Category Archives: Faculty Writing

Faculty Writing, Home, Urban Studies

How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All

This post originally appeared on the London School of Economics Policy Blog.

For more on the public transit crisis, join us for our October 13th forum “Getting Back on Track: The New York Transit Crisis.“

By Kafui Attoh

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848

There is perhaps nothing more idiotic than a city with poor public transit. The typical North American city may, in this sense, be the paragon of idiocy. As many have long noted, the US remains rather unique amongst developed nations in the reluctance of its citizens to board anything resembling – gasp!—a public bus.  In 2012, only 7 percent of all US residents used public transit on a daily basis. A whopping 51 percent reported never using public transit at all.  For many, of course, the reasons are clear enough. Beyond the “absurd primacy of the automobile in American life,” public transit in the US suffers the same underfunded fate as so much else that is “public” in this country. To quote John Kenneth Galbraith we remain a society that is “privately rich and publicly poor” and nowhere is this more evident than in the sorry state of urban mass transit.

Only this past summer, malfunctions with New York City’s century old signaling system drew national headlines after millions of subways riders complained of excessive delays, overcrowding, and of being stranded at their respective stops. In the previous summer a spate of track fires in Washington DC’s metro not only led to service delays, and the launch of the semi-ironic website “ismetroonfire.com” but several hospitalizations from smoke inhalation. Where this is the reality in two of our most transit-dependent cities, it is undoubtedly worse in smaller cities where transit often remains the domicile of the poor and where suburban sprawl makes commuting via bus slow and inconvenient. Continue reading How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All →

Faculty Writing, Home, Labor Studies, Murphy News

Stephanie Luce Talks Civil Disobedience, Arrest at PSC Action

All photos via PSC-CUNY.org.

On Wednesday, PSC-CUNY members demonstrated in response to 6 years without a contract at CUNY Central Administrative offices, where about 50 people were arrested. Prof. Stephanie Luce, one of many Murphy Institute community members who participated in the action, and one of four who were arrested, talks about her experience below:

Q. Why did you participate in the CD action?

A. I decided to participate in the civil disobedience action because I want to defend the idea of CUNY: a great public institution that is supported by the city and state. CUNY was created to provide a top-quality education to the people of New York City, and it is also a large employer providing good jobs to tens of thousands of people.110415rally30 Continue reading Stephanie Luce Talks Civil Disobedience, Arrest at PSC Action →

Faculty Writing, Home, Labor Studies, Media

Prof. Stephanie Luce on the Uber Ruling

In a potentially striking blow to the Uber-ization of the state’s economy, the California Labor Commission declared this week that a San Francisco-based Uber driver is an employee, and not an independent contractor, of the company. The implications of this ruling could be far-reaching, requiring the company to start offering benefits and protections to its drivers — which it has, until now, managed to skirt.

In an article by Amy Langfield on CBSMoneyWatch, Murphy Institute Prof. Stephanie Luce explains:

“Employers have been increasingly shifting the risks of the employment relationship onto workers – whether in the form of classification as independent contractor, or moving to on-call scheduling, shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions (or to no pension at all), and so on […] Workers and worker organizations have been resisting and fighting back – not just in the U.S., but in other parts of the world (similar issues are happening in Europe – and Uber is also engaged in similar legal battles in many other countries).”

“I think the ruling is significant both because of its impact on such a large and growing global company (Uber), but also for the possible spillover effects to so many other industries that have been moving in the same direction of attempting to evade the legal responsibility of the employer/employee relationship[…]”

For the full article, visit CBSMoneyWatch.

Photo by noeltock via flickr (CC-BY-NC).

Faculty Writing, Home, Labor Studies

Prof. Stephanie Luce Explores the Higher Wages Movement

By Michael Murphy

On April 15, protesters in New York City and across the United States engaged in a coordinated demonstration to highlight the problem of low wages for workers in the fast-food industry. This issue has resonated with workers who have seen their pay diverge in real terms from the cost of living. The “Fight for $15 on 4/15” protests brought workers together with allies in the community and organized labor in what has become a dynamic social movement. Yet the origins of this stark decline in purchasing power for workers can be found several decades ago. Why has this social movement for change emerged in recent years to place higher wages on the local and national political agenda?

In the forthcoming Spring 2015 issue of New Labor Forum, Murphy Institute Professor of Labor Studies Stephanie Luce explores the origins and influence of this movement. Continue reading Prof. Stephanie Luce Explores the Higher Wages Movement →

Faculty Writing, Home, Urban Studies

Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson: An Interview

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By Kafui Attoh

Something exciting is happening in Poughkeepsie. In the last two years a group of local residents — under the name “Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson” (NLMH) — have been organizing to fight for the rights of the city’s low-income residents.  For those whose knowledge of Poughkeepsie begins and ends with “The French Connection,” Poughkeepsie is not unlike many postindustrial cities in upstate NY — defined by decades of capital flight, city center decline and entrenched poverty. In this context, the emergence of NLMH has been an important development.

More than anything, it has been important for what the group has already accomplished. Last year, NLMH spearheaded the passage of the state’s first municipal foreclosure bond law — an ordinance requiring owners of properties in foreclosure (mostly banks) to post a $10,000 bond to the city for upkeep. Poughkeepsie is only the seventh city in the country to pass such legislation. This year, NLMH has embarked on a new campaign aimed at fighting the Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company — the public utility monopoly that serves the Mid-Hudson region. As Central Hudson pushes for a rate hike and as local residents —already on the margins — consider the possibility of power shut-offs, NLMH has raised a set of important questions. What rights do people have to heat, electricity and a warm home? More to the point, what rights should they have? Continue reading Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson: An Interview →

Faculty Writing, Home, Labor Studies, Urban Studies

Dead Labor on a Dead Planet: The Inconvenient Truth of Workers’ Bladders

This article was originally featured in Monthly Review Zine.

By Kafui Attoh

“Once labor has been embodied in instruments of production and enters the further process of labor to play its role there, it may be called, following Marx, dead labor [. . .]. The ideal toward which capitalism strives is the domination of dead labor over living labor.” — Harry Braverman
“[T]here are no jobs on a dead planet.” — Bill McKibben

In a recent essay in New Labor Forum, authors Jeremy Brecher, Ron Blackwell, and Joe Uehlein urge the labor movement to take a more active role in the fight against climate change. Many unions, they lament, have been reluctant to engage the issue, and indeed others have actively taken positions at odds with the climate movement’s most basic tenets. Where unions have been asked to choose between job security and the environment, many have understandably chosen the former. In this fraught context, the authors argue that unions must not only work to reveal the “jobs versus environment” choice as a false one, but that they must do so by developing a climate protection strategy of their own. Continue reading Dead Labor on a Dead Planet: The Inconvenient Truth of Workers’ Bladders →