Chicago Part of U.S. Citizenship Push for Legal Immigrants
Chicago Tribune - Septamber 17, 2014, by John Byrne - Chicago will join New York and Los Angeles in a corporate-funded...
Chicago Tribune - Septamber 17, 2014, by John Byrne - Chicago will join New York and Los Angeles in a corporate-funded push to try to get more legal immigrants to become U.S. citizens.
The Cities for Citizenship initiative is getting a $1.1 million contribution from Citigroup to help pay for the three cities to expand their naturalization programs. The effort also calls for additional counseling, legal assistance and financial help for immigrants in the urban centers.
The program will be coordinated by two nonprofits — The Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans — with the aim of encouraging cities across the country to invest in their citizenship drives, according to a news release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office and the other participants.
The mayors said naturalization would provide the new citizens with access to better jobs, academic scholarships and other benefits, while providing economic boosts to the cities in which they live, according to the release.
For Emanuel, it's the latest pro-immigrant move during his first term, after his early political career was marked by positions that drew the ire of immigrants' rights groups. And it's a chance to grow the Democratic Party voter base, since naturalized urban residents tend to vote Democratic.
Emanuel announced this summer that he would seek to expand the amount of shelter space available in Chicago for unauthorized immigrant children apprehended at the southern U.S. border. And he appeared with U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez in Washington DC in May to talk about the need for immigration reform.
The Cities for Citizenship program is another chance for Emanuel to try to shore up his progressive credentials and improve his standing among Chicago's sizable bloc of Hispanic voters ahead of the February 2015 municipal election. A Tribune poll in August found just 40 percent of Hispanic respondents had a favorable opinion of the mayor, down from 52 percent in 2013. And Ald. Bob Fioretti launched his mayoral bid last weekend by blasting Emanuel for policies Fioretti said favored wealthy people over Chicago's working class.
The citizenship push is also an opportunity for Emanuel to share the spotlight with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, an important figure in the re-emerging progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Earlier this summer, Emanuel traveled to New York for a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting, where he talked about early childhood education and the need to raise the minimum wage alongside de Blasio. Emanuel's office invited Chicago reporters along for the event.
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Meet The ‘Rapists’ Who Built Donald Trump’s Empire
As a real estate tycoon, Donald Trump built up and has given his name to ...
As a real estate tycoon, Donald Trump built up and has given his name to clothing lines, hotels,resorts, golf courses, a winery, and apartment buildings. And for a man who has unapologetically characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, and has said that infectious diseases are spilling across the border, Trump has decided to work in industries where it’s impossible to avoid the Latino immigrants he is maligning.
A 2010 Current Population Survey found that more than 200,00 foreign-born workers work in the hospitality industry, nearly 1.2 million foreign-born workers hold construction occupations, and another 1.3 million foreign-born workers are employed in the food service industry. The data doesn’t break down the figures by nationality and legal status, though a Southern Poverty Law Center survey found that Latino immigrants are most often employed in construction, factory work, cleaning, and restaurant work.
A 2011 National Council of La Raza study corroborated those results, finding that nearly one in five employees in the accommodation industry is Latino. The group is also overrepresented in “nearly all the major service jobs in the accommodation industry,” the NCLR study stated.
For Trump, that overrepresentation of Latino laborers could very well mean that at least some of his workers are from the country that he’s made inflammatory remarks about. And if he took a stroll through some of the properties that he owns long after business hours are over, he might encounter many of these “good people“:
Construction workers
As the Washington Post reported this week, Trump relies on both undocumented and legal immigrants on the construction site of his hotel in Washington, D.C. Trump has also put undocumented immigrants on the payroll in the past. In the 1980s and 1990s, Trump was embroiled in a 15-year lawsuit for allegedly cheating 200 undocumented Polish immigrants out of meager wages and fringe benefits during the demolition of the building that preceded Trump Tower, the New York Times reported in 1998.
