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As someone who works a cushy office job …

… and has worked several minimum wage jobs as second jobs, and worked a few minimum wage jobs before/while I was going to school, shit is hard work.

Burger flipping, washing dishes, washing cars, working in the kitchen at a restaurant, waiting tables, working a cash register at a gas station - I done all of these and got paid much less for doing MUCH harder work than I am doing these days.

I mean harder work in that these are physically (and often mentally) grueling jobs. I often came home feeling like I had my ass kicked and stressed as fuck because I wanted to choke a manager or punch the shit out of a customer.

Everyone wants to treat low wage workers like they’re shit or something less than human, they’ll argue with you over taxes on a purchase and say shit like, “Well, that’s why you work at a gas station” or other snide remarks.

Never mind the fact that it is HARD work. I get so fucking sick of people who want to act like low wage workers are lazy or only work for minimum wage because they want a government handout.

It’s bullshit. It’s hard work and I’m sure there are very few people who work low way jobs because they want to.

GOP’s New Outreach to Women: It’s a Trap - Republicans launch 1st concerted effort to win back female voters with ‘Working Families Flexibility Act’, a bill packaged as a lifeline to working moms. It’s a cruel hoax—a slick attempt to give employers more power & hourly workers much less.

(The Nation) - House Republicans are launching their first concerted effort to win back female voters on Tuesday with the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013, a bill that’s being packaged as a lifeline to working moms across the country.

Unfortunately, the legislation is a particularly cruel hoax—a slick attempt to give employers more power, and hourly workers much less.

At first blush, the idea sounds good. The bill would allow hourly workers to convert overtime pay into time off: in other words, instead of getting paid for extra hours, they could stockpile additional vacation time. The pitch here is that working parents could have more flexibility in their schedule and an enhanced ability to balance work and family. “This week, we’ll pass [Representative] Martha Roby’s bill to help working moms and dads better balance their lives between work and their responsibilities as parents,” House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday.

The GOP is specifically invested in convincing women this bill is for them. The GOP spent $20,000 last week on a digital ad campaign focusing on so-called “mommy blogs,” like Ikeafans.com and MarthaStewart.com, and geo-targeting Democrats in swing districts. “Will Rep. Collin Peterson stand up for working moms?” one iteration of the ad asked.

A fawning National Review profile of Roby, the bill’s sponsor, explains how she wasn’t sure she could handle a run for Congress in 2009 because of concerns about taking care of her children while running for a House seat and potentially becoming a member of Congress—and how those concerns have now inspired her to push this important legislation.

But it’s not too hard to see how pernicious this legislation truly is. “Flexibility” is a word that should make hourly workers check for their wallets—employers hold most of the power in the relationship with hourly workers, which is all the more true if they are not unionized. So “flexibility” to decide if you want to get paid for overtime work, instead of getting fewer hours later on, can quickly become a way for employers to withhold payment for overtime work while also cutting your hours down the road.

Over 160 labor unions and women’s groups sent a letter to members of Congress on Monday, protesting that the Working Families Flexibility Act is “a smoke-and-mirrors bill that offers a pay cut for workers without any guaranteed flexibility or time off to care for their families or themselves.”

Republicans say this isn’t true, and that there are safeguards in the bill that would prevent employers from muscling their employees into surrendering overtime pay. “It is illegal for them to do that. There are enforcement mechanisms in the bill,” Eric Cantor said in February.

But this is where they’re being really tricky—the bill does give workers the right to sue over such intimidation, but denies them the right to use much quicker, and cheaper, administrative remedies through the Department of Labor. It also gives the Department of Labor no additional funds to investigate nor enforce provisions of the act.

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Yeah, I know exactly how this is going to pan out if it passes. Employers will pressure workers to work more overtime, then pressure them to take comp time instead of pay. It would be far too easy for an employer to imply that you will be replaced if you don’t comply.

When Your Boss Steals Your Wages: The Invisible Epidemic That’s Sweeping America

(AlterNet) - Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money!  But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.

