8. POLITICAL ORPHANS
The quality of democracy is not measured in the contentment of the affluent, but in how the political system regards those who lack personal advantages. Such people have never stood in the front ranks of politics, of course, but a generation ago, they had a real presence, at least more than they have now. The challenging conditions they face in their daily lives were once part of the general equation that the political system took into account when it decided the largest economic questions. Now these citizens are absent from politics -- both as participants and as the subjects of consideration.
These citizens are not the idle poor, though many hover on the edge of official poverty and virtually all exist in a perpetual condition of economic insecurity. These are working people -- the many millions of Americans who fill the society's least glamorous yet essential jobs and rank at the bottom of the ladder in terms of compensation. A large segment of working-class Americans has effectively become invisible to the political debate among governing elites. They are neither seen nor heard nor talked about.
Their absence is a crucial element in the general democratic failure of modern politics. There are different reasons why this has occurred, including all of the deformed power relationships already discussed. But, above all, they are missing because in the past the weak and disorganized segments of society always depended on strong mediating institutions, such as organized labor, to speak for them, to make certain that their particular grievances were included in the whole. When those mediating agents lost power, these people were abandoned too, with consequences more starkly unjust than the injuries done to any other class of citizens.
This loss of power, as the evidence will demonstrate, was not entirely an accident of history or the result of ineluctable social change. The laws that protected the rights of workers to organize and defend themselves in politics have been systematically disfigured by political manipulation, much like what happened to other kinds of law. The governing system, likewise, displays the same cynical penchant for symbolic responses to the plight of working people that it has demonstrated in other areas. And the most difficult irony to grasp is that reforms enacted a generation ago to help the very poor are part of what obscures today's working-class citizens.
Like other citizens who have lost power, the humblest working folk have figured out how politics works in the modern age. They know that their only hope is "rude and crude" confrontation. To illustrate this reality, we turn to a group of citizens in Washington, D.C., who are utterly remote from power -- the janitors who clean the handsome office buildings in the nation's capital. In a sense, they clean up each night after the very people and organizations that have displaced people like themselves from the political debate. While they work for wages that keep them on the edge of poverty, their political grievances are not heard through the regular channels of politics.
Like other frustrated citizens, the janitors have taken their politics, quite literally, into the streets of the nation's capital.
***
In late afternoon on a warm June day, while the people in suits and ties were streaming out of downtown office buildings and heading home, a group of fourteen black and Hispanic citizens gathered on the sidewalk in front of 1150 Seventeenth Street Northwest and formed a loose picket line. They were the janitors who cleaned this building every night and, though hardly anyone noticed or cared, they were declaring themselves "on strike" against poverty wages.
"Fire me? Don't bother me one bit. Can't do worse than this," Lucille Morris, a middle-aged black woman with two daughters, said. She was passing out picket signs to hesitant coworkers, most of them women. "Hold 'em up'" she exhorted the others. "Let 'em know you're tired of this mess."
Others grinned nervously at her bravado. An older Hispanic woman dressed in work clothes started into the building and was intercepted by one of the strikers. "She says she's just going in to use the bathroom," Leila Williams reported, "but she's coming back out." Williams, a sweet-faced grandmother who lives with her sixteen-year-old grandson in one of the poorest wards of southeast Washington, was wearing a bright red union tee-shirt that proclaimed: "Squeeze Me Real Hard -- I'm Good Under Pressure."
"No one is working -- this building isn't going to get cleaned tonight," the organizer from the Services Employees International Union announced with satisfaction. "And nobody's going to get fired," Jay Hessey reassured. "The company can't find enough people to do these jobs at this pay."
"I've been here eleven years and I still get the same pay the newcomers get -- $4.75 an hour," Lucille Morris said. "We be doing like two people's work for four hours a night. We don't get nothing in the way of benefits. You get sick, you sick. You stay out too long, they fire you."
"One lady been here for fourteen years and she still get five dollars an hour for doing the bathrooms," Leila Williams added. "They give you another quarter an hour for doing the toilets. When we pass inspections, you know, they always treat us. They give us pizza or doughnuts, like that. We don't want no treats. We want the money."
The SEIU, a union that mainly represents people who do society's elementary chores, launched its "Justice for Janitors" strategy nationwide in 1987 and has staged scores of similar strikes in downtown Washington as well as other major cities. Because of the way federal government now regulates the workers' right to organize for collective action, regular union-organizing tactics have been rendered impotent. So the workers mostly stage symbolic one-night walkouts to grab attention.
The real organizing tactic is public shame -- theatrical confrontations intended to harass and embarrass the owners and tenants of the buildings. The janitors will crash the owner's dinner parties and leaflet his neighborhood with accusatory handbills. They will confront the building's tenants at social events and demand help in pressuring the owners.
