I did not attend this year’s state party convention but I have attended many in the recent past. I have a question that I hope someone can answer.
These events are held at large sports arenas that are serviced by a whole lot of people, including riggers, cleaners, setup people, and yeah, the people who staff the concession stands that sell coffee, pretzels, hot dogs and the rest.
Does the state party inquire as to the wages of these workers and insist that they receive a living wage, even if only for the time they are serving the Democratic Party?
Please share widely!
An excellent question, and one that I can guess the answer to.
I believe to the extent possible we try to use services that employ union labor, but there are only a handful of places in the whole state which can accommodate us.
The thread-starter acknowledges that.
I think this question deserves a response:
It is perhaps worth clarifying what John means by “a living wage”. Specifically, does he mean the $15/hour minimum wage that workers will receive years from now? My recollection is that Elizabeth Warren offered $22/hour as a “living wage” some time ago. Is that higher number what he means?
I understand that the Party makes every effort to employ union labor. Does union scale meet the “living wage” standard? For those services that are not unionized, does the Party still pay the living wage (whatever it is)?
Or does the Party follow the practice of most businesses and hire the lowest bidder?
Well, for starters keep in mind we only generally get a couple of responses to our RFPs each time, and the consensus seems to be that only Worcester’s DCU can accommodate a nominating convention. If I am correct about union labor then I assume their wages are higher than the legal minimum.
@only a couple of responses:
I think we all understand that.
The union wages you’re discussing are presumably paid only to the union workers.
The people selling sausages and pretzels (I’m making this up, I’ve never been there) aren’t union workers.
We are wondering about how much all those people are NOT union workers get paid.
I’d like to ask a related question, building on the last question of the thread-starter.
I’d like us to stipulate that at least some workers at the convention receive less than a living wage. There is therefore some sum of money — I’ll call it “the living wage shortfall” — that is the additional cost of paying every worker at the convention a living wage.
Assuming that the Democratic Party does not have unlimited funds to spend on its convention, which is a better use of the living wage shortfall:
1. Direct it to Democratic candidates competing in contested races in the general election (not the primary)
2. Use it to pay the workers that it relies on during convention.
I wonder what arguments we have for and against each alternative.
I also invite other alternatives that I haven’t thought of.
This is what I am talking about. Sure, some of the individuals might be getting paid a reasonable wage, but I’d be most concerned with those who are not, like the food vendor employees.
It should not take a huge study to come to what a living wage would be. Let’s say the convention is Springfield. Figure out how much of a yearly wage one would need to live in Springfield, say in a two bedroom apartment, transportation, food, clothing, medical, and so on and then translate that to an hourly wage.
The state committee could then invite anyone working at the convention to apply for a wage subsidy if they fell below that hourly wage and the state committee would pay it out of its funds.
My hunch is that this would get more votes on election day than any other action.
It’s certainly an interesting proposal.
I well imagine that such a program would attract votes in the Springfield area. I wonder if there are analogs that could be provided in other gateway cities.
What if the Democratic Party created such a program that any Democratic candidate could voluntarily sign up for. Suppose a candidate could agree to forego a specific amount they would otherwise get in party campaign funds. Suppose a public ceremony was held in some high-profile and visible location in the candidate’s district where the candidate could hand a large (three foot by seven foot) cardboard check to representatives of local hourly workers.
I wonder how effective such a program would be in comparison to, for example, a media advertising buy of the same amount.
I like it. I like it a lot.
Putting ones money where ones mouth is. Showing compassion for the working poor.
Some of it sounds nice but living wage for even close areas can be drastically different. I know an electrician who lives outside rt 495 but drives into Boston everyday to make 4 times what he could make in his hometown. When working I drove 30 minutes to make good money because I could make more but also because there were no comparable jobs in my rural area. But I wouldn’t have driven 2 hours each way, because it wouldn’t be worth it to me. The marketplace decides.
Simplistic solutions like the $15 minimum wage for a national level don’t really solve things either. It kicks the can down the road, so politicians can say “Look what we gave you, your live is great now. Vote for me” $15 an hour for running a McDonalds fryolator in Boston, Springfield Mass, and Immokolee Fla mean very different things. In Fla that would be way overpaid.
