Wage Campaign Research Articles

The effects of target vulnerabilities on social movement outcomes: Wage campaigns in U.S. cities

How do target vulnerabilities affect social movement outcomes? Walsh (1986) and Jasper and Poulsen (1993) conceptualize target vulnerabilities as characteristics or practices of organizations that are inconsistent with relevant normative expectations (laws, professional codes, widely-held public expectations, etc.). Organizations' claims to legitimacy, and the access to resources that legitimacy bestows, are based on the presumption of adherence to those normative expectations, so credible threats to that presumption cannot be ignored. We draw on political process theories and the logic of policy change to analyze how target vulnerabilities affect movement outcomes in campaigns for living wages (1994–2003) and for increased minimum wages (2012–2017). For living wage campaigns, we model the effects of political elites’ vulnerability to the threat of popular delegitimation and vulnerability to non-participation by municipal workers on the likelihood of city councils 1) holding a vote (access outcome) and 2) adopting a living wage ordinance (advantages outcome). Using sequential regression analyses of these outcomes in 596 U.S. cities, we find that the effects of target vulnerabilities vary across living wage ordinance outcomes: delegitimation vulnerabilities affect the likelihood of access outcomes, whereas adoption advantages are more likely in the presence of non-participation vulnerabilities. We test the generalizability of our model and measures in an analysis of local minimum wage ordinance campaigns. We show that contentious politics at the local level differs from the national-level in ways that render city political elites potentially vulnerable to movement threats of delegitimation and non-participation.

Urban Policy Entrepreneurship: Activist Networks, Minimum Wage Campaigns and Municipal Action Against Inequality

Why are cities acting against inequality? We attribute the growth of municipal economic policy to multi-city urban policy entrepreneurship networks. These networks combine activists who create pressure to address inequality with policy experts who supply the legislative means to do so. We illustrate the concept through the Fight for $15 campaign in Seattle and Chicago. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, participant observation and secondary documents, we show that advocates for municipal policy reform use national policy entrepreneurship networks to develop policy-specific and generalized policy advocacy techniques. Centering urban policy entrepreneurship brings into focus three important aspects of current municipal public policy: 1) The two-way interaction between national and local policy campaigns. 2) Partnerships between activists who set the political agenda and policy entrepreneurs who act on political opportunity. 3) The role of national advocacy and policy entrepreneurship networks in converting new policy ideas into routine, off-the-shelf policy solutions.

Making History the UCW Way

Making History the UCW Way

Raise the Wage LA: Campaigning for Living Wages in Los Angeles and an Emergent Working-Class Repertoire

In a relatively short period in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and the Occupy movement, minimum wage campaigns rapidly gained momentum across the United States. In particular a purposeful working-class mobilisation of the Los Angeles labour movement in coalition with worker centres and community organisations, and set against the backdrop of the national Fight for $15, deployed a range of tactics and exercised political leverage from 2014-2016 to be successful in securing an increase in the minimum wage to $15 in the U.S.’s second most populous city, in its most populous state. Based on interviews conducted in Los Angeles in December 2016 this article describes L.A.’s Raise the Wage campaign in a framework of mobilisation theory (Kelly 1998; Tilly 1978). It is argued that the elements of mobilisation theory are present and that the mobilisations in L.A. of the kind studied represent an expansion of working-class repertoire.

The introduction of a ‘monthly living wage’ in Slovenia

This article provides a chronological account of the Slovenian trade unions’ successful campaign to turn the statutory national monthly minimum wage into a living wage. The campaign led to a 23 per cent increase in the minimum wage and a change of its adjustment mechanism in 2010 and successive changes to its definition. The analysis starts with a historical overview of minimum wage developments in Slovenia and an account of the events prompting trade unions to launch their campaign. Reviewing the impact of the 23 per cent minimum wage increase, the Slovenian experience shows that turning the monthly minimum wage into a living wage does not necessarily lead to negative macroeconomic effects in terms of reduced growth or increased unemployment. The example of Slovenia furthermore illustrates that, even though the campaign was not explicitly couched in terms of a living wage campaign, the trade unions managed to adapt key elements of the living wage concept to the country-specific institutional context.

“As in a Civics Text Come to Life”: The East Brooklyn Congregations’ Nehemiah Housing Plan and “Citizens Power” in the 1980s

In the early 1980s the East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) began to build the first of 4,500 affordable, single-family homes, known as Nehemiah Houses. This essay examines how the EBC’s many trained local clergy and lay church members forged a potent body of ideas that drew on civic republicanism, nineteenth century populism, and the rich religious traditions of neighborhood churches to bring about the localization of author and decision making in the Plan’s rationale, design, building, process, and price. I argue that, as a “citizens power organization,” it succeeded in countering neoliberal solutions to urban decline that focused on privatization, deregulation, and subsidies to private developers. The adoption of the Nehemiah Plan elsewhere illustrates the cross-fertilization among citizen power organizations. In turn, the EBC took up new projects for East Brooklyn, including a living wage campaign launched first in Baltimore in the early 1990s.

