Working In These Times
Urban Communities Seek Lift Through Living Wage
(Photo courtesy Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance)
Economic indicators may be bouncing back this holiday season, but the working poor aren't so lucky. As they're forced to work harder for less pay and bills pile up, the floor seems to be falling out from under them.
But one thing that's rising is a grassroots movement for living wages. Recent actions in New York City and Los Angeles show that a combination of equitable social policy and local pressure can "raise the floor" for struggling workers.
Today, 14 states and the District of Columbia have set a wage floor higher than the federal minimum, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, has steadily eroded in value since the 1960s. Still, even those standards often fall well below what's needed to sustain a household. (The statewide minimum wage of $8 per hour in Massachusetts, according to the Living Wage Project, is merely one-quarter of the income needed to support a two-adult, two-child family.
To help narrow the gap between low wages and human needs, a grassroots movement has pushed for living wage ordinances, which typically set a pay standard for employers contracted in government-sponsored projects. Nationwide, scores of cities have lifted up the wage floor to help ensure that taxpayer investments don't condemn working people to poverty.
In the Bronx, a plan to build a mall at the Kingsbridge Armory fell through when City Council members tried to push a $10 an hour wage as part of the deal. The Council recently rejected the proposal and overrode the Mayor's veto. Of course, the collapse of the deal would deprive the community of some jobs in the immediate term. But the campaign has shown what workers can gain when they refuse to settle for whatever the developer is willing to dole out.
According to an analysis by the Drum Major Institute, despite the developer's promises of job creation, “the retail jobs created at the Armory will not allow families to survive without public assistance.” That means that unless the government compelled employers to offer sustainable wages, the government would pick up the tab in the long run through social welfare costs.
Though employers complain that higher wage standards constrain growth, DMI's John Petro challenges the quantity-vs-quality binary:
Economic development subsidies are intended to create new jobs in the city by helping businesses relocate or expand their operations here. But job quality matters just as much as the number of jobs created.
When the city subsidizes poverty-level wages, it pays twice. First, taxpayer dollars are diverted from schools, infrastructure, and other city needs. Then taxpayer dollars must go towards programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, and other social services that are needed by the workers in city subsidized jobs who still cannot make ends meet.
The Armory showdown could shape future discussions about “responsible development” in a city fraught with extremes of wealth and destitution. According to the Observer, labor advocates may soon look forward to debating citywide and statewide living-wage initiatives that would tie pay standards to government contracts.
Over in Queens, Make The Road New York has staked out a major urban mall as the next battleground in the living-wage fight. A few days after the City Council vote, the group rallied at the Queens Center Mall, which employs over 3,000 people, to demand that the mall require employers to pay a minimum of $10 per hour or $11.50 without benefits (up from the typical hourly wage of $7.25). It would be a modest holiday bonus: according to the Living Wage Calculator, even two parents earning $10 an hour wouldn't make a living wage that would support a child.
The campaign's platform for just development calls for not only living wage jobs, but protections for the right to join a union, as well as access to schools, public spaces, and other community resources. The campaign folds into a nationwide movement for “community benefits agreements,” contracts that provide local workers and families with an equitable stake in future development.
Those efforts would be boosted by reforms to the federal minimum wage. For example, indexing the federal baseline to the average wage, as proposed by the EPI, would foster consumer spending and economic recovery, and more importantly, detach the minimum wage issue from partisan bickering on the Hill; currently, the bare minimum pay rate is dictated not by economic trends but the political whims of Congress.
Although the proposed federal minimum wage hike would hardly close the country's pervasive wealth gap, some 16 million people would receive a direct raise, and a total of some 23 million would see some kind of income benefit due to the “spillover” effect. The workers who tend to be the least economically secure have the most to gain from a minimum wage hike. Blacks and Latinos would benefit disproportionately, as would workers in the service sectors and retail trades.
None of those benefits will materialize without follow-through from employers, though. A landmark study on low-wage workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago found that minimum wage requirements are routinely flouted, especially for vulnerable groups like undocumented immigrants and domestic workers. According to the researchers, about 25 percent of workers “were paid less than the legally required minimum wage in the previous work week.”
Los Angeles has a living wage ordinance, but that didn't stop Cintas, an industrial laundry company, from cheating hundreds of employees, according to a recent lawsuit. It was only when the workers organized, with the help of Workers United, that the company straightened up. Last week, the workers got a $6.5 million settlement.
