Several days ago, I watched Joe Biden deliver a talk to members of The United Farm and Commercial Workers, a union with 1.3 million members. It was a good old-fashioned New Deal talk of the sort that one used to hear from Democrats in the 1950s. He talked about a $15 an hour minimum wage, he talked about creating millions of new jobs to rebuild America’s infrastructure, he talked about creating more millions of jobs to retrofit buildings and substitute clean energy for fossil fuel energy. I am not sure that any of the other men and women who ran for the Democratic nomination this year would ever have given that talk, with the possible exception of Bernie. It made me feel good listening to it and if we take control of the Senate and get rid of the filibuster, there is no reason why programs of that sort can’t be enacted and put into place.
There are all sorts of structural and historical reasons for
the decline of unionization in the United States but a strong push for
re-unionization combined with legislation to undo the baleful effects of Right
to Work laws and with an expanded Supreme Court ready to uphold such pro –
union legislation, maybe we could rebuild the Democratic Party into something
like what it once was.
You have to give the devil his due.
6 comments:
You have to give the devil his due or his campaign managers. By the way, Geneva voters yesterday approved a $25/hour minimum wage.
I'm one of the probably few readers here who would claim to be pro-capitalist rather than pro-socialism...but I think it's hard to argue against $15 as a minimum wage at least. We need to find some way to make sure that everyone can feasibly access quality health care too.
In Australia there is no "general" minimum wage, but rather lots of different minimum wages set by so-called "awards", which apply to particular industries. (So, there is an "award" for people in retail, for people in "hospitality" - bars, non-fast-food restaurants, catering, etc., one for people in fast food, etc. Each of these sets its own minimum wage, and basic steps for raises and the like. The name "award" comes from the fact that these used to be semi-negotiated settlements decided by an arbitration panel as part of industrial disputes, but that's no longer so.) There is a minimum wage that applies to people w/o an award, but that's a very small group of people. Still, all of these wages are, in Australian dollars, more than $15/hour. (Their value in US dollars changes all the time, of course. When I moved to Australia the AUD was .89/USD, now it's in the low .70 range. But, we are paid in, and spend, Australian dollars, so that's what's relevant.)
There are good and bad results of this higher pay. The good, of course, is that people make more money, and working people earn more. The bad is that prices for lots of things are, in general, higher in than in the US, in terms of proportion of one's income - I pay a much higher percentage of my income on food, fuel, entertainment, clothes, etc. A big portion of this is related to higher labor costs. Of course, working-class people also pay more for all of these things, clawing back some of the gains. The other bad thing is that available hours of work are reduced - most restaurants and bars have fewer hours than in the US, many places close for a few hours mid-day, or just close earlier all together. (So, lots of cafes that, in the US, would be open until 6pm, at least, close at 1pm or maybe 2, since it's not profitable to stay open the other hours, or restaurants close between lunch and dinner, rather than staying open as most do in the US. Lots of bars and restaurants close at 8pm or so, not least because higher wages have to be paid for later work.) If people make the same amount of money for less work, that's good for them, but I'm not sure if it always works out this way. It's also bad for people who would use those services. (Because people are paid more on weekends, lots of places have fewer hours on weekends, too. This, and the general lower hours for shops, tends to make them, and other places, more crowded, as people try to fit them into fewer hours, and then all recreate during the remaining time. And, it is probably bad for gender equality, as it's harder to get lots of things done w/o a person who can stay home during the "working day" to do shopping etc.)
So, while I'd say the Australian approach is over-all fairer, there are trade-offs, and people need to think carefully about them when thinking about the issue. At least in most of the US, though, $15/hour is probably feasible, even if there will be some down-sides.
(I don't think that comparisons with places like Geneva - one of the riches and most expensive cities in the world - is very useful for thinking about most of the US, or many other places.)
Some data:
In the US, the minimum wage was raised to $1.60/hr. Adjusted for inflation and adjusted for personal income growth for the economy as a whole (which has grown 100.6 percent since 1968), minimum wage would be $21.16 (and these are figures from 2012 ).
The biggest factor in all of this, I believe, was policy decisions that issued in neo-liberalism. From 1948-1973, productivity rose by 96.7 percent while hourly compensation (wages and benefits) rose 91.3 percent. However, from 1973 to 2013, productivity rose 74.4 percent while hourly compensation rose by only 9.2 percent.
The campaign slogan ought not be "raise" the minimum wage but "restore" the minimum wage.
You say above that no Democrat except Bernie would have given that talk. I'd say that any Democrat in this race would have said the same. Maybe not Bloomberg, but certainly Kamala, Mayor Pete and Warren. It's what any campaign advisor would have told them to say to get out the vote. And by the way, since when, do we trust campaign promises?
Hi, professor Wolff, this is Louis from Ottawa Canada. I am now retired and took up philo again, given my free time. Your lectures on Kant deal with all the unresolved issues that a normal reader cannot overcome, namely the transition from karts epistemology to ethics. Thanks again. Take care. Le
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