Friends want me to switch my buying club membership from one major retailer to another because, they say, the second has better employment practices: it pays closer to a living wage, provides better benefits.
My switching has no practical effect on the low wage retailer. That’s not the idea. I should vote with my checkbook. But what am I voting for? Am I saying to the world: “I want businesses that pay living wages to succeed and businesses that don’t pay such wages to fail.” Maybe. But if that retailer goes away, what fills the void? A larger, fairer competitor? Another low-wage retailer? Nothing?
One might say: “There will always be better and worse places to work. People will try to get hired at the better places and, if they fail, they will apply at the worse places. Eventually, some of them will move up to the better places. The worse places to work will pay as little as they can get away with paying. The floor is set by legal constraints. To change the system, change the floor – the minimum wage rules, the rules about insurance and benefits, the enforcement of these laws. Don’t protest against what is going to happen; it’s a waste of scarce breath.”
One might say: “To shop at a store that gives you a slight advantage in price because it pays its people less than they need to live is to profit from an unjust system and to implicitly endorse that system. You are doing the same injustice to the employees that their employer is doing to them.”
The employees at the store with the lower wages will, oddly, want you to continue buying products there. Their jobs will go away if business slacks off, and the higher wage retailers aren’t hiring.
I understand actions that have an effect in the world, and I sort of understand actions that are undertaken on the off chance that they will have an effect in the world. But, with symbolic actions, and with group actions, I am ethically at sea.
Posted by shea0017 at August 22, 2005 11:10 AM