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?
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?
New York Times Sunday Magazine January 15, 2006 What Is a Living Wage? By JON GERTNER
If It Happened in Baltimore, Maybe It Can Happen Anywhere
For a few weeks in the summer of 1995, Jen Kern spent her days at a table in the Library of Congress in Washington, poring over the fine print of state constitutions from around the country. This was, at the time, a somewhat-eccentric strategy to fight poverty in America. Kern was not a high-powered lawyer or politician; she was 25 and held a low-paying, policy-related job at Acorn, the national community organization. Yet to understand why living-wage campaigns matter - where they began, what they mean, and why they inspire such passion and hope - it helps to consider what Kern was doing years ago in the library, reading obscure legislation from states like Missouri and New Mexico.
A few months earlier, she and her colleagues at Acorn witnessed an energetic grass-roots campaign in Baltimore, led by a coalition of church groups and labor unions. Workers in some of Baltimore's homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs. In response, local religious leaders successfully persuaded the City Council to raise the base pay for city contract workers to $6.10 an hour from $4.25, the federal minimum at the time. The Baltimore campaign was ostensibly about money. But to those who thought about it more deeply, it was about the force of particular moral propositions: first, that work should be rewarded, and second, that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.
So Kern and another colleague were dispatched to find out if what happened in Baltimore could be tried - and expanded - elsewhere. As she plowed through documents, Kern was unsure whether to look for a particular law or the absence of one. Really, what she was trying to do was compile a list of places in the U.S. where citizens or officials could legally mount campaigns to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard. In other words, she needed to know if anything stood in the way, like a state regulation or court decision. What she discovered was that in many states a law more ambitious than Baltimore's - one that didn't apply to only city contractors but to all local businesses - seemed permissible.
Whether a wage campaign was winnable turned out to be a more complicated matter. In the late 1990's, Kern helped Acorn in a series of attempts to raise the minimum wage in Denver, Houston and Missouri. They all failed. "It wasn't even close," she says. In the past few years, though, as the federal minimum wage has remained fixed at $5.15 and the cost of living (specifically housing) has risen drastically in many regions, similar campaigns have produced so many victories (currently, 134) that Kern speaks collectively of "a widespread living-wage movement."
Santa Fe has been one of the movement's crowning achievements. This month the city's minimum wage rose to $9.50 an hour, the highest rate in the United States. But other recent victories include San Francisco in 2003 and Nevada in 2004. And if a ending bill in Chicago is any indication, the battles over wage laws will soon evolve into campaigns to force large, private-sector businesses like Wal-Mart to provide not only higher wages but also more money for employee health care.
Yale law prof Kenji Yoshino's work on "covering" has found an impressive new platform in today's New York Timesmagazine. If you haven't read the basic thesis, here's a taste from the opening:
When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. "You'll have a better chance at tenure," he said, "if you're a homosexual professional than if you're a professional homosexual." Out of the closet for six years at the time, I knew what he meant. To be a "homosexual professional" was to be a professor of constitutional law who "happened" to be gay. To be a "professional homosexual" was to be a gay professor who made gay rights his work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay, my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don't flaunt.
I didn't experience the advice as antigay. . . . I took my colleague's words as generic counsel to leave my personal life at home. I could see that research related to one's identity - referred to in the academy as "mesearch" - could raise legitimate questions about scholarly objectivity.
I also saw others playing down their outsider identities to blend into the mainstream. Female colleagues confided that they would avoid references to their children at work, lest they be seen as mothers first and scholars second. Conservative students asked for advice about how open they could be about their politics without suffering repercussions at some imagined future confirmation hearing. A religious student said he feared coming out as a believer, as he thought his intellect would be placed on a 25 percent discount. Many of us, it seemed, had to work our identities as well as our jobs.
Substitute a few words, and this could serve as an introductory essay for the religious lawyering movement. For our purposes, the question will be whether this project would create space within the academy for religion only to the extent that it is tied to claims of personal identity and non-mainstream paths of self-creation, or would it also make room for religion as a set of truth claims? In any event, it's worth reading.
