Joyce Appleby: Living Wages are Key to Poverty Eradication
[Joyce Appleby is professor of history emerita at UCLA and a member of the LAANE Resource Board. Her latest book is "The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, 2010."]
Advocates for the poor are pushing against the same obstacles that 18th century opponents of slavery confronted: acceptance of an evil because of its familiarity. It's hard to be outraged by a condition that's been around for millenniums. Even the Great Emancipator despaired of ending poverty.
Quoting Scripture, Abraham Lincoln said that the poor will always be with us. That attitude once applied to slavery. Then, with remarkable suddenness, the idea of abolition aroused a cadre of reformers who changed public perceptions in less than a century.
So do we really have to accept that poverty is too firmly entrenched to ever be dislodged?...
Opponents of living-wage ordinances and benefit packages have real concerns. In our highly competitive world economy, individual companies or nations are only going to get pounded if they let their labor costs get out of whack with their competitors'.
But paying a living wage can benefit businesses too. A study of L.A.'s 1997 living-wage law, for instance, funded by the Ford Foundation and undertaken by LAANE in conjunction with the University of California, discovered that the ordinance had increased pay for an estimated 10,000 jobs. Employment reductions amounted to 1%, or an estimated loss of 112 jobs. Most firms gained from reduced employee turnover, which can be costly and disruptive....
Taking a pro-development stance has aligned living-wage advocates with the most powerful anti-poverty force in the world today: capitalism. Market growth in Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and India has lifted 300 million people out of poverty during the last 30 years. And though many of the world's most impoverished people still have no shot — yet — at any employment, much less something that pays a genuine living wage, we've seen remarkable progress....
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus...insists that one of the underpinnings of poverty is the widespread conviction that it is an ineradicable evil, like dying. "I firmly believe," he says, "that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it." In a poverty-free world, Yunus has remarked wryly, "the only place that you would be able to see poverty is in a poverty museum."
When that happens, L.A.'s living-wage advocates can take some of the credit for convincing the public that the poor need not always be with us.
Read entire article at LA Times
Advocates for the poor are pushing against the same obstacles that 18th century opponents of slavery confronted: acceptance of an evil because of its familiarity. It's hard to be outraged by a condition that's been around for millenniums. Even the Great Emancipator despaired of ending poverty.
Quoting Scripture, Abraham Lincoln said that the poor will always be with us. That attitude once applied to slavery. Then, with remarkable suddenness, the idea of abolition aroused a cadre of reformers who changed public perceptions in less than a century.
So do we really have to accept that poverty is too firmly entrenched to ever be dislodged?...
Opponents of living-wage ordinances and benefit packages have real concerns. In our highly competitive world economy, individual companies or nations are only going to get pounded if they let their labor costs get out of whack with their competitors'.
But paying a living wage can benefit businesses too. A study of L.A.'s 1997 living-wage law, for instance, funded by the Ford Foundation and undertaken by LAANE in conjunction with the University of California, discovered that the ordinance had increased pay for an estimated 10,000 jobs. Employment reductions amounted to 1%, or an estimated loss of 112 jobs. Most firms gained from reduced employee turnover, which can be costly and disruptive....
Taking a pro-development stance has aligned living-wage advocates with the most powerful anti-poverty force in the world today: capitalism. Market growth in Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and India has lifted 300 million people out of poverty during the last 30 years. And though many of the world's most impoverished people still have no shot — yet — at any employment, much less something that pays a genuine living wage, we've seen remarkable progress....
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus...insists that one of the underpinnings of poverty is the widespread conviction that it is an ineradicable evil, like dying. "I firmly believe," he says, "that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it." In a poverty-free world, Yunus has remarked wryly, "the only place that you would be able to see poverty is in a poverty museum."
When that happens, L.A.'s living-wage advocates can take some of the credit for convincing the public that the poor need not always be with us.