(Of course, the report’s second prong was “The Family Strategy: More Middle-Income Families with Children.” Looking at its specifics, it’s hard not to conclude it was merely a public relations consideration. In contrast with the “childless” strategy, its requirements were abstract and far more heavily weighted toward nebulous obligations to be borne by “the community.” The mechanisms proposed to ensure this strategy’s viability indicated no clear metrics.)
The outcomes were predictable. As was the explosion in demand for pet care that came with all the new “childless” households.
22
THE PLAN, PT. 2 (OURS)
Six months out from Stansted, our hosts from Umeå had taken up in my house for the last leg of winter. One on my couch, one in my bed. More than a year had blown by since I’d been forced to give up on my marriage, and despite some travel and a number of material upgrades, the life I woke up to each day still proved unfamiliar—and mostly unengaging. It wasn’t sad; it just wasn’t what I’d spent the better part of a decade growing into, and still mostly felt like a consolation prize for which I had no real affection or passion.
Treading water like that had grown so bleak and, more so, boring that I’d decided to check out and pursue something adventurous for its own sake, just to disrupt the tedium. A bike messenger in Stockholm had talked me into plotting a series of low-elevation rides around Sweden at the end of summer. Factoring in downtime visiting with friends in various cities, I’d budgeted that I’d need a few grand, and a few months. At the beginning of the year, I told one client to stop paying me and just set aside whatever I had due; it functioned as a savings account I could put out of mind, and by the time I got on the plane, I’d have way more than necessary for the two months I’d staked out. My houseguests had offered to carry back a wheel set my coconspirator asked to buy off me, but before they’d even left, he’d backed out of it, and I got spooked he might bail on the whole plan, potentially sticking me with the expense of flights I thankfully hadn’t booked, yet. My adventure quickly withered on the vine.
Meanwhile, my drummer friend had gone and gotten himself hired at a dog-walking agency. He said it suited him for the time, but he wasn’t committed to it beyond his band’s next tour, which happened to be ending right when I was planning on skipping town. It wasn’t hard to convince him to sublet my house, and cover my clients for two months. I just had to figure out where to go.
I decided on Montpelier, Vermont. There was a small, intellectually vibrant crew of anarchists I’d befriended there, who mostly drew from the tradition Murray Bookchin had established through the Institute for Social Ecology. Unlike most places in the United States, Vermont was still governed via face-to-face assemblies, with elected leaders carrying out decisions ratified from below. The first articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney following the Iraq invasion were submitted by Vermont senator Patrick Leahy. Likely begrudgingly, but he wasn’t given a choice: it had been decided in the local assemblies.
It wasn’t just structural. It was an attitude. Beyond Vermont’s reputed progressive streak—which itself was far more complicated than typically acknowledged—was a certain democratic zeitgeist. The legacy of Italian anarchist immigrants who once worked as stonecutters in the region was apparent in various markers; an anarchist and socialist labor hall still holds events in Barre, just over from the capitol. My friends there had recently opened a small, volunteer bookstore upstairs from a worker-run café in the center of Montpelier, and invited me to do shifts there while in town. Compared to D.C., August and September that far north are gloriously forgiving, rent was cheap, and two months of biking, skinny-dipping, and coffee seemed preferable to my sleepwalk in D.C. I found a short-term apartment through a friend and booked a flight.
March became April. Then May. The prospect of my impending northward retreat had done little to blunt my restlessness. As my escape drew closer, it became more material, less abstract—and thus less ripe with possibility. The odds were I’d come right back to the same comfortable-yet-unenchanting rut, which made the whole thing seem pointless and naïve. I had hit a sort of ceiling. I owned my labor, I was comfortable, and inasmuch as there was only so much work I could take on, there wasn’t much of anything to be ambitious about, professionally. Most of the activist work I’d been part of had either grown prohibitively toxic or emotionally unhealthy. Much of it had imploded, and what was left seemed likely to meet the same fate. The most rewarding and dynamic group of organizers I’d worked with had slowly and amicably dispersed by way of graduate studies, sabbaticals, newborns, and other mundane life transitions. I’d settled on doing childcare for a local anti-gentrification project, just to be involved in something.
I don’t remember exactly when it started, but an idea began percolating, and I spent each of my workdays for a full week turning it over and over. I knew dog walking inside and out, top to bottom. I’d seen what past employers had botched, and how existing models underserved both workers and clients. My friend’s time covering my clients for August and September could serve as an apprenticeship. Upon my return from Vermont, we could split my work into two routes, and run the work as a team. When the workload grew sufficiently, we could expand the project to a third person. And so on. Scaled this way, we could share a health-insurance policy, organize our work on a directly democratic model, cover each other’s work where necessary—for sick days or nonremunerative passions—without anyone having to quit their job, and to the extent the project succeeded and grew, it would provide that opportunity and freedom to greater numbers of people. The operating overhead and margins being what they were, the clients themselves served as startup capital; most initial outlays could be cash flowed. We’d turn our day job into both a means of day-to-day self-determination, and a living, breathing demonstration of anarchist self-organization.