They, for instance, targeted Mortimer Zuckerman, the real-estate developer who owns The Atlantic magazine and U.S. News & World Report, with a nasty flier that declared: "Mort Zuckerman might like to be seen as a public citizen, responsible editor, intellectual and all- around good guy. To the janitors who clean his buildings, he is just another greedy real-estate operator." They hounded Zuckerman at important banquets and even in the Long Island Hamptons at celebrity softball games, in which he is a pitcher. [1]
The owners and managers of some five hundred office buildings in Washington have developed an efficient system that insulates them from both unions and higher wages. Each owner hires an independent contractor to service the building and the competitive bidding for contracts is naturally won by the firm that pays the least to the janitors. About six thousand workers -- most of them black or Hispanic -- are left without any practical leverage over the arrangement. When the union signs up workers and demands its legal right to bargain for a contract in their behalf, the building owner promptly fires the unionized cleaning contractor and hires a new one who is nonunion. Old janitors are fired, new ones are recruited and the treadmill continues.
This management device keeps janitors like Lucille Morris stuck permanently at the same wage level year after year, hovering just above the legal minimum required by law, a wage level that provides less than $10,000 a year at full-time hours.
But these janitors do not even get full-time work from their employers. By doubling the size of the crews, the contractors can hold the workers to a four-hour shift each night and, thus, legally exclude the janitors from all of the employee benefits the firms provide to full- time employees -- health insurance, pensions, paid vacations, paid sick leave. The law protects this practice too.
In order to survive, these women and men typically shuttle each day between two or three similar low-wage jobs, all of which lack basic benefits and other protections. Some of the janitors, those who are supporting families, qualify as officially poor and are eligible for food stamps, public housing or other forms of government aid. In effect, the general taxpayers are subsidizing these low-wage employers -- the gleaming office buildings of Washington and their tenants -- by providing welfare benefits to people who do work that is necessary to the daily functioning of the capital's commerce.
In another era, this arrangement might have been called by its right name -- exploitation of the weak by the strong -- but in the contemporary political landscape that sort of language is considered passe. Exploitative labor practices are subsumed under the general principle of economic efficiency and the consequences are never mentioned in the political debates on the great social problems afflicting American cities. The government may authorize welfare for the indigent, but it will not address the wages and working conditions that impoverish these people.
In another time, unions might have been able to achieve a larger political remedy for these conditions -- increases in the minimum-wage law or labor laws that truly protect collective bargaining rights and prevent the profitable abuse of part-time workers. In the present political climate, labor is too weak and divided for such a straightforward assault.
The way is now blocked by others, including the array of Washington policy experts who speak on the subject of economics with scholarly authority. They have assured the political community that it would be counterproductive to address this matter concretely as a political issue, that the minimum-wage issue is no longer relevant to the modern economy. It is these voices that dominate the larger political debate, while the janitors cannot make themselves heard.
For the city of Washington, the political neglect constitutes a social irony, for many of these janitors live in the same troubled neighborhoods where the vicious street combat over drugs occurs. The community is naturally horrified by the violence among the young drug merchants and, without much success, has deployed both police and National Guard to suppress it. Yet the city is oblivious to the plight of the janitors -- the people who are working for a living, trying to be self-supporting citizens and must live in the midst of the dangerous social deterioration.
Economists might not see any connection between these two social problems, but any teenager who lives in one of the blighted neighborhoods can grasp it. One group of poor people, mostly young and daring, chooses a life of risk and enterprise with the promise of quick and luxurious returns. Another group of poor people, mostly older men and women, patiently rides the bus downtown each night, and in exchange for poverty wages, they clean the handsome office buildings where the lawyers and lobbyists work. When the janitors stage their occasional strikes, they are harassing the very people who have helped block them out of governing issues -- the policy thinkers, the lawyers and lobbyists and other high-priced talent who have surrounded the government in order to influence its decisions.
By coincidence, one of the tenants at 1150 Seventeenth Street, where they were picketing, was the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that produces policy prescriptions for the political debates of Washington. When the service-employees union organizers approached AEI for support, their request was brushed off, but AEI has had quite a lot to say about minimum-wage laws and their supposedly deleterious effects. In recent years, AEI has published at least nine different scholarly reports arguing against the minimum wage. This position faithfully represents the interests of AEI's sponsoring patrons -- the largest banks and corporations in America. [2]
But the SEIU organizers insisted they were not trying to make an ideological point by picking on AEI. The real target was the building owner, which operated a dozen downtown buildings in a similar manner. Besides, they explained, most of the ostensibly liberal policy groups in Washington are no different, from the janitors' point of view.
Indeed, the next strike was planned against another building, also owned by the Charles E. Smith Management Company, which served as the home of the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank that specializes in studying the afflictions of the urban poor. The Urban Institute, though presumably more sympathetic to the working poor, has also published scholarly pamphlets questioning the wisdom of laws to improve their wages.
The Urban Institute scholars are regarded as a liberal counterpoise to such conservative institutions as AEI but, in fact, the liberals are financed, albeit less generously, by the same business and financial interests that pay for the conservative thinkers -- Aetna Insurance, $75,000; Chase Manhattan Bank, $15,000; Exxon, $75,000; General Electric, $35,000; Southwestern Bell, $50,000 and so on. The commonly held illusion in Washington politics is that supposedly disinterested experts contend with each other over defining the "public good" from different viewpoints. Yet many of them get their money from the same sources -- business and financial interests.
