CPD IN THE NEWS

Toys “R” Us shuttered its last stores at the end of June and its liquidation left more than 30,000 workers without expected severance payouts. That prompted months of lobbying by the employees, organized in part by advocacy groups linked to the Center for Popular Democracy. Those groups estimate that workers are owed $75 million in severance pay and they have pressed Toys “R” Us creditors Angelo Gordon and Solus Alternative Asset Management to contribute to the fund, but the hedge funds have so far declined.

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New York Daily News - October 21, 2014, by Erin Durkin - City agencies are failing to do their part to make voter registration easier — even though they’re required to by law.

Legislation passed in 2000 mandates that 18 agencies give voter registration forms to visitors. But the Center for Popular Democracy and other non-profits found that 84% of those visitors were never offered a chance to register, according to a report to be released Tuesday.

In fact, 60% of the agencies didn’t even have any forms in the office. And 95% of the clients were never asked if they wanted to register to vote.

“This is an urgent problem which is leading to the disenfranchisement of many thousands of low-income New Yorkers,” said Andrew Friedman, the group’s co-executive director. “The city is failing to live up to its obligation.”

The group found that 30% of people who visited the city offices weren’t registered to vote, higher than the national average.

Mayor de Blasio’s spokesman Phil Walzak said Hizzoner has ordered agencies to step up their compliance with the law. “Mayor de Blasio is deeply committed to reducing barriers to voter participation, and making it simple and easy to register to vote is the first step,” he said.

Only one of the agencies, the Administration for Children’s Services, used a combined form that offers the chance to apply for ACS services, as required by the law, the report found.

Advocates say having city agencies help out with voter registration is especially important because most people nationwide sign up to vote at motor vehicle departments, but many city residents don’t drive.

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For more than two decades, workers in the retail and restaurant industries have struggled to balance family life and other obligations with jobs that demand they be “on call.” Now, under legal pressure and in a tightening labor market, some employers are changing their approach.

On Tuesday, the New York Attorney General’s office announced that six retailers – Aeropostale, Carter’s, David’s Tea, Disney, PacSun, and Zumiez – have agreed to end “on-call” scheduling. From now on, their employees will not need to check each day whether they should come to work, nor do they risk being sent home early without pay when the store is quiet. Four of the companies also committed to giving employees their schedules one week in advance.

Ending “on-call” scheduling will make a big difference for employees, increasing the predictability of work schedules and making it easier to plan other activities. But they aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the change, observers say: It could also bring long-term benefits for businesses and society.

“It’s a pretty significant move,” Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview. “Retail companies ... are really starting to recognize that they need to invest in their workforce.”

In the past, workers’ wages were considered a fixed cost, wrote Robert Reich, who served as Labor secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency and is now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. In the 1990s, however, wages became a variable cost: Many businesses used on-call scheduling to trim costs by having as few workers as possible. Some even deployed software systems that highlighted the times when employees were least needed.

That kind of scheduling takes a substantial toll on workers, explains Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor-employment relations at Penn State University-Abington, in a phone interview with the Monitor. Professor Golden was the primary author of an April report for the Economic Policy Institute about the consequences of irregular work scheduling.

Uncertain hours make it hard for workers to plan their daily lives, says Golden. Holding down a second job becomes more difficult, uncertain paychecks mean incomes often fall short, and childcare is an increased challenge.

These employees are most likely to experience “work-life conflict” and be stressed at work, Golden notes.

That also puts businesses with “on-call” scheduling on the wrong side of some state and federal labor laws. In April, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the attorneys general of seven other states and the District of Columbia sent a letter to the six retailers asking them to end the practice, as they have now agreed to do.

Ms. Gleason points to that April letter and other, similar investigations as the "single most influential factor" in moving businesses away from these scheduling practices. Seven other businesses announced that they would end "on-call" scheduling in 2015.

But with a new presidential administration kicking off in a few weeks, the future of these investigations is uncertain.

“The incoming Labor Secretary is [at] the complete opposite end of the spectrum,” Gleason says, making it “incumbent now on states” to continue pushing for these standards.

Worker-friendly policies are becoming bipartisan causes in many states, the Monitor’s Schuyler Velasco wrote in October – and New York is one of several states working toward a legislative ban on “on-call” scheduling. In September, Seattle's city council unanimously passed a “secure scheduling” law, which requires employers to schedule their workers 14 days in advance, and includes a "right to rest" provision that allows workers to decline closing and opening shifts that are less than 10 hours apart.

Businesses themselves may have incentives to end on-call scheduling. In a tightening labor market, employers want to hang on to their workers, notes Golden, who is also a senior research analyst at the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois. And businesses that offer better hours – and more consistent hours – are more appealing to workers, leading to better retention.

The more businesses sign on to these measures, the more workers’ wages are taken out of the cost-cutting equation. More than 300,000 workers have been impacted so far, says Gleason.

