Worker's Paradise Lost in East Hollywood?
by Richard Risemberg
May, 2003--A couple of blocks west of the Hollywood/Western Metro stop in Los Angeles, in a ramshackle neighborhood that is slowly pulling itself out of its own gutters, you can, during a leisurely five-minute stroll, pass by a sex shop, a squeaky-clean sushi bar, five Thai restaurants, an old-fashioned hardware store, two Armenian and a Korean-owned markets and an Armenian bakery; a couple of design firms, a camera shop, an odd building wherein one may view a painted panorama of the Los Angeles of a century ago, a tiny watch and computer store; a lot populated by eccentric plaster constructions that include two life-size gorillas and a ten-foot-tall sphinx, a number of old brick apartment buildings, a hostel, and a motel; car repair and carpet and dry-cleaning shops; a casting agency, a dentist, an antique shop; and, on a prime corner, the clean woodwork and painted tables of Espresso Mi Cultura, one of LA's most appealing coffeehouses.
Tall picture windows frame magenta-haired writers at their laptops, old white couples that have strolled down from their expensive hillside homes, earnest young Latino men with Che Guevara beards, tattooed punks, graceful twentysomethings in their painted-on denim, and just regular working folk from the block, in for a cup of strong coffee or spiced tea and a few minutes--or hours--with newspaper or neighbor before getting on with the day. The front room holds the bar and the little round tables, with room for three by-the-hour Internet stations toward the back; the other room holds bookshelves full of Latin/American literature--books from Mexico, South America, East Los Angeles--everywhere that Spanish language informs the culture in our continent--though almost all the books are in English. Art hangs on the walls, and Ramon, the owner, changes exhibitions every few weeks; Cuban music or Norteña or bebop plays discreetly--never so loudly that you can't talk comfortably with your tablemate; and there are poetry nights and singer-songwriters and peace posters, and a table wehre you can leave flyers "if they are of interest to the community."
Why, then, is a group of former employees demonstrating outside the front door regularly, calling for a boycott of the place, and referring to it as "Exploto Mi Cultura" ("I Exploit My Culture")?
* * * * *
I heard about it from a friend whom I work with: "Don't go to Mi Cultura anymore, there's a boycott."
I usually go to Mi Cultura three or four mornings a week, so this surprised me. What had happened? My friend said only that Ramon had suddenly fired four people for no good reason. He didn't know too much else, only what little he'd heard from the picketers one evening. The next morning I asked the dreadlocked and tattooed Daniel, who's usually behind the counter when I go. He said something vague about the employees who had been fired having made some demands, Ramon having tried to accommodate them, and the employees then having become arrogant and lazy. I said that it looked bad from the outside, when a coffeehouse that at that moment held two shrines to Cesar Chavez appeared to be getting in a little union-busting. The discussion led on to the matrix of Latino revolutionary symbols that decorate the walls. "These are symbols we all exploit," Daniel told me in Spanish, "All us Latinos…. If they think they can exercise their personal politics at work," that isn't right. "We're a small business…everyone has to make an effort."
The leaflet the picketers gave me a couple of days later listed their demands as: "Fair Wages, Respect, Business Practices." An odd grouping even in the capital of eclecticism, and a bit vague, but hardly grounds for mass terminations. It began to look like a stereotypical case of autocracy versus democracy, with a little hypocrisy in the mix.
It was both more and less than that.
* * * * *
I met with Eddie Roque first, who'd written the letter with the demands and who Denice and Hector, whom I met later that same evening, agreed could speak for them. He taught computers at a Catholic school and had been working at Mi Cultura for extra money--and because he liked the place. A youngish fellow of the affable and earnest sort, almost embarrassed to feel so indignant over what had happened, he outlined a history of what didn't really seem like exploitation, but a series of rather ordinary contretemps that occur at work: scheduling mishaps, primarily, and--oddly, given the revolutionary rhetoric that eventually inhabited the situation--a desire on the employees' part for more structure in the workplace.
Ramon, he said, seemed forgetful, detached, unconcerned; performance reviews were irregular, with some employees receiving two or three and others only one in the same time; they didn't really know what Ramon wanted. Time off for sickness or personal projects was a big issue, as was Ramon's objection to employees trading shifts to accommodate each other. "We understand a business must run," Eddie said. "I've taken economics in school. But my family ran a business for sixteen years, and I also know that happy workers are excellent workers…. Our employees could always come to us when they had a problem." They felt they couldn't talk to Ramon, that he really wouldn't listen. He would promise a day off to someone, then schedule the person to work that day. There should be more organization.
