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The
Michigan Socialist | News | Michigan
'Fiscal responsibility'
and
human rights in Lansing
By BEN BURGIS
The Michigan
Socialist
 |
| Living wage campaigns have been fought all over
the country, including in St. Louis, Mo.
(above). |
ACCORDING TO conventional wisdom, workers who
are lucky enough to have a job at any given moment should be
grateful to their employers for "giving" them one.
In exchange for their labor, the owning class
"pays" them a certain salary. Of course, socialists have
always questioned the meaningfulness of this terminology.
Value is produced by those who, well, work.
General Motors gets the money that goes into both wages and
profits from selling cars. Those cars are manufactured by
workers.
A study done in 1995 estimated that for every
dollar paid to American workers by manufacturing companies,
the latter took in about $5.39 in profits.
(And that's the ratio for workers with "good
jobs" in union shops. Imagine the ratio everywhere else!)
So, in a much more meaningful sense, the
workers who manufacture the cars sold by General Motors could
be said to pay their bosses the bulk of what they earn by
manufacturing and selling cars.
As Socialists, the core of our political
perspective is that executives and stockholders are worthless
employees who provide no useful service in exchange for the
generous income they are paid by the working class.
As such, they should be fired.
Of course, it should be understood that the
"victims" of this cost-cutting proposal will never agree to it
and that they will (and indeed have) resisted its
implementation anywhere in the world by any means at their
disposal.
Still, even within the confines of the current
arrangement, there are after all still some laws regulating
the amount of money that workers are entitled to keep for
themselves after most of their earnings have been taken by the
owning classes.
Indeed, "living wage" ordinances granting some
form of (fairly minimal and inadequate) guarantee that
companies that contract with city government pay their workers
enough to live on are already in place in several cities in
Michigan, including, Detroit, Ypsilanti and Ypsilanti
Township, Warren, Washtenaw County, Monroe County, Pittsfield
Township, Eastpointe, Ann Arbor, Ferndale, Taylor and
Southfield.
Generally, such ordinances guarantee that any
one paid the minimum required -- $9.20/hour for workers with
employer-paid health care and $11.50/hour for those who do not
in the case of the one being pushed in the Lansing area --
could pay for an average-priced apartment in their area
without having to spend an exorbitant portion of their income
on rent.
Not exactly radical stuff, especially as such
ordinances passed by local governments can only be applied
(unfortunately) to employers who receive contracts from local
government.
In the Lansing area, a small core of union
activists and community allies has been pushing for something
similar for a long time, often facing an uphill battle to get
support from other community organizations.
The first major victory came with the Ingham
County Board of Commissioners, the committee of which charged
with considering the matter met in early June to make a
recommendation to the full Board.
This meeting was packed with trade unionists
and community activists, including all of the active SPMI
members in the Lansing area, and no one could miss the fact
that the commissioners (who are far more accustomed to the
public ignoring them) were acting uncomfortably aware of this
unwelcome intrusion by the general public.
Predictably, the most vocal opposition came
from those commissioners most openly in the pocket of the
Chamber of Commerce, particularly rural, suburban Republicans
"representing" the most severely under-unionized parts of the
County.
One such Commissioner argued that the costs of
enforcing the measure would be an extravagance that would make
the County look "fiscally irresponsible."
 After all, he said, if Ingham
had to request assistance from other Counties for its upcoming
airport project, why should they "help us out" when the County
wasted "free money" that they could have done anything with on
making sure that workers in companies with County contracts
have a living wage.
This prompted several people present,
including a member of the Socialist Party, to get up to
denounce this Commissioner's "obscene" remarks in the public
comment section towards the end of the meeting.
By far the best exchange of the meeting came
when Mike Severino, a Republican Commissioner from Holt,
finally came into the meeting and took his seat.
He had skipped most of the meeting, but
apparently his opposition to allowing the workers cleaning the
building enough money to pay for food, housing and other
extravagances, was sufficient to convince him to make it for
the last five minutes and the vote.
He lamely argued that to spend the money
necessary to enforce the Living Wage ordinance in such a way
would be a "slap in the face" to County employees, suggesting
somewhat duplicitously that the money could perhaps be spent
on a raise for them. (Even though contract negotiations had
been completed and their new contract already voted on by that
point.)
This prompted Pat Sonnenberg, a County Health
Department employee and a member of UAW Local 2256, to get up
in the public comment section, livid with anger. She pointed
out that she was after all a County employee and a member of
the bargaining committee at that, and that they already had a
living wage.
"How dare you suggest that we would even
accept a raise if the cost was that the working poor get
nothing?"
In the end, the committee and the Board as a
whole adopted this fairly modest proposal and the campaign
organizers set their sights on the city of Lansing.
Mayor Tony Benavidas, about to face
re-election, surrendered to public opinion and decided to
implement the proposed ordinance as an executive order.
One certainly wonders, however, if it were
simply a matter of "doing the right thing" as he claims, why
he only got around to it after the successful grassroots
campaign on the County level!
This was clearly such a popular move that
nearly all of the candidates in the first phase of the Mayoral
election had to at least pay lip service to some form of a
living wage.
Benavidas' major competitor, Virg Bernero,
made it clear in his response that he was opposed to the
existing executive order or any other even remotely meaningful
living wage ordinance, criticizing Benavidas for not looking
at "all sides" of the issue.
He said that, in contrast, he would only
support a living wage measure that satisfied "all sides,"
making clear that that this very much included the Chamber of
Commerce.
This would have been the exact equivalent of a
politician in the South in the 1950s saying that he would only
support a civil rights ordinance amenable to "all sides,"
including the White Citizen's Councils.
This is the sort of thing that every one
expects to play well in the editorial pages of the Lansing
State Journal, a Gannett-owned rag with a history of
slandering the antiwar movement and refusing to run
corrections.
That said, many local activists involved in
these struggles were shocked to see the City Pulse --
the local "alternative" paper that is generally seen as a
"liberal" alternative -- endorse Bernero after he made this
comment.
The Pulse's editorial endorsing Bernero
essentially shrugged off the issue, claiming that as "the big
picture goes, a living wage is not crucial to achieving
Lansing's dreams."
Of course, the alternative should not be to
vote for typical Democratic Party politicians like Benavidas,
who is no more a thorn in the Chamber's side in his day-to-day
management of the city than any other such bureaucrat
disguised as a politician.
Indeed, Benavidas' campaign billboards
emphasize not his politics but his "experience," making it
clear that he is marketing himself simply as a more or less
efficient bureaucratic functionary.
Rather than crediting Benavidas for his
belated surrender to the wishes of his constituents, we should
credit the movement that put him in that position, and can and
should continue the struggle for more and better protections
around the area and outside of it, regardless of which
non-entity sits in the mayor's seat after this
fall.
If waiting politely for the public comment
sections at local government meetings doesn't get the job
done, then sitting in at the mayor’s office might get the
point across more effectively. A one-day general strike to
show that Lansing’s residents mean business might be better
still.
On the electoral front, what we need aren't
more almost indistinguishable candidates from the two parties
that the owning class trust with managing their system, but
rather strong campaigns by democratic socialist candidates who
will use their offices, if elected, not to passively surrender
to movement pressure but to fight as part of that movement and
publicize its goals.
Its unclear at this point whether the majority
of them will be on the ballot as independents of as Green
Party candidates or whether indeed our party will have
succeeded in gaining independent ballot access by then, but
you can count on the SPMI to start fielding candidates like
that across the state in the 2004
elections. | 
