At Saint Anselm, many professors conduct their own research driven by their passions. Recently, Kyle Hubbard, a philosophy professor here at Saint Anselm, published “What is a Just Wage?: The Minimum Wage, The Living Wage, and the Family Wage” in the “Journal of Religious and Business Ethics.” This paper highlights “The Fight for $15” movement, a campaign of the Service Employees International Union, which reinvigorated the push for every worker in the U.S. to be paid a living wage.
This project pushed Hubbard outside his comfort zone, as he started teaching at Saint Anselm College with a focus on business ethics. As he started teaching “The Fight for $15” movement, he found that articles that he gave the students to support the movement didn't satisfy them, and it didn't satisfy him. The philosophical approaches just defend the idea of adjusting wage in a satisfactory way. This inspired him to begin his research and ultimately publish his findings.
Hubbard provided a position paper for this movement to highlight and support their points. The “Fight for $15” movement is centered on three arguments:
- Every worker deserves a living wage that provides for the worker’s flourishing beyond mere survival.
- The living wage must be enough for the worker to provide for his or her family.
- The wage must be paid by the direct employer.
Hubbard believed that the standard ethical approaches cannot ground the second and third claims. Therefore, Hubbard took it upon himself to apply his philosophy and Catholic background to improve their claim.
Hubbard paired his philosophy background with Catholic background to find that Pope John Paul ll’s 1981 encyclical “On Human Work” is able to defend all three of the “Fight for $15” movement. “On Human Work” supports the second claim by the idea of personalism that the human is not just an individual, but it’s a person in community. The third claim that the wage is what communicates value to the worker. The wage actually is the best way for the employer to show that the worker has dignity.
Hubbard believes that “The Fight for $15” movement is best supported by Pope John Paul ll’s letter better than any philosophical or at least modern philosophical approaches. All three of these claims while they can't be defended by traditional philosophical approaches can be defended by Catholic social teaching.
Kyle Hubbard, shared all of this at the annual Faculty Research event in February. To learn more about Hubbard and read his published article visit, https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1171&context=jrbe