"Seattle Announces $15 Minimum Wage, Highest In The
Seattle Minimum Wage CREDIT: AP
Seattle will raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour over the coming years under a deal brokered by Mayor Ed Murray and blessed by labor and business groups alike, city leaders announced Thursday afternoon.
The new pay floor will phase in at different speeds for businesses of different sizes, but all employers will have to meet the $15 minimum wage by the end of the decade. Businesses with more than 500 employees nationwide will have a three-year phase-in period, while smaller employers get five years to ratchet up their payscales.
After reaching $15 an hour, the city’s minimum wage will automatically climb by 2.4 percent each year regardless of the rate of inflation. Even among states with relatively strong minimum wage laws, automatic increases are uncommon. Thursday’s deal will make Seattle the national leader on municipal minimum wage laws. Washington currently has the highest pay floor of any state at $9.32 per hour.
The deal was a long time coming, with Murray first indicating he wanted to establish a $15 floor back in September during the mayoral campaign. Murray created the 24-member advisory group that crafted the compromise package back in December, and the group of local business owners, restaurateurs, and labor leaders has been grinding toward an agreement for the past four months.
Approval from restaurant owners is especially noteworthy given the deal’s provisions for tipped workers. Tips can only be counted toward worker minimum pay for the next five years. After that, the separate minimum hourly pay rates for tipped and non-tipped workers will disappear, and all employees citywide will have to be paid $15 hourly or more.
An activist coalition called 15 Now led by the lone socialist member of the City Council, Kshama Sawant, has pledged to put an immediate wage hike before city voters in November if the deal falls short of the group’s goals. Another coalition, 15 For Seattle, issued a press release Thursday saying that “many of the coalitions 100+ progressive members have already endorsed” the deal but that others “are taking the Mayor’s proposal back to their organizations for review and approval.” Sawant’s ballot initiative would let employers with fewer than 250 workers phase in higher wages over three years but impose the $15 rate immediately for larger businesses.
Sawant is one of two members of the working group who is opposing the deal announced Thursday, according to a source close to the negotiations. The other is Craig Dawson, the owner of a payments processing company called Retail Lockbox. The head of the city’s Chamber of Commerce is abstaining. But the 21 votes in favor include representatives from two separate chapters of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) chapter, and the MLK Labor Council, as well as local hotel owners, restaurant owners, a pair of Councilmen, and the venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, who has made a name for himself in recent years as a wealthy champion of economic policies that focus on the middle class rather than on business owners and the wealthy.
There are 102,000 workers in Seattle currently earning less than $15 an hour. Raising those people’s wages will put about half a billion extra dollars of spending money into Seattle workers’ pockets. As SEIU 775 president and coalition co-chair David Rolf said in a statement Thursday, the deal “will pump nearly $500 million into Washington’s economy, proving that a higher minimum wage fuels business and job growth.”
Tags: Minimum Wage
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Stupid. $15 an hour for min wage? That's how bad our economy is now? The value of the dollar has reached that point?
I just love hope and change!
Posted by glassman on :
LOL cashcow.
15$/hr is about the average household income in MS. i can tell you first hand that Seattle is a much better place to live. You wanna play? You gotta pay. that's the American Way. They know exactly what they are doing up there.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: Shutterstock
On Tuesday, lawmakers in Hawaii voted to increase the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2018 and it was signed into law by Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) the next day. While the state is the third to raise its wage to that level this year, it’s unique in one aspect: its wage will apply to tipped and nontipped workers alike.
That means Hawaii will become the eighth state to require businesses like restaurants, nail salons, bars, and barber shops to pay the employees who earn tips the same minimum wage as everyone else. Before Hawaii, Alaska, California, Montana, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington had already done the same. Those seven states have more than 1 million tipped workers that make the full minimum wage.
There are opportunities for more to join the club. According to Saru Jayaraman, co-director of ROC United, ballot measures in Michigan and Washington, DC as well as legislation in Florida and Pennsylvania would get rid of the lower tipped minimum wage. “Our focus is on the ballot measures,” she told ThinkProgress, which she says “are likely to pass.”
Those seven states that have already eliminated the two-tier system stand out. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13, about 30 percent of the $7.25 wage for all other workers, and it hasn’t been raised in two decades. But among those who did away with the lower wage, the minimum for tipped workers reaches as high as 130 percent of the federal level. And their experience with a higher wage for people who earn tips shows it could have positive benefits for the whole economy.
The low tipped wage leaves many people who earn it struggling to get by. Across the country, workers in predominantly tipped jobs are twice as likely to experience poverty, and restaurant servers have a poverty rate that is nearly three times the rate for everyone else. Servers are also twice as likely to use food stamps to feed themselves. But the situation is different in states with higher tipped wages. In those seven states, the poverty rate for tipped workers has been reduced by a third.
Part of the reason so many tipped workers struggle to get by is that their employers don’t live up to their obligation to fill in their wages. If a workers’ hourly wage plus tips doesn’t add up to $7.25 an hour, the employer is required to make up the difference. But few do. More than one in ten tipped workers say their pay adds up to less than that even with tips. The Department of labor found 84 percent of employers weren’t compliant with the rule when it conducted 9,000 investigations over two years.
It doesn’t just help the workers themselves. A report from ROC United found that these states also experienced above average employment growth in the restaurant industry compared to the rest of the country. It’s set to grow 10.5 percent in those seven states, compared to 9.1 percent in the others. Job growth for tipped workers also tends to be higher where they make more than $5 per hour and is even higher in those seven states without a lower wage.
And restaurants themselves can benefit. The report found that per capita actual sales in the industry over the last three years increased as the tipped minimum wage increased. One reason, it posits, could be an improvement in customer service and a reduction in turnover — a survey of 1,000 employers in the industry found that higher wages cut their turnover in half. The higher wage also puts more money in workers’ pockets, which can translate to more money spent at these establishments.
Some restaurants have already decided that the benefits outweigh the costs. From a bar in Washington, DC to a high-end sushi restaurant in New York City, some places are banning tips for their workers in favor of just paying them a higher wage and giving them benefits. One restaurant owner said doing so improved both his service and revenues.
They have not just recognized that tipping can leave their workers making less, but that it doesn’t necessarily come with benefits. While customers think that tipping allows them to get better service, that doesn’t actually play out: their perception of service accounts for just a percentage point or so in what tips they leave. Meanwhile, tipping can perpetuate racism and sexism, rewarding attractive women and white servers over others.
Posted by glassman on :
i've lived allover the US. between my wife and I we've had 20 employers besides Ourslves (both of us have owned and operated businesses together and apart)this guys statements are dead on. something is missing. Our govt is broken at the political and the Bureaucratic levels. Seattle will actually GROW FASTER due to this new law. People will continue to leave chitholes to get better chances at making it. I have watched a state live in total denial about what it's actual problems are for a whole decade now, and not by choice. I just happened to be here in MS when our economy crashed. People have been leaving this area for three decades (25% decline in actual population)and the leaders of my local communities are lying to themsleves about why this is happening..
What’s happening is both easy enough for a traveler to see and for an economist to measure. Median household income in 2012 was no higher than it had been a quarter-century earlier. Meanwhile, expenses had outpaced inflation. U.S. Census Bureau figures show that the income gap between rich and poor had widened to a more than four-decade record since the 1970s. The 46.2 million people in poverty remained the highest number since the Census Bureau began collecting that data 53 years ago. The gap between how much total wealth America's 1% of earners control and what the rest of us have is even wider than even in the years preceding the Great Depression of 1929. Argue over numbers, debate which statistics are most accurate, or just drive around America: the trend lines and broad patterns, the shadows of our world of regime change, are sharply, sadly clear.
After John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, he said he was filled with “certain angers at people who were doing injustices to other people." I, too, felt anger, though it’s an emotion that I’m unsure how to turn against the problems we face. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/02
The founder and CEO of Subway says a minimum wage increase wouldn’t be such a bad thing for his stores and workers and believes it should be changed so that wages rise automatically with inflation.
“I’m not concerned,” CEO Fred DeLuca said on Wednesday when CNBC asked him about minimum wage hikes. “Over the years, I’ve seen so many of these wage increases. I think it’s normal. It won’t have a negative impact hopefully, and that’s what I tell my workers.”
DeLuca’s support is noteworthy in part because of the size of his business. Subway has the most locations of any fast food chain. While a majority of small business owners support a $10.10 wage hike, major corporations of that scale typically oppose raising wages.
DeLuca had previously warned that raising the minimum wage too rapidly would be a “bad idea” that could damage businesses, while acknowledging that “minimum-wage workers deserve to make more.” At the time that he offered that warning in 2013, President Obama was proposing a minimum wage hike from $7.25 to $9 an hour. Since then, Obama has joined congressional progressives in calling for a $10.10 hourly minimum, which would nearly recoup the purchasing power low-wage workers have lost to inflation over the past 40 years.
DeLuca launched Subway nearly 39 years ago. The minimum wage then was $1.25 an hour, which would be $9.38 per hour in today’s dollars. Even after a three-step wage hike from 2008 to 2010 — the first time the minimum wage had been raised in over a decade — the minimum wage is worth 20 percent less than it was in the late 1960s. “I personally think that if I were in charge of the government, I would index the minimum wage to inflation so that way everybody knows what they can count on,” DeLuca told CNBC.
In the 15 months since DeLuca criticized proposed wage hikes as too rapid, low-wage worker strikes have spread from a handful of New York fast food stores to a hundred cities in all parts of the country, ratcheting up the pressure on lawmakers to act on wages. On Wednesday, workers announced plans for strikes in 150 U.S. cities and protests in 30 other countries across six continents.
Beyond opposing higher wages, large fast food companies are often perpetrators of wage theft, which nine out of 10 fast food workers report experiencing. Subway leads the industry in wage theft violations, thanks in part to its size. “We, as a company, realize that some of our owners have not done the right thing,” DeLuca said when asked about wage theft. “The people who come to work deserve to be paid properly and there’s no excuse.”
At the same time that fast food companies fight to keep wages down and hide behind franchise agreements when discussing wage theft, their CEOs are earning ever-larger compensation packages. The fast food industry has the largest pay gap between workers and executives, with top men making 1,200 times more than their typical worker.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Vermont’s minimum wage will rise from $8.73 to $10.50 over the next four years under a bill that won final passage just before the legislative session ended on Saturday. The measure puts Vermont on track to have the highest minimum wage of any state in 2018, higher than a handful of states whose pay floors will rise to $10.10 under laws approved this year.
“I will be proud to sign it,” Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) said of the bill. The final version will phase in the higher wage in order to win nearly unanimous support in both chambers. The state’s minimum wage was already indexed to inflation.
The Green Mountain state is the seventh to enact a minimum wage hike this year and the fourth to crack the $10 mark. Delaware and West Virginia lawmakers raised their wages above $8 an hour. Minnesota raised the minimum wage for most large companies to $9.50. And Hawaii, Maryland, and Connecticut each established $10.10 minimum wages.
The $10.10 number has become a rallying point for lawmakers looking to give low-wage workers a boost. That figure would nearly restore the buying power minimum wage workers have lost to inflation over the past four decades. It would raise nearly 5 million people out of poverty, most of them working adults with bills to pay rather than the teenagers many people imagine when they think of minimum wage workers. President Obama raised his own target from $9 an hour to $10.10 late last year following years of pressure from progressives in Congress. Republican resistance to raising the minimum wage — or, in some cases, to having a minimum wage at all — has stymied those national efforts, however, shunting worker and activist energy off into state and local fights.
Seattle recently announced a plan to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years, and numerous other cities have enacted or are considering local wage ordinances. Some conservative state lawmakers and governors have tried to preempt those campaigns by issuing bans on local minimum wage laws. Dozens of states are still set to consider wage hikes through either legislative action or ballot measures this fall.
The energy driving these campaigns comes primarily from workers. After a handful of New York City fast food workers went on strike in late 2012, the walkouts spread across the country in 2013. A wave of fast food strikes hit 100 cities in December. Workers are expected to strike in 150 U.S. cities on Thursday amid solidarity protests in 30 other countries across all six inhabited continents on the planet.
Minimum wage opponents often argue that the laws harm the economy and that businesses oppose them. But six in 10 small business owners in a recent survey support a $10.10 wage floor, and even some larger companies in low-wage sectors have recently signaled support for raising the minimum wage. Academic evidence on the jobs impact of wage hikes is mixed, but there’s substantial reason to believe minimum wages don’t harm job growth — and probably even enhance it.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Why are they cheering their cause at their work? They should be at their city halls and local governance.
Posted by raybond on :
Why Walmart needs to support a higher minimum wage
Could Walmart (WMT) be the deciding factor in the higher minimum wage debate? A new Reuters Breakingviews column argues that the nation's largest retailer should throw its support behind proposals to raise the minimum wage.
Nearly half of Walmart's 1.4 million U.S. workers currently earn an average of $8.45 per hour for a 34-hour workweek. A higher hourly wage could increase Walmart's labor costs by $2 billion, says Breakingviews editor Rob Cox. But the payoffs would be much greater.
"Walmart has been vilified" for its low wages," says Cox in the video above. "This could be Walmart's Henry Ford moment."
Related: America’s 30M hourly workers deserve a raise: Ralph Nader
Ford Motor (F) founder Henry Ford revolutionized the industrial landscape when he doubled his employees' wages to $5 per day in 1914. The pay increase allowed his workers to buy the Model T cars they assembled every day on the factory line. The decision helped give rise to the burgeoning middle class. (Ford's gesture was not entirely benevolent; he raised wages to "stabilize the workforce" according to Ford historian Bob Kreipke. The decision also doubled Ford's profits.)
Congressional Republicans have thwarted efforts by President Obama and Democrats to boost the federal minimum wage, a cornerstone of the Democrats' midterm election campaign. Last month Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have gradually raised the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. At least 17 million Americans would be directly affected by a higher hourly wage.
Related: How Walmart and McDonald's can raise wages and still boost profits
Breakingviews estimates that Walmart could net an additional $13 billion if the minimum wage jumps to $10 an hour. At least one quarter of Walmart shoppers work in minimum-wage jobs and they're more likely to spend that extra cash than save it, Cox notes.
