Chicago fast-food and retail workers begin mass walkout – Hundreds of fast food and retail employees in Chicago began a mass walkout Wednesday morning, calling for the city’s minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour. WLS-TV reported that the protest, organized by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC), included employees from national store chains ranging from McDonald’s to Sears to Victoria’s Secret, most of whom currently make $8.25 an hour, a wage that WOCC members said forces workers to use social service programs like RentAid to make ends meet. “We need wages that we can survive on and support our families,” said committee member Lorraine Sanchez. “These are poverty wages and homelessness wages, and our workers are working two or three jobs, supporting families.”
NBC Chicago – The Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago campaign says many of the 275,000 men and women working in Chicago’s fast food and retail outlets can’t afford things like food, clothing and rent on the minimum $8.25 an hour that most of them make. Some say they rely on public assistance for health care for their children while others say bills are piling up. [...] The group says their companies make more than $4 billion a year on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and in the Loop yet workers’ wages remain too low to live in the city.
Chicago Tribune – A study last year by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, found that most of the jobs gained since the early 2010 — 58 percent — paid $12 an hour or less. It also found that the workers earning $14 to just over $21 per hour suffered the biggest losses during the recession and that hiring at that pay grade has lagged during the recovery.
But those six- and seven-figure executive bonuses keep growing every year!
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Blake Fall-Conroy, “Minimum Wage Machine,” 2008-2010 (via andrewfishman) – This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like. Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour. This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York. This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary. Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they’re earning by turning this mindless crank. A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day at much harder jobs than turning a crank. This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.
Why are Michigan Democrats opposed to right to work laws being contemplated by Gov. Rick Synder? ”Workers are currently not required to join a union — …they simply wanted to preserve the right of unions to collect fees from non-members to pay for wage and benefit negotiations that actually benefit them.”
Michigan prepares for mass protests today against right-to-work legislation: Union leaders in Michigan have been training members in “peaceful civil disobedience” methods in preparation for a protest on Tuesday against controversial right-to-work legislation. Supporters of the law, which among other measures would prohibit unions from collecting fees from non-union workers, are also expected to demonstrate at the state capitol in Lansing. The Republican-dominated Michigan Senate voted the right-to-work bill on Thursday by 22 votes to 16. Governor Rick Synder has said he will sign the bill into law and could do so on Tuesday.
Speaking in Detroit Monday afternoon, President Barack Obama strongly criticized the push by Michigan Republicans to pass an anti-union law during the lame duck session. In a speech largely focused on his proposal to tax income over $250,000 and making the case that “our economic success has never come from the top down, it comes from the middle out and the bottom up,” Obama characterized the bill being rushed through the Michigan legislature as political and part of a race to the bottom:
And by the way, what we shouldn’t do. I’ve just got to say this, what we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions. These so-called right to work laws, they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.
You only have to look to Michigan, where workers were instrumental in reviving the auto industry, to see how unions have helped build not just a stronger middle class but a stronger America. [...]
We don’t want a race to the bottom. We want a race to the top. America’s not going to compete based on low skill, low wage, no workers rights. That’s not our competitive advantage. There’s always going to be some other country that can treat its workers worse.
That appears to be just what Michigan Republicans do want, however. After hearing from his state’s congressional Democrats, Gov. Rick Snyder once again insisted that the bill “is all about creating more and better jobs in Michigan.” In fact, we know that freeloader laws lower wages by about $1,500 a year for the average worker—the “right to work for less money” that President Obama referred to.
The Waltons have created lots of jobs — but are they jobs YOU’d want to try to support your family with? How many of us want an American economy based almost exclusively on minimum-wage, no benefits “Mcjobs” — or a future for our children where, if you’re not born into wealth, those kinds of jobs are the only aspiration?
The company that owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden is feeling the effects of its well-publicized tantrum plan to not provide its employees — who get paid very low wages – with health insurance coverage. Of course we can expect that Darden’s owners / upper management will continue to receive outlandish salaries and bonuses, because that’s how American capitalism works. But that has nothing to do with anything… right?
