It is to the real advantage of every producer, every manufacturer and every merchant to cooperate in the improvement of working conditions, because the best customer of American industry is the well-paid worker. —Franklin D. Roosevelt

Despite the Koch Brothers spending a fortune, last year, to defeat the proposed $15 minimum wage in the town of Seatac, Washington, a community around the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, it passed. In the run-up to the election, employers threatened layoffs and shutdowns, some because they believed they couldn’t make it paying workers a living wage. The Washington Post reported:

In July 2013, hotelier Scott Ostrander stood before the city council in SeaTac, Wash., pleading with the town not to adopt a $15 minimum wage.

“I am shaking here tonight because I am going to be forced to lay people off,” he said, according to an account in the Washington State Wire. “I’m going to take away their livelihood. That hurts. It really, really hurts. . . . And what I am going to have to do on Jan. 1 is to eliminate jobs, reduce hours — and as soon as hours are reduced, benefits are reduced.”

So what happened to Scott Ostrander’s Cedarbrook Lodge? Instead of folding, the hotel went ahead with a $16 million expansion, adding 63 rooms, a spa and more $15 per hour jobs.

Ostrander may have been crying crocodile tears to persuade people not to pass the wage increase—or he could have been genuine. It’s hard to say.

Like many business owners, he may think that the best management approach is the greed-driven, scarcity-based business model developed by Walmart, fast food chains, Amazon and other large companies who hire low-wage workers, and/or outsource labor to low wage countries The idea is: squeeze workers wages, push them to higher levels of productivity, and increase profits. It’s a short-sighted business model that creates disengaged, unenthusiastic workers and impoverished communities. In the end, nobody wins except a small minority of owners and stockholders.

The good news is that the experiment in Seatac has not only helped the small town turn around economically, but it has publically driven a stake into the lie of trickle-down economics. Increasing the minimum wage did not destroy businesses. On the contrary, it has helped businesses profit.

Nearby Seattle has also enacted a $15 minimum wage but, unlike Seatac, it will be seven years until it is fully in place. Yet even with that increased labor cost looming, businesses in the area are expanding. The Washington Post gave a few examples:

Tom Douglas, who runs fifteen restaurants in the Seattle area, warned that a higher minimum wage law being considered by Seattle would force the shutdown of a quarter of his restaurants. Instead, after the results in Seatac, he is opening five new restaurants to meet demand. And this story is being repeated, over and over again, throughout the region.

And this:

SeaTac-based Alaska Airlines, likewise, spent heavily to defeat the minimum wage, saying that it would harm competitiveness. Though the $15 wage for airport workers remains in court, Alaska Airlines, the dominant SeaTac carrier, apparently isn’t worried: Last month, the port authority moved forward with airport construction that could reach nearly $1 billion—to be paid for by the airlines.

And kudos to Togo sandwiches:

Likewise, the International Franchise Association has sued to block implementation of the law, arguing that nobody “in their right mind” would become a franchisee in Seattle. Yet Togo’s sandwiches, a franchise chain, is expanding into Seattle, saying the $15 wage isn’t a deterrent.

The $15 minimum wage is an idea that is catching on. On September 4, fast food workers all over the country took to the streets to demand a $15 per hour living wage. Most now make on average $9 per hour, and many of these jobs are part time.

Opponents of the $15 minimum wage claim that prices will have to go up, causing businesses to go under. The New York Times reports that Ken Jacobs, chairman of the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education, estimates a $15 per hour wage would probably cause a 10 percent price increase, but that higher pay would save restaurants money by reducing turnover and increasing productivity. Of course, nothing says a franchise owner has to raise prices. He or she could swallow some of the increases in exchange for a more stable and productive work force.

And, let’s not forget, raising the minimum wage would save the government the billions it now spends on public assistance for minimum wage workers at fast food restaurants and low-paying, big box stores like Walmart.

As little Seatac is showing, when people are allowed to make a living wage, communities and businesses thrive. People have a way to save, go to school, support themselves and their families—and they have money to spend, which in turn helps the economy. We’re the wealthiest nation on earth yet we have a growing population living in poverty. It’s time to address income inequality with a $15 minimum wage.

