Thread: Wealth Inequality in the US

When mega-corporations don't pay their workers a living wage, taxpayers foot the bill. 52% of fast-food workers and their families are enrolled in one or more forms of public assistance.

Why is it that the same people who complain about government "handouts" in the form of SNAP, TANF, and SSDI are so silent about this corporate "welfare?"

^
A job at a fast-food restaurant is not a career-path, man.

You wanna spend $15.00 USD for a Big Mack do ya?

Move to Norway...

Funny you should mention Norway, where the minimum wage is about $22/hour-

^
You forgot one kinda important, pesky point.

How much tax do those folks have to pay, eh?

...a lot, man.

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

A job at a fast-food restaurant is not a career-path, man.

Tell that to people who started as servers in a fast food restaurant, and ended up senior executives. People like Charlie Bell- an aussie who started off as a server, ended up as CEO of Mcdonalds worldwide (then promptly got cancer and died, prolly from eating too much of his own product).


Minimum wages in the US are a disgrace, you seem to have totally abandoned the advanced consumer society model for something more 3rd or developing world.
Tax policy in the US is a disgrace too- can you name another advanced nation where the rich pay less in tax than the middle class?
As a result, your government is sliding towards insolvency, your middle class- the engine of the economy- is having it's purchasing power decimated, and of course your wealth divide is at all time highs.

Read and weep,-

Eat Your Heart Out Americans: 10 Remarkable Facts You Didn’t Know About Australia

1. Minimum full-time wage is almost $17 per hour.

2. Youth are paid to study and look for jobs.

3. Healthcare is a universal right.

4. Aussies receive up to 30 paid days of vacation per year.

5. The government pays people to have babies…plus additional allowances.

6. Prostitution is legal.

7. Bikie-gangs are outlawed.

8. Gun laws have been “hailed” by Obama.

9. Ranked #1 "Happiest Developed Country" in the world.

10. Aussies don’t do diets well…with majority exceptionally fat.
Eat Your Heart Out Americans: 10 Remarkable Facts You Didn


I guess the main thing we have left in common with you these days is no. 10.

The thing is, for most of my life wages were better in the US than Australia or Europe. But we have been going forward, while you have been going backward.
You guys seem to think you get a cheap burger- nonsense, you pay one hell of a high price for it.

Originally Posted by sabang

.
Read and weep,-

Eat Your Heart Out Americans: 10 Remarkable Facts You Didn’t Know About Australia

1. Minimum full-time wage is almost $17 per hour.

2. Youth are paid to study and look for jobs.

3. Healthcare is a universal right.

4. Aussies receive up to 30 paid days of vacation per year.

5. The government pays people to have babies…plus additional allowances.

6. Prostitution is legal.

7. Bikie-gangs are outlawed.

8. Gun laws have been “hailed” by Obama.

9. Ranked #1 "Happiest Developed Country" in the world.

10. Aussies don’t do diets well…with majority exceptionally fat.
Eat Your Heart Out Americans: 10 Remarkable Facts You Didn

I suppose those 10 rights are why it is so hard (and expensive) to immigrate to Australia. If Australia and Mexico shared a border then all the USA immigration problems would be solved!

RickThai

So how to explain this paradox?

As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. House Republicans are pushing for further cuts. If the sequester isn’t stopped everything else poor and working-class Americans depend on will be further squeezed.

We’re not talking about a small sliver of America here. Half of all children get food stamps at some point during their childhood. Half of all adults get them sometime between ages 18 and 65. Many employers – including the nation’s largest, Walmart – now pay so little that food stamps are necessary in order to keep food on the family table, and other forms of assistance are required to keep a roof overhead.

The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week’s Washington Post-ABC poll, 75 percent rated the state of the economy as “negative” or “poor.”

So why is Washington whacking safety nets and services that a large portion of Americans need, when we still very much need them?

It’s easy to blame Republicans and the rightwing billionaires that bankroll them, and their unceasing demonization of “big government” as well as deficits. But Democrats in Washington bear some of the responsibility. In last year’s fiscal cliff debate neither party pushed to extend the payroll tax holiday or find other ways to help the working middle class and poor.

