Living-Wage Campaigns and Laws

• Published in: Working USA Vol. 6; no. 3; p. 111
• Main Authors: Levi, Margaret, Olson, David J, Steinman, Erich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Armonk Brill Academic Publishers, Inc 31.01.2003
• Subjects: Activism; Activists; Civil rights; Comparable worth; Employee benefits; Employees; Employment; Labor force; Labor relations; Labor unions; Low income groups; Politics; Poverty; Religion; Religious organizations; Social conditions & trends; Social networks; Society; Unionization; Wage differential; Wages & salaries; Workers
• ISSN: 2471-4607

From the labor movement's point of view, the living-wage campaigns are most likely to be successful and sustained when linked with organizing drives, which means even failures in passing legislation can represent labor movement gains. Targeting living-wage proposals to cover employees in firms where employers have blocked workers' attempts to organize attracts labor to the campaigns. In Houston, the ordinance lost citywide but won in low-wage neighborhoods. Moreover, the joint campaign with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 100 helped the union succeed in its efforts to organize Head Start workers. In New Orleans, the community-labor coalition targeted hotel workers, which then became the focus of an organizing drive by the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE). The New Orleans campaign began in reaction to efforts by hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality industries to block unionization activities led by SEIU. In Santa Monica, the living wage covers employees of major beachfront employers who previously resisted unionization. In Oakland, where the ordinance passed in 1998, the effect was to frighten the Port Authority, which was not covered due to provisions of the city charter. Four years later, in 2002, the living-wage coalition remobilized to pass Measure I, extending living-wage coverage to port employees. The EBASE coalition led the campaign for passage of Measure I in 2002, which would apply the living wage to the Port of Oakland, that city's primary employer. Labor unions, community organizations, and churches developed a corps of volunteers who staffed phone banks, walked the precincts, and "postered" the city streets. This effort led to a victory in March 2002 when Oakland voters overwhelmingly, by a margin of 78 to 22 percent, approved the living-wage initiative, which provides an inflation-indexed wage rate of $10.50 without benefits and $9.37 with benefits to the 1,500 low-wage workers at the port proper. It also requires businesses designated as "port-assisted" to pay these same wage rates, and it guarantees, when a contract at the port changes hands, that existing workers will be retained for ninety days and can be fired only for just cause. There are more problems with the ACORN chapter hypothesis. According to ACORN's Web site, while there are chapters in "more than 30 cities," ACORN-led coalitions have won living-wage ordinances only in "St. Louis, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Boston, Oakland, Denver, Chicago, Cook County, IL and Detroit." That amounts to nine successes affiliated with ACORN chapters, hardly enough to compellingly support an account casting them as the key medium of diffusion and success for what is now more than eighty living-wage successes.