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For the past four decades, the majority of American workers have been shortchanged by economic policymaking that has suppressed the growth of hourly wages and prevented greater improvements in living standards. Achieving a secure, middle-class lifestyle has become increasingly difficult as hourly pay for most workers has either stagnated or declined. For millions of the country's lowest-paid workers, financial security is even more fleeting because of unscrupulous employers stealing a portion of their paychecks.
Wage theft, the practice of employers failing to pay workers the full wages to which they are legally entitled, is a widespread and deep-rooted problem that directly harms millions of U.S. workers each year. Employers refusing to pay promised wages, paying less than legally mandated minimums, failing to pay for all hours worked, or not paying overtime premiums deprives working people of billions of dollars annually. It also leaves hundreds of thousands of affected workers and their families in poverty. Wage theft does not just harm the workers and families who directly suffer exploitation; it also weakens the bargaining power of workers more broadly by putting downward pressure on hourly wages in affected industries and occupations. For many low-income families who suffer wage theft, the resulting loss of income forces them to rely more heavily on public assistance programs, unduly straining safety net programs and hamstringing efforts to reduce poverty.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:37AM
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Except when they aren't. There's little point, once again, to definitions that no one else agrees on. Capitalism is about private ownership of capital and the infrastructure, such as capital markets, needed to make that happen. Socialism is merely about ownership of capital by or on the behalf of a society. It can be done in a democratic manner, but it doesn't need to be. For example, the thing you've termed "state capitalism" (which is rather state socialism) in the past is a classic case of non-democratic socialism.
Further, I sense as many times before, that this is just an argument from semantics - defining things in a way to automatically win arguments. Capitalism is defined as bad and socialism defined as good. But reality doesn't fit the spin of the definitions.
It also leads to colossal myopia. In particular, the enormous benefits of our widespread capitalist systems are being roundly ignored when one obsesses about alleged concentration of wealth and power (especially when such concentrating is done by blatantly non-capitalist approaches! What other system is supposed to work when you deliberately break it?) rather than an overall view, such as how beneficial such systems are to the whole of society (after all, the point of socialism is to benefit society as a whole) or the efficacy of the approach.