The Baltimore City Council-Labor Subcommittee defeated a bill yesterday that would ensure a living wage of $10.59 per hour to workers at retailers with $10 million a year in annual revenue. The bill, Council Bill 10-0505 , sponsored by Councilperson Mary Pat Clarke of Baltimore’s 14th district, would have brought full time retail workers to a wage rate which would have allowed them to make wages equivalent to the federal poverty level for a family of four.
Major businesses and the interests they serve defeated the bill by banking on an argument that it would hurt the economy, dissuade retail from coming into the city, and cut jobs and wages. While most of these arguments were not backed up by any particular data, fly in the face of the empirical, and take as a given that poverty must be a part of the life of working families in the city, they prevailed. There will be time enough to answer these tired and untested arguments, as Councilperson Clarke has suggested she will continue the effort to pass the bill, and in time( if yesterday was any demonstration), the people, workers, and communities that need this the most will be able to organize and win.
I have always been dedicated to the value proposition behind living wage and workers justice, but for the last year the issue has taken on an urgency that is driven by self interest. In the summer of 2009 the youth entrepreneurship non-profit organization that I was working for was forced to close it’s doors due to the economy. I have been looking for work at almost every point since then. I have a lot of skills that i have developed over a decade of community and non-profit work, but I, like many workers, do not have a college degree.
I have submitted over 200 job applications, I have applied for everything from non-profit positions to cashier jobs at major retailers. On occasion I have gotten callbacks, interviews, and even offers. Many of the offers have been for minimum wage retail positions, these are not jobs I am against taking, but there is a basic standard of income I need to make in order to keep the lights on, insure and gas up the car I would need to drive to work, and make sure I have a roof over my head. While at points in the process my pride has been the factor that led me to turn down options, for the most part what has forced me to say no is the inability to live on the wages and in the conditions that have been offered.
I am not against working multiple jobs, I understand this is the way many working class people get by, and in fact this has been my strategy. But it is a buyers market out there, employers demand acceptance of variable hours, variable schedules, and are not eager to make positions full time for fear of paying benefits. $7.75 an hour is better than no employment, but when it does not guarantee a budgetable number of hours in any given week, and precludes you from getting another job either by mandate or by schedule variability it becomes almost impossible to survive.
I also have looked into AmeriCorps a program often touted recently as a way to get job training, or to shift careers, but these positions also pay an unsustainable wage, a living stipend of $13,000 is the typical offer.
How anyone is supposed to sustain on these wages is beyond me. The federal poverty level, which both the minimum wage and the AmeriCorps stipend are below, is not a sustainable living. Well beyond sustainability, and perhaps more importantly to this discussion, these wages do not provide the people working them with the money they need to spend at local and national businesses. Consumer spending is the only way the recession is going to end, and the economy is going to turn around, but with zero extra dollars to spend the workers and unemployed persons like myself will neither take part in the recovery or be able to shop at the retailers the city is trying to attract.
Why would retailers want to come to a city where a vast swath of the population has no ability to spend at their stores? Furthermore why would the city want retailers to come in who will only serve to drive down wages further? They wouldn’t, and they wont. The living wage may not be the immediate solution to the problems facing the City of Baltimore, but theses wages are a part of long term strategy that must be undertaken, to push the city toward a humane economics.
My question for the opposition is not why do you oppose a living wage, but what is your alternative? More of the stratification and poverty that has plagued the city since the manufacturing base left, more catering to the middle and upper class, more building the comfort of the few on the backs of many?
Living wage is not the silver bullet that will make Baltimore what it once was before these interests destroyed it, but is a start, and it is a means to show the working people of the city that the powers that be care, that they get it, and that they think that Baltimoreans who live on unsustainable wages matter.
If those Baltimoreans do not actually matter to the powers that be( through deeds and actions, not just platitudes) then it is time to organize an make sure new people get to make decisions for the city. There is an election coming up in 2011/12 and we should remember who failed us this time and every time.
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Inception, Imagination, and the Method of Politics.
By Andy Ellis on July 26, 2010
I saw “Inception” this weekend. I won’t give to much away, but basically it is about the power of ideas, how they can come from a place you don’t know, and how others outside of the self can plant an idea that feels like your own. The concept is not lost on marketers, activists, politicians and others in the field of meme creation. Often I am one of those willing to explore the infinite possibilities bracketed off by the bounds of the politically possible, to push the boundaries of the now for the vision of the as of yet undreamed. I am a visionary, and pretty good at it.
But visions of the future disconnected from the method of getting there are simply fantasy, or at best theory. This is what separates the worth of dreaming a better world from the stagnant lamenting of a wish to return to a world that never was. The struggle for a living wage and a more humane politcal economy for Baltimore City is the kind of dream that can occur. The climate in this city is one that allows for the possibility of great things, things that can not only make life better for the people who live here, but also for people all around the world.
Baltimore is small enough to make things happen, and decimated enough by the politics of the status quo and the economics of the inhumane that its people are willing to give new things a try. These new things like Hamsterdam from the Wire or the original living wage legislation are risky, dangerous, and dirty at times, but in a city that has been through the worst, it may be possible that such things can happen, can work, and can blaze a trail for the millions of other people around the world experiencing similar inhumanity.
There are many good ideas for how to make this city better, but for them to be good ideas there has to be some method of making them happen. It may be that the city would benefit the most from a libertarian approach to politics, no government intervention, no taxes, trickle down economics, but these ideas might as well be ” give everybody some magic beans and a goose that lays golden eggs” they take no account for the political climate within the city, for the sense of actuation needed to turn policy into politics, or for the people who make up the body politic.
Ideas can grow from anywhere, take hold and change the world, but they must have the ability to be implemented. They must have a method, and they must take account for the possible, even if they seem unlikely or impossible at first. This is why living wage is so exciting. It can actually happen here, we can make it work. The laws of economics can be bent by the will and heart of a people, by the desire for a life better than this one, and by hard working dedicated people who can see with one, two, or three eyes to a future where no one works three jobs and still sees their family in poverty.
Sometimes in the least ideal situations the most amazing things are possible, and Baltimore is still alive today as proof of that. There are many ideas for making things better, but no matter how good the theory, or what the textbooks say, if you don’t have a method for making those ideas into reality then they are simply the idle chatter of the overly intellectual. Living wage failed, but people are starting to see the possibility of a better way, starting to see how to get there and starting to figure out how to make their dreams the reality of city that needs humane dreamers.
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