GUEST WORDS-For the future of labor in America, says Roxana Tynan, cities should serve as the laboratory for change. As executive director of a local pro-labor group called the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Ms. Tynan put that principle to work. LAANE led a successful effort to get the City of Los Angeles to adopt a $15.37 an hour minimum wage for its hotel workers.
On Saturday, Steven Greenhouse wrote about that fight in the New York Times. His insightful report shows how both the City and the labor movement are radically different from what they were in 1990.
Greenhouse’ article is something of a puff piece. It puffs the hotel wage law effort in Los Angeles. Underneath the puff, though, is some useful and insightful journalism.
I am a product of an age when strong local families created strong local cities through their commitment to service and their conviction that civic health was in their own interest. Pasadena in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Santa Barbara in the late 50s and early 60s. Los Angeles in the late 60s and early 70s. I miss it.
The Times article correctly notes the decline of that age in Los Angeles as we lost our major financial, manufacturing and retail businesses. It also documents one movement that symbolizes the local rise of powerful sets of families and friends who are associated with the labor movement and the new Latino majority. I live in one core of that new political reality in the northeast San Fernando Valley.
The article correctly notes the rise of non-traditional local organizations and coalitions as a new source of power. However, the NYT doesn't provide the national context for this new political reality.
Ideological polarization and the decline in the basic political skill of compromise have created gridlock in our national government and in most state capitals. Local government is less under the sway of political parties, is populated by less experienced and more malleable politicians, and is more reachable by local grassroots efforts. Smart national operators on both the right and the left are beginning to realize this.
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Local government is increasingly the focal point of national social campaigns that masquerade as local efforts. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) is part of that scene. In this case, it happens to have been created here, by Latino labor leadership, instead of, for example, in Texas by the Koch brothers.
The economist in me isn't too upset about the labor movement's current focus on minimum wage laws. Higher minimum wages DO result in fewer jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder. They ALSO provide upward pressure on the wages above them.
Like union wages in the old days, this can be beneficial to wage rates for the non-unionized middle class. So if the poor are willing to campaign for higher wages despite the real risk of losing jobs, why would middle class voters complain?
The biggest economic reality in America today is the destruction of the middle class. Federal tax and government spending policies have concentrated an unprecedented amount of wealth in a very small group of capitalists and financiers at the top of the economic pile. Since the days of De Tocqueville, the middle class has been the foundation of our democracy.
Unlike the business leaders of days past, the current "greed is good" crowd fail to understand that a fairly compensated labor force is in their own long term economic interest. Playing with local minimum wage laws is just one symptom of a social rebellion that should become a national movement.
(Tony Wilkinson is a community leader and chair of the DWP MOU Oversight Committee.)
-c