Fast food chains stealing from low-wage workers

No matter how small the haul is, a thief is a thief, right? If a poverty-wage fast-food worker sneaks out a couple of burgers to take home to the kids, the bosses yell: “Thief!”
But what do you call it when the bosses steal from those same workers? How about outrageous, disgusting – or simply unbelievable? Well, believe it or not, it’s happening every day in multiple ways, and not by a few bad apples, but in what has become routine corporate practice by McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, and other hugely-profitable giants.
Technically it’s called “wage theft,” and it involves such slick-fingered moves as erasing hours from employee time cards, requiring off-the-clock work, not paying for overtime hours, refusing to reimburse workers for gas they bought while making deliveries, or inventing uniform fees and other deductions that illegally drop pay below the minimum wage. Come on – isn’t it shameful enough that these global behemoths pay rock-bottom wages, without them circling back like low-life pickpockets to steal from their own employees? This is not just corporate thievery, it’s thuggery.
How low can fast-food greed go? So low that the top bosses at headquarters play a sleazy game of Hide & Seek, pretending that they have nothing to do with this rip off. Personnel practices, they airily claim, are left to local franchisees, who are “independent business owners.” Bovine excrement! Corporate central dictates how much mustard each franchise can put on a bun, so to think that it doesn’t monitor every dime in payroll is a ludicrous lie.
In a recent survey of fast-food workers, nine out of ten said they have had wages stolen by their bosses. This thievery has become business as usual, and it’s worse than shameful – it’s slimy. For more information, go to the National Employment Law Project: www.nelp.org.


Pulling the curtain on an anti-minimum wage front group

In Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the “wizard’ turns out to be a phony – just an old guy sitting behind a curtain, using his booming voice to spew nonsense in a vain effort to fool people.
But now, a century after Baum’s fictional Oz, a real-life incarnation of the phony wizard has been discovered, hiding behind not one, but two curtains. He’s recently been booming out his nonsense in full-page newspaper ads that are hyperbolic screeds against economists who favor raising the minimum wage, denouncing them as “radical researchers.”
The ad directs readers to a website named MinimumWage.com, implying that it’s the site of independent, unbiased, non-radical economists. But, no – it’s not a group at all, just a curtain. Who’s behind it? Something that goes by the name of The Employment Policies Institute, which sounds rock solid, but it, too, is just a curtain.
Go to 1090 Vermont Avenue in Washington, the address of this “institute,” and you won’t find any economists or any other employees, for the institute has none. But you will find the old wizard sitting there – manipulating statistics, twisting logic, and spewing out economic nonsense.
The wiz turns out to be nothing but a 71-year-old PR and advertising hatchet man named Richard Berman. Various corporations pay him to set up official-sounding front groups that advance their political agenda. The Employment Policy Institute, for example, is a front for the big restaurant chains. They want to keep profiting by paying poverty wages to their workers, so they’ve hired Berman to trash any and all who support raising America’s wage floor.
The “Institute” provides a varnish of academic legitimacy for unvarnished corporate greed. As the watchdog group, PRWatch, says of Berman’s flim flam, “They are little more than phony experts on retainer.”

Mount Pompeo blows smoke over GMO Foods


In 79 AD, Pompeii was buried in ash by a volcanic eruption. Now, nearly 2000 years later, an eruption of hot legislative ash is spewing from Rep. Mike Pompeo, threatening to gag consumers with gas and ash.
Pompeo is the right-wing congress critter from the Ideological Republic of Kochistan. A longtime employee and lackey of the Koch brothers, this Republican from Wichita, Kansas, became the billionaire brothers’ personal congressman in 2010, when Koch money squeegeed him into a House seat. A Koch Industries lawyer was even dispatched to run his office, and Mike dutifully mouths the company line in Washington.
But in early April, with pressure building up within him to do a major favor for his patrons, Mount Pompeo blew. He became the lead sponsor of an industry-written bill that meets both the ideological and profiteering goals of Koch Industries, Monsanto, and the Grocery Manufacturers of America (the lobbying front for Big Food). Their bill would let brand-name food giants continue deceiving consumers about the use of genetically altered organisms in their food products.
More than 90 percent of consumers want food manufacturers to label any products containing those risky GMOs so they can decide for themselves whether to buy reengineered foods. Some 26 states are now considering laws to require these right-to-know labels. So here comes Pompeo, spewing ash and noxious gas, not only to keep families in the dark about what they’re eating, but also to snuff out their political rights.
His bill bans any state from passing labeling laws and says any federal labeling provision must be “voluntary.” Also, it usurps the scientific process to declare by legislative fiat that these altered foods are “safe” and can even be labeled as “natural.”

To keep up with Pompeo’s toxic eruptions, go to www.CenterForFoodSaftey.org.
“Rep. Pompeo to Introduce Koch-funded, Monsanto-Backed, Voluntary GMO Food Labeling Bill,” www.ecowatch.com, April 4, 2014.
“Don’t Let the Big Food Lobby Block State Labeling,” www.centerforfoodsafety.org, April 2014.
“Leaked Document Reveals Big Food Lobby’s Plans to Preempt State GMO Labeling,” www.centerforfoodsafety.org, January 7, 2014.

“OCA Calls on Consumers to Persuade Rep. Pompeo to Abandon Plans to Support Industry Bill that Would Preempt GMO Labeling Laws,” April 1, 2014.
“Koch Industries and Monsanto Team up to End Your Right to Know,” www.www.centerforfoodsafety.org, April 3, 2014.