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The date was March 25, 1911. As employees were getting ready to leave work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan, a fire broke out on the ninth floor. Within minutes, fire spread uncontrollably as discarded remnants and packing materials strewn across the floor ignited. Panicked workers rushed to find a way to safety, but found exit doors locked. In just 18 minutes, 146 people—123 young women and 23 men—were dead. Many were found huddled together, their scorched remains piled up against the locked doors. One hundred feet below on Greene Street, the sidewalk was littered with the mangled bodies of young women who leapt to their deaths to escape the inferno.

The horrors of that day marked a watershed moment in the struggle for better working conditions for American laborers. Shortly after the fire, 400,000 people filled the streets of New York demanding change. In the months and years following the fire, determined workers organized and joined together in unions as never before. Labor laws protecting the rights of workers and reasonable fire-safety regulations were written and passed on the local and federal level.

But the conditions that led to the tragedy at the Triangle are still with us. And, sadly, it’s easy to ignore what’s going on because the sweatshops are no longer located along the avenues and side streets in Manhattan’s garment district, but are hidden from our view in cities and towns continents away. More than a century later, workers across the Third World produce the inexpensively priced clothing we wear by laboring in sweatshops where the working conditions are nearly the same as those at the Triangle. Every day exploitation, injury, and loss of life are facts of life in factories in cities whose names, like Dhaka and Savar, become known to us only through the most tragic events.

For example:

• On December 14, 2010, twenty-nine workers were killed in the Hamin Factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the time the workers were manufacturing children’s clothing for Gap. Fire broke out on the tenth floor and then spread to the eleventh. Emergency exit doors were locked to prevent theft. In a scene horrifyingly reminiscent of the day in 1911, desperate workers, who knew the building had no exterior fire escapes, leapt out of upper-floor windows and landed on the street below. In addition to the twenty-nine who lost their lives, hundreds were injured.

• On November 24, 2012, one hundred and twelve workers were killed at the Tazreen Fashions Factory—again in the city of Dhaka—when a fire broke out on the building’s ground floor (where refuse was stored illegally). As the fire spread below, managers ordered workers on the floors above to ignore fire alarms and continue working at their sewing machines. At the time, clothes were being manufactured through a subcontractor for Walmart and Sears.

• On April 24, 2013, in Savar, Bangladesh (part of the greater Dhaka region), Rana Plaza—an eight-story-high building in which apparel was being manufactured for sale by Walmart, JCPenney, and Children’s Place—collapsed, killing 1,135 people and injuring 2,500. In violation of local codes, the building’s owners had added additional floors to a building built on swampy land and ignored warnings of structural deficiencies, forcing workers to continue working in a facility that proved unable to support the weight of heavy machinery and generators.

Today there are 4,500 garment factories in Bangladesh alone, employing more than 4 million workers, most of whom are young women and many of whom are children, at a wage of $37 a month, or 28 cents an hour. In 1911, the young women working in the Triangle factory were earning 14 cents an hour. Take a moment and think about those numbers. Adjusted for inflation and cost of living, that 14 cents from 1911 is worth $3.18 today. That means that garment workers working for 28 cents in the twenty-first century are earning one-tenth of what garment workers were earning more than one hundred years ago.

In the face of so much deprivation and exploitation, if we are the country that we would like to believe we are—that is, a country that claims to be committed to social justice—then there are some hard questions we should be asking of ourselves. The first of those is the most basic. “Will we bother to draw the connection between the clothing we wear and the working conditions of people who produce it?” The second is, “Do we care about what’s happening to those who work on our behalf halfway around the world?” The third is, “Once we know about unsafe working conditions, low wages, and exploitation, are we willing to ignore what we know and accept or tolerate it because we need (or prefer) low-cost clothing?” And most difficult of all: “What does it say about us if we turn away from the suffering through ignorance, willful blindness, or a lack of compassion?”

