Alex Press | Vox

Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.

2019-05-11T11:33:19-04:00

Protesters at a #MeToo rally in New York City in December 2017. | LightRocket via Getty Images

Jen was fired just before Christmas in 2017.

She had worked for a music venue for a few months when she learned that David, a musician who she alleges raped friends of hers, was an investor in the company (both of their names have been changed to protect anonymity).

“I only found that out because of his own big mouth,” she said. One night, not long after David had asked Jen to work with his band and she had told him why she didn’t want to do so, she began receiving texts from friends. “He was drunk and he was saying, ‘I basically own that venue and this bitch is working there. I’ll get her fired.’”

Concerned he would follow through on the threat, Jen told her boss about the allegations against David. Her boss thanked her, and two days later, he and two other members of management held a formal meeting with her, where they told her they were going to bring it up to their lawyers. Even though they warned her that getting him out of the company would be “quite a process,” she respected them for making the attempt.

Then everything changed for her at work.

“The moment I brought it up, it was as if the world flipped,” said Jen. “I cannot believe how uncomfortable it was. If I walked in a minute late, [my boss] would say, ‘You’re late.’ I knew I was going to get fired.”

Sure enough, the next week, Jen was let go. In order to receive her last paycheck of around $900, she was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

In that final meeting with her boss, Jen asked if her dismissal had anything to do with their prior conversations about David. He insisted it did not.

“It happened so fast,” she said. “It was only a week from, ‘Hey, there’s a problem,’ to, ‘Now you’re the problem.’”

More women are speaking up. But what happens after they come forward?

Were we able to draw up a balance sheet for all the accusations of sexual violence that have come out throughout the #MeToo movement, it would include several big success stories. Harvey Weinstein, once so powerful in the entertainment industry, no longer has immunity to prey on people. Leslie Moonves, the former chair and CEO of CBS, was ousted from the company after allegations of sexual misconduct and retaliation.

It’s not just happening in Hollywood or the media. Numbers released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws against gender, race, religious, and other forms of workplace discrimination, show that even as the overall number of complaints received is down 9.3 percent from 2017, complaints about sexual harassment rose 13.6 percent over the previous year.

“We’ve seen more people, mostly women but not exclusively women, willing to speak up,” said Victoria Lipnic, the agency’s acting chair. The numbers show that despite the obstacles to reporting harassment, more people are doing it.

It’s a useful, if imperfect, marker for measuring the magnitude of #MeToo. If that many more people made it to an EEOC filing, it’s reasonable to imagine that complaints registered elsewhere, whether at a state or local agency or internally with an employer, rose as well.

“Since we started in January 2018, we’ve had over 4,000 people reach out to us for help,” said Sharyn Tejani, director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which offers assistance to individuals facing workplace sexual harassment. Tejani said two-thirds of those who have reached out identify themselves as low-wage workers.

But if there are more people speaking up, there may be more people than ever being fired for doing so. It’s hard to quantify the number of people who face retaliation like Jen did — she never filed a complaint with a government agency, and her NDA silences her. But retaliation remains the most frequent charge filed with the EEOC, and three-quarters of sexual harassment charges filed with the commission include a charge of retaliation.

The data shows that #MeToo has raised many women’s expectations and increased their willingness to seek some semblance of justice in the face of harassment. But it’s not clear what’s happening to these women after they report. If speaking out against harassment isn’t paired with more power in the workplace, outcomes like what happened to Jen are all but inevitable.

“The number of retaliation charges has been climbing,” said Lipnic of the EEOC’s numbers, calling retaliation “the next frontier in terms of what we need to deal with on the harassment front.” The commission’s 2016 report on workplace sexual harassment emphasizes retooled trainings and the role of cultural change in curbing this behavior. But such efforts can only go so far without redistribution of power toward employees.

“You can know you have rights, and know you’re being harassed, but if you have no power on the job to do anything about it, it really makes no difference,” said Saru Jayaraman, director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, a workers center that advocates for improved wages and working conditions for the restaurant workforce. Although the restaurant industry employs just 7 percent of US workers, it accounts for more than a third of EEOC sexual harassment charges. “Getting millions of women to come forward and say, ‘I’m being harassed’ isn’t necessarily the solution,” said Jayaraman. “We want the harassment to stop in the first place and our research shows the best way for it to stop in the first place is to give women the power.”

For ROC, addressing that power imbalance means, first, ending the sub-minimum wage. In most states, restaurants can pay tipped workers below the minimum wage. ROC has found that in the seven states with a flat minimum wage, rates of harassment in the restaurant industry are half as high as in those without one. That’s because reliance on tips pressures workers to put up with anything from customers, fueling harassment and a sense of subordination in the workplace. Thanks in part to #MeToo, more states have since introduced such bills. “The biggest effect was helping us move policy on the issue, which I think is as it should be,” she said.

Yet even in-demand workers in highly paid jobs face retaliation for speaking up. Take the unfolding case of Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton. Both women helped organize the 20,000-worker walkout at Google in protest of mandatory arbitration clauses in the company’s contracts — the use of such clauses in settling sexual harassment claims has received widespread criticism since #MeToo. Whittaker and Stapleton now allege that Google has retaliated against them for their efforts, with their work roles diminished after the walkout—recently, they filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

Legislation is one solution. But power needs to be built into the workplace

This question of how to build the workplace power needed to address sexual harassment is all the more pressing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s May 2018 Epic Systems Corp. v Lewis ruling, which allows employers to bar workers from filing class-action lawsuits, channeling workplace grievances instead into mandatory arbitration, the very process against which Googlers revolted. Class-action lawsuits have been a major tool for those fighting workplace sexual harassment.

There has been promising legislation to fight back, such as state-level bans on the use of NDAs in agreements to settle sexual harassment claims. These are positive steps, though some of these bills have yet to pass into law.

