Every Movement in Its Right Place: A geopolitical analysis of the living wage movements success in t

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Every Movement in Its Right Place A geopolitical
analysis of the living wage movements success in
the Twin Cities

• Questions/Comments/Spam
• ioas_at_umn.edu

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Outline of Presentation

• Introduction to Living Wage Concept
• Problem Statement
• Methodology
• Review of Agnews Theory of Place coupled with
• Cursory analysis of the St Paul movement through
  the three elements of place that Agnew
  emphasizes
• Conclusion place plays a crucial factor in
  determining the success of particular strategies
  of resistance to neoliberal practices in this
  case, the living wage movement and this has the
  potential to be compared

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Living Wage Idea Movement

• What is the living wage movement?
• Living wage ordinance in general, if a city or
  county gives a certain amount of funding to a
  company, it must pay its employees 110 of the
  income that the Federal Government deems to be
  the poverty level for a family of four residing
  in that locality
• Gained momentum in mid-90s, as cities began to
  increasingly subsidize corporate relocations,
  etc., and roll-out neoliberalism shoved many
  traditional social and market responsibilities to
  the urban level
• Baltimore/Milwaukee Area enacted first such
  ordinances in 1994
• Movement was systematically planned by the New
  Party before it began springing up
• The New Party was a new political party focused
  on the local scale but networked nationally and
  incorporating many community organizations
• April 1994 New Party national meeting decided to
  launch 11 living wage movements in different
  cities within next two years

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Living Wage in Twin Cities

• New Party found enough signatures to put it to
  referendum in St. Paul by 1995
• Minneapolis did not allow ballot initiatives so
  Saint Paul was targeted first
• Though leading in the polls up until near the
  election, the initial referendum on the living
  wage in Saint Paul lost
• City Council largely opposed (only one member
  vocally supported it)
• Mayor and Chamber of Commerce were against
  ordinance
• After defeat, New Party and other groups involved
  regrouped
• Were able to induce both Minneapolis and Saint
  Paul to agree on establishing an unprecedented
  joint Minneapolis-Saint Paul Living Wage
  Taskforce to make recommendations on the LW to
  the councils
• Taskforce met every two weeks for over six months
  and came up with recommendations that were passed
  by both citys in early 1997

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Questions for Research

• Why and How?
• Why did the initial referendum fail in a
  traditionally liberal community?
• How did a taskforce representing two cities at
  once and made up of a diverse mix of interests
  including many neoliberal ones come to
  concordance on the living wage and induce both
  city councils to pass a living wage ordinance
• Problem Statement
• Such questions can only be answered, or at least
  scrutinized, in a geographical framework of
  analysis, because place and scale are both
  pivotally important
• Using Agnews theory of place and Peter Taylors
  scale framework, my project analyzes the
  agencies, processes, and networking behind the
  initial demise and eventual success of the LWM in
  the Twin Cities

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Methods

• Case study of a large (in time and actors)
  political process
• Lots of reading about Living Wage Movement
• Academic,
• Some posing as academic, and
• Much of it self-aggrandizing propaganda coming
  from the national organizations involved
• Archival research of
• New Party meeting notes
• Taskforce meeting minutes
• National and Local newspaper clippings and
• Local opinion/editorials
• Interview with founding member of the Twin Cities
  New Party

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Agnews Take on Place

• Broken Down into Three Realms
• Location
• Locale
• Sense of Place
• Location
• The economic and geopolitical role that a said
  place has within the larger world (i.e.,
  political-economy)
• St Paul and Twin Cities not actually on LWMs
  initial list of cities
• Internal movement fight over whether Twin Cities
  should be included
• Demographics not quite right, as in the mid-90s
  not as many ethnic minorities here
• Population was not as large as Chicago, Los
  Angeles, etc.
• Not strategically very important to the movement

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Sense of Place

• SENSE OF PLACE
• Essentially, the feeling of identity, or
  identities, arising from a place
• Not always positive or tangible
• Often contestable and in conflict
• Sense of place is the most dynamic aspect of
  place
• Shaped by location and locale and dependent upon
  the individual
• Saint Paul Affirmative
• Historically, Saint Paul (and the Twin Cities in
  general) viewed as liberal and progressive
• St. Paul Sense of Place Negative
• Boringest city in the US according to 60
  Minutes television show
• Lost in shadow of fraternal twin city,
  Minneapolis (Hawley 2003)
• Minneapolis was ranked most fun city in the US
  two years ago
• At this time, Minneapolis dominated the skyline,
  so to speak, perceived to be home to many of the
  niceties of the metro area
• Saint Paul a bureaucratic, state capital that
  everyone leaves at 5 p.m.

