This week, federal contract workers showed up at the DNC Platform Drafting Committee’s meeting to call for the platform to include an executive order calling for $15 an hour and union rights in federal contracts.
“Today, workers demanded that the Democratic Platform Committee put the United States government back on the side of workers,” said Joseph Geevarghese, Director of Good Jobs Nation. These workers have been on strike nearly 20 times. These workers serve US Senators, Generals and Cabinet Secretaries – some of the richest and most powerful people in the world – yet they make so little that they use public aid to survive. The truth is that the US Government is America’s #1 low wage job creator – funding over 2 million poverty jobs through contracts, loans and grants with private corporations. The Democratic Party must continue President Obama’s labor legacy by making sure 2 million low-wage contract workers win $15 and a Union with the stroke of the pen.”
Obama already raised the federal contract minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, among other protections he added. But the workers aren’t done organizing, and related to the ongoing fight for $15, one group of workers will get getting that raise. The Washington, D.C., city council voted for a $15 minimum wage this week, with a final vote coming next month. Many federal contract workers staff fast food restaurants and do other low-wage work in the District, so this raise will apply to them.
● This school leaves students miserable and scarred, but hey, test scores go up, so the system is working, right?
Traumatized. That’s the word my friends and I use when we talk about our school. It really scarred us. We were so used to freedom, like being able to walk to lunch in groups. All of a sudden, we were treated like children. Our lockers were taken away. Instead we had cubbies in our classrooms. We were like *cubbies? Are you joking???* We weren’t allowed to transition; our teachers transitioned. We stayed in the same room, in our chairs for 8 hours a day. We only moved when we went to lunch. We had to line up in a particular order and if you weren’t in the right order or if somebody was talking, you’d have to go back to the classroom and start again. There was one time when we missed lunch because we went through this process fifteen times.
● How can we make restaurant jobs into good jobs?
● This retired coal miner has black lung disease. He's fighting to make sure no one else gets it.
● Taming the global supply chain: a statement of principles.