Metaright

Burger King cook and cashier Kevin Ford was happy to receive a small goody bag from management as a reward for never calling in sick. But people on the internet were less thrilled. They believed Ford deserved more — over $400,000 more.

Last May, Ford was given a coffee cup, a movie ticket, some candy and few other small items for working over 20 years at Burger King without ever using a sick day, meaning he never took time off unexpectedly.

"I was happy to get this because I know not everyone gets something," said Ford, who works at the Burger King in Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

Ford, a big believer in appreciating small gestures in life, showed off the goody bag on TikTok. The video went viral, partly because people were outraged on his behalf.

While many on social media said they respected Ford's work ethic and positive attitude, they also argued that he deserved more than a bag of treats for prioritizing his job over his health.

That led his daughter, Seryna, to start a GoFundMe campaign last June in hopes of raising some money for her father to visit his grandchildren in Texas.

She set the goal to $200. Over the next year, the campaigned amassed over $400,000 in donations, while people flooded Ford's inbox with messages of how he reminded them of their own father, brother or friend.

"I think they just wanted to show my employer and other CEOs that people deserve to be congratulated, rewarded, even just acknowledged for their hard work and dedication," he said.
Like Ford, many restaurant workers don't get paid sick leave

As a single father with four daughters, Ford never took sick days because frankly, he couldn't afford to. Ford's job — like more than half of restaurant and accommodation jobs as of 2020 — does not offer paid sick leave, meaning workers typically do not get paid for missing work due to illness unless they dip into their paid vacation time.

Ford said he only ever missed work for medical reasons twice in his Burger King career — once for a surgery related to his sleep apnea, another for a spine procedure caused by working long hours on his feet. Even then, he used his vacation days to take that time off.

"I'd be laying down in front of the fryers because I was in so much pain and people would tell me to go home, but I was thinking about the power bill or the water bill," Ford added.

Ford is not alone. Across the country, many workers make the difficult choice between taking unpaid time off or muscling through their shift when they're sick. That issue magnified over the pandemic, as people quit their jobs in droves due to a lack of paid sick leave.

A Burger King spokesperson told NPR, "Decisions regarding employee benefits are made at the sole discretion of its individual franchisees including the franchise group that employs Kevin Ford."
Ford had deep regrets about how often he worked

Despite the overwhelming support on social media, Ford has been using his new platform to warn people: "Don't be like me."

His job was not worth the heavy toll on his body and mental health, he said. It was also difficult for his four daughters, who often saw Ford come home from work after 10 p.m.

Ford said he learned that lesson the hard way.

Before he went viral on social media, Ford said he was at the lowest point of his life. He was dealing with a divorce, the deaths of his parents and the departure of his children, who had grown up and moved away. After work, Ford would drive for hours around his neighborhood reflecting on his life and what he would have done differently.

"There was nothing but work in my life," Ford said. "Looking back, what was it all for? Why I was not missing days that I could've spent with my kids and my wife?"

That's why Ford has described the fundraiser as a second chance. Not only does he have enough money for his retirement and to help pay for his grandchildren's college educations, but he can also afford to take days off work and make up for lost time with his children.

He plans to keep working at Burger King, largely because he likes his coworkers.

"That's also my family there. We're fun and funny," he said. "When it's not like that, then I guess I'll retire."

Investigation findings: U.S. Department of Labor investigators found the employers allowed 33 employees – 14- and 15-year-olds – to work outside of legally allowed hours, a violation of the child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Specifically, the employer let the minors work past 7 p.m. while school was in session, past 9 p.m. between June 1 and Labor Day, more than three hours when school was in session, more than eight hours on non-school days and more than 18 hours during school weeks.

In addition, the employers failed to keep accurate records documenting the ages of the minor employees.

Civil money penalties assessed: $26,103 to address child labor violations.

Quote: “Federal law requires employers must balance their needs with their obligations to provide young workers with useful work experiences without jeopardizing their well-being or schooling opportunities,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Nicolas Ratmiroff in Tampa, Florida. “We encourage, employers, parents, educators and young workers to use the variety of resources we provide to help understand their obligations and rights under the law.”

