This is good news:
About 1,200 Cincinnati janitors voted Saturday to accept their first union contract with the area’s eight largest cleaning companies, landing a deal that will more than double their pay in five years.
The accord came after representatives for the Cincinnati janitors overwhelmingly approved a five-year contract with ABM, Jancoa, Aetna Building Maintenance, Professional Maintenance of Cincinnati, Scioto Corp, GSF, NSG and OneSource.
The janitors had earlier this month authorized calling a strike if necessary. But the union and the employers tentatively agreed to a deal after two days of talks that lasted until nearly 2 a.m. Friday.
The service economy is the largest portion of our economy and expected to provide almost all the new non-governmental jobs until 2014. Whatever happens with free trade in the future, technology and the inevitability of global competition will prevent a return to th 1950s, when the US was the manufacturer of the world. If our economy is going to continue to grow, then service sector jobs have to be made into middle class jobs in the same way that factory jobs were eventually made into middle class jobs. Unions cntracts like this one a a necessary first step in that process.
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
“If our economy is going to continue to grow, then service sector jobs have to be made into middle class jobs”
Lake Woebegone realized. Everyone will be (at or) above average.
Ted:
Asking that everyone be above average is impossible, but I don’t see why it should be impossible for everyone who works a full-time job to earn a living wage.
Also, unless I’m reading you wrong, you’re operating from a definition of “middle class” — whatever the people making around the median income make — that guarantees that there will always be a middle class. But that’s not the definition that most of us go by. (Certainly not I.) I look at it as people who are neither wealthy nor living in poverty. And I don’t see why the overwhelming majority of the populace can’t be in that group.
Yes, middle to me implies middle. I have no problem with everyone earning a living wage.
(no keyboard)
Ted:
Then you’re taking the term too literally. Historically speaking, the “upper class” have been the wealthy, and the “lower class” are the poor, including the working poor. For a long time throughout history, that’s pretty much all you had. The middle class is a fairly recent development, and if things keep going the way they have been, their place in history could be fairly short-lived.
It’s pedantic to assume the literal definition of “middle” in a discussion concerning the middle class.
When the majority of the ‘working poor’ have air conditioning in their homes, and one in three smokes cigarettes (quite expensive), and cable or sat TV, I think the “living wage” is the least of real concerns. 40 hours a week at 5.50 pays for much more than normal low-end living costs, even for those who need a car for travel, and it’s hard to stay at that low of a value. Outside of waitresses/waiters, most of whom would give up their normal wages in exchange for a half a hostess/host and the resulting ability to take more tables, I can’t think of any job position that stays at minimum wage for more than three months. Even dishwashers or Walmart greeter beat that.
And, as Ohio recently discovered, when labor costs go up, so do the costs on the market, often by significant amounts. Since the ‘working poor’ tend to spend a disproportionate amount of their income on low-end items made with inexpensive materials but higher in labor costs, increasing the bottom costs on the market can have significant and reverse negative effects — not to mention that many small businesses will no longer be able to offer pay raises for those who were previously at the new minimum wage without increasing costs or cutting heavily into other margins.
Minimum wage laws are an important part of standardizing inter-state commerce costs, something that the free market just can’t do. Pretending to save the low-end worker with new laws that’ll have little net long-term effect doesn’t justify the intervention, though.
Tgirsch, I think you are basically making this up as you go along. Of course there is no strict definition of the term middle class, but for you to assert that one must be living in poverty to not be included in the middle class is just plain silly. That might be your definition, but I think you would be hard pressed to find an academic who shares it. Perhaps you are familiar with the term “working class”?
Now if Kevin’s statement that service jobs must be turned into middle class jobs meant those who work service jobs should not live in poverty, then I agree. (To a degree. $100,000 and 18 kids implies poverty to me.) I read it to mean service workers should earn on par with white collar workers and skilled blue collar workers. Which is an unsustainable state short of government-regulated salary structures. That is my real point, a point that I can now more clearly state.
PS. I wonder what happened to all those factory jobs the US once had. Why did they move overseas? Is the segment of the US population that worked those jobs better off now than it was in the 50s? I don’t think the answer to that question is a slam dunk.
