in fair wages.

If you had any idea how much money you’re not making… If you had any idea what you should be getting, but are not… Let me give you a few hints: Imagine your paycheck just doubled. Imagine your vacation just doubled. Imagine 6 months paid maternity leave. Imagine that old clunker in the driveway is a Lexus… Imagine 40 hours a week instead of 60… Imagine your health-care is free... Imagine that your retirement benefits are included too… America, get mad! You are working harder and harder for fewer and fewer peanuts! Most EU countries have already set decent standards for corporations to follow. It’s just us, the Americans, who are lagging behind the rest of the civilized world. We work harder, for less, than just about everyone else.

The other part of this equation, however, is that there could be even more money out there to fight over. Wages are currently being held down artificially by cheap foreign labor. Corporate America has forgotten that it is innovation that made America great. It’s just so much easier to ship jobs overseas than it is to come up with clever and better ways to build and produce. Not under my administration. Corporate America will be penalized for every job they take away from deserving Americans.

Now don’t get too overly excited. There are no “freebies” here. I’m talking a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work. No freeloading allowed. I am, and always have been, a hard worker.

You can tell just how much a company thinks of its workers when it does something like Circuit City. It’s laying off 3400 workers to replace them with 3400 cheaper workers. Same jobs, just laying off the more experienced people who have been there longer and gotten a few raises and accrued a few benefits. Bye bye. To be fair, Wall Mart does the same thing, just more often and fewer workers at a time. Yup. Nice guys, huh? Heck, they just about all do it. Workers give them a few years, rack them up some nice profits, then get sacked just to add a few pennies to the stock price.

It’s just not right to screw with people’s lives like that.