A Way to Break the Cycle of Servitude
The New York Times
August 31, 2003
ECONOMIC VIEW
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
ON this Labor Day weekend, let us remember
low-wage workers.
Twenty percent of the work
force — 26 million people — earn $8.23
an hour or less. Most of them are
not teenagers snagging pocket money,
but adults supporting
families. With so little income, too
many Americans are pushed into poverty,
and getting out of this trap is
increasingly difficult.
As many studies have shown, rising income inequality has driven people apart. And low-wage workers,
occupying the bottom rung in this ruptured
society, have descended into what amounts
to a servant class. It is not their work
that makes them servants. We need
factory assemblers, store
clerks, child care workers and
the telephone operators who field
calls to "800" numbers, processing
much of the nation's commerce.
What makes them servants is the miserable pay.
Measuring status by wage, as many Americans do,
no one — the employers of low-wage worker,
the public or the low-wage workers
themselves — seems to value this class
of work. Promotion, or higher pay,
would be a way out. Unfortunately,
neither solution kicks in very often.
More than in the past, low-wage workers
are stuck in place.
"There is not any kind of sinister approach by companies or individuals to make this happen," said Jeffrey Joerres, chief executive of Manpower Inc., the temporary-help agency, which places many low-wage workers. "But it is the path that we are on."
That path has become self-perpetuating. Employers are under constant pressure to cut costs. Hospitals, for example, have to bid for good medical staffs, so they offset this cost by squeezing the wages of unskilled kitchen workers. Or they outsource food preparation to contractors who pay even
less. In either case, the result is a constant, dispiriting turnover. But it is tolerated. The low wage more than offsets the cost of one or two days of training for each new hire.
So wages barely rise. Adjusted for inflation, the $8.23 an hour today is only 9 percent higher than the $7.55 that the workers in the 20th percentile earned 30 years ago, according to the Economic Policy Institute. All of that improvement came in the very tight labor markets of the late 1990's,
when even low-wage workers could command higher pay.
The constant turnover of people in these jobs often leaves the impression that low-wage workers are irresponsible and unambitious. But Eileen Appelbaum, director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, offers a different explanation. "If you work in a hospital as a nurse's
aide, you care about patients, and you are asked to care for more people than you can safely care for and you are afraid you will hurt someone," she said. "So, you leave."
Or you have a personal crisis — a sick child, for example. Low-wage jobs seldom come with time off, "so you quit, knowing that when you can work again, there will be another rotten job you can get," she added.
Training is a way up the wage ladder, but employers of low-wage workers seldom offer it or give those workers time away from daily tasks. Manpower Inc. offers training, but for jobs that pay $9 an hour and up. Most of the more than 180,000 people that Manpower sends out each day
earn at least this wage, but 30 percent draw only $8.50 an hour or less. For them, the instruction is less than respectful. Job readiness, it is called.
"We have a whole set of videotapes that are uncomfortable for me to watch," Mr. Joerres said. "You need to arrive on time. You can only take breaks at break time. Have you taken a shower?"
FAR from lifting these workers, the unfettered American marketplace holds them down. They need help, ideally from employers, if only those employers could find their way back to the pre-1970's system of long-term employment in low-skilled jobs that included training, promotions and
raises. In some places, unions still force this to happen — at New York City hospitals, for example — and no hospital is at a disadvantage because each is bound by the same wage scale. But in this era of disappearing unions, that is not likely to work.
Raising the minimum wage would be a quicker
route, if only Congress and the administration
would make that a priority. The minimum wage once
went up regularly, peaking in 1968 at the
equivalent of $7.08 an hour today, adjusted
for inflation. That's nearly $2 above today's
actual minimum of $5.15 an hour. Just
restoring the minimum to its old value of
$7.08 would also push up wages that are
just above the minimum.
Suddenly, the bottom 20 percent of the work
force would be making up to $10 an hour,
instead of $8.23. That might be a large
enough raise to justify training and job
security, and new respect for the men
and women in these jobs — respect
as workers, not servants.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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