Campaign News

As the Federal Reserve’s interest rate debate heats up, a national coalition of workers, community-based organizations, and economists is stepping up its advocacy for a pro-jobs, pro-wages, racial equity agenda. Todayoutside of the Fed’s annual policy summit, workers and advocates called on the Fed to follow the data, not impulses, and to give the economic recovery enough time to reach all workers, including African Americans and Latinos.

Participants also delivered more than 110,000 petition signatures from supporters across the country warning the Fed against slowing down the economy and hurting working families. The petition effort was spearheaded by major advocacy allies including CREDO Action, the Working Families Organization, Demand Progress, Daily Kos, and an onlinevideo from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

The press conference is part of Whose Recovery: A National Convening on Inequality, Race, and the Federal Reserve, which the Fed Up coalition is hosting on August 27 and 28 to coincide with the Federal Reserve’s annual policy conference. The conference will feature two days of teach-ins and workshops by workers, civil rights leaders and renowned economists.

As part of the event, the Fed Up campaign released a report,A National Convening on Inequality, Race, and the Federal Reserve, that calculates the benefits of full employment for all communities, in terms of increased income, decreased poverty, and higher tax revenues. The report, available here, also features policy briefs and factsheets to accompany each of the convening’s teach-ins and a collection of articles and op-eds from the past year addressing issues of monetary policy, Fed governance, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Every day, my husband tries to get work. He competes with hundreds of other men who form long lines, every one of them desperate for even a temporary job at the local work pool. Together, despite our hard work and best efforts, we still struggle at the end of the month with health and household bills,” said Dawn O’Neal, a teaching assistant and member of Rise Up Georgia. “That’s not just our story, but that of our neighbors and our community. For members of the Fed looking to slow down the economy, I’d invite them to come here to East Atlanta. It’s not easy to live here; for some people the economy means our very survival.”

“This is not an economy where everyone can thrive. It is an economy where communities are struggling to survive; where parents are struggling with which bill to let slide and for how long, while still providing stability for their kids,” said Connie Razza, director of strategic research at the Center for Popular Democracy. “It is beyond clear: This is not a time for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. We are calling on the Fed to not raise interest rates and give the recovery to take hold in our communities.

“Whether it likes it or not, what the Federal Reserve does has significant effects on inequality in our country,” said Roosevelt Institute Chief Economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz. “It is time for the Fed to take greater recognition of this, since there are many channels through which its policies impact inequality and affect American workers and families, and reshape its polices accordingly.”

“We are here raising the voice of everyday people because no one should have to work works 60 hours a week and remain in poverty,” said Kendra Brooks, of Action United. “Our delegation is here to request transparency in the Fed with the selection process, with more access to timelines, the opportunity to preview potential candidates, and to be a part of the process. There is a clear problem with income inequality in our country. When the top 10% are controlling the financial futures of the rest of the country, the middle class and vast majority of nation are not represented nor are they heard.”

“I am in Jackson Hole because I have a personal stake in the Federal Reserve Bank focusing on full employment and living wages instead of raising rates. If the Fed continues to focus on talking about prematurely raising interest rates, it will just be harder for my two sons to get out of the trap of underpaid work that is either temporary or not nearly close to the kind full time work they need,” said Claudia Nelson, Chair of the Board of Directors at Communities Creating Opportunity in Kansas City, Missouri.

“Among other things, the Fed can do a lot to address inequality by allowing unemployment to fall to much lower levels,” said Josh Bivens, Research and Policy Director at the Economic Policy Institute.

“I am in Jackson Hole because I have a personal stake in this,” said Claudia Nelson, of Communities Creating Opportunity, in Kansas City, Mo. “The Federal Reserve must focus on full employment and living wages instead of slowing down the economy. If the Fed continues to ignore economic data and focus on raising interest rates, it would have a very real effect on my family. It will be harder for my two sons to get out of the trap of underpaid work that is either temporary or low-quality. My sons and my community deserve a fighting chance at better jobs and better wages.” 

The Fed Up campaign, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, is hosting the Whose Recovery convening in order  to elevate the voices of working families in the national debate about monetary policy. With the central message of “Let Our Wages Grow,” the convening is meant to highlight to Fed policy makers and the public that it makes no sense to slow down the national economy now. The teach-ins will be led by workers, economists, and Fed Up allies and will cover an array of topics like the Fed’s role in full employment, the intersection of Black Lives Matter and the Fed, the selection process for regional bank presidents, a historical look at inflation, and more.

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The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.

The New York Times - August 10, 2013, by Steven Greenhouse - Like most construction workers who come to see Patricia Zavala, the two dozen men who crowded into her office in Austin, Tex., one afternoon in March had a complaint.

