the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 6, 2025
You deposit money electronically into your child’s school lunch account. Turns out you’re feeding a giant corporation instead of your child!
Heartland Payment Systems has contracts to manage digital school lunch accounts for students at 30,000 schools across the country. This means that the company’s MySchoolBucks program takes a cut from each child’s account. For poorer families on the reduced price lunch program, these fees are the highest: up to 40 cents for each dollar the family pays in! The company and its competitors suck in more than $100 million a year from these fees.
Heartland is a huge company with revenues over nine billion dollars a year. It also processes many other kinds of digital payments for more than 750,000 businesses nationwide, including lobbyists for both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi.
Undaunted, families have sued Heartland and its competitors. Now the federal government says Heartland will eventually have to stop taking its cut from student accounts—but not before 2027. Families are falling behind, financially. Around the country, parents owe around $176 million in unpaid school lunch debt.
Capitalism literally steals food from children’s mouths.