Immigration - Part 4 - Fear

My boss’s family is from mainline Philadelphia. His mother’s father was a society doctor and they moved in the orbit reserved for hangers-on to the well-to-do. The family tree she chooses to remember is her mother’s from Virginia.

She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.

But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.

In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.

Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.

He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.

My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.

Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.

My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.

We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.

The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.

Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.

The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.

The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.

We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.

Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.

We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.

We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.

She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.

When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.

When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.

The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.

When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.

Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.

It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.

After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.

We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.

The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.

She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.

Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.

Language - Part 1 - Science

The fate of scientists like botanists, entomologists and astronomers is sad. They start as children awed by the wonders of nature, and end with methods that never allow them to look out the window.

The first thing they lose is language. Men concerned with precision have not only banished the poetic, but even the coherent. Much of the challenge of introductory college science courses is simply learning vocabulary, and graduate students know they must master arcane rhetoric to be published. I often wonder if they can even put statements into English like

Affected animals necropsied at time of death presented with hydrothorax with as much as 2 to 3 L of straw-colored thoracic fluid.

or

We also investigated the influence of different levels of N fertilization (1, 5, and 10 mM) on the modification of the allelopathic potential of amended soils, in terms of their effect on soil total phenolics and radish seedling growth.

Once scientists have their advanced degrees, many follow research into laboratories where machines do the looking and they do the writing. Genetics and DNA are answering important questions, but still you wonder if people despair when they spend months of their lives reducing morning glories to

The mutable allele is caused by an intragenic tandem duplication of 3.3 kb within a gene for transcriptional activator containing a bHLH DNA-binding motif.

The alternative for botanists and entomologists is research in how to kill what it is they loved. Instead of marveling that pigweed and horseweed have mutated to survive the active agent in Round-up, they’re paid to find something that will eradicate the survivors in cotton and soybean fields.

With the systematic separation of science students from their subject, it’s not surprising so much research has moved abroad. Why would someone who cares want to put the years of work into producing what seems inconsequential?

There are few independent seed companies left in the United States. Most have been bought by European conglomerates or chemical companies like Monsato. It’s easy for business students to say they are following the pattern of globalization pioneered by the steel companies.

Along with ownership we disdain anything that’s not immediately pragmatic. Along with the loss of seed companies has been the loss of breeders looking for new varieties. It’s the Japanese who’ve joined the Dutch and Germans as the leading breeders of new varieties of ornamental plants.

I’m not ridiculing the scientists I quoted. They are involved in things that matter. The agent in crownbeard that kills sheep and inhibits the growth of food crops like radishes is galegine, which has been synthesized into a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It may sound silly to learn sheep who die are ones who eat sweet things instead of nutritious ones, but the consequences of knowing a glucose chemical was involved could not have been anticipated by the researchers.

And those doing the various kinds of DNA research aren’t just looking for miracle cures. They’re also deepening our understanding of evolution. Morning glories happen to be interesting because new varieties are not hybrids, but spontaneous mutations. All the Heavenly Blues we see today probably came from one plant noticed by an amateur named Clarke in Colorado.

The chasm between passion and procedures is not unique to science. Many English professors have felt the same loss when their love of literature is channeled into formal literary criticism. Historians may want to know why and how something happened, but they’re forced to use statistics or other standard methods that deliberately eliminate the special so they write without biases.

Amateurs have options. They buy popular historians or read historical fiction or watch documentaries. People who love novels or poetry don’t even know professors write books. But for those of us interested in natural history, the barriers are greater. There are no ways to surmount the language barrier except by trying to comprehend the technical.

Perhaps the rigors of professionalism have had the unintended consequence of making outsourcing technology easier, for when people cannot read or write about things they care about the formative culture that produces innovation is destroyed. When that’s gone, outsourcing is only a cosmetic term for having to buy what we once created.

Sources:
Description of research at Division of Gene Expression and Regulation I, headed by Shigeru Iida, on internet .

Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of Botany 7:1419–1424:1999, abstract on internet.

Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992, abstract on internet.

Competition - Part 1 - Brand X Telephone

My telephone company just changed hands, and it looks like things are going to stay bad. I had hope a few years ago when the company that owned our company got bought by a major utility that we might finally get some genuine service. But, as part of the deal, they sold us off, to maintain competition.

What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.

Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.

I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.

But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.

When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.

Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.

Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.

When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.

I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.

I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.

While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.

Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received

They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.

Where’s the competition for the customers?

Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.

I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.

The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.

The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.

Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.