Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pack Your Lunch

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pack Your Lunch

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Low Pay Is Not Okay

Natali Rivers, Uptown:

… The timing is significant. August 28 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. African Americans disproportionately work in fast food jobs in this country. The movement felt that the strike would mirror the $2 wage demands of the organizers in 1963. Adjusted for inflation, that demand would be $15.26 today.

Fast food is a $200 billion per year industry, yet most employed within the industry earn minimum wage or just above it. According to the New York Times, the nationwide median wage for fast food workers is $9.05. The industry leaders argue that these entry level jobs are a stepping stone to better opportunities, but according to a report from the National Employment Law Project, only 2.2 percent of all jobs in the entire industry are managerial.

“We are united in our belief that every job should pay workers enough to meet basic needs such as food and housing,” said Nancy Salgado, a single mother of two who has worked at McDonald’s in Chicago for 10 years and makes Illinois’ minimum wage of $8.25 an hour. “Our families, communities, and economy all depend on workers earning a living wage.”…

Harold Meyerson:

… Those who seek to conservatize the March on Washington in modern memory either gloss over or neglect altogether its consistent emphasis on economic as well as social egalitarianism. A. Philip Randolph, the union leader and lifelong democratic socialist who conceived of and chaired the march, made this clear in the speech with which he began the rally. “Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens,” he said, “but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them. Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act [banning racial discrimination in hiring], but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white?”…

Of the more than 200,000 Americans who came to the Mall 50 years ago, tens of thousands were active in organizations that espoused and embodied an indissoluble link between civil and economic rights. That link was embraced by more than black churches and the NAACP. The United Auto Workers, garment and textile workers, the Packinghouse Workers and the still-fledgling teacher and public worker unions brought their members to Washington on hundreds of chartered buses and trains. They heard speeches not only declaring that Southern blacks should have the right to vote and to sit at the front of the bus but also calling for public employment programs to shrink unemployment and a hike in the minimum wage to reduce the incidence of poverty-level work….

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    Drexciya

    A few links:

    1) This meditation on the racialized misogyny that Miley Cyrus affirmed and publicly simulated to broad cheers should be read and digested in full.

    2) “What Obama Didn’t Say in His March on Washington Speech”:

    “For over a decade,” said Obama, continuing with the theme, “working Americans of all races have seen their wages and incomes stagnate,” he said, underscoring the interracial reality of inequality. “And so as we mark this anniversary,” he continued, “we must remind ourselves that the measure of progress for those who marched 50 years ago…was whether this country would admit all people who were willing to work hard, regardless of race, into the ranks of a middle-class life.” And to that end, he made calls for new efforts to restore some amount of fairness to our economy.

    Which is the classic liberal formulation. If we focus on class barriers to success, we’ll achieve a measure of racial justice. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” and such. But it’s wrong.

    Just look at the statistics. Yes, more black families than ever are in the middle class, but the wealth of the median African-American household is $28,500, compared to $265,000 for white families, an almost 10-to—1 difference. Yes, since the 1960s, when African-Americans were barred from most college campuses, the number of black college graduates has grown by a factor of 10. But African-Americans earn just 66 cents for every dollar earned by whites, an increase of only 11 cents since King announced his dream. Blacks have narrowed the racial gap in high school graduation rates (7 points in 2012 versus 24 points in 1963), life expectancy at birth (a four-year gap versus a seven-year gap), and voter turnout, with African-Americans surpassing whites last year for the first time in history. But the national unemployment crisis is a black unemployment catastrophe, and has been for five years. And the poverty rate among blacks is virtually unchanged from 30 years ago. In 1974, the poverty rate for African-Americans was 30.1 percent; in 2011, it was 27.6 percent.

    None of this is an accident. If African-Americans face a massive wealth gap, it’s not because of bad behavior or a lack of personal responsibility, it’s because they were purposefully excluded from a massive federal effort to invest in ordinary people. Discrimination, endorsed by the Federal Housing Administration and sealed with terrible racial violence in cities like Chicago and Detroit, kept blacks out of suburbs, away from good homes and opportunity. Redlining, used liberally in cities like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, segregated blacks in ghettos and made loans or home improvement or a new business impossible to afford. With contract lending, the precursor to subprime mortgages, upwardly mobile African-Americans in cities across the country were offered a usurious path to homeownership, which was yanked away, usually along with their savings, if they missed a payment.

    For a hundred years after the War of the Rebellion, white Americans worked to build a country where, through law and custom, blacks were kept as an underclass, either excluded from the materials to make the American Dream, or for prosperous blacks in towns like Tulsa, Okla., punished for succeeding. The United States was governed by a white supremacist consensus during the most productive years of its history, and we’re living with the consequences.

    And lastly, 3) Chauncey:

    Rather than draw connections from that legacy to our current moment—and to celebrate such ties—Obama instead chose to talk about black folks as racial grievance mongers, possessed of bad culture, criminality, and who are a people that somehow lost their way, and that need to work harder at holding up their end of the civic and cultural bargain in America.

