A Living Wage for All American Workers – Nonprofit Workers Too?
by Mike Gecan

The start of a new century is a good time to think about the nature of work, wages, and wealth. Often lost in all the understandable preoccupation with the many improvements in technology and information systems is the profound change in how our nation views and experiences work. And largely absent from the droning debates in the presidential primaries is this question: Is this the time to sew the strong fiber of a living wage back into the social fabric of our country?

The stage is set for a new breakthrough. Despite the fact that scores of millions of Americans remain poor, the middle class has expanded rapidly since the Second World War and wealth has exploded in the past decade, creating profits in the private sector and surpluses in the public sector. Today’s prosperity undercuts the theory that there is simply not enough wealth to go around – that low wages and working poor people are inevitable. The zero-sum game is over. Prosperity makes it possible to imagine a strong national push to create a living wage culture in this country and to spread the opportunity of housing and business equity to most of those left behind.

Living Wages on the Agenda

That push is underway. In 1994, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliate in Baltimore, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), launched the nation’s first successful living wage campaign. Two years later, the IAF affiliates in New York City launched the second successful drive. In the years since, more than 40 local living wage bills have been passed, with many more in the pipeline. The IAF considers its past and current contributions to the living wage actions one of its proudest achievements. Across the country, many other fine organizations and coalitions are doing their own important work on these campaigns.

But now is the time to push even harder. IAF leaders are calling for a national living wage and benefits standard of at least $25,000. Like social security, it would enable Americans to live fuller and more independent lives. In October, 1999 more than 1,000 leaders of the East Coast organizations affiliated with the IAF called for this standard. They are now approaching each of the four major presidential candidates and both major parties, asking them to endorse a national living wage and benefits package.

 IAF East is saying that any institution – public or private or non-profit – that benefits in any way from any form of federal subsidy or tax break or grant or loan should pay all of its employees and contract workers a living wage and benefits package of at least $25,000.

Living Wages for Nonprofit Workers Too

That means citizens groups, entire organizing networks, religiously-based social service providers would need to pay a living wage as well. Every home health care aide should make a living wage, every organizer, every secretary in every CDC, every child care provider – every worker at organizations benefiting from federal support. This would apply to Chase Manhattan and the local CDC, to Humana and a religious home health care agency, to Toll Brothers and a local housing group.

This, of course, is where the rubber hits the road. Those of us in the field of organizing have been asked thousands of questions over the years by funders. Many of these questions are appropriate. Some reflect a special concern or bias of the funder. Others seem impossibly detailed and overdone. Recently, a funder asked hundreds of questions that would eat up scores of hours, if anyone was kind enough or desperate enough to try to respond. Never, in all those years, have I or anyone I’ve known in organizing been asked the simple question: Do you pay all of your workers a living wage? Never.

Why Living Wages Are Important

I received my first lesson in the importance of a living wage from my parents. They worked very hard all their lives – my father as a security guard, bartender, sometime plasterer; my mother in a toy factory office on Pulaski Road in Chicago – and just barely made it. Just barely. Some of our neighbors did not make it. And many of those who lived in the neighborhoods next to ours – in the Garfield and Humboldt Park areas to the south and west – struggled and lost. Like so many of my fellow organizers in the IAF, I grew up right on the line between scarcity and just enough. Whether our parents were salesmen in Manhattan or oil workers in Houston or farmers in upstate New York or laborers in New Jersey, we learned firsthand what a living wage means to a family – and what less than a living wage can do to decent people.

I received my second lesson from Ed Chambers, IAF executive director. More than 20 years ago, I was about to be hired by a fledgling IAF group that I had helped put together. My wage at the time was $13,000, with no pension and bare-bones health benefits. When the group’s leaders asked my what I wanted as a salary, I was preparing to ask for $14,000. That’s when I talked to Ed. He said that if I didn’t think I was worth more than that, I shouldn’t take the job. I was communicating that organizing wasn’t a real profession, that good wages and other benefits were all right for other people but not for me.

