Media

Two major stories of corporate misconduct toward employees hit the headlines yesterday: in the morning, low-wage federal contract workers filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor alleging that more than 100 employees in the food court of federally-owned Union Station had been victims of wage theft—paid less than the minimum wage or denied overtime pay.

Eugenio Proto and Aldo Rustichini have written a new column for VOX in which they argue that once GDP per capita reaches a certain level, it actually begins to correlate with lower life satisfaction.

If you ask Cato's Michael Tanner, inequality is a non-issue for a bunch of reasons, including because it has nothing to do with unfairness. Tanner writes:

most wealthy Americans earned their wealth through talent and hard work. Roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be worth that much — they didn’t inherit their money.

Could Massachusetts become the next state to enact Election Day Registration? If today’s passage by the Commonwealth’s Senate chamber of omnibus voting bill S.1975 serves as indication, it very well could.

Here’s some welcome news. At his meeting with Democratic Senators last night, President Obama indicated that he is giving serious consideration to executive action designed to raise the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors, according to one Senator who was present.

One day after a top Obama administration official deflected a congressman’s call for executive action to raise labor standards for contractors, activists Wednesday announced the filing of a new Department of Labor complaint over alleged wage theft in a government building. The complaint alleges that dozens of workers in D.C.’s government-owned Union Station are owed over $3 million in back pay and damages for rampant failure to pay minimum wage or overtime.

One line of attack on a minimum wage hike is that it's small potatoes -- and further testament to the intellectual poverty of liberalism. As Marco Rubio said recently, speaking of both the minimum wage and other Obama proposals:

As the White House prepares to launch a major economic opportunity effort, record high unemployment among black and Latino youth underscores how essential it is to create job opportunities for young people of color. 

The critical issue here is that the ages of 16 to 24 are make or break years for lifelong earning potential. With one out four blacks and one out of six Latinos under the age of 25 without work, a generation of youth of color risks falling behind.

Staging imaginary competitions between cities and their elected leaders certainly makes for catchy headlines: “Step Aside, New York City. Los Angeles's Populism Is for Real” asserts the title of Nancy L. Cohen’s recent piece in the New Republic.