Charlotte Observer - July 6, 2014, by Mark Price - The creation of an official Charlotte ID card is still only a proposal, but critics are already lining up,...
Organize Florida activists protest Trump infrastructure plan
Organize Florida activists protest Trump infrastructure plan
Progressive activists gathered on the shores of Lake Parker on Thursday to air their discontent with the Trump administration’s outline for a nationwide infrastructure improvement plan.
The...
Progressive activists gathered on the shores of Lake Parker on Thursday to air their discontent with the Trump administration’s outline for a nationwide infrastructure improvement plan.
The plan, outlined broadly in a six-page memo released last month, amounts to placing heavy burdens on the poor through flat user fees like tolls, subsidizing private companies and ignoring public transportation, school facilities and clean energy, said activists with Organize Florida, a project of the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning political advocacy group.
Read the full article here.
Austin Passed a Landmark Paid Leave Policy. Will Texas Republicans Undermine It?
Austin Passed a Landmark Paid Leave Policy. Will Texas Republicans Undermine It?
It can have a chilling impact on the introduction of policies that have the potential to be pre-empted,” said Sarah Johnson, director of Local Progress, which was involved in advocating for the...
It can have a chilling impact on the introduction of policies that have the potential to be pre-empted,” said Sarah Johnson, director of Local Progress, which was involved in advocating for the legislation. But Austin decided to take a different approach. The city “realiz[ed] their power and [fought] back and [went] on offense despite that.
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How Janet Yellen Is Embracing The Fed’s Role In Racial Justice
How Janet Yellen Is Embracing The Fed’s Role In Racial Justice
Oh, what a difference a year can make.
Last July, Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen endured criticism for House testimony in which she seemed to imply that there was little the Fed...
Oh, what a difference a year can make.
Last July, Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen endured criticism for House testimony in which she seemed to imply that there was little the Fed could do to address the disproportionately high African-American unemployment rate.
Not so on Tuesday. In her semi-annual testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen emphasized that the failure of the economic recovery to reach communities of color influences the Fed’s decision-making, and made a strong commitment to improving diversity at the central bank.
“Jobless rates have declined for all major demographic groups, including for African Americans and Hispanics,” Yellen said, according to her prepared remarks. “Despite these declines, however, it is troubling that unemployment rates for these minority groups remain higher than for the nation overall, and that the annual income of the median African-American household is still well below the median income of other U.S. households.”
Yellen’s policy argument has not fundamentally changed. It is the Fed’s job to maximize employment in the economy as the whole, she says, and it lacks the tools to target particular communities. And the Fed chief has clarified since last summer that she takes seriously how the Fed’s adjustment of interest rates can have an especially big impact on African Americans and Latinos, who have higher jobless rates.
But Yellen’s remarks and actions on Tuesday represent the Fed’s greatest demonstration yet that it is putting the concerns of communities of color front and center on its agenda.
The Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups that has led the push to make the Federal Reserve more responsive to workers in general, and communities of color in particular, was pleased with the focus of Yellen’s testimony.
“Each time since Yellen spoke last July, when she got pushback over what she said, she has gotten a little bit better,” said Jordan Haedtler, Fed Up’s campaign manager. “Now she is proactively showing that the Fed is assessing this data and does take this data into account.”
Diversity is an extremely important goal and I will do everything I can to further advance it.
This week’s hearings, held every six months in both chambers of Congress — the House will hold its hearing on Wednesday — are an opportunity for the Fed chair to update lawmakers about the overall state of the economy. As part of the briefing, the Fed releases an accompanying monetary policy report summarizing its economic assessment and research.
For the first time, the Fed chose to devote a section of its report to whether the “gains of the economic expansion [have] been widely shared.” That section focused on how the recovery affected different races and ethnicities differently.
The results are discouraging. Despite years of job growth, the rates of full-time work for African Americans and Latinos are a few percentage points lower than they were before the recession, while the rates among white and Asian-American workers have more or less reached pre-recession levels. And the median income of black households, which took the biggest hit of any group during the recession, has also been slower to recover, reaching only 88 percent of what it was in 2007, compared with about 94 percent for the other three groups.
