The City Is the Factory

New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age

Miriam Greenberg, Penny Lewis, Miriam Greenberg, Penny Lewis

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501708053
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Urban public spaces, from the streets and squares of Buenos Aires to Zuccotti Park in New York City, have become the emblematic sites of contentious politics in the twenty-first century. As the contributors to The City Is the Factory argue, this resurgent politics of the square is itself part of a broader shift in the primary locations and targets of popular protest from the workplace to the city. This shift is due to an array of intersecting developments: the concentration of people, profit, and social inequality in growing urban areas; the attacks on and precarity faced by unions and workers' movements; and the sense of possibility and actual leverage afforded by local politics and the tactical use of urban space. Thus, "the city"—from the town square to the banlieu—is becoming like the factory of old: a site of production and profit-making as well as new forms of solidarity, resistance, and social reimagining.We see examples of the city as factory in new place-based political alliances, as workers and the unemployed find common cause with "right to the city" struggles. Demands for jobs with justice are linked with demands for the urban commons—from affordable housing to a healthy environment, from immigrant rights to "urban citizenship" and the right to streets free from both violence and racially biased policing. The case studies and essays in The City Is the Factory provide descriptions and analysis of the form, substance, limits, and possibilities of these timely struggles.

Contributors
Melissa Checker, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Daniel Aldana Cohen, University of Pennsylvania; Els de Graauw, Baruch College, City University of New York; Kathleen Dunn, Loyola University Chicago
Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University; Miriam Greenberg, University of California, Santa Cruz; Alejandro Grimson, Universidad de San Martín (Argentina); Andrew Herod, University of Georgia; Penny Lewis, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Stephanie Luce, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Lize Mogel, artist and coeditor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography; Gretchen Purser, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

1

THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT

Kathleen Dunn

Reading Capital won’t help us if we don’t also know how to read the signs in the street.

Marshall Berman, “The Signs in the Street”

In February 2014, twenty-five street vendors were violently evicted from Gangnamdaero street in the gentrifying Gangnam area of Seoul, and the headquarters of one of the city’s two street vendor unions were raided. Video of overturned carts and injured vendors splayed out on the street, as nearby police directed traffic around them, was immediately uploaded to YouTube.¹ Responding to the incident, Mayor Shin Yeon-hee asserted that the “area needed to be ‘cleaned up’ in order to make Gangnam more ‘global’ and ‘foreigner friendly’” (Kim 2014). In August, the chairman of the Bangkok City Council was arrested for extorting street vendors; he decried his arrest, warning that it would only discourage officials from policing vendors in the future.² By the end of the year, over twenty complaints of human rights violations were brought by the Nairobi Central Business District Hawkers’ Association; the leader of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights confirmed several “irregular acts of violence, to the extent of killing, maiming, or otherwise injuring hawkers” (Ruvaga 2014).

Such are the standard occupational hazards of street vending, despite great variance among vendors and the cities in which they work. Because their workplace is urban public space, vendors typically lack both property and labor rights, yet their occupational sector is one of the largest in the global informal economy. Moreover, street vendors tend to inhabit the lower rungs of multiple social hierarchies, whether as women, immigrants, indigenous peoples, the racially marginalized, the elderly, or the young—all groups among whom they are disproportionately represented (Roever 2014; ILO 2002; M. Chen 2001; Gallin 2001).

Governance discourse surrounding street vendors is also remarkably uniform. Vendors are usually described as problematic objects in the street, frequently with racialized overtones: “threats” to revitalization plans (Crossa 2009; Swanson 2007); “encroachments” on streetscapes slated for beautification (Fordham Road BID 2008); “contaminants” to public health (Kirshner 2008; Lyons and Brown 2007); and “aggravating factors” for community governance associations (Galvis 2013). Municipal governments often justify vendor criminalization by proclaiming that street vending is an inappropriate use of public space (Cross and Karides 2007). Indeed, it is street vendors’ appropriation of public space that threatens the moral order of neoliberal urbanism, as it flouts the sacred bond between property rights and class dominance. The problem street vending poses for urban elites is not a technocratic question of congestion and circulation; it is the audacity of workers who don’t know their place.

