Questions/Comments/Spam: ioas@umn

1. Every Movement in Its Right Place:A geopolitical analysis of the living wage movement’s success in the Twin Cities Questions/Comments/Spam: ioas@umn.edu

2. Outline of Presentation • Introduction to Living Wage Concept • Problem Statement • Methodology • Review of Agnew’s Theory of Place coupled with… • Cursory analysis of the St Paul movement through the three elements of “place” that Agnew emphasizes • Conclusion: place plays a crucial factor in determining the success of particular strategies of resistance to neoliberal practices – in this case, the living wage movement – and this has the potential to be compared

3. Living Wage Idea & Movement • What is the living wage movement? • Living wage ordinance: in general, if a city or county gives a certain amount of funding to a company, it must pay its employees 110% of the income that the Federal Government deems to be the poverty level for a family of four residing in that locality • Gained momentum in mid-90s, as cities began to increasingly subsidize corporate relocations, etc., and roll-out neoliberalism shoved many traditional social and market responsibilities to the urban level • Baltimore/Milwaukee Area enacted first such ordinances in 1994 • Movement was systematically planned by the New Party before it began springing up • The New Party was a new political party focused on the local scale but networked nationally and incorporating many community organizations • April 1994: New Party national meeting decided to launch 11 living wage movements in different cities within next two years

4. Living Wage in Twin Cities • New Party found enough signatures to put it to referendum in St. Paul by 1995 • Minneapolis did not allow ballot initiatives; so Saint Paul was targeted first • Though leading in the polls up until near the election, the initial referendum on the living wage in Saint Paul lost • City Council largely opposed (only one member vocally supported it) • Mayor and Chamber of Commerce were against ordinance • After defeat, New Party and other groups involved regrouped • Were able to induce both Minneapolis and Saint Paul to agree on establishing an unprecedented “joint” Minneapolis-Saint Paul Living Wage Taskforce to make recommendations on the LW to the councils • Taskforce met every two weeks for over six months and came up with recommendations that were passed by both city’s in early 1997

5. Questions for Research • Why and How? • Why did the initial referendum fail in a traditionally liberal community? • How did a taskforce representing two cities at once and made up of a diverse mix of interests – including many neoliberal ones – come to concordance on the living wage and induce both city councils to pass a living wage ordinance • Problem Statement • Such questions can only be answered, or at least scrutinized, in a geographical framework of analysis, because “place” and “scale” are both pivotally important • Using Agnew’s theory of place and Peter Taylor’s scale framework, my project analyzes the agencies, processes, and networking behind the initial demise and eventual success of the LWM in the Twin Cities

6. Methods • Case study of a large (in time and actors) political process • Lots of reading about Living Wage Movement: • Academic, • Some posing as academic, and • Much of it self-aggrandizing propaganda coming from the national organizations involved • Archival research of: • New Party meeting notes; • Taskforce meeting minutes; • National and Local newspaper clippings; and • Local opinion/editorials • Interview with founding member of the Twin Cities New Party

7. Agnew’s Take on Place Broken Down into Three Realms: • Location • Locale • Sense of Place Location The economic and geopolitical role that a said “place” has within the larger world (i.e., political-economy) St Paul and Twin Cities not actually on LWM’s initial list of cities • Internal movement fight over whether Twin Cities should be included • Demographics not quite right, as in the mid-90s not as many ethnic minorities here • Population was not as large as Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. • Not strategically very important to the movement

8. Sense of Place SENSE OF PLACE • Essentially, the feeling of identity, or identities, arising from a place • Not always positive or tangible • Often contestable and in conflict • Sense of place is the most dynamic aspect of place • Shaped by location and locale and dependent upon the individual • Saint Paul – Affirmative • Historically, Saint Paul (and the Twin Cities in general) viewed as liberal and progressive • St. Paul Sense of Place – Negative • “Boringest city in the US” according to 60 Minutes television show • Lost in shadow of fraternal twin city, Minneapolis (Hawley 2003) • Minneapolis was ranked “most fun” city in the US two years ago • At this time, Minneapolis dominated the skyline, so to speak, perceived to be home to many of the niceties of the metro area • Saint Paul a bureaucratic, state capital that everyone leaves at 5 p.m.

9. Sense of Place Conflict My evidence points to the fact that the mayor and Chamber of Commerce actually honed in on negative aspects of Saint Paul’s “Sense of Place” to squash the momentum of the initial referendum • Naturally, they used the “competitive city” argument to scare voters into voting against something that would benefit many of them, including the following arguments: • Will cause businesses to build elsewhere and even leave Saint Paul • What about Minneapolis? They didn’t have a living wage ordinance – so companies might move there. (Similar to the smoking ban debates recently.) • Image of city as stuffy and no fun – it would be impossible to get a sports team to move to the city (note: a few years later the Minnesota Wild came) and to revive downtown

10. Locale LOCALE • How people organize themselves in a place • Comprised of the socio-political institutions (both formal and informal) of a place affecting flow and interaction with other agencies and places. • Formal Institutions: neighborhood organizations, city councils, churches, unions, universities, political parties, et cetera • Informal Institutions: social clubs, interpersonal networking, family, intramural sports • Example: The City Council, New Party, non-profit orgs, community development orgs, the unions, and the Chamber of Commerce are all examples of formal political institutions. However, other smaller, informal institutions with influence would be university reading groups, neighborhood barbecues, post-coffee hour discussions, etc., which are very powerful in shaping our political views and in mobilizing us to action.

