Thoughts on the Living Wage Movement

I have a couple of thoughts on the Times' living wage article.  First, it should be assigned reading for law students (and perhaps certain members of the judiciary?) who have grown increasingly cynical about the relevance of moral and religious convictions to law.  Consider this description of the turning point in the battle to bring living wage legislation to Santa Fe:

It was then that the living-wage proponents hit on a scorched-earth, tactical approach. "What really got the other side was when we said, 'It's just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can't live on that,'" [an organizer] recalls. "It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy. And we knew that was our issue."

The moral argument soon trumped all others. The possibility that a rise in the minimum wage, even a very substantial one, would create unemployment or compromise the health of the city's small businesses was not necessarily irrelevant. Yet for many in Santa Fe, that came to be seen as an ancillary issue, one that inevitably led to fruitless discussions in which opposing sides cited conflicting studies or anecdotal evidence. Maybe all of that was beside the point, anyway. Does it - or should it - even matter what a wage increase does to a local economy, barring some kind of catastrophic change? Should an employer be allowed to pay a full-time employee $5.15 an hour, this argument went, if that's no longer enough to live on? Is it just under our system of government? Or in the eyes of God?

The Rev. Jerome Martinez, the city's influential monsignor, began to throw his support behind the living-wage ordinance. When I met with him in his parish, in a tidy, paneled office near the imposing 18th-century church that looks over the city plaza, Martinez traced for me the moral justification for a living wage back to the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI and John Paul II, in which the pontiffs warned against the excesses of capitalism. "The church's position on social justice is long established," Father Jerome said. "I think unfortunately it's one of our best-kept secrets."

I asked if it had been a difficult decision to support the wage law. He smiled slightly. "It was a no-brainer," he said. "You know, I am not by nature a political person. I have gotten a lot of grief from some people, business owners, who say, 'Father, why don't you stick to religion?' Well, pardon me - this is religion. The scripture is full of matters of justice. How can you worship a God that you do not see and then oppress the workers that you do see?"

Second, as Rick suggests, this is a fascinating movement to view through subsidiarity's lens.  For the most part, I think using cities and states as laboratories in this area is a good thing, and that wage laws can and should reflect local circumstances, priorities and concerns regarding the trade-off between higher wages on one side and employer viability and job creation on the other.  But subsidiarity, of course, does not call for blanket deference to local approaches.  A federal baseline is needed in order to ensure that workers everywhere are able to realize working lives of authentic human dignity, regardless of the dominant political culture in their city or state.  Subsidiarity can only be implemented with an eye toward solidarity, the preferential option for the poor, and the common good.  And even under subsidiarity itself, in order to empower the lowest bodies (e.g., the family) the higher body (e.g, the federal government) may need to trump the wage-setting autonomy of the intermediate body (e.g., the employer, city, or state). 

As for Rick's questions about the relevance or political prospects of the "family wage," I would love to get more information and insight from others who have thought or read about this more than I have.  Are there ways to promote a gender-neutral family wage that could meaningfully contribute to the moral debate about the living wage?  Is it a non-starter politically because in a single-income married household in today's society, the wage-earner almost invariably will be male?

Rob