But these laws need strong enforcement mechanisms. After all, retaliation is already illegal, but employers in low-wage industries know they can get away with it, so it continues. And with the EEOC itself headed for a pro-business makeover, employees need to take enforcement into their own hands — which is what a union can be: workers, collectively, enforcing their rights and pushing for more.

“The EEOC may help, but it’s not the solution,” said Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer and author of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. “Women need mechanisms in their workplaces to address the question of sexual harassment head on, and culture change isn’t going to happen unless there’s organizational might and power and heft — which is called a union — for women to force internal organizational change.”

As an example of what a union can achieve, McAlevey mentioned Unite Here’s “Hands Off, Pants On” campaign, which pushed Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance mandating that all hotel housekeepers, and anyone who works alone in a guest’s room, be given a panic button, with costs for implementation paid for by employers. The ordinance has inspired other cities to follow suit.

While there are plenty of examples of unions failing to take sexual harassment seriously, they are still the best vehicle for acting collectively in the workplace, whether to enforce existing policies or to craft new ones. Without them as a means for overcoming the hurdles to acting individually, not to mention the educational and mobilizing effects that come from politicizing sexual harassment, retaliation will simply carry on.

Speaking up publicly is intrinsic to #MeToo: It’s right there in the name. But even if you can get anyone to listen — many can’t — public opinion is fickle, and it’s full of rubberneckers. Adjudicating sexual violence requires time, and accountability and transparency among all involved parties. Plus, most women will not speak up regardless — many do not even know that what they experience in the workplace is harassment, much less that it’s illegal.

And whether or not the past year has led to cultural change, one thing hasn’t changed: For working-class people, speaking out still means risking their job. Reducing harassment requires reducing inequality, and though harassment happens in every sphere of life, it’s particularly pressing at the site we cannot opt out of: the workplace. It’s there that the potential for exercising collective power exists, separate from the authority of the employer.

Or, as Jen told me, most people she worked with had already known about allegations against David, but no one knew what to do about it. So when the choice was left up to her bosses, the outcome was no surprise. “I think I was believed, but I don’t think that mattered. Ultimately, their money mattered more.”

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Nation, and n+1, among other places. Find her on Twitter @alexnpress.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

What’s next for #MeToo? The McDonald’s strikes have an answer.

2018-09-20T16:25:05-04:00

McDonald’s workers protest sexual harassment at the fast-food chain’s restaurants outside of the company’s headquarters on September 18, 2018, in Chicago. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

McDonald’s workers in several states are going on strike Tuesday over sexual harassment. Workers in some (but not every) McDonald’s in 10 cities — Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Orlando, San Francisco, and Durham — walked out at lunchtime. They say they won’t return until tomorrow.

The strikes are an escalation after 10 McDonald’s employees filed sexual harassment complaints with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in May. The employees say McDonald’s ignored complaints about workplace sexual harassment, which including groping, propositions for sex, and lewd comments. In response, a McDonald’s spokesperson said the company has policies and training in place to prevent harassment and would continue to work with experts to “evolve” these practices.

While sexual harassment has motivated workplace organizing for well over a century, today’s action may be the first multi-state strike focused on sexual harassment in US history. Notably, the strike is backed by both the Fight for $15 and Time’s Up, the latter a legal aid group for low-wage workers experiencing sexual harassment created by women in Hollywood, some of whom have been at the center of #MeToo stories. This strike shows the tangible impact of #MeToo, which, despite being characterized largely by elite, high-profile cases, has offered a much-needed opening for working-class people fighting back against sexual harassment.

As such, the strike throws a spotlight on two of the past year’s most important political developments: the fight against the continued decimation of working-class power and the emergence of the #MeToo movement. While the latter was created by activist Tarana Burke as a response to the prevalence of sexual abuse among working-class women of color, it became a shorthand for any and all discussion of sexual harassment after the New York Times and the New Yorker published their investigations of Harvey Weinstein.

Taken together, these developments make for a precarious reality: the beginnings of long-overdue cultural change, but without the power and protections needed in the workplace to enforce it. As journalist Judith Levine summarized the untenable result of the past few decades’ twinned rising feminism and declining working-class power, “Thanks to feminism, women’s confidence and control in their social and family lives were solidifying. But at the same time their ‘actual power’ was shrinking along with the power of the institutions that would speak for them.”

This year shows what that disconnect looks like. I’m a reporter and editor who has been covering labor and #MeToo, and it’s a tense moment. Working-class power carries on eroding, while at the same time, more people feel empowered to speak up about sexual harassment. Although there is little definitive data on it yet, I’d predict that the result is as follows: More people than ever are currently being retaliated against for resisting sexual harassment.

I know a woman who assumed #MeToo meant she should speak up about a sexually abusive man in her workplace, as she would be believed. She was fired a week later.

That’s why efforts to use #MeToo to build such power, particularly among those most likely to experience sexual harassment — low-wage workers, immigrants, people of color — are critical. And with today’s action, those efforts will get more attention than ever.

Low-wage workers are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment

That McDonald’s workers are fighting against sexual harassment isn’t surprising. A 2016 survey of fast-food workers showed that 40 percent reported being sexually harassed, and 42 percent of those who experienced harassment felt keeping their jobs required they accept the behavior. Of those who did report it, more than one in five said they were retaliated against for doing so.

There are reasons workers in fast food are particularly vulnerable to harassment: Low pay and a lack of job security ensures them little say over any of their working conditions.

As Bernice Yeung, a journalist who has investigated sexual abuse among low-wage workers for years, told me, the financial precarity of low-wage work is central to the prevalence of harassment. “As janitors, farmworkers, and domestic workers have told me, trying to support their families on meager salaries means it’s difficult to make a complaint about sexual harassment since it might jeopardize the job that is their financial lifeline,” she said. For most individuals, the risk is simply too high.