Like other tenants, officials at the Urban Institute insisted the janitors' pay was not their problem. It was a dispute for the cleaning contractor or the building owner to resolve. The SEIU organizers Were twice turned down in their efforts to meet with the Urban Institute's officers, so they went out to picket their private homes and tried to crash the institute's banquet for its board of directors.
"Isn't it the same kind of issue any time you pass someone on the street who's homeless?" asked Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at the institute who is an authority on the "underclass" and related social questions. "It's hard to get involved as an individual in all these microdecisions to change the system. It can't be done at that level. Laws and policies have to be changed."
But these weren't exactly distant strangers one passed on the street. They were the very people who cleaned the office each night, carried out the trash, vacuumed the carpet and scrubbed the sinks and toilets.
"Actually, we never see them," Sawhill allowed. "I do sometimes see them, I admit, because I hang around late, but most people don't."
The janitors, it is true, were mostly invisible. Despite several years of flamboyant efforts, the janitors' campaign had gained very little presence in the civic consciousness of Washington. Public shame is not a terribly reliable lever of political power. For one thing, it only works if widely communicated, and the major media, including The Washington Post, had largely ignored the fractious little dramas staged by the janitors.
"People are yawning at them," said Richard Thompson, president of General Maintenance Service, Inc., the largest employer of low-wage janitors. "If there were really a justice question, people in this city would react. There are a lot of government and city government folks who wouldn't stand for it." [3]
The janitors thought they would embarrass both local politicians and congressional Democrats when they targeted a strike at the new shopping complex in Union Station, which is owned by the federal government. Instead, the janitors were fired and commerce continued without interference from the government. Though the Democratic party is ostensibly sympathetic to people like the janitors, Democrats also rely on the real-estate industry as a major source of campaign money.
After an hour or so of picketing on Seventeenth Street, the janitors got into vans and drove over to a museum at New York Avenue and Thirteenth Street where a local charity was holding its annual fund-raising gala. The strikers had no quarrel with the charity, but they did wish to embarrass David Bruce Smith, a young man who is an officer in his grandfather's real-estate company and was serving as chairman of the benefit dinner.
The women in red tee-shirts and the union organizers spread out along the sidewalk and began giving handbills to any who would take them. "Talk with David Bruce Smith," the leaflet asked. "The Janitors Deserve Some Benefits Too!"
The encounter resembled a sidewalk parody of class conflict. As people began arriving for the event, an awkward game of dodging and ducking ensued between the black janitors and the white dinner guests in evening dress. Women from the charity dinner stationed themselves at curbside and, as cars pulled up for the valet parking, they warned the arriving guests about what awaited them. The black women came forward offering their leaflets, but were mostly spurned, as people proceeded swiftly to the door.
"Look, we are a charitable organization and this is political," a man complained bitterly to the union organizers. "People are going to see this and say, what? Are you trying to embarrass me? They're coming here to enjoy themselves."
Jay Hessey reminded him of the constitutional right to petition for redress of grievances. Three D.C. police cars were on hand in the event the janitors violated the law by blocking the doorway or waving placards. It's unfair, the official sputtered, to target an organization that is devoted to charitable activities. It was unfair, the janitors agreed, but then so is life itself. Some people get valet parking. Some people get an extra quarter for cleaning the toilets.
As tempers rose, Hessey stood toe-to-toe with the angry officials and rebuffed them with an expression of utter indifference to their distress. Hessey's colloquial term for the janitors' rude theater -- "In your face" -- was the essence of their politics. Cut off from the legitimate avenues of political remedy, the janitors had settled on what was left. Like it Or not, fair or unfair, people were going to consider, at least for a few uncomfortable moments, the reality known to these janitors.
Most of the guests followed instructions and darted past the demonstrators to the door, but this greatly amused Lucille Morris and Leila Williams and their companions. It had taken considerable Courage for these black and Hispanic cleaning women to stand on a sidewalk in downtown Washington and confront well-to-do white people from the other side of town. Once they were there, the women found themselves enjoying the encounter.
It was the white people who turned grim and anxious. Without much success, the black women followed couples to the doorway, urging them to read the handbills. An elegantly dressed woman in silk turned on them and snapped: "You know what? For three hundred dollars, you should be able to enjoy your evening!"
When a mother and daughter streaked past Leila Williams, refusing her handbill, she called after them: "All right, ladies. But you might be standing out here yourself sometime."
"That's right," another janitor exclaimed. "The Lord gave it all, the Lord can take it away."
Their exercise in public shame was perhaps not entirely futile. The elegant woman in silk evidently thought better of her harsh words to the black women because, a few minutes later, she returned outside and discreetly asked them for a copy of their leaflet. She mumbled an expression of sympathy and promised to help, then returned to the banquet.
***
The janitors may lack formal educations and sophisticated experience with finance but they understand the economic situation well enough.