The workers, most of them Honduran immigrants, had jobs applying stucco to the exterior of a 17-story luxury student residence. It was difficult, dangerous work, but that was to be expected. What upset them was that for the previous two weeks their crew leader had not paid them; each was owed about $1,000.

Ms. Zavala, the workplace justice coordinator at the Workers Defense Project, listened to their stories and then spent a month failing to persuade the contractors to pay the back wages. So Ms. Zavala, 27, a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, turned to what she calls the nuclear option: the workers filed a lien on the building site. That legal maneuver snarls any effort to make transactions on the property and sometimes causes banks and investors to freeze financing.

The lien, along with a threatened protest march, quickly got the attention of the dormitory’s developer, American Campus Communities, and the general contractor, Harvey-Cleary Builders. Within hours, Harvey-Cleary arranged a meeting between the stucco contractor and the unpaid workers, and, presto, Harvey-Cleary and the contractor, Pillar Construction, agreed to pay the $24,767 owed to the workers.

“Liens are the very best tool workers have,” said Cristina Tzintzún, executive director of the Workers Defense Project. Instead of dealing with subcontractors, she said, “you’re negotiating with the project owner and general contractor. They can no longer shift responsibility and say: ‘I paid the guy downriver. It’s out of my hands.’ ”

The Workers Defense Project, founded in 2002, has emerged as one of the nation’s most creative organizations for immigrant workers. Its focus is the Texas construction industry, which employs more than 600,000 workers, about half of whom, several studies suggest, are unauthorized immigrants.

Immigrant workers, especially those who are undocumented, are especially vulnerable to abuse by contractors. Each year, the Workers Defense Project, which has 2,000 dues-paying members, receives about 500 complaints from workers who say they were cheated out of overtime or denied a water break in Texas’ scorching summer heat or stuck with huge hospital bills for an on-the-job injury.

The Workers Defense Project is one of 225 worker centers nationwide aiding many of the country’s 22 million immigrant workers. The centers have sprouted up largely because labor unions have not organized in many fields where immigrants have gravitated, like restaurants, landscaping and driving taxis. And there is another reason: many immigrants feel that unions are hostile to them. Some union members say that immigrants, who are often willing to work for lower wages, are stealing their jobs.

“The Workers Defense Project is not like a union — it welcomes everyone,” said Luis Rodriguez, a Mexican immigrant who sought the group’s help after he lost a finger in a construction accident. “It is always willing to take in more people and help more people.”

At a recent Workers Defense Project meeting — they are held every Tuesday night — the atmosphere was part pep rally, part educational session, part social hour. After a dinner of tacos, rice and beans, about 60 workers plotted strategy for a demonstration against the developer of a 1,000-room Marriott hotel. A skit mocking the developer drew raucous laughter. The energy and sense of solidarity were reminiscent of what America’s labor unions had many decades ago, before they started to stumble and stagnate.

Worker centers, which are among the most vigorous champions of overhauling immigration laws, coalesce around issues or industries. For example, there is Domestic Workers United, which persuaded New York and Hawaii to enact a bill of rights for housekeepers and nannies, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has gotten most Florida tomato growers to adopt a workers’ code of conduct and to increase pay by at least 20 percent. Young Workers United played an important role in persuading the San Francisco City Council to enact a paid-sick-days law and a minimum wage of $10.55 an hour. With labor unions losing members and influence, these centers are increasingly seen as an important alternative form of workplace advocacy, although no one expects them to be nearly as effective as unions in winning raises, pensions or paid vacations.

“Worker centers are filling a void by reaching out to a work force that is particularly hard to reach out to,” said Victor Narro, a specialist on immigrant workers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jefferson Cowie, a labor historian at Cornell, said: “Worker centers are part of the broad scramble of how to improve things for workers outside the traditional union/collective bargaining context. They’ve become little laboratories of experimentation.”

Cristina Tzintzún, the executive director of the Workers Defense Project, says of its Texas efforts, “Things can only go up because working conditions are so awful.”

As worker centers go, the Workers Defense Project in Austin has racked up an unusual number of successes. It has won more than $1 million in back pay over the last decade on behalf of workers alleging violations of minimum wage and overtime laws. A report it wrote on safety problems spurred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to investigate 900 construction sites in Texas — leading to nearly $2 million in fines.

And, despite a liberal image, the group made common cause with law-abiding contractors to persuade the state’s Republican-dominated legislature to approve a law that made wage theft — an employer’s deliberate failure to pay wages due — a criminal offense. The Workers Defense Project has just 18 employees, and its executive director, Ms. Tzintzún, 31, earns just $43,000 a year. But it managed to bring mighty Apple to the negotiating table. The group extracted a promise that construction workers on Apple’s new Austin office complex would receive at least $12 an hour, not the more commonly paid $10 — as well as workers’ compensation coverage.