Low-wage workers need more power on the job, and that’s what strikers are demanding of McDonald’s. They want procedures for receiving and responding to harassment complaints, mandatory anti-harassment training for managers and employees, and the formation of a national committee to address sexual harassment, composed of workers, representatives from corporate and franchise stores, and leaders of national women’s groups.

In addition to these demands, raising wages is a necessity to fighting sexual harassment. A stronger social safety net would reduce the costs of retaliation for women who come forward; a democratic workers’ organization — in short, a union — would offer a collective vehicle to overcome the high costs of fighting this problem individually.

These workers are up against the company’s war chest. McDonald’s is armed with battalions of PR firms and lawyers and political allies and money, while workers have their numbers and the company’s reliance on them to produce profit. Mcdonald’s responded to today’s action with an announcement that it would be “partnering with Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, RAINN, and the legal-compliance firm Seyfarth Shaw at Work.”

It’s a remarkable pairing: a nonprofit to shield the company from a PR nightmare, and the law firm currently defending the Weinstein Company. We could have expected as much — any time you wonder how much a company values its workers, look at their paychecks.

As Tanya Harrell, an organizer behind today’s strike and one of the 10 workers to file the original complaint, says, “They want people to think they care, but they don’t care.”

She’s probably right. A partnership with RAINN is a low-cost alternative to the real solution: McDonald’s must allow its workers to organize and pay them more. Without empowering workers with tangible benefits, soft nonprofit partnerships will have little impact.

This isn’t to say that stronger worker power, for example in the form of unions, automatically rids workplaces of sexual harassment. Last year, SEIU, the key union backing the Fight for $15, faced its own harassment allegations within its leadership, many of whom were key architects of the campaign, charged with leading organizing efforts among a predominantly female workplace.

It’s hard not to wonder if a strike against sexual harassment at McDonald’s would have gotten off the ground had these men remained central figures in the Fight for $15.

The McDonald’s strikes prove the collective power of #MeToo

The question of reducing sexual abuse is a question of who has power. Yet much of the writing about #MeToo functions as a conversation among relatively elite people, concerned with other elite people, and whether the latter elites — who have maybe, probably, or definitely sexually abused someone — should or should not be welcome in the former elites’ workplaces and social world. Hypotheticals and thought experiments metastasize across the pages of publications while harassment and retaliation remain.

We live in a world where sexual harassment is, for the average person, very common. As Saru Jayaraman, president of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit workers’ center that organizes around sexual harassment in the food service industry, told me, many restaurant workers don’t even consider that the behaviors they experience at work are sexual harassment or that they have protections against such behaviors.

When one’s work includes countless, routine indignities — wage theft, understaffing, working off the clock, surveillance, “the customer’s always right,” last-minute scheduling — sexual abuse becomes just part of the job, one more, particularly disturbing, reminder of a lack of power.

Given that reality, the McDonald’s strike isn’t just one more #MeToo story. Rather, it shows the early stages of what it takes to reduce sexual harassment and ensure there are consequences for perpetrators. The issue cannot be fixed from on high; it cannot be won by appeals to the morality of employers, and certainly not to perpetrators. It cannot merely be legislated — and definitely not policed — into resolution. It takes building collective power, not just individual empowerment.

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in sociology at Northeastern University. Find her on Twitter @alexnpress.

How Silicon Valley workers are revolting against Trump’s immigration policy

2018-07-13T16:08:42-04:00

Protesters demand that thousands of children taken from their immigrant parents by border officials under recent controversial Trump administration policies be reunited, on June 23, 2018, in San Diego, California. | DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images

There’s a fight on inside Microsoft. White-collar tech workers who have traditionally shied away from political activism starting to mobilize in their workplaces.

In the midst of last week’s growing uproar over the Trump administration’s family separation policy, Twitter users began circulating a blog post from earlier this year in which the company proclaimed how “proud” it was to support ICE, the agency responsible for immigration enforcement.

The post described how Microsoft would help ICE to “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.” Since ICE is currently consumed with the work of separating children from their families, a practice the UN has condemned as a human rights violation, such facial-recognition software could aid the agency in identifying people for deportation or detainment.

Alerted to the relationship by the blog post, Microsoft workers expressed outrage over the company’s $19.4 million contract with ICE. The company briefly edited the post to remove the glowing language about ICE, according to Gizmodo, then posted a statement describing its “dismay” at the administration’s family-separation policy. Microsoft did not address whether it would cancel the contract.

It wasn’t nearly enough. By Tuesday, an open letter signed by more than 100 Microsoft employees had been posted to company’s internal message board, the New York Times reported. The letter, addressed to CEO Satya Nadella, called for the cancellation of the contract and the creation and enforcement of a “clear policy stating that neither Microsoft nor its contractors will work with clients who violate international human rights law” — as well as greater transparency on contracts the company signs with any government.

The quick response among the company’s employees is indicative of a larger trend across the tech industry. Immediately following Trump’s election, tech workers mobilized, pledging not to build the database for the administration’s proposed “Muslim ban,” and protesting outside of Palantir, the company many saw as the likely candidate for building the database.

While tech workers as a group tend to lean to the left on social issues, they’ve also shied away from workplace organizing and workplace protests, in part due to comfortable salaries. But the Trump administration has ignited a sense of distrust among Silicon Valley’s white-collar workforce.

A revolt is moving quickly through Silicon Valley

The relationships built in the first wave of organizing were reactivated during current protests, which have extended beyond concerns about deportation. At Google last month, engineers rose up to express their anger over Project Maven, a contract to provide the US Department of Defense with AI to analyze drone data.

According to several current Microsoft employees who spoke to Vox, employees of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech giants are in regular contact, sharing strategies and blueprints. “They’re very closely in touch [with each other],” one Microsoft employee, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, told me.

