Not long ago, I responded to an op ed in my local newspaper written by an arch conservative who berated those in Missouri demonstrating for a $15 per hour minimum wage. This spring the Missouri General Assembly, deeply in the grip of a selfish GOP majority, reversed local efforts in Kansas City and St. Louis to raise the minimum wage in their cities. The fight won’t end there. But it is important to know where we’ve come from to understand why we need to go back to something that worked a half-century ago, why it worked and how to argue on behalf of this fundamental improvement.
First, let’s go back in time.
In 1967, my minimum-wage job at a children’s clothing warehouse near downtown Kansas City paid $1.40 per hour. I worked my tail off unloading up to five truckloads a day, 250 boxes each truckload, of clothes weighing about 60 pounds per box. I stocked those clothes on shelves up to 12 feet high in a dusty, sweltering oven of a warehouse. I took the bus from my home near Research Hospital and transferred at Brookside to get to the job and back each day.
That first summer out of high school I made enough in three months to pay for two semesters including books at UMKC (I couldn’t afford to go to college away from home), buy five shirts, five pairs of slacks, a pair of new shoes, socks and a coat for the winter, a year’s worth of car insurance so that I could drive our family car once in a while, and have some money for gas. The next summer I got ambitious, working at the warehouse and two other jobs making well below minimum wage, at a pizzeria and bucking hay bales – a penny a bale off the ground, another penny a bale off the truck.
Things weren’t the same as they are today. Back then, the clothing company had three plants in Falls City, Neb., Syracuse and Auburn, Kan. where mostly women from the surrounding farms would come to sew together the Eton suits, pants and shirts. America was filled with those small town factories, and their jobs. Even though none of us working for the company belonged to a union, well north of 28 percent of America’s workforce were members of organized unions, and wages and benefits across the country reflected that. CEOs of major companies made about 20 times what their average employee made. And if you were a resident of Missouri and wanted to attend a University of Missouri school (at Columbia, Rolla, St. Louis or UMKC), you paid no tuition, but were responsible for “fees and incidentals,” which at UMKC amounted to $187.50 a semester my first year, increased to $190 a semester the second year. Back then, the Missouri General Assembly and the governor thought enough of Missouri’s next generation that they financially supported higher education for all in-state students, regardless of income.
Those minimum wage floors weren’t generous, but enough for a person to get started, even to live on. There were opportunities in construction to manufacturing where even those lacking a high school education could find a job, maybe work at it 30 to 40 years and retire with a sufficient pension. The economy worked for most, not just for the few.
A lot has changed in five decades, and not for the better. Today two semesters at UMKC costs about $11,000, but that three-month, minimum-wage job only pays about $3,000 of that. Average CEO pay since the 1970s has risen nearly 1,000 percent compared to 11 percent for the average worker, adjusted for inflation. No one can support himself on a minimum-wage job today. Higher education is even more valuable now than 50 years ago, but much less affordable. At least some semesters in college are a must, and a bachelor’s degree means a hefty student loan for most nowadays, with years of crushing debt. Manufacturing jobs have gone off shore, were replaced by robots or became obsolete, yet this country’s net worth, adjusted for inflation, is staggeringly greater today than 50 years ago. Where did all that wealth go?
My conservative advocate insists that “Wages are not going to magically rise to some preconceived level such as $15 per hour because of protesters.” But the old golden rule is more insidious today than it was 50 years ago. Those who hold the gold make the rules, more so today than ever before. Blame the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, the reversal of campaign finance reforms, the right’s all-out assault on collective bargaining for more than a century, or just the concerted effort of the right to insist that greed is a virtue. We in Missouri have watched our neighbors in Kansas test out the cockamamie theory of trickle-down economics. It failed miserably, and conservative Republicans are now paying the political price in the Sunflower State.
How else will wages move upward? Union membership has fallen to around 8 percent of the workforce now, so far fewer are advocating for livable wages. The American worker is losing, and we know it. The wealthiest are culling the nation’s treasure to the detriment of more than 95 percent of the rest of us.
If those who are not surviving at the bottom of the economy take to the streets to protest, it’s for a good reason. This country’s working and middle class continues to be looted. Aggregating wealth among a relatively few plutocrats doesn’t find its way back into the economy, it doesn’t get invested into production or jobs or educating a broad base of the next generation. Instead it allows the few to buy up more stock, gain more control of production and capital, shift labor costs across the oceans and limit access to higher education by pricing it out of reach for all but the wealthiest.
Raising the minimum wage puts money into the hands of people who will spend it, who will invest in their education and their future, and provide more opportunity for most Americans. A minimum wage of $15 per hour doesn’t solve all problems, but it’s a start. It’s leverage to begin moving the economic needle of America back to the vast majority and away from the extremely wealthy, who won’t be harmed in any way. Find me just one former plutocrat standing in line at a soup kitchen.
The economic game has been fixed for benefit of the few, and Americans know it. Broad voter resentment of that got Trump elected and Bernie Sanders nearly nominated, but nothing is going to change unless it begins at the bottom, not the top. The tax code, banking and financial rules, and government commitment toward higher education are far different today than they were when I was starting out. No modern-day P.T. Barnum will change that. A swamp isn’t drained by adding the fattest Wall Street alligators and eliminating ethical scrutiny.
Remembering what once worked, and arguing for fairness today — with your friends, your neighbors or in the street — is our best chance.
We once benefitted greatly from a wind at our backs, not merely our fortitude and willingness to work hard. Today we should respect those protesters who struggle to walk into a tornado. As Nobel laureate Bob Dylan opined, I “don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”