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News :: Labor |
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Raw Deal For Workers On Minimum Wage Anniversary |
Current rating: 0 |
by Holly Sklar
(No verified email address) |
25 Jun 2003
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When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act on June 25, 1938, during the Great Depression, he wanted to assure workers "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." On the 65th anniversary of the federal minimum wage, Roosevelt's new deal has become a raw deal.
Roosevelt knew that to stimulate the economy, you boost workers and their families, you don't pile on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.
For decades, the minimum wage and worker productivity rose together. Between 1947 and 1973, worker productivity rose 108 percent while the minimum wage rose 101 percent, adjusting for inflation.
Since then, workers have put in their fair day's work without getting their fair day's pay. Between 1973 and 2000, worker productivity rose 52 percent, but the minimum wage fell 17 percent and hourly average wages fell 10 percent, adjusting for inflation. Between 2000 and 2002, productivity rose 6 percent; the real minimum wage fell 4 percent.
The current minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is lower than the real minimum wage of 1950 ($5.71). Today's 53-year-old workers were born in 1950; Truman was president, the Korean War began on June 25, there were no transistor radios, and pocket calculators were two decades away.
Since Congress last raised the minimum wage in 1997 to $5.15, it has raised congressional pay from $133,600 to $154,700, an increase of $21,100--nearly the pay of two minimum wage workers.
If your image of the typical minimum wage worker is a teenager, think again. Think of adult women working at checkout counters and in childcare, of healthcare aides taking care of your parents or grandparents--without employer health benefits, paid sick days or paid vacation.
A $5.15 minimum wage--$10,712 a year--just doesn't add up. A single parent with one child needs to work more than two full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. It takes more than three jobs at minimum wage to support a family of four. Maybe the Bush administration's marriage promotion programs will push polygamy.
See if you can make ends meet on minimum wage with a new interactive wage and household budget calculator (http://www.raisethefloor.org) on the web. Or will you be choosing between food and rent, healthcare and childcare?
It would take $8.45 to match the minimum wage peak of 1968 in $2003. Since 1968, worker productivity has risen more than 80 percent while the minimum wage has dropped nearly 40 percent, adjusting for inflation.
When the minimum wage is stuck in quicksand, it drags down wages for average workers as well. About one out of four workers makes $8.70 an hour or less. That's not much more than 1968's real minimum wage.
When workers don't get a fair day's pay they are not just underpaid--they are subsidizing employers, stockholders and consumers.
Plenty of employers know how to make a profit without ripping off their employees. In-N-Out Burger ranks first among fast food chains in quality, value and service. Chef Julia Child ate In-N-Out burgers while recuperating from knee surgery, the Associated Press reported. When the company opened a new restaurant in Oxnard, CA, in 2002 there were 900 applicants for 70 jobs. The starting wage is $8.25 an hour, with paid vacations, food at work, and the option of participating in a 401(k) with a company match.
Conservatives like to quote Adam Smith about the market. Smith wrote in "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776, "It is but equity...that those who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged."
In advocating minimum wage, Roosevelt said that goods produced "under conditions that do not meet a rudimentary standard of decency should be regarded as contraband."
We don't let businesses claim they can't afford to make hamburger without E-coli as a justification to keep serving up disease.
We don't tell businesses to keep dumping toxic waste in the river if they claim they can't afford proper disposal.
Poverty wages are toxic to our families, communities, economy and democracy. It's time to end them.
Holly Sklar is coauthor of "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us".
Copyright 2003 Holly Sklar |
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Power To The Janitors |
by Harold Meyerson
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
25 Jun 2003
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Americans may have divided over the war in Iraq this spring, but one thing that brought them together was their health coverage. It was shrinking.
From state to state and sector to sector, job-based health insurance either covered less or cost more or -- the insurance companies were loath to force a choice on us -- both.
One group managed to evade this bonding national experience, however: the janitors who clean the high-rise office buildings in America's downtowns. I know this sounds preposterous. Many janitors are immigrants, and many are here without legal status. They have no apparent power. Many don't speak English. So how is it that this spring, while the two-thirds of Americans who have health coverage were being told they would have to pay more to keep it, the janitors were getting their coverage upgraded?
