On January 13th, the Globe published a lead editorial challenging management and bringing labor issues to the fore in a significant way. It recognized that "drivers get no vacation, and lack worker protections. That's despite the fact that packaging papers into plastic bags, in the middle of the night, can be grueling work." The editorial called on the state attorney general and federal authorities to investigate the delivery business, including implicitly the accusation leveled by workers that their employers misclassify them as "independent contractors" in order to avoid paying the wages or offering the labor protections they deserve.
In other words, the organizing and protesting of the workers -- and the experiences of the reporters as one-day delivery people -- helped briefly open a window between the world of those who write and read the news and the world of the exploited labor that transports it from the former to the latter.
Yet the window didn't last long. A Globe postmortem by Mark Arsenault on January 16th returned to a purely technological explanation of the problem in summing up the three-week debacle. "The root of the delivery mayhem," he wrote, "lies in something so simple that nobody gave it much thought until it was too late: sensible paper routes." Once again, software and routing lay at the heart of the matter, while workers and working conditions conveniently vanished.
If newspaper writers and readers are effectively isolated from the world of the workers who deliver the paper, that divide goes both ways. One immigrant worker who spoke to Garca -- in Spanish -- was a Guatemalan who had taken on a second paper route during the crisis. He worked from one at night to eight in the morning and requested to be identified by a pseudonym. "I asked him if he ever reads the Globe," Garca reported. "He looked up and stared back at me as if I was saying something crazy. And he just laughed."
Our infatuation with virtual modernity should not blind us to the exploitative systems of labor that undergird our world from our front doorsteps to distant parts of the planet. As the Globe's delivery crisis made clear, the present system relies on ignorance and on the invisibility of the labor of mostly immigrant, often undocumented workers. The Globe's delivery breakdown offered a brief look at just one way in which the worlds of business, journalism, and readers rely on such workers. And the local and national coverage revealed just how unusual it is for those who own, manage, write, and read newspapers to see this underside of our information economy.
So when you next pick up your paper and read the latest blast by Donald Trump against undocumented immigrants, remember: the odds are you can only do so because an undocumented worker brought it to your doorstep.
Aviva Chomsky's most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
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Copyright 2016 Aviva Chomsky
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