Wage Slaves: The Case Against Raising the Minimum Wage

There’s been a lot of campaigning lately to raise the minimum wage, both at the Federal and State levels. In Illinois, there has been a drive to almost double the minimum wage for those working in larger industries. Many politicians might be afraid to oppose these initiatives, for fear of appearing hopelessly reactionary, for fear of alienating working families who are struggling to make ends meet. But I think there are a number of good reasons NOT to raise the minimum wage.

Conservative opponents of a rate hike in the United States usually argue that it will increase unemployment, particularly that it will make it more difficult for people to find entry level jobs. I agree with that. But I oppose an increase in the minimum wage for other reasons, for reasons that are hardly ever advanced – for reasons that those along the whole political spectrum from conservative to liberal could identify with and possibly support.

For one thing, I oppose higher wages because they are not good for the environment. That might seem like a non sequitur, but the connection was brought home to me in a conversation I had with a structural engineer from Mexico not long ago. He had trained and worked in Mexico for a few decades, fleshing out the plans that architects make. Like structural engineers everywhere, his job was to translate the architect’s plans into actual building specifications. He figured out how much concrete would be necessary to support the loads, how much steel would have to be imbedded to support the concrete. He had to make sure all the pipes and wiring and other utilities were accommodated. You would think that he’d be working with the same equations no matter where he did his job.

But he said that when he came to the U.S. to work, he had to radically change his approach. In Mexico, building has been done in such a way that a maximum number of laborers are used, and a minimum amount of material. That’s because labor has been relatively cheap in Mexico, while concrete, copper, steel, porcelain, and almost all materials are expensive. In the U.S. though, the situation is reversed. Because wages are already so high here, structures have to be built using a maximum of materials, and a minimum of labor.

My acquaintance had a hard time switching gears in the U.S. He came close to being fired from several engineering firms because he couldn’t bring himself to specify so much material. The waste! The waste! If they could just employ slightly larger crews. But here in the U.S., that wouldn’t have been economically feasible. The man eventually learned to do what was demanded here, but it continued to pain him.

Once I was alerted to this consequence of our high wages, I saw the waste it led to everywhere. It struck home again when I went in search of “caviar,” or more precisely “roe,” from fish other than sturgeon. I thought if fish eggs from those few rare and expensive fish are so delicious and so prized, why not try eating the fish eggs from all sorts of species? A firm in Chicago that had specialized in selling fish eggs from whitefish, trout, and some other species, was just closing its doors when I started my search. So the next time I vacationed in a shoreline town, I went along the piers, stopping at each of the five or six fish processing centers which provided the area with the “catch-of-the-day” fish. At each stop, I asked if I could buy any fish eggs there. After the initial blank looks and the need to repeat the question several times, I got an education in the realities of the fish trade.

I was told that if I wanted fish eggs or fish sacs, I would have to look among the whole fish for sale to see if I could discern a “pregnant” female fish. But my choice would be very limited. The vast majority of fish caught were sent through filleting machines, and these machines were not geared to save egg sacs. The smallest operation on the pier told me that until just six months before, they had employed a couple of workers to do some of the filleting by hand. It would have been possible for them to have saved the fish sacs. But especially since the fishing industry has been hit by such hard times with the depletion of fish from all waters, this one last company doing some hand processing had eliminated such labor intensive refinements and had transferred those employees to more mechanized sections of the operation. Now all the fish destined for filleting or other forms of dissecting were being sent through machines – machines that could not be adapted to save sacs, that could not do anything other than make standard cuts.

So where did all the fish eggs go? The owners told me that they just get dumped. They join the vast slurry of waste produced by all the fish processing plants along that pier and everywhere. What? The tastiest and most nutritious part of many fish species just gets dumped? Yes, that’s the way it had to be.

I realized then how much of most of the animals and fish we kill, how much of most of the plants we harvest – probably gets similarly wasted. Any parts that don’t lend themselves to being quickly processed by machine have to be thrown away.

And so it goes on all fronts. It isn’t just that jobs are eliminated when the high cost of labor pushes everything in the direction of machine processing. It’s that materials get wasted – the very life blood and substance of the earth gets wasted. We are all hit by the waste in all the little ways we lead our lives.

As most of us have observed, almost nothing ever gets repaired anymore, because the cost of the labor involved is prohibitive. It’s cheaper to get a new one. So throw out those printers, those cameras, those microwaves, those cell phones, those clothes, lamps, wash machines, and refrigerators. It’s not only that advancing technology has always made them obsolete and unusable. It’s that any little thing wrong with them would be too expensive to repair.

