Chicago Group Pushing For $15 Minimum Wage
Huffington Post - May 28, 2014, by Joseph Erbentraut - A coalition of Chicago aldermen on Wednesday introduced an ordinance that would increase the minimum wage for many workers in the third-...
Huffington Post - May 28, 2014, by Joseph Erbentraut - A coalition of Chicago aldermen on Wednesday introduced an ordinance that would increase the minimum wage for many workers in the third-largest U.S. city to $15 an hour.
The ordinance calls for corporations with more than $50 million in annual sales to increase worker pay to at least $15 an hour with a year of the law's effective date. Smaller businesses would be allowed more than five years to raise pay. Twenty-one of the council's 50 members have signed on as cosponsors, Crain's Chicago Business reports.
The current minimum wage in Chicago is $8.25 an hour, a dollar more than the federal minimum wage.
Several aldermen joined low-wage workers at a press conference at City Hall on Wednesday, before the meeting where the ordinance was filed. Home care worker Darlene Pruitt, a 55-year-old mother of three and grandmother of 22, said she earns $10.65 an hour after five annual raises of a dime an hour working for the Help at Home agency. It's not enough, the West Side resident told The Huffington Post.
Pruitt said she has sometimes turned to a food pantry to make sure her family has enough to eat. "It's hard out there," Pruitt said. "The cost to live in Chicago and meet your basic needs -- rent, utilities, food, medication, clothes -- is high."
Pruitt said she is not afraid of retribution from her employer from speaking out because she is optimistic her efforts will help other workers like her who are in a similar position. If she earned more money, much of it would go right back into her community, she said.
The Center for Popular Democracy, in partnership with Raise Chicago, an advocacy group pushing for the higher wage, released a study Wednesday claiming the higher wage would decrease worker turnover and stimulate the local economy.
The study said the higher minimum wage would be responsible for $616 million in new economic activity and would help create 5,350 new jobs in its first phase. The higher wage also would add $45 million in sales tax revenues, but would raise consumer prices about 2 percent, according to the study.
Voters overwhelmingly backed the $15 minimum wage in a non-binding ballot question on about 5 percent of the city's ballots in the March primary election.
Business groups, however, have yet to be swayed.
Doug Whitley of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce told DNAinfo Chicago the proposed ordinance is "a ridiculously excessive reach on the part of a local government to try to instruct private-sector employers how to manage their businesses." The chamber said in a previous statement with other business groups that employers "cannot afford another minimum-wage increase" of any amount.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced his support of a higher minimum wage, but for less than $15 an hour. Emanuel last week trumpeted the creation of a minimum wage "working group" tasked with creating a plan for increasing worker wages in the city and previously said he backed President Barack Obama's push for a $10.10 federal minimum wage.
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'Secure scheduling' rallies focus on giving hourly workers more stability
'Secure scheduling' rallies focus on giving hourly workers more stability
Dive Brief:
New York City Mayor DeBlasio and several advocate groups gathered recently to show support for the introduction of “Fair Workweek” legislation, designed to ensure that 65,000...
Dive Brief:
New York City Mayor DeBlasio and several advocate groups gathered recently to show support for the introduction of “Fair Workweek” legislation, designed to ensure that 65,000 hourly employees in the fast food industry receive fair notification on work hours.
Currently, employers nationwide aren’t required to provide their hourly employees with advance notice of upcoming shifts. As a result, too many families can't budget in advance, plan for education or family care, or secure a necessary second job, according to advocates.
The New York City event echoes the demands of coalition of New York-based advocates who launched a national campaign on Sept. 6. The groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, the Rockefeller Foundation and the online organization Purpose — are asking for scheduling at least two weeks in advance, eliminating on-call assignments that leave employees "scrambling for child care and unable to hold second jobs with uncertain paychecks."
Dive Insight:
Employers do realize that predictability and fairness are reasonable demands, but more often than not, labor cost (and in some cases, labor shortage) creates problems when trying to create better schedules. Frontline managers are expected to create the schedules while also trying to keep costs down, and balancing the two expectations isn't always successful.
What it will take is better workforce planning, with some technology solutions already available to help make that happen, say experts. Also, there are potential negative legal and compliance outcomes for employers who don't follow state and local laws that already require "reporting pay" time be allowed.