Greater certainty about schedules has benefits beyond individual workers, she says. If people know when they’re working, they can also schedule time to be with their children, or attend college and grad school classes.

“Employees are going to be better off, and maybe even society,” she says.

By Ellen Powell

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Democrat and Republican lawmakers on Wednesday took issue with the current structure of regional Federal Reserve Bank boards, though they couldn't agree on how to reform the quazi-private-public firms.

The twelve regional Fed banks have come under increased scrutiny in recent months after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton issued a statement in May saying she supports removing bankers from regional Fed boards and increasing director diversity. Her comments heightened the public profile of an issue that otherwise hasn't received much focus.

A key point of debate was concerns by consumer groups that having bankers on regional Fed boards creates a conflict of interest since reserve bank staff supervise big and small commercial banks in their districts. This contrasts to the central bank in Washington, which is a government agency with governors that are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. 

For example, among the nine directors who serve on the New York Fed board are Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO James Gorman and two community bank chief executives.

House Republicans indicated during a subcommittee hearing of the House Financial Services Committee that they weren't overly concerned by bank CEOs serving on such quasi-private boards while Democrats questioned the diversity of the panels.

"I don't object to bankers being on the boards," Gwen Moore, D-Wisc., told reporters after the hearing. "I'm concerned about the voice of other directors who are there and their efficacy to participate fully and about mobilizing and empowering them once they are there."

Moore, the top Democrat on the Monetary Policy and Trade subcommittee, said she the boards need more diversity, noting that none of them have hired a Latino or African American as president of the regional Fed banks where they serve.

Meanwhile, demonstrators from a consortium of consumer groups calling itself "Fed Up" attended the hearing, dressed in green shirts with slogans such as "16 of 17 Fed leaders are white."

The group also took issue with bankers on the regional Fed boards and, in their view, a lack of board diversity.

"When these voices are excluded from the conversation, then our interests are excluded," Ruben Lucio, a representative from the Center for Popular Democracy and a member of Fed Up, told reporters outside of the hearing.

According to current rules, regional boards have nine directors divided into three classes. Three banking directors are elected by member banks, another three are designated by the same banks to represent the public and interests of commerce, industry, labor and consumers, and the final class is appointed by Fed governors to represent the public. 

Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., said he wanted to delve more deeply into bank executives serving on the boards but noted that the Kansas City Fed, which covers the district he represents, appears to be quite diverse based on a variety of metrics.

It "has a diverse board ethnically, gender wise, labor wise, regional within the Fed and that was the template I'm using," Perlmutter said.

Two regional Fed presidents, meanwhile, pushed back against concerns about conflicts of interest during their testimony. 

Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker noted that strict rules govern their conduct. "They simply have no avenue through which they can influence supervisory matters," Lacker said.

And Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pointed out that bankers who serve on reserve bank boards are prohibited from participating in the selection of bank presidents.

Republicans, meanwhile, focused much of their attention on whether too much influence over monetary policy is wielded by the East Coast, particularly the New York Fed.

Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., and chairman of the monetary policy subcommittee, argued that lawmakers should back legislation he sponsored, the Federal Oversight Reform and Modernization Act, or FORM, which includes a provision that would reduce the influence of the New York bank.

The Federal Open Market Committee, the branch of the central bank that determines monetary policy, has 12 voting members made up of seven members of the Fed board of governors and five of the regional Fed banks.

The president of the New York Fed, which supervises Wall Street firms from JPMorgan Chase (JPM) to Goldman Sachs  (GS) and Citigroup (C) , is a permanent voting member but the other regional bank presidents serve rotating one-year terms. Huizenga's legislation would put the New York Fed president into the voting rotation along with all the other regional bank chiefs.

"For crying out loud, the San Francisco bank has a tremendously important area," Huizenga told reporters after the hearing. "Silicon Valley, that stretches from LA to Seattle, has tremendously valuable input and to have them only be a voting member every two or three years doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, said she was concerned that the Western states weren't well represented by the regional Fed bank structure.

"You have members on both sides of the aisle expressing concerns and I would like to know what might be done to rebalance the Fed to ensure that all Americans are represented in monetary policy decisions," she said. 

Don Lamson, of counsel at Squire Patton Boggs in Washington and a former regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, suggested that if the goal is to create greater accountability to Congress, legislators should require the Fed regional bank system to be funded through congressional appropriations instead of the self-funding that exists now.

With that structure, legislators could remove the regional Fed boards, transforming the quazi-private-public entities into government agencies.

An appropriations process, however, would destroy the independence of the Fed, which is vital to setting interest rates and supervising banks appropriately, Moore argued.

Expanding legislative influence would also open Federal Reserve funding to unrelated policy measures that might be attached in an attempt to get them passed. "Come meet with me I'm the chairman of the Fed's appropriations committee," Moore said facetiously.

By Ronald Orol

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