Charles Gladden works in the cafeteria at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, but he has not had a fixed address for 5 years. Instead of going home at night, the 63-year-old diabetic grandfather sleeps in the McPherson Square Metro Station, near the White House.

Gladden recently took part in a one-day strike to draw attention to the fact that the U.S. government is the single biggest indirect creator of jobs that do not pay a living wage. 

The Best of the Week’s News

• The New York City Housing Authority is way behind on lead abatement and kids are paying the price. (Hat Tip: Liz)

• 65% of migrants who died in 2014 drowned in the Mediterranean. How one NGO is trying to save lives at sea.

• Gwyneth Paltrow screwed up the Food Stamp Challenge, and not just by buying six limes.

• NYU made 10,000 construction workers on its Abu Dhabi campus second-class citizens, denying them wage and hour protections that the rest of NYU’s employees enjoy.

• Essay: “I Was an Invisible Woman.”

We are very pleased to announce that Spencer Woodman has won the April Sidney Award for exposing the outrageous non-compete agreements that Amazon has been enforcing on its temporary warehouse workers. Woodman found that the mega-retailer was forcing workers to sign 18-month non-compete agreements in order to qualify for a 3-month stint in an Amazon warehouse. The language of the non-compete clause is so sweeping that, if it were enforced, it would appear to bar workers from almost any job anywhere in the world, for a period 6 times longer than they actually worked at Amazon. 

Learn more about Spencer’s reporting and Amazon’s subsequent promise to stop imposing non-competes on hourly workers in The Backstory.