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4 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 237 (2005-2006)
The Progressive Critique of the Current Socio-Legal Landscape: Corporations and Economic Justice

handle is hein.journals/sjsj4 and id is 263 raw text is: The Progressive Critique of the Current Socio-legal Landscape: Corporations and Economic Justice* Julie A. Su1 The very definition of a corporation as an entity that is created to permit maximum income and designed to insulate the individuals who will profit from liability for the acts of that entity, seems to promote and perpetuate economic injustice. Today, employees who are making less than living wages, working without health care, being forced to endure long hours, and lacking job security have become the norm. From restaurants to retail, from farm workers in the fields to taxi drivers on the streets, and from day laborers fighting for their right to seek work to grocery store workers and nurses trying desperately to hang on to benefits at work, there is an ever-growing low wage sector in the United States.2 At the same time, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation at seventy of the largest 100 United States companies averaged $14.1 million last year.3 It would take the average U.S. production worker 525 years at an average salary of $26,902, to make what many CEOs make in one year.4 But executive salaries are only a small part of the problem. The real problem, and the larger challenge, is the growing ability of corporations to use, abuse, and exploit poor people anywhere in the world, and do this through subcontracting for labor. Let me illustrate. Suchadal is a garment worker who grew up in northern Thailand. On the day that she was supposed to begin second grade, she put on her secondhand school uniform and waited at the door. That day, her mom told her to take off her school uniform because she would not be going to school anymore. Her parents needed her to take care of household chores and to watch her two younger brothers while her mother and father worked in the

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