Joshua Holland, in an April 20, 2011 article for AlterNet, "If Wal-Mart Paid its 1.4 Million U.S. Workers a Living Wage, it Would Result in Almost No Pain for the Average Customer," (http://www.alternet.org/story/150685/), reports on a " new study, conducted by Ken Jacobs and Dave Graham-Squire at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and Stephanie Luce at CUNY's Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies," that if Wal-Mart paid its 1.4 million workers a living wage of at least $12.00 per hour, it the average Wal-Mart shopper would pay an additional $12.00 per year."
( http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/bigbox_livingwage_policies11.pdf ).
Mr. Holland then reminds us that employers like Wal-Mart are also drains on the local programs for the needy in their community. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce in 2004 estimated that the 200 "associates" at a Wal-Mart " costs taxpayers over $420,000 per year " in government assistance.
Wal-Mart is emblematic of the corporate vampires that are feeding on the life essence of the American economy, but it is not the sole offender. The Wal-Marts, the Bank of Americas, the Koch Industries, and the Exxon-Mobils, have insured that for the first time in our history, America's next generation does not have a brighter future than the one before. Their individual offenses may differ, but their indifference to the plight of the average American does not. One hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to deal with a nearly identical problem. We the People must make our government respond to this crisis in a similar fashion.
"You say you got a real solution,
Well you know
We'd all want to see the plan;
You ask me for a contribution,
Well you know
We're all doing what we can.
But if you want money for people with minds that hate,
All I can tell you is brother you'll have to wait.
Don't you know it's gonna be alright..."
"Revolution", Hey Jude;
The Beatles (1968)
So let's discuss the what and the how of changing our current plight.
We must first support organized labor, especially the few unions and union members that we have left in this country. When Congressman Fred A. Hartley, Jr. drafted the Taft-Hartley Act, he did so with the express purpose of destroying unions in this country. (See my article "The Daft-Heartless Act;" OpEdNews, September 10, 2010; for more on this.) Yes, there are problems with unions and the union membership in this country, but many of those problems can be traced back directly to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, and the "holding action," that big labor has felt that it has had to fight ever since.
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