Jackie Dana

The Working Stiff Journal
Vol. 3 #2, March 2000
by Jackie Dana

How is it that in a time of unprecedented prosperity and low unemployment, so many Austinites still can’t pay their bills?

It’s good to see that one of the hot topics in Austin these days is the “wage gap.” The only thing amazing about it is that it took the politicians so long to acknowledge something the rest of us have been experiencing for years. While the rich get richer, there are still lots of people all over the country who work full time but do not earn enough to make ends meet.

Elizabeth McNichol, an author of a recent economic report on U.S. incomes, noted that “the booming stock market… has mainly benefited people at the top end of the income scale,” while the “incomes of the poor and middle class have fallen or stagnated.”

Based on the concept that one should only pay one-third of a full-time salary towards rent, Austin workers would need to earn over $9.00 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment. As it stands now, someone earning minimum wage ($5.15/hour) would need to spend nearly all of their salary—about $900 a month before taxes—just to pay rent.

One way to improve the condition for poorest workers is to raise the minimum wage to a livable one. As obvious as that may be to many of us, the concept of a minimum wage, as well as basic workplace safety rules, has always been a sore spot with business owners and conservative politicians, dating back to the first minimum wage struggles in the 1930s.

As the United States suffered from the Great Depression, several states passed minimum wage laws, and as part of the National Industry Recovery Act in 1933, President Frankin D. Roosevelt had employers sign a “President’s Reemployment Agreement” covering 16.3 million employees. The employers who signed on agreed to limit work weeks to 40 hours, to pay a minimum wage of $12-$15 per week (at least 30 cents/hour) and to not hire children under 16. In exchange citizens were encouraged to patronize only participating companies, who displayed a “Blue Eagle” sign. However, in 1935 the Supreme Court declared the Agreement to be unconstitutional.

In 1937 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins drew up a bill and Roosevelt submitted it to Congress. Senator Hugo Black and Representative William Connery sponsored the bill, which called for a 40-cent minimum wage as well as the 40-hour week and a minimum work age of 16. It also proposed a labor standards board that could raise wages and shorten hours further if necessary.

Opponents of the Black-Connery bill claimed that it was “a bad bill badly drawn” and it would lead the U.S. to become a “tyrannical industrial dictatorship.”

Organized labor was divided on the bill. Some unions, such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, called for strong regulations. (In response to those in the South who requested lower wages for their region, the ILGWU leader, David Dubinsky, suggested that perhaps there should also be lower pay for southern Congressmen.) However, both the AFL and CIO, in an uncharacteristic moment of agreement, favored a weaker bill that would limit the new standards to low-paid, unorganized workers. The union leaders argued that a minimum wage might end up becoming a maximum wage. When the bill was amended to exclude work covered by collective bargaining agreements, the unions were largely satisfied.

The Senate passed the bill in July 1937, but it was held up in committee, and Congress adjourned without its passage. Despite the opposition, a 1938 national poll showed 67% of Americans approved a minimum wage law, prompting Roosevelt to call a special session of Congress to revisit the bill.

Its opponents remained steadfast. Southern states complained about the proposed minimum wage was too high. Rep. McClellan of Arkansas asked, “What profiteth the laborer of the South if he gain the enactment of a wage and hour law—40 cents per hour and 40 hours per week—if he then lose the opportunity to work?”

Over the next few months the bill was reworked, and finally the House passed the bill in May 1938. The Senate-House Conference Committee proposed still more amendments, almost all of which weakened it further, but it eventually passed both houses.

On June 25, 1938 President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, with provisions banning child labor, establishing a 44-hour work week, and creating the first federal minimum wage of 25 cents/hour. Although this act only applied to approximately one-fifth of the labor force and set a much lower minimum wage than the original proposal, it was still ground-breaking.

In 1961 and again in 1966 amendments to the original act extended the Fair Labor Standards Act to workers in the retail and service industry, farm workers, transit employees, restaurant and hotel workers, government employees and domestic workers, and other categories. It was not until 1978, however, when all employees covered by the act would earn the same rate (some categories of jobs had a lower minimum wage), and in 1997 a subminimum wage of $4.25 was instituted for employees under 20 for their first 90 days of employment.

Over the years the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation and escalating costs of living. According to a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 37% of people who sought food assistance in 1998 were employed, up from 24% in 1994. From 1980 to 1995, the minimum wage has increased by 37% while inflation has risen 86%.

