“Half the workers of the world,” writes Robert Neuwirth in his new book “Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy,” work in jobs that are “off the books … neither registered nor regulated.” The combined economic activity of these 1.8 billion workers adds up to $10 trillion. If the informal economy were squeezed into a single political structure, observes Neuwirth, it would be the second largest economy in the world.
For many economists, labor organizers, government leaders and law enforcement officers, those numbers represent a huge problem: a tragic panorama of exploited workers, criminal activity and crippling shortfalls in government revenue. But where others see darkness, Neuwirth — reporting from China, Brazil, Nigeria and elsewhere — witnesses something more promising. In a world of growing inequality and faltering “real” economic growth, the shadow economy is where job creation is actually happening. Calling upon the most meager of resources and without any government assistance, people are somehow finding a way to survive, and even prosper.
“Stealth of Nations” makes a provocative argument: Instead of demonizing the informal economy, we should embrace it. Left to their own devices, people are finding ways to create jobs for themselves. The informal economy may ignore borders, trample over intellectual property laws, and thrive on bribery and other rule-bending behavior. To a mainstream economist, it may represent a fundamentally inefficient way of organizing economic behavior. But to Neuwirth, the informal economy is something we’ve got to learn from, coexist with and possibly even nurture. Because the world needs all the avenues for upward mobility that can possibly be mustered. “Employment,” he writes, “has more value than efficiency.”
Neuwirth’s new book serendipitously arrived at Salon just two weeks after we began the “Inside the Shadow Economy” series, and I immediately seized upon the chance to call the author and talk to him about his work.
The “shadow” or “informal” economy gets a lot of bad press. Your book pushes back on the negativity, to the point that you even eschew the terminology most people are using to describe the phenomenon — gray, black, underground, shadow. Maybe a good place to start is with an explanation of why, throughout your book, you choose to call the informal economy by the name “System D”?
Sure. I pirated it from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, where the French word “debrouillard” means a person who is self-reliant. To say a man or woman is a debrouillard is to say that they know how to survive all sorts of difficult and sticky situations. That has been modified to fit the post-colonial reality of the Caribbean and Africa so that what we call the informal economy or the shadow economy comes to be known as “l’economie de la debrouillardise” or “the economy of self-reliance.” The short, street version is “System D.” For me, that’s a much less pejorative term, because self-reliance is something that is good — we are not casting aspersions on it even through its name.
A lot of the academic literature on the informal economy suggests that its growth is a reaction against high taxes or regulation, but the people you profile in your book seem to exist in a world where those concerns are almost irrelevant; they’re starting out so low on the economic totem pole that the notion of getting a license or paying taxes is inconceivable.
I don’t think people are turning to the so-called economic shadows because of any fear of regulation. It’s just not something that has even crossed their minds. Even here in the United State when I interviewed people who had businesses without licenses and registration, it wasn’t that they were avoiding anything, it was just that there was no way to start a business in the way that the legal requirements would suggest.
In the developed world, most economists seem to treat the informal economy as a stage on the way to something else — as a kind of transitional phenomenon. The U.S. went through its wild and woolly period in the 19th century, but now it has matured, so the expectation is that China will do the same, and maybe even, eventually, Nigeria. But at one point, you write that “the time for System D is now” and you seem to be referring to both the developed and the developing world. You even observe that there is some preliminary evidence that the countries with the most robust informal sectors recovered most quickly from the Great Recession. So should we be actively encouraging the informal economy?
In today’s economic system it is definitely something to be encouraged. I think the age of large industrial powerhouse corporations that are going to provide the majority of jobs is winding down. That is not even the way that things happen all that much in the United States anymore, and certainly not in the developing world. It seems to be anecdotally true that where there is a robust System D in the developed world there is a better cushion for surviving the economic shocks in the formal economy.
So how can governments support the informal economy?
I think we have to come up with in-between strategies that allow for System D to exist. System D needs government, it needs stable currency exchange rates. Businesses need electrical grids and public utilities. But it works both ways: I would argue that governments also need System D, because it provides employment generation and is the incubator of business ideas. Maybe there can be a meeting in the middle; maybe there are ways to experiment with how to encourage the robustness of System D while also helping some of the larger System D firms to enter the formal economy.
But how do you do that and still ensure that government can keep operating? Isn’t one of the problems with the informal economy the fact that it deprives governments of revenue while still leaving them on the hook for services?
