Some of America’s biggest corporations are (very publicly) raising the minimum wages of their employees. This is better than nothing, but not as good as, say, dangling a CEO by his ankles and shaking him until all of his billions fall out.
“Bank tellers, the single largest occupation within [the retail banking] category, have a median hourly wage of $12.44.” A 2014 report found that “nearly one-third of tellers’ families” were enrolled in public assistance programs.
Yesterday, America got a look at the new overtime rule, which will make millions of people who make less than $47,500 a year eligible for overtime pay. You may be wondering: who, exactly, is responsible for making sure I get paid for all my newfound overtime?
Today marks the official beginning of what may go down as the most underappreciated action of Obama’s presidency: the new overtime rule, which will force more money into the pocket of the middle class.
“People derive more happiness from pay when they know they’re earning more than co-workers, research shows. In a famous 1998 study...half of 257 people surveyed said they would rather make $50,000 a year when others around them earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 while peers earned $200,000.”
Being an adjunct professor at a college may be the job with the single biggest discrepancy between the (high) education level required to hold it and the (astoundingly low) level of pay. How long until this system blows up?
Target is reportedly raising its minimum wage to $10 an hour, following a similar announcement by Walmart last year. This will not satisfy the “$15 an hour” movement, but it’s nice to see Target forced to do something (minimally) nice for its long-suffering workers.
The idea of a universal basic income for all citizens has been catching on all over the world. Is it too crazy to believe in? We spoke to the author of a new book on the ins, outs, and utopian dreams of making basic income a reality.
The gender pay gap plus the racial pay gap equals this: “As compared with the hourly wage of the median white man, the median black woman earns 65.1 percent as much, and the median Hispanic woman earns 58.9 percent as much.”
California lawmakers, working in tandem with labor unions, struck a deal to raise the statewide minimum—at first, to $10.50, with gradual increases to $15. The deal allowed lawmakers to avoid bringing the wage increase issue to a ballot, a vote which polls suggest California voters would overwhelmingly support.
“Adjunct professors” are the McDonald’s workers of academia: poorly paid and highly disposable. Is raising their pay to (barely) middle class levels really too expensive? It’s all a matter of priorities.
Unless you work in a restaurant, you may not have noticed that many restaurants no longer include “automatic gratuities” on the checks of large groups. But if you do work in a restaurant, this little change may have left you financially destroyed.
Yesterday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the right of factory workers to be paid for the time they spend putting on and taking off safety gear. More evidence for the radical proposition: Workers should be paid for the time they work.
According to the Guardian, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that the Islamic State has announced its intention to reduce its members’s wages by half. This economy!
Discussions of raising our nation’s poverty-level federal minimum wage are often met with the objection that paying workers more would kill the profitability of businesses like restaurants. Not so, says a new study.
The working poor need more money. “But retail stores can’t raise wages very much—their profit margins are too small,” say conservatives. Aha—but there is a solution!
America! The greatest country in the world—where our robust free market system ensures that our economic growth is the envy of all lesser nations! Right?
Thanks to tighter borders and declining numbers of Mexican immigrants, America does not have enough farmworkers to meet demand. Has anyone told the Republicans this???
Today, low-wage workers in 200 cities across the world—fast food workers, Walmart employees, adjunct professors, and more—are walking off their jobs and staging protests to demand better pay and working conditions. Is there a strike near you? Probably. Leave dispatches in the comment section below.
After years of protests by its low-paid employees, McDonald's said today it "will pay at least $1 per hour more than the local legal minimum wage for employees at the roughly 1,500 restaurants it owns"—which does not include the 90% of McD's that are franchisee-owned. Still, it's something.
