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Stranger Registered: 08/22/05 Posts: 1,839 |
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Serving up cream to America's fat cats
The Republican-led Congress continues to push a central theme of Bush administration economic policy: Help the ultra-rich whenever there's a window of opportunity, but don't throw a bone to the working poor unless it's a political necessity. House GOP leaders are striving to exempt more multimillionaires from the estate tax after failing to win its outright repeal in the Senate. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., proposed legislation Wednesday that would permanently exempt as much as $10 million of a couple's estate from federal taxation, up from $4 million now. Meanwhile, GOP senators led the charge Wednesday against a predominantly Democrat-backed proposal by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to raise the shamefully low federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour to $7.25 over a period of more than two years. The proposal drew support from 52 senators on a procedural measure but needed 60 votes. The federal minimum wage, which now has less buying power than in the 1950s, hasn't been raised in nine years. While the out-of-touch GOP hierarchy in Congress doesn't see the need for a badly needed boost in the wage floor, voters and legislators have taken matters into their own hands by raising the minimum wage above the federal level in 21 states and the District of Columbia, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday. Several other states are considering minimum-wage increases. President Bush's 2001 tax-cut legislation phased out the estate tax through 2010, when it will be repealed for one year, only to be fully revived in 2011. The estate tax is an ideal tax: It is levied only on a small, exceptionally wealthy tier of society that can most afford to pay it, but it nevertheless raises a substantial chunk of needed federal revenue. Under current law, only 12,600 estates, representing less than 1 percent of those who die, will face the tax this year, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates. In light of the big cuts in income tax rates for the wealthy over the past 25 years and the record budget deficits incurred by the Bush administration in recent times, slashing the estate tax is the height of folly. Thomas' measure would shrink federal revenues by a staggering $280 billion through 2016, the staff of the bipartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates. That could significantly increase federal red ink, saddling our children and grandchildren with even bigger debts. Meanwhile, most GOP members of Congress can't find it in their little hearts to raise the minimum wage to a paltry $7.25, as Kennedy proposes, even though the wage floor hasn't been raised since 1997. Raising the minimum wage isn't welfare, as some argue. The pay hike goes only to those who work. Raising the minimum not only would help those making $5.15 but also put needed upward pressure on the wages of millions of additional struggling working-class people earning less than $10 per hour. But why should Republican members of Congress help the working class when it's more profitable to reward the fat cats with another big tax cut? After all, who's more likely to make a hefty campaign contribution when the next re-election campaign rolls around -- a multimillionaire or someone sweeping floors for a living? http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/14884948.htm
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Semper Fidelis Registered: 01/11/05 Posts: 7,459 Loc: Harmless (Mostly) Last seen: 2 hours, 51 minutes |
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Chicago was tinkering with the idea of making any "big retailer" to give a mandatory hourly wage of $10. These retailers have already said they would close shop, if this was implemented.......
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stakes are high in `big box' clash Wal-Mart and allies take stand against `living wage' law By Barbara Rose, Tribune staff reporter. Staff reporter Sandra Jones contributed to this story Published July 23, 2006 Additional material published July 24, 2006: CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS A Page 1 story Sunday about the "living wage" dispute between the city of Chicago and so-called big box retailers such as Wal-Mart misstated a comparison between Jewel Food Stores and Wal-Mart entry level wages in Chicago. Baggers at Jewel start at $6.55 an hour, according to the union contract. Wal-Mart?s lowest paid workers earn $7.25 an hour. Toni Foulkes tells customers there's a reason the cakes she sells at a South Side Jewel store cost more than cakes at Sam's Club. "They don't put love in 'em like I do," she says. "And their employees don't make what I make." She's on the front lines of a fight to make Chicago the first major city to require retailers like Sam's Club owner Wal-Mart to pay a "living wage" of at least $10 per hour with $3 in benefits by 2010. For her, the struggle comes down to a simple equation: All workers are threatened unless communities hold big corporations accountable for paying better-than-poverty-level wages. On the other side is Lisa Cox, a Wal-Mart worker who sees big stores as beacons of opportunity for communities like her West Side neighborhood. "They're going to run them out of the city instead of bringing in business here" if they single out big stores, she said. The stakes are high amid a frenzied lobbying campaign in advance of a City Council vote on Wednesday. On one side is one of the city's biggest and fast-growing industries--retailers, which employ about 250,000 workers in Chicago--and their Wal-Mart-led allies. On the other is organized labor and a broad coalition of neighborhood and advocacy groups. Both sides predict a close vote, and a legal challenge is all but certain. "If it becomes law we will end up in the courthouse," said David Vite, president and chief executive of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. The proposed "big-box" ordinance covering stores of 90,000 square feet and up with gross annual sales across the region of $1 billion would affect 42 Chicago outlets employing about 7,500 people, according to the retail association. They range from Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot to Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Sak's. The debate is being framed for