He pointed out I was also penalizing whoever my successor would be, assuming that that person would be as nervous about asking for money as I was. I asked Ed what he thought I should ask for. He said: “$26,000.” I gulped. But I followed his advice. The leaders didn’t blink and hired me at that rate.

One of Ed Chamber’s lasting contributions to the entire world of organizing is the simple notion that a salary, with benefits, for a top professional organizer, communicates all the right things. It communicates that organizing is a profession. It says that what’s good for our members’ families is also good for our own nuclear families. It doesn’t permit people who are incompetent or unprofessional to use their low wages as a way to hide from accountability and evaluation. And it tells others working in communities – receptionists, child care aides, project managers – that they should expect a living wage as well.

I received my third lesson in living wage by watching Jonathon Lange, Arnie Graf, Reverend Doug Miles, Ms. Avis Ransom and all the other fine staff and leaders of BUILD imagine, design, implement, and succeed at the nation’s first living wage campaign in Baltimore. Their work mixed into one creative strategy the best of the civil rights lessons, the most innovative thinking being done by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and others, and all that we in IAF had learned over the past twenty years in central cities. If there were a school that could actually teach organizing, this would be a prime case study.

The term “living wage” has entered the national vocabulary. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TV outlets and others report and comment on the living wage activities of groups around the country. There are studies, analyses, conferences, academic articles.

But a living wage has yet to become a national reality, and too few people benefit from the bills that have been passed in over 30 communities across the country. There are still millions of Americans who work for too little and lack quality health coverage. Many of these millions labor directly or indirectly for agencies, firms, contractors, or subcontractors which benefit from federal subsidy.

We believe we have the power to force the major candidates and parties to respond to our demand that every entity benefiting from federal support pay a living wage and benefits package of at least $25,000. The funding community can help. It should ask grantees the hard questions about wages and benefits. (See box for some ideas.) Funders should pay their own employees a living wage and demand that all recipients of their funding do so as well.

As organizers, we can’t demand that the public and private sectors pay living wages and not do so ourselves. The likelihood of a living wage and benefits standard of $25,000 becoming a permanent part of the nation’s economic fabric improves greatly when our sector leads by example. We can leverage more forcefully – secure in the knowledge that the people who work with and for us earn enough themselves to begin to live decent lives.
 

Mike Gecan is on the national staff of the Industrial Areas Foundation. He can be reached at 212-875-9345. Together with IAF organizer Arnie Graf, Mike is co-directing the effort of the IAF groups on the East Coast to inject the living wage issue into the current presidential campaign and beyond.

The Phoenix Fund for Workers and Communities has just released its Clearinghouse Listing of organizations engaged in economic justice organizing efforts. Included are organizations and contacts for labor/community collaborations as well as living wage campaigns. National and state-by-state listings provide contact information for particular campaigns as well as information about labor-community collaborations that have continued after passage of living wage ordinances. The report is available from The New World Foundation, 666 West End Ave., NY, NY 10025, 212-497-3466 or on line at www.phoneixfund.org.

• When you review an organization, ask for the individual salaries of each position. This is the only way you can find out what the current salary levels are. Then you can check for disparities among various positions.
• On each site visit, ask staff and board members, if they’re present, if staff have full benefits – including pension, health benefits, disability insurance, and dental insurance. Talk about why such benefits need to be paid.
• If nonprofits are to pay full benefits, funders must support the expenditure by giving operating support whenever possible. If you can’t, encourage staff and board to find other ways to raise these funds – holding fundraisers, developing institutional financial support, or paid memberships. Such funds can be used for general operating support, and are a renewable resource.
• Talk to other funders about the need to pay community organizers and other staff a just wage. This means a wage that is appropriate to the level of skill, management responsibilities, interpersonal skills, and public presence that are needed for success.
• Remember that the National Organizers Alliance (www.noa.org) has a portable pension plan for community organizers at a reasonable cost. There are other resources for your grantees. It’s never too late to start thinking about retirement.
• Increase your giving to community organizations that have limited fund-raising prospects from mainstream foundations.

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