Everardo Carrillo says that’s just what happened to him and other low-wage employees who worked at a Southern California warehouse run by a Walmart contractor. Carrillo and his fellow workers have launched a multi-class-action lawsuit for massive wage theft ( Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics) in a case that’s finally bringing national attention to an invisible epidemic. (Walmart, despite its claims that it has no responsibility for what its contractors do, has been named a defendant.)

What happened to Carrillo happens every day in America. And it could happen to you.

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This kind of shit is why we need unions, hell, it’s why we need a labor party. Individually we are powerless against this type of thing, but there is strength in numbers.

Something has to change soon or this type of thing will just become more and more commonplace.

“…there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job.”

(The New York Times) - When Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

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When I first came across this article, the comments on the website that posted it where along the lines of, “but profits”, “but corporations”, “but lazy workers”.

It fucking amazes me how so many Americans want to justify the exploitation of their time, their energy, their health - for abysmally low wages because they somehow think that it being ‘good for business’ makes it okay.

When Workers Die: “And nobody called 911″ - A man is scalded by boiling water & citric acid at a plant. His fate points to a dark reality for temp workers

CHICAGO (Salon.com) — By the time Carlos Centeno arrived at the Loyola University Hospital Burn Center, more than 98 minutes had elapsed since his head, torso, arms and legs had been scalded by a 185-degree solution of water and citric acid inside a factory on this city’s southwestern edge.

The laborer, assigned to the plant that afternoon in November 2011 by a temporary staffing agency, was showered with the solution after it erupted from the open hatch of a 500-gallon chemical tank he was cleaning. Factory bosses, federal investigators would later contend, refused to call an ambulance as he awaited help, shirtless and screaming. He arrived at Loyola only after first being driven to a clinic by a co-worker.

At admission Centeno had burns over 80 percent of his body and suffered a pain level of 10 on a scale of 10, medical records show. Clad in a T-shirt, he wore no protective gear other than rubber boots and latex gloves in the factory, which makes household and personal-care products.

Centeno, 50, died three weeks later, on Dec. 8, 2011. The Cook County medical examiner’s report attributed his death to “scald and chemical burns due to an industrial accident.”

A narrative account of the accident that killed him — and a description of conditions inside the Raani Corp. plant in Bedford Park, Ill. — are included in a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration memorandum obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. The 11-page OSHA memo, dated May 10, 2012, argues that safety breakdowns in the plant warrant criminal prosecution — a rarity in worker death cases.

The story behind Centeno’s death underscores the burden faced by some of America’s 2.5 million temporary, or contingent, workers — a growing but mostly invisible group of laborers who often toil in the least desirable, most dangerous jobs. Such workers are hurt more frequently than permanent employees and their injuries often go unrecorded, new research shows.

Raani’s “lack of concern for employee safety was tangible” and injuries in its factory were “abundant,” Thomas Galassi, head of OSHA’s Directorate of Enforcement Programs, wrote in the memo to David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health.

Selective Editing (of Scuffle at Union Protest) by Fox News Contributor Revealed: “This video is actually a composite of things that happened over the course of the day, many of them hours apart.”

(New York Times) - As my colleague Jennifer Preston reported, there were scuffles between union activists and supporters of Michigan’s Republican-dominated Legislature outside the state Capitol in Lansing on Tuesday, as the lawmakersapproved sweeping changes to the way unions will be financed.

At one stage during the tense standoff, union members opposed to the so-called right-to-work legislation ripped down a tent erected by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. Several supporters of the conservative group recorded video of their efforts to defend the tent, but the footage that got the most attention, with more than half a million views on YouTube, was an 80-second clip that showed a conservative comedian named Steven Crowder getting punched in the face by a union activist.

Immediately after the incident, Mr. Crowder posted photographs on Twitter documenting what he said were his injuries — a cut on his forehead and a chipped tooth — and his video quickly went into heavy rotation on Fox News, where he frequently appears and is identified as a contributor.

