Fast-food workers in cities around America joined together in protest for a $15 per hour minimum wage, and while our minimum wage does need to be higher, America should also focus on imposing a maximum wage.
Congress established the minimum wage in 1938 under the Fair Labor Standards Act as a way to help stabilize post-Depression America. Before the FLSA, workers had virtually no rights in America. They were subjected to the will of their employers. People often worked in terrible conditions for mere pennies a day. The FLSA helped protect workers from exploitation.
Unfortunately, most employers have found other ways to exploit their workers and the American people through tax breaks and loopholes, causing the wealthiest Americans to make substantially more than middle-class Americans.
According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, American CEOs get paid 354 times more than their average-paid employee, which is among the largest pay gap in the world. The next highest country,
Switzerland, is less than half that. Swiss CEOs get paid 148 times more than their average employee.
Whoever is going to be our next president, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or one of the many Republicans running for office, will have to address this gross income inequality. The future president will have to figure out how to reduce what is probably the highest disparity between average Americans and the top 1percent.
There has been talk about raising the minimum wage or revamping our tax system, but the best way to reduce income inequality is to create a maximum wage. It makes no sense that we have a pay floor but no pay ceiling.
This maximum wage doesn’t have to be a set number, but there needs to be some boundary. There’s no reason for hoarding all the money in America, especially when most of that money goes to offshore banks to evade taxes.
We can make a set ratio of pay. For example, CEOs and business owners can’t get paid more than 150 times their lowest-paid employee. Business owners who make over that threshold will either have to invest the excess money or the government will tax it all.
This might sound like an anti-capitalist, anti-market rule, but it’s what we need to sustain our capitalist system. Our economy will fail if we keep allowing corporate over human rights. People have a right not to be exploited. And people who work for a company have a right to that company’s wealth.
Places like McDonald’s can’t survive without the cashiers and cooks, and companies need janitors and repairmen. They’re the ones who are directly making money and keeping a corporation afloat, so they’re the ones who deserve a larger portion of a company’s wealth.
CEOs and business owners are the job creators of America. If they’re not using their profit and salaries to invest and create more jobs, then why should we pay them so much money? Wealthy Americans who hoard their money or hide it overseas are hurting our economy.
A maximum wage isn’t a new concept. Louisiana’s polarizing, yet fascinating former governor, Huey P. Long, suggested imposing a maximum wage. When he was a U.S. senator in the ‘30s, Long proposed capping all personal fortunes at $5 to 8
million, which would be about $60 to 90 million today. While we are in similar circumstances as we were in the ’30s, perhaps it’s time to revive some of the proposed policies of that era.
People have argued fast food workers don’t deserve $15 an hour. They do unskilled labor, so they shouldn’t be compensated like skilled workers.
Fine, if that’s the standards by which we’re going to live, then CEOs and business owners don’t deserve to be paid 354 times their average-paid employee. Their role is important in the business, but not 354 times more important. What do American CEOs do that’s more important than Swiss CEOs?
The fact is all full-time workers contribute to businesses. We need the unskilled labor as much as the skilled labor. At the end of the day, Dominos is always going to need someone to deliver pizza, and Walmart is always going to need cashiers.
Cody Sibley is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Opelousas, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @CodySibley.