Background: From fiscal year 2020 through 2022, the division assessed employers more than $2.8 million in penalties and conducted more than 500 child labor investigations affecting nearly 2,900 minors in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Employers can also contact the Wage and Hour Division at its toll-free number, 1-866-4-US-WAGE. Learn more about the Wage and Hour Division, including information about protections for young workers on the department’s YouthRules! website. Workers can call the Wage and Hour Division confidentially with questions – regardless of where they are from – and the department can speak with callers in more than 200 languages.

A federal investigation has found that a San Antonio wire drawing company could have prevented an employee from suffering fatal injuries by following required workplace safety standards.

Investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened an inspection in February 2023 at WMC San Antonio LLC and learned the company allowed employees to ride atop an unsecured, site-made forklift attachment to move wire mesh bundles at the plant. At the time of the incident, the deceased worker was transporting bundles to flat-bed trailers when the attachment slid off the forks, causing them to fall. The employer had tasked workers with moving material from the plant to another WMC location as the company prepared to close the San Antonio facility.

OSHA issued WMC a willful citation for failing to provide fall protection for employees working at heights up to 13 feet. The company also received a second willful citation for exposing workers to fall and struck-by hazards by allowing them to ride on improper and unsecured forklift attachments. The agency has proposed $299,339 in penalties for its violations.

“WMC San Antonio ignored the well-documented dangers of using unauthorized forklift attachments and an employee’s family, friends and co-workers are left to grieve their loss,” said OSHA Area Director Alex Porter in San Antonio, Texas. “This company publicly claims that employee safety and well-being is a priority but then unnecessarily exposed workers to serious dangers. In this case, actions would have meant much more than words.”

Founded in 2003 in Jacksonville, Florida, WMC San Antonio is now based in The Woodlands. The company also has mill facilities in Texas as well as California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

OSHA’s stop falls website offers safety information and video presentations in English and Spanish to teach workers about fall hazards and proper safety procedures.

WMC San Antonio LLC has 15 business days from receipt of citation and penalties to comply, request an informal conference with OSHA's area director, or contest the findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

To hear almost anyone tell it, racial preferences in university admissions are dead. But this pervasive sense of finality belies a curious silence in the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions. The Court never expressly overrules the line of precedent that has allowed universities to discriminate for the last 50 years. Without a direct overruling, how can we know whether the Supreme Court has ended racial preferences or simply renovated the existing case law?

A careful reading of the Chief Justice’s opinion and an understanding of his judicial philosophy indicates that the Court has left universities with no realistic means to rely on racial preferences in admissions, even if the case law stating otherwise lingers in a vegetative state. Four key cases have formed the foundation for racial preferences in student admissions, with a case called Grutter v. Bollinger as the cornerstone. The Students for Fair Admissions case presented the Court with a choice: either apply the existing test under Grutter and friends or uproot the whole line of precedent.

And here’s the odd silence sitting at the very heart of Students for Fair Admissions: It is no easy task to tell which approach the Chief Justice took in his majority opinion. His silence on whether Grutter remains good law is even more striking given that the petitioner in the case and 23 amici supporting the petitioner openly called for the Court to overrule Grutter. Everyone expected the Court to say something about it.

Yet the Chief Justice only seemed to hold that Harvard and UNC did not satisfy the existing test for racial preferences in admissions, known as strict scrutiny. Sort of. While he did not overturn or even openly challenge Grutter and friends, his opinion seems to directly contradict the key holding in those cases. So, did he change the rules entirely? That question requires us to answer two others: Does Students for Fair Admissions conflict with Grutter’s reasoning and thus quietly bury it? And would the Chief Justice have had a reason for holding a private graveside funeral for Grutter without publishing an obituary?

The answer to the first question seems to be yes, but it requires some unpacking. The Chief Justice seems to part ways with Grutter’s foundational holding. Grutter’s “strict scrutiny” test requires two things: first, that the university’s use of race be justified by a compelling interest, and second, that the university pursue that interest in a narrowly tailored way (i.e., with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw).