On Wednesday, however, questions were raised about the way in which Mr. Crowder had edited his video. After speaking with a witness to the events, the liberal blogger Chris Savage argued on his site Eclectablog that the video edit was misleading:

This video is actually a composite of a things that happened over the course of the day, many of them hours apart. The initial conversation happened early in the morning. At about 0:16, it cuts to Crowder saying, “You’ve already destroyed one tent, leave this one alone.” That happened hours after the interview with the union workers that starts the segment. The guy he’s talking to is standing quite a distance from the tent but Crowder insists that he’s somehow tearing down the tent.

Selective editing at about 0:39 mark shows what appears to be union guy attacking Crowder for no apparent reason. However, if you look closely, you’ll see that the guy is getting up off the ground — that he was NOT the one that became aggressive first.

As Mr. Savage noted, raw video of the scuffle over the tent shot by another camera showed that the man who punched Mr. Crowder was engaged in an angry discussion with a defender of the tent when the comedian stepped in between them. Within seconds the fight broke out.

In response to questions, including from his supporters, about the way he had edited the video, Mr. Crowder was by turns philosophical and prickly, but pointed out that more of the footage he used to make the clip was broadcast during his appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program on Tuesday night.

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[TW: Racism, Violence] You hate “right to work” laws more than you know. Here’s why

(nsfwcorp.co) - [T]he racist human hagfish who brought “right to work” into our lexicon and made it happen, and the far-right fascist oligarchs who made it worth their while. Once you meet a few of these cretins — specifically, Vance Muse, the Karl Rove-meets-David Duke brains behind the whole “Right-to-Work” movement whom I’ll introduce you to a little later in this piece — you’ll understand why those thousands who converged on Lansing were acting like their state legislators just invited Count Dracula into everyone’s homes.

In terms of understanding what just happened, it would help if we were back in the 1940s and 50s, when most liberals and establishment media used — and understood — the antonym, “union security” — a descriptive phrase for the New Deal labor laws which finally gave union organizers a fighting chance, and saw the percentage of unionized workers in the US soar from single digits in the early 1930s to around 35% of the workforce by the mid-late 1940s.

The “right-to-work” movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s, which gave labor organizers “union security” as the old euphemism went and should still go. Again, you have to understand the historical context: Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers’ rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West — child labor wasn’t even outlawed here until 1938.

But nothing compared to the endless massacres and murders of American labor organizers, massacres that are all but censored from the official history of this country. Maybe you’ve heard something about the Ludlow Massacre of the families of mine workers at Rockefeller’s mines in Colorado in 1913 — but you probably don’t know many of the details, like how Rockefeller’s private armed goons patrolled the miners’ miserable tent cities in an armored car with a mounted machine gun, spraying the tents and terrorizing the strikers, who demanded such radical concessions as “enforcement of Colorado’s laws,” the eight hour work week, and pay for time spent working. Or how the terrorized women and children in the embattled tent city dug a giant makeshift bunker pit beneath one of the larger tents to hide out from the bullets — only to have Colorado National Guardsmen douse the tents with kerosene and light them on fire while the miners’ families were sleeping, then shoot some of those who ran out, killing over a dozen children, scores of workers and their wives, and ending with the arrests of hundreds of miners.

In the end, anywhere from several dozen to 200 were left dead. We don’t know exactly — and there hasn’t been much effort on the part of our culture to find out. This “we don’t know the death toll” marks just about all of the many killings and massacres of labor organizers and strikers in the pre-New Deal era.

The same goes with the West Virginia mine wars: whether the massacre of tent city workers in 1913 by coal miner thugs firing from armored trains passing through the tent cities, or the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when the company raised the largest private standing army in the US, and attacked strikers with gas shells fired from artillery and dropped from bombers. President Harding followed that up by sending in federal troops and the US Air Force led by Brig. General Billy Mitchell, and when it was over, the miners’ unionization drive was dead. Along with well over 100 workers and family members — again, the exact number is “in dispute” as they say.

