Campaign News

New York Times - January 17, 2014, by Michael Grynbaum and Katie Taylor - New York City’s top elected officials said on Friday that they would greatly expand the reach of a measure mandating paid time off for sick workers, a cherished cause of the national left that had long been resisted by local business leaders.

The plan, a stark show of force by the city’s new liberal establishment, is the first in a series of labor- and immigrant-friendly laws that Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to champion, including higher pay for employees on many city-sponsored projects.

For the mayor, who has been in office for two and a half weeks, the sick-leave effort carried a potent symbolic weight, offering a chance to show early action on his campaign promise to close the gap between the city’s working class and its elite.

A bill unveiled on Friday would require businesses with five or more employees to provide up to five compensated days off to full-time workers if they, or their family members, fell ill. The benefits would accrue for 360,000 more New Yorkers, and affect 40,000 more employers, than under a weaker version that passed last year, which included only companies with staffs of 15 or more.

The revised measure, which also requires workers be paid on days spent caring for sick siblings, grandchildren and grandparents, would put New York closer in line to more stringent measures enacted in Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. It must be approved by the City Council, a likely outcome since Mr. de Blasio helped elect its new speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito.

In stagecraft and in substance, the announcement amounted to a direct jab from the city’s ascendant liberal leaders at the business-friendly, centrist politicians they have supplanted, who blocked action on a sick-leave measure for years, arguing its requirements would be financially onerous.

“Politics matter, and elections have consequences,” said Letitia James, the city’s new public advocate, in a pointed declaration that earned a broad smile from Mr. de Blasio and loud cheers on a mobbed sidewalk outside a Brooklyn restaurant, where officials introduced the measure.

The event, organized by the mayor’s office, was more like a raucous political rally than a formal news conference. Mr. de Blasio stood before a campaign-style banner featuring the slogan “One New York,” a play on his ubiquitous “tale of two cities” theme. Through loudspeakers, union officials and liberal activists chanted “Si, se puede!” as the mayor, at the lectern, conducted with a wave of his index finger.

“It may have taken awhile, brothers and sisters, but you never gave up the fight,” Mr. de Blasio said as he took the stage, acknowledging grass-roots advocates and council members gathered in the crowd.

“This City Hall is going to be on the side of working families all over this city,” the mayor said.

Liberal groups, led by the Working Families Party, had fought for years to enact sick-leave legislation in New York City, only to be stymied by Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and the previous Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who said businesses were too overburdened to withstand the added requirements.

Mr. de Blasio has long supported sick-leave laws, but he became more outspoken as the issue came to the forefront in the mayoral race, when he started hammering Ms. Quinn, a chief rival for the Democratic nomination, over her refusal to allow a vote on the measure. Under pressure, she eventually allowed a compromise bill to pass the Council. At the time, the city’s leading business groups, who had a sympathetic ear with Mr. Bloomberg, virulently protested the passage of the bill.

Signaling New York’s political turn, those same groups on Friday issued only tepid statements, saying they hoped to work with legislators in shaping the final form of the measure.

In interviews, small-business owners offered mixed reviews when told of Mr. de Blasio’s plans.

Sunny Singh, the manager of Market Deli in Midtown Manhattan, said he employed six workers and was fearful that the requirements would be financially harmful.

“Small businesses, they cannot afford it,” said Mr. Singh, who was overseeing a busy lunch hour, adding that he did not have enough money to pay employees who were unable to come to work. “When they are sick, they don’t get paid. It’s usually like this.”

At a Manhattan branch of the nutrition retailer GNC, Sandra Cesar, the manager, said she believed her six employees deserved the benefits included in the measure. “Everybody is entitled to get sick and get paid for it,” she said.

But Ms. Cesar said she also worried that workers eager to avoid shifts could exploit the measure. “They might take advantage of it,” she said.

In other cities, including San Francisco, where sick-leave laws are already in effect, there have been few reports of businesses forced to close or lay off workers because of the requirement.

In Washington, which passed a law in 2008 requiring even the smallest businesses to provide three paid sick days a year, an audit last year found that the law had not discouraged new businesses from opening, although some local employers reported cutting back on workers’ hours.

Despite the celebratory atmosphere of the event on Friday, Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito said they would hear out the concerns of business leaders who remain anxious about the measure.

“There is going to be a deliberative process,” the mayor said. “There is going to be an opportunity to hear the voices of small business.”

But Mr. de Blasio added that advocates had already spent several years debating the measure with business groups.

And Ms. James, who as public advocate presides over Council meetings, began her remarks on Friday by pantomiming a roll-call vote on the measure, joking that she would immediately move the bill, and declaring it passed when the council members gathered at the event shouted, “Aye.”