They know, for instance, that unionized janitors in New York City or Philadelphia will earn two or three times more for doing the very same work. They know that in Washington the federal government and some major private employers, like The Washington Post and George Washington University, pay nearly twice as much to janitors and also provide full employee benefits. They know, because the union has explained it for them, that janitorial services represent a very small fraction of a building's overall costs and that even dramatic pay increases would not wreck the balance sheets of either the owners or the tenants.
The problem, as they see it, is not economics. Their problem is power and no one has to tell the janitors that they don't have any. Collective action is the only plausible means by which they can hope to change things. But even the opportunity for collective action has been gravely weakened for people such as these.
The janitors' predicament provides a melodramatic metaphor for a much larger group of Americans -- perhaps 20 million or more -- who have also lost whatever meager political presence they once had. These are not idlers on welfare or drug addicts, though they often live among them. These are working people, doing necessary jobs and trying to live on inadequate incomes.
These Americans have been orphaned by the political system. They work in the less exalted occupations, especially in the service sector, making more than the minimum wage but less than a comfortable middle-class income. Most have better jobs and higher wages than the Washington janitors -- office clerks, hospital attendants, retail salespeople -- but are trapped by similar circumstances. Among health-care workers, for instance, one third earn less than $13,000 a year. Some occupations that used to be much higher on the wage scale -- airline stewardesses or supermarket clerks -- have been pushed closer to the low end by the brutal giveback contracts that labor unions were compelled to accept during the 1980s.
The incomes of the group I'm describing range roughly upward from the poverty line (around $10,000 for a family of three) to somewhere just short of the median household income of around $35,000. "Working poor" does not accurately describe most of them but then neither does "middle class." The poor still suffer more in their daily lives, of course, but even the poor are represented in politics by an elaborate network of civic organizations.
If one asks -- Who are the biggest losers in the contemporary alignment of governing power? -- it is these people who are economically insecure but not officially poor. During the last generation and especially the last decade, they have been effectively stripped of political protections against exploitation in the workplace. Neither party talks about them or has a serious plan to address their grievances. In the power coordinates that govern large national questions, these people literally do not exist.
The consequences of abandonment are profound and extend to many other conflicts beyond work and wages. On issue after issue from taxation to environmental protection, these are the people who suffer most regularly from political neglect. When EPA did nothing to enforce the law on toxic air pollution, these people absorbed the results -- the increased cancer rates in their neighborhoods. When the Labor Department allowed the law on occupational health and safety to become a scandal of nonenforcement, these were the people who suffered the injuries and disease. When Congress and a series of presidents played "bait and switch", with the tax code in order to reward the wealthy, these working people were the taxpayers who were penalized most unjustly.
How might their voices be heard? Only utopians imagine a democracy in which each and every one of these people is someday able to appear in person before the higher forums of government, where the larger questions are debated and decided. Most citizens, regardless of status, have neither the forensic skills nor the time and inclination to participate at that level. That is not what they want or expect from politics.
For most people, democratic expression requires the strength of collective action -- a mediating mechanism that will listen to them and speak faithfully on their behalf in the official forums. It is such institutions that accumulate power from their organized numbers, that hold a place for people in the debates and serve as surrogate spokesmen and intelligent monitors of the politicians. This ingredient is the heart of what these people lack and what they have lost.
The voice they lost was the voice of labor. Over the last twenty years, organized labor's political power has declined disastrously -- a fact that is central to virtually every economic question fought out in contemporary Washington politics. Labor unions, notwithstanding their rigidities and autocratic crust, were the core liberal force within the old Democratic party and committed their considerable political resources to other progressive causes, including both the civil rights and environmental movements. Their weakness has weakened many other causes -- especially the ranks of unorganized workers.
In another era, the urban political machines also spoke for many of the citizens who work in unglamorous jobs, but those organizations are now mostly defunct. People moved to the suburbs. Racial antagonism divided and weakened their representation. Political structures that effectively served struggling workers when the workers were Irish or Jewish or Italian are now much less effective when the workers are black or Hispanic or Asian. Labor unions do still try to organize and represent lower-tier workers but most of these people are not union members and the labor organizing is frustrated by both legal and cultural barriers.
A generation ago, leaders of the AFL-CIO could think of themselves, with only slight exaggeration, as full partners in the power elite that governed America. Now, they have lost their membership or, rather, they were kicked out of the club. Unions are mostly reduced to rear-guard battles -- fighting cheap-labor imports or defending the pensions of retired workers or competing expensively with each other for membership jurisdiction.
Like other mediating institutions that lost authority, organized labor saw its influence dissipate for many reasons, because of both complex changes in the society and its own stubborn refusal to adjust to change. More than those reasons, however, labor unions were decimated by two things: the global shifts in corporate economic structures and the political confinements imposed on workers by the law itself.
The ability to move industrial production from high-wage, unionized locales to cheaper nonunion areas -- first to the South and then, more important, to foreign labor markets -- devastated the major industrial unions representing auto and steel workers, machinists, electrical workers and others. They lost millions of members and also much of their contract-bargaining power. In real terms, measured against inflation, the wages of America's premier industrial workers are declining too.
