Daily Kos: Labor

Unemployment remains sky-high (no matter what Donald Trump tries to tell you), and four million workers have had their pay or hours cut due to the pandemic. For people who are still on the job, there’s some good news in some cities and states in the form of minimum wage increases that went into effect on July 1.

In Illinois, the minimum wage went from $9.25 an hour to $10. In Oregon, it went from $11.25 to $12. In Nevada, workers with health insurance will have an $8 minimum wage and workers without health coverage will get $9, up from $8.25. The minimum wage in Portland, Oregon, went from $12.50 to $13.25. Chicago rose from $13 to $14. More than a dozen other cities—most of them in California—and three counties had increases, too. The problem is that many workers, even those who are still employed, aren’t getting the hours they need to get by. 

Congressional Republicans are ready and eager to see the expanded unemployment insurance of the CARES Act expire at the end of July, and Senate Republicans are dragging their feet on the next coronavirus-related economic relief bill. Boy, is that ever the opposite of what voters want.

New polling from Data for Progress finds that a whopping 69% of voters say the CARES Act helped them or someone in their household. That includes 69% of Republicans, with just 19% saying it didn’t help anyone in their household. Even more voters—74%—support the CARES Act, including 64% of Republicans.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit working parents hard, and when I say working parents, I mean mostly working mothers. Unemployment is high for everyone, but it’s worse for women than for men, and women are more likely to have left the labor market or to be thinking about quitting their jobs. Relatedly, the brunt of caring for children suddenly at home all day every day is falling on women.

The childcare industry, meanwhile, is suffering, putting more than 325,000 people—overwhelmingly women, and nearly half Black, Asian, or Latino—out of work since February. If childcare centers go out of business, as threatens to happen without government help, then those women’s jobs remain gone, and other women’s ability to work is threatened by the disproportionate amount of child care they end up shouldering. The case for a major government funding program could not be clearer, but somehow it hasn’t happened.

News broke last week that meatpacking companies exported a record amount of pork to China after using warnings of shortages to get Donald Trump to order them to stay open despite massive coronavirus outbreaks in their plants. Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren are not letting that issue go, sending a letter to the CEOs of top meatpacking companies.

Warren and Booker have questions for those CEOs about exports and price increases. “These actions raise questions about the circumstances of the president’s executive order, your honesty with the American public about the reasons for higher food prices, and your commitment to providing a safe, affordable and abundant food supply for the nation,” they wrote in their letter.

Schools are a huge part of the economy—not just a place teachers and support staff and clerical workers and custodians work, but a place parents rely on to care for their kids so they can go to work. That means, as National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García said in a statement, “The American economy cannot recover if schools can’t reopen.” But reopening schools has to be done right, and without sacrificing students’ education, she continued, saying “we cannot properly reopen schools if funding is slashed and students don’t have what they need to be safe, learn and succeed.”

The NEA has offered its own guidance for reopening schools, calling for decisions rooted in science, with educators included in decision-making (they know their classrooms best, after all), access to personal protective equipment for students and school staff alike, and attention to equity in a pandemic that has hit Black and Latino communities especially hard. The union also calls for school systems to learn from the inequities exposed by the sudden move to remote learning, in which some students had computers and internet access and quiet places to learn while other students had none of those things. The NEA guidance is long, detailed, and thoughtful—and if you have many teacher friends, you may have heard that state reopening plans are … not necessarily those things.