The workers’ compensation pledge was an important victory. The construction industry in Texas has a higher fatality rate than that in most other states, but Texas is the only one that does not require building contractors to provide workers’ compensation to cover an injured worker’s hospital bills and disability benefits.

“We like organizing here in Texas,” Ms. Tzintzún said. “Things can only go up because working conditions are so awful.”

AS soon as word got out in March 2012 that Apple was planning to build a $300 million operations center in Austin, the Workers Defense Project sprang into action. Gregorio Casar, the group’s business liaison — his title might more fittingly be thorn-in-the-side — learned that Apple hoped to receive tax incentives in exchange for promising to create 3,600 full-time jobs with salaries averaging at least $63,000.

But Mr. Casar, a University of Virginia graduate who is the son of Mexican immigrants, assumed that Apple’s construction contractors would pay much less than that. The typical wage for nonunion construction laborers in Texas is just $10 an hour — about $20,000 a year.

Relying on relationships that the Workers Defense Project had built over the years, Mr. Casar, 24, persuaded the Austin City Council to require Apple to hold talks with the group as a condition for $8.6 million in city tax incentives. (The group had previously persuaded the council to enact Texas’ first ordinance requiring rest and water breaks for construction workers.)

In these discussions, Mr. Casar demanded that Apple’s construction contractors pay at least $12 an hour, provide safety training and workers’ compensation, and allow the group’s representatives to go to the site to inspect working conditions.

“Like many companies, Apple resisted at first because they wanted total flexibility,” Mr. Casar said.

So the group turned up the heat. On March 22, just before the council’s hearing on Apple’s tax incentives, 100 protesters demonstrated outside City Hall. Inside the council chambers, Jose Nieto, a demolition worker affiliated with the Workers Defense Project, testified about how he had once nearly bled to death when a large mirror he was removing from a hotel wall broke and sliced into his arm. His hospital bill, which included multiple operations, was more than $80,000. He had no workers’ compensation to pay for the operations or support his family.

Mr. Nieto implored the council not to grant Apple the tax incentives unless it accepted the Workers Defense Project’s demands. “It is in your power to prevent things like this from happening to other people,” he told the council.

Several weeks of negotiations ensued. Apple — then under criticism for conditions at the Foxconn plants in China that build its products — agreed to almost all of the group’s demands.

“Apple is a strong supporter of workers’ rights around the world,” Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said recently. “We’ve had a productive dialogue with the Workers Defense Project since we first heard from them last year. We shared many of the group’s goals.”

Ms. Tzintzún has an explanation for these victories. “We make it very hard for people to oppose us publicly,” she said. “We know what we’re asking for is the bare minimum, and we remind everybody of that.”

In taking on one of the world’s most successful companies, the Workers Defense Project showed how far it has come. Six years ago, it had just two employees: Ms. Tzintzún, then a senior at the University of Texas, and Emily Timm, now the group’s policy director, who had just graduated from Brown University and was working part time at a homeless shelter where many low-paid immigrant construction workers passed through.

The group limped along with insecure financing until 2009. That year, three immigrant workers plunged 11 floors when their scaffold collapsed in Austin; all three died. A week later, the Workers Defense Project released a 68-page report on worker safety.

The report had been a year in the making. Prepared with the help of University of Texas researchers, it found that two-thirds of 312 construction workers surveyed had not received basic health and safety training and that three-fourths had no health insurance. Most shocking, it calculated that one construction worker died in Texas every two-and-a-half days from work-related injuries.

To draw attention to the report — and to provide a television-friendly shot — Ms. Tzintzún and Ms. Timm held a news conference in front of 142 pairs of empty work boots. That was the number of construction workers who died in Texas in 2007. The report received media attention across Texas and turned the group overnight into an influential voice in a state where labor unions are weak.

The group’s higher profile has also meant more criticism. Stan Marek, chairman of a construction company based in Houston, called the group “a junkyard dog.” “They keep coming at you,” he said.

Scott Haeglin, project manager for Harvey-Cleary, voiced some annoyance with the group for filing the nettlesome lien and holding a protest march despite the settlement. “We take pride in treating our workers well and resolving these matters,” he said.

Phil Thoden, president of the Austin chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America, said: “They have a tendency to paint the entire industry in a negative light. It’s frustrating that when there’s an incident on a job site, they help give it tremendous media coverage and it leaves the public with the impression that contractors are doing nothing to protect their workers.”

