DC to Walmart: Screw you

Nice to see some good news from a local government for a change. Walmart threatened to cancel their ambitious building projects in DC if the local council didn't kill legislation they disapproved of but the DC Council passed a living wage law anyway.

D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city.

Should the bill be signed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and pass a congressional review period, retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger would be required to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage.

Good for DC for recognizing wages need to be pinned to the actual cost of living. Every city should pass a law that requires these mega-retailers to pay their employees enough so they don't need government assistance to survive. And certainly well past time for someone to stand up to Walmart's intimidation tactics. Let them take their greedy business model of wringing out their profits by shifting the social costs of underpaying their workers onto the taxpayers and shove it.

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Predatory capitalists

There's no real news this weekend so here's your long read. ProPublica posts an eye-opening piece, "The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed."

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Corporations have been using temps to cut costs for decades, but under the latest iteration of this business model, the plan appears to be to virtually cut full time hires to the barest minimum in order to exploit a desperate job market and effectively shift the social costs of their predatory capitalism onto the taxpayer.

Read it in full to see our future. They're stealthily turning us into a banana republic. Hard to see how this ends well for anyone except the owners and their CEOs.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round-up.]

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For whom the economy recovers

This isn't new, but it shows income inequality keeps getting progressively worse every day.

In short, our current obsessed-with-profits philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords (shareholders) and 300+ million serfs (employees).

It is also resulting in employees sharing less of the corporate wealth that they spend their lives creating than they ever have before.

That's not what has made America a great country. It's also not what most people think America or other lands of opportunity are supposed to be about.

This is an old chart I've had saved for a few months. Read the link for the wonkery and more charts that show how quickly the gap has grown. Yet they call the workers, "the takers." Clearly they have it backwards.

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The unseen victims of austerity addicts

According to the very important punditry, the sequestration spending cuts are just a big joke because -- ha ha -- the world didn't end and nothing happened to the well off Villagers, so what's the big deal? Of course they don't mention the cuts haven't really taken full effect yet. They're only just now beginning to filter out around our country. Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel collected 100 instances where the spending cuts have started. Already social safety programs like Meals on Wheels are being cut, thousands of jobs are being lost, and those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs are seeing pay cuts of 20% and more. None of these people are laughing.

John Stanton tells one combat veteran's story. The man served honorably in our government's wars. He came home and worked hard to climb the economic ladder. This is his reward.

Then sequestration slashed Maryak's paycheck by nearly 27%. That cut nearly $900 from the $3,400 he makes a pay period. He responded, first, by picking up a job four nights a week delivering pizza for Papa John's; he then traded in the BMW for a white Chevy Impala, to save money and because he discovered that nobody tips the delivery man in the BMW. And since that miserable combination hasn't quite closed the gap — gas is expensive, and the Impala gets terrible mileage — Maryak, who was awarded a bronze star in Sadr City in 2008, found himself dwelling deeply on one question: "How do I unfuck myself from this situation?"

His best answer is to go back to active combat duty, but that's not an easy option:

But Maryak, who's applied for eight deployments so far, has run into another problem: With the United States out of Iraq, withdrawing from Afghanistan, and wary of putting boots on the ground in Africa and the Middle East, "deployments are ridiculously hard to find nowadays."

Admit it pleases the anti-war part of me that this is true, but it doesn't help Maryak solve his cash flow problems. He takes responsibility for his choices. He's worked hard all his life. His story is being repeated thousands of times all across America. They deserve better than to be used as a pawns in the partisan political games on Capitol Hill.

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