Willard And Low-Wage Jobs

There are two ways that a businesses can improve its profits -- either sell more of the product or service they offer, or cut the wages (and benefits) of their employees. If you have wondered how American business has continued to thrive (especially corporate America) while the country still has a sluggish economy, it is because the corporations have chosen the second method -- and while it is devastating for the country as a whole, it is working to improve corporate profits.

Corporations are still exporting the good American jobs (like manufacturing jobs) to foreign countries, destroying the power of unions, and stealing worker productivity by keeping wages stagnant in spite of increased worker productivity. They are doing this with the help of their Republican puppets in Congress -- and they can more quickly increase this process of redistributing income from workers to corporations (and their executives), if they can put a Republican (like Willard Mitt Romney) in the White House. That's why they have given so many millions to Willard's super-PACs.

Meanwhile, the country is struggling to overcome the loss of the good-paying jobs. While their has been some job creation in the private sector, as the chart above shows, most of the new jobs are low-wage jobs -- meaning even if people are able to replace their lost job with a new one, they will probably have to work for much less in income (and benefits). The good jobs are still going to other countries, where workers can more easily be abused.

Willard Mitt Romney has claimed to be a job creator. The truth is that he and his company, Bain Capital, have been responsible for destroying or shipping overseas more jobs than they ever created -- and the few jobs their companies have created are mostly low-wage, low-benefit jobs. A perfect example of this is the jobs created at Staples (one of the companies Bain took over). Here is a picture of employment from that company (from Under The Mountain Bunker):

41 percent are part-time jobs.

Hourly wages for sales associates are less than $9 an hour.

Retail salespeople make about $20,670 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is lower than the federal poverty line for a family of four.

Staples describes its own workforce this way: “Many of our associates, particularly in retail stores, are in entry-level or part-time positions with historically high rates of turnover.”

Staples has been listed by the National Employment Law Project as one of the 50 largest low-wage employers in the country.

In 1987, a year after Staples was founded, there were 13,347 office supply stores across the country. Ten years later that number was cut in half, to just 6,178 office supply stores.

When Staples was founded in 1986, the market share of small and medium-sized sellers of office supplies was 20 percent. By 1998, it had plunged to just four percent.

The market share of large superstores, meanwhile, shot up from less than one percent to 20 percent during that same period.

Are these the kind of jobs you want to see in America. If Willard is elected, that's all America will get. The good jobs will continue to leave the country, and the corporations will continue to get tax breaks for exporting those jobs.