Dear Editor:

Every wage earner’s hope is that their hard work will garner sufficient income to provide a decent standard of living. Workers want safe housing, medical care when it’s needed, education for their children so they can go on to earn a living, and a comfortable retirement when they become too aged to work. Sadly this is not always the case. When workers are underpaid, it is a hardship not only for the individual worker but also the community he or she lives in.

Wage earners who earn a fair wage strengthen the local economy because they end up buying things like houses, cars, education for their children, and shopping at local stores. But when workers are systematically underpaid, they become a burden rather than a contributor to the local economy.

For example: when a worker's paycheck is not enough to pay the bills, they get food stamps, when a wage earner gets sick, it’s his family who suffers economically, or when a aged worker is unable to continue working and has no pension, he becomes a burden to others. Businesses that underpay their workers are relying upon public welfare to fill the gap.

Workers who have formed unions have been able to curb this sort of abuse. Before workers formed unions, there was no such thing as overtime pay, workers were expected to put in long hours in unsafe conditions. Wages were so low that whole families, including children, had to toil in inhumane conditions just sustain a meager living.

Plutocrats love this. They want people to work for less pay because it is more profitable for them. Plutocrats such as the Koch brothers and their front organizations such as American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the American Enterprise Institute work tirelessly to undermine workers rights to form unions and weaken other worker protections.

Slave owners opposed abolition for the same reasons modern plutocrats oppose unions: it is bad for that kind of business. But businesses can and should pay a wage that sustains the worker, and no business should rely on public welfare to exist.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay