Common ground
If The World Is Flat, how can Hawai'i's people avoid being Nickel and Dimed?
The Common Book program at Windward Community College was developed two years ago as an open-forum book club that brings students, faculty and interested community members together to have an extended conversation over a socially relevant book. In 2004, they chose Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. In 2005, they chose O.A. Bushnell’s Ka’a'awa. This year the nominations for Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed were so close, they decided to choose both.
Brian Richardson, the chair of the Common Book committee, says the two fit well together, ‘one offering a global vision, the other offering an account of what happens to specific people whose existence is marginal.’
‘They are both very appropriate to what is going on here,’ Richardson explains. ‘Tourism generates a considerable amount of working poor, and the social tensions identified by Ehrenreich are at least as powerful here. Likewise, Hawai’i is closely tied to global structures–those mentioned by Friedman and others that are not, like the U.S. military.’
In Nickel and Dimed, author Barbara Ehrenreich takes a few months off from her upper-middle-class life and goes undercover to investigate just how hard it is to survive on a low-wage job doing ‘unskilled’ labor. Moving from Key West to Portland to Minneapolis, she works as a waitress, a hotel maid, a housecleaner, a nursing home aide and a Wal-Mart salesperson. The honest, insightful and sadly entertaining account ends in her failure to sustain herself financially.
Many in Hawai’i can relate to her travails. The median household income on O’ahu hovers around $52,000 while the median price of a home has surpassed $600,000. Salaries aren’t comparable to those on the mainland for the same jobs, and skilled young people end up leaving Hawai’i so they can make a decent living. Affordable housing is disappearing while luxury development is on the rise. The gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow at a violent pace.
Regarding ethnic groups belonging to the servile class, Ehrenreich reports, ‘Today, the color of the hand that pushes the sponge varies from region to region: Chicanas in the Southwest, Caribbeans in New York, native Hawaiians in Hawaii…’ The irony is that by their work, low-wage workers help perpetuate the system that oppresses them. Ehrenreich calls the ‘working poor’ the ‘major philanthropists of our society.’ She writes, ‘They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.’ So, too, do Hawai’i’s hotel housekeepers sacrifice sleep so they can turn down tourists’ beds.
Capitalism- and welfare-reform- bashing aside, Ehrenreich discovers she can’t hack the physical and mental stamina required by so many minimum-wage jobs. No amount of ‘investigation,’ however, seems to help her figure out that they don’t do it because they can; they do it because they must.
As the world evolves, a growing Hawai’i also sees the need for change–efforts toward renewable energy, transit solutions and affordable housing. Rep. Ed Case expressed in a recent speech, ‘We talk about our obligation to the future, but too often we dwell in the past.’ His bid for the Senate underscores the perennial tug-of-war between old and new. Can Hawai’i move forward without sacrificing the traditions of its past? The answer is it must.
Fortunately, New York Times foreign affairs columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman offers hope that it also can. The World Is Flat explains the events that have ushered in an economic era Friedman calls ‘Globalization 3.0,’ one in which the global competitive playing field has been leveled, thanks to the timely convergence of social and technological forces. He lists ten ‘flatteners,’ including Netscape’s IPO and the democratization of the Web, the outsourcing of labor, the efficiency of supply-chaining, and the power of instant information indexing and retrieval a la Google. He explains, ‘It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.’
Friedman mentions Hawai’i only to explain how ‘Wikipedia’ got its name–from the Hawaiian word ‘wiki’ meaning ‘quick.’ But the phenomena he examines impact Hawai’i as much as anywhere else. The islands may be a long physical hop across the Pacific, but aloha is a brand that resonates internationally.
If technology trumps geographic isolation, Hawai’i, too, can become a global player. Jack Johnson, Lost and the Banzai Pipeline are rooted within a few country miles of each other, yet people all over the world know about them. On a micro level, it’s easier for small businesses whose markets were formerly limited to a few degrees of latitude and longitude to cater to new markets across the ocean. Entrepreneurial beach bums can now spend their days frolicking at Kahana Bay and their evenings buying and selling on eBay. On a macro level, the flattening of the world lays out the welcome mat for economic diversification. In the post-sugar plantation era, there is promise in biotech and marine sciences. The University of Hawai’i and the East-West Center have positioned Hawai’i to become a gateway and liaison to the tiger economies of Asia.
Friedman proposes three concepts that are particularly relevant to the Islands: ‘the globalization of the local’ and ‘the great sorting out’ and ‘the right stuff.’ He claims that the flattening of the world is actually strengthening local and regional identities; that global capitalism includes ‘non-market values like social cohesion, religious faith and national pride’ that will shape new rules for collaborating and competing; and that right-brain work is more valuable as left-brain work can be done cheaper elsewhere. (The people who will run the world, he implies, are ‘untouchables’ or ‘people whose jobs cannot be outsourced, digitized, or automated.’)
Friedman argues that outsourcing doesn’t have to be traitorous; rather it can help make the world a better place. Under Globalization 3.0, Hawai’i can tap into, grow and export its indigenous knowledge and Hawaiian values, proposing new rules for a new game with three billion new players. If the world dealt in a currency of ideas (why shouldn’t other countries measure a gross national happiness like Bhutan?), there would be much gold to be found in Hawai’i.
Applying Friedman’s theories, the key to stability during this economic transformation lies in strengthening a societal core that allows individual leaders to aggregate communities and enables a symbiotic relationship between conceptualizers and actualizers. It parallels the balance that humans seek to achieve between mind and body. Hawaiians have a name for that core. They call it ‘na’au.’ Literally, it means ‘guts.’ It’s the place inside us where experience and intuition are married. It’s the internal truth that Hawaiians consult in matters of importance. And quite possibly, it’s the place where Hawai’i’s past will meet its future.
For more information on the Common Book schedule of events in the fall, call WCC at 235-7338 or visit [www.wcc.hawaii.edu/CommonBook]
