A RETURN TO THE &quotFAMILY WAGE”

Democrats know this. They also know that the public doesn’t really understand it. Therefore, they can trade lost jobs for votes. When the jobs start disappearing-well, the Republicans can be blamed for not funding more job training. If the Republicans really wanted to dramatize the foolishness of the issue, why not go the Democrats one better? Why not raise the minimum wage to $ 10 an hour? Or how about $ 157 Wouldn’t that provide every worker with a living wage? At this point, even the most naive redistributionist would have to acknowledge the trade-off created by the minimum wage.

Appalling as it is to see the truth hung out to dry by such election-year cynicism, there is an issue here worth confronting and a political opening worth considering. This is the long-lost, long-forgotten “family wage” — also known as the “living wage.” Although no one seems to remember it, Americans lived for most of the century under this Progressive-era reform. The premise, which originated in European Catholic doctrine, was that every family in society that sent a wage-earner into the market was entitled to a breadwinner’s salary from that wage-earner. No longer would it be necessary for a working man to farm out his wife and children to feed and clothe all of them. Instead, the children could be educated, and the wife could manage their upbringing.

By the 1950s, the “family wage” had produced what is fondly remembered as a golden age of the family, in which marriage was a remarkably stable institution and the country had a broad and deep middle class. This is the halcyon world that even many liberals, who once reviled and condemned the 1950s as a decade of cultural stagnation, now look to as an almost mystical era to which they long for America to return.

The minimum wage was part of the “family-wage” doctrine, though only one part. Laws against child labor were another part, and such laws remain reforms only the most radical libertarian would alter today. But other aspects of family-wage doctrine were far less attractive.

It was inherently discriminatory. The family wage was largely denied to blacks and minorities by Jim Crow laws and general discrimination — and, more important, by the imposition of supposedly benign reforms (like the minimum wage) that subtly forced blacks out of the labor market. It also discriminated against women, not in an invidious fashion but in a way that was originally supposed to help them by allowing them to remain at home. And, by virtually mandating retirement, it discriminated against the elderly — a reform under increasing assault in recent years.

The group that the system did favor was white men. But this wasn’t a product of bias toward men. Instead, it was an effort to allot the goods of society by allowing one breadwinner per family. It was undertaken to counteract what had been the principal tactic of manufacturers and capitalists almost since the Industrial Revolution began — hiring unskilled women and children to replace higher-wage men in the marketplace. The main purpose of the family-wage reform was to rescue women and children from the harrowing environment of the factory.

It worked for a long while, probably through about 1970. Since then, the family-wage regime has been completely dismantled. Some of it became outdated, while some of it has been delegitimized out of sheer gleeful stupidity. The result has benefited some groups. But it has also created other inequalities and produced exactly the sort of social stratification Progressives would have predicted. Many of the problems that worry today’s progressives most are the very problems created by the dismantling of the old family-wage system.

The one thing we have never done as a society is sit down and say, “This old system no longer works, it’s time to replace it with something else,” or, alternatively, “This old system no longer works, it’s time to let nature take its course.” One way or the other, the discussion ought to begin.

Perhaps the best way to understand the family wage is to begin by looking at the effects the Industrial Revolution had on 19th-century society. As Allan Carlson points out in his brilliant 1988 analysis The Family Wage (published by the Rockford Institute), industrialism replaced the old craft system in which skilled workmen — with the help of guilds and other protective strategies — were able to command a substantial wage.

When the first factories were built, the machines did not run by themselves. But they did not need skilled craftsmen to run them either. In order to avoid paying craft and guild wages, the factory owners — great levelers that they were — began hiring women and children instead. The result was, in the words of one who experienced the dislocation, “a world turned upside down.”

Andrew Ure, a Scottish reformer of the early 19th century, wrote in 1835:

 

The constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery [is] to supersede human labor altogether or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men. . . . The effect . . .

is to discharge the great part of men spinners and retain adolescents and children.

Fifteen years later, Friedrich Engels was appalled by the reversal of roles he found in the mill towns. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he recounted a conversation with an unemployed English weaver: ” There’s plenty of Wark for Women and Bairns [children] in this quarter but very Little for men,” Engels quoted his subject. “When we were first married we gat on very well — we got a good firnished home. . . . I could work for us both. But now the world is turned upside down. Mary has to turn out to work and I have to stop at home to mind bairns — and to Wash and Clean — Bake and Mend.”

Reformers of every stripe agreed that the key evil was that machinery had enabled both women and children to do what was formerly men’s work. With the labor market so broadly expanded, everyone’s wages were driven down. Yet it was in no one’s interest to fight the system. Every family sent wives and children out to work because every other family did. All collectively needed the money even though the influx of mothers and children into the labor market drove down everyone’s wages. As John Stuart Mill (a strong suffragist and author of The Subjection of Women) put it: “It cannot . . . be considered desirable as a permanent element in the conditioning of a labouring class, that the mother of the family . . . should be under the necessity of working for subsistence, at least elsewhere than in their place of abode.” Mill championed a differential wage system in which men would be paid more so that they could support their families without wages from wives and children.