Social Movement Unionism as Union-Civil Alliances: A Democratizing Force? The New Zealand Case

This exploratory study examines union-civil alliances in New Zealand (NZ). It focuses on the involvement of NZ’s peak union body, the Council of Trade Unions, in three civil group coalitions around the Living Wage Campaign, Decent Work Agenda and Environmental Agenda. It assesses how the CTU and its affiliates’ coalition involvement are informed by and seek to progress liberal (representative), participatory and/or more radical democratic principles, and what this means for organizational practice; the relations between the coalition parties; workplaces; and beyond. Through case discussions, the study finds that civil alliances involving the CTU and its affiliates do not reflect a core trait of union activity in NZ. Among the union-civil alliances that do exist, there is a prevailing sense of their utility to progress shared interests alongside, and on the union side, a more instrumental aim to encourage union revival. However, the alliances under examination reflect an engagement with various liberal and participatory democratic arrangements at different organizational levels. More radical democratic tendencies emerge in relation to ad hoc elements of activity and the aspirational goals of such coalitions as opposed to their usual processes and institutional configurations. In essence, what emerges is a labour centre and movement which, on the one hand, is in a survivalist mode primarily concerned with economistic matters, and on the other, in a position of relative political and bargaining weakness, reaching out to other civil groups where it can so as to challenge the neo-liberal hegemony. Based on our findings, we conclude that Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) view of radical democracy holds promise for subsequent coalitions involving the CTU, particularly in the context of NZ workers’ diverse interests and the plurality of other civil groups and social movements’ interests. This view concerns on-going agency, change, organizing and strategy by coalitions to build inclusive (counter-) hegemony, arguing for a politic from below that challenges existing dominant neo-liberal assumptions in work and other spheres of life.

An Employee’s Living Wage and Their Quality of Work Life: How Important Are Household Size and Household Income?

Living Wage (LW) campaigns normally assume a prototype household configuration in setting their LW rate, comprised of number of dependent householders and the number of incomes. This information is used to calculate the hourly pay rate required to sustain their quality of life and work life. Real households are nonetheless diverse in terms of number of householders and incomes, rendering the living wage conceptually more of a continuous variable than a single constant, across a wage spectrum. We explored this spectrum and its links to job attitudes with a nationally representative sample of N = 1011 low-waged New Zealanders. We measured each participant’s: hourly pay rate, number of household dependents and total household income, alongside individual job attitudes indicative of quality of work life (job satisfaction, work engagement, career satisfaction, meaningful empowerment, affective commitment, organizational citizenship behaviours and work-life balance). As a set, job attitudes consistently pivoted upwards into positive values approximating the campaign LW rate in New Zealand, regardless of either number of household dependents or household income (net of personal wage). However household income net of personal wage (unlike number of household dependents) buffered the gradient of the pivot upwards. The gradient was steeper (more clearly transformational and binary) among lowest-waged workers, in single-income households. To the extent that job attitudes as a set are already widely linked to individual and unit-level productivity, paying at or above the living wage threshold may bring productivity gains and thereby contribute toward decent work and economic development combined.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Negotiating the Frame for a Living Wage in Revelstoke, British Columbia: An Econ-Anthropological Approach

This article reflects on multidisciplinary research in a specific context: a community-based, economic impact research project intended to map the potential effects of a “living wage” as a poverty reduction strategy for the city of Revelstoke, British Columbia. Living wage initiatives have emerged across Canada. Intended to reduce poverty among the local working poor, they have also sparked tensions within local business communities. The project partnered anthropologists and economists with local stakeholders to examine the community's concerns about the initiative and, in particular, its impact on local small businesses. Many of the benefits of a living wage campaign are difficult to measure, while the potential impacts on labor costs and consequences are easier to trace. The project resulted in an interactive tool that can provide an economic sector specific impact assessment against which the wider social benefits of poverty reduction can be judged. We analyze the consequences of a participatory method...