This is why income inequality is such a big issue. Your friend’s behavior is rational – go for the higher payout from an area of the state where the income is much higher. It does impact his hometown though, because that is one less electrician available to do work in his hometown, It drives up the price of electricians there.
When you look at the more depressed areas, you will find people living in them can’t “help themselves” because the labor market prices things well above their salaries. Want a roof on your $75k house? Be prepared to pay $25k for it, because that is what roofs cost in Boston on $750k houses, and the roofers price themselves to the maximum they can expect to get, not to local economic conditions.
How much should an economically depressed city pay teachers or police? Well, the suburbs set the prevailing area wage in the unions’ eyes, so while a teacher making $50k in Longmeadow is being supported by a tax base of households with a median income of $109k, that salary drives the Springfield teacher salaries to those same levels, which need to be supported by households with a median income of $34,731/year.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that this even affects the local media. the online arm of Springfield’s newspaper, the Republican, has been shifting its coverage to Worcester and Boston lately. Why? Because their “traffic” is more valuable. So now, instead of reading about coverage of things like Springfield-area politics (or even articles telling the public that a preliminary election is taking place), we get stories about the Taste of Shrewsbury Street in Worcester.
What is your solution? A national minimum wage of $15 doesn’t seem like it will solve things. As I said people are willing to travel to take advantage of better “living wages” in more prosperous economic areas close to them, up to a point. That point is established by the marketplace right now.
Truck drivers are willing to be away from home for long periods to provide for their families, Oil rig workers, fishermen, etc.
I went on Elizabeth Warren’s site but didn’t see income inequality as one of the many buttons, maybe I didn’t search well. She thinks the uber wealthy should spread their wealth around, for the people in Immokolee Fla who pick oranges her estimated wealth of 12 million puts her in the uber wealthy category already. It’s all a matter of perspective. If she said add taxes to those above 10 million she’d have more cred.
Someone who owns a 4 bedroom home in Boston mortgage free is a millionaire to someone from western Mass.
edit I searched her website again and it seems her answer is to make everyone a union worker, I guess it’s a plan.
@Elizabeth Warren’s plan:
Wealth inequality is different from income inequality.
In the extreme case, making everyone have the same income would — if anything — worsen wealth concentration. The result would be that nobody could become wealthy, and nobody could dilute the wealth already being captured by the uber-wealthy.
A consequence of very high marginal income tax rates is to protect the ranks of the uber-wealthy by making it much more difficult to become wealthy.
The threshold set by Ms. Warren is determined by the shape of the wealth distribution (a graph of the household wealth on one axis versus the number of people with that wealth on the other). That graph has a very pronounced knee between $5 M and $50 M, closer to the $50 M level. Setting the threshold below that knee greatly increases the number of taxpayers exposed to the wealth tax while generating a relatively tiny amount of new tax revenue from that new wealth tax.
The aspect that I think you miss is just how extreme our wealth concentration is. The distribution is essentially a straight line on a log-log scale. That means that for every thousand taxpayers at $50 M, there are one hundred taxpayers at $500 M and ten taxpayers at $5 B.
Think about those numbers. Just TEN taxpayers collectively hold FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS in wealth. Ms. Warren has proposed to collect 3% from those ten. That means that each of the ten will have “only” $4.85 BILLION — nobody will be pushed into abject poverty. Meanwhile, those same TEN people will provide $1.5 BILLION dollars in new tax revenue.
A classic retirement planning strategy for public employees (teachers, police, fire, etc) is to build a small real-estate portfolio of a half-dozen or so rental properties — some residential, some commercial, often spread across several towns. As you observe, it is not hard for some of those in the metro Boston area to end up with a portfolio worth $10-$15 M. Those people are NOT uber-wealthy — they are well below the knee I’m talking about. It is true that they hold more than the Florida orange pickers — but then, pretty much anybody who owns property anywhere in MA is “wealthy” by that standard.
The wealth tax is the first attempt to use federal tax policy to address macroeconomic, rather than microeconomic, concerns. The point of the wealth tax is not to punish the uber-wealthy. It is to instead address the very real impact on the money supply and money velocity of the current extreme wealth concentration.
