Hank Kalet

Let Shannon Sharpe’s comments stand by themselves. There really isn’t anything to add.

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My newest column is up at The Progressive Populist.

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The state’s editorial boards were nearly unanimous in their opposition to today’s minimum wage question. Most pointed to the requirement that the wage increase be indexed for inflation annually, and many cited constitutional concerns.

What is striking is how these arguments fail the basic test of logical argument. The constitutional argument, as outlined by the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business community, is that adding a wage issue or an employment issue to the state constitution amounts to special-interest tampering with a sacred document designed to protect individual rights.

When outlined this way, it is tough to argue against. The problem is that it is built on a flawed premise. In defining the minimum wage as being just a wage-and-hour or employment issue, it ignores what the wage is really designed to do, which is set a floor on wages that gives low-wage workers a fighting chance to survive. The wage, in this way, is a rights issue — a way of enforcing the right to a minimum standard of living, of defending one of the four freedoms that Franklin Roosevelt detailed 70 years ago, the right to be free from want.
 This is debatable, of course, but not to the state’s editorial boards, which seemed to just buy the business community’s constitutional argument without much of a thought or ignore the constitutional question altogether.

Obviously, I support the minimum wage increase and passing ballot question 2, but that is not the point I want to make here. What strikes me and troubles me is the loose logic used by editorial boards around the state not only in their opposition to the wage referendum, but on other issues — best exemplified, of course, by the Star-Ledger editorial “supporting” Gov. Christie for re-election.

Here I am going to quote from The Record’s public question editorial, not to pick on it, but because I think it is pretty typical of the argument being made.

The state constitution should not be amended over the minimum wage. And while inflation has not been a concern for several years, that will not always be the case. Once the constitution is amended, short of another statewide referendum, it is set in stone. Regardless of the economic picture, the minimum wage will rise automatically. We agree no one can live above poverty earning $7.25 an hour. Emotionally, the desire to increase the minimum wage is a no-brainer.

But this is not the way to do it. The Legislature should have fought with Christie on an acceptable compromise. Considering that the dollar amount on the ballot is the same figure Christie countered with makes it obvious that if a compromise was wanted, a compromise could have been achieved. We support raising the minimum wage.

So, The Record opposes the wage hike because it says it should not be included in the state constitution, right? That’s true, but I defy any reader to read the full editorial and explain why. The Record says this, but then fails to actually make the case. It’s argument boils down to: We don’t think it should be there, so therefore it shouldn’t be there.

It would have been nice had The Record actually explained why. The Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have made the case — that the constitution is not meant for employment debates or end-runs around the political process — so the argument is out there in the ether.

As for its argument against indexing — I could live with it if the bias of the editorial writers were made more obvious. Inflation is not an issue now, as the board writes, but it could be. And when it is, the board continues, businesses are likely to be screwed. But here is what the Record editorial board has neglected to say: Without indexing the wage for inflation, low-wage workers will see the value of the minimum wage deteriorate as the cost of living rises. If inflation becomes an issue, low-wage workers would get screwed without the indexing feature. The Record has decided to toss its lot in with the business community. Again, this is its prerogative, but it has a responsibility to be more explicit about this bias.

The Asbury Park Press (and the rest of its Gannett sister papers), which opposed the question in a tepid and wavering editorial, and the Ledger, one of the few major papers in the state to endorse the wage increase, are guilty of the same kind of faulty logic. The Press, for instance, is unsure, thinks the wage needs to increase, but not with a CPI provision, so maybe they should go back and start over in the Legislature, but who can trust the Legislature, but we need the increase, but — well, vote no. And it ignores the constitutional question.

As for the Ledger, it makes a strong (if incomplete) economic case for the increase, but then dismisses the constitutional question — which is a big one. Its reasoning — that the governor gave the Legislature no choice — has nothing to do with whether these kinds of issues should be addressed by the constitution. In terms of its logic, this dismissal actually supports the argument being made by the business lobby that the vote today could open the state’s charter to thorny questions on which the governor and Legislature cannot agree. (This would be a good argument for an initiative and referendum process, but not for the current minimum wage vote.)

As my students might say, the state’s papers have turned this debate into a “hot mess.”

Newspaper editorial boards should weigh in on important issues (as opposed to endorsing candidates), but they need to do a better job of constructing their arguments and being transparent about how they frame those arguments. Editorial writers have a responsibility to readers to provide fully fleshed out arguments that follow the basic rules of logic, to make the premises that underlie their arguments clear and make their biases known. Doing this gives the reader the ability to raise questions and judge the argument being offered by the paper.

The editorials by the state’s newspapers over the last few weeks on the minimum wage question have failed to do this.


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It was early 2012 when I first encountered Tent City. Sherry Rubel, a photographer who had done work for my Patch sites, had posted a press release to South Brunswick Patch explaining a Kickstarter campaign she had launched focusing on what was supposed to be a photo-music collaboration focusing on the tent encampment. I found it intriguing and, having recently read C.D. Wright’s remarkable One Big Self — a book that started with a photographer inviting the poet to write about the prisoners she was photographing — for my master’s thesis, it was clear to me that I had to get involved.

I reached out to Sherry and, eventually, brought in documentary filmmaker Jack Ballo and The Tent City Project was born. The idea was for each of us to spend time in the tent encampment, but to follow our own creative paths. Jack’s film, Destiny’s Bridge, opened in August with a small photo exhibit by Sherry and, while the bulk of the work was finished on my manuscript, I was not getting any bites from publishers.

That changed last night when the prestigious Serving House Journal posted  issue no. 8 last night. The issue features three selections from As an Alien in a Land of Promise, my poem, and six photos from Sherry, along with an author’s statement. It is an exciting moment, not only because my work is getting published alongside nationally renowned writers like Billy Collins and and my friends Tom Kennedy and Walter Cummins, and not only because Sherry’s wonderful photos are getting the national play they deserve, but because the plight of the people in the camp — and the larger group of people they represent — is continuing to get exposure.

Make no mistake, the individual stories are important and Tent City residents are now facing a difficult winter. Despite a consent order agreed to earlier this year that was supposed to result in housing for camp residents and the closure of the camp, the homeless and their de facto leader Steve Brigham are still battling with authorities in Lakewood whose primary goal remains erasing Tent City from existence.

Both sides carry some blame here — the encampment, because of the larger failure of American society to deal with what the reality of homelessness says about our economy, has continued to grow, in contravention of the agreement, and the township of Lakewood, because of its continued antipathy to the people in the camp. And both are also right in their claims — if not in the woods, then where, the homeless say, while the immediate neighbors of the camp complain about its very real impacts (smoke, noise, etc.).

The project for me was about both these individual and about what Tent City — and the hundreds like it around the country — means metaphorically. If we can continue to treat men and women as disposable, if we can view them as refuse because they may not have something to offer a capitalist system that judges worth purely on its impact on the corporate bottom line, then we will never be able to rid ourselves of tent encampments no matter how many affordable houses we create and no matter how high we raise the minimum wage (both of which I support).

The homeless, in the American capitalist system, are refuse. And they are weeds — invaders in the garden of consumerism, finding dead areas in which to live, to survive, parasites to some but clarions to those of us who view the system itself as choking on its own brutal illogic.

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