Bravo ! Fascinating, illuminating, and even entertaining.

As an aside, I spent the last several years working in the plastic recycling business. We paid our workers unconscionably low wages, and so did all of our competitors. Most of the workers in my plant, and in every plant that I know about, received some form of public assistance in order to survive. What’s tragic about that of course is that we were paying minimum wage. We could have paid more and in fact sometimes we really wanted to pay more, but we were always afraid that if we did that we would cease being competitive. My partners and I were happy when the minimum wage would rise because we would know that we would be paying our workers more but would continue to be on a level playing field with our competition.

Talk about corporate welfare! The government benefits that our workers received might as well have gone directly into our own pockets.

The irony of course is that we really needed the government to step up and raise the minimum wage. We would have preferred that to the way things worked.