A Living Wage is Right for Everyone
UUSC Justice Weekend
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
3/25 and 3/26/06

 

“There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American [worker] whether he is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.”
--The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Call to Gather  (adapted words of Rev. Mark Morrison Reed)

Welcome to your church.

As we gather today
we remind ourselves that the central task of a church like ours is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.  There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others.  Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.

It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community.  The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done.  Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.

It is good to be together this day.

 

Meditation

Our service today will focus on the reality that around 30 percent of our workforce earns a wage that does not enable them to meet what most of us would describe as the basic necessities of life.  We will begin our meditation time today with an activity that will highlight the challenges faced by the poorest of these people, those who work full time for minimum wage. In your order of service you will find an insert with the heading Minimum Wage Budget.  I invite you to take a few minutes and do your best to fill out the worksheet.  Ushers are ready to provide pencils to those who need them.  Just raise your hand.

 

[Here is the insert]

 

Minimum Wage Budget

 

Imagine you are in a family with two adult full time minimum-wage workers and two children.  Create your monthly budget for:

 

Food
Clothing
Rent or mortgage
Child Care
Utilities
Health care, medicine
Transportation (bus pass or car expenses)
Entertainment
Total Here:

 

Turn over to see how long you would get by on minimum wage using your estimated budget.

 

Could you survive a month on minimum wage?

 

If your total budgeted and spent was:

You could survive this many days:

 

Less than $1900	Congratulations!  You survived the entire month!
$1900-2200	You survived 26 days.
$2200-2499	You survived about 22 days.
$2500-2999	You survived about 19 days.
$3000-3399	You survived about 17 days.
$3400-3699	You survived about 15 days.
>$3700	You survived less than half the month!

 

How does a living wage compare?

 

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that a basic Des Moines family budget for a two parent/ two child family is $3465.  This places the living wage at about $8.50/hour if both adults work full time.  For a single parent, a living wage would be about $16.00 without health insurance.

 

The minimum wage gives a full time worker $5.15, or $1854 a month – usually without health insurance!

 

Readings

In 1998, just as welfare reform legislation was set to force millions of people off the welfare rolls and into low-paying jobs, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich embarked on a two-year study in which she intentionally pursued life as a low-wage earner.  During this time she moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide and Wal-Mart salesperson.  She shared her experiences in a book titled Nickel and Dimed. [Holt, 2001]

 

She writes,

 

“The first thing I discovered was that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’  Every one of the six jobs I entered into…required concentration, and most demanded that I master new terms, new tools, and new skills—from placing orders on restaurant computers to wielding… [a] backpack vacuum cleaner.  None of these things came as easily to me as I would have liked…. Whatever my accomplishments in the rest of my life, in the low-wage work world I was a person of average ability—capable of learning the job and also capable of screwing up.

 

Several times since completing this project I have been asked by acquaintances whether the people I worked with couldn’t, uh, tell—the supposition being that an educated person is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones.  I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in some enviable way—more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most.  But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me “special” was my inexperience.  To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright.  Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought to broaden their circle of friends.”

 

Our second reading is a Jewish wisdom story.

 

An ancient Jewish folktale depicts a man visiting hell, and being amazed to find its inhabitants all seated at long tables, with fancy tablecloths, beautiful silverware, and bountiful food in front of them. Yet no one was eating. And all of them were wailing. When he looked closely, he saw that none of them could bend their elbows; thus, although they could touch the food, no one could bring it to his mouth.

The visitor then went to heaven, where the scene was identical: long tables, fancy tablecloths, beautiful silverware, and bountiful food. And here as well, people could not bend their elbows, yet no one was wailing — because each person was serving his neighbor.

