BossFeed Briefing for February 13, 2017. It's been four weeks since inauguration day. Confirmation hearings for fast food CEO Andy Puzder to be the next Secretary of Labor are scheduled for Thursday, February 16th. Our State Legislature is considering bills to provide paid family leave… and to roll back the minimum wage.
Three things to know this week:
😖 Incomes of the bottom half of Americans have "collapsed" over the past several decades. According to the most recent figures, half of us together take home just 12% of total national income — the other half takes 88%.
📦 Amazon needs to deliver in their offices, too. Amazon played an important role in Washington State’s successful suit against the Trump Administration’s executive order on immigration. Now security officers are calling on the company to ensure religious freedom and immigrant rights in their own buildings, too.
👶 The richest quarter of workers are three and a half times more likely to have paid family leave than the poorest quarter of workers. When it’s left up to them, corporations tend to provide the most generous benefits to the best paid workers.
Two things to ask:
🔥 Will they burn Puzder? In Washington, DC, a U.S. Senate committee is scheduled to hold confirmation hearings on February 16th on the nomination of fast food CEO Andy Puzder to be the next Secretary of Labor. We’ll be watching to see if he gets the scorching he deserves.
Is it alive? In Olympia, a State Senate committee heard 3 bills which would roll back our minimum wage for younger workers, people who work for nonprofits, and anyone who works outside of King County. If the bills don’t get a vote by February 17th, they’ll likely be dead for the year.
And one thing that’s worth a closer look:
Founded in February 1903, the Japanese/Mexican labor association was the first major multiracial agricultural union on the West Coast. For better and for worse, solidarity, division, and resistance are recurring themes in the history of workers movements... and worth exploring in the current political climate.
Read this far?
🎩 Consider yourself briefed, boss.