Regarding ”Councilman, president call for city’s own minimum wage” (Nov. 19): The Honorable Allen Schulman, president of Canton City Council, stated, and rightly so, “Maybe we should look at the minimum wage. If a billion-dollar corporation is not going to give a decent living wage to its employees, maybe it’s time that local governments force them to.”
This comment was made by someone who has a successful, nationally known and very lucrative law firm but, more important, someone who is compassionate enough as a human being to donate his entire Council president salary to the Stark County Hunger Task Force. Apparently Mr. Schulman has more than enough and feels a moral obligation to help those who are less fortunate than he.
Wal-Mart’s workers — or, as they call them, associates — do not have a union to bargain on their behalf, and any attempts to organize in the past have been suppressed by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is America’s biggest private-sector employer and wealthiest corporation.
You would think that a company with a net Income in 2012 of nearly $17 billion, and whose CEO, Michael Duke, in 2012 had a pay package of $20.7 million, would have the same admirable quality as Mr. Schulman — a charitable, compassionate sense of reality for the needy in our community.
After all, it is Wal-Mart’s “associates,” and not just its consumers, who have enabled the company and its CEO to reap the benefits of having such high corporate and personal wealth.
To raise the wages, and thus the standard of living, for its employees, even as Wal-Mart’s wealth increases, is not only economically right but also morally right.
In Luke 12:48, Jesus said, “ For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”
ROBERT L. WARDEN, PERRY TOWNSHIP
Read more: http://www.cantonrep.com/article/20131122/OPINION/131129833/