Louisiana taxpayers subsidizing low-wage workers
While Louisiana has been adding jobs in recent months, many of them have been in low-wage sectors like the service industry. Now, a new report from the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)  shows just how harmful those low wages are to the economy. Median pay for core front-line fast-food jobs is $8.69 an hour, with many jobs paying at or near the minimum wage. Benefits are also scarce for front-line fast-food workers; an estimated 87 percent do not receive health benefits through their employer. The combination of low wages and benefits, often coupled with part-time employment, means that many of the families of fast-food workers must rely on taxpayer-funded safety net programs to make ends meet. … Even full-time hours are not enough to compensate for low wages. The families of more than half of the fast-food workers employed 40 or more hours per week are enrolled in public assistance programs.

According to the report, 72 percent of Louisiana’s fast-food workers’ families need public assistance to make ends meet, and combined the state and federal government paid more than $71 million in aid to subsidize fast food companies’ profits in 2011. Nationally, taxpayers spend $7 billion.

Blight increased by bank’s policies, group says
A fair housing group out of New Orleans is accusing a nationwide lender of contributing to blight in Baton Rouge’s nonwhite neighborhoods. The complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says U.S. Bank of Minneapolis keeps houses in mostly white neighborhoods in better condition and markets those houses better than those in nonwhite neighborhoods. “The neighbors are working hard,” said James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. “All we’re asking is that U.S. Bank do the same: Be a good neighbor.” A representative from the bank said the claims are inaccurate, and the bank does not have any legal right to maintain properties held in an investment pool, for which the bank is only a trustee.

Blue Cross Blue Shield to discontinue Medicare prescription plan
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana will no longer offer a plan to help seniors purchase prescription drugs. In a letter to its members, the insurer said those who were covered by the discontinued plans have until Feb. 28 to enroll in a new plan. Those who are not enrolled in a new plan by the end of 2013 will no longer have prescription drug coverage on Jan. 1. The company called the move a “strategic business decision,” and denied the change had any connection to the Affordable Care Act.

U.S. Supreme Court declines funeral directors’ appeal; monks allowed to sell coffins
The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear an appeal of a lower court’s decision to strike down a Louisiana state law restricting who is allowed to sell coffins. The suit, brought by Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors’, asked the courts to bar Benedictine monks from making and selling simple coffins. A district judge and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had found no reasonable grounds for a regulation that only state-licensed funeral directors may sell coffins in Louisiana. Darpana M. Sheth, attorney for St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, said the decision “vindicates what we’ve been saying from the beginning — that we and others like us have a right to build and sell caskets without any unnecessary restrictions from the government.” She added that government regulations should protect public health and safety, not special interests.