This week: McVote; placing race; cruise crews; and non-Tony tigers.
So does this mean elections matter, or not?
There’s just no end of news about people who work for McDonald’s — there’s the whole $15 thing, there’s that new Hamburglar, and now there’s this: McDonald’s just hired former Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs to run global communications, with a sideline in government relations. Recall that David Plouffe now works for Uber, Jay Carney for Amazon, and Tim Geithner for a hedge fund, and it’s all enough to make you wince with cynicism.
But there’s good news out of DC too: the Obama Administration is said to be on the verge of vastly expanding overtime protections to as many as 10 million low-paid salaried workers. They’re currently exempt from overtime because they’re paid more than a salary cutoff that hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the 1970s.
A house divided against itself
Housing affordability is a growing crisis for workers in Washington; housing discrimination is the crisis that keeps on keeping on; and Seattle is getting a strong dose of both crises. The city recently tested 124 rental properties for compliance with fair housing laws — and found evidence of discrimination in two-thirds of the places they investigated. Legal charges were filed regarding thirteen buildings.
Too bad the entirety of the proposed settlement is for the landlords to pay the costs of the investigation and commit to retraining their employees. Sounds like labor standards aren’t the only laws in need of more robust enforcement.
The job does seem hella sketchy though
It’s easy to dog the aggressively ideological editorial pages of The Seattle Times — and they deserve it. But the paper also employs some great talent, including the not-nearly-appreciated-enough Seattle Sketcher, Gabriel Campanario. His latest is a look at the work people do on cruise ships. He doesn’t promote the industry, or condemn it. Instead he does something much more rare — just examines the details of the jobs of the multinational crew in a way that’s honest and engaging. Also, the drawings are supercool!
It’s kind of weird that one of them is “Sumatran” and the other one doesn’t get an adjective
A concerned citizen called 911 to report a tiger strapped to the roof of a car in Camas, Washington, and police were deployed after the caller explained to the operator “I thought, well it must be a big stuffed animal and then it started moving and it wasn’t stuffed“. It was stuffed.
The Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma reported a Sumatran tiger in their care had died. Foul play is not suspected.
And a new study finds that adult tiger sharks spend their winters in the Caribbean, staying in the same favorite spot each year. Their parents must have money, amiright?