 

[From Jewish Wisdom (Morrow, 1994) by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin]

 

Sermon    

 

Last year, I caught an episode of a short-lived television program called “30 Days” in which the show’s creator Morgan Spurlock and his wife spent 30 days participating in an experiment similar to the one tried by Barbara Ehrenreich, though for a much shorter time period.  They moved to Columbus, OH, and tried to live for 30 days within their means working minimum-wage jobs. Watching these two struggle to make ends meet (they ended up with three jobs between them) and still, due to health care costs, not have enough to pay the next month’s rent, I had a powerful experience of what I had heard described as “the working poor.” The program was not sensationalized; it didn’t need to be.  The reality is dramatic…and gruesome enough. How do all these families do it? I wondered.  How can we allow this to happen…and by this, I mean the reality that our fellow citizens can work more than one full-time job and still not be able to afford a place to live…even a roach infested, poorly heated apartment in a dangerous neighborhood…much less anything more to eat than fast food or beans and rice.

 

For all the sadness I felt watching this program, though…sadness for all the people who live this reality not as an experiment, but as a fact of life…I didn’t do much with my concern or my anger.  I mostly just felt bad.

 

Feeling bad doesn’t do much, you know.  It is an emotional response, and it really means nothing unless we do something as a result of what we learn and how it makes us feel.

 

As I did the research to put this service together, I had lots of reasons to feel bad again.  And let me warn you: I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned…and chances are good that you are not going to enjoy hearing it. It is, after all, a sad commentary on our nation’s priorities that we allow our fellow citizens to suffer and struggle this way.  But know, even as I throw some rather ghastly facts at you, there is good news.  There is the possibility for change…there is the possibility that we can do something other than feel bad…that each of us can play a role in seeing to it that no one in this country should ever work a full-time job and still not have enough to pay for the basic necessities of life.   

 

But before I get to the hope, let me talk a little about the despair.

 

Simply put, poverty is a crisis in this country. Certainly the scenes from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina brought this fact home for most of us.  But what is so troubling about the poverty that we are experiencing now as a nation is that so many of the impoverished work full-time jobs…often times physically challenging and emotionally demanding full-time jobs…with salaries that do not cover the basic expenses of life. In fact, nearly one in three children living below the official poverty line currently live in families where someone works full time year round—a 75% increase since 1991.

 

To put the enormity of this problem in perspective, if poor Americans (those who fall under the Census Bureau’s poverty line) were a nation, the population would top that of Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. combined.  That’s using Census figures from 2004, which counted 37 million Americans in poverty.  And it gets worse: the thresholds used in these figures are increasingly outdated and unrealistic. The official poverty line is calculated by determining the cost of food for a family and multiplying by 3.  Food is the least expensive item for a family…far less expensive than housing, health care, and other personal necessities. So economists estimate that the poverty line created by this old formula is probably about half what it should be.  Taking a more realistic picture of life in America today, households would need almost twice the level of the official poverty line to meet basic necessities.  So for a family with two children and two adults working full-time minimum wage jobs, the family income would come up almost $17,000 short of meeting basic necessities.  According to the 2004 census about 91 million people—nearly one out of three Americans—are below twice the official poverty line.

 

The point of all this is that a  “Minimum wage” that doesn’t cover necessities is not a minimum wage; it’s a “minus wage.”

 

In fact, the value of the minimum wage has been literally decreasing for decades.  If the federal minimum wage of 1970 had simply kept up with inflation, it would be over $9.00 today, rather than the $5.15 is has been since 1997.  So if you worked a job at minimum wage over this time span, you would have taken what amounts to an $8,000 pay cut.

 

Why has this been happening?  Why has the federal minimum wage not been increased in nearly 10 years, particularly when polls show that over 80 percent of Americans strongly favor a higher minimum wage?

 

The answer is simple really.  The mandate to raise it has not been set by the people…by you and me.  It’s not that our representatives in Washington don’t understand the need for raises.  They have given themselves raises seven times since 1997.  They just don’t understand the needs of the poorest among us.  How could they when the congressional salary in 2005 was over $162,000 and millionaires make up at least ¼ of the House and ½ of the Senate? Most wage campaigns have not come from Washington anyway.  They come from the residents and low-level officials in cities and states…in fact, anywhere but the federal government.

 

So what has kept our citizens from pushing harder for a living wage? 

