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When one of the Sac Street dealers told the Mercury News that he was just another businessman in the Bay Area, his specific references might have been lost on the average reader. “You expect me to work at McDonald’s or Home Depot?” he asked reporter Sean Webby a couple of years after the shopping center opened. “I make more here in an hour than I would make there in a week.”41 McDonald’s and Home Depot weren’t just arbitrarily chosen mass-market businesses dependent on low-wage service work: They were also two of the big tenants at the Ravenswood 101 Retail Center, along with (no surprise) Starbucks and three big-box electronics retailers. The state authorities and their friends at the Department of Commerce did expect him to work at McDonald’s or Home Depot, or Togo’s or Taco Bell, or Good Guys or Best Buy or Office Depot. Precisely so. That’s where EPA was adding jobs in the twenty-first century, and there wasn’t anything subtle about it. In addition to Hoover’s federal department and the retailers, the center’s inaugural plaque acknowledges Bank of America and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. At the very bottom: ORIGINAL SITE OF RAVENSWOOD HIGH SCHOOL.
In East Palo Alto, as in the rest of the world, capital called forth the labor it needed at a price it was willing to pay. There’s no reason we need to pretend that authorities at any level wanted everyone in LouAnne Johnson’s bused EPA class to succeed, for none of them to be left behind. Capitalists needed low-wage employees because that’s where the growth was. If all the kids in East Palo Alto became engineers and doctors and lawyers, who would fill the hundreds of jobs at the new IKEA by the freeway? In 2003, the hulking furniture sales warehouse filled out the Ravenswood 101 center, thrilling local shoppers in a way big box electronics resellers never could. It was the age of brands, even if the brands were attached to DIY sheets of plywood. Domestic IKEAs were few and far between at the time. The store’s serve-yourself model reduced the number of higher-wage delivery, warehouse, and sales jobs, leaving mostly deskilled service gigs with compensation near the legal minimum. Locals protested during the zoning process that they wanted a grocery store instead—as with a high school, East Palo Alto went without—but leaders were swayed by the retailer’s promise of at least $1 million a year in tax revenue.55 The store opened its doors to what the San Francisco Chronicle described as a “rampaging horde.”56 Say what you will about drug users; they don’t line up 5,000 deep to score. Fifteen minutes on foot from Sacramento Street, the new million-dollar spot was blue and yellow.
It’s a mistake, then, to think of Uber’s carcinized business strategy as driven by its scandal-prone leader, Travis Kalanick, and his bad personality. When author Brad Stone asked Kalanick why the company raised over $10 billion in the previous two years alone, the billionaire’s answer comes off as more resigned than pumped: “If you didn’t do it, it would be a strategic disadvantage, especially when you’re operating globally,” he told Stone. “It’s not my preference for how to build a company, but it’s required when that money is available.”14 That last part is worth repeating: It’s required when that money is available. If Uber didn’t take $3.5 billion from Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the royals would have put it on Lyft, and then maybe no one would want to invest in Uber, and then it would all be over. These companies didn’t choose to become crabs—that’s not how evolution works. The founders couldn’t stop themselves any more than the railroad barons could.
The result was rapid-onset inequality, as capitalists drove up rents and hollowed out relatively high-wage and formerly influential sectors of service employment, such as hospitality and transportation. California’s unsheltered homeless population increased by 57 percent between 2010 and 2020.24 Complaining about its attic portrait once again, the tech industry has grown frustrated with its intractably displaced neighbors.25 The number of property thefts from cars exploded, contrasting with declining crime rates throughout the country and state and triggering Dirty Harry complexes among the techie elite.26 Some took the well-trod civic vigilante route and funded 2016’s Proposition Q, which empowered police to dismantle homeless tents and camps. The Sequoia Capital chairman, Michael Moritz, and archangel investor Ron Conway—very thick pillars in the community—each contributed just under $50,000, pushing the measure to passage by a narrow majority.27
i just like the attic portrait line
“What does it mean to abolish Silicon Valley?” asks tech worker Wendy Liu in her prescriptively titled book, Abolish Silicon Valley.1 Liu’s conclusion is that capital’s ever-accumulating need for profitable sinks is incompatible with the kind of democratic control over modern technology that the Black Panther Party put on its program. Based on what we’ve seen of Palo Alto’s 150 years, it’s hard to disagree. As long as capitalists have capital, they have to find somewhere to put it, and capital will always find its capitalists. It may be that Silicon Valley is best understood as a particular expression of this impersonal drive: geographic, historical, and imaginary. It represents the gold rush and the next gold rush and the one after that, from produce to real estate to radios to transistors to microchips to missiles to PCs to routers to browsers to web portals to iPods to gig platforms to… If California is America’s America, then Palo Alto is America’s America’s America. Not just opportunity but also the ceaseless renewal thereof. Silicon Valley is defined by a refusal to stop or even to slow down, which, given the dynamics of finance-led growth, would amount to the same thing. How do you end that story? One way or another. What is the one way, and what is the other?
