Dori: $15 min. wage champion Pramila Jayapal wasn’t paying her own interns

The hypocrisy of the left is delicious to report to you. Congressmember Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is such a community organizer — she calls for the abolition of ICE, she is always talking about lifting up people of color, and she hires a lot of people of color as interns.

There’s only one problem — she wasn’t paying her interns.

Guess what? That’s more usual for Democrats than Republicans. It turns out, 51 percent of congressional Republicans pay their interns, while only 32 percent of congressional Democrats do. So Democrats like slave labor. They like talking about $15 an hour, and the pay gap in America, and how they have to lift up communities. But 68 percent of the Democrats in Congress don’t pay their interns.

The folks at Crosscut got a copy of the letter that Pramila Jayapal’s interns wrote her. The interns wrote that “the exploitative conditions of our labor differ so drastically from the supposed principles of this campaign that we can no longer in good faith continue our work.”

RELATED: You won’t believe what Pramila Jayapal said

One woman of color wrote in a testimonial that she had to work two additional jobs while serving as Jayapal’s intern and could not afford to continue the internship without being paid. She called unpaid labor a historical part of a “white patriarchal society.”

So the solution for Pramila Jayapal and her campaign was to fire a bunch of interns, but pay the ones that they do keep. I’m sure she needs money for all those mailers, and for gas to drive to all of the ICE protests.

Our show busted Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s wife’s for-profit business stuffing stinky cabbage into jars, which had “volunteer labor.” That is illegal in this state. We busted them, and now they have to pay their employees.

The people who scream the most about the minimum wage seem to be the ones who are most interested in slave labor themselves.

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