In 1999 several bills were introduced in Congress to increase the minimum wage. One bill, S 192/HR 325, introduced by Senators Kennedy (MA) and Daschle (SD) and Representative Bonior (MI), would raise the minimum wage from $5.15/hour to $6.15/hour within a year’s time and would extend the entire Fair Labor Standards Act to the Northern Mariana Islands, where many products are made carrying the “Made in the USA” label. Another bill, HR 964, introduced by Rep. Quinn (NY), would spread the wage hike over three increments through 2001. Although it would not extend protections to the Northern Mariana Islands, it would provide for indexing the minimum wage to inflation, meaning it would increase as needed over time. A third bill, HR 3081, introduced by Rep. Lazio (NY), would spread the dollar hike over three years and would be coupled by massive tax breaks for the wealthy.

Needless to say, it is HR 3081, the weakest of the three bills, that stands the best chance of passage. It was discharged from committee on January 28, 2000. The other two bills remain locked in committee and may never reach the floor of the House or Senate.

Notwithstanding the constant and often unsuccessful wrangling in Congress, several states have even higher minimum wages. Oregon, for example, raised its minimum wage to $6.50 in 1999, while Washington state and Connecticut will raise theirs to $6.50 and $6.15, respectively, this year. Despite the Texas minimum wage remaining at $3.35, local Living Wage efforts have had some success in Austin. The City of Austin has set a living wage minimum at $8 for its full-time employees in April 1999, and several institutions, including Austin Community College and the University of Texas, have raised their lowest salaries. Still, there is much work to be done.

As Roosevelt argued in 1936, “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.”

The Working Stiff Journal was a free community newspaper produced in Austin, Texas and distributed across town. All of the articles were available online on the UT Watch site for many years, but they are no longer available, so I am republishing my own work here (in 2014). You can still read back issues thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The Working Stiff Journal
Vol. 2 #8, October 1999
by Jackie Dana

Negative stereotypes have always plagued immigrant workers, and many people have tried to deny immigrants access to employment, housing, and other opportunities U.S. citizens take for granted. In the nineteenth century, many immigrants, particularly working-class Irish, were portrayed as dirty, stupid, and lazy. Newspaper cartoons portrayed Irishmen as looking like apes, and it was acceptable to openly discriminate against them. Many window signs advertising work noted, “No Irish Need Apply.”

Throughout Texas, Mexicans and immigrants from other countries south of the U.S. border have faced the same anti-immigrant hostility. In contrast to the Irish experience, however, such attitudes have not diminished after well over a century. Austin recently witnessed such attitudes with the relocation of the day labor site. Before the First Workers site opened its doors, several residents of the surrounding neighborhood protested at Austin City Council meetings and sent letters to local papers. On opening day, a few residents picketed the new site at 4916 N. Interstate 35, waving U.S. flags and carrying signs suggesting that foreign-born workers were not welcome in their neighborhood.

With anti-immigrant sentiments still alive today, we as workers should be aware of the obstacles workers from Mexico in particular have faced for the past century from the government as well as from some of their fellow workers.

At the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, few expected a sizable Mexican immigration. At that time fewer than 0.5% of U.S. citizens were of Mexican ancestry. Fifty years later, however, political and economic conditions in Mexico, as well as expanding employment opportunities north of the border, led to sizable immigration of both temporary and permanent workers. By the early 1900s, over 70% of western railroad laborers were Mexicans; they also worked in agriculture and mining, and many moved to the Midwest to find jobs in factories and slaughterhouses alongside European immigrants.

The rising numbers of Mexican workers nationwide led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, criminalizing thousands of Mexicans and other legal immigrants and leading to widespread deportations without benefit of court hearings. Also in 1924 Congress created the Border Patrol, initially assigning 450 men to protect the U.S-Mexico border.

With the onset of the Great Depression, unemployment skyrocketed. Many feared that Mexican immigrants would take jobs or other resources from U.S. workers. As a result, 500,000 Mexican-Americans were deported over almost two decades.

Not until World War II caused labor shortages did the U.S government finally reverse its policy towards Mexican workers. Under the 1942 Braceros Treaty signed with Mexico, more than 300,000 laborers were allowed to legally enter the United States over the next few years (a large percentage of the number that had been deported just a few years earlier), California being the state that received the most immigrants.

