This is the fifth in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....
(Part 1: Why farming is not a business; Part 2: The case for subsistence farming; Part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else); Part 4: It takes a farm to raise a village)
"The real fact is that most wage earners have become so divorced from the responsibilities and the processes of thought inherent in free owners, that the wage they receive bears no relation in their minds to things produced for value given. They do not look beyond it, but only press for it to be made adequate to their needs. What it represents, where it comes from, how it is produced, what rights they have to it or to a larger one, they do not enquire. They start from the cash paid as from an incontestable metaphysical truth, and base all their personal economic assumptions upon that. It is true they realize that they cannot devour a pound note, or make it into a suit of clothes; but it is equally true that most of them cannot conceive of food or clothing except as the result of a money transaction. Thus the idea of a community largely self-subsistent appears to their minds as something unpractical -- almost unnatural." ~ Reginald Jebb
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I got into a debate with somebody the other day about the prospect of the federal minimum wage being raised to $15/hour across the board. While I acknowledged that there are mega corporations making a killing off of underpaid workers, I stated my firm conviction that simply raising the hourly wage will create more problems than it will solve. I hold that the problem is not with how much money a person makes, but with a system where the worth of an hour of labor is measured in dollars, which in themselves have no inherent value.
After all, what is $15 worth? Nothing, really. As Jebb points out, dollars -- pounds, for Brits like Jebb -- cannot be eaten and cannot be worn. Their worth is only found as a medium of exchange for something that actually has value because it's necessary for human thriving: basic necessities like food, clothing, or shelter, or things that that hold a culture together like learning and the arts.
Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour may give workers more dollars to exchange for the things that they really need... At least it would, except that then the amount of money required to make the exchange goes up. Raising workers' wages simply means that now it costs more to produce the same goods as before. The fat cats certainly aren't going to reduce their share simply because workers are paid more. So workers spend their increased salaries on goods that have increased in cost because they were produced at an increased cost, and workers are left as poor as they ever were. Inflation is a fast track to nowhere.
A worker's living wage according to the Church's perennial social teaching in Rerum Novarum has nothing to do with a particular dollar figure. Leo XIII teaches that a living wage "ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage earner." He ought to be able "comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children"; and if he is "sensible" and practices "thrift," he ought to be able "to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income."
Truly ensuring a living wage for workers has very little to do with money. It has to do with creating the societal conditions under which people are able to meet their basic needs through the work of their hands.
Jebb's essay is an argument for the small, local economy as the place where the value of a worker's labor is less strictly tied to the capriciousness of the capitalist system. To be clear, Jebb's is not an argument for a simple barter economy. He is arguing that small communities naturally link up laborers, farmers, and craftsmen who provide for each others' basic needs. The middlemen involved in transportation, marketing, and speculation are all eliminated. The actual value of a man's work is more readily apparent, and the relationships of actual human community living are free to flourish.
The middlemen of the global economy serve to distort the real value of things. To illustrate this point, I am thinking of my experience of growing Brussels Sprouts this past fall. The going rate for a ten-pound box of certified organic Brussels ended up hovering around $20. Once I got a system going, I found that I could clean and pack about a box and a half per hour. That's a wage of $30/hour. Which sounds nice until you deduct the hours spent planting, hoeing, spraying, and harvesting the Brussels, all prior to cleaning and packing them. It also doesn't take into consideration the mortgage payment on the land or the cost of the organic and food safety certifications.
As best that I can figure it, I made about one dollar of income per pound of Brussels. Yet I'm told that my certified organic Brussels Sprouts bring closer to $6 per pound at the big-city Whole Foods. So is a small bag of my Brussels worth a dollar, or is it worth half a dozen dollars? I argue that the question is non-sensical. Dollars are a poor measure of value -- not only of products, but especially of the work of the men who produce them.
What I do know, however, is that a pound of well prepared Brussels has the value of being the delicious vegetable component of a dinnertime meal, and that we regularly need vegetables with our meals, just as we need shoes on our feet, clothes on our backs, and roofs over our heads. The farmer, the teacher, the builder, and the craftsmen all deserve a wage that covers necessities like these. The irony is, I could not have afforded my own Brussels. Only my subsistence farming protects me from the capriciousness of the food market. More on that in a moment...
The point is, the monetary value of my brussels had very little to do with their actual value. Our global economy twists and distorts the actual value of things until it's hardly recognizable. Don't get me wrong, I'm not presenting a sob story. A dollar per pound on Brussels did constitute a living wage for our family last growing season, at least when factored in with other crops that paid a little better. I'll grow even a low profit crop like Brussels because a diversity of crops is insurance against total failure. One year the flea beetles will decimate the brassicas. Another year excess rains will cause the squash to rot.
But a dollar per pound didn't constitute a living wage because it was a dollar. It was a living wage because, as Rerum Novarum would have it, I was able to support myself and my family comfortably and put away a little savings. It wasn't an easy sort of comfortable. But there is food stocked away, and the mortgage has been paid. I'm not complaining.
Yet I will point out the irony -- and this is where I dovetail with Jebb's point -- that I managed to do this even with fat cats living off of the $5/pound that my Brussels lost in monetary value as they wended their way to the big-city Whole Foods. I agree with Jebb that I was able to earn my living wage in large part because land-holding insulates me from what he calls "world-wide gambling and the greed of a few monopolists." True, I do have monetary obligations -- things that I cannot grow -- and therefore I am not wholly protected. But my subsistence farming offers me a degree of protection that the hourly worker who buys everything at the grocery store at its prevailing price does not have.
My friend in that $15/hour wage discussion noted that although I was critical of the idea that raising the minimum wage would solve our societal ills, I had not put forward anything constructive of my own. I think that the start to my constructive alternative is found in Jebbs' argument is that what is true for me as the farmer can be true for an entire village of small landholders and craftsmen who are willing to work together. Just as I subsist mainly from my land and sell from my surplus, so too can the local community mainly subsist through, in Jebbs' words, "the local consumption of primary commodities."
Why buy your groceries at Walmart when you can buy them at the farmer's market? Well, because it's cheaper. Except that it isn't cheaper if your local farmer makes less because he has to sell to Walmart wholesale so that Walmart can turn around and sell it to you retail. It leaves the farmer with less money to spend on whatever it is that you are contributing to society through your own daily labor. Cut out the middlemen and fat cats. Buy from somebody that you know.
The glaring problem, of course, is that this only works where it works. I am fully aware, for example, that it's impracticable in the urban centers where so much of our nation's poverty is glaringly present. Yet that's why Jebb calls the cities artificial constructs that are "themselves powerless to supply their own needs," that are "the unwieldy factories of goods for which markets must be found by hook or by crook all the world over." It only works when the cities are dissolved by a fleeing to the fields, to the countryside and the small towns and villages that are more in keeping with human thriving.
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