Caspar Davis,[EMAIL PROTECTED],Internet writes:
>A copy of my letter is appened at the bottom.From
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Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 14:14:08 +0100
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From: "S. Lerner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The LKiving Wage movement
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Can you think of any defensible reason why there should have to a movement
to get a living wage?
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 14:36:45 -0500
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The Committees of Correspondence on the U.S. Living Wage Campaign
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The Committees of Correspondence invites you to join in building a movement
that can win Passage of a comprehensive federal living wage law. In this
brochure, we present reasons why such a law is now urgently needed and we
explain our legislative proposal
The Living Wage Campaign
equality, security and prosperity for all
The campaign for a living wage will characterize the present times as the
civil rights and peace movements characterized the 1960s. The campaign is
rooted in community organizations in cities and towns across the country.
The movement has won living wage ordinances in over a dozen cities. These
include our three largest cities, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The
living wage movement will continue to develop because it serves deep and
urgent needs.
The Economic Picture. The paradox of millions of lives crushed under a
steamroller of apparent prosperity is the contradiction that characterizes
the capitalist economy in boom times. In the struggle over how to slice the
country's economic pie, working people have been losing. The drop in
working class living standards means that a greater share of total economic
output is shifted from wages and benefits to profits. From 1979 to 1997,
the after-tax rate of corporate profit doubled. The present polarization of
income and wealth is staggering.
Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, recently
wrote: "The soaring poverty rates among young families who are playing by
the rules and working as hard as they can are shocking. If the fruits of
economic growth had been shared equally by all families over the last 20
years, then the typical young family with children would have seen its
income rise by 15 %, instead of falling by 33%." According to an Economic
Policy Institute study, average real hourly wages for non-supervisory and
production workers, 80% of the work force, have fallen steadily, about 8%
in the last 20 years. The proportion of workers earning wages below the
poverty level for a family of four increased from 24% in 1979 to 29% in
1997. The picture for African-Americans and Hispanics is even worse. In
1997, 38% of black workers earned poverty wages, up from 33 % in 1979, and
47% of Latino workers earned poverty wages in 1997, up from 34% in 1979.
With the welfare reform act of 1996, President Clinton fulfilled his
campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," sharply cutting social
programs such as Food Stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Some have been emboldened now to suggest cuts in Social Security benefits
and various privatization schemes. The combination of falling wages and
cutbacks in social programs has caused a serious decline in working class
living standards. At the same time, the nation's economic output has
experienced sustained growth.
PROFITS vs WAGES at business cycle peaks (corporate sector)
1959 1973 1979 1989 1997 Profit Rates Pre-tax 8.7% 7.4% 6.4% 7.1%
10.4% After-tax 4.6 3.9 3.2 4.0 6.7 Income Shares Profit share 21.7% 18.0%
17.4% 18.4% 21.6% Labor share 78.3 82.0 82.6 81.6 78.4
Profit = return to capital per dollar of assets. Profit share =
capital income divided
by all corporate income. From: State of Working America 98-99, Mishel et
al, EPI
The grave consequences of this paradox affect the entire country, and must
be addressed by comprehensive federal legislation. The campaign for a
comprehensive federal living wage law is a campaign for equality, security
and prosperity for all.
Three decades ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. called for raising the minimum
wage to a level that would keep working families out of poverty. King's
call resonates today, as the tens of millions who bear the brunt of
economic inequality struggle to choose between buying food and paying the
light bill. Workfare participants, labor unions and religious organizations
stood together at the forefront of Baltimore's seminal and successful 1994
campaign for a municipal living wage law. The campaign for a living wage is
a campaign for justice and equality.
And it is more. The recent series of major financial crises has brought the
issue of economic security before the country, and its economy, as a whole.
This lays open the opportunity for further qualitative development of the
living wage movement.
At the heart of the capitalist economy is the buying and selling of
manufactured goods, raw materials and labor power. And in its loins is an
innate drive for profit, which depresses wages and causes, on a cyclical
basis, financial crashes and disruptions in the process of commercial
trade. When commercial trade undergoes severe displacement, as it has in
recent years, our economy
is at risk.
Indeed, a wave of goods is loosed around the globe with each financial
shock, from the 1995 collapse of the Mexican Peso, to the 1997 debasement
of several Asian currencies, to the radical decline of the Russian Ruble in
1998. These goods are sent to markets that, because of declining wages, are
losing the buying-power to absorb them. Many of these goods are sent to the
US, the market of last resort. For example, a recent Economic Policy
Institute study projected a $100 to $200 billion increase in the US trade
deficit with Asia in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian currencies debacle.