By Tom Starner
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More on How Charter Schools Profit from Tax Dollars and Undermine Host School Districts
More on How Charter Schools Profit from Tax Dollars and Undermine Host School Districts
Recent weeks have brought a lot of press about the way charter schools are undermining public school districts and diverting tax dollars allocated for education too often to for-profit companies...
Recent weeks have brought a lot of press about the way charter schools are undermining public school districts and diverting tax dollars allocated for education too often to for-profit companies. Capital & Main in California just published a week-long expose explaining how rapid expansion of charters threatens the financial stability of the Los Angeles and Oakland school districts. The Salt Lake Tribune editorialized against for-profit charters after that newspaper’s scathing investigation explained how, “A handful of private companies have banked more than $68 million from Utah taxpayers over the past three years.” And in Ohio, after the legislature ended its spring 2016 session without considering an excellent law that would have required the notorious cyber charters to prove that the students the state is paying for are actually participating in the online program, the Columbus Dispatch editorialized: “The idea was that if student outcomes improved in charter schools, then the schools would continue… But the straightforward experiment went off the rails when some clever operators figured out how to get rich by sponsoring charter schools. And to keep the gravy flowing, they began making major political contributions to the lawmakers who control the gravy.”
This is the context in which the Center for Popular Democracy has just released its third annual report, Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: “Two years ago, the Center for Popular Democracy issued a report demonstrating that charter schools in 15 states—about one-third of the states with charter schools—had experienced over $100 million in reported fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement since 1994. Last year, we released a new report that found millions of dollars of new alleged and confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools had come to light, bringing the new total to $203 million. This report offers further evidence that the money we know has been misused is just the tip of the iceberg. With the new alleged and confirmed financial fraud reported here, the total fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools has reached over $216 million.”
The new report examines fraud and mismanagement across the states and explains that, “State oversight systems are currently reactive by design. While states do require that charter schools submit budgets, financial reports and independent financial audits, most do not proactively monitor for fraud, waste, mismanagement, or other financial abuses.” The Center for Popular Democracy recommends that charter schools be required to institute internal fraud risk management assessments and that oversight agencies like state comptrollers’ offices should regularly audit charter schools.
Of course a huge problem is that charter schools are established and regulated in state law, and experience tells us that political pressures and financial contributions to state lawmakers have exacerbated the states’ failures to oversee charter schools in the public interest. It is for this reason that the Center for Popular Democracy recommends that the U.S. Department of Education should make the awarding of enormous federal grants to states for the expansion of charter schools contingent on states’ passage of laws to strengthen oversight: “Taxpayers invest billions of education dollars in charter schools, yet states offer too few protections to ensure that those taxpayer dollars are benefitting students. Therefore, we recommend that federal funding for charter school education should flow only to states that have… taxpayer protection provisions in place for their charter schools.”
The new report once again points to failed federal regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program. “The federal government alone has contributed over $3.3 billion through several grant programs specifically designed to increase the number of charter schools in the United States. With the recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal government has signaled its plan to spend another $3.3 billion over the next 10 years, which would double the federal investment in charter schools.”
And yet, according to Center for Popular Democracy’s new report, “In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a memorandum to the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. The OIG stated that the purpose of the memorandum was to ‘alert you of our concern about vulnerabilities in the oversight of charter schools.’… In September of 2012, the OIG audited the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement’s (OII) Charter Schools Program and found that OII did not adequately monitor the federal funds. Specifically, the audit report states that: ‘We determined that OII did not effectively oversee and monitor the SEA (State Educational Agencies) and non-SEA grants and did not have an adequate process to ensure SEAs effectively oversaw and monitored their subgrantees. Specifically, OII did not have an adequate corrective action… process in place to ensure grantees corrected deficiencies noted in annual monitoring reports, did not have a risk-based approach for selecting non-SEA grantees for monitoring, and did not adequately review SEA and non-SEA grantees’ fiscal activities.'”
