March 18, 2015

Target Corp. is the latest business to say it will raise the minimum wage for hourly workers to at least $9 an hour, following in the footsteps of Wal-Mart and the parent company of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls.

"We make sure we're competitive in every marketplace in which we do business," Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder told the Star Tribune. "As part of that, we regularly and continually evaluate the marketplace to make sure our wages are competitive." Snyder also said that pay raises as part of a merit process usually happen in the spring. Catherine Garcia

March 5, 2021

Two top female aides to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) are reportedly departing his administration as the governor continues to grapple with two growing scandals.

Press secretary Caitlin Girouard and interim policy adviser Erin Hammond have both left Cuomo's administration, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

Their departures came after senior adviser Gareth Rhodes and first deputy press secretary Will Burns also announced they'd be leaving the Cuomo administration, though the governor's office has said these were previously planned, Bloomberg notes. They also said Hammond had been set to leave for several months to "focus on her family," and Girouard says she accepted another job in January, according to The Hill.

But the departures come as Cuomo is facing growing criticism and calls to resign in the wake of three allegations of sexual harassment, including from two former aides. He's also under fire for his handling of data on COVID-19 nursing home deaths, with The New York Times reporting on Thursday that Cuomo aides rewrote a report to take out the number of New York nursing home residents who died from COVID-19.

Girouard, Bloomberg points out, had issued the statement last week denying former aide Lindsey Boylan's sexual harassment claims, as well as the statement in December saying there is "simply no truth to these claims."

Cuomo earlier this week apologized over the sexual harassment allegations, saying he didn't intend to act "in a way that made people feel uncomfortable" while denying that he ever "touched anyone inappropriately." However, Cuomo said he will not resign from office. On Friday, according to CNBC, state lawmakers moved to strip Cuomo of COVID-19 pandemic emergency powers. Brendan Morrow

March 5, 2021

Eight Democratic senators voted against Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) effort to get a minimum wage hike included in the COVID-19 relief bill, but one senator in particular seems to be taking the most heat for it.

Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-Ariz.) voted against an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over five years, which Sanders introduced after the Senate Parliamentarian ruled the increase couldn't be included under budget reconciliation. She and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) were two moderate Democrats who were expected to oppose the move, since Sinema has said she thinks the issue of a minimum wage hike should be debated separately.

Though Sinema's vote wasn't a surprise, critics were still baffled. The Arizona senator, after all, had been pushing for a higher minimum wage for years, calling it a "no-brainer" back in 2014. As The New Republic notes, citing her election win margins, the proposal to raise the wage "is almost definitely more popular than the senator herself in her home state of Arizona ... Hundreds of thousands more Arizonans voted to raise the minimum wage than to make Kyrsten Sinema a senator." Over on Twitter, "Marie Antoinette" began trending after reporters noted she had brought a "large chocolate cake" into the Senate to share with staffers. An opinion column in the Arizona Republic raged, "Sinema apparently just wants the little people to eat cake."

Democratic Sens. Jon Tester (Mt.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Angus King (I-Maine), Chris Coons (Del.) and Tom Carper (Del.) also all voted against the amendment, but none faced the same level of public ire. One possible explanation? The Washington Post's Greg Sargent points out Sinema has the largest number of constituents affected by the failed wage hike. Summer Meza

March 5, 2021

A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study has found that mask mandates have been associated with fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths, as some states move to lift theirs.

The CDC released a new study Friday that looked at the relationship between mask mandates and COVID-19 cases and deaths between March 1 and Dec. 31, and it found that "mandating masks was associated with a decrease in daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation."

The mask mandates were associated with a 1.9 percentage point decrease in COVID-19 death growth rates 100 days after being implemented, the study said. Additionally, the study also looked at rules surrounding restaurants, and it found that allowing on-premises dining was "associated with increases in daily COVID-19 case growth rates," as well as increases in death growth rates.

"Mask mandates and restricting any on-premises dining at restaurants can help limit community transmission of COVID-19 and reduce case and death growth rates," the study said. "These findings can inform public policies to reduce community spread of COVID-19."

The study was released days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced the statewide mask mandate there would be lifted, a step that was also taken in Mississippi. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky earlier in the week warned states against easing their COVID-19 restrictions, saying the U.S. could "completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also said this week the idea of easing COVID-19 restrictions at this point in the pandemic is "inexplicable." Brendan Morrow

Opinion
March 5, 2021

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has long been on a crusade to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour. After being blocked by the Senate parliamentarian on the question of whether the minimum wage increase could be included in the pandemic relief package working its way through the chamber, Sanders filed it on Friday as an individual item to get all senators on the record. The results were quite surprising.

