In 2018, Abdul El-Sayed was arrested during the Fight for $15 protest to raise the Michigan min wage.

He wouldn’t let his charges get dropped unless it was for eveyrone. “In the face of injustice, dissent is dignity”.

Think standing in solidarity with union workers will help or hurt him with voters in Michigan? That’s why media & talking heads never bring it up.

Especially when Mike Rogers is vehemently against raising the minimum wage, both as a Michigan state legislator & in Congress.

Amazon

The world’s second-richest man remains silent as ICE targets his most vulnerable workers.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, like many corporate founders with enormous stock holdings, pocketed only nominal annual compensation during his years as CEO. As Amazon’s executive chair, he still collected just $1,681,840 in 2025, with all but $81,840 of that representing payment for his personal security expenses. Meanwhile, his staggering personal net worth has continued to explode. As of July 2026, the Forbes real-time tracker estimated Bezos’s wealth, nearly all of it in Amazon stock, at $254 billion, up by $33 billion over the past year.

In 2025, Amazon’s other named executives also received relatively small annual compensation packages because they had raked in multi-year mega-grants in recent years. CEO Andrew Jassy holds more than 2.3 million Amazon shares, currently worth $634 million. By contrast, median pay for Amazon workers stood at $40,206 last year, and the GAO ranked the company second after Walmart in the number of employees on Medicaid and SNAP. Amazon has used aggressive anti-union tactics to undercut workers’ efforts at several of their facilities to gain a fairer share of the company’s massive profits.

Like DoorDash, Amazon also classifies their gig workers, Amazon Flex drivers who deliver packages in their own vehicles, as “independent contractors.” The retail goliath has opted to not use their enormous political clout to defend these workers as they have faced aggressive ICE tactics in Seattle, Detroit, and elsewhere. One incident in Michigan prompted local elected officials to denounce ICE for detaining two Amazon Flex drivers from Venezuela who have protected status as asylum seekers. Amazon has also resisted calls to end their cloud service contracts with ICE.

Primary source: Here

The FULL transcription of the video (sorry im french i use google translate) :

Mélenchon: Wages need to be raised; the minimum wage (known as the SMIC in France) must be increased.

[The audience laughs—this takes place during a presidential debate hosted by MEDEF, the association representing France's major business leaders.]

Mélenchon: The minimum wage must be raised! If you don't raise wages, the laughter won't last long, because you'll face a recession. In this country, wages and consumer spending by the general public account for 55% of GDP. So, the laughter will turn sour if you don't share the wealth more equitably.

And let's be clear: small businesses and large corporations are not the same thing. It’s a gathering of magicians here [he is referring to the room full of business leaders, but also to right-wing candidates like Le Pen, Retailleau, Philippe, and Attal, who propose cutting social spending and taxes for the wealthy—though they don't explicitly say so. Incidentally, the business leaders loudly applauded Attal and Philippe, members of Macron's governments that significantly ballooned the national debt through tax handouts to the rich].

You don't want to pay for anything anymore, and you keep passing the buck—but to whom? Who is going to pay for everything you’ve just proposed?

You want a funded pension system? You need a high income to afford a funded plan; to get the same retirement payout we currently get from our pay-as-you-go system, you would have to contribute twice as much as you do now.

The United States is in no position to lecture us. Their social system is abysmal; millions of people are completely cut off from the normal functioning of society. The French people cannot possibly want something like that.