Washington    Landing in President Trump’s “swamp” in Washington early in the morning, I turned on my phone for email.  There was an ACTION ALERT!  I knew it was important, because it was all in capital letters, the universal signal for emergency.  Scanning quickly, it was not an emergency for me at all, but a panic email from the National Restaurant Association.  They wanted everyone to bombard their Congressional representatives with messages, and to do it PDQ, pretty darned quick. Why?  The Raise the Wage Act is coming up for a vote in July.

The Raise the Wage Act is the bill that would finally raise the federal minimum wages after a decade of being frozen in place.  The proposal would boost the wage from its current nadir of $7.25 per hour to $15 by the year 2024, a five-year period.  And, oh my goodness, this NRA, not the ones with guns, but the ones with spatulas, was horrified that one of their most oppressive accomplishments of the past, freezing the tip credit, was going to be totally abolished.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful!  Heck, it might even pass this time.  Pass the House of Representatives that is.  No chance in the Senate, but maybe, just maybe there’s the possibility with the election coming up, and Trump perhaps thinking he should deliver something to this left-behind base he likes to claim as a populist, that he might jump on the bandwagon for a bit of a raise.  Probably, not for eliminating the tip credit, which allows servers to be paid a tad over $2 per hour with tips making up the rest, but, you know, maybe something.

Why do I get these emails?  Another good question!  Fair Grinds Coffeehouse, our social enterprise in New Orleans supporting organizing, offering 100% fair trade products, and a community center of sorts in the neighborhood, has to be licensed to operate.  There’s no special coffeehouse license of course, so we have a restaurant license, which is fine by us, but that also means we have to have someone with a SafeServ license and of course the Restaurant Association, like most business unions, has created a monopoly there on the training and certification, so, voila, we get the constant barrages from the NRA, archenemy of living wages forever and ever.

Maybe they shouldn’t worry so much.  The National Employment Labor Project (NELP), one of the good soldiers in this fight in Washington issued a report on wage theft as I hit the ground as well.  We know the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor has been eviscerated with budget and staffing cuts, so there wouldn’t be a world of enforcement on minimum wages anyway, so it would be left to the states.  The vast majority of states do not have adequate laws to protect workers who report wage theft, according to the National Employment Law Project study. Only six states — Arizona, California, Florida, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia — provide “essential retaliation protections” for wage theft, while six others don’t have laws on the books on the books at all.

Even if we win this battle in whole or in part, there’s a larger war that we all have to fight continuously.  Meanwhile, do I as I do, not as the NRA says, and call or write your Congressperson and ask them to vote for the Raise the Wage Act, and damn the torpedoes.

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Please enjoy Rising Appalachia Featuring Ani DiFranco

and Matt Woods’ Jailbird Song.

Thanks to KABF.