A growing movement of low-wage workers is demanding a living wage for workers in fast food, retail, and other industries in this country that make huge profits by paying employees less than what they need to support themselves. In recent months there has been increasing awareness that when companies pay starvation wages, taxpayers make up the difference. Because employers like Walmart, McDonald’s and others pay their workers less than what they need to live, the workers must rely on food stamps, Medicaid, subsidized housing, energy assistance, the earned income tax credit, and other forms of public assistance.

Those of us who make a living wage and pay our taxes are thus subsidizing the profits of huge wealthy corporations, by making up the wages these employers refuse to pay. A congressional report last May by Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee, entitled "The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy,” found that taxpayers were shelling out $900,000 a year to assist underpaid workers at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin. "When low wages leave Walmart workers unable to afford the necessities of life, taxpayers pick up the tab," the report said.

With its “competitive wage” strategy of turning decent-paying manufacturing jobs into poverty-level jobs, GE plans to cash in on this form of corporate welfare. For example, GE plans to move capacitor production from Ft. Edward, NY, where UE members earn around $27, to Clearwater, Florida, where it will pay $12 an hour to regular employees and $8 to temps. Under Florida’s food stamp guidelines, these workers would be eligible for coverage. They are also likely to qualify for public assistance programs to help them with housing, healthcare, utilities, school lunches, and other needs that they will not be able to meet themselves on the stingy wages GE will pay.

These workers would also be eligible for the earned income tax credit, a benefit to low-income wage earners included in the federal tax code. A full-time worker earning $12 an hour with no other family income sources would qualify for an earned income tax credit of $2,740. An $8 an hour worker would receive $3,160.

GE has imposed so-called “competitive wages” of $13 or less on workers at dozens of its non-union manufacturing workers around the country, and is trying to drag the pay of union workers down as well. UE organizers have spoken to non-union GE manufacturing workers who receive GE paychecks of as little as $8 an hour. With its move of much of its locomotive and motorized wheel production from Erie to Ft. Worth, Texas, and its efforts to cut wages at the diesel engine plant in Grove City, Pennsylvania, GE is trying to turn its transportation division into a poverty “competitive wage” industry as well. To do so, GE will rely every day on government programs to keep its workers alive so they’re able to get to work and do their jobs the following day.

Making this situation even more outrageous is GE’s scandalous record of tax avoidance. In a number of recent years in which it made multi-billion dollar profits, GE has paid no federal income tax but instead received billions in “tax benefits,” and over the past decade the federal income tax it has paid has averaged a measly 2.9 percent. GE has long been shameless about evading taxes while getting honest hard-working taxpayers to subsidize many of its business costs, and now it’s expecting us to pay some of its employment costs as well.

UE has always favored programs of government assistance to members of our society who are in need because of unemployment, illness, disability, natural disasters and other causes. But the purpose of these programs is not to enable employers to pay wages that put their workers in poverty – least of all when those employers are the largest and most profitable companies in the world. As President Franklin Roosevelt once said, “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”