Minimum Wage

17 Numbers Reveal Just How Pathetic The Minimum Wage Is

September 27, 2014 Nick Wing, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Capitalism, Labor Rights, Minimum Wage

If you have a job that pays the federal minimum wage, an hour of your work is worth $7.25, before taxes. Activists and lawmakers from around the country say this amount and slightly higher state-based rates don't offer workers enough to pay for life's basics. President Barack Obama and his administration have called for Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, but Republicans have resisted a proposal to raise the federal minimum to $10.10 an hour over three years, claiming businesses can't afford to pay workers more. A wage hike would lead to devastating job losses, they say, and would do nothing to increase job opportunities or address poverty.

Nearly 500 Striking Fast Food Workers Arrested, Fight For 15 Intensifies

September 4, 2014 Laura Brandon and Alex Edwards, www.strikefastfood.org Resist! Fight for 15, Minimum Wage, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Fast-food workers—in uniforms from restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s—were arrested Thursday during a 150-city strike, as the fight for $15 and union rights intensified across the country. Thousands of cooks and cashiers walked off their jobs from more than 1,000 stores, chanting “We Believe That We Will Win,” and vowing to do whatever it takes to secure higher wages and union rights. Workers in New York City, who launched the Fight for $15 nearly two years ago, were among the first to get arrested, after blocking traffic in front of a McDonald’s in Times Square early Thursday morning. Workers were also arrested Thursday morning in Detroit and Chicago. All over the country, from Las Vegas to Little Rock, workers walked off their jobs and took arrest to show that they can’t wait any longer for companies like McDonald’s to raise their pay.

Tomorrow, Thousands Of Workers Fight Wage Theft

September 3, 2014 Carl Gibson, www.readersupportednews.org Resist! Minimum Wage, Wage Theft, Worker Rights and Jobs

But my experience is just one example of the situation for millions of restaurant workers in America today. All of America’s burglars, convenience store robbers, carjackers, muggers, and bank robbers combined don’t steal even half as much money as America’s top restaurant chains steal from their workers in a given year. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. Department of Labor had to recover $280 million in wages held by employers in 2012. That same year, the Department of Justice said the total amount of money stolen in robberies was $139 million. But since criminal restaurant chain executives aren’t being carted off to jail for their acts of robbery, restaurant workers will shut down their businesses by any means necessary this Thursday – including committing acts of civil disobedience.

McDonalds Responsible For Determining Wages At Franchises

July 30, 2014 Candice Choi, www.abcnews.go.com Educate! Corporatism, Labor, McDonald's, Minimum Wage

McDonald's is coming under intensifying pressure for labor practices at its U.S. restaurants. The National Labor Relations Board said Tuesday that the world's biggest hamburger chain could be named as a joint employer in several complaints regarding worker rights at franchise-owned restaurants. The decision is pivotal because it could expose McDonald's Corp. to liability for management practices in those locations. It also comes as protests for higher pay have captured national attention, with labor groups calling for pay of $15 an hour and the right to unionize. Organizers had been pushing to get McDonald's named as a joint employer at franchised restaurants, a move intended to give them a centralized and powerful target. In the U.S., the vast majority of McDonald's more than 14,000 restaurants are owned and operated by franchisees. The same is true for many other fast-food chains, including Burger King and Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza hut. As such, the companies have sought to distance themselves from the pay protests by saying they don't determine wages at its franchised locations. Heather Smedstad, senior vice president of human resources for McDonald's USA, said in a phone interview that the company has never been determined to be a joint employer in the past and that it would fight the decision by the labor board.

Fast-food Workers Ready To Escalate Wage Demands

July 26, 2014 AP, www.AP.org Resist! Fast Food, Labor, Minimum Wage, Poverty, Worker's Rights

Fast-food workers say they're prepared to escalate their campaign for higher wages and union representation, starting with a national convention in suburban Chicago where more than 1,000 workers will discuss the future of the effort that has spread to dozens of cities in less than two years. About 1,300 workers are scheduled to attend sessions Friday and Saturday at an expo center in Villa Park, Ill., where they'll be asked to do "whatever it takes" to win $15-an-hour wages and a union, said Kendall Fells, organizing director of the national effort and a representative of the Service Employees International Union. The union has been providing financial and organizational support to the fast-food protests that began in late 2012 in New York City and have included daylong strikes and a protest outside this year's McDonald's shareholder meeting that resulted in more than 130 arrests. "We want to talk about building leadership, power and doing whatever it takes depending on what city they're in and what the moment calls for," said Fells, adding that the ramped-up actions will be "more high-profile" and could include everything from civil disobedience to intensified efforts to organize workers. "I personally think we need to get more workers involved and shut these businesses down until they listen to us," perhaps even by occupying the restaurants, said Cherri Delisline, a 27-year-old single mother from Charleston, S.C., who has worked at McDonald's for 10 years and makes $7.35 an hour.

