Democratic Primaries

It's old news from last summer that some/many of you may have already seen before but it was news to me and I thought the hypocrisy was delicious...

The controversy over Bernie Sanders’s low-paid field staffers, explained

A moralist gets a taste of his own medicine.

https://www.vox.com/2019/7/20/20700841/bernie-sanders-minimum-wage-staff-pay

Field staff earn $36,000 a year, which would be above minimum wage on a standard workweek, but Sanders field personnel say they’re actually working about 60 hours a week — for an hourly wage of $13. Long hours are typical of campaign work (you have a limited span of time in which to win the thing, after all), but these particular positions fall into a kind of legal and sociocultural black hole. The norm in America was that low-status workers would be paid an hourly wage and thus be eligible for overtime pay if they worked long hours. Salaried workers wouldn’t necessarily get overtime for pulling long shifts, but salaried work was associated with high-skill, high-status, well-compensated white-collar work.

But capitalism abhors a vacuum, so over time, more and more low-paid workers found themselves in the category of being salaried and ineligible for overtime. The Obama administration tried to tackle this with a Labor Department regulation mandating overtime for anyone earning less than $47,000, but it was challenged in court and the Trump administration elected not to defend the rule, instead writing a new rule that set the threshold at $35,000. At an annual salary just below that threshold, Sanders’s field staff would be collecting lots of overtime and thus earning more than $36,000, but instead, their salary was pegged (perhaps not coincidentally) to be just above the exempt threshold.

Apparently a WaPo reporter uncovered the fact that the BS campaign had hired a bunch of people as salaried workers and then paid them $36,000 a year...a lousy grand above the level where they woulda been forced to pay them for the actual overtime they all worked. Soon after they got caught they upped their salaries a bit so that they were getting compensated a little better for actual hours worked...

BERNIE SANDERS SAYS CAMPAIGN STAFF ALL MAKING MORE THAN $15 PER HOUR AFTER NEW UNION DEAL

https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-campaign-staff-more-15-per-hour-after-union-deal-1450756

Doesn't take very long for a person who became a millionaire repeating "I am sick and tired of millionaires and billionaires..." ad nauseam to start acting like one himself, does it?