Wonderful article in the Washington Post today by the Nickel and Dimed author.

While fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say "IPO," my $6-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep.
We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by McKinsey & Co. also credited America's productivity growth to "managerial . . . innovations" and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.
The old liberal certainty was that "full employment" would create a workers' paradise, with higher wages and bargaining power for the little guy and gal. What the liberals weren't counting on was a depressed minimum wage, weak unions and a witch's brew of management strategies to hold wages and salaries down.
I could see this when I was doing research for a book on white-collar unemployment in 2004. I met laid-off people who'd been searching for a job for over a year and ended up taking low-wage work as big-box sales clerks or even janitors.

A century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. But, too many of our employers today haven't figured out that their cruelly low wages would eventually curtail their own growth and profits.