How not to succeed in business: Promise to dodge Obamacare mandates – Darden began testing a plan under which it would hire more part-time employees in October, who would work fewer than 40 hours a week. That would exempt the company from the health law’s mandate to provide health insurance coverage to all full-time workers. Separate research from YouGov suggests that other restaurant chains that have recently criticized the Affordable Care Act have seen their favorability dip shortly thereafter… As much as Americans have negative opinions about the larger health-care system, they also tend to have pretty positive views of their own health insurance. Politifact has sifted through this data before, and found that polls that ask Americans whether they’re satisfied with their health-care plan can find upwards of 80 percent of respondents agreeing with them.
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Darden Restaurants Inc. shares fell 9% in premarket trades on Tuesday after it said it expects adjusted second-quarter profit of 25 to 26 cents a share. The Orlando, Fla., operator of Olive Garden and Red Lobster eateries was expected to earn 46 cents a share, according to a survey by FactSet.
“So what you really want to ask is why American businesses don’t feel that it’s worth their while to pay enough to attract the workers they say they need.” — Paul Krugman (via azspot)
No wonder the Walton family’s personal wealth is equal to the combined wealth of 40% of American families. Walmart is the anti-American dream… it’s the American nightmare. Why would any American shop at Walmart?
“Representative-elect Alan Grayson (D-FL) said Monday that he will put mega-retailer Walmart squarely in his sights during the next Congress for the company’s liberal use of public assistance programs to supplement their workers’ wages… Grayson called Walmart “the largest recipient of public aid in the country,” saying their low wages force workers to take food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid just to get by.
“The taxpayer pays for the earned income credit,” he said. “The taxpayer pays for Medicaid. The taxpayer pays for unemployment insurance when they cut hours down. And the taxpayer pays for other forms of public assistance like food stamps. I think the taxpayer is getting fed up of paying these things when, in fact, Walmart could give every employee its got, even the CEO, a 30 percent raise and still be profitable.”
He added that while the health care mandate in the Affordable Care Act will help, “that’s just the start. In state after state after state, Walmart employees represent the largest group of Medicaid recipients, the largest group of food stamp recipients, and taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear that burden,” Grayson said. “It should be Walmart. So, we’re going to take that burden and put it where it belongs: on Walmart.”
abaldwin360: It goes even further than this, those Walmart employees who make so little that they need to be on food stamps more than likely spend their food stamps at Walmart.
For Costco, treating workers well has led to increased motivation, higher quality service, greater productivity and lower turnover. After the first year of employment, turnover was less than 6 percent, one of the lowest rates in the industry. The combination of good wages and the knowledge that there were opportunities for advancement was an important incentive for employees to work hard and build a career with the firm. The high quality of service provided by motivated, engaged employees at Costco, combined with the low prices, meant that customers returned and were willing to pay the membership fees. Costco’s high-quality service also attracted a clientele that shopped not only for basic goods but also luxury items, which were still more profitable, even with the low markup. As a result, Costco had higher annual sales per square foot than its most direct competitor, Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club, ($795 versus $516), and higher annual profits per employee ($13,647 versus $11,039) even though Costco’s average wage was 42 percent higher. Over 16 years, Costco grew from 206 warehouses and $16 billion in sales to 554 warehouses and $69.9 billion in sales.
We were once a great country that proudly built things, exported goods, and earned a living wage—in large part because we had thriving labor unions. We also had a healthy public sector employment rate, which contributed to employment, the economy and America’s overall success. Over the past 30 years or more, we’ve been outsmarted with tax laws written to benefit the one percent, had our labor unions and government workers demonized by conservative ideology, and we were Bain Capitalized out of our manufacturing base—we were Bain Capitalized to death. The GOP and their wealthy benefactors have killed America’s middle class for nothing more than greed—and here we are today.
According to a recent survey by The Associated Press, the number of Americans living at or below the poverty line will reach its highest point since President Johnson made his famous declaration of war on poverty in 1964.
Close to 16 percent of Americans now live at or below the poverty line. For a family of four, that’s $23,000 a year. On top of that, 100 million of us — 1 out of 3 Americans — manage to survive on a household income barely twice that amount. How is this poverty crisis happening?
[...] One half of all jobs in the U.S. today now pay less than $35,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s one of the lowest rates for American workers in five decades.
There’s a common perception that somebody who’s poor or living below the poverty level is lazy or simply living off government handouts. Edelman says the actual average poor person is working.