The treaty included the provision that “Mexicans entering the United States as result of this understanding shall not suffer discriminatory acts of any kind.” Not surprisingly, Texas was deemed to be too hostile towards Mexicans and was not allowed to bring workers into the state under provisions of the treaty. Mexican General Consul for Texas Raul Michel reported that, “as in other places, some restaurants in [Big Springs] have signs to prohibit the entrance of Mexicans,” while in Midland, “the food establishments don’t deny service to Mexicans, but when they are sold food, they are only allowed to eat it in the back of the kitchen.” To be sure, racism did exist elsewhere, and in many northern states signs were posted stating “No Mexicans. Whites Only.” In Texas, however, it was believed to be more overt and widespread.

After the war the additional Mexican work force was no longer needed. In 1954 the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched what was termed “Operation Wetback,” a massive effort to deport Mexican immigrants. In four years INS deported more than 3.8 million people of Mexican descent, including many U.S. citizens. As activist Roberto Martínez, 16 years old during Operation Wetback, recalled, “The Border Patrol would stop me on the street in downtown San Diego. Its officers would pull me out of my part-time jobs in restaurants and hotels and try to deport me, along with other unfortunate Mexicans they picked up along the way. . . . It didn’t matter that I was a fifth-generation U.S. citizen” (Latino/Hispanic Link News Service, 1999).

Since that time many policies have restricted the freedom of those who, although foreign-born, choose to reside in the United States. In 1965 the Immigration and Naturalization Act limited for the first time the annual number of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. More recently, Californians attacked Spanish-speaking immigrants with the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported a 20% increase in the number of hate groups in recent years, immigrants making up one of the main targeted groups. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 allows local police to “cooperate” with the INS by making arrests for supposed violations of immigration law. In the past few years INS has stepped up the number of raids for undocumented workers, Latino workers being the primary target. Furthermore, bosses use the INS to frighten employees from organizing a union or other collective action to improve working conditions.

As workers, we cannot be complacent about the way immigrant workers are treated. It is important to recognize that immigrants, documented or not, rarely take jobs otherwise held by native-born workers, but instead, as in the case of day laborers and migrant farmworkers, they tend to do the most demanding and difficult jobs. Neither legal status nor lack of English skills should give employers the right to discriminate against immigrants, nor should either become a wedge to undermine worker solidarity. Speaking a different language does not make one inferior or unintelligent; in fact, many immigrants possess college degrees or technical training.

We owe it to ourselves to support all workers’ efforts to organize themselves and demand better working conditions and wages, especially immigrant and migrant workers, who suffer the greatest exploitation. Organized labor in particular cannot afford to ignore this vital part of the working class. And at every opportunity we all must strike back against the anti-immigrant racism, both in the government and within our communities, that brands such workers criminals and undesirables.

A website dedicated to Los Braceros documents, to the origin of the border farmworkers, and to their contribution to society can be found at http://www.farmworkers.org/benglish.html

The Working Stiff Journal was a free community newspaper produced in Austin, Texas and distributed across town. All of the articles were available online on the UT Watch site for many years, but they are no longer available, so I am republishing my own work here (in 2014). You can still read back issues thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The Working Stiff Journal
Vol. 2 #7, September 1999
by Jackie Dana

Austin grows at a shocking pace as more and more high-tech companies move to town, attracting flocks of highly skilled (and highly paid) employees. Yuppies multiply faster than rabbits. The inhabitants of mansions perched over the greenbelts and Mount Bonnell stare, uncomprehending, at exhausted workers who are too tired to be polite when making that double decaf skim cappuccino at their second job.

In the next twenty years Austin’s population is predicted to increase by 66%, ranking it third in areas of greatest growth in the country (after Sacramento and Dallas/Fort Worth). The Austin area added nearly 118,000 residents between 1990 and 1994, an increase of 13.9%. Williamson County saw its population grow by 23.7%. In order for the city to continue experiencing meteoric growth and remain a great place to live, there must be workers. Someone has to serve food in restaurants, haul away garbage, pave streets, teach children, drive buses, sell pet food. Without us, the microchip plants close down, the electricity gets turned off, and no new houses get built. All that prosperity goes down the drain without people to do the work.