In other words, the U.S. Department of Education has been giving billions of dollars to states to promote the expansion of charter schools and to other charter school sponsors without any kind of adequate tracking of how the money is being used. This allegation is certainly consistent with the findings of a new report released in Ohio last week by Innovation Ohio and the Ohio Education Association. Ohio has been a big recipient of federal Charter Schools Program Grants over the years, receiving CSP grants of $99.6 million since the 2006-2007 school year. Belly Up: A Review of Federal Charter Schools Program Grants explains that in Ohio, “At least 108 of the 292 charter schools that have received federal CSP (Charter Schools Program) funding (37 percent) have either closed or never opened, totaling nearly $30 million.” “Of those that failed, at least 26 Ohio charter schools that received nearly $4 million in federal CSP funding apparently never even opened and there are no available records to indicate that these public funds were returned.”
By janresseger
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'I was demanding a connection': Ana Maria Archila reflects on confronting Jeff Flake
'I was demanding a connection': Ana Maria Archila reflects on confronting Jeff Flake
Ana Maria Archila had never told her father that she was sexually abused as a child.
But after she confronted a U.S. senator about President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and the video...
Ana Maria Archila had never told her father that she was sexually abused as a child.
But after she confronted a U.S. senator about President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and the video started going viral, she thought it was time to share her story.
“I always carried the fear that my parents would feel that they had failed in taking care of me if I told them,” Archila said Friday night in a phone interview with The Washington Post.
Read the full article here.
Mayor, council declare paid sick leave 'do-over'
Crain's New York Business - January 17, 2014, by Andrew Hawkins - Acting on one of his main campaign promises just three weeks into his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a bill to...
Crain's New York Business - January 17, 2014, by Andrew Hawkins - Acting on one of his main campaign promises just three weeks into his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a bill to significantly expand the city's paid sick leave law to apply to businesses with as few as five employees.
Flanked by his new partner atop city government, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, as well as a majority of the city's new elected leaders, the mayor effectively declared a "do-over" on paid sick days. They will re-introduce the original bill, which lacks many of the current law's concessions that had been included by former Council Speaker Christine Quinn at the behest of the business community.
"Paid sick leave legislation works for everyone," Mr. de Blasio said, standing outside an Ecuadorian restaurant in Bushwick, in response to a reporter's question about concerns from small businesses. "It improves productivity, it improves the retention of workers, and it creates a better environment for customers."
The new bill would apply to every business in the city with five or more employees. There will be no phase-in period (the current law to take effect April 1 would only apply to businesses with 20 or more employees, and drop to a 15-employee threshold after one year), nor will it have "economic trigger" language that would delay the legislation if the economy slumps; Ms. Quinn had insisted on such a provision in the law that passed last year.
An exemption for the manufacturing sector will be removed, and grandparents, aunts and uncles will be added to the definition of family members allowed to take days off to care for ill children. The Department of Consumer Affairs will still be the enforcing agency, even though it currently lacks the capacity of a regulatory body, not to mention a commissioner appointed by Mr. de Blasio.
"This is basically the original legislation that for three years had a supermajority [in the council]," Mr. de Blasio said, referring to a veto-proof majority.
Ms. Mark-Viverito, fresh off her win of the speaker's race, said there would be committee hearings, but seemed to imply that there had been enough debate already.
"There was no deal struck," she said bluntly. "This is a conversation that has been going on for many years."
There was some grumbling from Republicans in the City Council. Council Minority Leader Vincent Ignizio said the bill was "well-intentioned," but questioned the timing of the announcement.
"Ultimately we're putting an additional imposition on small business," he said. "And it's just going to force small businesses to reduce their workforce."
Mr. de Blasio said that with the passage of the new bill, paid sick leave benefits will be extended to an additional 355,000 workers in the city, mostly in the retail and food-service industries.
Business groups that for years fought the bill seemed resigned in their reactions that a new progressive era had descended on city government. The Manhattan and Brooklyn chambers of commerce both released statements applauding the mayor and City Council for addressing the needs of workers in New York.
"We do continue to be concerned with the costs of doing business in New York City and the burdens placed on the backs of the small business owners," said Nancy Ploeger, president of the Manhattan chamber.
Michael Weber, co-chair of the Hospitality Practice Group at Littler Mendelson, the nation's largest labor and employment law firm, echoed that sentiment.
"It makes it even more difficult for small businesses to be profitable and to be competitive," he said of the bill.
But James Copeland, director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Legal Policy, said the measure would still ban employees from taking private legal action against their employers.
"In other words, you're going to require that there be an administrative action, not to get private lawyers suing businesses on this stuff," he said. "That's actually better than some other cities that have this type of legislation."
