At $9.85 an hour, 25-year-old Terran Lyons supports herself and two kids as a crew trainer at a McDonald’s in Seattle’s university district. That’s a jump from the $9.19 an hour the high school dropout got when she started, and a step above the state’s $9.32 minimum wage. But it’s hardly enough to be self-sufficient. Lyons is on food stamps. She wouldn’t even be able to afford a Big Mac if it weren’t for the 50 percent employee discount.
Demos policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin joins Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! to discuss global fast food strikes taking place, protesting the vast wage disparities between executi
WASHINGTON, DC – Citing a recent report which found an alarming 1000-to-1 pay disparity between fast food CEOs and their front line workers, Senator Menendez again called on Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White to finalize its rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEO and median worker, as directed by Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank “Wall Street Reform Act”.
It seems every day that a well-regarded economist is telling us that the US economy is in dire straits. Larry Summers has warned that we are entering a period of “secular stagnation.” This is a condition in which low-interest rate monetary policy no longer stimulates growth of the economy and well-paying jobs.
Twenty-four cents. That’s what black children in Clarendon, South Carolina were worth per every dollar spent on white children’s education. That's why South Carolina was one of the five states challenged in the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.
Fast-food workers and labor organizers are planning a strike of global proportions Thursday, based on the premise that low-wage occupations should still be “living wage” occupations. In the US, Thursday’s date – May 15 – carries numerical significance, as actions in as many as 150 cities aim to win a pay raise to at least $15-an-hour from restaurant chains in the industry, as they also push to unionize the companies.
The Democratic Governors Association (DGA) recently filed a federal complaint challenging the constitutionality of several Connecticut statutes that regulate campaign expenditures made without the consent, coordination, or consultation of candidates for state office (“independent expenditures”).
The consumer advocates at the Center for Responsible Lending don’t mince words: “overdraft ‘protection’ is a racket; not a service.” CRL explains:
Transaction shuffling and multiple, exorbitant fees for small shortfalls in their checking accounts cost Americans billions per year in unfair fees. More than half of Americans are now living paycheck-to-paycheck, making a majority of U.S. families vulnerable to bank overdraft practices that are exceedingly misnamed “overdraft protection.”
I've written a few times in recent months about the breakdown of traditional employment relationships. Organizations of all kinds—mainly in the private sector, but also universities and other nonprofits—have grown super savvy about outsourcing any number of functions they used to do in-house to contractors. And, no, I'm not talking about shipping jobs to China.
This Mother's Day, Shanesha Taylor, a 25-year old homeless and unemployed mother, will be fighting for her freedom and to keep her family together just for the simple crime: trying to feed her children. Without childcare or family support, Shanesha left her children, ages two and six-months, in a parked car while she was in a job interview. In that 45-minute window, a passerby reported her unsupervised children to the Scottsdale, Arizona police who promptly arrested her on felony charges for child abuse.
You may think that if you spend wisely you’ll be able to avoid huge amounts of credit card debt. But those who have this debt not only spend more frugally than those without it, they actually got into the debt in the first place because of hardships out of their control, not due to unwise budgeting, according to a report from the think tank Demos.
David Tepper topped the list of best paid hedge managers for last year, pulling in $3.5 billion. That's an astonishing amount of money for one person to make in a single year -- and is larger than the annual GDP of 35 countries.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, East Egg represents inherited wealth and privilege, while West Egg represents wealth earned through innovation and hard work, a distinction at the core of the American ideal. We have always embraced a dynamic capitalism, marked not by stasis but rather “creative destruction,” lionizing trust-busters as heroes of competition.
Globalization has kept labor unions on the defensive for nearly forty years now. While workers are pretty much stuck where they live, corporations are able to move production around to find the lowest wages. But labor has gotten better over the years at exploiting a globalized world for its own aims, and we may see a big step forward on that front when fast-food workers stage their first-ever global strike on May 15 against multinational giants like McDonald's.
It's true that globalization has put more cards in the hands of capital.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley are two of the most admired progressives in politics right now. But there's a big difference between these leaders: One has lots of power and the other does not. O'Malley's power was vividly on display Monday when he signed a law that will raise his state's minimum wage in Maryland to $10.10 by 2018.
Henry Ford famously shocked the nation in 1914 when he announced that he was doubling the wages of Ford's workers to $5 an hour. Ford's logic was that better paid American workers would become bigger spending consumers -- not only buying more Model Ts, but more of everything. Which is pretty much what happened in the U.S. over the next 50 years as a new middle class sprang into being.
So which corporate leader in a low-wage industry could we imagine stepping forward to be the Henry Ford of today?