Recycling programs have a difficult time being cost effective because these projects tend to be labor intensive. Only human beings can judiciously sort and clean the mix of material that flows into re-cycling centers. So while most U.S. cities and towns pay lip service to recycling and while they dutifully distribute blue collection bags and bins along with exhortations to the citizenry on the importance of recycling – in reality, a large part of what’s collected under these auspices actually just gets dumped as part of the regular bulk of trash.

All this is taking a huge toll on the environment. We are sacrificing the long-term health of the planet in order to get a higher hourly wage and to make more money in the short-term. It isn’t even always that jobs are lost when wages are increased. As happened with the fisheries whose operations I learned a little about, many manual laborers are not fired. They are moved to “more productive” posts attending the automatic processing operations of machinery. But in the course of this transfer from manual to machine, the earth is being stripped of its resources at a much faster pace than necessary. More mines are being dug, more wells drilled, more rain forest acreage cut down – in order to get all that surplus material needed to accommodate the standardized operations which are the only operations machines are capable of performing. As the structural engineer from Mexico moaned, “Oh, the waste, the waste!”

But there are other reasons for rejecting demands for a higher minimum wage. What’s true at re-cycling centers, is true with so much of the economy at large. There is so much work to be done that is necessarily labor intensive, that can never be handed over to machines. While we do have a lot more stuff at our disposal than our grandparents had, we have also lost a lot of convenience as a result of making labor so expensive a factor in production. We’ve lost access to the kinds of services only human hands can provide. Public transportation is a prime example of the kind of service we have lost over the decades as wages and benefits have risen.

When my mother was a girl, there was a dense network of buses and trolley cars chugging through the streets of Chicago at all hours of the day and night. All the main arteries of the city had 24-hour service. Most of the elevated trains similarly ran at frequent intervals 24 hours a day. Even a lot of smaller streets had frequent service. Going to sit-up with a sick relative, my mother could stand on a wintry night at 1:00 A.M. by Devon Avenue, not a major artery, and expect a nice warm streetcar to come sparking along to pick her up in a few minutes.

The buses served other purposes than all-day/all-night transportation, as vital as that was to those working night shifts at the factories, to the elderly, to all those couldn’t or didn’t want to drive. The buses helped keep neighborhoods safe. Bus drivers provided monitory eyes-on-the-street as they threaded their way through different neighborhoods. “Watch out! I see you!” A street along which a bus could be expected to come rolling, not necessarily on any very strict schedule, was usually a street clear of drug-dealing, loitering gang activity, aggressive soliciting, and major violence. What’s more, no one was left to stand alone on any desolate corner of such a street for a dangerous forty-five minutes. You could always expect a bus to “be along” any minute.

The buses and els also helped weave neighborhoods together. They allowed senior citizens and children access to the whole city as long as they were able to “Step Up.” Public transportation kept the downtown area an active, vital place because it gave people a handy way to get there without the hassle of parking and confusing traffic restrictions.

Those days are gone. While Chicago still has what is considered to be one of the best public transportation systems in the country, this service is a mere shadow of its former self. A few els still run all night, but infrequently. A few of the largest streets still have some all-night service, but again, it’s usually too infrequent for many people to rely on. The vast majority of those other old routes have been eliminated, or service along them has been cut back so drastically that most people now have to go where they want to go in cars. There’s always the threat of still more service cuts and more rate hikes to come. One CTA Board Chairman after another has left office, if not in disgrace, at least under a cloud of failure – the failure to control costs and to consistently reduce the system’s budget deficit. All this happens against the backdrop of our heightened awareness of the important role public transportation could play in reducing reliance on private cars and the consequent consumption of gas.  

But the public at large, and even some insiders, are reluctant to recognize or acknowledge what’s at the root of the problem. A friend of mine took a typical approach when he announced he had the solution to any budgetary crisis in the system. He said that during off-hours, they should run, not those full-sized gas-guzzling buses, but small vans, like the Medi-Car vans that transport a handful of people at a time to doctors’ appointments. He was sure the use of these more fuel efficient vehicles would solve the problem.