[...] Many economists say that when the economy does recover, a lot of the jobs that were lost won’t be coming back. That suggests the possibility of significantly high unemployment for a long time — maybe even a permanently large class of Americans who live in poverty. Blackwell says we can act to prevent that future. “And it’s not rocket science.”
“We know now that by 2018, 45 percent of all jobs in this nation will require at least an associate’s degree,” she says. “We could invest in the system of training — particularly focusing on community colleges and preparing people to go to four-year institutions and improving our high school education.”
“We actually have extraordinary infrastructure in this country, from the manufacturing base we once had,” she continues. “We need to retool it, we need to refit it, we need to make sure that it’s ready for the kind of advanced manufacturing that we’re seeing develop in other countries.”
What we don’t need is to be “Bain Capitalized” further — or more of those “great” ideas like outsourcing work that can be done locally in the public sector. To let Republicans find more ways to cut spending, more austerity cuts for 99% of us—just to give the wealthiest even more tax breaks—costs our society, and our people, in too many ways to count.
According to Pat Garofalo at Think Progress, Walmart heirs have a combined wealth equal to the bottom 40% of Americans combined:
“Last year, Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, found that as of 2007, the Walton family — heirs to the Walmart fortune — had a net worth equal to that of the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And due to the effects of the Great Recession that ratio has gotten substantially worse. New Federal Reserve data analyzed by both Allegretto and Josn Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Waltons now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.”
So? Didn’t they ‘earn’ their wealth — should we punish the Walton family for being this wildly successful? As Garofalo points out, the federal government (i.e. the Republican Party / tax laws) have helped to redistribute money towards the Walton fortune as much as anything:
“At the same time that the Waltons have amassed an ever larger fortune, Congress decided to cut the estate tax, a policy for which the Waltons have been pushingfor years. And now that the estate tax cut is in place, conservatives are doing everything they can to ensure it doesn’t go away, allowing the Waltons to amass even larger amounts of wealth.”
And as president, Mitt Romney would like to redistribute even more money to the Waltons by implementing further tax cuts for those in the elite one percent class (himself included).
“[Walmart] employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called “associates”) is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees’ children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees – limited to less than 28 hours of work per week – and are not eligible for benefits.”
So every taxpayer, in any community where a Walmart is located, has helped to subsidize the Walton family’s employees — and by extension, the Walton family fortune. Instead of expecting them to pay their workers a living wage and provide affordable benefits (remember labor unions?), taxpayers have helped the Waltons pocket a selfishly unequal amount of their profits. Profits, by the way, which are created by selling goods from other countries, like China:
“Despite a well-publicized “Made in the U.S.A.” campaign, 85 percent of the stores’ items are made overseas, often in Third World sweatshops. In fact, only after Wal-Mart’s “Buy American” ad campaign was in full swing did the company become the country’s largest importer of Chinese goods in any industry. By taking its orders abroad, Wal-Mart has forced many U.S. manufacturers out of business.”
The Walton family is a basic story of how many in the elite one percent acquire their fortunes (ingenuity and hard work orby cheating with a lot of help from others including all levels of government). It’s this kind of information, ultimately, that people like Mitt Romney would like to withhold from public scrutiny. One doesn’t willingly reveal how one’s fortune was made, where it came from, who was sacrificed, and how it’s being used now by turning over one’s tax returns to the rabble. That could turn out to be rather distasteful.
ThinkProgress: According to an analysis by the pay research group Equilar, compensation for top bank CEOs grew by nearly 12 percent last year. The Financial Times noted that these increases occurred “despite widespread falls in profits and share prices“ [...] According to a different estimate by Bloomberg News, Wall Street CEO pay grew by 20 percent last year. At the same time, worker wages grew by only 2.1 percent. And inflation adjusted wages actually declined by 0.6 percent between March 2011 and March 2012. [...] Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay.
That time frame for unequal growth in CEO / worker pay coincides with the time period that Mitt Romney and Bain Capital (and companies like theirs) began their siege on outsourcing (offshoring!) American jobs. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?
What’s sad about these facts is that low-information voters are completely missing the point: according to a Pew poll, Americans currently give Romney an 8-point lead over Obama on who they trust to handle the economy better. Seriously.
Profit for a few at the expense of many — do these people understand they’re saying that’s exactly the kind of economy they approve of with Mitt Romney?