Trump doesn’t think it’s “crass” to tell people that he’s “really rich,” (he has a net worth anywhere between $4.1 billion and $8.7 billion), but his wealth isn’t solely from his own doing. He likely had help — as he currently does in D.C. — from immigrants like Ramon Alvarez, a window worker, who told the Washington Post, “Do you think that when we’re hanging out there from the eighth floor that we’re raping or selling drugs? We’re risking our lives and our health. A lot of the chemicals we deal with are toxic.”
A 2013 Center for Popular Democracy report found that the majority of construction site accident victims in New York State are Latinos and/or immigrant workers. Only 34 percent of all construction workers in New York state are Latino and/or an immigrant, but they comprise 60 percent of all OSHA-investigated “fall from an elevation fatalities” in the state. A 2008 Pew Hispanic study found that 17 percent of construction workers were undocumented.
Some of these workers are subject to wage theft. Fernando, an undocumented construction worker and painter, told ThinkProgress in March that he joined an union because “the contractor refused to pay me and they helped me get my money back.” He was also serious injured twice on the job, once in Galveston, Texas after Hurricane Ike.
Golf course maintenance workers
About 180,000 maintenance workers keep the nation’s 15,619 golf courses green and pristine across the country. As a four-part Golf Digest series documented, immigrants do most of the maintenance work on golf courses. “We get up early and try to stay out of the way,” one golf course worker told Golf Digest. “We don’t know anything about the players, and they don’t know anything about us.”
Most of the time, American workers just aren’t “willing to do those jobs,” Chava McKeel, the associate director of government relations for the GCSAA said.
“The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) estimates that two-thirds of the maintenance workforce is Latino, with the largest presence in California, Texas and Florida (85 percent), followed by the Northwest (50 percent) and the Midwest/Mideast (10 to 20 percent),” Golf Digest reported. A 2008 Cornell study backs up the findings, noting that superintendents responding to their survey indicated that “72 percent of their workforce at the peak of the season was Hispanic.”
The Trump organization owns seven golf courses throughout the country. The PGA of America saidon Tuesday that the Grand Slam of Golf tournament won’t be played at the Los Angeles golf club.
Restaurant workers
The 2008 Pew Hispanic study found that about one in ten workers in the restaurant industry is an immigrant. Of those, about 20 percent of restaurant cooks and 30 percent of dishwashers are undocumented, Seattle’s KUOW reported.
Latinos are “disproportionately likely to be dishwashers, dining room attendants, or cooks, also relatively low-paid occupations,” an Economic Policy Institute report stated last year. The study also found that “one in six restaurant workers, or 16.7 percent, live below the official poverty line” while “more than two in five restaurant workers, or 43.1 percent, live below twice the poverty line.”
Restaurateur and TV star Anthony Bourdain told the Houston Press in 2007, “It is undeniable…I know very few chefs who’ve even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job.”
Though Trump is mainly in the hotel business, his establishments have restaurants, like the Trump Grill located in the atrium of the Trump Tower and The Terrace at Trump Chicago. However, his recent comments are threatening to derail plans for a new restaurant at the planned Trump International Hotel in D.C. At least 2,510 people have already signed a petition asking Chef Jose Andres to back out of working at the restaurant.
Hotel workers
According to the 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 36,700 Latinos working in the building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations, such as janitors, maids and housekeepers, pest control workers, and grounds maintenance staff. There are also an additional25,100 hotel, motel, and resort desk clerks who identify as Latino.
A 2009 study of workers across 50 U.S. hotels found that Latino women are twice as likely to be injured as white house keepers and 1.5 times more likely to be injured than men. The New York Times reported that housekeepers have a high injury rate since they have to do repetitive tasks, lift heavy mattresses, and work quickly to clean rooms.
“I have worked as a housekeeper for about 13 years. I work in pain constantly. My body aches all over, but most of all my back from bending and lifting throughout the day,” one housekeeper who worked at a Hyatt hotel said, according to a Work Safe report.