Yeah, that’s true, but remember, all that money that is earned sub rosa ends up getting spent in the economy in all sorts of ways, so it’s not entirely true that there isn’t any benefit to government from the continuation of System D. But beyond that I think that governments have to start figuring out how to privilege employment and job creation through System D. Those things are social goods. So the same way that a formal business might get certain tax advantages for adding employees, informal firms should be looked on with that same kind of eye: that they are adding jobs and keeping people employed, and maybe they can be legitimized in some way without being forced to pay the kinds of taxes that every other business would. I know that that is a controversial statement — because it seems like it is unfair to the formal businesses. But I think we have to start looking at what an economy is for. What is a market system for? Is it is purely for corporate protectionism, something that favors the already existing businesses and shuts everyone else out, or are we looking at something that is a bit more egalitarian and fair? Something that privileges job creation and diversifying wealth and bringing sort of traditional disenfranchised communities into the market system. System D is very efficient at doing that and should be rewarded for that.
But isn’t there going to be push-back on that? You spend a lot of your book in Nigeria, but I think to many Americans, the capital city, Lagos, is the very definition of third-world squalor. Why would we want to nurture that?
The post-colonial reality is really difficult. I’m certainty not arguing that there isn’t squalor in Nigeria. But it is a tremendously entrepreneurial place and people are establishing businesses and making ends meet in ways that are necessary for the survival of the population — all without the assistance of government. In some ways it is more entrepreneurial than the United States is.
You note several times in your book that the informal economy has always existed and predates the formal economy. But what seems really important now are the ways in which modern globalization fosters the informal economy — and appears to be undermining the formal economy in the developed world. You write about a Spanish company, Zara, that outsources production of cut-price high fashion to a global network of informal textile workers. Isn’t that just another step in the downfall of textile workers in the developed world? Labor has lost whatever bargaining power it once had, in large part because globalization allows anyone with capital to tap networks of workers who will work for rock-bottom wages.
Every attempt to change a business model has a downside. In the United States, the Northeast in particular used to have a huge textile industry, and then the firms all ditched Lowell, Massachusetts, and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and moved down to South Carolina where they had more flexible labor rules. So what’s happening now globally is not all that different from what our own firms did.
I think there are ways in which System D is exploitative too and the more that we can find solutions for those forms of exploitation, the better. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It has just become so much easier to move things around the world — the world is dizzy with goods moving from here to there and all over the place — it’s impossible to keep track. So yes, it’s much harder for labor when the supply chains are global; that’s absolutely true. But pragmatically speaking, supply chains are global.
I think that there are still tremendous opportunities in the System D trade networks that exist within global trade. If that can be scaled up it becomes a way for the developing world to skip the middle man. They won’t need Sony or Nokia if they can do it themselves. Of course the downside of that, you might argue, is that it would be bad for Nokia or Sony. And I suppose that if System D producers get that strong, it would be. But it would also be good for their native countries. So then we have to look at globalization in terms of global equity.
Looking at the world, the question is: How do people survive? In researching my book, it just became obvious to me that outside of the U.S. and Western Europe, and certain Asian countries, it is the informal economy where people survive. And if the world is getting by on System D, then we can’t keep on demonizing or disparaging it. Because for most people and particularly for most people struggling to get a foothold it’s a necessity.
Even in the West, informal economies are growing. How do you see the future? Will the West regroup or will the future be increasingly informal?
I think that what’s going to happen is that things are going to be fluid: People are going to move back and forth. I won’t predict that the world is going to be completely informal. I think it would be silly to predict that. But I do think that there is going to be continued growth in System D and it is going to be the dominant economic system of the developing world — and so we are going to have to come up with some kind of mediating structures in which we recognize it as a legitimate part of development.
Chalk it up as one of the unexpected consequences of the intense media attention devoted to the Republican presidential nomination race. When Mitt Romney announced his support for the concept of “self-deportation” during a Florida debate last week, reporters instantly shone a bright spotlight on a strategy for removing illegal immigrants from the United States that had hitherto been mostly flying under the radar.
The word “self-deportation” has an agreeable, voluntary ring to it, suggesting that undocumented workers will happily decide of their own free will to return to their home countries, without the necessity for direct government action by ICE agents. The truth is something different: Self-deportation, as practiced today, is supposed to be the only choice left available to immigrants whose life has been made miserable by new, punitive laws put into place at the state level.
Of course, life in the United States is already extraordinarily difficult for undocumented workers. More often than not, non-citizen workers are the mainstay of the shadow economy, the off-the-books underground world where labor laws are frequently unenforced or ignored. In fact, one claim that proponents of self-deportation make is that by reducing the supply of labor willing to work under such conditions, self-deportation (or any other method of cracking down on illegal immigration) will cause the overall size of the underground economy to shrink, and thereby improve the quality of the U.S. labor market.