“40 hours a week at 5.50 pays for much more than normal low-end living costs, even for those who need a car for travel”
OK, let’s run a quick analysis. I’m more attuned to monthly costs, so let’s do this on a monthly basis. (We will assume no taxes, no kids.
Obviously, if you have a kid and have to spend $6 an hour for day care in order to work, you are under water before you even walk out the door.)
Income:
$953 per month
Expense:
$200 car payment (shitty, used car)
$100 gas (one tank of gas every 10 days)
$100 health care (assumes employer pays most)
$300 rent (probably an impossibility)
$250 food ($8.33 per day is pretty thin)
OK, so my single, non-tax paying individual just spent all his income and dollar one has not been allocated to clothes, entertainment, car repairs, non-covered medical expenses, electric bill, telephone, education, or any other such luxuries.
But if you say so Gat, I’m sure those $5.50 an hour folks have plenty of money to throw around.
Well, either that or you are completely full of shit.
So, here’s a question:
Given that federal min. wage doesn’t scale with local cost of living, in those places with higher costs of living the min. wage requirement is less of a deviation from what the free marketeers are asking for. The obvious question: Are people working minimum wage in high-cost areas any better off than in low cost areas?
Clearly, any answer would have to be viewed in the light of other infrastructure, but this seems like any easy thing to start with.
Ted:
Perhaps you are familiar with the term “working class”?
Mea culpa. That’s a better term. At the same time, however, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the time, those terms are used interchangeably.
Otherwise, I’ll let Kevin answer for himself as to what he actually meant.
And I was going to smack Gatt around, but I see you beat me to it. That “He has a DVD player, therefore he’s not poor” argument is as tired as it is asinine.
P.S. Good work: You even left $3
a daya month to support a smoking habit!Ted
I thought I was clear in the post — factory jobs used to be etremly low paid, hazardous work. Unions helped change the balance of power so that more of what the workers produced went in their pockets, leading to a situation where working class people could aspire to and reach a middle class life. Not everyone did, of course, but the path was available to most. I wasn’t trying to argue that we need to have every person in the country make the median wage, only that service sector jobs have replace manufacturing jobs in importance in the economy so if we don’t want to lose our large middle class, we need to make them look more like the factory jobs of the 50s and 60s than of the 1890s.
Kevin, then we agree. But if you read your initial post and your most recent comment, I think you will agree that the latter is not an obvious extension of the former. Not that my posts are the model of clarity or consistency, but you are a better writer than I am, so I hold you to a higher standard.
Dan M, can you explain your concept a bit more?
Ted:
Seemed pretty obvious to me, anyway…
The argument that I’ve heard (at least from “liber”tarians) against laws requiring a minimum wage is as follows:
(1) The min. wage law requires that buyers of labor pay more for certain kinds of labor than they otherwise would. (Clearly. That’s why the law’s there.)
(2) This increases the costs of things that require labor those kinds of labor. This increased cost is passed on to the outputs of that labor. (Almost certainly true.)
(3) This constitutes a distortion of the free market. (This is true for the laissez-fare meaning of “free market”, though that interpretation differs substantially from that used in capitalism.)
(4) If a free market is inherently efficient, then this distortion reduces efficiency. (This is a huge ‘if’. It’s the part I want to test, since it’s a priori pretty implausible.)
Now, if this theory holds, then those places in which the minimum wage distorts the market less should suffer less inefficiency. (Here, the meaning of “efficiency” is a bit unclear, but my understanding is that “liber”tarians think that “free” markets are optimal at reducing the transaction costs that increase the net costs of an economy.)
My question is simply whether places where the same numerical value of currency buy less material, i.e. those places in which the minimum wage laws cause less distortion, have a better or poorer efficiency of their local economies.
But I’m afraid that the question may be meaningless without also addressing what other facilities affect the fraction of wages that have to go to fixed costs, and it also depends on what it even means for “cost of living” to differ with locality.
I suspect the latter has some standard economic theory explaining it. I suspect it’s like most economic theory and is a matter of what side of an issue can shovel bullshit faster.