Another Microsoft senior engineer told me the company’s fumbling attempts at damage control only added to the outrage internally. In a statement sent to Microsoft employees and posted publicly on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Nadella claimed that the company “is not working with the U.S. government on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border” — which struck many employees as hair-splitting. The statement backfired, leading more of the company’s employees to sign the petition to cancel the contract.

“The way they’ve gone about trying to assuage our fears has only muddied the waters more,” the senior engineer said. Pointing out the disconnect between the company’s numerous public statements in favor of immigration reform and the contract with ICE, she said she expects this flair-up will have long-term consequences. As for herself, she said: “It’s making me ask questions I wouldn’t have asked a week ago.”

And she’s not alone. Some employees have stated that they are considering leaving the company, while other high-profile members of the tech community have backed out of conferences associated with the company in solidarity with those organizing internally. Additionally, more than 200 developers who use GitHub, a leading software development platform just acquired by Microsoft, which itself has faced criticism for its relationship with ICE, pledged not to continue working with the platform should the contract stand.

Plus, there’s a revolt happening at LinkedIn, a subsidiary of Microsoft. According to one current employee at the company’s Sunnyvale, California, campus who requested anonymity, LinkedIn workers have been doing their own organizing since news of the ICE contract broke last week.

When asked how broad the support is at LinkedIn for the campaign to cancel the ICE contract, the employee told Vox that he suspects nearly half of the employees are upset about the contract. With LinkedIn’s thousands of employees and position in Silicon Valley, this organizing is significant in its own right.

For one Microsoft worker, it’s a chance to have real impact. “Tech companies provide the machinery for coordinating between ICE agents, for tracking down immigrants,” they said. “If tech workers decide that they’re not going to build that, if they decide that they’re going to put their bodies on the gears, then they can stop it.”

Workers organizing at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are learning from each other

The unfolding story at Microsoft is just one development in a fast-moving revolt by tech workers against the Trump administration. The Google protest over the drone-related Project Maven was another key inflection point. After a months-long campaign that included a work boycott by what Bloomberg described as a group of particularly influential software engineers known as the Group of Nine, the company announced it would not seek another contract when the current one expires next year.

“We owe a huge debt to the Google employees who were able to get Project Maven not renewed by standing up,” said the senior engineer at Microsoft. “I don’t know if this would have happened if they hadn’t acted first, as it provided a very good blueprint for us.”

As the pressure mounts at Microsoft, a parallel campaign has emerged at Amazon. Amazon workers, community organizations, company shareholders, and more than 50,000 members of the public demanded the company stop selling Rekognition, a widely criticized facial-recognition technology, to all governments and government agencies, including ICE.

And coordination is growing: A number of those at the center of these campaigns are active members of cross-company organizations like the Tech Workers Coalition.

Asked what comes next, multiple Microsoft employees mentioned the possibility of protests in the works. The LinkedIn employee mentioned efforts to search through Department of Defense press releases and internal company resources to find other, potentially troubling, contracts.

Meanwhile, Science for the People, an activist group primarily made up of science educators and working scientists, will be picketing in solidarity with Microsoft workers outside of Microsoft’s flagship store in New York City Monday night.

This revolt has unfolded at a pace befitting an industry obsessed with speed and disruption. It’s a heartening first step toward increasing the political engagement of tech workers, which will be necessary if they will ever truly reign in these tech behemoths.

Tech workers need to organize with low-wage workers at their companies.

It remains to be seen if these workers can build the internal networks and connections to political organizations necessary to sustain their efforts. (In a notable shift from past disdain around using the term, the open letter at Microsoft was signed Microsoft “workers,” not “employees.”) But if — and, hopefully, when — they win the cancellation of the ICE contract, momentum is with them.

I spoke with a financial technology professional and organizer with Tech Action who agreed with the hopeful tone of those involved in the Microsoft campaign. But he also emphasized the potential limitations of tech campaigns that ignore the reasons these companies partner with indefensible agencies in the first place.

The “dirty work” pays very well, he pointed out, via Signal. So “if they lobby to stop the dirty work, they kill their own jobs.” Many white-collar Microsoft workers are angered by the company’s ICE contract, in part because “they or their parents were immigrants, or refugees,” according to one current employee. But every Microsoft employee who spoke with Vox stated that they did not believe there had yet been sustained coordination with the Microsoft workers who are most affected by Trump’s policies — the immigrants who work on Microsoft’s campuses as janitors, cafeteria staff, or security guards.

Pulling hourly, low-wage workers into the campaign wouldn’t only make sense because many of these workers may be directly affected by the administration’s immigration policies; it might also introduce white-collar techies to working-class criticisms of their employers.

Such criticisms include concerns related to pay, benefits, and the effect these companies have on the communities in which they’re located. After all, as the Tech Action organizer told me, at some point the focus of an effective resistance within tech will need to incorporate a view of owners and investors of tech companies themselves as the enemy — not just ICE and Trump.

Whether those at the center of the Microsoft campaign and their counterparts at Google and Amazon can reach these workers remains an open question. However, the growing recognition among white-collar workers that their labor is a precondition to the carrying out of unjust policies — and that if they withhold that labor, they can help bring these policies to a halt — is critical.

For an industry that has seemed almost allergic to the language of class, the current wave of resistance marks an exciting start.

Correction: The 200 developers who signed the pledge concerning GitHub’s ICE contract were users of the platform.

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in sociology at Northeastern University. You can follow her on Twitter @alexnpress.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The record-low birthrate offers yet another sign that millennials are economically screwed

2018-05-31T12:20:02-04:00

The birthrate in the United States is the lowest it’s been in 30 years, we recently learned, and the decline is spreading across age cohorts. In the past, the explanation for this was straightforward: As women gained greater access to educational and workplace opportunities, along with more accessible and effective contraceptives, some of them delayed having children.

