'We Suck' on Minimum Wage, U.S. Labor Chief Says; Christie Has 'Head in the Sand'

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.bloomberg.com

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has “got his head in the sand” when it comes to the plight of minimum-wage earners in his state, U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said.

“I’ve met with minimum-wage workers in New Jersey,” Perez said today at a Bloomberg News event in Washington. “I’ve met with folks who -- the only raise they got, they’re baggage handlers at Newark Airport, and the only raise they got was when the voters increased the minimum wage.”

President Barack Obama and his administration have been pushing Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. Most Republicans in Congress and many Republican governors, including Christie, oppose the increase. The Democratic-led Senate has tried and failed repeatedly to advance the issue, and House Speaker John Boehner has said his Republican-led chamber won’t consider it.

“All the Democrats and the president want to talk about is minimum wage,” Christie, 52, told reporters today at a diner in Bordentown, New Jersey, where he was campaigning for congressional candidate Tom MacArthur, a Republican from Toms River. “The reason they want to do that is because they have not had the kind of growth in this country that we should be having in terms of wages and better jobs.”

New Jersey voters last November approved a constitutional amendment that will increase the...
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Chris Christie berated by U.S. Labor Secretary over minimum wage comments

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nj.com

In this Sept. 14, 2014 file photo, protesters participate in a rally outside a McDonaldis on Chicago's south side as labor organizers escalate their campaign raise the minimum wage for employees to $15 an hour. As Democrats across the country make an election-year push to raise the minimum wage, they are also looking to motivate younger people, minorities and others in their base to go to the polls on Nov. 4th. The party has put questions on the ballot in five states asking voters whether the minimum wage should be increased. TRENTON — Speaking at a Bloomberg News event in Washington D.C. today, U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez said Gov. Chris Christie has “got his head in the sand” when it comes to the nation's lowest-paid workers. Earlier this week, Christie made headlines by saying he was "tired" of hearing about the minimum wage as a mid-term election issue. According to a Bloomberg News report, Perez noted that when it comes to a national minimum wage, the U.S. is a dismal third-from-dead-last among the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes the U.S., the United Kingdom, most Western European nations, Scandinavia, Mexico and Australia. "I mean, we suck,” Perez said. Minimum wage in New Jersey is now $8.25, a base rate that was hiked just this year, after voters passed a legislatively-referred...

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Daylight Saving Time Is Bad For Worker Health

Photo Credit:  ©2014 Jon L Gelman, All rights reserved Every year,  the time change swing mandated by Congress alters the clock we follow. Our bodies will suffer and accidents will happen and fatalities in the workplace will increase. The cycle is about to begin yet again as  Daylight Savings Time is about to end. Today's post by Mike Nudelman is shared from businessinsider.com Daylight saving time (DST) is about to end, and an interesting thing that you might not realize is how such a small shift in our time can have a large impact on our body clock and our health. These negative impacts of daylight saving time even cost us real money in lost productivity. DST starts at 2:00 a.m. (the clock gets turned forward to 3:00 a.m.) on the second Sunday in March and ends at 2:00 a.m. (the clock gets turned back to 1:00 a.m.) on the first Sunday of November. It was enacted during World War I to decrease energy use. Benjamin Franklin first advocated for the practice in 1784 because he noticed that people used candles at night and slept past dawn in the mornings. By shifting time by an hour during the summer, they would burn fewer candles and not sleep through the morning sunlight. The debate still rages as to if this time-switch does save energy, but along the way we've seen signs that it has negative effects on our health and the economy. Surprising health impacts Transitions associated with the start and end of DST disturb sleep patterns, and make people restless at night, which results in sleepiness the next day, even during a "Fall back" period, since when we Fall Back, we might have trouble adjusting to going to sleep "later" after the time change. This sleepiness leads to a loss of productivity and an increase in "cyberloafing" in which... [Click here to see the rest of this post]

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Former workers, whistleblowers shed light on nuclear site safety setbacks

RICHLAND, Wash. – On the banks of the Columbia River, miles of open land sit undeveloped behind barbed wire fences. A handful of mysterious structures dot the landscape, remnants from the early days of the Cold War. Passing by the old Hanford nuclear production complex can feel like a journey into the past.

