[ad_1]
WASHINGTON – Senator Bernie Sanders is so ashamed of Amazon that the online retailer has announced a new minimum wage of $ 15 last month. Now the Vermont freelancer has turned to another thorny, low-wage competitor: Walmart.
In a bill introduced Thursday, entitled Stop WALMART Act, Sanders essentially followed the same strategy that led Amazon to say that it would increase the starting salary in its distribution centers.
"You have the richest family in the US, worth $ 180 billion," Sanders told HuffPost, referring to Walton, which owns a majority stake in Walmart. "They pay the starvation wage of the workers."
The Sanders' Law on Subsidies to Illicit Employers, adopted by Sanders in September, would nullify subsidies, punish large companies that pay enough workers to qualify for social protection programs. The abbreviated version of its name, Stop BEZOS Act, has directly hit the head of Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos.
The Walmart bill – more formally, the Social Welfare Withdrawal Act for all large monopolies accumulating tax revenues – also links a leading company to an unsavory practice. In this case, it involves share buybacks, which have risen sharply this year as a result of the large corporate tax cut adopted by the Republicans last December.
Once again, the goal is to increase the wages of the lowest paid workers. According to the proposal, large corporations would not be allowed to buy back their own shares if all their employees did not earn at least $ 15 an hour and if their RAA did not earn more than 150 times the salary of their median employee.
A spokesman for Walmart said the starting salary for employees at his store was at least $ 11 an hour or more in some markets. "We have increased our starting salaries by more than 50% over the last three years," the company said in a statement, adding that its average hourly pay was US $ 17.50, taking into account social benefits such as Healthcare.
Many employers have started paying higher wages as the economic situation has improved in recent years, forcing companies to compete more with workers. In the cases of Amazon and Walmart, it is difficult to say to what extent their wage increases are due to the company's strategy, public pressure or simply market forces. The higher minimum wages imposed by cities and states are also a factor.
Although the new Sanders Bill mentions Walmart in its title, the legislation would apply to any business meeting the criteria it states. It is unlikely that the bill will become law, mainly because Republicans still control the Senate and the White House.
But even Democrats do not necessarily subscribe to Sanders' bills – no senator co-sponsored his Amazon legislation. Some Liberals even argued that the Stop BEZOS law would be bad public policy if it were passed. ("My friends of focus groups," said Sanders Wednesday).
Share buybacks have generated a lot of Liberal anger this year as corporate funds are channeled to shareholders rather than workers. Reducing a company's supply of securities on the market increases its value and generally benefits the company's executives, who are at least partially paid in shares and receive bonuses based on stock performance.
Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Who introduced a complementary bill in the House, pointed out that share buybacks were not even fully legal until a 1982 decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission. "People were not allowed to manipulate actions to enrich their shareholders and enrich their leaders," he said.
Although Sanders wants Walmart and Amazon to pay at least $ 15 an hour, the front-line jobs in the big chain are fundamentally different from those at the online giant's online distribution center. These tend to be more physically demanding and to receive a higher salary. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average moving materials carrier earned $ 14.78 per hour in 2017, while the median retail salesperson earned just $ 11.24.
This difference does not bother Sanders. "At the last word, whether you work in a warehouse or somewhere else, you have to eat, you have to put a roof over your head," he said.
[ad_2]
Source link