And in part, that explanation still holds — especially when it comes to the plummeting birthrate among teenagers, a good thing by all accounts. Were this the extent of the story, and the data, a low birthrate wouldn’t constitute much of a concern. But a closer look reveals two issues — one ethical, one economic.

The ethical concern is that the number of women who want children but aren’t having them is growing. As Lyman Stone wrote in the New York Times, “the gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years.” Rather than a “natural” reflection of a changing society, this is a political problem that needs to be addressed.

Just as women should have the choice not to have children — in the substantive sense of being free of the insidious coercion of the market as well as of legal barriers — so too should they be free to raise a family.

But as these numbers show, many women do not have such a choice. That brings us to the economics. Following a significant drop in the birthrate after the 2008 recession, women are continuing to have fewer children. Why hasn’t the rate recovered?

There are many reasons besides economic incentives to put off having children, as Vox’s Julia Belluz points out, but sociologists and economists agree that the economy plays a role. One study even found fertility rates to be a “leading economic indicator” — predicting downturns (and upticks) in advance — while another found the sharp decline in fertility rates to be “closely linked to the souring of the economy” that began around 2008.

One reason for the continuing low fertility rates, then, is that the economy hasn’t recovered. Sure, GDP may be back up and unemployment back down, but the economy isn’t just quantitative; it’s people, and quality of life is a critical measure of economic health. If women want children but think they can’t afford them, the lag in birthrates should raise alarm about just how much “recovery” the average American is experiencing.

Why would we expect millennials saddled with debt to decide it’s a great time to have kids?

Indebtedness is through the roof. Young people — precisely those forgoing childbearing, the dreaded millennials — can barely keep their heads above water. Credit card debt in the US surpassed $1 trillion this year, while student debt hit the $1 trillion mark six years ago. Meanwhile, peruse crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or Kickstarter and you’ll see that one of the most common reasons people use such sites is to seek help with medical debt. The idea of bringing a child into the world seems irresponsible, or even downright impossible, especially for the many of us who live with our parents, or the many more who rent glorified broom closets in apartments we share with multiple roommates.

And the future? If it looks anything like the past, don’t expect the birthrate to change soon. The average wage for a worker in the US hasn’t budged in 40 years, and with attacks on unions relentless and continuing, that figure may remain the same for the foreseeable future. For those unlucky enough to have been born around 1985, it’s reasonable to expect a “baby bust,” a lost generation of sorts, the product of, as Conor Sen argued at Bloomberg, “hitting every milestone at the worst moment” — from entering a difficult labor market in their 20s to suffering through a tight housing market in their 30s.

Such multiple blows create a deep psychic anxiety and force the forgoing of all sorts of meaningful life choices, having children being just one of them.

Meanwhile, the US remains one of only four countries that don’t mandate paid maternity leave (the other three are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland). And families can’t look to the private sector for such support either. As Amy Westervelt pointed out at the Guardian, only 56 percent of companies in the US offer maternity leave, and of those, 6 percent provide full pay during that leave.

What’s more, paying for child care is almost impossible for millions of Americans. According to a report by New America, the average cost of day care in the US — $9,589 annually — is now higher than the average cost of in-state college tuition. And that all comes, of course, after giving birth, a process that has become almost unfathomably expensive. On average, it costs more than $32,000 to give birth in the US, making it more expensive than in any other country.

In sum, for many Americans, economic trends and entrenched family-unfriendly policies don’t augur well for bringing children into the world. Surrounded by a culture that valorizes insecurity, one that points to the gig economy’s precarity and calls it “flexibility” and “innovation,” it’s no wonder that many no longer believe in the possibility of a stable future.

Politicians frame the threat to Social Security too narrowly, and counsel austerity

The declining birthrate itself has the potential to exacerbate economic strain. The total fertility rate (the number of births each woman is expected to have in her lifetime) in the US dropped to 1.76 in 2017, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 (the rate required to maintain a stable population).

That means that as the population ages, there are fewer workers to pay into Social Security and to care for those who have aged out of the workforce. The declining fertility numbers could provide grist for backward “pro-natalist” policies — restrictions on abortion and contraceptives — that reduce, rather than expand, women’s freedom to choose, while also offering yet another excuse for austerity measures.

Other countries are experiencing side effects of rapidly aging populations far more severe than those in the United States, which thus far has been protected from this issue by immigration. But of course, our immigration policies are changing under President Trump.

Concerns about the welfare state rooted in demographic trends are often framed far too narrowly. Several economists recently argued at the Hill that given the birthrate news, “changes in Social Security eligibility should be put on the table” — including raising the retirement age.

But if conservatives are so concerned with demographic strains — and, judging by Paul Ryan’s bizarre riff in a recent speech about how “we need to have higher birthrates in this country,” they are — let’s levy taxes on corporations and direct that revenue to subsidize elder care and raise the wages of care workers. Our vision need not be restricted to existing patterns of redistribution across the lines of age.

Bolstering our safety net is only one argument for immigration — and not the strongest. Still, it’s one conservatives ought to embrace.

What else can be done about all this? Policies that can make a difference for families that want children include paid parental leave, publicly subsidized child care, an end to workplace discrimination against women in general (and mothers in particular), rent control, universal health care, increases rather than cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the regulation of contract labor in the “gig economy.”

We must also grapple with the possibility that eventually, women in the US will simply not want to have 2.1 children each anymore. That’s okay. That decision isn’t a sign of cultural degeneracy, societal deficiency, or individual failure. Any attempts to reinvigorate ideas of motherhood as the be-all, end-all of women’s lives are misguided and regressive.

