Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Living wage update

I guess the Chicago City Council will vote on the living wage ordinance today. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune ran a piece by columnist Eric Zorn that went against the paper's conservative opinion page, which Zorn republished on his blog (click here). He brings up some of the same points that I made in my previous posting on the issue, including the one about the Santa Fe ordinance, but Mr. Zorn said it better.

[26 JUL 2006 17:10:00] Update: The Chicago Tribune website, in a "Breaking News" item, is reporting that the living wage ordinance was voted on this afternoon and passed 35-14 -- a veto-proof majority.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Temporary cat

The front page is starting to look a little boring. Time to post a cat picture.

grendel02b

This is Grendel, the temporary cat.

Why a living wage?

Lately, while Democratic legislators in D.C. have been talking about the minimum wage, Chicago politicians have been talking about a living wage ordinance. The ordinance would apply to big box retailers and require that they pay their employees $10 per hour plus another $3 an hour in benefits (a total compensation that exceeds the federal minimum wage by $7.85/hr). According to ChicagoFairTrade.org, the full City Council is expected to vote on the proposal on July 27 (maybe as early as the 26th?).

The Chicago Tribune, at least on its editorial page, has been a strident critic of the measure. This past week, they questioned whether it would even be constitutional, citing a recent court decision on a similar ordinance in Maryland. However, I think the comparison to the Maryland law is an apples-and-oranges arguement; the Maryland law was very specific about what one particular employer (Wal-Mart) must spend on certain benefits, whereas the Chicago ordinance affects a larger class of employers and more broadly defines a level of compensation.

The Tribune also ran an article this week that was somewhat misleading. The headline is: "Clerics slam big-box wage law." For those who tend to read the headline and the first few paragraphs, it gives the impression that there is a broad consensus against the measure. The article is actually balanced, but to find the balance, you need to read to the end. Here I'll quote the final seven paragraphs:
Supporters of the proposal set up a telephone conference call Monday afternoon in which politicians and experts from across the country weighed in about their experiences with such ordinances.

David Coss, mayor of Santa Fe, said retailers and the Chamber of Commerce were concerned about the effect on businesses after the New Mexico city passed a living wage law three years ago.

"The Wal-Mart in Santa Fe has never skipped a beat," Coss said. "At least here in Santa Fe they have learned to live with the law after all."

Coss said the chamber predicted employers would flee the city for the surrounding area, "and that just hasn't happened."

In fact, Coss said, Wal-Mart has won permission to build its first super center in Santa Fe. The Santa Fe ordinance requires all businesses with 25 employees or more to pay workers at least $8.50 an hour. Under the ordinance, the wage rose this year to $9.50.

Chicago Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) said the pattern and practice of the large retailers in other communities leads her to believe that their threats to not build stores "are disingenuous and disrespectful of the city and its residents."

Lyle said the city represents more than $1 billion of untapped buying power to the retailers. "Make no mistake, Wal-Mart and Target will open stores in Chicago, because the money is here," she said.

Why a living wage? If we can draw any conclusion from the Santa Fe example, the answer is: because it works. It really does help those it was intended to help.

As for the idea, implied by the headline, that the measure lacks popular support, the item from ChicagoFairTrade.org cites a mid-June poll in which 84% of registered voters said they supported a living wage. (N.B., there is no information given on who conducted the poll or on the methodology used.)

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Jazzy's unlucky 13th

As a 13th birthday present for my cat, I took her to the vet. She was not thrilled. Nor was I when I found out that her weight had plummeted from 7-1/4 to just 6 pounds in the last six months. She had had thyroid problems in the past, but then she inexplicably went into remission, and her weight had been stable for the past two years.

Yesterday I took Jazzy to a veterinary specialty clinic for a "thyroid scan," and it revealed that she has a benign thyroid adenoma. So I'll need to get treatment for her -- probably radioactive iodine. It's expensive, but it would be just as expensive to treat it with medication for three years.

A small amount of radioactive iodine was used in Jazzy's thyroid scan, so for a short while, I had a slightly radioactive cat. She'd be radioactive for a longer period of time while undergoing the treatment. It got me thinking... If Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider and turns into Spider-Man, what happens if you get bitten by a radioactive cat? Cat-Man??? That doesn't sound like a very good superhero. But I looked it up, and as it turns out, there was a superhero from the 1940s named Cat-Man (with his sidekick Kitten). Check out the Wikipedia entry. All I've got to say is Cat-Man's costume could use some pants.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Why a minimum wage?

