The Root Problem
[Caleb Stegall  03/09 05:44 PM]

Here’s a recent article by Allan Carlson that every conservative, regardless of prefix, ought to pay attention to. An excerpt:

Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 implied the necessity of a “family wage.” A more forceful articulation came from an American priest, Father John Ryan, in 1916 in a book called Distributive Justice: “The laborer has a right to a family Living Wage because this is the only way in which he can exercise his right to the means of maintaining a family, and he has a right to these means because they are an essential condition of normal life.”

Pope Pius XI directly endorsed the family wage idea in 1931 in Quadragesimo Anno. In a long commentary on this document, the Jesuit author Oswald von Nell-Brenning emphasized the radical consequences of the “family wage”:

“It will be absolutely necessary to see to it that female labor is kept from the labor market, something that will have to be attained by prudent and clear-sighted measures. Everyone knows that this cannot be accomplished by decree but requires a far-reaching reconstruction of the entire economic system.”

In the United States, at least, a somewhat less rigorous version of this “family wage” economy did exist between 1900 and 1965. It rested in part on public policy (more on that later) and in part on a culturally enforced form of conscious, open job discrimination: the phenomena of so-called men’s jobs (marked by higher wages and salaries and long-term tenure) and women’s jobs (oriented to lower pay and short-term tenure).

However, the revolutionary principle of pure sexual equality, embodied in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, shattered this system. The real wages of men fell, and the flow of young mothers into the workforce resumed.

Today, no one in America really talks about the “family wage,” except equity feminist historians who still, with great ritual, regularly dance on its grave. And yet the underlying problems posed by families living in an industrial milieu are still very much with us. There are, for example, muddled campaigns in our day for a “living wage,” although they are marked by intentionally ambiguous normative goals. Does a modern “living wage” assume one or two earners per household? Never a clear answer.

But a true “family wage” would solve, or at least sharply reduce, many of the problems so often complained about today—and so often “solved” by simultaneously accepting the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon family life and asking government to reduce its effects. Contemporary complaints over a lack of quality day care, mounting talk of a “care giving deficit,” the growing “elder care” crisis, so-called work/family conflicts: all derive from the disorders created by the separation of work and home.