The New York Times has published a review of work and workers in the Trump era. A link to the stories is here.
Popular ideas about the working class are woefully out of date. Here are nine people who tell a truer story of what the American work force does today — and will do tomorrow. Popular ideas about the working class are woefully out of date. Here are nine people who tell a truer story of what the American work force does today — and will do tomorrow.
New York Times columnist Dave Barry details the life, anguish and pride of unionized hotel workers in Las Vegas in a piece in the Sunday, Nov. 5, 2016 Times. A link is here.
LaborArts.org invites stories and poems from CUNY students who wish to write about the variety of issues facing working people or the labor movement.
Click here for a link to the “Making Work Visible” annual contest and past winners or go to http://www.laborarts.org/exhibits/contest2015/#2015contest
The deadline is March 1, 2016.
Van Edgewater is a Native American currently residing in a Salt Lake City shelter. He is part of an adult story writing project with teacher Tara Allred Niekamp, and he is writing poetry. The students are working to receive their high school diplomas.
Please check this link to http://9to5.org to see the stories of individuals whose stories make clear why that organization is working for policies to narrow the wage gap experienced by women and people of color. The organization actually is promoting a call-in program this weekend to allow others to submit stories. See: http://9to5.org/action/faces-of-the-wage-gap-blog/
April 15, 2015
by Lisa Calcasola
By the time the Fight for 15 protests stopped in Times Square in Manhattan on , it was dark. People who had been preparing for the event weeks ahead of time dropped their signs on the side of the road to be recycled and went their separate ways.
Even with most of the protestors gone, the space still felt electric with its energy. I talked with Chantelle and Monica; Monica had a camera around her neck. I asked if she was interested in film, and she told me she was in film school now, studying to be a director. Film is one of the most accessible forms of media there is, and can reach a multifaceted audience, she said.
“I’m really interested in documentaries,” Monica said. “Film can shed light on lots of social issues and get the word out, teach people about what’s going on.”
When asked what she thought today’s biggest message was about, Chantelle feistily replied, “It’s all about not letting corporations steal from the people.”
“Corporations make billions of dollars and what’re they doing with it? They’re keeping it for themselves and stealing from the people. Today is all about making sure we don’t let them win. We won’t go down without a fight.” Continue reading
Michael Hiltzik of The Los Angeles Times writes about a new first-person account of the descent into poverty. Click here for the column.
One little-recognized reality of poverty in America is how closely it lurks beneath the surface of even a successful professional life. A bad career turn, a couple of financial missteps, and — here comes the dizzying plunge from middle class to underclass.
That’s the lesson of a remarkable first-person account in the latest issue of the Hedgehog Review, published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture of the University of Virginia. Entitled “Falling,” its author is William McPherson, 81, a published novelist, former editor of the Washington Post Book World and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, in 1977.
A link to McPherson’s account is here.
Clare O’Connor Forbes Staff, Forbes Magazine
11/05/2014 @ 8:52AM
On Tuesday, San Francisco voters approved a minimum wage of $15 across the city, joining Seattle, which raised its pay to the same sum in June. As in Seattle, San Francisco workers will see their wage increase incrementally. By next May, it’ll hit $12.25, climbing to $13 in 2016. By 2018, it’ll be $15, meaning a full-time minimum wage worker in the liberal California city can expect to make $31,000 a year.
Minimum wage also got a boost in four traditionally Republican states following Tuesday’s midterm elections, with voters approving ballot measures in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota.
In Alaska, low-wage workers will see their hourly pay boosted to $9.75 by 2016 (the federal minimum remains $7.25). In Arkansas, that number will be $8.50, while Nebraska voters approved a new hourly salary of $9. South Dakota workers will see their wage upped to $8.50 next year.
These red state wage hikes follow a campaign by President Obama to see the federal minimum raised to $10.10 per hour. The bill died on the Senate floor in April. Continue reading
Huffington Post 10/31/2014
WASHINGTON — Republicans in Congress may be in no mood to hike the minimum wage, but four conservative-leaning states are poised to do it on their own next week.
Initiatives to raise the minimum wage appear on the ballot in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota on Tuesday. Alaska, Arkansas and South Dakota all have Republican-controlled legislatures, and Nebraska is solidly red despite the official lack of party affiliation in its statehouse.
Recent polls have shown strong support for each of these ballot initiatives. That should come as no surprise. The idea of hiking the wage floor tends to receive bipartisan backing among Americans, with around two-thirds of voters saying they favor such proposals in most surveys.
“We’re expecting them all to go through,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, an attorney with the National Employment Law Project Action Fund, which advocates for a higher minimum wage. “I would be shocked if it didn’t go through in any of the states.”
If the ballot measures pass, they will mark a milestone of sorts for the minimum wage.
Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia currently have their own minimum wage set higher than the federal level of $7.25 per hour, and Maryland and Hawaii will soon join them thanks to laws passed earlier this year. Of the four states weighing proposals next week, three of them — Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — have their wage floors set at just $7.25.
If all four ballot measures make it through, a majority of states will have effectively determined that the federal minimum wage set by Congress is too low. They would include large swaths of the U.S. where the cost of living is generally lower than average — a common argument among conservatives against raising the federal wage floor.
Alaska’s measure would hike the state’s minimum wage from $7.75 to $9.75 by 2016. Arkansas’ minimum wage would go to $8.50 by 2017, Nebraska’s to $9 by 2016, and South Dakota’s to $8.50 by next year. The measures in Alaska and South Dakota would also tie the minimum wage to an inflation index, so that the wage floor would rise with the cost of living. Ten states have already indexed their minimum wages.
Illinois also has a minimum wage measure on the ballot Tuesday, though it’s nonbinding and merely allows voters to send a message to state lawmakers.
The last time the country saw so many minimum-wage ballot initiatives in a midterm election was 2006, when there were six — in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio. The fate of those measures bodes well for the backers of this year’s initiatives: Every one of them passed.
Democrats in Congress have proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 and tying it to inflation, a measure backed by President Barack Obama. House Republicans have so far refused to give the bill a vote, however, and Senate Democrats haven’t managed to round up enough votes to overcome a GOP filibuster. If Republicans win control of the Senate next week, the prospects of a federal minimum wage hike anytime soon will become even dimmer.
Given the gridlock in Washington, the president has urged cities and states to bypass Congress and raise their own minimum wages.
“To every mayor, governor and state legislator in America, I say, ‘You don’t have to wait for Congress to act,'” Obama said in his State of the Union speech in January. “Americans will support you if you take this on.”
Angelica Valencia put the doctor’s note in her pocketbook and stepped out of her apartment in the early morning darkness. Then she started praying.
She prayed on the crowded buses and on the subway train that carried her from Queens into the Bronx to the potato-packing plant where she worked. “Please let me keep my job,” she repeated during her two-hour commute. “Please let everything work out.”
She punched in at 7:30 a.m. and handed her manager the note. Then Ms. Valencia, who was 39 and three months pregnant, went straight to work. Last year, she had a miscarriage. This time, her doctor said, she was once again high risk. No overtime, he ordered, just eight hours a day.
But it was the busy season at the Fierman Produce Exchange, and her bosses had already told her she had to work overtime. So as Ms. Valencia sorted potatoes on that Aug. 8 morning, she worried: How would her supervisors respond to the doctor’s note? At the end of her shift, would she still have a job?
This month is the first anniversary of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which was signed into law by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Oct. 2, 2013. The law, which went into effect in January, represents a big step forward for working women. Continue reading
WorkersWrite 