 

First of all, most of us don’t understand the severity of the problem.   Most of us don’t have to face the reality of living low-wage jobs.  That’s why eyewitness accounts like Barbara Ehrenreich’s are so important. After living the low-wage lifestyle for two years she found herself educated in a new way about the plight of millions of our sisters and brothers in this country.  She writes:

 

It is common, among the non-poor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition—austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they?  They are ‘always with us.’  What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress:  The lunch…of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift.  The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van.  The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next.  These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, not even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment.  They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations.  And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans—as a state of emergency.” (Nickel and Dimed, 214)

 

Another reason many of us may not feel the urgency around the need for a living wage is the abundance of myths about minimum wage…myths that need to be exposed and debunked.  Here are a few:

 

MYTH: Most Minimum Wage workers are teenagers

The supposition of this myth is that teenagers don’t need a living wage.  Here is the reality:
--three out of four minimum wage workers are 20 or older

--two out of three are women

--most have high school degrees or more.

 

MYTH: Raising Minimum Wage would result in less jobs

Reality:  The minimum wage was last raised in two steps in October 1996 and September 1997.  Between the first hike and 2000, 10.2 million jobs were created.

 

Many economists have backed away from the argument that minimum wage laws lead to fewer jobs. In 2004, over 500 economists including four Nobel Prize winners, endorsed a statement in support of raising the minimum wage.

 

States and cities with higher minimum wages actually have shown better employment trends.  Boston, for example, has a living wage law (11.57 wage) and a 2005 study found no evidence that this law reduced employment or increased use of part-time work at firms covered by the lay.  On average, in fact, employment expanded and firms increased their full-time staff.  Contractors in Baltimore believed that the living wage ordinance there actually helped their businesses because it created the same baseline salaries and therefore leveled the playing field, relieving the need for employers to pinch labor costs in order to win low-bid contracts.

 

MYTH: Businesses won’t be able to handle an increased minimum wage

 

Reality:  There is plenty of money to go around.  We just need to better prioritize. 

 

The pay gap between CEOs and average workers is one of the most obvious indicators of how backwards our priorities have become.  In 2004, CEOs made more than 300 times as much as average workers.  In 1980, the average CEO made as much as 97 minimum wage workers.  In 2004, the average CEO made as much as 952 minimum wage workers.

 

Just to put this disparity in the proper perspective…

The third highest paid CEO in 2004 was William McGuire of UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s leading insurer.  His pay of nearly 125 million dollars could cover the average health insurance premiums of 34,000 people. 

 

The 88.7 million dollar salary pocketed by the CEO of United Technologies is just a little shy of what we pay all the top executives running the three branches of our federal government.  So, for the same money United Technologies shareholders paid for their CEO last year, taxpayers got: one president, a vice president, 535 lawmakers on Capitol Hill and nine Supreme Court justices.

 

I share this information not to simply denounce the salaries of our nation’s CEOs…most of us feel powerless to do much about this disparity anyway.  Rather, I share this information to remind us of what we already know:  there is enough money to go around.  We can afford to have workers paid a living wage…and we can do it, by the way, without CEOs having to give up being rich…at least by the standards of the income earned by over 99% of the population.  How rich does one person really need to be, anyway?  This is a moral question because it is tied to the reality that as CEO salaries and corporate profits have risen over the past 25 years, the salaries and buying power of the majority of Americans have not.

 

Rather than trying to make up for this disparity, though, we make it worse by continuing to give tax breaks to the wealthy.  Over the last four years the richest one percent of taxpayers will have saved nearly $183,000 in cumulative tax cuts on average…more than 17 times what minimum wage workers earn in a year.

 

MYTH: Raising the Minimum Wage will hurt small businesses

 

Reality: researchers have found no reliable correlation between minimum wage increases and a rise in business failures.  If anything, the evidence leans the other way.

 

The idea that we need to protect businesses who can’t or won’t pay their employees a living wage is plainly absurd.  The taxpayers of local communities already subsidize business in countless ways, from development grants and tax breaks to providing local education and infrastructure. Shouldn’t businesses be obligated to return some of the payment by offering livable wages to employees?   Of course, businesses may have to deal with the possibility of lower profits.  But well-run businesses can deal with moral limits.  Those that can’t probably shouldn’t be in business. 

