Elizabeth Warren campaign staffers claim she runs a deceptive and exploitative campaign

  Bernie Sanders is facing some blow back for failing to pay his staffers a living wage–his staffers described it as “poverty wages”– although he advocates for a $15 an hour minimum wage, and his woes were compounded when some of his campaign staffers filed a Federal labor complaint against the candidate for being vindictive and threatening retribution against people working for his campaign.

  It turns out Bernie Sanders is not the only candidate for President on the Democratic side of the aisle to have a little trouble with campaign staffers because according to this story Elizabeth Warren is being accused by former staffers of having a misleading and exploitative process for allowing entry into the campaign. Here is more from The Daily Beast, of all places: 

the Massachusetts Democrat faces criticism from several of her own supporters who said the lowest tier of her campaign structure doesn’t match the image she projects. 

Two early converts to Warren described the process for entry into her campaign’s volunteer fellowship program as deceptive and at times exploitative in interviews with The Daily Beast. They said they were pushed toward unpaid positions over paid ones, misled over the availability of financial assistance, and asked to sign highly restrictive nondisclosure agreements that worker advocacy groups concede are irregular. Both applicants verified their accounts with emails and text messages from the Warren campaign.  

“What was sold to me was very different than it actually was,” said Jonathan Nendze, a rising senior at Seton Hall University who was offered a volunteer fellowship position on Warren’s campaign. “It was kind of a great scam of getting people to show up and work in the capacity of volunteer, but to function as a paid intern in the amount of work they’re doing,” he said.

  Apparently she took a little different approach than Bernie Sanders by tricking people into volunteering instead of paying them altogether. It was extremely hypocritical for Bernie Sanders not to pay his campaign workers $15 an hour when he claims he will make this the minimum wage if he is elected and the hypocrisy of Elizabeth Warren was not lost on The Daily Beast:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has built much of her political career as a champion of workers and consumers against the deceptive and exploitative practices of corporations and employers.

The complaints from those offered unpaid fellowships could raise new questions for Warren as she seeks to put her lengthy history of advocating for consumer and worker rights at the center of her rising campaign. 

  It makes it hard to take these two candidates seriously when they claim they will be advocates for the working man when we hear how they actually treat the people who work for them when they think nobody is watching. This is just another classic example of politicians who do not believe they have to live under the same rules as the people they long to govern.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium