Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–February 21, 2014. Gap’s announcement that it will raise its own minimum wage to $9.00 an hour in 2014 and $10 an hour next year represents a major victory by working people in their growing campaign to raise wages and working standards. While Gap has more work to do both in the United States and with its supply chain in countries like Bangladesh, this wage increase is a turning point.
The Gap’s decision exposes the greatest economic fraud of our time: that large employers cannot pay their employees fair wages. With one decision, the Gap has stripped the oligarch of his clothes and changed the economic debate in America.
So now Wal-Mart is exposed. The landscape is clear. What will the largest employer in our country, owned by the world’s richest family, do?
Walmart workers have been protesting and striking, demanding justice. What is Walmart’s answer?
As a first small step, Walmart workers, like all workers need a federal minimum wage of at least $10.10 an hour. But Walmart can do better than that. It must agree to its workers demands to stop using low wages and abusive scheduling practices to condemn its workers to poverty – and agree to the $25,000 a year minimum.
Then we can start to get to work. Everything that should constitute a normal working life – from a national living wage to paid sick days, among many other improvements – should move forward swiftly and with genuine purpose under the combined leadership of Wal-Mart, all of corporate America, and the labor movement.
The AFL-CIO, and all American workers, are ready to meet the challenge of falling wages and rising inequality that has been growing painfully for decades. The Gap has issued an invitation to Wal-Mart, and offered America a new path forward. Will Wal-Mart respond and join the tens of millions who deserve a better future?
Source: aflcio.org