Mr. de Blasio argued that other cities with similar laws experienced no negative ramifications. "What we've seen in Seattle, San Francisco, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, more recently Philadelphia—all over the country you see this consistent movement where states and localities are moving in this direction because it's been proven to work," he said.
But in San Francisco, which has a universal paid sick leave law, studies suggest the impact has strained some businesses. According to a study conducted in 2011 by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, almost one third of businesses affected by the ordinance had some difficulty administering the changes and roughly 14% saw a marked decrease in their profitability after implementation.
Still, Mr. de Blasio boasted that New York's law would be "the strongest in the nation," and said that this and other policies signaled a new direction for City Hall.
"This City Hall is going to be on the side of working families," he said.
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The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a politician has for creating jobs and boosting wages, it must contend with the...
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a politician has for creating jobs and boosting wages, it must contend with the Federal Reserve’s ability to unilaterally counteract it. If the Fed decides higher wages risk inflation, they can raise interest rates and deliberately strangle economic growth, reversing the wage effect. Why come up with ways to grow the economy, then, if the Fed will react by intentionally slowing it?
The reason the Fed operates as a wet blanket on the economy has to do with who really controls the institution. If the desires of bankers and the rich outweigh the desires of laborers, then their fear of inflation (which cuts into their profits) will always take precedence over full employment. Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke unwittingly gave a perfect example of that yesterday. Talking about how the Fed could institute “helicopter drops” of money to supplement federal spending and jump-start the economy, he stated from the outset, “no responsible government would ever literally drop money from the sky.” Who sets the boundaries of what’s “responsible” matters a great deal here.
To make the central bank work in the public interest rather than the interests of a select few, you must reform the very structure of the Federal Reserve. That’s the purpose of a new proposal from Andrew Levin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and former advisor to Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. In conjunction with the activist group Fed Up, which advocates for pro-worker policies at the Fed, Levin has devised a framework to make the central bank a fully public institution, with all the transparency and accountability demanded of other government entities.
It’s such an important idea that Warren Gunnels, policy director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, talked it up yesterday on a conference call with Levin. While stopping short of endorsing taking the Fed public, Gunnels did say, “Senator Sanders believes we need to made the Fed a more democratic institution, responsive to the concerns of all Americans, not a few billionaires on Wall Street.”
Right now, the Fed is a quasi-public, quasi-private hybrid, taking advantage of that status to maintain high levels of secrecy. Members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, like other federal agencies. But the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks are legally owned by commercial banks in each of those regions. Banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo hold stock in these regional banks, which happen to be one of their primary regulators.
This was how central banks worldwide operated at the time of the Fed’s founding, but that has changed. “Every other central bank around the world is fully public,” Professor Levin said, citing the Bank of Canada’s shift in the 1930s and the Bank of England in the 1940s.
Not only does having private banks own a chunk of the Fed raise questions about regulatory supervision, it implicitly privileges banker concerns over the public at large. This is particularly important because the Fed has failed as an institution consistently over the past decade.
First it failed to identify an $8 trillion housing bubble, along with increases in leverage and derivatives exposure that magnified the housing collapse into a larger crisis. Then, it failed to deploy all its policy tools and allowed a slow recovery to take hold that left millions of workers behind, as growth never caught up to its expectations. British economist Simon Wren-Lewis believes the third big mistake is happening now, through premature interest rate hikes to return to “normal” operations. “Central banks are wasting a huge amount of potential resources” by tightening too quickly, Wren-Lewis says. For everyday Americans, that translates into millions more people out of work than necessary.
So Levin’s plan would cash out the banks’ stock, and begin to remove their influence over the Fed. The board of directors of the regional Fed banks, which currently includes commercial bank executives, would be chosen through a representative process with mandates for diversity (no African-American has ever served as a regional Fed president) and a variety of viewpoints. Nobody affiliated with a financial institution overseen by the Fed could serve on any regional board.
These newly elected boards of directors would choose the regional presidents, which have a say on monetary policy decisions. That selection process would include public hearings and feedback. Under the current system, Fed presidents are re-elected through a pro forma process, with no opportunity for public engagement. Four of the 12 regional presidents were formerly executives at Goldman Sachs, and it’s hard to call that a coincidence.