Fortunately, there is an obvious fix to the possibility that women in the US may decide, for the long term, that they want fewer children. It’s not an original one, but it works: We can liberalize immigration laws, making it easy, not deadly, for those born outside the US to have a life here. While there is something decidedly creepy about encouraging the free movement of people so that immigrants can replenish an aging population — rather than for the straightforward reasons that it’s the ethical thing to do — we should still insist that those afflicted with birthrate anxiety should embrace the free movement of people across US borders.

After all, those who support the largely bipartisan project of deporting tens of thousands of women and children every year can’t well turn around and fret about the birthrate without conceding that their concern has to do with white women not having enough babies, not the health of the country as a whole.

While birthrates are tantalizingly easy to write off as biological and natural, they are a reflection of political and economic choices. That’s good news! It means that if we want to change them, we can.

We can reconfigure our priorities, valuing people’s abilities to lead dignified lives over their obligations to repay debt. We can catch up to the rest of the world and offer universal policies that would provide the support needed to start, and sustain, a family. We should use the concerns about the lagging birthrate to add urgency to the fight for a more just, equal, and feminist future.

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in sociology at Northeastern University. Find her on Twitter @alexnpress.

#MeToo must avoid “carceral feminism”

2018-04-27T15:48:42-04:00

“Our Constitution does not allow for cruel and unusual punishment. If it did … I would allow some or many people to do to him what he did to others.” These are the words of Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who presided over the sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar, the doctor who pleaded guilty to molesting US gymnasts under his care.

Many were quick to point out that while Aquilina’s statement may have been inappropriate coming from an officer of the court, it’s hard to fault her for being disgusted by Nassar’s actions. And in a country where nearly two out of three sexual assaults aren’t reported to the police and 994 out of 1,000 rapists walk free, Nassar is the rare perpetrator who didn’t get away with it.

But Aquilina’s barely concealed reference to prison rape — an epidemic to which an estimated 200,000 people in the US are subjected every year — calls our attention to a tension in the #MeToo moment: its relationship to the criminal justice system.

Institutional change moves more slowly than the news cycle, and it remains to be seen what efforts the post-Weinstein moment will be funneled into. The most visible development is Time’s Up, a program launched by women in Hollywood that will raise funds for working-class women facing workplace sexual abuse to file lawsuits. While survivors who want to seek justice through the courts should do so, “Lawsuits are not a strategy,” as Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, has put it.

Directing the movement’s energy into the criminal justice system doesn’t build the power we need to stop sexual violence: It allies us with a system that’s incompatible with liberation.

It’s true that talk of prison has played a very small role in the conversation to date about sexual violence. But calls to expand criminalization, under the #MeToo banner, are already prompting lawmakers to act. In France, legislation is under debate that, in addition to formalizing an age of consent (there is none now), includes “the possibility of police warnings for everyday sexist acts such as wolf whistling and comments about physical appearance in the street,” according to the Guardian.

The BBC reports that fines, too — not just warnings — may be issued for catcalling. The bill’s author, French MP Marlène Schiappa, cites #BalanceTonPorc, the French counterpart to #MeToo, as inspiration for the push.

And France isn’t alone in testing the water of carceral-focused feminism. As the New York Times reported in October, “In Europe, several countries have moved in recent years to criminalize sexual harassment.” In 2014, Belgium, for instance, “introduced penalties including a jail sentence of up to one year for remarks intending to express contempt for a person because of his or her gender.”

The United States incarcerates people — and especially black and brown people — at unparalleled rates, and our president embraces and publicizes racist explanations for social problems. If we criminalize the behaviors called out by the #MeToo movement — those that aren’t already crimes, that is — we will end up with broader definitions of sexual harassment and assault. There will be a corresponding emphasis on greater enforcement of existing laws. And we know what that means: locking up more poor and working-class people, even when it’s so often those in power who are the worst perpetrators.

Why using police and prisons to resolve sexual violence is a mistake

“Carceral feminism” refers to a reliance on policing, prosecution, and imprisonment to resolve gendered or sexual violence. A very early manifestation of this approach came with the UK’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. The act responded to public concern over slim evidence of the entrapment of British girls into the sex trade by raising the age of consent and outlawing “gross indecency” — which, as it happens, also gave the government a more effective means to arrest suspected gay men. (Famously, this was the law under which Oscar Wilde was convicted.)

The carceral impulse has arisen in each of feminism’s three waves and is most visible among today’s so-called sex-work “abolitionists,” who argue against decriminalizing sex work and instead for the criminalizing the purchase of sex. While intended to aid sex workers, in practice this approach leads to the isolation of workers from their systems of support and prevents them from earning a living.

Elizabeth Bernstein, a professor of women’s studies and sociology at Barnard, was the first to use the phrase “carceral feminism.” It appears in her 2007 article “The Sexual Politics of the ‘New Abolitionism.’”

She describes carceral feminism as failing to address the underlying economic conditions that exacerbate gendered violence. Neoliberalism shaped “a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation,” she writes. Instead of pushing for the preconditions necessary for feminist liberation, the “carceral turn” restricts feminist horizons to the individual and the punitive, rather than the collective and redistributive.

What does carceral feminism look like in practice? In the 1970s, class-action lawsuits filed by women against police departments that either ignored domestic violence calls or provided inadequate services — however well intended — spawned an approach to the issue of domestic violence overly reliant on prisons and punishment. Such cases resulted in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA for short, which was included in the largest crime bill in US history. It was a $30 billion piece of legislation that, among other things, funded the hiring of 100,000 new police officers across the country.

What grew from carceral feminism’s efforts to combat domestic violence should concern us all. Another example: Today, nearly half of all states have a mandatory arrest law, which requires that if someone places a call to law enforcement about domestic violence, the police must arrest someone in response.

In practice, this sometimes leads to victims being arrested. The decision is based on the officer’s perception of the situation, as well as any police record the victim or the perpetrator may have. But officers’ perspectives may be skewed: Studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, significantly higher than the 10 percent of families in the general population, according to the National Center for Women and Policing.

