Campaign News

ThinkProgress - June 27, 2013, by Bryce Covert - In an early morning session on Thursday, the New York City Council voted to override a veto from Mayor Michael Bloomberg on paid sick days legislation. The bill, which now becomes law, requires any company with more than 15 employees to provide five days of paid leave a year and any company with fewer employees to offer five days of unpaid leave. This means that more than 1 million New York City workers will now have access to paid sick leave who didn’t have it before.

New York City joins four other cities — Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; Washington, DC; and Portland, Oregon — and the state of Connecticut in the group of places that have mandated paid sick days. However, New York’s legislation is not as strong as that in the other cities, which require companies with five or more employees to offer paid leave.

The city’s law will be implemented over a slow timeline, not taking effect until 2014 and only applying to companies with more than 20 employees for the first year and a half.

Despite initial concerns from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the objections raised by Mayor Bloomberg that the bill will put too large a cost burden on businesses, studies of laws in other places show either a neutral or positive effect. A recent audit of Washington, DC’s law found no negative impact on businesses, while a study of San Francisco found little negative impact and strong support among businesses and another of Connecticut found a small cost with big potential upsides. In fact, San Francisco’s law was found to have spurred job growth.

Even with these laws in place around the country, most workers don’t have access to paid leave. Forty percent of private workers and 80 percent of low-income workers can’t take a paid day off if they or their family members get sick.

Meanwhile, a rash of preemption bills, which bar cities and localities from enacting paid sick days legislation, have also been implemented across the country, the latest of which was signed into law by Florida Governor Rick Scott (R). They have also cropped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi. These bills have been sponsored by big businesses and local chambers of commerce and are part of a national effort backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that coordinates conservative laws across states.

Source

Supporting a strong job market is a big part of the U.S. Federal Reserve's mandate. Fed officials, though, interpret that goal differently than most observers do. For the economy's sake, Congress should step in to resolve the discrepancy.

Specifically, the Federal Reserve Act instructs the central bank to promote "maximum employment" and "stable prices." Most people understand these instructions as meaning the Fed should seek to generate as much demand for workers as possible without causing an unduly large increase in prices.

The website of the Fed's Board of Governors, however, makes a slight modification to the jobs mandate: "maximum sustainable employment." Innocuous as it may seem, that one word can make a big difference.

How? Well, suppose inflation is running below the Fed's 2 percent target and the unemployment rate is at 5 percent, which officials consider to be its long-run level (pretty much the current situation). They can choose between two monetary policies, which are expected to result in the following paths for the unemployment rate:

Most observers would opt for the second policy. It's more aggressive, so it will get inflation back to target sooner. Even better, the unemployment rate is the same or lower every year, and by a significant amount: One percentage point is worth more than a million jobs.

The word "sustainable," however, means that the Fed views any deviation from the long-run unemployment rate -- up or down -- as undesirable. When officials speak of the economy “overheating” or “running hot” in the absence of inflationary pressures, this is what I think they have in mind. So they would see unemployment as running too low under policy 2.

Some Fed officials worry that “overheating” could trigger a recession. (I don’t understand the precise economic mechanism, but let’s leave that aside.) They think policy 2 might generate the following path for the unemployment rate:

Policy 2: Possible Recession Outcome

In 2019 and 2020, the economy falls into recession. From the Fed’s perspective, this unemployment path is terrible, because the rate is either too low or too high for the next four years.

It's easy to imagine, though, that many people would be willing to trade the risk of recessionary pain in 2019 and 2020 for the near-term gain of 2017 and 2018. They might even believe there's some chance that policy 2 will generate an outstanding outcome -- if, for example, the long-run unemployment rate is actually lower than the Fed thinks it is. Here's how that would look:

This interpretational divide was on full display last month, when Fed officials met with representatives of the pro-employment activist group Fed Up. The activists largely assumed that the central bank was contemplating near-term interest-rate increases to keep inflation in check. But most of the officials downplayed inflation, invoking instead the need to keep the economy from running too hot (which some said could lead to a recession).

I find it hard to believe that the Fed's approach is consistent with Congress's intent as expressed in the Federal Reserve Act. That said, it's really up to legislators to provide an unequivocal answer, which could matter a lot for the economy over the next few years.

By Narayana Kocherlakota

Source

The construction industry is full of dangerous jobs. Smaller companies often have particularly unsafe workplaces – they tend to be non-union and lack the necessary training, proper equipment, and respect for workers’ reports about unsafe conditions. Workers of color disproportionately face construction dangers because they work in construction in relatively high numbers, they are concentrated in smaller, non-union firms, and they are over-represented in the contingent labor pool.

