Tag: minimum wage

Categories
executive order Politics

President’s Executive Order Raises Wage for Disabled Too

President Obama’s executive order to raise the minimum wage for workers under future federal contracts includes a key provision to address concerns raised by advocates for disabled workers, according to the White House.

The president, who is set to sign the order at a ceremony in the White House East Room on Wednesday afternoon, announced his plan to take unilateral action at last month’s State of the Union Address and hike the minimum wage for low-wage workers to $10.10 from the current rate of $7.25.

Almost immediately after announcing his plan, advocates for the physically and intellectually disabled began pressing the White House to include the group among those getting raises. Under a government program that dates back to 1938, employers could pay certain disabled workers subminimum wages — sometimes for a fraction of the prevailing minimum wage.

But with Obama’s executive order, that practice will be discontinued with disabled workers laboring under federal contracts in the future.

“Under current law, workers whose productivity is affected because of their disabilities may be paid less than the wage paid to others doing the same job under certain specialized certificate programs,” according to a White House memo detailing the order. “Under this Executive Order, all individuals working under service or concessions contracts with the federal government will be covered by the same $10.10 per hour minimum wage protections.”

The White House says Obama will continue to push Congress to back legislation that would gradually raise the minimum wage for all workers to $10.10 by the end of his presidency, but the effort faces stiff resistance in the GOP-controlled House.

Categories
New York Politics

Bill de Blasio to Corporations – Time to Pay a Living Wage

New York City’s new mayor, Bill DeBlasio, has had enough of big corporations taking advantage of the city’s welfare system by paying notoriously low wages.

“If we’re subsidizing companies, we have every right to demand a living wage for the people they pay,” DeBlasio told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer on Monday.

DeBlasio is referring to the fact that millions of low wage workers depend on public assistance, like food stamps, to get by. A report in October found that American taxpayers shell out $3.8 billion per year to subsidize worker pay at the country’s top 10 largest fast food chains.

In October, de Blasio stood with fast-food workers in New York City who were protesting for higher wages. “The bottom line is, this is an unsupportable situation where every day hard-working people can’t make ends meet, and the companies involved certainly can do more,” he said.

The mayor is expected to soon introduce legislation expanding living wage protections in New York. Under a proposal introduced during his campaign this past summer, de Blasio would raise the wage for employees at companies receiving city subsidies — including some retail and fast-food restaurants — to $11.75 an hour with benefits.

Categories
Politics

A McDonald’s Worker Must Work 4 Months to See What CEO Makes in 1 Hour

That’s working 4 months and doing overtime the whole time. How is this right?

A McDonald’s employee working overtime for nearly four months straight would make as much as the company’s former CEO earned in just 60 minutes, according to an analysis published Tuesday.

The analysis, compiled by the financial information company NerdWallet, assumes the average salary of a McDonald’s hourly worker is $7.73, based on information from self-reported salary site GlassDoor.com. Official figures on McDonald’s worker pay aren’t publicly available, but the median wage for fast-food workers overall is $8.90 per hour.

By comparison, former McDonald’s CEO James Skinner raked in $9,247 for an hour of his precious time last year, according to NerdWallet. (The analysis focuses on Skinner and not current CEO Donald Thompson because full data on the latter’s salary isn’t publicly available yet.)

Categories
Domestic Policies News Politics

The Wages Are Sinful

You’ve heard about the healthcare website. You’ve heard about Iran. You’ve heard about the fiscal negotiations. You’ve eaten, shopped, dozed, decorated and lit candles.

Get ready for the wage fight, which could be the most important issue we’ll face in the next few months. On Thursday, fast food workers in 100 cities plan to strike at fast food outlets across the country to publicize the fight for a livable minimum wage. Right now, that wage is $7.25 per hour and hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living or the rate of inflation…ever. To give you some perspective, and to show just how old I am, I remember my first job at Korvettes making $2.50 per hour in 1977. The present wage isn’t even three times that much and over 35 years have passed.