Conventional GOP dogma, before Donald Trump, advocated “trickle-down” economics. The premise was that the very wealthy would voluntarily use their wealth in ways that spread that wealth among the economy as a whole.
Decades of raw experience and basic macroeconomics demonstrates that this simply doesn’t work. That’s been known for decades, going back at least to the Gilded Age, but the GOP has never bothered to ground its dogma in actual truth.
Ms. Warren’s proposal uses federal tax policy to accomplish the same effect. It reflects the reality that the linear log-log shape of the wealth distribution of an unregulated economy produces unacceptable economic suffering in a modern society. The effect of taxing a tiny portion of the wealth of the uber-wealthy is to stop that widespread economic suffering and begin to heal the wounds it has already caused.
It uses federal tax policy to ensure that the rising tide does, in fact, lift ALL the boats.
You make the assertion over and over that people are “willing”: to travel, “willing” to spend weeks away from home. What you omit is that they are often “willing” to do this because their is no other alternative,. For most, it’s Hobson’s Choice – it’s this or nothing.
As you may know, I now work in retail, work nights and weekend, odd hours, strenuous work for just a few dollars over the legal minimum. I have decades of experience in another field and was released because the employer was able to find someone “willing” to do the same job for thousands of dollars less than I was getting paid and far less benefits. Now I am “willing” to work in retail along with dozens of others like me who have been cast aside by the owners of this economy who are allowed, by tax code, to accumulate huge fortunes because the rest of us are “willing” to take less.
I think I’m confused about something. My understanding is that when an organization contracts a venue they negotiate a single price for the location including the services and staff that location provides. I’m pretty sure the organization is not responsible for paying individual venue staffers directly. The party DOES have an interest in keeping costs low too, and rightfully so. As it is the delegate fee is $75 which covers the cost of the convention without being a profitable fundraiser for the party, and even then the party is generous with subsidizing low-income delegates because we want to make sure that costs are not a barrier to party participation.
Understood.
Somebody pushes a broom before and after an event like this. What is their hourly rate? Somebody stands behind a cart or counter and sells coffee, donuts, and pastry. What is their hourly rate?
I think the first question we’re trying to get a handle on is whether the workers who make the convention possible are themselves paid the living wage that we Democrats say we support.
i likewise understand the question, but not sure how to resolve it. Dems of course will continue to push for raising the minimum wage and as much unionization as possible.
Well, if you understand the question then it sounds like you’re proposing that the Democratic Party advance a platform plank (“Every worker in Massachusetts should receive a living wage”) that the Democratic Party itself does not practice.
I think we can’t have it both ways. If the Democratic Party knowingly pays its own workers only the minimum wage, that is inconsistent with asking the government to impose a “living wage”.
@not sure how to resolve it:
The way to resolve it is something along the lines of what I sketched:
1. Determine the total amount of the shortfall (the difference between actual as-is payroll and what the payroll would be if the same workers were paid a living wage).
2. Raise funds from whatever sources are needed to cover that shortfall.
3. Disburse the resulting funds to the affected workers.
I could see a compromise being to apply the measured shortfall in one year to the actual payroll the following year. That should, in the space of a few years, end the shortfall.
I think the bottom line remains that the Democratic Party should conform to whatever standards it advocates in its platform.
I’m sure the Democratic Party pays its own staff appropriately. I do not believe it is the responsibility of the party to directly pay venue staff over and above what they get paid by the venue. This could get complicated tax-wise and just what we need is another excuse to fundraise, If you insist on the standard I think you are suggesting there is no way to avoid being a hypocrite. The job of the platform is to advocate for PUBLIC policy that will be legislated to everyone’s benefit. Likewise I would not want the party adhering to stricter than legal campaign finance standards just because that is what we support nor do I think every person who advocates a higher income tax rate in MA should be expected to voluntarily pay the higher rate option.
@Not the responsibility
I don’t think your logic works.
Suppose the “living wage” proposal was law. Would it still be ok for the party to knowingly let the venue pay its staff and contractors less than that (in violation of the law)?
