Labor As Seen from Down Under: Fair Wages and Decent Benefits Profit Everyone

[unhappycamper]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20248-labor-as-seen-from-down-under-fair-wages-and-decent-benefits-profit-everyone



Labor As Seen from Down Under: Fair Wages and Decent Benefits Profit Everyone
Friday, 29 November 2013 01:16
By Niall McLaren, Truthout | Op-Ed

~snip~
When we were visiting my son in Boston at Christmas, he had to keep reminding me to tip waiters. I couldn't see why it was necessary. Here, in the upside world of Down Under, we pay our waiters a wage but, in Boston as in the rest of the US of A, it seems they don't actually pay waiters. Remarkable. His university friends, he said, who were working in the restaurant we were patronizing, were granted the sum of $2.13 per hour by the owners to wait on their tables. If they wanted more, they had to wring it from the patrons. I appreciated the artful thinking behind this move, but if an employer tried to pull that stunt in this country, he'd be in serious trouble. And rightly so. Waitpersons, kitchenhands and other lowlife actually have to eat, and pay rent, and travel to work - and pay for medicines, or schools . . . In fact, waiters etc. don't get a free ride anywhere that I've seen. Perhaps the crafty restaurateur had also read Proverbs 12:24: The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor.

I see where workers at Walmart are paid an average of $24,000 a year, and need government subsidies to live (that figure is artificially inflated by including managers, as ordinary workers struggle to earn $17,000). Meanwhile, Walmart's owners blissfully wallow in torrents of money they couldn't possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes ($115 billion as of March 2013). To my simplistic way of thinking, this means the US government is subsidizing the Walton family to the tune of about $1 billion a year. I hope they pay their taxes in gratitude. The enterprising Mr Bezos, of Amazon fame, pays his workers about the same, but makes them wait in line to be frisked after their twelve-hour shifts - on their own time. Well-paid workers don't normally steal because they don't want to lose their jobs, and they also tend to respect generous employers more than tightwads. Look no further than Ephesians 4:28: Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

For us, the envious foreigners who don't live in Godzone, it is a total mystery why anybody would want to crush his workers into the dirt by depriving them of a profit to their toil. I'm an employer. If I knew my workers couldn't afford to pay their children's school fees, I wouldn't be able to look them in the face. What drives US companies to pay their CEOs 354 times an average worker's wage when, 60 years ago, CEOs were satisfied with only 20 times as much? A few years ago, the CEO of Caterpillar Corporation was asked by his production line workers why they hadn't received a pay raise for 10 years whereas the firm's senior executives were getting more and more every year. The CEO replied that the company had to pay internationally competitive salaries for its top executives. At the time, the CEO of Kubota, the only competitor for Caterpillar, was earning one-tenth of the Caterpillar CEO's $22.7 million annual take.

Salaries here in the workers' paradise have long been controlled by the government for the purpose of making sure that workers received adequate profit for their toil. It goes back a long way, almost to the time of Federation, in 1901. One of the earliest moves of the new government of the infant Commonwealth of Australia was to establish a legal basis for ensuring industrial peace and stability through a Federal Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. Unlike another federal court that's been in the news lately that prefers to remain hidden, this was a fully-functioning, adversarial court in which justice was done and was seen to be done. Anybody could bring a case against an employer and, in 1907, some unhappy workers did just that. They were not being paid a proper wage, as the law demanded, and the court found in their favor: Every employer, the judge ruled, was required to pay his workers a wage commensurate with ". . . the normal needs of an average employee, regarded as a human being in a civilized community." However, the killer point (from the owner's point of view) was this: it had to be paid regardless of the owner's capacity to pay. Crying poor didn't work (note that, Mr Bezos). The Harvester Judgement, as it was known, has shaped the industrial landscape of this country to the present; we do not accept that grinding workers into the dirt to save a few extra dollars is the action of a reasonable human being in a civilized country. We have a much higher minimum wage than the United States, and our unemployment rate is far lower. We do not have, and would not tolerate, a permanent underclass of disempowered workers on starvation wages.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth

[yeoman6987]

2. Waiters

I am torn by this to be honest. It really depends on where you work. I waited tables and made a lot of money on tips but made a measly amount per hour. I am not sure that I would want to make 15 dollars an hour and not allow tips. i would have made less money overall for sure. However, Walmart is different because they do not allow tips or it is not customary so their per hour should be raised.