Workers Speak Out Against Work Schedule Abuse And Retaliation

July 26, 2014 Emily Divito, www.ourfuture.org Educate! Labor, Minimum Wage, Women's Rights, Worker's Rights

When American women have no control over their own work schedules, they have no control over their own lives. Mary Coleman of Wisconsin knows this first-hand. She was working the night shift at a Milwaukee Popeye’s restaurant, a time slot notoriously unpopular for its exhausting hours. When she asked her manager for a transfer to the day shift, she was denied, lied to, and then penalized for even asking. Coleman’s manager told her that there were no more shifts available during daylight hours that she could have. But just weeks later, five new employees were hired to Popeye’s, all of whom were given day shifts. Simultaneously, Coleman’s hours were dramatically cut. She now only works two days a week. That is not nearly enough to live on. Coleman expressed her struggles at a Tuesday briefing in the Cannon House Office Building jointly hosted by the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Women’s Law Center. Coleman’s experience is like that of roughly 2.5 million other American women working in low-wage jobs who are at the mercy of their employers for consistent work, and so, for consistent pay.

Stop The War On The Poor Campaign

July 11, 2014 Stop the War on the Poor, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Living Wage, Minimum Wage, Poverty, Social Security, Wars and Militarism

Stop the War on the Poor commemorates Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign (PPC). In 1968, just prior to his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr condemned the Vietnam War and called for the PPC culminating in a Poor People’s March in DC in June, demanding a living wage and a guaranteed income. He said Congress had shown "hostility to the poor" by spending "military funds with alacrity andgenerosity”. Coretta Scott King spoke out against poverty and in support of welfare mothers. King learnt from welfare mothers. They had been calling for a poor people’s campaign and urging his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to oppose “anti-welfare” legislation and support their right to welfare. As a result of their leadership, King became anti-capitalist and anti-war.

States That Raised Minimum Wage Have Faster Job Growth

July 6, 2014 Bryce Covert, www.thinkprogress.com Educate! Finance and the Economy, Minimum Wage, Worker Rights and Jobs

Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate. The minimum wage went up in 13 states — Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington — either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is .99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is .68 percent.

Working Women Tell Obama: $10.10 Not Enough

June 26, 2014 Emily DiVito, www.ourfuture.org Organize! Barack Obama, Minimum Wage, Protest, Women's Rights

Joanne, a food service worker at the federal Ronald Reagan Building near the White House, took time off from her job Monday to join fellow federal contractor employees at a protest outside the Smithsonian National Zoo. As she explained her monthly budget, it was clear she had nothing much to lose. “I make just around $1,000 a month,” she said, “and I pay $500 for child care, and $250 just to ride the Metro to go to work. After that, I have nothing.” Even with her husband’s support, Joanne said she struggles to get by. Her salary of “$8.90 an hour is not enough,” she said. “I have no insurance, no holidays – nothing. My dream is to go to culinary school, and President Obama, you can help me make my dreams come true.” As a Summit on Working Families was underway at the White House, Joanne was with about 200 other women who work for federal contractors protesting at the Smithsonian National Zoo.

MA Passes Highest State Minimum Wage

June 22, 2014 Bryce Covert, www.thinkprogress.org Create! Minimum Wage

On Wednesday night, the Massachusetts House passed a bill that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2017. The Senate already passed that wage level, and after a procedural vote there it will head to Gov. Deval Patrick (D), who is expected to sign it into law. An earlier Senate version of the bill would have also automatically increased the minimum wage as inflation rose, but that provision was dropped in the final version. An $11 wage is the highest passed by any state this year. Eight other states have increased their wages so far: Delaware and West Virginia went above $8 an hour;Michigan went up to $9.25; Minnesota increased its wage to $9.50; Hawaii,Maryland, and Connecticut passed a $10.10 wage; and Vermont went to $10.50 an hour. The $10.10 an hour level is what President Obama and Congressional Democrats had pursued for a federal hike, but Republicans blocked the move.

Increasing Wages Is An Effective Poverty Reduction Tool

June 20, 2014 Elise Gould, www.talkpoverty.org Create! Inequality, Minimum Wage, Poverty, Unions

Broad-based wage growth—if we can figure out how to achieve it—would dwarf the impact of nearly every other economic trend or policy in reducing poverty. Even in 2010, the bottom fifth of working age American households relied on wages for the majority (56%) of their income. When you add in all work-based income including wage-based tax credits, nearly 70% of income for low-income Americans is work-related. Yes, the targeted efforts to strengthen the safety net are well deserved. Programs such as food stamps (SNAP), unemployment insurance, and Social Security have helped reduce poverty over the last four decades. But market based poverty (or poverty measured using only income from wages) has been on the rise and the safety net has to work even harder to counterbalance the growing inequalities of the labor market. There was once a strong statistical link between economic growth and poverty reduction, but rising inequality has severed it, and the results are deeply dispiriting. If the statistical link between economic growth and falling poverty that held before the mid-1970s had not been broken by rising inequality, then poverty, as the government measures it, would be virtually eradicated today. Furthermore, the impact of rising inequality is nearly five times more important in explaining poverty trends than family structure.

