While we’re thinking about issues of social justice today in particular, this article about the living wage is a must-read. Economic justice is crucial in this struggle.
Workers in some of Baltimore’s homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs.
Employees at places like Wal-Mart are encouraged to go on public assistance to make up for the fact that their employer doesn’t pay them enough to live, and doesn’t offer proper healthcare or other benefits. The working poor in America are paid as low as $5.15 an hour, even in places like New York City where the cost of living is incredibly high.
The immediate goal for living-wage strategists is to put initiatives on the ballots in several swing states this year. If their reckoning is correct, the laws should effect a financial gain for low-income workers and boost turnout for candidates who campaign for higher wages. In Florida, a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage by a dollar, to $6.15, won 71 percent of the vote in 2004, a blowout that surprised even people like Kern, who spent several weeks in Miami working on the measure. “We would like it to become a fact of political life,” Kern says, “where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum-wage law in some state.” Though victories like the one in Florida may have done little to help the Kerry-Edwards ticket – George Bush won 52 percent of the state’s vote – Kern and some in the Democratic establishment have come to believe that the left, after years of electoral frustration, has finally found its ultimate moral-values issue. “This is what moves people to the polls now,” Kern insists. “This is our gay marriage.”
Well, it would be nice if gay marriage was “our gay marriage,” because those who would exclude an entire class of people from legally marrying don’t really seem like they’re on the side of the angels, but I see her point. This issue has the power to mobilize the working class, especially in red states where incomes are often lower. And it absolutely is a moral issue — a whole lot more of one than, say, preventing women from getting their prescriptions at a pharmacy.
And before anyone jumps in with, “But raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy and cause job loss!,” check this out:
In simplest terms, most economists accepted that when government forces businesses to pay higher wages, businesses, in turn ,hire fewer employees. It is a powerful argument against the minimum wage, since it suggests that private businesses as a group, along with teenagers and low-wage employees, will be penalized by a mandatory raise.
The tenor of this debate began to change in the mid-1990’s following some work done by two Princeton economists, David Card (now at the University of California at Berkeley) and Alan B. Krueger. In 1992, New Jersey increased the state minimum wage to $5.05 an hour (applicable to both the public and private sectors), which gave the two young professors an opportunity to study the comparative effects of that raise on fast-food restaurants and low-wage employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained at the federal level of $4.25 an hour. Card and Krueger agreed that the hypothesis that a rise in wages would destroy jobs was “one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics.” Both told me they believed, at the start, that their work would reinforce that hypothesis. But in 1995, and again in 2000, the two academics effectively shredded the conventional wisdom. Their data demonstrated that a modest increase in wages did not appear to cause any significant harm to employment; in some cases, a rise in the minimum wage even resulted in a slight increase in employment.
And economics aside, we shouldn’t forget that our current minimum wage leaves even full-time workers practically destitute. Raising it, even slightly, can be a huge help.
One evening in Santa Fe, I sat down with some of the people Wal-Mart is worried about. Like Louis Alvarez, a 58-year-old cafeteria worker in the Santa Fe schools who for many years helped prepare daily meals for 700 children. For that he was paid $6.85 an hour and brought home $203 every two weeks. He had no disposable income – indeed, he wasn’t sure what I meant by disposable income; he barely had money for rent. Statistically speaking, he was far below the poverty line, which for a family of two is about $12,800 a year. For Alvarez, an increase in the minimum wage meant he would be able to afford to go to flea markets, he said.
I also met with Ashley Gutierrez, 20, and Adelina Reyes, 19, who have low-paying customer-service and restaurant jobs. By most estimates, 35 percent of those who make $7 an hour or less in the U.S. are teenagers. A few months ago, Reyes told me, she was spending 86 hours every two weeks at two minimum-wage jobs to pay for her car and to pay for college. Gutierrez, also in school, was working 20 hours a week at Blockbuster video for the minimum wage. People like Alvarez and Gutierrez and Reyes were the ones who spurred two city councilors in Santa Fe, Frank Montaño and Jimmie Martinez, to introduce the living-wage ordinance. “Our schools here don’t do so well,” Montaño told me, explaining that he believed higher-wage jobs would let parents, who might otherwise have to work a second job, spend more time with their children. (At the same time working teenagers like Gutierrez would have more time with their parents.) For Santa Fe residents who were living five or six to a room in two-bedroom adobes, Montaño said he hoped a higher minimum wage might put having their own places to live at least within the realm of possibility.
It’s also interesting to see the coalitions that the economic justice issue has built.
The Rev. Jerome Martinez, the city’s influential monsignor, began to throw his support behind the living-wage ordinance. When I met with him in his parish, in a tidy, paneled office near the imposing 18th-century church that looks over the city plaza, Martinez traced for me the moral justification for a living wage back to the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI and John Paul II, in which the pontiffs warned against the excesses of capitalism. “The church’s position on social justice is long established,” Father Jerome said. “I think unfortunately it’s one of our best-kept secrets.”
I asked if it had been a difficult decision to support the wage law. He smiled slightly. “It was a no-brainer,” he said. “You know, I am not by nature a political person. I have gotten a lot of grief from some people, business owners, who say, ‘Father, why don’t you stick to religion?’ Well, pardon me – this is religion. The scripture is full of matters of justice. How can you worship a God that you do not see and then oppress the workers that you do see?”
Read the whole thing.