Moreover, there is a well-established pattern of police officers committing rape and sexual assault against those they arrest. Sexual misconduct is the second most commonly reported form of police misconduct. (A 2015 investigation by the Buffalo News concluded that an officer is accused of sexual misconduct every five days.) Given such statistics, empowering police to adjudicate domestic violence is indefensible.

Even the act of calling 911 itself can ruin a victim’s life. The Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond records in his book Evicted how female tenants are often forced from their homes for making 911 calls about domestic violence since landlords often use police calls to their property (on any subject) as grounds for removal. What’s more, “nuisance” property ordinances allow police to punish landlords if too many 911 calls are made from their properties. Landlords are sometimes told to evict the source of the calls, even if that person is a domestic violence victim using 911 as a lifeline.

It’s not that VAWA itself, or the actions of survivors seeking assistance from the state, are bad or wrong. Rather, the problem is that the push for carceral solutions to social problems drowns out calls for social and economic justice. As Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women notes: “[P]oliticians and many others who pushed for VAWA ignored the economic limitations that prevented scores of women from leaving violent relationships.”

Shortly after Bill Clinton signed VAWA into law, the president kept his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” His Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act attached time limits and work requirements to welfare use while banning access to public benefits for those convicted of drug felonies. Rather than focusing on providing victims of domestic violence ways to escape abusive situations — such as funding public housing and the social safety net — the Clinton administration emphasized the punishment of abusers as the feminist priority, even as it undermined scores of working-class women with welfare reform.

Many of those who could be described as carceral feminists reject the label as inaccurate. Today, most self-described progressives recognize the problems with our criminal justice system. And it’s undeniable that it’s often state actors, not feminists, who are most prone to see incarceration as the answer to all our social problems.

But as a movement, it is up to us to know the ugly history of feminism’s entanglement with the criminal justice system if we want to avoid letting our words and actions be used to justify policies we oppose.

Feminists must focus on distributive economic solutions

We know by now that laws are unequally enforced in this country. While Harvey Weinstein may be facing charges, his powerful counterparts — the unknown numbers of Wall Street traders, media executives, and political leaders who have committed less-well documented assaults — are not the ones who will be swept into the criminal justice system. Instead, it will be the poor and working class — especially those from communities of color — who suffer, as feminists cheer on the enforcement of laws that offer police one more excuse for violence and harassment.

We must be precise in our designation of what is at the root of this scourge: power. Sexual harassment and assault are pervasive in our society because extravagant wealth and absolute poverty are pervasive. No, the most equal society on Earth would not be entirely free of interpersonal violence; it would, however, provide far less structural power for perpetrators to hold over their victims. To reduce this violence, we must reduce inequality.

That means redistributing wealth so no one can attain the immunity Weinstein enjoyed for decades. It means expanding the social safety net so survivors don’t need to remain with abusers. It means delinking health care from employment status so that one’s health doesn’t depend on remaining in an abusive workplace. It means the provision of citizenship to the undocumented so that supervisors can’t threaten the most vulnerable among us with deportation to ensure their acquiescence. And it means strengthening unions, so working people have recourse against retaliation for speaking up.

Any survivor of sexual violence can use the criminal justice system to seek justice, safety, or compensation if she so chooses. But as a movement, we should prioritize demands that can prevent sexual violence before it happens, assist survivors in leaving abusive environments, and remove the many barriers that keep women quiet. While a carceral feminist like Judge Aquilina may not envision justice that doesn’t beget more violence, we can.

Correction: Elizabeth Bernstein invented the term “carceral feminism.”

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in sociology at Northeastern University. You can follow her on Twitter @alexnpress.

It’s time to weaponize the “whisper network”

2017-10-17T10:02:54-04:00

Harvey Weinstein in Los Angeles, California, in 2014. | Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

“Hey, just so you know, don’t be alone with X.”

“I know you’re new here. In case nobody has mentioned it, Y has raped women. That’s a fact.”

“I’d call Z a creep, but I don’t think he’s dangerous in the way W is. I don’t know, I could be wrong.”

These are the kinds of warnings whispered in private among women in work spaces. They are spoken at the bar with other women; they appear in my email inbox or my Twitter DMs. This is the whisper network that exists, informally, among women who want to protect themselves and other women from sexual harassment.

It’s a phenomenon that has been part of the public conversation of the past few weeks. The publication of a New York Times investigation detailing Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged sexual harassment set off a whirlwind of chatter among women about the widespread sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape that exists not only in entertainment and media, but across other industries.

This news has brought to the surface the private conversations women have been having — the warnings whispered to each other to avoid getting hurt. As women have written in the past few days, these whisper networks are a lifeline. And as a 25-year-old woman new to both working in media and living in New York, I mean that literally: They have helped keep me safe. But a concern keeps gnawing at my conscience, and I don’t have an answer: What about the women who don’t get this information?

They are the women who are the most likely targets of abuse: not socially well networked with other women, young, new to these industries, naive, alone. When we rely on whisper networks, we ensure that these women won’t be privy to this information, and we — the women who rely on these networks — would be lying if we pretended we don’t know that some of these women will become victims. It’s not a question of if, but when.

So having acknowledged that, what can we do?

An anonymous spreadsheet of dangerous men was a flawed but important attempt

Last Wednesday, some women in media put forward one answer to this question.

On my commute home from work, I got a message from a female friend that said, “In case you haven’t been shared on this,” followed by link to a Google spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet contained a list of men in media and allegations of inappropriate behavior against them. The list, titled “SHITTY MEDIA MEN,” could be edited anonymously by anyone with access to it. While a couple of the allegations were minor — “creepy af in the dms” comes to mind — most were serious, with rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and physical violence littering the “alleged misconduct” column. They added up to a warning: Be careful; don’t be alone with this man; if you can avoid taking a job with him, do so. A man I am close with was on the list: When I read the allegations against him, it felt like the ground was falling out from beneath me. It still does.