Saturday morning, I put it all down into a Jerry Maguire–esque e-mail to my drummer friend—knowing full well my enthusiasm likely exceeded his. Hitting send took deep breaths. Once irretrievable, I felt the dread of adolescent romance and the embarrassment of having overread and overreached. Sometime that afternoon, stricken with shame at my overactive imagination, I called.
“So I sent you this e-mail. It’s a bit over the top.”
“I know. I saw it. It’s really unsettling how alike we are in our thinking.”
I spent my shifts at the bookstore in Montpelier researching incorporation options, liability insurance, and drafting website content. We each kicked in five hundred dollars for the minimum balance on a business checking account, and put our first year’s professional association and liability premiums on a credit card—paid off in a month. A graphic designer I’d been on a few dates with put us through some pretty challenging, demanding conversations about branding, resulting in a downright incredible logo and a solid set of guiding principles for merging our presentation as a service and a political project. And we committed ourselves to putting our workplace—and its stability as a low-overhead operation—in the service of an unapologetic and uncompromising political vision, both in what we did and did not do, and where we collaborated with peers to allocate available material resources.
Somewhat firmly, we constructed our workplace around a number of foundational principles:
• Consensus democracy within our workplace. This, in contrast with the familiar, majoritarian forms of voting. We all had to agree to a decision, and decisions about which someone felt exceptional opposition could be blocked, entirely. Seniority, alliances, and other factors corrosive to democracy were ruled out, from the jump.
• Generous paid time off, particularly for artistic or political passions. Livelihoods exist to serve us, not the other way around. They should sustain and encourage the parts of us that enrich and fulfill us, as people. Further, they should value those parts of us such that they structurally ensure their flourishing. We began with one month each, annually. We added a week each successive year.
• Worker-ownersh
ip, and—within a year of launching—a communized pay scale. This meant that we were paid as members of the collective, not by the volume of labor we performed. Initially, this simply made calculating vacation pay easier, and resolved the issue of new collective members being stuck working newer, less-developed routes with sometimes only a few invoices and little pay, while others worked far more lucrative routes.
But it wound up really opening up questions of value, and how a given worker’s contribution to the creation of that value is calculated. If someone walking dogs on a route spanning three adjacent neighborhoods was forced to cover a new client from an outlier neighborhood (perhaps a neighborhood we wanted to break into), it put his or her quality of service at risk and strained their time management. This could’ve actually resulted in lost clients, if service was compromised. Thus, the value of someone working even that one outlier client could not be pegged to the value of that client’s invoice; that foothold represented revenue from future clients in that neighborhood, but also the value lost in comprising the quality of another worker’s performance, should they have to stretch themselves.
This was a central debate in anarchist-communism, going back more than a hundred years, actually. Given the value contributed by innovations, new tools, and methods, not to mention differing abilities (especially sheer physical abilities), the metrics by which a given worker’s earnings are calculated are fairly arbitrary. They typically reflect altogether other considerations—pitting workers against each other in competitive arrangements whose benefits accrue well above them, for instance. Further, cleaving the calculation off from larger social forces is disingenuous (access to education, class, gender, etc.). Rather than foster an environment or ethic of competition, we set ourselves up to privilege mutual aid and support. It saved our asses in more than a few critical situations.
• Work distribution was organized by neighborhood (and clusters of neighborhoods), so that all work could be conducted via bike or public transit. The carbon footprint of this approach was less interesting to us than the fact that it had prefigurative, propaganda value: why are the services we use organized the way they are? Might they be organized otherwise? Our clients were put face to face with this, each time they engaged with us.
• Health care. Most of us had spent our entire adult lives without it, and functioning as a workplace, rather than isolated freelancing agents, allowed us to both negotiate a solid plan at lower costs, and socialize the costs between us. For instance, the women in our workplace were assigned twice the premiums of men, by insurers. To rectify this, we divided the lump sum of all the premiums, and deducted their costs equally from the collective members on the company health policy.
• An explicit politics. We were clear about who we were, and what we stood for. And wherever possible, we sought to make that irresistibly relatable.
We started with roughly $30,000 annually in clients I’d cultivated while freelancing, in November of 2006. Our first full year up and running, we multiplied that figure several times over. The following year, we did the same. Bands went on tour. Bike trips on far coasts were taken. Growing pains were endured. And quality of life improved for all of us. On our terms.
23
PUG LIFE
“So, this is Dov and Tzippi,” Dougie said, making my acquaintance with two ridiculous-looking, geriatric pugs as we eased into a third-floor condo half a block off Embassy Row. When he paused to consider possible introductory details, I cast furtive glances at distant corners of the apartment, the inhabitants of which seemed to occupy a higher tax bracket than god himself. Tzippi barked at me indignantly for shifting my attention, her tongue wagging sideways through a gap where several teeth used to be. Freestanding stairs zigzagged from the space where the dining and living rooms met, leading to what I’d assumed was a lofted master bedroom. Stretching onto my toes, I could see that the elevated area was, in fact, a whole other floor, with stairs at the back leading to a third. Trying not to give away my absolute shock, I silently noted the extravagance, given what was effectively a penthouse unit in a not altogether modern building.