The context for those questions and perhaps a few answers may be found in a powerful video produced by the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights and narrated with passion by Executive Director Charles Kernaghan.

The post The global sweatshop economy, a century after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Before you fire up the grill this Labor Day or check out the discounts at the stores, how about taking a moment to consider the real meaning of the day?

Labor Day. The words used to mean something.

The words used to have muscle and sweat behind them. They used to honor the labor of workers who built the industrial might of this country.  They defined a day set aside to give workers a well-earned day off but also to celebrate how workers risked their livelihoods (and sometimes their lives) to fight for the right to organize, for decent wages, reasonable hours, and safe working conditions. The concept was born out of the desire to acknowledge the struggle for a more economically and socially just society.

Labor Day should be the one day in the year when we recall how workplace reforms we now take for granted came about.  Shouldn’t we acknowledge on this day how it was organized labor—not the goodwill nor social conscience of employers —that forced an end to child labor, secured health and retirement benefits, and demanded compensation for those injured on the job?

How many of us think about those achievements this Labor Day?  In truth, the name is meaningless.  Labor Day is a joke. So why not drop the pretense and find a new moniker, like Bargain Day or End of Summer Day?  How about Barbeque Day or Must I Go Back to School Day?

Before we abandon the word labor altogether let’s recall some history

Labor Day as originally conceived was the brainchild of organized labor. The historical record is uncertain about who came up with the idea first. Still, it’s clear that the concept of a workingmen’s holiday was proposed either by Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, or Matthew Maguire, a machinist and later secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, New Jersey.

Whichever of the two men proposed the idea, New York’s Central Labor Union ran with it, and the first labor day parade was celebrated in New York City on September 5, 1882.   At the time, the Central Labor Union urged other labor organizations to follow its lead in highlighting the contributions of working people. And the idea caught on. By 1885 with the rapid growth of labor unions, the holiday spread across the industrial core of the country. In 1887 Oregon became the first state to legalize the holiday.

Federalization of the holiday was born out of violence that erupted in 1894 when railway workers in Illinois went on strike to protest wage cuts.  Two strikers were killed when President Grover Cleveland sent in 12,000 federal troops to quell what became known as the Pullman Strike.  Public opinion ran hot against Cleveland’s actions.  In order to appease workers and hoping to gain their votes (he lost his re-election bid anyway), Cleveland declared Labor Day, as we now know it, a national holiday.

There’s more than history to think about this Labor Day

We should also take time this holiday to take stock of where workers and the middle class stand today.  Unfortunately, the balance sheet looks none too pretty (unless, of course, you’re a member of the 1% crowd).  Here are some astounding numbers you might want to think about while you’re waiting for the grill to fire up:

•   Workers’ salaries are at the lowest percentage of G.D.P. since 1929, which amounts to 42.6 percent, the lowest since historical data has been kept.  American corporations, on the other side, are more profitable than ever.
• Incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans grew on average by about $59 in the last 40 years, while incomes of the top 10% of Americans rose on average by $116,071.
• The increase in the real value of the minimum wage since 1990 is 21%, while the increase in the cost of living since 1990 is 67%.

Those depressing (and depressed) numbers are a reflection of a struggling and diminished middle class.  But don’t be fooled by the self-serving rhetoric of the conservative/business class.  This state of affairs—this diminishment of the American Dream—is not about invisible, inevitable market forces. Rather, there is a direct correlation between the union-busting politics that gained ground in the 1980s—and are pursued with even greater zealotry today—and the decline of middle-class wages and benefits.

Jared Bernstein, economist and senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explains:

 The fact is that union density is much more a national policy decision than an act of nature. Unions are an institution that an advanced economy can or cannot decide to foster or suppress. More so than other advanced nations, we have taken the suppression route in recent decades. And that’s one of the reasons why American working families, despite their relatively high productivity levels, benefit significantly less from the fruits of their labor.

Bernstein concludes:

There’s no question that de-unionization is related to the decline in job quality and increase in inequality faced by many in today’s workforce.

Happy Labor Day, indeed.

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