Can you name the worst job you’ve ever had? For Cliff Mar­tin, that’s not an easy ques­tion. All three of his cur­rent jobs — deliv­er­ing news­pa­pers, deliv­er­ing mag­a­zines and work­ing as a jan­i­tor — are strong con­tenders. Tak­en togeth­er, they pay so poor­ly that the 20-year-old North­field, Min­neso­ta, native relies on MNsure, the state Med­ic­aid plan, for health­care and lives at home with his father to save mon­ey. But what if Martin’s boss­es had to fork over a fee to the state for pay­ing him so bad­ly? That mon­ey, in turn, could be used to help sup­port Mar­tin and his fel­low low-wage work­ers in a vari­ety of ways, from direct sub­si­dies for food and hous­ing to social pro­grams such as Med­ic­aid or pub­lic transportation.

'Walmart is the country's biggest beneficiary of food stamp dollars, and many of those dollars are coming from its own workers, like me.'-Bene't Holmes, 25

Take­Ac­tion Min­neso­ta, a net­work that pro­motes eco­nom­ic and racial jus­tice in the state, wants to make that fee a real­i­ty. It’s devel­op­ing the frame­work for a bill that it hopes will be intro­duced in 2015 by state leg­is­la­tors who have worked with the net­work in the past. As con­ceived, the ​“bad busi­ness fee” leg­is­la­tion would require com­pa­nies to dis­close how many of their employ­ees are receiv­ing pub­lic assis­tance from the state or fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Com­pa­nies would then pay a fine based on the de fac­to sub­si­dies they receive by exter­nal­iz­ing labor costs onto taxpayers.

Take­Ac­tion Minnesota’s plan is one prong of a larg­er nation­al effort. As pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions grap­ple with how to turn years of pub­lic out­rage over income inequal­i­ty into poli­cies for struc­tur­al change, a net­work of labor and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing groups has seized upon the bad busi­ness fee as a solu­tion that might take off.

Vam­pire businesses

Just how much mon­ey are low-wage busi­ness­es drain­ing from local, state and fed­er­al cof­fers? A study released in April by Amer­i­cans for Tax Fair­ness, a coali­tion of more than 400 orga­ni­za­tions that advo­cate pro­gres­sive tax reform, esti­mat­ed that Wal­mart alone costs tax­pay­ers $6.2 bil­lion annu­al­ly in pub­lic assis­tance. That report draws from a 2013 study by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic staff of the U.S. House Com­mit­tee on Edu­ca­tion and the Work­force, which esti­mat­ed that Wal­mart cost tax­pay­ers, on aver­age, between $3,015 and $5,815 per work­er. For a hypo­thet­i­cal 300-per­son Wal­mart Super­center in Wis­con­sin, that added up to as much as $1.75 mil­lion in pub­lic sub­si­dies per year. Those tax­pay­er dol­lars come in the form of joint fed­er­al-state pro­grams such as Med­ic­aid and the School Break­fast Pro­gram, as well as fed­er­al ones such as the Nation­al School Lunch Pro­gram, the Sec­tion 8 Hous­ing Pro­gram, the Earned Income Tax, Low Income Home Ener­gy Assis­tance and the Sup­ple­men­tal Nutri­tion Assis­tance Pro­gram (SNAP, also known as food stamps).

Amer­i­cans for Tax Fair­ness used the House Democ­rats’ study to extrap­o­late Walmart’s pub­lic-assis­tance bur­den on each state. In Min­neso­ta, for exam­ple, where Wal­mart has 20,997 employ­ees, the pub­lic bur­den totaled $92.7 mil­lion per year. That’s $92.7 mil­lion Wal­mart isn’t pay­ing in wages or ben­e­fits, but that instead is being borne by tax­pay­ers — tax­pay­ers who, of course, include Wal­mart workers.