Just off the cuff, I doubted that such a measure could contribute much to reducing the system’s budget deficits. Aside from the inconvenience of having strangers squeeze together into dark little vans at night, I mentioned that there would still be the expense of paying the drivers of these vans, and I thought that might be the system’s major expense. When I had a chance to actually study a CTA budget report, I saw that I was more right than I had suspected. Looking at the CTA’s budget report for the random month of August, 2013, I saw that all fuel, material, and power cost the system less than 8% of its total budget, while labor cost a whopping 70%. So clearly, reducing a few vehicles’ gas consumption would not make any inroads into budget deficits.

But the high wages and benefits that U.S. workers earn strike the average consumer in even more personal, vital ways. Almost all the people I know are either themselves in desperate need of some help in the home, or else they are close to someone who desperately needs such help. Many people are struggling with overwhelming responsibilities at both ends of the spectrum. They need help with child care and they need help caring for aging or invalid parents. But in most cases, there’s no help to be had. Most people simply cannot afford whatever in-home help might be available, at least not through normal channels.

Some resort to hiring immigrant home aid workers whom they pay under the table. Some just try to do everything themselves. Their lives consequently become hectic, over-scheduled, and stressful. Some simply do without altogether. They risk leaving their children home alone sometimes and they risk letting seniors fend for themselves.

An acquaintance of mine is a typical case. She is in her nineties and after a recent fall, has limited mobility. Full responsibility for her care has fallen on her daughter (it is usually the daughter, not any sons). Sometimes this daughter felt as if she was going down for the third time, weighed by the necessity of being in around-the-clock attendance on her mother on the one hand, and the responsibilities of her husband and still-demanding adult children at home on the other hand.

There seemed no way out. They are not a wealthy family. They couldn’t afford to hire a caretaker at the going rates, even for part of each day. Ideally, my elder acquaintance would have liked to have stayed in her own home. She had the mental acuity to enjoy all the books and other interests she was familiarly surrounded by there. But it got to the point that this wasn’t an option. She had to reconcile herself to going into a nursing home.

However that decision posed enormous problems of its own. Many good nursing homes charge residents thousands of dollars a month. That was way outside the range of what my acquaintance could afford. So she had to declare bankruptcy and apply for Medicaid in order to qualify for a nursing home that would admit residents in exchange for the monthly government support checks they could supply. All for the want of reasonable home care.

At this point, some might argue that maintaining the minimum wage at current levels, or even lowering that wage, wouldn’t help in such situations. Since home caretakers are already on the lower end of the pay scale, and since there is already such a shortage of them – maintaining their wages at relatively low levels would only exacerbate the problem. It would create even greater shortages of these workers. Yes, that’s true. But it’s even more apparent that raising general wage levels would only exacerbate the problem to a larger degree.

What’s needed is a re-framing of the problem. We have to stop defining the problem strictly in terms of adjusting wage scales. In order to come to terms with the exhausting need that so many baby boomers and others are facing, we have to recognize the larger disconnect that lies at the heart of our economic thinking. We have to see the irony inherent in the fact that so many people are complaining about the dire lack of any form of affordable help, while others are complaining about being chronically unemployed. With our emphasis on “creating” high paying jobs, we blind ourselves to the fact that there’s already plenty of work that exists out there. We might have to create "jobs", but we certainly don’t have to create any more work.

As one motivational guru put it – “Don’t ask what jobs are available. Ask what work needs to be done. Then go out and do it! Do it with all your heart.” More likely than not, some form of adequate remuneration will follow. If it doesn’t, you will at least have acquired some valuable experience and some widely applicable skills along the way.

If you live in a shabby place, you might not have a job, but you certainly have your work cut out for you sprucing it up. If you live in an apartment, get your landlord’s permission, get some library books, get some paint and plaster, and go to it. Do what you can, the best you can. If then, after seeing the improvements you’ve made, your landlord doesn’t hire you in a standard maintenance job, you will still come away with a nice living space to show for your efforts, and you will have acquired all kinds of do-it-yourself  skills. Similarly, if one of your neighbors needs child care and another needs help with an invalid mother, you have plenty of opportunities to work, with a good chance that the same sort of standard benefits will redound to you.

Elaborating on this “Look for work, not for a job” philosophy is outside the scope of this article. But the point is, as long as we stay stuck on the idea that we have to create high-paying jobs or immediately reward all effort with increasingly high wages - we’ll be stuck on an inflationary treadmill that lands us right back where we started. Consumers will be even less able to afford products and services, especially those products and services supplied by labor intensive industries, especially those services that touch people in their need closest to home. So beleaguered in their role as consumers, people will feel impelled in their role as producers to demand a still higher hourly rate in order to maintain a “living wage.”

