From the War on Poverty to "the New Inequality": The Fight for a Living Wage

"Where do we go from here," Martin Luther King Jr. asked fellow Americans forty years ago this year, "chaos or community?" In 1967 the country stood at a crossroads. The civil rights movement had stirred millions to want to right the nation's deepest wrongs, yet, already, the forces of reaction were massing to block change. Americans could "choose the path of materialism," King acknowledged, with its "inseparable twin" of violence, and opt for a "wasteland" at home and "arrogant . . . policing" abroad. Or they could choose community: they could build a sane society that embraced the flourishing of all as its noblest goal, in the recognition of our inescapable connections. To King, the right choice was obvious: "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization." Surely the United States, the most affluent and technologically accomplished society in human history, could see that "the time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty."¹ His call never received a fair hearing. The ongoing debacle in Vietnam, the assassination of King himself the following year, the mounting power of a political right that turned fear of change to political advantage, and the pervasive cynicism that such developments engendered all but extinguished the hope for reconciliation that King had held aloft.

In the forty years since America chose chaos over community, it has amassed the highest levels of inequality in the developed world. For the first time on record, a person working full-time at the minimum wage cannot pay market-rate rent on a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States. At the time of this writing, that wage amounts to $10,700 a year and buys less than at any time since 1955. At the top end of the scissors economy, Wal-Mart's CEO earns more than $3,500 an hour, and Exxon-Mobil's a whopping $13,700. The midcentury trend toward greater equity in resources and well-being produced by union power and New Deal policies has been all but reversed. A growing chorus of activists and social scientists is warning that inequality on this scale threatens not only its obvious victims, but also every element of social justice for which generations of progressive Americans have fought, from public education, to racial fairness and gender equity, to workers' rights and children's nutrition—and democratic governance itself. It may even harm productivity, some economists say, as betrayed American employees discover the folk wisdom of their old Soviet counterparts: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." A consensus is growing among those paying attention that economic justice is the most urgent issue of our time.²

Three timely new books offer important knowledge for the challenge ahead, as they extend into a new era the exciting revisionist work in labor history, African American history, and women's history that has lifted out of the shadows the class dimension of the long struggles for equality.³ All three authors examine the welfare rights activism that prompted King to speak out about poverty, and two carry the story beyond the defeat of that movement into subsequent struggles for a fairer economy, among them the community development corporations, living wage campaigns, and service worker organizing of recent years. Taken together, these three fine studies point to the dramatic reconstitution of class politics in the United States over the last thirty years, as the civil rights movement and feminism emboldened people long denied any chance at the American...