Responding to a question about the new section from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Yellen insisted that weighing the disparate impact of economic growth on a range of different groups is a key part of the Fed’s mission.
“There are very significant differences in success in the labor market across demographic groups,” she said. “It is important for us to be aware of those differences and to focus on them as we think about monetary policy and the broader work that the Federal Reserve does in the area of community development and trying to make sure that financial services are widely available to those that need it, including low- and moderate-income [households].”
Yellen also recognized the importance of diversity — of race, gender, professional background and ideology — within the Fed’s ranks in ensuring the bank remains sensitive to a broad array of Americans’ economic experiences.
She touted her creation of a task force in the Fed to improve its gender and ethnic diversity, but acknowledged there is more to be done.
“Diversity is an extremely important goal and I will do everything I can to further advance it,” Yellen said.
Progressive groups and their allies in Congress trying to make the Fed more accountable to the public have focused on increasing diversity and reducing Wall Street’s influence at the central bank. Eleven senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and 116 House members sent a letter to Yellen on May 12 urging her to prioritize the diversity of Fed officials, especially at the 12 regional Fed banks, which are privately owned. (Hillary Clinton expressed similar sentiments in a statement later that day.)
The makeup of the regional Fed bank boards is important because they are dominated by the big banks and have free reign to appoint their presidents. The regional Fed bank presidents hold five seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank panel that adjusts the benchmark interest rate. Currently, regional Fed presidents make up half of the FOMC’s influential votes.
As a result, the Fed officials with the power to raise interest rates and effectively increase unemployment are selected by people who are disproportionately white, male and from the finance and business sectors.
In the interests of changing that, the Fed Up campaign on Monday released a slate of 39 candidates for the regional Federal Reserve bank boards of directors. The candidates not only reflect racial and gender diversity, but also come exclusively from academic institutions, community groups and labor organizations.
“On racial and gender diversity there has been modest progress, though it has not taken place at the rate we would like to see,” Haedtler said. Haedtler added that there is even greater room for improvement when it comes to the diversity of professional backgrounds of board members and other top Fed officials, an area where he said there has been “regression” under Yellen’s watch.
By Daniel Marans
Source
Metro Phoenix Woman Fights For Toys R Us Workers' Severance Pay
Metro Phoenix Woman Fights For Toys R Us Workers' Severance Pay
Auerbach got mad and got moving. With the help of two groups, Rise Up Retail and Center for Popular Democracy, she joined other former employees to lobby politicians in Washington, D.C., and to...
Auerbach got mad and got moving. With the help of two groups, Rise Up Retail and Center for Popular Democracy, she joined other former employees to lobby politicians in Washington, D.C., and to march into the lobbies of companies they hold responsible.
Read the full article here.
Are Scheduling Bills Like D.C.'s Helpful or Meddlesome?
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to tell employees what their work schedules will be several weeks in advance...
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to tell employees what their work schedules will be several weeks in advance and require employers to compensate employees for last-minute schedule changes.
“This movement is under way across this country,” lead sponsor Vincent Orange Jr. (D-At Large) said when he introduced the measure Dec. 5. “San Francisco recently passed regulations to address this issue and bills have been introduced in seven states.”
The Hours and Scheduling Stability Act of 2015 wouldn't apply to all stores and restaurants, but it would have a big impact, Orange told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 17. If passed, the measure “will assist tremendously with providing [the district's] workforce and their families with certainty,” the councilmember said.
The bill would require employers to tell workers what their schedules will be at least three weeks in advance. A change in schedule less than three weeks out would require the employer to pay an extra hour of wages. Less than 24 hours' notice would require four hours of wages.
Orange's bill would cover any D.C. franchisee of a restaurant chain with at least 20 locations nationwide or a retail store chain with at least five.
Unpredicatability Affects Planning, Benefits Eligibility
It's hard enough for families to balance work and personal life, Orange said when he introduced the bill. “Having a schedule you can count on leads to a better work environment and better harmony in scheduling family obligations.”