At the far end of the living room was a giant bay window looking out across Twentieth Street NW onto the Indonesian Embassy. Even from our vantage point, I could make out the residual red stain on the embassy steps, dating back some years, to when friends had pelted the entrance with paint-filled balloons as the Suharto regime wiped out a quarter of the population of East Timor. Such were the more traditional circumstances of my “business” in this corner of the District. I gazed down, feeling something of a stowaway. Dougie was getting out of the proverbial game. He was moving on to take astrology classes or study Jungian dream interpretation or something. I honestly don’t remember—it may have been both, knowing him. His next steps were less pressing for me than the fact that his clients represented some $50,000 annually, and he was handing them off to our fledgling worker-owned agency.
The increase would allow us to build internal capacity to establish routes in neighborhoods where we only had a handful of outlier clients, as well as accelerate material support we’d begun providing for social-movement work that our peers were doing. During my time freelancing, I’d lucked into a barter arrangement in which I did daily walks that covered half my rent on a small house on the east side of Capitol Hill, owned by an anarchist professor I knew with roots in anti-Apartheid and Palestine solidarity struggles. When I moved out a few years later, rather than renegotiate the arrangement, I invited him to donate what I’d have billed him each month to the Institute for Anarchist Studies—an outfit that gave grants, as well as editorial and publication support, to movement writers, historians, and other movement knowledge producers who lacked access to the funding on offer in the academic world. We’d both been board members there, and thus knew the value of the work they were doing. By mentally removing just one client from my “books” in a sort of tithe, roughly $5,000 a year was now going to the project.
At which point a lightbulb went on for me. I had spent years watching grassroots efforts either hobble into eventual collapse—underresourced and thus strategically adrift—or blunt their potential at the altar of institutional funding or NGO affiliation. But as a collective—with an overt politics present in how we organized our work—we’d be able to approach this in a new way. We were suddenly in a position to funnel otherwise unlikely sums to projects that would have seemed unpalatable to more timid sources of funding. Many noble projects weren’t the kind of thing that offered a tax write-off, and we could compensate.
The conditions we laid out were deliberately concise: any project we funded had to be local, and in need of support for a particular task. Part of this was strictly pragmatic. We wanted our friends and allies in local struggles to set real goals, even if the achievement of a given goal had lackluster results. At the very least, it meant that the projects we were backing were willing to learn from pushing themselves into new ways of doing things. That entailed measurable progress for movement work, even if the gains were less material.
We also suspected that the example we were elaborating day to day might be replicated—improved upon, even—by peers in other cities, or other trades. Both our internal model and our relationship to organizing work suggested real potential for acquiring the means of production in low-capital enterprises, and leveraging those spaces as proof of concept and mutual aid. If that example was to be taken up by others, we wanted to emphasize the priority of local struggles. Beyond that, the people doing a lot of the work we supported knew that work best. Their autonomy was of a premium to us, so we stayed out of their way.
Amid all this, we were also adapting to the pace of being in business—a pace that, quite frankly, took us entirely by surprise. The brother of an organizer I knew was part of a collective in Canada, providing web development and general web strategy services. It turned out he was a fucking genius. He’d taken us on with a contract we paid monthly, building our site using Joomla (a competitor to Drupal), which a
llowed us to update and manage things through a web interface. Further, he applied search-engine optimization to the site, managed our Google AdWords account, and provided monthly statistics and recommendations for maximizing what we got out of it all. The effect was enormous. At one point, at his suggestion, we encouraged clients who were already using services like Yelp to review us. The first three that were posted bumped our Google ranking such that, in one day, we received ten client inquiries—a record. From that, we locked in new clients worth an annual gross of $60,000. Basically, in a single day, without warning, we all got a 20 percent raise.
At the time, applying such tools to dog walking appeared to be relatively unheard of (in D.C., anyway), and our little band of anarchists began to dominate the relevant web searches. We were fielding new inquiries daily, locking most of them down by routing them through a form on our site linked to an e-mail alias, which was pointed at an actual collective member’s e-mail. By collective policy, inquiring clients had to receive a reply within ten to fifteen minutes, with a signature file indicating the reply had been sent via smartphone. Straight out of the gate, this performed responsiveness to potential clients, and made it apparent we were equipped to handle last-minute details from the field, in real-time—that this was conveyed not by a sales pitch, but via the client’s own deduction only made it more convincing. In a care trade, the value of it happening that way was incalculable.
The web form required clients to provide their nearest cross streets, so our initial reply would notify them whether they were in our service areas, and (if so) which of our collective members would be their primary walker. This communicated that, if they hired us, they’d be in a direct relationship with the person holding their keys and walking their dog, and that the collective—rather than being a management go-between for a rotating cast of anonymous walkers—served to ensure the client’s interests should their primary point person perform poorly. Before an inquiring client even got a reply, their designated collective member would be forwarded their request, at which point that person had twenty-four hours to contact the client to schedule a consultation. Even gaming search-engine algorithms, in most cases we were one service among any number that a potential client contacted. Through this protocol, we’d often instilled confidence in and scheduled a consultation with a client before other agencies had even read their inquiry.
The Dog Walker Page 14