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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (25007)	3/6/2005 7:18:03 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Respond to of 116555

Nathan Newman dissects Sen. Rick Santorum's yearning for the past on labor and wage laws: This is as low as it goes, as the GOP fights to expand sub-minimum wage sweatshops across the country. Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum is leading the charge for a GOP bill that would ostensibly raise the minimum wage by $1.10 per hour, but in reality would cut wages for millions of American workers and expand unregulated sweatshops across the country. As this Economic Policy Institute analysis details, the bill is a trojan horse for assaulting workers rights. Licensing Sweatshops: While a $1.10 per hour minimum wage increase by itself would help 1.8 million workers, Santorum includes a poison bill exempting any business with revenues of $1 million or less from regulation -- raising the exemption from the current $500,000 level. The upshot: while 1.2 million workers could qualify for a minimum wage increase, another 6.8 million workers, who work in companies with revenues between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per year, would lose their current minimum wage protection. And an even larger number of businesses, those with revenues under $7 million, would be exempt from fines under a range of other safety, health, pension and other labor laws. Essentially, the realm of unregulated sweatshops would be expanded and legalized under Santorum's bill. . . . Banning State Minimum Wage Laws . . . With Santorum's bill as law, you would end up with a situation where small and even medium size restaurants and other businesses with tipped employees would be exempt from the federal minimum wage, and state governments would be barred from requiring employers to pay actual wages to tipped workers. Essentially, those workers could be hired for zero dollars and told they had to live only off tips, however little those were. . . . Killing Overtime: It gets worse-- the 40-hour work week would be abolished and companies would not have to pay overtime if they cut hours the next week. . . . Pounding Santorum and the GOP: If progressives miss the opportunity to smash this vote over the head of these rightwing politicians, they are truly brain-dead. While voters are closely divided on a range of social issues, even many normally Republican voters support raising the minimum wage. It's the best wedge issue in the progressive arsenal, and we get to skewer the GOP for hypocrisy on states rights.