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The decision by the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to stick with a 3% across the board pay increase for city employees as opposed to a $1.00/hour one was a sensible one.  But it brings up an issue common in labour relations, namely that of wage compression.

A quick summary of the facts: the Mayor had proposed the 3% increase.  But the trade union (the SEIU) had campaigned for the $1.00/hour increase, and it looked for a time that the City Council would go along with it.  But in the end the percentage increase prevailed.

The problem with what we used to call "cents an hour" increases (now $1) for everyone is that, over time, it produces wage compression.  As an example, consider a pay scale with the lowest wage $7/hour and the highest $14/hour.  The highest wage in this case is double the lowest.  If we apply a percentage increase each year (or whenever increases are applied,) the highest wave will remain double the lowest, and the increases all have the same relationship with whatever inflation rate is going at the time.

Now let’s consider three successive $1/hour increases.  The bottom wage is now $10/hour and the top $17/hour.   But now the top wage is only 1.7 times the lowest rather than 2 times the lowest.  Over time, with this type of increase, two things happen.

The first is that the lowest wage (unskilled or entry level) people end up above the market rate.  This not only discourages hiring people at this level, but it also encourages the company or government entity to contract out work at wage and benefit levels which are usually way below what the company or government entity would have paid if they had stuck with percentage increases.  So people eligible for work such as this end up being hurt.

The second result is that people at the highest job classifications end up underpaid, with wages either below market level, not keeping up with inflation, or both.  Those who can will seek work elsewhere, which over time will dilute the calibre of the work force.

Inequities in pay scales can and should be dealt with.  The City of Chattanooga has a study currently under way to try to remedy problems like this.  But trade unions traditionally hate to adjust pay scales because it creates division in the bargaining unit.  A flat rate increase is an easy way out for a union.  But in the long run the interests of both employer and employees are hurt by the practice.

It’s little wonder that U.S. Officials Voice Frustrations With Saudis’ Role in Iraq. The wonder is that they haven’t sooner.

Saudi Arabia is trying to do two things at once:

• Spread Wahhabi/Salafi Islam throughout the Muslim world through a well-financed system of patronage (mosques, imams, etc.)  Salafism attempts to return Islam to the faith and practice of Mohammed and his companions.  It is very strict and fundamental.  Although Salafis will attempt to tell you that bin Laden and his ilk are more influenced by modern currents (Marxism, Nazism) the truth is that, in a faith where religion and politics are a unity, sooner or later someone is going to try to put Salafism into action on a widespread basis, as many Islamicists want to do.
• Prevent internal dissidents and external rivals (such as Shi’ite Iran) from taking over the country.  For all of its oil wealth and holy sites, Saudi Arabia is a relatively weak country.

One explanation of this weakness is that the nature of the House of Saud (now running in five figures in membership) makes for a house divided against itself (to use a good Biblical expression.)  There is some merit to this argument.  It would explain why U.S. officials (used to a more set piece type of existence) find the Saudis equivocal.

But ultimately the Saudis are playing with fire.  It’s good foreign policy to try to keep all of the "balls up in the air" (as a juggler would do) and thus your potential rivals off balance.  The British used to do this in their imperial days.  But trying to export a tough version of Islam and expect your ship to stay afloat in the tempest it creates is asking too much.  The Saudis’ game is dangerous, and not just for them either.

In thinking about the recent poll Russian youth: Stalin good, migrants must go, one is reminded of the following concerning another brutal Russian tyrant, Ivan the Terrible:

By the 1580’s Russian society had assumed the essential shape it was to retain until 1861; despite war and revolution vestiges of it have survived until today.

During and since Ivan’s lifetime Russian and foreign writers have argued bitterly about the Terrible Tsar…To what extent was the disturbed personality of Ivan IV itself responsible for the events of his reign, and therefore for the transformation of Russian society?…

Also by 1582, Ivan killed his son and hair and his pregnant daughter-in-law, leaving only the mentally and physically handicapped Theodore Ioannovich to succeed him when he died two years later.  Were these apocalyptic events the results of a ‘class struggle’ as so many from Giles Fletcher onwards have suggested?  Or could it be that a powerful but deranged individual was able to impose himself on a country in which the social classes had not yet developed to the point at which effective resistance could be organised? (Lionel Kochan and Richard Abraham, The Making of Modern Russia.  London: Penguin Books, 1983, pp. 42, 44)

Ivan the Terrible’s legacy has long survived him, even with today’s Russian youth.

