The campaign for a living wage
This week I attended the North Bay Labor Council Pancake Breakfast, and as always I enjoyed the political buzz and the sense of camaraderie at this lively annual event. We heard brief and rousing speeches by Congressional Representatives Mike Thompson and Jared Huffman and County Supervisors Susan Gorin, Shirlee Zane and Mike McGuire. City of Sonoma Council members Ken Brown and Laurie Gallian were acknowledged by the Labor Council president.
I really like being around union folks. They appreciate passionate conviction for social justice and represent one of the last bastions of the culture of solidarity in American society. One of the more endearing features of the union movement is the custom of referring to one another as “brothers and sisters.” You can feel the love in the room. It’s a bit like a secular church, where we celebrate “solidarity forever,” in the words of an old union song.
However, that wonderful tradition of communal purpose and shared values is under siege, like a beautiful tropical island that is being slowly inundated by man-made global climate disruption. The annual Labor Day celebration is set against the backdrop of a steady decline in union membership, with the attendant loss of working class political power and a deliberately inculcated erasure of cultural memory of a century of social progress brought to us “union made.” In the context of this loss of historical memory, Labor Day has become for most Americans just the final weekend of summer, a day for picnics and barbeques. The origin of Labor Day as an acknowledgment of the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of social movements is being shoved down the memory hole.
Declining media coverage of the labor movement reflects the decline of the trade union movement, which has receded from the high water mark in 1955 of approximately 35 percent of the workforce, down to approximately 11 percent of the workforce. Mainstream media coverage of Labor Day typically focuses on individual workers rather than on the labor movement that was the source of this three day holiday to begin with. Students in the public education system can graduate high school having never heard of labor unions as anything more than an historical footnote.
So what is to be done? One recurring theme among the speakers at the Labor Council event was the call to action to raise the wage floor for workers by increasing the national minimum wage and enacting living wage ordinances at the city and county level. We all know that nothing can happen now in Washington, D.C. Rather then engage in nostalgia for a lost heyday, we can truly honor Labor Day by recognizing the historical opportunity presented to us by the deep and mounting public reaction to forty years of declining wages for the working class and the unraveling of the American middle class. These tectonic socio-economic structural stresses are the precursors for a political earthquake that will precipitate a national movement for economic justice. We will seize this moment.
As Piketty analyzed in “Capital in the 21st Century,” the inexorable tendency of capital towards concentrated wealth and highly dysfunctional levels of social inequality was temporarily held in check during the golden era of post-WWII shared prosperity by a strong labor movement that had sufficient political power to push back on the ratcheting effect of capital accumulation. Without a countervailing force, the share of productivity gains that could go to higher wages is simply absorbed as profits by the one percent.
One key front-line of this grassroots economic justice movement sweeping across the country is a demand for an increase in the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at the current unacceptable poverty wage of $7.25 an hour since 2009. Since the Reagan Administration came to power in 1980, the federal government has raised the minimum wage just three times.
We can do this, even if it has to occur in stages. President Obama has announced the modest goal of raising the minimum wage to $10.10/hr, indexed to inflation (for the very first time). The Los Angeles “Times” reported on Labor Day that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has introduced a proposal to raise the citywide minimum wage to $13.25 by 2017, after which it would be inflation-indexed. A national coalition of labor, community, and religious organizations has launched the “Fight for $15” to achieve a real minimum wage that will actually lift large segments of the population out of the cruel bondage of working poverty. Real money from actual wages in the hands of workers will do more to alleviate the social isolation and alienation, family and personal mental health breakdown, and the countless indignities of working poverty than any ameliorative social programs designed to remediate the symptoms of economic mal-distribution.
Since the year 2000, more than 140 cities and counties (including the city of Sonoma in 2004) have implemented living wage laws affecting public sector workers and contractors. The “Fight for $15” campaign is coming soon to Sonoma County. A coalition of labor, faith, environmental and community organizations will hold a press conference on Monday, September 8 at 10 a.m. at the Glaser Center, (Unitarian Universalist Congregation at 547 Mendocino Ave., in Santa Rosa) to announce the living wage ordinance it plans to propose to the county’s Board of Supervisors this fall.
Representatives from Sonoma County Conservation Action, Sierra Club, North Bay Jobs with Justice, North Bay Labor Council, SEIU 1021, and clergy from local congregations will be on hand to launch the county living wage ordinance. Representatives from three Sonoma County cities that have already passed living wage ordinances (David Glass, City of Petaluma mayor; Sarah Gurney, City of Sebastopol councilmember; Ken Brown, City of Sonoma councilmember) will speak to the press.
Despite all the many hardships that so many low-income citizens are bearing day-to-day, we do have cause to celebrate this year in the true spirit of Labor Day. As the old union slogan says: “Don’t mourn, organize!”
