Will It Take Another Great Depression to Give Workers a Living Wage?

A few weeks ago, I put together a chart showing the income gap between a minimum-wage worker and the average CEO while I was working with UUSC's Economic Justice Program staff on a new fact sheet. The difference was stark.

We were working with a statistic from our partner Let Justice Roll (LJR) that in 2007 the average CEO made 1,131 times as much as a minimum-wage worker. That is up from CEOs making 93 times as much as a minimum-wage worker just 25 years ago.

I put that chart together just as the banking crisis was unfolding, and stock markets around the globe were beginning to freefall.

Now, amid the near constant discussion of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, it is no surprise to me that right above that CEO statistic in LJR's Policy Points was a comparison to the Great Depression:

"The richest 1% of Americans [have] increased their share of the nation’s income to a higher level than any year since 1928 — the eve of the Great Depression."

In reading that statistic again, I realized that, no, the fall of the markets is no suprise at all!

Thinking back to some of the explanations I have heard for why the Great Depression happened, I remember hearing the idea that workers in factories and on farms just weren't making enough money to buy the very commodities they were producing. American workers were being critically underpaid and overexploited to the point where they could no longer participate in the flow of capital.

The inability of millions of full-time workers to participate in our nation's economy — to purchase health care, to buy a home, to pay for college, to put gas in the car, to put food on the table — is a sign of the major failure of that system. It speaks to the reason why the economy was in collapse, then and now.

Today, how can we say that the United States is the richest country in the world when millions of workers survive from paycheck to paycheck, just one missed paycheck away from an economic catastrophe? This, while CEOs are earning record salaries and bonuses.

I have been thinking about some of the people who have sounded the alarm about the growing income divide in the mainstream media. One that springs to mind is Michael Moore. In his book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, Moore criticizes the mass layoff of workers in the United States despite record corporate profits.

Another is Paul Krugman, the latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman decries the income gap, blaming backwards policies that have dismantled institutions created by the New Deal to make the United States a more equal society, such as unions, progressive taxation, and the minimum wage.

How do we turn back the clock and refortify these institutions? How do we prove that struggling workers can't wait any longer? Will it take another Great Depression?

With every dramatic turn that the credit crisis has taken, I have imagined that these great fissures in the system might call for larger, bolder solutions, no more "business as usual."

A true recovery will require a return to New Deal policies and a realization that wealth can not be concentrated in the hands of a select few. We do better as a nation and as a society when wealth is more evenly distributed, when we have a strong middle class.

One way to achieve this is by raising the minimum wage to a living wage, as the minimum wage is meant to be (not a poverty wage) -- and by protecting the right of workers to organize in unions.

In the coming months, Let Justice Roll and UUSC will need the support of human-rights defenders around the country to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.00 by 2010. An increase to $10 will help make up ground lost in the "earning power" of minimum-wage workers since 1968.

Raising the minimum wage is an attainable goal, and a right goal.

To learn more about UUSC's efforts to increase the minimum wage and how you can get involved, visit our Advancing the Fair Wage Movement webpage.