The fight is on for a rise in the minimum wage, so that it is a living wage, and corporations that have low wage work forces must show evidence that they treat their workers with dignity and respect!
Applebee’s, Papa John’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Longhorn Steak House and other restaurants have all seen profits fall, and fewer patrons, after they threatened to cut workers down to part time, fewer than 30 hours, so they would not have to provide employer health care for their workers under ObamaCare!
At the same time, Walmart has continued to pay low wages, mistreat its women workers as compared to men, and force their workers onto Medicaid and Food Stamps, because they will not provide benefits to their workers, despite the fact that they are the largest retail corporation in the world, and their four owners of the Walmart dynasty have as much in assets as the bottom 40 percent of the nation’s population combined!
This is the new GILDED AGE all over again, with low wage workers, half of whom are over 25, and majorities being women and minorities, with many having families to support, not just young people who are single and hang out on the streets without responsibilities!
The minimum wage, set up in 1938 under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, at 25 cents per hour, would be today over $22.00 an hour if kept up to the cost of living! Instead it is $7.25 per hour, and the proposal being promoted is to raise it to about $10.00 an hour, which is far from adequate, but essential as a beginning of promoting the ability of workers to support themselves and other family members, and have a sense of dignity and respect from their employers!
And if prices need to go up, so be it, as no one should be exploiting others for the sake of another dollar or less for items, and if enough consumer protests occur, the management, already overpaid and over pricing, will be forced to accept somewhat less than the obscene profits they now earn, making them an elite Gilded Age aristocracy in a country that is supposed to be promoting equality and justice!
Good morning Ronald. I find it interesting that businesses seem to be, by what you say, guilty from the start and thus the burden of proof is shifted to them to prove their innocence from…I really do not know what illegal behavior. I say this because of your phrase “corporations that have low wage work forces must show evidence that they treat their workers with dignity and respect.” Shouldn’t it be the other way around? That is, that government or employees must show evidence that employees are not treated with dignity and respect. Also when you compare the minimum wage in 1938 with today, shouldn’t you add to that 1938 minimum wage all the taxes that every working American pays today that didn’t exist in 1938? If you deduct those taxes you would be surprised at how much the disposable income of an ordinary wage earner rises. You would be surprised at how much the purchasing power of the dollar increases. So I sincerely believe we should compare apples to apples. Back then, employee and employers got much less taken away from them by the local, state and federal government that today. Just to give you an example in 1938 only 18 states had a sales tax. Social Security taxes were first collected in January 1937, and it was a fraction of what it is today. There was no AMT until 1978 . Today Americans on average have to work through April more or less just to earn the amount of money they would need to pay in taxes over the course of the year. That was unheard of in 1938. In 1932 Federal excise taxes on gasoline were implemented under President Herbert Hoover as part of the Revenue Act of 1932. Gas was taxed at a rate of 1 cent per gallon (in today’s dollars). Today the tax had risen to 18.4 cents per gallon. State gasoline taxes tack on an additional cost, ranging from a low of 8 cents per gallon in Alaska to a high of 42.5 cents per gallon in New York. So what I am trying to say is that the purchasing power of the dollar today, even with inflation, would be much more if it were not for all the excessive taxes that we all pay, taxes that the 1938 employee and employer did not have to bear. Have the big federal , local and state governments that we have cost money, and everyone eventually has to pay for it, including the hardest hit by the existence of such taxes to maintain such governments, the minimum wage earners, for in the end nothing is free. I think its about time we all do a cost benefit analysis of this situation.
Very much agree Professor. This is definitely the new Gilded Age.