However, I do not believe that the Democratic Party is on the side of the angels in teaming up with the president to offer amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in this country. Here the party is looking out for the party at the expense of the American people. The party wants to register millions of former illegals; Bush wants to serve his corporate masters who want an endless supply of cheap labor.

Those industries who have recruited and embraced the illegal work force have been able to hold or decrease wages for Americans who want to work in those industries. Illegals often buy identities of Americans who are the victims of identity theft; the consequences for the victims have been catastrophic in some cases. ‘Comprehensive’ reform, if passed by Congress, will be the issue which Republicans seize to regain the Senate in ‘08.

If you subscribe to laissez-faire capitalism, you’d better be prepared to adjust to whatever comes your way because nobody’s going to hold your hand and nobody’s going to give you a leg up.

I’m not an economist but to me it makes good sense to increase the minimum wage: you might pull a few people out of poverty, and the extra pocket change gets recycled back into the market: everybody wins!

The argument is that if you pay employees more, you have to make cuts elsewhere. Au contraire, I say. For example, I live near a Target that is seriously understaffed. Hiring more people costs money, right? Whenever I’m there, the lines at the checkout are obscene, and usually bad enough that people with carts full of stuff just give up and abandon them. Now, it seems to me that if you added a few more cashiers, you’d make the buying experience more pleasant for everyone — and you’d then get more repeat customers — plus all those cart abandoners would buy their stuff instead of leaving it in the store for an overworked employee to sort and put away. I mean, the merchandise in an abandoned cart is usually worth more money than a Target employee makes in a shift. And yet Target doesn’t want to pay more cashiers. It’s mind-boggling.

It seems to me that if you gave people decent wages and vacation time, they’d be well-rested, happier employees, which is good for your bottom line because it makes doing business with your company a better experience, which makes it more likely people will do business with you. After it took me an hour to buy shampoo and drain cleaner last weekend, I’ll think twice before I go into that Target again. But decision makers are spending too much time diving through their pool of gold coins to consider such controversial business strategies as “paying your employees enough money to eat and pay rent.”

The Toronto Star is currently running a series of articles on raising the minimum wage in Ontario and the horrible situation of people currently trying to get by on this starvation wage. It makes for interesting reading.

The amazing thing is that the current government (Liberal) is about the raise the minimum wage for the 4th time since taking power in Oct. 2003 and it’s still a starvation wage. If I’m not mistaken, the previous Conservative government froze the minimum wage for six years. The Conservatives also significantly reduced welfare benefits during their reign of terror. I think the cuts were about 25% and things have barely budged since the Liberals took power. Being on welfare in Ontario and particularly in Toronto, where a 1 bedroom apartment can easily cost $1200 month or more, is a terrible thing. I don’t think many people choose welfare. They’d rather work. However, it’s really hard to find a job when your welfare payments are so low that you can’t even afford bus fare to go on a job search. It’s a real vicious circle for many.

All this being said (and I apologize for being such a Canadian chauvinist), I’d rather live in Canada than the States. I believe our wingnut to normal human being ratio is lower than that of the States, we have universal healthcare (no, it’s not perfect, but the alternative to the south, unless you’re independently wealthy, is truly frightening), and our idea of middle-of-the-road liberal would pass for flaming Communist in your country. I admit though, that a week in Florida in February can be awfully tempting, as long as you take out iron-clad traveller’s health insurance!

In most corporations I have experience with, the people who get the highest wages are the people most directly involved in the money part of the business — i.e., finance, acquisitions, sales and marketing. Then comes research and development,. Personnel, administration, and facility management/security fall in here somewhere. Production and manufacturing are usually at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. I believe most corporations contract with other companies to clean the offices, maintain the grounds, and staff the company cafeteria. Of course, companies with low bids get the contracts.

People in the higher strata tend to think they are the heart and substance of the company, and they see people in the strata below only as cost. When the suits decide they need to be “leaner and meaner” and lay people off to boost the bottom line, most of the layoffs will be taken out of production/manufacturing and research/development. Usually the suits (who came up through the ranks from marketing or sales or finance) have no idea how their products actually are created and stocked on retail shelves. All they know is that there are a lot of employees in those departments, and those employees are “cost”; therefore, they’re the first to go.

As for the contract workers who clean the toilets and wipe the cafeteria tables — they are invisible.

I remember once watching a contract worker who had just delivered a baby two weeks before — she didn’t have health insurance or even paid vacations and couldn’t afford time off — take coffee and snacks into a conference room filled by the overfed and overpaid sales team — a pack of losers who couldn’t sell water in a desert — and she was actually wobbly from exhaustion. And I could see through the glass that the sales guys didn’t even look at her or acknowledge her presence except to bark that they wanted milk in their coffee. I wanted to break heads. I still get steamed up thinking about it.

We all know that the income gap is obscene and getting worse.

For decades, I have had some radical opinions about wage structure. Mostly, I believe that the more disgusting [cleaning toilets], more physically damaging or risky[coal mining, meat-packing, hard labor] or more boring [assembly line, typing pool] the work is, the higher should be the pay. It is those who enjoy life during their work hours who should be held to receiving merely adequate wages. They have 40 hours of each week in which they are happy, challenged and emotionally rewarded. Into this latter category, I can list entertainers, business and government leaders attending conferences, and all the ‘people helpers’ rewarded by the ever-changing interesting challenges that reward and fulfill their abilities, giving a rich depth to their lives not available to those toiling within the first category.

Pie in the sky idea….I agree it ain’t gonna happen. But I wager that if we had such a system, our valuing of the present-day lower classes and the work they do would shift dramatically.