The expanded sick-leave bill would take full effect in April, unlike the measure passed last year, which was set up to be phased in over a period of 18 months beginning in April. And Mr. de Blasio’s plan would remove several provisions included to placate corporate leaders, including a clause that would eliminate the sick-day requirements if the local economy were to erode.

Nancy Alzokari, who works at Danice, a clothing store in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said the new measure sounded like “a great step.”

A single mother, Ms. Alzokari said she was not compensated for sick days and often looked for a friend to take care of her three children if one of them was ill.

Even if someone becomes sick, she said, “the bills still got to be paid.”

Source

Last week, more than 100 disability rights and health care advocates were arrested in Washington D.C. during a civil disobedience protest of the GOP tax plan. Among them were residents of Peterborough and Temple.

Lisa Beaudoin of Temple, the executive director of ABLE New Hampshire, a grassroots organization that advocates for families that include people with disabilities, said that she sees the tax plan as taking firm aim at some of the most vulnerable populations – including people with disabilities.

Read the full article here.

An activist group on Monday named a slate of candidates it would like to see placed on the boards overseeing the regional Federal Reserve banks, saying these people would promote diversity at the central bank and de-emphasize the influence bankers have on policy makers.

The slate of candidates is in large part aimed at addressing what the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign sees as a lack of minority and female representation in the leadership ranks of top central bank officialdom.

“Regional Banks’ boards are disproportionately white, male, and from the corporate and financial sectors,” the group said in a report. “Regional Banks have continually selected bank directors without transparency or public input, and most directors’ backgrounds suggest that they are likelier to be familiar with the interests of the wealthy than with the interests of low-income individuals and communities of color,” the group said.

The Federal Reserve’s Shifting Makeup

The group identified a slate of candidates drawn from academia, think tanks and unions who could serve as directors at the 12 regional bank districts. These prospective candidates are mainly women or people of color. None are bankers or financial market participants.

The group also said the continued role of bankers on boards continues to create conflicts of interest between the Fed and regulated financial institutions. “The potential for conflicts of interest will remain high as long as commercial banks and financial institutions continue to dominate Fed leadership,” Fed Up said in its report.

Fed Up’s Candidates

The boards overseeing the regional Fed banks have long been a flashpoint. While the Washington-based Board of Governors, now led by Chairwoman Janet Yellen, is explicitly part of the government, the 12 regional banks exist as quasi-private institutions overseen by boards composed of a legally mandated mix of bankers, community members and business representatives.

The most public responsibility of these boards is to guide the selection of new regional bank presidents and to reapprove these officials when their terms are up. Directors from institutions regulated by the Fed aren’t involved in this process, but they were until several years ago.

The regional Fed boards also help oversee regional Fed operations and provide intelligence on local economic conditions. Most Fed bank presidents have spoken very favorably of their boards and have pointed out these directors have no influence and have no special access to Fed monetary policy-making.

The Fed Up campaign has been pressing the central bank for some time on diversity issues, to some successes. In May many congressional Democrats signed a letter to Chairwoman Janet Yellen expressing concern about what they saw as a lack of diversity among the Fed’s top officials and boards of directors. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also expressed support for getting bankers off Fed boards.

The Fed countered then that it is done a lot to improve diversity and that it would work to do even better in the future.

And speaking in early June with reporters, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan acknowledged the problem, saying “diversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity of all kinds leads to better decision making and greater performance. That’s something we should be striving for at the Fed.”

Earlier this year, former Minneapolis Fed leader Narayana Kocherlakota indicated in a blog post that a lack of African-American representation in policy-making positions may have caused officials to pay insufficient attention to the needs of this group during the financial crisis.

By MICHAEL S. DERBY

Source

WTAX News Radio - February 2, 2015 - Charter schools in Illinois are in the cross hairs of a new report alleging a lack of accountability leading to between $13 million and $27 million in fraud.“At a time when (Chicago Public Schools are) crying broke, and public schools are grossly under-resourced, and there’s a public demand for transparency and accountability around every corner,” says Action Now executive director Katelyn Johnson, “it seems unconscionable that CPS and the state of Illinois would not invest in rigid financial oversight of charter schools.”Johnson’s group is supporting the Center for Popular Democracy in the report, “Risking Public Money.”Andrew Broy has a differing viewpoint. He’s the president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and dismisses the other two groups as union-funded and anti-charter to begin with.“The question” about accountability, he says, “is if there are challenges with an internal governing board, how do we uncover that and make sure it’s taken care of, and the current law equips districts with all the tools they need to make sure that happens.”Source