Math-shaming is a thing. I understand. At the same time in trying to parse through huge datasets and various schemes, both deliberate and inadvertent. math turns out to be important, as our two lead articles this issue demostrate.
In one case, taking a survey of dollar stores and their workers in metro Atlanta, the primary authors, four MSW graduate students at Georgia State, found that once the numbers were crunched, as you will read, it working conditions were sketchy, and the workers seemed ready to do something about it. In another case, our longstanding support of efforts by the Voter Purge Project to prevent voter suppression yielded clear evidence at the hands of Joseph Woods and his mathematical models, that there is underlying discrimination in purges for young and minority voters in Georgia and elsewhere. These pieces aren’t just worth reading, they are worth studying, and then trying to figure out how to fix the problems.
We follow with the second part of “Evaluation of Base-Building Organizers” in a further unpacking of the skills and sensibilities that are essential in the craft, as reckoned by the authors. Interestingly, the excerpt later from Paris-based Professor Pettijean’s book Occupation Organizer calls into question whether the degree of professionalism, advocated in this essay, is advancing or stifling social change. These are hard, but important questions. Our other excerpt, looks at the impact of taxpayer associations that came out of largely middle-class anger that began as part of the good government Progressive movement, but intensified and morphed into something different in the Great Depression, while continuing to foreground current divisions in our communities, between rights and obligations.
Lightening the reader’s load, a bit, we have an amusing piece of auto-fiction from Richard Wise about organizing dumpsters. Not dumpsters and dumps per se, but the story of Rhode Island waste pickers doing recycling their own way. James Mumm’s book review listens to a different drum, in this case, art and its role in organizing, advocated by long-time activist Ken Grossinger. Mike Miller’s review essay applauds the initiatives to create cooperatives in Jackson, Mississippi, while noting that the walk needs to align with the talk, and to my delight pulling out a frequent quote of mine to make the point.
In our columns, Phil Mattera finds it unbelievable that corporations can so easily buy their way out of corruption. Drummond Pike is horrified at the political fakery involved in debt ceiling puppetry. Gregory Squires touts the essential tool of community benefit agreements in dealing with developers while wondering how much the community is really involved. John Anderson argues in Canada and around the world, we need better protections against tenant evictions. Finally in the Backstory, I marvel at the deja vu of historical repression as it rises and falls against advocates and organizations again and again in the United States.
In this issue one theme is inescapable: you don’t have to understand the formulas to suffer the consequences. At the same time, if we keep ignoring them, what goes around, will, once again, come around, making real solutions for the future even more urgent.
A 95-Store Survey of Workers’ Conditions in Metro Atlanta Dollar Stores
by Cameron Greensmith, Kayla Reives, Sophie Saffan, and Caitlyn Shiner
Georgia State University
Introduction
Dollar stores are everywhere. With over 37,000 locations in the United States, a figure that dwarfs Wal-Mart’s 4,600, the dollar store industry hasn’t just fundamentally reshaped the retail environment—it has profited off and contributed to economic decline in vulnerable communities (Feuer, 2023). The discount store business model depends both on workers being willing to accept low wages for difficult work, and on consumers not being able to afford to shop elsewhere.
As Family Dollar’s founder Leon Levine obituary in The Wall Street Journal noted “Levine sometimes found locations by looking for oil stains on the pavement – a sign of the leaky cars driven by poor people.” The industry has cornered the market in low-income communities of color and rural areas where local businesses of all kinds have shut their doors (Gonzalez, 2019). As the costs of basic household goods and rent costs have skyrocketed since COVID-19, dollar store stock values grow and grow (Lee, 2023). The profits of Dollar General alone, the largest of the discount store chains, grew from $110 million in 2008 to $2.4 billion in 2022 (Dollar General, 2022).
Voter Registration Policy During the Year 2022
In the lead up to the 2018 gubernatorial election, then Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, led efforts to purge over 500,000 voters from the Georgia voter rolls. This action was particularly controversial given that Brian Kemp was also a candidate in the race for governor. Georgia is one of at-least nine states that utilizes controversial "use-it-or-lose-it" protocols when maintaining their rolls. The policy allows those states to purge voters who have not voted in a certain number of previous elections. For example, a Georgia voter who had not voted since the 2008 presidential election was considered inactive and eligible for the July 2017 purge that saw more than eight percent of Georgia voters wiped from the rolls. The next year, the practice was further bolstered by a 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld a controversial Ohio law that allowed the state to purge voters who had failed to return an address confirmation form and didn’t vote for another four years. That case, Husted v. A Philip Randolph Institute, paved the way for other states to begin adopting the policy–though Georgia had adopted this policy prior to the 2018 ruling.
Read more: Age Not Apathy: A Discussion of Use-it-or-Lose-it
A Tool with Nuts & Bolts for the Job (PART II)
DESIRABLE PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS
We define performance characteristics here as desirable because their mastery fulfills many of the requirements for promotion to lead organizer. In addition to the abilities noted above, these include the know-how to build teams and healthy team culture, to plan and supervise major actions, campaigns, and negotiations, to educate and train other organizers, and to conduct in-depth evaluations of performance. Withal, a lead organizer must have a strong sense of personal responsibility for the outcomes of the organizing.
In February 2017, as I was conducting ethnographic research in Chicago for my PhD, I visited the home of an organizer named Patrick, on the city’s South Side.[1] A Chicago native who was raised Catholic and became active in Catholic youth organizations, Patrick worked as a senior staff member for the IAF throughout the 1970s. He went on to become a consultant in organizational development, a diversity project manager in a large philanthropic foundation, and an educator for school principals at a public university. When I interviewed him, he was long retired. On the table in the living room, where we talked for several hours, Patrick had carefully arranged two piles of books. The first consisted of books on community organizing—Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1946), The Professional Radical (1965), and Rules for Radicals (1971); two biographies of the man, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky by P. David Finks (1984) and Sanford Horwitt’s Let Them Call Me Rebel; and two books written by Alinsky’s successors at the helm of the IAF, Edward Chambers and Michael Gecan.
Read more: EXCERPT - Occupation Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America