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Sense of Place Conflict

• My evidence points to the fact that the mayor and
  Chamber of Commerce actually honed in on negative
  aspects of Saint Pauls Sense of Place to
  squash the momentum of the initial referendum
• Naturally, they used the competitive city
  argument to scare voters into voting against
  something that would benefit many of them,
  including the following arguments
• Will cause businesses to build elsewhere and even
  leave Saint Paul
• What about Minneapolis? They didnt have a living
  wage ordinance so companies might move there.
• (Similar to the smoking ban debates recently.)
• Image of city as stuffy and no fun it would be
  impossible to get a sports team to move to the
  city (note a few years later the Minnesota Wild
  came) and to revive downtown

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Locale

• LOCALE
• How people organize themselves in a place
• Comprised of the socio-political institutions
  (both formal and informal) of a place affecting
  flow and interaction with other agencies and
  places.
• Formal Institutions neighborhood organizations,
  city councils, churches, unions, universities,
  political parties, et cetera
• Informal Institutions social clubs,
  interpersonal networking, family, intramural
  sports
• Example
• The City Council, New Party, non-profit orgs,
  community development orgs, the unions, and the
  Chamber of Commerce are all examples of formal
  political institutions. However, other smaller,
  informal institutions with influence would be
  university reading groups, neighborhood
  barbecues, post-coffee hour discussions, etc.,
  which are very powerful in shaping our political
  views and in mobilizing us to action.

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Locale (continued)

• The referendum lost but the initiative kept
  going
• The New Party knew a City Council Member who was
  sympathetic to the Living Wage Initiative.
  Numerous small groups continued to pressure the
  council.
• There remained a large contingent pushing the
  Minneapolis City Council to discuss such an
  ordinance a council member there supported the
  movement as well
• Shift in institutional tactics from winning
  hearts-and-minds to bureaucratic and policy
• Those still involved in the LWM networked with
  local council members in both Minneapolis and
  Saint Paul
• Got the City Councils to form the first ever
  Joint City Taskforce to make a recommendation
  concerning the establishment of a living wage
  ordinance in both of the cities

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The Power of Infiltrating Local Politics

• Taskforce Composition
• Unions Trades
• Business owners and managers
• Religious leaders
• New Party/Progressive Minnesota
• Chamber of Commerce
• Non-profits (JOBS NOW Coalition)
• Minnesota Department of Trade and Economic
  Development
• Community Neighborhood Development Agencies
• Banks (e.g., Norwest, etc.)
• Job Training Center
• Council members supporting LWM created a
  Taskforce with individuals (e.g., even business
  owners!) who were largely sympathetic to the
  movement
• Met every two weeks for over half a year to
  hammer out a recommended dual ordinance for both
  Twin Cities

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Taskforce Recommendations

• Taskforce came to a consensus and brought their
  recommendations to both city councils November
  26, 1996
• 2 January 1997 St Paul City Council adopted the
  measure
• Living wage includes businesses receiving over
  100,000 in the form of loans, bonds, grants,
  and city tax incentives
• Living wage is pegged to 110 the Federal poverty
  income for a family of four, or 100 if the
  business provides employer-paid health
• 60 of new jobs created must go to city residents
• City promised to promote living wage ordinances
  in the greater metro area beyond Saint Paul and
  Minneapolis partially again, for its own
  competitive purposes
• Minneapolis March of 1997 passed the
  recommendations as well

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Locale and Sense of Place

• In the end, it is difficult for any city
  institution to argue for poverty
• Erica Schoenberger (1998) argues that academics
  and progressive groups have a large part to play
  in the failure of social justice movements in
  American cities
• She argues that even when academic work on such
  matters is objective, our arguments are framed
  within the discourse of classic economics (i.e.,
  neoliberalism) that promotes the common sense
  ideology of those our science opposes
• Rather than fight competitive city arguments
  with statistics showing that the living wage
  actually does not hamper job growth, etc., it is
  more useful to argue from the poverty side
• Taxes and high wages do not keep businesses away
  from urban centers, poverty does. A sense of
  poverty, and the social and political-economic
  dangers associated with it, are what keep
  businesses away and limit economic growth.

