Earlier today I praised the Obama administration's move to extend labor protections, including overtime and the minimum wage, to some two million home aides. Now for the reality check: This step will surely increase the cost of caring for the aged and disabled at a time when millions of Baby Boomers are starting to retire, straining entitlement programs. What's more, hikes to the minimum wage—such as one recently enacted by California—will further boost home care costs.
Today, the Obama administration extended minimum wage and labor protections to nearly two million home care workers, ensuring that these employees will now be covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Last year, Demos submitted a public comment to the Department of Labor urging this regulation.
There’s a line in Johnny Paycheck’s 1977 hit song that goes “I’d give the shirt right off my back, if I had the guts to say ... Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more.” In the past year, fast-food, retail, and warehouse workers have shown they do have the guts—but instead of quitting, they’re fighting back. From New York to California they’re taking to the streets. They’re fighting for a living wage, for respect from their bosses, and in some cases, for the right to form a union.
NEW YORK, NY – Today Washington D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray caved to the ultimatum issued by Walmart and vetoed a living wage bill that was passed by the D.C. City Council. The bill would have required retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces of 75,000 square feet or larger to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour.
In response to the veto, Demos Vice President of Policy and Outreach Heather McGhee issued the following statement:
Internships have long been a part of building a career trajectory and most students have resigned themselves to the fact that internships will be unpaid. Many college students spend summers interning at various places, hoping to gain some hands-on experience, a few recommendations and some sense of what they would like to do after graduation. However, the unpaid internship is now creeping into life after graduation.[...]
Washington DC needs jobs. When D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray made this point at a press conference this week, he may not have realized he was making a strong case in favor of the Large Retailer Accountability Act.
Paying workers more would lead to lower profits and layoffs for America's biggest corporations, right? Not necessarily.
Critics of a minimum wage hike cite a commonly held belief that forcing low-paying employers such as Wal-Mart to boost compensation would lead to greater economic suffering. Higher labor costs, they argue, would require higher prices, prompting layoffs and more pain.
Most research on rising economic inequality focuses on growing wage gaps between different groups of workers. But of course that is only part of the story. Just as important is the division of the national economic pie between profits going to capitalists and the “labor share” that includes all of the wages and benefits earned by workers.
We famously live an age of capital, where those who own businesses or other assets are prospering, while most people who rely on the value of their labor are doing terribly.
After decades of seeing their incomes shrink, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are starting to band together and fight back — and it’s one of the most important economic stories of our time.
Fast food workers in over 50 cities across the nation are striking on Thursday in what organizers are touting as the largest ever strike to hit the industry.
The workers are demanding $15 an hour and the right to unionize, continuing the calls and momentum of a series of strikes that first started in November of 2012.
Fast food companies keep employees at poverty-level wages while reaping billions of dollars in profits. It drives inequality, slows growth, and lowers living standards.
If I were a top executive in the retail or restaurant industries, or one of their hired guns in Washington, I'd be very nervous right now.
Tomorrow will see what may be the first-ever national strike against restaurant and retail chains, with workers expected to walk off the jobs in 35 cities -- including at retail giants like Sears, Macy's, and Walmart.
In the spring of 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to join sanitation workers seeking better pay, fairer treatment and the right to form a union.
I was with Dr. King as he stood with workers, all African-American, all fighting years of labor repression and wages that relegated them to poverty. Dr. King was assassinated on that trip to Memphis. His death, just as the images of workers carrying signs reading, "I am a man," is forever seared in my memory.
The Cato Institute came out with a big study recently that argues the familiar point that generous welfare payments undermine incentives to work. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities promptly replied with a four-page paper rebutting key aspects of the report.
You know the drill — we have a dysfunctional political system and a gridlocked Congress. The House is firmly in the grip of a band of Republican maniacs and the Senate, though technically Democratic, requires a virtually impossible filibuster-proof majority to get anything passed.
So we should just throw up our hands and admit that nothing productive can be done in Washington until we get a Democratic Congress, right?
On the eve of a march to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, labor and civil rights activists are calling on President Barack Obama to honor King with an executive order that would raise wages for as many as two million workers.
One of the most poignant calls came Wednesday from Alvin Turner, a veteran of the famous 1968 Memphis garbage workers strike. Recalling a recent face-to-face meeting with Obama, Turner said “he told me personally he was working hard for the little man. If he don’t sign, he’ll disappoint me badly.”