But the economic forces squeezing labor were complemented by politics and the force of law itself. The rights that labor's political power first won for workers in the reform era of the 1930s have been steadily disfigured and shrunk. The machinery for enforcing labor rights still exists in the federal government, but functions now as a device for impeding collective action. It is yet another self-correcting mechanism in politics that has been corrupted to other purposes.
A union like the SEIU that organizes a majority of workers at a worksite mayor may not ever see a contract with the employer. If the company chooses, it can undertake years of litigation and, in the meantime, the workers may well be fired. One in fifteen people who tries to organize a union at a workplace loses his or her job. The threat alone is enough to impede others from trying.
Over three decades, the AFL-C10 did not shrink in size, but it did not grow with the economy either. The AFL-CIO's 14 million members were roughly one third of the workforce in the 1960s, but only 17 percent by the 1990s. Given the legal risks of union organizing, the growth sector in American labor is now public employees, since, in most instances, they can't be fired for signing a union card.
The National Labor Relations Board has been converted by business appointees into a regulatory agency that adeptly protects management by stalling and suppressing workers' grievances. In the first 150 days of the Reagan administration, the NLRB reversed eight major precedents. Its probusiness decisions in union-representation cases soared to 72 percent, compared to 46 percent in the Carter administration and 35 percent under Gerald Ford. The backlog of undecided cases grew from eight hundred to seventeen hundred -- effectively nullifying the workers' complaints by postponing a remedy for years and years. [4]
While unions were crippled, work itself was also reorganized in many fields to undermine the leverage of individual wage earners. "Contracting out" and hiring "part-time" workers who receive no employee benefits have mushroomed as standard labor practices of business, cost-cutting techniques used by even the largest corporations. By 1989, nearly a fifth of the workforce held at least one part-time job. The so-called "temporary" jobs with no employee benefits tripled during the 1980s.
As labor law was compromised, companies figured out, as labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan wrote, that "they could violate the Wagner Act [enacted in 1935], fire workers at will, fire them deliberately for exercising their legal rights and nothing would happen.... Maybe, after three years of litigation, the employer might lose, and have to pay a few thousand bucks, if that much: a cheap price, though, for keeping out the union." [5]
By comparison, while U.S. labor was shrinking, Canadian unions grew in the same period from 32 percent of Canada's workforce to nearly 40 percent -- mainly because the process for gaining collective recognition is simpler and more direct in Canada. In most western industrial nations, the density of organized labor has increased since the 1960s -- a fact that refutes the familiar arguments about labor unions impeding international competitiveness. West Germany, admired for its productive efficiency, has a workforce that is 43 percent unionized.
"European workers enjoy more power, both economically and politically, than their American counterparts," said Michael Merrill, a professor of labor relations at Rutgers University. "They have higher real wages, a stronger and more comprehensive social 'safety net' and a greater degree of political representation than U.S. wage earners do." [6]
Indeed, the astonishing irony of American labor's political condition is that even struggling workers in eastern Europe, bravely led by Solidarity in Poland, have been able to pursue forms of collective action that are not available to workers in the United States. Americans who cheered the triumph of Solidarity perhaps did not realize that the sane tactics are illegal in the United States. If an American union adopted Solidarity's methods -- seizing the plant with sit-down strikes or forming an interfactory strike committee to coordinate a general strike across different industries -- it would be held in contempt and pinned down with injunctions and huge fines. If the tactics persisted, the leaders would doubtless be jailed and perhaps workers too.
These rights were either traded away in exchange for federal labor-law protection or gradually taken away through court decisions and legislation. Labor has tried periodically to win back some of the protection by political action and launched a new effort in 1991 with a measure to prohibit hiring striker replacements in wage strikes.
Its prospects are not good. In 1978, despite the fact that labor provides major funding for Democrats, the Democratic Congress refused to pass labor-law reforms that would have removed some of these barriers. The stereotype of aging white labor bosses still makes it relatively easy for politicians, even Democrats who get so much of labor's money, to scorn them, but the stereotype is no longer accurate. The rank and file of the labor movement is more thoroughly integrated by both race and gender than any other institution in America, except perhaps the armed services or the Catholic church. Furthermore, labor's goals are the very measures that would deliver the most direct relief to the struggling service-sector workers on the bottom rung -- workers who are overwhelmingly racial minorities and women.
One crucial fact has been obscured by the long decline of labor as a political force: Millions of American workers want to join a union but, for all these reasons and others, they can't. According to regular surveys conducted by the University of Michigan, 30 percent of the workforce consistently expresses a desire to be represented by a union contract protecting their working conditions and wages. When that number is added to the 17 percent of the workforce who are already union members, it provides a rough measure of how much the power relationships in politics have been distorted. Roughly half of the working population identifies with labor's interests, yet labor is confined by law and politics to a position of weakness.