For a few dollars more: Towards a translocal mobilities of labour activism in Cambodia

This paper uses the context of Cambodia’s 2013/14 and 2015 minimum wage campaigns to demonstrate the translocally rural-urban nature of worker agency and activism within global production networks. In doing so, it first highlights the gendered and hierarchical nature of the Cambodian union movement, emphasising in particular the disjuncture between its thriving, inter-occupational grassroots support and the male dominated, top down hierarchies of the union leadership. Secondly, the authors present primary informant testimonies and quantitative figures produced from 13 years of secondary strike data to highlight the key role of agricultural pressures in motivating strike participation. This translocal perspective on protest is used, finally, to demonstrate how certain features of the Cambodian union movement – hierarchy, male predominance and structural disjuncture – are rooted not in abstract norms, but in the everyday mobilities of translocally rura-urban livelihoods, which have rendered grassroots activism largely independent of the structures that represent it.

Two Perspectives on Platform Work

8 | International Union Rights | 25/3 FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 Two Perspectives on Platform Work Recognition comes from members, not courts SEBASTIEN FLAIS The common trend across the so-called ‘gig economy’ is a denial of rights, even when court judgements deem the practices unlawful. In the space of a few years, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) has managed to achieve results with our Couriers and Logistics branch through a member-led combination of strategic litigation and campaigns. When we first formed the Branch, workers told us stories about a sector where companies were constantly taking advantage of their workers. This exploitation was not limited to apps. We have taken on some app-based employers, such as Deliveroo, but most courier companies operate in a more traditional fashion, using radios to allocate orders. These companies claimed they were running their own businesses and classed their couriers as independent contractors. They argued this was necessary to provide couriers with flexibility, which the workers valued. But the couriers did not get to set their own rates of pay, had to wear uniforms and were fearful of not accepting jobs. They appreciated the flexibility, but they were definitely a part of someone else’s business. We took out four cases against CitySprint, Excel, Ecourier and Addison Lee to the Employment Tribunal. We argued their couriers were ‘limb (b) workers’, or ‘workers’ for short1. ‘Workers’ sit between employees, who have full employment rights, and independent contractors, who have no employment rights; they are self-employed but are also entitled to some rights, including minimum wage, holiday pay, trade union rights and protections against discrimination. The UK Supreme Court has drawn a distinction between the selfemployed running their own business and the selfemployed working for someone else’s2. The Court has also declared that in determining the nature of the employment relationship, judges must consider the incredible asymmetric bargaining power that the company has over workers. Simply looking at the contract is not enough, otherwise ‘armies of lawyers will simply place substitution clauses, or clauses denying any obligation to accept or provide work in employment contracts, as a matter of form, even where such terms do not begin to reflect the real relationship’3. In 2017, employment tribunals declared that the companies were unlawfully denying couriers rights in three of the cases, with Ecourier admitting liability as part of a settlement. Earlier this year, we also secured our first trade union recognition agreement in the ‘gig economy’ with couriers for The Doctor’s Laboratory (TDL). In our case against Deliveroo, however, things went differently. IWGB argued before the CAC that Deliveroo workers were entitled to a bargaining unit in Camden and Kentish Town (London), which would entail ‘worker’ status. Deliveroo’s lawyers successfully argued that their workers were independent contractors because of the workers’ ‘right to substitute’. In other words, the worker may be signed in to their Deliveroo account and accept an order, but someone else could perform the delivery. The CAC nevertheless wondered, ‘why would the question of substitution ever arise?’ Deliveroo’s contract offered large amount of flexibility, such as being able to stop an order during the delivery. To us, the answer is clear: employers are placing bogus clauses in contracts so they don’t have to provide basic employment rights. They are in a disproportionate position of power and thus well placed to deceive their workforce when it comes to employment status. As it stands, the High Court has given the IWGB permission to appeal the decision, based on Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Clearly unions cannot only rely on the courts because there is no victory guarantee. But a lack of recognition is not the end for unions operating in the gig economy – it is a call to creativity. We began organising Deliveroo workers in Brighton when they protested a lack of orders and demanded a recruitment freeze. Within a week, Deliveroo enacted a recruitment freeze. Indeed, before we had won a single case for the couriers, we secured a 25 percent pay rise across four of the biggest courier companies in the UK with a living wage campaign. We cycled with...

Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice ed. by Ian Thomas MacDonald

Reviewed by: Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice ed. by Ian Thomas MacDonald Myer Siemiatycki Ian Thomas MacDonald, ed., Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change ( Ithaca: Cornell University 2017) This book provides a more optimistic account of labour's influence on North American cities than readers might expect. In the process, its authors show commendable restraint eschewing any temptation towards wishful triumphalism. Instead, the essays in this uniformly strong collection present a highly nuanced account of successes and setbacks of union campaigns to shape the direction of two changing cities: New York and Toronto. To be sure, hard times have befallen labour in these and other cities across the continent in recent decades. Symptoms abound in both plummeting and rising trend lines: declining union density, workers' collective action, and real wages; increased precarious employment, work insecurity and income inequality. This timely work shifts the focus from class relations at the workplace to union efforts to shape the urban landscape in labour's interest. Exploring union efforts to influence urban land use, regulations, and services, the book illuminates the local state as a significant terrain of labour activism. A key theme is whether union campaigns to define urban landscapes can renew and revitalize the labour movement. It doesn't help that workers themselves are largely missing in action from these union urban struggles. This book advances the intersection of labour and urban studies. It turns from the more familiar ground of municipal worker strikes, or citywide minimum wage campaigns, to lesser studied contestations over urban space. As capital relentlessly strives to remake the city in its image and interest, this book looks at labour's rejoinder in all its commitments, coalitions, and contradictions. Editor Ian Thomas MacDonald succinctly conveys the collection's aspiration to "serve as a road map toward both a stronger labor (sic) movement and a socially just urban-ism." (1) The collection itself is a well-designed symmetrical construct. Case studies explore and compare how unions are contesting four dimensions of the postindustrial city in each of New York and Toronto. Paired chapters examine struggles to define "the hospitable city" (tourism, attractions, hotels), the "creative city" (film production), "the sustainable city" (a green economy) and "the caring city" (child care) in New York and Toronto. The focus on these cities retrieves them - from more familiar designations - as leading labour cities, past and present. Ian Thomas Macdonald's opening case study examines the successful recent campaign of unions in the New York hotel sector to block proposed redevelopment in Midtown Manhattan which would threaten existing unionized hotels with new hotels known for lower wages and antipathy to unions. Ambiguities surface with the recognition that building trades unions supported redevelopment, while key property owners allied themselves with hotel unions to block neighbourhood change. Steve Tufts provides a sophisticated study of a failed bid by Toronto's leading [End Page 258] hotel sector union to promote a downtown casino. For Unite Here, the casino proposal was "about getting the local government to prioritize postindustrial development as a means of reproducing middle-class jobs." (72) More potent was a diverse array of forces aligned against the proposal, including influential downtown residents, competing gaming and real estate corporations, and other unions opposed to the casino. The second pairing of essays examines "creative city" impulses through the lens of film production. In both instances, unions in the film sector succeeded in extracting favourable commitments from their city government. Maria Figueroa and Lois S. Gray examine the campaign to secure tax incentives for filming in New York, while Thorben Wieditz perceptively charts the progressive and problematic dynamics behind a successful campaign to preserve film studio space from redevelopment in Toronto. Both cases saw labour partner with local film industry employers. Both essays suggestively question whether union efforts were fuelled by union narrow self-interest or by broader social objectives. The next essay thematic - "the sustainable city" - sees a turn from unions waging largely defensive preservationist struggles, to labour adopting a more pro-active stance. It is the front on which unions have the least to show for their efforts. Maria Figueroa shows that New York construction sector unions have promoted retrofitting and...

In search of a living wage in Southeast Asia

PurposeDebates over the definition, processes and outcomes of minimum and “living” wages are heated and often politically contentious in garment-producing countries. Internationally, there have been various initiatives to promote and support the implementation of a living wage for workers in labour-intensive manufacturing, ranging from corporate-driven social responsibility and multi-stakeholder initiatives to the long-standing living wage campaign of the global unions. One prominent regional initiative is the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA). The purpose of this paper is to assess its reach and effect in Southeast Asia.Design/methodology/approachA living wage campaign is assessed with reference to Indonesia and Cambodia, two important garment manufacturing countries in Southeast Asia. The paper draws on data collected in interviews with garment manufacturers, brand representatives, trade unionists and labour NGO activists, including members of the AFWA Steering Committee in Indonesia and Cambodia, complemented by a systematic review of documents and reports produced by the AFWA.FindingsAs the paper shows, despite a series of initiatives, the Asia Floor Wage has failed to gain traction in Cambodia or Indonesia. This is so, the paper argues, because national economic, political and institutional contexts are the primary drivers of the strategies and priorities of constituent organisations, governments and industry stakeholders. In the absence of robust local and regional coalitions of trade unions, efforts towards a common and coordinated regional approach to living wages are thus unlikely to gain traction.Originality/valueTo a large extent, the literature on the concepts and practices associated with the living wage has focussed on developed rather than developing countries. This paper extends the literature by providing a systematic examination of a transnational wage campaign in developing Asian countries.

