Detroit Water Shut Offs; NBC News
Recently, Food & Water Watch, as part of a coalition of other organizations, submitted a report to the UN Special Rapporteur on Water, citing the DWSD’s mass shut offs of water to residential homes as a human rights violation. According to the UN, if a person cannot pay their bill, to shut off their water does indeed constitute a violation of the human right to water.
According to angry web commentators and pundits on the right of the political spectrum, water isn’t a right, but a commodity. They argue that the people of Detroit are merely too lazy, or too spoiled to ante up for water, and that the only way to motivate bill paying is through direct action… like turning the taps off. They say that it isn’t that people here CAN’T pay their bill, it is simply that they WON’T pay. They insist that even if the residential user in fact, simply cannot pay, if the residential user simply has no money, that water still is not a guarantee.
This has been a hard issue for me to process. It certainly wasn’t what I expected coming into the organization. I was under the impression I would fight privatization, which I already opposed. But instead, I was thrown into a complex and immediately relevant situation altogether different. Did I believe, at the very core, that water is a right, and should be available at reduced costs?
I’m still fighting over the answer to that question. On the one hand, I can’t ever agree that water to the sick and to children should be cut off. I believe fervently that poverty is not a reflection of a persons worth, nor that there is a strict casual link between effort/gumption and prosperity. Circumstances beyond one persons control can lead to situations with no easy escape, and poverty can become a cycle. Why punish these innocents by taking away one of the fundamental necessities of life?
At the same time, I know that water can’t always be on for everyone… that the infrastructure and the value inherent in H2O necessitates costs to consumers. I sympathize with the Water Department in that I agree that there are likely some individuals who can pay but do not, and that the sorting of these people from the others is no easy task.
So I’m still trying to reconcile these two notions in my own head. Some solutions… a % of income water bill, where usage is still charged but the total bill can never exceed a set percent of monthly income…. are better than others….one time charitable donation from wealthy capitalists. I imagine I’ll struggle with this for a while.
Thanks for sharing, Freida. This sounds like a really complicated issue. I never thought about the option of % of income water bill, that sounds like a pretty good idea. I’ve seen many articles on this issue recently, so hopefully with all this media attention change will come sooner rather than later!