    If Dr. King is really American royalty, and the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington is a celebration of how the Black Freedom Struggle helped to transform a nation (and the world) for the better, then Obama sullied that moment–just as he did during an earlier speech to the graduates of Morehouse College—by summoning the tired bogeyman of black pathology instead of singing the many successes of Black America high to the mountaintops.

    In following a “colorblind” post-racial script where African-Americans are hurt more by their “bad culture” than by structural and systemic white racism, Barack Obama dredged up caricatures and cartoon images of African-American history.

    To point. President Obama suggested that black folks have strayed away from Dr. King’s vision by rioting.

    Despite being a talking-point better suited for Fox News and its obsession with “black criminality” and “racist” assaults on innocent white people, Obama’s playing with symbolic racism (and the coded racial appeals of Republicans and “centrist” Democrats from Nixon onward) is a dishonest use of history.

    Black folks are not hyper-emotional civic children and brigands who sit around waiting to spontaneously riot and engage in wanton destruction…despite what the Tea Party GOP and the Right-wing media would suggest.

    As Obama most certainly knows, race riots in the United States have overwhelmingly been committed by whites against black and brown folks.

    Obama is a smart student of American history. He would most certainly know that the Kerner Commission report written in the aftermath of the urban rebellions of the 1960s detailed how those “riots” were caused by predictable variables such as police brutality, economic desperation, racism, geographic isolation, a sense of gross racial and class injustice, and other factors that speak to the power of institutional inequality along the color line.

    The Los Angeles Rebellion in 1992 was driven by a similar sense of alienation and justified rage at how police brutality and extra-legal violence against people of color is a recurring fixture in American life. George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin is a recent example of the semi-permanence of that fact.

    In those rare moments when black folks have rioted, they were for wholly understandable, and in many ways, quite rational reasons: African-Americans are no more violence prone by virtue of skin color than any other group.

    Mostly, yes to all of this. I would only add that while it’s correct to criticize Obama’s choice here, it’s improper and vaguely disingenuous to divorce that choice from a societal context that sees Obama’s existence as negatively racialized. He’s not an activist and shouldn’t be judged by the standards of one, he’s a black politician that must follow the dictates of a public he did not create that’s informed by a history he did not endorse. In a white supremacist society – where open pro-blackness and properly directed anti-racism are rewarded with outrage and where dishonestly soothing the racial consciousness of current and future white voters is at worst rewarded and at best ignored – his options as a representative are constrained. That constraint is a byproduct of democratic will and can’t be remove by singular actors moving against that.

  2. 2.

    kbuttle

    Anne, I’m in England trying to figure this out and I’ve just gotta ask: when do you sleep? Seriously, you’re out of the box sometimes hours before mistermix in the morning, and as often as not sharing late night thread duties with Cole. What gives?
    your puzzled ex-pat

  6. 6.

    Anne Laurie

    @Drexciya: Thank you. “I would only add that while it’s correct to criticize Obama’s choice here, it’s improper and vaguely disingenuous to divorce that choice from a societal context that sees Obama’s existence as negatively racialized….” That’s quite a narrow lane to navigate, isn’t it?

    @kbuttle: I’m not employed for money at the moment, so I can get up at 2pm and crash around 6am (East Coast time). Which means I can do the third shift here — think of me as the little charlady character at the end of the old Carol Burnett tv show… (and goodnight!)

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    a hike in the minimum wage to reduce the incidence of poverty-level work….

    Got my laugh for the day.

  8. 8.

    raven

    Yes, there remain racial inequalities in employment, income, health, wealth, incarceration, and in the victims and perpetrators of violent crime. But we don’t face beatings, lynchings and shootings for our political beliefs anymore. And I would respectfully suggest that Martin Luther King did not live and die to hear his heirs whine about political gridlock. It is time to stop complaining and put our shoulders against the stubborn gates holding the American people back.

  9. 9.

    NotMax

    Let’s see, how would Senator Paul, for instance, address this?

    “If the food and the service are up to standards, there’s nothing preventing anyone from saying ‘Keep the change’ to reward honest labor.”

    (Now I have to go shower. Repeatedly.)

  11. 11.

    Baud

    @Drexciya:

    I watched the entire MLK speech yesterday, and he spent some time criticizing the black militants of his day. Not sure if a similar criticism was levied against him at the time.

  13. 13.

    raven

    @Baud: I will never forget when I was in Korea and a couple of very militant brothers calling KIng an Uncle Tom the day he was killed.

