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
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Yale law prof Kenji Yoshino's work on "covering" has found an impressive new platform in today's New York Times magazine. 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.
Rob
Friday, January 13, 2006
The ongoing battle over our society's definition of personhood has expanded to your local courtroom legislative chamber traffic lane. (HT: CT)
Rob
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.
Rob
