On The Ethics of a Living Wage

• In Event: Market Forces, Corporate Rights and Emotional Labor

Abstract

Conservative economists and fiscal libertarians oftentimes claim that efforts to raise wages via minimum wage legislation represent a left-wing populist push that is harmful for society. Progressive demands for living wages, in this view, are an attempt by politicians to draw support from a large popular base that is not necessarily concerned with long-term stability and growth. Even though right-wing populist movements have not recently been characterized for their progressive economic platforms, the idea that redistributive economic measures are invariably a populist tool to win elections seats deeply in the minds of many conservatives. Are efforts to achieve living wages a mere populist electoral strategy, or are they based on legitimate justice-based considerations? I argue that justice reasons can explain demands for living wages.
My paper will investigate whether citizen- contributors to the community's wealth have a valid moral claim not to fall below a threshold of compensation for work whose fruits are in demand by society. In practice, my attention focuses on contributors that we can find in low paid jobs and occupations. If their pay is not adequate to reach a minimum of resources necessary for a (stipulated) decent standard of living , does society have a duty to ensure that they do?
In the paper, I will argue that society has such a duty. As straightforward as this proposition seems, the question of whether society owes its members assurance that their contribution to societal wealth will be rewarded so as to enable the worker to obtain income sufficient for decent living is either perfunctorily mentioned (see, for example Rawls in a Theory of Justice) or vastly ignored in the justice literature (albeit not in political debates, of course). However, this oversight is worrisome because it is not so obvious that there is anything wrong (unjust) with the market valuing certain contributions at a low rate. If we take market price as a sign of what society is willing to reciprocate to the individual for her contributed good (or labor), it makes sense to think that low rewards for contributions mirror the low value, or commonplaceness, of those contributions. Why should society ensure that contributions that aren’t that special receive a higher reward than it’s fitting to assign to them? We need to address specifically whether the claim to a living wage is anchored in intuitions that we can back up normatively.
The paper will argue that a principle of fair reciprocity requires that contributors to the social product not be denied of the possibility to lead a decent life. Traditionally, the right to a living wage has been justified on grounds of 1) the dignified nature of work (whatever its type), 2) the value of distributive equality and non-exploitation, and 3) the paramount duty to enable the fulfillment of basic human needs. My paper offers an under-explored alternative to these avenues of justification, which is more likely to be seen as politically viable in today’s climate. I suggest that an individual that contributes fulltime to the sustenance of a cooperative enterprise (such as society) has a valid rights-claim to receiving a share of the fruits of cooperation that is proportional to her contribution. The paper fleshes out the idea that this proportionality should entail a living wage because contributing to society with work that others need for enabling production and economic activity (i.e., with “labor” in the sense that Hanna Arendt understood that term, that is, activity addressed at realizing basic sustenance tasks) creates the conditions of freedom for our fellow-citizens. Creating conditions of freedom for others justifies a claim to being able to ensure freedom (from hardship) for oneself. The right to avoid slavery to the needs of others entails the effective right to a life with room for the execution of personal projects and plans, which the sufficient possession of materials resources allows. The paper consists of fleshing out this line of thinking and conceptualizing the mentioned principle of fair reciprocity and the associated ideal of freedom from slavery to the needs of society.

Author

• Julia Maskivker