Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to reduce income inequality is echoed in Joe Biden's $15-an-hour minimum wage proposal
Talis Shelbourne
Melinda Harmon is 39 and has two boys at home, ages 14 and 20.
Before the pandemic struck, she was working at Fiserv Forum where, under a "community benefits agreement" between the local union and Forum management, she was on track to make $15 an hour, plus tips, as a bartender.
Then the pandemic hit in March and Harmon was laid off.
She struggled to find consistent work and eventually landed a job at a Family Dollar store behind the cash register.
But Harmon — who was already behind on rent and other bills and can't afford to move — said her new wage of $10 an hour isn’t enough. She is working only 20 to 24 hours a week and spends 80% of her paychecks on rent.
President-elect Joe Biden has promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend that increase to farming and domestic workers who are not now covered. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
It's a goal that activists and others have sought for years, including in Milwaukee where organizers have staged protests, lobbied lawmakers and argued that a livable wage is a matter of social justice.
Their call echoes the work of Martin Luther King Jr., who in the months leading up to his death argued that every American deserved a reasonable income. When he was shot and killed in April 1968, he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers.
Making $15 an hour would change things significantly for Harmon, she said.
"I know to some people it don’t seem like it’s much, but it becomes a big difference in being able to just somewhat maintain a home," she said.
Poverty a defining factor in the lives of many Milwaukeeans
Today, poverty and income inequality are worse than they were in King's time, and in Milwaukee, that disparity falls sharply along racial lines.
Real median household income for Blacks in Milwaukee has fallen by almost 30% since 1979, according to research by Marc Levine, founding director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Black households in the city make 42% of what their white counterparts make, his research shows, a drop from 58.3% in 1979.
Jeffrey Sommers is a professor of political economy and public policy at UWM’s Department of African and African Diaspora Studies who co-wrote an article examining King's political and economic outlook.
If King were alive today, he’d be horrified by the lack of progress on poverty, Sommers said.
“What you have today is workers are getting a much smaller share of total output of the economy,” Sommers said. “It’s depressing and it’s horrifying, the state that we’ve allowed so many people to descend into with poverty.”
King tied economic security to social justice because he had seen economic security denied to his own relatives: King's father grew up in a plantation district, his grandparents were sharecroppers and four of his three great-grandparents had been slaves.
That's why, in speeches as early as 1956, King began pointing out the need to reduce wealth inequality.
“God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty,” he said.
His profound concern turned into the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967.
The campaign advocated for a number of economic reforms, including more support for labor unions, raising the minimum wage, establishing government jobs and creating a universal basic income.
King was planning a march on Washington as part of the campaign when he took a fateful detour to Memphis to lend his support to Black workers striking over low wages and dangerous working conditions.
There, before he was shot, King reaffirmed his belief in economic justice, saying, “It’s a crime in a rich nation for people to receive starvation wages."
Anti-poverty and labor groups support an increase
The Poor People’s March on Washington was held in May 1968, but King’s vision of ending poverty went unrealized.
It did result in the creation of anti-poverty agencies that were set up across the country in the 1960s.
George Hinton is the executive director of the Social Development Commission, one of those anti-poverty agencies; it focuses on Milwaukee County.
Hinton said that on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it's important that people recognize the breadth of King's vision.
"Martin Luther King was a champion of people in poverty, not just people of color," Hinton explained. "He spoke to the plight of people who were brown and Black just like me, but also the issues of poverty for everyone."
That compassion, Hinton said, is sorely needed as the coronavirus pandemic brings more economic suffering and exacerbates long-existing problems, such as the benefits cliff.
People can topple over the benefits cliff if their income rises above a certain point and social programs, such as food stamps or rental assistance, are no longer available. Forced to pay "full price," they can be left worse off, even with additional income.
"It’s not the smartest thing to do, to walk over the cliff," Hinton explained. "You find people making choices about how much they can make without losing all their benefits and ending up worse off than they were. ... (That) doesn’t incentivize people to take that next step."
Something similar played out over the summer, Hinton said, when many people saw income from unemployment insurance exceed their regular wages.
