What would a $15-an-hour minimum wage mean to SEIU 32BJ member Syid Abdullah? “It means food. It means rent. It means taking care of my son.” Abdullah was one of more than 150 witnesses last Thursday when the D.C. City Council's Committee on Business, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs held its first hearing on Mayor Bowser's legislation to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15 dollars by 2020 and $7.50 by 2022 for tipped workers. "Those who work for a living ought to be able to make a living," said Metro Washington Council executive director Carlos Jimenez, who, with SEIU 32BJ Area Director Jaime Contreras, helped kick off over eight hours of testimony by supporters and opponents of the bill.
For the latest local labor calendar, for to dclabor.org and click on Calendar. Here’s today’s labor history: On this date in 1889, more than 2,200 people died in the Johnstown Flood, when a dam holding back a private resort lake burst upstream of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The resort was owned by wealthy industrialists including Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Neither they nor any other members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were found guilty of fault, despite the fact the group had created the lake out of an abandoned reservoir. In 1943, some 25,000 white autoworkers walked off the job at a Detroit Packard Motor Car Company plant, heavily involved in wartime production, when three black workers were promoted to work on a previously all-white assembly line. The black workers were relocated and the whites returned. In 1997, Rose Will Monroe, popularly known as Rosie the Riveter, died in Clarksville, Indiana. During World War Two she helped bring women into the labor force. Today’s labor quote is by Phyllis McKey Gould, a welder at the Richmond, California Kaiser shipyard Number 2 during World War Two “I’d never worked in my life. I loved the look of welding, the smell of it… You’d look through really dark glass and all you’d see was the glow. You moved the welding rod in tiny, circular motions, making half-crescents. If you did it right, it was beautiful. It was like embroidery.”
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