Why Do CEO Deserve Your Raise

While working, you’re selling your life one hour at a time. What is an hour of your life worth? Remember you can never get that hour back, it is gone forever. When you set a price for your hour of life, how do you do it? Are you represented by a union? Or do you just let someone else set the price for your labor? However it is done, it is not working for you or any of the other workers. Nearly one out of every five workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living pay check to pay check. Most are working more hours than they worked decades ago with less vacation or sick leave days. The standard explanation for why all of this has come about is that workers are no longer worth as much as they were before the digital technology boom and globalization. So, they must now settle for lower wages and less security. But top executives of large corporations wage have gone up twenty times that of the workers to three-hundred times today. So who sets the one hour rate? Last year, Wall Street executives’ bonus pool alone was larger than the annual year-round earnings of all 3.3 million American workers working full-time jobs at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. So, essentially, the CEOs of corporations got our raises. Why is this happening? Is it because of the increasing ability of the moneyed interests to alter the system for their own benefit and the demolishing of the Trade Unions—turning workers workers into contract workers and gig job workers. We, workers, have let the Wall Street corporations set our worth as workers. We, workers, let this happen by not fighting harder for our unions, by believing the rhetoric fed to them by the corporate media, and voting GOP and Blue Dog Democrats, who put Wall Street over the working class. If we had kept our political and economic clout, we would have healthcare for all, free college and a minimum wage that kept up with inflation, like other civilized countries, including Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Germany, Italy—the list goes on, and we’re supposed to be the greatest country in the world. We've been sold the idea of the American Dream of becoming rich, if we just work hard with the American Work Ethic, but how many of us are actually realizing this dream? Few because the system is rigged against us: we don't have loopholes, we don't have tax breaks, and we don't have corporate welfare (making taxpayers makeup the difference for the low wages paid to most workers, who end up needing public assistance, like Walmart does). How do we go about getting what is right for us workers? Vote the right way, for candidates who put the people ahead of Wall Street, and not candidates like our local California Assemblyman Brian Dahle, who said workers don’t deserve a minimum wage. Who’s side do you think he’s on? Workers need to fight for a fair and equitable minimum wage. We need to fight for and support our unions, and don’t sell your life away one hour at a time for $7.25. The minimum wage should be between $18 to $24 an hour, and if this were to happen, you could see the workers making more than their parents and moving out of their parents basements. What is your life worth? Will you just give it away to make someone else rich while getting next to nothing? Happy Labor Day!