‘Fight for $15’ puts workers at risk
The Chicago Tribune recently reported on the links between the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and various community organizing groups behind the campaign to increase Chicago’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. In her story, reporter Alejandro Cancino found that SEIU and its affiliates had spent at least $2 million on a campaign to organize...
The Chicago Tribune recently reported on the links between the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and various community organizing groups behind the campaign to increase Chicago’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. In her story, reporter Alejandro Cancino found that SEIU and its affiliates had spent at least $2 million on a campaign to organize fast-food workers and promote a $15 minimum wage in Chicago.
The union is very unlikely to ever get to represent these workers, as University of California labor professor Harley Shaiken commented in the Tribune article, because many fast-food restaurants typically are franchises. This means workers at McDonalds restaurants in Chicago will have multiple employers, who would organize individually if they were to unionize.
But one could argue the union’s involvement in the fast-food campaign really isn’t about collective bargaining or organizing these people; it’s about politics. Labor unions do not accept the legitimacy of market-based wages – even with collective bargaining.
This is not limited to so-called unskilled, minimum wage jobs. Many union contracts call for negotiations to reopen – with workers expecting pay increases – whenever the minimum wage changes. There are even contracts that use the minimum wage as a base, and then derive wages for other workers from that. For instance, the contract may set wages at 50 percent over the state or federal minimum wage.
Such a contract basically disconnects worker pay from market conditions, because compensation is based on the law.
The problem for workers is that even if their wages are tied to politics, their job security is not. An ill-timed increase in the minimum wage may make their companies less competitive, and cost them their jobs. By contrast, a contract that pegged wages to key economic indicators, such as median income, would allow wages to go up when the economy is stronger, while remaining competitive when the economy slows down.
Beyond this, the union push for a $15 minimum wage is yet another example of how union officials can be cavalier about how the policies they pursue actually affect workers or the poor. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a $10.10 minimum wage would cost 500,000 workers their jobs. A $15 minimum wage would have even more drastic effects.
So in the “Fight for $15,” union officials are not worried about how their contracts work in the real economy. They think about politics, they write contracts based on politics. They base their activities and their spending on politics. And in the end, it’s workers who are put at risk because of it.