Justin's Political Corner
First New York, then central Pennsylvania, and then Chicago. Now St. Louis is the latest American city to be hit with a strike by non-union fast food workers demanding higher wages and the right to form a union. Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, over 100 employees at approximately 30 different St. Louis-based restaurants walked off the job, demanding the right to form a union and a raise from Missouri’s $7.35 hourly minimum wage to $15 per hour. The strike was organized by an alternative workers’ group called the St. Louis Organizing Committee as part of a campaign called STL Can’t Survive on $7.35.
“Increasingly, fast food jobs are the only options for St. Louisans, but these workers can’t even afford to pay for rent, food, or carfare,” said Rev. Martin Rafanan, director of STL Can’t Survive on $7.35, in a statement. “If the workers earned more, fast food workers would spend that money at local businesses here in St. Louis and help lift our economy.”
The strike—which hit restaurants such as McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, Wendy’s and Domino’s—was only a quarter a size of New York’s second fast food strike, still the largest walkout to occur in the industry. Still, the recent events in St. Louis indicate that labor unrest within the industry is not going away, and that the nationwide momentum shows no sign of abating.
A significant chunk of the jobs being gained during America’s economic recovery are concentrated in the service and retail sectors; in fact, the fast food industry is growing at twice the rate as the rest of the economy, according to The Nation’s Annie Shields. As a result, St. Louis is highly unlikely to be the last American city to be hit with a fast food strike.
h/t: MSNBC.com
Steve Kush, executive director of the Bernalillo County Republican Party in New Mexico, took to Twitter on Tuesday to verbally abuse a 19-year-old Working America volunteer who testified in favor of raising the minimum wage. Bernalillo County, the largest county in New Mexico, was considering a proposal to increase the county minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50.
Rather than listen to the 19-year-old woman’s testimony, Kush mocked her on social media, calling her a “radical bitch”:
As other advocates spoke on Tuesday, Kush was on Facebook, deploying a variety of sexist and offensive insults. He joked that Chelsey Evans, director of the New Mexico branch, “was hot enough to almost make me register democrat.”
Bob Cornelius, the former executive director of the Bernalillo County GOP, replied that Evans was using the boots to “walk Central,” a local street known for prostitution. Cornelius later deleted the comment and apologized. According to Evans, Kush has not yet offered an apology.
ProgressNow New Mexico called for Kush’s resignation, pointing out that a state run by a prominent Republican woman, Gov. Susana Martinez, should not be tolerating “misogynistic statements towards working women time and again.”
Also during the meeting, Kush called the Democrats the “Gestapo” multiple times. Despite the slew of hateful comments made by Kush over social media, the county passed the proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50 by 3-2 on Tuesday night.
H/T: Think Progress
(via Crooks and Liars: Fox News Tells Striking Workers to Get Two Jobs and ‘Expect to Get Paid the Minimum Wage’)
The hosts of Fox & Friends on Friday suggested that fast food workers should stop striking for higher pay and get a second job because the minimum wage “was never meant to be a career wage.”
On Thursday, hundreds of restaurant workers in New York City went on strike to demand a wage of at least $15 an hour. The current median wage of $9 an hour puts workers at about $4,500 lower that the poverty threshold of $23,000 for a family of four. The current minimum wage in New York City is $7.25.
“Here’s the deal, you’re a minimum wage worker, that’s an entry-level salary,” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade opined on Friday. “If you’re good, you’ll get a raise.”
“Minimum wage was never meant to be a career wage. If you work hard you will get higher — you will get more money. Here’s the other thing, as hard as it is in some cases, because you are a single mom or a single dad, you’ve got to get another job. You’ve got to get another job on top of that so you have two incomes.”
“Brian you hit on the nose, I think, the key thing,” co-host Steve Doocy remarked. “If it is a minimum wage job, expect to get paid the minimum wage.”
Warren also noted that wages have not been keeping up with productivity, and if they had, the minimum wage would be about $22 today. That’s $14.75 higher than the actual federal minimum wage.
(via recall-all-republicans)
Costco CEO Craig Jelinek supports raising the minimum wage.
Costco announced record profits today, averaging $10,000 in profit per employee compared to $7,400 at Walmart.
The secret to Costco’s success is paying employees well, providing benefits, and giving them an opportunity to unionize.So large corporations’ excuses that treating & paying workers well would damage profits are all a crock of shit.
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
Right-click-save this Upworthy graphic for the next time someone says the wage gap is a myth. (But also, prepare for them to point out that in a whopping two industries, women make up to nearly FOUR PERCENT more than men!!111)
From the 02.13.2013 edition of FNC’s Fox and Friends:Gretchen Carlson: Higher Minimum Wage May Be “Bad For Small Businesses.” On Fox & Friends the morning after the president’s State of the Union address, co-host Gretchen Carlson claimed “[Obama] also wants to increase minimum wage, and of course, that would be great for people who are working at those jobs, but possibly bad for small businesses who have to pay higher wages.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/13/13]
For more on Fox’s baseless attacks on minimum wage, click here and here.
h/t: MMFA
President Obama proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour and to tie it to the cost of living, during his State of the Union speech Tuesday.
“Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour,” Obama said, according to prepared remarks.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
H/T: TPM LiveWire
Mark Weisbrot writes:
The federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour and hasn’t been raised in three years. But a raise is much more overdue than that. If we look at the minimum wage 44 years ago, and simply adjust it for inflation, it would be more than $10 today. This is another ugly symptom of what has gone wrong in America over the past 35-40 years. From 1979-2007 about 60 percent of the income gains have gone to the now infamous 1 percent at the top, with the majority of those gains going to the top 0.1 percent – people who made, on average, $5.6 million per year.
(via texarshead)
Is Todd Akin Mainstream? (Social Security, Minimum Wage, and Student Loans) (by ClaireMcCaskill2012)
More than 100 House Democrats introduced a bill Thursday to raise the minimum wage. Rep. George Miller’s proposed legislation would raise the minimum wage to $9.80 over three years, 85 cents per year, then link it to inflation, so that raising it wouldn’t have to be a giant political fight every few years. Tipped workers, who haven’t seen their $2.13 minimum wage increased since 1991, would get 85 cent raises until the tipped minimum was 70 percent of the full minimum wage.
If you work at the current minimum wage for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, with no time off at all, the $15,080 you earn puts you $50 below the poverty threshold for a family of two. That—and the fact that many minimum wage employers keep workers at part-time levels—is why so many working people are forced to rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid and other aid programs. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that if you work, you shouldn’t be poor. But to today’s Republican Party, that counts as a radical statement.
Think of a minimum wage increase as an instant economic stimulus funded by the runaway profits of the major corporations.
People who are struggling to get by on minimum-wage jobs have a lot of pent-up demand - to fix or replace that broken-down car, to put decent groceries on the family table, or to purchase the necessities and tiny luxuries of life.
They’re not going to put that money into hedge funds or Swiss bank accounts. They’re going to buy stuff. When they do, local businesses are going to need people to sell them that stuff. That means there will be more jobs in the community. It also creates more revenue for the smaller businesses that employ low-wage workers, which will help revive real capitalism - the Mom and Pop kind.
As the demand for the stuff they’re buying goes up, the companies that provide it are going to have to hire people to produce it for them. That creates even more jobs.
And every time another job is created, more people buy more stuff - which in turn creates more jobs. That’s the cycle of economic growth. For a real-world example, look at this country’s economic boom after World War II.
FLASHBACK: Barton: “Jesus Opposed the Minimum Wage” | rightwingwatch.org
The event is being webcast by the American Family Association and last night David Barton got the festivities underway by explaining to the audience that all of our economic and tax policies ought to be dictated by the Bible … and that means getting rid of the minimum wage because it was opposed by Jesus (Barton didn’t actually cite the passage he uses to support this claim in this presentation, but it is Matthew 20:1-16).
The framers of our Constitution met in 1787 because the weak national governance adopted by the Articles of Confederation utterly failed. Their goal, in their own words, was to ensure that the federal government had the power to “legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent.” National leaders must have the ability to address national problems, and this is especially true with respect to the national economy. As the Supreme Court explained very early in American history, there is “no sort of trade” that our national leaders cannot regulate, and the the power to regulate something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated,” so long as Congress does not trample the individual protected elsewhere in the Constitution.
Few living Americans have done more to undermine this vision than Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and one of the leading architects of the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act. In an interview with NPR yesterday, Barnett admitted just how far he’d like to go in reimagining the Constitution if his attack on health reform succeeds.
The “New Deal cases” Barnett objects to rejected the fake constitution that dominated the pre-New Deal era. If Barnett succeeds in restoring this fake constitution, he would usher in a far meaner and less prosperous America:
- Child Labor: One of the seminal cases from this discredited era is Hammer v. Dagenhardt, which struck down a national child labor law. If the New Deal cases Barnett despises were overruled, the longstanding federal protections against exploiting child workers would cease to exist.
- No Minimum Wage: A key New Deal case, United States v. Darby, upheld a national minimum wage and overtime laws. If Darby were overruled, these and other basic labor protections would also cease to exist.
- Whites-Only Lunch Counters: The Court also relied on cases like Darby in upholding basic civil rights protections, including the ban on whites-only lunch counters. Barnett’s fake constitution would almost certainly eliminate most of the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era.
- The Right to Organize: The pre-New Deal justices also struck down laws ensuring workers’ right to organize into labor unions. Restoring their fake constitution would bring this decision back to life.
In other words, the fake constitution espoused by the anti-health reform case’s chief architect would roll back nearly one hundred years of progress — leaving poor children, minorities, workers and women out in the cold.