The statistics also confirm that the yearning for collective expression is alive and widespread, though effectively blocked. Labor is in retreat and unable to defend its own members from further loss, much less the weak and unorganized workers. Yet these two groups represent half of the nation's workforce -- the people who are not heard.
***
In the spring of 1989, various Democratic senators complained privately that Teddy Kennedy was forcing them to cast a "money vote" that might hurt them with campaign contributors but wouldn't accomplish anything since President Bush was' sure to veto the measure anyway.
The "money vote" was Kennedy's proposal to raise the federal minimum-wage floor modestly. Roll calls on such business-labor issues normally follow the obvious party division, but Democrats also feel the underlying tension of voting against business interests that have the power to finance a Republican opponent in their next campaign.
"A senator tells himself: You got an antibusiness reputation and you better work on it," Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas explained. "When it's a money vote -- minimum wages, mandatory health insurance, the capital-gains tax -- and you're perceived as antibusiness, you have to think about it. Even if you know you're not going to get their money, you think about keeping them quiet. You won't get their money but you can at least tranquilize them."
By 1989, the federal minimum-wage law had not been changed in a decade and, given the yearly erosion from inflation, the real value of $3.35 an hour had fallen by roughly one third during the 1980s -- one reason, among others, why the lowest-paid tier of workers was falling behind so drastically. Kennedy proposed only to restore the lost ground -- no more than that -- by raising the minimum in three stages to $4.55 an hour.
Even that proved to be too ambitious for political consensus. After much back and forth and a presidential veto, Congress settled on $4.25 an hour by 1991. The final deal was brokered between labor leaders and the White House so that no one would be embarrassed when President Bush addressed the AFL-CIO fall meeting. The wage increase, as the reluctant senators had predicted, was not enough to make much difference to anyone. [7]
Despite the elaborate complications piled onto the subject, the arguments about job losses and so forth, the straightforward effect of raising the minimum wage is not disputed among economists. Overall, it produces a net shift in incomes from employers to employees, from companies to workers. The secondary effect, if the wage floor is raised significantly, is to push up wage levels for jobs that are above the minimum but compete for workers in the same labor pools.
Thus, this approach is a very direct way to reorder the imbalance in rewards generated by the private economy and get money to those who need it most, not just poor people but the vast ranks of workers, such as the D.C. janitors. The people who pay for this are not the taxpayers, but the business owners and, to some degree, the consumers who have benefited from the cheap labor. Instead of spending public money to compensate for private injustices, it uses public authority to direct private behavior to just results.
Labor and business both understand these effects well enough and that is why they will always be on opposite sides of the question. For different reasons, neither wishes to speak too clearly in public about the underlying transaction. Instead, the issue was treated by all sides as a familiar anachronism and the congressional debate was spiritless and predictable, smothered in false pieties from both sides. Republicans made speeches that sounded like canned material from the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers. Democrats gave speeches that sounded like boilerplate from the AFL-CIO. Neither side talked about the millions of workers like the D.C. janitors who were paid somewhat above the federal minimum but would benefit directly if a serious measure were passed.
While organized labor is always the main locomotive driving minimum-wage politics, this time it was following more than leading -- repeating slogans that no longer stirred its energies. "Kennedy got it in his head to pass a bill and we went along," Rex Hardesty, chief spokesman for the AFL-CIO, acknowledged.
Throughout the Reagan years, labor had been wary of trying to increase the federal minimum wage for fear the outcome would be the enactment of the so-called "training wage" for youth that Republicans and business always push. Creating a subminimum would permit employers to hire teenagers at cheaper wages for the training period, then fire them and hire new ones, thus displacing older workers whose incomes support families.
For the major industrial unions, the minimum wage had never been a core issue, but in the past they always lent their muscle to their poorer cousins, unions like the SEIU, the garment workers' union, the food and commercial workers' union and others that represent the weakest workers. This time, given the new realities of American incomes and global economics, the heavyweight unions were fighting on other fronts that seemed more crucial to them. The AFL-CIO supported the Kennedy bill, but not with its old vigor.
The transformation of labor wages in the last two decades has opened up a new divide between the economic self-interest of industrial unions and the plight of those unorganized service workers at the bottom of the ladder. Both are losing ground, but the bottom tier is falling faster. This divide provides another explanation for why the political voice for those people has weakened.
"When the minimum wage was 50 percent of the average manufacturing wage, as it used to be, you could really push the wage structure up from the bottom," said David Smith, New York City's business development commissioner and a former aide to Senator Kennedy. "But, when the minimum wage is now only 26 or 27 percent of the manufacturing wage and there are virtually no minimum-wage workers in factories except for the garment industry, the gap between labor unions and the working poor is wider. If we push up the wages of cleaning people and security guards and nursing-home attendants by $1.50 an hour, we're still not bumping up against the bottom of the industrial wage structure."
