Deborah Montesano
April 22, 2015
An eloquent plea went out from a cook for the U.S. Senate as he prepared to participate in a strike on Wednesday. The day-long walkout by low-wage workers in Washington’s federal buildings was organized by Good Jobs Nation. It includes janitors and food handlers.
Bertrand Olotara, the cook in question, wrote a powerful editorial for The Guardian, illustrating why the walkout is necessary. He wrote:
“I am walking off my job because I want the presidential hopefuls to know that I live in poverty.”
He’s a single father who makes $12 an hour. Even though he has a second job and works 70 hours a week, he struggles to make ends meet. Paying the rent, buying school supplies, feeding his children — all are difficult in spite of working many times more hours than the senators he serves. Even clocking in for 70 hours, he has to rely on assistance to feed his children.
“I hate to admit it, but I have to use food stamps so that my kids don’t go to bed hungry.
“I’ve done everything that politicians say you need to do to get ahead and stay ahead: I work hard and play by the rules; I even graduated from college and worked as a substitute teacher for five years. But I got laid-off and now I’m stuck trying to make ends meet with dead-end service jobs.”
Olotara laments that senators neither notice nor seem to care about the poverty of the workers that surround them. Actually, the situation is even worse than a case of apathy. The GOP is actively hostile toward these workers.
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Good Jobs Nation isn’t bothering to address the hopeless, GOP-dominated Congress. Their rally on the front lawn of the U.S. Capitol has a very specific goal. They want to convince President Obama and the array of presidential hopefuls that the executive branch must intervene to stop federal contractors from exploiting workers with low wages and the absence of benefits.
The demands of the protestors are straightforward. They want two executive orders. One would award contracts to employers who paid at least $15 an hour, with benefits. The other would support workers’ collective bargaining rights.
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It is even more telling that it’s the foreign press that is reporting the story. Anyone checking the links in what I’ve written here will see that they come from The Guardian in the UK and Al Jazeera America. Good luck finding it in the mainstream press. I know because I tried. American media may come late to the story, after the rally is long gone, but they fail at providing these low-wage workers with visibility.
[Same thing happened with Occupy Wall Street.]
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