The Grinch has indeed stolen Christmas, and he is laughing all the way to the bank. For 2005, the CEOs of “big box” low-wage retailers (examples: H. Lee Scott of Wal-Mart; Robert Ulrich of Target) hoarded annual bonuses of between and $12 million and $16 million each. Their “floor” workers — the people actually serving long lines of frenzied costumers — had to rely on credit cards or charity to scrape up a few gifts for their kids.

The number of working poor in our city and in our nation continues to grow, hurting both our families and our local economy. How is it that a person can work 40 hours a week in this wealthy nation and still earn less than $16,000 per year? How can anyone afford even the modest American dream of home ownership with wages like this? When our citizens have so little left to spend, how do we expect to grow an economy that serves all of our citizens, not just a handful?

Business owners will say that these workers are unskilled, so ergo it is OK for “us” to pay “them” pennies (while our top managers and CEOs can literally roll in the dough if they so choose).

This reasoning comes dangerously close to the reasoning used to justify indentured servitude and slavery. “They are stupid people, ergo Not Really People, so it is perfectly justifiable to imprison them to work on our plantations in exchange for food and shabby housing.”

The argument also fails in the assumption that all low-wage workers are unskilled and uneducated. Just not so.

A group of Spokane’s citizens are working to legislate a “pilot” living wage that is 135 percent of the state minimum, or $10.70 per hour for our citizens who are working in the largest, and thus most prosperous, low-wage retail corporations (165 percent of minimum if health benefits are not provided).

After we collect the signatures on our petitions, there will be a vote on behalf of workers and fair wages. I consider this effort one tiny step to a greater social recognition that owners of publicly traded corporations have gone too far, and we, the American people, are letting them do it. This unfettered greed has reached outrageous proportions. Downright Grinchy, if you ask me.

Some businesses are already responding to the Spokane Living Wage campaign by saying “it’s not fair!” How fair is it for the workers largely responsible for the tasks that enable the profit when they do not earn an honest pay for an honest day’s work? How fair is it that Wal-Mart figured out how to charge Washington taxpayers for the health care premiums of their 3,000 workers who qualify for Medicaid (due to clever scheduling, and a lack of social responsibility).

Taxpayers like me have been duped into subsidizing the bonus pay of Wal-Mart CEO Scott, and I don’t even shop there!

Fairness? Let’s talk fairness after CEO wages return to something sane! Walk a few months in your poverty wage worker’s shoes and then we can sit down and discuss fairness.

The payment of living wages is becoming one of the greatest moral issues of our time. This wage crisis began to develop in the early 1970s and in a relatively short period of time a new class, the working poor, has been allowed to flourish. Charity is not the way to fix this. In the face of decaying morals among some of our most prosperous business owners, demanding decent wages is.