On demanding fair wages and paying for the principle

The New York Post reports that a 21-year-old unpaid intern at the New York City Council was fired after she demanded $32 an hour in wages and full health benefits for herself and her fellow interns, and that she now intends to sue the Council for failing to deliver. The Post's editors reach for the label "silver-spoon socialist" and consider the matter closed.

I am not so quick. I spent my early years setting type for a printer at wages that barely kept me in candles. Unpaid labor in a government office is a particular arrangement worth examining plainly: it filters public service toward those who can afford to work for nothing. That is not a trivial complaint. An apprentice who receives no bread learns no trade; an intern who receives no wage learns chiefly that civic participation is a luxury. So the young woman's instinct — that work deserves compensation — is not foolish on its face.

The harder question is the one she may not have asked herself: where does the money come from, and who must be taxed or cut to produce it? A demand for $32 an hour directed at a municipal council is a demand on the city's treasury, which is to say on every working household in the five boroughs. The virtue of a position is not determined by its warmth alone; it must survive the reckoning of cost. I wrote once that an investment in knowledge pays the best interest — but I meant knowledge purchased by one's own industry, not a stipend extracted without examination of the budget it strains.

There is also the matter of method. Going to the press before going to the ledger, threatening a lawsuit before proposing a realistic funding source — these are the tactics of one who has confused the announcement of a principle with the argument for it. Eloquence without arithmetic persuades no appropriations committee. The intern would have been wiser to come armed with numbers: what the internship program costs now, what it would cost at a living wage, and which line in the Council's budget might yield it.

I will not pretend, as the Post does, that the label "socialist" settles the argument. The merchants of my own Philadelphia called me a radical when I proposed that the colonial paper-money supply be expanded to serve working tradesmen rather than creditors alone. Labels are cheap; the numbers are what matter.

A counsel for the working person: If you believe your labor is undervalued — by an employer, a government office, or anyone else — make the case with evidence. Know the budget of the place that employs you. Know what comparable work pays elsewhere. Come to the table with a number you can defend, not merely one you desire. Righteous indignation is a poor substitute for a well-prepared ledger.