Industry lobbyists have blocked many of the group’s initiatives in the State Capitol. A proposal to stop the common practice of classifying workers as independent contractors — allowing construction contractors to avoid providing benefits or paying overtime — died in committee. So did a proposal to require workers’ compensation in construction.

Some business-backed groups have begun a new attack on worker centers in recent weeks, calling them union-front groups set up to circumvent legal requirements that unions face, like strict financial disclosure.

Not all businesses object to the centers. The Workers Defense Project has made allies of many who dislike being undercut by what they call “low-road contractors” — for instance, those that do not provide workers’ compensation.

“It makes no sense — in Texas I’m required to have insurance on the cargo I haul up a construction elevator, but not on the workers in that elevator,” said Andy Anderson, owner of Linden Steel, which provides steel and labor to building projects.

Impressed by the Workers Defense Project’s success in helping immigrant workers and highlighting job safety, the Ford Foundation and others have showered it with grants. As a result, the project’s budget has swelled to $1 million — four times what it was just four years ago. The money has helped finance building site inspectors and safety and computer classes.

Many worker centers rely heavily on grants. “We’re flavor of the month right now,” Ms. Tzintzún said. “I worry what happens to our funding when we’re not.”

Henry Allen, the recently retired executive director of the Discount Foundation, one of the group’s first benefactors, voiced confidence in its future. “They’re a real model,” he said. “If there’s a future for organizing for worker justice, I think it’s the Workers Defense Project.”

LUIS RODRIGUEZ, 42, a short and stocky man with a thick mustache and a deep, bass voice, came to the Workers Defense Project early last year. A heavy industrial drill had torn off his right index finger as he dislodged it from a wall. Doctors could not reattach the finger, and after 20 years of construction work, Mr. Rodriguez was suddenly too disabled to work.

That contractor provided workers’ comp, but the checks did not arrive — and when he went to the state workers’ comp office, he ran into one obstacle after another. “A lady working there whispered to me, ‘You should go to the Workers Defense Project,’ ” he said.

The project helped him get his checks, and it provided him with a cause: worker empowerment. “I was really lost when I went to them,” he said. “I was one of those people who didn’t know anything. But now I know my rights. Now I won’t let some jerk step on me.”

Educating immigrant workers and turning them into activists and leaders is central to the project’s mission. Immigrants make up half of its board, and Mr. Rodriguez is on its Construction Workers Committee. “No union can substitute for what the Workers Defense Project does,” he said. “A union is a more closed group.”

Unions often help workers win better wages and safer workplaces, but unionizing is especially hard in right-to-work states like Texas. The large number of unauthorized immigrants makes it even harder, because many of them fear that outright union support could lead to deportation. (The Workers Defense Project does not ask whether workers who come to it are in the United States legally.)

In the project’s early days, unions often viewed it as an antagonist, a supporter of immigrants who stole jobs from Americans. But unions now often work and march alongside the Workers Defense Project. The change dates from its influential 2009 report about the dangers of construction work in Texas.

“If you had asked me a few years ago, would we be working with a group of nonunion workers to help them better their lives, we’d ask, why would we help people that are taking our jobs?” said Michael Cunningham, executive director of the Texas Building and Construction Trades Council. “Well, the fact is they already have our jobs.

“By working together,” he continued, “we’re trying to drive out low-road contractors that are driving down wages.”

As organized labor strains to reverse its membership decline, unions have established an uneasy alliance with many worker centers, hoping that they might someday help bring immigrant workers into established unions.

“There’s a need to experiment with new ways to reach workers who haven’t been reached by unions,” said Anna Fink, a liaison between the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and foundations that help finance worker centers. “The labor movement doesn’t have the deep trust that worker centers have built with immigrant worker communities.”

Worker centers have done much to discourage wage theft and have marginally increased the pay of some workers. But they do not begin to have the power that unions once had to vault workers into a middle-class life.

Mr. Rodriguez may feel empowered, but he is also poor. After losing his finger, he could not work for seven months. His family of five lost its apartment and moved into a trailer. His son who is now 20 quit high school to help support the family, and to his great shame, Mr. Rodriguez had to cancel his daughter’s quinceañera celebration.

When he returned to work, he found a job framing walls and staircases that paid $11 an hour, $440 a week. That, he said, was not enough, considering that his rent is $850 a month, not to mention costs for electricity, telephone, gasoline, car and food. Some months he makes ends meet only because of that 20-year-old son, who earns money as a disc jockey. A few weeks ago, Mr. Rodriguez found a job paying $14 an hour. He hopes it lasts.

“Eleven dollars an hour isn’t really enough,” he said. “It’s difficult to survive on that.”

