Remember that feeling you used to get when you woke up on Saturday morning as a kid, bright-eyed and immediately alert to the world’s endless possibilities? Yeah, me neither. Thanks, world.
New Beginnings, the homeless charity that came under scrutiny last December for putting its homeless residents to work selling concessions at local professional athletic events for no pay, has been cleared of legal wrongdoing by the U.S. Department of Labor. Also totally legal: deciding not to do business with a nonprofit that exhibits distasteful practices, whether they’re against the law or not. The more you know!
About 12,000 Bay area Walmart employees will receive raises in the retail behemoth’s heavily publicized attempt to repair its well-earned image as king of American wage-slave capitalism by upping its hourly pay rate for bottom-rung workers to $9 an hour. The company is still figuring out a way to mandate that the additional wages can only be spent on Walmart debit cards that carry a corresponding uptick in convenience charge, which themselves can only be spent in the store.
And finally, TBO.com optimistically calls Thursday night’s record-setting 34-degree Tampa temperatures “winter’s last hurrah.” Oh, great. Because if natural disaster movies have taught us anything, it’s that giving nature the finger, taunting it and asking it if that’s all it’s got usually passes without any catastrophic consequences at all.
(Image of Walmart by Mike Kalasnik via Wikimedia Commons.)
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2015.
