Vivian Rothstein
interview transcript

A great number of people in LA don’t really earn a living wage. What are the alternatives?

If you look at the history of work in this country, there were manufacturing jobs, factory jobs, that were very low-wage jobs. There was a decision made to start organizing to raise the level of wages so auto workers became middle-class people, they could afford to feed their families, buy homes. Other production workers were able to earn middle-class wages. I don’t think it’s necessary that people have to work at poverty wages. I think it’s structured into the society right now, but service jobs could be middle-class jobs; they could pay a decent wage. People should be able to support themselves and their families if they work full time. So, I don’t think it’s inevitable, the concept of working in poverty seems to be an oxymoron; if you’re working, you should not be poor. When you work, you should be able to support yourself.

What is the magic number for what is a living wage?

Well, that’s complicated, because when you run a living wage campaign and you work through the political practice, a living wage basically becomes what you’re able to pass through the legislative body. We set our living wage at $10.69 in Santa Monica, because it was the level at which a family of four was no longer eligible for benefits and in that case, it was food stamps. This year, that’s gone up to $11.51, but we felt that a living wage is a wage on which you should be able to support your family without having to rely on government benefits. In other cities and states, they’ve set the living wage at various levels. When the movement first started about 8 years ago, the wage was more like $8. Now, living wage ordinances that are getting passed are more like $13, $12.50. So, what the movement is beginning to realize is that $8 an hour is not a living wage, you cannot support a family on that and frankly, $13 is barely a living wage, but certainly, better.

Is there a possibility to protect small businesses so that they could be exempt from living wage?

Our ordinance only affected businesses that make $5 million or more a year gross. So those are not small businesses, and there was also a hardship exemption. If paying a living wage created such a hardship for a company that it would put them out of business, they could get a waiver. This is not aimed at small businesses. The opponents tried to make it look like it was an attack on small businesses, but it was really not.

Another criticism is that when you enforce minimum wages, there’s a potential for layoffs.

Well, first of all, businesses always oppose any kind regulation on them. So, they’re generally opposed to safety and health legislation, they’re opposed to the minimum wage. One of the reasons we have such a problem with low-wage poverty is that the federal minimum wage has not been kept current with inflation. If it had been, it would be about $10.50 an hour, but interests have pressured Congress not to raise the federal minimum wage, and that’s why the minimum wage movement has developed to try to raise the living wage locally.

There was an economic study of our proposal in Santa Monica and it was shown that there would be jobs lost but very few. So, we didn’t think it was a job killer. This is what business interests always say, that any regulation, or any creating any kind of a floor for wages is a job killer, but we don’t agree with that.

There was a study from the Public Policy Institute that said that the unions were very tightly involved, they were hinting at unions being involved because it was a power play to help them get more members. What do you think of that?

Unions are the main group in the society that pushes workplace wages and benefits. That we have Social Security, because of the labor movement. We have the 8-hour day, because of the labor movement. There’s no reason why unions should have not taken leadership on this issue.

What people were objecting to was that in our ordinance like in all living wage ordinances across the country, the management of a particular company, along with the workers if they both agreed, could exempt their business from the standards of the living wage, and that’s because often employees and employers negotiate other benefits that aren’t necessarily monetary, like vacations, grievance procedure, seniority protection, other things that workers and management find in their interest. If they had negotiated an agreement like that, and they were both satisfied with that, and felt it was more beneficial than a living wage, they could exempt themselves. That’s in every living wage ordinance, or just about every one that exists; it’s certainly in the Los Angeles living wage.

The charge was that the labor movement was behind this living wage. No big surprise. The labor movement, the religious community, community activists, we are behind it. That’s what labor unions are for, to work on these issues. So, our opposition thought that they could say unions are behind it and it would make everybody upset, but in fact, it didn’t.

Talk about what you saw in the grocery strike and particularly, the union’s role in the grocery strike.

It used to be, when the labor movement first started, it was the local labor movement facing a company that was owned locally and so, the fight was a local fight. But as we’ve seen over the last 20 years, companies have consolidated. So, for instance, grocery chains now are large national chains. They’re no longer small grocery stores. I think one of their strategic mistakes in the grocery strike was that the local unions tried to organize and win against a national corporation, but they only did it locally. The only way to really get a voice in relationship to large, multinational corporations is to have a national or international perspective. Otherwise, the companies would just take the unions out city by city by city because they have national resources, they have a national strategy. The unions didn’t have a national strategy, and I think that was a big mistake.

