The Fight for $15 movement is usually identified with the fight for a $15 minimum wage. A call for government legislation is not the sort of thing you’d normally expect an anarchist to endorse. But in fact the movement to pay workers $15 or more is quite compatible with anarchist principles.
Back in the late 19th century, the American movement for an eight-hour day included people from a wide range of political ideologies. Some favored federal legislation to achieve their goal. But the movement also included numerous anarchist tendencies, including individualist anarchists affiliated with the New England Labor Reform League. The nationwide general strike for an eight-hour day was seen by some as a call for a government-mandated limit to the working day, but it was also a pressure campaign on employers. That’s how I see the Fight for $15 campaign.
Information and pressure campaigns against employers by unconventional labor organizations are arguably more effective than conventional campaigns under the umbrella of the AFL-CIO or SEIU, as witnessed by efforts like the Coalition of Immolakee Workers and OURWalmart. Such campaigns, allied with community social justice and civil rights organizations, and making use of direct action on the job, can make a tame AFL-CIO union certified under Wagner Act rules look comparatively appealing to an employer.
Right-wing libertarians frequently argue that labor action to raise wages is useless, because in a free market wages reflect workers’ marginal productivity. Hence forcing employers to pay a minimum wage will simply raise unemployment, by making workers whose marginal productivity is less than the minimum wage unemployable.
This argument makes several huge assumptions. First, it assumes that this is, in fact, a free market. But it is not. We have an economy in which the state has intervened in the market on behalf of capitalists and landlords to make capital and land artificially scarce and expensive, and acted in other ways to raise entry barriers against self-employment, so that wage employers are protected against the need to compete for workers against the possibility of self-employment or employment in worker-owned enterprise. As a result, employers are able to hire workers for a wage less than the full product of their labor; the difference between the free market wage of labor and what is actually paid under capitalism amounts to a substantial economic rent. Hence, an increase in wages resulting from increased bargaining power of labor can come out of this rent.
Second, it assumes that employers have some idea of what the marginal productivity of their workers is. But as Auburn University Professor Roderick Long argues, this is quite unlikely.
First of all, most employers do not know with any great precision their workers’ marginal revenue product. Firms are, after all, islands of central planning – on a small enough scale that the gains from central coordination generally outweigh the losses, but still they are epistemically hampered by the absence of internal markets…. A firm confronts the test of profitability as a unit, not employee by employee, and so there is a fair bit of guesswork involved in paying workers according to their profitability….
A firm that doesn’t pay adequate attention to profitability is doomed to failure, certainly; but precisely because we’re not living in the world of neoclassical perfect competition, firms can survive and prosper without being profit-maximisers. They just have to be less crazy/stupid than their competitors.
This leaves bargaining by workers as an important part of the discovery mechanism by which the marginal productivity of labor is determined.
And third, it assumes that the demand for labor is highly elastic. Right-wing libertarians are fond of claiming that increased minimum wages will increase unemployment, while leaving out the vital term “ceteris paribus” — all other things remaining equal. Factors like relatively inflexible consumer demand for fast food, the fact that labor cost is only one component of a business’s operating cost, and the fact that higher wages paid by all employers in a particular industry and locality would eliminate labor as an issue for cost competition, all complicate this simplistic assertion.
But let’s assume for a moment that labor is the main cost of service industry businesses. In that case, the fact that labor rather than capital outlays is the primary expense raises the question of why labor, as the scarce factor, isn’t calling the shots and hiring capital for worker-owned and -managed enterprises, rather than the other way around. The answer is that the owners of capital, working through the state by such expedients as bank licensing and capitalization laws, have preempted the avenues through which workers could advance capital to one another and given capitalists a monopoly on the issue of credit. And through zoning and safety codes, they have made renting expensive real estate and purchasing industrial-scale equipment a condition for establishing enterprises like restaurants, thereby foreclosing low-overhead micro-restaurants and -diners operated out of people’s homes, using the ordinary food preparation machinery in their own kitchens (along with similarly outlawing other home-based services like daycare, hair styling, ride-sharing, and the like).
Another common argument is that higher restaurant wages will result in employers automating fast food jobs out of existence. But remember that automats were once a thing, in the mid-20th century. They didn’t catch on for a reason. Interacting with actual human servers is part of the restaurant experience. Next time you’re in a retail establishment, take note of the number of people lined up to be checked out by a human cashier while the self-serve checkouts sit idle.
One practice of the nineteenth century labor movement that deserves revival is the formation of worker-owned and -managed enterprises by workers on strike. This has long been feasible in industries where human capital is the main cost, like temp agencies and various services. But current technological trends, which reduce the capital outlays for undertaking garage production with tabletop CNC machinery to the equivalent of a few months’ factory wages, greatly expand the number of industries where this is a possibility.
I for one am not interested in working through the state to impose a higher minimum wage. I think workers, acting through grassroots labor campaigns and direct action, should hit employers so hard that they beg government to protect them from us.
