All countries are only as good as their people. They are the engines of any country. The engines should be as powerful as possible in order to do this we need the best educational system, which should be free up to the bachelor’s degree, or an apprenticeship of four to five years for a trade, and a free healthcare system. The workers must have the wages to be able to save for a good pension when they retire, which would mean they would be productive on a volunteer basis. The workers must be paid a good living wage, starting at $15 to $18 an hour.
Paying people well for their work would release funds for government assets, which could be used for the cost of free education and healthcare. Also, the workers would be tax payers, instead of being like the Walmart stores in Minnesota with its 20,997 employees, which creates a public burden of $92.7 million a year in government assistance for these employees. Most workers are 35 years old and 88 percent are 20 years or older.
This is just what one low-wage paying corporation in one state costs the tax payers. I think this money could be better spent to make our country’s working engine better instead of giving the money to supplement large corporations that do nothing but improve their profits over interests of its workers and widens the income inequality.
The large, low-paying corporations like Burger King, McDonald’s, Walmart, Target, and Taco Bell. Then we have the temporary worker agencies, which force workers onto government assistance. This is like pouring sugar into a gas tank, which ruins the engine. We need to start pouring more gas and stop the sugar. The gas would be the $15 to $18 an hour, free education, healthcare and pensions.
Watch how the new Bad Boss Tax, that is about taxing low-wage paying corporations, like Walmart, which is the country’s largest beneficiary of food stamp dollars for its employees, which, ironically, many of these dollars are coming from Walmart workers. We need to hold corporations accountable when they ask to form corporations. The states are the agencies that give corporations the permissions to incorporate. At the time a business wants to incorporate in a state, we could at that time force corporation to pay a living wage with benefits, just like when the state or city allows corporations to get away with paying chump change for wages to its workers in the promise that the corporations will provide jobs.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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