I recently heard a replay of an NPR interview with Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Disney cofounder Roy Disney, about how disgusted she is with how Disney employees and those at many other companies are treated today. In just 13 short minutes she planted the seeds in my head for what has grown into a possible solution for so many people that should be able to get broad support from a large majority of Americans across the political spectrum.
Some snippets from the interview that captures todays reality for workers compared to her grandfather’s time and how we went from Disney sidewalk sweepers that gat a living wage, health care and a retirement to ling on food stamps today.
In Grandpa's day, a job at Disneyland was not a gig. A person could expect to own a home, raise a family, access decent health care, retire in some security on just what he earned there at the park. Mind you; Grandpa fought the unions, and he fought them hard. He wasn't an angel, and everyone wasn't well and fairly treated across the company, something that's well-known. But I think in his core, he had a very deep commitment to the idea that he had a moral obligation to every human being that worked for him. That actually wasn't such an uncommon attitude for CEOs of the day.
But in that time, a person, even the people who were sweeping the sidewalk in those days, had a salary. And with that salary came, you know, a retirement plan, sick days, health care and all of the things that we associate with a thriving middle class. And one by one by one, at Disney and everywhere else in the American economy, those things were stripped away.
I didn't want to believe it at first, either, but they weren't exaggerating anything. And when I sat down with people in a room full of 25 people (Disney employees) and I asked, how many of you are on food stamps, and every hand in the room went up, I wanted to throw up on the spot. I was so angry.
When my grandfather died in 1971, a new mindset was beginning to take hold of the American and, eventually, the global imagination. Jiminy Cricket got shown the door by economist Milton Friedman, among others, who popularized the idea of shareholder primacy. Milton Friedman's pivotal op-ed in the New York Times was followed by decades of concerted organizing and lobbying by business-focused activists, along with a sustained assault on every law and regulation that had once held businesses' worst impulses in check.
And soon enough, this new mindset had taken hold across every business school and across every sector. Profits were to be pursued by any means necessary. Unions were kneecapped. Taxes were slashed, and with the same machete, so was the safety net. The bottom line is that everything that turns a gig into a livelihood was stripped away from an American worker. Job security, paid sick days, vacation time - all of that went away even as the wealthy saw their networks float to unprecedented and, yes, unusable levels.
So my grandfather was not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination. But he would never have taken a $66 million payday in a million years, in part because you just didn't do that then - there was no law against it, but you didn't do it - and partly because if he looked at his workers and they didn't have enough money to put food on the table, I just cannot imagine a universe in which he would have said that was fine with him. And, you know, that's not special to my grandfather. That was how CEOs rolled. There were bad actors, and there were terrible people. But the norms at the time were so different.
Disney is just doing what everybody else does, and they're not even the worst offender. If I told you how bad it was for workers at Amazon or McDonald's or Walmart or any one of a thousand other places you've never heard of, it's not going to hit you as viscerally as if I tell you that 73% of the people who smile when you walk in, who help you comfort that crying baby, who maybe help you have the best vacation you ever had can't consistently put food on the table. It's supposed to be the happiest place on Earth.
What I say is they're humans working in your company, human beings. They have all the same needs and desires that you have. You have to treat them with the dignity you would want to be treated with yourself. Like, that's just the starting point. Then go make all the profit you want to make. But if your business plan starts with exploitation and you can't make - get to profitability without doing that, then you need to go get another business plan. If you really care about your employees - Jeff Bezos, I'm talking to you right now - you should pay them well and maybe make less money and make sure everybody else is making more. They're your fellow human beings, after all. All they want is lives with dignity.
There’s much more in the interview and I highly recommend reading the transcript or giving it a listen. It was the highlighted part her closing statement that opened my eyes to what’s been right in front of our faces and got me angry and thinking. Their are way too many businesses making billions, with CEOs making millions, by exploiting their employees. And who pays the costs of their exploitation? We do in our taxes to provide the exploited with Medicaid, food stamps and huge subsidies for Obamacare plans.
About 70% of the 21 million federal aid beneficiaries worked full time. As of 2014 Walmart's low-wage workers cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing.
Of course the simple solution would be a living minimum wage but that’s not about to happen. My idea for an alternative solution is an exploited worker tax. It would be rather simple. All medium and large companies that profit off the use of exploited workers that result in their employees qualifying for any type of government assistance must pay a tax in the amount of 150% of the cost currently being paid plus administrative costs. The tax would be split between funding the assistance and tax credits for exploited workers including those of smaller companies to whom the tax would not apply.
This would be an easy sell on the left, it would also appeal to many on the right who ideologically hate paying their taxes to provide for “handouts” for others including what are essentially handouts for billionaires. I just ran this by a right leaning coworker and he readily agreed that companies like Walmart, Disney and McDonalds that are awash in profits should pay the cost of federal aid for their workers. He agreed that it should also apply to their subcontractors, franchise employees and gig companies like Uber. He also immediately agreed with “if your business plan starts with exploitation and you can't make - get to profitability without doing that, then you need to go get another business plan”
While I haven’t got the second part fully figured out yet there should also be an exploitation tax on companies the exploit labor in other countries, use subcontractors that do or import from companies that use exploited labor. Perhaps a tax equivalent to the difference between a living wage in the other country and what they are paying. This could be sold on the left as protecting those exploited employees and on both sides as holding companies that move or create jobs in other countries accountable for not creating those jobs here in America. The revenue from this tax would be invested to providing jobs or retraining to those hardest hit over the years by outsourcing or low wage foreign competition. What average joe republican worker wouldn’t support making companies that cost American jobs by using exploited labor in other countries pay for what they are doing to American workers.
For far to long the rich and powerful have pulled the levers of government to weaken unions and exploit their workers to maximize their wealth at any cost and propagandized millions of Americans into supporting this. It’s high time all they pay for the costs to society for their greed. And if companies like Uber, Walmart, McDonalds and hundreds of others can’t be profitable without sucking on the teat of the taxpayer they don’t deserve to be in business. They certainly don’t deserve billions in profits and millions in pay for their CEOs and executives.
While not a minimum wage increase these taxes would effectively create a new minimum wage that would auto increment whenever the income level for the provision of federal aid increases. They would also create an effective minimum wage for outsourced labor reducing the incentive for outsourcing.