Liz Ben-Ishai, senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, which supports legislation requiring employers to provide workers with advance notice of schedules, told California lawmakers in March of 2015 that volatile schedules affect workers’ ability to arrange child care. Such volatility also interferes with their ability to hold second jobs and pursue education or training, she said.
There's another problem with unpredictable schedules, Ben-Ishai told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 22. Many public assistance programs ask participants to estimate their income or number of hours they will work, she said. “Because they have these erratic schedules or insufficient hours they can't predict how much they'll make,” she said.
Utah is “an example of a good approach,” she told Bloomberg BNA. State eligibility assessors use “professional judgment” to draw on multiple sources of information, including paychecks and conversations with employers regarding anticipated hours and overtime, to determine an applicant's’ eligibility, Ben-Ishai wrote in a policy brief. Utah encourages workers to follow up on information applicants provide that may not reflect their current eligibility, such as out-of-date wage information
Ben-Ishai also suggested a different time frame for evaluating applicants’ incomes and work hours. She pointed to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which “requires a longer authorization period” and “accounts for fluctuation in people's hours.” This federally funded program allows states to determine eligibility “over a period of 12 months to provide a more realistic picture,” she said.
Bills Introduced Around the Country
The Washington, D.C., bill is one of several under consideration in state and local legislatures, as well as on the federal level. Within the past two years, there have been similar proposals in 13 other cities and states, plus one on the federal level.
San Francisco has been the first and, so far, only jurisdiction to pass a predictable scheduling law. It passed Nov. 25, 2014, by a 10-0 vote of the 11-member Board of Supervisors and became law without the signature of Mayor Ed Lee (D). Lee said he was “concerned about large numbers of impacted merchants who said there was little meaningful discussion” in the drafting of the law (243 DLR C-1, 12/18/14).
Lizzy Simmons, the National Retail Federation's senior director, government relations, told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 30 that the San Francisco law has a “carve-out that allows unions and their collective bargaining agreements to waive out” of its requirements. She said she's concerned that allowing employees to contractually waive the law's requirements grants outsize influence to labor organizations “since a lot of the unions have been behind” efforts to pass predictable scheduling laws.
The San Francisco law actually “takes away and impedes on employee flexibility,” Simmons said. Retail managers and employees should work together to come up with schedules that can accommodate individual needs, she said. “A one-size-fits-all government mandate” makes that harder to accomplish, she said.
Part of the problem with scheduling bills is that there's little guidance on how to implement them, said Robin Winchell Roberts, the federation's senior director, media relations. For example, the San Francisco law exempts employee-requested changes from triggering schedule change compensation, which Roberts calls “penalty pay.” The key factor in determining when an employer must pay schedule change compensation is who requests the change, Roberts said. It isn't clear whether it is due when a retailer requires an employee who can't work a scheduled shift to find a co-worker to work the shift in her place, Roberts said.
The compensation might also be triggered if business is better than expected, Simmons said. For example, a store might want to extend a sale that's going well. If the store wants to staff up to respond to the additional customer demand, it might incur unexpected expenses on account of employees who weren't scheduled, she told Bloomberg BNA. “I don't think you can just say after the fact sales made up for that,” she said when asked whether the unexpected increase in revenue would offset the unexpected increase in expenses.
Flexibility Essential, Industry Group Says
“Flexibility is a trademark of the restaurant industry,” Christin Fernandez, director of media relations and public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, told Bloomberg BNA by e-mail Dec. 23. Businesses operate around the clock “with business models unique to each restaurant,” she said.
Starbucks is an example of a business that pursued its own scheduling model. The company announced in August 2014 that it would voluntarily change its scheduling practices. It said it would provide employees with schedules a week in advance. It also said it would prohibit scheduling employees to close a store one night and return a few hours later to open the next morning (157 DLR A-6, 8/14/14).
