SUMMARY: Denver public school teachers went on strike Monday for the first time in 25 years. Much of the fight comes down to a pay system known that involves a complicated merit and bonus system, and that teachers say is vastly outdated. For more, Amna Nawaz is joined by Madeline Will of Education Week.
SUMMARY: In 2015, Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price announced he would raise the company's minimum wage to $70,000 a year by 2017 and slash his own compensation by more than 90 percent. More than a year later, Price reports the company's revenue and clientèle has grown substantially, despite critics' predictions that the move would be bad for business. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent John Larson reports.
RECEPTIONIST: Gravity Payments, this is Korinne.
JOHN LARSON (NewsHour):About a year-and-a-half ago, life changed for the 100 employees of Gravity Payments in Seattle when their boss, Dan Price, announced the company's minimum wage would jump to 70-thousand dollars a year.
DAN PRICE: Effectively immediately, we are going to put a scaled policy into place, and we are going to have a minimum 70-thousand dollar pay rate for everyone that works here.
JOHN LARSON: The hikes would be phased in. A 50-thousand dollar a year minimum wage took effect immediately, and would rise to 60-thousand by the end of 2016, and 70-thousand in 2017. Price said he'd help pay for the increases by slashing his own million dollar a year compensation by more than 90 percent to 70-thousand.
DAN PRICE: I'm curious if anyone has any questions?
JOHN LARSON: Stories of his announcement went viral.
CBS/SCOTT PELLEY: Everyone is getting a raise at a Seattle-based company.
NBC/LESTER HOLT: One boss just changed the lives of his employees.
SUMMARY: It's a major issue on the campaign trail: American angst about jobs and wages. New census data from last year shows that for the first time in almost a decade, household incomes in the U.S. have gone up and the poverty rate has gone down. Lisa Desjardins takes a look at those numbers and at why many Americans feel like they are inconsistent with their experiences.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): This campaign has often focused on the question of economic growth, jobs and wages, particularly for the middle class.
Well, today, there was some good news on that front, as well as for lower-income households.
Lisa Desjardins looks at those latest numbers, and why so many Americans say they don't square with their own experiences.
LISA DESJARDINS (NewsHour):It is a triple hit of good economic news. New census data showed that, last year, median income rose 5.2 percent, the number of Americans living in poverty shrank by 3.5 million people, and the percentage of uninsured Americans dropped.
SUMMARY: In light of soaring health and benefit costs for members of the armed forces, a committee created to offer reforms is calling for big changes. Hari Sreenivasan examines the recommendations with Alphonso Maldon, chair of the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Over the past 15 years, health care and retirement benefit costs for members of the armed forces has nearly doubled. So far, efforts to rein in costs have stalled, as members of Congress and veteran groups have pushed back.
Today, a congressional-chartered commission charged with recommending reforms released their report. They call for overhauling the health insurance system for military families and retirees and modifying the pension benefits for soldiers.
To walk us through some of those recommendations, I am joined now by the commission’s chairman, Alphonso Maldon.
Thanks for joining us.
So, first, I want to ask, how important is it for the military to carry out some of these reforms? What’s wrong with the way things are now?
ALPHONSO MALDON, Chairman, Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission: Our retirement system today, we have — the vast majority of our military really doesn’t benefit from the traditional retirement, military retirement.
And we have made recommendations, this commission has made a recommendation that we can actually offer more benefits or increased benefit to the — to those service members. And we can best do that by a recommendation that we have made, which is actually a blended retirement system, which actually — and the blended retirement system that we are recommending is one that will leverage the benefits, the recruiting benefits of a government-sponsored thrift savings plan and the retention benefits of the traditional military retirement system.
And we add an additional continuation pay at the 12-year mark. And so then we — by doing that, we’re able to provide more benefits to more service members, which will extend the benefit that is to about 17 percent now to up to about 75 percent of the force.
COMMENT: As a retired Navy vet (22yrs) I can tell you that military pay has never kept pace with the cost of living. Military pay is decades behind and this proposed increase will not like catch up. There are military families who qualify for food stamps, for example.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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