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More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants.

UNIONS INEVITABLE? Job Opportunity, Pay Equity Making Bargaining Essential?

Haves and Have Mores Complaining They Pay Most of the Taxes

December 6, 2012       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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"Either we build an economy in which most workers can earn enough to adequately support their families or we build a government with the wherewithal to subsidize the existence of a lower class that can't survive on its own. We are doing neither.

" --Eduardo Porter, in The New York Times

More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald's, whose employees, like those at Walmart, are beginning to agitate for unionization.

"They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour," writes Eduardo Porter, emphasizing:

"A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty. And they are unlikely to have ever contemplated joining a union."

Porter also notes that home health workers, one of the fastest growing segments of the workforce, have a poverty rate of 57 percent.

But without a union these working poor have little chance of getting fair pay, or working conditions, according to many observers.

The conservatives have taken the position that the rich should pay no more in taxes because they already shoulder, in the aggregate, most of the budgetary burden of the country.

Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, in an impassioned plea before Congress for spending cuts instead of tax increases, complained that 80 percent of Americans are paying only six percent of the tax burden.

He just doesn't get it: the 80 percent don't have the income to pay more! If they had good paying jobs, certainly they would pay more in taxes. And they would be more than happy to do it.

A huge part of the success of our economy depends on the ability of average citizens to purchase the goods and services produced by companies owned by the wealthy. Our nation's economy cannot survive if most of its citizens are impoverished beggars.

Low wage workers not only have been marginalized by corporate America, they have also been stripped of rights to bargain collectively and their opportunities to work assaulted by foreign non-unionized competition in nearly every field.

Rep. Woodall said the principal focus of the discussions should be about deficit reduction through spending reforms.

"The president has done a great job of convincing America that this 'fiscal cliff' is a debate about increasing tax revenue. It's not -- everyone agrees that revenue has to go up. The president has taxpayers that he wants to punish and others that he wants to reward, and that's bad tax policy," Woodall said.

"While that may be good politics, it is bad policy and Congress will absolutely fight him on it. But when it comes to the need to raise federal revenue from its anemic levels of this recession, we all -- Democrats and Republicans -- recognize that we need to."

Woodall said that the Republican-led House has passed several bills to reduce spending, but the Senate has not. He blamed the upcoming sequestration -- across the board spending cuts scheduled by another law -- on the president and the Senate. And he worries that the outcome this winter will be another short-term fix to the long-term problems.

It is no doubt absolutely true that the rich already pay the highest proportion of taxes; why shouldn't they since they receive the most benefit?

Doesn't Rep. Woodall, and others of his ilk, realize that the 80 percent would be happy to pay their fair share of taxes, if only they were reaping the fruits of society.

As Warren Buffett has pointed out, the rich are winning the class war. How cheeky of them to not only win the war, but make the poor pay more than their share of the burden?

The poor these days are like the Christian buried up to his neck in sand with the dogs set upon him and the barbarians howling "play fair" when the Christian is able to take a bite out of a snarling dog.

A large part of today's American workplace appears to be morphing into something akin to serfdom in the Middle Ages.

Unless conservatives finally begin to realize that our system only works well when all people are equally treated they will remain radical voices crying in the wilderness and will continue to lose their electoral base.

Unless fairness is returned to the American workplace expect to see unions come roaring back to power; that would no doubt cause even more distress to the ruling class. Will they get it then? ###

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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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