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01/31/2006:

"High Wages, Low Wages, and Morality"

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR- t's unusual for a controversial economic issue to be fought on moral grounds. But ACORN, a public advocacy group, has been winning a higher "living wage" for workers in state after state, city after city, by appealing to voters' sense of justice.
"It's probably the best [argument] we have," says Jen Kern, director of ACORN's Living Wage Resource Center. A decent income is a moral matter of "fairness," she says. Those who "play by the rules of the game should be able to support themselves by their work."

"A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you poor," agrees Paul Sherry, coordinator of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, a church-based coalition in Cleveland seeking to raise low wages.

According to the father of classical capitalism, Adam Smith, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University in the 1700s, the "invisible hand" of self-interest ensures the most efficient use of resources in an economy, and public welfare is a byproduct.

Today Americans are mostly content to let market forces - that is, the law of supply and demand - determine the wage levels for the multiplicity of jobs, professions, and positions that make the economy work. It would be extremely difficult for a bureaucratic group to make detailed, comparative judgments as to the real value of various occupations and place a specific wage level on each.

But at some point, the extremes in wages resulting from what is called "free enterprise" begin to violate people's sense of common justice. They chuckle, then, at the portrayal in a Boston Globe cartoon of two bosses in a fancy office saying to three workers: "Why should you have a minimum wage? We don't have a maximum wage."

As it is, an employee working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour makes $10,712 a year, about $1,000 above the official poverty level for an individual ($9,654).
commondreams.org



Nat'l Guard Reports Recruiting Gains
WASHINGTON - National Guard officials said Monday that recruiting has accelerated so much in recent months that they expect to expand the Guard even as the Bush administration proposes to shrink it.

The National Guard Bureau, the Pentagon office that administers the Guard, issued a statement outlining a recent turnaround in recruiting and predicting that it will continue to rise this year. The Guard is "aggressively working" to reach the 350,000-troop level by the end of the current budget year on Sept. 30, it said.

...In its statement Monday, the National Guard Bureau emphasized recent gains on the recruiting front. In the final three months of 2005, the Guard signed up 13,466 recruits, compared with its goal of 12,605. It was the first time since 1993 that the Guard exceeded its goal during the fall quarter of the year.

Mark Allen, a National Guard Bureau spokesman, attributed the improvement to a new advertising campaign, a large increase in financial incentives and a near doubling of the number of recruiters, from 2,700 to 5,100.