First Things editor Joseph Bottum has this piece, "Alito and the Catholics: The Decline of an Institution and the Rise of its Ideas," in the Daily Standard. In the essay, he explores the possibility of a "connection between the rising rhetorical influence of Catholicism and the declining political influence of the Church." And, he raises the
interesting question whether the leading evangelicals would grant Catholicism its current role if Catholics still had the kind of ethnic-voter unity they used to show. We may be seeing the emergence of one of those uniquely American compromises: A Catholic philosophical vocabulary is allowed to express a moral seriousness the nation needs, on the guarantee that the Catholic Church itself will not much matter politically.
The Catholic clergy's particular sins, especially against children, produced a shame that is deep and well-deserved, and through their class-action suits, the victims are about to strip away the endowment left by five generations of ethnic believers. The bricks-and-mortar Catholicism of the last hundred years--the intense desire of all those hard-working immigrants to build a visible monument of parishes, schools, hospitals, and orphanages--may well have disappeared by the time the total damage is calculated.
He also discusses the recent New York Times op-ed by David Brooks, "Losing Alitos":
"By the late 1960s," Brooks noted,
cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers. The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. . . . The liberals thought an unjust society caused poverty; the ethnics believed in working their way out of poverty.
I took advantage of Rick’s recommendation and read John Breen’s and Michael Scaperlanda’s new article. It made me do a lot of thinking and praying about those who enter public life, particularly those called to legislative, administrative, and judicial responsibilities. After reading John’s and Michael’s draft, I concentrated on a couple of phrases: “freedom of the autonomous self” as modified by a word the authors sometimes used (“exaggeration”) and the “disorder of liberty run amok.” I wondered if I had witnessed any of this during the past week watching segments of those asking questions during Judge Alito’s confirmation hearings. I have reached one conclusion regarding the role of pastors and bishops in my reflection: there is a great deal of work to be done teaching those members of the Catholic community, or who say they are a part of it, who turn to the exaggerated freedom of the autonomous self and promote a world where order and “liberty run amok” seem compatible. A great deal could be said here about legal reasoning and the rule of law, but I shall defer until my presentation at the St. John’s symposium in March. Here I shall focus on the pastoral duties of those with teaching responsibility in the Church. There is a lot of work to do if this past week’s broadcasting of the Alito hearings is a reliable gauge. I may be in a minority, but I saw some prominent Catholics conduct themselves in often questionable ways. I wonder about their souls. Will the human law insulate them from the divine law? I wonder some more. But, if there is any legitimate concern emerging from my reaction, it has a clear solution: the teaching of the Church and the duty to see that it is properly understood by its members, the People of God. I was struck with a peculiar coincidence as I watched a group of people, many professing to be Catholic, who legislated a law a few years ago commonly known as “No Child Left Behind.” From what I witnessed on the web video streaming of the Judiciary Committee proceedings, I saw several souls responsible for the promulgation of that law putting into question their own future… and I thought, no soul should be left behind, either. Pastors and bishops who are in charge of the care of these souls have a lot of work ahead of them if no soul is to be left behind.RJA sj
Elizabeth Brown continues our conversation regarding New Orleans' redevelopment plan in light of subsidiarity; she questions my skepticism of the utility of a straight cost-benefit analysis when it comes to the redevelopment of the Ninth Ward given that such analysis is legally required:
Since they are required to undertake cost-benefit analyses, how should FEMA or the state and local officials calculate the “cultural cost” of the Ninth Ward? It was originally a cypress swamp and was not settled until after the Civil War. It was the last part of New Orleans that was settled. Even in 1950, only half of the Lower Ninth Ward was developed. The ward grew until 1965 when it was flooded by Hurricane Betsy. Many residents and businesses left after that hurricane and the area began to decline. Given that the Ninth Ward had been in decline since 1965, should FEMA and state and local officials attempt to take into account the fact that its cultural contributions might have been waning? Given that most of the residents of the Ninth Ward are poor or lower middle class and lacked flood insurance, the majority of residents might never return because they cannot afford to rebuild. Individuals undertake cost-benefit analyses too. If barely half the residents return, how valuable a community will it be to New Orleans? Will it be worth the billions and billions of dollars that it will cost to make the levies protecting it strong enough to withstand a Level 5 Hurricane?
