In the first post on this topic, I pointed out how even the most radical article on social justice in the winter 2015-2016 edition of Leaders & Learners (the official magazine of the Canadian Association of School Administrators, or CASS) expresses the limited definition (and views) of middle-class ideology. This post will continue to critically analyze the content of this publication. This time, I will look at the article in that publication written by Ann Boniferro, entited “The Poverty Challenge.”
Before looking at the article, though, it might prove useful to see who the author is. At the end of the article, it provides a clue as to who she is:
Ann Boniferro is Coordinator of Religious and Family Life Education for the Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, and chair of the board’s Committee for Social Justice.
The Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, Ontario, according to Wikipedia, is”the school district administrator for Roman Catholic schools in the western portions of Eastern Ontario” (Wikipedia)). She seems to be an administrator more than anything else.
The article refers to an activity involving role playing that is designed to teach students about poverty. As she writes on page 31:
The Poverty Challenge is designed to encourage those who are not living in poverty in Canada to care about those who do.
There is a problem with this definition of poverty. The implicit measure of poverty is–a certain level of income. In other words, it is socio-economic status which determines whether a person (and child) lives in poverty or not. There is an implicit level of income below which people are defined as poor, and above this level they are not poor. Indeed, this duality is explicitly expressed in the above quotation: “those who are not living in poverty in Canada” and “those who do.” Those who do not live in poverty, it is implied, are the fortunate ones, and those who live in poverty are the unfortunate ones. Those who are not poor exclude themselves as an object of empathy since they are the fortunate ones. It is only the poor people who are to receive empathy.
I have already criticized defining class in terms of socio-economic status in my first post on this topic so I will not repeat it here. Let us look, however, at the issue of poverty.
The author outlines how the role-playing unfolds:
Students and their teachers are each given a profile of one of several people who live in poverty. Playing this role, they must move through simulations of various social services and agencies to respond to crises that their character faces. They may need to find affordable housing, visit the local food bank, apply for Ontario Works, or access dental care for themselves or their children. Mock offices are spread throughout Loyalist College and staffed by volunteers from the school board and the broader community. As students navigate the halls of this unfamiliar building and interact with thevolunteers, they experience some of the frustration of dealing with multiple agencies and systems. Comments on a graffiti wall express their aggravation. “I’m lost.” “People are mean.” “This is VERY difficult!”
Once they experience personally what it might be like to live in what is considered poverty, the students then meet some of those who have personally experienced living in what is defined as poverty. The students then, in groups, discuss some possible solutions to the problems they experienced, and teachers also meet to discuss how they can extend the learning of what is defined as poverty in their classrooms.
Is such role-playing useful? Of course it is. One aspect of living in poverty may indeed involve living with a limited income. I have personally had to look for pennies in my apartment (when they existed in Canada) in order to make sure that I had enough money to buy a coffee and a muffin from McDonalds (where they had a coffee and muffin combo special for $1.39 Canadian). Level of income does matter, and not having a sufficient level of income, or depending on the government for income, can be humiliating and demeaning in a variety of ways.
Level of income definitely has an impact on the quality of life.
However, the duality that defines a few as living in poverty and the many (the so-called middle class) as not living in poverty exclusively looks it from the point of view of the level of income and, ultimately, is a consumerist definition of poverty. It has to do with the possible quality of life outside of work. (Even then, this quality of life is itself largely characterized by commodities produced at work, so quality of life outside of work is hardly independent of quality of life inside of work.)
Consider the definition of poverty by Geoffrey Kay, a Marxist theoretician (The Economic Theory of the Working Class, page 7):
The absolute poverty of the working class is visibly present in the conditions of work where everything the worker touches belongs to another. The means of production he uses, that is the machines, buildings, materials, etc., all belong to his employer, who also owns the output. The only thing the worker owns is his capacity to work and his economic welfare depends upon his being able to sell this at the best possible price.
Think about your own situation. How many times have you had to humiliate yourself at work? Bite your tongue when you wanted to say something against your boss? For not being able to sit down on the job? For not being able to defend yourself against their criticisms because you know that, if you do, you will experience reprimands and negative consequences.