Known simply as Hanford, workers here produced plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb and for many of the nation’s current nuclear warheads. The site was first developed in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and ceased plutonium production nearly 50 years later, leaving behind 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste. Spanning 586 square miles, it is now ground zero for the largest cleanup project in America.
For 27 years, Mike Geffre was part of that effort, working in an area known as the tank farms: 177 massive underground storage tanks, which hold up to 1 million gallons each of the country’s most toxic nuclear waste.
First built in the 1940s, many of the original single-shell tanks leaked and contaminated the local groundwater. But starting in the 1960s, the federal government built stronger double-shell tanks that were supposed to hold the waste securely until it could be treated and sent to a deep geological repository for final keeping. Geffre, who maintained instruments used to monitor chemical and radioactive waste, spent much of his time looking for leaks in the supposedly unleakable tanks.

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NCAA facing lawsuit over minimum wage laws

Today's post is shared from Jurist.org/

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) [official website] was Monday for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) [materials]. The lawsuit, brought by a former college athlete against the NCAA and NCAA Division 1 Member Schools, alleges that defendants both jointly agreed and conspired to violate the wage and hour provisions [materials] of the FLSA and that the NCAA affords better treatment to its students in work study part-time employment programs than its student athletes. Work study participants, "students who work at food service counters or sell programs or usher at athletic events, or who wait on tables or wash dishes in dormitories," qualify as temporary employees of the NCAA and are thus paid at least a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour for their non-academic work. According to the suit, student athletes engage in a more rigorous commitment than work study students, from time required to stricter, more exacting supervision by coaches and trainers. The complaint goes on to say that without the student athletes' performance many student jobs such as ushering fans and selling programs would not exist. Plaintiff is seeking damages for herself and those similarly situated who elect to opt-in to this action pursuant to the collective action section of the FLSA, in order to remedy the defendants' violation of the FLSA hourly wage provisions that have deprived plaintiff and others of lawfully earned...

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English: National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) logo. Source: http://www1.ncaa.org/eprise/main/Public/mlp/promotions_special_events/pe_web/promo_manual/memos/identity.pdf Converted by User:King of Hearts from :Image:National Collegiate Athletic Association logo.png using Inkscape. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thousands of federal workers on extended paid leave

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

Tens of thousands of federal workers are being kept on paid leave for at least a month — and often for longer stretches that can reach a year or more — while they wait to be punished for misbehavior or cleared and allowed to return to work, government records show. During a three-year period that ended last fall, more than 57,000 employees were sent home for a month or longer. The tab for these workers exceeded $775 million in salary alone. The extensive use of administrative leave continues despite government personnel rules that limit paid leave for employees facing discipline to “rare circumstances” in which the employee is considered a threat. The long-standing rules were written in an effort to curb waste and deal quickly with workers accused of misconduct. And the comptroller general, the top federal official responsible for auditing government finances and practices, has repeatedly ruled that federal workers should not be sidelined for long periods for any reason. But a report by the Government Accountability Office, first made public by The Washington Post on its Web site Monday, found that 53,000 civilian employees were kept home for one to three months during the three fiscal years that ended in September 2013. About 4,000 were idled for three months to a year and several hundred for one to three years. This is the first time the government has calculated the scope and cost of administrative leave. Auditors found that supervisors used wide...

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Doctor in New York City Tests Positive for Ebola

Today's post is shared from nytimes.com/ A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea tested positive for the Ebola virus Thursday, becoming the city’s first diagnosed case. The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center on Thursday and placed in isolation while health care workers spread out across the city to trace anyone he might have come into contact with in recent days. A further test will be conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to confirm the initial test. While officials have said they expected isolated cases of the disease to arrive in New York eventually, and had been preparing for this moment for months, the first case highlighted the challenges surrounding containment of the virus, especially in a crowded metropolis. Even as the authorities worked to confirm that Mr. Spencer was infected with Ebola, it emerged that he traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the subway on Wednesday night, when he went to a bowling alley, and then took a taxi home. The next morning, he reported having a temperature of 103 degrees, raising questions about his health while he was out in public. People infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air. As people become sicker, the viral load in the body builds, and they become more and more contagious. Dr. Spencer’s travel history and the timing of the onset of his symptoms led health officials to...

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