According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the first Monday in September wasn't originally set aside for cook outs, college football, consumer sales, and mourning those languid days of summer past. No, Labor Day as first celebrated by a coalition of unions in New York City in 1882, was created to show "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families."
Flash forward a century and a quarter and we've got the long weekend, but there is little esprit de corps for the American worker to celebrate. Real wages adjusted for inflation have been flat or declining for two generations, save a brief sprint during the Clinton Administration. Income inequality is on every economist's desk, every policy maker's plate, and in every candidate's talking points. Yet unlike other hot button issues - feminism, marriage equality, immigration, civil rights, criminal justice reform - the effort to stem the decline of U.S. living conditions for the bottom three quarters of workers doesn't exactly fill networked timelines.
But that may be changing. A concerted effort to raise the national minimum wage is picking up social steam, perhaps just in time for this year's mid-term Congressional elections.
In my view, the movement to increase the Federal minimum wage has the right ingredients to attract an army of online supporters who can empower (and prod) the pols to change the policy. Here's the recipe:
1. Vast public support - Simply put, most people want to see the Federal minimum wage increased. Last year, a Pew/USA Today poll found that Americans support increasing the wage from its current $7.25 per hour to $9 per hour by a margin of 71% to 26%. In terms of political affiliation, the results were also clear: Democrats, independents, and traditional (non Tea Party) Republicans all support increasing the wage.
- Short story: there's a huge cultivated audience ready to hear more about the minimum wage.
2. Connected millennials demand it - As many as 61% of Americans earning the Federal minimum wage were born after 1980. They support record levels of college loan debt. Their economic stagnation clearly effects the future of the U.S. economy. And of course, they have an unprecedented outlet for organizing and protest that has yielded political results (see LGBT rights).
- Short story: a huge, connected audience of young minimum wage earners sits ready to enter the political fray.
3. It's part of the national agenda - With President Obama's State of the Union speech in January, the minimum wage became a common national priority for the party in the White House, even as some prominent Republicans also started to move toward increasing the number. The White House sponsored #RaisetheWage hashtag is everywhere in
- Short story: the network for policy change is building, perhaps somewhat quietly, but steadily with support at the top.
4. The hot spots are interesting - For online networks to really take off and achieve large-scale digital purchase, the story has to be compelling and human, not esoteric and pedantic. The minimum wage battle is heating up ... with compelling stories. For one, the fast food workers campaigns have started to capture the public imagination - they're sharp, they tend to feature people who are easily identified with (your kids, your neighbors, that guy behind the lunch counter), and they have a common message. For another, so many of those actively advocating for a higher wage are women, people of color, and young people, thus leveraging three highly developed networks.
- Short story: you'll soon be seeing more stories about the minimum wage in your timeline.
The National Employment Law Project created RaisetheMinimumWage.com to work with state and national advocates and legislators toward "rebuilding the wage floor for low-wage workers in the US." Its #LiveTheWage Challenge asks users to do just that - pay the bills on $7.25 per hour, 0r $290 a week for a full-time job. In some ways, it's a clever game - but in others, it brings home the reality of full-time work for a really small paycheck.
As Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a critical report on wages earlier this year: “Broad wage stagnation underlies sluggish living standards growth for the vast majority.”
So as you munch on that Labor Day hotdog, you might consider those standards - and look ahead to the broad public campaign that's surely coming.