Related: One solution to McDonald’s pay standoff
For now, Walmart has stayed mum on the issue. But that's to the company's -- and employees' -- disadvantage, Cox says. "It's the right thing for the working man, who also happens to be their customer," he adds.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Now look what is happening. The solution to this is just charging people special living wage surcharges to your bill and getting rid of as many employees as you can. Automate everything.
Thanks ray, glad you support people losing their jobs.
Posted by raybond on :
cash, automation is coming no matter what kind of wages are being paid. Your insight into a problem is 40 years to late, and stinks of Limbaugh logic.
As far as your dim witted thought process goes the fast food workers should be striking for $1.00 an hour to create more jobs.
By the way I guess you never read the book, the end of work. I recommended it to you to read over 2 years ago as far as I remember. You might learn something from it, its a conservative book so you would like it.
Posted by raybond on :
How A Millionaire, A Socialist, And Some Taco Bell Workers Brought A Living Wage To Seattle
By Alan Pyke June 5, 2014 at 10:13 am Updated: June 5, 2014 at 11:22 am
"How A Millionaire, A Socialist, And Some Taco Bell Workers Brought A Living Wage To Seattle"
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When Mayor Ed Murray (D) signed a bill that gradually raises Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour on Tuesday, his choice of location seemed to reflect the complex and cooperative process that produced the document he was signing.
Rather than City Hall, Murray chose to hold the signing ceremony in Cal Anderson Park, which was the starting point for some of the many rallies that activists from groups, like 15 Now, organized over the past year. A ballplayer with a good arm would have no trouble throwing a rock from the park’s northwest corner into Dick’s Drive-In, a local Seattle burger chain. The south end of the park looks onto a multi-block stretch of bars and restaurants that has exploded with development and commerce in the past few years. Business interests like these played an essential role in crafting the aggressive-but-thoughtful law that Murray signed in that park on Tuesday.
And just a couple hundred feet west of the park sits Seattle Central Community College, a hub of Occupy Seattle activity and the trampoline from which Socialist Kshama Sawant launched her successful city council campaign.
It took a year of activist pressure, a worker-dominated election cycle that put a socialist on the city council, and several months of hard negotiating across ideological lines, but the new law will raise Seattle workers’ standard of living dramatically over the coming years. Some things about that process may be unique to Seattle, and replicating the exact recipe the city’s labor, business, and political communities used might be impossible. But interviews with some of the most prominent participants reveal that the key ingredients for a $15 minimum wage are completely portable, and could soon come to a city near you.
A Confluence Of Pressure
On the evening of May 29, 2013, Taco Bell and Burger King night shift workers walked off the job, forcing a pair of stores to close. They were joined the next morning by dozens more workers from other chain restaurants in other neighborhoods around the city, who planned to converge in the late morning — near Cal Anderson Park, of course — and march together a little more than a mile west to Denny Park for an afternoon rally. A local progressive activist called it “a powerful kickoff” for a movement that didn’t yet know what shape it would take.
The Seattle strikes came just as the city’s election season was beginning, and the multifaceted campaign that blossomed out of the walkouts eventually came to dominate citywide races.
“It didn’t hurt that we did that the first time in Seattle the week that candidates had to file for election,” said David Rolf, President of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 775NW and a co-chair of the committee that ultimately came up with the minimum wage proposal. The campaign then held a televised debate on low-wage worker issues, among a variety of other actions planned to correspond with the electoral calendar.
“People who didn’t know they were going to be running in an issue environment where $15 was one of the top three issues that the public was focused on ended up running in that environment,” Rolf said.
In September, then-candidate Ed Murray issued a proposal for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. “We counted!” Rolf laughed. “I think he made this promise something like 46 different times, debate after debate, candidate forum after candidate forum.” The campaign had made it so that the $15 wage “became a question you couldn’t not answer.”
One city candidate in particular was eager to answer questions about a $15 minimum wage. Kshama Sawant, then a community college economics professor in the city, had been nominated by her fellow socialists to run for city council on the Socialist Alternative ballot line. A group called 15 Now sprung up to rally workers and their supporters through the election season, and Sawant became their champion too. It was in some ways a perfect fit.
“I remember growing up in India as a child, one of my oldest memories is just wondering, why is there poverty?” Sawant said, recalling her dissatisfaction with the answers she got then. “I never bought into this idea that poor people are lazy. It is so patently untrue, because the poorest people are the hardest-working people.”
“When those fast food workers courageously walked out it had a huge effect on people’s consciousness”
Sawant is a mixture of fiery rhetoric and clear-eyed critique of a system she finds rotten, all laced together with a confident charm. Her campaign tapped into something powerful in the city’s electorate, and she ultimately won more than 93,000 votes – enough to unseat a four-term incumbent. She only accepts $40,000 of her nearly $120,000 council salary, sending the after-tax remainder to a Solidarity Fund managed by Socialist Alternative to fund other causes. One of its first donations was a $15,000 gift to 15 Now, one of the organizations Sawant credits with “changing the agenda” of the city’s political elites.
The same week Sawant won her seat, another key piece of Seattle’s minimum wage fight fell into place just a couple dozen miles down the road. The small town of Seatac, Washington, which encompasses the Seattle-Tacoma airport, enacted an almost immediate minimum wage hike to $15 an hour through a ballot measure. The vote kicked off a legal fight that has left Seatac’s workers in a delicate situation, but its political reverberations up the road strengthened Seattle workers’ hand significantly.
Before he was even sworn in as mayor, Murray made good on his campaign promise to focus on raising the minimum wage to $15 by announcing that SEIU’s Rolf and Seattle Hospitality Group head Howard Wright would co-chair a commission made up of Sawant and 21 other civic leaders from the business, labor, and social services communities. The Income Inequality Advisory Committee (IIAC) would have five months to hammer out a $15 minimum wage policy deal, but if it failed to produce a deal by the end of April, the mayor would send his own legislation to the City Council.
Councilwoman Sawant had her own power play in motion as the IIAC meetings proceeded, as the activists who she represented went around the city gathering signatures for an immediate $15 wage hike ballot initiative similar to the one that Seatac voters approved. After an election season dominated by the $15 question, polling showed well over 60 percent of the city wanted a $15 deal, which gave Sawant’s ballot initiative threat some teeth.
“A Little Bit Of Blood On The Floor” For Everybody
The final version of Seattle’s minimum wage law will take the minimum wage up to $10 next April for small businesses and $11 for larger ones. It will take seven years for the small business minimum wage to reach $15, while larger businesses must reach that rate in three years. The law labels a business “small” if it has 500 or fewer employees, not in Seattle alone but nationwide, and puts it on the slower ramp-up to the new minimum wage, “Schedule 2.” Any firm with 501 or more employees in the U.S. must adhere to the faster “Schedule 1” rate hikes.
Each of those two groupings has two sub-groups to allow companies that provide non-wage compensation like health care or tips to factor those benefits in temporarily. A large Schedule 1 employer that provides health care will get four years instead of three to reach the $15 minimum. A small Schedule 2 employer whose workers get tips and health care will have to show that workers’ total compensation has reached $15 an hour in five years instead of the seven-year window allotted for other small businesses. After that, the city’s minimum wage will rise automatically with inflation.
That core deal was finally hammered out by the mayor’s 24-member Income Inequality Advisory Committee back in May. And specifically from the close collaboration between business’s Wright, labor’s Rolf, and another six core IIAC members who dubbed themselves the “Group of 8.”
“The basic framework of a settlement was created on the evening of April 14th,” Rolf said. “This was sketched out on a white board and it became the go-home concept. We all kind of knew it at that moment,” he said, “where everybody makes the equivalent psychological leap halfway towards their counterpart’s position.” There were a few near-blowouts over the next two weeks, but after one cool-off weekend with no meetings the group announced a 21-2 vote in favor of the deal that Murray signed Tuesday. (Seattle Chamber of Commerce representative Maud Daudon abstained.)
Those two ‘no’ votes? A businessman named Craig Dawson, and Sawant.
“There was a mixture of philosophy and pragmatism that every member brought to the table, and the two most ideological members formed our only two no votes,” recalls SEIU’s Rolf. “The sorta libertarian business guy and the Trotskyist city councilwoman.”
Those bookend positions on the left and right helped set Seattle’s “blue-ribbon commission” apart from others formed to address tough policy questions that then fizzle out, even if they meant that Sawant got frozen out of the core group of negotiators.
The $15 minimum wage “became a question you couldn’t not answer.”
“No one was an ideological idiot,” remembers committee member and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. “Usually the people who get chosen for these blue ribbon commissions are actually not people who ever get **** done in their lives, but who are part of the process of creating polarization professionally.” When those sorts of groups fail, “nobody gives a ****.”
“But here there were going to be consequences. Real-life, immediate consequences,” Hanauer said, invoking the threat of the 15 Now Seatac-style ballot initiative. “People were going to go to the polls and they were going to get something passed and they were going to get something passed almost certainly that was not going to be optimal for anybody.”
Sawant’s support for the committee’s deal could have thrown cold water on the push for a ballot initiative. She withheld support when the committee voted, a decision she says was grounded in the concern that removing the ground-level activist pressure too soon would embolden the City Council to fiddle with a wage hike she already felt was too slow and too generous to big businesses. Voting for the deal would have been like turning off the kettle before the water had boiled.
That same tactical choice made space for the committee’s other members to come down off their natural ideological perches.
“Everybody left something behind,” said Wright, “a little bit of blood on the floor and some deeply held principles.” Wright and the business caucus insisted on three major points: a gradual phase-in, some form of credit for businesses that offer health care and other non-wage compensation, and no carve-out for union collective bargaining deals (something he said was a key flaw in the Seatac initiative). With the clear knowledge that $15 was coming to Seattle one way or another thanks to the worker pressure that had given Murray a mandate to create the committee, entrepreneurs and union officials haggled their way to something everyone could live with.
In that sense, then, Sawant’s hardline stance was a key part of this Tuesday’s victory.
“You look at the external factors of Seatac having passed $15, you look at Councilwoman Sawant’s campaign,” said Wright. “Had only one of those two things occurred, I’m not sure there would’ve been the groundswell toward $15.”
“Everyone understood the mayor had committed to this policy on the campaign trail,” Rolf said. “The other three things that happened that created a huge amount of momentum for this were a wave of very successful fast food strikes beginning last May in Seattle, the passage of the Seatac living wage ballot initiative … and then the surprise election of a socialist city councilwoman who ran on a single-issue $15 platform.”
“Those three things created a sense of civic momentum that said this thing’s leaving the station, you’re either on you’re not.”
Where Do We Go From Here
Ask four members of Seattle’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee how to make their successful minimum wage deal transferable to other parts of the country, and you’ll get four different answers. But the suggestions overlap one another, sketching an outline of what needs to happen in other cities and states to make something as dramatic as a $15 minimum wage possible.
“We could have a really interesting beer over this,” the business-side co-chair Howard Wright said in response to the question of how to transport Seattle’s win elsewhere. For Wright, it comes down to political geography: “I would suggest that Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco would be more open to this concept. I would suggest that perhaps Dallas Fort-Worth, Oklahoma, and other places might not be so open to this,” he said, chuckling. Even in Washington state, on the other side of the Cascades range that divides the urban from the rural, “I don’t think this would even grab traction there.”
“You shouldn’t be asking for fifty cents, you should be asking for five bucks. That gets people’s attention.”
Wright praised the process the mayor created as one that let all sides feel invested in doing something extraordinary, despite his reservations about the magnitude of the wage hike.
The other men echoed those accolades for the IIAC’s work. “’Compromise’ doesn’t do justice to the result we got,” venture capitalist Hanauer said. “It wasn’t that we just split the baby, it was that we collectively thought through the problem” and forged “a civic solution that no one probably would’ve come up with individually on their own.”
But to Hanauer, places like Dallas or eastern Washington or anywhere else are opportunities to revolutionize how Americans think about how the economy works. “It’s a pretty progressive place,” he said, and “we’re generally a little bit ahead of the curve. But I will tell you that while other places may not be as progressive as we are, when we enact this law and our state does not slide into the ocean, that will make it easier for people to be like ‘well, ****, why shouldn’t we do that?’”
People “look at the $27 billion in profit Walmart makes every year and they celebrate without connecting it to the fact that Walmart workers are the biggest recipients of food stamps in the country and are all in poverty,” Hanauer went on, “That’s on us. People don’t know that. But if you say to them, look we can live in a world where Walmart made $17 billion in profit and each one of the million lowest-paid Walmart workers would earn $10,000 more a year and none of them would be in poverty and all of them would be able to buy more stuff from your business, and by the way, you don’t have to pay food stamps now, and everybody’s gonna be better off? Then they’re like, ‘Oh, ****, we should do that!’”
Rather than simply wait for Seattle’s good example to dispel the witchcraft around minimum wage hikes and economic growth, Hanauer urges progressives to get bolder. “You shouldn’t be asking for fifty cents, you should be asking for five bucks. That gets people’s attention.” Once you have their attention, the key is to present a different model for how to create prosperity. “Progresives have been so boxed-in by trickle-down economics,” Hanauer said, deriding the past generation of progressive economic arguments as “trickle-down lite.”
Over the several months of organizing and persuasion work that set the stage for Seattle’s victory, “we weren’t out making social justice arguments, we were saying if we pay people a living wage then they can afford to shop in the businesses in our city and we won’t have to support the poverty programs that they now all live on. So that is a completely different argument than what progressives have advanced for 30 years, which is ‘Ohh, I feel so sorry for those people, we should help them!’
“The process was a good process,” SEIU’s Rolf said. “But I think the real lesson here is an organizing lesson not a process lesson. For progressives, the lesson is change the direction of the wind.”That means strikes and protests and candidate forums and election-year leverage, the kind of on-the-ground organizing work that can turn the middle-out message Hanauer described into a tool that shapes debate and writes policy.
“That is fundamentally replicable anywhere. Now, your starting line may be different in east Texas than it is in Seattle or New York City,” Rolf said. But “the fundamental lesson here is I think if you can engineer a change in the opinion climate, then the previously unthinkable becomes quite imaginable.”
Rolf’s lesson sounds a bit like a moderate shadow of what the radical Councilwoman Sawant prescribes for eradicating poverty.