Grutter and friends said universities had a compelling interest in the “educational benefits” of a diverse student body. Racial diversity on campus, said Grutter, “promotes cross-racial understanding,” “breaks down racial stereotypes,” and makes classroom discussions “livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting.” The Court lumped on additional aphorisms in a follow-up case called Fisher II: the “robust exchange of ideas,” “preparation for an increasingly diverse workforce,” and “cultivation of a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.”

This “educational benefits” interest is the key to racial preferences in student admissions, as the Supreme Court has rejected every other proposed interest, such as remedying past racial wrongs or mirroring society’s racial demographics. But the Chief Justice’s opinion seems to now reject the “educational benefits” interest, leaving racial preferences without any compelling interest at all.

In articulating their interests, Harvard and UNC figured they would be safe if they just paraphrased the interests that the Supreme Court approved in Grutter and Fisher II. But the Chief Justice was not satisfied. He claimed that the universities’ interests—lifted almost verbatim from the Court’s own opinions—“are not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.” How, Roberts opines, can a court decide whether an exchange of ideas has achieved peak robustness? These interests, Roberts claims, are “inescapably imponderable.”

Right or not—and I think he is right—this is a clear departure from Grutter and Fisher II. In fact, the Chief Justice here makes the exact argument that the dissenters made in Fisher II. That dissent, joined by the Chief Justice, argued that the University of Texas had not articulated its interests “with any degree of specificity.” And the interests asserted by the University of Texas were—wait for it—almost exactly the same as the ones asserted by Harvard and UNC: cross-racial understanding, stereotype obliteration, and so on.

In other words, the Chief Justice seems to have quietly transformed the Fisher II dissent into the law of the land. And, to quote the mystic Sybil Trelawney from Harry Potter, “neither can live while the other survives”—if the Chief Justice has breathed life into the Fisher II dissent, then Grutter is dead. Or is it “mostly dead,” as the much more competent mystic Miracle Max might put it? After all, perhaps universities can satisfy the Chief Justice’s demand for greater specificity in articulating their interests in the educational benefits of diversity. I suspect this is an impossible task, and I suspect the Chief Justice knows it.

Consider, for example, how a university might make its interests more concrete and measurable, as the Chief Justice demands. A university could say, for instance, that cross-racial understanding will be achieved once our student body is 30 percent black and Hispanic. More specific? Yes. But the university will have only veered away from Scylla (overly vague interests) to run into the domain of Charybdis (unlawful quotas). While the Supreme Court gave its blessing to racial preferences, it has always made one thing clear: racial quotas or their functional equivalents are off-limits. In fact, under Grutter and friends, universities must be fuzzy about how much they rely on race because race should be just one unquantified factor in a holistic review of a student’s application. This is why the Court struck down a point system used by the University of Michigan that gave minority students a 20-point boost.

So “cross-racial understanding” is too vague, but anything too specific strays into quota territory. Universities facing this conundrum have drummed up a magical notion called “critical mass.” How will courts know when a university has achieved its diversity interests? When they’ve reached a critical mass of minority students. And what is a critical mass? Whatever number of minority students is enough to satisfy the university’s diversity interests. Grutter blessed this dizzying circularity, which always winds back to whatever the university deems best. There is simply no daylight left between the overly vague “educational benefits” of diversity and the forbidden quota.

Some observers have pointed to a passage toward the end of the Chief Justice’s opinion as evidence that he blessed narrow uses of racial preferences. He writes that universities can still consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” But I don’t see this as a racial preference at all. For instance, I have white cousins who grew up in China. If one of them wrote a personal essay about the discrimination he faced growing up, then that could be weighed alongside a black applicant’s essay about experiencing discrimination in the United States. This experiential focus is distinct from what the Fisher II dissent called a “bare racial stamp,” in which my cousin’s race would count against him, and the black applicant’s race would count in his favor.

So Grutter seems to be gone, and racial preferences with it. Justice Thomas, in concurrence, agrees: “The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.” And Justice Sotomayor’s dissent agrees with Justice Thomas. If the Chief Justice thought this an unfair characterization of his opinion, he could have said so. Instead, he kept his silence on Grutter’s fate despite responding to other criticisms leveled by the dissents.

