Four stories for Labor Day:
1. CNN noted today that the average American CEO is paid 375 times what their ordinary worker gets paid. Twenty years ago the difference was 20 times.
2. The NY Times published a front page story today describing how major businesses cheat their employees out of earned overtime payments. Walmart’s warehouse subsidiary, McDonalds, Federal Express and Doubletree Hotels are among the many corporations that have routinely screwed their workers for years.
3. The long fight to increase the minimum wage in America continues to be stalled as Republican politicians and their business community supporters and funders continue to insist that they cannot afford a federal minimum wage increase over the current disgraceful level of $7.25 an hour while payoffs to CEOs has increased exponentially since the 1990s.
4. Several weeks ago the Board of Directors of Marketplace, a large grocery chain in the Northeast, fired its CEO. The family owned and operated chain had been plagued for decades by a nasty family feud that led finally to one branch of the family controlling the Board and ousting the CEO. But in addition to family rivalries the Board was responding to the desire of the controlling interests for reduced benefits and pay to its employees and greater profit to them. Well fine, except it ended up blowing up. Seems the fired CEO was beloved by his employees AND his customers and both groups began a battle to overturn the decision which included massive protests including workers simply refusing to go to work and customers refusing to shop in the chain. Soon store shelves were empty and threats to fire employees only exacerbated the problems.
Before it was over the Governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire got involved in negotiations, the press excoriated the Board for its inability to manage itself, and it became apparent that the only viable solution to keep the company afloat was to find a way to put the former CEO back in charge. He raised the funding to buy out his rivals and in a victory for workers and consumers the stores reopened last week. So a once successful, profitable business was saved by its workers and its customers without any of the workers being formally unionized. They simply refused to be pushed around by greed.
It is only one out of four for the good guys, but nice to have one positive story on this Labor Day. Now, back to work, everyone.