The limited data available on the impact of new anti-illegal immigration laws doesn’t support that thesis. In fact, the opposite may be happening. By making it even more difficult for non-citizen laborers to work in the normal economy, the new laws are pushing some workers even further into the shadows. The harder the crackdown, the more people are going underground. Laws aimed at encouraging self-deportation are just ratcheting up the misery.
Here’s what we know. Since the onset of the Great Recession, the number of undocumented workers in the United States has dropped sharply, from a peak of 12 million in 2007 to 11.2 million in 2010, according to the Pew Research Center. At the same time the flow of migrants across the Mexico-U.S. border has severely declined.
There are a number of intersecting explanations for the change in immigration dynamics. The economic downturn is the most obvious — the demand for labor has plummeted. As Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center observes, “if you look at the history of migration, it has frequently been influenced by the ebbs and flows of the economy. When there is more economic demand for jobs there will be an increase in immigration patterns, and when there is a shortage of jobs there will be a decrease.”
Improvements in the Mexican economy are also probably playing a role in decreasing flows across the border. The enormously stepped up number of deportations under the Obama administration — around 400,000 annually since 2009 — is another huge part of the puzzle.
And then there are the state laws passed in Arizona, Alabama and Georgia. Random identity checks, harsher oversight of employers, the creation of “chokepoints” at access points to services like public schools or medical care, are all combining to have a clear effect — at least insofar as we can tell from such data points as farmers reporting difficulty in finding workers to pick their crops.
Whether those workers are simply going to other states, instead of their home countries, is impossible to know. But on a surface level this is exactly how self-deportation is supposed to work, as spelled out by Mark Krikorian, a longtime anti-immigrant activist,
What would a policy of attrition look like? It would combine an increase in conventional enforcement — arrests, prosecutions, deportations, asset seizures, etc. — with expanded use of verification of legal status at a variety of important points, to make it as difficult and unpleasant as possible to live here illegally.
The new laws in Georgia and Alabama are too recent to provide much in the way of hard data on immigration trends or self-deportation. But Arizona has long had a head start on everyone else. In 2007 the state passed the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA). LAWA mandated the use of the national identity and work authorization verification system E-Verify, and imposed sanctions on employers who continue to hire “unauthorized” workers.
In March 2011, the Public Policy Institute of California published a study of the impact of the law. The authors came to two main conclusions: LAWA did achieve “the intended goal of reducing the number of unauthorized immigrants in the state. However, it also had the unintended consequence of shifting unauthorized workers into less formal work arrangements.”
One of the authors of the report, Magnus Lofstrom, says that the data show that after the passage of LAWA, there was a substantial increase in the number of low-skilled Hispanic men categorizing themselves as “self-employed.” No longer able to obtain jobs with regular wages or salaries, they were forced to hire out their labor on a more ad hoc basis.
“If we compare Arizona to states that had the same kind of employment patterns prior to the legislation passing,” says Lofstrom, “we see that in Arizona, for this group of likely unauthorized low-skilled men, the self-employment rate almost doubled in a very short period of time. That is consistent with that concern that the law does push unauthorized immigrants into the informal sector.
“What we’ve created here with this kind of legislation,” says Lofstrom, “is an incentive to shift the relationship between the employer and the employee.”
The consequences are unpalatable for anyone worrying about the quality of life of the workers. A higher proportion of low-skilled non-citizen Hispanic men who declare themselves self-employed live in poverty, says Lofstrom, and “a much higher proportion lack health insurance.”
Instead of shrinking the size of the underground economy, the combination of slow economic growth with laws aiming to encourage self-deportation is backing workers into a corner, says UCLA’s Wong.
“The economic recession has on the one hand reduced the number of immigrants coming to this country,” says Wong, “but in many ways it has also heightened the exploitation and abuse that exists in the underground economy, based on complete lack of options for those trapped in the underground economy to find better jobs.”
Could the right smartphone app help bring light to the shadow economy? The Department of Labor thinks so. Last May, the DoL announced the release of a new iPhone app: Timesheet. The purpose of the app is to help combat the off-the-books plague of “wage theft” — the increasingly common practice in which employers shortchange their workers by denying them overtime pay or break time, or failing to pay the legally mandated minimum wage.
Timesheet, says the DoL, is an app that will “help employees independently track the hours they work and determine the wages they are owed. Available in English and Spanish, users conveniently can track regular work hours, break time and any overtime hours for one or more employers.”
