Wage growth for low-income workers between 2013 and 2017 showed how important minimum wage increases are:
Wage growth at the 10th percentile in states with at least one minimum wage increase from 2013 to 2017 was more than twice as fast as in states without any minimum wage increases (5.2 percent vs. 2.2 percent). As expected given women’s lower wages in general, this result is even stronger for women (5.1 percent vs. 0.8 percent).
A favorite Republican argument against minimum wage increases is that they don’t want anyone to be making the minimum wage and if everyone was making more than the minimum, then it wouldn’t matter how low that was. But once again we’re reminded just how big a difference raising the minimum wage can make for the people who most need it.
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● Wendy's refuses to join program protecting farm workers from sexual abuse.
● Young workers and professional workers are starting to see the advantages of unions:
Last year, a third of the 262,000 new union members nationwide were in professional or technical occupations, mostly in the public sector. And more than three-quarters of new members were under age 35, part of a five-year trend of growth among younger workers, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. [...]
In 2003, 34 percent of union members nationwide were in professional and technical occupations; by last year, it was 42 percent, according to the Department for Professional Employees at the AFL-CIO. In New England, such professionals now make up 51 percent of union members.
● Companies are disclosing how much less they pay workers than executives. Thanks to the Dodd-Frank law Republicans are so intent on repealing.
● The factory in the family:
Domestic-worker organizer Ai-jen Poo has noted that the challenges workers face in the 21st century are increasingly those that paid domestic workers faced all along: isolation, irregular hours, exclusion from labor laws. One might add that they are also the challenges that women have faced all along. As Federici and Nicole Cox, another Wages for Housework activist, pointed out in 1975, the “self-management” and “workers’ control” touted by managers attempting to soothe restive workers and cut workspace costs had “always existed in the home.” Even if work was privatized, individualized, and personalized, that didn’t make it less work; it just meant “a bit more of the factory in the family (higher efficiency and productivity of housework) and a bit more of the family in the factory (more individual concern, responsibility, identification with work).”
● An Oakland coal terminal is officially stalled, thanks to a labor-environmental alliance.
● How trade deals and immigration laws hurt workers—Mexican workers.