DTES Street Market Reports: Street Market Report

It was a cloudy day. A few sprinkles of rain throughout the day, but nothing to really worry about. By the end of the day we had quite a bit of Sun.

We had a few confiscations, with a lot of VPD presence throughout the day. A notable confiscation happened right near the entrance of the market on the south east corner. The vendor was an elderly Chinese lady just entering the market. In her bag was a bunch of expensive watches and jewellery, and several other items with tags on them. The volunteer that witnessed the event said that the stuff looked brand new, and the VPD officer said that they would check the items out and if they were not stolen that the vendor would get the items back. Another volunteer did get a number of incident numbers, so we can help the vendors follow up if they want to. It did seem clear that even if the watches and jewellery were not stolen, they were clearly not 'binned' from a trash can, and thus she does not represent the kind of vendor that the market should support.

We had a minor complaint in the morning. A woman got hit in the head by a tent being put up. A volunteer was rude to her and she came and complained. We need to bring this up in our meetings and make sure that the volunteers know to treat people with the proper respect even though they are in the middle the stressful job of setting up the tents.

Sometimes I like to muse on the artificial economy of the DTES and wonder that a project like this can be completed on volunteer stipends. Most of our volunteers work for about $3 per hour, with coffee and a sandwich thrown in for a 3 hour shift. This is incredible considering that the minimum wage for Vancouver is $10.25 per hour. Why is this possible? Why is this OK? These are legitimate questions that we should all be asking because it illustrates the underlying economic desperation of the DTES, that people are willing to work for $3 per hour, and it also begs the question of exactly what are the criteria that should be satisfied if an organization wants to run an operation by paying people less than minimum wage (volunteer stipends).

1) Clearly it is not sufficient to merely be a social enterprise. It is far too slippery a slope for a restaurant, or a catering service, or a laundromat to call itself a social enterprise, employ "hard to employ" people and thus be allowed to breach the minimum wage laws.

2) It should have nothing to do with the ideology of the owner or organization. Why would it be exploitation if a capitalist restaurant owner wants to pay $3 and hour for a dishwasher, but not exploitation if a neighbourhood community centre pays its 'workers' the equivalent of $0.50 per hour in meal tickets? There should be no difference and the standards of 'employment' need to be the same regardless of the lip service paid by the organization.

3) It should have everything to do with participatory democracy. If the venture is governed by the volunteers in a real sense... ie) there is a society, they are members, they elect a board, and meetings are regularly held where the volunteers can alter the work plan and work load, determine the course of the project, and hire and fire the facilitators or coordinators, than this is the real test for whether the organization should be allowed to run on 'volunteer' labour.

This is the essential element of the Street Market that I will fight for with all of my heart. The coordinators of the Street Market are currently not paid more than the other volunteers. The coordinators do not have a vote at board meetings, and the vendors and volunteers are the majority in every job meeting and every board meeting. This ensures that volunteer labour will never be exploitative because the volunteers themselves have the power to prevent it.

The real payment came in the form of a comment by a vendor. At the end of the day, when we were gathering all the carts to go down into the basement of the Lux hotel, a woman in the alley going home thanked us for running the market and for helping out all the low income people to make their own money, and get there own pay check. It is moments like these that make everything worthwhile.

The end of the day offered us an enormous pile of garbage. We did not break the garbage truck like last week.

Financial Summary
50/50 Draw: $47.50
Tables/Tent Rental: $107.50
Coffee/Juice Sales: $109.20

Total Revenue = $273.20
Total Spending = $653.81 (anomalous due to glitch in stipends money from VANDU, very lucky that we have a well managed petty cash and can survive this and still pay all the volunteers.)

Petty Cash = $831.61 (This will likely be corrected up by $600 next week when we catch up on the stipend checks)

Vendor count: 200 @ 12:30pm