This Fight Is Our Fight, by Elizabeth Warren: on Jobs

Elizabeth Warren: How to advance when "flex work" requires 24/7 availability?

How does the guy in the stockroom sign up for auto-repair classes at a nearby vo-tech school if McDonald's won't give him his schedule more than a week in advance? Working two or three jobs is an economic necessity for them as they try to support their families, but with shifting hours in most places, it's hard for them to piece together schedules that will let them show up when called. Some say they look for all-night cleaning jobs so they can have their days free to take second and third jobs.

Elizabeth Warren: Workers earning $7.25 cannot keep above poverty line

I'm pretty hard-core about this issue. The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still love in poverty--period. But at $7.25 an hour, a mom working a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage job cannot keep herself and her baby above the poverty line. This is wrong--and this was something the U. S. Congress could make better if we'd just raise the minimum wage. We could fix this now.

Elizabeth Warren: Republican majority could ring death knell to unions

For decades, Republicans had been fighting unions on virtually every issue that touched working people--the minimum wage, paid family leave, fair scheduling laws, access to affordable health care, Medicaid, Medicare, and on and on. Republicans had also assaulted unions head-on by trying to shut down the National Labor Relations Board, which deals with companies that violate labor laws, and by attacking the Department of Labor's efforts to protect unions.

Lamar Alexander: If I could decide, there'd be no minimum wage

Senator Alexander replied that if he could decide, there would be no minimum.

No minimum wage at all. Not $15.00. Not $10.00. Not $7.25. Not $5.00. Not $1.00.

The comment was delivered quite casually. It wasn't a grand pronouncement shouted by a crazy, hair-on-fire ideologue. Instead, a long time U.S. senator stated with calm confidence that if an employer could find someone desperate enough to take a job for fifty cents an hour, then that employer should have the right to pay that wage and not a penny more. He might as well have said that employers could eat cake and the workers could scramble for whatever crumbs fall off the table.