In addition to breaking the conflict of interest inherent in current Fed governance, making the institution public would subject it to disclosure requirements, Freedom of Information Act requests, and external reviews that all other public agencies must submit to. Levin’s proposal calls for an annual Government Accountability Office review of Fed policies and procedures, and would allow the Fed’s inspector general new authority to investigate the regional banks.
The Levin proposal too often makes concessions to preserving central bank “independence,” like preserving the regional structure and giving Fed officials nonrenewable seven-year terms, which seems a little arbitrary. This impulse also led Democrats to reject Sen. Rand Paul’s legislation to audit the Fed earlier this year. The rhetoric of Federal Reserve “independence” conceals an institutional capture that allows it to ignore workers’ needs in favor of the wealthy. And its persistent failures and banker influence weaken the case for that independence.
Nevertheless, the heart of the proposal is to return democracy to the Fed, so the institution will edge away from its commitment to capital over labor. “The fundamental piece is that the Fed must be a public institution,” said Ady Barkan of the Fed Up Coalition.
Liberals too often ignore the Fed and the role it plays in the economy, but that’s starting to change. An obscure piece of the Federal Reserve Act statute identified by then-House staffer Matt Stoller led to a remarkable cut of billions of dollars in subsidies to big banks last year, under a Republican-majority Congress. Now the Fed Up coalition is not only rolling out this reform plan, but pushing the presidential candidates to answer whether the Fed should deliberately slow down the economy, make sure their institution looks like the general public, and reduce the power of private banks on its operations. (Bernie Sanders laid out his views on Fed reform in the New York Times last December, some of which intersect with the Fed Up proposal. Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ Policy Director, would only say that the Fed Up plan “deserves serious consideration.”)
A public, inclusive debate over Fed transparency and accountability is critical, given the importance of this institution to the economy. “These reforms would put the Fed on a path to serving the public for the next 100 years,” said Professor Levin. And that has to mean all the public, through democratic principles, not just the executives at our biggest banks.
By David Dayen
Source
Tax reform stumbling block
Don’t look for a tax reform roll-out as soon as Congress comes back despite the aggressive timetable laid out by White House legislative director Marc Short. Part of the reason is that it probably...
Don’t look for a tax reform roll-out as soon as Congress comes back despite the aggressive timetable laid out by White House legislative director Marc Short. Part of the reason is that it probably won’t be ready yet. But it also has to wait until after the GOP congress passes a budget resolution, people close to the matter tell MM.
Because if Republicans lay out their tax reform plan beforehand, Democrats could use the budget vote-a-rama process in the Senate to try and attack individual pieces of the plan.
Read the full article here.
Ciudades no sólo benefician a los inmigrantes con el ID municipal
Ciudades no sólo benefician a los inmigrantes con el ID municipal
Ocho años atrás, a raíz de ataques contra la comunidad local de inmigrantes y el fracaso de la legislatura estatal en expandir el acceso a licencias de conducir, la ciudad de New Haven creó el...
Ocho años atrás, a raíz de ataques contra la comunidad local de inmigrantes y el fracaso de la legislatura estatal en expandir el acceso a licencias de conducir, la ciudad de New Haven creó el primer programa municipal del país que otorga un documento de identificación.
Poco a poco, otras ciudades siguieron el ejemplo de New Haven y reconocieron los grandes beneficios que otorga una identificación municipal, no solo para los residentes que no pueden obtener acceso a otros tipos de identificación emitida por el gobierno, sino por el bien de la vida política y económica en general.
Al principio, la adopción de programas de identificación municipal fue un proceso lento, pero se ha acelerado significativamente en el año 2015, impulsada en gran parte por el lanzamiento de la identificación municipal de la ciudad de Nueva York. El IDNYC , aprobado por el Concejo Municipal el año pasado y estrenado a inicios de este año por el alcalde Bill de Blasio, es ahora el más extenso programa de identificación municipal en el país, con más de 350,000 inscritos.
Sin la correcta identificación, una persona tal vez no pueda abrir una cuenta bancaria o cobrar un cheque, recibir atención médica en un hospital, inscribir a su hijo en la escuela, solicitar beneficios públicos, presentar una queja ante el departamento de policía, sacar libros de la biblioteca, votar en las elecciones o siquiera recoger un paquete de la oficina de correos. Con una simple medida, la identificación municipal elimina todas esas barreras.
