WASHINGTON Two of the Senates top supporters of workers, Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, have gone on the attack against corporate subsidies and irresponsibility.
And though their legislation will go nowhere in the GOP-run 115th Congress, the two lawmakers are laying down markers for future legislative action to help workers.
Sanders bill is a direct attack on corporations with Wal-Mart and Amazon in the lead whose wages are so low their workers must also use federal subsidies to survive. It would impose a 100 percent federal tax on the firms for the amounts the government shells out to aid the affected workers.
Warren would mandate federal charters, not lax state ones, for large firms. The federal charters would come with tough requirements for corporate accountability to communities and workers and ban corporate political contributions unless 75 percent of both shareholders and directors OK them. Shed also reinstate the ban dead for 35 years on stock buybacks. And workers would get 40 percent of the seats on corporate boards, as in Germany.
Both measures aim at the largest corporations, especially those like Wal-Mart and Amazon, worth at least $1 billion, which also pay workers starvation wages, in Sanders words, and count on taxpayers to pick up the tab.
Sanders cited a new non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about firms and poverty wages. About 20 percent of families with a worker earning up to the federal minimum wage -- currently $7.25 per hour -- 13 percent of families with a worker earning above the federal minimum to $12 per hour, and 5 percent of families with a worker earning $12.01 to $16 per hour were in poverty" between 1995-2016, his GAO summary said.
All over this country, many Amazon employees, who work for the wealthiest person on earth, are paid wages so low they cant make ends meet. Thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low, including 1 out of 3 of its workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to The New Food Economy.
Bottom line: The taxpayers of this country should not have to subsidize employees at a company owned by Mr. Bezos who is worth $155 billion. That is absurd.
Amazon has been less than forthcoming with information about their employment practices. What we do know is Amazons median employee pay is only $28,446 9 percent less than the industry average and well below what constitutes a living wage in the United States. Further, we believe many of Amazons workers are employed by temporary staffing agencies and contractors and make even less than the median Amazon employee.
Warren said her Corporate Accountability Act would bring runaway executives to heel.
"There's a fundamental problem with our economy. For decades, workers helped create record corporate profits but have seen their wages hardly budge.
To fix this, we need to end the harmful corporate obsession with maximizing shareholder returns at all costs, which sucked trillions of dollars away from workers and necessary long-term investments. My bill will help the American economy return to the era when American companies and American workers did well together."
PAI