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Krysten Sinema (D-Ariz.) were already assumed to not support the $15 mark. But opposition among the Democratic Party's conservative wing was much deeper than that. Six more Democrats voted against the measure aside from them, for a total of eight: Jon Tester of Montana, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Angus King of Maine (an independent who caucuses with the Democrats), and finally Chris Coons and Tom Carper of Delaware.

All these senators are from purple or red states — except Carper and Coons, where Biden won by 19 percentage points. (Those two are doubly suspicious as both are close to Biden personally and Coons is well-known as his voice in the Senate.)

But needing to run for re-election in a hard state is no excuse. A $15 minimum wage is extremely popular — polling between 59 percent and 67 percent approval, depending on the poll — and almost certainly more popular than every one of these senators in their home states. A minimum wage hike has not failed to pass at the state level since 1996. Voting against such a policy is therefore a considerable political risk, though it also no doubt increases the chance these senators will have comfy post-office sinecures in the corporate sector, should they so desire. Ryan Cooper

March 5, 2021

Democrats in the Senate have reportedly reached an agreement to include lower weekly unemployment benefits in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.

Under a "last-minute agreement" expected to be introduced in an amendment from Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the weekly federal unemployment benefits in the relief bill would be $300 a week, rather than $400 a week as in the House of Representatives' bill, The Wall Street Journal reports.

This amendment, however, would also extend the unemployment benefits through September rather than August, and "the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits will now be non-taxable income," according to Politico.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki expressed support for this agreement on Friday, saying President Biden believes it's "critical" to extend the unemployment benefits through September, and along with the allowing the first $10,200 to be non-taxable, the amendment will "provide more relief to the unemployed than the current legislation."

But the Journal notes that "liberal Democrats had pushed to keep the unemployment benefits at $400 a week and weren't expected to be pleased with the Senate's changes." Brendan Morrow

March 5, 2021

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Friday blasted the Senate parliamentarian who ruled that raising the minimum wage couldn't be included in Democrats' COVID-19 relief package, as he introduced an amendment looking to do exactly that.

The Vermont senator introduced an amendment to the COVID-19 relief bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over five years, despite Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough previously ruling the increase couldn't be included under budget reconciliation. Some progressives had called for Democrats to overrule the parliamentarian's decision, a move Sanders backed.

"Because of an unfortunate and, in my view, misguided decision by the parliamentarian, this reconciliation bill does not include an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour," Sanders said. "In my view, it should have, and I think the parliamentarian is dead wrong."

Sanders went on to argue that it's "absurd" that this "unelected staffer" would be able to make this decision about raising the minimum wage, arguing "no parliamentarian should have that power" and that senators shouldn't "shuffle off" the reasonability of voting for or against the increase.

The White House previously said that President Biden "respects the parliamentarian's decision" rejecting the minimum wage increase "and the Senate's process." But NBC News' Sahil Kapur noted that while Sanders' amendment "doesn't have 50 votes at this stage and it's subject to being removed under reconciliation rules," it "looks like he intends to put every senator on the record." Brendan Morrow

Opinion
March 5, 2021

The February jobs report is out, and it found 379,000 jobs were created last month, bringing the unemployment rate to 6.2 percent. That would be a decent number for normal times — but the U.S. is still some 9.5 million jobs down relative to how things were before the coronavirus hit. And as the White House Council of Economic Advisers pointed out on Twitter, at this rate it would take until about April 2023 to restore all those jobs:

Now, it will probably not be possible or even advisable to fully restore economic health so long as the pandemic is ongoing. Many people will not return to normal activities so long as they have not been vaccinated, and therefore bars, restaurants, concert venues, and so on will struggle. But that only underlines the case for passing President Biden's pandemic relief package as soon as possible, because it contains money to accelerate the vaccination effort, and other measures (like survival checks and a boost to unemployment insurance) to keep people solvent while that is happening.

More broadly, the U.S. has suffered over a decade of terrible growth going back to the financial crisis. As I have previously argued, there is every reason to get American balance sheets nice and fat so that when the pandemic does die down, the economy can surge back to strength very fast and, with any luck, undo some of that damage. Ryan Cooper

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