But 11 months later, a report by the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization that describes itself as advocating for a “pro-worker” agenda, concluded that the company hasn’t kept its promises. The report, “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks,” drew on comments from a survey of employees who say back-to-back closing and opening shifts continue. Reached for comment Dec. 22, Brent Gow, global director for payroll at Starbucks, told Bloomberg BNA he couldn’t speak on the record because the company is still working on the issue.
Reporting Time Pay Laws Exist in Some States
Predictable scheduling laws don't take into account that “some of the people that go into these jobs to begin with do it for exactly the flexibility that's being challenged here,” said Diane Saunders, a shareholder in the Boston office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart P.C. who advises employers as co-chair of the firm's Retail Practice Group.
Saunders advises her clients to ensure that they comply with reporting time laws that are already on the books. In Washington, D.C., and eight states, employees are guaranteed a minimum number of hours of pay if they report to work but are sent home because business is unexpectedly slow, she wrote in a Novemberblog post.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's labor bureau chief, Terri Gerstein, wrote to 13 retailers in April 2015 as part of a review of on-call scheduling. In the letters, Gerstein reminded the companies that New York state law requires that an employee who reports for work must be paid four hours, or the number of hours of a regularly scheduled shift if that is less than four hours.
Gerstein told the retailers the attorney general's office had received reports that an increasing number of employers require their employees to call in “just a few hours in advance, or the night before.” Threatening enforcement action over this practice goes beyond what New York law says, said Jim Evans, a partner in Alston & Bird LLP's labor and employment practice who represents employers.
Whether the proposals become law, employers should focus on “the human aspect” of predictability in scheduling, he said. Employers that voluntarily change their practices and lawmakers who draft predictable scheduling laws should consider the “harsh economic consequences” of last-minute shift cancellations, he said.
New Application for Existing Laws
The New York attorney general's letters were sent to companies with household names such as Gap Inc., J. Crew and Burlington Coat Factory. One recipient was Abercrombie & Fitch Co., which is facing a class action in California over its use of on-call scheduling.
In the absence of laws requiring pay for on-call shifts, one team of lawyers is attempting to use wage and hour laws that are already on the books to help their clients. Hallie Von Rock and Carey James, of Aiman-Smith & Marcy, filed a lawsuit in December against Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of C’endan Claiborne and a class they estimate includes between 15,000 and 65,000 members in three states.
In the lawsuit, Von Rock and James allege that the company's practice of requiring California employees to call in one hour before their scheduled start time in order to find out whether they're required to work the shift should be considered reporting to work. When an employee calls and is told to stay home, the employee is entitled to a few hours of pay, Von Rock and James told Bloomberg BNA.
Under wage and hour laws already on the books, Abercrombie should pay its employees for the time they spend calling in, Rock and James said. The calls last between two and 20 minutes, which adds up to several hours of unpaid wages per month, they said.
Von Rock and James contend that employees—who aren't paid for the time they spend on these phone calls—are reporting for work when they make these calls. “Even though they're not physically showing up” at the store, the phone call is the beginning of a work shift, Von Rock said. Abercrombie, which is represented by Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP and Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease LLP, denies the lawsuit’s allegations.
James said the law “is undeveloped in California” as to what qualifies as reporting for work under the reporting time law. “To me, report is a straightforward word and it could just as easily mean call,” he said.
Von Rock expressed concern about a power imbalance between employers and employees. Predictable scheduling laws attempt to level the unequal bargaining power, she said.
Simmons, with the National Retail Federation, views it differently. These laws insert friction into the employer-employee relationship, she told Bloomberg BNA. “These bills punish job creators,” the federation says in its restrictive scheduling toolkit. A better approach would be to continue to allow the market to strike a balance, Simmons said.
Common Ground
One thing on which supporters and opponents of predictable scheduling laws agree is that it's too soon to tell what kind of impact San Francisco's law is having. Ben-Ishai, the policy analyst, and Simmons, of the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA it is too early to have meaningful research.
Evans, the employer-side attorney, offered advice on balancing employers' need for flexibility with workers' need for predictability. “Focus on the human aspect of it,” he said. “I represent large corporations, many of which are very focused on the human aspect of it. I think that the human aspect of the legislation and the impact of the practices can't be overemphasized.”
