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Friday, June 09, 2000
By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
If you have a job and work hard -- whether it's caring for the elderly or cleaning out a toilet -- Linda Wambaugh believes you deserve to earn enough to pay for bare essentials.
"Hey, if you're working 40 hours a week and can't pay your bills at a basic level, what does that say about us as a society?" Wambaugh asks, without bothering to supply what to her is an obvious answer.
Wambaugh, 46, is the executive director of the Alliance for Progressive Action, a broad-based coalition of groups that is pushing Allegheny County to adopt a controversial "living wage" of $9.11 an hour, the amount two adults would need to earn to keep a family of four on its feet without extras.
The effort has the potential to help thousands of low-wage workers, including 5,000 employees of government-funded nonprofits that care for the elderly, the mentally disabled and troubled youth. Many of those workers are women, who hold a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs.
"Some people look down their noses at janitors," Wambaugh said, "I don't. I want a clean building. I want a clean airport. It's productive work. It's important work."
Wambaugh has experienced first hand the difficulties women have making ends meet. She has worked as a waitress, with retarded adults in group homes and as a union organizer helping to raise living standards of mostly female nursing-home workers.
She also spent three years digging coal at the New Field Mines in Penn Hills, beginning in 1979. She was one of nine women among 250 men and earned a then princely $100 a day, plus benefits.
Her activism started early. As a university student in the early 1970s, Wambaugh volunteered as a Big Sister and with some friends helped to found a rape crisis center.
A native of Erie, she came to Pittsburgh in 1975 after graduating from Penn State University to study law at Duquesne University. But she left law school, disillusioned over what she saw as an emphasis on property rights, not justice.
She joined the alliance three years ago after 13 years with the Service Employees International Union Local 585, where she was organizing director. In addition to the "living wage" effort, her major campaigns at the alliance have included Save Pittsburgh Public Television and the Citizens for Police Accountability, which endorsed a civilian review board.
"The notion of what's right and justice have always been big issues with me" she said. "That's part of the American way. It's supposed to be a just and equitable society. So let's make it real."