A Bull Moose store in Salem, New Hampshire fired all its workers this past week, offering no justification. “We are not able to share the reasons behind our decisions regarding the Salem store as it is important to us to protect the confidentiality of our former employees,” read a post from the record store chain’s…
This is the second installment of a three-part series. You can read the first report here. One of the final changes made to the statewide paid time off law that passed the Maine legislature last session was the exemption of student workers. Internal emails examined by Beacon reveal that the University of Maine System worked alongside…
This is part one of a multi-part series. Part 2. Part 3. Last March, University of Maine System director of government and community relations Samantha Warren stood before the Maine legislature’s Labor Committee and announced that, this year, things were going to be different. “As returning lawmakers may be aware, the University has historically not…
Jeffrey Neil Young of the Maine Employment Lawyers Association says that over the years he has consulted with many workers who have gone unpaid, yet continue to work on the desperate hope that their employers will come through with their back pay. Wage theft, Young told state lawmakers in Augusta on Wednesday, occurs in many…
While opponents of the state’s minimum wage law continue to claim that restaurants are unable to pay workers’ higher wages, publicly available labor and tax data shows that Maine’s restaurant and bar industry continues to flourish and has grown significantly even as voter-approved wage hikes have been implemented. At the beginning of 2017, as the…
Maine politics and media critic Al Diamon has dug through years of old press reports for his latest column and says the facts clearly show that the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and other opponents of the referendum to raise Maine’s minimum wage gradually to $12 by 2020 are lying “in a feeble attempt to…
A coalition of corporate lobbyists have made a series of strange claims and apocalyptic predictions in an attempt to throw a wrench in the works of the citizen initiative headed for the ballot in November to raise Maine’s minimum wage. Their stated aim is to convince the legislature to place a competing measure on the…
In an internal email, Maine Restaurant Association CEO Greg Dugal has made a rather stunning admission. Dugal wrote to the organization’s membership last month that the citizen initiative to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 was too popular to be defeated at the ballot box. “We have concluded as an association…