Back when I was in college, the economics professors displayed charts on overhead projectors showing supply and demand curves for the labor market. Where the curves intersected, this was the point that the market would set for wages, on the vertical axis, and for the level of employment, on the horizontal axis. The invisible hand of the free market would find this point, and all would be well.

But what if, asked the professor, the government were to set a minimum wage? He drew a horizontal line above the point where the supply and demand curves crossed. Now wages were slightly higher, but the number of workers exceeded the demand for them. A minimum wage increases unemployment among the poorly-compensated, and that's a bad thing. So we were to conclude that the minimum wage, while arising from good intentions, actually harmed the very people it was intended to help. It was necessary to assimilate this view in order to obtain a good grade. But it's not quite right.

If only it were enough for people to have jobs! But work is not its own reward. Nor is it sufficient for it to just stave off homelessness or starvation. If we truly value labor, it should be compensated well enough to support a certain standard of living. The federal current minimum wage of $5.15/hr is well below the $8.30/hr needed to rise above the poverty line for a family of three. If poverty is the measure, then $5.15 fails to support a minimum standard of living by a wide margin. Yes, a moderate increase in the minimum wage would likely increase unemployment slightly, but it would still increase the aggregate income of those on the low end of the income scale.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Sing out a warning

I recently stumbled across some interesting audio files at the Library of Congress' website. On a pretty spartan web page, they've published an ethnographic field collection recorded in the deep south in 1939 by John and Ruby Lomax.

The Lomaxes went to prisons in areas where the practice of convict lease was once widespread. Because it was so profitable to lease convicts to work on chain gangs, when there was higher demand for convicts, law enforcement would often satisfy the demand by making more arrests for petty offenses. So it probably wouldn't be correct to characterize the prisoners interviewed by the Lomaxes as hardened criminals.

The Lomaxes recorded work songs [.MP3], corridos [.MP3], blues songs [.MP3], and many others. None of it sounds like anything you'd hear these days on the radio, but I find it has a certain authenticity that modern, target-marketed, popular music lacks.

One song that caught my attention is called Influenza (link to .MP3 file), a ballad that tells of the deadly flu outbreak of 1928-9. Compared to the Spanish flu of 1918-9 that killed tens of millions, the 1928-9 flu was much less catastrophic, but it was still far deadlier than the typical strain, and since 1929, we have not seen an outbreak to match it. Reading through obituaries from late 1928, I found quite a few along the lines of: "Ms. Jones' death followed a serious bout of influenza that lasted but two days." In the song Influenza, I would quibble with the message that the flu is a form of divine punishment and that you should "turn away from your sins" to ward off the disease. I have nothing against turning away from sin, but these days, we accept the germ theory of disease.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Car trouble

Last year I wrote about how my oil light went on when I was driving home from work. That's unlucky! But it happened when I was just 500 feet from my garage. That's lucky! But then my car started burning lots of oil, and I had to take the car in for major repairs. That's unlucky! But I had bought an extended warranty with the car, so the repairs were covered. That's lucky! But a month after I had the repairs done, I was driving home from work, and the oil light went on again. That's unlucky! But it happened when I was just 3 blocks from home. That's lucky! But now the repair shop doesn't know how to fix it. That's unlucky! So I guess I'm unlucky.

I was driving off a job site two weeks ago when suddenly I heard this clattering noise coming from under the hood. I pulled off the road, but by then this thing that looked kind of like a coat hanger had fallen off. Maybe it was some sort of wire retainer? How could I tell if it was even part of the car, or if it was some debris that I happened to pick up from the road surface? The car still seemed to drive OK, but shortly afterward, the check engine light came on. When I took the car in to the shop, they told me I needed to get two sensors and a valve replaced. All but fifty dollars is covered under warranty, but I'm still not feeling very lucky.

I figure 70,000 miles isn't enough for the car to be ready for the scrap heap. It wasn't long ago that I finished paying it off. One of my coworkers has the same kind of car, a Volkswagen Jetta, and he's had tons of trouble with it, but he's also put twice as many miles on it. He pointed me to a website where I could hear familiar tales of auto woe: MyVWLemon.com.

