The name is absent

19

contemporaneously and with a 4-quarter lag. For below-median unionized municipal
workers, living wages exceeding the minimum wage by 30 percent - which apparently is
not uncommon (see also Adams and Neumark, 2005, Table 1) - would have the effect of
raising the wages of union workers by around 4.5 percent. It is reported that living wages
do not influence the earnings of ‘municipal worker groups’ for whom they are not
expected to apply (e.g. teachers and police), which gives us some confidence in the prior
results, and also that the positive earnings effect on union wages holds for the center of
the wage distribution but not the extremes (substituting centiles from the 30^th to the 90^th
for the median), suggesting some fragility of the wage result.¹¹

Further, case studies of living wage ordinances in Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, and
San Diego by Zabin and Martin (1999) call into question the test used by Neumark
(2001), while offering some political insights. In the first place, the authors see the
narrow scope of living wage ordinances as strategic - helping guarantee success - and as
providing a basis for expansion from service contractors through recipients of direct
subsidies, loans and or tax breaks through to holders of public leases and different
agencies (port authorities, airports, redevelopment agencies and other local government
bodies), and product suppliers. The inevitability of gradualness - a phased extension of
coverage - is necessitated by the “fragmentation of local government and the sheer
number of public funding streams in an urban economy” (p. 31). The union role is also
perceived very differently from Neumark: unions are directly tied to the effectiveness of
the ordinances. Living wage laws are either targeted to cover groups that are likely to be
organized or have recently been organized. Ordinances are also linked to related laws that
help the climate for unionism such as labor peace laws. So the regulations are seen as
structured to support union organizing. Next, the case studies link the success of living
wage campaigns to inclusive coalitions of unions and community organizations (after
admittedly fractious relationships in the 1960s and 1970s). Low-income peoples’
organizations and unions are said to be now organizing the same communities, and labor-
community coalitions are portrayed as instrumental to the formulation and passage of
living wage ordinances. Links to national associations on each side of the coalition and
integration of platforms, preferably in hybrid organizations, are also identified as

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