"You can look at it from a cynical way or an opportunity way. The cynical way is, 'OK people don’t want to work because they can get more money with unemployment.' The thing is, maybe we’re not paying people enough money in the first place," he said.
Peter Rickman, president of Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization, which is part of Milwaukee's Fight for 15 campaign, said while he is excited about the prospect of a federal minimum wage, he hasn't given up pursuing it in Wisconsin. The current minimum at both the federal and state levels is $7.25 an hour.
Rickman and other unions have brought Gov. Tony Evers a proposal to increase the minimum wage and lobbied for legislation that would allow municipalities to set their own.
"We can’t just hope for goodwill from the local employers here. That strategy is doomed to failure," Rickman said.
A debate over the impact of raising the minimum wage
But proposals to raise the minimum wage have run into strong opposition in the past, and when the economy is strong, employers frequently have to pay more than $7.25 an hour to attract workers.
On one side are people like Levine and Sommers.
Sommers argues Biden’s promise could begin to lift millions out of poverty and even help narrow the racial wealth gap.
Levine said a purely economic argument doesn't consider equity. Raising the minimum wage, he said, "would set a standard for fairness and make an unequivocal statement that we don’t think, as a society, we should be paying poverty-level wages to workers."
Laura Dresser, a labor economist and the associate director at COWS (the Center on Wisconsin Strategy), a left-leaning Madison-based think tank, said that in a place like Milwaukee, concerns about job loss are based on an outdated narrative that places manufacturing at the center of the economy.
"So many of our metaphors in Milwaukee employment are around manufacturing, but the entire competitive structure in Milwaukee is in the service sector. To raise the minimum wage in the service sector, you don’t face ruinous wage competition from a hamburger maker in China."
But conservative economists and thought leaders are not persuaded by such arguments.
They argue that small businesses, in particular, would find an increase to $15 an hour burdensome. And those businesses would respond by either hiring fewer workers or letting some of their current workers go.
In a commentary last summer for the conservative Heritage Foundation, Rachel Greszler, a research fellow in economics, used the online shopping giant Amazon as a case in point.
As businesses become larger and more productive, she wrote, they can pay their workers more. In 2018, Amazon announced it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour, which likely gave the company a competitive advantage in hiring.
But that won’t work for many smaller businesses, Greszler wrote. And it wouldn’t have worked for Amazon years ago when it was a young company.
"If Amazon had to pay a $15 minimum wage when it first set up shop 26 years ago, it may not even exist today. Businesses don’t start big, and if they don’t have room to grow, they won’t start at all," she wrote.
Sommers counters that while the increase may be painful for small businesses in the short-term, higher wages would mean customers can afford to spend more.
Levine says there is another benefit. Economic research from the 1950s and '60s suggests increasing the minimum wage will narrow the income and wage gap between white and Black workers.
"I think the main argument in favor would clearly be the equity argument and particularly, racial equity," Levine said. "The bottom line is, a disproportionate number of Black and Latino workers hold low-wage jobs or slightly above minimum wage jobs."
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that nearly a quarter (22.7%) of Wisconsin's workforce would be affected by a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025.
A pay hike would be welcome
Whatever the economic arguments, for workers directly affected, a pay bump would be welcome news.
Anthony Steward is a 35-year old who, like Harmon, has two sons. Steward recently became a union steward for the premium cooks and dishwashers at Fiserv Forum, and he's happy workers there make a $15 minimum wage.
"This minimum wage here, it's ridiculous," he said of the prevailing standard. "It's not keeping up with society or our living standards. The cost of living is going up, but our pay rate isn't going up."
Like Harmon, Steward has been laid off from his job as a cook at the arena. For now, he is living off unemployment.
Harmon's older son helps out financially. But with her 14-year-old son home and attending virtual school, Harmon said that's another expense she wasn't expecting.
"It gets hard, but I keep my faith that everything will get better," she said. "Even though I know it’s not quite enough, I still work. I still do what I can. I know there’s people who are way worse off than I am."
Contact Talis Shelbourne at (414) 403-6651 or tshelbourn@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @talisseer and message her on Facebook at @talisseer.
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