News & Commentary

April 26, 2017

Alexa Kissinger

Alexa Kissinger is a student at Harvard Law School.

This morning Senators Bernie Sanders and Patty Murray along with 21 Democratic members of Congress came together to support a $15 minimum wage. The Raise the Wage Act would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, jumping to $9.20 an hour upon passage and adding around dollar a year until it reaches $15 in 2024. The minimum wage would rise automatically after that with the country’s median wages. The bill as proposed would also gradually do away with the tipped minimum wage.

According to POLITICO, Minneapolis attorney Doug Seaton, described as an an anti-union executive, is on President Trump’s shortlist to fill one of the two empty seats on the NLRB. Reports say none of the three candidates is pro-union, but Seaton — who calls himself a “lawyer for employers” — stands apart.

The New York Times reported that eleven current and former Fox News employees filed a class-action lawsuit against the network, accusing it of “abhorrent, intolerable, unlawful and hostile racial discrimination.” The lawsuits claim that Fox News employees repeatedly complained about racial discrimination to current network executives but that no action was taken and that the discriminatory behavior continued. This lawsuit comes on the heels of a spate of employee complaints of sexual harassment and the public ousting of Bill O’Reilly.

The New York Times published a January study from the Department of Energy showing that the clean energy industry employed more Americans than the coal industry last year. In 2016, 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power jobs, 373,000 in solar energy, and only 160,000 in coal.

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