Unlike Trump, some conservative hoteliers have recognized the necessity of immigrant workers. J.W. Bill Marriott, then CEO and now Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board of Marriott International, has called for immigration reform several times in 2007, 2010, and again in 2012.
Source: ThinkProgress
After minimum wage changes, Bay Area workers push for ‘fair’ scheduling
After minimum wage changes, Bay Area workers push for ‘fair’ scheduling
As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are...
As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are turning to what they see as another piece of the puzzle for improving workers’ lives: scheduling.
From ensuring workers get the full-time hours they desire, to preventing retaliation against them for turning down last-minute schedule changes, several initiatives are aimed at making employees’ schedules more stable and reducing underemployment.
“Now, it’s about getting fair wages and fair hours,” said Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).
Business interests have railed against the idea of regulating scheduling across diverse sectors, and warn of unintended consequences that could actually hurt workers looking for additional hours and flexibility in their schedules.
Angie Manetti, director of government affairs for the California Retailers Association, said that has already happened in San Francisco since that city’s Retail Workers Bill of Rights was passed last year. Managers now choose to leave shifts unfilled to avoid penalty pay from scheduling workers on short notice, leaving heavier workloads on the employees who are working, she said.
San Jose’s Opportunity to Work initiative, an ordinance on the ballot Nov. 8, would require businesses there to offer extra hours to part-time employees before hiring more workers.
The initiative would apply to businesses with 35 or more employees but exclude government jobs and allow companies to apply for a “hardship” exemption.
Dilsa Gonzalez, a San Jose resident who has held a variety of positions in the fast food sector there, hopes the measure will support people like her. Gonzalez works 16 hours per week, but she would like to work 40. When she asks supervisors for additional hours, they tell her there is no work available.
“But then they hire other people,” Gonzalez said through a translator. She tries other means of making money, including recycling or helping her husband, a mechanic, work. But in San Jose, it’s “hard to survive with just a few hours of work,” she said.
“There is a crisis of underemployment in Silicon Valley,” said Ben Field, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, which gathered the required signatures to place the measure on the ballot. “It’s symptomatic of a problem across the country in which more and more wage earners are dependent on part-time work as a main source of income.”
Matthew Mahood, CEO of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, counters that the San Jose ordinance would “pit workers against each other” for full-time hours rather than creating more jobs and that the ordinance is too far-reaching.
Meanwhile, in the East Bay city of Emeryville, the City Council passed its “Fair Work Week Initiative” last week.
The initiative requires retail and fast food establishments that have more than 56 employees globally to:
• provide employee schedules two weeks in advance of their shifts;
• allow employees to decline schedule changes that happen within seven days of the changed shift;
• offer extra hours to part-time employees before bringing on new ones;
• provide employees with extra pay for taking on shifts on short notice, known as “predictability pay.”
The initiative also would require employers to allow employees to deny back-to-back closing and opening shifts and to request alternate work schedules without retaliation.
Emeryville has often been a trendsetter when it comes to passing worker protection legislation, EBASE’s Lin said. That includes the $14.44-per-hour minimum wage it established last year that at the time was the highest in the nation. She hopes to push the effort throughout the East Bay in the near future.
Moriah Larkins, an Oakland resident who has worked in retail in Emeryville for five years, is among those who say the unpredictability of retail scheduling has made life difficult. As a single mother, Larkins said, taking on last-minute shifts was difficult because child care is not easy to schedule, but she also often did not get scheduled as many hours as she wanted to pay her bills.
She now works at Home Depot, where her schedule is more secure, allowing her to plan better for her family and financially, she said. Home Depot store manager Lionel Stevens said at the City Council meeting that it issues schedules three weeks in advance, and has an open-door policy for employees who need flexibility.
A study commissioned by Emeryville indicates that relatively few workers believe work scheduling has a negative effect on their life. According to the study, 87 percent of employees said they have influence in creating their schedules, and 76 percent said their schedule has never changed with less than 24 hours of notice.
