For me, the big local story of the day (Joan who?) was the arrest of nineteen fast-food workers at a Times Square strike for a living wage. The average wage for fast-food cooks in the U.S. is $9.07. These people do hard labor, often under dangerous conditions (seriously, commercial kitchens are chock-full of pitfalls- boiling hot oil, slippery grease-slicked floors, harsh cleaning chemicals, hot surfaces and open flames. In the U.S., low wages and high risk (actual risk, not the "risk" that the MotU types claim is their bailiwick) go together like chopped meat and E. coli.
McDonald's stock is doing well and the corporation pays out a generous dividend. The profits are being made on the backs of the employees, who don't make enough money to dine at the crappy restaurants in which they work.
It's a national disgrace that the striking workers were arrested... they are not the criminals in the organization. These people aren't asking for a lot, they don't need DeLoreans, velour jumpsuits, and disco balls:
They just need a wage they can live on.
My Congressperson, Gwen Moore, was arrested here for marching with the local contingent.
ReplyDeleteThe question, of course, is not why she was marching and arrested with them, but why she was the only politician to do so....
The American family makes $200 more a year than it did in 1989
ReplyDeleteLUXURY!
~
I hope these efforts do some good, but I doubt they will. Corporations are inherently greedy - and over the years their rapaciousness has only grown as concern for their employees & their families has evaporated.
ReplyDeleteBut here's the thing - if you KNOW that corporations are not going to do the right thing, society has to make rules. That's why we have labor laws and pollution regulations and such as. The criminal is not the corporations, any more than it is the scorpion that stings the frog halfway across the river. The criminal is our corrupt, dysfunctional legislators who refuse to do what is necessary for their (supposed) constituency...