Posted by
Contrarian Guitarist on Saturday, December 02, 2006 4:13:58 PM
I thought WalMart was the only big box store that paid minimum wage. Not the socially lofty Target....
"Two months into her minimum wage job at Target Corp., Tara Dennis realized she and her three children would be better off if she was unemployed and on food stamps. So she quit."Read full article
here.
Three children, no father, at 23? Why no question as to where is the father? I guess that's not what this story is about. If it were about delinquent fathers then maybe. This story is on those who would be affected by the Democrats "New Direction" Minimum Wage proposal. But the article later states...
"But the proposed increase "is not a solution to poverty," said Matt Fellowes, a scholar at the Brookings Institute. "This is, for the most part, a symbolic effort," he said."Ah, symbolism.
But the article has a tacit endorsement for nuclear families in the following admission...
"A jump to $7.25 would make a two-bedroom apartment affordable to families with two minimum wage earners in all but 19 states, said Danilo Pelletiere, research director at the National Low Income Housing Coalition."But you'd have to read the whole article for this factoid. A skill lost on most people.
The groundwork is being clearly laid here for a
living wage, ala Santa Monica.
But seriously $10.50 an hour in LA is not a living wage. At forty hours a week that at best is $1600 a month before taxes. Seen the
rents in Santa Monica?
It actually saddens me to go to my local supermarket and see the cashiers giving their lives to a $10 an hour job because it pays $27.50 per hour, twice that on holidays. Would they have gone on to bigger and better things if it only paid the minimum instead of the artificially, union adjusted rate. Would they have stayed in school? Become a doctor? Cured cancer? We'll never know, because they are getting paid enough to keep them flush in flat screen TV's, a new car every five years, barely make their mortgage. Yes, keep the masses down by giving them what we tell them they want. All the while thinking that we saved them from evil corporations.