Like Ivan the Terrible, Stalin imposed himself on a country where the classes were in a definite state of flux, and did so with brutality against which even Ivan’s paled.  Although Americans are shocked that Russian youth look up to Stalin, the truth is that democracy as understood in the English speaking world is not a taste that the Russians have acquired with their centuries of autocracy.  To expect a change in idea overnight–especially after the chaos and rampant corruption of the "wide open" Yeltsin years–is to expect too much too fast, just as the Bush Administration’s expectations of democracy in the Middle East are equally unrealistic.

The lesson of the Ward Churchill saga Ward Churchill Saga is simple: if you want real ethnic diversity and the viewpoints that come with it, hire someone with real non-white background.

Living in "Cherokee Country," the University of Colorado would have had a better shot at this if they had walked into just about any Pentecostal (and many other Evangelical churches as well) congregation around here and picked someone at random.  And their viewpoint would have a lot different from most of the faculty than Ward Churchill.

Lydia Playfoot’s loss of her legal action to wear a chastity ring brings to mind two previous posts:

• Liberals and Sex Go Together (her opponents)
• What They Really Don’t Like is the Chastity. Don’t Like the Free Speech Either. (previous direct comment on the subject)
  

But it also brings up something else, this time from the appendix dealing with "Weights, Measures and Currency" of the Positive Infinity New Testament:

The use of Bahamian paper explains how many of the pounds, shillings and pence got on this page; it came out of having to learn how to count it and spend it while in the Bahamas. The good news was that this education could be had in a place with a warm climate and people. This also illustrates one of the characteristics of the old British Empire: many of the colonies were improvements over the mother country. Why else would two small islands be able to populate two entire continents with the people who either wanted or had to leave, to say nothing of the “expatriates” in places such as South Africa and India?

Many of those emigrants left for reasons of religious freedom.

It seems that the UK (and a lot of the supposedly "free" West) is moving to the idea that the only way freedom can be guaranteed when everyone is a secularist, which is enforced groupthink.  Perhaps it’s time for her move to a place where her religious convictions are more honoured than in the UK (and, unlike the US, are not in medium-term jeopardy.)  It’s something easier to do while young; the older one gets, the harder it is to make the move.

The Boston Globe’s report that poverty is the key theme for Democrats is a combination of wishful thinking and a blind faith in the success of past programs.

The thinking is wishful for one simple reason: the Democrat party is largely controlled by elites who have no concept of what poverty means or how to fix it.  On top of that they have a visceral distaste for those who are in it.  That’s why it’s so much easier for them to support "justice" causes for people more like them: the secularisation of society, homosexuals and the like.  Given that they would end up paying for direct assistance to the poor, I can’t help but think that this sudden interest in the poor is sentimental (or a form of vote buying) up front and a non-starter once in power.

The one candidate who breaks the mould in this regard is John Edwards.  He is, in some ways, one–and maybe one of the last–in a long line of Southern populists like Huey Long.  The media has focused on the $400 haircuts and the multi-million dollar house, but this an accepted part of the genre.  As with preachers, Edwards’ success–and his flaunting of it–is a sign that, if he can do it, his followers can too, which is a way of projecting hope.  Edwards is a bona fide product of the kind of background and people that the Democrats are supposed to be helping in this new emphasis.

But Edwards is swimming against the tide.  The rest of the candidates are too much a part of their party’s elite.  The most complicated case is that of Hillary Clinton.  Like Edwards, Bill Clinton came up from nothing, and in the same culture too.  But Bill was too good of a politician to push a hard social agenda in his day.  For her part Hillary has doubtless found her years in Arkansas too distasteful for her to empathise with people like those in Marks, MS, described in the article.

As is the case with the Episcopal Church, if your organisation isn’t the preferential option of the poor, it doesn’t have the preferential option for the poor.