Sunday News PatrolWith all the talking and speeching and discussioning going on about minimum wage laws right now, there is one very important group being perpetually overlooked: tipped workers. America’s waitstaff has enjoyed a federal minimum wage of $2.13/hour since 1991. Employers are legally obligated to make up the difference between what an employee makes including tips and the federal non-tipped minimum wage of $7.25, but it is quite common for this to not occur. The Economic Policy Institute found that 83.8% of investigated restaurants had some kind of wage or hour violation. Mother Jones has a piece about this by Dana Liebelson.

Global protests for fast food workers! I absolutely want fries with that.

All this restaurant worker talk is making me hungry. Hungry for a map illustrating which countries are doing something about GMO food labeling and the consumer’s right to know where their food comes from. Guess which great nation has refused to do anything? It has been found that over 90% of Americans want foods containing GMO ingredients to be labeled. I’m no math whiz but I’d call that a strong majority.

(My) Representative Jim McGovern of the Mass. 2nd congressional district spent a night in a homeless shelter to learn about the lives of the homeless.

A well-reasoned explanation of why wages should not be kept secret. I’ve always found the practice kind of needlessly sinister. What are you hiding, boss man? If employees know what others are making, and know why wages are what they are, does this promote ill-will? Resentment? Rebellion??? I don’t think it does, and there is something to be said for openness about money. We go to work to make money, but can’t talk about it with each other. Seems like a weird, cult-ish intellectual disconnect.

Some speculative grumbling about the possibility of Senator Sherrod Brown chairing the banking committee. He’s considered a dangerous anti-Wall Street villain by the dangerous Wall Street villians.

General Motors has been fined $35 million in its ignition switch/airbag/fatality/coverup/recall scandal. Faulty ignition switches are being blamed for accidents resulting in 13 deaths, that the company knew about and did not address. This yields a penalty rate of about $2.6 million per death. Doesn’t really sound like a lot, considering GM’s $213 million profit last quarter, but this is the largest civil penalty EVER!

All those sweet Tahoes, Silverados and Corvette’s are going to look pretty stupid at the bottom of the american rivers once spanned by crumbling road and highway infrastructure. That’s right, we have a national transportation infrastructure funding crisis! And guess who can fix it? That’s right, the do-nothing congress! AHHH! I got a email from Biden and he’s out there working to #RebuildAmerica. The White House says “In less than a decade, we’ve fallen from 7th to 18th on the quality of our roads.”

Surprise! Kansas slashed taxes for the rich and now has a catastrophic budget problem!


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s