“I work at Quick Pita in the food court of the Ronald Reagan Building. I work nearly 12 hours every day serving lunch to the thousands of people who work in the building. But I am not here to tell you how hard I work. I am here to tell you that my employer does not follow the law,” testified Antonio Vanegas before a hearing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus yesterday.
Melissa Roseboro has worked at the McDonald's outlet at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. for nearly a year. The 53-year-old grandmother said she just got a raise—of 8 cents.
That brings her hourly wage to $8.33 an hour and was the reason she joined 200 other federal contract workers in the nation's capital to stage a one-day walkout Tuesday, forcing several food outlets in the city to shut down for the day. [...]
Today’s strike follows the release last week of a report from the progressive think tank Demos estimating that at least 1,992,000 workers receive $12 per hour or less while doing jobs backed by public funds.
Hundreds of low-wage employees of federal contractors walked off the job on Tuesday morning, demanding that President Obama sign legislation or an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay higher wages. The Washington, D.C., strike is led by a new campaign called Good Jobs Nation, formed earlier this month.
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.
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?
The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive.
Regardless of the rationale behind these credit checks, this practice can be discriminatory, say Daniel Garodnick and Amy Traub in the New York Daily News. For instance, "African-American and Latino households are disproportionately likely to report poor credit, a finding some attribute to the nat