“Somehow, firing people with jobs became the Republican strategy for job creation. People who taught our children; policed our streets; picked up our garbage; put out our fires; built and maintained our parks, libraries, and roads for a living wage became the scapegoat for the impoverishment the private sector imposed on workers. Instead of organizing to win back their own living wages and lost benefits, people were convinced that taking away those of government workers would somehow make them better off. Divide and conquer politics. The politics of fear, hate, greed, envy and spite. The race to the bottom. Orchestrated by plutocrats, executed by conservatives, allowed by Democrats.” – John Atcheson
Okay, I found the source for this map. It’s from here. That’s it in PDF. This is the page about the 2012 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and here is the full report in PDF (in just under 250 pages).
Why are all the twenty-somethings living back home again? THIS. And remember — according to the GOP, our problems will all be solved when we can get some more tax cuts to the one percent — and maybe LOWER the minimum wage to help out the corporations and employers create jobs?!
Combine the graphic above with this little factoid:
After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations.
1) Economy gets more good news- ”After more than two years of frustrating fits and starts, the U.S. economy is showing signs of moving onto firmer ground. A host of reports Thursday underscored that point, as well as the perils that persist. The number of Americans filing initial claims for government unemployment benefits has fallen to levels last seen before Lehman Brothers collapsed, the Labor Department said. The stock market, a leading indicator of growth, is off to its best start this year since 1998 and notched more gains Thursday. Meantime, consumer confidence has reclaimed ground lost last year, and another report showed that income growth is firming. However the economy is far from robust. Government and company reports showed consumer spending has been mixed. And the manufacturing sector, though on the rebound, isn’t booming, according to a survey of manufacturing purchasing managers by the Institute for Supply Management.”
2) Obama Tells Congress To Eliminate ‘Outrageous’ Big Oil Tax Breaks - In a speech before a large crowd in Nashua, New Hampshire, President Barack Obama exhorted Americans to tell Congress to eliminate $4 billion in annual subsidies to big oil companies, who are making record profits on soaring gas prices. The audience booed as Obama talked about the “outrageous” and “inexcusable” tax breaks. Obama had an unambiguous message for every member of Congress: “You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people.”
3) Leaders Ask Why We’re Exporting Fossil Fuels Without Considering American Security First - Panelists Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) bemoaned the fact that the United States does not have a national strategy on exports. Wyden accused the country of being “on autopilot” to an energy export policy, which could have tremendous economic, social, and environmental consequences. He expanded: So I have been somebody who’s been expansionist on trade and think that we ought to have freer trade, have fairer trade, but we also need to have smarter trade. And allowing energy producers—we haven’t really touched on this—to trade away our international competitiveness and our energy independence by exporting the resources right now without thinking through the implications here of what it means for consumers and our companies doesn’t strike me as a smart trade policy.
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4) Mitt Romney is not impressed with the ‘fancy raincoats’ worn by NASCAR fans - these three sentences, from The New York Timeswriteup of Romney’s visit to the Daytona 500, might just be the three most hilarious sentences about Mitt Romneybot that you read all day. But the crowd initially booed Mr. Romney, who occasionally struck a discordant note, as when he approached a group of fans wearing plastic ponchos. “I like those fancy raincoats you bought,” he said. “Really sprung for the big bucks.” The only question is whether he’s so clueless that he’s never seen plastic ponchos before and actually thinks they are a big money item … or if he’s a enough of a condescending jackass that he’d make fun of somebody for wearing one.
“Look, I have worn a garbage bag for rain gear myself.” -Mitt Romney
5) SLUTS* AND THEIR CONTRACEPTION:Senate Votes in Favor of Loose-Moraled Hussies (Blunt Act) -The Senate rejected an amendment [yester]day that would have vastly expanded so-called conscience objections to the Obama administration’s health care law. The measure, which was narrowly defeated in a 51-48 vote, would have allowed employers and insurers to opt out of any portion of the health care law they found morally objectionable, including the requirement to cover the costs of birth control. Currently, churches are the only institutions fully exempt from that requirement, though President Obama recently announced an accommodation by which religiously affiliated organizations such as charities, schools, or hospitals can refuse to provide contraceptive coverage through their insurance plans. || *if by ‘sluts’ you mean average women…
Rep. Speier calls for boycott of Limbaugh sponsors- But on his show, Limbaugh accused Fluke of not being able to afford contraception because she was “having so much sex.” Then on Thursday, he demanded that women post sex tapes online if they use insurance-covered birth control. “Shame on you for calling the women of this country prostitutes,” Speier said. “Ninety-eight percent of the women in this country at some time in their lives used birth control.” “So I say to the women in this country, do something about this,” she continued. “I say to the women of this country, ask Century 21, Quicken Loans, Legal Zoom, and Sleep Number to stop supporting the hate mongering of Rush Limbaugh and if they do not do that, then I ask them to boycott those companies.”
