“Why do they deserve that bonus?” asked David Donaldson, a District sanitation worker, as he emptied garbage cans near the White House on Saturday afternoon.
“We’re doing labor,” his co-worker Ricardo Brandon said. “We get a bonus, we get, like, 50 cents. Dealing with hazardous materials. Having to fight off rats.”
Most people know exactly how much money they get paid, and they know that under no circumstance are they likely to make Wall Street kind of money. And so, from where Daisy Montague’s standing, making espresso drinks for $12 an hour at the Baked & Wired coffee shop in Georgetown, the AIG executives should give back not 90 percent but 100 percent.
“What is it they do that’s so valuable? And why are we rewarding the people who put us in this crisis we’re in now?” the 25-year-old, who has a college degree in theater education, said Saturday morning. “I think those folks are basically stealing from taxpayers such as myself.”
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