“It's just not fair to subject people to that last minute change and kind of harsh economic consequences,” he added. “When you measure who has the ability to absorb the impact of a last minute change in schedule, the answer's kind of obvious.”
Source: Clasp
It Takes a Village: Educators, Unions Rally for Continued Funding of Community Schools
Baltimore City Paper - November 4, 2014, by Evan Serpick - Administrators, teachers, union organizers, community leaders, politicians, and students—including cheerleading squads...
Baltimore City Paper - November 4, 2014, by Evan Serpick - Administrators, teachers, union organizers, community leaders, politicians, and students—including cheerleading squads and step teams—were among those gathered in front of City Hall on Oct. 21 to sing the praises of community schools, some literally.
“We are gentle, angry people,” The Charm City Labor Chorus sang from the dais. “And we are singing for our lives.”
The effort, organized by the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU), Maryland Communities United, Center for Popular Democracy, and AFT-Maryland, aims to press the city government to continue funding the city’s 48 community schools and to ultimately expand the program to include all 210 city schools. (Disclosure: My wife is a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools.) Community schools work to help students and their families access non-academic services such as health care and food assistance. One key element of the advocates’ efforts, many of those assembled acknowledged, was to inform the public and key officials of exactly what community schools are and how they’re beneficial to students and families.
“People hear ‘community schools’ and they don’t know what that means,” said Councilman Carl Stokes (D, 12th District), who spoke to the crowd “on behalf of [his] colleagues” in support of the effort.
The $10 million in municipal funding for the city’s 48 community schools pays for each school to employ a site coordinator to connect students and families in need with existing services, both public and private. The funding does not, organizers emphasize, pay for the services themselves.
Christopher Gaither, who has been principal of Upper Fells Point’s Wolfe Street Academy for nine years, spoke to the assembled group in Spanish and English. He said when Wolfe Street became a community school in 2006, the school, which had a 72 percent English language learner (ELL) population and 94 percent reduced-price lunch population, ranked 77th among city elementary schools. Eight years later, the ELL rate has gone up to 78 and reduced-lunch rate up to 96, but the school is now ranked second in the city academically, behind only Roland Park Elementary-Middle (which, as Gaither estimated, has an 18 percent reduced-price lunch population). Gaither gives much of the credit to being a community school.
“It sets up systems to identify partnerships to help families to take on challenges,” he said, before adding, more colloquially, “It gives people fish and teaches them how to fish.”
Gaither said his site coordinator helps families apply for food stamps and Medicaid, and also helps find mental health and housing services when needed, in addition to establishing after-school and recreational programs.
“No parent at Roland Park would think it’s acceptable if their child had to go to school hungry or without sleeping because of bedbugs,” he said. “Why should our parents?”
He added that, while community school funding doesn’t pay directly for social services, it does make that funding more effective, since site coordinators are able to link social-service providers directly with families in need so those providers spend less time and money on outreach.
Among those speaking at the rally were Chelsea Gilmer, a seventh-grader at City Springs Elementary/Middle School downtown who is active in Baltimore Urban Debate League, and Yolanda Pernell, a parent of children at Callaway Elementary, a community school in Northwest Baltimore where the site coordinator created an after-school program with the Boys and Girls Club of Metropolitan Baltimore.
Fred D. Mason, president of the Maryland and D.C. AFL-CIO, was on hand to explain why unions support community schools. “It provides a better, safer, more productive community for teachers to work in,” he said. “When the community organizations are coming into the school, interacting with the students, it just make a better overall environment for everybody.”
But BTU president Marietta English, who has been pushing City Hall hard on the issue, worries that funding for community schools will be cut. “We’re looking at how we can get the funding for next year,” she said. “Right now, it’s all about the budget deficit. Everybody I talk to is like, ‘Well you know we got a budget deficit.’ I hear their support but in the end, it’s ‘Where do we get the money?’”
Speaking to City Paper after the rally, Stokes said funding community schools was imperative.