Fight For 15 In NYC Just Got A Lot More Promising And Complicated

June 14, 2014 William Blueher and James Hoff, www.truth-out.org Resist! Bill De Blasio, Minimum Wage, New York (NY)

Bill de Blasio's role in helping Andrew Cuomo attain the endorsement of the Working Families Party has opened up a space for a more vigorous and radical discussion of a minimum wage for NYC. In politics, the greatest opportunities often present themselves amid the least promising of circumstances. The New York Working Families Party's (WFP) scandalous and much decried endorsement of Governor Andrew Cuomo on June 1 is but one example of how, out of the chaos of internal conflict, opportunities for more radical change can become possible. Though the WFP endorsement was a shameful capitulation to the politics of business as usual, it very well may have opened up a new front in the fight to raise the minimum wage in New York City. Though Cuomo had several times expressed opposition to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's longstanding plans to increase the city's minimum wage, the mayor's last minute role in securing the endorsement of the WFP for Cuomo seems to have changed the ground of that debate, and it is looking increasingly likely that Cuomo may now be more open to allowing the city to set its own minimum wage above the state level - with caveats, of course. By just how much and when the minimum wage (currently an insultingly low $8 an hour) might be increased remains to be seen, but it is clear that lawmakers in New York City and Albany, including de Blasio, are feeling the heat of the grassroots minimum wage movement that has been sprouting up in cities across the country - most notably in Seattle, which recently passed legislation increasing that city's minimum wage to $15 an hour.

How Corporations Get Away With Rampant Wage Theft

June 10, 2014 Myron Levin, Stuart Silverstein and Lilly Fowler, www.salon.com Educate! Law, Minimum Wage, Wage Theft

For workers stuck on the bottom rung, living on poverty wages is hard enough. But many also are victims of wage theft, a catch-all term for payroll abuses that cheat workers of income they are supposedly guaranteed by law. Over the last few years employers ranging from baseball’s San Francisco Giants to Subway franchises to Farmers Insurance have been cited for wage violations. More often, though, wage abuses are not reported by victims or punished by authorities despite being routine in some low-wage industries. “If you steal from your employer, you’re going to be hauled out of the workplace in handcuffs,” said Kim Bobo, a Chicago workers rights advocate and author. “But if your employer steals from you, you’ll be lucky to get your money back. Victims typically are low wage, low-skilled workers desperate to hang on to their jobs. Frequently, they are immigrants—the most vulnerable and least apt to speak up. “They know that if they complain, there’s always someone else out there who is willing to take their job,” said Maria Echaveste, a former labor official during the Clinton administration who is now at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. While heart-breaking for employees, wage theft also robs federal and state treasuries of many billions of dollars in taxes, and puts employers who play by the rules at a serious competitive disadvantage.

The History Of Raising Minimum Wage Ran Through Occupy

June 7, 2014 Peter Dreier, www.huffingtonpost.com Organize! Congress, Minimum Wage, Occupy

An idea that only a year ago appeared both radical and impractical has become a reality. On Monday, Seattle struck a blow against rising inequality when its City Council unanimously adopted a citywide minimum wage of $15 an hour, the highest in the nation. This dramatic change in public policy is partly the result of changes brought about by last November's Seattle municipal elections. But it is also the consequence of years of activism in Seattle and around the country. Now that Seattle has established a new standard, the pace of change is likely to accelerate quickly as activists and politicians elsewhere seek to capture the momentum. Five years from now, Americans may look back at this remarkable victory and wonder what all the fuss was about. Seattle now joins a growing list of cities -- including San Francisco, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. (along with two adjacent Maryland counties) -- that in the past few years have seized growing frustration over the widening income gap and declining living standards by establishing local minimum wages substantially above the federal level of $7.25. Unions, community groups, and progressive politicians in San Diego, New York City, Oakland, Los Angeles, and other cities are already taking steps to follow in Seattle's footsteps. In 19 states, minimum wages are now over $7.25 an hour; 10 of those states automatically increase their minimum wages with inflation. The highest state-mandated wage law is in Washington State, where the minimum wage increased to $9.32 in January.

McDonald’s CEO: ‘We Will Support’ Minimum Wage Hike

June 5, 2014 Mark Gongloff, www.huffingtonpost.com Organize! GEO, Inequality, McDonald's, Minimum Wage

McDonald's might finally have figured out that paying its low-wage workers more would actually be a good thing for McDonald's. McDonald's CEO Don Thompson recently suggested his company would support a bill, proposed by President Barack Obama, raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. Such a wage hike likely wouldn't satisfy his workers, some of whom recently stormed the company's Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters demanding $15 an hour. But it would be a noticeable shift in attitude for the world's biggest restaurant chain, which has so far been neutral as the debate about higher wages has roiled around it. "You know, our franchisees look at me when I say this and they start to worry: 'Don, don't you say it. Don't you say we support $10.10,'" Thompson said during a little-noticed talk at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management last month, according to a Chicago Tribune report. "I will tell you we will support legislation that moves forward." Thompson, who made $9.5 million last year, has been on the defensive about worker pay since at least last July, when the news media discovered McDonald's had a financial-advice website for its employees (no longer available) recommending they get second jobs and not turn on their heat.

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