“When those fast food workers courageously walked out it had a huge effect on people’s consciousness,” Sawant said. As a die-hard opponent of capitalism, her goal is “to see if we can build a broader movement, not just in Seattle but nationwide.” When the fast-food walkouts began to spread, “the idea of $15 started imprinting itself on people’s consciousness. The idea that this is not just a concept but something we can fight for and win.”
When workers shut down those two Seattle fast food stores last May, Seattle was the seventh city to see fast food strikes. Since then, the strikes have spread to more than 150 U.S. cities. There is already talk of mounting similar campaigns in other nearby cities.
Posted by NR on :
So hows it feel when your goals align with those of a Socialist Ray?
Posted by raybond on :
politics makes strange bed fellows. As the saying goes
Posted by Lockman on :
Guess the $5.00 sandwich in Seattle just jumped to 6.25...who eats at Subway? People making minimum wage...
Posted by Upside on :
With a $15.00 minimum wage guess who's going to suffer the most? The workers. For an entry level position I now have to pay 15 bucks an hour. Okay, that two week paid vacation you were getting? Gone. That retirement account that I've been contributing to for so long? Not anymore. Company sponsored health insurance? Bye bye. Paid sick days? Don't make me laugh.
Here's the downside to all of this. Businesses that are worth their salt will figure out a way to profit even more with a higher wage rate, that's what they do in the face of adversity They'll increase the cost of their goods/services AND they'll strip costly benefits from the labor force. It's going to happen, just watch.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
This country is falling apart
Posted by raybond on :
As of now its just Seattle that passed a minimum wage law at that nice rate, but I'am sure it will be heading your way soon enough for you guys.
All I have to say about the matter is do what you have to do, that's the great thing about America. You can fight anything you can go down swinging and maybe you might win.
Posted by Upside on :
Ray, for just one minute put yourself in the shoes of a small business owner. Your business provides you with a decent but modest lifestyle and you try to provide for your employees as best you can. Now a 15 dollar per hour minimum wage comes into play and it raises the wage rate of all of your employees from the top to the bottom.
If you don't do something the new wage structure will put you out of business. What are you going to do? Seriously, what do you do? Do you risk everything and hope that you can turn up new business knowing that if you fail you're going to go under? Or do you immediately slash costs down to business survival level? Yes, you're preserving your lifestyle while damaging those of your employees but it's your blood sweat and tears that built the business. Are you really going to throw it all away so your employees don't suffer while you do?
Posted by Relentless. on :
quote:Originally posted by Upside: Ray, for just one minute put yourself in the shoes of a small business owner. Your business provides you with a decent but modest lifestyle and you try to provide for your employees as best you can. Now a 15 dollar per hour minimum wage comes into play and it raises the wage rate of all of your employees from the top to the bottom.
If you don't do something the new wage structure will put you out of business. What are you going to do? Seriously, what do you do? Do you risk everything and hope that you can turn up new business knowing that if you fail you're going to go under? Or do you immediately slash costs down to business survival level? Yes, you're preserving your lifestyle while damaging those of your employees but it's your blood sweat and tears that built the business. Are you really going to throw it all away so your employees don't suffer while you do?
Give them a clue.
How long do you pay minimum wage for a good employee? How long before said good employee learns enough and is capable enough to truly benefit the company such that his reward surpasses the stated goal of $15/HR?
That's the real issue here.
Idiots languishing on minimum wage. Some idiotic notion that people earn minimum wage their entire lives and it's not their efn fault. If someone is so stupid that they can't, in this country, rise above the lowest of the low? Then fm.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP
A question on San Francisco’s November ballot will ask city residents whether they want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by July 2018.
The city already has the highest big-city minimum wage at $10.74, mainly thanks to the fact that it increases with inflation. And in California, tipped workers such as waiters or taxi drivers have to get the full minimum wage, instead of the lower tipped minimum wage of $2.13 at the federal level, so they will share in the raise. The ballot measure would increase the minimum wage to $11 by January 2015 and gradually increase every year until hitting the $15 level.
The higher wage is meant to be one way to address rising income inequality in the city and the growing cost of living. The area’s tech boom has created a divide between Silicon Valley workers and the growth in low-wage jobs for everyone else.
San Francisco’s move also comes after Seattle struck an agreement to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of a decade. A town surrounding Seattle’s airport had already passed a $15 minimum wage, although it is currently being fought over in the courts. Chicago and New York City are also considering a $15 wage. That particular number was put on the national radar by striking fast food workers, who have staged a series of walk outs across the country to demand that higher pay.
While some worry that higher minimum wages will cost jobs or economic growth, San Francisco residents are likely unconcerned. The city’s experience with having the country’s highest wage has been positive. It was the city with the greatest growth in small business employment over the last year. In the seven years after it increased its wage, employment grew by more than 5 percent while falling in nearby counties and restaurant job growth grew faster, increasing by 17.7 percent.
The same has happened at the state level. Washington state has had the highest minimum wage and topped all others for small business job growth. Overall job growth has stayed steady at an 0.8 percent rate, higher than the national one. A comprehensive look at state-level wage hikes over the last two decades didn’t find any clear evidence that they affected job creation.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
Posted by raybond on :
sounds ok to me smart ass.
economics 101 labor is like any other market it gets all it can,
free country yet, why don't you hit the streets and protest for no minimum wage, if you got the guts to do so.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP
Would you give up all food for a week for a $15 wage?
In Providence, Rhode Island, three hotel workers and a city councilwoman started a week-long hunger strike on Monday, protesting a state bill that would block their efforts to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The state Senate Finance Committee has passed a provision banning cities and towns from raising their minimum wages above the state level, which rose to $8 an hour at the beginning of the year and might be increased to $9. But $9 an hour is not high enough for Providence’s hotel workers, who had organized to get their city council to consider raising their wages to at least $15 an hour.
Santa Brito, a hotel housekeeper on hunger strike who spoke with ThinkProgress through an interpreter, said she’s making $10 an hour but still can’t get by. “I have to borrow money from my brothers and cousins just to pay off my bills and buy other things my son needs,” she said. “With the money I earn I can’t even pay off my mortgage.”
A $15 minimum wage, on the other hand, could make a big difference. It would allow Brito to pay her bills, buy necessities for her family, and even pay for her son to go to college.
My kids can eat more. With that minimum wage I could buy a home for my children to have a better place to grow up.
For Ylenny Ferreras, also a hotel worker on hunger strike who has been organizing for the wage increase and spoke through an interpreter, that higher wage “would definitely change my life,” she said. “My kids can eat more. With that minimum wage I could buy a home for my children to have a better place to grow up.” But on her current $8 wage, it would be very difficult to buy her own home.
Mirjaam Parada, another hunger striker who is lucky enough to make $17 an hour at her hotel, made less in her last job when everyone’s pay was cut by 20 percent. “I know what it means to survive,” she said. Her rent is $800 a month, and that plus gas and food “is all the money” at a lower wage, she added.
A $15 wage would allow the hotel workers to “live with a little bit of respect and not have to be afraid for the next month about how to pay the bills,” Parada added.
The fight isn’t just about wage levels, however. The provision in the state budget blocking local minimum wage hikes has made them feel ignored and disenfranchised. “Politicians say you have the right to vote, it’s your responsibility to make sure your community is fine,” Parada said. But their voices aren’t being heard.
“We’ve been totally ignored by the statehouse,” Ferreras explained.
That lack of local control is what made City Councilwoman Shelby Maldonado join the hunger strike. “As an official, I feel like it’s a right being taken away,” she said. “City officials should be able to respond to the needs of their community, especially on the minimum wage.” She represents Central Falls, where she said “families are living paycheck to paycheck just trying to make ends meet. They’re asking for a fair minimum wage.”
Rhode Island is the latest place to see these sort of preemption measures that ban municipalities from raising their own wages. Oklahoma passed one in April and Kansas has a law that prevents local governments from requiring contractors to pay higher wages. A handful of mostly Republican states passed these kinds of laws about a decade ago, including Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, and Texas. But in Rhode Island, the state legislature is controlled by Democrats.
The hunger strike will take place outside of the Rhode Island statehouse and last for seven days. “If we need it to go longer, then we will,” Maldonado said.
“I want the governor to know we’re together and this is necessary, to have a $15 minimum wage,” Ferreras said. “That’s why I’m on this hunger strike.”
Posted by buckstalker on :
So CCM...Is it YOUR belief that people that pick up YOUR trash and cook YOUR food are a lower form of human life than say YOU?
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
Posted by NR on :
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
That's only $20/hr. That's only going to hold them off for another four or five years. You've got to go much, much, higher. People who pick up trash and cook fast food are just as important to our society as our Senators or Congressmen. It takes a village, remember? I'm thinking more along the lines of $150-200K. If it's good enough for the 1% then it's good enough for the 99% right?
Posted by glassman on :
actaully? i think thy worth about twice as much as Senators or Congressmen
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker: So CCM...Is it YOUR belief that people that pick up YOUR trash and cook YOUR food are a lower form of human life than say YOU?
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
No, why do you say that? What is your problem? Elevate your thinking, and stay out of the thought gutter.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month, paying for the increase with money originally devoted to executive bonuses.
The lowest-level employees at the hospital currently make $8.78 an hour, and the increase will give about 230 workers a raise. Those workers were already making more than Texas’s minimum wage, which is the same as the federal $7.25 an hour rate. The move also means that every worker employed by Dallas county, inside and outside the hospital, will make more than $10.25 an hour.
The wage increase will cost the hospital about $350,000 a year. The expense will be covered with money from the upcoming quarter’s bonus pool for the hospital’s 60 vice presidents and top executives. That pool was between $750,000 and $1.2 million in the most recent quarter, and it’s between $3 million and $5 million for the full year.
Dr. Jim Dunn, the hospital’s executive vice president and chief talent officer, told Modern Healthcare that the decision was made in the hopes of improving workers’ morale and to provide a living wage. “We really want, in any way possible, to break down any gaps or anything between the top leaders and those who are closest to our patients,” he said. “We feel like it’s the right thing to do.”
Raising wages can help businesses’ bottom lines, as it can improve efficiency, make it easier to recruit workers, and lower turnover. Losing employees to turnover is particularly expensive, as it can cost as much as 20 percent of a workers’ salary to replace her. Other companies have voluntarily raised their minimum wages lately, including retailer Gap, which boosted its lowest pay to $10 an hour.
Funding a raise with executive compensation also makes sense, given the growing disconnect between pay at the top and the bottom. CEOs’ pay is now 295.9 times the pay for their own workers, far higher than the 87.3-to-one ratio in the early 1990s. Average pay for a chief executive last year was $15.2 million, a 21.7 percent increase over 2010, while workers saw their pay fall by 1.3 percent in the same time. Corporate profits have also hit record highs as workers keep increasing their productivity, but they haven’t shared in that growth. If the minimum wage had kept up with rising productivity, it would be nearly $22 an hour, and if it had simply kept up with inflation since the 1960s it would be over $10 an hour.
President Obama and Congressional Democrats have pushed to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but it’s been stymied by Republicans. In light of that inaction, some states have taken matters into their own hands, and three have passed a $10.10 minimum wage while Vermont put its at $10.50.
Posted by buckstalker on :
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo:
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker: So CCM...Is it YOUR belief that people that pick up YOUR trash and cook YOUR food are a lower form of human life than say YOU?
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
No, why do you say that? What is your problem? Elevate your thinking, and stay out of the thought gutter.
I didn't SAY anything...I ASKED a question It was a tough question for you, I know... I was fairly sure that I wouldn't get an answer from you when I asked Please tell me why a garbage man should not make a living wage for his labor?
Posted by buckstalker on :
quote:Originally posted by glassman: actaully? i think thy worth about twice as much as Senators or Congressmen
I was thinking 4 to 5 times...
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker:
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo:
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker: So CCM...Is it YOUR belief that people that pick up YOUR trash and cook YOUR food are a lower form of human life than say YOU?
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
No, why do you say that? What is your problem? Elevate your thinking, and stay out of the thought gutter.
I didn't SAY anything...I ASKED a question It was a tough question for you, I know... I was fairly sure that I wouldn't get an answer from you when I asked Please tell me why a garbage man should not make a living wage for his labor?
I never said a garbage man shouldnt make a living wage for his labor. Maybe I should start putting words in your mouth. Like, why should a garbage man be paid 100K? I dont look down on people who do tough jobs, but I also dont pity them so much that I feel so guilty to pay them more than what that skill is.
On a side note, speaking of guilt, if I had as much white guilt as you do I would go crazy.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: Flickr/Wisconsin Jobs Now
On Wednesday night, the Massachusetts House passed a bill that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2017. The Senate already passed that wage level, and after a procedural vote there it will head to Gov. Deval Patrick (D), who is expected to sign it into law.
An earlier Senate version of the bill would have also automatically increased the minimum wage as inflation rose, but that provision was dropped in the final version.
An $11 wage is the highest passed by any state this year. Eight other states have increased their wages so far: Delaware and West Virginia went above $8 an hour; Michigan went up to $9.25; Minnesota increased its wage to $9.50; Hawaii, Maryland, and Connecticut passed a $10.10 wage; and Vermont went to $10.50 an hour. The $10.10 an hour level is what President Obama and Congressional Democrats had pursued for a federal hike, but Republicans blocked the move.
While $11 an hour will be the highest state wage, some cities are going even further. Seattle will raise its wage to $15 an hour over ten years, and a nearby town already passed the same wage, although it’s currently being held up in court. Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco are all eyeing a $15 minimum wage as well.
While some worry that higher minimum wages will hurt jobs or businesses, states that already had high wages haven’t had that experience. Washington, which has the highest current wage at $9.32 an hour, experienced the biggest increase in small business employment last year. Over the 15 years since it increased its wage to a national high, job growth has remained at a steady, above average rate. All told, a comprehensive look at state minimum wage increases over two decades didn’t find evidence that they impacted job creation.
Ta
Posted by raybond on :
hey cash since you are so interested in what garbage men make 7 years ago in the state of Rhode Island they made $50.00 an hour I hope it is a lot more now. Oh, excuse me that was long island.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by raybond: hey cash since you are so interested in what garbage men make 7 years ago in the state of Rhode Island they made $50.00 an hour I hope it is a lot more now. Oh, excuse me that was long island.
Dont worry, your argument wont even matter before too long.
