II: The American Dream
Carmen Rojas, CEO at The Workers Lab, September 2017
White Americans, what
Nothing better to do
Why don’t you kick yourself out
You’re an immigrant tooWho’s using who
What should we do?
Well, you can’t be a pimp
And a prostitute tooThe White Stripes, Icky Thump
Hardly a week goes by without someone announcing the death of the American Dream. And yet, the myth refuses to go away. The idea that if you only work hard enough, you can climb the social ladder is not just the heart of American culture. Despite its name, it’s a global phenomenon. Our grandparents told our parents that if they work hard, they will go far. Then our parents passed that on to us. Now, we’re selling the same story to the next generation, even as it becomes obvious the American Dream is a con — in the US and elsewhere. People work their asses off while inequality grows and social mobility shrinks.
Carmen Rojas isn’t a big believer in the American Dream. Not in the sense of thinking everyone can find fulfilling work and turn it into a profitable career. She does, however, believe that any working person should be able to satisfy their basic needs, to send their children to school, to have healthcare, and to retire at a certain age. This is why she founded The Workers Lab, a California-based innovation lab that looks for new ways to empower workers. They try to bring together entrepreneurs, technologists, activists, and policymakers to work out solutions benefitting all sides and preserving whatever’s left of the American Dream.
I sat down with Carmen Rojas to ask about the projects she’s been working on with The Workers Lab. We also talked about what innovation means in the labor market and how does it differ from technological innovation.
Wojtek Borowicz: Why do we need The Workers Lab?
Carmen Rojas: Because the labor movement, the state of organizations seeking to empower workers, is crippled. That’s in part because of conservative, right-wing attacks but also unions and workers organizations from the 20th century generally haven’t been able to evolve to respond to the 21st century working conditions. We provide a place for worker organizers and entrepreneurs to experiment. We want to create new organizational forms and market conditions that can build powerful working people in a way that the US labor movement was able to do at its peak, in the middle of the last century.
Shouldn’t we expect the unions and the state to do this?
Yes, actually we should. But the nature of labor unions has become so bloated that now it’s more about survival than about innovating and adapting to new economic conditions. And also as the left, or the broader progressive movement in this country, we’ve undervalued, underanalyzed, and underestimated the power of the state to create conditions for people to have power, mobility, and equity in the workplace. And so part of what we’re doing is trying to find regulatory mechanisms and incentives the government can provide to enable economic conditions where working people aren’t making impossible choices but are driving and participating in our economy and democracy.
We quickly pulled out of a couple of projects the moment we saw ourselves as privatizing the functions of the state. Last year we worked with a tech company to build a tool for workers to report health and safety violations in the workplace. It quickly became clear that actually there were enough people in the government enforcing those laws and we didn’t want to create a bunch of non-profit organizations that were going to take that over from the state.
That’s an interesting point. Is there a risk that in the countries where the labor market is collapsing, private organizations will cripple the state even further by taking over its role?
Yeah! I don’t know if you’ve heard the story about Google giving money to the New America Foundation…
About an employee being fired after researching Google’s monopoly practices?
A whole team of people, 15 employees were fired. I think that we, progressives in the US in particular, are really comfortable believing that non-profit organization are doing good, without questioning what it means to have deep ties to private dollars. Philanthropic dollars in this country are outside our tax system. They’re atrophying the state. What does it mean for Bill Gates to be able to set an education agenda? I don’t know if he has expertise and I did not elect him. And he is setting an education agenda without the accountability of the state in ways that are harmful to the public good.
Which initiatives supported by The Workers Lab are you most excited about?
There are three I’m really excited about. One is called Workers Defense Project. They’re an immigrant workers rights group in Texas. Texas has, or had under Obama, two health and safety inspectors for the entire state and no required worker compensation. Across the state a worker was dying every 9 hours. So the Workers Defense Project was trying to pass policies to change this and they found out that developers would be interested in improving standards if they knew it meant faster permitting time. We helped them create a business that is handling training and certification for the construction industry in Texas, in parallel to their non-profit organization. So the Workers Defense Project is providing a service to the construction industry while making sure workers are paid a living wage, have access to benefits, and are getting trained so they won’t die in the workplace. It’s like a market-based intervention. We found an opportunity, developers aren’t trying to fight it, it’s pretty great.
