Monthly Archives: January 2019

New Jersey Raises Minimum to $15

Thanks to the work of WEC and many allies in the Fight for $15 coalition, New Jersey is now the fourth state in the nation to have a $15 minimum wage by 2024. We want to thank Governor Phil Murphy, Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin for improving the lives of one million low-wage workers in New Jersey.  For decades the real wages of lower-income workers in the United States have been stagnant. The result has been the high social cost of food insecurity, poverty, and difficulty in access to healthcare. This bold step from New Jersey policy makers is an affirmation that a living wage is an indispensable part of creating healthy, sustainable communities in the Garden State. While we are disappointed that farmworkers and tipped workers are not guaranteed this crucial right, and that small business employees and seasonal workers must wait longer to achieve a living wage, we are glad that due to the advocacy of teen workers and the Fight for $15 coalition, workers under 18 will not be left behind from receiving a living wage.  WEC is proud of the educational work we put in on this topic, and proud to have stood [...]

By |2020-08-12T15:04:42-04:00January 18th, 2019|Highlights|Comments Off on New Jersey Raises Minimum to $15

WEC Statement on Comptroller Audit of the Economic Development Authority

January 9, 2018A report released earlier today by the state comptroller confirms what the NJ Work Environment Council (WEC) and our partners have been educating on and advocating around for decades: that our economy in the United States, and in New Jersey, is rigged to benefit the ultra-rich. The report, which detailed a vast failure of oversight and implementation in the state Economic Development Authority's (EDA) tax incentive program, found that the EDA could not identify if the $11 billion of incentives given out since 2005, which went to highly profitable corporations, generated any economic benefit to the state. That's $11 billion which could have gone to building New Jersey's communities. But New Jersey's economic system, our tax code, and our policies are very often not written for us. They are written to dish out corporate welfare, so that wealthy executives can line their pockets while destroying jobs, failing to stimulate or contribute meaningfully to our economy, and polluting our environment. Workers and taxpayers have felt this at every turn- as our state government bends over backwards to please corporations and moneyed interests, in hopes that they will somehow save our economy, our wages remain stagnate, our working conditions fail to [...]

By |2019-01-09T16:45:38-05:00January 9th, 2019|Highlights, Press Releases|Comments Off on WEC Statement on Comptroller Audit of the Economic Development Authority
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