A separate study led by the backers of the Fair Work Week initiative, EBASE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Center for Public Democracy found different results: that more workers — roughly two-thirds — get their schedule less than a week in advance and want to work more hours.
Many workers believe an ordinance is needed to close any loopholes for businesses who are not scheduling fairly.
Kelby Peeler, a Union City resident who worked at Barnes and Noble for seven years, said he would often be scheduled 30 hours one week and 10 the next, making it impossible to plan financially, and he often lost sleep with late-night closing shifts paired with opening shifts the next day.
“There are definitely good actors — it’s not like every store is having these problems,” Peeler said. “But you can’t have your schedule based on the whim of a manager.”
By ANNIE SCIACCA
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Activist: U.S. Response to Puerto Rico “Lifts the Veil of Colonialism” & 119 Years of Exploitation
Activist: U.S. Response to Puerto Rico “Lifts the Veil of Colonialism” & 119 Years of Exploitation
The U.S. military has sent more than 4,000 soldiers to Puerto Rico as the island continues to grapple with a dire...
The U.S. military has sent more than 4,000 soldiers to Puerto Rico as the island continues to grapple with a dire shortage of clean water, food and electricity nearly two weeks after Hurricane Maria. For more on the militarization of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the devastating storm, we speak with Xiomara Caro Diaz, lawyer, activist and director of New Organizing Projects at the Center for Popular Democracy.
Watch the video and read the transcript here.
Economic Recovery? Not for Ferguson or Black America
MSNBC - March 13, 2015, by Jane Timm - “America is coming back,” President Obama declared late last month, touting...
MSNBC - March 13, 2015, by Jane Timm - “America is coming back,” President Obama declared late last month, touting strong job creation and rising wages. “We’ve risen from recession.” But for Ferguson, Missouri – and black America as a whole – the recovery still hasn’t come.
“Black unemployment rates are still at the height of the national unemployment rates during the Great Recession,” the Center for Popular Democracy’s Connie Razza told msnbc. “We’re still in a recession in black America.”
Indeed, while American unemployment is down to 5.5%, black unemployment is at 10.4%. While wages have risen over the last 15 years by 45 and 48 cents for Latino and white workers, respectively, they’ve fallen 44 cents for black workers, according to a study produced by Razza at the left-leaning organization. The net wealth of African-American families, too, is hurting. “As the wealth of the other groups is stabilizing in the wake of the recession, the wealth of the African-American community is declining,” Razza added.
Blacks have long faced unemployment rates that are double those of white workers – according to Pew, it’s been that way since 1954 – but sources say the recession has hurt black America, and the St. Louis region, particularly hard. “It’s not just a recession of jobs, it’s a recession of income; it’s a recession of wealth in the sense that a whole lot of homes in Ferguson are still under water. It’s a three-way disaster for people in that part of St. Louis county,” Dave Robertson, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told msnbc. “In places like Ferguson, it’s not coming back quickly.
The most recent racial employment breakdown indicates that Missouri’s problems may be worse than the rest of the country’s, too. In Missouri, black unemployment was 15.7% in the fall of 2014 – triple the state’s 4.5% white unemployment at the time.
“It’s not just unemployment,” Robertson added. “It’s the poor wages, it’s the under-employment, it’s the part-time work.”
And economic inequality is fueling the protests and activist movement, sources said. “There’s a real sense of despair especially for those young folks. You just don’t have the economic opportunities for young people. Especially young people coming out of sub-standard school districts … not having the tools prepared for the economy,” Ferguson activist Umar Lee told msnbc. “And then there’s a shortage of jobs, leaving young people at a disadvantage, and so they just drop out.”
“That’s the driving force, we believe,” former state Sen. Maida Coleman told msnbc. She’s heading up Gov. Jay Nixon’s Office of Community Engagement, a state office formed in the wake of August’s protests to focus on low-income and minority communities. “What’s happening now is that we see a real need to address these high levels of unemployment, just as we are addressing education,” Coleman said. “The hopelessness needs to be addressed.”
