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The joke is that socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has finally learned something about economics.
Faced with an insurrection from his starving campaign workers, who complained they can’t live on what the multimillionaire politician pays them and demanded $15 an hour, Sanders will cut the hours they work and so “increase” their hourly wage.
Work less, the elderly Soviet apologist says. That’ll help.
We’re Starving
The trouble for Sanders, who’s never had a real job and has parlayed his lifelong campaign to destroy America into a small fortune, began when the Washington Post divulged on Thursday that field workers can’t make ends meet.
Those workers earn about $36,000 annually, about $17 an hour for a 2,080-hour year. But they’re actually working about 60 hours, which dramatically cuts that pay to a little more than $11 an hour.
And so they demanded $15 per hour, in keeping with Sanders’ campaign plank for a national minimum wage of that amount, which the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives approved last week.
As the Post reported, workers bombed Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign commissar, to say they can’t feed themselves on the meager salaries the campaign paid.
“I am struggling financially to do my job, and in my state, we’ve already had 4 people quit in the past 4 weeks because of financial struggles,” wrote one field organizer. Another employee said his co-workers “shouldn’t have to get payday loans to sustain themselves.”
A third said he supported the demands for higher wages “because I need to be able to feed myself.” A fourth quoted a line Sanders often uses in speeches, writing, “As you know, real change never takes place from the top on down, it always takes place from the bottom on up.”
Sanders was none too happy the skeleton crew complained, given that his campaign was the first ever to permit union representation of its workers.
Work Fewer Hours
But Sanders had a solution, the Des Moines Register reported on Friday.
His “campaign will limit the number of hours staffers work to 42 or 43 each week to ensure they’re making the equivalent of $15 an hour,” the newspaper reported.
Sanders also complained that his workers went “outside of the process … to the media,” which he called “improper.” He told the newspaper he is “disappointed” that workers “have decided to damage the integrity” of the union-campaign negotiation over wages.
“Workers of the World Unite!” is not, apparently, among his campaign planks, but anyway, working fewer hours at the campaign office won’t really raise the workers’ pay. If they can’t make ends meet on $36,000 annually while they work 60 hours a week, they won’t make ends meet in $36,000 while they work 40 hours per week.
The solution? For Sanders to pay overtime, as any standard union contract requires, which would raise their annual salaries to about $53,000 for a consistent 60-hour week.
That aside, hilarity ensued after Sanders, a one-percenter who donates virtually nothing to charity, told the workers to cut back hours, Fox News reported.
Tweeted columnist Stephen Miller, “for the first time in his life, socialist Bernie Sanders practices economics and, buddy, the results are hilarious. Why won’t millionaire Bernie Sanders, who owns 3 homes, instead of cutting hours, pay his staff a living wage? People are starving.”
Asked Representative Dan Crenshaw, the Texas Republican, “so does this fall under the category of hypocrisy, irony, or poetic justice? All three? Can’t make this stuff up.”
Sanders’ Past
Sanders’ unfamiliarity with the struggles of real working folks, despite speeches that suggest he knows something about them, is likely the result of his never having a real job in the private sector, where salaries depend on profits, not upon confiscatory taxation.
As Politico reported in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign:
Before Sanders was a U.S. senator, before he was a congressman, before he was mayor of Burlington — before he won one shocking election, then 13 more — he was a radical and an agitator in the ferment of 1960s and ’70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion of laborers who didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old.
His work history, before deciding his impressive résumé entitled him to run the country, was this:
He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.
“He was always poor,” a friend told Politico, which might have something to do with never collecting a steady paycheck.
Photo: AP Images
