Time for a Political Revolution?

(This article first appeared in the January-February 2016 issue of The American Postal Worker magazine.)

You may have heard politicians talking about income inequality recently, but did you know that:

• Approximately 42 percent of Americans work for $15 or less an hour – and there is a growing movement to make $15 an hour the federal minimum wage.
• Just over 50 percent of all African-Americans earn less than $15 an hour.
• Nearly 60 percent of Latinos earn less than $15 an hour.
• 72 percent of welfare costs go to working families, costing taxpayers over $153 billion a year.
• America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years – more than $30 trillion dollars.
• During the same time frame, the number of homeless children grew by 60 percent.
• Among industrialized nations, the U.S. has the largest number of homeless women and children.
• The U.S. has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world.
• Over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies.
• Almost half of African-American children under the age of six are living in poverty.
• Nearly half of all food stamp recipients are children.
• In 2007, about 12 out of every 100 kids were on food stamps. Today it’s 20 out of every 100.
• $153 billion in taxpayer money supplements the wages of workers whose employers refuse to pay a livable wage. This is your money!
• Six of the 10 most common occupations with median wages of less than $15 are among the jobs that are projected to grow the most by 2022: retail sales, food preparation and serving, laborers and freight movers, janitors and cleaners, stock clerks and order fillers, nursing assistants, and personal care aides.
• Most of the jobs that pay $15 or less are not going away and they can’t be outsourced.
• Women are the primary breadwinners in 6 out of 10 households, yet earn just 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.

Employees of Walmart, the largest civilian employer in the country, frequently need some form of welfare to survive. In fact, Walmart encourages its workers to apply for Medicaid and food stamps.    

• The average Walmart employee makes $8.81 an hour.
• The Walton family – the heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart – is the richest family in the world, with a combined wealth of $144.7 billion dollars. Their fortune equals the combined wealth of the lowest 42 percent of American earners.
• Through Medicaid and food stamp payments to Walmart employees, taxpayers are subsidizing the retail giant to the tune of about $5,815 per employee.
• There are 1.3 million Walmart workers in the U.S., meaning taxpayers subsidize Walmart by more than $75 billion a year.

Meanwhile, Walmart is very profitable. The company could raise wages for employees and remain well in the black, but instead it actively resists paying anything resembling a living wage.

Walmart has created 78 subsidiaries in 15 tax-haven countries to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It has at least $76 billion in assets in shell companies based in low-tax nations like Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Walmart’s total no-tax or barely-taxed earnings is much higher, because the company also puts money in other low-tax countries, including Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and Curacao, which don’t disclose financial information.

When people ask the rich and the corporations to pay their fair share of taxes or to pay their employees a livable wage, they respond by calling it “wealth redistribution,” “socialist,” or “anti-American.”

So instead of the corporations properly paying their workers, other working people like you and me end up paying way too much in taxes and having our money subsidizing major corporations. This is just wrong. It has to change.

The only answer to the increasing disparity is to elect representatives who truly have the interests of working people at heart. It seems most people running for office will sell out to the millionaires and billionaires who fund their campaigns.

We need election finance reform that will stop the super-rich from buying elections. We need representatives who are for the people. We need legislation that will:

• Increase the minimum wage so that no full-time worker lives in poverty;
• Allow the minimum wage to rise at the rate of inflation;
• Allow for greater opportunities for unionization with its associated collective bargaining;
• Punish those that illegally restrict workers’ rights to free association, and
• Eliminate trade deals that ship good-paying American jobs out of our country only to exploit low-paid workers in other countries.

Please join me and my fellow coordinators, Sharyn Stone, Kennith Beasley, Omar Gonzalez and John Dirzius in the political revolution.