The protests now are asking for a wage of $15 dollars per hour, which still isn’t much, but would allow some people to actually live a middle class existence without having to get more than one job. Consider these statistics from this article about one such person who is trying to survive on the minimum wage:

According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.
The classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs after class is sorely out of date. Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry. These days, according to the National Employment Law Project, the average age of fast-food workers is 29. Forty percent are 25 or older; 31 percent have at least attempted college; more than 26 percent are parents raising children. Union organizers say that one-third to one-half of them have more than one job — like Mr. Shoy, who is 58 and supports a wife and children.

The argument against a rise on the minimum wage has always centered around the notion that raising the wage would force small businesses to lay off workers because labor costs would eat into profits. I can see this happening to a certain extent to local businesses and independent stores, but there’s simply not a lot of evidence to suggest that this would be an issue for large retail outlets, fast-food restaurants or national chain stores. In fact, the data suggests that raising the wage would even help the economy and lift spending, which would then allow companies to hire more workers to meet demand.

The other problem is that this is a moral issue that is reaching far beyond what many people consider to be a teenage, burger-flipping concern. More and more families rely on the minimum wage to get by and more adults, whose higher paying jobs have fled or disappeared, are now working the lower paying jobs. Children are now in danger of living below the poverty line. That’s a huge concern.

We are living in a country where the top wage earners have seen a fabulous rise in their incomes, and for the most part they have earned that. But if we don’t help those who struggle at the bottom–people who are working–then what does that say about our country?

There’s an argument about what might happen if we raise the wage, but we know what will happen if we don’t raise it. Make this a personal issue. Respect the fast food strike on Thursday. Make sure that all people get their shot at the American Dream.

For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest  

Categories
Domestic Policies Healthcare News Politics Wisconsin Union Bashing

The State of the Unions

There’s been a lot of talk recently about workers. You know, the people who do the work in this country and who expect to be paid a livable wage while earning a little respect from employers and customers. The problem is that somewhere along the way, the conservative revolution has been glorifying the wealthy while bashing the people who actually create the wealth. I’m not saying anything new, but a spate of reports have caught my eye and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if present trends continue, we could have another revolution, but this one will be messy.

First up are those pesky fast food workers, you know, the ones who serve the most meals in the country. They are holding one-day walkouts to protest the unlivable minimum wage, $7.25 an hour or about $30,000 per year if full time, that many of them can’t really live on. Add in the lack of health care benfits and you have the fixin’s of a major problem. Since many of the jobs being created these days are not full time, more people are earning a wage that doesn’t support even a minimal existence.

So what to do? In DC, the City Council voted to require Wal-mart to pay its employees at least $12.50 per hour in all of its city stores. Wal-mart was considering building six stores in DC, but now that they actually have to pay a livable wage, they’re threatening not to build three of them. This wage would also apply to other big box stores. Keep in mind that Wal-mart makes billions of dollars a year, as do other retailers such as Home Depot and Target, and they all pay their executives millions of dollars in salaries. But of course, they couldn’t lower some of those high paying jobs just a little bit to cover the hourly workers. That would send the wrong message. Like, we care about our employees.

And it’s not just in the United States. Amazon is currently finding that European governments (those darn socialists!) are pushing back against Amazon’s attitude towards unions and the right to organize. Amazon is going to lose this battle, just as Google lost the privacy battle over its mapping service that also scooped up private information. In Europe, they take privacy and union rights seriously and that’s complicating big American businesses who are used to allies on the right allowing companies to bust unions and pay people very little (while telling workers that they should be happy to just have a job).

I am certainly not advocating fighting in the streets, but over time, as people find it difficult, if not impossible, to earn a living wage, and politicians turn a blind eye to them, then what other recourse will people have? Social media and elections will help, but gerrymandered Congressional districts almost ensure that anti-worker politicians will continue to be reelected. The gap between wealthy and not wealthy in this country is as large as it’s ever been, and that, in part, is why the economy is not growing a robustly as it should. Let’s solve this problem before more people become desperate.

And yes, that’s a warning.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Politics

Hey, Democrats Do Dumb Stuff Too

We have all heard of the RINOs – Republicans In Name Only, and we have went out of our way to bring them to you… free of charge. But when we come across the DINOs – Democrats In Name Only, people who call themselves Democrats then do things we expect a Republican to do, well… we’ll point them out too.

