Days of Wage

My home town has always been a pretty great place for a liberal. Almost half Hispanic, with a Catholic Church that still remembers liberation theology and an Anglo community that still remembers the 1960s, Santa Fe likes to flaunt its status as one of the most progressive towns in the country. Two years ago, Santa Fe struck again. It passed a municipal living wage of $8.50, the highest in the country. With a seven to one vote by the City Council, one in six Santa Feans got a raise. It was a good day.
Since Harvard started paying its workers a living wage five years ago, living wage campaigns have been sprouting up all over the country. In 2004, living wage initiatives were on the ballot in two states, Florida and Nevada. In 2006, activists expect to target an additional four states. At the same time, unions and community groups around the country have persuaded cities to pay more to their employees. As I write, activists in our own Cambridge are working on a minimum wage increase. (Technically, a “living wage” law only raises the pay of city employees and the employees of private firms who do business with the city. A pay raise for a whole city or a whole state is simply a “minimum wage increase.” Why some people insist on this distinction is beyond me. I’m just going to call any law that substantially raises a state or local minimum wage a “living wage” law.)
Advocates of living wage campaigns have made two claims to get people to focus on their issue. First, as Paul Sonn, a living wage activist and associate counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, puts it, living wage activists have “economics on their side.” This seems to be true. In Santa Fe, business leaders and their in-house economists argued that a living wage would boost unemployment. They were wrong. The job growth rate in Santa Fe for the past year was 2 percent. This puts Santa Fe in line with the rest of New Mexico, which had the 13th best job growth record in the nation. More importantly, the hospitality industry, arguably the most affected by the living wage law, had 3.2 percent job growth, a truly impressive figure by national standards.
Not only did the living wage law not hurt Santa Fe’s economy, it succeeded in pulling Santa Fe’s workers out of poverty, just as it was intended to do. Welfare applications in Santa Fe went down 9.7 percent in the last year. That’s compared to a drop of just 0.6 percent in the rest of the state. Other places that have passed living wage laws have had similar results. Illinois, which passed a statewide minimum wage in 2003, is the only state in its region to see poverty drop in the last few years.
But living wage advocates make another, more complicated claim. In 2004, as most progressives focused their efforts on defeating George W. Bush, living wage activists in Florida and Nevada argued that their efforts would bring workers and progressives to the polls to vote for Kerry. I remember thinking that the living wage initiative in Florida was Kerry’s ticket to the White House. I was wrong.
Even though more than 70 percent of Floridians backed an increase in the state’s minimum wage, fewer than half of Florida voters cast their ballot for the presidential candidate who had promised to raise the federal minimum wage. There are plenty of possible reasons why Kerry didn’t capitalize on the living wage movement in Florida. Many, including Jenn Kern, national organizer for the Association of Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN), the group that spearheaded the Florida living wage campaign, blame Kerry. “Kerry,” says Kern, “failed to seize the opportunity to use the issue to connect with voters.” Regardless of who is responsible for Kerry’s loss in Florida, one thing is clear: a living wage initiative, no matter how popular, won’t assure victory for Democrats.
But living wage initiatives may hold a less immediate benefit for progressives. When pundits have looked at living wage movements, they tend to act as if the movements end when they pass (or fail to pass) living wage laws. This kind of analysis misses a crucial point about living wage movements: their mission doesn’t end with a vote.
On paper, Florida has a $6.15 minimum wage. But in reality, wages are constantly being worked out between workers and employers. If workers feel powerless to force their bosses to obey the law, living wage laws frequently aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. That’s why ACORN continues to work with Florida labor unions to ensure that workers receive the living wage to which they are entitled. ACORN has successfully defeated attempts by the state legislature to overrule the people’s will by undermining the immensely popular minimum wage law. And ACORN will still be on the ground mobilizing workers when the next presidential contest focuses national attention on the Sunshine State.
In Illinois, a successful living wage campaign in 1998 was only the beginning. The 1998 law, seen as a great victory across the country, raised the pay of 2,000 workers. That victory gave ACORN the credibility to launch a more ambitious effort. In 2003, a coalition of labor and community groups succeeded in raising the pay of 900,000 Illinois workers by bumping the state minimum wage to $6.50. And ACORN wasn’t done. In an innovative effort to protect local workers and local businesses, ACORN is now working on a campaign to require that big box retailers like WalMart pay their workers at least $10 per hour plus benefits.
Through a series of successful campaigns, living wage activists in Illinois have changed the political culture in that state. “Collaboration is the mode of getting things done now,” says Madeleine Talbots, an ACORN organizer in Chicago. “It didn’t used to be that way.”
Living wage initiatives may not always be enough to get Democrats elected, but they do provide a great impetus to organizing. The best test of the power of these movements is not whether Kerry won Florida. It is what happens to states like Florida for years to come. The seeds planted by living wage movements may not always bear fruit immediately in the form of Democratic officials, but these seeds have not stopped growing.
<i>Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.</i>