If Congress were to raise the federal wage floor substantially, bringing it back to a level around 50 percent of the manufacturing wage level, the 20 million or so workers now dispossessed by politics would benefit enormously. Even though most of them earn more than the minimum, the action would inevitably create upward wage pressure in their labor markets too. Yet such action is highly unlikely so long as organized labor's power is atrophying and its rear-guard battles are concentrated elsewhere. That describes the vicious circle the janitors and others are caught in -- their only champion is weak and distracted.
During the Senate debate, Republicans needled Kennedy by asking him why, if he wished to help the downtrodden, he didn't propose a minimum wage of six dollars or seven dollars. Kennedy danced away from the debating trap, but it was actually the right question. A steep increase in the wage floor or a shorter work week for everyone would be most disruptive to existing economic relationships, too controversial for even ardent liberals to endorse, but if the political community were serious about attacking the grosser inequities of American life it would require such disruptive measures.
The minimum-wage law is one of those inherited forms that endures from previous reformers, but only as an empty shell. The original purpose has been lost in politics, but the measure still gets passed with appropriate fanfare -- and even the conservative president's signature -- because it satisfies old bromides and looks like an enlightened act of social conscience. In the real world, nothing much is changed.
If politics ever approached the subject seriously again, the old form could itself be drastically revised. Labor's original purpose in promoting the federal wage law was, in part, to prop up wages in the impoverished South and thus slow the migration of industrial union jobs to cheaper labor markets. That purpose has been obliterated by the changed economy and global production. Therefore, it is now possible, for instance, to draw up a more sensible and flexible version of a federal wage standard that allows for the disparities in regional or rural labor markets, just as federal pay standards now accept that a federal employee in Washington, D.C., needs more income than one in Mississippi.
A modernized minimum wage, furthermore, could redefine the coverage to distinguish between part-time jobs mostly filled by teenagers and the jobs that are filled by those millions of service workers suffering from inadequate incomes. Middle-class teenagers do often fill the jobs in fast-food restaurants. They do not generally work as nursing-home attendants or security guards or janitors.
Some low-wage jobs, it is true, might be driven overseas in search of cheaper labor if the federal minimum were raised substantially. But the overwhelming preponderance of these jobs, especially in the service sectors, are not portable. Companies cannot hire people in Mexico or Indonesia to clean office buildings in Washington or harvest crops in Florida or answer telephones in New York City. A redefined minimum-wage law could make some distinctions between what work is portable and what is not. It would attack especially the exploitation in jobs that are not going anywhere, but are essential to daily life.
The minimum-wage debate in 1989 did not talk about any of these questions or even hint at any of these possibilities. Instead, the discussion was almost exclusively about the "poor" -- as officially defined by the federal government -- and whether raising the minimum wage would help them or hurt them.
Republicans spoke for the "poor" by opposing the minimum wage on the grounds that a higher wage floor would eliminate some low-wage jobs, as 'indeed it would. Democrats argued for the "poor" by pointing out that several million full-time minimum-wage workers are officially poverty-stricken, as in fact they are. Nobody talked about those millions who are a bit higher on the wage ladder who might also benefit from a higher floor.
Like the janitors in downtown Washington, not only have the "nonpoor" been rendered invisible, but their identity has been perversely distorted in the public-policy debate. A critique of the minimum-wage bill published by the Progressive Policy Institute, another Washington think tank, pointed out that 85 percent of the minimum-wage workers are not "poor" and, indeed, many are suburban teenagers working in hamburger joints. With facile arithmetic, the institute's policy thinkers described an economy in which it seemed that most of the crummier jobs are actually filled by middle-class white kids.
The institute's report had a devastating impact in Washington political circles. After all, if "progressives" are against the minimum wage, then who can be for it? In this case, "progressive" was a slight misnomer since the institute is aligned with center-right Democrats trying to move their party rightward and it is financed by wealthy business contributors from Wall Street and elsewhere. Among the institute's "progressive" board members was Robert Kogod, president of the Charles E. Smith Company, the same Washington real-estate company targeted by the striking janitors, the same firm that paid its workers $4.75 an hour, with an extra quarter for cleaning toilets. [8]
The unintended effect of the federal government's so-called "poverty line" is to obscure the existence of the vast pool of struggling families who are above the line -- the officially "nonpoor" -- and to push them out of the political equation. Just as affluent Washington does not see the black and Hispanic janitors in its midst, the political community as a whole cannot see this class of exploited workers. So long as basic economic issues are defined by the government's narrow and misleading statistics on "poverty," the minimum wage and many other effective reform measures will indeed sound anachronistic.
When liberal economists invented the so-called "poverty line" in the early 1960s, it was a brilliant stroke of political imagination. By devising a quantifiable definition of who was poor, they made the vast deprivation in American society instantly visible to others. The public was shocked by the numbers and politicians could proceed to make decisions about government programs based on crisp estimates of how many millions would be lifted out of "poverty."
