Search Results

This chapter examines the factors that influence the decisions of politicians (and others) to support or oppose higher minimum wages, and considers why minimum wages remain so popular even though many economists oppose them. It also discusses the newest manifestation of mandated wage floors—living wages—which are enacted at the city level and cover a narrower set of workers.

The Introductory chapter begins with the claim that renewed pressure for higher minimum or living wages has special significance for the Anglo-American social model. The English-speaking liberal welfare states have assertively pushed ‘work first’ social policy through hard-line welfare reform, particularly in Australia, the UK, and US, and the consequence is renewed emphasis on improving low-wage employment as a path to ameliorating inequality. The Introduction further establishes that arguments for living wages go beyond union demands and claims made by socialists—liberals and conservatives have cause to support wage justice. At the same time, living wage movements offer practical beginning points for a major challenge to increasing inequality and should be seen as the most significant alternative redistributive project to the basic income.

Mild optimism emerging around the living wage movement does not mean an absence of challenges and debates about a justice strategy built around protecting low-wage workers. Some lack confidence in a living wage movement because of threats and challenges facing low wage employment. This chapter discusses three of these in turn—threats of automation, non-enforceability of high minimums in an era of wage theft and work fragmentation, and the superior anti-poverty potential of basic income. Fears of automation understate the likely continuation of employment growth. Enforcement of higher minimum wage and better standards for low-wage employment are both realistic goals for regulation. And, finally, basic income in the liberal world is more likely to have partial coverage and low replacement rates—and fail to deal with ongoing dependence on low-wage employment for many.

The Conclusion makes the case for a living wage welfare state, building on the analysis, evidence, and argument of the previous chapters. It distinguishes a minimal reform strategy based on narrow improvements in the wage floor from a broader reform program aimed at building living wage foundations that are realistic and suitable to the structures, power resources, and institutions of liberal welfare states. In doing so, it makes a distinction between conservative-liberal, social-liberal, and living wages models for transforming liberal welfare and employment structures to reduce inequalities and improve working class lives. At the same time, the book strongly endorses a greater role for social scientists in debates and research about low wage workers and encourages social policy analysts to re-engage with the emerging situation in overextended and liberalised labour markets.

Although living wage movements have appeared throughout this century, the contemporary movement is centered on a specific policy: passing a local ordinance to raise the wage floor for a specified group of workers covered by the ordinance. This chapter focuses on the living wage movement in the United States and whether it is an effective policy tool for raising the living standards of the working poor. It first suggests a typology for the different local ordinances currently in place based on coverage, wage levels, and other requirements. It then considers the arguments for and against living wages, focusing on the motivations behind the campaigns, such as the increase in wage and income inequality, the increase in privatization of public services, and the increase in the use of tax abatements to increase local economic activity. It also discusses the arguments of those who oppose living wages. One innovative approach with the potential to meet both the goals of the movement and concerns of those who oppose living wages is combining a living wage with a local Earned Income Tax Credit.

This chapter details the Scottish Government's implementation in 2016 of the Scottish Living Wage (SLW) for front-line workers in adult social care in an effort to address cost and quality tensions in the market as well as recruitment and retention difficulties. After briefly outlining the literature on minimum and living wages and on austerity in social care, the chapter presents findings on local authorities' and providers' experiences with SLW implementation. Drawing on interviews with voluntary and private social care providers across Scotland, representatives of lead employer bodies, union officials, commissioning authorities, and civil servants, the findings suggest that the re-regulation of pay has, paradoxically, prompted greater insecurity in market relations in social care. Local authorities' experiences highlight several unintended consequences of the policy, including an uneven distribution of funding to poorer payers that disadvantages fair employers, bringing services in-house and making cuts to other services. The chapter then discusses the experiences and impact of SLW implementation on social care organizations, such as providers making efficiencies and withdrawing from or declining to enter unviable contracts. It concludes with implications for the sustainability of the SLW and service provision in adult social care.