But he is grateful to have survived. Many construction workers do not, a truth brought home in 2011, when the Workers Defense Project organized a haunting procession to the State Capitol with 138 mock coffins, commemorating all the Texas construction workers who died in job-related incidents in 2009.

Now, each year, the group commemorates a Day of the Fallen. The workers at the defense project come together around tragedy and hurt, but with a larger purpose, “Now,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “I tell other workers how to stand up for their rights.”

Source:

This week Newark, New Jersey, became the latest in a growing number of cities to adopt a municipal ID program. The IDs, available to all residents 14 and older, will be especially useful to undocumented immigrants, the homeless, formerly incarcerated people, and other populations who may not be able to present documents typically required for state-issued cards.

One notable addition to this list: transgender people. Unlike other forms of state and federal identification, Newark’s new card will not list the holder’s gender. The omission is expected to benefit those who do not identify with the gender listed on their birth certificate or other official documents.

Gender sensitivity is a relatively new development within the relatively newphenomenon of municipal IDs. In 2007, New Haven, Connecticut, became the first city in the U.S. to offer city IDs, followed by several cities in California (including San Francisco and Los Angeles), Washington, D.C., New York City, and a few others. In every case, undocumented immigrants were the main target group for the cards. But when San Francisco launched its ID program in 2007, the city made a point of omitting a gender marker (“male” or “female”) from the card, and in 2014 New York City became the first jurisdiction to allow local ID card holders to self-designate their gender.

Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, hopes that more cities will embrace self-designation on municipal IDs. “Since transgender people face so much discrimination based on sex, it’s important that they have ID that matches who they truly are and how they appear to the outside world,” he says. It’s a human rights issue, since IDs confer access to virtually every aspect of public life. When applying for jobs, public benefits, or other services that require identification, the option to affirm one’s gender identity (or omit it) can be significant. Sometimes, Silverman says, ID is the “only layer of support” for a person’s gender identity.

Gender markers are just one battleground in the struggle for gender-flexible documentation, however. Most states don’t allow people to change the gender on their birth certificates unless they undergo sex-reassignment surgery—difficult-to-define procedures that many transgender people either do not want or cannot afford. TLDEF has represented transgender people in West Virginiaand South Carolina who were asked to remove wigs, makeup, and other items associated with female gender expression before taking their driver’s license photos, and the ACLU recently sued the state of Michigan for requiring proof of reassignment surgery to change gender markers on state IDs.

But Silverman senses a sea change in public attitudes on gender identity, buoyed by the high-profile stories of Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner. In Newark, New York, and San Francisco, gender identity has become part of the conversation surrounding municipal IDs—one that has so far focused on the legal rights of undocumented immigrants. Silverman predicts that, moving forward, “municipalities will look to what other similar cities have done, and will take the concerns of the local transgender population into account when they plan these types of programs.”

In a 2013 report on municipal ID programs across the U.S., the Center for Popular Democracy wrote that “cities that offer ID to their residents regardless of immigration status are making a powerful statement of welcome and inclusion.” The same goes for cities who do so regardless of gender identity.

Source: The Atlantic's CityLab 

Capitol Confidential - August 20, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy group that supports New York’s controversial Scaffold Law, has filed an appeal of its initial Freedom of Information Law request for all communications between SUNY’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, the business-backed anti-Scaffold Law group that paid almost $83,000 for an analysis of the law’s economic impacts.

That report, made public in February, has been the subject of fierce debate — concerning the details of the Institute’s report as well as larger issues of academic integrity. The Rockefeller Institute subsequently backed away from the most controversial chapter of the report, which included a statistical analysis that concluded gravity-related accidents fell in Illinois after the state ditched its version of Scaffold Law.

Scaffold Law, which places “absolute liability” on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a “comparative negligence” standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.

The initial FOIL request from the Center for Popular Democracy resulted in SUNY’s release of email communications between Rockefeller Institute researchers and Tom Stebbins of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance — contact that was required by the contract for the report.

On appeal, SUNY released an initial draft copy of the report that had been attached to one of those emails. The TU last week offered a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions.

The Center is now requesting to see all subsequent drafts of the report. “Given that the anti-worker groups behind this debunked report are still trying to use its flawed findings to weaken New York’s safety laws, SUNY should release all of the drafts that we know exist,” said the group’s Josie Duffy. “What we saw in the one draft that SUNY did release was disturbing enough, but we still don’t have a full accounting of how this study was manipulated.”

A SUNY spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment — though it’s unlikely the system would have anything to say about the mere filing of a FOIL request.

Here’s the Center’s FOIL appeal:

Center FOIL appeal

Source