Here in California the project I’m most interested in started a couple of years ago, when the tenth largest agricultural company in the country approached us. We have a labor shortage, nobody is immigrating to work on farms, and the current political climate is making it hard to keep workers. What can they do? We knew that historically, farmers were contracted from labor contractors and the conditions were really shitty. We removed the contractors from the conversation and essentially created a labor co-op owned by overwhelmingly undocumented farm workers. It’s not technically a co-op because we didn’t want to expose the workers to an IRS investigation so we created a trust. And the workers negotiate directly with the farmer on wages and standards. For the first time in their lives they have access to benefits and paid leave. But most importantly, they get 5% equity in the farm. So we solved a problem for the grower and we solved a problem for workers in a way that I think can change the entire agriculture industry in the United States.
Now we’re entering into a new partnership with the Centre for Economic Democracy in Boston. They’ve been putting a lot of pressure on the city of Boston to think about what it means to use public dollars in service of co-ops. They mapped a set of businesses that have been around for at least 10 years and had 30 or more employees where the owner is interested in retiring and selling the business. Can the city step in and help the workforce buy those companies and convert them into co-ops? Cities and states are providing subsidies to the private sector all the time but imagine being able to leverage those subsidies not to just move the company from me to you but from the owner who wants to retire to the workers who have been there for 10 years. This is a public good. This is what we should be doing with public dollars, how we should be thinking about subsidies.
What has been the biggest success so far?
For me, being able to rearticulate the roles of the market and the state in the current political climate. Talking about the difference between capital and capitalism. Being able to point out the problems and dilemmas of capitalism while using capital structures to support organizations that haven’t historically been able to access equity or debt or lots of money to build innovative things.
You talk about innovation but is that really what we need? Don’t we need higher minimum wage, guaranteed maternity leave, and other employee protections first?
Neoliberals and the tech sector have adopted the language of innovation as if it was something that can solely be a market-based intervention. I would argue that raising the minimum wage to $15 isn’t an innovation only because in the most populous cities in this country you can’t afford to live on $30,000 a year — we should be pushing for a $30 minimum wage in places like the Bay Area. That’s an amazing innovation. Maternity leave is an amazing innovation. And for us it’s really about taking back the language.
What would have to happen for you to say that The Workers Lab accomplished its goal?
A state that works. One of the richest countries in the world being able to make sure that working people can feed their kids, live where they want to, have access to public education and public services.
I never want to be in the work of institution building or empire building. Every year I’m like oh maybe this is the last year that The Workers Lab is gonna exist because if we’re not adding value to the labor movement, if all we’re doing is testing with no evidence that we’re changing people’s lives, I don’t think we should exist. If we talk in two years and I’m gonna be like let me tell you about farm workers in California, then I shouldn’t have my job. But right now I have too much evidence that we’re moving the needle.
Do you want to export the ideas from The Workers Lab abroad? Do you think about expanding overseas?
All the time! But I am less interested in exporting than in importing. I’m interested in importing the idea of codetermination from Germany. I think a lot about what does it mean to have workers, business, and the state sitting at the table, discussing industry standards. I think a lot about Podemos in Spain. What does it mean to build political power through wholly democratic institutions? At the core of Podemos is a deep belief in everybody having a shared fate in a shared reality. Like, a librarian could be the fucking mayor! In the US there is no example where somebody didn’t climb up the machine.
So I’m more interested in going abroad to figure out what we can learn from other places.
You seem to take a lot of inspiration from tech and from Silicon Valley. But isn’t the Valley at least partially responsible for what happened to the workforce? Is that a good place to take inspiration from?