Toward the turn of the century, this movement began putting on flesh. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical The Condition of Labor outlined a plan for a living wage and urged employers to pay each worker enough to support a family. The argument was picked up by European labor unions and instituted by several philanthropic anthropic corporations. It eventually became law in many European countries. Through much of this century French employers have been required to pay a wage that would support a family of five.

In America, its principal advocate was Father John Ryan, an admirer of English Fabian socialism and the author of A Living Wage (1906). Arguing that every job should pay enough to support a family, Father Ryan was also realistic enough to realize this meant limiting the role of women and children in the work force. “The welfare of the whole family, and that of society likewise, renders it imperative that the wife and mother should not engage in any labor except in the household,” he wrote.

By this time, however, many English and American reformers had hit upon a better tactic for a family wage — minimum-wage laws and other restrictions covering women and children in order to make their employment less profitable. The first minimum-wage law, adopted by Massachusetts in 1911, applied only to women and children, as did the first laws mandating an eight-hour day. They were promptly overturned by the courts, which argued — following the Social Darwinist theories of Herbert Spencer — that they interfered with the right of contract. Heeding the objections of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, however, the judiciary eventually began to allow such experimentation.

Most important, business leaders began to see the wisdom of the policy. When Henry Ford instituted the “Five Dollar Day” ($ 5 for eight hours’ work) in 1914, it applied only to “married men living with and taking good care of their families,” single men 23 and over of “proven thrifty habits,” and all women “who are the sole support of some next-of-kin as blood relative.” On the other hand, Ford refused to hire married women whose husbands were employed.

“One wage-earner per family” soon became a non-legislated but widely enforced national policy. It did not discriminate against women as a group: Single women were allowed to work just as readily as single and married men. Whole professions — schoolteachers, secretaries, nurses — came to be dominated by single women. Teachers’ contracts often contained clauses forbidding women from marrying during the school year (so they would not have to leave their jobs). A “career girl” was a woman who opted out of marriage and stayed in the work force for an extended period of time. Widows were also allowed to return to the work force — although so-called mothers’ pensions tried to help them avoid this fate.

There were glass ceilings. There was male clubbiness. But the underlying logic had nothing to do with gender. The object was to support families. Income was redistributed down the income scale so that families near the bottom could also earn a “living wage” and become part of a stable middle class.

When the Depression hit, all these informal restraints were put under tremendous strain. The urge to send women and children out to work emerged again. My aunt and uncle once told me that when they married in 1935, they kept it a secret for two years so she wouldn’t have to quit her job.

The response was the New Deal — which Allan Carlson describes as “coercive traditionalism”:

 

Under the National Industrial Recovery Act, for example, wage differentials between men and women were first codified. Bans on homework, moreover, were precisely designed to save mothers and their offspring from exploitation and to restore normal homes: “that is, one with a male breadwinner, a housewife, and children.”

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 empowered the federal government to eliminate child labor and set minimum wages for large categories of workers. The Social Security Act of 1935 took the elderly out of the work force by encouraging retirement and promising old-age pensions. “Mothers’ pensions” — called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the root program of what we today call “welfare” at the federal level — were also set up for families that had lost a breadwinner.

At the same time, pressure was exerted against “cheap labor,” which generally meant blacks. Alfred Kazin once wrote that one of the things he remembers about blacks in the New York of the 1920s was that “they were the ones who always bid low” on home-improvement contracts. The Davis-Bacon Law of 1931 was a prelude to the New Deal, passed specifically in response to itinerant southern black labor crews. Minimum-wage and licensing laws further locked in the advantage skilled white workers had over unskilled blacks without community ties or credentials. The Wagner Act of 1935 formalized these proceedings, in many cases handing over job selection to trade unions, which often ensured that jobs went from father to son. Racial battles being fought today at construction sites around the country are the reverberations of this law.

The result for blacks was disheartening. Nudged out of the labor market by the many market restrictions of the New Deal, they began to rely more on AFDC, which, through a series of loopholes, became an “unfamily wage,” rewarding mothers for not forming families. The result has been a social disaster in its own right.

For the country’s burgeoning white middle class, however, the entire effort was an unparalleled success. The world of the 1950s was the crowning achievement of family-wage policy. Millions upon millions of men, from gray- flanneled junior executives to carpenters, plumbers, and auto workers, were able to support their families by doing a day’s work for a day’s pay.