Chili's Has Installed More Than 45,000 Tablets in Its Restaurants
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker: So CCM...Is it YOUR belief that people that pick up YOUR trash and cook YOUR food are a lower form of human life than say YOU?
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Hey Ray, I have an idea I think you would like. Lets just get rid of hourly wages and pay everyone a fair salary mandated by law. Minimum $40K a year to pick up trash or cook fast food. What say you?
No, why do you say that? What is your problem? Elevate your thinking, and stay out of the thought gutter.
I didn't SAY anything...I ASKED a question It was a tough question for you, I know... I was fairly sure that I wouldn't get an answer from you when I asked Please tell me why a garbage man should not make a living wage for his labor?
I never said a garbage man shouldnt make a living wage for his labor. Maybe I should start putting words in your mouth. Like, why should a garbage man be paid 100K? I dont look down on people who do tough jobs, but I also dont pity them so much that I feel so guilty to pay them more than what that skill is.
On a side note, speaking of guilt, if I had as much white guilt as you do I would go crazy.
White guilt??? You are one twisted phuck... This has nothing to do with race dickweed...it has everything to do with paying working class human beings that don't have the ability to become surveyors or lawyers or engineers a living wage...PERIOD
Posted by Relentless. on :
Buck, I hate to say it, but you're wrong.
The recent push to increase minimum wage is nothing more than a distraction aimed at securing votes.
No..
Not what I mean to say.
A distraction meant to keep people voting... Make the idiot 99% think the system is real.
Who the f makes minimum wage their entire life??? Who?
Name one person and I can then point to a thumbless fn idiot in that instant.
Nothing you see is real. It's all fake.
That idiot whining about minimum wage is also taking home gubment subsidies allowing a greater disposable income than a working guy like me.
I give no shts about these idiots.
Always a distraction.
Posted by buckstalker on :
RD...I agree 100% with your take on this illusion that our gummit works for and is elected by the people and that our vote counts...I quit voting 10 years ago because I know it's a rigged game and a complete waste of time My fight is not about minimum wage...it is about the elitist pricks that have cut the working man's wages in half and essentially enslaved anyone that doesn't have a college degree or entrepreneurial skills. I'm talking about working class people...carpenters, mechanics, factory workers, etc. who's wages have been cut in half and who's jobs have been eliminated (by design) all the while the cost of living has continued to rise. Not all people have the ability either financially or intellectually to go to college, and I believe that a carpenter's work, for example, is just as important to society as a lawyers or a phucking baseball players...yet we don't pay them enough to make ends meet, let alone prosper.
Posted by buckstalker on :
I agree 100% with your take on this illusion that our gummit works for and is elected by the people and that our vote counts...I quit voting 10 years ago because I know it's a rigged game and a complete waste of time My fight is not about minimum wage...it is about the elitist pricks that have cut the working man's wages in half and essentially enslaved anyone that doesn't have a college degree or entrepreneurial skills. I'm talking about working class people...carpenters, mechanics, factory workers, etc. who's wages have been cut in half and who's jobs have been eliminated (by design) all the while the cost of living has continued to rise. Not all people have the ability either financially or intellectually to go to college, and I believe that a carpenter's work, for example, is just as important to society as a lawyers or a phucking baseball players...yet we don't pay them enough to make ends meet, let alone prosper.
Posted by Relentless. on :
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker: RD...I agree 100% with your take on this illusion that our gummit works for and is elected by the people and that our vote counts...I quit voting 10 years ago because I know it's a rigged game and a complete waste of time My fight is not about minimum wage...it is about the elitist pricks that have cut the working man's wages in half and essentially enslaved anyone that doesn't have a college degree or entrepreneurial skills. I'm talking about working class people...carpenters, mechanics, factory workers, etc. who's wages have been cut in half and who's jobs have been eliminated (by design) all the while the cost of living has continued to rise. Not all people have the ability either financially or intellectually to go to college, and I believe that a carpenter's work, for example, is just as important to society as a lawyers or a phucking baseball players...yet we don't pay them enough to make ends meet, let alone prosper.
First: You never need to say you agree with me. I already know we see things the same.
Second: You're completely fn wrong about everything.
Look, you're falling victim to the distraction. Worrying about some unskilled idiot's wages for work better done by a chimp is part of "their" plan. "they" want you to be concerned about the fn feeble idiots..
Do you work for minimum wage? Personal question, yes I know. Do you? No really answer the question.
The only people who think minimum wage is a career plan are those we can live without.
Posted by buckstalker on :
quote:Originally posted by Relentless.:
quote:Originally posted by buckstalker: RD...I agree 100% with your take on this illusion that our gummit works for and is elected by the people and that our vote counts...I quit voting 10 years ago because I know it's a rigged game and a complete waste of time My fight is not about minimum wage...it is about the elitist pricks that have cut the working man's wages in half and essentially enslaved anyone that doesn't have a college degree or entrepreneurial skills. I'm talking about working class people...carpenters, mechanics, factory workers, etc. who's wages have been cut in half and who's jobs have been eliminated (by design) all the while the cost of living has continued to rise. Not all people have the ability either financially or intellectually to go to college, and I believe that a carpenter's work, for example, is just as important to society as a lawyers or a phucking baseball players...yet we don't pay them enough to make ends meet, let alone prosper.
First: You never need to say you agree with me. I already know we see things the same.
Second: You're completely fn wrong about everything.
Look, you're falling victim to the distraction. Worrying about some unskilled idiot's wages for work better done by a chimp is part of "their" plan. "they" want you to be concerned about the fn feeble idiots..
Do you work for minimum wage? Personal question, yes I know. Do you? No really answer the question.
The only people who think minimum wage is a career plan are those we can live without.
First off mister...I like the way you think Second: I AM wrong about everything...ask my wife Again my fight is NOT about minimum wage...its about the deliberate destruction of this country. In answer to your question...NO Furthermore...I am very well aware of the distractions that are before me, and unlike the ignorant masses, I'm not buying any of it...
Posted by Relentless. on :
You can ask my wife but it just sounds like Charlie Brown's mom.. fd if I know what she's blathering about.
Deliberate destruction of the economy/country sounds a lot like a bloke who posted here years ago.. DiQuiRiesco, or RelentlessDespot, or Relentless something like that
Posted by buckstalker on :
LOL...
Yeah...I remember that guy Effin whacko for sure
Posted by Relentless. on :
Not to mention what an as s hole he was.. wow
The complete destruction of the US economy is at hand. Where do we look for said confirmation? Russia is the first.. The rest of BRICs follow suit.
Got bullets?
We are in the initial stages of the end of this nation as a global leader.
For us it is a horrible time. For history it is yet another step towards complete control.
The solution offered will be no different from the plan that failed.
Fiat currency... Bartering with nothing more than a delayed IOU, not enforceable but by an over-reaching governance.
Posted by IWISHIHAD on :
Originally Posted By Buckstalker:
"My fight is not about minimum wage...it is about the elitist pricks that have cut the working man's wages in half and essentially enslaved anyone that doesn't have a college degree or entrepreneurial skills. I'm talking about working class people...carpenters, mechanics, factory workers, etc. who's wages have been cut in half and who's jobs have been eliminated (by design) all the while the cost of living has continued to rise. Not all people have the ability either financially or intellectually to go to college, and I believe that a carpenter's work, for example, is just as important to society as a lawyers or a phucking baseball players...yet we don't pay them enough to make ends meet, let alone prosper." -------------------------------------------------
Do you guy's have a college degree?
Not sure why having a college degree exempts anyone from what's is going on in the job market?
Working class to me means anyone that works, i do not take points away because they have decided to further their education.
Modernization has taken away jobs and we all know that this will increase.
All those jobs you list have plenty of college educated people working in the industries and plenty that are in the unemployment lines also.
Many of these workers do not even show up on the unemployment stats, because they can not get unemployment any more.
Sure it pisses us off, but most goes back to how are government allows their special interest groups to control, big money talks and gov. listens.
-
Posted by glassman on :
i know of many Phd's who are miserable in htis job market right now.
maybe they have enough moeny to pay the bills, but Universities all over the country are hiring foreign students and post-docs to fill jobs at much lower wages than American students will accept. It's more than epidemic now, it's even so bad in the Govt that they changed the laws.
they do it because holding somebodies green card makes tehm so much more compliant. The amount of intellecual property "changing hands" in these programs is unbelievable....
Posted by IWISHIHAD on :
We really messed it up for the next generations.
I'm not sure how we could have stoped our gov. from having so much power, especially when we ask them to protect us every time things start to get bad.
Were in such a bad spiral now that 50 years down the line it will be such a mess. The classes of people will be so far apart, that socializing out of class will most likely become very dangerous.
Starbucks owner seems like a nice guy that treats his employees more than fair. But how much will the public pay for coffee?
Similiar to buying made in America, people gripe about wages, but buy products that are cheaper made outside the US.
-
Posted by raybond on :
Ikea will announce Thursday a plan to raise its average minimum wage at U.S. stores to $10.76 an hour, a 17 percent increase over the current wage.
The lowest wage at its 38 locations won’t all raise to the same level, but will be set based on the cost of living in each area given housing, food, transportation, and taxes. It will be as low as $8.69 in Pittsburgh and as high as $13.22 in Woodbridge, VA. The change will increase pay for about half of the 13,120 American workers employed at its stores.
The store is increasing pay because it is “investing in our co-workers,” Rob Olson, acting president for the United States and CFO, told the New York Times. “We believe they will invest in our customers, and they will invest in Ikea’s stores. We believe that it will be a win-win-win for our co-workers, our customers and our stores.” He noted that while the new pay structure will “be a significant investment,” it won’t mean higher prices for its products.
Ikea’s announcement comes after some other large companies have announced their own voluntary wage increases. The Gap said in February that it will eventually raise its lowest wage to $10 an hour. A hospital in Dallas is increasing its minimum wage to $10.25 an hour with money originally meant for executive bonuses. Two pizza companies in St. Louis raised their lowest pay to $10.10 an hour.
These companies usually cite the same reason: they expect it to help them attract and retain better employees, which will help their bottom lines. The Gap says it has already seen this effect, with the number of job applicants jumping 10 percent since it announced a higher wage. Research backs this idea up, showing that higher minimum wages can make it easier to recruit workers, improve their efficiency, and lower turnover — and the latter is costly, consuming the equivalent of about 20 percent of former employees’ pay to replace them.
The companies’ wage adjustments come while legislative action to raise all workers’ minimum wages has stalled. President Obama and Congressional Democrats have pushed for a $10.10 federal minimum wage, but Republicans blocked it. At least nine states have raised their wages this year, however.
Ikea also offers benefits to its workers. It has a 100 percent match for the first 4 percent of pay contributed to the company’s 401(k) plans, and a 50 percent match for the next 2 percent, as well as a bonus program for all employees.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP/Markus Schreiber
On Thursday, Germany’s parliament approved the country’s first ever minimum wage at €8.50, or $11.60, an hour.
The new minimum will take effect in 2015 with a two-year transition period for some businesses. The law also allows some groups to be paid less, including people under 18, short-term interns, and the long-term unemployed. Future increases will be set by an independent commission made up of unions and business representatives, and the first increase could come as early as 2017.
Before the passage of the law, Germany was one of just seven countries out of the 28 members of the European Union without a minimum wage.
And it is already far outpacing the minimum wage in the United States. Ours currently rests at $7.25 an hour and hasn’t been raised in five years. It’s lost much of its purchasing power to inflation over the years; if it had kept up with it since its peak in the 1960s, the wage would be over $10 an hour. And if it had kept up with increases in workers’ productivity, rewarding them for their harder work, it would be nearly $22 an hour.
President Obama and Congressional Democrats have pushed for raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but Republicans blocked a bill that would have done just that. Despite warnings that a higher minimum wage will cost jobs, states that have raised their minimum wages have experienced healthy job growth, even among small businesses. A $10.10 wage would also lift millions out of poverty, particularly helping women and people of color.
In light of this evidence and a lack of Congressional action, states have been raising their own wages, although none have gotten to quite the same level as Germany’s. Massachusetts comes the closest, raising its minimum wage to $11 by 2017. Vermont put its wage at $10.50 an hour and three others, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Maryland, have passed the $10.10 level sought by President Obama. But some city wages surpass Germany, such as the $15 an hour wage agreed upon in Seattle.
Posted by Relentless. on :
If someone makes $7.25 an hour and thinks that's a career choice? Well then that particular person deserves to live the life they've prepared for themselves.
Any argument to the contrary is ABSOLUTE bs.
You are paid what you are worth. Try being worth more.
Posted by raybond on :
don't worry much more to come as time goes on. I just love seeing people handle there problems locally. BTW I am not arguing I am stating results and I will continue to do so.
Posted by raybond on :
In a new national poll, 61 percent of small business owners with under 100 employees say they support gradually increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
The poll contacted 555 owners of for-profit small businesses. They supported increasing the wage, which has stayed at $7.25 an hour for five years, to $10.10 over two and a half years, and then letting it automatically rise as inflation rises. Just 35 percent opposed this proposal.
The largest share of poll respondents identified as Republicans, and those who did were evenly split in support or opposition to the wage increase.
The owners also felt that there would be positive impacts from raising the wage: 58 percent said it would increase consumer purchasing power in the economy, and 56 percent said it would help the economy generally. Many also felt it would help them specifically, with 53 percent agreeing that businesses would benefit from lower turnover, increased productivity, and customer satisfaction.
Earlier polls have similarly found that small businesses back a higher wage. Nearly 60 percent supported a $10.10 wage, with 27 percent strongly in favor, in a different poll from March. And while the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small business owners, vocally opposes increasing the wage, its most recent survey of its members found that they ranked “Minimum Wage/’Living’ Wage” at number 52 out of 75 issues that they are concerned about. Meanwhile, just 8.6 percent said the issue is “critical,” while more than a quarter said it isn’t a problem.
There are signs that the owners are right to expect positive economic impacts from a higher wage. In Washington, which currently has the highest state minimum wage, small businesses experienced the highest rate of job growth of any state over the last year. Economists have found that higher minimum wages can improve efficiency as employers push their employees to work harder and lower turnover, which can cost as much as 20 percent of a worker’s full-time salary. It can also make it easier to recruit employees.