If this runs counter to everything you know about power in America, you probably have forgotten about unions. At minimum, you have forgotten about unions that organize so many workers in a single sector that those workers can win some real power over the conditions of their work.
It's an understandable oversight: Such unions are few and far between. What with the mobility of capital, the intransigence of employers and the impotence of labor law, many unions have decided to abandon organizing altogether. Others have opted to go after the more plausibly organizable workers in the public sector, where employer opposition is often muted. The United Auto Workers (UAW) has found it easier to pick up teaching assistants at the University of Michigan than assembly-line workers at nonunion auto plants in the South. This doesn't strengthen the UAW's bargaining power in auto, but it certainly brings in new members.
In the mid-1980s, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) chose the more challenging course. The SEIU had begun as a union of janitors, but in one city after another, building owners were firing their unionized workers and hiring immigrant workers just arrived from Mexico and Central America. The SEIU was already established as the major public employee union in California, and the better part of valor would have been to build its public-sector membership (which it's done anyway) and forget the janitors.
Instead, it built the "Justice for Janitors" movement, employing hundreds of organizers, cultivating public sympathy, applying political leverage and mobilizing a raucous rank-and-file whose bells-and-whistles demonstrations are now a regular feature in many American cities. The union's janitorial membership swelled to more than 200,000, and this spring, janitors in Chicago got employers to pay more for expanded family coverage; janitors in Orange County, Calif., got employers to pay for family coverage for the first time; and janitors in Boston and Washington got employers to begin to pay for part-timers' health coverage too. "Union density trumped a bad economy," says Stephen Lerner, who heads the SEIU's building services division. It has also given the janitors more leverage when organizing in new cities.
This morning in Chicago, two other unions are embarking on what looks to be a long, hard organizing campaign at a vehemently anti-union company -- because they can't build real sectoral bargaining power if this company stays nonunion. Bruce Raynor, president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), and James P. Hoffa of the Teamsters are announcing a joint organizing drive at Cintas Corp., the nation's largest uniform rental and cleaning company. UNITE will target the workers in the plants, most of them immigrants making less than $9 an hour; the Teamsters, of course, will go after the drivers.
With domestic clothing manufacturing growing smaller every day, UNITE could have opted for health-care or public-sector organizing. Instead, it has chosen to organize harder targets closer to home -- apparel distribution and industrial laundries. In the past half-decade, it has unionized about one-third of the large-scale laundry business, but Cintas is the industry giant that will drag wages down so long as it's nonunion.
Like Andrew Stern, the president of the SEIU, and John Wilhelm, the president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, Raynor believes that the scramble of other unions to pick up new members outside their core industries adds little to union power at a time when the labor movement's continued existence is no sure thing. "Just organizing anybody you can is a formula for unions to decline," he insists.
Raynor, Wilhelm and Stern, who are widely admired for converting their unions into organizing machines, are prodding their fellow presidents to restructure labor's house along sectoral lines. A battle is shaping up that may spill over into the contest to succeed John Sweeney as AFL-CIO president. The three presidents are encountering serious opposition from union leaders who don't want to change -- though I doubt they'll get an argument from the couple of hundred thousand janitors and their families who don't have to pay more to see their doctors.
The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
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Re: Raw Deal For Workers On Minimum Wage Anniversary |
by Doug Matthes
doug_matthes (nospam) or.mxim.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
23 Jan 2006
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I've been working for 30years at various corps in retail, education and semiconductor manufacturing.
Just like the rest of America, my heath care cost are increasing, never had a pension, and so on.
As our Ford and GM continue to loose market share the auto workers will loose more and more. Its unfortunate the UAW makes it more difficult for Ford and GM to win - I've worked with union labor systems and in them - they do not support company objectives.
UAW labors should expect increased heath care costs and decreased pension, allow the company to define the job and needs for the workers and create an environment that support the company goals, not this obstuctionist idealogy.
Regards, Doug |
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