Although he congratulated anti-sweatshop activists on Northwestern’s decision to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium, Dr. Robert Pollin, a living wage expert, urged students Monday not to ignore opponents’ arguments.
“Anyone who advocates for WRC has to be pretty damn careful about what you’re doing and make sure the opponent isn’t right,” Pollin said.
Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts and author of the book “The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy,” spoke to about 30 students gathered in Swift 104 about the idea of a living wage and how it relates to sweatshops.
Pollin said increasing workers’ wages would not substantially affect the price of the goods produced.
In Mexico, for example, by doubling wages for all apparel workers, “you’d have to raise prices 3.4 percent on average at the retail level,” Pollin said. “You’re talking about a casual shirt going from $32 to $32.60.”
This increase, Pollin said, is “well below what people say they are willing to pay to get rid of sweatshops – and they’re not just college students.”
Because the “living wage” is so vaguely defined, Pollin said he wasn’t even sure if doubling current wages would meet the requirements.
That vagueness has been one of the reasons NU was hesitant to join the WRC.
“We don’t know exactly how to set a living wage,” Pollin said, but “there’s a lot of room for improving the living standards of workers.”
Pollin also acknowledged NU’s other concern: the lack of corporate involvement in the WRC.
“Realistically nothing is going to change unless businesses are at the table,” he said.
Despite those precautions, Pollin said the WRC was important as competition for the Fair Labor Association, a sweatshop monitoring organization that includes corporations in its decision-making processes. Pollin believes a strong WRC will keep the FLA honest.
“You have to have a mechanism through which the workers’ voice is heard,” he said. “That is what the WRC is trying to construct.”
The living wage movement in the United States started in Baltimore six years ago when religious workers noticed people with full-time jobs coming into soup kitchens, Pollin said.
“If you have a full-time job and you’re coming to a soup kitchen, then you’re not earning a living wage,” Pollin said. “What’s happened in (the past) 30 years is a complete abandonment of the notion that minimum-wage workers get paid a living wage.”
In 1968, U.S. workers earning minimum wage earned an income 17 percent above the poverty line, Pollin said.
“Today, you’re 25 percent below the poverty line,” if you work a minimum-wage job full time, he said.
The anti-sweatshop movement, Pollin said, is making people again focus on working conditions.
“The point of the anti-sweatshop movement is not just to target the workers making apparel for Northwestern or North Carolina,” Pollin said. “The next step is to move from Northwestern to Wal-Mart. Then you’re going to change the world.”