  16. 16.

    cvstoner

    Vonnegut:

    If there is to be no ceiling on the amount of money a man can take out of our economy, then concomitantly there can be no foundation below which a human being cannot sink. What capitalists must realize is that you are fighting to make capitalism survive, not destroy it; you are fighting to eliminate the seeds of destruction inherent in the status quo.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    @cvstoner

    And another:

    Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
      – Mohandas K. Gandhi

  19. 19.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    I was on the road at the time of the March, and I was thinking about how the NPR coverage was actually avoiding a lot of the mealy-mouth “balance” they usually attempt, and then one of the people in the discussion after the President’s speech said something stupid.

    Where, I ask you, did they get the idea that Obama could raise the minimum wage by executive order?

  21. 21.

    Jeremy

    I would respect these black critics of Obama’s speech if they did the same of Bill Clinton. I never heard these “critics” say anything about a President and these issues until Obama came into office. They were going to criticize his speech no matter what he said, and the fact that they ignore Bill Clinton telling people to stop complaining about gridlock and get to work (which is more direct than anything Obama said) tells me all I need to know about these so called “critics”.

  22. 22.

    Betty Cracker

    The fast food worker walk-outs are a heartening development. FSM knows we need a new labor movement.

    Random complaint: Business founders need to stop making up stupid company and product names that squash two perfectly good words together with illogical capitalization conventions or — worse yet — purposely misspell an actual word or insist on all lowercase, which makes sentences and titles look incredibly awkward and wrong. You’re not bell hooks or e.e. cummings; get over yourselves. The end.

  23. 23.

    kwAwk

    I have a problem with the statistics of only 2.2% of jobs in the industry are managerial. Doesn’t make any sense andvis obviosly incorrect.

    If that were correct then it would mean that every manager oversaw almost 50 employees each. That would be absurdly amazing efficiency.

  24. 24.

    PurpleGirl

    Betty — Look up the company “Landor”. They call themselves the “branding’ experts (or something like that). They dream up those funny names for major corporations and such. IIRC Landor renamed The Phillip Morris Company, the Altria Group.

    Landor did a renaming of the non-profit I worked for. One name they came up with was Ascentives. Granted, The New York City Public School Volunteer Program needed a new name, too many people (and funders) thought we were a city agency or part of the Board of Education. Landor developed a list of 20 names; the one we liked the best was Learning Leaders. It was the best of the bunch. At least they developed the names pro bono. We only paid printing costs of new stationery samples.

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    @PurpleGirl

    Triggered memory of an exchange from the comic book Young Avengers.

    Short backstory: Two of the members are gay and in a romantic relationship. When the team decides they each need super-hero names, one of those two, Billy, chooses Asgardian.

    The following conversation ensues:

    Hawkeye: So Billy, about your new codename.
    Asgardian: Why do I need a new codename?
    Hawkeye: Because you’re not an Asgardian, you’re a warlock. Plus, you need a name that won’t become a national joke when the press finds out about you and Teddy.
    Asgardian: (pregnant pause) I definitely need a new codename.

  26. 26.

    Ben Cisco

    @Jeremy: Yup.

    The cognitive dissonance required to expect the President of the United States to act like the mauiest Mau Mau that ever maued is stunning, stupefying, and depressing at the same time.

  29. 29.

    Shakezula

    And if the GOP would even letting a living wage bill come to a vote in the House, they might stand a chance of surviving. But instead they’ll scream NOOOOO!! Dirty wage moochers, you must work three jobs and donate jobs and sell your bodies to science if you want to eat.

    Because they really have become so insane that they think being employed is privilege enough for the proles.

  31. 31.

    feebog

    @KwAwk:

    I have a problem with the statistics of only 2.2% of jobs in the industry are managerial. Doesn’t make any sense and is obviosly incorrect.

    If that were correct then it would mean that every manager oversaw almost 50 employees each. That would be absurdly amazing efficiency.

    Depends on the definition of “manager” Many of these workers are promoted to “Shift Manager” or “Shift Supervisor”, but their wage differential from an entry level employee is minimal. The only real managers in many of these operations are the owner of the franchise or the overall manager of the business, plus the regional folks who really hold all the managerial reins.

  32. 32.

    Steeplejack

    @kwAwk:

    Welcome to the new world of retail. The 2.2% management number is quite plausible. You may have “shift managers” or “crew leaders” in fast-food restaurants, but the fact is that they are hourly employees who often make only a few dollars more per hour than the line employees. And they have very little managerial control, in the traditional sense.

    And it’s similar in other retail. When I worked at Barnes & Noble, in a store that had 40-60 employees—a mix of full-time, part-time and seasonal—there was only one employee who wasn’t hourly: the store manager. There were two “assistant managers” and two “merchandise managers,” all of whom had the nominal “manager” ability to open and close the store and run a shift, but that was about it. They had no hiring/firing authority and very little discretion to do anything except keep the basic machinery clanking away. Only the store manager was on salary, and the only one I would consider “management” in a real sense.

    Also, keep in mind that as fast-food and retail businesses have gone to the “more employees working fewer hours each” model it is going to increase the employee/manager ratio. So, yes, it is quite plausible for one manager to oversee 50 employees.

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