Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) are demanding answers from the U.S.’s leading restaurant industry group after an explosive New York Times investigation revealed that the group has, unbeknownst to workers, used millions of dollars of workers’ own pocket money to lobby against raising their wages. In a letter to National Restaurant Association (NRA)… Source Source / Read More: Warren, Sanders Slam Restaurant Lobby For Making Workers Fund Anti-Worker Battle
Minimum Wage
Inequality-Fighting Ballot Initiatives Won Big in the Midterms
Americans are sick and tired of seeing CEO pay and billionaire wealth in the stratosphere while working families are struggling with soaring costs. This election day, voters in several states used direct democracy to do something about it. They voted to hike taxes on the wealthy, raise wages and build union power, help ordinary people afford basic necessities, and tackle the problem of big money in politics. Massachusetts Hikes Taxes on the Rich Sixth time’s a charm. Massachusetts fair tax advocates had tried and failed five times since 1962 to undo the regressive flat income tax rate embedded in their…
DC Voters Overwhelmingly Pass Measure to End Tipped Minimum Wage
A measure to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers in Washington, D.C. passed overwhelmingly on Tuesday, marking a win for labor and wage activists who have been fighting the restaurant industry to pass such a measure for years. Currently, the tipped minimum wage in D.C. is $5.35 an hour, leaving workers reliant on tips to survive. Initiative 82 would start phasing out that wage, eventually raising tipped workers’ minimum hourly wage to that of non-tipped workers, currently $16.10, by 2027. With 90 percent of votes counted on Wednesday, according to The New York Times, the measure has 74 percent…
More than 100,000 people urge UN states to end spyware crisis
UN member states should urgently support a halt on the sale, transfer and use of spyware to end the endemic unlawful surveillance of activists, journalists, lawyers, and political leaders, Amnesty International said today. 107, 273 people from 180 countries and territories signed the organization’s petition demanding UN member states support a global moratorium on surveillance […] The post More than 100,000 people urge UN states to end spyware crisis appeared first on Amnesty International.
Activists Have Gathered Enough Signatures to Put $18 Wage on California Ballot
California voters will likely soon get a chance to vote on raising the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour, as proponents of the proposal have gathered enough signatures for the measure to appear on the ballot this November. On Thursday, the Living Wage Act announced that the group has begun submitting the signatures it’s gathered in support of the initiative to the California Secretary of State. The initiative has gathered over 1 million signatures, far past the roughly 620,000 signatures needed to qualify to appear on the ballot. The group behind the Living Wage Act says that labor unions…
Data Reveals 63 Percent of Hourly Starbucks Workers Make Under $15 an Hour
Despite Starbucks’s claims that it is a progressive employer that prioritizes the needs of its workers, newly released data shows that a majority of the company’s hourly workers make less than the average living wage across the U.S. According to research from Harvard/UCSF’s The Shift Project and the Economic Policy Institute, 63 percent of hourly workers at Starbucks make less than $15 an hour. About a quarter of the company’s hourly workers make between $10 and $12 an hour, while another quarter make about $12 to $14 an hour, the data finds. Only about 10 percent of its workers make…
Campaign Seeks to Abolish the Subminimum Wage in 25 States by 2026
As the economy recovers from a global pandemic, many business owners are pointing to labor shortages caused by the “Great Resignation” as a source of frustration. The term refers to the more than 33 million U.S. workers who have quit their jobs since the spring of 2021, largely due to low wages and burnout. The restaurant and service industry is experiencing one of the largest shockwaves to its workforce, adding just 108,000 jobs in January 2022, and remains 900,000 jobs short of where it was prior to the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But restaurant workers and…