This still leaves the question of whether the Chief Justice might have had a reason not to just expressly overrule Grutter and friends if he really meant to end them entirely. The somewhat unsatisfying but likely answer is that the Chief Justice simply does not like to overrule precedent. He is known for his distaste for big dramatic swings. In 2005, at his Senate confirmation hearing, he said, “It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” which “plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness.” His cautious approach was on display recently in Dobbs, where he departed from the majority on overruling abortion precedent and pushed for a “more measured course.”

This would not be the first time the Chief Justice has been accused of overruling major precedent on the sly. In a 2007 campaign finance case that paved the way for Citizens United three years later, Justice Scalia accused the Chief of overruling precedent “without saying so,” calling his opinion “faux judicial restraint” that only causes “judicial obfuscation.” Students for Fair Admissions may be another example of the Chief Justice grappling with his own discomfort about overturning precedent.

Combining a careful look at Grutter and an understanding of Chief Justice Roberts’s reluctance to expressly overturn precedent, we can conclude that Grutter has been silently interred. But we will doubtless see pundits, jurists, and universities pointing out this silence and seeking to leverage it to their own ends—namely, reviving racial preferences. That’s the gamble the Chief Justice has taken. By failing to expressly overrule Grutter, he’s left room for mischief and confusion.

This has happened before. Justice Scalia once referred to a precedent that refused to die despite repeated opinions disavowing it as a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” Grutter may lie uneasy in its coffin as well. One could wish the Chief Justice had gone for the head and put a clear end to Grutter to avoid this trouble. But read in good faith and with both eyes open, it is not too hard to follow the Chief Justice’s reasoning: racial preferences are gone for good.

This article takes the interesting perspective of an anti-consumer bootlicker.

Full text:

Nintendo appears to be on a patent-registering spree as it files over 30 patents related to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

As reported by Automaton, from July 10 - August 4, Nintendo made public a total of 32 patents - 31 of those relating to Tears of the Kingdom. It's not rare or even surprising for Nintendo to claim ownership of its ideas and prevent anyone from copying its homework but the amount of patents, as well as what exactly it is Nintendo has decided to patent, is what's interesting about this lot of filings.

For instance, Link's Ultrahand and Fuse abilities, some of the game's mechanics, NPCs' abilities, and even its loading screens have all been filed for patent by Nintendo. Some of the other elements of the game Nintendo wants to keep safe include Riju’s lightning attack and some of the technical elements of the game that allow Link to interact with the world around him (eg: standing on moving objects, gripping onto ledges, etc.)

It's interesting to see what Nintendo wants to keep for itself in potential future iterations of the Zelda series or just its other games in general - especially since the majority of these things would go totally unnoticed by the average player. We've seen a lot of patents linked to well, Link, in the past but this is the first bout we've found after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, so they probably don't hint towards anything in terms of future content.

It actually makes a lot of sense why Nintendo would be so protective over the inner workings of its game (although this isn't limited to just Tears of the Kingdom or Zelda games in general). For starters, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has already sold two-thirds of what Breath of the Wild managed in six years - just in case you forgot, the Breath of the Wild sequel was released less than three months ago. So it's probably fair that Nintendo doesn't want anyone stealing its ideas for their own games.

Lemmy

I have to try each page and scan the entire thread for my avatar in order to find the exchange the notification was telling me about. It would be very nice if the notification link just jumped directly to the reply.

Source.

The theory that many people feel the work they do is pointless because their jobs are “bullshit” has been confirmed by a new study.

The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others.

The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were “bullshit”—socially useless and meaningless.

Researchers had since suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work, but Mr. Walo found this was only part of the story.

He analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the U.S. working in 21 types of jobs, who were asked if their work gave them “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society” and “the feeling of doing useful work.”

The American Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, found that 19% of respondents answered “never” or “rarely” to the questions whether they had “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society” and “of doing useful work” spread across a range of occupations.

Mr. Walo adjusted the raw data to compare workers with the same degree of routine work, job autonomy and quality of management, and found that in the occupations Graeber thought were useless, the nature of the job still had a large effect beyond these factors.