Some large businesses also see a benefit, as The Gap and Ikea announced they will voluntarily increase their lowest wages. Both stores said they were making the move in anticipation of better employee performance and customer experience.
Tags: Minimum Wage Small Businesses
Posted by IWISHIHAD on :
Originally Posted By Relentless:
You are paid what you are worth. Try being worth more. -------------------------------------------------
Actually some are paid much more than their worth, which is the case with some that will be benefiting by the wage hike.
-
Posted by Relentless. on :
quote:Originally posted by IWISHIHAD: Originally Posted By Relentless:
You are paid what you are worth. Try being worth more. -------------------------------------------------
Actually some are paid much more than their worth, which is the case with some that will be benefiting by the wage hike.
-
You're an eager fan of reducing the mandatory minimum wage to 0, zilch, nada.
Yup, me too.
Posted by raybond on :
So far ten states have passed higher wages since January: Delaware to $8.25 an hour; West Virginia to $8.75; Rhode Island to $9; Michigan to $9.25; Minnesota to $9.50; Connecticut, Hawaii, and Maryland to $10.10; Vermont to $10.50; and Massachusetts to $11 an hour. They’re not alone: 22 states have wage floors above the federal minimum. The city of Seattle has gone even further, implementing a $15 wage
Posted by Relentless. on :
quote:Originally posted by raybond: So far ten states have passed higher wages since January: Delaware to $8.25 an hour; West Virginia to $8.75; Rhode Island to $9; Michigan to $9.25; Minnesota to $9.50; Connecticut, Hawaii, and Maryland to $10.10; Vermont to $10.50; and Massachusetts to $11 an hour. They’re not alone: 22 states have wage floors above the federal minimum. The city of Seattle has gone even further, implementing a $15 wage
Ray, can you explain to me why we need to raise minimum wage. In your own words please. Can you also, in that soon to be brilliant diatribe, explain the future effects on the economy?
Posted by raybond on :
How A Labor Coalition Plans To Bring Paid Sick Leave And A Higher Minimum Wage To The Bay Area
By Josh Israel July 9, 2014 at 4:05 pm Updated: July 9, 2014 at 4:27 pm
"How A Labor Coalition Plans To Bring Paid Sick Leave And A Higher Minimum Wage To The Bay Gary Jimenez SEIU Local 1021 regional vice president Gary Jimenez
This November, voters in Oakland, CA will have the opportunity to establish a minimum wage of $12.25 and ensure paid sick days for employees. In nearby San Francisco, voters will weigh in on a measure that would raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2016. And, a coalition of labor and community groups are working actively to ensure, voters in neighboring communities like Berkeley, Concord, and Richmond will have similar opportunities by 2016.
Last month, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW)’s president proposed that the labor movement launch an audacious national effort to place living wage measures on the ballot in the 24 states with ballot initiative processes. SEIU-UHW had successfully pushed the state hospital trade association into reaching an agreement on a joint project by using the threat of a ballot initiative to limit hospital charges and salaries and he hoped to take the strategy national. As he was launching the “Live Better Together” proposal, another SEIU local was already hard at work — with coalitions of other labor organizations, workers centers, and community groups on a plan to put minimum wage laws on the ballot in jurisdictions across the Bay Area.
SEIU Local 1021 regional vice president Gary Jimenez, who is heading up the Oakland coalition of labor unions locals and other labor organizations, told ThinkProgress that these efforts are about boosting the floor for workers throughout the San Francisco Bay: “Corporations are making billions in record profits, yet workers are as bad off as, if not worse off, than before the economic downturn. It’s time to level the playing field. We are excited.”
It’s time to level the playing field. We are excited.
Like the hospital workers, Service Employees International Union Local 1021 may have helped maneuver the San Francisco government and business community into accepting a minimum wage increase. In April, it proposed a ballot referendum to raise the city of San Francisco’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2016. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce denounced the proposal, saying it was “outraged by the preemptive minimum wage ballot measure,” and “a thinly veiled attempt to influence the outcome of the consensus-building process” being convened by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (D).
But when Lee, SEIU 1021, and the other groups in the Coalition for a Fair Economy jointly announced that compromise last month, a representative from the Chamber was even on hand for the announcement. Their “consensus measure,” which will allow voters to raise the minimum to that $15 level by 2018, will now be the one on the ballot in November. While a Chamber’s board will not take a formal position on the proposal until the end of the month, its public policy committee co-chair applauded the Mayor for “considering the impact to businesses – large and small – as he led this effort to bring people together to send one strong measure to the voters this November.”
Jimenez explained that the SEIU 1021 proposal “helped pave the way for groups to come together.” “From our perspective,” he said, “we felt it was important to put all the pressure we could to make it the most progressive measure we could in San Francisco. Had that not come together, we were prepared.”
Jim Lazarus, the San Francisco Chamber’s senior vice president of public policy, told ThinkProgress that the SEIU’s gambit helped make the consensus measure more labor-friendly. “There’s no doubt that their political strategy of threatening a ballot measure had a big impact on the outcome of the mayor’s discussions and the drafting of that measure,” he explained. “If it had come through the normal process, we might have been able to moderate the ramp up and have something everyone could support, which was our hope.” Still, while he said the Chamber has concerns that this version could raise wages too quickly, especially for tipped workers and new employees, he predicted that “it’s probably something the business community will not organize to attempt to defeat.”
Lazarus predicts that the measure is likely to pass easily this November: increasing the minimum wage “passed with 60 percent in 2003, it’ll do at least that well this time,” he said, “I don’t expect a lot of opposition from the business community, I just don’t expect a lot of support.”
There’s no doubt that their political strategy of threatening a ballot measure had a big impact
In Oakland, Local 1021 joined with SEIU’s United Long Term Care Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5, UNITE HERE 2850, and other worker-rights community organizations to form Lift Up Oakland for Better Wages, Healthy Families and a Healthy Economy. Together, they collected more than 33,000 signatures and put a $12.25 minimum wage on the ballot. Their proposal would also require five or nine paid sick days (depending on business size), protect hospitality workers from wage theft, and tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index (CPI).
The Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce is attempting to prevent this from passing, offering its own countermeasure to stagger an increase over three years and reduce the amount of sick-leave for employees at small businesses — but since the time for ballot petitions for this November has passed, its only route to the this year’s general election ballot would require action by the city council.
“The alternative is inferior to the Lift Up Oakland measure, as any kind of real increase wouldn’t be seen until five-years out,” Jimenez argued. “They call it ‘$13 in 3′, but that’s disingenuous, [as many workers] wouldn’t see anything close to the $12.25 we’re proposing until five years [from now] and they haven’t tied it to CPI. We figured that that’s the is most progressive thing we could do. Gas rises, housing costs rise, so should people’s wages.” He believes these values are “not something the people want to compromise on,” and noted that a recent poll by the Chamber found about 70 percent support for the $12.25 minimum.
The Oakland Metropolitan Chambers of Commerce did not immediately respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.
Gas rises, housing costs rise, so should people’s wages
Similar efforts are underway in other area jurisdictions. Jimenez noted that different coalitions are already working in Berkeley, Concord, Richmond, Sonoma, and Sunnyvale to bring minimum wage initiatives to voters by 2016: “We’re looking at this as a regional referendum… This stuff is popping up like popcorn. People are feeling the heat of low wages and higher expenses and it’s coming up organically… popping up here, popping up there.” After seeing the successful efforts in Seattle, he said, people are saying “we could do that here.”
A recent analysis of Lift Up Oakland’s proposal by economists from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at University of California, Berkeley and policy experts from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that up to 48,000 workers (about 30 percent of workers in Oakland), would benefit from the $12.25 minimum wage, including a significant number of workers of color.
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law last September that will raise the statewide minimum hourly wage to $10 by 2016. A proposal to increase that to $13 by 2017, filed by State Senator Mark Leno (D) in February, cleared the Senate but did not pass the Assembly.
Posted by Relentless. on :
quote:Originally posted by Relentless.:
quote:Originally posted by raybond: So far ten states have passed higher wages since January: Delaware to $8.25 an hour; West Virginia to $8.75; Rhode Island to $9; Michigan to $9.25; Minnesota to $9.50; Connecticut, Hawaii, and Maryland to $10.10; Vermont to $10.50; and Massachusetts to $11 an hour. They’re not alone: 22 states have wage floors above the federal minimum. The city of Seattle has gone even further, implementing a $15 wage
Ray, can you explain to me why we need to raise minimum wage. In your own words please. Can you also, in that soon to be brilliant diatribe, explain the future effects on the economy?
Guessing that's a no then
Posted by raybond on :
bourgeois
Posted by Relentless. on :
quote:Originally posted by raybond: bourgeois
Still a no then?
Come on little fella.. Give it a shot.
Answer the question.
Posted by raybond on :
no no no
stay tuned for more victories if that bothers you then don't read the posts
Posted by Relentless. on :
So essentially you're not capable of explaining your "point", nor are you capable of explaining said "point".
You do however have the ability to post long winded communist articles.
Got it.
Thanks, Ray for clearing that up.
Posted by raybond on :
ok, you win flip dizzy.
Posted by Relentless. on :
Thanks, Ray, I already knew that.
Anything else?
Posted by NR on :
Ray doesn't care about facts Relentless. What's the old expression?
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."
Just wanted to see if I could get him to admit he has no idea what he's talking about.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP
The Oakland Raiders will pay their cheerleaders $9 an hour, in line with the California state minimum wage, for all work the Raiderettes perform for the team during the 2014-2015 season, the team quietly announced near the end of June.
Former cheerleaders alleged wage theft and unfair labor practices in a lawsuit against the team filed in January, saying that they earned less than $5 per hour if all of their work, from games to practices to promotional appearances, was included.
The Raiders posted the new wage on audition fliers that are no longer on the team’s web site, according to NBC Bay Area, which first reported the wage increase this week.
Since former Raiderette Lacy T. filed the lawsuit against the Raiders, cheerleaders from four other teams — the Buffalo Bills, New York Jets, Cincinnati Bengals, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers — have filed similar suits, some of them alleging pay as low as $2 per hour.
Caitlin Y., another of the plaintiffs against the Raiders, has decided to return to the squad, according to Slate’s Amanda Hess.
The suit will continue toward arbitration to determine whether the cheerleaders who brought it are owed back wages, and there are still other problems around NFL cheerleaders, like the fact that the former Bills cheerleaders said they were subjected to “jiggle tests” to check their weights. And wage theft remains a major problem throughout professional sports, from cheerleaders to office workers to minor league baseball players, and outside of sports too.
The other suits are also proceeding. Tuesday, a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss the suit against the Bills.
Posted by Relentless. on :
Sorry Raychel, are you considering $9/hr for an NFL cheerleader a "Win"? Just a little clarification please.
Posted by Upside on :
9 bucks an hour to show half your tits to the world? Hell, I've paid more than that in a cover charge just to see the same thing, never mind the two drink minimum. Doesn't seem like a win to me.
Posted by IWISHIHAD on :
Originally Posted By Upside:
9 bucks an hour to show half your tits to the world? Hell, I've paid more than that in a cover charge just to see the same thing, never mind the two drink minimum. Doesn't seem like a win to me. ------------------------------------------------- And in the bars they get tips and pay no taxes on the money. Yes i did say tips. The cheerleaders don't realize how much money they could be making... 9 bucks is chump change
-
Posted by IWISHIHAD on :
Realistically the cheeerleaders should work a short time with the teams, then open their own studios.
They will make a lot more then $9 teaching dance and cheerleading to the younger girls and the dads will be there a lot more watching their daughters learn dance and cheerleading.
The young girls will come a flying when they learn the instructors were cheerleaders for professional teams.
-
Posted by raybond on :
Well I never thought that my cheer leader post would create such an interest. My only thought was in a section of the economy where big money is thrown around to the tune of millions, someone is paid so little.
Posted by raybond on :
In a ruling that raises the stakes for numerous fast food worker efforts, the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) top lawyer said on Tuesday that McDonald’s Corp. is responsible for the actions of the owner-operator franchisees who run the vast majority of its stores.
The arrangements McDonald’s makes with its franchisees have long been understood to insulate the corporation from worker lawsuits. Because the buck stopped with individual owner-managers rather than with at the company’s Illinois headquarters, worker lawsuits and unionization efforts were limited in scope and unable to seek remedies from the company’s $5.6 billion in annual corporate profits.
Workers have repeatedly challenged that interpretation of the franchisee relationships, most recently in a slew of class-action wage theft lawsuits this spring. Those cases centered on a computer system installed by McDonald’s at franchisee stores that compares labor costs to money coming in in real-time, encouraging managers to fiddle with workers hours and timesheets as necessary to keep that expenses ratio as low as possible at all times.
The suits named both franchisees and McDonald’s itself, and workers and attorneys were optimistic that the legal challenges would poke holes in the company’s claims to legal indemnity. Tuesday’s ruling did just that, though it stemmed from separate, older claims involving workers who had attempted to unionize and were fired in retaliation.
“McDonald’s has tried to avoid the obligations associated with employing the vast majority of the people who prepare and serve their food,” worker attorney Micah Wissinger said on an afternoon press call, “but the reality is they require franchisees to adhere to strict rules.” Wissinger, whose clients brought the initial lawsuits over alleged retaliatory firings at New York City stores in 2012, explained that the decision does not make it any more or less likely that the labor board will find merit in any of the 113 individual allegations of which he is aware. But in cases where regional NLRB officials do find complaints have merit, “they are to name McDonald’s as an employer” in their rulings. An NLRB spokesperson confirmed the decision to ThinkProgress.
McDonald’s told the Associated Press that it had been notified of the general counsel’s ruling earlier Tuesday afternoon. Senior vice president of human resources Heather Smedstad told the wire service that Tuesday’s ruling “is such a radical departure that it should be a concern to business men and women across the country.”
Cathy Ruckelshaus of the National Employment Law Project disputed that assessment of the ruling on Tuesday’s press call. “Holding McDonald’s accountable will not portend the death of franchising as many argue,” Ruckelshaus said. “All it means is that corporations that exercise control over their workers cannot feign ignorance” of those workers’ rights and complaints.