And work we do. As of June there were 707,918 employable workers in the Austin-San Marcos area. Fewer than 19,000 were unemployed, giving Austin a mere 2.6% unemployment rate, half the statewide unemployment rate of 5.4%. Contributing to that rate is a hefty increase in jobs – nearly 25,000 jobs created in the past year. In the Austin Business Journal, Ryan Robinson, chief demographer for the City of Austin, called the job growth rate of 6.5% in the past few years “stratospheric.”

Why is this significant? Take note of the types of jobs that are being created. In the past year, the goods-producing sector saw an increase of just 4,400 jobs while the service-producing sector expanded by 20,300. Almost 9,000 jobs were created in areas like computer and data processing, management, and business services. In fact, in 1997 the top ten local employers included Motorola, Dell Computer, IBM, and Advanced Micro Devices. Austin’s 1,700 technology firms make up approximately 12% of the area’s total work force.

The high-tech industry: A boon to our city, but does it help Austin’s workers? No one can doubt that the high-tech industry creates jobs. The problem is that lots of people beyond our state borders are ready to take them. The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M noted that from 1990 to 1996 Travis County’s population increased 18.7%, more than half of the new population originating elsewhere in the United States, particularly California and the East Coast. Further complicating matters, these new Austinites are bringing money with them, forcing up the cost of rent and new homes. “Immigrants have dramatically scaled up the cost of real estate, since even now Austin still looks cheap by New York, Silicon Valley, or D.C. standards,” Brian Kushner, CEO of Recompute, said in the Austin Business Journal.

Could it be that “Smart Growth” is just another term for a relocation package for wealthy high-tech workers? Between October 1998 and June of this year, the median home price in the Austin area rose 8.6% to $130,160. Only one-fifth of all homes built in the past year were priced below $110,000. In January the maximum mortgage limit for FHA loans in the area rose from $116,800 to $133,855. The Austin Chamber of Commerce notes that the average new house sells for just over $153,000, while an existing single-family home averages just over $112,000 when resold. Such prices are out of the reach of the average worker. Apartment rent, however, isn’t much better. Between 95% and 97% of the area’s 87,574 apartment units are occupied, keeping rents high. According to the Austin American-Statesman, “rents have jumped 21 percent over the past five years alone to their highest level – making the Austin area the most expensive in Texas and the third-most expensive in the South” after Washington, D.C., and South Florida. According to the Chamber of Commerce, rents average about 85 cents/square foot. Believe it or not, it’s actually cheaper to buy a house in Austin than to rent an apartment.

But don’t accuse high-tech workers of raising the cost of living. It’s the industries, not the workers, who deserve the blame for the skyrocketing costs. New companies move to town, increase demands on our infrastructure, and employ out-of-state workers in high-level positions. Local folks, on the other hand, get the crumbs, working in poor conditions, often as “contract labor” for little more than minimum wage.

The “prosperity” high-tech companies bring to town doesn’t help average workers at all. In “The State of Working America 1998-99” we are cautioned not to believe that prosperity automatically brings a higher standard of living. Instead, “living standards of most working families still have not recovered from the recession of the early 1990s, nor have their wages kept pace with the growth in productivity. The income growth that has been generated among middle-income families has been driven largely by an increase in working hours . . . to make up for the long-term deterioration of wages.”

So the cost of living in Austin has mushroomed while our wages remain stagnant. Despite our hometown prosperity, business owners insist that they cannot afford to pay workers living wages. The federal minimum wage is $5.15, but with our cost of living, Austin workers need to earn at least $9.09 per hour just to afford a one-bedroom apartment. The lowest-paid workers need two full-time minimum-wage jobs just to survive.

We need to change this pattern. Smart Growth is fine as long as the workers don’t suffer as a result. After all, Austin needs its workers – it cannot function without us. Workers need to support each other, to help win better pay and benefits for all of us, and to achieve living wage standards in both public and private sector employment. We must stand together – for united we stand, divided we fall.

The Working Stiff Journal was a free community newspaper produced in Austin, Texas and distributed across town. All of the articles were available online on the UT Watch site for many years, but they are no longer available, so I am republishing my own work here (in 2014). You can still read back issues thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The Working Stiff Journal
Vol. 2 #6, August 1999
by Jackie Dana

For too long we workers—those who do work for others—have been brainwashed by our corporation-driven society to be ashamed of what we are.

In 1999 it’s hard to find someone who takes pride in being “working class.” Most people structure their whole lives to escape the treacherous confines of the working class, to become the supposedly more respectable and comfortable “middle class,” seeing the label as more important than the substance.

