Here's a thought. Could we borrow the notion of carbon offsets to promote better labor practices?
I think some good could come of it; follow me below the fold for my reasoning.
Last night I ate at Giovanni's, a restaurant where you place your order at the window, take a seat, and they bring you your food. There was a basket for tips, and it got me thinking. What's the "right" amount to tip? We've got standards at full-service restaurants, and standards (of nothing) at fast food joints, but Giovanni's falls somewhere in between. And - as always when driven to consider tips - I felt a little resentment: why should I have to decide? I just want my food, and that the people who get it to me earn a decent living; I don't want to use my money to say something, good or bad, about the service, or to control or even influence their work. Of course I want good service, and of course I'm happy to pay for it - but why can't we just build that into the cost of the meal and be done with it? Yeah, yeah - I know: it's not gonna happen. But I wouldn't mind.
And I thought: what would it take to put together a restaurant where everyone is paid a fair wage? How much more would the meal prices be? And how would customers know that the extra money they were paying was actually going to the workers, and not just to further increase the profits of the owners? I realize it probably wouldn't be a successful business, but I started following that line of thought. And it led to: sure, the servers are the front lines, the visible faces, of the food delivery system - but what about all the other people in the supply chain? The laborers who pick the crop, the truckers who deliver it, the folks in the kitchen preparing it. The whole Little Red Hen thing. How could the Living Wage Restaurant ensure that everyone involved was getting a fair cut? How could their customers be sure they were dealing only with Living Wage Truckers delivering from Living Wage Farms? Where do we have to start?
And that question: where do we start? is very disheartening; it's a show-stopper. You can't start the restaurant because the trucker doesn't exist and the farm doesn't exist. And you can't start the farm because nobody would pay those prices in a market where they don't have to. But here's the thing.
If we had labor offsets - auditable, transparent contributions that advance the state of the worker, to which a company or individual could contribute to offset the harm that they can't, in the current market, avoid doing in the course of their business, we could start this process at any point. Like at the restaurant. I'm sure there are ways of determining the number of hours that go into producing a meal, and ways of estimating the pay of the people putting in those hours, and ways of establishing what would constitute fair pay. Put those things together and the Living Wage Restaurant can say: "we're paying our direct workers a fair wage (and here are the numbers); the difference between a fair pay and what our truckers and farmers are paid is $X, so the cost of your meal is $X more than it would otherwise be, and that $X is going to this fund that helps workers."
Now we've got an incentive for some truckers and farmers to join the fun. If our restaurant can start dealing with Living Wage Truckers instead of All Profit Truckers, we can afford to pay LWT enough to pay their workers better, because it just comes out of the offset - our cost, and our customers' cost, of a meal isn't affected.
What do you think? Could it work? Any economists in the crowd?