A man named Richard who has worked in the same Kansas City McDonald’s for 18 years agreed that franchisees will be better able to care for employees’ well-being if the corporation is held accountable for wages and working conditions. “Some may think that who my boss is is just a technicality, but it matters,” Richard said on Tuesday’s call, because in order to adhere to the rules of their franchising contracts “the only thing franchisees can skimp on is wages.”
“They would pay more if they could, I’m sure of it,” he said, “but they’re hamstrung. This will help us hold McDonald’s accountable for wage theft and other violations, and make it easier to form a union.”
The fast food worker campaign for a $15 wage and the ability to unionize began with strikes in New York City in late 2012 and has spread to more than 150 U.S. cities and dozens of other countries as of this spring. No matter how hard McDonald’s and other chains with similar business models fight before judges and NLRB panels, the workers are prepared to intensify their efforts. At a convention last weekend, over a thousand worker attendees voted to add civil disobedience to the list of tools they will use to press for changes in an industry where CEOs earn 1,200 times what frontline workers do and grown-ups with families work full-time but still cannot escape poverty.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Ray, do you believe companies should be forced to hire employees who can not speak english to do the job? Do you believe language discrimination should be outlawed too?
Posted by raybond on :
On Monday, San Diego’s city council gave final approval to a bill that would require the city’s employers to offer their full-time workers at least five paid sick days a year. It would also increase the city’s minimum wage to $11.50 by 2017 with automatic increases for inflation after 2019.
On the same day, Eugene, Oregon’s city council passed a paid sick leave law will go into effect next July, barring a successful legal challenge. The city’s employers would have to give workers an hour of paid time off for every 30 they work, with a maximum of 40 hours a year. All businesses and nonprofits will be covered by the law. An estimated 25,000 workers in the city don’t have access to paid sick days.
San Diego’s part-time workers would be able to earn prorated sick days based on how many hours they work. An estimated 279,000 workers will now be able to earn the leave, and the bill doesn’t have any exemptions for certain industries or businesses. An earlier analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that about 433,500 private-sector workers in the city didn’t have any access to paid sick leave.
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has said he will veto the bill that guarantees paid sick days and a minimum wage increase, saying that it “puts our job growth in jeopardy and will lead to higher prices and layoffs for San Diego families.” But given that the measure passed six to three and a veto override requires six votes, it’s likely that the city council will override his veto.
Assuming both ordinances eventually become law, the cities would become the ninth and tenth places in the country with a paid sick leave law on the books, joining the cities of Jersey City, NJ; Newark, NJ; New York City; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, D.C. and the state of Connecticut. But there is no federal guarantee to cover all workers; the United States is the only country out of 22 developed ones that doesn’t ensure that all workers can take a paid day for illness. More than 41 million American workers don’t have access to paid sick leave.
Despite Faulconer’s concern that paid sick leave will hurt job growth, evidence from these other laws shows the opposite. Two different studies of Seattle’s law have found that it didn’t hurt job growth or business growth and that in fact job growth was stronger after it went into effect. The majority of the city’s businesses support it. San Francisco’s business growth increased after its law was implemented and jobs weren’t harmed, while a majority of employers also support it there. In Washington, D.C., the law hasn’t discouraged business owners from opening up or encouraged them to move. And Connecticut’s has come with little to no burden on employers, the majority of whom support it.
San Diego also joins a growing group of states and cities in passing a higher minimum wage. Ten states have passed higher wages since January, with five at or above the $10.10 an hour level being sought by Congressional Democrats and President Obama. None have gone as far as San Diego’s $11.50 an hour, although some cities have topped it, such as Seattle, which passed a $15 minimum wage. Real life evidence again offers comfort to anyone worried that higher wages kill jobs: those whose wages increased at the beginning of the year are experiencing faster job growth, and a study of increases over the past two decades found no evidence of harm to job growth.
Posted by raybond on :
Early on Saturday morning, the California Senate passed a bill guaranteeing at least three paid sick days a year for about 6.5 million workers, sending it to Gov. Jerry Brown (D).
Brown’s office said it supports the bill, and in a statement after it passed he said, “Tonight, the Legislature took historic action to help hardworking Californians.” Assuming he signs the bill, California will become just the second state ever to guarantee paid sick leave and the law will be the tenth in the nation.
The bill would require employers to provide sick leave to employees who work 30 or more days within a year, allowing them to accrue at least one hour for every 30 they put in. Currently, about 44 percent of the state’s workers don’t have access to a single paid day off if they or a family member gets sick.
It does, however, have a big carve out, as last minute negotiations between the bill’s author and Gov. Brown left out those who care for the elderly and disabled in their homes. That change led labor unions, which had made the bill a priority for the year, to pull their support, but it secured the governor’s backing.
California joins Connecticut, the first state to guarantee its residents have paid sick leave. If that state’s experience is a guide, the California Chamber of Commerce, which called the state’s bill a “job killer,” should have nothing to worry about. A year and a half after Connecticut’s law took effect, most employers said the costs had been negligible or non-existent, abuse hadn’t cropped up, and many actually saw benefits. More than three-quarters support the law, with nearly 40 percent saying they’re very supportive.
The same story has played out at the city level. Jersey City, NJ; Newark, NJ; New York City; Portland, OR; San Diego, CA; Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, D.C. have all passed paid sick leave laws. San Francisco saw business growth increase and no harm to jobs, and a majority of employers support the law. Seattle’s didn’t hurt business or job growth, and job growth was actually stronger after the law took effect, while businesses support it. And Washington, D.C.’s law hasn’t pushed business owners to move or discouraged them from opening up shop in the city.
Despite these positive experiences, the cities and states with paid sick days requirements remain rare. The United States is the only country among 22 rich nations that doesn’t have such a national requirement. That leaves about 40 percent of the country’s workers, or more than 41 million people, without access to a single paid day off if they get sick or need to care for family members who are sick. And low-wage workers are even less likely to have access to leave. Bills have been introduced in Congress that would guarantee access for all, but none of them have passed.
And some places have moved in the opposite direction. Ten have passed preemption laws that ban cities and counties from passing paid sick leave laws, with most of them happening last year.
Posted by raybond on :
The campaign to get fast-food workers paid at least $15 a hour resumes later this week.
Union organizers say workers will walk off their jobs Thursday in 150 cities nationwide. Restaurants that they say will be affected include McDonald's (MCD), Burger King (BKW) , Wendy's and KFC, which is owned by Yum Brands (YUM). The action would be the latest in a two-year effort to get employers to pay them a minimum wage of $15 an hour and allow them to form unions without retaliation.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP
Hundreds of striking fast food workers and their supporters were arrested Thursday while protesting to demand higher wages and the right to unionize, strike organizers say. Workers walked off the job in 159 different cities on what was at least the 10th day of strikes in the 21 months since the campaign for a $15 hourly wage and full labor rights began in New York City just after Thanksgiving 2012.
The arrests were scattered around the country and included 50 in Chicago, 42 in Detroit, 11 in Little Rock, 10 in Las Vegas, and 52 in Kansas City, according to a partial list provided by organizers. Police in Detroit reportedly ran out of handcuffs at one point while arresting peaceful strikers who were blocking traffic during their demonstration. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) was among the 25 workers and supporters arrested in Milwaukee, and several other members of the House Progressive Caucus joined worker actions in various cities. Moore said she was given a $691 ticket for disorderly conduct after she and other protesters defused to clear the road they were blocking.
With 159 cities striking on Thursday, fast food workers have approximately doubled the size of the battlefield over the past year. Strikes hit 60 cities in August 2013, the first day to see strikes in a double-digit number of cities. A December strike day featured 100 cities, and about 150 cities saw walkouts in May. Over the nearly two years since the campaign began, the strikes have leaped from New York and other northern cities to every corner of the continental U.S.
But beyond the geographic spread, Thursday’s strikes are the first example of a tactical escalation that workers and organizers promised at a convention earlier this summer. A July gathering of more than 1,300 fast food workers produced a resolution to begin using civil disobedience and nonviolent protest to advance their cause.
“We had over 100 people arrested, but however they respected every police officer,” Rev. W. J. Rideout told Detroit’s ABC affiliate WXYZ on Thursday. “And we also chanted, ‘Police need a raise also.’ EMS need a raise, firefighters need a raise. So we’re not against anyone here, we’re against the corporations, we’re against McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s was recently found to be responsible for its workers’ treatment by the National Labor Relations Board. That might sound obvious, but for decades the fast food industry has used franchise agreements to shrug off legal liability for labor violations by the owner-operators who run the vast majority of fast food chain stores. That legal facade crumbled this summer after workers’ attorneys presented evidence that McDonald’s is responsible for setting the rules that lead store owners to commit wage theft by falsifying time sheets, forcing people to work off the clock, and requiring workers to pay for their own uniform upkeep, among other widespread company practices.
The unrelenting worker pressure on the ground and the gradual shift in how labor regulators treat the fast food business model could make it difficult for these companies to maintain the status quo for much longer. At present, CEOs are paid 1,200 times more than workers in the industry. Frontline fast food workers — the vast majority of whom are adults, many with families to support — earn poverty wages that require them to turn to public assistance programs to survive despite having a job. This taxpayer subsidy of low fast food wages costs the American public well over a billion dollars a year (and when accounting for similar dynamics in other low-wage industries, the cost is closer to a quarter-trillion dollars). Worse, even those meager wages often don’t get paid properly. Nine out of 10 fast food workers reports being victimized by some form of wage theft.
Posted by NR on :
That's what you get for blocking the road, preventing people who have a REAL JOB from getting to work while you sit on your butt crying about not getting enough money for flipping dead cow. Not only are these selfish pukes holding their employer hostage, they want to hold the rest of their community hostage as well. Serves them right.
Posted by raybond on :
Fast Food Franchise Owners Ask Congress For Help To Stop Worker Campaign For Wages, Union
by Alan Pyke Posted on September 16, 2014 at 9:33 am
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"Fast Food Franchise Owners Ask Congress For Help To Stop Worker Campaign For Wages, Union"
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McDonald's Hamburglar character steals imaginary food from other characters. The company steals real wages from its workers. McDonald’s Hamburglar character steals imaginary food from other characters. The company steals real wages from its workers.
CREDIT: Flickr user sortofbreakit
The fast food industry is hoping that a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill can blunt the momentum that fast food workers have gained through nearly two years of strikes and multiple lawsuits.
The International Franchise Association (IFA) is flying fast food store owners and other franchisees into Washington on Tuesday to drum up congressional opposition to a recent legal decision that could make corporations liable for how franchise employees are treated. The trade group expects more than 350 business owners from both the franchisee and franchisor sides of the business model to show up at its event this week, according to The Hill. Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and former Republican Governors Association head and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour are scheduled to speak to the group, and the paper reports that top Senate Republicans will introduce legislation targeting federal labor regulators in general later this week.
The top attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined in July that McDonald’s exerts so much control over how franchisees operate that they are responsible for labor law violations committed by franchise owners. That finding has yet to be tested in court, but if it holds up and is applied beyond the nation’s largest fast food chain, it would make it much harder for industries that rely on franchising to stymie workers’ attempts to exercise their labor rights.
IFA President Steve Caldeira said the board’s decision about McDonald’s franchisees “would essentially take away their autonomy to run their own business.” But franchisees enjoy little autonomy under the restrictive agreements they sign with the corporation now.
McDonald’s sends both formal company inspectors and secret shoppers into some of its stores to verify that the owners are keeping up with the exacting requirements of its contracts. It installs a computer system that monitors the money coming in and going out of each store at all times, automatically alerting managers if their labor costs get too high — an occurrence that can trigger labor law violations such as requiring workers to clock out but keep working or remain on-site without pay until the computer system reports that the store is back in the black.
Nine in 10 fast food workers report wage theft. The industry pays corporate CEOs 1,200 times more than it pays the typical worker. McDonald’s made $5.6 billion in profit on $28.1 billion in total revenue last year.
Most fast food companies require franchise owners to demonstrate a personal net worth in the millions of dollars before they are eligible to run a store. McDonald’s won’t entertain franchise applications from anyone who doesn’t have at least $750,000 in non-borrowed assets.
The eagerness of IFA members to take up McDonald’s cause against the NLRB indicates that many other companies fear they are vulnerable to the same arguments about corporate control over franchise workplaces, and would ultimately face the same consequences for labor violations that the board’s lawyer believes McDonald’s should face.
It also signals that franchise owners and their corporate bosses are more afraid of workers’ power than of the enforcement mechanisms that are supposed to punish wage theft. While workers have won several multi-million-dollar wage theft settlements this year, the legal systems that govern wage and hour violations around the country are generally ineffective. In California, where labor law is robust, workers have a less than one-in-five chance of recovering lost wages even when they prove they were robbed and win a judgment for restitution from the state. Wage theft steals more money each year than every bank robbery and store holdup in America combined.
Tags: Fast Food Workers Labor
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP/M. Spencer Green
The amount of money employers had to pay because they were found guilty of wage theft is nearly three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
EPI gathered figures of money recovered for victims of wage theft — which occurs when an employer has workers perform tasks off the clock or pay for their own uniforms, violating labor laws — from the Department of Labor, state labor departments, state attorneys general, and research firms. In 2012, $933 million was paid in back wages for wage theft violations, although that figure is an under-count because there were six state departments of labor and five attorneys general the organization couldn’t contact.
Compare that to the less than $350 million stolen in all robberies, including from banks, residences, stores, and on the street in 2012. That’s not just the figure for those that were solved, but for any robbery simply reported to the police.
Even the nearly $1 billion collected is likely an under-count of the problem given that most victims don’t contract lawyers or file complaints. Relying on a study of low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, which found that workers were losing nearly $3 billion to wage theft, EPI generalized to the rest of the country and estimated that it’s robbing people of more than $50 billion each year. And even that may be a low figure, given that the three-city study found that two-thirds of workers experienced at least one form of wage theft each week, yet a recent poll of workers nationwide found nearly 90 percent of fast food workers had experienced it.
That $50 billion figure dwarfs the $14 billion taken from victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts in 2012. That’s less than a third of the cost of wage theft, according to EPI’s estimations.
The workers who aren’t getting the full paychecks they deserve can’t afford to lose that money, given that many victims are in low-wage jobs like fast food and retail. A minimum wage worker who loses just a half hour of a day’s pay would end up losing 10 percent of her yearly earnings when added up, “the difference between paying the rent and utilities or risking eviction and the loss of gas, water, or electric service,” the report notes.