“This new technology is significant,” reads a DoL press release, “because instead of relying on their employers’ records, workers now can keep their own records. This information could prove invaluable during a Wage and Hour Division investigation when an employer has failed to maintain accurate employment records.”
The Labor Department is putting some muscle behind its digital efforts; under the leadership of Secretary Hilda Solis, Labor has hired hundreds of new enforcement investigators. But one could easily scoff. With unemployment at historically high levels, why is the federal government putting scarce resources to work creating smartphone apps? How many victims of wage theft — typically workers at the lowest end of the economic scale — even own a smartphone?
More than you might think. A smartphone, with accompanying data package, is significantly more expensive than the regular old (soon to be extinct) cellphone or land line, but compared to other ways of getting online — a desktop or laptop computer plus DSL or cable broadband access — the smartphone is the best deal in town. A review of survey data points out a provocative fact: Smartphone adoption is occurring at faster rates among lower-income Americans and minorities. Turns out, there is more than enough room in the shadow economy for smartphones — for many people, they are fast becoming the indispensable lifeline that connects them to the wired world.
We’ve known this for years with respect to the developing world; as Jeffrey Sachs, author of “The End of Poverty,” told CNN last October, “The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development.”
“Poverty is almost equated with isolation in many places of the world. Poverty results from the lack of access to markets, to emergency health services, access to education, the ability to take advantage of government services and so on. What the mobile phone — and more generally IT technology — is ending is that kind of isolation in all its different varieties.”
But what we haven’t seen, until very recently, is recognition in the United States that the smartphone is a domestically appropriate tool for combating entrenched poverty, employer abuses, and the myriad of constraints that have long prevented some of the most vulnerable Americans from taking advantage of opportunities that may significantly improve their lives.
What’s more, the increasing adoption of smartphones by people whose economic activity often doesn’t register “officially” — thus relegating them to what is variously known as the “underground,” “gray” or “shadow” economy — is creating data trails that can give researchers a good look at what has previously been obscure. The smartphone can illuminate the shadow economy, both for those inside of it, and those who want to understand it better.
“There are so many great tools on the Internet for comparing options,” says Brendan McBride, “whether you are going to a restaurant or seeing a movie. What we are trying to do is bring those kinds of tools to bear on a sector that hasn’t traditionally had this kind of tool.”
McBride, an affordable housing developer in New York, is talking about Remas, a still-in-beta project that aims to help immigrants find the cheapest, safest way to send money back to their families. Plug in your destination and how much money you want to send, and the app will conduct a price comparison on available money transfer services. On the website Applications for Good, Remas describes the problem it is trying to solve:
One in nine people living in the US was born in another country. In 2009, immigrants in the US sent $38 billion in funds – known as remittances – to their places of origin, mostly through money transfer companies like Western Union, MoneyGram, and dozens more. With variable fees and fluctuating exchange rates, money transfer costs are difficult to decipher and compare, restricting consumers’ abilities to make informed decisions about sending money home. Millions of dollars in savings every year are unrealized—savings that could benefit senders and their families here and abroad.
“With our tools,” declares an explanatory video, “more people will get banked, more money will be left in the pockets of immigrants, and more money will be sent back to support the families and communities immigrants come from.”
McBride says his motivation to found Remas was partly generated by his experience working in a community health center coordinating a program that did outreach to migrant farmworkers. It was clear to him that the driving motivation sending these workers to the U.S. was their desire to support people back home, but their “awareness of their options for doing so was severely limited.” Remas — as a website, smartphone app or simple text messaging service — is designed to solve that problem.
McBride’s project got a big boost when he and his team entered a competition sponsored by Applications for Good, a spinoff project created by One Economy, a nonprofit that works to leverage technology solutions to alleviate poverty. With the help of a broadband stimulus grant from the Obama administration, One Economy set up Applications for Good with the express intention of creating mobile applications that change the world for the better.
Applications for Good offers a concentrated repository for smartphone apps designed to help break down the isolation that so often works as a kind of amplifier of poverty. Another project under way with Applications for Good support is SNAP Fresh, a text-based phone app that locates five nearby grocery outlets that accept food stamp debit cards as payment. There’s also BEE Local, an app that locates public services targeted at low-income people.
The field of shadow economy smartphone apps is clearly in its infancy, but seems certain to grow, either through efforts by developers who want to change the world for the better or via entrepreneurs who recognize that there is a largely unserved market rapidly getting online through their phones. As this market grows bigger, however, it may end up shoving the shadow economy right out of the shadows into the glaring light of mainstream society. When you are online you are no longer invisible. Every tweet, every query, every text is trackable.