This chapter examines South Korea's developmental era, from the 1960s to the 1980s. It focuses on the effect of the industrial relations system that consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s and, in particular, the ways in which institutionalization of the male breadwinner model and family living wage discourse in the labor movement beginning in the 1960s enforced the continuing invisibility of yŏgong. The chapter then explores the ways in which women factory workers in the 1970s and 1980s built their grassroots organizational power and developed critical consciousness and practices regarding the gender discrimination they faced at work. The setting here is export-industry factories, including textile, wig, and electronics shops, in Seoul and the surrounding Kyŏnggi Province, with th occasional visit to Kwangju, the provincial capital of South Chŏlla Province. Radical intellectuals and students, like the socialists of the colonial era, recognized women workers' revolutionary potential, and another generation of students-turned-labor organizers emerged, forging a tension-ridden relationship of the so-called worker–student alliance (nohak yŏndae) and further complicating the politics of memory surrounding the 1970s labor movement.

In this chapter, the author demonstrates the synergy between scholarship and engagement based on her experience as a researcher with the living wage movement in Los Angeles and the ways in which this experience shaped her future academic career. Not only did she continue to be involved with living-wage campaigns in other cities, but her academic research shifted as well to focus on this topic. The modern living wage movement emerged just as a fierce debate about minimum wages raged. The author expresses the frustrations of academics who enter the world of activists—issue campaigns are often primarily ideological rather than based on research, and opponents insist on oversimplifying the issues involved. Scholars must accept that the best-reasoned argument does not always win. Nonetheless, the author contends that researchers can make important contributions to movements, not only in terms of producing research to meet the short-term goals of a campaign, but also in analyzing campaigns on a larger scale that can help movements formulate and pursue larger goals. She concludes with a discussion of the challenges involved in engaged scholarship and activism.

Wage debates in twentieth-century Europe were dominated by a new regulating principle: the minimum vital, ‘living wage’ or Existenzminimum. This chapter analyzes the political-scientific content of the ‘vital’ or ‘living’ component of the living wage. The figure of the vital minimum traveled from classical political economy to physical energetics, Marxism and social Catholicism, to social statistics to Fordist wage regulation and welfare. The vital minimum performed multiple rhetorical and political functions, often contradictory. It could refer to a physiological threshold, grounded in chemical-thermodynamic studies of individual male model organisms (workers.) Or the vital minimum could describe a collective cultural and sociological norm, subject to change over time. Welfare politics invoked both physiology and sociology via the vital minimum. The French welfare state first mobilized the vital minimum as an individual minimum wage. Later it changed sites and reappeared as the logic behind a collective family allowance.

This chapter assesses progress on wages in global supply chains, using AUDCO data. The data include hourly wage rates, the gap between actual wages and minimum wages, the gap between actual wages and take-home pay, and finally the gap between these paid wages and a number of different living wage estimates drawn from 14,315 reliable audits done during the period 2011–2017 in ten countries and seven industries. These data show that wages in all countries have increased and are above the minimum wage (with a few exceptions in a small number of audits). Of course, it is difficult to credit private regulation programs with these increases, given the numerous other influences on wage levels — not the least being local labor market conditions as well as prices paid to suppliers for their product. But the fact that wages paid are above the minimum in most countries is at least consistent with code of conduct commitments. The evidence also shows that wages have been increasing every year — some codes require annual year-on-year increases. Moreover, it demonstrates that wage levels are nowhere near the living wage required by many codes of conduct. The gaps are large, and wages would need to increase considerably to reach the living wage commitments made by global firms in different countries and industries.

Activism by labor and community coalitions at the local level is redefining labor law in the United States. Despite a drastic decline in union density and power in the United States, labor and community alliances have emerged at the local level that seek to influence labor conditions outside of the traditional collective bargaining framework. Unions and their community allies in some cities have had success in securing living wages, job training, local hiring preferences, workplace safety protections, health insurance benefits, and even job security for local workers. These achievements have been built on a new legal foundation: local government law. Labor-community alliances have leveraged different facets of local government power — contracting, land use, and general regulatory power — to achieve labor objectives through local ordinances and negotiated community benefit agreements. This chapter describes some of the ways in which these new labor-community alliances have exercised power at the local level. It pays particular attention to Los Angeles where local labor activism has achieved a series of remarkable successes through the robust use of local governmental levers. The chapter then addresses the question of whether, and to what extent, local labor initiatives can provide an adequate substitute for, or enhancement of, labor power at the national level.