It’s also a problem that seems to be on the rise. The number of cases filed in federal court jumped from about 5,000 in 2008 to nearly 8,000 in 2013 and have grown more than five times the number reported 20 years ago.
Wage theft is illegal under the Federal Labor Standards Act. But clearly it still happens. So various states and cities have enacted ordinances to further crack down on it by giving investigators more resources, making it easier for workers to bring complaints, and penalizing companies found guilty of the practice. EPI suggests at the federal level beefing up investigators, withholding government business from companies found to steal wages, and increasing the penalties. The maximum civil penalty for failing to give workers at least the minimum wage or overtime pay is $1,100.
Posted by raybond on :
Low-wage workers are walking off the job in almost 200 American cities on Thursday, barely two years after a far smaller group of fast food employees in New York City launched strikes demanding a $15 hourly wage and the right to form a union. These are the largest strikes that the fast food industry has ever seen, according to a press release, expanding from the roughly 160 cities hit by walkouts in September to a full 191 cities on Thursday. Thursday’s actions are the ninth major coordinated day of strikes and protests since the campaign began.
As the campaign spread from New York fast food stores to nearly every corner of the country, it also jumped industrial divides. Overnight convenience store attendants kicked off the Thursday strike day by walking off the job in Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Airport workers in 10 cities including Boston, Fort Lauderdale, and Oakland are also joining the fray for the first time. Low-wage retail and home care workers continue to participate in a campaign that organizers have dubbed the “Fight for $15.”
That momentum has influenced state, local, and national politics, pushing working-class economic stagnation and corporate wage theft into the category of issues that politicians can’t ignore. It was key to driving minimum wage increase campaigns around the country over the past two years.
In Seattle, which was one of the earliest cities to see major strikes by fast food workers in 2013, the activist pressure helped push business leaders to the negotiating table by making a large minimum wage hike politically inevitable. City lawmakers enacted a record-high $15 hourly minimum wage law last spring after months of negotiations and compromise between commercial interests and workers’ representatives.
Workers in other places on this map have not seen such rapid returns from their risk-taking. In Washington, D.C., where low-wage service workers employed by federal contractors have been striking at places like the Pentagon, Union Station, and the Smithsonian museums for well over a year, progress has been far slower. These federally-contracted low-wage workers successfully persuaded President Obama to use his executive authority to raise the minimum wage that a federal contractor can pay, but only to $10.10 an hour. They have since raised their target to $15. The intricacies of federal contracting rules mean that the new wage rules don’t necessarily kick in immediately for people like Reginald Lewis and Tony Brawner.
The D.C. campaign’s experience underscores one of the key lessons that wealthy progressive entrepreneur Nick Hannauer learned from participating in the Seattle negotiations. “You shouldn’t be asking for 50 cents,” he told ThinkProgress in June. “You should be asking for five bucks. That gets people’s attention.”
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: UFCW International Union’s Flickr
Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S., will be forced to raise its wages thanks to new minimum wage hikes in 21 states that will take effect in the new year. Reuters reports that the retail giant is preparing to raise its base salary in about a third of its stores in the U.S. Currently, about 6,000 Walmart employees make $7.25 an hour.
According to Reuters, Walmart will change its pay structure in 1,434 stores to narrow the gap between low-paid workers and higher skilled positions. The company has also pledged to make more changes in 2015 to give workers more opportunity for advancement.
Walmart workers have been striking for years against the company’s notoriously poor treatment of employees. On Black Friday this year, thousands protested at 1,000 stores across the country, calling for a livable wage and more reliable working hours. Walmart keeps many employees on erratic part-time or temporary schedules to avoid giving them full benefits.
But even with base salaries adjusted to meet the new requirements, it won’t be enough for workers to survive. The Walmart strikes have called for a $15 an hour wage, which only a couple of cities have approved. Walmart’s home state, Arkansas, voted in November to raise its minimum wage to $8.50 — but the state’s low-wage workers told ThinkProgress that rate still leaves them in deep poverty.
Researchers have found that Walmart’s low prices would rise by pennies even if the company passed the entire cost of a $10.10 minimum wage on to consumers.
Moreover, Walmart’s poverty wages have forced their workers onto public benefits like food stamps, costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by raybond: CREDIT: UFCW International Union’s Flickr
Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S., will be forced to raise its wages thanks to new minimum wage hikes in 21 states that will take effect in the new year. Reuters reports that the retail giant is preparing to raise its base salary in about a third of its stores in the U.S. Currently, about 6,000 Walmart employees make $7.25 an hour.
According to Reuters, Walmart will change its pay structure in 1,434 stores to narrow the gap between low-paid workers and higher skilled positions. The company has also pledged to make more changes in 2015 to give workers more opportunity for advancement.
Walmart workers have been striking for years against the company’s notoriously poor treatment of employees. On Black Friday this year, thousands protested at 1,000 stores across the country, calling for a livable wage and more reliable working hours. Walmart keeps many employees on erratic part-time or temporary schedules to avoid giving them full benefits.
But even with base salaries adjusted to meet the new requirements, it won’t be enough for workers to survive. The Walmart strikes have called for a $15 an hour wage, which only a couple of cities have approved. Walmart’s home state, Arkansas, voted in November to raise its minimum wage to $8.50 — but the state’s low-wage workers told ThinkProgress that rate still leaves them in deep poverty.
Researchers have found that Walmart’s low prices would rise by pennies even if the company passed the entire cost of a $10.10 minimum wage on to consumers.
Moreover, Walmart’s poverty wages have forced their workers onto public benefits like food stamps, costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year.
I very rarely go to wal mart. Costco is a better place to shop and they treat their employees better.
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: AP
Many of the largest American retail brands decided to keep their stores open on Thanksgiving, but one company that put its workers’ holiday plans ahead of business was rewarded with sales growth that beat analyst expectations.
A Costco spokesperson told ThinkProgress last month that it gives workers the day off because they “work especially hard during the holiday season and we simply believe that they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with their families.” And while it might seem like the company would take a financial hit for closing while others opened their doors, Costco’s total November sales were up 7 percent at its American locations compared to November 2013, the company announced on Thursday. Factoring in a decline at its international stores, the company reported overall monthly sales growth of 5 percent, well above the 3.7 percent growth forecast by industry professionals.
Other all-purpose retail chains including Walmart, Target, Sears, and Kmart opted to open their doors on Thanksgiving in hopes of luring shoppers with early sales tied to “Black Friday.” Kmart went so far as to threaten to fire workers who refused the holiday shifts, which began before 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving day. None of those stores had released sales figures for November at the time of this writing.
Costco’s overall approach to its workforce contrasts with the cost-trimming approach that companies like Walmart employ, and its relative benevolence doesn’t hamper the company’s profitability. Costco’s frontline employees start at $11.50 an hour for work that pays less than $9 an hour at Walmart. Seven out of every eight Costco employees gets company-sponsored health care coverage, something that the majority of Walmart workers are either ineligible for because of their part-time hours or unable to afford because the company’s insurance plan is so expensive.
Walmart’s approach typifies the classic way of thinking about labor costs for large American businesses. By squeezing as much productivity as possible out of workers who get paid as little as the company can manage, retailers hope to increase their profit margins. From fast food stores to Amazon.com warehouses, that view of labor as just one more cost in a basic profit-seeking equation is dominant in many sectors of the U.S. economy.
But the approach seems to be backfiring for Walmart, where understaffed stores routinely fail to keep shelves stocked and store sections clean, and various fast food stores, where two years of strikes and worker unrest have produced an official labor law finding that could shake the foundations of the industry’s business model. And because many of these companies’ workers earn such a meager living, they end up relying on taxpayer-funded assistance programs to make ends meet. In effect, the public subsidizes corporations that offer substandard wages and benefits as a way of maximizing their profits.
Posted by raybond on :
On Thursday, Walmart announced that it will raise all of its full-time and part-time employees’ pay to at least $9 an hour starting in April. The lowest wage will rise to $10 an hour by February of next year.
In a press release, it said it is also raising pay for the compensation range for each position, and all told says that about 500,000 employees will see a raise from the changes. It also says the raises will mean its average hourly wage for full-time workers will increase from $12.85 to $13 an hour and the average for part-time workers will increase from $9.48 to $10 an hour.
It also promised that workers “will have more control over their schedules.” The wage increases will cost more than $1 billion this fiscal year.
In announcing the changes, CEO Doug McMillon acknowledged some of the criticism that the company has sacrificed customer loyalty because of its pay practices. “We have work to do to grow the business. We know what customers want from a shopping experience, and we’re investing strategically to exceed their expectations and better position Walmart for the future,” he said. “We’re strengthening investments in our people to engage and inspire them to deliver superior customer experiences.”
The company, which is the nation’s largest employer, has long come under fire for its low pay. While the company has said that it pays most workers above the minimum wage, it has also admitted in the past that the majority of its employees make under $25,000 a year. One study from 2013 of a single store in Wisconsin found that its pay was so low that workers consumed about $1 million in public benefits to get by.
Workers have repeatedly gone on strike over the past three years to demand higher pay, better scheduling, and the right to unionize. They have called for the store’s wage floor to rise to at least $15 an hour. Thursday’s announcement also comes after so many states raised their minimum wages above the federal $7.25 level that a third of Walmart stores had to raise their base wages anyway.
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In an emailed statement, Emily Wells, a leader of the worker organizing group Our Walmart, said, “We are so proud that by standing together we won raises for 500,000 Walmart workers, whose families desperately need better pay and regular hours from the company we make billions for. We know that this wouldn’t have happen without our work to stand together with hundreds of thousands of supporters to change the country’s largest employer. The company is addressing the very issues that we have been raising about the low pay and erratic scheduling, and acknowledging how many of us are being paid less than $10 an hour, and many workers like me, are not getting the hours we need.” But she added, “Especially without a guarantee of getting regular hours, this announcement still falls short of what American workers need to support our families. With $16 billion in profits and $150 billion in wealth for the owners, Walmart can afford to provide the good jobs that Americans need – and that means $15 an hour, full-time, consistent hours and respect for our hard work.”
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by raybond: On Thursday, Walmart announced that it will raise all of its full-time and part-time employees’ pay to at least $9 an hour starting in April. The lowest wage will rise to $10 an hour by February of next year.
In a press release, it said it is also raising pay for the compensation range for each position, and all told says that about 500,000 employees will see a raise from the changes. It also says the raises will mean its average hourly wage for full-time workers will increase from $12.85 to $13 an hour and the average for part-time workers will increase from $9.48 to $10 an hour.
It also promised that workers “will have more control over their schedules.” The wage increases will cost more than $1 billion this fiscal year.
In announcing the changes, CEO Doug McMillon acknowledged some of the criticism that the company has sacrificed customer loyalty because of its pay practices. “We have work to do to grow the business. We know what customers want from a shopping experience, and we’re investing strategically to exceed their expectations and better position Walmart for the future,” he said. “We’re strengthening investments in our people to engage and inspire them to deliver superior customer experiences.”
The company, which is the nation’s largest employer, has long come under fire for its low pay. While the company has said that it pays most workers above the minimum wage, it has also admitted in the past that the majority of its employees make under $25,000 a year. One study from 2013 of a single store in Wisconsin found that its pay was so low that workers consumed about $1 million in public benefits to get by.
Workers have repeatedly gone on strike over the past three years to demand higher pay, better scheduling, and the right to unionize. They have called for the store’s wage floor to rise to at least $15 an hour. Thursday’s announcement also comes after so many states raised their minimum wages above the federal $7.25 level that a third of Walmart stores had to raise their base wages anyway.
Update
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In an emailed statement, Emily Wells, a leader of the worker organizing group Our Walmart, said, “We are so proud that by standing together we won raises for 500,000 Walmart workers, whose families desperately need better pay and regular hours from the company we make billions for. We know that this wouldn’t have happen without our work to stand together with hundreds of thousands of supporters to change the country’s largest employer. The company is addressing the very issues that we have been raising about the low pay and erratic scheduling, and acknowledging how many of us are being paid less than $10 an hour, and many workers like me, are not getting the hours we need.” But she added, “Especially without a guarantee of getting regular hours, this announcement still falls short of what American workers need to support our families. With $16 billion in profits and $150 billion in wealth for the owners, Walmart can afford to provide the good jobs that Americans need – and that means $15 an hour, full-time, consistent hours and respect for our hard work.”
Wal Mart disgusts me anyway. I go out of my way to make sure I dont spend money there. What they have done to the mom and pop businesses in small towns across USA is sad. Not to mention they have filled households with cheap chinese crap.
Posted by raybond on :
Portland Raises Minimum Wage For City Workers To $15
by Bryce Covert Posted on February 20, 2015 at 8:50 am Updated: February 20, 2015 at 10:12 am
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"Portland Raises Minimum Wage For City Workers To $15 dollars per hour
CREDIT: AP
On Wednesday, the Portland, OR city council voted unanimously to increase the minimum wage for city workers and contractors to $15 an hour, currently the highest minimum wage anywhere in the country.
They amended the Fair Wage Policy, which sets the floor for about 173 full-time city employees and contractors. Most of the affected workers are janitors, parking attendants, and security workers paid by contractors who are subject to the policy. The wage increase could also trickle out to those who work for third-party vendors that honor the Fair Wage Policy.
Workers who won’t be covered include 1,800 seasonal and part-time employees mostly working for the Parks Bureau, many of whom have a capped number of hours they can work each year, often making their part-time status involuntary.
The wage hike comes as a bill is being considered in the Oregon legislature to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour from its current level of $9.25. It’s the first state considering that wage level; so far it has only taken hold in cities, where it was adopted in Seattle and San Francisco and is under consideration in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
The call for a $15 an hour minimum wage began with fast food workers, who started staging strikes three years ago to demand they paid at least that much. The call also spread to Walmart workers, who have staged many of their own strikes, and home care workers.
Critics of such high wage levels argue that businesses will have to cut jobs to deal with the higher cost of labor, thus hurting the low-wage workers the increases are meant to help. But a recent study of the low-wage fast food industry concluded that it could absorb a $15 wage without cutting jobs or hurting profits through lower turnover, higher prices, and greater economic growth.
