April 28
To Elise Hiton and her blogpost on the minimum wage. This appeared in the Acton blog.
We should note that the first people who like minimum wage jobs are employers. And considering how much gov't assistance is being used to subsidize the payroll of some fast-food businesses, some retail businesses, and even some banks, the issue of minimum wage jobs cannot be settled by the information given above.
Other missing information includes the demographics of workers who are being paid minimum wage and poverty wages. In addition to that, we could include the changing job market between when I worked minimum wage jobs and now. The globalization of the workforce for many jobs has meant a reduction in number of lower skilled jobs. This makes it more difficult for minimum wage jobs to act as stepping-stone jobs. Even some technical jobs have been offshored because of the globalization of labor for certain jobs.
Finally, we should note what Chris Rock said about minimum wage jobs. He stated that when a boss is paying an employee a minimum wage, that boss is actually saying that they would pay his/her minimum wage employees less if they were allowed to. So how does Chris Rock's comment here demonstrate that employers value their workers as people? And according to Martin Luther King, isn't that the crux of some of our major problems today:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Joe Carter and his blogpost on the economic effects of the Baltimore Riots. This appeared in the Acton blog.
Expressing economic concerns here without mentioning the social and human concerns is troubling. Because with the social and human concerns are actual experiences of people who have been abused by the police--the actual reason for the riots. While many have won court cases and have received some compensation for their pain, others have had their cases dismissed. And this point made by Ta-Nehisi Coates leads to another one of his points. When will our calls for peaceful protests be accompanied by demands for the end of police brutality (see http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/nonviolence-as-compliance/ar-BBiL0kQ )?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Joe Carter and his blogpost on lobbying and corporate cronyism. This appeared in the Acton blog.
A key mistake here is the association made between 'corporate cronyism and lobby. In reality, corporate control over the government existed when Eisenhower retired and warned us of the emerging Military Industrial Complex. In fact, corporate control over the government existed before that in the 1950s as corporate influence played key roles in the government's decisions to back coups in Iran ('53) and Guatemala ('54). And one only needs to read the writings of former Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to see the tie between business interests and foreign policies. Other ties, such as domestic ones between business and government can be found too--our labor history provides many examples.
The trouble with this article is that it provides too limited a time when government took care of business. In addition, the naive reductionistic definition of a corporation by its shareholders, thus not including workers, shows a perspective that is lacking.
No comments:
Post a Comment