The feasibility and need to bring affordable health care to deserving Americans.

::::::::

Papa John's Manifesto

Recently, statements were attributed to Papa John's regarding its opposition to Obamacare and it was disheartening to learn about the callousness in which the company treats its employees.  There are a variety of political ideologies and views in America, but the company's clamor about having to provide more of its employees with affordable health care touched a nerve that cut across vast swaths of our political spectrum.  This is not a case where people who are too lazy to go out and look for a job seek a government handout to support their idleness.  These employees are not the 47% of the population that allegedly pay no taxes and freeload off the rest of us that Mitt Romney does not care about.  These are members of the 53% who by all accounts pay taxes and are employed.  These are the people that Romney supposedly cares about.  Papa John's employees work hard to make the company profitable so that its millionaire CEO John Schnatter can have a mansion accented with every imaginable luxury (a Louisville-area estate so nice, that even Romney was taken aback by its opulence).  A lot of his employees make around minimum wage and Schnatter is concerned that he might have to raise the cost of pizza eleven-fourteen cents so that they can have access to health care in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.  With all the deals, specials and coupons that are a hallmark of the franchise pizza industry, most people do not even know how much a full-price pizza from Papa John's costs.  The average consumer would not notice an increase of fourteen cents or care if it meant making health care more accessible for hardworking families.       

This is not a situation of a company with painfully thin profit margins that is struggling to stay afloat, let alone expand.  Papa John's owns or franchises approximately 4,000 restaurants and plans to add another 1,500 in the next six years.  The juggernaut pizza franchise finds the prospect of increasing its number of total locations by nearly 40% to be much more appealing than providing the very people who will make this growth possible with affordable health care. As the company increases its market share, the money funneled to the CEO, executives and large franchise owners through salaries, bonuses and stock options will proliferate; that is the point of expansion.  The money is there, Papa John's simply does not want to use it to provide affordable health care to the backbone of its enterprise.  The company is currently giving away two million free pizzas in a football season promotion.  For further proof, one need only turn to CEO John Schnatter, who proclaimed, "We're not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry.  But our business model and economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb Obamacare."  The deflection of accountability notwithstanding, this translates into: Our business model is ideally suited for providing affordable health care to our employees, we simply do not want to.  

If required to provide affordable health care to its employees, Papa John's has no intention of absorbing the costs by reducing its profit margins.  It wants no responsibility for the welfare of the work force that makes its continued success a reality.  A lot of these employees are probably living near the poverty line and Papa John's would rather keep them on Medicaid (if they qualify) and pass the burden of providing health services to its hardworking, underpaid employees on to the Government at the taxpayers' expense.  Even more unfortunate, Papa John's most likely leaves employees that do not qualify for Medicaid, even those with young families, to fend for themselves.  Franchise owner Judy Nichols of Texas, suggested that she would rather terminate employees to keep her staff numbers under 50, than provide them with affordable health care.  The solution to this issue is not to demote an employee to part-time or terminate his employment.  The answer is: let him earn it. The last thing people struggling to make ends meet need is to be fired because the government is apparently, albeit slowly, starting to recognize health care to be a fundamental right, similar in nature to K-12 public education.  The callous position of the company appears to be systemic, starting from the CEO and working its way down to the franchise levels.       

Stepping away from Papa John's for the moment, its objectionable position is a microcosm for a broader issue that needs to be addressed. 

Comfortable: The New Standard for the Middle Class

Throughout history, members of the oppressive class have always feared the masses and for good reason.  The power they hold over them is tenuous and often maintained by an illusion of dominance sprinkled with a healthy dose of false promises, idle threats and misinformation. They know they are hopelessly outnumbered and even a strong military state must draw a significant amount of its force from the general population.  This dynamic creates rampant insecurity among the oppressive class; they are aware of their limited ability to withstand an uprising.  One of the most baffling attributes of this phenomenon is the premise that: the masses, collectively, want what the aristocracy has.  This faulty assumption has created untold amounts of grief and suffering.  There is a myriad of theories as to why the oppressing class continues to repeat this mistake, perhaps their lust for power and wealth renders them incapable of viewing the world through the eyes of people not consumed by greed.

 For the most part, the masses do not desire an extravagant lifestyle defined by wealth and excess. Sure, there are exceptions, but the average person simply wants to be comfortable.  He wants to be able to provide his family with adequate food, clothing and respectable shelter.  She wants to shield her kids from the ugliness of destitution that too many children in this wealthy nation have experienced.  Parents want their kids to have a decent education that will allow them to become self-sufficient, contributing members of society.  The standard of living that the common people will accept as comfortable is relatively modest.  For millennia, the oppressive ruling class has failed to realize this simple fact and opted to impose less than desirable living conditions on its subjects.  What constitutes less than desirable living conditions is subjective, but one constant in this power dynamic is: the working class is subjected to a standard of living that is below the respective society's definition of comfortable. 

