Daily Clips: July 1, 2016
OWNERS WON’T PLAY BALL WITH MINOR LEAGUE PLAYERS: Our own Hanna Brooks Olsen wrote a terrific piece on Medium about a proposed bill to make minor league baseball players exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act. As owners make millions, many of these players already “scrape by on a stipend of about $1,100 per month for the spring and summer months that they get paid (during winter training, they’re expected to work without pay.)” As we prepare for this 4th of July weekend, it’s sad to think about America’s pastime reduced to a race to the bottom like this.
THE GIG ECONOMY NEEDS AN OVERHAUL: Katy Steinmetz at TIME has all the information about a study of the gig economy:
Employers, according to the survey, do agree that change is needed. Nearly 70% of them say the social contract — “whereby health, retirement, and other benefits are generally tied to traditional, full-time W2-based employment” — should be reformed as more people move to making a living through alternative arrangements.
Might I suggest those employers take a look at the Shared Security plan proposed by David Rolf and Nick Hanauer? Seems like it would simply solve a lot of the problems discussed in this survey.
WHY AREN’T MILLENNIALS SPENDING MORE? Business Insider quotes “retail expert” Robin Lewis on the millennial spending gap: “This is a generation that is bigger than the boomers in population but their wallets are smaller.”
Uh, sure, okay. Those dang small wallets. It surely doesn’t have to with the fact that millennial median incomes are lower than average, right? Or skyrocketing college debt? Could it be that millennials are currently at the ass end of a decades-old economic system that pumps money up to the top one percent and keeps it at the top, thereby choking the 99 percent with ever-lower salaries, nonexistent benefits, and a shrinking pool of savings? But okay, let’s talk about their wallet size.
TWEET OF THE DAY: I don’t know about you, but the idea of a Trump/Gingrich ticket is so ghoulish that I really hope it happens.
In honor of Newt being Trump’s VP frontrunner, perhaps the best press release of all time https://t.co/7trmLIiPSC pic.twitter.com/jsfMztd4OI
— Jamal Raad (@jamalraad) July 1, 2016
(Housekeeping note: There will be no Daily Clips on Monday, July 4th. Have a great holiday weekend!)
