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This chapter examines the effects of the minimum wage on the distribution of family incomes. It first considers the relationship between low-wage workers and low-income families, and then discusses updated evidence on the extent to which minimum-wage workers are concentrated in low-income families. The chapter considers evidence that parallels much of the minimum wage employment literature in terms of empirical methods, but focuses instead on how minimum wages affect family incomes. This analysis considers the question of whether higher minimum wages reduce poverty.

This chapter discusses the role of religious organizations in multiracial and ethnic living wage organizing. Religious activists take on two major racialized functions within the living wage movement: bridge building and political activation. Bridge building involves the work of ideology translation, relational repair, and inclusion monitoring in coalitions. Political activation involves cultivating the resources necessary to enhance political participation. Through these activities, activists improve the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies by offering pathways for building a collective identity across difference. They also provide opportunities for more marginalized persons to cultivate key civic skills. Continued meditation on the multiple dimensions of theological solidarity—preferential accountability, structural conscientization, identity recognition, and expansive moral agency—can help religious allies evaluate their work.

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.

Work gives people dignity, income, and political voice but it also puts people at risk of premature death, jeopardizes self-sufficiency, and dominates workers’ lives. How a person experiences work profoundly influences well-being and lifetime success. How a society organizes work opportunities shapes public health, fairness, and democracy. This chapter describes how changes in modern capitalism have expanded a workforce that is low paid with few benefits, inadequately protected against workplace hazards, and lacking in economic security. It explains how deregulation, low wages, weakened labor laws, and the rise of the gig economy have worsened the life circumstances of millions of U.S. workers, threatening their physical and mental health. The chapter also describes how new forms of labor organizing and new coalitions have promoted pro-worker policies such as living wages, sick and parental leave, laws against wage theft, and universal health care and childcare.

During the latter half of the 1990s, the unemployment rate in the United States reached a thirty-year low, a major influx of former welfare recipients entered the labor market, and employers in the high-tech sector demanded immigration reform to import skilled labor in order to meet their hiring needs. The time seemed ripe for increased job training in the United States, yet in spite of increasing returns to education and training over the last twenty years and high skill needs, the United States still seems to invest much less in post-school training than many other advanced industrialized economies. This chapter examines how various labor market intermediaries have intervened in the creation of training programs for low-wage workers to address the so-called “skills gap” of the past two decades. It first summarizes what is known about the need for and supply of skills in the United States. It then presents some examples of how labor market intermediaries in the United States have tried to create a new training system for low-wage workers at the local and national level.

This introductory chapter discusses the story of a group of people who kept a controversial labor union, while going through some of the more tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From the Great Depression through World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War, the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, and into the 1990s, the men and women of Local 65 focused on improving the lives of the largely “invisible” people who worked in small warehouses and wholesale shops. Throughout the union's history, its members sustained a critique of the ways in which the American dream consistently fell short. A great deal can be learned from Local 65's history as labor unions and worker centers continue to launch campaigns for better pay and working conditions for low-wage workers, migrant farm workers, office workers, and workers in other non-factory-based settings throughout the United States.

This chapter assesses some limitations of the paid family leave (PFL) program's effectiveness. Awareness of PFL remains extremely limited among Californians. Although support for the idea of PFL is extensive across the state's diverse population groups, the most eligible residents are not even aware that the program exists. Moreover, awareness is lowest among those who would benefit most from the program: Latinos, low-wage workers, younger employees, and immigrants. This has substantially limited the potential of PFL to act as a social leveler by making wage replacement for family leaves universally available, rather than being largely confined to the best-paid segments of the workforce. Unless awareness of PFL grows among the rest of the workforce, the stark economic inequalities that characterize twenty-first century California will be reinforced rather than ameliorated by the program.

This chapter describes Miller and Lux's workforce. It notes that in order to fill its constantly changing labor needs, the firm employed migrant, low-wage workers and divided them along racial and ethnic lines, adding that the racial and ethnic segmentation reflected the company's attempt to organize a large and potentially unwieldy male population. The chapter explains that Miller and Lux, like industrial employers nationwide, capitalized on immigration trends, and separated their workers as a way to prevent strikes. It narrates that Miller and Lux's largest labouring group had little direct contact with livestock but instead found themselves employed in reclamation activities, and notes that the laborers spent long hours of arduous work for low wages. The chapter explains that human labor was the integral link between resource exploitation and large-scale production, and that the company's power ultimately derived from the ability to tap both human and natural energy for its own ends.

This chapter illustrates how Local 65, at the time of its Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) affiliation, was predominantly Jewish and had organized people at all skill levels in small wholesale shops on the Lower East Side. In 1937 and 1938, the union began to target people who worked in “dead end” jobs, before branching out to other industries in Midtown, Uptown, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Their goal is to bring low-wage male and female workers—including blacks, more Jews, and immigrants—into the union. The strategy put the union at odds with others in the city, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and the Teamsters, which all laid claim to the low-wage workers Local 65 organized.

This chapter demonstrates how motivation and strategy may have more to do with failure and success across all sectors of workers than previously thought. Most academics have long assumed that organizing the unorganized might be possible only among low-wage service workers. The case study of Smithfield Foods returns the focus to the private sector, to the organization of the world’s largest pork production facility, in rural North Carolina—the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the United States. The workers there are mostly men, and the employer had encouraged and exploited racial and ethnic tensions among them so profoundly as to turn the plant into a de facto Jim Crow enclave. It was in this unpromising context that the workers in a traditional private-sector factory were organized into a strong union that achieved a stunning win.

This chapter offers guidelines for organizing a public policy wage theft campaign. Wage theft refers to the illegal nonpayment of workers’ wages, a major problem that affects low-wage workers. To address the problem, worker centers undertake wage theft campaigns, and in recent years have led most of the campaigns around the country to improve enforcement. This chapter first summarizes the benefits of a well-designed and implemented wage theft campaign to the organization before discussing external and internal considerations when to run a wage theft campaign, citing the experiences of worker centers such as the Micah Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Fe y Justicia Worker Center in Houston, Texas. It also outlines the steps a worker center should undertake in planning a wage theft campaign and concludes by reviewing lessons from various wage theft campaigns.

This chapter focuses on the contributions of feminist organizations to living wage activism and discusses their connections to religious activists. Partially motivated by the feminization of poverty, certain feminist foundations, organizations, and researchers provide important resources for the living wage movement. Women represent half of all the organizers and board members in religious organizing. This is important since women are generally underrepresented in political engagement, and these women provide crucial role models. However, this “feminization of organizing” can be a problem when women religious organizers lack the structural support (childcare, healthcare, retirement) necessary to sustain their positions. The chapter also considers the “sacrificial” demands of low-wage worker organizers and the support needed for women organizers.