Those working in business and finance and sales were more than twice as likely to say their jobs were socially useless than others. Managers were 1.9 more likely to say this and office assistants 1.6 times.

“David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs’ theory claims that some jobs are in fact objectively useless, and that these are found more often in certain occupations than in others,” says the study, published in the journal Work, Employment and Society.

"Graeber hit a nerve with his statement. His original article quickly became so popular that within weeks it was translated into more than a dozen languages and reprinted in different newspapers around the world.

"However, the original evidence presented by Graeber was mainly qualitative, which made it difficult to assess the magnitude of the problem.

"This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilized dataset and provides new evidence.

“It finds that working in one of the occupations highlighted by Graeber significantly increases the probability that workers perceive their jobs as socially useless, compared to all others. This article is therefore the first to find quantitative evidence supporting Graeber’s argument.”

Law was the only occupation cited by Graeber as useless where Mr. Walo found no statistically significant evidence that staff found their jobs meaningless.

Mr. Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit or the public sector.

More information: Simon Walo, “Bullshit” After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless, Work, Employment and Society (2023). DOI: 10.1177/09500170231175771

I'm so sick of this! Everyone keeps saying that the trades are desperate for workers, but no company wants to train them. They expect you to be in a good life situation to be able to go to school for the experience, but a lot of us have neither the money nor time to do so! School is expensive, you don't get paid for it, and most of us are one paycheck away from becoming homeless. How is this system sustainable?

Source.

Six straight days of 12-hour driving. Single digit paychecks. The complaints come from workers in vastly different industries: UPS delivery drivers and Hollywood actors and writers.

But they point to an underlying factor driving a surge of labor unrest: The cost to workers whose jobs have changed drastically as companies scramble to meet customer expectations for speed and convenience in industries transformed by technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated those changes, pushing retailers to shift online and intensifying the streaming competition among entertainment companies. Now, from the picket lines, workers are trying to give consumers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to produce a show that can be binged any time or get dog food delivered to their doorstep with a phone swipe.

That workers are overworked and underpaid is an enduring complaint across industries — from delivery drivers to Starbucks baristas and airline pilots — where surges in consumer demand have collided with persistent labor shortages. Workers are pushing back against forced overtime, punishing schedules or company reliance on lower-paid, part-time or contract forces.

At issue for Hollywood screenwriters and actors staging their first simultaneous strikes in 40 years is the way streaming has upended the economics of entertainment, slashing pay and forcing showrunners to produce content faster with smaller teams.

“This seems to happen to many places when the tech companies come in. Who are we crushing? It doesn’t matter,” said Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, a screenwriter and showrunner on the negotiating team for the Writers Guild of America, whose members have been on strike since May. Earlier this month, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists joined the writers’ union on the picket line.

Actors and writers have long relied on residuals, or long-term payments, for reruns and other airings of films and televisions shows. But reruns aren’t a thing on streaming services, where series and films simply land and stay with no easy way, such as box office returns or ratings, to determine their popularity.

Consequently, whatever residuals streaming companies do pay often amount to a pittance, and screenwriters have been sharing tales of receiving single digit checks.

Adam Shapiro, an actor known for the Netflix hit “Never Have I Ever,” said many actors were initially content to accept lower pay for the plethora of roles that streaming suddenly offered. But the need for a more sustainable compensation model gained urgency when it became clear streaming is not a sideshow, but rather the future of the business, he said.

“Over the past 10 years, we realized: ‘Oh, that’s now how Hollywood works. Everything is streaming,’” Shapiro said during a recent union event.

Shapiro, who has been acting for 25 years, said he agreed to a contract offering 20% of his normal rate for “Never Have I Ever” because it seemed like “a great opportunity, and it’s going to be all over the world. And it was. It really was. Unfortunately, we’re all starting to realize that if we keep doing this we’re not going to be able to pay our bills.”

Then there’s the rising use of “mini rooms,” in which a handful of writers are hired to work only during pre-production, sometimes for a series that may take a year to be greenlit, or never get picked up at all.

