Michael beat me to the punch: Like him, I appreciated the story in today's Times about the "living wage." Notice that the essay raises interesting questions about subsidiarity and locally-based reform (Rob?):
Just as the voters of states and cities have sorted themselves politically into red and blue, and into pro- and anti-gay marriage, in other words, they are increasingly sorting their wage floors and (perhaps soon) their health-care coverage. This trend may produce not progressive national policies but instead a level of local self-determination as yet unseen. Or as Freeman puts it, "Let Santa Fe do what it wants, but let's not impose that on Gadsden, Ala."
Also, the piece got me thinking (again) about what strikes me as an important, but often overlooked, aspect of the living-wage debate.
Obviously, there is a long tradition in Catholic Social Thought of proposing a living wage. As I understand it, the case for a living wage is built in part on the dignity of the worker and of work itself. It also reflects, though -- doesn't it? -- the idea that a wage should be sufficient for a worker to provide for a family. I seem to recall, in some "conservative" circles, the "living wage" being referred to as a "family wage". Here's an essay, for example, by Allan Carlson, in Touchstone Magazine, that talks about the "family wage." (Carlson might be described as a Catholic agrarian, or perhaps even -- and I do not mean this as an insult -- "paleoconservative.") Carlson writes:
[Consider] this peculiar story:
Jack was sitting before the hearth fire, darning his working’s wife’s sock. A tear lay in his eye. ‘No,’ the wretched man said in a thick Yorkshire accent, ‘there is plenty of Wark for Wemen and Bairns [children] in this quarter but very Little for men—thou may as well go try to finde a hondred pounds, as go to find wark abouts heare—but I hed not ment neather thee nor eneyone els to have seen me manding t’wife’s stockings, for it’s a poar job.’
The poor man “wiped away the tear,” the story continues.
‘I do not [k]now what is to become of us,’ he whimpered, ‘for she as been t’man now for a long time, and me t’woman—it is hard wark.’ When he had married, Jack said, he held a fine job and the couple ‘gat on very well—we got a firnished Home. . . . I could wark for us boath. But now t’world is turned upside down. Mary has to turn out to wark and I have to stop at home to mind Bairns—and to Wash and Clean—Bake and mend.’ At that point, Jack lost control and wept violently declaring over and again his wish that he had never been born.
Who wrote this lament about sex roles turned upside down? Was it some early version of Beverly LaHaye? Or perhaps an ancestor of Phyllis Schlafly? No, it was the proto-Communist Friedrich Engels, in his 1844 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, a powerful indictment of industrial capitalism’s social effects.
Indeed, we can see the non-Marxist labor movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as seeking, in large part, to rebuild traditional family life within a world torn asunder by the industrial principle, a principle that dictated the radical separation of work and home. The labor movement’s central strategy was to secure a “family wage.” This meant that the industrial sector could have one, but only one, family member: the father.
Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 implied the necessity of a “family wage.” A more forceful articulation came from an American priest, Father John Ryan, in 1916 in a book called Distributive Justice: “The laborer has a right to a family Living Wage because this is the only way in which he can exercise his right to the means of maintaining a family, and he has a right to these means because they are an essential condition of normal life.”
Pope Pius XI directly endorsed the family wage idea in 1931 in Quadragesimo Anno. In a long commentary on this document, the Jesuit author Oswald von Nell-Brenning emphasized the radical consequences of the “family wage”:
It will be absolutely necessary to see to it that female labor is kept from the labor market, something that will have to be attained by prudent and clear-sighted measures. Everyone knows that this cannot be accomplished by decree but requires a far-reaching reconstruction of the entire economic system.
In the United States, at least, a somewhat less rigorous version of this “family wage” economy did exist between 1900 and 1965. It rested in part on public policy (more on that later) and in part on a culturally enforced form of conscious, open job discrimination: the phenomena of so-called men’s jobs (marked by higher wages and salaries and long-term tenure) and women’s jobs (oriented to lower pay and short-term tenure).
However, the revolutionary principle of pure sexual equality, embodied in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, shattered this system. The real wages of men fell, and the flow of young mothers into the workforce resumed.
Today, no one in America really talks about the “family wage,” except equity feminist historians who still, with great ritual, regularly dance on its grave. And yet the underlying problems posed by families living in an industrial milieu are still very much with us. There are, for example, muddled campaigns in our day for a “living wage,” although they are marked by intentionally ambiguous normative goals. Does a modern “living wage” assume one or two earners per household? Never a clear answer.
But a true “family wage” would solve, or at least sharply reduce, many of the problems so often complained about today—and so often “solved” by simultaneously accepting the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon family life and asking government to reduce its effects. Contemporary complaints over a lack of quality day care, mounting talk of a “care giving deficit,” the growing “elder care” crisis, so-called work/family conflicts: all derive from the disorders created by the separation of work and home.
Now, to be very (very, very, very) clear and explicit, I am not endorsing the claims and prescriptions in the Carlson excerpt. I do think it is worth thinking about, though, whether achieving a "living wage" is made more difficult by the expectation (in many circles, anyway) that everyone does and should -- not only to secure an income, but in order to find fulfillment and to contribute to society -- work outside the home. (In practice, I imagine that many of those who do or would earn the "living wage" are, in fact, sole wage-earners). I didn't come across any discussion in the Times piece -- even when it quoted a Catholic priest talking about CST -- about whether the "living wage" argument might be even more radical than its proponents realize. Any thoughts?