Here’s a clue: A new survey of families in the top 10 percent of net worth (done by the American Affluence Research Center) shows they’re feeling better than they’ve felt since 2007, before the Great Recession.

It’s not just that the top 10 percent have jobs and their wages are rising. The top 10 percent also owns 80 percent of the stock market. And the stock market is up a whopping 24 percent this year.

The stock market is up even though most Americans are down for two big reasons.

First, businesses are busily handing their cash back to their shareholders – buying back their stock and thereby boosting share prices – rather than using the cash to expand and hire. It makes no sense to expand and hire when most Americans don’t have the money to buy.

The S&P 500 “Buyback Index,” which measures the 100 stocks with the highest buyback ratios, has surged 40 percent this year, compared with a 24% rally for the S&P 500.

IBM has just approved another $15 billion for share buybacks on top of about $5.6 billion it set aside previously, thereby boosting its share prices even though business is sluggish. In April, Apple announced a $50 billion increase in buybacks plus a 15% rise in dividends, but even this wasn’t enough for multi-billionaire Carl Icahn, who’s now demanding that Apple use more of its $170 billion cash stash to buy back its stock and make Ichan even richer.

Big corporations can also borrow at rock-bottom rates these days in order to buy back even more of their stock — courtesy of the Fed’s $85 billion a month bond-buying program. (Ichan also wants Apple to borrow $150 billion at 3 percent interest, in order to buy back more stock and further enrich himself.)

The second big reason why shares are up while most Americans are down is corporations continue to find new ways to boost profits and share prices by cutting their labor costs – substituting software for people, cutting wages and benefits, and piling more responsibilities on each of the employees that remain.

Neither of these two strategies – buying back stock and paring payrolls – can be sustained over the long run (so you have every right to worry about another Wall Street bubble). They don’t improve a company’s products or customer service.

But in an era of sluggish sales – when the vast American middle class lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going – these two strategies at least keep shareholders happy. And that means they keep the top 10 percent happy.

Congress, meanwhile, doesn’t know much about the bottom 90 percent. The top 10 percent provide almost all campaign contributions and funding of “independent” ads.

Moreover, just about all members of Congress are drawn from the same top 10 percent – as are almost all their friends and associates, and even the media who report on them.

Get it? The bottom 90 percent of Americans — most of whom are still suffering from the Great Recession, most of whom have been on a downward escalator for decades — have disappeared from official Washington.

https://www.commondreams.org/view/20...baJuw.facebook

Well, obviously, what's needed is a shot of Income Redistribution & Obamacare is but one vehicle with which to perform that function!

Hard to believe, while the Waltons hang on to every penny of their plus $100 billion fortune, their poorly paid employees are being asked to donate to provide for struggling co-workers.

The greed of the Walton family is mind-boggling to me.




The Walmart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton is collecting food for employees who can't afford Thanksgiving dinner. The company said this is proof that employees look out for one another. The group of employees who have held national strikes against the world's largest retailer says the food drive is proof Walmart doesn't pay associates enough to survive.

Is Walmart's request of associates to help provide Thanksgiving dinner for co-workers proof of low wages? | cleveland.com

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

give them a bit more pay

How much is a bit?

Where's the link to the above article?

Originally Posted by misskit

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

give them a bit more pay

How much is a bit?

Where's the link to the above article?

Sorry - here we go!

Ask Wal Mart how much is a 'bit'.

Walmart giving 1 million employees who work on Thanksgiving extra pay, a turkey dinner and 25% off a future purchase | cleveland.com

^The last sentence of the above article says it the best.


He said that while Walmart's extra pay and discounts will no doubt be welcomed by those making minimum wage, "employees across the board would still prefer to be with their families than getting the extra perks, because that's what the holiday is all about."


What happened to the days when employers closed on holidays so employees could spend time with their families?

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Ask Wal Mart how much is a 'bit'.

A bit is not time and a half I bet. The greedy bastards.

Originally Posted by misskit

What happened to the days when employers closed on holidays so employees could spend time with their families?

