Dignity

Rewarding 'Unskilled' Workers

On Labor Day, this article strikes me as a good articulation of why we need to think more, as a society, about the way we define a good job and a fair wage. Jobs that many of us would turn up our noses at, even in times of extended unemployment in our chosen field, pay very little, offer very little in the way of fulfillment--and pay very little because they don't require any special skills.

Is that right? Beth Shulman notes something I should have noticed long ago. While it's no longer kosher to say that the help should make themselves invisible, we still treat those who serve us as if they are. The janitors at my office and the people who work there all day avert their eyes from one another when they run into one another at that magic moment at the end of the white-collar day when one group relinquishes the building so the other can clean up the mess. None of us who work there during the day would even think about making a living cleaning the place at night--so why do we have trouble understanding that the people who do clean should probably make more for a night's work than we do every couple of hours?

I'm not suggesting that there's no value in having an education and being able to do a job that few others could do. But our society devalues the jobs that no one who got an education wanted to do, robbing them of any nobility. Someone has to clean; someone has to cook french fries; someone has to man a cash register (though maybe not for long). And all of those people, in order to have any life at all, also have to live in close proximity to those after whom they clean up, those for whom they cook those fries, and those for whom they scan pricetags. But how can they live among us on their wages when some of us can barely get by on what we make?

Shulman reaches the same conclusions that I have. If our society is going to continue to produce an ever greater income divide between those who have high levels of education and ability and those who clean up after them, we must, for both practical and moral reasons, widen--not narrow--the safety net that ensures a fundamental minimum quality of life for anyone who toils in America to make its greatness possible. That's not achieved by allowing members of our invisible serving class to undercut one another down to, and even below, the minimum wage, leaving them with poverty-level incomes, no health care--and the down-and-dirty jobs that are a necessity in our culture without any of the dignity that should accompany them. It is achieved by raising the minimum wage, by encouraging service personnel to organize and thus gain the power to bargain fairly with those who have little choice but to employ them, and by offering health care to every person in America as part of a commitment to take care of all of our neighbors. Democrats already support these reforms; if Republicans are truly the party of God and morals, how can they not also support the idea of "love thy neighbor?" How can 36 million people living below an artificially low poverty line be part of God's plan, or something that should be tolerated in a nation that is meant to be a city on a hill, a bright beacon shining for the rest of the world?