09.11.13
The six figure explainer gets in a huff
Perfectly illustrating the daily attitudes of the Culture of Lickspittle in which all are against all for the sake of the top, Sandy Banks, one of the Los Angeles Times’ very well-compensated star pundits, on Monday, complaining about McDonald’s strikers wishing to double their take home:
Fast-food workers have become the current face of a resurging labor movement. Employees of fast-food restaurants in cities across the country have been striking, protesting and rallying for pay raises that would practically double their average hourly wage.
My heart is with the workers; the industry’s typical take-home pay leaves many stranded in poverty with no room for advancement.
But my mind rebels when I contemplate what a raise like that suggests about our priorities and the value of an educated populace.
How do you justify paying $15 an hour for someone to bag fries? That’s almost on par with the average hourly wage of a paramedic, whose job involves saving lives.
Banks makes six figures a year writing color and opinion columns for the Los Angeles Times. She is self-absorbed, apparently not realizing that you could easily rephrase her paragraph:
How do you justify paying $125,000 a year for someone to write whatever comes into their head once or twice a week? That’s
almost on par with the average hourly wagefour to five times the annual pay of a paramedic, whose job involves saving lives.
“I do applaud the audacity of the workers’ demands,” Banks adds. “We need to raise the national minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour, beyond even the $9 that President Obama is asking Congress to approve. And we ought to use this fast-food campaign to launch a public conversation about the link between corporate greed and the proliferation of low-paying jobs.”
And then she adds another gripe about the theoretical wage increase for fast-food workers — which hasn’t happened — using what her daughter earns as further context:
But we undercut our message that preparation matters when we pay the cashier at Carl’s Jr. more than my college-educated daughter earns teaching writing to low-income middle-school students — so they can go to college.
While she has made a point about the necessity of making a reasonably-priced college education for everyone, nowhere in her piece does she mention her own great good fortune, a rarity, in the modern American economy.
Perhaps an editor could have pointed this out. Perhaps one did and it made no difference because Sandy Banks is one of the winners, a star here in southern California. And no one tells our chosen anything. It’s they who do the telling.
In the business section of the Times, Monday, on Richard Trumka:
In a fiery speech Monday, the leader of the nation’s largest labor federation took aim at top American corporations and the U.S. Supreme Court, which he accused of waging a “war on democracy.”
Speaking to thousands of union members at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, President Richard Trumka denounced the “powerful forces in America today who want our country to be run by and for the rich.”
He singled out Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, saying “their whole business model is about keeping the people who work for them poor,” as well as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whom he called an “apostle of greed” for his efforts to limit collective bargaining by public employee unions.
Trumka’s scorching remarks came on the second day of a convention that he has sought to portray as a crucial turning point for a shrinking labor movement that has seen membership fall to just 11% of American workers, down from 35% in the 1950s.