As disorganized and dysfunctional as the Occupy movement was, we as a country owe them a great debt for changing the political conversation to highlight wealth inequality. It's not going to be easy to correct it even now, but it certainly wouldn't have gotten easier if we'd kept going down the same path.
The question now is what to do about it. A change in taxation definitely helps, but the Hostess closing really highlights the problem in hedge funds buying distressed companies and bleeding them dry.
Another fascinating labor issue at the moment is what's going on in and around Walmart. I'll admit to not liking Walmart and avoiding shopping there whenever possible. The only time I've been in a Walmart in the past 10 years was when I need to buy something at 5AM and they were the only store open (long and not very interesting story). Walmart is evil. They're not unmitigated evil, I know, but their core retail strategy rests upon abuse of its labor force.
I saw an excerpt from one of their internal documents about their pay scale and they start people at $8 an hour and then the maximum annual is raise is 60 cents an hour. So a perfect employee has to work for 4 years to get their pay rate up to $10 an hour. And then they limit hours to prevent most employees from receiving benefits. So if you top out at 29 hours per week (the typical cutoff for benefits being 30 hours), your maximum annual earnings at $10.40 an hour are $15,678.00. The federal government considers $23,000 to be the poverty line for a family of 4. Does that sound okay to you?
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