Hailed as powerful get-out-the-vote measures, minimum wage campaigns are set for the ballot in at least four major states (Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and Colorado) this fall. And they’re attracting increased attention in legislatures nationwide.
Why this issue, and why now? First, business interests have succeeded in blocking, through their influence with the Republican-controlled Congress, any federal minimum wage increase since the $5.15 an hour figure set in 1997. In the meantime, Congress has raised its own compensation level seven times, notes Jen Kern, minimum wage strategist for ACORN, a national advocacy group for poor peoples’ interests.
Indeed, the federal level is so low that 18 states, covering more than half the country’s work force, have set higher levels – among them Connecticut, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and Alaska – at more than $7 an hour.
A second triggering factor: the rolling collapse of the post-World War II social contract for ordinary workers. Income for the wealthiest Americans has skyrocketed while low-income workers have seen their wage gains stall and buying power erode.
The essential equity issue – the idea that full-time work deserves a living wage – resonates increasingly with millions of middle-class Americans who see their own health insurance drying up, neighbors and friends fired by seemingly callous managements, and corporate executives claiming stratospheric pay and benefits while they renege on pension guarantees to employees.
Business groups – especially in the restaurant, hotel and motel industries with the most low-paid workers – claim minimum wages distort the free market for labor and may drive up wages across the board, threatening profitability not just for large corporations but small businesses operating on thin margins. And they argue (though there’s zero evidence to prove it) that increased minimum wages will be job- killers for low-income workers.
Increasingly, the public disagrees. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed 86 percent popular support for raising the national minimum wage to $6.45 an hour. Maryland legislators last month overrode a governor’s veto to raise the state’s minimum by $1 an hour.
In 2004, an ACORN- and AFL-CIO-led campaign to raise Florida’s minimum wage to $6.40 won by a stunning 71 percent of the vote.
Even in conservative Virginia, minimum wage support is growing. “It bothers me,” says the state House Appropriations Committee chairman, Republican Vincent Callahan, “that a state that is as affluent as Virginia is still paying people Third World wages. You can’t support a family on that.”
The emerging issue is whether minimum wage levels can be indexed to grow automatically with inflation. So far only three states – Oregon, Washington and Florida – have indexing, each approved by popular initiatives. But the ground is shifting. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, after twice vetoing minimum wage legislation, has done an about- face and backs a raise to $7.75 an hour by mid-2007.
Organized labor calls that “half a step,” insisting indexing is needed, too. “Workers have lost 10 percent to inflation [just] since Arnold came on board,” says state AFL-CIO leader Art Pulaski. All the initiatives up in November include indexing.
The minimum wage on the ballot, notes Kern, should help move youths, residents of poor neighborhoods, African-Americans, and Latinos – often low turnout voters – to the polls. In the long run, Kern suggests, the object isn’t just minimum wages but awakening officeholders to a broad agenda for America’s less privileged – health benefits, child care, earned income tax credits, and the Wal-Mart issue. Of course, those broader agendas upset business lobbies because they threaten the economic royalism of recent years’ politics and policies.
Mounted at the state and local level, the minimum wage could be a turning point issue, permitting groups such as the numerically diminished U.S. labor movement to start reversing the political field.
But they’ll face ferocious opposition from dramatically better-heeled, professional, tough lobbies. Just raising sufficient organizing cash, qualifying issues for ballots and directing campaigns constitute a huge stretch for ACORN and like-minded groups.
Still, the minimum wage provides the American left with a formidable asset: a cause that touches not just peoples’ sense of fairness but their growing fears that the nation’s social compact is crumbling and might just leave them out, too.