At the Price of Weed website, recent purchasers of marijuana are invited to post how much their latest quarter-ounce cost them. A couple of researchers at the University of Kentucky decided to crunch the numbers to see what they could learn about pot market economics. What they discovered was not too startling — prices were lowest near prime cultivation regions and in states with lenient medical marijuana laws. But there was a larger lesson. Self-reported geo-coded data about an off-the-books economic activity ending up describing a market that is often obscured in haze.
In a research paper discussing their findings that is currently under peer review, the authors note that “by measuring a facet of the underground economy never before studied with a national-level dataset … the analysis of user-generated data undoubtedly allows for unprecedented insights into a highly significant component of everyday economic and social life.”
The potential for doing similar research into other hitherto obscure regions of economic activity is huge.
Illuminating the market-based underground economies could be highly beneficial by uncovering facets of the economy such as child labor, slavery and human trafficking that are able to persist in part precisely because they are able to remain unmeasurable and uncodified by traditional data collection methods.
Of course, “beneficial” is in the eye of the beholder. The authors also note that “the increasing information shadows to economic activities raise the specter of state and corporate control into previously unregulated practices of informal exchange (e.g. bartering and gifting practices).”
As one of the authors, Matthew Zook, explained, “You can bypass a lot of traditional ways of doing things,” by jumping into the digitally mediated realm, “but precisely because it is digital technology it can be traced back. The Department of Defense or industry can use social networking data to better understand terrorism cells or how to better sell you a better electronic gadget.”
The smartphone will set us free, and simultaneously suck us deeper into the system.
SAN FRANCISCO — My name is Samir Mogannam. I’m 21 years old [and] I live in the Mission District. If you live in my neighborhood and go out to clubs at night, you see guys selling bacon-wrapped hot dogs on the street, and it’s awesome.
I always had the idea to do that, but with vegan chili-dogs, something a little different and something everybody could eat.
It took months before I got my [food] cart; talking to these mysterious guys and communicating with them, getting their numbers. You can’t just find a cart on Craigslist or whatever. Finally, I found a guy named Saul who was able to help me.
My dad always had a restaurant. My cousins opened up Bi-Rite (market) over there on 18th and Dolores, which was originally my grand uncle’s place back in the late ’60s. It was a liquor store and market, then eventually the kids took it over and it evolved into what it is today. I’m born into working with food.
My vending routine begins with prepping; getting the onions chopped up to grill. If I’m doing my vegan chili-dogs, it’s hard work. I have to go to the farmer’s market in the morning and get all the produce needed. I make my chili from scratch; nothing out of the can. So I reduce all of the tomatoes and get the beans cooked, getting my chili ready for the day.
Then it’s getting everything on the cart. After I make sure I have everything on my checklist — hot dogs, buns, plates, napkins — then I start hauling that thing to my destination, which is the hardest part; just dragging that thing. Depending on how much stuff is on, it could get up to around 120 pounds. In the Mission nothing’s too far away and [the neighborhood] is mostly flat. After I find a good spot — usually in Dolores Park — it takes 20 minutes for me to set up.
I go to the park on nice sunny days. I just try to find people at the park hanging out chilling. Maybe they’ll get the munchies. I thought, it’s a great place to set up because everybody’s young and alive and everyone’s so nice over there and it’s a good vibe. I thought it would be a good idea to be conveniently there for people to just walk a couple feet and get something to eat, some street food, without having to kill their high by walking all the way down to the market to spend a bunch of money.
I’ve probably put $700 into it at least, and I’m not planning on breaking even on the investment any time soon. It’s probably going to take me at least a dozen times of taking the thing out and having really good days to really break even on the investment, but it’s something that’s going to be there in the long run and it’s something I’m passionate about and something I like doing.
I kind of worry about getting harassed by SFPD [San Francisco Police Department] about it sometimes; then other times I’m not really tripping. Thankfully, nobody has a problem with me out there.
They can see how I conduct myself; I kind of know what I’m doing. I’m not doing anything unsafe and everything is sanitary and kept at the right temperature. Cops haven’t been a problem [even though] I’m sure they have seen me in Dolores Park. And I don’t think the health inspector is there too much, so … I haven’t really had that problem yet.
[Not having a permit] does restrict me from just posting up on the street out in the middle of the day when I want to. I never even tried to get one. I grew up out here and I gotta hustle and bustle, you know? No time to ask or pay for permission.
I want to make a deal with an establishment that would authorize me to be right outside of their place. People love to grab a quick bite of street food, after the club.
