Bernie Pushes For $15/hour, Does THIS After His Employees Ask For it

And the morons on the left still want to vote for him…

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave his campaign staff a lesson in how a $15 minimum wage works when it is implemented.

His staff complained this week that they were not being paid the $15 minimum wage that he is advocating for everyone, Vox reported.

The underlying issue is that while the Sanders campaign’s collective bargaining agreement with its staff union sets hourly pay above $15, there are also salaried workers on the team.

Field staff earn $36,000 a year, which would be above minimum wage on a standard workweek, but Sanders field personnel say they’re actually working about 60 hours a week — for an hourly wage of $13. Long hours are typical of campaign work (you have a limited span of time in which to win the thing, after all), but these particular positions fall into a kind of legal and sociocultural black hole.

The norm in America was that low-status workers would be paid an hourly wage and thus be eligible for overtime pay if they worked long hours.

Salaried workers wouldn’t necessarily get overtime for pulling long shifts, but salaried work was associated with high-skill, high-status, well-compensated white-collar work.

But capitalism abhors a vacuum, so over time, more and more low-paid workers found themselves in the category of being salaried and ineligible for overtime.

The Obama administration tried to tackle this with a Labor Department regulation mandating overtime for anyone earning less than $47,000, but it was challenged in court and the Trump administration elected not to defend the rule, instead writing a new rule that set the threshold at $35,000.

At an annual salary just below that threshold, Sanders’s field staff would be collecting lots of overtime and thus earning more than $36,000, but instead, their salary was pegged (perhaps not coincidentally) to be just above the exempt threshold.

“As union members, the Bernie 2020 campaign staff have access to myriad protections and benefits secured by their one-of-a-kind union contract, including many internal avenues to democratically address any number of ongoing workplace issues, including changes to pay, benefits, and other working conditions,” a statement from the union that represents the workers said to The Washington Post.

“We look forward to continuing to work closely with our members and the management of the Bernie 2020 campaign to ensure all workers have dignity and respect in the workplace.”

“I’m very proud to be the first presidential candidate to recognize a union and negotiate a union contract,” Sen. Sanders said in an interview with the Des Moines Register.

And that contract was ratified by the employees of the campaign, and it not only provides pay of at least $15 an hour, it also provides, I think, the best health care benefits that any employer can provide for our field organizers.”

“It does bother me that people are going outside of the process and going to the media,” the senator said.

“That is really not acceptable. It is really not what labor negotiations are about, and it’s improper,” he said.

And the Democrat presidential candidate addressed the issue is a way that many businesses are going to address it if he gets his $15 minimum wage. He cut their hours, Newsweek reported.

The workers wanted more cash and what they got was less hours. That is how math works. That is how the economy works. It is an example of what happens if there is a $15 minimum wage.

Src: The Federalist Papers