I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear. This week, Home Motors and Company, all work and no pay. Food workers fight for a living wage.

How is it that a major industry has basically convinced America, convinced Congress that they practically shouldn't have to pay their workers at all?

It's purely money

and power and their control over our legislators.

Thanks for joining us.

If you wonder why so many Americans doing essential but many will work at low wages never

seem to get a break, here's an answer for you. That's how it's intended to be. Not by nature,

or the market, or from any lack of character or will on the part of workers. No, the fact is

our system is organized against them. The very thing workers most want to need, a fair wage,

is the very thing the controlling interest don't want them to have.

And by controlling interest, I mean the owners of capital who were emboldened even further this

week by the Supreme Court's McCutcheon decision, giving money to interest more opportunity

to rig the political system against everyday Americans.

Case in point.

You've heard about the wave of protest against fast food chains like McDonald's and Wendy's, where employees are forced to live

on next to nothing. Workers in regular sit-down restaurants are also penalized because in the 1990s,

the National Restaurant Association, often known as the other NRA, passed around

enough campaign contributions to, shall we say, persuade Congress to set the federal minimum wage

for waiters, bus boards, and bartenders at only $2.13 an hour. $2.13 an hour. The NRA claims that tips are additional income that make up

the difference. But tips are random and often meager, and restaurant workers struggling to earn a

living are twice as likely to be on public assistance. In other words, the people who run the system expect taxpayers

to subsidize profits with welfare for their poorly paid employees. Which could explain why

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