“The city government needs to put it in the budget in this coming budget year—they should pass it so that it goes into the budget for July and can apply to next year,” he said. “This works. The schools that have the full funding for the coordinator, it works for them. A lot of kids come from environments that aren’t as strong as they could be, should be, and to make that environment in the school helps kids all around.”
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Building Momentum From The Ground Up: A Toolkit For Promoting Justice In Policing
The killing of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, John Crawford III, and Ezell Ford over just four weeks last summer, and the subsequent failure to hold any officers involved responsible, spurred a national...
The killing of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, John Crawford III, and Ezell Ford over just four weeks last summer, and the subsequent failure to hold any officers involved responsible, spurred a national conversation about police violence and systemic racism. Community members, often led by tenacious young leaders, planned direct actions, die-ins, walk-outs, and acts of civil disobedience to demand accountability and recognition that black lives matter. From New York to Seattle, outraged elected officials walked out of city council meetings and state buildings with their hands up to express solidarity with, and commitment to, the movement for police and criminal justice reform.
Communities across the country that have lived for too long under the weight of discriminatory policing and mass incarceration are calling for a transformation of our policing and criminal justice systems. They are making it clear that it is time for policies to first and foremost reflect the concerns and solutions of communities most affected by flawed policing practices. Communities are demanding meaningful oversight of law enforcement, accountability, an end to the criminalization of communities of color, and an investments well beyond federally-sponsored tanks and additional police. To support the efforts of community organizations and elected officials, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and PolicyLink have created Building Momentum from the Ground Up: A Toolkit for Promoting Justice in Policing. The Toolkit is a direct response to organizers, elected officials, and community members from across the country seeking support and resources for campaigns aimed at transforming the policies and practices of local law enforcement.
Download the Toolkit here
Dems rally for same-day voter registration
Democrats rallied at Legislative Hall on Tuesday in favor of legislation that would allow Delawareans to register to vote on the same day as a primary or general election.
"We should so...
Democrats rallied at Legislative Hall on Tuesday in favor of legislation that would allow Delawareans to register to vote on the same day as a primary or general election.
"We should so everything we can to make sure eligible others have every opportunity to exercise their constitutional right to vote," said Rep. John Viola, D-Newark, the legislation's sponsor.
Democrats and activists supporting the bill dismissed concerns that same-day registration could lead to voter fraud.
"There's nothing there," Viola said, adding that he feels "confident" the bill will pass the House in the "next couple weeks."
The bill was voted out of committee in May, and would still need to go to the Senate for committee and floor votes if it passes the House. Delaware's current registration deadline is the fourth Saturday prior to an election.
Rep. John Kowalko, a Newark Democrat, told supporters gathered outside Legislative Hall on Tuesday that "you deserve the right to vote" and said the measure only reinforces the constitutional rights of Delawareans. Rep. Paul Baumbach, D-Newark, called the legislation "as American as it gets."
Representatives from several left-leaning advocacy groups attended the rally in support of the legislation on Tuesday, including the Delaware Alliance for Community Advancement and American for Democratic Action.
Same-day registration is already law in 11 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Mike Begatto, executive director of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the public employees union, also spoke in favor of the bill on Tuesday. Sen. Margaret Rose Henry, a Wilmington Democrat, is sponsoring the measure in the Senate.
Source
How to Join the ‘Day Without Immigrants’ on May Day
How to Join the ‘Day Without Immigrants’ on May Day
A coalition led by immigrants and workers is aiming to mark this year’s May Day with the biggest workers strike and mobilization in over a decade...
...
A coalition led by immigrants and workers is aiming to mark this year’s May Day with the biggest workers strike and mobilization in over a decade...
Read full article here.
Critics Lining Up Against Charlotte’s Proposed City ID
Charlotte Observer - July 6, 2014, by Mark Price - The creation of an official Charlotte ID card is still only a proposal, but critics are already lining up, including a national political action group that claims the city’s plan will “aid and abet illegal immigrants.”