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Conclusions About LWM Success

• Taskforce was a formal institution comprised of
  powerful and interested parties from both local
  and national scales
• This institution would not defend the conclusion
  that people should make less than poverty wages,
  nor could it justify that either city provide
  support to businesses paying less than poverty
  level incomes to their employees
• Biggest debates came over wording of the
  recommendations used to create the ordinance
  (debates over location and sense of place)
• Loopholes exist in the ordinance for new
  stadiums, and
• Community Development Organizations to act as
  middlemen in providing city money to some
  businesses
• In this case, resistance to neoliberalism was
  more successful when progressive, non-mainstream
  local institutions networked themselves within
  formal institutions of authority and power.
• LW passed a year after it had only found one
  supporter in the city council vote and the public
  had voted the measure down.

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Why Geography?

• Whereas political processes are operating in
  network fashion across different scales and in
  different places
• To fully understand and compare the processes
  behind successful and unsuccessful living wage
  movements, a geographic framework is necessary
  that
• Encompasses place (i.e., our case studies) and
  agency (operating across scales) and
• That allows the systematic analysis of place for
  comparative purposes.
• My paper attempts to do this in the Saint
  Paul-Minneapolis context by using Agnews Theory
  of Place embedded in Peter Taylors scales of the
  political-economy
• Questions?

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Place as Nested in Scale

• Doreen Massey Open University, UK
• Places as dynamic networks of social relations
  "which have over time been constructed, laid
  down, interacted with one another, decayed, and
  renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it
  were, contained within the place others will
  stretch beyond it, tying any particular locale
  into wider relations and processes in which other
  places are implicated too.
• Peter Taylor Loughborough University, UK
• Three dominant socially constructed scales in
  which all places (as networks of social
  relations) are nested
• Local Scale scale of experience, where we
  experience everyday life
• State Scale scale of ideology, traditionally
  promotes policies shaped by individual
  experiences that in turn shape our geopolitical
  imaginations of the larger world (nationalism,
  human rights, religion, common sense of
  neoliberalism)
• World-Economy scale of reality, the holistic
  scale in which all networks of socio-political
  interaction take place and affect one another,
  and the scale at which capitalism, and perhaps
  the neoliberal ideology, emanates from.

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Place and Scale

• Case of LWM in St Paul
• The State Scale (agencies networks)
• City of St Paul (and Twin Cities as metro area)
• Under contemporary neoliberalism, cities such as
  St. Paul use competitiveness argument against
  living wage ordinances
• New Party was sprouting up across US, was never
  trans-national
• ACORN national network of community
  organizations still working on living wage
  movements today
• Local Scale (agencies networks)
• Political Institutions unions, taskforce,
  political parties, community organizations, and
  local chapters of above networks
• Agents of Local Power Chamber of Commerce, City
  Council, Mayor, State Capital, etc.
• Using Taylors Framework with Agnews Theory of
  Place will allow us to analyze the interactions
  between institutions operating both nationally
  and locally

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Twin Cities Location

• Not really deemed a major center of economic
  exploitation in the mid-90s, as low unemployment
  forced wages in the Twin Cities region to
  automatically be higher than minimum wage
• Still, local activists argued that they were not
  high enough
• Able to network and quickly set up an initiative
  because of strong local institutions

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Significance

• By creating a unique framework in which to
  analyze the living wage movement, it is hoped
  that other studies can be conducted in other
  localities for purposes of comparative analysis
• Numerous studies out there on the living wage
  movement but many are incredibly subjective
  (along the lines of Treanors take on
  Neoliberalism)
• The studies that are not manifestos come from a
  variety of social science disciplines and have
  little in the way of link to one another
• Study by Isaac Martin (2001) comes closest to
  having a replicable methodology, but the
  replicable part of his study is conducted at the
  national scale