Another Victim of the BP Oil Leak

The ongoing BP oil leak has many victims—the hundreds of dead animals, the lost of business for the already hard-hit Gulf Coast, the destroyed and polluted beaches, the devastating environmental toll. Add to the list BP gas station owners.

BP sold off its retail gas business, which means the people who own the 13,000 BP gas stations are generally independent franchisees. So the calls for BP boycotts and demonstrations outside of BP gas stations are misguided and end up hurting independent business owners who are locked into contacts with BP. Besides, as Consumerist points out when you choose another gas station over BP you may be giving your money to a wholly-owned BP subsidiary.

But what to do to show your disgust? It’s difficult as a consumer to take an action that will have an impact on the evils of the corporation and not the employees who are likely getting screwed over already. A single person’s boycott is just a drop in the bucket (I refuse to shop at both Wal-Mart and American Apparel because of their business practices as I’m sure many people do—yet not enough to make a noticeable difference in their bottom line).

A huge shift in public sentiment however (like seeing constant footage of spewing oil and sad dying animals) tends to motivate a more urgent need to take action. It’s a difficult line to toe, by no means should we sit idly by when corporations make huge mistakes and act poorly. Consumer boycotts sometimes do make a huge difference and force corporations into action. And voting with your wallet is often the best and easiest way to make an impact to a company, but we’d all be wise to use a more thoughtful approach to who is going to be most impacted by our actions and what better ways there might be.

This kind of limited thinking can be found at work in overtly brainless ways like boycotting Arizona Iced Tea (which is produced in New York) over Arizona’s eff-ed up immigration law. Or in misplaced good intentions like Michael Moore’s approach to shaming corporate criminals and fat cats.

The cornering and public/on camera dressing down of men like GM’s CEO Roger Smith would provide audiences with satisfying schadenfreude. Instead too often Moore goes for the easy showiness of storming the security guards at corporate headquarters (blue collar working dudes) These guys would probably be on his side of the issues, but a job’s a job and they don’t want to lose theirs so they follow orders and turn Mike and his cameras away and look like the bad guys while the criminals never have to leave their offices. Not that mid or entry level employees at evil places are without responsibility, it does raise questions about personal integrity, choices, and selling out, but these days it’s difficult to criticize someone who likely is grateful to have a job at all.

But like the ending to most of Moore’s movies, I don’t have the answer. Doing nothing isn’t good advice, boycotting BP and putting more small business owners out of work will hurt the wrong people, and pressuring law makers to regulate and penalize companies like BP seems like the best if not most frustrating means of action. That, and giving time and money to companies who are doing good and demanding more transparency and asking the right questions about the places you spend your money are probably the best actions we can take.

Paying to Work?

Last week Atlantic Media decided to start paying interns , including retroactively paying last year’s interns. This is huge news for journalism interns. For college students (and graduates!) who want to get experience at a publication (and often more than one internship is necessary if you ever ever want to get hired anywhere) unpaid internships are de rigueur. And these aren’t coffee-fetching internships (do those even exist anymore?) These are (as many articles have been pointing out lately) what would otherwise be paid staff or freelance jobs. In fact, the students filling these unpaid positions are often in fact paying for the privilege since they complete the internship for college credit which even though the college isn’t providing the education or experience, they still must pay tuition for.

During my time at Popular Photography I was in charge of hiring and supervising (and assigning work to) several interns, all (but one who shall remain nameless, but she should know who she is) of these interns were incredibly smart and hard working, and I did my best to give them meaningful work that they could not only learn from but leaving with something valuable to put on their resumes and clips to show. They all interned for college credit and worked part-time around paying job schedules. But we never gave them a dime, and the work that they did was things that we didn’t have the budget to pay staff or freelancers for.

When I was in college I was an unpaid intern at Metro Times Detroit (and paid for the college credit to do it), I was there part time around two other part time paying jobs, but the experience remains one of my fondest journalistic memories (it was thrilling to feel like a real reporter and be sent out on assignment and pitch ideas, and work alongside and learn from some of the savviest journalists I’ve ever met). I did a lot of small work there for which I wasn’t paid, but when I pitched and wrote two feature stories I was paid (an albeit very small) freelance rate, and walked out with solid clips and experience. I have no doubt that internship helped me as I started my career.

While few publications (like Atlantic media and Mother Jones) offer paid internships, the competiveness of the publishing world (especially now when experienced journalists are working beneath their skill level) shows no sign of letting up, while paying positions (and entire publications) are becoming less available. So paying interns should be common practice, but unless it becomes illegal to hire people and not pay them (it should!) I doubt many if any publications will follow Atlantic’s lead. If fact some of the woman’s glossies seem to be going the opposite direction—auctioning off the privilege of working there; there is currently a $12,000 bid to work next to Anna Wintour at Vogue for a week. While that example may be solely for the morbid curiosity of working with the Devil Wears Prada, internships at magazines like Elle have also been auctioned off.

It’s a Catch 22 as a college student or recent grad; you don’t have the experience to get hired, and the only way you can get the experience is to work for free. While publications can’t (or won’t pay interns like they would real employees—and maybe that shouldn’t since there is often a lot of work teaching on the staff’s part—they could at least provide freelance pay for the work they publish.

Affordable Housing and Transportation

Mother Jones’ blog last week pointed to the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s recent report on affordable housing and transportation. The traditional way to look at what makes housing affordable is if it costs less than 30% of your household income, but this new survey takes into account the cost of transportation as well (a combo which seems kind of arbitraly at 45%) which (because of the lack of public transportation in many parts of the country) changes the amount of affordable housing in the US drastically. Click here to look at the handy map and find your hood.

Looking at my part of Brooklyn and the areas around it the lack of affordable housing seems to predictably follow the lines of desirable neighborhoods (like Park Slope), and the addition of transportation into the equation makes little difference since most parts of the area are well served by public transportation. What’s interesting on the map to me is the blue areas (people who are paying more than 30% of their income for housing) are predictably in expensive neighborhoods, with giant yellow patches in less desirable places like Bushwick and East New York, there’s also giant blue patches in Marine Park and Bay Ridge/ Bensonhurst, I don’t know enough about these areas to say why, my guess is that more people there own houses and have to pay property taxes/ deal with foreclosures, etc.

As far as transportation equaling in on the affordability of these more far flung neighborhood I could predict that the recent MTA cuts could make certain places less affordable or that less access to public transit might drive down home costs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in many other places.

What I’d like to see however is a neighborhood affordability index that took into account more factors about the neighborhood as a whole. The Median Household Income for New York City is listed as $41,053. Of course it’s impossible to live in these more expensive hoods on that income, the people who live there make well in the 100 thousands and above, which means there’s some pretty low incomes in those more affordable hoods drive the median down. While housing prices might change, I’d like to see a study of prices of the rest of costs of living by neighborhood and how much that changes. I think I could predict the results. Moral of the story: it’s effing expensive to live here, and “affordable” housing probably only exists if you have a rent stabilized apartment.