No living wage proposal would survive in the political arena or the workplace without a vibrant grassroots movement to hold officials and employers accountable. In the end, the leverage isn't the law itself, but the community's conviction that meaningful development is more complicated than constructing a mall and filling it with warm bodies. The dignity of earning a real living, after all, is priceless.
UPDATE: Although this post focused on the living wage campaign, another intriguing local angle on the Kingsbridge Armory battle (as a commenter pointed out below) is the political dissonance between the two labor stakeholders: the construction unions and low-income service workers from surrounding communities. Tom Robbins of the Village Voice explores this tension between community members and established unions. Underlying the struggle for equitable development in a racially and economically divided city, Robbins writes, "This labor-community divide—with one group of workers played off against another—is one of the oldest and saddest chapters in the city."
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Comments
Problem - if the Kingsbridge Armory project had gone through, it would have been renovated 100% union - which would have given jobs to approximately 1,000 union building trades workers over the life of the project.
Considering how high unemployment is in the trades right now, we could have really used those jobs.
But this “living wage” campaign totally torpedoed that for us.
For the record, how many of the local businesses (who feared competition from the stores in the Armory) pay that living wage - and how many of the members of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (the union that was behind this campaign) make $ 10/hr or better?
Considering the low wages in NYC’s retail sector, probably not a whole lot.
So, why doesn’ t the RWDSU and it’s anti poverty agency “community allies” focus on raising those workers wages, instead of denying jobs to union tradespeople?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Thanks. You identify an interesting tension between local union interests and low-wage workforce in general. Maybe the answer to this problem is best pursued through another question: are you saying the union explicitly chose to put aside the living wage issue in order to push this development through? And if so, was the opposition to the living wage a matter of political pragmatism, or is there an ideological reason that organized labor would line up on the business side of this debate?
More broadly, are there other ongoing labor struggles in New York City that meet the union’s vision of a viable campaign for a living wage or prevailing wage standard? What is that standard—is it an issue of how union members specifically stand to benefit? And to what degree does the union prioritize the issue of a living wage for workers outside the building trades? Surely, after the project is built, the long-term sustainability of the development is an issue that the whole community will continue to wrestle with. If any readers out there were directly involved in the politics leading up to the deal, inquiring minds do want to know.
Sister Chen,
Basically, the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council will unconditionally support any real estate development if the developer promises to build with all union labor.
Related Companies, the developer of the Kingsbridge Armory, builds all of it’s developments with union labor - the last big mall they built in the city, Time Warner Center, was done all union, as was the mixed use complex that mall was built in.
They were going to do the same thing here.
Beyond that, I strongly suspect the living wage thing was a red herring here on the part of RWDSU and their allies from the not for profit sector.
RWDSU signs low wage contracts in the retail industry and the vast majority of their members do not earn a living wage, and the same can be said for the UFCW, the RWDSU’s parent union and the other big retail industry union.
If they genuinely cared about living wage jobs, they would bargain living wage contracts with their signatory employers.
In the case of Kingsbridge, there is an element of NIMBYism [NIMBY = “Not In My Back Yard”]
RWDSU allied with a local low wage supermarket that is one of their signatory employers, who was afraid that they would not be able to compete with the stores in the Kingsbridge Mall, which was going to bring suburban style quality retailers to a poor neighborhood where merchants sell low quality merchandise at high prices to low income people.
Defending those merchants - all of whom pay wages far below living wage levels - was also the agenda pushing the “community based organizations” who are allies of these high price low quality low wage merchants.
The needs of the working class - both construction workers citywide and the local residents of Kingsbridge - were not really relevant.
I have similar suspicions about the Queens Mall campaign - RWDSU signatory employer Macy’s has been the anchor tenant at Queens Mall since they built the place decades ago, and if the RWDSU was really worried about low retail wages, they could have resolved that at the bargaining table with Macy’s, who has been an RWDSU employer since 1937!
As for the other stores at Queens Center - the RWDSU has had a presence at that mall since they built the place in the 1950’s - the UFCW used to be there too, back when May’s and Alexander’s were still in business and they were still the Retail Clerks International Association - they’ve had 55 years to unionize that building, why are they only talking about it now?