The study also notes that Wal­mart prof­its from food stamps on the con­sumer end. Accord­ing to the company’s own esti­mates, Wal­mart cap­tures 18 per­cent of the SNAP mar­ket, some $13.5 bil­lion annu­al­ly. The irony is not lost on Wal­mart work­er Bene’t Holmes, a 25-year-old sin­gle moth­er of a 5‑yearold boy. ​“Recent­ly I was forced to apply for food stamps just so my son and I don’t starve. Wal­mart is the country’s biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ry of food stamp dol­lars, and many of those dol­lars are com­ing from its own work­ers, like me,” she writes in an email to In These Times. ​“I want to raise my son in a nice neigh­bor­hood, but when Wal­mart only pays me $8.75 an hour, I can’t afford it. If it weren’t for my par­ents let­ting us live with them, we’d be on the streets. I shouldn’t have to face the real­i­ty of pover­ty and pub­lic assis­tance work­ing at the country’s largest employ­er, but Wal­mart pays hun­dreds of thou­sands of us so lit­tle we can bare­ly stay afloat.”

Wal­mart isn’t alone; there are thou­sands of oth­er low-wage employ­ers. Accord­ing to a Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics report, 1.5 mil­lion hourly work­ers report­ed earn­ing the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage of $7.25 an hour in 2013, and anoth­er 1.8 mil­lion said they earned less than that — which means they’re either legal­ly exclud­ed from min­i­mum-wage laws or ille­gal­ly under­paid. (Those num­bers are like­ly low; they don’t include salaried work­ers and rely on work­ers feel­ing com­fort­able dis­clos­ing their wage data to the cen­sus.) Accord­ing to the lat­est salary data from Glass​door​.com, McDonald’s cashiers make an aver­age of $7.81 an hour; Tar­get team mem­bers, $8.94 an hour; and J. Crew sales asso­ciates, $9.17 an hour. For a part-time job of 30 hours a week, all of those hourly salaries would qual­i­fy those work­ers for SNAP ben­e­fits and fed­er­al Med­ic­aid, even if they didn’t have fam­i­lies to support.

And while con­ser­v­a­tives would argue that the major­i­ty of low-wage earn­ers are teenagers sling­ing burg­ers for pock­et change, the Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (EPI) found that the aver­age age of work­ers who would ben­e­fit from a raise to $10.10 an hour is 35, and 88 per­cent are 20 or old­er. Fifty-six per­cent of them are women, and 28 per­cent have chil­dren. On aver­age, the EPI cal­cu­lates, these low-wage work­ers bring in half of their family’s total income.

Most of those min­i­mum-wage work­ers are in the ser­vice indus­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly in food ser­vice. And not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, tax­pay­ers are also shelling out to prop up food indus­try wages. Stud­ies last year from the Nation­al Employ­ment Law Project and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, showed that fast­food com­pa­nies cost tax­pay­ers an addi­tion­al $7 bil­lion per year in pub­lic assis­tance, with McDonald’s account­ing for $1.2 bil­lion. The Berke­ley study notes that fast-food com­pa­nies pay cashiers and oth­er front­line work­ers a medi­an wage of $8.69 an hour, and more than half of those work­ers rely on one or more pub­lic pro­grams, com­pared to 25 per­cent of the work­force as a whole.

These com­pa­nies often drain gov­ern­ment cof­fers in oth­er ways, too. The Amer­i­cans for Tax Fair­ness report notes that Wal­mart avoids about $1 bil­lion per year in fed­er­al tax­es. Pol­i­cy research cen­ter Good Jobs First reports on its Wal­mart Sub­sidy Watch web­site that the com­pa­ny has received more than $1.2 bil­lion in ​“tax breaks, free land, infra­struc­ture assis­tance, low-cost financ­ing and out­right grants from state and local gov­ern­ments around the country.”

Fed­er­al law­mak­ers are tak­ing note. When the UC-Berke­ley report came out, Sen. Tom Harkin (D‑Iowa) released a state­ment say­ing, ​“Any­one con­cerned about the fed­er­al deficit only needs to look at this report to under­stand a major source of the prob­lem: mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­nies that pay pover­ty wages.”

With Wash­ing­ton ground to a halt, get­ting a bad busi­ness fee on the fed­er­al lev­el seems unlike­ly at the moment. But state and local activists aren’t wait­ing for Congress.

