Campaign News

Brianna Roy-Rankin, 23, is just the kind of worker Target would like to retain and promote. She says she loved her job at the retailer's store in Champaign, Illinois. She had great bosses, got along well with her co-workers and enjoyed the employee discounts. But last week, after two years as a sales associate, Roy-Rankin quit her job.

“I couldn’t really plan. I was at the mercy of the scheduling system,” she says. “Otherwise, I honestly, probably, would’ve stayed.”

Roy-Rankin went to college nearby, at the University of Illinois. Before she graduated in May, she says it was a constant challenge to balance her studies and social life with her part-time job -- usually around 20 hours a week at just under $10 an hour.

Target has an unforgiving scheduling system. Roy-Rankin says she would have to submit requests to take time off for spring break or visit her parents weeks, if not months in advance -- otherwise she’d be slotted to work without recourse. She would learn about her weekly work schedule three weeks in advance, which wasn’t too bad. But then her hours would fluctuate drastically. One week, she’d be scheduled for a 8 a.m.-to-noon shift on a particular day; the next, it might be a 5 p.m.-to-11 p.m. closing shift. Eventually, it became too much to juggle.

Roy-Rankin's situation is hardly unique.

A Common Trend

Nearly three in 10 hourly workers in the United States say they rarely get consistent work schedules, according to a study released Tuesday by WorkJam, a firm that specializes in workforce scheduling technology.

What’s more, an astounding 56 percent say they get their schedules a week or less in advance. Both trends run rampant in the fast-growing service sector, especially in low-wage fields like retail and fast food. And while policies of this sort save companies money by allowing them to tailor schedules to an expected flow of customer traffic, workers say it's the source of headaches.

Joshua Ostrega, chief operating officer and co-founder of WorkJam, admits the 56 percent figure came as a bit of a shock. “I think it’s extremely high,” he says. “We were actually quite surprised.”

Workers Employed in the Retail Trade Industries (Seasonally Adjusted) | FindTheData

An especially harsh practice among retailers is what’s known as just-in-time or on-call scheduling. Under this system, workers are required to be “on call” to come in and work on a particular day even if they’re not scheduled to do so.

The industry’s profit margins are tight, says Ostrega, and companies are looking to extract savings however they can. Software-based scheduling systems do the trick by linking labor supply to consumer demand. When store traffic is low, the system calls for fewer employees; when the system projects more patrons, it demands more workers. Employers like it because it keeps them from racking up unnecessary labor costs.

Now, unpredictable scheduling is increasingly drawing the interest of public authorities.

'The Pressure's Mounting'

In April, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to major retailers that inquired about their on-call scheduling and asked whether their policies violated state law. Like seven other states and the District of Columbia, New York has so-called reporting-time laws that require employees to be paid when they report to work, even if no work is provided.

Since the letters went out, a number of high-profile companies have announced changes to their policies. The Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch, which both received the notices, said they would end the practice of on-call scheduling. And Starbucks promised last year to provide more consistent scheduling to baristas. But as a recent story in the New York Times revealed, the cafe chain has failed to do so.

Robert Hiltonsmith, senior policy analyst at Demos, a progressive think tank, expects the positive trends to continue -- even if Tuesday’s survey suggests employers overall aren’t relenting on tough and irregular scheduling demands. “I think it’s a slow burn, but the pressure’s mounting,” he says.

It’s in part a question of economic self-interest, Hiltonsmith says. Burned-out workers tend to quit their jobs fairly quickly, and high turnover is expensive. That’s one of the reasons why Walmart, the nation’s largest private-sector employer, and its top competitors voluntarily hiked wages earlier this year, according to Hiltonsmith. In fact, when Walmart announced it was boosting starting pay to at least $9 an hour, it also promised to notify workers of their schedules at least two and a half weeks in advance.

Reforms like this and others -- shifts that are scheduled the same time every week -- could prevent retailers from losing employees like Roy-Rankin, the kind of people who are otherwise content at work.

There’s also mounting political pressure, which stems from growing public concern over the livelihood of service-sector workers. Hiltonsmith attributes this to the “seismic shifts in the labor force” -- the decades-long decline of manufacturing and growth in service-sector employment.

Contrary to the popular image, retail workers are not teenagers looking to make a quick buck. The median age of a retail trade employee is 38, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I think people had less concern when it wasn’t people trying to support their families,” Hiltonsmith says. “For better or worse, the service economy is the economy of the country’s future.”

Source: International Business Times

The selection of a regional Federal Reserve bank president normally takes place in relative obscurity, followed only by local business leaders, financial executives and analysts who track monetary policy.

But amid concerns about a lack of diversity at the highest levels of the nation’s central banking system, great attention is being focused on who will be chosen as the next head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The search is being watched closely by members of Congress and advocacy groups that have complained publicly in recent months that the Fed’s top leadership is nearly all white.

The Atlanta region, which has a large African American population, presents the perfect opportunity to start changing that, they said.

 “This would be historic,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who would like the Fed to make the next Atlanta chief the first African American to lead one of the 12 regional banks. “It would be very important, and it’s long overdue.”

