A handful of food-service workers walked off their jobs in the food court of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Tuesday morning as part of a day-long protest of low wages paid to federal contract employees.
The series of protests, dubbed “Good Jobs Nation,” was in support of the contract workers who clean the offices, serve the food and take care of the museums and landmarks in the federal city, some of whom said they make less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. [...]
Groups of workers employed in service jobs at federal buildings around D.C. are picketing this morning outside the landmark sites at which they are employed over their low wages. The protest, organized by a new group calling itself Good Jobs Nation, includes people who work at federal building food courts, loading docks, memorabilia shops, and facilities that manufacture uniforms for the military.[...]
The National Voter Registration Act set the first ever national standards for mail-in registration and increased the number of places people could register to vote, including motor vehicle and public assistance offices.
New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come.
Since NVRA was passed, citizens can now register to vote when they go to public assistance offices to apply for welfare or disability benefits, or at their local DMV when they apply for a drivers license — hence the nickname “Motor Voter Act” — and also allowed for mailed-in registration forms. The result was that over 30 million people registered via the new paths opened by NVRA in its first year.
Though Americans of all ages suffered as a result of the Great Recession, the downturn dealt a particularly harsh blow to young people, as employers opted for suddenly plentiful workers with more experience. As a result, nearly half of the nation’s unemployed are under 34 years old, according to an April report from public policy organization Demos.
Let us finally dispel the notion that increased numbers of African American voters, and more broadly all voters of color, headed to the polls in 2008 and 2012 solely because of Barack Obama.
The political history of race in America will record the Obama era as a breakthrough moment and a huge step forward. But any economic racial history will tell a nearly opposite story: Under the first black president, African-Americans have lost much of the wealth they built up over previous decades. The main culprit has been an ongoing foreclosure crisis that Washington has done very little to stop, even as it has shoveled trillions in nearly free loans to big banks who have enjoyed record profits.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you should be able to agree that the IRS needs to be rigorously neutral in its oversight of the nonprofit sector.
The retail and restaurant sector – two primary employers of low-wage workers – receive larger public subsidies than the fossil fuel industry in the form of public assistance for the working poor.
In 2012, no one, it seemed, could afford to sit on the sidelines. Having decried super PACs as "a threat to democracy," Obama and his advisers flip-flopped and blessed the creation of one devoted specifically to reelecting the president. Soon, they were everywhere, at the local, state, and federal levels.
This week has delivered two economic surprises that illustrate the right way and the wrong way to respond to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.
First, the euro zone economy shrank more than expected in the past three months, moving France back into a recession. That's what happens when you implement an austerity policy that serves to undermine economic demand.
Previous research has found that the majority of the jobs added to the economy since the end of the recession pay low wages. Middle-wage and high-wage jobs haven’t seen nearly the same rate of growth, meaning that the economy has traded comfortable jobs for those that merely allow workers to scrape by.
At the very least, argues a recent report from Demos, the American government owes employees on its payroll a livable wage. Demos, a research and policy center focused on economic stability, defines low-wage work as “a job paying $12 an hour or less, equivalent to an annual income of about $24,000 for a full-time worker. Nationwide, a family of four trying to subsist on $24,000 a year hovers near the poverty level.
With Jamie Dimon under growing fire from shareholders of JP Morgan Chase, one possibility is that he may relinquish his role as chairman of the board but remain as CEO. That raises an interesting question: Why does Dimon hold both jobs to begin with?
A JP Morgan Chase shareholder insurrection threatens to split the roles of Chairman and CEO, stripping Jamie Dimon of the chairmanship. People with reputations for wisdom and good judgment like Rupert Murdoch and Hank Paulson have rushed to defend the dapper and aggressive Dimon claiming that he is unworthy of such cruel and unusual punishment.
Silicon Valley, better known for big innovation, and big houses, is also falling prey to equally enormous economic inequality. There's been a 20% rise in homelessness in the last two years, and while jobs for the tech-savvy are growing faster than they have in a decade, so is food stamp usage. About 11% of the area's population falls below the federal poverty line.