Campaign News

***Media Advisory for July 22, 2 PM, Capitol Hill, Washington DC***

Contact: Dan Morris: (917)-952-8920; progressivecities2014@gmail.com Benjamin Linsley: (917) 232-0020; blinsley@populardemocracy.org

On Capitol Hill, Top Democrats and Advocates Call for Fair Schedules for Millions of Workers

*Fair Workweek Initiative and Federal Legislation Unveiled to Address National Crisis in Scheduling*

Lack of Stable, Reliable Schedules Identified as Most Urgent Workplace Issue for Three Key Groups in the Democratic Electorate: Women, People of Color, and Millenials  

WHAT: On Capitol Hill,advocates, workers, and experts will unveil the Fair Workweek Initiative, a national campaign anchored by the Center for Popular Democracy to address the most urgent workplace issue facing millions of Americans: unpredictable, unstable schedules. The campaign brings together organizations from around the country, and strongly supports the Schedules That Work Act, new federal legislation that will require retailers and other employers in the service sector to give workers stable, reliable hours. This groundbreaking legislation will be introduced by top Democrats including Rep. George Miller and Rep. Rosa DeLauro on July 22nd.

The Congressional briefing on the Schedules that Work Act will spotlight the lack of stable, reliable schedules as a growing national crisis in the American workplace that Democrats around the country should seize on and highlight during the upcoming mid-term elections.

WHERE: U.S. House of Representatives, Cannon House Office Building Room 234, Washington D.C.

WHEN: Tuesday, July 22, 2:00-3:30 p.m.

WHO: Key speakers and participants are listed below.

Carrie Gleason, Director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, Center for Popular Democracy Worker leaders from OUR Walmart, Retail Action Project, Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU/UFCW), Wisconsin Jobs Now, & Restaurant Opportunities Center United Susan Lambert, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Sherry Leiwant, Co-President, A Better Balance Jodie Levin-Epstein, Deputy Director, Center for Law and Social Policy Paul Sonn, Legal Director, National Employment Law Project (NELP) Liz Watson, Director of Workplace Justice for Women, National Women’s Law Center The Congressional Briefing for the Schedules that Work Act is supported by: 9to5, A Better Balance, Center for Law and Social Policy, Coalition of Labor Union Women, Family Values @ Work, Gender Justice, Good Jobs Nation, CTW, Jobs with Justice, Labor Project for Working Families, Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center, National Council of Women’s Organizations, National Employment Law Project, National Partnership for Women & Families, OUR Walmart, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Retail Action Project, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, Taskforce on Older Women’s Economic Security, UNITE HERE, United Food and Commercial Workers, and Women Employed.

...codirector of Local Progress, a national group that unites progressive local officials and allied organizations. It is run by the Center for popular Democracy...

Read the transcript here.

NJ.com - 05-06-2015 -  Newark's schools should add more social services and community programming to tackle issues of poverty afflicting local neighborhoods, a group of education advocates said Tuesday.

Dubbed the "community school" model, schools should strive to address needy students' health and emotional needs, teach content beyond what is included in standardized tests and include parental input in the decision making.

NJ Communities United organizer Roberto Cabanas told a packed audience in Kings Family Restaurant & Catering, that the district could work local nonprofit organizations to support a wider range of student needs.

"We need to bring the village inside of the school," he said.

Cabanas was one of four panelists at an education forum organized by activists and the city, including Newark chief education officer Lauren Wells, Evie Frankl of the Center for Popular Democracy and Mary Bennett of the Alliance for Newark Public Schools.

Wells said Newark Public Schools once adopted this approach about five years ago through the Global Village Zone, when the district attempted to turn around seven schools in the city's Central Ward.

At the time, the district announced that the program would implement longer days and provide more professional development and pay for teachers. Under the model, schools were set to turn schools into a place where students would be taught but also be able to go to health clinics.

"A community school is a place, a physical place, but it's also a practice," Wells said. "It is a way about going about doing things."

The program also sought input from teachers and parents when it designed it, Wells said.

"Teachers, specifically, at 18th Avenue School worked with the principal to design what (an) extended day would look like in their school," she said.

Bennett said when she was a principal in the district she tried to better serve students on probation by working with the county probation department to have one probation officer assigned to all the students in her school.