Their conclusion: "700,000 to 1.5 million jobs will be eliminated in
manufacturing and other tradable goods industries, and these job losses
will occur in every state." They predict a significant drain on US Gross
Domestic Product, in part due to declining wages as workers are pushed out
of manufacturing into the service sector. The campaign for a living wage is
a campaign for economic security.
With each crisis, big investors and their spokespersons in Washington have
demanded, and received, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal
bailouts, from the savings and loan giveaway of the early 1990s to the
recent bailout of the major "hedge fund," Long Term Capital. That is the
Wall Street response to the current economic situation. It has not worked.
The living wage campaign is the working people's response to the economic
crisis. The living wage movement will characterize the present times.
A Comprehensive Federal Living Wage Law. In the Great Depression of the
1930s, working class living standards were under severe attack, and
significant sectors of capital in the developed industrial countries had
turned to fascism. In the US, the progressive movement launched a campaign
against the fascist threat and for broad democratic rights. We organized
mass labor unions. We fought hard for what many working people thought at
the time was a pipe dream. And we won passage of the laws that gave us,
among other things, the minimum wage, Social Security and welfare.
Sixty years ago, when Congress passed the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act
(the minimum wage law), they wrote their purpose into that law: "The
Congress finds that the existence ... of labor conditions detrimental to
the maintenance of the minimum standard of living necessary for health,
efficiency, and general well-being of workers, is, in a word, bad for the
economy." By including provisions in the law that guarantee a minimum
hourly wage, that set the standard 40 hour work week, and that prohibit
child labor and sex discrimination in wages, they demonstrated that the
detrimental labor conditions they found must be addressed by federal law in
a comprehensive manner. That was a correct judgment then as now.
But both the nature of "labor conditions detrimental to ... health,
efficiency, and general well-being of workers," as well as our society's
capacity to remedy the problems have changed in the last 60 years. In
particular, the need to make ends meet has caused a tremendous growth in
the proportion of two-parent and single-parent families where all parents
are wage-earners. This means that access to quality child care from early
infancy must be regarded as a fundamental labor condition. Furthermore, in
the wake of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, we won our
first national health care system, Medicare. This led to a dramatic growth
in America's health care delivery network. Thus, we are now more able than
ever to provide for the health of workers, one of the original goals
proclaimed in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.
The legislative proposal we make is to amend that law. To bring it up to
date requires that:
· The minimum hourly wage be determined by a formula
that allows every full-time worker to provide for the most basic personal
consumption needs of a family of four: food, housing, utilities, clothing,
transportation, household supplies, personal care, taxes and co-payments
for health care and child care as provided for below;
· Congress be directed to extend the Medicare program so that every
working family can be fully covered from the first day of employment to the
end of the period covered by unemployment insurance, as well as at any
other time these benefits are available;
· Congress be directed to expand the Head Start program to make child
care from early infancy available to every working family in an easily
accessible facility that provides a safe and developmentally appropriate
environment.
The formula we propose to determine the minimum wage is similar to that
proposed by a panel of the National Research Council in 1995 to measure the
poverty threshold. It is expected to yield a minimum wage of at least $10
per hour at present prices. This would be a guarantor of security for the
entire economy. It would spread economic prosperity.
By raising payrolls and, consequently, payroll tax revenues, our
legislative proposal would strengthen the Social Security system, and talk
of privatizing it would be laid to rest. The development of the health care
and child care industries as proposed in our legislative draft would create
further economic benefits. The growth of these industries, promoted under
the public sector, would create secure jobs and would insulate a large part
of our economy from the turbulence of world financial crises and the ups
and downs of the business cycle.
It Can Be Won. The recent story of the Kennedy Bill (S. 1805), which would
have raised the minimum wage to $6.15 per hour, hardly a living wage, has
some important lessons. That bill made it to the senate floor, where
senators, fearful in an election year, tabled the measure rather than
directly voting it down. Had there been a broad-based movement, organized
to throw street heat behind that bill, the outcome would have been
otherwise. To galvanize such a movement, however, requires a comprehensive
law, one that addresses directly and in full measure the widely felt need
for federal living wage legislation.
The movements that established the social safety net in the 1930s, and that
brought civil rights legislation and Medicare in the 1960s, were
monumental. The legacy to us, beyond the concrete social gains, is the idea
that great changes can be won, under certain historical conditions, by
ordinary people and their organizations. Let's make the minimum wage law a
living wage law.
