The EconomistFebruary 24th 2018 United States 332
Winter in Chicago
Dibs etiquette
A
FTER two relatively mild winters,
Rahm Emanuel’s ability to manage a
snowstorm was put to the test earlier this
month when it snowed, with little re-
spite, fornine days. On the worst day of
the storm Chicago’s mayor cancelled
lessons in public schools to minimise
traffic. He deployed more than 280 of the
city’s salt-spreaders, asked residents to
check on family, friends and neighbours,
kept schools open for children who had
nowhere to go and asked libraries to
double as places to keep warm.
Unlike his predecessor, Richard Daley,
Mr Emanuel did not mention “dibs” in
his remarks about the snow, though he
has in the past conceded that he believes
in “sweat equity”. Dibs are a Chicago
tradition that divides Chicagoans. If you
shovel snow from a parking space and
defend it with some old furniture to mark
the space, you can claim it for as long as
the city iscovered in snow. “Ifsomeone
spends all their time digging their car out,
do not drive into that spot,” said Mr
Daley in a press conference in 2000. “This
is Chicago. Fair warning.”
Boston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh
have something similar. In fact it seems
that snow, a population density of about
1,300 people per square mile and lots of
Italian-Americans are the necessary
ingredients for a dibs culture. But the
unwritten rules governing dibs in Chica-
go are the most sophisticated.
Temporary ownership of a spot en-
courages locals to do the job well by
scraping the snow all the way to the
pavement. Chairs (mostly lawn chairs,
the tattier the better) and traffic cones arethe most commonly used dibs. But cut-
outs of Leonardo DiCaprio, statues of
saints or the Virgin Mary, giant stuffed
teddy bears and sparsely dressed manne-
quins have also been spotted. Not accept-
able as dibs are empty cereal boxes,
Zimmer frames and cardboard signs with
death threats (“Move this and die” is not
considered midwestern nice). In Boston,
by contrast, pinching a parking space
shovelled by someone else may result in
a menacing note on your windscreen, if
you’re lucky.
This winter Havas, an advertising
agency, and Lincoln Park Community
Services, a charity, persuaded 20 local
artists to create dibs chairs forauction on
eBay, an online auctioneer, to help the
homeless. One created a chair with a
skull and crossbones in the shape of
shovels. Another simply says “Nope” in
red letters. A third appeals to gentler
sentiments with a wooden bird-house
resting on a branch adorned with the
sign, “Please do not disturb the birds”.
City officials warned that they would
start clearing “dibs chairs, cones and
otherobjects” asthe snow melted. Then
it snowed again, though not enough to
justify continued dibbing. Among the
unwritten rules of Chicago dibs is that
snow must be plentiful (more than a
couple of inches) and the space shovelled
must be in front of the shoveller’s house.
And even though Lefty Out There, anoth-
er local artist, made a chair for charity
inscribed with “If you taka my space, I
breaka you face”, you cannotslash the
tyres or threaten someone who, wittingly
or not, slides into your space anyway.CHICAGO
Life, liberty and the pursuit of parkingThis is not a tableIf the court rules in favour ofMr Janus,
public-sector unions everywhere in Amer-
ica will no longer be authorised to collect
agency fees. Twenty-eight states, including
Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Michigan,
have adopted RTWlaws—and some states
have done away with collective-bargain-
ing rights for certain public-sectors work-
ers such as teachers in Tennessee, munici-
pal employees in Oklahoma and
farmworkers in Maine. But in 22 states un-
ions still collect compulsory fees from
around 5m public-sector workers. The big
question is how many of them would con-
tinue to pay if the fee became optional.
Paul Secunda at Marquette University
Law School in Wisconsin is convinced that
a pro-Janus ruling would have a devastat-
ing effect on public-sector unions, as it
would deprive them of a big chunk of their
income. Thanks to Governor Walker push-
ing through Act 10 and the RTWlaw, mem-
bership of both public and private-sector
unions has plummeted in Wisconsin. Ac-
cording to the Bureau of Labour Statistics,
union membership in the state has de-
clined from 14% in 2010 to just 8%.
Their supporters say unions perform
essential services for their members, who
would be far worse-off without them. Ac-
cording to the Economic Policy Institute, a
think-tank, workerscovered byunion con-
tracts earn on average 13% more than their
peers in a workplace that is not unionised.
Ninety-four per cent receive access to em-
ployer-sponsored health benefits, com-
pared with just 67% of non-union workers,
with union employers paying 77% more
(per hour worked) towards their employ-
ees’ health coverage than comparable non-
union employers.
Unionised workers get more paid sick
days and paid holidays. They are half as
likely as their non-unionised peers to be
paid less than a state’s minimum wage, a
situation that can arise in jobs where work-
ers depend on tips. And if the share of
unionised workers is high, wages of non-
union workers can increase too. In 2014 the
Services Trade Council Union (represent-
ing housekeepers, lifeguards and other ser-
vice workers) and Disney World agreed on
wage increases for union members at its
Orlando theme park to at least $10 an hour,
starting in 2016. Disney subsequently ex-
tended the wage increase to all its 70,000
employees in Orlando.
Both sides of the argument expect the
Supreme Court to rule in favour of Mr Ja-
nus in June. When a very similar case was
argued at the court in 2016, the justices tied
4-4 because of the death of Antonin Scalia,
the court’s chief conservative voice. His re-
placement, Neil Gorsuch, is expected to
side with Judge Samuel Alito and the other
three conservative justices. Mr Janus prob-
ably never expected to play such an impor-
tant role in the history ofAmerica’s labour
movement. 7