42 hedge fund managers on Wall Street earned an average of 2 billion dollars in 2010, that breaks down to approximately 1 million dollars an hour.Steve Helmsley the CEO of UnitedHealthcare “earned” 102 million in 2009 yet millions are without any healthcare coverage, 1 in 5 kids in the US is hungry, and 52,000 factories closed between 2000 and 2010 due to corporate profiteering through offshoring and outsourcing.
For thirty years – Republicans have been waging a war on labor – a war on working people, and they’re winning, as unionized workers now represent just 7 percent of the workforce today, when it used to be 33 percent of the workforce 50 years ago.
GOP Governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, Chris Christie in New Jersey, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Paul Lepage in Maine and Rick Scott in Florida, have launched attacks on public sector workers – trying to deny them collective bargaining rights, and Republicans are getting close to their goal of destroying the Post Office along with half-million unionized postal workers.
Sadly, the United States is no longer a place for organized labor, which means it’s no longer a place for the Middle Class. Yet, organized labor once flourished in this country and was respected and rewarded with laws but now thanks to the Corporate Owned Republican Party, those benefits, hard won by the working class, are fading fast.
Today’s minimum wage is a meager $7.25 an hour, which is lower, when adjusted for inflation, than it was 50 years ago, and most jobs today offer a low hourly wage with no benefits at all, so with little available work–as the GOP refuses to invest in our infrastructure to rebuild America and create jobs and prosperity–no pay and no safety net, Poorhouses will return again, those horrible facilities that housed the destitute elderly and were widespread in the US before the creation of the Social Security program in the 1930s. This is what those bought-and-paid-for Republican mean when say Take Our Country Back–back to the days of the poorhouse. Happy Labor Day to us.