Exhibit number one: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which warns that contracting reforms "could increase costs to taxpayers by $100 billion a year at a time when we are struggling with unsustainable deficits." The numbers do indeed sound alarming. Yet research on the impact of municipal living wages finds that city governments have systematically overestimated the costs to the public before living wages went into effect. In Los Angeles, for example, living wage opponents projected costs as high as $40 million before the ordinance was passed: actual expenditures totaled less than a tenth of that. Similarly, a 2003 analysis of 20 living wage laws across the nation found that any increase in contracting costs generally amounted to less than 0.1% of total city budgets in the years following the passage of a living wage law. Some cities saw no measurable increase in costs at all, as a competitive bidding environment forced contractors to reduce their own profits in order to raise pay for their low-wage workforce.

Meanwhile, a group of Republican Senators has raised an alarm about "undermining the diversity of the Federal contracting base and lessening competitive pressure on larger Federal contractors." Yet a survey of living wage research by the Economic Policy Institute finds that some living wage laws had the opposite effect, improving the competitive environment and encouraging offers by new firms that were previously "unwilling to bid when the outcome of the contract was determined exclusively by who could offer the lowest wages." And while the Republican Senators cite a concern for small businesses (so often a fig leaf for the interests of large multinational corporations), new federal contracting standards would in fact make it easier for small companies that already take the "high road" by paying employees living wages and solid benefits to compete for federal contracts.

If history continues to be our guide, we can expect to see arguments that living wage standards in federal contracting will harm employment (discredited - but already being revived by a Chamber of Commerce blog post listing contracting reform as a "job-killer") as well as nebulous contentions that the government's decisions about who to do business with somehow represent unfair meddling in the otherwise unconstrained free market. Luckily, cities have already been there and done that, and can provide hard evidence that the sky does not fall when the government uses its purchasing power to improve the lot of its citizens.

For many years when the federal government issues of poverty and the rise of low-wage, poor quality jobs, grassroots organizers worked to enact and enforce living wage laws in America's cities. Today, the entire nation can benefit from their efforts.