I don’t want it to be a full-time thing or anything like that — I serve tables at Chilly’s in San Bruno, too — but if I can have fun, serve people good food and make a little bit of money at the same time, that wouldn’t be bad. Right now, little side hustles like my cart are essential to me. Just having one job won’t pay the bills.
I would like to one day own my own establishment. That was definitely one of my fantasies and one of my dreams. That would be cool.
I eventually want to get away from making money off meat and animals and want to serve people things that are wholesome and just delicious, using my creativity and letting that be a choice in people’s day: to spend money on my food.
There are a lot of communities that don’t have the choices to get healthy food. You got liquor stores and there’s nothing healthy in there, nothing wholesome. Then you got fast food all around you, so like throughout your day there’s nothing you can get that’s convenient and healthy. I’m just trying to start that whole movement, actually, and be that person to serve healthy foods — and not only serving food but building awareness about living healthy.
SAN FRANCISCO — Twenty-year-old Jerome Noveras from Daly City, Calif., lives in the heart of San Francisco’s Sunset district with his nine roommates. It’s the kind of house where every time you glance at the couch in the living room there are at least two new people on it who seemed to appear out of nowhere, lounging back comfortably, their eyes glued to something on the TV.
The room where he and his girlfriend live in the back of the house is typical for a couple in their early 20s. There’s a PlayStation 3 that sits humming by a TV with “Law and Order SVU” idle on the screen.
What’s not typical is the tattooing equipment on a workbench with his tattoo designs and his girlfriends’ colorful Hello Kitty cards sharing the same wall space above.
Noveras, a high school graduate, is part of a generation coming of age in the Great Recession where jobs are more than scarce. With the unemployment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds now running at more than 20 percent, young people increasingly look outside the formal economy to make a livelihood. As Noveras has discovered, there is more opportunity in the shadow economy.
He has had a few jobs at tattoo shops in the city, but for one reason or
another they didn’t work out. He figured what better place to pursue his dream than in his bedroom.
‘‘It’s been about two years now since I did my first tattoo. I’m still pretty new to the game,” he said.
The tattoo business is very competitive in San Francisco so it’s been difficult for Noveras to find an apprenticeship with a seasoned tattoo artist. But thanks to brave friends who let him practice on them with new tattoo designs and ideas, and under the guidance of some artists in the industry, he’s been able to teach himself the ins and outs of tattooing.
There are some benefits to being an independent tattoo artist.
Noveras said he is able to barter tattoos for other things with friends and fellow artists. He says he’s traded tattoos for all sorts of things. A while back he traded a tattoo for a professional massage.
“I usually charge a fraction of what shops charge because I don’t have all that overhead,” said Noveras.
Even though he tattoos out of his house, he doesn’t cut corners when it comes to safety. He’s a stickler about keeping things clean and takes the same precautions as shops do. He opens all new needles and tubes every time he tattoos. He has a little red hazard box on his workbench where he throws away the scraps.
His business is not entirely off the books.
“I do have my blood-borne pathogens license,” he said. “I had to take a class to learn how to
prevent blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis.”
At just 20, most of his body is already tattooed. Vibrant colorful artwork peeks from under his shirtsleeve and stretches down both arms and legs.
He used to work at Burger King and save some money every month to get another tattoo by some of the best tattoo artists the city had to offer. Noveras said he always knew he wanted to have a lot of tattoos and was introduced to tattooing by some friends he uses to do graphite with. When he was bored, he would practice tattooing on his own legs.
Now the money he makes tattooing is a big chunk of his income. He advertises by word of mouth; he schedules appointments via text messages.
Business is good
Being in the business isn’t cheap though. Noveras’ monthly expenses for tattoo supplies can run up to $100. The six custom tattoo machines he uses range from $200 to $300. The two power supplies that run his machines range from a $50 to $100. A one-ounce bottle of ink costs about 9 bucks.
Although he makes good money tattooing, business is not stable. So he holds down a second job as a line cook. He was lucky enough to find a job where his visible tattoos are not an issue. In fact, he says a lot of people in the culinary industry are heavily inked.
“Most of the chefs I know have like full sleeves, half sleeves, hand tattoos. It’s actually pretty cool because they’re the ones working behind the scenes.”
Noveras feels like it’s his job to tell young people who want tattoos on “public skin” such as face, hands and neck that “those kinds of tattoos can keep you from getting some jobs.”
“Think twice,” he advises. “Hand and neck tattoos are what we call job stoppers. I really advise
them to think about what they’re doing right now.”
He says young people should consider what job field they want to go into before
they decide on any visible tattoos.
“I know kids in nursing programs that have hand tattoos. In a hospital who would
want to hire someone who is heavily tattooed?”
