut out the middleman and let the people speak for themselves.

Seeing and not seeing

We're all blind, at least a bit. Our lives are so complicated, full of so many tiny intricate pieces interacting in different ways, and we'd go crazy if we were forced to look it in the eye, to comprehend the full magnitude of the systems that sustain us.

I can rail against sweatshops, coal plants, industrial agriculture, Wal-Mart, oil production in the Niger Delta or any number of other things destroying the planet. It's easy for someone to counter whatever I might say by pointing out the awful truths that govern our world. Sweatshops are horrible, but many pay better wages than other available jobs, and children working in them would likely starve or end up as prostitutes if they closed. Coal plants provide jobs in poor communities. Industrial agriculture is the only way to feed seven billion. Wal-Mart allows working class families to save money on consumer goods and provides millions of jobs. Oil production is necessary to continue our lifestyle.

These truths are where so much conventional wisdom about saving the planet fall flat. Lobbying the Gap to source their clothes from more responsible factories won't end a system where children have to choose between working twelve hour days or selling themselves to sex tourists (if that can even be called a choice). Eating local won't stop industrial monocrop agriculture from spreading to Africa, India and Latin America. Installing solar panels on your house won't make a coal plant close its doors, or give the people who work in one a job. Boycotting Wal-Mart or refusing to let one into your town won't stop the real minimum wage from sliding down, and it won't improve the life of a single child in Asia.

In the systems we've created--economic, social and political--we've made these things a necessity. Some people point to this to argue that environmentalists and labor activists are wrong. We need sweatshops, coal plants, pesticides, dams, aluminum smelters, deep-sea oil rigs and big box stores for our society to keep functioning and growing. The leftists argue back with half-truths, saying that we can push for reform. We focus on small targets and we don't see the big picture. We demonize Wal-Mart while ignoring Target, K-Mart and Fred Meyer. We argue for solar, but not against coal. We believe people want to change. We believe we can tweak the system and it will become transparent, fair and sustainable.

That's not how it works. These institutions are fundamental to the way we operate as a society. Change won't come gradually, and it won't come easily. Making conscious choices as a consumer is a worthwhile activity for personal awareness, but it won't change the system.

Every day, I wake up in the morning and choose not to see. I don't think about the people in the Niger Delta, where the equivalent of a BP Deepwater Horizon spill occurs every year, even though that oil feeds the trucks that bring me food. I don't think about the toxic chemicals used to process and dye the cotton my clothes are made out of. I don't think about the fact that while I have four years of college paid for, other students at Whitman will graduate with thousands in debt, other students from my high school class are in prison or single parents, and other young adults around the world work ten or twelve hour days in factories to make the furniture in my room. I don't think about the habitat that has been lost to development, agriculture, and the ever-expanding demands of the human race.

I don't say these things because I feel guilty. I didn't create these systems, and god knows I don't know how to change them. I say this because I'm angry. I'm angry that this is how our world is structured. I'm angry that women in Thailand get cancer from making laptops like the one I'm typing this on. I'm angry that my being a vegetarian for twelve years did nothing to end factory farming. I'm angry that I can be the most conscientious consumer in the world and it won't to a damn thing to improve the lives of the people, animals and ecosystems that buckle under the collective weight of first world demand.

We can't see this. We can't feel it or think about it, because if each of us understood the full magnitude of the systems supporting us, we would go crazy. And if each one of us felt what was wrong on a personal level--if our child got cancer from a chemical factory's abandoned waste, if our beloved forest was clearcut to make room to grow soy--we would fight back. But we can't see the whole picture, and we can't articulate the deep, unsettling feeling we have that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

I don't have an answer. I don't have ten simple things you can do to make a difference. I'm tired of pushing towards the center, talking about compromise, gradual progress and effortless changes. I want to fight, but I don't know how or where. I want to see, but I don't really want to know or understand, because I'm scared that there won't be anything I can do to fix it.

Privilege and work

I'm lucky with my job. I don't need it to pay rent or buy food. I don't even need it to pay for school. I'm not in debt, I'm not poor, even relatively speaking, and I'm at work because I choose to be.

None of that would be relevant, except that I talk to my coworkers, and a lot of them aren't as lucky as me. One has thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Many are on food stamps. Several would like to go to school, or go back and finish a degree, but they can't afford to. Some don't have health insurance, because they can't afford it or don't work enough hours to be eligible. Many work multiple jobs to cover basic necessities. A lot of them don't want to be there, but they don't have a choice, because they need to eat.

A lot of customers understand where we're coming from. They're young, or they work minimum-wage jobs too, or they're just nice. But they understand, when they come through our lines, that we're people, first and foremost. They understand that working for a major corporation for $8.65 an hour is not first on the list of things we'd be doing with our lives, if all of us could choose.

What's interesting to me is the people who don't get that. I'm not talking about customers who are quiet, or don't want to talk, or upset or a bit standoffish. I understand people might be in a hurry, or having a bad day, or on the phone or whatever. I understand people get mad or confused and I'm used to checking prices or explaining complicated sales to people. And some of that's not fun, but you suck it up, because it's part of the job. What I'm talking about is people who come in acting entitled.

Some people act entitled because they think they own the store and have a right to get whatever they want. They're the ones who storm in demanding to speak to a manager and get incensed when you inform them that it's 10:30pm, and there aren't any managers in the store. They're the ones who believe fervently that it's your fault they read the week's ad wrong and thought something should be cheaper when it doesn't go on sale until the next day. They're the ones who make it very clear that there's a "you all" separate from the "me" that deserves to be served immediately and perfectly. These people, I see a lot at my Queen Anne store, because the store is in a fairly affluent neighborhood in a decent sized city. They bother me, because they don't seem to have any capacity for empathy, not to mention common courtesy. But at the end of the day, I can just forget about them.

What really sticks with me are the people who either judge you or feel uncomfortable interacting with you because of your job. This, I got a few times in Walla Walla, mostly from (presumably) Whitman students. I'd ask people about their finals or comment on profs and they'd be taken aback for a moment, as if going to Whitman and having an off-campus minimum wage job were somehow incompatible. Some of them almost looked like they felt guilty for having me serving them, or uncomfortable because they were reminded of the fact that not everyone can afford to go through four years of college without working.

One incident I remember in particular, I was talking to a young man who either went to Whitman or had graduated in the last few years. I mentioned that I was also a Whitman student, and he said something like, "I bet you have an advantage over the townies--showing up to work on time and everything." He smiled at me, friendly, but conspiratorial, like we belonged to a group that set us apart from my coworkers.

That was a really interesting moment for me. He was right in a way--we did belong to a different group, a privileged group. We have parents who can pay for the $50,000 per year that it costs to attend Whitman. But how did he extrapolate from that to decide that my coworkers must be in some way inferior? Why did he assume I'd automatically be able to get to work on time and my coworkers wouldn't?

Working at a grocery store is not exactly rocket science, so to assume my coworkers were too stupid or incompetent to show up to work on time seems like quite an insult. Besides, even if it did require a significant amount of thought, attending a private liberal arts school doesn't mean you have a monopoly on intelligence. All it means is you're damn lucky compared to a lot of people. And at the end of the day, that's half the reason I like having my job. It forces me to think about that everyday--both to acknowledge that I have privileges and opportunities a lot of people will never get, and to understand that I'm not a better person because of it.