 

Furthermore, when businesses do not pay living wages, taxpayers end up subsidizing their stinginess anyway, because we pay for the food stamps, emergency medical, housing, and other social service bills that low-wage workers often require to support themselves and their families. In Iowa, for example, Wal-Mart, which has received millions of dollars in taxpayer economic subsidies, leads employers in the number of workers on Medicaid. Guess who pays for this Wal-Mart benefit package?  We do! In short, our ever-shrinking public dollars should not be subsidizing poverty-wage work.

 

If we are so worried about small businesses, where is the legislation against Wal-Mart and other mass merchandisers who have really done more to destroy small businesses than any other single cause? Wal-Mart, for example, first came to Iowa in 1983.  Over the next ten years our state had a net loss of 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building material stores, 292 apparel stores, 161 variety stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drug stores, and more.

 

Before we come down too hard on Wal-Mart, you should know that its

president and C.E.O., Lee Scott, recently spoke out in favor of raising the minimum wage. He apparently wasn't motivated by altruism or economic theory or even the public relations possibilities, but by business sense. "Our current average hourly wage for workers is $9.68," says Lee Culpepper, a Wal-Mart spokesman. "So I would think

raising the wage would have minimal impact on our workers. But we think it would have a beneficial effect on our customers."

 

Duh!  Isn’t that the point that is so obvious…that paying workers more will enable them to spend more?  Not to mention the other obvious benefits to business, which have been described as higher employee morale, less turnover, lower recruitment and training costs, and increased employee efficiency.

 

OK, so it is time for some good news, right?

 

Regardless of the federal government’s obvious reluctance to raise the minimum wage, every state and most cities have the power to increase their own minimum wage higher than the federal.  And the good news is that some have.  There is a successful living wage movement in this country which includes 18 states who have already raised the minimum wage. Three states, VT, WA and OR, have even indexed the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. Over 130 living wage laws have been enacted around the country…and campaigns are underway in 120 communities and universities.

 

While Iowa’s minimum wage is still at $5.15, we have proof that living wage ordinances have worked here in the past.  In fact, I learned this week that the first living-wage ordinance in the U.S. was passed in 1988 when a city council set a minimum compensation policy for city-funded urban renewal and loan projects.  In 1996, this policy was amended to set a goal of $9.00 average wage, including benefits.  What was this ambitious city?  Des Moines, Iowa!  But before we get too proud of ourselves we should remember that this ordinance only covers a small segment of the city and doesn’t begin to effect the change felt in cities like Santa Fe, Washington, DC and San Francisco, which have enacted citywide minimum wage increases.

 

So what can we do? Clearly, feeling bad or guilty isn’t enough.  Supporting the UUSC is one small step.  In your insert there is a petition that we can sign and get updates on the living wage movement [www.uusc.org].  We can talk to our representatives, write letters to the editor, we can research and support businesses that pay living wages, even if we have to pay a little more for goods and services.  In short, we can do our part to speak up and act so that the working poor are no longer ignored, but are honored and cared for.  Don’t those of us who are not poor have a responsibility to our sisters and brothers who are?  Barbara Ehrenreich puts it well when she writes:

 

When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.  The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.  They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.  To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. (220-221)

 

It’s time this nation gave something back to these generous philanthropists.  It’s time we took the necessary steps so that the working poor no longer have to be working and poor.  This is a moral issue, one that demands our action and participation.  For…

 

It is immoral that people work full time, but have to choose between paying the rent and paying for child care.

It is immoral to have wages so low that people working the food industry depend on food banks to help feel their families.

It is immoral that health care aides can’t afford health insurance.

It is immoral that the children of child care workers can’t afford college.

It is immoral that many CEOs make more in a year than workers make in a lifetime.

It is immoral that some people are paid so little their children go without necessities while other people are paid so much their grandchildren could live in luxury without having to work at all.

It is immoral to cut taxes at the top when the richest 400 Americans have as much wealth as the 50 million households at the bottom.

It is immoral for corporations to violate worker rights and get rich off poverty wages whether in the US, Mexico China or anywhere else.

It is immoral to reward selfishness over social responsibility.

It is immoral that the minimum wage keeps people in poverty instead of out of poverty.[1]

 

So let us do our part to change things in this country.  As Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”