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News :: Miscellaneous |
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'Living Wage' Laws Gain Momentum Across U.S. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Daniel B. Wood
(No verified email address) |
15 Mar 2002
Modified: 02:43:31 PM |
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New study shows higher incomes from 'living wage' outweigh the cost in job losses. |
INGLEWOOD, CALIF. - Three years ago, Juana Zatarin couldn't make ends meet. The mother of three, a baggage handler at Los Angeles International Airport, was subsisting on an income about half that of the federal poverty rate of $17,028 for a family of four.
Today, thanks to a "living wage" law requiring city contractors to pay employees a minimum of $8.97 per hour, Ms. Zatarin earns more than $24,000 a year. Now life is good. "I can make my payments on time now and even have a chance to take some time off," she says.
It is a story that is being repeated in dozens of cities across America as part of a trend that - surprisingly - has continued to spread even during the economic downturn.
When Baltimore in 1994 became the first American city to adopt a so-called living-wage ordinance, critics said it would reduce employment and hobble local businesses and contractors forced to pay higher wages.
But more than 60 municipalities have since passed such laws, including the broadest, yet in New Orleans in February, and another last week in Santa Fe. The laws mandate that businesses under contract with the city - or in some cases businesses that receive grants, subsidies, or tax breaks from the city pay employees a wage large enough to lift their families out of poverty. (In California, wages under such agreements range from a low of $7.25 in Pasadena to a high of $11 in Santa Cruz.)
Despite some defeats, several dozen campaigns are percolating from coast to coast, even during the current economic slowdown, causing even detractors to admit the movement seems here to stay.
"Over all the early objections and fears, we are seeing a broadening of these laws to larger cities and to all sections of the country," says Robert Pollin, a University of Massachusetts economist who wrote a book called, "Living Wages," and has conducted surveys of cities that have adopted such laws. "Based on earlier successes, the movement is gaining confidence and momentum, strengthening the discussion and carrying it to bigger and bigger arenas."
The number of workers affected by such laws is still small - perhaps 100,000. And such ordinances have been banned in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oregon. But experts say the trend is gaining momentum because there's growing evidence to dispell the early fears that the benefits of substantial pay increases would be overshadowed by huge reductions in the number of jobs in the job categories effected. And they say the demise of other social safety nets, and lack of movement on the current federal minimum-wage law - stalled at $5.15 - are helping spur steady activity.
"Since the beginning of this movement, we kept hearing 'the sky will fall, the sky will fall,' " says Jen Kern, executive director of the Living Wage Resource Center for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). (http://www.acorn.org/) "Now those employers who thought they'd suffer are saying they get higher production from these employees, less turnover, more satisfaction ... and are able to service their clients better."
Pro-living-wage forces got a boost from a study released yesterday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.( http://www.ppic.org/) Done by an early skeptic of the benefit of living-wage laws, the report examined 36 cities with such laws - including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, New Haven, and San Jose. It found that slight job losses caused by the law are more than compensated by the decrease in family poverty.
"The steep wage increases [caused by living-wage laws] make it less likely that families with a living-wage worker will live in poverty, especially in cities where the law applies most broadly," says David Neumark, professor of economics at Michigan State University and author of the report. His study comes on the heels of others with similar findings in recent years. But despite the growth of such findings, some observers say, it's still too early to draw conclusions.
"It's very hard to draw definitive conclusions from studies like these because the laws only affect a tiny fraction of the workforce - perhaps 1 percent, tops," says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epinet.org/), a liberal thinktank in Washington. But he says the findings, by a mainstream economist who has opposed living-wage increases, help the movement.
"The fact that a known opponent of these ordinances has come out with a credible study showing the net benefits of the policies is a significant boost to the movement," says Bernstein.
Another sign of growing acceptance of such laws is the percentage of margin of recent wins. In February, a city-wide referendum in New Orleans raising the minimum wage by $1 passed by 63 percent of the voters. The largest living-wage law yet passed, the measure covers every business in the city, not just public employees or employees of public contractors. An Oakland measure passed by 78 percent of voters March 5. And two weeks ago, voters in Montgomery County, Maryland passed a measure that was rebuffed the year before.
"There was a lot of talk immediately after Sept. 11 that the living wage movement was dead," says Madeleine Janis-Aparicio, executive director of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (http://www.laane.org/), which supported a Santa Monica law passed last July. A campaign by local hotels has forced a city-wide referendum in November, but most observers feel the law will be upheld.
"We think the continued groundswell of activity even during this period shows that the issue is changing people's views in small ways that will eventually force the issue on national politicians.
Copyright © 2002 The Christian Science Monitor
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Going Down the Road: Campaign for a Living Wage |
by Jim Hightower
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Mar 2002
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If our so-called national leadership had not lost its shame gene, surely it would be red-faced over its failure to do some little something about the plummeting value of the minimum wage. Today's miserly minimum of $5.15 an hour delivers a sub-subsistence income of $10,700 a year, if you get full-time work. That's gross, in two meanings of the word. Millions of Americans--most of them adults and supporting families--are working either for this wage or are paid just a few coins more and have their poverty pay pegged to this wage floor.