Many of us believe the myths promoted by our politicians that we are better off than our parents and grandparents, that the standard of living is better than at any other time in the past century, and that the efforts to improve working conditions, pay, and benefits are largely unnecessary.

Now that we’re all “middle class,” and now that proportionately fewer people work in factories or mines, unions are presented as some anachronistic holdover from the unwashed past. The working class has become a thing of the past.

Or has it? The fact is that the situation for the majority of workers has been steadily worsening, despite all the news about the booming economy. Corporations are making record profits, but the workers are not seeing dividends for their efficiency. Wages have not kept up with inflation and costs of housing and medical care, among other things, have grown so high that they are escaping the reaches even of people with full-time employment. And the reason there are fewer factory jobs is not because we’re all becoming middle class but because all those jobs are being sent overseas, to places where corporations can pay workers even less than they paid them here.

Statistics demonstrate that the rich are getting richer every year while the so-called middle class is shrinking. According to the IRS, the combined income of the top 1% of families is greater than that of the bottom 50%. The US Census Bureau estimates that in 1996 approximately 41.7 million Americans had no health insurance and another 40 million had only limited coverage. From 1979 to 1995 the number of hours worked per person per year in the US increased by 47 hours, while it actually declined by over 200 hours in other industrialized countries such as Germany and Japan.

Most Americans, particularly those under 40, do not have the same standard of living as their parents. Fewer people can afford to buy homes; college educations even at less expensive schools require substantial loans; and credit card debt is spiraling out of control. Workers are being exploited at a record rate, yet it seems that fewer and fewer people recognize this fact. Indeed, many people eschew the concept of “working class” and believe that the language of class divisions and class struggle is outdated.

It’s about time we reclaim the concept of working class and remind ourselves that there is no shame in being a worker. After all, despite the labels, the vast majority of Americans are workers who earn a salary or a wage or a commission. We must work to survive, to pay our rent, to buy food, to get medical care, to pay for a car or a bike or the bus. Most of us are not born into wealth—we must earn it. We have no investment income or inheritances to support us, and no company profits.

We should accept our role and position in the economic system without shame, and recognize the inherent value of our work and strive to find a way beyond the exploitation. Otherwise, as someone at The Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University states, we shall lack “awareness, meaning, and sources of pride in [our] work, aesthetics, cultural sensibilities, and lives.”

As part of reclaiming our identity and pride as workers, we should also stop being apologists for management in all its forms, for we do not share the goals and needs of those who employ us. Management will do what it can to make each workplace as efficient as possible, getting the most production out of the fewest workers for the lowest wages.

The money that is “saved” in an efficient workplace becomes profit and goes into the management/owners’ pockets, not to the workers. Layoffs squeeze higher productivity out of the workers who remain, who are then forced to prove themselves rather than face the next round of pink slips. And as many of us are starting to realize, reducing health care and other benefits is another way of squeezing more money out of the employees.

Meanwhile, as management does what it needs to create profit, workers have a different goal. For the employee, work is a means for survival. Many of us feel pride in our jobs but find that management’s ever-increasing demands make solid products or high-quality service all but impossible.

Workers are often constrained by rules that make work burdensome and unpleasant, and they rarely have opportunities to suggest meaningful changes to their workplace. In that regard, we must look out for ourselves, to make sure our wages, and those of our fellow workers, are sufficient and fair representations of the effort and responsibility that is expected of us, and that our workplaces are safe and comfortable places to complete our tasks.

It is time that we workers again stand up for ourselves. This isn’t a radical suggestion; it is a logical one. We do not need to undermine our employers, but we should not allow ourselves to be exploited and then brainwashed into believing that is okay.

In unions, in our neighborhoods and schools, and in the workplace itself, we need to demonstrate that we are proud of being working class, and that we, as a class, will no longer suffer in silence. We will demand a living wage, better housing, more insurance, affordable education, and an end to corporate dominance.

When we do it with one voice, we WILL be heard.

The Center for Working Class Studies has many suggestions for further reading and research at their Working-Class Bibliography at http://as.ysu.edu/~cwcs/BIB.html

The Working Stiff Journal was a free community newspaper produced in Austin, Texas and distributed across town. All of the articles were available online on the UT Watch site for many years, but they are no longer available, so I am republishing my own work here (in 2014). You can still read back issues thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.