The Living Wage, “That Reproductive Ferment”

Abstract

The Living Wage, “that Reproductive Ferment” Dana Simmons How much life is in the living wage? In recent months, a number of major American cities have enacted minimum wage ordinances, offering urban working families a promise of better living conditions. Yet just as minimum wage laws attempt to ameliorate the conditions of low-wage workers, working communities appear under threat by temporary work, automation, task labor, mass incarceration, deportation, and a host of other social pressures. Shifts in capital and labor seem to have swept away any guarantees of secure, steady, and sufficient working- class employment in the global North. A decent life continues to escape even those within the reach of recent minimum wage victories. The MIT Living Wage Calculator reckons that a $15/hour minimum wage would not suffice in a city like Los Angeles to cover a family’s basic expenses. 1 When one considers all the forms of life and all the living people excluded from wage work—by choice, by necessity, or by force—very little potential life appears left in the wage. The era of the wage, some two hundred years old, seems likely to fade sooner or later. The living wage was conceived in opposition to a free market, contractual model of wage work. Scientific wage theories were tied to the mass expansion of wage labor in the mid- nineteenth century. Yet today, labor increasingly happens in contexts without stable contracts. “Freedom” appears severed from any semblance of contractual relations in the salvage economy of temporary, freelance, sharing, and foraging work that characterizes many global supply chains today. What comes next? If the wage relation is giving way to other unstable socio-economic forms, where may we search for a promise of life? Wages are not generally thought of as a scientific question. Wage struggles are rarely imagined as epistemological battles; categories like life and labor are taken for granted. Workers