Am I the only one that gets tired of us taxpayers having to subsidize the businesses of mega corporations? Walmart, and some other companies, pay as little as $7.25/hour (the Federal minimum wage) where allowed. Working at that wage for 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, will get you $15,080, BEFORE taxes. In school and for personal exercises, I’ve estimated the cost of living, for one person, at around $30,000 to $40,000 a year.  It goes without saying that people working at this wage cannot sustain themselves without government assistance and probably other help. Some solutions?

Raise the Minimum Wage – just raise that minimum wage on a national level to $10 or $15/hour. Many people have a problem with this idea because they’re afraid that companies will do one of two things: (a) reflect the cost of paying their workers more in their product/service prices or; (b) lay off workers because there’s less money to go around. I’m no economist, but here’s my take: these things may be true in the interim, but they are small side-effects of a much bigger positive change. Let’s say you go from having $7.25/hour to having $15/hour. First of all, you’ll likely no longer qualify for Food Stamps, and secondly, you’ll SPEND more. Why wouldn’t you? You have more money to spend, and you can now afford more things, both essentials and luxury goods (things like new, snappy electronics and nice vacations). It is this increased spending, and thus increased demand, which has the capacity to create jobs. Therefore, I would posit that anyone losing a job because of the minimum wage will probably get it back, and the companies that complain that they’ll have to “lose money” to pay for workers could actually get MORE money from people who have more money to spend. Everyone involved ends up in a better place.

Let the Government Employ People – it’s been done before during the Great Depression. We have large numbers of projects that need doing and a shortage of people to do them. If we offered people more than Corporate America does and trained them to do new kinds of work (e.g. construction), those people would leave the companies that are taking advantage of them and those companies would be forced to either close or raise their wages to attract employees. This program can be utilized not only by the under-paid, but by those who have no job and need one. It’s a fine alternative to conventional welfare programs that invest in people but produce no immediate and direct benefit for everyone else.

Unionize – By requiring companies like Walmart to honor unions, we can give collective bargaining power to their employees, allowing them to leverage something that they can’t do right now. They can effectively say “If you do not agree to pay us well, we will walk off the job, close your store, and make you lose money…and you can’t fire us in retribution!”

Collectivize – To take it a step further, there is also a pipe dream known as collectivization, in which community members (particularly the customers of the business) and/or workers could work together to create a collective/cooperative that raises funds and offers to buy a store from a company. This is not a likely possibility, as such a sale would be difficult to mount anywhere, particularly an impoverished community, but if it were effective, it could lead to a business that first and foremost serves employees and customers and NOT outside shareholders. To be fair, numerous challenges would exist in this plan even if it were pulled off. Large corporations are unlikely to start licensing their products to a small collective operation. This would require someone to have expertise in finding and ordering products, which could be a huge expense. It would also require good management, marketing, and legal parts of the team. With all that said, though, I still think it could prove a useful (and interesting) idea if anyone attempted it with a big-box store.

If we get creative and come up with solutions to the problem of horrifically under-paid workers, we can build a better economy for everyone.