Blogger servers behaving badly

If you've visited this site in the past few days, you might have noticed that there was a duplicate of the most recent entry. I swear I only hit the publish button once, but something got messed up on the Blogger servers where they created two postings. I didn't catch the problem right away because at the time I posted the article, there was something going on with Blogger -- maybe related to the duplicate posting problem -- that was causing my browsers to crash (both MSIE and Safari).

I deleted the redundant posting. If you still get an uneasy feeling of deja vu as you scroll down the page, I can't explain it.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

What I've been reading

Lately I've been doing more reading than writing, which accounts for the sporadic updates to the blog. I just finished a couple of novels -- a departure from my usual non-fiction fare, but not exactly light reading. The first one was The Stranger by the French existentialist Albert Camus. The other book I read was The Natural, an early work by Bernard Malamud.

If you're in the over-30 crowd, you might remember the 1984 movie adaptation of The Natural starring Robert Redford. Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:
The Natural was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in 1984. The movie is not considered to be faithful to the book, since important details are changed, particularly the film's upbeat ending, which differs significantly from the novel's ending. While Malamud wrote a dark satire of a fallen hero, the film version took a traditional "Hollywood" approach.

The film had a happy ending??? It figures. But it ruins the story. Also, I don't see how a movie could do justice to Malamud's prose. Here's a little sample:
     [Roy:] "Everything came out different than I thought." His eyes were clouded.
     [Iris:] "In what sense?"
     "Different."
     "I don't understand."
     He coughed, tore his voice clear and blurted, "My goddamn life didn't turn out like I wanted it to."
     "Whose does?" she said cruelly. He looked up. Her expression was tender.
     The sweat oozed out of him. "I wanted everything." His voice boomed out in the silence.
     She waited.
     "I had a lot to give to this game."
     "Life?"
     "Baseball."

A little tie-in to my neighborhood... There is a scene in the book where the protagonist is shot in a hotel room by a deranged woman. This actually happened to a baseball player named Eddie Waitkus at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1949. The hotel is no longer there, but there is one remaining structure from the resort complex: the Edgewater Beach Apartments. It is a distinctive pink building at the north end of Lake Shore Drive, and I once posted a picture of it on this site.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Breakin' the Law

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court did a good thing. They took a stand against the expansion of executive power claimed by the Bush Administration, reaffirming that this is a nation of laws.

On this site I had previously criticized President Bush for attaching a signing statement to this year's defense appropriations bill in a section that stripped the courts of jurisdiction to accept Guantanamo detainees' habeas petitions. In the signing statement, Bush argued that the law (inserted in the bill as Amendment 2524) was to apply retroactively to cases that were already in the system.

To give you some perspective on why this was so outrageous, the issue of due process for Guantanamo detainees was raised in the Bingaman Amendment (No. 2523) to the bill, which asserted that the D.C. Circuit Court would have jurisdiction to hear the habeas cases. The Republicans responded with No. 2524, the "Constitutional Rights Compromise Amendment," which stated that no court would have jurisdiction to accept new habeas petitions. The Republican-dominated Senate easily passed their amendment. But it apparently didn't go far enough for the President in denying detainees due process, and so he took his pen and made a few little edits before signing it. With one stroke of the pen, he showed contempt for both of the other branches of government -- Congress by unilaterally altering the laws they passed, and the Judicial Branch by stripping them of their jurisdiction.

In the Hamdan decsision, the Supreme Court rebuked President Bush over the signing statement, affirming that the D.C. Circuit Court retains jurisdiction over habeas cases that were already in the system when Bush signed the defense appropriations bill into law.

The other major part of the decision ruled that the Guantanamo tribunals authorized by the President are illegal, conforming neither to military justice law nor to the Geneva Conventions. So I guess the Geneva Conventions aren't so "quaint" after all, eh, Alberto? See, the reason the Administration has been pushing this argument that the Geneva Conventions don't apply is to fend off prosecution of the President and other U.S. officials under the War Crimes Act of 1996, which would have very serious consequences. Now that the Supreme Court has found the President in violation of the Geneva Conventions, he may find himself open to prosecution anyway.