Living Wages

Living Wages

Radley Balko over at Reason Hit & Run mentions this charming bit of hypocrisy:

The workers who clean Baltimore's Camden Yards baseball stadium are planning a hunger strike to protest their $7 per hour wages. The stadium is the largest employer of the city's homeless day laborers. The kicker, though, is that the Maryland legislature recently passed a "living wage" bill, setting the minimum at $11.30 per hour. But while the bill covers any business with state contracts in the Baltimore area, the state government is exempt, and Camden is owned by the state of Maryland.

He also mentions that the leftist organizing group ACORN has a history of not paying a living wage to its workers--and then challenging the law when applied to them with a free market critique of a law that they want applied to everyone else!

ACORN isn't the only leftist operation that wants laws that it won't follow itself. Back in the late 1970s, the Campaign for Economic Democracy (Hayden and Fonda's operation) was demanding a raise in the minimum wage--but they weren't paying their workers a minimum wage. Why? They were a non-profit, and thus exempt from California law for that reason.

If the left really wanted to do something to alleviate the misery of the poor, they would be shutting off the spigot that supplies vast quantities of poorly educated illegal aliens. But that wouldn't do anything for their campaign against capitalism.

A reduction in the supply of cheap labor would drive up wages. Would it drive wages up enough to pay the equivalent of these "living wage" laws? I don't know. I do know that in the 19th century, before steamships made travel to America cheap, the perpetual shortage of labor here meant that even unskilled workers did much better here than in Europe--with daily wages often three or four times that of Britain, for example. In Britain, workers averaged about a shilling a day. In America, three or four shillings a day was more typical.

The response of the privileged classes, at least during the Colonial period, was to pass maximum wage laws, so that the poor wouldn't exploit the rich. A couple of years back, I mentioned an example from Massachusetts Governor Winthrop's journal of an "insolent" worker, and why they just had to pass a maximum wage law. Some colonies set a maximum wage of three shillings a day for skilled laborers, and 2 1/2 shillings a day for unskilled laborers. Accounts from English travelers to America in the early Republic also mention how difficult it was to keep servants, because they could, if mistreated, find another equal or better paying job on short notice.

I know, I know, interfering in the free market by enforcing our immigration laws would drive up prices of anything that has unskilled labor in it. There's no question that this is true. But I rather doubt that even a 25% increase in labor rates for lettuce pickers would mean a 5% increase in the price of lettuce. Remember that a lot of the cost of food isn't the labor to pick it, but packaging and transportation. Even labor in restaurants isn't the major cost of your meal. I would much rather pay another 50 cents for a Big Mac Meal, in exchange for stopping the flood of illegal aliens, and see the people working behind the counter get paid enough that leftist ideology doesn't sound so attractive. And remember: these are our neighbors, sometimes our friends, and even our kids (at least until they get through college).