There could have been a national boycott of Safeway. There could have been picket lines all over the country. They could have affected the national income of these large companies.

There ws enormous public support for the grocery workers. But a strike wasn’t enough.

Do you think that was caused by the locals not reaching out to their chapters elsewhere? I remember seeing a few little rallies in New York but there didn’t seem like there was cohesion between them. Would that have been something they could have done?

Yeah, absolutely. I think in the past, the labor unions were much more an association of locals. They were all called locals. That’s how they used to win; they can’t win that way anymore. The companies have all consolidated and they are huge, they have very deep pockets. They operate all over the country. So you have a strike in Southern California, but they’re still making zillions of dollars in the rest of the country. You have to affect their income nationally.

Do you know how these unions work: they’re locally based, is there good communication between New York and California, for instance?

Every union is different, and every union is struggling now with this issue, facing large, multinational and in fact, global corporations and in fact the labor movement in countries outside the United States is facing this too. Eventually, if unions want to have power and workers want to have a voice in multinational corporations, they’re going to have to internationalize. Their unions are going to have to work together, and that is a revolutionary thing, because unions are used to just working in their own towns.

In Santa Monica, you had a situation there with hotel workers where that was likely a success for the workers.

Well, I think what we were able to do was to build an extremely strong community base of supporters and the hotel industry is very sensitive about its image and I think that we were able to highlight the plight of the workers within the hotels and catalyze a lot of religious support and community support. But there was also a national strategy in that campaign to reach out to the companies that were running these hotels and to have a relationship with them. So, there was never the thought that just doing it in Santa Monica alone was gonna win, but it needed to be larger. So, for instance, the clergy supporters published an ad in New York and Los Angeles addressed to Jonathan Tisch, who was the president of the Lowe’s Hotel Corporation. And appealed to him to put pressure on him, he’s a very public figure in New York and it was that kind of national strategy that really made a difference.

In a way the hotel unions did what the grocery unions didn’t.

See, the grocery union has had a very good contract and in the past, people had been very well paid. I think that they became a little bit complacent about their ability to win again. Hotel workers are mostly immigrant workers, making fairly low wages, even if they’re unionized. I think that the union realizes that is has to reach out to allies or it doesn’t have a chance. Immigrant workers organizing by themselves can’t win. They really need clergy in the community, they need political leaders to stand with them. They started out in a much less powerful position, and I think they realized they needed to build this national strategy.

The main issue in the grocery strike was healthcare. Somehow the union didn’t get to the public. Healthcare is extremely expensive and a lot of people aren’t covered. Why didn’t healthcare issues resonate with the public?

Well I think it was the way they presented it. It wasn’t the only issue. Most grocery workers don’t work full time, and their hours are controlled by the employers. They don’t guarantee hours, so very few of them work 40 hours a week and so, some of them make $14 an hour, which is really good, but if you’re not working 40 hours a week, it’s not very good. And in the past, the union has been willing to give up on the hours and give up on the wages just to protect healthcare. So, they didn’t explain enough about how much a typical grocery worker makes. They don’t make that much money. But they make the sacrifice financially in order to hold onto health benefits. I think they didn’t explain that well enough. People thought, “Oh, my God, they’re making $50,000 a year and they get free health benefits. But the fact is they don’t make $50,000 a year. They should have gotten more of that out. I think they thought they could win with just the strike, but they really didn’t move the public opinion enough, so I don’t think they put the resources into catalyzing the public support.

On healthcare, what could be done to make healthcare more affordable?

A. Well, I don’t think that it is affordability so much; I think it’s corporate greed. If you look at the heads of American corporations in the 1950s, they made about 7 or 8 times what the lowest wage workers in American companies made. Now they make 400 to 500 times what the lowest paid worker makes. The gap between the heads of corporations and the people that do the work is so extreme, so the resources are being skimmed off at the top and they want like 25-30 percent profitability on these companies and these huge corporate salaries. We have to get back to this idea that a company can make a modest profit and still be considered successful. It’s one of the problems I think in many industries. Multinational corporations have bought up the companies; they have very little interest in the actual service the company provides like grocery stores. What they want to be is a profit center, take as much profit out of the industry as they possibly can, and they don’t have a lot of interest in the people who provide the work or the service itself. I think that’s the problem. I don’t think it’s just that healthcare costs are high; they are high, but so are the corporate salaries.

