Minimum wage should be linked to the poverty level.
This is basic economic fact.
A business that claims it can’t afford to pay a living wage to its workers is admitting that by definition it fails to meet its basic operating expenses. That major multinational corporations can be “successful” while failing to meet a basic operating expense is only possible because We The People pick up their greedy/lazy slack through taxes and charity.
And yet somehow it’s everybody else who’s a moocher and a looter…
And this corrosive greed is a big part of what’s slowly poisoning the U.S. economy. Money being hoarded at the top and put in “safe” investments and bank accounts is money that does nothing for no one. It’s just an elaborate means of keeping score. Money put into the hands of the workers does what money is meant to do: it circulates. It gets spent. The same dollar will go through dozens of sets of hands, touching dozens of lives, feeding dozens of people and sparking profits for dozens of businesses. The same dollar, in the hands of the rich, will generally do… nothing. It won’t create jobs. It won’t fund innovations. It won’t start businesses.
Less than 1% of corporate revenues become wages for workers. Less than 3% of the wealthy are actually entrepreneurs (people who risk their money on business ventures that create jobs).
But 100% of the working class spends their money. That money creates jobs. That money fuels innovations. That money becomes profits. That money keeps the economy ticking.
We have been lied to about who are the parasites and who are the drivers of the economy. We have largely accepted a view of money as a means of keeping score and the economy as something that must have winners and losers, rather than money being a proxy for barter and an economy being a way to divide the labor of society and distribute the load of living
#poverty #classism
“A business that claims it can’t afford to pay a living wage to its workers is admitting that by definition it fails to meet its basic operating expenses.”
yet ceo’s are getting away with huge salaries and bonuses and even government writeoffs.
There was a place I worked where there were huge cutbacks and a lot of people had to choose between taking a paycut and being terminated. Most of them lost their benefits and a pay-freeze went into effect. There “wasn’t enough money” to do it. “No one” was getting bonuses or raises or anything else.
Except the CEO. Who got his bonus and gave himself a 3% raise every year.
After something like three or four years of this, I, along with something like 17% of the people employed there, ended up getting the axe because of the “not enough money” song. I ended up on unemployment and food stamps, which of course makes me the moocher and the Bad Guy and lazy and whatever the fuck else.
He took the “lack of funds” and built a few buildings for the business that remained pretty much empty. He’d forced all this consolidation because of the “lack of funds” so even the buildings that had been there were half-empty.
All “We can’t afford to pay a living wage” means to me, is “If I do that, I can’t have my 3% every year. I might only get 2%!”
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