Noveras’ friends and their friends make up most of his clients. But he would someday like to apprentice and work in a shop.
“I think definitely the goal is to one day open my own shop,” he says. “They say you can’t tell until [you are] three years in a business if you’re going to make it or not. I’m hoping to be in this for a long time.”
If so, he will emerge from the shadow economy.
Leonardo Mejia is a truck driver at the Port of Long Beach, Calif. He’s worked at the port for 10 years, a vital cog in the infrastructure that moves cargo containers between ships and warehouses and other transport networks. He used to own his own truck but was forced to sell it when he couldn’t afford to fix its engine. Today, Mejia leases a truck from a company called Shippers Transport Express, a subsidiary of the massive container shipping terminal operator SSA Marine.
It’s a good deal for Shippers — Mejia has to cover the costs of his own health insurance, maintenance on the truck, and diesel fuel — but not so great for Mejia. Although he works exclusively for Shippers Transport Express, according to his employer he’s an independent contractor, with no safety net to protect him from misfortune except for whatever scraps he can carve out from his barely subsistence level wages.
He misses his old truck.
“Every day is getting worse,” says Mejia. “Before when we used to have our own trucks, every time we have a problem with a dispatcher or the owner of a company we just take the name of the company off our truck and we go to somewhere else. Right now we don’t have nothing to take with us. Except maybe my clipboard.”
Mejia is part of the shadow economy, though not in the sense that that term is commonly understood: as an autonomous netherworld entirely off the books and underground, invisible to the taxman and mainstream society. Mejia’s shadow economy is something a little different; purposefully created from the top down, its growth driven by employers increasingly eager to shed costly, legally mandated commitments to their employees.
Full-time employees are expensive — employers have to cover things like payroll taxes and workers’ compensation. By classifying — or misclassifying, as critics of the practice label it — their employees as independent contractors, employers escape all those profit-crimping expenses.
A world of freely operating independent contractors is a libertarian utopia, and there are some corners of the economy — notably Silicon Valley — where the dream approximates reality, at least on the high end. But on an economy-wide scale, the calculated misclassification of employees as independent contractors is a nightmare for workers. It removes the normal protections employers are legally required to give their employees without offering any real freedom in exchange. The practice is also a disaster for governments struggling to balance their budgets, depriving both federal and state governments of billions of dollars in tax revenue.
On the surface, the growing incidence of independent contractor misclassification and other efforts by employers to shortchange their employees — paying less than the minimum wage, skimping on workers’ comp, refusing to pay overtime — would appear to support the conservative explanation of why the shadow economy is growing: Companies are attempting to escape the burdens of “high” taxes and “excessive” regulation. In other words, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the bigger the shadow economy.
But a closer look at the situation of port truck drivers like Leonardo Mejia reveals that the truth is far more complicated, and far less a consequence of the size of government, than the stock conservative analysis suggests. In the trucking industry, deregulation has played at least as large a role as labor law regulations in prompting the remorseless squeezing of workers. No less important are the cost pressures induced by globalization — truckers like Mejia are tiny, vulnerable links in vast global supply and production chains dominated by huge multinational corporations. In a competitive landscape where everyone is constantly striving to reduce costs, workers like Mejia end up crushed.
“There’s an imbalance of power in the market,” says David Bensman, a professor of labor studies and industrial relations at Rutgers University and co-author of “The Big Rig: Poverty, Pollution, and the Misclassification of Truck Drivers at America’s Ports,” “which enables the big shippers to control the cost of shipping. And as long as you have that imbalance of market power you are going to have intense competition and substandard industry practices.”
Examples of employers attempting to stiff employees to boost their own bottom line are easy to find. A Labor Department report in 2000 determined that 30 percent of all U.S. employers had misclassified some employees, and the practice appears to be accelerating.
Some incidents are more egregious than others. In the annals of stupid greed, it’s hard to top the antics of the Orange County husband-and-wife team of roofing contractors Michael Vincent Petronella and Devon Lynn Kile. In November 2010, the couple were sentenced to 10 years in prison for the worst case of workers’ compensation fraud in the history of the state of California. Petronella and Kile vastly underreported their payrolls to the State Compensation Insurance Fund and then, when their uninsured workers got injured on the job, filed fraudulent claims for workers’ comp. Meanwhile, the couple owned a Bentley, two Ferraris and a Range Rover, and spent more than $2.1 million on their American Express credit card in just two years. State investigators also discovered that Kile had applied to join the cast of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”
But Petronella and Kile’s excesses may well be less reprehensible than the the case of Cecil Parker, a former city councilman and local contractor in the town of Anahuac, Texas. In the aftermath of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ike on coastal Texas in September 2008, Parker managed to finagle himself a $1.4 million public grant to clean up the debris. He hired 57 workers to haul away the junk, but instead of treating them as full-time employees, Parker designated them all as independent contractors.