Si bien las comunidades inmigrantes han sido una fuerza influyente al solicitar que las ciudades adopten programas de identificación municipal, los beneficiarios no se limitarán a las comunidades de inmigrantes.
La identificación municipal es una medida política de gran impacto, precisamente por su potencial de adaptarse a un amplio espectro de situaciones de la vida real. Una docena de ciudades tienen programas nuevos, y hay campañas a su favor en otras tantas. Estos programas tienen el propósito de reducir la falta de acceso a servicios municipales para jóvenes, personas sin hogar, ancianos, ex convictos y personas trasgénero.
Las ciudades también se están dando cuenta de que, para que sus programas de identificación local tengan éxito, deben ser atractivos para todos, incluso residentes que ya tienen otras formas de identificación. El uso de estos documentos de identificación otorga beneficios en negocios e instituciones culturales locales. De esta manera, las ciudades atraen una amplia gama de participantes, lo que le da mayor legitimidad a dicho documento en la comunidad.
Mientras continúe la lucha por la reforma a nivel federal, la identificación municipal es algo que los gobiernos locales pueden hacer para incluir y empoderar a los inmigrantes en su comunidad.
Programas como estos envían un mensaje de inclusión y bienvenida no solo dentro de los linderos de la ciudad donde existen, sino también externamente, hacia el resto del país y Washington DC, donde millones de vidas están en la cuerda floja, pendientes de un debate paralizado.
Source: El Diario
New Report: Big Banks Require Tellers to Use Predatory Practices
Bill Moyers & Company - April 9, 2015, by Katie Rose Quandt - Front-line workers at our nation’s big banks — tellers, loan interviewers and customer service representatives — are required by...
Bill Moyers & Company - April 9, 2015, by Katie Rose Quandt - Front-line workers at our nation’s big banks — tellers, loan interviewers and customer service representatives — are required by their employers to exploit customers, according to a revealing report out today from the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD). Big banks have internal systems of penalties and rewards that entice employees to push subprime loans and credit cards on customers who would be better off without them.
CPD’s report outlines several illegal predatory practices big banks have been caught employing, usually via their front-line workers:
Blatantly discriminatory lending: In 2011 and 2012, Bank of America and Wells Fargo paid out settlements for charging higher rates and fees to tens of thousands of African American and Hispanic borrowers than to similarly qualified white customers. Minority customers were also more likely to be steered into (more expensive, riskier) subprime mortgages.
Manipulating payment processing to maximize overdraft charges: When a savings account balance drops too low, the bank charges a hefty overdraft fee on each subsequent purchase. Both Bank of America and US Bank paid settlements for intentionally processing customers’ largest debit card payments first, regardless of chronological order, in order to hit $0 faster and maximize overdraft fees. US Bank was also accused of allowing debit card purchases on zero-balance accounts to go through (and incur overdraft fees), instead of denying the charges upfront.
Forcing sale of unneeded products: Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup were accused of forcing customers to purchase overpriced property insurance.
Manipulative sales quotas: Lawsuits show Wells Fargo and Bank of America created incentive programs for employees with the interests of the company — not the customer — in mind. Wells Fargo’s sales quotas encouraged bank workers to steer prime-eligible customers to subprime loans, while falsifying other clients’ income information without their knowledge. Bank of America’s “Hustle” program rewarded quantity over quality, encouraging workers to skip processes and checks intended to protect the borrower.
Instead of cutting back on the risky, unethical practices that led to the Great Recession, the CPD report asserts that big banks have not learned from their mistakes. Bank workers report higher levels of sales pressure in 2013 than in 2008, and most do not have the job security or seniority to simply refuse to hawk credit cards or steer customers into risky financial situations. While the financial sector is turning near-record profits, the average bank teller made just $12.25 an hour in 2013 (a real-dollar decrease from 2007), causing 31 percent of tellers’ families to rely on public assistance. What’s more, 85 percent of these underpaid front-line bank employees are women, and one-third are people of color. Most are in no position to risk losing their job or having their pay docked for stepping out of line.
Several anonymous big bank employees went into detail about how their employers incentivize sales:
An HSBC employee reported that when workers fell short of sales goals, the difference was taken out of their paychecks.