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This is just a small excerpt of a very long read but it’s worth it. The violence against the  early labor movement was astonishing, as was the racism involved.

People died so that you would have many of the rights you do today regarding employment.  We shouldn’t forget that.

The average worker—unionized or not— working in a right-to-work state earns approximately $1,500 less per year than a similar worker in a state without such a law

Unions strengthen businesses and the economically vital middle class by giving workers a voice in both the workplace and our democracy. Unions do this by pushing for fair wages and good benefits, and also by encouraging citizens to advocate for middle-class-friendly policies like a strong Social Security system and family-leave benefits.

In fact, according to a recent study conducted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, strengthening unions is as important to the middle class as boosting college-graduation rates. Similarly, sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld of Harvard University and the University of Washington, respectively, have calculated that approximately one-third of the increase in male wage inequality from 1973 to 2007 was due to decreasing unionization—about the same amount they ascribed to the increasing payoff of a college education.

Not surprisingly, right-to-work laws have a negative impact on the middle class. The average worker—unionized or not— working in a right-to-work state earns approximately $1,500 less per year than a similar worker in a state without such a law. Workers in right-to-work states are also significantly less likely to receive employer-provided health insurance and pensions. If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide. And unions tend to especially make large income differences for communities of color in the United States.

All of the states with the lowest percentage of workers in unions—Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, South Dakota, and Oklahoma—are right-to-work states and they all have a relatively weak middle class, with the share of total state income going to the middle 60 percent of the population below the national average.

Over the past several decades, unions in Michigan have weakened and the middle class has been hollowed out—a trend that would significantly worsen if right-to-work became law. As we see in the data, as union membership has declined in the United States, so too has the share of income going to America’s middle class. (see Figure 1). In 2011 the middle class received the smallest share of the nation’s income since these data were first reported, according to U.S. Census Bureau, with the middle 60 percent of households receiving only 45.7 percent of the nation’s income that year, down from the historical peak of 53.2 percent in 1968. Since 1968 the share of households in unions has declined from nearly 30 percent to less than 12 percent today.

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A strong union presence in any area drives wages up. Non union business have to offer wages that are comparable to union wages (and benefits) in order to compete for workers.

So, of course big business and by extension the GOP hate unions.

Corporate Profits Hit Record High While Worker Wages Hit Record Low

A constant conservative charge against President Obama is that he is inherently anti-business. However, businesses keep defying the storyline by making larger and larger profits, rebounding nicely out of the Great Recession.

In the third quarter of this year, “corporate earnings were $1.75 trillion, up 18.6% from a year ago.” Corporations are currently making more as a percentage of the economy than they ever have since such records were kept. But at the same time, wages as a percentage of the economy are at an all-time low, as this chart shows. (The red line is corporate profits; the blue line is private sector wages.):

Corporations made a record $824 billion in profits last year as well, while the stock market has had one of its best performances since 1900 while Obama has been in office.

Meanwhile, workers are getting the short end of the stick. As CNN Money explained, “a separate government reading shows that total wages have now fallen to a record low of 43.5% of GDP. Until 1975, wages almost always accounted for at least half of GDP, and had been as high as 49% as recently as early 2001.”

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If this business about the “job creators” and “wealth trickling down” were true, then we should be swimming in jobs right now.

Be we aren’t.

Tyranny in the Private Sphere: History and recent events demonstrate, private powers, especially in our age of international business behemoths, are equally capable of denying liberty.

The large, tyrannical state has always been one of the greatest threats to freedom and liberty. And even in our current age, unchecked government power continues to stifle human progress and expression, not only abroad but in the United States as well. For, in even in our country, the state, both at the federal and local level, still punishes its citizens for indulging in the “wrong” types of narcotics—it still denies equal rights to those of a different sexual orientation, it still retains the unchecked, lethal authority of one person, the executive, to sentence death upon any citizen the president deems a “terrorist.”