The system first cracked on a day in 1959 when an Illinois newspaper reporter named Betty Friedan was told after having her first baby that she couldn’t reclaim her old job. (The system had relaxed so that she had not been asked to leave when she married.) Friedan was only being asked to do what millions of women had been asked to do before, but she objected. She began freelancing magazine articles, which eventually led to The Feminine Mystique. The rest is history.

In truth, feminists had long objected to the family wage. During the 1920s, the policy had two primary opponents — the National Association of Manufacturers (which didn’t want to pay the high wage) and the National Women’s party. Their association was so close it was long rumored that the manufacturers’ association was funding the party of women.

The objection was clear. Highly educated women — who have always been most active in the feminist cause — felt their job opportunities were being limited by the family wage. Many, like Friedan, were clearly capable of earning more than the majority of men. The Feminine Mystique articulated their objections, and the barriers quickly came tumbling down.

Unfortunately, the entry of highly educated women into the labor market set off a chain of events that any Progressive reformer could have predicted. As talented women began out-competing a few men for high-paying jobs (places in law and medical schools, for example), these men found their own earning powers limited. That made it more likely that their own wives would work. These women then took away jobs from other men, who were in turn forced to ask their own wives to work, and so on down the line. Thus, the stunningly rapid transition in which, by the 1970s, most women found themselves entering the labor force of necessity. This transition is commonly attributed to the inflation of the era, but it can just as easily be explained by the collapse of the family wage.

Blacks also fought to break down employment bartiers — all to the good. The result has been rising income at many levels. Unfortunately, a growing portion of the black population had already been swallowed by the single- parent culture — and much effort has been wasted on trying to enhance that system rather than undo its anti-family effects.

The social stratification we have today perfectly reflects this transformation. As the latest census figures show, the top quintile of income — what the Clinton administration and others call “the rich” — is largely made up of two-career couples combining professional incomes. Below them is a brittle middle class, where husband and wife are both working and family life is severely disrupted as a result. Below that are the “working poor,” where two incomes are barely enough to make out a living. At the bottom is the portion of the population that has never married. Among households making less than $ 10,000 per year in this country, half are families headed by a single parent.

In an era without a family wage, the failure to form a family or keep it intact has proved to be the greatest economic disaster.

This theme has been amplified by the power of assortive mating. In the old days, a doctor usually married his nurse. Today he marries another doctor. Upward mobility has become restricted as couples choose each other for earning-potential as much as for other qualities. This has made men at the bottom of the income scale particularly unappealing as marriage partners — which is a major reason poor families are no longer forming.

What can we do about it? There are several options. One is simply be to leave things as they are. This is the supply-side argument and goes like this: The contribution that women make to the economy far outweighs any disadvantage created by the upward redistribution of income. Because of the contributions of women, we have a bigger pie to slice. We are all much better off without the family wage.

Yet this leaves many people uneasy. By yielding to economic pressures to put women in the job market, we have placed enormous strains on family life. These strains are felt most at the bottom, where marriage is viewed as a virtually irrelevant institution. Women and children at this level may be ” maintained” by welfare payments, but the results are hardly benign. The sheltering structure of the family is lost, and the “missing men” return as the nation’s crime problem.

Is there any way a family wage can be reconstructed without the discriminatory aspects? Dick Armey and the House Republicans made an attempt to address the problem in April when they suggested increasing the earned- income tax credit for families with children. Unfortunately, they proposed funding this increase by eliminating the tax credit for low-income families without children. This might be called robbing the poor to pay the poor. If anyone should pay the cost of a family wage, it would seem only fair that it be people further up the income scale.

The minimum wage, on the other hand, is an even more inept tool. The result of increasing it will be to deny the least skilled employment in order to raise wages a bit for people just up the ladder. This could be called robbing the poorest to pay the next poorest.

One alternative might be to return to the family-wage principle of one breadwinner per family, but on a non-gender basis: The breadwinner could be either the husband or the wife. Or, if this proved too draconian, employers might at least be allowed to give preferences to employees whose spouses do not have high incomes or to discriminate ever so slightly against those whose spouses do. Yet aside from being diffcult to enforce, this notion would require a measure of social consciousness and self-restraint. And the late 20th century is not likely to be remembered as the Era of Self-Restraint.

On the other hand, the solution liberals are likely to propose — meat-ax income redistribution from top to bottom — will have the usual unproductive side-effects. With welfare currently structured as it is, taxing the rich and giving to the poor simply means taxing the married to give to the unmarried. No such effort will be able to go forward without a complete overhaul of the welfare system.

Yet we should not be discouraged. The original family-wage regime wasn’t put together at a single stroke. It was a series of intelligent reforms (child labor laws, for example) that not only made sense in themselves but also had the happy consequence of serving the greater good. Progressives succeeded because they recognized the consequences of what they were doing. With all the facts before us, we surely can do as well as they did.

William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn, whose last piece for THE WEEKLY STANDARD was “Punishment is a Language” (April 8, 1996).