Wage

Somebody’s gonna hurt someone,
Before the night is through.
Somebody’s gonna come undone,
There’s nothin’ we can do.
— The Eagles, Heartache Tonight

It was not your usual celebration to mark the launch of a new venture. While Secretary of State for Scotland David ‘Fluffy’ Mundell was opening a food bank upstairs from a baker’s in Dumfries town centre, noisy demonstrators gathered in the street outside demanding he came down to explain himself. But ‘Fluffy’ chose to treat his constituents with contempt and slink out the back door under police protection and into a waiting car.
Photo by Stuart Littlewood

If you don’t mind working hard—and partying even harder—why not get a business degree, take a couple of state and federal tests, and become a Wall Street trader?
These are the people who are the current crop of Gordon Gekkos—you know, the pretend-fictional character portrayed by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. The men spend thousands of dollars on suits, ties, and cocaine. The women spend thousands just to own a closet of Jimmy Choo shoes.
But their existence is shrouded by a coop they call an office or cubicle. Their tools are multiple phone lines and computer screens.

While the general public decides to reject fast food served up by McDonald’s and dozens of other fast food chains, McWorkers are showing disdain for McDonald’s in a different way. On Wednesday, thousands of protesters from cities around the country stormed McDonald’s Oak Brook headquarters, demanding that the hourly wage for McDonald’s employees be raised to $15 an hour.

A complex class system exists in the United States, but the mass media and political rhetoric generally reduces it to three components — one middle class, and two economic generalizations — rich and the poor. Indeed the term “class” itself, as a means of defining the economic and social status of the population, has been fading away. There are, of course, a number of other classes, particularly the all-important capitalist class.

The fight for the $15 an hour wage is alive and strong in Washington State, for faculty, AKA, professors at the college level. Think hard how the majority of faculty teaching young and old in Washington state, known for Bezos of Amazon, Gates of Microsoft, and Big Planes Brought to you by Intelligence Monitoring Boeing, are precarious, working semester-to-semester and quarter-to-quarter and subject to the whine or whim of disgruntled, uninformed and poorly formed students. One bad evaluation, or one helicopter parent against the teacher’s politics, and, bam, bye-bye $3100 a class.

Across the United States, the campaign for raising the minimum wage to 15 dollars is gaining momentum. From cities such as traditionally left wing Olympia, Washington, to more moderate Atlanta, Georgia, activists are pushing for better wages- and they’re starting to win the debate.

For those of us who came of age sometime in the late 80s to early 90s the date October 21, 2015 has special significance in terms of both nostalgia and excitement. For those who don’t grasp the reference immediately this is the day that Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) travel to in the film Back to the Future 2. The purpose of the trip was to prevent Marty’s future son (also played by Fox) from taking part in an armed robbery that sends the McFly family on a downward spiral (Doc Brown having already taken the trip to the future and witnessed all this).

Henry Ford was a smart fellow. As a matter of fact, he was much smarter than the current ruling junta of the much-envied and much-maligned 1%, because they still haven’t yet figured out what Henry realized in the early Twenties. In addition to inventing the assembly line, he shrewdly calculated the ratio of the worker-wage-purchaser cycle, such that he determined precisely the minimum hourly wage he could pay his workers, vis-a-vis the maximum price tag he could put on his Model T, in order for his workers to be able to buy their own product, i.e. his cars.

One.   Seven Nobel Laureates in Economics endorse the higher minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016, saying it does not lead to lower fewer jobs.