Two immigration reform groups – the national Americans for Legal Immigration PAC and NC Listen – say they will press North Carolina legislators to stop cities from creating IDs, which are of most benefit to people who don’t have Social Security numbers.
In Charlotte, that population is made up largely of immigrants of all nationalities who are not in the country legally. They can’t get a Social Security number or apply for a driver’s license, and they are subject to arrest and deportation.
About a half-dozen U.S. cities have already created municipal IDs, which experts see as a way of dealing locally with immigration issues that aren’t being solved on a national level.
Charlotte, like many of those other cities, has an immigrant population that is outpacing the growth rate of both whites and blacks, leading to entire neighborhoods and schools where foreign-born people are in the majority.
City leaders say that accepting them as residents is a practical matter. However, the ID proposal remains controversial and critics question whether it’s legal.
“It’s against federal law to aid and abet people in the country illegally and if this isn’t aiding and abetting, I don’t know what is,” said Ron Woodard of NC Listen.
William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is more blunt. “We will ask the General Assembly to stop any North Carolina city from helping illegal immigrants,” he said.
Charlotte Mayor Dan Clodfelter met with the city’s Immigrant Integration Task Force last month and asked the group to research a city ID program that can be used by all citizens to access community services.
The task force was created to craft policies that will make Charlotte more welcoming to immigrants of all nationalities, particularly those interested in starting businesses.
Recommendations – including whether to adopt a municipal ID program – are scheduled to be presented to the City Council in February.
Background checks at school
The idea of creating a city ID emerged in response to complaints from undocumented immigrant parents that they can’t interact with their own children in school classrooms.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools requires a Social Security number so it can do criminal background checks daily on people who want to do volunteer work in schools. The district recently announced a team is exploring alternative forms of identification that can be used to perform those criminal background checks. It may complete its work later this year.
CMS is independent from city government and would not be required to accept a municipal ID.
Still, Clodfelter said he hoped the new ID might help undocumented parents gain greater access to schools.
“This is a question for the entire community,” Clodfelter said in a statement. “The city, county, school system, law enforcement, community based nonprofits and other agencies need to work together on a review of the options to explore what may be feasible at the local level.”
Hector Vaca of the immigrant advocacy group ActionNC says he has doubts a city ID could be easily used for criminal background checks. To do that, he says the city would have to share ID card specifics with state and federal law enforcement databases – and that’s not necessarily something undocumented immigrants want to see happen.
ActionNC supports municipal IDs, he said, but is waiting to see what Charlotte leaders propose.
“This is another way to identify people, which is something even the police have said would be a good thing,” Vaca said. “I think it’s contradictory when anti-immigrant groups say we need to better identify the people who are in this country, and yet when you give them another tool that helps identify people, those critics say they don’t want it.”
Uses for municipal IDs
The Immigrant Integration Task Force intends to study municipal IDs created by other cities, including a program adopted last month by New York City. That program, which goes into effect at the end of the year, allows any New Yorker, “regardless of immigration status,” to get a government-issued photo identification card from the city. The cards are predicted to cost about $10 per person.
Proponents of such programs say the IDs can accomplish a lot of good, including making communities safer.
A study by the Center for Popular Democracy notes that immigrants who don’t have IDs are often unable to open bank accounts, which makes them easy targets for thieves. Such immigrants are also reluctant to report crimes and/or to visit doctors for conditions that might pose a community health threat, the report says.
Charlotte police say the IDs could also be useful in identifying victims of crimes.
Emily Tucker of Center for Popular Democracy says criticism of ID programs is often based on a mistaken belief that it is all about helping undocumented immigrants. In New York, city leaders are negotiating with museums, sports venues, businesses and banks to have benefits associated with city ID cards.
“Undocumented people may have been the inspiration initially, but I think it undercuts that effectiveness of (winning support for) the card,” she said.
“In New York, we decided to market it to a cross section of New Yorkers, including the LGBT community, homeless advocates, and even the American Civil Liberties Union, which wanted a form of ID with privacy protections: Something people wouldn’t be afraid to apply for.”
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