The Senate has the already-damaged bill to raise the Maryland minimum wage to $15 an hour on its plate and is planning to vote on extending the timeline for “small businesses” to 2028, slowing the rate of increase. They think they are protecting Maryland’s small employers. However…

A longer timeline is Bad for Business. Find out why here>

TODAY IS Crossover Monday, March 18. The push is on today in Annapolis to move bills out of committee or to pass bills on the floor to improve their chances of getting considered by the full Assembly this year.

A top issue, the Fight for $15 as a minimum wage statewide, is still in play and the damage done by the two "money committees" to the bill must be reconciled before passage. You can be heard; see our Memo for details.

The scam run to get undistinguished rich kids into elite colleges is not unique -- it's the logical criminal outcome of the unjust system that labor leader Leo Gerard outlines here. In this Progressive Breakfast analysis we see that working people are hemmed in on many fronts by the economic advantages enjoyed by the wealthy that keep the rich -- and their children -- on top of the economic ladder. That system must be unwound.

Danielle Gaines of Maryland Matters recounts the rocky path toward passage of the $15 minimum wage in the Senate, as many try to put their regional or ideological stamp on the already tattered bill. The House, passing it last week, disgracefully went along with the business-sodden Economic Matters Committee’s cuts – no indexing for inflation, no tipped workers, no agricultural workers, pitfalls for young workers and a two-year delay in reaching the full $15. The Senate made the rubble bounce by exempting businesses with 15 or fewer employees. The WaPo seems to think even this badly damaged bill is a “major victory for liberal Democrats,” overlooking the victories of neoliberal Democrats in gutting the bill. But as Gaines’s play-by-play shows, many senators still had to get into the act…

Among the Maryland workers most injured by the gutted $15 minimum wage bill, tipped workers stand out. At $3.63 an hour plus tips, a level unchanged for decades and a legacy of Jim Crow racist oppression, workers in the food service industry remain most under the thumb of unscrupulous business interests, as Drew Koshgarian shows in a Maryland Matters commentary,

A FLURRY OF INFO -- tonight's March for Schools; Larry S pokes the restaurant bosses; latest on the Fight for $15 and other legislation in the State House sausage factory; Movement Politics training this weekend, and more -- all in the Weekly Memo, your one-stop guide for progressive activism in Maryland.

When you ask a fake question, you get a fake answer -- even in a statewide poll about the minimum wage, a matter of great urgency for 600,000 low-wage workers in Maryland. Bad polling poisoned by paid questions distorts the public view and is warping the work of the General Assembly on this important bill, as PM director Larry Stafford Jr. outlines here.

Activists are telling Senate committee members -- today voting on the $15 minimum wage bill -- to do better than the House and in fact to clean up the mess House members made of the badly needed measure that would give some support to 600,000 low-paid Maryland workers.

A flurry of hearings in the Assembly this week tries to beat a deadline for bills to cross from one chamber to another in order to pass. Several factors, including Del. Lisanti's vow to remain in the House despite her censure for using a racial slur among colleagues, could slow those bills down.

At a news conference Monday evening the coalition urging a "clean $15" minimum wage bill -- one that does not exclude tipped workers and other marginalized groups -- made their case forcefully and with testimony from affected workers. The Senate, they said, should repair the damage done by the House.