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Labor Notes

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A lot of good labor stories today:

1. Michael Powell has a pretty pointed article for the Times, making fun of wealthy outrage at the idea that New York could possibly have a city-wide living wage of $10.

“I think,” Michael R. Bloomberg said a few weeks back, “that when the government tries to too much interfere with the marketplace, it doesn’t turn out well.”

There is an indefinable something about a so-called living wage bill that puts New York’s leaders at risk of breaking out in socialist hives. Advocates have amended, sanded down and liposuctioned their bill in hopes of pleasing the mayor and the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn.

But this bill strikes Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steel, a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, as dire. This autumn, he noted that the bill would apply to the gift shop at the Museum of Modern Art. As MoMA retails a natural stones necklace at $775, the imagination strains a bit to imagine a $10-an-hour clerk shuttering the joint. The state minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

Of course, what does $10 an hour get you in New York?

Margaret Passley, 50 and a Jamaican immigrant, has labored in home care for more than two decades. In 2002, she got a raise to $10 an hour: that is not to be confused with living well. She worked 50, 60, sometimes 70 hours a week to support her two children, and to try to hold onto a Brooklyn house she eventually lost to foreclosure.

What of your spare time? I ask. Can you take in a movie? She shakes her head. A restaurant? She chuckles.

“To be honest, I can’t afford that. I go to church,” she says. “For leisure time, I go to the park.”

This is a living wage with little room for life.

Indeed.

2. Good summary on the Republican war on child labor law.

3. Dave Jamieson has an outstanding if depressing story on the rise of temporary subcontracted labor for warehouses, especially but not exclusively WalMart. If this is the future of American blue collar labor, income inequality will only increase.

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