workers' rights

Massachusetts voters are set to decide two ballot questions on workers’ rights in the November 5 election. One would pay tipped workers in restaurants the state’s $15 minimum wage, instead of $6.75 an hour plus tips. The other would allow drivers for ride share services like Uber and Lyft to organize unions.

Before taking the stage at a rally for worker’s rights in Cambridge Sunday afternoon, Sen. Bernie Sanders popped over to Starbucks with a megaphone and a Teamsters hat. At a unionized Starbucks location in Boston, Sanders joined a picket line that has gained national attention as the longest-running strike of its kind in the nation.

In the eight months since states went on lockdown in March, 647 billionaires in the United States have seen their wealth increase by $960 billion, according to a report released last week by the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based progressive think tank. Meanwhile, frontline and low-wage workers have faced dangerous working conditions, furloughs, layoffs and evictions.

Hundreds of hotel workers marched through Back Bay on Labor Day in a bid for better working conditions and pay before demonstrating in front of the Boston Sheraton Hotel where Unite Here Local 26 President Brian Lang announced the hotel workers would take a Sept. 12 vote to strike against the Marriott Hotel chain.