maximum emotional impact, forcing council members to choose in an election year between constituents' calls for wages that lift working people out of poverty and retailers' promises to bring jobs to neighborhoods with double-digit unemployment. Target said three stores slated for predominantly African-American communities were on hold pending the vote, a move labeled "scare tactics" by the law's proponents. Chicago, with large densely populated neighborhoods barren of major retail outlets, is a promising frontier for the likes of Wal-Mart. Under pressure from Wall Street to expand sales, the nation's biggest employer is targeting urban areas. South and West Side Chicago residents spend an estimated $1.3 billion annually--more than half their total retail spending--outside their communities, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. "Retailers are never going to love this law," said economist Annette Bernhardt, deputy director of Brennan Center's poverty program. "The question is whether they can afford to live with it, and everything we know about the economics of the industry and Chicago says they can." Retailers disagree. "It will slow development here," Vite said. "Expanding retail companies are not going to invest their money in a community that doesn't respect their right to operate their business in a fashion that's OK in 99.9 percent of the rest of the country." Signs of lobbying are everywhere. At Ald. Anthony Beale's 9th Ward office on the Far South Side, aides fielded 200 phone calls in a two-day period last week, evenly divided, as opposing phone banks kicked into high gear. Scores of postcards stacked up urging "yes" or "no" votes. There were visits from Wal-Mart executives, retail association leaders, labor leaders and prominent clergy. Wal-Mart financed an ad campaign warning, "Don't Box Us Out!" and called on its vendors to contact elected officials, including Mayor Richard Daley, who has come out against the measure, saying it would hurt economic development. Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. called Daley recently, prompting speculation that Scott asked the mayor to consider vetoing the ordinance if it is passed. A spokeswoman for Daley's office declined to comment on a private conversation. For organized labor and especially the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which for years has waged a costly and largely ineffective battle to organize Wal-Mart workers, the Chicago drive is important. It's a test of whether a re-energized labor and community coalition can open a new front on a "living wage" campaign that has gained momentum nationally. More than 100 municipalities, including Chicago, adopted living wage laws in the mid-1990s affecting city contractors, said political scientist Dorian Warren, a Columbia University assistant professor who studies living wage campaigns. "What we're seeing now is a much broader reach," Warren said. "Chicago's big-box ordinance is unique in that it targets a private industry." Tactics also have changed. "This latest drive is much more of a coalition," said labor expert Robert Bruno at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Seeds for the coalition were planted two years ago when the City Council approved Wal-Mart's request to build a store on the West Side, its first in Chicago, while narrowly denying its bid for a South Side outlet. The votes were a wake-up call. When Wal-Mart's West Side store opens, some entry-level workers will earn $7.25 per hour, or about $1 less than entry-level wages for Jewel and Dominick's workers represented by UFCW Local 881 in Chicago. Wal-Mart, the country's biggest grocer, has had little presence in Chicago's grocery market but is preparing a big push over the next three years. Within two months of the votes, Local 881 had joined Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and other community-based advocates to introduce Chicago's big-box ordinance. Their template was Costco, a big-box store that offered $10 per hour starting wages to employees at a North Side store. Rather than painting a bull's-eye on Wal-Mart, the ordinance targets employers in an industry where the median wage for sales associates is $9.43 per hour in Chicago, or $19,611 a year, according to the Brennan Center. The living wage issue resonated with more than 30 groups who joined the loose coalition coordinated by Chicago's Grassroots Collaborative, which spearheaded earlier living wage campaigns. "The Chicago labor movement is realizing it needs now more than ever community alliances to help win its goals at the contract table," Warren said. "The old way of doing things is not working anymore." Cox, the Wal-Mart worker, isn't following the debate closely, but she looks forward to no longer commuting to work at a suburban Northlake Wal-Mart when the West Side store opens five minutes from her home. She makes $13.47 per hour as a supervisor, making sure checkout lines flow smoothly and greeters and cart-gatherers keep customers happy. The 40-year-old single mother dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and worked two jobs while raising her son. She started at Wal-Mart eight years ago as a part-time cashier, making $7.25 per hour. "You don't have a problem moving [up] at Wal-Mart," she said. "There's nothing I can't do." Foulkes, 42, a college-educated Jewel worker and Local 881 steward, remembers her excitement as a teenager when one of her girlfriends started dating a Jewel worker. "He has benefits and he's in the union!" she recalled them chattering. "We didn't even know what the union was, but we knew our parents talked about it. We thought the boys who worked for Jewel were the greatest guys." She lives on the same block in West Englewood where she learned to ride a two-wheeler, rooted in a life revolving around decorating cakes and training workers in Jewel's bakery, volunteer work and community activism. She made about $35,000 last year at her $12.85 per hour job, including overtime. "It's a passion for me, it's not just a job," she said. "I think people should go to a job they love, work hard and get paid well for it." She preaches to anyone who will listen about the big-box ordinance, delivering tough rhetoric with a disarming smile. "We know they can afford to pay it and we're going to fight for it," she said. "We're going to fight until our knuckles bleed." ---------- -------------------- “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
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