Can workers today make more than their parents? At this time it is 50/50, but people born in 1940, the chance of children making more than their parents was at 92 percent—why? One reason for this is economic growth has slowed from 4 to 5 percent in the past decades to just 2 to 3 percent today; and almost all of the benefits of the 2 to 3 percent growth goes to the top with people in the lower income bracket are stuck with stagnant wages.
The Americans at the bottom 50 percent are making an average of just $16,000 a year while the top 1 percent makes $1.3 million, and send their children to elite schools so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Part of the attack on the 1.7 million poor workers are employed by temporary agencies. Of these 1.7 million workers, 900,000 are on zero hour contracts. This problem is worldwide. Workers in the UK are facing the same problem, some 20 percent of the workers do not know if they will get a full week’s work.
The people who are and have been speaking out here in the U.S. is Bernie Sanders, and in the UK, it is Jeremy Corbyn. Ninety-four percent of the 10 million net new jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were contract-based and not traditional 9-to-5 jobs. This job and wage inequality has spread drug use in 2015, 12,000 people died of overdoses in 10 states here in the U.S., drugs, alcoholism and suicide, which is looked at as diseases of despair.
One way to counter this lack of jobs with a living wage could very well be a UBI (universal basic income) pay. Now, we are even ruining the lives of children not even born yet fueled by opioid use among women. This now affects about one out of 130 babies in rural areas nationwide. This condition is known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, drug withdrawal after birth. It has gone from 1.2 per 1,000 to 7.5 per 1,000 births.
Then there is an increase in foster care, the number of foster care cases has risen by 24 percent in West Virginia; in Vermont this number rose to 40 percent. The HaveNots have little left and the UsedtoHaves have lost all hope and no one seems to know what to do.
So, again, how about the government issuing UBI pay and building up our unions for better jobs. Still, we must keep up the fight for a living minimum wage of $15 to $24 an hour or a UBI income of $2,000 a month. It is up to us, we either sink or swim.
It’s time to pick a side. You want to have and keep unions with good wages and pensions, then it’s time to pick a side. You want to keep Social Security for yourself and family, it is time to pick a side. You want to get or keep Medicare and Obama’s Affordable Care Act, then it’s time to pick a side. It is us against the billionaires. The very rich got that way off the backs of workers, and now want to strip everything away from those workers. It’s time to pick a side. The very rich can buy countries, then make the people get on their hands and knees and grovel and beg for scrapes that usually go into the dumpster. It’s time to pick a side. Is this what we want for our family and our future? It’s time to pick a side. Get ready to fight for you and your families’ lives. There is no middle ground with these greedy people for they want it all—all the money—all the power—all the land so where does this leave us when they have all the commons, like water, land and airways? It’s time to pick...
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