Important note from commentor Burnspbesq:
Speaking of memberships, some anonymous patriot has offered to match up to a half million bucks of year-end contributions to the ACLU.
So if you’ve got a little spare cash from a year-end bonus, or need a gift for that hard-to-buy-for friend…
Apart from seasonal charity, what’s on the agenda for the day?
***********
Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg, at the Washington Post:
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.”…
Raising the wage floor would clearly be good policy, too. Decades of research show that minimum-wage increases more substantial than those Republicans are proposing have their intended effects of helping low-wage workers without much in the way of unintended job loss effects. While the labor market effects of the boldest Democratic proposals are harder to predict, as they lie outside the range of prior research, such proposals still phase in over several years to give businesses time to adjust and are worthy of Republicans’ consideration.
That they should do the right thing doesn’t mean these politicians will do it willingly, of course. Their feet will need to be held to the fire. But that’s precisely where the Fight for $15 has been so successful over the past four years, and low-wage workers’ resolve appears to be as strong as ever…