As for Make The Road - I read the report they co authored with RWDSU.
It seemed that Make The Road and the local not for profits were angling for free office and classroom space from the mall operators and that may be what is really driving this, not concern for low wage retail workers.
Essentially, it looks to be a Jesse Jackson-style shakedown - take a genuine injustice and use it as a cover for a legal shakedown of an abusive employer - basically, it’s a legalized protection racket.. no crime is committed, but it’s far from ethical.
I was also taken aback by some of the starkly anti working class and anti youth positions taken by Make The Road and RWDSU’s report - they seemed to have a problem with working class youth from the neighborhood wanting to get jobs there and hanging out in the mall in their free time.
Instead of praising Queens Center for providing jobs for 2,000+ local high school and college students and for the fact that - unlike a lot of places in NYC - working class youth of color are free to hang out in the Queens Center mall without fear of police harassment, the report slammed Queens Center mall for “distracting” those students from their studies by giving them jobs and a place to hang out!
That was an appallingly reactionary position to hear from folks who claim to advocate for the poor!
Bottom line, over the past 50 years, retail has ceased to be a career job and has become a “transitional job” for teenagers and young adults.
Retail employers have a tiny core workforce of full time store managers and delivery drivers who are career retail workers.
The rest of the industry is teenagers for whom retail is a stepping stone to their “real jobs” that they will get when they finish college.
That’s why retailers can pay wages that are so low - since these workers don’t see themselves as workers (but as students who have a day job) and they perceive these jobs as a temporary hardship that will end when they graduate from college, they will put up with low pay, infrequent hours and bad working conditions.
To some degree, working in a low wage retail job is seen as a “rite of passage” on the way to a successful adult career in another industry, rather than a job injustice that can and should be fought against.
The RWDSU, the UFCW and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters were fully aware that this transition was happening in the retail industry because they SIGNED OFF ON IT EVERY STEP OF THE WAY and never made any effort to stop it while it was happening over the last 50 years.
The low wage retail industry was created by 50 years of union concessions and contracts that allowed employers to hire an unlimited number of part timers.
It weakened the RWDSU, UFCW and IBT to the point that these days, most retailers don’t even bother to have a low wage union contract - and that loss of a steady stream of dues payers may be what’s driving the RWDSU’s newfound pseudomilitancy.
But when the RWDSU’s grandstanding about a low wage industry that they helped to create gets in the way of the creation of 1,000+ good paying union jobs, then it’s a problem.
I rarely agree with the leaders of my union, the Carpenters Union, and the rest of the building trades unions - hell, usually, I’m one of their harshest critics - but in this case, I think they are right to oppose the RWDSU.
Gregory Butler is misconstruing much of the facts that are presented by the RWDSU and Make The Road. In his post, Butler says that he was “taken aback by some of the starkly anti working class and anti youth positions taken by Make The Road and RWDSU’s report [on the Queens Center Mall]- they seemed to have a problem with working class youth from the neighborhood wanting to get jobs there and hanging out in the mall in their free time.”
If Butler had actually read the report, he would know that the report says that it is important that the Queen Center Mall “serves as a public space for residents in the area,” and as such “should give back to young people in the community,” through such improvements as providing job training and placement services.
Although Butler says that over the past 50 years, retail has ceased to be a career job and has become a “transitional job” for teenagers and young adults, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of retail workers in New York City—78% to be exact—are 25 years or older, and half are 35 years or older. In many cases, they are providing for their whole families and in nearly a majority of cases, they are earning less than $10 per hour.
I am most taken aback by Butler’s statement that the RWDSU and Make The Road do not show concern for low wage retail workers. Haven’t these two groups fought tirelessly for low wage workers to be guaranteed living wages and the right to organize into a union throughout New York City for many years?
Sister Krasndebski
I actually read the report, from cover to cover, on the RWDSU’s website.
As for the transitional job status of retail work, I know it both by reading about it, and by living it as a young retail worker when I was a teenager.
I worked at a unionized supermarket - Pathmark store # 645 in Chinatown, represented by UFCW local 1500, and I know the year I worked there, we had 100% staff turnover, and the only cashiers who weren’t teenagers were folks who worked for the city who moonlighted at Pathmark as a night job.
I stand by my statements and my conclusions.