Yet, although the illiberal actions of the state still need to be combated  government is not the only source of tyranny—it is not the only enemy of freedom. As recent events in Bangladesh attest, with the death 112 factory workers as the result of atrocious working conditions, the private sector has its share of tyrants.

This is where most libertarians and current day liberals seem to differ. The former sees only the state, the government as the perpetrator of oppression. However, as both history and recent events demonstrate, private powers, especially in our age of international business behemoths, are equally capable of denying liberty.

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Great read and food for thought. There is a large set of people in the U.S. who seem to have forgotten that private entities can be just as tyrannical as government entities.

Any intrusion on my rights (or the rights of others) is just as egregious to me no matter what entity it’s coming from.  

Costco CEO, Jim Sinegal, rejects Wall Street’s assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street’s profit demands.

JIM SINEGAL, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation’s fifth-largest retailer, had all the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old in a candy store as he tore open the container of one of his favorite new products: granola snack mix. “You got to try this; it’s delicious,” he said. “And just $9.99 for 38 ounces.”

Some 60 feet away, inside Costco’s cavernous warehouse store here in the company’s hometown, Mr. Sinegal became positively exuberant about the 87-inch-long Natuzzi brown leather sofas. “This is just $799.99,” he said. “It’s terrific quality. Most other places you’d have to pay $1,500, even $2,000.”

But the pièce de résistance, the item he most wanted to crow about, was Costco’s private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts. “Look, these are just $12.99,” he said, while lifting a crisp blue button-down. “At Nordstrom or Macy’s, this is a $45, $50 shirt.”

Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers - and epitomize why some retail analysts say Mr. Sinegal just might be America’s shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.

But not everyone is happy with Costco’s business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco’s customers but to its workers as well.

Costco’s average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam’s Club. And Costco’s health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.”

Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street’s assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street’s profit demands.

Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco’s customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense. “This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.”

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Hostess Execs Denied Bonuses by DOJ. Agree to Mediation With Union.

Hostess executives and the baker’s union, which is currently on strike, haveagreed to mediation.

(Reuters) – Hostess Brands Inc, its lenders and the unions representing its striking workers, agreed to start mediation hearings on Tuesday at the urging of a bankruptcy court judge.

A hearing on Monday during which the bankrupt maker of Twinkies snack cakes and Wonder Bread was set to ask for permission to liquidate was quickly adjourned until Wednesday after the judge urged the parties to mediate in private.

The good news is that it’s possible 18,500 people will not end up losing their jobs, however it’s worth pointing out that, coincidentally, or perhaps not-coincidentally, Hostess executives agreed to mediation only after the Department of Justice thwarted their request to pay additional bonuses this afternoon.

(Reuters) – Hostess Brands Inc, the maker of the iconic Twinkies snack cake, will square off in a bankruptcy court on Monday against an agent of the U.S. Justice Department, who says the wind-down plan is too generous to management.

The U.S. Trustee, an agent of the U.S. Department of Justice who oversees bankruptcy cases, said in court documents it is opposed to the wind-down plan because Hostess plans improper bonuses to company insiders.

The 82-year-old Hostess wants permission to pay senior management a bonus of up to 75 percent of their annual pay so they will stay on and help wind-down the business.

More from Fortune

“The cessation of … operations is not a simple matter of turning off the lights and shutting the doors,” the company wrote in a court filing. “A freefall shutdown and fire sale liquidation” could result in damaged production equipment and the “improper disposal” of waste, the company added.

Under the plan, bonuses ranging from $7,400 to $130,500 will be paid to 19 executives. The company argues the bonuses are below market rates for such payments.

After the Department of Justice thwarted the company’s plans to pay new bonuses while liquidating the company, both sides agreed to mediation at the urging of U.S Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain.

Mediation will begin tomorrow.

For more on how the company arrived at this point, see here.

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So, it may not be the end of Twinkies as we know them after all.