When Wall Street investors take a financial hit they call it getting a haircut. For Thomas Bradley, a barber in Ferguson, the mayhem in this Missouri town has given the expression a literal meaning.
The 24-year-old sat in one of his own leather chairs, a bib around his neck, to receive a haircut from a colleague, Toriano Johnson. Why not? There were no customers.
Eleven days of protests triggered by the police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager have reduced business by 80%, leaving the barbershop’s 10 employees idle – and increasingly anxious.
“It’s bad. People don’t want to come to this area right now, everyone’s on edge,” said Bradley.
It one sense that is a familiar feeling: this blue collar outpost of St Louis has long lived on an economic edge, balanced between getting by and tumbling into poverty.
The clashes between riot police and protestors, furious over the 9 August death of Michael Brown, 18, have focused worldwide attention onmilitarised US policing but they have also damaged local businesses and pushed some of their workers and families closer to destitution.
One store is burned and gutted, other businesses are smashed and looted, others are physically unscathed but bereft of customers.
“I’m down 99%,” said Kaye Mershon, owner of the Clip Appeal beauty salon. “The police shut down the street, people can’t get in. And by the time they open it people are afraid to come.” Consequences for her six staff were grave, said Mershon.
Sonny Dayan’s electrical goods store, which abuts the spot where police assemble armoured vehicles each night, has lost half its normal revenue, he said. “It’s not on purpose but police are hurting the local businesses more than the looters.” An assistant, Steve Beale, 27, fretted about losing shifts. “I can’t afford to lose a dollar.”
Some store owners have boarded up their windows and doors and said they haemorrhaged so much they may not reopen.
Mershon doubted that. “I have faith in recovery. It may take some time but we’ll be OK.”
But reverting to normal, turning back the clock to how things were a fortnight ago, may not be enough.
Economic marginalisation, as well as heavy-handed policing, havedriven the protests, said activists and analysts.
“People are stuck. It’s a grinding existence, you’re trying to make it, doing your best, but you’re falling down, and your kids are not making it,” said Clarence Lo, a sociologist at the University of Missouri who studies protest movements. “There are so many frustrations. And on top of that a cop harasses you for walking down the street.”
Ferguson is no Gothamesque slum of crumbling tenements and crack dens. It is a working class suburb of single-family homes and low-rise apartment blocks which used to be a gateway to the middle class. Manufacturing jobs offered decent wages and there was a decent public school system.
Something went wrong. You see it in the physical landscape of potholes and pawn brokers. And in the desperation. Some of it quiet: a mother counting out pennies, dimes and quarters to buy ice cream for her two children in McDonald’s. Some of it more dramatic: the owner of a burger bar bolting out onto the street after a skinny, grubby young man with shattered teeth. “You took from the tip jar! I saw you! Give it back.”
A major culprit is de-industrialisation. Missouri is part of the rustbelt of shuttered factories which arcs across the midwest.
The father of Bradley, the barber, used to work at a nearby Chrysler plant until it shut down. Then he worked at Boeing until it downsized and laid him off. It left his son little chance to go to college. “He earned $24 an hour in 1990,” marvelled Bradley. He did not know anyone in Ferguson who earned anything close to that now, 24 years later.
Toriano Johnson, 39, the colleague clipping Bradley’s hair, sighed. “Back in the day when people drove American cars you could get a good job and go to college. Times change.”
The closure of Chrysler, Ford and McDonnell Douglas plants cost thousands of unionised jobs in the area and triggered a vicious cycle, said Mark Esters, 50, a former Chrysler worker turned vice-president of the St Louis chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.
Suppliers to the factories also went bust, costing more jobs. This devastated not just family incomes but the local tax base, degrading police salaries, the quality of schools and student test scores, among other things. “A downward spiral. It’s all linked,” said Esters.
When Ferguson and nearby suburbs were largely white and relatively prosperous they incorporated themselves into cities to gain independence from St Louis, a move which backfired when factories shut, said Lo. “Now those little enclaves are impoverished.”
Another blow was the closure of a bakery which made Twinkies after Hostess Brands tried to slash wages, prompting a dispute with unions.
Some 47% of African American men aged 16-24 in St Louis county areunemployed. Even that understates the economic crisis since many of those who do have jobs, men and women, earn a pittance in service jobs. “It used to be McDonnell Douglas was considered a good job. Now it’s McDonald’s,” said Teresa Mithen Danieley, rector of an episcopal church.
The scenes of looting, teargas and boarded up stores looked bleak, said Lara Granich, director of the Missouri branch of Jobs with Justice, an advocacy group, but they could herald positive change. “I hope we make this a turning point.”
The energy unleashed by the protests could galvanise efforts to unionise McDonald’s workers and give home care workers the right to collective bargaining, among other causes, said Granich. “Getting rid of the idea that there has to be poverty jobs is a very important step. Economic inequality and racism are mutually reinforcing forces.”
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