A nov­el strategy

The force behind the bad busi­ness fee idea is TakeAction’s par­ent orga­ni­za­tion, Nation­al People’s Action (NPA), a com­mu­ni­ty-orga­niz­ing net­work that advo­cates eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal reforms to shift pow­er from cor­po­ra­tions to peo­ple, along with the labor orga­ni­za­tion Jobs With Jus­tice (JWJ). They have part­nered with oth­er labor and com­mu­ni­ty groups, such as the Ser­vice Employ­ees Inter­na­tion­al Union and the Mak­ing Change at Wal­mart campaign.

Though the plan is in its infan­cy, NPA and JWJ see the bad busi­ness fee as unique­ly posi­tioned to catch on across the coun­try. To build last­ing change, says NPA’s exec­u­tive direc­tor George Goehl, poli­cies must pro­vide short-term, tan­gi­ble results and have long-term, trans­for­ma­tive poten­tial. He believes the bad busi­ness fee does both.

Mar­tin, a mem­ber of Take­Ac­tion Min­neso­ta and an enthu­si­as­tic sup­port­er of the plan, agrees: ​“My life will be eas­i­er because of this,” he says. ​“It’s also the foun­da­tion of a total­ly new econ­o­my and total­ly new way of think­ing about the way our econ­o­my works, what we are putting our mon­ey into, [and] the true effects of how we’re spend­ing money.”

The bad busi­ness fee has the poten­tial to bring togeth­er an ​“unusu­al set of allies,” accord­ing to Dan McGrath, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Take­Ac­tion Minnesota.

As inequal­i­ty has become a hot-but­ton issue, the solu­tions on offer tend to focus either on tax­ing the extreme­ly wealthy or on rais­ing work­ers’ wages. What makes the bad busi­ness fee par­tic­u­lar­ly attrac­tive is that it does both of those things. It makes the con­nec­tion con­cep­tu­al­ly between the low wages at the bot­tom of the work chain and the out­sized incomes at the top, and sets out both to pun­ish com­pa­nies that keep wages low, and to cre­ate val­ue out of that pun­ish­ment for the peo­ple strug­gling on low incomes.

In that way, the fee is win-win. If com­pa­nies seek to avoid it, they end up doing some­thing just as good for their employ­ees, or even bet­ter. Mar­tin says, ​“For me in par­tic­u­lar, the bet­ter part is my boss may be think­ing, ​‘Well, I should just pay my employ­ees bet­ter. I should just pay a liv­ing wage. I should just give Cliff some benefits.’ ”

To Liz Ryan Mur­ray, pol­i­cy direc­tor at NPA, the bad busi­ness fee bridges the issues of work­ers’ rights and tax­pay­ers’ rights. Often con­ver­sa­tions around pub­lic ben­e­fits get mired down in argu­ments about deficits and the cost to the tax­pay­er, ignor­ing the val­ue of the pro­grams to the peo­ple who depend on them and rarely con­ceiv­ing of ​“the tax­pay­er” as a low-wage work­er her­self. But, Mur­ray notes, on this issue there’s no way to split them apart — the tax­pay­er and the work­er have the same inter­est in see­ing big com­pa­nies pay their fair share.

Goehl believes that the pol­i­cy even has the pos­si­bil­i­ty of appeal­ing to con­ser­v­a­tives. ​“I think about my dad in south­ern Indi­ana who, for most of my life, was a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive. Hand­outs to cor­po­ra­tions that pay low wages were the kind of stuff that real­ly upset him,” he says. Intro­duc­ing the bad­busi­ness fee in con­ser­v­a­tive places may prove edu­ca­tion­al, Goehl says, in smok­ing out the oppo­si­tion. ​“Wichi­ta would be inter­est­ing because the Koch broth­ers are there, and to see what kind of stops they would roll out would be fas­ci­nat­ing,” Goehl says. ​“It would also be nice to win some­thing in a red­der area to show it’s pos­si­ble everywhere.”

