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.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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