Fair wages

The age-old practice by commerce of underpaying and overworking women and youth needs to become extinct as a shameful and backward relic of history, like workhouses and, I might add, war. Radical? Read on. Historically, executives, with the help of government’s laissez-faire, have successfully gained great wealth, not because of their skill, but because workers have been forced to subsidize them. It amounts to paying for a portion of the time, labour, skill and talent of employees and freely taking the rest and turning it into a profit for the top of the hierarchy while the very essence of the organization, without which it could not exist at all, barely scrapes by. It’s all about power: those who have it all versus those who have none. Women and youth have essentially been colonized to produce more and faster by the fast food, restaurant and hospitality industry; retail; all business; banks; farms; domestic; military; manufacturing; child care; care givers and educators, and I’m sure I’ve missed some. No employee should be subsidizing business; business is very wealthy. Desperate for work and propagandized that they should be grateful to business because it has provided them with a job—an appalling job, but a job—powerless workers have no choice which commerce manipulates as a matter of course. The crock that a company will fail if employees are paid what they are worth is open evidence that this business is not viable. Yet it is proclaimed regularly, telling the public and government that employers are immorally underpaying to make commerce work. That translates to corruption. And governments, just as unprincipled as business, do virtually nothing. All levels of government, the G8/20, the European Parliament, the World Bank, etc., are equally responsible for abdicating responsibility to protect the masses by regulating business against its raw exploitation, the theft of labour from millions, just as it once did to artisans who built magnificent buildings for subsistence incomes, an exercise we now consider to be greed in the extreme, but entrepreneurs are still doing it. We need total reform, business practices must be regulated to compensate employees with a fair share of the profits. Start-ups at the table declare they can get women and young people to work for $10.00 or less an hour and the company passes muster with the bank. That needs to be changed to the real value women and youth bring to the company and what will sustain them into the future as the company grows. It cannot, after all, survive and grow without them. The utter cowardice of government, beholden to executives for their contribution to parties and provision of so-called jobs while denying the source of their funds it receives from executives is from the poorest in the land, to allow this to happen, is indefensible. Its responsibility is to all constituents, not just the few wealthy in our midst. Executives are hardly likely to ever admit to their plunder and turn this around on their own. And all governments who are party to the United Nations have a firm agreement to, “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” Certainly, no government in Canada, (and very few others), has taken any steps to fulfill this obligation. Executives and leaders duplicitously deplore openly exploiting the poor when it happens in third world countries. They deserve severe backlash in their own country where they are doing just as much harm to their own people. And governments need to promptly step up and pass fair compensation legislation to end this disgraceful part of our history.