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The Wall Street Journal tells us about the plight of tipped workers who are now unemployed:

Take Ian Prebo. On a good night, Mr. Prebo was making $400 in tips bartending at Seattle’s Blue Moon Tavern, which closed this month after a patron caught Covid-19. Since then, like many bars and restaurants across the country, Blue Moon Tavern—which can’t provide takeout or delivery—has remained shut.

Mr. Prebo, 36 years old, estimated roughly three-quarters of his monthly $3,500 income was from tips. After applying for unemployment benefits, he was told he would receive $188 a week. “I have customers who take care of me,” he said. “But the flip side is in a catastrophic event like this, my income is completely wiped out.”

Why does the Journal use this as its opening anecdote? As they acknowledge farther down, the median wage for tipped workers is a meager $2,000 per month, which means that Prebo’s experience is not even remotely typical. What’s more, the expanded unemployment insurance in the coronavirus rescue bill will pay at least $800 per week for low-wage workers. Virtually all of them will lose no income, and some might even make more than they did while working.

These are tough times, and the benefits from the rescue bill are still a few weeks away. I have nothing but sympathy for low-wage workers who are scared about what’s happening. Nevertheless, we’ve just passed legislation that will make up the lost income for nearly all of them, and surely that should rate more than a passing sentence midway through the story?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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