Although the aristocratic class has historically favored the oppression of the masses, it is an over-generalization to impute this characteristic onto all members of the upper class.  They might be outnumbered by their counterparts, but there are still members of this class who desire to bring fundamental fairness to all levels of our society.  Privileged persons who are not threatened by the numerosity of the masses, chiefly because they have no desire to oppress them.  When referring to the oppressive class it is important to note that not all members of the elite who control the vast majority of wealth and power are members of this class.  For those seeking economic fairness, it is counterproductive to vilify the wealthy outright; within their ranks lay powerful allies, sympathetic to the cause and willing to help. 

There is nothing atypical about an extremely small portion of society accounting for the vast majority of the wealth and power.  This attribute can arguably be considered an immutable characteristic of complex civilizations.  On its face, it appears to be a natural tendency of large societies; almost as natural as the desire to establish a sense of law and order that insulates citizens from the state of nature described by Hobbes.  Even in communistic situations such as the former USSR and China, the greater part of the resources and control remained concentrated among a very small portion of the population, small as in well under one percent.  A true communist regime, as envisioned by Marx, will probably never govern a large political state.  Such a system works best in small, commune-type arrangements and breaks down rapidly when applied outside such parameters.             

Although capitalism is a much more viable economic system, man's inability to tame his greed and lust for power has rendered pure capitalism inoperable.  Capitalism naturally produces uneven results in the sense that wealth and power will not be distributed evenly; it will be concentrated among a very small few.  Rather than enable the working class, the backbone of the economy, to earn a comfortable lifestyle, history has proven that ownership in a pure capitalistic system will create desperation among the wage-earners, forcing them to settle for unsuitable working conditions, inferior compensation and a sub-par quality of life.  This approach makes fiscal operations more profitable for the corporation at the workers' expense.  One does not even need to look into the past for such evidence, many American corporations have active work forces overseas in furtherance of this agenda.       

Capitalism can have a chilling effect on competition and free markets to the detriment of society.  The entire body of antitrust law developed in response to this tendency.  Invariably a company with superior resources and acumen will dominate a market niche or industry to the point that consumers are left with little or no choice.  More likely, a market will have a handful of major actors that can either collude or mirror each other's offerings so closely, that in effect, consumers do not have an alternative mean to a particular service or good.  This exposes consumers to price-gouging, price-fixing, artificial inflation and cripples any leverage that can be asserted through spending habits.  Capitalism works best when a detached entity with sufficient authority can oversee the markets and make adjustments in the interest of fundamental fairness.  

A society's power structure is compromised when the ruling class becomes unduly exploitive.  There is nothing objectionable about exploiting a situation.  Life is full of opportunities that we should take advantage of.  The upper class has every right to exploit the resources of the working class.  The exploitation becomes unjust when wage-earners fail to receive fair compensation for their services and labor.  This equilibrium hinges upon what is determined to be fair compensation.

What constitutes fair compensation is subjective and must be based on the overall wealth and capabilities of a nation.  Fair compensation in a third world and first world nation will be different.  Fair compensation in our society is: the means one needs to live a comfortable life. Not extravagant or luxurious, just comfortable.  Decent living space, quality food, clean water, adequate clothing, affordable healthcare and the ability to reasonably enjoy one's interests.  This level of comfort is not achievable en masse in every country, but it is in the United States.  Fair compensation is a two-way street; people must work and provide competent labor and services in exchange for a comfortable lifestyle.  An issue arises when this option is not made available to those who are willing to work for it.    

Too often, everyday people are precluded from reaching this threshold so that certain members of the controlling class can accumulate excessive wealth.  Excessive wealth is the amount of discretionary resources retained by ownership that prevents a wage-earner from achieving a comfortable standard of living.  It should not be confused with acquiring more money than one could ever need; they are two entirely different concepts.  For example, if an employee needs to earn $40,000 annually in order for his family to live comfortably, and his employer pays him $35,000, the amount of excessive wealth in this equation is $5,000.  A billionaire entrepreneur might have earned her money without accumulating any excessive wealth, whereas the majority of a borderline-millionaire entrepreneur's fortune might consist of excessive wealth.  The determining factor is whether they supplied their respective work forces with fair compensation. Both work forces were exploited, but was the exploitation fair?  That is the question.      

