U.S.-LABOUR: Minimum Wage Is Hot Campaign Issue

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 11 1996 (IPS) - The minimum wage for a U.S. worker, a dead topic for years, is suddenly one of the hottest issues in the political arena.

Labour leaders this month pledged millions of dollars to the Democratic Party, claiming President Bill Clinton will raise the minimum wage for workers. Former Republican candidate Pat Buchanan, who avoided the minimum wage issue, nevertheless inspired massive campaign crowds when he protested workers’ falling wages and job insecurity.

For supporters of labour, the signs are clear: as the 1996 election year heats up, interest in improving labour conditions and wages is at its highest level in years.

“Down-sizing and out-sourcing (methods of replacing U.S. workers) have been moved to the centre of the debate, and I think it is very, very healthy,” says John Cavanagh, an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think-tank.

“I think there are several factors here at work that point to the fact that America is in big trouble,” adds Karla Garland, spokesperson for the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), the main labour coalition.

She contends that the growing concern over unemployment and stagnant wages in a tight election year, gives organised labour a chance to push its battle for a higher minimum wage.

To that end, new AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has started a campaign, called ‘America Needs a Raise’, to push politicians to increase the minimum wage from the present 4.25 dollars per hour to 5.15 dollars an hour.

The AFL-CIO has endorsed Clinton’s re-election bid and sunk 35 million dollars toward campaigning for candidates in the November elections. AFL-CIO Vice President Rich Trumka, formerly head of the militant United Mine Workers of America, says that, although Clinton’s labour record has been spotty, his effort to raise the minimum wage deserves union support.

But Garland adds that organised labour is not going to support Democrats unless they agree to improve workers’ rights. “We’re not just going to be a mouthpiece of the Democratic Party anymore,” says Garland, noting that the AFL-CIO campaign also targets Democrats deemed to be anti-union.

To some critics, however, there is considerably less to the minimum wage campaign than meets the eye.

Robert Fitch, who teaches metropolitan studies at New York University, claims that Clinton is backing a minimum wage raise only because he knows that the Republicans who control Congress will not accept it.

“Why didn’t (the Clinton administration) raise it when there was a Democratic Congress (in 1993-94)?” he asks. “Why did they raise the issue when they couldn’t possibly deliver?”

Fitch argues that organised labour and the Democrats are only capitalising on workers’ fears to plead for minor changes in the system, when both major parties have contributed to declining living conditions.

The minimum wage, he says, when adjusted for the rising cost of living, is at its lowest level in 46 years. Another minimum wage increase, although the first since former President Goerge Bush accepted one in 1989, will not change that picture significantly, Fitch contends.

The lowest paid workers are not the only ones being hurt.

Doug Henwood, editor of ‘The Left Business Observer’, a New York magazine, notes that wages of college graduates have been declining since 1993. “Even the upper middle class is stagnating,” he says.

What is happening, Henwood argues, is that wealth is being transferred from labour to capital — ultimately, from all workers to stock owners. At the same time that wages have fallen, he notes, the stock market has enjoyed a 13-year run of increasing stock profits.

Workers, Garland admits, have been “a forgotten group of people,” particularly as the level of unionised workers has fallen. But she adds that new AFL-CIO leaders like Sweeney and Trumka intend to change that by infusing labour with new militancy: “We’re going back to the basic grassroots network that has gotten a little rusty in the past few years.”

Fitch, however, holds more hope in locally based movements to secure living wages for workers, which have sprung up recently in Chicago, New York, and other cities.

In Chicago, workers are demanding that all companies seeking city contracts pay an hourly living wage, sufficient to provide for a family of four — calculated to be 7.60 dollars per hour. That number is calculated on the current federal poverty line of 15,600 dollars annually for a family of four.

The Chicago campaign has succeeded in devising an ordinance to enforce the 7.60-an-hour minimum wage, although city officials remain mum on whether they will pass the measure when it comes up for a vote next month. Three cities — Baltimore in Maryland, Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and Gary in Indiana — have already passed similar measures.

New York’s drive for a similar ordinance, Fitch says, has already been crippled in the City Council here. Councilman Sal Albanese’s proposal to mandate living wages was quickly watered down in the Council by a loophole excluding New York non-profit agencies from having to comply — even though, Fitch notes, they have “by far the most important contracts” with the city.

Garland agrees that the living wage campaign has had varying success so far, since it is organised by different groups at the local level. But she adds that those efforts, as well as the AFL- CIO and other national campaigns, “have done a lot to make lay- offs, mergers, and downsizing a national issue when Chief Executive Officers and stock owners are making a fortune.”

The problem, Cavanagh adds, is that fears over unemployment and low wages may simply be channeled — as he says happened with the Buchanan campaign — into racist and xenophobic accusations against foreign workers.

Susan Cowell, vice president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, says that racism is “one of the biggest threats” to worker unity in her own union. “Our own members frequently blame each other,” she says.

“We have to see the issue (of worker insecurity) capitalised by other people than Pat Buchanan,” Fitch says. “Sometimes, the raising of problems can itself be problematic.”