I was greeted by this heartwarming display on the corner of my street today. Thank you to all of you who did this. Happy Thanksgiving. -H pic.twitter.com/b69mW3Oqbf
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 24, 2016
Apart from recovering from yesterday’s festivities and/or shopping plans, what’s on the agenda for the day?
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Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg, in the Washington Post, “Thankful for the Fight for $15“:
The Fight for $15 has been incredibly successful since 100 fast-food workers first went on strike on Nov. 29, 2012, in New York City. The movement they helped create went 5-for-5 during the most recent election, winning ballot initiatives in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington, while defeating a subminimum wage law for teenagers in South Dakota. And with the anniversary of its original strike approaching, that movement is only gaining steam.
As Bryce Covert of the news site ThinkProgress recently reported, workers in more than 340 cities will go on strike again on Tuesday, while “fast food employees, airport workers, childcare and home care providers, and university graduate students” will engage in “civil disobedience at McDonald’s and 20 of the nation’s largest airports.” The workers have also upped the ante: In addition to their calls for minimum wage increases, they’re “demanding no deportations of undocumented immigrants, an end to police violence against black people, and the protection of health care coverage.”
Winning all of these important fights is unlikely, especially in an era of Republican governance, but this type of grass-roots activism is exactly what’s needed. Coupled with the widespread popularity of increasing the minimum wage, these protests could help lead to an increase in the federal wage floor sometime during the next four years.
Such an increase would be long overdue. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since July 2009 and, after accounting for inflation, is 24 percent below its maximum annual value from 1968. It was 55 percent of the median wage that year, according to OECD data; in 2015, that ratio had fallen to 36 percent, significantly below international norms…
Friday Morning Open Thread: Thank <em>You</em>, HillaryPost + Comments (177)