But there’s still another reason for us not to waste ourselves in efforts to raise the minimum wage. By making labor yet more expensive, we will not only eliminate some jobs, but worse yet, we will make many of the remaining jobs more dismal, stressful, and inhuman. We’ll put intense pressure on those who remain on the job to be yet more productive, to perform more like automatons. More work places will begin to feel like modern sweat shops.

The sweat shops of the early 20^th century were possible because labor was so cheap and plentiful. If one worker dropped out of his place at the treadle, there were many others standing in line waiting to take the job for a pittance. Now in the United States and many other developed countries, the power relationship has shifted. Most citizens aren’t put in the position of having to stand in line in supplication for wretched jobs at slave wages. But employees’ work environment has eroded from an opposite cause – from the fact of wages being so high that employers feel compelled to squeeze every ounce of labor they can out of their employees every minute of the work day. With each new round of wage hikes, some employees do get eliminated, and those remaining have to bear a heavier workload, more rigid enforcement of workplace protocol, and more infringement on their personal freedom while on the job. Employees have to be continuously and maximally productive in order to justify their increased expense to the company.  

I can again cite changes I’ve been able to study first-hand in a typical work environment. That work place is a big branch of the U.S. post office right across the street from my house. My parents bought this building in the early 1950’s because it was so conveniently situated for the mailing business they started then. My father would carry customer mail over to the P.O. every day. These trips across the street would be occasions for conviviality. My father and the back room clerks would chat, exchange the news of the day. During their lunch hour, many of the clerks would in turn walk across and hang out here at our shop. There was more easy conversation that would often spill a little innocuously over the hour allotted for lunch.

Our mail carrier faced similarly relaxed and relatively free-wheeling days. He had time to really know some of the people along his route. He carried dog bones for our dog and other favorite pets. He served as the pedestrian version of the ubiquitous bus driver I mentioned earlier. He (it was almost always a “he” then) had time to take heed if any of his residents were in trouble, or if any of them needed a brief sympathetic ear in the wake of receiving some bad news. He had time to pause. He had time for humanity.

Yet through all this easy exchange, the mail got efficiently delivered. In the very earliest part of this period there were two deliveries a day to businesses. There were many more workers on the job, so the workload was distributed among more people in such a way that each worker had breathing room. What’s more, the workers were less strictly supervised. They could exercise more individual discretion as to how and at what pace they performed their work.

Most of that old convivial atmosphere has changed so dramatically now that the post office is hardly recognizable as being on the same planet we inhabited in the 1950’s. With each raise that postal workers got, there was a tightening of the corporate belt (as indeed the P.O. became a quasi corporate entity). That meant lay-offs and increased pressure on remaining workers. The last significant pay increase that came over a decade ago was followed by a serious transformation of the workplace. Work staff was reduced to a skeleton crew. Now, there are usually only one or two tellers available to serve the increasingly long lines of irate customers inside the post office. Carrier routes were re-mapped so each remaining carrier walks a longer route.

But the problem isn’t only the sheer increase in workload that each postal employee now has to live with every day. It’s the increase in the monitoring of their every move. Carriers have to “check-in” at set points along their route using GPS trackers, so their supervisors can be assured they’re moving along at the required pace and that they are where they’re supposed to be at any given moment. They have almost no time, no time at all for human interaction. Now if I want to say something to my mail carrier, it ought to be strictly business. No idle chit-chat. And even on the rare occasions when I have some specifically postal related matter to ask him about, he has no time to pause at my house. I often have to run after him, voicing my concerns on the fly. The carriers have all been turned into Mad Hatters with the imperative of “No time to say ‘Hello, goodbye.’ I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.”

Furthermore, carriers have very little discretion over even such minute details as how they sort the mail they carry out onto their routes. To cite one somewhat technical, but revealing example of carriers’ loss of control - when most Chicago mail carriers arrive on the job, they are faced with two separate trays of mail to deliver. One tray has come pre-sorted from the central distribution center. The other tray is what has filtered in directly for their specific zip codes. The carriers have to sort this latter bunch of mail themselves before they set off on their rounds. But the kicker is – once that second bunch of mail is sorted according to street address, the carriers are not allowed to merge the two streams of mail. They are required to leave the P.O. with two separately sequenced bunches of mail. They are expected to check each bunch at every address to see if there’s any mail here – any mail there – for the customer.

