Pushing for a $15 minimum wage, the Star-Ledger pays its drivers $10 an hour (are any undocumented?)
/The Star-Ledger doesn’t report the news. As Editor Tom Moran wrote (November 1, 2018): “Our core mission is helping voters decide which lever to pull.”
That’s right, the Star-Ledger is a advocacy organization. First and foremost, you can always depend on the Star-Ledger to lobby for its own bottom line.
For years, the newspaper was a strident supporter of the New Jersey State Supreme Court’s Abbott Decision – which forces working class families in suburban and rural New Jersey to subsidize the property taxes of wealthy corporations and professionals in urban areas. Among those wealthy corporations was the parent corporation that owns the Star-Ledger, whose property holdings were so extensive in Newark that the city named a street… no, make that a plaza, after the Star-Ledger.
Now comes this new hypocrisy.
A few days before Christmas, the New Jersey Globe reported that while editorializing for a $15 minimum wage, the Star-Ledger was paying workers at $10 an hours, with no benefits. The corporation that owns the Star-Ledger is itself owned by one of the richest families in America.
Here’s an excerpt from the New Jersey Globe:
The state’s largest daily newspaper ran an advertisement in Wednesday’s print edition seeking drivers for newspaper deliveries willing to work 2-3 hours daily, “starting around 3 AM,” with a typical bi-weekly compensation that starts at $400. That could mean less than $10-per-hour.
To get a job like that, applicants must have their own cars. Star-Ledger drivers – they call them Delivery Service Providers — receive no benefits; they “are independently contacted, meaning they are self-employed” and receive 1099s. Minimum wage laws do not apply.
There is no paid vacation time, no workers compensation, and since drivers do not handle collections, there are no gratuities involved.
“The job, once the bastion of neighborhood kids looking to make a few extra bucks on their bikes, has evolved into a grueling nocturnal marathon for low-income workers who toil almost invisibly on the edge of the economy,” wrote Associated Press reporter Michael Levenson in 2016.
Today the Star-Ledger once again editorialized for drivers’ licenses for resident undocumented immigrants illegally in the United States. Is this another self-serving position for the owners to take? Will this help drive down the cost of newspaper distribution? We wonder if there are any internal memos on this?
While the Star-Ledger and its owners are up on all the latest virtue-signaling, paying just enough lip-service to reassure the cocktail set that they are good and worthy people, their actions seek to drive down the wages of American workers, while creating an immigrant class of toiling wage slaves. Raising the minimum wage is a farce until you can control the gray economy that doesn’t abide by such rules. Normalizing the gray economy (by things like drivers licenses) will only solidify its position as an alternative workforce.
And while the Democrats talk about the minimum wage, Governor Murphy is doing his utmost to flood the state with illegal labor that every economist tells us will drive down wages. When there is more of something, you pay less, we all know that. Either the Democrats are well-meaning but stupid, or they are engaging in the very same hypocrisy that the Star-Ledger is engaging in.
Here is the original New Jersey Globe story:
