Greg Kaufmann: Sweeping up After Billionaires, but No Living Wage

Greg Kaufmann: Sweeping up After Billionaires, but No Living Wage

Greg Kaufmann: Sweeping up After Billionaires, but No Living Wage

A successful five-week strike still leaves the Houston janitors below $10 an hour, while Pennsylvania eliminates healthcare for scores of children.

Facebook
Twitter
Email
Flipboard
Pocket

It looks like you don’t have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.

After five weeks on strike, Houston janitors have won a 12 percent pay increase—a win for the union that shouldn’t be discounted. Yet the pay raise still leaves the people cleaning the offices of billionaires (think Exxon and Shell) without a living wage. Nation writer Greg Kaufmann went on The Matthew Filipowicz Show to discuss what the outcome of the janitor’s strike means for the labor movement, as well as the astoundingly under-reported news that Pennsylvania has quietly taken some 91,000 children off of Medicaid.

Follow these and other stories with Kaufmann’s This Week in Poverty column. 

—Zoë Schlanger

Thank you for reading The Nation!

We hope you enjoyed the story you just read, just one of the many incisive, deeply-reported articles we publish daily. Now more than ever, we need fearless journalism that shifts the needle on important issues, uncovers malfeasance and corruption, and uplifts voices and perspectives that often go unheard in mainstream media.

Throughout this critical election year and a time of media austerity and renewed campus activism and rising labor organizing, independent journalism that gets to the heart of the matter is more critical than ever before. Donate right now and help us hold the powerful accountable, shine a light on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and build a more just and equitable future.

For nearly 160 years, The Nation has stood for truth, justice, and moral clarity. As a reader-supported publication, we are not beholden to the whims of advertisers or a corporate owner. But it does take financial resources to report on stories that may take weeks or months to properly investigate, thoroughly edit and fact-check articles, and get our stories into the hands of readers.

Donate today and stand with us for a better future. Thank you for being a supporter of independent journalism.

Thank you for your generosity.

Ad Policy
x