There's been a longstanding proposal in Congress to raise the minimum wage by a buck, but stand there is all it has done, for neither party has moved it forward. There was a flurry of excitement a couple of years ago when House Speaker Dennis Hastert rose on his hind legs and gave an impassioned plea for Congress to help economically distressed people: "I am not crying crocodile tears, but they need to be able to have a life and provide for their family. They need to have a modest increase in their salary." Unfortunately, he was not talking about minimum-wage workers; rather he was speaking of the urgent need to raise the pay of members of Congress, which the members promptly did.
We progressives need to stop looking to Washington to do it for us and move our focus to the battleground where we have legitimate, lasting and growing power: America's grassroots. ACORN, an indefatigable organizer of low-income communities, and SEIU, the feisty unionizer of the low-wage service industry, are two national groups that understand this. They've teamed up with churches, civil rights advocates, an array of unions, women's organizations and other local groups in cities, counties and states across America to pass not a minimum wage but living-wage laws. It is a sophisticated effort, including excellent research and support available through ACORN's Living Wage Resource Center (www.acorn.org). In less than eight years, these ground-level coalitions have won living-wage campaigns in seventy-nine places from coast to coast.
Tough Fight in the Big Easy
Their latest and most sweeping victory is in the Big Easy--New Orleans, the home of jazz, Mardi Gras, great food...and unconscionably low wages. The engine of the Crescent City's economy is the "hospitality" industry, including hotels, restaurants and clubs. These places rake in huge profits from the hundreds of millions of tourist dollars that flow through their doors every year, yet two-thirds of New Orleans service and retail workers are paid poverty wages. On average, full-time cooks there are paid 20 percent below the family poverty level, kitchen workers are 37 percent below poverty and housekeepers are 41 percent below. Yet, of America's twelve major tourist markets, New Orleans hotels enjoy the fourth-highest room rates, and its high-dollar restaurants are consistently packed. With such prodigious wealth being generated on the backs of such poorly paid workers, SEIU organizer Wade Rathke says of his city, "We're Jamaica without a beach."
Local pols were not going to do anything to right this disparity, so SEIU, ACORN and others decided to take it to the people. Their strategy was to propose a referendum: a simple one-buck increase over the federal minimum. This is lower than most living-wage ordinances (which go up to $12 an hour), but the New Orleans initiative throws by far the widest loop, applying the new $6.15-an-hour standard to practically all private-sector employees. The bottom line is that about 75,000 people--nearly a third of the city's working class--would get a boost of roughly $500 to $2,000 a year in their pay, depending on their current wage and the hours they work.
The New Orleans Campaign for a Living Wage (NOCLW http://www.acorn.org/acorn10/livingwage/neworleans.htm) made another smart move: It appealed to small-business owners, especially in neighborhoods where low-wage workers live. Any extra bucks that these workers get tend to be spent in their own areas--getting the roof fixed, buying a used car, purchasing a few more groceries, etc.--so these are sales that ripple through the small-business community. It's classic percolate-up economics, recognizing that money is like manure: It works best if you spread it around.
But the opposition was not sleeping. It formed the Small Business Coalition to Save Jobs, an acronym that in plain English spells "Hokum." These so-called small businesses were Marriott, Sheraton, Hyatt, Hilton and other global hotel chains, as well as such political powerhouses as the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council and the Restaurant Association. They adopted a classic "the sky is falling" strategy, predicting mass layoffs, soaring prices and fleeing businesses.
But their real tactic was to do all they could to stop the vote, including rushing to the state legislature to ram a bill through that prohibits any city from enacting a minimum wage. With that done, they then asked the courts to quash the New Orleans initiative. But the state's highest appeals court finally ruled that the Hokum's lawsuit was moot, since the local law had not passed. If it did, then they could come back for a hearing. So the vote was on.
"Can you believe it," exclaimed Louisiana ACORN president Beulah Labostrie on election night, February 2. "Against all odds, we just gave a raise to 75,000 workers!" NOCLW's volunteers had made thousands of calls and gone door to door in a spirited shoe-leather campaign, getting 73,000 votes for the living wage and winning by a sweeping 63-37 margin.
The next day the corporate lawyers went running back to the courts, and a decision is due in the next few weeks on whether a trumped-up state law can overturn the voters' voice. Whichever way the decision goes, the people's sense of victory in New Orleans has been transforming. Rathke says that since the vote, "there's a step in people's walk that wasn't there before. They've learned that they have power, and their attitude is 'we can beat you again.' This is what the business guys are really worried about."
Rathke adds that the lesson for progressives is that "our base is really here. If we create coalitions and take our message to the people, we're gonna win. But we've got to be willing to put our vision of justice out there. Progressives can't be afraid to let people vote."
Jim Hightower has been called America's favorite populist. He's been editor of The Texas Observer, president of the Texas Consumer Association, Texas Agriculture Commissioner, host of a radio show. Nowadays he broadcasts daily radio commentaries, publishes a monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown (http://jimhightower.com/) and makes more than 100 speeches a year. With groups like ACORN and Public Citizen he's organizing the Rolling Thunder Chautauqua Tour, a series of political/cultural festivals around the country (http://www.rollingthundertour.org/). He'll be traveling through America talking to people engaged in grassroots work and new political movements for working people.
© 2002 The Nation Company, L.P.
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