6) First Company Pulls Ads From Rush Limbaugh’s Show, Others May Follow - After repeatedly and unapologetically attacking law school student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” on his nationally-syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh is facing backlash from his advertisers, reports the Huffington Post. Mattress retailer Sleep Train announced this morning that they would be pulling all of its advertisements from the program after being besieged on Twitter by angry customers. ProFlowers, eHarmony, and several other companies have also been fielding complaints as well, and both companies have said they are considering taking action as well. || Note: can you IMAGINE getting flowers at this point from PROFLOWERS, sent by some guy who ordered them from there because he listens to Limbaugh? It would be like getting spit on and then pushed down.
7) John Boehner vows to continue war on icky lady parts - Asshole: “I think it’s important for us to win this issue,” Mr. Boehner told reporters just before the Senate killed a Republican measure with a vote of 51 to 48. “The government, our government, for 220 years has respected the religious views of the American people, and for all of this time there’s been an exception for those churches and other groups to protect the religious beliefs that they believe in, and that’s being violated here.” [...] “I’ve been trying to take this out of the political realm and get it into a position where we can continue to protect the American people’s right to their own religious views,” he said. “And there are a lot of ways to do that. There’s one in the Senate. We have a couple in the House. It’s matter of how we proceed.” [...] “The government is moving in a direction that would force some Americans to violate their religious beliefs,” he said. “This is wrong, and we want to stop it.”
8) Pillheads in the Senate - This is not a debate, let alone a “fierce” one. This is an issue on which the country made up its damn mind long ago, regardless of how ginned up some politicians can get the rubes. It’s also not a debate about “religion,” unless, to borrow Garry Wills’s felicitous phrase, one reduces the Gospels to “the mere smithying of chastity belts.” … Let us begin by noting that the whole fooferaw happened at all because the Republicans decided to attach an anti-contraception amendment to a multimillion-dollar bill aimed at improving the nation’s highways, which are presently falling apart faster than Roy Blunt’s libido. This, of course, makes the entire thing a profoundly embarrassing charade. This, of course, makes this the United States Senate. The fact that this nonsense failed by an extraordinarily narrow 51-48 reinforces my belief that this issue is not the gold-plated sure winner that White House partisans think it is. (In case you’re wondering, the three hopeless Democrats were Joe Manchin of West Virginia, young Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and the Council Of Trent, and the inevitable Ben Nelson.)
Democratic ideal
9) Dems vow: No more cuts for federal workers- Leading Democrats charged Republicans this week with “discrimination” against federal workers amid Congress’s struggle to cut deficit spending. The Democrats said a series of federal pay cuts – most recently as part of the payroll-tax package – pile the deficit-reduction burden on one group of Americans while the rest of the country gets a free pass. The lawmakers – all of whom represent districts laden with federal workers – are vowing to oppose any future legislation that includes cuts in federal compensation. [...] The Democrats on Wednesday defended the pay discrepancy. The problem is not that federal workers are overcompensated, they said, but that too many private-sector employees are denied fair wages and benefits. “We’re trying to give them a living wage – how awful that is,” Hoyer quipped. “Let’s correct what they’re doing in the private sector,” Cardin added, “[not] race to the bottom.”‘
NTEU launches Web site to counter ‘false statements’ against federal workers - Upset by “a wide variety of politicians, pundits and think tanks making grand statements and broad assertions about federal government employees,” the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has launched a Web site to provide a counter view. “Far too often, these statements will be false,” the union said in a news release Thursday. The Web site, FederalEmployeeFacts.com, is “dedicated to correcting those who are all too willing to bend the truth when it comes to claims about the federal workforce,” NTEU said.
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Democratic ideal