The UK living wage

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the value that UK trade unions now place on the living wage.Design/methodology/approachThe author is the TUC’s Pay Policy Officer and examines the issue from a practitioner’s perspective.FindingsThe living wage now has a well-established place within the hierarchy of pay demands adopted by UK trade unions. This continues a tradition of unions supporting norms and regulations as an adjunct to collective bargaining. However, support had to be achieved through a process of negotiation with the broader UK living wage campaign.Practical implicationsThe paper concludes that there are good prospects for the living wage, and thus for the continued trade union support.Social implicationsThe living wage standard is seen as having a strong moral basis, which often helps to win agreement with good employers. This results in a steady stream of workers out of in-work poverty. The credit for such pay increases is often shared between employers and trade unions.Originality/valueThe paper is written by a practitioner with inside knowledge and experience of the entire course of the living wage campaign in the UK and how it has been adopted and integrated by trade unions.

The Living Wage campaign in the UK

PurposeThis paper presents an account of the UK campaign for the voluntary Living Wage, an example of civil regulation. The purpose of this paper is to identify and characterize the actors involved in the campaign, describe methods used and examine direct and indirect consequences of the campaign.Design/methodology/approachA mixed-method design is employed, reflecting the broadly framed purpose of the research. The research used semi-structured interviews with campaigners, union representatives and employers, observation of campaign activities and the creation of a database of Living Wage employers.FindingsThe campaign originated in the community organizing movement, but has involved a broad range of labor market actors, both “new” and “old.” A continuum of campaigning methods has been used, stretching from community mobilization to appeals to employer self-interest and corporate social responsibility. The campaign has recruited 3,000 employers, led to wage increases for thousands of workers and registered indirect effects by shaping the policies of governments, employers and unions.Originality/valueThe research presents a novel account of the UK’s distinctive Living Wage campaign, a notable example of the civil regulation of the labor market.

Community and union-led Living Wage campaigns

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate different approaches to effective campaigning in support of the Living Wage and so this paper contributes to the broader debate over the nature of the union movement’s engagement with community groups in pursuit of workplace and social issues.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a systematic comparison of a union-led and a community-led campaign, drawing primarily upon interview and survey data.FindingsThough different, both campaigns met with a measure of success in improving employee pay and in increasing union membership suggesting a pragmatic approach to the building of union-community relationships.Practical implicationsThe paper shows the need for campaigners to adopt a strategic approach in identifying the target for their campaign, and also the importance of shaping a persuasive argument.Originality/valueThe paper reaffirms the importance of traditional union-led campaigning alongside campaigning through engagement with community groups and so offers a broader framework for exploring the relationships between union and community groups.

Precarious Workers and Collective Efficacy

Scholars of contemporary capitalism have argued that the rise of flexible accumulation and precarious employment has left workers disillusioned and adrift, experiencing an erosion of solidarities and human bonds. In contrast, this study uncovers a sense of collective efficacy where existing scholarship would lead us to least expect it: among workers who are, structurally, among the most marginal and vulnerable. The case examined is a Chicago living wage campaign, which for three long years mobilized workers laboring outside of traditional employment relationships. Why would a sense of collective efficacy emerge when participants’ ability to make change had remained in doubt for years? Why would workers who lack structural power come to feel so efficacious? Drawing on in-depth interviews with campaign participants, I argue that their understandings of power arose from their experience of collective action. The case sheds new light on our understanding of identity and subjectivity under contemporary capitalism.

The role of civil society in reducing poverty and inequality: A case study of the living wage campaign in the UK

The introduction of the national minimum wage at the end of the 1990s in the UK represented an important intervention by the then New Labour government but it has remained too low to effectively address increasing levels of in-work poverty and inequality. This article traces the development of the living wage campaign, initiated and led by Citizens UK and its main affiliate London Citizens from 2001 onwards and what it has to say about the role and potential of civil society in addressing issues of poverty and inequality.

FINANCIAMENTO DA EDUCAÇÃO E LUTA SINDICAL: CONFLITOS EM UMA GRANDE REDE DE ENSINO

RESUMO: Este trabalho apresenta um debate sobre o impacto da lei do piso salarial profissional nacional sobre as disputas dos professores de Curitiba, com o gestor da rede local de ensino. Como metodologia, optou-se por analisar as pautas de reivindicações do Sindicato da categoria, nas campanhas salariais desde 2008, focalizando os itens que diziam respeito a piso e remuneração e implementação de 1/3 de hora atividade. Como resultado foi possível observar diferentes maneiras de vocalizar as demandas de piso e diferentes impactos concretos sobre a remuneração. Em certos momentos, provocando achatamento da carreira e, em outros, achatamento do próprio piso. Quanto a hora atividade, esta deixa de ser uma reivindicação de organização do trabalho e assume a característica de um direito justo.