As the Fed has taken on a larger role in the economy in the wake of the Great Recession, the lack of racial and ethnic diversity among key decision-makers has sparked concerns that monetary policy decisions haven’t taken into account the higher unemployment rates among African Americans and Latinos.

“Communities of color have not yet experienced full economic recovery,” said Shawn Sebastian, field director of Fed Up, a campaign by labor, community and liberal activist groups that wants the Fed to enact pro-worker policies.

“As a really important economic policymaker, the Fed needs to actually reflect America,” he said.

Leading African American lawmakers have called on Fed Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen, the first woman to lead the central bank, and the Atlanta Fed to conduct a broad search.

Fed officials have promised to do that. But they’ve made no commitment to a diverse appointment for a complex job that includes overseeing about 1,700 employees in the Atlanta region and participating in monetary policy deliberations in Washington.

During an October webcast on the search, Tom Fanning, chairman of the Atlanta Fed’s board of directors, was asked whether the bank had “a special opportunity” to break the regional bank “color barrier.”

“That would be a great thing. We’re all for it,” he said. “We want the best person as well.”

The U.S. labor force's guy problem: Lots of men don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one »

Fanning, chief executive of Atlanta-based energy firm Southern Co., is leading the bank’s search committee. The committee is reviewing candidates and doesn’t have a timetable for a decision, Atlanta Fed spokeswoman Jean Tate said.

The five sitting members of the Board of Governors and 11 of the 12 regional bank presidents are white. Since the central bank was created in 1913, three African Americans have served as governors, but there have been no Latinos. There never has been an African American or Latino regional Fed president.

“They just need more diversity,” Waters said.

Regional Fed presidents rotate onto the Federal Open Market Committee, where they join Fed governors in setting the level of a key interest rate that affects business and consumer loans.

The committee has started nudging up the rate as the unemployment rate has fallen below 5%. But many liberals are worried the job market isn’t fully healed, pointing to higher unemployment rates for African Americans and Latinos.

Last spring, Waters was among 116 House members and 11 senators who wrote to Yellen criticizing what they called “the disproportionately white and male” leadership at the central bank.

“Given the critical linkage between monetary policy and the experiences of hardworking Americans, the importance of ensuring that such positions are filled by persons that reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country, cannot be understated,” said the letter, organized by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

At congressional hearings, lawmakers have pushed Yellen to do more to improve diversity among the regional bank chiefs.

The president nominates Fed governors, who must be confirmed by the Senate. Yellen and her colleagues on the Board of Governors give final approval for regional bank president selections, which are made by the board of directors of each bank.

“It’s our job to make sure that every search for those jobs assembles a broad and diverse group of candidates,” Yellen told Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) last winter after he pressed her to consider “getting an African American, for the first time in history, to be a regional president of a Federal Reserve bank.”

That was before Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart announced his resignation in September, effective Feb. 28.

Shortly afterward, Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, joined Conyers, Scott and Rep. John Lewis, another Georgia Democrat, in writing to Yellen and Fanning urging the Fed to “consider candidates from diverse personal backgrounds, including African Americans, Latinos and women.”

The letter said that “grave racial disparities exist across our nation in unemployment wages and income.” It also said that the unemployment and poverty rates for African Americans in the Atlanta region — Alabama, Florida, Georgia and parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — were about double those for whites.

For the first time, the Atlanta Fed’s search committee has asked the public to submit names of potential candidates. The Atlanta Fed also has tried to make the process more transparent by posting details on its website, including holding the October webcast in which Fanning answered the public’s questions.

Asked about the importance of diversity for addressing “the special concerns of minority communities,” Fanning said he thought the Fed already did a good job on the issue, but “increasing our cultural bandwidth” was important.

“It is incumbent upon the person that gets this job to have the broadest perspective possible,” he said. “That’s why valuing diversity is really a critical component here.”

By Jim Puzzanghera

Source

Immigration advocates are praising Mayor Bill de Blasio's proposal for a municipal ID program.

In his State of the City address, de Blasio said that the city would make ID cards available to all New Yorkers.

That includes people who usually can't get other forms of identification, like the homeless and undocumented immigrants.

On Tuesday, the Center for Popular Democracy released a report analyzing similar programs in other cities.

Advocates say that the program could be a big help to vulnerable populations.

"Without this ID, it can be difficult to register to a child for school. It can be difficult to open a bank account. It can be difficult to even exercise your right to vote, to file a complaint with the police department," said Brittny Saunders of the Center for Popular Democracy.

"We also want to make sure that this card is available to multiple constituencies in this city," said City Councilman Carlos Menchaca of Brooklyn. "There's so many constituencies in this city that can benefit from this card, so we want to make sure that we know all those so we design the best cards that everyone has it."

Menchaca, who is the immigration chair for the City Council, also said that the Council plans to hold hearings in the next month about the best way to design the program.

Source

“I work with the Opioid Network, which is a subset of Center for Popular Democracy. I’m going to be in DC on April 18, doing an action at the Smithsonian, where we put down medicine bottles from a bunch of different people to show, this is where this new opioid crisis has spawned from. I also work with an organization called the Delaware Alliance for Community Advancement, along with Metropolitan Women’s Urban League. I also work with Achievement Matters, where I’m a facilitator for a fellowship program to close the achievement gap and foster new leadership in communities of color.”

Read the full article here.