How should FEMA and state and local officials account for the fact that, if brought out, most of the residents of the Ninth Ward probably might simply move to other parts of New Orleans and will enrich their new communities and continue to enrich the city itself? The endowment effect certainly causes people to value what they have (or had) more than it might really be worth. This cognitive bias certainly would support policies like saving the Ninth Ward. Such biases, if they exist, need to recognized and accounted for when undertaking any cost-benefit analysis. New Orleans as a whole might be better off if the former residents of the Ninth Ward were no longer isolated in the Ninth Ward but spread to other parts of the city to enrich other communities.
Again, these are good contributions to any evaluation of the redevelopment plan. A couple of points bear emphasizing: first, the difficulty in assigning a value to the cultural significance of the Ninth Ward underscores the appeal of empowering members of that community to assign value through their decisions whether or not to return and rebuild. I'm not against giving government checks to residents; rather, I'm against giving them government checks and categorically forbidding them from using the check to rebuild in their current neighborhood. Second, New Orleans might be better off if Ninth Ward residents were spread around the city to enrich other communities, but the top-down dispersal of residents is highly problematic. Any such redistribution of social capital should occur bottom-up, through residents' own decision-making.
When the city of Chicago started tearing down public housing projects and pushing residents into other areas of the city and suburbs, I conducted housing-rights seminars for the residents. Many were terrified and/or crestfallen at the prospect of leaving the only community they had known; others couldn't wait to get out. So I'm not suggesting a blanket characterization of how Ninth Ward residents value the preservation of their community. It might be that Ninth Ward residents can't wait to get out of an economically depressed area. Subsidiarity, at least as I interpret it, would want residents to decide for themselves, and the New Orleans proposal allows them to do so, albeit imperfectly. Perhaps the government checks should be reduced for residents who decide to return to the Ninth Ward, shifting a portion (but certainly not all) of the levees' cost to them. There is nothing wrong with seeking to internalize the cost of decision-making in our efforts to empower local decision-makers. But we should be careful that we don't start making the decisions for them.
John Paul’s debt to Marxism Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch
The late Pope is often portrayed as an enemy of the extreme Left, but an unpublished early work, Catholic Social Ethics, reveals that he was much less dismissive of the ideology prevalent in his native Poland than has recently been suggested
When a Polish supplementary tribunal for John Paul II’s beatification began work in Krakow this November, a key task was to examine the late Pope’s pre-papal writings, for the light they threw on his firmness of faith and loyalty to Catholic doctrine.
[To read this interesting piece, click here.] _______________ mp
Chronicle of Higher Education Friday, January 13, 2006
A glance at the current issue of Policy Review: Defining "cruel and unusual"
The Supreme Court's torturous interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, which bans "cruel and unusual punishment," is an illogical "cop-out" that ignores the amendment's text, writes Benjamin Wittes, an editorial writer for The Washington Post who specializes in legal affairs.
The court's understanding of the amendment, established in a 1958 decision, holds that a punishment is excessive only if it defies "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." That view dodges any principled stance, says Mr. Wittes, and invites subjective court rulings by leaving it to justices to gauge America's cultural development. The precedent, "quite simply, suffers from a birth defect," he writes.
Justice Antonin Scalia has voiced the loudest dissent to the "evolving standards" stance, arguing that the amendment should ban only the punitive acts that it outlawed upon its adoption, such as drawing and quartering. He reasons that the 1958 precedent fails to protect the public from future, more brutal generations. Mr. Wittes finds that alternative unreasonable, though, and says it is the type of principled stance that, unfortunately, "gives principle itself a bad name."
"Construing 'cruel and unusual punishments' as strictly as Scalia does is a little like construing the right to keep and bear arms as limited to such 18th-century firearms as muskets," he writes.
Mr. Wittes says the Supreme Court can avoid those jurisprudential black holes by defining "cruel and unusual." Punishment can be a successful deterrent, he writes, but it becomes cruel once it crosses the threshold of senselessness. To avoid arbitrariness, he continues, the court should consider a punishment unusual if it is already illegal in 38 states -- the number required to amend the Constitution.
That interpretation would be more adequate than the court's current precedent, says Mr. Wittes. And while the risks of "judicial impressionism" under this framework are not trivial, he says, "neither are they prohibitive."
The article, "What Is 'Cruel and Unusual'?," is available here.