Facing conditions such as these, street vendors have increasingly turned urban public space into a “hot shop,” a workplace from which a street labor movement is claiming a right to the city. Street vendor organizations exist in many forms, from millions-strong trade unions, to nonprofit organizations small and large, to worker cooperatives. In regions where a strong informal labor movement has developed, vendor associations often affiliate with larger coalitions of workers, including trade unions (Celik 2010; Lindell, Hedman, and Nathan-Verboomen 2010). While not all a part of “organized labor,” nearly all such groups constitute some form of labor organization (Milgram 2011; Brown, Lyons, and Dankoco 2010; Celik 2010; Kirshner 2008; Lyons and Brown 2007).

Yet instead of struggling against the exploitation of employers, the street labor movement struggles against exclusion by the state, typically municipal government and its policies designed by and for elite urban actors—from real estate owners to multinational corporations. Street vendors’ collective grievances concern how the governance of public space excludes and degrades them through policy and policing. Their demands are class based, and advanced by organizations rooted in poor and working-class communities. As such, they represent a labor movement fighting against criminalization and dispossession as processes mediated through urban space. Their organizing efforts beg further inquiry into how we conceptualize labor, given its precarious and increasingly informal composition, in both what a right to the city entails and the urban process itself.

In its explicit challenge to modes of urbanization that subjugate the poor and working class, street labor is a quintessential right-to-the-city movement. Its collective demands to appropriate space and to participate in decision making about space are as fundamental an expression of the right to the city as movements for affordable housing, equitable transit, and quality education. Following Lefebvre (2003, 1992, 1968, 1967), the right to the city is a collective right to inhabit urban space through participation in both its creation and direction. Urban inhabitance entails more than mere residence in the city; it is a creative and collective process of constructing the city through everyday life, eliding divisions between housing and work, or private and public space. The right to the city thus encompasses the spatial practices of work, including appropriation and decision making, which suit the working needs of urban inhabitants. This classe ouvrière shouldn’t be narrowly misread as the working class (Purcell 2002); rather, we might more astutely conceive it as a constructive class: those who directly create the oeuvre or work of the city from the street up.

The street labor movement also provides a view into how labor both sustains and challenges the urban process, though clearly not under conditions of its own choosing. Since the return to a political economy of the city in the late twentieth century, urban scholars have done much to elucidate the outsize role of capital in directing urbanization, particularly through innovations in finance and privatizing governance practices that constrain democracy. Yet the role of labor in urbanization, particularly new forms of labor organizing that respond to mass precarity on the job, at home, and in the street, also fuels the urbanization of society. The vast majority of urban migration is labor migration, and the lack of formal work for so many migrants drives an expansion of urban informality that neither state nor capital can manage to contain, try at they might. In asserting its right to the city, the street labor movement grates against the homogenizing ideology of the branded and securitized neoliberal city, eliciting a consistently draconian subjugation of street vendors in cities around the world. The movement against such criminalization is a class-based demand for urban life that illustrates how struggles for workplace justice sit within the constellation of collective rights that constitute the right to the city.

Combining original data from three years of fieldwork conducted in New York City with a review of the growing body of street vendor research, this chapter details how street vending campaigns have emerged as paradigmatic right-to-the-city struggles in the United States and globally. First, I discuss common patterns in street vendors’ work, workplaces, grievances, and demands. Next, I analyze street labor campaigns against criminalization in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, global cities that have facilitated growth of a higher-end, “gourmet” food truck industry alongside vigorous policing of lower-income immigrant vendors. Finally, I turn to examples from outside the United States to discuss street labor campaigns that jump from the urban scale to national and transnational scope: a national street-vending labor law recently passed in India, led by the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI); and the World Class Cities for All (WCCA) campaign against the displacement wrought by urban mega-events, led by StreetNet International, a federation of vendor groups in roughly forty countries. Most of my New York fieldwork was conducted with the multiethnic Street Vendor Project (SVP) based in Manhattan, with nearly two thousand members, and VAMOS Unidos, a Latino organization based in the Bronx with about five hundred members. I spent nearly two years as a participant observer with SVP and VAMOS. Of the over seventy interviews I conducted with vendors and their advocates, fifteen were conducted among the small but growing number of the city’s gourmet food truck owners, predominantly native-born and upper strata, and far less criminalized than the city’s estimated twenty thousand immigrant vendors.

