A group representing service employees has organized a morning of demonstrations and civil disobedience at various locations throughout the capital on Tuesday to protest low pay and alleged wage theft by vendors at federal buildings.
Good Jobs Nation, which represents low-wage employees of government contractors, plans to start the day with a mock trial in an intersection near the Ronald Reagan Building, according to organizers.
Beginning at 8:30 this morning, non-union, federally contracted workers plan to walk off the job at the Ronald Reagan Building and Old Post Office Pavilion in Washington, DC. Today’s strike, and a “mock trial” and pair of civil disobedience actions planned for this morning, are designed to highlight alleged “wage theft,” and to pressure President Obama to use his executive authority to require higher labor standards for federal contractors.
June 25th marked the 75th anniversary of the federal minimum wage law in the United States, known as the Fair Labor Standards Act. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed this legislation, his vision was to ensure a “fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” and to “end starvation wages.”
Political scientists like to argue that politics is about who gets what and that self-interest tends to drive policy preferences. But the real world doesn't always work this way -- certainly not when it comes to government benefits. Some of the same states where residents rely most heavily on public programs routinely elect politicians who are determined to slash these very same programs.
Members of Congress are calling on the government to get out in front of the growing income gap by addressing the low wages paid within its own buildings.
In a July 2 letter to President Barack Obama, 17 House Democrats said the government needs to take action toward the fair treatment and decent pay of its unskilled service-contract employees, particularly those working at iconic sites such as Union Station, the Smithsonian and the National Zoo.
The Supreme Court of the United States must be criticized for blindness, perhaps even willful ignorance of reality, in their recent decision gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Voting rights activists have seized upon a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in an effort to mitigate the damage done by the Supreme Court earlier this month in the case of Shelby County, Alabama v. Attorney General Eric Holder. According to Adam Serwer at MSNBC.com, the state of Texas may still be subject to the federal government’s approval before it can rearrange voting districts or make changes to election law.
The question of student loans is taking on an increasing urgency everywhere but Washington.
Rates on federally subsidized loans doubled to almost 7% on July 1,thanks to Congressional bickering and dithering. The latest attempt to roll back the rates failed to get out of the Senate earlier this week, when sponsoring Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster against the bill.
Low-wage workers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. went on strike today. The striking workers are employed through private federal contractors—mostly vendors at federal buildings like the Smithsonian Museums, the Ronald Reagan Building and the International Trade Center. Although their labor keeps the federal government running, they are making poverty wages. The workers are demanding President Obama issue an executive order mandating that private federal contractors pay employees a living wage.
Without a doubt, the big banks should be broken up; the need is even more urgent than it was in 2007 or 2008. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – hardly an Occupy Wall Street affiliate – titled its 2011 Annual Report "Choosing the Road to Prosperity: Why We Must End Too Big to Fail – Now."
When Governor Lincoln Chaffee signed the Temporary Care Giver’s Insurance law last week, Rhode Island became the third state—along with California and New Jersey—to grant paid time off to care for a sick loved one or a new baby.
Rhode Island’s law, which goes into effect in 2014, will not only provide most workers with up to four weeks off with about two-thirds of their salaries (up to $752 a week), it will protect employees from being fired and losing their health insurance while they’re out.
The attack on voting rights in North Carolina is a shameful attempt by the state’s politicians to curtail access to the ballot, in ways devised particularly to discourage voting by African-Americans.
And you thought the government didn’t have a jobs program. It does. The problem is that the pay and benefits are lousy, and in many cases the working conditions ain’t so great either.
Employer-sponsored plans such as 401(k)s are workers' best hope for a secure retirement. Critics of the 401(k) system contend that the plans weren't designed to be the foundation of a secure retirement and should be scrapped in favor of something tailor-made, while supporters of the system say it just needs fine-tuning. While regulators, academics and the financial industry tussle over the best way to get everyone to retirement, investors have to keep saving as much as possible and, just as importantly, keep expenses low.
Financial markets, now heavily dependent on technology, need to be safeguarded against cyberattacks, natural disasters and the more prosaic scourge of human error that can cause massive disruptions, according to experts and a federal panel.
At Demos, we are working for an America where we all have an equal say and an equal chance. The slaying of Trayvon Martin has reminded us that we have not yet achieved an America where we all have equal chance to merely live. Trayvon Martin was denied that chance because his identity was one that our society marks, in countless ways each day, as fearsome. This fear-based animus towards young African American men is so pervasive in our society that a jury found this fear to be reasonable -- so reasonable that it was justifiable grounds for his killing.