The nuts and bolts

Rather than dic­tat­ing from above, the NPA and JWJ plan to anchor the ini­tia­tive with what JWJ’s direc­tor of cam­paigns, Eri­ca Smi­ley, calls ​“a hub for sup­port, strat­e­gy, devel­op­ment and shared expe­ri­ence, shared lessons,” in which groups inter­est­ed in the pol­i­cy can get help and con­nect with one another.

Beyond that, the details of the pol­i­cy itself are still vague. The coali­tion wants to leave room for local flex­i­bil­i­ty, so that the tax can take dif­fer­ent forms in dif­fer­ent cities and states, depend­ing on the par­tic­u­lar needs and desires of the community.

But there will be some con­stants. The extent to which a company’s employ­ees have to rely on pub­lic assis­tance serves as a mea­sure of whether that com­pa­ny pro­vides jobs that can sus­tain peo­ple, and is thus the most like­ly basis for how the fee would be assessed. The fee might be imple­ment­ed on a per-employ­ee basis — in Cook Coun­ty, Illi­nois, NPA and JWJ part­ners are con­sid­er­ing a $5,000 charge for each employ­ee receiv­ing pub­lic assis­tance— or as a lump sum based on how much an entire sec­tor costs tax­pay­ers, which would then be split up among the employ­ers in that sec­tor. The orga­niz­ers also want to hold big busi­ness­es account­able for their sup­ply chains and fran­chisees. For instance, if McDonald’s Cor­po­ra­tion got slapped with a fee for each restau­rant that under­pays its work­ers, it could be pushed to include high­er wages in its fran­chise con­tracts. Sim­i­lar­ly, if Wal­mart had to pay not just for its retail employ­ees, but the work­ers in its ware­hous­es, it might have an incen­tive to require bet­ter wages from subcontractors.

Though the pol­i­cy is mod­eled to tar­get mega-employ­ers — which, accord­ing to a 2012 Nation­al Employ­ment Law Project report, employ 66 per­cent of the low-wage work­force — Mur­ray hopes that this will have a salu­tary effect on all wages. If the fee encour­ages Wal­mart, Tar­get and McDonald’s to raise their wages, small­er busi­ness­es may have to do the same.

As to where the funds recouped through the bad busi­ness fee will go, it’s impor­tant to the orga­niz­ers that some be used to strength­en safe­tynet pro­grams — such as Med­ic­aid and hous­ing assis­tance — that under­paid work­ers rely on to cov­er basic needs. Those pro­grams have been stretched thin thanks to the years of aus­ter­i­ty fol­low­ing the finan­cial cri­sis. ​“We need a stronger safe­ty net, not a more tat­tered one,” Mur­ray says. How­ev­er, she stress­es that work­ing-class peo­ple should be the ones who decide how the mon­ey is spent in their own communities.

There are plen­ty of options. At a munic­i­pal lev­el, Mur­ray explains, the mon­ey could go to an exist­ing devel­op­ment depart­ment that could man­age and dis­trib­ute the mon­ey. On a statewide lev­el, it could be dis­trib­uted through the rev­enue depart­ment as a tax break for work­ers. There’s also the pos­si­bil­i­ty of dis­trib­ut­ing some of the funds to non­prof­its involved with direct work­er sup­port, child­care or food assistance.

McGrath says the mon­ey could go to bol­ster the pub­lic ser­vices that work­ers rely on, or to hire more peo­ple to enforce wage and hour laws. ​“Min­neso­ta suc­ceed­ed in rais­ing its min­i­mum wage­to $9.50 an hour by 2016 and index­ing it to infla­tion,” he says. ​“But we have a pal­try num­ber of wage and hour inves­ti­ga­tors in our state. How will we know that peo­ple are actu­al­ly being paid the wage that was just won?”

Else­where, oth­er com­mu­ni­ty and labor part­ners are busy brain­storm­ing about what would make sense in their states and cities. In Chica­go, hous­ing sub­si­dies are a pos­si­bil­i­ty; in New York, the mon­ey could be used to off­set the ris­ing costs of pub­lic trans­porta­tion; in San Fran­cis­co, a com­bi­na­tion of hous­ing and trans­porta­tion issues is under con­sid­er­a­tion, as gen­tri­fi­ca­tion has rapid­ly made it hard­er for low-wage work­ers to live near their jobs. In New Mex­i­co, using a bad busi­ness fee to sup­port ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion is being discussed.