11. Locale (continued) The referendum lost but the initiative kept going… The New Party knew a City Council Member who was sympathetic to the Living Wage Initiative. Numerous small groups continued to pressure the council. There remained a large contingent pushing the Minneapolis City Council to discuss such an ordinance – a council member there supported the movement as well Shift in institutional tactics from winning hearts-and-minds to bureaucratic and policy: • Those still involved in the LWM networked with local council members in both Minneapolis and Saint Paul • Got the City Councils to form the first ever “Joint City Taskforce” to make a recommendation concerning the establishment of a living wage ordinance in both of the cities

12. The Power of Infiltrating Local Politics Taskforce Composition: • Unions & Trades • Business owners and managers • Religious leaders • New Party/Progressive Minnesota • Chamber of Commerce • Non-profits (JOBS NOW Coalition) • Minnesota Department of Trade and Economic Development • Community & Neighborhood Development Agencies • Banks (e.g., Norwest, etc.) • Job Training Center Council members supporting LWM created a Taskforce with individuals (e.g., even business owners!) who were largely sympathetic to the movement Met every two weeks for over half a year to hammer out a recommended dual ordinance for both Twin Cities

13. Taskforce Recommendations Taskforce came to a consensus and brought their recommendations to both city councils – November 26, 1996 2 January 1997 – St Paul City Council adopted the measure • Living wage includes businesses receiving over $100,000 in the form of loans, bonds, grants, and city tax incentives • Living wage is pegged to 110% the Federal poverty income for a family of four, or 100% if the business provides employer-paid health • 60% of new jobs created must go to city residents • City promised to promote living wage ordinances in the greater metro area beyond Saint Paul and Minneapolis – partially again, for its own competitive purposes Minneapolis March of 1997 passed the recommendations as well

14. Locale and Sense of Place In the end, it is difficult for any city institution to argue for “poverty” • Erica Schoenberger (1998) argues that academics and progressive groups have a large part to play in the failure of social justice movements in American cities • She argues that even when academic work on such matters is objective, our arguments are framed within the discourse of classic economics (i.e., neoliberalism) that promotes the common sense ideology of those our science opposes • Rather than fight “competitive city” arguments with statistics showing that the living wage actually does not hamper job growth, etc., it is more useful to argue from the “poverty” side… • Taxes and high wages do not keep businesses away from urban centers, poverty does. A sense of poverty, and the social and political-economic dangers associated with it, are what keep businesses away and limit economic growth.

15. Conclusions About LWM Success • Taskforce was a formal institution – comprised of powerful and interested parties from both local and national scales • This institution would not defend the conclusion that people should make less than poverty wages, nor could it justify that either city provide support to businesses paying less than poverty level incomes to their employees • Biggest debates came over wording of the recommendations used to create the ordinance (debates over location and sense of place): • Loopholes exist in the ordinance for new stadiums, and • Community Development Organizations to act as middlemen in providing city money to some businesses • In this case, resistance to neoliberalism was more successful when progressive, non-mainstream local institutions networked themselves within formal institutions of authority and power. • LW passed a year after it had only found one supporter in the city council vote and the public had voted the measure down.

16. Why Geography? • Whereas political processes are operating in network fashion across different scales and in different places… • To fully understand and compare the processes behind successful and unsuccessful living wage movements, a geographic framework is necessary that: • Encompasses place (i.e., our case studies) and agency (operating across scales) and • That allows the systematic analysis of place for comparative purposes. • My paper attempts to do this in the Saint Paul-Minneapolis context by using Agnew’s Theory of Place embedded in Peter Taylor’s scales of the political-economy Questions?

18. Place as Nested in Scale • Doreen Massey – Open University, UK • Places as dynamic networks of social relations "which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed, and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locale into wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too.“ • Peter Taylor – Loughborough University, UK • Three dominant socially constructed scales in which all “places” (as networks of social relations) are nested: • Local Scale: scale of experience, where we experience everyday life • State Scale: scale of ideology, traditionally promotes policies shaped by individual experiences that in turn shape our geopolitical imaginations of the larger world (nationalism, human rights, religion, common sense of neoliberalism) • World-Economy: scale of reality, the holistic scale in which all networks of socio-political interaction take place and affect one another, and the scale at which capitalism, and perhaps the neoliberal ideology, emanates from.

19. Place and Scale Case of LWM in St Paul • The State Scale (agencies & networks) • City of St Paul (and Twin Cities as metro area) • Under contemporary neoliberalism, cities such as St. Paul use “competitiveness” argument against living wage ordinances • New Party: was sprouting up across US, was never trans-national • ACORN: national network of community organizations still working on living wage movements today • Local Scale (agencies & networks) • Political Institutions: unions, taskforce, political parties, community organizations, and local chapters of above networks • Agents of Local Power: Chamber of Commerce, City Council, Mayor, State Capital, etc. • Using Taylor’s Framework with Agnew’s Theory of Place will allow us to analyze the interactions between institutions operating both nationally and locally

20. Twin Cities Location • Not really deemed a major center of economic exploitation in the mid-90s, as low unemployment forced wages in the Twin Cities region to automatically be higher than minimum wage • Still, local activists argued that they were not high enough • Able to network and quickly set up an initiative because of strong local institutions

21. Significance • By creating a unique framework in which to analyze the living wage movement, it is hoped that other studies can be conducted in other localities for purposes of comparative analysis • Numerous studies out there on the living wage movement but many are incredibly subjective (along the lines of Treanor’s take on “Neoliberalism”) • The studies that are not manifestos come from a variety of social science disciplines and have little in the way of link to one another • Study by Isaac Martin (2001) comes closest to having a replicable methodology, but the replicable part of his study is conducted at the national scale