The carriers think it would be so much easier if they were allowed to merge the two bunches of mail before they hit the streets. But no. If they are caught merging in the back room of the P.O. they get bawled out. If they persist in merging, they might even get fired. For some reason, headquarters has determined that it’s more efficient for the carriers not to pause to consolidate the two packs of mail inside the P.O. itself, but rather to get out there immediately and start delivering. So it’s not only the carriers’ pace that is strictly dictated; it’s their methods as well. They are no longer independent businessmen, as many felt themselves to be back in the old days. Now they are the strictly controlled and dictated to minions of a higher power.

Under the pressure of these new time constraints and all this oversight, many postal employees took early retirement. Many more are wearily looking forward to the finish line. Going to work is no longer any fun. And what’s true of the post office is true of many workplaces all over, in every sector of the economy.

The typical modern workplace is hardly what’s depicted in TV sitcoms where no one seems to be under any great pressure to perform. In TV-Land, everyone has time to exchange witty banter and to have lively human interaction. Meanwhile, the reality is so much bleaker and more impersonal. After a grace period of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, in which a good percentage of white collar workplaces could be jovial meeting places – now it’s back to the old enslavement of “Tote that barge, lift that bale!” The only difference between the old slavish sweat shop days and conditions in these modern sweat shops is the shorter hours, and the relatively bigger paycheck that employees receive now. They can use that paycheck to go home, get a big screen plasma TV and vicariously project themselves into the cheerier workplaces depicted there. They can also use their higher wages to buy all sorts of other things that they can enjoy – after work hours.

But that’s the crux of the problem. The pressures that high wages have put on employees to perform at maximum speed on the job, have stripped many workplaces themselves of any possibility of enjoyment. The workers can use their salaries to enjoy life – somewhere else. Real living doesn’t happen in these boiler plate workplaces. Real life is pushed off into the future somewhere, apart from people’s daily workaday routines.

The eight or ten hours spent working and getting to and from work aren’t intrinsically interesting or worthwhile. These hours can only be tolerated for the paycheck at the end of them. A worker’s real existence is postponed. Then even home life often fails to be enjoyable now because by the time workers get home, they are often too tired and drained to fully appreciate all the things their paychecks have bought for them there.

Ideally, every hour of the day should offer an opportunity for “real life.” People should not have to slog through one set of hours in order to get to hours somewhere else. A true employee benefit would be to give employees back those hours of their lives that they are at work – to allow them to be as self-determining and free of pressure and regimentation as possible in the performance of their duties. Higher and higher minimum wages only militate against such an ability to live happily both on and off the job.

Higher wages, as we’ve seen, also will do little to enable people to maintain a “living wage” in the long run. Why is it so hard now to maintain a family on a salary of $30,000 a year? That’s because so many goods and services cost so much. And why do they cost so much? That’s because wages here are already so relatively high and labor costs account for the largest part of the cost of so much that the average consumer has to buy in order to lead a decently comfortable life. That’s not only true in the realms of public transportation and home health care that I cited, but it’s true across the boards. When examined from this perspective, the argument that higher wages are necessary to maintain a “living wage” is exactly the kind of circular reasoning that it sounds.

Finally, there’s all that damage that the environment sustains as the result of our need to automate and expedite every operation. We throw out the baby with the bath water in order to save the human time it takes to lift the one out of the other.

So a high minimum wage can generate a variety of negative effects. It’s not that anyone arguing on this side of the debate wants U.S. workers to be reduced to the wage level of Mexican construction workers or to the level of children working in Chinese toy factories. It’s that we need to consider balancing labor and material inputs in our economy. More affordable labor will mean the availability of more badly needed human intelligence aimed at our problems – whether we’re calling a bank, a phone company, or a computer service provider to straighten out our accounts – whether we’re trying to get a sofa reupholstered – or whether we’re trying to find a plumber or a carpenter to investigate the cause of some rotting floor boards. We shouldn’t be slaves to the idea that high wages are the royal road out of subsistence living. My current high wages become some senior citizen’s skimped living conditions, and likely one day – my own meager circumstances.

We can’t afford to lose any more of the human touch in our daily lives. We can’t afford to let materials substitute for human spirit. To the extent that high wages make so many grace notes as well as so many near-necessities unaffordable, we should not make raising the minimum wage a priority. As the cliché goes – instead of making a living, we should concentrate on making a life.