America the Poor: The Human Consequences of Unlivable Wages
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How could Barack Obama say, in
his State of the Union speech, “Let’s declare that in the wealthiest
nation on Earth no one who works full-time should have to live in
poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour”?
Back in 2008, Obama campaigned to have a
$9.50 per hour minimum wage by 2011. Now he’s settling for $9.00 by
2015! Going backward into the future is the price that poverty groups
and labor unions are paying by giving Mr. Obama a free ride last year on
this moral imperative. How can leaders of poverty groups and unions
accept this back-of-the-hand response to the plight of thirty million
workers who make less today than what workers made 45 years ago in 1968,
inflation adjusted?
But, of course, the poverty groups and
labor unions chose not to mobilize some of the thirty million workers
who grow our food, serve, clean up and fix things for us to push for a
meaningful increase in the minimum wage before Election Day.
It gets worse. The Obama White House
demanded “message discipline” by all Democratic candidates. That meant
if Obama wasn’t talking about raising the minimum wage to catch up with
1968, none of the other federal candidates for Congress should embarrass
the President by speaking out, including Elizabeth Warren, of all
people, who was running for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.
It didn’t matter that the U.S. had the
lowest minimum wage of any major western country (Australia is over $15,
France over $11, and the province of Ontario in Canada is $10.25 – all
of these countries also have health insurance for all).
It didn’t matter that several cities and
19 states plus the District of Columbia have higher minimums, though
the highest – Washington state – reaches only to $9.19.
It didn’t matter that two-thirds of
low-wage workers in our country work for large corporations such as
Walmart and McDonald’s, whose top CEOs make an average of $10 million a
year plus benefits. Nor did it matter that these corporations that
operate in Western Europe, like Walmart, are required to pay workers
there much more than they are paying Americans in the United States
where these companies got their start.
Haven’t you noticed how few workers
there are in the “big box” chain stores compared to years ago? Well, one
Walmart worker today does the work of two Walmart workers in 1968. That
is called a doubling of worker productivity. Yet, many of today’s
Walmart workers, earning less than $10.50 an hour, and are making
significantly less than their counterparts made in 1968.
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz told me that minimum wage policy relates intimately to child
poverty. Single moms with children on a shrinking real minimum wage
“translates to child poverty” and is “creating another generation” of
impoverished people.
The arguments for a higher minimum wage,
at least to reach the level of 1968, are moral, political and economic.
James Downie writing in The Washington Post provided five
reasons to raise the minimum wage: “1) it will help the economy; 2) it
reduces poverty and inequality; 3) it reduces the ‘wage gap’ for women
and minorities; 4) indexing the minimum wage is, well, common sense; and
5) it’s consistent with American values.”
Downie gives historical perspective on
just how far our economic expectations have slid when he quotes 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.”
In the ensuing 100 years, worker
productivity has increased about twentyfold. Why then are not most
workers sharing in the economic benefits of this productivity? With
other worker advocates, we chose to demonstrate on Feb. 12, 2013 before
the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce whose business
coalition opposes increases in the minimum wage while its members report
record profits and boss pay. And before the headquarters of the large
labor federation – the AFL-CIO – we urged well-paid union leaders to
devote more of their power and resources on Congress and the White House
to lift up the minimum wage for those they like to call their “brothers
and sisters,” from the ranks of the working poor.
The last time – 2007 – a higher minimum
wage law was passed under the prodding of the late Senator Edward
Kennedy, nearly 1,000 business owners and executives, including Costco
CEO Jim Sinegal, the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce CEO Margot Dorfman
(two thirds of low-income workers are women), and small business owners
from all 50 states signed a “Business for a Fair Minimum Wage”
statement.
It read: “[H]igher wages benefit
business by increasing consumer purchasing power, reducing costly
employee turnover, raising productivity, and improving product quality,
customer satisfaction and company reputation.”
Listen to those words, Walmart! You badly need to improve your reputation, given your recent major missteps.
Catching up with a 1968 federal minimum
wage of $10.50, inflation adjusted, should be a winnable goal this year.
Once the media starts regularly reporting on the human consequences of
unlivable wages, and once the entry of more and more of the thirty
million workers to marches, rallies and town meetings grows, neither the
Republicans nor the Blue Dog Democrats will be able to stop this drive.
Congressional districts all have many such workers in their districts
and polls show 70 percent popular support for raising the minimum wage.
That includes millions of workers who call themselves conservatives.
The April Congressional recess – the
first two weeks of the month – will be the first opportunity to show up
where it counts – at the town meetings held by senators and
representatives back home. Filling those seats usually requires two to
three hundred local voters. If workers rally, by the time the lawmakers
go back to Congress, they’ll have a strong wind to their back to face
down the lobbies for greed and power, who have money, but don’t have
votes.
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