While the idea of a living wage is traceable back to concerns about the status of wage earners in a republican political order voiced during the Jacksonian era, the modern history of the movement began in Baltimore in 1994. A coalition of unions, liberal religious groups, and organizations that work with and for the poor persuaded the city council to adopt a policy requiring all firms with city contracts to pay their employees a living wage. From there, the movement has spread to other parts of the country, resulting in about 130 similar ordinances at last count. These two books are the latest in a growing literature covering various facets of this phenomenon.

Stephanie Luce's Fighting for a Living Wage is primarily a handbook for activists, although it delves into scholarly analysis at points. Luce's focus is on the implementation of living-wage policies, rather than strategies proponents might take to secure passage of an ordinance. She and her research assistants thoroughly analyzed documents and news reports, made numerous phone queries, and conducted interviews with a wide variety of people from some 91 cities with ordinances through 2002. What they found can only be said to be discouraging, both for advocates of living-wage policies and believers in the principle of legislative supremacy in policymaking.

Only 22 of the cities had any information regarding their ordinances posted on their Websites, and only a little over a third designated a special agency to enforce the law. Responsibility for enforcement was often tacked onto the tasks of some already existing department (often one with a pro-business orientation, such as a procurement agency) and understaffing was universal. Ignorance was rampant. In Chicago, for example, two years after the ordinance went into effect, the person answering the phone at the relevant department denied the city had any such policy. Moreover, enforcement agencies were customarily given little power (such as the right to examine payroll records), waivers were common, and fines, even when levied, were minuscule. As a result, compliance is spotty at best; at the extreme, in Buffalo two years after the adoption of the ordinance, not a single covered worker had been paid the living wage.

Consequently, Luce urges advocates to pay close attention to implementation and offers a number of helpful tips about how best to do that. These range from trying to secure a place in the enforcement machinery to keeping protests at the ready. One interesting finding she notes is that the more opposition there is to the ordinance when passage is being sought, the better the enforcement. This seems to come from the strengthening of the pro-living-wage coalition during the political battle.

The misfeasance and malfeasance offered up in the case studies, the data, and the anecdotes are, to put it simply, disgusting. In the presentation, however, her ideological proclivities sometimes overwhelm rather than inform the analysis. For instance, she constantly refers to “community” groups, confining the term solely to those that support help for people with low incomes. In fairness, other organizations can surely claim this label as well. More seriously, there is a repeated use of Marxist and quasi-Marxist categories to explain what is happening. At the end of the day, these forays detract from, more than they add to, the argument.

From a political science perspective, the book suffers from two other deficiencies. One is that a critique is offered of the old politics/administration dichotomy, with no notice paid to the mountain of previous writings on the subject. The other comes from an attempt to link the findings to the literature on implementation. The effort, sadly, is rather superficial and unsatisfying.

However, none of these problems takes away from the usefulness of the book for its intended audience. Furthermore, political scientists interested in implementation, particularly at the local level, will find here a bounty of enlightening information.

Oren Levin-Waldman's The Politics of the Living Wage is addressed more directly to political scientists. The author utilizes Clarence Stone's regime theory as an organizing device to analyze the experience of four cities that adopted living-wage ordinances: Baltimore, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New Orleans. Concomitantly, he borrows from social theorists who study “social movements” to argue that “a living wage campaign, to the extent that it reflects a grassroots movement, represents a social protest movement” (p. 19). His central question is to what degree this alleged social movement has penetrated the regimes of America's major cities.

The groundwork material is quite well done. A chapter on the conjectured effects of living wages, especially the oft-cited but hardly ever supported argument that legally mandated minimum wages of any type lead to unemployment, is the best discussion I have seen on this topic. The coverage of the economic and political factors present in the four cities is informative and clearly presented.

In the last two decades, urban regimes have almost uniformly pursued a search for economic development, while initiating a drive to privatize a wide variety of public services. Economic development policies became necessary, or so city leaders believed, as deindustrialization and the move to the suburbs deprived core cities of their once-robust economic bases. Subsidies and other concessions have been routinely granted to lure or keep business enterprises within a city's boundaries, with the justification that “creating jobs” is good for everyone: “Politicians tend to view economic growth and development as a collective good that contributes to electoral success” (p. 182). Despite the fact that economic development and the policies designed to achieve it are trumpeted as beneficial to everyone, in fact the rewards (and costs) are spread in dramatically uneven ways. Businesses, mostly larger ones, benefit enormously from the array of subsidies and special concessions. Most of the time, though, the jobs that are created carry low wages and offer little opportunity for promotion. Even when high-wage manufacturing jobs are at stake, as when Detroit offered a lucrative package to General Motors, the firm may end up moving elsewhere (as happened here). As a result, income inequality has grown even faster in cities than it has in the country as a whole.

Governing elites often stress that privatization will support pro-growth policies both by lowering taxes and demonstrating that the locale is “friendly to investment.” Since labor costs are the major component of most public services, putting these activities out to competitive bidding drives down wages. The “taxpayers” do save money, in the short run anyway. Again, though, the costs and benefits are spread unevenly, with the main losers being the workers who once held relatively well paying and secure public sector jobs.

Consequently, one group that is a natural supporter of living-wage policies is unions representing public sector workers. By having a city adopt a living-wage ordinance, they can recover the wage levels their members had before privatization, and also forestall further privatization efforts, since the cost savings will disappear. Levin-Waldman lays out all these arguments in convincing fashion. His main thesis, though, is that the living-wage movement is a social movement that is challenging the regimes' pro-growth, pro-development policies. These citizens, speaking through groups, want a seat at the table when decisions are made: “The bottom classes are organizing in order to attain political voice” (p. 190).

There are two basic problems with this contention. First, the concept of a “social movement” is never defined. It is, as is usual in the literature, employed in such a loose fashion as to lose almost all analytical utility. Second, there is scant evidence that those at the bottom are in reality doing much organizing themselves. While ordinarily a few low-wage workers do become active in living-wage campaigns, they are only a minute fraction of the poor, and the leadership of these efforts is almost always heavily middle class. It is uncontestable that the quality of urban life has diminished for many people, especially the poor, and that they are generally unhappy about that; but to move from that proposition to one contending that they blame pro-growth policies for their fate and are turning the search for a living wage into a “social movement” aimed at influencing those policies requires a great deal of evidence. Instead, we get a discussion of Alain Touraine's ideas of “individuation.” My experience is that those who spend most of their time worrying about how to pay the bills on a meager income do not think like that, and are on the whole disconnected from politics. Personally, I wish the poor were organizing to challenge the pro-growth shibboleths, but I am no more convinced after reading this book than before that this is true or likely to become true.

Nevertheless, in spite of these shortcomings, Levin-Waldman offers a useful discussion of regime theory, an excellent analysis of the dynamics of living-wage policies, a helpful critique of recent urban development policies, and some interesting details regarding living-wage politics in four of our major cities.