Sanchez-Witzel, co-creator of the recently released Netflix series “Survival of the Thickest,” said television shows traditionally hire robust writing teams for the duration of production. But Netflix refused to allow her to keep her team of five writers past pre-production, forcing round-the-clock rewrites with just one other writer.

“It’s not sustainable and I’ll never do that again,” she said.

Sanchez-Witzel said she was struck by the similarities between her experience and those of UPS drivers, some of whom joined the WGA for protests as they threatened their own potentially crippling strike. UPS and the Teamsters last week reached a tentative contract staving off the strike.

Jeffrey Palmerino, a full-time UPS driver near Albany, New York, said forced overtime emerged as a top issue during the pandemic as drivers coped with a crush of orders on par with the holiday season. Drivers never knew what time they would get home or if they could count on two days off each week, while 14-hour days in trucks without air conditioning became the norm.

“It was basically like Christmas on steroids for two straight years. A lot of us were forced to work six days a week, and that is not any way to live your life,” said Palmerino, a Teamsters shop steward.

Along with pay raises and air conditioning, the Teamsters won concessions that Palmerino hopes will ease overwork. UPS agreed to end forced overtime on days off and eliminate a lower-paid category of drivers who work shifts that include weekends, converting them to full-time drivers. Union members have yet to ratify the deal.

The Teamsters and labor activists hailed the tentative deal as a game-changer that would pressure other companies facing labor unrest to raise their standards. But similar outcomes are far from certain in industries lacking the sheer economic indispensability of UPS or the clout of its 340,000-member union.

Efforts to organize at Starbucks and Amazon stalled as both companies aggressively fought against unionization.

Still, labor protests will likely gain momentum following the UPS contract, said Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, which released a report this year that found the number of labor strikes rose 52% in 2022.

“The whole idea that consumer convenience is above everything broke down during the pandemic. We started to think, ‘I’m at home ordering, but there is actually a worker who has to go the grocery store, who has to cook this for me so that I can be comfortable,’” Campos-Medina said.

Labor unions marched across Nigeria on Wednesday to protest the soaring cost of living under the West African nation’s new president, with calls for the government to improve social welfare interventions to reduce hardship.

The unions, made up of government workers, said the economic incentives announced this week by Nigerian President Bola Tinubu to ease hardship were not enough. They also accused him of failing to act quickly to cushion the effect of some of his policies, including the suspension of decadeslong, costly subsidies that have more than doubled the price of gas, causing a spike in prices for food and most other commodities.

Tinubu on May 29 scrapped the subsidy that cost the government 4.39 trillion naira ($5.07 billion) while new leadership of the country’s central bank ended the yearslong policy of multiple exchange rates for the local naira currency, allowing the rate to be determined by market forces.

Both moves aimed to boost government finances and woo investors, authorities said. But they have had an immediate impact of further squeezing millions in Nigeria who were already battling surging inflation, which stood at 22.7% in June, and a 63% rate of multidimensional poverty.

“Since the subsidy removal, you can’t move from one place to another,” said Joe Ajaero, president of the Nigerian Labor Congress, the umbrella body of the unions. He was referring to the cost of transportation that has more than doubled in many cities, forcing a growing number of people to walk to work.

Ajaero said the labor unions have proposed an upward review of salaries but “the federal government has refused to inaugurate the committee on the proposal.”

“Mr. President can’t join the league of lamentations; he should come out openly and let us know those people who have cornered our commonwealth … and not to lament that some people have stolen our money,” said Ajaero, adding that the protest could continue for a long time.

One of the protesters, Usman Abdullahi Shagari, said he has been struggling to provide for his family, which includes five children, after the price of food items more than doubled.

“Feeding today is the most important thing,” said Shagari, 45. “Everything has increased, so that has affected the feeding of my family and my salary cannot withstand it.”

Original tweet:

Thousands of NYC public sector nurses are paid nearly $20,000 less than their counterparts in the private sector.

These 6,600 union nurses are refusing to settle for a contract that keeps them overworked and underpaid, and are escalating the struggle to get what they deserve.

New tweet:

UPDATE: NYC public hospital nurses just won a new union contract that includes improved staffing ratios and raises of 37 percent (or at least $32,000) over the next 5 years, their largest salary increase ever.