Wisconsin's minimum wage currently stands at $7.25 per hour, the federal minimum. The Living Wage Coalition, an alliance of labor and progressive organizations are campaigning to raise the statewide minimum wage to $20 per hour before the next legislative session.
Organizations in the coalition include Citizen Action of Wisconsin, Fighting Oligarchy, Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Union, Our Wisconsin Revolution, and Wisconsin Working Families Party.
Peter Rickman, president and business manager of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Union joins Lake Effect's Sam Woods to discuss how the campaign relates to previous efforts to raise the minimum wage, and why he believes Wisconsinites deserve a raise.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Describe the goals of this campaign and the coalition that you're working with.
At a time of a cost-of-living crisis, the rent keeps going up, housing prices are out of control, no one can afford health care, to put food on the table and pay the bills on time, we need real living wages for every person who works here in Wisconsin. About a third of the people in our state who punch a clock, bring home a wage less than $20 an hour. There's not a single county in Wisconsin where you can get by on anything less than $20 an hour. Some MIT economic researchers have determined that a living wage in Wisconsin for just a single adult starts at around $21 per hour. When a third of our workforce makes less than a living wage, we have an economic and social crisis.
When I saw the announcement for this campaign, I immediately thought of the Fight for 15 campaign, which was an effort launched a little over a decade ago to set the minimum wage at $15 per hour nationwide. But do you see this campaign as a continuation of that Fight for 15 effort?
Well, the movement for living wages and worker power today absolutely builds on the work of the Fight for 15 and a union. I'm a veteran of that movement, and MASH actually grew out of the Fight for 15 and a union. We carry on that work just like the Fight for 15 and a union built on the struggles of folks in the labor movement for the decades preceding it as well. But if you take that demand for $15 an hour in November 2012, when we launched that campaign, and applied it today it would be over $21 per hour. So the Fight for 15 and a union of a decade ago is the fight for 20 and a union here today.
During the Fight for 15 campaign, there was discussion around who deserves a higher wage. This would often use terms like “flipping burgers” pejoratively, saying that someone who flips burgers doesn’t deserve to make $15 an hour because that job isn’t difficult enough or important to society. Do you expect this to come up again in this campaign?
Sam, I grew up in the Catholic Church where we believe that all human beings are created in the image of God. One of the core tenets is that all labor has dignity. Whether you're changing bedpans and sheets in a nursing home, flipping burgers or doing something else that some person might deem more socially valuable, all of us deserve at least a living wage. I don't know how any person can look their fellow human being in the eye and say, “You deserve to live in poverty. You don't deserve to be able to pay the rent. You should not be able to put food on your table.”
And yes, if we raise wages for hotel housekeepers and home health aides, it's going to put upward pressure on the wages of those with college degrees who are working in entry level white collar jobs. We should celebrate that and we should not be pitting workers against one another.
Congress recently passed legislation to leave tips untaxed, though the IRS is still set to clarify exactly which jobs these untaxed tips would apply to. The Wisconsin legislature has discussed passing a similar exemption for state taxes on tips, but nothing has been passed yet. Does leaving tips untaxed negate the need for an increased minimum wage?
You know, over 20 years of working in the labor movement, never once have I heard someone say ‘you know, what we need to do is get rid of taxes on tips or get rid of taxes on overtime.’ The reason for that is working people understand that when politicians hand out these scraps and crumbs, they're doing it because they want to distract us from the fact that the labor that we contribute to this economy generates untold massive wealth. This is the richest country in the history of the world. There's plenty of money to go around for all of us to be able to bring home a paycheck that covers the bills. Tax incentives like this are meant to pacify working people. We want jobs that pay living wages, and that requires power in the labor market.
Do you see this being a campaign issue in next fall's state election?
We believe that every person running for office needs to tell us which side they're on. Are they on the side of the billionaires and the boss class and Wall Street and the one percent? Or are you going to be on the side of working people who are fighting for living wages? We're not really interested in whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or nothing at all. Any politician can stand with working class people and say that no matter what job you do, no matter where you punch a clock, no matter where you bring that paycheck home, you're going to make a living wage.
