A Fuller Picture of Living-Wage Issues

To the Editor:

In reading your article “Paying a High Price,” by Michael Anft (May 2), I came away feeling that your analysis of the problem presented to the nonprofit sector by the living-wage movement did not present a full view of the real issues involved.

When people such as those organizational directors and managers quoted in your article say that they can’t afford to pay a living wage or that they are prevented from doing so due to lack of funding, they are using industry code words to dismiss the argument in order to prevent a true analysis of their position. Again and again, hindsight tells the true story. In their world “can’t” actually means “don’t want to.”

Managers of nonprofit organizations choose not to pay higher wages for some simple and surprisingly universal reasons.

Type-one managers argue that their organization’s budget does not provide for higher wages and has not in the past. This type of manager either cannot or will not think outside of the traditional budget box. “What has been must be” is their mantra. Their motivation? Inflexibility.

Type-two managers lack the education, skills, and experience to realize that budgets are working plans that can and should be modified to adapt to changes in their organizations’ environment. In addition, these managers do not want to change wage budgets because they realize that there are only 100 pennies in a dollar and that any monies added to the wages of employees are monies no longer available for the budget items the managers hold as a higher or more desirable priority. Their motivation? Poor management skills.

Type-three managers cling to the 1970s nonprofit model that held that social-service–delivery workers should, for moral, ethical, and political reasons, earn only low wages. (It is interesting to note and readily observable that this “rule” is almost always applied to the lowest levels of the organization and most often does not apply at all to upper management.) Their motivation? Greed.

Type-four managers lack the education and practical knowledge of organizational management and the sciences of basic human behavior to understand that employee satisfaction is important to an organization’s ability to properly fulfill its services-delivery mission. Their motivation? Ignorance.

All four of these reasons are usually present in a given organization, with each organization operating with a unique combination of the four as its prioritizing mechanism. The four reasons act in concert to support each other and to provide a false air of legitimacy to these self-serving arguments. The result is always the same: The organization, its executive management, and its board engage in a group-think process that proves that they “cannot” pay a decent wage to the organization’s lowest-echelon employees.

Joseph F. Billingiere
Ventura, Calif.