Is it just to pay low wages . . .

Last updated on: May 20, 2016 at 8:53 am by Jane the Actuary

Is it just to pay low wages . . . 2016-05-20T08:53:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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if the alternative is no wages?

That’s the natural follow up to my comment on the Archdiocese of Chicago parental leave policy.

One could substitute “provide poor or no employee benefits” for “pay low wages,” of course — which would encompass decisions about health insurance provision, or time off, or retirement benefits.

And the lens of nonprofit employers is a helpful one for framing the issue, I think, because it bypasses accusations of employer “greed.”

Case 1: the youth minister. In a parish where funds are too tight to pay a staff member, you’d likely have a volunteer instead, or perhaps a team of volunteers. And back before the idea of having a specific ministry for youth, this was likely all there was, until, at various parishes, when funds were flowing more than now, the decision was made that this should be a paid position. Perhaps the motivation might have been that a paid individual would be more professional about the work, than the existing team of volunteers, or perhaps there may have been one individual (e.g., a nominally “stay-at-home” mom) doing so much work on a “volunteer” basis that it was agreed that the right thing to do, given present accomodating financial circumstances, was to give the volunteer a paycheck.

Must this be an “all-or-nothing” decision? That is, a salary and benefits package appropriate for a professional, or nothing at all?

Case 2: a worker at a thrift store. In some cases, such as Goodwill, these are paid staff. In other cases, such as the Sparrow’s Nest thrift stores around us, these are volunteers. Obviously, the more people volunteer their time, the more profits from sales can flow through to the programs the charity provides. And the particular thrift store that I shop at tends to have retired ladies at the counter — but presumably they can’t staff the entire store’s opening hours purely with volunteers. So how should they determine the right compensation for their paid staff? Perhaps there are even prospective volunteers for whom money is tight, and they’d be happy to volunteer, but need at least some income (e.g., to supplement their Social Security checks), or maybe even “in-kind” income like credits towards items in the store. And, again, if they transform the paid jobs into “real jobs” with benefits packages, that’s less money raised for their cause. And if everyone was paid, and paid at a “fair wage,” if the thrift store can no longer raise funds, it shuts down. (Which, incidentally, has happened around here — operating a thrift store is not a guaranteed moneymaker.)

Case 3: a schoolteacher at a Catholic school. Well, this is in some ways, a different situation. Even if every Catholic school in America shut down, because there aren’t enough parents able to pay tuition at the levels required to fund a compensation package that’s been determined to be “just” and “fair,” those kids would still need to be educated, so, after some transitional headaches, presumably those displaced teachers would find jobs at public schools. And the idea of Catholic education is gone (to be replaced by debates about whether religious ed teachers are paid stipends or not), but it doesn’t leave unemployment in its wake.

So do you see a distinction between “jobs that would have to exist in any case because the work must be done” and “jobs that wouldn’t exist at all if they paid a ‘living wage’ so it’s better to have a low-paid job than none at all”? Or are we better off maintaining the bright line between volunteer work and living wage-paid jobs?

I don’t think there’s a simple answer here, and offer this as something to chew on today.

image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACommunityClosetThriftStoreItems.jpg; By Sparklingdawg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

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