But the problem extends beyond Ferguson; when there are jobs to be had, black Americans struggle to get hired.
A 2013 study found that black college grads had twice the unemployment rate of white college grads and that racial inequality actually grew during the recovery. A 2014 study by nonpartisan education and economic advocacy group the Young Invincibles found that black workers need college credit to compete with white high school drop-outs thanks to racial discrimination.
Getting an interview may be half the battle, too. A 2003 study found that very white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews than a very black-sounding name.
For these reasons, Razza and the Center for Popular Democracy are urging the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. The Fed had vowed to keep rates low until employment dipped below 6.5% and the recovery came in earnest, but Razza argued that the country needs to be closer to “full employment”—that is there are close to the same number of jobs as people who want to work—before the Fed can really stop intervening. “The fact that black Americas are still experiencing a recession is really … the canary in the coal mine of the recovery,” she said.
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Activists: US Justice Department Response to Baltimore Police Racism Falls Short
Activists: US Justice Department Response to Baltimore Police Racism Falls Short
The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’...
The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’ constitutional rights falls short of addressing the systemic problem of racism in US policing, activists said.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — "[The Department of Justice] is being forced to look like it is responsive, so to speak, but it also can’t deal with the systemic nature of things," Pan-African Community Action activist Netfa Freeman told Sputnik.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department released a report concluding that the BPD systematically engaged in conduct that violates the US Constitution, and disproportionately targets African-Americans. In response, the Justice Department entered into a consent agreement with the BPD to reform the latter.
"We know it is not just Baltimore and it’s not just ‘bad apples’," Freeman said. The report is still "treating things like they are isolated incidents, not like it is a systemic problem or an epidemic," he said of anti-black police misconduct.
In a forum hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy, Marbre Stahly-Butts, said that while it was "important" for the federal government to articulate the problem of police abuses, Justice Department's actions did not go far enough.
An anti-terrorism rehearsal is held targeting a possible bomb attack during the Olympic Games at the main bus station in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 12, 2016
Stahly-Butts argued the Justice Department should leverage the findings of the report to cut off funding to local law enforcement caught violating federal law.
"If we find… that you are violating the basic human rights of people in this city, we, as the government, will not give you taxpayer money to do that," Stahly-Butts said.
The Justice Department report covered police misconduct that took place from January 2010 through May 2015. The investigation was launched in 2015 following the widely publicized death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who died from wounds he sustained while in BPD custody.
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Protesters Converge On Stephen Schwarzman's Water Mill Home
About 35 protesters from various political organizations—the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New...
About 35 protesters from various political organizations—the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, and Strong for All Economy Coalition—converged on the Water Mill Home of Stephen Schwarzman on Friday afternoon.
Mr. Schwarzman is the chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group and an adviser to President Donald Trump.
Read the full article here.
Appointment of Another Former Goldman Sachs Insider Shows Why Fed Presidential Appointment Process Needs Reform
Appointment of Another Former Goldman Sachs Insider Shows Why Fed Presidential Appointment Process Needs Reform
Jordan Haedtler, Campaign Manager for the Fed Up coalition, released the following statement following the Minneapolis...
Jordan Haedtler, Campaign Manager for the Fed Up coalition, released the following statement following the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s announcement that it would appoint Neel Kashkari as its president:
“For the past year, the Fed Up coalition has worked to develop relationships with the presidents of all 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, and we look forward to developing a relationship with Neel Kashkari. When he ran for California Governor last year, Mr. Kashkari spent a week posing as a jobseeker in some of the hardest hit parts of the state. We hope Mr. Kashkari recognizes that job prospects remain far too weak for too many people, particularly Black and Latino people, and that his brief experiences searching for jobs in California are the real, lived experience for millions of people every day. Our partners in Minneapolis look forward to welcoming Mr. Kashkari to the Minneapolis region, and showing him the many communities in the region that are still struggling with economic recovery.
