Wanted: A Living Wage
By Anna Daniels
ohio.onlineactions.org
It is useful exercise to remind ourselves that the battle for an increased minimum wage/sick leave benefit in San Diego is not a new one. Peel back the right wing maker versus taker meme and you get Howard Zinn, placing today’s minimum wage struggle firmly in our collective history of bitter class conflict between the rich and the poor and working class.
In 1944, when Franklin Roosevelt was running for his third term, he emphasized the need for an economic bill of rights as a vehicle for addressing the limitations of the political Bill of Rights. This economic bill of rights would have constitutionally guaranteed that workers have a living wage, would not have to work more than a certain number of hours and that the people would be entitled to vacations and healthcare. An economic bill of rights never materialized. Today, here in San Diego, we are experiencing the results of this omission.
But the economic bill of rights missing in the Constitution made it inevitable that workers would have to get those rights by their own efforts, by organizing, by going on strike, by facing the police and the sheriffs and the National Guard and the Army. That’s why we had such a series of bitter labor struggles in this country, because the political system, touted all over the world even today, this great democratic system, gave no economic rights to the working people. They had to fight for it themselves. Howard Zinn, Democracy Now! August 14, 2006
So yes, all the John and Maria Paychecks have had to fight for their economic rights. Fifty-one years ago, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington, where he gave his “I have a dream” speech. It often escapes notice that King’s speech was the final one of ten speeches delivered that day as part of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The economic demands outlined that day included “massive public works and job training programs for the unemployed, a federal law prohibiting discrimination in public and private hiring, a broadening of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and ‘a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.'”
In 1963, King was advocating for a $2 minimum wage. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $15.27 today.
Political freedom devoid of economic justice is no freedom at all.
Which side are you on?
Anna Daniels
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There’s an interesting piece on how class division is destroying fellow feeling… between the very rich and the superrich… over at The Daily Kos today. At the tip of Long Island, NY, where the 1% are burdened by living with the 10%, the 10 percenters are complaining that helicopters carrying the CEOs to and from Manhattan are waking people up and making their dogs bark as they fly overhead.
Granted, it’s tough to know who to empathize with.
I read a week ago that a new apartment building in mid-town Manhattan has high-end condos mixed with “affordable housing” and two separate entries — one for rich residents, one for the poor. (In imperfect response to this, I am taking a six-month break from the home-delivered New York Times, punishing the messenger.)
Also, according to some historian of Labor Day on NPR, the custom of not-wearing-white-after-Labor-Day relates to the gilded age when this holiday was established. Only the rich could afford to wear white clothing at all and the fashion-rule was invoked to show modest deference to new thinking surrounding the new holiday.
Finally, if you want to see how current economics are playing out among poor whites in rural Missouri, look at a recent short-lived Landmark Theaters movie documentary called “Rich Hill.” It is devastating.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech is memorialized in a monument on Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River – not visited by many but visited by me.
From Wikipedia:
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is a park designed by the architect Louis Kahn for the south point of Roosevelt Island. The Park celebrates the famous speech, and text from the speech is inscribed on a granite wall in the final design of the Park.
Freedom from Want encompassed Roosevelt’s Bill of Economic Rights. There are other monuments in Evansville, Indiana and Cleveland, Ohio.
Raise the minimum wage to $23 an hour. I am bone weary of all the hatred and profit mongering. Nothing is real anymore and there is so little humanity for our fellow humans. Raise it up, raise it way up.