Over the years, the poverty statistics steadily became less meaningful. The measure was never realistically adjusted to rising living costs, but it remains the focal point of political debate -- the 13 percent or so who are identifiably impoverished in the midst of fabulous wealth. Helping the "poor" is considered virtuous, even among Republican conservatives. Helping the "nonpoor" is thought to be. wasteful or even fraudulent. In fact, most of the so-called "welfare cheaters" denounced by politicians and the public are actually low-wage working people who collect food stamps or other federal benefits on the sly, even though they earn a bit too much to qualify as officially "poor." [9]
The official recognition of "poverty" has become an especially cruel instance of old reforms that imprison the politics of the present. The "war on poverty," leaving aside its failures and successes, left behind a deformed perspective in public policy that is oddly disconnected from the present realities. Instead of defending the livelihoods of working people who do not make enough money, politics focuses primarily on the most disabled and disaffected group below them -- people who either cannot or will not fill the low-wage jobs their neighbors do every day. A convenient ideological stalemate has developed around this perspective, in which the liberal experiments prove ineffective while conservatives will not discuss any alternative that might disrupt business clients.
The illusion that doomed the "war on poverty" was the assumption that education and training could "solve" the problem of poverty, and this illusion still reigns in the higher realms of politics, shared by liberals and conservatives alike. The problem of poverty is presumed to reside in the poor people themselves, not in the structure of wages available in the private economy. It is assumed that the personal weaknesses of the poor must first be repaired in order to prepare them for better jobs and higher incomes.
This reasoning perversely focuses political attention on the most impaired people -- the hardest cases -- and skips over those virtuous folk who are already working, doing society's dirty jobs for the rest of us every day. The training-and-education approach is popular, however, and much less controversial because it does not disrupt the private labor markets. The ethic of self-improvement and personal effort is central to the American experience and almost everyone believes in it.
"Fixing up" poor people, however, even when the federal programs succeed, does not alter the structure of the wage ladder in the slightest. Some people may climb up, but someone else must still do the same jobs, the ones that pay too little to support families. The logic of this, though generally evaded, is inescapable. Imagine that education programs were so universally successful that everyone in the society was someday magically brought up to a level of higher education and awarded a college degree, even those cleaning women in D.C. If everyone were transformed into computer technicians or lawyers, then who will sweep the floors and clean the toilets? Someone has to do it.
Since politicians will not confront these wage questions in the private economy, they turn instead to the public treasury for relief. Aid is delivered in various forms to people to make up for the shortcomings in their incomes. Since those programs mostly only reach the officially "poor," political sentiment has turned to another approach that will reach some of the low-wage workers -- an earned-income tax credit that gives a cash rebate to those who do not earn enough to support families. Even younger Republican conservatives, anxious to demonstrate their social conscience, have embraced the idea. Among its political virtues, the earned-income tax credit is discreet -- a subsidy that other citizens don't see.
But using the tax system has the same effect as the other forms of federal welfare that are provided to workers: The net effect is to subsidize the low-wage employers by relieving them of the responsibility for paying living wages. Instead of the office-building owners and their tenants, the burden of providing for the janitors is shifted to the general taxpayer (and may ignite considerable resentment if people ever figure it out). When the federal tax structure was progressive, placing the heaviest tax burden on those with the most income and wealth, the tax-credit approach had much merit. Now it adds injustice -- a discreet transfer of money from one group of struggling wage earners to another group just below them. [10]
Most obviously missing from the political debate are the people who will be most affected by these decisions. Their experience and understanding are not present and they cannot be heard through the layers of expert opinion and old political formulas. If the janitors found a political voice, it might or might not alter the decisions, but it would certainly blow away many of the illusions. If they could be heard, what would the janitors say to the politicians? They might say what Lucille Morris said: We're "tired of this mess." And what Leila Williams said: "We don't want no treats. We want the money."
***
After many weeks of pressure and rude confrontations, the D.C. janitors found that some people do respond to the tactics of public embarrassment. After twice rebuffing them, officials at the Urban Institute agreed to support the janitors' plea for better wages. Mortimer Zuckerman also evidently had a change of heart, for his real-estate company abruptly agreed to bargain with the union for contracts at three buildings. The Charles E. Smith Company retreated too after the expressions of community concern generated by the janitors' appearance at the charity dinner. [11]
These breakthroughs for "Justice for Janitors" might be taken as heartwarming evidence that "the system works," as Washington political columnists like to say. But the real meaning was the contrary. The janitors' union, like others, has figured out that the way politics gets done nowadays is not by electing people to office or passing bills in Congress. Politics gets done by confronting power directly, as persistently and rudely as seems necessary.
For all its weaknesses, the irregular methodology exemplified by "Justice for Janitors" has become the "new politics" of the democratic breakdown. Other labor unions, large and small, have adopted similar strategies designed to "shame" corporations into accepting decent labor relations. They confront prominent shareholders at public gatherings or testify against the companies at zoning hearings and before government agencies. They assemble critical dossiers on a corporation's environmental record that will shock the public and drive off consumers. These and other corporate-campaign strategies are sometimes effective in forcing a company to respond to its workers. Like the "Justice for Janitors" campaign, however, the tactics are driven by the workers' essential weakness, not the potential power that lies in their collective strength. In the present circumstances, what else works?