While $15 an hour is the highest wage enacted so far, many other places have raised their minimum wages above the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. A number of states increased their wages last year, so many that as of January 1, the majority of states have wages that are higher than $7.25.
Posted by raybond on :
Largest-Ever Strike Hits Fast Food Industry In 230 Cities
by Bryce Covert & Dylan Petrohilos Posted on April 15, 2015 at 10:59 am Updated: April 15, 2015 at 11:00 am
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"Largest-Ever Strike Hits Fast Food Industry In 230 Cities"
Share: facebook icon twitter icon Fast food workers and other protesters in Boston Fast food workers and other protesters in Boston
On Wednesday, fast food workers walked off the job in 230 cities, staging the largest-ever strike in their movement aimed at a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union.
The movement began with a single strike in New York City at the end of 2012 but has grown increasingly larger as the Fight for 15 movement has staged nine other days of coordinated strikes since then. Wednesday’s actions took place in cities on both coasts, the south, and the midwest, and it even went global, with strikes in Italy and New Zealand
While McDonald’s recently announced that it will raise base wages at the locations it operates directly — about 10 percent of its stores — organizers have said that it doesn’t go far enough and they’re still pushing for a $15 wage. But that wage level has taken hold in some places, with Seattle and San Francisco passing $15 minimum wages and other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, OR, and Washington, DC considering the same. Some states might even adopt that minimum wage. Research has found that the fast food industry could absorb a $15 minimum wage without having to resort to cutting jobs.
Meanwhile, states have been raising their minimum wages, if not to the $15 level, and a majority now have a higher wage than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. And Congressional Democrats have raised their sights from pushing for a $10.10 federal wage to a $12 an hour one.
The Fight for 15 movement has also spread past the fast food industry. Home care workers, Walmart employees, adjunct professors, and others joined protests around Wednesday’s actions and have called for a $15 minimum wage of their own. Walmart workers have been staging repeated strikes against their employer demanding at least $25,000 a year and the ability to form a union.
Tags: Fast Food Workers Minimum Wage
Posted by raybond on :
CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos/ThinkProgress
Los Angeles is the largest city to adopt a $15 wage, but Seattle and San Francisco have also increased their minimum wages to that level. It also isn’t the highest wage level adopted in the country so far. Earlier this month, the California city of Emeryville voted to increase its minimum wage to nearly $16 an hour by 2019.
The $15 an hour minimum wage gained prominence as fast food workers staged repeated strikes over the last three years, calling to be paid at least that much as well as to have the right to form unions. Their call has since been taken up by retail employees, home care aids, and adjunct professors.
Besides the three cities that have since approved that wage level, a handful of others have also considered it, as have some states. And Democrats in Congress have increased their minimum wage target from $10.10 an hour to $12 an hour. Minimum wage increases at lower levels have also been widespread, as the majority of states have increased theirs above the federal $7.25 floor, which hasn’t been raised in about six years.
Critics of increases warn that higher minimum wage requirements will force companies to lay workers off to deal with higher costs. But decades of economic research has found virtually no impact on job growth with potential benefits through increased worker productivity and sales when people have more money to spend. And even concerns about the $15 minimum wage aren’t panning out so far, as claims that businesses were forced to shut down were overblown.
Posted by glassman on :
so, for what it's worth this map shows a sort of minimum wage level. In my area of Mississippi 13.67 comes in at abouth4e averag household income (that's usually two people working but not always. We have a few extremely rich people heree and alot of people that are more like half that amount of household income. I will alos again state that there is NO JOB that is not worth paying a living wage. not one. If you don't like spit on your restaurant food? then pay the workers a living wage.
Posted by raybond on :
Well glass from reading your last post on the subject of minimum wages I would have to say I agree with you. A society functions with everybody's labor making it go around and work. Keeping peoples wages to a point to where they go in the whole every month and can't fully meet requirements of life makes a good fertile ground for revolution. And I don't have to tell anybody hear the low end of the wage scale is the fastest growing segment of the scale.
Posted by Relentless. on :
Who works a work a minimum wage job and complains about the wage?
That was a trick question...
Posted by raybond on :
New York is set for $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers
Demonstrators rally for a $15 minimum wage before a meeting of the wage board in New York, Monday, June 15, 2015. The board, created by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, will consider a minimum wage increase for New York's fast-food workers. A panel formed at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s behest recommended that the minimum wage for fast-food workers be raised to $15 an hour by 2018 in New York City and three years later in the rest of the state.
Cuomo has indicated that his labor commissioner, who has final say, will follow the board’s advice, though tweaks may be possible. The increase, which will be phased in annually, applies to fast-food chains with 30 or more locations.
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The panel was created in May to sidestep the legislature, where Cuomo’s effort to raise the $8.75 minimum wage for all workers has been stymied by Republicans who control the Senate.
The move follows nationwide strikes by employees of McDonald’s Corp. and other fast-food chains who demanded a $15 hourly wage. New York spends $6,800 in public assistance per fast-food worker annually, or $700 million a year, more than any other state, Cuomo has said.
Speaking at a rally in Manhattan after the vote, Cuomo said the change would have national implications, comparing it with the state’s legalization of gay marriage in 2011.
“When New York acts, the rest of the states follow,” he told the crowd. “This statement today is going to radiate across the country.”
Cities including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles have raised their minimum wages recently as part of a nationwide movement that’s responding to a call from President Barack Obama to take local action amid gridlock in Washington. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to raise the minimum to $15 an hour by 2020.
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Executive Power
Cuomo is using a power he has under state law to circumvent the legislature; he couldn’t persuade the Senate to back his proposal to raise the minimum to $10.50 per hour and $11.50 in New York City. The Democratic-controlled Assembly had sought a $15 rate for the city.
.Los Angeles County weighs $15 minimum wage for som …. Play video Los Angeles County weighs $15 minimum wage for some … It’s the second time this year that a wage board pushed by Cuomo raised earnings in the restaurant industry. Restaurant workers who earn tips received a $2.50 boost to $7.50 an hour in February.
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The 57-year-old Democrat has said boosting wages, rather than smothering companies that pay them with rules and taxes, is his answer to a national debate over how to narrow the divide between rich and poor. In New York, entry-level fast-food workers earn an average of $16,920 annually, he has said.
Raising wages for only one segment of the restaurant business is unprecedented, said Melissa Fleischut, who heads the New York State Restaurant Association.
“From day one Governor Cuomo’s wage board has sought to silence the business community and force through an unfair and discriminatory increase on a single sector of one industry,” Fleischut said in a statement e-mailed Wednesday. “The result is an extremist policy that will force business owners in this low profit margin industry to cut hours, lay off employees and use technology to help offset skyrocketing labor costs.”
Posted by raybond on :
This Is How Much A Big Mac Would Cost If The Minimum Wage Was $15
by Bryce Covert Aug 3, 2015 10:27am
CREDIT: Shutterstock
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If the minimum wage were increased to $15 an hour, prices at fast food restaurants would rise by an estimated 4.3 percent, according to a new study. That would mean a McDonald’s Big Mac, which currently goes for $3.99, would cost about 17 cents more, or $4.16.
The study from Purdue University’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management also found that in order to compensate for the higher cost of employee compensation at limited-service restaurants, or those without table service or tipping, if they decided to change food sizes rather than prices, the Big Mac would shrink somewhere between 12 and 70 percent.
The price increases would be a good deal larger if the minimum wage were raised to $22 an hour, or average private sector pay: the authors found they would increase by 25 percent, raising the price of a Big Mac by about a dollar.
The study notes that it doesn’t take into account the costs of turnover or any savings gained from higher wages. “People often hypothesize that if you raise pay and offer benefits, turnover will go down. I don’t think we answered the question of whether that reduces turnover,” Richard Ghiselli, professor and head of the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, said in a press release. In 2013, the turnover rate for franchises was 93 percent, and it can cost $4,700 per worker who leaves. A previous study found that for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, turnover drops by 2.2 percent, and a $15 wage would come with $5.2 billion in savings for the fast food industry.
That study also found that between the extra money from higher prices, savings from lower turnover, and greater overall economic growth, the fast food industry could easily cover the increased costs of having to pay a $15 minimum wage without reducing any jobs and still have money left over. Other research has found that all employers could react to higher minimum wage costs in the same way — through savings from reduced turnover, higher prices, improved efficiency, and increased demand — and therefore avoid layoffs.
Real world evidence also supports the idea that fast food would deal with higher wages without cutting jobs. In the face of a planned minimum wage increase in Georgia and Alabama, for example, fast food restaurants were going to respond by raising employees’ performance standards. A major review of all the available research on how minimum wage increases impact job growth found that it’s close to zero, and state-level reviews found that those that have raised wages over recent decades haven’t hurt job growth.
The research showing that the fast food industry has ways to cope with a $15 minimum wage comes as workers in that industry, who have staged widespread strikes over the past three years demanding they be paid at least that much, have experienced recent victories. San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles have raised their minimum wages to that level, while fast food workers across the state of New York notched a recent victory that means they will likely be guaranteed that minimum. A $15 minimum wage proposal has even reached Congress.
Tags Fast Food Workers, Minimum Wage
Posted by raybond on :
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unveiled a new bill this week that would make it easier for workers to form a union and negotiate a contract free from employer retaliation or foot-dragging. As he actively courts union endorsements of his presidential candidacy, Sanders’ latest move also draws a strong contrast with his Republican opponents in the presidential race, who have almost unanimously backed “right-to-work” laws that would weaken labor unions.
“Millions of Americans who today want to join unions, who understand that collective bargaining will raise their wages and income, are unable to do so because of the coercive and often illegal behavior of their employers,” Sanders said Tuesday, citing evidence that unions dramatically improve wages and benefits for their workers.
Sanders added that his bill will send a strong message both to workers struggling to organize and to their employers. “We will no longer tolerate CEOs who fire workers for exercising their constitutional right to form a union,” he said. “We will no longer tolerate CEOs who threaten to move plants to China if their workers vote in favor of a union. We will no longer tolerate CEOs and managers who intimidate or threaten pro-union workers. And we will no longer tolerate CEOs who refuse to negotiate a first contract with workers who have voted to join unions.”
Should the Workplace Democracy Act become law — which is unlikely in the current Congress, where Republicans control both chambers — employers would be forced to recognize a union when a majority of workers in a bargaining unit sign a union card. Currently, employers can choose to voluntarily recognize the union when this happens — known as a “card check” — or they could demand an election monitored by the National Labor Relations Board. When the latter occurs, management often tries to discourage the workers from voting to organize.
This happened recently to fast food workers at the Jimmy Johns sandwich chain in Baltimore, where management refused to recognize their union, and retaliated by firing a lead organizer. Jimmy Johns workers in other cities, such as Minneapolis, have had to go through an NLRB election despite gathering a majority of signed cards.
Two online newsrooms have also recently struggled with the unionization process.
Just this week, writers at Al Jazeera America won a contentious NLRB election to form a union after their management refused to recognize that an overwhelming majority of the staff had signed cards. The vote tallied this week at 32 in favor and five against. Management also unsuccessfully attempted to keep nine editors out of the union.
It is standard practice for workers to be subjected to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance, and retaliation for union activity.
Similarly, last year, management at the progressive watchdog site Media Matters for America refused to recognize their workers through a “card check.” The staff wrote at the time: “Not only is management subjecting Media Matters employees to arduous NLRB procedures, the actions of their attorneys indicate Media Matters executives object so tenaciously to our union that they appear willing to prevent employees from ever having the opportunity to vote on the matter. Many Media Matters employees feel betrayed.” They too ended up winning their election.
Had Sanders’ bill been in place, these and many other workplaces would have been able to unionize much more quickly and easily, and get down to the difficult process of bargaining an initial contract.
“To understand how important [Sanders’ bill] is, just look at the difference between the U.S. and Canada,” Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the think tank Economic Policy Institute, told ThinkProgress. “In the U.S., union density has fallen to just 6 percent in private sector, but it’s over 30 percent in Canada, where they have card check and first contract arbitration laws, which means they’re still able to organize.”
Sanders’ bill also aims to speed up and protect workers during the contract negotiation phase. He explained this week: “Under our bill, companies will not be allowed to deny or delay a first contract with workers who have voted to join a union. If companies refuse to seriously negotiate a first contract, this bill would require binding arbitration and the completion of a first contact in less than 6 months.”
Eisenbrey told ThinkProgress that his team’s research has shown that in the U.S. a depressingly large percentage of first-time union contract negotiations not only drag on for multiple years, but many never reach a contract at all.
“At that point, the employees often get discouraged and end up voting the union out,” he said. “But it some provinces of Canada that give unions the right to forced arbitration, including Manitoba, our research found that businesses who went through the arbitration were more likely to survive.”
Though it’s illegal for employers to fire or otherwise retaliate against workers for unionizing, Eisenbrey notes that it’s extremely common, as U.S. labor law includes no real punishment for employers who do so. An EPI study from 2009 found that “it is standard practice for workers to be subjected to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance, and retaliation for union activity.”
Another bill just introduced by Democrats in Congress — the WAGE Act — would change that, by imposing fines against employers who break the law, tripling back pay awards, guaranteeing back pay regardless of a worker’s immigration status, and allowing victims of retaliation to seek damages in court.
“If a company fires someone for unionizing now, the worker is lucky if it takes them three years to get their job back,” explained Eisenbrey. “If they do find another job during that time, the wages they earn are subtracted from the back pay they’re awarded if they win their case. Our agencies are almost completely toothless. That’s why [the Workplace Democracy Act and WAGE Act] in combination would take us a long way to real labor law reform.”
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
$15 an hour? Problem solved. Posted by raybond on :
your wright cash I think we should all fight for $2.00 an hour so everybody can have a job. Business is going to automate where ever it can no matter what the wage is.
Sounds like you are living in fear so you think everybody else should be.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Ray, I have always wondered if you ever owned a Che Guevera poster. Maybe Salvadore Allende.
Posted by raybond on :
hey cash here is another way its called boycott. That works I have seen it.
Cash as to your idiot question the answer is simply no.
Are you a fascist
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
I thought it was a very valid question based on our conversations over the years. None of you should be going to fast food places anyway.
Posted by raybond on :
pretty bold question for a person who toadies it up to the Russians
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