Kay recognizes that the rate of increase in the level of income of the working class with relatively higher rates of labour productivity was unheard of after the Second World War:
In the course of this century, particularly during the period of the post-war boom, this price measured in terms of the commodities it can purchase, the real wage, has risen to unprecedented heights, at least in the advanced industrialised countries of the west. As a result of this and the maintenance of full or near full employment backed up by social welfare, the working class has enjoyed greater prosperity and security than at any time in its history. In these circumstances it appears strange to talk of absolute poverty, and the old socialist claim that the working class has nothing to lose but its chains seems an archaic relic of the past when the working class did indeed live in dire poverty. Yet the fact remains that the working class today has no greater economic autonomy than its forbears a hundred years ago.
Economic autonomy in the sense of controlling one’s own life at work is hardly in the cards for most people in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan and so forth is a will’o-the-wisp for most people in the present economic structure. As Kay points out (pages 7-8):
Consider the situation of a contemporary worker who loses his job. This has happened to several million workers in the industrialised world since the long boom faltered in 1973, not counting the other millions of young people who have never found jobs at all. Many of the workers who have recently suffered unemployment for the first time, earned wages that allowed them to enjoy all the trappings of ‘affiuence’ -decent housing, cars, television, refrigerators and so on. But the loss of the job puts this standard of living immediately in jeopardy, particularly if unemployment lasts for anything more than a few weeks. In the unlikely event of a working class family having a large private income, its initial response to unemployment is to cut back spending on marginal items, and attempt to maintain its style of life intact in the hope that new work will be found shortly. As the period of unemployment lengthens, it begins to eat into savings, but this does not hold out much hope. Working class savings are notoriously low, and often take the form of insurance policies that can only be cashed in at a considerable loss. If the family decides to sell off it consumer durables, apart from reducing its standard of living immediately it will invariably make further losses as second-hand prices are always far below prices for new articles. Moreover, many working class purchases are financed by hire purchase where the interest element makes the actual price higher than the market price, and the family that sells off relatively new items bought in this way often finds that, far from releasing cash, it lands itself in further debt. Working class affluence is entirely dependent upon wages: remove these – i.e. unemployment – and the absolute poverty of its social situation shows through very quickly. In the nineteenth century unemployment meant immediate destitution; the modern worker is clearly much better off than his forbears – for him and his family poverty is a few weeks, maybe even a few months, away.
Excluding the dependence of workers on having to work for an employer in order the money they need to purchase the consumer products they need does a disservice to workers. By implicitly defining poverty as purely a function of level of income and hence level of consumption, Ms. Boniferro completely ignores the need of most workers to subordinate their will to the power of employers in various ways (such as having to stand when they want to sit, having to accept the insults of customers when they want to tell such customers how rude they are and so forth). She ignores the economic blackmail which workers experience on a daily basis when they work for an employer (‘You do not like it here–there is the door. You are “free” to go’–so is the implicit message of employers–knowing full well the economic dependence of most workers.)
Imagine if there were role playing of the various ways in which employees have to do something against their will in order to receive a wage or salary? How often they feel humiliated and yet accept such humiliation in order to receive a wage or salary?
Why was there no such role playing? The answer lies in the middle-class bias implicit in the definition of who is poor and who is not. It lies in the implicit definition of poverty exclusively in terms of level of income.
How does this express social justice? The definition of social justice characteristic of school ideology is consistent with social-democratic definitions, which consider there to be such a thing as a “fair contract,” “decent work,” “fair labour laws,” and so forth. As long as there is higher wage or salary that exceeds a definition of poverty, and some control over working conditions (as provided by a collective agreement), then there all is fine in the best of all possible worlds.
Take a couple of examples this. Ken Lewenza. the former president of the Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW (now Unifor)), representing 200,000 members throughout Canada, wrote:
My last point is this—and I’m pleading with you on this. If you do your work on the labour movement, if you take a look at any country that’s doing well in terms of eliminating poverty, it’s because they have a strong labour movement; because they have free collective bargaining. At the end of the day, through the power of the union, through the power of collective bargaining, we have established a middle class [my emphasis].
Or again, let us listen to Andrea Horwath, former leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party (the social democratic political party in Canada, often linked to unions):
Protect middle class families by having the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations pay their fair share
Note how the implicit definition of “middle class” according to level of income goes hand in hand with the idea of corporations “paying their fair share”–as if corporations that somehow pay a certain level of taxes are legitimate. There is so little critical thinking in such phrases that it is astounding how the radical left persistently fail to call such obvious pandering to the class of employers to account.
The Abolitionary 