The existence of the list was reported by BuzzFeed less than 24 hours after the creation of the document. After the story was picked up by other outlets, the list quickly went offline. Many women have criticized BuzzFeed’s decision to publish a story on a document never intended to be public. The document was a flawed but understandable attempt to make the whisper network more concrete — and in doing so, to democratize it. Considering that the women who don’t have access to the private whisper network are the women most likely to be targeted by abusers, the document was a laudable effort driven by women’s collective impulse to protect one another.

But Shitty Media Men was also disastrous in some ways. No mechanism to verify the allegations had been developed — and no chance for a large number of women to weigh in. Still, the speed at which it spread spoke to a voracious hunger among women in media to do something, even a flawed something, to stamp out sexual harassment and assault in our industry.

The informal whisper network needs to be formalized

Two days before the spreadsheet was created, an accomplished female journalist wrote to me asking a question posed repeatedly since the news of the secret list broke.

“What would it mean to formalize the whisper network and use it to take power rather than to accept men’s power and do the added work of working around it?” she asked.

She cited a recent story by Anne Helen Petersen about whisper networks as a “means of survival,” as well as an essay I wrote for Jacobin recently about workplace sexual harassment. She then raised the question: Are we normalizing a system in which it is left to women to do the significant labor of spreading this information, and avoiding sexual predators? As Petersen writes, “We’ve become dependent on unofficial modes of communication to protect ourselves.” So how do we shift the labor required to protect ourselves onto our industries themselves — onto the people and institutions with the money and power?

As a grassroots effort to resolve a political problem, whisper networks clearly fall into the category of political organizing. But they are resolutely on the informal end of the spectrum. They are far from frivolous; they’re unambiguously political. But how do we expand and institutionalize these networks, moving them closer to the formal end of tactics?

Rallying cries that men need to do their part by speaking up feels insufficient, to say the least. Call me a cynic, but most men will not act upon knowledge about sexual harassment until we have weaponized these networks. Nor do I trust HR departments, loyal to the company above all else, to adequately investigate allegations against the men who hold power in that company. We need entities with teeth that can bring real consequences to bear on men who we know are abusive.

We also cannot rely on powerful women to speak out against dangerous men. It’s no coincidence that Ashley Judd was initially one of the few women who spoke about Weinstein’s behavior on the record. Her career is stable enough to allow her space to speak out without fear of destroying her job prospects. That the stories in the Shitty Media Men document were anonymous shows that many women still believe the consequences of going public about harassment are too high. And these women in US media, as white-collar workers, have more room than, say, low-wage or undocumented workers to come forward.

Collective action is the best way forward

So, again, what do we do? If this were an issue within one workplace, one answer is to unionize, and to use the union as a third party — not beholden to the company — through which to collectively stamp out harassment or assault. When a victim comes forward with an accusation through a union, she has the legal expertise of the union on her side, as well as the institutionalized collective power of her co-workers.

Of course, unions aren’t a cure-all. At least one actress who says she was harassed by Harvey Weinstein, Mia Kirshner, has written about why she did not trust her unions — the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists (ACTRA) — to forcefully deal with the issues. Kirshner pointed out that the SAG union will typically ask the studio or production house to investigate any alleged abuse internally if a worker reports harassment to the union. “You can imagine its effectiveness,” she writes. “Especially when the person being investigated runs or owns the studio.”

Kirshner also proposed changes that the unions could institute, suggesting that a harassment complaint should trigger a third-party independent investigation, for instance, and that unions should ban one-on-one meetings in hotel rooms. Rather than give up on unions, we should strengthen them.

But this is a cross-workplace issue, so unions may not be enough. We work for different companies, and sometimes in different industries entirely. This complicates our ability to place demands on any one employer. If whisper networks operate at the level of the social world of women, whatever the industry, then we can take the next step toward building the power of these networks.

We saw one example in the Shitty Media Men spreadsheet. But while false reporting is far from common, the ability to input an allegation anonymously and online runs the risk of declaring men guilty without verification. This in turn tars all the allegations with an uncertainty that stops us from acting on them. Further, the whisper network, formalized or not, accepts the status quo, in which women work around abusers rather than forcing them out of our workplaces.

I can imagine a hotline for women (and men, who are not immune to sexual harassment or assault) to report abuse, one that connects the victim with a woman in her industry who is willing to guide her through the possible steps she can take. We’d leverage tools across workplaces and industries, a rational response to an economy where workers hop from job to job on an increasingly frequent basis.

In the long term, I can imagine a more formal body that compiles allegations, verifies their validity, and acts on that information — perhaps by connecting women who accuse the same man so as to enable them to coordinate a legal or public claim against him. This could be done through existing professional associations or unions, or as an entirely new project.

Whatever we do, we should encourage victims to file complaints and speak out publicly. It’s encouraging that so many articles about this have been written in the wake of the Weinstein allegations, but we should be skeptical as to what will come of this public conversation. Trauma sells and gets clicks, but we won’t stamp out these problems by changing social norms or improving “workplace culture” alone. We must show that the accused, not the accuser, will suffer when a case goes public, and do so by building institutions of support for victims who come forward.

I don’t have the answers. I’m one woman, and this is a collective problem requiring the knowledge of as many women as possible. But I do know that the status quo enabled Weinstein to abuse women for decades. It allows men in media who have raped their colleagues to continue to write, even to write about feminism. Relying on a whisper network isn’t enough; the current situation is unacceptable, and we need to think about what we can do to change it.

This essay is adapted from a Patreon post.

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in sociology at Northeastern University. You can follow her on Twitter @alexnpress.

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