In-work poverty has been a problem in the UK for many years. Since wage supplements were condemned in the 19th century, various approaches have been taken to deal with the seemingly intractable problem that wages under capitalism cannot always deliver an above poverty income for many working people and families. Placing the analysis in this historical context, the chapter focuses upon contemporary developments in, and debates about, policies to address in-work poverty. The chapter focuses upon the development of Universal Credit and how it can be understood in long-term concerns with in-work poverty. The chapter also discusses contemporary debates about the living wage as a means of addressing in-work poverty. The chapter argues that in-work poverty is likely to remain a problem as governments continue to seek to constrain public spending and developments regarding the living wage remain constrained by political and orthodox economic concerns.

This essay suggests that US proposals for a federal minimum wage, which achieved success in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, emerged in a transnational discourse shaped by the introduction of a compulsory minimum wage in Victoria, Australia in 1896 and the definition of the minimum wage as a “living wage,” owed to workers in their capacity as human beings, by H. B. Higgins, president of the Australian Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. Higgins met leading Progressive reformers in Boston, New York, and Washington, in 1914. The essay also notes the importance of the world-historic context of the mobility of Chinese labor in the trans-Pacific world in the nineteenth century that led to the insistence in Australia that “white men’s wages” be protected by a legal minimum wage and associated wages boards.

This chapter studies the emergence of the contemporary living wage movement in the United States. By conscious political choice, U.S. politicians decided to undermine the original intent of the minimum wage by refusing to raise it adequately over the last half-century. Despite increased worker productivity, the minimum wage remains far below what is necessary for a small family in this country. The increase in working poverty thus signals both the economic and political poverty of low-wage workers. Religious organizations join coalitions for a living wage precisely to counter these intertwined poverties. The reemergence of progressive religious activism and the rebirth of religion–labor–community coalitions for living wages have been mutually reinforcing. The chapter shows how religious activists seek to enhance the economic political agency of low-wage workers and put poverty back on the national agenda.

This introductory chapter presents three major insights that can be obtained in analyzing religious activists in the living wage movement. First, the roles of religious activists and their ethical underpinnings can be better understood even in a seemingly secular movement. Second, one can better understand the actual, rather than projected, challenges of ethics and agency that the movement faces, which will then aid in its scope and effectiveness. Finally, one can begin to understand the movement's goals more broadly, which helps in contextualizing the movement in larger efforts toward the expansion of democracy in the United States, both politically and economically. Ultimately, religious activists are not merely mobilizing for a specific policy measure, they are also seeking and enacting an expanded vision of democratic polity founded on greater economic equity and representation.

This concluding chapter contemplates on the next stages of the living wage movement. The movement is best seen as a gateway to other worker justice struggles such as raising state and federal minimum wages, developing and enforcing anti-wage theft laws, fair treatment of undocumented workers, and negotiating community benefit agreements. As with previous campaigns, religious activists not only aim to enact concrete policies, but also build the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies in order to alter the landscape of the political economy. As the movement enters new stages, the chapter reviews the lessons and challenges the movement's work has presented so far. Strong economic political agency for the working poor and their religious allies entails not only making good moral arguments, but also parallel work in bridge building, alternative political development, gendered leadership, and ritual renewal.

This chapter canvasses a long-term vision for improving the lives of poor and precarious workers who work in informal conditions. It proposes a bold, transnational initiative that aims to promote a global living wage and regulate supply chains. The chapter puts forward three interrelated regulatory pathways out of informality. First, the promotion of Global Living Wages through a multilateral instrument such as an International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention or United Nations treaty, which would also establish an International Living Wage disputes mechanism for enforcement of these minima; second, the setting up of National Living Wage Tribunals empowered to hear disputes concerning non-payment of living wages due to supply chain dynamics and to hold parties in the supply chain responsible for non-payment; third, the fostering of local pathways out of informality.