WRITER - Vancouver Lifestyles -
The Sins of Wages
On July 26th, the city of Chicago ordered “big box” stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot to begin paying a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.
This news should be of more than passing interest to a community like Vancouver, which donned its hairshirt and wrung its hands through several years of agony about whether it would even allow a scoundrel like Wal-Mart on its hallowed soil.
The Chicago ordinance, affecting stores of more than 90,0000 square feet and companies that gross more than $1billion annually, is the first in America to single out large retailers for wage rules.
John Simley, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart said, “It’s sad – this puts politics ahead of working men and women. It means that Chicago is closed for business.” Some economists have argued that this kind of “living wage” legislation stifles development and deprives consumers of access to cheap goods. The Illinois Merchants Association has condemned the measure, claiming that it will hamper job creation. Mayor Richard Daley says the ordinance will impede growth and tax revenues.
Whatever the potency of such arguments, this fact remains. The impulse to raise local minimum wages has grown out of a clear frustration with the American Congress, which has abandoned the federal minimum wage at $5.15 an hour for almost a decade now. Twenty-two states have passed their own laws to counteract that neglect.
All of this against a background in which the American taxpayer has forfeited, at last count, something in the neighbourhood of $400 Billion for the war in Iraq. How many medical plans might that have bought? How many hospitals, schools, libraries, seniors’ homes, community centres? How many times over? One fifth of the richest population in the world is medically uninsured and faces catastrophic and bankrupting illness every moment of every day.
Always, in a modern western democracy, we face the struggle of the individual versus society. Freud spoke of this fundamental battle almost a hundred years ago. The flags of Free Enterprise and Socialism conveniently cauterize the issue. Who can tell me I must wear a helmet to ride a bike or drive my Harley? On the other hand, why do cars almost drive over me when I walk across Alma Road? Whose rules prevail on a given day? Who calls the shots? Isn’t my movie more important than yours? After all, it’s my movie!
Communism, an ideal, hideously exposed by years of murder, brutality and iniquity, suffers an essential flaw. The Great Program fails to acknowledge greed, ambition and want as essential human drives. Thus, the party aparachiks and mandarins line their furs and silks while the masses starve. Capitalism pays full homage to our competitive nature, gives us free rein to get out there and achieve; makes heroes of us when we do so against romantically insurmountable odds.
But to believe in an unrestricted free enterprise system is to believe in Oz and Brer Rabbit. Governments have a role, yes, even in business. The question, every day is which role? And how big a role?
Years ago, I knew an elegant, brilliant fellow who was the vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada. When you asked him about governments, he would simply laugh. “Oh, we just do what we do. We don’t really think about them very much.”
Recently, Bell Globemedia bought out the CHUM group of radio and television stations. The next morning they fired 47 people whose task was to provide a news broadcast for CITY-TV here in Vancouver.
Not many will insist that this was the greatest news presentation in the history of electronic media. But it was a newscast, and we do have a government office called the CRTC, whose job, we are told, is to issue licenses and demand of those given the opportunity to print money faster than the mint that they make even the most modest attempt to reflect the community. Broadcasters apply to the CRTC for licenses, and lie through their teeth about the riches of local programming and community involvement they will bring to the party. Wasn’t this a case where the government of the people could have declared with some good reason that the conglomerate News Company had no shutting down a local newscast and putting 47 people on the dole? Kudos, by the way, to Canwest Global, who, in a matter of hours, found work in its own newscasts for many of those same people.
British Petroleum boasted net incomes for the last quarter in excess of $7 Billion. Peanuts, as it turns out. Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, based in Irving, Texas, posted net incomes of $10.36 Billion, only a 36 percent gain in second-quarter earnings. Exxon revenues climbed 12 % to $99 Billion.
Profits from oil and natural gas sales rose 45 per cent from a year earlier. When I first bought my little Mazda in 1993, it cost me less than $20 to fill ‘er up. Yesterday, I paid $44.83. And so did you, and you and you. And so did all the men and women with young families and so did all the single parents and so did all the seniors.
So the City of Chicago has stepped in where unions and more senior governments have failed, or downright neglected their duties. I can point the finger to dozens of shops, large and small, in every sector of business, from service to high tech, in every community in the Lower Mainland that have quietly built their success on minimum-wage, part-time employees who are paid no benefits.
So call me a commie socialist left-wing bleeding heart liberal. But, I’ll tell you this: Until we get some courageous and visionary political leadership in this neck of the woods, Chicago – you’re My Kind of Town.
