By Mike Hollihan

Democratic legislators held a press conference in Nashville two weeks ago to announce their push for Tennessee to adopt a minimum wage of $6.15 per hour, a dollar more than the current national standard. The Democrats present did not offer any hard figures demonstrating need, or the number of people affected, or the costs to business in Tennessee, but were long on stressing how raising the minimum wage would help “single mothers with families.”

Such a move may have seemed to come out of the blue for the rest of Tennessee, but Memphis has long been dealing with advocates for a similar income “solution”: the living wage. These issues are linked in that Memphis Democratic activists have been pushing for more government intervention on income for some time, and Democrats now see this as a winning issue to run on for the 2006 elections.

The minimum wage is intended to keep all workers above a perceived income floor below which one worker cannot support himself in at least the essentials — usually defined as shelter, food and health care. Sometimes child care is included. The living wage takes this idea a step further, while also hearkening back to the past. The living wage is an income level intended to provide, at 40 hours a week, enough money for one worker to support a full family (frequently defined as one parent and two children, or as two parents and two children) with shelter, food and health care. This is the Fifties ideal of a working father supporting his entire family while the wife is the full-time childraising partner.

The Memphis Living Wage Coalition has been working for several years to get the Memphis and Shelby County governments to adopt a law requiring them, and all companies doing business with them, to pay all workers $10 an hour with health benefits, or $12 per hour if no benefits are provided. This Memphis Flyer story gives some details.

There was also this earlier Flyer story with more information on the supporters of the living wage and what they want to achieve:

…Rebekah Jordon, executive director of the Mid-South Interfaith Network for Economic Justice…

…Jacob Flowers, director of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center. Flowers was upset that tax freezes through the payment-in-lieu-of taxes (PILOT) program mean that neither the retail portion of Peabody Place nor Hampton Inn will pay full taxes until 2037, while the companies pay workers as little as $7 an hour.

Brad Watkins, chair of Democracy for Memphis and a member of the Living Wage Coalition, said that legislators recognize that the living wage is an important issue.

You’ll notice that while $7.00 an hour isn’t a “living wage” neither is it the current minimum wage nor the new suggested minimum. And yet it’s still not enough.

These groups are tied together by the First Congregational Church, or “First Congo” as they are locally known. The church provides meeting and office space to the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center and is involved with MIFA, the Mid-South Interfaith Alliance. These groups have also participated in numerous anti-war marches and demonstrations here in Memphis. They are proud members of the anti-war Christian far Left, and their boards are populated by academics from a couple of local private colleges.

Democratic party activists, as evidenced by Mr. Watkins (named above), are also part of this loose network of sympathetic leftists and serve on some of these organisations’ boards. The editor for the Shelby County Democratic Party newspaper during the 2004 election run up was a professor at Christian Brothers University and an activist with the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center.

The catalyst that set them all into directed forward motion was a 1999 white paper, “What Is a Living Wage for Memphis?”, written by University of Memphis professor Davic Ciscel. (Note: the link is to the 2002 update.) In an email to me, Prof. Ciscel said, “No one writes such things unless they are interested in the topic…. Yes, the paper was written to influence public opinion. We felt that the issue of low wage work was not being taken seriously in the Memphis region. The response over the past 7-8 years has be[en] very good.” He said the paper “was sponsored by the UM Center for Research on Women and the Women’s Foundation.”

Professor Ciscel now sits on the board of the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center. He is also active with the Living Wage Coalition and MIFA (in other matters).

But what the Ciscel paper makes clear is:

It takes $31,284 a year or $15.64 an hour in a full-time job for a family with one adult and two children in Memphis to be self-sufficient, according to the new Living Wage 2002 study…. For a family with two adults and two children, the 2002 Living wage is $35,130 a year, an increase of 12.5 percent from the 1999 Living Wage of $31,220.

Four more years have passed since these calculations. And even though this “living wage” has continued rising, the demand for the $10/$12 two-tier system remains unchanged.

The local blog Smart City Memphis, part of the Richard Florida creative class-influenced business Smart City, stepped into the debate with two recent posts on the living wage issue.

In the first post, they lay out their argument for the living wage. That post sparked some lively debate which caused them to post a follow up, in which they distill their support of the living wage into these three arguments, via an obliging Professor Ciscel:

1. They improve human dignity.
2. They increase the spendable income in the area.
3. Higher wages force business innovations.

The first is, obviously, as vaporous as the blather presented by the Nashville Democrats. The last argument can be restated as saying that businesses will find ways to use technology to get by with fewer employees. In other words, the living wage (and by relation, the minimum wage) helps workers by throwing them out of jobs!

What was most revealing was this statement by the author of the SCM blog:

We see city government as the most fertile starting point for this movement. Then the county and the state, and if the living wage could be applied to PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes), it would capture an awfully (sic) lot of jobs that are locating outside of Memphis.

In another comment he misconstrued the “social compact” of the Founding Fathers as requiring income equalization.

All of this appears to be the potent stew from which the Tennessee minimum wage law was served. State Senator Steve Cohen is from Memphis and was one of the chief sponsors of the legislation. He is also the most high-profile of the bunch.

What was missing in all this, as noted in the beginning, were hard numbers. It fell to the Nashville Tennessean to provide them in a subsequent story last week.

They note that a minimum wage increase in Tennessee will affect “[a]bout 40,000 people — fewer than 3% of the state’s hourly workers — [who] have jobs that pay at or below the federal minimum wage, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

They also note that minimum wage workers “were generally young, single and without high school diplomas,” which directly counters the assertion of Tennessee’s Democrat legislators.

You can also read about the political side of the debate in the General Assembly in this story from the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Still, Democrats think they’ve found a winner with this issue. It appeals directly to workers who always feel underpaid, even though very few people will directly benefit immediately from a minimum wage hike. After the bruising they took with the Tennessee Waltz scandal, where they were seen as willing pawns of business, it helps to strengthen their credibility with liberal voters.

The Democratic legislators think it costs them nothing, but they will learn better when the State employee’s union uses the new minimum wage base to argue for increases in their wages.

The minimum wage is the foot in the door to larger plans. The living wage is social engineering. It’s tinkering with things as they are to get the desired outcome as it should be. “Should be” of course, is defined by those seeking to inflict their ideas on the rest of us.

Mike Hollihan is an award-winning blogger who writes at Half-Bakered and is currently campaigning to be The Commercial Appeal’s new Metro columnist.