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Living Wage

Mass. Home Care Workers First To Win $15/Hour Starting Wage

June 27, 2015 Anna Susman, www.popularresistance.org , , ,
By Anna Susman - Tears of joy streaked the faces of cheering home care workers assembled in their Dorchester union hall on Thursday afternoon as a decades-long struggle for recognition and a living wage culminated in a historic moment of celebration. According to an agreement reached in contract negotiations between the 35,000 home care workers of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and the administration of recently elected Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (R), Massachusetts Personal Care Attendants (PCAs) are poised to become the first in the nation to achieve a statewide $15 per hour starting wage. Upon reaching the agreement, workers called off the fifteen-hour picket they had planned to begin at the Massachusetts State House on the morning of Tuesday, June 30th. Instead, caregivers are planning a celebration of this milestone and nation-leading achievement of a $15 standard at 4:00 p.m. on the State House steps the afternoon of June 30th.

Basic Income: World’s Simplest Plan To End Poverty, Explained

June 9, 2015 Dylan Matthews, www.vox.com , ,
By Dylan Matthews in Vox - "Basic income" is shorthand for a range of proposals that share the idea of giving everyone in a given polity a certain amount of money on a regular basis. A basic income comes with no categorical eligibility requirements; you don't have to be blind or disabled or unemployed to get it. Everyone gets the same amount by virtue of being a human with material needs that money can help address. There are a number of different names this idea has gone by over the years. "Universal basic income" and "basic income guarantee" are used frequently. "Guaranteed minimum income" and "negative income tax" are generally used to refer to versions of the plan that also impose a tax that gradually eats up the cash transfer, as a means of reducing the cost of the policy.

Workers Confront Walmart Executives At Star-Studded Company Event

June 9, 2015 Sarah Jaffe, www.truth-out.org , , ,
By Sarah Jaffe in Truthout - Early Friday morning June 5 in the Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Venanzi Luna told her story to the Walmart shareholders meeting. Her image was projected in front of her on massive screens that had just been magnifying the live performance of R&B star Brian McKnight. "I'm here to urge you to support proposal number nine, because our board of directors needs an independent chair committed to the highest standards of integrity," Luna said. "Under our current, NON-independent chair, our company has suffered a series of governance failures - alleged bribery and a cover-up, repeated violations of environmental regulations and breaches of labor law, both at home and abroad. I know about this firsthand."

LA’s New Minimum Wage Isn’t Worth Anywhere Close To $15

May 23, 2015 Ben Casselman, www.fivethirtyeight.com , , ,
The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday voted to raise the city’s minimum wage to nearly $10 an hour. Oh, sure, the headlines in Wednesday’s papers all said the council raised the wage floor to $15 an hour. That’s what the actual ordinance says, too. But $10 is a more accurate reflection of what low-wage Angelenos will actually experience. There are two reasons for this. The first is inflation: Los Angeles’s minimum wage won’t go up to $15 tomorrow. Instead, the hike will be phased in over the next five years. Assuming inflation holds more or less steady, $15 an hour in 2020 will be worth the equivalent of about $13.75 today. But the bigger issue is that $15 doesn’t go as far in Los Angeles as it does in most of the rest of the country. Not even close. According to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, it costs workers about 40 percent more to live in Los Angeles than in the average American community.

5,000 Workers Descend On McDonald’s Shareholder Meeting

May 21, 2015 Jack Temple, www.PopularResistance.org , , ,
Marching behind a giant banner that read, “McDonald’s: $15 and Union Rights, Not Food Stamps,” 5,000 cooks and cashiers massed at the company’s corporate headquarters Wednesday to kick off the largest-ever protest to hit the burger giant’s annual shareholder meeting. Fed up with pay that drives them to rely on public assistance, angry over the company’s springtime publicity stunt disguised as a wage increase, and emboldened by recent moves by elected leaders in New York and Los Angeles to raise pay to as high as $15, workers surged into the streets outside McDonald’s corporate headquarters, doubling the size of the previous year’s historic protest.

Newsletter – Overcome Fear With Love

May 16, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Instead of taking action to prevent or mitigate the next crisis, politicians are causing more harm as they work hand in hand with the wealthy elites who are trying to grab even greater power and extract even greater riches. Maryland's governor was quick to bring in the National Guard and militarized police, but just cut Baltimore education funding by $11.6 million to fund pensions, while last week the state approved funding for a youth jail the people in Baltimore don't want. This article provides five key facts about Baltimore and a graphic that shows how the United States built its wealth on slavery, Jim Crow and racially-based economic injustice and kept African Americans from benefiting the economy. Also, as a special addition to recognize BB King, he sings "Why I Sing the Blues" describing the history of African Americans from slavery until today.

Protests Occupy And Shutdown The Guggenheim Museum

May 3, 2015 Alanna Martinez,www.observer.com ,
On Friday May 1, activists from Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF) organized a sit-in at the Guggenheim Museum and demanded a meeting with board members to discuss the state of workers rights at the museum’s Abu Dhabi location. The protest is the fifth unsanctioned action by the group to date. At noon, GULF, a branch of the Gulf Labor activist group, unfurled a large, red banner at the base of the museum’s Rotunda that read “Meet Workers’ Demands Now!” and released thousands of red and blue pamphlets inspired by the artwork of On Kawara (the artist’s retrospective is currently on view) from balconies above, according to Artinfo writer Mostafa Hedaya. Protestors sang chants over the live reading of Kawara’s ongoing performance project “One Million Years,” and announced that they would occupy the space until they were able to meet with board members.