Moving on to social justice—the state of public schools and a lot of minority students are failing….The government has made attempts to try to fix the problem, but it’s not working. What can be done?

I think it’s very related to the job situation. There are many families where the parents are working two and three jobs because they make so little money that one job does not support their family and are absent from the home a lot. They don’t give the kids the kind of attention or pay enough attention to what’s going on in school or be engaged at all. So the kids and the schools are sort of left on their own. I think education would improve dramatically if people made a decent wage on a full-time job and spent the rest of their time paying attention to their children.I really think that this is very much related.

On affordable housing, you have people living nine people to an apartment. You have the Section 8 program going away for whatever reason. When they look at the building going on in Los Angeles it’s not aimed at lower income, it’s aimed at higher income, and it’s increasingly getting more difficult unless you want to move all the way out to San Bernadino or beyond. What are some options for making housing more affordable in the city?

Well, when you said that Section 8 is disappearing for whatever reason, it’s disappearing because the Republican administration does not believe in the Section 8 housing industry and there needs to be a Section 8 housing industry. There needs to be a federal involvement in creation, in incentive programs for the construction and maintenance of affordable housing, not public housing but just affordable housing. It’s just disappearing. So, again, the reason that I’ve worked on the issue of wages is that I feel that the political will to provide public money to subsidized housing or to subsidize benefit programs is disappearing. And so people are left at the mercy of the market.

The market has to be just. At this point, it makes a lot of sense to work on issues of wages. If people have money in their pockets, it as an economic development strategy for low-income communities at a time when the federal government is not willing to put money into housing and when local government is cutting taxes and doesn’t have the money to put into housing as well. In a robust economy and in a just economy, I think that local governments and state governments and the federal government will put a lot of our tax dollars into creating affordable housing. The biggest subsidy to housing is the tax decuction you get if you’re a homeowner. Homeowners are able to deduct the interest on their mortgages which is an enormous subsidy. But the Republican administration doesn’t believe in creating any kind of similar subsidy for rental housing. So, it doesn’t get built.

Can you make for us an economic argument for higher wages generally, in the sense of X people get higher wages, which produces more spending with more productivity, etc?

Sure. If people get decent wages, they can buy quality housing, they can shop in the community, which creates sales tax. They can pay income tax, so they help the state economy function and they get insurance, so they’re not a drain on the county system, public health system. Right now, when you have people working at poverty wages, basically, the local welfare system is subsidizing local businesses like hotels. They don’t provide health benefits. So where do people go when they’re ill? They go to county clinics. Who pays for the county clinics? We do. If the families don’t make enough money for food, what do they do? They either go to social service agencies that are funded by the government or they go to collect food stamps. We are now subsidizing corporate America, because they’re not paying people enough to support themselves. This is not a cheap alternative; this is an unjust and irrational system as far as I’m concerned and the people who are in the middle of it are just getting ground up. They’re working so hard. We’ve got people who play by the rules, they work full time, more than full time. They’re doing exactly what American society says you do to get ahead and they’re in poverty. Really, what is the incentive for anybody to do full-time work and be a responsible worker if they just fall further and further behind?

What do you think about the role education plays, either the lack of education in not helping someone or the role it plays in helping someone out?

I think that education is very important in helping people take professional jobs, but there will always be jobs in a society that are not professional. Those jobs need to be done. Service sector jobs need to be done. Hotels need to have people clean their rooms. There need to be bartenders, there need to be waiters, there need to be banquet servers, and not all those people can go to college and get a job, a professional job. Who’s going to do this work? So, I think education is great, but it’s not a substitute for decent wages. I think there still has to be the idea that, you work hard, you do work that’s important to the society, you should make enough to support your family.

Community colleges have been raising tuition, cutting classes, pricing up and up and up. The majority of people who go to community colleges tend to be minorities and people of lower income families. What future impact will it have if we keep raising the price of what used to be an affordable education system?

A lot of people just won’t be able to go to community college. As important as education is, I just don’t think it’s the only answer. You can’t have a country of all college graduates and nobody doing the service work, the dirty work, the hard physical work. Someone has to do it. I mean, there’s a lot of jobs that can go abroad, manufacturing jobs can go abroad, healthcare can’t go abroad really, the tourism industry can’t go abroad, the restaurant industry can’t go abroad, the laundry industry can’t go abroad. There’s a lot of stuff that we need to be done here and someone has to do it and jobs should be good.