He didn’t get away with it. In July 2011, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hours Division announced that it had successfully recovered $104,837 in back wages from Parker for the workers, on the grounds that he had not been paying them the overtime wages required under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
A study by two UC Berkeley researchers on Fraud in Worker’s Compensation Payroll Reporting in California tied the growth in fraud directly to higher insurance costs — and noted that, ironically, the fraud ended up pushing overall premiums even higher.
The study finds substantial under-reporting of payroll in jobs where the employer pays high workers’ compensation premium rates. The under-reporting becomes increasingly more severe as the cost of workers’ compensation increases. The level of under-reporting results in much higher premiums for firms employing workers in high-risk jobs. Honest employers consequently face inappropriately high premium costs that are not adequately mitigated by experience modification, especially for small employers.
Again, the Berkeley study can be used to support the argument that onerous government regulations are motivating bad behavior — although it should be noted that in California, workers’ compensation rates, overall, have been falling for eight years even as labor law violations continue to grow.
But the specific case of port truck drivers tells a different story. According to Bensman and other experts on the history of the American trucking industry, such as Wayne State University’s Mike Belzer, the deregulation of the trucking industry that began during the presidential administration of Jimmy Carter was the true catalyst for the rise of the bogus, exploited independent contractor.
Before deregulation, says Bensman, trucking rates were set by the government. After deregulation, rates were set by the market, and the entry of hundreds of new non-union trucking companies into that market inevitably pushed those rates down. This was excellent news for the companies that needed to ship goods, as well as for the consumers who ended up purchasing those goods at Walmart or Target, but it was a disaster for the truckers. According to Belzer, real wages for all truckers have fallen by 30 percent since 1980.
The big shippers now have all the power, observes Bensman. Wal-Mart routinely requires all its suppliers to lower their prices year after year, and that pressure inevitably trickles down to the small trucking companies that perform such services as port transport. These are the companies that typically have been eager to move to an independent contractor relationship with their employees — it’s just another way to cut costs enough to keep them viable in an industry dominated by huge players benefiting from vast economies of scale.
The result, reports Bensman’s Big Rig report, is disheartening.
The picture emerging from our analysis of driver surveys done by prior researchers and industry reports is of an underground economy. Fierce competition, ever-increasing service requirements, a contingent workforce, poverty level wages, no health care coverage, rampant safety violations, ineffective or illusory enforcement — these are the rules of the industry.
To its credit, Obama’s Department of Labor has been actively striving to address the misclassification of independent contractors by stepping up enforcement and inspection efforts. Just two weeks ago, the IRS and Department of Labor signed a memorandum of understanding “that will improve departmental efforts to end the business practice of misclassifying employees in order to avoid providing employment protections.”
But the ongoing budget showdown has hamstrung the Obama administration’s efforts, offering a classic illustration of how Republican ideological opposition to government spending actually makes government finances worse. In 2009, the Government Accountability Office reported that misclassification has cost the U.S. government $2.72 billion. In February, the Obama administration requested $46 million to pay for misclassification enforcement inspectors. After the long summer of budget struggles, that request has since been lowered to $15 million, but the most recent appropriations bill for the Department of Labor drawn up by the GOP-controlled House doesn’t even reference misclassification enforcement, while calling for sharp overall cuts to the Department of Labor budget — cuts that would make it even harder to enforce the labor laws that currently still exist. (Calls to the Department of Labor to determine the current status of the misclassification enforcement budget request were not returned.)
At the state level, there are several legislative initiatives underway that could help crack down on misclassification abuses. One bill, AB 469, “the Wage Theft Prevention Act of 2011,” has already passed both the state Assembly and state Senate and is currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s yea or nay.
So far Leonardo Mejia hasn’t seen any sign of government pressure on the shipping industry in Long Beach, but he would welcome it, because the challenges faced by a struggling independent contractors who want to change the status quo are immense.
“Hopefully the government will put more pressure on the companies, and participate in this fight that the drivers have,” says Mejia. “Because we’re not going to win this alone. We need the government, the community, the unions, we need everybody to win this fight.”
(Credit: Telstar Logistics / CC BY 3.0/Salon) 
Samir Mogannam 
A truck driver is silhouetted as he drives his truck to the port of Long Beach, Calif. (Credit: AP/Ric Francis) 