I think this is a fair post, but there are other concerns with raising the minimum wage. For example, it would likely shift the composition of workers as a higher minimum wage would attract more people to the labor market, particularly middle-class and well-off teens and college students, whereas those jobs would otherwise go to less advantaged people. There may not be a large drop in employment, but the point of the minimum wage is to help people finding it hard to support their family, not soon-to-be college graduates with better job prospects.
The other point is that the reason large companies like Walmart favor minimum wage increases is because the policy helps drown out competition from smaller firms that can't afford the additional costs. Walmart on average pays above the proposed minimum wage, about $12.83 according to Newsweek. So raising the rate to $10 or $15 per hour might not substantially increase its labor costs, but it could for a smaller competitor.
There may be ways to ameliorate government-granted privileges, but the Fight for $15 movement seems to be a clumsy one.
$15? What are you a big corporatist? $50 is a living wage. Start there!!
I've seen some advocate for MW increases because it will hasten automation. Any concern there?
My recent post The Paranoid Style in Oakland Politics
But the idea that minimum wage service jobs are just "starter jobs" for people who will soon move up is becoming obsolete. A growing share of the work force — even professionals — is becoming precaritized, and there are enormous unemployment rates for recent college grads.
I am a Seattle resident (and regular reader of C4SS.) I have attended most of the meetings in Seattle about the new minimum wage hike.
One industry that fought against Seattle's minimum wage hikes were the immigrant community, especially those that own and work at restaurants. At one minimum-wage meeting I attended, I heard a Vietnamese refugee talk about fleeing Vietnam. His story was typical of many whom spoke against draconian MW hikes. He began telling us how he escaped his country with no money and little skill. And how he worked his way up from a low paid job to eventually own his Pho restaurant. He now specifically hires immigrants like himself. He believed that such an rapid and high minimum wage hike would make his story harder to obtain. Especially for those fleeing countries where the government hand in the market, like this topic, are routine and overbearing, keeping their citizens in poverty.
I changed my mind when I heard this.
I think it is better for us to work against regulation that makes unions less powerful when realizing the true value of labor. We should work to unregulate business ownership, so that owning a business and working for a business can be equally accessible and manageable. Also work against the systems where inflation would depreciate savings, labor wages, and pensions that just harm working people. All of these factors, and more, are whats needed. Not pretend bandaid issues.
Automation doesn't have to be an all or nothing game. You might keep a couple of shift workers to man the registers and add indrediants to the sutomation as needed. If you could replace 2 workers per shift with automation and you ran 2 shifts per day the automation return on investment would be much faster if you were replacing employees at $15 per hour instead of $8 per hour.
365 days * 2 workers * 2 shifts * 8 hours = 11680 hours per year.
at $8.00 per hour + ss and medicare + unemployement insurance + workmans comp insurance + health insurance … all of these except health insurance goes up as the wage goes up.
So lets just use a figure of 25% so $8 * 1.25 = $10 per hour
but $15 * 1.25 = $18.75 per hour
If you wanted a 1 year Return on Investment then the cost of the automation would have to be
$116,800 if you are replacing $8 per hour employees….
and
$219000 if you are replacing $15 per hour employees.
At some cost of labor you are going to replace some employees…
Now if you are a casher you might say give me the $15 bucks and to bad for the fry cooks
But if you are a fry cook you might just rather have everyone at $8….
"should hit employers so hard that they beg government to protect them from us."
a left-libertarian can't be an employer?
No if you are a mutualist or anarchist.
We don't believe in employers, work must not have hierarchy and be horizontal
Unfortunately, a conventional labor strike endorses the cash nexus and the fast-food menu of goods, services, and big-box standard brands that come with it.
It also establishes a sort of de facto wage zoning.
Why not, instead of striking, put the effort into an economic rebellion? A grass-roots movement towards "home brewing," child labor, unschooled speech, and self-building would leave the T-Bill boys nothing left to eat but their money, as you might say.
I'm all for raising the minimum wage, it will simply incentivize more automation and robots taking over.
Once again Kevin Carson demonstrates his opposition to a free market in which a violence-free agreement between two traders is how a price is arrived at. He has in his mind some Platonic vision of a "fair" or "just" or "life-sustaining" wage and is having this end result in his head is willing to employ violence, intimidation, coercion, extortion, and other means of the entitled to achieve his desired end result.
If an employer can hire four people at $3.50 per hour and four people agree to that, where the fuck does Kevin Carson inject himself into this trade and demand that three of them go jobless and one entitled worker reap the wages that could have gone to pay all four?
What hubris of the All Knowing Benevolent Aristocrat.
"violence-free" doesn't mean free of the threat of violence, obviously.
Try selling burgers and fries out of your home sometime.
McDonalds employees aren't freely trading anymore than high school students are freely speaking.