It really is a shame. In Europe it is just illegal plain and simple you can not open your business.

Says the extra pay will equal the average daily wage, so a days wage. If the employee worked a six hour day @ $7.50, then an extra $45 for working a holiday.



Just to compare my first job with Coca-Cola late '70s, for Thanksgiving, we were given the day off with pay, a turkey, and a $25 gift certificate.

Originally Posted by misskit

What happened to the days when employers closed on holidays so employees could spend time with their families?

Those days disappeared along with the single wage-earner and a stay-at-home Mom.

If you make a last-minute run to Costco on Thanksgiving Day, you'll be out of luck. The discount retailer is bucking the hot trend in retail: kicking off the holiday shopping season before the turkey is even out of the oven.

"Our employees work especially hard during the holiday season, and we simply believe that they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with their families," Paul Latham, the company's vice president for membership and marketing, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. "Nothing more complicated than that."

While Walmart, Kmart, Target and others grab headlines for starting the holiday shopping season on Thanksgiving Day, Costco and a few others are standing out for their commitment to a national day off.

“Maybe call me old-fashioned, but I feel that it’s an easy decision to make [to stay closed on Thanksgiving],” Laura Sen, the CEO of BJ’s Wholesale Club, told HuffPost. Her company’s 201 stores are staying closed on Thanksgiving Day. The company tried out a Thanksgiving Day opening in 2006, and shoppers just didn’t respond, she said. And staying closed that day means workers will get the “nice holiday with their families” that they deserve, Sen added.

Stores that are staying closed are also scoring points with shoppers and workers upset about being strong-armed into cutting their Thanksgiving short in order to take full advantage of Black Friday deals. “There’s a PR benefit to holding out, just as there’s a PR benefit to opening early,” said Roger Beahm, a marketing professor at Wake Forest University. “We know that there is a consumer backlash to this.”

After stores announced Thanksgiving opening and deal times, some shoppers took to company Facebook pages, arguing that stores are injecting consumerism into a holiday meant for family. Others expressed concern that employees were being forced to work on the holiday. Still others expressed a fear of missing out on deals if they didn't shop on Thanksgiving.

Nadja Gutowski, 47, is one of those shoppers. The stay-at-home mom started a petition asking shoppers to boycott Kmart, shortly after the company announced it would be opening at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving and staying open for 41 hours straight. Now that more retailers have announced their plans to open on Thanksgiving, Gutowski said she'd like to expand her petition to include them.

“It’s very tragic to me to see stores that [are] increasingly opening on the holiday, which is not only a stress to people who are planning on shopping, but also for the workers,” Gutowski said. “We all want the sales, but can you just hold them until Friday?”

Theoretically, yes, but for retailers looking to squeeze as much as possible out of a holiday shopping season that’s six days shorter this year, staying closed on Thanksgiving could be risky, Beahm said. Last year, nearly one quarter of Americans said they planned to shop on Thanksgiving Day, according to a survey from Deloitte, compared to 17 percent a year before. And the holiday season -- which is typically from Black Friday to Christmas -- made up 19.3 percent of retailers' total sales in 2012, according to the National Retail Foundation. For some stores, holiday shopping can account for as much as 40 percent of annual sales, according to the NRF. By opening on Thanksgiving, some stores want to add that one crucial day to their season.

Many of the businesses staying closed on Thanksgiving aren't geared towards your average Black Friday shopper. Nordstrom, for example, tends to do more business during its annual anniversary sale in July than on Black Friday, said spokesman Colin Johnson. For the high-end department store, staying closed on Thanksgiving and waiting to unveil holiday decorations until Black Friday is a long-standing company tradition. “This goes back as long as anybody here can remember,” Johnson said. “Over the years we’ve heard a lot from our customers, and they appreciate that we take this approach.”

As membership warehouses, BJ's and Costco tend to have a loyal customer base they can count on as well. Still, that doesn't mean they won't be tempted in the future to move Black Friday earlier, Beahm said.

“The early bird gets the worm,” Beahm said. “It will continue until the majority of people find Thanksgiving Day to be a great time to start shopping.”