Ramon, for his part, admits that some such things happened. "I agree that I've made mistakes. And there is a feeling of impersonality between me and them. I'm always very busy with backoffice stuff. I do all the ordering, all the bookkeeping, and I'm not out there with them. But they have to understand that this is my sole livelihood; I have nothing else. I have to make it work." Ramon, for his part, is not very emotionally expressive, and told me that he had had a stressful year, but that he shouldn't have to explain that to his employees. "That's very personal."
He went on to tell me of morning shifts dragging in late and leaving customers facing a locked door, of presences sullen enough behind the counter that customers complained about it to him, of himself trying to accommodate school schedules and other work, but at the same time feeling that his workers shouldn't make the coffeehouse out to be less of a job because it was part-time. He knew that some employees were unhappy with the way he scheduled them, but he felt that he couldn't let experienced workers trade their rush hour shifts off to slower workers who couldn't keep up with the customer volume. And was it too much to ask that they should be on time and start work right away, that they should call him when they weren't going to come in? sullen enough "I've spent five years building up this business; I've loaned some of them money interest-free. The one who worked for me the longest of the six was here only a year and a half. They shouldn't be telling me how to run the business."
He felt they "had problems with boundaries."
They felt he was impersonal.
* * * * *
When I looked over, it didn't seem as though either side's complaints were devastating. Ordinary workaday disgruntlements. And in fact both sides told the same story of the personal meeting between Ramon and Eddie, when Eddie presented the demands verbally. It was a calm, civil encounter, with Daniel, who was close to both sides, present as a moderating influence. Eddie laid out the grievances, Ramon listened sincerely and responded, according to Eddie and Daniel as well as Ramon, and Eddie gave him the letter. Ramon didn't read it till that night.
The letter. Ah, the letter. They had spent three weeks writing it, and they wrote it by committee, and apparently it grew and it grew until it sounded like a revolutionary manifesto. It included a digression about hierarchical wage systems that sounded like a demand to restructure the store as a cooperative (though with no offer by the employees to vest themselves in it by financial contribution or sweat equity to compensate for their short period of participation in Mi Cultura). It raised clenched fists, it shouted and swaggered, it complained at great length--and yet when you deconstruct it, its actual demands are modest and reasonable. But Ramon read the tone of voice, not the words, and became angry. "I felt betrayed," he told me. He was going to fire one employee for cause anyway--repeated lateness and arbitrary absences. He fired the other three for fear they would "retaliate" in some way for the first firing. "It wasn't the best thing to do," he admitted. But it was too late now.
* * * * *
It's now become a pissing contest. Ramon says the four called in the Health Department, claiming unsanitary conditions (the inspector found all in order); and that they should be badmouthing him to the neighborhood, boycotting his store, hurts him both financially and emotionally. Surprisingly, he suggests that if they feel aggrieved they should sue him or call in the State Labor Relations Board--not a boss's usual perspective, to be sure.
For their part, the four feel gravely insulted, their dignity trampled, the comfortable world they helped build for the customers and for themselves closed off to them. And yet both sides admit the good in the other and the faults in themselves.
It's a conflict of styles. Ramon, a private person, (doubly so in a Latino context), wanting to maintain a bit of distance, a reserve; and the boisterous employees wanting to work, yes, but have fun too, and wanting to be loved for what they are.
Each one deserves respect for their desires. Work is part of life, but one works to live, and life isn't something you hang on a hook by the time clock. But life without work is chaotic and cold; one is equally obligated to both sides, because work and life are really just one side.
In this conflict, both sides "had reason," as we say in Spanish--"tenían razón." Both sides were right. Why couldn't they all just get along? If Ramon is exploiting the symbology of Latinismo on his part--and he certainly is; he says so himself--then Eddie and his colleagues also are exploiting that same symbology, using it as a shortcut to expression, an act of unconcern no less grave than Ramon's forgetfulness in scheduling. The emblematic construct Ramon used to create the ambience of a revolutionary Latino coffeehouse drew to him employees who expected to be working in an anarchistic cooperative; and his workers' use of revolutionary boilerplate in their negotiations led them to ask for much more than they really wanted, much more harshly than they meant to. And the result is this quiet bit of war in Hollywood.