Charges Against Sawant Dismissed In #Fightfor15 Protest

May 3, 2015 Daniel Beekman, www.seattletimes.com , , ,
A SeaTac city judge abruptly ended the disorderly-conduct trial of Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and two others Friday, dismissing all charges against the three defendants, who were arrested during a minimum-wage demonstration. The defense didn’t need to call witnesses and the jury didn’t deliberate because Judge Ann Danieli terminated the trial moments after prosecutors rested their case. Danieli agreed with a defense lawyer, who argued the prosecutors had failed to present sufficient evidence that Sawant, the Rev. John Helmiere and airport worker Socrates Bravo engaged in disorderly conduct by intentionally blocking traffic. Testimony from police officers showed that it was police who blocked traffic on International Boulevard in the minutes before Sawant, Helmiere and Bravo were arrested, the judge said.

The 15-Dollar Minimum Wage & The Broader Struggle Against Capital

April 25, 2015 Eoin Higgins, www.medium.com , ,
Across the United States, the campaign for raising the minimum wage to 15 dollars is gaining momentum. From cities such as traditionally left wing Olympia, Washington, to more moderate Atlanta, Georgia, activists are pushing for better wages- and they’re starting to win the debate. But will a higher minimum wage really change that much for the average American? It’s unlikely unless the struggle is broadened beyond the scope of the minimum wage in the United States. To explore this further, let’s start with a hypothetical future scenario of the results of the domestic struggle. Once the groundswell of activism in favor of the 15-dollar minimum wage becomes too great to ignore, the concept will begin to be taken seriously by leading pundits. Leaders from Socialist Alternative, such as Seattle’sKshama Sawant, will be ignored in the mainstream media.

Workers Say Walmart Closed Stores In Retaliation

April 23, 2015 Daily Kos, www.dailykos.com , ,
The Pico Rivera workers and the labor group OUR Walmart say it looks awfully suspicious that the closures just happened to hit a store that's been a center of worker organizing, and they're claiming retaliation: The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which backs OUR Walmart, is listed as the filing party on the NLRB complaint, which claims that Wal-Mart targeted the Pico Rivera store because it has been “the center of concerted action by [workers] to improve wages and working conditions for all Walmart [workers] around the country.” The Pico Rivera store was the site of OUR Walmart’s first strike in 2012; workers at that location have participated in strikes and civil disobedience ever since.

How To Deal When Protests Disrupt Your Day

April 22, 2015 Jesse A. Meyerson, www.rollingstone.com , ,
Your "normal" may consist of a commute or a meal, activities ranging from acceptable to pleasant, so the disruption of that routine annoys you. But the protest happens because someone else's "normal" is intolerable. It consists of routine injustice, exploitation, and even violence – sometimes lethal violence. For these people's "normal," disruption is a vital exercise. By and large, people only take to the streets reluctantly, after a situation has become so fraught that it compels them to protest. In hundreds of encampments across the country in 2011-2012 could be found debt-overburdened people chucked into a painful, hopeless economy by a bailed-out billionaire financial class.

Faculty Join Fast Food in the Fight for $15

April 19, 2015 Justin Miller, www.prospect.org , , , ,
Higher education institutions in the United States employ more than a million adjunct professors. This new faculty majority, about 70 percent of the faculty workforce, is doing the heavy lifting of academic instruction. These are positions with tenuous job security (often semester-by-semester), sparse instructional resources, limited academic freedom, and meager wages—the average working adjunct makes around $3,000 per three-credit course. An astounding 20 percent of part-time adjunct faculty rely on government assistance, according to a recent report from NBC News. That is to say, many faculty in the United States are among the ranks of low-wage workers. From Seattle University in Washington and the University of Southern California, to schools in Chicago and North Carolina, adjuncts made it clear yesterday that they are fed up with their second-tier status. This isn’t the first mass mobilization of adjuncts either. Adjuncts across the country participated in a National Adjunct Walkout Day back in February.

Getting Better Organized: The Fight For $15 And A Union

April 17, 2015 Carl Finamore, www.commondreams.org , ,
The Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign came to San Francisco in the very early hours of April 15. Around 100 protestors assembled at 6am and then marched very orderly through the doors, packed the dining area and shut down for one hour the McDonalds in the heart of the city’s Latino Mission district, an area which itself is a focal point of the city’s gentrification and displacement of working class residents. Speakers spoke inside with bullhorns, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago when arrests would have been certain. The political climate has dramatically changed in a very short time. A majority of Americans support the message that was heard loud and clear today, “workers need a raise, a big raise!”

The High Cost Of Fighting For The $15/Hr Minimum Wage

April 17, 2015 Leo Gerard, www.alternet.org , ,
This is no plea for pity for corporate kingpins like Walmart and McDonald’s inundated by workers’ demands for living wages. Raises would, of course, cost these billion-dollar corporations something. More costly, though, is the price paid by minimum-wage workers who have not received a raise in six years. Even more dear is what these workers have paid for their campaign to get raises. Managers have harassed, threatened and fired them. Despite all that, low-wage workers will return to picket lines and demonstrations Wednesday in a National Day of Action in the fight for $15 an hour. The date is 4 – 15. These are workers who live paycheck to paycheck, barely able to pay their bills, and certainly unable to cope with an emergency.

Major Showdown For $15 Wage Against Big Corporations In Atlanta

April 17, 2015 Zaid Jilani, www.alternet.org , ,
The South has long been one of the most hostile places for labor organizing. From using prison labor to break labor unions – which in Georgia was done almost entirely to African Americans, as a form of an extension of slavery-by-another-name – to intense hostility to even the concept of the minimum wage itself – Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has called for abolishing it – Southern elites have long suppressed the rights and wages of workers. But big changes are afoot, as activists across the region have been successful in recruiting thousands of people from all walks of life to join a movement for economic and social justice that sprawls several states. On Wednesday, this movement took the form of the Fight For 15 Movement.
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