Patience, young padawan!
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I like the lack of nuance.
The minimum wage is not a subtle tool. It is not bigger for hard jobs, or smaller for regions with a depressed economy. Within the country, one size fits all. If you pay people beneath this rate, they are doing this job, and not another job; so we donāt have to concern ourselves with the details.
Same here. Dividends are published. It is a simple rule to enforce. There are probably other ways of syphoning money from a company. Given time, we can go after those too.
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I do too. The point of both of these restrictions is to remind everyone that corporations are legal entities defined by statutes and they should only exist to serve the interest of the public.
Economists like to talk about unintended consequences of actions like this. We know that companies will find other tricks, we know that some will think about moving their headquarters to a different country that doesnāt have the same restrictions. Itās all fine. If there are loopholes, just keep closing them. If millionaires and billionaires decide to leave then good riddance, they can take their outsized influence over public policy with them.
Rather than try to limit executive wages, Iād just follow the tax policy of the American golden age (90%+ marginal tax rate above a very large income), but āmaximum wageā laws make sense in a similar way to minimum wage laws. The rich should be thankful they arenāt being eaten.
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Any kind of formulation like that will be subverted to the point of irrelevance. Might as go straight for the jugular and not only penalize these companies but call attention to their practice of profiting off of abusing āthe doleā.
But part of wheeling and dealing is to throw in terms you know wonāt be acceptable. This way it can be dropped, your primary goal is achieved and it looks like you compromised.
Well, in the U.S. at least, the rich may well be thankful instead that their propagandists have created an entire culture that basically indicates thereās no problem with the rich being rich, no matter how obscenely so. The propaganda effort has succeeded to the point that itās just ācommon senseā among most people (including many of the rich themselves) to think of the rich as basically like the rest of us, except that they have a lot of money that theyāre absolutely entitled to.
I do appreciate the Occupy Movement for injecting the idea of the 1% into public discourse, and itās great that Sandersā class-based critique is gaining some traction, but I think itāll be a long time before the rich in the U.S. ever feel thankful that they arenāt being eaten, let alone fearful that they will be. The rest of us have been bamboozled into a false class consciousness, and the sensible among the rich know it.
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This is a daft policy thought up by spineless politicans. Just raise the min wage to the living wage if thats what you want to do!
If Iām correct min wage is currently Ā£6.70 and the living wage currently appears to be Ā£8.25 per hour. I dont think a raise like that is going to put the FTSE companies out of business.
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My fellow commenter Michael Smith asks why the Living Wage isnāt compulsory ?
I fear the despite having lived in the UK, Mr. Doctorow did not pay enough attention to any media other than the left wing press.
The Living Wage is being made compulsory by the Conservative government, backed by a program of fines and public naming and shaming. The tax authorities are specifically tasked with enforcing it.
The Conservative Living Wage is much higher than the minimum wage that the Labour party brought in. A fact strangely absent from the coverage in the left wing media.
This will strike many American readers as odd, but reflect the fact that UK Conservatives arenāt the bunch of religious fanatics led by bozos that Americans so frequently choose to vote for. In the UK, the Conservative Party has a Department of Energy and Climate change, itās official title. We fought both the last 2 elections on increasing in real terms the funding of socialiised medicine, with a system that exposes the half witted half hearted Obamacare for the wasteful and cruel political fudge that it is.
In the UK a woman has a right to a free safe abortion, the morning after pill is widely available including at many supermarkets, together with free and excellent birth control and as a girl will receive so much sex education that many complain of being bored with it. (except in Norther Ireland where the local government is controlled by two competing violent gangs, of the kind that look remarkably like US political parties, corrupt and faith driven)
The Conservative government has pushed through Gay Marriage, in the teeth of opposition from faith groups
Obama canāt be bothered and even if he tried, Americans choose to vote for religious nutters in both parties whoād kill it.
Because Americans vote for people like that
The first UK woman prime minster was a Conservative and the UK had its first Jewish prime minster more than a century ago, and guess what he was a Conservative and not the last.
The Conservative government maintains a complete ban on hand guns, possesion of any sort of firearm is subject to police checks and most police donāt carry guns at all.
More recently the Conservative Prime Minister has required state bodies like the BBC to drop their racist hiring policies. Imagine Obama or any Republican doing that. No I canāt either.
When a large chunk of the UK thought it might be
It does seem like a very indirect way to achieve something that could just as easily be done by raising the minimum wage. Or is he proposing blocking dividends from companies with underpaid overseas employees?
The minimum wage is going up to Ā£7/hr from Ā£6.45/hr, you mean. Increases are being phased in over a number of years, if they in fact decide to keep doing so. Abortion laws were changed under Harold Wilsonās Labour government, the handgun ban was also Labour, the Lib Dems pushed for the marriage laws, and donāt even get me started on what the bastard Tories are doing to the NHS. Oh, and fuck Thatcher, its a shame she didnāt get caught in the Brighton bombing.
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Hear, hear!
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True, and yet ā¦
Part of the value in the U.S. of asserting public control over corporate privileges like limited liability would be to dispute the premise that corporate profit alone will serve the public interest.
It hasnāt and yet that idea is embedded in the legal and popular culture here.
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