Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today signed legislation enacting a statewide $15 minimum wage plan and a 12-week paid family leave policy. The legislation was passed as part of the 2016-17 state budget, and marks a major accomplishment in the Governor’s efforts to restore economic justice and fairness to working families in New York State. The Governor signed these two pieces of legislation immediately prior to attending a 1,000-person victory rally, which included workers, advocates, labor leaders, and elected officials. That rally was held at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City.
“By moving to a $15 statewide minimum wage and enacting the strongest paid family leave policy in the nation, New York is showing the way forward on economic justice,”said Governor Cuomo. “These policies will not only lift up the current generation of low-wage workers and their families, but ensure fairness for future generations and enable them to climb the ladder of opportunity. I am proud to sign these programs into law, because they will ensure a stronger, fairer and brighter future for all New Yorkers.”
Donald Trump is giving Mitt Romney a run for his money in the flip flopping department. Even his closest advisers are confused by the speed at which Trump changes his mind.
This week, Trump said the government should raise the federal minimum wage by roughly one-third, calling for a legal standard of $10 per hour. The federal minimum is currently $7.25 per hour.
The Republican presidential nominee has made a series of contradictory comments during his campaign, at times indicating wages are already too high and at other times suggesting a boost is in order.
At the Democratic National Convention this week in Philadelphia, Trump was hammered repeatedly by Democratic speakers for suggesting the minimum wage should be dropped.
But now that Trump is recommending a specific wage hike, it’s the right’s turn to gripe.
Trump’s latest position puts him at odds with conservative thinkers and most of the business community, which argues that a government-mandated wage hike would just mean fewer workers as businesses cut costs to meet the new requirement.
Even Trump’s own economic brain trust could not explain how the GOP nominee decided $10 per hour should be the new standard.
“I saw the statement that he made on TV, but I haven’t had the chance to talk to him in the last couple weeks about this,” Stephen Moore, an economist at the Heritage Foundation who is advising the Trump campaign on economic issues, told The Hill on Wednesday.
“I don’t know exactly what he was endorsing. The $10 minimum wage, that was the first I’d heard of that.”
Los Angles steps up to the plate and does the right thing for its citizens.
The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday backed a plan to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, joining a trend sweeping cities across the country as elected leaders seek to boost stagnating pay for workers on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
Lawmakers agreed to draft an ordinance raising the $9-an-hour base wage to $15 by 2020 for as many as 800,000 workers, making L.A. the largest city in the nation to adopt a major minimum-wage hike. Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle already have approved similar increases, and raising the federal minimum wage has moved to the forefront of the Democratic Party’s agenda.
On Thursday, Walmart announced that it will raise all of its full-time and part-time employees’ pay to at least $9 an hour starting in April. The lowest wage will rise to $10 an hour by February of next year.
In a press release, it said it is also raising pay for the compensation range for each position, and all told says that about 500,000 employees will see a raise from the changes. It also says the raises will mean its average hourly wage for full-time workers will increase from $12.85 to $13 an hour and the average for part-time workers will increase from $9.48 to $10 an hour.
It also promised that workers “will have more control over their schedules.” The wage increases will cost more than $1 billion this fiscal year.
In announcing the changes, CEO Doug McMillion acknowledged some of the criticism that the company has sacrificed customer loyalty because of its pay practices. “We have work to do to grow the business. We know what customers want from a shopping experience, and we’re investing strategically to exceed their expectations and better position Walmart for the future,” he said. “We’re strengthening investments in our people to engage and inspire them to deliver superior customer experiences.”
He is a Republican Representative from California named, Tom McClintock. And in an interview with C-SPAN on Thursday, McClintock went there with his Republican ideology in public, saying that the minimum wage is for “minorities,” teenagers and other unskilled people no work experience. And those people do not deserve more than $7 an hour.
He was answering a question from the host who asked if he would support Mitt Romney in 2016 seeing that Romney has flipped and is now calling for a raise in the minimum wage. Yes folks, Romney is now pushing to raise the minimum wage! The New York Times reports that Romney is vowing a campaign to “end the scourge of poverty” if he runs for president a third time, has backed raising the minimum wage over the wishes of congressional leaders.
“It’s not supposed to support a family. The minimum wage is that first job when you have no skills, no experience, no working history. That’s how you get into the job market, that’s how you develop that experience, develop that work record, get your first raise, then your next raise, then your promotion.”
“If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable,” McClintock says. “That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can’t get on it. That is a tragedy.”
With the November elections just weeks away, I thought I’d let you know something about some of the candidates on the various ballots. An educated voter usually makes the right choice.
Let’s go to Wisconsin. The candidate we will be looking at today is Brad Schimel, the Republican candidate for Attorney General in Wisconsin. Raising the minimum wage is going to be a huge issue in the November elections, so let’s see where Schimel stands on raising the wage issue.
Speaking to a group of supporters at a Milwaukee County Republicans party gathering, Schimel said;
“I want every one of our neighbors to have a job again, a well-paid job, so we don’t have to argue about minimum wage for someone working at Burger King. Let’s get them a real job.”
In other words, minimum wage jobs like those in the food industry are not “real jobs.” So don’t expect Schimel to support raising the minimum wage for the millions of Americans trying to support their families on one of these fake jobs.
She worked three jobs at three different Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey, trying to survive and pay her $550 a month rent. According to her landlady, Maria’s rent payments were often late.