Figure 1.1. Street vendor protest, New York City, November 2015. The Street Vendors Project rallied to urge the New York City Council to #LiftTheCaps, removing the caps on street vendor permits and licenses. Photo © Kimberley J. Avalos/CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Used by permission.

Street Vending and the Right to the City

Street vending entails a rather literal right-to-the-city demand: the right of economically and socially marginalized groups to shape city streets according to their needs. What is most challenging about vending is not the work itself, but the requisite struggle against multiple mechanisms of spatial discipline that prevent the urban “precariat” from appropriating city space. As a result, vendor grievances and demands largely pertain to workplace conditions. Street labor organizing engages with a variety of state practices and processes, from street-level negotiations against police harassment and violence, to establishing or reforming municipal vending policy, to demanding recognition as legitimate workers entitled to labor protections. Despite great variance in the content and location of vending as a form of work, vendors’ collective grievances and demands are remarkably consistent.

The Work

While the challenge of how to classify and organize “atypical” workers is an ongoing debate, the highest concentration of these workers, and the most innovative organizing strategies to build their power, are playing out in rapidly urbanizing regions mainly across the Global South. As Demissie (2011) underlines, the mass migration to cities across the Global South in the post-Keynesian era is occurring without social welfare programs or adequate investment in infrastructure, job, or housing creation. Such conditions have rendered informal urbanization and informal work the norm, not the exception. An OECD analysis (2009) estimates that more than half of all jobs in the nonagricultural sector of developing countries are informal, constituting over nine hundred million workers. The International Labor Office’s (ILO 2007) research indicates that street vendors, along with home-based workers, are the two largest subgroups of the informal sector.

Street vending connotes the ostensibly noncriminal sale of goods in public space, most commonly everyday commodities, including food. While vendors are an extremely variable occupational group, basic characteristics shape vendors’ working conditions. These include type of goods, location of work, type of vending unit (mobile, market stall, basket or blanket on the ground, etc.), and relationships to other vendors—that is, whether they are working independently, with paid subcontractors or unpaid helpers, or are unpaid helpers themselves (ILO 2002, 50). As Cross (1997) suggests, independence among vendors varies widely. Some scholars characterize vendors as street entrepreneurs (Cross and Morales 2007), but the larger literature frames vendors as workers (Bhowmik 2014; Roever 2014; Milgram 2011; Brown, Lyons, and Dankoco 2010; Celik 2010; Kirshner 2008; Lund and Skinner 2004; Gallin 2001). Members of vendor organizations often characterize themselves as both entrepreneurs and workers, and many other variations of their liminal occupational status; one street vendor federation in Peru translates vendadores ambulantes as “workers of small businesses.”³

An important distinction among vendors as a workforce is whether or not they possess legal authorization to vend. Some municipalities render all street vending illegal, while others have a mixture of authorizations for some and not others, based on citizenship status and location and modality of vending. In a handful of countries, constitutional court decisions force municipalities to allow vending under right-to-work law (Meneses-Reyes and Caballero-Juárez 2014; Swider 2014). In Swider’s (2014) study of vendors in Beijing, the Chinese hukou system of two-tiered citizenship allows registered urban citizens to get vending licenses but denies them to migrant vendors, most of whom are women. Most street vendors must contend with some measure of criminalization in their working lives.

Vendor criminalization serves to precaritize a group who, in most circumstances, has few if any other viable alternatives for income generation. In New York, nearly all the SVP and VAMOS vendors that I interviewed turned to vending as a better alternative to untenable exploitation in the low-wage labor market, and prize vending’s higher income and greater autonomy, particularly regarding control over one’s time. This is a common finding in studies of immigrant-dominated, semi-independent occupations in global cities, such as taxi drivers and domestic workers (Milkman and Ott 2014; Mathew 2008; Itzigsohn 1994). The time flexibility of street vending is more conducive to sustaining the demands of gendered responsibilities of care and transnational family life than are standard employment arrangements (Chant and Pedwell 2008; ILO 2002). As Moustafa, a Senegalese merchandise vendor explains, “When I had a job, it would pay like $10 hour or $15 hour. Those kinds of jobs won’t support my family, bringing them here from Africa…. I work for a year at that job, but I want to go see my wife and my children. They give me like two weeks vacation. But if I sell this merchandise, I can stay there one month, two months, three months.”⁴ New York vendors often take time off in the winter months, as business slows, to visit their country of origin. For many, vending facilitates an important means of acculturation through interactions with a wide swath of the public.