The balance of providing employees with fair compensation while maintaining acceptable profit margins is very achievable.  While many companies only achieve this symmetry with certain segments of their work force(unfortunately, workers with lower skill sets disproportionately absorb the short end of this paradigm), other companies are able to across the board.  When thinking of the latter, companies like Google, Microsoft, GE and Proctor & Gamble come to mind.  Costco Wholesale is a commendable example of a company that seems to make a concerted effort to provide fair compensation to its entire work force in an industry where this is rare; Starbucks is too.  In other words, they apparently care about their employees.            

It is the pursuit and accumulation of excessive wealth that produces unnecessary friction between the classes and division within the middle class.  The most frustrating aspect of this dynamic is that it does not have to be this way.  Although it is a fixation in complex societies, that does not make it necessary and indispensable.  A balance between the wealthy being able to enjoy their lavish lifestyles and the multitudes, who enable this lifestyle through their work and spending, being able to work for and enjoy a comfortable standard of living is very attainable.  The one-percent can keep their wealth; the average person does not desire it. Sure they would accept it if gifted to them, but they are not actively pursuing it.  The average person simply wants a comfortable lifestyle.    

The greatest single barrier to economic fairness are members of the ninety-nine percent who are unaware of where their best interests lie and actively, albeit unknowingly, undermine the effort to bring fair compensation to all working individuals.  Sadly, these are the very people who would benefit the most from it.  This class of person is by far the most formidable impediment as they undermine the proletariat's greatest asset: numerosity.  Without such resistance, in our democracy, the oppressive class would be stripped of its ability to create economic distress en masse for the sake of achieving wider than necessary profit margins. Although external factors will exert their influence, the battle for economic fairness will be waged and determined within the population's core. 

The push to bring fair compensation to all working members of our society has been an uphill battle.  Strides have been made and the working class is unequivocally in a better position than it was one-hundred years ago; but there is still work to do. The fact that progress has been made, notwithstanding certain moments of regression, should serve as hope that change can be effectuated.  As a country, we are closer to achieving this equitable goal than many realize, but a fierce resistance has been mounted on one of the last frontiers: the frontier of affordable health care.   As the formula to provide a comfortable standard of living to the working individual continues to evolve, affordable health care remains one of the largest missing pieces.  In a lot of middle class familial situations, it is the only piece missing.  The same applies to the level of compensation for many working class individuals where the inclusion of affordable health care would render their compensation fair.  To many, obtaining a comfortable standard of living is the American dream. As a country we should we should strive to keep this dream alive for those who are willing to work for it.   

The masses are the engine that drives this country.  Collectively, it was working class tax dollars that paid for the bailouts that pulled this country out of its worst economic depression since The New Deal era.  Our precious auto and financial industries, which are so vital to this county's survival, were preserved on the backs of the wage-earners.  Now the wage-earners want their consideration, and this bill is long overdue.  Many individuals of the wealthy elite were held up by the middle class during the recession; going forward, it is only fair to ensure they receive fair compensation for their work. 

This is not class warfare; to the contrary, the classes need each other.  Specifically, they must nurture a symbiotic relationship to keep both healthy and viable.  For too long the working class has carried a disproportionate amount of the weight.  This is not a call for one class to supplant and subjugate the other or for the upper class to bear a disproportionate burden.  This is a call for fairness.  Give the common people fair trade for their labor and services; let them earn a comfortable lifestyle.  Too many individuals are working full-time for less than fair compensation.  They are working full-time and are unable to attain decent shelter, food, clothing and affordable health care in exchange.  This is not a high standard and yet millions of working individuals are held below it in the pursuit of excessive wealth. 

Some people who read this document will quickly dismiss it on grounds that it is "communistic." Such rhetoric will most likely come from persons who neglected to actually read the piece, let alone the paragraph that expressly rejects communism, holding its utility to be strictly suited for small, commune-type collectives.  Nor will they read the part that endorses capitalism with equitable constraints.  To be fair, a lot of its supporters will probably also fail to actually read it; that just seems to be the norm in this country.  The import of proffering informed opinions seems to be diminishing by the day.  Certain media sources actually thrive on this aspect of intellectual regression.  For the record, this manifesto is about human decency and fundamental fairness.  It is about taking care of the middle class, the backbone of our country, but not at the undue expense of the wealthy.  It is about finding a healthy balance between the classes and fostering a mutually beneficial relationship therein.

Historically, the oppressive class has put great stock in the formula: the less informed the masses are, the easier it is to control them.  A poorly informed populous class is much less likely to understand what its best interests are, what controlling members of government have those interests in mind and what overarching political policies are most favorable to the common people as a whole.  A lot of detractors will try to shift the focus onto people who are chronically unemployed.  That topic is worthy of discussion, but it is wholly irrelevant to addressing the issue at hand. It is important not to succumb to misdirection tactics designed to divide and misplace accountability. This manifesto is advocating the need to provide working individuals with fair compensation for their labor and services.  It is demanding that companies who generate huge sums of money exercise due care and take responsibility for the welfare of their work forces rather than saddle the taxpayers with this duty.  There are too many people who are not only willing, but actually do grind out a full week of work for compensation and benefits, or lack thereof, that keep them well below a comfortable standard of living.  This needs to change.    