A teller at a major bank said she is expected to sell three new checking, savings, or debit card accounts every day. If she falls short, she gets written up.
Customer service representatives at one major bank’s call-center said everyone is expected to make at least 40 percent of the sales of the top seller. Credit card sales count for extra, encouraging callers to push credit cards on customers who would be better served with checking or savings accounts.
A call-center worker said she offers a credit card to every customer, regardless of whether it would be beneficial. She explained: “If you aren’t offering, you can get marked down — the managers and Quality Analysts listen to your call, and can tell if you aren’t offering.”
“We’re not servicing their needs,” said one front-line worker. “What they want, what they need, isn’t important to us. Selling them a product is … Some of our customers just have their savings, many are just retirees.”
As the report concludes, “Our nation’s big banks are committed to a model that jeopardizes our communities and prevents bank employees from having a voice in their workplace.”
Source
New York's vote to curb stop-and-frisk is another win for civil rights
The Guardian - June 27, 2013, by Brittny Saunders - New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety and respect for all New Yorkers. The measures were championed by Communities...
The Guardian - June 27, 2013, by Brittny Saunders - New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety and respect for all New Yorkers. The measures were championed by Communities United for Police Reform, a broad coalition of city groups, and will strengthen the existing ban on police profiling and establish independent oversight of the city's police department.
Today is a new day for New York City. The move reflects a growing alarm over NYPD policies and practices that violate the rights of thousands of New Yorkers and undermine police-community relationships – practices such as the discriminatory use of stop-and-frisk that waste valuable public dollars, while producing no measurable impact on public safety.
Criticism is mounting, not only in the council, but also in federal court, where the legality of these practices is being questioned. Those same questions are echoed in the homes of regular New Yorkers – a majority of whom disapprove of stop-and-frisk and two-thirds of whom support independent oversight of the department. The message is clear: it's time for New York City to turn away from an approach to policing that results in countless rights violations each year, while doing little to reduce crime, according to an analysis by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The bills passed by city council respond to increasing evidence that in too many cases the department has substituted stereotyping for real police work. A study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that in 2011, for example, 41.6% of all New Yorkers stopped by the NYPD were black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 years old, despite the fact that that these groups make up a mere 4.7% of the city's population. The department has continued to defend these discriminatory tactics, despite evidence that they do not even succeed on their own terms, failing to take guns off the street or to significantly reduce crime. In more than 99% of all 2011 stops, for example, no gun was retrieved. And in the first three months of 2013, crime dropped, even as stops also tapered, undermining the department's claim that stop-and-frisk is responsible for the city's lowered crime rate.
All of this suggests that the department's continued reliance on discriminatory tactics is not about what it takes to actually keep all New Yorkers (and those visiting the city) safe. Instead, it is about what it takes to convince some in New York City's whiter, wealthier communities that the administration and the department are serious about public safety.
For too long, too many city leaders have accepted discriminatory policing tactics on the assumption that the costs borne by the New Yorkers who are targeted are outweighed by the benefits enjoyed by communities that are not singled out for unlawful and abusive treatment. But the truth is the NYPD's discriminatory policies and practices have indirect negative impacts on all who live in the city, including its white residents. They allow the NYPD to substitute crude and ineffective strategies – like stopping New Yorkers on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender expression – for the sophisticated police work one might expect from the nation's largest local law enforcement agency. In the process, they position NYPD officers as adversaries instead of allies of many of the communities they are charged with protecting, reducing willingness to report crime and making all New Yorkers less safe.
It is becoming increasingly apparent, then, that the costs of massive spending on ineffective policing strategies extend beyond those borne by the individuals who are unlawfully targeted in the streets each day. But the most powerful argument for increased NYPD accountability has nothing to do with financial costs and benefits and everything to do with what we, as New Yorkers, allow to be done in our names. And it is about staying true to the city's own legacy of innovation and the conviction that here – if nowhere else – we can find a way to keep everyone safe without sacrificing anyone's rights.
City Council made an important choice today. They stopped endorsing a set of NYPD policies and practices that are discriminatory, ineffective and wasteful. They chose instead to guarantee safety and respect across the boroughs. The choices that they and other city leaders will make in the coming weeks, months and years as these bills are enacted and implemented will have a lasting impact on New York City and hopefully set a better example for cities across the country.
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