Our review of 2003-2011 OSHA investigations of construction site accidents involving a fatal fall from an elevation revealed that Latinos and immigrants are disproportionately killed in fall accidents.

Download the full report here.

The construction industry is full of dangerous jobs. Smaller companies often have particularly unsafe workplaces – they tend to be non-union and lack the necessary training, proper equipment, and respect for workers’ reports about unsafe conditions. Workers of color disproportionately face construction dangers because they work in construction in relatively high numbers, they are concentrated in smaller, non-union firms, and they are over-represented in the contingent labor pool.

Our review of 2003-2011 OSHA investigations of construction site accidents involving a fatal fall from an elevation revealed that Latinos and immigrants are disproportionately killed in fall accidents.

In 2011 focus groups, Latino construction workers reported fearing retaliation as a key deterrent to raising concerns about safety.

The primary protection for construction workers’ safety, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is ineffective. Understaffed because of inadequate funding, OSHA is unable to inspect a significant number of construction, demolition, and building rehabilitation sites active at any one time in the state. And, when OSHA does inspect a construction site, the monetary penalties imposed for violations are so small that employers can see them as just an incidental cost of doing business. Further, OSHA almost never pursues criminal penalties, even for egregious and willful violations that are directly linked to a worker’s death.

New York State offers supplemental protection through the Scaffold Law (Labor Law §240), which requires owners and contractors to provide appropriate and necessary equipment, such as safe hoists, ladders, and scaffolds. The law holds owners and contractors fully liable if their failure to follow the law causes a worker to be injured or killed.

The construction and insurance industries are proposing an amendment to the Scaffold Law that would shift responsibility for workplace safety from owners and contractors, who control site safety, to workers, who do not. The change will have a disparate impact on construction workers of color, which makes the preservation of the current Scaffold Law a civil rights issue.

Construction workers’ safety should be improved by:

Update: December 30, 2016, 12:00 p.m. EST: Versace has issued a statement affirming its commitment to equality: “Versace believes strongly in equal opportunity, as an employer and a retailer. We do not tolerate discrimination on the basis of race, national origin or any other characteristic protected by our civil rights laws. We have denied the allegations in this suit, and we will not comment further concerning pending litigation.”

Originally posted on December 27, 2016:

Versace is coming under fire for allegedly using a secret code to alert workers when an African-American person enters the store. A former employee who says he experienced the shocking scenario firsthand is suing for unpaid wages and damages.

According to the lawsuit, Christopher Sampiro, 23, claims the employees at the Bay Area Versace location used the code word “D410” to casually let each other know when a black person entered the store. The exact code is also used to identify all black clothing. After learning of the practice, the plaintiff, who self-identifies as one-quarter African American, responded to his manager by asking, "You know that I'm African American?" Following the exchange, Sampiro claims he was denied rest breaks and a "legitimate" training. He was fired two weeks later.

The management told Sampiro that he was let go because he hadn't "lived the luxury life," the lawsuit reports. Versace denied the allegations and filed a request for dismissal of the suit—but this isn’t the first time the Italian fashion house has gotten into trouble for its similarly questionable actions related to race.

Earlier this summer, the company released its fall 2016 ad featuring Gigi Hadid as the matriarch of an interracial family. While the campaign initially received praise for the depiction of a racially-diverse family, people were later upset to find that the 21-year-old model was depicted as a mother of two small children. One of the black children also appeared to be strapped into its stroller with a metal chain...it was odd, to say the least. In response to the criticism, Versace released a statement that said, "The campaign is made of a series of tableaux, some real-life and some fantastical. One part of the story is very glamorous, almost a fantasy, a kind of dream. The other part of the story is the same people, but in their real lives.”

Legal controversy related to race isn't new in the world of fashion. Last year, the Center for Popular Democracy accused Zara of racial profiling in a new report compiled from a survey of 251 Zara employees in New York City. According to the report, the store employees used the word “special order” to trail black customers who were deemed potential thieves while shopping. In the survey, 46 percent of employees claimed black customers were called “special orders” "always" or "often," while 14 percent said the same about Latino customers and 7 percent said the same about whites.

While Zara refuted the claims, both Versace and the Spanish retailer's cases, if proven to be true, show that the industry still clearly has a long way to go when it comes to diversity.

By KRISTEN BATEMAN

Source