Cliff Mar­tin would also like to see the mon­ey go to incen­tivize work­er-owned busi­ness­es or co-ops. ​“Putting out sub­si­dies for the econ­o­my I actu­al­ly want to be a part of, and not just pro­grams to keep us bare­ly liv­ing — that would be my pref­er­ence,” he says. ​“In my mind those go hand in hand. Bad busi­ness fee? Good busi­ness incentive.”

The pos­si­bil­i­ties are near­ly end­less— it’s eas­i­er in some ways to say what the mon­ey and the pol­i­cy should not do. ​“Cer­tain­ly we would not be sat­is­fied if the mon­ey just went into some fund to pay off some deficit,” Goehl says.

Struc­tur­al change

Win­ning the bad busi­ness fee will require a del­i­cate bal­ance between argu­ing that jobs should pay a decent wage and argu­ing for stronger, more uni­ver­sal social sup­ports for those not at the top of the eco­nom­ic food chain. Too nar­row, and the pol­i­cy risks demo­niz­ing the very pub­lic wel­fare pro­grams it aims to strength­en; too broad, and it los­es its punch.

But the bad busi­ness fee fits into the broad­er strat­e­gy for struc­tur­al change being laid out by NPA, JWJ and their coali­tion part­ners. The fee is designed to com­ple­ment and encour­age — rather than sup­plant — strug­gles in the work­place and broad­er efforts to raise the min­i­mum wage. Giv­ing local peo­ple the pow­er to decide on where the mon­ey goes can cre­ate infra­struc­ture for oth­er orga­niz­ing, JWJ’s Smi­ley sug­gests. Work­ers at Wal­mart, for exam­ple, could cre­ate neigh­bor­hood com­mit­tees to nego­ti­ate where the mon­ey should be spent, and to inform oth­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty that they might be qual­i­fied to receive some­thing. ​“You could imag­ine [work­ers’] orga­ni­za­tions being able to get to a dif­fer­ent scale in cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties,” she says.

Smi­ley also sees it as part of the enforce­ment mech­a­nism for things like local liv­ing wage ordi­nances — a poten­tial stick rather than the end­less car­rots of tax breaks and sub­si­dies that cor­po­ra­tions receive for so-called job creation.

Instead of cities and states gen­u­flect­ing to big com­pa­nies in the hope of boost­ing local economies, Smi­ley thinks this pol­i­cy could make the needs of res­i­dents come first. ​“We’re try­ing to change the nar­ra­tive as to who is val­ued in our com­mu­ni­ties, what is val­ued in our com­mu­ni­ties, real­ly speak­ing to the val­ue of work­ing peo­ple and their fam­i­lies as the heart of our cities and our neigh­bor­hoods — as opposed to the big cor­po­ra­tions, who are exter­nal­iz­ing their costs but total­ly pri­va­tiz­ing their prof­its,” she says.

The tax is a first step in chang­ing the way we think about cor­po­ra­tions, Goehl says. ​“Cor­po­ra­tions have to apply for a char­ter every year to con­tin­ue to be a cor­po­ra­tion in this coun­try,” he says. ​“We’ve been taught not to think about the fact that cor­po­ra­tions are some­thing we allow to be cre­at­ed. We don’t think, ​‘Well, wait, we could be ask­ing for a lot more from them just by the fact that we allow them to exist.’ ”

McGrath takes it a step fur­ther. ​“We are try­ing to start a con­ver­sa­tion about what is the high­est and best use of gov­ern­ment,” he says. ​“What is the prop­er role for gov­ern­ment in an econ­o­my that is expe­ri­enc­ing such pro­found income inequal­i­ty? Is the role of gov­ern­ment to sub­si­dize major cor­po­ra­tions? [Or] is it to actu­al­ly sup­port the workers?”