We’ll bring you to Scranton Pennsylvania and allow us to introduce you to a Democratic Mayor name Chris Doherty. Doherty and the City Counsel cannot figure out how to close a $16.8 million budget gap, so Doherty decides the best way to raise revenue would be to cut the pay of Firefighters and other public employees to minimum wage. Although a local judge ordered Doherty not to cut wages, the DINO went ahead and reduced the public employees wages anyway.

Doherty last week ignored a court order and cut the pay of about 400 city workers to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The Democratic mayor said it was all the cash-strapped city of more than 76,000 could afford, promising to restore full pay once finances are stabilized.

“It’s incredible,” the unions’ attorney, Thomas Jennings, said Tuesday. “I’ve never had a public official just say, ‘I’m not going to obey a court order. I’m not even going to try. He can’t tell me what to do.'”

We can all agree that deficits need to be reduced and even eliminated, but something is terribly wrong when the only way out of a financial hole is to put the cost on the backs of the hard-working middle class while the rich goes scott-free!

Categories
Featured Republican

Man Asks Republican to Raise The Minimum Wage, Republican Tells Man “Get a Job!”

The unbelievable encounter happened in Florida when a constituent asked Republican C.W. Bill Young to support a Democratic bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour. The answer from the Republican Representative epitomizes the you’re-nothing-leave-me-alone mentality of today’s Republican to the hardworking middle class.

Mr. Young’s told the man to, “Get a job!”

“Jesse Jackson, Jr. is passing a bill around to increase the minimum wage to 10 bucks an hour,” the man tells Young in a video obtained by FLDemocracy. “Do you support that?”

“Probably not,” Young replies.

“Ten bucks, that would give us a living wage,” the constituent points out.

“How about getting a job?” Young snaps.

“I do have one, $8.50 an hour,” the man insists.

“Why do you want that benefit?” Young grumbles. “Get a job!”

“I do have a job, but it’s not enough to get by on,” the man explains as Young turns away.

Video below:

Categories
Politics Republican Texas United States

Anita Perry Says Husband Rick Creates “Minimum Wage Jobs” In Texas

WOW… and she’s supposed to be helping him win the presidency?

Anita Perry, wife of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry has, in this one soundbite, cast doubt on her husband’s argument that he has fixed and improved Texas’ economy. Realizing that her husband’s campaign has gone down-hill in recent days as Republicans slowly continue their exodus away from the Perry bandwagon, Anita decided to go on the campaign trail to stand by her man. She had this to say;

He knows how to create jobs…We have 1,500 people moving to Texas every day to find a job. I’m not going to tell you they’re all high-paying jobs, but they’re a job, even if they’re a minimum wage job. And that’s what people are hungry for.

Anita is telling the truth. Under Perry’s leadership, almost 10% of the jobs created in Texas are minimum wage jobs. And Perry has taken the economy from 4.2% to 8.5%. Talk about a Texas miracle…!

For more on this story, click here

Categories
job creation Politics Republican Texas

Texas Residents Are Number 2 In The United States… In Hunger

Either Rick Perry is a liar, or he just doesn’t know the residents of his state that well.

The Texas governor recently announced his intention to run for the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama in the 2012 Presidential elections, and he often quotes his “success” in Texas as his main qualification for president. But if this new report is true, the question begs to be asked – why exactly are Texas residents the second hungriest folks in the nation?

Yes, despite Perry’s claims that Texas has the best economy in the nation, and despite his claims that his state produced more jobs than any other state, why are the people wanting for something as basic as food?

From the USDA report;

An estimated 85.5 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2010, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (14.5 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 5.4 percent with very low food security—meaning that the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food.

So where do Texans  falls? Well in 2010, under the auspicious leadership of Mr. Perry, 18.8% of residents reported not having enough food at some point during the year. That number was only second to Mississippi’s 19.4% who made the same claim.

This report shows the emptiness of Perry’s job creation claim. Although data shows that 4 out of every 10 jobs recently created in the nation came from Texas, something is drastically wrong if the citizens of your state still can’t afford to buy food. But there is no surprise here. Although Perry’s claim is partly correct, the fact remains the same – Texas leads the nation in minimum wage jobs.

Texas has more people earning the federal minimum wage or less than any other state and is tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers. New York follows Texas and Mississippi by three percentage points.

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