I was in Sedona, AZ, two weeks ago when Jacob Morrison, the North Alabama Area Labor Council (NAALC) President and NADSA comrade reached out to ask for my assistance as a delegate to NAALC to present our proposal for a Raise the Wage campaign to Alabama Arise. Arise is, roughly, the 2nd largest progressive policy-advocacy nonprofit headquartered in the state, beaten only by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which is a national level organization, while Arise is not).
The NAALC is a member group of Arise, which also has individual memberships. It’s not the vehicle we want NADSA to be, but it is a big get if NAALC’s campaign is selected by the membership to be a priority. So I said yes, and committed myself to ~6 hours of driving and 4 hours of meeting on a beautifully sunny Saturday. Luckily, my presentation was last because I needed all the time to sit at a table in a dark corner of the room behind the “stage” and type away on a script.
I wanted to paint just how far behind Alabama is with a $7.25/hour minimum wage set by Congress almost 2 decades ago (because Alabama actually does not have a minimum wage and uses the federal standard), but I also didn’t want to just advocate for $15/hour being the end of the discussion. Inflation does exist, and we have been “Fight[ing] for 15” since fast-food workers began demanding it in 2012, but most folks know it from Bernie delivering the message 3 years later. I just like to emphasize that it was worker led from the start. So to push it a little further, I cracked the door on the topic of a livable wage.
Analysis that I found on the day of said that, as of May of this year, a livable wage in Alabama is roughly $18.10/hour, though further study to fact check my claims in this write-up has revealed it is closer to $21.06/hour per MIT’s Living Wage Calculator for Alabama. Still, I included that $18.10/hour information to inspire an ask amongst the attendees, internally if not externally. My hope was rewarded when an attendee did ask the question I wanted to be asked, basically, “If a livable wage is above the $15 being asked here, then why doesn’t the campaign aim for that livable wage instead?”
Why indeed? The limits of “progressivism” are exposed in this ask. In this scenario, I’m first and foremost a representative of NAALC. I’m there at the behest of NAALC, but I’m also a socialist. The pull for organized labor institutions is still very much to moderate our positions, a lesson that the wider public is beginning to understand does not produce wins. So, in the spirit of Frank Sinatra and the brain damaged, barely literate mind of Donald Trump departing Andrews Air Force Base beside D.C. for what we had hoped would be the last time in 2021, I did it my way.
It is my belief that a wage commission should exist with the express mission of setting a new livable wage every single year that every business must comply with, at the penalty of the state seizing the business and continuing to operate it under livable-wage conditions, and with a much easier pathway to a union. Yes, even those darling small businesses that every liberal insists are the backbone of America. This or any number of similar actions. Clearly my own flub with an ever changing livable wage number is also evidence for the need of an active commission that proactively sets the standard. Obviously there isn’t a universal answer to how to handle businesses that refuse to submit to the will of a democratic government, but I digress. I still also felt the need to moderate my position in this space as well for the role I was playing, and for understanding that neither Alabama Arise nor NAALC can be the organizations that create revolutionary demands and create the mass support to achieve them (with a caveat of the merger formula being fully implemented with NAALC at some future date). Anyway, I stuck to the livable wage for now.
Hopefully the campaign is adopted with NAALC as a partner organization helping lead the fight to raise the minimum wage. Hopefully NADSA can find a way to assist and grow our profile with organized and unorganized labor. Hopefully we can use this fight to push for the next step of setting the minimum wage at a livable wage. Hopefully we can use that fight to build a commission, and hopefully, by that time, we’ll have some socialist state power to make sure the commission isn’t bent over a barrel by the corporate interests that own our government.