Costco, Nordstrom Refuse To Ruin Thanksgiving

^
Good for them!

Originally Posted by bsnub

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Ask Wal Mart how much is a 'bit'.

A bit is not time and a half I bet. The greedy bastards.

Originally Posted by misskit

What happened to the days when employers closed on holidays so employees could spend time with their families?

It really is a shame. In Europe it is just illegal plain and simple you can not open your business.

An affront to free market capitalism! How dare the proletariat enjoy a day off on national holidays! Those Euros have always been commie pinko bastards!!

It's all very well pointing out the USA's perilous descent towards a third world economy- but absolutely nobody in Washington is doing anything about it, or even talking about it.

Congress is too busy squabbling about who said what about Benghazi, or legislation enacted years ago. President Obama has landed more wealth in the hands of the already wealthy in five years than any US President ever, but meanwhile done absolutely nothing for the middle and working classes.

Over 90% of the spectacular wealth made since the GFC has landed in less than 1% of Americans pockets- if that doesn't set the stage for some sort of social upheaval, what on earth will.

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

Originally Posted by bsnub

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Ask Wal Mart how much is a 'bit'.

A bit is not time and a half I bet. The greedy bastards.

Originally Posted by misskit

What happened to the days when employers closed on holidays so employees could spend time with their families?

It really is a shame. In Europe it is just illegal plain and simple you can not open your business.

An affront to free market capitalism! How dare the proletariat enjoy a day off on national holidays! Those Euros have always been commie pinko bastards!!

You and bsnubtard are confused - but what's new.

Germany is the only country aside from possibly parts of France that have laws regarding Sunday closures.

Here’s an idea for how to end corporate greed and reverse the trend of growing income inequality worldwide: impose a new rule that would limit the pay of top executives to just 12 times that of the lowest-paid employees at the same firm. In other words, prevent CEOs from earning more in one month than the lowliest shop-floor worker earns in a year.

This proposal might sound like something cooked up by Occupy Wall Street or another radical protest movement, but in fact it comes from the heartland of a nation not usually known for its disdain of money-making: Switzerland. On Nov. 24, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on whether to enshrine the 1:12 pay ratio — in their national constitution, no less.

The initiative is backed by an assortment of mainstream political groups, including the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, who argue that CEO pay in Switzerland has gotten out of control and needs to be reined in. They quote a raft of figures to show that the ratio of top to bottom earners in Swiss firms has grown from about 1 to 6 in 1984, to 1 to 43 today. And that’s just the average. In some companies, especially banks, the gap is much wider, with top executives such as Brady Dougan, the American CEO of Credit Suisse, and Andrea Orcel, head of investment banking at UBS, earning hundreds of times as much as their juniors.

The campaign’s backers consider salary inequality to be a social injustice. A video cartoon made by the Social Democrats features a Swiss nurse who is astounded by the way top manager salaries have grown to “astronomical” proportions, even as hers has barely increased. Regula Rytz, a co-head of the Greens, says that a constitutional amendment is necessary because neither the government nor business has “a recipe against the self-service mentality in corporate suites.”

Swiss business, meanwhile, has made a so-far successful effort to sway public opinion. A month ago, public opinion for and against the initiative was split at about 44 percent. Swiss business launched a public relations campaign, warning that the measure would spark an exodus of corporations. Employers’ associations commissioned studies that predicted lost jobs and higher taxes if the measure is passed. The latest polls this week suggest that the measure is unlikely to be approved, with just over 50 percent opposing it.

Even so, the issue isn’t likely to go away, and is gaining traction beyond Switzerland. Kristina Schüpbach, leader of the youth wing of the Social Democrats and one of the campaign initiators, says that “the main thing this time is to get a result that sends a strong signal” — to business and government. Significantly, the 1:12 campaign has made inroads in Spain, where the opposition Social Democrats have just adopted it as official policy. Schüpbach says the idea of setting a ceiling on pay ratios is also being discussed within the opposition Social Democratic Party in Germany. And more broadly, the issue of executive pay has become a red-hot political topic in France and elsewhere on the continent.

