Last Wednesday was Women’s Equality Day, in commemoration of the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920. In commemoration, the Tucson Weekly’s Maria Ines Taracena published a blog post on The Range calling attention to Tucson’s dismal standing among US cities in terms of the gender wage gap.
According a Census data analysis by SpareFoot.com, Tucson is at the bottom in terms of women’s median salary ($22,446, 2013 estimate), 5-year growth in median earnings (3%), 2013 median earnings as a percentage of men’s (73.9%) and more. An annual salary of $22,446 translates to $10.75/hour for full time work— far belong the $15/hour minimum wage promoted by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Let’s put this into perspective. The median wage is the salary right in the middle– 50% of working women to Tucson make more than $10.75/hour and 50% make less per hour. That is criminal when you consider how many Tucson women are single mothers and when you consider the recent Congressional and Legislative attacks on poor women and their families…
Being a low-wage, service worker kind of town, Tucson has been in the Fight for $15 since the beginning in 2013. The Fight for $15 movement is spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). SEIU has been organizing fast food workers in the US and wants to raise the minimum wage to $15, since the federal minimum wage of … Read more
If you’re a college student or if you’re paying for your children’s college education, you should care.
Adjunct faculty are non-voting, non-tenure-track instructors, lecturers, and other lower-level teaching staff. As state legislatures have cut higher education budgets nationwide, universities and community colleges have shifted to employing more adjunct faculty to teach because they’re cheap contract labor it’s more cost effective. To put it simply: As budgets have been slashed and as tuition has gone up, universities and community colleges have replaced full-time tenure-track professors with part-time piece-workers adjunct or contingent non-tenure-track faculty.
Over the past 30 years, there has been a dramatic shift from 75% of teaching faculty being tenure-track professors to 75% being non-tenure-track. A full professor can make between $72,000 – $160,000 per year (more on the medical campus), while adjuncts make $22,000 – $27,000 per year, according to NPR. Part-time adjuncts make far less than that because they often teach only one or two classes for as little as $2000-3000/class… and live on the edge of poverty.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has organized another fast food strike today, December 4 in Tucson and around the country. This is the third nationwide fast food strike in a year, with one in December 2013 and one in September 2014. Protesters, strikers, and supporters will meet around 12:30 at Casa Maria, 401 E 26th … Read more
Over the past few years, fast food workers have made strides in their fight for a living wage, fair treatment by their corporate masters, and the right to unionize.
Nationwide fast food strikes organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have brought the issues of chronically low wages and wage theft in the fast food industry into the limelight.
Since millionaire franchisee owners and their billionaire corporate parents are not succeeding in their fight to keep the highly-profitable status quo, they are turning to Congress for help in fighting to keep their workers poor and non-union.
The fast food industry is hoping that a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill can blunt the momentum that fast food workers have gained through nearly two years of strikes and multiple lawsuits.
The International Franchise Association (IFA) is flying fast food store owners and other franchisees into Washington on Tuesday to drum up congressional opposition to a recent legal decision that could make corporations liable for how franchise employees are treated. The trade group expects more than 350 business owners from both the franchisee and franchisor sides of the business model to show up at its event this week, according toThe Hill. Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and former Republican Governors Association head and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour are scheduled to speak to the group, and the paper reports that top Senate Republicans will introduce legislation targeting federal labor regulators in general later this week.
The top attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined in July that McDonald’s exerts so much control over how franchisees operate that they are responsible for labor law violations committed by franchise owners. That finding has yet to be tested in court, but if it holds up and is applied beyond the nation’s largest fast food chain, it would make it much harder for industries that rely on franchising to stymie workers’ attempts to exercise their labor rights.