Street vending is labor intensive, requires little technological support, and offers an ease of entry, particular for immigrants whose skills or degrees might not be recognized in the host country (Bhowmik 2010; ILO 2003). Just as in the formal economy, networks—of ethnicity, religion, and gender, to name a few—play an important role in channeling vendors not only into the occupation but into specific product niches and/or physical locations (Lyons and Brown 2007; Stoller 2002; Bhowmik 2010). The main requirement of vending is the appropriation of space, which is vendors’ primary transgression against the process of neoliberal urbanization.

While vending has emerged as a vital niche for these marginalized workers, it remains one of the riskiest forms of work in the city. Remarkably consistent across the vending research literature is the primacy of criminalization and state subjugation as the most detrimental aspects of the work; ticketing, confiscation of goods, eviction, arrest, and police violence are pervasive (Roever 2014; Swider 2014; Davis and Morales 2012; IBO 2010; Crossa 2009; Hunt 2009; Swanson 2007). In a five-city study of roughly 750 vendors, the Informal Economy Monitoring Study led by Roever (2014) found that focus groups of vendors in each city cited lack of legal access to public space for vending and abuse of state authority as the largest obstacles to secure workplaces.⁵ The study also found that street vendors are twice as likely as market vendors to face these insecurities, with abuses against women vendors tending to be underreported.

The Workplace

Street vendors don’t own their work space, and relatively few have formal use rights to the space they claim. Indeed, the occupation is fundamentally defined by its location outside of private property. Because street vendors are never fully in control of their space, their working conditions are strongly shaped by policies and priorities governing public space, which tend to reproduce the socio-spatial stratification found within formal labor and housing markets. The workplace itself is thus a primary mechanism through which the work of vending is both defined and subjugated.

As many scholars of public space have documented, neoliberal urbanism and its innovations in surveillance and enclosure have rendered city streets less public and less democratic (Sorkin 1992; Davis 1992; Zukin 1995; Mitchell 2003; Low 2000; Low and Smith 2006). The entrepreneurial form of urban governance, which redirects the role of the state from redistribution to competition, has strengthened the influence of corporate interests in shaping the urban landscape (Harvey 1989a). The branding of cities (Greenberg 2008) further reinforces the homogenization of streetscapes, rendering manifestations of difference both more visible and, as urban militarization advances, more threatening (Graham 2010; Davis 1992). Yet few public-space scholars⁶ have explicitly addressed how governance practices impact the economically marginalized who use public space for work.

The overhaul of New York City’s vending regulations in the wake of the 1975 fiscal crisis offers one example. Not long after the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965 allowed more immigrants of color to enter the United States, the city’s post-crisis efforts to rebrand itself for global capital entailed targeted eviction of poor...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From the Factory to the City and Back Again
• 1. The Street Labor Movement
• 2. Day Labor Agencies and the Logic and Landscape of Neoliberal Poverty Management
• 3. Economic Development for Whom? Retail, Neoliberal Urbanism, and the “Fight for 15”
• 4. Context, Coalitions, and Organizing: Immigrant Labor Rights Advocacy in San Francisco and Houston
• 5. A Bridge Too Far: Industrial Gentrification and the Dynamics of Sacrifice in New York City
• 6. Radical Ruptures: Crisis Organizing and the Spatial Politics of Uneven Redevelopment
• 7. The Other Low-Carbon Protagonists: Poor People’s Movements and Climate Politics in São Paulo
• 8. The Space of Speech
• 9. Spatial Politics and Urban Borders: A Study of Buenos Aires
• 10. From Workers in the City to Workers’ Cities?
• Notes
• References
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index