The government can only do so much.  Our society has made great strides since the era where steel, coal and oil barons operated with impunity, devoid of empathy for the commoner. However, greed has prevented fair compensation from reaching all levels of the working class. Neither political party has been able to achieve such equity, but we the people can; the masses can.  The most valuable asset of the populous class is its numerosity.  We are the engine that drives the major sectors, whether it be industrial, energy, service, military or agricultural.  This is not a call for violence or even a revolution.  It is more of a call for evolution.  It is a call to make a stand.                           

 Make A Stand

Returning to the topic that spurred this manifesto, to the employees of Papa John's, there is a way that you can protect yourselves from the callous greed the company has demonstrated.  You can strike.  The ownership of Papa John's needs you a whole lot more than you need them.  They know this and are hopeful you will not figure it out.  Collectively, you are the moving parts of the well-oiled machine that is currently operating over 4,000 franchises in several different continents.  On your backs, you have made the CEO and others on the corporate side of the business very wealthy. You have provided the human capital to produce above-average profit margins for many owners on the franchise-level and rather than show a debt of gratitude, many franchise owners are developing schemes to preclude you from a comfortable standard of living.  Strategies like keeping a worker's status below full-time and releasing people outright, not because of job performance, but to keep the work force under fifty employees in an effort to make affordable health care inaccessible are being devised.  All of you work, none of you are asking for a handout and yet, they are not willing to let you earn fair compensation.  Even when given the option of raising the cost of pizza in order to provide you with affordable health care, some owners would rather slash hours and terminate employees than charge customers eleven-fourteen cents more per pizza. 

The collective apathy of Papa John's leads to an unmistakable conclusion: the company has placed the pursuit of excessive wealth over the welfare of its employees.  It is opposed to providing the heart of its work force with fair compensation.  The company has stated that, "If Obamacare is in fact not repealed.  We will find tactics to shallow out any Obamacare costs...in order to protect our shareholder's best interests."  Written clearly between the lines is: we will cut hours and terminate jobs from the people who need them the most, in the pursuit of excessive wealth.  John Schnatter's priorities clearly rest with the shareholders, not the people whose work maintains the value of their shares.  In effect, you have been devalued and unduly exploited.  So how do you respond?         

You must first recognize how important you are to the company: you are its backbone.  You are not expendable.  You have value; you have worth.  If ownership is unwilling to recognize this fact then you must make them.  Protests and rallies can be effective, but they pale in comparison to bringing operations to an abrupt and sudden halt.  By simply not showing up one day, en masse, Papa John's will realize just how integral you are to the company.  They can replace some of you, but they cannot replace all of you; especially not overnight.  I therefore call for an October 26, 2012 strike.  Friday is a very popular day for pizza orders and Papa John's will not be able to deliver without its work force.  

All employees who are currently not receiving fair compensation or who detest the underlying unfairness of the situation should refrain from working on the target date.  Staying consistent with the principles of this manifesto, this stand does not have to create widespread division and discord between ownership, management and the rank and file.  Amongst the franchise owners and management will be a mix of viewpoints, some will be in favor of economic fairness; others will take a more callous approach.  It is important not to ostracize people who support the strike, simply because they are in a more fortunate position than you.  To the Papa John's owners and management who care for your employees and do not subscribe to the company's pursuit of excessive wealth: stand with your colleagues, your friends, your kin.  Exercise independent thought, sometimes the company line is wrong.  Do not let your loyalty to the company interfere with your principles and deep-seeded belief of what is fair.  Distinguishing between right and wrong is rarely complicated; choosing to do right over wrong, and absorbing the fallout, is often the hard part.  Here is your chance.

This might not be easy; not everyone will agree with you, but it is time to take a stand.  Everyday, the employees that man the 4,000 plus Papa John's restaurants fuel the company's continued growth and success.  Their labor lines the pockets of its CEO, executives, shareholders and franchise owners.  Far too many employees are not receiving fair compensation for their labor.  The company is very capable of providing affordable health care to its work force while expanding; the two objectives are not mutually exclusive.  Whether the price of pizza is going up eleven-fourteen cents or Papa John's will accept reduced profit margins, the bill for fair compensation is due.  October 26, 2012 is the date.  

RWH

Authors Bio:
Hello,
I am submitting a manifesto that I wrote in response to Papa John's comments regarding Obamacare and the overarching issue of affordable health care and entitlement to a livable wage in our country. I hope you publish it.
-RWH