Suppose the party learns that the venue is hiring illegal immigrants, or is paying its workers and contractors less than minimum wage. Does your exclusion still apply? I would hope not. I think we expect our vendors, suppliers, and their contractors to at least obey the law.
If the “stricter than legal campaign finance standards” being contemplated are “moral issues” — not accepting PAC money, or not accepting large donations from big industry players — then a great many candidates, including both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, disagree with you.
We Democrats claim a moral basis for advocating a living wage. We say “Every worker deserves a living wage, as a matter of principle” (we don’t, for example, advocate a living wage because it’s good for the economy or because we want to attract voters, or other such rationalizations).
I don’t know of anyone who says that anybody has a moral obligation to pay more than required taxes.
Because of the moral basis for our support, I think it really IS hypocritical for us to not conform to the same standard we say we want the government to enforce.
The GOP has long campaigned on making abortion illegal, because they claim it to be immoral. If we learned that the accepted practice of GOP candidates promoting that standard was to get abortions for inconvenient pregnancies, would we cite that to claim hypocrisy of those candidates on abortion? I think so.
Nope, I don’t think your logic works. I think we have to decide whether or not we actually mean it when we say we “believe in” a living wage. If we say “yes”, and we advocate that the government impose mandatory “living wage” laws, then I think it’s hypocritical for us to not insist that anybody who deals with us live up to that standard.
I have heard people, mostly the anti-tax crowd, ask “If you think we should pay more taxes, why don’t you pay more yourself?” The party absolutely should not be patronizing anyone known to be breaking the law. It would be hypocritical if the party itself did not pay its own staff appropriately, but after a couple degrees of separation there’s only so much you can do.
I’ve heard the same comments about voluntarily paying more than required in taxes. I think that’s different because, as I said earlier, nobody claims that paying taxes is a moral obligation.
I hope that if the party knew that its venue was using a contractor that was hiring illegal aliens or refusing to pay wages, the party would do more than just shrug and ignore the abuse.
I hear you about degrees of separation. I think that argument might be stronger if we were talking about contractors and providers that were on the other side of the world. For example, I suspect that most of the booty distributed at trade shows — logo t-shirts, embroidered bags, and so on — is made in overseas sweat-shops. That might be awful, but I get that there are limits to what organizers of a state convention in Springfield can do about factories in Thailand.
I think that the guy who puts your hot dog on a bun or pulls your coffee in the morning — in the venue or right outside its doorway — is different. Delegates are handing those workers cash and taking the resulting product. Delegates have to step around the cleaning crew swabbing the toilets they’re about to pee in.
If I have direct contact with men and women providing goods and services, and I argue that all of us have a moral obligation to pay men and women a living wage, then I think it’s hypocritical for me to find rationalizations for why those men and women who are serving me should NOT be paid a living wage.
Well to be clear when it comes to swag, the party is pretty insistent that such things be produced in union shops and come affixed with the “bug” to prove it.
@union swag:
No doubt. But, like the automobile industry, that “bug” applies only to the last link in the supply chain. In an embroidered bag, for example, most of the material is imported from elsewhere (in the same way that most of the parts of a “made in USA” automobile come from overseas).
I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty you cite. Rather, to emphasize the difference between goods that are the final result of a long supply chain and services that necessarily require the presence of local workers.
And what about the hotels delegates stay at? Or the gig and cab drivers ferrying delegates from hotels to the convention center. let’s not forget the waiters and bartenders serving delegates at nearby restaurants…how far with this conversation take us?
Yes we need a living wage in America. Yes people are getting screwed and need to be paid adequately. But, are we going to micro-manage every aspect of things and just pick things to death. If so, eventually we’ll cancel the conventions (and frankly the “issues convention” is a waste of time) because of the carbon footprint all the driving to the convention creates.
I know I sound like some crazy righwinger making stuff up about a “slippery slope”, but I didn’t start this conversation worried about what the hot dog vendor makes.
@I didn’t start this conversation worried about what the hot dog vendor makes:
Actually johntmay started THIS question — he explicitly included “what the hot dog vendor makes” in the thread-starter.
