"while your ideas are obviously well intentioned Im not sure businessess could survive most of them
interesting ideas though..."
Let's look at my rationale for each.
1- Capping the work week. If you have two salaried people who work sixty hours each in a week, that's 120 hours. With a cap, another person would have to be hired to get the same 120 hours of work done.
2- Tax breaks or credits for furloughs or reductions in work week. This would encourage companies to retain workers that they might not otherwise be able to keep. Many companies are already doing this, and their employees feel that it's better to have a cutback than to be terminated.
3- Penalties for sending jobs offshore. This one does cut into Corporate America's ability to do what it bleepin'-A pleases, no question about it. But I think it's necessary to send Corporate America an unmistakable message that some responsibility to communities and this nation as a whole will be demanded from now on, that owning a company is not a marauding license.
4- Looking at positions being changed from hourly to salaried. This is not as prevalent this go-round as it was in the wake of 9/11, but it's still going on. This would go along with the cap on the work week, making it necessary to hire more people to get a given workload accomplished, rather than working a remaining few people much harder, without paying them fairly.
5- A tax on companies doing mass layoffs. Again, very controversial, and probably a whole new area for the law. However, when companies do things (like closing, merging or selling out) that create mass layoffs, they should bear as much as possible of the cost of the layoff's impact on the community, I feel. Whirlpool Corporation recently bought out Maytag and closed all of Maytag's facilities in Newton, Iowa, which is now hurting very badly. I'd like to see more of the societal cost of business decisions like this one come out of owners' pockets, not city, state and Federal budgets.
6- Looking hard at independent contractor arrangements. When an hourly worker loses a job, they're covered in most instances by unemployment insurance, which eases their situation, at least for a time. Independent contractors have nothing but their savings, which - considering how poorly many are paid - can be modest at best. An independent contractor stands a higher chance of needing expensive services if no work is available, like housing assistance. Nothing costs like having the government dole something out.
Anyway, I'd like to see Obama live up to that "Next F.D.R." reputation he garnered back when he was elected, and look harder for ways to keep Americans working. He promised we'd get change, and so far, I must say that promise is being kept. It's just that I think most Americans would prefer folding money.
