The Rich Get Richer Trump’s Department of Labor is intent on rescinding a regulation which prohibits employers from expropriating workers’ tips for the purposes of creating “tip pools.” The way the proposal is worded means that employers can keep all of the tips for themselves, as long as the worker is paid a minimum wage. The Labor Department has suppressed an internal analysis which shows the potentially disastrous effects of this measure on workers’ income. Action: 1. Comments are closed at the Labor Dept. site. Instead, send a postcard, saying that workers should continue to be the sole owners of their tips: Melissa Smith, Director, Regulations, Legislation and Interpretations, WHD/DOL, 200 Constitution Avenue NW., Room S-3502, Washington, DC 20210 2. Contact your Member of Congress and ask them to pass legislation to override the DoL’s tip pool rule change. 3. Contact your Senators and ask them to put pressure on the DoL to cancel the rule change.
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A Suggestion Hopefully we are all making frequent calls (and/or sending frequent emails) to our elected representatives on a variety of topics. It might be a good idea to follow up on these calls later to ask what, if any, action has been taken. Just, y’know, to prove we’re not kidding. Action: Consider opening a document to log your calls to your elected officials, with a different page for each rep. Show date, topic of call, to whom you spoke, with what result. If you later receive an email in reply, note the substance of the response on your log. Armed with this documentation, you can later call back, and say, e.g., “Remember when I called you on January 6 regarding S.1629? Well, I was wondering whether you had decided to support that bill and, if not, why not?” e.g.: Health Care Brits across the political spectrum have rallied together to denounce Trump’s ignorant words about the National Health Service. There may be problems with the NHS but everyone wants to FIX it, and nobody, BUT NOBODY, wants to swap it for a free-market system such as Trump would like to institute. Action: 1. Contact your Member of Congress and demand passage of HR 676 Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act. If you have any experience, personally or indirectly, with a single-payer system, go ahead and talk about that. 2. Email the British Embassy to congratulate their nation on speaking up on behalf of the need for a fair, humane, system which provides health care for all regardless of ability to pay. Trump Being an Idiot Again The Prez. has been tweeting out of line again. He has criticized Britain’s National Health Service for being “broke” and “not working,” as a pretext for accusing the Democrats’ health care plans of being “really not good.” The Brits, including the P.M. have responded with some ire to this nonsense. Action: 1. Contact the White House and tell Mr. T. that you’d much rather have the NHS than the really not good scheme he and his GOP toadies have come up with. 2. Contact your Senators and tell them you want the equivalent of the British NHS in this country and that you think the Prez. is ignorant. Afrin Turkish Forces Bomb Civilians The Turkish government has launched a military attack on the people of Afrin, a Kurdish area of Syria on the border of Turkey. Turkish forces have massed on the border and have started launching missiles into Afrin, terrorizing civilians. The pretext for this attack is the Turkish claim that the U.S. military allies, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, are terrorists. Regardless of the truth or falsity of this claim, the principal victims of the Turkish attack are civilians. Action: 1. Contact the State Department to ask that the U.S.A. protest Turkey’s attack on civilians in Afrin. 2. Contact the Turkish Embassy to protest Turkey’s attack on civilians in Afrin. Health Care: Point of Service Payments More and more hospitals and health care centers are requiring that 100% of a patient’s annual deductible be met before going ahead with a procedure, even if there is a life-threatening condition. The law requires that an immediately life-threatening situation (e.g. ruptured appendix) must be treated before asking about payment, but a necessary cancer surgery would not count. These annual deductibles can amount to several thousand dollars. At the beginning of the year, it is likely that most of the deductible is unmet, and very few patients can come up with the large sums needed in time for an urgent procedure. Action: Call Ted Rossi, President and CEO of Summit Healthcare at (781) 519-4840 x101 and ask if Summit demands point-of-service payments to cover the deductible before surgery. (You can say that you’re considering using Summit.) If the answer is yes, or vague, say you consider this behavior to be cruel and unpatriotic and that you would no longer consider using their services. |
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