I wonder if you would view all this as micro-management if you were the cab driver bring delegates to the convention or a server, bartender, barback, or food-runner serving the delegates.
You make an excellent point about carbon footprint. There is an existing rail link between Boston and Springfield — an Amtrak train (the Lakeshore Limited) traverses it each and every day.
We Democrats control the legislature with a veto-proof majority. We could provide rail service to and from the convention if we wanted to. There are hotels within walking distance of the venue. There is no need for that event to be automobile-centric.
I’d love for Boston to not be the state’s only hub, but right now that IS the only city with rail access to Springfield (with Worcester en route I guess). Local committees and elected officials often do supply busses for delegates to convention from various other points.
I’m fairly certain the party will only negotiate group rates with unionized hotels. The rest is directly paid by delegates ad hoc so while the party is not directly responsible I’ve heard conversations encouraging delegates to tip fairly. I’ve long advocated for scrapping the odd-year conventions in favor of Democratic Campaign Institutes, but alas, annual conventions are required by the charter and the charter can only be amended by delegates who like their conventions.
Just to be clear, paying union scale is not necessarily the same as paying a living wage. The union that represents hotel and restaurant workers is “UniteHERE” (Union of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees). I found a 2017 piece describing a new contract for UNITEHERE local 26, covering Northeastern University in downtown Boston (emphasis mine):
That figure ($35,000) is $17.50/hour (assuming two weeks vacation per year). While higher than the new state minimum wage, it is well under the $22.00/hour cited by Elizabeth Warren. That is for Northeastern University workers in downtown Boston. I’m not at all sure that $35,000 is a living wage for somebody living in Boston.
Meanwhile, there are LOTS of workers who are not unionized.
I think that if we care about this, we need to do more than just wave a union contract.
Ironically, the Lectionary Gospel reading for today was the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). At no time does this parable describe actual abuse or mistreatment of Lazarus by the rich man. The point emphasized in today’s sermon was that in this parable, the rich man did not even SEE Lazarus. Even after they are in the afterlife, the rich man does not address Lazarus directly — he instead asks Abraham to order Lazarus to help him. This is the real failing of the rich man — his refusal or inability to even SEE the suffering servant before him as anything but a servant (even though Lazarus lay at his gate day after day).
It seems to me that if our party is to ever actually do anything about wealth concentration, we have to do a better job of SEEING those who are not wealthy. We must SEE the non-unionized men and women who clean our toilets, sweep our floors, empty our trash, pull our coffee, and — yes — prepare and hand us our hot dogs, sausages, hamburgers, and sandwiches.
I think we need to take a serious a look at ourselves — who we see, and who remains invisible to us.
I have to admit compared to my present circumstances I would love to be making 35K. I guess I figured any union worth its salt would make sure their members could live off of their wages. We DO see these workers, but again our job as a party is to advocate for public policy which will lift all of them up, which I think is ultimately more efficient than piecemeal.
@ We DO see…:
I guess we’re just different about this. Perhaps because several of my children are in the restaurant industry, I tip very generously — I’ve never known any underpaid servers or cooks. I feel a personal responsibility to do what I can for the workers I personally see and interact with. For many years, I worked in office environments. As a programmer, I was often there late at night after everybody else had gone home. The same graveyard shift worker emptied my wastebasket every night. He told me that simply recognizing him by name was a HUGE compliment to him — he said that most of my colleagues “never even see me”. I gave him (and every similar person) a cash Christmas present each year — not nearly enough, of course, but it was something.
I have always viewed the things I promote and advocate for politically as different from the things I do in my daily life. I feel that the two necessarily influence each other. I find “I gave at the office” to be an unhelpful answer.
It was summarized very succinctly in a phrase from my days as a nuclear-freeze activist:
And if people want to ask tough questions about Democratic Conventions, how about asking questions about soliciting lobbyists and other influence peddlers with perks and access to events, in exchange for donations to fund the convention. Now that is a question worth asking.
I think that’s another question well worth asking — on it’s own thread.
THIS diary is about the Massachusetts Democratic Party in Springfield, and whether or not it/we live up the moral imperative we claim when we promote a living wage.