What about social services and the role they play, and how accessible are they to people? If you come here from El Salvador, how do you know how to access them?

Well, it’s a problem. Not only is it a problem to access it, but if you get federal money for your social services, you’re not allowed to serve undocumented people. And that is one of the changes that the first Bush administration has instituted. So Legal Aid can’t serve people who are undocumented immigrants, a lot of food banks can’t, and health clinics and it’s huge. So, that cuts out, especially in LA, a huge portion of people in need.

It’s happened gradually through the various federal funding sources and it’s so devastating for immigant communities. For 10 years I ran a non-profit that served homeless people and over the course of the 10 years, I began to feel it was less and less effective in really dealing with the systemic problem that was creating homeless and poverty.

So there’s been a declining interest from the federal level to . . .?

It’s not declining interest, it’s hostility toward immigrants. I feel like the Republican administration wants to be able to supply employers with cheap labor because a lot of industry wants cheap labor, but they are totally hostile towards addressing the real needs that undocumented immigrants have. So they want to use their labor but have hostility to their long-term needs. Now, they’re associating immigrants with terrorism--in a place like LA, it’s a huge population. The Rand Corporation did this study about what immigrants bring to the LA economy, it’s enormous what they bring in terms of the value of their labor. They’re not allowed to draw on public social services. They’re pouring millions of dollars into the Social Security system which they will never get back. In some ways they’re shoring up the Social Security system. LA is benefiting, yet the workers themselves are not; they’re being taken advantage of.

The people who are here legally, how much do they help?

A. I think they play a very important role in helping individuals. I think they’re critical, I mean the extended family is weak, and what’s replaced that …is social services, places to go for food and shelter or assistance, legal assistance. The same things you used to go to your families, now you go to a non-profit. But I don’t think they have the power to change the basic structure of inequality, because most of them get federal money and the federal government has every bit weakened the ability of non-profits to be advocates, political advocates. In fact, right now, there’s a new FEC, Federal Election Commission, proposal that would restrict non-profits’ participation in any public policy matter, any election on a public policy initiative. They want to take away non-profits’ rights to participate in those elections. So that Republicans are trying to take away the political power of non-profits.

But the corporation, Wal-mart, can spend $1million to fight the Inglewood ballot measure….

More like $1.6 million. It was the same people that fought against our living wage. The Dolphin Group communications team. It’s the same group of Republican consultants. The advertise that for $1 million they can defeat any initiative. Of course we defeated them. It’s a cabal of Republican consultants who are trying to develop expertise at manipulating the initiative process in California for the benefit of large corporations.

If you can find a core of what causes urban poverty, is there one thing that does it?

A. It’d have to be about economic systems, we live in a capitalist system that’s based on private property with a large emphasis on profits. Over the last 20-25 years, the demands of the market have been to maximize profits in every industry and to consolidate industries and to consolidate power. And so, now you have these huge, multinational corporations like Wal-mart that have no commitment to local cities or local communities or local people; they have a commitment to the bottom line and I think they’re running up rough-shod not just over American cities, but nations around the world. Wal-mart is the largest employer in the entire world, they employ more than 2 million people around the world. They come into communities, they want to sell a lot of stuff, they want to pay extremely low wages and they want to take all the profits out of those communities. I think that’s one of the reasons we have urban poverty and rural poverty, frankly.

What can be done?

Well, historically, the only force that’s been able to balance the profit motive in large corporations has been organized workers. They are very important to the functioning of their companies, and when they organize and demand a voice on the job and they demand a piece of the profit, that’s the only thing that mediates rampant corporate greed. And what happens is that those unions are membership organizations, and they’re supported by the member fee, they’re not dependent on the federal government to say you can’t serve immigrants. They’re independently financed by themselves and their huge membership organizations and they can participate in politics and they can run candidates for office and they’re the only countervailing force to corporate greed and that’s one of the reasons the Republican administration is trying to continue to shrink and defeat the labor movement. It has been the focal point of a lot of conservative legislation, to try to take the power away from organized labor. So my view is that what we have to do is to organize the people who do the work in this country to stand up and demand their rights And they’re not very revolutionary rights, just to get a living wage and health benefits and a voice on the job, it’s not very revolutionary. Most of Western Europe has very good wages, they retire at 52, they have guaranteed two months vacation, they have free family health benefits, they have childfare for people with children, they have housing for low-income people, there’s no reason our country can’t treat our workers better.