Steps needed to revive the Have Nots and Have Littles to a middle class status include income inequality, which the movement for $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage will help with opportunity inequality. With more money and time, workers would have time to take night classes to improve their chances for a better job and will have more time when they don’t have to work two or three part-time jobs.
Then the workers need childcare, vacations and some type of pension, which will follow them from job to job like a hybrid Social Security without changing the present Social Security system. The fly in the ointment is there is just not enough jobs worldwide and here in the U.S. and there will be even less after the passage of Trans Pacific Partnership.
The capitalist system depends on the proletarians who need to be adequately compensated for their labor to have money to buy the products the capitalist system sales, which ironically are made by the labor of the proletarians.
One way is a hybrid capitalist system, such as workers being paid a non-labor wage, which provides substance to keep people out of poverty and not need many different types of government assistance—just cash once a month. Think of all the subsidies corporations get and give nothing back for this public money. They pay no taxes and have loopholes to get out of paying fines.
This then would free people to work temporary low-wage, part-time jobs. With their free time, the proletarians could provide free labor to the social infrastructure, such as firefighting or volunteering at a school, medical service, tutoring, couching sports, boys and girls club, scouts, the list goes on. These types of volunteer jobs have the potential to lead to a full-time job.
In the end, people who are better educated can move out of poverty, with better paying jobs, more purchases can be made thereby necessitating the production of more goods because there will more people purchasing more goods. More taxes paid by workers who make more money with the cash subsidies.
We have to make changes. Better labor laws, which give people the right to form unions or associations to represent them. These are all civil liberties that the proletarians have a right to. Also, another source of money to support these non-labor payments should come from rent for the use of our Commons just like the State of Alaska does for its people.
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…