Working three jobs meant Maria was hardly ever home. She took naps in her car between shifts and at 6am on August 25th, after finishing up one of her shifts, Maria got into her car heading to her next job. She had another shift at another location and during a brief conversation with her boyfriend that morning, Maria told him she was going to pull over for a nap.
She pulled into the parking lot of a Wawa convenience store and reclined her seat. It was the last moments of her life. Maria was found dead in her car, foaming from the mouth.
Maria’s story is detailed in a report by the New York Times, and according to the report, Maria always slept in her car with the engine running. Her biggest fear, the report says, was waking up and realizing that she had no gas left after sleeping with the engine running. So she bought a container, filled it with gas and stored it in her car.
Her boyfriend cautioned her about storing gas in her car, but waking up and realizing that she had no gas was something she had to avoid. No gas meant she couldn’t get to work and not working a shift at one of her three jobs was out if the question.
Surveillance cameras at the Wawa convenience store picked up the images of the 32-year-old woman, dressed in her Dunkin Donuts uniform and driving her 2001 Kia Sportage, pulling into the parking lot at 6:27am.
A Wawa employee, on his way to work, noticed Ms. Fernandes about an hour later. She was lying motionless in her S.U.V., which was parked behind the store, police records show. He said he thought she was sleeping and went inside.
When he finished his shift around 3:30 p.m., the Wawa employee noticed that Ms. Fernandes was still there. This time, though, she was foaming at the mouth. His manager called 911.
Emergency responders found the gas can open and overturned in the cargo hold and the S.U.V. filled with fumes, in what police said appeared to have been an accident. As commuters streamed by her counter in Newark, Ms. Fernandes was pronounced dead at 5:56 p.m. She was still in her uniform.
Maria’s story is unfortunate, but not exclusive. Republicans who are trying to end Obamacare and other social programs designed to help the poor, and those trying to fight any raise in the minimum wage, are all contributors to stories like Maria’s.
In the poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, the majority of Republicans admitted they would not be able to live on today’s minimum wage, but when the question of raising it was asked, the majority of Republicans refused.
The poll found that 69 percent of Republican respondents said they don’t think they could live off the minimum wage, versus 80 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of voters overall. However, when asked if they support raising the minimum wage, just 37 percent of Republicans said they would back an increase. (74 percent of Democrats said they are in support of a hike.)
The poll’s release comes on the heels of a new campaign by Americans United for Change challenging lawmakers to “Live the Wage” and live off just $77 for a week. Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan (Ohio) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) as well as former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland announced that they will begin the challenge Thursday.
ThinkProgress is reporting that Seattle will raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour over the coming years under a deal brokered by Mayor Ed Murray and blessed by labor and business groups alike, city leaders announced Thursday afternoon.
The new pay floor will phase in at different speeds for businesses of different sizes, but all employers will have to meet the $15 minimum wage by the end of the decade. Businesses with more than 500 employees nationwide will have a three-year phase-in period, while smaller employers get five years to ratchet up their payscales.
After reaching $15 an hour, the city’s minimum wage will automatically climb by 2.4 percent each year regardless of the rate of inflation. Even among states with relatively strong minimum wage laws, automatic increases are uncommon.
First it was marriage equality. Now it’s the minimum wage. And prison reform. And some lefty laboratories in cities across the country. It’s not a sharp turn to the left as many had anticipated with Obama’s election in 2008. It’s a wide turn, and the country’s already done the first hand-over-hand on the cultural-political wheel.
If you haven’t seen the Frontline series on American prisons, please go their post-haste and watch what you can. The growth of the prison population in this country is staggering, and is a direct result of the conservative policies that created minimum sentences and the mandated arrests of millions of low-level and non-violent offenders, most of whom were males of color. Pair that with the creation of laws that, in some states, treated 12 year-olds as adults, and the results are explosive. We built prisons, then made sure we filled them up.
That’s changing. Many states, such as Kentucky, are trying to reform and rewrite their legal codes to provide the kind of care that young, at-risk juveniles and older, clearly sick men and women need in order to avoid jail time. One of the stories on the program shows a clearly distressed young women who needs counseling, medication, emotional support and a mentor if she is to thrive as a citizen. Otherwise, she’s going to wind up as a ward of the state and she might commit a violent act against someone. Another story shows a 67 year old addict who’s been released from jail to a halfway house with nothing. No money, no prospects, no clothes other than the sweats on his body. And he’s supposed to get a job? Go on welfare or food stamps (that the GOP wants to cut more)?
And while we were spending all of this money on being punitive, the right wing also told us that we needed to spend less on schools and lower taxes that paid for needed government services. Spending more on prisons and less on schools has had a direct impact on our culture. But as I said, that’s changing.
There are other signs of a wide left turn. Minimum wages are going up in some states. In New Jersey, the people voted to raise the wage over the objections of Governor Christie. Today’s vote to try and raise the national wage ended in a Republican-led filibuster, which will show up in Democratic ads come the fall. The national reactions to comments from Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy shows that, although there are still racists in the United States, they will not be tolerated as they were before. Courts are striking down voter ID laws, most recently in Wisconsin, which is a welcome sign for democracy.
We still have work to do, and there will be setbacks, but slowly and surely, ideas that for years were ridiculed as soft and unworkable are seeing the light of day.
Hawaii, led by a Democrat is doing the right thing for that people, and is following the president’s recommendations to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. The bill is expected to be signed into law on Wednesday.
Hawaii is the third state to pass a wage at that level this year, following Connecticut and Maryland.
In his weekly address, President Obama continued his push to raise the minimum wage and the importance of of recognizing women and their contribution in the workplace.
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