Under the community schools model, the district could streamline cooperation between government and universities, Bennett argued.

"You shouldn't have to spend a year to try and unify the services to support students," she said.

Frankl said districts around the country including in Baltimore, New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania are adopting this approach.

"Community schools can happen," she said. "There is no reason why a community school should not be the definition of a public school in the United States of America."

Source: NJ.com

Jared Bernstein Blog - March 3, 2015 - As a tireless (some would say tiresome) advocate for full employment and the benefits it yields for working people, you can imagine how I was thrown by this NYT headline over a piece by economics reporter Bin Appelbaum:

Black jobless rates remain high, but Fed can’t do much to help.

“Shots fired!” as the kids say.

I find this hard to believe in the following sense. Black unemployment has averaged almost twice that of overall unemployment since the monthly data begin in 1972 (avg: 1.9, with standard deviation of 0.15, so not a ton of variation around that mean). Crudely, that implies that if overall unemployment fell from 6% to 5%, the black rate might fall more in percentage point terms, from 12% to 10%.

Next, if the Fed can push down the overall unemployment rate, which is certainly within its purview and, at a time like this, its job description, then the headline seems off.

Now, there are important nuances in play here.

First, these relationships are not always so clean. Over the long, strong recovery of the 1990s, black unemployment fell 4.5 points compared to 2.1 points for whites (and 2.5 points overall). Over the 1980s recovery, black unemployment—which was about 20% at the end of the deep early 1980s recession—fell 8.5 points compared to 4.7 for whites.

Those comparatively big declines show the disproportionate benefits that blacks reap from lower unemployment and, conditional on the Fed’s ability to lower unemployment, they belie the NYT headline. I could make similar claims based on wages and incomes, but I’m bound by secrecy for now (more on that in a moment).

However, more recently, that relationship isn’t generating such impressive results. Over this recovery, black and white unemployment have declined by similar amounts (4.5 points for blacks; 3.8 for whites). And, as Appelbaum points out, real median wages have fallen twice as much for blacks as for whites.

But that’s kinda the point: until recently this has been a uniquely weak recovery, and as such, tells us little yet about the extent to which full employment will lift the relative economic fortunes of black workers.

If we get to and stay at full employment, I’m confident it will work as it has in the past, based both on the history briefly cited above and on some truly exciting results from a new paper we’ve commissioned for our full employment project on the benefits of full employment to black workers, written by the economist Valarie Wilson from the Economic Policy Institute.

Valerie will be highlighting the results at an event we’re holding in DC on March 30th so far be it from me to steal her thunder. But she’s got some panel data regressions (which provide lots more observations and variance than the simple time series comparisons noted above) showing the impact of lower unemployment on black compared to white median wages, and man…all’s I can say is I’m employing great restraint not to just print them right here and now!

Here’s another point worth considering. Various economists on team full employment have been trying to get the Fed to hold off on its interest rate liftoff, but Appelbaum writes: “It’s not obvious, however, that holding down borrowing costs for a little longer would be an effective way to address the underlying problem. Indeed, the problem is a good illustration of the limits of monetary policy.”

That may be true in the following sense: if the Fed raises rates a little bit in 2015q4 instead of 2015q3, I doubt it will matter that much to anyone in the real economy (though financial markets would make a huge deal out of it). Similarly, if they hold to a 5.4% full employment rate and a firm 2% inflation ceiling that mustn’t be breached, or if they shift from being data driven to shooting at the phantom menace of inflation that’s allegedly hiding out of sight from the data just around the corner—well then, yeah, they won’t much help those who depend on lasting full employment to catch a break.

He’s also got a point re underlying problems. Even full employment may not be enough to reach the millions of workers with criminal records who face uniquely high barriers to the job market. I’ve written about fair-hiring policies to reach these workers, and so has Appelbaum.

But check this out: I mentioned our March 30 event. Well, another speaker on the panel that morning will be the guy from whom I learned all I know about fair-hiring, Maurice Emsellem from the National Employment Law Project.

I know what you’re thinking: what about macro, what about Fed policy? How can you call yourself a full employment maven and leave that out? Did I forget to mention our keynote speaker? A fella named Bernanke…Ben Bernanke. Here’s the flyer. Be there and be square.

Source