This is a question I am always struggling with. On one hand, I agree. The tech sector is at the forefront of consolidating capital and political power in this country. It distorted the reality for working people. On the other hand, I don’t think our current organizational and institutional forms are working at scale. The tech industry has been quicker to move in terms of the things we want for workers than any other industry. I just came back from a meeting with an organization that we’re supporting, called Silicon Valley Rising. They’ve been organizing Facebook bus drivers into a union, they’ve been organizing Google cafeteria workers into a union. Tech isn’t a monolith, just like retail isn’t a monolith.
I’ll be really direct. In peddling the language of tech in service of building powerful workers, frankly, I’ve been able to create a different lane for The Workers Lab. When we’re done with Workers Defence Project, it will affect more than a million workers in Texas. That’s in five years of work. Look at this agriculture project in California. At its completion it’s going to be 5,000 overwhelmingly undocumented farm workers who own part of the 10th largest agricultural company in the country.
I am peddling the language of tech because I know it piques people’s interest. If I were to talk about just building power for working people, then we would be labeled as storytellers but not change-makers. But I’m uncomfortable with it, for transparency’s sake. It makes me throw up a little bit.
I would argue that raising the minimum wage to $15 isn’t an innovation only because in the most populous cities in this country you can’t afford to live on $30,000 a year.
In another interview, I talked to James Livingston, an economy historian at Rutgers, who says that work is doomed and it cannot be saved. Your view on the workforce seems more optimistic. Would you argue the labor market and the American Dream can be restored?
I don’t think the American Dream has ever been real. Even though I am like the story, I am an outlier. My parents immigrated here with a middle school education. My dad was a truck driver, my mom sewed jeans at a Levi’s factory. I am the youngest of their kids and the only one to graduate from high school. Then I got a PhD and now I run this amazing organization. I always feel weird telling my story because it’s not the common story. It feeds into this belief that you can make it if only you work hard, which is false for the vast majority of working people. They are working hard and not making it. But there was once a time in this country when regardless of you being a truck driver, or a secretary, or a teacher, you had a baseline of wages, benefits, retirement, health insurance. You had a set of protections. That no longer exists.
Our economy, however, is still creating jobs. In low-wage industries we are creating jobs hand over fist. In retail, in restaurants, there hasn’t been a decline. It’s actually been growing since 2008…
But that’s the point. We can keep creating low-wage jobs indefinitely. Just… why do this?
What worries me about the logic of professor Livingston is that the end result is something like Universal Basic Income and I feel like the impact of UBI is to further hollow out the state, to say hey Carmen, I’m gonna give you a $15,000 check — you don’t have to work, but you figure out how you’re gonna use these $15,000. For school or for food? For the roads or for the light on the streets? And it’s never going to be enough. I don’t have any evidence that UBI will create this radically transformative everybody-gets-a-check-and-lives-well. I don’t have any evidence that in one generation we can move from work being the way we organize our well-being to a check from the government being the way we organize our well-being. I have more evidence that when we stop thinking about the state as an enabler of public good and a provider of public service and start thinking about it as a transfer of wealth… that shit always ruins the lives of black people, of immigrants. It ruins the lives of the most marginalized people in our country.
To say I’m optimistic may be a stretch but I just refuse to be the last generation of people… like me, frankly. Did my parents love their jobs? Of course not. But they weren’t treated like shit at their jobs, they could afford to buy a house with their jobs, they could afford to send me to a good school with their jobs, they could afford to feed us and go on vacation with their jobs. I just refuse to be the last generation of people in this country that gets to benefit, even if I’m an outlier, from a system that made sure the working people could live in dignity.
For as long as capitalism has existed, workers had to fight for this dignity. Doesn’t it mean that our society stands by a system that is anathema to workers’ rights?
Germany is also a capitalist country and as a nation they have tied their fate to the working people, so that working people can live well to a varying degree. But I also don’t want to be nostalgic. Our job at the Lab is to keep one foot in the reality of the capitalist system while using the other foot to test the water about what is possible, what is the next step we should be taking. Our commitment to worker ownership and cooperative development is in large part a belief there can be a new economic model where workers are owners. We’re testing the water. But the tension in that question is something I think about a lot and I don’t have an answer. I would be irresponsible not thinking about that.
