Raising wages is definately necessary. We will never transcend the current crisis without it. A large public sector will soak up the unemployed creating full employment making private employers compete with the state for workers thus increasing wages to where they need to be to spur demand. Inflation will be controlled by massive imports of consumer goods that are no longer manufactured domestically. Raising real income will redistribute wealth and shift investment away from financial markets thus eliminating bubbles and instability. This is the way forward.

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This is a good, credible proposal. And another set of proposals is also good, and is perhaps much more important:

1.) Federalize any large corporation which engages in interstate commerce.

2. Require all, by federal charters, to support the public interest. This can be done with 28 words:

“The pursuit of profits must not come at the expense of the environment, human rights, public health and safety, the dignity of employees or the welfare of communities”.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0726-11.htm

3.) Require all by federal charters to comprise its boards of directors with a significant )35 to 50 percent) composition of elected employees.

This third provision is routine in Europe, in Germany for example. It is well known. It is becoming the EU standard. It is called economic co-determination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination

Nader has been proposing this for over 15 years.

What would this set of proposals mean if implemented?

Your thoughts?

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When you try to advocate unions to many Americans, you get the following robotic response: "Unions were good a long time ago, but now they're not needed."

This way of thinking has been systematically programed by the corporate media into the minds of the masses.

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Union positions on the board of major corporations only result in the collusion between the union and the bosses to preserve the status quo, and the fact that such influence is so high up the corporate ladder means that day-to-day, employees don't have any democracy at all.

We should look to the process shown in Naomi Klein's documentary "The Take": worker self-management through the democratic control and operation of all aspects of the workplace.

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The first step should be to get rid of the thugs that are running America's so-called labor movement who care more about their stocks and country homes than working for the members of their unions. They're just as bad as CEOs.

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I recently commented to a McDonald's worker about the sudden high price of milkshakes which I attributed to the increases in the costs of milk and oil and other escalating expenditures. Her response was "when the minimum wage goes up, everything goes up." I didn't have the time or energy to argue. And I was too stunned to know what to say anyhow.

Of course, she is right in that when wages go up, in order to maintain the excesses of management pay and company profits, corporations certainly do pass on the cost of paying their employees to their customers. But this is not a market necessity, nor should it be morally acceptable to anyone with a minimal conscience. It's horrifying that the workers at the bottom are subjected to that kind of brainwashing.

Molly Ivins had some great things to say about the state of American workers. I first encountered her writing in Mother Jones a number of years ago during the Clinton administration. She pointed out that prior to the 1990s, the average CEO made about 40 times the income of the average worker. But by the time she wrote the article I was reading, it had shot up to about 140 times, while taxes on the wealthy had been "adjusted" to the point where "the teacher of the year" was in the same tax bracket as J. Paul Getty. Getty was either the richest man in the world or one of the ones very near the top.

I'm not a history scholar, but I do remember the Reagan years and the way he busted the air traffic controllers. That seemed like the beginning of the end of workers' rights. I'm sure there are a great many other factors, but this event was a bad one. Since then, labor unions have gone downhill into near oblivion.

Unions might not be the definitive answer to the Great Divide between the top 1% and the rest of us, but strengthening them should be a start in the right direction (and not "right" as opposed to "left"). However, educating people about the realities of the income gap, how minimum wage should affect the middle and working classes, and other economic issues is vital.

I work for a school system, and the superintendent of schools in my county makes around $100,000 a year. We have 15,000 students and over 1,500 employees, so his salary is not outrageous by any means. A secretary with a similar number of years of experience as the superintendent makes probably over $20,000. That's just 5 times as much for the "CEO." One of the secretaries I work with was quite put out that the superintendent makes so much money. But earlier, when I told her that the average CEO now makes around 400 times (it's gone up since Clinton) the average worker, she didn't seem perturbed. Some of that is because the human mind can't grasp such high numbers, and some is a lack of personal connection, and some is probably due to this being a "government" job. Somehow a lot of people think if a person is management in a private company, he or she "earns" the money, but when someone works for the government "we" pay the salary. As if "we" don't pay the private CEO when we buy goods and services. Still, it's very weird how people can just not grasp the inequities in the global market system.

Unless working and middle class people can comprehend how they are being used as pawns in the free market game, realize that government is not the enemy when it comes to regulating big business, and stop being duped by the framing of the wealthy and powerful, unions will never come into their own.

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