The widening of the wage inequality worldwide is going to destroy democracy as we know it today and destroy the economy for the economy and democracy go hand-in-hand. If we take out the guts of both, which is the wage slaves, we can lose it all. The wage slaves are the ‘have littles’ and the ‘haves,’ which leaves the one who are at the top, the 1 percent, and the ones at the bottom, the ‘have nothing.’
The 1 percent just sits on their money and the ‘have nothings’ have no money to add to the economy. If we could get more money into the hands of the ‘have littles’ through higher wages, tax breaks, and free healthcare. They, then, would employ the ‘have nothings,’ then the new money and taxes they pay and the funds that are saved from welfare would trickle up to the government and the 1 percent, who could make even more money. The inequality of wages would start to lose, which might just save the consumer economy and democracy.
The alternative is what? A plutocracy or a revolution? It may only be money, but the working poor need $15 to $16 an hour to subsist. You have to ask yourself why it is that the Stock Exchange is set to hit 1600, there are more billionaires made in the retail industry and yet Walmart is asking its employees to donate food so their co-workers can have a Thanksgiving dinner.
If you, the worker or unemployed, aren’t willing to risk it all, they, the 1 percent, will eventually take it all. We are headed straight back into the Dickens’ era of "A Christmas Story," when we should have already learned that a concentration of wealth hurts everyone.
To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant.
Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?”
This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their job…