Harry Targ
In one way or another progressives are addressing fundamental
questions basic to human sustainability. And as Pete Seeger has said: "Participation: that’s what’s going to
save the human race."
First, more and more activists are raising concerns
about the survivability of the natural environment in which we live: the land
mass, the water systems, the productivity of the land, and the capacity of
humans to continue to live on the land. Most visible to the naked eye are
consequences of global climate change, including hurricanes, tsunamis, floods,
storms, and blistering heat.
Second, there is a growing discussion of problems of
access to the rudimentary resources for the maintenance of human life: food,
water, and air. Because of the devastations of the environment to distorted and
inadequate systems of production and distribution, people are living in
poverty, are malnourished, and remain exposed to toxic air and water.
Third, Samir Amin estimates that one-half to
two-thirds of the global population lives in conditions of “precariousness”.
That is people lack access to secure jobs and income in global and national
economies that systematically are able to produce more goods and services with
fewer and fewer workers. However, global capitalism is based on a system of
remuneration linking income to jobs. The need for fewer workers leads to fewer
jobs and a downward spiral of wages and income.
Fourth, because of environmental devastation;
declining access to food and clean air and water; and lack of the capacity to
acquire monetary resources to sustain life, little time is left for discussions
of what a better life and a better society might look like.
In this blog I will address the access to remuneration,
reducing “precariousness,” and having the resources in a money economy to
sustain life. Recently, discussion of that dimension of human sustainability
has been stimulated by President Obama’s call for raising the minimum wage and
the jobs/income crisis faced by workers as a result of the sequester crisis. The
data is familiar to most people.
Wages
and Income
-Economic Policy Institute analyses show clearly
that worker productivity has increased over the last 40 years and wages have
stagnated or declined with the exception of a bump in real wages during the
late 1990s. For economist Lawrence Mishel, in terms of wages, the last decade
has been “the lost decade.”
-Wage stagnation has affected all sectors of the
working population, including those with college degrees.
-Wage and income inequality has increased
dramatically over the last 40 years. As Mishel’s wrote: “This divergence has
been demonstrated anew in the current recovery over 2009-2011 as real wages
fell for the bottom ninety percent of the wage distribution but rose for the
top five percent.”
-African Americans and Latinos have experienced wage
and job stagnation at rates at least a third higher than whites.
-“The declining value of the minimum wage has played
a key role in these trends….” (Mishel, February 21, 2013, Economic Policy Institute.)
Using
the Indiana Story to Relate Wages, Jobs, and Poverty:
-Indiana’s job loss between 2008 and 2012 was
231,500.
-Indiana is among 17 states that have continued to
experience absolute declines in its labor force since the recession began.
-Median family income fell by 29.6 percent in the
past decade from $78,599 to $55,368. Only Michigan, among all states, has
experienced a larger percentage decrease.
-Since 2000, Indiana has seen a 52 percent increase
in poverty. In 2010, 15.3 percent of Hoosiers were living in poverty, nearly
one million people. Childhood poverty rates have increased by the same amount.
(“Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011, Indiana Institute for Working Families, April, 2012).
One
Response: Living Wage Campaigns
From the 1990s to 2004 living wage campaigns all
across the United States grew, drawing together coalitions of community
activists, led by labor, faith communities, and grassroots organizations such
as ACORN. Ralph Nader in a recent essay (Common
Dreams, February 16, 2013) referred to an apt definition of a living wage
proposed by Theodore Roosevelt at the 1912 Progressive Party convention:
“We stand for a living wage…enough to secure the
elements of a normal standard of living-a standard high enough to make morality
possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members
of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit
a reasonable saving for our old age.”
The first major living wage victory occurred in the Baltimore
campaign of 1994. A local coalition consisting of AFSCME and a group of 50
churches called BUILD, Baltimorean’s United in Leadership Development won a
very modest ordinance requiring that companies with city service contracts pay
workers a base wage of $6.10 increasing to $7.70 over five years.
While modest, the Baltimore campaign inspired coalitions
and demands all across the country. Between 1995 and 1999, 37 additional
ordinances passed sometimes including benefits with wage increases. In 2000-2001
mobilizations led to an additional 57 ordinances. By 2002, three quarters of
these ordinances required health care benefits and wage rates from $9.77 to
$11.10 without health care. An additional 70 campaigns were launched in small
towns and big cities around the country, including New Orleans, Santa Monica,
and San Francisco (S. Laurel Weldon and Harry Targ, “From Living Wages to
Family Wages?” New Political Science ,
March 2004).
Stephanie Luce, Professor of Labor Studies, Murphy Institute,
CUNY, updated the living wage story in 2012. She said that since Baltimore much
has been accomplished “…winning more than 125 living wage ordinances in cities
and counties, three city minimum wages, and state and federal minimum wage
increases. Eight states have indexed their minimum wage to inflation because of
activist pressure, and campaigns to raise and index state minimums are underway
in 10 more states.”
Luce also described problems with living wage campaigns.
They tended to target small sectors of the working class (usually public
employees). They often did not include part-time workers. Restrictive
provisions were included in ordinances which excluded certain corporate
investors from the wage and benefit requirements. Also campaigns have been long
and difficult, with growing opposition from ‘big box” and other huge
corporations.
On the other hand, she suggested that the value of
such campaigns included the impetus living wage coalitions provided for
building community coalitions. Often these coalitions supported union organizing
drives. They brought together African American, faith, and labor communities.
They generated pressure for other campaigns such as for a minimum wage,
prevailing wage, and worker rights.
For example, Luce reported: “After activists won a
living wage in Tucson, Arizona, city workers contacted the Communications
Workers and organized their own union….The San Francisco living wage coalition
helped win card check from the airport commission, resulting in several
thousand workers joining a handful of unions....The NEA has launched a national
effort to use living wage campaigns as contract campaigns, to raise wages for
school support staff.” (http://www.labornotes.org,
February 27, 2012).
Luce concluded that: “Many living wage campaigns
were launched not because they were the best policy available but because they
could use leverage where activists were most likely to have it: at the local
level.”
Are
Living Wage Campaigns Still Relevant Today
Although some living wage campaigns continue, often
expanding their projects to include support for minimum wages, union
organizing, and other local campaigns, 9/11, two wars, and the 2008-2012
recession reshaped the agenda of progressive groups. Assaults on worker rights throughout
the heartland required mobilizing to save jobs, oppose Right-to-Work Laws,
protect the right of public employees to form unions, and resist the
privatization of every conceivable public institution.
However, given the vision that animates the progressive
majority and the need to build broad coalitions, rebuilding living wage
campaigns could be an important part of its organizing future.
Living wage campaigns address one of the issues of
sustaining humankind mentioned above; jobs, income and remuneration.
They would resonate with workers who survive on
wages just above existing minimum wage laws.
They could work in conjunction with and parallel to
mobilizations around minimum wage and jobs campaigns.
And, if the history of such campaigns is a good
predictor, living wage campaigns would bring together broad coalitions of workers,
faith-based activists, activists from African American and Latino communities,
and activists for reproductive health.
Finally, living wage campaigns, whether committed to
federal or local legislation in the past, have been grassroots movements shaped
by local conditions and the particularities of organizing possibilities at the
local level. Building a progressive majority requires parallel and interconnected
organizing at the grassroots level and the national level. Each is informed by
the other. And ultimately sustaining human life is both a global and a local
project.