let's fucking goooo
The layoffs and safety concerns did not dissuade U.S. Steel from going forward with its plan to issue 21.7 million new shares of stock. This special stock offering, which raised $482 million, occurred in August, the same month the union accused the company of gutting its maintenance department. Angry over safety issues, the union on August 26 led a protest march to U.S. Steel’s main gate in Gary. Normally union protests occur only during contract negotiations. Workers chanted, “McKinsey sucks! McKinsey sucks!” Union members carried signs that drove home their sentiment:
“Hello Mario! McKinsey must go.”
“McKinsey stole.”
“McKinsey = contract violations.”
“Union yes, McKinsey no.”
“McKinsey steals.”
“Give McKinsey the (picture of a boot).”
the signs are helpful imagery
U.S. Steel regrouped and in 2018 created a new plan and a new slogan.
“Underlying our efforts,” the company wrote, “is our belief that we must operate as a principled company committed to a code of conduct that is rooted in our Gary Principles and our core values.” Those core values are “articulated in our S.T.E.E.L. principles…: Safety First, Trust and Respect, Environmentally Friendly Activities, Ethical Behavior, and Lawful Business Conduct.”
S.T.E.E.L.—with a dash of Ayn Rand. As a Christmas present, the company’s new chief executive, David Burritt, gave the former union official Billy McCall a surprise gift—the book Atlas Shrugged. “This is the philosophy right now,” McCall said in an interview. “This is corporate philosophy, for crying out loud.”
lmao. good pano inspo
At Disneyland, though, the process evolved primarily into a mandate to cut expenses. Using terms like “cost avoidance,” McKinsey recommended cutting back on park maintenance, eliminating jobs, paying some people less, and hiring outside contractors. In a broadly unpopular move, most maintenance workers were transferred to the overnight, or graveyard, shift. To deal with the shock of such a sudden move, McKinsey recommended bringing in counselors to address issues of sleep, nutrition, and relationships. Each overnight worker would also receive a one-year subscription to the Working Nights newsletter.
no way
Other top companies dangle promises of riches and the status that comes with them. McKinsey offers that, but also something more—the opportunity for young recruits to use their talents for a higher purpose, to make the world a better place. “Change that matters,” McKinsey tells job candidates, a sales pitch of wealth without guilt. “We are a values-driven organization,” McKinsey insists.
lol
parody this in pano? with a fake company
Executives and their consultants had legitimate reasons for wanting to reimagine the American corporation. Cheap, high-quality Japanese products were challenging U.S. manufacturers, especially in the auto industry, prompting General Motors once again to seek help from McKinsey. But instead of focusing on quality-control issues, a major reason for Japan’s success, GM and McKinsey embarked on a massive corporate reorganization, notable mostly for how much it cost and how little it accomplished. In the end, the workers paid the stiffest price for this miscalculation through job losses.
The 1980s brought more instability, sparking a breathless string of stories about sudden riches, corporate raids, leveraged buyouts, and the fading appeal of once stable companies. “Billions could be made by buying up American companies and loading them with mountains of debt,” said Les Leopold, director of New York’s Labor Institute and author of Runaway Inequality. As these raiders got rich off what Leopold called “the deindustrialization of America,” their apologists praised them for making corporations more efficient. Some companies had indeed become complacent, but raiders often bought companies to break them up and sell off the pieces, leaving thousands of employees without jobs. “This is not the invisible hand of the market,” Leopold said. “This is the financial extraction process.”
useful context