Bruce Kogut, director of the Sanford C. Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School, says the issue resonates in Europe “because people care more about equity” than they do in the U.S. But he also sees salary caps as a reaction to the pain of the financial crisis. “There have not been major consequences. Collective expiation of guilt and responsibility is lacking,” Kogut says.

Switzerland, with its history of Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic, is particularly fertile ground for this issue. The nation has lived through a series of corporate calamities in the past decade, including the collapse of Swissair in 2001 after it racked up an unmanageable level of debt. One of the most shocking blows to many Swiss was the state rescue of UBS in 2008, after the bank incurred giant losses from its foray into American mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives.

Huge payouts to executives at struggling companies have added fuel to the flames. The referendum campaigners point out that last year, UBS paid out a total of 2.5 billion Swiss francs in bonuses, at the same time as it reported a 2.5 billion franc loss. Pro-reform activists have calculated that it would take an ordinary bank employee as much as 385 years to earn the 18.5 million franc ($20 million) compensation package given to Orcel, the investment bank head, when he joined UBS from Merrill Lynch last year. (UBS has defended the package, claiming that it compensates Orcel for a loss of deferred pay when he left Merrill Lynch. The total bonus pool, the bank says, was paid out to a range of employees and not just top management.)

Orcel was already at UBS last March, when in a previous referendum, the Swiss approved an initiative that gives shareholders of listed Swiss companies a binding say in the compensation paid to their directors. It also sharply curtailed “golden handshakes” and other special bonuses.

Still, imposing caps on pay ratios turns out to be quite a bit harder than it sounds. Coming up with reliable statistics is a particular challenge. Publicly-traded companies in America and in many European countries are required to disclose the salaries and benefits paid to their CEO and other top executives. But obtaining data for the lowest-paid workers is much harder. Some Swiss opponents of the referendum question the accuracy of the figures issued by the campaign initiators.

The U.S. is an example of how difficult and politically fraught such an exercise can be. Three years ago, under section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress ordered public companies to disclose the ratio of CEO pay to the annual median compensation of employees. So far, however, this stipulation has not been enforced, and the HR Policy Association’s Center on Executive Compensation, for one, believes the enforcement is “not worth the cost” to companies.

Supporters of income equality would argue that in the United States, even more so than Switzerland, such an investment is worthwhile. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in the top 350 largest U.S. firms is 231:1, including realized stock options. That’s more than five times the gap in Switzerland. According to the institute, CEO compensation grew by more than 725 percent between 1978 and 2011, at a time when the annual compensation of a typical private-sector worker grew by just 5.7 percent.

In both the U.S. and Switzerland, the public debate over pay ratios is just getting started. Schüpbach, the organizer of the Swiss initiative, says that even if the referendum doesn’t produce a majority vote in favor of the measure on majority on Nov. 24, the campaign will continue. “There’ll be a second, third or fourth attempt,” she says.

It remains to be seen whether even these renewed efforts will put a brake on runaway executive pay. But at the least, they put business on the defensive to justify huge packages.

Swiss outrage over executive pay sparks a movement in Europe | The Great Debate

Out of touch’ unionized public employees strike over 14.5 percent raise.

Taxpayers in Will County have offered its public employees a hefty pay raise and are willing to pick up 90 percent of the cost for their health insurance, but that’s not good enough for members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1028.



Its 1,300 members went on strike Monday, decrying a “paltry” offer from the county that would have given workers a 14.5 percent pay hike and have taxpayers pay for the overwhelming majority of their health insurance costs.

“That gives an indication of just how out of touch government workers are,” Steve Stanek, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, told Illinois Watchdog. “I think they’ve become more radicalized and more out of touch as they have become more unionized.”

Illinois Watchdog.org

There's the root of the problem - greedy union workers who think a 14.5% pay raise is 'paltry'...

Oh, really-




The inequality within america is a major threat to your economic & social system, not to mention your already decimated quality of life.
Take off your ideological blinders, and pull your damn head out of the sand- these are facts, not wishy washy conspiracy theories.

^ Boontard is happy mooching off the Thai government. He could care less about his hypocrisy.