Rick Santorum is evil

It's already been defeated, thank God, and not that it ever really stood much of a chance, but holy crap.

Rick Santorum's "minimum wage" bill would have made all businesses that make under $1,000,000 a year exempt from having to pay minimum wage (which would have been raised by $1.10 in another part of the bill). It would have made overtime pretty much a thing of the past, by allowing companies to declare it "flex time" and take it out of the worker's schedule later. So if I worked 45 hours this week, they could just give me an hour off each day next week, and we'd be cool. Except that they'd've saved 7.5 hours worth of wages. Usually, 7.5 hours worth of wages isn't that much to the employer, but it can be a hell of a lot to the employee.

Additionally, the bill would have paved the way for prohibiting states from making minimum wage provisions above and beyond the federal level (which is still stuck at $5.15; I saw that increase, from $4.75, when I was working at McDonald's in high school). It would do this by first prohibiting states from legislating mandatory wages for tipped workers. Currently, there's a $2.13 federal minimum wage for tipped workers, but under Santorum's bill, small and medium restaurants could be exempt from paying any minimum wage at all, and thus could make their tipped workers work from tips alone. This one hits home for me because of those three weeks I spent as a waiter. Sometimes people just don't tip well. It may be because they're jerks; it may be because they're older people (sorry, don't mean to stereotype, but it's true) who've got a different conception of tipping. But tips are not commensurate, in the broader sense, with the level of service you provide as a waiter or waitress. I guess "server" is now the PC term.

Like I said, this bill was defeated, but 38 senators voted for it. That's a little bit too close for comfort, in my book. They were all Republicans, but the bankruptcy bill that just passed the Senate tells us that when it comes down to where they're getting their money from, nobody's in the little guy's corner anymore.

Fargus...