Restaurant owners who whine about paying the cost of their employees’ health care are leaving it to you and I to do the job for them with every monthly health insurance premium we pay, thereby subsidizing their bottom lines whether we buy their products or not. How is that not corporate welfare? Oil companies who threaten to take their jobs and go elsewhere if we dare to cut back on their research and development subsidies, all the while pointing the finger at single mothers who get government help.
I’m sorry, but this is nuts.
It is no secret that American patriotism was, for many people, long ago replaced by something these folks consider far more important—personal and shareholder profit.
I like profits. But I also like living in a country where our commitment to the betterment of our nation and the lives of our people takes precedence over the desire to give away a few million pizza pies.
If these companies are permitted to get away with this effort to hold hostage their employees—and the American public at large—in order to get their way because they lost an election…or if they can successfully threaten to pick up their ball and take it to a different field because we might just ask them to forgo some R&D subsidy money for the national betterment…America has a problem far more dramatic than paying an extra fifteen cents for a slab of carbohydrate drenched in sugar filled tomato sauce and then covered with artery clogging meat.
Quick reversal once opinions are take out of of the ultra-right fever swamps.
To put these figures in perspective, the federal poverty line for a family of three is $19,090. You would have to work 40 hours a week, every week of the year at Best Buy to clear that figure. Since about 42 percent of low-wage retail employees only work part time, according to a recent study by Demos, it’s not a surprise that about a quarter of them live in or near full poverty.
Ultimately, this all comes back to consumers. We are the ones who choose where to take our business. And for the most part, Americans have chosen cheap.
It’s hard to blame middle class families for making that decision – not a lot of people have the extra cash to make a political statement out of where they buy paper towels and diapers. But it’s led to cycle of impoverishment, where big box stores have brought down wages at smaller competitors desperate to compete, taking money out of the hands of workers, and sending back up the corporate food chain to shareholders. [u]That’s put a burden back on tax payers: research has suggested that Wal-Mart workers are disproportionately reliant on safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid.[/u] I wouldn’t be surprised if the same goes for Target and Best Buy employees.
If people don’t have money, people can’t spend money.
Well, they can, but having large swaths of people defaulting on debt they can’t pay is worse than people not spending money at all.
To put these figures in perspective, the federal poverty line for a family of three is $19,090. You would have to work 40 hours a week, every week of the year at Best Buy to clear that figure.
But most folks working at Best Buy aren’t working for minimum wage to support a family of three.
Most of them are college and high school students, working for supplemental income.
You don’t seem to recognize this as a chicken-and-egg problem. I also like the characterization of these jobs as “supplemental” income. What’s their main income source, mommy and daddy? Do you really think that’s healthy?
I thought we already knew that Capitalism fails too? The bank bail-outs, the world economies crashing etc? I guess the problem is that for that 1% those were not that big a deal, they had the resources to deal with it, and infact many of that group got even richer, and continue to do so in the skewed system of capitalism they have created. It’s all about them, and they are doing just fine for the most part. Screw everyone else.
Yes, clearly it is supplemental income, because you can’t live off it and have to get it supplemented by welfare programs, credit card debt or other sources of income.
Why are We The People are in business of subsidizing corporate profits by paying part of their employee’s wages?
Indeed. Most of the retail/food service jobs around me have been filled by older and older people since around 2007/2008. It’s rare to even see someone who looks high school aged working at most places I go to.
Things have changes as our economy has shifted more to low-paying service jobs instead of decent-paying manufacturing jobs for the average joe out there.
If you’re marketable, things haven’t changed too much, but most folks aren’t going to be marketable in any economy.
This is a bit reason why I believe what I believe- I suspect one day I will be one of those joes, I don’t want to have to live on Wal-Mart wages. It’s also a big reason why I save up what I can now- I want to be able to not lose what I own when that day comes.
The point here is that every job in the market is not supposed to support a family of three.
There is a section of the job market which is happy to work for minimum wage. They do not need more. They are not impoverished as a result (at least, no more so than i was when i worked in college).
Happy to work for minimum wage? Or forced into it for lack of better alternatives? I guess that also rules out offering them a raise, since in Timex-logic they’d refuse it.
As for the morality of it, I could point to something as distant as the [I]Rerum Novarum[/I] encyclical of 1891:
Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.
Yes, the Catholic Church, not exactly boat-rocking commies (on the contrary, it reaffirmed private property, and advocated higher wages to encourage it) was saying this even before the welfare state developed. And since the Church wasn’t exactly known for advocating that women should join the workforce to supplement the husband’s income, that wage had to be sufficient to “comfortably… support himself, his wife, and his children”.
Maybe everyone wants more stuff, but given that we don’t live in a magical futuristic star trek society with unlimited resources, everyone doesn’t get what they want.
So then the choice isn’t simply, “Would you like to have more money?” and instead becomes “Would you like to have a job where you make minimum wage, or no job at all?”
As I suggested, in many cases, minimum wage is perfectly fine. There are lots of workers in our economy who are not in fact supporting a family.
This is nothing but a bunch of victim-blaming, so disconnected from the reality that it hurts to read. I am well off, and don’t cross social circles with people in question, but how far up the ivory tower do you have to be to entirely lose the sight of the bottom?