"Mr. Kashkari joins a Federal Reserve System that too often excludes the perspectives of working families and communities of color. We are very disappointed that his appointment marks the third presidential appointment this year of a regional Bank president with strong ties to Goldman Sachs. Come January, 1/3rd of the 12 regional Bank presidents will have served in senior roles at the investment bank that most epitomizes the problems that led to the financial crisis.
"Kashkari’s appointment illustrates the problem with the regional Bank president selection process. Federal Reserve Bank presidents are some of the most influential economic policymakers in the country, and they have an obligation to represent the public. Unfortunately, the public is completely shut out of the process for their selection, which is dominated by corporate and financial elites.
"We were very pleased when the Minneapolis Fed took a small and unprecedented step toward transparency by outlining the criteria for their next president. We wish the Minneapolis Fed had gone a step further, publishing the list of candidates being considered, and giving the public an opportunity for input. A history of working with labor and community groups, and an understanding of how working families and communities of color have been impacted by a sluggish economic recovery should qualify candidates for consideration. But the presidential appointments we have seen this year suggest that regional Banks are looking for a history of working at Goldman Sachs instead.”
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www.populardemocracy.org
The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
Crece interés de inmigrantes por irse de NYC a sus países
Hace siete años José V dejó su trabajo en Colombia como cajero en un banco y llegó a Nueva York, dispuesto a quedarse....
Hace siete años José V dejó su trabajo en Colombia como cajero en un banco y llegó a Nueva York, dispuesto a quedarse. Las deudas y los serios problemas económicos de su familia lo pusieron a soñar con una mejor vida, que no podía alcanzar con su salario mensual de apenas $350. En menos de una semana de llegar a la Gran Manzana ya estaba trabajando en un restaurante como lavaplatos, ganando más dinero, y en cuestión de semanas la vida le empezó a sonreír.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Bill to offer state citizenship for undocumented immigrants
NY Daily News - June 16, 2014, by Erin Durkin - Undocumented immigrants in New York could become “state citizens” with...
NY Daily News - June 16, 2014, by Erin Durkin - Undocumented immigrants in New York could become “state citizens” with a slew of benefits from driver’s licenses under a new bill to be introduced Monday.
Advocates are set to announce a bill that would allow immigrants who aren’t U.S. citizens to become New York state citizens if they can prove they’ve lived and paid taxes in the state for three years and pledge to uphold New York laws, regardless of whether they’re in the country legally.
“The path to achieving opportunity and equity and dignity for immigrants through Washington seems blocked by Washington’s general dysfunction,” said Andrew Friedman, executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy and a founder of Make the Road New York. “States should push for full equality and inclusion.”
The bill will face long odds in Albany, where even more modest immigration reforms have failed to get through the legislature.
The bill would apply to about 2.7 million New Yorkers who lack citizenship, including those in the country legally and illegally.
People who secured state citizenship under the bill would be able to vote in state and local elections, and run for state office.
They could get a driver’s license, a professional license issued by the state, and Medicaid and other benefits controlled by the state.
Immigrants would also be eligible for in-state tuition and financial aid, and would be protected from discrimination based on their status. And the bill would sharply limit state authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The legislation would not grant legal authorization to work or change any other regulations governed by federal law.
It’s destined to be a longshot in Albany, where the DREAM Act, which would help undocumented students afford college, and efforts to offer driver’s licenses have failed so far.
But backers say it will prompt similar efforts in other states, similar to how states led the way on gay marriage, with talks on bills already underway in Illinois, Oregon, and Maryland.
“Obviously this is not something that’s going to pass immediately, but nothing as broad as this or as bold as this passes immediately,” said Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), the sponsor in the Senate.
The bill is estimated to cost taxpayers $106 to 173 million a year, while generating $145 million in new economic activity and saving drivers $100 million in insurance premiums, advocates say.
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