Pundits talk about which faction won last night, they won't tell you who lost: The American worker

[DonViejo]

GOP’s quiet election scandal: What Tuesday’s results really mean for workers
When pundits talk about which faction won last night, they won't tell you who lost: The American worker. Here's why

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

When pundits talk about which faction won last night, they won't tell you who lost: The American worker

It’s the morning after a primary Election Day, the smoke has cleared and the pundits have spoken. They tell us that the portent for November is obvious and the 2016 election will be shaped by what happened in places like Kentucky and Georgia. What they are far less likely to discuss is what the result of elections mean for people in their real lives.

This piece by Corey Robin in the New York Times gives us a hint about what that might be. He talks about a recent study from Gordon Lafer, a political scientist from the University of Oregon who published a paper for the Economic Policy Institute on bills affecting workers all over the country. The bills involved unemployment insurance, sick days, childcare, minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, etc. These are meat and potatoes issues for hundreds of millions of Americans. And what he found was that across the board, where Republicans had the power, they passed legislation to roll back workers’ rights and make individual employees weaker in the workplace.

Here’s a neat trick. Employers are allowed to pay waiters and waitresses less than the federal minimum wage because they get tips. But they are required to pay the non-tipped staffed — busboys, dishwashers, etc. — the full minimum wage. Republican lawmakers are getting around this by allowing restaurant owners to force their employees to pool their tips, thereby turning the busboys and dishwashers into tipped workers and allowing owners to pay them below the the minimum wage as well. Everybody loses money — except the employer. And you’d better believe they sold this on the basis of being “fair” to the non-tipped workers. After all, those waiters and waitresses had been getting the big bucks, right? Not really: According to Robin “the poverty rate among waiters and waitresses is 250 percent higher than it is among the general work force.”

In other states they passed laws allowing employers to pocket the tips for themselves, which makes it much simpler all around. And they deserve them, don’t they? They are the job creators, after all. But what it all adds up to is simple wage theft. Employers are stealing their employees blind.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/21/gops_quiet_election_scandal_what_tuesdays_results_really_mean_for_workers/